What manner of place is Oxford? Every one knows Oxford; and yet, how little is Oxford understood—even by those who enjoy a period of residence within its gates! Tourists come for a day or a week, ask numerous questions, consult a guide or a book, see a few buildings and a picture postcard, and are ready to tell ‘all about Oxford’. Yet the longer one stays in Oxford the more one hesitates to attempt description.

The University has its ‘Statutes’, its ‘Handbook’, its ‘Calendar’, its ‘Examination Statutes’, its ‘Programmes’ and ‘Lecture Lists’, which contain the official information which an American inquirer expects to find in his University ‘Catalogues’, ‘Bulletins’, and ‘College Annuals’. Then there are numberless books which deal with various phases of Oxford life, some of them serious, some merely impressionist sketches. But no one book professes to give a really comprehensive description of Oxford or to touch on all its phases; few persons have time or opportunity or inclination to read all; and still fewer, after reading of Oxford or living in Oxford, or doing both, agree in their impressions of what Oxford really is.

Oxford changes slowly, very slowly—and yet what one writes of Oxford to-day may seem inaccurate to his readers to-morrow; Oxford mills grind exceeding fine, yet what one person thinks wheat may seem to another chaff. It depends on the point of view. This is where the difficulty lies, and herein one feels his presumption when trying to make Oxford real and comprehensible to the uninitiated.

Really ‘Oxford’ means two things—it is the name of a place, and it represents an idea. Bonaparte said of himself that he was ‘not a man but an event’, and yet he was both. The word ‘Napoleon’ represents to us a man and an idea. The difficulty is to differentiate, to say how far the concrete and the abstract may be separated, and how far each is necessary to the proper understanding of the other. The technical purpose for which these chapters are intended suggests that this attempt to outline certain salient features of Oxford custom and practice shall be limited to the concrete, avoiding as far as possible the ideal side, especially where bordering on the lines of controversy.

Oxford is unique among Universities. Only Cambridge approximates to it in character and in system. No other English or Continental University is like these two. It is from its manner of life and from its environment that Oxford has acquired and maintained its individuality. The University has a history which by tradition antedates the Conquest; it has grown with England; its rights, its charters, its laws have undergone the vicissitudes of centuries and have developed in the same process of evolution with the charters and laws and Constitution of England. The Colleges have been intimately associated with the great events, constitutional, political, religious, and social, which have made English history; and the University has fought for and won its rights side by side with other English institutions.

As it exists to-day the University is ‘sovereign’ within its own borders, subject to the National Government only in regard to those greater obligations, such as an individual State in the United States owes to the National Government.

Oxford and Cambridge are not National or State Universities in the sense in which that term is applied to many Continental and American Universities. The English Government makes no appropriation for their support. And yet they are—and they only—in character the great national Universities of England.

Visitors from abroad come to Oxford, are shown about through College after College, and after many expressions of surprise and delight exclaim, ‘Yes, yes; excellent, excellent, but where is the University?’ They are looking for the ‘main building’, the ‘administration building’, something concrete which they may call the University—and they do not find it.

The University is a federation—an academic United States, made up of twenty-two ‘societies’—the Colleges—each of which has its separate corporate existence.

The University is dependent for its running expenses on its endowments, fees, and the pro rata contributions from each of the Colleges. The Colleges are also supported by their endowments, which, usually in land, are considerable and yet decidedly variable, and also by College fees as paid by undergraduates. The University is not as rich in income as credited, and its yearly revenues are really insufficient for the enormous work which it undertakes.[44]

There are a number of reasons why the cost of living at Oxford is high. The University, as explained, consists of a large number of separate establishments—the Colleges. Students are ‘up’ but one half of the year, and yet the College ‘establishment’ must be maintained the year round. A large number of servants are necessary to the system, which in respect to style of living and service resembles hotel life. The standard of maintenance and service demanded by the students themselves is not conducive to economy.

