ABSTRACT
The English visitor to the Continent was always surprised by the part played by students in society and in politics. They had even become the subjects of music and literature by a sort of natural right which, I rather think, has never existed in England since the time of Chaucer. The drinking songs and the tales of Heidelberg, a book like Murger's Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, have no parallel in England; and the explanation seems to be that the English universities preserved the monasticism of the Middle Ages but cut themselves off from the medieval spirit. A student tradition, one that goes back to Abelard and Villon, is not nurtured in seclusion; it depends upon poverty and mingling with the ferment of the town. This has not been in the character of any of our older universities. For us the student does not exist. We have never idolised youth. Our idol, oddly enough, has been the Public School boy, and when a Frenchman asks us for the parallel to Murger's book, we are forced to hush up the fact that Charley's Aunt is the only play about an undergraduate, and to divert his attention to the enormous importance of Tom Brown's Schooldays. Among the Anglo-Saxons it was the unsecluded Americans, rather than ourselves, who took to the Quartier Latin as ducks to water in the last twenty years.
