’VARSITY LITERATURE—(continued)

There were many other minor literary outputs which made their appearance from time to time through the century, but it would be tedious to analyse all of them. The outstanding ones were The Oxford Packet, Academia: or the Humours of Oxford, The Oxford Act, Tom Warton’s fighting poem entitled The Triumph of Isis, and The Oxford Sausage.

The Oxford Packet was a purely topical piece of writing containing heated articles on the burning questions of the moment in Oxford. It was published in London, “printed for J. Roberts in 1714,” with a list of contents including “(1) News from Magdalene College (Sacheverell’s Inscription on a piece of plate); (2) Antigamus: or a Satire against Marriage, written by Mr Thomas Sawyer; (3) A Vindication of the Oxford Ladies, wherein are displayed the amours of some Gentlemen of All Souls and St John’s Colleges.”

Academia, perpetrated by a woman, Alicia d’Anvers, ridiculed the manners and customs of the university in a pointed and quite scurrilous manner. It lived up to its sub-title, however, for it was an extremely humorous piece of work.

In 1733 there appeared the The Oxford Act, a ballad opera. A crude and unamusing play, it is nevertheless interesting as containing the germ of modern musical comedy. The idea of the piece was to satirise university politics, but the lack of construction and the laboured manner in which the dramatist introduced his songs and manoeuvred his characters makes it tedious and rather difficult to appreciate.

The Triumph of Isis was occasioned by a denunciation of Oxford by a Cambridge man, William Mason, who was guilty of a poem entitled Isis. In it he taunted Oxford upon the degeneracy of her sons who

“... madly bold
To Freedom’s foes infernal orgies hold.”

This was more than any devoted son of Alma mater could stand. Accordingly, Tom Warton, stung to a retort, girded up his loins and flung off The Triumph of Isis, in which he hurled ten thousand thunderbolts at The Venal Sons of Slavish Cam. Dr Anderson, who wrote a preface to the collection of Warton’s poems, says, “It is remarkable that though neither Mason nor Warton ever excelled these performances, each of them as by consent, when he first collected his poems into a volume, omitted his own party production.”[23]

It was not until 1764 that The Oxford Sausage was concocted. Its title is singularly apt. It was a volume of choice scraps—selected pieces in prose and verse which had already made their appearance in other and earlier publications. It included several poems by Tom Warton, who edited The Sausage, and contained others from The Student and the Oxford Journal.

These then are the literary productions which distinguished the eighteenth century in Oxford. From the numerous excerpts and passages quoted in preceding chapters it will have been seen that there is not only an enormous difference between the writing of the eighteenth century and to-day in style and treatment, but in the method of conducting a paper. To-day it is quite impossible to call a spade a spade. In those days it was exactly the opposite. The whole point of writing was to call things by their proper names. In fact, any other method would have been completely misunderstood. The morals of the time were not more lax than now—that would be impossible—but the language employed was, to put it mildly, very much more unguarded.

Matters were openly discussed in the drawing-rooms of the eighteenth century which nowadays are supposed to be whispered in smoking-rooms. Drunkenness and other kindred vices were held in high esteem. It was “the thing” for him who had any aspirations to be a man of the world to have a half dozen bottles of wine to his own cheek at one sitting, and unless he succeeded in arriving at that state of helplessness which necessitated bodily assistance from persons unknown, he was a dismal social failure. Women, whose husbands were carried home night after night, smiled leniently and did not dream of interfering. Many ladies indeed did not deny themselves the solace of the bottle, and in the records of the time I have found more than one reference to women who were well-known, almost licensed, topers. The question of toasts, too, and the light in which the university held them, was Gilbertian. The statutes sternly forbade them under penalty of dire pains and punishments, but for all practical purposes the statutes were a waste of time. Oxford was famed for her toasts, and their dealings were not confined solely to the gownsmen but also to Dons and Heads of colleges, who, far from carrying out the statutes which they had made, pooh-poohed them and indulged themselves to their heart’s content.

With such a condition of things it is not very remarkable that the literature of the time should be characterised by coarseness of language and ideas. Its humour was of the riper kind which permitted of no possible misunderstanding. Many of the jokes printed in such periodicals as the Oxford Journal and the Oxford Magazine—both papers in high repute which circulated among Dons, Undergraduates and residents—would be quite unprintable to-day even in the most yellow of the sporting papers. The pen of Amhurst was hampered by no considerations of delicacy or modesty. Whatever he felt on any subject that he wrote, boldly and without mincing, and the fact that his articles were read with interest and delight by male and female alike is proof that there is no blame attaching to him for scurrility. He was merely in the period. There are also instances of women who wrote with almost the same degree of frankness as did Alicia d’Anvers, who had, as I have shown, an immodesty of style unique in the entire century. She satirised all the manners, customs, hobbies and vices of the university with flagrant lack of good taste which, judging by the characteristics of the time, made her poem a great success.

In the eighteenth century there were neither advertisements—except in the Oxford Journal, and they were few in number—nor athletic fixtures. The editors, therefore, had to rely entirely upon the merits of the articles printed in their paper. Their sole hope of life lay in circulation, and as they had not then discovered such “adventitious aids” as idols and open letters, they were forced to do their utmost to make their paper bright and readable. That they did so is obvious from the great number of contributors who sent in articles regularly, and that, too, without any hope of payment.

From the point of view of journalism there is no paper in Oxford to-day which can survive a comparison with Terrae Filius. He did not go outside the university for his subjects, and yet in each paper he was topical, forcible, and to the point. Beyond this he was amusing, and there was a sting in each single word which made the unhappy subject of his attack squirm in his place. He did not indulge in long-winded and abortive discussions about matters of no interest whatever to the university, such as are invariably to be seen in twentieth-century papers. He instinctively hit upon the only subject each week that was before the eye of Oxford, and in straightforward, pithy language wrote it down, laughed at it, or cried over it. In whatever spirit he treated it he left nothing more to be said. He used it up, exhausted it, and turned to the next point. Not having any advertisers to consider—and he would certainly not have considered them had they existed—he said what he wanted to say without fear or favour, and if he did not attain to such financial success as does the milk and water stuff of to-day, he did establish, beyond all argument, a reputation which has already survived two centuries. Which of the existing Oxford journals can hope to compete against such a record?

However much eighteenth-century writers merit the charge of coarseness—and it is not laid at their door in the spirit of blame but merely as an illustration of things as they existed—they undoubtedly attained a higher literary standard than the Undergraduate writers of to-day. As, however, I have said that the modern standard does not rise above mediocrity, I am not paying a very great compliment to the writers of the Rowlandson period. Such is, however, my intention, for I cannot see that there is such great brilliance in the eighteenth-century papers as to justify my launching out into paeans of adulation. In all the publications of the time there were, as I have shown, some excellent pieces of writing. The sonnets and epigrams, dashed off at the coffee-houses to the beauties of the reigning toast, were filled with classical allusions and subtle parallels. This is somewhat remarkable because the Bloods admittedly never did any reading. They had no time for it. However likeable and readable these were, there was no genius, no striking merit in any of them. They certainly showed more promise than the greater part of the work of twentieth-century Oxford men—a point which is emphasised by the fact that our predecessors were generally three or four years younger on going up to the university. To-day we go up at about nineteen years of age. In those days it was the fashion for men to arrive in Oxford in their fifteenth or sixteenth year.

With the exception of Nicholas Amhurst, from whom I have drawn with so much pleasure, there can be found no Undergraduate of Georgian times whose genius, in however crude a form, awoke in the pages of university literature.