YOUNG DAYS AT OXFORD

I

How little those who are school-girls of to-day can realize what it was to be a school-girl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century! A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one. The games, the gymnastics, the solid grounding in drawing and music, together with the enormously improved teaching in elementary science, or literature and language, which are at the service of the school-girl of to-day, had not begun to be when I was at school. As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted. I learned nothing thoroughly or accurately, and the German, French, and Latin which I soon discovered after my marriage to be essential to the kind of literary work I wanted to do, had all to be relearned before they could be of any real use to me; nor was it ever possible for me-who married at twenty--to get that firm hold on the structure and literary history of any language, ancient or modern, which my brother William, only fifteen months my junior, got from his six years at Rugby, and his training there in Latin and Greek. What I learned during those years was learned from personalities; from contact with a nature so simple, sincere, and strong as that of Miss Clough; from the kindly old German governess, whose affection for me helped me through some rather hard and lonely school-years spent at a school in Shropshire; and from a gentle and high-minded woman, an ardent Evangelical, with whom, a little later, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I fell headlong in love, as was the manner of school-girls then, and is, I understand, frequently the case with school-girls now, in spite of the greatly increased variety of subjects on which they may spend their minds.

English girls' schools to-day providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century. They are almost entirely taught by women, and women with whom, in many cases, education--the shaping of the immature human creature to noble ends--is the sincerest of passions; who find, indeed, in the task that same creative joy which belongs to literature or art, or philanthropic experiment. The schoolmistress to whom money is the sole or even the chief motive of her work, is, in my experience, rare to-day, though we have all in our time heard tales of modern "academies" of the Miss Pinkerton type, brought up to date--fashionable, exclusive, and luxurious--where, as in some boys' preparatory schools (before the war!) the more the parents paid, the better they were pleased. But I have not come across them. The leading boarding-schools in England and America, at present, no less than the excellent day-schools for girls of the middle class, with which this country has been covered since 1870, are genuine products of that Women's Movement, as we vaguely call it, in the early educational phases of which I myself was much engaged; whereof the results are now widely apparent, though as yet only half-grown. If one tracks it back to somewhere near its origins, its superficial origins, at any rate, one is brought up, I think, as in the case of so much else, against one leading cause--railways! With railways and a cheap press, in the second third of the nineteenth century, there came in, as we all know, the break-up of a thousand mental stagnations, answering to the old physical disabilities and inconveniences. And the break-up has nowhere had more startling results than in the world of women, and the training of women for life. We have only to ask ourselves what the women of Benjamin Constant, or of Beyle, or Balzac, would have made of the keen school-girl and college girl of the present day, to feel how vast is the change through which some of us have lived. Exceptional women, of course, have led much the same kind of lives in all generations. Mrs. Sidney Webb has gone through a very different sort of self-education from that of Harriet Martineau; but she has not thought more widely, and she will hardly influence her world so much as that stanch fighter of the past. It is the rank and file--the average woman--for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly. The revelation of her wide-spread and various capacity that the present war has brought about is only the suddenly conspicuous result of the liberating forces set in action by the scientific and mechanical development of the nineteenth century. It rests still with that world "after the war," to which we are all looking forward with mingled hope and fear, to determine the new forms, sociological and political, through which this capacity, this heightened faculty, must some day organically express itself.

In the years when I was at school, however--1858 to 1867--these good days were only beginning to dawn. Poor teaching, poor school-books, and, in many cases, indifferent food and much ignorance as to the physical care of girls--these things were common in my school-time. I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child. I had few tools and little grounding; and I was much more childish than I need have been. A few vivid impressions stand out from these years: the great and to me mysterious figure of Newman haunting the streets of Edgbaston, where, in 1861, my father became head classical master of the Oratory School; the news of the murder of Lincoln, coming suddenly into a quiet garden in a suburb of Birmingham, and an ineffaceable memory of the pale faces and horror-stricken looks of those discussing it; the haunting beauty of certain passages of Ruskin which I copied out and carried about with me, without in the least caring to read as a whole the books from which they came; my first visit to the House of Commons in 1863; the recurrent visits to Fox How, and the winter and summer beauty of the fells; together with an endless storytelling phase in which I told stories to my school-fellows, on condition they told stories to me; coupled with many attempts on my part at poetry and fiction, which make me laugh and blush when I compare them to-day with similar efforts of my own grandchildren. But on the whole they were starved and rather unhappy years; through no one's fault. My parents were very poor and perpetually in movement. Everybody did the best he could.

With Oxford, however, and my seventeenth year, came a radical change.

