WALES AND OXFORD
I left Eton at Christmas, 1854, after nearly nine years’ experience of
its good and its evil. The last half spent there was not a happy one,
though I was high up (second, in fact) in sixth form, in the boats, a
member of Pop, captain of my house, and invested therefore with dignities
such as I could never hope to possess again. I had been for two years
in Dr. Goodford’s division, and during all that time I cannot call to
mind ever having received from him a friendly word, a kindly look or
a smile: and when I left and deposited his fee[24] with him, he said,
“Well! I hope you may do better elsewhere than you have done here. But I
doubt it.” Not very gracious or encouraging words with which to send a
boy forth into the battle of life. And yet I cannot have been altogether
so bad as he thought, for my leave-taking with my tutor, and with other
masters who knew me better than Goodford did, was very different.
But apart from such personal matters, the memory of that last half is a
sad one. We were at the beginning of the Crimean War, and never shall I
forget the black gloom of the day when the list of killed and wounded
at the battle of the Alma was posted up at Pote Williams’ bookshop.
We older boys came out of the shop blinded with tears ill repressed
for poor young fellows who had been in the same division with us a few
months before, and others a year or two our seniors, who had been the
demi-gods of our fourth-form days. Then came Inkerman—and how the blood
raced boiling through our veins when we read the soul-stirring story of
Balaclava—outdoing Thermopylæ. Just heaven! Why were we not there? Think
of us boys, almost men, reading of the gallant deeds of Bob Lindsay,
Gerald Goodlake, George Wombwell, and many others, men almost boys! Then
came the trenches, but of those hours the worst was yet to come.
From Eton I went to Batsford, which I saw for the first time, little
thinking of the future which it held for me; and there I spent four happy
weeks, being introduced to shooting and hunting, the latter under the
tutelage of old Jem Hills, the famous huntsman of the Heythrop, of which
Lord Redesdale, though no longer master, was still the uncrowned king.
At the end of the holidays I was to go to Mr. W. E. Jelf, near Barmouth,
to be coached for a few months before going to Oxford. At that time the
railway went no further than Shrewsbury, where I lodged at the sign
of the “Raven,” an old-fashioned country inn of great repute—such an
inn as Charles Dickens would have loved, and as he alone could have
described. As I sat at dinner I saw that there was one other guest in the
coffee-room. While the waiter was out of the room this gentleman came up
to me and said, “Sir, I beg your pardon for interrupting you, but you
can render me a great service.” I thought of Buckstone in “Lend me Five
Shillings,” and instinctively froze, but I thawed again when he went on
to say, “I am Professor Anderson, the Wizard of the North; I am going to
give an exhibition of conjuring to-night, and for two of my most telling
tricks I need an accomplice. Will you help me? I need hardly say that you
will have a free admission.”
I suppose that he thought that I was a “youth of an ingenuous countenance
and ingenuous modesty,” and should not arouse suspicion. I consented,
and he entrusted me with a marked coin and some other trifle, giving me
full instructions as to what I was to do. We adjourned after dinner; the
room was crowded and the Professor made a great success of his show. And
so it came about that my first appearance in public was as “bonnet” to
the Wizard of the North. I saw no more of my friend, for the next day I
was coaching in Pickwickian fashion on the box seat through Wales to
Dolgelly, where my tutor’s carriage met me and finally landed me at his
pretty place, Caerdeon, where he had bought himself a small estate and
built a charming house.
The Rev. William Edward Jelf was a man of no little renown in the Oxford
world. He had been senior Censor of Christ Church, a great disciplinarian
both in college as tutor, and outside as proctor. He was a very sound
scholar, and the translator of Raphael Kühner’s Greek Grammar, a
monumental work. One of his greatest friends was Scott, the master of
Balliol, to whom he was wont to assign quite the lion’s share of the
credit for the great dictionary—Liddell and Scott. As a Don, Jelf was
anything but popular—he was too uncompromising, too “stiff in opinions.”
At the same time he was justice itself, and if you obeyed the law—his
law—to the right or to the left of which there was no salvation, there
was no limit to what he would do for you. I had been warned of his
“stiffness,” and made up my mind to observe discipline, with the result
that we got on famously, and the months spent with him were, if rather
lonely, on the whole happy and very profitable, for he certainly was a
most inspiring teacher.
