The Past

ALL SAINTS’ CHURCH, FROM TURL STREETAll Saints’ Church was built in 1708 from a design by Dr. Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church. The tower, lantern, and spire, which appear in the picture, are well proportioned.There are some ancient half-timbered buildings on the right, and between them and the Church tower, at the south end of Turl Street, is a glimpse of the High Street.North of the nave of the Church, along “The Turl,” shows a portion of the buildings of Lincoln College.

ALL SAINTS’ CHURCH, FROM TURL STREET

All Saints’ Church was built in 1708 from a design by Dr. Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church. The tower, lantern, and spire, which appear in the picture, are well proportioned.There are some ancient half-timbered buildings on the right, and between them and the Church tower, at the south end of Turl Street, is a glimpse of the High Street.North of the nave of the Church, along “The Turl,” shows a portion of the buildings of Lincoln College.

All Saints’ Church was built in 1708 from a design by Dr. Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church. The tower, lantern, and spire, which appear in the picture, are well proportioned.

There are some ancient half-timbered buildings on the right, and between them and the Church tower, at the south end of Turl Street, is a glimpse of the High Street.

North of the nave of the Church, along “The Turl,” shows a portion of the buildings of Lincoln College.

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burnishing, the unused virtue in these abjects. “I have avoided what is called vice,” he said, “because it is so easy, and I do not love easy things;” and for the same reason he frowned but tenderly on those who had not avoided it.

While the sunlight was failing, we were left by ourselves. But Philip was not alone. He had laid his book and ale aside, and looked at the solemn row of empty chairs against the wall. His eyes wore the creative look of eyes that apprehend more than is visible. In those chairs he beheld seated what he called his Loves—the very faces and hair and hands of his dead friends. I have heard him say that they appeared “in their old coats.” Night after night they revisited him—“of terrible aspect,” yet sweet and desirable. They were as saints are to men whose religion is of another name than his. He could say and act nothing which those faces approved not, or which those faint hands would have stayed. Embroidered by the day upon the border of the night, their life was an hour. Out of doors he saw them, too, in well-loved places—gateways above Hinksey, hilltops at Cumnor or Dorchester, Christ Church groves, or fitting Oxford streets—such as (he believed) had something in them which they owed to his passionate contemplation in their midst. There he heard them speak softlier than the wings of fritillaries in Bagley Wood.Si quis amat novit quid hæc vox clamat.... But his own face comes not to satisfy the longing of those who watch as faithfully, with eyes dimmer or of less felicity.[Pg 238]

The Oxford graduate of the past is far too pale a ghost in literature. He lies in old books, like a broken sculpture waiting to be reconstructed, and survives but in an anecdote and from his importance after leaving Oxford for a bishopric or a civil place. For one memory of a Don there are a hundred of soldiers, statesmen, priests, in the quadrangles and streets. He is in danger of being treated as merely the writer of a quaint page among the records of the college muniment-room. Erasmus, Fuller, Wood, Tom Warton, preserve and partly reveal the spirit of the past, and help us to call up something of the lusty, vivid life which the fellows and canons and presidents led in their “days of nature.” There is, for example, a Dean of Christ Church, afterwards Bishop of Oxford and last of Norwich, who has still the breath of life in him, on John Aubrey’s page.

He was “very facetious and a good fellow,” and Ben Jonson’s friend. When a Master of Arts, if not a Bachelor of Divinity, he was often merry at a good ale parlour in Friar Bacon’s study, that welcomed Pepys and stood till 1779. It was rumoured that the building would fall if a more learned man than Bacon entered, a mischance of which the Dean had no fear. When he was a Doctor of Divinity “he sang ballads at the Cross at Abingdon on a market-day.” The usual[Pg 239]ballad-singer could not compete with such a rival, and complained that he sold no ballads. Whereat “the jolly Doctor put off his gown and put on the ballad-singer’s leathern jacket, and being a handsome man, and had a rare full voice,” he had a great audience and a great sale of sheets. His conversation was “extreme pleasant.” He and Dr. Stubbinge, a corpulent Canon of Christ Church, were riding in a dirty lane, when the coach was overturned. “Dr. Stubbinge,” said the Dean, “was up to his elbows in mud, but I was up to the elbows in Stubbinge.” He was a verse-maker, of considerable reputation, of some wit and abundant mirth, with a quaint looking backward upon old places and old times that is almost pathetic in these verses:—

Farewell rewards and fairies,Good housewives now may say,For now foul sluts in dairiesDo fare as well as they.And though they sweep their hearths no lessThan maids were wont to do,Yet who of late for cleanlinessFinds sixpence in her shoe?Lament, lament, old abbeys,The fairies’ lost command;They did but change priests’ babies,But some have changed your land;And all your children sprung from thenceAre now grown Puritans;Who live as changelings ever since,For love of your domains.

