In his Oxford life Robert surrendered himself to the best and most
stimulating influences of the place, just as he had done at school. He
was a youth of many friends, by virtue of a natural gift of sympathy,
which was no doubt often abused, and by no means invariably profitable
to its owner, but wherein, at any rate, his power over his fellows, like
the power of half the potent men in the world's history, always lay
rooted. He had his mother's delight in living. He loved the
cricket-field, he loved the river; his athletic instincts and his
athletic friends were always fighting in him with his literary instincts
and the friends who appealed primarily to the intellectual and moral
side of him. He made many mistakes alike in friends and in pursuits; in
the freshness of a young and roving curiosity he had great difficulty in
submitting himself to the intellectual routine of the University, a
difficulty which ultimately cost him much; but at the bottom of the lad,
all the time, there was a strength of will, a force and even tyranny of
conscience, which kept his charm and pliancy from degenerating into
weakness, and made it not only delightful, but profitable to love him.
He knew that his mother was bound up in him, and his being was set to
satisfy, so far as he could, all her honourable ambitions.
His many undergraduate friends, strong as their influence must have been
in the aggregate on a nature so receptive, hardly concern us here. His
future life, so far as we can see, was most noticeably affected by two
men older than himself, and belonging to the dons--both of them fellows
and tutors of St. Anselm's, though on different planes of age.
The first one, Edward Langham, was Robert's tutor, and about seven years
older than himself. He was a man about whom, on entering the college,
Robert heard more than the usual crop of stories. The healthy young
English barbarian has an aversion to the intrusion of more manner into
life than is absolutely necessary. Now, Langham was overburdened with
manner, though it was manner of the deprecating and not of the arrogant
order. Decisions, it seemed, of all sorts were abominable to him. To
help a friend he had once consented to be Pro-proctor. He resigned in a
month, and none of his acquaintances ever afterwards dared to allude to
the experience. If you could have got at his inmost mind, it was
affirmed, the persons most obnoxious there would have been found to be
the scout, who intrusively asked him every morning what he would have
for breakfast, and the college cook, who, till such a course was
strictly forbidden him, mounted to his room at half-past nine to inquire
whether he would 'dine in.' Being a scholar of considerable eminence, it
pleased him to assume on all questions an exasperating degree of
ignorance; and the wags of the college averred that when asked if it
rained, or if collections took place on such and such a day, it was pain
and grief to him to have to affirm positively, without qualifications,
that so it was.
Such a man was not very likely, one would have thought, to captivate an
ardent, impulsive boy like Elsmere. Edward Langham, however,
notwithstanding undergraduate tales, was a very remarkable person. In
the first place, he was possessed of exceptional personal beauty. His
colouring was vividly black and white, closely curling jet-black hair,
and fine black eyes contrasting with a pale, clear complexion and even,
white teeth. So far he had the characteristics which certain Irishmen
share with most Spaniards. But the Celtic or Iberian brilliance was
balanced by a classical delicacy and precision of feature. He had the
brow, the nose, the upper lip, the finely-moulded chin, which belong to
the more severe and spiritual Greek type. Certainly of Greek blitheness
and directness there was no trace. The eye was wavering and profoundly
melancholy; all the movements of the tall, finely-built frame were
hesitating and doubtful. It was as though the man were suffering from
paralysis of some moral muscle or other; as if some of the normal
springs of action in him had been profoundly and permanently weakened.
He had a curious history. He was the only child of a doctor in a
Lincolnshire country town. His old parents had brought him up in strict
provincial ways, ignoring the boy's idiosyncrasies as much as possible.
They did not want an exceptional and abnormal son, and they tried to put
down his dreamy, self-conscious habits by forcing him into the common,
middle-class, Evangelical groove. As soon as he got to college, however,
the brooding, gifted nature had a moment of sudden and, as it seemed to
the old people in Gainsborough, most reprehensible expansion. Poems were
sent to them, cut out of one or the other of the leading periodicals,
with their son's initials appended, and articles of philosophical
art-criticism, published while the boy was still an undergraduate--which
seemed to the stern father everything that was sophistical and
subversive. For they treated Christianity itself as an open question,
and showed especially scant respect for the 'Protestantism of the
Protestant religion.' The father warned him grimly that he was not going
to spend his hard-earned savings on the support of a free-thinking
scribbler, and the young man wrote no more till just after he had taken
a double first in Greats. Then the publication of an article in one of
the leading Reviews on 'The Ideals of Modern Culture' not only brought
him a furious letter from home stopping all supplies, but also lost him
a probable fellowship. His college was one of the narrowest and most
backward in Oxford, and it was made perfectly plain to him before the
fellowship examination that he would not be elected.
He left the college, took pupils for a while, then stood for a vacant
fellowship at St. Anselm's, the Liberal headquarters, and got it with
flying colours.
Thenceforward one would have thought that a brilliant and favourable
mental development was secured to him. Not at all. The moment of his
quarrel with his father and his college had, in fact, represented a
moment of energy, of comparative success, which never recurred. It was
as though this outburst of action and liberty had disappointed him, as
if some deep-rooted instinct--cold, critical, reflective--had reasserted
itself, condemning him and his censors equally. The uselessness of
utterance, the futility of enthusiasm, the inaccessibility of the ideal,
the practical absurdity of trying to realise any of the mind's inward
dreams: these were the kind of considerations which descended upon him,
slowly and fatally, crushing down the newly springing growths of action
or of passion. It was as though life had demonstrated to him the
essential truth of a childish saying of his own which had startled and
displeased his Calvinist mother years before. 'Mother,' the delicate,
large-eyed child had said to her one day in a fit of physical weariness,
'how is it I dislike the things I dislike so much more than I like the
things I like?'
