Chapter III: An Oxford Final Honor School 319 (2)

A tradition of the late master of Balliol, Jowett, the great humanist, would seem to show that he held some such opinion. It was his custom in his declining years to walk after breakfast in the garden quad, and whenever there were evidences of a rag, even to the extent of broken windows, he would say cheerily to his _fidus Achates_, "Ah, Hardie, the mind of the college is still vigorous; it has been expressing itself." The best possible justification of the cloistral restrictions of English college life is the facility with which the mind of the college expresses itself. It is by no means fantastic to hint that the decline of well-considered hazing in American colleges has come step by step with the breaking up of the bonds of hospitality and comradeship that used to make them well-organized social communities.

I have not come to this philosophy without deep experience. On one occasion after Hall, I was flown with such insolence against college restrictions that the _cheval-de-frise_ above the back gate seemed an affront to a freeborn American. Though the porter's gate was still open, it was imperatively necessary to scale that roller of iron spikes. I was no sooner astride of it than a mob of townspeople gathered without, and among them a palsied beggar, who bellowed out that he would hextricate me for 'arf a crown, sir. I have seldom been in a less gratifying position; and when I had clambered back into college, I ruefully recalled the explanation my tutor had given me of the iron spikes and bottle shards,--an explanation that at the time had shaken my sides with laughter at British absurdity. My tutor had said that if the fellows were allowed to rag each other in the open streets and smash the townspeople's windows, the matter would be sure to get into the papers and set the uninitiated parent against the universities. In effect, the iron spikes and the stumps of bottles are admirable, not so much because they keep the undergraduate in, as because they keep the public out; and since the public includes all people who wish to hextricate you for 'arf a crown, sir, my mind was in a way to be reduced to that British state of illogic in which I regarded only the effect.

As a last resort I carefully sounded the undergraduates as to whether they would find use for greater liberty. They were not only content with their lot, but would, I found, resent any loosening of the restrictions. To give them the liberty of London at night or even of Oxford, they argued, would tend to break up the college as a social organization and thus to weaken it athletically; for at Oxford they understand what we sometimes do not, that a successful cultivation of sports goes hand in hand with good comradeship and mutual loyalty.

The only question remaining was of the actual moral results of the semi-cloistral life. Such outbreaks of public opinion as I have described are at the worst exceptional; they are the last resort of outraged patience. The affair at Christ Church is unexampled in modern times. Many a man of the better sort goes through his four years at the university without either experiencing or witnessing undergraduate violence. As for drinking, in spite of the fact that wine and spirits are sold to undergraduates by the college at any and all times and in any and all quantities, there seemed to be less excessive indulgence than, for instance, at Harvard or at Yale. And the fact that what there was took place for the most part within the college walls was in many respects most fortunate. When fellows are turned loose for their jubilations amid the vices of a city, as is usually the case with us, the consequences to their general morality are sometimes the most hideous. In an English college the men to whom immorality seems inevitable--and such are to be found in all communities--have recourse to London. But as their expeditions take place in daylight and cold blood, and are, except at great risk, cut short when the last evening train leaves Paddington shortly after dinner, it is not possible to carry them off with that dazzling air of the man of the world that in America lures so many silly freshmen into dissipations for which they have no natural inclination. This little liberty is apparently of great value. The cloistral vice, which seems inevitable in the English public schools, is robbed of any shadow of palliation. A fellow who continues it is thought puerile, if nothing worse. When it exists, it is more likely to be the result of the intimate study of the ancient classics, and is then even more looked down upon by the robust Briton as effeminate or decadent. The subject, usually difficult or impossible to investigate, happened to be on the surface at the time of my residence because of the sensational trial of an Oxford graduate in London. I was satisfied that the general body of undergraduates was quite free of contamination. On the whole, I should say that the restrictions of college life in England are far less dangerous than the absolute freedom of life in an American college. Under our system a few men profit greatly; they leave college experienced in the ways of the world and at the same time thoroughly masters of themselves. But it is a strong man--perhaps a blasphemous one--that would ask to be led into temptation. The best system of college residence, I take it, is that which develops thoroughly and spontaneously the normal social instincts, and at the same time leaves men free moral agents. In a rightly constituted fellow, in fact, the normal social life constitutes the only real freedom. Those frowning college walls, which we are disposed to regard as instruments of pedagogical tyranny, are the means of nourishing the normal social life, and are thus in effect the bulwarks of a freer system than is known to American universities.

VII

CLUB LIFE IN THE COLLEGE

As a place for the general purposes of residence--eating and sleeping, work and play--the English college is clearly quite as well organized and equipped as any of the societies, clubs, or fraternities of an American university. And whereas these are in their very nature small and exclusive, the college is ample in size and is consciously and effectively inclusive; the very fact of living in it insures a well-ordered life and abundant opportunity for making friends. Yet within this democratic college one finds all sorts of clubs and societies, except those whose main purpose is residential, and these are obviously not necessary.

