“THE SOLEMN UNDERGRADUATE.”

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1747, 30 August 1905, Page 64

“THE SOLEMN UNDERGRADUATE.”

THE MORAL REVOLUTION OF MODERN CAMBRIDGE. (By OSCAR BROWNING, in the “Morning Leader.”) It is difficult for a don to give an account of the general nature of the Cambridge undergraduate which the undergraduate will accept as a true representation of himself. Nor is it an advantage to be so closely connected with the university that delicate distinctions escape the notice which might attract the attention of an ousider, or to have been in the University for such a length of time that gradual changes have been imperfectly observed. Still, some alterations are very obvious. The University is far larger than it was fifty years ago, the number of studies has immensely increased, and is increasing every year. The change is not only in quantity but in quality. An undergraduate who sits next to another in Hall is engaged in pursuits the rudiments of which are absolutely unintelligible to his neighbour. Sets are innumerable, or, rather, are so multitudinous that they can scarcely be said to exist. I often wonder whether outside the colleges there is any coterie at all. Perhaps the Union Society forms aset, and the University blues, wetbobs or dry-bobs, but even these are amorphous and imperfectly constituted. SILENCE AND THE SIMPLE LIFE. Far different was it when men knew by heart the Latin verses which theii friends had written in - the scholarship, and when a mighty personality, for whom a great future was expected, dominated the undergraduate world. The University is one of the loosest of confederations, in which the separate states are composed of elements joined together with the minimum of cohesion, everything is in flux, whirligig is king, having driven out the ancient Zeus. Again the predominant study of the place is Natural Science, which did not exist fifty years ago, hardly to be distinguished from medicine, a still more recent growth, although it may have flourished in prehistoric ages. History runs it close, but it is too much subdivided to form a concentrated whole, and a school of history is rather an affair of colleges than of the University. Mathematics is nowhere, although the London Press still exalts “the great Mathematical Tripos!” Another prominent note of change is the greater simplicity of, life. Wines have disappeared, desserts, once a mysterious source of extravagance, are almost unknown. To the examiner of shop windows, preserved meats seems to be the staple commodity of the town. The college breakfast party, once the feast of wit and reason, has come to an end, except to. be confounded with luncheon on Sunday. Men take tea together, dine together, but in a Spartan manner. Ready money payments are the rule, and the undergraduate knows how to get his value for his money. He does not leave the University, as his father and his grandfather did, fettered by debt which clings about him far into middle-age.

Cambridge is undoubtedly a place of hard work. For a Science man, lectures occupy the morning, and -“lals” (i.e., the laboratories) the afternoon, and this sets the note of laborious study. The summer term is perhaps the least idle of the three. The pressure of the Tripos is at hand, and the gaieties do not begin till the examinations are over. We have indeed few temptations to a lazy life. The upper river is a poor substitute for the Cher we 11 and the Isis, i and the inhospitable Cam is far less seductive than the Circean groves of Parsons Pleasure. Also we have no aesthetes. No Cambridge undergraduate tries to live up to his blue china; few have any blue china to live up to. We have neither the good nor the harm of that cult. Picture-sellers have a poor time at Cambridge, but few lives are wasted by effeminacy. i , . Such is the University, a body ot vigorous young men, generally hardworking and simple in their lives, each pursuing his own study with little regard for the rest, not given to morbid self-analysis or exaggerated ot the beautiful; serious with an unemotional seriousness, playful with a constant self-restraint. No deans are screwed up in our courts, no tutors have to fear crackers or sodawater bottles. It is only in bonfires that we let ourselves go, and then brutality gets the better of imagination. . Perhaps the greatest change noticeable to a man of my standing is the decay of ambition. Forty or fifty years ago there was always a set of men who knew themselves born to great things. The end of their lives was to influence

their generation, and one who look* back must admit that they have influenced it. To them the honours of th* Tripos were a subordinate object. Often senior classics, and sometimes high, wranglers, they sought their education outside the schools. They dominated the Union, they disputed in philosophical societies, they gave themselves a laborious self-education, the conduct of their lives was the business of posterity. They took themselves seriously; but the world has since taken many of them at their own valuation. The tone is now different. The ablest young men prefer the Home Civil Service to anything else. A fair income with a pension satisfies their aspirations, and the richest possibilities pale before a certainty, or, as they would call it, a “cert/’ This is disappointing to older men. But where everything is substantially healthy there is no need for complaint. The waters are still waiting to be stirred, the bones to be called into life, but when the time comes the torrent will flow with a mighty stream, and skeletons clothed with flesh will move onwards with the tramp of a victorious army.