Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 280
“Yes,” said Charles.
“Do you know, the other day I made the silliest mistake about a spoon. I thought it was a Twelfth Century spoon and said so and in reality it was only Eleven and a half. Wasn’t it, Charles?”
“Yes,” said Charles.
“But do come into the drawing-room and have some tea. And, by the way, since you are interested in antiques, do look please at my teapot.”
“It looks an excellent teapot,” I said, feeling it with my hand, “and it must have been very expensive, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, not that one,” interposed Mr. Hespeler-Hyphen-Jones. “That is nothing. We got that here in New York at Hoffany’s — to make tea in. It is made of solid silver, of course, and all that, but even Hoffany’s admitted that it was made in America and was probably not more than a year or so old and had never been used by anybody else. In fact, they couldn’t guarantee it in any way.”
“Oh, I see,” I said.
“But let me pour you out tea from it and then do look at the perfect darling beside it. Oh, don’t touch it, please, it won’t stand up.”
“Won’t stand up?” I said.
“No,” said Hespeler-Jones, “that’s one of the tests. We know from that it is genuine Swaatsmaacher. None of them stand up.”
“Where did you buy it,” I asked, “here?”
“Oh, heavens, no, you couldn’t buy a thing like that here! As a matter of fact, we picked it up in a little gin shop in Obehellandam in Holland. Do you know Obehellandam?”
“I don’t,” I said.
“It’s just the dearest little place, nothing but little wee smelly shops filled with most delightful things — all antique, everything broken. They guarantee that there is nothing in the shop that wasn’t smashed at least a hundred years ago.”
“You don’t use the teapot to make tea,” I said.
“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Hespeler-Jones as she handed me a cup of tea from the New York teapot. “I don’t think you could. It leaks.”
“That again is a thing,” said her husband, “that the experts always look for in a Swaatsmaacher. If it doesn’t leak, it’s probably just a faked-up thing not twenty years old.”
“Is it silver?” I asked.
“Ah, no. That’s another test,” said Mrs. Jones. “The real Swaatsmaachers were always made of pewter bound with barrel-iron off the gin barrels. They try to imitate it now by using silver, but they can’t get it.”
“No, the silver won’t take the tarnish,” interjected her husband. “You see, it’s the same way with ever so many of the old things. They rust and rot in a way that you simply cannot imitate. I have an old drinking horn that I’ll show you presently — Ninth Century, isn’t it, dear? — that is all coated inside with the most beautiful green slime, absolutely impossible to reproduce.”
“Is it?” I said.
“Yes, I took it to Squeeziou’s, the Italian place in London. (They are the great experts on horns, you know; they can tell exactly the century and the breed of cow.) And they told me that they had tried in vain to reproduce that peculiar and beautiful rot. One of their head men said that he thought that this horn had probably been taken from a dead cow that had been buried for fifty years. That’s what gives it its value, you know.”
“You didn’t buy it in London, did you?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” answered Hespeler-Jones. “London is perfectly impossible — just as hopeless as New York. You can’t buy anything real there at all.”
“Then where do you get all your things?” I asked, as I looked round at the collection of junk in the room.
“Oh, we pick them up here and there,” said Mrs. Jones. “Just in any out-of-the-way corners. That little stool we found at the back of a cow stable in Loch Aberlocherty. They were actually using it for milking. And the two others — aren’t they beautiful? though really it’s quite wrong to have two chairs alike in the same room — came from the back of a tiny little whiskey shop in Galway. Such a delight of an old Irishman sold them to us and he admitted that he himself had no idea how old they were. They might, he said, be Fifteenth Century, or they might not.
