IN EXETER COLLEGE CHAPEL. Drawn by E. Stamp.
It is always pleasant, too, to be wiser than one's erstwhile pastors and masters. The pupil goes out into the great world; the teacher remains behind, and continues apparently to go on in his old and crusted errors. Outwardly the Universities do not change much, and it is easy to assume that the habits and ideas of their denizens do not change either. Thus it is that the young men of the 'National Observer,' coming back from a Saturday-to-Monday visit to a university which they never respected and are now entitled to despise, are moved to declare to the world the complete inutility of what they call the Futile Don. 'He is dead,' they say, 'quite dead;' and if he is, might not the poor relic of mortality be allowed in mere charity to lie peacefully entombed in his collegiate cloisters? Yet, after all, it is only among the great Anglo-Saxon race that the profession of teaching is without honour; and even among us it may be allowed that it is a mode of earning a pittance as decent and comparatively innocuous as another. We cannot, all of us, taste the fierce joys of writing for the daily or weekly press, and the barrister's 'crowded hours of glorious life' in the law courts would be more overcrowded than ever were not a few fainéants suffered to moulder in the retirement of a university. Seriously, it was all very well for the young lions of the Press to denounce the torpor of Dons in the bad old days when colleges were close corporations--when Fellows inherited their bloated revenues without competition, and simply because they happened to be born in a particular corner of some rural district. But now that nearly every First-class man has the chance of election and would be a Fellow if he could, one is tempted to recall the ancient fable of the sour grapes. Or at least the esprits forts whom the University has reluctantly driven out into the great world might be grateful to her for saving them in spite of themselves from an existence of futile incapacity.
Probably as long as colleges exist in something like their present form--until the People takes a short way with them, abolishes common rooms and the Long Vacation, and pays college tutors by a system of 'results fees'--these things will continue to be said. Deans and Senior Tutors will never escape the stigma of torpor or incapacity. That quite respectable rhymester, Mr. Robert Montgomery (who, had he not been unlucky enough to cross the path of Lord Macaulay, might have lived and died and been forgotten as the author of metrical works not worse than many that have escaped the lash), has left to the world a long poem--of which the sentiments are always, and the rhymes usually, correct--entitled 'Oxford.' He has taken all Oxford life for his subject, Dons included; and this is how he describes the fate of College Tutors:--
'The dunce, the drone, the freshman or the fool,
'Tis theirs to counsel, teach, o'erawe, and rule!
Their only meed--some execrating word
To blight the hour when first their voice was heard.'
To a certain extent this is true in all ages. But there are worse things than mere sloth: this is not the measure of the crimes charged against college authorities. They--even such contemptible beings as they--are said to have the audacity to neglect untitled merit, and to truckle to the aristocracy. Every one knows Thackeray's terrible indictment of University snobs: Crump, the pompous dignitary (who, to do him justice, seriously thinks himself greater than the Czar of All the Russias), and Hugby, the tutor grovelling before the lordling who has played him a practical joke. Every one remembers how even the late Laureate gibbeted his Dons--how
'One
Discussed his tutor, rough to common men.
But honeying at the whisper of a lord:
And one the Master, as a rogue in grain,
Veneer'd with sanctimonious theory.'
No doubt Universities are not immaculate. There have been Tartuffes and tuft-hunters there, as in the great world. No doubt, too, it was very wrong to allow noblemen to wear badges of their rank, and take their degrees without examination (although the crime was a lesser one in the days before class-lists were, when even the untitled commoner became a Bachelor by dark and disreputable methods); but these things are not done any more. At this day there are probably few places where a title is less regarded than at Oxford or Cambridge. It is true that rumour asserts the existence of certain circles where, ceteris paribus, the virtuous proprietor of wealth and a handle to his name is welcomed with more effusion than the equally respectable, but less fortunate, holder of an eleemosynary exhibition. But, after all, even external Society, which regards tuft-hunting with just displeasure, does--it is said--continue to maintain these invidious distinctions when it is sending out invitations to dinner. The fact is that there are a great many peccadilloes in London which become crimes at the University.
Satire, however, does not confine itself to Dons: undergraduates come in for a share of it too, though in a different way. When the novelist condescends to depict the Fellow of a college, it is usually as a person more or less feeble, futile, and generally manqué. The Don can never be a hero, but neither is he qualified to play the part of villain; his virtues and his vices are all alike inadequate. If he is bad, his badness is rarely more than contemptible; if he is good, it is in a negative and passionless way, and the great rewards of life are, as a rule, considered as being out of his reach. But with the undergraduate the case is different. He--as we have said--is always in extremes: literature gives him the premier rôle either as hero or villain; but it is as the villain that he is the most interesting and picturesque. Satire and fiction generally describe him as an adept in vicious habits. So sings Mr. Robert Montgomery, with admirable propriety:--
'In Oxford see the Reprobate appear!
Big with the promise of a mad career:
With cash and consequence to lead the way,
A fool by night and more than fop by day!'