COLLEGE SERVANTSOF THE PRESENT AND THE PAST

THE BATHING SHEDS, OR “PARSONS’ PLEASURE”These sheds are built on the banks of the river Cherwell, the willow trees lining the stream being fitted with platforms at all heights for plunging.A figure to the right is taking advantage of one of these stations; others are dressing or preparing to bathe.The time is near sunset in summer.

THE BATHING SHEDS, OR “PARSONS’ PLEASURE”

These sheds are built on the banks of the river Cherwell, the willow trees lining the stream being fitted with platforms at all heights for plunging.

A figure to the right is taking advantage of one of these stations; others are dressing or preparing to bathe.

The time is near sunset in summer.

[Pg 285][Pg 284][Pg 283]

unscrupulousness of their ancestors. In short, he may be a most brilliant, most fascinating, or most modest person, who has chosen to appear piebald.

His room is decorated with photographs of actresses, along with perhaps a Hogarth print, a florid male and a floral female portrait, an expensive picture of a horse, and copies from Leighton. In a corner is a piano, which he is perhaps eager and unable to play. The air is scented with roses and cigarettes. The window-seat is strewn with hunting-crops, bills, a caricature of himself from an undergraduate paper, several novels and boxes of cigarettes, a history of the Argent-Bigpotts of Bigpott, and, under a cushion, some note-books and a table of work.

He is to be met with everywhere; for he is not ashamed to be seen. He lives long in the memories of travellers from Birmingham who wait five minutes in Oxford. In the Schools he is a constant attendant, always sanguine, not quite cheerful or satisfied with the company, yet equal (at his Viva Voce) to a look of ineffectual superiority for the man who ploughs him with a smile. He is also to be found by the river, during the Eights, when he cheers and looks very well; in a bookshop, where he recognises Omar and some novels; or in the High, which never wearies him, although his bored look seems to say so.[Pg 286]

He has come up with a scholarship from school. There, he took prizes, had an attack of brain-fever, and edited the magazine: and he has come to the University as if it were an upper class of his old school. His aim is, as many prizes as possible and a good degree. The tutors here, like the masters at school, he regards as men who turn a handle and work up more or less good material into scholars, as a butcher makes sausages, all exactly alike to the eye, out of a mysterious heap. At first he is in great awe of a fellow, and wears his scholar’s gown at its utmost length, and as proudly as star and riband—he will hardly take it off in the severe quarter of an hour in which he permits himself to drink coffee and eat anchovy toast after dinner; and he sometimes pretends to forget that he has it on until he goes to bed. Perhaps on one occasion he trips his tutor over a quotation or something of no account. He scans the tutor’s bookshelves, and finds odd things between Tacitus and Thucydides which make him ponder. At length, he is less respectful; opens discussions, in which, having tired the tutor, he returns very well satisfied. For he has a patent memory, as he has a patent reading-lamp and reading-desk. Nothing goes into it without a bright label, as nothing goes into his note-book without honours of pencilled red and blue. His copy of Homer is so overscored that one might[Pg 287]suppose that the battle of the pigmies and cranes had been fought to a sanguinary end upon its page.

At school his football was treated with contempt, yet with silence, except by very small boys. At college he is anxious to do a little at games. The captain of the boats asks him, as a matter of course, to go down to the river, to be tubbed (or coached) in a pair-oar boat; and he replies that he “will willingly spare half an hour.” He shows some good points at the river; is painstaking and neat. His half-hour is mercilessly multiplied day after day. He is to be found at the starting-point in February, in his college Torpid, and proves a stately nonentity or passenger; discovers that rowing abrades more than his skin, and gives it up just before he is asked to. For the future he sculls alone, once a week, when it is mild, and oftener when his friends are visiting him—which he does not encourage. At such times he learns that it is quite true that Oxford possesses some fine drawings, marbles, stained glass, and a library of little use to a determined “Greats” man. These he exhibits to the visitors impatiently and with pride. He returns to his work unruffled. Already he has scored one First Class and aproximefor a prize. Yet his tutor pays him qualified compliments, which he attributes to the natural bitterness of a second class man. The tutor sometimes asks him what he reads; to which he replies brightly with a long list of texts, etc.

“Yes, but what do you read when you unbend?” says the tutor. “Did you ever readMidshipman Easy?” (with a touch of exasperation).[Pg 288]

The youth blushingly replies: “No, I never unbend.”

Nor is the other far more pleased when he brings with him, on a short vacation boating holiday, a volume of theEncyclopædia Britannica.