So he wrote no more, he quarrelled no more, he meddled with the great
passionate things of life and expression no more. On his taking up
residence in St. Anselm's, indeed, and on his being appointed first
lecturer and then tutor, he had a momentary pleasure in the thought of
teaching. His mind was a storehouse of thought and fact, and to the man
brought up at a dull provincial day-school and never allowed to
associate freely with his kind, the bright lads fresh from Eton and
Harrow about him were singularly attractive. But a few terms were enough
to scatter this illusion too. He could not be simple, he could not be
spontaneous; he was tormented by self-consciousness, and it was
impossible to him to talk and behave as those talk and behave who have
been brought up more or less in the big world from the beginning. So
this dream, too, faded, for youth asks, before all things, simplicity
and spontaneity in those who would take possession of it. His lectures,
which were at first brilliant enough to attract numbers of men from
other colleges, became gradually mere dry, ingenious skeletons, without
life or feeling. It was possible to learn a great deal from him; it was
not possible to catch from him any contagion of that _amor
intellectualis_ which had flamed at one moment so high within him. He
ceased to compose; but as the intellectual faculty must have some
employment, he became a translator, a contributor to dictionaries, a
microscopic student of texts, not in the interest of anything beyond,
but simply as a kind of mental stone-breaking.
The only survival of that moment of glow and colour in his life was his
love of music and the theatre. Almost every year he disappeared to
France to haunt the Paris theatres for a fortnight; to Berlin or
Bayreuth to drink his fill of music. He talked neither of music nor of
acting; he made no one sharer of his enjoyment, if he did enjoy. It was
simply his way of cheating his creative faculty, which, though it had
grown impotent, was still there, still restless. Altogether a
melancholy, pitiable man--at once thorough-going sceptic and
thorough-going idealist, the victim of that critical sense which says No
to every impulse, and is always restlessly, and yet hopelessly, seeking
the future through the neglected and outraged present.
And yet the man's instincts, at this period of his life at any rate,
were habitually kindly and affectionate. He knew nothing of women, and
was not liked by them, but it was not his fault if he made no impression
on the youth about him. It seemed to him that he was always seeking in
their eyes and faces for some light of sympathy which was always
escaping him, and which he was powerless to compel. He met it for the
first time in Robert Elsmere. The susceptible, poetical boy was struck
at some favourable moment by that romantic side of the ineffective
tutor--his silence, his melancholy, his personal beauty--which no one
else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the older men, cared to
take into account; or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in
passing, of weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous
tone of the College towards him. He showed his liking impetuously,
boyishly, as his way was, and thenceforward during his University career
Langham became his slave. He had no ambition for himself; his motto
might have been that dismal one--'The small things of life are odious to
me, and the habit of them enslaves me; the great things of life are
eternally attractive to me, and indolence and fear put them by;' but for
the University chances of this lanky, red-haired youth--with his
eagerness, his boundless curiosity, his genius for all sorts of lovable
mistakes--he disquieted himself greatly. He tried to discipline the
roving mind, to infuse into the boy's literary temper the delicacy, the
precision, the subtlety of his own. His fastidious, critical habits of
work supplied exactly that antidote which Elsmere's main faults of haste
and carelessness required. He was always holding up before him the
inexhaustible patience and labour involved in all true knowledge; and it
was to the germs of critical judgment so implanted in him that Elsmere
owed many of the later growths of his development--growths with which we
have not yet to concern ourselves.
And in return, the tutor allowed himself rarely, very rarely, a moment
of utterance from the depths of his real self. One evening in the summer
term following the boy's matriculation, Elsmere brought him an essay
after Hall, and they sat on talking afterwards. It was a rainy,
cheerless evening; the first contest of the Boats week had been rowed in
cold wind and sleet; a dreary blast whistled through the College.
Suddenly Langham reached out his hand for an open letter. 'I have had an
offer, Elsmere,' he said abruptly.
And he put it into his hand. It was the offer of an important Scotch
professorship, coming from the man most influential in assigning it. The
last occupant of the post had been a scholar of European eminence.
Langham's contributions to a great foreign review, and certain Oxford
recommendations, were the basis of the present overture, which, coming
from one who was himself a classic of the classics, was couched in terms
flattering to any young man's vanity.
Robert looked up with a joyful exclamation when he had finished the
letter.
'I congratulate you, sir.'
'I have refused it,' said Langham abruptly.
His companion sat open-mouthed. Young as he was, he knew perfectly well
that this particular appointment was one of the blue ribbons of British
scholarship.
'Do you think--' said the other in a tone of singular vibration, which
had in it a note of almost contemptuous irritation--'do you think _I_ am
the man to get and keep a hold on a rampagious class of hundreds of
Scotch lads? Do you think _I_ am the man to carry on what Reid
began--Reid, that old fighter, that preacher of all sorts of jubilant
dogmas?'
He looked at Elsmere under his straight black brows imperiously. The
youth felt the nervous tension in the elder man's voice and manner, was
startled by a confidence never before bestowed upon him, close as that
unequal bond between them had been growing during the six months of his
Oxford life, and plucking up courage hurled at him a number of frank,
young expostulations, which really put into friendly shape all that was
being said about Langham in his College and in the University. Why was
he so self-distrustful, so absurdly diffident of responsibility, so
bent on hiding his great gifts under a bushel?
The tutor smiled sadly, and, sitting down, buried his head in his hands
and said nothing for a while. Then he looked up and stretched out a hand
towards a book which lay on a table near. It was the _Reveries_ of
Senancour. 'My answer is written _here_,' he said. 'It will seem to you
now, Elsmere, mere Midsummer madness. May it always seem so to you.
Forgive me. The pressure of solitude sometimes is too great.'