By far the larger proportion of the clubs are formed to promote the recognized undergraduate activities. No college is without athletic and debating clubs, and there are musical and literary clubs almost everywhere. Membership in all of them is little more than a formal expression of the fact that a man desires to row, play cricket or football, to debate, read Shakespeare, or play the fiddle. Yet they are all conducted with a degree of social amenity that to an American is as surprising as it is delightful.

The only distinctively social feature of the athletic clubs is the wine, which is given to celebrate the close of a successful season. A boating wine I remember was held in a severe and sombre old hall, built before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It was presided over by a knot of the dons, ancient oarsmen, whose hearts were still in the sport. They sat on the dais, like the family of a baron of the Middle Ages, while the undergraduates sat about the tables like faithful retainers. All the sportsmen of the college were invited, and everybody made as much noise as he could, especially one of the boating men, who went to the piano and banged out a song of triumph he had written, while we all tumbled into the chorus. One of the fellows--I have always taken it as a compliment to my presence--improvised a cheer after the manner not unknown in America, which was given with much friendly laughter. "Quite jolly, isn't it!" he remarked, with the pride of authorship, "and almost as striking as your cry of 'Quack, quack, quack!'" He had heard the Yale men give their adaptation of the frog chorus at the athletic games between Oxford and Yale. About midnight the college butler passed a loving cup of mulled wine of a spicy smoothness to fill your veins with liquid joy. The recipe, I was told, had been handed down by the butlers of the college since the fourteenth century, being older than the hall in which we were drinking. I have no doubt it was the cordial Chaucer calls Ypocras, which seems to have brought joy to his warm old heart. After the loving cup had gone about, the fellows cleared away the tables and danced a stag. At this stage of the game the dons discreetly faded away, and the wine resolved itself into a good-natured rag in the quad that was ended only by daylight and the dean. I have seen many feasts to celebrate athletic victory and the breaking of training, but none as homelike and pleasant all through as the wine of an Oxford college.

The debating clubs have of necessity a distinct social element, for where there is much talk, food and drink will always be found; and with the social element there is apt to be some little exclusiveness. In Balliol there are three debating clubs, and they are of course in some sense rivals. Like the fraternities in an American college, they look over the freshmen each year pretty closely; and the freshmen in turn weigh the clubs. One freshman gave his verdict as follows: "The fellows in A are dull, and bathe; the fellows in B are clever, and sometimes bathe; the fellows in C are supposed to be clever." The saying is not altogether a pleasant one, but will serve to indicate the range of selection of members. In spite of social distinctions, few fellows need be excluded who care to debate or are clubable in spirit. As a system, the clubs are inclusive rather than exclusive.

Each club convenes at regular intervals, usually in the rooms of such members as volunteer to be hosts. The hour of meeting is directly after dinner, and while the men gather and settle down to the business of the evening, coffee, port, and tobacco are provided out of the club treasury. The debates are supposed to be carried on according to the strictest parliamentary law, and the man who transgresses is subject to a sharp rebuff. On one occasion, when the question of paying members of Parliament was up, one speaker gravely argued that the United States Senate was filled with politicians who were attracted by the salary. Though I had already spoken, I got up to protest. The chairman sat me down with the greatest severity--amid a broad and general smile. I had neglected, I suppose, the parliamentary remark that I arose to a point of fact. A member's redress in such instances is to rag the president at the time when, according to custom, interpellations are in order; and as a rule he avails himself of this opportunity without mercy. On one occasion, a fellow got up in the strictest parliamentary manner and asked the president--a famous shot on the moors--whether it was true, as reported, that on the occasion when he lately fell over a fence three wrens and a chipping sparrow fell out of his game-bag. Such ragging as the chair administers and receives may not aid greatly in rational debate, but it certainly has its value as a preparation for the shifts and formalities of parliamentary life. It is the first duty of a chairman, even the president of the Oxford Union, to meet his ragging with cheerfulness and a ready reply, and the first duty of all debaters is to be interesting as well as convincing. In American college debating there is little of such humor and none of such levity. The speakers are drafted to sustain or to oppose a position, often without much reference to their convictions, and are supposed to do so to the uttermost. The training is no doubt a good one, for life is largely partisan; but a man's success in the world depends almost as much on his tact and good sense as on his strenuosity.

The Englishman's advantage in address is sometimes offset by deficiencies of information. In a debate on Home Rule, one argument ran somewhat as follows: It is asserted that the Irish are irresponsible and lacking in the sense of administrative justice. To refute this statement, I have only to point to America, to the great metropolis of New York. There, as is well known, politics are exclusively in the hands of Irish citizens, who, denied the right of self-government--as the American colonies were denied similar freedom, I need scarcely point out with what disastrous results to the empire--the Irish immigrants in America, I say, are evincing their true genius for statesmanship in their splendid organization known as Tammany Hall.

