The Casual Ward Part 10

Afar will Democracy chase it, That gang of impenitent Dons Who drowned the occasional Placet By bawling their truculent Nons: No idle and opulent College Will feed that obstructionist clique, Those scoffers at Practical Knowledge Who vote for compulsory Greek.

And now when the Party of Labour, a.s.serting its virtuous sway, Annexes the wealth of its neighbour In Labour's traditional way,- When purged of its various abuses By Birrell's beneficent rule, This haunt of the obsolete Muses Is changed to a charity school,-

When Fellows and bloated Professors Their stipends are forced to disgorge, (Obeying the fiat of Messrs.

Keir Hardie and Burns and Lloyd George) Deprived by the wrath of the Nation Of all their unmerited aids, Perhaps to escape from starvation They'll take to respectable trades!

O wholly delectable vision!

I view with excusable glee The fate of the shallow precisian Who failed to appreciate Me;- I fancy I see myself tossing With blandly contemptuous mien A penny for sweeping a crossing To him who was formerly Dean!

DIPLOMAS IN ARCHITECTURE AT CAMBRIDGE

("Education differs from technical training."-Expert opinion in a letter to the _Times_.)

Not in vain with quaint devices Infants of the age of four Build their mimic edifices All upon the nursery floor; Neither is the presage missed By the Educationist, When he doth the fact recall How that Balbus built a wall!

Thus I mused on such-like theses, While my errant fancy swam Through the circ.u.mambient breezes To the silver streams of Cam,- There observed with pleased surprise Ancient Universities Still in touch at every stage With the Progress of the Age;

There, released from sloth and coma (Alma Mater's chief defect), There they grant a new Diploma To the budding Architect, Take the blighted Builder's art To their academic heart, Hope it may in time become Part of their curriculum:

There they tell their College Porters Not to think it strange or odd When a load of bricks and mortar's Dumped within the College quad; No indignant Tutor hauls Him who scales the College walls,- Plying on that airy perch Architectural Research!

Thus I sang: I seemed to see an Epoch made, the Future's guide; But my glad exultant paean Was not wholly justified: Men whose names we all revere, Stars in Architecture's sphere, Phrases used which don't imply Any genuine sympathy:

Ch---mpn---ys, Bl---mfield, T. G. J---cks---n, Hushed my lyre's triumphant string- Said in limpid Anglo-Saxon What they thought about the thing: "Seats of learning are designed For to Educate the Mind, Not to teach a craft or trade,"

_That_ was what these persons said!

What! and must a thwarted Nation Draw the obvious inference?

What! a Liberal Education Doesn't mean the quest of pence?

(Really, this extremely crude Obscurantist att.i.tude Isn't quite what one expects From distinguished Architects!)

Here's another dear illusion Reft away and wholly gone: O the spiritual confusion Of the pained progressive Don!

If the facts are quite correct As regards the Architect, Comes the question, plain and clear, _How about the Engineer_?

ICHABOD: A MONODY

Now is the time when everything is glad, Their vernal greenery the fields renew, Each feathered songster chants with livelier tone, And lambkins leap and cloudless skies are blue, And all is gay and cheerful:-I alone Am singularly sad; Mine erstwhile happiness and calm content Yields to a sense of sorrowful surprise: Things that I thought were thus, are otherwise: And all is grief, and disillusionment.

For He, who did in everything surpa.s.s Our common world,-the Good, the Truly Great, The Working Man, who shamed with standards high Our obscurantists unregenerate,- Is not, 'twould seem, better than you, or I, Or any other a.s.s: The vision's faded, as a snowflake melts; Fallen is that idol from his high renown: He hath waxed fat, and kicked, and tumbled down, And we must seek ensamples somewhere else!

Where is it, Comrades! in this direful day- That n.o.ble zeal for academic lore, That reverence due for discipline, in which He used to s.h.i.+ne conspicuously o'er The Brainless Athlete and the Idle Rich?

O, does he now display That ample breadth of calm impartial view, That sober judgment and that balanced mind, Which we were taught that we should always find, O R---skin College, domiciled in you?

I have a Pupil: when his mental food Fails (as it will) his appet.i.te to sate, What! does that patient much-enduring elf Proclaim a strike? set pickets at my gate?

Boycott my lectures? give them for himself?

(Full oft I wish he would:) Nay-when he finds those lectures dull and flat, He asks no other: new ones might be worse: Too well he knows that Cosmos' ordered course Meant him to hear, and me to talk like that.

