IT was a very merry party at the vicarage that evening. Lily had not
been prepared to meet Kenelm there, and her face brightened
wonderfully as at her entrance he turned from the book-shelves to
which Mr. Emlyn was directing his attention. But instead of meeting
his advance, she darted off to the lawn, where Clemmy and several
other children greeted her with a joyous shout.
"Not acquainted with Macleane's Juvenal?" said the reverend scholar;
"you will be greatly pleased with it; here it is,--a posthumous work,
edited by George Long. I can lend you Munro's Lucretius, '69. Aha!
we have some scholars yet to pit against the Germans."
"I am heartily glad to hear it," said Kenelm. "It will be a long time
before they will ever wish to rival us in that game which Miss Clemmy
is now forming on the lawn, and in which England has recently acquired
a European reputation."
"I don't take you. What game?"
"Puss in the Corner. With your leave I will look out and see whether
it be a winning game for puss--in the long-run." Kenelm joined the
children, amidst whom Lily seemed not the least childlike. Resisting
all overtures from Clemmy to join their play, he seated himself on a
sloping bank at a little distance,--an idle looker-on. His eye
followed Lily's nimble movements, his ear drank in the music of her
joyous laugh. Could that be the same girl whom he had seen tending
the flower-bed amid the gravestones? Mrs. Emlyn came across the lawn
and joined him, seating herself also on the bank. Mrs. Emlyn was an
exceedingly clever woman: nevertheless she was not formidable,--on the
contrary, pleasing; and though the ladies in the neighbourhood said
'she talked like a book,' the easy gentleness of her voice carried off
that offence.
"I suppose, Mr. Chillingly," said she, "I ought to apologize for my
husband's invitation to what must seem to you so frivolous an
entertainment as a child's party. But when Mr. Emlyn asked you to
come to us this evening, he was not aware that Clemmy had also invited
her young friends. He had looked forward to rational conversation
with you on his own favourite studies."
"It is not so long since I left school, but that I prefer a half
holiday to lessons, even from a tutor so pleasant as Mr. Emlyn,--
"'Ah, happy years,--once more who would not be a boy!'"
"Nay," said Mrs. Emlyn, with a grave smile. "Who that had started so
fairly as Mr. Chillingly in the career of man would wish to go back
and resume a place among boys?"
"But, my dear Mrs. Emlyn, the line I quoted was wrung from the heart
of a man who had already outstripped all rivals in the race-ground he
had chosen, and who at that moment was in the very Maytime of youth
and of fame. And if such a man at such an epoch in his career could
sigh to 'be once more a boy,' it must have been when he was thinking
of the boy's half holiday, and recoiling from the task work he was
condemned to learn as man."
"The line you quote is, I think, from 'Childe Harold,' and surely you
would not apply to mankind in general the sentiment of a poet so
peculiarly self-reflecting (if I may use that expression), and in whom
sentiment is often so morbid."
"You are right, Mrs. Emlyn," said Kenelm, ingenuously. "Still a boy's
half holiday is a very happy thing; and among mankind in general there
must be many who would be glad to have it back again,--Mr. Emlyn
himself, I should think."
"Mr. Emlyn has his half holiday now. Do you not see him standing just
outside the window? Do you not hear him laughing? He is a child
again in the mirth of his children. I hope you will stay some time in
the neighbourhood; I am sure you and he will like each other. And it
is such a rare delight to him to get a scholar like yourself to talk
to."
"Pardon me, I am not a scholar; a very noble title that, and not to be
given to a lazy trifler on the surface of book-lore like myself."
"You are too modest. My husband has a copy of your Cambridge prize
verses, and says 'the Latinity of them is quite beautiful.' I quote
his very words."
"Latin verse-making is a mere knack, little more than a proof that one
had an elegant scholar for one's tutor, as I certainly had. But it is
by special grace that a real scholar can send forth another real
scholar, and a Kennedy produce a Munro. But to return to the more
interesting question of half holidays; I declare that Clemmy is
leading off your husband in triumph. He is actually going to be Puss
in the Corner."
"When you know more of Charles,--I mean my husband,--you will discover
that his whole life is more or less of a holiday. Perhaps because he
is not what you accuse yourself of being: he is not lazy; he never
wishes to be a boy once more; and taskwork itself is holiday to him.
He enjoys shutting himself up in his study and reading; he enjoys a
walk with the children; he enjoys visiting the poor; he enjoys his
duties as a clergyman. And though I am not always contented for him,
though I think he should have had those honours in his profession
which have been lavished on men with less ability and less learning,
yet he is never discontented himself. Shall I tell you his secret?"
"Do."
"He is a /Thanks-giving Man/. You, too, must have much to thank God
for, Mr. Chillingly; and in thanksgiving to God does there not blend
usefulness to man, and such sense of pastime in the usefulness as
makes each day a holiday?"
Kenelm looked up into the quiet face of this obscure pastor's wife
with a startled expression in his own.
"I see, ma'am," said he, "that you have devoted much thought to the
study of the aesthetical philosophy as expounded by German thinkers,
whom it is rather difficult to understand."
"I, Mr. Chillingly! good gracious! No! What do you mean by your
aesthetical philosophy?"
"According to aesthetics, I believe man arrives at his highest state
of moral excellence when labour and duty lose all the harshness of
effort,--when they become the impulse and habit of life; when as the
essential attributes of the beautiful, they are, like beauty, enjoyed
as pleasure; and thus, as you expressed, each day becomes a holiday: a
lovely doctrine, not perhaps so lofty as that of the Stoics, but more
bewitching. Only, very few of us can practically merge our cares and
our worries into so serene an atmosphere."
"Some do so without knowing anything of aesthetics and with no
pretence to be Stoics; but, then, they are Christians."
"There are some such Christians, no doubt; but they are rarely to be
met with. Take Christendom altogether, and it appears to comprise the
most agitated population in the world; the population in which there
is the greatest grumbling as to the quantity of labour to be done, the
loudest complaints that duty instead of a pleasure is a very hard and
disagreeable struggle, and in which holidays are fewest and the moral
atmosphere least serene. Perhaps," added Kenelm, with a deeper shade
of thought on his brow, "it is this perpetual consciousness of
struggle; this difficulty in merging toil into ease, or stern duty
into placid enjoyment; this refusal to ascend for one's self into the
calm of an air aloof from the cloud which darkens, and the hail-storm
which beats upon, the fellow-men we leave below,--that makes the
troubled life of Christendom dearer to Heaven, and more conducive to
Heaven's design in rendering earth the wrestling-ground and not the
resting-place of man, than is that of the Brahmin, ever seeking to
abstract himself from the Christian's conflicts of action and desire,
and to carry into its extremest practice the aesthetic theory, of
basking undisturbed in the contemplation of the most absolute beauty
human thought can reflect from its idea of divine good!"
Whatever Mrs. Emlyn might have said in reply was interrupted by the
rush of the children towards her; they were tired of play, and eager
for tea and the magic lantern.