N OT long ago the Spectator reviewed shortly but with special

sympathy a very remarkable little book entitled The Oxford Stamp : Articles from the Educational Creed of an American Oxonian.* The author was Professor Aydelotte, snnetime Rhodes Scholar, and now Professor of English in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Aydelotte is also Secretary to the Alumni Association of American Rhodes Scholars and Editor of the American Oxonian. It will be seen from this record that he has every right of audience from the English-speaking peoples on both sides of the water.

I ask to be allowed to call the attention of your readers once more to this fascinating and stimulating book. I believe that, properly understood, it offers the greatest opportunity that Oxford has ever had for putting her stamp upon the spiritual development of the English-speaking race and for carrying out in the widest sense her motto, "Dominus, illu- minatio mect " ;—in a word, for keeping the lamp of Literae humaniores burning wherever men can read the Bible and Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth.

The three essentials with which Professor Aydelotte's book is concerned are :- (1) That the "Oxford stamp "—i.e., the educational ideals of Oxford—is not only good and worthy per se, but supplies the thing needful in the -work of making a man. Instead of Oxford being a venerable ruin, she is -really engaged in supplying the last thing and the best thing in education. (2) Thatwe are wrong insetting up Schools in English Litera- ture, and Courses in English Poetry and Prose, the objects of which are to teach people to write and to train them in matters of style and power over words. As Professor Aydelotte urges, in sympathy with all the best minds that have explored the subject, what we have got to do is to teach men to think. "Take care of the thoughts, and the words will take care of them- selves," is the motto to follow. To put it in another .way : "Learn to think, and you will find you hive learned to write."

(3) The conclusion which arises naturally from Professor Aydelotte's premisses is that there ought to be a School of the Civil Polity of the English People, or, for short, an English School, at Oxford which shall provide as good a training for the intellect as " Greats " ; a School which shall open not one but a dozen windows on to life ; a School which shall free the mind and set it upon the hill of Truth, where the air is always calm and serene.

In short, Professor Aydelotte has seen that the advantage of " Greats " is not that it teaches people to appreciate the Greeks and the Romans, but that it acts, in the " luciferous " phrase of Socrates, as "the midwife of the mind," and makes the teacher preside at the birth of new ideas.

• Published in New York by the Oxford University Preen:St West Thirty-second Street. It can be obtained from their London office, AMID Corner, E.G., and Iti price here Si Os. net. But Professor Aydelotte is not content with lighting his torch at the ever-living fire fanned by Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Euripides. He can, he realizes, light it as well at the glorious beacon of our own Shakespeare and Milton, of Bacon and Newton. He tells us incidentally that such study would enable us to

take upon us the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies" *

—as poignant a use of quotation as I can anywhere recall. Professor Aydelotte's first two propositions will, I think, be universally admitted—i.e., that Oxford does the right thing in not cramming people with practical knowledge, but by " teaching them how to think, and so how to get at the truth of things; and that words without thoughts draw nectar in a sieve." It is upon the third proposition that I wish to enlarge somewhat, with apologies to the learned Professor if I sometimes go beyond warrant in the structure I build on his premisses. Fired by the torch which he has lighted so nobly, I would urge upon the authorities at Oxford the foundation of an English School which shall be greater even than "Greats," or at any rate as great, and which shall become, if I may make use of an apparently barbarous and yet for many minds a thrilling metaphor, the Grand Trunk Road of the Mind of those who speak the English tongue.

May I attempt a very rough sketch for the School of the Civil Polity of the English, or better perhaps, to follow the analogy of the "History School," the English School "1 It should embrace :-

(1) The study of English History, Political and Social, and of the great originals upon which our History is founded, beginning with excerpts from Caesar and Tacitus, and following on with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Asser, Bede, and the other Chroniclers, through Clarendon, Burke, and Macaulay, to the greater Histories, Lives, and Memoirs of our own day. (My list is very imperfect, but the books specially marked for study should not be those which are most correct, but those which are most capable of firing the imagination and freeing the spirit.) (2) English Constitutional History and the Machinery of Govern- ment among the English-speaking peoples. This involves the study of the English Statutes and notable Constitutional Trials, and also the Constitution of the United States, which again involves the study of the works of Hamilton and of the Federalist and the judgments of Marshall moulding the Constitution. Further, the Constitutions of the Dominions would here come under review.

