It was eligible in every way, with window-seats overlooking the High from which we could watch passers-by surreptitiously trying to pick up the half-crown that Loring from time to time glued to the pavement. The house had been repainted inside and out, there were new carpets and furniture, a grand piano in one room and two Siamese kittens in every other. Old Lady Loring used to complain of dust when she came to visit us, but her son assured her that this was but a concession to my democratic spirit. We were certainly comfortable. As Loring observed the first night, "Now we've every excuse for neglecting our work."
He was reading Greats; I, History. We both expected seconds, hoped for firsts and told our friends thirds. What our tutors thought, I have no idea. Loring never consulted his unduly.
"I pay the College eight pounds a term tuition fees," he reasoned. "I'll make it twice that if they'll leave me alone. I want to think. Your society alone, George, is an Undenominational Education."
So he breakfasted at nine, cut lectures till one, lunched at the Club and hacked twenty miles in the afternoon. From tea till dinner he would wander round Oxford buying prints and large-paper editions; after dinner he would take a kitten on his knee and read German metaphysics aloud to it with a wealth of feeling in his voice. At eleven we would pay one or two calls or sit talking till a late hour.
It was Andrew Lang, I believe, who said that the reason why there were no good books on Oxford life was because they were all written by women who had spent one day in—Cambridge. I sometimes fancy that Oxford reformers are really Oxford novelists off duty. We went through the transition from boyhood to man's estate in some of this world's loveliest surroundings. Does it matter what we read or when we read it? A time had to come when each of us had the choice of working uncompelled or not working at all; we could not be given lines and detention all our life, and at Oxford I worked hard. So did Loring, for all his outward pose of idleness. We read seven hours a day for two-thirds of the vacation and were not wholly unoccupied even during term.
Looking back on it all I can find no period of mental development to compare with my last year at Oxford. It was no small thing to read a thousand years of history, however superficially. I began to touch general principles, to discard cherished preconceptions, and little by little to hammer out a philosophy of my own. In political science and economy Loring's school overlapped mine to some extent, and in the rambling 'School shop' we talked lay the germ of the Thursday Club. Every week of term and for a year or two after I came down, some ten of us would meet and dine together. There was a "book of the week"—too long or dull for all to read—which one would undertake to digest and expound. "Saint Simon's Memoirs," the "Contrat Social," the "Paston Letters" were among the works we had served up to us minced and réchauffé.
Later on, when Loring had dropped out, we became more purely political. Carmichael brought us in touch with socialist writers, and a week-end visit from Baxter Whittingham of Lincoln and Shadwell was responsible for my brief taste of working-class conditions some years later. I cannot hope that everyone nowadays looks at "Thursday Essays," which we published in 1904 as a statement of Young Oxford Liberalism, but, though it had little effect on the outside world, it consolidated its authors. Seddon of Corpus, who wrote on "Unemployment," is now in the Insurance Commission; Terry of Lincoln, the author of "Small Holdings," was private secretary to the President of the Board of Agriculture; Ainger, Mansfield, Gregory and I, who spread ourselves on "Public Economy," "Federation and the National Ideal," "The Tendrils of Socialism," and "The Irish Question Once More," all found our way into the House at the time of the 1906 Election.
Loring, too, matured on lines of his own. It would perhaps be truer to say that he developed that dual personality of which the germs had been existent at Melton. He was a cynic and idealist,—no uncommon union,—a pessimist and a practical reformer, honestly believing that the world was gradually deteriorating, that to cleanse the corruption was beyond man's powers, and yet that it was worth his own while to run the lost race to a finish.
I always fancy I can trace three phases through which he passed, three sources of inspiration. At school his taste for the romantic and picturesque found satisfaction in the Church of which he was a member: Eternal Rome captured his imagination, and, while I aspired to a vague universal brotherhood, he hoped and believed that Temporal Power would some day be once more œcumenical and that the warring world would in time find peace in a new age of faith. Oxford and the society of his fellow Catholics broke into the dream. Doctrinally he was unsettled by the philosophy he read for 'Greats' and the fabric and organization of his Church brought disillusionment when he saw them at close quarters. Old Lord Loring had made the house in Curzon Street a centre for English Catholicism. I remember balls and bazaars, receptions and committee-meetings without end, Catholic marquesses were rare, they had to work hard; they were also valuable as giving social respectability to a persecuted Church. An inconspicuous, undistinguished peer assumed rather an exalted position in a small religious communion where everyone knew everyone else. I imagine more people spoke of 'dear Lord Loring' than would have been the case had his religion been, say, that of the Established Church. His son felt and expressed extreme repugnance for the position he was expected to fill. The Catholic Church in partibus infidelium was not a trading company, and he declined to have his name published on the prospectus to inspire confidence among doubting subscribers.
On ceasing to be a Catholic in anything but name, he had a second bout of mediaevalism, and dreamed, as Disraeli dreamed in the 'Young England' days, of a re-vitalized, ascendant aristocracy. The reality of the dream passed quickly; it is questionable how much faith Disraeli himself put into his vision, though anything was possible while the political revolution of the first Reform Bill was still seething. It is doubtful if Loring ever considered his idealized aristocracy of philosopher-kings otherwise than with a sentimental, unhistorical regret. And when he abandoned hope of seeing mankind regenerated either by the spiritual influence of his Church or the temporal influence of his order, I think he abandoned hope of seeing mankind regenerated at all. Life thereafter became a private, personal matter; he preserved a fastidious sense of what was incumbent on him to do and a pride in not being false to his own standards. What happened to the world outside his gates was an irrelevance with which, in his growing detachment and surface cynicism, he declined to interest himself.