distinction between the faculties than the traditionary ideal, handed
down through a long sequence of students, and getting rounder and more
featureless at each successive session. The plague of uniformity has
descended on the College. Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions
of men) now require their faculty and character hung round their neck on
a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare's theatre. And in the midst of
all this weary sameness, not the least common feature is the gravity of
every face. No more does the merry medical run eagerly in the clear
winter morning up the rugged sides of Arthur's Seat, and hear the church
bells begin and thicken and die away below him among the gathered smoke
of the city. He will not break Sunday to so little purpose. He no longer
finds pleasure in the mere output of his surplus energy. He husbands his
strength, and lays out walks, and reading, and amusement with deep
consideration, so that he may get as much work and pleasure out of his
body as he can, and waste none of his energy on mere impulse, or such
flat enjoyment as an excursion in the country.
See the quadrangle in the interregnum of classes, in those two or three
minutes when it is full of passing students, and we think you will admit
that, if we have not made it "an habitation of dragons," we have at
least transformed it into "a court for owls." Solemnity broods heavily
over the enclosure; and wherever you seek it, you will find a dearth of
merriment, an absence of real youthful enjoyment. You might as well try
"To move wild laughter in the throat of death"
as to excite any healthy stir among the bulk of this staid company.
The studious congregate about the doors of the different classes,
debating the matter of the lecture, or comparing note-books. A reserved
rivalry sunders them. Here are some deep in Greek particles: there,
others are already inhabitants of that land
"Where entity and quiddity,
Like ghosts of defunct bodies fly--
Where Truth in person does appear
Like words congealed in northern air."
But none of them seem to find any relish for their studies--no pedantic
love of this subject or that lights up their eyes--science and learning
are only means for a livelihood, which they have considerately embraced
and which they solemnly pursue. "Labour's pale priests," their lips seem
incapable of laughter, except in the way of polite recognition of
professorial wit. The stains of ink are chronic on their meagre fingers.
They walk like Saul among the asses.
The dandies are not less subdued. In 1824 there was a noisy dapper
dandyism abroad. Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial--a
matter of white greatcoats and loud voices--strangely different from the
stately frippery that is rife at present. These men are out of their
element in the quadrangle. Even the small remains of boisterous humour,
which still clings to any collection of young men, jars painfully on
their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a hasty retreat to resume
their perfunctory march along Princes Street. Flirtation is to them a
great social duty, a painful obligation, which they perform on every
occasion in the same chill official manner, and with the same
commonplace advances, the same dogged observance of traditional
behaviour. The shape of their raiment is a burden almost greater than
they can bear, and they halt in their walk to preserve the due
adjustment of their trouser-knees, till one would fancy he had mixed in
a procession of Jacobs. We speak, of course, for ourselves; but we would
as soon associate with a herd of sprightly apes as with these gloomy
modern beaux. Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines, even our
Brummels, should have left their mantles upon nothing more amusing!
Nor are the fast men less constrained. Solemnity, even in dissipation,
is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with a perverse
seriousness, a systematic rationalism of wickedness that would have
surprised the simpler sinners of old. Some of these men whom we see
gravely conversing on the steps have but a slender acquaintance with
each other. Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins
of depravity; and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up their
items of transgression, and give an abstract of their downward progress
for approval and encouragement. These folk form a freemasonry of their
own. An oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship. Once they
hear a man swear, it is wonderful how their tongues loosen and their
bashful spirits take enlargement under the consciousness of brotherhood.
There is no folly, no pardoning warmth of temper about them; they are as
steady-going and systematic in their own way as the studious in theirs.
Not that we are without merry men. No. We shall not be ungrateful to
those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter, whose active feet in the
"College Anthem" have beguiled so many weary hours and added a pleasant
variety to the strain of close attention. But even these are too
evidently professional in their antics. They go about cogitating puns
and inventing tricks. It is their vocation, Hal. They are the gratuitous
jesters of the class-room; and, like the clown when he leaves the stage,
their merriment too often sinks as the bell rings the hour of liberty,
and they pass forth by the Post-Office, grave and sedate, and meditating
fresh gambols for the morrow.
This is the impression left on the mind of any observing student by too
many of his fellows. They seem all frigid old men; and one pauses to
think how such an unnatural state of matters is produced. We feel
inclined to blame for it the unfortunate absence of _University feeling_
which is so marked a characteristic of our Edinburgh students.
