Part 9

The mention of "Vincent's" reminds me of the Union, to which also I belonged, though I was a sparing and infrequent participator in its debates. I disliked debating for debating's sake; and, though I have always loved speaking on Religion or Politics or any other subject in which the spoken word might influence practice, it has always seemed to me a waste of effort to argue for abstract propositions. If by speaking I can lead a man to give a vote on the right side, or a boy to be more dutiful to his mother, or a sin-burdened youth to "open his grief," I am ready to speak all night; but the debates of the Oxford Union on the Falck Laws and the Imperial Titles Bill always left me cold.

The General Election of 1874 occurred during my second year at Oxford. The City of Oxford was contested by Harcourt, Cardwell, and the local brewer. Harcourt and Cardwell were returned; but immediately afterwards Cardwell was raised to the peerage, and a bye-election ensued. I can vividly recall the gratification which I felt when the Liberal candidate--J. D. Lewis--warmly pressed my hand, and, looking at my rosette, hoped that he might count on my vote and interest. Not for the world would I have revealed the damning fact that I was a voteless undergraduate.

In connexion with the Election of 1874, my tutor--C. A. Fyffe--told me a curious story. He was canvassing the Borough of Woodstock on behalf of George Brodrick, then an academic Liberal of the deepest dye. Woodstock was what was called an "Agricultural Borough"--practically a division of the County--and in an outlying district, in a solitary cottage, the canvassers found an old man whom his neighbours reported to be a Radical. He did not disclaim the title, but no inducements could induce him to go to the poll. Gradually, under persistent cross-examination, he revealed his mind. He was old enough to remember the days before the Reform Bill of 1832. His father had been an ardent reformer. Everyone believed that, if only the Bill were passed, hunger and poverty and misery would be abolished, and the poor would come by their own. He said--and this was the curious point--that firearms were stored in his father's cottage, to be used in a popular rising if the Bill were rejected by the Lords. Well, the Lords had submitted, and the Bill had been passed; and we had got our reform--and no one was any better off. The poor were still poor, and there was misery and oppression, and the great people had it all their own way. He had got his roof over his head, and "a bit of meat in his pot," and it was no good hoping for anything more, and he was never going to take any part in politics again. It was a notable echo from the voices which, in 1832, had proclaimed the arrival of the Millennium.

Oxford in those days was full of Celebrities. Whenever one's friends came "up" to pay one a visit, one was pretty certain to be able, in a casual stroll up the High or round Magdalen Walks or Christ Church Meadows, to point out someone of whom they had heard before. I have already spoken of Liddell and Pusey and Liddon and Acland and Burgon and Henry Smith. Chief perhaps among our celebrities was Ruskin, who had lately been made Slade Professor of Fine Art, and whose Inaugural Lecture was incessantly on the lips of such undergraduates as cared for glorious declamation.

"There is a destiny now possible to us--the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey. We have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must either now finally betray, or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with splendid avarice, so that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour, should be the most offending souls alive.... Will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts; faithful guardian of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and, amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour, of goodwill towards men? Vexilla regis prodeunt. Yes, but of which King? There are two oriflammes; which shall we plant on the farthest islands--the one that floats in heavenly fire, or that hangs heavy with foul tissue of terrestrial gold?"

Ruskin's lectures, ostensibly devoted to the Fine Arts, ranged over every topic in earth and heaven, and were attended by the largest, most representative, and most responsive audiences which had ever been gathered in Oxford since Matthew Arnold delivered his Farewell Lecture on "Culture and its Enemies."

Another of our Professors--J. E. Thorold Rogers--though perhaps scarcely a celebrity, was well known outside Oxford, partly because he was the first person to relinquish the clerical character under the Act of 1870, partly because of his really learned labours in history and economics, and partly because of his Rabelaisian humour. He was fond of writing sarcastic epigrams, and of reciting them to his friends, and this habit produced a characteristic retort from Jowett. Rogers had only an imperfect sympathy with the historians of the new school, and thus derided the mutual admiration of Green and Freeman--

"Where, ladling butter from a large tureen, See blustering Freeman butter blundering Green."

