§ 5
Oswald’s investigation of Oxford and Cambridge began even before Peter had entered School House at Caxton. As early as the spring of 1906, the scarred face under the soft felt hat was to be seen projecting from one of those brown-coloured hansom cabs that used to ply in Cambridge. His bag was on the top and he was going to the University Arms to instal himself and have “a good look round the damned place.” At times there still hung about Oswald a faint flavour of the midshipman on leave in a foreign town.
He spent three days watching undergraduates, he prowled about the streets, and with his face a little on one side, brought his red-brown eye to bear on the books in bookshop windows and the display of socks and ties and handkerchiefs in the outfitters. In those years the chromatic sock was just dawning upon the adolescent mind, it had still to achieve the iridescent glories of its crowning years. But Oswald found it symptomatic; ex pede Herculem. He was to be seen surveying the Backs, and standing about among the bookstalls in the Market Place. He paddled a Canadian canoe to Byron’s pool, and watched a cheerful group dispose of a huge tea in the garden of the inn close at hand. They seemed to joke for his benefit, neat rather than merry jesting. So that was Cambridge, was it? Then he went on by a tedious crosscountry journey to the slack horrors of one of the Oxford hotels, and made a similar preliminary survey of the land here that he proposed to prospect. There seemed to be more rubbish and more remainders in the Oxford second-hand bookshops and less comfort in the hotels; the place was more self-consciously picturesque, there was less of Diana and more of Venus about its beauty, a rather blowsy Gothic Venus with a bad tooth or so. So it impressed Oswald. The glamour of Oxford, sunrise upon Magdalen tower, Oriel, Pater, and so forth, were lost upon Oswald’s toughened mind; he had spent his susceptible adolescence on a battleship, and the sunblaze of Africa had given him a taste for colour like a taste for raw rye whiskey....
He walked about the perfect garden of St. Giles’ College and beat at the head of Blepp, the senior tutor, whose acquaintance he had made in the Athenaeum, with his stock questions. The garden of St. Giles’ College is as delicate as fine linen in lavender; its turf is supposed to make American visitors regret the ancestral trip in the Mayflower very bitterly; Blepp had fancied that in a way it answered Oswald. But Oswald turned his glass eye and his ugly side to the garden, it might just as well have not been there, and kept to his questioning; “What are we making of our boys here? What are they going to make of the Empire? What are you teaching them? What are you not teaching them? How are you working them? And why? Why? What’s the idea of it all? Suppose presently when this fine October in history ends, that the weather of the world breaks up; what will you have ready for the storm?”
Blepp felt the ungraciousness of such behaviour acutely. It was like suddenly asking the host of some great beautiful dinner-party whether he earned his income honestly. Like shouting it up the table at him. But Oswald was almost as comfortable a guest for a don to entertain as a spur in one’s trouser pocket. Blepp did his best to temper the occasion by an elaborate sweet reasonableness.
“Don’t you think there’s something in our atmosphere?” he began.
“I don’t like your atmosphere. The Oxford shops seem grubby little shops. The streets are narrow and badly lit.”
“I wasn’t thinking of the shops.”
“It’s where the youngsters buy their stuff, their furniture, and as far as I can see, most of their ideas.”
“You’ll be in sympathy with the American lady who complained the other day about our want of bathrooms,” Blepp sneered.
“Well, why not?” said Oswald outrageously.
Blepp shrugged his shoulders and looked for sympathy at the twisted brick chimneys of St. Giles’.
Oswald became jerkily eloquent. “We’ve got an empire sprawling all over the world. We’re a people at grips with all mankind. And in a few years these few thousand men here and at Cambridge and a few thousand in the other universities, have practically to be the mind of the empire. Think of the problems that press upon us as an empire. All the nations sharpen themselves now like knives. Are we making the mentality to solve the Irish riddle here? Are we preparing any outlook for India here? What are you doing here to get ready for such tasks as these?”
“How can I show you the realities that go on beneath the surface?” said Blepp. “You don’t see what is brewing today, the talk that goes on in the men’s rooms, the mutual polishing of minds. Look not at our formal life but our informal life. Consider one college, consider for example Balliol. Think of the Jowett influence, the Milner group—not blind to the empire there, were we? Even that fellow Belloc. A saucy rogue, but good rich stuff. All out of just one college. These are things one cannot put in a syllabus. These are things that defeat statistics.”
“But that is no reason why you should put chaff and dry bones into the syllabus,” said Oswald....
“This place,” said Oswald, and waved his arm at the great serenity of St. Giles’, “it has the air of a cathedral close. It might be a beautiful place of retirement for sad and weary old men. It seems a thousand miles from machinery, from great towns and the work of the world.”
“Would you have us teach in a foundry?”
