COLLEGE SERVANTS OF THE PRESENT AND THE PAST
THE PRESENT
The fact that no porter or other college servant has recently received a
D.C.L. is no proof of his insignificance. “The President and your humble
servant manage very well between us,” said one porter, with perfect
truth. College servants are the corbels and gargoyles that complete the
picturesqueness and usefulness of Oxford. The oldest are not so much
serviceable as quaint, often grotesque, reminders of an age that has
gone; their faces are apt to express grim judgments upon the changes
which they have helplessly watched; and they are among the stoutest
retainers of the past. The younger are either very much like any other
good men-servants, silent, receptive, curious but uninquiring,
expensive, and better able to instruct than to learn; or they are
average men, with Oxford variations. In spite of their profound
knowledge of the richer classes, they remain, as a body, good
conservatives, with the half-sarcastic, half-reverent servility of their
order. They do not often change; the men whom they serve are replaced
every year by others; and looking on at generation after generation,
they are not only skilled and practical psychologists, and almost the
only persons in Oxford who wear silk hats on Sunday, but perhaps the
most enduring human element in the University. “Well,” says an
eighteenth-century “scout” to another to-day, in an undergraduate
“dialogue of the dead”--“Well, I suppose gentlemen are no worse and
servants no better than in my time?” “Such a thing is impossible” was
the reply. Yet one may surmise that they are more plutocratic, at least,
than they were, if it be true that every summer at a Scottish hotel one
may find “Mr. and Mrs. Brown of---- College, Oxford” on the pages of
the visitors’ book, in a handwriting known to the buttery. In the game
which they play with the undergraduates, they know all their opponents’
cards. Yet, until a member of the University is admitted to the cellar
and pantry parliament, they will always be praised as reticent and
discreet. A little inexperience will soon reveal, as the freshman knows,
the other qualities of the college servant.
I
He awakens you every morning by playing with your bath, and is a
perpetually recurring background to the sweet disquiet of your last
half-hour in bed. In serving you, he serves himself; and late in the day
he is to be seen with a wallet on his back, bent under such “learning’s
crumbs” as half-empty wine-bottles and jars of Cooper’s marmalade. In
these matters he has a neat running hand, without flourishes. No man has
the air of being so much as he the right hand of fate. When he drinks
your wine and disappoints a joyous company, when he assumes your best
cigars, and leaves only those which were provided for the freshman of
taste--so inevitable are his ways that you can only hope sarcastically
that he liked the fare. He appears to have a noble scorn of cash, when
he asks for it; and you are bound to imitate. All the wisdom of the wise
is cheap compared with his manner of beginning a speech with, “If you
please, sir, it is usual for freshmen to, ...” while he is dusting your
photographs. He is blessed with an incapacity to blush. His politics are
those of the majority; his religion has something in common with that of
all men. He could be conscientiously recommended for a post in a temple
niche or a street corner, with the inscription “For twenty years a mate
at sea, and blinded in the pursuit of my duties,” or “Crippled in
childhood.” He is equalled only by his “boy,” who is perhaps older than
himself. I remember one such. I should like to have known his tailor,
who must have had a genius for style, for fitting aptest clothes for
men. His coat was as many-pocketed as Panurge’s, and as wonderful. Its
bulges and creases were an epitome of----; its “hang” might serve as the
one true epitaph, if suspended over his tomb. With all his faults, he
had that toleration which the vicious often extend to the good, but do
not often receive in return. He was a fellow of infinite wiles that were
wasted but not thrown away in a world of three or four quadrangles and a
buttery. Full of traditions, he was their master, not their prey; and
though he was the shadow of great names, he seemed conscious of being
their inheritor too. For he had served men who had got fellowships and
even Rugby or rowing Blues. With leading cases out of this mighty past
he defended his misdemeanours and supported his proposals. In vain he
toiled after time; he was always a generation behind. If a man failed in
“Smalls” or Divinity, he was told that Mr.----, the “Varsity
three-quarter,” did no less, and Mr.----, who rowed at Henley and was
sent down after a bonfire, was ploughed four times. “Lightly like a
flower” he wore his honours, tyrannising over men who never got Blues
and were never sent down, and smiling away awe and ridicule alike. “I
never saw nor shall see such men as Pirithous, ...” he might have said;
it mattered little to him; and even Pirithous was only respected after
many years, when he had become an investment of the “boy’s.” He quoted
wise saws, was full of advice, offered with a kind of humility and yet
indifference, because you were so small a factor in his
self-satisfaction.
