THE UNDERGRADUATE THEN AND NOW

How few of us there are to-day who ever devote even the slack hour between tea and “hotters” and Hall to finding out something at least about the Undergraduates who had our rooms two centuries ago. Yet to every man the word Oxford conjures up vast vague shadows from the past which make him as a freshman tread softly and with reverence through the quads and gardens, High Streets and by-streets of the City of Spires. Great names rise up into our minds and fill us with wonder, but the scout knocks at our door with half-cold food and our dreams dissolve into irritated reality. There may come a moment, perhaps, when, with feet at rest upon the mantel-shelf and a straight-grained pipe bubbling in quiet response between our teeth, we are deafening our ears to the call of bed, the slow-flowing conversation drifts by chance to a casual query as to what our predecessors did at the same hour two hundred years ago. Beyond a few more or less unimaginative surmises we remain in ignorance, blissful and uncaring, believing them to be strange-clothed beings of stilted language and curious habits, and at once the talk turns to present and more pleasant topics. We little think that to all intents and purposes we are almost exactly the same as our old-time-brethren.

To-day we row, play cricket, football, tennis, golf; we cut our lectures when we safely can and “binge” at every opportunity. Schools do occupy us, it is true, but as a mere secondary item in the university scheme of things—and rightly so. A degree, however good, does not, by itself, make men of us and teach us how to live. It is the social life of the university which is the real education and which sends us out into the world ready to face anything and everything. By developing our bodies we develop our minds, and in this programme of athletics and sociability we are a replica of our eighteenth-century brethren. They rose about nine, breakfasted at ten, and dallied away the morning with a flute or the latest French comedy. By way of strenuous exercise, necessitated by a climate which was just as evil then as now, they walked, rode, rowed, or skated, and in the evening figured at the Mitre or Tuns where they made merry into the small hours with beer, claret, or punch.

To them schools were much less a source of worry than they are to us, for, beyond attending occasional disputations and an odd lecture or so, when a Don could be persuaded to give one, they obtained their degree by the simple but expensive process of drinking the examiner—usually a hardened toper—under the table overnight. He was then led, in the morning, while still pleasantly fuddled, to the schools, and there, in consideration of a respectable douceur, he signed away the necessary papers with a beaming and self-satisfied smile. They knew nothing of the humours of white ties, dark suits, and a week’s terrible strain to get a First in Honour Mods—before the Finals are even thought of. The shivering crowds waiting in the Hall to be led to the slaughter did not exist in those days. A Trinity man named Skinner, who matriculated in 1790, flung himself at the subject in satirical verse:—

“Enter we next the Public Schools
Where now a death-like stillness rules;
Yet these still walls in days of yore
Back to the streets returned the roar of hundreds....
But since their champion Aristotle
Has been deserted for the bottle
The benches stand like Prebends’ stalls
Lone and deserted ’gainst the walls.”[1]

No sooner have we finished with our public school days, when we are known as boys, and have either scrambled over the “Smalls” hedge with some humility and relief, or else have secured the privilege of lording it in a scholar’s gown, than we instantly become men. We may be anything between eighteen and twenty, but if a sister, brother, or cousin be unwary enough to refer to us as a boy—woe unto him or her! We may pretend that we do not mind, but in our heart of hearts we rejoice in being Oxford “men,” and guard our title jealously. We are not, however, unique in this. It is a habit which has come down to us from the eighteenth century when they were just as jealous of such points of etiquette.

George Colman the younger tells us that he came upon two freshmen of that time who had had a quarrel. Six months before they blacked each other’s eyes at Westminster in the good old British way. Now, however, being Oxford men, they could not descend to such a childish level, but agreed to afford each other “gentlemanly satisfaction.” They may have lacked a certain sense of humour, but it was the right spirit, and it is safe to conclude that they both did well at their respective colleges.The lonely freshman of to-day who has no friends already in residence wanders round just as nervously and makes the same faux pas as did his predecessors. It takes him just as long to find his feet and settle down and make friends. Exactly in the same way also if he knows men already up he is welcomed by them, invited to heavy breakfasts and put right on matters of etiquette: such as never by any chance to wear square and gown unless absolutely compelled to—and all the other minutiÆ which are of such importance. In the eighteenth century a freshman was taken by his senior friends to the Mitre and sat in front of a bowl of punch with brown toast bobbing in it. He heard sonnets recited to the eyelashes of Sylvia. He was taught to drink on his knees to Phyllis or Chloe, or some other fair female of the moment. He was taken to the barber’s and shown how to wear a wig instead of his own hair. In fact, his feet were set in the proper path then in just the same friendly spirit as now.

They had their clubs and societies at which, in the intervals of drinking, they indicted Latin poems or discussed some important political question where we, over mulled claret and other comestibles, read papers on “The Abolition of the Halfpenny Press,” or “The Glories of Tariff Reform.” They had big dinners, and tried to find their way home in the small hours. We have our fresher’s wines and bump suppers in which the whole college participates with the sole object of enjoying good wine and destroying good furniture, and we crawl home, if we are outside college, through the same streets. To-day we have the “pi” man who sternly refuses to countenance such evil things as fresher’s wines; who has signed the pledge and eschews tobacco. If he is compelled by an outraged band of senior men to lend his presence against his better judgment, and is led out from a room in a state of DorÉ-like chaos, he becomes uproarious on a glass of water and two bananas, and writes home to his mother that his bill for repairs is enormous owing to his bravery in being a martyr to his principles, and that drunkenness is on the increase among the Undergraduates. All the same he thoroughly enjoys himself, and in time wears off rough corners and learns how to keep his vows without any objectionable fanfare. At the end of the eighteenth century a man of this kidney named Crosse wrote to his mother: “Oxford is a perfect hell upon earth. What chance is there for an unfortunate lad just come from school with no one to watch and care for him—no guide? I often saw my tutor carried off perfectly intoxicated.” I can see the man crouching in a dark corner of the quad appalled at the sight of his fellows dancing round a bonfire, while his tutor rushes by on the arms of a festive crowd in full rejoicing at some college triumph. It would be interesting to ascertain Crosse’s views at the end of his university career. He remained, however, in the obscurity of mediocrity.