“But, oh, Charles,” my hostess interrupted herself to say, “I’ve just had a letter from Jane (Jane is my sister, you know) that is terribly exciting. She’s found a table at a tiny place in Brittany that she thinks would exactly do in our card room. She says that it is utterly unlike anything else in the room and has quite obviously no connection with cards. But let me read what she says — let me see, yes, here’s where it begins:
“ ’. . . a perfectly sweet little table. It probably had four legs originally and even now has two which, I am told, is a great find, as most people have to be content with one. The man explained that it could either be leaned up against the wall or else suspended from the ceiling on a silver chain. One of the boards of the top is gone, but I am told that that is of no consequence, as all the best specimens of Brittany tables have at least one board out.’
“Doesn’t that sound fascinating, Charles? Do send Jane a cable at once not to miss it.”
And when I took my leave a little later, I realized once and for all that the antique business is not for me.
Oxford as I See It
MY PRIVATE STATION being that of a university professor, I was naturally deeply interested in the system of education in England. I was therefore led to make a special visit to Oxford and to submit the place to a searching scrutiny. Arriving one afternoon at four o’clock, I stayed at the Mitre Hotel and did not leave until eleven o’clock next morning. The whole of this time, except for one hour spent in addressing the undergraduates, was devoted to a close and eager study of the great university. When I add to this that I had already visited Oxford in 1907 and spent a Sunday at All Souls with Colonel L. S. Amery, it will be seen at once that my views on Oxford are based upon observations extending over fourteen years.
At any rate I can at least claim that my acquaintance with the British university is just as good a basis for reflection and judgment as that of the numerous English critics who come to our side of the water. I have known a famous English author to arrive at Harvard University in the morning, have lunch with President Lowell, and then write a whole chapter on the Excellence of Higher Education in America. I have known another one come to Harvard, have lunch with President Lowell, and do an entire book on the Decline of Serious Study in America. Or take the case of my own university. I remember Mr. Rudyard Kipling coming to McGill and saying in his address to the undergraduates at 2.30 p.m., “You have here a great institution.” But how could he have gathered this information? As far as I know he spent the entire morning with Sir Andrew Macphail in his house beside the campus, smoking cigarettes. When I add that he distinctly refused to visit the Palaeontologic Museum, that he saw nothing of our new hydraulic apparatus, or of our classes in Domestic Science, his judgment that we had here a great institution seems a little bit superficial. I can only put beside it, to redeem it in some measure, the hasty and ill-formed judgment expressed by Lord Milner, “McGill is a noble university”: and the rash and indiscreet expression of the Prince of Wales, when we gave him an LL.D. degree, “McGill has a glorious future.”
To my mind these unthinking judgments about our great college do harm, and I determined, therefore, that anything that I said about Oxford should be the result of the actual observation and real study based upon a bona fide residence in the Mitre Hotel.
On the strength of this basis of experience I am prepared to make the following positive and emphatic statements. Oxford is a noble university. It has a great past. It is at present the greatest university in the world: and it is quite possible that it has a great future. Oxford trains scholars of the real type better than any other place in the world. Its methods are antiquated. It despises science. Its lectures are rotten. It has professors who never teach and students who never learn. It has no order, no arrangement, no system. Its curriculum is unintelligible. It has no president. It has no state legislature to tell it how to teach, and yet — it gets there. Whether we like it or not, Oxford gives something to its students, a life and a mode of thought, which in America as yet we can emulate but not equal.
If anybody doubts this let him go and take a room at the Mitre Hotel (ten and six for a wainscotted bedroom, period of Charles I) and study the place for himself.
These singular results achieved at Oxford are all the more surprising when one considers the distressing conditions under which the students work. The lack of an adequate building fund compels them to go on working in the same old buildings which they have had for centuries. The buildings at Brasenose College have not been renewed since the year 1525. In New College and Magdalen the students are still housed in the old buildings erected in the sixteenth century. At Christ Church I was shown a kitchen which had been built at the expense of Cardinal Wolsey in 1527. Incredible though it may seem, they have no other place to cook in than this and are compelled to use it to-day. On the day when I saw this kitchen, four cooks were busy roasting an ox whole for the students’ lunch: this at least is what I presumed they were doing from the size of the fire-place used, but it may not have been an ox; perhaps it was a cow. On a huge table, twelve feet by six and made of slabs of wood five inches thick, two other cooks were rolling out a game pie. I estimated it as measuring three feet across. In this rude way, unchanged since the time of Henry VIII, the unhappy Oxford students are fed. I could not help contrasting it with the cosy little boarding houses on Cottage Grove Avenue where I used to eat when I was a student at Chicago, or the charming little basement dining-rooms of the students’ boarding houses in Toronto. But then, of course, Henry VIII never lived in Toronto.
