Chapter 6

Arise, my _Muse_, and ply th' extended Wing! It is of Language that I mean to sing. Thou mighty Medium, potent to convey The clearest Notions in the darkest Way, Diffus'd by thee, what Depth of verbal Mist Veils now the Realist, now th' Idealist! Our mental Processes more complex grow Than those our Sires were privileged to know. In Ages old, ere Time Instruction brought, A Thought or Thing was but a Thing or Thought: Such simple Names are now forever gone-- A Concept this, that a Noumenon: As _Cambria's_ Sons their Pride of Race increase By joining _Ap_ to _Evan_, _Jones_, or _Rees_, A prouder Halo decks the Sage's Brow, Perceptive once, he's Apperceptive now! Here sits Mentality (that erst was Mind), By correlated Entities defin'd: Here Monads lone Duality express In bright Immediacy of Consciousness: O who shall say what Obstacles deter The Youth who'd fain commence Philosopher! The painful Public with bewilder'd Brain For Metaphysic pants, but pants in vain: Too hard the Names, too weighty far the Load: Language forbids, and _Br-dl-y_ blocks the Road. From Themes like these I willingly depart, And pass (discursive) to the Realms of Art. Ye _Muses_ nine! what Phrases ye employ, What wondrous Terms t' express aesthetic Joy! As once in Years ere _Babel's_ Turrets rose Contented Nations talk'd the self-same Prose: As early _Christians_ in the Days of Yore Took what they wanted from a common Store: So different Arts th' astonished Reader sees Pool all their Terms, then choose whate'er they please. 'Mid critick Crews (where Intellect abounds) Sound sings in Colours, Colours shine in Sounds: When mimick Groves _Apelles_ decks with green, Or _Zeuxis_ limns the vespertinal Scene, _Staccato Tints_ delight th' auscultant Eye And soft _Andantes_ paint the conscious Sky: Nor less, when Musick holds the list'ning Throng, How crisply lucent glows th' entrancing Song! Each loud _Sonata_ boasts its lively Hue, And _Fugues_ are red, and _Symphonies_ are blue. Not mine to deem your Epithets misplac'd, Ye learned Arbiters of publick Taste! Yet such th' Effect on merely human Wit, That _Esperanto_ is a Joke to it.

Hail, Terminology! celestial Maid! Portress of Science, Guide to Art and Trade! I see Democracy--an ardent Band Who fain would read yet wish to understand-- Compell'd that Goal in alien Tongues to seek, Fly for Relief to _Necessary Greek_, Claim as their Right (advised by _Mr. Snow_) The sweet Simplicity of [Greek text],-- While Dons con English till they're pale and lean, And Candidates in _Mods_ do English for Unseen!

THE PUPILS' POINT OF VIEW

Relate, my Muse, the fame of him Whose calling and peculiar mission It was to wage with courage grim A battle 'gainst effete Tradition! When Movements moved, with holy zest He scaled the breach and led the stormers,-- And was among the first and best Of Educational Reformers.

He saw the Boy at Public Schools Regard his books with fear and loathing, From Latin's arbitrary rules Deriving practically nothing:-- He said,--"O bounding human Boys, Of all the fare whereon you batten, What chiefly mars your simple joys?" With one accord they answered "Latin!"

"Exactly so," th' Inquirer cried, "This is the lore which cramps and stunts us; O how can pedagogues abide A course that makes their pupils dunces? Since with the rules of Latin Prose They can't be brought to yield compliance, This Fact conclusively it shows-- They've all a natural bent for Science!"

They sought for Scientific Truth, And pedagogues with books and birches Guided the faltering steps of Youth In biological researches: The infant in his nurse's care In Science' terms was taught to stammer: They practised vivisection where They used to cut their Latin grammar;

'Twas all in vain--the Human Boy Remained unalterably chilly: Still less than Virgil's tale of Troy He liked compulsory bacilli! Much grieved the Zealot was thereat:-- "We'll try," he said, "a course of Spelling" . . . But O, the way they hated that Quite overcomes my power of telling!

