Edward Thomas

With cares that move, not agitate the heart.

In other cities the past is a tradition, and is at most regretted. In Oxford it is an entailed inheritance. Nevertheless, by way of a gaudy foil to this hale immortality, fashions flourish there more luridly, and fade more suddenly, than elsewhere. Afraid, therefore, that I might stumble upon anachronisms unaided, I addressed myself as a seeker after truth to several freshmen who might have been expected to know practically everything. One wished to be excused because he was standing for the secretaryship of the Union, and was “somewhat out of touch with ordinary life.” He had been busily opening debates in half the colleges of Oxford, in order to prove his sound principles and high capabilities, and enclosed this table of labours:—

11th inst., at ——: “That in the opinion of this house His Majesty’s government has done its best.”

12th, at ——: “That the struggles of the poor towards a larger and freer life are not to be discouraged.”

[Pg 352]

13th, at——: “That vegetarianism is opposed alike to our traditions and our present needs.” Also later (to oppose): “That a wave of imperialism causes a reformation in the standards of literature.”

(14th, twenty-first birthday.)

18th, at ——: “That poets are the interpreters of their age.”

19th, at ——: “That in encouraging sports this University approaches more nearly to the Greek ideal than at any other period of its existence has been the case.”

20th, at ——: “A paper on ‘Mentality in Life and Art.’”

21st, at ——: “That Oxford has not sufficiently realised and reformed its national position since imperialism became an acknowledged fact.”

Another gentleman of more tender years and less exuberance forwarded the menu of his college junior gaudy, in itself a pleasant reminder of the more solid occupations of undergraduates. He had made a table of a day’s life, alongside the dishes, like this:—

	Soup
Macedoine.		The Senior Proctor.
	Fish
Turbot and Lobster Sauce.		My tailor: and to buy a meerschaum.
	EntrÉes
Tomates FarcÉes.		My Coach.
	Joint
Saddle of Mutton.		If possible, my philosophy tutor.
	Game
Pheasants.		Aristotle.
	Sweets
Pudding À la Belleline.		Eights.
	Glace
Neapolitain.		The Master.
	Savoury
Oysters À la Bonne Bouche.		Jones’s hair.

He had “no time for more.”

Of the third answer I can just see this fragment, in a fine confident penmanship, among the flames: “Oxford life falls under three heads, which I shall discuss separately. They are Religion, Education, and Social Life. And first of Education. My tutor breakfasts at eight. He has forty-eight pupils, and four ladies from Somerville College. He has one lecture and to-morrow’s to prepare. In the afternoon he will be fresh and cheerful at the college barge, watching the races. He is writing two books, and is on the Board of Guardians. In spite of this the great thing about Oxford education is the way it stamps a man—‘the cast of Vere de Vere,’ as the poet says; no matter in what position in life his lot is thrown, a certain easy grace——”

I find a more rational description of an Oxford day as it was in 1867, and as it was up to the publication of Mr. Rhodes’s will, in the Oxford Spectator, one of the most enduring of undergraduate periodicals.

“The whole History of Philosophy,” says the writer, E. N[olan], “is simply the story of an ordinary Oxford day.... In the morning, when I awake, the eastern dawn, as it shines into my room, gives my philosophy[Pg 354] an Oriental tinge. I turn Buddhist, and lie thinking of nothing. Then I rise, and at once my tenets are those of the Ionics. I think, with Thales, that Water is the great first principle. Under this impression I take my bath. Then, yielding to Animaxander, I begin to believe in the unlimited, and straightway, in a rude toilette, consume an infinite amount of breakfast. This leads to the throwing open of my window, at which I sit, an unconscious disciple of Anaximenes, and a believer in the universal agency of Air. I lock my door and sit down to read mathematics, seeming a very Pythagorean in my loneliness and reverence for numbers. I am disturbed by a knock. I open the door and admit my parlour-maid, who wishes to remove the breakfast things. She is evidently an Eleatic, for she makes an abstraction of everything material, and reduces my table to a state of pure being. Again I am alone, and as I complete my toilet before my mirror, I hold, as Heraclitus did, the principle of the becoming, and think that it, and it only, should be the rule of existence. I saunter to the window, and ponder upon the advantages or otherwise of taking a walk. I am kept at home by some theory of the Elements, such as possessed Empedocles. Now I bethink me of my lunch, and I become an Atomist in my hunger, as I compare the two states of Fulness and Void. At last Atomistic Necessity prevails, and I ring my bell. Lunch over, I walk out, and am much amused, as usual, with the men I meet. I notice that those who have intellect superior to their fellows neglect their personal appearance.[Pg 355] These, I think, are followers of Anaxagoras: they believe in ????, and they deny the Becoming. Others I noticed to be bent upon some violent exercise. I feel myself small and weak beside them, wondering much whether I, who to them am but half a man, am man enough to be considered, sophistically, the measure of all things. I console myself with remarking to myself that I surely know my work for the Schools better than they. Behold! I am Socratic. Virtue, I say, consists in knowing. So I chatter away to myself, feeling quite Platonic in my dialogue, until I meet a luckless friend who is to be examined next day in Moderations. I walk out with him far into the country, talking to him about his work, and struggling against my deeply-rooted antipathy to exertion of any kind. Surely Aristotle could not have been more peripatetic, or Chrysippus more Stoical. The dinner-hour makes me Epicurean, and I pass unconsciously over many stages of philosophy. I spend an hour in the rooms of a friend who is reading hard for honours. I come away but little impressed with the philosophy of the Schoolmen. The evening passes like a dream. I have vague thoughts of recurring to my former good habits of home correspondence; but this revival of letters passes by, leaving me asleep in my chair. Here, again, as at dinner, I doubtless pass through many unconscious stages. At length I begin to muse upon bed. It is a habit of mine to yield to the vulgar fascinations of strong liquors before retiring for the night. Philosophy, I learn, works in a circle, ever[Pg 356] returning unto itself. It is for this reason, perhaps, that my last waking act is inspired both by Hegel and Thales. Hegel prompts me to crave for Spirit: Thales influences me to temper it with Water.”

