Robert Elsmere
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 afterwards 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
colouring 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-moulded 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 colours.
Thenceforward one would have thought that a brilliant and favourable
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 realise 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 quarrelled 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 colour 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 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 favourable 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, of weariness or shrinking, as compared with the contemptuous
tone of the College towards 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 that antidote which Elsmere's main faults of haste
and carelessness required. He was always holding up before him the
inexhaustible patience and labour involved in all true knowledge; and it
was to the germs of critical judgment so implanted in him that Elsmere
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 afterwards. It was a rainy,
cheerless evening; the first contest of the Boats week had been rowed in
cold wind and sleet; 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 knew 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 rampagious 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