In the better clubs, the debates are often well prepared and cogent. I remember with particular gratitude a discussion as to whether the English love of comfort was not an evidence of softening morals. The discussion was opened with a paper by a young Scotchman of family and fortune. More than any other man I met he had realized the sweetness and pleasantness of Oxford, and all the delights of the senses and of the mind that surround the fellows there; and the result of it was, as it has so often been with such men, a craving for the extreme opposite of all he had known, for moral earnestness and austerity. What right, he questioned, had one to buy a book which, with ever so little more effort, he might read in the Bodleian, while all the poor of England are uneducated? And was it manly or in any way proper to spend so much time and interest on things that are merely agreeable? The sense of the meeting seemed to be that comfort in daily life is an evil only when it becomes an end in itself, a self-indulgence; and that a certain amount of it is necessary to fortify one for the most strenuous and earnest work in the world. I think that debate made us realize, as we never could have realized without it, to what serious end England makes the ways of her young men so pleasant; yet the more deeply I lived into the life of the university, the more deeply I questioned, as the young Scotchman did, whether the line between the amenities and the austerities was not somewhat laxly drawn.

The only purely social club, and therefore the only really exclusive one, is the wine club. In Balliol there is a college rule against wine clubs, which seems to be due partly to a feeling against social exclusiveness, and partly perhaps to a distrust of purely convivial gatherings. The purpose of a wine club was served quite as well, however, by an organization that was ostensibly for debating. The notices of meetings were usually a parody of the notices of the meetings of genuine debating clubs, and the chief business of the secretary was to concoct them in pleasing variety. For instance, it would be _Resolved_, that this House looks with disfavor upon the gradual introduction of a continental sabbath into England; or _Resolved_, that this House looks with marked disfavor upon the assumption that total abstinence is a form of intemperance. On the evening when the House was defending total abstinence, our host's furniture and tea-things suffered some damage, and as I was in training, I found it advisable to leave early. As I slipped out, the president of the club, a young nobleman, who was himself at the time in training for the 'varsity trial eights, called me back and said with marked sobriety that he had just thought of something. "You are in for the mile run, aren't you? And in America you have always run the half. Well, then, if you find the distance too long for you, just don't mind at all about the first part of the race, but when you get to the last part, run as you run a half mile. Do it in two minutes, and you can't help beating 'em." He bade me good-night with a grave and authoritative shake of the hand. If he recalled his happy thought next morning, he was unable to avail himself of it, for I grieve to say that in the 'varsity trial race, which came only a few days later, he missed his blue by going badly to pieces on the finish.

The meeting at which this occurred was exceptional. For the most part the fellows were moderate enough, and at times I suspected the wine club of being dull. Certainly, we had no such fun as at the more general jubilations--a rag in the quad or a boating wine. I doubt if any one would have cared so very much to belong to the club if it had not afforded the only badge of social distinction in college, and if this had not happened to be an unusually pretty hatband. However successful a wine club may be, moreover, it is of far less consequence than similar clubs in America. In the first place, since there are one or more of them in each of the twenty colleges, the number of men who belong to them is far greater relatively, which of course means far less exclusion. In the second place, and this is more important, the fellows who do not belong are still able to enjoy the life which is common to all members of the college. In general, the social walls of Oxford are like the material ones. Far from being the means of undue exclusion and of the suppression of public feeling, they are the live tissues in which the vital functions of the place are performed.

Until well along in the nineteenth century, this life in the college was about the only life; but of late years the university has begun to feel its unity more strongly, and in social and intellectual life, as in athletics, it has become for the first time since the Middle Ages an organic whole.

VIII

SOCIAL LIFE IN THE UNIVERSITY

The first formal organization of the life of the university was, as its name records, the Oxford Union, an institution of peculiar interest to Americans because our universities, though starting from a point diametrically opposite, have arrived at a state of social disorganization no less pronounced than that which the Union was intended to remedy. Harvard, which has progressed farthest along the path of social expansion and disintegration, has already made a conscious effort to imitate the Union. The adamantine spirit of Yale is shaken by the problems of the Sophomore societies; and it will not be many decades before other universities will be in a similar predicament. It will not be amiss, therefore, to consider what the Oxford Union has been and is. If Americans have not clearly understood it even when attempting to imitate it, one should at least remember that it would not be easy for an Oxford man to explain it thoroughly.

