Guardian from London, Greater London, England • Page 19

THE GUARDIAN, OCTOBER 4, 1899. 1339 UNtVEBSlTY LIFE AND ITS CRITICS. It is not quite dear what are the causes to whioh the undergraduate world owes the large amount of attention whioh has been paid to it recently by journalists and publio speakers. Addresses on school speech-days and similar occasions during this summer appear (from newspaper reports) to have oontained warn ing 9 more than usually frequent against the extravagance and carelessness of higher things whioh are supposed to be obaraoteristio of Oxford and Cambridge life; and it was somewhat surprising to find the new Master of Pembroke, whose reputation for height and knowledge of youth was known to be well founded, generalising after one term's, residence on the universal idleness of Oxford. the last few weeks an anonymous writer in the Speaker has joined in the chorus, with an article which cannot, indeed, be taken quite seriously, but which baa the advantage of expressing with unmistakable clearness and in the most lurid light the worst that a distorted imagination could conceive as a picture of University life.

It is possible that parents and others may be misled by some of these speeches and writings, and a consideration of the charges brought and the real condition of the undergraduate world is, therefore, worth while. If I treat the article in the Speaker as representative of the attacking side ft must not be supposed that I attach any importance to it on its own account; it is obviously based ou a knowledge of a very small section of men, such as may form a small set in a few colleges, but would be represented in most only by one or two individuals; and there is something about its tone whioh would prevent even the most pessimistic reader from giving much credence to it. It reads as if dictated by impressions such as might have been gathered from some (mostly absurd) correspondence a few years back in regard to a domestio disturbance in Christ Church, aided by pages out of one or two novels in whioh sensationalism is ranked above truth, at least so far as the Universities are concerned. But the article is usefuljlike most exaggerations, because it emphasises the weakness of the side it represents, and can, therefore, be usefully quoted for my present purpose. The really serious attack is that which bos been made by less irresponsible writers and speakers elsewhere, in a tone very different from that of the Speaker, and it is quite worth while considering whether University life is as muoh on the down grade as some of them apparently believe it to be.

I should add that I can only speak from personal knowledge about Oxford, and that I have an intl mate acquaintance with two colleges of very different of them one of the leading intellectual centres, the other generally supposed to depend for its present success on its athletio renown. My remarks must necessarily be based mainly on, these two colleges; but an extensive acquaintance with undergraduates in many others will, I hope, save me from hasty generalisation and from undue narrowness of view. The chief points in the indictment (when divested of the rhetorical garb in which the Speaker has clothed them) are these. Extravagant expenditure, it is said, is praotically compulsory for every one who would not be a total social failure, and a laughingstock to his whole college, and pass bis time in friendless misery. Moderation in expenditure and manners is regarded with contempt; rowdiness, especially if it succeeds in securing the rustication of the offender, is the high road to honour; study and respectability of life the high road to social obloquy.

Gambling, horse-racing, betting, drinking, elaborate dress are the most prevalent features of society. The dress need not be in good taste, nor the wine of good vintage; expensiveness is the only criterion of excellence. Nor need the object of the wager be scientifically treated; to back a bad horse is even more sporting and, therefore, more meritorious than to back a good one. Again, the extravagance is rendered worse by effeminacy; the blood of former days was at least a sportsman, and his rooms bore witness to it by their with hunting-crops, boxing-gloves, fencing-sticks, and so on; to-duy we find soft Oriental fabrics and cushions, the cigarette instead of the pipe, and all the vicious seductiveness of so-called "aathetioism." But a few lines of the Speaker 1 1 article are too vivid not to be quoted Drunkenness, in fact, is expected of every self-respecting member of a college after ten clock in the when the fun All is debauchery, effeminacy, extravagance. As to reading, the only reading the modern undergraduate knows is contraband translations of French novels and the lower class of sporting prints.

