UNDERGRADUATES OF THE PRESENT AND THE PAST CHAPTER IV UNDERGRADUATES OF THE PRESENT AND THE PAST The Present

What a thing it is to be an undergraduate of the University of Oxford! Next to being a great poet or a financier, there is nothing so absolute open to a man. For several years he is the nursling of a great tradition in a fair city: and the memory of it is above his chief joy. His follies are hallowed, his successes exalted, by the dispensation of the place. Surely the very air whispers of wisdom and the beautiful, he thinks—

That time is the one luxury he never regrets. It is a second childhood, as blithe and untroubled as the first, and with this advantage over the first: that it is not only good, but he knows that it is good. What games! what books! what walks! what affections! are his. Time passes, we say, although it is we—like children that see the square fields receding from their swift train—that pass. Yet, with these things in Oxford, he seems to lure time a little way with him[Pg 256] upon the road. The liberty of a man and the license of a child are his together. Of course, he abuses them. He uses them, too. Hence the admirable independence of the undergraduate, which has drawn upon him the excommunication of those whose concern is with the colour and cut of clothes. He is the only true Bohemian, because he cannot help it—does not try to be—and does not know it. He is the true Democrat, and condescension is far less common than servility in his domain. He alone keeps quite inviolate the principle of freedom of speech. It is indeed true that, as anywhere else, fools are exclusive as regards clever men and different kinds of fools; and snobs, as regards all but themselves. But theirs is a rare and lonely life. At Christ Church they have actually a pool, in the centre of their great quadrangle, for the baptism of those who have not learned these fine traditions; it is appropriately called after Mercury, to whom men used to sacrifice pigs, and especially lambs and young goats. And there is no college in Oxford where any but the incompatible are kept apart, and few where that distinction is really preserved. As befits a prince in his own palace, the undergraduate usually dispenses with hypocrisy and secrecy, and thus gives an opportunity to the imaginative stranger. Such an one drew a lurid picture of a horde of wealthy bacchanals, making night hideous with the tormenting of a poor scholar. It was not said whether the sufferer was in the habit of doing nasty and dishonourable things, or had funked at football, or worn ringlets over his collar: it was[Pg 258][Pg 257]

[Pg 261]

[Pg 260]

[Pg 259]

almost certainly one of the remarkable efforts of imagination which are frequently devoted to that famous city and its inhabitants. The patience of the undergraduate is extreme. It is extended to tradesmen and to the sounds of the Salvation Army. He greets bimetallists with tenderness, teetotallers with awe, and vegetarians with a kind of rapture, tempered by a rare spurt of scientific inquiry. If he makes an exception against sentimentalism, he relents in favour of that place, “so late their happy seat,” when he goes down. Mr. Belloc has put that retrospection classically:—

I

The average man seldom gets into a book, though he often writes one. Yet who would not like to paint him or have him painted, for once and for ever! And, a fortiori, who would not wish the same for the average[Pg 263] undergraduate? I can but hint at his glories, as in an architect’s elevation. For he is neither rich nor poor, neither tall nor short, neither of aristocratic birth nor ignobly bred. Briefly, Providence has shielded him from the pain and madness of extremes. He plays football, cricket, rackets, hockey, golf, tennis, croquet, whist, poker, bridge. In neither will he excel; yet in some one he will for an hour be conspicuous, if only at a garden-party or on a village green. He never rashly ventures in the matter of dress, and when his friends who are above the average are wearing very green tweeds, he will be just green enough to be passable, and yet so subdued as not to be questioned by those who stick to grey. He is never punctual; on the other hand, he is never very late. In conversation, he will avoid eloquence for fear of long-windedness, and silence for fear of appearing original or rude: at most, he will be frivolous to the extent of remarking, about a pretty face, ‘Oh, she is alpha plus!’ As a freshman only will he make any great mistakes. Thus, he will have several meerschaums; will assemble at a wine party the most incompatible men, and conclude it by all but losing his self-respect; and will for a term use Oxford slang as if it were a chosen tongue, and learn a few witticisms at the expense of shopkeepers, if he is free by the accident of birth. But he will speedily forget these things and become a person with blunt and tender consideration for others, and may be popular because of his excellent cigarettes or his ready listening. He will in a few years learn to row honestly, if not[Pg 264] brilliantly; to know what is fitting to be said and read in the matter of books; to discuss the theatre, the government, the cricket season, in an inoffensive way. Add to this pale vision the colouring implied by a college hat-band and a decent, ruddy face, and you have the not too vigorous or listless, manly man, with modest bearing and fearless voice, who plays his part so well in life, and now and then—on a punt, or at a wedding—reveals to the discerning observer his university. The late Grant Allen knew him by his broad, brown back, and his habit of bathing in winter in a rough sea.

II

He has come to Oxford, much as a man of old would have come to some fabled island, out beyond the pillars of Hercules; for even so Oxford is out beyond the world which he knows—

Perhaps his schoolmasters have been Oxford men. But that has not disillusioned him. He has been in the habit of thinking of them as men who, for some fault or misfortune, have come back from the fortunate islands, discontented or empty. They have not known how to use the place: he knows, or will learn to know; and he dreams of it in his peaceful country school, or at a London school, where boys go as to a place of business, and make verses as others cast accounts. To[Pg 265] some Oxford men, Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” is the finest poem that was ever written; and he knows it by heart already; has sighed ignorantly over it; and as his train draws near to Oxford, he repeats it to himself, with a most fantastic fervour, as if it were half a prayer and half a love-song, and certainly more than half his own. The pleasant excited uncertainty, as to whether he has seen the Fyfield elm, or whether that oaken slope was Cumnor, and his happy surmises while his eye skips from tower to tower in the distance, blind him to the drizzling, holiday air of the platform: he has no time to remember how it differs from Eastbourne: he is so set upon beholding the High Street that he is indifferent to the tram and the mean streets, and is not reminded of Wandsworth. The cabman is to him a supernal, Olympian cabman. He pays the man heavily, and quotes from Sophocles as he steps through the lodge gate, amid the greetings of porter, messenger, and a scout or two. The magnificent quadrangle gives a dignity to his walk that is laughable to senior men. He goes from room to room, making his choice, and knows not whether to be attracted by the spaciousness of one suite, or the miniature sufficiency of another,—the wainscot of a third, the traditions of a fourth, or the view from a fifth.

