Oxford
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Andrew Lang >> Oxford
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People believed in Liberalism! Their faith worked miracles; and the
great University Commission performed many wonderful works, bidding
close fellowships be open, and giving all power into the hands of
Examiners. Their dispensation still survives; the large examining-
machine works night and day, in term time and vacation, and yet we
are not happy. The age in Oxford, as in the world at large, is the
age of collapsed opinions. Never men believed more fervidly in any
revelation than the men of twenty years ago believed in political
economy, free trade, open competition, and the reign of Common-sense
and of Mr. Cobden. Where is that faith now? Many of the middle-aged
disciples of the Church of Common-sense are still in our midst. They
say the old sayings, they intone the old responses, but somehow it
seems that scepticism is abroad; it seems that the world is wider
than their system. Not even open examinations for fellowships and
scholarships, not half a dozen new schools, and science, and the
Museum, and the Slade Professorship of Art, have made Oxford that
ideal University which was expected to come down from Heaven like the
New Jerusalem.
We have glanced at the history of Oxford to little purpose if we have
not learned that it is an eminently discontented place. There is
room in colleges and common rooms for both sorts of discontent--the
ignoble, which is the child of vanity and weakness; and the noble,
which is the unassuaged thirst for perfection. The present result of
the last forty years in Oxford is a discontent which is constantly
trying to improve the working, and to widen the intellectual
influence, of the University. There are more ways than one in which
this feeling gets vent. The simplest, and perhaps the most honest
and worthy impulse, is that which makes the best of the present
arrangements. Great religious excitement and religious discussion
being in abeyance, for once, the energy of the place goes out in
teaching. The last reforms have made Oxford a huge collection of
schools, in which physical science, history, philosophy, philology,
scholarship, theology, and almost everything in the world but
archaeology, are being taught and learned with very great vigour.
The hardest worked of men is a conscientious college tutor; and
almost all tutors are conscientious. The professors being an
ornamental, but (with few exceptions) MERELY ornamental, order of
beings, the tutors have to do the work of a University, which, for
the moment, is a teaching-machine. They deliver I know not how many
sets of lectures a year, and each lecture demands a fresh and full
acquaintance with the latest ideas of French, German, and Italian
scholars. No one can afford, or is willing, to lag behind; every one
is "gladly learning," like Chaucer's clerk, as well as earnestly
teaching. The knowledge and the industry of these gentlemen is a
perpetual marvel to the "bellelettristic trifler." New studies, like
that of Celtic, and of the obscurer Oriental tongues, have sprung up
during recent years, have grown into strength and completeness. It
is unnecessary to say, perhaps, that these facts dispose of the
popular idea about the luxury of the long vacation. During the more
part of the long vacation the conscientious teacher must be toiling
after the great mundane movement in learning. He must be acquiring
the very freshest ideas about Sanscrit and Greek; about the Ogham
characters and the Cyprian syllabary; about early Greek inscriptions
and the origins of Roman history, in addition to reading the familiar
classics by the light of the latest commentaries.
What is the tangible result, and what the gain of all these labours?
The answer is the secret of University discontent. All this
accumulated knowledge goes out in teaching, is scattered abroad in
lectures, is caught up in note-books, and is poured out, with a
difference, in examinations. There is not an amount of original
literary work produced by the University which bears any due
proportion to the solid materials accumulated. It is just the
reverse of Falstaff's case--but one halfpenny-worth of sack to an
intolerable deal of bread; but a drop of the spirit of learning to
cart-loads of painfully acquired knowledge. The time and energy of
men is occupied in amassing facts, in lecturing, and then in eternal
examinations. Even if the results are satisfactory on the whole,
even if a hundred well-equipped young men are turned out of the
examining-machine every year, these arrangements certainly curb
individual ambition. If a resident in Oxford is to make an income
that seems adequate, he must lecture, examine, and write manuals and
primers, till he is grey, and till the energy that might have added
something new and valuable to the acquisitions of the world has
departed.
