Part 10

In the final schools the range of choice is greater than at moderations, and is greater in some schools than in others. Literæ humaniores offers the least scope for election. The reason is that the subject-matter is a synthetic view of the classic world entire. Still, in so vast a field, a student perforce selects, laying emphasis on those aspects of the ancient world which he considers (or which he expects the examining board to consider) of most interest and importance. It has been objected even at Oxford that such a course of study gives a student little or no training in exact scholarship. The examination statutes accordingly give a choice of one among no less than forty special subjects, the original sources of which a man may thresh out anew in the hope of adding his iota to the field of science; and, on six months' notice, a student may, under approval, select a subject of his own. The unimportance of this part of the "greats" curriculum is evident in the fact that it is recommended, not required.

The history school requires the student to cover the constitutional and political history of England entire, political science and economy, with economic history, constitutional law, and political and descriptive geography. It also requires a special subject "carefully studied with reference to the original authorities," and a period of general history. If a student does not aim at a first or second class at graduation, he may omit certain parts of all this. In any case, he has to choose from the general history of the modern world one special period for a more detailed examination. In the school of natural science, the student, after filling in the broad outlines of the subject for his preliminary, must choose for his final examination one of the following seven subjects: physics, chemistry, animal physiology, zoölogy, botany, geology, and astronomy. Besides the written examination, a "practical" examination of three hours is required to show the student's ability at laboratory work. These three honor schools are the most important, and may be regarded as representative. After a man has taken one honor degree, for example, in literæ humaniores, he may take another, for example, in modern history. He then becomes a double honor man, and if he has got a first class in both schools, he is a "double first."

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

THE TUTOR

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.

IV

READING FOR EXAMINATIONS

How easy is the course of Oxford discipline on the whole is evident in the regulations as to the times for taking the examinations. The earliest date when a man may go up for moderations is his fifth term after matriculation. As there are four terms a year, this earliest date falls at the outset of his second year. For a passman there is apparently no time beyond which it is forbidden to take mods, or finals either. An honor man may repeat his attempts at mods until eight terms are gone--two full and pleasant years; that is, he may take mods in any of three terms--almost an entire year. For finals he may go up as early as his eleventh term, and as late as his sixteenth--giving a latitude of more than a year. If he wishes to take a final examination in a second subject, he may do so up to his twentieth term. Clearly, the pupil's work is done without pressure other than the personal influence of the tutor. When an American student fails to pass his examinations on the hour, he is disclassed and put on probation, the penalty of which is that he cannot play on any of the athletic teams. On this point, at least, the Oxford system of discipline is not the less childish of the two.

As to the nature of the work done, it is aptly expressed in the Oxford term, "reading." The aim is not merely to acquire facts. From week to week the tutor is apt to meet his pupils, and especially the less forward ones, in familiar conversation, often over a cup of tea and a cigarette. He listens to the report of what the pupil has lately been reading, asks questions to see how thoroughly he has comprehended it, and advises him as to what to read next. When there are several pupils present, the conference becomes general, and thus of greater advantage to all. In the discussions that arise, opposing views are balanced, phrases are struck out and fixed in mind, and the sum of the pupil's knowledge is given order and consistency. The best tutors consciously aim at such a result, for it makes all the difference between a brilliant and a dull examination paper, and the examiners highly value this difference.

The staple of tutorial instruction is lectures. In the old days the colleges were mutually exclusive units, each doing the entire work of instruction for its pupils. This arrangement was obviously wasteful, in that it presupposed a complete and adequate teaching force in each of the twenty colleges. Latterly, a system of "intercollegiate lectures" has been devised, under which a tutor lectures only on his best subjects and welcomes pupils from other colleges. These intercollegiate tutorial lectures are quite like lecture courses at an American college, except that they are not used as a means of police regulation. Attendance is not compulsory, and there are no examinations. A man issues from the walls of his college for booty, and comes back with what he thinks he can profit by.

