(For it is Cambridge, of course, though he calls it Oxbridge. And here may I parenthetically drop a long-hoarded curse upon that trick of the Victorian novelists of sending up their young heroes to Oxbridge or Camford, entering them usually at the College of St. Boniface, head of the river or just about to be head. If, from the pages of Victorian fiction, a crew could be mustered to unmoor and paddle down the dear old ’Varsity barge, in the early June twilight, past the Pike and Eel to Iffley, there to await the crack of the rifle that loosens the tense muscles,—heavens! what a crew!—or, as Matthew Arnold would say, “what a set!”—all so indifferent to the rules of training, so like in appearance to young Greek gods, so thirsty!—and, on the run of it, what laurels for dear old St. Boniface!... I don’t know why these hermaphrodite names “Oxbridge” and “Camford” have always been so peculiarly repugnant to me: but they always have been, and are. I feel somehow as if to be a graduate of either were to offend against the Table of Forbidden Degrees. But Thackeray achieved one success in the blending—when he combined “scout” and “gyp” into “skip.”)
Oxbridge, then, in Pendennis is Cambridge. Thackeray came up in February, 1829—in the Lent term, that is, instead of in the previous October—I cannot discover for what reason. It made him, however, by the rules then prevailing, a non ens or non annus man for that year: and being also a non-reading man, he decided after two years of genially unprofitable residence, to refuse the Tripos and a degree, and retire on London, and took chambers at Hare Court in the Temple. His age was twenty.
III
Sainte-Beuve—I have read reasonably in his voluminous works, but without as yet happening on the passage which, quoted by Stevenson in his Apology for Idlers, really needs no verification by reference, being just an opinion dropped, and whoever dropped it and when, equally valuable to us—Sainte-Beuve, according to Stevenson, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years before we go hence: and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter XX, which is the Differential Calculus, or in Chapter XXXIX, which is hearing the band play in the gardens. Note well, if you please, that I am not endorsing this as a word of advice for Tripos purposes. I am but applying it to Thackeray, who never sat for his degree, but left Cambridge to write Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Esmond, sundry other great stories, with several score of memorable trifles—ballads, burlesques, essays, lectures, Roundabout Papers, what-not. If I may again quote from Sir Walter Raleigh, “there are two Days of Judgment, of which a University examination in an Honours School is considerably the less important.” The learning we truly take away from a University is (as I conceive) the talent, whatever it be, we use (God helping), and turn to account. Says Mr. Charles Whibley of Thackeray’s two years here:
The friendships that he made ended only with his life, and he must have been noble, indeed, who was the friend of Alfred Tennyson and of Edward FitzGerald. Moreover, Cambridge taught him the literary use of the university, as the Charterhouse had taught him the literary use of a public school. In a few chapters of Pendennis he sketched the life of an undergraduate, which has eluded all his rivals save only Cuthbert Bede. He sketched it, moreover, in the true spirit of boyish extravagance, which he felt at Cambridge and preserved even in the larger world of London; and if Trinity and the rustling gown of Mr. Whewell had taught him nothing more than this, he would not have contemplated them in vain.
As a matter of fact, of course, the Charterhouse and Cambridge had taught him much more, even of scholarship. “Scholarship,” is, to be sure, a relative term which, if lifted to the excellent heights—to scorn lower degrees of comparison—(as heaven forbid it should not be) will exclude all who have so learnt their Horace at school that in after life merely to rehearse and patch together from memory an Ode of his, long ago learnt for “repetition,” brings comfort to the soul and can steel it, Romanly, under the stars even on Himalayan outposts. But if there be aught worthy the name of scholarship to have that one author bred into your bones—why, then, I challenge that Thackeray did carry away a modicum of scholarship (and a very pure modicum, too) from school and university. I shall come to his prose cadences by and by, and will say no more of them here than that—in Esmond especially, but in general and throughout his prose—they are inconceivable by me save as the cadences of a writer early trained upon Greek and Latin. For blunter evidence, you will find the Roundabout Papers redolent—in quotation, reminiscences, atmosphere—of Horace on every page; and for evidence yet more patent take his avowed imitation of Horace (Odes i. 38), the two famous, jolly Sapphic stanzas beginning Persicos odi. Turn to your Conington (say) and you will find them most neatly and adequately rendered: and then take your Thackeray—
But a plain leg of mutton, my Lucy,
I prithee get ready at three;
Have it smoking and tender and juicy,
And what better meat can there be?