An American at Oxford

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Title: An American at Oxford

Author: John Corbin

Release Date: December 1, 2011 [EBook #38180]

Language: English

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TEA ON THE LAWN AT THE OXFORD UNION (page 63)

AN AMERICAN AT

OXFORD

BY

JOHN CORBIN

AUTHOR OF SCHOOLBOY LIFE IN ENGLAND

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1903

COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY JOHN CORBIN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published May, 1902

TO

A. F. C.

PREFACE

By a curious coincidence, the day on which the last proof of this book was sent to the printer saw the publication of the will of the late Cecil Rhodes, providing that each of the United States is forever to be represented at Oxford by two carefully selected undergraduate students. That the plan will result in any speedy realization of the ideals of the great exponent of English power in the new worlds is perhaps not to be expected. For the future of American education, on the other hand, few things could be more fortunate. Native and independent as our national genius has always been, and seems likely to remain, it has always been highly assimilative. In the past, we have received much needed aliment from the German universities. For the present, the elements of which we have most need may best, as I think, be assimilated from England.

Whether or not Americans at Oxford become imbued with Mr. Rhodes's conceptions as to the destiny of the English peoples, they can scarcely fail to observe that Oxford affords to its undergraduates a very sensibly ordered and invigorating life, a very sensibly ordered and invigorating education. This, as I have endeavored to point out in the following pages, our American universities do not now afford, nor are they likely to afford it until the social and the educational systems are more perfectly organized than they have ever been, or seem likely to be, under the dominance of German ideals. If, however, the new Oxford-trained Americans should ever become an important factor in our university life, the future is bright with hope. We have assimilated, or are assimilating, the best spirit of German education; and if we were to make a similar draft on the best educational spirit in England, our universities would become far superior as regards their organization and ideals, and probably also as regards what they accomplish, to any in Europe. The purpose and result of an introduction of English methods would of course not be to imitate foreign custom, but to give fuller scope to our native character, so that if the American educational ideals in the end approximate the English more closely than they do at present, such a result would be merely incidental to the fact that the two countries have at bottom much the same social character and instincts. If Mr. Rhodes's dream is to be realized, it will probably be in some such tardy and roundabout but admirably vital manner as this.

At a superficial glance the testator's intention seems to have been to send the students to Oxford directly from American schools. Such a course, it seems to me, could only work harm. Even if the educational and residential facilities afforded at Oxford were on the whole superior to those of American universities, which they are not, the difference could not compensate the student for the loss of his American university course with all it means in forming lifelong friendships among his countrymen and in assimilating the national spirit. If, however, the Oxford scholarships were awarded to recent graduates of American universities, the greatest advantage might result. The student might then modify his native training so as to complete it and make it more effective. Now the wording of the testament requires only that the American scholars shall commence residence as undergraduates. This they will be able to do whatever their previous training, and in fact this is what Americans at Oxford have always done in the past. The most valuable A.B. leaves the field of human knowledge far from exhausted; and the methods of instruction and of examining at Oxford are so different from anything we know that it has even proved worth while for the American to repeat at Oxford the same studies he took in America. The executors of the will should be most vigorously urged to select the scholars from the graduates of American universities.

The parts of this book that treat most intimately of Oxford life were written while in residence in Balliol College some six years ago. Most of the rest was written quite recently in London. Much of the matter in the following pages has appeared in Harper's Weekly, The Bachelor of Arts, The Forum, and The Atlantic Monthly. It has all been carefully revised and rearranged, and much new matter added. Each chapter has gained, as I hope, by being brought into its natural relation with the other chapters; and the ideas that have informed the whole are for the first time adequately stated.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

AN AMERICAN AT OXFORD

The great German historian of the United States, H. E. Von Holst, declares[1] that, in the sense attached to the word by Europeans, ... there is in the United States as yet not a single university; institutions like Johns Hopkins and Harvard he characterizes as hybrids of college and university. In his survey of European usage, one suspects that Professor Von Holst failed to look beyond Germany. The so-called universities of England, for example, are mere aggregations of colleges; they have not even enough of the modern scientific spirit to qualify as hybrids, having consciously and persistently refused to adopt continental standards. The higher institutions of America belong historically to the English type; they have only recently imported the scientific spirit. To the great world of graduates and undergraduates they are colleges, and should as far as possible be kept so.

