Cor]l1-nun ication

Oxford in Lent Term

[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] Sun,—The sluggish air of this part of the Thames valley slows down the rate of living, so that anyone with x amount of energy who could last for say, seventy years in London, or till fifty in New.York, lingers on to ninety in Oxford. Delirium tremens, asthma, and paralysis strike more often but less fatally than in other places, and the distinguished victims of the years, unable to communicate the content of their learning, pass into legend long before their departure from this Mesopotamia of deceptive longevity. For the long years are a tribute to disease, not to health.

The atmosphere afflicts the inhabitants irrespective of age, and the neuroses of the young are conditioned by it equally. In mediaeval times the plagues that beset Oxford were more openly recognised, and the colleges closed or migrated in times of heat or drought or floods. Nowadays they are nominally open in Lent term. The townspeople as of old fill the Thames with old bottles and garbage, and the silting up of the bed " deadens " the water to the oar, if not to the nose. The water- neurosis takes the form of an attempt to " conquer " the source of disease, the river, by becoming " head " of it. No amount of contact with the outside world where the objective test of the Boat-race annually demonstrates that rowing in Oxford does not exist cures them of their fantastic perfor- mances. " Toggers " is now adding its quota to the cases of influenza.

Rowing has a certain aesthetic justification. Eights week (m a tine day, the colours of the flags, pennants, women's wide summer hats and Ascot dresses, the river reflecting a blue sky and the upright painted oars of the crews being ferried across the river, those have formed part of the remembrance of generations of Oxford men, and have been celebrated in Impressionist painting. And the key to that scene has always been the absurd but graceful fantasy of the fleet of barges. But this excuse for rowing is to be removed. Christ Church cares only for efficiency and economy in rowing, and therefore, as her old barge is sinking, her governing body is about to authorise the cutting down of the trees of a part of the Meadows, and the building of a nice brick (or concrete) boat-house. If old Oxford men do not realise the full horror of this proposal and protest at once the vandalism will quietly proceed.

But if the rowing-fetishists care nothing for the scene that they incidentally create, so the present generation of under- graduates is typically opposed to aestheticism. Or rather, it is simply not an issue for them. There are now no flam- boyant beards such as are still the gesture of the most ordinary student in Paris or at the Slade, and dress, apart from political ties and shirts, has a note of careless sobriety.

The monastic design of college as opposed to campus education renews almost a period of latency, and the natural reaction-formation of this is that in lieu of maturer interests the undergraduate is concerned with pseudo-problems of morality and religion. But perhaps the end of this phase is in sight, the phase of the Groups and of a certain approach to politics. There are some hopeful signs that a quicker education of the adolescent is possible despite vested interests in its delay.

There is a new emphasis in political discussion. The members of the Labour Club, as speakers from London have begun to observe, are no longer interested in the precisely correct social attitude to adopt; they want to hear about programmes, and from the horses' mouths, Mr. Dalton and Mr. Herbert Morrison being the horses. The organisation of the club has also perfected a scheme of recruiting members ; a table of statistics hangs in the club-room showing that there are now 800 members, the highest percentage for a college coming from Brasenose. The Isis reports this week of the Liberal Club that " We have still not had any news. Mr. J. A. Brown is however still alive. The other member is busy." The Conservatives are rallying well, and their Clti.) was addressed at a joint meeting by Mr. Harold Macmillan on planning. There is thus a general movement to get down to hard tacks.

A second portent perhaps, no other than an exhibition of concrete and abstract art, one for which even the promoters and all the Press adopted an apologetic tone, natural enough in Oxford, meant a walk down St. Giles ; and for those who associated St. Giles-too much with dreary Jesuits and income- tax collectors, with doctors and humiliating pilgrimages to

Somerville, or the sordid _fairyland. of the Fair, this was a journey, like a famous journey to Venice, that was left

unmade from afternoon to afternoon ; let it suffice that the works of art were there, a brave gesture similar to the attempt to hire pictures to the ladies of Lady Margaret Hall and St. Hilda's. It is impossible to find out what was exhibited except some golden balls, arranged differently from those of the pawnshop, and a wooden egg or so. The show was almost a success, and many people saw each other there.

• Even the Film Society, fortunate to be able to show a work of genius this term, L'Atalante, with an actor more -comic and more tragic than Charlie ever could be, is financially in difficulties through want of support for next term. The Brothers Karamazov has with great skill been steered past the eye of the Chief Constable, and will appear publicly at the Scala. Jonah and the Whale at St. Hilda's on Friday provided a setting for Miss Tania Vorontzoff, who was Eurydice last year, in Coeteau's CIrphie, and at Somerville a poor play called The Devil Again was well spoken by Miss Black and Miss Harrisson. But the O.U.D.S. has outshone these draMaties with Richard H, in which the acting of Mr. David King-Wood and Miss Vivian Leigh are outstanding.

• Poetry, like dramatic art, is allowed us by the youth movement, for there is perhaps a youth cult, fostered by philistines, among the generation born in and after the War (they have after all been so often told how young they are), since Keats, Byron and Shelley were young. Yet there is no sign of a successor to Auden or to Spender or to Day Lewis, who are poets of the slightly earlier, more aggressively political, generation. Now that the revolution is becoming acceptable intellectually without much disturbance of soul, so that politics is taking its important but minor place as planning, there is a possibility of getting away from the dis- ordered pylons and the significant war.

The realities of the situation, then, are becoming clearer in Oxford as in other places, and the insidious daydream that was offered for so many years in substitute for education is perhaps going to burst like a bubble. That Oxford has a population that has doubled in 10 years and that more than half the undergraduates need help financially from scholarships and exhibitions, are only the most obvious of the conditions that govern the education of fidure citizens in Oxford University. The events of the day, the day's residue would itself disturb the most persistent distortions of the dream.

The civilisation of slow living which has produced no great thinker, no Einstein, or Russell, or Sigmund Freud, can produce great historians. Here Oxford has no rivals, and not all the laboured or facile Whiggery of other places will ever touch the knowledge so often here piled up and lost.

This week Sir Charles Firth, the father of accurate historical research passed away at the age of 79. His minute knowledge of the seventeenth century, and his shrewd judgement of that period, were always at the service of any " researcher " working for a degree, or writing a book. Some influence prevented him from ever doing full justice to his learning in the monumental works he could have written.

Perhaps. the more active political career of the Warden of New College has enabled him to break the inertia of Oxford by setting him a higher standard of achievement. He has finished his History of Europe, and it has appeared all ready to take its place among the classics of English historical writing. Of other publications the most useful has been Mr. A. J. Ayer's. attack on philosophers in Language, Truth and Logic. Many undergraduates are now able to counter their tutor's pretence that metaphysics is other than meaning- less nonsense. In economics, the rhetorical passages of Mr. Keynes' book serve a similar purpose.

A schoolboy howler appeared in a West Country paper as authentic : The master asked " What is an obelisk ? " Reputed answer, " A Russian prince who plays Rugby for Oxford." Russia, White or Red, is popular now, and the Russia society is venturing to sponsor another visit of the Dolin-Markova ballet. The Carl Rosa Opera is here this week, but Sir Oswakl Mosley is not, as the City. Council

is learning where to draw the am, Sir, &c., • YOUR OXFORD CORRESPONDENT.