High on your summit, Wisdom’s mimick’d Air
Sits thron’d, with Pedantry her solemn sire.
In every glance and motion you display,
Sage Ignorance her gloom scholastic throws
And stamps o’er all your visage, once so gay,
Unmeaning Gravity’s serene repose.
And so he goes through life, with all the pomp of learning--of the
reality, none--complacent, imposing, and yet hardly a man.
II
Of the college cook it is easy to say too much. He is a potentate
against whom there is no appeal on earth. “Much knavery,” says Ben
Jonson, “may be vented in a pudding.” In the days of the _Shotover
Papers_ he could offer in exchange for a recipe “an introduction to some
country families.” At the monastic door of his kitchen, as he meditates
his mysteries, something of the Middle Ages clings to him yet, and he is
half an abbot, contemptuous of a generation that makes small demand upon
his subtlety and wealth. It is said that he comes of brilliant ancestry
and has fallen. What heights there may be in the world from which a man
could be said to fall in becoming a college cook, I do not know. For
years he made clear the distinction between fancy and imagination. By
fancy he lived, and on his fancies generations fed. He could disguise
the meanest materials, and make them illustrious, subtle, or exquisitely
sweet. He was _animal propter convivia natum_. In his grey kitchen, with
chestnut beams aloft, a visitor seemed to assist at the inauguration of
a perpetual spring. On the one hand was the earth--the raw material--the
mere flesh or fish; and out of this, with upturned sleeves, like artist
or conjuror, he made the flowers flourish and the leaves abound. By the
perfume, it was a mysterious indoor Mayday. And so he lived, and was
feared and respected. But it was admitted that he had rivals. Something
in a grander style was yet to be done....
It was mid-February. Wherever I looked, I saw first the cold white sky
above and the snow beneath, and secondly the red faces of skaters out of
doors, and indoors the blaze of great fires and the purple and gold of
wine. Winter was to be met in every street--white-haired, it is true,
but nevertheless a lusty, red-faced fellow, redder than autumn, with a
grip of the hands and a roaring voice. As I passed the kitchen, the cook
was silently at work. His hair was like the snow, his face like the
fire. The brass, steel, pewter, and silver shone. The kitchen, with its
fragrance, lustre, and quietness, was like an altar. There, too, was the
priest, with stainless vestment and sacerdotal bearing. And as I left
him and mounted the stairs, I seemed unblest. I found Scott tedious,
Pater excessive, and Sir Thomas Browne a trifler, and threw them aside.
Soon there was a knock at the door, and a man--a throne, domination,
princedom, virtue, power--swept magnificently in. A light and a warmth,
beyond the power of fire to bestow, accompanied him. He bent down
solemnly and laid a little white covered plate upon the hearth. Before I
could speak--“the gods themselves are hard to recognise”--he was gone. I
uncovered the plate with something of my visitant’s solemnity--
Fair spirit of ethereal birth,
In whom such mysteries and beauties blend!
Still from thine ancient dwelling-place descend,
And idealise our too material earth;
Still to the Bard thy chaste conceptions lend,
To him thine early purity renew;
Round every image, grace majestic throw;
Till rapturously the living song shall glow
With inspiration as thy being true,
And Poesy’s creations, decked by thee,
Shall wake the tuneful thrill of sensuous ecstasy.
It was the climacteric of his career, and he shall go down to posterity
upon the palates of men, not as one who worked out his recipes to three
places of decimals, or as a distinguished maker of “bishop” or “posset,”
or as one worth his weight in oysters, but as the creator of that
necessary which is in fact brown bread, toasted and buttered.
III
Most pontifical of all college servants was old Acamas, who was not long
ago to be seen, in his retirement, apparently beating the city bounds,
and now and then standing sentry and defender of some old gate or
archway. I first noticed him in the chapel quadrangle of----, and could
almost have mistaken him for a fellow of the old school, such was his
aspect, and the reverent, half-wondering air with which he surveyed the
buildings. But he took off his hat to the junior fellow, and I was
undeceived. There was something pathetic in that salute. He was himself
apparently far worthier than the young man in flannels of the chapel and
the ancient arms; and he seemed to know it, as he bent and trembled over
his stick to declaim:--
“He may be a very clever young gentleman, but, bless me, it is not the
Greek that makes the scholar. There was the old President, who never
looked at his book, and was all for horses;--but he had a way with him;
he would swear just so, so; he was a scholar, if ever a man was. But the
new ones are just all book or all play. They came in about the same time
as bicycles and steam ploughs and such nonsense. And there’s too much
lady about the college now; and such ladies! they are so dressed that it
is hard to tell which of them is quite respectable....”
