Seventy Years Among Savages

by Henry S. Salt

But even the genial Dr. Kennedy could not wholly release himself from the rigidness of Cambridge etiquette: it was impossible, so he had stated when he desired me to call on him, for him to call on an undergraduate. No such difficulty existed for the greatest yet least assuming of the distinguished men then living in Cambridge, Frederick Denison Maurice. Having heard of me as a pupil of Mr. Kegan Paul’s, he came, though he was an old man, to my room on the top story in King’s, and talked so quietly and naturally that I felt quite at ease with him. On a later occasion I breakfasted at his house, alone with him, a privilege which I much valued; for even then I was aware of his real greatness, unlike as he was to the pompous University magnates who figured so largely in public. If only the heads of Colleges and Universities could know—but, of course, they rarely know—how much more powerful is the influence of simple unaffected kindness than of the affability which betrays a touch of patronage and condescension!

St. Edward’s Church, of which Maurice was the incumbent, was close to the gates of King’s—and some of us undergraduates used to go there on Sunday evenings, notwithstanding our weariness of our own chapel services, in order to hear him preach, for we were drawn to him by the obvious impression which he gave of quiet sympathy and strength. At a time when the revolting doctrine of eternal punishment was still widely held, his humanizing influence must have been very valuable within the Church. Matthew Arnold’s clever gibe, that he beat about the bush, but without starting the hare, left a good deal unsaid; for if he did not start the hare he helped to silence the hell-cat.

Not very long before the time of which I am speaking, Maurice’s curate at St. Edward’s had been a namesake of that saint’s, Edward Carpenter, who, as is related in his autobiography,[11] resigned his Orders, together with his Fellowship at Trinity Hall, in 1871. Some thirteen years later I made his acquaintance in London; and I have often regretted that I went to Cambridge too late to hear him preach, for I have never been able quite to picture the author of Towards Democracy in the pulpit, arrayed canonically in surplice or gown.

The goal of a Kingsman’s career at Cambridge was the Classical Tripos; and for three years he would read steadily, and with increasing intentness, keeping that end in view. It was generally thought advisable to have a “coach”; but experience led me to doubt whether, for those who knew how to direct their own reading, and had the necessary perseverance, it was not a waste of time to invoke such assistance; a good “crib” was a far speedier and more effective instructor. Some “coaches,” moreover, were apt to be rather lazy at times, and to put off their pupils’ attendance on the plea, perhaps, that they had to go to London for the day, or were called off by some equally important engagement; and now, by a curious reversal, we, who at Eton should have been only too delighted if our tutors had perennially shirked their duties, had become in turn the studious ones, and having ourselves paid for the tuition were annoyed if we did not get it! One contemporary of mine at King’s was so upset by his “coach’s” remissness that he wrote him a letter of remonstrance, more in sadness than anger, and roused him to fury by quoting some words from Thucydides (οί δἐ προλαβόντες τὀ ἀργύριον), in open allusion to those who first get their fee and then neglect to earn it.

Young men often fail to realize the sensitiveness of their elders, and thus say and do things which cause more hurt than was intended. We used to be resentful, in those too fastidious pre-war days, of the considerable amount of shale, schist, and rubble which was sold to us with our coal; and a fellow Kingsman once asked me to accompany him to the coal-merchant’s, to whom he proposed to return a basketful of the refuse in question. Foreseeing sport, I went; but the scene that ensued was sorrowful rather than amusing, for the head of the firm, a venerable-looking old man with white hair, happened to be in the office, and when the coal-substitutes were handed to him over the counter his wrath was so great that his hand positively shook with passion. Savages though we were, we came away rather penitent.

There was, however, one Kingsman at that time, an undergraduate senior to myself, who was unpleasantly famed for the remorseless devilry with which he scored off any unfortunate person whom chance placed in his power. His tailor, it was said, having by mistake sent him in a bill that had already been paid, was ordered to set the matter right, on pain of being dismissed. He did so; and then the offended customer said to him: “And now I dismiss you just the same.” On another occasion it was a broken-down clergyman who had the ill-luck to appeal to this young gentleman for pecuniary aid: so rare an opportunity could not be allowed to slip. “You trust in God, I suppose,” said the undergraduate. It was not possible for a clergyman to gainsay it. “Then I will toss up,” said the other; “and if you cry rightly, I shall know you deserve assistance”; and forthwith he spun the coin, and the clergyman cried—“heads” or “tails” as might be. But unluckily for the poor pilgrim, the Kingsman was a skilled manipulator of the coin in hazards of this sort, and the result was never in doubt. The mendicant was proved, on the highest authority, to be undeserving.

But to return to the Classical Tripos. Coached or uncoached, we came at last to that great final examination, a sort of Judgment Day in miniature, which, for some of us, would have an important bearing on our later lives. The examination system is in various ways open to criticism, and critics have by no means been lacking, but it need not be denied that intellectual benefit in many cases may result from the sustained effort to prepare oneself for a very searching test, necessitating a thorough study of the chief Classical writers. But the weightiest charge against the University education is the one which least often finds expression—that a learning which would strengthen the intellect only, and does not feed the heart, is in the main but barren and unprofitable, a culture of the literæ inhumaniores. Except from F. D. Maurice, I never heard, during my four years at Cambridge—from preacher or professor, from lecturer, dean, or don—the least mention of the higher social ethics, without which there can be no real culture and no true civilization.

I remember, with shame, that I was once so moved by the florid rhetoric of Dean Farrar, in a missionary sermon preached before the University, that I made a contribution to the offertory which I could ill afford. A day or two afterwards, with the return of sanity, I felt the force of the adage that “fools and their money are soon parted,” and I saw that it was worse than folly to send missions to other countries, when we ourselves were little better than pagans at home. The mischief of this spurious religionism was that it lessened the chance of any genuine awakening of conscience to the facts that stared us in the face. We were made to study Paley’s fantastic “Evidences,” while the evidence of nature, of the human heart, and of actual life, was sedulously hidden away.

In the Tripos of 1875 the Senior Classic was Mr. Peskett, who belonged properly to the preceding year, but owing to illness or some other cause had “degraded” into ours, and thus robbed my friend Mr. Arthur Tilley of an honour which should rightly have been his. Dr. J. Gow, Headmaster of Westminster School, was third; the fifth place was shared by Mr. Gerald Balfour and myself.

It was the custom in those days for headmasters of Eton to draw largely on King’s College for their supply of assistants: thus a King’s Scholar of Eton, after taking his degree at Cambridge, would often return to the school as a Classical assistant master, and so complete the academical round. The process might, perhaps, have been likened to the three stages of butterfly life, but with the first and the last phase transposed. We began as the gay Eton insects, whose ignorance was bliss; and then, after passing through the chrysalis period by the Cam, reappeared on Thames’s bank, metamorphosed into the caterpillars locally known as “beaks,” and usually content thenceforth to crawl soberly along on a wingless but well-nourished career. But even a worm, as we know, will turn; and, as the next chapter must relate, some of the grubs would at times be so unconscionable as to take new and unsettling notions into their heads.