CHAPTER IIA SETTING AND A DATE"I am the captive of your bow and spear, sir. The position has its obligations—on both sides.... Brainy men languishing under an effete system which, when you take good holt of it, is England—just all England.... If you want to realise your assets, you should lease the whole proposition to America for ninety-nine years."Rudyard Kipling:The Captive.IThe men who in 1914 were of military age, as that definition was used on the outbreak of war, were born at earliest in the middle of the eighties. Queen Victoria was to reign for half a generation longer, Lord Beaconsfield was but lately dead, Mr. Gladstone had ahead of him more than a dozen years of life and one more term as prime minister, and Mr. Parnell was appearing for the first time as the maker and breaker of ministries.Abroad, Prince Bismarck was still chancellor to the Emperor William I, and the third French Republic was young enough to be still unsteady on its legs; but, since British fears of Russian aggression had been for the most part interred with the bones of Disraeli's spirited foreign policy, the chief imperial problems related to the yet new British responsibility for Egypt and to border wars and punitive expeditions on the fringe of empire. At home, the conservatives, wagged by thetail of the "fourth party," were coming to terms with the liberal-unionists who had seceded from Mr. Gladstone in 1886; the liberal party, committed to home rule as a first charge, unless the findings of the Parnell commission should discredit its policy, was shelving the rest of its programme and secretly waiting for its leader's death in order to infuse a stronger radicalism than was palatable in the lifetime of a man who had first held office under Sir Robert Peel.On either side of either house, as on either side of the Irish Sea, the dominant political problem from 1885 to 1895 was the problem of Irish self-government: on this old parties were split and new parties formed; from this proceeded the policies and controversies which filled the life of Parliament to the exclusion of almost everything else for the twenty years from 1895 to the great war. In the first home rule bill and the liberal defeat of 1886, in the Parnell commission and the second home rule bill, in the Parnell divorce and the defeat of Mr. Gladstone's last administration, in the constitutional struggle between Lords and Commons from 1893 to 1911, in the Wyndham land legislation, the devolution scheme and the fall of Mr. Wyndham, in the Irish councils bill, the third home rule bill, the threat of rebellion and the outbreak of civil war, English political history lay under the sable shadow of Ireland, English political interests and developments were sacrificed to Irish demands, and English political parties, jointly and severally, one after another, paid for their failure to give Ireland an acceptable form of self-government.Though an Irishman brought up in England may lose the faith, the speech and the nationality of the one country without acquiring those of the other, he will inevitablybe forced into an alternating sympathy with both; and, while he may hesitate to explain the English to the Irish or the Irish to the English, he is bound, by any affection that he may feel for either, to disperse by any means in his power the cloud of tragic misunderstanding which has for so long poisoned the life of both. It was said, in seeming paradox, at a time of diplomatic tension between Great Britain and the United States, that both countries laboured equally under the curse of a common language; and at all times, unless the same words embody the same ideas to both disputants, they will encounter less confusion by translating, however cumbrously, from one language to another. When an American says "gotten", he means "gotten"; but an Englishman is too ready to imagine that he meant to say "got", but unhappily knew no better—until, perhaps, set right. Similarly, a full half of the immemorial friction between Ireland and England arises from the vulgar belief that, because the two peoples employ roughly the same language, they must be one people; the other half from the abysmal ignorance of Ireland exhibited by the English and the no less abysmal ignorance of England exhibited by the Irish. Apart from those who for reasons of sport or business are taken regularly from the one country to the other, there is little intercourse between them: a hundred Englishmen go to France or Italy for one who goes to Ireland; and, without a steadying glimpse of reality to check a too exuberant imagination on either side, the Irishman deduces an England made up of commercial travellers from Liverpool and of six-day trippers to Killarney or Portrush, while the Englishman constructs a figure from the novels of Leverand half persuades himself that Irishmen habitually brandish shillelaghs and welcome bad government for its own sake and for love of a grievance. The literary conception[5]has been somewhat refined by the writings of Shaw and Synge, of Somerville and Ross, but he would be little out of pocket who offered a reward to any Englishman who could distinguish between the intonation of a Galway fisherman and the accent of Sir Edward Carson.Some progress towards understanding will be achieved when it is realised that the Irish derive from an older and different wave of westerly migration and were a civilised and proselytising nation when the English were a pagan collection of barbarian tributaries distracted by the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain. Insulated from Europe by a second sea, Ireland has retained a faith, a poetry and a mysticism which in England could not withstand the materialising influence of commercial development nor the imperial fruits of participation in European politics; the Irish have never regarded industrial pre-eminence as the goalof human energy and ambition, they never will; and they are deaf to the lure of imperialism. Those who confound mysticism with sentiment mistake the most mystical people in Europe for the most sentimental; the Irish are without sentimentality, and their cynicism, once realised, tempts the bewildered alien to doubt their spiritual quality until he discovers that cynicism may be used as protective colouring. In conflict with neighbours of sometimes less generous soul the Irish forgive easily, perhaps they forgive too easily; they never forget, and perhaps it would be for their good if they learned to forget. They are more chivalrous than most of the nations in Europe and more chaste than any. In common with the rest of the world they believe that a man is worthless unless he will die for his ideals; they believe also that an ideal is worthless if men will not die for it. To the English, who in normal times will do anything for an ideal but sacrifice themselves for it and who will risk their necks for anything but an ideal, this fanaticism is as inexplicable as it is exasperating.In all political relations an Irishman interprets patriotism to mean his love for Ireland; in all relations with the British Government Ireland is offered, a year too late, what she would have accepted thankfully a year earlier. When English political parties are vying with one another to press upon Ireland a remedy for which the time has passed, it is hard to recall the days when coercion bill trod on the heels of coercion bill and "twenty years of resolute government" was proposed as the blunt, common-sense method of curing a nation that aspired to independence: Ireland turbulent, it was said, was unfit for self-government, Ireland at peace no longer wanted it. In two hundred and fifty years Englandhad tried every expedient, from the Cromwellian massacres to the Wyndham land act, with the exception of just that political autonomy which she blessed so fervently when it was won by Greece and Italy, Bulgaria, Servia and Roumania. Still the Irish dreamed of a national destiny, still the imperial genius of the English bled Ireland slowly to death. More than a century after the act of union, a conservative ministry discovered that perhaps the Irish really desired to control their own fate; and the twenty years of resolute government ended in an abortive scheme of devolution. It is true that Mr. Wyndham, a great scholar, a greater gentleman and one of the greatest friends that Ireland ever had, was denounced, betrayed and left to die heartbroken; his work lived after him; and, when the Liberal party returned to power in 1906, it was agreed, though not admitted, by all that some concession must be made to the Irish demand for home rule; all in turn now prescribe milk, when brandy is required, and brandy, when oxygen alone will save the patient's life.Day after day and year after year, the political youth of any one who was born after the first home rule bill has been overcast by Ireland; for a moment the dream of O'Connell and Parnell seemed likely to be realised by Redmond; but the shadow descended again in the hour of his death to darken the youth of another generation, as it descended in the hour of Mr. Gladstone's last defeat and retirement.IIIf the party of reform in the last years of the nineteenth century seemed to be waiting for the death of itsleader, the whole English world seems, in retrospect, to have been waiting for the death of the older generation and for the passing of an era which was arrested in its decay by the venerable presence and vigour of the queen and Mr. Gladstone, of Cardinal Manning and Cardinal Newman, of Dr. Spurgeon and Miss Nightingale. The great Victorian age, solid and stable, rich in discovery and invention, richer in literature and art, spanned the historical chasm between the eighteenth century and the twentieth: the political unrest and transition which perplexed the sons of George III had given place to an order so settled that, in the last years of George III's granddaughter, it seemed to defy change; the licence which endured as a legacy of the Napoleonic wars and as a memory of the Regency had been ended by the example and influence of the queen; in material strength and in the bewildering splendour of imperial pageantry, England stood higher than at any time since the last years of Queen Elizabeth. There is a tendency among the shallow-minded of the present day to see only the stiff conventionality and smug complacency of Victorianism, to ridicule its solemnity and to castigate its occasional tastelessness: in the eyes of such critics, Victorianism is to be remembered only by the Albert Memorial. Already in the Queen's last years there might be heard murmurs of revolt against the bloodless rectitude of life which she inspired; hopes were entertained that, when at length the Prince of Wales came to the throne, cheerfulness might be allowed to break in; the English had been on their best behaviour for too long and were profoundly bored.When those who opened their eyes on the second half of the eighties were still young children, the first attackwas made on the outposts of Victorian "respectability": the "new woman" made her appearance, defiantly smoking in public and—until threatened with violence by an outraged and susceptible mob—bicycling about the streets of London in "bloomers"; new ideas were spread, new rights suggested and an alarming new freedom of discussion inaugurated by the plays of Ibsen; a new wave of riches poured into England from the Rand, their possessors resolute to enjoy them without the restrictions of an outworn decorum. The epithet which has become the historic description of these years is "roaring," and, if it described something which by modern standards was mild and blameless, the vigour of the word registers the public misgiving and astonishment at the thing which it described. Nevertheless, though this brawling exuberance gave an earnest of what would come when the brawlers had discredited Victorianism, as yet they misconducted themselves clandestinely or "under the eye of perpetual disapprobation": the nod and frown of the court were still potent; and the rulers of half-a-dozen great houses decided effectively and subject only to the veto of the queen who should be received in the small and envied world known as "society."In the realm of literature, where the writ of social rulers did not run, a steady movement towards intellectual freedom, more permanent in its results and less open to criticism in its course, made itself felt; and few more illuminating contrasts between the mental range of late Victorianism and that of the present day can be presented than by a study of the once forbidden problems which may now be discussed in novels, on the stage and in the press. The free lover and the unmarriedmother have escaped from the tribunal of the moralist into the consulting-room of the pathologist and the workshop of the artist; diseases never before mentioned have supplied the dramatist with a motive; vices still unmentionable furnish a hinted explanation to the psychologist. And between men and women of almost any age there is an unembarrassed interchange of opinion, not always free from the gratification of morbid curiosity, which exceeds the limits even of what may be debated in print. The belief in safety through innocence has been replaced by a belief in safety through knowledge; the war went far towards completing the work begun by the early prophets of women's rights; while the change in outlook must be recorded, there has not yet been time to judge it in its effects on the well-being of the nation or on the spiritual quality of the individual. The revolutionaries of this, as of all other epochs, are too much concerned in pursuing liberty as an end to regard it as a means.To them the restrictions of Victorianism would be as intolerable as its pleasures would be insipid. London, in the nineties, formal and unvarying, was only in session from Easter until Goodwood; and the slave of routine followed his appointed path from Sussex to Cowes, from Cowes to a foreign watering-place or to Scotland and from Scotland, by way of long visits in different parts of the country, to the shires, returning to London in the spring after a taste of cosmopolitanism in the south of France. Once more in England, he attended a succession of parties as punctually and conscientiously as he murmured the responses in church; if they grew irksome, there was no alternative, and, if he absented himself, he incurred the suspicion, in thatintimate small world, of having been left uninvited. So for seven days a week and for twelve weeks of seven days: the week-end party, which now diverts a few and exhausts the rest, only dates from the early nineties; Sunday was always passed in London, with church and church parade, a luncheon party and ceremonial calls to urge the lagging hours.Though the young girl unchaperoned was the young girl abandoned, it is probably the young bachelor who would have most reason to dread the obligations entailed by a plunge back into the nineties. Etiquette ordained that he must leave cards at any house where he had dined or danced; and a call in those strict days, when no one but a sloven would dare to be seen without a tall hat between the months of May and July, postulated that the caller must array himself in frock-coat and all its concomitants and, for a reason still obscure, must carry his hat into the drawing-room. Later, as a concession to human weakness and in imitation of the bar, a morning-coat was permitted; serge suits and bowler hats, exhibiting themselves