Atany given time a large number of poets may be found among the undergraduates at Oxford, and the younger dons. It is not easy to say what becomes of all these pious bards, who are a marked and peculiar people while they remain in residence. The undergraduate poet is a not uninteresting study. He wears his hair long, and divides it down the middle. His eye is wild and wandering, and his manner absent, especially when he is called on to translate a piece of an ancient author in lecture. He does not ‘read’ much, in the technical sense of the term, but consumes all the novels that come in his way, and all the minor poetry. His own verses the poet may be heard declaiming aloud, at unholy midnight hours, so that his neighbours have been known to break his windows with bottles, and then to throw in all that remained of the cold meats of a supper party, without interfering with the divineafflatus. When the college poet has composed a sonnet, ode, or what not, he sends it to the Editor of theNineteenth Century, and it returns to him after many days. At last it appears in print, inCollege Rhymes, a collection of mild verse, which is (or was) printed at regular or irregular intervals, and was never seen except in the rooms of contributors. The poet also speaks at the Union, where his sentiments are either revolutionary, or so wildly conservative that he looks on Magna Charta as the first step on the path that leads to England’s ruin. As a politician, the undergraduate poet knows no mean between Mr. Peter Taylor and King John. He has been known to found a Tory club, and shortly afterwards to swallow the formulæ of Mr. Bradlaugh.
The life of the poet is, not unnaturally, one long warfare with his dons. He cannot conform himself to pedantic rules, which demand his return to college before midnight. Though often the possessor of a sweet vein of clerical and Kebleian verse, the poet does not willingly attend chapel; for indeed, as he sits up all night, it is cruel to expect him to arise before noon. About the poet’s late habits a story is told, which seems authentic. A remarkable and famous contemporary singer was known to his fellow-undergraduates only by this circumstance, that his melodious voice was heard declaiming anapaests all through the ambrosial night. When the voice of the singer was lulled, three sharp taps were heard in the silence. This noise was produced by the bard’s Scotch friend and critic in knocking the ashes out of his pipe. These feasts of reason are almost incompatible with the early devotion which, strangely enough, Shelley found time and inclination to attend.
Now it is (or was) the belief of undergraduates that you might break the decalogue and the laws of man in every direction with safety and the approval of the dons, if you only went regularly to chapel. As the poet cannot do this (unless he is a ‘sleepless man’), his existence is a long struggle with the fellows and tutors of his college. The manners of poets vary, of course, with the tastes of succeeding generations. I have heard of two (Thyrsis and Corydon) ‘who lived in Oxford as if it were a large country-house.’
Of other singers, the latest of the heavenly quire, it is invidiously said that they build shrines to Blue China and other ceramic abominations of the Philistine, and worship the same in their rooms. Of this sort it is not the moment to speak. Time has not proved them. But the old poets of ten years ago lived a militant life; they rarely took good classes (though they competed industriously for the Newdigate, writing in the metre ofDolores), and it not uncommonly happened that they left Oxford without degrees. They were often very agreeable fellows, as long as one was in no way responsible for them; but it was almost impossible—human nature being what it is—that they should be much appreciated by tutors, proctors, and heads of houses. How could these worthy, learned, and often kind and courteous persons know when they were dealing with a lad of genius, and when they had to do with an affected and pretentious donkey?
These remarks are almost the necessary preface to a consideration of the existence of Shelley and Landor at Oxford—the Oxford of 1793–1810. Whatever the effects may be on Shelleyan commentators, it must be said that, to the donnish eye, Percy Bysshe Shelley was nothing more or less than the ordinary Oxford poet, of the quieter type. In Walter Savage Landor, authority recognised a noisier and rowdier specimen of the same class. People who have to do with hundreds of young men at a time are unavoidably compelled to generalise. No don, that was a don, could have seen Shelley or Landor as they are described to us without hastily classing them in the category of poets who would come to no good and do little credit to the college. Landor went up to Trinity College in 1793. It was the dreadful year of the Terror, when good Englishmen hated the cruel murderers of kings and queens. Landor was a good Englishman, of course, and he never forgave the French the public assassination of Marie Antoinette. But he must needs be a Jacobin, and wear his own unpowdered hair—the Poet thus declaring himself at once in the regular recognised fashion. ‘For a portion of the time he certainly read hard, but the results he kept to himself; for here, as at Rugby, he declined everything in the shape of competition.’ (Now competition is the essence of modern University study.) ‘Though I wrote better Latin verses than any undergraduate or graduate in the University,’ says Landor, ‘I could never be persuaded by my tutor or friends to contend for any prize whatever.’ The pleasantest and most profitable hours that Landor could remember at Oxford ‘were passed with Walter Birch in the Magdalen Walk, by the half-hidden Cherwell.’ Hours like these are indeed the pleasantest and most profitable that any of us pass at Oxford. The one duty which that University, by virtue of its very nature, has never neglected, is the assembling of young men together from all over England, and giving them three years of liberty of life, of leisure, and of discussion, in scenes which are classical and peaceful. For these hours, the most fruitful of our lives, we are grateful to Oxford, as long as friendship lives; that is, as long as life and memory remain with us. And, ‘if anything endure, if hope there be,’ our conscious existence in the after-world would ask for no better companions than those who walked with us by the Isis and the Cherwell.
