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

charming, becomes under these circumstances a sacred and pontifical act. Never had Mrs. Elsmere bought a teapot for herself with half the fervor which she now threw into the purchase of Robert's; and the young man, accustomed to a rather bare home, and an Irish lack of the little elegancies of life, was overwhelmed when his mother actually dragged him into a printseller's, and added an engraving or two to the enticing miscellaneous mass of which he was already master.

They only just left themselves time to rush back to their lodgings and dress for the solemn function of a dinner with the Provost. The dinner, however, was a great success. The short, shy manner of their white-haired host thawed under the influence of Mrs. Elsmere's racy, unaffected ways, and it was not long before everybody in the room had more or less made friends with her, and forgiven her her marvellous drab poplin, adorned with fresh pink ruchings for the occasion. As for the Provost, Mrs. Elsmere had been told that he was a person of whom she must inevitably stand in awe. But all her life long she had been like the youth in the fairy tale who desired to learn how to shiver and could not attain unto it. Fate had denied her the capacity of standing in awe of anybody, and she rushed at her host as a new type, delighting in the thrill which she felt creeping over her when she found herself on the arm of one who had been the rallying-point of a hundred struggles, and a centre of influence over thousands of English lives.

And then followed the proud moment when Robert, in his exhibitioner's gown, took her to service in the chapel on Sunday. The scores of young faces, the full unison of the hymns, and finally the Provost's sermon, with its strange brusqueries and simplicities of manner and phrase--simplicities suggestive, so full of a rich and yet disciplined experience, that they haunted her mind for weeks afterward--completed the general impression made upon her by the Oxford life. She came out, tremulous and shaken, leaning on her son's arm. She, too, like the generations before her, had launched her venture into the deep. Her boy was putting out from her into the ocean; henceforth she could but watch him from the shore. Brought into contact with this imposing University organization, with all its suggestions of virile energies and functions, the mother suddenly felt herself insignificant and forsaken. He had been her all, her own, and now on this training-ground of English youth, it seemed to her that the great human society had claimed him from her.


CHAPTER V.

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 honorable 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 afterward 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 coloring 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-molded 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 colors.

Thenceforward one would have thought that a brilliant and favorable 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 realize 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 quarreled 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 color 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