The Youth of Parnassus and Other Stories Part 3

"Oh, but surely, if you tried you could find something! It seems to me you _ought_ to try."

"Oh, I _have_ tried!" he said, his cheeks flushing with painful emotion; "but now they don't want me to come back any more--they never want to see me again! I used to pray I might never change;--and when you would argue with me,--but now I see it was all wrong, and all my liberal ideas--"

"I hope," Foley interrupted, for this had been on his conscience ever since his talk with Abel, "I hope your change, whatever it is, has nothing to do with anything I ever said; you must have misunderstood me," and he went on to explain that he had never been really reactionary. He had always believed in compromise, and a conservative, reasonable progress.

"Do you know, Eliaphet," he went on, "I think you have made a mistake in staying here so long in this old place. It isn't wholesome to live so far from real life; you ought to get away, you ought to go home."

But Sutton had only listened to two or three of his friend's words.

"No," he cried eagerly, "no, we can make no compromise. We must give up the human reason, we must go back to the Past, we must submit. Oh, Foley," he cried, and there was a strange appeal in his voice, "we have been friends, but now we may never see each other again,--let me warn you, you must decide whether you will be on the right or the wrong side--oh, if you only knew at what peril you refuse to listen!"

For a moment Foley was almost frightened. Then, reminding himself of reason and reality, he said, "But, Eliaphet, are you quite sure that you yourself are doing what is right in staying here? When so much depends on you out there--Dr. Turnpenny and all. And they have sacrificed so much too. Have you thought--"

"As if I was not always thinking of it!" Sutton cried; "but I could not go back to them a Roman Catholic; they would rather I was dead. And Foley, when you judge me, remember that I have had to make sacrifices too--I have given up everything, everything! What can I do?"

A Roman Catholic! Of course he could not go back. Foley was dismayed.

Why had he not foreseen it?

For a moment they stood in silence. Then Sutton turned away.

"You don't understand," he said, in a voice that his friend always remembered afterwards; "No one understands," and he went down the path alone and out of Foley's sight.

XX.

When Foley went the next day to Sutton's lodgings, he was told that Sutton had already left Oxford; had gone away early that morning. Where he had gone, however, no one seemed to know. Certainly Foley never found out; he never saw Sutton again, nor, in spite of all his inquiries, did he ever hear anything but the most vague and uncertain news about him.

Abel said he had never gone back to Parna.s.sus City. And then, years after, it was reported that an Oxford man, when visiting some old shrine in Italy, had recognized, or thought he recognized, Sutton in the monk who showed him about the church.

Foley never got rid of a certain feeling of remorse, a sense that at the beginning he had too lightly interfered in the life of the young Dissenter.

But then he would tell himself, that it was probably after all nothing less than Oxford itself, with its old ways and memories, that had gradually changed and influenced the American. Influenced him not for good, surely! he thought. And indeed, remembering Sutton's slow estrangement from his early ideas and friends, his poor attempts to remain faithful, the trouble and mystery in which he had disappeared at last, Foley would ask himself, (and he took a strange sort of pleasure in the question,) whether there were not something really dangerous in the venerable and Gothic beauty of Oxford, a chill in the old shadows, an iron sound in the bells.

_The Will to Live_

Part One

"Moral Philosophy," notwithstanding all its modern ideas and developments, is still taught at Oxford from the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle. Something indeed of the old Academic discipline might be said still to exist there, the tradition of it coming down through the Schools of the Middle Ages. Certainly the discussions between tutor and pupils, by means of which so much of the philosophic training is carried on, are not without a certain resemblance to the Socratic dialogues.

And the young men who are so eager and amusing in Plato's writings--one might find the like of these, perhaps, among the English undergraduates, as well as the types with which modern novels have made us more familiar. The questions they talk and think about would at least be much the same as those so eagerly debated in the Athenian garden--the old questions about Truth and Justice and Beauty; and then the meaning or purpose of Life--that question which is the oldest of all, and which each generation of youth tries to solve in some new way.

"Good night, sir"--"Good night"--"Good night"--and their discussion ended, the young men took their caps and books, and clattered noisily down the stone staircase from the tutor's room. They still lingered a moment, outside in the quadrangle, four or five together, vaguely talking in the darkness.

"Ames was right, you know--what he said about Pleasure."

"Old Ames! what does he know about it?" Waters interrupted. More than once, during the argument that evening, Waters had dropped a book or shuffled his feet impatiently; and now, declaring that all such talk was great waste of time and "rot" anyhow, he went off, after vainly inviting the others to join him, to an interrupted game of cards. In a minute the others separated, some to work, one or two to the concert in the college hall. Walter Cornish walked away alone across the quadrangle. Finding a bench, he sat listlessly down, his hands in his pockets, his feet stretched out in front of him. He would do no more work that night; it would be better to rest there for a while, listening to the music of the concert.

