Part 11

To the robustious intelligence of the honor man, it must be admitted, the finer enthusiasm of scientific culture is likely to be a sealed book. The whole system of education is against it. Even if a student is possessed by the zeal for research, few tutors, in their pursuit of firsts, scruple to discourage it. "That is an extremely interesting point, but it will not count for schools." One student in a discussion with his tutor quoted a novel opinion of Schwegler's, and was confuted with the remark, "Yes, but that is the German view." It is this tutor who is reported to have remarked: "What I like about my subject is that when you know it you know it, and there's an end of it." His subject was that tangle of falsehood and misconception called history. It must, of course, be remembered in extenuation that with all his social and tutorial duties, the don is very hard worked. And considering the pressure of the necessary preparation for schools, the temptation to shun the byways is very great.

The examining board for each school is elected by the entire faculty of that school from its own members; and though it is scarcely possible for an unscrupulous examiner to frame the questions to suit his own pupils, there is nothing to prevent the tutor from framing his pupils' knowledge to meet the presumptive demands of the examiners. "We shall have to pay particular attention to Scottish history, for Scotus is on the board, and that is his hobby." In the school of literæ humaniores, no one expects either pupil or tutor to go far into textual criticism, philology, or archæology. These branches are considered only as regards their results. In history, a special subject has to be studied with reference to its original sources, but its relative importance is small, and a student is discouraged from spending much time on it. Stubbs's "Select Charters" are the only original documents required, and even with regard to these all conclusions are cut and dried.

To be sure there is a science school, but few men elect it, and it is in distinctly bad odor. In the slang of the university it is known as "stinks," and its laboratories as "stink shops." One must admit that its unpopularity is deserved. As it is impossible that each of the twenty colleges should have complete apparatus, the laboratories are maintained by the university, and not well maintained, for the wealth of Oxford is mainly in the coffers of the colleges. The whole end of laboratory work at Oxford is to prepare the student for a "practical examination" of some three hours. The Linacre professor has made many strenuous efforts, and has delivered much pointed criticism, but he has not yet been able to place the school on a modern or a rational basis. In his nostrils, perhaps, more than those of the university, the school of science is unsavory.

Many subjects of the highest practical importance are entirely ignored. No advanced instruction is offered in modern languages and literatures except English, and the school in English is only six years old and very small. No one of the technical branches that are coming to be so prominent a part of American university life is as yet recognized.

The Oxford honor first knows what he knows and sometimes he knows more. Few things are as distressing as the sciolism of a second-rate English editor of a classic. The mint sauce quite forgets that it is not Lamb. The English minor reviewer exhibits the pride of intellect in its purest form. The don perhaps intensifies these amiable foibles. There is an epigram current in Oxford which the summer guide will tell you Jowett wrote to celebrate his own attainments:--

Here I am, my name is Jowett; I am the master of Balliol College. All there is to know, I know it. What I know not is not knowledge.

This is clearly a satire written against Jowett, and it would be more clearly a legitimate satire if aimed at the generality of dons.

VII

THE UNIVERSITY AND REFORM

This tale of Oxford shortcomings is no news to the English radical. The regeneration of the university has long been advocated. On the one hand, the reformers have tried to make it possible, as it was in the Middle Ages, to live and study at Oxford without being attached to any of the colleges; on the other, they have tried to bring into the educational system such modern subjects and methods of study as are cultivated in Germany, where the new branches have been so admirably grafted on the mediæval trunk. In general it must be said that Oxford is becoming more democratic and even more studious; but the advance has come in spite of the constitution of the university. All studied attempts at reform have proved almost ludicrously futile.

In order to combat the monopoly of the colleges, and to build up a body of more serious students without their walls, a new order of "unattached" students was created. The experiment has no doubt been interesting, but it cannot be said that it has revived the glorious democracy and the intellectual enthusiasm of the mediæval university. Few things could be lonelier, or more profitless intellectually, than the lot of the unattached students. Excluded by the force of circumstances from the life of the colleges, they have no more real life of their own than the socially unaffiliated in American universities. They have been forced to imitate the organization of the colleges. They lunch and dine one another as best they can, hold yearly a set of athletic games, and place a boat in the college bumping races. They have thus come to be precisely like any of the colleges, except that they have none of the felicities, social or intellectual, that come from life within walls.

