other victuals, a number of poor old alms-women; and if any further
proof be needed of the exceeding thinness of the veneer by which our
youthful savagery was overlaid, it will be found in our treatment of
those humble folk, who were of much more use in the world than
ourselves. We named them “the hags”; and one of our amusements was to
construct for them what was called a “hag-trap.” A large square piece of
bread was hollowed out in the centre through a hole bored in the side,
and when the cavity had been filled up with mustard, pepper, salt, etc.,
the opening was plugged, and the bread left lying on the table as a bait
for some unwary victim who should carry it to her home. Whether the Eton
Mission in Hackney Wick has so ameliorated the hearts of later
generations of Etonians that a “hag-trap” would now be an impossibility,
I do not know; but in those days we certainly had not the smallest atom
of sympathy with the working classes, except perhaps with those College
servants who were known to us personally, and who ministered to our
wants.
We did not pretend to regard the working man as a brother. Once, when I
was travelling with some Eton friends, a sweep who was standing on the
platform tried to enter our carriage just as the train was about to
start. Instantly we seized the door, and held it closed from the inside;
and after a short struggle (the black man’s anxious eyes still haunt
me), the victory remained with us, for the train begun to move, and the
sweep was left behind. That was our idea of Fraternity. Was it Waterloo
that was won in the Eton Playing Fields? I have sometimes thought it
must have been Peterloo.
But let me turn from the recollection of childish deeds done by those
who were but “scugs,” or “lower boys,” to that of the immense
self-importance of which we were conscious when we had reached the
eminence of sixth form. Surely nowhere on earth is there such a
tremendous personage as a sixth-form Eton boy; he acts continually with
that “full sense of responsibility” so dear to the occupants of the
Parliamentary front-bench. No visitor to Eton College Chapel can have
failed to be impressed by the pompous entry of those twenty immaculately
attired young men as they precede the Headmaster and the Provost in a
sort of triumphal procession, thinking of anything rather than the
religious service to which their arrival is the prelude. On speech-days,
too, when, arrayed in dress-coat and knee-breeches, we declaimed
passages from the great writers of antiquity or of modern times, we felt
to the full the colossal seriousness of our position--serious also it
was in another sense, for our self-satisfaction was then sobered by the
possibility of breaking down. To keep order in the passages at night; to
say the Latin grace in Hall; to note the names at “Absence” in the
school-yard, standing by the headmaster’s side--even to read prayers in
the Houses on occasions--these were but a few of the many duties and
dignities of sixth form. No young feathered “bloods” in red Indian tribe
could have had greater reason to be proud.
Even in the holidays our grave responsibilities did not wholly cease;
for it was a custom for sixth-form youths to be sent as tutors to lower
boys who needed “coaching” at their homes. On two occasions it fell to
my lot to perform that service for a lively but very backward boy at
Evans’s House, Charley Selwyn, nephew of the Bishop of Lichfield; and
the awe which I felt at sojourning in a bishop’s palace helped to fix
more firmly in my memory some of the impressions which I got there.
Dr. George Augustus Selwyn was the most stalwart champion of “muscular
Christianity.” His face was somewhat grim and stern, as was to be
expected in so redoubtable a preacher of the gospel of hard work; but
there was a humorous twinkle in his eyes which betokened a very kind
heart; and to any one connected with Eton, present Etonian or Old
Etonian, he extended the warmest of welcomes. In fact, New Zealand, the
scene of his missionary labours, and Eton, where he had been a
successful scholar and athlete, were the standing subjects of
conversation at his table: he and Mrs. Selwyn used often to converse
together in the Maori tongue; and had there been an Etonian language
(other than slang) it would assuredly have been spoken by them. The
world was, for the bishop, divided into Etonian and non-Etonian. I once
heard him pressing upon an old schoolfellow, who was about to leave the
Palace, some table-delicacies of rare excellence, and quoting the
Horatian line:
Ut libet; hæc porcis hodie comedenda relinques.
(“As you like! The pigs will eat them up, if left.”)
He explained that some other guests who were coming to Lichfield that
day were--non-Etonians.
But in spite of the large and lion-like geniality of the bishop, there
were anxious moments when the sight of some indolent or slovenly action
caused his quick temper to give way, and then one knew not whether to
tremble or be inwardly amused at the forms which his anger would take.