Elsmere looked up with one of his flashing, affectionate smiles, and
took the book from Langham's hand. He found on the open page a marked
passage:
'Oh swiftly passing seasons of life! There was a time when men seemed to
be sincere; when thought was nourished on friendship, kindness, love;
when dawn still kept its brilliance, and the night its peace. _I can_,
the soul said to itself, and _I will_; I will do all that is right--all
that is natural. But soon resistance, difficulty, unforeseen, coming we
know not whence, arrest us, undeceive us, and the human yoke grows heavy
on our necks. Thenceforward we become merely sharers in the common woe.
Hemmed in on all sides, we feel our faculties only to realise their
impotence: we have time and strength to do what we _must_, never what we
will. Men go on repeating the words _work, genius, success_. Fools! Will
all these resounding projects, though they enable us to cheat ourselves,
enable us to cheat the icy fate which rules us and our globe, wandering
forsaken through the vast silence of the heavens?'
Robert looked up startled, the book dropping from his hand. The words
sent a chill to the heart of one born to hope, to will, to crave.
Suddenly Langham dashed the volume from him, almost with violence.
'Forget that drivel, Elsmere. It was a crime to show it to you. It is
not sane; neither perhaps am I. But I am not going to Scotland. They
would request me to resign in a week.'
Long after Elsmere, who had stayed talking a while on other things, had
gone, Langham sat on brooding over the empty grate.
'Corrupter of youth!' he said to himself once bitterly. And perhaps it
was to a certain remorse in the tutor's mind that Elsmere owed an
experience of great importance to his after life.
The name of a certain Mr. Grey had for some time before his entry at
Oxford been more or less familiar to Robert's ears as that of a person
of great influence and consideration at St. Anselm's. His tutor at
Harden had spoken of him in the boy's hearing as one of the most
remarkable men of the generation, and had several times impressed upon
his pupil that nothing could be so desirable for him as to secure the
friendship of such a man. It was on the occasion of his first interview
with the Provost, after the scholarship examination, that Robert was
first brought face to face with Mr. Grey. He could remember a short dark
man standing beside the Provost, who had been introduced to him by that
name, but the nervousness of the moment had been so great that the boy
had been quite incapable of giving him any special attention.
During his first term and a half of residence, Robert occasionally met
Mr. Grey in the quadrangle or in the street, and the tutor, remembering
the thin, bright-faced youth, would return his salutations kindly, and
sometimes stop to speak to him, to ask him if he were comfortably
settled in his rooms, or make a remark about the boats. But the
acquaintance did not seem likely to progress, for Mr. Grey was a Greats
tutor, and Robert naturally had nothing to do with him as far as work
was concerned.
However, a day or two after the conversation we have described, Robert,
going to Langham's rooms late in the afternoon to return a book which
had been lent to him, perceived two figures standing talking on the
hearth-rug, and by the western light beating in recognised the thick-set
frame and broad brow of Mr. Grey.
'Come in, Elsmere,' said Langham, as he stood hesitating on the
threshold. 'You have met Mr. Grey before, I think?'
'We first met at an anxious moment,' said Mr. Grey, smiling and shaking
hands with the boy 'A first interview with the Provost is always
formidable. I remember it too well myself. You did very well, I
remember, Mr. Elsmere. Well, Langham, I must be off. I shall be late for
my meeting as it is. I think we have settled our business. Good-night.'
Langham stood a moment after the door closed, eyeing young Elsmere.
There was a curious struggle going on in the tutor's mind.
'Elsmere,' he said at last abruptly, 'would you like to go to-night and
hear Grey preach?'
'Preach!' exclaimed the lad. 'I thought he was a layman.'
'So he is. It will be a lay sermon. It was always the custom here with
the clerical tutors to address their men once a term before Communion
Sunday, and some years ago, when Grey first became tutor, he determined,
though he was a layman, to carry on the practice. It was an
extraordinary effort, for he is a man to whom words on such a subject
are the coining of his heart's blood, and he has repeated it very
rarely. It is two years now since his last address.'
'Of course I should like to go,' said Robert with eagerness. 'Is it
open?'
'Strictly it is for his Greats pupils, but I can take you in. It is
hardly meant for freshmen; but--well, you are far enough on to make it
interesting to you.'
'The lad will take to Grey's influence like a fish to water,' thought
the tutor to himself when he was alone, not without a strange
reluctance. 'Well, no one can say I have not given him his opportunity
to be "earnest."'
The sarcasm of the last word was the kind of sarcasm which a man of his
type in an earlier generation might have applied to the 'earnestness' of
an Arnoldian Rugby.
At eight o'clock that evening Robert found himself crossing the
quadrangle with Langham on the way to one of the larger lecture rooms,
which was to be the scene of the address. The room when they got in was
already nearly full, all the working fellows of the college were
present, and a body of some thirty men besides, most of them already far
on in their University career. A minute or two afterwards Mr. Grey
entered. The door opening on to the quadrangle, where the trees,
undeterred by east wind, were just bursting into leaf, was shut; and the
little assembly knelt, while Mr. Grey's voice with its broad intonation,
in which a strong native homeliness lingered under the gentleness of
accent, recited the collect 'Lord of all power and might,' a silent
pause following the last words. Then the audience settled itself, and
Mr. Grey, standing by a small deal table with the gaslight behind him,
began his address.
All the main points of the experience which followed stamped themselves
on Robert's mind with extraordinary intensity. Nor did he ever lose the
memory of the outward scene. In after years, memory could always recall
to him at will the face and figure of the speaker, the massive head, the
deep eyes sunk under the brows, the Midland accent, the make of limb and
feature which seemed to have some suggestion in them of the rude
strength and simplicity of a peasant ancestry; and then the nobility,
the fire, the spiritual beauty flashing through it all! Here, indeed,
was a man on whom his fellows might lean, a man in whom the generation
of spiritual force was so strong and continuous that it overflowed of
necessity into the poorer, barrener lives around him, kindling and
enriching. Robert felt himself seized and penetrated, filled with a
fervour and an admiration which he was too young and immature to
analyse, but which was to be none the less potent and lasting.
