Part 3
There stands the old College porter, Harry Atkins, whom, to our disgrace, we used to bombard on dark winter nights in his little lodge at the gateway into School Yard, hurling missiles at his door from behind the pillars of the cloisters under Upper School, and trusting to our superior fleetness of foot when he was goaded into a desperate charge. There, too, are Culliford, the butler, and Westbrook, the cook, who were treated by us with far greater respect than the equally respectable Atkins, as presiding over departments in which our own personal comforts were more closely concerned, and from whose hands, on the occasion of banquets in the College Hall, the smaller Collegers would try to beg or snatch dainties as they carried them up from the kitchen. Among the least prominent members of the group is one Wagstaffe, designated “scullion”; yet, humble though he was in appearance, his name had become a household word among the boys; for the somewhat unappetizing dough which formed the base of the puddings served to the Collegers was then known as “the Wagstaffe,” on the supposition, presumably, that the under part of the pudding was the creation of the under-cook. I do not think I could eat that pudding now; but looking on the worthy Wagstaffe’s image again, I feel that we wronged him in identifying him, as we did, with an unsavoury composition for which he, a mere subordinate, was not personally to blame.
To the College Hall there came daily, for the remnants of bread and other victuals, a number of poor old alms-women; and if any further proof be needed of the exceeding thinness of the veneer by which our youthful savagery was overlaid, it will be found in our treatment of those humble folk, who were of much more use in the world than ourselves. We named them “the hags”; and one of our amusements was to construct for them what was called a “hag-trap.” A large square piece of bread was hollowed out in the centre through a hole bored in the side, and when the cavity had been filled up with mustard, pepper, salt, etc., the opening was plugged, and the bread left lying on the table as a bait for some unwary victim who should carry it to her home. Whether the Eton Mission in Hackney Wick has so ameliorated the hearts of later generations of Etonians that a “hag-trap” would now be an impossibility, I do not know; but in those days we certainly had not the smallest atom of sympathy with the working classes, except perhaps with those College servants who were known to us personally, and who ministered to our wants.
We did not pretend to regard the working man as a brother. Once, when I was travelling with some Eton friends, a sweep who was standing on the platform tried to enter our carriage just as the train was about to start. Instantly we seized the door, and held it closed from the inside; and after a short struggle (the black man’s anxious eyes still haunt me), the victory remained with us, for the train begun to move, and the sweep was left behind. That was our idea of Fraternity. Was it Waterloo that was won in the Eton Playing Fields? I have sometimes thought it must have been Peterloo.
But let me turn from the recollection of childish deeds done by those who were but “scugs,” or “lower boys,” to that of the immense self-importance of which we were conscious when we had reached the eminence of sixth form. Surely nowhere on earth is there such a tremendous personage as a sixth-form Eton boy; he acts continually with that “full sense of responsibility” so dear to the occupants of the Parliamentary front-bench. No visitor to Eton College Chapel can have failed to be impressed by the pompous entry of those twenty immaculately attired young men as they precede the Headmaster and the Provost in a sort of triumphal procession, thinking of anything rather than the religious service to which their arrival is the prelude. On speech-days, too, when, arrayed in dress-coat and knee-breeches, we declaimed passages from the great writers of antiquity or of modern times, we felt to the full the colossal seriousness of our position--serious also it was in another sense, for our self-satisfaction was then sobered by the possibility of breaking down. To keep order in the passages at night; to say the Latin grace in Hall; to note the names at “Absence” in the school-yard, standing by the headmaster’s side--even to read prayers in the Houses on occasions--these were but a few of the many duties and dignities of sixth form. No young feathered “bloods” in red Indian tribe could have had greater reason to be proud.
Even in the holidays our grave responsibilities did not wholly cease; for it was a custom for sixth-form youths to be sent as tutors to lower boys who needed “coaching” at their homes. On two occasions it fell to my lot to perform that service for a lively but very backward boy at Evans’s House, Charley Selwyn, nephew of the Bishop of Lichfield; and the awe which I felt at sojourning in a bishop’s palace helped to fix more firmly in my memory some of the impressions which I got there.
Dr. George Augustus Selwyn was the most stalwart champion of “muscular Christianity.” His face was somewhat grim and stern, as was to be expected in so redoubtable a preacher of the gospel of hard work; but there was a humorous twinkle in his eyes which betokened a very kind heart; and to any one connected with Eton, present Etonian or Old Etonian, he extended the warmest of welcomes. In fact, New Zealand, the scene of his missionary labours, and Eton, where he had been a successful scholar and athlete, were the standing subjects of conversation at his table: he and Mrs. Selwyn used often to converse together in the Maori tongue; and had there been an Etonian language (other than slang) it would assuredly have been spoken by them. The world was, for the bishop, divided into Etonian and non-Etonian. I once heard him pressing upon an old schoolfellow, who was about to leave the Palace, some table-delicacies of rare excellence, and quoting the Horatian line:
Ut libet; hæc porcis hodie comedenda relinques. (“As you like! The pigs will eat them up, if left.”)
