Part 5 (1/2)

”Know you her secret none can utter?

Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?

Still on the spire the pigeons flutter; Still by the gateway flits the gown; Still on the street, froutter, Faces of stone look down

Still on her spire the pigeons hover; Still by her gateway haunts the gown; Ah, but her secret? You, young lover, Dru her old ones forth from town, Know you the secret none discover?

Tell it--when _you_ go down”

_Know you the secret none discover_--none, that is, while they still are undergraduates?

Well, I think I do; and, to begin with a negative, it is not the secret of Nirvana There are uided critics abroad in the land who seem to assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, ae in its coedy of poverty and toil and pain, ards the actual work and warfare ofPoplar does not very readily penetrate to the well-spread tables of Halls and Common-rooms In a laburnum-clad villa in The Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life in cities where five families camp in one rooion of thought and opinion, all the pent energy of Oxford seethes and stirs The Hebreord for ”Prophet” conifies to bubble like water on the fla that Oxford is Prophetic It is the tradition that in one year of the storate Prize Poe poee was Plato In that selection Oxford was true to herself For a century at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) she has been the battle-field of contending sects Her air has resounded with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain lie thick in her streets All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with fine irony, described as ”so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!” Every succeeding generation of Oxfordstrifes To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery

Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blohich our strength could coerous pitfalls for our opponents' feet which wit could suggest Nothing ca could co dislocation of all subsequent life But ere obeying the irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was cast, and ere ready to risk our all upon the venture

But now all that passion, genuine enough while it lasted, lies far back in the past, and we learn the secret which we never discovered while as yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight We thought then that ere the ave none; pushed our argumentative victories to their uttermost consequences, and made short work of a fallen foe But, when all the old battle-cries have died out of our ears, gentler voices begin to reat part of our old contentions was only sound and fury and self-deception, and that, though the causes for which we strove ht, our opponents were not necessarily villains In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford

All the tiher and subtler influences of the place were racious ideal We had really learnt to distinguish between intellectual error and moral obliquity We could differ froical coe hi a single conviction, we ca our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of offending and alienating We had attained to that teous to the crowning virtue of Christian charity

”Tell it--when _you_ go down”

Not long ago I was addressing a coraduates, all keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all devotedly loyal to the tradition of Oxford as each understood it, and all with their eyes eagerly fixed on ”the wistful limit of the world”

With such an audience it was inevitable to insist on the graces and benedictions which Oxford can confer, and to dwell on Mr Gladstone's dogma that to call a hest possible praise

But this was not all So raduateshi+p lay thirty years behind to state as plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place which had decided the course and coht is coenius and personal charht to be, an Oxford ht to claim but cannot is the name of Ed seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the ideal character:--”It is our businessto bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the coentlemen; to cultivate friendshi+ps and to incur en, but both selected--in the one to be placable, in the other immovable”

Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the ”Secret” of Oxford

FOOTNOTES:

[17] The Rev J M Lester

[18] Here I must depart from my rule, and mention a name--FitzRoy Stewart

VI

HOME

”Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam; True to the kindred points of Heaven and Hoood-bye to Oxford on the 17th of June, 1876 What was the next step to be? As so often in h a doctor's lips He spoke in a figure, and this is what he said ”When a e sum out of his capital

Unless he has the wisdom to replace it, he inal stock was not large, the necessity of econoent You are in that case My advice, therefore, is--Do nothing for the next two or three years Concentrate all your efforts on getting better Live as healthy a life as you can, and give mind and body a complete rest If you will obey this counsel, you will find that you have replaced the capital, or, at any rate, some of it; and you may, in spite of all disabilities, be able to take your part in the life and work of the world” The prescription of total abstinence from effort exactly suited my disposition of the moment Oxford, one way and another, had taken more out of me than till then I had realized, and I was only too thankful to have an opportunity of , for the time, th, I was beyond measure fortunate in the possession of an absolutely ideal hooes straight to the heart of every English man and woman For forty years we never asked Mada else

The unhappy, decadent, Latin races have not even a word in their language by which to express it, poor things! Home is the secret of our honest, British, Protestant virtues It is the only nursery of our Anglo-Saxon citizenshi+p Back to it our far-flung children turn, with all their h ways, but they keep so as they are faithful to the old home There is still a tenderness in the voice, and tears are in their eyes, as they speak together of the days that can never die out of their lives, when they were at home in the old faladness of their childhood”[19] To me home was all this and even more; for not only had it been-place, in which I could prepare ht have in store for me

That London as well as country may be, under certain conditions, Home, I am well aware For many natures London has an attractiveness which is all its own And yet to indulge one's taste for it rave dereliction of duty The State is built upon the Ho-place for social virtue, there can surely be no comparison between a ho influences which count for so much in the true home are infinitely weaker in the town than in the country In a London ho to fascinate the eye The conteh the back-s of the nursery will not elevate even the most impressible child There is no mystery, no dreamland, no Enchanted Palace, no Bluebeard's Chamber, in a stucco mansion built by Cubitt, or a palace of terra-cotta on the Cadogan estate There can be no traditions of the past, no inspiring meht five years ago and of which the previous owners are not known to you even by name ”The Square” or ”The Gardens” are sorry substitutes for the Park and the Pleasure-grounds, the Co folk, but you cannot cultivate those intie-keeper at hoenarian waggoner who has driven your father's team ever since he was ten years old Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, or All Saints, Margaret Street, ation what Lord Beaconsfield called ”sparkling and modish”; but they can never have the roe Church where you were confirmed side by side with the keeper's son, or proposed to the Vicar's daughter when you reathing holly round the lectern There is a ic in the memory of a country home hich no urban associations can compete