East returned to his regiment in a few days, and at the end of
the month the gallant 101st embarked for India. Tom wrote several
letters to the lieutenant, inclosing notes to Harry, with
gleanings of news from Englebourn, where his escape on the night
of the riot had been a nine-days' wonder; and, now that he was
fairly "'listed," and out of the way, public opinion was
beginning to turn in his favor. In due course a letter arrived
from the lieutenant, dated Cape Town, giving a prosperous account
of the voyage so far. East did not say much about "your convict,"
as he still insisted on calling Harry; but the little he did say
was very satisfactory, and Tom sent off this part of the letter
to Katie, to whom he had confided the whole story, entreating her
to make the best use of it in the interest of the young soldier.
And, after this out-of-the-way beginning, he settled down into
the usual routine of his Oxford life.
This change in his opinions and objects of interest brought him
now into more intimate relations with a set of whom he had, as
yet, seen little. For want of a better name, we may call them
"the party of progress." At their parties, instead of practical
jokes, and boisterous mirth, and talk of boats, and bats, and
guns, and horses, the highest and deepest questions of morals,
and politics, and metaphysics, were discussed, and discussed with
a. freshness and enthusiasm which is apt to wear off when doing
has to take the place of talking, but has a strange charm of its
own while it lasts, and is looked back to with loving regret by
those for whom it is no longer a possibility.
With this set Tom soon fraternized, and drank in many new ideas,
and took to himself also many new crotchets besides those with
which he was already weighted. Almost all his new acquaintances
were Liberal in politics, but a few only were ready to go all
lengths with him. They were all Union men, and Tom, of course,
followed the fashion, and soon propounded theories in that
institution which gained him the name of Chartist Brown.
There was a strong mixture of self-conceit in it all. He had a
kind of idea that he had discovered something which it was
creditable to have discovered, and that it was a very fine thing
to have all these feelings for, and sympathies with, "the
masses", and to believe in democracy, and "glorious humanity,"
and "a good time coming," and I know not what other big matters.
And, although it startled and pained him at first to hear himself
called ugly names, which he had hated and despised from his youth
up, and to know that many of his old acquaintances looked upon
him, not simply as a madman, but as a madman with snobbish
proclivities; yet, when the first plunge was over, there was a
good deal on the other hand which tickled his vanity, and was far
from being unpleasant.
To do him justice, however, the disagreeables were such that, had
there not been some genuine belief at the bottom, he would
certainly have been headed back very speedily into the fold of
political and social orthodoxy. As it was, amidst the cloud of
sophisms, and platitudes, and big, one-sided ideas half-mastered,
which filled his thoughts and overflowed in his talk, there was
growing in him, and taking firmer hold on him daily, a true and
broad sympathy for men as men, and especially for poor men as
poor men, and a righteous and burning hatred against all laws,
customs, or notions, which, according to his light, either were
or seemed to be setting aside, or putting anything else in the
place of, or above, the man. It was with him the natural
outgrowth of the child's and boy's training (though his father
would have been much astonished to be told so), and the instincts
of those early days were now getting rapidly set into habits and
faiths, and becoming a part of himself.
In this stage of his life, as in so many former ones, Tom got
great help from his intercourse with Hardy, now the rising tutor
of the college. Hardy was travelling much the same road himself
as our hero, but was somewhat further on, and had come into it
from a different country, and though quite other obstacles. Their
early lives had been very different; and, both by nature and from
long and severe self-restraint and discipline, Hardy was much the
less impetuous and demonstrative of the two. He did not rush out,
therefore (as Tom was too much inclined to do), the moment he had
seized hold of the end of a new idea which he felt to be good for
_him_ and what _he_ wanted, and brandish it in the face of all
comers, and think himself a traitor to the truth if he wasn't
trying to make everybody he met with eat it. Hardy, on the
contrary, would test his new idea, and turn it over, and prove it
as far as he could, and try to get hold of the whole of it, and
ruthlessly strip off any tinsel or rose-pink sentiment with which
it might happen to be mixed up.