Lament, lament, old abbeys,The fairies’ lost command;They did but change priests’ babies,But some have changed your land;And all your children sprung from thenceAre now grown Puritans;Who live as changelings ever since,For love of your domains.

When Bishop of Oxford, he had “an admirable, grave, and venerable aspect.” But his pontifical state[Pg 240]permitted some humanities, and he was married to a pretty wife. “One time,” says Aubrey, “as he was confirming, the country people pressing in to see the ceremony, said he, ‘Bear off there, or I’ll confirm you with my staff.’ Another time, being about to lay his hand on the head of a man very bald, he turns to his chaplain (Lushington) and said, ‘Some dust, Lushington’ (to keep his hand from slipping).” He and Dr. Lushington, of Pembroke College, “a very learned and ingenious man,” would sometimes lock themselves in the wine-cellar. Then he laid down first his episcopal hat, with, “There lies the doctor”; next, his gown, with, “There lies the bishop”; and then ’twas “Here’s to thee, Corbet” and “Here’s to thee, Lushington.” Three years after attaining the bishopric of Norwich he died. “Good-night, Lushington,” were his last words.

There is also in Aubrey another such ruddy memory of a fine old gentleman—a scholar, a thoughtful and genial governor of youth, “a right Church of England man,” and President of Trinity. In gown and surplice and hood “he had a terrible gigantic aspect, with his sharp grey eyes” and snowy hair. He had a rich, digressive mind, “like a hasty pudding, where there was memory, judgment, and fancy all stirred together,” not suited to his day; and began a sermon happily, but not at all to Aubrey’s taste:—

“Being my turn to preach in this place, I went into[Pg 242][Pg 241]

TRINITY COLLEGEThe entrance to the College is under the tower at the west end of the Chapel, which appears towards the right of the picture.The architecture of the Chapel is worthy of being seen, though the covering of green prevents this—a custom carried to excess in Oxford buildings.Opposite, at the extreme left, is a portion of the east end of the Chapel of Balliol College, and the trees are standing in that remnant of an old orchard fronting the Broad which forms the spacious approach to Trinity College.

TRINITY COLLEGE

The entrance to the College is under the tower at the west end of the Chapel, which appears towards the right of the picture.The architecture of the Chapel is worthy of being seen, though the covering of green prevents this—a custom carried to excess in Oxford buildings.Opposite, at the extreme left, is a portion of the east end of the Chapel of Balliol College, and the trees are standing in that remnant of an old orchard fronting the Broad which forms the spacious approach to Trinity College.

The entrance to the College is under the tower at the west end of the Chapel, which appears towards the right of the picture.

The architecture of the Chapel is worthy of being seen, though the covering of green prevents this—a custom carried to excess in Oxford buildings.

Opposite, at the extreme left, is a portion of the east end of the Chapel of Balliol College, and the trees are standing in that remnant of an old orchard fronting the Broad which forms the spacious approach to Trinity College.

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my study to prepare myself for my sermon, and I took down a book that had blue strings, and looked in it, and ’twas sweet Saint Bernard. I chanced to read such a part of it, on such a subject, which has made me to choose this text....”

He concluded, says Aubrey:—

“‘But now I see it is time for me to shut up my book, for I see the doctors’ men come in wiping of their beards from the ale-house.’ He could from the pulpit plainly see them, and ’twas their custom in sermon to go there, and about the end of sermon to return to wait on their masters.”

Undergraduates who pleased him not were warned that he might “bring an hour-glass two hours long” into the hall. He was inexorable towards wearers of long hair, and would cut it off with “the knife that chips the bread on the buttery hatch.” It was his fashion to peep through key-holes in order to find out idlers. Says one: “He scolded the best in Latin of any one that ever he knew.” It seemed to him good discipline to keep at a high standard the beer of Trinity, because he observed that “the houses that had the smallest beer had most drunkards, for it forced them to go into the town to comfort their stomachs.” Yet in his exhortations to a temperate life, he admitted that the men of his college “ate good commons and drank good double beer, and that will get out.” And he was a man of tender and exquisite charity. When he saw that a diligent scholar was also poor, “he would many times put money in at his window,” and gave work in[Pg 246]transcription to servitors who wrote a good hand. His right foot dragged somewhat upon the ground, so that “he gave warning (like the rattlesnake) of his coming,” and an imitative wag of the college “would go so like him that sometimes he would make the whole chapel rise up, imagining he had been entering in.” The Civil War, thinks Aubrey, killed the old man, just before he would have been fifty years President. For it “much grieved him that was wont to be so absolute in the college to be affronted and disrespected by rude soldiers.” The cavaliers and their ladies invaded the college grove to the sound of lute or theorbo. Some of the gaudy women even came, “half dressed, like angels,” to morning chapel. A foot-soldier broke the President’s hour-glass. So he gathered his old russet cloth gown about him and closed his eyes upon the calamity and died, still a fresh and handsome old man.

