Only three years intervened between my leaving school and my engagement to Mr. T. Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford.
But those three years seem to me now to have been extraordinarily full.
Lincoln and the Pattisons, Balliol and Mr. Jowett, and the Bodleian Library, outside the influences and affections of my own home, stand in the forefront of what memory looks back on as a broad and animated scene. The great Library, in particular, became to me a living and inspiring presence. When I think of it as it then was, I am, aware of a medley of beautiful things--pale sunlight on book-lined walls, or streaming through old armorial bearings on Tudor windows; s.p.a.ces and distances, all books, beneath a painted roof from which gleamed the motto of the University--_Dominus illuminatio mea_; gowned figures moving silently about the s.p.a.ces; the faint scents of old leather and polished wood; and fusing it all, a stately dignity and benignant charm, through which the voices of the bells outside, as they struck each successive quarter from Oxford"s many towers, seemed to breathe a certain eternal reminder of the past and the dead.
But regions of the Bodleian were open to me then that no ordinary reader sees now. Mr. c.o.xe--the well-known, much-loved Bodley"s Librarian of those days--took kindly notice of the girl reader, and very soon, probably on the recommendation of Mark Pattison, who was a Curator, made me free of the lower floors, where was the "Spanish room," with its shelves of seventeenth and eighteenth century volumes in sheepskin or vellum, with their turned-in edges and leathern strings. Here I might wander at will, absolutely alone, save for the visit of an occasional librarian from the upper floor, seeking a book. To get to the Spanish Room one had to pa.s.s through the Douce Library, the home of treasures beyond price; on one side half the precious things of Renaissance printing, French or Italian or Elizabethan; on the other, stands of illuminated Missals and Hour Books, many of them rich in pictures and flower-work, that shone like jewels in the golden light of the room.
That light was to me something tangible and friendly. It seemed to be the mingled product of all the delicate browns and yellows and golds in the bindings of the books, of the bra.s.s lattice-work that covered them, and of reflections from the beautiful stone-work of the Schools Quadrangle outside. It was in these n.o.ble surroundings that, with far too little, I fear, of positive reading, and with much undisciplined wandering from shelf to shelf and subject to subject, there yet sank deep into me the sense of history, and of that vast ocean of the recorded past from which the generations rise and into which they fall back. And that in itself was a great boon--almost, one might say, a training, of a kind.
But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.
In _Miss Bretherton_, my earliest novel, and in _Lady Connie_, so far my latest,[1] will be found, by those who care to look for it, the reflection of that other life of Oxford, the life which takes its shape, not from age, but from youth, not from the past which created Oxford, but from the lively, laughing present which every day renews it. For six months of the year Oxford is a city of young men, for the most part between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. In my maiden days it was not also a city of young women, as it is to-day. Women--girls especially--were comparatively on sufferance. The Heads of Houses were married; the Professors were mostly married; but married tutors had scarcely begun to be. Only at two seasons of the year was Oxford invaded by women--by bevies of maidens who came, in early May and middle June, to be made much of by their brothers and their brothers" friends, to be danced with and flirted with, to know the joys of coming back on a summer night from Nuneham up the long, fragrant reaches of the lower river, or of "sitting out" in historic gardens where Philip Sidney or Charles I had pa.s.sed.
[Footnote 1: These chapters were written before the appearance of _Missing_ in the autumn of 1917.]
At the "eights" and "Commem." the old, old place became a mere background for pretty dresses and college luncheons and river picnics.
The seniors groaned often, as well they might; for there was little work done in my day in the summer term. But it is perhaps worth while for any nation to possess such harmless festivals in so beautiful a setting as these Oxford gatherings. How many of our national festivals are spoiled by ugly and sordid things--betting and drink, greed and display! Here, all there is to see is a compet.i.tion of boats, manned by England"s best youth, upon a n.o.ble river, flowing, in Virgilian phrase, "under ancient walls"; a city of romance, given up for a few days to the pleasure of the young, and breathing into that pleasure her own refining, exalting note; a stately ceremony--the Encaenia--going back to the infancy of English learning; and the dancing of young men and maidens in Gothic or cla.s.sical halls built long ago by the "fathers who begat us." My own recollection of the Oxford summer, the Oxford river and hay-fields, the dawn on Oxford streets, as one came out from a Commemoration ball, or the evening under Nuneham woods where the swans on that still water, now, as always, "float double, swan and shadow"--these things I hope will be with me to the end. To have lived through them is to have tasted youth and pleasure from a cup as pure, as little alloyed with baser things, as the high G.o.ds allow to mortals.