tentatively at either end of the week, were excused by a presumed sojourn in the country; and then, with the speed of an avalanche, the reign of dandified dowdiness set in, tidying itself slowly into comfort that was also presentable.IIIPolitically, too, it was felt that the passing of the Victorian era would be accompanied by upheaval and a transference of power.The middle-class electorate which ultimately ruledEngland from 1832 to 1867 was extended by the reform bills of the latter year and of 1884 to include the vast majority of the adult male working-classes. At the time of this generous dilution Robert Lowe caustically suggested that it would be well to "educate our masters," and in the middle of his 1868 administration Mr. Gladstone introduced universal elementary education into England. The first children to benefit by this belated afterthought were men and women who were in the early twenties by the time that the generation which is now being described was able to read and to see what others were reading; its members grew up side by side with the numerous progeny of a popular, cheap press, and its future rulers were in a state to digest and discuss political problems for themselves and by themselves.This is not to say that a knowledge of letters gave to democracy political wisdom; it is probable that, while new classes were enabled to spread and to receive political doctrines, later to unite and organise themselves into political bodies, their instinct for affairs became blunted and debased. "Some of us," wrote Lord Bryce inModern Democracies, "remember among the English rustics of sixty years ago shrewd men unable to read, but with plenty of mother wit, and by their strong sense and solid judgement quite as well qualified to vote as are their grandchildren to-day who read a newspaper and revel in the cinema. The first people who ever worked popular government, working it by machinery more complicated than ours, had no printed page to learn from.... These Greek voters learnt their politics not from the printed, and few even from any written page, but by listening to accomplished orators and by talking to one another.... It is thinking that matters, notreading.... In conversation there is a clash of wits, and to that some mental exertion must go.... The man who reads only the newspaper of his own party, and reads its political intelligence in a medley of other stuff, narratives of crimes and descriptions of football matches, need not know that there is more than one side to a question.... The printed page, because it seems to represent some unknown power, is believed more readily than what he hears in talk.... A party organ, suppressing some facts, misrepresenting others, is the worst of all guides.... That impulse to hasty and ill-considered action which was the besetting danger of ruling assemblies swayed by orators, will reappear in the impression simultaneously produced through the press on masses of men all over a large country."It is possible that the last thirty years may come to be regarded, in the development of democracy, as the history of the press rising victorious over the political mass-meeting, even as the political mass-meeting, since the days of Mr. Gladstone's electoral campaign of 1880, had been gradually rising victorious over the House of Commons. It is possible again that the present moment registers the highest point which newspaper influence will reach and that, during the next thirty years, the publicity of the cinematograph and of the poster will rise victorious over the press. The patriotism of the public during the war was kept alive by direct and simple appeals to enlistment and economy; they issued their message from every hoarding and competed for public interest with advertisements for patent foods and soaps. Though its want of dignity may have offended the fastidious, this method of propaganda permitted neither argument nor contradiction; the government stated itscase and plastered the countryside with an exhortation or declaration for which the public paid and which the press could not overtake. Since the war, the government has employed this method of propaganda in more than one industrial dispute: wages and profits, nationalisation and private ownership are debated on convenient walls; it is recognised that, in a democracy, knowledge must not be denied to the people; and, as in the first French revolution, it is believed that the information can be supplied most attractively by the government itself. Robert Lowe, were he still alive, might feel malicious satisfaction in seeing the use to which democracy had put its long-deferred education and the manner in which the ultimate masters of democracy are educated.The immediate effect of diffused, cheap printing and of the power of reading and expression was that democracy became articulate and organised, ready to play in the business of government that part to which it was entitled by its votes, but to which others were by no means ready to admit it. In the conversation and literature of these years may be traced a profound uneasiness at the onward march of labour, and the opponents of democracy vented their fear and hostility in outbursts of almost hysterical bitterness against the ignorant, gullible, self-seeking and rapacious proletariat into whose hands the welfare of the empire had been surrendered.In 1833 Carlyle's Teufelsdröckh had written: "Two men I honour, and no third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman that with earth-made Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too, is the ruggedface, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred." In 1850 the fear of Chartism had purged Carlyle's mind of this veneration, pity and love for a man living manlike, a hardly-entreated brother and a conscript who had been marred in fighting the battles of others. "Consider, in fact," he exhorts his readers, "a body of Six-hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous persons set to consult about 'business' with Twenty-seven millions mostly fools assiduously listening to them, and checking and criticising them—was there ever since the world began, will there ever be till the world end, any 'business' accomplished in these circumstances?"For fifty years, from Carlyle to Kipling, this scorn for a deliberative assembly and this contempt for an electorate which had hitherto been sedulously denied all political education frustrated all attempts to modify the old machine of government and to assimilate the new rulers to the old. "Bigots," said Macaulay, "... never fail to plead in justification of persecution the vices which persecution has engendered. England has been to the Jews less than half a country; and we revile them because they do not feel for England more than a half patriotism. We treat them as slaves, and wonder that they do not regard us as brethren...."With little change of language, the disabilities of the Jews could be paralleled by the disabilities of labour;and both were defended by the same spirit of blatant intolerance which rose in a self-satisfiedcrescendoduring the second half of the nineteenth century, till a cynic might have said that, as there had been no class-antagonism, it would become necessary to create one. Of the present conflict between classes and of any conflict in the immediate future the seeds were sown in the last years of Queen Victoria's reign.IVThe men of this epoch grew up half-way between the second harvest of great nineteenth-century literature and the first crop of the twentieth. In their early boyhood, Tennyson was still Poet Laureate, Browning was still prolific and Swinburne's last song was not yet sung; George Meredith and Thomas Hardy were still in practise as novelists, and Robert Louis Stevenson was approaching the climax of his powers; John Ruskin, though silent, was still alive; the influence of Walter Pater was at its zenith; the reputation of Herbert Spencer stood higher than at any time before or since; and John Morley was in his prime. Among the younger men who were winning fame—with the surge and thunder that heralded the youth of the nineties—was Rudyard Kipling; the seething brain of H. G. Wells was boiling over into scientific romance; and old romance was brought to life by the charm of Anthony Hope. Among those who were doing the work for which a belated fame was reserved were Samuel Butler and Joseph Conrad. For experimenting, adventurous youth the pages ofThe Yellow Booklay open; "the men of thenineties" flashed meteorically across the deafened heavens, and, when they had passed with their falsity and clamour, there was discovered in their train the more abiding genius of Whistler and Beardsley, the precocious, detached perfection of Beerbohm, the occasional beauty of Gray and Dowson, the alternate paste and diamond of Oscar Wilde.These were the last working years of Leighton and Watts, of Holman Hunt and Morris, of Tenniel and Crane; the heyday of Ricketts and Shannon; the morning of Phil May. They were the years, too, of the first illustrated magazines and of thoseStrands, ever memorable to the boys of that generation, in whichSherlock Holmesappeared month after month.A new chapter in dramatic history was opened by Pinero withThe Second Mrs. Tanqueray; and, though Shaw and Barrie were not yet come into their own, though Galsworthy and Barker were not yet articulate, the last decade of the nineteenth century was the summer time of the British stage for a hundred years. Irving ruled still imperially, with Terriss, Forbes Robertson and Wyndham among his marshals; Boucicault, Toole and Bancroft were still alive; it was not yet impossible to find a theatre for serious drama, and the seductions of burlesque and of musical comedy were confined to Daly's and the old Gaiety.The music-halls of that period did not come within the purview of a boy: the humour was too broad, the air too much tainted, the associations too squalid; but in those days the true "variety entertainment"—exhibiting hardly less continuity than the modernrevue—was still to be seen, the old-fashioned chairman still sat at his table surrounded by privileged friends, the priceswere half those of the theatre, it was exceptional for a man to appear in evening dress and inconceivable for a woman of repute to appear at all.The memory of a child is pierced, deeply and without order, by quarter-comprehended sights and sounds. Those were the days of Lottie Collins andTa-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, ofThe Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carloand ofThe Bicycle Made for Two—this last to commemorate the safety bicycle which took England by storm and urged the citizens of London in endless, untiring circles round Regent's Park on Sunday mornings. These were the days of May Yohe andHoney, ma Honey, of Hayden Coffin andSunshine Above, of Albert Chevalier and his coster songs; of Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell in immortal partnership at Drury Lane pantomimes, of Corney Grain—and a piano; of Sims Reeves at the Queen's Hall, old and inexpressibly sweet; of Maskelyne and Cook at the Egyptian Hall, of Moore and Burgess at the St. James' Hall; they were the days of "Niagara" and the old Aquarium.It was in the middle nineties, when the "knife-board" omnibus was still to be seen in the streets, that London was excited by an exhibition of "horseless carriages," though for a few years still a small boy might be driven to Berkeley Square on a summer afternoon, there to draw up under the trees opposite Gunter's and consume raspberry ices. In those days the cows and milk-stall were not yet evicted from St. James' Park; Booksellers Row had not been sacrificed to the improvement of London, which was then more picturesque and less sanitary. Those were the days of the long frost; the days of the Klondike gold-rush, the Jameson raid, the Græco-Turkishwar; days in which a boy heard dying rumours of a "baccarat case," of the Parnell divorce, of Barnie Barnato's death, rumours more active but less intelligible of vast financial operations and vaster crashes.The first five years of life, perhaps the first seven, are the hinterland of memory in which a trail is blazed by word or name and, later, a road straightened and made durable by reading. After seven, memory is in ordered cultivation: after 1895 public events marshal themselves and stand out against the uneventful background of the child's daily life. The fall of the Rosebery government seemed less important than Mr. Gladstone's retirement the year before and, to a boy, neither equalled in excitement the Diamond Jubilee with its thanksgiving-service and procession, its songs and marches, its bunting and illumination. A year later the news-bills stopped every passer-by with the words: "DEATH OF GLADSTONE"; and children who had never seen him cried in the streets of London as they had cried in America or Italy at the passing of Lincoln or Garibaldi.A year later still came rumours of discord in South Africa; and the patriot of the private school waited eagerly for a declaration of war, less eagerly for news that President Kruger had yielded to pressure; the memory of the Spithead review which had followed the massing of an empire's troops at the Diamond Jubilee was still vivid, and in a hundred thousand truculent hearts there lurked the sinister thought that an army and navy were useless if they did not fight and that small nations existed, in the scheme of creation, to be taught sharp lessons. The handful of opponents who cried out on an impious war of aggression were shouted down or manhandled as "pro-Boers" until the cheersof the Irish and of a few radicals, when a British reverse was announced in the House of Commons, convinced the wondering militarists that opposition might be prompted by a moral sense as well as by native factiousness. These were the days ofThe Absent-Minded Beggar, of "Black Friday" and the Fall of Ladysmith, of the aged queen's recruiting-tour in Ireland, of the relief of Mafeking and "Mafeking Night" in London; the days when Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener were sent out to cut short the retribution which the arrogance of a swollen power had called down upon its head, the days of concentration-camps and "the methods of barbarism," of the "Khaki" election, ofThe Islandersand the last despairing shriek of that vulgar ferocity which had brought about this needless and iniquitous bloodshed; the days of Queen Victoria's last illness and death, the approach of peace.The chapter of imperialism which opened with Mr. Chamberlain's ultimatum and ended with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's grant of self-government to the Union of South Africa was only symptomatic of a wider-spread arrogance and savagery. While the war was still in progress, another chapter of history, shorter but not less infamous, was being enacted in the suppression of the Boxer rising and—incidentally—in the looting of the palace at Pekin. It was in the middle of these two excursions that there began the six years' sojourn at Westminster, to which reference was made in the last chapter.
A SETTING AND A DATE
"I am the captive of your bow and spear, sir. The position has its obligations—on both sides.... Brainy men languishing under an effete system which, when you take good holt of it, is England—just all England.... If you want to realise your assets, you should lease the whole proposition to America for ninety-nine years."
