It cannot be too strongly emphasized at the very outset that what follows are but sketchy impressions of Oxford and Oxford life, based upon only a term’s residence and observation; a period just long enough, it may be said in apology, for one to have corrected one’s preconceptions, on the one hand, and yet not have contracted any bias or prejudices on the other. Oxford to most Americans, to tourists in general, the Oxford of the summer vacation is little more than a heap of legends and a pile of stones; they go very well together—legends and stones—and deceive only those whom they puzzle. But the real Oxford, the living society of term time, is puzzling only on the closest scrutiny, and in proportion as one is undeceived; for it is, indeed, the most baffling of paradoxes. All appearances to the contrary, Oxford life is not medieval, but most modern; while it is Oxford thought, Oxford ideas of education that both seem to be and ought to be modern, which are, to my way of thinking at least, most medieval. These two significant facts, with the several significant contrasts they make between Oxford and American universities, are all that this article can attempt to sketch, and that only in barest outline.
Certainly the most fundamental, though not the most evident, difference, a contrast hard to appreciate from an American viewpoint, doubtless, is the simple fact that this great English university is a society of scholars, a scholar-craft for the perpetuation rather than for the extension of learning, for the maintenance of its dignity as a class profession more than for its dissemination either as an institutional or popular heritage. Wherefore it follows—as the night the day perhaps, yet quite as inevitably—that the typical Oxonian is neither a philosopher nor an educationalist in ours or the German sense of the terms. For the typical Oxonian’s philosophy is a philosophy of manners, ethics of the Aristotelian sort rather than a system of thought or even a systematization of knowledge; and his pedagogy is based upon the principle of the craft-guild, the principle that whoever has served his apprenticeship is a journeyman and fit to teach apprentices, and whover has matured as a journeyman is, in turn, master over journeymen and a guardian of the profession. This is why the ability to parse Greek sentences is thought to imply the ability to teach the parsing of Greek sentences. And why also a master’s degree is conferred for four years further enrolment upon the university books after graduation, a sufficient time, in all reason, for the discipline of the undergraduate regime to have ripened into character, or, as some one has facetiously put it, just time enough for a man to have recovered the mastery of himself.
Both the inherent excellence and defect of Oxford as an educational system seems to center here. Because his philosophy is a philosophy of manners, and the discipline of study goes hand in hand with the discipline of living, the typical Oxonian is inevitably a man of culture—a man whose learning bears some vital relation to his life. Because his theory and practice of education is the theory and practice of a craft, the typical Oxonian’s learning is his own private property by which he makes his living or maintains his social standing, and which he finally bequeaths to his sons. That is to say, he is neither by temperament nor by force of social obligation a teacher. The Oxford professor is very like the professional type the world over, but the Oxford “don” or tutor, as compared with an American type that boasts himself, Prometheus-like, “a maker of men,” is very like a prudent gardener who relies a prayerful lot on the sun, and the wind, and the rain—on his system and the natural laws of growth. Not that he isn’t painstaking and watchful, but he would as soon think of inoculating a set of young men with a dangerous or contagious idea as a gardener of pouring worms in his garden; as soon think of reversing the natural, logical, traditional order of exposition or of altering the perspective to inspire interest and enthusiasm, as a gardener of planting a bulb upside down. And, again, an Oxford man who goes out to teach would hardly go out with the idea of making little Oxfords over England, but of selecting and making little Oxonians, orienting them toward the great Mecca of their fathers. Education at Oxford, in brief, influences and influences for life every one who becomes a part of its corporate life. This is its excellence. But the same system gives Oxford a sort of religious dominance over the province of knowledge that certainly makes the right to teach, and too often the right to be taught a matter of apostolic succession, and excommunicates all education that does not subordinate itself as directly preparatory to that system. This is its defect; both excellence and defect are medieval.
These statements will seem unkind and adverse to those who think it a reproach to be called medieval—but by such Oxford never can be understood or appreciated. It is more serious that they will seem unjust and untrue to many who are familiar with the slow but persistent progress of university reform at Oxford. Is not Oxford, such men will say, the source of the movement for the extension of university teaching? She has established, and maintains in flourishing condition, an elaborate system of research degrees. It is a matter of commonplace that the honor school of history is becoming so popular as almost to dispute the traditional ascendancy of the school of the humanities. Then there is the new movement in the study of sociology the diploma system, the recently proposed engineering department, and the promising Curzon fund for the express furtherance of university aims and development.