It is somewhat misleading to characterize Oxford and Cambridge as ‘rich men’s Universities’. The phrase is probably more appropriate to them than it is to any other English-speaking educational institutions; yet ‘wealth’ is not the key to entrance or to success in Oxford. So far as technical restrictions are concerned, the University is open ‘without respect of birth, age, or creed to all persons who satisfy the appointed officers that they are likely to derive educational advantage from its membership’.[45]

In practice a considerable amount of ready cash is necessary for every one who wishes to enjoy the advantages of Oxford College life.[46] The sons of aristocratic and of well-to-do families in England, if destined for University careers, are nearly all sent to Oxford or to Cambridge, and the student bodies are recruited largely from these sources. It is asserted that Oxford draws a large proportion of its students from some twenty ‘Public Schools’. The boys who go through these ‘Schools’ have had most of their education away from home since their ninth or tenth years. The cost of living in an English ‘Public School’ is as great as, or greater than, that of educating a boy in an American Private Preparatory School or ‘Military Academy’. Men who have been in these Schools usually come up to Oxford with a generous allowance.

But there are also in Oxford a large number of men whose means are comparatively limited. There is no such thing as ‘working one’s way’ in Oxford, and practically the only way in which one’s allowance may be supplemented is through the winning of a scholarship. The type of student who under Western conditions in America not infrequently ‘starts his College career on nothing and graduates with a bank account’ is impossible in Oxford. Again, while it is true that many men in Oxford consider themselves ‘absolutely poor’ on a sum which will keep a man in most Universities altogether comfortably, yet for all purposes of comparison there is an inconsiderable proportion of poor men in the University.

Oxford life is expensive—in many respects it seems too expensive. A high minimum allowance[46] is necessary to the student, just as some knowledge of Latin and Greek is necessary for passing Responsions; but it is as misleading to characterize the whole institution as a ‘rich man’s University’ as it would be to say the whole student body is composed of scholars.

Within itself the University is very democratic. The lines of social cleavage are rather vertical than horizontal. There is a thorough atmosphere of personal independence. While peculiarities and eccentricities are discouraged, yet originality—so long as it does not annoy—is at a premium, and individuality is sacred to an extent best known to Englishmen. The diversity of interests and the variety of pursuits in which Oxford men are daily engaged cover almost as wide a range as the catalogue of individual tastes.

With all this diversity of taste and pursuit, the students within the University commonwealth are alike in this, that, whether from noble, aristocratic, or middle-class families, they generally represent achievement and ambition—and most of them regard their University course as a training for active political, professional, literary, or social life. Oxford and Cambridge claim pre-eminently to fit the men, who by reason of birth or merit succeed to the leading places in British administration and thought, for the high places which they are to fill. As Wellington gave credit for the victory of Waterloo to the ‘playing-fields of Eton’, so England gives credit for innumerable triumphs, military, civil, and political, for achievements, physical, intellectual, and moral, to the playing-fields and the river, the lecture-rooms and the firesides of Oxford. The University boasts that it trains men to live lives both of achievement and of enjoyment, to meet exigencies and emergencies as they arise—to be not only men but gentlemen. Oxford and Cambridge degrees are accepted in England as educational hall-marks.

Clubs and cliques and social discriminations, of course, exist, but they are little paraded. One’s social relations and activities are little known outside the circle to which they appertain. There is a rare freedom from ‘’Varsity Politics’. Athletic professionalism is an absent quantity. Oxford neither knows nor understands the spirit of the German student Verbindung or of the American ‘College Fraternity’. In fact many phases of the ‘fraternizing’ spirit seem lacking in Oxford life.

The nearest approach to the ‘Class organization’ or organization by Departments which influences University life in America, is the predominance of the College in Oxford life. Clear lines between ‘Senior’, ‘Junior,’ ‘Sophomore,’ and ‘Freshmen’ are not drawn; there are no Class organizations and Class activities—such, for instance, as football matches, cane-rushes, editing the College Annual, and the ‘Junior Prom.’ There is some natural separation but no artificial cleavage between students of different years. The relations between a ‘Fresher’ and a ‘Second year’ or ‘Third year’ man, for instance, are subject to certain conventions and formalities of introduction which Oxford emphasizes only in their practice, but, beyond that, social relations are only limited by one’s own personality.

