Robert Elsmere
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
towards 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 realise 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 a while 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 after life.
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 recognised the thick-set
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 young Elsmere.
There was a curious struggle going on in the tutor's mind.
'Elsmere,' he said at last abruptly, 'would you like to go to-night 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 a 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 afterwards 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.
All the main points of the experience which followed stamped themselves
on Robert's mind with extraordinary intensity. Nor did he ever lose the
memory of the outward scene. In after years, memory could always recall
to him at will the face and figure of the speaker, the massive head, the
deep eyes sunk under the brows, the Midland accent, the make of limb and
feature which seemed to have some suggestion in them of the rude
strength and simplicity of a peasant ancestry; and then the nobility,
the fire, the spiritual beauty flashing through it all! Here, indeed,
was a man on whom his fellows might lean, a man in whom the generation
of spiritual force was so strong and continuous that it overflowed of
necessity into the poorer, barrener lives around him, kindling and
enriching. Robert felt himself seized and penetrated, filled with a
fervour and an admiration which he was too young and immature to
analyse, but which was to be none the less potent and lasting.
Much of the sermon itself, indeed, was beyond him. It was on the meaning
of St. Paul's great conception, 'Death unto sin and a new birth unto
righteousness.' What did the Apostle mean by a death to sin and self?
What were the precise ideas attached to the words 'risen with Christ'?
Are this death and this resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain
alleged historical events? Or are they not primarily, and were they not,
even in the mind of St. Paul, two aspects of a spiritual process
perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and constituting the
veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable and lasting witness of
the Father: the spiritual history of the individual and the world, or
the envelope of miracle to which hitherto mankind has attributed so much
importance?
Mr. Grey's treatment of these questions was clothed, throughout a large
portion of the lecture, in metaphysical language, which no boy fresh
from school, however intellectually quick, could be expected to follow
with any precision. It was not, therefore, the argument, or the logical
structure of the sermon, which so profoundly affected young Elsmere. It
was the speaker himself, and the occasional passages in which,
addressing himself to the practical needs of his hearers, he put before
them the claims and conditions of the higher life with a pregnant
simplicity and rugged beauty of phrase. Conceit, selfishness, vice--how,
as he spoke of them, they seemed to wither from his presence! How the
'pitiful, earthy self' with its passions and its cravings sank into
nothingness beside the 'great ideas' and the 'great causes' for which,
as Christians and as men, he claimed their devotion.
To the boy sitting among the crowd at the back of the room, his face
supported in his hands and his gleaming eyes fixed on the speaker, it
seemed as if all the poetry and history through which a restless
curiosity and ideality had carried him so far, took a new meaning from
this experience. It was by men like this that the moral progress of the
world had been shaped and inspired; he felt brought near to the great
primal forces breathing through the divine workshop; and in place of
natural disposition and reverent compliance, there sprang up in him
suddenly an actual burning certainty of belief. 'Axioms are not axioms,'
said poor Keats, 'till they have been proved upon our pulses;' and the
old familiar figure of the Divine combat, of the struggle in which man
and God are one, was proved once more upon a human pulse on that May
night, in the hush of that quiet lecture room.
As the little moving crowd of men dispersed over the main quadrangle to
their respective staircases, Langham and Robert stood together a moment
in the windy darkness, lit by the occasional glimmering of a cloudy
moon.
'Thank you, thank you, sir!' said the lad, eager and yet afraid to
speak, lest he should break the spell of memory. 'I should be sorry
indeed to have missed that!'
'Yes, it was fine, extraordinarily fine, the best he has ever given, I
think. Good-night.'
And Langham turned away, his head sunk on his breast, his hands behind
him. Robert went to his room conscious of a momentary check of feeling.
But it soon passed, and he sat up late, thinking of the sermon, or
pouring out in a letter to his mother the new hero-worship of which his
mind was full.
A few days later, as it happened, came an invitation to the junior
exhibitioner to spend an evening at Mr. Grey's house. Elsmere went in a
state of curious eagerness and trepidation, and came away with a number
of fresh impressions which, when he had put them into order, did but
quicken his new-born sense of devotion. The quiet unpretending house
with its exquisite neatness and its abundance of books, the family
life, with the heart-happiness underneath, and the gentle trust and
courtesy on the surface, the little touches of austerity which betrayed
themselves here and there in the household ways--all these surroundings
stole into the lad's imagination, touched in him responsive fibres of
taste and feeling.
But there was some surprise, too, mingled with the charm. He came, still