The senior members of the University are perhaps as interesting as they have ever been. The freshman or other critical stranger to the city finds them less picturesque, if his ideal be anything like that of the youthful Ruskin, who looked for presences like the Erasmus of Holbein or Titian’s Magnificoes, and was disappointed at Christ Church by all save one. For the President or Master, whose absolutism used to be the envy of kings, now bears his honours inconspicuously. The fellows of colleges are no longer, indeed, a distinct and noticeable class, but are, for the most part, purely and simply scholars, or historians, or instructors of youth. The conscientious, capable, and hard-working Don is probably commoner than he has ever been; and his success is great. But even he might echo the cry against a possible tendency towards mere educational efficiency in fellows, which is expressed in the exclamation: “Nothing is so much to be feared[Pg 196] as that we should one day compete with the Board Schools.”

“O goodly usage of those antique times,” when it was a sufficient grace to be a scholar, and it was a kind of virtue to quote from Horace and never to play upon words outside Homer. Here and there such a man survives, always old, married to the place, and yet with a widowed air, looking as if he had crept out of one of the reverend pictures in the hall, and still clear-sighted enough to see the length of Broad Street and regret it, fumbling with the spectacles which he bought to protect his eyes in the first year of railway travelling. No one could draw him quite so happily as the Sub-Rector of Lincoln College, and in his latest book he gives us a charming hint, and there, quite appropriately, but too pathetically, he allows the old scholar to die.

“The Church, indeed,” he writes, “was mouldy enough, and the air within was close and sleep-giving; and as the old parson murmured his sermon twice a Sunday from the high old pulpit, his hearers gradually dropped into a tranquil doze or a pleasant day-dream—all except the old Scholar, who sat just below, holding his hand to his ear, and eagerly looking for one of those subtle allusions, those reminiscences of old reading, or even now and then three words of Latin from Virgil or the Imitatio with which his lifelong friend would strain a point to please him. They had been at school together, and at college together, and now they were spending their last years together, for the old Scholar had come, none of us knew[Pg 198][Pg 197]

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whence, and settled down in the manor-house by the churchyard, hard by the Rectory of his old companion. And so they walked together through the still shady avenues of life’s evening, wishing for no change, reading much and talking little, lovers of old times and old books, seeking the truth, not indeed in the world around them, but in the choice words of the wise men of old: Pia et humilis inquisitio veritatis per sanas patrum sententias studens ambulare.

I

Such a one there was, until recently, to be met walking on a fine day between Magdalen and Oriel; or even, in April, as far as the Shotover road in expectation of hearing the nightingales; or as far as Carfax to learn whether the tower was looking any older. He was exquisitely courteous, without a tinge of mere courtliness, and could hate and contemn. Such was his loathing of what was unseemly that he begged he might be awakened by any one that heard him snore. If he was a misogynist, it was because he was shy and ignorant of women. He would gently insinuate, and as if it were temerity, that even good women cannot distinguish between fiction and Jane Austen, and have been known to deposit pins in ashtrays. He could not express an opinion upon subjects which he ignored or disliked, and when they were discussed in the Common Room, he had an irrepressible sympathy with both sides. Thus he was no politician,[Pg 202] but was at one with members of Parliament of both sides, by means of a little genial commonplace. But on his hobby-horses—sublimis in equis—he had a sweet eloquence which he “hoped was not persuasive.” For he disliked proselytisers more than proselytes. In later years, he became too deaf to be quite honest in answering a stupid or knavish man. He had, too, a little vocal impediment which he could use rhetorically. Preaching one day at a country church, he was dwelling at length upon the good qualities of a prophet.

“That’s parson all over,” murmured now and then a grey parishioner, and inquired of whom he spoke.

“Isaiah or Habakkuk,” explained his neighbour.

“Then I don’t believe,” answered the disappointed man, “there is such a person—unless ’tis another name for parson.”

