Vol. XIV :

Number 2

April, 1927

On a Certain Condescension to Rhodes

Scholars

BY THE EDITOR.

Would the first Review of the world have printed the niaiseries of M. Maurice Sand as a picture of society in any civilized country? But since the conductors of the "Revue" could not have published his story because it was clever, they must have thought it valuable for its truth. As true as the last-century Englishman's picture of Jean Crapaud! We do not ask to be sprinkled with rose-water, but may perhaps fairly protest against being drenched with the rinsings of an unclean imagination.—J. R. Lowell.

E are not yet ready to call The American Mercury "the first review of the world," but it has certain standards to maintain-among others a prepossession in favor of common sense and sound English. This being so, the publication of the niaiseries of Maurice Sand (Miss Mary: Récit de la Vie Américaine) in the Révue des Deux Mondes was surely no more remarkable phenomenon than the appearance of those of Mr. O. B. Andrews, Jr., concerning Rhodes Scholars in the American Mercury last February. It is surprising that Mr. Mencken should be willing to prejudice the humor of the collection of grotesque and fatuous remarks in his "Americana" by subjecting them to competition with the sustained nonsense of Mr. Andrews, who tells us, among other strange things, that "the warlocks he toasts with in his nocturnal gatherings are grappled to his soul in a bond of abuse of England," and that every Latin Quarter cellar "shelters a braying meteor of distorted verse."

The trouble with Mr. Andrews' article (which can be read with real pleasure) is chiefly stylistic. It has the symptoms which Mr. Mencken so admirably diagnosed in his book on The American Language,

though Mr. Mencken was obliged to derive his examples for that work mainly from the utterances of bucolic Senators as printed in the Congressional Record. The trouble, as with most really bad writing, arises simply from the author's resolution to make a very big splash of language with a quite imponderable pebble of thought.

When partially purged of its adjectives and the Gothic Latinity of its wording, Mr. Andrews' paper is seen to be an arraignment of what he calls "the Rhodes prodigy," whom he ends by making prodigious beyond human credence. The Rhodes Scholar-so the legend runs goes to Oxford as a self-professed member of an intellectual élite, superior to all other Americans and to all British whatsoever: "He is our cultural champion." Met by indifference, he strives to convert the English to Middle-Western ways, and is ostracized for his pains. Then "he joins the American Club and attends its conventions regularly; its mesmeric speakers and raconteurs strike a sympathetic chord in him, and he revels in the sunshine of a sweetened vanity. They impress upon him the grave importance of avoiding all suspicion of treason to the Republic; they exhort him to remember that the honor of the flag rests personally on him; they assuage his battered sensibilities and advocate a solemn unity of association for mutual moral protection. The delightful evening concludes with a great blast to either Washington, Lincoln, or Coolidge."

At vacation time he hastens to the Continent, always culpably in the company of other Rhodes Scholars and, as the writer quaintly puts it, "always painstaking lest some Anglican colleague corrupt the party. He arrives in Paris "with a premeditated propensity for worshipful delight," which naturally leads to great wickedness. So it goes till "toward the end of his last term at Oxford, by a curious twist of his secret processes, the Rhodes prodigy manifests the most appalling phenomenon of his sojourn." He awakes one morning to find himself an Anglomaniac. "For hours he sits in a window-seat above the High, watching the pageantry of youth gambol in the sunshine of late May. Every flagged walk through the miniature parked forests (sic) and every punt idling in the Isis and Cherwell holds a beauty and glamor that, regretfully, he realizes he has missed." So with "invectives and diatribes" and much other hard language the prodigious prodigy returns unwillingly to America, where "once more in the company of his gaping native brothers he points out the defects of their sacred idols, and then smashes them ruthlessly, exhibiting the glittering débris to

the astonished eyes of the high-school principal who has looked upon him as the pedagogic masterpiece of his career.'

One thing in this figment is sincere; namely, the real, and surely not extraordinary, dislike the writer feels for the image he has created in the fancied likeness of the Rhodes Scholar. How, one wonders, did he come by it? We are told only that he is a Tennesseean and was a student at Oxford last year. The last fact is supported by his ability to distinguish adequately between the periods of term and vacation, but is not otherwise evidenced-surely not by the description of the American Club (long moribund and now quite definitely dead) or of the Rhodes Scholar. There is no influence of Oxford, for good or ill, in what he writes. Nor can one very reasonably ascribe his attitude to the chagrin a candidate for a Rhodes Scholarship may feel on finding himself one of the many the Selection Committee has to reject rather than the one it appoints. If Mr. Andrews ever had a view to a Rhodes Scholarship, he must have changed his mind or been eliminated before meeting the committee of selection, for the account of these committees with which his paper closes is possibly the most totally unrecognizable thing in it.

