CHRIST CHURCH
"Come, doctor," said Euphranor, suddenly, "you, who find such
fault with others' education, shall tell me how _you_ would bring
up a young knight, till you turned him out of your hands a Man."
* * * * *
"I doubt I shall be content with him," said I, "if (at sixteen
say) he shows me outwardly ... a glowing cheek, an open brow,
copious locks, a clear eye, and looks me full in the face withal;
... the blood running warm and quick through his veins, and easily
discovering itself in his cheeks and forehead, at the mention of
what is noble or shameful.... Candid of soul I hope he is; for
I have always sought his confidence, and never used it against
himself.... He is still passionate perhaps, as in his first
septenniad, but easily reconciled; subdued easily by affection and
the appeal to old and kindly remembrance, but stubborn against
force; generous, forgiving: still liking to ride rather than to
read, and perhaps to settle a difference by the fist than by the
tongue; but submitting to those who do not task him above Nature's
due...."
"And this is your education," said Euphranor, "for all boys
indiscriminately, without regard to any particular genius they may
show."
"But without injury to it, I hope," said I; ... "if Sir Lancelot
not only _has_ a Genius, (as I suppose all men have some,)
but _is_ a Genius--big with Epic, Lyrical or Parliamentary
inspiration,--I do not meddle with him--he will take his own
course in spite of me. What I have to turn out is, not a Genius,
but a Young Gentleman, qualified at least for the common
professions, or trades, if you like it. Or if he have means and
inclination to live independently on his estate, may, _in spite_
of his genius, turn into a very good husband, father, neighbour,
and magistrate...."
EDWARD FITZGERALD: _Euphranor: A Dialogue on Youth_.
I
At noon on Friday of the second week in October, 1906, a slow
procession of cabs jingled down the slope from the Great Western
station at Oxford and turned under the bridge towards the middle
of the town. At Carfax they separated east, north and south,
bearing through the High, the Corn and Saint Aldates their burden
of expectant, fluttered freshmen, who had been summoned, on this
first day of the term, to present themselves early for admission
to their colleges and university. At Tom Gate the newcomers to the
House enquired for their rooms, paid their cabmen and left their
luggage to follow them. Over the doors in Peckwater or Canterbury,
Meadow Buildings, Old Library or Tom they found their names
painted in black on a white ground; they introduced themselves to
their scouts--who alone in all Oxford affected interest in their
existence,--ordered luncheon and sat down to recall the more
pressing advice on deportment which had been bestowed on them.
To a freshman, the etiquette and technique of Oxford abound in real
and, still more, in imaginary pitfalls. He may live for years on
the same staircase as a man one term his senior, but, unless they
have been introduced, he must never bow nor say "good-morning"
to him. The senior would, perhaps, leave a card on the freshman,
choosing a moment when he was not at home; the freshman must return
his call, but it was not enough to leave a card: he must go on
calling until he ran him to earth. In all things a freshman must
comport himself humbly, taking a distant seat in the junior common
room and leaving the arm-chairs in front of the fire to those
who better deserved them. There were rules of dress and rules of
conduct; there were clubs which a man would feel honoured to join
and clubs which he would prudently avoid; there were games worth
playing and games that were waste of time.
When the appointed day came, the ordeal was refreshingly light
and quickly forgotten in the joyous sense of possession which a
man's own rooms, with his shining, black name painted over the
door, gives him more fully, perhaps, than he ever knows later; the
sense of protection, too, at a time when he feels more solitary and
unwanted than ever before. Though the carpet were threadbare and
the curtains dingy, though sofa and chairs needed recovering and
the meagre blankets on one bed bore the name of "Arthur Bourchier"
and a date four years before the new owner was born, the rooms
belonged to him _de facto_, and within a few hours he would _de
jure_ belong to them; it was time to unpack books and pictures
and to study the regulations and hints embodied in the brochure
libellously known as "The Blue Liar."
After luncheon the freshmen were collected in Hall for presentation
to the Dean.[6] The Old Westminsters gathered together to discuss
their rooms and to exchange whispered confidences. From Hall
they were ushered to the Old Schools and admitted members of the
university by the vice-chancellor. Then they drew breath.
