Ch. 10: Undergraduate Life: Conclusion - Page 2

in a brown-paper parcel. There are many other species of undergraduate, scarcely more closely resembling each other in manners and modes of thought than the little Japanese student resembles the metaphysical Scotch exhibitioner, or than the hereditary war minister of Siam (whose career, though brief, was vivacious) resembled the Exeter Sioux, a half-reclaimed savage, who disappeared on the warpath after failing to scalp the Junior Proctor. When The Wet Blanket returned to his lodge in the land of Sitting Bull, he doubtless described Oxford life in his own way to the other Braves, while the squaws hung upon his words and the papooses played around. His account would vary, in many ways, from that of

"Whiskered Tomkins from the hail Of seedy Magdalene."

And he, again, would not see Oxford life steadily, and see it whole, as a more cultivated and polished undergraduate might. Thus there are countless pictures of the works and ways of undergraduates at the University. The scene is ever the same--boat-races and foot-ball matches, scouts, schools, and proctors, are common to all,--but in other respects the sketches must always vary, must generally be one- sided, and must often seem inaccurate.

It appears that a certain romance is attached to the three years that are passed between the estate of the freshman and that of the Bachelor of Arts. These years are spent in a kind of fairyland, neither quite within nor quite outside of the world. College life is somewhat, as has so often been said, like the old Greek city life. For three years men are in the possession of what the world does not enjoy--leisure; and they are supposed to be using that leisure for the purposes of perfection. They are making themselves and their characters. We are all doing that, all the days of our lives; but at the Universities there is, or is expected to be, more deliberate and conscious effort. Men are in a position to "try all things" before committing themselves to any. Their new-found freedom does not merely consist in the right to poke their own fires, order their own breakfasts, and use their own cheque-books. These things, which make so much impression on the mind at first, are only the outward signs of freedom. The boy who has just left school, and the thoughtless life of routine in work and play, finds himself in the midst of books, of thought, and discussion. He has time to look at all the common problems of the hour, and yet he need not make up his mind hurriedly, nor pledge himself to anything. He can flirt with young opinions, which come to him with candid faces, fresh as Queen Entelechy in Rabelais, though, like her, they are as old as human thought. Here first he meets Metaphysics, and perhaps falls in love with that enchantress, "who sifts time with a fine large blue silk sieve." There is hardly a clever lad but fancies himself a metaphysician, and has designs on the Absolute. Most fall away very