Our trousseau when we first appear at the university consists of modest socks and humble waistcoats, and ties which make no claim to originality or even to smartness. They are content to be merely useful and to fulfil their appointed functions. But does not every parent learn subsequently, with dreadful results to his peace of mind, how after our first month we make our way unerringly to the tailors and clothiers, and there with deadly earnestness absorb colour schemes which cry a loud challenge to Joseph’s coat? Our waistcoats are dreams,—sometimes nightmares; the blending of harmony between shirt, tie, and socks is as perfect as the rainbow. Our hair, which used to be parted carelessly down one side, now disdains partings and goes straight back in one beautiful Magdalen sweep. Our trousers are thrown at the scout’s head as a gift unless they be of unparalleled width and of exceptional crease.This tendency to burst forth into strange and variegated garments in token of our emancipation from apron strings was just as strong in the old days. The sons of country farmers came trooping into Oxford, their clouted shoes thick with good red earth, in linsey wolsey coats, with greasy, uncombed heads of hair flapping in the wind. Their stockings were of coarse yarn, and they knew nothing better than to have long muslin neckcloths run with red at the ends. But they soon realised the contempt in which they were held for this dull chrysalis-like appearance. After a few weeks these shamefaced clodhoppers sneaked into the side door of the barbers’ shops to emerge proudly by the front entrance in a bob wig. Their clouted shoes were relegated to young brothers, and they wore new ones—Oxford cut. Their yarn stockings gave place to worsted, until, after a very short interval between their arrival and their settling down, they blushed out like butterflies in tye wigs and ruffles and silk gowns. The “blood” of that period, or, as the term then was, the “smart,” or the “buck of the first head,” was distinguished when he aired his person, Amhurst told us, “by a stiff silk gown which rustles in the wind as he struts along; a flaxen tye wig, or sometimes a long natural one which reaches down below his rump; a broad bully cock’d hat, or a square cap of above twice the usual size; white stockings, thin Spanish leather shoes; his cloaths lined with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as well as at the wrists. Besides all which marks, he has a delicate jaunt in his gait, and smells philosophically of essence.”

How his direct descendant, the Bullingdon man, must envy him his magnificent opportunities of making a brave show! Not for him the silk gown, the bully cocked hat. The best he can do in imitation is the amazing dinner jacket which he sometimes sports at the theatre, under which one finds not the accepted form of dress shirt but a peculiar form of abortion which is neatly ruffled at “bosom and wrists.” In place of the Spanish leather shoes the last word to-day is apparently buckskin. The “delicate jaunt in the gait” has been retained—the result being caused now by a union of “Eton slouch” and “Oxford manner.” The head still smells of essence—honey and flowers at Hatt’s, brilliantine at Martyr’s. These great-minded people think alike not only in point of dress but of the manner of killing time. “The Lownger” summed up the process as carried out in the eighteenth century—

“I rise about nine, get to breakfast by ten,
Blow a tune on my flute, or perhaps make a pen,
Read a play till eleven or cock my lac’d hat,
Then step to my neighbour’s, till dinner to chat.
Dinner over to Tom’s or to James’s I go,
The news of the town so impatient to know,
While Low, Locke and Newton and all the rum race
That talk of their Modes, their ellipses and space,
The Seat of the Soul and new Systems on high,
In Halls as abstruse as their mysteries lie.
From the coffee-house then I to Tennis away,
And at five I post back to my College to pray,
I sup before eight and secure from all duns,
Undauntedly march to the Mitre or Tuns,
Where in Punch or good Claret my sorrows I drown,
And toss off a bowl to the best in the town.
At one in the morning I call what’s to pay?
Then home to my College I stagger away.
Thus I tope all the night as I trifle all day.”

Every one knows the various processes of slacking at the present time, so that there is no need for detail. But in essence the method is the same, and the result also. Our lunches at the Cherwell Hotel, at the riverside inns at Iffley and Abingdon; our “Grinds”; our slacking on the river in summer term—all these were done two centuries ago, and, just as some of the more energetic of us seek to immortalise these doings by contributing poems and articles to the ’varsity papers, so did the Undergraduates then send their sonnets and Latin verses to The Student, the Oxford Magazine, and Jackson’s Oxford Journal. In place of the musical comedy lady, whose silvery laughter floats down wind to-day, the Oxford toast flaunted it right merrily in the old days. The gownsmen’s tobacco accounts then amounted to quite as much as ours do, and they wrote home for further supplies of pocket money in almost the identical terms which we use to-day. Yesterday’s and to-day’s Oxford men are one and the same. Oxford herself and her Dons are changed, but the Undergraduate goes on doing and thinking the same things in the same way, and when he goes down now he feels very much as felt the eighteenth-century poet who, also down, sang:—

“Could Ovid, deathless bard, forbear,
Confin’d by Scythia’s frozen plains,
Cease to desire his native air
In softest elegiac strains?
Cursed with the town no more can I
For Oxford’s meadow cease to sigh....
Can I, while mem’ry lasts, forget
Oxford, thy silver rolling stream,
Thy silent walks and cool retreat
Where first I sucked the love of fame?
E’en now the thought inspires my breast
And lulls my troubled soul to rest.”

View of S^t. Mary’s Church & Radcliffe Library.