Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best classic literature txt) 📕

the orthodox traditional teaching of Christianity would become impossible as soon as it should be the habit to make a free and modern use of history and geography and social material in connection with the Gospels. Nothing tends so much, he would say, to break down the irrational barrier which men have raised about this particular tract of historical space, nothing helps so much to let in the light and air of scientific thought upon it, and therefore nothing prepares the way so effectively for a series of new conceptions.

By a kind of natural selection Richards became Elsmere's chief helper and adjutant in the Sunday lectures,--with regard to all such matters as beating up recruits, keeping guard over portfolios, handing round maps and photographs, &c.--supplanting in this function the jealous and sensitive Mackay, who, after his original opposition, had now arrived at regarding Robert as his own particular property, and the lecturer's quick smile of thanks for services rendered as his own especial right. The bright, quicksilvery, irascible little workman, however, was irresistible and had his way. He had taken a passion for Robert as for a being of another order and another world. In the discussions which generally followed the lecture he showed a receptiveness, an intelligence, which were in reality a matter not of the mind but of the heart. He loved, therefore he understood. At the Club he stood for Elsmere with a quivering, spasmodic eloquence, as against Andrews, and the Secularists. One thing only puzzled Robert. Among all the little fellow's sallies and indiscretions, which were not infrequent, no reference to his home life was ever included. Here he kept even Robert absolutely at arm's length. Robert knew that he was married and had children, nothing more.

The old Scotchman, Macdonald, came out after the first lecture somewhat crestfallen.

'Not the sort of stooff I'd expected!' he said, with a shade of perplexity on the rugged face. 'He doosn't talk eneuf in the _aa_bstract for me.'

But he went again, and the second lecture, on the origin of the Gospels, got hold of him, especially as it supplied him with a whole armory of new arguments in support of Hume's doctrine of conscience, and in defiance of 'that blatin' creetur, Reid'. The thesis with which Robert, drawing on some of the stores supplied him by the Squire's book, began his account--i.e. the gradual growth within the limits of history of man's capacity for telling the exact truth--fitted in, to the Scotchman's thinking, so providentially with his own favorite experimental doctrines as against the 'intueetion' folks, 'who will have it that a babby's got as moch mind as Mr. Gladstone ef it only knew it!' that afterward he never missed a lecture.

Lestrange was more difficult. He had the inherited temperament of the Genevese _frondeur_, which made Geneva the headquarters of Calvinism in the sixteenth century, and bids fair to make her the headquarters of continental radicalism in the nineteenth. Robert never felt his wits so much stretched and sharpened as when after the lecture Lestrange was putting questions and objections with an acrid subtlety and persistence worthy of a descendant of that burgher class which first built up the Calvinistic system and then produced the destroyer of it in Rousseau. Robert bore his heckling, however, with great patience and adroitness. He had need of all he knew, as Murray Edwardes had warned him. But luckily he knew a great deal; his thought was clearing and settling month by month, and whatever he may have lost at any moment by the turn of an argument, he recovered immediately afterward by the force of personality, and of a single-mindedness in which there was never a trace of personal grasping.

Week by week the lecture became more absorbing to him, the men more pliant, his hold on them firmer. His disinterestedness, his brightness and resource, perhaps, too, the signs about him of a light and frail physical organization, the novelty of his position, the inventiveness of his method, gave him little by little an immense power in the place. After the first two lectures Murray Edwardes became his constant and enthusiastic hearer on Sunday afternoons, and, catching some of Robert's ways and spirit, he gradually brought his own chapel and teaching more and more into line with the Elgood Street undertaking. So that the venture of the two men began to take ever larger proportions; and, kindled by the growing interest and feeling about him, dreams began to rise in Elsmere's mind which as yet he hardly dared to cherish which came and went, however, weaving a substance for themselves out of each successive incident and effort.

Meanwhile he was at work on an average three evenings in the week besides the Sunday. In West End drawing-rooms his personal gift had begun to tell no less than in this crowded, squalid East; and as his aims became known, other men, finding the thoughts of their own hearts revealed in him, or touched with that social compunction which is one of the notes of our time, came down and became his helpers. Of all the social projects of which that Elgood Street room became the centre, Elsmere was, in some sense, the life and inspiration. But it was not these projects themselves which made this period of his life remarkable. London at the present moment, if it be honey-combed with vice and misery, is also honey-combed with the labor of ever expanding charity. Week, by week men and women of like gifts and energies with Elsmere spend themselves, as he did, in the constant effort to serve and to alleviate. What _was_ noticeable, what _was_ remarkable in this work of his, was the spirit, the religious passion which, radiating from him, began after a while to kindle the whole body of men about him. It was from his Sunday lectures and his talks with the children, boys and girls, who came in after the lecture to spend a happy hour and a half with him on Sunday afternoons, that in later years hundreds of men and women will date the beginnings of a new absorbing life. There came a time, indeed, when, instead of meeting criticism by argument, Robert was able simply to point to accomplished facts. 'You ask me,' he would say in effect, 'to prove to you that men can love, can make a new and fruitful use, for daily life and conduct, of a merely human Christ. Go among our men, talk to our children, and satisfy yourself. A little while ago scores of these men either hated the very name of Christianity or were entirely indifferent to it. To scores of them now the name of the teacher of Nazareth, the victim of Jerusalem, is dear and sacred; his life, his death, his words, are becoming once more a constant source of moral effort and spiritual hope. See for yourself!'