All my work was done in my own room; with Mr. Jelf I had but one hour
a day, but then it was such an hour! Sixty minutes not one of which
was without its value. During the months that I spent with him, from
the end of January to October, I read through the whole of Herodotus,
the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Agamemnon of Æschylus, and, above all,
as an exercise, the Medea of Euripides, looking out every reference in
my master’s great grammar. In Latin I read Pliny’s delightful letters,
was supposed to be sufficiently well up in Horace and Virgil, and was
spared the arch-bore Cicero, in regard to whom I by no means shared
the enthusiasm of Mrs. Blimber; as a matter of archæology I might
sympathize with her as to the Tusculan villa, but its owner and his
self-glorification I should have avoided.
The curriculum was chosen as the best preparation for trying to gain the
Slade Exhibition at Christ Church. When I had been a few days with Jelf
and he had taken my measure, he made up his mind that he would make me
carry that off, and of course no one knew better than he did what would
be the most profitable training.
I should like, if it be not deemed an impertinence, to say one word here
upon the much-vexed question of a classical education, and of Greek in
particular. It is very easy, very cheap, to say that Greek and Latin are
of no use in learning modern languages. I have had some experience in the
study of both, and I am distinctly of opinion that nothing has helped
me so much in the acquisition of even the most out-of-the-way modern
languages as the work which I did under Jelf, dissecting every sentence
and every particle in the Medea with the help of his Greek grammar.
No language has been so thoroughly analysed—perhaps because none has been
so philosophically constructed—as Greek. The man who starts upon the
study of modern languages, after having dissected, conscientiously and
searchingly, the work of one of the Greek giants with the help of Jelf’s
great book, has insensibly converted his mind into a sort of comparative
grammar, he has acquired the knowledge of points of difference and points
of similarity, that is to say of comparison, of which Buffon said, “nous
ne pouvons acquérir de connaissance que par la voie de la comparaison,”
and although the aid given to him is, of course, indirect, it is none the
less real. He is in the position of a man who goes to a new gymnastic
exercise with trained muscles, and therefore with marvellous ease, as
compared with the man whose muscles and sinews are flabby and slack. That
it is a discipline of the highest significance few will be found to deny.
When Darwin spent seven years in dissecting barnacles it was not simply a
knowledge of barnacle nature at which he was aiming; he was training his
mind for other purposes. Apart from the beauties which they reveal to us,
and so without any reference to the important question of culture, I am
in favour of the study of the classics, as a gymnastic exercise of the
brain, as a dissection of barnacles which yields far higher results than
could be gained by merely learning French and German without any other
preparation. In that way a man would attain what must simply be a more or
less glorified couriers’ knowledge, practical no doubt, up to a certain
degree, but unscientific and failing him at crucial points.
The best Oriental scholars whom I have known have all been men who
attacked their Eastern studies armed with the weapons furnished by a
classical education. In China Sir Harry Parkes was an admirable oral
interpreter. But he, himself, as I have said elsewhere, always regretted
his want of classical training—nor would it be possible to compare him
with that great scholar Sir Thomas Wade. In Japan Von Siebold was as
fluent a talker as could be found. He was the son of the famous physician
and naturalist, who was attached to the Dutch Mission at Deshima, and
had learnt Japanese “ambulando.” But it would be childish to name him
with such learned men as Satow, Aston and Chamberlain, men who brought
the training and literature of the West to their studies in the East.
It is not without significance to note the great respect which such men
were able to command, whereas the mere parrot, however clever, was held
in little more esteem than a head waiter. Think of Basil Chamberlain
appointed to the Chair of ancient Japanese literature in the University
of Tokio.
And our own beautiful English, the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton: will that not suffer if a false utilitarianism should succeed
in banishing the classics from our schools? Even now it is surrounded
by enemies, but I shudder to think of what it might become after
two centuries of nothing but trans-oceanic influences unchecked by
scholarship.