Rudyard Kipling:The Captive.
The men who in 1914 were of military age, as that definition was used on the outbreak of war, were born at earliest in the middle of the eighties. Queen Victoria was to reign for half a generation longer, Lord Beaconsfield was but lately dead, Mr. Gladstone had ahead of him more than a dozen years of life and one more term as prime minister, and Mr. Parnell was appearing for the first time as the maker and breaker of ministries.
Abroad, Prince Bismarck was still chancellor to the Emperor William I, and the third French Republic was young enough to be still unsteady on its legs; but, since British fears of Russian aggression had been for the most part interred with the bones of Disraeli's spirited foreign policy, the chief imperial problems related to the yet new British responsibility for Egypt and to border wars and punitive expeditions on the fringe of empire. At home, the conservatives, wagged by thetail of the "fourth party," were coming to terms with the liberal-unionists who had seceded from Mr. Gladstone in 1886; the liberal party, committed to home rule as a first charge, unless the findings of the Parnell commission should discredit its policy, was shelving the rest of its programme and secretly waiting for its leader's death in order to infuse a stronger radicalism than was palatable in the lifetime of a man who had first held office under Sir Robert Peel.
On either side of either house, as on either side of the Irish Sea, the dominant political problem from 1885 to 1895 was the problem of Irish self-government: on this old parties were split and new parties formed; from this proceeded the policies and controversies which filled the life of Parliament to the exclusion of almost everything else for the twenty years from 1895 to the great war. In the first home rule bill and the liberal defeat of 1886, in the Parnell commission and the second home rule bill, in the Parnell divorce and the defeat of Mr. Gladstone's last administration, in the constitutional struggle between Lords and Commons from 1893 to 1911, in the Wyndham land legislation, the devolution scheme and the fall of Mr. Wyndham, in the Irish councils bill, the third home rule bill, the threat of rebellion and the outbreak of civil war, English political history lay under the sable shadow of Ireland, English political interests and developments were sacrificed to Irish demands, and English political parties, jointly and severally, one after another, paid for their failure to give Ireland an acceptable form of self-government.
Though an Irishman brought up in England may lose the faith, the speech and the nationality of the one country without acquiring those of the other, he will inevitablybe forced into an alternating sympathy with both; and, while he may hesitate to explain the English to the Irish or the Irish to the English, he is bound, by any affection that he may feel for either, to disperse by any means in his power the cloud of tragic misunderstanding which has for so long poisoned the life of both. It was said, in seeming paradox, at a time of diplomatic tension between Great Britain and the United States, that both countries laboured equally under the curse of a common language; and at all times, unless the same words embody the same ideas to both disputants, they will encounter less confusion by translating, however cumbrously, from one language to another. When an American says "gotten", he means "gotten"; but an Englishman is too ready to imagine that he meant to say "got", but unhappily knew no better—until, perhaps, set right. Similarly, a full half of the immemorial friction between Ireland and England arises from the vulgar belief that, because the two peoples employ roughly the same language, they must be one people; the other half from the abysmal ignorance of Ireland exhibited by the English and the no less abysmal ignorance of England exhibited by the Irish. Apart from those who for reasons of sport or business are taken regularly from the one country to the other, there is little intercourse between them: a hundred Englishmen go to France or Italy for one who goes to Ireland; and, without a steadying glimpse of reality to check a too exuberant imagination on either side, the Irishman deduces an England made up of commercial travellers from Liverpool and of six-day trippers to Killarney or Portrush, while the Englishman constructs a figure from the novels of Leverand half persuades himself that Irishmen habitually brandish shillelaghs and welcome bad government for its own sake and for love of a grievance. The literary conception[5]has been somewhat refined by the writings of Shaw and Synge, of Somerville and Ross, but he would be little out of pocket who offered a reward to any Englishman who could distinguish between the intonation of a Galway fisherman and the accent of Sir Edward Carson.
Some progress towards understanding will be achieved when it is realised that the Irish derive from an older and different wave of westerly migration and were a civilised and proselytising nation when the English were a pagan collection of barbarian tributaries distracted by the withdrawal of the Roman legions from Britain. Insulated from Europe by a second sea, Ireland has retained a faith, a poetry and a mysticism which in England could not withstand the materialising influence of commercial development nor the imperial fruits of participation in European politics; the Irish have never regarded industrial pre-eminence as the goalof human energy and ambition, they never will; and they are deaf to the lure of imperialism. Those who confound mysticism with sentiment mistake the most mystical people in Europe for the most sentimental; the Irish are without sentimentality, and their cynicism, once realised, tempts the bewildered alien to doubt their spiritual quality until he discovers that cynicism may be used as protective colouring. In conflict with neighbours of sometimes less generous soul the Irish forgive easily, perhaps they forgive too easily; they never forget, and perhaps it would be for their good if they learned to forget. They are more chivalrous than most of the nations in Europe and more chaste than any. In common with the rest of the world they believe that a man is worthless unless he will die for his ideals; they believe also that an ideal is worthless if men will not die for it. To the English, who in normal times will do anything for an ideal but sacrifice themselves for it and who will risk their necks for anything but an ideal, this fanaticism is as inexplicable as it is exasperating.
In all political relations an Irishman interprets patriotism to mean his love for Ireland; in all relations with the British Government Ireland is offered, a year too late, what she would have accepted thankfully a year earlier. When English political parties are vying with one another to press upon Ireland a remedy for which the time has passed, it is hard to recall the days when coercion bill trod on the heels of coercion bill and "twenty years of resolute government" was proposed as the blunt, common-sense method of curing a nation that aspired to independence: Ireland turbulent, it was said, was unfit for self-government, Ireland at peace no longer wanted it. In two hundred and fifty years Englandhad tried every expedient, from the Cromwellian massacres to the Wyndham land act, with the exception of just that political autonomy which she blessed so fervently when it was won by Greece and Italy, Bulgaria, Servia and Roumania. Still the Irish dreamed of a national destiny, still the imperial genius of the English bled Ireland slowly to death. More than a century after the act of union, a conservative ministry discovered that perhaps the Irish really desired to control their own fate; and the twenty years of resolute government ended in an abortive scheme of devolution. It is true that Mr. Wyndham, a great scholar, a greater gentleman and one of the greatest friends that Ireland ever had, was denounced, betrayed and left to die heartbroken; his work lived after him; and, when the Liberal party returned to power in 1906, it was agreed, though not admitted, by all that some concession must be made to the Irish demand for home rule; all in turn now prescribe milk, when brandy is required, and brandy, when oxygen alone will save the patient's life.
Day after day and year after year, the political youth of any one who was born after the first home rule bill has been overcast by Ireland; for a moment the dream of O'Connell and Parnell seemed likely to be realised by Redmond; but the shadow descended again in the hour of his death to darken the youth of another generation, as it descended in the hour of Mr. Gladstone's last defeat and retirement.
If the party of reform in the last years of the nineteenth century seemed to be waiting for the death of itsleader, the whole English world seems, in retrospect, to have been waiting for the death of the older generation and for the passing of an era which was arrested in its decay by the venerable presence and vigour of the queen and Mr. Gladstone, of Cardinal Manning and Cardinal Newman, of Dr. Spurgeon and Miss Nightingale. The great Victorian age, solid and stable, rich in discovery and invention, richer in literature and art, spanned the historical chasm between the eighteenth century and the twentieth: the political unrest and transition which perplexed the sons of George III had given place to an order so settled that, in the last years of George III's granddaughter, it seemed to defy change; the licence which endured as a legacy of the Napoleonic wars and as a memory of the Regency had been ended by the example and influence of the queen; in material strength and in the bewildering splendour of imperial pageantry, England stood higher than at any time since the last years of Queen Elizabeth. There is a tendency among the shallow-minded of the present day to see only the stiff conventionality and smug complacency of Victorianism, to ridicule its solemnity and to castigate its occasional tastelessness: in the eyes of such critics, Victorianism is to be remembered only by the Albert Memorial. Already in the Queen's last years there might be heard murmurs of revolt against the bloodless rectitude of life which she inspired; hopes were entertained that, when at length the Prince of Wales came to the throne, cheerfulness might be allowed to break in; the English had been on their best behaviour for too long and were profoundly bored.
When those who opened their eyes on the second half of the eighties were still young children, the first attackwas made on the outposts of Victorian "respectability": the "new woman" made her appearance, defiantly smoking in public and—until threatened with violence by an outraged and susceptible mob—bicycling about the streets of London in "bloomers"; new ideas were spread, new rights suggested and an alarming new freedom of discussion inaugurated by the plays of Ibsen; a new wave of riches poured into England from the Rand, their possessors resolute to enjoy them without the restrictions of an outworn decorum. The epithet which has become the historic description of these years is "roaring," and, if it described something which by modern standards was mild and blameless, the vigour of the word registers the public misgiving and astonishment at the thing which it described. Nevertheless, though this brawling exuberance gave an earnest of what would come when the brawlers had discredited Victorianism, as yet they misconducted themselves clandestinely or "under the eye of perpetual disapprobation": the nod and frown of the court were still potent; and the rulers of half-a-dozen great houses decided effectively and subject only to the veto of the queen who should be received in the small and envied world known as "society."
In the realm of literature, where the writ of social rulers did not run, a steady movement towards intellectual freedom, more permanent in its results and less open to criticism in its course, made itself felt; and few more illuminating contrasts between the mental range of late Victorianism and that of the present day can be presented than by a study of the once forbidden problems which may now be discussed in novels, on the stage and in the press. The free lover and the unmarriedmother have escaped from the tribunal of the moralist into the consulting-room of the pathologist and the workshop of the artist; diseases never before mentioned have supplied the dramatist with a motive; vices still unmentionable furnish a hinted explanation to the psychologist. And between men and women of almost any age there is an unembarrassed interchange of opinion, not always free from the gratification of morbid curiosity, which exceeds the limits even of what may be debated in print. The belief in safety through innocence has been replaced by a belief in safety through knowledge; the war went far towards completing the work begun by the early prophets of women's rights; while the change in outlook must be recorded, there has not yet been time to judge it in its effects on the well-being of the nation or on the spiritual quality of the individual. The revolutionaries of this, as of all other epochs, are too much concerned in pursuing liberty as an end to regard it as a means.
To them the restrictions of Victorianism would be as intolerable as its pleasures would be insipid. London, in the nineties, formal and unvarying, was only in session from Easter until Goodwood; and the slave of routine followed his appointed path from Sussex to Cowes, from Cowes to a foreign watering-place or to Scotland and from Scotland, by way of long visits in different parts of the country, to the shires, returning to London in the spring after a taste of cosmopolitanism in the south of France. Once more in England, he attended a succession of parties as punctually and conscientiously as he murmured the responses in church; if they grew irksome, there was no alternative, and, if he absented himself, he incurred the suspicion, in thatintimate small world, of having been left uninvited. So for seven days a week and for twelve weeks of seven days: the week-end party, which now diverts a few and exhausts the rest, only dates from the early nineties; Sunday was always passed in London, with church and church parade, a luncheon party and ceremonial calls to urge the lagging hours.
Though the young girl unchaperoned was the young girl abandoned, it is probably the young bachelor who would have most reason to dread the obligations entailed by a plunge back into the nineties. Etiquette ordained that he must leave cards at any house where he had dined or danced; and a call in those strict days, when no one but a sloven would dare to be seen without a tall hat between the months of May and July, postulated that the caller must array himself in frock-coat and all its concomitants and, for a reason still obscure, must carry his hat into the drawing-room. Later, as a concession to human weakness and in imitation of the bar, a morning-coat was permitted; serge suits and bowler hats, exhibiting themselves tentatively at either end of the week, were excused by a presumed sojourn in the country; and then, with the speed of an avalanche, the reign of dandified dowdiness set in, tidying itself slowly into comfort that was also presentable.
Politically, too, it was felt that the passing of the Victorian era would be accompanied by upheaval and a transference of power.