To say that Oxford is Conservative is almost to state an axiom. The ‘town’ is Conservative; the University is Conservative; the students are Conservative. Conscious of this characteristic, Oxford cultivates it to some extent as an ideal. Pointing to history, and emphasizing results, it justifies Conservatism, yet its Conservatism should not be magnified. The town, rejoicing for the present in the artistic inconvenience of horse-cars and some other like antiquities, nevertheless continues a study and a discussion of motor-trams and motor-’buses, and will doubtless some day adopt that form of conveyance which it decides best. Likewise the University, feeling a certain prejudice against innovations and a certain suspicion of new methods and practices, looks with a critical eye upon new theories, new educational ideas and suggestions, and yet it is generally ready to appropriate and to apply those productions of modern thought and genius which prove themselves, by surviving the experimental stage, really worth while. Oxford Conservatism is essentially a thinking attitude. In the realm of politics, ‘Socialism’ as it is commonly cried in many of the Continental Universities, is tabooed in Oxford. ‘Conservatives’—and every Oxford man has his politics—outnumber ‘Liberals’, although not by any great majority. Oxford has seldom stood for other than Tory principles; and yet one has not far to look in English history to see how time and again reform movements and the promulgation of new and radical ideas have originated and found their support in ‘the Universities’.

Oxford would not be English if it did not emphasize comfort—personal comfort. True, it has many inconveniences and lacks some of the fittings which add to the perfection of modern buildings. It is hard to reconcile old buildings and modern conveniences. Lamp and candle still shed the only light in at least one College—but this is not the rule; nearly every College building in Oxford has been ‘wired’, and table-lamps as well as drop-light ‘switch on’ in student rooms at the ‘press of the button’. Modern baths and showers (except a few new buildings) and a University gymnasium are wanting; but every man has his ‘tub’; and the gymnasium ‘though missing is not missed’—for all outdoors is the Oxford gymnasium. For boxing, wrestling, and fencing there are private gymnasiums.

But for the solid everyday comfort of well-furnished apartments, of good cooking and excellent service, for freedom from bother with details, for convenient arrangements for athletic sports and for social life, Oxford provides as by a high art. The ‘strenuous life’ is frequently better known by its absence than otherwise, and many people in Oxford dislike even the sound of those words; yet there is a clear track and every opportunity for the man who insists on being strenuous.

Added to the personal comforts are the artistic and scholastic comforts—if one may speak of them as such—with which the student is surrounded. The natural beauties of Oxford’s environment are a fit setting for the classic treasures of architecture which have risen in irregular grouping throughout the mediaeval town. As the student comes and goes, as he sits at his lecture, he is, consciously or unconsciously, living in an atmosphere of artistic realities. And then again, one cannot but remember now and then that he is sitting on the same benches or writing at the same table where once sat or wrote many of the men whose lives or whose works he is set to study, and whose portraits now stare down upon him from the walls opposite or whose coats of arms are blazoned on the oak panelling around him. Then as for books and libraries and reading-rooms—whether one wishes to dig among ancient texts or manuscripts, to consult reference libraries, or to fill one’s own shelves with books old and new, where can Oxford be surpassed?

As a cosmopolitan intellectual centre Oxford is a Mecca to which pilgrims flock from all parts of the world; pilgrims with brains, pilgrims without brains; those who want to learn and those who do not want to learn; bookworms, athletes, soldiers, ‘sports,’ workers and idlers; sons of noblemen, sons of commoners; not Englishmen alone, but Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Egyptians, Germans, and Frenchmen. All this variety of student units go about looking very much alike in the conventional ‘lounge’ garb of Oxford; so that only an intimate acquaintance reveals the true cosmopolitanism of its personnel and of its intellectual life.

Although the University encircles, and, in constitutional and jurisdictional matters, exercises authority over the Colleges, it is really only the sum of the Colleges, each of which is in turn only the sum of its members. While the University is thus only a union of the Colleges for attaining such ends and such status as can better be attained by united than by isolated existence, the College is a real and concrete thing, the foundation stone of the ‘Oxford System’. Each College is within itself independent; each has its own traditions and some characteristics of organization, life, and system which are peculiar to itself. With the affairs of the College individually the University is not concerned.

The Colleges as they exist to-day suggest some features of the monastery, some of the ancient hostelry, some of the fashionable hotel, some of the College dormitory, and some of the bachelor’s club—they combine church, lecture-rooms, dining-halls, professors’ houses, College clubs and students’ apartments, all within the radius of College walls, all accessible only through College gates, all capable of being shut off from the outside world, at once castle and prison.