Once, on a dull Sunday afternoon (the Sundays _were_ dull at the
Palace), he overheard his nephew yawning wearily and saying he did not
know what to do. “What!” cried the bishop. “A Christian boy not know
what to do on a Sunday afternoon!” Then, in terrible tones: “Go and
fetch your Greek Testament.” Forthwith, while I made haste to escape
from that scene of wrath, the wretched boy had to undergo a long lesson
from his uncle.
On another occasion it was my pupil’s sister, a very beautiful child of
ten or twelve, who caused an eruption of the volcano. She had left, in
the course of luncheon, “a wasteful plate”--that is, she had put the
gristle of the meat at the side, cleverly hidden, as she thought, under
knife and fork--and the bishop, observing this, lectured her sharply on
the sinfulness of such a habit. Then, to our consternation, his anger
rising higher, he ended by seizing the girl’s plate, and then and there
himself devoured the disgusting stuff as a practical lesson in
frugality. “The bishop’s in a very bad temper, to-day, sir,” the butler
gravely remarked to me afterwards.[9]
Eton, then, was the school where ignorance was bliss, but the bliss was
very dear while it lasted, and it would have been dearer still if we had
more fully realized the nature of the change that was to follow--the
difference between University and School. As the end of the last summer
term drew near, we felt more and more the pang of the parting that was
to come; and when it was time to write our _Vale_--that last copy of the
weekly verses, in which we were allowed, for once, to substitute English
for Latin--we naturally likened ourselves to some prophetic dreamer of
sad dreams, or to some despairing convict who sees his approaching fate.
So I, who write, feel ever on my heart
Such dim presentiment, such dull despair:
Me, too, a doom awaits; I, too, must part,
And change a careless life for toil and care.
Doubtless many such elegies periodically found their way, as mine did,
into Dr. Hornby’s waste-paper basket.
III
LITERÆ INHUMANIORES
Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow.
MILTON.
Certainly, after the liveliness of Thames, old Camus seemed to foot it
very slowly. Heavy was the fall from the exaltation of the sixth form to
the lowliness of the freshman. A needed experience it may have been, as
correcting the natural priggishness of boyhood; but it was a change that
we little relished while we underwent it.
King’s College, Cambridge, in the early ’seventies, was in a phase of
transition from the old-fashioned system, under which it was a mere
appanage of Eton, to a new order of things which was gradually throwing
its gates open to all comers; much, however, of the ancient pettiness of
spirit still remained; the College was small in numbers and small in
tone, dominated by a code of unwritten yet vexatious ordinances, which
it was waste of time to observe, yet “bad form” to neglect. “King’s
always had a tyrant,” was a remark made to me by F. W. Cornish, himself
a Kingsman.
The Provost was Dr. Okes, a short, rather crabbed-looking old man, whose
enormous self-complacency was the theme of many tales. Once, when he was
walking through the court, his pompous gait caused some ill-mannered
undergraduates, who were watching him from a window, to give vent to
audible laughter; whereupon he sent for them and explained that such
merriment must not be indulged in while _he_ was passing by. That he
himself could have been the cause of the merriment was a possibility
which had not entered his mind.
Next in authority was the dean, a wan and withered-looking clergyman
named Churton, who always seemed unhappy himself and infected every one
who entered his rooms with a sense of discomfort. He used to invite
undergraduates to breakfast with him, a melancholy function in which he
often had the aid of Fred Whitting (the name was pronounced Whiting), a
bluff and more genial don whose conversation just saved the guests from
utter despair; and at these entertainments poor Churton’s one remark, as
he helped the fish, was to say with a sour smile of ineffable
wretchedness: “Whitting, will you be a cannibal?”
Very different from this chilly dean, and much more interesting, as
being genuine relics of the brave old days when Kingsmen had no need to
study or to exert themselves, inasmuch as their University career was
assured them from the first, were two portly and inseparable bachelors,
Messrs. Law and Brocklebank, whose sole employment it seemed to be to
reap to the full the emoluments of their life-fellowship, which they had
held for a goodly number of years. “Brock” and “Applehead” were their
nicknames; both were stout and bulky, but there was a rotundity about
Mr. Law’s cranial development which gave him a more imposing appearance.