John Earle, a notable scholar and divine of the seventeenth century, a fellow of Merton, and afterwards Bishop of Worcester and Bishop of Salisbury, has drawn the picture of “a downright scholar,” which I may not omit. Earle had the most concentrated style of any man of his time; each of his sentences is a document. His characters are as clear and firm as the brasses on Merton altar platform, and likely to endure as long.

“A downright scholar,” he writes, “is one that has[Pg 248][Pg 247]

INTERIOR OF THE LIBRARY OF MERTON COLLEGEThe newel posts, balusters, and hand-rails of the staircase leading to the ground-floor show in the centre of the picture, to the right and left of which are bookcases and the quaint “Jacobean” screens peculiar to this Library.The ribbed barrel roof is covered with timber, the dormer windows which light the Library appearing on the left, over the staircase.An old oak coffer, bound with iron, is placed to the left of the staircase.

INTERIOR OF THE LIBRARY OF MERTON COLLEGE

The newel posts, balusters, and hand-rails of the staircase leading to the ground-floor show in the centre of the picture, to the right and left of which are bookcases and the quaint “Jacobean” screens peculiar to this Library.The ribbed barrel roof is covered with timber, the dormer windows which light the Library appearing on the left, over the staircase.An old oak coffer, bound with iron, is placed to the left of the staircase.

The ribbed barrel roof is covered with timber, the dormer windows which light the Library appearing on the left, over the staircase.

An old oak coffer, bound with iron, is placed to the left of the staircase.

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much learning in the ore, unwrought and untried, which time and experience fashions and refines. He is good metal in the inside, though rough and unsecured without, and therefore hated of the courtier that is quite contrary. The time has got the vein of making him ridiculous, and men laugh at him by tradition, and no unlucky absurdity but is put upon his profession, and done like a scholar. But his fault is only this, that his mind is somewhat much taken up with his mind, and his thoughts not laden with any carriage besides. He has not put on the quaint garb of the age, which is now become a man’s total. He has not humbled his meditations to the industry of compliment, nor afflicted his brain in an elaborate leg. His body is not set upon nice pins, to be turning and flexible for every motion, but his scrape is homely, and his nod worse. He cannot kiss his hand and cry Madam, nor talk idly enough to bear her company. His smacking of a gentlewoman is somewhat too savoury, and he mistakes her nose for her lip. A very woodcock would puzzle him in carving, and he wants the logic of a capon. He has not the glib faculty of gliding over a tale, but his words come squeamishly out of his mouth, and the laughter commonly before the jest. He names this word College too often, and his discourse beats too much on the University. The perplexity of mannerliness will not let him feed, and he is sharp set at an argument when he should cut his meat. He is discarded for a gamester at all games but ‘one and thirty,’ and at tables he reaches not beyond doublets. His[Pg 252]fingers are not long and drawn out to handle a fiddle, but his fist is clenched with the habit of disputing. He ascends a horse somewhat sinisterly, though not on the left side, and they both go jogging in grief together. He is exceedingly censured by the Inns of Court men for that heinous vice being out of fashion. He cannot speak to a dog in his own dialect, and understands Greek better than the language of a falconer. He has been used to a dark room, and dark clothes, and his eyes dazzle at a satin doublet. The hermitage of his study makes him somewhat uncouth in the world, and men make him worse by staring on him. Thus he is silly and ridiculous, and it continues with him for some quarter of a year, out of the University. But practise him a little in men, and brush him over with good company, and he shall outbalance those glisterers as much as a solid substance does a feather, or gold gold lace.” One story is told of him. He was sharp-tempered and much beloved; his servitor was endeared to his faults, and inquired respectfully one day why his master had not boxed his ears. To which he replied “that he thought he had done so; but indeed he had forgot many things that day”; it being the day of Charles I.’s execution. Whereat the servitor wept, and received the admonition unexpectedly for his pains.[Pg 253]

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Whata thing it is to be an undergraduate of the University of Oxford! Next to being a great poet or a financier, there is nothing so absolute open to a man. For several years he is the nursling of a great tradition in a fair city: and the memory of it is above his chief joy. His follies are hallowed, his successes exalted, by the dispensation of the place. Surely the very air whispers of wisdom and the beautiful, he thinks—

Planius et melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit!

