第58章

Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much as formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there.Every time that he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence, and since he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even more distinctly foreign to his own than usual.Its transcendental aspirations - still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell - were as foreign to his own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet.Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to regulate.

On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing divergence from the Angel Clare of former times.It was chiefly a difference in his manner that they noticed just now, particularly bis brothers.He was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more.The manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner of the drawing-room young man.A prig would have said that he had lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse.Such was the contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and swains.

After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical, well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest fibre; such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a systematic tuition.They were both somewhat shortsighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own vision.When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies; and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on their shelves.When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal objection.

If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations.Felix seemed to him all Church; Cuthbert all College.His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the main-springs of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other.Each brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant scores of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with and respected.

They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their visits to their parents.Felix, though an offshoot from a far more recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less self-sacrificing and disinterested.More tolerant than his father of a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own teaching.Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded, though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.

As they walked along the hillside Angel's former feeling revived in him - that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself, neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived.Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of expression.Neither had an adequate conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and gentle current in which they and their associates floated.Neither saw the difference between local truth and universal truth;that what the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.

`I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,' Felix was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as he looked through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad austerity.`And, therefore, we must make the best of it.But I do entreat you to endeavour to keep as much as possible in touch with moral ideals.Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but high thinking may go with plain living, nevertheless.'

`Of course it may,' said Angel.`Was it not proved nineteen hundred years ago - if I may trespass upon your domain a little? Why should you think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my moral ideals?'

`Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our conversation - It may be fancy only - that you were somehow losing intellectual grasp.

Hasn't it struck you, Cuthbert?'

`Now, Felix,' said Angel drily, `we are very good friends, you know;each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had better leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours.'

They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at which their father's and mother's morning work in the parish usually concluded.

Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last thing to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare; though the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to wish that their parents would conform a little to modern notions.