Evening Post. MONDAY, JUNE 16, 1924. POOR OXFORD!

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 141, 16 June 1924, Page 6

Evening Post. MONDAY, JUNE 16, 1924. POOR OXFORD!

When Mr. Verdant Green went up from the very next county to take h"is first look at Oxford he feli into the hands of a guide whose boast it was that he "could do the 'alls, collidges, and principal hedifices in a nour and a naff." There were obvious advantages in such rapid work, but there were also drawbacks. "It could not be expected," we are told, "but that Mr. Green should take back to Warwickshire otherwise than a slightly confused impression of Oxford. When he unrolled that rich panorama before his mind's eye, all its component parts were strangely out of place." Mr. Green, of the United States—we regret that Saturday's cablegram does not enable us to give more precise particulars, but we infer that he also is of the verdant variety—has travelled at least three thousand miles further than the other Mr. Green in order to see Oxford, and he has stayed years instead of hours. Yet this Mr. Green seems to be taking back to Texas or Oklahoma or whatever his native State may be —we incline to place it a good deal nearer to the heart of the wilderness than Boston or New York—an impression of Oxford which, like the other Mr. Green's, is at least "slightly confused" and, even like his, puts all the component parts "strangely out of place." And fundamentally the explanation is probably the same—that he had to rely on the wrong sort of guide.

Mr. Green, who is an American Rhodes Scholar, declares that "American scholars are not responsive to the late Cecil Rhodes's ideals" ; and that "Oxford had not been Elysium." The only one of Rhodes's ideals with which the holders of his scholarships are concerned is that of making the English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the world better acquainted with one another. The assignment of two scholarships to each State of the Union to cover a full Oxford course was a munificent provision, and the use to which it has hitherto been put and the other humbler efforts which have since been made, both in Britain and in the United States, for the interchange of scholars and teachers show that Mr. Green has no right to speak, as he professes to do, for American scholarship as a whole. Oxford has not been 'an Elysium to Mr. Green. "We regret that in its idleness and its ugliness and its aimlessness he has apparently found it much more suggestive of the other place. But it takes at least two things to make either an Elysium or an Inferno; there must be a subject as well as an object. As Milton says,

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven:

Pope expresses part of the same truth in more pedestrian fashion:

All seems infected that th' infected spy As all looks yellow to the jaundie'd eye. As our latest advices from Oxford indicate that her spires and her cloisters, her gardens and her meadows, her trees and her rivers have not yet lost their power to charm, and that honest work is still being done there by both young and old, we venture to suggest that ■ the malady is in Mr. Green himself and not in the University of Oxford.

It is indeed a strange eye to which Oxford's "grey, unbeautiful buildings are merely old-fashion-ed, and often prisons for soul and body"— to which presumably the main street of scores of mushroom cities out West can produce a score of clean, rectilineal1, and completely up-to-date buildings that can "knock spots off" the cloisters and tower of Magdalen College and the spire of St Mary's Church. It is also a strange mmd to which all the beauty, all the learning, and all the history o± Oxford "has only brought death to our dreams of romance and hopes." If Oxford herself has failed to touch the heart and the imagination of this Philistine from the Wild West, it would be of little avail to quote against him that beautiful tribute of one of her most brilliant and faithful sons—that tribute in which Matthew Arnold, not without a wear perception of her weaknesses, champions his Alma Mater against the Philistines of his own land :

Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual ..m OUr cent »ry, so serene! 'There are young barbarians, all afc play!"

And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxlord, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all ot us, to the ideal, to perfection—to beauty, in a word; wh j ch is only Wllfh seen from another side?—nearer, perImps, than all the science of Tubingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to Uiu Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular uumes, smd impossible loyalties ! . . . . Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this queen of romance hiw been ivugiug against

them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?

Matthew Arnold was so deeply infected by the virus of Oxford that he will of course be anathema to Mr. Green. Perhaps he will listen with less impatience to a foreigner's testimony.

„In to", 4*1 these is scarcely a. spot, in the world, says Ulric Huber, which bears an historical stamp so deep and varied as Oxford:—where so many noble memorials of moral and material power co-operating at an honourable end meet the eye all at once. He who' can be proof against the strong emotions which the whole aspect and genius of the place lend to inspire, must be dull, thoughtless., uneducated, or of very perverted views and understanding. "Others will bear us witness that even side by side with Eternal Rome, the Alma Mater of Oxford may be fitly named, as producing a deep, lasting, and peculiar impression.

Dull, thoughtless, uneducated, or of very perverted ideas and understanding "—this is not our tribute to Mr. Green, but it is the opinion expressed by a learned German on those who hold similar views. Seeing, however, that "Oxford, England, and Europe" are included by Mr. Green in a common condemnation, we had proposed to reinforce these authorities by a weighty opinion from his own side of the Atlantic, but trip, limits of our space compel us to hold it over.