Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [42]
At first, the proceedings in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre seemed appropriately formal. Lord Curzon of Kedleston, the university chancellor, introduced him in Latin as “Honorabilem Theodorum Roosevelt,” who by virtue of public achievements, merited a doctorate in civil law. As beadles escorted him onstage, Curzon’s prose turned to poetry:
Hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis,
Cuius in adventum pavidi cessere cometae
Et septemgemini turbant trepida ostia Nili!
A translation of these lines was helpfully printed in the official program:
Behold, Vice-Chancellor, the promised wight,
Before whose coming comets turned to flight,
And all the startled mouths of sevenfold Nile took fright!
Roosevelt took his place amid general laughter. It became evident that members of the Oxford faculty fancied themselves as classical wits. Perhaps they had heard about his telegram to Punch. Speakers compared him to Hercules in his battle against the trusts, and to Ulysses for his wanderings after a period in Africae solitudinibus. Henry Goudy, regius professor of civil law, archly noted that the Colonel had served two terms in the White House, and might yet extend that record to three—numero auspicatissimo, “most auspicious of numbers.”
Curzon, draping Roosevelt in scholarly silk, hailed him as Strenuissime, insignissime civium toto orbe terrae hodie agentum—“Most strenuous of men, most distinguished of citizens dominating today’s world scene.” In a final access of humor, the chancellor praised his friendliness toward all men—ne nigerrimum quidem—“even the blackest of the black.”
At least there was no giant Teddy bear to detract from Roosevelt’s dignity when he mounted the podium and began his lecture. He said that as an eighth-generation American visiting the heart of English academia, he felt less “alien” than one of his Dutch, French, Irish, or Scottish ancestors might have, in “the spacious days of great Elizabeth.” The phrase was a quotation from Tennyson. He left it unattributed, not wanting to condescend to his hosts, and swung into his main text with an eloquence that made their earlier joshing sound sophomoric:
More than ever before in the world’s history, we of today seek to penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages, from the immemorial past when in “cramp elf and saurian forms” the creative forces “swathed their too-much power,” down to the yesterday—a few score thousand years distant only—when the history of man became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet. And studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the highly complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when we speak of nations and civilizations.
Only the continued use of blind quotations betrayed his uncertainty as an academic speaker. Echoing Balfour, he called for a scientific literature that went beyond jargon, so that tomorrow’s humanists could synthesize and explain what today seemed so confusing. He conceded that patterns in natural and human history did not duplicate one another. “Yet there is a certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be that there are homologies.” He spoke for almost a quarter of an hour about the development of higher life-forms, from Eocene beginnings through the arrival of Homo erectus. Phylogenetically, he said, the word new denoted only a trend deviant enough to seem original. The same was often true of obsolescence: what looked like extinction might just be transformation. Thus, the small three-toed Neohipparion had variously become the horse, the donkey, and the zebra.
Clearly enjoying himself, Roosevelt ranged over