Oxford Stories

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1

I came across the following story about Benjamin Jowett in a CS Lewis letter:

Do you remember Mrs Asquith’s saying in that detestable autobiography that she once asked Jowett if he had ever been in love? He replied ‘Yes’ and being asked what the lady was like, replied ‘Violent–very violent.’ Apparently the lady was really Florence Nightingale. Poynton and Farquharson both knew of it. For her ‘violence’ see Strachey in ‘Eminent Victorians’. The story–a strange tragi-comedy–seems to have been common property. Both the parties were irascible and opinionated and quarreled nearly as often as they met: and yet the affair hung on for a long time.

2

July 9/27 letter from CS Lewis to his brother, describing the vote to limit the number of women admitted to Oxford.

The Term has now been over some weeks, for which I am not sorry. It produced one public event of good omen–the carrying in Congregation of a Statute limiting the number of wimmen at Oxford. The appalling danger of our degenerating into a woman’s university (nay worse still, into > the > women’s university, in contradistinction to Cambridge, > the > men’s university) has thus been staved off. There was fierce Opposition of course, our female antagonists being much more expert than we in the practice of ‘whipping’ in the parliamentary sense.

Since the victory the papers have been full of comment from such people as Sybil Thorndike, Lady Astor, Daisy Devoteau, Fanny Adams and other such notable educational authorities. They mostly deplore (especially in the Daily Mirror and the Little Ha’penny Sketch) one more instance of the unprogressiveness of those ‘aged Professors’. The word ‘academic’ is also worked hard: tho’ how the politics of an academy could, or why they should, cease to be ‘academic’, ‘might admit of a wide conjecture’.

But the question of the age of the anti-feminists is an interesting one: and the voting (we have no secret franchise) revealed very consolatory facts. First came the very old guard, the octogenarians and the centurions, the full fed patriarchs of Corpus, the last survivors of the days when ‘women’s rights’ were still new fangled crankery. They were against the women. Then came the very-nearly-as-old who date from the palmy days of J.S. Mill, when feminism was the new, exciting, enlightened thing: people representing as someone said, ‘the progressiveness of the ’eighties’. They voted for the women. Then came the young and the postwar (I need not say I trust that I did my duty) who voted solid against. The arrangement is quite natural when you think it out. The first belong to the age of innocence when women had not yet been noticed: the second, to the age when they had been noticed but not yet found out: the third to us. Ignorance, romance, realism. The queer thing was that one solitary woman voted against her sex. She has since married and given up her job. > Una de multis face nuptial digna> : your Horation apprenticeship will carry you as far as that.

But what irritated me beyond bearing during the whole thing was the re-iterated statement made even by people on our side, that, if we ought on principle to put up a show, it was really no good, because ‘it was bound to come’. If I remember rightly your friend Drysdale, on the only occasion I met him, indulged in the same fatalism. It is a very remarkable thing, this kind of view. Because the 18th century was fond of personifying abstractions (‘Corruption has seized the provinces’ etc.) and because Carlyle carried that further and gave us a tinge of poetry in his French Revolution, whence it passed into every writer who wants to write impressively on poetical and historical subjects, we have now reached a stage at which causes, movements, tendencies etc. are talked of as if they were real things who did things: as if it were Bolshevism, not Bolsheviks, who fomented revolutions, and the revolutionary spirit, instead of the revolutionary spirits, which made men drunk. The natural corollary is that the world is managed by beings such as ‘Woman’ or ‘The Locarne spirit’ and real human beings are pawns in their hands. Now a days you can resist a given spirit or tendency only by hitching yourself to its equally spirituous or tendentious opponent–much like an ancient Egyptian who, helpless himself against the name of a god, can put it across it by means of the name of an higher god. I was just going to describe this as the return to polytheism. But the polytheists were more sensible for they accepted their positions as pawns because they believed in their gods. And if the wiseacre really believed in the beings to whom he attributes all public events (as I wd. be quite prepared to do with certain reservations) I cd. forgive him. But he is the first man to denounce you for a mystic if you hint that there might really be an entity such as the ‘spirit of the age’ over and above the human beings acting in that age. He is thus in the remarkable position of suspending everything on a peg which (he believes) isn’t there, and preaching the uselessness of human endeavor because we are helpless in the hands of–Nobody. However, the subject seems to be carrying me further than I foresaw.

3

Absolutely fascinating!!

Cheers.

4

Letter to Owen Barfield, 27 May 1928.