Now and then he speaks at the Union. There and at afternoon teas with ladies he is known for the lucidity of his commonplaces and the length of his quotations. For the most part he talks only of his work and the current number of theTimes. His work, meantime, is less and less satisfactory to every one but his coach. Some say that he will get another first, and will not deserve it. Already he is learning that three or four years among “boys” is not helpful to his future. No one so much as he emphasises the distinction between third and second year undergraduates. He is always looking for really improving conversation, and play of mind without any play. A book tea would please him, if it were not so frivolous.

Once only he lapses from the rigidity of his ways. He thinks it a matter of duty until it occurs, when the hearty and informal reception given to his rendering of “To Anthea” discourages any further condescension. With that exception, he moves with considerable dignity among mankind: in all things discreet, with a leaning towards the absurd; in most things well under control, yet, in spite of his rigidity, really luxuriating in the sweets of a neutral nature that never tempts temptation. He sends in a neat, flowery, and icy poem for the Newdigate Prize, and wins. He gets his second First[Pg 289]Class and an appointment which he likes at the same time. He enters for a fellowship, and his failure calls forth the old story about the cherry tart that was offered to likely competitors at a fellowship examination, where the cleanest management of the stones meant success.

He goes down with his degree, and confident, applauded, unmissed. His friends say that he lacks something which he ought to have. What is it?

He has come up to Oxford with an unconquerable love of men and books and games; is resolved not to be careful in small matters for a few years; and has a clear vision of a profession ahead. Others think that a fellowship and a prize are his due; he vaguely regards them as nice. But he has a strong belief that any kind of distinction is dangerous at Oxford, and among the least of its possibilities. He respects the scholar and the Blue, and sees that they might equally well be made in another city or on another stream. Bent upon a life among men, he sees that a university is a place where many are men, but where many of the suspicious and calculating passions of a bigger world are in abeyance; and thinks that it should therefore be the home of perfect rivalries and friendships.

He will attend the lectures of——, which are outside his course. He[Pg 290]will accept some hearty excesses in the rooms of—— as equally important. When he comes up his sympathies are universal. He is eager and warm in his liking of men and things; and he is straightway on happy terms with undergraduates and dons. After a few terms his versatility is hard-worked in order to give something more than an appearance of sympathy in the company of athletes, reading men, contemplative men, and wealthy men. For a time his success is sublime. The reading man thinks there was never such a student. The rowing man approves of his leg-work and his narratives at those little training parties for the enjoyment of music, port, and fruit—“togger ports.” His method appeals to the don. Now and then, indeed, some one a little more reticent than himself puts him to a test, and he may discourse on Aquinas to a Unitarian Socialist, or on Gargantua to one deep in Christian mysticism or fresh from the new year’s advice of his great-aunt. In such cases, either he is repulsed with sufficient narrowness on the part of the other to supply a necessary balm, or he makes a surprised and admiring convert, who may do odd things on account of his inferior versatility. For quite a long time he may have the good fortune to let loose his interest in the Ptolemies in the neighbourhood of other admirers or neutral gentlemen. And so long all is more than well. He is popular, exuberant, and in a fair way of growth, albeit a little overdone. It is true that in tired moments he is likely to choose the path of least resistance and find himself in not very versatile company. But what a life he leads! what afternoons on the Cherwell between Marston and Islip in the[Pg 291]summer; and beyond Fyfield, when autumn still has all that is a perfecting of summer in its gift! The admiring plodder who hears his speeches says that he will some day be Lord Chancellor. His verses have something beyond cleverness in them: they have a high impulsion, as when spring makes a crown imperial or a tulip. And listening to his talk or reading his letters, one might think that he will be content to be one of those men of genius who avoid fame—but if their letters are unearthed two hundred years hence they will have the life of Wotton’s or T. E. Brown’s. His friends think that such a clear-souled, gracious, brilliant creature would leaven the Senior Common Room and draw out the shyness of ——, and twist the neck of ——’s exuberant dulness.

The liberal life, close in friendship with so many of the living and the historical, on occasions almost gives him the freedom of all time. His friends note that Catullus or Lucan or Dante is nearer to him than to other men. He quotes them as if he had lived with them and were their executor, and by his sympathy seems to have won a part authorship of their finest things. He expounds the law and makes it as exhilarating as theArabian Nights, or as if it were a sequel toDon Quixote. And in history the dons notice his picturesqueness, which is as passionate as if he could have written that ardent sonnet:—

The kings come riding back from the Crusade,The purple kings, and all their mounted men;They fill the street with clamorous cavalcade;The kings have broken down the Saracen.[Pg 292]Singing a great song of the Eastern wars,In crimson ships across the sea they came,With crimson sails and diamonded dark oars,That made the Mediterranean flash with flame.And reading how, in that far month, the ranksFormed on the edge of the desert, armoured all,I wish to God that I had been with themWhen the first Norman leapt upon the wall,And Godfrey led the foremost of the Franks,And young Lord Raymond stormed Jerusalem.

