1907-1908
The opening of the Long Vacation of 1907 was pleasantly signalized for us Benedictines by the gratifying successes in the Final Schools of our little Hall, which secured two first classes (in "Greats" and History), and a second class in Theology. The Oxford Magazine was kind enough to point out that this was a remarkable achievement for a Hall numbering nine undergraduates, and compared favourably with the percentage of honours at any college in the university. I was given to understand that my young theologian would also have secured his "first" had he not objected to the matter and form of some of the questions set him, and declined to answer them!
This cheerful news sent me in good spirits up to Dumfries for my usual week's examinations at the Benedictine convent school there. I found almost eighty nuns in residence, including the exiled community of the mother house of Arras, whom (the Prioress was eighty-five, and there were several old ladies on crutches) the great French Republic had driven out of house and home as a "danger to the State!" I had several interesting talks with "Madame la Prieure," who had been professed in the reign of Louis Philippe, and who bore her cruel uprootal with true French (and Christian) resignation and cheerfulness. I do not know if the tradition about St. Swithun holds good in Scotland; but these days succeeding his festival (July 15) were certainly almost continuously wet. One of the French nuns said that in her country (Picardy) St. Medard was credited with a similar influence, and quoted the lines—
Quan ploon per San Médar,
Ploon quarante jhiours pus tard;
and I recalled the Italian distich about St. Bibiana (December 2)—
Se piove il giorno di Santa Bibiana,
Pioverà per quaranta giorni ed una settimana.
I spent a few days at Longridge Towers, Sir Hubert Jerningham's Border castle, when my work at Dumfries was finished, and found my host, as usual, excellent company, and full of anecdotes, both French and English. Speaking of a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Edmund at Pontigny in which he had joined some years before, he said that an English newspaper described an open-air benediction given by the "Bishops of Estrade and Monte"; the reporters having doubtless been informed that the bishops would mount on the platform to give the blessing! He showed us a cutting from another English newspaper, stating that MM. Navire, Chavire, and Bourrasque had been shipwrecked and drowned at sea! Sir Hubert had a complete set of the Revue des Deux Mondes in his library; and I hunted up for his delectation a passage in which M. Forgues, writing on English clerical life, à propos of George Eliot's first book, gave an original etymology for the word tract. "Il [Rev. Amos Barton] a sa Track Society, qui va mettre en Fair toutes les bonnes femmes du pays, enrégimentées pour dépister (track) les pauvres hères susceptibles de conversion." The same writer rendered the epithet "Gallio-like" (applied by the minister to the parishioners of Shepperton) by "pareils à des Français!"
Yorkshire, after Northumberland, claimed me for two pleasant visits—the first to the Herries' at Everingham, with its beautiful chapel copied from the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, and its famous deer-park, one of the oldest in England (so Lord Herries told me), and a very different thing, as one of Disraeli's country squires in Lothair remarks, from a mere park with deer in it. The weather was bright and hot; and it was a pretty sight to see the droves of fallow-deer, bucks and does together, clustering for shade under the great trees near the house. From Everingham I went on to Bramham, where George Lane Fox was spending a happy summer in his old home. He took me everywhere, through the lovely gardens laid out by Lenôtre, and (in a brougham drawn by an ancient hunter and driven by a stud-groom not less ancient) all over the park, and up the noble beech avenue called Bingley's Walk. My friend had lost his splendid inheritance for conscience' sake; and it was pleasant to see him, in old age and enfeebled health, passing happy days, through his nephew's hospitality and kindness, at the well-loved home of his boyhood and youth.
I was glad to find myself settled for some golden weeks of August and September at our abbey among the Highland hills, where we were this autumn favoured with almost continuous sunshine. Our many guests came and went—some of them busy city men, enjoying to the full the pure air, lovely surroundings, and quiet life in our guest-house, all to the accompaniment of chiming bells and chanted psalms. Whether they found our "brown Gregorians" as devotional as the sentimentalist of Mr. Hichens's novel[[1]] I know not; but anyhow to me our monastic plain-chant was restful and pleasant after the odd stuff in the way of "church music" which had elsewhere assailed my ears. I confess that after our more normal Oxford hours (though I hope we were not sluggards at our Hall), I reconciled myself with difficulty to "the hour of our uprising" in the monastery. The four o'clock matin-bell had always been more or less of a penance to me (as I suppose it was to most of my brethren), though I tried to fortify myself with Dr. Johnson's argument—a purely academic one in the case of that lie-abed old sage—that "it is no slight advancement to obtain for so many more hours the consciousness of being"; but an American guest of ours, to whom I cited this dictum, countered it by a forcibly-expressed opinion "on the other side" by one of the most eminent living specialists in insanity.[[2]]