Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography
Chancellorship of the University! With what dramatic zest he read out
the scraps of paper (carefully preserved by Clarendon) which used to
pass between himself and his Royal Master across the Council-table!"
I quote this life-like description from Burgon's _Twelve Good Men_, and
Burgon it is who supplies the link with Jowett. "It was shortly after
the publication of _Essays and Reviews_ that Jowett, meeting Coxe,
enquired:--"Have you read my essay?" "No, my dear Jowett. We are good
friends now; but I know that, if I were to read that essay, I should
have to cut you. So I haven't read it, and I don't mean to.""--A
commendable way of escape from theological controversy.
It is scarcely fair to reckon Cardinal Manning among Oxford celebrities;
but during my undergraduateship he made two incursions into the
University, which were attended by some quaint consequences. In 1873 he
was a guest at the banquet held in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of
the foundation of the Union; and it was noted with amusement that,
though he was not then a Cardinal, but merely a schismatic Archbishop,
he contrived to take precedence of the Bishop of Oxford in his own
cathedral city. Bishop Wilberforce had died three months before, and I
remember that all the old stagers said:--"If Sam had still been Bishop
of Oxford, this would not have happened." The Roman Catholics of Oxford
were of course delighted; and when, soon afterwards, Manning returned as
Cardinal to open the Roman Catholic Church in St. Giles's, great efforts
were made to bring all undergraduates who showed any Rome-ward
proclivities within the sphere of his influence. To one rather bumptious
youth he said:--"And what are you going to do with your life?" "I'm
thinking of taking Orders." "Take care you get them, my friend."
Another, quite unmoved by the pectoral cross and crimson soutane, asked
artlessly, "What was your college?" The Cardinal replied, with some
dignity, "I was at Balliol, and subsequently at Merton." "Oh! that was
like me. I was at Exeter, and I was sent down to a Hall for not getting
through Smalls." "_I was a Fellow of Merton._" No powers of type can do
justice to the intonation.
At the time of which I speak Oxford was particularly rich in delightful
and accomplished ladies. I have already paid my tribute to Mrs. Cradock,
Mrs. Liddell, Mrs. Acland, Mrs. Talbot, and Miss Eleanor Smith. Miss
Felicia Skene was at once a devoted servant of the poor and the outcast,
and also one of the most powerful writers of her time, although she
contrived almost entirely to escape observation. Let anyone who thinks
that I rate her powers too highly read "The Divine Master," "La
Roquette--1871," and "Hidden Depths."
No account of the famous women at Oxford would be complete without a
reference to Miss Marion Hughes--the first Sister of Mercy in the Church
of England--professed on Trinity Sunday, 1841, and still the
Foundress-Mother of the Convent of the Holy and Undivided Trinity at
Oxford.
* * * * *
I said at the beginning of this chapter that my Oxford life was divided
sharply into two halves. Neither the climate nor the way of living ever
suited my health. In my first term I fell into the doctor's hands, and
never escaped from them so long as I was an undergraduate. I well
remember the decisive counsel of the first doctor whom I consulted (not
Dr. Acland). "What wine do you drink?" "None--only beer." "Oh! that's
all nonsense. You never will be able to live in this climate unless you
drink port, and plenty of it."
To this generous prescription I dutifully submitted, but even port was
powerless to keep me well at Oxford. I always felt "seedy"; and the
nervous worry inseparable from a time of spiritual storm and stress (for
four of my most intimate friends seceded to Rome) told upon me more than
I knew. An accidental chill brought things to a climax, and during the
Christmas vacation of 1874 I was laid low by a sharp attack of
_myelitis_, mistaken at the time for rheumatic fever. I heard the last
stroke of midnight, December 31, in a paroxysm of pain which, for years
after, I never could recall without feeling sick. I lost two terms
through illness, and the doctors were against my returning to the damps
of Oxford. However, I managed to hobble back on two sticks, maimed for
life, and with all dreams of academical distinction at an end. But what
was more important was that my whole scheme of life was dissipated.
Henceforward it was with me, as with Robert Elsmere after his malaria
at Cannes--"It was clear to himself and everybody else that he must do
what he could, and not what he would, in the Christian vineyard." The
words have always made me smile; but the reality was no smiling matter.
