CHAPTER VII

EARLY DAYS AT OXFORD

It had been settled that my edition of the Rig-veda should be printed at the Oxford University Press, and I found that I had often to go there to superintend the printing. Not that the printers required much supervision, as I must say that the printing at the University Press was, and is, excellent—far better than anything I had known in Germany. In providing copy for a work of six volumes, each of about 1000 pages, it was but natural that lapsus calami should occur from time to time. What surprised me was that several of these were corrected in the proof-sheets sent to me. At last I asked whether there was any Sanskrit scholar at Oxford who revised my proof-sheets before they were returned. I was told there was not, but that the queries were made by the printer himself. That printer was an extraordinary man. His right arm was slightly paralysed, and he had therefore been put on difficult slow work, such as Sanskrit. There are more than 300 types which a printer must know in composing Sanskrit. Many of the letters in Sanskrit are incompatible, i. e. they cannot follow each other, or if they do, they have to be modified. Every d, for instance, if followed by a t, is changed to t; every dh loses its aspiration, becomes likewise t, or changes the next t into dh. Thus from budh + ta, we have Buddha, i. e. awakened. In writing I had sometimes neglected these modifications, but in the proof-sheets these cases were always either queried or corrected. When I asked the printer, who did not of course know a word of Sanskrit, how he came to make these corrections, he said: “Well, sir, my arm gets into a regular swing from one compartment of types to another, and there are certain movements that never occur. So if I suddenly have to take up types which entail a new movement, I feel it, and I put a query.” An English printer might possibly be startled in the same way if in English he had to take up an s immediately following an h. But it was certainly extraordinary that an unusual movement of the muscles of the paralysed arm should have led to the discovery of a mistake in writing Sanskrit. In spite of the extreme accuracy of my printer, however, I saw, that after all it would be better for myself, and for the Veda, if I were on the spot, and I decided to migrate from London to Oxford.

My first visit had filled me with enthusiasm for the beautiful old town, which I regarded as an ideal home for a student. Besides, I found that I was getting too gay in London, and in order to be able to devote my evenings to society, I had to get up and begin work soon after five. May, therefore, saw me established for the first time in Oxford, in a small room in Walton Street. The moving of my books and papers from London did not take long. At that time my library could still be accommodated in my portmanteau, it had not yet risen to 12,000 volumes, threatening to drive me out of my house. A happy time it was when I possessed no books which I had not read, and no one sent books to me which I did not want, and yet had to find a place for in my rooms, and to thank the author for his kindness.

I at once found that my work went on more rapidly at Oxford than in London, though if I had expected to escape from all hospitality I certainly was not allowed to do that. Accustomed as I was to the Spartan diet of a German convictorium, or a dinner at the Palais Royal à deux francs, the dinners to which I was invited by some of the Fellows in Hall, or in Common Room, surprised me not a little. The old plate, the old furniture, and the whole style of living, impressed me deeply, particularly the after-dinner railway, an ingenious invention for lightening the trouble of the guests who took wine in Common Room. There was a small railway fixed before the fireplace, and on it a wagon containing the bottles went backwards and forwards, halting before every guest till he had helped himself. That railway, I am afraid, is gone now; and what is more serious, the pleasant, chatty evenings spent in Common Room are likewise a thing of the past. Married Fellows, if they dine in Hall, return home after dinner, and junior Fellows go to their books or pupils. In my early Oxford days, a married Fellow would have sounded like a solecism. The story goes that married Fellows were not entirely unknown, and that you could hold even a fellowship, if you could hold your tongue. Young people, however, who did not possess that gift of silence, had often to wait till they were fifty, before a college living fell vacant, and the quinquagenarian Fellow became a young husband and a young vicar.

What impressed me, however, even more than the great hospitality of Oxford, was the real friendliness shown to an unknown German scholar. After all, I had done very little as yet, but the kind words which Bunsen and Dr. Prichard had spoken about me at the meeting of the British Association, had evidently produced an impression in my favour far beyond what I deserved. I must have seemed a very strange bird, such as had never before built his nest at Oxford. I was very young, but I looked even younger than I was, and my knowledge of the manners of society, particularly of English society, was really nil. Few people knew what I was working at. Some had a kind of vague impression that I had discovered a very old religion, older than the Jewish and the Christian, which contained the key to many of the mysteries that had puzzled the ancient, nay, even the modern world. Frequently, when I was walking through the streets of Oxford, I observed how people stared at me, and seemed to whisper some information about me. Tradespeople did not always trust me, though I never owed a penny to anybody; when I wanted money I could always make it by going on faster with printing the Rig-veda, for which I received four pounds a sheet. This seemed to me then a large sum, though many a sheet took me at first more than a week to get ready, copy, collate, understand, and finally print. If I was interested in any other subject, my exchequer suffered accordingly—but I could always retrieve my losses by sitting up late at night. Poor as I was, I never had any cares about money, and when I once began to write in English for English journals, I had really more than I wanted. My first article in the Edinburgh Review appeared in October, 1851.