That time is the one luxury he never regrets. It is a second childhood, as blithe and untroubled as the first, and with this advantage over the first: that it is not only good, but he knows that it is good. What games! what books! what walks! what affections! are his. Time passes, we say, although it is we—like children that see the square fields receding from their swift train—that pass. Yet, with these things in Oxford, he seems to lure time a little way with him[Pg 256]upon the road. The liberty of a man and the license of a child are his together. Of course, he abuses them. He uses them, too. Hence the admirable independence of the undergraduate, which has drawn upon him the excommunication of those whose concern is with the colour and cut of clothes. He is the only true Bohemian, because he cannot help it—does not try to be—and does not know it. He is the true Democrat, and condescension is far less common than servility in his domain. He alone keeps quite inviolate the principle of freedom of speech. It is indeed true that, as anywhere else, fools are exclusive as regards clever men and different kinds of fools; and snobs, as regards all but themselves. But theirs is a rare and lonely life. At Christ Church they have actually a pool, in the centre of their great quadrangle, for the baptism of those who have not learned these fine traditions; it is appropriately called after Mercury, to whom men used to sacrifice pigs, and especially lambs and young goats. And there is no college in Oxford where any but the incompatible are kept apart, and few where that distinction is really preserved. As befits a prince in his own palace, the undergraduate usually dispenses with hypocrisy and secrecy, and thus gives an opportunity to the imaginative stranger. Such an one drew a lurid picture of a horde of wealthy bacchanals, making night hideous with the tormenting of a poor scholar. It was not said whether the sufferer was in the habit of doing nasty and dishonourable things, or had funked at football, or worn ringlets over his collar: it was[Pg 258][Pg 257]

CHRIST CHURCH COLLEGE—TOM QUADRANGLEThe front of the picture is occupied by part of the basin of the fountain, from the centre of which rises a pedestal bearing a figure in bronze of “Mercury” (restored). In reality the figure no longer shows above the water-lilies in the basin, but engravings of views of the Quadrangle in the eighteenth century, in which a figure of Mercury appears, are still to be seen, and the fountain was once called “The Mercury.”The entrance gateway to the College and a portion of Tom Tower appear in the background.

CHRIST CHURCH COLLEGE—TOM QUADRANGLE

The front of the picture is occupied by part of the basin of the fountain, from the centre of which rises a pedestal bearing a figure in bronze of “Mercury” (restored). In reality the figure no longer shows above the water-lilies in the basin, but engravings of views of the Quadrangle in the eighteenth century, in which a figure of Mercury appears, are still to be seen, and the fountain was once called “The Mercury.”The entrance gateway to the College and a portion of Tom Tower appear in the background.

The entrance gateway to the College and a portion of Tom Tower appear in the background.

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almost certainly one of the remarkable efforts of imagination which are frequently devoted to that famous city and its inhabitants. The patience of the undergraduate is extreme. It is extended to tradesmen and to the sounds of the Salvation Army. He greets bimetallists with tenderness, teetotallers with awe, and vegetarians with a kind of rapture, tempered by a rare spurt of scientific inquiry. If he makes an exception against sentimentalism, he relents in favour of that place, “so late their happy seat,” when he goes down. Mr. Belloc has put that retrospection classically:—

The wealth of youth, we spent it wellAnd decently, as very few can.And is it lost? I cannot tell,And what is more, I doubt if you can....They say that in the unchanging place,Where all we loved is always dear,We meet our morning face to face,And find at last our twentieth year....They say (and I am glad they say)It is so; and it may be so:It may be just the other way;I cannot tell. But this I know:From quiet homes and first beginning,Out to the undiscovered ends,There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,But laughter and the love of friends.. . . . . . . . . .But something dwindles, oh! my peers,And something cheats the heart and passes,And Tom that meant to shake the yearsHas come to merely rattling glasses.[Pg 262]And He, the Father of the Flock,Is keeping Burmesans in order,An exile on a lonely rock,That overlooks the Chinese border.And one (myself I mean—no less),Ah! will Posterity believe it—Not only don’t deserve success,But hasn’t managed to achieve it.Not even this peculiar townHas ever fixed a friendship firmer,But—one is married, one’s gone down,And one’s a Don, and one’s in Burmah.. . . . . . . . . .And oh! the days, the days, the days,When all the four were off together;The infinite deep of summer haze,The roaring boast of autumn weather!. . . . . . . . . .I will not try the reach again,I will not set my sail alone,To moor a boat bereft of menAt Yarnton’s tiny docks of stone.But I will sit beside the fire,And put my hands before my eyes,And trace, to fill my heart’s desire,The last of all our Odysseys.The quiet evening kept the tryst:Beneath an open sky we rode,And mingled with a wandering mistAlong the perfect Evenlode....

The wealth of youth, we spent it wellAnd decently, as very few can.And is it lost? I cannot tell,And what is more, I doubt if you can....

They say that in the unchanging place,Where all we loved is always dear,We meet our morning face to face,And find at last our twentieth year....

