Emanuel Torr, at the age of forty, was felt by those who knew and loved him almost to have justified the very highest of the high hopes which his youth had encouraged. This intimate circle of appreciation was rendered a small one by the circumstances of his temperament and choice of career; but beyond this his name was familiar to many who had never seen him, or who remembered him at best as a stripling, yet who habitually thought and spoke of him as an example and model to his generation.

At Oxford, twenty years before, he had attracted attention of a sort rather peculiar to himself. Those who took note of him saw foreshadowed the promise, not so much of great achievements as of the development and consolidation of a great influence. He was not specially distinguished in his work at the University, and he made no mark at the Union, where there happened at the time to be glittering a quite exceptional galaxy of future front bench men, judges and bishops. In Emanuel’s case, the interest he aroused was perhaps more sentimental than intellectual. His mind was seen to be of a fine order, but his character was even more attractive to the observant eye. The facts that he was half Jewish in blood, and that in time he would be the possessor of enormous wealth, no doubt lent an added suggestion of romance to the picture of delicate, somewhat coldly modeled features, of ivory skin and serious, musing dark eyes, and of a rare smile of wonderful sweetness, which Oxford men of the mid-seventies still associate with his name. It was in the days when Disraeli’s remarkable individuality was a part of England’s current history, and when the English imagination, in part from the stimulus of this fact, dwelt upon the possibilities of a new Semitic wave of inspiration and ethical impetus. The dreams, the aspirations, the mysterious “perhaps” of Daniel Deronda were in men’s minds, and Johannesburg had not been so much as heard of.

What the University recognized in the youth standing upon the threshold of manhood, had been an article of faith within his home since his childhood. It is as well to recount at this place the brief story of that home.

At the age of twenty-five Lord Julius Torr, engaged in the listless pursuit of that least elusive of careers, called diplomacy, found himself at The Hague, and yawned his way about its brightly scrubbed solitudes for some months, until, upon the eve of his resolve to have done with the whole business, and buy a commission in a line regiment, he encountered a young woman who profoundly altered all his plans in life. It was by the merest and unlikeliest of accidents that he came to know the Ascarels, father and daughter, and at the outset his condescension had seemed to him to be involved as well. They were of an old family in the Netherlands, Jewish in race but now for some generations estranged from, the synagogue, and reputed to be extraordinarily wealthy. It was said of them too that they were sternly exclusive, but to the brother of an English duke this had not appeared to possess much meaning. He had previously been of some official service to the father, in a matter wherein Dutch and English interests touched each other at Sumatra; from this he came to meet the daughter. He had been told by the proud father that she was of the blood of the immortal Spinoza, and had been so little impressed that he had not gone to the trouble of finding out who Spinoza was.

The marriage of young Torr, of the Foreign Office, to some Dutch-Jewish heiress a half-year later, received only a trifle more notice in England than did the news of his retirement from his country’s diplomatic service. The duke had already four sons, and the brother, when it seemed that he intended to live abroad, was not at all missed. Nearly fifteen years elapsed before a mature Lord Julius reappeared in England—a Lord Julius whom scarcely any one found recognizable. He bore small visible relation to the aimless and indolent young attachÉ whom people, by an effort of memory, were able to recall; still less did he resemble anything else that the Torr family, within recollection, had produced. He took a big old house in Russell Square, and in time it became understood that very learned and intellectual people paid pilgrimages thither to sit at the feet of Lady Julius, and learn of her. Smart London rarely saw this Lady Julius save at a distance—in her carriage or at the opera. The impression it preserved of her was of a short, swarthy woman, increasingly stout as years went on, who peered with near-sighted earnestness through a large pince-nez of unusual form. On her side, it seemed doubtful if she had formed even so succinct an impression as this of smart London. She was content with Bloomsbury to the end of her days; and made no effort whatever to establish relations with the West End. Indeed, tales came to be told of the effectual resistance she offered, in later years, to amiable interested advances from that quarter. It grew to be believed that she had made an eccentric will, and would leave untold millions to Atheist charities. The rumor that she was among the most highly cultivated women of her time, and that the most illustrious scientists and thinkers would quit the society of kings to travel post-haste across Europe at her bidding, did not, it must regretfully be added, seem incompatible with this theory about a crazy will. Finally, when she died in 1885, something was printed by the papers about her philanthropy, and much was said in private speculation about her disposition of her vast fortune, but it did not come out that any will whatever was proved, and London ceased to think of the matter.