“I’d have you teaching something about the storm that seems to me to be gathering in the world of labour. These youngsters here are going to be the statesmen, the writers and teachers, the lawyers, the high officials, the big employers, of tomorrow. But all that world of industry they have to control seems as far off here as if it were on another planet. You’re not talking about it, you’re not thinking about it. You’re teaching about the Gracchi and the Greek fig trade. You’re magnifying that pompous bore Cicero and minimizing—old Salisbury for example—who was a far more important figure in history—a greater man in a greater world.”
“With all respect to his memory,” said Blepp, “but good Lord!”
“Much greater. Your classics put out your perspective. Dozens of living statesmen are greater than Cicero. Of course our moderns are greater. If only because of the greatness of our horizons. Oxford and Cambridge ought to be the learning and thinking part of the whole empire, twin hemispheres in the imperial brain. But when I think of the size of the imperial body, its hundreds of nations, its thousands of cities, its tribes, its vast extension round and about the world, the immense problem of it, and then of the size and quality of this, I’m reminded of the Atlantosaurus. You’ve heard of the beast? Its brain was smaller than the ganglia of its rump. No doubt its brain thought itself quite up to its job. It wasn’t. Something ate up the Atlantosaurus. These two places, this place, ought to be big enough, and bigly conceived enough, to irradiate our whole world with ideas. All the empire. They ought to dominate the minds of hundreds of millions of men. And they dominate nothing. Leave India and Africa out of it. They do not even dominate England. Think only of your labour at home, of that huge blind Titan, whom you won’t understand, which doesn’t understand you——”
“There again,” interrupted Blepp sharply, “you are simply ignorant of what is going on here. Because Oxford has a certain traditional beauty and a decent respect for the past, because it doesn’t pose and assert itself rawly, you are offended. You do not realize how active we can be, how up-to-date we are. It wouldn’t make us more modern in spirit if we lived in enamelled bathrooms and lectured in corrugated iron sheds. That isn’t modernity. That’s your mistake. In respect to this very question of labour, we have got our labour contact. Have you never heard of Ruskin College? Founded here by an American of the most modern type, one Vrooman.” He repeated the name “Vrooman,” not as though he loved it but as though he thought it ought to appeal to Oswald. “I think he came from Chicago.” Surely a Teutonic name from Chicago was modern enough to satisfy any one! “It is a college of real working-men, of the Trade Union leader type, the actual horny-handed article, who come up here—I suppose because they don’t agree with your idea that we deal only in the swathings of mummies. They at any rate think that we have something to tell the modern world, something worth their learning. Perhaps they know their needs better than you do.”
Oswald was momentarily abashed. He expressed a desire to visit this Ruskin College.
Blepp explained he was not himself connected with the college. “Not quite my line,” said Blepp parenthetically; but he could arrange for a visit under proper guidance, and presently under the wing of a don of radical tendencies Oswald went.
It seemed to him the most touching and illuminating thing in Oxford. It reminded him of Jude the Obscure.
Ruskin College was sheltered over some stables in a back street, and it displayed a small group of oldish young men, for the most part with north-country accents, engaged in living under austere circumstances—they paid scarcely anything and did all the housework—and doing their best to get hold of the precious treasure of knowledge and understanding they were persuaded Oxford possessed. They had come up on their savings by virtue of extraordinary sacrifices. Graduation in any of the Oxford schools was manifestly impossible to them, if only on account of the Greek bar; the university had no use for these respectful pilgrims and no intention of encouraging more of them, and the “principal,” Mr. Dennis Hird, in the teeth of much opposition, was vamping a sort of course for them with the aid of a few liberal-minded junior dons who delivered a lecture when their proper engagements permitted. There was a vague suggestion of perplexity in the conversation of the two students with whom Oswald talked. This tepid drip of disconnected instruction wasn’t what they had expected, but then, what had they expected? Vrooman, the idealist who had set the thing going, had returned to America leaving much to be explained. Oswald dined with Blepp at St. Osyth’s that night, and spoke over the port in the common room of these working men who were “dunning Oxford for wisdom.”
Jarlow, the wit of the college, who had been entertaining the company with the last half-dozen Spoonerisms he had invented, was at once reminded of a little poem he had made, and he recited it. It was supposed to be by one of these same Ruskin College men, and his artless rhyming of “Socrates” and “fates” and “sides” and “Euripides,” combined with a sort of modest pretentiousness of thought and intention, was very laughable indeed. Everybody laughed merrily except Oswald.
“That’s quite one of your best, Jarlow,” said Blepp.
But Oxford had been rubbing Oswald’s fur backwards that day. The common room became aware of him sitting up stiffly and regarding Jarlow with an evil expression.
“Why the Devil,” said Oswald, addressing himself pointedly and querulously to Jarlow, “shouldn’t a working-man say ’So-crates?’ We all say ’Paris.’ These men do Oxford too much honour.”