content of the scholar's career seem to have been swallowed up in the one prevailing note of distaste and dissatisfaction and apology. Professor Gilbert Murray, who is qualified to speak for the Oxford of to-day, complains of the satiety that pervades college life, and attributes it to the very liberation of mind and the enriching of the means of personal satisfaction. "Whatever gifts Oxford may bring her children," he says, "she is apt to bring steeped in the one poison that is fatal to poetry, the poison of satiety. A spirit of satiety broods over the rich meadows and the slow streams, over streets and towers and quadrangles and playing-grounds. Do you wish for games? There they are waiting for you, laid on like water or electric light, all the games that exist. If you can think of another it shall be brought; there shall be no trouble to you in the preparing of it, and no time for your hunger to grow. Do you wish for books? There they are, old and new, in convenient libraries and magnificent bookshops, more than you can ever read or look at; so many that the sight wearies you, and suggests, not a desire to be richly gratified, but an ever-mounting and fastidious duty." This is no doubt a true account of the matter, true in a way; but going back to an earlier day, and studying the transition from the Oxford of Newman to the Oxford of Mrs. Ward, I seem to see other causes at work than that heaping up of material resources which has turned the delight of scholarship into a fastidious duty. At least one can safely say that a unique interest was lost to learning with the admission of women into Oxford's cloistered society and the banishment of God. THE END |