Yet, if the Oxford day, as is fitting, can always be expressed in terms of philosophy, it is sometimes more complex, often more simple than that; and it is longer. It begins and ends at 7 A.M. At that hour, the student and the fanatical novel-reader, forgetful of time, the passive Bacchanalian, and the man who prefers the divine, long-seated Oxford chair to bed, are usually persuaded to retire; for unacademic voices of servant and starling begin to be heard in the quadrangle. The blackbird is awake in the shrubbery. Very soon the scout will appear, and will not know whether to say “Good-night” or “Good-morning,” and with the vacant face of one who has slept through all the blessed hours of night, will drive men to bed. There is a dreamy laying aside of books—volumes of Daudet and Dickens, Fielding and AbbÉ PrÉvost, Morley, Roberts and Poe,—old plays and romances,—Stubbs, and the Chronicles, Stuart pamphlets,—Thucydides, Aristotle, and later Latin than Quintilian. If there is to be a Divinity examination later in the morning, there are Bibles scattered up and down, epitomes, and a sound of men’s voices asking the difference between one and another version of a parable, and “Who was Gallio?” and preparing all the playful acrobatics that will pass for knowledge in the Schools. While these are trying to sleep, with the gold sunlight winning through their[Pg 358][Pg 357]

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EXETER COLLEGE CHAPEL, FROM SHIP STREET

The Chapel of the College, rebuilt by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1857, rises in the centre of the picture, and with its spire forms a conspicuous feature in Ship Street.

Below is that part of the College fronting “The Turl.”

On the right are some of the buildings of Jesus College.

The sun of a late summer afternoon strikes the western gable of the Chapel.

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eyelids, one or two picked men are rising of their own free will, and some because they have to run in the Parks before a training breakfast; others are arguing with themselves or with their scouts that it cannot possibly be nearly half-past seven; or later on, that a passing bell or a bell-wether has been mistaken for the college chapel bell; others expelling the awakening scout with more frankness: some doze and doze, with alternate pricks of conscience and necessity, and desperately deciding to rise, have to saunter about, too late for chapel, too early for breakfast; the majority murmuring that all is well, and enjoying the pleasantest of thefts from daylight; for, to the man who need not, or will not, rise, the chapel bell is a blithe and kindly spirit, that sets a crown upon the bliss of oncoming sleep and gives a keener edge to his complacency, as he thinks of the cold, sleepy virtue that walks in the world below. The chaplain, a man of habit, is also getting up. No one has ever seen a fellow late for chapel.

When the service is over, those who have attended are either awake or asleep again. The service itself is of an awakening kind, and has a vigour that is unknown outside Oxford.

Oh, dear and saintly chaplain,
Time toils after you in vain!
When you stroked the Eight to glory,
Did you prove this quite so plain,
As at morning chapel daily
And at evensong again?
[Pg 362]

So run the verses which express the kind of vigour in vogue.

