I also want you to go from the college a good combination of a good
worker and a good loafer. To be able to loaf well is not a bad purpose
of an education. The loafing that carries along with itself the
freedom from selfishness, appreciation of others' conditions, and
gentlemanliness, is worth commending. Loafing that follows hard work
and prepares for hard work is one of the best equipments of a man.
Loafing that has no object, loafing as a vocation, is to be despised.
The late Professor Jebb wrote to his father once from Cambridge,
saying:--
"I _will_ read but not very hard; because I know better than you or
any one can tell me, how much reading is good for the development of
my own powers at the present time, and will conduce to my success next
year and afterwards; and I will _not_ identify myself with what are
called in Cambridge 'the reading set,' _i. e._, men who read twelve
hours a day and never do anything else; (1) because I should lose ten
per cent. of reputation (which at the university is no bubble but real
living useful capital); (2) because the reading set, with a few
exceptions, are utterly uncongenial to me. My set is a set that
_reads_, but does not only read; that accomplishes one great end of
university life by mixing in cheerful and intellectual society, and
learning the ways of the world which its members are so soon to enter;
and which, without the pedantry and cant of the 'reading man,' turns
out as good Christians, better scholars, better men of the world, and
better gentlemen, than those mere plodders with whom a man is
inevitably associated if he identifies himself with the reading set."
I rather like the loafing which young Jebb indulged in, but I fear it
is a type of the life which some college men do not follow. They are
inclined to look upon the four college years as a respite between the
labor of the preparatory school and the labor of business, or rather
they may look upon the four college years as a life of professional
leisure. I am glad you cannot, even if you wished to, and I know you
do not wish to, think of college as either respite or leisure. Whether
the college is wise in allowing such loafing, it is not for me now to
say, but I can trust you to be the proper kind of loafer as well as of
worker.
Indeed, I want you to have good habits of working. In such habits the
valuation of time is of special significance. For time is not an
agent. It does nothing. As a power, time is absolutely worthless. As a
condition, time is of infinite worth. Mark Pattison, the rector of
Lincoln College, said: "Time seems infinite to the freshman in his
first term." But let me add that to a senior in his last term time is
a swiftly moving opportunity. The need of time becomes more and more
urgent as the college years go. When Jowett was fifty-nine years old,
he wrote: "I cannot say _vixi_, for I feel as if I were only just
beginning and had not half completed what I had intended. If I live
twenty-five years more I will, _Dei gratia_, accomplish a great work
for Oxford and for philosophy in England. Activity, temperance, no
enmities, self-denial, saving eyes, never overwork." On his seventieth
birthday Jowett made out what he called his Scheme of Life. It was
this:--