Langham

“ Fresh as he was from all the delicate sights, the harmonious colours and delightful forms of the squire's house, they made an unusually sharp impression on his fastidious senses. What does human life become lived on reeking floors and under stifling roofs like these? What strange abnormal deteriorations, physical and spiritual, must it not inevitably undergo? Langham felt a sudden inward movement of disgust and repulsion. ”

“ It was a dull chilly day towards the close of September, as late one afternoon he dismounted at the door of Langham's shanty, and giving his horse into the charge of a slim youth, who had emerged from the dwelling on hearing the sounds of an approaching horseman, with the laconic remark of "Stable him, my lad," entered through the public-room, where Nat Langham was to be seen behind a roughly constructed bar, possessing none of those outward attractions which are found so alluring to the denizens of our big cities and towns. ”

“ Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal note also, that the satisfaction of it has already half departed.
So the great moment has come and gone! The one supreme experience which life and his own will had so far rigidly denied him, is his. He has felt the torturing thrill of passion—he has evoked such an answer as all men might envy him,—and fresh from Rose’s kiss, from Rose’s beauty, the strange maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion, her response! One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of gratitude and tenderness ”

“ Langham took another step toward the door, but his eyes—the starting bloodshot eyes of a hunted animal—still searched the room for some weapon. Except for the heavy iron poker by the grate, there was nothing that would serve his purpose, and he must pass the gambler to reach that. Still fumbling with his collar he paused irresolutely, midway of the room. Pride and self-respect would have taken him from the place but hate and fear kept him there. ”

“ As he read on, his arms resting on the high desk in front of him, and his eyes, full of infectious enjoyment, travelling from the book to his audience, surrounded by human beings whose confidence he had won, and whose lives he was brightening from day to day, he seemed to Langham the very type and model of a man who had found his métier, found his niche in the world, and the best means of filling it. ”

“ The dismal place had no small adornings—none of those little superfluities which, however ugly and trivial, are still so precious in the dwellings of the poor, as showing the existence of some instinct or passion which is not the creation of the sheerest physical need; and Langham, as he sat down, caught the sickening marsh smell which the Oxford man, accustomed to the odors of damp meadows in times of ebbing flood and festering sun, knows so well. As old Milsom began to talk to him in his weak, tremulous voice, the visitor’s attention was irresistibly held by the details about him. ”

“ He found a great deal of the old stimulus and piquancy in Langham’s society, but there was an occasional irritability in his companion, especially toward himself personally, which puzzled him. After a while, indeed, he began to feel himself the unreasonably cheerful person which he evidently appeared to his companion. A mere ignorant enthusiast, banished for ever from the realm of pure knowledge by certain original and incorrigible defects—after a few hours’ talk with Langham Robert’s quick insight always showed him some image of himself resembling this in his friend’s mind. ”

“ Lord Richard wrestled hard with his demon of doubt, to no avail. In good time, alas, as it was ordained, when Vivian was a bonny babe in his third summer, the unforeseen deliverance came. Ralph Langham was thrown from his pony at Long Meldom Cross, and brought home for dead. He never spoke a word, but passed to eternity with his fingers clasped tight on the Lord Richard's compassionate hand, and a great tear rolling down his round brown cheek. His short career had been like a cheerful cloud swimming in the sun, and itself casting damp and darkness on the hills below. ”

“ Even the trodden worm however——And there came a time when the concentration of a good many different lines of feeling in Langham’s mind betrayed itself at last in a sharp and sudden openness. It began to seem to him that she was specially bent often on tormenting him by these caprices of hers, and he vowed to himself finally, with an outburst of irritation due in reality to a hundred causes, that he would assert himself, that he would make an effort at any rate to save her from her own follies. ”

“ Langham saw how it was with Tom Sayers, and, smiling to himself, he went for him, leading with his left again and again on the mouth and eyes. The tenth round was overwhelmingly in Langham’s favour. In the twelfth both were winded and for several rounds they took things easy. In the twenty-first Sayers in a close threw his man and fell on him, and he kept up a general improvement. He said to himself that he would win yet, Langham was getting weak. But he must hurry. ”

