An American At Oxford Part 7

The importance of the university examinations is thus proportionate to their rarity. The examiners are chosen from the best available members of the teaching force of the university; they are paid a very considerable salary, and the term of service is of considerable length. The preparation for the examination, at least as regards honor men, has a significance impossible under our system. Matters of fact are regarded mainly as determining whether a man shall or shall not get his degree; the cla.s.s he receives--there are four cla.s.ses--depends on his grasp of facts and upon the apt.i.tude of his way of writing. No man can get either a first or a second cla.s.s whose knowledge has not been a.s.similated into his vitals, and who has not attained in some considerable degree the art of expression in language.

One of the incidents of reading is a set of examinations set by the colleges severally. They take place three times a year, at the end of each term, and are called collections--apparently from the fact that at this time certain college fees used to be collected from the students. The papers are set by the dons, and as is the case with all tutorial exercises, the results have nothing at all to do with the cla.s.s a man receives in the public examinations--mods and finals. I was surprised to find that it was rather the rule to crib; and my inquiries disclosed a very characteristic state of affairs. One man, who was as honorable in all respects as most fellows, related how he had been caught cribbing. His tutor took the crib and examined it carefully. "Quite right," he said. "In fact, excellent. Don't be at any pains to conceal it. By the finals, of course, you will have to carry all these things in your head; at present, all we want to know is how well you can write an examination paper." The emphasis as to the necessity of knowing how to write was quite as genuine as the sarcasm. These examinations have a further interest to Americans. They are probably a debased survival of examinations which in centuries past were a police regulation to test a student's diligence, and thus had some such relation to a degree as our hour examinations, midyears, and finals. In other words, they suggest a future utility for our present midyears and finals, if ever a genuine honor examination is made requisite for an American honor degree.

For the greater part of his course, an undergraduate's reading is by no means portentous. It was Dr. Johnson, if I am not mistaken, whose aim was "five good hours a day." At Oxford, this is the maximum which even a solid reading man requires of himself. During term time most men do much less, for here is another of the endlessly diverting Oxford paradoxes: pa.s.sman and cla.s.sman alike aim to do most of their reading in vacations. As usual, a kernel of common sense may be found.

If the climate of England is as little favorable to a strenuous intellectual life as it is to strenuous athleticisms, the climate of Oxford is the climate of England to the _n_th power. A man's intellectual machinery works better at home in the country. And even as the necessity of relaxation is greater at Oxford, so is the chance of having fun and of making good friends--of growing used to the ways of the world of men. The months at the university are the heyday of life. The home friends and the home sports are the same yesterday and forever. The university clearly recognizes all this. It rigidly requires a man to reside at Oxford a certain definite time before graduation; but how and when he studies and is examined, it leaves to his own free choice. A man reads enough at Oxford to keep in the current of tutorial instruction, and to get on the trail of the books to be wrestled with in vacation.

V

THE EXAMINATION

When mods and finals approach, the tune is altered. Weeks and months together the fellows dig and dig, morning, noon, and night. All sport and recreation is now regarded only as sustaining the vital forces for the ordeal. Sometimes, in despair at the distractions of Oxford life, knots of fellow sufferers form reading parties, gain permission to take a house together in the country, and draw up a code of terrible penalties against the man who suggests a turn at whist, the forbidden cup, or a trip to town. From the simplest tutorial cram-book to the profoundest available monograph, no page is left unturned. And this is only half. The motto of Squeers is altered. When a man knows a thing, he goes and writes it. Pa.s.sages apt for quotation are learned by rote; phrases are polished until they are luminous; periods are premeditated; paragraphs and sections prevised. An apt epigram turns up in talk or in reading--the wary student jots it down, polishes it to a point, and keeps it in ambush to dart it at this or that possible question. One man I knew was electrified with Chaucer's description of the Sergeant of the Law,--

No wher so bisy a man as he ther nas, And yet he semed bisier than he was;--

and fell into despair because he could not think of any historical personage in his subject-matter to whom it might aptly apply. On the other hand, there was Alfred the Great, whose character was sure to be asked for. Did I know any line of Chaucer that would hit off Alfred the Great? So unusual to quote Chaucer.

All this sort of thing has, of course, its limits. In the last days of preparation, the brains are few that do not reel under their weight of sudden knowledge; the minds are rare that are not dazzled by their own unaccustomed brilliance. The superlatively trained athlete knocks off for a day or two before an important contest--and perhaps has a dash at the flesh-pots by way of relaxing tension from the snapping point.

