by John Buchan
With the coming of the university the converging roads acquired a new meaning and discovered a new type of traveller. Turbulent, disputatious lads journeyed along them from all quarters to cluster round the lamp of learning. From our viewpoint on the hill we can see how they came. Over the Berkshire ridges they flocked from the southern shires, and some of them from beyond the Channel. From London they came by what was one of the oldest highroads in the land, that from the capital to Worcester (the road by which Shakespeare must have often travelled), leaving it at Wheatley for the final stage over Shotover. From the west they had the road through Cotswold, by which the pack-trains of the wool-staplers travelled, descending upon Oxford either by Woodstock or by Eynsham and the Botley causeway. From the north they also followed the skirts of Cotswold, for the valleys were too marshy. To all such pilgrims the first sight of Oxford must have come with a shock of delighted surprise; it is wonderful enough to see your goal on a far hill-top and travel with it in sight for hours or days, but it is more wonderful to come on it suddenly when you have wearily topped the last ridge. In those days Oxford was close and compact, with no sprawling faubourgs, for her ancient stones rose sharply from green meadows — such a view can still be got to-day from the Elsfield hill. The first glimpse of the spire of St. Mary’s and the tall tower of Oseney — the third greatest in the land — as seen from Shotover or Boar’s Hill or over the Campsfield moor, must to many a foot-sore pilgrim have come like the vision of John in Patmos.
From this hill we can reconstruct another great moment in history, when Oxford and her countryside were linked in one dream — the Civil War and the Siege. Charles held west England, his opponents London and the east, and the ridge on which we stand, running north to the Brill upland and lying half-way between Cotswold and the Chilterns, was a strategic point in the campaign, for it must be occupied before the city could be surrounded. So for two years there was a great marching and counter-marching here. Boarstall castle towards Brill was defended for the King. Islip bridge and the fords of Cherwell were vital points; Parliament had its artillery park in the Elsfield clearing, and all the adjacent towns were drawn into the orbit of war. The last act was played at the foot of this hill, in the manor house of Marston, when Fairfax and Rupert agreed the terms of Oxford’s surrender.
So much for the history of the city. It is a long tale half-forgotten. But the memory of it makes the Oxford country as haunted a place as any in our land. From Roman centurion to Norman baron, from churchman to cavalier, much of the drama of England was staged here. These things have passed, but there remain the rural loveliness and the
“bright and intricate device
Of days and seasons.”
Time has brought its wrongs. Boar’s Hill and Cumnor, which I remember as downs and cornfields, are now dotted with villas; Cowley is an industrial town, and an eruption of red brick has spread far along the Woodstock, Banbury and Iffley roads. But much of Oxfordshire is as unspoilt as in the Middle Ages, and some of it is lonelier to-day than then.
The hills remain, though two of them are a little marred. Wytham is still a sanctuary, and the tableland of Shotover has been preserved. The Elsfield ridge is unspoilt. Further afield there is nothing to complain of. The hill-top of Brill, from which the eye may cover half the southern midlands, is less urban to-day than at the beginning of last century, when it threatened to become a spa and a rival of Bath. The Ilsley downs are still thymy sheep-walks The hillocks of the Bicester country have not been touched by man. The long slopes of Cotswold, which rise slowly from Woodstock and Ditchley and Witney to end in the scarp above the Severn, are still a pastoral upland, hiding in their nooks the loveliest of English villages. Oxford remains a lowland city, but with gates opening on all sides into the hills.
The forests have for the most part given place to tillage and pasture, though the self-sown saplings in the meadows are a reminder of the old days of oak and ash and thorn. Stowood is now only a patch, but the newer woods, which are called the Quarters, and which stretch along the southern side of Otmoor, enable us to picture how Oxfordshire must have looked in earlier times. The one great forest remnant is Wychwood, between the Evenlode and the Windrush, several thousand acres of unspoilt coppice and glade. But though the forests have mostly gone, much of Oxfordshire remains forest country. There are still forest crafts among the people and much of the wild life is the same. Wherever it is permitted, bracken resumes its old dominion. Were the hand of man withdrawn the shire would soon go back to primeval woodland.
