From a Cornish Window Part 13

"We can find plenty of beauty in the familiar northern scenes; but we miss the pent-up forces, the volcanic outbursts, the tropic glow, and all the surprising manifold and tender and sweet-scented outpourings of soil and sunshine, so spontaneous, so inexhaustibly rich, and with the heat of a great fire burning and palpitating underneath all the time."

Natures more masterfully commanding I have known: never one more remarkable. In the mere possession of him, rather than in his direct influence, all Cliftonians felt themselves rich. We were at least as proud of him as Etonians of the author of "Ionica." But no comparisons will serve. Falstaffian--with a bent of homely piety; Johnsonian--with a fiery Celtic heat and a pa.s.sionate adoration of nature: all such epithets fail as soon as they are uttered. The man was at once absolute and Protean: entirely sincere, and yet a different being to each separate friend. "There was no getting to the end of Brown."

I have said that we--those of us, at any rate, who were not of Brown's House--were conscious of a rich and honourable possession in him, rather than of an active influence. Yet that influence must not be underrated.

Clifton, as I first knew it, was already a great school, although less than twenty years old. But, to a new-comer, even more impressive than its success among schools, or its aspirations, was a firmness of tradition which (I dare to say) would have been remarkable in a foundation of five times its age. It had already its type of boy; and having discovered it and how to produce it, fell something short of tolerance towards other types. For the very reason which allows me with decency to call the type an admirable one, I may be excused for adding that the tradition demanded some patience of those who could not easily manage to conform with it.

But there the tradition stood, permanently rooted in a school not twenty years old. Is it fanciful to hold that Brown's pa.s.sion for 'continuity'

had much to do with planting and confirming it? Mr. Irwin quotes for us a pa.s.sage from one of his sermons to the school: "Suffer no chasm to interrupt this glorious tradition. . . . Continuous life . . . that is what we want--to feel the pulses of hearts that are now dust." Did this pa.s.sage occur, I wonder, in the sermon of which I rather remember a fierce, hopeless, human protest against 'change and decay'?--the voice ringing down on each plea, "What do the change-and-decay people say to _that?_"

"I postulate the continuity." Vain postulate it often seems, yet of all life Brown demanded it. Hear him as he speaks of his wife's death in a letter to a friend:--

"My dear fellow-sufferer, what is it after all? Why this sinking of the heart, this fainting, sorrowing of the spirit? There is no separation: life is continuous. All that was stable and good, good and therefore stable, in our union with the loved one, is unquestionably permanent, will endure for ever. It cannot be otherwise. . . . When love has done its full work, has wrought soul into soul so that every fibre has become part of the common life-- _quis separabit?_ Can you conceive yourself as existing at all without _her?_ No, you can't; well, then, it follows that you don't, and never will."

I believe it to have been this pa.s.sion for continuity that bound and kept him so absolute a Manxman, drawing his heart so persistently back to the Island that there were times (one may almost fancy) when the prospect of living his life out to the end elsewhere seemed to him a treachery to his parents' dust. I believe this same pa.s.sion drew him--master as he was of varied and vocal English--to clothe the bulk of his poetry in the Manx dialect, and thereby to miss his mark with the public, which inevitably mistook him for a rustic singer, a man of the people, imperfectly educated.

"I would not be forgotten in this land."--

This line of another true poet of curiously similar temperament[1]

has haunted me through the reading of Brown's published letters.

But Brown's was no merely selfish craving for continuity--to be remembered. By a fallacy of thought, perhaps, but by a very n.o.ble one, he transferred the ambition to those for whom he laboured. His own terror that Time might obliterate the moment:

"And all this personal dream be fled,"

Became for his countrymen a very spring of helpfulness. _Antiquam exquirite matrem_--he would do that which they, in poverty and the stress of earning daily bread, were careless to do--would explore for them the ancient springs of faith and custom.

"Dear countrymen, whate'er is left to us Of ancient heritage-- Of manners, speech, of humours, polity, The limited horizon of our stage-- Old love, hope, fear, All this I fain would fix upon the page; That so the coming age, Lost in the empire's ma.s.s, Yet haply longing for their fathers, here May see, as in a gla.s.s, What they held dear-- May say, ''Twas thus and thus They lived'; and as the time-flood onward rolls Secure an anchor for their Keltic souls."