"There must be ways," the good man said, "(Though hitherto perhaps we've missed 'em) Of putting things within the head: We've something wrong about the System:" And musing on the sacred flame Of Genius, and the cause that hid it, He unto this conclusion came-- COMPULSION was the thing that did it.

"Within the Boy's aspiring brain For Study still there lies a craving, And what is won against the grain Is never really worth the having; This boasted Categorical Imperative is clearly vicious,-- Pastors and masters, one and all, Must ascertain their pupils' wishes!"

And now those simple human Boys,-- All, to a boy, for Culture yearning,-- No pedagogues with idle noise Impede upon the path of Learning:-- Released from books and teachers both, No intellectual pastures feed 'em; And, if they lose in mental growth, Think how they gain in moral freedom!

HINTS FOR THE TRANSACTION OF PUBLIC BUSINESS

_Of a Cheerful Hope_.

Whene'er you do to Meetings go, as many such there be (And few and far those persons are who home return to tea), Then take with you this principle, to cheer you on your way-- The less there is to talk about, the more there is to say.

_Of an Exordium_.

Consult your hearers' happiness, and state for their relief That you'll avoid prolixity and study to be brief: For if you can't be brief at once, 'twill comfort them to know That you'll arrive at brevity in half an hour or so.

_Of Obedience to Rule_.

Should e'er the Chairman censure you, as Chairmen oft will do, And tell you that you miss the point, and bid you keep thereto, (Though points are things, by Euclid's law, that always must be missed-- They have no parts or magnitude, and therefore don't exist)-- Obey at once the Chairman's hest (because, as you're aware, It is a most improper thing to argue with the Chair), Accept his ruling patiently, without superfluous fuss, And state the things you _might_ have said--unless he'd ruled it thus.

_Of a Peroration_.

And when you've spent your arguments yet somehow still go on (It shows a want of enterprise to stop because you've done), Don't search about for topics new or vex your weary brain, But take what someone else has said and say it all again.

_Of Impartiality_.

And when at last your speech is o'er, be careful if you can That none may hint--a horrid charge--that you're a Party Man: So speak for this and speak for that as blithely as you may, But keep your mental balance true, and Vote the other Way.

EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY

Two youths there were in days of yore Called Jones and Robinson. Jones had abilities galore, While Robinson had none.

They met with corresponding fates: And Jones, that genius proud, Obtained in time a First in Greats: While Robinson was ploughed.

Jones hoped that mental gifts like his Might gain a Fellowship: But ah! full many a slip there is Between the cup and lip:

"You have a brain," the College said, "Which unassisted soars: 'Tis not for Colleges to aid Abilities like yours!

Go--wealth awaits your gathering hand, And empires crave your rule! But Fellowships like ours are planned To help the helpless fool."

He tried the Press: he tried the Bar: But still the Bar and Press Said, "Not for him our openings are Whose gifts ensure success:

Such posts are meant ('tis justice plain) For those unhappy chaps (Like Robinson) whom lack of brain Unfairly handicaps!"

And now--yet check the rising tear: It seems that long ago Those Founders whom we all revere Meant it to happen so--

Some lack of necessary food, All in a garret lone, Has ended Jones. I thought it would. But Robinson's a DON.

UNIVERSITY COMMISSIONS

BY LAMBDA MINUS

A rumour and rumbling volcanic Is heard in the Radical Press, And Presidents tremble in panic And Wardens their terrors confess: How each with anxiety shivers, The Dean with his fines and his gates, The ruffian who ragged me in Divvers, The pedant who ploughed me in Greats!

The doctrines degrading they taught, and The Progress they nipped in the bud: The things that they did when they oughtn't And failed to perform when they should: The Questions prevented from burning, The Movements forbidden to move, Recoil on their centres of learning, Their Parks and the System thereof!

Afar will Democracy chase it, That gang of impenitent Dons Who drowned the occasional Placet By bawling their truculent Nons: No idle and opulent College Will feed that obstructionist clique, Those scoffers at Practical Knowledge Who vote for compulsory Greek.

