Part 3

He who is responsible for the proper conduct of a gang of relations or friends will not treat them in this way. He will endeavour, so far as possible, to confine them within the limits of his own college, where he is on his native heath, and, if he is not an antiquarian, can at least animate the venerable buildings with details of contemporary history. He will point out his Dons (like the great French nation, 'objects of hatred or admiration, but never of indifference') with such derision or reverence as they may deserve, and affix to them ancient anecdotes whereby their personality may be remembered. He will show to an admiring circle the statue which was painted green, the pinnacle climbed by a friend in the confidence of inebriation, and the marks of the bonfire which the Dean did not succeed in putting out. Even the most ignorant and frivolous-minded person can make his own college interesting. When he has succeeded in impressing upon his friends the true character of a college as a place of religion and sound learning, he may be permitted to show them such external objects as form a part of every one's education, and which no one (for the very shame of confessing it) can pretermit unseen, such as the gardens of New College or St. John's, the 'Nose' of B.N.C, the Burne-Jones tapestry at Exeter, or the picture of Mr. Gladstone in the hall of Christ Church. Those who absolutely insist on a more comprehensive view of the University and City may be allowed to make the ascent of some convenient point of view--Magdalen Tower, for instance; it is a stiff climb, but the view from the top will repay your exertions. This is where, as since the appearance of Mr. Holman Hunt's picture everybody is probably aware, the choir of the college annually salute the rising sun from the top of the tower by singing a Latin hymn on May morning--while the youth of the city, for reasons certainly not known to themselves, make morning hideous with blowing of unmelodious horns in the street below. At all times--even at sunrise on a rainy May morning--it is a noble prospect. The unlovely red-brick suburbs of the north are hidden from sight by the intervening towers and pinnacles of the real Oxford; immediately below the High Street winds westwards, flanked by colleges and churches, of which the prevailing grey is relieved by the green trees of those many gardens and unexplored nooks of verdure with which Oxford abounds; to the south there are glimpses of the river flowing towards the dim grey line of the distant Berkshire downs. To the historically-minded the outlook may suggest many a picture of bygone times--scenes of brawling in the noisy High Street, when the old battle of Town and Gown was fought with cold steel, and blood flowed freely on both sides--in the days when the maltreated townsman appealing to the Proctor could get no satisfaction but a 'thrust at him with his poleaxe!' Down the street which lies below passed Queen Elizabeth--'Virgo Pia Docta Felix'--after being royally entertained with sumptuous pageants and the play of 'Palamon and Arcyte' in the Christ Church hall. Over the Cherwell, in the troublous times of the Civil Wars, rode the Royalist horse to beat up the Parliamentary quarters below the Chiltern hills and among the woods of the Buckinghamshire border--enterprising undergraduates perhaps taking an _exeat_ to accompany them. Here it was that certain scholars of Magdalen, having a quarrel with Lord Norreys by reason of deer-stealing, 'went up privately to the top of their tower, and waiting till he should pass by towards Ricot' (Rycote) 'sent down a shower of stones upon him and his retinew, wounding some and endangering others of their lives'--and worse might have happened had not the 'retinew' taken the precaution, foreseeing the assault, to put boards or tables on their heads. At a later day Pope entered Oxford by this road, and there is a pretty description of the scene in one of his letters--it will no doubt appeal to the nineteenth-century visitor who departs through slums to the architecturally unimpressive station of the Great Western. 'The shades of the evening overtook me. The moon rose in the clearest sky I ever saw, by whose solemn light I paced on slowly, without company, or any interruption to the range of my own thoughts. About a mile before I reached Oxford all the bells tolled in different notes, the clocks of every college answered one another, and sounded forth (some in a deeper, some in a softer tone) that it was eleven at night. All this was no ill preparation to the life I have led since among those old walls, venerable galleries, stone porticos, studious walks, and solitary scenes of the University.' Jerry-built rows of lodging-houses rather militate against the romance of the Iffley Road as we know it now.