“ Meanwhile downstairs a curious little scene was passing, watched by Langham, who, in his usual anti-social way, had retreated into a corner of his own as soon as another visitor appeared. Beside Catherine sat a Ritualist clergyman in cassock and long cloak—a saint clearly, though perhaps, to judge from the slight restlessness of movement that seemed to quiver through him perpetually, an irritable one. But he had the saint’s wasted unearthly look, the ascetic brow, high and narrow, the veins showing through the skin, and a personality as magnetic as it was strong. ”

“ As we drove on the weather improved. Now and again the sun struggled out for a time, and the cloud-scapes above and the strong play of light and shade on the hilly landscape below were very effective. The country was wild and beautiful, with a beauty of hill and dale, of wood, and hedgerowed lane that called Devonshire to remembrance. The only place we passed through on the way of any importance was the straggling and very pretty village of Langham. ”

“ In July 1373 he was made cardinal-bishop of Praeneste. Next year, on the death of Whittlesey, the chapter of Canterbury chose Langham for archbishop, but the court desired the post for Simon Sudbury, and the pope refused to confirm the election by the chapter on the ground that Langham could not be spared from Avignon; Langham thereon agreed to waive his rights (Eulog. Hist. iii. 339) . When in 1376 the return of the papal court to Rome was proposed, Langham obtained permission to go back to England, but died before effecting his purpose on 22 July. ”

“ He was a very good fellow after his kind, as Sir Langhams go, and would not have done a dishonourable thing, with full knowledge of it, for the three kingdoms; but Sir Langham was a guardsman, a man of fashion, a man of the world; he was not so blinded by passion as to be quite oblivious of what befalls a man who marries a pretty face; he was not wealthy enough or great enough to indulge such a whim with impunity, and the beauty which was enough to elevate a Banburyshire Hall, was not sufficient to gild over the unmentionable enormity{64} of a house in Islington and a father in the City. ”

“ Langham's look turned significantly towards a group near the piano. It contained one or two men whom he regarded as belonging to a low type; men who, if it suited their purpose, would be quite ready to tell or invent malicious stories of the girl they were now flattering, and whose [Pg 432] standards and instincts represented a coarser world than Rose in reality knew anything about. ”

“ Jim Langham, brother to Lady Douglass; the other, a barrister with leanings in the direction of political work, and a present desire to be amiable towards everybody in the neighbourhood who possessed a vote.
"Now, you are to sit down here, Miss Higham," said the old lady, "and talk to me. I may interrupt you, now and again, but you mustn't mind that. One of the few privileges of age."
"I don't know what to talk about."
"Talk about yourself. I've heard about you from Henry, but I want to verify the information. You work for your living, don't you? ”

“ The ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession, and I abhor all useless regrets and repentances.”
Mrs. Ward dramatized this strange individuality in the character of Langham. The love-scene in which Langham wins the hand of the beautiful Rose, followed by the all-night mental struggle in which he finally feels compelled to renounce all that he has gained, is almost tragic in its intensity. ”

“ Langham wrote to the Dean of Bocking to denounce "one John Ball, pretending that he is a priest,"who persisted in" preaching manifold errors and scandals." He called upon the Dean to admonish the said Ball, with "other and singular rectors, vicars, and parochial chaplains who adhered to him." Ten years after he was once more proceeded against, this time by Sudbury, and imprisoned in Maidstone jail. He was there again in the spring of 1381, when the men of Essex began the universal strike. ”

“ Some remark on the Dissenter’s logic, made, perhaps, a little too much in the tone of the Churchman conscious of University advantages, seemed to irritate Langham.
‘You think your Anglican logic in dealing with the Bible so superior! On the contrary, I am all for your Ranter. He is your logical Protestant. Historically, you Anglican parsons are where you are and what you are, because English-men, as a whole, like attempting the contradictory—like, above all, to eat their cake and have it. The nation has made you and maintains you for its own purposes. ”