From time to time the introduction of new honor schools is proposed to keep pace with modern learning. A long-standing agitation in favor of a school in modern languages was compromised by the founding of the school in English; but it is not yet downed, and before the century is over may yet rise to smite conservatism. Coupled with this there is an ever-increasing desire to cultivate research. As yet these agitations have had about as much effect as the kindred agitation that led to the rehabilitation of the unattached student.

The Bodleian Library is a treasure chest of the rarest of old books and of unexplored documents; but nothing in the Bod counts for schools, and so the shadow of an undergraduate darkens the door only when he is showing off the university to his sisters--and to other fellows'. When I applied for permission to read, the fact that I wore a commoner's gown, as I was required to by statute while reading there, almost excluded me. If I had been after knowledge useful in the schools, no doubt I should have been obliged to consult a choice collection of well-approved books across the way in the camera of the Radcliffe. In America, a serious student is welcome to range in the stack, and to take such books as he needs to his own rooms. Some few researchers come to the Bodleian from the world without to spend halcyon days beneath the brave old timber roof of Duke Humphrey's Library; but any one used to the freedom of books in America would find very little encouragement to do so. The librarian is probably an eminently serviceable man according to the traditions of the Bodleian; but there are times when he appears to be a grudging autocrat intrenched behind antique rules and regulations. In the Middle Ages it was the custom to chain the books to the shelves, as one may still observe in the quaint old library of Merton College. The modern method at the Bodleian would seem to be a refinement on the custom. And what is not known about the Bodleian in the Bodleian would fill a library almost as large. In the picture gallery hangs a Van Dyck portrait of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a former chancellor of the university, a nephew of Sir Philip Sydney, son of Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and the once reputed patron to whom Shakespeare addressed the first series of his sonnets. The librarian did not know how or when the portrait came into the possession of the University, or whether it was an original; and not being required to know by statute, he did not care to find out, and did not find out.

The crowning absurdity of the educational system is the professors, and here is an Oxford paradox as yet unredeemed by a glimmering of reason. When I wanted assistance as to a thesis on which I was working, my tutor referred me to the Regius Professor of Modern History, who he thought would be more likely than any one else to know about the sources of Elizabethan literature.

Few as are the professors, they are all too many for the needs of Oxford. They are learned and ardent scholars, many of them with a full measure of German training in addition to Oxford culture. But in proportion as they are wise and able they are lifted out of the life of the university. They lecture, to be sure, in the schools; and now and then an undergraduate evades his tutor long enough to hear them. Several young women may be found at their feet--students from Somerville and Lady Margaret. When the subject and the lecturer are popular, residents of the town drop in. But as regards the great mass of undergraduates, wisdom crieth in the streets. The professors are as effectually shelved as ever their learned books will be when the twentieth century is dust. "The university, it is true," Mr. Brodrick admits in his "History of Oxford," "has yet to harmonize many conflicting elements which mar the symmetry of its institutions."

This torpor in which the university lies is no mere matter of accident. I quote from Mr. Gladstone's Romanes Lecture, delivered in 1892:--

"The chief dangers before the English universities are probably two: one that in [cultivating?] research, considered as apart from their teaching office, they should relax and consequently dwindle [as teachers?]; the other that, under pressure from without, they should lean, if ever so little, to that theory of education, which would have it to construct machines of so many horse power rather than to form character, and to rear into true excellence the marvelous creature we call man; which gloats upon success in life, instead of studying to secure that the man shall ever be greater than his work, and never bounded by it, but that his eye shall boldly run--

Along the line of limitless desire."

Few will question the necessity of rising above the sphere of mere science and commercialism; but many will question whether the way to rise is not rather by mastering the genius of the century than by ignoring it. It is scarcely too much to say that the greatest intellectual movement of the nineteenth century, though largely the work of English scientists, has left no mark on Oxford education. If, as Professor Von Holst asserts, the American universities are hybrids, Oxford and Cambridge cannot be called universities at all.

VIII

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE PEOPLE

As a result of the narrowness of the scope of Oxford teaching, the university has no relation to the industrial life of the people--a grave shortcoming in a nation which is not unwilling to be known as a nation of shopkeepers. The wail of the British tradesman is not unfamiliar. Wares "made in Germany" undersell English wares that used to command the market; and being often made of a cheaper grade to suit the demands of purchasers, the phrase "made in Germany" is clearly indicative of fraudulent intention.