Let me recall one more experience before I come to the married life which began in 1872--my first sight of Taine, the great French historian, in the spring of 1871. He had come over at the invitation of the Curators of the Taylorian Inst.i.tution to give a series of lectures on Corneille and Racine. The lectures were arranged immediately after the surrender of Paris to the German troops, when it might have been hoped that the worst calamities of France were over. But before M. Taine crossed to England the insurrection of the Commune had broken out, and while he was actually in Oxford, delivering his six lectures, the terrible news of the last days of May, the burning of the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville, and the Cour des Comptes, all the savagery of the beaten revolution, let loose on Paris itself, came crashing, day by day and hour by hour, like so many horrible explosions in the heavy air of Europe, still tremulous with the memories and agonies of recent war.
How well I remember the effect in Oxford!--the newspaper cries in the streets, the fear each morning as to what new calamities might have fallen on civilization, the intense fellow-feeling in a community of students and scholars for the students and scholars of France!
When M. Taine arrived, he himself bears witness (see his published Correspondence, Vol. II) that Oxford could not do enough to show her sympathy with a distinguished Frenchman. He writes from Oxford on May 25th:
I have no courage for a letter to-day. I have just heard of the horrors of Paris, the burning of the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville, etc. My heart is wrung. I have energy for nothing. I cannot go out and see people. I was in the Bodleian when the Librarian told me this and showed me the newspapers. In presence of such madness and such disasters, they treat a Frenchman here with a kind of pitying sympathy.
Oxford residents, indeed, inside and outside the colleges, crowded the first lecture to show our feeling not only for M. Taine, but for a France wounded and trampled on by her own children. The few dignified and touching words with which he opened his course, his fine, dark head, the attractiveness of his subject, the lucidity of his handling of it, made the lecture a great success; and a few nights afterward at dinner at Balliol I found myself sitting next the great man. In his published Correspondence there is a letter describing this dinner which shows that I must have confided in him not a little--as to my Bodleian reading, and the article on the "Poema del Cid" that I was writing. He confesses, however, that he did his best to draw me--examining the English girl as a new specimen for his psychological collection. As for me, I can only perversely remember a pa.s.sing phrase of his to the effect that there was too much magenta in the dress of Englishwomen, and too much pepper in the English _cuisine_. From English cooking--which showed ill in the Oxford of those days--he suffered, indeed, a good deal. Nor, in spite of his great literary knowledge of England and English, was his spoken English clear enough to enable him to grapple with the lodging-house cook. Professor Max Muller, who had induced him to give the lectures, and watched over him during his stay, told me that on his first visit to the historian in his Beaumont Street rooms he found him sitting bewildered before the strangest of meals. It consisted entirely of a huge beefsteak, served in the unappetizing, slovenly English way, and--a large plate of b.u.t.tered toast. Nothing else. "But I ordered bif-tek and pott-a-toes!" cried the puzzled historian to his visitor!
Another guest of the Master"s on that night was Mr. Swinburne, and of him, too, I have a vivid recollection as he sat opposite to me on the side next the fire, his small lower features and slender neck overweighted by his thick reddish hair and capacious brow. I could not think why he seemed so cross and uncomfortable. He was perpetually beckoning to the waiters; then, when they came, holding peremptory conversation with them; while I from my side of the table could see them going away, with a whisper or a shrug to each other, like men asked for the impossible. At last, with a kind of bound, Swinburne leaped from his chair and seized a copy of the _Times_ which he seemed to have persuaded one of the men to bring him. As he got up I saw that the fire behind him, and very close to him, must indeed have been burning the very marrow out of a long-suffering poet. And, alack! in that house without a mistress the small conveniences of life, such as fire-screens, were often overlooked. The Master did not possess any. In a pale exasperation Swinburne folded the _Times_ over the back of his chair and sat down again. Vain was the effort! The room was narrow, the party large, and the servants, pushing by, had soon dislodged the _Times_. Again and again did Swinburne in a fury replace it; and was soon reduced to sitting silent and wild-eyed, his back firmly pressed against the chair and the newspaper, in a concentrated struggle with fate.
