Aspects of Modern Oxford, by a Mere Don

by A. D. Godley

Wish my scout wouldn't hide hard things under the mattress.

Noise in quadrangle renewed: 'Daddy wouldn't buy me a Bow-wow,' with variations.... Some one's oak apparently battered with a poker. Ought to get up and go out to stop it....

[VIII--THE UNIVERSITY AS A PLACE OF LEARNED LEISURE.]

'I had been used for thirty years to no interruption

save the tinkling of the dinner-bell and the chapel-bell.'

Essays of Vicesimus Knox.

Standing with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in a luxuriously furnished 'Common Room'--such is Oxford life as summarised by a German visitor, who appears to have been a good deal perplexed, like the outer world in general, by the academic mixture of things ancient and modern, and a host who wore a cap and gown over his evening dress. Certainly the University is a strange medley of contraries. It never seems to be quite clear whether we are going too fast or too slow. We are always reforming something, yet are continually reproached with irrational conservatism. Change and permanence are side by side--permanence that looks as if it could defy time:

'The form remains, the function never dies,'

and yet all the while the change is rapid and complete. Men go down, and are as if they had never been: as is the race of leaves so is that of undergraduates; and so transiently are they linked with the enduring existence of their University, that, except in the case of the minority who have done great deeds on the river or the cricket-field, they either pass immediately out of recollection or else remain only as a dim and distant tradition of bygone ages. An undergraduate's memory is very short. For him the history of the University is comprised in the three or four years of his own residence. Those who came before him and those who come after are alike separated from him by a great gulf; his predecessors are infinitely older, and his successors immeasurably younger. It makes no difference what his relations to them may be in after-life. Jones, who went down in '74, may be an undistinguished country parson or a struggling junior at the Bar; and Brown, who came up in '75, may be a bishop or a Q.C. with his fortune made; but all the same Brown will always regard Jones as belonging to the almost forgotten heroic period before he came up, and Jones, whatever may be his respect for Brown's undoubted talents, must always to a certain extent feel the paternal interest of a veteran watching the development of youthful promise. So complete is the severance of successive generations, that it is hard to see how undergraduate custom and tradition and College characteristics should have a chance of surviving; yet somehow they do manage to preserve an unbroken continuity. Once give a College a good or a bad name, and that name will stick to it. Plant a custom and it will flourish, defying statutes and Royal Commissions. Conservatism is in the air; even convinced Radicals (in politics) cannot escape from it, and are sometimes Tories in matters relating to their University. They will change the constitution of the realm, but will not stand any tampering with the Hebdomadal Council. Whatever be the reason--whether it be Environment or Heredity--Universities go on doing the same things, only in different ways; they retain that indefinable habit of thought which seems to cling to old grey walls and the shade of ancient elms, which the public calls 'academic' when it is only contemptuous, explaining the word as meaning 'provincial with a difference' when it is angry.

BOWLS IN NEW COLLEGE GARDEN. Drawn by Lancelot Speed.

There is the same kind of unalterableness about the few favoured individuals to whom the spirit of the age has allowed a secure and permanent residence in Oxford; a happy class which is now almost limited to Heads of Houses and College servants. You scarcely ever see a scout bearing the outward and visible signs of advancing years; age cannot wither them, nor (it should be added) can custom stale their infinite variety of mis-serving their masters. Perhaps it is they who are the repositories of tradition. And even Fellows contrive to retain some of the characteristics of their more permanent predecessors, whom we have now learnt to regard as abuses. Hard-worked though they are, and precarious of tenure, they are, nevertheless, in some sort imbued with that flavour of humanity and dolce far niente which continues to haunt even a Common Room where Fellows drink nothing but water, and only dine together once a fortnight.