He was passing from a bright, buoyant lad into a man, and a man of ardor and conviction. And the chief instrument in the transformation was Mr. Grey.
Elsmere got his first in Moderations easily. But the Final schools were a different matter. In the first days of his, return to Oxford, in the October of his third year, while he was still making up his lecture list, and taking a general oversight of the work demanded from him, before plunging definitely into it, he was oppressed with a sense that the two years lying before him constituted a problem which would be harder to solve than any which had yet been set him. It seemed to him in a moment which was one of some slackness and reaction, that he had been growing too fast. He had been making friends besides in far too many camps, and the thought, half attractive, half repellent, of all those midnight discussions over smouldering fires, which Oxford was preparing for him, those fascinating moments of intellectual fence with minds as eager and as crude as his own, and of all the delightful dipping into the very latest literature, which such moments encouraged and involved, seemed to convey a sort of warning to the boy's will that it was not equal to the situation. He was neither dull enough nor great enough for a striking Oxford success. How was he to prevent himself from attempting impossibilities and achieving a final mediocrity? He felt a dismal certainty that he should never be able to control the strayings of will and curiosity, now into this path, now into that; and a still stronger and genuine certainty that it is not by such digression that a man gets up the Ethics or the Annals.
Langham watched him with a half irritable attention. In spite of the paralysis of all natural ambitious in himself, he was illogically keen that Elsmere should win the distinctions of the place. He, the most laborious, the most disinterested of scholars, turned himself almost into a crammer for Elsmere's benefit. He abused the lad's multifarious reading, declared it was no better than dram-drinking, and even preached to him an ingenious variety of mechanical aids to memory and short cuts to knowledge, till Robert would turn round upon him with some triumphant retort drawn from his own utterances at some sincerer and less discreet moment. In vain. Langham felt a dismal certainty before many weeks were over that Elsmere would miss his First in Greats. He was too curious, too restless, too passionate about many things. Above all he was beginning, in the tutor's opinion, to concern himself disastrously early with that most overwhelming and most brain-confusing of all human interests--the interest of religion. Grey had made him 'earnest' with a vengeance.