“I, Terrae Filius, a free-thinker, and a free-speaker, highly incensed against all knavery and imposture, and not thinking Truth such a terrible enemy to religion and good order, as it has been represented, do hereby declare war against all cheats and deluders, however dignified, or wheresoever residing; the fear of obloquy and ill-usage shall not deter me from this undertaking, nor shall any considerations rob me of the liberty of my own thoughts and my own tongue. In the pursuit of this design, I shall not confine myself to any particular method; but shall be grave and whimsical, serious or ludicrous, prosaical or poetical, philosophical or satirical, argue or tell stories, weep over my subject, or laugh over it, be in humour or out of humour, according to whatever passion is uppermost in my breast whilst I am writing.”
In token of this promise there stands the truth on every page, however bedded in satire, philosophy, poetry, or ridicule. He saw to it that his daily path was studded with nails, and in his passage he hit them each one on the head. As a result the pages of Terrae Filius are from cover to cover a source of immense joy. For an example of bold and delightful satire I cannot find a better instance than the ne plus ultra in skits on the Poetical Club. Of course he gave the president and learned professors who composed it fictitious names, but it is palpable that those caricatured recognised themselves, and, if they had the least grain of humour in their compositions, they must have enjoyed it thoroughly. As, however, the question of their possessing a sense of humour is open to grave doubts—a fact proved by the very formation of the club and the secrecy of its doings—it is infinitely more likely that the club writhed under his well-pointed jibes and consigned the author to eternal perdition. Then, too, the bland and smiling manner in which he turned aside the violent pulpit denunciations of his hard-hit victims is exhilarating to a degree. He received, for instance, a letter from an anonymous friend (hidden behind the title “John Spy”) who sent him an account of the heated charges laid at his door by a certain grave college Head. Terrae printed the letter and smilingly pointed out the reasons of the man’s wrath in a tone of charming tolerance.
“You see, reader,” he said, “that I had no sooner undertaken this task but I raised a nest of holy wasps and hornets about my ears; an huge old drone, grown to an excessive bulk upon the spoils of many years, has thought fit, you see, to call me terrible names before his learned audience, at St Mary’s Church in Oxford; it is, it seems, an hellish attempt to bring about a reformation of the universities; and it is daring and impious in me to style myself a free-thinker and a free-speaker: poor man! poor man! What! art afraid I should tell tales out of school, how a certain fat doctor got his bedmaker with child, and play’d several other unlucky pranks? That would be daring and impious indeed. No, no, never fret thyself, man; I love a pretty woman myself, and I never desire any better usage in this world than as I do unto others to be done unto myself.”
Turning to politics, Terrae Filius summed up the attitude of the authorities in Oxford in one short paragraph—which was made a hundred times more severe by his assertion upon honour that religion received the same treatment at their hands.
“In politics my advice is the same as in religion—not to let your upstart reason domineer over you, and say you must obey this king or that king; or you must be of this party, or that party; instead of that, follow your leaders; observe the cue, which they give you; speak as they speak; act as they act; drink as they drink, and swear as they swear; comply with everything which they comply with; and discover no scruples which they do not discover.”
Upon a Whig and a Tory enquiring what was their exact position, he told them that one day the Whig might be safe and have things all his own way, but that the next the certainty of the Tory’s being uppermost was absolute. Finally he urged upon them that the only safe method of proceeding was to employ what are called nowadays the Winston tactics—one side one day, the other the next, according to one’s greater individual advantage.
He dealt exhaustively with the peculiarly slack method of conducting, or rather the practical non-existence of, university examinations. On reading his account alone, it would very naturally be supposed that he was drawing the long bow, caricaturing the existing conditions out of all shape and possibility of recognition, and we laugh unreservedly. But further study of other writers’ criticisms of the times very quickly turns our smile into a gasp of amazement. Terrae Filius was not caricaturing. All his absurd and quite impossible relations of bribery and corruption were true. It is precisely the same with all his papers. He has wisely written them in the style of caricatures, and at times, no doubt, has indulged his humour overmuch; but, on going into his inimitable showings up of drinking and immoral Dons, political conflicts, university statutes, toasts, smarts, or any one of the innumerable subjects dissected by him, and then comparing his work with other eighteenth-century documents, one finds that Terrae Filius carried out his boast and kept to the truth.
Is there any man to-day who, at the age of twenty-four, has achieved such notoriety, done such brilliant work, and proved himself to be such a master of his craft?