PREFACE
I think it meet, Gentlemen, that before we resume our subject to-day, a word should be said on a loss that has befallen English letters in general and our sister-University in particular, since I last addressed you.
Walter Raleigh was an authentic son of Cambridge: and although he spent the most of his life teaching in other places the better understanding of a literature—our own literature—which in his undergraduate days had not found adequate recognition here, yet Cambridge had been his pasture, and he carried everywhere the mettle of that pasture: yes, and unmistakably, and although by the gay sincerity of his nature he would win men to like him, wherever he went.
Personal affection may count for too much in my faith that he will some day be recognised, not only for a true son of Cambridge, but for a great one in his generation. I put, however, that reckoning on one side. He did, very gaily and manfully and well, all the work that fell to his hand; and his end was in this wise. He had, in the first and second weeks of August, 1914, been eye-witness at Oxford of one of two amazing scenes—the other simultaneously passing here—when in these precincts, in these courts of unconscious preparation, by these two sacred streams, all on a sudden the spirit of youth was a host incorporate.
Χρυσῷ δ’ ἄρα Δῆλος ἅπασα
ἤνθησ’, ὡς ὅτε τε ῥίον οὔρεος ἄνθεσιν ὕλης.
“Then Delos broke in gold, as a mountain spur is canopied in season with the flowering bush.”
“The mettle of your pasture” ... “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision” ... and the host, so suddenly gathered, as suddenly in motion, gone, for their country’s sake challenging the scythe. Raleigh saw that with his eyes, and could not forget.
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The Dean of St. Paul’s returned, the other day, to a rightly respectful Cambridge, to deliver a Rede Lecture to us on The Victorian Age. Now he is a fool who denies or doubts Dean Inge to be a great man of our time—though he may now and then be a little too apt to regard himself as the only widow of another. Dean Inge, at any rate, felt himself strong enough to tell you he had no doubt that, to the historian of the future, the Elizabethan and Victorian Ages will appear as “the twin peaks in which English civilisation culminated.”
Now I have been talking to you—already through three lectures—upon the best-beloved writer of that Victorian Age—its most representative writer, perhaps—and preaching his eminence. But I should be nervous of claiming quite all that! It seems to me, if I may put it so without offence, a somewhat complacent view for us to take of an Age in which we were born—he, to unseal the vials of prophecy, I, just to happen along with the compensation of a more sanguine temperament. He admits that he has “no wish to offer an unmeasured panegyric on an age which after all cannot be divested of the responsibility for making our own inevitable.” He admits that “the twentieth century will doubtless be full of interest, and may even develop some elements of greatness.” But as regards this country, “the signs are that our work on a grand scale, with the whole world as our stage, is probably nearing its end.” Well, I dare to say that such talk from a man of the Dean’s age or mine is more than unhopeful; is ungrateful:
Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti....
Would he but go back in memory to the tempus actum of August, 1914, it may dawn upon him that “fears may be liars” and the likelier for that some hopes were not dupes: that some men less gifted, less eloquent, than he, in those August days of 1914 saw this vision as of a farther Pacific:
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Raleigh at any rate saw it: I would not use extravagant language, but I verily believe Raleigh, from that hour, saw the assembled chivalry of those boys of 1914 as a meadow of cloth-of-gold spreading past all known or prophetical horizons—a prairie, the scent over which was a scent of sacrifice, at once holy and intolerable. Let me repeat—for one does not ring changes on the loss of a friend—the mourning bell strikes once and repeats itself—let me repeat some words written, the other night, under durance on returning from his funeral:
In his last few years, under an invincible inward compulsion, he turned from his life’s trade, in which he had vindicated himself as one of the best few, to become a child again and learn to be a valiant soldier. The sacrifice of the young in 1914–18, about which so many talk so easily, was a torture to him: it cut to the bone, the marrow. It was matter for indignation that he should survive these many boys.... Some of us, who noted, almost from the first, the operation of the War upon Raleigh’s soul, foreboded that in some way or other it would cut short his span, or, at least, that it menaced him. His converse again and again would wander away from the old writers, once his heart-fellows, to machinery, air-fights, anything.... When I last talked with him he was full of his History of the Air Service in the War, the first volume of which is in the press, I believe. For the second he went out to survey, from the air, the fields of campaign in Mesopotamia, took typhoid in Baghdad, and came home just in time to die.
It is a purely simple story: of a great teacher who saw his pupils go from him on a call more instant than his teaching, and followed their shades with no thought of
So were I equall’d with them in renown
but the thought only to overtake them in service.
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Forgive the length of my discourse, Gentlemen. It is right, I think, that our sister-Universities should feel one for the other’s pride, one for the other’s wound.