Much of the sermon itself, indeed, was beyond him. It was on the meaning
of St. Paul's great conception, 'Death unto sin and a new birth unto
righteousness.' What did the Apostle mean by a death to sin and self?
What were the precise ideas attached to the words 'risen with Christ'?
Are this death and this resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain
alleged historical events? Or are they not primarily, and were they not,
even in the mind of St. Paul, two aspects of a spiritual process
perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and constituting the
veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting witness of
the Father: the spiritual history of the individual and the world, or
the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attributed so much
importance?
Mr. Grey's treatment of these questions was clothed, throughout a large
portion of the lecture, in metaphysical language, which no boy fresh
from school, however intellectually quick, could be expected to follow
with any precision. It was not, therefore, the argument, or the logical
structure of the sermon, which so profoundly affected young Elsmere. It
was the speaker himself, and the occasional passages in which,
addressing himself to the practical needs of his hearers, he put before
them the claims and conditions of the higher life with a pregnant
simplicity and rugged beauty of phrase. Conceit, selfishness, vice--how,
as he spoke of them, they seemed to wither from his presence! How the
'pitiful, earthy self' with its passions and its cravings sank into
nothingness beside the 'great ideas' and the 'great causes' for which,
as Christians and as men, he claimed their devotion.
To the boy sitting among the crowd at the back of the room, his face
supported in his hands and his gleaming eyes fixed on the speaker, it
seemed as if all the poetry and history through which a restless
curiosity and ideality had carried him so far, took a new meaning from
this experience. It was by men like this that the moral progress of the
world had been shaped and inspired; he felt brought near to the great
primal forces breathing through the divine workshop; and in place of
natural disposition and reverent compliance, there sprang up in him
suddenly an actual burning certainty of belief. 'Axioms are not axioms,'
said poor Keats, 'till they have been proved upon our pulses;' and the
old familiar figure of the Divine combat, of the struggle in which man
and God are one, was proved once more upon a human pulse on that May
night, in the hush of that quiet lecture room.
As the little moving crowd of men dispersed over the main quadrangle to
their respective staircases, Langham and Robert stood together a moment
in the windy darkness, lit by the occasional glimmering of a cloudy
moon.
'Thank you, thank you, sir!' said the lad, eager and yet afraid to
speak, lest he should break the spell of memory. 'I should be sorry
indeed to have missed that!'
'Yes, it was fine, extraordinarily fine, the best he has ever given, I
think. Good-night.'
And Langham turned away, his head sunk on his breast, his hands behind
him. Robert went to his room conscious of a momentary check of feeling.
But it soon passed, and he sat up late, thinking of the sermon, or
pouring out in a letter to his mother the new hero-worship of which his
mind was full.
A few days later, as it happened, came an invitation to the junior
exhibitioner to spend an evening at Mr. Grey's house. Elsmere went in a
state of curious eagerness and trepidation, and came away with a number
of fresh impressions which, when he had put them into order, did but
quicken his new-born sense of devotion. The quiet unpretending house
with its exquisite neatness and its abundance of books, the family
life, with the heart-happiness underneath, and the gentle trust and
courtesy on the surface, the little touches of austerity which betrayed
themselves here and there in the household ways--all these surroundings
stole into the lad's imagination, touched in him responsive fibres of
taste and feeling.
But there was some surprise, too, mingled with the charm. He came, still
shaken, as it were, by the power of the sermon, expecting to see in the
preacher of it the outward and visible signs of a leadership which, as
he already knew, was a great force in Oxford life. His mood was that of
the disciple only eager to be enrolled. And what he found was a quiet,
friendly, host, surrounded by a group of men talking the ordinary
pleasant Oxford chit-chat--the river, the schools, the Union, the
football matches, and so on. Every now and then, as Elsmere stood at the
edge of the circle listening, the rugged face in the centre of it would
break into a smile, or some boyish speaker would elicit the low
spontaneous laugh in which there was such a sound of human fellowship,
such a genuine note of self-forgetfulness. Sometimes the conversation
strayed into politics, and then Mr. Grey, an eager politician, would
throw back his head, and talk with more sparkle and rapidity, flashing
occasionally into grim humour which seemed to throw light on the innate
strength and pugnacity of the peasant and Puritan breed from which he
sprang. Nothing could be more unlike the inspired philosopher, the
mystic surrounded by an adoring school, whom Robert had been picturing
to himself in his walk up to the house, through the soft May twilight.
It was not long before the tutor had learned to take much kindly notice
of the ardent and yet modest exhibitioner, in whose future it was
impossible not to feel a sympathetic interest.
'You will always find us on Sunday afternoons, before chapel,' he said
to him one day as they parted after watching a football match in the
damp mists of the Park, and the boy's flush of pleasure showed how much
he valued the permission.
For three years those Sunday half-hours were the great charm of Robert
Elsmere's life. When he came to look back upon them, he could remember
nothing very definite. A few interesting scraps of talk about books; a
good deal of talk about politics, showing in the tutor a living interest
in the needs and training of that broadening democracy on which the
future of England rests; a few graphic sayings about individuals; above
all, a constant readiness on the host's part to listen, to sit quiet,
with the slight unconscious look of fatigue which was so eloquent of a
strenuous intellectual life, taking kindly heed of anything that
sincerity, even a stupid awkward sincerity, had got to say--these were
the sort of impressions they had left behind them, reinforced always,
indeed, by the one continuous impression of a great soul speaking with
difficulty and labour, but still clearly, still effectually, through an
unblemished series of noble acts and efforts.