They say (and I am glad they say)It is so; and it may be so:It may be just the other way;I cannot tell. But this I know:

From quiet homes and first beginning,Out to the undiscovered ends,There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,But laughter and the love of friends.. . . . . . . . . .But something dwindles, oh! my peers,And something cheats the heart and passes,And Tom that meant to shake the yearsHas come to merely rattling glasses.[Pg 262]And He, the Father of the Flock,Is keeping Burmesans in order,An exile on a lonely rock,That overlooks the Chinese border.

And one (myself I mean—no less),Ah! will Posterity believe it—Not only don’t deserve success,But hasn’t managed to achieve it.

Not even this peculiar townHas ever fixed a friendship firmer,But—one is married, one’s gone down,And one’s a Don, and one’s in Burmah.. . . . . . . . . .And oh! the days, the days, the days,When all the four were off together;The infinite deep of summer haze,The roaring boast of autumn weather!. . . . . . . . . .I will not try the reach again,I will not set my sail alone,To moor a boat bereft of menAt Yarnton’s tiny docks of stone.

But I will sit beside the fire,And put my hands before my eyes,And trace, to fill my heart’s desire,The last of all our Odysseys.

The quiet evening kept the tryst:Beneath an open sky we rode,And mingled with a wandering mistAlong the perfect Evenlode....

The average man seldom gets into a book, though he often writes one. Yet who would not like to paint him or have him painted, for once and for ever! And,a fortiori, who would not wish the same for the average[Pg 263]undergraduate? I can but hint at his glories, as in an architect’s elevation. For he is neither rich nor poor, neither tall nor short, neither of aristocratic birth nor ignobly bred. Briefly, Providence has shielded him from the pain and madness of extremes. He plays football, cricket, rackets, hockey, golf, tennis, croquet, whist, poker, bridge. In neither will he excel; yet in some one he will for an hour be conspicuous, if only at a garden-party or on a village green. He never rashly ventures in the matter of dress, and when his friends who are above the average are wearing very green tweeds, he will be just green enough to be passable, and yet so subdued as not to be questioned by those who stick to grey. He is never punctual; on the other hand, he is never very late. In conversation, he will avoid eloquence for fear of long-windedness, and silence for fear of appearing original or rude: at most, he will be frivolous to the extent of remarking, about a pretty face, ‘Oh, she isalpha plus!’ As a freshman only will he make any great mistakes. Thus, he will have several meerschaums; will assemble at a wine party the most incompatible men, and conclude it by all but losing his self-respect; and will for a term use Oxford slang as if it were a chosen tongue, and learn a few witticisms at the expense of shopkeepers, if he is free by the accident of birth. But he will speedily forget these things and become a person with blunt and tender consideration for others, and may be popular because of his excellent cigarettes or his ready listening. He will in a few years learn to row honestly, if not[Pg 264]brilliantly; to know what is fitting to be said and read in the matter of books; to discuss the theatre, the government, the cricket season, in an inoffensive way. Add to this pale vision the colouring implied by a college hat-band and a decent, ruddy face, and you have the not too vigorous or listless, manly man, with modest bearing and fearless voice, who plays his part so well in life, and now and then—on a punt, or at a wedding—reveals to the discerning observer his university. The late Grant Allen knew him by his broad, brown back, and his habit of bathing in winter in a rough sea.

He has come to Oxford, much as a man of old would have come to some fabled island, out beyond the pillars of Hercules; for even so Oxford is out beyond the world which he knows—

The Graces and the rosy-bosomed HoursThither all their bounties bring.

Perhaps his schoolmasters have been Oxford men. But that has not disillusioned him. He has been in the habit of thinking of them as men who, for some fault or misfortune, have come back from the fortunate islands, discontented or empty. They have not known how to use the place: he knows, or will learn to know; and he dreams of it in his peaceful country school, or at a London school, where boys go as to a place of business, and make verses as others cast accounts. To[Pg 265]some Oxford men, Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” is the finest poem that was ever written; and he knows it by heart already; has sighed ignorantly over it; and as his train draws near to Oxford, he repeats it to himself, with a most fantastic fervour, as if it were half a prayer and half a love-song, and certainly more than half his own. The pleasant excited uncertainty, as to whether he has seen the Fyfield elm, or whether that oaken slope was Cumnor, and his happy surmises while his eye skips from tower to tower in the distance, blind him to the drizzling, holiday air of the platform: he has no time to remember how it differs from Eastbourne: he is so set upon beholding the High Street that he is indifferent to the tram and the mean streets, and is not reminded of Wandsworth. The cabman is to him a supernal, Olympian cabman. He pays the man heavily, and quotes from Sophocles as he steps through the lodge gate, amid the greetings of porter, messenger, and a scout or two. The magnificent quadrangle gives a dignity to his walk that is laughable to senior men. He goes from room to room, making his choice, and knows not whether to be attracted by the spaciousness of one suite, or the miniature sufficiency of another,—the wainscot of a third, the traditions of a fourth, or the view from a fifth.

