POETS AT OXFORD: SHELLEY AND LANDOR
AT any given time a large number of poets may be found among the
undergraduates at Oxford, and the younger dons. It is not easy to say
what becomes of all these pious bards, who are a marked and peculiar
people while they remain in residence. The undergraduate poet is a not
uninteresting study. He wears his hair long, and divides it down the
middle. His eye is wild and wandering, and his manner absent, especially
when he is called on to translate a piece of an ancient author in
lecture. He does not ‘read’ much, in the technical sense of the term,
but consumes all the novels that come in his way, and all the minor
poetry. His own verses the poet may be heard declaiming aloud, at unholy
midnight hours, so that his neighbours have been known to break his
windows with bottles, and then to throw in all that remained of the cold
meats of a supper party, without interfering with the divine _afflatus_.
When the college poet has composed a sonnet, ode, or what not, he sends
it to the Editor of the _Nineteenth Century_, and it returns to him after
many days. At last it appears in print, in _College Rhymes_, a
collection of mild verse, which is (or was) printed at regular or
irregular intervals, and was never seen except in the rooms of
contributors. The poet also speaks at the Union, where his sentiments
are either revolutionary, or so wildly conservative that he looks on
Magna Charta as the first step on the path that leads to England’s ruin.
As a politician, the undergraduate poet knows no mean between Mr. Peter
Taylor and King John. He has been known to found a Tory club, and
shortly afterwards to swallow the formulæ of Mr. Bradlaugh.
The life of the poet is, not unnaturally, one long warfare with his dons.
He cannot conform himself to pedantic rules, which demand his return to
college before midnight. Though often the possessor of a sweet vein of
clerical and Kebleian verse, the poet does not willingly attend chapel;
for indeed, as he sits up all night, it is cruel to expect him to arise
before noon. About the poet’s late habits a story is told, which seems
authentic. A remarkable and famous contemporary singer was known to his
fellow-undergraduates only by this circumstance, that his melodious voice
was heard declaiming anapaests all through the ambrosial night. When the
voice of the singer was lulled, three sharp taps were heard in the
silence. This noise was produced by the bard’s Scotch friend and critic
in knocking the ashes out of his pipe. These feasts of reason are almost
incompatible with the early devotion which, strangely enough, Shelley
found time and inclination to attend.
Now it is (or was) the belief of undergraduates that you might break the
decalogue and the laws of man in every direction with safety and the
approval of the dons, if you only went regularly to chapel. As the poet
cannot do this (unless he is a ‘sleepless man’), his existence is a long
struggle with the fellows and tutors of his college. The manners of
poets vary, of course, with the tastes of succeeding generations. I have
heard of two (Thyrsis and Corydon) ‘who lived in Oxford as if it were a
large country-house.’
Of other singers, the latest of the heavenly quire, it is invidiously
said that they build shrines to Blue China and other ceramic abominations
of the Philistine, and worship the same in their rooms. Of this sort it
is not the moment to speak. Time has not proved them. But the old poets
of ten years ago lived a militant life; they rarely took good classes
(though they competed industriously for the Newdigate, writing in the
metre of _Dolores_), and it not uncommonly happened that they left Oxford
without degrees. They were often very agreeable fellows, as long as one
was in no way responsible for them; but it was almost impossible—human
nature being what it is—that they should be much appreciated by tutors,
proctors, and heads of houses. How could these worthy, learned, and
often kind and courteous persons know when they were dealing with a lad
of genius, and when they had to do with an affected and pretentious
donkey?
These remarks are almost the necessary preface to a consideration of the
existence of Shelley and Landor at Oxford—the Oxford of 1793–1810.
Whatever the effects may be on Shelleyan commentators, it must be said
that, to the donnish eye, Percy Bysshe Shelley was nothing more or less
than the ordinary Oxford poet, of the quieter type. In Walter Savage
Landor, authority recognised a noisier and rowdier specimen of the same
class. People who have to do with hundreds of young men at a time are
unavoidably compelled to generalise. No don, that was a don, could have
seen Shelley or Landor as they are described to us without hastily
classing them in the category of poets who would come to no good and do
little credit to the college. Landor went up to Trinity College in 1793.
It was the dreadful year of the Terror, when good Englishmen hated the
cruel murderers of kings and queens. Landor was a good Englishman, of
course, and he never forgave the French the public assassination of Marie
Antoinette. But he must needs be a Jacobin, and wear his own unpowdered
hair—the Poet thus declaring himself at once in the regular recognised
fashion. ‘For a portion of the time he certainly read hard, but the
results he kept to himself; for here, as at Rugby, he declined everything
in the shape of competition.’ (Now competition is the essence of modern
University study.) ‘Though I wrote better Latin verses than any
undergraduate or graduate in the University,’ says Landor, ‘I could never
be persuaded by my tutor or friends to contend for any prize whatever.’
