MR. WELBY arrived, and pleased everybody. A man of the happiest
manners, easy and courteous. There was no pedantry in him, yet you
could soon see that his reading covered an extensive surface, and here
and there had dived deeply. He enchanted the Parson by his comments
on Saint Chrysostom; he dazzled Sir Peter with his lore in the
antiquities of ancient Britain; he captivated Kenelm by his readiness
to enter into that most disputatious of sciences called metaphysics;
while for Lady Chillingly, and the three sisters who were invited to
meet him, he was more entertaining, but not less instructive. Equally
at home in novels and in good books, he gave to the spinsters a list
of innocent works in either; while for Lady Chillingly he sparkled
with anecdotes of fashionable life, the newest /bons mots/, the latest
scandals. In fact, Mr. Welby was one of those brilliant persons who
adorn any society amidst which they are thrown. If at heart he was a
disappointed man, the disappointment was concealed by an even serenity
of spirits; he had entertained high and justifiable hopes of a
brilliant career and a lasting reputation as a theologian and a
preacher; the succession to his estate at the age of twenty-three had
changed the nature of his ambition. The charm of his manner was such
that he sprang at once into the fashion, and became beguiled by his
own genial temperament into that lesser but pleasanter kind of
ambition which contents itself with social successes and enjoys the
present hour. When his circumstances compelled him to eke out his
income by literary profits, he slid into the grooves of periodical
composition, and resigned all thoughts of the labour required for any
complete work, which might take much time and be attended with scanty
profits. He still remained very popular in society, and perhaps his
general reputation for ability made him fearful to hazard it by any
great undertaking. He was not, like Mivers, a despiser of all men and
all things; but he regarded men and things as an indifferent though
good-natured spectator regards the thronging streets from a
drawing-room window. He could not be called /blase/, but he was
thoroughly /desillusionne/. Once over-romantic, his character now was
so entirely imbued with the neutral tints of life that romance
offended his taste as an obtrusion of violent colour into a sober
woof. He was become a thorough Realist in his code of criticism, and
in his worldly mode of action and thought. But Parson John did not
perceive this, for Welby listened to that gentleman's eulogies on the
Ideal school without troubling himself to contradict them. He had
grown too indolent to be combative in conversation, and only as a
critic betrayed such pugnacity as remained to him by the polished
cruelty of sarcasm.
He came off with flying colours through an examination into his Church
orthodoxy instituted by the Parson and Sir Peter. Amid a cloud of
ecclesiastical erudition, his own opinions vanished in those of the
Fathers. In truth, he was a Realist, in religion as in everything
else. He regarded Christianity as a type of existent civilization,
which ought to be reverenced, as one might recognize the other types
of that civilization; such as the liberty of the press, the
representative system, white neckcloths and black coats of an evening,
etc. He belonged, therefore, to what he himself called the school of
Eclectical Christiology; and accommodated the reasonings of Deism to
the doctrines of the Church, if not as a creed, at least as an
institution. Finally, he united all the Chillingly votes in his
favour; and when he departed from the Hall carried off Kenelm for his
initiation into the new ideas that were to govern his generation.