It was a bitterly cold winter, long spoken of as the Crimean winter,
which was ushered in by January, 1855. In Wales as elsewhere it was so
cold that many birds and beasts were frozen to death, and one day in my
tutor’s garden I caught a live woodcock in my hand. The poor creature
was at the last gasp, dying of starvation. For many scores of miles
round there was no moist cranny into which it could insert its long beak
for food. The earth was like iron. Death and misery everywhere in these
islands, and it was terrible to get the news from the Crimea, where
hundreds of our poor, starving, shivering soldiers were in little better
plight than the wild creatures at home. How they suffered! and how nobly
patient they were!
During the dark months there was not much to be done beyond taking long,
solitary walks in the midst of that glorious scenery; Diphwys behind
us, the Barmouth river and Cader Idris in all its majesty in front of
us. Barmouth itself a little tiny fishing village. It would have been
a dull time if Jelf had not clapped spurs into me and filled me with a
new-born ambition, and a certain measure of that belief in myself without
which there is no hope. And I did work! When the spring came it brought
with it an invitation to Jelf to act as examiner in the final schools at
Oxford. He was very anxious to accept this, for he loved keeping up the
connection with his old university, so he proposed to me that I should
finish up the last two or three weeks with him at Christ Church, where
his brother, the principal of King’s College, who was a Canon, had lent
him his house. My father raised no objection, and I, of course, was
delighted, for I knew that among the undergraduates I should find many
old friends. I am grateful for the memory of those days, for never again
in after years did Oxford exercise upon me the same fascination that it
possessed at that time; I was very young, and very impressionable. Indeed
in a way it seemed as if I then was under an influence which, when I came
back some months later, had died away.
At my first visit there was still an old-world atmosphere about the
place, something which had preserved a sort of elusive aroma of the
cloister and the monk. It was the Oxford of the great men who from days
immemorial had made it famous; in modern times of “that devout spirit,”
Pusey, Newman, and “the movement.” It was instinct with the music of
Keble. But to me at that particular moment it was the Oxford of Gaisford.
The great Dean died a few weeks later, Liddell became Dean, and Oxford
came under the gentle sceptre of a bevy of ladies, two of them very
beautiful, very smart, and not a bit monachal. Moreover, it soon ceased
to be a place of learning for English gentlemen of the reformed Christian
faith. In 1855 the Parthian, the Mede, the Elamite, the dweller in
Mesopotamia, had no place in the sacred cloisters. We were all called
upon to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles (“forty, if you wish it,
sir,” was the pert answer of a famous wit), and as for the various
fellowships and scholarships, they remained as they had been instituted
by the pious founders. All Souls was a link between the university and
the great world. The qualifications for a fellowship there were that
the candidate should be “bene natus, bene vestitus et modice doctus _in
arte canendi_.” It was irreverently said that those last three words
had long since been omitted. The legend ran that before the election the
candidates, duly qualified as founder’s kin, were invited to dine in
Hall: a cherry tart was served, and the supreme test upon which election
depended was the way in which the aspirant disposed of the stones.
In those happy days a fellowship of All Souls possessed the same quality
which Lord Melbourne admired so much in the Order of the Garter, “There
was no damned nonsense of merit about it.” Now, alas! all is changed. The
fellows of colleges, even of All Souls, are married and meritorious. The
Don’s wife is the ruling power and his daughters are the nymphs of Isis,
floating luxuriously in punts under the willows of the backwaters—punts
that the ruthless proctors of my day, suspiciously tolerant of sisters,
would have employed mine-sweepers to disperse. Oxford has suffered a
sea-change. All the tongues of the diaspora of Babel raise a cacophony
in the groves of the Academeia. The Mohammedan in pious prayer turns
his face to the Kibleh and curses the infidel. The Buddhist reverently
seeks Nirvana in the contemplation of his own navel. The mild Hindoo
profitably studies anarchy. The Negro becomes a Christian and takes holy
orders that he may go back to his own country, receive a revelation, and
organize a massacre of whites by Divine command. Such are the uses to
which the grand old universities of England and America are now put, and
this is what is called reform. The Oxford of Gaisford, the Cambridge of
Whewell are phantoms of the past; what were once the strong places of
Christianity are now held by the heathen, and England is no longer for
the English—no—not even the House of Commons.