This was his task, and the public of course set him down for a rustic.

"What ought I to do?" he demands. "Shall I put on my next t.i.tle-page, 'Late Fellow of Oriel, etc.'? or am I always to abide under this ironic cloak of rusticity?" To be sure, on consideration (if the public ever found time to consider), the language and feeling of the poems were penetrated with scholarship. He entered his countrymen's hearts; but he also could, and did, stand outside and observe them with affectionate, comprehending humour. Scholarship saved him, too--not always, but as a rule--from that emotional excess to which he knew himself most dangerously p.r.o.ne. He a.s.signs it confidently to his Manx blood; but his mother was Scottish by descent, and from my experience of what the Lowland Scot can do in the way of pathos when he lets himself go, I take leave to doubt that the Manxman was wholly to blame. There can, however, be no doubt that the author of "The Doctor," of "Catherine Kinrade," of "Mater Dolorosa," described himself accurately as a "born sobber," or that an acquired self-restraint saved him from a form of intemperance by which of late our literature has been somewhat too copiously afflicted.

To scholarship, too, imposed upon and penetrating a taste naturally catholic, we owe the rare flavour of the many literary judgments scattered about his letters. They have a taste of native earth, beautifully rarefied: to change the metaphor, they illuminate the page with a kind of lambent common sense. For a few examples:--

"I have also read a causerie on Virgil and one on Theocritus. So many French _litterateurs_ give me the idea that they don't go nearer the Greek authors than the Latin translations. . . . Sainte Beuve [_Nouveaux Lundis_, vii. 1--52, on 'The Greek Anthology'] is an enthusiastic champion for our side, but, oddly enough, he never strikes me as knowing much about the matter!"

"Your Latin verses [translating Cowley] I greatly enjoy. The dear old Abraham goes straight off into your beautiful lines. Of course he has not a sc.r.a.p of modern _impedimenta_. You go through the customs at the frontier with a whistle and a smile. You have _nothing to declare_. The blessed old man by your side is himself a Roman to begin with, and you pa.s.s together as cheerfully as possible. . . ."

"I have also been reading Karl Elze's _Essays on Shakespeare_.

He is not bad, but don't you resent the imperturbable confidence of men who, after attributing a play of Shakespeare's to two authors, proceed to suggest a third, urged thereto by some fatuous and self-sought exigency?"

"Did you ever try to write a Burns song? I mean the equivalent in ordinary English of his Scotch. Can it be done? A Yorkshireman-- could he do it? A Lancashire man (Waugh)? I hardly think so.

The Ayrshire dialect has a _Schwung_ and a confidence that no-English county can pretend to. Our dialects are apologetic things, half-ashamed, half-insolent. Burns has no doubts, and for his audience unhesitatingly demands the universe. . . ."

"There is an ethos in Fitzgerald's letters which is so exquisitely idyllic as to be almost heavenly. He takes you with him, exactly accommodating his pace to yours, walks through meadows so tranquil, and yet abounding in the most delicate surprises. And these surprises seem so familiar, just as if they had originated with yourself. What delicious blending! What a perfect interweft of thought and diction! What a _sweet_ companion!"

Lastly, let me quote a pa.s.sage in which his thoughts return to Clifton, where it had been suggested that Greek should be omitted from the ordinary form-routine and taught in "sets," or separate cla.s.ses:--

"This is disturbing about Greek, 'set' Greek. Yes, you would fill your school to overflowing, of course you would, so long as other places did not abandon the old lines. But it would be detestable treachery to the cause of education, of humanity. To me the _learning_ of any blessed thing is a matter of little moment.

Greek is not learned by nineteen-twentieths of our Public School boys. But it is a baptism into a cult, a faith, not more irrational than other faiths or cults; the baptism of a regeneration which releases us from I know not what original sin. And if a man does not see that, he is a fool, such a fool that I shouldn't wonder if he gravely asked me to explain what I meant by original sin in such a connection. . . ."

