Chapter II: New or Kodak Style (3)

Consult your hearers' happiness, and state for their relief
That you'll avoid prolixity and study to be brief:
For if you can't be brief at once, 'twill comfort them to know
That you'll arrive at brevity in half an hour or so.

_Of Obedience to Rule_.

Should e'er the Chairman censure you, as Chairmen oft will do,
And tell you that you miss the point, and bid you keep thereto,
(Though points are things, by Euclid's law, that always must be
missed--
They have no parts or magnitude, and therefore don't exist)--
Obey at once the Chairman's hest (because, as you're aware,
It is a most improper thing to argue with the Chair),
Accept his ruling patiently, without superfluous fuss,
And state the things you _might_ have said--unless he'd ruled it thus.

_Of a Peroration_.

And when you've spent your arguments yet somehow still go on
(It shows a want of enterprise to stop because you've done),
Don't search about for topics new or vex your weary brain,
But take what someone else has said and say it all again.

_Of Impartiality_.

And when at last your speech is o'er, be careful if you can
That none may hint--a horrid charge--that you're a Party Man:
So speak for this and speak for that as blithely as you may,
But keep your mental balance true, and
Vote the other Way.

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

Two youths there were in days of yore
Called Jones and Robinson.
Jones had abilities galore,
While Robinson had none.

They met with corresponding fates:
And Jones, that genius proud,
Obtained in time a First in Greats:
While Robinson was ploughed.

Jones hoped that mental gifts like his
Might gain a Fellowship:
But ah! full many a slip there is
Between the cup and lip:

"You have a brain," the College said,
"Which unassisted soars:
'Tis not for Colleges to aid
Abilities like yours!

Go--wealth awaits your gathering hand,
And empires crave your rule!
But Fellowships like ours are planned
To help the helpless fool."

He tried the Press: he tried the Bar:
But still the Bar and Press
Said, "Not for him our openings are
Whose gifts ensure success:

Such posts are meant ('tis justice plain)
For those unhappy chaps
(Like Robinson) whom lack of brain
Unfairly handicaps!"

And now--yet check the rising tear:
It seems that long ago
Those Founders whom we all revere
Meant it to happen so--

Some lack of necessary food,
All in a garret lone,
Has ended Jones. I thought it would.
But Robinson's a DON.

UNIVERSITY COMMISSIONS

BY LAMBDA MINUS

A rumour and rumbling volcanic
Is heard in the Radical Press,
And Presidents tremble in panic
And Wardens their terrors confess:
How each with anxiety shivers,
The Dean with his fines and his gates,
The ruffian who ragged me in Divvers,
The pedant who ploughed me in Greats!

The doctrines degrading they taught, and
The Progress they nipped in the bud:
The things that they did when they oughtn't
And failed to perform when they should:
The Questions prevented from burning,
The Movements forbidden to move,
Recoil on their centres of learning,
Their Parks and the System thereof!

Afar will Democracy chase it,
That gang of impenitent Dons
Who drowned the occasional Placet
By bawling their truculent Nons:
No idle and opulent College
Will feed that obstructionist clique,
Those scoffers at Practical Knowledge
Who vote for compulsory Greek.

And now when the Party of Labour,
Asserting its virtuous sway,
Annexes the wealth of its neighbour
In Labour's traditional way,--
When purged of its various abuses
By Birrell's beneficent rule,
This haunt of the obsolete Muses
Is changed to a charity school,--

When Fellows and bloated Professors
Their stipends are forced to disgorge,
(Obeying the fiat of Messrs.
Keir Hardie and Burns and Lloyd George)
Deprived by the wrath of the Nation
Of all their unmerited aids,
Perhaps to escape from starvation
They'll take to respectable trades!

O wholly delectable vision!
I view with excusable glee
The fate of the shallow precisian
Who failed to appreciate Me;--
I fancy I see myself tossing
With blandly contemptuous mien
A penny for sweeping a crossing
To him who was formerly Dean!

DIPLOMAS IN ARCHITECTURE AT CAMBRIDGE

("Education differs from technical training."--Expert opinion in a letter to the _Times_.)

