II.

OXFORD WIT AND HUMOUR.

THERE was lately put into my hand a little book called Memories of Oxford, written by a young Frenchman, M. Jacques Bardoux, who to an unfeigned admiration of our heavier virtues seems to have added an unfeigned contempt for our lighter intelligence. His strictures and compliments set me in my turn thinking and remembering, and my rumination has resulted in a very simple proposition. Assuming the current division of Focularia into wit and humour to be substantially sound, I should say that there is an academic variety of each: the former being found for the most part among the fellows and scholars of colleges, the latter among the undergraduates; for the obvious reason that academic wit postulates learning, while academic humour is the child of high spirits. University wit, therefore, is apt to change its form from age to age, for sciences have their fashions, and the learning of one age is often the folly of the next; but University humour, relying almost entirely upon the genial sense of youth, is a

It might be illustrated remotest ages, and be

far more constant quantity. from the traditions of the certain to awake an answering chord in the undergraduate bosom of to-day. I have a neighbour who, whenever talk falls upon the Universities, as it is apt to do just before Easter, will relate how in his youth, when a certain set of his fellow-collegians affected to wear their hair longer than the custom of the hour dictated, they were torn by night from their quiet beds and conveyed to the college pump. On one occasion, when this story had been told with more than ordinary gusto, I could not help suggesting that the process would have been more in character as shampooing if the water had been warmed; but, as my neighbour pointed out, in that case where would have been the humour? Not, of course, that humour necessarily implies a low temperature (though I have observed its operation to be more nimble in winter) but only an unexpected temperature. There are well-known occasions in University life when it takes the inflammatory form of making a bonfire of college desks and deans; the humour here also lurking in the element of surprise. In ancient days this highblooded humour of the undergraduate body was largely purged by exercise upon townspeople.1 But, as the townsmen's idea of humour was coarse, their

1 A tradition of this was, within living memory, preserved by certain interludes annually enacted between Town and Gown on the fifth of November, the meaning of which, however, was altogether forgotten.

repartees were less satisfactory. In 1214, for example, the townspeople had to be fined 'propter suspendium clericorum;' and in the next century on a day long remembered (St. Scholastica's day, 1354), they again got the best of the joke by calling to their aid a rabble of country bumpkins, who, having but a rudimentary sense of fun, flayed the scalps of certain clerks in scorn of their clergy. So that succeeding

generations of undergraduates found it prudent to restrain their humour within academical boundaries, and joke only among gentlemen.1 These and like incidents prove that the Town and Gown controversy was only one, somewhat acute, form of the ancient antinomy between Clerk and Layman, which itself is only a particular shape of the eternal conflict between Form and Matter. It will be recollected that this antipathy forms the staple of Chaucer's unacademic humour, most of his caricatures being drawn from ecclesiastical functionaries. He allows no virtue to any of them except the poor country parson, it being a primary lay dogma that in no point but poverty may the principle of apostolical succession be

1 As an annex to the discussion on p. 12 as to the definition of a gentleman, I would suggest that he might fairly be described as one who is content to 'play the game,' whatever the game be-in short, a sportsman? Many people who are not 'gentle' will play their own game fairly enough, but have no respect for that of their neighbours. Farmers, for example, think themselves genteel for not shooting foxes, but they do not mind spoiling the sport of the poor bicyclist by strewing the roads with their hedge-clippings.

tolerated, and that there it should even be encouraged. But the laicising of the University has now removed from Oxford every trace of this old quarrel, so that the Reverend the Vice-Chancellor is as often as not an Alderman of the city, and His Worship the Mayor in like manner an undergraduate who has taken 'Smalls' out of compliment to the Vice-Chancellor. And so, being on this friendly footing, Town and Gown are once more content to pass an occasional jest upon each other, the most humorous sally of the Town in this generation having been the driving a tram-line down the High Street, and widening Magdalen Bridge to give it way.

Of University humour I need give no more particular account, as it is indistinguishable from that of the English schoolboy in every age. But I must

not omit to mention that there is also a type of wit, as well as their proper humour, sometimes found among the more unscholarly undergraduates. Aristotle, whose definitions have long supplied the basis of Oxford training in morals, described wit as 'a scholarly insolence,' but he gave no name of its own to the peculiar vein of insolence sometimes found in those who are not scholars. This type of wit has always been allowed an opportunity for public display at the Act; in old days the function was delegated to an official called 'Terræ-filius,' a half-licensed jester, who represented the main undergraduate body. I say 'half-licensed,' because in many cases where

the 'Terræ-filius' went beyond his part and proved really witty in the ordinary sense of the term, he was sent down and refused his degree. Addison's father, Terræ filius speech

for example, had to recant his upon his knees in Convocation.

The Puritans made

an attempt to abolish the office in 1658, but it lasted out that century. The part is now played at Commemoration unofficially by any undergraduate who cares to attempt it. I may point out that what I find described in old treatises as 'Oxford manners or 'the Oxford manner' seems to have been simply a blend of humour with this unscholarly kind of wit. Steele, referring to it in the Tatler (No. 30), says, 'There is in this place [i.e. Oxford] such a true spirit of raillery and humour, that if they cannot make you a wise man they certainly will let you know you are a fool.' This manner is as extinct as the wigs and knee-breeches of the young gentlemen who used to cultivate it, so that a paragraph from a last century writer in which it is touched upon may prove of interest. Nicholas Amhurst, in his collection of essays called Terræ-filius, published in 1721, thus describes the modish undergraduate of the day taking his walks abroad:

'They have singly, for the most part, very good assurances; but when they walk together in bodies, as they often do, how impregnable are their foreheads!

1 Various anecdotes relating to holders of this office, taken from Anthony à Wood, will be found in Oxoniana, i. 104 ff.