And so he went on, a little less reverent than he looked. But it was
only a crimson heat of old age, and soon passed.
What a fine, decent figure he was. He was clothed in a dull black suit,
with black tie, and an old-shaped hat, and wore his gloves. He had
unquestionably a professional mien, and could not have been a gardener
or groom. He was something old, settled in the land and known to the
stars, traditional. His sorrow was nothing less dignified than
disestablishment. It was time to be going. The enemy was in possession
and insulting. He had been in the Balliol fellows’ garden ages ago, and
knew what a line the old buildings made against the sky, and what the
scene is now. He would walk about, hoping to express a volley of scorn
by his silence to persons with no ear for silence. He never went into
Tom quad at Christ Church without missing the figure of Mercury--perhaps
a copy from John of Bologna, and taken down early last century--which
used to preside over the fountain, still known as
[Illustration: THE TOM QUADRANGLE, CHRIST CHURCH, FROM THE SOUTH
ENTRANCE
This Quadrangle was formerly cloistered. The springers, the wall
ribs of the vaulting, and the bases of the buttresses may be seen
on the two sides of the Quadrangle shown in the picture.
The Great Hall and tower founded by Cardinal Wolsey are on the
right or southern side, whilst opposite, over the eastern
buildings, rise the tower and spire of “The Cathedral Church of
Christ in Oxford.”
Part of the basin of the fountain is seen on the left.
The time is late afternoon in summer.
]
“Mercury,” and used as a water ordeal or court of ultimate appeal by
undergraduates. “That old pagan fellow,” he used to say, “told you more
about the size of that quadrangle than the guide-books do”; and
certainly nothing short of that or a playing fountain would so
pleasantly expound the spaciousness of Wolsey’s square. When some one
proposed burning in effigy certain officials at the time of Edward
VII.’s coronation, he “did not remember that such things were done at
George’s.”
He stopped to look at the new buildings of the college, and pointing at
the whitened stone, said, “I don’t believe that stone is stone at all.”
As he passed an entry, full of bicycles, he said sadly, without a
thought of scorn, “It was built by public subscription,” and with his
hand in his pocket, he seemed to be thinking that the finest thing in
the world was to be the sole founder of a college. He once had a distant
prospect of the Banbury Road, and would like to make night beautiful
with its burning.
He still leaves Oxford by coach, or not at all. I believe that he calls
Market Street “Cheyney Lane,” and Brasenose Lane “St. Mildred’s,” and
Pembroke Street “Pennyfarthing Street.” To hear him talk of St.
Scholastica’s day gives one a pretty notion of the antiquity of Oxford
and himself. In 1354, on that day, several scholars found fault with the
wine of a city vintner, and threw it at his prosperous face. The vintner
gathered his neighbours and threatened. St. Martin’s bell was rung, and
the city made fierce preparations at the accustomed summons. Then St.
Mary’s bell was rung, and the University came forth with bows and arrows
and slings. “Slay,” and “Havock,” and “Give good knocks,” cried the
citizens. The fight was long and bloody, and disastrous to the scholars.
So for many centuries the city had to appear penitentially at St. Mary’s
on St. Scholastica’s day. In 1825 this institution ceased at the
corporation’s request. But Acamas will never forgive them, and hardly
the University for giving way. “When laudable old customs dwindle, ’tis
a sign learning dwindles,” he would say, as Hearne said, when there were
no longer any fritters at dinner. Nor is he to be moved by the mundane
glories of his college in the schools or elsewhere. A brilliant
“examinee” of the college, and his particular aversion, having gained a
First in Law, when it was pointed out to him by the scholar’s scout, the
old man remarked: “And now I hope he knows what a privilege it is to
belong to this college.”
