Logan Pearsall Smith

“ One evening, however, when he was sitting in the garden, happening to look up, he saw the melancholy figure of the American coming down the garden path. Now that he actually saw Sutton, and was vividly aware of the atmosphere of reserve and solitude that enveloped him, Foley shrank from saying the things that he felt he ought to say. And yet someone must speak to him; someone must tell him his duty, and make him go back to the good simple people who had cared for him, supported him, and who relied on him so much! ”

“ 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?" ”

“ When Arthur Lestrange had come first from school to Oxford, he had entered with eagerness and youthful ambition into the pleasures and activities of university life, wishing to do everything well that he tried to do, and with distinction if he could. And all these ambitions and activities he came to share, in the pleasant, intimate Oxford way, with a friend, slightly older than himself.
But after a while he began to grow discontented; success was not so easy;—and what was the good of it after all? ”

“ How much more delightful it made life, he told himself one evening, as he sat there, half lost in sentimental musing, how much more delightful it made life to have been at Oxford, to have learned to love the place as one did learn to love it—to have it always as a charming memory! It was so perfect, that evening, with the sunset still lingering faint and red behind the blue trees and towers, up there above the dusky garden stretches. ”

“ Even to this Abel could not agree entirely; he admitted that of course culture had its charm and value; only in cases it might be dangerous, he thought. But how could that be? Foley asked, and for a moment, in their discussion of the larger question, they almost forgot Sutton. Abel thought that an undue cultivation of taste, of the sense of beauty, without an equal training of the reason, would make you into a narrow and fastidious person, judging things by the eyes and ears, and caring only for what was well-expressed and beautiful. ”

“ And when he rode into the old city, walking his horse through the darkening streets, it seemed to him as if he were riding home now, as often he had ridden home into Oxford before, at just this hour of the twilight. The groups in the doorways, the lighted windows in the dim buildings, the sounds about him of bells and footsteps and friendly voices, brought back to him confusedly, mixed with the memory of this and that, the charm and comfort of that old life—that life of order and disciplined ways, and high old-fashioned purposes. ”

“ Sutton took everything that Foley said with delightful seriousness; the well-worn arguments against Democracy and Republicanism were new to him, and seemed to puzzle him—he would come days afterwards with carefully thought-out answers to them. Or he would give his friend tracts to read, as if he was worried by Foley's ritualistic tastes, and hoped to convert him to Methodism; and once he persuaded him to go and hear Dr. Joseph preach. Foley was really impressed by the good sense and vigour of Sutton's master, but to Sutton himself he criticized what he thought a want of beauty in the service. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Will to Live Part Two
William Waters had dreamed that the Persians, in a fleet of Canadian canoes, had come up the Thames to attack the College barge, and that he himself had been sent on foot to demand reinforcements from the Oxford examiners at Sparta. And after the weary, breathless running, the hopeless search, in his dream, for the right Greek words, it was most delightful to open his eyes and find himself comfortably lying in his familiar bedroom, with the sunlight glowing on the blinds. ”

“ First came the letters Foley remembered: Sutton's first Long Vacation; his home-sickness in Oxford; his thoughts of Parnassus; the American tourists he would watch and speak with sometimes. Then in the autumn his impression of the chapel, his growing fondness for Oxford, followed by the sudden determination to go home, from which Dr. Joseph had dissuaded him, telling him that there was nothing he need be afraid of in Oxford, or in the Past. ”

“ But after a while Foley's interest in him, and his own shy charm of manner, gained him a more friendly welcome in the College, and little by little he began to modify, it was remarked, the quaint unconventionalities of his speech and ways.
A curious life it was, this Oxford life into which the inexperienced American had chanced to drift! A community of young men, generously bred and taught, living together so intimately in that mediaeval place, with its own old usages and traditions and ways of thinking; shut out, as by a high wall, from the world outside; aloof from the vulgar needs of life ”

“ But as he drove up to Oxford, "What a fool I am," he kept saying to himself. Indeed Boyle's surprise, the commonplace platform, the ticket-collector's questions, the sight outside of his own luggage being lifted up on a hansom, had soon made his foolish, helpless impulse fade, like the flame of a candle, taken out into the daylight and windy air. But to go back to the train would have seemed doubly foolish, so, borne on by the impetus of his dead desire, he drove away. The next train was not till half-past six. He would get luncheon, and, after all, it might be pleasant to see the old place. ”

“ Foley studied the photograph of the college, and the pictures on the mantelpiece—several college friends, with lank serious faces; an intellectual young lady, her hand resting on a copy of the Bible; and an old, mild, white bearded minister—Dr. Turnpenny, no doubt. There was a picture too of a wide city street. Then it really existed, this remote place, and people lived there! he thought, amused at the curious chance which had brought Sutton, the promise and pride, perhaps, of his native town, and set him down in so different a world. ”

“ People from the villages about Oxford have stalls there, and you see the ruddy, old-fashioned cottagers' wives, seated each one behind a fresh bank of vegetables and flowers she herself has grown at home in her quaint garden. Sweet, old-fashioned flowers, flags and peonies and roses, made up into tight bouquets and set out for sale in trim rows, not unlike, I fancy, the trim rows in which they grew in their formal cottage flower beds.... ”

“ 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." ”

