[7] IN March, 1868, at the end of my second year at the University of Aberdeen, I was feeling every day that college work had been an unalloyed happiness, and every moment spent in class-work or in preparation a delight. Even the details of syntax and word-formation had their fascination, and the inflection of the Greek verb was interesting. True, we never passed one throughout two years of class-work without some student being called on to conjugate it, though years before I entered college I could and did often write out the parts of every common verb without an error, and the best of my class-fellows I do not doubt had done the same. Yet the unexpectedness of the parts made this work like voyaging on an unknown sea: in that primitive period no explanation was given us how those strange vagaries were all obedient to more deep-lying laws; but one was vaguely beginning to feel that some hidden principle lay under the apparent caprice.

The idea was simmering unconsciously in my mind that scholarship was the life for me: not the life of teaching, which was repellent, but the life of discovery. Why should I not continue to voyage on that adventurous sea, where one always as it were had one's life in one's hand, where no slip or omission was ever pardoned, where the smallest fault in grammar was a deadly sin and a maximus error, where there was the excitement of continual exploration [8] and the finding of the unknown? Ideas of history, too, were beginning to shape themselves in my mind, not taken in cut-and-dry form from a text-book, but gathered fresh out of the difficulties of Sophocles and Juvenal. I was learning for myself out of Greek and Latin grammar and the sentences of great authors, that, as Plato expresses it in the "Theaetetus," word is spoken thought, and thought is unspoken word. But all was in embryo, I could not have told what was in my mind in those days, as we waited for the declaration of results in the class examinations.

At that time in Aberdeen the prizes and places in each subject were not announced until the final day, when they were declared publicly for each of the four classes in separate session. The old class-system was still in full force, the same system which about 1760 was carried to Philadelphia and introduced into the University of Pennsylvania by William Smith of Aberdeen, first Provost of the University, 1 and which spread thence over the whole of the United States, being accepted by all the older Universities except the University of Virginia, and adopted by almost all the new foundations. Every student belonged to the class of his own year, studied the regular subjects in a fixed order, and passed through the curriculum among the same body of associates. He belonged for life to that "class," and in Aberdeen many of these classes kept up the custom of meeting once a year, and occasionally publishing a record of the fortunes of each individual. The annual meeting of the classes is in America associated with a public function of the University, and officially used as a powerful engine for preserving its unity and its connexion with former graduates. In Aberdeen the meeting remained [9] always a private gathering of any class which chose to hold such a re-union, and the University took no part in it and no notice of it. Occasionally some Professor was invited to the meeting, but as a rule it was purely a students' gathering of a single class.

The class-system at Aberdeen, now much destroyed by the Royal Commission of 1894, 2 was then a power in University life and exercised a strong influence on every student. That was the case with us, although our class was one which has never held any re-union or met in any general fashion after the fourth year ended; and this explanation of the system is needed to explain why that meeting of the class to hear the declaration of the prizes was felt as a momentous occasion for young students.

On the final day we of the Second Year gathered in the Latin class-room. The feeling was in my mind that morning that something determining was going to happen: I rose with a vague anticipation of some event, and walked with a dreamy half-consciousness of an impending change. The subjects in the Second Year were a class of mathematics, two distinct classes of Greek, and two of Latin. The mathematical declaration put me fourth, Greek twice first, and Latin the same. The Professor of Greek, who knew every student by face and position, glanced round the room before beginning to read his list, until he saw me; and as I caught his eye, I knew before he spoke that I was [10] the outstanding figure in his mind. The Professor of Latin mentioned that I stood apart in the list. In that room my life was determined: I formed the resolve to be a scholar, and to make everything else subservient to that purpose and that career.

In the class-room, also, one other matter settled itself. The border-land between Greece and the East, the relation of Greek literature to Asia, had already a vague fascination for me; and this was to be the direction of the life that I imagined in the future. As it has turned out, that thought of the relation between Greece and the East was an anticipation of my life; but the form developed in a way that I did not imagine until many years passed. I thought of work in a room or a library, but it has lain largely in the open air and on the geographical frontier where Greek-speaking people touched the East. I thought of Greek literature in its relation to Asia; but the subject widened into the relation between the spirit of Europe and of Asia through the centuries.

