whole for the first time in the dressing-rooms of the Queen's Club.
The fellows dropped in one by one, in frock coats, top hats, and with
a general holiday air. The Oxford broad-jumper, who was the best man
at the event in England, had been so busy playing cricket all season,
and smoking his pipe with the other cricketers on the pier at
Brighton, that he had not had time even to send to Oxford for his
jumping-shoes. In borrowing a pair he explained that unless a fellow
undertook the fag of thorough training, he could jump better without
any practice. Our weight-thrower, a freshman, had surprised himself
two days previously by making better puts than either of the Cambridge
men had ever done; but as nobody had ever thought it worth while to
coach him, he did not know how he had done it, and was naturally
afraid he couldn't do it again. He showed that he was a freshman by
appearing to care whether or not he did his best; but even his
imagination failed to grasp the fact that the team which won was to
have the privilege of meeting Yale in America. As it turned out, if
either of these men had taken his event, Oxford, instead of Cambridge,
would have met Yale.
As I went out to start in my race, the question of half-sleeves which
Englishmen require in all athletic contests was settled in my mind.
The numberless seasonable gowns in the stands and the innumerable top
hats ranged on all sides about the course made me feel as if I were at
a lawn party rather than at an athletic meeting. I suffered as a girl
suffers at her first evening party, or rather as one suffers in those
terrible dreams where one faces the problem of maintaining his dignity
in company while clad in a smile or so. Waiving the question of
half-sleeves, I should have consented to run in pyjamas.
In the race I had an experience which raised a question or two that
still offer food for reflection. As my best distance--a half mile--was
not included in the inter-varsity program, I ran in the mile as second
string. There was a strong wind and the pace was pretty hot, even for
the best of us, namely, the Cambridge first string, who had won the
race the year before in 4 min. 19-4/5 sec.,--the fastest mile ever run
in university games. As the English score in athletic games, only
first places count, and on the second of the three laps I found myself
debating whether it is not unnecessarily strenuous to force a
desperate finish where the only question is how far a man can keep in
front of the tail end. Several of the fellows had already dropped out
in the quietest and most matter of fact manner; and as we were
finishing the lap against the wind, I became a convert to the English
code of sportsmanship.
As the bunch drew away from me and turned into the easy going of the
sheltered stretch, I was filled with envy of them, and with
uncontrollable disgust at myself, the like of which I had never felt
when beaten, however badly, after making a fair struggle. And when I
saw them finishing against the hurricane, striding as if they were
running upstairs, I felt the heroism of a desperate finish as I had
never done before. It did not help matters when I realized that it was
the last race I was ever to run.
At the Sports' dinner that night at the Holborn Restaurant, I pocketed
some of my disgust. The occasion was so happy that I remember wishing
we might have something like it after our meetings at home, for
good-fellowship chastens the pride of winning and gives dignity to
honest defeat. There was homage for the victors and humorous sympathy
for the vanquished. Light blue and dark blue applauded and poked fun
at each other impartially. Sir Richard Webster, Q. C., now Lord Chief
Justice, himself an old blue, presided at the dinner, and explained
how it was that the performances of his day were really not to be
sneezed at; and the young blues, receiving their prizes, looked happy
and said nothing. After dinner, we divided into squads and went to the
Empire Theatre of Varieties, Cantab locking arms with Oxonian. By
supper time, at St. James', I was almost cheerful again.
Yet the disgust of having quitted that race has never left me. The
spirit of English sportsmanship will always seem to me very gracious
and charming. As a nation, I think we can never be too thankful for
the lesson our kinspeople have to teach us in sportsmanly moderation
and in chivalry toward an opponent. But every man must draw his own
line between the amenities of life and the austerities; and I know one
American who hopes never again to quit a contest, even a contest in
sport, until he has had the humble satisfaction of doing his best.
V
ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SPORTSMANSHIP
The prevalence of out-of-door sports in England, and the amenity of
the English sporting spirit, may be laid, I think, primarily, to the
influence of climate. Through the long, temperate summer, all nature
conspires to entice a man out of doors, while in America sunstroke is
imminent. All day long the village greens in England are thronged with
boys playing cricket in many-colored blazers, while every stream is
dotted with boats of all sorts and descriptions; and in the evenings,
long after the quick American twilight has shut down on the heated
earth, the English horizon gives light for the recreations of those
who have labored all day. In the winter the result is the same, though
the cause is very different. Stupefying exhalations rise from the damp
earth, and the livelong twilight that does for day forces a man back
for good cheer upon mere animal spirits. In the English summer no
normal man could resist the beckoning of the fields and the river. In
the winter it is sweat, man, or die.