Now the perfervid reading man, and the man whose genealogical tree is conspicuous for a constant succession of maiden aunts, go to their cocoa and eggs: and, within three hours afterwards, the average man, to porridge, fish, eggs and bacon, coffee and oranges; the decadent, to cigars, liqueurs and wafers; the Æsthete, to his seven wonders and a daffodil; and some, of all classes, to the consolations of philosophy and soda-water. Only the last-named habitually break their fast in solitude. For it is in Oxford the most social meal of the day. It may begin at any time from eight until half-past eleven—anything later being “brunch”—and last until half-past one. Some even believe that an invitation to breakfast embraces the afternoon. Lectures seldom interfere with the meal, since the man who leaves for their sake is not usually missed. A very early breakfast is pregnant with yawns, and may also be forgotten; a very late one is unhappily curtailed. Ten o’clock is an ideal to be striven after. The host has to be studious not to invite two men who are “blues,” or who are entered for the same examinations, or who are freshmen from the same school, which would be apt to produce treatises instead of conversation. It is dangerous also to have two epigrammatists. For that leads to a game of shuttlecock and battledore between the two, and of patience among the rest.... He knows that four men incapable of these things are coming, and as he peeps from his bedroom to see that all is ready,[Pg 363] he hears their steps and laughter echoing up the stairs. He is rapidly surveying them all in his mind, wondering how such excellent ingredients will mix, when they enter, having picked one another up by good fortune on the way, and already got rid of a possible tendency to talk about politics, weather, or dreams. They discuss everything. One who is bound to be a fellow starts on “the Æsthetic value of dons.” One who has never left England offers a suggestive remark on Swiss scenery or the effect of palms against a sunrise in the Pacific. The transitions are indescribably rapid; yet the link of merely an epigram or a laugh, or possibly the very sense of contrast and incongruity, makes the whole run on as some fine hedge of maple, hawthorn, holly, elm, beech, and wild cherry runs on, and is fine and nothing else, except to a botanist. The talk is a play in five acts: each man is in turn a chorus. But whether the subject be freshmen, or Disraeli, or Sancho Panza, or the English aristocracy, it is treated as it never was before. Perhaps that is the result of the detached attitude of a number of very young men. Perhaps it is because each in turn, of the five average men, is touched with genius temporarily by accretion from the other four. One says a dull thing, another a silly thing, a third a rash thing, a fourth a vague thing, and straightway the fifth catches fire and blazes with something of the true light from heaven, and he not less than the rest is astonished. The spirit of the conversation is as different from the prandial spirit as shortbread from wedding cake. It has neither the richness of that nor the frivolity of tea.[Pg 364] The breakfast talker seems to depend very little on memory. He remembers fewer stories, less of the book he read on the night before, than at a later meal. He is thrown more entirely upon the resources of his own fantasy. The experience of sleep still lies like a great water between him and yesterday. In the cold, young, golden light, among the grey stones of the quadrangle, the brain, too, rejoices in its own life, and forgets to look before and after. Habit is weaker. He catches another glimpse of the “clouds of glory,” if only in a mirage. He is renovated by the new day; and although by dinner-time he will have advanced to warmer sympathies and a more tranquil satisfaction, there will then be something more cynical in his indolent optimism than in the sharp but easily warded points of morning wit.... Of course, a breakfast party of men in training for the Torpids is another thing. That is a question of arithmetic. So, too, with a breakfast given formally to freshmen, which is mainly a question of time and stories about dons. Breakfasts with fellows are either of the best kind, or they are ceremonies. There are some colleges, where the fellows not only feel that there is no need of condescension, but they do not condescend: the elder is not expected to be preternaturally simple, nor the younger to be abstruse. In other colleges, such breakfasts of the great and small are sometimes farces and sometimes ceremonies. The don knows that the other’s knowledge of the Republic is small; the undergraduate is equally aware of the fact: the one assumes that he has an index to the othe[Pg 365]r’s mind; the other that one so scathing in his opinion of essays will be the same in his treatment of little quips about the Colonial Secretary or accounts of pheasant-shooting in the Christmas vacation: one is determined to pounce; the other not to be pounced upon. The scout who changes the dishes indicates whether it is a ceremony or a farce. If he smiles, it is the one; if he does not, it is the other. Not everybody, indeed, in these colleges has the same misfortune, though any one may, as the young man who carefully prepared a paraphrase of one of the obscurest articles in the EncyclopÆdia Britannica and two brand new epigrams artfully inwoven, and served them up as he sat down at the breakfast table of the bursar, who smiled and commented moodily: “What a boon the EncyclopÆdia is to the tired man!” But breakfast with even the best of dons has this disadvantage, that he can bring it to an end with a word; so that his guest may afterwards be seen disconsolately reading a newspaper, and feeling that to have eaten food is hardly more to have breakfasted than to have dined.

Between nine and one o’clock the different species of Oxford kind are either within doors—sleeping, talking, or working—or to be seen in various conditions of unrest; observers and observed in the High, in pairs or singly; and, if freshmen, either stately in scholars’ gowns or apparently anxious to convince others that they have just picked up their commoners’ gowns; sauntering to the book-shops, or to look at a cricket pitch or a dog; or hurrying to lectures with an earnest[Pg 366]ness that strangely disappears when they are seated and the lecture is begun.

In the stream of men there is one thin black line that is unwavering—the line of men, with white fillets of sacrifice under their chins, going to the examination Schools. This is the only place in the world where the plough is still wrought into a weapon of offence. They are under the care of a suitable, ferocious, wild man, who is one of the Old Guard of the opposition to women at Oxford; and in his bleak invitation to ladies, to proceed to their appointed rooms, lays terrible stress upon the word “women,” as if it were a term of abuse in his strange tongue. He is partly responsible for the reply of an undergraduate to an American who asked, what might be the name of the buildings which he so admired and which made him feel at home?

“That,” said the undergraduate, “is the Martyrs’ Memorial.”

“And who are those going in?”

“They are the Martyrs.”

“But I thought they were burned three hundred years ago?”

“Sir,” said the undergraduate impressively, “they are martyred twice daily.”

“Well, I guess Oxford is very Middle Age and all that, but I didn’t know it went so far as that”: and the humane visitor went away, talking of agitation in the New York Herald.

Of all Oxford pastimes, that of going to the book[Pg 367]sho[Pg 368]p

ENTRANCE TO THE DIVINITY SCHOOL

The doorway through which a servant with a silver “poker” is preceding the Vice-Chancellor leads to the old Divinity School.

The window at the end of the lobby—usually called the “Pig Market”—looks into Exeter College garden.

[Pg 371][Pg 370][Pg 369]

after breakfast is one of the most wise. There the undergraduate meets the don whose lecture he has slighted; in fact, he meets every one there, or escapes them, if he thinks fit, behind one of the tall piles. Some prefer leap-frog and hopping contests in the quadrangle. In some colleges they are said to read Plato under the trees in the morning: in others, it is to be presumed, in spite of the negligent capers of the wearers, that the hours are spent in choosing the necktie or waistcoat best suited to “flame in the forehead of the morning sky.” Another amusement is to go to the Divinity School and see the Vice-Chancellor, seated between the two neat and restless proctors, conferring degrees. Near, and on either side of the daÏs, the ladies are enjoying the scene, with no traces of any selfish “I would an’ if I could.” Below them sit dons who are to present members of their colleges,—a pale, superb, militant priest conspicuous among the rows of English gentlemen. Farther removed from authority is the Opposition, half a hundred undergraduates, who merrily applaud the perambulations of the mace-bearer or the deportment of their friends. Pale blue, and scarlet, and peach-coloured hoods make a brave contrast with the dead grey light and colourless stone of traceried ceiling and pillared walls, and the dim foliage of trees and ivy outside.