Landor called himself ‘a Jacobin,’ though his own letters show that he was as far as the most insolent young ‘tuft’ from relishing doctrines of human equality. He had the reputation, however, of being not only a Jacobin, but ‘a mad Jacobin’; too mad for Southey, who was then young, and a Liberal. ‘Landor was obliged to leave the University for shooting at one of the Fellows through a window,’ is the account which Southey gave of Landor’s rustication. Now fellows often put up with a great deal of horse-play. There is scarcely a more touching story than that of the don who for the first time found himself ‘screwed up,’ and fastened within his own oak. ‘What am I to do?’ the victim asked his sympathising scout, who was on the other, the free side of the oak. ‘Well, sir, Mr. Muff, sir, when ’e’s screwed up ’e sends for the blacksmith,’ replied the servant. What a position for a man having authority, to be in the constant habit of sending for the blacksmith! Fellows have not very unfrequently been fired at with Roman candles, or bombarded with soda-water bottles full of gunpowder. One has also known sparrows shot from Balliol windows on the Martyrs’ Memorial of our illustration. In this case, too, the sportsman was a poet. But deliberately to pot at a fellow, ‘to go for him with a shot gun,’ as the repentant American said he would do in future, after his derringer missed fire, is certainly a strong measure. No college which pretended to maintain discipline could allow even a poet to shoot thus wildly. In truth, Landor’s offence has been exaggerated by Southey. It was nothing out of the common. The poet was giving ‘an after-dinner party’ in his rooms. The men were mostly from Christ Church; for Landor was intimate, he says, with only one undergraduate of his own college, Trinity. On the opposite side of the quadrangle a Tory and a butt, named Leeds, was entertaining persons whom the Jacobin Landor calls ‘servitors and other raff of every description.’ The guests at the rival wine-parties began to ‘row’ each other, Landor says, adding, ‘All the time I was only a spectator, for I should have blushed to have had any conversation with them, particularly out of a window. But my gun was lying on a table in the room, and I had in a back closet some little shot. I proposed, as they had closed the casements, and as the shutters were on the outside, to fire a volley. It was thought a good trick, and accordingly I went into my bedroom and fired.’ Mr. Leeds very superfluously complained to the President. Landor adopted the worst possible line of defence, and so the University and this poet parted company.
It seems to have been generally understood that Landor’s affair was a boyish escapade. A copious literature is engaged with the subject of Shelley’s expulsion. As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his delightful book, theLife of Shelley, that poet’s career at Oxford was a typical one. There are in every generation youths like him, in unworldliness, wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of course, in genius. The divine spark has not touched them, but they, like Shelley, are still of the band whom the world has not tamed. As Mr. Hogg’s book is out of print, and rare, it would be worth while, did space permit, to reproduce some of his wonderfully life-like and truthful accounts of Oxford as she was in 1810. The University has changed in many ways, and in most ways for the better. Perhaps that old, indolent, and careless Oxford was better adapted to the life of such an almost unexampled genius as Shelley. When his Eton friends asked him whether he still meant to be ‘the Atheist,’ that is, the rebel he had been at school, he said, ‘No; the college authorities were civil, and left him alone.’ Let us remember this when the learned Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. Shairp, calls Shelley ‘an Atheist.’ Mr. Hogg sometimes complains that undergraduates were left too much alone. But who could have safely advised or securely guided Shelley?
Undergraduates are now more closely looked after, as far as reading goes, than perhaps they like—certainly much more than Shelley would have liked. But when we turn from study to the conduct of life, is it not plain that noofficialinterference can be of real value? Friendship and confidence may, and often does, exist between tutors and pupils. There are tutors so happily gifted with sympathy, and with a kind of eternal youth of heart and intellect, that they become the friends of generation after generation of freshmen. This is fortunate; but who can wonder that middle-aged men, seeing the generations succeed and resemble each other, lose their powers of understanding, of directing, of aiding the young, who are thus cast at once on their own resources? One has occasionally heard clever men complain that they were neglected by their seniors, that their hearts and brains were full of perilous stuff, which no one helped them to unpack. And it is true that modern education, when it meets the impatience of youth, often produces an unhappy ferment in the minds of men. To put it shortly, clever students have to go through their age ofSturm und Drang, and they are sometimes disappointed when older people, their tutors, for example, do not help them to weather the storm. It is a tempest in which every one must steer for himself, after all; and Shelley ‘was borne darkly, fearfully afar,’ into unplumbed seas of thought and experience. When Mr. Hogg complains that his friend was too much left to himself to study and think as he pleased, let us remember that no one could have helped Shelley. He was better at Oxford without his old Dr. Lind, ‘with whom he used to curse GeorgeIII.after tea.’
