Hyacinth Conneally had submitted himself to such emotions time after time when, fresh from the wilds of Connemara, he made his way to the examination-hall, an outside student in a borrowed cap and gown. Now, when for the first time he entered into the actual life of the college, could look up at windows of rooms that were his own, and reckon on his privilege of fingering tomes from the shelves of the huge library, the spirit of the place awed him anew. He neither analyzed nor attempted an expression of what he felt, but his first night within the walls was restless because of the inspiration which filled him.
Yet this college does not fail to make an appeal also to the thinking mind, only it is a strange appeal, tending to sadness. The sudden silence after the tumult of the streets has come for some minds to be the symbol of a divorce between the knowledge within and the life without. And this is not the separation which must always exist between thought and action, the gulf fixed between the student and the merchant. It is a real divorce between the nation and the University, between the two kinds of life which ought, like man and woman, to complete each other through their very diversity, but here have gone hopelessly apart. Never once through all the centuries of Ireland’s struggle to express herself has the University felt the throb of her life. It is true that Ireland’s greatest patriots, from Swift to Davis, have been her children; but she has never understood their spirit, never looked on them as anything but strangers to her family. They have been to her stray robber wasps, to be driven from the hive; while to the others they have seemed cygnets among her duckling brood. It is very wonderful that the University alone has been able to resist the glamour of Ireland’s past, and has failed to admire the persistency of her nationality. There has surely been enough in every century that has passed since the college was founded to win it over from alien thought and the ideals of the foreigner.
All this Hyacinth came to feel afterwards, and learnt in bitterness of spirit to be angry at the University’s isolation from Irish life. At first quite other thoughts crowded upon his mind. He felt a rebellion against his father’s estimate of what he was to learn. It seemed to him that he had come into vital touch with the greatest life of all. He was to join the ranks of those who besieged the ears of God for knowledge, and left behind them to successors yet unborn great traditions of the enigmas they had guessed. In entering upon the study of theology he seemed to become a soldier in the sacred band, the élite of the army which won and guarded truth. Already he was convinced that there could be no greater science than the Divine one, no more inspiring moment in life than this one when he took his first step towards the knowledge of God.
He crossed the quadrangle with his mind full of such thoughts, and joined a group of students round the door of one of the examination-halls. It did not shock his sense of fitness that some of his fellow-students in the great science wore shabby clothes, or that others scorned the use of a razor. Bred as he had been at home, he felt no incongruity between dirty collars and the study of divinity. It was not until he caught scraps of conversation that he experienced an awakening from his dream. One eager group surrounded a foreseeing youth who had written the dates of the first four General Councils of the Church upon his shirt-cuff.
‘Read them out, like a good man,’ said one.
‘Hold on a minute,’ said another, ‘till I see if I have got them right. I ground them up specially this morning. Nicæa, 318—no, hang it! that’s the number of Bishops who were present; 325 was the date, wasn’t it?’
‘What was the row about at Chalcedon?’ asked a tall, pale youth. ‘Didn’t some monk or other go for Cyril of Alexandria?’
‘You’ll be stuck anyhow, Tommy,’ said a neat, dapper little man with a very ragged gown.
Hyacinth slipped past the group, and approached two better dressed students who stood apart from the others.
‘Is this,’ he asked, ‘where the entrance examination to the divinity school is to be held?’