Bildungsromans; England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Illegitimate children -- Fiction
Stewart of Trinity represented an undergraduate type that perhaps had
endured and would endure longer than any of the others. He would have
been most in his element if he had come up in the early nineties, but
yet with all his intellectual survivals he did not seem an anachronism.
Perhaps it was as well that he had not come up in the nineties, since
much of his obvious and youthful charm might have been buried beneath
absurdities which in those reckless decadent days were carried
sometimes to moral extremes that destroyed a little of the absurdity.
As it was, Stewart was perhaps the most beloved member of Trinity,
whether he were feeding Rugger blues on plovers’ eggs or keeping an
early chapel with the expression of an earthbound seraph or playing
tennis in the Varsity doubles or whether, surrounded by Baudelaire and
Rollinat and Rops and Huysmans, he were composing an ode to Satan, with
two candles burning before his shrine of King Charles the Martyr and a
ramshorn of snuff and glasses of mead waiting for casual callers.
With Townsend, Mowbray, and Stewart, thought Michael, added to
Wedderburn’s Pre-Raphaelitism and staid Victorian romance, to
Hazlewood’s genuine inspiration, and with Maurice Avery to whip the
result into a soufflée of exquisite superficiality, it certainly seemed
as if The Oxford Looking-Glass might run for at least a year. But what
exactly was himself doing on the committee? He could contribute,
outside money, nothing of force to help in driving the new magazine
along to success. Still, somehow he had allowed his name to appear in
the preliminary circular, and next October when the first number was
published somehow he would share however indirectly in the credit or
reproach accruing. Meanwhile, there were the mere externals of this
first summer term to be enjoyed, this summer term whose beginning he
had hailed from St. Mary’s tower, this dream of youth’s domination set
against the gray background of time’s endurance that was itself spun of
the fabric of dreams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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