The bond of an identic school held them in small groups which
explored one another's rooms and perambulated Oxford to purchase
bedroom ware and such other necessaries of life as had not been
included in the equipment taken over, at a valuation, from the
previous tenants. They made a preliminary inspection of picture
shops and turned over the books in Blackwell's; they bought
tobacco--and refused to buy pipe-racks and tobacco-jars enriched
with the college arms, because these were "freshers' delights" and
a mark of juvenility to be avoided. Then they returned to college
and discovered that already a few of their senior friends had left
cards. And then it was time to discover which were the freshmen's
tables in hall.
If for an hour or two it had seemed that no one but their scouts
was interested in their existence, they were to find within their
first week a flattering competition for their company. First of
all, their tutors invited them to call and arrange what lectures
they were to attend; after that, the president and secretary of
innumerable clubs solicited their patronage. Then came the turn of
the literary and debating societies, in which the House abounded.
It was a matter of no little importance to have a club-meeting for
at least six nights in the week: only the more serious members
stayed for anything but the highly personal questions and motions
of "private business," but during that first stimulating half-hour
the visitors and their hosts could feast richly and variously on
the abundant dessert supplied by the club; at nine o'clock they
could leave, pleasantly sated, to work, talk or pay calls, while
the club stalwarts remained to read plays or, unwillingly and at
short notice, to deliver conscientious speeches on the political
problems of the day.[7]
Outside the college there was an almost unlimited choice of
university clubs: the Bullingdon, Vincent's and the Grid were
purely sporting or social, the O.U.D.S. was primarily theatrical,
while the Union--though it was not popular at the House at this
time--provided the biggest audiences and the most serious
debating. In addition, the Canning and Chatham, the Palmerston and
Russell, the Strafford and Gladstone, the St. Patrick's and a dozen
more offered a varied bill of fare to every political appetite and
entailed on their members the obligation of reading a solemn paper
once in every few terms and of listening to the solemn papers of
other members once a week. At their annual "wines" and dinners
the young politician met such of the leading liberals as could be
enticed to Oxford; after the arid detachment of politics at school,
one meeting with a single minister seemed to bring the pulsing
heart of government nearer; there followed cards for receptions in
London and invitations to join the Eighty Club.
Perhaps by reason of its size, the House escaped or defied any
effort to impose a uniform spirit or code. Its members were indeed
united in such practises as dressing for the theatre and in such
conventions as a general disinclination for the society of other
colleges; but this was largely because they were numerous enough
to provide every one with the friends, the clubs and the interests
that he required without seeking them abroad. Rival foundations
charged them with superiority and sectionalism; but, if they had
ever made a claim for themselves, it would only have been that
they allowed their neighbours to live unmolested. There was no
Sunday-evening "After," at which the whole college met; no concert;
no "Freshmen's Wine." All were left free to choose their friends
and to pass their time as they liked, provided that they did not
offend against public taste or make a nuisance of themselves to
their neighbours.
New friendships came rapidly in those first few weeks. At the
freshmen's tables in hall, the freshmen's pews in the cathedral, on
the football-ground, in the common room and clubs and at a score of
breakfast-parties given for their benefit, the men in their first
year came to know one another. There followed testing, sifting and
an occasional change of value; the bond of the identic school was
gradually relaxed; and small groups broke away from the general
tables in hall and established messes of their own.
II
Oxford is a loose confederation of jealously independent states;
and a man must have considerable personality or prowess to be known
outside his own college. There are always one or two men[8] with a
reputation extending beyond their own walls and promising a later
distinction; but there are seldom more than a handful of exceptions
in any undergraduate generation. Of the House this is especially
true, as it is almost a university in itself, and no one need go
outside it. The patriotism and hero-worship of a public school had
made it inconceivable that a new boy should pass one week without
knowing who was the Captain of Cricket; at Oxford in every year
there must have been hundreds unaware who was President of the Boat
Club. The greatest emancipation that came to all on leaving school
was just this freedom to be interested in what they liked. The
tyranny of games was broken; the snobbism of pretended enthusiasms
sank into abeyance; and many who had been despised and rejected at
school began suddenly to shine as unexpected social lights.
