nephew without an aunt, and I am sure you couldn’t do without several.”
“I wonder why he came to Oxford,” reflects the freshman.
“He’s mistaken his calling,” chuckles the other on the way downstairs.
The freshman lights his meerschaum (holding it in a silk handkerchief), and begins to make a plan for three or four years. But he never completes it. He believes Oxford to be as a fine sculptor, and wishes to put himself in its hands in such a way as to be best shapen by the experience, in a “wise passiveness.” He wants to be a scholar, and fears to be a pedant. He wants to learn a wise and graceful habit with his fellow-men, and fears to be what he hears called a gentleman. He wants to test his enthusiasm and prejudices, and fears to be a Philistine. He wants to taste pleasure delicately, and fears to be a viveur or an æsthete. None of these aims is altogether conscious or precise; yet it is some such combination that he sees before him, faint and possible, at the end of three or four years. Nor has he any aim beyond that. He will work, but at what? Neither has he realised that he will be alone and unhelped.
At first the loneliness is a great, and even at times a delirious, pleasure; and whether he is in a church, or in the fields, or among books, it is almost sensual, and never critical. Oxford is, as it were, doing his living for him. He is as powerless to influence the passage of his days as to plan the architecture of his[Pg 274] dreams. He only awakens at his meals with contemporaries, and sometimes at interviews with tutors. The former find him dull and superior. The latter tell him that in his work he is indeed gathering honey, but filling no combs; and find him ungainly and vague. He consoles himself with the reflection that he is not becoming a pedant or a careless liver. He writes verses to celebrate the melodious days he lives. All influences of men fall idly upon him—
They on us were rolled
But kept us not awake.
The digressive habit of mind not only grows upon him; he cultivates it. His tutor says that it is impossible to give a title to his best essays. Long, lonely evenings with books only encourage the habit. But he can defend it, and laughs at criticism. Shakespeare’s dramas, he says, flow through the centuries, like the Nile; his flood is not so vast, that it may not be aggrandised by many a tributary. It has come down to us vaster than when it reached Milton or Gray, not only by definite commentary, but by the shy emotions of a myriad readers. We add to it, he says triumphantly, by our digressions; and what revelation it may make in consequence, to a far future generation, we cannot guess. In his pursuit of words, which soon enthrall him, he goes far, rather than deep. Wherever the word has been cherished for its own sake, in all “decadent” literature, he makes his mind a home. He begins to write, but in a style[Pg 275] which, along with his ornate penmanship, would occupy a lifetime, and result in one brochure or half a dozen sonnets. It is a kind of higher philately. But it takes him to strange and fascinating byways in literature. He loves the grotesque. Now and then, he lets fall a quotation or even a dissertation on such a book at dinner, and suddenly he is launched into popularity.
First he is hailed as a decadent, and shrinks. When the shrinking is over, he secretly falls in love with the half-contemptuous title, and seeks others who accept it. Now he is never by himself. Those with whom he has no sympathies like him because he happens to know Pantagruel and a few books such as some undergraduates keep between false covers. His room is fragrant with unseasonable flowers, with the perfume of burning juniper, burning cassia, and cedar, and sweet oils. What if the honourable ghosts of Oxford frown upon his strange devotions? He is at least living a life that could not persist elsewhere. At chapel, he is reading Theophrastus. He is studying an undercurrent of the Italian Renaissance at a lecture on Thucydides. As if he were to live for ever, and in Oxford, his existence is such that his stay in Oxford or in life becomes precarious. He is reputed to be a connoisseur in wines, pictures, and sixteenth-century furniture. He is a Roman Catholic by profession, an agnostic by conviction; yet no religion or superstition is quite safe from his patronage. He mistakes the recrudescence of childishness for a sad and wise maturity. Freshmen are struck by his listless gaiety and the unkind[Pg 276] and seeming wise solemnity of his light expressions. If to sit sumptuous and still, to discourse melodiously of everything or nothing, to be courteous, sentimental, cold, and rude in turns, were wisdom, he is wise. He acquires the lofty cynicism of the under-informed and the over-fed. He can talk with ease and point, about the merely married don, about virtue as the fine which the timid pay to the bold, about the dulness of enthusiasm and the strange beauty of grey. At what is temperate and modest he throws satire with a bitterness enhanced by a secret affection for what he lapidates. Like a man who should paint an angel and call it a thief, he narrowly pursues his own choicest veiled gifts with a malicious word. In short, his brilliant conversation proves how much easier it is to think what one says than to say what one thinks. Yet is he now a harder student than he has ever been, and allows nothing to disturb him at his books. He has nodded at European literatures through half their courses, in the lonely hours when his companions are asleep. He is planning again, and realises that it would be a showy thing to get a first class. His conversation becomes gloomy as well as bitter. People suspect that he means what he says; and he mutters in explanation that experience is the basis of life and the ruin of philosophies. His friends simply accept the remark as untrue. He is now often reduced to silence among those who sleep well. He no longer pours a current of fresh and illuminating thought upon things which he not only does not understand, but does not care for, in politics or art.[Pg 277]
He slips out of brilliant company, to enter occasionally among religious circles where they are tolerant of lost sheep, and has begun to pay his smaller bills and to find out what books he must read for a degree, when the examination day arrives. Then he borrows his old dignified look of indolence in the sultry schools, while he writes hard, and secures a second class by means of a legible handwriting, clear style, and amusing irrelevance. He goes down, alone, still with a fascinating tongue, desperate, and yet careless of success, ready to do anything so long as he can escape comfortable and conventional persons, and quite unable to be anything conspicuous, but a man who has been to the garden of the Hesperides and brought back apples that he alone can make appear to be golden in his rare moments of health.