In the evening, at dinner in the college hall, he puts all of his emotion into the grace before meat, and by his slow, loving utterance robs the fellows of their chairs and the undergraduates of their talk. He scans curiously the healthy or clever or human faces of his[Pg 266] contemporaries at the table. As all visible things are symbols, he supposes that something, which he is too inexperienced to understand, distinguishes these youths from the others with similar faces in London or elsewhere. He answers a few questions about his school and his athletic record. Then he falls back upon the coats of arms and the founders’ portraits on the walls, and is glad when he has returned to his room. There, the unpacking and arrangement of a hundred books fill the hours until long after midnight. For he kneels and opens and reads a page, and dreams and reopens, and goes to the window, to listen or watch. Not a book but he finds flat and uninspired, and quite unworthy of his first Oxford night. He wants something more megalophonous than De Quincey, more perfect than Pater, more fantastic than Browne, more sweet than Newman,—something that shall be witty, spiritual, gay, and solemn in a breath,—something in short that was never yet written by pen and ink, although often inspired by a night like this.

And so he sleeps; but in spite of his great dreams, he is not disappointed when he looks out upon the glorious company of the spires and towers of Oxford. He rises early, and is surprised when he meets only the college cat in the quadrangle, and the gate is[Pg 267] shut. But he returns quite cheerfully to his room, to read Virgil while the dreamy sky is still tender with the parting touch of night.

After breakfast, and some disbursements to porter and scout, he begins to make acquaintances, over a newspaper in the junior common room, or at a preliminary visit to his tutor. With one, he walks up and down High Street: he learns which are the tailors and which are not. With another, he goes out to Parson’s Pleasure, and likes the willows of Mesopotamia, and sees New College Tower: he wants to loiter in the churchyard of Holy Cross, but is scornfully reminded that Byron did much the same. Queen’s College inspires his companion with the remark that Queen in Oxford is called “Quagger.” The Martyr’s Memorial calls forth “Maggers Memugger”; Worcester, “Wuggins”; Jesus, “Jaggers”: and he is much derided when he supposes that the scouts use these terms.

After luncheon, he cannot get free, but must watch football or the humours of “tubbing” on the river. His companions, with all the easy omniscience of public-school boys, are so busy telling him what’s what, that he learns little of what is. And at tea, he is as wise as they, and has the tired emotion of one who has been through fairyland on a motor car.

A week in this style broadens his horizon; his optimism, still strong, embraces mankind and excludes most men. A series of teas with senior men and a crowd of contemporaries fails to exhilarate him. The[Pg 268] shy are silent: the rest talk about their schools; appear advanced men of the world; and shock their seniors, who in their turn dispense tales about dons, and useful information: and he feels ashamed to be silent and contemptuous of what is said. His grace in hall has become so portentous that his neighbour hums the Dead March in Saul by way of accompaniment.

With some misgiving he goes alone to his room, sports his oak—which others so often do for him when he is out—and puts his room in order. His college shield, brilliantly and incorrectly blazoned, hangs above the door. Photographs of his newest acquaintances rest for the time upon his desk. He has not yet learned to respect the photograph of a Botticelli above the mantelpiece, and has tucked under its frame a caricature of some college worthy, with visiting-cards, notes of invitation, a table of work, and his first menu. On the mantelpiece are photographs that recall tenderer things, along with his meerschaum and straight-grained briar. For a minute he is interrupted by a kick, an undeniable shout, a cigar, and behind it the captain of Rugby football.

“Can you play?” says the captain.

“I have never tried,” says the freshman, modestly.

The captain retires, after conferring an indignity in pert monosyllables, and familiarly inquiring after “all your aunts.”

“How do you know I have any aunts, Mr.——?” he inquires.

“Oh,” replies the captain, “I never heard of a[Pg 270][Pg 269]

[Pg 273]

[Pg 272]

[Pg 271]

nephew without an aunt, and I am sure you couldn’t do without several.”

“I wonder why he came to Oxford,” reflects the freshman.

“He’s mistaken his calling,” chuckles the other on the way downstairs.

The freshman lights his meerschaum (holding it in a silk handkerchief), and begins to make a plan for three or four years. But he never completes it. He believes Oxford to be as a fine sculptor, and wishes to put himself in its hands in such a way as to be best shapen by the experience, in a “wise passiveness.” He wants to be a scholar, and fears to be a pedant. He wants to learn a wise and graceful habit with his fellow-men, and fears to be what he hears called a gentleman. He wants to test his enthusiasm and prejudices, and fears to be a Philistine. He wants to taste pleasure delicately, and fears to be a viveur or an Æsthete. None of these aims is altogether conscious or precise; yet it is some such combination that he sees before him, faint and possible, at the end of three or four years. Nor has he any aim beyond that. He will work, but at what? Neither has he realised that he will be alone and unhelped.