In the Garden of Worcester College. By Richard Seeley
There are few chapters in literary history more fascinating than those which tell the story of Shelley at Oxford. We see him entering the hall of University College—a tall, shy stripling, bronzed with the September sun, with long elf-locks. He takes his seat by a stranger, and in a moment holds him spell-bound, while he talks of Plato, and Goethe, and Alfieri, of Italian poetry, and Greek philosophy. Mr. Hogg draws a curious sketch of Shelley at work in his rooms, where seven-shilling pieces were being dissolved in acid in the teacups, where there was a great hole in the floor that the poet had burned with his chemicals. The one-eyed scout, ‘the Arimaspian,’ must have had a time of tribulation (being a conscientious and fatherly man) with this odd master. How characteristic of Shelley it was to lend the glow of his fancy to science, to declare that things, not thoughts, mineralogy, not literature, must occupy human minds for the future, and then to leave a lecture on mineralogy in the middle, and admit that ‘stones are dull things after all!’ Not less Shelleyan was the adventure on Magdalen Bridge, the beautiful bridge of our illustration, from which Oxford, with the sunset behind it, looks like a fairy city of the Arabian Nights—a town of palaces and princesses, rather than of proctors.
‘One Sunday we had been reading Plato together so diligently, that the usual hour of exercise passed away unperceived: we sallied forth hastily to take the air for half-an-hour before dinner. In the middle of Magdalen Bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms. Shelley was more attentive at that instant to our conduct in a life that was past, or to come, than to a decorous regulation of the present, according to the established usages of society, in that fleeting moment of eternal duration styled the nineteenth century. With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child. The mother, who might well fear that it was about to be thrown over the parapet of the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it fast by its long train.‘“Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, Madam?” he asked, in a piercing voice, and with a wistful look.’
‘One Sunday we had been reading Plato together so diligently, that the usual hour of exercise passed away unperceived: we sallied forth hastily to take the air for half-an-hour before dinner. In the middle of Magdalen Bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms. Shelley was more attentive at that instant to our conduct in a life that was past, or to come, than to a decorous regulation of the present, according to the established usages of society, in that fleeting moment of eternal duration styled the nineteenth century. With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child. The mother, who might well fear that it was about to be thrown over the parapet of the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it fast by its long train.
‘“Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, Madam?” he asked, in a piercing voice, and with a wistful look.’
Shelley and Hogg seem almost to have lived in reality the life of the Scholar Gipsy. In Mr. Arnold’s poem, which has made permanent for all time the charm, the sentiment of Oxfordshire scenery, the poet seems to be following the track of Shelley. In Mr. Hogg’s memoirs we hear little of summer; it seems always to have been in winter that the friends took their long rambles, in which Shelley set free, in talk, his inspiration. One thinks of him
‘in winter, on the causeway chill,Where home through flooded fields foot travellers go,’
‘in winter, on the causeway chill,Where home through flooded fields foot travellers go,’
returning to the supper in Hogg’s rooms, to the curious desultory meals, the talk, and the deep slumber by the roaring fire, the small head lying perilously near the flames. One would not linger here over the absurd injustice of his expulsion from the University. It is pleasant to know, on Mr. Hogg’s testimony, that ‘residence at Oxford was exceedingly delightful to Shelley, and on all accounts most beneficial.’ At Oxford, at least, he seems to have been happy, he who so rarely knew happiness, and who, if he made another suffer, himself suffered so much for others. The memory of Shelley has deeply entered into the sentiment of Oxford. Thinking of him in his glorious youth, and of his residence here, may we not say, with the shepherd in Theocritus, of the divine singer:
αἰθ’ ἐπ’ ἐγμῦ ζωοῖς ἐναρίθμιος ὤφελες εἶμεν,ὥς τοι ἐγὼν ἐνόμευον ἀν ὤρεα τὰς καλὰς αἶγαςφωνᾶς εἰσαίων, τὺ δ’ ὑπὸ δρυσὶν ἦ ὑπὸ πεύκαιςἁδὺ μελισδόμενος κατεκέκλισο, θεῖε Κομᾶτα.
αἰθ’ ἐπ’ ἐγμῦ ζωοῖς ἐναρίθμιος ὤφελες εἶμεν,ὥς τοι ἐγὼν ἐνόμευον ἀν ὤρεα τὰς καλὰς αἶγαςφωνᾶς εἰσαίων, τὺ δ’ ὑπὸ δρυσὶν ἦ ὑπὸ πεύκαιςἁδὺ μελισδόμενος κατεκέκλισο, θεῖε Κομᾶτα.
‘Ah, would that in my days thou hadst been numbered with the living, how gladly on the hills would I have herded thy pretty she-goats, and listened to thy voice, whilst thou, under oaks and pine-trees lying, didst sweetly sing, divine Comatas!’
