Robert Elsmere
any rate, he had set his heart on. But in this direction, as in many
others, the way was barred. All the land in the parish was the squire's,
and not one inch of the squire's land would Henslowe let young Elsmere
have anything to do with if he knew it. He would neither repair nor
enlarge the Workmen's Institute; and he had a way of forgetting the
squire's customary subscriptions to parochial objects, always paid
through him, which gave him much food for chuckling whenever he passed
Elsmere in the country lanes. The man's coarse insolence and mean hatred
made themselves felt at every turn, besmirching and embittering.
Still it was very true that neither Henslowe nor the squire could do
Robert much harm. His hold on the parish was visibly strengthening; his
sermons were not only filling the church with his own parishioners, but
attracting hearers from the districts round Murewell, so that even on
these winter Sundays there was almost always a sprinkling of strange
faces among the congregation; and his position in the county and diocese
was becoming every month more honourable and important. The gentry about
showed them much kindness, and would have shown them much hospitality if
they had been allowed. But though Robert had nothing of the ascetic
about him, and liked the society of his equals as much as most
good-tempered and vivacious people do, he and Catherine decided that for
the present they had no time to spare for visits and county society.
Still, of course, there were many occasions on which the routine of
their life brought them across their neighbours, and it began to be
pretty widely recognised that Elsmere was a young fellow of unusual
promise and intelligence, that his wife too was remarkable, and that
between them they were likely to raise the standard of clerical effort
considerably in their part of Surrey.
All the factors of this life--his work, his influence, his recovered
health, the lavish beauty of the country, Elsmere enjoyed with all his
heart. But at the root of all there lay what gave value and savour to
everything else--that exquisite home-life of theirs, that tender, triple
bond of husband, wife, and child.
Catherine, coming home tired from teaching or visiting, would find her
step quickening as she reached the gate of the rectory, and the sense of
delicious possession waking up in her, which is one of the first fruits
of motherhood. There, at the window, between the lamplight behind and
the winter dusk outside, would be the child in its nurse's arms, little
wondering, motiveless smiles passing over the tiny puckered face that
was so oddly like Robert already. And afterwards, in the fire-lit
nursery, with the bath in front of the high fender, and all the
necessaries of baby life beside it, she would go through those functions
which mothers love and linger over, let the kicking dimpled creature
principally concerned protest as it may against the over-refinements of
civilisation. Then, when the little restless voice was stilled, and the
cradle left silent in the darkened room, there would come the short
watching for Robert, his voice, his kiss, their simple meal together, a
moment of rest, of laughter and chat, before some fresh effort claimed
them. Every now and then--white-letter days--there would drop on them a
long evening together. Then out would come one or the few books--Dante
or Virgil or Milton--which had entered into the fibre of Catherine's
strong nature. The two heads would draw close over them, or Robert would
take some thought of hers as a text, and spout away from the hearthrug,
watching all the while for her smile, her look of assent. Sometimes,
late at night, when there was a sermon on his mind, he would dive into
his pocket for his Greek Testament and make her read, partly for the
sake of teaching her--for she knew some Greek and longed to know
more--but mostly that he might get from her some of that garnered wealth
of spiritual experience which he adored in her. They would go from verse
to verse, from thought to thought, till suddenly perhaps the tide of
feeling would rise, and while the wind swept round the house, and the
owls hooted in the elms, they would sit hand in hand, lost in love and
faith,--Christ near them--Eternity, warm with God, enwrapping them.
* * * * *
So much for the man of action, the husband, the philanthropist. In
reality, great as was the moral energy of this period of Elsmere's life,
the dominant distinguishing note of it was not moral but intellectual.
In matters of conduct he was but developing habits and tendencies
already strongly present in him; in matters of thinking, with every
month of this winter he was becoming conscious of fresh forces, fresh
hunger, fresh horizons.
'_One half of your day be the king of your world_,' Mr. Grey had said to
him; '_the other half be the slave of something which will take you out
of your world_, into the general life, the life of thought, of man as a
whole, of the universe.'
The counsel, as we have seen, had struck root and flowered into action.
So many men of Elsmere's type give themselves up once and for all as
they become mature to the life of doing and feeling, practically
excluding the life of thought. It was Henry Grey's influence in all
probability, perhaps, too, the training of an earlier Langham, that
saved for Elsmere the life of thought.
The form taken by this training of his own mind he had been thus
encouraged not to abandon, was, as we know, the study of history. He had
well mapped out before him that book on the origins of France which he
had described to Langham. It was to take him years, of course, and
meanwhile, in his first enthusiasm, he was like a child, revelling in
the treasure of work that lay before him. As he had told Langham, he had
just got below the surface of a great subject and was beginning to dig
into the roots of it. Hitherto he had been under the guidance of men of
his own day, of the nineteenth century historian, who refashions the
past on the lines of his own mind, who gives it rationality, coherence,
and, as it were, modernness, so that the main impression he produces on
us, so long as we look at that past through him only, is on the whole an
impression of _continuity_, of _resemblance_.