Lectures are a less stately pleasure. Some lecturers walk up and down the room as in a cage, and pause only for a more genial remark than usual, with uplifted gown and back to the blazing fire. Others laugh at their[Pg 372] own jokes, or even at jokes which they leave unexpressed. Some are stern and impassioned: some appear to be proposing a health; others, again, a vote of condolence. One came in clothed for travel, twenty minutes late, and after a few remarks, said that brevity was the most pardonable of the virtues, and that he had to catch a train; and left. In the old days, Merton was famous for Schoolmen, Christ Church for poets, All Souls’ for orators, Brasenose for disputants, and so on, says Fuller. That is not quite so now. Yet, as then, “all are eminent in some one kind or other,” although the undergraduate does not always perceive it. Some are noted for research, some for views, some for condensation. An impartial observer once remarked that, “even when he is abridging an abridgment, an Oxford lecturer always had views.” A scratching, coughing, whispering silence is respectfully observed. Once upon a time, a lady (not English) entered a famous hall, guide-book in hand, spectacles on nose; went from place to place, contemplated all, and incurred only the amazement of the lecturer and the admiration of the audience. It is to be noticed that the audience of what M. Bardoux good-naturedly calls Monks, is in most cases far more interested in note-books than in the lecturer. Some will spend three consecutive hours in lecture rooms, and therein compile very curious anthologies. Even that does not conduce to enthusiasm; and nobody in recent years has been electrified in an Oxford lecture room. “I have discovered,” writes an outsider, “with much difficulty that there are two[Pg 373] classes in Oxford, the learned and the unlearned: my difficulty arose from the fact that the latter were without coarseness and the former without enthusiasm.” And certainly in a city that loves to light bonfires, and is never more herself than when she is welcoming a guest, enthusiasm is astonishingly well concealed. It may be detected occasionally among gentlemen who are conducting East-Enders from quadrangle to quadrangle, or among those who like the ground-ivy beer at Lincoln College on Ascension Day, or among those who salute financiers and others in the act of becoming Doctors of Civil Law at the EncÆnia. It was said that some one unsuccessfully spread his gown as a carpet for the late Mr. Rhodes’s feet: it is certain that some played upon him with little jets of truth very heartily, and asked Socratic questions, on that august occasion.

At luncheon there is, however, some enthusiasm; not for the meal, which is commonly a stupid one, but for the long afternoon, to be spent in the parks, or on the river, or in the country, east to Wheatley, west to Fyfield. These matters, or the prospect of a long bookish afternoon indoors or (in the summer) under a willow on the Cherwell or Evenlode, encroach too absolutely upon luncheon to allow it to be anything more than an affair of knives and forks. As for the country, a man used frequently to walk so as to know all the fields for twenty miles on every side. But the walker is vanishing. Games take away their thousands; bicycles their hundreds; the motor car destroys twos and threes. On Sundays walking is almost fashionable;[Pg 374] on week-days it is in danger of becoming notorious as the hall-mark of a “reading man.” An uninteresting youth was once asked, as a freshman, what exercise he favoured, and replied, “I belong to the reading set and go walks.” The remark was generally considered to lower him to the rank of the Intellectuels, or as the “Guide Conversationelle” translates the word, the Prigs. That guide, which appeared in the J.C.R. in June 1899, is so characteristic in its humour that I cannot apologise for quoting from it:—

Guide Conversationelle de l’Étranger À Oxford

The river (or l’aprÈs midi) is the new college of the nineteenth century. As an educational institution it is unquestioned. The college barges represent perhaps the most successful Oxford architecture of the age. Certainly it was a thought of no mean order which set that tapering line of gaudy galleys to heave and shimmer along the river-side, against a background of trees and grass, and themselves a background for the white figures of the oarsmen. It is a fine lesson in eloquence to listen to the coaches shouting reprimand and advice, in sentences one or two words long, to a panting crew. One can see the secret of English success in the meek reception which a number of hard-working, conscientious, abraded men give to the abuse of an idler on the bank. On the afternoon of the races all is changed. The man who yesterday shouted “Potato sacks!” or “Pleasure boat!” now screams “Well rowed all!” Before and behind him flows all of the University that can run a mile. The faces of all are expressive in every inch; all restraint of habit or decorum is gone for the time being. The racing boats make hardly a sound; and for the most part the rowers hear not a sound from the bank, but only the click of their own rowlocks. Here and there a rattle is twirled; a bell rings; a pistol is fired; and a pair or several pairs of boats creep into the side, winners and losers, and languidly[Pg 376] watch the still competing boats as they pass. The noise of rattles, bells, pistols, whistles, bagpipes, frying-pans, and shouts can be heard in all the colleges and in the fields at Marston and Hinksey, where it has a kind of melody. Close at hand, it has a charm for the experienced tympanum: for in the cries of the victorious colleges the joy of victory is too great to allow of any discordant crow of mere triumph; the cries of those about to be beaten are too determined to have in them anything of hate. Such is the devout enthusiasm of the runners on the bank that if their own college boat is bumped they will sometimes run on to cheer the next boat that passes. The mysteries of harmony are never so wonderful as when, opposite the barge of a college that has made its bump, the sound of a hundred voices and a hundred instruments goes up, from dons, clergymen, old members of the college, future bishops, governors, brewers, schoolmasters, literary men, all looking very much the same, and in their pride of college forgetting all other pride. “If the next great prophet comes in knickerbockers, with good legs and a megaphone, he will be received in Oxford,” says one as he leaves the river. “Was a prophet possible? Would he be a warrior, or an orator, or a quiet actor and persuader? Out of the wilderness, or out of the slum?” Such were the questions asked. “In any case he would not be listened to in Oxford,” thought one. “Why not? provided his accent was good,” thought another. “Comfort yourself,” said a third; “some one would ask at hall table what school he came[Pg 378][Pg 377]

[Pg 381]

[Pg 380]

