Oxford in the Twenties*
Louis MacNeice
IN
THE SUMMER
of 1926 the English general strike occurred
and
was broken. The most publicized blacklegs were the undergrad–
uates of Oxford and Cambridge who regarded the strike as an
occasion for a spree; a comic phenomenon due to the Lower
Classes; a comet that came from nowhere and dissolved in rubble
and presaged nothing to come.
In the fall of that year I went up to Oxford to continue
my
classical education. This traditional English form of education is
rooted in that same class system which conduces to an ethics of self–
interest; it thus came about that when I was nineteen I joined to a
dislike of science a disbelief in altruism. Skimming the cream off
the milk; skimming the cream off the cream; you begin to forget
there are cows. I had been specializing in Classics since the age of
fifteen when I had ceased to study any branch of mathematics,
science, modern history or modern languages. While at Oxford I
took only two examinations-'Honour Mods' and 'Greats.' These
examinations are still invested with glamor although the first in–
volves a great deal of futile memorization and the second encour–
ages jargon and false profundity. Being a natural examinee, i.e.
an intellectual window-dresser, I succeeded in both; for Mods I
stored up some textual emendations by Wilamowitz or Scaliger, for
Greats I dragged in my own pet theories on a leash.
I did not, however, go to Oxford to study; that was what
grammar school boys did. We products of the English public
schools (which correspond to private schools in America) went to
Oxford either for sport and -beer-drinking, in which case we filled
in time deriding the intellectuals, or for the aesthetic life and cock·
tails, in which case we filled in time deriding the athletes; our feuds
were between ourselves for the grammar school boys did not enter
*This article-with certain alterations, condensations and omissions-is an excerpt
from a book entitled
The Strings Are False,
to be published in America next year
by
the Oxford University Press.-THE EDITORS.
430
