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--
Planius et melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit!
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 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
[Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH COLLEGE--TOM QUADRANGLE
The front of the picture is occupied by part of the basin of the
fountain, from the centre of which rises a pedestal bearing a
figure in bronze of “Mercury” (restored). In reality the figure no
longer shows above the water-lilies in the basin, but engravings of
views of the Quadrangle in the eighteenth century, in which a
figure of Mercury appears, are still to be seen, and the fountain
was once called “The Mercury.”
The entrance gateway to the College and a portion of Tom Tower
appear in the background.
]
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:--
The wealth of youth, we spent it well
And decently, as very few can.
And is it lost? I cannot tell,
And what is more, I doubt if you can....
They say that in the unchanging place,
Where all we loved is always dear,
We meet our morning face to face,
And find at last our twentieth year....
They say (and I am glad they say)
It is so; and it may be so:
It may be just the other way;
I cannot tell. But this I know:
From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.
* * * * *
But something dwindles, oh! my peers,
And something cheats the heart and passes,
And Tom that meant to shake the years
Has come to merely rattling glasses.
And He, the Father of the Flock,
Is keeping Burmesans in order,
An exile on a lonely rock,
That overlooks the Chinese border.
And one (myself I mean--no less),
Ah! will Posterity believe it--
Not only don’t deserve success,
But hasn’t managed to achieve it.
Not even this peculiar town
Has ever fixed a friendship firmer,
But--one is married, one’s gone down,
And one’s a Don, and one’s in Burmah.
* * * * *
And oh! the days, the days, the days,
When all the four were off together;
The infinite deep of summer haze,
The roaring boast of autumn weather!
* * * * *
I will not try the reach again,
I will not set my sail alone,
To moor a boat bereft of men
At Yarnton’s tiny docks of stone.
But I will sit beside the fire,
And put my hands before my eyes,
And trace, to fill my heart’s desire,
The last of all our Odysseys.
The quiet evening kept the tryst:
Beneath an open sky we rode,
And mingled with a wandering mist
Along the perfect Evenlode....
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
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 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--
The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours
Thither all their bounties bring.
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 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
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.
The eager hours and unreluctant years
As on a dawn-illumined mountain stood,
Trampling to silence their loud hopes and fears,
Darkening each other with their multitude,
And cried aloud, Liberty!
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 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 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
[Illustration: HOLYWELL CHURCH
Holywell is the Campo Santo of Oxford, and many names famous in her
history are found there.
The almost ruined cottage and desolate garden make a suitable
foreground.
The view is from the north-west.
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 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--
They on us were rolled
But kept us not awake.
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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--
Strict age and sour Severity,
With their grave saws, in slumber lie.
We that are of purer fire
Imitate the starry quire.
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
[Illustration: THE BATHING SHEDS, OR “PARSONS’ PLEASURE”
These sheds are built on the banks of the river Cherwell, the willow
trees lining the stream being fitted with platforms at all heights for
plunging.
A figure to the right is taking advantage of one of these stations;
others are dressing or preparing to bathe.
The time is near sunset in summer.]
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.
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 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).
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 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
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 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:--
The kings come riding back from the Crusade,
The purple kings, and all their mounted men;
They fill the street with clamorous cavalcade;
The kings have broken down the Saracen.
Singing a great song of the Eastern wars,
In crimson ships across the sea they came,
With crimson sails and diamonded dark oars,
That made the Mediterranean flash with flame.
And reading how, in that far month, the ranks
Formed on the edge of the desert, armoured all,
I wish to God that I had been with them
When the first Norman leapt upon the wall,
And Godfrey led the foremost of the Franks,
And young Lord Raymond stormed Jerusalem.
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 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
Because perhaps among the crowd
I shall find some to whom I may relate
That story of the children and the meat--
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 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 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--
Is this the region, this the soil, the clime?...
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. 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--
Clear as the sky, withouten blame or blot.
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 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.