When an old lady lay a-dying, and was troubled concerning the destiny of her magpie and tame hare after her death, the curate amiably suggested that Providence would take care of them.

“No, no,” she interposed, “give them to Mr.——.”

He was, despite features which the dull might call plain, remarkably, and I had almost said physically, beautiful, because of the clear shining of his character. The tender motives that often moulded his lips, the purity and grace that found expression in his eyes, and that fluctuation of the lines of the face in thought which is almost light and shade, wrought an immortal beauty out of Nature’s poor endowment. Nor was that only when he was in a fit small company. Some men, when[Pg 203] not moved by such an influence, lapse into that sculptured and muddy expression which is the chief quality of photographs. You may surprise them void and waste. But if he was ever surprised, it might be seen that he turned to the intruder fresh from a spiritual colloquy. His smile, on opening Plutarch, was as if he blessed and was blessed, and restored the beholder to the age of the first revival of learning. Very soft—some said mincing—was his step among his books, as not knowing what or whom he might disturb. If you saw him in the Bodleian, he seemed its familiar spirit, and in some way its outward and visible expression or heraldic device. Though a wide and learned reader, he had published nothing that had anything to do with books. In his youth he had circulated “An Elegy written within sight of Keble College,” and in later years speculations on the Jurassic sea and the migration of birds. He often read aloud to himself, and even to others on being provoked, in his sounding wainscotted room in sight of All Saints steeple. Especially he liked to chant Sophocles, and to the opening of Electra gave a solemn and almost religious sweetness in the rendering. Then it was that we knew how he had gained and preserved that notable grace of pronunciation. He used to say, “It is a fine day,” instead of “Tserfineday.” And thus of every day he made a rosary of gracious thoughts and deeds among men and Nature and books; and apparelling a worldly life with the sanctity of unworldly temperance and charity, his homeliness became dignified without[Pg 204] losing its simplicity, and almost ornate with courtesies that never set a blush in the face of truth.

II

Of the successful man who is a Don by accident I confess an ignorance that borders on dislike. He is perhaps a scholar, certainly a courtier. He has the open secret of perennial youth. It is very likely that he dabbles in light literature, and may have written a book of fiction or history with a wide circulation. He was a gay, discursive parodist in his youth; chose his own ties, or thought he did; worked hard, and concealed the fact from his inferiors. His extreme caution to-day might appear indiscreet to an impartial judge. He writes letters to the Times on important matters on which he seeks information; or if his old self should be assertive, he writes over the name of “Justice” or “One who knows” in a penny paper, and is indignant towards the friends who fail to recognise his style and point of view. In this and every possible way he keeps a firm connection with the great outer world. He knows the female cousins of all the undergraduates of his college, and many of them have been mildly in love with him in a punt. He is often in London, where he is very academic, and would wish to appear merely well-informed. When he meets London friends in Oxford, he is anxious to prove that he at least is not a mere Don; yet his friends can only wonder that there is now no such thing as an Oxford point of view, but only an[Pg 205] Oxford drawl. His sitting-room is magnificent, and like style, conceals the man. It is no wonder that a man with such arm-chairs should be well satisfied. His books are noble up to the year 1800—abundant and select, often old, always fine; but after the year 1800 a certain timidity of taste may be observed. Of course his friends’ books are there, with the books which you are expected to know in country houses. For the rest, he has overcome the difficulty of selection by not selecting. As the college has good port and is indifferent in its choice of white wine, so he has good classics and a jumble of later work. He is charitable, a ready contributor to approved causes. He has travelled, and is never reduced to silence in company. He is a good talker, knowing how not to offend. He is a brilliant host, suave, considerate,—with comprehensive views,—and ready to make allowances for those who are not Dons. Perhaps he is in the main a summer bird. Then he shows that he is a gallant as well as a scholar and man of the world. He is the figure-head of his college barge during The Eights, and with an eye-glass, that is a kind of sixth sense, he surveys womankind, and sees that it is good.

