After many family councils it was decided that I should accept the invitation of my uncle and aunt (Professor T. H. Green and his wife) and take up my residence with them in their house in St. Giles's. There I read for Responsions. If it had not been for some extraordinary power of resistance in the matter of Latin and Greek I ought to have found the task easy, for, as I have said elsewhere, I had two of the most accomplished scholars in the University to teach me. One was Mr. Henry Nettleship, soon to become Regius Professor of Latin. The other was a young Balliol man who had just won a Magdalen Fellowship and who was destined to become President of that famous college over which he still presides so worthily and so wisely. But, alas! I was Greek and Latin proof, and all I really gained from my learned teachers was two very close and intimate friends, and the privilege of meeting at the house of the one and in the rooms in the College of the other, a good many of the abler Dons, young and old, and getting on good terms with them. In the same way, I used to see at my uncle's house the best of Oxford company, and also a certain number of Cambridge men.
It must not be supposed, however, that I was not learning anything. I was getting a priceless store of knowledge,
[Illustration: J St Loe Strachey. Ætat 16 (From a photograph done at Cannes, about 1876.)] nay, wisdom from my uncle, who was kindness itself and who was, I am sure, fond of me. He was almost as ready to talk and to answer questions as my father. In him, too, I saw the working of a great and good man and of a noble character.
Though in a different, but equally true, way, Green was as religious a man as my father. If my father felt the personal relationship between God and His children more than Green did, that was chiefly because Green's mind could take nothing which had not the sanction of reason, or, to be more accurate, of an intuition guarded so closely by Reason that very little of the mystic element in Faith remained unchallenged. No one could live with Green without loving him and feeling reverence for his deep sincerity and his instinct for the good.
Though foolish people talked of him as a heretic, or even an infidel, he was in truth one of the most devout of men. That noble passage in Renan's play fits him exactly. The Almighty, conversing as in Job with one of His Heavenly Ministers as to this Planet's people, says:
Apprends, enfant fidèle, ma tendresse pour ceux qui doutent ou qui nient. Ces doutes, ces négations sont fondés en raison; ils viennent de mon obstination à me cacher. Ceux qui me nient entrent dans mes vues. Ils nient l'image grotesque ou abominable que l'on a mise en ma place. Dans ce monde d'idolâtres et d'hypocrites, seuls, ils me respectent réellement.
Understand, faithful child, my tenderness for those who doubt and who deny. Those doubts, those denials are founded on reason; they come from my obstinate resolve to hide myself. Those who deny me enter into my plans. They deny the grotesque or abominable image which men have set up in my place. In a world of idolators and hypocrites, they alone really respect me.
But what I gained from my uncle and his friends, from Nettleship and from Warren, and also from the people I used to meet at the house of my great-uncle, Dr. Frederick Symonds, was not all that I achieved in the year before I matriculated. The air of Oxford did not repress but greatly stimulated my love of verse and belles-lettres, and I careered over the green pastures of our poetry like the colt let loose that I was. Elizabethan plays were at the moment my pet reading, and without knowing it I emulated Charles James Fox, who is said while at Oxford to have read a play a day—no doubt out of the Doddesley collection. I even went to the Bodleian in search of the Elizabethans, and remember to this day my delight in handling the big and little books mentioned by Lamb in his Dramatic Selections. I recall how I turned over the leaves of such enchanting works as Inigo Jones's designs for The Tempest played as a Masque. Though I do not happen to have seen it since, and so speak with a forty years' interval, the pen-and-ink drawing of Ariel, portrayed exactly like a Cinquecento angel, is fixed in my mind. It has all the graciousness and gentleness of Bellini and all the robust beauty of Veronese or Palma Vecchio. To tell the truth, I was in the mood of the lady of the Island over which Prospero waved his wand. I could say with Miranda, "O brave new world, that has such men and women in it!" Indeed, though I still stood outside the gates, as it were, I had already felt the subtle intoxication of Oxford.
The result of all this was that when I at last got through Responsions and entered Balliol, with the understanding that directly I got through Pass Mods. I was to abandon the Classics and read for the History School, I knew, as it were, too much and too little. This knowledge of some things and want of knowledge of others produced a result which was highly distasteful to the normal academic mind. In a word, I was in the position of Gibbon when he went up to Magdalen. His ignorance would have astonished a schoolboy and his learning a professor, and no doubt he seemed to the greater part of the High Table an odious and forward young man.
All the same, and though no one then believed it, I was extraordinarily innocent, if not as to my ignorance, as to my learning. When I met a Don who, I was told, was "unsurpassed" in the Greek or Latin classics and could probably appreciate them as well as if he had been a Greek or Roman of the best period, I was tremendously excited. I felt sure that being so highly endowed in this direction he could not possibly have neglected English literature, and must know all about that also, and so would be of the greatest help to me. I was inclined, therefore, to rush at these scholars with the perfect assurance that I could get something from them. When, however, they either evaded my questionings or told me curtly that they had never heard of the people about whom I asked, I felt sure that this was only said to get rid of me. For some reason unknown to me I had managed, I felt, to offend them as Alice offended the creatures in Wonderland.