The Present
The fact that no porter or other college servant has recently received a D.C.L. is no proof of his insignificance. “The President and your humble servant manage very well between us,” said one porter, with perfect truth. College servants are the corbels and gargoyles that complete the picturesqueness and usefulness of Oxford. The oldest are not so much serviceable as quaint, often grotesque, reminders of an age that has gone; their faces are apt to express grim judgments upon the changes which they have helplessly watched; and they are among the stoutest retainers of the past. The younger are either very much like any other good men-servants, silent, receptive, curious but uninquiring, expensive, and better able to instruct than to learn; or they are average men, with Oxford variations. In spite of their profound knowledge of the richer classes, they remain, as a body, good conservatives, with the half-sarcastic, half-reverent servility of their order. They[Pg 322] do not often change; the men whom they serve are replaced every year by others; and looking on at generation after generation, they are not only skilled and practical psychologists, and almost the only persons in Oxford who wear silk hats on Sunday, but perhaps the most enduring human element in the University. “Well,” says an eighteenth-century “scout” to another to-day, in an undergraduate “dialogue of the dead”—“Well, I suppose gentlemen are no worse and servants no better than in my time?” “Such a thing is impossible” was the reply. Yet one may surmise that they are more plutocratic, at least, than they were, if it be true that every summer at a Scottish hotel one may find “Mr. and Mrs. Brown of—— College, Oxford” on the pages of the visitors’ book, in a handwriting known to the buttery. In the game which they play with the undergraduates, they know all their opponents’ cards. Yet, until a member of the University is admitted to the cellar and pantry parliament, they will always be praised as reticent and discreet. A little inexperience will soon reveal, as the freshman knows, the other qualities of the college servant.
I
He awakens you every morning by playing with your bath, and is a perpetually recurring background to the sweet disquiet of your last half-hour in bed. In serving you, he serves himself; and late in the day he[Pg 323] is to be seen with a wallet on his back, bent under such “learning’s crumbs” as half-empty wine-bottles and jars of Cooper’s marmalade. In these matters he has a neat running hand, without flourishes. No man has the air of being so much as he the right hand of fate. When he drinks your wine and disappoints a joyous company, when he assumes your best cigars, and leaves only those which were provided for the freshman of taste—so inevitable are his ways that you can only hope sarcastically that he liked the fare. He appears to have a noble scorn of cash, when he asks for it; and you are bound to imitate. All the wisdom of the wise is cheap compared with his manner of beginning a speech with, “If you please, sir, it is usual for freshmen to, ...” while he is dusting your photographs. He is blessed with an incapacity to blush. His politics are those of the majority; his religion has something in common with that of all men. He could be conscientiously recommended for a post in a temple niche or a street corner, with the inscription “For twenty years a mate at sea, and blinded in the pursuit of my duties,” or “Crippled in childhood.” He is equalled only by his “boy,” who is perhaps older than himself. I remember one such. I should like to have known his tailor, who must have had a genius for style, for fitting aptest clothes for men. His coat was as many-pocketed as Panurge’s, and as wonderful. Its bulges and creases were an epitome of——; its “hang” might serve as the one true epitaph, if suspended over his tomb. With all his faults, he had that toleration which the vicious[Pg 324] often extend to the good, but do not often receive in return. He was a fellow of infinite wiles that were wasted but not thrown away in a world of three or four quadrangles and a buttery. Full of traditions, he was their master, not their prey; and though he was the shadow of great names, he seemed conscious of being their inheritor too. For he had served men who had got fellowships and even Rugby or rowing Blues. With leading cases out of this mighty past he defended his misdemeanours and supported his proposals. In vain he toiled after time; he was always a generation behind. If a man failed in “Smalls” or Divinity, he was told that Mr.——, the “Varsity three-quarter,” did no less, and Mr.——, who rowed at Henley and was sent down after a bonfire, was ploughed four times. “Lightly like a flower” he wore his honours, tyrannising over men who never got Blues and were never sent down, and smiling away awe and ridicule alike. “I never saw nor shall see such men as Pirithous, ...” he might have said; it mattered little to him; and even Pirithous was only respected after many years, when he had become an investment of the “boy’s.” He quoted wise saws, was full of advice, offered with a kind of humility and yet indifference, because you were so small a factor in his self-satisfaction.