It is perhaps because of the incessant call to be out of doors that
Englishmen care so little to have their houses properly tempered. At
my first dinner with the dons of my college, the company assembled
about a huge sea-coal fire. On a rough calculation the coal it
consumed, if used in one of our steam-heaters, would have heated the
entire college to incandescence. As it was, its only effect seemed to
be to draw an icy blast across our ankles from mediaeval doors and
windows that swept the fire bodily up the chimney, and left us
shivering. One of the dons explained that an open fire has two supreme
advantages: it is the most cheerful thing in life, and it insures
thorough ventilation. I agreed with him heartily, warming one ankle in
my palms, but demurred that in an American winter heat was as
necessary as cheerfulness and ventilation. "But if one wears thick
woolens," he replied, "the cold and draught are quite endurable. When
you get too cold reading, put on your great-coat." I asked him what he
did when he went out of doors. "I take off my great-coat. It is much
warmer there, especially if one walks briskly." Some days later, when
I went to dine with my tutor, my hostess apologized for the chill of
the drawing-room. "It will presently be much warmer," she added; "I
have always noticed that when you have sat in a room awhile, it gets
warm from the heat of your bodies." She proved to be right. But when
we went into the dining-room, we found it like a barn. She smiled with
repeated reassurances. Again she proved right; but we had hardly
tempered the frost when we had to shift again to the drawing-room,
which by this time again required, so to speak, to be acclimated.
Meanwhile my tutor, who was of a jocular turn of mind, diverted our
thoughts from our suffering by ragging me about American steam heat,
and forced me, to his infinite delight, to admit that we aim to keep
our rooms warmed to sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Needless to say,
this don was an athlete. As the winter wore away, I repeatedly saw him
in Balliol hockey squashes, chasing the ball about with the agility of
a terrier pup. At nightfall, no doubt, he returned to his wife and
family prepared to heat any room in the house to the required
temperature. Heaven forbid that I should resent the opprobrium
Englishmen heap upon our steam heat! I merely wish to point out that
the English have failed as signally as we, though for the opposite
reason, in making their houses habitable in the winter, and that an
Englishman is forced into athletics to resist the deadly stupefaction
of a Boeotian climate, and to keep his house warm.
In a sportsman it would be most ungracious to inveigh against English
weather. The very qualities one instinctively curses make possible the
full and varied development of outdoor games, which Americans admire
without stint. Our football teams do day labor to get fit, and then,
after a game or so, the sport is nipped in the bud. To teach our
oarsmen the rudiments of the stroke we resort to months of the
galley-slavery of tank-rowing. Our track athletes begin their season
in the dead of winter with the dreary monotony of wooden dumb-bells
and pulley-weights, while the baseball men are learning to slide for
bases in the cage. In England the gymnasium is happily unknown. Winter
and summer alike the sportsman lives beneath the skies, and the sports
are so diverse and so widely cultivated that any man, whatever his
mental or physical capacity, finds suitable exercise that is also
recreation.
It is because of this universality of athletic sports that English
training is briefer and less severe. The American makes, and is forced
to make, a long and tedious business of getting fit, whereas an
Englishman has merely to exercise and sleep a trifle more than usual,
and this only for a brief period. Our oarsmen work daily from January
to July, about six months, or did so before Mr. Lehmann brought
English ideas among us; the English 'varsity crews row together nine
or ten weeks. Our football players slog daily for six or seven weeks;
English teams seldom or never "practice," and play at most two matches
a week. Our track athletes are in training at frequent intervals
throughout the college year, and are often at the training-table six
weeks; in England six weeks is the maximum period of training, and the
men as a rule are given only three days a week of exercise on the
cinder-track. To an American training is an abnormal condition; to an
Englishman it is the consummation of the normal.
The moderation of English training is powerfully abetted by a
peculiarity of the climate. The very dullness and depression that make
exercise imperative also make it impossible to sustain much of it. The
clear, bright American sky--the sky that renders it difficult for us
to take the same delight in Italy as an Englishman takes, and leads us
to prefer Ruskin's descriptions to the reality--cheers the American
athlete; and the crispness of the atmosphere and its extreme
variability keeps his nerves alert. An English athlete would go
hopelessly stale on work that would scarcely key an American up to his
highest pitch.
The effect of these differences on the temperament of the athlete is
marked. The crispness and variety of our climate foster nervous
vitality at the expense of physical vitality, while the equability of
the English climate has the opposite effect. In all contests that
require sustained effort--distance running and cross-country running,
for example--we are in general far behind; while during the
comparatively few years in which we have practiced athletic sports we
have shown, on the whole, vastly superior form in all contests
depending upon nervous energy--sprinting, hurdling, jumping, and
weight-throwing.
Because of these differences of climate and of temperament, no rigid
comparisons can be made between English and American training; but it
is probably true that English athletes tend to train too little. Mr.