The middle-class electorate which ultimately ruledEngland from 1832 to 1867 was extended by the reform bills of the latter year and of 1884 to include the vast majority of the adult male working-classes. At the time of this generous dilution Robert Lowe caustically suggested that it would be well to "educate our masters," and in the middle of his 1868 administration Mr. Gladstone introduced universal elementary education into England. The first children to benefit by this belated afterthought were men and women who were in the early twenties by the time that the generation which is now being described was able to read and to see what others were reading; its members grew up side by side with the numerous progeny of a popular, cheap press, and its future rulers were in a state to digest and discuss political problems for themselves and by themselves.
This is not to say that a knowledge of letters gave to democracy political wisdom; it is probable that, while new classes were enabled to spread and to receive political doctrines, later to unite and organise themselves into political bodies, their instinct for affairs became blunted and debased. "Some of us," wrote Lord Bryce inModern Democracies, "remember among the English rustics of sixty years ago shrewd men unable to read, but with plenty of mother wit, and by their strong sense and solid judgement quite as well qualified to vote as are their grandchildren to-day who read a newspaper and revel in the cinema. The first people who ever worked popular government, working it by machinery more complicated than ours, had no printed page to learn from.... These Greek voters learnt their politics not from the printed, and few even from any written page, but by listening to accomplished orators and by talking to one another.... It is thinking that matters, notreading.... In conversation there is a clash of wits, and to that some mental exertion must go.... The man who reads only the newspaper of his own party, and reads its political intelligence in a medley of other stuff, narratives of crimes and descriptions of football matches, need not know that there is more than one side to a question.... The printed page, because it seems to represent some unknown power, is believed more readily than what he hears in talk.... A party organ, suppressing some facts, misrepresenting others, is the worst of all guides.... That impulse to hasty and ill-considered action which was the besetting danger of ruling assemblies swayed by orators, will reappear in the impression simultaneously produced through the press on masses of men all over a large country."
It is possible that the last thirty years may come to be regarded, in the development of democracy, as the history of the press rising victorious over the political mass-meeting, even as the political mass-meeting, since the days of Mr. Gladstone's electoral campaign of 1880, had been gradually rising victorious over the House of Commons. It is possible again that the present moment registers the highest point which newspaper influence will reach and that, during the next thirty years, the publicity of the cinematograph and of the poster will rise victorious over the press. The patriotism of the public during the war was kept alive by direct and simple appeals to enlistment and economy; they issued their message from every hoarding and competed for public interest with advertisements for patent foods and soaps. Though its want of dignity may have offended the fastidious, this method of propaganda permitted neither argument nor contradiction; the government stated itscase and plastered the countryside with an exhortation or declaration for which the public paid and which the press could not overtake. Since the war, the government has employed this method of propaganda in more than one industrial dispute: wages and profits, nationalisation and private ownership are debated on convenient walls; it is recognised that, in a democracy, knowledge must not be denied to the people; and, as in the first French revolution, it is believed that the information can be supplied most attractively by the government itself. Robert Lowe, were he still alive, might feel malicious satisfaction in seeing the use to which democracy had put its long-deferred education and the manner in which the ultimate masters of democracy are educated.
The immediate effect of diffused, cheap printing and of the power of reading and expression was that democracy became articulate and organised, ready to play in the business of government that part to which it was entitled by its votes, but to which others were by no means ready to admit it. In the conversation and literature of these years may be traced a profound uneasiness at the onward march of labour, and the opponents of democracy vented their fear and hostility in outbursts of almost hysterical bitterness against the ignorant, gullible, self-seeking and rapacious proletariat into whose hands the welfare of the empire had been surrendered.
In 1833 Carlyle's Teufelsdröckh had written: "Two men I honour, and no third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman that with earth-made Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too, is the ruggedface, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred." In 1850 the fear of Chartism had purged Carlyle's mind of this veneration, pity and love for a man living manlike, a hardly-entreated brother and a conscript who had been marred in fighting the battles of others. "Consider, in fact," he exhorts his readers, "a body of Six-hundred and fifty-eight miscellaneous persons set to consult about 'business' with Twenty-seven millions mostly fools assiduously listening to them, and checking and criticising them—was there ever since the world began, will there ever be till the world end, any 'business' accomplished in these circumstances?"
For fifty years, from Carlyle to Kipling, this scorn for a deliberative assembly and this contempt for an electorate which had hitherto been sedulously denied all political education frustrated all attempts to modify the old machine of government and to assimilate the new rulers to the old. "Bigots," said Macaulay, "... never fail to plead in justification of persecution the vices which persecution has engendered. England has been to the Jews less than half a country; and we revile them because they do not feel for England more than a half patriotism. We treat them as slaves, and wonder that they do not regard us as brethren...."
With little change of language, the disabilities of the Jews could be paralleled by the disabilities of labour;and both were defended by the same spirit of blatant intolerance which rose in a self-satisfiedcrescendoduring the second half of the nineteenth century, till a cynic might have said that, as there had been no class-antagonism, it would become necessary to create one. Of the present conflict between classes and of any conflict in the immediate future the seeds were sown in the last years of Queen Victoria's reign.
The men of this epoch grew up half-way between the second harvest of great nineteenth-century literature and the first crop of the twentieth. In their early boyhood, Tennyson was still Poet Laureate, Browning was still prolific and Swinburne's last song was not yet sung; George Meredith and Thomas Hardy were still in practise as novelists, and Robert Louis Stevenson was approaching the climax of his powers; John Ruskin, though silent, was still alive; the influence of Walter Pater was at its zenith; the reputation of Herbert Spencer stood higher than at any time before or since; and John Morley was in his prime. Among the younger men who were winning fame—with the surge and thunder that heralded the youth of the nineties—was Rudyard Kipling; the seething brain of H. G. Wells was boiling over into scientific romance; and old romance was brought to life by the charm of Anthony Hope. Among those who were doing the work for which a belated fame was reserved were Samuel Butler and Joseph Conrad. For experimenting, adventurous youth the pages ofThe Yellow Booklay open; "the men of thenineties" flashed meteorically across the deafened heavens, and, when they had passed with their falsity and clamour, there was discovered in their train the more abiding genius of Whistler and Beardsley, the precocious, detached perfection of Beerbohm, the occasional beauty of Gray and Dowson, the alternate paste and diamond of Oscar Wilde.
These were the last working years of Leighton and Watts, of Holman Hunt and Morris, of Tenniel and Crane; the heyday of Ricketts and Shannon; the morning of Phil May. They were the years, too, of the first illustrated magazines and of thoseStrands, ever memorable to the boys of that generation, in whichSherlock Holmesappeared month after month.
A new chapter in dramatic history was opened by Pinero withThe Second Mrs. Tanqueray; and, though Shaw and Barrie were not yet come into their own, though Galsworthy and Barker were not yet articulate, the last decade of the nineteenth century was the summer time of the British stage for a hundred years. Irving ruled still imperially, with Terriss, Forbes Robertson and Wyndham among his marshals; Boucicault, Toole and Bancroft were still alive; it was not yet impossible to find a theatre for serious drama, and the seductions of burlesque and of musical comedy were confined to Daly's and the old Gaiety.
The music-halls of that period did not come within the purview of a boy: the humour was too broad, the air too much tainted, the associations too squalid; but in those days the true "variety entertainment"—exhibiting hardly less continuity than the modernrevue—was still to be seen, the old-fashioned chairman still sat at his table surrounded by privileged friends, the priceswere half those of the theatre, it was exceptional for a man to appear in evening dress and inconceivable for a woman of repute to appear at all.
The memory of a child is pierced, deeply and without order, by quarter-comprehended sights and sounds. Those were the days of Lottie Collins andTa-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, ofThe Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carloand ofThe Bicycle Made for Two—this last to commemorate the safety bicycle which took England by storm and urged the citizens of London in endless, untiring circles round Regent's Park on Sunday mornings. These were the days of May Yohe andHoney, ma Honey, of Hayden Coffin andSunshine Above, of Albert Chevalier and his coster songs; of Dan Leno and Herbert Campbell in immortal partnership at Drury Lane pantomimes, of Corney Grain—and a piano; of Sims Reeves at the Queen's Hall, old and inexpressibly sweet; of Maskelyne and Cook at the Egyptian Hall, of Moore and Burgess at the St. James' Hall; they were the days of "Niagara" and the old Aquarium.
It was in the middle nineties, when the "knife-board" omnibus was still to be seen in the streets, that London was excited by an exhibition of "horseless carriages," though for a few years still a small boy might be driven to Berkeley Square on a summer afternoon, there to draw up under the trees opposite Gunter's and consume raspberry ices. In those days the cows and milk-stall were not yet evicted from St. James' Park; Booksellers Row had not been sacrificed to the improvement of London, which was then more picturesque and less sanitary. Those were the days of the long frost; the days of the Klondike gold-rush, the Jameson raid, the Græco-Turkishwar; days in which a boy heard dying rumours of a "baccarat case," of the Parnell divorce, of Barnie Barnato's death, rumours more active but less intelligible of vast financial operations and vaster crashes.
The first five years of life, perhaps the first seven, are the hinterland of memory in which a trail is blazed by word or name and, later, a road straightened and made durable by reading. After seven, memory is in ordered cultivation: after 1895 public events marshal themselves and stand out against the uneventful background of the child's daily life. The fall of the Rosebery government seemed less important than Mr. Gladstone's retirement the year before and, to a boy, neither equalled in excitement the Diamond Jubilee with its thanksgiving-service and procession, its songs and marches, its bunting and illumination. A year later the news-bills stopped every passer-by with the words: "DEATH OF GLADSTONE"; and children who had never seen him cried in the streets of London as they had cried in America or Italy at the passing of Lincoln or Garibaldi.
A year later still came rumours of discord in South Africa; and the patriot of the private school waited eagerly for a declaration of war, less eagerly for news that President Kruger had yielded to pressure; the memory of the Spithead review which had followed the massing of an empire's troops at the Diamond Jubilee was still vivid, and in a hundred thousand truculent hearts there lurked the sinister thought that an army and navy were useless if they did not fight and that small nations existed, in the scheme of creation, to be taught sharp lessons. The handful of opponents who cried out on an impious war of aggression were shouted down or manhandled as "pro-Boers" until the cheersof the Irish and of a few radicals, when a British reverse was announced in the House of Commons, convinced the wondering militarists that opposition might be prompted by a moral sense as well as by native factiousness. These were the days ofThe Absent-Minded Beggar, of "Black Friday" and the Fall of Ladysmith, of the aged queen's recruiting-tour in Ireland, of the relief of Mafeking and "Mafeking Night" in London; the days when Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener were sent out to cut short the retribution which the arrogance of a swollen power had called down upon its head, the days of concentration-camps and "the methods of barbarism," of the "Khaki" election, ofThe Islandersand the last despairing shriek of that vulgar ferocity which had brought about this needless and iniquitous bloodshed; the days of Queen Victoria's last illness and death, the approach of peace.
The chapter of imperialism which opened with Mr. Chamberlain's ultimatum and ended with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's grant of self-government to the Union of South Africa was only symptomatic of a wider-spread arrogance and savagery. While the war was still in progress, another chapter of history, shorter but not less infamous, was being enacted in the suppression of the Boxer rising and—incidentally—in the looting of the palace at Pekin. It was in the middle of these two excursions that there began the six years' sojourn at Westminster, to which reference was made in the last chapter.
