TABLE TALK
High Midsummer pomps
DENIS BROGAN
During the 'Era of Beautiful Nonsense', the once famous portrayer of the young American girl, John Held, Jr., of pre-Luce Life, ran, not quite in the spirit of Norman Mailer, as a Democrat for a sound Repub- lican Congressional seat in Connecticut. In those days, all Congressional seats in Con- necticut were Republican, so it was as for- lorn a hope as Mr Mailer's attempt to be- come Mayor of New York. A solemn reporter asked Mr Held: Had he ever be- fore thought of being a Member of Con- gress, and got the answer, `Well, rather less often than I have thought of being in the shower room at Vassar College.'
In these days of compulsory nudity, Mr Held's retort would not have had the scan- dalous effect it had in the days of the Bon Roi Dagobert, usually called Calvin Cool- idge. In the same way, if I had been asked two or three months ago, if I had ever thought of receiving an honorary degree from the University of Oxford, I could have said I had thought of it, but not often, and not as anything that was likely to happen to me. But I duly received the offer; was flattered; and last week took part in the elaborate ceremony of the Encaenia.
I had, of course, been present as specta- tor, as a Master of Arts, and possibly as an undergraduate at previous Encaenias. I can well remember the occasion on which Senator Jacques Bardoux, the grandfather of M Giscard d'Estaing, and one of the first members of the French haute bourgeoisie to come to Oxford, received the degree of D. Litt with very intense pleasure. He attri- buted this honour very largely to the activity of his friend Sir John Simon, but I was very glad that Jacques Bardoux should get the degree and I decided to forgive him any support he had got from Sir John Simon.
I had known, of course, of some disputed honorary degrees given in the past. A group of Radicals almost summoned up courage to vote down the offer of an honorary degree to Mr Cecil Rhodes of Oriel, but the imperial spirit, or perhaps the anticipation of great financial benefits to both Oriel and the University, overcame any Radical scru- ples. In fact, I have only once seen or taken part in a protest against giving an honorary degree, and that is an episode in the history of Harvard which I don't think has been sufficiently stressed. In 1926 Mr Andrew Mellon, supposed to be the third richest man in the United States in those remote pre- Texan days, known to his admirers, who were many, as `the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton', was offered a degree at Harvard in a ceremony equivalent to the Oxford Encaenia. To the astonishment of most of the spectators, and to the great annoyance, I think, of President Lowell and the Fellows of the Harvard Cor- poration, the new doctor was hissed. Not hissed by many, but the hissing was very audible. It was felt that Mr Mellon had not shown sufficient vigilance as Secretary of the Treasury in keeping a firm hand on the activities of President Harding's shady friends. And it was also felt that the amount of money he had spent, unavailingly as it happened, to get that eminent Episcopalian, amateur theologian, and politician, Senator Pepper, re-nominated for the Senate was one of the great scandals of the age.
But Dr Mellon's reputation has survived the hissing, if it did not survive the ddbracle which began roughly three years later. It is reported that the Law School of Duke University, one of whose most distinguished alumni is the President of the United States, refused to consent to the conferring on Senator Nixon of an honorary degree, and Harvard has twice turned down the claims of Governors of Massachusetts. The first was the famous, or infamous, Ben Butler, and the second was James Michael Curley who unfortunately happened to be Gover- nor in the year in which the three hun- dredth anniversary of Harvard's foundation was being celebrated. Governor Curley, as was his right, spoke and made, I think, the best speech of the whole elaborate ceremony.
After going through this great ceremony
of the Encaenia last week, I came to the conclusion, which the more recent cere- mony at Caernarvon supports, that the thing the English are best at is pageantry. Cer- tainly the pageantry of the Encaenia was vastly superior to the performances put on at a number of American universities, some of comparatively great antiquity and cer- tainly of great wealth. It is partly that Americans march badly, and partly that the other officials of the procession are not nearly so impressive as the bearers of silver- and gold-tipped rods who guided my steps up to the pulpit in which the Chancellor, Mr Macmillan, was waiting to confer the degree on me (as well as on other people).
We had, of course, in Oxford the great advantage, as we had had in Cambridge a few days before for May Week, of magni- ficent weather for our 'high Midsummer pomps'. Thus, the garden party in the mag- nificent garden of Saint John's (Oxford) was a very great success indeed: it could have been a dreadful failure if it had had to undergo what an American poet has called the 'hourly dourly showers' that 'water old Oxford's towers'.
Of course, the formalities of the Encaenia were not purely pictorial. The Public Orator has to present in elegant Latin the claims of the men and women (there was only one woman, the first female member of the Royal Society, Dame Katherine Lonsdale). As it happened, the Public Orator is a very old friend of mine—I have literally known him since he was a schoolboy—and his testimony to me was extremely elegant, although it did not, per- haps, bring out enough the deep spiritual values that my life has manifested. The best of the Latin texts, I think, was the apt allusion to the Princeton origins of Pro- fessor George Kennan: 'inter nativas he- deras sibi serpere laurum', an admirable quotation which consultation of the English text on the opposite page tells me is a refer- ence to his representing the spirit of the Ivy League.
But it was not only the weather that made the celebration so great a success, nor was if even my presence. For the Sheldonian, three hundred years after it was built, has been cleaned up and inside is gay, Baroque, and entertaining, if not quite so magnificent as the Senate House in Cambridge. The prize winners, and the Orator reciting the Creweian Oration, performed their exercises from pulpits on opposite sides of the Shel- donian. The young male prize winners were in fine rhetorical form and were not dressed (perhaps not allowed to be dressed) in the costume of our modern rebel youth. As the ceremonies went on—lunches, garden par- ties, a great deal of music, a great deal of excellent Latin oratory—it was hard to be- lieve that we were in the presence of a great revolt of students which recalls the Middle Ages.
There were enough young men around taking examinations or doing post- graduate work to have imitated the latest pranks of the students at Vincennes or at Cornell. But all this seemed very remote as we marched to and fro in coloured cos- tume, and it seemed to me—I may be wrong —that the famous emperors at the entrance to the Sheldonian smiled with a bland con- fidence that what might happen at other places would not happen in the home of lost causes. Perhaps Oxford realises that a great deal of the student disorder is already a lost cause, and Oxford has enough lost causes in its long past not to need to adopt the novelties of less favoured places.
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