The idea of his possibly desiring to do well in the Bchools is smiled at as an antiquated notion of an old fogey, a silly early Victorian idea that went out with antimacassars and crinolines. Study is looked upon as the last degradation, and the sole aim of the average undergraduate is to outstrip his fellows in profligacy and in 'appalling It is obvious that there are grains of truth in the article. There is probably no society in the world whioh has not at any given moment its fashionable vices, which change from time to time. It could not be expected' that undergraduate society would prove an exception. There have undoubtedly been periods in Oxford when, it may have been, gambling, or drunkenness, or betting, or extravagance in dress, has become prominent for a time.

About eight years ago, to my own knowledge, and again about five years ago (on each occasion only for about a term), a good many men in several colleges carried drinking to excess; for an equally short period some three years ago there was a serious indulgence in betting and card-playing for high stakes; the aesthetic movement was undoubtedly not without a temporary influence on Oxford, but practically ceased when its foremost representative fell into the hands of the police, and its more vicious side was even at its worst restricted to a very small circle. Such things come in occasional and cause mulch trouble when they come. Further, there are, of course, always men, and probably in every college, who err in some or other of these ways. But it simply shows ignorance of undergraduate life to suppose that such men are in any way representative of the majority or of public opinion in most colleges. They are often the most in evidence, simply because they are usually the noisiest, and therefore are selected by the casual visitor and the superficial moralist as typical, and though probably nine-tenths of the whole number of under graduates would in no way follow or admire such men, it mutt he regretfully admitted" that they do not suppress them as they might do if it were not so much easier to neglect them than to organise any publie opinion against them.

I can, however, think of several extreme cases where the latter course has been adopted with effect; and I do not believe that the representatives of tho worst kinds of folly or vice are ever really looked up to by the rest of their colleges, unless they also possess singular gifts of a higher order, which attract independently of their faults. Again, to the visitor, especially in the summer term, when most visitors arrive, it must seem at first sight as though Oxford were a home of idleness and enjoyment, and nothing and from the average undergraduate's conversation it might easily be posed that his sole interest was in athletics. This is what appears on the surface; but though the last half of the summer term is for a good many men too much of a carnival, and though rowing, cricket, football, and other sports are undoubtedly the main element in common conversation, it requires only a more intimate acquaintance with undergraduates as individual men as a class viewed unsympathetioally from tho know that nearly all have other interests than these, some higher, some lower, like the rest of mankind, and that most young men are singularly, shy of introducing into general conversation the things whioh they feel moat deeply, and will only speak of them to one or two intimate friends. It has been my own privilege to know many undergraduates of several generations thus intimately, some of them being among the most prominent athletes in the University and, though I am very far from being blind to the evils of over-athleticism (of whioh more presently), I speak what I know when I say that it is comparatively rarely that a man is to be found at that age without higher interests, oven though often not the highest, nor yet as well developed as they might be; that the best athletes are not unfroquently among the most hardworking men in college, perhaps because vigour in one direotion often carries with it the capacity for vigour in othors; and that when properly that is, a man is treated on the assumption that his better interests are his real interests, and not played down to by confining conversation to athletio shop men very soon expand and are genuinely gratified and encouraged by the recognition that they are no longer mere sohoolboys, but men with a purpose. As regards work, even in the summer term, a college tutor may possibly be believed in asserting that a good deal more is done than is supposed; that some men (and those, of course, the men who are most seen) are lamentably idle is true enough their comparative freedom from external pressure is bound to result thus in some cases; but good workers and moderate workers are at least as large a proportion of tho whole as in the rest of the world.

But it will be replied that, however it may be palliated, athleticism has run wild and everything has bowed down before it. Though I have tried to show that this is an over-statement, and though there are very many who have never bowed the knee to Baal, and more still whose conversation does not represent more than the surface of themselves, yet no one can deny that in the case of very many men sports and games do occupy a disproportionate shore of their time. It is not that the time regularly allotted to such things is excessive: from 1.46 till five o'clock in the winter, and the whole afternoon (and in the case of a few' picked men, parts of some mornings) in summer, is not really too long a time of recreation for men still growing and needing a good deal of exercise for their healthy development. The fault rather lies in the fact that during much of the morning and evening also men's thoughts run on these same linos, and that the excitement of competition precedes and outlasts tho actual struggle. Record times, high scoring, and so on (though the interest even in these things is a form of hero-worship, if not a high one) also absorb a good deal of interest; and the attractiveness of such topics is often a bar to thoroughness in work and to the more serious reflections whioh there ought to be time for.