It was in July, 1865, while I was still a school-girl, that in the very middle of the Long Vacation I first saw Oxford. My father, after some five years as Doctor Newman's colleague at the Oratory School, had then become the subject of a strong temporary reaction against Catholicism. He left the Roman Church in 1865, to return to it again, for good, eleven years later. During the interval he took pupils at Oxford, produced a very successful Manual of English Literature, edited the works of Wycliffe for the Clarendon Press, made himself an Anglo-Saxon scholar, and became one of the most learned editors of the great Rolls Series. To look at the endless piles of his note-books is to realize how hard, how incessantly he worked. Historical scholarship was his destined field; he found his happiness in it through all the troubles of life. And the return to Oxford, to its memories, its libraries, its stately, imperishable beauty, was delightful to him. So also, I think, for some years, was the sense of intellectual freedom. Then began a kind of nostalgia, which grew and grew till it took him back to the Catholic haven in 1876, never to wander more.

But when he first showed me Oxford he was in the ardor of what seemed a permanent severance from an admitted mistake. I see a deserted Oxford street, and a hansom coming up it--myself and my father inside it. I was returning from school, for the holidays. When I had last seen my people, they were living near Birmingham. I now found them at Oxford, and I remember the thrill of excitement with which I looked from side to side as we neared the colleges. For I knew well, even at fourteen, that this was "no mean city." As we drove up Beaumont Street we saw what was then "new Balliol" in front of us, and a jutting window. "There lives the arch-heretic!" said my father. It was a window in Mr. Jowett's rooms. He was not yet Master of the famous College, but his name was a rallying-cry, and his personal influence almost at its zenith. At the same time, he was then rigorously excluded from the University pulpit; it was not till a year later that even his close friend Dean Stanley ventured to ask him to preach in Westminster Abbey; and his salary as Greek Professor, due to him from the revenues of Christ Church, and withheld from him on theological grounds for years, had only just been wrung--at last--from the reluctant hands of a governing body which contained Canon Liddon and Doctor Pusey.

To my father, on his settlement in Oxford, Jowett had been a kind and helpful friend; he had a very quick sympathy with my mother; and as I grew up he became my friend, too, so that as I look back upon my Oxford years both before and after my marriage, the dear Master--he became Master in 1870--plays a very marked part in the Oxford scene as I shall ever remember it.

It was not, however, till two years later that I left school, and slipped into the Oxford life as a fish into water. I was sixteen, beginning to be conscious of all sorts of rising needs and ambitions, keenly alive to the spell of Oxford and to the good fortune which had brought me to live in her streets. There was in me, I think, a real hunger to learn, and a very quick sense of romance in things or people. But after sixteen, except in music, I had no definite teaching, and everything I learned came to me from persons--and books--sporadically, without any general guidance or plan. It was all a great voyage of discovery, organized mainly by myself, on the advice of a few men and women very much older, who took an interest in me and were endlessly kind to the shy and shapeless creature I must have been.

It was in 1868 or 1869--I think I was seventeen--that I remember my first sight of a college garden lying cool and shaded between gray college walls, and on the grass a figure that held me fascinated--a lady in a green brocade dress, with a belt and chatelaine of Russian silver, who was playing croquet, then a novelty in Oxford, and seemed to me, as I watched her, a perfect model of grace and vivacity. A man nearly thirty years older than herself, whom I knew to be her husband, was standing near her, and a handful of undergraduates made an amused and admiring court round the lady. The elderly man--he was then fifty-three--was Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, and the croquet-player had been his wife about seven years. After the Rector's death in 1884, Mrs. Pattison married Sir Charles Dilke in the very midst of the divorce proceedings which were to wreck in full stream a brilliant political career; and she showed him a proud devotion till her death in 1904. None of her early friends who remember her later history can ever think of the "Frances Pattison" of Oxford days without a strange stirring of heart. I was much at Lincoln in the years before I married, and derived an impression from the life lived there that has never left me. Afterward I saw much less of Mrs. Pattison, who was generally on the Riviera in the winter; but from 1868 to 1872, the Rector, learned, critical, bitter, fastidious, and "Mrs. Pat," with her gaiety, her picturesqueness, her impatience of the Oxford solemnities and decorums, her sharp, restless wit, her determination not to be academic, to hold on to the greater world of affairs outside--mattered more to me perhaps than anybody else. They were very good to me, and I was never tired of going there; though I was much puzzled by their ways, and--while my Evangelical phase lasted--much scandalized often by the speculative freedom of the talk I heard. Sometimes my rather uneasy conscience protested in ways which I think must have amused my hosts, though they never said a word. They were fond of asking me to come to supper at Lincoln on Sundays. It was a gay, unceremonious meal, at which Mrs. Pattison appeared in the kind of gown which at a much later date began to be called a tea-gown. It was generally white or gray, with various ornaments and accessories which always seemed to me, accustomed for so long to the rough-and-tumble of school life, marvels of delicacy and prettiness; so that I was sharply conscious, on these occasions, of the graceful figure made by the young mistress of the old house. But some last stubborn trace in me of the Evangelical view of Sunday declared that while one might talk--and one must eat!--on Sunday, one mustn't put on evening dress, or behave as though it were just like a week-day. So while every one else was in evening dress, I more than once--at seventeen--came to these Sunday gatherings on a winter evening, purposely, in a high woolen frock, sternly but uncomfortably conscious of being sublime--if only one were not ridiculous! The Rector, "Mrs. Pat," Mr. Bywater, myself, and perhaps a couple of undergraduates--often a bewildered and silent couple--I see that little vanished company in the far past so plainly! Three of them are dead--and for me the gray walls of Lincoln must always be haunted by their ghosts.