To the University there come each year about 900 new men: there are in residence about 2,800; of these each College has from 40 to 300. During his first and second year the student is generally required to live in College, while in his third he may (except in a few instances) and often must go out into ‘digs’, that is, into ‘licensed lodgings’ in the town.

The life of the College is real Oxford life. It was this which Cecil Rhodes cherished most in his reverence for his University; it was this which gave him his confidence in the ‘Oxford System’.

As with individuals so with these Colleges—the longer one’s acquaintance, the better one realizes that each College is independent, has its individuality, its own traditions, and its own personal character. This makes College life again a difficult subject upon which to generalize. Certain technical characteristics, however, are common to all. The College buildings are arranged in quadrangles, in each of which are several ‘stairs’. On each stair are a number of suites of rooms, eight suites being perhaps the average. There are no corridors, so that each stair is as it were a house by itself. Each student has rooms to himself, a ‘sitter’, which serves as living and dining room, and a ‘bedder’ always; while often a ‘thirder’ adds the convenience of a separate study-room. Each suite has also a small cupboard-pantry, and there is usually on each stair a ‘scout’s pantry’ (or kitchen). Each stair has a ‘scout’ and one or two ‘scout’s boys’, who are servants-in-general to all the men on the stair.

The system of breakfasting, lunching, and entertaining in one’s rooms makes the undergraduate at once a host and a householder. When at rare intervals a student wishes to be left alone with his books or his thoughts he may ‘sport his oak’, that is, he may slam the heavy oaken outer door, well known to readers of Tom Brown, whose inside spring-lock bars entrance even to friends who may be familiar enough to ignore the suggestion of its closing. The great elasticity of the tutoring and examination system further makes it possible for the undergraduate to study or not as he may choose, and to dispose of his time practically at his own sweet will. In these respects the Oxford student enjoys an independence which is almost unknown elsewhere—excepting in some of the German Universities.

As the activities of Oxford readily resolve themselves into scholastic, athletic, and social, so the Oxford day, the natural Oxford day, in respect to morning, afternoon, and evening, approximately adopts this order.

Voluntary early rising is not the fashion, but eight o’clock chapel or roll-call compels it on half, or more than half, the days of Term, while the demands of training prevent many men from sleeping as late as their less strenuous fellows. As compared with American students, however, on their native soil, the Oxford student is a late riser. The voice of the scout and the slamming of a bath-tub on the floor rouse the student to a consciousness of the new day. Morning hours begin invariably with a cold tub. Chapel, if attended (ritual service only), requires about fifteen minutes.

Breakfast is taken in one’s own rooms or in the rooms of a friend, alone, or with three or four friends or guests—for the breakfast hour is a favourite time for entertaining, and enjoying a social meal. An Oxford ‘brekker’ is very different from the coffee and rolls of the Continent—it is a good, hearty meal, with satisfying solid courses.

Most lectures are given between nine and one o’clock. These four hours, more than any others, are Oxford’s formal work-time, while the hours from eight in the evening on are those also given to work.

Luncheon, if the student lunch in his rooms or in the College Common-room (only possible in a few Colleges), is a very light meal. But luncheon, again, is a favourite medium for entertaining, especially on Sundays, and when one has guests, luncheon loses its ordinarily simple character.

It requires a more or less elaborate system, especially in a large College, to provide for and keep up with the wants of two or three hundred tables. The cooking is all done in the College kitchen, and from there are sent the dishes which the student orders through his scout. Milk, bread, cheese, ‘drinks,’ and so forth are supplied by the College buttery; cakes, candies, fruits, tea, coffee, and tobaccos are usually obtained from the College ‘Common-room’—all are sent to the ‘stair’, and the scout serves the tables upon the stair. Every student has tea and coffee and sugar, and usually a shelf full of such edibles and drinkables as he chooses, together with dishes and ‘plate’ in his pantry. A kettle of water is usually boiling, or ready to boil, on the trivet before his fireplace, so that he is always prepared to dispense a substantial as well as a cordial hospitality.