The choice of friends marched step by step with the tentative first
efforts in hospitality. Entertaining is made easy in a college
where a man orders breakfast or luncheon for as many guests as
his rooms will contain, where the epicure descends to the college
kitchen and chooses an apolaustic repast, where wine and cup
are as easily had from the buttery and where the junior common
room supplies the coffee and dessert. His scout and scout's boy,
prepare the table and attend to the waiting (how they do it when
several parties take place simultaneously on the same staircase
is a craft-secret which is handed down from one generation to
another); when his own cutlery, glass and china run short, his
scout borrows from the abundance of a neighbour. And, when the
feast is done, the host is not disturbed by the frugal housewife's
concern for the broken meats, for they have been decently packed
and discreetly removed by his scout. The imagination of the curious
may sometimes exercise itself to picture the internal chaos of a
scout's digestion: for six days he subsists chiefly on superfluous
butter and remainder loaves; the seventh day is one on which every
undergraduate seeks to give a luncheon-party or to attend the
board of a friend. On that day the scout must fare bewilderingly
on undetected treasures of dressed crab, unwanted drum-sticks of
chicken, trembling ruins of fruit-jelly and the unmortised halves
of meringues; yet longevity is the reward of their imprudence.
There is, furthermore, a guest-table in Hall;[9] there are
dining-clubs; and, when a man is grown weary of monotony, the Grid,
the O.U.D.S. and Vincent's supply relief to their members. For the
first weeks, indeed, the hospitality comes all from the seniors;
then it is time for a freshman to repay it and to strike out for
himself in entertaining the new friends of his own year. It is a
delicate and embarrassing enterprise, for all the mechanical aid of
kitchen and scout: the inexpert host fears that he has not ordered
enough, he never knows how long to wait for a fourth-year man who
lives out of college and has perhaps forgotten the invitation, he
fails to realise--until he has himself ceased to be a freshman--the
devastating horror of a three-or four-course breakfast at half-past
eight with obligatory conversation. And, not content with one
venture, he repeats it in cold blood.
The emancipation in being allowed to choose friends and amusements
is hardly greater than the latitude in arranging the work of three
or four years. A mathematical scholar is, indeed, not expected to
read the Modern Language School; but for the commoner there is
almost unlimited range of optional subjects to take and varied
lectures to attend. Here is a further step in emancipation and
responsibility: when a man has satisfied the bare minimum demanded
by authority, he must work out his own salvation; there is a point
at which, if he will not read for himself, it is not worth any
one's while to compel him. Many of those who kept a political goal
ahead of them elected to study Modern History, for which it may
be asserted that in scope and variety, in the volume of reading,
the mental discipline and the practical benefit of knowledge and
perspective it excels even the final school of _Literæ Humaniores_
which has been for so long the peculiar glory of Oxford. Touching
the ancient world at one end and modern politics at the other,
interlaced with geography, economics, political science, law and
modern languages, it does indeed exclude natural science and
Asiatic languages, but it excludes little else.[10]
III
Some of the most common English phrases are also those which most
obstinately defy exact definition. It is related of an obscure
enquirer that he gave his life to elucidating the significance of
"a man-about-town," having met the phrase but not the type to which
it is applied. For years he wandered moodily about London in search
of a specimen, growing ever more abstracted and becoming in time a
familiar figure in the streets, until his researches were cut short
on the day when he was knocked down by a motor-bus and fatally
injured. Though carried promptly to the nearest hospital, he
survived only a few hours; as the end approached, one of the nurses
sought to strengthen his resistance by shewing him an account of
the mishap in an early edition of an evening paper; the last words
that he ever read were: "ACCIDENT TO WELL-KNOWN MAN-ABOUT-TOWN."
* * * * *
A fate as disappointing, if not so tragic, awaits him who seeks to
find a definition of "the Oxford manner." It is seemingly a blazon
borne by every man who has been at Oxford and quickly recognised by
every one who has not. When Herrick in _The Ebb Tide_ anchored in
the lagoon of an uncharted Pacific pearl-fishery, something in his
speech or bearing caused Attwater to ask: '"University man?" ...
"Yes, Merton," said Herrick, and the next moment blushed scarlet at
his indiscretion. "I am of the other lot," said Attwater: "Trinity
Hall, Cambridge. I call my schooner after the old shop...."'
Without delay Attwater then made himself insolently rude to the two
men who had been neither at Oxford nor at Cambridge. The fact that
Stevenson was himself an Edinburgh man may explain his creature's
ability to detect the Oxford manner; for Oxford men the task is
less easy and is but made the harder by the involved analysis which
explains it as "the expression of a superiority which every Oxford
man is too superior to shew."