In the evening, at dinner in the college hall, he puts all of his emotion into the grace before meat, and by his slow, loving utterance robs the fellows of their chairs and the undergraduates of their talk. He scans curiously the healthy or clever or human faces of his[Pg 266]contemporaries at the table. As all visible things are symbols, he supposes that something, which he is too inexperienced to understand, distinguishes these youths from the others with similar faces in London or elsewhere. He answers a few questions about his school and his athletic record. Then he falls back upon the coats of arms and the founders’ portraits on the walls, and is glad when he has returned to his room. There, the unpacking and arrangement of a hundred books fill the hours until long after midnight. For he kneels and opens and reads a page, and dreams and reopens, and goes to the window, to listen or watch. Not a book but he finds flat and uninspired, and quite unworthy of his first Oxford night. He wants something more megalophonous than De Quincey, more perfect than Pater, more fantastic than Browne, more sweet than Newman,—something that shall be witty, spiritual, gay, and solemn in a breath,—something in short that was never yet written by pen and ink, although often inspired by a night like this.

The eager hours and unreluctant yearsAs on a dawn-illumined mountain stood,Trampling to silence their loud hopes and fears,Darkening each other with their multitude,And cried aloud, Liberty!

And so he sleeps; but in spite of his great dreams, he is not disappointed when he looks out upon the glorious company of the spires and towers of Oxford. He rises early, and is surprised when he meets only the college cat in the quadrangle, and the gate is[Pg 267]shut. But he returns quite cheerfully to his room, to read Virgil while the dreamy sky is still tender with the parting touch of night.

After breakfast, and some disbursements to porter and scout, he begins to make acquaintances, over a newspaper in the junior common room, or at a preliminary visit to his tutor. With one, he walks up and down High Street: he learns which are the tailors and which are not. With another, he goes out to Parson’s Pleasure, and likes the willows of Mesopotamia, and sees New College Tower: he wants to loiter in the churchyard of Holy Cross, but is scornfully reminded that Byron did much the same. Queen’s College inspires his companion with the remark that Queen in Oxford is called “Quagger.” The Martyr’s Memorial calls forth “Maggers Memugger”; Worcester, “Wuggins”; Jesus, “Jaggers”: and he is much derided when he supposes that the scouts use these terms.

After luncheon, he cannot get free, but must watch football or the humours of “tubbing” on the river. His companions, with all the easy omniscience of public-school boys, are so busy telling him what’s what, that he learns little of what is. And at tea, he is as wise as they, and has the tired emotion of one who has been through fairyland on a motor car.

A week in this style broadens his horizon; his optimism, still strong, embraces mankind and excludes most men. A series of teas with senior men and a crowd of contemporaries fails to exhilarate him. The[Pg 268]shy are silent: the rest talk about their schools; appear advanced men of the world; and shock their seniors, who in their turn dispense tales about dons, and useful information: and he feels ashamed to be silent and contemptuous of what is said. His grace in hall has become so portentous that his neighbour hums the Dead March inSaulby way of accompaniment.

With some misgiving he goes alone to his room, sports his oak—which others so often do for him when he is out—and puts his room in order. His college shield, brilliantly and incorrectly blazoned, hangs above the door. Photographs of his newest acquaintances rest for the time upon his desk. He has not yet learned to respect the photograph of a Botticelli above the mantelpiece, and has tucked under its frame a caricature of some college worthy, with visiting-cards, notes of invitation, a table of work, and his firstmenu. On the mantelpiece are photographs that recall tenderer things, along with his meerschaum and straight-grained briar. For a minute he is interrupted by a kick, an undeniable shout, a cigar, and behind it the captain of Rugby football.

“Can you play?” says the captain.

“I have never tried,” says the freshman, modestly.

The captain retires, after conferring an indignity in pert monosyllables, and familiarly inquiring after “all your aunts.”

“How do you know I have any aunts, Mr.——?” he inquires.

“Oh,” replies the captain, “I never heard of a[Pg 270][Pg 269]

HOLYWELL CHURCHHolywell is the Campo Santo of Oxford, and many names famous in her history are found there.The almost ruined cottage and desolate garden make a suitable foreground.The view is from the north-west.

HOLYWELL CHURCH

Holywell is the Campo Santo of Oxford, and many names famous in her history are found there.The almost ruined cottage and desolate garden make a suitable foreground.The view is from the north-west.

Holywell is the Campo Santo of Oxford, and many names famous in her history are found there.

The almost ruined cottage and desolate garden make a suitable foreground.

The view is from the north-west.

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[Pg 271]

nephew without an aunt, and I am sure you couldn’t do without several.”

“I wonder why he came to Oxford,” reflects the freshman.

“He’s mistaken his calling,” chuckles the other on the way downstairs.