So the glories of youth and history and summer mingle in his brain and speech.

No one is so married to his surroundings as he, and while he appears to many to be shaped by them—beautiful or grotesque—as an animal in a shell; to a few he appears also to shape them, so that Oxford in his company is a new thing, as if it were the highest, last creation of the modern mind. He does not acquiesce in the limp mediævalism of the rest, but recreates the Middle Ages for himself, finding new humanities in the sculptures, and beauties in the perspective, strange sympathies between the monkish work and the voices and faces of those who sit amidst it. In his own college he effects a surprising “modernisation” by removing a little eighteenth-century work and revealing the fifteenth-century original. Thus all history is to him a vivid personal experience.

But he is overwhelmed by his versatility, and cultivates that for its own sake, and at last loses his sympathy with all who are not as he. The athletes begin to treat him as a poser. The hard workers stand aloof from his extravagances. With different sets he is treated[Pg 293]and rejected as a man of the world, a hepatetic philosopher, a dilettante; ... some speak of the literary taint; the dons are tired. He is in danger of becoming the hero of the most unstable freshman and his scout. And so, though he has perhaps but one failing more than his contemporaries, and certainly more virtues, he is ridiculed or feared or despised, and goes about like Leonolo in the play, who wandered

Because perhaps among the crowdI shall find some to whom I may relateThat story of the children and the meat—

until he has the good luck to fall back upon his friends. There he is safe again. His name will indeed be handed down through half a dozen undergraduate generations for his least characteristic adventures, but if that is a rare distinction, and equivalent to a press immortality, it is likely to be of no profit to him. Where he used to be an expensive copy of a Bohemian, he becomes at last as near the genuine thing as any critic, with a wholesome fear of being absolute, would care to pronounce. His one pose is that of the plain-spoken, natural man, in the presence of a snob. Everywhere he is as independent as a parrot or a tramp. In life, few are to be envied so much. For he achieves everything but success.

The important undergraduate is one who has been[Pg 294]thunderstruck by the inferiority of the rest. He cannot, if he would, be rid of the notion. In a large college the distinction between himself and others is cheerfully acknowledged by them, while he leads a painful life. In a small college, for a year or two, he is so handled that he may sometimes wish he were as other men are. At the end of that time he has by contagion created a covey of important men, and now, to his moral, athletic, and intellectual excellence, and his superior school, is added the excellence of being several years older than the majority. He establishes a despotism for the good of the college. He is willing to take the fellows into partnership, makes advances, and, when coyly repulsed, has his sense of importance increased by the knowledge that an opposition exists. His splendour is marred only by the stranger, who mistakes his brass-buttoned blazer for a livery, and finds his pomposity well worthy of such fine old quadrangles,—and requests him with a smile and half a sovereign to exhibit the chapel and the hall, and “tell me who are the swells”!

He walks about Oxford with a beautiful satisfaction. “A poor thing, but my own,” he seems to say, as he enters the college gate. Little boys in the street pull off their caps as he passes, and the saucy, imprudent freshman does the same. He rows, he plays football and cricket, he debates, all indifferently, but with such an air that he and even some others for a time believe that he is the life and soul of the college.

He has been captain and president of everything, when he finds that there is no further honour open to[Pg 295]him, and he muses almost with melancholy. The others find it out somewhat later; he is dejected. Though fallen, he is still majestic. He stalks about like a foxhound in July, or like a rebellious archangel—

Is this the region, this the soil, the clime?...

Once more October returns. A new generation of freshmen is invited to tea, and for one glorious hour his old vivacity returns, as he questions, instructs, exhorts. “The President of the O.U.B.C. once said to me, ...” or “When I was in the college boat and we made seven bumps ...”—such are his conjuring terms.

Perhaps in a few years he returns, to find that the college is not what it was, and that his nickname is still remembered.

