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

faculty, which, though it had grown impotent, was still there, still restless. Altogether a melancholy, pitiable man--at once thorough-going sceptic and thorough-going idealist, the victim of that critical sense which says 'No' to every impulse, and is always restlessly and yet hopelessly, seeking the future through the neglected and outraged present.

And yet the man's instincts, at this period of his life at any rate, were habitually kindly and affectionate. He knew nothing of women, and was not liked by them, but it was not his fault if he made no impression on the youth about him. It seemed to him that he was always seeking in their eyes and faces for some light of sympathy which was always escaping him, and which he was powerless to compel. He met it for the first time in Robert Elsmere. The susceptible, poetical boy was struck at some favorable moment by that romantic side of the ineffective tutor--his silence, his melancholy, his personal beauty--which no one else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the older men, cared to take into account; or touched perhaps by some note in him, surprised in passing, by weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous tone of the college toward him. He showed his liking impetuously, boyishly, as his way was, and thenceforward during his University career Langham became his slave. He had no ambition for himself; his motto might have been that dismal one--'The small things of life are odious to me, and the habit of them enslaves me; the great things of life are eternally attractive to me, and indolence and fear put them by;' but for the University chances of this lanky, red-haired youth--with his eagerness, his boundless curiosity, his genius for all sorts of lovable mistakes--he disquieted himself greatly. He tried to discipline the roving mind, to infuse into the boy's literary temper the delicacy, the precision, the subtlety of his own. His fastidious, critical habits of work supplied exactly the antidote which Elsmere's main faults of haste and carelessness required. He was always holding up before him the inexhaustible patience and labor involved in all true knowledge; and it was to the germs of critical judgment so planted in him that Elsemere owed many of the later growths of his development--growths with which we have not yet to concern ourselves.

And in return, the tutor allowed himself rarely, very rarely, a moment of utterance from the depths of his real self. One evening, in the summer term following the boy's matriculation, Elsmere brought him an essay after Hall, and they sat on talking afterward. It was a rainy, cheerless evening; the first contest of the Boats week had been rowed in cold wind and sheet; a dreary blast whistled through the college. Suddenly Langham reached out his hand for an open letter. 'I have had an offer, Elsmere,' he said, abruptly.

And he put it into his hand. It was the offer of an important Scotch professorship, coming from the man most influential in assigning it. The last occupant of the post had been a scholar of European eminence. Langham's contributions to a great foreign review, and certain Oxford recommendations, were the basis of the present overture, which, coming from one who was himself a classic of the classics, was couched in terms flattering to any young man's vanity.

Robert looked up with a joyful exclamation when he had finished the letter.

'I congratulate you, sir.'

'I have refused it,' said Langham, abruptly.

His companion sat open-mouthed. Young as he was, he know perfectly well that this particular appointment was one of the blue ribbons of British scholarship.

'Do you think--' said the other in a tone of singular vibration, which had in it a note of almost contemptuous irritation--'do you think _I_ am the man to get and keep a hold on a rampageous class of hundreds of Scotch lads? Do you think _I_ am the man to carry on what Reid began--Reid, that old fighter, that preacher of all sorts of jubilant dogmas?'

He looked at Elsmere under his straight, black brows, imperiously. The youth felt the nervous tension in the elder man's voice and manner, was startled by a confidence never before bestowed upon him, close as that unequal bond between them had been growing during the six months of his Oxford life, and plucking up courage hurled at him a number of frank, young expostulations, which really put into friendly shape all that was being said about Langham in his College and in the University. Why was he so self-distrustful, so absurdly diffident of responsibility, so bent on hiding his great gifts under a bushel?

The tutor smiled sadly, and, sitting down, buried his head in his hands and said nothing for a while. Then he looked up and stretched out a hand toward a book which lay on a table near. It was the 'Reveries' of Senancour. 'My answer is written _here_,' he said. 'It will seem to you now, Elsmere, mere Midsummer madness. May it always seem so to you. Forgive me. The pressure of solitude sometimes is too great.'

Elsmere looked up with one of his flashing, affectionate smiles, and took the book from Langham's hand. He found on the open page a marked passage:

"Oh swiftly passing seasons of life! There was a time when men seemed to be sincere; when thought was nourished on friendship, kindness, love; when dawn still kept its brilliance, and the night its peace. _I can_, the soul said to itself, and _I will_; I will do all that is right--all that is natural. But soon resistance, difficulty, unforeseen, coming we know not whence, arrest us, undeceive us, and the human yoke grows heavy on our necks; Thenceforward we become merely sharers in the common woe. Hemmed in on all sides, we feel our faculties only to realize their impotence: we have time and strength to do what we _must_, never what we will. Men go on repeating the words work, genius, success. Fools! Will all these resounding projects, though they enable us to cheat ourselves, enable us to cheat the icy fate which rules us and our globe, wandering forsaken through the vast silence of the heavens?"