Also I own I'm disappointed by Your friends and patrons, British Working Man!

For they, methought, were champions of the Cause, Fighters for Freedom, foremost in the van, Not servile scruplers, bound by rules and laws, Not men who dealt in dry Respectable traditions: leaders true, No timid Moderates, who would define Too strict a boundary 'twixt Mine and Thine, Potential martyrs, heart and soul with you:-

'Twas all illusion: they would feed you with Mere talks on Temperance: when your spirit's wings Would soar to Sociology alone, Whereby will come that blessed state of things When none has property to call his own, They give you-Adam Smith . . .

These too are fall'n: ah me, that I should live To hear our brightest Radicals and best By angry Labour in such terms addressed As might apply to a Conservative!

To this conclusion I perforce must come, 'Twere best we parted: seeing that we, 'twould seem, Haply have no appreciation of Your high ambitions and your aims supreme, Nor can we hope that you should greatly love Our mental pabulum: Depart, O Comrades! to some happier sphere Where you can still be n.o.bly on the make, And mine, or plumb, or brew, or butch, or bake,- Best to depart, and leave us mouldering here!

Yea, if ye scorn our learning overmuch, Misguided sons of h.o.r.n.y-handed toil!

Yet discontented with your lowly lot Still pine to burn the sad nocturnal oil 'Mid academic culture, or 'mid what Describes itself as such- Go elsewhere, O my brothers! only go To Bath, to Birmingham-where'er the Don Teaches the sacred art of Getting On,-- -It is not far from here to Jericho.

THE PANACEA

It is Research of which I sing, Research, that salutary thing!

None can succeed, in World or Church, Who does not prosecute Research: For some read books, and toil thereat Their intellect to waken: But if you think Research is _that_ You're very much mistaken.

All in Columbia's blessed States They have no Smalls, or Mods, or Greats, Nor do their faculties benumb With any cold curriculum: O no! for there the ambitious Boy, Released from schools and birches, At once pursues with studious joy Original Researches:

A happy lot that Student's is, -I wish that mine were like to his,- Where in the bud no pedants nip His Services to Scholars.h.i.+p: And none need read with care and pain Rome's History, or Greece's, But each from his creative brain Evolves semestrial Theses!

On books to pore is not the kind Of thing to please the serious mind,- I do not very greatly care For such unsatisfying fare: To seek the lore that in them lurks Would last _ad infinitum_: Let others read immortal works,- I much prefer to write 'em!

THE HEROIC AGE

When I ponder o'er the pages of the old romantic ages, ere the world grew cold and gray, When there wasn't a relation between Oxford and the Nation, or a Movement every day, How I marvel at the glamour (in these duller days and tamer) which informed those scenes of glee, At the glamour and the glory of contemporary story, and the Eights as they used to be!

It is obvious that the weather must have differed altogether from the kind that now we know: I arise from reading Fiction with the permanent conviction that it did not hail, nor snow: For each fair and youthful charmer had a summer sun to warm her and a bran new frock and hat,- In the progress of the l.u.s.tres, when the crowd of Fas.h.i.+on musters it has grown too wise for that.

Every boat from keel to rigger was a grand ideal figure as it skimmed those Wavelets Blue, While the Heroes who propelled 'em were comparatively seldom of a commonplace type, like you- In their strength and in their science they were positively giants, through the gorgeous days of old, Still an Admirable Crichton in those _lieben alten Zeiten_ was the oarsman brave and bold:

He could row devoid of training, and (it hardly needs explaining) got a quite unique degree: With his blus.h.i.+ng honours laden, he espoused a lovely maiden at the end of Volume Three: This alone he had to grieve for-that he'd nothing more to live for, or expect from Fortune's whim: For I never could discover, when his Oxford days were over, what the world could hold for him!

O the rapture singlehearted of that Period has departed, with its views ornate of Man, And I think it won't come back till we restore the Pterodactyl, or revive the late Queen Anne: We have grown in mental stature, and we Go Direct to Nature, in these days of stress and strife, And the hero of a novel in a palace or a hovel is intolerably True to Life:-

Not an infant learns to toddle but EFFICIENCY'S his model, which he still pursues with rage, In a manner inconsistent with the methods dim and distant of that mid-Victorian age: For that atmosphere Elysian it has faded from our vision and has gone where the old tales go, And I really don't know whether I regret altogether-but the simple fact is so.