[Pg 379]

from; the question would go round; and the prophet would retreat from the refrigerator.” “But suppose him a sort of Kipling, twenty or thirty feet broader every way——”

“Send up some buttered crumpets and slow poison” was the epitaph of the conversation, which was, after all, between children of a cynical age and in the hour of tea. But there is many a true thing said at tea in Oxford. The hours from four to seven are nothing if not critical. It is an irresponsible, frivolous time, and an interregnum between the tyranny of exercise and the tyranny of food. Nothing is now commended; yet nothing is envied. I suspect that some of the causes of the University love of parody might be found by an investigator in the Oxford tea. Over his crumpet or “slow poison” the undergraduate who is no wiser than he should be legislates for the world, settles even higher matters, and smilingly accepts a viceroyalty from Providence. With some it is a festival of Slang—venerable goddess! I have heard a philologist trace a little Oxford phrase to the thieves of Manchester a century ago or more. Now he plans profound or witty speeches for the Union, devises “rags” and rebellions, and writes for the undergraduate magazines, and has his revenge in a few well-chosen words upon coaches, dons, captains of football, and all forms of Pomposity, Dulness, and Good Sense. “Common-sense,” says one, “is nonsense À la mode.” He luxuriates in the criticism of life, and blossoms with epigrams. He says in his heart, “In much wisdom is much grief: and he that[Pg 382] increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” and sets himself to make sayings which, if not truer than proverbs, are funnier. Others prowl: i.e. they go through that promiscuous calling upon acquaintances which is the bane of half its beneficiaries. Some of these prowlers seem to live by this kind of canvassing—thieves of others’ time and generous givers of their own. They will boast of having taken twenty teas in one afternoon. But on Sunday comes their judgment. They wear a soberer aspect on their way to the drawing-rooms of Oxford hostesses. In the comfortable chairs sit the incurable habituÉs—cold, saturnine spectators, or impudent, stiff-hearted epigrammatists, handing round at regular intervals neat slices from the massy joints of their erudition or their wit. They smile sadly and yet complacently over their tea-cups as the prowler enters. They wait until the victim is in right position, viz. with a perfectly true remark about the weather, or Sunday, or sport, or dentists; and then suddenly “slit the thin-spun life” with an unseasonable query or corroboration. The hostess smiles imperceptibly. In a few moments the prowler is gone. “Mr. ——,” says the hostess, “you pronounce the sweetest obituaries I ever meet, but I have never known you to pronounce them over the deceased.”

There are also teas with the young, the beautiful,[Pg 383] and the virtuous in the plain and exclusive northernmost haunts of learning in Oxford. The University could not well do without their sweet influences. Yet if men, in their company, are often better than themselves, as is only right, they are perhaps less than themselves. Also, in wit carnivals, it is permitted to women to use all kinds of weapons, from a sigh to a tea-urn; to men they are not permitted, although they have nothing sharper or more rankling in their armoury. Hence, on the part of generous women, a sort of pity, and on the part of men some timidity and (short of rudeness) tergiversation. And I am not privileged to give an account of a real Somerville tea.

But it is a thing impossible to praise in rhyme or prose the pleasures of tea at Oxford—perhaps especially in autumn, as the sun is setting after rain—when a man knows not whether it is pleasanter to be rained upon at Cumnor, or to be dried again by his fire—and the bells are ringing.

Perhaps, as you light candles, and ask, “What is warmth without light?” your companion replies, “A minor poet”; and when you ask again in irritation, “What is light without warmth?” he is ready with, “An edition of Tennyson with notes.” And not even the recollection of such things and worse can spoil the charm of Oxford tea. Then it is that the homeliness of Oxford[Pg 384] is dearest. And what a carnival of contrasts in men and manners can be seen in a little room. “Oxford,” writes the Oxford Spectator,—

I said that undergraduate magazine humour was a tea-table flower. I should have said that it flowers at tea and is harvested after dinner. The penning of it is a nocturnal occupation, and the best wit is sometimes the result of that pregnant nervousness which comes from competing with time. It was until very lately[Pg 386][Pg 385]

[Pg 389]

[Pg 388]

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a tradition that undergraduate journalism should be anonymous. Of many good and feeble things the authorship will now probably never be known. “Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?” And it is an odd thing that so few reputations have been promised or made therein. Probably the writers of the Cambridge Light Green and the “Lambkin Papers” in the J.C.R. of Oxford have alone not only shown but fulfilled their promise in contributions to an undergraduate periodical. The explanation is that the cleverest men are content to produce either parody or what is narrowly topical, and both of these are usually born in their graves. “Parody,” said a don, “is always with us, and nearly always against us.” Parody and its companions are, in fact, a sort of unofficial bull-dogs, that persecute all forms of bad, and even good, behaviour which do not come within the proctor’s jurisdiction. The proctor is a favourite victim. “O vestment of velvet and virtue,” runs an obvious parody in the Shotover Papers of 1874, by “Gamble Gold,”—