Term after term passed away. Mrs. Elsmere became more and more proud of
her boy, and more and more assured that her years of intelligent
devotion to him had won her his entire love and confidence, 'so long as
they both should live;' she came up to see him once or twice, making
Langham almost flee the University because she would be grateful to him
in public, and attending the boat-races in festive attire to which she
had devoted the most anxious attention for Robert's sake, and which made
her, dear, good, impracticable soul, the observed of all observers. When
she came she and Robert talked all day, so far as lectures allowed, and
most of the night, after their own eager, improvident fashion; and she
soon gathered, with that solemn, half-tragic sense of change which
besets a mother's heart at such a moment, that there were many new
forces at work in her boy's mind, deep under-currents of feeling,
stirred in him by the Oxford influences, which must before long rise
powerfully to the surface.
He was passing from a bright buoyant lad into a man, and a man of ardour
and conviction. And the chief instrument in the transformation was Mr.
Grey.
Elsmere got his first in Moderations easily. But the Final Schools were
a different matter. In the first days of his return to Oxford, in the
October of his third year, while he was still making up his lecture
list, and taking a general oversight of the work demanded from him,
before plunging definitely into it, he was oppressed with a sense that
the two years lying before him constituted a problem which would be
harder to solve than any which had yet been set him. It seemed to him in
a moment which was one of some slackness and reaction, that he had been
growing too fast. He had been making friends besides in far too many
camps, and the thought, half attractive, half repellent, of all those
midnight discussions over smouldering fires, which Oxford was preparing
for him, those fascinating moments of intellectual fence with minds as
eager and as crude as his own, and of all the delightful dipping into
the very latest literature, which such moments encouraged and involved,
seemed to convey a sort of warning to the boy's will that it was not
equal to the situation. He was neither dull enough nor great enough for
a striking Oxford success. How was he to prevent himself from attempting
impossibilities and achieving a final mediocrity? He felt a dismal
certainty that he should never be able to control the strayings of will
and curiosity, now into this path, now into that; and a still stronger
and genuine certainty that it is not by such digression that a man gets
up the Ethics or the Annals.
Langham watched him with a half irritable attention. In spite of the
paralysis of all natural ambitions in himself, he was illogically keen
that Elsmere should win the distinctions of the place. He, the most
laborious, the most disinterested of scholars, turned himself almost
into a crammer for Elsmere's benefit. He abused the lad's multifarious
reading, declared it was no better than dram-drinking, and even preached
to him an ingenious variety of mechanical aids to memory and short cuts
to knowledge, till Robert would turn round upon him with some triumphant
retort drawn from his own utterances at some sincerer and less discreet
moment. In vain. Langham felt a dismal certainty before many weeks were
over that Elsmere would miss his first in Greats. He was too curious,
too restless, too passionate about many things. Above all he was
beginning, in the tutor's opinion, to concern himself disastrously early
with that most overwhelming and most brain-confusing of all human
interests--the interest of religion. Grey had made him 'earnest' with a
vengeance.
Elsmere was now attending Grey's philosophical lectures, following them
with enthusiasm, and making use of them, as so often happens, for the
defence and fortification of views quite other than his teacher's. The
whole basis of Grey's thought was ardently idealist and Hegelian. He had
broken with the popular Christianity, but for him, God, consciousness,
duty, were the only realities. None of the various forms of materialist
thought escaped his challenge; no genuine utterance of the spiritual
life of man but was sure of his sympathy. It was known that after having
prepared himself for the Christian ministry he had remained a layman
because it had become impossible to him to accept miracle; and it was
evident that the commoner type of Churchmen regarded him as an
antagonist all the more dangerous because he was so sympathetic. But the
negative and critical side of him was what in reality told least upon
his pupils. He was reserved, he talked with difficulty, and his respect
for the immaturity of the young lives near him was complete. So that
what he sowed others often reaped, or to quote the expression of a
well-known rationalist about him: 'The Tories were always carrying off
his honey to their hive.' Elsmere, for instance, took in all that Grey
had to give, drank in all the ideal fervour, the spiritual enthusiasm of
the great tutor, and then, as Grey himself would have done some twenty
years earlier, carried his religious passion so stimulated into the
service of the great positive tradition around him.
And at that particular moment in Oxford history, the passage from
philosophic idealism to glad acquiescence in the received Christian
system, was a peculiarly easy one. It was the most natural thing in the
world that a young man of Elsmere's temperament should rally to the
Church. The place was passing through one of those periodical crises of
reaction against an overdriven rationalism, which show themselves with
tolerable regularity in any great centre of intellectual activity. It
had begun to be recognised with a great burst of enthusiasm and
astonishment, that, after all, Mill and Herbert Spencer had not said
the last word on all things in heaven and earth. And now there was
exaggerated recoil. A fresh wave of religious romanticism was fast
gathering strength; the spirit of Newman had reappeared in the place
which Newman had loved and left; religion was becoming once more popular
among the most trivial souls, and a deep reality among a large
proportion of the nobler ones.
With this movement of opinion Robert had very soon found himself in
close and sympathetic contact. The meagre impression left upon his
boyhood by the somewhat grotesque succession of the Harden curates, and
by his mothers shafts of wit at their expense, was soon driven out of
him by the stateliness and comely beauty of the Church order as it was
revealed to him at Oxford. The religious air, the solemn beauty of the
place itself, its innumerable associations with an organised and
venerable faith, the great public functions and expressions of that
faith, possessed the boy's imagination more and more. As he sat in the
undergraduates' gallery at St. Mary's on the Sundays, when the great
High Church preacher of the moment occupied the pulpit, and looked down
on the crowded building, full of grave black-gowned figures, and framed
in one continuous belt of closely packed boyish faces; as he listened to
the preacher's vibrating voice, rising and falling with the orator's
instinct for musical effect; or as he stood up with the great
surrounding body of undergraduates to send the melody of some Latin hymn
rolling into the far recesses of the choir, the sight and the experience
touched his inmost feeling, and satisfied all the poetical and dramatic
instincts of a passionate nature. The system behind the sight took
stronger and stronger hold upon him; he began to wish ardently and
continuously to become a part of it, to cast in his lot definitely with
it.