So does the over-read examinee. He goes home to his sisters and his aunts, and to all the soothing wholesomeness of English country life.

And then that terrible week of incessant examinations! All the facts and any degree of style will fail to save a man unless he has every resource ready at command. No athletic contest, perhaps no battle, could be a severer test of courage. Life does not depend upon the examination, but a living may. In America, degrees are more and more despised; but in England, it still pays to disarrange the alphabet at the end of one's name, or to let it be known to a prospective employer that one is a first-cla.s.s honor man. The nature of the young graduate's employment and his salary too have a pretty close correspondence with his cla.s.s at graduation. If he can add a blue to a first, the world is his oyster. The magnitude of the issue makes the examinee--or breaks him. Brilliant and laborious students too often come off with a bare third, and happy audacity has as often brought the careless a first. It may seem that the ordeal is unnecessarily severe; but even here the reason may be found, if it be only granted that the aim of a university is to turn out capable men. The honor examination requires some knowledge, more address, and most of all pluck--pluck or be plucked, as the Cambridge phrase is; and these things in this order are what count in the life of the British Empire.

VI

OXFORD QUALITIES AND THEIR DEFECTS

Under the German-American system, the main end is scholarly training.

Our graduates are apt to have the Socratic virtue of knowing how little they know--and perhaps not much besides. Even for the scholar this knowledge is not all. Though the English undergraduate is not taught to read ma.n.u.scripts and decipher inscriptions--to trace out knowledge in its sources--the examination system gives him the breadth of view and mental grasp which are the only safe foundations of scholarship. If he contributes to science, he usually does so after he has left the university. The qualities which then distinguish him are rare among scholars--sound common sense and catholicity of judgment.

Such qualities, for instance, enabled an Oxford cla.s.sical first to recognize Schliemann's greatness while yet the German universities could only see that he was not an orthodox researcher according to their standards. If a man were bent on obtaining the best possible scholarly training, he probably could not do better than to take an English B. A. and then a German or an American Ph.D. As for the world of deeds and of men, the knowledge which is power is that which is combined with address and pluck; and the English system seems based on practical sense, in that it lays chief stress on producing this rare combination.

To attribute to the honor schools the success with which Englishmen have solved the problems of civic government and colonial administration would be to ignore a mult.i.tude of contributory causes; but the honor schools are highly characteristic of the English system, and are responsible for no small part of its success. A striking ill.u.s.tration of this may be seen in the part which the periodical press plays in public affairs. In America, nothing is rarer than a writer who combines broad information with the power of clear and convincing expression. The editor of any serious American publication will bear me out in the observation that, notwithstanding the mult.i.tude of topics of the deepest and most vital interest, it is difficult to find any one to treat them adequately; and any reader can satisfy himself on this point by comparing the best of our periodicals with the leading English reviews. Now the writing of a review article requires nothing more nor less than the writing of a first-cla.s.s examination paper, even to the element of pluck; for to marshal the full forces of the mind in the pressure of public life or of journalism requires self-command in a very high degree. The same thing is as obvious in the daily papers. The world is filled with English newspaper men who combine with reportorial training the power of treating a subject briefly and tellingly in its broadest relations.

The public advantage of this was not long ago very aptly exemplified.

When our late war suddenly brought us face to face with the fact that our national destiny had encountered the destinies of the great nations of the world, the most thoughtful people were those who felt most doubt and uncertainty; the more one considered, the less could one say just what he thought. At that crisis a very clear note was sounded. The London correspondents of our papers--Englishmen, and for the most part honor men--presented the issue to us from British and imperialistic point of view with a vigor and conviction that had immediate effect, as we all remember, and gave the larger part of the nation a new view of the crisis, and a new name for it. It was not until weeks later that our own most thoughtful writers as a body perceived the essential difference between our position and that of Great Britain, and we have scarcely yet discarded the word "imperialism." The knowledge, address, and pluck--or shall we call it audacity?--of the English correspondents enabled them to make a stroke of state policy. This is only one of many citable instances.