Matthew Arnold was another of the party, and I have a vision of my uncle standing talking with M. Taine, with whom he then and there made a lasting friendship. The Frenchman was not, I trust, aware at that moment of the heresies of the English critic who had ventured only a few years before to speak of "the exaggerated French estimate of Racine," and even to indorse the judgment of Joubert--"_Racine est le Virgile des ignorants"!_ Otherwise M. Taine might have given an even sharper edge than he actually did to his remarks, in his letters home, on the critical faculty of the English. "In all that I read and hear," he says to Madame Taine, "I see nowhere the fine literary sense which means the gift--or the art--of understanding the souls and pa.s.sions of the past."
And again, "I have had infinite trouble to-day to make my audience appreciate some _finesses_ of Racine." There is a note of resigned exasperation in these comments which reminds me of the pa.s.sionate feeling of another French critic--Edmond Scherer, Sainte-Beuve"s best successor--ten years later. _a propos_ of some judgment of Matthew Arnold--whom Scherer delighted in--on Racine, of the same kind as those I have already quoted, the French man of letters once broke out to me, almost with fury, as we walked together at Versailles. But, after all, was the Oxford which contained Pater, Pattison, and Bywater, which had nurtured Matthew Arnold and Swinburne--Swinburne with his wonderful knowledge of the intricacies and subtleties of the French tongue and the French literature--merely "_solide and positif_," as Taine declares? The judgment is, I think, a characteristic judgment of that man of formulas--often so brilliant and often so mistaken--who, in the famous _History of English Literature_, taught his English readers as much by his blunders as by his merits. He provoked us into thinking. And what critic does more? Is not the whole fraternity like so many successive Penelopes, each unraveling the web of the one before? The point is that the web should be eternally remade and eternally unraveled.
II
I married Mr. Thomas Humphry Ward, Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, on April 6, 1872, the knot being tied by my father"s friend, my grandfather"s pupil and biographer, Dean Stanley. For nine years, till the spring of 1881, we lived in Oxford, in a little house north of the Parks, in what was then the newest quarter of the University town. They were years, for both of us, of great happiness and incessant activity.
Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and 1879. We had many friends, all pursuing the same kind of life as ourselves, and interested in the same kind of things. n.o.body under the rank of a Head of a College, except a very few privileged Professors, possessed as much as a thousand a year. The average income of the new race of married tutors was not much more than half that sum. Yet we all gave dinner-parties and furnished our houses with Morris papers, old chests and cabinets, and blue pots. The dinner-parties were simple and short. At our own early efforts of the kind there certainly was not enough to eat. But we all improved with time; and on the whole I think we were very fair housekeepers and competent mothers. Most of us were very anxious to be up-to-date and in the fashion, whether in esthetics, in housekeeping, or in education. But our fashion was not that of Belgravia or Mayfair, which, indeed, we scorned! It was the fashion of the movement which sprang from Morris and Burne-Jones. Liberty stuffs very plain in line, but elaborately "smocked," were greatly in vogue, and evening dresses, "cut square," or with "Watteau pleats," were generally worn, and often in conscious protest against the London "low dress," which Oxford--young married Oxford--thought both ugly and "fast." And when we had donned our Liberty gowns we went out to dinner, the husband walking, the wife in a bath chair, drawn by an ancient member of an ancient and close fraternity--the "chairmen" of old Oxford.
Almost immediately opposite to us in the Bradmore Road lived Walter Pater and his sisters. The exquisiteness of their small house, and the charm of the three people who lived in it, will never be forgotten by those who knew them well in those days when by the publication of the _Studies in the Renaissance_ (1873) their author had just become famous.