As they ambled side by side about the courts and lawns, it amused us to
fancy them a pair of strange survivals from a rude prehistoric age, we
ourselves, of course, playing the part of the moderns and intellectuals.
When “Applehead” died, we were enjoined in a poetical epitaph, by some
anonymous admirer, to deck his grave with pumpkins, gourds, melons,
cucumbers and other emblematic fruits.
The literary element was not strong in King’s; but in Henry Bradshaw,
one of the senior Fellows, the College could boast a University
Librarian of much distinction. He was a kind, but most whimsical and
eccentric man, whose friendship was open to any undergraduate who sought
it, only it must be sought, and under the conditions imposed by Bradshaw
himself, for it was never in any circumstances offered. If you presented
yourself uninvited at his rooms--rather an ordeal for a nervous
freshman--you were welcomed, perhaps taken to his heart. If you did not
present yourself, he never asked you to come; on the contrary, however
often he met you on the stairs or elsewhere, he passed with a look of
blank and stony indifference on his large and somewhat inexpressive
visage. I knew a scholar of King’s who lived on Bradshaw’s staircase,
and who for more than a year was thus passed by as non-existent: then,
one evening, moved by a sudden impulse, he knocked at the great man’s
door, entered, and was immediately admitted to the cheery circle of his
acquaintance. It was useless to resent such waywardness on Bradshaw’s
part; there was no “ought” in his vocabulary; you had to take him on his
own terms, or “go without”; and the great number of University men who
came on pilgrimage to his rooms was in itself a proof of his mastery. I
recall the following lines from an epigram which some rebellious
undergraduate wrote on him:
Throned in supreme indifference, he sees
The growing ardour of his devotees:
He cares not if they come, yet more and more
They throng subservient to the sacred door:
He cares not if they go, yet none the less
His “harvests ripen and his herds increase.”
It was so; and Bradshaw, having a gift of very pungent speech, was well
able to keep his “herds” in order when they were assembled: he would at
times say a sharp and wholesome word to some conceited or presumptuous
visitor. Even his nearest friends could take no liberties with him. It
was said that when Mr. G. W. Prothero, then a Fellow of King’s, took to
omitting the “Esquire” in the address of letters, and wrote plain “Henry
Bradshaw,” the librarian retaliated in his reply by addressing
laconically to “Prothero”--nothing more.
To attend lectures and chapel services formed the chief duties of
undergraduates; and the lectures were much the less tedious task. It was
a chilly business, however, on a cold winter morning, to hear the great
Greek scholar, R. Shilleto, hold forth for an hour on his beloved
Thucydides; for he was an elderly man with a chronic cough, and his
enthusiasm for a Greek idiom hardly compensated his audience for the
physical difficulties with which he laboured. He would begin cheerily on
a difficult passage, and, overtaken by a bout of coughing, lose the
place for a while; then, with a drawling “yes,” catch up the thread of
his discourse, till another spasm overwhelmed him; while we, desiring
our breakfasts much more than the privilege of listening to a second
Porson, fumed and fidgeted, and took notes, or neglected to take notes,
till the stroke of the clock released us. Much more popular were some of
the lectures which we attended, in other Colleges, given by such skilled
exponents of the Classics as Henry Jackson and R. C. Jebb. Jebb was
always the same--self-composed, neat and eloquent; Jackson, on the
contrary, though not at all less competent, used to work himself into a
fever of fretfulness when he could not find the exact word he sought
for; and then, to our amusement, he would upbraid himself as “dolt” and
“idiot,” even while he was giving a most suggestive address.
The compulsory “chapels” were a great trial to some of us; and each
King’s scholar was further liable, in turn, to the function of reading
the Lessons for a week. I do not know why this should have seemed more
formidable than “speeches” at Eton, but it was an office which we would
very thankfully have escaped. It needed some courage to step down from a
stall in that spacious chapel--most of all when, as on a Sunday
afternoon, there was a large concourse of visitors--and then to mount,
by what cragsmen would call an “exposed ridge,” the steps that led up to
the big lectern in the middle of the nave. The sensation was one of
extreme solitariness and detachment, with little but the lectern itself
to give support and protection; so that we could almost sympathize with
the plight of that disreputable undergraduate who, according to a
current story (which, be it hoped, was fictitious), had essayed to read
the Lessons, in some college chapel, when he was not so sober as he
should have been. Throwing his arms round the eagle--for his lectern was
fashioned in the shape of that pagan bird--he appalled the congregation,
it was said, by exclaiming, in a pensive voice: “If it wasn’t for this
[something] duck, I’d be down.”