The historian of French painting and French decorative art was already in those days unfolding in Mrs. Pattison. Her drawing-room was French, sparely furnished with a few old girandoles and mirrors on its white paneled walls, and a Persian carpet with a black center, on which both the French furniture and the living inmates of the room looked their best. And up-stairs, in "Mrs. Pat's" own working-room, there were innumerable things that stirred my curiosity--old French drawings and engravings, masses of foreign books that showed the young and brilliant owner of the room to be already a scholar, even as her husband counted scholarship; together with the tools and materials for etching, a mysterious process in which I was occasionally allowed to lend a hand, and which, as often as not, during the application of the acid to the plate, ended in dire misfortune to the etcher's fingers or dress, and in the helpless laughter of both artist and assistant.

The Rector himself was an endless study to me--he and his frequent companion, Ingram Bywater, afterward the distinguished Greek Professor. To listen to these two friends as they talked of foreign scholars in Paris or Germany, of Renan, or Ranke, or Curtius; as they poured scorn on Oxford scholarship, or the lack of it, and on the ideals of Balliol, which aimed at turning out public officials, as compared with the researching ideals of the German universities, which seemed to the Rector the only ideals worth calling academic; or as they flung gibes at Christ Church, whence Pusey and Liddon still directed the powerful Church party of the University--was to watch the doors of new worlds gradually opening before a girl's questioning intelligence. The Rector would walk up and down, occasionally taking a book from his crowded shelves, while Mr. By water and Mrs. Pattison smoked, with the after-luncheon coffee--and in those days a woman with a cigarette was a rarity in England--and sometimes, at a caustic mot of the former's there would break out the Rector's cackling laugh, which was ugly, no doubt, but, when he was amused and at ease, extraordinarily full of mirth. To me he was from the beginning the kindest friend. He saw that I came of a literary stock and had literary ambitions; and he tried to direct me. "Get to the bottom of something," he would say. "Choose a subject, and know everything about it!" I eagerly followed his advice, and began to work at early Spanish in the Bodleian. But I think he was wrong--I venture to think so!--though, as his half-melancholy, half-satirical look comes back to me, I realize how easily he would defend himself, if one could tell him so now. I think I ought to have been told to take a history examination and learn Latin properly. But if I had, half the exploring joy of those early years would, no doubt, have been cut away.

Later on, in the winters when Mrs. Pattison, threatened with rheumatic gout, disappeared to the Riviera, I came to know a sadder and lonelier Rector. I used to go to tea with him then in his own book-lined sanctum, and we mended the blazing fire between us and talked endlessly. Presently I married, and his interest in me changed; though our friendship never lessened, and I shall always remember with emotion my last sight of him lying, a white and dying man, on his sofa in London--the clasp of the wasted hand, the sad, haunting eyes. When his Memoirs appeared, after his death, a book of which Mr. Gladstone once said to me that he reckoned it as among the most tragic and the most memorable books of the nineteenth century, I understood him more clearly and more tenderly than I could have done as a girl. Particularly, I understood why in that skeptical and agnostic talk which never spared the Anglican ecclesiastics of the moment, or such a later Catholic convert as Manning, I cannot remember that I ever heard him mention the great name of John Henry Newman with the slightest touch of disrespect. On the other hand, I once saw him receive a message that some friend brought him from Newman with an eager look and a start of pleasure. He had been a follower of Newman's in the Tractarian days, and no one who ever came near to Newman could afterward lightly speak ill of him. It was Stanley, and not the Rector, indeed, who said of the famous Oratorian that the whole course of English religious history might have been different if Newman had known German. But Pattison might have said it, and if he had it would have been without the smallest bitterness as the mere expression of a sober and indisputable truth. Alas!--merely to quote it, nowadays, carries one back to a Germany before the Flood--a Germany of small States, a land of scholars and thinkers; a Germany that would surely have recoiled in horror from any prevision of that deep and hideous abyss which her descendants, maddened by wealth and success, were one day to dig between themselves and the rest of Europe.

