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.