And now when the Party of Labour, Asserting its virtuous sway, Annexes the wealth of its neighbour In Labour's traditional way,-- When purged of its various abuses By Birrell's beneficent rule, This haunt of the obsolete Muses Is changed to a charity school,--

When Fellows and bloated Professors Their stipends are forced to disgorge, (Obeying the fiat of Messrs. Keir Hardie and Burns and Lloyd George) Deprived by the wrath of the Nation Of all their unmerited aids, Perhaps to escape from starvation They'll take to respectable trades!

O wholly delectable vision! I view with excusable glee The fate of the shallow precisian Who failed to appreciate Me;-- I fancy I see myself tossing With blandly contemptuous mien A penny for sweeping a crossing To him who was formerly Dean!

DIPLOMAS IN ARCHITECTURE AT CAMBRIDGE

("Education differs from technical training."--Expert opinion in a letter to the _Times_.)

Not in vain with quaint devices Infants of the age of four Build their mimic edifices All upon the nursery floor; Neither is the presage missed By the Educationist, When he doth the fact recall How that Balbus built a wall!

Thus I mused on such-like theses, While my errant fancy swam Through the circumambient breezes To the silver streams of Cam,-- There observed with pleased surprise Ancient Universities Still in touch at every stage With the Progress of the Age;

There, released from sloth and coma (Alma Mater's chief defect), There they grant a new Diploma To the budding Architect, Take the blighted Builder's art To their academic heart, Hope it may in time become Part of their curriculum:

There they tell their College Porters Not to think it strange or odd When a load of bricks and mortar's Dumped within the College quad; No indignant Tutor hauls Him who scales the College walls,-- Plying on that airy perch Architectural Research!

Thus I sang: I seemed to see an Epoch made, the Future's guide; But my glad exultant paean Was not wholly justified: Men whose names we all revere, Stars in Architecture's sphere, Phrases used which don't imply Any genuine sympathy:

Ch---mpn---ys, Bl---mfield, T. G. J---cks---n, Hushed my lyre's triumphant string-- Said in limpid Anglo-Saxon What they thought about the thing: "Seats of learning are designed For to Educate the Mind, Not to teach a craft or trade," _That_ was what these persons said!

What! and must a thwarted Nation Draw the obvious inference? What! a Liberal Education Doesn't mean the quest of pence? (Really, this extremely crude Obscurantist attitude Isn't quite what one expects From distinguished Architects!)

Here's another dear illusion Reft away and wholly gone: O the spiritual confusion Of the pained progressive Don! If the facts are quite correct As regards the Architect, Comes the question, plain and clear, _How about the Engineer_?

ICHABOD: A MONODY

Now is the time when everything is glad, Their vernal greenery the fields renew, Each feathered songster chants with livelier tone, And lambkins leap and cloudless skies are blue, And all is gay and cheerful:--I alone Am singularly sad; Mine erstwhile happiness and calm content Yields to a sense of sorrowful surprise: Things that I thought were thus, are otherwise: And all is grief, and disillusionment.

For He, who did in everything surpass Our common world,--the Good, the Truly Great, The Working Man, who shamed with standards high Our obscurantists unregenerate,-- Is not, 'twould seem, better than you, or I, Or any other ass: The vision's faded, as a snowflake melts; Fallen is that idol from his high renown: He hath waxed fat, and kicked, and tumbled down, And we must seek ensamples somewhere else!

Where is it, Comrades! in this direful day-- That noble zeal for academic lore, That reverence due for discipline, in which He used to shine conspicuously o'er The Brainless Athlete and the Idle Rich? O, does he now display That ample breadth of calm impartial view, That sober judgment and that balanced mind, Which we were taught that we should always find, O R---skin College, domiciled in you?

I have a Pupil: when his mental food Fails (as it will) his appetite to sate, What! does that patient much-enduring elf Proclaim a strike? set pickets at my gate? Boycott my lectures? give them for himself? (Full oft I wish he would:) Nay--when he finds those lectures dull and flat, He asks no other: new ones might be worse: Too well he knows that Cosmos' ordered course Meant him to hear, and me to talk like that.