The difficulties in this career I did not count, because I could not know them. How was one to live? I knew enough to judge that the only path lay in an Oxford Fellowship. That was arranged before the meeting ended, and always was before my mind in the following two years, but it was never mentioned to my most intimate friends. I was intended by my family to compete for an appointment in the Indian Civil Service; and, as instability was a deadly sin in the eyes of some of my relatives, I did not speak of the change. For the time, the ordinary Aberdeen course was the path to either goal; and the new plan was not spoken of at home, until the end of the curriculum in March, 1871. Then there was strong disapproval, not in my mother's household, but outside, for many thought it [11] foolish to turn to an Oxford course with its vague uncertainties. That path was then untrodden, though it has become a common one since for Aberdeen students.

A scholarship was necessary; and as I was now over twenty, the limit at that time in most Oxford Colleges, 3 opportunities were few. I had only one acquaintance at Oxford, who recommended me to enter for an exhibition at his own College, New, where nothing would be open till the following spring, 1872, and I spent a year in apparent idleness. It might have been more profitably spent: but I had no advisers, and muddled on in my own ignorant fashion.

In March, 1872, it chanced that the University Intelligence in the "Times," which I read every day in the public Reading-room, contained one Friday an "amended notice" issued by St. John's College: one of the two scholarships previously announced for competition was now stated to be open without age-limit. Here was an opening. The examination began on the ensuing Monday at 9 A.M. in the College Hall, and names with proper documents had to reach the President not later than Saturday. There was barely half-an-hour to catch the mail; I posted a letter from a shop, saying that the needed documents would be sent later; and then went to the rooms of an intimate college friend to discuss whether or not I should risk the journey. He confirmed my wavering resolution. My name and all the proper documents were already in the hands of the Warden of New College, where the competition was to begin a week later; but my friend undertook to procure copies, while I packed and started for Oxford, a long journey at that time. I arrived on Sunday at 1.30 P.M.; had lunch, found the [12] Post Office and the College, and returned to my hotel, where I slept as one sleeps after spending twenty-two hours in the train.

One of the Fellows at St. John's took some interest in me; and on Thursday at the end of the paper-work 1 learned that the scholarship lay between a man from Trinity College, Dublin, and myself, and that the loser would be offered an Exhibition of almost equal value, created for the occasion. The decision was made on Saturday morning on viva voce translation at sight; this was my strong point at any time, but in the elation of success after a tedious year I could have made something of Lycophron at sight, and Aristotle, an author new to me, seemed simple.

A thing that impressed me was that my New College friend chanced to meet me in the street after the final test; and when I told him what had happened, he explained that it was fortunate he had not known, as he would have warned me not to try at St. John's, because this Trinity man (whom he knew by reputation) was considered certain of anything he might try for in Oxford; if St. John's had remembered in time about the unlimited nature of that single scholarship (which was open only once in five years), my adviser (by whom I was in this matter guided absolutely) would have prevented me from trying. My competitor came to St. John's, took his First, and soon afterwards was made Principal of a colonial University.

The importance of this scholarship lay in its size (£100 a year as compared with £60 at New), in its tenure for a fifth year, which as things turned out was invaluable for me, and in the free position that it gave me. At New they would have dosed me with teaching, for which I was too mature; and I should have grown sick of college work. At St. John's they let me alone to take my own course in [13] my own way -- often a wrong way, but I had to learn to take the chances and trust myself. With this and an Aberdeen graduate scholarship I was started for five years.

Carrying out my old dream about the contact between Greece and the East, I began in 1874 to study Sanskrit, thinking that in this speech of an Aryan people who had melted into Asia one could best approach the historical problem, and spent three months at Goettingen during the long vacation, 4 studying with Benfey, who gave up his usual autumn holiday in Switzerland to continue the lessons. In Benfey I first came in contact with a really great scholar of the modern type, and learned something of German method. He opened to me a new world, and gave me fresh courage and hope, telling me that he looked to me to continue his work on the Rig-Veda. The way of scholarship had been hitherto arid in my education, the sense of discovery was never quickened, and the power of perceiving truth was becoming atrophied. Scholarship had been a learning of opinions, and not a process of gaining real knowledge. One learned what others had thought, but not what truth was. Benfey was a vivifying wind,. to breathe life into the dry bones, for he showed scholarship as discovery and not as a rehearsing of wise opinions. From him I returned to Oxford, and there my eyes were opened by another teacher.