At first the loneliness is a great, and even at times a delirious, pleasure; and whether he is in a church, or in the fields, or among books, it is almost sensual, and never critical. Oxford is, as it were, doing his living for him. He is as powerless to influence the passage of his days as to plan the architecture of his[Pg 274] dreams. He only awakens at his meals with contemporaries, and sometimes at interviews with tutors. The former find him dull and superior. The latter tell him that in his work he is indeed gathering honey, but filling no combs; and find him ungainly and vague. He consoles himself with the reflection that he is not becoming a pedant or a careless liver. He writes verses to celebrate the melodious days he lives. All influences of men fall idly upon him—

The digressive habit of mind not only grows upon him; he cultivates it. His tutor says that it is impossible to give a title to his best essays. Long, lonely evenings with books only encourage the habit. But he can defend it, and laughs at criticism. Shakespeare’s dramas, he says, flow through the centuries, like the Nile; his flood is not so vast, that it may not be aggrandised by many a tributary. It has come down to us vaster than when it reached Milton or Gray, not only by definite commentary, but by the shy emotions of a myriad readers. We add to it, he says triumphantly, by our digressions; and what revelation it may make in consequence, to a far future generation, we cannot guess. In his pursuit of words, which soon enthrall him, he goes far, rather than deep. Wherever the word has been cherished for its own sake, in all “decadent” literature, he makes his mind a home. He begins to write, but in a style[Pg 275] which, along with his ornate penmanship, would occupy a lifetime, and result in one brochure or half a dozen sonnets. It is a kind of higher philately. But it takes him to strange and fascinating byways in literature. He loves the grotesque. Now and then, he lets fall a quotation or even a dissertation on such a book at dinner, and suddenly he is launched into popularity.

First he is hailed as a decadent, and shrinks. When the shrinking is over, he secretly falls in love with the half-contemptuous title, and seeks others who accept it. Now he is never by himself. Those with whom he has no sympathies like him because he happens to know Pantagruel and a few books such as some undergraduates keep between false covers. His room is fragrant with unseasonable flowers, with the perfume of burning juniper, burning cassia, and cedar, and sweet oils. What if the honourable ghosts of Oxford frown upon his strange devotions? He is at least living a life that could not persist elsewhere. At chapel, he is reading Theophrastus. He is studying an undercurrent of the Italian Renaissance at a lecture on Thucydides. As if he were to live for ever, and in Oxford, his existence is such that his stay in Oxford or in life becomes precarious. He is reputed to be a connoisseur in wines, pictures, and sixteenth-century furniture. He is a Roman Catholic by profession, an agnostic by conviction; yet no religion or superstition is quite safe from his patronage. He mistakes the recrudescence of childishness for a sad and wise maturity. Freshmen are struck by his listless gaiety and the unkind[Pg 276] and seeming wise solemnity of his light expressions. If to sit sumptuous and still, to discourse melodiously of everything or nothing, to be courteous, sentimental, cold, and rude in turns, were wisdom, he is wise. He acquires the lofty cynicism of the under-informed and the over-fed. He can talk with ease and point, about the merely married don, about virtue as the fine which the timid pay to the bold, about the dulness of enthusiasm and the strange beauty of grey. At what is temperate and modest he throws satire with a bitterness enhanced by a secret affection for what he lapidates. Like a man who should paint an angel and call it a thief, he narrowly pursues his own choicest veiled gifts with a malicious word. In short, his brilliant conversation proves how much easier it is to think what one says than to say what one thinks. Yet is he now a harder student than he has ever been, and allows nothing to disturb him at his books. He has nodded at European literatures through half their courses, in the lonely hours when his companions are asleep. He is planning again, and realises that it would be a showy thing to get a first class. His conversation becomes gloomy as well as bitter. People suspect that he means what he says; and he mutters in explanation that experience is the basis of life and the ruin of philosophies. His friends simply accept the remark as untrue. He is now often reduced to silence among those who sleep well. He no longer pours a current of fresh and illuminating thought upon things which he not only does not understand, but does not care for, in politics or art.[Pg 277]

He slips out of brilliant company, to enter occasionally among religious circles where they are tolerant of lost sheep, and has begun to pay his smaller bills and to find out what books he must read for a degree, when the examination day arrives. Then he borrows his old dignified look of indolence in the sultry schools, while he writes hard, and secures a second class by means of a legible handwriting, clear style, and amusing irrelevance. He goes down, alone, still with a fascinating tongue, desperate, and yet careless of success, ready to do anything so long as he can escape comfortable and conventional persons, and quite unable to be anything conspicuous, but a man who has been to the garden of the Hesperides and brought back apples that he alone can make appear to be golden in his rare moments of health.

III

He is one who knows that three or four years at the University is a good investment. He comes up with an open scorn of idlers, both gilded and gifted. Whether he is clever and successful or not, he has a suspicion that dons are underworked, colleges expensive hotels or worse, and is determined to change all that. Not infrequently such a one is perverted by a happy evening with a few acquaintances, early in his first term. If he is not, he is a white elephant. The dons are alarmed by his instructions, the undergraduates by his clothes. “If this were not an old conservative creek,” he seems to say, “promotion would go by merit, and I should[Pg 278] soon be at the top of the tree and begin repairs.” But the University remains unchanged.

He looks about him for a more stealthy passage to his ends.

A vernal impulse, it may be, sends him to a tailor’s shop, and in the unwonted resplendence that follows he is almost a butterfly. In a jocular spirit he calls upon the persons whose invitations he used to ignore. If he is clever or amusing, or apparently labouring under a delusion, he is liked. In his turn he is called upon. He begins to find that there is something in himself which has a taste for all that is human. Homo sum, he mutters, with one of the classical quotations which are to his taste. He will dally with the multitude for an hour or two,—a week,—why not for a term? When he is in the company of the sons of old or wealthy families, it occurs to him that rank and wealth are powerful: it follows, and can be demonstrated, that the power cannot be more justly exercised than in the furthering of honest and meritorious poverty. He will make a concession; possibly another visit to a tailor; perhaps a little champagne. Several discoveries follow.

