friends will not treat them in this way. He will endeavour, so far as
possible, to confine them within the limits of his own college, where he
is on his native heath, and, if he is not an antiquarian, can at least
animate the venerable buildings with details of contemporary history. He
will point out his Dons (like the great French nation, 'objects of
hatred or admiration, but never of indifference') with such derision or
reverence as they may deserve, and affix to them ancient anecdotes
whereby their personality may be remembered. He will show to an
admiring circle the statue which was painted green, the pinnacle climbed
by a friend in the confidence of inebriation, and the marks of the
bonfire which the Dean did not succeed in putting out. Even the most
ignorant and frivolous-minded person can make his own college
interesting. When he has succeeded in impressing upon his friends the
true character of a college as a place of religion and sound learning,
he may be permitted to show them such external objects as form a part of
every one's education, and which no one (for the very shame of
confessing it) can pretermit unseen, such as the gardens of New College
or St. John's, the 'Nose' of B.N.C, the Burne-Jones tapestry at Exeter,
or the picture of Mr. Gladstone in the hall of Christ Church. Those who
absolutely insist on a more comprehensive view of the University and
City may be allowed to make the ascent of some convenient point of
view--Magdalen Tower, for instance; it is a stiff climb, but the view
from the top will repay your exertions. This is where, as since the
appearance of Mr. Holman Hunt's picture everybody is probably aware, the
choir of the college annually salute the rising sun from the top of the
tower by singing a Latin hymn on May morning--while the youth of the
city, for reasons certainly not known to themselves, make morning
hideous with blowing of unmelodious horns in the street below. At all
times--even at sunrise on a rainy May morning--it is a noble prospect.
The unlovely red-brick suburbs of the north are hidden from sight by the
intervening towers and pinnacles of the real Oxford; immediately below
the High Street winds westwards, flanked by colleges and churches, of
which the prevailing grey is relieved by the green trees of those many
gardens and unexplored nooks of verdure with which Oxford abounds; to
the south there are glimpses of the river flowing towards the dim grey
line of the distant Berkshire downs. To the historically-minded the
outlook may suggest many a picture of bygone times--scenes of brawling
in the noisy High Street, when the old battle of Town and Gown was
fought with cold steel, and blood flowed freely on both sides--in the
days when the maltreated townsman appealing to the Proctor could get no
satisfaction but a 'thrust at him with his poleaxe!' Down the street
which lies below passed Queen Elizabeth--'Virgo Pia Docta Felix'--after
being royally entertained with sumptuous pageants and the play of
'Palamon and Arcyte' in the Christ Church hall. Over the Cherwell, in
the troublous times of the Civil Wars, rode the Royalist horse to beat
up the Parliamentary quarters below the Chiltern hills and among the
woods of the Buckinghamshire border--enterprising undergraduates perhaps
taking an _exeat_ to accompany them. Here it was that certain scholars
of Magdalen, having a quarrel with Lord Norreys by reason of
deer-stealing, 'went up privately to the top of their tower, and waiting
till he should pass by towards Ricot' (Rycote) 'sent down a shower of
stones upon him and his retinew, wounding some and endangering others of
their lives'--and worse might have happened had not the 'retinew' taken
the precaution, foreseeing the assault, to put boards or tables on their
heads. At a later day Pope entered Oxford by this road, and there is a
pretty description of the scene in one of his letters--it will no doubt
appeal to the nineteenth-century visitor who departs through slums to
the architecturally unimpressive station of the Great Western. 'The
shades of the evening overtook me. The moon rose in the clearest sky I
ever saw, by whose solemn light I paced on slowly, without company, or
any interruption to the range of my own thoughts. About a mile before I
reached Oxford all the bells tolled in different notes, the clocks of
every college answered one another, and sounded forth (some in a deeper,
some in a softer tone) that it was eleven at night. All this was no ill
preparation to the life I have led since among those old walls,
venerable galleries, stone porticos, studious walks, and solitary scenes
of the University.' Jerry-built rows of lodging-houses rather militate
against the romance of the Iffley Road as we know it now.
[Illustration: _THE DEER PARK, MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD. By J. H.
Lorimer._]
But, after all, the majority of sightseers are not given to historical
reflections. What most people want is something that 'palpitates with
actuality;' they want to see the machine working. They are temporarily
happy if they can see a Proctor in his robes of office, and rise to the
enthusiasm of 'never having had such a delightful day' if the Proctor
happens to 'proctorise' an undergraduate within the ken of their vision.