Cornish, with the others, would be in for his last examinations in a few weeks; then he would be leaving Oxford. But as he had money enough of his own, and belonged moreover to that fortunate cla.s.s of young Oxford men to whom success at everything seems easy, he could look into the future, untroubled by most of those commonplace difficulties and despairs that beset the ordinary unknown, untried, young man, when he is leaving the university to go out into the world.

It seemed very hot that evening; no breath of air was stirring within the enclosure of those trees and walls. From the open windows of the college hall tinkling piano notes came faintly now and then across the darkness; while, drifting in over the roofs of the college, and deadening at times the music, there came, like a dim smoke of sound, the rumour of city noises, of carts, footsteps, and high faint voices in the street outside. But as Cornish sat there lazily, his hands deep in his pockets, his eyes fixed on the ground, he soon ceased to hear either the music or the sounds of the streets. Vagrant thoughts about himself, his own affairs and prospects, were going through his head. Then phrases from their argument--Pleasure wasn't the End, and the End wasn't Pleasure; but whose pleasure, and the end of what? To his tired mind, however, the words were little more than empty sounds. Other things he had been studying floated past in large dim ma.s.ses; he remembered the armies, invasions, and old battles of history; the Roman Empire seemed to be near him, like something immense and heavy in the night. And behind it in the past were the Persian, a.s.syrian, Egyptian Dominations, with the weight of all their millions and millions of lives!

He was going to do well in the examinations, he knew; more or less mechanically he repeated over what his tutor had said, and some flattering words the Warden had written to his father--"We consider him one of our best men; he is certain to distinguish himself."

"But what's the good of it all?" he found himself asking. He looked up at the college buildings, dark about him, save for their squares of yellow windows. Gradually he began to wake out of his vacant reverie.

What was the good of doing well?--why, it was an absurd question; of course, he wanted to do well, to win honour for himself and his College.

He a.s.sured himself of this, in conventional phrases, but somehow, just then, he did not seem to care in the least for success like that, and honour. Yet here he had been, all this time, working for nothing else!

He was ashamed of this want of ambition, this deadness of desire. Of course, there were other things he cared for, he told himself, and to prove this he brought to mind the interests and pleasures of his ordinary life--his friendships, the ideas and books he believed in, his public speaking, the positions he held in various societies. But somehow all these seemed utterly foolish, futile, and unimportant. In desperation he began to think of simpler things--of boating, good clothes, and horses, and some riding boots he was having made. But everything, even the most universal pleasures of life, struck him now as tasteless and absurd. Why did people do such things, and what could they find in them to enjoy?

"But it's against common sense to feel this way!" he said to himself. He had always thought the disillusions of youth somewhat ridiculous, and often had made fun of the modern philosophy, or pseudo-philosophy, of disenchantment, with its literature of pa.s.sion and despair. And now, as he sat there in the familiar quadrangle, with the rooms of his friends about him, all the people he knew so well, in there at the concert, he was uncomfortably aware of how absurd they would think it, should they know that he too had secretly begun, in the old, foolish, hackneyed way, to meditate on the nothingness of life. He of all people, who had always taken such sensible, commonplace views of things!

"Well, it will be different soon; I shall have things to work for that really are worth while," he told himself. Hitherto, when he had felt any futility in his life, he had put it down to the youthfulness of his occupations, feeling sure that the world beyond his school or college, with its great interests and ambitions, would give endless objects of desire. But now, in spite of himself, he could not help asking--what were those great interests and ambitions after all?

Almost comically there rose before his mind pictures of all the middle-aged people he knew--his relatives, his father's friends--large, solemn, successful people, who were thought, and thought themselves, very important. And the dull speeches they made, and the way they often grew red and angry, as they argued about the Government, or the Eastern question! And their houses, their wives and dinner parties, their social differences and ambitions, and the way they pushed and struggled for money and t.i.tles! What was the value of it all; to succeed or fail, what difference did it make? He tried to imagine himself at the head of what would be his profession, as Lord Chancellor--a fat and bald Lord Chancellor in stuffy robes--wasn't that the position that young men were supposed to be ambitious of attaining? Or if he should make a fortune, or write a famous book, or carry some great reform through Parliament?

But, somehow, he did not seem to care; and gradually, as he listened to the far-off rumour of the city, it came to sound faintly in his ears like a voice of blind craving--as if the agitation of the world and life were meaningless and vain. And he would go out into it, he knew, would struggle and push with the others....

Now from the open windows, sounds of music floated again across the quadrangle. He could picture to himself the audience, all those rows of young men, sitting there in the hot air and gaslight. Indeed, he could almost see, he felt, into the rows of minds--if you could call them minds--behind all those heads: the ridiculous images of hope and cheap romance wakened by the music, the foolish dreams of the future, and false, poetic ideas of life.