To which Jowett replied, in his quavering treble, "That's a false antithesis, Rogers. It's quite possible to bluster and blunder, too!"

The mention of Oxford historians reminds me of my friend Professor Dingo, to whom reference has been made in an earlier chapter. He had a strong admiration for the virile and masterful character of Henry VIII., and was wont to conceal the blots on his hero's career by this pathetic paraphrase--"The later years of this excellent monarch's reign were clouded by much domestic unhappiness."

Jowett has been mentioned more than once, and there is no need for me to describe him. Lord Beaconsfield, in Endymion, gave a snapshot of "a certain Dr. Comeley, an Oxford Don of the new school, who were initiating Lord Montfort in all the mysteries of Neology. This celebrated divine, who, in a sweet silky voice, quoted Socrates instead of St. Paul, was opposed to all symbols and formulas as essentially unphilosophical." Mr. Mallock, in the New Republic, supplied us with a more finished portrait of "Dr. Jenkinson," and parodied his style of preaching with a perfection which irritated the Master of Balliol out of his habitual calm. My own intercourse with Jowett was not intimate, but I once dined with him on an occasion which made an equally deep impression on two of the guests--Lord Milner and myself. When the ladies had left the dining-room, an eminent diplomatist began an extremely full-flavoured conversation, which would have been unpleasant anywhere, and, in the presence of the diplomatist's son, a lad of sixteen, was disgusting. For a few minutes the Master endured it, though with visible annoyance; and then, suddenly addressing the offender at the other end of the table, said, in a birdlike chirp, "Sir ----." "Yes, Master." "Shall we continue this conversation in the drawing-room?" No rebuke was ever more neatly administered.

Jowett's name reminds me, rather obliquely, of the Rev. H. O. Coxe, who in my time was Bodleian Librarian. He was clergyman, sportsman, scholar, all in one, with an infectious enthusiasm for the treasures in his charge, and the most unfailing kindness and patience in exhibiting them. "Those who have enjoyed the real privilege of hearing Mr. Coxe discuss points of historical detail, or have been introduced by him to some of the rarer treasures of the Bodleian, will bear witness to the living interest which such subjects acquired in his hands. How he would kindle while he recited Lord Clarendon's written resignation of the Chancellorship of the University! With what dramatic zest he read out the scraps of paper (carefully preserved by Clarendon) which used to pass between himself and his Royal Master across the Council-table!"

I quote this life-like description from Burgon's Twelve Good Men, and Burgon it is who supplies the link with Jowett. "It was shortly after the publication of Essays and Reviews that Jowett, meeting Coxe, enquired:--"Have you read my essay?" "No, my dear Jowett. We are good friends now; but I know that, if I were to read that essay, I should have to cut you. So I haven't read it, and I don't mean to.""--A commendable way of escape from theological controversy.

It is scarcely fair to reckon Cardinal Manning among Oxford celebrities; but during my undergraduateship he made two incursions into the University, which were attended by some quaint consequences. In 1873 he was a guest at the banquet held in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Union; and it was noted with amusement that, though he was not then a Cardinal, but merely a schismatic Archbishop, he contrived to take precedence of the Bishop of Oxford in his own cathedral city. Bishop Wilberforce had died three months before, and I remember that all the old stagers said:--"If Sam had still been Bishop of Oxford, this would not have happened." The Roman Catholics of Oxford were of course delighted; and when, soon afterwards, Manning returned as Cardinal to open the Roman Catholic Church in St. Giles's, great efforts were made to bring all undergraduates who showed any Rome-ward proclivities within the sphere of his influence. To one rather bumptious youth he said:--"And what are you going to do with your life?" "I'm thinking of taking Orders." "Take care you get them, my friend." Another, quite unmoved by the pectoral cross and crimson soutane, asked artlessly, "What was your college?" The Cardinal replied, with some dignity, "I was at Balliol, and subsequently at Merton." "Oh! that was like me. I was at Exeter, and I was sent down to a Hall for not getting through Smalls." "I was a Fellow of Merton." No powers of type can do justice to the intonation.