To the robustious intelligence of the honor man, it must be admitted, the finer enthusiasm of scientific culture is likely to be a sealed book. The whole system of education is against it. Even if a student is possessed by the zeal for research, few tutors, in their pursuit of firsts, scruple to discourage it. "That is an extremely interesting point, but it will not count for schools." One student in a discussion with his tutor quoted a novel opinion of Schwegler's, and was confuted with the remark, "Yes, but that is the German view." It is this tutor who is reported to have remarked: "What I like about my subject is that when you know it you know it, and there's an end of it." His subject was that tangle of falsehood and misconception called history.

It must, of course, be remembered in extenuation that with all his social and tutorial duties, the don is very hard worked. And considering the pressure of the necessary preparation for schools, the temptation to shun the byways is very great.

The examining board for each school is elected by the entire faculty of that school from its own members; and though it is scarcely possible for an unscrupulous examiner to frame the questions to suit his own pupils, there is nothing to prevent the tutor from framing his pupils' knowledge to meet the presumptive demands of the examiners.

"We shall have to pay particular attention to Scottish history, for Scotus is on the board, and that is his hobby." In the school of literae humaniores, no one expects either pupil or tutor to go far into textual criticism, philology, or archaeology. These branches are considered only as regards their results. In history, a special subject has to be studied with reference to its original sources, but its relative importance is small, and a student is discouraged from spending much time on it. Stubbs's "Select Charters" are the only original doc.u.ments required, and even with regard to these all conclusions are cut and dried.

To be sure there is a science school, but few men elect it, and it is in distinctly bad odor. In the slang of the university it is known as "stinks," and its laboratories as "stink shops." One must admit that its unpopularity is deserved. As it is impossible that each of the twenty colleges should have complete apparatus, the laboratories are maintained by the university, and not well maintained, for the wealth of Oxford is mainly in the coffers of the colleges. The whole end of laboratory work at Oxford is to prepare the student for a "practical examination" of some three hours. The Linacre professor has made many strenuous efforts, and has delivered much pointed criticism, but he has not yet been able to place the school on a modern or a rational basis. In his nostrils, perhaps, more than those of the university, the school of science is unsavory.

Many subjects of the highest practical importance are entirely ignored. No advanced instruction is offered in modern languages and literatures except English, and the school in English is only six years old and very small. No one of the technical branches that are coming to be so prominent a part of American university life is as yet recognized.

The Oxford honor first knows what he knows and sometimes he knows more. Few things are as distressing as the sciolism of a second-rate English editor of a cla.s.sic. The mint sauce quite forgets that it is not Lamb. The English minor reviewer exhibits the pride of intellect in its purest form. The don perhaps intensifies these amiable foibles.

There is an epigram current in Oxford which the summer guide will tell you Jowett wrote to celebrate his own attainments:--

Here I am, my name is Jowett; I am the master of Balliol College.

All there is to know, I know it.

What I know not is not knowledge.

This is clearly a satire written against Jowett, and it would be more clearly a legitimate satire if aimed at the generality of dons.

VII

THE UNIVERSITY AND REFORM

This tale of Oxford shortcomings is no news to the English radical.

The regeneration of the university has long been advocated. On the one hand, the reformers have tried to make it possible, as it was in the Middle Ages, to live and study at Oxford without being attached to any of the colleges; on the other, they have tried to bring into the educational system such modern subjects and methods of study as are cultivated in Germany, where the new branches have been so admirably grafted on the mediaeval trunk. In general it must be said that Oxford is becoming more democratic and even more studious; but the advance has come in spite of the const.i.tution of the university. All studied attempts at reform have proved almost ludicrously futile.

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 mediaeval university.

Few things could be lonelier, or more profitless intellectually, than the lot of the unattached students. Excluded by the force of circ.u.mstances 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 b.u.mping 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 doc.u.ments; 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 a.s.sistance 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 ma.s.s 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 inst.i.tutions."

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 a.s.serts, the American universities are hybrids, Oxford and Cambridge cannot be called universities at all.

VIII

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE PEOPLE

As a result of the narrowness of the scope of Oxford teaching, the university has no relation to the industrial life of the people--a grave shortcoming in a nation which is not unwilling to be known as a nation of shopkeepers. The wail of the British tradesman is not unfamiliar. Wares "made in Germany" undersell English wares that used to command the market; and being often made of a cheaper grade to suit the demands of purchasers, the phrase "made in Germany" is clearly indicative of fraudulent intention.