The wise fool, the foolish wise man, the impostor, and the ungainly fanatic, are all game to the undergraduate[Pg 390] satirist. “We draw our bow at a venture,” he writes; “so look to it, don and undergraduate, boating men and reading men; look to it, O Union orators, statesmen of the future; look to it, ye patrons of St. Philip’s and St. Aldate’s; look to it, ye loungers in the Parks; look to it, ye Proctors, and thou, O Vice-Chancellor, see that your harness be well fitted, that between its joints no arrow shall pierce. Our aim is careless, but perhaps it may strike deep; if we cannot smite a king we shall contentedly wing a freshman.” Not seldom this note of Titanic defiance is struck by the freshman himself. If he cannot be an example of what is most subtle in literature or most brilliant in life, he will peacefully consent to be in his own person a warning against the commonplace. He is, indeed, very often among the parodists, although as a rule he does not get beyond imitation. Perhaps the large percentage of parodists will account for that timidity of poets which has left Cambridge almost without a tribute from its countless band. The gay, sarcastic man who dines next to you, or is a fellow-officer at the Union, is bound to hear of your serious follies in print, and will as infallibly make that an excuse for rushing into print himself. I have even heard it seriously urged that the number of critics in Oxford accounts for the silence of nearly every one else, and that not the irresponsible undergraduate alone blasts the blossoms of wisdom while he takes the sting out of foolishness. A cautious use of high teas might be recommended as a step towards seriousness.[Pg 391]

Some, even to-day, fly speedily from tea to work. Upon others, and in some degree upon these, dinner lays a cheerful hand in anticipation. The optimist becomes “happier and wiser both.” The very pessimist rises at least to a cynic. Under the head of dinner I include, first and least, the discussion of the cook’s poetry and prose, if one may be permitted to make the distinction, since his joints have been called “poems in prose”; second, the feast of reason, etc.; third, those acts of pleasure or duty which came naturally to the wise diner. The first two are hardly distinct acts. “We devour” says Leigh Hunt, “wit and argument, and discuss a turkey and chine.” The word “dinner” was once derived from the Greek word for terrible, and was held to imply not so much its terrors for the after-dinner speaker, as for the man who came simply to eat. Most Oxford colleges have accordingly an elaborate and forcible set of rules for humiliating the sordid man. In old days he apparently quoted from the Bible, which every one knew, just as every one knows the Times to-day; and consequently a quotation from the Bible was punished along with puns, quotations from Latin and Greek, and oaths. As unbecoming to a feast of reason, flannels and other clothes belonging to the barbaric hours of life are forbidden. The unpunctuality of such as obviously come only to devour is treated in the same way. Gross inadvertence or apparent physical incapacity to do anything but eat have also been punished in gentlemen both punctual and suitably clothed; but these and other excesses of[Pg 392] virtuous intention are not always sanctioned by the High Table. The punishment usually takes the form of a fine to the extent of two quarts of beer, which the sufferer has to put in circulation among his judges. Punning, too, is attacked. It was time that the pun should go. It was becoming too perfect, and a monopoly of the mathematical mind. Two hundred years ago men laughed at this:—“A chaplain in the University of Oxford, having one leg bigger than the other, was told that his legs might be chaplains too, for they were never like to be fellows.” To-day, it is doubtful whether it would be honoured by the fine or “sconce.” Yet the pun has in a sense been supplanted not very worthily by the “spoonerism.” That, too, has become a very solemn affair. It is in the hands of calculating prodigies, and men are expected to laugh at “pictures defeated” instead of “features depicted” and the like. It smacks of the logic required for a pass degree, while the old puns sentent plus le vin que l’huile. Yet the spoonerism is venerable in years; and Anthony Wood records among his pieces of humour the saying of Dr. Ratcliff of Brasenose, that “a proud man will buy a dagger or die a beggar.” Nor is the anecdote extinct, as one may learn from the laughter at any High Table, where it is known that men do not discuss ontology. Oxford humour, at and after dinner, may be divided under these heads:—

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The first, saving when it amounts to house-breaking or assault, or should endanger the perpetrator under the last Licensing Act, consists in the thoughtful preparation and execution of something unexpected for the benefit of an offending person, or in the elaboration of something visibly and audibly funny for fun’s sake at the expense of the artists alone. It was “a rag,” for example, two hundred and fifty years ago, as also more recently, to make a various and crowded ceremony of the enforced exit of a popular undergraduate. The hero may be mounted on a hearse or a steam-roller, and proceed with stately accompaniment. Or he may go in pink with a pack of bull-dogs, and whips dressed as proctors, to the tune of “ The Conquering Hero.” Some prefer twenty-four barrel-organs, if obtainable. But the “rag” is a branch of decorative art that deserves a volume with illustrations. No one who has not studied it can guess at the beautiful work which is devoted to the conversion of a gentleman’s bedroom into a sitting-room. Any one who would teach us how divine a thing the rag can be made, would be heartily thanked. I may remark, in passing, that it gives full play to the intellect,—is, in fact, a counterpart to the occupations of the schoolmen, and is neither less practical nor less ingenious, and reaches its highest perfection in the hands of scholars who can do nothing without remembering Plato, and say nothing without remembering Aristophanes. Lest I should be suspected of not being on the side of the angels in recent controversy, I will give no examples, save a trifling one[Pg 394] which has just been recalled for me by a volume of Hazlitt. We made a supper party of six with Corydon, our host at —— in Oxford. His gestures (particularly a gracious way of bowing his head as he smiled) had a magic that quickly made our number seem inevitable and right. Very soon all were talking eagerly in harmonious alternation. A choicely laden board of cold viands, which none seemed to have noticed, stood unvisited, and was finally cleared. Corydon was speaking (of nothing in the least important) when the servant carried in a strange but dainty course of little, fine old books that sent the conversation happily into every nook that rivers from Helicon visit. Again and again came in dishes of the same character, for which Corydon’s purse and library had been ransacked. The wealth of how many provinces—to use an honoured phrase—had gone to the preparation of that meal! “And by the way, I have some cold fowls and wine and fruit ready,” the host said suddenly.... One found that Shelley and champagne were good bosom friends; another that a compÔte of port, Montaigne, and pomegranate was incomparable.... This Hazlitt also was at that excellent supper and “rag.” Nor can I omit a mention of the strong sculptor who strove all night in the midst of a wintry quadrangle, in order to astonish the college with a snow statue of the most jovial fellow of the society, with a cigar between his teeth and a bottle in each hand. Mr. Godley has sung of a more boisterous rag, “the raid the Saxon made on the Cymru men,” which was in this way:[Pg 395]—