Pity the poets and novelists could not invent something a little more true to life! Cornish thought. For after all they had but two receipts: either they enlarged the world into a glorious and unreal place, full of love, success, and eternal sunshine, or else they magnified poor human nature, and invented towering, Byronic heroes, who could find nothing in a shrunken universe worthy of their pa.s.sionate souls.

The music finished in a noise of long and loud applause. How all of them enjoyed it; how all of them believed in it, he thought; finding something foolish and inane in these sounds of clapping hands and pounding feet. A little while afterwards the concert ended, and the audience, a vague press of people, began to murmur and move down the steps of the hall, and pa.s.s him in the darkness. But now the sound of their footsteps and cheerful retreating voices came back to him almost sadly. A whole generation of youth, they seemed to him, as he sat there almost like some remote spectator--a whole generation of youth, those young men, pouring out of that ancient hall and pa.s.sing away into the silence.

They were all gone at last; one by one the bright windows in the hall grew dark. Cornish still sat there alone. These voices and footsteps and dim figures, moving past him thus in the darkness, had left his mind curiously vibrating. So life went by, he thought, a few careless steps together on the brief-trodden path, a few words, a few greetings, and then the darkness and silence of death. What a curious mystery it was, this life, so vivid and brief in each of those pa.s.sers by; the life he was conscious of in himself, as he sat there alone--the sound of his breath, the blood beating at his temples, the "soul" within--what was the meaning of it all, and for what reason was it given?

Surely this was the question of philosophy--the very question they had discussed that evening! And now, for the first time, he realized that the theories and systems he had been studying so long were not mere exercises of thought, and abstract speculations, but almost pa.s.sionate attempts to explain the meaning of existence--of his own existence!

But the great solutions of the philosophers--Aristotle's "Contemplation," Kant's "Moral Law," the "Calculated Pleasure" of the Hedonists, and all the rest--there seemed to be a mortal coldness in them all. Surely they could never give a motive, or make life desirable to anyone! Vaguely dismayed at this conclusion, he repeated over to himself all the words again. Still he could find in them no motive for existence; and in a dim way he began to feel half proud of this discernment. Yes, Waters had been right after all, (and somehow he pitied both Waters and himself), philosophy was but a barren waste. And the picture of a great desert filled his mind--a desert of endless sand.

When he was again conscious of himself, for a moment he wondered where he was, confused by the discomfort of his position, and the coolness of the air. Then through the darkness he saw, outlined against the starry sky, the trees and buildings of the College quadrangle, and remembered how he had sat down there to rest after their discussion. He must have fallen asleep, and now it was late--the night had grown completely silent, and only one or two windows shone yellow in the blackness of the walls. What had their argument been about? he began to ask himself; but, chancing to look up again, he forgot everything in his wonder at the brilliance of the stars. The whole patch of sky, shut in by the dark College roofs, quivered and glowed with shining stars; he thought he had never seen the vault of heaven so wonderful and luminous.

The long, faint sigh of a pa.s.sing train on the distant railway brought back his thoughts at last, out of their vague wonder, to the earth and himself again. His imagination wandered after the train as it went through the night towards London. Soon he would be in London himself, he thought, smiling. It was not three weeks now. There were some dances he was going to, and a cricket match, and the theatre, of course....

But then a vague sense of misfortune weighed him down, and in a moment he remembered how, a little while before, he had decided that life was altogether inane and meaningless. How was it that he had grown so foolishly eager again? No secret had been revealed to him; he had found no meaning behind desire, no purpose in existence. Yet here he was, looking forward to dances, actually counting the days to a cricket match! It was absurd for a self-conscious spirit to desire such things as these, especially after surveying life and philosophy, and finding there was no reason why you should desire anything at all!

But somehow Cornish did not seem to need a reason now; success, love, friendship, and even dances and cricket matches, he desired these things for themselves, they shone with their own brightness; no theory, no sanction of Greek or German philosophy could possibly make him want them more. How was it that there were desires that reason did not give?

He puzzled over this, till at last he saw the question was rather a meaningless one, a question of words only. For desire of life came long before reasoning about it; reason did not sit aloft in a purer air, creating out of itself the meanings of experience. It could create no desires, could give us indeed none of the ultimate facts of life, for the ideas it used were all abstracted from things our direct perceptions gave us. And the existence of these things themselves--the blue sky, the solid earth, the sweetness of youth and sunshine--it could never prove, it did not need to prove! When, a little while before, he had felt no desire, reason had not helped him. And now he did not want its help.

The striking clocks told Cornish the lateness of the hour, and he got up to go in. As he walked across the quadrangle he heard voices and laughter in the darkness, and dimly saw a group of young men come out of a doorway in front of him.

"Well, have you had a good game, Waters?" he asked, as he joined them.

"Oh, a ripping game. What have you been doing?"

"Nothing much--thinking."