CHAPTER IV
TRANSFORMATION OF THE PROFESSIONS
“I charge you by the law,
Whereof you are a well-deserving pillar.”
Merchant of Venice.
Sixty years ago there were three professions and two services. The two services were the Army and the Navy; the three professions were the Church, Law, and Medicine.
The Church was the natural home of the scholars: a few scholars drafted off into the Law; there were also a few in the House, where they made apt quotations from Horace, and delighted the members by giving a Virgilian turn to a debate. Nowadays—alas!—were a scholar to venture on a Latin quotation, the House would not understand.
It is pleasant to look back upon the quiet, uneventful, peaceful life of the early Victorian scholar. He began at a public school, where he needed no stimulus in the way of stripes; he devoured books; he acquired scholarship by a kind of intuition; he wrote Latin verses, in which every hexameter had a Virgilian phrase and every pentameter reminded one of Ovid; he wrote Greek Iambics more easily than the most rapid English poet ever composed blank verse; he thought in Latin; he made jokes in Greek. This boy gained, of course, a School scholarship and entered one of the Colleges of Oxford or Cambridge. Here he obtained one of the College scholarships; one of the University scholarships; all the prizes that there were for Latin and Greek compositions; and at last took the highest degree possible in Classical Honours. This done, a Fellowship was the next step. This place was worth about £300 a year, with rooms, commons, and dinner free. There were no duties attached: if he chose to take Orders and to remain unmarried he might keep his Fellowship for life. He did take Orders: he was appointed College Lecturer in Classics; he remained Lecturer for ten years, when the Tutor took a College Living; he then succeeded to the Tutorship, which was worth three or four thousand a year. He then had two courses open to him: he might remain Tutor long enough to amass a considerable fortune, and then take a College Living and retire into the country; or he might wait on, presently retire, and either finish his days as a Fellow, or be perhaps elected to the Mastership, a post both dignified and well endowed. By this time he had passed the period when men most desire to marry: he was settled in most excellent rooms; he had a free library; his habits were fixed; the College Port was renowned; he was too comfortable to run the risk of change. Therefore he stayed where he was, within the walls of the old College, and younger men took the College Livings. He never wrote anything to prove his own learning or to advance the learning of others; he produced nothing except a few Greek epigrams. And when at last he died there was for a brief period a memory of one who had been among them—a great scholar—and then oblivion closed over him and he was gone. Such was the life of the Don. Sometimes he retired from the College and took the Head Mastership of a school, but not often.
Painting by Count D’Orsay