Compton Mackenzie
I AM almost sure that it was Crashaw who wrote: Lock'd up from mortal eye, In shady leaves of destiny.
If I err in the attribution I beg pardon and plead temporary inability to check my references because as I write these words my books are in, packing-cases being transported from Berk- shire to Edinburgh. _ Exactly fifty years ago in the November of my third year at Oxford, the President of Magdalen sent a note inviting my attendance at his Lodgings to hear of something to my advan- tage. He did not use so vulgar a phrase, but that was the implication. In due course I presentepi myself at the appointed hour and was shown into the President's room where, under the eyes of the late Lord Wantage looking out of a mezzotint, T. Herbert Warren was wont to exercise with consummate ability his various duties as head of a house.
With his dark bushy beard, his large gleaming teeth, his plump white silk sailor's knot of a tie and his slightly buttery enunciation that somehow avoided the least suggestion of unctuousness, T. Herbert Warren—he was ten years away then from being Sir Herbert Warren—did not strike even the most nervous freshman as a formidable figure. Yet now when I look back at his remarkable career as President of Magdalen he seems in retrospect a much more formidable figure than we undergraduates of fifty years ago fancied him to be. When I was seated on the other side of his desk on that November day of 1903 he came to the point at once: " I have had a letter from Mr. St. Loe Strachey, asking me if I know of any young man who might be suitable to take the place of John Buchan on the Spectator. You'll be glad to hear that, provided you take a satisfactory degree, I have in mind to recommend you. I have been impressed by the way in which you have edited The Oxford Point of View, though I hope you are not letting it interfere too much with your reading." The President's teeth gleamed benevolently as he waited for the expression of my gratitude.
" But, Mr. President," I protested, " I don't want to join the Spectator." The President's smile was still there, but the teeth no longer gleamed benevolently: indeed, they seemed as menacing as the teeth of the wolf in the bed of Red Riding Hood's grand, mother.
" An opportunity to join the staff of the Spectator is not one that many young men have," he observed coldly.
" But I should be out of sympathy with what the Spectator stands for. It doesn't seem to realise that Queen Victoria is dead."
" May I ask what paper you hope to join when you go down ? '
" I don't intend to do any journalism. I intend to live in the country and write poetry and plays."
No doubt I seemed an intolerably perverse and conceited youth to a man who believed that a career was an essential ambition for anybody who was not the heir to a title or at least to a handsome landed property. However, in self- defence I may urge that in the previous summer term after a performance of Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice I had refused an offer from Arthur Bourchier of a seven years' contract as his jeune premier at the- Garrick Theatre, when I had taken my degree. In that case the shady leaves of destiny parted more quickly, for only seven years later, after trying vainly for nearly two years to get my first novel accepted by a publisher, I was compelled to make .a professional appearance as an actor at the Garrick Theatre in a play by Hall Caine, and as a French priest shipwrecked upon the Isle of Man absolve Bransby Williams, the Deemster's banished son. Fortunately the play lasted only a week.
In the case of the Spectator those shady leaves of destiny have waited until now to part.
The President never forgave me for my failure to appreciate his offer of a recommendation to Mr. St. Loe Strachey. The bi-terminal review I edited called The Oxford Point of View was henceforth regarded as a baneful influence upon my academic studies. I was not allowed to play Touchstone in the OUDS production of As You Like It the following term, which, incidentally, provided a chance for the late A. P. Boissier to give a richly humorous-performance of the part. Paul Boissier was to become Headmaster of Harrow one day, and alas, died only a few weeks ago. He was a footballer and hockey player of the front rank, a brilliant mathematician and a magnificent thorn in the academic flesh of Balliol. When he became Headmaster of Harrow I wrote in a letter of congratulation that if anybody had asked me once upon a time who of all my Oxford friends was least likely to become Headmaster of Harrow in the future I should without hesitation have declared for him.
The President's next move for impressing upon me the folly of rejecting his good offices with Mr. St. Loe Strachey was to insist after the " collections " at the end of that term that I must take my schools in the summer of 1904 instead of being allowed a fourth year. " And if you get a second in History you can stay up another year and read for English Literature." " Whatever class li get, Mr. President, I shall go down this year." In those days the recently invented school of English Literature was regarded as a joke. and I saw no reason to deprive myself of the pleasure of writing my blank verse play about Joan of Arc in the cottage my future brother-in-law Christopher Stone and I had taken in Burford.
The President never overcame his disapproval of my ingrati- tude. I have a letter from him thanking me for a copy of Carnival but telling me that he is afraid he will be unable to read it because the review in the Spectator indicated plainly that it was not the kind of novel he cared to read. HoWever, I had the pleasure of seeing that presentation copy priced in a catalogue, when some of his books were sold after his death, at eighteen guineas, so perfectly intact an example was it of the first edition. The Spectator disapproved of Carnival but it had been kind to my first novel and its review of The Passionate Elopement prompted the first repeat of the circulating libraries whose original subscription had been a mere 200 copies.
Forgive these egotistical reminiscences : I am still under the spell of those shady leaves of destiny in which so far..as the Spectator is concerned I have been locked up from mortal eye for fifty years. Self-confident as I was in 1903 I succeed to Sir Harold Nicolson's page of Marginal Comment with much diffidence. That page, the urbanity and graceful wit and philosophic charm of which has delighted readers of the Spectator for so many years, will be missed, indeed sadly missed, and I am very sure that nobody will miss that page more sadly than I shall. Moreover, inasmuch as I am the successor of a younger man than myself, I can hope for no indulgence, and assuredly Sir Herbert Warren would feel that I did not at all deserve it. I think of that great President with piety and I am glad he was spared the contemplation of that curious phase at Magdacn when the white lilies, which Warren used to warn successive gatherings of freshmen always tb keep unsullied, began to look more like tiger lilies, and when I was tempted to write a supplementary novel to Sinister Street under the title of Red Flows the Don.
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