Often and often did Tom suffer under this severe method, and
rebel against it, and accuse his friend, both to his face and in
his own secret thoughts, of coldness, and want of faith, and all
manner of other sins of omission and commission. In the end,
however, he generally came round, with more or less of rebellion,
according to the severity of the treatment, and acknowledge that,
when Hardy brought him down from riding the high horse, it was
not without good reason, and that the dust in which he was rolled
was always most wholesome dust.
For instance, there was no phrase more frequently in the mouths
of the party of progress than "the good cause." It was a fine
big-sounding phrase, which could be used with great effect in
perorations of speeches at the Union, and was sufficiently
indefinite to be easily defended from ordinary attacks, while it
saved him who used it the trouble of ascertaining accurately for
himself, or settling for his hearers, what it really did mean.
But, however satisfactory it might be before promiscuous
audiences, and so long as vehement assertion or declaration was
all that was required to uphold it, this same "good cause" was
liable to come to much grief when it had to get itself defined.
Hardy was particularly given to persecution on this subject, when
he could get Tom, and, perhaps, one or two others, in a quiet
room by themselves. While professing the utmost sympathy for "the
good cause," and a hope as strong as theirs that all its enemies
might find themselves suspended to lamp-posts as soon as
possible, he would pursue it into corners from which escape was
most difficult, asking it and its supporters what it exactly was,
and driving them from one cloud-land to another, and from "the
good cause" to the "people's cause," the "cause of labor," and
other like troublesome definitions, until the great idea seemed
to have no shape or existence any longer even in their own
brains.
But Hardy's persecution, provoking as it was for the time, never
went to the undermining of any real conviction in the minds of
his juniors, or the shaking of anything which did not need
shaking, but only helped them to clear their ideas and brains as
to what they were talking and thinking about, and gave them
glimpses--soon clouded over again, but most useful,
nevertheless--of the truth; that there were a good many knotty
questions to be solved before a man could be quite sure that he
had found out the way to set the world thoroughly to rights, and
heal all the ills that flesh is heir to.
Hardy treated another of his friend's most favorite notions even
with less respect than this one of "the good cause." Democracy,
that "universal democracy," which their favourite author had
recently declared to be "an inevitable fact of the days in which
we live", was, perhaps, on the whole, the pet idea of the small
section of liberal young Oxford, with whom Tom was now hand and
glove. They lost no opportunity of worshipping it, and doing
battle for it; and, indeed, most of them did very truly believe
that that state of the world which this universal democracy was
to bring about, and which was coming no man could say how soon,
was to be in fact that age of peace and good-will which men had
dreamt of in all times, when the lion should lie down with the
kid, and nation should not vex nation any more.
After hearing something to this effect from Tom on several
occasions, Hardy cunningly lured him to his rooms on the pretence
of talking over the prospects of the boat club, and then, having
seated him by the fire, which he himself proceeded to assault
gently with the poker, propounded suddenly to him the question,
"Brown, I should like to know what you mean by 'democracy'?"
Tom at once saw the trap into which he had fallen, and made
several efforts to break away, but unsuccessfully; and, being
seated to a cup of tea, and allowed to smoke, was then and there
grievously oppressed, and mangled, and sat upon, by his oldest
and best friend. He took his ground carefully, and propounded
only what he felt sure that Hardy himself would at once
accept--what no man of any worth could possibly take exception
to. "He meant much more," he said, "than this; but for the
present purpose it would be enough for him to say that, whatever
else it might mean, democracy in his mouth always meant that
every man should have a share in the government of his country."
Hardy, seeming to acquiesce, and making a sudden change in the
subject of their talk, decoyed his innocent guest away from the
thought of democracy for a few minutes, by holding up to him the
flag of hero-worship, in which worship Tom was, of course, a
sedulous believer. Then, having involved him in most difficult
country, his persecutor opened fire upon him from masked
batteries of the most deadly kind, the guns being all from the
armory of his own prophets.
"You long for the rule of the ablest man, everywhere, at all
times? To find your ablest man, and then give him power, and obey
him--that you hold to be about the highest act of wisdom which a
nation can be capable of?"
"Yes; and you know you believe that to, Hardy, just as firmly as
I do."
"I hope so. But then, how about our universal democracy, and
every man having a share in the government of his country?"