Not in vain with quaint devices
Infants of the age of four
Build their mimic edifices
All upon the nursery floor;
Neither is the presage missed
By the Educationist,
When he doth the fact recall
How that Balbus built a wall!

Thus I mused on such-like theses,
While my errant fancy swam
Through the circumambient breezes
To the silver streams of Cam,--
There observed with pleased surprise
Ancient Universities
Still in touch at every stage
With the Progress of the Age;

There, released from sloth and coma
(Alma Mater's chief defect),
There they grant a new Diploma
To the budding Architect,
Take the blighted Builder's art
To their academic heart,
Hope it may in time become
Part of their curriculum:

There they tell their College Porters
Not to think it strange or odd
When a load of bricks and mortar's
Dumped within the College quad;
No indignant Tutor hauls
Him who scales the College walls,--
Plying on that airy perch
Architectural Research!

Thus I sang: I seemed to see an
Epoch made, the Future's guide;
But my glad exultant paean
Was not wholly justified:
Men whose names we all revere,
Stars in Architecture's sphere,
Phrases used which don't imply
Any genuine sympathy:

Ch---mpn---ys, Bl---mfield, T. G. J---cks---n,
Hushed my lyre's triumphant string--
Said in limpid Anglo-Saxon
What they thought about the thing:
"Seats of learning are designed
For to Educate the Mind,
Not to teach a craft or trade,"
_That_ was what these persons said!

What! and must a thwarted Nation
Draw the obvious inference?
What! a Liberal Education
Doesn't mean the quest of pence?
(Really, this extremely crude
Obscurantist attitude
Isn't quite what one expects
From distinguished Architects!)

Here's another dear illusion
Reft away and wholly gone:
O the spiritual confusion
Of the pained progressive Don!
If the facts are quite correct
As regards the Architect,
Comes the question, plain and clear,
_How about the Engineer_?

ICHABOD: A MONODY

Now is the time when everything is glad,
Their vernal greenery the fields renew,
Each feathered songster chants with livelier tone,
And lambkins leap and cloudless skies are blue,
And all is gay and cheerful:--I alone
Am singularly sad;
Mine erstwhile happiness and calm content
Yields to a sense of sorrowful surprise:
Things that I thought were thus, are otherwise:
And all is grief, and disillusionment.

For He, who did in everything surpass
Our common world,--the Good, the Truly Great,
The Working Man, who shamed with standards high
Our obscurantists unregenerate,--
Is not, 'twould seem, better than you, or I,
Or any other ass:
The vision's faded, as a snowflake melts;
Fallen is that idol from his high renown:
He hath waxed fat, and kicked, and tumbled down,
And we must seek ensamples somewhere else!

Where is it, Comrades! in this direful day--
That noble zeal for academic lore,
That reverence due for discipline, in which
He used to shine conspicuously o'er
The Brainless Athlete and the Idle Rich?
O, does he now display
That ample breadth of calm impartial view,
That sober judgment and that balanced mind,
Which we were taught that we should always find,
O R---skin College, domiciled in you?

I have a Pupil: when his mental food
Fails (as it will) his appetite to sate,
What! does that patient much-enduring elf
Proclaim a strike? set pickets at my gate?
Boycott my lectures? give them for himself?
(Full oft I wish he would:)
Nay--when he finds those lectures dull and flat,
He asks no other: new ones might be worse:
Too well he knows that Cosmos' ordered course
Meant him to hear, and me to talk like that.

Also I own I'm disappointed by
Your friends and patrons, British Working Man!
For they, methought, were champions of the Cause,
Fighters for Freedom, foremost in the van,
Not servile scruplers, bound by rules and laws,
Not men who dealt in dry
Respectable traditions: leaders true,
No timid Moderates, who would define
Too strict a boundary 'twixt Mine and Thine,
Potential martyrs, heart and soul with you:--

'Twas all illusion: they would feed you with
Mere talks on Temperance: when your spirit's wings
Would soar to Sociology alone,
Whereby will come that blessed state of things
When none has property to call his own,
They give you--Adam Smith . . .
These too are fall'n: ah me, that I should live
To hear our brightest Radicals and best
By angry Labour in such terms addressed
As might apply to a Conservative!