He is one whom the Important Undergraduate regards as a parody of himself. For he resembles the other in no respect. He is a clean, brave, and modest freshman, with too great a liking for the same qualities in others to be disturbed by any faulty affectations that may go along with them. When he comes up he has a few friends in Oxford, keeps them, and is well contented. He plays his games heartily, and is almost as glad to cheer, when he is not good enough or pushing enough to play. Nothing can destroy his regular habits, and at first he narrowly escapes being despised for them by his inferiors. He is comparatively poor and not very clever.[Pg 296]Neither has he any amusing oddities, or stories to tell, or much whisky to dispense. Yet he finds notoriety thrust upon him. If it were not for his firm and blushing manner, he would never have his room empty for work. Very soon, he is the only man in the college who may sport his oak with no fear from the thunders of distant and idle acquaintances. Every one wishes to possess him. The athletes cannot withstand his running, his hard fielding. The more unpopular reading-men are first attracted by his simple habits as a freshman, and then surprised that they are not repulsed when they hear that he will get his Blue; he is always their protector. The elegant and stupid men, at least for a few terms, know no man who so becomes a cigar, and is so fit to meet their female cousins at breakfast. The brilliant men like him first because he is a mystery; next, because he recalls to them their “lost youth,” which was nothing like his; and finally, because he is so friendly and so naïvely rebukes their most venturesome sallies. His presence in a room is more than a wood fire and a steaming bowl. He seems to know not sorrow—

Clear as the sky, withouten blame or blot.

It is sorrow-killing to see his amazement at sorrow, like the amazement of those spirits in Purgatory who exclaimed, as Dante passed: “The light seems not to shine on one side of him, though he behaves as one that lives.” Men of very different persuasions are fascinated by “the young Greek” in the Parks or on the river. He is successful everywhere, and is in time captain of[Pg 297]football and president of the debating and literary society, although his knowledge of literature is confined to Scott’s Novels,Hypatia, and theIdylls of the King. He accepts the advice of the Important Undergraduate, here and elsewhere, and unconsciously ignores it, with happy results. For his contemporaries believe that he has launched his college upon one of those sudden, mysterious ascensions that mean social, learned, and athletic improvement at once. To the last he is diffident, and at the same time always capable of doing his best. “Can you clear that brook?” one asks in the Hinksey fields. “I don’t know,” is the reply, and over he goes, a foot clear amongst the orchis. Not a great deal more powerful than the cox, he strokes a boat that has never been bumped, and is the only oar whom the rest all praise. To see him halting over a commonplace speech at a college function, or making the most ludicrous new verses to the alphabetical song of “Jolly old Dons,” and winning applause; or dropping his head on his knees at the winning-post on the river; or carried for the hundredth time round the quadrangle on some festive night—is, nobody knows or asks why, an inspiration. And after his last farewell dinner he smiles, as if he knew everything or had thepitié suprême, as he notices the follies which he supposes he is “not clever enough for,” and goes down to his manor or country curacy very happily.[Pg 298]

There was for a short time, amidst but not of the University, a student whom I cannot but count as a “clerk of Oxenford.” He came from no school, but straight from a counting-house. All his life he had been a deep, unguided delver in the past. An orphan in the world, he had chosen his family among the noble persons of antiquity. Cæsar was more real to him than Napoleon, and Cato more influential than any millionaire. He had tasted all the types, from Diogenes to Seneca and Lucullus. When he tired of his counting-house, he tried to imagine a resemblance between it and a city state, but was himself but a helot in the end.

So it happened that he came to live in a cottage attic, five or six miles from Oxford. He wanted to be a university man. He despised scholarships as if they had been the badge of the Legion of Honour. Colleges he would have nothing to do with, because they spoiled the simplicity of the idea of a university in his mind. They had made possible the social folly of Oxford. But in his reading of history he had travelled no farther than the Middle Ages towards his own time; and a picture of Oxford life in that day fascinated him. He believed that it was still possible to lead the unstable, independent, penniless life of a scholar; and he knew not why a student should hope or wish to be anything like a merchant or a prince. A merchant had money, and a prince flattery: he would have wisdom. It was[Pg 299]likely to be a long search, and in his view it was the search that was beyond price. He wanted wisdom as a man might want a star, because it was a rare and beautiful thing. So his studies were a spiritual experience. The short passages of Homer which he knew by heart had something of religious unction in his utterance.

He left London afoot, with a parcel of books strapped to his shoulders; his only disappointment coming from a landlord who refused to pay for his singing with a meal, as he would have done six hundred years ago. A farmer treated him generously, under the belief that he was mad.

A few antiquated Greek texts and notes, an odd volume of Chronicles from the Rolls Series, and an Aldrich, adorned his room, and with their help he hoped to lay the foundations of a seraphic, universal wisdom. Gradually he would become worthy to use the Bodleian and contend with the learned gown and hostile town.