(3) English Law, including a selection from the most important Leading Cases. Here the object would be not to give detailed legal knowledge, but, as Lord Morley once so well pointed out, to make use of the poignant intellectual stimulus which may be got from the study of the arguments in a great trial and its derivatives. It has been said that a trial at Bar in an English Court is the best way of arriving at a particular truth known to mankind. Properly understood, it may be made one of the best awakeners of the mind. The selection of Cases opens a most fascinating prospect for the Board of Studies. Would it, I wonder, exclude or include the Rule in Shelley's Case ? Finally, the study of English Law would involve the study of that admirable piece of practical philosophy, "The English Law of Evidence."

(4) The Connexion of Church and State considered historically and with reference to such subjects as :—Episcopacy, Presby- terianism, the Reformation in England, the Puritans, the Latitu- dinarians, the Tractarians.

(5) English Literature ; (a) Poetry and Prose from Chaucer to the Victorians ; (6) Prosody ; (c) Development of the English Lan. guage, including History of Words ; advantages and disadvantages of the English Language as a medium for expressing thought and emotion ; (d) Grammar.

(6) Science among the English (Roger Bacon, Bacon, Newton, Darwin, &c. Here, of course, no attempt would be made to teach anything but the prolegomena or to cover the whole field of Science. —Scientiae non Angell: sod Angli.)

(7) A Section on the growth and maintenance of the British Empire, with special reference to the rule of undeveloped or un- civilized races, illustrated by the work and works of such men as Lord Wellesley, the Lawrences, and Lord Cromer. (Out of the despatches of Clive, Warren Hastings, Cornwallis, and Wellesley, and Lord Cromer's State Papers, admirable and intensely stimulating grounds of study could be provided.) (8) A Section on the organization of Social Life among the English-speaking races—i.e., Trade Unionism, Co-operation, State Socialism, and the principles involved.

(9) International Problems: War and Peace ; with reference to the works of Burke, Wordsworth (Convention of Cintra and Letter

to Pasley), Pasley, and Clausewitz. (Here one may add that very considerable illumination might be got from the study of the history of the Holy Alliance and of the admirable State Papers in which is recorded Castlereagh's refusal to allow an iron door to be bolted against Freedom in the name of Peace.)

(10) The Science and Mechanism of Thought, including (a) Logic, (b) the fundamental principles of Mathematics, illustrated by

Geometry and Algebra, (c) Psychology, (d) the material processes of Thought as shown by Surgery and Medicine, (e) Spiritual and Material explanations of Consciousness. The contribution of the English-speaking race to the above. To learn to think men must consider how they think. The great Books and great Men here stretch out in line from Locke and Berkeley to the Metaphysicians of our own day.

• Vide the last scene of Lear. I dare say that the Educational experts—I mean nothing offensive by the phrase, though the words, I admit, have a forbidding sound—would find my suggestions somewhat too big for a "School," but these could easily be pared down.—There would, of course, have to be Special Subjects, and Special Periods, and if I had to settle it I should certainly add Special Men and Special Books for study.

I should like incidentally to say one or two things, partly drawn from Professor Aydelotte's book and partly from my own thoughts on the subject, in regard to the Literature Section. Here Professor Aydelotte would make the chief books for study on the poetry side Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth. That is an admirable selection, though perhaps one might like to add Chaucer, not because he is one of the origines, or because of his use of English, but simply and solely because he is one of the great illuminators of the human heart. In prose, besides the obvious Hooker, Bacon, Dryden, Swift, and Burke, I should like to add, not only Halifax the Trimmer, but a selection from the best of the Pamphlet literature of the Commonwealth, much of which attained a high level of excellence, as has lately been shown incidentally by an American writer, Mr. Pease.* His account of the writings of Lilburne and the Levellers places them very high in the matter of style. There should also be a selection from the writings of the Cavalier Pamphleteers. The author of that soul-shaking pamphlet, Killing No Murder, antedated the lucid prose of Dryden by twenty years.