Yet there is reason enough for calling them hybrids. In the teaching bodies of all of them the German, or so-called university, spirit is very strong, and is slowly possessing the more advanced of our recent graduates and undergraduates. Let us be duly grateful. The first result of this spirit is an extraordinary quickening and diffusion of the modern ideal of scholarship, a devotion to pure science amounting almost to a passion. As to the second result, we may or may not have cause to be grateful. Our most prominent educational leaders have striven consciously to make over our universities on the German plan. We are in the midst of a struggle between old and new forces, and at present the alien element has apparently the upper hand. The social ideal, which only a few years ago was virtually the same in England and America, has already been powerfully modified; and the concrete embodiment of the new scientific spirit, the so-called elective system, has transformed the peculiar educational institution of our Anglo-Saxon people.

We have gone so far forward that it is possible to gain an excellent perspective on what we are leaving behind. In the ensuing pages I propose to present as plainly as I may the English university of colleges. I shall not hesitate to give its social life all the prominence it has in fact, devoting much space even to athletic sports. The peculiarity of the English ideal of education is that it aims to develop the moral and social virtues, no less than the mental—to train up boys to be men among men. Only by understanding this is it possible to sympathize with the system of instruction, its peculiar excellences, and its almost incredible defects. In the end I hope we shall see more clearly what our colleges have inherited from the parent institutions, and shall be able to judge how far the system of collegiate education expresses the genius of English and American people.

At the present juncture of political forces in America this consideration has a special importance. The success with which we exert our influence upon distant peoples will depend upon what manner of young men we train up to carry it among them. If the graduates of German institutions are prepared to establish their civilization in the imperial colonies, the fact has not yet been shown. The colleges of England have manned the British Empire.

I

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE COLLEGE

I

THE UNIVERSITY OF COLLEGES

One of the familiar sights at Oxford is the American traveler who stops over on his way from Liverpool to London, and, wandering up among the walls of the twenty colleges from the Great Western Station, asks the first undergraduate he meets which building is the university. When an Oxford man is first asked this, he is pretty sure to answer that there isn't any university; but as the answer is taken as a rudeness, he soon finds it more agreeable to direct inquirers to one of the three or four single buildings, scattered hither and yon among the ubiquitous colleges, in which the few functions of the university are performed. A traveler from our middle West, where universities often consist of a single building, might easily set forth for London with the firm idea that the Ashmolean Museum or the Bodleian Library is Oxford University.

To the undergraduate the university is an abstract institution that at most examines him two or three times, ploughs him, or graduates him. He becomes a member of it by being admitted into one of the colleges. To be sure, he matriculates also as a student of the university; but the ceremony is important mainly as a survival from the historic past, and is memorable to him perhaps because it takes place beneath the beautiful mediæval roof of the Divinity School; perhaps because he receives from the Vice-Chancellor a copy of the university statutes, written in mediæval Latin, which it is to be his chief delight to break. Except when he is in for schools, as the examinations are called, the university fades beyond his horizon. If he says he is reading at Oxford, he has the city in mind. He is more likely to describe himself as up at Magdalen, Balliol, or elsewhere. This English idea that a university is a mere multiplication of colleges is so firmly fixed that the very word is defined as a collection of institutions of learning at a common centre. In the daily life of the undergraduate, in his religious observances, and in regulating his studies, the college is supreme.

To an American the English college is not at first sight a wholly pleasing object. It has walls that one would take to be insurmountable if they were not crowned with shards of bottles mortared into the coping; and it has gates that seem capable of resisting a siege until one notices that they are reinforced by a cheval-de-frise, or a row of bent spikes like those that keep the bears in their dens at the Zoo. Professor Von Holst would certainly regard it as a hybrid between a mediæval cloister and a nursery; and one easily imagines him producing no end of evidence from its history and traditions to show that it is so. Like so many English institutions, its outward and visible signs belong to the manners of forgotten ages, even while it is charged with a vigorous and very modern life. A closer view of it, I hope, will show that in spite of the barnacles of the past that cling to it—and in some measure, too, because of them—it is the expression of a very high ideal of undergraduate convenience and freedom.