So little sense of superiority clouds the brain of most Oxford
men that they are humbly grateful, their whole life through,
for their good fortune in spending three happy years, howsoever
little distinguished, in the most beautiful of all kingdoms of
youth. No city in the world has been so decreed, constructed,
endowed and ordered for the benefit and enjoyment of the boys
who there reach a privileged manhood. The university returns
its own members to parliament and preserves order among the
undergraduates by means of the proctors and their satellites; the
vice-chancellor's court stands between debtor and creditor; and a
member of the _corps diplomatique_ in a foreign capital is hardly
more "extra-territorial" than the undergraduate at Oxford. This is
partly the law and partly the custom of the constitution; but to
the visitor it is less impressive than that the entire economic
and social dispensation should have for object the comfort and
happiness of three thousand men between the ages of eighteen and
twenty-two. The colleges, their gardens and pleasances; the river
and its barges; the theatre and clubs; the shops and streets; all
have been designed on the presumption that Oxford contains no women
and that the men are of an age that never changes.[11] In their
midst there are, indeed, "townees," but even the shops at which
they buy their meat are not suffered to desecrate the beauty of the
High; there are straggling acres of houses in North Oxford, but
they exist in the undergraduate scheme as unwelcome destinations
for a duty call on Sunday afternoons in winter; the undergraduate
horizon is bounded by Christ Church Meadows and the Broad, by
Magdalen Bridge and Carfax; their world consists of those who live
within these limits.
Of the three thousand who for three or four years gloried in that
kingdom, a few did no work at all and, when their days of grace
expired, went down for good or until they had passed the necessary
examinations; those who hoped for a high class in an honour school
perforce worked hard during term and harder in vacation; the
average man of average intelligence, reading a pass school, could
be content with four or six hours' work a day and an untroubled
vacation.
More than six hours is not easy to maintain, for, though the
term is but eight weeks long, a man is living at high pressure
in a low-lying city. Those who had their schools at heart would
get up at half-past seven and keep a chapel at eight, read the
morning paper, breakfast with friends or by themselves and begin
work at nine or ten; on most days they would have lectures or a
"private hour" with their tutors and for the rest of the morning
they worked in their rooms or in the library. At one o'clock the
quadrangle woke to sudden life with men returning from lectures,
men on their way out to luncheon, men in stocks and breeches
assembling at Canterbury Gate to drive in brakes to a meet of the
House beagles. They exchanged the news and badinage of the day,
from the middle of Peck to an attic window, and from one window to
another; the quadrangle emptied and sank again to silence, as they
repaired to the common-room for a light repast of bananas and milk
or toast and honey. And in turn the common room, which had filled
suddenly, as suddenly emptied; within a quarter of an hour all had
dispersed to the football ground or the House barge, a private
gravel tennis-court or the hockey ground; one or two went sailing
on the Upper River, one or two more hacked slowly out of Oxford
for a gallop on Port Meadow or Shotover; and, as every generation
discovered for itself the beauty of the surrounding country and
fell anew under its spell at the whisper of the old unforgettable
names, the pedestrians struck north-west or south-west to "the
warm, green-muffled Cumner Hills", "the stripling Thames at
Bablock-hithe", "Godstow Bridge, when hay-time's here in June",
"the skirts of Bagley Wood" or "Hinksey and its wintry ridge".
Convention and climate ordain that no one in Oxford shall work in
the early afternoon; when the sacred exercise has been taken and
all are refreshed by tea in common room or at home, there is time
for two hours' reading before Hall. After that, a man may go to
the theatre, where he will find a tolerable selection of companies
and of "London successes";[12] he may look in at a club or retire
to finish a belated essay in his rooms; he may dawdle over coffee
in the common room and stroll back with a friend for one of those
endless disputations which clear the head and suggest a new point
of view--raw, paradoxical stuff, it may be, but earnestly argued
and perhaps making up in idealism what it lacked in experience.
Whatever is "universal" in university education comes chiefly
from the men of one's own age and from the distillation of three
thousand minds seething with youth and a new encouragement to
self-expression which had been rigorously withheld at school.[13]
If the scope of reading is limited there, the limitations are
broken down to some extent by the sum of all the reading in all the
public schools. It was in the intimate late hours when some club
had dispersed that one man would talk of Browning's Jewish blood
and reproduce the savage indignation of _Holy Cross Day_; another
would give forth the magic music of Synge's plays; and a generation
which had hitherto escaped the theological preoccupation of the
Victorian era argued Renan and discussed _The Golden Bough_ in
comfort of mind.