He explained that some other guests who were coming to Lichfield that day were--non-Etonians.
But in spite of the large and lion-like geniality of the bishop, there were anxious moments when the sight of some indolent or slovenly action caused his quick temper to give way, and then one knew not whether to tremble or be inwardly amused at the forms which his anger would take. Once, on a dull Sunday afternoon (the Sundays _were_ dull at the Palace), he overheard his nephew yawning wearily and saying he did not know what to do. “What!” cried the bishop. “A Christian boy not know what to do on a Sunday afternoon!” Then, in terrible tones: “Go and fetch your Greek Testament.” Forthwith, while I made haste to escape from that scene of wrath, the wretched boy had to undergo a long lesson from his uncle.
On another occasion it was my pupil’s sister, a very beautiful child of ten or twelve, who caused an eruption of the volcano. She had left, in the course of luncheon, “a wasteful plate”--that is, she had put the gristle of the meat at the side, cleverly hidden, as she thought, under knife and fork--and the bishop, observing this, lectured her sharply on the sinfulness of such a habit. Then, to our consternation, his anger rising higher, he ended by seizing the girl’s plate, and then and there himself devoured the disgusting stuff as a practical lesson in frugality. “The bishop’s in a very bad temper, to-day, sir,” the butler gravely remarked to me afterwards.[9]
Eton, then, was the school where ignorance was bliss, but the bliss was very dear while it lasted, and it would have been dearer still if we had more fully realized the nature of the change that was to follow--the difference between University and School. As the end of the last summer term drew near, we felt more and more the pang of the parting that was to come; and when it was time to write our _Vale_--that last copy of the weekly verses, in which we were allowed, for once, to substitute English for Latin--we naturally likened ourselves to some prophetic dreamer of sad dreams, or to some despairing convict who sees his approaching fate.
So I, who write, feel ever on my heart Such dim presentiment, such dull despair: Me, too, a doom awaits; I, too, must part, And change a careless life for toil and care.
Doubtless many such elegies periodically found their way, as mine did, into Dr. Hornby’s waste-paper basket.
III
LITERÆ INHUMANIORES
Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow. MILTON.
Certainly, after the liveliness of Thames, old Camus seemed to foot it very slowly. Heavy was the fall from the exaltation of the sixth form to the lowliness of the freshman. A needed experience it may have been, as correcting the natural priggishness of boyhood; but it was a change that we little relished while we underwent it.
King’s College, Cambridge, in the early ’seventies, was in a phase of transition from the old-fashioned system, under which it was a mere appanage of Eton, to a new order of things which was gradually throwing its gates open to all comers; much, however, of the ancient pettiness of spirit still remained; the College was small in numbers and small in tone, dominated by a code of unwritten yet vexatious ordinances, which it was waste of time to observe, yet “bad form” to neglect. “King’s always had a tyrant,” was a remark made to me by F. W. Cornish, himself a Kingsman.
The Provost was Dr. Okes, a short, rather crabbed-looking old man, whose enormous self-complacency was the theme of many tales. Once, when he was walking through the court, his pompous gait caused some ill-mannered undergraduates, who were watching him from a window, to give vent to audible laughter; whereupon he sent for them and explained that such merriment must not be indulged in while _he_ was passing by. That he himself could have been the cause of the merriment was a possibility which had not entered his mind.
Next in authority was the dean, a wan and withered-looking clergyman named Churton, who always seemed unhappy himself and infected every one who entered his rooms with a sense of discomfort. He used to invite undergraduates to breakfast with him, a melancholy function in which he often had the aid of Fred Whitting (the name was pronounced Whiting), a bluff and more genial don whose conversation just saved the guests from utter despair; and at these entertainments poor Churton’s one remark, as he helped the fish, was to say with a sour smile of ineffable wretchedness: “Whitting, will you be a cannibal?”
Very different from this chilly dean, and much more interesting, as being genuine relics of the brave old days when Kingsmen had no need to study or to exert themselves, inasmuch as their University career was assured them from the first, were two portly and inseparable bachelors, Messrs. Law and Brocklebank, whose sole employment it seemed to be to reap to the full the emoluments of their life-fellowship, which they had held for a goodly number of years. “Brock” and “Applehead” were their nicknames; both were stout and bulky, but there was a rotundity about Mr. Law’s cranial development which gave him a more imposing appearance. As they ambled side by side about the courts and lawns, it amused us to fancy them a pair of strange survivals from a rude prehistoric age, we ourselves, of course, playing the part of the moderns and intellectuals. When “Applehead” died, we were enjoined in a poetical epitaph, by some anonymous admirer, to deck his grave with pumpkins, gourds, melons, cucumbers and other emblematic fruits.