To recapitulate, one of the chief advantages of such a School as I advocate would be the way in which it would bring the student into contact with great minds, and so with great trains of thought, which could be followed up as the thoughts of Socrates or the Pre-Socratics are followed through Kant and Hegel down to modern times by those who read for" Greats." Here indeed would be the essential point of the "School." There would be no reading of text-books, no cramming of names. Unless a man was ready and able to bend his mind to get into touch with the great thinkers and great waves of thought that have made the English what they are, he had better take his place among practical people and decline upon the School of Agriculture, or the Faculty of Brewing, or some other form of so-called useful knowledge—i.e., the knowledge which any man who has learned to think can soon acquire out of a shilling handbook. Lord Beaconsfield, as Professor Whitehead reminds us in his delightful Introduction to Mathe- matics in the "Home University Library," has defined the practical man in one of his novels as "one who practises the errors (if his forefathers," and Professor Whitehead goes on to declare with absolute truth that though the Romans were a great race, "they were cursed with the sterility which waits upon practicality. They did not improve upon the knowledge of their forefathers, and all their advances were confined to the minor technical details of engineering. They were not dreamers enough to arrive at new points of view which could give more fundamental control over the forces of nature.

The English Course would teach men to live and to die nobly, to think and invite their souls, but not how to do, or even to know, any one particular set of things. And yet, by going to the root of the matter, they would in reality be doing the most practical thing in the world. Just as be who does not seek to save his life saves it, so he who does not directly pursue knowledge finds it more quickly and in fuller measure than he whose eyes are set only on the golden bough of Information. I would back the man who had gone through the "Greats," or an English School such as I have sketched, improved by more care and more thought, to beat the practical man any day at his own game. The essential thing about the English School would be that it would repel with equal sternness Byzantinism on the one hand—i.e., the mere study of style—and practicality and cram on the other—i.e., the Schools of Etymology or Entomology, Aryan roots or Bugs and Beetles.

I fear that the wiser minds of Oxford when they read these words will think them very crude. I throw myself upon their mercy and ask them in all sincerity to amend my plea. If any one of them should indeed be inclined to admonish me for daring to tread sacred ground, and accuse me of a light and almost blasphemous handling of sacred things, I can only reply in the words which Dryden, in his magnificent rhymed version of Paradise Lost—a poem more often scoffed at than read—put into the mouth of Adam after he had been

• 14.1 Levetters.

admonished by the affable archangel Raphael for a too free use of dialectic on the divine mysteries :— " Far, far from me be baniah'd such a thought ; I argue only to be better taught."

And here I may say that if my thoughts are wild, they would have been wilder still if they had not been partially tamed in the Oxford History School, which I may regard as a kind of beginning or hall-way house to an English " Greats " School. The History School I may indeed consider, except for reading Law in Chambers, as the only educational process to which my mind—poor but honest—was ever subjected. Greek and Latin were taught to me in my schoolboy days and at the University in such a way as to create a horror of great dulness, from which I have only painfully escaped in later life. In the History School, however, a window was indeed flung open upon a noble champaign. I have never done any his- torical work and never shall, but History and the great men and the great books with which I was brought into contact provided just the whetstone for the wit which a University Course ought to provide. By the happy accidents of a scholarly father, a large country-house library, and a passionate dislike of study per se, I was encouraged to set my mind like a flint against the deadening perusal of text-books. I much preferred to gallop superficially, as most people would say, through the works themselves on which the text-books were based. When I was reading for the History Schools I rushed through the gravest tomes as one reads a novel. For example, instead of reading about the Trial of the Seven Bishops, I browsed in the Trial itself. I did not dare tell my Tutors, and felt rather ashamed of myself, but the temptation was irresistible. The process would have turned the stomach of many professors, but at any rate I managed to get sparks struck out of me by the originals, whereas reading digests would have left me cold. When will people learn that in most cases books about books are absolute " duds " ?

That some one may light and maintain a Beacon fire where I have struck a spluttering match, and that Oxford may have the priceless privilege of showing to the English-speaking world the glories of the English mind, is the simple though fervent prayer of one who may with all truth and humility sign himself,— BIS ARATUS.—TWICE PLOUGHED FOR " MODS."