I recall very clearly the effect of that book, and of the strange and poignant sense of beauty expressed in it; of its entire aloofness also from the Christian tradition of Oxford, its glorification of the higher and intenser forms of esthetic pleasure, of "pa.s.sion" in the intellectual sense--as against the Christian doctrine of self-denial and renunciation. It was a gospel that both stirred and scandalized Oxford.
The bishop of the diocese thought it worth while to protest. There was a cry of "Neo-paganism," and various attempts at persecution. The author of the book was quite unmoved. In those days Walter Pater"s mind was still full of revolutionary ferments which were just as sincere, just as much himself, as that later hesitating and wistful return toward Christianity, and Christianity of the Catholic type, which is embodied in _Marius the Epicurean_, the most beautiful of the spiritual romances of Europe since the _Confessions_. I can remember a dinner-party at his house, where a great tumult arose over some abrupt statement of his made to the High Church wife of a well-known Professor. Pater had been in some way pressed controversially beyond the point of wisdom, and had said suddenly that no reasonable person could govern his life by the opinions or actions of a man who died eighteen centuries ago. The Professor and his wife--I look back to them both with the warmest affection--departed hurriedly, in agitation; and the rest of us only gradually found out what had happened.
But before we left Oxford in 1881 this att.i.tude of mind had, I think, greatly changed. Mr. Gosse, in the memoir of Walter Pater contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, says that before 1870 he had gradually relinquished all belief in the Christian religion--and leaves it there. But the interesting and touching thing to watch was the gentle and almost imperceptible flowing back of the tide over the sands it had left bare. It may be said, I think, that he never returned to Christianity in the orthodox or intellectual sense. But his heart returned to it. He became once more endlessly interested in it, and haunted by the "something" in it which he thought inexplicable. A remembrance of my own shows this. In my ardent years of exploration and revolt, conditioned by the historical work that occupied me during the later "seventies, I once said to him in tete-a-tete, reckoning confidently on his sympathy, and with the intolerance and certainty of youth, that orthodoxy could not possibly maintain itself long against its a.s.sailants, especially from the historical and literary camps, and that we should live to see it break down. He shook his head and looked rather troubled.
"I don"t think so," he said. Then, with hesitation: "And we don"t altogether agree. You think it"s all plain. But I can"t. There are such mysterious things. Take that saying, "Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden." How can you explain that? There is a mystery in it--something supernatural."
A few years later, I should very likely have replied that the answer of the modern critic would be, "The words you quote are in all probability from a lost Wisdom book; there are very close a.n.a.logies in Proverbs and in the Apocrypha. They are a fragment without a context, and may represent on the Lord"s lips either a quotation or the text of a discourse. Wisdom is speaking--the Wisdom "which is justified of her children."" But if any one had made such a reply, it would not have affected the mood in Pater, of which this conversation gave me my first glimpse, and which is expressed again and again in the most exquisite pa.s.sages of _Marius_. Turn to the first time when Marius--under Marcus Aurelius--is present at a Christian ceremony, and sees, for the first time, the "wonderful spectacle of those who believed."
The people here collected might have figured as the earliest handsel or pattern of a new world, from the very face of which discontent had pa.s.sed away.... They had faced life and were glad, by some science or light of knowledge they had, to which there was certainly no parallel in the older world. Was some credible message from beyond "the flaming rampart of the world"--a message of hope ...
already molding their very bodies and looks and voices, now and here?
Or again to the thoughts of Marius at the approach of death:
At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house was ready for the possible guest, the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatever divine fingers might choose to write there.
