In America, the election of studies goes by fragmentary subjects, and the degree is awarded for passing some four such subjects a year, the whole number being as disconnected, even chaotic, as the student pleases or as chance decrees. In England, the degree is granted for final proficiency in a coherent and well-balanced course of study; but within this not unreasonable limit there is the utmost freedom of election. The student first chooses what honor school he shall pursue, and then chooses the general lines along which he shall pursue it.
III
In preparing for his two "public examinations," the pupil is solely in the hands of a college tutor. Any familiar account of the Oxford don is apt to make him appear to the American, and especially to the German mind, a sufficiently humble person. His first duty is the very unprofessional one of making newcomers welcome. He invites his pupils to breakfast and to dinner, and introduces them to their fellows so that they shall enter easily into the life of the college; he tells them to go in for one or another of the various undergraduate activities. As a teacher, moreover, his position is strikingly similar to that of the venal tutors in our universities, who amiably keep lame ducks from halting, and temper the frost of the examination period to gilded grasshoppers. It is all this that makes the American scholar so apt to smile at the tutor, and the German, perhaps, to sniff. The tutor is not easily put down. If he replies with anything more than a British silence, it is to say that after all education cannot be quite dissociated from a man's life among his fellows. And then there is the best of all English reasons why the tutor should think well of his vocation: it is approved by custom and tradition. Newman, Pusey, Jowett, Pater, Stubbs, Lang, and many such were tutors, and they thought it well worth while to spend the better part of each day with their pupils.
Homely as are the primary duties of the tutor, it is none the less necessary that certain information should be imparted. The shadow of the examiners looms across the path twice in the three or four years of an undergraduate's life. There is no dodging it: in order to get a degree, certain papers must be written and well written. Here is where the real dignity of the tutor resides, the attribute that distinguishes him from all German and American teachers. He is responsible to the college that his pupils shall acquit themselves well before the examiners,—that the reputation of the college shall be maintained. By the same token, the examiners are responsible to the university that its degrees shall be justly awarded, so that the course of education in England is a struggle of tutor against examiner. In Germany and in America, an instructor is expected to be a master of his subject; he may be or may not be—and usually is not—a teacher. In England, a tutor may be a scholar, and often is not. His success is measured first and foremost by the excellence of the papers his pupils write. Is Donkin of Balliol a good tutor? Well, rather, he has got more firsts than any don in Oxford; by which is meant of course that his pupils have got the firsts. A college is rated partly by its number of blues and partly by its number of firsts. For a tutor to lead his pupils to success is as sacred a duty as for an athletic undergraduate to play for the university. The leisurely, not to say loafing, tutor of eighteenth-century tradition has been reformed out of existence. If the modern tutor fails of any high attainment as a scholar, it is mainly because he is required to be a very lively, strenuous, and efficient leader of youth.
The means by which the tutor conducts his charges in the narrow path to success in the schools are characteristic. The secret lies in gaining the good-will of the pupil. Thus any breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners that the hospitable tutor gives to his pupils while they are learning the ways of the place are bread cast upon the waters in a very literal sense. For a decent fellow to neglect the just wishes of a teacher to whom he is indebted is easy enough on occasions; but systematically to shirk a genuine debt of gratitude without losing caste with one's self requires supreme ingenuity. If you don't want to get into the clutches of your tutor, don't take the least chance of getting to like him. This is the soundest advice ever given by the wary upper classman. It has not been ordained by nature that the soul of the teacher is sib to the soul of the taught, but clearly, by exercising the humanities, the irrepressible conflict may be kept within bounds.
Sometimes harsher measures are necessary. Then a man is sent up to the Head of the college, which is not at all a promotion. One fellow used to tell a story of how Jowett, the quondam master of Balliol, chastised him. When he reported, the Master was writing, and merely paused to say: "Sit down, Mr. Barnes, you are working with Mr. Donkin, are you not?" The culprit said he was, and sat down. Jowett wrote on, page after page, while the undergraduate fidgeted. Finally Jowett looked up and remarked: "Mr. Donkin says you are not. Good-morning." After that the undergraduate was more inclined to work with Mr. Donkin.
For graver offenses a man is imprisoned within the paradise behind the college walls—"gated," the term is. One fellow I knew—a third year man who roomed out of college—was obliged to lodge in the rooms of the dean, Mr. J. L. Strachan Davidson. The two turned out excellent friends. No one could be altogether objectionable, the undergraduate explained, whose whiskey and tobacco were as good as the dean's. In extreme cases a man may be sent down, but if this happens, he must either have the most unfortunate of dispositions, or the skin of a rhinoceros against tact and kindness.
It is by similar means that the don maintains his intellectual ascendency. Nothing is more foreign to Oxford than an assumption of pedagogic authority. Mr. Hilaire Belloc, who is now not unknown in London as a man of letters, used to tell of a memorable encounter with Jowett. Mr. Belloc was holding forth in his vein of excellent enthusiasm with regard to his countrymen. For a long time Jowett listened with courteously qualified assent, but finally said: "Mr. Belloc, do you know the inscription which is said to stand above the gate to Hell?" Mr. Belloc was ready with the familiar line from Dante. "No, Mr. Belloc, Ici on parle français." The oratory of even a president of the Oxford Union broke down in laughter. Under such a system a mutual confidence increases day by day between teacher and taught, which may end in a comradeship more intimate than that between father and son.
Our universities are fast adopting the German or pseudo-German idea that an advanced education consists merely in mastering the subject one may choose to pursue. The point of departure is the "course." If we gain the acquaintance of Lowell or Longfellow, Agassiz, Child, or Norton, we have to thank our lucky stars. In England, the social relationship is the basis of the system of instruction.