So his thoughts reverted to the school he had left in 1892. In October, 1897, he returned to it on a visit. He was the guest of one of the house masters, Mr. Tait, and on Friday evening, October 29th, gave an address to the boys of the house. He had spoken for some minutes with brightness and vigour, when his voice grew thick and he was seen to stagger. He died in less than two hours.

His letters have been collected and piously given to the world by Mr.

Irwin, one of his closest friends. By far the greatest number of them belong to those last five years in the Island--the happiest, perhaps, of his life, certainly the happiest temperamentally. "Never the time and the place . . ." but at least Brown was more fortunate than most men.

He realised his dream, and it did not disappoint him. He could not carry off his friends to share it (and it belongs to criticism of these volumes to say that he was exceptionally happy in his friends), but he could return and visit them or stay at home and write to them concerning the realisation, and be sure they understood. Therefore, although we desire more letters of the Clifton period--although twenty years are omitted, left blank to us--those that survive confirm a fame which, although never wide, was always unquestioned within its range. There could be no possibility of doubt concerning Brown. He was absolute. He lived a fierce, shy, spiritual life; a wise man, keeping the child in his heart: he loved much and desired permanence in the love of his kind.

"Diuturnity," says his great seventeenth-century namesake, "is a dream and folly of expectation. There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality." And yet, _prosit ama.s.se!_

The railway took me on to Oxford--

"Like faithful hound returning For old sake's sake to each loved track With heart and memory burning."

"I well remember," writes Mrs. Green of her husband, the late John Richard Green, "the pa.s.sionate enthusiasm with which he watched from the train for the first sight of the Oxford towers against the sky:" and although our enthusiasm nowadays has to feed on a far tamer view than that which saluted our forefathers when the stage-coach topped the rise of Shotover and its pa.s.sengers beheld the city spread at their feet, yet what faithful son of Oxford can see her towers rise above the water-meadows and re-greet them without a thrill?

In the year 1688, and in a book ent.i.tled _The Guardian's Instruction_, a Mr. Stephen Penton gave the world a pleasing and lifelike little narrative--superior, in my opinion, to anything in _Verdant Green_-- telling us how a reluctant father was persuaded to send his son to Oxford; what doubts, misgivings, hesitations he had, and how they were overcome.

I take the story to be fict.i.tious. It is written in the first person, professedly by the hesitating parent: but the parent can hardly have been Penton, for the story will not square with what we know of his life.

The actual Penton was born, it seems, in 1640, and educated at Winchester and New College; proceeded to his fellowship, resided from 1659 to 1670, and was Princ.i.p.al of St. Edmund's Hall from 1675 to 1683. He appears to have been chaplain to the Earl of Aylesbury, and, according to Antony a Wood, possessed a "rambling head." He died in 1706.

The writer in _The Guardian's Instruction_ is portrayed for us--or is allowed to portray himself--rather as an honest country squire, who had himself spent a year or so of his youth at the University, but had withdrawn when Oxford was invaded by the Court and the trouble between King Charles and Parliament came to a head: and "G.o.d's grace, the Good example of my parents, and a natural love of virtue secured me so far as to leave Oxford, though not much more learned, yet not much worse than I came thither." A chill testimonial! In short, the old squire (as I will take leave to call him) nursed a somewhat crotchety detestation of the place, insomuch "that when I came to have children, I did almost _swear_ them in their childhood never to be friends with Oxford."

He tried his eldest son with a course of foreign travel as a subst.i.tute for University training; but this turned out a failure, and he had the good sense to acknowledge his mistake. So for his second boy he cast about to find a profession; "but what course to take I was at a loss: Cambridge was so far off, I could not have an eye upon him; Oxford I was angry with."

