Robert Browning.
CHAPTER XXVII.
COURTSHIP.
Busy as Sydney Campion was, at this juncture of his career, public affairs were, on the whole, less engrossing to him than usual; for a new element had entered into his private life, and bade fair to change many of its currents.
The rector's education of his son and daughter had produced effects which would have astonished him mightily could he have traced their secret workings, but which would have been matter of no surprise to a psychologist.
He himself had been in the main an unsuccessful man, for, although he had enjoyed many years of peace and quiet in his country parish, he had never attained the objects with which he set out in life. Like many another man who has failed, his failure led him to value nothing on earth so highly as success. It is your fortunate man who can afford to slight life's prizes. The rector of Angleford was never heard to utter soothing sentiments to the effect that "life may succeed in that it seems to fail," or that heaven was the place for those who had failed on earth. He did not believe it. Failure was terrible misfortune in his eyes: intellectual failure, greatest of all. Of course he wanted his children to be moral and religious; it was indeed important that they should be orthodox and respectable, if they wanted to get on in the world; but he had no such passion of longing for their spiritual as he had for their mental development. Neither was it money that he wished them to acquire, save as an adjunct; no man had more aristocratic prejudices against trade and pride of purse than Mr. Campion; but he wanted them—and especially he wanted Sydney—to show intellectual superiority to the rest of the world, and by that superiority to gain the good things of life. And of all these good things, the best was fame—the fame that means success.
Thus, from the very beginning of Sydney's life, his father sedulously cultivated ambition in his soul, and taught him that failure meant disgrace. The spur that he applied to the boy acted with equal force on the girl, but with different results. For with ambition the rector sowed the seeds of a deadly egotism, and it found a favorable soil—at least in Sydney's heart. That the boy should strive for himself and his own glory—that was the lesson the rector taught him; and he ought not to have been surprised when, in later years, his son's absorption in self gave him such bitter pain.
Lettice, with her ambition curbed by love and pity, accepted the discipline of patience and self-sacrifice, set before her by the selfishness of other people; but Sydney gave free rein to his ambition and his pride. He could not make shift to content himself, as his father had done, with academic distinction alone. He wanted to be a leader of men, to take a foremost place in the world of men. He sometimes told himself that his father had equipped him to the very best of his power for the battle of life, and he was grateful to him for his care; but he did not think very much about the sacrifices made for him by others. As a matter of fact, he thought himself worth them all. And for the prize he desired, he bartered away much that makes the completer man: for he extinguished many generous instincts and noble possibilities, and thought himself the gainer by their loss.
In Lettice, the love of fame was also strong, but in a modified form. Her tastes were more literary than those of Sydney, but success was as sweet to her as to him. The zest with which she worked was also in part due to the rector's teaching; but, by the strange workings-out of influence and tendency, it had chanced that the rector's carelessness and neglect had been the factors that disciplined a nature both strong and sweet into forgetfulness of self and absorption in work rather than its rewards.