“Mind’st thou the bells? What a place it was for bells, lad!
Spires as sharp as thrushes’ bills to pierce the sky with song.
How it shook the heart of one, the swaying and the swinging,
How it set the blood a-tramp and all the brains a-singing,
Aye, and what a world of thought the calmer chimes came bringing,
Telling praises every hour
To His majesty and power,
Telling prayers with punctual service, summers, centuries, how long?
The beads upon our rosary of immemorial song.”
The Minstrelsy of Isis.

Oxford is a subject from which one cannot easily tear oneself: so I make no apology for returning to it. In that delightful book, “The Minstrelsy of Isis,” I have found an anonymous poem beginning

“Royal heart, loyal heart, comrade that I loved,”

and, in the spirit of that line, I dedicate this chapter to the friend whom I always regarded as the Ideal Undergraduate. Other names and other faces of contemporaries and companions come crowding upon the memory, but it is better, on all accounts, to leave them unspecified. I lived quite as much in other colleges as in my own, and in a fellowship which was gathered from all sorts and sections of undergraduate life. Let the reader imagine all the best and brightest men in the University between 1872 and 1876, and he will not go far wrong in assuming that my friends were among them.

My Oxford life was cut sharply into two halves by a very definite dividing-line; the first half was cheerful and irresponsible enough. A large part of the cheerfulness was connected with the Church, and my earliest friendships (after those which I brought with me from Harrow) were formed in the circle which frequented St. Barnabas. I am thankful to remember that my eyes were even then open to see the moral beauty and goodness all around me, and I had a splendid dream of blending it all into one. In my second term I founded an “Oxford University Church Society,” designed to unite religious undergraduates of all shades of Churchmanship for common worship and interchange of views. We formed ourselves on what we heard of a similar Society at Cambridge; and, early in the Summer Term of 1873, a youth of ruddy countenance and graceful address-now Canon Mason and Master of Pembroke-came over from Cambridge, and told us how to set to work. The effort was indeed well-meant. It was blessed by Churchmen as dissimilar as Bishop Mackarness, Edwin Palmer, Burgon, Scott Holland, Illingworth, Ottley, Lacey, Gore, and Jayne, now Bishop of Chester; but it was not long-lived. Very soon the “Victorian Persecution,” as we used to call it, engineered by Archbishop Tait through the P.W.R. Act, made it difficult for ritualists to feel that they had part or lot with those who were imprisoning conscientious clergymen; so the O.U.C.S. fell to pieces and disappeared, to be revived after long years and under more peaceable conditions, by the present Archbishop of York, when Vicar of St. Mary’s.

The accession of Dr. King to the Pastoral Professorship brought a new element of social delight into the ecclesiastical world of Oxford, and that was just what was wanted. We revered our leaders, but saw little of them. Dr. Pusey was buried in Christ Church; and though there were some who fraudulently professed to be students of Hebrew, in order that they might see him (and sketch him) at his lectures, most of us only heard him in the pulpit of St. Mary’s. It was rather fun to take ritualistic ladies, who had fashioned mental pictures of the great Tractarian, to Evensong in Christ Church, and to watch their dismay as that very unascetic figure, with tumbled surplice and hood awry, toddled to his stall. “Dear me! Is that Dr. Pusey? Somehow I had fancied quite a different-looking man.” Liddon was now a Canon of St. Paul’s, and his home was at Amen Court; so, when residing at Oxford, he lived a sort of hermit-life in his rooms in Christ Church, and did not hold much communication with undergraduates. I have lively recollections of eating a kind of plum duff on Fridays at the Mission-House of Cowley, while one of the Fathers read passages from Tertullian on the remarriage of widows; but this, though edifying, was scarcely social.

But the arrival of “Canon King,” with the admirable mother who kept house for him, was like a sunrise. All those notions of austerity and stiffness and gloom which had somehow clung about Tractarianism were dispelled at once by his fun and sympathy and social tact. Under his roof, undergraduates always felt happy and at home; and in his “Bethel,” as he called it, a kind of disused greenhouse in his garden, he gathered week by week a band of undergraduate hearers, to whom religion spoke, through his lips, with her most searching yet most persuasive accent.