The Union was founded in 1823, and was primarily for debating. In fact, it was the only university debating society. Its members were carefully selected for their ability in discoursing on the questions of the day. In its debates Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, the Marquis of Salisbury, and countless other English statesmen of recent times got their first parliamentary training. Its present fame in England is largely based upon this fact; but its character has been metamorphosed. Early in its history it developed social features; and though it was still exclusive in membership, little by little men of all kinds were taken in. At this stage of its development, the Union was not unlike those vast political clubs in London in which any and all principles are subordinated to the kitchen and the wine cellar. The debates, though still of first-rate quality, became more and more an incident; the club was chiefly remarkable as the epitome of all the best elements of Oxford life. The library was filled with men reading or working at special hobbies; the reading and smoking rooms were crowded; the lawn was daily thronged with undergraduates gossiping over a cup of tea; the telegram board, the shrine of embryo politicians watching for the results from a general election, was apt to be profaned by sporting men scanning it for the winners of the Derby or the Ascot. In a word, the Union held the elect of Oxford, intellectual, social, and sporting. This is the Union remembered by the older graduates, and except for a single feature, namely, that it was still exclusive, this is the Union that has inspired the projectors of the Harvard Union.

The Oxford man of the later day knows all too well that this Union is no more. Some years ago, responding to a democratic impulse that has been very strong of late at Oxford, the Union threw down all barriers; virtually any man nowadays may join it, and its members number well beyond a thousand. The result is not a social millennium. The very feature of inclusiveness that is to be most prominent in the Union at Harvard destroyed the character of the Oxford Union as a representative body. To the casual observer it still looks much as it did a dozen years ago; but its glory has departed. In any real sense of the word it is a Union no more. The men who used to give it character are to be found in smaller clubs, very much like the clubs of an American university.

The small university debating clubs are the Russell, the Palmerston, the Canning, and the Chatham, each of which stands for some special stripe of political thought, and each of which has a special color which--sure sign of the pride of exclusiveness--it wears in hatbands. The clubs meet periodically--often weekly--in the rooms of members. Sometimes a paper is read which is followed by an informal discussion; but the usual exercise is a formal debate. Time was when the best debates came off at the Union, and writers of leading articles in London papers even now look to it as a political weather-vane. The debates there are still earnest and sometimes brilliant, and to have presided over them is a distinction of value in after life; but as far as I could gather, their prestige is falling before the smaller debating clubs. The main interest at the Union appeared to centre in the interpellation of the president, which is carried on much as in the House of Commons, though with this difference, that, following the immemorial custom, it is turned into ragging. When this is over, the major part of the audience clears out to the smoking and reading rooms. In the smaller clubs the exercises are not only serious, but--in spite of the preliminary ragging, which no function at Oxford may flourish without--they are taken seriously. The clubs really include the best forensic ability of Oxford. At the end of each year they give dinners, at which new and old members gather, while some prominent politician from Westminster holds forth on the question of the hour. In a word, these clubs, collectively, are what the Union once was--the training school of British statesmen.

The university social clubs are of a newness that shocks even an American; but it would not be quite just to account for the fact by regarding them as mere offshoots, like the debating clubs, of a parent Union. Until the nineteenth century, there really was no university at Oxford, at least in modern times. The colleges were quite independent of one another socially and in athletics, and each of them provided all the necessary instruction for its members. The social clubs which now admit members from the university at large began life as wine clubs of separate colleges, and even to-day the influence of the parent college is apt to predominate. The noteworthy fact is that in proportion as the social prestige of the Union has declined, these college wine clubs, like the small debating clubs, have gained character and prestige.

The oldest of these is the Bullingdon, which is not quite as old, I gathered, as the Institute of 1770 at Harvard, and, considered as a university organization, it is of course much younger. It was originally the Christ Church wine club, and to-day it is dominated by the sporting element of Christ Church, which is the most aristocratic of Oxford colleges. In former years, it is said, the club had kennels at Bullingdon, and held periodic hunts there; and it is still largely composed of hunting men. To-day it justifies its name mainly by having an annual dinner beneath the heavy rafters of a mediaeval barn at Bullingdon. On these, as on other state occasions, the members wear a distinctive costume--no doubt a tradition from the time when men generally wore colors--which consists of a blue evening coat with white facings and brass buttons, a canary waistcoat, and a blue tie. This uniform is no doubt found in more aristocratic wardrobes than any other Oxford trophy. The influence of the Bullingdon is indirectly to discourage athletics, which it regards as unaristocratic and incompatible with conviviality; so that Christ Church, though the largest of Oxford colleges and one of the wealthiest, is of secondary importance in sports. For this reason the Bullingdon has suffered a partial eclipse, for the middle-class spirit which is invading Oxford has given athletic sports the precedence over hunting, while expensive living and mere social exclusiveness are less the vogue. By a curious analogy, one of the oldest and most exclusive of the clubs at Harvard is similarly out of sympathy with the athletic spirit.

Another old and prominent college wine club that has come to elect members from without is the Phoenix of Brazenose, the uniform of which is perhaps more beautiful than the Bullingdon uniform, consisting of a peculiar dark wine-colored coat, brass buttons, and a light buff waistcoat. In general, the college wine clubs are more or less taking on a university character. The Annandale Club of Balliol, for instance, has frequent guests from outside, and often elects them to membership out of compliment. At the formal wines the members have the privilege of inviting outside guests.

