The students, in short black gowns, were seated uncomfortably on benches carved with the names of many generations, and were writing awkwardly on long boards. These were furnished with ink-wells and quill pens, although the students sensibly used fountain pens. I suppose it is somebody's perquisite to supply such things as quills and snuff to the college even if nobody uses them. An American college president told me that he thought there was more graft at Oxford than anywhere else in the world.
If Mr. Schiller had remained in America he would now be lecturing to one or two hundred at a time, largely teachers who had come from all parts of the country expressly to hear his ideas and who would in turn transmit them to their students. But in that room there were only these fifteen boys, many of whom doubtless had no special interest in logic or in Schiller's views of logic and who took his lectures simply because they were required for examination, after which they could be forgotten. I could not help contrasting this scene with the big lecture room at Jena, modern yet satisfying to the esthetic and historic taste, where Eucken's fiery eloquence held men and women gathered from five continents, or with the Collège de France, where Bergson had attracted an even larger and equally cosmopolitan audience. A man in Schiller's position must gain his disciples chiefly through his books, and for a man of Schiller's attractive personality this is a great disadvantage. Print can never take the place of "the spoken word", but to have its effect the spoken word must be widely heard.
The American visitor to Oxford meets a double mystery: how it is that Oxford accomplishes so much with a poor and antiquated plant and how it is that American universities do not accomplish more with their modern and convenient plants. One hates to conclude that plumbing and ventilation are incompatible with high thinking. But if Spencer is right in defining life as the power of adaptation to environment, the Oxford dons are most alive of any human beings. They have shown the adaptability of hermit crabs in fitting themselves into their awkward environment. They somehow manage to make themselves comfortable in buildings that a New York tenement house inspector—who is never regarded as unduly particular—would order torn down. They work contentedly under conditions that would cause a strike in any well-regulated union.
Oxford is the favorite resort of American tourists because it is the most satisfactory of all the sights of Great Britain. The Tower of London and Stratford-on-Avon do not compare with it. They are as disappointing as an extinct volcano. But Oxford is an antiquity in action. Our common feeling in regard to it was best expressed by a lady tourist who was being personally conducted through one of the college quadrangles when a student stuck his head out of a dormer window. "Oh, my! Are these ruins inhabited?" was her delighted exclamation.
That is a characteristic trait of the English, the economical utilization of antiquated buildings and institutions. The House of Lords actually does something, even though what it does is wrong. Westminster Abbey is not a mere mausoleum, like the Paris Panthéon. It is a church where one may worship and hear sermons of decidedly modernistic tone. The French, when they made up their minds that they did not need a King any longer, cut his head off, which was a waste. The English keep their King and make use of him for spectacular and advertising purposes. Oxford is Cluny and Sorbonne in one, a curious combination of old and new, useful and superfluous, progress and reaction, that puzzles and fascinates every American visitor.
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, M.A., D. Sc., Fellow and Senior Tutor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford—to give for once his full name and titles—was born in 1864. While at Rugby he showed decided symptoms of intelligence, so he was picked as a probable winner in the scholastic race and put in training for the classical scholarships. The British turn all things into sport, even war and education, and since public opinion does not allow headmasters to keep racehorses they indulge their sporting instincts by backing their boys for the Blue Ribbon, the Balliol Scholarships. These boys are then given daily doses of classical verse competition; I infer for the same reason that jockeys are fed on gin.
It is curious to see how widely educators differ as to the fundamental principles of their business. The British system is built upon competitions, prizes, and examinations. The American state universities in the days of their pristine purity—I mean by that of course, when I was a student—regarded competition as vicious, prizes as demoralizing, and examinations as an evil to be eliminated if possible. But it ill becomes a pragmatist to condemn a system that works so well as the British, whatever theoretical objections may occur.
Much as Schiller detested making verses in a dead language, he did it so well that he got a Major Exhibition. This gave him three hundred and fifty dollars for five years as well as four hundred and fifty dollars in Exhibitions from Rugby. But it also meant that he had sold himself to run in harness for another four years at Balliol and was obliged to master a philosophy which he already felt to be a fraud. T. H. Green had died just before Schiller came up and had been sainted for the greater glory of Balliol, and it seemed to the tutors good pedagogy to set their pupils to begin the study of philosophy with Green's "Prolegomena to Ethics." Most of the boys confronted with this abstruse introduction came to the conclusion that it was wonderful, but that they had no head for metaphysics because they could not see any sense in it. Schiller very curiously came to the opposite conclusion from the same premise.