Tom felt that his flank was turned; in fact, the contrast of his
two beliefs had never struck him vividly before, and he was
consequently much confused. But Hardy went on tapping a big coal
gently with the poker, and gave him time to recover himself and
collect his thoughts.
"I don't mean, of course, that every man is to have an actual
share in the government," he said at last.
"But every man is somehow to have a share; and, if not an actual
one, I can't see what the proposition comes to."
"I call it having a share in the government when a man has share
in saying who shall govern him."
"Well, you'll own that's a very different thing. But let's see;
will that find our wisest governor for us--letting all the most
foolish men in the nation have a say as to who he is to be?"
"Come now, Hardy, I've heard you say that you are for manhood
suffrage."
"That's another question; you let in another idea there. At
present we are considering whether the _vox populi_ is the best
test for finding your best man. I'm afraid all history is against
you."
"That's a good joke. Now, there I defy you, Hardy."
"Begin at the beginning, then, and let us see."
"I suppose you'll say, then, that the Egyptian and Babylonian
empires were better than the little Jewish republic."
"Republic! well, let that pass. But I never heard that the Jews
elected Moses, or any of the judges."
"Well, never mind the Jews; they're an exceptional case; you
can't argue from them."
"I don't admit that. I believe just the contrary. But go on."
"Well, then, what do you say to the glorious Greek republics,
with Athens at the head of them?"
"I say that no nation ever treated their best men so badly. I see
I must put on a lecture in Aristophanes for your special benefit.
Vain, irritable, shallow, suspicious old Demus, with his two
oboli in his cheek, and doubting only between Cleon and the
sausage-seller, which he shall choose for his wisest man--not to
govern, but to serve his whims and caprices. You must call
another witness, I think."
"But that's a caricature."
"Take the picture, then, out of Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, how
you will--you won't mend the matter much. You shouldn't go so
fast, Brown; you won't mind my saying so, I know. You don't get
clear in your own mind before you pitch into everyone who comes
across you, and so do your own side (which I admit is mostly the
right one) more harm than good."
Tom couldn't stand being put down so summarily, and fought over
the ground from one country to another, from Rome to the United
States, with all the arguments he could muster, but with little
success. That unfortunate first admission of his, he felt it
throughout, like a millstone round his neck, and could not help
admitting to himself, when he left, that there was a good deal in
Hardy's concluding remark,--"You'll find it rather a tough
business to get your 'universal democracy' and 'government by the
wisest' to pull together in one coach."
Notwithstanding all such occasional reverses and cold baths,
however, Tom went on strengthening himself in his new opinions,
and maintaining them with all the zeal of a convert. The shelves
of his bookcase, and the walls of his room, soon began to show
signs of the change which was taking place in his ways of looking
at men and things. Hitherto a framed engraving of George III had
hung over his mantle-piece; but early in this, his third year,
the frame had disappeared for a few days, and when it reappeared,
the solemn face of John Milton looked out from it, while the
honest monarch had retired into a portfolio. A facsimile of Magna
Charta soon displaced a large colored print of "A Day With the
Pycheley", and soon afterwards the death warrant of Charles I.
with its grim and resolute rows of signatures and seals, appeared
on the wall in a place of honour, in the neighbourhood of Milton.
Squire Brown was passing through Oxford, and paid his son a visit
soon after this last arrangement had been completed. He dined in
hall, at the high table, being still a member of the college, and
afterwards came with Hardy to Tom's rooms to have a quiet glass
of wine, and spend the evening with his son and a few of his
friends, who had been asked to meet "the governor."
Tom had a struggle with himself whether he should not remove the
death-warrant into his bedroom for the evening, and had actually
taken if down with this view; but in the end he could not stomach
such a backsliding, and so restored it to its place. "I have
never concealed my opinions from my father," he thought, "though
I don't think he quite knows what they are. But if he doesn't, he
ought, and the sooner the better. I should be a sneak to try to
hide them. I know he won't like it, but he is always just and
fair, and will make allowances. At any rate, up it goes again."
And so he re-hung the death-warrant, but with the devout secret
hope that his father might not see it.
