to-morrow.... Never could understand why a gentleman being neither
intoxicated nor in the society of his friends, cannot cross the
quadrangle without a view-halloo... There he is again: must go out and
see what is going on. Quadrangle very cold, raining. Group of men
playing football in the corner: friends look on and encourage them from
windows above. As I come on the scene all disappear, with shouts: none
identified: saves future trouble, at all events. More tobacco and
period of comparative peace. Bedtime.
Wish my scout wouldn't hide hard things under the mattress.
Noise in quadrangle renewed: 'Daddy wouldn't buy me a Bow-wow,' with
variations.... Some one's oak apparently battered with a poker. _Ought_
to get up and go out to stop it....
VIII--THE UNIVERSITY AS A PLACE OF LEARNED LEISURE.
'I had been used for thirty years to no interruption
save the tinkling of the dinner-bell and the chapel-bell.'
_Essays of Vicesimus Knox._
Standing with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in a luxuriously
furnished 'Common Room'--such is Oxford life as summarised by a German
visitor, who appears to have been a good deal perplexed, like the outer
world in general, by the academic mixture of things ancient and modern,
and a host who wore a cap and gown over his evening dress. Certainly
the University is a strange medley of contraries. It never seems to be
quite clear whether we are going too fast or too slow. We are always
reforming something, yet are continually reproached with irrational
conservatism. Change and permanence are side by side--permanence that
looks as if it could defy time:
'The form remains, the function never dies,'
and yet all the while the change is rapid and complete. Men go down,
and are as if they had never been: as is the race of leaves so is that
of undergraduates; and so transiently are they linked with the enduring
existence of their University, that, except in the case of the minority
who have done great deeds on the river or the cricket-field, they either
pass immediately out of recollection or else remain only as a dim and
distant tradition of bygone ages. An undergraduate's memory is very
short. For him the history of the University is comprised in the three
or four years of his own residence. Those who came before him and those
who come after are alike separated from him by a great gulf; his
predecessors are infinitely older, and his successors immeasurably
younger. It makes no difference what his relations to them may be in
after-life. Jones, who went down in '74, may be an undistinguished
country parson or a struggling junior at the Bar; and Brown, who came up
in '75, may be a bishop or a Q.C. with his fortune made; but all the
same Brown will always regard Jones as belonging to the almost forgotten
heroic period before he came up, and Jones, whatever may be his respect
for Brown's undoubted talents, must always to a certain extent feel the
paternal interest of a veteran watching the development of youthful
promise. So complete is the severance of successive generations, that it
is hard to see how undergraduate custom and tradition and College
characteristics should have a chance of surviving; yet somehow they do
manage to preserve an unbroken continuity. Once give a College a good
or a bad name, and that name will stick to it. Plant a custom and it
will flourish, defying statutes and Royal Commissions. Conservatism is
in the air; even convinced Radicals (in politics) cannot escape from it,
and are sometimes Tories in matters relating to their University. They
will change the constitution of the realm, but will not stand any
tampering with the Hebdomadal Council. Whatever be the reason--whether
it be Environment or Heredity--Universities go on doing the same things,
only in different ways; they retain that indefinable habit of thought
which seems to cling to old grey walls and the shade of ancient elms,
which the public calls 'academic' when it is only contemptuous,
explaining the word as meaning 'provincial with a difference' when it is
angry.
[Illustration: _BOWLS IN NEW COLLEGE GARDEN. Drawn by Lancelot Speed._]
There is the same kind of unalterableness about the few favoured
individuals to whom the spirit of the age has allowed a secure and
permanent residence in Oxford; a happy class which is now almost limited
to Heads of Houses and College servants. You scarcely ever see a scout
bearing the outward and visible signs of advancing years; age cannot
wither them, nor (it should be added) can custom stale their infinite
variety of mis-serving their masters. Perhaps it is they who are the
repositories of tradition. And even Fellows contrive to retain some of
the characteristics of their more permanent predecessors, whom we have
now learnt to regard as abuses. Hard-worked though they are, and
precarious of tenure, they are, nevertheless, in some sort imbued with
that flavour of humanity and _dolce far niente_ which continues to haunt
even a Common Room where Fellows drink nothing but water, and only dine
together once a fortnight.