“ Craik. Indeed you do! But come," she added suddenly, "we must be going back to the garden. How I hate to leave this dear old cloister!"
"Must we really go?"
"Yes, we really must. Isn't it horrid, when you have had such an interesting talk, to have to go back and say stupid and silly things to stupid and silly people?"
They left the cloisters and, crossing the quadrangle, they stopped for a moment, and looked at the blue picture set in an archway of grey walls, the blue picture of the afternoon light and air in the depth and distance of the garden. ”

“ And, as they talked, the young man began to fancy idly what his own life would have been, had he never gone away from the old Devonshire town. It had been intended, of course, that he should stay there, and take his own part in the family concerns; even yet his uncles were keeping a place for him; and although they feared he was quite spoiled by Oxford, yet they would welcome him back, he knew, should he only give up those ambitions, that to them—and to himself sometimes!—seemed so impossible, so dreamy and unreal. ”

“ Woolley stared hard at the notes which he gripped in his hand, and then he turned and pointed at a place at the back of the platform, which he called "the Future," and began to speak about a model dwelling, a cow, and a vine and fig-tree; then his voice sank, and he wavered and sat down.
"He expects a good deal from Temperance," the Sub-Warden thought; "what a thing it is to be young!" And he applauded with vigour, such vigour that several rustics in the audience turned and fixed him with their ruminating eyes. ”

“ As nothing came, however, he said, "Surely there are lots of places where they want Oxford men?"
"Possibly there were"; Ames looked as if he, however, had never heard of them.
"But Grant and Vaughan had got good places, and Sturdy, they said, was doing well at the Bar."
"Ah, I see you mean those clever men, who do so well in the Schools and all. You're quite right; a man like Cornish for instance; I thought you meant more the average man."
No, it wasn't Cornish, Waters meant; it wasn't the average man either. "I mean more the man—what you call an all-round-man." ”

“ Turning toward Oxford we saw black figures like dots on the sun-flushed towers and roofs of the other Colleges. Our tower, and, indeed, the whole sky, seemed to rock with the pealing bells; and the undergraduates, engaging in a wild scuffle, tore off each other's caps and gowns, throwing them out into the air, to fall with giddy swirls on the roofs, or into the street below. It seemed almost an outburst of Pagan turbulence, after the Pagan sun-worship, up there on that windy tower-top over the sleeping town! I wrote describing it to Dr. Turnpenny ”

“ One of these dissenting friends of the American's, a friendly, awkward young man, named Abel, who was assistant tutor to Dr. Joseph, and had come with him to Oxford when the college moved there from Birmingham, seemed to have a special supervision over the American. Abel had no very high idea of Oxford and Oxford people, and once, when they met in Sutton's rooms, he and Foley argued a little about the University.
Anyhow he envied Sutton, Abel said at last, turning, as he rose to go, to the silent American; it wasn't everybody who had the luck to live in such a place. ”

“ Craik overheard Mrs. Lyon, the wife of the president of All Saints, talking to the Warden of St. Simon's.
"Dear Miss Lamb!" she said in a deep and sentimental voice; "she is just as nice to women as she is to men."
"She is much nicer, surely," the ancient Warden replied with a cackling laugh; "she never kissed me!"
Miss Lamb had disappeared. And Mrs. Cotton was busy discussing with philanthropic friends the affairs of Oxford charities.
"These Oxford parties are so nice," she said to Craik, as she turned her benevolent spectacles away from him; "they save one writing such heaps of notes." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 class 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. ”

“ Probably he was one of George's Oxford friends, she thought, beginning to feel a little shy, as they walked towards her across the grass. The bicyclist was thin and very tall; his shadow, in the late sunshine, seemed to stretch endlessly over the grass. His face was bathed in perspiration; he was grey with dust, and altogether he looked very shabby by the side of her good-looking husband.
"Mary, I want to introduce my friend, Mr. Allen, to you." Mrs. Ross was always a little afraid of her husband's friends; then Allen was a don at Oxford, and she knew he was considered extremely clever. ”

“ They never allowed ladies inside the gates."
"How silly!"
"Yes," Craik said, smiling, "wasn't it silly?"
They walked with slow steps around the shadowed cloisters, and Miss Lamb talked idly of the party. It was such a pretty party, so amusing. Did he often go to garden parties? No! How odd! She did—to ever so many, in America, in London, and now in Oxford. The Oxford parties were the best though. Then suddenly she cried in a changed voice, "But how frivolous I am, Mr. Craik! I can see that you are quite shocked." ”

“ As soon as he could, Foley went off to find his friend, getting the address from the College books. At last in a dark alley he discovered the house. Mr. Sutton had gone away from Oxford the day before, the landlady told him, and had not said when he would be back. Perhaps the gentleman would like to leave his card? The room was at the top; he must be mindful of the stairs. Climbing up with care, Foley opened the door and lighted a match in the darkness; the poverty and destitution of the little room growing vivid for a moment, and then fading again into blackness, affected him somewhat sadly. ”

“ Then, in answer to a question of Miss Lamb's, he described his quiet bringing up in an obsolete old town where his parents were tradespeople; his early schooling, how he had come to Oxford on a scholarship, and how he had stayed there ever since, living in the same College, his parents having died, and the Logic tutorship being offered to him just when he had taken his degree. So he seemed to have lived a long while there, in that sleepy old College, within its high walls and buildings: as an undergraduate first, busy and almost solitary, save for a few friends similar to himself ”