Lay Morals and Other Essays (eBook)

COLLEGE PAPERS CHAPTER II - THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY

WE have now reached the difficult portion of our task.  MR.  TATLER, for all that we care, may have been as virulent as he  liked about the students of a former; but for the iron to  touch our sacred selves, for a brother of the Guild to betray  its most privy infirmities, let such a Judas look to himself  as he passes on his way to the Scots Law or the Diagnostic,  below the solitary lamp at the corner of the dark quadrangle.   We confess that this idea alarms us.  We enter a protest.  We  bind ourselves over verbally to keep the peace.  We hope,  moreover, that having thus made you secret to our misgivings,  you will excuse us if we be dull, and set that down to  caution which you might before have charged to the account of  stupidity.

The natural tendency of civilisation is to obliterate those  distinctions which are the best salt of life.  All the fine  old professional flavour in language has evaporated.  Your  very gravedigger has forgotten his avocation in his  electorship, and would quibble on the Franchise over  Ophelia's grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the  duration of bodies under ground.  From this tendency, from  this gradual attrition of life, in which everything pointed  and characteristic is being rubbed down, till the whole world  begins to slip between our fingers in smooth  undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that  we must not attempt to join MR. TALLER in his simple division  of students into LAW, DIVINITY, and MEDICAL.  Nowadays the  Faculties may shake hands over their follies; and, like Mrs.  Frail and Mrs. Foresight (in LOVE FOR LOVE) they may stand in  the doors of opposite class-rooms, crying: 'Sister, Sister - Sister everyway!'  A few restrictions, indeed, remain to  influence the followers of individual branches of study.  The  Divinity, for example, must be an avowed believer; and as  this, in the present day, is unhappily considered by many as  a confession of weakness, he is fain to choose one of two  ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus.  Some swallow  it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a credit to  believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw philosopher,  although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His own  authority.  Others again (and this we think the worst  method), finding German grammar a somewhat dry morsel, run  their own little heresy as a proof of independence; and deny  one of the cardinal doctrines that they may hold the others  without being laughed at.

Besides, however, such influences as these, there is little  more distinction between the faculties than the traditionary  ideal, handed down through a long sequence of students, and  getting rounder and more featureless at each successive  session.  The plague of uniformity has descended on the  College.  Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions of  men) now require their faculty and character hung round their  neck on a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare's theatre.   And in the midst of all this weary sameness, not the least  common feature is the gravity of every face.  No more does  the merry medical run eagerly in the clear winter morning up  the rugged sides of Arthur's Seat, and hear the church bells  begin and thicken and die away below him among the gathered  smoke of the city.  He will not break Sunday to so little  purpose.  He no longer finds pleasure in the mere output of  his surplus energy.  He husbands his strength, and lays out  walks, and reading, and amusement with deep consideration, so  that he may get as much work and pleasure out of his body as  he can, and waste none of his energy on mere impulse, or such  flat enjoyment as an excursion in the country.

See the quadrangle in the interregnum of classes, in those  two or three minutes when it is full of passing students, and  we think you will admit that, if we have not made it 'an  habitation of dragons,' we have at least transformed it into  'a court for owls.'  Solemnity broods heavily over the  enclosure; and wherever you seek it, you will find a dearth  of merriment, an absence of real youthful enjoyment.  You  might as well try

 'To move wild laughter in the throat of death'

 as to excite any healthy stir among the bulk of this staid  company.

The studious congregate about the doors of the different  classes, debating the matter of the lecture, or comparing  note-books.  A reserved rivalry sunders them.  Here are some  deep in Greek particles: there, others are already  inhabitants of that land

 'Where entity and quiddity, 'Like ghosts of defunct bodies fly - Where Truth in person does appear Like words congealed in northern air.'

 But none of them seem to find any relish for their studies -  no pedantic love of this subject or that lights up their eyes  - science and learning are only means for a livelihood, which  they have considerately embraced and which they solemnly  pursue.  'Labour's pale priests,' their lips seem incapable  of laughter, except in the way of polite recognition of  professorial wit.  The stains of ink are chronic on their  meagre fingers.  They walk like Saul among the asses.

The dandies are not less subdued.  In 1824 there was a noisy  dapper dandyism abroad.  Vulgar, as we should now think, but  yet genial - a matter of white greatcoats and loud voices -  strangely different from the stately frippery that is rife at  present.  These men are out of their element in the  quadrangle.  Even the small remains of boisterous humour,  which still clings to any collection of young men, jars  painfully on their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a  hasty retreat to resume their perfunctory march along Princes  Street.  Flirtation is to them a great social duty, a painful  obligation, which they perform on every occasion in the same  chill official manner, and with the same commonplace  advances, the same dogged observance of traditional  behaviour.  The shape of their raiment is a burden almost  greater than they can bear, and they halt in their walk to  preserve the due adjustment of their trouser-knees, till one  would fancy he had mixed in a procession of Jacobs.  We  speak, of course, for ourselves; but we would as soon  associate with a herd of sprightly apes as with these gloomy  modern beaux.  Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines, even  our Brummels, should have left their mantles upon nothing  more amusing!

Nor are the fast men less constrained.  Solemnity, even in  dissipation, is the order of the day; and they go to the  devil with a perverse seriousness, a systematic rationalism  of wickedness that would have surprised the simpler sinners  of old.  Some of these men whom we see gravely conversing on  the steps have but a slender acquaintance with each other.   Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins of  depravity; and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up  their items of transgression, and give an abstract of their  downward progress for approval and encouragement.  These folk  form a freemasonry of their own.  An oath is the shibboleth  of their sinister fellowship.  Once they hear a man swear, it  is wonderful how their tongues loosen and their bashful  spirits take enlargement, under the consciousness of  brotherhood.  There is no folly, no pardoning warmth of  temper about them; they are as steady-going and systematic in  their own way as the studious in theirs.

Not that we are without merry men.  No.  We shall not be  ungrateful to those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter,  whose active feet in the 'College Anthem' have beguiled so  many weary hours and added a pleasant variety to the strain  of close attention.  But even these are too evidently  professional in their antics.  They go about cogitating puns  and inventing tricks.  It is their vocation, Hal.  They are  the gratuitous jesters of the class-room; and, like the clown  when he leaves the stage, their merriment too often sinks as  the bell rings the hour of liberty, and they pass forth by  the Post-Office, grave and sedate, and meditating fresh  gambols for the morrow.

This is the impression left on the mind of any observing  student by too many of his fellows.  They seem all frigid old  men; and one pauses to think how such an unnatural state of  matters is produced.  We feel inclined to blame for it the  unfortunate absence of UNIVERSITY FEELING which is so marked  a characteristic of our Edinburgh students.  Academical  interests are so few and far between - students, as students,  have so little in common, except a peevish rivalry - there is  such an entire want of broad college sympathies and ordinary  college friendships, that we fancy that...