One May evening he was wandering by himself along the towing-path which
skirts the upper river, a prey to many thoughts, to forebodings about
the schools which were to begin in three weeks, and to speculations as
to how his mother would take the news of the second class, which he
himself felt to be inevitable. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, there
flashed into his mind the little conversation with his mother, which had
taken place nearly four years before, in the garden at Trinity. He
remembered the antagonism which the idea of a clerical life for him had
raised in both of them, and a smile at his own ignorance and his
mother's prejudice passed over his quick young face. He sat down on the
grassy bank, a mass of reeds at his feet, the shadows of the poplars
behind him lying across the still river; and opposite, the wide green
expanse of the great town-meadow, dotted with white patches of geese and
herds of grazing horses. There, with a sense of something solemn and
critical passing over him, he began to dream out his future life.
And when he rose half an hour afterwards, and turned his steps
homewards, he knew with an inward tremor of heart that the next great
step of the way was practically taken. For there by the gliding river,
and in view of the distant Oxford spires, which his fancy took to
witness the act, he had vowed himself in prayer and self-abasement to
the ministry of the Church.
During the three weeks that followed he made some frantic efforts to
make up lost ground. He had not been idle for a single day, but he had
been unwise, an intellectual spendthrift, living in a continuous
succession of enthusiasms, and now at the critical moment his stock of
nerve and energy was at a low ebb. He went in depressed and tired, his
friends watching anxiously for the result. On the day of the Logic
paper, as he emerged into the Schools quadrangle, he felt his arm caught
by Mr. Grey.
'Come with me for a walk, Elsmere; you look as if some air would do you
good.'
Robert acquiesced, and the two men turned into the passage way leading
out on to Radcliffe Square.
'I have done for myself, sir,' said the youth with a sigh, half
impatience, half depression. 'It seems to me to-day that I had neither
mind nor memory. If I get a second I shall be lucky.'
'Oh, you will get your second whatever happens,' said Mr. Grey quietly,
'and you mustn't be too much cast down about it if you don't get your
first.'
This implied acceptance of his partial defeat, coming from another's
lips, struck the excitable Robert like a lash. It was only what he had
been saying to himself, but in the most pessimist forecasts we make for
ourselves, there is always an under protest of hope.
'I have been wasting my time here lately,' he said, hurriedly raising
his college cap from his brows as if it oppressed them, and pushing his
hair back with a weary restless gesture.
'No,' said Mr. Grey, turning his kind frank eyes upon him. 'As far as
general training goes, you have not wasted your time at all. There are
many clever men who don't get a first class, and yet it is good for them
to be here--so long as they are not loungers and idlers, of course. And
you have not been a lounger; you have been headstrong, and a little
over-confident, perhaps,'--the speaker's smile took all the sting out
of the words--'but you have grown into a man, and you are fit now for
man's work. Don't let yourself be depressed, Elsmere. You will do better
in life than you have done in examination.'
The young man was deeply touched. This tone of personal comment and
admonition was very rare with Mr. Grey. He felt a sudden consciousness
of a shared burden which was infinitely soothing, and though he made no
answer, his face lost something of its harassed look as the two walked
on together down Oriel Street and into Merton Meadows.
'Have you any immediate plans?' said Mr. Grey, as they turned into the
Broad Walk, now in the full leafage of June, and rustling under a brisk
western wind blowing from the river.
'No; at least I suppose it will be no good my trying for a fellowship.
But I meant to tell you, sir, of one thing--I have made up my mind to
take orders.'
'You have? When?'
'Quite lately. So that fixes me, I suppose, to come back for divinity
lectures in the autumn.'
Mr. Grey said nothing for a while, and they strolled in and out of the
great shadows thrown by the elms across their path.
'You feel no difficulties in the way?' he asked at last, with a certain
quick brusqueness of manner.
'No,' said Robert eagerly. 'I never had any. Perhaps,' he added, with a
sudden humility, 'it is because I have never gone deep enough. What I
believe might have been worth more if I had had more struggle; but it
has all seemed so plain.'
The young voice speaking with hesitation and reserve, and yet with a
deep inner conviction, was pleasant to hear. Mr. Grey turned towards it,
and the great eyes under the furrowed brow had a peculiar gentleness of
expression.
'You will probably be very happy in the life,' he said. 'The Church
wants men of your sort.'
But through all the sympathy of the tone Robert was conscious of a veil
between them. He knew, of course, pretty much what it was, and with a
sudden impulse he felt that he would have given worlds to break through
it and talk frankly with this man whom he revered beyond all others,
wide as was the intellectual difference between them. But the tutor's
reticence and the younger man's respect prevented it.
When the unlucky second class was actually proclaimed to the world,
Langham took it to heart perhaps more than either Elsmere or his mother.
No one knew better than he what Elsmere's gifts were. It was absurd that
he should not have made more of them in sight of the public. '_Le
clericalisme, voila l'ennemi!_' was about the gist of Langham's mood
during the days that followed on the class list.
Elsmere, however, did not divulge his intention of taking orders to him
till ten days afterwards, when he had carried off Langham to stay at
Harden, and he and his old tutor were smoking in his mother's little
garden one moonlit night.