The wine-party went off admirably. The men were nice,
gentlemanly, intelligent fellows; and the Squire, who had been
carefully planted by Tom with his back to the death-warrant,
enjoyed himself very much. At last they all went, except Hardy;
and now the nervous time approached. For a short time longer the
three sat at the wine-table while the squire enlarged upon the
great improvement in young men, and the habits of the University,
especially in the matter of drinking. Tom had only opened three
bottles of port. In his time the men would have drunk certainly
not less than a bottle a man; and other like remarks he made, as
he sipped his coffee, and then, pushing back his chair, said,
"Well, Tom, hadn't your servant better clear away, and then we
can draw round the fire, and have a talk."
"Wouldn't you like to take a turn while he is clearing? There's
the Martyr's Memorial you haven't seen."
"No, thank you. I know the place well enough. I don't come to
walk about in the dark. We sha'n't be in your man's way."
And so Tom's scout came in to clear away, took out the extra
leaves of the table, put on the cloth, and laid tea. During these
operations Mr. Brown was standing with his back to the fire,
looking about him as he talked. When there was more space to move
in, he began to walk up and down, and very soon took to remarking
the furniture and arrangements of the room. One after the other
the pictures came under his notice. Most of them escaped without
comment, the Squire simply pausing a moment, and then taking up
his walk again. Magna Charta drew forth his hearty approval. It
was a capital notion to hang such things on his walls, instead of
bad prints of steeple-chases, or trash of that sort. "Ah, here's
something else of the same kind. Why, Tom, what's this?" said the
squire, as he paused before the death-warrant. There was a moment
or two of dead silence, while the Squire's eyes ran down the
names, from Jo. Bradshaw to Miles Corbet; and then he turned, and
came and sat down opposite to his son. Tom expected his father to
be vexed, but was not the least prepared for the tone of pain,
and sorrow, and anger, in which he first inquired, and then
remonstrated.
For some time past the Squire and his son had not felt so
comfortable together as of old. Mr. Brown had been annoyed by
much that Tom had done in the case of Harry Winburn, though he
did not know all. There had sprung up a barrier somehow or other
between them, neither of them knew how. They had often felt
embarrassed at being left alone together during the past year,
and found that there were certain topics which they could not
talk upon, which they avoided by mutual consent. Every now and
then the constraint and embarrassment fell off for a short time,
for at bottom they loved and appreciated one another heartily;
but the divergences in their thoughts and habits had become very
serious, and seemed likely to increase rather than not. They felt
keenly the chasm between the two generations. As they looked at
one another from opposite banks, each in his secret heart blamed
the other in great measure for that which was the fault of
neither. Mixed with the longings which each felt for a better
understanding was enough of reserve and indignation to prevent
them from coming to it. The discovery of their differences was
too recent, and they were too much alike in character and temper,
for either to make large enough allowance for, or to be really
tolerant of, the other.
This was the first occasion on which they had come to outspoken
and serious difference; and though the collision had been
exceedingly painful to both, yet when they parted for the night,
it was with a feeling of relief that the ice had been thoroughly
broken. Before his father left the room, Tom had torn the
facsimile of the death-warrant out of its frame, and put it in
the fire, protesting, however, at the same time, that, though "he
did thist out of deference to his father, and was deeply grieved
at having given him pain, he could not and would not give up his
convictions, or pretend that they were changed, or even shaken."
The Squire walked back to his hotel deeply moved. Who can wonder?
He was a man full of living and vehement convictions. One of his
early recollections had been the arrival in England of the news
of the beheading of Louis XVI, and the doings of the Reign of
Terror. He had been bred in the times when it was held impossible
for a gentleman or a Christian to hold such views as his son had
been maintaining, and, like many of the noblest Englishmen of his
time, had gone with and accepted the creed of the day.
Tom remained behind, dejected and melancholy; now accusing his
father of injustice and bigotry, now longing to go after him, and
give up everything. What were all his opinions and convictions
compared with his father's confidence and love? At breakfast the
next morning, however, after each of them had had time for
thinking over what had passed, they met with a cordiality which
was as pleasant to each as it was unlooked for; and from this
visit of his father to him at Oxford, Tom dated a new and more
satisfactory epoch in their intercourse.
