In these days of fifteen years ago, came the first batch of Rhodes scholars. Nothing but a war will drive the average Englishman to look at a map; and nothing less than the late war would have stirred the imagination of the English to concern for the size and cohesion of the British Empire. Cecil Rhodes had been dead nearly half a generation before South Africans and Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians—to name but a few—met together on a single battle-front; but his vision embraced what the war of 1914 made actual, and he, who confessedly owed more to Oxford than to any other phase of his career, made Oxford the trial-ground for the greatest historical experiment in imperial education. With the effect of Oxford on the Rhodes scholars only a Rhodes scholar is competent to deal; the influence of the Rhodes scholars on Oxford was marked. They were the picked men from the universities of the world; not only from the dominions and colonies of the British Empire, but from Germany as well, for Rhodes felt that conflict between the two countries could most surely be avoided by making their peoples better acquainted. Chosen for general prowess—in sport, in work, in the popularity and position which they had attained in their own universities,—they came somewhat older than the generality in years and much older in experience; they brought new intellectual standpoints and a deliberate wisdom to leaven the facile cleverness and omniscience of British Oxford.[14]
Those three or four years resolve themselves into a collection of exquisite memories in miniature; but, day after day and term after term, nothing ever happened to shake a man's soul from its seating. There were glorious parties in college and on the river; there were great rides and walks; there were splendid disputations. During Eights Week a man invited his sisters and friends to lunch with him; shy and self-conscious, he met them at the station and piloted them informatively through the cathedral and hall, the cloisters and library and kitchen until it was time to stroll back to his rooms, where through the flower-boxes and open windows could be seen cold salmon and roast chicken, meringues, strawberries-and-cream and cider-cup spread out in monotonous invitation, where, too, the prudent host had enlisted his most socially gifted friends to ease the burden of hospitality. Replete and a trifle weary of so much good behaviour, he and his friends threaded their way through the crowded Meadows and took up their position on the barge, returning between second and first division for tea. Utterly exhausted, he at last drove his patient guests to the station and returned for dinner and uninterrupted celibacy.[15]
Hardly had he recovered from the social exigencies of Eights Week than Commemoration was upon him with sterner demands, longer drawn out. For anxious weeks he debated which balls he would attend and who should be invited to go with him; parties were arranged, rooms engaged; and for one, two or three nights he danced indefatigably from nine till five or six, then shivered in a wind-swept quadrangle or on the pavement outside the Town Hall while he surrendered to the undergraduate herd-instinct of being commemoratively photographed. Then, perhaps, he would go to bed for a few hours, rising wearily to take part in a picnic on the Cher and returning in time to dress for the next ball, and the more conscientious sort—hosts and guests alike—would insist on being present at the Encænia.[16]
Before Commemoration is over, many were laying their plans for Henley. After that, the pleasure-lovers went to London for the last weeks of the season; and, for the serious workers, the coming of August marked the beginning of a long ten weeks of uninterrupted reading.
So from term to term and year to year. Every summer carried away the older friends, every autumn brought a new draft to take their place. With time came better rooms and perhaps greater dignity of position; a man worked through the lower offices of various clubs and succeeded in time to the chair; he woke to find himself a senior member of the college, setting to freshmen the tone which had been set to him in his own first year. With abrupt suddenness he discovered that he must begin looking for digs. out of college; if he had idled or overspent his allowance, he would perhaps retire to a distant monastic cell to retrench or work; otherwise he looked for good rooms near the House and a friend to share them with him.
Life out of college diminishes the sense that a man is a living, breathing part of a community which wakes to life in hall, common room and cathedral, if indeed it is not always awake in the quadrangle. So long as he is back in digs... by midnight, there are few restrictions on his liberty; he can entertain, he can get up and go to bed when he likes, he can see as much or as little of the college as he chooses. And, with comfortable digs.., an excellent cook and work which swells like a banking cloud as his schools approach, there are many temptations to stay at home and only to visit the college for Sunday evening chapel, hall and a club meeting.
The last year, for those who find time to think, is depressing, for they are watching the O.U.D.S. or the House Grind for the last time, and the menace of their final schools throws a gloom over everything. Some of the subjects are being read for the first time; others, that seemed to have been mastered two years before, are now almost wholly forgotten; losing confidence, a man speaks of himself as "lucky to scrape a fourth," he grows fatalistic and says that he does not care; and his tutor wisely sends him away for a few days' holiday and reestablishes his confidence with a word of praise.
Then for a week he faces his examiners, two papers a day, three hours for each paper; and at the end, when they have laid him bare, he cares very little indeed for any other result than that he will probably never again be compelled to study English political or constitutional history, political economy and economic history, political science and European history, a special subject or even a modern language. The taut nerves become of a sudden very slack.