The Oxford Manner.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIV, Issue 15, 13 April 1910, Page 54

The Oxford Manner.

What is the Oxford manner? It indubitably exists, for one is continually hearing of it, whether for good or evil. “What’s the matter with your manner? There’s something I don’t like about your manner,” an editor—a man who came from no seat of learning, but had, so to say, sprung up outside by the irrepressible force of his personality—once remarked to a young contributor who was proposing to do some work for him. “It’s the Oxford manner, I hope,” the young man replied. “Whatever it is, it’s a <1 disagreeable manner,” said the editor, closing the discussion. That is one point of view; but there is another, to which Gladstone once gave utterance. He could, he said, bestow no higher praise on any human being than to say that his manner suggested the typical Oxonian. What, then, is the "formula,” as mathematicians would say, of this manner which affects different people so differently? The typical Oxford man, is, shall we say, is just a shade more convinced than other people that his mission in life is to instruct and civilise the intellectually dark and barbarous places of the world, but is also a shade more careful than other people to qualify himself to speak the last word on every subject under the sun before calling for silence and speaking it. Moreover, when he does speak it he speaks it very’ quietly, as one who feels quite sure of himself, and is not accustomed to be contradicted. Of course, it would be easy to enumerate Oxford men to whom the description is inapplicable. One would not apply it to the Nash of Jesus who became Reau Nash of Bath; to the Burton of Trinity who became Captain Sir Richard Burton; to the Russell of Exeter who became “Parson Jack”; or to the Hook of St. Mary Hall, better known as Theodore Hook, who offered to sign forty Articles if the signature of thirty-nine did not suffice. But there is, on the other hand, a preponderant number of Oxford mon whom the definition does fairly well hit off. It hits off Jowett, and Matthew Arnold, and Arthur Hugh Clough in one department of life, and Lords Lansdowne, and Milner, and Curzon, and Mr. Asquith in another; and they are, on the whole, more typical than the men whom our first list enumerate.