Wehave looked at Oxford life in so many different periods, that now, perhaps, we may regard it, like our artist, as a whole, and take a bird’s-eye view of its present condition. We may ask St. Bernard’s question,Whither hast thou come? a question to which there are so many answers readily given, from within and without the University. It is not probable that the place will vary, in essential character, from that which has all along been its own. We shall have considered Oxford to very little purpose, if it is not plain that the University has been less a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English intellectual life. At Oxford the men have been thinking what England was to think a few months later, and they have been thinking with the passion and the energy of youth. The impulse to thought has not, perhaps, very often been given by any mind or minds within the college walls; it has come from without—from Italy, from France, from London, from a country vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a wandering preacher. Whencesoever the leaven came, Oxford (being so small, and in a way so homogeneous) has always fermented readily, and promptly distributed the new forces, religious or intellectual, throughout England.
It is characteristic of England that the exciting topics, the questions that move the people most, have always been religious, or deeply tinctured with religion. Conservative as Oxford is, the home of ‘impossible causes,’ she has always given asylum to new doctrines, to all the thoughts which comfortable people call ‘dangerous.’ We have seen her agitated by Lollardism, which never quite died, perhaps, till its eager protest against the sacerdotal ideal was fused into the fire of the Reformation. Oxford was literally devastated by that movement, and by the Catholic reaction, and then was disturbed for a century and a half by the war of Puritanism, and of Tory Anglicanism. The latter had scarcely had time to win the victory, and to fall into a doze by her pipe of port, when Evangelical religion came to vex all that was moderate, mature, and fond of repose. The revolutionary enthusiasm of Shelley’s time was comparatively feeble, because it had no connection with religion; or, at least, no connection with the religion to which our countrymen were accustomed. Between the era of the Revolution and our own day, two religious tempests and one secular storm of thought have swept over Oxford, and the University is at present, if one may say so, like a ship in a heavy swell, the sea looking much more tranquil than it really is.
The Tractarian movement was, of course, the first of the religious disturbances to which we refer, and much the most powerful.
It is curious to read about that movement in theApologia, for example, of Cardinal Newman. On what singular topics men’s minds were bent! what queer survivals of the speculations of the Schools agitated them as they walked round Christ Church meadows! They enlightened each other on things transcendental, yet material, on matters unthinkable, and, properly speaking, unspeakable. It is as if they ‘spoke with tongues,’ which had a meaning then, and for them, but which to us, some forty years later, seem as meaningless as the inscriptions of Easter Island.
Old Episcopal Palace. From a Drawing by R. Kent Thomas
This was the shape, the Tractarian movement was the shape, in which the great Romantic reaction laid hold on England and Oxford. The father of all the revival of old doctrines and old rituals in our Church, the originator of that wistful return to things beautiful and long dead, was—Walter Scott. Without him, and his wonderful wand which made the dry bones of history live, England and France would not have known this picturesque reaction. The stir in these two countries was curiously characteristic of their genius. In France it put on, in the first place, the shape of art, of poetry, painting, sculpture. Romanticism blossomed in 1830, and bore fruit for ten years. The religious reaction was a punier thing; the great Abbé, who was the Newman of France, was himself unable to remain within the fantastic church that he built out of medieval ruins. In England, and especially in Oxford, the æsthetic admiration of the Past was promptly transmuted into religion. Doctrines which men thought dead were resuscitated; and from Oxford came, not poetry or painting, but the sermons of Newman, theTracts, the whole religious force which has transformed and revivified the Church of England. That force is still working, it need hardly be said, in the University of to-day, under conditions much changed, but not without thrills of the old volcanic energy.
Probably the Anglican ideas ceased to be the most powerfully agitating of intellectual forces in Oxford about 1845. A new current came in from Rugby, and the influence of Dr. Arnold and the natural tide of reaction began to run very strong. If we had theapologiæof the men who thought most, about the time when Clough was an undergraduate, we should see that the influence of the Anglican divines had become a thing of sentiment and curiosity. The life had not died out of it, but the people whom it could permanently affect were now limited in number and easily recognisable. This form of religion might tempt and attract the strongest men for a while, but it certainly would not retain them. It is by this time a matter of history, though we are speaking of our contemporaries, that the abyss between theLives of the English Saints, and theNemesis of Faith, was narrow, and easily crossed. There was in Oxford that enthusiasm for certain German ideas which had previously been felt for medieval ideas. Liberalism in history, philosophy, and religion was the ruling power; and people believed in Liberalism. What is, or used to be, called the Broad Church, was the birth of some ten or fifteen years of Liberalism in religion at Oxford. TheEssays and Reviewswere what theTractshad been; and Homeric battles were fought over the income of the Regius Professor of Greek. When that affair was settled Liberalism had had her innings, there was no longer a single dominant intellectual force; but the old storms, slowly subsiding, left the ship of the University lurching and rolling in a heavy swell.