'It was all so _delightful_ and mediaeval, and all that kind of thing,
don't you know? Poor young man--simply for not wearing one of those
horrid caps and gowns! _I_ call it a shame.' This is the reason why a
Degree Day is so wonderfully popular a ceremony. There is a sense of
attractive mystery about it all--the Vice-Chancellor throned in the
Theatre or Convocation House, discoursing in unintelligible scraps of
Latin like the refrain of a song, and the Proctors doing their
quarter-deck walk--although the dignity of the function be rather marred
by the undergraduates who jostle and giggle in the background forgetting
that they are assisting at a ceremony which is, after all, one of the
University's reasons of existence. It is the same kind of curiosity
which causes the lecturer to become suddenly conscious that he is being
watched with intense interest--an interest to which he is altogether
unaccustomed--by 'only a face at the window' of his lecture-room, to his
own confusion and the undisguised amusement of his audience.
[Illustration: _IN CONVOCATION: CONFERRING A DEGREE. Drawn by Ernest
Stamp._]
Such are sightseers: yet every man to his taste. When Samuel Pepys came
over from Abingdon to see the sights of the University town, it is
gratifying and rather surprising to learn that what most impressed him
was the small price paid for creature comforts: 'Oxford mighty fine
place,' such is the diarist's reflection, 'and _cheap entertainment_.'
IV--OF EXAMINATIONS
'Thinketh one made them in a fit of the blues.'
_Q_
If there is one subject on which the professedly non-reading
undergraduate is nearly always eloquent it is the aggravation of his
naturally hard lot by the examination system; that is, not only 'The
Schools' themselves, but the ancillary organization of lectures,
'collections,' and college tuition in general; all which machinery,
being intended to save him from himself and enable him to accomplish the
ostensible purpose of his residence at the University, he very properly
regards as an entirely unnecessary instrument of torture, designed and
perfected by the gratuitous and malignant ingenuity of Dons, whose sole
object is the oppression of undergraduates in general and himself in
particular. He is obliged to attend lectures, at least occasionally.
His tutors compel him to attempt to pass his University examination at a
definite date; and then--adding insult to injury--actually reproach him
or even send him down for his ill success, just as if he had not always
demonstrated to them by repeated statements and constant proofs of
incapacity that he had not the smallest intention of getting through!
Small wonder, perhaps, that on returning from a highly unsatisfactory
interview with the University examiners to a yet more exasperating
colloquy with the authorities of his college, he should wish that fate
had not matched him with the 'cosmic process' of the nineteenth century;
and that it had been his happier lot to come up to Oxford in the days
when examinations were not, and his remote ancestors got their degrees
without any vain display of mere intellectual proficiency, or went down
without them if they chose.
[Illustration: _A LECTURE-ROOM IN MAGDALEN COLLEGE. Drawn by E.
Stamp._]
And yet, should the modern undergraduate take the trouble (which of
course he never does) to acquaint himself with the statutes and
ordinances which governed his University in the pre-examination period,
he would find that even then the rose was not wholly devoid of thorns.
Even then the powers that be had decreed that life should not be
completely beer, nor altogether skittles. It is true that the student
was probably less molested by his college; but the regulations of the
University dealt far more hardly with him than they do at present.
Under the statutes of Archbishop Laud, the University exercised those
functions of teaching and general supervision which it has since in
great part surrendered to its component colleges; and in theory the
University was a hard task-mistress.
Attendance at professorial lectures was theoretically obligatory, and
'since not only reading and thought, but practice also, is of the
greatest avail towards proficiency in learning,' it was required that
the candidate for a degree should 'dispute' in the Schools at stated and
frequent times during the whole course of his academic career.
Beginning by listening to the disputations of his seniors (a custom
which perhaps survives in the modern fashion which sometimes provides a
'gallery' at the ceremony of _viva voce_), he was as time went on
required himself to maintain and publicly defend doctrines in a manner
which would be highly embarrassing to his modern successor--'responding'
at first to the arguments of the stater of a theory, and with riper
wisdom being promoted to the position of Opponent.' This opposing and
responding was termed 'doing generals.' 'Argufying' was the business of
the University in the seventeenth century, and had been so for a long
time.