This state of things has produced the demand for the "Endowment of
Research." It is not necessary to go into that controversy.
Englishmen, as a rule, believe that endowed cats catch no mice. They
would rather endow a theatre than a Gelehrter, if endow something
they must. They have a British sympathy with these beautiful, if
useless beings, the heads of houses, whom it would be necessary to
abolish if Researchers were to get the few tens of thousands they
require. Finally, it is asked whether the learned might not find
great endowment in economy; for it is a fact that a Frenchman, a
German, or an Italian will "research" for life on no larger income
than a simple fellowship bestows.
The great obstacle to this "plain living" is perhaps to be found in
the traditional hospitality of Oxford. All her doors are open, and
every stranger is kindly entreated by her, and she is like the
"discreet housewife" in Homer -
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
In some languages the same word serves for "stranger" and "enemy,"
but in the Oxford dialect "stranger" and "guest" are synonymous.
Such is the custom of the place, and it does not make plain living
very easy. Some critics will be anxious here to attack the
"aesthetic" movement. One will be expected to say that, after the
ideas of Newman, after the ideas of Arnold, and of Jowett, came those
of the wicked, the extravagant, the effeminate, the immoral "Blue
China School." Perhaps there is something in this, but sermons on
the subject are rather luxuries than necessaries in the present
didactic mood of the Press. "They were friends of ours, moreover,"
as Aristotle says, "who brought these ideas in"; so the subject may
be left with this brief notice. As a piece of practical advice, one
may warn the young and ardent advocate of the Endowment of Research
that he will find it rather easier to curtail his expenses than to
get a subsidy from the Commission.
The last important result of the "modern spirit" at Oxford, the last
stroke of the sanguine Liberal genius, was the removal of the
celibate condition from certain fellowships. One can hardly take a
bird's-eye view of Oxford without criticising the consequences of
this innovation. The topic, however, is, for a dozen reasons, very
difficult to handle. One reason is, that the experiment has not been
completely tried. It is easy enough to marry on a fellowship, a
tutorship, and a few small miscellaneous offices. But how will it be
when you come to forty years, or even fifty? No materials exist
which can be used by the social philosopher who wants an answer to
this question. In the meantime, the common rooms are perhaps more
dreary than of old, in many a college, for lack of the presence of
men now translated to another place. As to the "society" of Oxford,
that is, no doubt, very much more charming and vivacious than it used
to be in the days when Tony Wood was the surly champion of celibacy.
Looking round the University, then, one finds in it an activity that
would once have seemed almost feverish, a highly conscientious
industry, doing that which its hand finds to do, but not absolutely
certain that it is not neglecting nobler tasks. Perhaps Oxford has
never been more busy with its own work, never less distracted by
religious politics. If we are to look for a less happy sign, we
shall find it in the tendency to run up "new buildings." The
colleges are landowners: they must suffer with other owners of real
property in the present depression; they will soon need all their
savings. That is one reason why they should be chary of building;
another is, that the fellows of a college at any given moment are not
necessarily endowed with architectural knowledge and taste. They
should think twice, or even thrice, before leaving on Oxford for many
centuries the uncomely mark of an unfortunate judgment.
CHAPTER X--UNDERGRADUATE LIFE--CONCLUSION
A hundred pictures have been drawn of undergraduate life at Oxford,
and a hundred caricatures. Novels innumerable introduce some Oxford
scenes. An author generally writes his first romance soon after
taking his degree; he writes about his own experience and his own
memories; he mixes his ingredients at will and tints according to
fancy. This is one of the two reasons why pictures of Oxford, from
the undergraduate side, are generally false. They are either drawn
by an aspirant who is his own hero, and who idealises himself and his
friends, or they are designed by ladies who have read Verdant Green,
and who, at some period, have paid a flying visit to Cambridge. An
exhaustive knowledge of Verdant Green, and a hasty view of the
Fitzwilliam Museum and "the backs of the Colleges" (which are to
Cambridge what the Docks are to Liverpool), do not afford sufficient
materials for an accurate sketch of Oxford. The picture daubed by
the emancipated undergraduate who dabbles in fiction is as
unrecognisable. He makes himself and his friends too large, too
noisy, too bibulous, too learned, too extravagant, too pugnacious.