I do not believe that BO many men aa is often believed really seriously hampered in this way; but that the are evil exists, and causes no small number to live in a fool's paradise, is true. What are the causes of thisp The mischief undoubtedly often begins in the publio schools, and it is the boys who come from the largest and best-known public schools who aro most affected by it. Those who hail from tho smaller grammar-schools and, still more, those from the Scotch Universities are far less touched with the craze. And in the schools the fault which gives rise to it is, no doubt, in part, a kind of over-organisation which is apt to crush out individual interests and divert the attention of all exclusively to the playing-fields; in part it is the appointment of masters for their athletio merits, the result of this being to give a sanction (from the boys' point of view) to their athletio pursuits of a superior kind to any they would otherwise have possessed, and also, it must be feared, to pull down the level of interest and conversation in the masters' common room to that of its least intellectual and idealistic members; in part, again (at least in the case of some of the large schools), the preparatory schools from which the boys come may be at fault; one or two of these schools are well known to the outer world chiefly through cricket teams composed of their masters. Again, I suspect a good deal more might be done to encourage literary and artistic sympathies among boys, in ways which I know to be already effectively used in some few sohools, by informal (and voluntary) reading of poetry, essays, in small groups at the invitation of a master; natural history and science may be similarly encouraged, and will have a widening influence.

The opportunities afforded by the school chapel cannot be overestimated, but there is much reason to fear that they are not always made use of; boys and young men are soon rendered inattentive by dulness and formality, but respond with marvellous readiness to sympathy and enthusiasm. It always takes an idealist to make idealists, but it doubtful whether they can be so easily made at any other age. It would, however, be idle to blame the schools alone, or to regard the publio school system pessimistically. No one who knows how increasingly large a number of earnest and sympathetic men are devoting their lives to the highest welfare of the boys under their charge can take an altogether gloomy view; that head masters are well aware of the dangers above indicated has been shown at a good many recent meetings, and there is reason for thinking that appointments of masters on athletio grounds solely are far fewer than they were, and may soon be a thing of the past. A much worse influence, and far more difficult to combat, is that of "the great sophist," the British publio; the sporting craze, with a concomitant tendency to betting and gambling, may have originated "with the aristocracy, but its influence on.the middle and working classes is, perhaps, one of the most serious features of our times; this reacts on nearly all newspapers, and young men are led to suppose that success in sports and in record-making is a real title to the highest admiration of their fellow-countrymen.

"Any one who has seen the crowds at a midland football match will recognise that it will take all that preachers and teachers and men with ideals can do to safeguard our youth against the danger. It is, however, certainly not greater at the Universities than elsewhere, and is only so great in the Universities because it is so great elsewhere. Again, it has happened in a number of oases within my own experienoe that home influences have favoured the gospel play. There are undoubtedly parents, and not a fow, who prefer a pewter to a prize for work, partly, it may be, because the former usually brings greater looal reputation than tho latter. And tho power of home influences on men at the University is, I believe, really stronger than that of sohool.

I have oortainly never other teachers have continually assured mo of the same man at whose home a really high tone was maintained and valuable interests fostered, permeated by the athletio superstition. But the home influenoe must be positivo and deep to be effective; if it is suoh it has all the forco of strongest thing in the world. The athletio ovil, then, is not manufactured at the University as our oritios would often lead us to believe: it is ready made for us, and it may grow worse or hotter at tho University, according to the treatment it receives. At present the worst feature about it is a oertain tendency to professionalism, evon in colleges, and a consequent loss of that sooial character whioh is one of tho really educative features in games. The oolloge games, that is, are too muoh confined to the few men who are good enough to play or row for the oolloge against others, and theso men thus tend to form a class apart from the rest, whose chances of getting a game beoome fow; thorearo too many matches and not onough games of tho squash or piok-up kind, played simply for the enjoyment and not in tho spirit of competition.