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 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
Sunt multi fratres sed in illis rarus amicus--
he hastened to the city. The spires gave him courage again, and he ran,
singing an old song:--
When that I was a scholar bold,
And in my head was wealth untold:
Heigh! Ho! in the days of old
In Oxford town a scholar trolled.
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,
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE HALL, MAGDALEN COLLEGE
At the east end of the Hall, facing the spectator, is the daïs and
high table, lighted from the north by an oriel window looking into
the Cloister Court (see picture of Cloisters).
Portraits of College dignitaries adorn the walls above the dado.
The long tables and seats in the foreground are used by the
undergraduates.
]
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 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--
O fortunati quorum jam mœnia surgunt!--
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.
[Illustration: A “STUDY” IN THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY
The window in the “study” looks south into the Fellows’ Garden of
Exeter College. To the right, outside the picture, is the main
aisle of the Library, shown in another drawing, and to the extreme
left is a glimpse of the cross aisle leading to the staircase
entrance to the Library, the columns supporting the galleries, and
the ancient timbered roof.
Beneath the coloured bust of Sir Thomas Sackville, and on the
screen forming one side of the “study,” are placed rare portraits
of distinguished persons, and “drawings” by old masters, etc.
In the showcase fixed over the specimen-drawers are books, relics,
autographs, etc., and objects of great value and antiquity.
]
THE PAST
I
Whilome ther was dwellynge at Oxenford
A riche gnof, that gestės heeld to bord,
And of his craft he was a carpenter.
With hym ther was dwellynge a poure scoler,
Hadde lernėd art, but al his fantasye
Was turnėd for to lern astrologye,
And koude a certeyn of conclusions,
To demen by interrogaciouns,
If that men sholde have droghte or ellės shoures.
Or if men askėd him what sholde bifalle
Of everythyng, I may nat rekene hem alle.
This clerk was clepėd hendė Nicholas.
Of deernė love he koude, and of solas,
And ther-to he was sleigh and full privee,
And lyk a mayden mekė for to see.
A chambrė hadde he in that hostelrye
Allone withouten any compaignye,
And fetisly y-dight, with herbės swoote,
And he himself as sweete as is the roote
Of lycorys, or any cetėwale.
His Almageste, and bookės grete and small,
His astrelabie, longynge for his art,
His augrym stonės, layen faire apart,
On shelvės couchėd at his beddės heed.
His presse y-covered with a faldyng reed,
And all above there lay a gay sautrie,
On which he made a-nyghtės melodie
So swetėly, that al the chambrė rong,
And _Angelas ad Virginem_, he song;
And after that he song the “Kyngės noote”;
Ful often blessėd was his myrie throte,
And thus this sweetė clerk his tymė spente
After his freendės fyndyng and his rente.
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 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,
After the scole of Oxenfordė tho;
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 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 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 rise about nine, get to Breakfast by ten,
Blow a Tune on my Flute, or perhaps make a Pen;
Read a Play till eleven, or cock my lac’d Hat;
Then step to my Neighbour’s, till Dinner to chat.
Dinner over, to _Tom’s_ or to _James’s_ I go,
The News of the Town so impatient to know:
While _Law_, _Locke_ and _Newton_, and all the rum Race
That talk of their Modes, their Ellipses, and Space,
The Seat of the Soul, and new Systems on high,
In Holes, as abstruse as their Mysteries lye.
From the Coffee-house then I to Tennis away,
And at five I post back to my College to pray:
I sup before eight, and secure from all Duns,
Undauntedly march to the _Mitre_, or _Tuns_;
Where in Punch or good Claret my Sorrows I drown,
And toss off a Bowl to the best in the Town:
At one in the Morning, I call what’s to pay,
Then Home to my College I stagger away.
Thus I tope all the Night, as I trifle all Day.
From the _Oxford Sausage_.
V
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 acquaintance. 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 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.”
COLLEGE SERVANTS OF THE PRESENT AND THE PAST