"The 'pale Galilean' has banished Beauty; and only here and there, disguised almost beyond recognition, has it ventured with infinite apology to return.... Yet let us not be all unthankful to the pale Galilean and his lessons of suffering; there are too many of us who see in their own instincts the very impress of impossibility to be satisfied, who have to reflect with some bitterness, not '_il faut mourir_,' but '_il faut vivre_' and gather up our scraps and skulk along, hoping, perhaps, some day for a lowly place in some court in the House of Life, if it be only that of a scullion. And then at what a frightful cost have those lessons become part of the world's inheritance! Surely it cannot have been for nothing."
Obviously, in all this outburst, if its literary and intellectual origins are not hard to trace, there was no pose whatever; it was a mood that Johnstone honestly and passionately lived through, or rather it remained as a background to his nature. He was far from happy at this period. He had many friends and varied interests, but he felt that life was being wasted; in fact he had not "found himself," nor was he to do so until his visit to Germany. No doubt Keble was not the college for one of his temperament, and the English system of teaching the classics made them, for him, dead languages indeed; but had their oral use been encouraged (the practice of the late Professor Blackie) it is possible that he might have taken a real interest in them. With one of his friends he would speak constantly in Latin.
During the next few years Johnstone was mainly engaged in scholastic work, and the necessity of earning his own living prevented him from taking his degree. In a letter of September 1885, he regrets that he "had to live much in continuous utter rebellion against outward circumstances. In the morning is much strife and crying; in the evening, comfort of the pot. The Day of Rest brings loneliness in crowds--'stalled oxen and hatred.' _Ca finira._"
In the spring of 1887 he inherited a small legacy, which set him free, for a time, from the drudgery of teaching, and enabled him to carry out his long-deferred wish for a course of serious musical study at a foreign conservatorium. At this period he knew absolutely no German, and had only a fair knowledge of French, and was quite unconscious of possessing the natural gift for modern languages, which he was afterwards to turn to good account at the Edinburgh Academy and elsewhere. In August he went to Kreuznach to acquire the elements of German before proceeding to the Cologne Conservatorium, where he had determined to study. The family where he stayed could speak no English and but little French, so he was forced from the outset to express himself in a strange tongue and make shift to understand it. Early in October he entered the Conservatorium as a student, and engaged himself to take the year's course. His chief friend was M. Sidney Vantyn, now Professor of the Piano at the Liège Conservatoire, and then in his last year of study. They met in the class of Professor Eibenschütz, one of the most severe masters there, who made no allowance for Johnstone's previous amateur training, and was rather harsh and discouraging. He knew no English and Johnstone's German was still elementary, so Vantyn, who knew English thoroughly, acted as interpreter between them. In his recollections of those days M. Vantyn writes:--