One of my clearest memories connected with the Pattisons and Lincoln is that of meeting George Eliot and Mr. Lewes there, in the spring of 1870, when I was eighteen. It was at one of the Sunday suppers. George Eliot sat at the Rector's right hand. I was opposite her; on my left was George Henry Lewes, to whom I took a prompt and active dislike. He and Mrs. Pattison kept up a lively conversation in which Mr. Bywater, on the other side of the table, played full part. George Eliot talked very little, and I not at all. The Rector was shy or tired, and George Eliot was in truth entirely occupied in watching or listening to Mrs. Lewes. I was disappointed that she was so silent, and perhaps her quick eye may have divined it, for, after supper, as we were going up the interesting old staircase, made in the thickness of the wall, which led direct from the dining-room to the drawing-room above, she said to me: "The Rector tells me that you have been reading a good deal about Spain. Would you care to hear something of our Spanish journey?"--the journey which had preceded the appearance of The Spanish Gypsy, then newly published. My reply is easily imagined. The rest of the party passed through the dimly lit drawing-room to talk and smoke in the gallery beyond, George Eliot sat down in the darkness, and I beside her. Then she talked for about twenty minutes, with perfect ease and finish, without misplacing a word or dropping a sentence, and I realized at last that I was in the presence of a great writer. Not a great talker. It is clear that George Eliot never was that. Impossible for her to "talk" her books, or evolve her books from conversation, like Madame de StaËl. She was too self-conscious, too desperately reflective, too rich in second-thoughts for that. But in tÊte-À-tÊte, and with time to choose her words, she could--in monologue, with just enough stimulus from a companion to keep it going--produce on a listener exactly the impression of some of her best work. As the low, clear voice flowed on in Mrs. Pattison's drawing-room, I saw Saragossa, Granada, the Escorial, and that survival of the old Europe in the new, which one must go to Spain to find. Not that the description was particularly vivid--in talking of famous places John Richard Green could make words tell and paint with far greater success; but it was singularly complete and accomplished. When it was done the effect was there--the effect she had meant to produce. I shut my eyes, and it all comes back--the darkened room, the long, pallid face, set in black lace, the evident wish to be kind to a young girl.

Two more impressions of her let me record. The following day, the Pattisons took their guests to see the "eights" races from Christ Church meadow. A young Fellow of Merton, Mandell Creighton, afterward the beloved and famous Bishop of London, was among those entertaining her on the barge, and on the way home he took her and Mr. Lewes through Merton garden. I was of the party, and I remember what a carnival of early summer it was in that enchanting place. The chestnuts were all out, one splendor from top to toe; the laburnums; the lilacs; the hawthorns, red and white; the new-mown grass spreading its smooth and silky carpet round the college walls; a May sky overhead, and through the trees glimpses of towers and spires, silver gray, in the sparkling summer air--the picture was one of those that Oxford throws before the spectator at every turn, like the careless beauty that knows she has only to show herself, to move, to breathe, to give delight. George Eliot stood on the grass, in the bright sun, looking at the flower-laden chestnuts, at the distant glimpses on all sides, of the surrounding city, saying little--that she left to Mr. Lewes!--but drinking it in, storing it in that rich, absorbent mind of hers. And afterward when Mr. Lewes, Mr. Creighton, she, and I walked back to Lincoln, I remember another little incident throwing light on the ever-ready instinct of the novelist. As we turned into the quadrangle of Lincoln--suddenly, at one of the upper windows of the Rector's lodgings, which occupied the far right-hand corner of the quad, there appeared the head and shoulders of Mrs. Pattison, as she looked out and beckoned, smiling, to Mrs. Lewes. It was a brilliant apparition, as though a French portrait by Greuze or Perronneau had suddenly slipped into a vacant space in the old college wall. The pale, pretty head, blond-cendrÉe; the delicate, smiling features and white throat; a touch of black, a touch of blue; a white dress; a general eighteenth-century impression as though of powder and patches--Mrs. Lewes perceived it in a flash, and I saw her run eagerly to Mr. Lewes and draw his attention to the window and its occupant. She took his arm, while she looked and waved. If she had lived longer, some day, and somewhere in her books, that vision at the window and that flower-laden garden would have reappeared. I seemed to see her consciously and deliberately committing them both to memory.