At the time of which I speak Oxford was particularly rich in delightful and accomplished ladies. I have already paid my tribute to Mrs. Cradock, Mrs. Liddell, Mrs. Acland, Mrs. Talbot, and Miss Eleanor Smith. Miss Felicia Skene was at once a devoted servant of the poor and the outcast, and also one of the most powerful writers of her time, although she contrived almost entirely to escape observation. Let anyone who thinks that I rate her powers too highly read "The Divine Master," "La Roquette--1871," and "Hidden Depths."

No account of the famous women at Oxford would be complete without a reference to Miss Marion Hughes--the first Sister of Mercy in the Church of England--professed on Trinity Sunday, 1841, and still the Foundress-Mother of the Convent of the Holy and Undivided Trinity at Oxford.

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I said at the beginning of this chapter that my Oxford life was divided sharply into two halves. Neither the climate nor the way of living ever suited my health. In my first term I fell into the doctor's hands, and never escaped from them so long as I was an undergraduate. I well remember the decisive counsel of the first doctor whom I consulted (not Dr. Acland). "What wine do you drink?" "None--only beer." "Oh! that's all nonsense. You never will be able to live in this climate unless you drink port, and plenty of it."

To this generous prescription I dutifully submitted, but even port was powerless to keep me well at Oxford. I always felt "seedy"; and the nervous worry inseparable from a time of spiritual storm and stress (for four of my most intimate friends seceded to Rome) told upon me more than I knew. An accidental chill brought things to a climax, and during the Christmas vacation of 1874 I was laid low by a sharp attack of myelitis, mistaken at the time for rheumatic fever. I heard the last stroke of midnight, December 31, in a paroxysm of pain which, for years after, I never could recall without feeling sick. I lost two terms through illness, and the doctors were against my returning to the damps of Oxford. However, I managed to hobble back on two sticks, maimed for life, and with all dreams of academical distinction at an end. But what was more important was that my whole scheme of life was dissipated. Henceforward it was with me, as with Robert Elsmere after his malaria at Cannes--"It was clear to himself and everybody else that he must do what he could, and not what he would, in the Christian vineyard." The words have always made me smile; but the reality was no smiling matter. The remainder of my life at Oxford was of necessity lived at half-speed; and in this place I must commemorate, with a gratitude which the lapse of years has never chilled, the extraordinary kindness and tenderness with which my undergraduate friends tended and nursed me in that time of crippledom. Prince Leopold, then an undergraduate of Christ Church, and living at Wykeham House in The Parks, used to lend me his pony-carriage, which, as it strictly belonged to the Queen, and bore her crown and cypher, did not pay toll; and, with an undergraduate friend at my side, I used to snatch a fearful joy from driving at full tilt through turnpike gates, and mystifying the toll-keeper by saying that the Queen's carriages paid no toll. For the short remainder of my time at Oxford I was cut off from riding and all active exercise, and was not able even to go out in bad weather. It was with me as with Captain Harville in Persuasion--"His lameness prevented him from taking much exercise; but a mind of usefulness and ingenuity seemed to furnish him with constant employment within."

* * * * *

Here I must close my recollections of Oxford, and, as I look back upon those four years--1872-1876--I find my thoughts best expressed by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who has done for Oxford in his Alma Mater just what Matthew Arnold did in the preface to Essays in Criticism....

"Know you her secret none can utter? Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown? Still on the spire the pigeons flutter; Still by the gateway flits the gown; Still on the street, from corbel and gutter, Faces of stone look down.

* * * * *

Still on her spire the pigeons hover; Still by her gateway haunts the gown; Ah, but her secret? You, young lover, Drumming her old ones forth from town, Know you the secret none discover? Tell it--when you go down."

Know you the secret none discover--none, that is, while they still are undergraduates?

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

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

"Tell it--when you go down."