Also I own I'm disappointed by Your friends and patrons, British Working Man! For they, methought, were champions of the Cause, Fighters for Freedom, foremost in the van, Not servile scruplers, bound by rules and laws, Not men who dealt in dry Respectable traditions: leaders true, No timid Moderates, who would define Too strict a boundary 'twixt Mine and Thine, Potential martyrs, heart and soul with you:--

'Twas all illusion: they would feed you with Mere talks on Temperance: when your spirit's wings Would soar to Sociology alone, Whereby will come that blessed state of things When none has property to call his own, They give you--Adam Smith . . . These too are fall'n: ah me, that I should live To hear our brightest Radicals and best By angry Labour in such terms addressed As might apply to a Conservative!

To this conclusion I perforce must come, 'Twere best we parted: seeing that we, 'twould seem, Haply have no appreciation of Your high ambitions and your aims supreme, Nor can we hope that you should greatly love Our mental pabulum: Depart, O Comrades! to some happier sphere Where you can still be nobly on the make, And mine, or plumb, or brew, or butch, or bake,-- Best to depart, and leave us mouldering here!

Yea, if ye scorn our learning overmuch, Misguided sons of horny-handed toil! Yet discontented with your lowly lot Still pine to burn the sad nocturnal oil 'Mid academic culture, or 'mid what Describes itself as such-- Go elsewhere, O my brothers! only go To Bath, to Birmingham--where'er the Don Teaches the sacred art of Getting On,---- --It is not far from here to Jericho.

THE PANACEA

It is Research of which I sing, Research, that salutary thing! None can succeed, in World or Church, Who does not prosecute Research: For some read books, and toil thereat Their intellect to waken: But if you think Research is _that_ You're very much mistaken.

All in Columbia's blessed States They have no Smalls, or Mods, or Greats, Nor do their faculties benumb With any cold curriculum: O no! for there the ambitious Boy, Released from schools and birches, At once pursues with studious joy Original Researches:

A happy lot that Student's is, --I wish that mine were like to his,-- Where in the bud no pedants nip His Services to Scholarship: And none need read with care and pain Rome's History, or Greece's, But each from his creative brain Evolves semestrial Theses!

On books to pore is not the kind Of thing to please the serious mind,-- I do not very greatly care For such unsatisfying fare: To seek the lore that in them lurks Would last _ad infinitum_: Let others read immortal works,-- I much prefer to write 'em!

THE HEROIC AGE

When I ponder o'er the pages of the old romantic ages, ere the world grew cold and gray, When there wasn't a relation between Oxford and the Nation, or a Movement every day, How I marvel at the glamour (in these duller days and tamer) which informed those scenes of glee, At the glamour and the glory of contemporary story, and the Eights as they used to be!

It is obvious that the weather must have differed altogether from the kind that now we know: I arise from reading Fiction with the permanent conviction that it did not hail, nor snow: For each fair and youthful charmer had a summer sun to warm her and a bran new frock and hat,-- In the progress of the lustres, when the crowd of Fashion musters it has grown too wise for that.

Every boat from keel to rigger was a grand ideal figure as it skimmed those Wavelets Blue, While the Heroes who propelled 'em were comparatively seldom of a commonplace type, like you-- In their strength and in their science they were positively giants, through the gorgeous days of old, Still an Admirable Crichton in those _lieben alten Zeiten_ was the oarsman brave and bold:

He could row devoid of training, and (it hardly needs explaining) got a quite unique degree: With his blushing honours laden, he espoused a lovely maiden at the end of Volume Three: This alone he had to grieve for--that he'd nothing more to live for, or expect from Fortune's whim: For I never could discover, when his Oxford days were over, what the world could hold for him!

