Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1924. VERDANT GREEN AND DARK BLUE

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 146, 21 June 1924, Page 6

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1924. VERDANT GREEN AND DARK BLUE

The devastating censures of Mr. Green of the United States are doubtless engraved more durably on the heart of Oxford, if she has survived them, than if they had been inscribed on the crumbling free-stone of her dilapidated, out-of-date, and grossly over-estimated buildings. But in a country which is perhaps as free from the vices denounced from Mr. Green as his own memory is likely to be less retentive. After a week's interval it may therefore be advisable to remind the fond parents of prospective Rhodes scholars of the dangers to which their boys will be exposed if their deplorable condition is realised. Two scholarships to the University of Oxford are assigned to each State in the American Union by Cecil Ehodes's will, and the holder'of one of them, at the end apparently of his: three ye-ars; course, thus describes the soul-destroying influences which through the mistaken kindness of Mr. Rhodes have been brought to bear upon him by a depraved stepmother. It was no elysjum that the unhappy Mr. Green found at Oxford, but at the best a purgatory. But for the superb powers of that American manhood which Mr. Green brought with him from the land of the brave and the free we shudder to think how terrible the consequences might have been.

It has only brought death to our dreams of romance and hopes. Its grey unbeautifnl buildings are merely oldfashioned, and often prisons for soul and body. . . . Oxford, England, and Europe only make the American .Rhodes scholars love America more, and become more American daily. We are sick of hand-shaking across the seas. We go home without regret and eagerly to the nation we know and understand, hoping that some of us will amount to something, if Oxford's life of idleness has not impaired our energies.

"Vanity of vanities!" saith the preacher. Surely Solomon in all his pessimism was not arrayed like Mi-. Green, nor was Jeremiah quite so dismally drenched in tears. jNTo dolphin in the woods, no nouveau riche from Chicago sighing amid the beauties of Venice or Borne for the superior glories of the porkpacking works where he made his pile, was more completely out of place than Mr. Green at Oxford. When the author of "The Fairchild Family" visited the place she noted with grave dissatisfaction in her diary:

The appearance of Oxford by no means pleased me, and I thought tho fine-old colleges had an appearance of considerable dilapidation.

Time, which "delves the parallels in beauty's brow," has been at work on Oxford for about a century since then, and to this visitor from some brand-new spick and span city on the other aide of the Atlantic the buildings naturally present a far more deplorable appearance to-day. "That sweet city with her dreaming spires" is merely a sour and stuffy back number, a ramshackle collection of prisons for body and soul, a place where the stagnation and decay which are sapping its buildings have also paralysed its moral and its intellectual life. If in after-life the dark blue of Oxford eyel1 recalls anything to this fastidious critic it will bo the blue mould, that he. found settled on everything in .this benighted and moribund place.

To the exacting taste of Mr. Green f,ho "grey, unbeautiful buildings" of Magdalen and Merton, of New College and St. John's, are "merely old-fashioned." Magdalen Tower, to, which generations of residents and visitors have paid ill) almost idolatrous homage, is obviously nut. a patch on tho Woolworth .Building it, .Now York. Tho Wonlu-prHi sk-ywni|.>er is W:2 CcH. lii^ and luiij njj viuiuot su£ huw

many miles of elevators; the Tower of Magdalen must be at least 500 feeb shorter, and there is probably not an elevator in the whole University. As the young Australian said alter his first introduction to the -wonders of Westminster Abbey, "You should just see the Scotch Church at Ballarat." The still more youthful New Zealander who likened the Madeleine at Paris to the Nelson Post Office must have been Mr. Green's junior by nearly twenty years. " Weight for age, "we are prepared to back the American to win, hands down, .against all-comers. The contrast between what Mr. Green saw and felt and learned at Oxford and what he might have seen and felt and learned there may be admirably illustrated by a reference to tho impression that Oxford made upon a cultured American of an earlier generation. Writing in the "North American Review" of October, 1906, Mr. W. D. Howells said:

Once, when the last convivial delight was exhausted, and there was a loath parting at the door in the grassy quadrangle under the mild heaven, where not oven a star intruded, I had a realism" sense of what Oxford could mean tosome youth who comes to it in ea^er inexperience from such a strange, far land as ours, and first fjilly ima.oines it Or perhaps it was rather in one of the lambent mornings when I strayed through the gardened closes too harshly called quadrangles that I had the company ot this supposititious student, and wreathed myself in his sense of measureless opportunity. Nor opportunity atone, but opportunity tiacel with all the charm of tradition," and weighted with rich scholarly convention, the outgrowth of the patient centuries blossoming at last in a flower from whose luminous chalice he should drink the hoarded wisdom of the past. I said to myself that if I were such a youth mv heart would go near to break" with the happiness of finding myself in that environment and privileged to all its possibilities, with nothing but, myself to hinder me from their utmost effect.

It is the last words—"with nothing but myself to hinder me from their utmost effect"—that supply the key to the mystery. As the Spanish proverb' says, "He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." The man who is to bring anything with him from Oxford to Oklahoma or Arizona must carry under his hat something that was not included in Mr. Green's equipment. If he 'had known how to look he must have found something about the place in architecture or natural beauty, in history or scholarship, in science or sport, that was not entirely contemptible. As it is, Mr. Green returned with an apparently enhanced conceit of himself, but in other respects as poorly equipped as when he came. "We go home without regret and eagerly," he says. It is quite possible that there, are no regrets on either side. The case of Gibbon may supply a partial parallel while illustrating on another point the vices which Mr. Green a century and • a half later found still -rampant in the University.

To the University of Oxford, says Gibbon, I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounct me for a son as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life : the reader will pronounce between the school and the- scholar; but I cannot affect to believe, that Nature had disqualified me for all literary pursuits.

It must be conceded that the author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and of the Autobiography which Mr. Bin-ell ha.s ventured to call " a perfect book," was not entirely "disqualified for all literary pursuits." We may also hope that Mr. Green is not entirely disqualified for something, "if," as he says, " Oxford's life of idleness has not impaired our energies." New York "Life" not long ago represented a very small boy arresting the parental rod with the remark, "Say, father, is this the way to treat a future President of the United States V For all we know, Mr. Green may have been that small boy. Oxford, which burned Latimer and Ridley—a crime which has been insufficiently excused on the ground that they were Cambridge men—might have something still worse on its conscience if it diverted a future budding President of the United States from his destiny. But the solemn Mr. Green strikes us as a .person who would take a good deal of diverting.