Cecil, some five months after his eighteenth birthday, went up to
Oxford and entered Balliol. Here he gave the cold shoulder to cricket,
and took to the water with the enthusiasm of a man who has the honour
of his college to uphold and his blue to get. He also took more kindly
to correspondence, and wrote Lee long letters on the tendencies of
modern civilisation. His letters struck his friend, used to the lighter
mood of Mr. Montgomery and Mr. Brannan, as decidedly priggish, and she
worried over the development not a little,--being unaware that the
University youth of Great Britain must take priggishness in the regular
course of measles, mumps, whooping-cough, Public School wickedness, the
overwhelming discovery of his own importance as an atom of the British
Empire, and cynicism.
During the second term he became profoundly and theologically
religious, and Lee wept at the prospect of being a parson’s wife. His
excursions into the vast echoing region of spiritual mysteries nearly
addled her brains, and she felt quite miserable at times to think that
there was so little of the old Cecil left. But during the spring of his
second year there seemed to be a healthy reaction. A letter dated from
Maundrell Abbey informed Lee that he had been sent down for breaking
windows and attempting to feed a bonfire in the quadrangle with an
objectionable don. He further confided that upon the last hilarious
night before his exile he had been discovered by a good Samaritan at
the foot of his stairs calling imperiously upon the Almighty to carry
him up to his room and put him to bed.
During the months of his exile he travelled on the Continent. His
letters at this period were less like essays for posterity, and much of
his old self flashed through them. When he returned to Oxford in the
autumn he went in bitterly for politics, announced himself a Liberal,
and made cutting references to the House of Peers. Indeed, shortly
after he had been elected President of the Union, he gave full rein
to his eloquence and his new-born convictions, and so scathingly and
vituperously assailed the entire territorial system that he finished
in a perfect pandemonium of cheers and hisses, and was pestered for
months by the enterprising Socialist. During the following vacation
he attempted to convert his father, who was a blue-hot Tory; and the
fixity and bitterness of his convictions and his arrogant assumption
of advanced thinking so irritated Lord Barnstaple that he damned his
offspring for a prig; forgetting that in his own time he had been
as pretty a prig as Oxford had ever turned out. Cecil’s keynote at
this time--frequently quoted to Lee--was Matthew Arnold’s unpleasant
arraignment of their common country: “Our world of an aristocracy
materialised and null, a middle-class purblind and hideous, a lower
class crude and brutal.” Lord Maundrell was for reforming all three.
Unlike the great poet who inspired those lines, there was no danger of
his being the “passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope, who,
ignorant of the future, and unconsoled by its promises, nevertheless
waged against the conservatism of the old impossible world so fiery
battle.” To-day the future was quite clear, that is to say, it was to
be what its brilliant and determined youth chose to make it.
Lee thought these sentiments simply magnificent, and expressed her
approval with such fire and enthusiasm that Cecil wrote with increasing
frequency, and assured her that the way her style had improved was
really remarkable.
During his last year his fads had pretty well run their course,
although he was temporarily interested in “The Influence of Zola on
Modern Thought,” and bi-metallism. But his ideals, so he assured Lee,
were leaving him. All he really cared for in life was to take a double
first in Greats and History, and he was working like a horse. There
were long intervals between his letters, and when he wrote it was to
apologise on the score of fatigue. He was “dog tired.” So were all the
men. If they weren’t drivelling idiots when the thing was over it was
because nothing could really knock an Englishman out. Of course he was
on the water more or less, and took a turn every day at cricket, which
kept him in fair condition, although he was far from fit. Meanwhile Lee
was to pray that he was not ploughed. He liked women to pray. Religion
had gone with his other ideals, but it was a beautiful thing in a
woman.