* * * * *
Still on her spire the pigeons hover;
Still by her gateway haunts the gown;
Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,
Drumming her old ones forth from town,
Know you the secret none discover?
Tell it—when you go down."
Know you the secret none discover—none, that is, while they still are undergraduates?
Well, I think I do; and, to begin with a negative, it is not the secret of Nirvana. There are misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which includes all knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from the human tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be calm. And so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may be. The bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to the well-spread tables of Halls and Common-rooms. In a laburnum-clad villa in The Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life in cities where five families camp in one room. But, when we leave actualities, and come to the region of thought and opinion, all the pent energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for "Prophet" comes, I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble like water on the flame; and it is just in this fervency of thought and feeling that Oxford is Prophetic. It is the tradition that in one year of the storm-tossed 'forties the subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem was Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding poem at Cambridge was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to herself. For a century at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) she has been the battle-field of contending sects. Her air has resounded with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain lie thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with fine irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery. Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blows which our strength could compass, and devised the most dangerous pitfalls for our opponents' feet which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture.