THE ILLITERATE UNDERGRADUATE.
READING," at Oxford and Cambridge, is a term that has been narrowed down into meaning the study of books profitable for the schools rather than enter- taining as literature, and "the reading man" is he who devotes his attention to mathematics or Roman law rather than to poetry or fiction. But these absorbing studies, happily, do not occupy more than a portion of the under- graduate's time, and it has been commonly supposed that at these seats of learning were many young men who possessed some literary taste, who trained their critical faculties, consciously or unconsciously, by reading good -novels, and who even fitted themselves to some extent for producing tolerable literature themselves. Certainly this was the case a few years ago, and it is difficult to believe that there has been a vast change for the worse since that time.
Yet, if we are to believe the undergraduates themselves, this really seems to have come about, at least at Cambridge. For on turning to a recent number of the Grants, a paper -edited and written by Cambridge undergraduates, we find an article headed "The Literature of the Undergraduate," which, if it is a statement of actual facts, gives us a dolorous picture of the taste for fiction as it exists at the present time in what we have always considered to be a centre of culture. The writer asserts that nothing but the trashiest of modern novels is in demand at the Union Library, and that the works of Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens are abso- lutely neglected. Nor is this neglect of standard authors to be accounted for by the theory that every undergraduate has all the best works of fiction on his own shelves. "With the -possible exception of Shakespeare," he writes, "we have seldom seen a standard book in an undergraduate's rooms. As for the theory that those works worth reading are read at home, we reply that we have seldom met an undergraduate who had even a superficial knowledge of any really good books except, perhaps, 'Ivanhoe' and the 'Pickwick Papers.'"
We may well rub our eyes at this assertion. This article presumably is written by an undergraduate now in residence, and who therefore may be supposed to be giving the facts of the case accurately. Yet the assertion is almost incredible. He has seldom met an undergraduate with even a superficial knowledge of any really good books ! We might, perhaps, be inclined to wonder what qualities were necessary to make a work of fiction "really good" in this young gentleman's estimation, but fortunately his last words show that his canons of taste are by no means exigent, and include as "really good books" such popular works as the two he names. So then we are left with the amasing deduction which his words imply, namely, that you will hardly find an undergraduate in Cambridge who has "even a superficial knowledge" of such works, for instance, as "David Copper- field," or "Esmond," or "Guy Mannering." He has never heard of Mr. Micawber; the dreadful warning afforded by the academic career of Arthur Pendennis reaches him not ; he is absolutely unacquainted, to select a few more names at random, with Silas Marner, with Becky Sharpe, with Mrs. Proudie, with Amyas Leigh. As for poetry, of course, he never looks at it. He reads nothing but the trashiest of modern pro- ductions, says our informant, who can scarce include under this term the works of Mr. Meredith, or Mr. Kipling, or Robert Louis Stevenson. Clearly his friends have not even a superficial knowledge, then, of the works of these writers.
Frankly, we refuse to believe that this article gives an alto- gether faithful portrait of the intellectual capacity and liking of the average undergraduate. Either the writer is extremely unfortunate in his acquaintance, or he is guilty of con- siderably exaggerating the evil. At any rate, we can vouch for the fact that his strictures would have seemed palpably absurd to those who were undergraduates four or five years ago. As regards the men in residence at that not very dis- tant epoch, comparatively few, of course, studied English literature carefully and systematically. But none the less it would have been a rank libel on nine out of every ten under- graduates to state that they had not even a superficial know- ledge of any good book,—if one meant by that term, as this modern censor seems to mean, any standard novel. Of course they did not limit their literature to Ruskin, Browning, and Rossetti, being for the most part, mercifully, average Englishmen rather than affected prigs. Equally of course, they read a good deal of trash ; most undergraduates, being, after all, not much else than emancipated schoolboys, do read trash. But, on the other hand, they certainly did not confine their study of good novels to the perusal of "Pickwick " and "Ivanhoe."
Still, after making every allowance for exaggeration, we are bound to suppose that there must be a certain amount of cause for this writer's complaint, and even if the case is not quite so bad as he would have us believe, it is probably quite bad enough. Of course there is always to be found a so-called " literary " set at the University, who fain would profess a kind of anthetic paganism, who write "limp and limping" sonnets, and whose professed admiration for certain decadent French authors certainly exceeds their understanding of them. Not for the world would we add to the number of these premature prigs. Again, there are the undergraduates who live wholly for some game or other, and whose literary studies are limited to the perusal of the sporting Press. But both these are classes apart; rather we would consider the case of the average undergraduate.
And if it be in any degree true that the average under- graduate of the present day is wholly ignorant of English literature, the fact is surely a deplorable one. The result may be partly due to the strange indifference of the public-school masters, who do little indeed to encourage their pupils to take an intelligent interest in their own language, and who scarcely make them realise that there is such a quality as style in English, anxious though they are to insist upon it in the case of Latin or Greek prose. Yet their attitude in this respect is certainly not worse to-day than it has always been in the past, while certainly it was not the case a short time since that the average undergraduate wholly confined his reading to novels of the flimsiest type. And yet from this class of young men are shortly to come our novelists, our journalists, our poets,— persons to whom any allusion to the works of such writers as Thackeray and Dickens must needs be wholly incom- prehensible!
We must leave to others the task of explaining the cause of this degeneracy, and of suggesting a remedy. Bat it seems worth while to emphasise how great, according to the testi- mony of a journal written by themselves, is the illiteracy of the average modern undergraduates.
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