Once a week, in the beginning, he walked into Oxford. He saw the river covered with boats, and laughed happily and pitifully at men who seemed to know nothing about the uses of a university. A good-tempered youth, in rowing knickerbockers, was a fit disciple for his revelations, he thought, and was about to preach, when he barely escaped from a bicycle and a megaphone. Almost sad, murmuring Abelard’s line

Sunt multi fratres sed in illis rarus amicus—[Pg 300]

he hastened to the city. The spires gave him courage again, and he ran, singing an old song:—

When that I was a scholar bold,And in my head was wealth untold:Heigh! Ho! in the days of oldIn Oxford town a scholar trolled.

Every one in a master’s gown received a bow. He was mistaken for a literary man. And once in Oxford, he went, seriously and as if at a ceremony, through a minutely prepared plan. He attended service at one of the churches, and especially St. Mary’s. He took long, repeated walks up and down High Street, and into all the lanes, which he hardly knew when their names had been changed. Then he sat for an hour in the oldest-looking inn. In blessed mood, he tried the landlord unsuccessfully with Latin, and waited until some scholar should call and exchange jests with him in the learned tongue, or perhaps join him in a quarrel with the town. The only scholar that called talked in a strange tongue, chiefly to a bull-pup, and never to him. And late at night he stole reluctantly home, never so much pleased as when, in a dark alley, he was saluted by a proctor, and asked if he might be a member of the University. But the little note inviting him to be at—— College at——A.M.on the following day never came, and he was cheated of the glory of being the first member of the University who could by no means pay a fine.

At the end of this holy day he spent the night with his books, thinking it shame to sleep away the ardent,[Pg 302][Pg 301]

INTERIOR OF THE HALL, MAGDALEN COLLEGEAt the east end of the Hall, facing the spectator, is the daïs and high table, lighted from the north by an oriel window looking into the Cloister Court (see picture of Cloisters).Portraits of College dignitaries adorn the walls above the dado.The long tables and seats in the foreground are used by the undergraduates.

INTERIOR OF THE HALL, MAGDALEN COLLEGE

At the east end of the Hall, facing the spectator, is the daïs and high table, lighted from the north by an oriel window looking into the Cloister Court (see picture of Cloisters).Portraits of College dignitaries adorn the walls above the dado.The long tables and seats in the foreground are used by the undergraduates.

At the east end of the Hall, facing the spectator, is the daïs and high table, lighted from the north by an oriel window looking into the Cloister Court (see picture of Cloisters).

Portraits of College dignitaries adorn the walls above the dado.

The long tables and seats in the foreground are used by the undergraduates.

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[Pg 304]

[Pg 303]

memoried hours that followed. When sleep caught him at last, with what happiness and pomp he walked down St. Aldate’s and along Blue Boar Street and Merton Street, and came suddenly upon Wren’s domed gate at Queen’s! or paused in St. Mary’s porches, or found the inmost green sanctuary of Wadham Gardens!

Once he dreamed that on a Sunday he preached from the little outdoor pulpit at Magdalen, where he mounted by some artifice of sleep’s. The chamber windows and quadrangles were full. His voice rose and linked to him the crowd outside in High Street. All remained silent, even when it was known that the hieroglyphics were skipping from their perches in the cloister and carrying off large numbers, no one knew whither. Those that were spared—and his voice rose ever higher, and expanded like the column and fans of masonry at Christ Church—were stripped of their waistcoats and ties and all their luxuries and dignities. Their hair was shaved: presently they were all cowled, and with a great shout hailed him Chancellor. He floated down from the pulpit and led them down the High, evicting the pampered tradespeople and fettering all parasites. Singing a charging hymn, they marched in procession to St. Mary’s, and thence to a feast at Christ Church hall; when he awoke with the din of revelry.

Sometimes, in his dreams, he saw enacted the Greek tragedies, to the accompaniment of the organs of New College and the Cathedral.

Now that he knew his plays by heart, he came oftener[Pg 306]to Oxford, and gained the freedom of the Bodleian. Every day he came, bringing his own books to fill the interval before the library books arrived, although for the most part he stared at the gilt inscriptions outside his alcove window, or at the trees and roofs farther off. When he was hidden among the expected volumes he read but feverishly. He put questions to himself in the style of the schoolmen, and pondered “whether the music of the spheres be verse or prose.” He tingled all over with the learned air, and was intoxicated by the dust of a little-used book. The brown spray that fell from a volume on the shelf before him was sweeter than the south wind. Week after week obscured his aims. The only moments of his old chanting joy came to him in his still undiluted expectations, when he came in sight of the city—

O fortunati quorum jam mœnia surgunt!—

and at night, while the river shone like an infinite train let fall from the shoulders of the city.