When are you coming home? I must see someone sane again soon. Just by the bye–and you must not repeat it to anyone, even myself–this college is a cesspool, a stinking puddle, faex Romuli, inhabited by Fals-Semblant, Favel, Mal-Bouche and Losengeres: things in men’s shapes climbing over one another and biting one another in the back: ignorant of all things except their own subjects and often even of those: caring for nothing less than for learning: cunning, desperately ambitious, false friends, nodders in corners, tippers of the wink: setters of traps and solicitors of confidence: vain as women: self-important: fie upon them–excepting always the aged who have lived down to us from a purer epoch. Don’t you think it dammed unfair to have resisted all youthful temptations to cynicism and then to have ones lines cast in a sewer where all that the cynic asserts in general happens for the nonce to be true?

I forgot. We have one honest man. He preaches what he practices: tells you openly that anyone who believes another is a fool, and holds that Hobbs alone saw the truth: tells me I am an incurable romantic and is insolent by rule to old men and servants. He is very pale, this man, good-looking, and drinks a great deal without getting drunk. I think he is best of our younger fellows and I would sign his death warrant to-morrow, or he mine, without turning a hair. Don’t conclude that all Oxford colleges are like this: I’ve seen a good deal of them, and I know.

The editor includes the following footnote:

Lewis was almost certainly describing Thomas Dewar Weldon (1896–1958). He took a BA from Magdalen in 1921 and was Fellow and Tutor of Philosophy there 1923–58. There is a good deal about Weldon in Lewis’s AMR. Weldon is also one of the subjects of the nine ‘portraits’ Lewis wrote about his colleagues in about 1927 and which are found in AMR, pp. 482–3. It seems likely that Weldon is the man Lewis was writing about in SBJ XIV in which he said: ‘Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.”’ This may have occurred on the night of 27 April 1926, about which Lewis says in AMR: ‘In the evening…Weldon came in. This meant whiskey and talk till 12.30…We somehow got on the historical truth of the Gospels, and agreed that there was a lot that could not be explained away.’ See Martin Moynihan’s ‘C.S. Lewis and T.D. Weldon’, Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review, vol. 5 (1984), pp. 101–5.

5

The above reminded me of Burton’s critique of Oxford (but really, universities generally).

…Quid enim fieri posse speramus, quum tot indies sine delectu pauperes alumni, terrae filii, et cujuscunque ordinis homunciones ad gradus certatim admittantur? qui si definitionem, distinctionemque unam aut alteram memoriter edidicerint, et pro more tot annos in dialectica posuerint, non refert quo profectu, quales demum sint, idiotae, nugatores, otiatores, aleatores, compotores, indigni, libidinis voluptatumque administri, “Sponsi Penelopes, nebulones, Alcinoique,” modo tot annos in academia insumpserint, et se pro togatis venditarint; lucri causa, et amicorum intercessu praesentantur; addo etiam et magnificis nonnunquam elogiis morum et scientiae; et jam valedicturi testimonialibus hisce litteris, amplissime conscriptis in eorum gratiam honorantur, abiis, qui fidei suae et existimationis jacturam proculdubio faciunt. “Doctores enim et professores” (quod ait ille) “id unum curant, ut ex professionibus frequentibus, et tumultuariis potius quam legitimis, commoda sua promoverant, et ex dispendio publico suum faciant incrementum.” Id solum in votis habent annui plerumque magistratus, ut ab incipientium numero pecunias emungant, nec multum interest qui sint, literatores an literati, modo pingues, nitidi, ad aspectum speciosi, et quod verbo dicam, pecuniosi sint. Philosophastri licentiantur in artibus, artem qui non habent, “Eosque sapientes esse jubent, qui nulla praediti sunt sapientia, et nihil ad gradum praeterquam velle adferunt.” Theologastri (solvant modo) satis superque docti, per omnes honorum gradus evehuntur et ascendunt. Atque hinc fit quod tam viles scurrae, tot passim idiotae, literarum crepusculo positi, larvae pastorum, circumforanei, vagi, barbi, fungi, crassi, asini, merum pecus in sacrosanctos theologiae aditus, illotis pedibus irrumpant, praeter inverecundam frontem adferentes nihil, vulgares quasdam quisquilias, et scholarium quaedam nugamenta, indigna quae vel recipiantur in triviis. Hoc illud indignum genus hominum et famelicum, indigum, vagum, ventris mancipium, ad stivam potius relegandum, ad haras aptius quam ad aras, quod divinas hasce literas turpiter prostituit…

“ad haras aptius quam ad aras”, lol

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Robert_Burton%2C_Christ_Church_Cathedral%2C_An_Inventory_of_the_Historical_Monuments_in_the_City_of_Oxford.jpg

6

Friday 9 June, 1922. CS Lewis’s diary.