The pleasantest and most profitable hours that Landor could remember at
Oxford ‘were passed with Walter Birch in the Magdalen Walk, by the
half-hidden Cherwell.’ Hours like these are indeed the pleasantest and
most profitable that any of us pass at Oxford. The one duty which that
University, by virtue of its very nature, has never neglected, is the
assembling of young men together from all over England, and giving them
three years of liberty of life, of leisure, and of discussion, in scenes
which are classical and peaceful. For these hours, the most fruitful of
our lives, we are grateful to Oxford, as long as friendship lives; that
is, as long as life and memory remain with us. And, ‘if anything endure,
if hope there be,’ our conscious existence in the after-world would ask
for no better companions than those who walked with us by the Isis and
the Cherwell.
Landor called himself ‘a Jacobin,’ though his own letters show that he
was as far as the most insolent young ‘tuft’ from relishing doctrines of
human equality. He had the reputation, however, of being not only a
Jacobin, but ‘a mad Jacobin’; too mad for Southey, who was then young,
and a Liberal. ‘Landor was obliged to leave the University for shooting
at one of the Fellows through a window,’ is the account which Southey
gave of Landor’s rustication. Now fellows often put up with a great deal
of horse-play. There is scarcely a more touching story than that of the
don who for the first time found himself ‘screwed up,’ and fastened
within his own oak. ‘What am I to do?’ the victim asked his sympathising
scout, who was on the other, the free side of the oak. ‘Well, sir, Mr.
Muff, sir, when ’e’s screwed up ’e sends for the blacksmith,’ replied the
servant. What a position for a man having authority, to be in the
constant habit of sending for the blacksmith! Fellows have not very
unfrequently been fired at with Roman candles, or bombarded with
soda-water bottles full of gunpowder. One has also known sparrows shot
from Balliol windows on the Martyrs’ Memorial of our illustration. In
this case, too, the sportsman was a poet. But deliberately to pot at a
fellow, ‘to go for him with a shot gun,’ as the repentant American said
he would do in future, after his derringer missed fire, is certainly a
strong measure. No college which pretended to maintain discipline could
allow even a poet to shoot thus wildly. In truth, Landor’s offence has
been exaggerated by Southey. It was nothing out of the common. The poet
was giving ‘an after-dinner party’ in his rooms. The men were mostly
from Christ Church; for Landor was intimate, he says, with only one
undergraduate of his own college, Trinity. On the opposite side of the
quadrangle a Tory and a butt, named Leeds, was entertaining persons whom
the Jacobin Landor calls ‘servitors and other raff of every description.’
The guests at the rival wine-parties began to ‘row’ each other, Landor
says, adding, ‘All the time I was only a spectator, for I should have
blushed to have had any conversation with them, particularly out of a
window. But my gun was lying on a table in the room, and I had in a back
closet some little shot. I proposed, as they had closed the casements,
and as the shutters were on the outside, to fire a volley. It was
thought a good trick, and accordingly I went into my bedroom and fired.’
Mr. Leeds very superfluously complained to the President. Landor adopted
the worst possible line of defence, and so the University and this poet
parted company.
It seems to have been generally understood that Landor’s affair was a
boyish escapade. A copious literature is engaged with the subject of
Shelley’s expulsion. As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his delightful
book, the _Life of Shelley_, that poet’s career at Oxford was a typical
one. There are in every generation youths like him, in unworldliness,
wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of course, in genius. The
divine spark has not touched them, but they, like Shelley, are still of
the band whom the world has not tamed. As Mr. Hogg’s book is out of
print, and rare, it would be worth while, did space permit, to reproduce
some of his wonderfully life-like and truthful accounts of Oxford as she
was in 1810. The University has changed in many ways, and in most ways
for the better. Perhaps that old, indolent, and careless Oxford was
better adapted to the life of such an almost unexampled genius as
Shelley. When his Eton friends asked him whether he still meant to be
‘the Atheist,’ that is, the rebel he had been at school, he said, ‘No;
the college authorities were civil, and left him alone.’ Let us remember
this when the learned Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. Shairp, calls
Shelley ‘an Atheist.’ Mr. Hogg sometimes complains that undergraduates
were left too much alone. But who could have safely advised or securely
guided Shelley?
Undergraduates are now more closely looked after, as far as reading goes,
than perhaps they like—certainly much more than Shelley would have liked.