Dean Gaisford was a great potentate: not only was his scholarship superb,
but he was also a ruler of men. When he nodded, Olympus trembled. When
he stood up at the altar in Christ Church and thundered out the first
Commandment, with a long pause after the “I” and a strong insistence on
the “Me,” he would look round the cathedral sternly, as much as to say,
“I should like to see the undergraduate, or the graduate either, for that
matter, who will dare to dispute that proposition.” His famous utterance
in a sermon, “St. Paul says, and I partly agree with him,” has become
a classic. But he was like the Nasmyth Hammer: he could crush a rock or
flatten out a rose-leaf. Jelf had a good story of the way in which he
once petrified a very young Don who at one of his dinners ate an apple in
a way which he did not consider to be quite orthodox.
Not unnaturally I felt no little trepidation when on presenting myself
for the _vivâ voce_ examination for the Slade Exhibition, I saw the
dreaded Dean in the Chair. To my relief the Iliad was the book chosen,
and I was put on to construe. Then came a few questions on Homeric
matters, in which Jelf, during long months, had primed me well; and as
I left the room, great was my joy to hear the terrible Dean growl out,
“That young man knows his Homer well.” Never shall I forget the welcome
which Jelf gave me when it was announced that I had won. Perhaps not a
little both of his pleasure and mine consisted in thinking how annoyed
Goodford would be, for Jelf always held that Goodford had been unfair to
me. It was something of a _schaden-freude_.
So I was matriculated by Dean Gaisford, went to Switzerland with my
father for a month, and then back to Caerdeon for a final polish at the
hands of Mr. Jelf before Oxford.
When I entered Christ Church in the following October (1855) there were
at any rate three memorable personages amongst the Dons. Dr. Pusey was
a venerable figure—venerable not on account of his age, for he was but
fifty-five, and had nearly thirty more years ahead of him, but as the
hero of many fights, the victim of fierce persecutions, the man who, had
he lived two or three centuries earlier, would have been burnt alive;
some of his opponents must have regretted the disabilities imposed by
the nineteenth century, but he himself would have faced the stake with
all the courage of an inspired martyr. As he shuffled along the great
quadrangle, by no means a stately figure, looking older, far older, than
his years, there would be few men, whatever their opinions might be as
to the religious controversy of which he was the figurehead, who would
not take off their caps out of respect for his goodness, his piety, his
heroism and his great learning. He was not only profoundly versed in
all the subtleties of the old Fathers, but at Göttingen, whither the
necessities of theological study had driven him, he plunged with heart
and soul into the dark depths of German priestcraft and anti-priestcraft,
and into the mysteries of Syriac, Hebrew and Arabic scholarship.
To me there was always a magic halo about the learning of the East, and
so, although I never had speech of the great Divine, never even had the
very real honour of being introduced to him, I looked upon him with
no little awe as one removed far above the level of ordinary men. The
other canons and professors were no doubt worthy men and learned—perhaps
even an honour to their cloth; but the famous professor of Hebrew was
Somebody. I felt, as Napoleon said of Goethe, “there is a Man.”
The senior Censor of Christ Church was Osborne Gordon, a brilliant
character whom to have known was indeed a privilege, and as I had the
good fortune to be his pupil and he was very kind to me, he has remained
one of the pleasantest memories of my university days. He was a finished
scholar, very witty, with a great appreciation of character. He would
say the drollest things with the most imperturbable gravity, being in
his way a man of the world, in spite of the cramping tendencies of the
Oxford common room. When Lord Lisburne took his son, my contemporary, to
Christ Church, he consulted Mr. Gordon as to what allowance he should
give him as a Tuft. “Well, Lord Lisburne,” answered the witty Don,
cocking his trencher cap on one side as was his wont when he was going to
say something very funny, “you can give your son any allowance you like,
but please remember that his debts will always be in proportion to his
allowance”—a most sagacious remark! On another occasion, a certain young
gentleman went to him and asked him whether he had any chance of passing
his little-go. “Well! you have one great advantage,” was the answer. “You
will go into the examination absolutely unhampered by facts.”
