FIVE YEARS IN AN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY.* THE first edition of
this work was published in America in the year 1851. Originally intended for readers in the United States only, it contains many details which, however interesting to the American, will yet, through being well known in Eng- land, prove somewhat tiresome to anyone who takes up the book here ; on the other hand, certain particulars of the American Colleges counterbalance this drawback. It is not a work in which the various questions of university training are handled with any depth or novelty, it is somewhat of a sketchy nature, but being written by a man who began his college career at rather a late age—he was a graduate at Yale College, and a foreigner into the bargain—it naturally brings a certain freshness and originality to bear on these subjects. Personally, Mr. Bristed was well qualified for the task, and has thus not improbably performed it better than many more able men would have done. Cosmopolitan in his likings, if we except his utter dislike to mathematical studies, be has looked on the different sides of
* Fire Years in an English University. By C. A. Bristed. London: Sampson Low and Marston. 1578.
the University with impartial eyes ; fond of culture and of cul- tivated men, he was not so eaten up by intellectual ambition or desires as to see in a first-class or a fellowship the sole end and object of a university career. Unfortunately having bad health, he remained an unusually long time at college ; he thus had time to observe carefully the changes in his contemporaries, and in the course of study. Like many valetudinarians also, he is full of sympathy for men endued with physical powers, and does not undervalue bodily exercise. He has written with good taste and fairness, if we except a childish tirade against the High-Church movement of 1840, and with judgment, if he had but omitted a chapter on the Public Schools. This is so slight and one-sided in detail, that it gives no fair impression at all of Eton, or any other large school.
The book itself may be divided in something like the following manner :—There is a comparison of the English and American students ; then a comparison of the Universities in their mental, moral, and physical training ; and lastly, comes the general train- ing of the English Universities, but more especially of Cambridge. And the result of Mr. Bristed's experience places the English University very far above that of Yale or Columbia. But still it must be remembered that to compare youths of seven- teen with those of twenty, is very like comparing an Etonian with an Oxonian ; and again, the course of study which is fitting for the former is quite unsuited to the powers of the latter. For when most English boys are entering a college the American is leaving, even though within the last two years the age has been raised. Now, for the ordinary run of men, we are by no means sure that the American plan with regard to age is not the best. The result to the pa.ssman of his study, either as filling his mind with knowledge, or training it, is absolutely nil. The chief and almost sole benefit which he gets from having spent three years at Oxford is the indirect good from necessarily associating, as even the most absorbed athlete does, with many men of superior intellectual or moral calibre to himself. This benefit he could obtain in two years' residence, or in three years begun sooner. The conse- quence would be, that many often intelligent youths who from various practical reasons cannot now afford the usual time for a University residence, would be able to go up, with advantage to themselves in after-life and to those with whom they came in con- tact. And this need not necessarily curtail the time which the clever man would pass at College for the purpose of qualifying himself thoroughly in some particular branch of study. When we come to compare the relative courses of study at the American and English Universities, they will be found to differ widely. The object of the first is to fill rather than train the mind ; in England, the whole ostensible aim is the developing of the different faculties, more especially at Cambridge. "The strong point of our Colleges," says Mr. Bristed (p. 461), "and the immediate object, is to make the students fluent speakers and ready writers, and the object is certainly accomplished ; our collegians learn to think on their legs and handle a pen with dexterity at a remarkably early age." The result of this sort of training the writer very shortly puts thus : "The error of our system is that it makes a great many ordinary men suppose themselves to be geniuses, while at the same time it does not develop their ordinary abilities in the best way." One cause of this wide but shallow sort of study Mr. Bristed considers to be the naturally quick development of the American, but if this be so, one great object should be to counterbalance this too rapid growth by steadier and more solid methods of study. Although, for our part, while allowing that this may be, to some extent, a cause, yet we are quite sure that precocity is very often rather pro- duced by early associations and training; a naturally quick mind in a child can, with very little want of or with bad bringing-up, develop its possessor into what is usually termed a precocious boy. Another conclusion which a comparison of the two systems cannot fail to bring forth in the reader's mind is that while the American wants much of our solidity, yet it would be well if we could transplant some more of the interest in and cultivation of the powers of expression, whether by pen or speech, into our Universities. The great requisite to a real cultivation and careful study of classics or mathematics in America the writer considers to be many more endowments, in order, so to speak, to subsidise those who will make accurate learning the pursuit of their life, and thus gradually form a body of teachers, directly as tutors, indirectly as producers and increasers of literary or scientific knowledge and accuracy, by books or other means. But America is a young country yet, and we have little doubt that these will come in time, for the last few years have seen a great improvement in her Colleges. It is to be hoped that this will continue, and that the low standard of political and com- mercial morality will not lower that of the Universities. For by their means, if they can only be properly worked, we may not un- reasonably hope to see a great deal done which will actually pro- duce a change for the better, both in the Assembly and on the Exchange. It is quite impossible within the limits of a review of a book which touches upon so many important subjects as does the one before us to notice each of these. For instance, the chapter "On the State of Morals and Religion in Cambridge" at once opens a wide field for discussion. But in the matter of drunken- ness and immorality, we think Mr. Bristed places the standard too low. No one doubts that some men take too much to drink at a bump supper, but it is an exaggeration at the present time at least to speak of "some hundred young men getting drunk systematically." We do not believe that there are fifty men who get systematically drunk every year either at Cambridge or Oxford. Again, the American, who "is utterly confounded at the amount of open profligacy going on all around him at an English University," must have either lived the life of a hermit, or his powers of comparison must be small. We have no intention of setting up the undergraduates and resident graduates of either University as a collection of saints ; among so many men, there must be a certain number whose lives are not models of purity, and there must be some who, though habitually moral, occasionally give way to some vices. But this is a very dif- ferent thing from the wholesale sort of immorality which Mr. Bristed's chapter would lead a reader ignorant of the real state of things to suppose. The one is a state of society necessarily im- perfect, the other one utterly debauched ; and it is not fair that such an impression should get abroad, either in England or America, since it is the part which outsiders have the least oppor- tunity of seeing for themselves. No doubt, since Mr. Bristed's time, the Universities have improved in this respect, but not to such an extent as to make a description written twenty years since quite incorrect at the present time, and moreover, the work is supposed to be corrected so as to apply to our own days.
We have no space to notice more of this work. Many of the per- sonal descriptions of tutors, examinations, and the occupations of leisure hours show with much vividness and truth the inner life of the Universities, especially when contrasted with some of the dis- cussions on the sterner subjects of education in which they are imbedded. On the whole, the book is well worth the attention of anyone interested in our Universities, and looked at as an attempt to show them in their true colours to American readers, is both a fair and successful one. We ought not to omit to say also that some of the remarks about Mr. Bristed's contemporaries have an intrinsic interest apart from his actual subject. It is pleasant to hear something more about such men, for instance, as Arthur Hallam, even though this is but little. Of him, all that is said bears out what we already know of his great promise ; especially was the writer struck with that eloquence full of thought which was not forgotten by his friend Tennyson :—
"Who, but hung to hear The rapt oration flowing free
"From point to point, with power and grace, And music in the bounds of law, To those conclusions when we saw The God within him light his face."
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