The literary element was not strong in King’s; but in Henry Bradshaw, one of the senior Fellows, the College could boast a University Librarian of much distinction. He was a kind, but most whimsical and eccentric man, whose friendship was open to any undergraduate who sought it, only it must be sought, and under the conditions imposed by Bradshaw himself, for it was never in any circumstances offered. If you presented yourself uninvited at his rooms--rather an ordeal for a nervous freshman--you were welcomed, perhaps taken to his heart. If you did not present yourself, he never asked you to come; on the contrary, however often he met you on the stairs or elsewhere, he passed with a look of blank and stony indifference on his large and somewhat inexpressive visage. I knew a scholar of King’s who lived on Bradshaw’s staircase, and who for more than a year was thus passed by as non-existent: then, one evening, moved by a sudden impulse, he knocked at the great man’s door, entered, and was immediately admitted to the cheery circle of his acquaintance. It was useless to resent such waywardness on Bradshaw’s part; there was no “ought” in his vocabulary; you had to take him on his own terms, or “go without”; and the great number of University men who came on pilgrimage to his rooms was in itself a proof of his mastery. I recall the following lines from an epigram which some rebellious undergraduate wrote on him:
Throned in supreme indifference, he sees The growing ardour of his devotees: He cares not if they come, yet more and more They throng subservient to the sacred door: He cares not if they go, yet none the less His “harvests ripen and his herds increase.”
It was so; and Bradshaw, having a gift of very pungent speech, was well able to keep his “herds” in order when they were assembled: he would at times say a sharp and wholesome word to some conceited or presumptuous visitor. Even his nearest friends could take no liberties with him. It was said that when Mr. G. W. Prothero, then a Fellow of King’s, took to omitting the “Esquire” in the address of letters, and wrote plain “Henry Bradshaw,” the librarian retaliated in his reply by addressing laconically to “Prothero”--nothing more.
To attend lectures and chapel services formed the chief duties of undergraduates; and the lectures were much the less tedious task. It was a chilly business, however, on a cold winter morning, to hear the great Greek scholar, R. Shilleto, hold forth for an hour on his beloved Thucydides; for he was an elderly man with a chronic cough, and his enthusiasm for a Greek idiom hardly compensated his audience for the physical difficulties with which he laboured. He would begin cheerily on a difficult passage, and, overtaken by a bout of coughing, lose the place for a while; then, with a drawling “yes,” catch up the thread of his discourse, till another spasm overwhelmed him; while we, desiring our breakfasts much more than the privilege of listening to a second Porson, fumed and fidgeted, and took notes, or neglected to take notes, till the stroke of the clock released us. Much more popular were some of the lectures which we attended, in other Colleges, given by such skilled exponents of the Classics as Henry Jackson and R. C. Jebb. Jebb was always the same--self-composed, neat and eloquent; Jackson, on the contrary, though not at all less competent, used to work himself into a fever of fretfulness when he could not find the exact word he sought for; and then, to our amusement, he would upbraid himself as “dolt” and “idiot,” even while he was giving a most suggestive address.
The compulsory “chapels” were a great trial to some of us; and each King’s scholar was further liable, in turn, to the function of reading the Lessons for a week. I do not know why this should have seemed more formidable than “speeches” at Eton, but it was an office which we would very thankfully have escaped. It needed some courage to step down from a stall in that spacious chapel--most of all when, as on a Sunday afternoon, there was a large concourse of visitors--and then to mount, by what cragsmen would call an “exposed ridge,” the steps that led up to the big lectern in the middle of the nave. The sensation was one of extreme solitariness and detachment, with little but the lectern itself to give support and protection; so that we could almost sympathize with the plight of that disreputable undergraduate who, according to a current story (which, be it hoped, was fictitious), had essayed to read the Lessons, in some college chapel, when he was not so sober as he should have been. Throwing his arms round the eagle--for his lectern was fashioned in the shape of that pagan bird--he appalled the congregation, it was said, by exclaiming, in a pensive voice: “If it wasn’t for this [something] duck, I’d be down.”
But practice makes all things easier; and after a time one or two of us so far overcame our nervousness as to utilize our position at the lectern for the benefit, as we thought, of the congregation at large--certainly for our own personal comfort; for we ventured to dock and shorten the Lessons as we felt inclined. “Here endeth the Lesson,” we would cry, when we had read, perhaps, no more than a dozen verses out of twice or thrice that number; and immediately the great organ would sound, and the pompous choral service continued on its course. We had private information that this irregularity did not pass unobserved by some of the dons; but as nothing was said we concluded that they blessed us for it in secret.