To this conclusion I perforce must come,
'Twere best we parted: seeing that we, 'twould seem,
Haply have no appreciation of
Your high ambitions and your aims supreme,
Nor can we hope that you should greatly love
Our mental pabulum:
Depart, O Comrades! to some happier sphere
Where you can still be nobly on the make,
And mine, or plumb, or brew, or butch, or bake,--
Best to depart, and leave us mouldering here!

Yea, if ye scorn our learning overmuch,
Misguided sons of horny-handed toil!
Yet discontented with your lowly lot
Still pine to burn the sad nocturnal oil
'Mid academic culture, or 'mid what
Describes itself as such--
Go elsewhere, O my brothers! only go
To Bath, to Birmingham--where'er the Don
Teaches the sacred art of Getting On,----
--It is not far from here to Jericho.

THE PANACEA

It is Research of which I sing,
Research, that salutary thing!
None can succeed, in World or Church,
Who does not prosecute Research:
For some read books, and toil thereat
Their intellect to waken:
But if you think Research is _that_
You're very much mistaken.

All in Columbia's blessed States
They have no Smalls, or Mods, or Greats,
Nor do their faculties benumb
With any cold curriculum:
O no! for there the ambitious Boy,
Released from schools and birches,
At once pursues with studious joy
Original Researches:

A happy lot that Student's is,
--I wish that mine were like to his,--
Where in the bud no pedants nip
His Services to Scholarship:
And none need read with care and pain
Rome's History, or Greece's,
But each from his creative brain
Evolves semestrial Theses!

On books to pore is not the kind
Of thing to please the serious mind,--
I do not very greatly care
For such unsatisfying fare:
To seek the lore that in them lurks
Would last _ad infinitum_:
Let others read immortal works,--
I much prefer to write 'em!

THE HEROIC AGE

When I ponder o'er the pages of the old romantic ages, ere the world
grew cold and gray,
When there wasn't a relation between Oxford and the Nation, or a
Movement every day,
How I marvel at the glamour (in these duller days and tamer) which
informed those scenes of glee,
At the glamour and the glory of contemporary story, and the Eights as
they used to be!

It is obvious that the weather must have differed altogether from the
kind that now we know:
I arise from reading Fiction with the permanent conviction that it did
not hail, nor snow:
For each fair and youthful charmer had a summer sun to warm her and a
bran new frock and hat,--
In the progress of the lustres, when the crowd of Fashion musters it
has grown too wise for that.

Every boat from keel to rigger was a grand ideal figure as it skimmed
those Wavelets Blue,
While the Heroes who propelled 'em were comparatively seldom of a
commonplace type, like you--
In their strength and in their science they were positively giants,
through the gorgeous days of old,
Still an Admirable Crichton in those _lieben alten Zeiten_ was the
oarsman brave and bold:

He could row devoid of training, and (it hardly needs explaining) got
a quite unique degree:
With his blushing honours laden, he espoused a lovely maiden at the
end of Volume Three:
This alone he had to grieve for--that he'd nothing more to live for,
or expect from Fortune's whim:
For I never could discover, when his Oxford days were over, what the
world could hold for him!

O the rapture singlehearted of that Period has departed, with its
views ornate of Man,
And I think it won't come back till we restore the Pterodactyl, or
revive the late Queen Anne:
We have grown in mental stature, and we Go Direct to Nature, in these
days of stress and strife,
And the hero of a novel in a palace or a hovel is intolerably True to
Life:--

Not an infant learns to toddle but EFFICIENCY'S his model, which he
still pursues with rage,
In a manner inconsistent with the methods dim and distant of that
mid-Victorian age:
For that atmosphere Elysian it has faded from our vision and has gone
where the old tales go,
And I really don't know whether I regret altogether--but the simple
fact is so.