It is the Committees of Selection, we are told, that are really responsible for the depravity and general uselessness of Rhodes Scholars. Such a committee, he says, is "composed generally of leading educational dignitaries or high public officials," and all their actions are dogged by a horrid band of vices, "prejudice and favoritism, mainly, with a liberal sprinkling of obfuscation and inferior judgment." "I have never heard a hint of bribery or attempted financial corruption," he generously concedes. Nor does he appear to have evidence that the "high officials of political and ecclesiastical station"-elsewhere further described as “decaying dignitaries”—who make up his imaginary committee are habitually guilty of murder, arson, or bigamy; but they are "blinded by shabby distinctions." They care for naught but learning and athletics. "Such traits as an attractive personality, poise, tact, and tolerance are tragically ignored in the scramble for an athletic or academic specialist." No, it is clear that Mr. Andrews never exchanged words with a real committee of selection. If he had, it is very likely that his own personality, poise, tact, and tolerance would have come memorably under discussion. And it is certain that he would have found it impossible to designate as decaying dignitaries a group of men of whom four-fifths-having themselves been Rhodes Scholars and so

at the very worst under twenty-five in 1904-must by the laws of simple arithmetic have been still reasonably far from either decay or dignity. We conclude that Mr. Andrews simply carried to Oxford with him a certain vague prejudice, unfortunately not uncommon, and a plentiful lack of knowledge, unfortunately commoner still, and that he returned with the same. This makes him more a phenomenon and less a freak, and may serve as my justification for the preceding pages.

The fact is that the small paper I have mentioned indicates the remarkable change of tactics that has taken place, on the part of those who enjoy tilting at windmills, concerning the Rhodes Scholarships. The time was when they were denounced as the invention of a Machiavelli-some said, Satan himself-for the overthrow of American institutions. Our choicest youth were to be converted into emissaries of evil who might confidently be expected, when they returned, to blow up the Statue of Liberty and embezzle the Monroe Doctrine. But these institutions being found after twenty years to be much as before, and being now somewhat less ardently admired, a certain resentment is felt, and the suspicion gets abroad that the Rhodes Scholars are a pretty inferior kind of fireworks. The feeling is human enough: it was that of the Turkish ladies of Ismail, mentioned by Byron, who upon waiting a sufficiently long time in heroic suspense after the Russians took the town were heard to wonder wherefore the atrocities did not begin. Mr. Andrews is markedly polite to Cecil Rhodes. He merely commiserates with him on the inadequate material he has to work with. The present writer recently had to answer an engaging personal inquiry from a private gentleman in New Jersey (apparently circulated in considerable number), who wished to know whether the answerer did not agree with him that the Rhodes Scholars are a quite ineffectual lot of people.

Thus condescension has in large measure taken the place of contumely; and doubtless this is a gain. Doubtless it would not greatly matter anyway, except that the continued success of the Rhodes Scholarships depends vitally upon their securing the serious attention of the best type of possible candidates in the various states; and the pose of condescension or contempt, if assumed too often by airy persons in the popular journals and other public places, works an unmerited and important injury. The inexactitudes of the condescenders are "gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” Mark, now, how a plain tale shall put them down.

The first charge is that Rhodes Scholars are an arrogant, conceited group, carrying to Oxford a sense of their superiority and an unwillingness to learn from others. If this could ever have been true, one would suppose it must have been in the early days of the foundation, when the publicity given the Scholars was far greater and the condescension far less than at present, when ignorance of the real conditions at Oxford was great among American appointees, and our innocent provincial heroes might have been expected to flatter themselves with dreams of easy conquests. I am glad that I can speak from personal knowledge of those first years between 1904 and 1907. I ask myself, Did the majority of Rhodes Scholars in that period think of themselves as an intellectual élite? Were they contemptuous of their competitors and college companions? Quite the reverse, surely, if my memory is worth anything. Consider the situation. The Rhodes Scholars came, three out of four at least, from remote and backward colleges, from institutions that quite clearly knew themselves to be second-rate and had never had the idea of putting their students into competition with those of an ancient famous University. The Scholars came also with very sensible wounds upon their vanity. The best of them had not found Responsions any child's play: it had been their first experience of the Oxford manner of brain-sifting and it left them with a more than adequate respect for what was ahead. They had read, or sought to read, the Examination Statutes on the subject of the Honour Schools, and had not been cheered by its dour intimations of omniscience. They had, moreover, been through the ordeal of selection by their state committees, and the very best of them probably was not so sure as, for the sake of his amour propre, he would have liked to be that his selection was not a fluke. Many knew that it was, that they had just matched minds, bodies, manners, character with some one who in one or perhaps all of these matters was their better. They were Rhodes Scholars dei gratia, possibly through the faulty judgment of a perplexed committee; they had a huge responsibility to their states, their colleges, their committees, themselves. Their liabilities were clear and mountainous, their assets as yet quite undetermined. They were, with very few exceptions, simply a scared, serious, diffident group. So it certainly was in 1904, and so, I have the best reasons for believing, it is still. I never look on the company of outgoing Rhodes Scholars that dine together in New York every October that I do not look on a scared, serious, diffident group.