During the time that I was at Oxford, Charles Spurgeon was making a new
sensation as a preacher. One Sunday Osborne Gordon and two or three
Oxford Dons went up to London to hear him. The next evening my tutor
came, as he often did, to smoke a pipe in my rooms. I asked him what had
been the impression made by Spurgeon on him and his friends. They had
been struck by Spurgeon’s power, but had been greatly shocked when the
preacher, after laying down a rule of life, went on to say: “If you do
as I have told you to do, and if after that Jesus Christ should at your
death refuse you admittance to heaven, you tell Him that Charles Spurgeon
says He is a very shabby fellow!” Surely, contempt of all convention
and the familiar degradation of the most sacred Name could hardly go
further. Throw propriety to the winds, and it is an easy matter to make
a startling speech or preach an arresting sermon. To Gordon’s cultivated
and fastidious mind such levity and vulgarizing of the sublime could only
be repellent.
Osborne Gordon was afterwards, in 1860, appointed Vicar of East
Hampstead, where he was as much beloved by Lord and Lady Downshire and
his other parishioners as he had been at Oxford. Who that really knew him
could help loving him? He died in 1883. Ruskin wrote his epitaph—rather a
stilted Johnsonian attempt.
The third great treasure, unsuspected by us, that we possessed at Christ
Church, was our mathematical lecturer, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Who
could have guessed that the dry little man from whom we learnt the
sublime truth that things which are equal to one another are equal to
themselves, was hatching in that fertile brain of his such a miracle of
fancy and fun as “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”? The book came out
whilst I was in the Far East, out of the way of all literary gossip, and
I was stricken with amazement when I came home and the identity of Lewis
Carrol was revealed to me.
A good story was told about him which I have not seen in print. Queen
Victoria, it seems, was so much struck by “Alice” that she commanded Sir
Henry Ponsonby to write and compliment the author, adding that she would
be pleased to receive any other book of his. He was greatly flattered and
sent her his “Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry.”
All the tutors were good and amiable men. But there was one in memory
of whom I would fain burn my candle, though it be but a tallow-dip, and
that was St. John Tyrwhitt, a most dear and charming man, a person of
great culture, an artist in his leisure hours, the friend and disciple
of Ruskin. He would often invite me to his rooms and talk with fervent
admiration of his illustrious friend, infecting me with the first germs
of enthusiasm for his works. Always kind, always sympathetic, ready
at all times to give good advice, a trusty friend in need, without a
half-penny’s worth of donnishness about him, St. John Tyrwhitt, whatever
his scholarship may have been, as to which I know nothing, was a valuable
asset in a flock of young men. Dean Liddell, who succeeded Dean Gaisford,
was a singularly handsome man, and a great figurehead. But he was not
popular. The undergraduates resented his treatment of them as schoolboys;
he could not quite shake off the schoolmaster attitude of his Westminster
days, and this led to some deplorable follies, and worse than follies.
Rebellion was rife, the lecture room was gutted, and the furniture
destroyed; a kettle of gunpowder with a fuse attached to it was hung
upon the door of the deanery, but was fortunately discovered in time. A
subscription was got up to pay for the damage that had been done, and the
malefactors were rusticated. For the first year the condition of things
was deplorable—after that they mended. But the Dean, in spite of his
wife’s judicious help, never in my time commanded the sympathy of “the
House.”
The drawing together of the threads of memories much more than half a
century old is but dismal work. It is like walking through a cemetery
filled with tombstones all inscribed with names that in spite of time are
still familiar, and some of them very dear. This has probably been said
before—it is so evident. Of the Dons of 1855 not one remains. Baynes,
who died a few years ago, was the last. Even of my own contemporaries
few, only here and there one, are left. The bright curly heads, fair
or dark, with whose owners we lived, and laughed, and hoped and
quarrelled, have all been laid low, and if one remains above ground, it
is as bald as a billiard ball, or perhaps nourishes a few straggling
lifeless hairs, white as old age can bleach them. Few became eminent:
among them were Lord St. Aldwyn (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach), _facile
princeps_—Alfred Thesiger, raised to be a Lord Justice of Appeal, but who
did not live long to enjoy his fame—Roland Williams, also Lord Justice,
himself the son of a judge (if I only knew how to apply “matre pulchrâ
filia pulchrior” to a legal reputation!) one of the most delightful
room-neighbours—were men who made their mark in the world—outside of
Christ Church were Swinburne, and, a little older, Lord Justice Bowen,
prince of lawyers and wits—Tom Brassey at University, and above all, John
Morley at Exeter. The latter I did not know until a dozen or so years
later, when he was already a power in Letters, a man for whom, differing
with him as I always have done _toto cœlo_ in politics, I entertain the
greatest respect mingled with an affectionate gratitude for giving me my
first encouragement as a writer in 1871.