Horan, the president of the Cambridge team that ran against Yale at
New Haven, said as much after a very careful study of American
methods; but he was not convinced that our thoroughness is quite worth
while. The law of diminishing returns, he said, applies to training as
to other things, so that, after a certain point, very little is gained
even for a great sacrifice of convenience and pleasantness. Our
American athletes are twice as rigid in denying the spirit for an
advantage, Mr. Horan admitted, of enough to win by.
The remark is worth recording: it strikes the note of difference
between English and American sportsmanship. After making all
allowances for the conditions here and abroad that are merely
accidental, one vital difference remains. For better or for worse, a
sport is a sport to an Englishman, and whatever tends to make it
anything else is not encouraged; as far as possible it is made
pleasant, socially and physically. Contests are arranged without what
American undergraduates call diplomacy; and they come off without
jockeying. It is very seldom that an Englishman forgets that he is a
man first and an athlete afterwards. Yet admirable as this quality is,
it has its defects, at least to the transatlantic mind. Even more,
perhaps, than others, Englishmen relish the joy of eating their hearts
at the end of a contest, but they have no taste for the careful
preparation that alone enables a man to fight out a finish to the best
advantage. It is no doubt true, as the Duke of Wellington said, that
the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of England; but
for any inconsiderable sum I would agree to furnish a similar saying
as to why the generals in South Africa ran into ambush after ambush.
In America, sportsmanship is almost a religion. Fellows mortify the
flesh for months and leave no means untried that may help to bring
honor to their college; or if they don't, public opinion brings swift
and sure retribution. It is true that this leads to excesses.
Rivalries are so strong that undergraduates have been known to be more
than politic in arranging matches with each other. So the graduate
steps in to moderate the ardor of emulation, and often ends by keeping
alive ancient animosities long after they would have been forgotten in
the vanishing generations of undergraduates. The Harvard eleven wants
to play the usual football game; but it is not allowed to, because a
committee of graduates sees fit to snub Yale; the athletic team wants
to accept a challenge from Oxford and Cambridge, but it is not allowed
to because Pennsylvania, which is not challenged, has a better team,
and it is the policy of the university (which has an eye to its
graduate schools) to ingratiate sister institutions. In a word, the
undergraduates are left to manage their studies while the faculty
manages their pastimes.
When a contest is finally on, excesses are rampant. Of occasional
brutalities too much has perhaps been said; but more serious errors
are unreproved. There is a tradition that it is the duty of all
non-athletes to inspire the 'varsity teams by cheering the play from
the side lines; and from time to time one reads leading articles in
the college papers exhorting men to back the teams. The spectator is
thus given an important part in every contest, and after a 'varsity
match he is praised or blamed, together with the members of the team,
according to his deserts. Yale may outplay Harvard, but if Harvard
sufficiently out-cheers Yale she wins, and to the rooters belong the
praise. In baseball games especially, a season's championship is not
infrequently decided by the fact that the partisans of one side are
more numerous, or for other reasons make more noise. These are serious
excesses, and are worthy of the pen of the robustest reformer; but
after all has been said they are incidents, and in the slow course of
time are probably disappearing.
The signal fact is that our young men do what they do with the
diligence of enthusiasm, and with the devotion that inspires the
highest courage. It is not unknown that, in the bitterness of failure,
American athletes have burst into tears. When our English cousins hear
of this they are apt to smile, and doubtless the practice is not
altogether to be commended; but in the length and breadth of a man's
experience there are only two or three things one would wish so
humbly as the devotion that makes it possible. Such earnestness is the
quintessence of Americanism, and is probably to be traced to the
signal fact that in the struggle of life we all start with a fighting
chance of coming out on top. Whatever the game, so long as it is
treated as a game, nothing could be as wholesome as the spirit that
tends to make our young men play it for all it is worth, to do
everything that can be done to secure victory with personal honor. In
later years, when these men stand for the honor of the larger alma
mater, on the field of battle or in the routine of administration, it
is not likely that they will altogether forget the virtues of their
youth.
The superiority of English sportsmanship arises, not from the spirit
of the men, but from the breadth of the development of the sports, and
this, climate aside, is the result of the division of the university
into colleges. The average college of only a hundred and fifty men
maintains two football teams--a Rugby fifteen and an Association
eleven--an eight and two torpids, a cricket eleven, and a hockey
eleven. Each college has also a set of athletic games yearly. If we
add the men who play golf, lawn and court tennis, rackets and fives,
who swim, box, wrestle, and who shoot on the ranges of the gun club,
the total of men schooled in competition reaches eighty to one
hundred. A simple calculation will show that when so many are
exercising daily, few are left for spectators. Not a bench is
prepared, nor even a plank laid on the spongy English turf, to stand
between the hanger-on and pneumonia. A man's place is in the field of
strife; to take part in athletic contests is almost as much a matter
of course as to bathe. Of late years there has been a tendency in
England to believe that the vigor of undergraduates--and of all
Englishmen, for the matter of that--is in decadence. As regards their
cultivation of sports at least, the reverse is true. Contests are more
numerous now than ever, and are probably more earnestly waged. What is
called English decadence is in reality the increasing superiority of
England's rivals.
