Isis and The Isis

By STRIX

r is sad to think,' wrote the editor of The Isis _tin March, 1929, 'that from now on practically no-one will accuse us of libel, blasphemy, mis- representation, criminal negligence, obscenity, Plagiarism, and getting their initials wrong: that no-one will seek our help in founding a glee- club or a school of thought, in selling a punt or a sonnet-sequence.'

On this (I fear) slightly arch note the youthful Strix relinquished control of The Isis. With which is incorporated The Varsity: a social view of Oxford Life. Last week's news of a tiff between the editor and the proprietor of Isis (as the Periodical is now more compendiously called) im- pelled me to look up the records of a distant Past. Some kind person at the Holywell Press sAds me the contemporary product, which I generally read; and I thought it might be instruc- tive to compare two widely separated vintages of an undergraduate journal which was founded in

1892,

The contrast between Isis 1958 and The Isis 1929 is, as one would hope, marked. My editor- ship began when I was twenty-one and lasted for a Year. Mr. Dennis Potter, the present incumbent, and his recent predecessors have been I believe a few years older than I was; and an editor's tour of duty is now limited by custom to one term. The modern editor and his staff give the im- pression of trying harder, of being more pro- fessional than we were thirty years ago. The stall's appointments and identities are published at the beginning of every term; the list is quite a long one. Our list, had we published one, would have been shorter; my small stage-army dis- charged its duties behind a flimsy camouflage of Pseudonyms and initials. Nowadays experiments are carried out with the make-up and layout;. I doubt if these technical terms were within our ken, and The Isis appeared week after week with that few variations in its format as there were, at mat Period, between successive issues of the

Spectator.

One, has only to compare Isis with The Isis to be reminded that tremendous strides have been made during the past three decades in the art, or practice, of photographing human beings. In their studio portraits the undergraduate per-

sonalities of 1929 look as though they were facing not a camera but a firing squad. With their tidy suits, their neatly brushed hair, and their owlish, apprehensive expressions, they seem to belong not merely to an earlier generation but to a category of beings altogether different from, and far more insecure than, that represented in the 1958 photo- graphs. In these the sitter—if this term can be applied to a young man who often appears to be leaning over sideways or lying on his back—has a relaxed, masterful air and as likely as not a beard; the dentist's-waiting-room demeanour has disappeared.

At the end of the Twenties The Isis carried anything up to six pages of University sports news (rather well done, on the whole) and a page or so of `Academics,' which were notes recording the incidence of death, promotion, ordination and so on among past members of the University. Where these notes came from I cannot recall; we regarded them as deadly dull and they were apt to be held over.

This hard core of parochial news has dis- appeared. Isis has become largely an organ of opinion. Its success in this role inevitably depends on how interesting the opinions of the editor and his friends are, and how well they express them. The editor, with only eight issues of Isis in which to project himself, to build up a team of con- tributors and to do all the other things which even undergraduate editors have to do if they want to be a success, faces a difficult task; and this task is made harder when the paper is all flesh and no bone, all comment and no facts.

* * *

One gains from Isis the impression that the articulate minority whose views it reflects suffer from some abstruse malaise. 'For two and a half terms,' wrote a correspondent in last week's issue, `I have read with some dismay and much incom- prehension a dreary succession of Isis articles which seemed directed to protest at the existing order mainly because, apparently, such a state of affairs exists. . . . Like you, I feel disin- herited; but I should like to 'know where else you propose to find, more suitable ground for putting down roots.'

1 commend the sturdy, Bairnsfather philosophy of the last sentence-1f you know of a better 'ole, go to it.' But why should these young gentlemen feel disinherited when they are enjoying, at the expense of their parents or the tax-payers or both, the delights and benefits of an Oxford education? They may not like or enjoy their inheritance, but they can hardly say that they have not got it : nor indeed that their fathers did not fight to keep it for them.

Without polemics undergraduate journalism would be even more jejeune than it generally is; but has Oxford no battlefields of its own? A week or two ago Isis published a long, violent, tremendously dull attack on the Monarchy. Last week it carried a two and a half page diatribe of Miltonic severity against Freemasonry (a sub- ject on which, I seem to remember, Hitler also held strong views) and a rebuke, more temperately administered, to the Arts Council. So much saeva indignatio expended on distant objectives in undistinguished prose produces upon the reader a dreary effect; and the voice of Oxford, in so far as his echoes it, sounds rather like the Small Cat House at feeding time.

In the late Twenties The Isis was edited, as Isis has been in the late Fifties, by undergraduates whose childhood had been shadowed by war; and under my editorship, as the files show all too clearly, it did less than nothing to open its readers' eyes to the horrors, uncertainties and in- conveniences of the age in which they had the unprecedented misfortune to live.

We attacked people right and left—the Buch- manites, who were then establishing themselves in Oxford and were known as the Oxford Group : the proctors, on a number of pretexts : a film company, who aspired to make a film of Univer- sity life based on The City of Youth, a book written in 1910 by Mrs. Oonah Ball. But these battles were fought, however thunderously, around the parish pump; we did not, rightly or wrongly, take ourselves seriously enough to make forays into the great world and to lay down the law about its issues and institutions.

It was our unworthy aim to amuse. We relied extensively on nonsense in various forms and, generally writing against time, filled up the front of the paper with foolish and inconsequent paragraphs like— Albanian Proverb.

A hungry boll-weevil fears not the tidal wave.

A Useful Tip.

With the advent of Spring, your tutor should be carefully cleaned and oiled, and put away in a warm, dark cupboard.

We were not escapists, for though we recog- nised our world as imperfect we.had no impulse to bale out of it. I think we merely felt that here was a perfectly good paper, we were in charge, and the thing to do was to get as much amuse- ment as possible out of it for ourselves and our readers. In this I was greatly helped by my prin- cipal artist, Mr. Osbert Lancaster, for it was his contributions that did most to raise the general level of wit above the Wooster-line. Looking back through the exhumed pages, 1 cannot honestly say that I feel ashamed of the general impression they produce. It is one of irresponsible cheerful- ness; this may not be admirable, but it is on the whole less irksome than irresponsible gloom.