CHAPTER VIII
SIR ROGER NEWDIGATE'S PRIZE (1837-1839)
Of all the prizes which Oxford could bestow, the Newdigate used to be the most popular. Its fortunate winner was an admitted poet in an age when poetry was read, and he appeared in his glory at Commemoration, speaking what the ladies could understand and admire. The honour was attainable without skill in Greek particles or in logarithms; and yet it had a real value to an intending preacher, for the successful reciter might be felt to have put his foot on the pulpit stairs. John Ruskin was definitely meant for the Church, and he went to Oxford in the avowed hope of getting the Newdigate, if nothing else. His last talk with Mr. Dale was chiefly about ways and means to this end; and before he went up he had begun "The Gipsies" for March, 1837.
The prize was won that year by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, afterwards Dean of Westminster. Our candidate and his old schoolfellow, Henry Dart, of Exeter College, set to work on the next subject, "The Exile of St. Helena," and after the long vacation read their work to each other, accepting the hints and corrections of a friendly rivalry.
Meantime his old nurse Anne (it is trivial, but a touch of nature), being at Oxford in attendance on the ladies, and keen, as she always was, for Master John's success, heard from the keeper of the Reading-room of criticisms on his published verses. She brought the news to his delighted mother. "He was pleased," she writes, "but says that he forms his own estimate of his poems, and reviews don't alter it; but 'How my father will be delighted! How he will crow!'" Which historiette repeated itself many a time in the family annals.
In Lent term, 1838, he was hard at work on the new poem. He wrote:
"I must give an immense time every day to the Newdigate, which I must have, if study will get it. I have much to revise. You find many faults, but there are hundreds which have escaped your notice, and many lines must go out altogether which you and I should wish to stay in. The thing must be remodelled, and I must finish it while it has a freshness on it, otherwise it will not be written well. The old lines are hackneyed in my ears, even as a very soft Orleans plum, which your Jewess has wiped and re-wiped with the corner of her apron, till its polish is perfect, and its temperature elevated."
In this March he got through his "Smalls."