In dealing with University Education Punch maintained his attitude of a moderate reformer. Keble College, Oxford, dates from 1870; in 1878 Punch twice over displays a keen hostility to the Anglican spirit of its founders and the "gingerbread and gilt" of Butterfield's architecture. He seizes the occasion to belittle Keble's poetry, to attack Pusey, Burgon and Liddon, and to describe the college in the following contemptuous quatrain:—
Half withdrawn in ways ascetic,
Half with modern notions stirring;
Half athletic, half æsthetic,
Neither fish, flesh nor red herring.
Punch did not share the late Canon Liddon's pessimism over the new Science degree at Oxford in 1879. Liddon is quoted as saying that without the habits of exactness and precision acquired by classical studies it was impossible to reach the higher characteristics of an educated man. The argument was naturally resented by those who maintained that "exactness and precision" were precisely the qualities inculcated by scientific training, and in an ironical dialogue Punch derides specialization as compared with the "humanities." In 1885 the neglect of English literature at the older Universities is satirized in the picture of the undergraduate reading out his illiterate letter, in which the first and third persons are hopelessly mixed up.
In 1886 the spread of free education to the Universities is foreshadowed in a description of the Slade Professor at Oxford lecturing to a mixed audience of coal-heavers and undergraduates; and the "Progressists' Calendar" indicates a revolt of Ratepayers against their new burdens. In the same year the "Studies from Punch's Studio" include a portrait of the new type of University don. "Wyckham of Jude's," who displays much versatile energy and a wide range of interests—athletics, music, philosophy, Browning and psychical research—ultimately goes to Australia as a Professor of Greek. The reference to "Eleutheria Hall" foreshadows Ruskin College, which was founded in 1899, and in other ways Punch's fancy portraiture illustrates the changes which had come over the spirit of Oxford's dream. We note, for example, the allusion to the new cosmopolitanism—the invasion of foreigners, white and coloured, anticipating the time some thirty years later which gave birth to one of the best of modern Oxford anecdotes. A film was being exhibited showing a large canoe manned by Hawaiian natives, whereon a voice arose from the audience, "Well rowed, Balliol!"
The Value of Modern Languages
The proposal, since realized, to introduce Agriculture as a subject for study at Oxford is jocularly treated early in 1887 in the form of a diary of a candidate who is ploughed for his unorthodox views on potato culture. As for modern languages, the advantages of a foreign education—social and artistic as well as commercial—are excellently summed up in the same year in Du Maurier's picture of the industrious and accomplished young man from Hamburg, who is not only a skilled pianist but can speak six languages, live on a pound a week, work eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and do without a holiday!