People believed in Liberalism! Their faith worked miracles; and the great University Commission performed many wonderful works, bidding close fellowships be open, and giving all power into the hands of Examiners. Their dispensation still survives; the large examining-machine works night and day, in term time and vacation, and yet we are not happy. The age in Oxford, as in the world at large, is the age of collapsed opinions. Never men believed more fervidly in any revelation than the men of twenty years ago believed in political economy, free trade, open competition, and the reign of Common-sense and of Mr. Cobden. Where is that faith now? Many of the middle-aged disciples of the Church of Common-sense are still in our midst. They say the old sayings, they intone the old responses, but somehow it seems that scepticism is abroad; it seems that the world is wider than their system. Not even open examinations for fellowships and scholarships, not half a dozen new schools, and science, and the Museum, and the Slade Professorship of Art, have made Oxford that ideal University which was expected to come down from Heaven like the New Jerusalem.
We have glanced at the history of Oxford to little purpose if we have not learned that it is an eminently discontented place. There is room in colleges and common rooms for both sorts of discontent—the ignoble, which is the child of vanity and weakness; and the noble, which is the unassuaged thirst for perfection. The present result of the last forty years in Oxford is a discontent which is constantly trying to improve the working, and to widen the intellectual influence, of the University. There are more ways than one in which this feeling gets vent. The simplest, and perhaps the most honest and worthy impulse, is that which makes the best of the present arrangements. Great religious excitement and religious discussion being in abeyance, for once, the energy of the place goes out in teaching. The last reforms have made Oxford a huge collection of schools, in which physical science, history, philosophy, philology, scholarship, theology, and almost everything in the world but archæology, are being taught and learned with very great vigour. The hardest worked of men is a conscientious college tutor; and almost all tutors are conscientious. The professors being an ornamental, but (with few exceptions)merelyornamental, order of beings, the tutors have to do the work of a University, which, for the moment, is a teaching-machine. They deliver I know not how many sets of lectures a year, and each lecture demands a fresh and full acquaintance with the latest ideas of French, German, and Italian scholars. No one can afford, or is willing, to lag behind; every one is ‘gladly learning,’ like Chaucer’s clerk, as well as earnestly teaching. The knowledge and the industry of these gentlemen is a perpetual marvel to the ‘bellelettristic trifler.’ New studies, like that of Celtic, and of the obscurer Oriental tongues, have sprung up during recent years, have grown into strength and completeness. It is unnecessary to say, perhaps, that these facts dispose of the popular idea about the luxury of the long vacation. During the more part of the long vacation the conscientious teacher must be toiling after the great mundane movement in learning. He must be acquiring the very freshest ideas about Sanscrit and Greek; about the Ogham characters and the Cyprian syllabary; about early Greek inscriptions and the origins of Roman history, in addition to reading the familiar classics by the light of the latest commentaries.
The Ante Chapel, New College
What is the tangible result, and what the gain of all these labours? The answer is the secret of University discontent. All this accumulated knowledge goes out in teaching, is scattered abroad in lectures, is caught up in note-books, and is poured out, with a difference, in examinations. There is not an amount of original literary work produced by the University which bears any due proportion to the solid materials accumulated. It is just the reverse of Falstaff’s case—but one halfpenny-worth of sack to an intolerable deal of bread; but a drop of the spirit of learning to cart-loads of painfully acquired knowledge. The time and energy of men is occupied in amassing facts, in lecturing, and then in eternal examinations. Even if the results are satisfactory on the whole, even if a hundred well-equipped young men are turned out of the examining-machine every year, these arrangements certainly curb individual ambition. If a resident in Oxford is to make an income that seems adequate, he must lecture, examine, and write manuals and primers, till he is grey, and till the energy that might have added something new and valuable to the acquisitions of the world has departed.
This state of things has produced the demand for the ‘Endowment of Research.’ It is not necessary to go into that controversy. Englishmen, as a rule, believe that endowed cats catch no mice. They would rather endow a theatre than aGelehrter, if endow something they must. They have a British sympathy with these beautiful, if useless beings, the heads of houses, whom it would be necessary to abolish if Researchers were to get the few tens of thousands they require. Finally, it is asked whether the learned might not find great endowment in economy; for it is a fact that a Frenchman, a German, or an Italian will ‘research’ for life on no larger income than a simple fellowship bestows.
The great obstacle to this ‘plain living’ is perhaps to be found in the traditional hospitality of Oxford. All her doors are open, and every stranger is kindly entreated by her, and she is like the ‘discreet housewife’ in Homer—
εἴδατα πόλλ’ ἐπιθεῖσα, χαριζομένη παρεόντων.
εἴδατα πόλλ’ ἐπιθεῖσα, χαριζομένη παρεόντων.
