A New Medley of Memories Part 5

To the Jesuits and Benedictines, already domiciled in Oxford, were added this winter the Franciscan Capuchins, who opened with some ceremony their church and "seraphic college"[6] at Cowley. It was something of an historic event, this returning of the Friars to Oxford after a rustication of 367 years; and it evoked general and kindly interest {80} quite outside Catholic circles. Sir Hubert Jerningham accompanied me to the inaugural function, and to dinner later at Mgr.

Kennard's. We spoke of the decay of the good old custom, universal in my youth, of grace before meals. Our host recalled a country squire who, perfunctorily looking round his table, would mutter, "No parson?

Thank G.o.d!"[7] and hastily seat himself. I told of a Scots farmer on a Caledonian Ca.n.a.l steam-boat, who, invited to "return thanks," delivered himself of this sentiment, "O Lord, we're all floating down the stream of time to the ocean of eternity, for Christ's sake, Amen!" and Sir Hubert had a family story of the chaplain who, if he espied champagne-gla.s.ses on the table, would begin his grace with "Bountiful Jehovah!" but if only sherry-gla.s.ses, "We are not worthy of the least of these Thy mercies." We all remembered Mr. Mallock's canon, who, glancing with clasped hands at the _menu_, beginning with two soups, comprising three _entrees_, and ending with Strasburg pate, began, "O Thou that sittest between the Cherubim, whose glory is so exceeding that even they veil their faces before Thee; consecrate to their appointed use these poor morsels before us, and make them humble instruments in the great scheme of our sanctification." I took Sir Hubert next day over the Clarendon Press, which I had never myself seen. We were both struck by two things: all the machinery was American, and there was no electric light, the whole place being lit by flaring {81} gas-jets.[8] We had planned that evening to go and hear George Wyndham speak at the Union; but it occurred to us, as a happy thought, to stay comfortably at home on a foggy November night, and read his speech in next day's _Times_. The only important politician I heard speak this term was Bonar Law, by whom I sat at the Conservative Club dinner one evening. I found him a very pleasant neighbour, and he made as good a speech as I ever heard at a gathering of the kind.

I made my way northward to Beaufort for Christmas, feeling a bit of a wreck after a sharp bout of influenza, and enjoyed to the full the breezy suns.h.i.+ne which so often prevails there in mid-winter. There was a shooting-party at New Year, with pleasant _al fresco_ luncheons in sheltered corners of leafless woods, and of an evening music, and ghost stories round a great fire of beechen logs. Of telepathy between the dying and the living Lord Hamilton gave me a striking instance. He had served in South Africa; and at dawn, sleeping on the veldt, was aroused by an unmistakable voice thrice calling his name. The voice was his father's, of whose death he heard next day by cable. The quiet conviction with which he narrated this little incident impressed me much.

Staying at an uncle's in Edinburgh on my way south, I met at dinner Lord Dunedin and some other interesting people; and there was some "good {82} talk" on books and poetry. Some one quoted Swinburne's opinion that the two finest lines in the language[9] were Browning's--

"As the king-bird, with ages on his plumes, Travels to die in his ancestral glooms."

Three unhackneyed images, from the _City of the Soul_, I noted as admirable:

"The distant rook's faint cawing, harsh and sweet."

"Black was his hair, as hyacinths by night."

"Wet green eyes, like a full chalk stream."

The mention of Mallock reminded me of some of his delectable similes:

"Miss Drake dropped a short curtsey, which resembled the collapse of a concertina."

"Above them a seagull pa.s.sed, like the drifting petals of a magnolia."

"She advanced slowly towards the group, moving along the carpet like a clockwork mouse on wheels."

"Her eyes had the brown moisture that glimmers on a slug's back."

A cousin of mine at this dinner, lately returned from China, amused me by the information that the pigeon-English word, or phrase, for a bishop was "Number one topside heaven pidgin-man!"

On the evening of my arrival in London, a geographical friend carried me to a notable meeting of his Society at Queen's Hall--the sailor Duke of the Abruzzi lecturing, in quaint staccato {83} Italian-English, on his ascent of Ruanzori, in Equatorial Africa. The King (with the Prince of Wales) was on the platform--stout, grey-bearded, and rather bored, I fancied, at being deprived of his after-dinner cigar: he made a nice little speech of thanks and appreciation. A day or two later came the startling news of the great earthquake in Jamaica, the only Englishman who lost his life being my dear old friend Sir James Fergusson, whose body was found beneath the ruins of a tobacconist's shop in Kingston. He was a man of many gifts and many friends, who had served his country with distinction in almost every part of the Empire; and his death was a real tragedy, as well as a very real grief to me.

It was followed very shortly by that of another old friend, Susan Lady Sherborne; and two very pleasant houses in Cornwall Gardens and Brook Street, where I had spent many happy hours, were thus closed to me.

