Writing in Soliloquies in England (1922), the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, who quit Harvard and America in 1912 to wander across Europe, never returning and eventually settling in Rome, reflected on Oxford as he had observed it during the First World War:
Dons are picturesque figures. Their fussy ways and their oddities, personal and intellectual, are as becoming to them as the black feathers to the blackbird. Their minds are all gaunt pinnacles, closed gates and little hidden gardens. A mediaeval tradition survives in their notion of learning and in their manner of life… In the grander ones there may be some assimilation to the prelate, a country gentleman or a party leader; but the rank and file are modest, industrious pedagogues… The general systems to which the dons may be addicted [are] probably some revision of Christian theology, of Platonic mysticism, or of German philosophy. Such foreign doctrines do very well for the dons of successive epochs, native British philosophy not being fitted to edify the minds of the young; those vaster constructions appeal more to the imagination, and their very artificiality and ticklish architecture, like that of a house of cards, are part of their function…
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