After reading a little Plato I returned to town. I met Wyllie in the High . . . [He] said that girls were not allowed to take Juvenal or Catullus for Schools, which I never knew before . . .

This is fellow student Basil Platel Wyllie. He was mentioned in the earlier diary entry of May 23rd, 1922.

As I went in, I met Wyllie coming out: we regretted to have missed each other and arranged to bathe together in future. A beautiful bathe (water 63 degrees) but very crowded. Amid so much nudity I was interested to note the passing of my own generation: two years ago every second man had a wound mark, but I did not see one today.

Lewis himself had been wounded near the end of the war. In a letter from his brother to his father (April 24th 1918):

A shell burst close to where he was standing, killing a Sergeant, and luckily for ‘It’ he only stopped three bits: one in the cheek and two in the hands: he then crawled back and was picked up by a stretcher bearer.

Lewis corrected this in a latter letter to his father (May 4th 1918).

As a matter of fact I was really hit in the back of the left hand, on the left leg from behind and just above the knee, and in the left side just under the arm pit. All three were only flesh wounds. The myth about being hit in the face arose, I imagine, from the fact that I got a lot of dirt in the left eye which was closed up for a few days, but is now alright.

And in a later letter (May 14th 1918):

In one respect I was wrong in my last account of my wounds: the one under my arm is worse than a flesh wound, as the bit of metal which went in there is now in my chest, high up under my ‘pigeon chest’ as shown: this however is nothing to worry about as it is doing no harm. They will leave it there and I am told that I can carry it about for the rest of my life without any evil results.

7

As Michaelmas is coming up, this letter on the founding of the Michaelmas club is from CS Lewis to his father, November 3rd, 1928.

Two or three of us who are agreed as to what a College ought to be, have been endeavouring to stimulate the undergraduates into forming some sort of literary society. In any other Colleges the idea that undergraduates should require, or endure, stimulus in that direction from the dons, would be laughable. But this is a very curious place. All College societies whatever were forbidden early in the reign of the late President–an act which was then necessitated by the savagely exclusive clubs of rich dipsomaniacs which really dominated the whole life of the place. This prohibition succeeded in producing decency, but at the cost of all intellectual life. When I came I found that any Magdalen undergraduate who had interests beyond rowing, drinking, motoring and fornication, sought his friends outside the College, and indeed kept out of the place as much as he could. They certainly seldom discovered one another, and never collaborated so as to resist the prevailing tone. This is what we wish to remedy: but it had to be done with endless delicacy, which means, as you know, endless waste of time.

First of all we had to make sure that our colleagues would agree to the relaxation of the rule against societies. Then we had to pick our men amongst the undergraduates very carefully. Luckily I had been endeavouring already for a term or two to get a few intelligent men to meet one another in my rooms under the pretext of play reading or what not, and that gave us a lead. Then we had to try to push those chosen men v. gently so that the scheme should not appear too obviously to be managed by the dons. At present we are at the stage of holding a preparatory meeting ‘at which to discuss the foundation of a society’ next Monday–so the whole show may yet be a dismal failure. I hope not: for I am quite sure that this College will never be anything more than a country club for all the idlest ‘bloods’ of Eton and Charterhouse as long as undergraduates retain the schoolboy’s idea that it would be bad form to discuss among themselves the sort of subjects on which they write essays for their tutors. Ours at present are all absolute babies and terrific men of the world–the two characters I think nearly always go together. Old hearts and young heads, as Henry James says: the cynicism of forty and the mental crudeness and confusion of fourteen.

I sometimes wonder if this country will kill the public schools before they kill it. My experience goes on confirming the ideas about them which were first suggested to me by Malvern long ago. The best scholars, the best men, and (properly understood) the best gentlemen, seem now to come from places like Dulwich, or to be wafted up on country scholarships from secondary schools. Except for pure classics (and that only at Winchester, and only a few boys even there) I really don’t know what gifts the public schools bestow on their nurslings, beyond the mere surface of good manners: unless contempt of the things of the intellect, extravagance, insolence, self-sufficiency, and sexual perversion are to be called gifts.