At that time the idea of settling at Oxford, of remaining in this academic paradise, never entered my head. I was here to print my Rig-veda and work at the Bodleian; that I should in a few years be an M.A. of Christ Church, a Fellow of the most exclusive of colleges, nay, a married Fellow—a being not even invented then—and a professor of the University, never entered into my wildest dreams. I could only admire, and admire with all my heart. Everything seemed perfect, the gardens, the walks in the neighbourhood, the colleges, and most of all the inhabitants of the colleges, both Fellows and undergraduates. My ideas were still so purely continental that I could not understand how the University could do such a thing as incorporate a foreign scholar—could, in fact, govern itself without a Minister of Education to appoint professors, without a Royal Commissioner to look after the undergraduates and their moral and political sentiments. And here at Oxford I was told that the Government did not know Oxford, nor Oxford the Government, that the only ruling power consisted in the Statutes of the University, that professors and tutors were perfectly free so long as they conformed to these statutes, and that certainly no minister could ever appoint or dismiss a professor, except the Regius professors. “If we want a thing done,” my friends used to explain to me, “we do it ourselves, as long as it does not run counter to the statutes.”

But Oxford changes with every generation. It is always growing old, but it is always growing young again. There was an old Oxford four hundred years ago, and there was an old Oxford fifty years ago. To a man who is taking his M.A. degree, Oxford, as it was when he was a freshman, seems quite a thing of the past. By the public at large no place is supposed to be so conservative, so unchanging, nay, so stubborn in resisting new ideas, as Oxford; and yet people who knew it forty or fifty years ago, like myself, find it now so changed that, when they look back they can hardly believe it is the same place. Even architecturally the streets of the University have changed, and here not always for the better. Architects unfortunately object to mere imitation of the old Oxford style of building; they want to produce something entirely their own, which may be very good by itself, but is not always in harmony with the general tone of the college buildings. I still remember the outcry against the Taylor Institution, the only Palladian building at Oxford, and yet everybody has now grown reconciled to it, and even Ruskin lectured in it, which he would not have done, if he had disapproved of its architecture. He would never lecture in the Indian Institute, and wrote me a letter sadly reproving me for causing Broad Street to be defaced by such a building, when I had had absolutely nothing to do with it. He was very loud in his condemnation of other new buildings. He abused even the New Museum, though he had a great deal to do with it himself. He had hoped that it would be the architecture of the future, but he confessed after a time that he was not satisfied with the result.

In his days we still had the old Magdalen Bridge, the Bodleian unrestored, and no trams. Ruskin was so offended by the new bridge, by the restored Bodleian, and by the tram-cars, that he would go ever so far round to avoid these eyesores, when he had to deliver his lectures; and that was by no means an easy pilgrimage. There was, of course, no use in arguing with him. Most people like the new Magdalen Bridge because it agrees better with the width of High Street; they consider the Bodleian well restored, particularly now that the new stone is gradually toning down to the colour of the old walls, and as to tram-cars, objectionable as they are in many respects, they certainly offend the eye less than the old dirty and rickety omnibuses. The new buildings of Merton, in the style of a London police-station, offended him deeply, and with more justice, particularly as he had to live next door to them when he had rooms at Corpus.

These new buildings could not be helped at Oxford. The stone, with which most of the old colleges were built, was taken from a quarry close to Oxford, and began to peel off and to crumble in a very curious manner. Artists like these chequered walls, and by moonlight they are certainly picturesque, but the colleges had to think of what was safe. My own college, All Souls, has ever so many pinnacles, and we kept an architect on purpose to watch which of them were unsafe and had to be restored or replaced by new ones. Every one of these pinnacles cost us about fifty pounds, and at every one of our meetings we were told that so many pinnacles had been tested, and wanted repairing or replacing. Many years ago, when I was spending the whole Long Vacation at Oxford, I could watch from my windows a man who was supposed to be testing the strength of these pinnacles. He was armed with a large crowbar, which he ran with all his might against the unfortunate pinnacle. I doubt whether the walls of any Roman castellum could have resisted such a ram. I spoke to some of the Fellows, and when the builder made his next report to us, we rather objected to the large number of invalids. He was not to be silenced, however, so easily, but told us with a very grave countenance that he could not take the responsibility, as a pinnacle might fall any day on our Warden when he went to chapel. This, he thought, would settle the matter. But no, it made no impression whatever on the junior Fellows, and the number of annual cripples was certainly very much reduced in consequence.