There was some talk, a little later, of a memorial to Sir James, the Anglican Bishop of the West Indies suggesting that this should take the form of subscriptions to his church restoration scheme. I ventured strongly to deprecate this proposal in the columns of _The Times_, and my objections were emphatically endorsed by Mr. Fleming, the well-known Presbyterian minister in Belgravia.[10]

Two more deaths I may note in the early spring of 1907--the first that of Professor Pelham, president {84} of Trinity; a gentleman and a scholar, a real loss to Oxford, and (incidentally) one of my kindest friends among college heads, just as his brother Sidney (famous slow bowler and future archdeacon) had been thirty years before, when I was a feather-headed freshman at Magdalen. In the same week died our worthy Chancellor, Lord Goschen, after little more than three years of office. Lords Rosebery and Curzon of Kedleston emerged as the favourites among the many candidates "in the air"; but dining with a large party at Lord Teignmouth's a little later, I heard it confidently said that the country parsons would almost certainly "bring Curzon in."

They came up, as a matter of fact, in such swarms that they practically swamped the election, Lord Curzon obtaining 1,101 votes against Lord Rosebery's 440. I sat, by the way, at Lord Teignmouth's dinner next an American "scientist" (odious word!) of some kind, who told me some odd things about the Lower Mississippi. That river, he said, had, in 176 years, shortened itself by 242 miles--an average of about l 1/10 miles per year. From this it followed that in the old Oolitic-Silurian period, some 100,000 years ago, the lower Mississippi was upwards of 1,300,000 miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fis.h.i.+ng-rod!

I went to Downside in March, for the solemn blessing of the new abbot, my kind and learned friend Dom Cuthbert Butler. The elaborate ceremony took nearly three hours: we were mercifully spared a sermon, but, _en revanche_, the episcopal and abbatial speeches at the subsequent luncheon were long and rather wearisome. At Fort Augustus, {85} whatever the occasion, we never in those days derogated from the good old monastic usage of silence, and public reading, in the refectory.

_Summum ibi fiat silentium_, said Saint Benedict: "let no _mussitatio_ [delicious Low Latin word for "whispering"] be heard there, or any voice save that of the reader alone." The custom was one, I think, as congenial to our guests as to their monastic hosts.

I was preoccupied at this time with the rapidly-failing health of my oldest Oxford friend, H. D. Grissell of Brasenose, who spent half his year in Rome, and the other half in what seemed a bit of old Rome transported to Oxford. He was the most pertinacious and indefatigable _collector_ I ever knew: coins, books and bindings, bra.s.s-rubbings, autographs, book-plates, holy relics, postage-stamps, even birds'

eggs--all was fish that came to his far-flung net; and he laboured incessantly to make all his collections, as far as possible, complete.

I found the old man at this time, rather pathetically, trying to complete the collection of eggsh.e.l.ls which he had begun as a Harrow boy sixty years before. He insisted on exhibiting every drawer of his cabinet, and was greatly pleased with the motto which, I told him, Sir Walter Trevelyan had inscribed on _his_ egg-cabinet: "Hic Argus esto, non Briareus"; or, in plain English, "Look, but don't touch!"[11]

Grissell said he would like to affix this cla.s.sical caution to all his collections of curios; but he did not live to do this, or indeed to do much else of {86} any kind. He left England before Easter for Rome; and there (as perhaps he would have wished) he died very suddenly a few weeks later. By his own desire his body was brought back to England, at great trouble and cost (these _post mortem_ migrations never appealed to me), and was laid near his parents' graves in the pretty country churchyard of Mickleham, in Surrey. There was a large gathering in the pouring rain, Professor Robinson Ellis and I representing his many Oxford friends. As his literary executor, I came into possession of a great number of curious and interesting letters and doc.u.ments, dealing chiefly with Roman matters and the early days of the Ritual movement at Oxford and elsewhere.

The Corpus Professor of Latin, old Robinson Ellis, and I saw subsequently (perhaps drawn together by the loss of our common friend) a good deal of one another. At "meat tea," a meal he dearly loved, we used to sit long together, and talk cla.s.sics, the only subject in which he seemed in the least interested. I wish I had noted down all the odd bits of erudition with which he used to entertain me. Cicero's last words, he said (I cannot imagine on what authority) were "Causa causarum, miserere mei!"[12] A curious story (perhaps mediaeval) of Ovid was of how two monks visited his tomb, and in grat.i.tude for the n.o.ble line--the best, in his own opinion, that he had ever written--"Virtus est licitis abstinuisse bonis," began reciting Paters and Aves for his soul. The poet's spirit, unhappily, {87} was unappreciative of their charity; and a voice was heard from the tomb declaiming the irreverent pentameter: "Nolo Paternoster: carpe, viator, iter!" The professor told me that in his opinion the best elegiac couplet ever written in English was:

"Three Patagonian apes with their arms extended akimbo: Three on a rock were they--seedy, but happy withal."