He sold his books in Little Clarendon Street, and whenever he wished to read, there he found them and others ready. Most of his time passed in the corner of an inn, where he sat at a hole in the dark window as at a hagioscope, and with heavy eyelids watched the University men. And it was possible to earn a living by selling theStarfor a penny, night after night, and to have the felicity of dying in Oxford.[Pg 308][Pg 307]

A “STUDY” IN THE BODLEIAN LIBRARYThe window in the “study” looks south into the Fellows’ Garden of Exeter College. To the right, outside the picture, is the main aisle of the Library, shown in another drawing, and to the extreme left is a glimpse of the cross aisle leading to the staircase entrance to the Library, the columns supporting the galleries, and the ancient timbered roof.Beneath the coloured bust of Sir Thomas Sackville, and on the screen forming one side of the “study,” are placed rare portraits of distinguished persons, and “drawings” by old masters, etc.In the showcase fixed over the specimen-drawers are books, relics, autographs, etc., and objects of great value and antiquity.

A “STUDY” IN THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY

The window in the “study” looks south into the Fellows’ Garden of Exeter College. To the right, outside the picture, is the main aisle of the Library, shown in another drawing, and to the extreme left is a glimpse of the cross aisle leading to the staircase entrance to the Library, the columns supporting the galleries, and the ancient timbered roof.Beneath the coloured bust of Sir Thomas Sackville, and on the screen forming one side of the “study,” are placed rare portraits of distinguished persons, and “drawings” by old masters, etc.In the showcase fixed over the specimen-drawers are books, relics, autographs, etc., and objects of great value and antiquity.

Beneath the coloured bust of Sir Thomas Sackville, and on the screen forming one side of the “study,” are placed rare portraits of distinguished persons, and “drawings” by old masters, etc.

In the showcase fixed over the specimen-drawers are books, relics, autographs, etc., and objects of great value and antiquity.

[Pg 311]

[Pg 310]

[Pg 309]

The Past

Whilome ther was dwellynge at OxenfordA riche gnof, that gestės heeld to bord,And of his craft he was a carpenter.With hym ther was dwellynge a poure scoler,Hadde lernėd art, but al his fantasyeWas turnėd for to lern astrologye,And koude a certeyn of conclusions,To demen by interrogaciouns,If that men sholde have droghte or ellės shoures.Or if men askėd him what sholde bifalleOf everythyng, I may nat rekene hem alle.This clerk was clepėd hendė Nicholas.Of deernė love he koude, and of solas,And ther-to he was sleigh and full privee,And lyk a mayden mekė for to see.A chambrė hadde he in that hostelryeAllone withouten any compaignye,And fetisly y-dight, with herbės swoote,And he himself as sweete as is the rooteOf lycorys, or any cetėwale.His Almageste, and bookės grete and small,His astrelabie, longynge for his art,His augrym stonės, layen faire apart,On shelvės couchėd at his beddės heed.His presse y-covered with a faldyng reed,And all above there lay a gay sautrie,On which he made a-nyghtės melodieSo swetėly, that al the chambrė rong,AndAngelas ad Virginem, he song;And after that he song the “Kyngės noote”;Ful often blessėd was his myrie throte,And thus this sweetė clerk his tymė spenteAfter his freendės fyndyng and his rente.

Such was a “clerk of Oxenford” in Chaucer’s day, living probably on the generosity of a patron, and differing only from his patron’s son, inasmuch as he[Pg 312]was saved the expense of a fur hood. In the rooms of most, Bibles, Missals, or an Aristotle or Boethius, took the place of the Almagest of the astrologer; and more conspicuous were the rosaries, lutes, bows and arrows of the undergraduates. In their boisterous parti-coloured life of almost liberty, even an examination was a vivid thing, and meant a disputation against all comers in a public school, to be followed by a feast of celebration, visits to taverns, and probably a dance,

After the scole of Oxenfordė tho;

and so, after a fight with saucy tradesmen or foreigners, to bed, or Binsey for a hare, or to other night work.

“A meere young Gentleman of the Universitie is one that comes there to weare a gowne, and to say hereafter, he has been at the Universitie. His Father sent him thither, because hee heard there were the best Fencing and Dancing Schools. From these he has his Education, from his Tutor the oversight. The first element of his knowledge is to be shewne the Colleges, and initiated in a Taverne by the way, which hereafter hee will learne for himselfe. The two marks of his Senioritie, is the bare velvet of his gowne, and his proficiencie at Tennis, where when he can once play a Set, he is a Freshman no more. His Studie has commonly handsome shelves, his Bookes neate silk strings, which he shows to his Father’s man, and is loth to untye or take downe for feare of misplacing. Upon[Pg 313]foule days for recreation hee retyres thither, and looks over the prety booke his Tutor reades to him, which is commonly some short Historie, or a piece ofEuphormio; for which his Tutor gives him Money to spend next day. His maine loytering is at the Library, where hee studies Armes and bookes of Honour, and turnes a Gentleman Critick in Pedigrees. Of all things hee endures not to be mistaken for a Scholler, and hates a black suit though it be of Satin. His companion is ordinarily some stale fellow, that has been notorious for an Ingle to gold hatbands, whom hee admires at first, afterward scornes. If hee have spirit or wit, he may light of better company, and may learne some flashes of wit, which may doe him Knight’s service in the Country hereafter. But he is now gone to the Inns of Court, where he studies to forget what hee learn’d before, his acquaintance and the fashion.”