Certain instances are exceptionally galling. Aniline dyes were first manufactured from the residuum of coal tar in Great Britain. But enterprising Germany, which has coal-fields of its own, sent apprentices to England who learned the manufacture, and then by means of the chemistry taught in the German universities, revolutionized the process, and discovered how to extract new colors from the coal tar, so that now the bulk of aniline dyes are made in Germany. Obviously, the German chemist is a perfidious person. The Yankee is shrewd and well taught in the technical professions. He makes new and quite unexampled tools, and machinery of all sorts. It takes the Briton some years to be sure that these are not iniquitous--a Yankee trick; but in the end he adopts them. Even then, to the Briton's surprise, the Yankee competes successfully. A commission (no German spy) is sent to America to find out why, and on its return gleefully reports that the Yankee works his tools at a ruinous rate, driving them so hard that in a decade it will be necessary to reëquip his plant entire. At the end of the decade, the conservative Englishman's tools are as good as if they had been kept in cotton batting; but by this time the Yankee has invented newer and more economical devices, and when he reëquips his plant with them he is able to undersell the English producer even more signally. The honest British manufacturer sells his old tools to an unsuspecting brother in trade and adopts the new ones. The Yankee machinist is obviously as perfidious as the German chemist. The upper middle classes in England realize that the destinies of Great Britain and America run together, and they are very hospitable to Americans, but the industrial population hate us scarcely less than they hate the Germans.

All this is, of course, not directly chargeable to the English universities: but the fact remains that in Germany and in America the educational system is the most powerful ally of industry. Here again the English radical is on his guard. From time to time, in letters to the daily papers or political speeches before industrial audiences, the case is very clearly stated. In a recent epistolary agitation in "The Times" it was shown that whereas American and German business men learn foreign languages, Englishmen attempt to sell their wares by means of interpreters, and do not even have their pamphlets and prospectuses translated. Admitting the facts, one gentleman gravely urged that if only the English would stick out the fight, their language would soon be the business language of the world. If it is the conscious purpose of the nation to make it so, it might be of advantage to spell the language as it has been pronounced in the centuries since Chaucer; already with some such purpose the Germans are adopting Roman characters. But at least it will be many decades before English is the Volapük of business, and meantime England is losing ground. From the point of view of the mere outsider, it would seem of little moment to England what language is used, if the profits of the business transacted accrue to Russian, German, and American corporations.

It has even been strongly urged that commercial and technical subjects be taught in the universities. Cambridge and the University of Glasgow have already a fund with this in view; and the new Midland University at Birmingham, of which Mr. Joseph Chamberlain is chancellor, is to be mainly devoted to commercial science and engineering. It cannot be foretold that the ancient universities will hold their own against the modern. In a speech at Birmingham (January 17, 1901), Mr. Chamberlain said: "Finance is the crux of the situation. Upon our finance depends entirely the extent to which we shall be able to develop this new experiment. With us, in fact, money is the root of all good. I am very glad to say that the promises of donations which, when I last addressed you, amounted to £330,000, have risen since then to an estimated amount of about £410,000.... Now £410,000 is a large sum. I heard the other day that the University of Cambridge, which has for some time past been appealing for further assistance, has only up to the present time received £60,000. I most deeply regret that their fund is not larger, and I regret also that ours is so small." Oxford has apparently not entered the new competition even in a half-hearted manner. For centuries it has been the resort of the nobility and aristocracy, the "governing classes," and though the spirit of the age has so far invaded it as to have been in Mr. Gladstone's eyes its chief danger, the university has as yet only the slenderest connection with the industrial life of the nation.

The virtues of the Oxford educational system, like those of the social and athletic life, are pretty clearly traceable in the main to the division of the university into colleges; at least, it is hard to see how anything other than this could have suggested the idea of having one body to teach the student and another to examine him. And they have a strong family likeness one to another, the concrete result being a highly sturdy and effective character. But the educational system differs from the social and athletic system in that the defects of its qualities are the more vigorous. As far as these defects result from the educational system, they are chargeable not so much to the preponderance of the colleges as to the torpor of the university; and they are powerfully abetted by the Oxford tradition as to the nature and function of a liberal education. This has not always been the case at Oxford. To understand the situation more clearly, it is necessary to review in brief the origin and the growth of the colleges, and the extinction of the mediæval university. This will throw further light on Oxford's social history. We shall thus be better able to judge how and to what extent the college system offers a solution for the correction of our American instruction.