The outer world had in truth been wrong from the beginning. Lady Julius was not a deeply learned woman, and the limited circle of friends she gathered about her contained hardly one distinguished figure, in the popular use of the phrase; her opinions were not notably advanced or unconventional; she did not shun society upon philosophic principles, but merely because it failed to attract a nature at once shy and practical; so far from being rich in her own right, she had insisted many years before her death upon transferring every penny of her fortune to her husband.

Inside her own household, this dark, stout little woman with the eye-glasses was revered as a kind of angel. She was plainfaced almost to ugliness in the eyes of strangers. Her husband and her son never doubted that she was beautiful. Now, when she had been a memory for ten years and more, these two talked of her lovingly and with no constraint of gloom, as if she were still the pivot round which their daily life turned.

The elder man particularly delighted in dwelling upon the details of that earlier change in him, under her influence, to which allusion has been made. Emanuel had in his mind, from boyhood, no vision more distinct or familiar than this selfpainted picture of his father—the idle, indifferent, unschooled, paltry-ideaed young gentleman of fashion—meeting all unawares this overpowering new force, and kneeling in awed yet rapturous submission before it. To the boy’s imagination it became a historical scene, as fixed and well known in its lines of composition as that of Nelson’s death in the cockpit. He saw his beardless father in dandified clothes of the Corn-Laws-caricature period, proceeding along the primrose path of dalliance, like some flippant new Laodicean type of Saul of Tarsus—when “suddenly there shined around him a light from heaven.” Lord Julius, indeed, thought and spoke of it in much that same spirit. The recollection that he had not known who Spinoza was tenderly amused him: it was the symbol of his vast oceanic ignorance of all things worth knowing.

“Ah, yes,” the son used to say, “but if you had not had within yourself all the right feelings—only lacking the flash to bring them out—you would not have seen how wonderful she was. You would not have understood at all, but just passed on, and nothing would have happened.”

And the father, smiling in reverie, and stroking his great beard, would answer: “I don’t see that that follows. I remember what I was like quite vividly, and really there was nothing in me to explain the thing at all. I was a young blood about town, positively nothing more. No, Emanuel, we may say what we like, but there are things supernatural—that is, beyond what we can see, and are prepared for, in nature. It was as unaccountable as magic, the effect your mother produced upon me from the beginning. At the end of a few hours, when it was time for me to take my leave, and I turned—there was a gulf in front of me, cutting me off from where I had been before I came to her, that very day. It was so wide, it seemed that I could barely see across it.”

To any listener but Emanuel such language must have been extravagant. To him there were no words for overpraise of his mother. It was not alone that he had never seen her in anger or even vexation; that he had never known her to be in error in any judgment, or suspected in her an uncharitable or unkindly thought. These were mere negations, and the memory of her was full of positive influences, all wise and pure and lofty. Very early in life, when he began to look about the world he found himself in, he learned to marvel that there were no other such women anywhere to be seen. She had been so perfect, with seemingly no effort to herself! Why should other women not even try?

Emanuel had been born some ten years after the marriage of his parents, and they thus came into his baby consciousness as persons of middle age, in appearance and its suggested authority at least, by comparison with the parents of other children he saw about him. Nowhere else, however, either then or in later years, did he see another home so filled from center to circumference with love, and tender gentleness of eye and word and deed. The perception that this environment was unique colored all his boyhood. It became a habit with him to set in contrast his own charmed existence against the unconsidered and uneven experiences of other children, and to ponder the meaning of the difference. As he grew up, the importance of this question expanded in his mind and took possession of it. He was consumed with the longing to make some effective protest against the peevish folly with which humanity mismanaged its brief innings of life. From the cradle to the grave the race swarmed stupidly along, elbowing and jostling in an aimless bustle, hot and ill-tempered through exertions which had no purpose; trampling down all weaker than themselves and cursing those who, in turn, had the strength to push them under; coming wearily at the end to the gate and the outer darkness of extinction, a futile and disappointed mob—having seen nothing, comprehended nothing, profited nothing.

The progress of a generation across the span of life might be made so serene and well-ordered and fruitful an affair! What else had man to concern himself about than this one thing—that “peace on earth, good will to men,” should rule in his time? And how was it that this alone, of all possible problems, received from him no attention at all?