It would be not only difficult, but contemptible, to play football or to row; yet he can learn to play lawn tennis. He is presently quite at home, if not in love, at garden parties. He mistakes the curious interest of men and women, in one who is entirely different from themselves, for a compliment to his adaptability.

Society bores him rapidly. He has had enough of[Pg 279] vacation visits and picnics during the term, and revives his acquaintance with work and the indolent fellows. But that is not necessarily attractive. Also, his friends and admirers will not let him disappear; and he returns to frivolity in a serious and plotting spirit. He tolerates nearly every one, and in particular the influential. They cultivate him, clearly, for his intelligence, his independence, his originality. Why should he not cultivate them for their own petty endowment? He enters office at the Union. He is elected to presidentships, secretaryships.

He is lucky if he does not learn from others—what he will not easily learn alone—that his resemblance to them is neither his best nor his most useful quality. And so he finds that after all there is nothing in ideals, and steps into a comfortable place in life; or perhaps he does not.

IV

The many-coloured undergraduate looks as if he had been designed by the architect of the “Five Orders Gate” in the Schools’ Quadrangle. His hat, his face, his tie, his waistcoat, his boots, represent the five orders; as in his great original, the Corinthian is predominant, and like that, he would never be thought possible, if he had not been seen. Yet he moves. Despite his elaborate appearance—destined to endure perhaps for all time, or as long as a shop-front—it is impossible to guess what may be his activities. He may be a famous[Pg 280] oarsman or cricketer, in which case his taste forbids him to adopt the broad blue band of his rank, unless there are ladies in Oxford. He may be a hard-working student who adopts this among many methods of showing that his successes fall to him as naturally as Saturday and Sunday. He may be an amateur tragedian, or magazine-wit, or Æsthete, who finds the costume less embarrassing although less distinguishing than cosmetics and an overcoat of fur. He may be a billiard-player who has chosen this contrasted, barry, wavy set of colours as his coat of arms, or the perambulating mannequin d’osier of several tailors, a transcendental sandwich-man. Or he may be a “blood” of many great connections and expenses; genial in his sphere; pleased with the number of his debts and the times he has been ploughed in “Smalls”; hunting or rowing keenly, while he lasts; and except when he has to work (which sends him to sleep), a sitter up at nights over cards and wine—

Or his great expenses and connections may not exist. He is perhaps a poor and worthless imitation of all that is great,—who does not know Lord X., of whom he tells such dull stories,—whose relatives are neither retired, nor in Army, Navy, or Church,—and entirely respectable in the Vacations, when he earns by his own self-sacrifice what was earned for his models by the[Pg 282][Pg 281]

[Pg 285][Pg 284][Pg 283]

unscrupulousness of their ancestors. In short, he may be a most brilliant, most fascinating, or most modest person, who has chosen to appear piebald.

His room is decorated with photographs of actresses, along with perhaps a Hogarth print, a florid male and a floral female portrait, an expensive picture of a horse, and copies from Leighton. In a corner is a piano, which he is perhaps eager and unable to play. The air is scented with roses and cigarettes. The window-seat is strewn with hunting-crops, bills, a caricature of himself from an undergraduate paper, several novels and boxes of cigarettes, a history of the Argent-Bigpotts of Bigpott, and, under a cushion, some note-books and a table of work.

He is to be met with everywhere; for he is not ashamed to be seen. He lives long in the memories of travellers from Birmingham who wait five minutes in Oxford. In the Schools he is a constant attendant, always sanguine, not quite cheerful or satisfied with the company, yet equal (at his Viva Voce) to a look of ineffectual superiority for the man who ploughs him with a smile. He is also to be found by the river, during the Eights, when he cheers and looks very well; in a bookshop, where he recognises Omar and some novels; or in the High, which never wearies him, although his bored look seems to say so.[Pg 286]

V

He has come up with a scholarship from school. There, he took prizes, had an attack of brain-fever, and edited the magazine: and he has come to the University as if it were an upper class of his old school. His aim is, as many prizes as possible and a good degree. The tutors here, like the masters at school, he regards as men who turn a handle and work up more or less good material into scholars, as a butcher makes sausages, all exactly alike to the eye, out of a mysterious heap. At first he is in great awe of a fellow, and wears his scholar’s gown at its utmost length, and as proudly as star and riband—he will hardly take it off in the severe quarter of an hour in which he permits himself to drink coffee and eat anchovy toast after dinner; and he sometimes pretends to forget that he has it on until he goes to bed. Perhaps on one occasion he trips his tutor over a quotation or something of no account. He scans the tutor’s bookshelves, and finds odd things between Tacitus and Thucydides which make him ponder. At length, he is less respectful; opens discussions, in which, having tired the tutor, he returns very well satisfied. For he has a patent memory, as he has a patent reading-lamp and reading-desk. Nothing goes into it without a bright label, as nothing goes into his note-book without honours of pencilled red and blue. His copy of Homer is so overscored that one might[Pg 287] suppose that the battle of the pigmies and cranes had been fought to a sanguinary end upon its page.

At school his football was treated with contempt, yet with silence, except by very small boys. At college he is anxious to do a little at games. The captain of the boats asks him, as a matter of course, to go down to the river, to be tubbed (or coached) in a pair-oar boat; and he replies that he “will willingly spare half an hour.” He shows some good points at the river; is painstaking and neat. His half-hour is mercilessly multiplied day after day. He is to be found at the starting-point in February, in his college Torpid, and proves a stately nonentity or passenger; discovers that rowing abrades more than his skin, and gives it up just before he is asked to. For the future he sculls alone, once a week, when it is mild, and oftener when his friends are visiting him—which he does not encourage. At such times he learns that it is quite true that Oxford possesses some fine drawings, marbles, stained glass, and a library of little use to a determined “Greats” man. These he exhibits to the visitors impatiently and with pride. He returns to his work unruffled. Already he has scored one First Class and a proxime for a prize. Yet his tutor pays him qualified compliments, which he attributes to the natural bitterness of a second class man. The tutor sometimes asks him what he reads; to which he replies brightly with a long list of texts, etc.