The rest of us were just mediocrities: tolerable specimens of healthy
young Englishmen ready to do our duty as landowners, soldiers, lawyers,
clergymen, civil servants; in general, fairly respectable, in some
cases woeful scamps. On one point we were most of us agreed, at any
rate in practice, and that was that it was expedient that we should go
through the University doing as little work and spending as much money
as possible. That was the way in which we interpreted our duty to our
parents. And so I spent the first two years of my life at Oxford in
forgetting with the utmost facility the small modicum of scholarship that
with the utmost difficulty I had acquired under Jelf. A piteous and a
shameful record.
We had the usual number of Tufts—some of whom achieved notoriety in
after life: Lord Coventry early made a name for himself as a great
agriculturist and model landlord, a mighty hunter before the Lord, M.F.H.
and Master of the Buckhounds, a most conscientious and hardworking Lord
Lieutenant of his county, and I suppose one of the best living judges of
horses and racing; a man who has always been idolized by his friends.
Then there was Skelmersdale, a really resplendent youth in all the first
glory of a beard which was to become the joy of Courts and the title
to an Earldom. He was as handsome as he was good and generous, the
highest type of honest Anglo-Saxon beauty, after whom the Donnesses ran,
worshipping, “en tout bien tout honneur,” as if he had been in deed, and
not in appearance only, the archangel Gabriel.
Of the undergraduates at Christ Church who were a little older than
me, none was more brilliant, socially, than John Arkwright of Hampton
Court, near Hereford; he was so gay, so full of fun, and so “good all
round,” that he was always the central figure wherever he might be. The
other day I was reading over again the copy of verses which he wrote
as a “Vale” when he left Eton; the satire, always good-natured, of the
different masters of that day was really a masterpiece of wit. Of course,
all the delicate humour of it would be unintelligible to the present
generation—its value depended on knowing the now long-forgotten shades
that then were men—but as the work of a boy of seventeen or eighteen it
was wonderful.
One fifth of November, when there was a town and gown row, about forty
of us went out from Christ Church to see the fun. Hardly had we all got
into St. Aldate’s Street when we met the senior Proctor, with Brown
the marshal carrying the mace, the bull dogs and all the myrmidons of
collegiate authority. Of course, he stopped us—“Your name and College,
gentlemen!” We were promptly sent back into Tom Gate, and as promptly
marched across the quadrangle and were out again at Canterbury Gate,
Arkwright and myself still leading. This time we got as far as the High
Street unmolested, but no sooner had we turned the corner by Spiers’ shop
than we ran into the arms of another Proctor. “Your names, gentlemen;
go back to College at once!” and forming up behind us with his lictors,
the great guardian of morals drove us in front of him along the High
Street and by St. Aldate’s to Tom Gate. We had not gone many yards when
we met Proctor No. 1, who mercifully did not recognize us. “Your names
and Colleges, gentlemen.” “Thank you, sir,” said John Arkwright with
inimitable coolness, pointing to the police force behind, “We have our
Escort!” There was a great laugh from the crowd that had collected, and
I expected consequences, but the Proctor must have been a good-natured
fellow who saw the joke of the thing, for he took off his cap and
disappeared, and we heard no more of the matter—but all chance of fun or
a fight was over for that night, and this time we stayed within gates.
John Arkwright, among other accomplishments, was a capital boxer—and we
used to have great bouts at Maclaren’s gymnasium and fencing-rooms.