High on your summit, Wisdom’s mimick’d Air
Sits thron’d, with Pedantry her solemn sire.
In every glance and motion you display,
Sage Ignorance her gloom scholastic throws
And stamps o’er all your visage, once so gay,
Unmeaning Gravity’s serene repose.
[Pg 325]
And so he goes through life, with all the pomp of learning—of the reality, none—complacent, imposing, and yet hardly a man.
II
Of the college cook it is easy to say too much. He is a potentate against whom there is no appeal on earth. “Much knavery,” says Ben Jonson, “may be vented in a pudding.” In the days of the Shotover Papers he could offer in exchange for a recipe “an introduction to some country families.” At the monastic door of his kitchen, as he meditates his mysteries, something of the Middle Ages clings to him yet, and he is half an abbot, contemptuous of a generation that makes small demand upon his subtlety and wealth. It is said that he comes of brilliant ancestry and has fallen. What heights there may be in the world from which a man could be said to fall in becoming a college cook, I do not know. For years he made clear the distinction between fancy and imagination. By fancy he lived, and on his fancies generations fed. He could disguise the meanest materials, and make them illustrious, subtle, or exquisitely sweet. He was animal propter convivia natum. In his grey kitchen, with chestnut beams aloft, a visitor seemed to assist at the inauguration of a perpetual spring. On the one hand was the earth—the raw material—the mere flesh or fish; and out of this, with upturned sleeves, like artist or conjuror, he made the flowers flourish and the leaves abound. By the perfume, it was a mysterious indoor Mayday. And so[Pg 326] he lived, and was feared and respected. But it was admitted that he had rivals. Something in a grander style was yet to be done....
It was mid-February. Wherever I looked, I saw first the cold white sky above and the snow beneath, and secondly the red faces of skaters out of doors, and indoors the blaze of great fires and the purple and gold of wine. Winter was to be met in every street—white-haired, it is true, but nevertheless a lusty, red-faced fellow, redder than autumn, with a grip of the hands and a roaring voice. As I passed the kitchen, the cook was silently at work. His hair was like the snow, his face like the fire. The brass, steel, pewter, and silver shone. The kitchen, with its fragrance, lustre, and quietness, was like an altar. There, too, was the priest, with stainless vestment and sacerdotal bearing. And as I left him and mounted the stairs, I seemed unblest. I found Scott tedious, Pater excessive, and Sir Thomas Browne a trifler, and threw them aside. Soon there was a knock at the door, and a man—a throne, domination, princedom, virtue, power—swept magnificently in. A light and a warmth, beyond the power of fire to bestow, accompanied him. He bent down solemnly and laid a little white covered plate upon the hearth. Before I could speak—“the gods themselves are hard to recognise”—he was gone. I uncovered the plate with something of my visitant’s solemnity—
Fair spirit of ethereal birth,
In whom such mysteries and beauties blend!
Still from thine ancient dwelling-place descend,
And idealise our too material earth;[Pg 327]
Still to the Bard thy chaste conceptions lend,
To him thine early purity renew;
Round every image, grace majestic throw;
Till rapturously the living song shall glow
With inspiration as thy being true,
And Poesy’s creations, decked by thee,
Shall wake the tuneful thrill of sensuous ecstasy.
It was the climacteric of his career, and he shall go down to posterity upon the palates of men, not as one who worked out his recipes to three places of decimals, or as a distinguished maker of “bishop” or “posset,” or as one worth his weight in oysters, but as the creator of that necessary which is in fact brown bread, toasted and buttered.
III
Most pontifical of all college servants was old Acamas, who was not long ago to be seen, in his retirement, apparently beating the city bounds, and now and then standing sentry and defender of some old gate or archway. I first noticed him in the chapel quadrangle of——, and could almost have mistaken him for a fellow of the old school, such was his aspect, and the reverent, half-wondering air with which he surveyed the buildings. But he took off his hat to the junior fellow, and I was undeceived. There was something pathetic in that salute. He was himself apparently far worthier than the young man in flannels of the chapel and the ancient arms; and he seemed to know it, as he bent and trembled over his stick to declaim:—
“He may be a very clever young gentleman, but,[Pg 328] bless me, it is not the Greek that makes the scholar. There was the old President, who never looked at his book, and was all for horses;—but he had a way with him; he would swear just so, so; he was a scholar, if ever a man was. But the new ones are just all book or all play. They came in about the same time as bicycles and steam ploughs and such nonsense. And there’s too much lady about the college now; and such ladies! they are so dressed that it is hard to tell which of them is quite respectable....”
