“Yes, yes,” said Mr Admer, impatiently, “I know all that; but who will ever hear of you again if you go and become what Sydney Smith calls ‘a kind of holy vegetable’ in the cabbage-gardens of a Wiltshire hamlet?”
“Why, what would you have me do, Mr Admer?”
“Oh, I don’t know; stay up here, edit a Greek play, or one of the epistles; bestir yourself for some rising university member in a contested election; set yourself to get a bishopric or a deanery; you could easily do it if you tried. I’ll give you a receipt for it any day you like. Or go to some London church; with such sermons as you could preach you might have London at your heels in no time, and as you would superadd learning to effectiveness, your fortune would be made.”
Julian was sorry to hear him talk like this; it was the language of a disappointed and half-believing man.
“I don’t care for such aims,” he said. “A mere popular preacher I would not be, and as for preferment it doesn’t depend much on me, but for the most part on purely accidental causes. All I care for at present is to be useful and happy. Obscurity is no trial to me; neither success nor failure can make me different from what I am.”
“Well then, at least, write a book or something to keep yourself in men’s memory.”
“I don’t feel inclined. There are too many books in the world, and I have nothing particular to say. Besides, the annoyance and spite to which an author subjects himself are endless—to hear ignorant and often malicious criticisms, to see his views misrepresented, his motives calumniated, and his name aspersed. No, for the present, I prefer the peace and the dignity of silence.”
“What on earth will you find to do, then, if you have no ambition?”
“Nay, I don’t want you to think that I’m so virtuous or so phlegmatic as to have no ambition. I have a passionate ambition, whether known or unknown, so to live as to lead on the coming golden age, and prepare the next generation to be truer and wiser than ours. If it be my destiny never to be called to a wider sphere of work than Elstan, I shall be content to do it there.”
“And how will you occupy your time?” asked Mr Admer, who had long loved Julian too well even to smile at what were to himself mere unintelligible enthusiasms.