The key to the Oxford topography is the valleys, for they are the natural divisions. First there is the “stripling Thames,” above Godstow becomes a different stream from the sophisticated lower river. It twines through its meadows like a brook in a missal, always within sight of uplands. If a man wants to recover the Middle Ages let him go there on a summer day when the grass is high, and he will see and hear nothing which was not there five hundred years ago when the monks of Eynsham caught their Friday’s trout. Of the tributaries two are wholly lowland, the little Thame which threads the vale of Aylesbury, and the Cherwell which rises far up in the Midlands. But the latter has an affluent which traverses one of the wildest patches of south England, for the Ray, which enters it at Islip, flows through the great marsh of Otmoor. Otmoor is divided by rough hedges, but it is undrained, and perhaps undrainable. In a wet winter it is one vast lagoon; in summer it is a waste of lush grass, and its few mud tracks are pitted and ribbed like the seracs of a glacier. Once it was the preserve of the Seven Towns of Otmoor which pastured their geese on it, and there were riots early in last century when it was enclosed. Now the Royal Air Force has a bombing-station there, and by day it is apt to be a noisy place, but at night and in wild weather it recovers its loneliness. To ride or walk there in an autumn twilight is to find oneself in a place as remote from man as Barra or Knoydart.
But it is the little valleys which are the glory of the Oxford countryside — those of Coln and Leach, Windrush and Evenlode. The first two are in Gloucestershire, but the latter two are Oxford’s avenues into Cotswold. There we have a landscape which is still unravished. The names of the streams are in themselves a melody, and the valleys wind into the recesses of the hills so softly that they combine upland austerity with lowland graces. What The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis have done for Oxford’s immediate environs Mr. Belloc’s Dedicatory Ode does for those magical little streams.
“A lovely river, all alone,
She lingers in the hills and holds
A hundred little towns of stone,
Forgotten in the western wolds.”
And there are slender affluents of both — the Dickler, the Glyme, and the Dorn — which a man may trace happily to their source during a long summer’s day.
To those bred in the Scottish Borders the Oxford landscape has always had a peculiar charm. It laid its spell on Walter Scott, as Kenilworth and Woodstock witness, and on Andrew Lang, and ever since my undergraduate days I have felt it. The reason, I think, is that it recalls my native countryside, but with an entrancing difference. It is pastoral, but it has no “pastoral melancholy.” It is haunted, but only by idyllic things. The shallows of the Windrush are never the “wan water” of Yarrow. It is a country wholly and exquisitely fitted for the gentler uses of life.
V
Oxford enabled me to discover Scotland. Before I came up I had explored a great part of the Lowlands with the prosaic purpose of catching trout; but apart from my own Borders, the land, though I was steeped in its history, made no special appeal. Scottish literature, except the ballads and Sir Walter Scott, was scarcely known to me, and I had read very little of Robert Burns. But now as a temporary exile I acquired all the characteristics of the Scot abroad. I became a fervent admirer of Bums and a lover of Dunbar and the other poets of the Golden Age. I cultivated a sentiment for all things Scottish and brought the Highlands and the Isles into the orbit of my interest. A quarter of my blood was Highland and in that I developed a new pri
de, for it was a time when people talked of the “Celtic twilight,” and Mr. Yeats had just published his Wind Among the Reeds. Oxford was full of Scotsmen of every type — studious Scots, orgiastic Scots, rhetorical Scots who talked in the Union, robustious Scots from the football teams. The result was a new Caledonian Club. An earlier institution had been suppressed some years before by the University authorities after a carnival of special disorder. Some of us reconstituted it on an austere basis. It was limited to members with a proven Scots descent on both sides for at least three generations; an English club in the University, which adopted the same principle, could only find two who passed the test conditions! We specialised in vintage clarets and dined in a uniform of green and purple, intended to represent the thistle in flower. Semel insanivimus omnes.