The same lack of a building-fund necessitates the Oxford students living in the identical old boarding houses they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Technically they are called “quadrangles,” “closes” and “rooms”; but I am so broken in to the usage of my student days that I can’t help calling them boarding houses. In many of these the old stairway has been worn down by the feet of ten generations of students: the windows have little latticed panes: there are old names carved here and there upon the stone, and a thick growth of ivy covers the walls. The boarding house at St. John’s College dates from 1509, the one at Christ Church from the same period. A few hundred thousand pounds would suffice to replace these old buildings with neat steel and brick structures like the normal school at Schenectady, N. Y., or the Peel Street High School at Montreal. But nothing is done. A movement was indeed attempted last autumn towards removing the ivy from the walls, but the result was unsatisfactory and they are putting it back. Anyone could have told them beforehand that the mere removal of the ivy would not brighten Oxford up, unless at the same time one cleared the stones of the old inscriptions, put in steel fire-escapes, and in fact brought the boarding houses up to date.
But Henry VIII being dead, nothing was done. Yet in spite of its dilapidated buildings and its lack of fire-escapes, ventilation, sanitation, and up-to-date kitchen facilities, I persist in my assertion that I believe that Oxford, in its way, is the greatest university in the world. I am aware that this is an extreme statement and needs explanation. Oxford is much smaller in numbers, for example, than the State University of Minnesota, and is much poorer. It has, or had till yesterday, fewer students than the University of Toronto. To mention Oxford beside the 26,000 students of Columbia University sounds ridiculous. In point of money, the $39,000,000 endowment of the University of Chicago, and the $35,000,000 one of Columbia, and the $43,000,000 of Harvard seem to leave Oxford nowhere. Yet the peculiar thing is that it is not nowhere. By some queer process of its own it seems to get there every time. It was therefore of the very greatest interest to me, as a profound scholar, to try to investigate just how this peculiar excellence of Oxford arises.
It can hardly be due to anything in the curriculum or programme of studies. Indeed, to anyone accustomed to the best models of a university curriculum as it flourishes in the United States and Canada, the programme of studies is frankly quite laughable. There is less Applied Science in the place than would be found with us in a theological college. Hardly a single professor at Oxford would recognize a dynamo if he met it in broad daylight. The Oxford student learns nothing of chemistry, physics, heat, plumbing, electric wiring, gas-fitting or the use of a blow-torch. Any American college student can run a motor car, take a gasoline engine to pieces, fix a washer on a kitchen tap, mend a broken electric bell, and give an expert opinion on what has gone wrong with the furnace. It is these things indeed which stamp him as a college man, and occasion a very pardonable pride in the minds of his parents. But in all these things the Oxford student is the merest amateur.
This is bad enough. But after all one might say this is only the mechanical side of education. True: but one searches in vain in the Oxford curriculum for any adequate recognition of the higher and more cultured studies. Strange though it seems to us on this side of the Atlantic, there are no courses at Oxford in Housekeeping, or in Salesmanship, or in Advertising, or on Comparative Religion, or on the influence of the Press. There are no lectures whatever on Human Behavior, on Altruism, on Egotism, or on the Play of Wild Animals. Apparently, the Oxford student does not learn these things. This cuts him off from a great deal of the larger culture of our side of the Atlantic. “What are you studying this year?” I once asked a fourth-year student at one of our great colleges. “I am electing Salesmanship and Religion,” he answered. Here was a young man whose training was destined inevitably to turn him into a moral business man: either that or nothing. At Oxford Salesmanship is not taught and Religion takes the feeble form of the New Testament. The more one looks at these things the more amazing it becomes that Oxford can produce any results at all.