The most popular and representative Oxford club is Vincent's, which owes its prominence to the fact that it expresses the enthusiasm of modern Oxford for athletics. It was founded only a third of a century ago, but it must be remembered that inter-varsity boat races did not become usual until 1839, nor a fixture until 1856; that the first inter-varsity athletic meeting came in 1864, and the first inter-varsity football game as late as 1873. Vincent's was originally composed largely of men from University College, which was at that time a leader in sports; but later it elected many men from Brazenose, then in the ascendant. When Brazenose became more prominent in athletics, it gained a controlling influence in Vincent's; and when it declined, as it lately did, the leadership passed on. The name Vincent's came from a printer's shop, above which the club had its rooms. Any second year man is eligible; in fact, until a few years ago, freshmen were often taken in. The limit of members is ninety, but as the club is always a dozen or so short of this, no good fellow is excluded for lack of a place. When a man is proposed, his name is written in a book, in which space is left for friends in the club to write their names in approval. After this, elections are in the hands of a committee. Like all Oxford clubs, Vincent's will always, I suppose, lean towards men of some special college or group of colleges; yet it is careful to elect all clubable blues, and, in point of fact, is representative of the university at large, as, for instance, the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard, or the senior societies at Yale, to which, on the whole, it most nearly corresponds.

The most democratic, as well as one of the most recent of the more purely social clubs, is the Gridiron. It is a dining rather than a social club, and one may invite to his board as many guests who are not members as he chooses. Any good fellow is eligible, though here, again, a man in one of the less known colleges might fail to get in from lack of acquaintances on the election committee.

The Union has long lost prestige before this development of small exclusive clubs. Politically, socially, and even in that most essential department, the kitchen, it holds a second place. If you ask men of the kind that used to give it its character why they never go there, they will tell you, in the most considerate phrase, how the pressure of other undergraduate affairs is so great that they have not yet found time; and this is quite true. They may add that next year they intend to make the time, for they believe that one should know all kinds of men at Oxford; and they are quite sincere. But next year they are more preoccupied than ever. If Oxford is united socially, it is not because of the Oxford Union.

In addition to the clubs which are mainly social, there is the usual variety of special organizations. These, as a rule, are of recent growth. The Musical Union has frequent meetings for practice, and gives at least one concert a year. The Dramatic Society, the O.U.D.S., as it is popularly called, will be seen to be a very portentous organization. In America, college men give comic operas and burlesques, usually writing both the book and the music themselves; and when they do, there is apt to be a Donnybrook Fair for vulnerable heads in the faculty. So well is musical nonsense adapted to the calibre of the undergraduate mind that college plays sometimes find their way to the professional stage, and to no small general favor. At Oxford the Vice-Chancellor, who is a law to himself and to the university, has decreed that there shall be no fun and nonsense. If the absurdities of donnishness are all too fair a mark for the undergraduate wit, the Vice-Chancellor has found a very serviceable scapegoat. He permits the undergraduates to present the plays of Shakespeare. Surely Shakespeare can stand the racket. The aim of the O.U.D.S. seems to be to get as many blues as possible into the cast of a Shakespearean production, with the idea, perhaps, of giving Oxford its full money's worth. I remember well the sensation made by the most famous of all university athletes,--a "quadruple blue," who played on four university teams, was captain of three of them, and held one world's record. The play was "The Merchant of Venice," and the athlete in question was the swarthy Prince of Morocco. Upon opening the golden casket his powers of elocution rose to unexpected heights. Fellows went again and again to hear him cry, "O hell! what have we here?" In one way, however, the performances of the O.U.D.S. are really noteworthy. Not even the crudest acting can entirely disguise the influences of birth and environment; and few Shakespearean actors have as fine a natural carriage as those companies of trained athletes. For the first time, perhaps, on any stage, the ancient Roman honor more or less appeared in Antonio, and there were really two gentlemen in Verona. For this reason--or, what is more likely, merely because the plays are given by Oxford men--the leading dramatic critics of London run up every year for the O.U.D.S. performance, and talk learnedly about it in their dignified periodicals. Both the musical and the dramatic societies have an increasing social element, and the dramatic society has a house of its own.

Of at least one association I happened upon, I know of no American parallel. One Sunday afternoon, a lot of fellows who had been lunching each other in academic peace were routed from college by a Salvation Army gathering that was sending up the discordant notes of puritanical piety just outside the walls. In the street near by we came upon a quiet party of undergraduates in cap and gown. They were standing in a circle, at the foot of the Martyr's Memorial, and were alternately singing hymns and exhorting the townspeople who gathered about. Their faces were earnest and simple, their attitude erect. If they were conscious of doing an unusual thing, they did not show it. I don't remember that they moved any of us to repent the pleasantness of our ways, but I know that they filled the most careless of us with a very definite admiration. One of the fellows said that he thought them mighty plucky, and that they had the stuff at least out of which sportsmen are made. The phrase is peculiarly British, but in the undergraduate vernacular there is no higher epithet of praise. In America there are slumming societies and total abstinence leagues; but I never knew any body of men who had the courage to stand up in the highway and preach their gospel to passers-by.