From theMicrocosmographie.

The younger Richard Graves (1715-1804), a contemporary of Shenstone and Whitfield at Pembroke, has sketched, in his own person, the unstable undergraduate of sixteen, in his progress from set to set. It is a very lasting type. “Having brought with me,” he writes, “the character of a tolerably good Grecian, I was invited to a very sober little party, who amused themselves in the evening with reading Greek and drinking water. Here I continued six months, and[Pg 314]we read over Theophrastus, Epictetus, Phalaris’Epistles, and such other Greek authors as are seldom read at school. But I was at length seduced from this mortified symposium to a very different party, a set of jolly, sprightly young fellows, most of them west-country lads, who drank ale, smoked tobacco, punned, and sang bacchanalian catches the whole evening. I began to think them the only wise men. Some gentlemen commoners, however, who considered the above-mentioned very low company (chiefly on account of the liquor they drank), good-naturedly invited me to their party; they treated me with port wine and arrack punch; and now and then, when they had drunk so much as hardly to distinguish wine from water, they would conclude with a bottle or two of claret. They kept late hours, drank their favourite toasts on their knees, and in short were what were then called ‘bucks of the first head.’”

The Lownger

I rise about nine, get to Breakfast by ten,Blow a Tune on my Flute, or perhaps make a Pen;Read a Play till eleven, or cock my lac’d Hat;Then step to my Neighbour’s, till Dinner to chat.Dinner over, toTom’sor toJames’sI go,The News of the Town so impatient to know:WhileLaw,LockeandNewton, and all the rum RaceThat talk of their Modes, their Ellipses, and Space,The Seat of the Soul, and new Systems on high,In Holes, as abstruse as their Mysteries lye.From the Coffee-house then I to Tennis away,And at five I post back to my College to pray:[Pg 315]I sup before eight, and secure from all Duns,Undauntedly march to theMitre, orTuns;Where in Punch or good Claret my Sorrows I drown,And toss off a Bowl to the best in the Town:At one in the Morning, I call what’s to pay,Then Home to my College I stagger away.Thus I tope all the Night, as I trifle all Day.From theOxford Sausage.

I have taken from Glanvil’sVanity of Dogmatizingthe original version of the story of Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy.

“There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who being of very pregnant and ready parts, and yet wanting the encouragement of preferment, was by his poverty forc’d to leave his studies there, and to cast himself upon the wide world for a livelyhood. Now, his necessities growing dayly on him, and wanting the help of friends to relieve him, he was at last forced to join himself to a company of Vagabond Gypsies, whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their Trade for a maintenance. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtilty of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem; as that they discovered to him their Mystery: in the practice of which, by the pregnancy of his wit and parts he soon grew so good and proficient, as to be able to outdo his Instructors. After he had been a pretty while well exercised in the Trade; there chanc’d to ride by a couple of Scholars who had formerly bin of his acquaint[Pg 316]ance. The Scholars had quickly spyed out their old friend among the Gypsies; and their amazement to see him among such society, had well nigh discovered him; but by a sign he prevented their owning him before that crew, and taking one of them aside privately, desired him with a friend to go to an Inn, not far distant thence, promising there to come to them. They accordingly went thither, and he follows: after their first salutations, his friends enquire how he came to lead so odd a life as that was, and to joyn himself with such a cheating, beggarly company. The Scholar Gypsy having given them an account of the necessity, which drove him to that kind of life; told them, that the people he went with were not such Imposters as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of Imagination, and that himself had learnt much of their Art, and improved it further than themselves could. And to evince the truth of what he told them, he said he’d remove into another room, leaving them to discourse together; and upon his return tell them the sum of what they had talked of. Which accordingly he performed, giving them a full account of what had pass’d between them in his absence. The Scholars being amazed at so unexpected a discovery, earnestly desired him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave them satisfaction, by telling them, that what he did was by the power of Imagination, his Phancy binding theirs; and that himself had dictated to them the discourse, they held together, while he was from[Pg 317]them: That there were warrantable wayes of heightening the Imagination to that pitch, as to bind another’s; and that when he had compass’d the whole secret, some parts of which he said he was yet ignorant of, he intended to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned.[Pg 319][Pg 318]”