One who might be supposed to know said in 1899 that where a Cambridge man would know an article from the EncyclopÆdia Britannica by heart, an Oxford man would abridge it in an epigram; and there, he contended, was a difference and a distinction. But the epigram is said to be dying. It were greatly to be regretted, if that were true, since the epigram was the handsomest medium ever chosen by inexperience for its own expression. As poetry is a criticism of life by livers, so the epigram is a criticism of life by those who have not lived. It used to be the toga of the infant prodigy at Oxford. “If only life were a dream, and I could afford hansoms!” or “A little Jowett is a dangerous thing!” used to pass muster in a crowd of epigrams. But I seemed to see the skirt of[Pg 396] the departing epigram this year, when a young man exclaimed that he had discovered that, “After all, life is the thing,” in a discussion concerning conduct and literature: and the shock was hardly lessened by the critical repartee that the remark was “not only true but inadequate.” A few years ago smaller notions than that were not allowed to go into the world without their fashionable suit. That was the epigram. It was a verbal parallel to legerdemain. The quickness of the fancy deceived the brain: or rather the brain made it a point of courtesy to be deceived. For there was a kindly conspiracy between the speaker and the hearer in the matter of epigrams. A certain degree of skill was expected of the latter, who knew almost infallibly whether a saying was an epigram, just as he would have known a hearse or a skiff. It was the jingling bell which every one but the exceptionally clever wore in his cap, to prove that he aspired to talk. All were epigrammatists, and regarded as alien nothing epigrammatical. When “Lady Windermere’s Fan” was played at Oxford, even those who had not heard them before laughed at the epigrams in the Club scene. One such remarked to a persevering imitator of Wilde: “The epigrams in ‘Lady Windermere’ were a faint echo of yourself.” But these are other times, and when the same youth, bald and still young, very recently ventured to clothe a little truism archaically, the curate next to him touched a note of horror mingled with contempt as he said, “That sounded like an epigram.” In one respect an Oxford dinner is the better for the absence[Pg 397] of epigram. The machine-made article is impossible. It used to be as ineffectual as the prayers of Thibet. A man might be seen, forgetful of the world, nursing his faculties from soup to ice, in the gestation of an epigram. Thus it tended to cast a shadow over conversation, and to replace the genial, slow, and whist-like alternations of good talk with the sudden follies of snap or the violences of bridge. Breakfast itself was sometimes made the occasion of duels, with a thrust and parry not oftener than twice in a course. A man would come melancholy to luncheon because he had not hit upon a good thing in the lecture which preceded it. Nevertheless, there was something to be said for the manufacture, if not for the manufacturer. His epigrams could be repeated spontaneously by another. Thus an elderly morose undergraduate, unable to knot a bow, would one day ejaculate at the wrong moment: “A woman is never too stupid to be loved, nor too clever to love.” The next evening a simple and dashing boy would make a hit with it, by nice judgment of time and place. Much applause was sometimes accorded to the wit of laborious, obscure young men who were content to father their offspring upon the illustrious. Thus, one undergraduate was once found slaving at an original work, entitled “Addenda to the Posthumous Humour of the late Master of Balliol.”

Of humour, the third division, there is nothing to be said. It has been met with at the Union, in spite of the notice:[Pg 398]—

For the most part, the heavier vices and lighter virtues of speech are said to flourish there. “It is a pity,” said a critic of the Union, “that so many ingenious youths should disarm themselves by pretending to be in the House of Commons, which they rival as a club.” A Frenchman has said that its histrionic wealth at one time equalled the house of MoliÈre. Indeed, as a home of comedy it is the most amusing and accomplished in Oxford; and on that account, probably, the public theatre seldom provides anything but opera and farce. A bland, clever youth, stooping like a candle in hot July—his body and a scroll of foolscap quivering with emotion, as he suggests to a smiling house that the Conservative party should bury its differences under the sole management of Mr. Redmond: a stiff, small, heroic figure—with a mouth that might sway armies, a voice as sweet as Helicon, as irresistible and continuous as Niagara—pouring forth praise of the English aristocracy and the Independent Labour Party, to a house that believes or disbelieves, and applauds: a minute, tormented skeleton, acrobatic and ungainly, so eloquent on the futility of Parliament, that he might govern the Empire, if he could govern himself: one who is not really comfortable without a cigarette, yet awes the house by his superb complacency, as he utters now and[Pg 399] then a languid epigram about the Irish peasantry or indigo, in the brief intervals of an apparent colloquy with himself:—these and a multitude of the fervid, the weighty, the listless, the perky, and the dull, are among the Union orators of yesterday. “I went to the Union to be amused,” says one. “They were debating a question of literature. A brilliant man opened; a learned opposed. Others followed—some for, some against, the motion; others again made observations. I was not disappointed. I was edified. There was no research. There was little originality. But there was a dazzling simplicity and lucidity, and an extraordinary power of treating controversially the profoundest matters as if they were common knowledge; above all, the reserved gestures, the self-control, were dignified, and made me believe that I was listening to the opinions of an assembly of middle-aged men of the world, and not a handful of students not yet past their majority.” But the glories of Union oratory are weekly: the theatre is consequently a favourite evening lounge; some even prefer it on Thursdays. It is noticeable that the house is more familiar than elsewhere in its praise or disapproval of the players. Half a dozen in the dress circle will hold a (rather one-sided) conversation with the stage for half an evening. It is also customary, and especially on Saturdays, for the audience to sing the choruses of songs to their taste many times over, and then to revive them in the quiet streets. Banquets, and the reception given to the speeches of actors and managers, and the nature of those speeches[Pg 400] as well, prove the hearty fellowship between University and stage. It has long been so. “At a stage play in Oxford,” says one old author, “(at the King’s Arms in Holywell) a Cornishman was brought in to wrestle with three Welshmen, one after another, and when he had worsted them all, he called out, as his part was, Have you any more Welshmen? Which words one of Jesus College took in such indignation that he leaped upon the stage and threw the player in earnest.” It must be admitted, however, that such familiarities on the stage itself are now unknown.