_Marius_ was published twelve years after the _Studies in the Renaissance_, and there is a world between the two books. Some further light will be thrown on this later phase of Mr. Pater"s thought by a letter he wrote to me in 1885 on my translation of Amiel"s _From Journal Intime_. Here it is rather the middle days of his life that concern me, and the years of happy friendship with him and his sisters, when we were all young together. Mr. Pater and my husband were both fellows and tutors of Brasenose, though my husband was much the younger, a fact which naturally brought us into frequent contact. And the beautiful little house across the road, with its two dear mistresses, drew me perpetually, both before and after my marriage. The drawing-room, which runs the whole breadth of the house from the road to the garden behind, was "Paterian" in every line and ornament. There were a Morris paper; spindle-legged tables and chairs; a sparing allowance of blue plates and pots, bought, I think, in Holland, where Oxford residents in my day were always foraging, to return, often, with treasures of which the very memory now stirs a half-amused envy of one"s own past self, that had such chances and lost them; framed embroidery of the most delicate design and color, the work of Mr. Pater"s elder sister; engravings, if I remember right, from Botticelli, or Luini, or Mantegna; a few mirrors, and a very few flowers, chosen and arranged with a simple yet conscious art. I see that room always with the sun in it, touching the polished surfaces of wood and bra.s.s and china, and bringing out its pure, bright color. I see it too pervaded by the presence of the younger sister, Clara--a personality never to be forgotten by those who loved her. Clara Pater, whose grave and n.o.ble beauty in youth has been preserved in a drawing by Mr. Wirgman, was indeed a "rare and dedicated spirit." When I first knew her she was four or five and twenty, intelligent, alive, sympathetic, with a delightful humor and a strong judgment, but without much positive acquirement. Then after some years she began to learn Latin and Greek with a view to teaching; and after we left Oxford she became Vice-President of the new Somerville College for Women. Several generations of girl-students must still preserve the tenderest and most grateful memories of all that she was there, as woman, teacher, and friend. Her point of view, her opinion, had always the crispness, the savor that goes with perfect sincerity. She feared no one, and she loved many, as they loved her. She loved animals, too, as all the household did. How well I remember the devoted nursing given by the brother and sisters to a poor little paralytic cat, whose life they tried to save-- in vain! When, later, I came across in _Marius_ the account of Marcus Aurelius carrying away the dead child Annius Verus--"pressed closely to his bosom, as if yearning just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress"--I remembered the absorption of the writer of those lines, and of his sisters, in the suffering of that poor little creature, long years before. I feel tolerably certain that in writing the words Walter Pater had that past experience in mind.
After Walter Pater"s death, Clara, with her elder sister, became the vigilant and joint guardians of their brother"s books and fame, till, four years ago, a terrible illness cut short her life, and set free, in her brother"s words, the "unclouded and receptive soul."
CHAPTER VII
BALLIOL AND LINCOLN
When the Oxford historian of the future comes across the name and influence of Benjamin Jowett, the famous Master of Balliol, and Greek professor, in the mid-current of the nineteenth century, he will not be without full means of finding out what made that slight figure (whereof he will be able to study the outward and visible presence in some excellent portraits, and in many caricatures) so significant and so representative. The _Life_ of the Master, by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, is to me one of the most interesting biographies of our generation. It is long--for those who have no Oxford ties, no doubt, too long; and it is c.u.mbered with the echoes of old controversies, theological and academic, which have mostly, though by no means wholly, pa.s.sed into a dusty limbo. But it is one of the rare attempts that English biography has seen to paint a man as he really was; and to paint him not with the sub-malicious strokes of a Purcell, but in love, although in truth.
[Ill.u.s.tration: BENJAMIN JOWETT]
The Master, as he fought his many fights, with his abnormally strong will and his dominating personality; the Master, as he appeared, on the one hand, to the upholders of "research," of learning, that is, as an end in itself apart from teaching, and, on the other, to the High- Churchmen encamped in Christ Church, to Pusey, Liddon, and all their clan--pugnacious, formidable, and generally successful--here he is to the life. This is the Master whose personality could never be forgotten in any room he chose to enter; who brought restraint rather than ease to the gatherings of his friends, mainly because, according to his own account, of a shyness he could never overcome; whose company on a walk was too often more of a torture than an honor to the undergraduate selected for it; whose lightest words were feared, quoted, chuckled over, or resented, like those of no one else.
Of this Master I have many remembrances. I see, for instance, a drawing- room full of rather tongue-tied, embarra.s.sed guests, some Oxford residents, some Londoners; and the Master among them, as a stimulating-- but disintegrating!--force, of whom every one was uneasily conscious.
The circle was wide, the room bare, and the Balliol arm-chairs were not placed for conversation. On a high chair against the wall sat a small boy of ten--we will call him Arthur--oppressed by his surroundings. The talk languished and dropped. From one side of the large room, the Master, raising his voice, addressed the small boy on the other side.