He said that one of Dr. Johnson's acutest literary criticisms was his remark that Tacitus seemed rather to have made notes for a historical work than to have written a history. The word "jour," he pointed out to me, was derived from "dies" (though every single letter was different) through the Italian--"dies, diurnus, giorno, jour." He asked if I could tell him the authors.h.i.+p of the striking couplet--

"Mors mortis! morti mortem nisi morte dedisses, aeternae vitae janua clausa foret."

This I was unable to do: on the other hand, I evoked a chuckle (whimsical etymologies always pleased him) by telling him how a fifteenth-century writer[13] had rendered the "Royal Collegiate Church of Windsor" into Latin as "Collegium Domini Regis de _Ventomorbido_!"

At the end of Lent Term I spent a few days at Eastbourne, which struck me (as the Honourable Mrs. Skewton struck Mr. Dombey) as being "perfectly genteel"--no shops on the front, no minstrels or pierrots or c.o.c.kshys or vulgarity. The hill behind seemed to swarm with schools: my host took me to one where he had two sons--a fine {88} situation, capital playgrounds, and the head a pleasant capable-seeming little man, who trotted briskly about on his little Chippendale legs, clad in knickerbockers, and was as keen on his Aberdeen terriers as on his young pupils. I remember at Eastbourne a quite appallingly ugly Town Hall, and a surprisingly beautiful fourteenth-century church, I suppose the only bit of old Eastbourne left. I went on to Arundel for my usual pleasant Easter-tide visit; and after hearing much florid church-music there, I enjoyed, on Low Sunday, the well-rendered plain-chant at Westminster Cathedral; but I did not enjoy a terrible motett composed by an eminent Jew--the words unintelligible and the music frankly pagan. My nephew Kelburn and his wife ran me down one day to Chatham in their new motor--cream-colour lined with crimson, very smart indeed.

He had been lately posted as first lieutenant to H.M.S. _Cochrane_, and took us all over the great grey monster, vastly interesting. We buzzed home through Cobham and Rochester, stopping to look over the grand old Norman cathedral. "How strange," observed the simple sailor, looking at the sculptured images round the west doorway, "to see all these old Roman Catholic saints in a Protestant cathedral!" How I wished some of my young Oxford friends had been by to hear him! Our whole drive to town was of course redolent of d.i.c.kens and "Pickwick"--to me, but not to my modern nephew and niece.

For the last week of the vacation a friend was bent on taking me to Belgium; but great guns were blowing when we reached the coast, so we alighted at Dover and stayed there! finding it quite {89} an interesting place of sojourn. I was astonished at the antiquity, extent, and interest of the Castle, especially of its church, once a Roman barrack, and its tower, the ancient Pharos or lighthouse.

Gilbert Scott and the Royal Engineers between them had done their best (or their worst) in the way of "restoration," disjoining the Pharos from the main building, and adding an Early English (!) front, windows, and door; but it still was, and is, by far the oldest edifice in England used for religious wors.h.i.+p, and of the greatest antiquarian interest.

The event of the summer at Oxford was the installation of our new Chancellor, Lord Curzon, who was by no means content, like the Duke of Wellington, Lord Salisbury, and others of his not indistinguished predecessors, to be quietly inducted into office by the university officials at his own country residence. There was a great function at the Sheldonian, and a Latin harangue from my lord which was both elegant and well delivered, though it was thought by some that his emotional reference to his late wife was a little out of place.

Oxford had caught the pageant-fever which was this summer devastating England; and a great part of the term was spent (some cynics said wasted) in the extensive preparations for our own particular show.

When they were all but complete, one of the historic "rags" by which Christ Church has from time to time distinguished itself broke out, in consequence of the House becoming head of the river; and among other excesses, some damage was done to the pageant-stands already erected in the meadows. A few days after this _emeute_ a description of it, which is really too good to be lost, {90} appeared in the _Corriere della Sera_ of Milan, "telephoned by our London correspondent." I translate literally from the Italian:--

Recently the students of Oxford were beaten by those of Cambridge in the great annual regatta: the other day they were defeated by the sportive group (_il gruppo sportivo_) of Merton College; finally, they allowed themselves to be vanquished by the sportive section (_la sezione sportiva_) of the Society of Christ Church, to whom was adjudged the primacy of the Thames. Yesterday, profoundly moved in their _amore proprio_, the students of Oxford permitted themselves to proceed to deplorable excesses, even to the point of applying fire to the _stands_ erected on the riverside by the rival Societies. They set fire also to the tent of the Secretariat of Christ Church, feeding the flames with the chairs which they discovered in the vicinity.[14]