[Pg 320]

[Pg 321]

Thefact that no porter or other college servant has recently received a D.C.L. is no proof of his insignificance. “The President and your humble servant manage very well between us,” said one porter, with perfect truth. College servants are the corbels and gargoyles that complete the picturesqueness and usefulness of Oxford. The oldest are not so much serviceable as quaint, often grotesque, reminders of an age that has gone; their faces are apt to express grim judgments upon the changes which they have helplessly watched; and they are among the stoutest retainers of the past. The younger are either very much like any other good men-servants, silent, receptive, curious but uninquiring, expensive, and better able to instruct than to learn; or they are average men, with Oxford variations. In spite of their profound knowledge of the richer classes, they remain, as a body, good conservatives, with the half-sarcastic, half-reverent servility of their order. They[Pg 322]do not often change; the men whom they serve are replaced every year by others; and looking on at generation after generation, they are not only skilled and practical psychologists, and almost the only persons in Oxford who wear silk hats on Sunday, but perhaps the most enduring human element in the University. “Well,” says an eighteenth-century “scout” to another to-day, in an undergraduate “dialogue of the dead”—“Well, I suppose gentlemen are no worse and servants no better than in my time?” “Such a thing is impossible” was the reply. Yet one may surmise that they are more plutocratic, at least, than they were, if it be true that every summer at a Scottish hotel one may find “Mr. and Mrs. Brown of—— College, Oxford” on the pages of the visitors’ book, in a handwriting known to the buttery. In the game which they play with the undergraduates, they know all their opponents’ cards. Yet, until a member of the University is admitted to the cellar and pantry parliament, they will always be praised as reticent and discreet. A little inexperience will soon reveal, as the freshman knows, the other qualities of the college servant.

He awakens you every morning by playing with your bath, and is a perpetually recurring background to the sweet disquiet of your last half-hour in bed. In serving you, he serves himself; and late in the day he[Pg 323]is to be seen with a wallet on his back, bent under such “learning’s crumbs” as half-empty wine-bottles and jars of Cooper’s marmalade. In these matters he has a neat running hand, without flourishes. No man has the air of being so much as he the right hand of fate. When he drinks your wine and disappoints a joyous company, when he assumes your best cigars, and leaves only those which were provided for the freshman of taste—so inevitable are his ways that you can only hope sarcastically that he liked the fare. He appears to have a noble scorn of cash, when he asks for it; and you are bound to imitate. All the wisdom of the wise is cheap compared with his manner of beginning a speech with, “If you please, sir, it is usual for freshmen to, ...” while he is dusting your photographs. He is blessed with an incapacity to blush. His politics are those of the majority; his religion has something in common with that of all men. He could be conscientiously recommended for a post in a temple niche or a street corner, with the inscription “For twenty years a mate at sea, and blinded in the pursuit of my duties,” or “Crippled in childhood.” He is equalled only by his “boy,” who is perhaps older than himself. I remember one such. I should like to have known his tailor, who must have had a genius for style, for fitting aptest clothes for men. His coat was as many-pocketed as Panurge’s, and as wonderful. Its bulges and creases were an epitome of——; its “hang” might serve as the one true epitaph, if suspended over his tomb. With all his faults, he had that toleration which the vicious[Pg 324]often extend to the good, but do not often receive in return. He was a fellow of infinite wiles that were wasted but not thrown away in a world of three or four quadrangles and a buttery. Full of traditions, he was their master, not their prey; and though he was the shadow of great names, he seemed conscious of being their inheritor too. For he had served men who had got fellowships and even Rugby or rowing Blues. With leading cases out of this mighty past he defended his misdemeanours and supported his proposals. In vain he toiled after time; he was always a generation behind. If a man failed in “Smalls” or Divinity, he was told that Mr.——, the “Varsity three-quarter,” did no less, and Mr.——, who rowed at Henley and was sent down after a bonfire, was ploughed four times. “Lightly like a flower” he wore his honours, tyrannising over men who never got Blues and were never sent down, and smiling away awe and ridicule alike. “I never saw nor shall see such men as Pirithous, ...” he might have said; it mattered little to him; and even Pirithous was only respected after many years, when he had become an investment of the “boy’s.” He quoted wise saws, was full of advice, offered with a kind of humility and yet indifference, because you were so small a factor in his self-satisfaction.

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