In this fix he consulted with a neighbour, "an old grave learned divine,"

and rigid Churchman, who confessed that many of the charges against Oxford were well grounded, but averred that the place was mending. The truth was, the University had been loyal to the monarchy all through the Commonwealth times; and when Oliver Cromwell was dead, and Richard dismounted, its members perceived, through the maze of changes and intrigues, that in a little time the heart of the nation would revert to the government which twenty years before it had hated. And their impatient hopes of this "made the scholars talk aloud, drink healths, and curse Meroz in the very streets; insomuch that when the King came in, they were not only like them that dream, but like them who are out of their wits, mad, stark, staring mad." This unholy 'rag' (to modernise the old gentleman's language) continued for a twelvemonth: that is to say, until the Vice-Chancellor--holding that the demonstration, like Miss Mary Bennet's pianoforte playing in _Pride and Prejudice_, had delighted the company long enough--put his foot down. And from that time the University became sober, modest, and studious as perhaps any in Europe. The old gentleman wound up with some practical advice, and a promise to furnish the squire with a letter of recommendation to one of the best tutors in Oxford.

Thus armed, the squire (though still with misgivings) was not long in getting on horseback with his wife, his daughters, and his young hopeful, and riding off to Oxford, where at first it seemed that his worst suspicions would be confirmed; "for at ten o'clock in the inn, there arose such a roaring and singing that my hair stood on end, and my former prejudices were so heightened that I resolved to lose the journey and carry back my son again, presuming that no noise in Oxford could be made but _scholars_ must do it,"--a h.o.a.ry misconception still cherished, or until recently, by the Metropolitan Police and the Oxford City Bench.

In this instance a proctor intervened, and quelled the disturbance by sending 'two young pert townsmen' to prison; "and quickly came to my chamber, and perceiving my boy designed for a gown, told me that it was for the preservation of such fine youths as he that the proctors made so bold with gentlemen's lodgings." The squire had some talk with this dignitary, who was a man of presence and suitable address, and of sufficient independence to deny--not for the first time in history--that dons were overpaid.

Next morning the whole family trooped off to call upon the tutor whom their old neighbour had recommended. Oddly enough, the tutor seemed by no means overwhelmed by the honour. "I thought to have found him mightily pleased with the opinion we had of his conduct, and the credit of having a gentleman's son under his charge, and the father with cap in hand.

Instead of all this he talked at a rate as if the gentry were _obliged_ to tutors more than tutors to them." The tutor, in short, was decidedly tart in his admonitions to this honest family--he did not forget, either, to a.s.sure them that (_generally_) a college tutor was worse paid than a dancing-master. Here is a specimen of his advice--sound and practical enough in its way:--

"I understand by one of your daughters that you have brought him up a _fine padd_ to keep here for his health's sake. Now I will tell you the use of an horse in Oxford, and then do as you think fit.

The horse must be kept at an _ale-house_ or an _inn_, and he must have leave to go once _every day_ to see him eat oats, because the master's eye makes him fat; and it will not be genteel to go often to an house and spend nothing; and then there may be some danger of the horse growing _resty_ if he be not used often, so you must give him leave to go to _Abingdon_ once every week, to look out of the tavern window and see the maids sell turnips; and in one month or two come home with a surfeit of poisoned wine, and save _any farther trouble_ by dying, and then you will be troubled to send for your horse _again_. . . ."

The humour of college tutors has not greatly altered in two hundred years.

I have known one or two capable of the sardonic touch in those concluding words. But conceive its effect upon the squire's lady and daughters!

No: you need not trouble to do so, for the squire describes it: "When the tutor was gone out of the room, I asked how they liked the person and his converse. My boy clung about his mother and cry'd to go home again, and she had no more wit than to be of the same mind; she thought him too weakly to undergo so much hardship as she foresaw was to be expected.

My daughter, who (instead of catechism and _Lady's Calling_) had been used to read nothing but speeches in romances, and hearing nothing of _Love_ and _Honour_ in all the talk, fell into downright _scolding_ at him; call'd him the _merest_ scholar; and if this were your _Oxford_ breeding, they had rather he should go to _Constantinople_ to learn manners!

But I, who was older and understood the language, call'd them all great fools. . . ."