On the memorable occasion of Queen Elizabeth's visit to Oxford in the
year 1566, Her Majesty was entertained intermittently with disputations
on the moon's influence on the tides, and the right of rebellion against
bad government. Thus, Archbishop Laud required of the
seventeenth-century undergraduate so many disputations before he became
a _sophista_, and so many again before he could be admitted to the
degree of Bachelor; and if the system had worked in practice as it was
intended to do in theory, young Oxford would not have had an easy time
of it. In the days of Antony Wood's undergraduate career exercises in
the 'Schooles' were 'very good.' 'Philosophy disputations in Lent time,
frequent in the Greek tongue; _coursing_ very much, ending alwaies in
blowes,' which Wood considers scandalous; but at least it shows the
serious spirit of the disputants. But a University can always be
trusted to temper the biting wind of oppressive regulations to its shorn
alumni; and there can be no doubt that the comparative slackness and
sleepiness of the eighteenth century--a somnolence which it is easy to
exaggerate, but impossible altogether to deny--must have tended to wear
the sharp corners off the academic curriculum. Indications that this
was so are not wanting. After all, there must have been many ways of
avoiding originality in a disputation. A writer in 'Terrae Filius'
(1720) states the case as follows:--
'All students in the University who are above one year's standing, and
have not taken their batchelor' (of arts) 'degree, are required by
statute to be present at this awful solemnity' (disputation for a
degree), 'which is designed for a public proof of the progress he has
made in the art of reasoning; tho' in fact it is no more than a formal
repetition of a set of syllogisms upon some ridiculous question in
logick, which they get by rote, or, perhaps, only read out of their
caps, which lie before them with their notes in them. These commodious
sets of syllogisms are call'd strings, and descend from undergraduate to
undergraduate, in regular succession; so that, when any candidate for a
degree is to exercise his talent in argumentation, he has nothing else
to do but to enquire amongst his friends for a string upon such-and-such
a question.'
So, even in the early part of the present century, reverend persons
proceeding to the degree of D.D. have been known to avail themselves of
a thesis (or written harangue on some point of theology) not compiled by
their unaided exertions, but kept among the archives of their college
and passed round as occasion might require. If mature theologians have
reconciled this with their consciences in the nineteenth, what may not
have been possible to an undergraduate in the eighteenth century? Also,
the functionary who stood in the place of the modern examiner was a very
different kind of person from his successor--that incarnation of cold
and impassive criticism; collusion between 'opponent' and 'respondent'
must have been possible and frequent; and so far had things gone that
the candidate for a degree was permitted to choose the 'Master' who was
to examine him, and it appears to have been customary to invite your
Master to dinner on the night preceding the final disputation. Witness
'Terrae Filius 'once more:--
'Most candidates get leave .... to chuse their own examiners, who never
fail to be their old cronies and toping companions.... It is also well
known to be the custom for the candidates either to present their
examiners with a piece of gold, or to give them a handsome
entertainment, and make them drunk, which they commonly do the night
before examination, and some times keep them till morning, and so
adjourn, cheek by jowl, from their drinking-room to the school, where
they are to be examined.'
The same author adds: 'This to me seems the great business of
_determination_: to pay money and get drunk.'
Vicesimus Knox, who took his B.A. degree in 1775, is at pains to
represent the whole process of so-called examination as an elaborate
farce. 'Every candidate,' he says, 'is obliged to be examined in the
whole circle of the sciences by three masters of arts, of his own
choice.' Naturally, the temptation is too much for poor humanity. 'It
is reckoned good management to get acquainted with two or three jolly
young masters and supply them well with port previously to the
examination.' _Viva voce_ once put on this convivial footing, it is not
surprising that 'the examiners and the candidate often converse on the
last drinking bout, or on horses, or read the newspapers, or a novel, or
divert themselves as well as they can till the clock strikes eleven,
when all parties descend, and the _testimonium_ is signed by the
masters.' Under such circumstances it is obvious that the provisions of
Archbishop Laud might be shorn of half their terrors. Even at an earlier
period other methods of evasion were not wanting. As early as 1656,
orders were made 'abolishing' the custom of candidates standing treat to
examiners. In the statute which still prescribes the duties of the
_clericus universitatis_, there is a clause threatening him with severe
penalties--to the extent of paying a fine of ten shillings--should he so
far misuse his especial charge, the University clock, as to 'retard and
presently precipitate the course' of that venerable time-piece, 'in such
a manner that the hours appointed for public exercises be unjustly
shortened, to the harm and prejudice of the studious.' Moreover, we
read in Wood that notice of examination was given by 'tickets stuck up
on certaine public corners, which would be suddenly after taken downe'
by the candidate's friends. To such straits and to such unworthy shifts
could disputants be reduced by mere inability to find matter.