IX

THE COLLEGE AND THE UNIVERSITY

The distinctive feature of the social organization of Oxford life is said to be the colleges. Fifty years ago the remark held good, but to-day it requires an extension. The distinctive feature is the duality of the social organization: a man who enters fully into undergraduate affairs takes part both in the life of the college and in the life of the university. The life of the college, in so far as it is wholesome, is open to all newcomers; it is so organized as to exert powerfully upon them the force of its best influences and traditions, and is thus in the highest degree inclusive. The life of the university, in so far as it is vigorous, is in the main open only to those who bring to it special gifts and abilities, and is therefore necessarily exclusive. In college, one freely enjoys all that is fundamental in the life of a young man--a pleasant place to sleep in and to dine in, pleasant fellows with whom to work and to play. In the university, one finds scope for his special capacities in conviviality or in things of the mind. More than any other institution, the English university thus mirrors the conditions of social life in the world at large, in which one is primarily a member of his family, and takes part in the life of the outside community in proportion as his abilities lead him.

The happiest thing about all this is that it affords the freest possible interplay of social forces. As soon as a newcomer gains distinction, as he does at once if he has the capacity, he is noticed by the leading men of the college, and is thus in a way to be taken into the life of the university. From the college breakfast it is only a step to the Gridiron, from the college eight to Vincent's, and from the debating society to the Chatham or the Canning. These, like all undergraduate clubs, are in yearly need of new members, and the older men in college are only too glad to urge the just claims of the younger for good-fellowship sake, and for the general credit of their institution.

Even when a fellow has received all the university has to offer, he is still amenable to the duality of Oxford life. In American institutions, in proportion as a man is happily clubbed, he is by the very nature of the social organization withdrawn from his college mates; but at Oxford he still dines in Hall, holds forth at the college debating society, plays on the college teams, and, until his final year, he lives within the college walls. First, last, and always his general life is bound up with that of the college.

The prominent men thus become a medium by which every undergraduate is brought in touch with the life of the university. The news of the athletic world is reported at Vincent's over afternoon tea; and at dinner time the men who have discussed it there relate it to their mates in the halls of a dozen colleges. A celebrated debater brings the news of the Union or of the smaller clubs; and whatever a man's affiliations in the university, he can scarcely help bringing the report of them back with him. In an incredibly short time all undergraduate news, and the judgments upon it of those best qualified to judge, ramify the college; and men who seldom stir beyond its walls are brought closely in touch with the innermost spirit of the university life. Here, again, those forbidding walls make possible a freedom of social interplay which is unknown in America. The real union of Oxford, social, athletic, and intellectual, is quite apart from the so-called Oxford Union; it results from the nice adjustment between the general residential life of the colleges and the specialized activities of the university.

The immediate effect of this union is the humble one of making the present life of the undergraduate convenient and enjoyable; but its ultimate effect is a matter of no little importance. Every undergraduate, in proportion to his susceptibilities and capacities, comes under the influence of the social and intellectual traditions of Oxford, which are the traditions of centuries of the best English life. In Canada and Australia, South Africa and India, you will find the old Oxonian wearing the hatband, perhaps faded and weather-stained, that at Oxford denoted the thing he was most proud to stand for; and wherever you find him, you will find also the manners and standards of the university, which are quite as definite a part of him, though perhaps less conspicuous. Without a large body of men animated by such traditions, it is no exaggeration to say that it would not have been possible to build up the British empire. If the people of the United States are to bear creditably the responsibilities to civilization that have lately fallen to them, or have been assumed, there is urgent need for institutions that shall similarly impose upon our young men the best traditions and influences of American life.

II

OXFORD OUT OF DOORS

I

SLACKING ON THE ISIS AND THE CHERWELL

The dual development of college and university, with all its organic coordinations, exists also in the sports of Oxford. The root and trunk of the athletic spirit lies in the colleges, though its highest development is found in university teams. To an American, this athletic life of the college will be found of especial interest, for it is the basis of the peculiar wholesomeness and moderation of Oxford sports. If the English take their pleasures sadly, as they have been charged with doing ever since Froissart hit upon the happy phrase, they are not so black a pot but that they are able to call us blacker; in the light of international contests, they have marveled at the intensity with which our sportsmen pursue the main chance. The difference here has a far deeper interest than the critic of boating or track athletics often realizes. Like the songs of a nation, its sports have a definite relation to its welfare: one is tempted to say, let me rule the games of my countrymen and who will may frame their laws. At least, I hope to be pardoned if I speak with some particularity of the out-of-door life, and neglect the lofty theme of inter-varsity contests for the humbler pursuits of the common or garden undergraduate.