But the real Scotland for me was discovered in my spring walking tours and my summer holidays. I had been a miserable headachy little boy, but at the age of five I had a serious carriage accident, when my skull was fractured, and I lay for the better part of a year in bed. I arose a new child, and throughout all my youth I was as hardy as a seal; indeed, apart from dysentery and a slight malaria in South Africa, I scarcely had an ailment until the War. I was lean and tough in body, accustomed to sleep out of doors in any weather, including December frosts, and, though never an athlete, capable of a good deal of physical endurance. Once I walked sixty-three miles on end in the Galloway hills. It was my custom in the long vacations to bury myself in the moorlands, taking up my quarters in a shepherd’s cottage. There I rose early, worked for five or six hours, and then went fishing until the summer midnight. I throve on a diet of oatmeal, mutton and strong tea, and, with the habit to which I have already referred of linking philosophy with terrestrial objects, the works of Aristotle are for ever bound up for me with the smell of peat reek and certain stretches of granite and heather.
The chief episodes were the spring walking tours. Each year after much planning I would tramp with a friend or two on a circuit north of Tweed. We covered the Cheviots from Liddesdale to the sea, and footed it over most of Argyll and Lochaber. Those expeditions have given me memories of which time has not dimmed the rapture. There would be wild days among wet or snowy hills, or on moorland roads in the teeth of a hailstorm, and nights in inns before roaring fires, when, replete and content, we talked the rhetoric of youth. And there would be blue days beside western sea-lochs when oyster-catchers piped on the shingle and curlews wailed on the bent, and April evenings when the far mountains were etched in violet against a saffron sky. After those escapades it was always a little hard to adjust oneself to Oxford; the call of a more strenuous world seemed to have broken in on our academic peace.
I was little use at games, but about this time I took to field sports. About fishing I already knew a good deal, and now I discovered the charm of the dry-fly, to which I was introduced on some college water on the Windrush. In the spring tours I began mountaineering, on the Buachaille Etive Mhor, and the Glencoe peaks, and the north-east face of Ben Nevis. I took to shooting also, especially rough shooting, for I never cared much for a battue of pheasants or a grouse drive; my preference was for some place like the delectable island of Colonsay where in a day it was possible to get a dozen varieties of game. At that time the Mecca of sport for us was the house of Ardwall in Kirkcudbrightshire, the home of Lord Ardwall, the last of the great “characters” on the Scottish Bench and a figure who might have stepped out of a Raeburn canvas. There between the hills and the sea a party of us forgathered each autumn. Those were royal days when we rode and walked and shot all over Galloway as far as the Dungeon of Buchan, and returned in the small hours of the morning to prodigious feasts. Looking back it is hard to see how we escaped with our lives, for we would hunt the hare on horseback with greyhounds among the briars and bogs and boulders of a Galloway moor, and swim our horses over the estuary of the Fleet at high tide. We almost came to believe that our necks were spared for the judicial end which Lord Ardwall always predicted.
VI
It was a secure and comfortable world, that close of Victoria’s reign before the disillusion and change of the South African War. Peace brooded over the land and we should not have believed a prophet had he told us that most of our group would fall in battle. We were hardly aware of the problems of the State or its demands upon our services, and the University Volunteers had a hard time keeping up their strength. It was the day when Mr. Chamberlain was preaching a new gospel of empire, and Lord Milner beginning his difficult course in South Africa, but we were scarcely conscious of their efforts, except to laugh at Raymond Asquith’s parodies of Kipling. There were political clubs — like the Conservative Canning and Chatham, and the Liberal Palmerston and Russell; but they were chiefly pretexts for annual dinners, when statesmen came up to speak to audiences which were interested in their persons but apathetic about their policies. I called myself a Tory and belonged to the Canning, but that club at two successive meetings, after drinking Church and King, had by a large majority disestablished the Church and nationalised the land of England; and it had adventurous members who belonged also to the Fabian Society. Raymond Asquith and I at the Union usually spoke on the same side on foreign affairs and always carried our motion. When we troubled our heads about politics we debated questions by the cold light of reason, oblivious of party fervours. There were, of course, busy partisans who pulled wires and spoke at by-elections, but they were not highly regarded. The statesmen who visited us did not greatly impress me, with one exception. I met Sir Wilfrid Laurier at an All Souls luncheon, and began an acquaintance which in later years I highly valued.