The effect of the comparison is heightened by the peculiar position occupied at Oxford by the professors’ lectures. In the colleges of Canada and the United States the lectures are supposed to be a really necessary and useful part of the student’s training. Again and again I have heard the graduates of my own college assert that they had got as much, or nearly as much, out of the lectures at college as out of athletics or the Greek letter society or the Banjo and Mandolin Club. In short, with us the lectures form a real part of the college life. At Oxford it is not so. The lectures, I understand, are given and may even be taken. But they are quite worthless and are not supposed to have anything much to do with the development of the student’s mind. “The lectures here,” said a Canadian student to me, “are punk.” I appealed to another student to know if this was so. “I don’t know whether I’d call them exactly punk,” he answered, “but they’re certainly rotten.” Other judgments were that the lectures were of no importance: that nobody took them: that they don’t matter: that you can take them if you like: that they do you no harm.
It appears further that the professors themselves are not keen on their lectures. If the lectures are called for they give them; if not, the professor’s feelings are not hurt. He merely waits and rests his brain until in some later year the students call for his lectures. There are men at Oxford who have rested their brains this way for over thirty years: the accumulated brain power thus dammed up is said to be colossal.
I understand that the key to this mystery is found in the operations of the person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him, that the students learn all that they know: one and all are agreed on that. Yet it is a little odd to know just how he does it. “We go over to his rooms,” said one student, “and he just lights a pipe and talks to us.” “We sit round with him,” said another, “and he simply smokes and goes over our exercises with us.” From this and other evidence I gather that what an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of students together and smoke at them. Men who have been systematically smoked at for four years turn into ripe scholars. If anybody doubts this, let him go to Oxford and he can see the thing actually in operation. A well-smoked man speaks and writes English with a grace that can be acquired in no other way.
In what was said above, I seem to have been directing criticism against the Oxford professors as such: but I have no intention of doing so. For the Oxford professor and his whole manner of being I have nothing but a profound respect. There is indeed the greatest difference between the modern up-to-date American idea of a professor and the English type. But even with us in older days, in the bygone time when such people as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were professors, one found the English idea; a professor was supposed to be a venerable kind of person, with snow-white whiskers reaching to his stomach. He Was expected to moon around the campus oblivious of the World around him. If you nodded to him he failed to see you. Of money he knew nothing; of business, far less. He was, as his trustees were proud to say of him, “a child.”
On the other hand he contained within him a reservoir of learning of such depth as to be practically bottomless. None of this learning was supposed to be of any material or commercial benefit to anybody. Its use was in saving the soul and enlarging the mind.
At the head of such a group of professors was one whose beard was even whiter and longer, whose absence of mind was even still greater, and whose knowledge of money, business, and practical affairs was below zero. Him they made the president.
All this is changed in America. A university professor is now a busy, hustling person, approximating as closely to a business man as he can do it. It is on the business man that he models himself. He has a little place that he calls his “office,” with a typewriter machine and a stenographer. Here he sits and dictates letters, beginning after the best business models, “in re yours of the eighth ult., would say, etc., etc.” He writes these letters to students, to his fellow professors, to the president, indeed to any people who will let him write to them. The number of letters that he writes each month is duly counted and set to his credit. If he writes enough he will get a reputation as an “executive,” and big things may happen to him. He may even be asked to step out of the college and take a post as an “executive” in a soap company or an advertising firm. The man, in short, is a “hustler,” an “advertiser” whose highest aim is to be a “live-wire.” If he is not, he will presently be dismissed, or, to use the business term, be “let go,” by a board of trustees who are themselves hustlers and live-wires. As to the professor’s soul, he no longer needs to think of it as it has been handed over along with all the others to a Board of Censors.