In some languages the same word serves for ‘stranger’ and ‘enemy,’ but in the Oxford dialect ‘stranger’ and ‘guest’ are synonymous. Such is the custom of the place, and it does not make plain living very easy. Some critics will be anxious here to attack the ‘æsthetic’ movement. One will be expected to say that, after the ideas of Newman, after the ideas of Arnold, and of Jowett, came those of the wicked, the extravagant, the effeminate, the immoral ‘Blue China School.’ Perhaps there is something in this, but sermons on the subject are rather luxuries than necessaries in the present didactic mood of the Press. ‘They were friends of ours, moreover,’ as Aristotle says, ‘who brought these ideas in’; so the subject may be left with this brief notice. As a piece of practical advice, one may warn the young and ardent advocate of the Endowment of Research that he will find it rather easier to curtail his expenses than to get a subsidy from the Commission.
The last important result of the ‘modern spirit’ at Oxford, the last stroke of the sanguine Liberal genius, was the removal of the celibate condition from certain fellowships. One can hardly take a bird’s-eye view of Oxford without criticising the consequences of this innovation. The topic, however, is, for a dozen reasons, very difficult to handle. One reason is, that the experiment has not been completely tried. It is easy enough to marry on a fellowship, a tutorship, and a few small miscellaneous offices. But how will it be when you come to forty years, or even fifty? No materials exist which can be used by the social philosopher who wants an answer to this question. In the meantime, the common rooms are perhaps more dreary than of old, in many a college, for lack of the presence of men now translated to another place. As to the ‘society’ of Oxford, that is, no doubt, very much more charming and vivacious than it used to be in the days when Tony Wood was the surly champion of celibacy.
Looking round the University, then, one finds in it an activity that would once have seemed almost feverish, a highly conscientious industry, doing that which its hand finds to do, but not absolutely certain that it is not neglecting nobler tasks. Perhaps Oxford has never been more busy with its own work, never less distracted by religious politics. If we are to look for a less happy sign, we shall find it in the tendency to run up ‘new buildings.’ The colleges are landowners: they must suffer with other owners of real property in the present depression; they will soon need all their savings. That is one reason why they should be chary of building; another is, that the fellows of a college at any given moment are not necessarily endowed with architectural knowledge and taste. They should think twice, or even thrice, before leaving on Oxford for many centuries the uncomely mark of an unfortunate judgment.
Ahundredpictures have been drawn of undergraduate life at Oxford, and a hundred caricatures. Novels innumerable introduce some Oxford scenes. An author generally writes his first romance soon after taking his degree; he writes about his own experience and his own memories; he mixes his ingredients at will and tints according to fancy. This is one of the two reasons why pictures of Oxford, from the undergraduate side, are generally false. They are either drawn by an aspirant who is his own hero, and who idealises himself and his friends, or they are designed by ladies who have readVerdant Green, and who, at some period, have paid a flying visit to Cambridge. An exhaustive knowledge ofVerdant Green, and a hasty view of the Fitzwilliam Museum and ‘the backs of the Colleges’ (which are to Cambridge what the Docks are to Liverpool), do not afford sufficient materials for an accurate sketch of Oxford. The picture daubed by the emancipated undergraduate who dabbles in fiction is as unrecognisable. He makes himself and his friends too large, too noisy, too bibulous, too learned, too extravagant, too pugnacious. They seem to stride down the High, prodigious, disproportionate figures, like the kings of Egypt on the monuments, overshadowing the crowd of dons, tradesmen, bargees, and cricket-field or river-side cads. Often one dimly recognises the scenes, and the acquaintances of years ago, in University novels. The mildest of men suddenly pose as heroes of the Guy Livingstone type, fellows who ‘screw up’ timid dons, box with colossal watermen, and read all night with wet towels bound round their fevered brows. These sketches are all nonsense. Men who do these things do not write about them; and men who write about them never did them.
There is yet another cause which increases the difficulty of describing undergraduate life with truth. There are very many varieties of undergraduates, who have very various ways of occupying and amusing themselves. A steady man that reads his five or six hours a day, and takes his pastime chiefly on the river, finds that his path scarcely ever crosses that of him who belongs to the Bullingdon Club, hunts thrice a week, and rarely dines in hall. Then the ‘pale student,’ who is hard at work in his rooms or in the Bodleian all day, and who has only two friends, out-college men, with whom he takes walks and tea,—he sees existence in a very different aspect. The Union politician, who is for ever hanging about his club, dividing the house on questions of blotting-paper and quill pens, discussing its affairs at breakfast, intriguing for the place of Librarian, writing rubbish in the suggestion-book, to him Oxford is only a soil carefully prepared for the growth of that fine flower, the Union. He never encounters the undergraduate who haunts billiard-rooms and shy taverns, who buys jewelry for barmaids, and who is admired for the audacity with which he smuggled a fox-terrier into college in a brown-paper parcel. There are many other species of undergraduate, scarcely more closely resembling each other in manners and modes of thought than the little Japanese student resembles the metaphysical Scotch exhibitioner, or than the hereditary war minister of Siam (whose career, though brief, was vivacious) resembled the Exeter Sioux, a half-reclaimed savage, who disappeared on the warpath after failing to scalp the Junior Proctor. When The Wet Blanket returned to his lodge in the land of Sitting Bull, he doubtless described Oxford life in his own way to the other Braves, while the squaws hung upon his words and the papooses played around. His account would vary, in many ways, from that of
‘Whiskered Tomkins from the hallOf seedy Magdalene.’
