The late Mr. Cecil Rhodes once summarized all Fellows of Colleges as children in matters of finance. Be that as it may, you will find nothing more constant in history than the talent of the Universities for extracting money or money’s worth out of a riot. Time (I speak as a parent) has scarcely blunted that faculty; and still—since where young men congregate, noise there must be—our Universities like Wordsworth’s Happy Warrior
turn their necessity to glorious gain.
These were the excesses of young “bloods,” and their servants: but with them mingled scholars not less ferocious in their habits because almost desperately poor. You all know, I dare say, that very poor scholars would be granted licences to beg by the Chancellor. The sleeve of this gown in which I address you represents the purse or pocket of a Master of Arts, and may hint to you by its amplitude how many crusts he was prepared to receive from the charitable.
Now, choosing to ignore (because it has been challenged as overpainted) a picture of penury endured by the scholars of St. John’s College in this University, let me tell you two stories, one well attested, the other fiction if you will, but both agreeable as testifying to the spirit of youth which, ever blowing upon their sacred embers, has kept Oxford and Cambridge perennially alive.
My first is of three scholars so poor that they possessed but one “cappa” and gown between them. They took it in turns therefore, and when one went to lecture the other two kept to their lodgings. I invite you even to reflect on the joy of the lucky one, in a winter lecture room, dark, with unglazed windows, as he listened and shuffled his feet for warmth in the straw of the floor. (No one, by the way, can understand the incessant harping of our early poets upon May-time and the return of summer until he has pictured to himself the dark and cold discomfort of a Middle-English winter.) These three poor scholars fed habitually on bread, with soup and a little wine, tasting meat only on Sundays and feasts of the Church. Yet one of them, Richard of Chichester, who lived to become a saint, saepe retulit quod nunquam in vita sua tam jucundam, tam delectabilem duxerat vitam—that never had he lived so jollily, so delectably.
That is youth, youth blessed by friendship. Now for my second story, which is also of youth and friendship.—
Two poor scholars, who had with pains become Masters of Arts and saved their pence to purchase the coveted garb, on the afternoon of their admission took a country walk in it, together flaunting their new finery. But, the day being gusty, on their return across the bridge, a puff of wind caught the biretta of one and blew it into the river. The loss was irrecoverable, since neither could swim. The poor fellow looked at his friend. His friend looked at him. “Between us two,” he said, “it is all or naught,” and cast his own cap to float and sink with the other down stream.
You will never begin to understand literature until you understand something of life. These young men, your forerunners, understood something of life while as yet completely careless of literature. After the impulse of Abelard and others had died down, the mass of students betook themselves to the Universities, no doubt, for quite ordinary, mercenary reasons. The University led to the Church, and the Church, in England at any rate, was the door to professional life.
Nearly all the civil servants of the Crown—I am here quoting freely—the diplomatists, the secretaries or advisers of great nobles, the physicians, the architects, at one time the secular lawgivers, all through the Middle Ages the then large tribe of ecclesiastical lawyers, were ecclesiastics. … Clerkship did not necessarily involve even minor orders. But as it was cheaper to a King or a Bishop or a temporal magnate to reward his physician, his legal adviser, his secretary, or his agent by a Canonry or a Rectory than by large salaries, the average student of Paris or Oxford or Cambridge looked toward the Church as the “main chance” as we say, and small blame to him! He never at any rate looked towards Literature: nor did the Universities, wise in their generation, encourage him to do anything of the sort.
You may realise, Gentlemen, how tardily, even in later and more enlightened times, the study of Literature has crept its way into official Cambridge, if you will take down your “University Calendar” and study the list of Professorships there set forth in order of foundation. It begins in 1502 with the Lady Margaret’s Chair of Divinity, founded by the mother of Henry VII Five Regius Professorships follow: of Divinity, Civil Law, Physic, Hebrew, Greek, all of 1540. So Greek comes in upon the flush of the Renaissance; and the Calendar bravely, yet not committing itself to a date, heads with Erasmus the noble roll which concludes (as may it long conclude) with Henry Jackson. But Greek comes in last of the five. Close on a hundred years elapse before the foundation of the