And so he went on, a little less reverent than he looked. But it was only a crimson heat of old age, and soon passed.
What a fine, decent figure he was. He was clothed in a dull black suit, with black tie, and an old-shaped hat, and wore his gloves. He had unquestionably a professional mien, and could not have been a gardener or groom. He was something old, settled in the land and known to the stars, traditional. His sorrow was nothing less dignified than disestablishment. It was time to be going. The enemy was in possession and insulting. He had been in the Balliol fellows’ garden ages ago, and knew what a line the old buildings made against the sky, and what the scene is now. He would walk about, hoping to express a volley of scorn by his silence to persons with no ear for silence. He never went into Tom quad at Christ Church without missing the figure of Mercury—perhaps a copy from John of Bologna, and taken down early last century—which used to preside over the fountain, still known as[Pg 330][Pg 329]
THE TOM QUADRANGLE, CHRIST CHURCH, FROM THE SOUTH ENTRANCE
This Quadrangle was formerly cloistered. The springers, the wall ribs of the vaulting, and the bases of the buttresses may be seen on the two sides of the Quadrangle shown in the picture.
The Great Hall and tower founded by Cardinal Wolsey are on the right or southern side, whilst opposite, over the eastern buildings, rise the tower and spire of “The Cathedral Church of Christ in Oxford.”
Part of the basin of the fountain is seen on the left.
The time is late afternoon in summer.
“Mercury,” and used as a water ordeal or court of ultimate appeal by undergraduates. “That old pagan fellow,” he used to say, “told you more about the size of that quadrangle than the guide-books do”; and certainly nothing short of that or a playing fountain would so pleasantly expound the spaciousness of Wolsey’s square. When some one proposed burning in effigy certain officials at the time of Edward VII.’s coronation, he “did not remember that such things were done at George’s.”
He stopped to look at the new buildings of the college, and pointing at the whitened stone, said, “I don’t believe that stone is stone at all.” As he passed an entry, full of bicycles, he said sadly, without a thought of scorn, “It was built by public subscription,” and with his hand in his pocket, he seemed to be thinking that the finest thing in the world was to be the sole founder of a college. He once had a distant prospect of the Banbury Road, and would like to make night beautiful with its burning.
He still leaves Oxford by coach, or not at all. I believe that he calls Market Street “Cheyney Lane,” and Brasenose Lane “St. Mildred’s,” and Pembroke Street “Pennyfarthing Street.” To hear him talk of St. Scholastica’s day gives one a pretty notion of the antiquity of Oxford and himself. In 1354, on that day, several scholars found fault with the wine of a city vintner, and threw it at his prosperous face. The vintner gathered his neighbours and threatened. St. Martin’s bell was rung, and the city made fierce[Pg 334] preparations at the accustomed summons. Then St. Mary’s bell was rung, and the University came forth with bows and arrows and slings. “Slay,” and “Havock,” and “Give good knocks,” cried the citizens. The fight was long and bloody, and disastrous to the scholars. So for many centuries the city had to appear penitentially at St. Mary’s on St. Scholastica’s day. In 1825 this institution ceased at the corporation’s request. But Acamas will never forgive them, and hardly the University for giving way. “When laudable old customs dwindle, ’tis a sign learning dwindles,” he would say, as Hearne said, when there were no longer any fritters at dinner. Nor is he to be moved by the mundane glories of his college in the schools or elsewhere. A brilliant “examinee” of the college, and his particular aversion, having gained a First in Law, when it was pointed out to him by the scholar’s scout, the old man remarked: “And now I hope he knows what a privilege it is to belong to this college.”
How slow and decorous he was at the buttery hatch, performing even his own business as if he were about that of another. He carried a plate as if it were a ceremony; and his imperturbability would have completely endowed a railway porter and several judges. In hall, when once the needs of all the diners had been supplied, he would stand like “Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved,” an effigy, a self-constituted symbol of olden piety and order, bent on asserting sweet ancient things, while fellows raced into hall, and undergraduates raced[Pg 336][Pg 335]
CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE AND MERTON TOWER, FROM CHRIST CHURCH MEADOWS
To the left of the picture shows a portion of the east boundary wall of the gardens of Christ Church, shadowed by elegant silver birch.