CHAPTER IIICHRIST CHURCH"Come, doctor," said Euphranor, suddenly, "you, who find such fault with others' education, shall tell me howyouwould bring up a young knight, till you turned him out of your hands a Man.""I doubt I shall be content with him," said I, "if (at sixteen say) he shows me outwardly ... a glowing cheek, an open brow, copious locks, a clear eye, and looks me full in the face withal; ... the blood running warm and quick through his veins, and easily discovering itself in his cheeks and forehead, at the mention of what is noble or shameful.... Candid of soul I hope he is; for I have always sought his confidence, and never used it against himself.... He is still passionate perhaps, as in his first septenniad, but easily reconciled; subdued easily by affection and the appeal to old and kindly remembrance, but stubborn against force; generous, forgiving: still liking to ride rather than to read, and perhaps to settle a difference by the fist than by the tongue; but submitting to those who do not task him above Nature's due....""And this is your education," said Euphranor, "for all boys indiscriminately, without regard to any particular genius they may show.""But without injury to it, I hope," said I; ... "if Sir Lancelot not onlyhasa Genius, (as I suppose all men have some,) butisa Genius—big with Epic, Lyrical or Parliamentary inspiration,—I do not meddle with him—he will take his own course in spite of me. What I have to turn out is, not a Genius, but a Young Gentleman, qualified at least for the common professions, or trades, if you like it. Or if he have means and inclination to live independently on his estate, may,in spiteof his genius, turn into a very good husband, father, neighbour, and magistrate...."Edward FitzGerald:Euphranor: A Dialogue on Youth.IAt noon on Friday of the second week in October, 1906, a slow procession of cabs jingled down the slope from the Great Western station at Oxford and turned under the bridge towards the middle of thetown. At Carfax they separated east, north and south, bearing through the High, the Corn and Saint Aldates their burden of expectant, fluttered freshmen, who had been summoned, on this first day of the term, to present themselves early for admission to their colleges and university. At Tom Gate the newcomers to the House enquired for their rooms, paid their cabmen and left their luggage to follow them. Over the doors in Peckwater or Canterbury, Meadow Buildings, Old Library or Tom they found their names painted in black on a white ground; they introduced themselves to their scouts—who alone in all Oxford affected interest in their existence,—ordered luncheon and sat down to recall the more pressing advice on deportment which had been bestowed on them.To a freshman, the etiquette and technique of Oxford abound in real and, still more, in imaginary pitfalls. He may live for years on the same staircase as a man one term his senior, but, unless they have been introduced, he must never bow nor say "good-morning" to him. The senior would, perhaps, leave a card on the freshman, choosing a moment when he was not at home; the freshman must return his call, but it was not enough to leave a card: he must go on calling until he ran him to earth. In all things a freshman must comport himself humbly, taking a distant seat in the junior common room and leaving the arm-chairs in front of the fire to those who better deserved them. There were rules of dress and rules of conduct; there were clubs which a man would feel honoured to join and clubs which he would prudently avoid; there were games worth playing and games that were waste of time.When the appointed day came, the ordeal was refreshinglylight and quickly forgotten in the joyous sense of possession which a man's own rooms, with his shining, black name painted over the door, gives him more fully, perhaps, than he ever knows later; the sense of protection, too, at a time when he feels more solitary and unwanted than ever before. Though the carpet were threadbare and the curtains dingy, though sofa and chairs needed recovering and the meagre blankets on one bed bore the name of "Arthur Bourchier" and a date four years before the new owner was born, the rooms belonged to himde facto, and within a few hours he wouldde jurebelong to them; it was time to unpack books and pictures and to study the regulations and hints embodied in the brochure libellously known as "The Blue Liar."After luncheon the freshmen were collected in Hall for presentation to the Dean.[6]The Old Westminsters gathered together to discuss their rooms and to exchange whispered confidences. From Hall they were ushered to the Old Schools and admitted members of the university by the vice-chancellor. Then they drew breath.The bond of an identic school held them in small groups which explored one another's rooms and perambulated Oxford to purchase bedroom ware and such other necessaries of life as had not been included in the equipment taken over, at a valuation, from the previous tenants. They made a preliminary inspection of picture shops and turned over the books in Blackwell's; they bought tobacco—and refused to buy pipe-racks and tobacco-jars enriched with the college arms, because these were "freshers' delights" and a mark of juvenility tobe avoided. Then they returned to college and discovered that already a few of their senior friends had left cards. And then it was time to discover which were the freshmen's tables in hall.If for an hour or two it had seemed that no one but their scouts was interested in their existence, they were to find within their first week a flattering competition for their company. First of all, their tutors invited them to call and arrange what lectures they were to attend; after that, the president and secretary of innumerable clubs solicited their patronage. Then came the turn of the literary and debating societies, in which the House abounded. It was a matter of no little importance to have a club-meeting for at least six nights in the week: only the more serious members stayed for anything but the highly personal questions and motions of "private business," but during that first stimulating half-hour the visitors and their hosts could feast richly and variously on the abundant dessert supplied by the club; at nine o'clock they could leave, pleasantly sated, to work, talk or pay calls, while the club stalwarts remained to read plays or, unwillingly and at short notice, to deliver conscientious speeches on the political problems of the day.[7]Outside the college there was an almost unlimited choice of university clubs: the Bullingdon, Vincent's and the Grid were purely sporting or social, the O.U.D.S. was primarily theatrical, while the Union—though it was not popular at the House at this time—providedthe biggest audiences and the most serious debating. In addition, the Canning and Chatham, the Palmerston and Russell, the Strafford and Gladstone, the St. Patrick's and a dozen more offered a varied bill of fare to every political appetite and entailed on their members the obligation of reading a solemn paper once in every few terms and of listening to the solemn papers of other members once a week. At their annual "wines" and dinners the young politician met such of the leading liberals as could be enticed to Oxford; after the arid detachment of politics at school, one meeting with a single minister seemed to bring the pulsing heart of government nearer; there followed cards for receptions in London and invitations to join the Eighty Club.Perhaps by reason of its size, the House escaped or defied any effort to impose a uniform spirit or code. Its members were indeed united in such practises as dressing for the theatre and in such conventions as a general disinclination for the society of other colleges; but this was largely because they were numerous enough to provide every one with the friends, the clubs and the interests that he required without seeking them abroad. Rival foundations charged them with superiority and sectionalism; but, if they had ever made a claim for themselves, it would only have been that they allowed their neighbours to live unmolested. There was no Sunday-evening "After," at which the whole college met; no concert; no "Freshmen's Wine." All were left free to choose their friends and to pass their time as they liked, provided that they did not offend against public taste or make a nuisance of themselves to their neighbours.New friendships came rapidly in those first few weeks.At the freshmen's tables in hall, the freshmen's pews in the cathedral, on the football-ground, in the common room and clubs and at a score of breakfast-parties given for their benefit, the men in their first year came to know one another. There followed testing, sifting and an occasional change of value; the bond of the identic school was gradually relaxed; and small groups broke away from the general tables in hall and established messes of their own.IIOxford is a loose confederation of jealously independent states; and a man must have considerable personality or prowess to be known outside his own college. There are always one or two men[8]with a reputation extending beyond their own walls and promising a later distinction; but there are seldom more than a handful of exceptions in any undergraduate generation. Of the House this is especially true, as it is almost a university in itself, and no one need go outside it. The patriotism and hero-worship of a public school had made it inconceivable that a new boy should pass one week without knowing who was the Captain of Cricket; at Oxford in every year there must have been hundreds unaware who was President of the Boat Club. The greatest emancipation that came to all on leaving school was just this freedom to be interested in what they liked. The tyranny of games was broken; the snobbism of pretended enthusiasms sank into abeyance; and many whohad been despised and rejected at school began suddenly to shine as unexpected social lights.The choice of friends marched step by step with the tentative first efforts in hospitality. Entertaining is made easy in a college where a man orders breakfast or luncheon for as many guests as his rooms will contain, where the epicure descends to the college kitchen and chooses an apolaustic repast, where wine and cup are as easily had from the buttery and where the junior common room supplies the coffee and dessert. His scout and scout's boy, prepare the table and attend to the waiting (how they do it when several parties take place simultaneously on the same staircase is a craft-secret which is handed down from one generation to another); when his own cutlery, glass and china run short, his scout borrows from the abundance of a neighbour. And, when the feast is done, the host is not disturbed by the frugal housewife's concern for the broken meats, for they have been decently packed and discreetly removed by his scout. The imagination of the curious may sometimes exercise itself to picture the internal chaos of a scout's digestion: for six days he subsists chiefly on superfluous butter and remainder loaves; the seventh day is one on which every undergraduate seeks to give a luncheon-party or to attend the board of a friend. On that day the scout must fare bewilderingly on undetected treasures of dressed crab, unwanted drum-sticks of chicken, trembling ruins of fruit-jelly and the unmortised halves of meringues; yet longevity is the reward of their imprudence.There is, furthermore, a guest-table in Hall;[9]thereare dining-clubs; and, when a man is grown weary of monotony, the Grid, the O.U.D.S. and Vincent's supply relief to their members. For the first weeks, indeed, the hospitality comes all from the seniors; then it is time for a freshman to repay it and to strike out for himself in entertaining the new friends of his own year. It is a delicate and embarrassing enterprise, for all the mechanical aid of kitchen and scout: the inexpert host fears that he has not ordered enough, he never knows how long to wait for a fourth-year man who lives out of college and has perhaps forgotten the invitation, he fails to realise—until he has himself ceased to be a freshman—the devastating horror of a three-or four-course breakfast at half-past eight with obligatory conversation. And, not content with one venture, he repeats it in cold blood.The emancipation in being allowed to choose friends and amusements is hardly greater than the latitude in arranging the work of three or four years. A mathematical scholar is, indeed, not expected to read the Modern Language School; but for the commoner there is almost unlimited range of optional subjects to take and varied lectures to attend. Here is a further step in emancipation and responsibility: when a man has satisfied the bare minimum demanded by authority, he must work out his own salvation; there is a point at which, if he will not read for himself, it is not worth any one's while to compel him. Many of those who kept a political goal ahead of them elected to study Modern History, for which it may be asserted that in scope and variety, in the volume of reading, the mental discipline and the practical benefit of knowledge and perspective it excels even the final school ofLiteræ Humanioreswhich has been for so long the peculiar glory of Oxford. Touching the ancient world at one end and modern politics at the other, interlaced with geography, economics, political science, law and modern languages, it does indeed exclude natural science and Asiatic languages, but it excludes little else.[10]IIISome of the most common English phrases are also those which most obstinately defy exact definition. It is related of an obscure enquirer that he gave his life to elucidating the significance of "a man-about-town," having met the phrase but not the type to which it is applied. For years he wandered moodily about London in search of a specimen, growing ever more abstracted and becoming in time a familiar figure in the streets, until his researches were cut short on the day when he was knocked down by a motor-bus and fatally injured. Though carried promptly to the nearest hospital, he survived only a few hours; as the end approached, one of the nurses sought to strengthen his resistance by shewing him an account of the mishap in an early edition of an evening paper; the last words that he ever read were: "accident to well-known man-about-town."A fate as disappointing, if not so tragic, awaits him who seeks to find a definition of "the Oxford manner."It is seemingly a blazon borne by every man who has been at Oxford and quickly recognised by every one who has not. When Herrick inThe Ebb Tideanchored in the lagoon of an uncharted Pacific pearl-fishery, something in his speech or bearing caused Attwater to ask: '"University man?" ... "Yes, Merton," said Herrick, and the next moment blushed scarlet at his indiscretion. "I am of the other lot," said Attwater: "Trinity Hall, Cambridge. I call my schooner after the old shop...."' Without delay Attwater then made himself insolently rude to the two men who had been neither at Oxford nor at Cambridge. The fact that Stevenson was himself an Edinburgh man may explain his creature's ability to detect the Oxford manner; for Oxford men the task is less easy and is but made the harder by the involved analysis which explains it as "the expression of a superiority which every Oxford man is too superior to shew."So little sense of superiority clouds the brain of most Oxford men that they are humbly grateful, their whole life through, for their good fortune in spending three happy years, howsoever little distinguished, in the most beautiful of all kingdoms of youth. No city in the world has been so decreed, constructed, endowed and ordered for the benefit and enjoyment of the boys who there reach a privileged manhood. The university returns its own members to parliament and preserves order among the undergraduates by means of the proctors and their satellites; the vice-chancellor's court stands between debtor and creditor; and a member of thecorps diplomatiquein a foreign capital is hardly more "extra-territorial" than the undergraduate at Oxford. This is partly the law and partly the custom of the constitution;but to the visitor it is less impressive than that the entire economic and social dispensation should have for object the comfort and happiness of three thousand men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. The colleges, their gardens and pleasances; the river and its barges; the theatre and clubs; the shops and streets; all have been designed on the presumption that Oxford contains no women and that the men are of an age that never changes.