Not even this peculiar town
Has ever fixed a friendship firmer,
But—one is married, one’s gone down,
And one’s a Don, and one’s in Burmah.
. . . . . . . . . .
And oh! the days, the days, the days,
When all the four were off together;
The infinite deep of summer haze,
The roaring boast of autumn weather!
. . . . . . . . . .
I will not try the reach again,
I will not set my sail alone,
To moor a boat bereft of men
At Yarnton’s tiny docks of stone.

But I will sit beside the fire,
And put my hands before my eyes,
And trace, to fill my heart’s desire,
The last of all our Odysseys.

The quiet evening kept the tryst:
Beneath an open sky we rode,
And mingled with a wandering mist
Along the perfect Evenlode....

I

The average man seldom gets into a book, though he often writes one. Yet who would not like to paint him or have him painted, for once and for ever! And, a fortiori, who would not wish the same for the average[Pg 263] undergraduate? I can but hint at his glories, as in an architect’s elevation. For he is neither rich nor poor, neither tall nor short, neither of aristocratic birth nor ignobly bred. Briefly, Providence has shielded him from the pain and madness of extremes. He plays football, cricket, rackets, hockey, golf, tennis, croquet, whist, poker, bridge. In neither will he excel; yet in some one he will for an hour be conspicuous, if only at a garden-party or on a village green. He never rashly ventures in the matter of dress, and when his friends who are above the average are wearing very green tweeds, he will be just green enough to be passable, and yet so subdued as not to be questioned by those who stick to grey. He is never punctual; on the other hand, he is never very late. In conversation, he will avoid eloquence for fear of long-windedness, and silence for fear of appearing original or rude: at most, he will be frivolous to the extent of remarking, about a pretty face, ‘Oh, she is alpha plus!’ As a freshman only will he make any great mistakes. Thus, he will have several meerschaums; will assemble at a wine party the most incompatible men, and conclude it by all but losing his self-respect; and will for a term use Oxford slang as if it were a chosen tongue, and learn a few witticisms at the expense of shopkeepers, if he is free by the accident of birth. But he will speedily forget these things and become a person with blunt and tender consideration for others, and may be popular because of his excellent cigarettes or his ready listening. He will in a few years learn to row honestly, if not[Pg 264] brilliantly; to know what is fitting to be said and read in the matter of books; to discuss the theatre, the government, the cricket season, in an inoffensive way. Add to this pale vision the colouring implied by a college hat-band and a decent, ruddy face, and you have the not too vigorous or listless, manly man, with modest bearing and fearless voice, who plays his part so well in life, and now and then—on a punt, or at a wedding—reveals to the discerning observer his university. The late Grant Allen knew him by his broad, brown back, and his habit of bathing in winter in a rough sea.

II

He has come to Oxford, much as a man of old would have come to some fabled island, out beyond the pillars of Hercules; for even so Oxford is out beyond the world which he knows—

The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours
Thither all their bounties bring.

Perhaps his schoolmasters have been Oxford men. But that has not disillusioned him. He has been in the habit of thinking of them as men who, for some fault or misfortune, have come back from the fortunate islands, discontented or empty. They have not known how to use the place: he knows, or will learn to know; and he dreams of it in his peaceful country school, or at a London school, where boys go as to a place of business, and make verses as others cast accounts. To[Pg 265] some Oxford men, Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” is the finest poem that was ever written; and he knows it by heart already; has sighed ignorantly over it; and as his train draws near to Oxford, he repeats it to himself, with a most fantastic fervour, as if it were half a prayer and half a love-song, and certainly more than half his own. The pleasant excited uncertainty, as to whether he has seen the Fyfield elm, or whether that oaken slope was Cumnor, and his happy surmises while his eye skips from tower to tower in the distance, blind him to the drizzling, holiday air of the platform: he has no time to remember how it differs from Eastbourne: he is so set upon beholding the High Street that he is indifferent to the tram and the mean streets, and is not reminded of Wandsworth. The cabman is to him a supernal, Olympian cabman. He pays the man heavily, and quotes from Sophocles as he steps through the lodge gate, amid the greetings of porter, messenger, and a scout or two. The magnificent quadrangle gives a dignity to his walk that is laughable to senior men. He goes from room to room, making his choice, and knows not whether to be attracted by the spaciousness of one suite, or the miniature sufficiency of another,—the wainscot of a third, the traditions of a fourth, or the view from a fifth.

In the evening, at dinner in the college hall, he puts all of his emotion into the grace before meat, and by his slow, loving utterance robs the fellows of their chairs and the undergraduates of their talk. He scans curiously the healthy or clever or human faces of his[Pg 266] contemporaries at the table. As all visible things are symbols, he supposes that something, which he is too inexperienced to understand, distinguishes these youths from the others with similar faces in London or elsewhere. He answers a few questions about his school and his athletic record. Then he falls back upon the coats of arms and the founders’ portraits on the walls, and is glad when he has returned to his room. There, the unpacking and arrangement of a hundred books fill the hours until long after midnight. For he kneels and opens and reads a page, and dreams and reopens, and goes to the window, to listen or watch. Not a book but he finds flat and uninspired, and quite unworthy of his first Oxford night. He wants something more megalophonous than De Quincey, more perfect than Pater, more fantastic than Browne, more sweet than Newman,—something that shall be witty, spiritual, gay, and solemn in a breath,—something in short that was never yet written by pen and ink, although often inspired by a night like this.