Some time ago I ventured to defend that race of hunted and persecuted
outlaws, the Bishops; but until this week I had no idea of how much
persecuted they were. For instance, the Bishop of Birmingham made some
extremely sensible remarks in the House of Lords, to the effect that
Oxford and Cambridge were (as everybody knows they are) far too much
merely plutocratic playgrounds. One would have thought that an Anglican
Bishop might be allowed to know something about the English University
system, and even to have, if anything, some bias in its favour. But (as
I pointed out) the rollicking Radicalism of Bishops has to be
restrained. The man who writes the notes in the weekly paper called the
_Outlook_ feels that it is his business to restrain it. The passage has
such simple sublimity that I must quote it—
“Dr. Gore talked unworthily of his reputation when he spoke of the
older Universities as playgrounds for the rich and idle. In the first
place, the rich men there are not idle. Some of the rich men are, and
so are some of the poor men. On the whole, the sons of noble and
wealthy families keep up the best traditions of academic life.”
So far this seems all very nice. It is a part of the universal
principle on which Englishmen have acted in recent years. As you will
not try to make the best people the most powerful people, persuade
yourselves that the most powerful people are the best people. Mad
Frenchmen and Irishmen try to realise the ideal. To you belongs the
nobler (and much easier) task of idealising the real. First give your
Universities entirely into the power of the rich; then let the rich
start traditions; and then congratulate yourselves on the fact that the
sons of the rich keep up these traditions. All that is quite simple and
jolly. But then this critic, who crushes Dr. Gore from the high throne
of the _Outlook_, goes on in a way that is really perplexing. “It is
distinctly advantageous,” he says, “that rich and poor—_i. e._, young
men with a smooth path in life before them, and those who have to hew
out a road for themselves—should be brought into association. Each
class learns a great deal from the other. On the one side, social
conceit and exclusiveness give way to the free spirit of competition
amongst all classes; on the other side, angularities and prejudices are
rubbed away.” Even this I might have swallowed. But the paragraph
concludes with this extraordinary sentence: “We get the net result in
such careers as those of Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and Mr. Asquith.”
Those three names lay my intellect prostrate. The rest of the argument
I understand quite well. The social exclusiveness of aristocrats at
Oxford and Cambridge gives way before the free spirit of competition
amongst all classes. That is to say, there is at Oxford so hot and keen
a struggle, consisting of coal-heavers, London clerks, gypsies,
navvies, drapers’ assistants, grocers’ assistants—in short, all the
classes that make up the bulk of England—there is such a fierce
competition at Oxford among all these people that in its presence
aristocratic exclusiveness gives way. That is all quite clear. I am not
quite sure about the facts, but I quite understand the argument. But
then, having been called upon to contemplate this bracing picture of a
boisterous turmoil of all the classes of England, I am suddenly asked
to accept as example of it, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and the present
Chancellor of the Exchequer. What part do these gentlemen play in the
mental process? Is Lord Curzon one of the rugged and ragged poor men
whose angularities have been rubbed away? Or is he one of those whom
Oxford immediately deprived of all kind of social exclusiveness? His
Oxford reputation does not seem to bear out either account of him. To
regard Lord Milner as a typical product of Oxford would surely be
unfair. It would be to deprive the educational tradition of Germany of
one of its most typical products. English aristocrats have their
faults, but they are not at all like Lord Milner. What Mr. Asquith was
meant to prove, whether he was a rich man who lost his exclusiveness,
or a poor man who lost his angles, I am utterly unable to conceive.
There is, however, one mild but very evident truth that might perhaps
be mentioned. And it is this: that none of those three excellent
persons is, or ever has been, a poor man in the sense that that word is
understood by the overwhelming majority of the English nation. There
are no poor men at Oxford in the sense that the majority of men in the
street are poor. The very fact that the writer in the _Outlook_ can
talk about such people as poor shows that he does not understand what
the modern problem is. His kind of poor man rather reminds me of the
Earl in the ballad by that great English satirist, Sir W.S. Gilbert,
whose angles (very acute angles) had, I fear, never been rubbed down by
an old English University. The reader will remember that when the
Periwinkle-girl was adored by two Dukes, the poet added—
“A third adorer had the girl,
A man of lowly station;
A miserable grovelling Earl
Besought her approbation.”
Perhaps, indeed, some allusion to our University system, and to the
universal clash in it of all the classes of the community, may be found
in the verse a little farther on, which says—
“He’d had, it happily befell,
A decent education;
His views would have befitted well
A far superior station.”
Possibly there was as simple a chasm between Lord Curzon and Lord
Milner. But I am afraid that the chasm will become almost
imperceptible, a microscopic crack, if we compare it with the chasm
that separates either or both of them from the people of this country.