[11]In their midst there are, indeed, "townees," but even the shops at which they buy their meat are not suffered to desecrate the beauty of the High; there are straggling acres of houses in North Oxford, but they exist in the undergraduate scheme as unwelcome destinations for a duty call on Sunday afternoons in winter; the undergraduate horizon is bounded by Christ Church Meadows and the Broad, by Magdalen Bridge and Carfax; their world consists of those who live within these limits.Of the three thousand who for three or four years gloried in that kingdom, a few did no work at all and, when their days of grace expired, went down for good or until they had passed the necessary examinations; those who hoped for a high class in an honour school perforce worked hard during term and harder in vacation; the average man of average intelligence, reading a pass school, could be content with four or six hours' work a day and an untroubled vacation.More than six hours is not easy to maintain, for, though the term is but eight weeks long, a man is living at high pressure in a low-lying city. Those who hadtheir schools at heart would get up at half-past seven and keep a chapel at eight, read the morning paper, breakfast with friends or by themselves and begin work at nine or ten; on most days they would have lectures or a "private hour" with their tutors and for the rest of the morning they worked in their rooms or in the library. At one o'clock the quadrangle woke to sudden life with men returning from lectures, men on their way out to luncheon, men in stocks and breeches assembling at Canterbury Gate to drive in brakes to a meet of the House beagles. They exchanged the news and badinage of the day, from the middle of Peck to an attic window, and from one window to another; the quadrangle emptied and sank again to silence, as they repaired to the common-room for a light repast of bananas and milk or toast and honey. And in turn the common room, which had filled suddenly, as suddenly emptied; within a quarter of an hour all had dispersed to the football ground or the House barge, a private gravel tennis-court or the hockey ground; one or two went sailing on the Upper River, one or two more hacked slowly out of Oxford for a gallop on Port Meadow or Shotover; and, as every generation discovered for itself the beauty of the surrounding country and fell anew under its spell at the whisper of the old unforgettable names, the pedestrians struck north-west or south-west to "the warm, green-muffled Cumner Hills", "the stripling Thames at Bablock-hithe", "Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here in June", "the skirts of Bagley Wood" or "Hinksey and its wintry ridge".Convention and climate ordain that no one in Oxford shall work in the early afternoon; when the sacred exercisehas been taken and all are refreshed by tea in common room or at home, there is time for two hours' reading before Hall. After that, a man may go to the theatre, where he will find a tolerable selection of companies and of "London successes";[12]he may look in at a club or retire to finish a belated essay in his rooms; he may dawdle over coffee in the common room and stroll back with a friend for one of those endless disputations which clear the head and suggest a new point of view—raw, paradoxical stuff, it may be, but earnestly argued and perhaps making up in idealism what it lacked in experience. Whatever is "universal" in university education comes chiefly from the men of one's own age and from the distillation of three thousand minds seething with youth and a new encouragement to self-expression whichhad been rigorously withheld at school.[13]If the scope of reading is limited there, the limitations are broken down to some extent by the sum of all the reading in all the public schools. It was in the intimate late hours when some club had dispersed that one man would talk of Browning's Jewish blood and reproduce the savage indignation ofHoly Cross Day; another would give forth the magic music of Synge's plays; and a generation which had hitherto escaped the theological preoccupation of the Victorian era argued Renan and discussedThe Golden Boughin comfort of mind.IVIf in the pooling of their enthusiasms the men of this vanished generation advanced even one step towards the universality of spirit which is the intellectual vision of a university, they advanced many steps nearer to a social universality than had been possible at school. Eton, by virtue of its size and repute, is fed, within the limits of one plane, by the greatest number of tributaries; but Westminster and Harrow, Winchester, Rugby and Charterhouse are filled each from its own well-defined source. At Oxford, in greater or lesser degree, hitherto unfamiliar types mingled for the first time and, in social and political debate, encountered the embodiment of what had hitherto been malevolent abstractions: an Orange land-owner lived over the head of a rebellious home ruler; the hereditary legislator sat in Hall beside the radical who expended his eloquencein trying to abolish the House of Lords. There were Catholics, Presbyterians and an occasional Jew; rich men, poor men; scholars, dunces; sceptics and fanatics; prigs and worldlings; incipient swindlers, congenital debauchees and a vast representation of the vast average English class which is between rich and poor, which is shrewd without being subtile, tenacious but practical, self-satisfied but self-depreciatory, with conservative instincts and radical initiative.To all and to each, Oxford smilingly proferred her inexhaustible tray ofcotillonfavours. There was and is and, seemingly, always must be a class debarred by poverty from entering this kingdom; but, once inside, there is an unmatched equality of opportunity for rich and poor, exalted and humble, an unprecedented freedom for each to express his individuality in the choice of his work and recreation, his friends and life. Though there, as elsewhere, the deepest pocket commanded the greatest material comfort, narrow means were no obstacle to the enjoyment and profit which every man could extract from four years of the most democratic life that England provided outside the House of Commons; nowhere was a man taken more ungrudgingly on his merits, nowhere did the eccentric—were he poser, experimenter or monomaniac—obtain a better run for his money.In these days of fifteen years ago, came the first batch of Rhodes scholars. Nothing but a war will drive the average Englishman to look at a map; and nothing less than the late war would have stirred the imagination of the English to concern for the size and cohesion of the British Empire. Cecil Rhodes had been dead nearly half a generation before South Africans and Australians,New Zealanders and Canadians—to name but a few—met together on a single battle-front; but his vision embraced what the war of 1914 made actual, and he, who confessedly owed more to Oxford than to any other phase of his career, made Oxford the trial-ground for the greatest historical experiment in imperial education. With the effect of Oxford on the Rhodes scholars only a Rhodes scholar is competent to deal; the influence of the Rhodes scholars on Oxford was marked. They were the picked men from the universities of the world; not only from the dominions and colonies of the British Empire, but from Germany as well, for Rhodes felt that conflict between the two countries could most surely be avoided by making their peoples better acquainted. Chosen for general prowess—in sport, in work, in the popularity and position which they had attained in their own universities,—they came somewhat older than the generality in years and much older in experience; they brought new intellectual standpoints and a deliberate wisdom to leaven the facile cleverness and omniscience of British Oxford.[14]Those three or four years resolve themselves into a collection of exquisite memories in miniature; but, day after day and term after term, nothing ever happened to shake a man's soul from its seating. There were glorious parties in college and on the river; there were great rides and walks; there were splendid disputations. During Eights Week a man invited his sisters and friends to lunch with him; shy and self-conscious, he met them at the station and piloted them informatively through the cathedral and hall, the cloisters and library and kitchen until it was time to stroll back to his rooms, where through the flower-boxes and open windows could be seen cold salmon and roast chicken, meringues, strawberries-and-cream and cider-cup spread out in monotonous invitation, where, too, the prudent host had enlisted his most socially gifted friends to ease the burden of hospitality. Replete and a trifle weary of so much good behaviour, he and his friends threaded their way through the crowded Meadows and took up their position on the barge, returning between second and first division for tea. Utterly exhausted, he at last drove his patient guests to the station and returned for dinner and uninterrupted celibacy.[15]Hardly had he recovered from the social exigencies of Eights Week than Commemoration was upon him with sterner demands, longer drawn out. For anxious weeks he debated which balls he would attend and who should be invited to go with him; parties were arranged, rooms engaged; and for one, two or three nights he danced indefatigably from nine till five or six, then shivered in a wind-swept quadrangle or on the pavement outside the Town Hall while he surrendered to the undergraduate herd-instinct of being commemoratively photographed. Then, perhaps, he would go to bed for a few hours, rising wearily to take part in a picnic on the Cher and returning in time to dress for the next ball, and the more conscientious sort—hosts and guests alike—would insist on being present at the Encænia.[16]Before Commemoration is over, many were laying their plans for Henley. After that, the pleasure-lovers went to London for the last weeks of the season; and, for the serious workers, the coming of August marked the beginning of a long ten weeks of uninterrupted reading.So from term to term and year to year. Every summercarried away the older friends, every autumn brought a new draft to take their place. With time came better rooms and perhaps greater dignity of position; a man worked through the lower offices of various clubs and succeeded in time to the chair; he woke to find himself a senior member of the college, setting to freshmen the tone which had been set to him in his own first year. With abrupt suddenness he discovered that he must begin looking for digs. out of college; if he had idled or overspent his allowance, he would perhaps retire to a distant monastic cell to retrench or work; otherwise he looked for good rooms near the House and a friend to share them with him.Life out of college diminishes the sense that a man is a living, breathing part of a community which wakes to life in hall, common room and cathedral, if indeed it is not always awake in the quadrangle. So long as he is back in digs... by midnight, there are few restrictions on his liberty; he can entertain, he can get up and go to bed when he likes, he can see as much or as little of the college as he chooses. And, with comfortable digs.., an excellent cook and work which swells like a banking cloud as his schools approach, there are many temptations to stay at home and only to visit the college for Sunday evening chapel, hall and a club meeting.The last year, for those who find time to think, is depressing, for they are watching the O.U.D.S. or the House Grind for the last time, and the menace of their final schools throws a gloom over everything. Some of the subjects are being read for the first time; others, that seemed to have been mastered two years before, are now almost wholly forgotten; losing confidence, a man speaks of himself as "lucky to scrape a fourth," hegrows fatalistic and says that he does not care; and his tutor wisely sends him away for a few days' holiday and reestablishes his confidence with a word of praise.Then for a week he faces his examiners, two papers a day, three hours for each paper; and at the end, when they have laid him bare, he cares very little indeed for any other result than that he will probably never again be compelled to study English political or constitutional history, political economy and economic history, political science and European history, a special subject or even a modern language. The taut nerves become of a sudden very slack.And then it has to be realised that within a week all will be over.One last Commemoration. A day or two of unbearable farewells. Instructions for the packing of books and pictures which he had unpacked so very lately, yet at the distant other end of his Oxford career. And then that overwhelming day when a man drives to the station and, as the train gathers speed, looks for the last time on Tom Tower. He will come back again, no doubt, but no longer as a resident undergraduate; the Kingdom of the Young has passed to another dynasty. In three or four years he has progressed, in age, from boy to man; but the development has been chiefly intellectual, and, for all his greater knowledge and experience, he has changed little in character or essential instincts. The rigour of school discipline has been relaxed, because it is no longer needed; but the simple school ideals of honour and loyalty, restraint and self-control, clean living and hard condition remain unaltered. Had he chosen to defy opinion and to disdain the protection with which Oxford surrounds him, the opportunity wasat hand for drinking too much and for getting into debt, for idling and for discarding the fastidiousness which impels English boys to keep women at a distance. There are men in every generation who will collect experience at all costs, but at Oxford they are not regarded with admiration: the undergraduate who drinks or boasts of his exploits with women is voted noxious or boring or both.A month or six weeks after the end of term comes the viva; then the class lists. In the following October the curtain is rung down for most, when they meet again—and, perhaps, for the last time—to receive the grace of their college and to proceed to the degree of Bachelor of Arts.
CHRIST CHURCH
"Come, doctor," said Euphranor, suddenly, "you, who find such fault with others' education, shall tell me howyouwould bring up a young knight, till you turned him out of your hands a Man."
