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 hall
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. {221} 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
{120} Poems by Ernest Myers. London, 1877.
{221} A very pleasing account of the scenery near Oxford appeared in the
_Cornhill_ for September 1879.