O the rapture singlehearted of that Period has departed, with its views ornate of Man, And I think it won't come back till we restore the Pterodactyl, or revive the late Queen Anne: We have grown in mental stature, and we Go Direct to Nature, in these days of stress and strife, And the hero of a novel in a palace or a hovel is intolerably True to Life:--

Not an infant learns to toddle but EFFICIENCY'S his model, which he still pursues with rage, In a manner inconsistent with the methods dim and distant of that mid-Victorian age: For that atmosphere Elysian it has faded from our vision and has gone where the old tales go, And I really don't know whether I regret altogether--but the simple fact is so.

MAKERS OF HISTORY

Minstrels! who your choicest notes Keep for men who row in boats, Mark with what exalted mien Comes the Hero of the Scene! He, amid the festal swarm, Fashion's glass and mould of form, How in shape and how in features Far surpassing other creatures, How incomparable to Common things like me and you! He in whose transcendent state All the ages culminate-- Could we ever keep him thus, How delightful 'twere for us! Could he, 'mid the admiring throng, Ever beauteous, ever young, Still abide for ever pent In his true environment, Wear that aureole still which now Decks his high victorious brow! Out, alas! that Fortune can't Ever give us what we want! HE must quit this vernal stage: HE must sink to middle age (E'en the Poet's soaring wit Scarcely can envisage it): Go with men of common clay In to business every day: Be perhaps a Brewer, or Haply a Solicitor,-- None the fact to notice that Haloes once adorned his hat: Ay! the ways of Fate are odd: Men are mortal . . . Ichabod . . .

* * * * *

Yet shall stay by stream and tree Something still of what was He,-- Plainly put, his More or Less Immaterial Consciousness,-- Very fine and very large, Floating o'er his College barge: Always while the world continues Bards shall sing his thews and sinews,-- Here he rowed and here he ran, Being rather more than man;-- Thus as ages onward go Still he'll great and greater grow, Larger still in prose or rhyme Looming down the aisles of time, Till he sit, sublime and vast, 'Mid the Giants of the Past, Men who lived in days of old (Ch-tty, W- -dg-te, N-ck-lls, G-ld), Lived and rowed in ages dark Long ere Noah built the Ark, Very, very famous oars, Mighty men in Eights and Fours, Towering o'er our Browns and Smiths Huge and grey, like Monoliths.

Thus the Hero's happy fate Keeps in store a blissful state, All adown the Future dim, Nearly worthy e'en of Him!

ALMA MATER FILIO

Dear Youth! whose wealth and lineage high Each outward sign denotes, The highly fashionable tie, The latest thing in coats-- Imprinted on whose candid brow No gazer could detect (As e'en your enemies allow) The Pride of Intellect--

Who, 'spite your want of mental scope And lack of Serious Aim, Still left us, as we dared to hope, More pensive than you came, And thus at least, while critics vied In pointing out our flaws, For our continuance supplied A kind of Final Cause:--

Your part is played, your turn is o'er: Prepare to quit the stage: It seems you're not the person for The Spirit of the Age: Though high your birth, though large your means, I see--'tis sad, but true-- Soon, 'mid these academic scenes, No corner left for you!

Ah! what avail the things that went To build your prosperous lot, The ample cash, the long descent, The athlete's frequent pot, The waistcoat bright of ardent red Or fascinating green, The social charm that captive led The Provost, and the Dean?

I see the Cherwell's peaceful flood, I see the courts of King's Invaded by a student brood Which knows all kinds of things-- A crowd with high desires replete, Whose recreations are To sit at Professorial feet And join a Seminar:

Bright Butterfly! your haunts of old Are tenanted by men Who realise what studies mould Th' Efficient Citizen . . . These shall alone the blessings know Of Isis and of Cam, And You (I'm sure 'tis better so) Will go to--Birmingham!

IN MEMORIAM EXAMINATORIS CUIUSDAM

Lo, where yon undistinguished grave Erects its grassy pile on One who to all Experience gave An Alpha or Epsilon!

The world and eke the world's content, And all therein that passes, With marks numerical (per cent.) He did dispose in classes:

Not his to ape the critic crew Which vulgarly appraises The Good, the Beautiful, the True In literary phrases:

He did his estimate express In terms precise and weighty,-- And Vice got 25 (or less,) While Virtue rose to 80.