III

There was lately also a more Roman type amongst us. He had a lusty Terentian wit that was not in the fashion of these times; and his proud frankness about everything but his soul found even less welcome from a[Pg 206] generation that liked to talk of little else. “A little hypocrisy”—such was his advice to freshmen, but not his practice—“a little hypocrisy is useful to a virtuous man, since it is hard not to appear a hypocrite, especially when one is not.” He was what is called an intemperate man. For, though a small, fastidious eater and short sleeper, he was a man of many bottles; nor had he the common gift of repenting of the truths which claret inspired and port enabled him to express. He never learned to whine over private infelicity—a weighty shortcoming; or to moralise on the infelicities of others—which was almost a virtue. A small Kantian once asked him how he felt after a bereavement. “It has never occurred to me,” was his reply, “to think how I felt.” An unsuccessful man himself, and burdened by his more successful and more indolent relatives, his catchword was, nevertheless, “Success.” But he perhaps hated more than a noisy failure a noisy success. Always scheming on behalf of others, he laid no plans for himself, except by writing his own epitaph, on the day before his death. He ate, drank, was merry, and did his duty. He was the life and soul and financial saviour of his college. At no time was he a profound student; he had been elected to a fellowship on account of his birth; yet the brilliant scholar and the nice courtier of the college admitted that he, the chapel, and the cook were equally indispensable. In fact, he was as near to the ideal head of a college as it would be wise to have in an ancient university. He could not lecture, and was a poor judge of imitation Greek prose. He radiated[Pg 207] a clean and vigorous worldly influence through both Common Rooms. He knew every undergraduate who was within the reach of knowledge. His judgment of men was as consummate and as untransferable as his judgment of wine. It was his custom to say that there had been three philosophers, two ancient, one modern, in the history of the world—Ecclesiastes, Democritus, and Sir William Temple of Moor Park. To his pupils he used to pronounce that, “since you are average men and will never be able to understand Ecclesiastes or take the trouble to understand Democritus,” they should follow the Englishman. He then repeated from memory this passage (with such solemnity that I believe he felt it to be his own):—

“Some writers, in casting up the goods most desirable in life, have given them this rank—health, beauty, and riches. Of the first, I find no dispute; but to the two others much may be said; for beauty is a good that makes others happy rather than one’s self; and how riches should claim so high a rank I cannot tell, when so great, so wise, and so good a part of mankind have, in all ages, preferred poverty before them—the Therapeutae and Ebionites among the Jews, the primitive monks and modern friars among Christians, so many dervises among the Mahometans, the Brachmans among the Indians, and all the ancient philosophers; who, whatever else they differed in, agreed in this, of despising riches, and at best esteeming them an unnecessary trouble or encumbrance of life: so that whether they are to be reckoned among goods or evils, is yet left in doubt.[Pg 208]

“When I was young, and in some idle company, it was proposed that every one should tell what their three wishes should be, if they were sure to be granted: some were very pleasant, and some very extravagant; mine were health, and peace, and fair weather; which, though out of the way among young men, yet perhaps might pass well enough among old: they are all of a strain; for health in the body is like peace in the state, and serenity in the air; the sun, in our climate at least, has something so reviving, that a fair day is a kind of sensual pleasure, and of all others the most innocent.”

The last words he would often repeat, with this comment: that people to-day were so much busied with sunsets and landscapes and colours that they had no such hearty feeling for Nature as the old seventeenth-century statesman, philosopher, and gardener had.

“Read Cowley and Pope,” was his only criticism in English literature. “Any one can be a Keats, though few can write as well,” he argued, “but it is not so easy to be like Pope.” Meeting Browning one day, and telling him that he enjoyed some of his poetry, the poet asked him whether he understood it. “No,” said the Don, “do you?”

