CHAPTER IV.

University Careers.

I ADD a few words especially on the subject of university careers, inasmuch as the university is to an immense number of men essentially a great turning-point in life, and because, when different schemes for university extension are developed and bear fruit, the universities will become more than ever national institutions, and centres of intellectual life for the nation at large. I am hardly sanguine enough to believe that the time will ever return when, as in the days of Occam, some thirty thousand students will troop from all parts of the country to Oxford as the gateway of all knowledge. It is impossible to doubt that our universities are now in a transition state. This is symbolized by the demolition and reconstruction of the collegiate edifices themselves during the last decade; by the new examinations that have been instituted; by the constitution, in either university, of the new class of unattached students; by schemes for making the universities schools for special study on the arts and sciences. If we could look into the Oxford or the Cambridge of the future, the eyes of the old university man, already sorely dazzled by changes outward and inward even now existing, might behold, not without infinite trepidation, an expansion and metamorphosis of which his past experience could hardly suggest any idea. Any discussion of university life must relate chiefly to the historic aspect of the subject, and it may be that, with a proverbial slowness, we may linger long before the

transition is accomplished; but a transition is in store for us, and we may hope that it will be for the best.

In speaking of university careers, a great deal depends on the conception which we may form of academical success. Differences of opinion depend mainly on a single point, namely, whether a successful college career is regarded as a means to an end, or as an end in itself. The notion of a successful university career usually implies a first-class and a fellowship; and, as this involves a modestly substantial income and a not undistinguished social position, such a career is looked upon as a good thing, worthy to be sought for its own sake. With many persons, on the other hand, a college career, however brilliant, is only regarded as a step toward ulterior objects. The real aim is in the direction of the church, parliament, or the bar, and a successful career at college is looked upon as a significant omen of the real success of after-life. There are many distinguished men now living, whose names are familiar enough to those who habitually handle the "University Calendar," who have amply justified any prognostics that might be drawn from early eminence. Christ Church has, pre-eminently, been the foster-parent of such men; that ancient foundation having given to the world a long line of illustrious statesmen, who have entered the House of Commons with a brilliant prestige for scholarship and ability. High university honors comprise, however, so many advantages of a lucrative kind that they excite a keen competition for them among those with whom they are a natural object of desire. One result is that men enter the university at a somewhat later age than was formerly the case; they bring up a larger stock of knowledge than they once used to do, and the standard of the honor-examination is proportionately raised. It was once possible for the same Cambridge man to obtain the highest place both in mathematics and classics; but we think it was the

late Baron Alderson, who was one of the very few remarkable men thus distinguished, who used to say that the system of examination is now so far extended that it is impossible for any human being to repeat this particular kind of success. Men at present run for the great university prizes under a regular training system, as complete and as scientific as any other system of prize competition. There is now established a regular migration from the Scottish to the English universities. Men who have actually taken a master-of-arts degree at Edinburgh or Glasgow take the position of undergraduates who have only just discarded their jackets. Those who know any thing of Baliol College, Oxford, or of St. Peter's College, Cambridge, are aware of the great extent to which this kind of thing is carried. Some hardship seems involved, by this system, on younger competitors; but then older men pay a penalty in being proportionately late starters in the great business of life. However, they often consider that they have satisfactorily performed that business if they have obtained that academical success which will guarantee them a modest, permanent competence.

The competition for educational honors and advantages, which has ordinarily been supposed, with justice, to commence at the university, in accordance with modern notions of competition, has been pushed back to a still earlier age. The advantages are so questionable that it is to be hoped that the system will not receive any further extension. Great pecuniary advantages are now attainable by mere children at our great public schools. A very juvenile youngster may save his father many hundred pounds by gaining a place on the foundation of Eton or Winchester. While this is the case, we can not but fear that forcing establishments will gain in parental estimation, and many a young head and heart will be weighed down by a burden of too early thought and care. We ques

tion, also, if there is much real wisdom in playing a long game instead of a short game. The prematurely clever child, who is extraordinarily successful at school, will probably be only an ordinary man, with no special success at college. In the same way, the extraordinarily clever man at college in many instances will subsequently shade off into a very insignificant kind of being for the rest of his life. Among the crowds of young men in the fast-fleeting generations of the university, there are many who, by their force of ability, seconded by only moderate application, achieve the very highest degree of college success, and repeat that success, on a still broader scale, in the world. But, beyond these instances, it appears perfectly possible to crowd into a few years the intellectual labors of many years, and to impoverish and exhaust the mental soil by a system of unfairly high farming. Men are constantly met with who sweep the universities of all the prizes which it is in the power of those great corporations to bestow, and who find that their subsequent career can bear no kind of comparison with that brilliant early success. They have lost the fresh spring of youthful elasticity, the early ardor of intellectual exertion. The mind that has long run in a scholastic groove acquires a kind of mental immobility, and will not easily adapt itself to the untried career of an active professional life. Even zealous attempts to achieve something of the kind often prove real failures, and the college don who has tried to renew college success in politics or at the bar frequently falls back once more on the common-room or the combination-room, and takes his share in college tuition and the emoluments of college offices. But the university career which, after all, is confined within the limits of the university, is not, perhaps, such an enviable kind of success that it should be constantly held up to the admiration and imitation of all those who are starting on the race of life.

Of course, here as elsewhere, we have to arbitrate between different orders of men, and different kinds of successes. It is a great success when a man has won his way to the headship of his college, with a clear prospective eye to bishopric or deanery. It is no less a success when the poor scholar, after wading through difficult waters, has obtained a college fellowship, and with grateful, contented mind waits for his college living. His horizon may be narrow and bounded, but it is, at least, satisfactorily filled. Still, the college career, which is limited and bounded by college objects, is often fraught with melancholy considerations. A merely merchantile element is often introduced, which can not be wholly deprived of a despicable character. We can hardly sympathize with young men who are always eagerly calculating the value of scholarships and fellowships, and subordinate every study to the question whether it will pay. Things are often bad enough at Oxford, but at Cambridge an essentially ignoble system is pursued to a most deleterious extent. It is often the fault of parents, who tell their sons that they must look to the university as the main source of the present and future subsistence. We have heard the case of a father who made his two sons handsome allowances, with the understanding that, after they took their degrees, they should entirely maintain themselves. We feel sure that nearly all our readers can recall similar instances. In this particular case, one of the sons went mad; the other, with broken health, won a fellowship, and, naturally, was on bad terms with his father ever afterward. The training system at Cambridge is carried to as high a degree of perfection as any system of trainer and jockey can be carried. The Johnian stables are particularly celebrated. Every particular of diet, rest, and exercise is sedulously attended to. The reading man will look with the utmost abhorrence upon the feeding man, simply because the

D