The origin of the boating spirit is no doubt what the Oxonian calls slacking, for one has to learn to paddle in a boat before he can row to advantage; and in point of fact the bumping races are supposed to have originated among parties of slackers returning at evening from up the river. If I were to try to define what a slacker is, I suppose you could answer that all Oxford men are slackers; but there are depths beneath depths of _far niente_. The true slacker avoids the worry and excitement of breakfast parties and three-day cricket matches, and conserves his energies by floating and smoking for hours at a time in his favorite craft on the Isis and the Cherwell--or "Char," as the university insists on calling it. He is a day-dreamer of day-dreamers; and despised as he is by the more strenuous Oxford men, who yet stand in fear of the fascination of his vices, he is as restful a figure to an American as a negro basking on a cotton-wharf, and as appealing as a beggar steeped in Italian sunlight. Merely to think of his uninterrupted calm and his insatiable appetite for doing nothing is a rest to occidental nerves; and though one may never be a roustabout and loaf on a cotton-wharf, one may at any time go to Oxford and play through a summer's day at slacking.

Before you come out, you must make the acquaintance of the O.U.H.S.--that is, the University Humane Society. In the winter, when there is skating, the Humane Society man stands by the danger spot with a life-buoy and a rope; and in the summer, when the streams swarm with pleasure-craft, he wanders everywhere, pulling slackers out of the Isis and the Char. In view of the fact that, metaphorically speaking at least, you can shake hands with your neighbors across either of these streams, the Humane Society man is not without his humors.

You may get yourself a tub or a working-boat or a wherry, a rob-roy or a dinghy, for every craft that floats is known on the Thames; but the favorite craft are the Canadian canoe and the punt. The canoe you will be familiar with, but your ideas of a punt are probably derived from a farm-built craft you have poled about American duck-marshes--which bears about the same relationship to this slender, half-decked cedar beauty that a canal-boat bears to a racing-shell.

During your first perilous lessons in punting, you will probably be in apprehension of ducking your mentor, who is lounging among the cushions in the bow. But you cannot upset the punt any more than you can discompose the Englishman; the punt simply upsets you without seeming to be aware of it. And when you crawl dripping up the bank, consoled only by the fact that the Humane Society man was not at hand with his boat-hook to pull you out by the seat of the trousers, your mentor will gravely explain how you made your mistake. Instead of bracing your feet firmly on the bottom and pushing with the pole, you were leaning on the pole and pushing with your feet. When the pole stuck in the clay bottom, of course it pulled you out of the boat.

Steering is a matter of long practice. When you want to throw the bow to the left, you have only to pry the stern over to the right as you are pulling the pole out of the water. To throw the bow to the right, ground the pole a foot or so wide of the boat, and then lean over and pull the boat up to it. That is not so easy, but you will learn the wrist motion in time. When all this comes like second nature, you will feel that you have become a part of the punt, or rather that the punt has taken life and become a part of you.

A particular beauty of punting is that, more than any other sport, it brings you into personal contact, so to speak, with the landscape. In a few days you will know every inch of the bottom of the Char, some of it perhaps by more intimate experience than you desire. Over there, on the outer curve of the bend, the longest pole will not touch bottom. Fight shy of that place. Just beyond here, in the narrows, the water is so shallow that you can get the whole length of your body into every sweep. As for the shrubbery on the bank, you will soon learn these hawthorns, if only to avoid barging into them. And the Magdalen chestnut, which spreads its shade so beautifully above the water just beyond, becomes quite familiar when its low-reaching branches have once caught the top of your pole and torn it from your hands.

The slackers you see tied up to the bank on both sides of the Char are always here after luncheon. An hour later their craft will be as thick as money-bugs on the water, and the joys of the slackers will be at height. You won't, as a rule, detect happiness in their faces, but it is always obvious in the name of the craft. One man calls his canoe "Vix Satis," which is the mark the university examining board uses to signify that a man's examination paper is a failure. Another has "P.T.O." on his bows--the "Please Turn Over" which an Englishman places at the bottom of a card where we say "Over." Still another calls his canoe the "Non-conformist Conscience"--which, as you are expected to remark, is very easily upset. All this makes the slacker even happier than if he were so un-English as to smile his pleasure, for he has a joke ready-made on his bow, where there is no risk of any one's not seeing it.

These pollard willows that line the bank are not expected to delight your eye at first sight, but as you see them day after day, they grow on you like the beauty of the bull-terrier pup that looks at you over the gunwale of the boat tied beneath them. They have been topped to make their roots strike deeper and wider into the soil, so that when the freshets come in the spring the banks will stand firm. The idea came some centuries ago from Holland, but has been so thoroughly Englished that the university, and, indeed, all England, would scarcely be itself without its pollard willows. And though the trees are not in themselves graceful, they make a large part of the beauty of the river scenery. The sun is never so golden as up there among their quivering leaves, and no shadow is so deep as that in the water at their feet.