The importance of the university examinations is thus proportionate to their rarity. The examiners are chosen from the best available members of the teaching force of the university; they are paid a very considerable salary, and the term of service is of considerable length. The preparation for the examination, at least as regards honor men, has a significance impossible under our system. Matters of fact are regarded mainly as determining whether a man shall or shall not get his degree; the class he receives--there are four classes--depends on his grasp of facts and upon the aptitude of his way of writing. No man can get either a first or a second class whose knowledge has not been assimilated into his vitals, and who has not attained in some considerable degree the art of expression in language.

One of the incidents of reading is a set of examinations set by the colleges severally. They take place three times a year, at the end of each term, and are called collections--apparently from the fact that at this time certain college fees used to be collected from the students. The papers are set by the dons, and as is the case with all tutorial exercises, the results have nothing at all to do with the class a man receives in the public examinations--mods and finals. I was surprised to find that it was rather the rule to crib; and my inquiries disclosed a very characteristic state of affairs. One man, who was as honorable in all respects as most fellows, related how he had been caught cribbing. His tutor took the crib and examined it carefully. "Quite right," he said. "In fact, excellent. Don't be at any pains to conceal it. By the finals, of course, you will have to carry all these things in your head; at present, all we want to know is how well you can write an examination paper." The emphasis as to the necessity of knowing how to write was quite as genuine as the sarcasm. These examinations have a further interest to Americans. They are probably a debased survival of examinations which in centuries past were a police regulation to test a student's diligence, and thus had some such relation to a degree as our hour examinations, midyears, and finals. In other words, they suggest a future utility for our present midyears and finals, if ever a genuine honor examination is made requisite for an American honor degree.

For the greater part of his course, an undergraduate's reading is by no means portentous. It was Dr. Johnson, if I am not mistaken, whose aim was "five good hours a day." At Oxford, this is the maximum which even a solid reading man requires of himself. During term time most men do much less, for here is another of the endlessly diverting Oxford paradoxes: passman and classman alike aim to do most of their reading in vacations. As usual, a kernel of common sense may be found. If the climate of England is as little favorable to a strenuous intellectual life as it is to strenuous athleticisms, the climate of Oxford is the climate of England to the _n_th power. A man's intellectual machinery works better at home in the country. And even as the necessity of relaxation is greater at Oxford, so is the chance of having fun and of making good friends--of growing used to the ways of the world of men. The months at the university are the heyday of life. The home friends and the home sports are the same yesterday and forever. The university clearly recognizes all this. It rigidly requires a man to reside at Oxford a certain definite time before graduation; but how and when he studies and is examined, it leaves to his own free choice. A man reads enough at Oxford to keep in the current of tutorial instruction, and to get on the trail of the books to be wrestled with in vacation.

V

THE EXAMINATION

When mods and finals approach, the tune is altered. Weeks and months together the fellows dig and dig, morning, noon, and night. All sport and recreation is now regarded only as sustaining the vital forces for the ordeal. Sometimes, in despair at the distractions of Oxford life, knots of fellow sufferers form reading parties, gain permission to take a house together in the country, and draw up a code of terrible penalties against the man who suggests a turn at whist, the forbidden cup, or a trip to town. From the simplest tutorial cram-book to the profoundest available monograph, no page is left unturned. And this is only half. The motto of Squeers is altered. When a man knows a thing, he goes and writes it. Passages apt for quotation are learned by rote; phrases are polished until they are luminous; periods are premeditated; paragraphs and sections prevised. An apt epigram turns up in talk or in reading--the wary student jots it down, polishes it to a point, and keeps it in ambush to dart it at this or that possible question. One man I knew was electrified with Chaucer's description of the Sergeant of the Law,--

No wher so bisy a man as he ther nas, And yet he semed bisier than he was;--

and fell into despair because he could not think of any historical personage in his subject-matter to whom it might aptly apply. On the other hand, there was Alfred the Great, whose character was sure to be asked for. Did I know any line of Chaucer that would hit off Alfred the Great? So unusual to quote Chaucer.

