Chapter 5

The railway—not that of the quickset hedges, but the Great Western, on to which I changed after a tramp across Dartmoor—took me to pay a pious visit to my old school: a visit which I never pay without thinking— especially in the chapel where we used to sing 'Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing' on the evening before holidays—of a passage in Izaak Walton'sLife of Sir Henry Wotton:—

"He yearly went also to Oxford. But the summer before his death he changed that for a journey to Winchester College, to which school he was first removed from Bocton. And as he returned from Winchester towards Eton College, said to a friend, his companion in that journey, 'How useful was that advice of a holy monk who persuaded his friend to perform his customary devotions in a constant place, because in that place we usually meet with those very thoughts which possessed us at our last being there! And I find it thus far experimentally true that at my now being in that school, and seeing the very place where I sat when I was a boy, occasioned me to remember those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me: sweet thoughts indeed, that promised my growing years numerous pleasures without mixtures of cares: and those to be enjoyed when time—which I therefore thought slow-paced—had changed my youth into manhood. But age and experience have taught me that those were but empty hopes: for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell, 'Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.' Nevertheless, I saw there a succession of boys using the same recreations and, questionless, possessed with the same thoughts that then possessed me. Thus one generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recreations, hopes, fears, and death.'"

But my visit on this occasion was filled with thought less of myself than of a poet I had known in that chapel, those cloisters, that green close; not intimately enough to call him friend, yet so intimately that his lately-departed shade still haunted the place for me—a small boy whom he had once, for a day or two, treated with splendid kindness and thereafter (I dare say) had forgotten.

Thomas Edward Brown was born on May 5th, 1830, at Douglas, in the Isle of Man, where his father held the living of St. Matthew's. Sixty-five years later he wrote his last verses to aid a fund raised for a new St. Matthew's Church, and characteristically had to excuse himself in a letter penetrated with affection for the old plain edifice and its memories.

"I was baptised there; almost all whom I loved and revered were associated with its history… 'The only church in Douglas where the poor go'—I dare say that is literally true. But I believe it will continue to be so.… I postulate the continuity.…"

I quote these words (and so leave them for a while) with a purpose, aware how trivial they may seem to the reader. But to those who had the privilege of knowing Brown that cannot be trivial which they feel to be characteristic and in some degree explicative of the man; and with this 'I postulate the continuity' we touch accurately and simply for once a note which sang in many chords of the most vocal, not to say orchestral, nature it has ever been my lot to meet.

Let me record, and have done with, the few necessary incidents of what was by choice avita fallensand "curiously devoid of incident." The boy was but two years old when the family removed to Kirk Braddan Vicarage, near Douglas; the sixth of ten children of a witty and sensible Scots mother and a father whose nobly humble idiosyncrasies continued in his son and are worthy to live longer in his description of them:—

"To think of aPazonrespecting men's vices even; not as vices, God forbid! but as parts ofthem, very likely all but inseparable from them; at any rate,theirs!Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not rebuking. My father would have considered he was 'taking a liberty' if he had confronted the sinner with his sin. Doubtless he carried this too far. But don't suppose for a moment that the 'weak brethren' thought he was conniving at their weakness. Not they: they saw the delicacy of his conduct. You don't think, do you, that these poor souls are incapable of appreciating delicacy? God only knows how far down into their depths of misery the sweetness of that delicacy descends.… He loved sincerity, truth and modesty. It seemed as if he felt that, with these virtues, the others could not fail to be present."

Add to this that the Vicar of Kirk Braddan, though of no University, was a scholar in grain; was, for example, so fastidious about composition that he would make his son read some fragment of an English classic to him before answering an invitation! "To my father style was like the instinct of personal cleanliness." Again we touch notes which echoed through the life of his son—who worshipped continuity.

From a course of tuition divided between his father and the parish schoolmaster, Brown went, at fifteen or over, to King William's College, and became its show scholar; thence, by the efforts of well-meaning friends (but at the cost of much subsequent pain), to Christ Church, Oxford, as a servitor. He won his double first; but he has left on record an account of a servitor's position at Christ Church in the early fifties, and to Brown the spiritual humiliation can have been little less than one long dragging anguish. He had, of course, his intervals of high spirits; but (says Mr. Irwin, his friend and biographer) "there is no doubt he did not exaggerate what the position was to him. I have heard him refer to it over and over again with a dispassionate bitterness there was no mistaking." Dean Gaisford absolutely refused to nominate him, after his two first classes, to a fellowship, though all the resident dons wished it. "A servitor never has been elected student—ergo, he never shall be." Brown admired Gaisford, and always spoke kindly of him "in all his dealings with me." Yet the night after he won his double first was "one of the most intensely miserable I was ever called to endure." Relief, and of the right kind, came with his election as Fellow of Oriel in April, 1854. In those days an Oriel Fellowship still kept and conveyed its peculiar distinction, and the brilliant young scholar had at length the ball at his feet.