But, after all, the majority of sightseers are not given to historical reflections. What most people want is something that 'palpitates with actuality;' they want to see the machine working. They are temporarily happy if they can see a Proctor in his robes of office, and rise to the enthusiasm of 'never having had such a delightful day' if the Proctor happens to 'proctorise' an undergraduate within the ken of their vision. 'It was all so _delightful_ and mediaeval, and all that kind of thing, don't you know? Poor young man--simply for not wearing one of those horrid caps and gowns! _I_ call it a shame.' This is the reason why a Degree Day is so wonderfully popular a ceremony. There is a sense of attractive mystery about it all--the Vice-Chancellor throned in the Theatre or Convocation House, discoursing in unintelligible scraps of Latin like the refrain of a song, and the Proctors doing their quarter-deck walk--although the dignity of the function be rather marred by the undergraduates who jostle and giggle in the background forgetting that they are assisting at a ceremony which is, after all, one of the University's reasons of existence. It is the same kind of curiosity which causes the lecturer to become suddenly conscious that he is being watched with intense interest--an interest to which he is altogether unaccustomed--by 'only a face at the window' of his lecture-room, to his own confusion and the undisguised amusement of his audience.

Such are sightseers: yet every man to his taste. When Samuel Pepys came over from Abingdon to see the sights of the University town, it is gratifying and rather surprising to learn that what most impressed him was the small price paid for creature comforts: 'Oxford mighty fine place,' such is the diarist's reflection, 'and _cheap entertainment_.'

IV--OF EXAMINATIONS

'Thinketh one made them in a fit of the blues.' _Q_

If there is one subject on which the professedly non-reading undergraduate is nearly always eloquent it is the aggravation of his naturally hard lot by the examination system; that is, not only 'The Schools' themselves, but the ancillary organization of lectures, 'collections,' and college tuition in general; all which machinery, being intended to save him from himself and enable him to accomplish the ostensible purpose of his residence at the University, he very properly regards as an entirely unnecessary instrument of torture, designed and perfected by the gratuitous and malignant ingenuity of Dons, whose sole object is the oppression of undergraduates in general and himself in particular. He is obliged to attend lectures, at least occasionally. His tutors compel him to attempt to pass his University examination at a definite date; and then--adding insult to injury--actually reproach him or even send him down for his ill success, just as if he had not always demonstrated to them by repeated statements and constant proofs of incapacity that he had not the smallest intention of getting through! Small wonder, perhaps, that on returning from a highly unsatisfactory interview with the University examiners to a yet more exasperating colloquy with the authorities of his college, he should wish that fate had not matched him with the 'cosmic process' of the nineteenth century; and that it had been his happier lot to come up to Oxford in the days when examinations were not, and his remote ancestors got their degrees without any vain display of mere intellectual proficiency, or went down without them if they chose.

And yet, should the modern undergraduate take the trouble (which of course he never does) to acquaint himself with the statutes and ordinances which governed his University in the pre-examination period, he would find that even then the rose was not wholly devoid of thorns. Even then the powers that be had decreed that life should not be completely beer, nor altogether skittles. It is true that the student was probably less molested by his college; but the regulations of the University dealt far more hardly with him than they do at present. Under the statutes of Archbishop Laud, the University exercised those functions of teaching and general supervision which it has since in great part surrendered to its component colleges; and in theory the University was a hard task-mistress.

Attendance at professorial lectures was theoretically obligatory, and 'since not only reading and thought, but practice also, is of the greatest avail towards proficiency in learning,' it was required that the candidate for a degree should 'dispute' in the Schools at stated and frequent times during the whole course of his academic career. Beginning by listening to the disputations of his seniors (a custom which perhaps survives in the modern fashion which sometimes provides a 'gallery' at the ceremony of _viva voce_), he was as time went on required himself to maintain and publicly defend doctrines in a manner which would be highly embarrassing to his modern successor--'responding' at first to the arguments of the stater of a theory, and with riper wisdom being promoted to the position of Opponent.' This opposing and responding was termed 'doing generals.' 'Argufying' was the business of the University in the seventeenth century, and had been so for a long time.

On the memorable occasion of Queen Elizabeth's visit to Oxford in the year 1566, Her Majesty was entertained intermittently with disputations on the moon's influence on the tides, and the right of rebellion against bad government. Thus, Archbishop Laud required of the seventeenth-century undergraduate so many disputations before he became a _sophista_, and so many again before he could be admitted to the degree of Bachelor; and if the system had worked in practice as it was intended to do in theory, young Oxford would not have had an easy time of it. In the days of Antony Wood's undergraduate career exercises in the 'Schooles' were 'very good.' 'Philosophy disputations in Lent time, frequent in the Greek tongue; _coursing_ very much, ending alwaies in blowes,' which Wood considers scandalous; but at least it shows the serious spirit of the disputants. But a University can always be trusted to temper the biting wind of oppressive regulations to its shorn alumni; and there can be no doubt that the comparative slackness and sleepiness of the eighteenth century--a somnolence which it is easy to exaggerate, but impossible altogether to deny--must have tended to wear the sharp corners off the academic curriculum. Indications that this was so are not wanting. After all, there must have been many ways of avoiding originality in a disputation. A writer in 'Terrae Filius' (1720) states the case as follows:--