All this sort of thing has, of course, its limits. In the last days of preparation, the brains are few that do not reel under their weight of sudden knowledge; the minds are rare that are not dazzled by their own unaccustomed brilliance. The superlatively trained athlete knocks off for a day or two before an important contest--and perhaps has a dash at the flesh-pots by way of relaxing tension from the snapping point. So does the over-read examinee. He goes home to his sisters and his aunts, and to all the soothing wholesomeness of English country life.

And then that terrible week of incessant examinations! All the facts and any degree of style will fail to save a man unless he has every resource ready at command. No athletic contest, perhaps no battle, could be a severer test of courage. Life does not depend upon the examination, but a living may. In America, degrees are more and more despised; but in England, it still pays to disarrange the alphabet at the end of one's name, or to let it be known to a prospective employer that one is a first-class honor man. The nature of the young graduate's employment and his salary too have a pretty close correspondence with his class at graduation. If he can add a blue to a first, the world is his oyster. The magnitude of the issue makes the examinee--or breaks him. Brilliant and laborious students too often come off with a bare third, and happy audacity has as often brought the careless a first. It may seem that the ordeal is unnecessarily severe; but even here the reason may be found, if it be only granted that the aim of a university is to turn out capable men. The honor examination requires some knowledge, more address, and most of all pluck--pluck or be plucked, as the Cambridge phrase is; and these things in this order are what count in the life of the British Empire.

VI

OXFORD QUALITIES AND THEIR DEFECTS

Under the German-American system, the main end is scholarly training. Our graduates are apt to have the Socratic virtue of knowing how little they know--and perhaps not much besides. Even for the scholar this knowledge is not all. Though the English undergraduate is not taught to read manuscripts and decipher inscriptions--to trace out knowledge in its sources--the examination system gives him the breadth of view and mental grasp which are the only safe foundations of scholarship. If he contributes to science, he usually does so after he has left the university. The qualities which then distinguish him are rare among scholars--sound common sense and catholicity of judgment. Such qualities, for instance, enabled an Oxford classical first to recognize Schliemann's greatness while yet the German universities could only see that he was not an orthodox researcher according to their standards. If a man were bent on obtaining the best possible scholarly training, he probably could not do better than to take an English B. A. and then a German or an American Ph.D. As for the world of deeds and of men, the knowledge which is power is that which is combined with address and pluck; and the English system seems based on practical sense, in that it lays chief stress on producing this rare combination.

To attribute to the honor schools the success with which Englishmen have solved the problems of civic government and colonial administration would be to ignore a multitude of contributory causes; but the honor schools are highly characteristic of the English system, and are responsible for no small part of its success. A striking illustration of this may be seen in the part which the periodical press plays in public affairs. In America, nothing is rarer than a writer who combines broad information with the power of clear and convincing expression. The editor of any serious American publication will bear me out in the observation that, notwithstanding the multitude of topics of the deepest and most vital interest, it is difficult to find any one to treat them adequately; and any reader can satisfy himself on this point by comparing the best of our periodicals with the leading English reviews. Now the writing of a review article requires nothing more nor less than the writing of a first-class examination paper, even to the element of pluck; for to marshal the full forces of the mind in the pressure of public life or of journalism requires self-command in a very high degree. The same thing is as obvious in the daily papers. The world is filled with English newspaper men who combine with reportorial training the power of treating a subject briefly and tellingly in its broadest relations.

The public advantage of this was not long ago very aptly exemplified. When our late war suddenly brought us face to face with the fact that our national destiny had encountered the destinies of the great nations of the world, the most thoughtful people were those who felt most doubt and uncertainty; the more one considered, the less could one say just what he thought. At that crisis a very clear note was sounded. The London correspondents of our papers--Englishmen, and for the most part honor men--presented the issue to us from British and imperialistic point of view with a vigor and conviction that had immediate effect, as we all remember, and gave the larger part of the nation a new view of the crisis, and a new name for it. It was not until weeks later that our own most thoughtful writers as a body perceived the essential difference between our position and that of Great Britain, and we have scarcely yet discarded the word "imperialism." The knowledge, address, and pluck--or shall we call it audacity?--of the English correspondents enabled them to make a stroke of state policy. This is only one of many citable instances.