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CHAPTER V

University Journalism

The

HE man in the train has settled habits and views, definite experience of life, its problems and difficulties. undergraduate changes yearly, and is in the tentative period of youth, though the influence of his school and his restricted atmosphere (in England, at any rate) keep him fairly constant in type. He has much of the freedom of manhood without its responsibilities. For him, life is a comedy, or, at most, a tragi-comedy; he has not begun to understand. He writes, if he writes at all, at leisure, and the product of idle hours beneath the shade, as Horace hints, is not often destined to be remembered beyond the year. Horace, who owed his success largely to a good schoolmaster and the university of Athens, is, in tone and form, the ideal poet of university life. He is halfserious, half-sportive, with an exquisite sense of form and metre, and he has more university imitators than a dozen good prose writers can boast. These imitators have a zeal for form due to their reading. The study of the ancient classics gives a sense of conciseness, and a detestation for the mere verbiage which is frequent in ordinary journalism. University journalism thus follows a great tradition, but it does not start a new one.

An anarchic age like the present is inclined to underrate the sense of tradition, which does not, perhaps, foster the most seminal minds; but modern masters of prose and verse have mostly been trained in it, and the maxim, "the form, the form alone is eloquent," is worth remembering. In particular, the sense of comedy which comes from playing at life has found expression in classical parody and light verse. Here, Cambridge can show a long line of masters whom she has trained, from Prior and Praed to Thackeray, Calverley and J. K. Stephen.

Oxford, more in touch with the world, has been more serious and more prolific in prophets, but can claim a first-rate professor of the sportive mood in Andrew Lang. Calverley, however, is the leading master and his inimitable short line has had many disciples:

The wit of smooth delicious Matthew Prior,

The rhythmic grace which Hookham Frere displayed,
The summer lightning wreathing Byron's lyre,

The neat inevitable turns of Praed,

Rhymes to which Hudibras could scarce aspire,
Such metric pranks as Gilbert oft has played,
All these good gifts and others far sublimer

Are found in thee, beloved Cambridge rhymer.'

Among many excellent composers of parody in verse, A. C. Hilton is pre-eminent. The two numbers of The Light Green, which are mainly his work, were produced just before and after he took his degree at Cambridge (1872), and are still sold in reprints. They represent a solitary flowering of wit and craftsmanship, for he died young. The Light Green ridiculed The Dark Blue, a magazine now forgotten, which was published in London, but was understood to represent the life and thought of young Oxford.' Hilton's supreme achievement is a parody of Bret Harte's Heathen Chinee. The Heathen Pass-ee secretes about his person tips for examination purposes instead of the cards of his prototype:

And we found in his palms which were hollow,

What are frequent in palms,-that is dates.

'J. K. S., Lapsus Calami, "To C. S. C." See, ante, Vol. XIII, Chap. VI. 'Russell, G. W. E., Collections and Recollections, chap. XXVIII.

1

The last two lines are perfect in point, expression and likeness to the original. Almost equally famous are The Vulture and the Husbandman, after Lewis Carroll, and The Octopus, after Swinburne.

Special brilliance is certainly needed to make university magazines live; their humour is limited in scope, and refers to persons who do not survive in the public memory; jests pass with many repetitions from Oxford to Cambridge and back again, and even to America, where an old story of Whewell is now current concerning a new professor of encyclopaedic range. Hence, a great number of university magazines are forgotten, and a study of them at large does not suggest that they deserved to be more than ephemeral. The Shotover Papers, or Echoes of Oxford (1874-5) may serve as a typical example of parodies and comments which, praised in their day, have now lost their savour. In such magazines, the social history and atmosphere of the university are fairly recorded for the future historian; but the Promethean touch which lifts the local to the permanent is wanting. Great men, however, will always attract great attention even by their immature efforts. Thus, The Snob and The Gownsman are still remembered because they contained the work of Thackeray; but they were not brilliant periodicals; and comic treatments, by comparatively unknown persons, of subjects set for prize poems are quite as good as Thackeray's Timbuctoo.