The freshman lights his meerschaum (holding it in a silk handkerchief), and begins to make a plan for three or four years. But he never completes it. He believes Oxford to be as a fine sculptor, and wishes to put himself in its hands in such a way as to be best shapen by the experience, in a “wise passiveness.” He wants to be a scholar, and fears to be a pedant. He wants to learn a wise and graceful habit with his fellow-men, and fears to be what he hears called a gentleman. He wants to test his enthusiasm and prejudices, and fears to be a Philistine. He wants to taste pleasure delicately, and fears to be aviveuror an æsthete. None of these aims is altogether conscious or precise; yet it is some such combination that he sees before him, faint and possible, at the end of three or four years. Nor has he any aim beyond that. He will work, but at what? Neither has he realised that he will be alone and unhelped.

At first the loneliness is a great, and even at times a delirious, pleasure; and whether he is in a church, or in the fields, or among books, it is almost sensual, and never critical. Oxford is, as it were, doing his living for him. He is as powerless to influence the passage of his days as to plan the architecture of his[Pg 274]dreams. He only awakens at his meals with contemporaries, and sometimes at interviews with tutors. The former find him dull and superior. The latter tell him that in his work he is indeed gathering honey, but filling no combs; and find him ungainly and vague. He consoles himself with the reflection that he is not becoming a pedant or a careless liver. He writes verses to celebrate the melodious days he lives. All influences of men fall idly upon him—

They on us were rolledBut kept us not awake.

The digressive habit of mind not only grows upon him; he cultivates it. His tutor says that it is impossible to give a title to his best essays. Long, lonely evenings with books only encourage the habit. But he can defend it, and laughs at criticism. Shakespeare’s dramas, he says, flow through the centuries, like the Nile; his flood is not so vast, that it may not be aggrandised by many a tributary. It has come down to us vaster than when it reached Milton or Gray, not only by definite commentary, but by the shy emotions of a myriad readers. We add to it, he says triumphantly, by our digressions; and what revelation it may make in consequence, to a far future generation, we cannot guess. In his pursuit of words, which soon enthrall him, he goes far, rather than deep. Wherever the word has been cherished for its own sake, in all “decadent” literature, he makes his mind a home. He begins to write, but in a style[Pg 275]which, along with his ornate penmanship, would occupy a lifetime, and result in onebrochureor half a dozen sonnets. It is a kind of higher philately. But it takes him to strange and fascinating byways in literature. He loves the grotesque. Now and then, he lets fall a quotation or even a dissertation on such a book at dinner, and suddenly he is launched into popularity.

First he is hailed as a decadent, and shrinks. When the shrinking is over, he secretly falls in love with the half-contemptuous title, and seeks others who accept it. Now he is never by himself. Those with whom he has no sympathies like him because he happens to knowPantagrueland a few books such as some undergraduates keep between false covers. His room is fragrant with unseasonable flowers, with the perfume of burning juniper, burning cassia, and cedar, and sweet oils. What if the honourable ghosts of Oxford frown upon his strange devotions? He is at least living a life that could not persist elsewhere. At chapel, he is reading Theophrastus. He is studying an undercurrent of the Italian Renaissance at a lecture on Thucydides. As if he were to live for ever, and in Oxford, his existence is such that his stay in Oxford or in life becomes precarious. He is reputed to be a connoisseur in wines, pictures, and sixteenth-century furniture. He is a Roman Catholic by profession, an agnostic by conviction; yet no religion or superstition is quite safe from his patronage. He mistakes the recrudescence of childishness for a sad and wise maturity. Freshmen are struck by his listless gaiety and the unkind[Pg 276]and seeming wise solemnity of his light expressions. If to sit sumptuous and still, to discourse melodiously of everything or nothing, to be courteous, sentimental, cold, and rude in turns, were wisdom, he is wise. He acquires the lofty cynicism of the under-informed and the over-fed. He can talk with ease and point, about the merely married don, about virtue as the fine which the timid pay to the bold, about the dulness of enthusiasm and the strange beauty of grey. At what is temperate and modest he throws satire with a bitterness enhanced by a secret affection for what he lapidates. Like a man who should paint an angel and call it a thief, he narrowly pursues his own choicest veiled gifts with a malicious word. In short, his brilliant conversation proves how much easier it is to think what one says than to say what one thinks. Yet is he now a harder student than he has ever been, and allows nothing to disturb him at his books. He has nodded at European literatures through half their courses, in the lonely hours when his companions are asleep. He is planning again, and realises that it would be a showy thing to get a first class. His conversation becomes gloomy as well as bitter. People suspect that he means what he says; and he mutters in explanation that experience is the basis of life and the ruin of philosophies. His friends simply accept the remark as untrue. He is now often reduced to silence among those who sleep well. He no longer pours a current of fresh and illuminating thought upon things which he not only does not understand, but does not care for, in politics or art.[Pg 277]

He slips out of brilliant company, to enter occasionally among religious circles where they are tolerant of lost sheep, and has begun to pay his smaller bills and to find out what books he must read for a degree, when the examination day arrives. Then he borrows his old dignified look of indolence in the sultry schools, while he writes hard, and secures a second class by means of a legible handwriting, clear style, and amusing irrelevance. He goes down, alone, still with a fascinating tongue, desperate, and yet careless of success, ready to do anything so long as he can escape comfortable and conventional persons, and quite unable to be anything conspicuous, but a man who has been to the garden of the Hesperides and brought back apples that he alone can make appear to be golden in his rare moments of health.

