Part 3

If you stay out of college after midnight, the dean makes a star chamber offense of it, fines you a "quid" or two, and like as not sends you down. This sounds a trifle worse than it is; for if you must be away, your absence can usually be arranged for. If you find yourself in the streets after twelve, you may rap on some friend's bedroom window and tell him of your plight through the iron grating. He will then spend the first half of the night in your bed and wash his hands in your bowl. With such evidence as this to support him, the scout is not apt, if sufficiently retained, to report a suspected absence. I have even known fellows to make their arrangements in advance and spend the night in town; but the ruse has its dangers, and the penalty is to be sent down for good and all.

It is owing to such regulations as these that life in the English college has the name of being cloistral. Just how cloistral it is in spirit no one can know who has not taken part in a rag in the quad; and this is impossible to an outsider, for at midnight all visitors are required to leave, under a heavy penalty to their host.

VI

THE MIND OF THE COLLEGE

Any jubilation is a rag; but the most interesting kind, though perhaps the least frequent, takes the direction of what we call hazing. It is seldom, however, as hazing has come to be with us, a wanton outbreak. It is a deliberate expression of public opinion, and is carried on sedately by the leading men of the college. The more I saw of it, the more deeply I came to respect it as an institution.

In its simplest if rarest form it merely consists in smashing up a man's room. The only affair of this kind which I saw took place in the owner's absence; and when I animadverted on the fact, I was assured that it would have turned out much worse for the man's feelings if he had been present. He was a strapping big Rugbeian, who had come up with a "reputter," or reputation, as a football player, and had insisted on trying first off for the 'varsity fifteen. He had promptly been given the hoof for being slow and lazy, and when he condescended to try for the college fifteen, his services were speedily dispensed with for the same reason. As he still carried his head high, it was necessary to bring his shortcomings home to him in an unmistakable manner. Brutal as I thought the proceeding, and shameful to grown men, it did him good. He became a hard-working and lowly minded athlete, and prospered. I am not prepared to say that the effect in this particular instance did not justify the means.

A series of judicial raggings was much more edifying. Having pulled their culprit out of bed after midnight, the upper classmen set him upon his window-seat in pyjamas, and with great solemnity appointed a judge, a counsel for the prosecution, and a counsel for the defense. Of the charges against him only one or two struck home, and even these were so mingled with the nonsense of the proceedings that their sting was more or less blunted. The man had been given over to his books to the neglect of his personal appearance. It was charged that in pretending to know his subjunctives he was ministering to the vanity of the dean, who had written a Latin grammar, and that by displaying familiarity with Hegel he was boot-licking the master, who was a recently imported Scotch philosopher. Then the vital question was raised as to the culprit's personal habits. Heaven defend him now from his legal defender! It was urged that as he was a student of Literæ Humaniores, he might be excused from an acquaintance with the scientific commodity known as H2O: one might ignore anything, in fact, if only one were interested in Literæ Humaniores. By such means as this the face of the college is kept bright and shining.

Here is a round robin, addressed to the best of fellows, a member of the 'varsity shooting team and golf team. He was a Scotchman by birth and by profession, and even his schoolboy days at Eton had not divested him of a Highland gait.

"Whereas, Thomas Rankeillor, Gent, of the University of Oxford, has, by means of his large feet, uncouth gait, and his unwieldy brogues, wantonly and with malice destroyed, mutilated, and otherwise injured the putting greens, tees, and golf course generally, the property of the Oxford University Golf Club, whereof he is a member, and

"Whereas, 2, The said Thomas Rankeillor, etc., has by these large feet, uncouth gait, and unwieldy brogues aforesaid, raised embankments, groins, and other bunkers, hazards, and impediments, formed unnecessary roads, farm roads, bridle paths, and other roads, on the putting greens, tees, and golf course generally, aforesaid; excavated sundry and diverse reservoirs, tanks, ponds, conduits, sewers, channels, and other runnels, needlessly irrigating the putting greens, tees, and golf course generally aforesaid, and

"Whereas, 3, The said Thomas Rankeillor, etc., has by those large feet, uncouth gait, and unwieldy brogues aforesaid, caused landslips, thus demolishing all natural hills, bunkers, and other excrescences, and all artificial hillocks, mounds, hedges, and other hazards,

"Hereby we, the circumsigned, do request, petition, and otherwise entreat the aforesaid

"THOMAS RANKEILLOR, GENT, OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, to alter, transform, and otherwise modify his uncouth gait, carriage, and general mode of progression; to buy, purchase, or otherwise acquire boots, shoes, and all other understandings of reasonable size, weight, and material; and finally that he do cease from this time forward to wear, use, or in any way carry the aforesaid brogues.

"Given forth this the 17th day of March, 1896."

At times rougher means are employed. At Brazenose there happened to be two men by the same name, let us say, of Gaylor, one of whom had made himself agreeable to the college, while the other had decidedly not. One midnight a party of roisterers hauled the unpopular Gaylor out of his study, pulled off his bags, and dragged him by the heels a lap or two about the quad. This form of discipline has since been practiced in other colleges, and is called debagging. The popular Gaylor was ever afterward distinguished by the name of Asher, because, according to the Book of Judges, Asher abode in his breaches.