How slow and decorous he was at the buttery hatch, performing even his
own business as if he were about that of another. He carried a plate as
if it were a ceremony; and his imperturbability would have completely
endowed a railway porter and several judges. In hall, when once the
needs of all the diners had been supplied, he would stand like
“Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved,” an effigy, a self-constituted symbol of
olden piety and order, bent on asserting sweet ancient things, while
fellows raced into hall, and undergraduates raced
[Illustration: CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE AND MERTON TOWER, FROM CHRIST
CHURCH MEADOWS
To the left of the picture shows a portion of the east boundary
wall of the gardens of Christ Church, shadowed by elegant silver
birch.
Part of Corpus Christi College looks over the Fellows’ Garden,
divided from Christ Church Meadows by a wall, upon which is a fence
of flowering dahlias.
The Chapel tower of Merton College rises grandly against the sunset
sky.
In the foreground a pathway fenced from the Meadows runs farther
on, under the old south city wall, passing under the Fellows’
Garden of Merton, shown in another picture.
]
out. He was one with the coats of arms emblazoned on the panels or the
glass, and the benefactors’ portraits up among the shadows of the roof
timber, and with the dial on the grass, which says, “I change and am the
same.”
He is now seldom outside the old city wall, unless he goes in May to the
river through Christ Church or between Merton and Corpus. When he sees
Tom tower he makes the melancholy revelation that he once heard Tom boom
one time less than the appointed number. As for the flowers in the
window-boxes, it is “cook’s work”; he has seen the like ornament “on
pastry.” On a bank holiday he is clothed in extraordinary dignity and
gloom, and stands with an expression that wields a mace, in the hope of
repelling the pleasure-seeker from some holy or learned retreat. If he
were not mistaken for an eminent person, it would fare ill with those
whose footsteps he dogs, lest they should commit some desecration. He
can hardly permit smoking in the quadrangles, and has to turn his back
to avoid seeing the accursed thing. At one time, a man dared not run
through the purlieus of the Divinity School, for fear of the nod of
Acamas.
He is a mirror of good manners, which he has learned out of love, and
not necessity. He has a great store of antique information--statutes,
precedents, fables--which, as in an aumbry, he keeps fragrant by much
meditation, and is pleased to display. His elaborate courtesies are
interpreted almost as insults by the new generations; men wonder what
they have done to deserve his withering respect. It is reported that on
one occasion, at twilight, a vigorous gentleman brushed past him,
between the Camera and Brasenose. Acamas turned, with a soft and bitter
protest against “a gentleman forcing what he could command.” “If,” said
he, “the Vice-Chancellor were here, he should know that a gentleman had
insulted an old college servant by mistaking him for a townsman.” ... He
bowed and almost broke his heart when he recognised the beaming face of
the Vice-Chancellor.
He is the corrector of all new abuses and the defender of old, and
through his father, a college butler and long since dead, he has the
times of Trafalgar fresh in his mind, with imposing third-hand memories
of the days when Oxford was Jacobite. The subtle distinguishing marks of
all the colleges, as far as concerns fashions of morals and manners,
scholarship and sport, he knows by heart, and professes such an
experienced acquaintance with like matters that in the High or by the
Long Bridges he knows at sight a “Greats” man or a “Stinks” man or a
mathematician; of which last he is a determined hater; and when on one
occasion he remarked on the good looks of a certain plain person, he was
forced to explain that he meant “good-looking for a mathematician.” He
would at need devise a new coat of arms for Magdalen or St. John’s, or
improve “the devil that looks over Lincoln.”
Of “his own college” he knows everything, from the cobweb on Jeremy
Taylor in the library to the oldest beam in the kitchen roof. He knows
the benefactors and their benefactions, their rank, and everything but
the way to pronounce their names; and has a kind of unofficial bidding
prayer in celebration of their good deeds. His ideal of a head of a
college is an odd mixture of Dean Gaisford and Tatham of Lincoln; for he
demands some eccentricity along with dignity and repute, and in the
course of three-quarters of a century he has combined the two. The
common-room chairs he knows better than those who sit in them--their
history and their peculiarities, and who have sat therein. By nice
observation he is aware of the correct way of crossing a quadrangle, and
of whose furniture should be consumed in bonfires. The spires and
gateways of the city are close friends to him, and “Isn’t _she_
beautiful,” or “Isn’t _he_ looking well,” or “They have their little
ways,” is his comment as he passes one or other of the things that have
brooded over his life continually. He can tell when the bats will come
out of the tower in a fine January or a windy March; when the swifts
shall scream first by All Saints’; and the colour of New College tower
when a storm is due from the west. I can think of him as being the deity
of the place, in a mythopœic age, and picture him _corniger_, with
fritillaries in his hoary locks, as the genius of Isis, up in a niche at
the Bodleian.