Part of Corpus Christi College looks over the Fellows’ Garden, divided from Christ Church Meadows by a wall, upon which is a fence of flowering dahlias.
The Chapel tower of Merton College rises grandly against the sunset sky.
In the foreground a pathway fenced from the Meadows runs farther on, under the old south city wall, passing under the Fellows’ Garden of Merton, shown in another picture.
out. He was one with the coats of arms emblazoned on the panels or the glass, and the benefactors’ portraits up among the shadows of the roof timber, and with the dial on the grass, which says, “I change and am the same.”
He is now seldom outside the old city wall, unless he goes in May to the river through Christ Church or between Merton and Corpus. When he sees Tom tower he makes the melancholy revelation that he once heard Tom boom one time less than the appointed number. As for the flowers in the window-boxes, it is “cook’s work”; he has seen the like ornament “on pastry.” On a bank holiday he is clothed in extraordinary dignity and gloom, and stands with an expression that wields a mace, in the hope of repelling the pleasure-seeker from some holy or learned retreat. If he were not mistaken for an eminent person, it would fare ill with those whose footsteps he dogs, lest they should commit some desecration. He can hardly permit smoking in the quadrangles, and has to turn his back to avoid seeing the accursed thing. At one time, a man dared not run through the purlieus of the Divinity School, for fear of the nod of Acamas.
He is a mirror of good manners, which he has learned out of love, and not necessity. He has a great store of antique information—statutes, precedents, fables—which, as in an aumbry, he keeps fragrant by much meditation, and is pleased to display. His elaborate courtesies are interpreted almost as insults by the new generations; men wonder what they have done to[Pg 340] deserve his withering respect. It is reported that on one occasion, at twilight, a vigorous gentleman brushed past him, between the Camera and Brasenose. Acamas turned, with a soft and bitter protest against “a gentleman forcing what he could command.” “If,” said he, “the Vice-Chancellor were here, he should know that a gentleman had insulted an old college servant by mistaking him for a townsman.” ... He bowed and almost broke his heart when he recognised the beaming face of the Vice-Chancellor.
He is the corrector of all new abuses and the defender of old, and through his father, a college butler and long since dead, he has the times of Trafalgar fresh in his mind, with imposing third-hand memories of the days when Oxford was Jacobite. The subtle distinguishing marks of all the colleges, as far as concerns fashions of morals and manners, scholarship and sport, he knows by heart, and professes such an experienced acquaintance with like matters that in the High or by the Long Bridges he knows at sight a “Greats” man or a “Stinks” man or a mathematician; of which last he is a determined hater; and when on one occasion he remarked on the good looks of a certain plain person, he was forced to explain that he meant “good-looking for a mathematician.” He would at need devise a new coat of arms for Magdalen or St. John’s, or improve “the devil that looks over Lincoln.”
Of “his own college” he knows everything, from the cobweb on Jeremy Taylor in the library to the[Pg 341] oldest beam in the kitchen roof. He knows the benefactors and their benefactions, their rank, and everything but the way to pronounce their names; and has a kind of unofficial bidding prayer in celebration of their good deeds. His ideal of a head of a college is an odd mixture of Dean Gaisford and Tatham of Lincoln; for he demands some eccentricity along with dignity and repute, and in the course of three-quarters of a century he has combined the two. The common-room chairs he knows better than those who sit in them—their history and their peculiarities, and who have sat therein. By nice observation he is aware of the correct way of crossing a quadrangle, and of whose furniture should be consumed in bonfires. The spires and gateways of the city are close friends to him, and “Isn’t she beautiful,” or “Isn’t he looking well,” or “They have their little ways,” is his comment as he passes one or other of the things that have brooded over his life continually. He can tell when the bats will come out of the tower in a fine January or a windy March; when the swifts shall scream first by All Saints’; and the colour of New College tower when a storm is due from the west. I can think of him as being the deity of the place, in a mythopœic age, and picture him corniger, with fritillaries in his hoary locks, as the genius of Isis, up in a niche at the Bodleian.[Pg 342]