The impulse toward a mission was discernible in the lad; it altogether dominated the young man. His parents, regarding him lovingly and yet with wise inquiry, were fascinated by what they saw. A sense of lofty responsibility in their trusteeship for this beneficent new force formed a fresh bond between them, which grew to absorb within itself all their other ties. They came to regard themselves in no other light than as the parents of Emanuel. To preserve him from vitiating and stunting suggestions; richly to nourish, yet with an anxious avoidance of surfeit, both the soul and the mind within him; to give him strength and means and single-hearted courage adequate to the task he yearned to undertake—they asked nothing better of life than this.
After Oxford, he went abroad for a couple of years, having as a companion a young Fellow of Swithin’s, a trifle older than himself, who shared his moral attitude if not his passionate aspirations. He saw many parts of the world, and scrutinized closely in each the working of those portions of the social mechanism which interested him. Returning with a mass of notes and a mind packed with impressions and theories, he set to work to write a big book. At the end of a year he produced instead a small volume, dealing with one little phase of the huge, complex theme he had at heart. It was a treatise on the relations between parents and children, and it received very favorable reviews indeed. University men felt that it was what they had had the foresight to expect from this serious and high-minded young fellow, who was lucky enough to have the means and leisure for ethical essay-writing. Evidently he was going in for that sort of thing, and they noted with approbation that he had been at great pains with his style. Much to Emanuel’s surprise, only some three hundred copies of the work were sold; upon reflection, he saw that it was no part of his plan to sell books, and he forthwith distributed the remainder of the edition, and another edition as well, among the libraries of the Three Kingdoms. Within the next three years two other brochures went through much the same experiences. They treated respectively of primary education and of public amusements. Again the reviews were extremely cordial; again the men who had always predicted that Torr would do something regarded their prophetic intuition with refreshed complacency; again Emanuel drew considerable checks in favor of his publisher. What had been hinted at rather vaguely heretofore was now, however, announced with confidence in “literary” columns: these small volumes were merely chapters of a vast and comprehensive work to which the author had dedicated his life—the laborious exposition of a whole new philosophy of existence, to be as complete in its way as Herbert Spencer’s noble survey of mankind.
Not long after came the death of Emanuel’s mother—an unlooked-for event which altered everything in the world to the bereaved couple left behind. They went away together in the following month, with a plan of a prolonged tour in the Orient, but came back to England after a few weeks’ absence, having found their proposed distraction intolerable. Lord Julius promptly invented for his own relief the device of taking over upon himself the drudgery of caring for his millions, which heretofore had been divided among a banker, a broker, a solicitor and two secretaries. Emanuel saw his way less directly, but at last he found the will to begin a tentative experiment with some of his theories of life on a Somersetshire farm which his father gave him. The work speedily engrossed him, and expanded under his hands. He became conscious of growth within himself as well. The conviction that life is a thing not to be written about, but to be lived, formulated itself in his mind, and he elaborated this new view in an argument which persuaded his father. The Somersetshire estates of the family, which had been bought by Lord Julius in 1859, when the duke and his son Porlock joined to set aside the entail, were placed now unreservedly at Emanuel’s disposal. What he did with them is to be seen later on.
At the moment, it was of the first importance that he should decide for himself the great question of celibacy v. marriage. The far-reaching projects which possessed his brain would, beyond doubt, be multiplied infinitely in value if precisely the right woman were brought in to share his enthusiasm and devotion. It was no whit less clear that they would dwindle into failure and collapse under the blight of the wrong woman. The dimensions of the risk so impressed him, as he studied them, that for more than two years he believed himself to be irrevocably committed to the cold middle course of bachelorhood.
Then, by a remarkable stroke of good fortune, he met, fell in love with and married the sister of Lord Rosbrin, a young Irish peer whom he had known at Oxford. No one has ever doubted, he least of all, that she was the right woman.
He wrote no more books, in the years following this event, but gradually he became the cause of writing in others. A review article upon the character and aims of his experiment in Somersetshire, written in an appreciative spirit by an economist of position, attracted so much attention that the intrusion of curious strangers and inquisitive reporters threatened to be a nuisance. After this, his name was always mentioned as that of an authority, when sociological problems were discussed. There was even a certain flurry of inquiry for his books, though this did not turn out to have warranted the printing of the new popular edition. Sundry precepts in them became, however, the stock phrases of leader-writers. People of culture grew convinced that they were familiar with his works, and only a few months before the period at which we meet him, his university had conferred upon him an honorary D.C.L., which gratified him more deeply than any other recognition his labors and attainments had ever received.
CHAPTER X
Christian, observing his celebrated cousin by daylight for the first time, perceived the necessity of revising some of the previous night’s impressions.