But notwithstanding all this, the contention is that Oxford is still medieval; not, indeed, because the Oxford system is antiquated, but because the typical Oxonian’s ideas of the purpose and privileges and ideals of education are. University reforms seem like the yielding of outer walls, while deep within old regime flourishes with greater intensity because of its restrictions—indeed, with the religious intensity and fervor of a beleaguered city of the elect. And the greatest misfortune is that what was once a society is fast becoming a sect. There are circles in Oxford still where, if Truth is an open book, it is like those books of childhood memory, too heavy for youthful knees, and opened only on the maternal lap. In those same circles, an instructor is an intermediator rather than a guide; and a library a precious granary stored against intellectual famine, and not a mint and exchange for the currency of modern thought; and there, too, scholastic distinction means social privileges more than simply certified skill or attainment.
The usual, trite criticisms of Oxford are as unfair as they are unreasonable. Oxford is above all else consistent, and one must either take issue with the system or with nothing at all. It is foolish for instance, to charge Oxford with pedantry, granting their contention that the best thought is impersonal, and that a first-class mind is like a first-water diamond, colorless and transparent. Again, from a certain point of view, dignity is superciliousness; and craft-secrets, charlatanism; and an aristocracy of learning, which Oxford is indeed, must needs seem wrong side out if viewed from the outside. This is what is meant by saying that Oxford is medieval, and that it must some day face, not reforms, but reform; that is to say, be challenged as a system. And that day, to the lasting and reasonable regret of many Oxonians, Oxford will probably choose to become modern.
But once this ancient tradition, that every one admits to be one of the most effective and desirable of educative influences, is driven out of scholarship, where will it take refuge? It is to be hoped in University customs and social life, where it is supposed even now to be rooted, but is so only nominally. Oxford social life is a remarkably well-seasoned and well-working system, rather paternal, it is true, but one where every university function, every university custom is both the occasion and the cause of some little bit of wholesome social life. Even when the difficulties of American contrasts are met and the social antipodes meet, the system by no means breaks down; and under the usual English conditions of more or less approximation to one scale or standard of living among college men, it is or should be the great paradigm to American universities. For one of the greatest of our university problems, I take it, is to make the social life of students the corporate life of the university, and so to equalize its contrasts and fraternize its so-called fraternities as to make it worthy of a single name. Inter-collegiate sports in which the public cannot take sufficient interest to seriously intrude itself upon undergraduate life are another thing that should be our present envy and despair. Some would claim that our American college debate brings students enough into contact with non-academic life and problems to anticipate all charges of intellectual provincialism. But the English equivalent, a sort of mock parliament, has the additional advantage of being the direct preparation for civic usefulness our debate is supposed to be. Our average college debating is as good a training for open—that is to say public—mindedness as football is for healthy, normal living.
But to call Oxford social life effective does not gainsay our contention that it is not what it is supposed to be, a noteworthy survival of medievalism. It is of all things most modern. There are the old customs, the old forms, it is true. The very same that seem so “medieval and quaint” to the tourist, are so formally observed as to have little or no meaning. The living conventions of Oxford social life are the fashions and customs of the English “public” or preparatory schools. It is rather disillusioning, for instance, to hear in connection with the gown-wearing custom that every night scores of undergraduates run the risk of losing five shillings rather than be bothered by them, and the university administration thinks the temptation so natural as to count upon its being profitable—and finding it so. Money fines and dispensations, which are quite the rule at Oxford, have marked the disintegration of medieval codes of discipline before this. And when medievalism has been driven out of scholarship it will have ample work to do, filling with the true spirit of reverence and tradition the observance of what are now largely formal conventions of student life and custom. This superiority Oxford will always have over most American universities, however, that it is a place of select retirement, so necessary—since a place of preparation is necessarily a place apart—the one thing that may ultimately keep the urban American university from being the home of scholarship, of beauty and repose.
