On the right are some of the buildings of Jesus College.
The sun of a late summer afternoon strikes the western gable of the Chapel.
eyelids, one or two picked men are rising of their own free will, and some because they have to run in the Parks before a training breakfast; others are arguing with themselves or with their scouts that it cannot possibly be nearly half-past seven; or later on, that a passing bell or a bell-wether has been mistaken for the college chapel bell; others expelling the awakening scout with more frankness: some doze and doze, with alternate pricks of conscience and necessity, and desperately deciding to rise, have to saunter about, too late for chapel, too early for breakfast; the majority murmuring that all is well, and enjoying the pleasantest of thefts from daylight; for, to the man who need not, or will not, rise, the chapel bell is a blithe and kindly spirit, that sets a crown upon the bliss of oncoming sleep and gives a keener edge to his complacency, as he thinks of the cold, sleepy virtue that walks in the world below. The chaplain, a man of habit, is also getting up. No one has ever seen a fellow late for chapel.
When the service is over, those who have attended are either awake or asleep again. The service itself is of an awakening kind, and has a vigour that is unknown outside Oxford.
Oh, dear and saintly chaplain,
Time toils after you in vain!
When you stroked the Eight to glory,
Did you prove this quite so plain,
As at morning chapel daily
And at evensong again?
[Pg 362]
So run the verses which express the kind of vigour in vogue.
Now the perfervid reading man, and the man whose genealogical tree is conspicuous for a constant succession of maiden aunts, go to their cocoa and eggs: and, within three hours afterwards, the average man, to porridge, fish, eggs and bacon, coffee and oranges; the decadent, to cigars, liqueurs and wafers; the æsthete, to his seven wonders and a daffodil; and some, of all classes, to the consolations of philosophy and soda-water. Only the last-named habitually break their fast in solitude. For it is in Oxford the most social meal of the day. It may begin at any time from eight until half-past eleven—anything later being “brunch”—and last until half-past one. Some even believe that an invitation to breakfast embraces the afternoon. Lectures seldom interfere with the meal, since the man who leaves for their sake is not usually missed. A very early breakfast is pregnant with yawns, and may also be forgotten; a very late one is unhappily curtailed. Ten o’clock is an ideal to be striven after. The host has to be studious not to invite two men who are “blues,” or who are entered for the same examinations, or who are freshmen from the same school, which would be apt to produce treatises instead of conversation. It is dangerous also to have two epigrammatists. For that leads to a game of shuttlecock and battledore between the two, and of patience among the rest.... He knows that four men incapable of these things are coming, and as he peeps from his bedroom to see that all is ready,[Pg 363] he hears their steps and laughter echoing up the stairs. He is rapidly surveying them all in his mind, wondering how such excellent ingredients will mix, when they enter, having picked one another up by good fortune on the way, and already got rid of a possible tendency to talk about politics, weather, or dreams. They discuss everything. One who is bound to be a fellow starts on “the æsthetic value of dons.” One who has never left England offers a suggestive remark on Swiss scenery or the effect of palms against a sunrise in the Pacific. The transitions are indescribably rapid; yet the link of merely an epigram or a laugh, or possibly the very sense of contrast and incongruity, makes the whole run on as some fine hedge of maple, hawthorn, holly, elm, beech, and wild cherry runs on, and is fine and nothing else, except to a botanist. The talk is a play in five acts: each man is in turn a chorus. But whether the subject be freshmen, or Disraeli, or Sancho Panza, or the English aristocracy, it is treated as it never was before. Perhaps that is the result of the detached attitude of a number of very young men. Perhaps it is because each in turn, of the five average men, is touched with genius temporarily by accretion from the other four. One says a dull thing, another a silly thing, a third a rash thing, a fourth a vague thing, and straightway the fifth catches fire and blazes with something of the true light from heaven, and he not less than the rest is astonished. The spirit of the conversation is as different from the prandial spirit as shortbread from wedding cake. It has neither the richness of that nor the frivolity of tea.[Pg 364] The breakfast talker seems to depend very little on memory. He remembers fewer stories, less of the book he read on the night before, than at a later meal. He is thrown more entirely upon the resources of his own fantasy. The experience of sleep still lies like a great water between him and yesterday. In the cold, young, golden light, among the grey stones of the quadrangle, the brain, too, rejoices in its own life, and forgets to look before and after. Habit is weaker. He catches another glimpse of the “clouds of glory,” if only in a mirage. He is renovated by the new day; and although by dinner-time he will have advanced to warmer sympathies and a more tranquil satisfaction, there will then be something more cynical in his indolent optimism than in the sharp but easily warded points of morning wit.... Of course, a breakfast party of men in training for the Torpids is another thing. That is a question of arithmetic. So, too, with a breakfast given formally to freshmen, which is mainly a question of time and stories about dons. Breakfasts with fellows are either of the best kind, or they are ceremonies. There are some colleges, where the fellows not only feel that there is no need of condescension, but they do not condescend: the elder is not expected to be preternaturally simple, nor the younger to be abstruse. In other colleges, such breakfasts of the great and small are sometimes farces and sometimes ceremonies. The don knows that the other’s knowledge of the Republic is small; the undergraduate is equally aware of the fact: the one assumes that he has an index to the othe[Pg 365]r’s mind; the other that one so scathing in his opinion of essays will be the same in his treatment of little quips about the Colonial Secretary or accounts of pheasant-shooting in the Christmas vacation: one is determined to pounce; the other not to be pounced upon. The scout who changes the dishes indicates whether it is a ceremony or a farce. If he smiles, it is the one; if he does not, it is the other. Not everybody, indeed, in these colleges has the same misfortune, though any one may, as the young man who carefully prepared a paraphrase of one of the obscurest articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica and two brand new epigrams artfully inwoven, and served them up as he sat down at the breakfast table of the bursar, who smiled and commented moodily: “What a boon the Encyclopædia is to the tired man!” But breakfast with even the best of dons has this disadvantage, that he can bring it to an end with a word; so that his guest may afterwards be seen disconsolately reading a newspaper, and feeling that to have eaten food is hardly more to have breakfasted than to have dined.
Between nine and one o’clock the different species of Oxford kind are either within doors—sleeping, talking, or working—or to be seen in various conditions of unrest; observers and observed in the High, in pairs or singly; and, if freshmen, either stately in scholars’ gowns or apparently anxious to convince others that they have just picked up their commoners’ gowns; sauntering to the book-shops, or to look at a cricket pitch or a dog; or hurrying to lectures with an earnest[Pg 366]ness that strangely disappears when they are seated and the lecture is begun.
In the stream of men there is one thin black line that is unwavering—the line of men, with white fillets of sacrifice under their chins, going to the examination Schools. This is the only place in the world where the plough is still wrought into a weapon of offence. They are under the care of a suitable, ferocious, wild man, who is one of the Old Guard of the opposition to women at Oxford; and in his bleak invitation to ladies, to proceed to their appointed rooms, lays terrible stress upon the word “women,” as if it were a term of abuse in his strange tongue. He is partly responsible for the reply of an undergraduate to an American who asked, what might be the name of the buildings which he so admired and which made him feel at home?