The impulse toward a mission was discernible in the lad; it altogether dominated the young man. His parents, regarding him lovingly and yet with wise inquiry, were fascinated by what they saw. A sense of lofty responsibility in their trusteeship for this beneficent new force formed a fresh bond between them, which grew to absorb within itself all their other ties. They came to regard themselves in no other light than as the parents of Emanuel. To preserve him from vitiating and stunting suggestions; richly to nourish, yet with an anxious avoidance of surfeit, both the soul and the mind within him; to give him strength and means and single-hearted courage adequate to the task he yearned to undertake—they asked nothing better of life than this.

After Oxford, he went abroad for a couple of years, having as a companion a young Fellow of Swithin’s, a trifle older than himself, who shared his moral attitude if not his passionate aspirations. He saw many parts of the world, and scrutinized closely in each the working of those portions of the social mechanism which interested him. Returning with a mass of notes and a mind packed with impressions and theories, he set to work to write a big book. At the end of a year he produced instead a small volume, dealing with one little phase of the huge, complex theme he had at heart. It was a treatise on the relations between parents and children, and it received very favorable reviews indeed. University men felt that it was what they had had the foresight to expect from this serious and high-minded young fellow, who was lucky enough to have the means and leisure for ethical essay-writing. Evidently he was going in for that sort of thing, and they noted with approbation that he had been at great pains with his style. Much to Emanuel’s surprise, only some three hundred copies of the work were sold; upon reflection, he saw that it was no part of his plan to sell books, and he forthwith distributed the remainder of the edition, and another edition as well, among the libraries of the Three Kingdoms. Within the next three years two other brochures went through much the same experiences. They treated respectively of primary education and of public amusements. Again the reviews were extremely cordial; again the men who had always predicted that Torr would do something regarded their prophetic intuition with refreshed complacency; again Emanuel drew considerable checks in favor of his publisher. What had been hinted at rather vaguely heretofore was now, however, announced with confidence in “literary” columns: these small volumes were merely chapters of a vast and comprehensive work to which the author had dedicated his life—the laborious exposition of a whole new philosophy of existence, to be as complete in its way as Herbert Spencer’s noble survey of mankind.

Not long after came the death of Emanuel’s mother—an unlooked-for event which altered everything in the world to the bereaved couple left behind. They went away together in the following month, with a plan of a prolonged tour in the Orient, but came back to England after a few weeks’ absence, having found their proposed distraction intolerable. Lord Julius promptly invented for his own relief the device of taking over upon himself the drudgery of caring for his millions, which heretofore had been divided among a banker, a broker, a solicitor and two secretaries. Emanuel saw his way less directly, but at last he found the will to begin a tentative experiment with some of his theories of life on a Somersetshire farm which his father gave him. The work speedily engrossed him, and expanded under his hands. He became conscious of growth within himself as well. The conviction that life is a thing not to be written about, but to be lived, formulated itself in his mind, and he elaborated this new view in an argument which persuaded his father. The Somersetshire estates of the family, which had been bought by Lord Julius in 1859, when the duke and his son Porlock joined to set aside the entail, were placed now unreservedly at Emanuel’s disposal. What he did with them is to be seen later on.

At the moment, it was of the first importance that he should decide for himself the great question of celibacy v. marriage. The far-reaching projects which possessed his brain would, beyond doubt, be multiplied infinitely in value if precisely the right woman were brought in to share his enthusiasm and devotion. It was no whit less clear that they would dwindle into failure and collapse under the blight of the wrong woman. The dimensions of the risk so impressed him, as he studied them, that for more than two years he believed himself to be irrevocably committed to the cold middle course of bachelorhood.

Then, by a remarkable stroke of good fortune, he met, fell in love with and married the sister of Lord Rosbrin, a young Irish peer whom he had known at Oxford. No one has ever doubted, he least of all, that she was the right woman.

He wrote no more books, in the years following this event, but gradually he became the cause of writing in others. A review article upon the character and aims of his experiment in Somersetshire, written in an appreciative spirit by an economist of position, attracted so much attention that the intrusion of curious strangers and inquisitive reporters threatened to be a nuisance. After this, his name was always mentioned as that of an authority, when sociological problems were discussed. There was even a certain flurry of inquiry for his books, though this did not turn out to have warranted the printing of the new popular edition. Sundry precepts in them became, however, the stock phrases of leader-writers. People of culture grew convinced that they were familiar with his works, and only a few months before the period at which we meet him, his university had conferred upon him an honorary D.C.L., which gratified him more deeply than any other recognition his labors and attainments had ever received.