Of course the truth is exactly as the Bishop of Birmingham put it. I am
sure that he did not put it in any unkindly or contemptuous spirit
towards those old English seats of learning, which whether they are or
are not seats of learning, are, at any rate, old and English, and those
are two very good things to be. The Old English University is a
playground for the governing class. That does not prove that it is a
bad thing; it might prove that it was a very good thing. Certainly if
there is a governing class, let there be a playground for the governing
class. I would much rather be ruled by men who know how to play than by
men who do not know how to play. Granted that we are to be governed by
a rich section of the community, it is certainly very important that
that section should be kept tolerably genial and jolly. If the
sensitive man on the _Outlook_ does not like the phrase, “Playground of
the rich,” I can suggest a phrase that describes such a place as Oxford
perhaps with more precision. It is a place for humanising those who
might otherwise be tyrants, or even experts.
To pretend that the aristocrat meets all classes at Oxford is too
ludicrous to be worth discussion. But it may be true that he meets more
different kinds of men than he would meet under a strictly aristocratic
_regime_ of private tutors and small schools. It all comes back to the
fact that the English, if they were resolved to have an aristocracy,
were at least resolved to have a good-natured aristocracy. And it is
due to them to say that almost alone among the peoples of the world,
they have succeeded in getting one. One could almost tolerate the
thing, if it were not for the praise of it. One might endure Oxford,
but not the _Outlook_.
When the poor man at Oxford loses his angles (which means, I suppose,
his independence), he may perhaps, even if his poverty is of that
highly relative type possible at Oxford, gain a certain amount of
worldly advantage from the surrender of those angles. I must confess,
however, that I can imagine nothing nastier than to lose one’s angles.
It seems to me that a desire to retain some angles about one’s person
is a desire common to all those human beings who do not set their
ultimate hopes upon looking like Humpty-Dumpty. Our angles are simply
our shapes. I cannot imagine any phrase more full of the subtle and
exquisite vileness which is poisoning and weakening our country than
such a phrase as this, about the desirability of rubbing down the
angularities of poor men. Reduced to permanent and practical human
speech, it means nothing whatever except the corrupting of that first
human sense of justice which is the critic of all human institutions.
It is not in any such spirit of facile and reckless reassurance that we
should approach the really difficult problem of the delicate virtues
and the deep dangers of our two historic seats of learning. A good son
does not easily admit that his sick mother is dying; but neither does a
good son cheerily assert that she is “all right.” There are many good
arguments for leaving the two historic Universities exactly as they
are. There are many good arguments for smashing them or altering them
entirely. But in either case the plain truth told by the Bishop of
Birmingham remains. If these Universities were destroyed, they would
not be destroyed as Universities. If they are preserved, they will not
be preserved as Universities. They will be preserved strictly and
literally as playgrounds; places valued for their hours of leisure more
than for their hours of work. I do not say that this is unreasonable;
as a matter of private temperament I find it attractive. It is not only
possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible
to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be
maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a
task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure
innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so
good that one can treat everything as a joke—that may be, perhaps, the
real end and final holiday of human souls. When we are really holy we
may regard the Universe as a lark; so perhaps it is not essentially
wrong to regard the University as a lark. But the plain and present
fact is that our upper classes do regard the University as a lark, and
do not regard it as a University. It also happens very often that
through some oversight they neglect to provide themselves with that
extreme degree of holiness which I have postulated as a necessary
preliminary to such indulgence in the higher frivolity.
Humanity, always dreaming of a happy race, free, fantastic, and at
ease, has sometimes pictured them in some mystical island, sometimes in
some celestial city, sometimes as fairies, gods, or citizens of
Atlantis. But one method in which it has often indulged is to picture
them as aristocrats, as a special human class that could actually be
seen hunting in the woods or driving about the streets. And this never
was (as some silly Germans say) a worship of pride and scorn; mankind
never really admired pride; mankind never had any thing but a scorn for
scorn. It was a worship of the spectacle of happiness; especially of
the spectacle of youth. This is what the old Universities in their
noblest aspect really are; and this is why there is always something to
be said for keeping them as they are. Aristocracy is not a tyranny; it
is not even merely a spell. It is a vision. It is a deliberate
indulgence in a certain picture of pleasure painted for the purpose;
every Duchess is (in an innocent sense) painted, like Gainsborough’s
“Duchess of Devonshire.” She is only beautiful because, at the back of
all, the English people wanted her to be beautiful. In the same way,
the lads at Oxford and Cambridge are only larking because England, in
the depths of its solemn soul, really wishes them to lark. All this is
very human and pardonable, and would be even harmless if there were no
such things in the world as danger and honour and intellectual
responsibility. But if aristocracy is a vision, it is perhaps the most
unpractical of all visions. It is not a working way of doing things to
put all your happiest people on a lighted platform and stare only at
them. It is not a working way of managing education to be entirely
content with the mere fact that you have (to a degree unexampled in the
world) given the luckiest boys the jolliest time. It would be easy
enough, like the writer in the _Outlook_, to enjoy the pleasures and
deny the perils. Oh what a happy place England would be to live in if
only one did not love it!