When he had finished his statement Langham stood still a moment watching
the wreaths of smoke as they curled and vanished. The curious interest
in Elsmere's career, which during a certain number of months had made
him almost practical, almost energetic, had disappeared. He was his own
languid, paradoxical self.
'Well, after all,' he said at last, very slowly, 'the difficulty lies in
preaching anything. One may as well preach a respectable mythology as
anything else.'
'What do you mean by a mythology?' cried Robert hotly.
'Simply ideas, or experiences, personified,' said Langham, puffing away.
'I take it they are the subject-matter of all theologies.'
'I don't understand you,' said Robert, flushing. 'To the Christian,
facts have been the medium by which ideas the world could not otherwise
have come at have been communicated to man. Christian theology is a
system of ideas indeed, but of ideas realised, made manifest in facts.'
Langham looked at him for a moment, undecided; then that suppressed
irritation we have already spoken of broke through. 'How do you know
they are facts?' he said drily.
The younger man took up the challenge with all his natural eagerness,
and the conversation resolved itself into a discussion of Christian
evidences. Or rather Robert held forth, and Langham kept him going by an
occasional remark which acted like the prick of a spur. The tutor's
psychological curiosity was soon satisfied. He declared to himself that
the intellect had precious little to do with Elsmere's Christianity. He
had got hold of all the stock apologetic arguments, and used them, his
companion admitted, with ability and ingenuity. But they were merely the
outworks of the citadel. The inmost fortress was held by something
wholly distinct from intellectual conviction--by moral passion, by love,
by feeling, by that mysticism, in short, which no healthy youth should
be without.
'He imagines he has satisfied his intellect,' was the inward comment of
one of the most melancholy of sceptics, 'and he has never so much as
exerted it. What a brute I am to protest!'
And suddenly Langham threw up the sponge. He held out his hand to his
companion, a momentary gleam of tenderness in his black eyes, such as on
one or two critical occasions before had disarmed the impetuous Elsmere.
'No use to discuss it further. You have a strong case, of course, and
you have put it well. Only, when you are pegging away at reforming and
enlightening the world, don't trample too much on the people who have
more than enough to do to enlighten themselves.'
As to Mrs. Elsmere, in this new turn of her son's fortunes, she realised
with humorous distinctness that for some years past Robert had been
educating her as well as himself. Her old rebellious sense of something
inherently absurd in the clerical status had been gradually slain in her
by her long contact through him with the finer and more imposing aspects
of church life. She was still on light skirmishing terms with the Harden
curates, and at times she would flame out into the wildest, wittiest
threats and gibes, for the momentary satisfaction of her own essentially
lay instincts; but at bottom she knew perfectly well that, when the
moment came, no mother could be more loyal, more easily imposed upon,
than she would be.
'I suppose, then, Robert, we shall be back at Murewell before very
long,' she said to him one morning abruptly, studying him the while out
of her small twinkling eyes. What dignity there was already in the young
lightly-built frame! what frankness and character in the irregular,
attractive face!
'Mother,' cried Elsmere indignantly, 'what do you take me for? Do you
imagine I am going to bury myself in the country at five or
six-and-twenty, take six hundred a year, and nothing to do for it? That
would be a deserter's act indeed.'
Mrs. Elsmere shrugged her shoulders. 'Oh, I supposed you would insist on
killing yourself, to begin with. To most people nowadays that seems to
be the necessary preliminary of a useful career.'
Robert laughed and kissed her, but her question had stirred him so much
that he sat down that very evening to write to his cousin Mowbray
Elsmere. He announced to him that he was about to read for orders, and
that at the same time he relinquished all claim on the living of
Murewell. 'Do what you like with it when it falls vacant,' he wrote,
'without reference to me. My views are strong that before a clergyman in
health and strength, and in no immediate want of money, allows himself
the luxury of a country parish, he is bound, for some years at any rate,
to meet the challenge of evil and poverty where the fight is
hardest--among our English town population.'
Sir Mowbray Elsmere replied curtly in a day or two to the effect that
Robert's letter seemed to him superfluous. He, Sir Mowbray, had nothing
to do with his cousin's views. When the living was vacant--the present
holder, however, was uncommon tough and did not mean dying--he should
follow out the instructions of his father's will, and if Robert did not
want the thing he could say so.
In the autumn Robert and his mother went back to Oxford. The following
spring he redeemed his Oxford reputation completely by winning a
Fellowship at Merton after a brilliant fight with some of the best men
of his year, and in June he was ordained.
In the summer term some teaching work was offered him at Merton, and by
Mr. Grey's advice he accepted it, thus postponing for a while that
London curacy and that stout grapple with human need at its sorest for
which his soul was pining. 'Stay here a year or two,' Grey said bluntly;
'you are at the beginning of your best learning time, and you are not
one of the natures who can do without books. You will be all the better
worth having afterwards, and there is no lack of work here for a man's
moral energies.'
Langham took the same line, and Elsmere submitted. Three happy and
fruitful years followed. The young lecturer developed an amazing power
of work. That concentration which he had been unable to achieve for
himself his will was strong enough to maintain when it was a question of
meeting the demands of a college class in which he was deeply
interested. He became a stimulating and successful teacher, and one of
the most popular of men. His passionate sense of responsibility towards
his pupils made him load himself with burdens to which he was constantly
physically unequal, and fill the vacations almost as full as the terms.
And as he was comparatively a man of means, his generous impetuous
temper was able to gratify itself in ways that would have been
impossible to others. The story of his summer reading parties, for
instance, if one could have unravelled it, would have been found to be
one long string of acts of kindness towards men poorer and duller than
himself.
