The Youth of Parnassus, and Other Stories

by Logan Pearsall Smith

"Ames was right, you know—what he said about Pleasure."

"Old Ames! what does he know about it?" Waters interrupted. More than once, during the argument that evening, Waters had dropped a book or shuffled his feet impatiently; and now, declaring that all such talk was great waste of time and "rot" anyhow, he went off, after vainly inviting the others to join him, to an interrupted game of cards. In a minute the others separated, some to work, one or two to the concert in the college hall. Walter Cornish walked away alone across the quadrangle. Finding a bench, he sat listlessly down, his hands in his pockets, his feet stretched out in front of him. He would do no more work that night; it would be better to rest there for a while, listening to the music of the concert.

Cornish, with the others, would be in for his last examinations in a few weeks; then he would be leaving Oxford. But as he had money enough of his own, and belonged moreover to that fortunate class of young Oxford men to whom success at everything seems easy, he could look into the future, untroubled by most of those commonplace difficulties and despairs that beset the ordinary unknown, untried, young man, when he is leaving the university to go out into the world.

It seemed very hot that evening; no breath of air was stirring within the enclosure of those trees and walls. From the open windows of the college hall tinkling piano notes came faintly now and then across the darkness; while, drifting in over the roofs of the college, and deadening at times the music, there came, like a dim smoke of sound, the rumour of city noises, of carts, footsteps, and high faint voices in the street outside. But as Cornish sat there lazily, his hands deep in his pockets, his eyes fixed on the ground, he soon ceased to hear either the music or the sounds of the streets. Vagrant thoughts about himself, his own affairs and prospects, were going through his head. Then phrases from their argument—Pleasure wasn't the End, and the End wasn't Pleasure; but whose pleasure, and the end of what? To his tired mind, however, the words were little more than empty sounds. Other things he had been studying floated past in large dim masses; he remembered the armies, invasions, and old battles of history; the Roman Empire seemed to be near him, like something immense and heavy in the night. And behind it in the past were the Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian Dominations, with the weight of all their millions and millions of lives!

He was going to do well in the examinations, he knew; more or less mechanically he repeated over what his tutor had said, and some flattering words the Warden had written to his father—"We consider him one of our best men; he is certain to distinguish himself."

"But what's the good of it all?" he found himself asking. He looked up at the college buildings, dark about him, save for their squares of yellow windows. Gradually he began to wake out of his vacant reverie. What was the good of doing well?—why, it was an absurd question; of course, he wanted to do well, to win honour for himself and his College. He assured himself of this, in conventional phrases, but somehow, just then, he did not seem to care in the least for success like that, and honour. Yet here he had been, all this time, working for nothing else!

He was ashamed of this want of ambition, this deadness of desire. Of course, there were other things he cared for, he told himself, and to prove this he brought to mind the interests and pleasures of his ordinary life—his friendships, the ideas and books he believed in, his public speaking, the positions he held in various societies. But somehow all these seemed utterly foolish, futile, and unimportant. In desperation he began to think of simpler things—of boating, good clothes, and horses, and some riding boots he was having made. But everything, even the most universal pleasures of life, struck him now as tasteless and absurd. Why did people do such things, and what could they find in them to enjoy?

"But it's against common sense to feel this way!" he said to himself. He had always thought the disillusions of youth somewhat ridiculous, and often had made fun of the modern philosophy, or pseudo-philosophy, of disenchantment, with its literature of passion and despair. And now, as he sat there in the familiar quadrangle, with the rooms of his friends about him, all the people he knew so well, in there at the concert, he was uncomfortably aware of how absurd they would think it, should they know that he too had secretly begun, in the old, foolish, hackneyed way, to meditate on the nothingness of life. He of all people, who had always taken such sensible, commonplace views of things!

"Well, it will be different soon; I shall have things to work for that really are worth while," he told himself. Hitherto, when he had felt any futility in his life, he had put it down to the youthfulness of his occupations, feeling sure that the world beyond his school or college, with its great interests and ambitions, would give endless objects of desire. But now, in spite of himself, he could not help asking—what were those great interests and ambitions after all?

Almost comically there rose before his mind pictures of all the middle-aged people he knew—his relatives, his father's friends—large, solemn, successful people, who were thought, and thought themselves, very important. And the dull speeches they made, and the way they often grew red and angry, as they argued about the Government, or the Eastern question! And their houses, their wives and dinner parties, their social differences and ambitions, and the way they pushed and struggled for money and titles! What was the value of it all; to succeed or fail, what difference did it make? He tried to imagine himself at the head of what would be his profession, as Lord Chancellor—a fat and bald Lord Chancellor in stuffy robes—wasn't that the position that young men were supposed to be ambitious of attaining? Or if he should make a fortune, or write a famous book, or carry some great reform through Parliament? But, somehow, he did not seem to care; and gradually, as he listened to the far-off rumour of the city, it came to sound faintly in his ears like a voice of blind craving—as if the agitation of the world and life were meaningless and vain. And he would go out into it, he knew, would struggle and push with the others....