But practice makes all things easier; and after a time one or two of us
so far overcame our nervousness as to utilize our position at the
lectern for the benefit, as we thought, of the congregation at
large--certainly for our own personal comfort; for we ventured to dock
and shorten the Lessons as we felt inclined. “Here endeth the Lesson,”
we would cry, when we had read, perhaps, no more than a dozen verses out
of twice or thrice that number; and immediately the great organ would
sound, and the pompous choral service continued on its course. We had
private information that this irregularity did not pass unobserved by
some of the dons; but as nothing was said we concluded that they blessed
us for it in secret.
The relations between dons and undergraduates were for the most part
very friendly; but the blandness of the dons was somewhat measured and
condescending--not without reason, perhaps, for undergraduates, like
schoolboys, were apt to take undue advantage of any excess of
affability. Once, when I was walking along King’s Parade with a friend,
we saw the great Dr. Lightfoot coming from the opposite direction. “Now
just look,” said my companion, “how polite Lightfoot will be. See how
I’ll make him smile as he passes.” And sure enough, the learned divine,
in response to an audacious salute from one who had no sort of claim to
his acquaintance, was instantly wreathed in smiles and benignity, as if
he were meeting the son of his dearest friend, instead of being
impudently imposed on by a stranger.
We rather dreaded the invitations that sometimes reached us to a formal
breakfast, or worse still, a _soirée_ (familiarly known as a
“stand-up”), at the residence of some high authority. I have spoken of
the Churton breakfasts in King’s; still more serious an affair was it to
be one of a dozen undergraduates summoned _en bloc_ to breakfast at
Trinity Lodge, for Dr. Thompson, the Master of Trinity, was a great
University magnate, widely famed and feared for his sententious sayings
and biting sarcasms, many of which were reported from mouth to mouth. We
had heard of that deadly verdict of his on a University sermon preached
by Dean Howson, joint author of Conybeare and Howson’s _Life of St.
Paul_: “I was thinking what a very clever man Mr. Conybeare must have
been.” As a member once or twice of such a breakfast-party, I recollect
how awkwardly we stood herded together when we had entered the sage’s
presence, and how, as we passed into the breakfast-room, we almost
jostled each other in our anxiety to get a seat as far as possible away
from that end of the long table where the Master in his majesty sat. As
for the _soirées_ at Trinity Lodge and elsewhere, they demanded some
strength of limb; for the number of visitors exceeded the number of
seats, and to stand for two hours in a corner, and look as if one liked
it, was irksome even for youth. At these ceremonials, when the Provost
of King’s was the host, he used to invite undergraduates with immense
condescension to “be seated”; and when he added with emphasis: “You may
sit down _here_,” he was understood to be reflecting on the superior
comfort of a Provost’s entertainment as compared with that of Trinity
Lodge.
One thing that rather galled the feelings of undergraduates was that
none but Provost and Fellows might set foot on the extensive lawns at
King’s--a selfish privilege of the few, as it appeared, maintained to
the exclusion of the many. However that may have been, there came a
night when a small party of Kingsmen committed the sacrilegious act of
releasing a mole in front of the Provost’s Lodge, and dauntlessly
awaited the result, thus anticipating Lord Milner’s policy of “damning
the consequences.” There were no serious consequences, except to the
most innocent of all the persons concerned--the mole. We watched him
with admiration as he sank into that soft green turf, like a seal into
water; and the next morning we were thrilled to see a small line of
earthen hillocks on the sacred sward. Then followed a great to-do of
gardeners and mole-catchers; and on the third day, to our regret and
remorse, the poor mole paid the penalty for the trespasses of others. We
put a London newspaper on the track of this incident, and the editor
published some humorous speculations, for the benefit of readers
interested in natural history, as to how the mole could have found his
way to that cloistered spot.
The _Cambridge Undergraduates’ Journal_ (I am now speaking of the year
1873 and thereabouts) was a fortnightly paper--edited at one time by G.