But when we turn from study to the conduct of life, is it not plain that
no _official_ interference can be of real value? Friendship and
confidence may, and often does, exist between tutors and pupils. There
are tutors so happily gifted with sympathy, and with a kind of eternal
youth of heart and intellect, that they become the friends of generation
after generation of freshmen. This is fortunate; but who can wonder that
middle-aged men, seeing the generations succeed and resemble each other,
lose their powers of understanding, of directing, of aiding the young,
who are thus cast at once on their own resources? One has occasionally
heard clever men complain that they were neglected by their seniors, that
their hearts and brains were full of perilous stuff, which no one helped
them to unpack. And it is true that modern education, when it meets the
impatience of youth, often produces an unhappy ferment in the minds of
men. To put it shortly, clever students have to go through their age of
_Sturm und Drang_, and they are sometimes disappointed when older people,
their tutors, for example, do not help them to weather the storm. It is
a tempest in which every one must steer for himself, after all; and
Shelley ‘was borne darkly, fearfully afar,’ into unplumbed seas of
thought and experience. When Mr. Hogg complains that his friend was too
much left to himself to study and think as he pleased, let us remember
that no one could have helped Shelley. He was better at Oxford without
his old Dr. Lind, ‘with whom he used to curse George III. after tea.’
[Picture: In the Garden of Worcester College. By Richard Seeley]
There are few chapters in literary history more fascinating than those
which tell the story of Shelley at Oxford. We see him entering the hall
of University College—a tall, shy stripling, bronzed with the September
sun, with long elf-locks. He takes his seat by a stranger, and in a
moment holds him spell-bound, while he talks of Plato, and Goethe, and
Alfieri, of Italian poetry, and Greek philosophy. Mr. Hogg draws a
curious sketch of Shelley at work in his rooms, where seven-shilling
pieces were being dissolved in acid in the teacups, where there was a
great hole in the floor that the poet had burned with his chemicals. The
one-eyed scout, ‘the Arimaspian,’ must have had a time of tribulation
(being a conscientious and fatherly man) with this odd master. How
characteristic of Shelley it was to lend the glow of his fancy to
science, to declare that things, not thoughts, mineralogy, not
literature, must occupy human minds for the future, and then to leave a
lecture on mineralogy in the middle, and admit that ‘stones are dull
things after all!’ Not less Shelleyan was the adventure on Magdalen
Bridge, the beautiful bridge of our illustration, from which Oxford, with
the sunset behind it, looks like a fairy city of the Arabian Nights—a
town of palaces and princesses, rather than of proctors.
‘One Sunday we had been reading Plato together so diligently, that
the usual hour of exercise passed away unperceived: we sallied forth
hastily to take the air for half-an-hour before dinner. In the
middle of Magdalen Bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms.
Shelley was more attentive at that instant to our conduct in a life
that was past, or to come, than to a decorous regulation of the
present, according to the established usages of society, in that
fleeting moment of eternal duration styled the nineteenth century.
With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child. The mother, who
might well fear that it was about to be thrown over the parapet of
the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it fast by its long
train.
‘“Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, Madam?” he
asked, in a piercing voice, and with a wistful look.’
Shelley and Hogg seem almost to have lived in reality the life of the
Scholar Gipsy. In Mr. Arnold’s poem, which has made permanent for all
time the charm, the sentiment of Oxfordshire scenery, the poet seems to
be following the track of Shelley. In Mr. Hogg’s memoirs we hear little
of summer; it seems always to have been in winter that the friends took
their long rambles, in which Shelley set free, in talk, his inspiration.
One thinks of him
‘in winter, on the causeway chill,
Where home through flooded fields foot travellers go,’
returning to the supper in Hogg’s rooms, to the curious desultory meals,
the talk, and the deep slumber by the roaring fire, the small head lying
perilously near the flames. One would not linger here over the absurd
injustice of his expulsion from the University. It is pleasant to know,
on Mr. Hogg’s testimony, that ‘residence at Oxford was exceedingly
delightful to Shelley, and on all accounts most beneficial.’ At Oxford,
at least, he seems to have been happy, he who so rarely knew happiness,
and who, if he made another suffer, himself suffered so much for others.
The memory of Shelley has deeply entered into the sentiment of Oxford.
Thinking of him in his glorious youth, and of his residence here, may we
not say, with the shepherd in Theocritus, of the divine singer:
αἰθ’ ἐπ’ ἐγμῦ ζωοῖς ἐναρίθμιος ὤφελες εἶμεν,
ὥς τοι ἐγὼν ἐνόμευον ἀν ὤρεα τὰς καλὰς αἶγας
φωνᾶς εἰσαίων, τὺ δ’ ὑπὸ δρυσὶν ἦ ὑπὸ πεύκαις
ἁδὺ μελισδόμενος κατεκέκλισο, θεῖε Κομᾶτα.
‘Ah, would that in my days thou hadst been numbered with the living, how
gladly on the hills would I have herded thy pretty she-goats, and
listened to thy voice, whilst thou, under oaks and pine-trees lying,
didst sweetly sing, divine Comatas!’