"This is none of your empty honours," he wrote to his mother; "it gives me an income of about £300 per annum as long as I choose to reside at Oxford, and about £220 in cash if I reside elsewhere. In addition to this it puts me in a highly commanding position for pupils, so that on the whole I have every reason to expect that (except perhaps the first year) I shall make between £500 and £600 altogether per annum. So you see, my dear mother, that your prayers have not been unanswered, and that God will bless the generation of those who humbly strive to serve Him. . . I have not omitted to remark that the election took place on April 21st, the anniversary of your birth and marriage."

How did he use his opportunity? "He never took kindly to the life of an Oxford fellow," thought the late Dr. Fowler (an old schoolfellow of Brown's, afterwards President of Corpus and Vice-Chancellor of the University). Mr. Irwin quotes another old friend, Archdeacon Moore, to much the same effect. Their explanations lack something of definiteness. After a few terms of private pupils Brown returned to the Island, and there accepted the office of Vice-principal of his old school. We can only be sure that his reasons were honourable, and sufficed for him; we may include among them, if we choose, thatnostalgiawhich haunted him all his days, until fate finally granted his wish and sent him back to his beloved Argos "for good."

In the following year (1857) he married his cousin, Miss Stowell, daughter of Dr. Stowell, of Ramsay; and soon after left King William's College to become 'by some strange mischance' Head Master of the Crypt School, Gloucester. Of this "Gloucester episode," as he called it, nothing needs to be recorded except that he hated the whole business and, incidentally, that one of his pupils was Mr. W. E. Henley—destined to gather into hisNational Observer, many years later, many blooms of Brown's last and not least memorable efflorescence in poesy.

From Gloucester he was summoned, on a fortunate day, by Mr. Percival (now Bishop of Hereford), who had recently been appointed to Clifton College, then a struggling new foundation, soon to be lifted by him into the ranks of the great Public Schools. Mr. Percival wanted a man to take the Modern Side; and, as fate orders these things, consulted the friend reserved by fate to be his own successor at Clifton—Mr. Wilson (now Canon of Worcester). Mr. Wilson was an old King William's boy; knew Brown, and named him.

"Mr. Wilson having told me about him," writes the bishop, "I made an appointment to see him in Oxford, and there, as chance would have it, I met him standing at the corner of St. Mary's Entry, in a somewhat Johnsonian attitude, four-square, his hands deep in his pockets to keep himself still, and looking decidedlyvolcanic. We very soon came to terms, and I left him there under promise to come to Clifton as my colleague at the beginning of the following Term; and, needless to say, St. Mary's Entry has had an additional interest to me ever since. Sometimes I have wondered, and it would be worth a good deal to know, what thoughts were crossing through that richly-furnished, teeming brain as he stood there by St. Mary's Church, with Oriel College in front of him, thoughts of his own struggles and triumphs, and of all the great souls that had passed to and fro over the pavement around him; and all set in the lurid background of the undergraduate life to which he had been condemned as a servitor at Christ Church."

Was he happy in his many years' work at Clifton? On the whole, and with some reservation, we may say 'yes'—'yes,' although in the end he escaped from it gladly and enjoyed his escape. One side of him, no doubt, loathed formality and routine; he was, as he often proclaimed himself, a nature-loving, somewhat intractable Celt; and if one may hint at a fault in him, it was that now and then he soontired. A man so spendthrift of emotion is bound at times to knock on the bottom of his emotional coffers; and no doubt he was trueto a moodwhen he wrote—

"I'm here at Clifton, grinding at the millMy feet for thrice nine barren years have trod,But there are rocks and waves at Scarlett still,And gorse runs riot in Glen Chass—thank God!"Alert, I seek exactitude of rule,I step and square my shoulders with the squad,But there are blaeberries on old Barrule,And Langness has its heather still—thank God!"

—With the rest of the rebellious stanzas. We may go farther and allow that he played with the mood until he sometimes forgot on which side lay seriousness and on which side humour. Still itwasa mood; and it was Brown, after all, who wrote 'Planting':—

"Who would be planted chooseth not the soilOr here or there,Or loam or peat,Wherein he best may growAnd bring forth guerdon of the planter's toil—The lily is most fair,But says not' I will only blowUpon a southern land'; the cedar makes no coilWhat rock shall oweThe springs that wash his feet;The crocus cannot arbitrate the foilThat for his purple radiance is most meet—Lord, even soI ask one prayer,The which if it be granted,It skills not whereThou plantest me, only I would be planted."