The remainder of my life at Oxford was of necessity lived at half-speed;
and in this place I must commemorate, with a gratitude which the lapse
of years has never chilled, the extraordinary kindness and tenderness
with which my undergraduate friends tended and nursed me in that time of
crippledom.[18] Prince Leopold, then an undergraduate of Christ Church,
and living at Wykeham House in The Parks, used to lend me his
pony-carriage, which, as it strictly belonged to the Queen, and bore her
crown and cypher, did not pay toll; and, with an undergraduate friend at
my side, I used to snatch a fearful joy from driving at full tilt
through turnpike gates, and mystifying the toll-keeper by saying that
the Queen's carriages paid no toll. For the short remainder of my time
at Oxford I was cut off from riding and all active exercise, and was not
able even to go out in bad weather. It was with me as with Captain
Harville in _Persuasion_--"His lameness prevented him from taking much
exercise; but a mind of usefulness and ingenuity seemed to furnish him
with constant employment within."
* * * * *
Here I must close my recollections of Oxford, and, as I look back upon
those four years--1872-1876--I find my thoughts best expressed by Sir
Arthur Quiller-Couch, who has done for Oxford in his _Alma Mater_ just
what Matthew Arnold did in the preface to _Essays in Criticism_....
"Know you her secret none can utter?
Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?
Still on the spire the pigeons flutter;
Still by the gateway flits the gown;
Still on the street, from corbel and gutter,
Faces of stone look down.
* * * * *
Still on her spire the pigeons hover;
Still by her gateway haunts the gown;
Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,
Drumming her old ones forth from town,
Know you the secret none discover?
Tell it--when _you_ go down."
_Know you the secret none discover_--none, that is, while they still are
undergraduates?
Well, I think I do; and, to begin with a negative, it is not the secret
of Nirvana. There are misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to
assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which
includes all knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from
the human tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be
calm. And so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may
be. The bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to
the well-spread tables of Halls and Common-rooms. In a laburnum-clad
villa in The Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life
in cities where five families camp in one room. But, when we leave
actualities, and come to the region of thought and opinion, all the pent
energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for "Prophet" comes,
I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble like water on the
flame; and it is just in this fervency of thought and feeling that
Oxford is Prophetic. It is the tradition that in one year of the
storm-tossed 'forties the subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem was
Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding poem at Cambridge
was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to herself. For a century
at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) she
has been the battle-field of contending sects. Her air has resounded
with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain lie
thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of
theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social
and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which
Matthew Arnold, with fine irony, described as "so unruffled by the
fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding
generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever recurring
strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery.
Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life
to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and
denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blows which our
strength could compass, and devised the most dangerous pitfalls for our
opponents' feet which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and
nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the
resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the
irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was
cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture.
But now all that passion, genuine enough while it lasted, lies far back
in the past, and we learn the secret which we never discovered while as
yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight. We thought then that we
were the most desperate partisans; we asked no quarter, and gave none;
pushed our argumentative victories to their uttermost consequences, and
made short work of a fallen foe. But, when all the old battle-cries have
died out of our ears, gentler voices begin to make themselves heard. All
at once we realize that a great part of our old contentions was only
sound and fury and self-deception, and that, though the causes for which
we strove may have been absolutely right, our opponents were not
necessarily villains. In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford.
All the time that we were fighting and fuming, the higher and subtler
influences of the place were moulding us, unconscious though we were, to
a more gracious ideal. We had really learnt to distinguish between
intellectual error and moral obliquity. We could differ from another on
every point of the political and theological compass, and yet in our
hearts acknowledge him to be the best of all good fellows. Without
surrendering a single conviction, we came to see the virtue of so
stating our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of offending
and alienating. We had attained to that temper which, in the sphere of
thought and opinion, is analogous to the crowning virtue of Christian
charity.
"Tell it--when _you_ go down."
Not long ago I was addressing a company of Oxford undergraduates, all
keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all
devotedly loyal to the tradition of Oxford as each understood it, and
all with their eyes eagerly fixed on "the wistful limit of the world."
With such an audience it was inevitable to insist on the graces and
benedictions which Oxford can confer, and to dwell on Mr. Gladstone's
dogma that to call a man a "typically Oxford man" is to bestow the
highest possible praise.
But this was not all. Something more remained to be said. It was for a
speaker whose undergraduateship lay thirty years behind to state as
plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place which had
decided the course and complexion of his life. Wherever philosophical
insight is combined with literary genius and personal charm, one says