He is one who knows that three or four years at the University is a good investment. He comes up with an open scorn of idlers, both gilded and gifted. Whether he is clever and successful or not, he has a suspicion that dons are underworked, colleges expensive hotels or worse, and is determined to change all that. Not infrequently such a one is perverted by a happy evening with a few acquaintances, early in his first term. If he is not, he is a white elephant. The dons are alarmed by his instructions, the undergraduates by his clothes. “If this were not an old conservative creek,” he seems to say, “promotion would go by merit, and I should[Pg 278]soon be at the top of the tree and begin repairs.” But the University remains unchanged.

He looks about him for a more stealthy passage to his ends.

A vernal impulse, it may be, sends him to a tailor’s shop, and in the unwonted resplendence that follows he is almost a butterfly. In a jocular spirit he calls upon the persons whose invitations he used to ignore. If he is clever or amusing, or apparently labouring under a delusion, he is liked. In his turn he is called upon. He begins to find that there is something in himself which has a taste for all that is human.Homo sum, he mutters, with one of the classical quotations which are to his taste. He will dally with the multitude for an hour or two,—a week,—why not for a term? When he is in the company of the sons of old or wealthy families, it occurs to him that rank and wealth are powerful: it follows, and can be demonstrated, that the power cannot be more justly exercised than in the furthering of honest and meritorious poverty. He will make a concession; possibly another visit to a tailor; perhaps a little champagne. Several discoveries follow.

It would be not only difficult, but contemptible, to play football or to row; yet he can learn to play lawn tennis. He is presently quite at home, if not in love, at garden parties. He mistakes the curious interest of men and women, in one who is entirely different from themselves, for a compliment to his adaptability.

Society bores him rapidly. He has had enough of[Pg 279]vacation visits and picnics during the term, and revives his acquaintance with work and the indolent fellows. But that is not necessarily attractive. Also, his friends and admirers will not let him disappear; and he returns to frivolity in a serious and plotting spirit. He tolerates nearly every one, and in particular the influential. They cultivate him, clearly, for his intelligence, his independence, his originality. Why should he not cultivate them for their own petty endowment? He enters office at the Union. He is elected to presidentships, secretaryships.

He is lucky if he does not learn from others—what he will not easily learn alone—that his resemblance to them is neither his best nor his most useful quality. And so he finds that after all there is nothing in ideals, and steps into a comfortable place in life; or perhaps he does not.

The many-coloured undergraduate looks as if he had been designed by the architect of the “Five Orders Gate” in the Schools’ Quadrangle. His hat, his face, his tie, his waistcoat, his boots, represent the five orders; as in his great original, the Corinthian is predominant, and like that, he would never be thought possible, if he had not been seen. Yet he moves. Despite his elaborate appearance—destined to endure perhaps for all time, or as long as a shop-front—it is impossible to guess what may be his activities. He may be a famous[Pg 280]oarsman or cricketer, in which case his taste forbids him to adopt the broad blue band of his rank, unless there are ladies in Oxford. He may be a hard-working student who adopts this among many methods of showing that his successes fall to him as naturally as Saturday and Sunday. He may be an amateur tragedian, or magazine-wit, or æsthete, who finds the costume less embarrassing although less distinguishing than cosmetics and an overcoat of fur. He may be a billiard-player who has chosen this contrasted, barry, wavy set of colours as his coat of arms, or the perambulatingmannequin d’osierof several tailors, a transcendental sandwich-man. Or he may be a “blood” of many great connections and expenses; genial in his sphere; pleased with the number of his debts and the times he has been ploughed in “Smalls”; hunting or rowing keenly, while he lasts; and except when he has to work (which sends him to sleep), a sitter up at nights over cards and wine—

Strict age and sour Severity,With their grave saws, in slumber lie.We that are of purer fireImitate the starry quire.

Or his great expenses and connections may not exist. He is perhaps a poor and worthless imitation of all that is great,—who does not know Lord X., of whom he tells such dull stories,—whose relatives are neither retired, nor in Army, Navy, or Church,—and entirely respectable in the Vacations, when he earns by his own self-sacrifice what was earned for his models by the[Pg 282][Pg 281]

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