'All students in the University who are above one year's standing, and have not taken their batchelor' (of arts) 'degree, are required by statute to be present at this awful solemnity' (disputation for a degree), 'which is designed for a public proof of the progress he has made in the art of reasoning; tho' in fact it is no more than a formal repetition of a set of syllogisms upon some ridiculous question in logick, which they get by rote, or, perhaps, only read out of their caps, which lie before them with their notes in them. These commodious sets of syllogisms are call'd strings, and descend from undergraduate to undergraduate, in regular succession; so that, when any candidate for a degree is to exercise his talent in argumentation, he has nothing else to do but to enquire amongst his friends for a string upon such-and-such a question.'

So, even in the early part of the present century, reverend persons proceeding to the degree of D.D. have been known to avail themselves of a thesis (or written harangue on some point of theology) not compiled by their unaided exertions, but kept among the archives of their college and passed round as occasion might require. If mature theologians have reconciled this with their consciences in the nineteenth, what may not have been possible to an undergraduate in the eighteenth century? Also, the functionary who stood in the place of the modern examiner was a very different kind of person from his successor--that incarnation of cold and impassive criticism; collusion between 'opponent' and 'respondent' must have been possible and frequent; and so far had things gone that the candidate for a degree was permitted to choose the 'Master' who was to examine him, and it appears to have been customary to invite your Master to dinner on the night preceding the final disputation. Witness 'Terrae Filius 'once more:--

'Most candidates get leave .... to chuse their own examiners, who never fail to be their old cronies and toping companions.... It is also well known to be the custom for the candidates either to present their examiners with a piece of gold, or to give them a handsome entertainment, and make them drunk, which they commonly do the night before examination, and some times keep them till morning, and so adjourn, cheek by jowl, from their drinking-room to the school, where they are to be examined.'

The same author adds: 'This to me seems the great business of _determination_: to pay money and get drunk.'

Vicesimus Knox, who took his B.A. degree in 1775, is at pains to represent the whole process of so-called examination as an elaborate farce. 'Every candidate,' he says, 'is obliged to be examined in the whole circle of the sciences by three masters of arts, of his own choice.' Naturally, the temptation is too much for poor humanity. 'It is reckoned good management to get acquainted with two or three jolly young masters and supply them well with port previously to the examination.' _Viva voce_ once put on this convivial footing, it is not surprising that 'the examiners and the candidate often converse on the last drinking bout, or on horses, or read the newspapers, or a novel, or divert themselves as well as they can till the clock strikes eleven, when all parties descend, and the _testimonium_ is signed by the masters.' Under such circumstances it is obvious that the provisions of Archbishop Laud might be shorn of half their terrors. Even at an earlier period other methods of evasion were not wanting. As early as 1656, orders were made 'abolishing' the custom of candidates standing treat to examiners. In the statute which still prescribes the duties of the _clericus universitatis_, there is a clause threatening him with severe penalties--to the extent of paying a fine of ten shillings--should he so far misuse his especial charge, the University clock, as to 'retard and presently precipitate the course' of that venerable time-piece, 'in such a manner that the hours appointed for public exercises be unjustly shortened, to the harm and prejudice of the studious.' Moreover, we read in Wood that notice of examination was given by 'tickets stuck up on certaine public corners, which would be suddenly after taken downe' by the candidate's friends. To such straits and to such unworthy shifts could disputants be reduced by mere inability to find matter.

It has been said that attendance at professorial lectures was theoretically obligatory; but it is hardly necessary to point out that even serious students have occasionally dispensed with the duty of attending lectures; and it is more than whispered there have been occasions in recent centuries when it was not an audience only that was wanting. There are, of course, instances of both extremes. Rumour tells of a certain professor of anatomy, who, lacking a quorum, bade his servant 'bring out the skeleton, in order that I may be able to address you as "gentle*men*;"' but all professors have not been so conscientious. Gibbon goes so far as to assert that 'in the University of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up altogether the pretence of teaching,' and the Reverend James Hurdie does not much improve the matter, when he prepares to refute the historian's charge in his 'Vindication of Magdalen College.' So far as the College is concerned, the reverend gentleman has something of a case; but his defence of the University is not altogether satisfying. Some of the professors, no doubt, do lecture in a statutable manner. But 'the late noble but unfortunate Professor of Civil Law began his office with reading lectures, and only desisted for want of an audience' (a plausible excuse, were it not that some lecturers seem to have entertained peculiar ideas as to the constitution of an audience). 'Terrae Filius' has a story of a Professor of Divinity who came to his lecture-room, found to his surprise and displeasure, a band of intending hearers, and dismissed them straightway with the summary remark: 'Domini, vos non estis idonei auditores!' 'The present Professor, newly appointed (the author has heard it from the highest authority), means to read.' Moreover, 'the late Professor of Botany at one time _did_ read.' In fact, as the 'Oxford Spy' observes in 1818:--