For times are sadly changed now, and a fellowship is far from being the
haven of rest which it once was, and still is to a few. Look at that old
Fellow pacing with slow and leisurely steps beneath Magdalen or
Christchurch elms: regard him well, for he is an interesting survival,
and presently he and his kind will be nothing but a memory, and probably
the progressive spirit of democracy will hold him up as an awful
example. He is a link with a practically extinct period. When he was
first elected _verus et perpetuus socius_ of his college--without
examination--the University of Oxford was in a parlous state. Reform was
as yet unheard of, or only loomed dimly in the distance. Noblemen still
wore tufts--think how that would scandalise us now!--and 'gentlemen
commoners' came up with the declared and recognised intention of living
as gentlemen commoners should. Except for the invention of the
examination system--and the demon of the schools was satisfied with only
a mouthful of victims then--Oxford of the forties had not substantially
changed since the last century--since the days when Mr. Gibbon was a
gentleman commoner at Magdalen College, where his excuses for cutting
his lectures in the morning were 'received with a smile,' and where he
found himself horribly bored by the 'private scandal' and 'dull and deep
potations' of the seniors with whom he was invited to associate in the
evening. Not much had changed since those days: lectures were still
disciplinary exercises rather than vehicles of instruction, and the
vespertinal port was rarely if ever interrupted in its circulation by
'the man who comes at nine.' Many holders of fellowships scarcely came
near the University; those who did reside were often not much concerned
about the instruction of undergraduates, and still less with
'intercollegiate competition.' Perhaps it was not their life's work: a
fellowship might be only a stepping-stone to a college living, when a
sufficiently fat benefice should fall vacant and allow the dean or
sub-warden to marry and retire into the country; and even the don who
meant to be a don all his days put study or learned leisure first and
instruction second, the world not yet believing in the 'spoon-feeding'
of youth. Very often, of course, they did nothing. After all, when you
pay a man for exercising no particular functions, you can scarcely blame
him for strictly fulfilling the conditions under which he was elected.
'But what do they do?' inquired--quite recently--a tourist, pointing to
the fellows' buildings of a certain college. 'Do?!!' replied the Oxford
cicerone--'do? ... why them's fellows!' But if there was inactivity, it
is only the more credit to the minority who really did interest
themselves in the work of their pupils. Not that the relation of
authorities to undergraduates was ever then what it has since
become--whether the change be for the better or the worse. Few attempts
were made to bridge the chasm which must always yawn between the life of
teacher and taught. Perhaps now the attempt is a little
over-emphasised; certainly things are done which would have made each
particular hair to stand on end on the head of a Fellow of the old
school. In his solemn and formal way he winked at rowing, considering
it rather fast and on the whole an inevitable sign of declining morals.
He wore his cap and gown with the anachronistic persistency of Mr. Toole
in 'The Don,' and sighed over the levity of a colleague who occasionally
sported a blue coat with brass buttons. Had you told him that within
the present century College Tutors would be seen in flannels, and that a
Head of a House could actually row on the river in an eight--albeit the
ship in question be manned by comparatively grave and reverend seniors,
yclept the Ancient Mariners--he would probably have replied in the
formula ascribed to Dr. Johnson: 'Let me tell you, sir, that in order to
be what you consider humorous it is not necessary that you should be
also indecent!' But there is a lower depth still; and grave dignitaries
of the University have been seen riding bicycles.
All this would have been quite unintelligible to the youthful days of
our friend, whom we see leisurely approaching the evening of his days in
the midst of a generation that does not know him indeed, but which is
certainly benefited by his presence and the picture of academic repose
which he displays to his much-troubled and harassed successors: a
peaceful, cloistered life; soon to leave nothing behind it but a brass
in the College chapel, a few Common Room anecdotes, and a vague
tradition, perhaps, of a ghost on the old familiar staircase. Far
different is the lot of the Fellow _fin de siecle_; 'by many names men
know him,' whether he be the holder of an 'official' Fellowship, or a
'Prize Fellow' who is entitled to his emoluments only for the paltry
period of seven years. And what emoluments! Verily the mouth of
Democracy must water at the thought of the annual 'division of the
spoils' which used to take place under the old _regime_: spoils which
were worth dividing, too, in the days when rents were paid without a
murmur, and colleges had not as yet to allow tenants to hold at
half-a-crown an acre, lest the farm should be unlet altogether. But now
if a Prize Fellow receives his 200*l.* a year he may consider himself
lucky; and remember that if he is not blessed with this world's goods,
the grim humours of the last Commission at least allowed him the
inestimable privilege of marrying--on 200*l.* a year. After all, it is
not every one who receives even that salary for doing nothing.