The bar of foam ahead of us is the overflow from the lasher--that is to say, from the still water above the weir. The word "lasher" is obsolete almost everywhere else in England, and even to the Oxford mind it describes the lashing overflow rather than the _lache_ or _slack_ water above. When we "shoot the lasher," as the phrase goes, you will get a hint as to why the obsolete term still clings to this weir. Those fellows beyond who have tied up three deep to the bank are waiting to see us get ducked; but it is just as easy to shoot the lasher as to upset in it; and with that swarm of slackers watching, it makes a difference which you do. We have only to get up a fair pace and run into it on a diagonal. The lashing torrent will catch our bows, but we shall be half over before it sweeps them quite around; and then it will catch the stern in turn, and whirl the bow back into the proper direction. A sudden lurching of the bow, the roaring of a torrent beneath, a dash of spray--and we are in still water again.

In order to reach the inn at Marston by four we must pole on. If we were true slackers, to be sure, we should have brought a spirit lamp and a basket of tea, and tied up in the first convenient nook on the bank; but these are heights of slacking to which the novice cannot aspire. Just beyond here we shall have to give the Thames Conservancy man threepence to roll the punt around a weir. If there were ladies with us, we should have to let them walk a quarter of a mile on shore, for just above is Parson's Pleasure, the university bathing-hole; and these men, who would not let the Yale and the Cornell athletes appear in sleeveless "zephyrs," plunge into a frequented waterway without any zephyrs at all.

Above Parson's Pleasure we emerge from Mesopotamia--as the pretty river bottom is called in which the Char divides into several channels--and come in sight of the 'varsity cricket-ground. There is a game on against a picked eleven from the Marylebone Club; and every few minutes, if we waited, we might see the statuesque figures in white flannel suddenly dash after a ball or trot back and forth between the wickets. Few slackers have had energy to get beyond this point; and as we pole among the meadows, the cuckoo's homely voice emphasizes the solitude, singing the same two notes it sang to Shakespeare--and to Chaucer before him, for the matter of that.

At Marston, having ordered tea of the red-cheeked housewife, it is well to ask the innkeeper for credit. He is a Parisian, whose sociological principles, it is said, were the cause of his venturing across the Channel--in Paris, a man will even go as far as that for his opinions; and while his cheery English spouse, attended by troops of his red-cheeked boys, brings out the thin buttered bread, he will revile you. What business have you to ask an honest yeoman to lend you money? If he were to go down to Oxford and ask the first gentleman he met to lend him half a crown to feed his starving family, should he get it? Should he? And what right have you to come to his house--his _home_!--and demand food at his board? You are a gentleman; but what is a gentleman? A gentleman is the dregs of the idleness of centuries! Then he will declaim about his plans for the renovation of the world. All this time his well-fed wife has been pouring out the tea and slicing the Genoa cake; and now, with a smile of reassurance, she takes our names and college. But the innkeeper's eloquence does not flag, and it will not until you tell him with decision that you have had enough. This you are loath to do, for he has furnished you with a new ideal of happiness. The cotton-wharf negro sometimes wants leisure, the repose of the cricketer is at times rudely broken in upon, and even the slacker is liable to his ducking; but to stand up boldly against the evils of the world and to picture the new Utopia while your wife averts all practical consequences, this is _otium cum dignitate_.

This journey up the Char, though all-popular with the undergraduate, is not the only one worth taking. We might have gone down the Isis to the Iffley Mill and the sleepy little Norman church near by. This would have taken us through the thick of the college crews training for the summer eights. But the rules of the river are so complicated that no man on earth who has not given them long hours of study can understand them; and if an eight ran into us, we should be fined a quid or two--one quid for a college eight, and two for the 'varsity. Below Iffley, indeed, there is as much clear punting as you could desire, and here you are in the full current of Thames pleasure-boats. The towing-path skirts the water, so that when you are tired of punting you can get out and tow your craft. The stretch of river here I hold memorable as the scene of the only bit of dalliance I ever witnessed in this most sentimental of environments. A young man and a young woman had tied the painter of their punt to the middle of a paddle, and shoulder by shoulder were loitering along the river-side. Twenty yards behind, three other men and a baffled chaperon were steering the punt clear of the bank, and boring one another.

The best trip on the Isis is into the backwaters. These are a mesh of tiny streams that break free from the main current above Oxford and lose themselves in the broad bottom-lands. The islands they form were chosen in the Dark Ages as the sites of religious houses; for not only was the land fertile, but the network of deep, if tiny, streams afforded defense from the heathen, while the main channel of the Thames afforded communication with the Christian world. The ruins of these, or of subsequent monasteries, remain to-day brooding over a few Tudor cottages and hamlets, with a mill and a bakery and an inn or two to sustain life in the occasional undergraduate who lazes by in his canoe.