Lovers of Friendship’s Garland will remember that, during their three years at Oxford, Lord Lumpington and Esau Hittall were “so much occupied with Bullingdon and hunting that there was no great opportunity for those mental gymnastics which train and brace the mind for future acquisition.” My ways of wasting time were less strenuous than theirs; and my desultory reading, and desultory Church-work, were supplemented by a good deal of desultory riding. I have some delicious memories of autumnal canters over Shotover and Boar’s Hill, and racing gallops across Port Meadow, and long ambles on summer afternoons, through the meadows by the river-side, towards Radley and Nuneham. Having been brought up in the country, and having ridden ever since I was promoted from panniers, I looked upon riding as a commonplace accomplishment, much on a par with swimming and skating. Great, therefore, was my surprise to find that many undergraduates, I suppose town-bred, regarded horsemanship not merely as a rare and difficult art, but also as implying a kind of moral distinction. When riding men met me riding, I saw that they “looked at each other with a wild surmise;” and soon, perhaps as a consequence, I was elected to “Vincent’s.” When, after a term or two, my father suggested that I had better have my own horse sent from home, I was distinctly conscious of a social elevation. Henceforward I might, if I would, associate with “Bloods”; but those whom they would have contemned as “Ritualistic Smugs” were more interesting companions.

The mention of “Vincent’s” reminds me of the Union, to which also I belonged, though I was a sparing and infrequent participator in its debates. I disliked debating for debating’s sake; and, though I have always loved speaking on Religion or Politics or any other subject in which the spoken word might influence practice, it has always seemed to me a waste of effort to argue for abstract propositions. If by speaking I can lead a man to give a vote on the right side, or a boy to be more dutiful to his mother, or a sin-burdened youth to “open his grief,” I am ready to speak all night; but the debates of the Oxford Union on the Falck Laws and the Imperial Titles Bill always left me cold.

The General Election of 1874 occurred during my second year at Oxford. The City of Oxford was contested by Harcourt, Cardwell, and the local brewer. Harcourt and Cardwell were returned; but immediately afterwards Cardwell was raised to the peerage, and a bye-election ensued. I can vividly recall the gratification which I felt when the Liberal candidate-J. D. Lewis-warmly pressed my hand, and, looking at my rosette, hoped that he might count on my vote and interest. Not for the world would I have revealed the damning fact that I was a voteless undergraduate.

In connexion with the Election of 1874, my tutor-C. A. Fyffe-told me a curious story. He was canvassing the Borough of Woodstock on behalf of George Brodrick, then an academic Liberal of the deepest dye. Woodstock was what was called an “Agricultural Borough”-practically a division of the County-and in an outlying district, in a solitary cottage, the canvassers found an old man whom his neighbours reported to be a Radical. He did not disclaim the title, but no inducements could induce him to go to the poll. Gradually, under persistent cross-examination, he revealed his mind. He was old enough to remember the days before the Reform Bill of 1832. His father had been an ardent reformer. Everyone believed that, if only the Bill were passed, hunger and poverty and misery would be abolished, and the poor would come by their own. He said-and this was the curious point-that firearms were stored in his father’s cottage, to be used in a popular rising if the Bill were rejected by the Lords. Well, the Lords had submitted, and the Bill had been passed; and we had got our reform-and no one was any better off. The poor were still poor, and there was misery and oppression, and the great people had it all their own way. He had got his roof over his head, and “a bit of meat in his pot,” and it was no good hoping for anything more, and he was never going to take any part in politics again. It was a notable echo from the voices which, in 1832, had proclaimed the arrival of the Millennium.

Oxford in those days was full of Celebrities. Whenever one’s friends came “up” to pay one a visit, one was pretty certain to be able, in a casual stroll up the High or round Magdalen Walks or Christ Church Meadows, to point out someone of whom they had heard before. I have already spoken of Liddell and Pusey and Liddon and Acland and Burgon and Henry Smith. Chief perhaps among our celebrities was Ruskin, who had lately been made Slade Professor of Fine Art, and whose Inaugural Lecture was incessantly on the lips of such undergraduates as cared for glorious declamation.