They seem to stride down the High, prodigious, disproportionate
figures, like the kings of Egypt on the monuments, overshadowing the
crowd of dons, tradesmen, bargees, and cricket-field or river-side
cads. Often one dimly recognises the scenes, and the acquaintances
of years ago, in University novels. The mildest of men suddenly pose
as heroes of the Guy Livingstone type, fellows who "screw up" timid
dons, box with colossal watermen, and read all night with wet towels
bound round their fevered brows. These sketches are all nonsense.
Men who do these things do not write about them; and men who write
about them never did them.
There is yet another cause which increases the difficulty of
describing undergraduate life with truth. There are very many
varieties of undergraduates, who have very various ways of occupying
and amusing themselves. A steady man that reads his five or six
hours a day, and takes his pastime chiefly on the river, finds that
his path scarcely ever crosses that of him who belongs to the
Bullingdon Club, hunts thrice a week, and rarely dines in hall. Then
the "pale student," who is hard at work in his rooms or in the
Bodleian all day, and who has only two friends, out-college men, with
whom he takes walks and tea,--he sees existence in a very different
aspect. The Union politician, who is for ever hanging about his
club, dividing the house on questions of blotting-paper and quill
pens, discussing its affairs at breakfast, intriguing for the place
of Librarian, writing rubbish in the suggestion-book, to him Oxford
is only a soil carefully prepared for the growth of that fine flower,
the Union. He never encounters the undergraduate who haunts
billiard-rooms and shy taverns, who buys jewelry for barmaids, and
who is admired for the audacity with which he smuggled a fox-terrier
into college in a brown-paper parcel. There are many other species
of undergraduate, scarcely more closely resembling each other in
manners and modes of thought than the little Japanese student
resembles the metaphysical Scotch exhibitioner, or than the
hereditary war minister of Siam (whose career, though brief, was
vivacious) resembled the Exeter Sioux, a half-reclaimed savage, who
disappeared on the warpath after failing to scalp the Junior Proctor.
When The Wet Blanket returned to his lodge in the land of Sitting
Bull, he doubtless described Oxford life in his own way to the other
Braves, while the squaws hung upon his words and the papooses played
around. His account would vary, in many ways, from that of
"Whiskered Tomkins from the hail
Of seedy Magdalene."
And he, again, would not see Oxford life steadily, and see it whole,
as a more cultivated and polished undergraduate might. Thus there
are countless pictures of the works and ways of undergraduates at the
University. The scene is ever the same--boat-races and foot-ball
matches, scouts, schools, and proctors, are common to all,--but in
other respects the sketches must always vary, must generally be one-
sided, and must often seem inaccurate.
It appears that a certain romance is attached to the three years that
are passed between the estate of the freshman and that of the
Bachelor of Arts. These years are spent in a kind of fairyland,
neither quite within nor quite outside of the world. College life is
somewhat, as has so often been said, like the old Greek city life.
For three years men are in the possession of what the world does not
enjoy--leisure; and they are supposed to be using that leisure for
the purposes of perfection. They are making themselves and their
characters. We are all doing that, all the days of our lives; but at
the Universities there is, or is expected to be, more deliberate and
conscious effort. Men are in a position to "try all things" before
committing themselves to any. Their new-found freedom does not
merely consist in the right to poke their own fires, order their own
breakfasts, and use their own cheque-books. These things, which make
so much impression on the mind at first, are only the outward signs
of freedom. The boy who has just left school, and the thoughtless
life of routine in work and play, finds himself in the midst of
books, of thought, and discussion. He has time to look at all the
common problems of the hour, and yet he need not make up his mind
hurriedly, nor pledge himself to anything. He can flirt with young
opinions, which come to him with candid faces, fresh as Queen
Entelechy in Rabelais, though, like her, they are as old as human
thought. Here first he meets Metaphysics, and perhaps falls in love
with that enchantress, "who sifts time with a fine large blue silk
sieve." There is hardly a clever lad but fancies himself a
metaphysician, and has designs on the Absolute. Most fall away very
early from this, their first love; and they follow Science down one
of her many paths, or concern themselves with politics, and take a
side which, as a rule, is the opposite of that to which they
afterwards adhere. Thus your Christian Socialist becomes a Court
preacher, and puts his trust in princes; the young Tory of the old
type will lapse into membership of a School Board. It is the time of
liberty, and of intellectual attachments too fierce to last long.
