CHAPTER VI
Alma Mater! Alma Mater! New-fashioned folks, with their large theories of education, may find fault with thee. But a true Spartan mother thou art: hard and stern as the old matron who bricked up her son Pausanius, bringing the first stone to immure him,—hard and stern, I say, to the worthless, but full of majestic tenderness to the worthy.
For a young man to go up to Cambridge (I say nothing of Oxford, knowing nothing thereof) merely as routine work, to lounge through three years to a degree among the (Greek word),—for such an one Oxford Street herself, whom the immortal Opium-Eater hath so direly apostrophized, is not a more careless and stony-hearted mother. But for him who will read, who will work, who will seize the rare advantages proffered, who will select his friends judiciously,—yea, out of that vast ferment of young idea in its lusty vigor choose the good and reject the bad,—there is plenty to make those three years rich with fruit imperishable, three years nobly spent, even though one must pass over the Ass's Bridge to get into the Temple of Honor.
Important changes in the Academical system have been recently announced, and honors are henceforth to be accorded to the successful disciples in moral and natural sciences. By the side of the old throne of Mathesis they have placed two very useful fauteuils a la Voltaire. I have no objection; but in those three years of life it is not so much the thing learned as the steady perseverance in learning something that is excellent.
It was fortunate, in one respect, for me that I had seen a little of the real world,—the metropolitan,—before I came to that mimic one,—the cloistral. For what were called pleasures in the last, and which might have allured me, had I come fresh from school, had no charm for me now. Hard drinking and high play, a certain mixture of coarseness and extravagance, made the fashion among the idle when I was at the University, console Planco,—when Wordsworth was master of Trinity; it may be altered now.
But I had already outlived such temptations, and so, naturally, I was thrown out of the society of the idle, and somewhat into that of the laborious.
Still, to speak frankly, I had no longer the old pleasure in books. If my acquaintance with the great world had destroyed the temptation to puerile excesses, it had also increased my constitutional tendency to practical action. And, alas! in spite of all the benefit I had derived from Robert Hall, there were times when memory was so poignant that I had no choice but to rush from the lonely room haunted by tempting phantoms too dangerously fair, and sober Town the fever of the heart by some violent bodily fatigue. The ardor which belongs to early youth, and which it best dedicates to knowledge, had been charmed prematurely to shrines less severely sacred. Therefore, though I labored, it was with that full sense of labor which (as I found at a much later period of life) the truly triumphant student never knows. Learning—that marble image—warms into life, not at the toil of the chisel, but the worship of the sculptor. The mechanical workman finds but the voiceless stone.
At my uncle's, such a thing as a newspaper rarely made its appearance. At Cambridge, even among reading men, the newspapers had their due importance. Politics ran high; and I had not been three days at Cambridge before I heard Trevanion's name. Newspapers, therefore, had their charms for me. Trevani