“There is a destiny now possible to us-the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey. We have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must either now finally betray, or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with splendid avarice, so that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour, should be the most offending souls alive.... Will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts; faithful guardian of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and, amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour, of goodwill towards men? Vexilla régis prodeunt. Yes, but of which King? There are two oriflammes; which shall we plant on the farthest islands-the one that floats in heavenly fire, or that hangs heavy with foul tissue of terrestrial gold?”

Ruskin’s lectures, ostensibly devoted to the Fine Arts, ranged over every topic in earth and heaven, and were attended by the largest, most representative, and most responsive audiences which had ever been gathered in Oxford since Matthew Arnold delivered his Farewell Lecture on “Culture and its Enemies.”

Another of our Professors-J. E. Thorold Rogers-though perhaps scarcely a celebrity, was well known outside Oxford, partly because he was the first person to relinquish the clerical character under the Act of 1870, partly because of his really learned labours in history and economics, and partly because of his Rabelaisian humour. He was fond of writing sarcastic epigrams, and of reciting them to his friends, and this habit produced a characteristic retort from Jowett. Rogers had only an imperfect sympathy with the historians of the new school, and thus derided the mutual admiration of Green and Freeman-

“Where, ladling butter from a large tureen,
See blustering Freeman butter blundering Green.”

To which Jowett replied, in his quavering treble, “That’s a false antithesis, Rogers. It’s quite possible to bluster and blunder, too!”

The mention of Oxford historians reminds me of my friend Professor Dingo, to whom reference has been made in an earlier chapter. He had a strong admiration for the virile and masterful character of Henry VIII., and was wont to conceal the blots on his hero’s career by this pathetic paraphrase-“The later years of this excellent monarch’s reign were clouded by much domestic unhappiness.”

Jowett has been mentioned more than once, and there is no need for me to describe him. Lord Beaconsfield, in Endymion, gave a snapshot of “a certain Dr. Comeley, an Oxford Don of the new school, who were initiating Lord Montfort in all the mysteries of Neology. This celebrated divine, who, in a sweet silky voice, quoted Socrates instead of St. Paul, was opposed to all symbols and formulas as essentially unphilosophical.” Mr. Mallock, in the New Republic, supplied us with a more finished portrait of “Dr. Jenkinson,” and parodied his style of preaching with a perfection which irritated the Master of Balliol out of his habitual calm. My own intercourse with Jowett was not intimate, but I once dined with him on an occasion which made an equally deep impression on two of the guests-Lord Milner and myself. When the ladies had left the dining-room, an eminent diplomatist began an extremely full-flavoured conversation, which would have been unpleasant anywhere, and, in the presence of the diplomatist’s son, a lad of sixteen, was disgusting. For a few minutes the Master endured it, though with visible annoyance; and then, suddenly addressing the offender at the other end of the table, said, in a birdlike chirp, “Sir .” “Yes, Master.” “Shall we continue this conversation in the drawing-room?” No rebuke was ever more neatly administered.

Jowett’s name reminds me, rather obliquely, of the Rev. H. O. Coxe, who in my time was Bodleian Librarian. He was clergyman, sportsman, scholar, all in one, with an infectious enthusiasm for the treasures in his charge, and the most unfailing kindness and patience in exhibiting them. “Those who have enjoyed the real privilege of hearing Mr. Coxe discuss points of historical detail, or have been introduced by him to some of the rarer treasures of the Bodleian, will bear witness to the living interest which such subjects acquired in his hands. How he would kindle while he recited Lord Clarendon’s written resignation of the 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. 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 instinctively, “That man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man.” Chiefest among the great names which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name of Edmund Burke; and the “Secret” on which we have been discoursing seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the ideal character:-“It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to cultivate friendships and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but both selected-in the one to be placable, in the other immovable.”

Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the “Secret” of Oxford.