The afternoon is given up to sport. Oxford students probably give more time to athletics than any other body of students in the world. At Heidelberg, aside from a few sporadic efforts on the river, the most strenuous exercise indulged in seems to be on the blood-stained floor of the duelling-room in the ‘Hirschgasse’, but less than half the students indulge in this energetic crossing of swords. The French students scarcely understand the term ‘athletics’ at all. America and England lead, and although the American College has a good deal of athletics, and sometimes too much, it is athletics for the minority, whereas at Oxford almost everybody ‘goes in for something’.

The students come from that class which can and does take the greatest interest in all manner of sports and athletic games. In the ‘Public Schools’ the boys learn the rules and requirements of their games, and get about all the coaching they ever get. Men do not often learn games at the ’Varsity; they play them. ‘Practice’ is a word little heard on a College field; only in rowing is a systematic and an evolutionary coaching-system in practice.

Each College has its own boats, its own football and cricket and hockey teams, with its own playing-fields. There is a constant programme of inter-college contests.

The Oxford idea is ‘exercise for every one’, a thing of vital importance for keeping in condition in the climate of Oxford. Exercise is taught the English boy with his A, B, C. Of the 2,800 students who keep Term at Oxford, fully two-thirds are out engaging in some vigorous exercise every afternoon. For games, it is not requisite that one be a ‘star’—every one may find room at something or other. The men who show up best in their College teams or in College crews are ‘tried’ for the ’Varsity. Thus the ’Varsity teams and crews are chosen from a very large number of men who are actually engaged in and practising the sports for which ’Varsity men are needed, and under this system athletic ability is often discovered which, under systems where only ‘promising candidates’ ever ‘try’, would never even be suspected.

The game more than the victory is the objective in College contests,[47] and although this may rob the play of a certain intense strenuousness, it at the same time eliminates roughness and foul play.

With the exception of rowing, systematic coaching and serious training are little applied. At times, this causes a decided lack of that efficiency which results from precise ‘team-work’, and may be criticized as leaving too much to the brilliancy of individual playing; but it eliminates professionalism and trickery.

There is little business connected with College athletics. The expenses of field and pavilion and barge and boats are met from subscriptions to the ‘amalgamated clubs’—to which nearly every College man belongs. The expenditure of a team is slight. The College provides the field. Every man furnishes his own ‘togs’, of which a different sort are required for nearly every sport. The clubs furnish boats and balls, and the few requisites which must be common property. Only to ’Varsity matches (and not to all of them) is admission charged. Almost no one watches a College match, for the simple reason that every one who is not playing on the field is engaged somewhere else at some other game. There is no ‘rooting’. A few scattered cheers break out at times, but there is no organized ‘encouragement’. One feature of Oxford athletics which is in striking antithesis to American College athletics is, that here, the more prominent and successful an athlete becomes, the greater his expenses, as he buys his own outfits, his own ‘blazers’, often pays his own railroad fares, usually incurs numerous social obligations, and receives no ‘compensation’ further than a row of shining prizes which may adorn his mantle-shelf.

From the river and fields the men come in at about 4.30 for tea. Years ago a German traveller wrote in his diary, ‘To the Englishman tea is as necessary as to the German his beer.’ The customs have not changed. In this respect as in others ‘Oxford is nothing if not the reflection of English life’. As a social institution the tea-hour, with rest and ‘something to eat’ and lively conversation ‘after the game’, is thoroughly enjoyable; while as a practical institution it is a necessity, as dinner is two and a half hours away and the inner man needs immediate fortifying after the vigorous exercise of the past two hours.

The hard-working man, then, has a chance to get in two hours of reading between tea-time and dinner.

After the bells have struck seven the students stream, in gown and bare-headed, toward their College halls. At this one time during the day the students of each College really gather in a body. In the semi-gloom of the long hall, with its high ceiling and panelled, portrait-hung walls, with fireplaces glowing and electric lights illumining white cloths and bright silver, the tables are arranged in long rows, with flanking of narrow, backless benches on each side. Students file in; dons and Master enter, in evening dress, their loose gowns flowing back from their shoulders as they stride to ‘high table’. After the reading of a Benedictus benedicat all sit down and fall-to right merrily. The dinner hour can hardly be styled a social hour—in hall; in fact, so business-like does it become at certain undergraduate tables that it might well appear to the casual observer——but, as a matter of fact, casual observers are not allowed entrance.

