Look down, turn usward, bow thine head;
O thou that wast of God forsaken,
Look on thine household here, and see
Those that have not forsaken thee.
A. C. Swinburne: Before a Crucifix.
I
Nearly twelve months after the treaty of peace with Germany had been signed, a few of the men who had gone down from Oxford ten or twelve years before met again at their annual college gaudy. It may be not superfluous to explain that all masters of arts who have kept their names on the books are invited in rotation, in the second half of June, to the commemoration ceremony, to dinner in hall, to a service next day and to breakfast in hall. From 1914 to 1918 the gaudies were discontinued; and 1920 provided the first occasion on which the men who had taken their M.A. degrees in the years immediately prior to the war received an invitation.
From the moment that they clambered into their hansoms, men who had not seen one another for ten years lapsed into a world which they had known as undergraduates in the last days of King Edward's reign. They had come together from India and Africa: clergymen, civil servants and officials of the Woods and Forests; with or without lasting injury, they had survived the war on one of its many fronts; some had grown rich, some had married and begotten children; some had remained as materially unchanged as they were unchanged in appearance; and, after a longer or shorter Odyssey of adventure, all were now settled to their work in life. Automatically they disinterred forgotten nicknames, and the first of all seemed to cast a spell upon them and to revive the atmosphere of the last night of their last term. The awnings and supper-tent lingered on as a reminder of Commemoration; ornate young men hurried through Tom Quad to the last ball of the week, leaden-footed young men limped to the bathrooms next day as their seniors made ready for prayers in the Cathedral.
Ten years before, a world to which their schools and universities were but a window lay before a disintegrating Oxford generation; and on its youth and enthusiasm, in an age which aspired to keep soul and body in hard condition, depended the mark that each member made in it. Half unconsciously, the young men of that epoch were reacting to that epoch's literary fervour of humanity and rational order: Galsworthy was teaching them that life should be gentle, Wells that it should be tidy, Shaw that it should be ascetic. That was the open noon of their idealism; those seemed the brave days for men of democratic faith.
In little more than the hundred years which ended with Queen Victoria's death an humane spirit of liberalism, not confined to a single country, had forbidden torture and abolished slavery; it had achieved political emancipation and religious toleration; in making the whole of a community responsible for each part, it was slowly inculcating an idea of fraternity; and, in asserting public right between nations, it was beginning to merge in that universal spirit which at intervals of many centuries shines through the world and teaches men to regard mankind as one whole: the constant spirit of Buddha, of Christ and of Tolstoi, the transitory half-understood dream of Alexander and of Napoleon. The trend of history seemed, in those days, to be a term interchangeable with the progress of liberalism; whatever stood in its way seemed destined to fight a losing battle; and the hope of the future was rooted in the record of the past. Every difficulty that for a moment seemed insuperable was matched by some old and seemingly insuperable difficulty which had been overcome: if old age, lazy and without vision, predicted that there must always be violence and injustice, youth could retort that injustice and violence were diminishing daily; if war continued, duelling in England had at least been abolished; if the modern sportsman fired broadsides into a cloud of driven birds, he was at least denied, and perhaps disinclined for, the pleasures of cock-fighting. Life, until 1914, was sacred; and the conditions under which life was carried on were becoming no less important than life itself.