Whereas, on the contrary, the first impression left on a man by the
attempt to plunge into the materials of history for himself is almost
always an extraordinarily sharp impression of _difference_, of
_contrast_. Ultimately, of course, he sees that these men and women
whose letters and biographies, whose creeds and general conceptions he
is investigating, are in truth his ancestors, bone of his bone, flesh of
his flesh. But at first the student who goes back, say, in the history
of Europe, behind the Renaissance or behind the Crusades into the actual
deposits of the past, is often struck with a kind of _vertige_. The men
and women whom he has dragged forth into the light of his own mind are
to him like some strange puppet-show. They are called by names he
knows--kings, bishops, judges, poets, priests, men of letters--but what
a gulf between him and them! What motives, what beliefs, what embryonic
processes of thought and morals, what bizarre combinations of ignorance
and knowledge, of the highest sanctity with the lowest credulity or
falsehood; what extraordinary prepossessions, born with a man and
tainting his whole ways of seeing and thinking from childhood to the
grave! Amid all the intellectual dislocation of the spectacle, indeed,
he perceives certain Greeks and certain Latins who represent a forward
strain, who belong as it seems to a world of their own, a world ahead of
them. To them he stretches out his hand: '_You_,' he says to them,
'though your priests spoke to you not of Christ, but of Zeus and
Artemis, _you_ are really my kindred!' But intellectually they stand
alone. Around them, after them, for long ages the world 'spake as a
child, felt as a child, understood as a child.'
Then he sees what it is makes the difference, digs the gulf.
'_Science_,' the mind cries, '_ordered knowledge_.' And so for the first
time the modern recognises what the accumulations of his forefathers
have done for him. He takes the torch which man has been so long and
patiently fashioning to his hand, and turns it on the past, and at every
step the sight grows stranger, and yet more moving, more pathetic. The
darkness into which he penetrates does but make him grasp his own
guiding light the more closely. And yet, bit by bit, it has been
prepared for him by these groping half conscious generations, and the
scrutiny which began in repulsion and laughter ends in a marvelling
gratitude.
But the repulsion and the laughter come first, and during this winter of
work Elsmere felt them both very strongly. He would sit in the morning
buried among the records of decaying Rome and emerging France,
surrounded by Chronicles, by Church Councils, by lives of the Saints, by
primitive systems of law, pushing his imaginative impetuous way through
them. Sometimes Catherine would be there, and he would pour out on her
something of what was in his own mind.
One day he was deep in the life of a certain saint. The saint had been
bishop of a diocese in Southern France. His biographer was his successor
in the see, a man of high political importance in the Burgundian state,
renowned besides for sanctity and learning. Only some twenty years
separated the biography, at the latest, from the death of its subject.
It contained some curious material for social history, and Robert was
reading it with avidity. But it was, of course, a tissue of marvels. The
young bishop had practised every virtue known to the time, and wrought
every conceivable miracle, and the miracles were better told than usual,
with more ingenuity, more imagination. Perhaps on that account they
struck the reader's sense more sharply.
'And the saint said to the sorcerers and to the practisers of unholy
arts, that they should do those evil things no more, for he had bound
the spirits of whom they were wont to inquire, and they would get no
further answers to their incantations. Then those stiff-necked sons of
the devil fell upon the man of God, scourged him sore, and threatened
him with death, if he would not instantly loose those spirits he had
bound. And seeing he could prevail nothing, and being, moreover,
admonished by God so to do, he permitted them to work their own
damnation. For he called for a parchment and wrote upon it, "_Ambrose
unto Satan--Enter!_" Then was the spell loosed, the spirits returned,
the sorcerers inquired as they were accustomed, and received answers.
But in a short space of time every one of them perished miserably and
was delivered unto his natural lord Satanas, whereunto he belonged.'
Robert made a hasty exclamation, and turning to Catherine, who was
working beside him, read the passage to her, with a few words as to the
book and its author.
Catherine's work dropped a moment on to her knee.
'What extraordinary superstition!' she said, startled. 'A bishop,
Robert, and an educated man?'
Robert nodded.
'But it is the whole habit of mind,' he said half to himself, staring
into the fire, 'that is so astounding. No one escapes it. The whole age
really is non-sane.'
'I suppose the devout Catholic would believe that?'
'I am not sure,' said Robert dreamily, and remained sunk in thought for
long after, while Catherine worked, and pondered a Christmas
entertainment for her girls.
* * * * *
Perhaps it was his scientific work, fragmentary as it was, that was
really quickening and sharpening these historical impressions of his.
Evolution--once a mere germ in the mind--was beginning to press, to