The relations between dons and undergraduates were for the most part very friendly; but the blandness of the dons was somewhat measured and condescending--not without reason, perhaps, for undergraduates, like schoolboys, were apt to take undue advantage of any excess of affability. Once, when I was walking along King’s Parade with a friend, we saw the great Dr. Lightfoot coming from the opposite direction. “Now just look,” said my companion, “how polite Lightfoot will be. See how I’ll make him smile as he passes.” And sure enough, the learned divine, in response to an audacious salute from one who had no sort of claim to his acquaintance, was instantly wreathed in smiles and benignity, as if he were meeting the son of his dearest friend, instead of being impudently imposed on by a stranger.
We rather dreaded the invitations that sometimes reached us to a formal breakfast, or worse still, a _soirée_ (familiarly known as a “stand-up”), at the residence of some high authority. I have spoken of the Churton breakfasts in King’s; still more serious an affair was it to be one of a dozen undergraduates summoned _en bloc_ to breakfast at Trinity Lodge, for Dr. Thompson, the Master of Trinity, was a great University magnate, widely famed and feared for his sententious sayings and biting sarcasms, many of which were reported from mouth to mouth. We had heard of that deadly verdict of his on a University sermon preached by Dean Howson, joint author of Conybeare and Howson’s _Life of St. Paul_: “I was thinking what a very clever man Mr. Conybeare must have been.” As a member once or twice of such a breakfast-party, I recollect how awkwardly we stood herded together when we had entered the sage’s presence, and how, as we passed into the breakfast-room, we almost jostled each other in our anxiety to get a seat as far as possible away from that end of the long table where the Master in his majesty sat. As for the _soirées_ at Trinity Lodge and elsewhere, they demanded some strength of limb; for the number of visitors exceeded the number of seats, and to stand for two hours in a corner, and look as if one liked it, was irksome even for youth. At these ceremonials, when the Provost of King’s was the host, he used to invite undergraduates with immense condescension to “be seated”; and when he added with emphasis: “You may sit down _here_,” he was understood to be reflecting on the superior comfort of a Provost’s entertainment as compared with that of Trinity Lodge.
One thing that rather galled the feelings of undergraduates was that none but Provost and Fellows might set foot on the extensive lawns at King’s--a selfish privilege of the few, as it appeared, maintained to the exclusion of the many. However that may have been, there came a night when a small party of Kingsmen committed the sacrilegious act of releasing a mole in front of the Provost’s Lodge, and dauntlessly awaited the result, thus anticipating Lord Milner’s policy of “damning the consequences.” There were no serious consequences, except to the most innocent of all the persons concerned--the mole. We watched him with admiration as he sank into that soft green turf, like a seal into water; and the next morning we were thrilled to see a small line of earthen hillocks on the sacred sward. Then followed a great to-do of gardeners and mole-catchers; and on the third day, to our regret and remorse, the poor mole paid the penalty for the trespasses of others. We put a London newspaper on the track of this incident, and the editor published some humorous speculations, for the benefit of readers interested in natural history, as to how the mole could have found his way to that cloistered spot.
The _Cambridge Undergraduates’ Journal_ (I am now speaking of the year 1873 and thereabouts) was a fortnightly paper--edited at one time by G. C. Macaulay, at another by Hallam (now Lord) Tennyson--in which some of us used to try our hands at the higher journalism, and write satirical essays on the various anomalies of Cambridge life. Compulsory chapels; compulsory Latin and Greek; “cribbing” in examinations; antiquated college customs; the exactions of college servants; the social functions known as “stand-ups”--these were but a few of the topics on which we held forth with all the confidence of youth. It was the _Adventurer_ over again, but on a more comprehensive scale; for the undergraduate could express his feelings more openly than the schoolboy; else the writer of an article on compulsory chapels could hardly have inveighed, as he did, against the ordinance of full choral service, where “the man without an ear” was doomed, for two long hours, “to sit, stand, and kneel in wearisome succession.”
The annual competition for the English Prize Poem afforded another opportunity for nascent ambition. The subject one year was the recovery of the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward) from a serious illness; and it was this rather snobbish theme that drew from one of the competitors a couplet which went the round of a delighted University:
Flashed o’er the land the electric message came: “He is not better, but he’s much the same.”[10]
Then there were the “Sir William Browne’s Medals,” offered annually for Greek and Latin odes and epigrams. These prizes were usually the perquisite of a few select scholars (my friend E. C. Selwyn had a way of carrying them off); but as the poems were sent in anonymously, the envelope containing the competitor’s name not being opened except when he won the medal, it was a safe and rather good sport to try one’s luck in the contest. One of the surprises of my life was when old Shilleto (the coughing grammarian) walked into my room one evening, and told me that the examiners had awarded me the medal for Greek epigram. There being a defect in one of the lines, he sat down and corrected it, there and then, by an emendation which was doubtless better Greek and certainly worse poetry.