IX

There was for a short time, amidst but not of the University, a student whom I cannot but count as a “clerk of Oxenford.” He came from no school, but straight from a counting-house. All his life he had been a deep, unguided delver in the past. An orphan in the world, he had chosen his family among the noble persons of antiquity. Cæsar was more real to him than Napoleon, and Cato more influential than any millionaire. He had tasted all the types, from Diogenes to Seneca and Lucullus. When he tired of his counting-house, he tried to imagine a resemblance between it and a city state, but was himself but a helot in the end.

So it happened that he came to live in a cottage attic, five or six miles from Oxford. He wanted to be a university man. He despised scholarships as if they had been the badge of the Legion of Honour. Colleges he would have nothing to do with, because they spoiled the simplicity of the idea of a university in his mind. They had made possible the social folly of Oxford. But in his reading of history he had travelled no farther than the Middle Ages towards his own time; and a picture of Oxford life in that day fascinated him. He believed that it was still possible to lead the unstable, independent, penniless life of a scholar; and he knew not why a student should hope or wish to be anything like a merchant or a prince. A merchant had money, and a prince flattery: he would have wisdom. It was[Pg 299] likely to be a long search, and in his view it was the search that was beyond price. He wanted wisdom as a man might want a star, because it was a rare and beautiful thing. So his studies were a spiritual experience. The short passages of Homer which he knew by heart had something of religious unction in his utterance.

He left London afoot, with a parcel of books strapped to his shoulders; his only disappointment coming from a landlord who refused to pay for his singing with a meal, as he would have done six hundred years ago. A farmer treated him generously, under the belief that he was mad.

A few antiquated Greek texts and notes, an odd volume of Chronicles from the Rolls Series, and an Aldrich, adorned his room, and with their help he hoped to lay the foundations of a seraphic, universal wisdom. Gradually he would become worthy to use the Bodleian and contend with the learned gown and hostile town.

Once a week, in the beginning, he walked into Oxford. He saw the river covered with boats, and laughed happily and pitifully at men who seemed to know nothing about the uses of a university. A good-tempered youth, in rowing knickerbockers, was a fit disciple for his revelations, he thought, and was about to preach, when he barely escaped from a bicycle and a megaphone. Almost sad, murmuring Abelard’s line

Sunt multi fratres sed in illis rarus amicus—
[Pg 300]

he hastened to the city. The spires gave him courage again, and he ran, singing an old song:—

When that I was a scholar bold,
And in my head was wealth untold:
Heigh! Ho! in the days of old
In Oxford town a scholar trolled.

Every one in a master’s gown received a bow. He was mistaken for a literary man. And once in Oxford, he went, seriously and as if at a ceremony, through a minutely prepared plan. He attended service at one of the churches, and especially St. Mary’s. He took long, repeated walks up and down High Street, and into all the lanes, which he hardly knew when their names had been changed. Then he sat for an hour in the oldest-looking inn. In blessed mood, he tried the landlord unsuccessfully with Latin, and waited until some scholar should call and exchange jests with him in the learned tongue, or perhaps join him in a quarrel with the town. The only scholar that called talked in a strange tongue, chiefly to a bull-pup, and never to him. And late at night he stole reluctantly home, never so much pleased as when, in a dark alley, he was saluted by a proctor, and asked if he might be a member of the University. But the little note inviting him to be at—— College at—— A.M. on the following day never came, and he was cheated of the glory of being the first member of the University who could by no means pay a fine.