After the War I came to live near Oxford and have had the chance ever since of studying the young entries. How shall I compare them with my own generation Upon them has fallen the shadow of economic disaster, so that Oxford cannot seem an end in itself as it seemed to us, but only a means of finding a niche in the world. Moreover, transport facilities have made the place less of a sanctuary which devised its own life, and more of a London suburb. The modern undergraduates are what we should have called “banausic,” with a strict utilitarian outlook. For their virtues: they are more temperate and frugal than we were, less snobbish about athletics, more industrious, better sons to their parents, and, I am inclined to think, better mannered. For their defects: they lack our disinterested curiosity about the things of the mind, and in the broad sense they are less well-educated. Their average man lacks our average man’s general culture. They tend to fall into grooves and exclusive cliques. The Union, for example, is a resort only of earnest politicians, chiefly of the left wing, and its debating quality seems to me to have declined, as has its catholicity of membership; in my time everybody belonged to it and more than one rowing Blue was president.
But the spirit of physical adventure, I believe, is more alive to-day than ever. A few years ago I made a list of how some of my son’s contemporaries were spending the long vacation and found the following: as deck-hand in a Hull trawler in the White Sea; working at the Canadian harvest; as purser in a South American liner; helping Welsh miners to cultivate the land; trading old rifles in the Arctic for walrus ivory! It is as though they felt they were living in a hard and dangerous world and were resolved there should be no experience they could not face. And one characteristic they have in which we were sadly lacking. They feel their responsibility to the State. Politics have become for them a serious personal duty. Youth is inclined to political extremes, and it is small wonder that the causes which most appeal to them are the grandiloquent world-reconstructions; but the reason, I think, is not only the rhetorical turn of youth, but the fact that such causes require sacrifices and an austere discipline. Since most Englishmen over thirty are inclined to compromise, it is right that some Englishmen under thirty should redress the balance by extravagance.
During my four years at Oxford I read hard and finished with a considerable stock of miscellaneous knowledge. That mattered little, but the trend which my mind acquired matte
red much. Generally speaking, I accepted the brand of idealism which was then fashionable, that derived from Thomas Hill Green, and expounded in my day by F. H. Bradley, and H. H. Joachim. More and more I became sceptical of dogmas, looking upon them as questions rather than answers. Philosophy did not give us solutions, but it taught us to ask the right questions, about which we could cheerfully go on disputing until the dawn put our candles out. The limited outlook of my early youth had broadened. Formerly I had regarded life as a pilgrimage along a strait and steep path on which the pilgrim must keep his eyes fixed. I prided myself on a certain moral austerity, but now I came to realise that there was a good deal of self-interest in that outlook, like the Puritan who saw in his creed not only the road to Heaven but the way to worldly success. I began to be attracted by the environs as well as by the road, and I became more charitable in my judgment of things and men.
I had some of my Gothic corners smoothed away, but I still had a good many angles, and there remained a large spice of the Shorter Catechist in my make-up. Just as my walks were not random contemplative saunters, but attempts to get somewhere, so a worthy life seemed to me to be a series of efforts to conquer intractable matter, to achieve something difficult and perhaps dangerous. Much as I detested Napoleon, I was for him, as against Thackeray in his “Ballad of the Drum”:
“Come fill me one more glass of wine