The mombers of the seleot college teams may also, from the same cause, in some colleges tend to be elevated on a pedestal above their fellows for no vory adequate reason; but this is not always BO. The giving of blues for everything, of whioh the Speaker oomplains, is also in the direotion of professionalism. Probably, however, this professional tendency will right itself in time, and there are games (hookey, for example) whioh are muoh played, and are almost unaffeoted by it. As to the treatment of athleticism by those responsible for the conduct of tho colleges, I have already hinted that sympathetic and discriminating appeal to other interests in men as individuals is probably the ohief solution of the difficulty. This involves undoubtedly intimate personal relations between the older and the younger residents; but this state of things is already the rule in some colleges in Oxford, and is coming more and more to be so throughout.

Unoompromising hostility to or neglect of the athletio man is obviously mere folly, and the good that has been done, both to dons and men, by their joining in common pastimes continually can hardly bo overestimated; it has really booomo impossible to suppose (except from pure wilfulness) that thero is any incompatibility between good work and good fellowship. No doubt tho maintenance of suoh intimate acquaintance with a good many mon moans a great sacrifice of time and a great deal of thought ou the part of tho older residents; it may mean, to somo extent, the saoriflce of research," though a teacher who is not also to some degree a student will soon be neither; but the results which may be thus attained are likely to be of muoh greater value than a good deal of information from the obscurer fields of research; and there is no fear that there will ever be a lack of men who will prefer to spend their spare time apart from their pupils or any thought of them, not to speak of the vacations, large parts of which will always remain open for private study. I have tried to deal with the alleged idleness and over-athletioism of Oxford by showing that thoy have been exaggerated by our critics; that the causes of them lie largely outside our own control, and that the remedy lies chiefly in eliciting tho latent ideals which aro present in nearly all men of the undergraduate age, by personal intercourse, and of course by any other more public means of appeal. Something can no doubt be done by formal and disciplinary regulations, though not muoh. Almost, everything depends upon the men recognising tho true place of enjoyment in life, and this cannot be taught by discipline in the.

narrower sense. There is no need here to allude to the obvious merits of games and sports as an occupation for leisure hours, a school of patriotism, and an element in general education (in tho sense of fitting men for life) both at school and college. Those critics of the University who affirm roundly that no interest is taken in important matters, or in anything but enjoyment, may really be best met by a flat negative. It ueods only a very slight acquaintance with Oxford to become aware of the intense interest taken by a large number of men in social and political questions. Nearly every oollege has dobating societies which are taken seriously by their members, and are the scene of genuine discussion, although tho dangers of epigram-making and clever rhetoric are always with us; and tho interest in the debates of the Union Society has certainly not diminished during the last ten years, and, so far as I can see, has greatly increased.

It would probably affect the judgment oven of our sternest critics to attend a Union debate on a serious subject (of course all debates are not equally serious, and some must be admitted to sink to a rather unfortunate level of frivolity, especially in Eights week and on similar occasions), or to be present at a meeting of the Junior Scientific Club, where they would beoome acquainted with a side of University life which is little known to the outside world, but which represents genuine study of a high order; or to see the crowd waiting for the publication of a class-list in the hall of the sohools. The musical societies of the University might also teach our critics something. And the attendance at the Sunday evening sermons for undergraduates is larger than a total want of interest in anything but low pleasures will account for. With regard to the expensiveness of University life, the tendency at present is certainly in the direotion of economy. No doubt a man who hunts several times a week and gives large entertainments will find the University more expensive than Eton; but such men are very few, except in one or two colleges, and the ordinary man can, if he chooses, live with complete comfort, supply himself with books and clothes, and pay his other personal expenses for the year (unless he pastes his vacations in some exjeasive manner), for under a year.fcl speak from.