(e) Any of the Fine Arts;
(f) Any of the Laws of England;
(g) The rules which guide the Law Courts in estimating the value of human testimony;
(h) The Art of Government and Economics;
(i) The Art of War;
(j) French, German or any Modern Language.
In my discredited trade of a novelist—that is to say, the trade of people who create out of their own brains new things—we have a technique of phrase. Unimportant to the pedant, as are the methods by which we are sometimes able to secure a great, and even grateful public, we still have our little catchwords and there is a certain freemasonry of craft.
One finishes up, it is generally understood, with “a canter down the straight.” Bursting away from the restrictions of the Essay, glad to have finished with an academic convention which says one must write this way and so, let me attempt to crystallize just what this paper means, from my own, and doubtless limited, point of view. It means this.
Upon the sturdy oak, generations old, in which the University may be typified in allegory, a dusty parasite of ivy has been clinging. This parasite, which has clogged the newer shoots from the old tree, is a parasite of the classical and especially of the history don and pedant. Law, Science and Mathematics have entered Oxford as a bright light comes into the dark. Here, all is well. And in regard to the older arts, I think, and many other people who are in the centre of the ferment of change think with me, all is about to be reconstituted in a freer air. It remains as a wonder that past and present undergraduates, the guests of the hotel, remain so individually and cumulatively distinct from the obstructionist section of its managers and landlords.