Academical interests are so few and far between--students, as students,
have so little in common, except a peevish rivalry--there is such an
entire want of broad college sympathies and ordinary college
friendships, that we fancy that no University in the kingdom is in so
poor a plight. Our system is full of anomalies. A, who cut B whilst he
was a shabby student, curries sedulously up to him and cudgels his
memory for anecdotes about him when he becomes the great so-and-so. Let
there be an end of this shy, proud reserve on the one hand, and this
shuddering fine ladyism on the other; and we think we shall find both
ourselves and the College bettered. Let it be a sufficient reason for
intercourse that two men sit together on the same benches. Let the great
A be held excused for nodding to the shabby B in Princes Street, if he
can say, "That fellow is a student." Once this could be brought about,
we think you would find the whole heart of the University beat faster.
We think you would find a fusion among the students, a growth of common
feelings, an increasing sympathy between class and class, whose
influence (in such a heterogeneous company as ours) might be of
incalculable value in all branches of politics and social progress. It
would do more than this. If we could find some method of making the
University a real mother to her sons--something beyond a building of
class-rooms, a Senatus and a lottery of somewhat shabby prizes--we
should strike a death-blow at the constrained and unnatural attitude of
our Society. At present we are not a united body, but a loose gathering
of individuals, whose inherent attraction is allowed to condense them
into little knots and coteries. Our last snowball riot read us a plain
lesson on our condition. There was no party spirit--no unity of
interests. A few, who were mischievously inclined, marched off to the
College of Surgeons in a pretentious file; but even before they reached
their destination the feeble inspiration had died out in many, and their
numbers were sadly thinned. Some followed strange gods in the direction
of Drummond Street, and others slunk back to meek good-boyism at the
feet of the Professors. The same is visible in better things. As you
send a man to an English University that he may have his prejudices
rubbed off, you might send him to Edinburgh that he may have them
ingrained--rendered indelible--fostered by sympathy into living
principles of his spirit. And the reason of it is quite plain. From this
absence of University feeling it comes that a man's friendships are
always the direct and immediate results of these very prejudices. A
common weakness is the best master of ceremonies in our quadrangle: a
mutual vice is the readiest introduction. The studious associate with
the studious alone--the dandies with the dandies. There is nothing to
force them to rub shoulders with the others; and so they grow day by day
more wedded to their own original opinions and affections. They see
through the same spectacles continually. All broad sentiments, all real
catholic humanity expires; and the mind gets gradually stiffened into
one position--becomes so habituated to a contracted atmosphere, that it
shudders and withers under the least draught of the free air that
circulates in the general field of mankind.
Specialism in Society then, is, we think, one cause of our present
state. Specialism in study is another. We doubt whether this has ever
been a good thing since the world began; but we are sure it is much
worse now than it was. Formerly, when a man became a specialist, it was
out of affection for his subject. With a somewhat grand devotion he left
all the world of Science to follow his true love; and he contrived to
find that strange pedantic interest which inspired the man who
"Settled _Hoti's_ business--let it be--
Properly based _Oun_--
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic _D_
Dead from the waist down."
Nowadays it is quite different. Our pedantry wants even the saving
clause of Enthusiasm. The election is now matter of necessity and not of
choice. Knowledge is now too broad a field for your Jack-of-all-Trades;
and, from beautifully utilitarian reasons, he makes his choice, draws
his pen through a dozen branches of study, and behold--John the
Specialist. That this is the way to be wealthy we shall not deny; but we
hold that it is _not_ the way to be healthy or wise. The whole mind
becomes narrowed and circumscribed to one "punctual spot" of knowledge.
A rank unhealthy soil breeds a harvest of prejudices. Feeling himself
above others in his one little branch--in the classification of
toadstools, or Carthaginian history--he waxes great in his own eyes and
looks down on others. Having all his sympathies educated in one way,
they die out in every other; and he is apt to remain a peevish, narrow,
and intolerant bigot. Dilettante is now a term of reproach; but there is
a certain form of dilettantism to which no one can object. It is this
that we want among our students. We wish them to abandon no subject
until they have seen and felt its merit--to act under a general interest
in all branches of knowledge, not a commercial eagerness to excel in
one.
In both these directions our sympathies are constipated. We are apostles
of our own caste and our own subject of study, instead of being, as we
should, true men and _loving_ students. Of course both of these could be
corrected by the students themselves; but this is nothing to the
purpose: it is more important to ask whether the Senatus or the body of
alumni could do nothing towards the growth of better feeling and wider
sentiments. Perhaps in another paper we may say something upon this
head.
One other word, however, before we have done. What shall we be when we
grow really old? Of yore, a man was thought to lay on restrictions and
acquire new deadweight of mournful experience with every year, till he
looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse and freedom. We
please ourselves with thinking that it cannot be so with us. We would
fain hope that, as we have begun in one way, we may end in another; and
that when we _are_ in fact the octogenarians that we _seem_ at present,
there shall be no merrier men on earth. It is pleasant to picture us,
sunning ourselves in Princes Street of a morning, or chirping over our
evening cups, with all the merriment that we wanted in youth.