"You don't care for school-work," he writes to an Old Cliftonian. … "I demur to your statement that when you take up schoolmastering your leisure for this kind of thing will be practically gone. Not at all. If you have the root of the matter in you the school-work will insist upon this kind of thing as a relief. My plan always was to recognise two lives as necessary—the one the outer Kapelistic life of drudgery, the other the inner and cherished life of the spirit. It is true that the one has a tendency to kill the other, but it must not, and you must see that it does not.… The pedagogic is needful for bread and butter, also for a certain form of joy; of the inner life you know what I think."

These are wise words, and I believe they represent Brown more truly than utterances which only seem more genuine because less deliberate. He was as a house master excellent, with an excellence not achievable by men whose hearts are removed from their work: he awoke and enjoyed fervent friendships and the enthusiastic admiration of many youngsters; he must have known of these enthusiasms, and was not the man to condemn them; he had the abiding assurance of assisting in a kind of success which he certainly respected. He longed for the day of emancipation, to return to his Island; he was impatient; but I must decline to believe he was unhappy.

Indeed, his presence sufficiently denied it. How shall I describe him? A sturdy, thick-set figure, inclining to rotundity, yet athletic; a face extraordinarily mobile; bushy, grey eyebrows; eyes at once deeply and radiantly human, yet holding the primitive faun in their coverts; a broad mouth made for broad, natural laughter, hearty without lewdness. "There are nice Rabelaisians, and there are nasty; but the latter are not Rabelaisians. I have an idea," he claimed, "that my judgment within this area is infallible." And it was. All honest laughter he welcomed as a Godlike function.

"God sits upon His hill,And sees the shadows fly;And if He laughs at fools, why should He not?"

And for that matter, why should not we? Though at this point his fine manners intervened, correcting, counselling moderation. "I am certain God made fools for us to enjoy, but there must bean economy of joyin the presence of a fool; you must not betray your enjoyment." Imagine all this overlaid with a certain portliness of bearing, suggestive of the high-and-dry Oxford scholar. Add something of the parsonic (he was ordained deacon before leaving Oxford, but did not proceed to priest's orders till near the end of his time at Clifton); add a simple natural piety which purged the parsonic of all "churchiness."

"This silence and solitude are to me absolute food," he writes from the Clifton College Library on the morning of Christmas Day, 1875, "especially after all the row and worry at the end of Term.… Where are the men and women? Well, now look here, you'll not mention it again. They're all in church. See how good God is! See how He has placed these leitourgic traps in which people, especially disagreeable people, get caught—and lo! the universe for me!!! me— me.…"

I have mentioned his fine manners, and with a certain right, since it once fell to me—a blundering innocent in the hands of fate—to put them to severest proof. A candidate for a scholarship at Clifton—awkward, and abominably conscious of it, and sensitive—I had been billeted on Brown's hospitality without his knowledge. The mistake (I cannot tell who was responsible) could not be covered out of sight; it was past all aid of kindly dissimulation by the time Brown returned to the house to find the unwelcome guest bathing in shame upon his doorstep. Can I say more than that he took me into the family circle—by no means an expansive one, or accustomed, as some are, to open gleefully to intruders—and for the inside of a week treated me with a consideration so quiet and pleasant, so easy yet attentive, that his dearest friend or most distinguished visitor could not have demanded more? A boy notes these things, and remembers. … "If I lose my manners," Mr. Irwin quotes him as saying once over some trivial forgetfulness, "what is to become of me?" He was shy, too, like the most of his countrymen—"jus' the shy "—but with a proud reserve as far removed as possible from sham humility—being all too sensible and far too little of a fool to blink his own eminence of mind, though willing on all right occasions to forget it. "Once," records Mr. Irwin, "when I remarked on the omission of his name in an article on 'Minor Poets' in one of the magazines, he said, with a smile, 'Perhaps I am among the major!'" That smile had just sufficient irony—no more.

To this we may add a passion for music and a passion for external nature— external to the most of us, but so closely knit with his own that to be present at his ecstasies was like assisting a high priest of elemental mysteries reserved for him and beyond his power to impart. And yet we are beating about the bush and missing the essential man, for he was imprehensible—"Volcanic," the Bishop of Hereford calls him, and must go to the Bay of Naples to fetch home a simile:

"We can find plenty of beauty in the familiar northern scenes; but we miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic outbursts, the tropic glow, and all the surprising manifold and tender and sweet-scented outpourings of soil and sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating underneath all the time."