Robert looked up startled, the book dropping from his hand. The words sent a chill to the heart of one born to hope, to will, to crave.

Suddenly Langham dashed the volume from him almost with violence.

'Forget that drivel, Elsmere. It was a crime to show it to you. It is not sane; neither perhaps am I. But I am not going to Scotland. They would request me to resign in a week.'

Long after Elsmere, who had stayed talking awhile on other things, had gone, Langham sat on brooding over the empty grate.

'Corrupter of youth!' he said to himself once, bitterly. And perhaps it was to a certain remorse in the tutor's mind that Elsmere owed an experience of great importance to his afterlife.

The name of a certain Mr. Grey had for some time before his entry at Oxford been more or less familiar to Robert's ears as that of a person of great influence and consideration at St. Anselm's. His tutor at Harden had spoken of him in the boy's hearing as one of the most remarkable men of the generation, and had several times impressed upon his pupil that nothing could be so desirable for him as to secure the friendship of such a man. It was on the occasion of his first interview with the Provost, after the scholarship examination, that Robert was first brought face to face with Mr. Grey. He could remember a short dark man standing beside the Provost, who had been introduced to him by that name, but the nervousness of the moment had been so great that the boy had been quite incapable of giving him any special attention.

During his first term and a half of residence, Robert occasionally met Mr. Grey in the quadrangle or in the street, and the tutor, remembering the thin, bright-faced youth, would return his salutations kindly, and sometimes stop to speak to him, to ask him if he were comfortably settled in his rooms, or make a remark about the boats. But the acquaintance did not seem likely to progress, for Mr. Grey was a Greats tutor, and Robert naturally had nothing to do with him as far as work was concerned.

However, a day or two after the conversation we have described, Robert, going to Langham's rooms late in the afternoon to return a book which had been lent to him, perceived two figures standing talking on the hearth-rug and by the western light beating in recognized the thickset frame and broad brow of Mr. Grey.

'Come in, Elsmere,' said Langham, as he stood hesitating on the threshold. 'You have met Mr. Grey before, I think?'

'We first met at an anxious moment,' said Mr. Grey, smiling and shaking hands with the boy. 'A first interview with the Provost is always formidable. I remember it too well myself. You did very well, I remember, Mr. Elsmere. Well, Langham, I must be off. I shall be late for my meeting as it is. I think we have settled our business. Good night.'

Langham stood a moment after the door closed, eyeing Elsmere. There was a curious struggle going on in the tutor's mind.

'Elsmere,' he said at last, abruptly, 'would you like to go tonight and hear Grey preach?'

'Preach!' exclaimed the lad. 'I thought he was a layman.'

So he is. It will be a lay sermon. It was always the custom here with the clerical tutors to address their men once a term before Communion Sunday, and some years ago, when Grey first became tutor, he determined, though he was a layman, to carry on the practice. It was an extraordinary effort, for he is a man to whom words on such a subject are the coining of his heart's blood, and he has repeated it very rarely. It is two years now since his last address.'

Of course I should like to go,' said Robert, with eagerness. Is it open?'

'Strictly it is for his Greats pupils, but I can take you in. It is hardly meant for freshmen; but--well, you are far enough on to make it interesting to you.'

'The lad will take to Grey's influence like a fish to water,' thought the tutor to himself when he was alone, not without strange reluctance. 'Well, no one can say I have not given him his opportunity to be "earnest."'

The sarcasm of the last word was the kind of sarcasm which a man of his type in an earlier generation might have applied to the 'earnestness' of an Arnoldian Rugby.

At eight o'clock that evening Robert found himself crossing the quadrangle with Langham on the way to one of the larger lecture-rooms, which was to be the scene of the address. The room when they got in was already nearly full, all the working fellows of the college were present, and a body of some thirty men besides, most of them already far on in their University career. A minute or two afterward Mr. Grey entered. The door opening on to the quadrangle, where the trees, undeterred by east wind, were just bursting into leaf, was shut; and the little assembly knelt, while Mr. Grey's voice with its broad intonation, in which a strong native homeliness lingered under the gentleness of accent, recited the collect 'Lord of all power and might,' a silent pause following the last words. Then the audience settled itself, and Mr. Grey, standing by a small deal table with the gaslight behind him, began his address.

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