"Well, Arthur, so I hear you"ve begun Greek. How are you getting on?"
To the small boy looking round the room it seemed as though twenty awful grownups were waiting in a dead silence to eat him up. He rushed upon his answer.
"I--I"m reading the Anabasis," he said, desperately.
The false quant.i.ty sent a shock through the room. n.o.body laughed, out of sympathy with the boy, who already knew that something dreadful had happened. The boy"s miserable parents, Londoners, who were among the twenty, wished themselves under the floor. The Master smiled.
"The Anabasis, Arthur," he said, cheerfully. "You"ll get it right next time."
And he went across to the boy, evidently feeling for him and wishing to put him at ease. But after thirty years the boy and his parents still remember the incident with a shiver. It could not have produced such an effect except in an atmosphere of tension; and that, alas! too often, was the atmosphere which surrounded the Master.
I can remember, too, many proud yet anxious half-hours in the Master"s study--such a privilege, yet such an ordeal!--when, after our migration to London, we became, at regular intervals, the Master"s week-end visitors. "Come and talk to me a little in my study," the Master would say, pleasantly. And there in the room where he worked for so many years, as the interpreter of Greek thought to the English world, one would take a chair beside the fire, with the Master opposite. I have described my fireside tete-a-tetes, as a girl, with another head of a College--the Rector of Lincoln, Mark Pattison. But the Master was a far more strenuous companion. With him, there were no diversions, none!--no relief from the breathless adventure of trying to please him and doing one"s best. The Rector once, being a little invalidish, allowed me to make up the fire, and, after watching the process sharply, said: "Good!
Does it drive _you_ distracted, too, when people put on coals the wrong way?" An interruption which made for human sympathy! The Master, as far as I can remember, had no "nerves"; and "nerves" are a bond between many. But he occasionally had sudden returns upon himself. I remember once after we had been discussing a religious book which had interested us both, he abruptly drew himself up, in the full tide of talk, and said, with a curious impatience, "But one can"t be always thinking of these things!" and changed the subject.
So much for the Master, the stimulus of whose mere presence was, according to his biographers, "often painful." But there were at least two other Masters in the "Mr. Jowett" we reverenced. And they, too, are fully shown in this biography. The Master who loved his friends and thought no pains too great to take for them, including the very rare pains of trying to mend their characters by faithfulness and plain speaking, whenever he thought they wanted it. The Master, again, whose sympathies were always with social reform and with the poor, whose hidden life was full of deeds of kindness and charity, who, in spite of his difficulties of manner, was loved by all sorts and conditions of men--and women--in all circles of life, by politicians and great ladies, by diplomats and scholars and poets, by his secretary and his servants-- there are many traits of this good man and useful citizen recorded by his biographers.
And, finally, there was the Master who reminded his most intimate friends of a sentence of his about Greek literature, which occurs in the Introduction to the _Phoedrus_: "Under the marble exterior of Greek literature was concealed a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion," says the Master. His own was not exactly a marble exterior; but the placid and yet shrewd cheerfulness of his delicately rounded face, with its small mouth and chin, its great brow and frame of snowy hair, gave but little clue to the sensitive and mystical soul within. If ever a man was _Gottbetrunken_, it was the Master, many of whose meditations and pa.s.sing thoughts, withdrawn, while he lived, from all human ken, yet written down--in thirty or forty volumes!--for his own discipline and remembrance, can now be read, thanks to his biographers, in the pages of the _Life_, They are extraordinarily frank and simple; startling, often, in their bareness and truth. But they are, above all, the thoughts of a mystic, moving in a Divine presence. An old and intimate friend of the Master"s once said to me that he believed "Jowett"s inner mind, especially toward the end of his life, was always in an att.i.tude of Prayer. One would go and talk to him on University or College business in his study, and suddenly see his lips moving, slightly and silently, and know what it meant." The records of him which his death revealed-- and his closest friends realized it in life--show a man perpetually conscious of a mysterious and blessed companionship; which is the mark of the religious man, in all faiths and all churches. Yet this was the man who, for the High Church party at Oxford, with its headquarters at Christ Church, under the flag of Doctor Pusey and Canon Liddon, was the symbol and embodiment of all heresy; whose University salary as Greek professor, which depended on a Christ Church subsidy, was withheld for years by the same High-Churchmen, because of their inextinguishable wrath against the Liberal leader who had contributed so largely to the test-abolishing legislation of 1870--legislation by which Oxford, in Liddon"s words, was "logically lost to the Church of England."