For twenty years, when men spoke of—— College, they thought of him. “The University of Oxford,” said an old pupil who lived to send his son to that college, “the University of Oxford, at least as a place of education, consists of old——, the river, and the college pump.” That college is now like Roman[Pg 210][Pg 209]

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literature without Lucretius, or a wine-glass of cold water.

When I look back and see him, more military than ecclesiastical (except for a snuffle) in his doctorial scarlet, I think that it was partly his brow that was his power. It was a calm, ample, antique brow. In the ancient world the brow made the man and the god. It was as divine as Ægis or thunder or eagle. It was more magisterial than the fasces. It commanded the Consulate and troubled the dominion of Persia and cast down the power of Hannibal. The brow of Jupiter—of Plato—of Augustus—was a hill of majesty equal with Olympus. The history of old sculpture is an Ave! to the brow. Now the soul has descended to the eyes. In politics, war, literature, above all in finance, victory is with the eyes. The old man had the godlike span of curving bone; but his eyes slept. It was his good fortune and Oxford’s honour that he ruled an Oxford college.

IV

Among the younger men is one who spent perhaps a year in trying to combine high living and high thinking; then made a compromise by dropping the high thinking; and at last, perhaps as the result of some solemn intervention, became ascetic. He is a friend of authors and potentates. He understands a bishop, and takes a kindly interest in east-enders, so long as they are in Oxford. His aspect is grave and calm, since life, in losing half its vices, has lost all its charm. Like fine[Pg 214] cutlery, his manners lack nothing but originality; he has a good taste in flowers, and can even arrange them. Nor is the taste in books limited by his connoisseurship in binding. He is a free and fearless reader, yet careful in the choice of books to be left on the table. If style were finish, his writing would be famous; but his beautiful style is always subordinated to a really beautiful handwriting. His originally dilettante interest in palÆography has lured him into some genuine research among old manuscripts. His lectures are therefore fresh, thoughtful, and perfect in gesture, delivery, and composition. I seem to behold Virgil himself at the end of one of his descants, or Politian at least. If he had not more love of the applause of his most graceful pupils than of the learned world, he might be renowned. But he is content to be three-quarters of a specialist in history and more than one of the arts, and to be a lodestar to the ladies of his audience. Perhaps only they can do him justice.

V

There is (or was) to be found at the top of a mouldy Oxford staircase the most unpedantic man in the world, seated underneath and upon and amidst innumerable books. In the more graceful than sufficient garments of his leisure, he looked like Homer, with hair still ungrizzled. He spoke, and back came the Iliad and the Odyssey on that stormy sound. But he could so well dissemble this physical magnificence that he passed in[Pg 216][Pg 215]

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different clothing for an able-bodied seaman and a member of Parliament.

He loved the forest and cloud and sea as if they had been brothers. To visit him in his ancient room was to take a journey to Nature: to walk with him, in all weathers—to Wood Eaton, Sunningwell, Fyfield, Northmoor—was to go with a talking and genial embodiment of the north-west wind and a dash of orchard scent.

His room was alive with the spirit of old histories. Famous men—Pericles or Alexander or John XXII.—seemed to live once more when they were discoursed of in that eloquent chamber. It may have been illusion,—for there was little talk of historical principles,—but on leaving him, a man felt that he had gone away “before the mysteries,” and that if he could but live in the rooms of Urbanus, the past would be wonderfully revealed. Then, a day or two afterwards, he could remember only Urbanus himself, and, after a brief indignation at the cheiromancy quite unwittingly practised, admitted that that was sufficient.

I am not sure whether he professed history or divinity or Chinese. He wrote, however, an epoch-making treatise on “The Literature of Aboriginal Races, with special reference to Sumatra”; an invaluable brochure on “The Jewellery of the Visigothic Kings”; “A Complete Exposition of the Ancient Game of Tabblisk”; and “A Brief Summary of the Loves of Diarmad O’Diubhne.” His sonnet to M. MallarmÉ, though it has been described as trop mallarmisÉ, is justly[Pg 220] admired. But he did not write ten volumes of reminiscences.