It has been said that attendance at professorial lectures was
theoretically obligatory; but it is hardly necessary to point out that
even serious students have occasionally dispensed with the duty of
attending lectures; and it is more than whispered there have been
occasions in recent centuries when it was not an audience only that was
wanting. There are, of course, instances of both extremes. Rumour
tells of a certain professor of anatomy, who, lacking a quorum, bade his
servant 'bring out the skeleton, in order that I may be able to address
you as "gentle*men*;"' but all professors have not been so
conscientious. Gibbon goes so far as to assert that 'in the University
of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many
years given up altogether the pretence of teaching,' and the Reverend
James Hurdie does not much improve the matter, when he prepares to
refute the historian's charge in his 'Vindication of Magdalen College.'
So far as the College is concerned, the reverend gentleman has something
of a case; but his defence of the University is not altogether
satisfying. Some of the professors, no doubt, do lecture in a
statutable manner. But 'the late noble but unfortunate Professor of
Civil Law began his office with reading lectures, and only desisted for
want of an audience' (a plausible excuse, were it not that some
lecturers seem to have entertained peculiar ideas as to the constitution
of an audience). 'Terrae Filius' has a story of a Professor of Divinity
who came to his lecture-room, found to his surprise and displeasure, a
band of intending hearers, and dismissed them straightway with the
summary remark: 'Domini, vos non estis idonei auditores!' 'The present
Professor, newly appointed (the author has heard it from the highest
authority), means to read.' Moreover, 'the late Professor of Botany at
one time _did_ read.' In fact, as the 'Oxford Spy' observes in 1818:--
'Yet here the rays of Modern Science spread:
Professors are appointed, lectures read.
If none attend, or hear: not ours the blame,
Theirs is the folly--and be theirs the shame.'
It is evident that professorial lectures were not a wholly unbearable
burden.
'It is recorded in the veracious chronicle of Herodotus that Sandoces, a
Persian judge, had been crucified by Darius, on the charge of taking a
bribe to determine a cause wrongly; but while he yet hung on the cross,
Darius found by calculation that the good deeds of Sandoces towards the
king's house were more numerous than his evil deeds, and so, confessing
that he had acted with more haste than wisdom, he ordered him to be
taken down and set at large.'
[Illustration: _THE LIBRARY, MERTON COLLEGE. Drawn by Ernest Stamp._]
So when the Universities are at last confronted with that great Day of
Reckoning which is continually held over their heads by external
enemies, and which timorous friends are always trying to stave off by
grudging concessions and half-hearted sympathy with Movements; when we
are brought to the bar of that grand and final commission, which is once
for all to purge Oxford and Cambridge of their last remnants of
mediaevalism, and bring them into line with the marching columns of
modern Democracy; when the judgment is set and the books are opened, we
may hope that some extenuating circumstances may be found to set against
the long enumeration of academic crimes. There will be no denying that
Oxford has been the home of dead languages and undying prejudice. It
will be admitted as only too true that Natural Science students were for
many years compelled to learn a little Greek, and that colleges have not
been prepared to sacrifice the greater part of their immoral revenues to
the furtherance of University Extension; and we shall have to plead
guilty to the damning charge of having returned two Tory members to
several successive Parliaments. All this Oxford has done, and more;
there is no getting out of it. Yet her counsel will be able to plead in
her favour that once at least she has been found not retarding the rear,
but actually leading the van of nineteenth-century progress; for it will
hardly be denied that if the Universities did not invent the Examination
System, at least they were among the first to welcome and to adapt it;
and that if it had not been for the development of examinations,
qualifying and competitive, at Oxford and Cambridge, the ranks of the
Civil Service would have continued for many years longer to be recruited
by the bad old method of nomination (commonly called jobbery and
nepotism by the excluded), and society would, perhaps, never have
realised that a knowledge of Chaucer is among the most desirable
qualifications for an officer in Her Majesty's Army. Here, at least, the
Universities have been privileged to set an example.