Natures more masterfully commanding I have known: never one more remarkable. In the mere possession of him, rather than in his direct influence, all Cliftonians felt themselves rich. We were at least as proud of him as Etonians of the author of "Ionica." But no comparisons will serve. Falstaffian—with a bent of homely piety; Johnsonian—with a fiery Celtic heat and a passionate adoration of nature: all such epithets fail as soon as they are uttered. The man was at once absolute and Protean: entirely sincere, and yet a different being to each separate friend. "There was no getting to the end of Brown."

I have said that we—those of us, at any rate, who were not of Brown's House—were conscious of a rich and honourable possession in him, rather than of an active influence. Yet that influence must not be underrated. Clifton, as I first knew it, was already a great school, although less than twenty years old. But, to a new-comer, even more impressive than its success among schools, or its aspirations, was a firmness of tradition which (I dare to say) would have been remarkable in a foundation of five times its age. It had already its type of boy; and having discovered it and how to produce it, fell something short of tolerance towards other types. For the very reason which allows me with decency to call the type an admirable one, I may be excused for adding that the tradition demanded some patience of those who could not easily manage to conform with it. But there the tradition stood, permanently rooted in a school not twenty years old. Is it fanciful to hold that Brown's passion for 'continuity' had much to do with planting and confirming it? Mr. Irwin quotes for us a passage from one of his sermons to the school: "Suffer no chasm to interrupt this glorious tradition.… Continuous life… that is what we want—to feel the pulses of hearts that are now dust." Did this passage occur, I wonder, in the sermon of which I rather remember a fierce, hopeless, human protest against 'change and decay'?—the voice ringing down on each plea, "What do the change-and-decay people say tothat?"

"I postulate the continuity." Vain postulate it often seems, yet of all life Brown demanded it. Hear him as he speaks of his wife's death in a letter to a friend:—

"My dear fellow-sufferer, what is it after all? Why this sinking of the heart, this fainting, sorrowing of the spirit? There is no separation: life is continuous. All that was stable and good, good and therefore stable, in our union with the loved one, is unquestionably permanent, will endure for ever. It cannot be otherwise.… When love has done its full work, has wrought soul into soul so that every fibre has become part of the common life—quis separabit?Can you conceive yourself as existing at all withouther?No, you can't; well, then, it follows that you don't, and never will."

I believe it to have been this passion for continuity that bound and kept him so absolute a Manxman, drawing his heart so persistently back to the Island that there were times (one may almost fancy) when the prospect of living his life out to the end elsewhere seemed to him a treachery to his parents' dust. I believe this same passion drew him—master as he was of varied and vocal English—to clothe the bulk of his poetry in the Manx dialect, and thereby to miss his mark with the public, which inevitably mistook him for a rustic singer, a man of the people, imperfectly educated.

"I would not be forgotten in this land."—

This line of another true poet of curiously similar temperament[1] has haunted me through the reading of Brown's published letters. But Brown's was no merely selfish craving for continuity—to be remembered. By a fallacy of thought, perhaps, but by a very noble one, he transferred the ambition to those for whom he laboured. His own terror that Time might obliterate the moment:

"And all this personal dream be fled,"

Became for his countrymen a very spring of helpfulness.Antiquam exquirite matrem—he would do that which they, in poverty and the stress of earning daily bread, were careless to do—would explore for them the ancient springs of faith and custom.

"Dear countrymen, whate'er is left to usOf ancient heritage—Of manners, speech, of humours, polity,The limited horizon of our stage—Old love, hope, fear,All this I fain would fix upon the page;That so the coming age,Lost in the empire's mass,Yet haply longing for their fathers, hereMay see, as in a glass,What they held dear—May say, ''Twas thus and thusThey lived'; and as the time-flood onward rollsSecure an anchor for their Keltic souls."

This was his task, and the public of course set him down for a rustic. "What ought I to do?" he demands. "Shall I put on my next title-page, 'Late Fellow of Oriel, etc.'? or am I always to abide under this ironic cloak of rusticity?" To be sure, on consideration (if the public ever found time to consider), the language and feeling of the poems were penetrated with scholarship. He entered his countrymen's hearts; but he also could, and did, stand outside and observe them with affectionate, comprehending humour. Scholarship saved him, too—not always, but as a rule—from that emotional excess to which he knew himself most dangerously prone. He assigns it confidently to his Manx blood; but his mother was Scottish by descent, and from my experience of what the Lowland Scot can do in the way of pathos when he lets himself go, I take leave to doubt that the Manxman was wholly to blame. There can, however, be no doubt that the author of "The Doctor," of "Catherine Kinrade," of "Mater Dolorosa," described himself accurately as a "born sobber," or that an acquired self-restraint saved him from a form of intemperance by which of late our literature has been somewhat too copiously afflicted.