"I doubt I shall be content with him," said I, "if (at sixteen say) he shows me outwardly ... a glowing cheek, an open brow, copious locks, a clear eye, and looks me full in the face withal; ... the blood running warm and quick through his veins, and easily discovering itself in his cheeks and forehead, at the mention of what is noble or shameful.... Candid of soul I hope he is; for I have always sought his confidence, and never used it against himself.... He is still passionate perhaps, as in his first septenniad, but easily reconciled; subdued easily by affection and the appeal to old and kindly remembrance, but stubborn against force; generous, forgiving: still liking to ride rather than to read, and perhaps to settle a difference by the fist than by the tongue; but submitting to those who do not task him above Nature's due...."
"And this is your education," said Euphranor, "for all boys indiscriminately, without regard to any particular genius they may show."
"But without injury to it, I hope," said I; ... "if Sir Lancelot not onlyhasa Genius, (as I suppose all men have some,) butisa Genius—big with Epic, Lyrical or Parliamentary inspiration,—I do not meddle with him—he will take his own course in spite of me. What I have to turn out is, not a Genius, but a Young Gentleman, qualified at least for the common professions, or trades, if you like it. Or if he have means and inclination to live independently on his estate, may,in spiteof his genius, turn into a very good husband, father, neighbour, and magistrate...."
Edward FitzGerald:Euphranor: A Dialogue on Youth.
At noon on Friday of the second week in October, 1906, a slow procession of cabs jingled down the slope from the Great Western station at Oxford and turned under the bridge towards the middle of thetown. At Carfax they separated east, north and south, bearing through the High, the Corn and Saint Aldates their burden of expectant, fluttered freshmen, who had been summoned, on this first day of the term, to present themselves early for admission to their colleges and university. At Tom Gate the newcomers to the House enquired for their rooms, paid their cabmen and left their luggage to follow them. Over the doors in Peckwater or Canterbury, Meadow Buildings, Old Library or Tom they found their names painted in black on a white ground; they introduced themselves to their scouts—who alone in all Oxford affected interest in their existence,—ordered luncheon and sat down to recall the more pressing advice on deportment which had been bestowed on them.
To a freshman, the etiquette and technique of Oxford abound in real and, still more, in imaginary pitfalls. He may live for years on the same staircase as a man one term his senior, but, unless they have been introduced, he must never bow nor say "good-morning" to him. The senior would, perhaps, leave a card on the freshman, choosing a moment when he was not at home; the freshman must return his call, but it was not enough to leave a card: he must go on calling until he ran him to earth. In all things a freshman must comport himself humbly, taking a distant seat in the junior common room and leaving the arm-chairs in front of the fire to those who better deserved them. There were rules of dress and rules of conduct; there were clubs which a man would feel honoured to join and clubs which he would prudently avoid; there were games worth playing and games that were waste of time.
When the appointed day came, the ordeal was refreshinglylight and quickly forgotten in the joyous sense of possession which a man's own rooms, with his shining, black name painted over the door, gives him more fully, perhaps, than he ever knows later; the sense of protection, too, at a time when he feels more solitary and unwanted than ever before. Though the carpet were threadbare and the curtains dingy, though sofa and chairs needed recovering and the meagre blankets on one bed bore the name of "Arthur Bourchier" and a date four years before the new owner was born, the rooms belonged to himde facto, and within a few hours he wouldde jurebelong to them; it was time to unpack books and pictures and to study the regulations and hints embodied in the brochure libellously known as "The Blue Liar."
After luncheon the freshmen were collected in Hall for presentation to the Dean.[6]The Old Westminsters gathered together to discuss their rooms and to exchange whispered confidences. From Hall they were ushered to the Old Schools and admitted members of the university by the vice-chancellor. Then they drew breath.
The bond of an identic school held them in small groups which explored one another's rooms and perambulated Oxford to purchase bedroom ware and such other necessaries of life as had not been included in the equipment taken over, at a valuation, from the previous tenants. They made a preliminary inspection of picture shops and turned over the books in Blackwell's; they bought tobacco—and refused to buy pipe-racks and tobacco-jars enriched with the college arms, because these were "freshers' delights" and a mark of juvenility tobe avoided. Then they returned to college and discovered that already a few of their senior friends had left cards. And then it was time to discover which were the freshmen's tables in hall.
If for an hour or two it had seemed that no one but their scouts was interested in their existence, they were to find within their first week a flattering competition for their company. First of all, their tutors invited them to call and arrange what lectures they were to attend; after that, the president and secretary of innumerable clubs solicited their patronage. Then came the turn of the literary and debating societies, in which the House abounded. It was a matter of no little importance to have a club-meeting for at least six nights in the week: only the more serious members stayed for anything but the highly personal questions and motions of "private business," but during that first stimulating half-hour the visitors and their hosts could feast richly and variously on the abundant dessert supplied by the club; at nine o'clock they could leave, pleasantly sated, to work, talk or pay calls, while the club stalwarts remained to read plays or, unwillingly and at short notice, to deliver conscientious speeches on the political problems of the day.[7]
Outside the college there was an almost unlimited choice of university clubs: the Bullingdon, Vincent's and the Grid were purely sporting or social, the O.U.D.S. was primarily theatrical, while the Union—though it was not popular at the House at this time—providedthe biggest audiences and the most serious debating. In addition, the Canning and Chatham, the Palmerston and Russell, the Strafford and Gladstone, the St. Patrick's and a dozen more offered a varied bill of fare to every political appetite and entailed on their members the obligation of reading a solemn paper once in every few terms and of listening to the solemn papers of other members once a week. At their annual "wines" and dinners the young politician met such of the leading liberals as could be enticed to Oxford; after the arid detachment of politics at school, one meeting with a single minister seemed to bring the pulsing heart of government nearer; there followed cards for receptions in London and invitations to join the Eighty Club.
Perhaps by reason of its size, the House escaped or defied any effort to impose a uniform spirit or code. Its members were indeed united in such practises as dressing for the theatre and in such conventions as a general disinclination for the society of other colleges; but this was largely because they were numerous enough to provide every one with the friends, the clubs and the interests that he required without seeking them abroad. Rival foundations charged them with superiority and sectionalism; but, if they had ever made a claim for themselves, it would only have been that they allowed their neighbours to live unmolested. There was no Sunday-evening "After," at which the whole college met; no concert; no "Freshmen's Wine." All were left free to choose their friends and to pass their time as they liked, provided that they did not offend against public taste or make a nuisance of themselves to their neighbours.
New friendships came rapidly in those first few weeks.At the freshmen's tables in hall, the freshmen's pews in the cathedral, on the football-ground, in the common room and clubs and at a score of breakfast-parties given for their benefit, the men in their first year came to know one another. There followed testing, sifting and an occasional change of value; the bond of the identic school was gradually relaxed; and small groups broke away from the general tables in hall and established messes of their own.
Oxford is a loose confederation of jealously independent states; and a man must have considerable personality or prowess to be known outside his own college. There are always one or two men[8]with a reputation extending beyond their own walls and promising a later distinction; but there are seldom more than a handful of exceptions in any undergraduate generation. Of the House this is especially true, as it is almost a university in itself, and no one need go outside it. The patriotism and hero-worship of a public school had made it inconceivable that a new boy should pass one week without knowing who was the Captain of Cricket; at Oxford in every year there must have been hundreds unaware who was President of the Boat Club. The greatest emancipation that came to all on leaving school was just this freedom to be interested in what they liked. The tyranny of games was broken; the snobbism of pretended enthusiasms sank into abeyance; and many whohad been despised and rejected at school began suddenly to shine as unexpected social lights.
The choice of friends marched step by step with the tentative first efforts in hospitality. Entertaining is made easy in a college where a man orders breakfast or luncheon for as many guests as his rooms will contain, where the epicure descends to the college kitchen and chooses an apolaustic repast, where wine and cup are as easily had from the buttery and where the junior common room supplies the coffee and dessert. His scout and scout's boy, prepare the table and attend to the waiting (how they do it when several parties take place simultaneously on the same staircase is a craft-secret which is handed down from one generation to another); when his own cutlery, glass and china run short, his scout borrows from the abundance of a neighbour. And, when the feast is done, the host is not disturbed by the frugal housewife's concern for the broken meats, for they have been decently packed and discreetly removed by his scout. The imagination of the curious may sometimes exercise itself to picture the internal chaos of a scout's digestion: for six days he subsists chiefly on superfluous butter and remainder loaves; the seventh day is one on which every undergraduate seeks to give a luncheon-party or to attend the board of a friend. On that day the scout must fare bewilderingly on undetected treasures of dressed crab, unwanted drum-sticks of chicken, trembling ruins of fruit-jelly and the unmortised halves of meringues; yet longevity is the reward of their imprudence.
There is, furthermore, a guest-table in Hall;[9]thereare dining-clubs; and, when a man is grown weary of monotony, the Grid, the O.U.D.S. and Vincent's supply relief to their members. For the first weeks, indeed, the hospitality comes all from the seniors; then it is time for a freshman to repay it and to strike out for himself in entertaining the new friends of his own year. It is a delicate and embarrassing enterprise, for all the mechanical aid of kitchen and scout: the inexpert host fears that he has not ordered enough, he never knows how long to wait for a fourth-year man who lives out of college and has perhaps forgotten the invitation, he fails to realise—until he has himself ceased to be a freshman—the devastating horror of a three-or four-course breakfast at half-past eight with obligatory conversation. And, not content with one venture, he repeats it in cold blood.
The emancipation in being allowed to choose friends and amusements is hardly greater than the latitude in arranging the work of three or four years. A mathematical scholar is, indeed, not expected to read the Modern Language School; but for the commoner there is almost unlimited range of optional subjects to take and varied lectures to attend. Here is a further step in emancipation and responsibility: when a man has satisfied the bare minimum demanded by authority, he must work out his own salvation; there is a point at which, if he will not read for himself, it is not worth any one's while to compel him. Many of those who kept a political goal ahead of them elected to study Modern History, for which it may be asserted that in scope and variety, in the volume of reading, the mental discipline and the practical benefit of knowledge and perspective it excels even the final school ofLiteræ Humanioreswhich has been for so long the peculiar glory of Oxford. Touching the ancient world at one end and modern politics at the other, interlaced with geography, economics, political science, law and modern languages, it does indeed exclude natural science and Asiatic languages, but it excludes little else.[10]
Some of the most common English phrases are also those which most obstinately defy exact definition. It is related of an obscure enquirer that he gave his life to elucidating the significance of "a man-about-town," having met the phrase but not the type to which it is applied. For years he wandered moodily about London in search of a specimen, growing ever more abstracted and becoming in time a familiar figure in the streets, until his researches were cut short on the day when he was knocked down by a motor-bus and fatally injured. Though carried promptly to the nearest hospital, he survived only a few hours; as the end approached, one of the nurses sought to strengthen his resistance by shewing him an account of the mishap in an early edition of an evening paper; the last words that he ever read were: "accident to well-known man-about-town."
A fate as disappointing, if not so tragic, awaits him who seeks to find a definition of "the Oxford manner."It is seemingly a blazon borne by every man who has been at Oxford and quickly recognised by every one who has not. When Herrick inThe Ebb Tideanchored in the lagoon of an uncharted Pacific pearl-fishery, something in his speech or bearing caused Attwater to ask: '"University man?" ... "Yes, Merton," said Herrick, and the next moment blushed scarlet at his indiscretion. "I am of the other lot," said Attwater: "Trinity Hall, Cambridge. I call my schooner after the old shop...."' Without delay Attwater then made himself insolently rude to the two men who had been neither at Oxford nor at Cambridge. The fact that Stevenson was himself an Edinburgh man may explain his creature's ability to detect the Oxford manner; for Oxford men the task is less easy and is but made the harder by the involved analysis which explains it as "the expression of a superiority which every Oxford man is too superior to shew."