The fact had begun to dawn on the Squire that the world had
changed a good deal since his time. He saw that young men were
much improved in some ways, and acknowledged the fact heartily;
on the other hand, they had taken up with a lot of new notions
which he could not understand, and thought mischievous and bad.
Perhaps Tom might get over them as he got to be older and wiser,
and in the meantime he must take the evil with the good. At any
rate he was too fair a man to try to dragoon his son out of
anything which he really believed. Tom on his part gratefully
accepted the change in his father's manner, and took all means of
showing his gratitude by consulting and talking freely to him on
such subjects as they could agree upon, which were numerous,
keeping in the back-ground the questions which had provoked
painful discussions between them. By degrees these even could be
tenderly approached; and, now that they were approached in a
different spirit, the honest beliefs of the father and son no
longer looked so monstrous to one another, the hard and sharp
outlines began to wear off, and the views of each of them to be
modified. Thus, bit by bit, by a slow but sure process, a better
understanding than ever was re-established between them.
This beginning of a better state of things in his relations with
his father consoled Tom for many other matters that seemed to go
wrong with him, and was a constant bit of bright sky to turn to
when the rest of his horizon looked dark and dreary, as it did
often enough.
For it proved a very trying year to him, this his third and last
year at the University; a year full of large dreams and small
performances, of unfulfilled hopes and struggles to set himself
right, ending ever more surely in failure and disappointment. The
common pursuits of the place had lost their freshness, and with
it much of their charm. He was beginning to feel himself in a
cage, and to beat against the bars of it.
Often, in spite of all his natural hopefulness, his heart seemed
to sicken and turn cold, without any apparent reason; his old
pursuits palled on him, and he scarcely cared to turn to new
ones. What was it that made life so blank to him at these times?
How was it that he could not keep the spirit within him alive and
warm?
It was easier to ask such questions than to get an answer. Was it
not this place he was living in and the ways of it? No, for the
place and its ways were the same as ever, and his own way of life
in it better than ever before. Was it the want of sight or
tidings of Mary? Sometimes he thought so, and then cast the
thought away as treason. His love for her was ever sinking deeper
into him, and raising and purifying him. Light and strength and
life came from that source; craven weariness and coldness of
heart, come from whence they might, were not from that quarter.
But precious as his love was to him, and deeply as it affected
his whole life, he felt that there must be something beyond
it--that its full satisfaction would not be enough for him. The
bed was too narrow for a man to stretch himself on. What he was
in search of must underlie and embrace his human love, and
support it. Beyond and above all private and personal desires and
hopes and longings, he was conscious of a restless craving and
feeling about after something, which he could not grasp, and yet
which was not avoiding him, which seemed to be mysteriously
laying hold of him and surrounding him.
The routine of chapels, and lectures, and reading for degree,
boating, cricketing, Union-debating,--all well enough in their
way--left this vacuum unfilled. There was a great outer visible
world, the problems and puzzles of which were rising before him
and haunting him more and more; and a great inner and invisible
world opening round him in awful depth. He seemed to be standing
on the brink of each--now shivering and helpless, feeling like an
atom about to be whirled into the great flood and carried he knew
not where--now ready to plunge in and take his part, full of hope
and belief that he was meant to buffet in the strength of a man
with the seen and the unseen, and to be subdued by neither.
In such a year as this, a bit of steady, bright blue sky was a
boon beyond all price, and so he felt it to be. And it was not
only with his father that Tom regained lost ground in this year.
He was in a state of mind in which he could not bear to neglect
or lose any particle of human sympathy, and so he turned to old
friendships, and revived the correspondence with several of his
old school-fellows, and particularly with Arthur, to the great
delight of the latter, who had mourned bitterly over the few
half-yearly lines, all he had got from Tom of late, in answer to
his own letters, which had themselves, under the weight of
neglect, gradually dwindled down to mere formal matters. A
specimen of the later correspondence may fitly close the
chapter:--
ST. AMBROSE
"Dear Geordie--I can hardly pardon you for having gone to
Cambridge, though you have got a Trinity scholarship--which I
suppose is, on the whole, quite as good a thing as anything of
the sort you could have got up here. I had so looked forward to
having you here though, and now I feel that we shall probably
scarcely ever meet. You will go your way and I mine; and one
alters so quickly, and gets into such strange new grooves, that
unless one sees a man about once a week at least, you may be just
like strangers when you are thrown together again. If you had
come up here it would have been all right, and we should have
gone all through life as we were when I left school, and as I
know we should be again in no time if you had come here. But now,
who can tell?