To a stranger walking from the Union or the theatre, after Tom has sounded the ideal hour of studious retirement, Oxford might well appear to be a nest of singing birds. The windows of brilliantly lighted rooms, with curtains frequently undrawn, in dwelling-house or college, reveal rows of backs and rows of faces, with here one at a piano and there one standing beside, singing lustily, while the rest try with more or less success to concentrate their talents upon the chorus: probably they are singing something from Gaudeamus, Scarlet and Blue, or other song-books for students, soldiers, and sailors; or, it may be, a folk song that has never come into print. Sometimes, in the later evening, the singing is not so beautiful. For here those sing who never sang before, and those who used to sing now sing the more. Perhaps only the broadest-minded lover of grotesque contrasts will care for the ballads flung to the brightening moon among the battlements and towers. But the others should not[Pg 402][Pg 401]

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judge harshly or with haste. These are but part of the motley in which learning clothes itself. Much sound and fury is here no proof of deep-seated folly; nor quietness, of study; nor are a man’s age, dignity, and accomplishments in mathematical proportion to the demureness of his deportment. I notice on one little tankard these philosophies in brief, scrawled with a broken pen:—

And though some are evidently framed with an eye confined to the tankard, how applicable all are to the shining pewter and life itself!

You shall be in one small sitting-room, on an evening, while in one corner a ditty from the Studentenlieder is hummed; in another, Hagen’s Carmina Medii Ævi or W. B. Yeats or Marlowe is declaimed; in another,[Pg 406] you shall hear ghosts or sports discussed; in a fourth, the orthodoxy of the Inferno: yet the whole company shall be one in spirit. And the same in another such room—where a dozen men are divided into groups around three of the number who are reading, for discussion, the rules of the Salvation Army, the Anthologia Planudea, and a Blue Book.

At the top of an adjacent staircase there is a lonely gentleman eating strawberries and cream, and thinking about wall-paper; or one like a gnome, amidst innumerable books,—his floor strewn with notes, phrases, queries,—writing a prize essay; or one reading law, with his newly-presented football cap on his head; one reading Kipling and training a meerschaum; one alternately reading the Organon of Aristotle and quoting verbatim from Edgar Allen Poe to admiring workers at the same text; or one digesting opium, and now and then looking for five minutes at one or other of a huge pile of books at his side—Paul Verlaine, Marlowe, Jeremy Taylor, the Odyssey, Ariosto, and Pater. The staircases creak or clatter with the footsteps of men going up and down, to and from these rooms. Outside one or two sets of rooms the great outer door—the “oak”—is fastened, a signal that the owner wishes to be undisturbed, and practically an invitation to trials of strength with heel and shoulder from the passer-by. In the faintly lighted quadrangles, men are hurrying, or sauntering, or resting on the grass among the trees. Perhaps there is a light in the college hall. The sound of a castanet dance played by a band—or a song—comes through the window. The music[Pg 407] grows wilder. The chorus swallows up the song. There are half a dozen conductors beating time, among the crowded benches of the audience. The small lights are but stains upon the air, which is composed of cigar and cigarette smoke. Mirth is eloquently expressed in every way, from laughter to a snore. The candles begin to fall from the brackets; the seats are carried out; and, to a still wilder tune, two hundred men join hands and dance. The band is given no rest: in fact, they are unable to rest, and the same glow sits in their cheeks. But in the darkness they slip away. For all the candles are out, and there is a bonfire making red weals upon the grey walls; then another dance; and a hundred times, “Auld lang syne,” until the college is quiet, and but rarely a light is seen through curtains and over battlements: and the long Oxford night begins. Large reponens, we build up the fire. If it be autumn, we will hardly permit it ever to go out, thus consoling ourselves for the transitory glow of the sun, and fantastically handing on the sunsets of many summers and the dawns of many springs, in that constant flame. Sitting before it, we seem to evolve a fiery myth, and think that Apollo and Arthur and other “solar” heroes more probably leapt radiant from just such a fire before the eyes of more puissant dreamers in the old time. The light creeps along the wall, fingering title after title of our books. They are silently preluding to a second spring, when poets shall sing instead of birds, and we shall gather old fragrant flowers, not from groves, but from books. We see coming a long, new summer, a bookish summer,[Pg 408] when we shall rest by olive and holm oak and palm and cypress, and not leave our chairs—a summer of evenings, with tropic warmth, no cloud overhead, and skies of what hue we please.

A certain Italian poet used “to retire to bed for the winter.” He had some wisdom, and we will follow him in spirit; but, having Oxford rooms and Oxford armchairs, that were not dreamed of in his philosophy, we need not stay abed. Few of the costless luxuries are dearer than the hour’s sleep amidst the last chapter of the night, while the fire is crumbling, grey, and murmurous, as if it talked in its sleep. The tenderest of Oxford poets knew these nights:—

And it is day once more; and beauty, the one thing in Oxford that grows not old, seems a new-born, joyous thing, to a late watcher who looks out and sees the light first falling on dewy spires.[Pg 411][Pg 410]

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