The Oxford examination system is practically contemporaneous with the
century; the first regular class list having been published in 1807.
The change was long in coming, and when it did come the face of the
University was not revolutionised; if the alteration contained, as it
undoubtedly did, the germs of a revolution which was to extend far
beyond academic boundaries, it bore the aspect of a most desirable but
most moderate reform. Instead of obtaining a degree by the obsolete
process of perfunctory disputation, ambitious men were invited to offer
certain books (classical works for the most part), and in these to
undergo the ordeal of a written and oral examination; the oral part
being at that time probably as important as the other. Sudden and
violent changes are repugnant to all Englishmen, and more especially to
the rulers of Universities, those homes of ancient tradition; and just
as early railways found it difficult to escape from the form of the
stage-coach and the old nomenclature of the road, so the new Final
Honour School took over (so to speak) the plant of a system which it
superseded. _Viva voce_ was still (and is to the present day)
important, because it was the direct successor of oral disputation. The
candidate for a degree had obtained that distinction by a theoretical
argument with three 'opponents' in the Schools; so now the opponents
were represented by a nearly corresponding number of examiners, and the
_viva voce_ part of the examination was for a long time regarded as a
contest of wit between the candidate and the questioner. Nor did the
race for honours affect the great majority of the University as it does
at present. It was intended for the talented few: it was not a matter
of course that Tom, Dick, and Harry should go in for honours because
their friends wished it, or because their college tutor wished to keep
his college out of the evening papers. Candidates for honours were
regarded as rather exceptional persons, and a brilliant performance in
the Schools was regarded as a tolerably sure augury of success in life:
a belief which was, perhaps, justified by facts then, but which--like
most beliefs, dying hard--has unfortunately survived into a state of
society where it is impossible to provide the assurance of a successful
career for all and each of the eighty or hundred 'first-class' men whom
the University annually presents to an unwelcoming world.
[Illustration: _READING THE NEWDIGATE. Drawn by T, H. Crawford._]
However small its beginnings it was inevitable that the recognition of
intellect should exercise the greatest influence--though not immediately
and obviously--on the future of the University. _La carriere_ once
_ouverte aux talents_--the fact being established and recognised that
one man was intellectually not only as good as another, but a deal
better--colleges could not help following the example set them; the
first stirrings of 'inter-collegiate competition' began to be felt, and
after forty years or so (for colleges generally proceed in these and
similar matters with commendable caution, and it was only the earlier
part of the nineteenth century after all) began the gradual abolition of
'close' scholarships and fellowships--those admirable endowments whereby
the native of some specified county or town was provided with a
competence for life, solely in virtue of the happy accident of birth.
To disregard talent openly placarded and certificated was no longer
possible. The most steady-going and venerable institutions began to be
reanimated by the infusion of new blood, and to be pervaded by the
newest and most 'dangerous' ideas.
Nor were the outside public slow to avail themselves after their manner
of the changed state of things. The possessor of a University degree
has at all times been regarded by less fortunate persons with a kind of
superstitious awe, as one who has lived in mysterious precincts and
practised curious (if not always useful) arts, and at first the title of
'Honourman,' implying that the holder belonged to a privileged
few--_elite_ of the _elites_--whom a University, itself learned, had
delighted to honour for their learning, could inspire nothing less than
reverence. Also the distinction was a very convenient one. The public
is naturally only too glad to have any ready and satisfactory
testimonial which may help as a method of selection among the host of
applicants for its various employments; and here was a diploma signed by
competent authorities and bearing no suspicion of fear or favour.
Presently the public began to follow the lead of Oxford and Cambridge,
and examine for itself, but that is another story: schoolmasters more
especially have always kept a keen eye on the class list. So an
intellectual distinction comes in time to have a commercial price, and
this no doubt has had something (though, we will hope, not everything)
to do with the increase in the number of 'Schools' and the growing
facilities for obtaining so-called honours. But it is needless to
observe that the multiplication of the article tends to the depreciation
of its value. The First-class man, who was a potential Cabinet Minister
or an embryo Archbishop at the beginning of the century, is now capable
of descending to all kinds of employments. He does not indeed--being
perhaps conscious of incapacity--serve as a waiter in a hotel, after the
fashion of American students in the vacation, but he has been known to
accept gratefully a post in a private school where his tenure of office
depends largely on the form he shows in bowling to the second eleven.