"What makes me think so much of this is a visit of a few days
that East paid me just before his regiment went to India. I feel
that if he hadn't done it, and we had not met till he came
back--years hence perhaps--we should never have been to one
another what we shall be now. The break would have been too
great. Now it's all right. You would have liked to see the old
fellow grown into a man, but not a bit altered--just the quiet,
old way, pooh-poohing you, and pretending to care for nothing,
but ready to cut the nose off his face, or go through fire and
water for you at a pinch, if you'll only let him go his own way
about it, and have his grumble, and say that he does it all from
the worst possible motives.
"But we must try not to lose hold of one another, Geordie. It
would be a bitter day to me if I thought anything of the kind
could ever happen again. We must write more to one another. I've
been awfully lazy, I know, about it for this last year and more;
but then I always thought you would be coming up here, and so
that it didn't matter much. But now I will turn over a new leaf,
and write to you about my secret thoughts, my works and ways; and
you must do it too. If we can only tide over the next year or two
we shall get into plain sailing, and I suppose it will all right
then. At least, I can't believe that one is likely to have many
such up-and-down years in one's life as the last two. If one is,
goodness knows where I shall end. You know the outline of what
has happened to me from my letters, and the talks we have had in
my flying visits to the old school, but you haven't a notion of
the troubles of mind I've been in, and the changes I've gone
through. I can hardly believe it myself when I look back. However
I'm quite sure I have _got on_; that's my great comfort. It is a
strange blind sort of world, that's a fact, with lots of blind
alleys, down which you go blundering in the fog after some seedy
gaslight, which you take for the sun till you run against the
wall at the end, and find out that the light is a gaslight, and
that there's no thoroughfare. But for all that one does get on.
You get to know the sun's light better and better, and to keep
out of the blind alleys; and I am surer and surer every day, that
there's always sunlight enough for every honest fellow--though I
didn't think so a few months back--and a good sound road under
his feet, if he will only step out on it.
"Talking of blind alleys puts me in mind of your last. Aren't you
going down a blind alley, or something worse? There's no wall to
bring you up, that I can see down the turn you've taken; and
then, what's the practical use of it all? What good would you do
to yourself, or anyone else, if you could get to the end of it? I
can't for the life of me fancy, I confess, what you think will
come of speculating about necessity and free will. I only know
that I can hold out my hand before me, and can move it to the
right or left, despite of all the powers in heaven or earth. As I
sit here writing to you, I can let into my heart, and give the
reins to, all sorts of devil's passions, or to the Spirit of God.
Well, that's enough for me. I _know_ it of myself, and I believe
you know it of yourself, and everybody knows it of themselves or
himself; and why you can't be satisfied with that, passes my
comprehension. As if one hasn't got puzzles enough, and bothers
enough, under one's nose, without going a-field after a lot of
metaphysical quibbles. No, I'm wrong,--not going
a-field,--anything one has to go a-field for is all right. What a
fellow meets outside himself he isn't responsible for, and must
do the best he can with. But to go on for ever looking inside of
one's self, and groping about amongst one's own sensations, and
ideas, and whimsies of one kind and another, I can't conceive a
poorer line of business than that. Don't you get into it now,
that's a dear boy.
"Very likely you'll tell me you can't help it; that every one has
his own difficulties, and must fight them out, and that mine are
one sort, and yours another. Well, perhaps you may be right. I
hope I'm getting to know that my plummet isn't to measure all the
world. But it does seem a pity that men shouldn't be thinking
about how to cure some of the wrongs which poor dear old England
is pretty near dying of, instead of taking the edge off their
brains, and spending all their steam in speculating about all
kinds of things, which wouldn't make any poor man in the
world--or rich one either, for that matter--a bit better off, if
they were all found out, and settled to-morrow. But here I am at
the end of my paper. Don't be angry at my jobation; but write me
a long answer of your own free will, and believe me ever
affectionately yours,
"T. B."