Not dissimilar correctives may be employed, in extreme need, against those mightiest in authority. A favorite device is to screw the oak of an objectionable don. Mr. Andrew Lang, himself formerly a don at Merton, reports a conversation--can it have been a personal experience?--between a don standing inside a newly screwed oak and his scout, who was tendering sympathy from the staircase. "What _am_ I to do?" cried the don. "Mr. Muff, sir," suggested the scout, "when 'e's screwed up, sir, _'e_ sends for the blacksmith." At Christ Church, "The House," as it is familiarly called, much more direct and personal methods have been employed. Not many years ago a censor (whose office is that of the dean at other colleges) stirred up unusual ill-will among his wards. They pulled him from his bed, dragged him into Tom Quad,--Wolsey's Quad,--and threw him bodily among the venerable carp of the Mercury Pond. Then they gathered about in a circle, and, when he raised his head above the surface, thrust him under with their walking-sticks. Something like forty of them were sent down for this, and the censor went traveling for his health.

The memory of this episode was still green when the Duke of Marlborough gave a coming of age ball at Blenheim Palace, and invited over literally hundreds of his Oxford friends. In other colleges the undergraduates were permitted to leave Oxford for the night, but at the House the censor stipulated that they be within the gates, as usual, by midnight. This would have meant a break-neck drive of eight miles after about fifteen minutes at the ball, and was far more exasperating to the young Britons than a straightforward refusal. That evening the dons sported their oaks, and carefully bolted themselves within. The night passed in so deep a silence that, for all they knew, the ghost of Wolsey might have been stalking in his cherished quadrangle, the glory of building which the Eighth Henry so unfeelingly appropriated. As morning dawned, the common-room gossips will tell you, the dons crawled furtively out of bed, and shot their bolts to find whether they had need of the blacksmith. Not a screw had been driven. The morning showed why. On the stately walls of Tom Quad was painted "Damn the Dons!" and again in capital letters, "Damn the Dons!" and a third time, in larger capitals, "Damn the Dons!" There were other inscriptions, less fit to relate; and stretching along one whole side of the quad, in huge characters, the finely antithetical sentence: "God bless the Duke of Marlborough." The doors of the dean's residence were smeared with red paint; and against a marble statue of the late Dean Liddell, the Greek lexicographer, a bottle of green ink had been smashed. Two hundred workmen, summoned from a neighboring building, labored two days with rice-root brushes and fuller's earth, but with so little effect that certain of the stones had to be replaced in the walls, and endless scrubbings failed to overcome the affinity between the ink and the literary Liddell. The marble statue has been replaced by one of plaster.

Compared with the usual Oxford rag, the upsetting of Professor Silliman's statue in the Yale campus by means of a lasso dwindles into insignificance, and the painting of 'varsity stockings on John Harvard, which so scandalized the undergraduates that they repaired the damage by voluntary subscriptions, might be regarded as an act of filial piety.

The more I learned of Oxford motives, the less anxious I was to censure the system of ragging. In an article I wrote after only a few months' stay, I spoke of it as boyish and undignified; and most Americans, I feel sure, would likewise hold up the hand of public horror. Yet I cannot be wholly thankful that we are not as they. To the undergraduates, ragging is a survival of the excellently efficient system of discipline in the public schools, where the older boys have charge of the manners and morals of the younger; and historically, like public school discipline, it is an inheritance from the prehistoric past. In the Middle Ages it was apparently the custom to hold the victim's nose literally to the grindstone. In the schools, to be sure, the Sixth Form take their duties with great sobriety of conscience--which is not altogether the case in college; but the difference of spirit is perhaps justifiable. For a properly authorized committee of big schoolboys to chastise a youngster who has transgressed is not unnatural, and the system that provides for it has proved successful for five centuries; but for men to adopt the same attitude towards a fellow only a year or two their junior would be preposterous. Horseplay is a necessary part of the game. The end in both is the same: it is to bring each individual under the influence of the traditions and standards of the institution of which he has elected to be a part. Just as the system of breakfasting freshmen is by no means as altruistic as it at first appears, the practice of ragging is by no means as brutal. It is as if the college said: We have admitted you and welcomed you, opening up the way to every avenue of enjoyment and profit, and it is for our common good, sir, that you be told of your shortcomings. The most diligent and distinguished scholar is not unlikely to be most in need of a pointed lesson in personal decorum; and the man who was not Asher may be thankful all his life for the bad quarter of an hour that taught him the difference between those who do and those who do not abide in their breaches.

With regard to the dons, a similar case might be made. Any one who assumes an authority over grown men that is so nearly absolute should be held to strict honesty and justice of dealing. So far as I could learn, the Christ Church dons who were so severely dealt with were both unjust and insincere, and I came to sympathize in some measure with the undergraduates at the House, who were half humorously inclined to regard the forty outcasts as martyrs.

This is not to argue that all American hazing is justifiable. In many cases, especially of late years, it has been as silly and brutal as the most puritanical moralists have declared. To steal the Louisburg Cross from above the door of the Harvard Library was vandalism if you wish--it was certainly a very stupid proceeding; and to celebrate a really notable athletic victory by mutilating the pedestal of the statue of John Harvard was not only stupid, but unworthy of a true sportsman. How much better to make an end with painting 'varsity stockings on the dear old boy's bronze legs, and leave the goody to wash them off next day. What I wish to point out is that where there is vigorous public spirit, it may be more efficiently expressed by hazing than by a very nor'easter of Puritan morality.

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.