Certain instances are exceptionally galling. Aniline dyes were first manufactured from the residuum of coal tar in Great Britain. But enterprising Germany, which has coal-fields of its own, sent apprentices to England who learned the manufacture, and then by means of the chemistry taught in the German universities, revolutionized the process, and discovered how to extract new colors from the coal tar, so that now the bulk of aniline dyes are made in Germany. Obviously, the German chemist is a perfidious person. The Yankee is shrewd and well taught in the technical professions. He makes new and quite unexampled tools, and machinery of all sorts. It takes the Briton some years to be sure that these are not iniquitous--a Yankee trick; but in the end he adopts them. Even then, to the Briton's surprise, the Yankee competes successfully. A commission (no German spy) is sent to America to find out why, and on its return gleefully reports that the Yankee works his tools at a ruinous rate, driving them so hard that in a decade it will be necessary to reequip his plant entire. At the end of the decade, the conservative Englishman's tools are as good as if they had been kept in cotton batting; but by this time the Yankee has invented newer and more economical devices, and when he reequips his plant with them he is able to undersell the English producer even more signally. The honest British manufacturer sells his old tools to an unsuspecting brother in trade and adopts the new ones. The Yankee machinist is obviously as perfidious as the German chemist. The upper middle cla.s.ses in England realize that the destinies of Great Britain and America run together, and they are very hospitable to Americans, but the industrial population hate us scarcely less than they hate the Germans.

All this is, of course, not directly chargeable to the English universities: but the fact remains that in Germany and in America the educational system is the most powerful ally of industry. Here again the English radical is on his guard. From time to time, in letters to the daily papers or political speeches before industrial audiences, the case is very clearly stated. In a recent epistolary agitation in "The Times" it was shown that whereas American and German business men learn foreign languages, Englishmen attempt to sell their wares by means of interpreters, and do not even have their pamphlets and prospectuses translated. Admitting the facts, one gentleman gravely urged that if only the English would stick out the fight, their language would soon be the business language of the world. If it is the conscious purpose of the nation to make it so, it might be of advantage to spell the language as it has been p.r.o.nounced in the centuries since Chaucer; already with some such purpose the Germans are adopting Roman characters. But at least it will be many decades before English is the Volapuk of business, and meantime England is losing ground. From the point of view of the mere outsider, it would seem of little moment to England what language is used, if the profits of the business transacted accrue to Russian, German, and American corporations.

It has even been strongly urged that commercial and technical subjects be taught in the universities. Cambridge and the University of Glasgow have already a fund with this in view; and the new Midland University at Birmingham, of which Mr. Joseph Chamberlain is chancellor, is to be mainly devoted to commercial science and engineering. It cannot be foretold that the ancient universities will hold their own against the modern. In a speech at Birmingham (January 17, 1901), Mr. Chamberlain said: "Finance is the crux of the situation. Upon our finance depends entirely the extent to which we shall be able to develop this new experiment. With us, in fact, money is the root of all good. I am very glad to say that the promises of donations which, when I last addressed you, amounted to 330,000, have risen since then to an estimated amount of about 410,000.... Now 410,000 is a large sum. I heard the other day that the University of Cambridge, which has for some time past been appealing for further a.s.sistance, has only up to the present time received 60,000. I most deeply regret that their fund is not larger, and I regret also that ours is so small." Oxford has apparently not entered the new compet.i.tion even in a half-hearted manner. For centuries it has been the resort of the n.o.bility and aristocracy, the "governing cla.s.ses," and though the spirit of the age has so far invaded it as to have been in Mr. Gladstone's eyes its chief danger, the university has as yet only the slenderest connection with the industrial life of the nation.

The virtues of the Oxford educational system, like those of the social and athletic life, are pretty clearly traceable in the main to the division of the university into colleges; at least, it is hard to see how anything other than this could have suggested the idea of having one body to teach the student and another to examine him. And they have a strong family likeness one to another, the concrete result being a highly st.u.r.dy and effective character. But the educational system differs from the social and athletic system in that the defects of its qualities are the more vigorous. As far as these defects result from the educational system, they are chargeable not so much to the preponderance of the colleges as to the torpor of the university; and they are powerfully abetted by the Oxford tradition as to the nature and function of a liberal education. This has not always been the case at Oxford. To understand the situation more clearly, it is necessary to review in brief the origin and the growth of the colleges, and the extinction of the mediaeval university. This will throw further light on Oxford's social history. We shall thus be better able to judge how and to what extent the college system offers a solution for the correction of our American instruction.