Unluckily there are subjects more engrossing, and problems more
attractive, than politics, and science, art, and pure metaphysics.
The years of undergraduate life are those in which, to many men, the
enigmas of religion present themselves. They bring their boyish
faith into a place (if one may quote Pantagruel's voyage once more)
like the Isle of the Macraeones. On that mournful island were
confusedly heaped the ruins of altars, fanes, temples, shrines,
sacred obelisks, barrows of the dead, pyramids, and tombs. Through
the ruins wandered, now and again, the half-articulate words of the
Oracle, telling how Pan was dead. Oxford, like the Isle of the
Macraeones, is a lumber-room of ruinous philosophies, decrepit
religions, forlorn beliefs. The modern system of study takes the
pupil through all the philosophic and many of the religious systems
of belief, which, in the distant and the nearer past, have been
fashioned by men, and have sheltered men for a day. You are taught
to mark each system crumbling, to watch the rise of the new temple of
thought on its ruins, and to see that also perish, breached by
assaults from without or sapped by the slow approaches of Time. This
is not the place in which we can well discuss the merits of modern
University education. But no man can think of his own University
days, or look with sympathetic eyes at those who fill the old halls
and rooms, and not remember, with a twinge of the old pain, how
religious doubt insists on thrusting itself into the colleges. And
it is fair to say that, for this, no set of teachers or tutors is
responsible. It is the modern historical spirit that must be blamed,
that too clear-sighted vision which we are all condemned to share of
the past of the race. We are compelled to look back on old
philosophies, on India, Athens, Alexandria, and on the schools of men
who thought so hard within our own ancient walls. We are compelled
to see that their systems were only plausible, that their truths were
but half-truths. It is the long vista of failure thus revealed which
suggests these doubts that weary, and torture, and embitter the
naturally happy life of discussion, amusement, friendship, sport, and
study. These doubts, after all, dwell on the threshold of modern
existence, and on the threshold--namely, at the Universities--men
subdue them, or evade them.
The amusements of the University have been so often described that
little need be said of them here. Unhealthy as the site of Oxford
is, the place is rather fortunately disposed for athletic purposes.
The river is the chief feature in the scenery, and in the life of
amusement. From the first day of term, in October, it is crowded
with every sort of craft. The freshman admires the golden colouring
of the woods and Magdalen tower rising, silvery, through the blue
autumnal haze. As soon as he appears on the river, his weight,
strength, and "form" are estimated. He soon finds himself pulling in
a college "challenge four," under the severe eye of a senior cox, and
by the middle of December he has rowed his first race, and is
regularly entered for a serious vocation. The thorough-going
boating-man is the creature of habit. Every day, at the same hour,
after a judicious luncheon, he is seen, in flannels, making for the
barge. He goes out, in a skiff, or a pair, or a four-oar, or to a
steeplechase through the hedges when Oxford, as in our illustration,
is under water. The illustration represents Merton, and the writer
recognises his old rooms, with the Venetian blinds which Mr. Ruskin
denounced. Chief of all the boating-man goes out in an eight, and
rows down to Iffley, with the beautiful old mill and Norman church,
or accomplishes "the long course." He rows up again, lounges in the
barge, rows down again (if he has only pulled over the short course),
and goes back to dinner in hall. The table where men sit who are in
training is a noisy table, and the athletes verge on "bear-fighting"
even in hall. A statistician might compute how many steaks, chops,
pots of beer, and of marmalade, an orthodox man will consume in the
course of three years. He will, perhaps, pretend to suffer from the
monotony of boating shop, boating society, and broad-blown boating
jokes. But this appears to be a harmless affectation. The old
breakfasts, wines, and suppers, the honest boating slang, will always
have an attraction for him. The summer term will lose its delight
when the May races are over. Boating-men are the salt of the
University, so steady, so well disciplined, so good-tempered are
they. The sport has nothing selfish or personal in it; men row for
their college, or their University; not like running--men, who run,
as it were, each for his own hand. Whatever may be his work in life,
a boating-man will stick to it. His favourite sport is not
expensive, and nothing can possibly be less luxurious. He is often a
reading man, though it may be doubted whether "he who runs may read"
as a rule. Running is, perhaps, a little overdone, and Strangers'
cups are, or lately were, given with injudicious generosity. To the
artist's eye, however, few sights in modern life are more graceful
than the University quarter-of-a-mile race. Nowhere else, perhaps,
do you see figures so full of a Hellenic grace and swiftness.