“ Langham?'
'We went to Murewell first. The library was well worth [Pg 207] seeing. Since then we have been a parish round, distributing stores.'
Rose's look changed in an instant. The words were spoken by the Langham of her earliest acquaintance. The man who that morning had asked her to play to him had gone—vanished away.
'How exhilarating!' she said scornfully. 'Don't you wonder how any one can ever tear themselves away from the country?'
'Rose, don't be abusive,' said Robert, opening his eyes at her tone. Then, passing his arm through hers, he looked banteringly down upon her. ”

“ I don't say it is a landlord's duty to provide more cottages than are wanted; but if the labour is wanted, the labourer should be decently housed. He is worthy of his hire, and woe to the man who neglects or ill-treats him!'
Langham could not help smiling, partly at the vehemence of the speech, partly at the lack of adjustment between his friend's mood and his own. He braced himself to take the matter more seriously, but meanwhile Robert had caught the smile, and his angry eyes melted at once into laughter. ”

“ At the house of Nat Langham young men were taught how to use their hands skilfully years agone; at the home of the Langham their hands are trained with equal care and discretion, with a different end in view. ”

“ He is the only man in the University who knows anything about it. I gather from what he says that Langham is becoming a complete valetudinarian. Everything must go exactly by rule—his food, his work, the management of his clothes—and any little contretemps makes him ill. ”

“ Langham laughed.
‘Has he such an episcopal appetite for them? That accounts for the fact that when he and I begin to task novels I am always nowhere.’
‘I shouldn’t have supposed you ever read them,’ said Rose, obeying an irresistible impulse, and biting her lip the moment afterward.
‘Do you think that we poor people at Oxford are always condemned to works on the “enclitic de**”?’ he asked, his fine eyes lit up with gayety, and his head, of which the Greek outlines were ordinarily so much disguised by his stoop and hesitating look, thrown back against the books behind him. ”

“ For all its gargantuan scale and the somewhat elephantine playfulness of the detail (not to speak of the dinginess to which the ‘Suffolk-white’ brickwork and the stone trim have now been reduced) , the Langham is a rich and powerfully plastic composition, most skilfully adapted to a special site, and more original than most of what was produced in the sixties in Paris. The carved animals at the window heads, so varied and so humorous, deserve an attention they rarely receive; these scurrying creatures almost seem to come out of Tenniel, but may actually derive from Viollet-le-Duc. ”

“ LANGHAM, SIMON (d. 1376) , archbishop of Canterbury and cardinal, was born at Langham in Rutland, becoming a monk in the abbey of St Peter at Westminster, and later prior and then abbot of this house. In 1360 he was made treasurer of England and in 1361 he became bishop of Ely; he was appointed chancellor of England in 1363 and was chosen archbishop of Canterbury in 1366. Perhaps the most interesting incident in his primacy was when he drove the secular clergy from their college of Canterbury Hall, Oxford, and filled their places with monks. ”

“ Whenever the upper classes want to do away with themselves they chose one of the big hotels—the Grosvenor, the Langham, or ourselves. Indeed they say more has done the trick in the Langham than 'ere, I suppose because it is more central; but you can't get behind the motives of such people. ”

“ In all the world there are no officials more affable than those of the Langham. They are, in fact, types of the highest hotel civilization. Instead of showing nettled, he thus appealed to makes assenting rejoinder, accompanying his words with a re-examination of the letters under R; soon as completed saying,—
"No, sir; none for the name of Ryecroft." ”

“ He was soon allowed to hold other although less exalted positions in England, and in 1374 he was elected archbishop of Canterbury for the second time; but he withdrew his claim and died at Avignon on the 22nd of July 1376. Langham’s tomb is the oldest monument to an ecclesiastic in Westminster Abbey ”