Yet no doubt they had their excuses! For this, too, was the man who, in a city haunted by Tractarian shades, once said to his chief biographer that "Voltaire had done more good than all the Fathers of the Church put together!"--who scornfully asks himself in his diary, _a propos_ of the Bishops" condemnation of _Essays and Reviews_, "What is Truth against an _esprit de corps_?"--and drops out the quiet dictum, "Half the books that are published are religious books, and what trash this religious literature is!" Nor did the Evangelicals escape. The Master"s dislike for many well-known hymns specially dear to that persuasion was never concealed. "How c.o.c.ky they are!" he would say, contemptuously. ""When upward I fly--Quite justified I"--who can repeat a thing like that?"
How the old war-cries ring again in one"s ears as one looks back! Those who have only known the Oxford of the last twenty years can never, I think, feel toward that "august place" as we did, in the seventies of the last century; we who were still within sight and hearing of the great fighting years of an earlier generation, and still scorched by their dying fires. Balliol, Christ Church, Lincoln--the Liberal and utilitarian camp, the Church camp, the researching and pure scholarship camp--with Science and the Museum hovering in the background, as the growing aggressive powers of the future seeking whom they might devour-- they were the signs and symbols of mighty hosts, of great forces still visibly incarnate, and in marching array. Balliol _versus_ Christ Church--Jowett _versus_ Pusey and Liddon--while Lincoln despised both, and the new scientific forces watched and waited--that was how we saw the field of battle, and the various alarms and excursions it was always providing.
But Balliol meant more to me than the Master. Professor Thomas Hill Green--"Green of Balliol"--was no less representative in our days of the spiritual and liberating forces of the great college; and the time which has now elapsed since his death has clearly shown that his philosophic work and influence hold a lasting and conspicuous place in the history of nineteenth-century thought. He and his wife became our intimate friends, and in the Grey of _Robert Elsmere_ I tried to reproduce a few of those traits--traits of a great thinker and teacher, who was also one of the simplest, sincerest, and most practical of men--which Oxford will never forget, so long as high culture and n.o.ble character are dear to her. His wife--so his friend and biographer, Lewis Nettleship, tells us--once compared him to Sir Bors in "The Holy Grail":
A square-set man and honest; and his eyes, An outdoor sign of all the wealth within, Smiled with his lips--a smile beneath a cloud, But Heaven had meant it for a sunny one!
A quotation in which the mingling of a cheerful, practical, humorous temper, the temper of the active citizen and politician, with the heavy tasks of philosophic thought, is very happily suggested. As we knew him, indeed, and before the publication of the _Prolegomena to Ethics_ and the Introduction to the Clarendon Press edition of Hume had led to his appointment as Whyte"s Professor of Moral Philosophy, Mr. Green was not only a leading Balliol tutor, but an energetic Liberal, a member both of the Oxford Town Council and of various University bodies; a helper in all the great steps taken for the higher education of women at Oxford, and keenly attracted by the project of a High School for the town boys of Oxford--a man, in other words, preoccupied, just as the Master was, and, for all his philosophic genius, with the need of leading "a useful life."
Let me pause to think how much that phrase meant in the mouths of the best men whom Balliol produced, in the days when I knew Oxford. The Master, Green, Toynbee--their minds were full, half a century ago, of the "condition of the people" question, of temperance, housing, wages, electoral reform; and within the University, and by the help of the weapons of thought and teaching, they regarded themselves as the natural allies of the Liberal party which was striving for these things through politics and Parliament. "Usefulness," "social reform," the bettering of daily life for the many--these ideas are stamped on all their work and on all the biographies of them that remain to us.