IV
If in the pooling of their enthusiasms the men of this vanished
generation advanced even one step towards the universality of
spirit which is the intellectual vision of a university, they
advanced many steps nearer to a social universality than had been
possible at school. Eton, by virtue of its size and repute, is
fed, within the limits of one plane, by the greatest number of
tributaries; but Westminster and Harrow, Winchester, Rugby and
Charterhouse are filled each from its own well-defined source.
At Oxford, in greater or lesser degree, hitherto unfamiliar
types mingled for the first time and, in social and political
debate, encountered the embodiment of what had hitherto been
malevolent abstractions: an Orange land-owner lived over the head
of a rebellious home ruler; the hereditary legislator sat in
Hall beside the radical who expended his eloquence in trying to
abolish the House of Lords. There were Catholics, Presbyterians
and an occasional Jew; rich men, poor men; scholars, dunces;
sceptics and fanatics; prigs and worldlings; incipient swindlers,
congenital debauchees and a vast representation of the vast average
English class which is between rich and poor, which is shrewd
without being subtile, tenacious but practical, self-satisfied
but self-depreciatory, with conservative instincts and radical
initiative.
To all and to each, Oxford smilingly proferred her inexhaustible
tray of _cotillon_ favours. There was and is and, seemingly, always
must be a class debarred by poverty from entering this kingdom;
but, once inside, there is an unmatched equality of opportunity
for rich and poor, exalted and humble, an unprecedented freedom
for each to express his individuality in the choice of his work
and recreation, his friends and life. Though there, as elsewhere,
the deepest pocket commanded the greatest material comfort,
narrow means were no obstacle to the enjoyment and profit which
every man could extract from four years of the most democratic
life that England provided outside the House of Commons; nowhere
was a man taken more ungrudgingly on his merits, nowhere did the
eccentric--were he poser, experimenter or monomaniac--obtain a
better run for his money.
In these days of fifteen years ago, came the first batch of Rhodes
scholars. Nothing but a war will drive the average Englishman
to look at a map; and nothing less than the late war would have
stirred the imagination of the English to concern for the size
and cohesion of the British Empire. Cecil Rhodes had been dead
nearly half a generation before South Africans and Australians,
New Zealanders and Canadians--to name but a few--met together on a
single battle-front; but his vision embraced what the war of 1914
made actual, and he, who confessedly owed more to Oxford than to
any other phase of his career, made Oxford the trial-ground for
the greatest historical experiment in imperial education. With the
effect of Oxford on the Rhodes scholars only a Rhodes scholar is
competent to deal; the influence of the Rhodes scholars on Oxford
was marked. They were the picked men from the universities of the
world; not only from the dominions and colonies of the British
Empire, but from Germany as well, for Rhodes felt that conflict
between the two countries could most surely be avoided by making
their peoples better acquainted. Chosen for general prowess--in
sport, in work, in the popularity and position which they had
attained in their own universities,--they came somewhat older than
the generality in years and much older in experience; they brought
new intellectual standpoints and a deliberate wisdom to leaven the
facile cleverness and omniscience of British Oxford.[14]
Those three or four years resolve themselves into a collection
of exquisite memories in miniature; but, day after day and term
after term, nothing ever happened to shake a man's soul from its
seating. There were glorious parties in college and on the river;
there were great rides and walks; there were splendid disputations.