To scholarship, too, imposed upon and penetrating a taste naturally catholic, we owe the rare flavour of the many literary judgments scattered about his letters. They have a taste of native earth, beautifully rarefied: to change the metaphor, they illuminate the page with a kind of lambent common sense. For a few examples:—

"I have also read a causerie on Virgil and one on Theocritus. So many Frenchlittérateursgive me the idea that they don't go nearer the Greek authors than the Latin translations.… Sainte Beuve [Nouveaux Lundis, vii. 1—52, on 'The Greek Anthology'] is an enthusiastic champion for our side, but, oddly enough, he never strikes me as knowing much about the matter!""Your Latin verses [translating Cowley] I greatly enjoy. The dear old Abraham goes straight off into your beautiful lines. Of course he has not a scrap of modernimpedimenta. You go through the customs at the frontier with a whistle and a smile. You havenothing to declare. The blessed old man by your side is himself a Roman to begin with, and you pass together as cheerfully as possible.…""I have also been reading Karl Elze'sEssays on Shakespeare. He is not bad, but don't you resent the imperturbable confidence of men who, after attributing a play of Shakespeare's to two authors, proceed to suggest a third, urged thereto by some fatuous and self-sought exigency?""Did you ever try to write a Burns song? I mean the equivalent in ordinary English of his Scotch. Can it be done? A Yorkshireman— could he do it? A Lancashire man (Waugh)? I hardly think so. The Ayrshire dialect has aSchwungand a confidence that no-English county can pretend to. Our dialects are apologetic things, half-ashamed, half-insolent. Burns has no doubts, and for his audience unhesitatingly demands the universe.…""There is an ethos in Fitzgerald's letters which is so exquisitely idyllic as to be almost heavenly. He takes you with him, exactly accommodating his pace to yours, walks through meadows so tranquil, and yet abounding in the most delicate surprises. And these surprises seem so familiar, just as if they had originated with yourself. What delicious blending! What a perfect interweft of thought and diction! What asweetcompanion!"

Lastly, let me quote a passage in which his thoughts return to Clifton, where it had been suggested that Greek should be omitted from the ordinary form-routine and taught in "sets," or separate classes:—

"This is disturbing about Greek, 'set' Greek. Yes, you would fill your school to overflowing, of course you would, so long as other places did not abandon the old lines. But it would be detestable treachery to the cause of education, of humanity. To me thelearningof any blessed thing is a matter of little moment. Greek is not learned by nineteen-twentieths of our Public School boys. But it is a baptism into a cult, a faith, not more irrational than other faiths or cults; the baptism of a regeneration which releases us from I know not what original sin. And if a man does not see that, he is a fool, such a fool that I shouldn't wonder if he gravely asked me to explain what I meant by original sin in such a connection.…"

So his thoughts reverted to the school he had left in 1892. In October, 1897, he returned to it on a visit. He was the guest of one of the house masters, Mr. Tait, and on Friday evening, October 29th, gave an address to the boys of the house. He had spoken for some minutes with brightness and vigour, when his voice grew thick and he was seen to stagger. He died in less than two hours.

His letters have been collected and piously given to the world by Mr. Irwin, one of his closest friends. By far the greatest number of them belong to those last five years in the Island—the happiest, perhaps, of his life, certainly the happiest temperamentally. "Never the time and the place…" but at least Brown was more fortunate than most men. He realised his dream, and it did not disappoint him. He could not carry off his friends to share it (and it belongs to criticism of these volumes to say that he was exceptionally happy in his friends), but he could return and visit them or stay at home and write to them concerning the realisation, and be sure they understood. Therefore, although we desire more letters of the Clifton period—although twenty years are omitted, left blank to us—those that survive confirm a fame which, although never wide, was always unquestioned within its range. There could be no possibility of doubt concerning Brown. He was absolute. He lived a fierce, shy, spiritual life; a wise man, keeping the child in his heart: he loved much and desired permanence in the love of his kind. "Diuturnity," says his great seventeenth-century namesake, "is a dream and folly of expectation. There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality." And yet,prosit amâsse!

The railway took me on to Oxford—

"Like faithful hound returningFor old sake's sake to each loved trackWith heart and memory burning."

"I well remember," writes Mrs. Green of her husband, the late John Richard Green, "the passionate enthusiasm with which he watched from the train for the first sight of the Oxford towers against the sky:" and although our enthusiasm nowadays has to feed on a far tamer view than that which saluted our forefathers when the stage-coach topped the rise of Shotover and its passengers beheld the city spread at their feet, yet what faithful son of Oxford can see her towers rise above the water-meadows and re-greet them without a thrill?