In October of that year work for the Final School of Literae Humaniores began, embracing classical philosophy, history and scholarship -- the typical Oxford school and a wonderfully stimulating and educative course, in spite of the fact that an examination is its goal. Now in philosophy I had been brought up at the feet of Professor Bain, whose [14] ability stood out conspicuous in the University of Aberdeen, and whom I regarded as having said the final word in the subject, viz. that all philosophers had been mere jugglers with phrases, who succeeded in bamboozling the world into the belief that there was some meaning under their words, whereas in reality there was none. Bain's class of Logic had been the one class at Aberdeen in which I eagerly aimed at gaining the first place; and it had been a severe blow when I came out twenty-first.

As it was now necessary to know something about one of those jugglers with words, named Plato, and I was perfectly ignorant as to his particular way of deluding people, I felt bound to attend the lectures of Mr. Bidder on the Republic. Going across the quadrangle to the first lecture I remarked to a friend that I should now have to spend two years in learning how Plato had been able to delude mankind.

The lecturer walked up and down the room with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets talking lightly and easily about the development of thought and language in Greece before Plato. He put a question to me at an early stage, which I answered from the lofty level of a devotee of Bain. He airily tore my reply to tatters and explained clearly what I ought to have said. Thereafter, he continued every few minutes to put a question to me and to exhibit the helpless inadequacy of my reply. In one hour I learned what a fool I was -- a very salutary lesson for a young man -- and at the end of the hour I remarked to the same friend: "Bidder is evidently a man of ability, and he seems to think that Plato had some meaning in his words: I must try to find out whether that is true". One hour had changed my whole attitude towards philosophy, and made it possible for me to begin to understand Greek thought.

[15] In Oxford there were many other able lecturers on philosophy, and at St. John's in particular there was an excellent man, from whom I learned much; but Bidder with his incisive speech was the one man that could have opened my eyes. I shall always remember Aubrey Moore with deep gratitude but his words would have passed me by and made no impression on my unopened mind. He could never have unsealed my eyes, though he taught me more than Bidder after my eyes were open.

It was a great step to make in that first hour with Plato. If you want to understand the relation between Greece and Asia) you must begin by understanding Greece; but I remained blind and deaf to the true spirit of Hellenism, however much I might admire and love Greek literature, so long as the mind was closed to Plato.

Benfey recommended me to Max Mueller, who took a generous interest in my scheme of studying Sanskrit, and gave me the opportunity of meeting at his house people from the greater world; but he strongly advised me to finish the Final Schools before spending serious labour on the language. A visit to Cambridge, and interviews with Peile, the master of Christ's, author of a book on the young science of Comparative Philology, and with Cowell, the Professor of Sanskrit, confirmed Max Mueller's warning that there was no career in Sanskrit except as a sequel to the regular schools. Then Benfey's attempt to procure for me a presentation from Government of the vast Commentary of Sayana on the Rig-Veda proved unsuccessful. Like many later disappointments, it was a blessing in disguise. Had the book been given me, honour would have bound me to justify the gift and to labour at Sanskrit. As it was, I was free to act on Max Mueller's advice, and thus was [16] rescued from a cul de sac. The path of Sanskrit had nothing for me: the men who wrote Sanskrit cared nought for mundane things, and the history of action would have become no clearer from its study. I shut the books, intending to return to them after twenty-two months, and have never opened them again.

In 1876 the Final Schools were approaching, and with them a Divinity examination, involving either the Thirty-nine Articles or some substitute. I could not with years of labour pass an examination in the Articles: to read them was as impossible as to fly to the moon. In childhood I could have committed them to memory like the Shorter Catechism, without understanding what I repeated; but at the age of twenty-four that was impossible. I took refuge in the Epistle to the Galatians, and communed with Lightfoot, whose transparent honesty was invigorating and delightful. My mother's love for Paul began to move in my mind; and she and I read together Conybeare and Howson's Life and translation of the Letters, a thoroughly scholarly book. I was now full of Aristotle's most advanced treatises, and came to Paul with a new mind, finding him the true successor of the Stagirite.

The letter to the Galatians I was free to regard as the work of Paul, for it was admitted in the Tuebingen School, which at this time was my guide in criticism. The logical skill with which Baur and his associates carried out their premises to their foregone conclusion had impressed me deeply, and I did not inquire into the premises, which in fact were accepted as necessary by a follower of Bain, but should not have been accepted by one who was beginning to think that he might succeed in understanding Plato. I was still under the domination of schools, and accepted the principles taught by such great writers and teachers as had [17] first caught me, and as yet I had not learned to go back to first principles for myself.