IV

THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY AND THE COLLEGE

I

THE UNIVERSITY BEFORE THE COLLEGE

In the beginning was the university. The colleges were as unimportant as the university is now. If it be admitted that the university exists to-day, they were less important; for there were no colleges. The origin of the university was probably due to a migration of students in 1167 from the then world-famous University of Paris. The first definite mention of a _studium generale_ at Oxford, or assembly of masters of the different faculties, dates from 1185, when Giraldus Cambrensis, as he himself relates, read his new work, "Topographia Hibernia," before the citizens and scholars of the town, and entertained in his hostel "all the doctors of the different faculties."

At this time, and for many centuries afterward, Oxford, like other mediæval universities, was a guild, and was not unlike the trade guilds of the time. Its object was to train and give titles to those who dealt in the arts and professions. The master tanner was trained by his guild to make leather, and he made it; the master of arts was trained by the university to teach, and he taught. He was required to rent rooms in the university schools, for a year and even two, and to show that he deserved his title of master by lecturing in them, and conducting "disputations." The masters lived directly from the contributions of their hearers, their means varying with the popularity of their lectures; and the students were mainly poor clerks, who sought degrees for their money value.

The lectures were mere dictations from manuscript, necessitated by the lack of accessible texts. The students copied the lectures verbatim for future study. The instruction in arts covered the entire field of secular knowledge, the "seven arts," the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic or dialectic), and the quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy). The lectures were the main and often the only means of imparting knowledge. The disputations were scholastic arguments--debates--on some set question, and were conducted by the masters. They were the practical application of what the student had learned from the lectures, and were the chief means of intellectual training. Besides attending lectures and disputing, the candidate for the degree had to pass an examination; but the great test of his acquirement seems to have been the skill with which he used his knowledge in debate. Thus the formal disputations occupied very much the same place as the modern written examinations, and they must have required very much the same rare combination of knowledge, address, and pluck. All learning was in a pint-pot; but it was a very serviceable pint-pot.

The university education did not make a man above the work of the world: it made him an engine of so many horse power to perform it. It brought him benefices in that great sphere of activity, the mediæval Church, and important posts in that other sphere of mediæval statecraft, which was so often identified with the Church. If the clerk was above the carpenter, it was not because he came from a different station in life, for he often did not: it was because his work was more important. And he was far above the carpenter. It was a strenuous, glorious life, and the man of intelligence and training found his level, which is the highest. The kings and the nobility were warriors, and may have affected to despise education; but they were far from despising educated men. The machinery of state was organized and controlled by clerks from the university. If the scientific and mechanical professions had existed then, there is no doubt that they would not have been despised as to-day, but would have had full recognition.

Socially, the university was chaos. In the absence of colleges, all the students lived with the townsmen in "chamberdekyns," which appear to be etymologically and historically the forbears of the "diggings" to which the fourth year man now retreats when he has been routed from college by incoming freshmen and by the necessity of reading for his final examination. But such discipline as is now exerted over out-of-college students was undreamed of. In his interesting and profoundly scholarly history of the universities of the Middle Ages, the Rev. Hastings Rashdall gives a vivid picture of mediæval student life, which was pretty much the same in all the universities of Europe. Boys went up to the university at as early an age as thirteen, and the average freshman could not have been older than fifteen; yet they were allowed almost absolute liberty. Drunkenness was rarely treated as a university offense; and for introducing suspicious women into his rooms, it was only on being repeatedly caught that an undergraduate was disciplined. At the University of Ingolstadt, a student who had killed another in a drunken quarrel had his scholastic effects and garments confiscated by the university. He may have been warned to be good in future, but he was not expelled. "It is satisfactory to add," Rashdall continues, "that at Prague, a Master of Arts, believed to have assisted in cutting the throat of a Friar Bishop, was actually expelled." The body of undergraduates was "an undisciplined student-horde." Hende Nicholas, in Chaucer's "Miller's Tale," is, it must be admitted, a lively and adventuring youth; but he might have been much livelier without being untrue to student life in chamberdekyns.