At the same time he formed close and eager relations with the heads of
the religious party in Oxford. His mother's Evangelical training of him
and Mr. Grey's influence, together, perhaps, with certain drifts of
temperament, prevented him from becoming a High Churchman. The
sacramental, ceremonial view of the Church never took hold upon him. But
to the English Church as a great national institution for the promotion
of God's work on earth no one could have been more deeply loyal, and
none coming close to him could mistake the fervour and passion of his
Christian feeling. At the same time he did not know what rancour or
bitterness meant, so that men of all shades of Christian belief reckoned
a friend in him, and he went through life surrounded by an unusual,
perhaps a dangerous amount of liking and affection. He threw himself
ardently into the charitable work of Oxford, now helping a High Church
vicar, and now toiling with Grey and one or two other Liberal fellows,
at the maintenance of a coffee-palace and lecture-room just started by
them in one of the suburbs; while in the second year of his lectureship
the success of some first attempts at preaching fixed the attention of
the religious leaders upon him as upon a man certain to make his mark.
So the three years passed--years not, perhaps, of great intellectual
advance, for other forces in him than those of the intellect were mainly
to the fore, but years certainly of continuous growth in character and
moral experience. And at the end of them Mowbray Elsmere made his offer,
and it was accepted.
The secret of it, of course, was overwork. Mrs. Elsmere, from the little
house in Merton Street, where she had established herself, had watched
her boy's meteoric career through these crowded months with very
frequent misgivings. No one knew better than she that Robert was
constitutionally not of the toughest fibre, and she realised long before
he did that the Oxford life as he was bent on leading it must end for
him in premature breakdown. But, as always happens, neither her
remonstrances, nor Mr. Grey's common-sense, nor Langham's fidgety
protests had any effect on the young enthusiast to whom self-slaughter
came so easy. During the latter half of his third year of teaching he
was continually being sent away by the doctors, and coming back only to
break down again. At last, in the January of his fourth year, the
collapse became so decided that he consented, bribed by the prospect of
the Holy Land, to go away for three months to Egypt and the East,
accompanied by his mother and a college friend.
Just before their departure news reached him of the death of the rector
of Murewell, followed by a formal offer of the living from Sir Mowbray.
At the moment when the letter arrived he was feeling desperately tired
and ill, and in after-life he never forgot the half-superstitious thrill
and deep sense of depression with which he received it. For within him
was a slowly-emerging, despairing conviction that he was indeed
physically unequal to the claims of his Oxford work, and if so, still
more unequal to grappling with the hardest pastoral labour and the worst
forms of English poverty. And the coincidence of the Murewell
incumbent's death struck his sensitive mind as a Divine leading.
But it was a painful defeat. He took the letter to Grey, and Grey
strongly advised him to accept.
'You overdrive your scruples, Elsmere,' said the Liberal tutor with
emphasis. 'No one can say a living with 1200 souls, and no curate, is a
sinecure. As for hard town work, it is absurd--you couldn't stand it.
And after all, I imagine, there are some souls worth saving out of the
towns.'
Elsmere pointed out vindictively that family livings were a corrupt and
indefensible institution. Mr. Grey replied calmly that they probably
were, but that the fact did not affect, so far as he could see,
Elsmere's competence to fulfil all the duties of rector of Murewell.
'After all, my dear fellow,' he said, a smile breaking over his strong
expressive face, 'it is well even for reformers to be sane.'
Mrs. Elsmere was passive. It seemed to her that she had foreseen it all
along. She was miserable about his health, but she too had a moment of
superstition, and would not urge him. Murewell was no name of happy omen
to her--she had passed the darkest hours of her life there.
In the end Robert asked for delay, which was grudgingly granted him.
Then he and his mother and friend fled over seas: he feverishly
determined to get well and cheat the fates. But, after a halcyon time in
Palestine and Constantinople, a whiff of poisoned air at Cannes, on
their way home, acting on a low constitutional state, settled matters.
Robert was laid up for weeks with malarious fever, and when he struggled
out again into the hot Riviera sunshine it was clear to himself and
everybody else that he must do what he could, and not what he would, in
the Christian vineyard.
'Mother,' he said one day, suddenly looking up at her as she sat near
him working, 'can _you_ be happy at Murewell?'
There was a wistfulness in the long thin face, and a pathetic accent of
surrender in the voice, which hurt the mother's heart.
'I can be happy wherever you are,' she said, laying her brown nervous
hand on his blanched one.
'Then give me pen and paper and let me write to Mowbray. I wonder
whether the place has changed at all. Heigh ho! How is one to preach to
people who have stuffed you up with gooseberries, or swung you on gates,
or lifted you over puddles to save your petticoats? I wonder what has
become of that boy whom I hit in the eye with my bow and arrow, or of
that other lout who pummelled me into the middle of next week for
disturbing his bird-trap? By the way, is the Squire--is Roger
Wendover--living at the Hall now?'
He turned to his mother with a sudden start of interest.
'So I hear,' said Mrs. Elsmere drily. '_He_ won't be much good to you.'
He sat on meditating while she went for pen and paper. He had forgotten
the Squire of Murewell. But Roger Wendover, the famous and eccentric
owner of Murewell Hall, hermit and scholar, possessed of one of the most
magnificent libraries in England, and author of books which had carried
a revolutionary shock into the heart of English society, was not a
figure to be overlooked by any rector of Murewell, least of all by one
possessed of Robert's culture and imagination.
The young man ransacked his memory on the subject with a sudden access
of interest in his new home that was to be.
Six weeks later they were in England, and Robert, now convalescent, had
accepted an invitation to spend a month in Long Whindale with his
mother's cousins, the Thornburghs, who offered him quiet, and bracing
air. He was to enter on his duties at Murewell in July, the bishop, who
had been made aware of his Oxford reputation, welcoming the new recruit
to the diocese with marked warmth of manner.