III
DEBATING SOCIETIES
A debating society is at first somewhat of a disappointment. You do not
often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his pebbles in the same room
with you; or, even if you do, you will probably think the performance
little to be admired. As a general rule, the members speak shamefully
ill. The subjects of debate are heavy; and so are the fines. The Ballot
Question--oldest of dialectic nightmares--is often found astride of a
somnolent sederunt. The Greeks and Romans, too, are reserved as sort of
_general-utility_ men, to do all the dirty work of illustration; and
they fill as many functions as the famous waterfall scene at the
"Princess's," which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in
Peru, a haunt of German robbers, and a peaceful vale in the Scottish
borders. There is a sad absence of striking argument or real lively
discussion. Indeed, you feel a growing contempt for your fellow-members;
and it is not until you rise yourself to hawk and hesitate and sit
shamefully down again, amid eleemosynary applause, that you begin to
find your level and value others rightly. Even then, even when failure
has damped your critical ardour, you will see many things to be laughed
at in the deportment of your rivals.
Most laughable, perhaps, are your indefatigable strivers after
eloquence. They are of those who "pursue with eagerness the phantoms of
hope," and who, since they expect that "the deficiencies of last
sentence will be supplied by the next," have been recommended by Dr.
Samuel Johnson to "attend to the History of Rasselas, Prince of
Abyssinia." They are characterised by a hectic hopefulness. Nothing
damps them. They rise from the ruins of one abortive sentence, to launch
forth into another with unabated vigour. They have all the manner of an
orator. From the tone of their voice, you would expect a splendid
period--and lo! a string of broken-backed, disjointed clauses, eked out
with stammerings and throat-clearings. They possess the art (learned
from the pulpit) of rounding an uneuphonious sentence by dwelling on a
single syllable--of striking a balance in a top-heavy period by
lengthening out a word into a melancholy quaver. Withal, they never
cease to hope. Even at last, even when they have exhausted all their
ideas, even after the would-be peroration has finally refused to
perorate, they remain upon their feet with their mouths open, waiting
for some further inspiration, like Chaucer's widow's son in the
dung-hole, after
"His throat was kit unto the nekke bone,"
in vain expectation of that seed that was to be laid upon his tongue,
and give him renewed and clearer utterance.
These men may have something to say, if they could only say it--indeed
they generally have; but the next class are people who, having nothing
to say, are cursed with a facility and an unhappy command of words, that
makes them the prime nuisances of the society they affect. They try to
cover their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality of delivery.
They look triumphantly round the room, as if courting applause, after a
torrent of diluted truism. They talk in a circle, harping on the same
dull round of argument, and returning again and again to the same remark
with the same sprightliness, the same irritating appearance of novelty.
After this set, any one is tolerable; so we shall merely hint at a few
other varieties. There is your man who is pre-eminently conscientious,
whose face beams with sincerity as he opens on the negative, and who
votes on the affirmative at the end, looking round the room with an air
of chastened pride. There is also the irrelevant speaker, who rises,
emits a joke or two, and then sits down again, without ever attempting
to tackle the subject of debate. Again, we have men who ride
pick-a-back on their family reputation, or, if their family have none,
identify themselves with some well-known statesman, use his opinions,
and lend him their patronage on all occasions. This is a dangerous plan,
and serves oftener, I am afraid, to point a difference than to adorn a
speech.
But alas! a striking failure may be reached without tempting Providence
by any of these ambitious tricks. Our own stature will be found high
enough for shame. The success of three simple sentences lures us into a
fatal parenthesis in the fourth, from whose shut brackets we may never
disentangle the thread of our discourse. A momentary flush tempts us
into a quotation; and we may be left helpless in the middle of one of
Pope's couplets, a white film gathering before our eyes, and our kind
friends charitably trying to cover our disgrace by a feeble round of
applause. _Amis lecteurs_, this is a painful topic. It is possible that
we too, we, the "potent, grave, and reverend" editor, may have suffered
these things, and drunk as deep as any of the cup of shameful failure.
Let us dwell no longer on so delicate a subject.
In spite, however, of these disagreeables, I should recommend any
student to suffer them with Spartan courage, as the benefits he receives
should repay him an hundredfold for them all. The life of the debating
society is a handy antidote to the life of the class-room and
quadrangle. Nothing could be conceived more excellent as a weapon
against many of those _peccant humours_ that we have been railing
against in the jeremiad of our last "College Paper"--particularly in the
field of intellect. It is a sad sight to see our heather-scented
students, our boys of seventeen, coming up to College with determined
views--_roues_ in speculation--having gauged the vanity of philosophy or
learned to shun it as the middle-man of heresy--a company of determined,
deliberate opinionists, not to be moved by all the sleights of logic.
