“I’ve settled to stay on here during Commem Week,” said Alan. “Your people are staying at the Randolph?”
Michael nodded, wondering to himself if it were possible that Alan could really have been so far-sighted as to stay on in St. Giles for the sake of having the most obvious right to escort his mother and Stella home. “But why aren’t you going into college?” he asked.
“Oh, I thought it would be rather a fag moving in for so short a time. Besides, it’s been rather ripping in these digs.”
Michael looked at him gratefully. He had himself feared to voice his appreciation of this last year with Alan: he was feeling sentimental enough to dread on Alan’s side a grudging assent to his enthusiasm.
“Yes, it has been awfully ripping,” he agreed.
“I should like to have had another year,” sighed Alan. “I think I was just beginning to get a dim sort of a notion of philosophy. I wonder how much of it is really applicable?”
“I don’t fancy, you know,” said Michael, “that the intellectual part of Oxford is directly applicable to the world at all. What I mean to say is, that I think it can only be applied to the world through our behavior.”
“Well, of course,” said Alan, “that’s a truism.”
Michael was rather disconcerted. The thought in his mind had seemed more worthy of expression.
“But the point is,” Alan went on, “whether our philosophic education, our mental training has any effect on our behavior. It seems to me that Oxford is just as typically Oxford whatever a man reads.”
“That wasn’t the case at school,” said Michael. “I’m positive for instance the Modern side was definitely inferior to the Classical side—in manners and everything else. And though at Oxford other circumstances interfere to make the contrast less violent, it doesn’t seem to me one gains the quintessence of the university unless one reads Greats. Even History only supplies that in the case of men exceptionally sensitive to the spirit of place. I mean to say sensitive in such a way that Oxford, quite apart from dons and undergraduates, can herself educate. I’m tremendously anxious now that Oxford should become more democratic, but I’m equally anxious that, in proportion as she offers more willingly the shelter of her learning to the people, the learning she bestows shall be more than ever rigidly unpractical, as they say.”