“Yes, but what do you read when you unbend?” says the tutor. “Did you ever read Midshipman Easy?” (with a touch of exasperation).[Pg 288]

The youth blushingly replies: “No, I never unbend.”

Nor is the other far more pleased when he brings with him, on a short vacation boating holiday, a volume of the EncyclopÆdia Britannica.

Now and then he speaks at the Union. There and at afternoon teas with ladies he is known for the lucidity of his commonplaces and the length of his quotations. For the most part he talks only of his work and the current number of the Times. His work, meantime, is less and less satisfactory to every one but his coach. Some say that he will get another first, and will not deserve it. Already he is learning that three or four years among “boys” is not helpful to his future. No one so much as he emphasises the distinction between third and second year undergraduates. He is always looking for really improving conversation, and play of mind without any play. A book tea would please him, if it were not so frivolous.

Once only he lapses from the rigidity of his ways. He thinks it a matter of duty until it occurs, when the hearty and informal reception given to his rendering of “To Anthea” discourages any further condescension. With that exception, he moves with considerable dignity among mankind: in all things discreet, with a leaning towards the absurd; in most things well under control, yet, in spite of his rigidity, really luxuriating in the sweets of a neutral nature that never tempts temptation. He sends in a neat, flowery, and icy poem for the Newdigate Prize, and wins. He gets his second First[Pg 289] Class and an appointment which he likes at the same time. He enters for a fellowship, and his failure calls forth the old story about the cherry tart that was offered to likely competitors at a fellowship examination, where the cleanest management of the stones meant success.

He goes down with his degree, and confident, applauded, unmissed. His friends say that he lacks something which he ought to have. What is it?

VI

He has come up to Oxford with an unconquerable love of men and books and games; is resolved not to be careful in small matters for a few years; and has a clear vision of a profession ahead. Others think that a fellowship and a prize are his due; he vaguely regards them as nice. But he has a strong belief that any kind of distinction is dangerous at Oxford, and among the least of its possibilities. He respects the scholar and the Blue, and sees that they might equally well be made in another city or on another stream. Bent upon a life among men, he sees that a university is a place where many are men, but where many of the suspicious and calculating passions of a bigger world are in abeyance; and thinks that it should therefore be the home of perfect rivalries and friendships.

He will attend the lectures of——, which are outside his course. He [Pg 290]will accept some hearty excesses in the rooms of—— as equally important. When he comes up his sympathies are universal. He is eager and warm in his liking of men and things; and he is straightway on happy terms with undergraduates and dons. After a few terms his versatility is hard-worked in order to give something more than an appearance of sympathy in the company of athletes, reading men, contemplative men, and wealthy men. For a time his success is sublime. The reading man thinks there was never such a student. The rowing man approves of his leg-work and his narratives at those little training parties for the enjoyment of music, port, and fruit—“togger ports.” His method appeals to the don. Now and then, indeed, some one a little more reticent than himself puts him to a test, and he may discourse on Aquinas to a Unitarian Socialist, or on Gargantua to one deep in Christian mysticism or fresh from the new year’s advice of his great-aunt. In such cases, either he is repulsed with sufficient narrowness on the part of the other to supply a necessary balm, or he makes a surprised and admiring convert, who may do odd things on account of his inferior versatility. For quite a long time he may have the good fortune to let loose his interest in the Ptolemies in the neighbourhood of other admirers or neutral gentlemen. And so long all is more than well. He is popular, exuberant, and in a fair way of growth, albeit a little overdone. It is true that in tired moments he is likely to choose the path of least resistance and find himself in not very versatile company. But what a life he leads! what afternoons on the Cherwell between Marston and Islip in the[Pg 291] summer; and beyond Fyfield, when autumn still has all that is a perfecting of summer in its gift! The admiring plodder who hears his speeches says that he will some day be Lord Chancellor. His verses have something beyond cleverness in them: they have a high impulsion, as when spring makes a crown imperial or a tulip. And listening to his talk or reading his letters, one might think that he will be content to be one of those men of genius who avoid fame—but if their letters are unearthed two hundred years hence they will have the life of Wotton’s or T. E. Brown’s. His friends think that such a clear-souled, gracious, brilliant creature would leaven the Senior Common Room and draw out the shyness of ——, and twist the neck of ——’s exuberant dulness.

The liberal life, close in friendship with so many of the living and the historical, on occasions almost gives him the freedom of all time. His friends note that Catullus or Lucan or Dante is nearer to him than to other men. He quotes them as if he had lived with them and were their executor, and by his sympathy seems to have won a part authorship of their finest things. He expounds the law and makes it as exhilarating as the Arabian Nights, or as if it were a sequel to Don Quixote. And in history the dons notice his picturesqueness, which is as passionate as if he could have written that ardent sonnet:—

So the glories of youth and history and summer mingle in his brain and speech.

No one is so married to his surroundings as he, and while he appears to many to be shaped by them—beautiful or grotesque—as an animal in a shell; to a few he appears also to shape them, so that Oxford in his company is a new thing, as if it were the highest, last creation of the modern mind. He does not acquiesce in the limp mediÆvalism of the rest, but recreates the Middle Ages for himself, finding new humanities in the sculptures, and beauties in the perspective, strange sympathies between the monkish work and the voices and faces of those who sit amidst it. In his own college he effects a surprising “modernisation” by removing a little eighteenth-century work and revealing the fifteenth-century original. Thus all history is to him a vivid personal experience.