‘Whiskered Tomkins from the hallOf seedy Magdalene.’
And he, again, would not see Oxford life steadily, and see it whole, as a more cultivated and polished undergraduate might. Thus there are countless pictures of the works and ways of undergraduates at the University. The scene is ever the same—boat-races and foot-ball matches, scouts, schools, and proctors, are common to all,—but in other respects the sketches must always vary, must generally be one-sided, and must often seem inaccurate.
It appears that a certain romance is attached to the three years that are passed between the estate of the freshman and that of the Bachelor of Arts. These years are spent in a kind of fairyland, neither quite within nor quite outside of the world. College life is somewhat, as has so often been said, like the old Greek city life. For three years men are in the possession of what the world does not enjoy—leisure; and they are supposed to be using that leisure for the purposes of perfection. They are making themselves and their characters. We are all doing that, all the days of our lives; but at the Universities there is, or is expected to be, more deliberate and conscious effort. Men are in a position to ‘try all things’ before committing themselves to any. Their new-found freedom does not merely consist in the right to poke their own fires, order their own breakfasts, and use their own cheque-books. These things, which make so much impression on the mind at first, are only the outward signs of freedom. The boy who has just left school, and the thoughtless life of routine in work and play, finds himself in the midst of books, of thought, and discussion. He has time to look at all the common problems of the hour, and yet he need not make up his mind hurriedly, nor pledge himself to anything. He can flirt with young opinions, which come to him with candid faces, fresh as Queen Entelechy in Rabelais, though, like her, they are as old as human thought. Here first he meets Metaphysics, and perhaps falls in love with that enchantress, ‘who sifts time with a fine large blue silk sieve.’ There is hardly a clever lad but fancies himself a metaphysician, and has designs on the Absolute. Most fall away very early from this, their first love; and they follow Science down one of her many paths, or concern themselves with politics, and take a side which, as a rule, is the opposite of that to which they afterwards adhere. Thus your Christian Socialist becomes a Court preacher, and puts his trust in princes; the young Tory of the old type will lapse into membership of a School Board. It is the time of liberty, and of intellectual attachments too fierce to last long.
Unluckily there are subjects more engrossing, and problems more attractive, than politics, and science, art, and pure metaphysics. The years of undergraduate life are those in which, to many men, the enigmas of religion present themselves. They bring their boyish faith into a place (if one may quote Pantagruel’s voyage once more) like the Isle of the Macraeones. On that mournful island were confusedly heaped the ruins of altars, fanes, temples, shrines, sacred obelisks, barrows of the dead, pyramids, and tombs. Through the ruins wandered, now and again, the half-articulate words of the Oracle, telling how Pan was dead. Oxford, like the Isle of the Macraeones, is a lumber-room of ruinous philosophies, decrepit religions, forlorn beliefs. The modern system of study takes the pupil through all the philosophic and many of the religious systems of belief, which, in the distant and the nearer past, have been fashioned by men, and have sheltered men for a day. You are taught to mark each system crumbling, to watch the rise of the new temple of thought on its ruins, and to see that also perish, breached by assaults from without or sapped by the slow approaches of Time. This is not the place in which we can well discuss the merits of modern University education. But no man can think of his own University days, or look with sympathetic eyes at those who fill the old halls and rooms, and not remember, with a twinge of the old pain, how religious doubt insists on thrusting itself into the colleges. And it is fair to say that, for this, no set of teachers or tutors is responsible. It is the modern historical spirit that must be blamed, that too clear-sighted vision which we are all condemned to share of the past of the race. We are compelled to look back on old philosophies, on India, Athens, Alexandria, and on the schools of men who thought so hard within our own ancient walls. We are compelled to see that their systems were only plausible, that their truths were but half-truths. It is the long vista of failure thus revealed which suggests these doubts that weary, and torture, and embitter the naturally happy life of discussion, amusement, friendship, sport, and study. These doubts, after all, dwell on the threshold of modern existence, and on the threshold—namely, at the Universities—men subdue them, or evade them.
