An American at Oxford

by John Corbin

In order to combat the monopoly of the colleges, and to build up a body of more serious students without their walls, a new order of "unattached" students was created. The experiment has no doubt been interesting, but it cannot be said that it has revived the glorious democracy and the intellectual enthusiasm of the mediæval university. Few things could be lonelier, or more profitless intellectually, than the lot of the unattached students. Excluded by the force of circumstances from the life of the colleges, they have no more real life of their own than the socially unaffiliated in American universities. They have been forced to imitate the organization of the colleges. They lunch and dine one another as best they can, hold yearly a set of athletic games, and place a boat in the college bumping races. They have thus come to be precisely like any of the colleges, except that they have none of the felicities, social or intellectual, that come from life within walls.

From time to time the introduction of new honor schools is proposed to keep pace with modern learning. A long-standing agitation in favor of a school in modern languages was compromised by the founding of the school in English; but it is not yet downed, and before the century is over may yet rise to smite conservatism. Coupled with this there is an ever-increasing desire to cultivate research. As yet these agitations have had about as much effect as the kindred agitation that led to the rehabilitation of the unattached student.

The Bodleian Library is a treasure chest of the rarest of old books and of unexplored documents; but nothing in the Bod counts for schools, and so the shadow of an undergraduate darkens the door only when he is showing off the university to his sisters—and to other fellows'. When I applied for permission to read, the fact that I wore a commoner's gown, as I was required to by statute while reading there, almost excluded me. If I had been after knowledge useful in the schools, no doubt I should have been obliged to consult a choice collection of well-approved books across the way in the camera of the Radcliffe. In America, a serious student is welcome to range in the stack, and to take such books as he needs to his own rooms. Some few researchers come to the Bodleian from the world without to spend halcyon days beneath the brave old timber roof of Duke Humphrey's Library; but any one used to the freedom of books in America would find very little encouragement to do so. The librarian is probably an eminently serviceable man according to the traditions of the Bodleian; but there are times when he appears to be a grudging autocrat intrenched behind antique rules and regulations. In the Middle Ages it was the custom to chain the books to the shelves, as one may still observe in the quaint old library of Merton College. The modern method at the Bodleian would seem to be a refinement on the custom. And what is not known about the Bodleian in the Bodleian would fill a library almost as large. In the picture gallery hangs a Van Dyck portrait of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a former chancellor of the university, a nephew of Sir Philip Sydney, son of Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and the once reputed patron to whom Shakespeare addressed the first series of his sonnets. The librarian did not know how or when the portrait came into the possession of the University, or whether it was an original; and not being required to know by statute, he did not care to find out, and did not find out.

The crowning absurdity of the educational system is the professors, and here is an Oxford paradox as yet unredeemed by a glimmering of reason. When I wanted assistance as to a thesis on which I was working, my tutor referred me to the Regius Professor of Modern History, who he thought would be more likely than any one else to know about the sources of Elizabethan literature.

Few as are the professors, they are all too many for the needs of Oxford. They are learned and ardent scholars, many of them with a full measure of German training in addition to Oxford culture. But in proportion as they are wise and able they are lifted out of the life of the university. They lecture, to be sure, in the schools; and now and then an undergraduate evades his tutor long enough to hear them. Several young women may be found at their feet—students from Somerville and Lady Margaret. When the subject and the lecturer are popular, residents of the town drop in. But as regards the great mass of undergraduates, wisdom crieth in the streets. The professors are as effectually shelved as ever their learned books will be when the twentieth century is dust. "The university, it is true," Mr. Brodrick admits in his "History of Oxford," "has yet to harmonize many conflicting elements which mar the symmetry of its institutions."

This torpor in which the university lies is no mere matter of accident. I quote from Mr. Gladstone's Romanes Lecture, delivered in 1892:—

"The chief dangers before the English universities are probably two: one that in [cultivating?] research, considered as apart from their teaching office, they should relax and consequently dwindle [as teachers?]; the other that, under pressure from without, they should lean, if ever so little, to that theory of education, which would have it to construct machines of so many horse power rather than to form character, and to rear into true excellence the marvelous creature we call man; which gloats upon success in life, instead of studying to secure that the man shall ever be greater than his work, and never bounded by it, but that his eye shall boldly run—

Along the line of limitless desire."

Few will question the necessity of rising above the sphere of mere science and commercialism; but many will question whether the way to rise is not rather by mastering the genius of the century than by ignoring it. It is scarcely too much to say that the greatest intellectual movement of the nineteenth century, though largely the work of English scientists, has left no mark on Oxford education. If, as Professor Von Holst asserts, the American universities are hybrids, Oxford and Cambridge cannot be called universities at all.

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