The credit of having been the first lasting university organ belongs to The Cambridge Review, which was started in 1879, and has been published weekly in term time ever since. The first number expresses the idea that university men are too busy to have much time for journalism; but the purpose of the Review-to give a representation of the life and thought of the university-has been well maintained. It has a semi-official claim, too, on serious readers, in publishing weekly the university sermon. Perpetual discussions of university topics which, to the outsider, seem of small moment is characteristic of all universities; learned and sedentary persons are prone to controversy; and, perhaps, for this reason, the Review has not paid so much attention to belles lettres as some of its light-hearted predecessors. It has, however, had its humours, as the selections in The Book of the Cambridge Review (1898) show, and, for

many years, it has excelled every February in valentines, ingenious quotations and perversions of quotations, addressed to men of note both in and outside Cambridge.

In the nineties, The Granta started as a light and bright commentator on Cambridge affairs, and absorbed some of the humour which would otherwise have found a place in the Review. The wayward genius of J. K. Stephen, already an accomplished rimer in his Eton days, shone in both periodicals. His verse is the more astonishing inasmuch as it was casually and rapidly produced. His best known lines (The Cambridge Review, 1891),

When the Rudyards cease from kipling
And the Haggards Ride no more,1

have become so familiar that their author is often forgotten. Of other Cambridge periodicals, the best are The Cambridge University Magazine, which came out under the title The Symposium in 1840, and contained some good work by George Brimley, and The Tatler in Cambridge (1871-2) which was illumined by the wit of A. W. Verrall. The Cambridge Observer was started in 1892 by a small group including G. W. Steevens, an Oxford man then in Cambridge, S. V. Makower and others. Largely ignoring the ancient classics, it set out épater le bourgeois, and was defiantly propagandist concerning foreign authors. It contested the claim of contemporary critics, and discovered the best of all art in the New English Art club. Such a paper could not last, but did something, in spite of its extravagancies, to enlarge the average mind of the university.

The Oxford Magazine, which was started in 1883, has lasted till to-day, and secured a recognised position as a commentator on university affairs. Resembling The Cambridge Review in general, it differs in being the organ of the don. The talent for writing English is more widely valued at Oxford than at Cambridge; essays figure largely in examinations; and the Oxford paper is more elaborately written than its contemporary. It is, in fact, almost too well written, and loses, sometimes, in irony and paraphrase what it would have gained by naturalness. It has that excessive use of negative forms of expression which is 1 J. K. S., Lapsus Calami, "To R. K." See, ante, Vol. XIII, Chap. VI.

characteristic of Jane Austen and it has maintained an excellent standard of serious verse. The pieces in Echoes from the Oxford Magazine: being reprints of Seven Years (1890) form a collection unrivalled for brilliancy. R. W. Raper is supreme in his parody of Whitman. The volume is also strong in that humour which comes from imitating in English the style and manner of an ancient author. "L'Envoy," concerning the purpose of The Magazine, is a good specimen of Oxford

prose.

As The Cambridge Review was supplemented by The Granta, The Isis was started in 1892 as a light-hearted and flippant variant on the sobriety of The Oxford Magazine. A prominent feature in the paper is the series of "Isis Idols" with illustrations.

Of other Oxford magazines of the nineteenth century, The Oxford Critic and University Magazine (1857), conducted chiefly by undergraduates, was the first to shake off the lumbering verbosity which came from Johnson and survived longer in the universities than elsewhere. Its criticism was occasionally smart, but its verse lacked distinction. The Oxford Spectator of Copleston and Nolan (1868), in shape and size like Addison's famous periodical, is still remembered as a deserved success. It was humorous on esoteric subjects like Oxford philosophy, but, also, was capable of seizing the charm of Oxford in such a passage as this:

When I look back to my own experience, I find one scene, of all Oxford, most deeply engraved upon "the mindful tablets of my soul." And yet not a scene, but a fairy compound of smell and sound, and sight and thought. The wonderful scent of the meadow air just above Iffley, on a hot May evening, and the gay colours of twenty boats along the shore, the poles all stretched out from the bank to set the boats clear, and the sonorous cries of "ten seconds more, all down from the green barge to the lasher. And yet that unrivalled moment is only typical of all the term; the various elements of beauty and pleasure are concentrated there.

The conditions of academic life in Scotland differ considerably from those prevailing in Oxford and Cambridge, and the resultant journalism does not make so general an appeal as the best of the English writing of the sort. The Scots tongue, in