In the summer before the Final Schools I spent two months near Robertson Smith, and under his care read everything recent that he thought most worth reading on the Old Testament, worshipped Wellhausen, dipped into the study of comparative religion and folklore, and fell in love with J. F. MacLennan's anthropological researches. Most advisers would have regarded this as a reckless and insane throwing away of chances in the Final Schools, and they are right as regards some students, but wrong as regards others. I had been hesitating about a Special Subject in addition to the prescribed work, and was ready to offer either comparative philology with the elements of Sanskrit, or the metaphysical "Trilogy" of Plato, or the Metaphysics of Aristotle; I had read them all with equal care, with equal interest, and doubtless with equally little understanding, and two months spent on the Old Testament was health-giving; probably a Second Class might have been my lot, if I had not wandered on to the solid ground of history for two months. That ground was slippery: Wellhausen and others were reconstructing Hebrew history after their own free will; but they were at least free and they were constructing, though after a fashion which seems to me now to ignore vital conditions of the problem.

There is some truth in a remark that I heard Walter Pater make: talking of a college tutor's work be said, "I prefer pass students to honours students; you occasionally find a passman who can take an interest in the subject for its own sake; but honours men are so entirely occupied with their next examination that they have no time to think about their subject". I think there are now probably some honours men who would escape the censure.

[18] I had not such good fortune in the lectures that I heard in Oxford on Greek history as on Greek philosophy, and I heard none on Roman history. The new men had not begun, and the old lecturers (so far as I heard them) were hardened in the narrowness of an older school. In 1913 an Oxford historian read a paper fixing exact dates in primitive Greek history. I listened, and reflected with intense amusement that every sentence in it would have been regarded by Oxford opinion in my undergraduate days as sheer lunacy; yet here in 1913 an audience of the best lecturers in Oxford regarded it as the serious work of a serious historian. One draws a moral for the study of New Testament history. Perhaps the next generation may draw a moral for Old Testament history (as some already do).

At the end of the fourth year the problem of a livelihood confronted me. I had come to Oxford to be a scholar; there was no other path open to that life, so far as I could see, except a fellowship; and a fellowship was as far off as ever. I was not on good terms with my own College, partly from my own fault, partly from the fact that the College, accustomed to boys fresh from school, was puzzled by an incomprehensible student who aimed at being a scholar, and could not believe that he was genuine. This again was fortunate. Had the College approved of me, it would have found a place for me; and circumstances would have forced me into the life of a College lecturer and tutor, for which I was not suited. The College acted for my best interest, and for its own also, I am sure.

I was on the outlook for any opening, and was ready to go off to English Literature, if there had been any places in that line of University work, such as now exist in fair number. The subject interested me, and there were no examinations to prepare for, which would prevent one from [19] serious work. I had read pretty widely, subscribed to the New Shakespere Society from its foundation, and made addresses to Students' Societies on subjects of English literature. Nothing however presented itself, and the prospect was dark.

Then, as it appeared, the stroke of fate fell, and I was ordered by a doctor to go abroad and wander for a year, reading nothing, but keeping my ears and eyes and mind open, living in the open air, and reversing all the course of my life. To go down from Oxford at that stage was to go down for ever: the absent is forgotten, and new men come up: --

To have done is to hang
Quite Out of fashion like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery.

And so I said farewell to Oxford, and "went out sighing," thinking never to see the fair city again. I had learned much there, though not in the conventional way.

I had just enough with the last year of my scholarship at St. John's to pay all I owed, and start on my travels with nothing. I did not pay all I owed till several years later, and never regretted it, for I found that accounts presented to an undergraduate going down were charged on a lordly scale; but some were afterwards rendered on a distinctly humble grade.

Those of my friends and relatives who had disapproved my Oxford venture, now found that their disapprobation had been fully justified: I had made a disastrous failure, none the less a failure that it had been nearly a success. 5 [20] Those who had approved were now my helpers; and my uncle Mr. Drake told me that £100 was at my disposal at any time. I went off to Germany, Switzerland, and Italy with £25 in my pocket, to which a second £25 was soon added. I had the fortune to make new friends, to get a valuable part of my education, to earn some money, and at last to return with as much in my pocket as when I started. Always since then I have cherished a warm feeling towards Americans, because it was from Americans that much of the enjoyment and profit of that year came, and it was they that taught me to live in the world of Europe.