I can see him, in a brown library or a pictured hall, beginning a lecture. He moves about a little uneasily, like the late William Morris, and as if he would rather use deeds than words. An old book lies open before him: now and then he turns over a page, reads to himself, and smiles. The conscientious undergraduate looks at his watch and begins spoiling his pen upon the blotting-paper. He comes to take notes; but Urbanus does not care. Suddenly the lecturer laughs heartily at a good passage and begins:—

“I think perhaps you will like this story....”

And he reads, punctuating the matter with his own lively appreciation. Somerville and Lady Margaret and St. Hugh’s look resigned; future first (or third) class men look contemptuous; a Blue feels that his time is being wasted,—he must complain,—he rises and walks out as Urbanus remarks:—

“I don’t know your name, sir, but you can sleep here, if you wish.”

Urbanus closes the book five minutes before or after the appointed hour; some one mutters about “the worst lecturer in this incubator of bad lecturers”: such is his influence, not so much injecting knowledge as dredging and maturing what is already gained, that others can think of him easily as a humanist of the great days, who has survived in his old college, with an indifference to mere time which is not incredible in Oxford, where memories three centuries old are still alive in oral tradition.[Pg 221]

VI

Philip Amberley, late fellow of——, took it much to heart that he was not born in 1300. He would have been a monk, and would have illuminated Ovid to the astonishment of all ages. All he could do in this age was to perform his tutorial duty, and to write a few pages of noble English in a caligraphy that was worthy of the ages he loved. He wrote but one book, which he burned, because nobody would give him £5 for it. A not very old or very credible story tells how an intelligent alien blurted out the question, at the high table of Philip’s college: Whether the uncomely heads before the Sheldonian Theatre were not the fellows of that same college. The inquirer was corrected with asperity; and in revenge he always stated that he afterwards received photographs of the younger fellows, by way of removing the mote from his eye. But Philip sent a photograph of the least human physiognomy, signed with full name and college. For the rest, he had that uncertainty of character which is called conscience in the good and timidity in the bad, and in him meant merely that he exchanged an act for a dream. He was filled with a supreme pity, even for the Devil, whom he called “that immortal scapegoat of gods and men.”

He died on an evening of July, while the scent of hay in passing waggons filled and pleased his nostrils, lying in his half-monastic, half-manorial home, not far from Oxford. How often had he celebrated the sweet[Pg 222]ness of the dead grass as an emblem of comely human death! For a little while he spoke of his friends, of the “beautiful gate” of St. Mary’s, of his columbines (the older sort), and of a copy of Virgil newly come from Italy. We listened silently. Life was still an eloquent poet on his lips. But Death was a strong sculptor already at work upon his face and hands. The last waggon passed below his window as he lay dead, and the friendly carter shouted “Good-night.”

Now, we three were ashamed that we could find no tears for the loss of such a man; and again, that we should suffer any alteration of our joy, at having seen what we had seen. We recalled the past through half the night. As we sat, none of us looked more alive than he, amidst the old gloomy furniture, refashioned by the moon. We were but the toys of night, of the smooth perfumes and the sounds of nothing known, and of the presence which was like a great thought in the room. Then as the coming day mingled with the passing night, a cold pale beam—? f??? ?????—came to the four. As often a symbol becomes an image, so the beam of light seemed to be the very spirit of which it was a messenger, hailed by our eyes and hearts. It was beautiful as the Grail with many angels about it,—awful as the woman of stern aspect and burning eyes that visited the dream of Boethius. It was worthy to have ushered visions yet more august. Ah! the awful purity of the dawn. The light grew; our fancies were unbuilt; we became aware of a holy excellence in the light itself, and enjoyed an almost sensual[Pg 224][Pg 223]

THE CLARENDON BUILDING, LOOKING EAST