But he is overwhelmed by his versatility, and cultivates that for its own sake, and at last loses his sympathy with all who are not as he. The athletes begin to treat him as a poser. The hard workers stand aloof from his extravagances. With different sets he is treated[Pg 293] and rejected as a man of the world, a hepatetic philosopher, a dilettante; ... some speak of the literary taint; the dons are tired. He is in danger of becoming the hero of the most unstable freshman and his scout. And so, though he has perhaps but one failing more than his contemporaries, and certainly more virtues, he is ridiculed or feared or despised, and goes about like Leonolo in the play, who wandered

until he has the good luck to fall back upon his friends. There he is safe again. His name will indeed be handed down through half a dozen undergraduate generations for his least characteristic adventures, but if that is a rare distinction, and equivalent to a press immortality, it is likely to be of no profit to him. Where he used to be an expensive copy of a Bohemian, he becomes at last as near the genuine thing as any critic, with a wholesome fear of being absolute, would care to pronounce. His one pose is that of the plain-spoken, natural man, in the presence of a snob. Everywhere he is as independent as a parrot or a tramp. In life, few are to be envied so much. For he achieves everything but success.

VII

The important undergraduate is one who has been [Pg 294]thunderstruck by the inferiority of the rest. He cannot, if he would, be rid of the notion. In a large college the distinction between himself and others is cheerfully acknowledged by them, while he leads a painful life. In a small college, for a year or two, he is so handled that he may sometimes wish he were as other men are. At the end of that time he has by contagion created a covey of important men, and now, to his moral, athletic, and intellectual excellence, and his superior school, is added the excellence of being several years older than the majority. He establishes a despotism for the good of the college. He is willing to take the fellows into partnership, makes advances, and, when coyly repulsed, has his sense of importance increased by the knowledge that an opposition exists. His splendour is marred only by the stranger, who mistakes his brass-buttoned blazer for a livery, and finds his pomposity well worthy of such fine old quadrangles,—and requests him with a smile and half a sovereign to exhibit the chapel and the hall, and “tell me who are the swells”!

He walks about Oxford with a beautiful satisfaction. “A poor thing, but my own,” he seems to say, as he enters the college gate. Little boys in the street pull off their caps as he passes, and the saucy, imprudent freshman does the same. He rows, he plays football and cricket, he debates, all indifferently, but with such an air that he and even some others for a time believe that he is the life and soul of the college.

He has been captain and president of everything, when he finds that there is no further honour open to[Pg 295] him, and he muses almost with melancholy. The others find it out somewhat later; he is dejected. Though fallen, he is still majestic. He stalks about like a foxhound in July, or like a rebellious archangel—

Once more October returns. A new generation of freshmen is invited to tea, and for one glorious hour his old vivacity returns, as he questions, instructs, exhorts. “The President of the O.U.B.C. once said to me, ...” or “When I was in the college boat and we made seven bumps ...”—such are his conjuring terms.

Perhaps in a few years he returns, to find that the college is not what it was, and that his nickname is still remembered.

VIII

He is one whom the Important Undergraduate regards as a parody of himself. For he resembles the other in no respect. He is a clean, brave, and modest freshman, with too great a liking for the same qualities in others to be disturbed by any faulty affectations that may go along with them. When he comes up he has a few friends in Oxford, keeps them, and is well contented. He plays his games heartily, and is almost as glad to cheer, when he is not good enough or pushing enough to play. Nothing can destroy his regular habits, and at first he narrowly escapes being despised for them by his inferiors. He is comparatively poor and not very clever.[Pg 296] Neither has he any amusing oddities, or stories to tell, or much whisky to dispense. Yet he finds notoriety thrust upon him. If it were not for his firm and blushing manner, he would never have his room empty for work. Very soon, he is the only man in the college who may sport his oak with no fear from the thunders of distant and idle acquaintances. Every one wishes to possess him. The athletes cannot withstand his running, his hard fielding. The more unpopular reading-men are first attracted by his simple habits as a freshman, and then surprised that they are not repulsed when they hear that he will get his Blue; he is always their protector. The elegant and stupid men, at least for a few terms, know no man who so becomes a cigar, and is so fit to meet their female cousins at breakfast. The brilliant men like him first because he is a mystery; next, because he recalls to them their “lost youth,” which was nothing like his; and finally, because he is so friendly and so naÏvely rebukes their most venturesome sallies. His presence in a room is more than a wood fire and a steaming bowl. He seems to know not sorrow—

It is sorrow-killing to see his amazement at sorrow, like the amazement of those spirits in Purgatory who exclaimed, as Dante passed: “The light seems not to shine on one side of him, though he behaves as one that lives.” Men of very different persuasions are fascinated by “the young Greek” in the Parks or on the river. He is successful everywhere, and is in time captain of[Pg 297] football and president of the debating and literary society, although his knowledge of literature is confined to Scott’s Novels, Hypatia, and the Idylls of the King. He accepts the advice of the Important Undergraduate, here and elsewhere, and unconsciously ignores it, with happy results. For his contemporaries believe that he has launched his college upon one of those sudden, mysterious ascensions that mean social, learned, and athletic improvement at once. To the last he is diffident, and at the same time always capable of doing his best. “Can you clear that brook?” one asks in the Hinksey fields. “I don’t know,” is the reply, and over he goes, a foot clear amongst the orchis. Not a great deal more powerful than the cox, he strokes a boat that has never been bumped, and is the only oar whom the rest all praise. To see him halting over a commonplace speech at a college function, or making the most ludicrous new verses to the alphabetical song of “Jolly old Dons,” and winning applause; or dropping his head on his knees at the winning-post on the river; or carried for the hundredth time round the quadrangle on some festive night—is, nobody knows or asks why, an inspiration. And after his last farewell dinner he smiles, as if he knew everything or had the pitiÉ suprÊme, as he notices the follies which he supposes he is “not clever enough for,” and goes down to his manor or country curacy very happily.[Pg 298]

IX

There was for a short time, amidst but not of the University, a student whom I cannot but count as a “clerk of Oxenford.” He came from no school, but straight from a counting-house. All his life he had been a deep, unguided delver in the past. An orphan in the world, he had chosen his family among the noble persons of antiquity. CÆsar was more real to him than Napoleon, and Cato more influential than any millionaire. He had tasted all the types, from Diogenes to Seneca and Lucullus. When he tired of his counting-house, he tried to imagine a resemblance between it and a city state, but was himself but a helot in the end.