On the tutor's return they begged to have his company at dinner, at their inn: but he declined, kept the young man to dine with him, and next day invited the family to luncheon. They accepted, fully expecting (after the austerity of his discourse) to be starved: "and the girles drank chocolette at no rate in the morning, for fear of the _worst_." But they were by no means starved. "It was very pleasant," the squire confesses, "to see, when we came, the _constrain'd_ artifice of an unaccustomed complement." There were silver tankards 'heaped upon one another,'

'napkins some twenty years younger than the rest,' and gla.s.ses 'fit for a _Dutchman_ at an _East-India Return_.' The dinner was full enough for ten. "I was asham'd, but would not disoblige him, considering with myself that I should put this man to such a charge of forty shillings at least, to entertain me; when for all his honest care and pains he is to have but forty or fifty shillings a quarter; so that for one whole quarter he must doe the drudgery to my son for nothing." After dinner, our good squire strolled off to a public bowling-green, "that being the onely recreation I can affect." And "coming in, I saw half a score of the finest youths the sun, I think, ever shined upon. They walked to and fro, with their hands in their pockets, to see a match played by some scholars and some gentlemen fam'd for their skill. I gaped also and stared as a man in his way would doe; but a country ruff gentleman, being like to _lose_, did swear, at such a rate that my heart did grieve that those fine young men should _hear_ it, and know there was such a thing as swearing in the kingdom. Coming to my lodging, I charged my son never to go to such publick places unless he resolved to quarrel with me."

And so, having settled the lad and fitted him up with good advice, the father, mother, and sisters returned home. But the squire, being summoned to Oxford shortly after to "sit in _parliament_" (presumably in the last Parliament held at Oxford, in March, 1681), took that opportunity to walk the streets and study the demeanour of the "scholars." And this experiment would seem to have finally satisfied him. "I walk'd the streets as late as most people, and never in ten days ever saw any scholar rude or disordered: so that as I grow old, and more engaged to speak the _truth_, I do repent of the _ill-opinion_ I have had of that place, and hope to be farther obliged by a very good _account_ of my son."

Old Stephen Penton may have had a rambling head; but unless I have thumbed the bloom off his narrative in my attempt to summarise it, the reader will allow that he knew how to write. He gives us the whole scene in the fewest possible touches: he wastes no words in describing the personages in his small comedy--comic idyll I had rather call it, for after a fashion it reminds me of the immortal chatter between Gorgo and Praxinoe in the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus. There the picture is: the honest opinionated country squire; the acidulous tutor; the coltish son; the fond, foolish, fussing mother; the prinking young ladies with their curls and romantic notions; the colours of all as fresh as if laid on yesterday, the humour quite untarnished after two hundred years. And I wonder the more at the vivacity of this little sketch because, as many writers have pointed out, no one has yet built upon University life a novel of anything like first-cla.s.s merit, and the conclusion has been drawn that the elements of profound human interest are wanting in that life. "Is this so?" asks the editor of Stephen Penton's reminiscences in a volume published by the Oxford Historical Society--

"In spite of the character given to Oxford of being a city of short memories and abruptly-ended friendships, in spite of the inchoative qualities of youths of eighteen or twenty, especially in respect to the 'ruling pa.s.sion' so dear to novelists, yet surely in the three or four years spent at Oxford by an incredible company of young students 'fresh from public schools, and not yet tossed about and hardened in the storms of life'--some of them Penton's 'finest youths,' some obviously otherwise--there must be, one would think, abundance of romantic incident awaiting its Thackeray or Meredith. For how many have these years been the turning point of a life! . . ."

There at any rate is the fact: _the_ novel of University life has not been written yet, and perhaps never will be. I am not at all sure that _The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green_ do not mark the nearest approach to it-- save the mark! And I am not at all sure that _The Adventures of Mr.

Verdant Green_ can be called a novel at all, while I am quite certain it cannot be called a novel of first-cla.s.s merit. _Tom Brown at Oxford_ still counts its admirers, and has, I hear, attained the dignity of translation into French; but Tom Brown, though robust enough, never seemed to get over his transplantation from Rugby--possibly because his author's heart remained at Rugby. 'Loss and Gain' is not a book for the many; and the many never did justice to Mr. Hermann Merivale's 'Faucit of Balliol'

or Mr. St. John Tyrwhitt's 'Hugh Heron of Christ Church.' Neither of these two novels obtained the hearing it deserved--and 'Faucit of Balliol'