’I only wish my critics had to write A High-class Paper!’ _Anon._
The business of those who teach in the Universities is to criticise mistakes, and criticism of style has two results for the master and the scholar. It may produce that straining after correctness in small matters which the cold world calls pedantry; and in the case of those who are not content only to observe, but are afflicted with a desire to produce, criticism of style takes the form of parody or imitation; for a good parody or a good imitation of an author’s manner is an object-lesson in criticism. Hence it is that that same intolerance of error which makes members of a University slow in the production of really great works stimulates the genesis of ephemeral and mostly imitative literature. The more Oxford concerns herself with literary style, the more she is likely in her less serious moods to ape the manner of contemporary literature. It all comes, in the first instance, of being taught to copy Sophocles and travesty Virgil. Ephemeral literature, then, at the Universities has always been essentially imitative. In the last century, when it was the fashion to be classical--and when as in the earlier poems of Mr. Barry Lyndon, ’Sol bedecked the verdant mead, or pallid Luna shed her ray’--Oxonian minor poets imitated the London wits and sang the charms of the local belles under the sobriquets of Chloe and Delia, and academic essayists copied the manner of the ’Spectator,’ and hit off the weaknesses of their friends, Androtion and Clearchus; and now that the world has come to be ruled by newspapers, it is only natural that the style and the methods of the daily and weekly press should in some degree affect the lighter literature of Universities, and that not only undergraduates, who are naturally imitative, but even dons, who might be supposed to know better, should find themselves contributing to and redacting publications which are conducted more or less on the lines of the ’new journalism.’
[Illustration: _THE RADCLIFFE. Drawn by Ernest Stamp._]
Oxford has been slow to develop in this particular direction, and the reasons are not far to seek. The conditions just now are exceptionally favourable--that is, a _cacoëthes scribendi_ has coincided with abundance of matter to write about, but the organs of the great external world naturally provide a model for the writer. But it is only recently that these causes have been all together present and operative, and the absence of one or more of them has at different times been as effectual as the absence of all. In the early part of the present century there can have been no lack of matter: University reform was at least in the air, athletics were developing, the examination system was already in full swing. But for some reason the tendency of the University was not in the direction of the production of ephemeral or at least frivolous literature. The pompous Toryism of University authorities seventy years ago did not encourage any intellectual activity unconnected with the regular curriculum of the student, and when intellectual activity began to develop, it was rather on the lines of theological discussion--the subjects were hardly fitted for the columns of a newspaper. At an earlier date the Vice-Chancellor was interviewed by the delegate of an aspiring clique of undergraduates, who wished to form a literary club and to obtain the sanction of authority for its formation. He refused to grant the society any formal recognition, on the ground that while it was true that the statutes did not absolutely forbid such things, they certainly did not specifically mention them; and the members of the club--when it was eventually founded independent of the Vice-Chancellarial auspices--were known among their friends as the ’Lunatics.’ Such was the somewhat obscurantist temper of the University about the year 1820; and we can imagine that the Vice-Chancellor, who could find nothing in the statutes encouraging a debating society, would not have looked with enthusiastic approbation on a newspaper designed to discuss University matters without respect for authority. Even if he had, it would have been hard to appeal to all sections of the community; though there was certainly more general activity in the University than formerly, the _gaudia_ and _discursus_ of undergraduates were matters of comparatively small importance to their friends, and of none at all to their pastors and masters.