He has come up to Oxford with an unconquerable love of men and books and games; is resolved not to be careful in small matters for a few years; and has a clear vision of a profession ahead. Others think that a fellowship and a prize are his due; he vaguely regards them as nice. But he has a strong belief that any kind of distinction is dangerous at Oxford, and among the least of its possibilities. He respects the scholar and the Blue, and sees that they might equally well be made in another city or on another stream. Bent upon a life among men, he sees that a university is a place where many are men, but where many of the suspicious and calculating passions of a bigger world are in abeyance; and thinks that it should therefore be the home of perfect rivalries and friendships.
He will attend the lectures of——, which are outside his course. He [Pg 290]will accept some hearty excesses in the rooms of—— as equally important. When he comes up his sympathies are universal. He is eager and warm in his liking of men and things; and he is straightway on happy terms with undergraduates and dons. After a few terms his versatility is hard-worked in order to give something more than an appearance of sympathy in the company of athletes, reading men, contemplative men, and wealthy men. For a time his success is sublime. The reading man thinks there was never such a student. The rowing man approves of his leg-work and his narratives at those little training parties for the enjoyment of music, port, and fruit—“togger ports.” His method appeals to the don. Now and then, indeed, some one a little more reticent than himself puts him to a test, and he may discourse on Aquinas to a Unitarian Socialist, or on Gargantua to one deep in Christian mysticism or fresh from the new year’s advice of his great-aunt. In such cases, either he is repulsed with sufficient narrowness on the part of the other to supply a necessary balm, or he makes a surprised and admiring convert, who may do odd things on account of his inferior versatility. For quite a long time he may have the good fortune to let loose his interest in the Ptolemies in the neighbourhood of other admirers or neutral gentlemen. And so long all is more than well. He is popular, exuberant, and in a fair way of growth, albeit a little overdone. It is true that in tired moments he is likely to choose the path of least resistance and find himself in not very versatile company. But what a life he leads! what afternoons on the Cherwell between Marston and Islip in the[Pg 291] summer; and beyond Fyfield, when autumn still has all that is a perfecting of summer in its gift! The admiring plodder who hears his speeches says that he will some day be Lord Chancellor. His verses have something beyond cleverness in them: they have a high impulsion, as when spring makes a crown imperial or a tulip. And listening to his talk or reading his letters, one might think that he will be content to be one of those men of genius who avoid fame—but if their letters are unearthed two hundred years hence they will have the life of Wotton’s or T. E. Brown’s. His friends think that such a clear-souled, gracious, brilliant creature would leaven the Senior Common Room and draw out the shyness of ——, and twist the neck of ——’s exuberant dulness.
The liberal life, close in friendship with so many of the living and the historical, on occasions almost gives him the freedom of all time. His friends note that Catullus or Lucan or Dante is nearer to him than to other men. He quotes them as if he had lived with them and were their executor, and by his sympathy seems to have won a part authorship of their finest things. He expounds the law and makes it as exhilarating as the Arabian Nights, or as if it were a sequel to Don Quixote. And in history the dons notice his picturesqueness, which is as passionate as if he could have written that ardent sonnet:—
The kings come riding back from the Crusade,
The purple kings, and all their mounted men;
They fill the street with clamorous cavalcade;
The kings have broken down the Saracen.[Pg 292]
Singing a great song of the Eastern wars,
In crimson ships across the sea they came,
With crimson sails and diamonded dark oars,
That made the Mediterranean flash with flame.
And reading how, in that far month, the ranks
Formed on the edge of the desert, armoured all,
I wish to God that I had been with them
When the first Norman leapt upon the wall,
And Godfrey led the foremost of the Franks,
And young Lord Raymond stormed Jerusalem.
So the glories of youth and history and summer mingle in his brain and speech.
No one is so married to his surroundings as he, and while he appears to many to be shaped by them—beautiful or grotesque—as an animal in a shell; to a few he appears also to shape them, so that Oxford in his company is a new thing, as if it were the highest, last creation of the modern mind. He does not acquiesce in the limp mediævalism of the rest, but recreates the Middle Ages for himself, finding new humanities in the sculptures, and beauties in the perspective, strange sympathies between the monkish work and the voices and faces of those who sit amidst it. In his own college he effects a surprising “modernisation” by removing a little eighteenth-century work and revealing the fifteenth-century original. Thus all history is to him a vivid personal experience.
But he is overwhelmed by his versatility, and cultivates that for its own sake, and at last loses his sympathy with all who are not as he. The athletes begin to treat him as a poser. The hard workers stand aloof from his extravagances. With different sets he is treated[Pg 293] and rejected as a man of the world, a hepatetic philosopher, a dilettante; ... some speak of the literary taint; the dons are tired. He is in danger of becoming the hero of the most unstable freshman and his scout. And so, though he has perhaps but one failing more than his contemporaries, and certainly more virtues, he is ridiculed or feared or despised, and goes about like Leonolo in the play, who wandered
Because perhaps among the crowd
I shall find some to whom I may relate
That story of the children and the meat—
until he has the good luck to fall back upon his friends. There he is safe again. His name will indeed be handed down through half a dozen undergraduate generations for his least characteristic adventures, but if that is a rare distinction, and equivalent to a press immortality, it is likely to be of no profit to him. Where he used to be an expensive copy of a Bohemian, he becomes at last as near the genuine thing as any critic, with a wholesome fear of being absolute, would care to pronounce. His one pose is that of the plain-spoken, natural man, in the presence of a snob. Everywhere he is as independent as a parrot or a tramp. In life, few are to be envied so much. For he achieves everything but success.