UNDERGRADUATES OF THE PRESENT AND THE PAST
CHAPTER IV
UNDERGRADUATES OF THE PRESENT AND THE PAST
The Present
What a thing it is to be an undergraduate of the University of Oxford! Next to being a great poet or a financier, there is nothing so absolute open to a man. For several years he is the nursling of a great tradition in a fair city: and the memory of it is above his chief joy. His follies are hallowed, his successes exalted, by the dispensation of the place. Surely the very air whispers of wisdom and the beautiful, he thinks—
Planius et melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit!
That time is the one luxury he never regrets. It is a second childhood, as blithe and untroubled as the first, and with this advantage over the first: that it is not only good, but he knows that it is good. What games! what books! what walks! what affections! are his. Time passes, we say, although it is we—like children that see the square fields receding from their swift train—that pass. Yet, with these things in Oxford, he seems to lure time a little way with him[Pg 256] upon the road. The liberty of a man and the license of a child are his together. Of course, he abuses them. He uses them, too. Hence the admirable independence of the undergraduate, which has drawn upon him the excommunication of those whose concern is with the colour and cut of clothes. He is the only true Bohemian, because he cannot help it—does not try to be—and does not know it. He is the true Democrat, and condescension is far less common than servility in his domain. He alone keeps quite inviolate the principle of freedom of speech. It is indeed true that, as anywhere else, fools are exclusive as regards clever men and different kinds of fools; and snobs, as regards all but themselves. But theirs is a rare and lonely life. At Christ Church they have actually a pool, in the centre of their great quadrangle, for the baptism of those who have not learned these fine traditions; it is appropriately called after Mercury, to whom men used to sacrifice pigs, and especially lambs and young goats. And there is no college in Oxford where any but the incompatible are kept apart, and few where that distinction is really preserved. As befits a prince in his own palace, the undergraduate usually dispenses with hypocrisy and secrecy, and thus gives an opportunity to the imaginative stranger. Such an one drew a lurid picture of a horde of wealthy bacchanals, making night hideous with the tormenting of a poor scholar. It was not said whether the sufferer was in the habit of doing nasty and dishonourable things, or had funked at football, or worn ringlets over his collar: it was[Pg 258][Pg 257]
CHRIST CHURCH COLLEGE—TOM QUADRANGLE
The front of the picture is occupied by part of the basin of the fountain, from the centre of which rises a pedestal bearing a figure in bronze of “Mercury” (restored). In reality the figure no longer shows above the water-lilies in the basin, but engravings of views of the Quadrangle in the eighteenth century, in which a figure of Mercury appears, are still to be seen, and the fountain was once called “The Mercury.”