Alma Mater! Alma Mater! New-fashioned folks, with their large theories
of education, may find fault with thee. But a true Spartan mother thou
art: hard and stern as the old matron who bricked up her son Pausanius,
bringing the first stone to immure him,--hard and stern, I say, to the
worthless, but full of majestic tenderness to the worthy.
For a young man to go up to Cambridge (I say nothing of Oxford, knowing
nothing thereof) merely as routine work, to lounge through three years
to a degree among the (Greek word),--for such an one Oxford Street
herself, whom the immortal Opium-Eater hath so direly apostrophized, is
not a more careless and stony-hearted mother. But for him who will
read, who will work, who will seize the rare advantages proffered, who
will select his friends judiciously,--yea, out of that vast ferment of
young idea in its lusty vigor choose the good and reject the bad,--there
is plenty to make those three years rich with fruit imperishable, three
years nobly spent, even though one must pass over the Ass's Bridge to
get into the Temple of Honor.
Important changes in the Academical system have been recently announced,
and honors are henceforth to be accorded to the successful disciples in
moral and natural sciences. By the side of the old throne of Mathesis
they have placed two very useful fauteuils a la Voltaire. I have no
objection; but in those three years of life it is not so much the thing
learned as the steady perseverance in learning something that is
excellent.
It was fortunate, in one respect, for me that I had seen a little of the
real world,--the metropolitan,--before I came to that mimic one,--the
cloistral. For what were called pleasures in the last, and which might
have allured me, had I come fresh from school, had no charm for me now.
Hard drinking and high play, a certain mixture of coarseness and
extravagance, made the fashion among the idle when I was at the
University, console Planco,--when Wordsworth was master of Trinity; it
may be altered now.
But I had already outlived such temptations, and so, naturally, I was
thrown out of the society of the idle, and somewhat into that of the
laborious.
Still, to speak frankly, I had no longer the old pleasure in books. If
my acquaintance with the great world had destroyed the temptation to
puerile excesses, it had also increased my constitutional tendency to
practical action. And, alas! in spite of all the benefit I had derived
from Robert Hall, there were times when memory was so poignant that I
had no choice but to rush from the lonely room haunted by tempting
phantoms too dangerously fair, and sober Town the fever of the heart by
some violent bodily fatigue. The ardor which belongs to early youth,
and which it best dedicates to knowledge, had been charmed prematurely
to shrines less severely sacred. Therefore, though I labored, it was
with that full sense of labor which (as I found at a much later period
of life) the truly triumphant student never knows. Learning--that
marble image--warms into life, not at the toil of the chisel, but the
worship of the sculptor. The mechanical workman finds but the voiceless
stone.
At my uncle's, such a thing as a newspaper rarely made its appearance.
At Cambridge, even among reading men, the newspapers had their due
importance. Politics ran high; and I had not been three days at
Cambridge before I heard Trevanion's name. Newspapers, therefore, had
their charms for me. Trevanion's prophecy about himself seemed about to
be fulfilled. There were rumors of changes in the Cabinet. Trevanion's
name was bandied to and fro, struck from praise to blame, high and low,
as a shuttlecock. Still the changes were not made, and the Cabinet held
firm. Not a word in the "Morning Post," under the head of "fashionable
intelligence," as to rumors that would have agitated me more than the
rise and fall of governments; no hint of "the speedy nuptials of the
daughter and sole heiress of a distinguished and wealthy commoner:" only
now and then, in enumerating the circle of brilliant guests at the house
of some party chief, I gulped back the heart that rushed to my lips when
I saw the names of Lady Ellinor and Miss Trevanion.
But amongst all that prolific progeny of the periodical Press, remote
offspring of my great namesake and ancestor (for I hold the faith of my
father), where was the "Literary Times"? What had so long retarded its
promised blossoms? Not a leaf in the shape of advertisements had yet
emerged from its mother earth. I hoped from my heart that the whole
thing was abandoned, and would not mention it in my letters home, lest I
should revive the mere idea of it. But in default of the "Literary
Times" there did appear a new journal, a daily journal too,--a tall,
slender, and meagre stripling, with a vast head, by way of prospectus,
which protruded itself for three weeks successively at the top of the
leading article, with a fine and subtle body of paragraphs, and the
smallest legs, in the way of advertisements, that any poor newspaper
ever stood upon! And yet this attenuated journal had a plump and
plethoric title,--a title that smacked of turtle and venison; an
aldermanic, portly, grandiose, Falstaflian title: it was called The
Capitalist. And all those fine, subtle paragraphs were larded out with
recipes how to make money. There was an El Dorado in every sentence.
To believe that paper, you would think no man had ever yet found a
proper return for his pounds, shillings, and pence; you would turn up
your nose at twenty per cent. There was a great deal about Ireland,--
not her wrongs, thank Heaven! but her fisheries; a long inquiry what had
become of the pearls for which Britain was once so famous; a learned
disquisition upon certain lost gold mines now happily re-discovered; a
very ingenious proposition to turn London smoke into manure, by a new
chemical process; recommendations to the poor to hatch chickens in ovens
like the ancient Egyptians; agricultural schemes for sowing the waste
lands in England with onions, upon the system adopted near Bedford,--net
produce one hundred pounds an acre. In short, according to that paper,
every rood of ground might well maintain its man, and every shilling be,
like Hobson's money-bag, "the fruitful parent of a hundred more." For
three days, at the newspaper room of the Union Club, men talked of this
journal: some pished, some sneered, some wondered; till an ill-natured
mathematician, who had just taken his degree, and had spare time on his
hands, sent a long letter to the "Morning Chronicle," showing up more
blunders, in some article to which the editor of "The Capitalist" had
specially invited attention, than would have paved the whole island of
Laputa. After that time, not a soul read "The Capitalist." How long it
dragged on its existence I know not; but it certainly did not die of a
maladie de langueur.
Little thought I, when I joined in the laugh against "The Capitalist,"
that I ought rather to have followed it to its grave, in black crape and
weepers,--unfeeling wretch that I was! But, like a poet, O
"Capitalist"! thou Overt not discovered and appreciated and prized and
mourned till thou Overt dead and buried, and the bill came in for thy
monument.
The first term of my college life was just expiring when I received a
letter from my mother, so agitated, so alarming,--at first reading so
unintelligible,--that I could only see that some great misfortune had
befallen us; and I stopped short and dropped on my knees to pray for the
life and health of those whom that misfortune more specially seemed to
menace; and then, towards the end of the last blurred sentence, read
twice, thrice, over,--I could cry, "Thank Heaven, thank Heaven! it is
only, then, money after all!"