In the year 1688, and in a book entitledThe Guardian's Instruction, a Mr. Stephen Penton gave the world a pleasing and lifelike little narrative—superior, in my opinion, to anything inVerdant Green— telling us how a reluctant father was persuaded to send his son to Oxford; what doubts, misgivings, hesitations he had, and how they were overcome. I take the story to be fictitious. It is written in the first person, professedly by the hesitating parent: but the parent can hardly have been Penton, for the story will not square with what we know of his life. The actual Penton was born, it seems, in 1640, and educated at Winchester and New College; proceeded to his fellowship, resided from 1659 to 1670, and was Principal of St. Edmund's Hall from 1675 to 1683. He appears to have been chaplain to the Earl of Aylesbury, and, according to Antony à Wood, possessed a "rambling head." He died in 1706.

The writer inThe Guardian's Instructionis portrayed for us—or is allowed to portray himself—rather as an honest country squire, who had himself spent a year or so of his youth at the University, but had withdrawn when Oxford was invaded by the Court and the trouble between King Charles and Parliament came to a head: and "God's grace, the Good example of my parents, and a natural love of virtue secured me so far as to leave Oxford, though not much more learned, yet not much worse than I came thither." A chill testimonial! In short, the old squire (as I will take leave to call him) nursed a somewhat crotchety detestation of the place, insomuch "that when I came to have children, I did almostswearthem in their childhood never to be friends with Oxford."

He tried his eldest son with a course of foreign travel as a substitute for University training; but this turned out a failure, and he had the good sense to acknowledge his mistake. So for his second boy he cast about to find a profession; "but what course to take I was at a loss: Cambridge was so far off, I could not have an eye upon him; Oxford I was angry with."

In this fix he consulted with a neighbour, "an old grave learned divine," and rigid Churchman, who confessed that many of the charges against Oxford were well grounded, but averred that the place was mending. The truth was, the University had been loyal to the monarchy all through the Commonwealth times; and when Oliver Cromwell was dead, and Richard dismounted, its members perceived, through the maze of changes and intrigues, that in a little time the heart of the nation would revert to the government which twenty years before it had hated. And their impatient hopes of this "made the scholars talk aloud, drink healths, and curse Meroz in the very streets; insomuch that when the King came in, they were not only like them that dream, but like them who are out of their wits, mad, stark, staring mad." This unholy 'rag' (to modernise the old gentleman's language) continued for a twelvemonth: that is to say, until the Vice-Chancellor—holding that the demonstration, like Miss Mary Bennet's pianoforte playing inPride and Prejudice, had delighted the company long enough—put his foot down. And from that time the University became sober, modest, and studious as perhaps any in Europe. The old gentleman wound up with some practical advice, and a promise to furnish the squire with a letter of recommendation to one of the best tutors in Oxford.

Thus armed, the squire (though still with misgivings) was not long in getting on horseback with his wife, his daughters, and his young hopeful, and riding off to Oxford, where at first it seemed that his worst suspicions would be confirmed; "for at ten o'clock in the inn, there arose such a roaring and singing that my hair stood on end, and my former prejudices were so heightened that I resolved to lose the journey and carry back my son again, presuming that no noise in Oxford could be made butscholarsmust do it,"—a hoary misconception still cherished, or until recently, by the Metropolitan Police and the Oxford City Bench. In this instance a proctor intervened, and quelled the disturbance by sending 'two young pert townsmen' to prison; "and quickly came to my chamber, and perceiving my boy designed for a gown, told me that it was for the preservation of such fine youths as he that the proctors made so bold with gentlemen's lodgings." The squire had some talk with this dignitary, who was a man of presence and suitable address, and of sufficient independence to deny—not for the first time in history—that dons were overpaid.

Next morning the whole family trooped off to call upon the tutor whom their old neighbour had recommended. Oddly enough, the tutor seemed by no means overwhelmed by the honour. "I thought to have found him mightily pleased with the opinion we had of his conduct, and the credit of having a gentleman's son under his charge, and the father with cap in hand. Instead of all this he talked at a rate as if the gentry wereobligedto tutors more than tutors to them." The tutor, in short, was decidedly tart in his admonitions to this honest family—he did not forget, either, to assure them that (generally) a college tutor was worse paid than a dancing-master. Here is a specimen of his advice—sound and practical enough in its way:—