In leaving Oxford I had the fortune to propitiate one who was not a friend, and to make a new friend. I called on the President of St. John's, who had not liked me and made no secret of his dislike. He never hid his opinions in such matters. If he thought that a man was a fool or a knave, he told him so "in good round terms". I often said in those weary years of undergraduate life at Oxford, that if we had met at some house in the country we should have got on very well; for I always admired his blunt directness and honesty of language; but in a college with its schoolboy rules, he was puzzled and annoyed with my views, which had been expressed to him with a directness and honesty like his own. Now that I was going down, I felt free to explain the reason of some things, and he said, "If your time here were to begin over again, I should act differently towards you". This was about as near as Bella my ever came to making an apology to an undergraduate. When the Asia Minor Exploration Fund was started, Professor Pelham, who managed it, found that the President of St. John's was the readiest of subscribers every year.

The day before I went down I received an invitation from the Master of Balliol, Dr. Jowett, to call on him It hap- [21] pened that, while I was in Goettingen two years before, a young Balliol philosopher, now Professor J. Cook Wilson, came there to study with Lotze; and he afterwards spoke of me to Jowett. T. H. Green, one of the Examiners in the Final Schools, had also mentioned me to the Master: he had himself invited me to call on him after the examination was over, an honour that I valued very highly.

Jowett said he wished to learn whether he could help me in any way; and when he heard that I was going abroad next day, he said, "If you come back to Oxford, call on me, and I will do what I can to help you". Seven years later, in January, 1884, I called on him and reminded him of this promise, as having been always a support to me in a time full of uncertainties. He had not forgotten; and not very long afterwards, being (as it chanced) one of the electors to the newly instituted Professorship of Greek Art and Archaeology, he wrote inviting me to dine with him five weeks later, on the night after the election, "to meet Sir Charles Newton," another of the electors. It was a remarkable act, one of those bold and unconventional things that few men would dare to do, and which can be pardoned only when they have been justified by success; and we took it as a proof that he hoped I should feel in good spirits two hours after the electors made their choice. The Professorship was a small one, and candidates in that subject were few and already well known. We said nothing to anyone about the invitation until after the event. As Jowett had the reputation of caring only for Balliol men, this seems worth mentioning as a trait in the character of a noteworthy personality.

Professor Bywater, a very fine scholar and a great Aristotelian, also invited me to call on him, hearing of my interest in Aristotle; and it was refreshing to converse with [22] him, or rather to listen to his epigrammatic talk. By a coincidence translation from Aristotle, which had decided the entrance scholarship, played a part also in the Final Examinations; the "Metaphysics" was my Special Subject, and among the unseen translations was a piece from the "Physics". Of this I gave two renderings, one straight and the other treating the passage as an unintelligent mixture of the notes made by two different pupils who heard the same lecture and wrote what they could understand of it, these separate notes having been put together by a third pupil, who edited the lecture. This theory, caught from Trendelenburg, I had in private study applied to some other parts of Aristotle; and it was excellent training for the treatment of similar theories as applied by some scholars to the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of Paul.

At Max Mueller's house I had met Professor Sayce, and afterwards saw him pretty often. He was the first person who treated me frankly as a scholar, not as an undergraduate. The examinations that divided me from other dons did not exist for him. He saw only the interest in scholarship and the love of truth; and my inclination towards the Asian borderland was much stimulated in talking with him. He was for several years the only correspondent that I had in Oxford to keep the connexion living.

So far as work in life, or even the way of earning a livelihood was concerned, the outlook was darker than ever. In Oxford after the Final Schools, a friend and I had planned to make an edition of the Nicomachean Ethics, and that work was just begun when my Oxford life was brought apparently to an end. The deciding event was now at hand; but it came very slowly. At Rome in January, 1878, when talking with a young Oxford graduate, a Modern [23]

FOOTNOTES

1 This interesting fact of University history is given on the authority of the present Provost, who told the whole story to the present writer in 1913.

2 Royal Commissions rarely do the good that might be expected; but that of 1890-94 was peculiarly unsuccessful. Hardly any member of it had been educated at a Scottish University, or showed any sympathy with the national tradition of college life; and Aberdeen was represented on the board of fifteen by a retired professor, eighty years of age, who lived far away in his own country, and knew the University only during his very efficient professoriate. The students now still struggle to maintain the old custom in spite of adverse circumstances.

3 In some the age was nineteen, as it soon afterwards was fixed generally.

4 I Immediately after the First Public Examination in June, 1874.

5 Many incidents, which are omitted because they have no bearing on the present plan, show that the phrase, "nearly a success," is justified. Other colleges had Fellowships: but, as has been said, a Fellowship of the ordinary type would have ruined my aspirations in life.

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