The 'official' variety of Fellow, or the Prize Fellow who chooses to be
a College Tutor, is a schoolmaster, with a difference. He has rather
longer holidays--if he can afford to enjoy them-and a considerably
shorter purse than the instructors of youth at some great schools. He
is so far unfortunate in his predecessors, that he has inherited the
reputation of the Fellows of old time. Everybody else is working: the
Fellow is still a useless drone. As a matter of fact, the unfortunate
man is always doing something--working vehemently with a laudable desire
to get that into eight weeks which should properly take twelve; or
taking his recreation violently, riding forty miles on a bicycle, with a
spurt at the finish so as not to miss his five-o'clock pupil; sitting on
interminable committees--everything in Oxford is managed by a committee,
partly, perhaps, because 'Boards are very often screens;' or sitting
upon a disorderly undergraduate. On the whole, the kicks are many, and
the halfpence comparatively few. He has the Long Vacation, of course,
but then he is always employed in writing his lectures for next term, or
compiling a school edition, or a handbook, or an abridgment of somebody
else's school edition or handbook, in order to keep the pot
boiling--more especially if he has fallen a victim to matrimony, and
established himself in the red-brick part of Oxford. It is true that
there is the prospect--on paper--of a pension when he is past his work,
but in the present state of College finances that is not exactly a vista
of leisured opulence. Altogether there is not very much repose about
_him_. College Tutors in these days are expected to work. It is on
record that a tourist from a manufacturing district on seeing four
tutors snatching a brief hour at lawn-tennis, remarked, 'I suppose
there's _another shift_ working inside?' Such are the requirements of
the age and the manufacturing districts.
Nor are beer and skittles unadulterated the lot of the undergraduate
either--whatever the impression that his sisters and cousins may derive
from the gaieties of the Eights and 'Commem.' For the spirit of the
century and the 'Sturm und Drang' of a restless world has got hold of
the 'Man,' too, and will not suffer him to live quite so peacefully as
the Verdant Greens and Bouncers of old. Everybody must do something;
they must be 'up and doing,' or else they have a good chance of finding
themselves 'sent down.' I do not speak of the reading man, who
naturally finds his vocation in a period of activity--but rather of the
man who is by nature non-reading, and has to sacrifice his natural
desires to the pressure of public opinion acting through his tutor.
Perhaps he is made to go in for honours; but even if he reads only for a
pass, the schools are always with him--he is always being pulled up to
see how he is growing; or at least he must be serving his College in one
way or another--if not by winning distinction in the schools, by toiling
on the river or the cricket-field. Then he is expected to interest
himself in all the movements of the last quarter of the nineteenth
century; he must belong to several societies; he cannot even be properly
idle without forming himself into an association for the purpose. If he
wants to make a practice of picnicing on the Cherwell he founds a
'Cherwell Lunch Club,' with meetings, no doubt, and possibly an 'organ'
to advocate his highly meritorious views. An excellent and a healthy
life, no doubt! but yet one is tempted sometimes to fear that the loafer
may become extinct; and then where are our poets to come from? For it is
a great thing to be able to loaf well: it softens the manners and does
not allow them to be fierce; and there is no place for it like the
streams and gardens of an ancient University. If a man does not learn
the great art of doing nothing there, he will never acquire it anywhere
else; and it is there, and in the summer term, that this laudable
practice will probably survive when it is unknown even in Government
Offices.
[Illustration: _COACHING THE EIGHT. By J. H. Lorimer._]
For there is a season of the year when even the sternest scholar or
athlete and the most earnest promoter of Movements yields to the _genius
loci_; when the summer term is drawing to a close, and the May east
winds have yielded to the warmth of June, and the lilacs and laburnums
are blossoming in College gardens; when the shouting and the glory and
the bonfires of the Eights are over, and the invasion of Commemoration
has not yet begun. Then, if ever, is the time for doing nothing. Then
the unwilling victim of lectures shakes off his chains and revels in a
temporary freedom, not unconnected with the fact that his tutor has gone
for a picnic to Nuneham. Perhaps he has been rowing in his College
Eight, and is entitled to repose on the laurels of 'six bumps;' perhaps
he is not in the schools himself, and can afford to pity the
unfortunates who are. And how many are the delightful ways of loafing!
You may propel the object of your affections--if she is up, as she very
often is at this time--in a punt on that most academic stream, the
Cherwell, while Charles (your friend) escorts the chaperon in a dingey
some little distance in front; you may lie lazily in the sun in
Worcester or St. John's gardens, with a novel, or a friend, or both; you
may search Bagley and Powderhill for late bluebells, and fancy that you
have found 'high on its heathy ridge' the tree known to Arnold and
Clough. Or if you are more enterprising you may travel further afield
and explore the high beech woods of the Chiltern slopes and the bare,
breezy uplands of the Berkshire downs; but this, perhaps, demands more
energy than belongs to the truly conscientious loafer.
[Illustration: _EVENING ON THE RIVER. Drawn by E. Stamp._]
Well, let the idle undergraduate make the most of his time now; it is
not likely that he will be able to loaf in after-life. Nor (for the
matter of that) will his successors be allowed to take their ease here
in Oxford even in the summer, in those happy days when the University is
to be turned into an industrial school, and a place for the education no
longer of the English gentleman but the British citizen. Will that day
ever come? The spirit of the age is determined that it shall. But
perhaps the spirit of the place may be too much for it yet.
_London: Strangeways, Printers._