MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IT is sad and strange that Oxford, whose very motto is one of illumination, should be the darkest city in all the land today. In other towns some glow-worm lamp does at least reflect a pin-point
on the pavement, indicating where the way to Grimsby cuts the Great North Road. But, when sunset passes, the black-out gathers Oxford firmly in its arms, muffling every eye and orifice, shrouding the spires in impenetrable dark. The visitor on arriving at the station finds the platform a medley of struggling forms composed almost entirely of bicycles and the Army. A distant light, with brown paper tied around it, indicates the wicket at which the col- lector receives the little squares of cardboard which we thrust into her hand. And beyond that dim portal is darkness impenetrable pierced by the shouts of forlorn men calling cabs. Grasping my suit-case I tottered out into the night. I suppose that in the world there are other towns as dark and damp as Oxford in war-time. Zhitomir, for instance, can scarcely be garish at this time of year; and I assume that even the oil lamp outside its bath-house has for security purposes been dimmed. It may be also that the Pripet marshes, on a November evening in the rain, can emulate and perhaps even surpass the damp of Oxford. Yet as I walked along the road which leads from the station—bumping into Americans, bumping into Canadians, bumping into other human beings of whose nationality I was unaware—I reflected that in no other area of the earth's .surface could it rain in just the same way as it rains at Oxford. For when the waters of the upper air mingle with the waters of the Isis and the Cherwell a general liquification results ; the rain ceases to fall downwards but creeps sideways and upwards from the streets. And all this wetting process happens silently, without a single sound. Not a splash is heard in the surrounding darkness ; one is aware only that one's very thigh-bones are being slowly soaked. * * * * Groping cautiously along I observed how deceptive are the effects of total darkness, in that the front of Worcester College looked like an enormous oak and the great trees in the garden quadrangle at Balliol looked like the front of Worcester College. Sadly I murmured the lines in which Tennyson celebrated his return to Trinity: " I past beside the reverend walls In which of old I wore the gown ; I roved at random through the town, And saw the tumult of the halls ; " But there was no tumult in the halls. A few medical students in mackintoshes sloped up the wet steps with a dim torch to guide them ; and in the hall itself a lonely little group of Dominion officers were consuming spam and water. I found the " guest-room " which had been allotted to me. It was on the ground floor and adjoined the room from which sixty-five years ago George Nathaniel Curzon had impressed his personality upon his Balliol contemporaries. I considered how stimulating (in principle) was the high Spartan dis- cipline which Balliol imposes upon her alumni. How different was this noble simplicity from the chintz and steam-heating of Yale or Harvard, of Princeton or even Amherst. A naked bulb glared down upon the jug and basin of cold water, upon the hard cold celibate bed. I took the towel and wiped the mist that had gathered on the looking-glass. With blue and shaking fingers I put the studs
into my shirt. I took my torch and passed out again into the dark- ness ; the tune of In Memoriam was still humming in my head :
" And looking back to whence I came Or on to where the pathway leads ; And crying ` How changed from where it ran Thro' lands where not a leaf was dumb' ; But all the lavish hills would hum The murmur of a happy Pan." * * * * I attended that evening the annual dinner of the Chatham Club. Suddenly I found again the Oxford which I have always known. Here was light and laughter and mulled claret in a loving cup, upon the silver of which were engraved the names of those who had been killed in the First German War. The undergraduates present appeared to be the same as those whom I had known, through generation after generation, all these years. We toasted " Church and King " and we toasted the memory of the immortal Pitt. Many of those present had, it is true, been discharged from the Services, for wounds or illness in the war—a circumstance which gave to their young lips a firm and settled look. Yet there was no trace in them either of self-pity or of undue self-esteem. They were preparing themselves soberly and earnestly for a life which they knew would be difficult, but which they did not think would deny them opportunity. My thoughts went out to all those other men in the Forces who are being denied their education and their pleasures, and who, from time to• time, write me letters which disturb me. Are they, indeed, as they suppose, the " lost " or " forsaken " generation, the men ' who have fallen between two worlds, "one dead, the other powerless to be born "? They have been denied learning, and they have been given far too much experience. Life has snatched from them the youth which they were given to enjoy, and their April and their May are spent not among the blossom and the primroses, but in mud and blood. They dread lest when they return (if they return) they will find a world in which their advantages are disadvantageous, and their assets liabilities.
* * * *
I have sought in all sympathy to understand the sorrow of the young intellectual who has been caught, and displaced, by the war. It is no doubt a tragic and bewildering experience to discover that the elite into which one was born, and to which one was educated in boyhood, would seem, during one's own absence upon a most unprofitable adventure, to be losing its authority. Scholarship, intelligence, even experience, appear to have become less important ; and the old tests and standards of eminence seem to be threatened by the rise of an internal and external proletariate. I fully recognise that the men and women who in 1939 reached the age of twenty are in an indefinite position. The men of my father's generation believed quite simply that creation was moving towards an event which was not only Divine, but also far-off ; their actions and ambitions were guided and controlled by the belief that Providence had decreed that a certain class of Englishman should rule a quarter of the globe. and furnish an excellent example to all other men. In my own generation we were content to expose the moral fallacies of our elders and to put in their place a belief in intellectual integrity. After .the last war the young men who returned to the Universities sought to recompense themselves by all forms of self-indulgence for the hardships and dangers to which they had been exposed. They were followed by a generation of austere men and women who believed quite sincerely in the existence of the economic man and who derived much spiritual and intellectual solace from the per- fected logic of the Marxist theory. But the young people of today neither believe nor disbelieve in any theory ; they have come to learn that the world is a highly intricate organism, and that most of what has been said about it is either partially or totally untrue. And since they dismiss the wisdom of the ancients as being fallacious and the advice of their immediate elders as savouring of " pro- paganda," they are left naked with their own horrible but slight experience and a deep consciousness of the enormous intricacies of life.
* * * *
With the tiny torches of their own knowledgp they grope amid the majestic ruins of the past. I am not surprised that they should feel " forsaken." Yet- if they can believe in no absolute theories, they can. at least know that courage, truthfulness, energy, scholar- ship and kindness are virtues and that their opposites are vices• With their little torches they can see and illumine these great absolutes. Guided by such stable landmarks, they can find their, way through -the dark, wet fog which surrounds them. And in the' end, I suppose, they will find warmth again, and laughter and
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