8

I sometimes wonder if this country will kill the public schools before they kill it. My experience goes on confirming the ideas about them which were first suggested to me by Malvern long ago. The best scholars, the best men, and (properly understood) the best gentlemen, seem now to come from places like Dulwich, or to be wafted up on country scholarships from secondary schools. Except for pure classics (and that only at Winchester, and only a few boys even there) I really don’t know what gifts the public schools bestow on their nurslings, beyond the mere surface of good manners: unless contempt of the things of the intellect, extravagance, insolence, self-sufficiency, and sexual perversion are to be called gifts.

As a former grammar school boy I suppose I should know better than to comment, other than to say that our current Prime Minister was educated at Winchester College, and if he learned anything of the classics there, he doesn’t seem to let it show. I suspect that all these decades later Lewis might be even less impressed with the products of all our types of school, but I imagine that those few boys (and girls, of course) he mentions are still just a few and are as talented and hard working as their predecessors were. They may be more able than their forebears in fact, having had the benefit of modern teaching methods and less “brute memorisation”, as Dowling put it.

9

In several of these letters, Lewis makes it clear that he thinks that this is a problem with Magdalen college in particular, and that the other colleges are different. On the other hand, he seems to have had a talent for being unhappy in places where other people were happy – compare he and his brother’s experience at Malvern – and had some personal trials associated with supporting his secret wife and her child may have also have contributed to some general unhappiness. So I’m not sure whether we can take all of these complaints at face value.

To Lewis’s brother, August 31st, 1929:

…I read a few pages of Macaulay’s letters…They are not uninteresting. Do you know that Macaulay developed his full manner as a schoolboy and wrote letters home from school which read exactly like pages out of the Essays? This is very illuminating. He was talking about the nature of government, the principles of human prosperity, the force of the domestic affections and all that (you know the junk) at the age of fourteen. He could not at that age have known anything about them: least of all could he have known enough for the flowing generalizations which he makes. One can see quite clearly that having so early acquired the talk he found he could go on quite comfortably for the rest of his life without bothering to notice the things. He was from the first clever enough to produce a readable and convincing slab of claptrap on any subject whether he understood it or not, and hence he never to his dying day discovered that there was such a thing as understanding. Don’t you think the last word on him is Southey’s statement–‘Macaulay’s a clever lad, and a clever lad he’ll remain’–?

…He was also apparently responsible for one of the greatest absurdities in the Empire–I mean the fact that I as a Lower Certificate examiner get papers by little Mohammedan girls in Purdah on, say, Ivanhoe: a story which rests at every turn on what the Germans call Frauendienst–the mediaeval knight and lady romantic ideal, place aux dames, breaking of lances, and ‘all that’. What on earth it can mean to them I have often wondered. Well when Macaulay arrived in India, the Company was just agitating the question of native education, and had fixed up the only scheme by which any real education was possible: an education of Indians in their own classics, Sanskrit and Persian, conducted on European lines–i.e. according to the standards demanded by European scholarship.

Macaulay (who of course could hardly speak a syllable of even the vernacular, let alone any classical Oriental language) wrote a minute which is a real masterpiece of Philistinism and P’daitism. First of all you have the familiar device of the false parallel. To teach native scholarship would be as if Europe at the Renaissance, instead of studying Latin, and Greek, had gone back to Norman French or Anglo-Saxon. Notice the delicious implication that English (an alien contemporary language) is to India as Greek, Latin (ancient native languages) are to Europe. Don’t forget that even inside the parallel Macaulay knows exactly nothing of Norman French or Anglo-Saxon, but he is quite sure that there is nothing in them. How should there be–he never learned them.

Then comes the master stroke. He ‘suspects’ that Sanskrit is little superior to Anglo-Saxon, ‘in some departments, such as history, certainly inferior’. That is, while the reader is still being amused by the false parallel, he is bowled over by a ‘how much the less, therefore’ argument based on a comparison of two literatures both absolutely unknown to the writer and the reader! It is worth remarking that the clever lad, as he wrote the minute, was really creating the Babu. For what is a Babu but a man sufficiently servile to take pride in having imperfectly acquired the jargon of a culture which he cannot assimilate and which he would never have attempted to master but for purely financial reasons? ‘Muddlejee-All-Buggard-Up, Failed Calcutta Entrance’ is the natural epitaph of Macaulay’s education policy in India. You remember Raleigh: ‘Macaulay–God’s ape. He stinks in my nostrils’. And mine. Yours too I trust.

