Robert Elsmere. Mrs. Humphry Ward
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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 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 Réveries 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