OXFORD IN THE TWENTIES
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ness of class. Themselves barely articulate they gauged the under–
graduates by accent.
As for the dons they might just as well have been at Cam–
bridge; I should hardly have missed them. Few of them were
interested in teaching. They lived in a parlor up a winding stair and
caught little facts like flies in webs of generalization. For recrea–
tion they read detective stories. The cigar smoke of the Senior
Common Rooms hid them from each other and from the world.
Some of them had never been adult, their second childhood having
come too early. Some of them had never been male, walked around
in their gowns like blowsy widows or wizened spinsters. They had
charm without warmth and knowledge without understanding.
In appearance they were nearly as grotesque as the menials.
There were exceptions of course, maybe the exceptions were a
majority, but for me at least it was the grotesques who typified
Oxford.. When I think of Oxford dons I see a Walpurgisnacht, a
zoo--scraggy-necked baldheads in gown and hood looking like
marabou storks, giant turtles reaching for a glass of port with
infinitely weary flippers, sad chimpanzees, codfish, washing blown
out on a line. Timid with pimples or boisterous with triple chins.
Their wit and themselves had been kept too long; the squibs were
damp, the cigars were dust, the champagne was flat.
· But in spite of, and partly because of, all this I am grateful
to Oxford. Four years' free time is four years' free time and it is
an additional blessing to spend it somewhere where there are books
and ·ideas in circulation. I have never yet come across an educa–
tional institution which was not largely absurd; in Oxford the
absurdities ·had a shape and a patina that were stimulating. And
our classical education, which seemed rather useless at the time,
compares very well, I have since discovered, with that all-round,
useful, sensible, modern education that equips you for everything
and nothing; I doubt whether education
ought
to be 'useful' or
'sensible.' In particular the Oxford tradition of Socratic argument
may have led us nowhere but it gave us a weapon we should never
have got from a crammer. And it is a weapon one needs in this
world of wishful thinking. For my own taste the Oxford intellect
was too dry but at least it was articulate; other universities with no
more red blood in their veins have a good deal more water on
the brain.