So it happened that he came to live in a cottage attic, five or six miles from Oxford. He wanted to be a university man. He despised scholarships as if they had been the badge of the Legion of Honour. Colleges he would have nothing to do with, because they spoiled the simplicity of the idea of a university in his mind. They had made possible the social folly of Oxford. But in his reading of history he had travelled no farther than the Middle Ages towards his own time; and a picture of Oxford life in that day fascinated him. He believed that it was still possible to lead the unstable, independent, penniless life of a scholar; and he knew not why a student should hope or wish to be anything like a merchant or a prince. A merchant had money, and a prince flattery: he would have wisdom. It was[Pg 299] likely to be a long search, and in his view it was the search that was beyond price. He wanted wisdom as a man might want a star, because it was a rare and beautiful thing. So his studies were a spiritual experience. The short passages of Homer which he knew by heart had something of religious unction in his utterance.

He left London afoot, with a parcel of books strapped to his shoulders; his only disappointment coming from a landlord who refused to pay for his singing with a meal, as he would have done six hundred years ago. A farmer treated him generously, under the belief that he was mad.

A few antiquated Greek texts and notes, an odd volume of Chronicles from the Rolls Series, and an Aldrich, adorned his room, and with their help he hoped to lay the foundations of a seraphic, universal wisdom. Gradually he would become worthy to use the Bodleian and contend with the learned gown and hostile town.

Once a week, in the beginning, he walked into Oxford. He saw the river covered with boats, and laughed happily and pitifully at men who seemed to know nothing about the uses of a university. A good-tempered youth, in rowing knickerbockers, was a fit disciple for his revelations, he thought, and was about to preach, when he barely escaped from a bicycle and a megaphone. Almost sad, murmuring Abelard’s line

he hastened to the city. The spires gave him courage again, and he ran, singing an old song:—

Every one in a master’s gown received a bow. He was mistaken for a literary man. And once in Oxford, he went, seriously and as if at a ceremony, through a minutely prepared plan. He attended service at one of the churches, and especially St. Mary’s. He took long, repeated walks up and down High Street, and into all the lanes, which he hardly knew when their names had been changed. Then he sat for an hour in the oldest-looking inn. In blessed mood, he tried the landlord unsuccessfully with Latin, and waited until some scholar should call and exchange jests with him in the learned tongue, or perhaps join him in a quarrel with the town. The only scholar that called talked in a strange tongue, chiefly to a bull-pup, and never to him. And late at night he stole reluctantly home, never so much pleased as when, in a dark alley, he was saluted by a proctor, and asked if he might be a member of the University. But the little note inviting him to be at—— College at—— A.M. on the following day never came, and he was cheated of the glory of being the first member of the University who could by no means pay a fine.

At the end of this holy day he spent the night with his books, thinking it shame to sleep away the ardent,[Pg 302][Pg 301]

[Pg 305]

[Pg 304]

[Pg 303]

memoried hours that followed. When sleep caught him at last, with what happiness and pomp he walked down St. Aldate’s and along Blue Boar Street and Merton Street, and came suddenly upon Wren’s domed gate at Queen’s! or paused in St. Mary’s porches, or found the inmost green sanctuary of Wadham Gardens!

Once he dreamed that on a Sunday he preached from the little outdoor pulpit at Magdalen, where he mounted by some artifice of sleep’s. The chamber windows and quadrangles were full. His voice rose and linked to him the crowd outside in High Street. All remained silent, even when it was known that the hieroglyphics were skipping from their perches in the cloister and carrying off large numbers, no one knew whither. Those that were spared—and his voice rose ever higher, and expanded like the column and fans of masonry at Christ Church—were stripped of their waistcoats and ties and all their luxuries and dignities. Their hair was shaved: presently they were all cowled, and with a great shout hailed him Chancellor. He floated down from the pulpit and led them down the High, evicting the pampered tradespeople and fettering all parasites. Singing a charging hymn, they marched in procession to St. Mary’s, and thence to a feast at Christ Church hall; when he awoke with the din of revelry.

Sometimes, in his dreams, he saw enacted the Greek tragedies, to the accompaniment of the organs of New College and the Cathedral.

Now that he knew his plays by heart, he came oftener[Pg 306] to Oxford, and gained the freedom of the Bodleian. Every day he came, bringing his own books to fill the interval before the library books arrived, although for the most part he stared at the gilt inscriptions outside his alcove window, or at the trees and roofs farther off. When he was hidden among the expected volumes he read but feverishly. He put questions to himself in the style of the schoolmen, and pondered “whether the music of the spheres be verse or prose.” He tingled all over with the learned air, and was intoxicated by the dust of a little-used book. The brown spray that fell from a volume on the shelf before him was sweeter than the south wind. Week after week obscured his aims. The only moments of his old chanting joy came to him in his still undiluted expectations, when he came in sight of the city—

and at night, while the river shone like an infinite train let fall from the shoulders of the city.

