ndously anxious now that Oxford should become
more democratic, but I'm equally anxious that, in proportion as she
offers more willingly the shelter of her learning to the people, the
learning she bestows shall be more than ever rigidly unpractical, as
they say."

"So you really think philosophy is directly applicable?" said Alan.

"How Socratic you are," Michael laughed. "Perhaps the Rhodes Scholars
will answer your question. I remember reading somewhere lately that it
was confidently anticipated the advent of the Rhodes Scholars would
transform a provincial university into an imperial one. That may have
been written by a Cambridge man bitterly aware of his own provincial
university. Yet a moment's reflection should have taught him that
provincialism in academic matters is possibly an advantage. Florence and
Athens were provincial. Rome and London and Oxford are metropolitan--much
more dangerously exposed to the metropolitan snares of superficiality
and of submerged personality with the corollary of vulgar display.
Neither Rome nor London nor Oxford has produced her own poets. They have
always been sung by the envious but happy provincials. Rome and London
would have treated Shelley just as Oxford did. Cambridge would have
disapproved of him, but a bourgeois dread of interference would have let
him alone. As for an imperial university, the idea is ghastly. I figure
something like the Imperial Institute filled with Colonials eating
pemmican. The Eucalyptic Vision, it might be called."

"And you'd make a distinction between imperial and metropolitan?" Alan
asked.

"Good gracious, yes. Wouldn't you distinguish between New York and
London? Imperialism is the worst qualities of the provinces gathered up
and exhibited to the world in the worst way. A metropolis takes
provincialism and skims the cream. It is a disintegrating, but for
itself a civilizing, force. A metropolis doesn't encourage creative art
by metropolitans. It ought to be engaged all the time in trying to make
the provincials appreciate what they themselves are doing."

"I think you're probably talking a good deal of rot," said Alan
severely. "And we seem to have gone a long way from my question."

"About the application of philosophy?"

Alan nodded.

"Dear man, as were I a Cantabrian provincial, I should say. Dear man!
Doesn't it make you shiver? It's like the 'Pleased to meet you,' of
Americans and Tootingians. It's so terribly and intrusively persona