The Youth of Parnassus, and Other Stories

by Logan Pearsall Smith

VI.

Then in the autumn, Sutton wrote about the coming together of the College, the beginning of busy life after the long quiet of the vacation days. For the first time he had gone to service in the College chapel. He did not like the way of worship, finding it formal and meaningless; but gradually, as the twilight faded away, and the great painted windows filled with darkness—growing black in the candle-lit walls about them—another impression came to him, looking at all those faces in the dim light, and listening to their voices—an impression of the unity and living spirit of the College, as being a small, ancient commonwealth, with a history and traditions of its own. There they all were, just themselves, shut in from the world outside, gathered together, as the College had gathered together in the same place for five or six hundred years. Though he was only there as a spectator, who had chanced to wander in from the outside, yet he realized how great an influence such a place, with all its old ways and customs, might have on the young Englishmen who came there. Indeed, if the influence had not been so obviously narrow and deadening he himself might have been a little affected by it....

"Yes, you were right," he said in another letter, "when you told me that the antiquity of England belongs to us Americans as much as to you.... Sometimes I fancy I had an ancestor here once; I am sure he was a Puritan, and disapproved of the ecclesiasticism and worldliness of the place. And yet, poor man, he could not help loving Oxford too. A retired, melancholy person, he liked it best in the days like these when the buildings and yellow and greenish trees are half veiled in the autumn mist. But at last he went over with the Puritans to New England, and was much better and more active there, and free from all the dreamy influences that held him in Oxford. And it will be much better for me too, when I go back next year."

VII.

But he had almost decided to go back at once, he wrote in the next letter. He saw now, and indeed all along he had felt deep down in his soul, that he was doing wrong in staying there; that there was nothing really in Oxford to help him. If Foley only knew all the circumstances he would understand. And, in any case, it was not wholesome to be always living in the past.

And in Oxford you were in the past; the dead were about you everywhere; you dwelt in the buildings they had built, you read their books, you thought their thoughts, and the weight of their dreary traditions crushed down on you, forcing your life into the shape of theirs. Surely there was something evil and haunted about the place! And during all those dripping autumn days, Sutton's one thought had been a longing to be back again under the keen skies of his prairie-home; life was new and hopeful there, unshadowed by the gloom of antiquity and death....

But soon after Sutton wrote that he had had a talk with Dr. Joseph. "He advises me by all means to stay here. He says that all I am getting at Oxford will certainly be very useful to me when I go back. I never had an idea how strong our position is; I wish you might have a talk with him sometime, when you return. He explains that religion is progressive; that there is no real antagonism between the new and the old; the one has grown out of the other by a natural evolution. Indeed he laughed at the idea of being afraid of the Past; one ought to enjoy it, not fear it, he said. Then when I asked him if there wasn't a danger in the new criticism, and too much reasoning about things, he said that there never could be any real danger in following one's best reason, and that we need not be the least afraid of what it will lead us to."

VIII.

Other letters came to Foley now and then. Sutton spoke of his work and occupations, the taciturn young man taking a certain pleasure, as it seemed, in writing down the ideas and impressions that he found it hard to express in any other way.

But Foley at this time was travelling in the East; he could only read the American's letters with haste and small attention. Some, however, he put aside to keep, and now and then would write back in a disconnected way, for he felt a certain friendliness for this assiduous correspondent. As time went on, however, the letters grew more infrequent, and at last the correspondence died. Foley, with his new interests, had almost forgotten Sutton, or would only think of him vaguely as a preacher somewhere in America, whither doubtless he had returned some time ago.