"I understand by one of your daughters that you have brought him up afine paddto keep here for his health's sake. Now I will tell you the use of an horse in Oxford, and then do as you think fit. The horse must be kept at anale-houseor aninn, and he must have leave to go onceevery dayto see him eat oats, because the master's eye makes him fat; and it will not be genteel to go often to an house and spend nothing; and then there may be some danger of the horse growingrestyif he be not used often, so you must give him leave to go toAbingdononce every week, to look out of the tavern window and see the maids sell turnips; and in one month or two come home with a surfeit of poisoned wine, and saveany farther troubleby dying, and then you will be troubled to send for your horseagain.…"

The humour of college tutors has not greatly altered in two hundred years. I have known one or two capable of the sardonic touch in those concluding words. But conceive its effect upon the squire's lady and daughters! No: you need not trouble to do so, for the squire describes it: "When the tutor was gone out of the room, I asked how they liked the person and his converse. My boy clung about his mother and cry'd to go home again, and she had no more wit than to be of the same mind; she thought him too weakly to undergo so much hardship as she foresaw was to be expected. My daughter, who (instead of catechism andLady's Calling) had been used to read nothing but speeches in romances, and hearing nothing ofLoveandHonourin all the talk, fell into downrightscoldingat him; call'd him themerestscholar; and if this were yourOxfordbreeding, they had rather he should go toConstantinopleto learn manners! But I, who was older and understood the language, call'd them all great fools.…"

On the tutor's return they begged to have his company at dinner, at their inn: but he declined, kept the young man to dine with him, and next day invited the family to luncheon. They accepted, fully expecting (after the austerity of his discourse) to be starved: "and the girles drank chocolette at no rate in the morning, for fear of theworst." But they were by no means starved. "It was very pleasant," the squire confesses, "to see, when we came, theconstrain'dartifice of an unaccustomed complement." There were silver tankards 'heaped upon one another,' 'napkins some twenty years younger than the rest,' and glasses 'fit for aDutchmanat anEast-India Return.' The dinner was full enough for ten. "I was asham'd, but would not disoblige him, considering with myself that I should put this man to such a charge of forty shillings at least, to entertain me; when for all his honest care and pains he is to have but forty or fifty shillings a quarter; so that for one whole quarter he must doe the drudgery to my son for nothing." After dinner, our good squire strolled off to a public bowling-green, "that being the onely recreation I can affect." And "coming in, I saw half a score of the finest youths the sun, I think, ever shined upon. They walked to and fro, with their hands in their pockets, to see a match played by some scholars and some gentlemen fam'd for their skill. I gaped also and stared as a man in his way would doe; but a country ruff gentleman, being like tolose, did swear, at such a rate that my heart did grieve that those fine young men shouldhearit, and know there was such a thing as swearing in the kingdom. Coming to my lodging, I charged my son never to go to such publick places unless he resolved to quarrel with me."

And so, having settled the lad and fitted him up with good advice, the father, mother, and sisters returned home. But the squire, being summoned to Oxford shortly after to "sit inparliament" (presumably in the last Parliament held at Oxford, in March, 1681), took that opportunity to walk the streets and study the demeanour of the "scholars." And this experiment would seem to have finally satisfied him. "I walk'd the streets as late as most people, and never in ten days ever saw any scholar rude or disordered: so that as I grow old, and more engaged to speak thetruth, I do repent of theill-opinionI have had of that place, and hope to be farther obliged by a very goodaccountof my son."

Old Stephen Penton may have had a rambling head; but unless I have thumbed the bloom off his narrative in my attempt to summarise it, the reader will allow that he knew how to write. He gives us the whole scene in the fewest possible touches: he wastes no words in describing the personages in his small comedy—comic idyll I had rather call it, for after a fashion it reminds me of the immortal chatter between Gorgo and Praxinoë in the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus. There the picture is: the honest opinionated country squire; the acidulous tutor; the coltish son; the fond, foolish, fussing mother; the prinking young ladies with their curls and romantic notions; the colours of all as fresh as if laid on yesterday, the humour quite untarnished after two hundred years. And I wonder the more at the vivacity of this little sketch because, as many writers have pointed out, no one has yet built upon University life a novel of anything like first-class merit, and the conclusion has been drawn that the elements of profound human interest are wanting in that life. "Is this so?" asks the editor of Stephen Penton's reminiscences in a volume published by the Oxford Historical Society—

"In spite of the character given to Oxford of being a city of short memories and abruptly-ended friendships, in spite of the inchoative qualities of youths of eighteen or twenty, especially in respect to the 'ruling passion' so dear to novelists, yet surely in the three or four years spent at Oxford by an incredible company of young students 'fresh from public schools, and not yet tossed about and hardened in the storms of life'—some of them Penton's 'finest youths,' some obviously otherwise—there must be, one would think, abundance of romantic incident awaiting its Thackeray or Meredith. For how many have these years been the turning point of a life!…"