He sold his books in Little Clarendon Street, and whenever he wished to read, there he found them and others ready. Most of his time passed in the corner of an inn, where he sat at a hole in the dark window as at a hagioscope, and with heavy eyelids watched the University men. And it was possible to earn a living by selling the Star for a penny, night after night, and to have the felicity of dying in Oxford.[Pg 308][Pg 307]

[Pg 311]

[Pg 310]

[Pg 309]

The Past

I

Such was a “clerk of Oxenford” in Chaucer’s day, living probably on the generosity of a patron, and differing only from his patron’s son, inasmuch as he[Pg 312] was saved the expense of a fur hood. In the rooms of most, Bibles, Missals, or an Aristotle or Boethius, took the place of the Almagest of the astrologer; and more conspicuous were the rosaries, lutes, bows and arrows of the undergraduates. In their boisterous parti-coloured life of almost liberty, even an examination was a vivid thing, and meant a disputation against all comers in a public school, to be followed by a feast of celebration, visits to taverns, and probably a dance,

and so, after a fight with saucy tradesmen or foreigners, to bed, or Binsey for a hare, or to other night work.

II

“A meere young Gentleman of the Universitie is one that comes there to weare a gowne, and to say hereafter, he has been at the Universitie. His Father sent him thither, because hee heard there were the best Fencing and Dancing Schools. From these he has his Education, from his Tutor the oversight. The first element of his knowledge is to be shewne the Colleges, and initiated in a Taverne by the way, which hereafter hee will learne for himselfe. The two marks of his Senioritie, is the bare velvet of his gowne, and his proficiencie at Tennis, where when he can once play a Set, he is a Freshman no more. His Studie has commonly handsome shelves, his Bookes neate silk strings, which he shows to his Father’s man, and is loth to untye or take downe for feare of misplacing. Upon[Pg 313] foule days for recreation hee retyres thither, and looks over the prety booke his Tutor reades to him, which is commonly some short Historie, or a piece of Euphormio; for which his Tutor gives him Money to spend next day. His maine loytering is at the Library, where hee studies Armes and bookes of Honour, and turnes a Gentleman Critick in Pedigrees. Of all things hee endures not to be mistaken for a Scholler, and hates a black suit though it be of Satin. His companion is ordinarily some stale fellow, that has been notorious for an Ingle to gold hatbands, whom hee admires at first, afterward scornes. If hee have spirit or wit, he may light of better company, and may learne some flashes of wit, which may doe him Knight’s service in the Country hereafter. But he is now gone to the Inns of Court, where he studies to forget what hee learn’d before, his acquaintance and the fashion.”

From the Microcosmographie.

III

The younger Richard Graves (1715-1804), a contemporary of Shenstone and Whitfield at Pembroke, has sketched, in his own person, the unstable undergraduate of sixteen, in his progress from set to set. It is a very lasting type. “Having brought with me,” he writes, “the character of a tolerably good Grecian, I was invited to a very sober little party, who amused themselves in the evening with reading Greek and drinking water. Here I continued six months, and[Pg 314] we read over Theophrastus, Epictetus, Phalaris’ Epistles, and such other Greek authors as are seldom read at school. But I was at length seduced from this mortified symposium to a very different party, a set of jolly, sprightly young fellows, most of them west-country lads, who drank ale, smoked tobacco, punned, and sang bacchanalian catches the whole evening. I began to think them the only wise men. Some gentlemen commoners, however, who considered the above-mentioned very low company (chiefly on account of the liquor they drank), good-naturedly invited me to their party; they treated me with port wine and arrack punch; and now and then, when they had drunk so much as hardly to distinguish wine from water, they would conclude with a bottle or two of claret. They kept late hours, drank their favourite toasts on their knees, and in short were what were then called ‘bucks of the first head.’”

IV

The Lownger

I have taken from Glanvil’s Vanity of Dogmatizing the original version of the story of Matthew Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy.

“There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who being of very pregnant and ready parts, and yet wanting the encouragement of preferment, was by his poverty forc’d to leave his studies there, and to cast himself upon the wide world for a livelyhood. Now, his necessities growing dayly on him, and wanting the help of friends to relieve him, he was at last forced to join himself to a company of Vagabond Gypsies, whom occasionally he met with, and to follow their Trade for a maintenance. Among these extravagant people, by the insinuating subtilty of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem; as that they discovered to him their Mystery: in the practice of which, by the pregnancy of his wit and parts he soon grew so good and proficient, as to be able to outdo his Instructors. After he had been a pretty while well exercised in the Trade; there chanc’d to ride by a couple of Scholars who had formerly bin of his acquaint[Pg 316]ance. The Scholars had quickly spyed out their old friend among the Gypsies; and their amazement to see him among such society, had well nigh discovered him; but by a sign he prevented their owning him before that crew, and taking one of them aside privately, desired him with a friend to go to an Inn, not far distant thence, promising there to come to them. They accordingly went thither, and he follows: after their first salutations, his friends enquire how he came to lead so odd a life as that was, and to joyn himself with such a cheating, beggarly company. The Scholar Gypsy having given them an account of the necessity, which drove him to that kind of life; told them, that the people he went with were not such Imposters as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of Imagination, and that himself had learnt much of their Art, and improved it further than themselves could. And to evince the truth of what he told them, he said he’d remove into another room, leaving them to discourse together; and upon his return tell them the sum of what they had talked of. Which accordingly he performed, giving them a full account of what had pass’d between them in his absence. The Scholars being amazed at so unexpected a discovery, earnestly desired him to unriddle the mystery. In which he gave them satisfaction, by telling them, that what he did was by the power of Imagination, his Phancy binding theirs; and that himself had dictated to them the discourse, they held together, while he was from[Pg 317] them: That there were warrantable wayes of heightening the Imagination to that pitch, as to bind another’s; and that when he had compass’d the whole secret, some parts of which he said he was yet ignorant of, he intended to leave their company, and give the world an account of what he had learned.[Pg 319][Pg 318]”

[Pg 320]

[Pg 321]