Here was Wedders writing with more distinction than Michael would have expected, but not with all the sartorial distinction of his attire.
“Let us turn now to the illustrators of the sixties and seventies, and we shall see....” Wedderburn in the plural scarcely managed to convey himself into print. The neat bulk began to sprawl: the solidity became pompous: the profundity of his spoken voice was lacking to sustain so much sententiousness.
Quo Vadis? By Nigel Stewart.
Nigel’s plea for the inspiration of modernity to make more vital the decorative Anglicanism whose cause he had pledged his youth to advance, was with all its predetermined logic and emphasis of rhetorical expression an appealing document. Michael did not think it would greatly serve the purpose for which it had been written, but its presence in The Oxford Looking-Glass was a guarantee that the youngest magazine was not going to ignore the force that perhaps more than any other had endowed Oxford with something that Cambridge for all her poets lacked. Michael himself had since he came up let the practice of religion slide, but his first fervors had not burned themselves out so utterly as to make him despise the warmth they once had kindled. His inclination in any argument was always toward the Catholic point of view, and though he himself allowed to himself the license of agnostic speech and agnostic thought, he was always a little impatient of a skeptical non-age and very contemptuous indeed of an unbelief which had never been tried by the fire of faith. He did not think Stewart’s challenge with its plaintive under-current of well-bred pessimism would be effective save for the personality of the writer, who revealed his formal grace notwithstanding the trumpeting of his young epigrams and the tassels of his too conspicuous style. With all the irritation of its verbal cleverness, he rejoiced to read Quo Vadis? and he felt in reading it that Oxford would still have silver plate to melt for a lost cause.
Under the stimulus of Nigel Stewart’s article, Michael managed to finish his breakfast with an appetite. As he rose to leave the Common Room, Lonsdale emerged from the zareba of illustrated papers with which he had fortified his place at table.
“Have you been reading that thing of Mossy’s?” he asked incredulously.
Michael nodded.
“Some of it,” Michael assured him.
“I suppose it would be only sporting to buy a copy,” sighed Lonsdale. “I suppose I ought to buzz round and buck the college up into supporting it. By Jove, I’ll write and tell the governor to buy a copy. I want him to raise my allowance this year, and he’ll think I’m beginning to take an interest in what he calls ‘affairs.’”