THE PAST
I have no doubt that the past had many such to show, and that the
present, when it has graduated into a past, will not be found wanting;
but the ways of the college servants of old are buried deep in oblivion.
They were less numerous then, when a senior and a junior student slept
in the same room, and the latter made the beds, etc. Upon scholars,
Bible-clerks, and the like, fell a great many of the duties which are
now the scout’s--as waiting at the fellows’ table in hall, and the
pleasanter although more thankless task of calling up the fellows and
more luxurious commoners in the morning. Not only was the scholar or
“servitor” a practical servant for part of his time, but the regular
servants could be students also, and we may guess from the Corpus
statutes that they must sometimes have attended lectures and have taken
degrees. A story runs that a vain scholar had sent some Latin verses to
his tutor by the hand of a servant, who quickly read and corrected them,
to the humiliation of the scholar, when he received them back, with the
comment, that his work seemed to have been revised by one who was
acquainted with the Latin tongue. No doubt a man of this stamp often
rose, or if he stayed in college made his attainments profitable. A man
who was once manciple at Wadham became a noted maker of mathematical
instruments. The manciple bought and distributed provisions in the
college: the cook or
[Illustration: THE ENTRANCE TO QUEEN’S COLLEGE FROM LOGIC LANE
The cupola and entrance gate beneath, appearing across the road at the
end of Logic Lane, form one of the most attractive objects in the High
Street.
Behind the cupola shows part of the campanile and pediment of the
buildings of the College on the north side of the Great Quadrangle. The
statue is that of Queen Caroline, consort of George II. The buildings on
the left of the picture belong to University College.]
cooks and butlers were sometimes called upon to furnish a banquet of
“nine hundred messes of meat, with twelve hundred hogsheads of beer and
four hundred and sixteen of wine,” as at Balliol, when a Chancellor of
twenty-two years of age was installed: the porter was prominent, but as
yet much subordinated to the head of the college, to whom he delivered
the keys at an early hour: the barber, who was sometimes also the
porter, was the welcome dispenser of true and false news, and at Wadham
survived until the sixties of last century, when he insisted that the
amateur actors should have their wigs dressed by him, under pain of
being betrayed to the Warden. Of the old servants--_heu prisca
fides_--we can only guess at the devotion, from the story of old Thomas
Allen’s servitor, who was overawed by his master’s mathematical
instruments and his reputation of astrologer, and would “impose on
freshmen or simple people” by telling them that spirits were often to be
met coming up Allen’s staircase “like bees.” John Earle has preserved
the ways of an old college butler, from his experience as a fellow of
Merton.
“An old College Butler is none of the worst students in the house, for
he keeps the set hours at his book more duly than any. His authority is
great over men’s good names, which he charges many times with shrewd
aspersions, which they can hardly wipe off without payment. His Box and
Counters prove him to be a man of reckoning; yet he is stricter in his
accounts than a usurer, and delivers not a farthing without writing. He
doubles the pain of _Gallobelgicus_, for his books go out once a
quarter, and they are much in the same nature, brief notes and sums of
affairs, and are out of request as soon. His comings in are like a
Tailor’s from the shreds of bread, the chippings, and remnants of the
broken crust: excepting his vails from the barrel, which poor folks buy
for their hogs, but drink themselves. He divides a halfpenny loaf with
more subtility than _Kekerman_, and subdivides the _a primo ortum_ so
nicely, that a stomach of great capacity can hardly apprehend it. He is
a very sober man, considering his manifold temptations of drink and
strangers, and if he be overseen, ’tis within his own liberties, and no
man ought to take exceptions. He is never so well pleas’d with his
place, as when a Gentleman is beholding to him for showing him the
Buttery, whom he greets with a cup of single beer and sliced manchet,
and tells him ’tis the fashion of the College. He domineers over
Freshmen when they first come to the Hatch, and puzzles them with
strange language of Cues and Cees, and some broken Latin which he has
learnt at his Bin. His faculty extraordinary is the warming of a pair of
Cards, and telling out a dozen of Counters for Post and Pair, and no man
is more methodical in these businesses. Thus he spends his age, till the
tap of it is run out, and then a fresh one is set abroach.”
THE OXFORD DAY