C. Macaulay, at another by Hallam (now Lord) Tennyson--in which some of
us used to try our hands at the higher journalism, and write satirical
essays on the various anomalies of Cambridge life. Compulsory chapels;
compulsory Latin and Greek; “cribbing” in examinations; antiquated
college customs; the exactions of college servants; the social functions
known as “stand-ups”--these were but a few of the topics on which we
held forth with all the confidence of youth. It was the _Adventurer_
over again, but on a more comprehensive scale; for the undergraduate
could express his feelings more openly than the schoolboy; else the
writer of an article on compulsory chapels could hardly have inveighed,
as he did, against the ordinance of full choral service, where “the man
without an ear” was doomed, for two long hours, “to sit, stand, and
kneel in wearisome succession.”
The annual competition for the English Prize Poem afforded another
opportunity for nascent ambition. The subject one year was the recovery
of the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward) from a serious illness;
and it was this rather snobbish theme that drew from one of the
competitors a couplet which went the round of a delighted University:
Flashed o’er the land the electric message came:
“He is not better, but he’s much the same.”[10]
Then there were the “Sir William Browne’s Medals,” offered annually for
Greek and Latin odes and epigrams. These prizes were usually the
perquisite of a few select scholars (my friend E. C. Selwyn had a way of
carrying them off); but as the poems were sent in anonymously, the
envelope containing the competitor’s name not being opened except when
he won the medal, it was a safe and rather good sport to try one’s luck
in the contest. One of the surprises of my life was when old Shilleto
(the coughing grammarian) walked into my room one evening, and told me
that the examiners had awarded me the medal for Greek epigram. There
being a defect in one of the lines, he sat down and corrected it, there
and then, by an emendation which was doubtless better Greek and
certainly worse poetry.
Another high Cambridge authority, at that time, was Dr. Benjamin
Kennedy, famed as former headmaster of Shrewsbury School, and as author
of a Latin Grammar familiar to many generations of schoolboys. I had
been told to call on him at his house, for my father had been under him
at Shrewsbury, and there was an old friendship between the families; and
when I did so with some trepidation--perhaps because a recent experience
at Trinity Lodge had made me fearful of “receptions”--I found him a most
benign old gentleman, quite free from the awful stateliness of a Provost
or a Master; indeed, when he asked undergraduates to dinner he relaxed
to an extent which could not but restore confidence in the most timid.
After dinner he would give us “words” to decipher, in ivory letters,
according to that rather inane Victorian pastime; or he would recite odd
verses to us in his quaint sing-song voice, something between a whisper
and a wheeze. Who could have feared even the most learned of Professors,
when he stooped to conquer by rehearsing for us such an example of an
English pentameter as the following, presumably of his own composition:
Strawberry jam jam jam; strawberry, strawberry jam.
But even the genial Dr. Kennedy could not wholly release himself from
the rigidness of Cambridge etiquette: it was impossible, so he had
stated when he desired me to call on him, for _him_ to call on an
undergraduate. No such difficulty existed for the greatest yet least
assuming of the distinguished men then living in Cambridge, Frederick
Denison Maurice. Having heard of me as a pupil of Mr. Kegan Paul’s, he
came, though he was an old man, to my room on the top story in King’s,
and talked so quietly and naturally that I felt quite at ease with him.
On a later occasion I breakfasted at his house, alone with him, a
privilege which I much valued; for even then I was aware of his real
greatness, unlike as he was to the pompous University magnates who
figured so largely in public. If only the heads of Colleges and
Universities could know--but, of course, they rarely know--how much more
powerful is the influence of simple unaffected kindness than of the
affability which betrays a touch of patronage and condescension!
St. Edward’s Church, of which Maurice was the incumbent, was close to
the gates of King’s--and some of us undergraduates used to go there on
Sunday evenings, notwithstanding our weariness of our own chapel
services, in order to hear him preach, for we were drawn to him by the
obvious impression which he gave of quiet sympathy and strength. At a
time when the revolting doctrine of eternal punishment was still widely
held, his humanizing influence must have been very valuable within the
Church. Matthew Arnold’s clever gibe, that he beat about the bush, but
without starting the hare, left a good deal unsaid; for if he did not
start the hare he helped to silence the hell-cat.