After dinner the men gather in little knots about the bulletin-boards or drift into the Common-room, there in the College club-rooms to spend a few minutes over the newspapers, writing notes, consulting the bulletins, athletic reports and predictions, or engaging in conversation over coffee-cups and a quiet smoke. Or little groups go off to this or that room for ‘coffee’ and a social hour or evening; while many go straight away to libraries or work-tables.

The possible divisions for the evening are too numerous for even a summary; but of the serious possibilities there are numerous debating and literary societies in every College. There are University Clubs, literary, musical, social, political; the Union Debates, parliamentary in their training, occur every Thursday evening; on Sunday evenings the Balliol Concerts provide excellent programmes of music, open to undergraduates; under town auspices and under University auspices, Oxford is given opportunity throughout Term-time to hear much of the best musical talent; visits and addresses by the leaders of English political and ecclesiastical thought are frequent, and are thoroughly appreciated by the undergraduate body.

An attempt to describe the difference between the activities of one Term and another would lead too far afield. Three times each year the men ‘come up’, spend eight weeks in Oxford, and go down again for the three Vacations, which last six, six, and sixteen weeks respectively. No small amount—in the case of many men the major portion—of the student’s ‘work’ is done during these Vacations. To some men the Vacation is the ‘dull season’ and Term-time is play-time; to others Term-time is a season for filling up notebooks and Vacation a time for learning what has been written into them. To some the object of life seems to be reading; to others, athletics and sports in general. There is no ‘dull season’ in Oxford athletics. Football, hockey, lacrosse, &c., are played in the two winter Terms; rowing goes on the year round, as does track practice; tennis, cricket, and the ‘slacking’ forms of river exercise are favourites in the Summer Term. The Oxford-Cambridge Rugby match is played in the Christmas Vacation; the Oxford-Cambridge Boat-race and the field sports take place in the Spring Vacation. The pleasures of Oxford Summer Term, ‘Eights week,’ ‘Commem.,’ and Henley, lead to the realm of poetry and have no place in a handbook.

Some critics complain that men waste their time in Oxford. So they do, some of them—and so they do elsewhere. It is all a matter of manner and degree, and a question of what constitutes waste. One might do almost no work in Oxford and yet do just the opposite of wasting his time—if he use his eyes and ears. There is that about Oxford which breathes of History, which exhales Romance, which is redolent of culture, which fills the very atmosphere with the spirit of hospitality. One need only walk through the College ‘quads’ and cloisters, follow the windings of the ‘finest architectural street in Europe’, ‘the High,’ wander through meadow and park, along the banks of Isis and Cherwell, through Addison’s Walk, through ‘Mesopotamia’, or out on the hills where Shelley delighted to pass long afternoons, or off to the north where Gladstone walked alone; one must, if he have any capacity, get something of a liberal education; he cannot fail of inspiration. One may go to lectures on Literature and History, and, without ever taking a note, carry away impressions of what has been and what is and what is going to be in the world, especially in the English world, and in life and thought both ancient and modern.

It is impossible to tell some one else just what Oxford is—but Oxford as it may be is a question with which every Oxford man has to deal for himself. Oxford is a home of ‘influences’; it is all too frequently referred to as the ‘home of lost causes’; what it becomes for each man who trusts himself or is entrusted to its ‘influence’, depends largely upon himself. The University offers each man wide fields for the investment of his time and talent—it offers much for one to learn—but it does not do much choosing for one, nor does it set itself as a task-master.

It is often hard to take Oxford seriously. Examinations seem a far-away, hazy something, too often forgotten, as each day unrolls a tempting programme of delights other than books. Unlimited credit causes many an unthinking undergraduate to step deep into debt before he stops to reflect that tradesmen do keep accounts. The freedom of a life where every man is expected to think and act for himself offers every opportunity for self-improvement or self-destruction. But there is always a day of reckoning. Sooner or later examinations stare one in the face and bills roll in from every side. The student has kept his Terms and Oxford has offered him what he has chosen to take. The man who has reckoned well with his time and his money will take something far more valuable than his degree from Oxford. The man who has looked upon his ’Varsity years as a mere summer of pleasure has also gotten much out of his ‘College course’, but in its last days he may find much cause to quote from the ‘grasshopper and the ant’.

The University Calendar for 1906-7 shows a total of 3,663 undergraduates at present enrolled.[48]

COLLEGES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.