OXFORD

"Once, my dear—but the world was young then—
Magdalen elms and Trinity limes,—

Lissom the oars and backs that swung then,
Eight good men in the good old times—

Careless we and the chorus flung then.

Under St. Mary's chimes!

"Still on her spire the pigeons hover;
Still by her gateway flits the gown;

Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,
Drumming her old ones forth from town,

Know you the secret none discover?

Tell it—when you go down."

What Matthew Arnold did for the interpretation of Oxford through the medium of prose, that Mr. Quiller-Couch has done through the medium of verse. In the poem from which I have just quoted two stanzas he conveys, as no one else has ever conveyed it in poetry, the tender and elusive charm of that incomparable place.

"Know you her secret none can utter—
Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?"

It is a hard question, and susceptible of some very prosaic and therefore inappropriate answers. The true answer can, I think, only be given by those for whom Oxford lies, half hid, in the enchanted past: "Tell it—when you go down."

Some parts of the spell which Oxford exercises on those who are subjected to her influence are in no sense secret. We perceive them from the day when we first set foot within her precincts, and the sense of them abides with us for ever.

"If less insensible than sodden clay
In a sea-river's bed at ebb of tide,"

all sons of Oxford must realize her material beauty, her historical pre-eminence, her contribution to thought and culture, her influence on the religious life of England.

"Ah, but her secret? You, young lover."

There is nothing secret about all this; it is palpable and manifest; and yet it does not exhaust the spell. Something there is that remains undiscovered, or at best half-discovered—felt and guessed at, but not clearly apprehended—until we have passed away from the "dreaming spires"—the cloisters and the gardens and the river—to that sterner life for which these mysterious enchantments have been preparing us.

"Know you the secret none discover?"

If you do, that is proof that time has done its work and has brought to the test of practical result the influences which were shaping your mind and, still more potently, your heart, between eighteen and twenty-two. What that "secret" is, let an unworthy son of Oxford try to tell.

To begin with a negative, it is not the secret of Nirvana. There are misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which includes all knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from the human tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be calm. And so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may be. The bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to the well-spread table of an Oxford common-room. In a laburnum-clad villa in the Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life in cities where five families camp in one room. But when we leave the actualities of life and come to the region of thought and opinion, all the pent energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for "Prophet" comes, I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble like water on the flames; and in this fervency of thought and feeling Oxford is characteristically prophetic. It is a tradition that in some year of the passion-torn 'forties the subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem was Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding poem at Cambridge was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to herself. For a century at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) she has been the battle-field of contending sects. Her air has resounded with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain have lain thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with rare irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever-recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery. Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blows which our strength could compass, and devised the most dangerous pitfalls which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture.

"Never we wince, though none deplore us,
We who go reaping that we sowed;

Cities at cockcrow wake before us—
Hey, for the lilt of the London road!

One look back, and a rousing chorus!

Never a palinode!"

It is when we have finally sung that chorus and have travelled a few miles upon that road, that we learn the secret which we never discovered while as yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight. We thought then that we were the most desperate partizans; we asked no quarter, and gave none; pushed our argumentative victories to their uttermost consequences, and made short work of a fallen foe. But, when all the old battle-cries have died out of our ears, we begin to perceive humaner voices. All at once we realize that a great part of our old contentions was only sound and fury and self-deception, and that, though the causes for which we strove may have been absolutely right, our opponents were not necessarily villains. In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford. All the time that we were fighting and fuming, the higher and subtler influences of the place were moulding us, unconscious though we were, to a more gracious ideal. We had really learnt to distinguish between intellectual error and moral obliquity. We could differ from another on every point of the political and theological compass, and yet in our hearts acknowledge him to be the best of all good fellows. Without surrendering a single conviction, we came to see the virtue of so stating our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of offending and alienating. We had attained to that temper which, in the sphere of thought and opinion, is analogous to the crowning virtue of Christian charity.

"Tell it—when you go down."

Lately it has been my privilege to address a considerable gathering of Oxford undergraduates, all keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all devotedly loyal to the tradition of Oxford as each understood it, and all with their eyes eagerly fixed on "the wistful limit of the world." With such an audience it was inevitable to insist on the graces and benedictions which Oxford can confer, and to dwell on Mr. Gladstone's dogma that to call a man a "typically Oxford man" is to bestow the highest possible praise.

But this was not all. Something more remained to be said. It was for a speaker who had travelled for thirty years on "the London road" to state as plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place which had decided the course and complexion of his life. And, when it was difficult to express that obligation in the pedestrian prose of an after-dinner speech, he turned for succour to the poet who sang of "the secret none discover." Wherever philosophical insight is combined with literary genius and personal charm, one says instinctively, "That man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man." Chiefest among the great names which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name of Edmund Burke; and the "Secret" on which we have been discoursing seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the ideal character: "It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to cultivate friendships and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but both selected—in the one to be placable, in the other immovable." Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the "Secret" of Oxford.