Quite aside from the physical and moral benefit to the men engaged,
this multiplication of contests has a striking effect in lessening the
importance of winning or losing any particular one of them. It is more
powerful than any other factor in keeping English sports free from the
excesses that have so often characterized our sports. From time to
time a voice is raised in America as of a prophet of despair demanding
the abolition of inter-university contests. As yet the contests have
not been abolished, and do not seem likely to be. Might it not be
argued without impertinence that the best means of doing away with the
excesses in question is not to have fewer contests, but more of them?
If our universities were divided into residential units, corresponding
roughly to the English colleges, the excesses in particular contests
could scarcely fail to be mitigated; and what is perhaps of still
higher importance, the great body of non-athletes would be brought
directly under the influence of all those strong and fine traditions
of undergraduate life which centre in the spirit of sportsmanship.
NOTE. For a discussion of the influences of climate in
international athletics, see Appendix II.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] For a note on the value of walking as a part of athletic training,
see Appendix I.
III
THE COLLEGE AS AN EDUCATIONAL FORCE
I
THE PASSMAN
In the educational life of Oxford, as in the social and athletic life,
the distinctive feature, at least to the American mind, is the duality
of organization in consequence of which an undergraduate is amenable
first to his college and then to the university: the college teaches
and the university examines. In America, so far as the undergraduate
is concerned, the college and the university are identical: the
instructor in each course of lectures is also the examiner. It follows
from this that whereas in America the degree is awarded on the basis
of many separate examinations--one in each of the sixteen or more
"courses" which are necessary for the degree--in England it is awarded
on the basis of a single examination. For three or four years the
college tutor labors with his pupil, and the result of his labors is
gauged by an examination, set and judged by the university. This
system is characteristic of both Cambridge and Oxford, and for that
matter, of all English education; and the details of its organization
present many striking contrasts to American educational methods.
Sir Isaac Newton's happy thought of having a big hole in his door for
the cat and a little hole for the kitten must have first been held up
to ridicule by an American. In England, the land of classes, it could
hardly fail of full sympathy. In America there is but one hole of
exit, though men differ in their proportions as they go out through
it. In England there are passmen and classmen.
To say that the passman is the kitten would not be altogether precise.
He is rather a distinct species of undergraduate. More than that, he
is the historic species, tracing his origin quite without break to the
primal undergraduate of the Middle Ages. He is a tradition from the
time when the fund of liberal knowledge was so small that the
university undertook to serve it all up in a pint-pot to whoever might
apply. The pint-pot still exists at Oxford; and though the increasing
knowledge of nine centuries long ago overflowed its brim, the passman
still holds it forth trustfully to his tutor. The tutor patiently
mingles in it an elixir compounded of as many educational simples as
possible, and then the passman presents it to the examiners, who smile
and dub him Bachelor of Arts. After three years, if he is alive and
pays the sum of twelve pounds, they dub him Master.
The system for granting the pass degree is, in its broader outlines,
the same as for all degrees. In the first examination--that for
matriculation--it is identical for passmen and classmen. This
examination is called "responsions," and is, like its name, of
mediaeval origin. It is the equivalent of the American entrance
examination; but by one of the many paradoxes of Oxford life it was
for centuries required to be taken after the pupil had been admitted
into residence in one of the colleges. In the early Middle Ages the
lack of preparatory schools made it necessary first to catch your
undergraduate. It was not until the nineteenth century that a man
could take an equivalent test before coming up, for example at a
public school; but it is now fast becoming the rule to do so; and it
is probable that all colleges will soon require an entrance
examination. In this way two or three terms more of a student's
residence are devoted to preparation for the two later and severer
university tests.
The subjects required for matriculation are easy enough, according to
our standards. Candidates offer: (1) The whole of arithmetic, and
either (_a_) elementary algebra as far as simple equations involving
two unknown quantities, or (_b_) the first two books of Euclid; (2)
Greek and Latin grammar, Latin prose composition, and prepared
translation from one Greek and one Latin book. The passages for
prepared translation are selected from six possible Greek authors and
five possible Latin authors. The influence of English colonial
expansion is evident in the fact that candidates who are not "European
British subjects" may by special permission offer classical Sanskrit,
Arabic, or Pali as a substitute for either Greek or Latin: the
dark-skinned Orientals, who are so familiar a part of Oxford life, are
not denied the right to study the classics of their native tongues.
Thus the election of subjects is a well-recognized part of
responsions, though the scope of the election does not extend to
science and the modern languages.