II

THE OXFORD FRESHMAN

When a freshman comes up to his college, he is received at the mediæval gate by a very modern porter, who lifts boxes and bags from the hansom in a most obliging manner, and is presently shown to his cloistral chambers by a friendly and urbane butler or steward. To accommodate the newcomers in the more populous colleges, a measure is resorted to so revolutionary that it shocks all American ideas of academic propriety. Enough seniors—fourth and third year men—are turned out of college to make room for the freshmen. The assumption is that the upper classmen have had every opportunity to profit by the life of the college, and are prepared to flock by themselves in the town. Little communities of four or five fellows who have proved congenial live together in diggings—that is, in some townsman's house—hard by the college gate. This arrangement makes possible closer and more intimate relationship among them than would otherwise be likely; and after three years of the very free life within those sharded walls, a cloistered year outside is usually more than advisable, in view of the final examination. It cannot be said that they leave college without regret; but I never heard a word of complaint, and it is tacitly admitted that on the whole they profit by the arrangement.

The more substantial furnishings in the rooms are usually permanent, belonging to the college: each successive occupant is charged for interest on the investment and for depreciation by wear. Thus the furniture is far more comfortable than in an American college room and costs the occupant less. Bed and table linen, cutlery, and a few of the more personal furnishings the student brings himself. If one neglects to bring them, as I confess I did through ignorance, the deficiency is supplied by the scout, a dignitary in the employ of the college, who stands in somewhat more than the place of a servant and less than that of a parent to half a dozen fellows whose rooms are adjacent. The scout levies on the man above for sheets, on the man below for knives and forks, and on the man across the staircase for table linen. There is no call for shame on the one part or resentment on the other, for is not the scout the representative of the hospitality of the college? When you have time, sir, he says kindly, you will order your own linen and cutlery. How high a state of civilization is implied in this manner of receiving a freshman can be appreciated only by those who have arrived friendless at an American university.

The scout is in effect a porter, goody, and eating-club waiter rolled into one. He has frequently a liberal dash of the don, which he has acquired by extended residence at the university; for among all the shifting generations of undergraduates, only he and the don are permanent. When he reaches middle age he wears a beard if he chooses, and then he is usually taken for a don by the casual visitor. There is no harm in this; the scout plays the part con amore, and his long breeding enables him to sustain it to a marvel. Yet for the most part the scout belongs with the world of undergraduates. He has his social clubs and his musical societies; he runs, plays cricket, and rows, and, finally, he meets the Cambridge scout in the inter-varsity matches. His pay the scout receives in part from the college, but mostly from the students, who give him two to four pounds a term each, according to his deserts. All broken bread, meat, and wine are his perquisites, and tradition allows him to bag a fair amount of tea, coffee, and sugar. Out of all this he makes a sumptuous living. I knew only one exception, and that was when four out of six men on a certain scout's staircase happened to be vegetarians, and five teetotalers. The poor fellow was in extremities for meat and in desperation for drink. There was only one more pitiable sight in college, and that was the sole student on the staircase who ate meat and drank wine; the scout bagged food and drink from him ceaselessly. At the end of one term the student left a half dozen bottles of sherry, which he had merely tasted, in his sideboard; and when he came back it was gone. Where's my sherry, Betts? he asked. Sherry, sir? you ain't got no sherry. But I left six bottles; you had no right to more than the one that was broken. Yes, sir; but when I had taken that, sir, the 'arf dozen was broke. According to Oxford traditions the student had no recourse; and be it set down to his praise, he never blamed the scout. He bemoaned the fate that bound them together in suffering, and vented his spleen on total abstinence and vegetarianism. It may be supposed that the scout's antiquity and importance makes him a bad servant; in the land of the free I fear that it would; but at Oxford nothing could be more unlikely. The only mark that distinguishes the scout from any other class of waiters is that his attentions to your comfort are carried off with greater ease and dignity. It may be true that he is president of the Oxford Society of College Servants—the Bones or the Hasty Pudding of the scouts; that he stroked the scouts' eight in the townie's bumping races, during the long vac, and afterward rowed against the scouts' eight from Cambridge; that he captained the scouts' cricket eleven; that in consequence he is a double blue and wears the Oxford 'varsity color on his hat with no less pride than any other blue. Yet he is all the more bound, out of consideration for his own dignity, to show you every respect and attention.

After the scout, the hosts of the college are the dons. As soon as the freshman is settled in his rooms, or sometimes even before, his