'Yet here the rays of Modern Science spread: Professors are appointed, lectures read. If none attend, or hear: not ours the blame, Theirs is the folly--and be theirs the shame.'

It is evident that professorial lectures were not a wholly unbearable burden.

'It is recorded in the veracious chronicle of Herodotus that Sandoces, a Persian judge, had been crucified by Darius, on the charge of taking a bribe to determine a cause wrongly; but while he yet hung on the cross, Darius found by calculation that the good deeds of Sandoces towards the king's house were more numerous than his evil deeds, and so, confessing that he had acted with more haste than wisdom, he ordered him to be taken down and set at large.'

So when the Universities are at last confronted with that great Day of Reckoning which is continually held over their heads by external enemies, and which timorous friends are always trying to stave off by grudging concessions and half-hearted sympathy with Movements; when we are brought to the bar of that grand and final commission, which is once for all to purge Oxford and Cambridge of their last remnants of mediaevalism, and bring them into line with the marching columns of modern Democracy; when the judgment is set and the books are opened, we may hope that some extenuating circumstances may be found to set against the long enumeration of academic crimes. There will be no denying that Oxford has been the home of dead languages and undying prejudice. It will be admitted as only too true that Natural Science students were for many years compelled to learn a little Greek, and that colleges have not been prepared to sacrifice the greater part of their immoral revenues to the furtherance of University Extension; and we shall have to plead guilty to the damning charge of having returned two Tory members to several successive Parliaments. All this Oxford has done, and more; there is no getting out of it. Yet her counsel will be able to plead in her favour that once at least she has been found not retarding the rear, but actually leading the van of nineteenth-century progress; for it will hardly be denied that if the Universities did not invent the Examination System, at least they were among the first to welcome and to adapt it; and that if it had not been for the development of examinations, qualifying and competitive, at Oxford and Cambridge, the ranks of the Civil Service would have continued for many years longer to be recruited by the bad old method of nomination (commonly called jobbery and nepotism by the excluded), and society would, perhaps, never have realised that a knowledge of Chaucer is among the most desirable qualifications for an officer in Her Majesty's Army. Here, at least, the Universities have been privileged to set an example.

The Oxford examination system is practically contemporaneous with the century; the first regular class list having been published in 1807. The change was long in coming, and when it did come the face of the University was not revolutionised; if the alteration contained, as it undoubtedly did, the germs of a revolution which was to extend far beyond academic boundaries, it bore the aspect of a most desirable but most moderate reform. Instead of obtaining a degree by the obsolete process of perfunctory disputation, ambitious men were invited to offer certain books (classical works for the most part), and in these to undergo the ordeal of a written and oral examination; the oral part being at that time probably as important as the other. Sudden and violent changes are repugnant to all Englishmen, and more especially to the rulers of Universities, those homes of ancient tradition; and just as early railways found it difficult to escape from the form of the stage-coach and the old nomenclature of the road, so the new Final Honour School took over (so to speak) the plant of a system which it superseded. _Viva voce_ was still (and is to the present day) important, because it was the direct successor of oral disputation. The candidate for a degree had obtained that distinction by a theoretical argument with three 'opponents' in the Schools; so now the opponents were represented by a nearly corresponding number of examiners, and the _viva voce_ part of the examination was for a long time regarded as a contest of wit between the candidate and the questioner. Nor did the race for honours affect the great majority of the University as it does at present. It was intended for the talented few: it was not a matter of course that Tom, Dick, and Harry should go in for honours because their friends wished it, or because their college tutor wished to keep his college out of the evening papers. Candidates for honours were regarded as rather exceptional persons, and a brilliant performance in the Schools was regarded as a tolerably sure augury of success in life: a belief which was, perhaps, justified by facts then, but which--like most beliefs, dying hard--has unfortunately survived into a state of society where it is impossible to provide the assurance of a successful career for all and each of the eighty or hundred 'first-class' men whom the University annually presents to an unwelcoming world.