Though much of the beauty of Oxford is latent in its mouldering stones and the conventional observance of its own traditions, there is one beauty of tradition that is its chief charm—of great antiquity and slow growth, and, therefore, as yet almost below the horizon for our more westerly prospects. It is the beauty of impersonal service that only the oldest and most sanctified of institutions can command. There is in the teaching and the living of Oxford a self-effacement that almost seems to be self-sacrifice until one reflects how human and dignified and well-proportioned it is withal in its very humility. It consecrates even the most aristocratic of all aims, self-culture, and makes one wish democracy did not need to be so blatant, so self-assertive—but it does need to be.
But what is the point of all this contrast, all this that one calls the paradox of Oxford? The simple fact that Oxford is a place worthy of the respect of all, the thinking consideration of many, the pilgrimage of some. Further, that Oxford and American universities are so different that, in the main, the faults of the one are the virtues of the other, and vice versa. There is a class of men, the American Rhodes scholars, whom these contrasts vitally concern, and in conclusion a word concerning them.
It has often been remarked that the credit given for three or four years, as the case may be, in American universities is very slight, and to those who know that socially and in all college is distinguished from university matters the Rhodes man becomes a “fresher commoner,” even this credit seems merely nominal. But what else can it be if Oxford is such a craft-guild of learning? The very essence of its discipline is that the journeyman should have been an apprentice, and the master, a journeyman, and that the generations of the craft should have grown up beside each other. In such a system there is no anticipating the first or any intermediate stage. And then again does it follow that, because the defects of the American system are the virtues of the English, the finished Rhodes man is the well-rounded man public opinion expects him to be, the perfect circle logic makes him out? By no means. If he has served his time and purpose well, he will be, I take it, a man whose sympathies are wider than his prejudices, whose knowledge is larger than his beliefs, his work and his hopes greater than he himself. He will be an ideal type—a rare type, indeed—a patriotic cosmopolitan. The representativeness of a Rhodes man is often spoken of in diplomatic terms—and it is in a sense a diplomatic mission with this difference be it added for prospective Rhodes men: Whereas the cash value of the diplomat is earned in his own country, and his credit-value good currency abroad, the Rhodes man will find that his paper value presented to him in his commission, so to speak, is at home, and his title to it, indeed his title to any exceptional consideration whatsoever must be earned at Oxford.
There is one more contrast, one which it is my privilege to have observed as a personal experience, that is mentioned with greater deference to a sense of duty than to its own private claims. To one who has lived upon the cleavage-plane of so great a class distinction as that of races in America, distinctions are marvelously subtle things, they are so broad as sometimes to seem ridiculously unreal, self-contradictory, yet they manage to evade the keen edge of logic which splits a hair instead. And real as they are, they are too often due to defective eyesight all round. In a land of class distinctions, distinctions which have taxed my blunt democratic vision, I have found no race distinctions, and better still in cultured circles no race curiosity. While in America, where they boast of having no class distinctions, there are both race distinctions, and a certain strange race-curiosity which most optimistically interpreted is a forerunner of race-sympathies and understandings. What is there left to repeat what has been said before—the faults of one system are often the virtues of another, and vice versa? There is something more, however. I shall not speak of individual preferences—they mean little, for wherever a man consents to live there, I take it, he is satisfied or ought to be—or else values some other things he possesses actually or in prospect above his self-satisfaction. But racially, I prefer disfavor and that most proverbial and effective of disciplines, persecution even, to indifference. One cannot be neutral toward a class or social body without the gravest danger of losing one’s own humanity in denying to some one else the most human of all rights, the right to be considered either a friend or an enemy, either as helpful or harmful. So for the good of every one concerned, I infinitely prefer race prejudice to race indifference. Further than this, I believe that we, with our ten million odd problems, each solving his own and then, if need be, helping solve his neighbors’, will have completed our gigantic task before the sixty million combined will have come to terms with that one stubborn, irreducible fraction they call “the race-problem.” And then, in shame and annoyance, they will wash the scribbled slate clean, and begin all over again—it is to be hoped, on the next problem. It is a far cry from this to Oxford, but not as far as from Oxford to this.
Hertford College, Oxford.