Indeed there was quite a little fashion-wave of sparring which came over
Oxford about the years 1856 and 1857, and so we got Aaron Jones to come
down and give us lessons. He arrived the week after his second fight
with Tom Sayers, and at that time, though by no means an ill-looking
man, he was not a pretty sight. All shape, all humanity seemed to have
been beaten out of his face; he must have suffered horribly, but that
he did not mind. His courage was extraordinary and he was an undeniably
fine boxer; but he had one great defect which was fatal to a first-class
fighter in those days; his hands used to swell and get puffy, and the
striking value of his blows was largely discounted. Now that gloves
are used in all fights he would have been a most formidable adversary,
for his power of inflicting punishment would have been as great as his
endurance in taking it. He was a good specimen of his class, and he had a
certain rough and ready wit which made him very amusing.
One day several of us had been sparring in my rooms, and we left off
just when it was too late to go for a walk and a little too early to
get ready for dinner; so we walked across to Tom Gate and stood there
smoking and watching the passers-by. As we were talking, there came along
a very pretty girl, very smartly dressed, under full sail (and it was
full sail in those crinoline days, of which John Leech was the recorder).
Somebody said, “Oh! look—what a pretty girl!” “Ah!” said Aaron, “I don’t
think much of her. Why just look at her feet! She’d frighten a worm in a
half-acre field into fits if he saw her coming in at the further end of
it.”
Talking of boxing, it appears to me that the difference between the
fighting of the days of which I am writing and the fighting of to-day
is more than a question of gloves or no gloves. The gloves may save
a certain amount of disfigurement which was caused by the cutting of
knuckles; but as a guarantee against risk to life they are useless. On
the other hand, the theory of the modern school of boxing points to far
more real danger than was run by the prize-fighters of my day, such men
as Ben Caunt, Bendigo, Nat Langham, Tom Sayers, Bob Travers and a host of
other famous pugilists.
They continued the traditions of Tom Spring, Cribb, Jackson, Molyneux,
the men of the Georgian days. Hitting was straight from the shoulder;
“hooks” were practically unknown, and the sickening body blows rare
indeed; the face was the target, and the infliction of black eyes and a
bloody nose represented the punishment which it was sought to inflict; in
the great fight between Tom Sayers and Heenan, of which I shall hope to
write later on, I cannot call to mind the delivery of a single body blow,
certainly there was not one that had any significance; in teaching, the
first-rate masters of the art, Nat Langham, Hoiles (the Spider), young
Reed, used to make their pupils defend the body by the position in which
the right arm was carried, but the attack was always directed at the
head—mainly at the eyes.
In the old straight fights, therefore, there was unquestionably much ugly
mauling, but probably less danger than exists in these days of gloves,
and hooks on the jaw, and deadly punches over the heart and vital organs.
In the Christmas and Easter vacations, the haunts of “the Fancy,” as
they were called (a name more fitting to beautiful ladies than to
prize-fighters), in the neighbourhood of St. Martin’s Lane, were very
attractive to a young undergraduate who felt himself big and proud
when he was greeted by and had shaken hands with such celebrities as I
have mentioned above. There, too, he would meet many of the well-known
patrons of the ring—Napier Sturt, Billy and Folly Duff and others. Billy
was a great character of whom many a queer story was told. Rat-killing,
badger-drawing and other kindred sports brought him into contact with
all the dog-dealers or dog-stealers, for I fancy that in London the two
trades were often interchanged in those days; perhaps they are still.
A lady whom he knew lost a pet dog and was miserable, so she wrote and
complained piteously to Billy Duff, who said he would try and get it back
for her. Off he went to the house of a famous dog-dealer, and was told
that he was not at home. Billy asked to see the wife—oh! yes, the wife
was at home, but she had had a baby a few days since and was in bed.
Billy said that did not signify; he would just go upstairs and see her
for a moment as he had something important to tell her. So up he went
and found Mrs. L—, who on hearing the case, swore by all her gods that
her husband knew nothing about it. Something in the good woman’s too
positive manner aroused Billy’s suspicion, so he took the baby out of its
cradle and told her that he was going to carry it off and (he stammered
badly), “as soon as his friend got her d-d-d-dog back he would return
the b-b-b-aby.” Downstairs he went with the baby, and in two hours the
bereaved lady was shedding tears of joy over her dog.