I believe that our Oxford pageant (in spite of the wet summer) proved financially successful, if not altogether so artistically. A few of the scenes were very pretty, especially the earliest (St. Frideswide), and also the one representing Charles I. and his family at Oxford. And the ecclesiastical and monastic episodes were instructive, if only as showing the incompetence of twentieth-century Anglicanism to reproduce even the externals--much more the spirit--of the Catholicism of old England. Even more deplorable was the "comic" scene (written by the Chichele professor of modern history!) in which the _clarum et venerabile nomen_ of one of Oxford's saintliest sons was dragged in the mud: Roger Racon being depicted as a mountebank cheap-jack, hawking quack medicines from a {91} motor-bicycle![15] My brother, who had entertained me at Warwick, came as my guest to witness the Oxford effort; and we had the rather interesting experience of viewing it in the company of Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain. They were both pleased and interested; but it was impossible to deny that the poetic glamour of the Warwick pageant (largely due to the romantic beauty of its setting) was almost wholly wanting at Oxford.

Of the other pageants which were sprouting up all over the country during this summer (unhappily one of the wettest on record), I attended only one--that held at Bury St. Edmunds, which attracted me as being mainly concerned with Benedictines. The setting was almost as fine as at Warwick--verdant lawns, big trees and the majestic ruins of our famous abbey all "in the picture"; and the "monks," mostly represented by blameless curates, were at least presentable, not unkempt ragam.u.f.fins as at Oxford.[16] The appearance of "Abbot Sampson"

(played, I was told, by a local archdeacon) was grotesque enough: he wore throughout a purple chasuble over a black ca.s.sock, with a white mitre, and strode about brandis.h.i.+ng a great wooden crosier! but he spoke his lines very well. Everything, however, was spoilt by the pitiless rain, which {92} fell unceasingly. A clever black-haired lady who played Boadicea (I believe the wife of an Ipswich dentist) had to abandon her chariot and horses and appear on foot, splas.h.i.+ng through several inches of mud; and some of the "early British" matrons and maidens sported umbrellas and mackintoshes! I had to leave half-way through the performance, chilled to the bone, and firmly convinced that open-air drama in England was a snare and a delusion.

Mark Twain, whom I have mentioned above, was one of the miscellaneous celebrities, including Prince Arthur of Connaught and "General" Booth, whom our Chancellor nominated for honorary degrees at his first Encaenia. I met Mrs. Whitelaw Reid (the American Amba.s.sadress) at dinner at Magdalen on Commemoration evening, and lunched with her a few days later at Dorchester House. One of the attaches was told off to show me the famous "old Masters," about which I found he knew a good deal less than I did! The same agreeable young American accompanied me a little later to Bradfield, to see the boys play _Antigone_: a real summer's day, for once, and the performance was admirable, especially that of the t.i.tle-role, the youth who played the part proving himself a genuine tragedian. The comments of a lady just behind us, who was profoundly bored most of the time, were amusingly fatuous.[17]

{93}

I was in spiritual charge this term of our Catholic undergraduates (fifty or so), their chaplain having gone off on an invalid's holiday, and left his flock in my care. I was delighted to have the company every week-end of Robert Hugh Benson, who was giving the Sunday conferences in our chapel. "Far from being the snake-like gloomy type of priest so common in fiction," a weekly paper said of him about this time, "Father Benson is a thorough man of the world, liberal, amiable, and vivacious." He was, of course, all this and a great deal more; and I greatly appreciated the opportunity which these summer weeks afforded me of becoming really intimate with him. It was the beginning of a genuine friends.h.i.+p, which was only interrupted (not, please G.o.d, broken) by his premature and lamented death seven years later.[18]

[1] "Very satisfactory, I think, from an architectural point of view,"

said the alderman to his colleague, as they surveyed together the interior of the new town hall; "but I fear the acoustics are not exactly what they ought to be." His companion sniffed several times.

"Do you think not?" he said. "I don't notice anything myself!"

[2] [Greek: Henosis tes anglichanes cha tes Orthodoxou Echchlesias.]

[3] It was at least a convenient method of disposing of the Pope and his claims.

[4] Collaterally, of course: Gregory XIII. (Buoncompagni), 1572-1585; and Gregory XV. (Ludovisi), 1621-1623. I interested Don Andrea by telling him that Gregory XIII. (reformer of the Julian Calendar and builder of the Quirinal) was probably the last Pope officially prayed for at Oxford, and that in his own college chapel. Ma.s.s certainly continued to be celebrated in Merton Chapel well into the Pontificate of Gregory XIII.

[5] The possession of the Evil Eye has never been considered incompatible with the highest moral excellence. Pius IX., who was venerated by his people as a saint, was nevertheless regarded by many of them as an undoubted _jettatore_.

[6] The traditional name given by the Franciscans to their monastic schools. But they had, if I remember rightly, sufficient sense of humour not to apply it to their Cowley seminary.