MAKERS OF HISTORY

Minstrels! who your choicest notes
Keep for men who row in boats,
Mark with what exalted mien
Comes the Hero of the Scene!
He, amid the festal swarm,
Fashion's glass and mould of form,
How in shape and how in features
Far surpassing other creatures,
How incomparable to
Common things like me and you!
He in whose transcendent state
All the ages culminate--
Could we ever keep him thus,
How delightful 'twere for us!
Could he, 'mid the admiring throng,
Ever beauteous, ever young,
Still abide for ever pent
In his true environment,
Wear that aureole still which now
Decks his high victorious brow!
Out, alas! that Fortune can't
Ever give us what we want!
HE must quit this vernal stage:
HE must sink to middle age
(E'en the Poet's soaring wit
Scarcely can envisage it):
Go with men of common clay
In to business every day:
Be perhaps a Brewer, or
Haply a Solicitor,--
None the fact to notice that
Haloes once adorned his hat:
Ay! the ways of Fate are odd:
Men are mortal . . . Ichabod . . .

* * * * *

Yet shall stay by stream and tree
Something still of what was He,--
Plainly put, his More or Less
Immaterial Consciousness,--
Very fine and very large,
Floating o'er his College barge:
Always while the world continues
Bards shall sing his thews and sinews,--
Here he rowed and here he ran,
Being rather more than man;--
Thus as ages onward go
Still he'll great and greater grow,
Larger still in prose or rhyme
Looming down the aisles of time,
Till he sit, sublime and vast,
'Mid the Giants of the Past,
Men who lived in days of old
(Ch-tty, W- -dg-te, N-ck-lls, G-ld),
Lived and rowed in ages dark
Long ere Noah built the Ark,
Very, very famous oars,
Mighty men in Eights and Fours,
Towering o'er our Browns and Smiths
Huge and grey, like Monoliths.

Thus the Hero's happy fate
Keeps in store a blissful state,
All adown the Future dim,
Nearly worthy e'en of Him!

ALMA MATER FILIO

Dear Youth! whose wealth and lineage high
Each outward sign denotes,
The highly fashionable tie,
The latest thing in coats--
Imprinted on whose candid brow
No gazer could detect
(As e'en your enemies allow)
The Pride of Intellect--

Who, 'spite your want of mental scope
And lack of Serious Aim,
Still left us, as we dared to hope,
More pensive than you came,
And thus at least, while critics vied
In pointing out our flaws,
For our continuance supplied
A kind of Final Cause:--

Your part is played, your turn is o'er:
Prepare to quit the stage:
It seems you're not the person for
The Spirit of the Age:
Though high your birth, though large your means,
I see--'tis sad, but true--
Soon, 'mid these academic scenes,
No corner left for you!

Ah! what avail the things that went
To build your prosperous lot,
The ample cash, the long descent,
The athlete's frequent pot,
The waistcoat bright of ardent red
Or fascinating green,
The social charm that captive led
The Provost, and the Dean?

I see the Cherwell's peaceful flood,
I see the courts of King's
Invaded by a student brood
Which knows all kinds of things--
A crowd with high desires replete,
Whose recreations are
To sit at Professorial feet
And join a Seminar:

Bright Butterfly! your haunts of old
Are tenanted by men
Who realise what studies mould
Th' Efficient Citizen . . .
These shall alone the blessings know
Of Isis and of Cam,
And You (I'm sure 'tis better so)
Will go to--Birmingham!

IN MEMORIAM EXAMINATORIS CUIUSDAM

Lo, where yon undistinguished grave
Erects its grassy pile on
One who to all Experience gave
An Alpha or Epsilon!

The world and eke the world's content,
And all therein that passes,
With marks numerical (per cent.)
He did dispose in classes:

Not his to ape the critic crew
Which vulgarly appraises
The Good, the Beautiful, the True
In literary phrases:

He did his estimate express
In terms precise and weighty,--
And Vice got 25 (or less,)
While Virtue rose to 80.

Now hath he closed his earthly lot
All in his final haven,--
(And be the stone that marks the spot
_On one side only_ graven,)

Bring papers on his grave to strew
Amid the grass and clover,
And plant thereby that pencil blue
Wherewith he looked them over!

There, freed from every human ill
And fleshly trammels gross, he
Lies in his resting-place until
The final Viva Voce:

So let him rest till crack of doom
Of mortal tasks aweary,--
And nothing write upon his tomb
Save [Greek text: beta]--(?).

THE END

* * * * *

PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.

Footnotes:

{24} 1897

{77} 1900.