10

H. Stuart Jones, Preface to the Ninth Edition LSJ, 1925:

Lieut.-Col. Farquharson’s scrutiny of the quotations from Plato and Aristotle is producing important results

CS Lewis, Letter to Arthur Greeves, 1/26/1930, where he describes Farquharson’s “consulting” him on the new Lexicon:

Just before term began I had to go and call on Farquharson in Univ. He is the senior tutor there, and of course I have known him since my undergraduate days. On the strength of having done some office work at Whitehall during the war, and having been in the Territorials before, he has called himself Lieutenant Colonel ever since. He lives in a tall, narrow house, cheek by jowl with Univ. Library which itself is like a mortuary chapel. The space between them is about six feet across; into the Fark’s house daylight never comes. I have never been beyond the ground floor: here in broad low rooms, lined with books, he works by artificial light most of the day. Somewhere upstairs, is a wife one never meets. He came gliding towards me in the dusk, about five feet four inches high, his face exactly like an egg in shape, with sandy-hair fringing a bald patch, a little military moustache, and eyebrows so far up his forehead that it gives him a perpetual air of astonishment. On this occasion, as on every other on which I have met him, he came towards me with an air (not a gesture, an air) that would have suggested an embrace rather than a handshake: then, laying one hand on my shoulder, he wrung my hand with the other, cooing in refined military voice ‘My > dear > fellow, this is very good of you.’ (He knew perfectly well that I had come on business and hadn’t any choice but to come.) No underlining can convey the emphasis on the word > dear> : it was as if he had said ‘darling’. At the same time, however, the eyebrows moved a good deal higher up the forehead and while his voice gave the > darling > effect, his face gave the effect of ‘Well what a pair of fools we are, to be sure.’

Waiving the matter in hand, he began to consult me on an incredibly obscure point of Greek–he is one of the people producing the new Lexicon. He knows perfectly well that he knows twenty times more Greek than I do, but every word and tone suggested that I was the one man in Oxford, if not in Europe, who could help him out of his scrape: but every > look > said just as plainly, ‘Isn’t this fun? Or course you don’t know anything about it, and nobody really knows much about this question, and it doesn’t really matter anyway, but you won’t mind my pulling your leg a bit, will you?’ And I didn’t. Then every now and then, his manner would become if possible a little more serious, and a little more insanely deferential, and out would come some extremely indecent story: without a tremor of his gravity: but perhaps a minute later the egg would suddenly crack and he would go off into great solid chunks of laughter–the sort of ‘Ha–Ha–Ha’ with long intervals between which one imagines Johnson laughing. When I left he told me how much I’d helped him. I said I hadn’t known anything at all about the points he’d raised. He said ‘It was the stimulus of my presence’ (same contradictory effect of voice & face) and left me wondering whether he went back to chuckle at me, or to forget the whole visit as instantly and irrevocably as we sometimes forget a dream. Either seems equally probable. It is an old subject of controversy just how mad the Fark is. (He has put himself down on the list as lecturing on Heraclitus every summer term for years. I am the only person who ever volunteered to go, and he said it was off > that > year: also the surviving fragments of Heraclitus occupy about two pages!)

11

CS Lewis to Owen Barfield, June 10th, 1938:

What is the betting I forget to put that lyric in after all?–They keep sheep in Magdalen grove now and I hear the fleecy care bleating all day long; I am shocked to find that none of my pupils, though they are all acquainted with pastoral poetry, regards them as anything but a nuisance: and one of my colleagues has been heard to ask why sheep have their wool cut off. (Fact)

It frightens me almost. And so it did the other night when I heard two undergrads. giving a list of pleasures which were (a) Nazi. (b) Leading to homosexuality. They were, feeling the wind in your hair, walking with bare feet in the grass, and bathing in the rain. Think it over: it gets worse the longer you look at it. More cheering is the true report from Cambridge of a conversation

A. > What is this Ablaut > that K. keeps on talking about in his lectures?
B. Oh don’t you know, he was in love with Eloise.

12

J.R.R. Tolkien to Christopher Tolkien 14 May 1944:

. . . .Fr C. gave a pretty stirring little sermon, based on Rogation Days (next Mon - Wed) in which he suggested we were all a lot of untutored robots for not saying Grace; and did not suggest but categorically pronounced Oxford to deserve to be wiped out with fire and blood in the wrath of God for the abominations and wickedness there perpetrated. We all woke up. I am afraid it is all too horribly true. But I wonder if it is > specially > true now? A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men – sinks! And at the same time one knows that there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible, beauties of word or deed or face – not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there. But I fear that in the individual lives of all but a few, the balance is debit – we do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!. . . .