The amusements of the University have been so often described that little need be said of them here. Unhealthy as the site of Oxford is, the place is rather fortunately disposed for athletic purposes. The river is the chief feature in the scenery, and in the life of amusement. From the first day of term, in October, it is crowded with every sort of craft. The freshman admires the golden colouring of the woods and Magdalen tower rising, silvery, through the blue autumnal haze. As soon as he appears on the river, his weight, strength, and ‘form’ are estimated. He soon finds himself pulling in a college ‘challenge four,’ under the severe eye of a senior cox, and by the middle of December he has rowed his first race, and is regularly entered for a serious vocation. The thorough-going boating-man is the creature of habit. Every day, at the same hour, after a judicious luncheon, he is seen, in flannels, making for the barge. He goes out, in a skiff, or a pair, or a four-oar, or to a steeplechase through the hedges when Oxford, as in our illustration, is under water. The illustration represents Merton, and the writer recognises his old rooms, with the Venetian blinds which Mr. Ruskin denounced. Chief of all the boating-man goes out in an eight, and rows down to Iffley, with the beautiful old mill and Norman church, or accomplishes ‘the long course.’ He rows up again, lounges in the barge, rows down again (if he has only pulled over the short course), and goes back to dinner in hall. The table where men sit who are in training is a noisy table, and the athletes verge on ‘bear-fighting’ even in hall. A statistician might compute how many steaks, chops, pots of beer, and of marmalade, an orthodox man will consume in the course of three years. He will, perhaps, pretend to suffer from the monotony of boating shop, boating society, and broad-blown boating jokes. But this appears to be a harmless affectation. The old breakfasts, wines, and suppers, the honest boating slang, will always have an attraction for him. The summer term will lose its delight when the May races are over. Boating-men are the salt of the University, so steady, so well disciplined, so good-tempered are they. The sport has nothing selfish or personal in it; men row for their college, or their University; not like running—men, who run, as it were, each for his own hand. Whatever may be his work in life, a boating-man will stick to it. His favourite sport is not expensive, and nothing can possibly be less luxurious. He is often a reading man, though it may be doubted whether ‘he who runs may read’ as a rule. Running is, perhaps, a little overdone, and Strangers’ cups are, or lately were, given with injudicious generosity. To the artist’s eye, however, few sights in modern life are more graceful than the University quarter-of-a-mile race. Nowhere else, perhaps, do you see figures so full of a Hellenic grace and swiftness.
The cream of University life is the first summer term. Debts, as yet, are not; the Schools are too far off to cast their shadow over the unlimited enjoyment, which begins when lecture is over, at one o’clock. There are so many things to do,—
‘When wickets are bowled and defended,When Isis is glad with the eights,When music and sunset are blended,When Youth and the Summer are mates,When freshmen are heedless of “Greats,”When note-books are scribbled with rhyme,Ah! these are the hours that one ratesSweet hours, and the fleetest of Time!’
‘When wickets are bowled and defended,When Isis is glad with the eights,When music and sunset are blended,When Youth and the Summer are mates,When freshmen are heedless of “Greats,”When note-books are scribbled with rhyme,Ah! these are the hours that one ratesSweet hours, and the fleetest of Time!’
There are drags at every college gate to take college teams down to Cowley. There is the beautiful scenery of the ‘stripling Thames’ to explore; the haunts of the immortal ‘Scholar Gipsy,’ and of Shelley, and of Clough’s Piper, who—
‘Went in his youth and the sunshine rejoicing, to Nuneham and Godstowe.’
‘Went in his youth and the sunshine rejoicing, to Nuneham and Godstowe.’
Further afield men seldom go in summer, there is so much to delight and amuse in Oxford.[221]What day can be happier than that of which the morning is given (after a lively college breakfast, or a ‘commonising’ with a friend) to study, while cricket occupies the afternoon, till music and sunset fill the grassy stretches above Iffley, and the college eights flash past among cheering and splashing? Then there is supper in the cool halls, darkling, and half-lit up; and after supper talk, till the birds twitter in the elms, and the roofs and the chapel spire look unfamiliar in the blue of dawn. How long the days were then! almost like the days of childhood; how distinct is the impression all experience used to make! In later seasons Care is apt to mount the college staircase, and the ‘oak’ which Shelley blessed cannot keep out this visitor. She comes in many a shape—as debt, and doubt, and melancholy; and often she comes as bereavement. Life and her claims wax importunate; to many men the Schools mean a cruel and wearing anxiety, out of all proportion to the real importance of academic success. We cannot see things as they are, and estimate their value, in youth; and if pleasures are more keen then, grief is more hopeless, doubt more desolate, uncertainty more gnawing, than in later years, when we have known and survived a good deal of the worst of mortal experience. Often on men still in their pupilage the weight of the first misfortunes falls heavily; the first touch of Dame Fortune’s whip is the most poignant. We cannot recover the first summer term; but it has passed into ourselves and our memories, into which Oxford, with her beauty and her romance, must also quickly pass. He is not to be envied who has known and does not love her. Where her children have quarrelled with her the fault is theirs, not hers. They have chosen the accidental evils to brood on, in place of acquiescing in her grace and charm. These are crowded and hustled out of modern life; the fever and the noise of our struggles fill all the land, leaving still, at the Universities, peace, beauty, and leisure.
If any word in these papers has been unkindly said, it has only been spoken, I hope, of the busybodies who would make Oxford cease to be herself; who would rob her of her loveliness and her repose.
[120]Poems by Ernest Myers. London, 1877.
[221]A very pleasing account of the scenery near Oxford appeared in theCornhillfor September 1879.