What have such men to do with study? If their minds are made up
irrevocably, why burn the "studious lamp" in search of further
confirmation? Every set opinion I hear a student deliver I feel a
certain lowering of my regard. He who studies, he who is yet employed in
groping for his premises, should keep his mind fluent and sensitive,
keen to mark flaws, and willing to surrender untenable positions. He
should keep himself teachable, or cease the expensive farce of being
taught. It is to further this docile spirit that we desire to press the
claims of debating societies. It is as a means of melting down this
museum of premature petrifactions into living and impressionable soul
that we insist on their utility. If we could once prevail on our
students to feel no shame in avowing an uncertain attitude towards any
subject, if we could teach them that it was unnecessary for every lad to
have his _opinionette_ on every topic, we should have gone a far way
towards bracing the intellectual tone of the coming race of thinkers;
and this it is which debating societies are so well fitted to perform.
We there meet people of every shade of opinion, and make friends with
them. We are taught to rail against a man the whole session through, and
then hob-a-nob with him at the concluding entertainment. We find men of
talent far exceeding our own, whose conclusions are widely different
from ours; and we are thus taught to distrust ourselves. But the best
means of all towards catholicity is that wholesome rule which some folk
are most inclined to condemn,--I mean the law of _obliged speeches_.
Your senior member commands; and you must take the affirmative or the
negative, just as suits his best convenience. This tends to the most
perfect liberality. It is no good hearing the arguments of an opponent,
for in good verity you rarely follow them; and even if you do take the
trouble to listen, it is merely in a captious search for weaknesses.
This is proved, I fear, in every debate; when you hear each speaker
arguing out his own prepared _specialite_ (he never intended speaking,
of course, until some remarks of, etc.), arguing out, I say, his own
_coached-up_ subject without the least attention to what has gone
before, as utterly at sea about the drift of his adversary's speech as
Panurge when he argued with Thaumaste, and merely linking his own
prelection to the last by a few flippant criticisms. Now, as the rule
stands, you are saddled with the side you disapprove, and so you are
forced, by regard for your own fame, to argue out, to feel with, to
elaborate completely, the case as it stands against yourself; and what a
fund of wisdom do you not turn up in this idle digging of the vineyard!
How many new difficulties take form before your eyes? how many
superannuated arguments cripple finally into limbo, under the glance of
your enforced eclecticism!
Nor is this the only merit of Debating Societies. They tend also to
foster taste, and to promote friendship between University men. This
last, as we have had occasion before to say, is the great requirement of
our student life; and it will therefore be no waste of time if we devote
a paragraph to this subject in its connection with Debating Societies.
At present they partake too much of the nature of a _clique._ Friends
propose friends, and mutual friends second them, until the society
degenerates into a sort of family party. You may confirm old
acquaintances, but you can rarely make new ones. You find yourself in
the atmosphere of your own daily intercourse. Now, this is an
unfortunate circumstance, which it seems to me might readily be
rectified. Our Principal has shown himself so friendly towards all
College improvements that I cherish the hope of seeing shortly realised
a certain suggestion, which is not a new one with me, and which must
often have been proposed and canvassed heretofore--I mean, a real
_University Debating Society_, patronised by the Senatus, presided over
by the Professors, to which every one might gain ready admittance on
sight of his matriculation ticket, where it would be a favour and not a
necessity to speak, and where the obscure student might have another
object for attendance besides the mere desire to save his fines: to wit,
the chance of drawing on himself the favourable consideration of his
teachers. This would be merely following in the good tendency, which
has been so noticeable during all this session, to increase and multiply
student societies and clubs of every sort. Nor would it be a matter of
much difficulty. The united societies would form a nucleus: one of the
class-rooms at first, and perhaps afterwards the great hall above the
library, might be the place of meeting. There would be no want of
attendance or enthusiasm, I am sure; for it is a very different thing to
speak under the bushel of a private club on the one hand, and, on the
other, in a public place, where a happy period or a subtle argument may
do the speaker permanent service in after life. Such a club might end,
perhaps, by rivalling the "Union" at Cambridge or the "Union" at Oxford.
IV
THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS[36]
It is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our whole Society
by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius,--that our climate
is essentially wet. A mere arbitrary distinction, like the
walking-swords of yore, might have remained the symbol of foresight and
respectability, had not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island
pointed the inclination of Society to another exponent of those virtues.
A ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a string of medals may prove a
person's courage; a title may prove his birth; a professorial chair his
study and acquirement; but it is the habitual carriage of the umbrella
that is the stamp of Respectability. The umbrella has become the
acknowledged index of social position.