The cream of University life is the first summer term. Debts, as
yet, are not; the Schools are too far off to cast their shadow over
the unlimited enjoyment, which begins when lecture is over, at one
o'clock. There are so many things to do, -
"When wickets are bowled and defended,
When Isis is glad with the eights,
When music and sunset are blended,
When Youth and the Summer are mates,
When freshmen are heedless of "Greats,"
When note-books are scribbled with rhyme,
Ah! these are the hours that one rates
Sweet hours, and the fleetest of Time!"
There are drags at every college gate to take college teams down to
Cowley. There is the beautiful scenery of the "stripling Thames" to
explore; the haunts of the immortal "Scholar Gipsy," and of Shelley,
and of Clough's Piper, who -
"Went in his youth and the sunshine rejoicing, to Nuneham and
Godstowe."
Further afield men seldom go in summer, there is so much to delight
and amuse in Oxford. {2} What day can be happier than that of which
the morning is given (after a lively college breakfast, or a
"commonising" with a friend) to study, while cricket occupies the
afternoon, till music and sunset fill the grassy stretches above
Iffley, and the college eights flash past among cheering and
splashing? Then there is supper in the cool halls, darkling, and
half-lit up; and after supper talk, till the birds twitter in the
elms, and the roofs and the chapel spire look unfamiliar in the blue
of dawn. How long the days were then! almost like the days of
childhood; how distinct is the impression all experience used to
make! In later seasons Care is apt to mount the college staircase,
and the "oak" which Shelley blessed cannot keep out this visitor.
She comes in many a shape--as debt, and doubt, and melancholy; and
often she comes as bereavement. Life and her claims wax importunate;
to many men the Schools mean a cruel and wearing anxiety, out of all
proportion to the real importance of academic success. We cannot see
things as they are, and estimate their value, in youth; and if
pleasures are more keen then, grief is more hopeless, doubt more
desolate, uncertainty more gnawing, than in later years, when we have
known and survived a good deal of the worst of mortal experience.
Often on men still in their pupilage the weight of the first
misfortunes falls heavily; the first touch of Dame Fortune's whip is
the most poignant. We cannot recover the first summer term; but it
has passed into ourselves and our memories, into which Oxford, with
her beauty and her romance, must also quickly pass. He is not to be
envied who has known and does not love her. Where her children have
quarrelled with her the fault is theirs, not hers. They have chosen
the accidental evils to brood on, in place of acquiescing in her
grace and charm. These are crowded and hustled out of modern life;
the fever and the noise of our struggles fill all the land, leaving
still, at the Universities, peace, beauty, and leisure.
If any word in these papers has been unkindly said, it has only been
spoken, I hope, of the busybodies who would make Oxford cease to be
herself; who would rob her of her loveliness and her repose.
Footnotes:
{1} Poems by Ernest Myers. London, 1877.
{2} A very pleasing account of the scenery near Oxford appeared in
the Cornhill for September 1879.
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