So little sense of superiority clouds the brain of most Oxford men that they are humbly grateful, their whole life through, for their good fortune in spending three happy years, howsoever little distinguished, in the most beautiful of all kingdoms of youth. No city in the world has been so decreed, constructed, endowed and ordered for the benefit and enjoyment of the boys who there reach a privileged manhood. The university returns its own members to parliament and preserves order among the undergraduates by means of the proctors and their satellites; the vice-chancellor's court stands between debtor and creditor; and a member of thecorps diplomatiquein a foreign capital is hardly more "extra-territorial" than the undergraduate at Oxford. This is partly the law and partly the custom of the constitution;but to the visitor it is less impressive than that the entire economic and social dispensation should have for object the comfort and happiness of three thousand men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. The colleges, their gardens and pleasances; the river and its barges; the theatre and clubs; the shops and streets; all have been designed on the presumption that Oxford contains no women and that the men are of an age that never changes.[11]In their midst there are, indeed, "townees," but even the shops at which they buy their meat are not suffered to desecrate the beauty of the High; there are straggling acres of houses in North Oxford, but they exist in the undergraduate scheme as unwelcome destinations for a duty call on Sunday afternoons in winter; the undergraduate horizon is bounded by Christ Church Meadows and the Broad, by Magdalen Bridge and Carfax; their world consists of those who live within these limits.
Of the three thousand who for three or four years gloried in that kingdom, a few did no work at all and, when their days of grace expired, went down for good or until they had passed the necessary examinations; those who hoped for a high class in an honour school perforce worked hard during term and harder in vacation; the average man of average intelligence, reading a pass school, could be content with four or six hours' work a day and an untroubled vacation.
More than six hours is not easy to maintain, for, though the term is but eight weeks long, a man is living at high pressure in a low-lying city. Those who hadtheir schools at heart would get up at half-past seven and keep a chapel at eight, read the morning paper, breakfast with friends or by themselves and begin work at nine or ten; on most days they would have lectures or a "private hour" with their tutors and for the rest of the morning they worked in their rooms or in the library. At one o'clock the quadrangle woke to sudden life with men returning from lectures, men on their way out to luncheon, men in stocks and breeches assembling at Canterbury Gate to drive in brakes to a meet of the House beagles. They exchanged the news and badinage of the day, from the middle of Peck to an attic window, and from one window to another; the quadrangle emptied and sank again to silence, as they repaired to the common-room for a light repast of bananas and milk or toast and honey. And in turn the common room, which had filled suddenly, as suddenly emptied; within a quarter of an hour all had dispersed to the football ground or the House barge, a private gravel tennis-court or the hockey ground; one or two went sailing on the Upper River, one or two more hacked slowly out of Oxford for a gallop on Port Meadow or Shotover; and, as every generation discovered for itself the beauty of the surrounding country and fell anew under its spell at the whisper of the old unforgettable names, the pedestrians struck north-west or south-west to "the warm, green-muffled Cumner Hills", "the stripling Thames at Bablock-hithe", "Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here in June", "the skirts of Bagley Wood" or "Hinksey and its wintry ridge".
Convention and climate ordain that no one in Oxford shall work in the early afternoon; when the sacred exercisehas been taken and all are refreshed by tea in common room or at home, there is time for two hours' reading before Hall. After that, a man may go to the theatre, where he will find a tolerable selection of companies and of "London successes";[12]he may look in at a club or retire to finish a belated essay in his rooms; he may dawdle over coffee in the common room and stroll back with a friend for one of those endless disputations which clear the head and suggest a new point of view—raw, paradoxical stuff, it may be, but earnestly argued and perhaps making up in idealism what it lacked in experience. Whatever is "universal" in university education comes chiefly from the men of one's own age and from the distillation of three thousand minds seething with youth and a new encouragement to self-expression whichhad been rigorously withheld at school.[13]If the scope of reading is limited there, the limitations are broken down to some extent by the sum of all the reading in all the public schools. It was in the intimate late hours when some club had dispersed that one man would talk of Browning's Jewish blood and reproduce the savage indignation ofHoly Cross Day; another would give forth the magic music of Synge's plays; and a generation which had hitherto escaped the theological preoccupation of the Victorian era argued Renan and discussedThe Golden Boughin comfort of mind.
If in the pooling of their enthusiasms the men of this vanished generation advanced even one step towards the universality of spirit which is the intellectual vision of a university, they advanced many steps nearer to a social universality than had been possible at school. Eton, by virtue of its size and repute, is fed, within the limits of one plane, by the greatest number of tributaries; but Westminster and Harrow, Winchester, Rugby and Charterhouse are filled each from its own well-defined source. At Oxford, in greater or lesser degree, hitherto unfamiliar types mingled for the first time and, in social and political debate, encountered the embodiment of what had hitherto been malevolent abstractions: an Orange land-owner lived over the head of a rebellious home ruler; the hereditary legislator sat in Hall beside the radical who expended his eloquencein trying to abolish the House of Lords. There were Catholics, Presbyterians and an occasional Jew; rich men, poor men; scholars, dunces; sceptics and fanatics; prigs and worldlings; incipient swindlers, congenital debauchees and a vast representation of the vast average English class which is between rich and poor, which is shrewd without being subtile, tenacious but practical, self-satisfied but self-depreciatory, with conservative instincts and radical initiative.
To all and to each, Oxford smilingly proferred her inexhaustible tray ofcotillonfavours. There was and is and, seemingly, always must be a class debarred by poverty from entering this kingdom; but, once inside, there is an unmatched equality of opportunity for rich and poor, exalted and humble, an unprecedented freedom for each to express his individuality in the choice of his work and recreation, his friends and life. Though there, as elsewhere, the deepest pocket commanded the greatest material comfort, narrow means were no obstacle to the enjoyment and profit which every man could extract from four years of the most democratic life that England provided outside the House of Commons; nowhere was a man taken more ungrudgingly on his merits, nowhere did the eccentric—were he poser, experimenter or monomaniac—obtain a better run for his money.
In these days of fifteen years ago, came the first batch of Rhodes scholars. Nothing but a war will drive the average Englishman to look at a map; and nothing less than the late war would have stirred the imagination of the English to concern for the size and cohesion of the British Empire. Cecil Rhodes had been dead nearly half a generation before South Africans and Australians,New Zealanders and Canadians—to name but a few—met together on a single battle-front; but his vision embraced what the war of 1914 made actual, and he, who confessedly owed more to Oxford than to any other phase of his career, made Oxford the trial-ground for the greatest historical experiment in imperial education. With the effect of Oxford on the Rhodes scholars only a Rhodes scholar is competent to deal; the influence of the Rhodes scholars on Oxford was marked. They were the picked men from the universities of the world; not only from the dominions and colonies of the British Empire, but from Germany as well, for Rhodes felt that conflict between the two countries could most surely be avoided by making their peoples better acquainted. Chosen for general prowess—in sport, in work, in the popularity and position which they had attained in their own universities,—they came somewhat older than the generality in years and much older in experience; they brought new intellectual standpoints and a deliberate wisdom to leaven the facile cleverness and omniscience of British Oxford.[14]
Those three or four years resolve themselves into a collection of exquisite memories in miniature; but, day after day and term after term, nothing ever happened to shake a man's soul from its seating. There were glorious parties in college and on the river; there were great rides and walks; there were splendid disputations. During Eights Week a man invited his sisters and friends to lunch with him; shy and self-conscious, he met them at the station and piloted them informatively through the cathedral and hall, the cloisters and library and kitchen until it was time to stroll back to his rooms, where through the flower-boxes and open windows could be seen cold salmon and roast chicken, meringues, strawberries-and-cream and cider-cup spread out in monotonous invitation, where, too, the prudent host had enlisted his most socially gifted friends to ease the burden of hospitality. Replete and a trifle weary of so much good behaviour, he and his friends threaded their way through the crowded Meadows and took up their position on the barge, returning between second and first division for tea. Utterly exhausted, he at last drove his patient guests to the station and returned for dinner and uninterrupted celibacy.[15]
Hardly had he recovered from the social exigencies of Eights Week than Commemoration was upon him with sterner demands, longer drawn out. For anxious weeks he debated which balls he would attend and who should be invited to go with him; parties were arranged, rooms engaged; and for one, two or three nights he danced indefatigably from nine till five or six, then shivered in a wind-swept quadrangle or on the pavement outside the Town Hall while he surrendered to the undergraduate herd-instinct of being commemoratively photographed. Then, perhaps, he would go to bed for a few hours, rising wearily to take part in a picnic on the Cher and returning in time to dress for the next ball, and the more conscientious sort—hosts and guests alike—would insist on being present at the Encænia.[16]
Before Commemoration is over, many were laying their plans for Henley. After that, the pleasure-lovers went to London for the last weeks of the season; and, for the serious workers, the coming of August marked the beginning of a long ten weeks of uninterrupted reading.
So from term to term and year to year. Every summercarried away the older friends, every autumn brought a new draft to take their place. With time came better rooms and perhaps greater dignity of position; a man worked through the lower offices of various clubs and succeeded in time to the chair; he woke to find himself a senior member of the college, setting to freshmen the tone which had been set to him in his own first year. With abrupt suddenness he discovered that he must begin looking for digs. out of college; if he had idled or overspent his allowance, he would perhaps retire to a distant monastic cell to retrench or work; otherwise he looked for good rooms near the House and a friend to share them with him.
Life out of college diminishes the sense that a man is a living, breathing part of a community which wakes to life in hall, common room and cathedral, if indeed it is not always awake in the quadrangle. So long as he is back in digs... by midnight, there are few restrictions on his liberty; he can entertain, he can get up and go to bed when he likes, he can see as much or as little of the college as he chooses. And, with comfortable digs.., an excellent cook and work which swells like a banking cloud as his schools approach, there are many temptations to stay at home and only to visit the college for Sunday evening chapel, hall and a club meeting.
The last year, for those who find time to think, is depressing, for they are watching the O.U.D.S. or the House Grind for the last time, and the menace of their final schools throws a gloom over everything. Some of the subjects are being read for the first time; others, that seemed to have been mastered two years before, are now almost wholly forgotten; losing confidence, a man speaks of himself as "lucky to scrape a fourth," hegrows fatalistic and says that he does not care; and his tutor wisely sends him away for a few days' holiday and reestablishes his confidence with a word of praise.
Then for a week he faces his examiners, two papers a day, three hours for each paper; and at the end, when they have laid him bare, he cares very little indeed for any other result than that he will probably never again be compelled to study English political or constitutional history, political economy and economic history, political science and European history, a special subject or even a modern language. The taut nerves become of a sudden very slack.
And then it has to be realised that within a week all will be over.
One last Commemoration. A day or two of unbearable farewells. Instructions for the packing of books and pictures which he had unpacked so very lately, yet at the distant other end of his Oxford career. And then that overwhelming day when a man drives to the station and, as the train gathers speed, looks for the last time on Tom Tower. He will come back again, no doubt, but no longer as a resident undergraduate; the Kingdom of the Young has passed to another dynasty. In three or four years he has progressed, in age, from boy to man; but the development has been chiefly intellectual, and, for all his greater knowledge and experience, he has changed little in character or essential instincts. The rigour of school discipline has been relaxed, because it is no longer needed; but the simple school ideals of honour and loyalty, restraint and self-control, clean living and hard condition remain unaltered. Had he chosen to defy opinion and to disdain the protection with which Oxford surrounds him, the opportunity wasat hand for drinking too much and for getting into debt, for idling and for discarding the fastidiousness which impels English boys to keep women at a distance. There are men in every generation who will collect experience at all costs, but at Oxford they are not regarded with admiration: the undergraduate who drinks or boasts of his exploits with women is voted noxious or boring or both.
A month or six weeks after the end of term comes the viva; then the class lists. In the following October the curtain is rung down for most, when they meet again—and, perhaps, for the last time—to receive the grace of their college and to proceed to the degree of Bachelor of Arts.