And Maxwell was worthy that she should do this thing. When he and
Marcella first met, he was a man of thirty, very able, very reserved, and
often painfully diffident as to his own powers and future. He was the
only young representative of a famous stock, and had grown up from his
childhood under the shadow of great sorrows and heavy responsibilities.
The stuff of the poet and the thinker lay hidden behind his shy manners;
and he loved Marcella Boyce with all the delicacy, all the idealising
respect, that passion generates in natures so strong and so highly
tempered. At the same time, he had little buoyancy or gaiety; he had a
belief in his class, and a constitutional dislike of change, which were
always fighting in his mind with the energies of moral debate; and he
acquiesced very easily--perhaps indifferently--in many outward
conventions and prejudices.
The crisis through which Marcella put him developed and matured the man.
To the influences of love, moreover, were added the influences of
friendship--of such a friendship as our modern time but seldom rears to
perfection. In Raeburn's college days, a man of rare and delicate powers
had possessed himself of Raeburn's tenacious affection, and had
thenceforward played the leader to Raeburn's strength, physical and
moral, availing himself freely, wherever his own failed him, of the
powers and capacities of his friend. For he himself bore in him from his
youth up the seeds of physical failure and early death. It was partly the
marvellous struggle in him of soul with body that subdued to him the
homage of the stronger man. And it was clearly his influence that broke
up and fired Raeburn's slower and more distrustful temper, informing an
inbred Toryism, a natural passion for tradition, and the England of
tradition with that "repining restlessness" which is the best spur of
noble living.
Hallin was a lecturer and an economist; a man who lived in the perception
of the great paradox that in our modern world political power has gone to
the workman, while yet socially and intellectually he remains little less
weak, or starved, or subject than before. When he died he left to Raeburn
a legacy of feelings and ideas, all largely concerned with this contrast
between the huge and growing "tyranny" of the working class and the
individual helplessness or bareness of the working man. And it was these
feelings and ideas which from the beginning made a link between Raeburn
and the young revolts and compassions of Marcella Boyce. They were at one
in their love of Edward Hallin; and after Hallin's death, in their sore
and tender wish to make his thoughts tell upon the English world.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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