However, we are anticipating. Let us go back to May.

One beautiful morning Robert was sitting working in his study, his windows open to the breezy blue sky and the budding plane-trees outside, when the door was thrown open and Mr. Wendover was announced.

The Squire entered; but what a shrunken and aged Squire! The gait was feeble, the bearing had lost all its old erectness, the bronzed strength of the face had given place to a waxen and ominous pallor. Robert, springing up with joy to meet the great gust of Murewell air which seemed to blow about him with the mention of the Squire's name, was struck, arrested. He guided his guest to a chair with an almost filial carefulness.

'I don't believe, Squire,' he exclaimed, 'you ought to be doing this---wandering about London by yourself!'

But the Squire, as silent and angular as ever when anything personal to himself was concerned, would take no notice of the implied anxiety and sympathy. He grasped his umbrella between his knees with a pair of brown twisted hands, and, sitting very upright, looked critically round the room. Robert, studying the dwindled figure, remembered with a pang the saying of another Oxford scholar, _a propos_ of the death of a young man of extraordinary promise, '_What learning has perished with him! How vain seem all toil to acquire!_'--and the words, as they passed through his mind, seemed to him to ring another death-knell.

But after the first painful impression he could not help losing himself in the pleasure of the familiar face, the Murewell associations.

'How is the village, and the lnstitute? And what sort of man is my successor--the man, I mean, who came after Armitstead?'

'I had him once to dinner,' said the Squire briefly; 'he made a false quantity, and asked me to subscribe to the Church Missionary Society. I haven't seen him since. He and the village have been at loggerheads about the Institute, I believe. He wanted to turn out the Dissenters. Bateson came to me, and we circumvented him, of course. But the man's an ass. Don't talk of him!'

Robert sighed a long sigh. Was all his work undone? It wrung his heart to remember the opening of the Institute, the ardor of his boys. He asked a few questions about individuals, but soon gave it up as hopeless. The Squire neither knew nor cared.

'And Mrs. Darcy?'

'My sister had tea in her thirtieth summer-house last Sunday,' remarked the Squire grimly. 'She wished me to communicate the fact to you and Mrs. Elsmere. Also, that the worst novel of the century will be out in a fortnight, and she trusts to you to see it well reviewed in all the leading journals.'

Robert laughed, but it was not very easy to laugh. There was a sort of ghastly undercurrent in the Squire's sarcasms that effectually deprived them of anything mirthful.

'And your book?'

'Is in abeyance. I shall bequeath you the manuscript in my will, to do what you like with.'

'Squire!'

'Quite true! If you had stayed, I should have finished it, I suppose. But after a certain age the toil of spinning cobwebs entirely out of his own brain becomes too much for a man.'

It was the first thing of the sort that iron mouth had ever said to him. Elsmere was painfully touched.

'You must not--you shall not give it up,' he urged. Publish the first part alone, and ask me for any help you please.'

The Squire shook his head.

'Let it be. Your paper in the "Nineteenth Century" showed me that the best thing I can do is to hand on my materials to you. Though I am not sure that when you have got them you will make the best use of them. You and Grey between you call yourselves Liberals, and imagine yourselves reformers, and all the while you are doing nothing but playing into the hands of the Blacks. All this theistic philosophy of yours only means so much grist to their mill in the end.'

'They don't see it in that light themselves,' said Robert, smiling.

'No,' returned the Squire, 'because most men are puzzle-heads. Why,' he added, looking darkly at Robert, while the great head fell forward on his breast in the familiar Murewell attitude, 'why can't you do your work and let the preaching alone?'

'Because,' said Robert, 'the preaching seems to me my work. There is the great difference between us, Squire. You look upon knowledge as an end in itself. It may be so. But to me, knowledge has always been valuable first and foremost for its bearing on life.'

'Fatal twist that,' returned the Squire harshly. 'Yes, I know; it was always in you. Well, are you happy? does this new crusade of yours give you pleasure?'

'Happiness,' replied Robert, leaning