There at any rate is the fact:thenovel of University life has not been written yet, and perhaps never will be. I am not at all sure thatThe Adventures of Mr. Verdant Greendo not mark the nearest approach to it— save the mark! And I am not at all sure thatThe Adventures of Mr. Verdant Greencan be called a novel at all, while I am quite certain it cannot be called a novel of first-class merit.Tom Brown at Oxfordstill counts its admirers, and has, I hear, attained the dignity of translation into French; but Tom Brown, though robust enough, never seemed to get over his transplantation from Rugby—possibly because his author's heart remained at Rugby. 'Loss and Gain' is not a book for the many; and the many never did justice to Mr. Hermann Merivale's 'Faucit of Balliol' or Mr. St. John Tyrwhitt's 'Hugh Heron of Christ Church.' Neither of these two novels obtained the hearing it deserved—and 'Faucit of Balliol' was a really remarkable book: but neither of them aimed at giving a full picture of Oxford life. And the interest of Miss Broughton's 'Belinda' and Mr. Hardy's 'Jude the Obscure' lies outside the proctor's rounds. Yes (and humiliating as the confession may be), with all its crudities and absurdities,Verdant Greendoes mark the nearest approach yet made to a representative Oxford novel.

How comes this? Well, to begin with,Verdant Green, with all his faults, did contrive to be exceedingly youthful and high-spirited. And in the second place, with all its faults, it did convey some sense of what I may call the 'glamour' of Oxford. Now the University, on its part, being fed with a constant supply of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty, does contrive, with all its faults, to keep up a fair show of youth and high spirits; and even their worst enemies will admit that Oxford and Cambridge wear, in the eyes of their sons at any rate, a certain glamour. You may argue that glamour is glamour, an illusion which will wear off in time; an illusion, at all events, and to be treated as such by the wise author intent on getting at truth. To this I answer that, while it lasts, this glamour is just as much a fact asThe Timesnewspaper, or St. Paul's Cathedral, just as real a feature of Oxford as Balliol College, or the river, or the Vice-Chancellor's poker: and until you recognise it for a fact and a feature of the place, and allow for it, you have not the faintest prospect of realising Oxford. Each succeeding generation finds that glamour, or brings it; and each generation, as it passes, deems that its successor has either found or brought less of it. But the glamour is there all the while. In turning over a book the other day, written in 1870 by the Rev. Robert Stephen Hawker, I come on this passage:—

"When I recall my own undergraduate life of thirty years and upwards agone, I feel, notwithstanding modern vaunt, thelaudator temporis actiearnest within me yet, and strong. Nowadays, as it seems to me, there is but little originality of character in the still famous University; a dread of eccentric reputation appears to pervade College and Hall: every 'Oxford man,' to adopt the well-known name, is subdued into sameness within and without, controlled as it were into copyism and mediocrity by the smoothing-iron of the nineteenth century. Whereasinmy time and before it there were distinguished names, famous in every mouth for original achievements and 'deeds of daring-do.' There were giants in those days—men of varied renown— and they arose and won for themselves in strange fields of fame, record and place. Each became in his day a hero of the Iliad or Odyssey of Oxford life—a kind of Homeric man."

To which I am constrained to reply, "Mere stuff and nonsense!" Mr. Hawker—and more credit to him—carried away Homeric memories of his own seniors and contemporaries. But was it in nature that Mr. Hawker should discover Homeric proportions in the feats of men thirty years his juniors? How many of us, I ask, are under any flattering illusion about the performances of our juniors? We cling to the old fond falsehood that there were giants inourdays. We honestly believed they were giants; it would hurt us to abandon that belief. It does not hurt us in the least to close the magnifying-glass upon the feats of those who follow us. But this generation, too, will have its magnifying-glass. "There were giants in our days?" To be sure there were; and there are giants, too, in these, but others, not we, have the eyes to see them.

Say that the scales have fallen from our eyes. Very well, we must e'en put them on again if we would write a novel of University life. And, be pleased to note, it does not follow, because we see the place differently now, that we see it more truly. Also, it does not follow, because Oxford during the last twenty years has, to the eye of the visitor, altered very considerably, that the characteristics of Oxford have altered to anything like the same extent. Undoubtedly they have been modified by the relaxation and suspension of the laws forbidding Fellows to marry. Undoubtedly the brisk growth of red-brick houses along the north of the city, the domestic hearths, afternoon teas and perambulators, and all things covered by the opprobrious name of "Parks-system," have done something to efface the difference between Oxford and other towns. But on the whole I think they have done surprisingly little.

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