During Eights Week a man invited his sisters and friends to lunch
with him; shy and self-conscious, he met them at the station and
piloted them informatively through the cathedral and hall, the
cloisters and library and kitchen until it was time to stroll
back to his rooms, where through the flower-boxes and open
windows could be seen cold salmon and roast chicken, meringues,
strawberries-and-cream and cider-cup spread out in monotonous
invitation, where, too, the prudent host had enlisted his most
socially gifted friends to ease the burden of hospitality. Replete
and a trifle weary of so much good behaviour, he and his friends
threaded their way through the crowded Meadows and took up their
position on the barge, returning between second and first division
for tea. Utterly exhausted, he at last drove his patient guests to
the station and returned for dinner and uninterrupted celibacy.[15]
Hardly had he recovered from the social exigencies of Eights Week
than Commemoration was upon him with sterner demands, longer
drawn out. For anxious weeks he debated which balls he would
attend and who should be invited to go with him; parties were
arranged, rooms engaged; and for one, two or three nights he
danced indefatigably from nine till five or six, then shivered in
a wind-swept quadrangle or on the pavement outside the Town Hall
while he surrendered to the undergraduate herd-instinct of being
commemoratively photographed. Then, perhaps, he would go to bed
for a few hours, rising wearily to take part in a picnic on the
Cher and returning in time to dress for the next ball, and the more
conscientious sort--hosts and guests alike--would insist on being
present at the Encænia.[16]
Before Commemoration is over, many were laying their plans for
Henley. After that, the pleasure-lovers went to London for the last
weeks of the season; and, for the serious workers, the coming of
August marked the beginning of a long ten weeks of uninterrupted
reading.
So from term to term and year to year. Every summer carried away
the older friends, every autumn brought a new draft to take their
place. With time came better rooms and perhaps greater dignity of
position; a man worked through the lower offices of various clubs
and succeeded in time to the chair; he woke to find himself a
senior member of the college, setting to freshmen the tone which
had been set to him in his own first year. With abrupt suddenness
he discovered that he must begin looking for digs. out of college;
if he had idled or overspent his allowance, he would perhaps retire
to a distant monastic cell to retrench or work; otherwise he looked
for good rooms near the House and a friend to share them with him.
Life out of college diminishes the sense that a man is a living,
breathing part of a community which wakes to life in hall, common
room and cathedral, if indeed it is not always awake in the
quadrangle. So long as he is back in digs... by midnight, there are
few restrictions on his liberty; he can entertain, he can get up
and go to bed when he likes, he can see as much or as little of the
college as he chooses. And, with comfortable digs.., an excellent
cook and work which swells like a banking cloud as his schools
approach, there are many temptations to stay at home and only
to visit the college for Sunday evening chapel, hall and a club
meeting.
The last year, for those who find time to think, is depressing,
for they are watching the O.U.D.S. or the House Grind for the last
time, and the menace of their final schools throws a gloom over
everything. Some of the subjects are being read for the first time;
others, that seemed to have been mastered two years before, are
now almost wholly forgotten; losing confidence, a man speaks of
himself as "lucky to scrape a fourth," he grows fatalistic and
says that he does not care; and his tutor wisely sends him away for
a few days' holiday and reestablishes his confidence with a word of
praise.
Then for a week he faces his examiners, two papers a day, three
hours for each paper; and at the end, when they have laid him bare,
he cares very little indeed for any other result than that he will
probably never again be compelled to study English political or
constitutional history, political economy and economic history,
political science and European history, a special subject or even a
modern language. The taut nerves become of a sudden very slack.
And then it has to be realised that within a week all will be over.
One last Commemoration. A day or two of unbearable farewells.
Instructions for the packing of books and pictures which he had
unpacked so very lately, yet at the distant other end of his Oxford
career. And then that overwhelming day when a man drives to the
station and, as the train gathers speed, looks for the last time
on Tom Tower. He will come back again, no doubt, but no longer as
a resident undergraduate; the Kingdom of the Young has passed to
another dynasty. In three or four years he has progressed, in age,
from boy to man; but the development has been chiefly intellectual,
and, for all his greater knowledge and experience, he has changed
little in character or essential instincts. The rigour of school
discipline has been relaxed, because it is no longer needed; but
the simple school ideals of honour and loyalty, restraint and
self-control, clean living and hard condition remain unaltered. Had
he chosen to defy opinion and to disdain the protection with which
Oxford surrounds him, the opportunity was at hand for drinking
too much and for getting into debt, for idling and for discarding
the fastidiousness which impels English boys to keep women at
a distance. There are men in every generation who will collect
experience at all costs, but at Oxford they are not regarded with
admiration: the undergraduate who drinks or boasts of his exploits
with women is voted noxious or boring or both.
A month or six weeks after the end of term comes the viva; then the
class lists. In the following October the curtain is rung down for
most, when they meet again--and, perhaps, for the last time--to
receive the grace of their college and to proceed to the degree of
Bachelor of Arts.