An escapade of Billy Duff’s at Baden might have ended in a tragedy. It
was in the old days of the gaming tables when the most heterogeneous
polyglot crowd, not altogether composed of angels, used to be gathered
together in that earthly paradise. Dining at the table d’hôte, Billy
found himself sitting next to a portentous personage wearing upon his
thumb a huge red Cornelian ring graven with a coronet and a coat of
arms of many quarterings. It was summer, and there were green peas,
which the personage proceeded to shovel into his mouth with his knife.
This offended Billy, who, with sublime impertinence, desired him not
to repeat the offence. The Baron or Count, or whatever he was, stared
furiously and went on pea-shovelling as before. “I have spoken to you
once,” stammered Billy. “D-d-d-don’t let me have to speak again.” This,
of course, only made the heraldic personage more angry. So Billy watched
his opportunity and nudged his neighbour’s elbow, nearly driving the
knife through his cheek. Of course there was a hideous row and a duel
the next day, when Billy broke his adversary’s arm. “I did not want to
hurt the poor d-d-d-devil much,” said Billy when he told the story. Long
years afterwards I was talking to the head of his clan about him. To my
amazement he had never even heard of him. Such is fame!
It would have been better for me if I had devoted a little less attention
to the Fancy and their Corinthian friends, the Toms and Jerrys of
the fifties, and had shown a little more respect for the purposes of
the University. There was a moment when Moderations, then a modern
innovation, came in sight, and I had to cram into something like six
weeks work which would have been mastered easily enough with a very
small amount of work spread over two years. Osborne Gordon was kindness
itself—he took me in hand and made me read Pindar with him, thinking that
if he could but cram that into me, it would cover a multitude of sins.
The fatal day arrived. I did well enough until I came to Demosthenes;
I had only read six orations out of eight, and as ill-luck would have
it, two out of the three pieces set happened to be taken out of the
unread speeches. Then came the _vivâ voce_—I was taken on in Pindar, and
Osborne Gordon, who had come to listen, was delighted when at the end
the examiners stood up and took off their caps, usually a sign that the
victim who has been upon the rack has got a first-class. My dear tutor
met me outside and said all sorts of pretty things. But when the lists
came out there was I, a dismal second-class, beaten by two or three
rivals whom I had floored over and over again in other examinations. When
Osborne Gordon, furious, asked the reason why, the Examiners said that it
was impossible to give a first to a young man who had evidently not read
his books. Demosthenes had done me! How I cursed him and his pebble and
the roaring sea-waves, and Æschines and the ἄνδρες δικασταί[25] and all
the rabble of them!
Not long afterwards I received a nomination for the Foreign Office and
was delighted to say farewell to the University. I was disgusted with
Oxford, when I ought to have been disgusted with myself. But it was
better that I should go. Amidst the old surroundings it would have been
difficult, perhaps impossible for me to break with the old habits, the
old loafing, and for an undergraduate there is nothing so dangerous,
nothing so demoralizing as loafing. In that respect I believe that the
University can claim a change for the better.
In my day, unless a youngster played cricket or rowed in the summer,
unless he hunted or went out riding in the winter, there was little
for him to do except dawdle about the High Street, or play billiards,
or rackets, or tennis, and for these latter games there was but small
provision. There was no hockey, and practically no football: I believe
that there were a few young men who kicked about a ball in remote
pastures, but the game was looked upon as a degradation and the players
as eccentricities. There were no “blues” except for the eleven, and the
eight.
I quite sympathize with those who think that too much attention is now
given to games; still, when I go to Oxford and see the hundreds of lads
flocking out, half naked, to football, hockey, running and jumping, I
cannot help admitting that they are leading cleaner, wholesomer lives
than we did, when we sauntered between Carfax and Magdalen Bridge,
parading the last unpaid masterpiece of some London tailor.
I am reminded of one of Gavarni’s old caricatures. A poor, shabby student
in the Quartier Latin is watching another trying on a very glorious new
coat. “Combien ça te coûte-t-il un habit comme cela?” “Je ne sais pas.”
“Dieu veuille, mon cher, que tu ne le saches jamais!” Sooner or later the
bill has to be paid, whether for loafing or for coats, and the bill for
loafing is the heavier of the two.