Chapter VI: Part 6

These remarks open up the whole question of education and intellectual culture in Greece—a vista far too wide for our detailed survey on the present occasion; but we must add a few remarks by way of necessary correction. We have met persons to whom the university of Athens was as much “a myth” as any of those nebulous allegories into which German scepticism weens that it has dissipated the solid traditions of an old Attic Theseus, and other classical monarchs. But the testimony of our traveller here is most decided to the point, that the university of Athens is an existing fact, and one of the most real and significant in the whole history of the restored nationality of this remarkable people. All persons who have lived even for a short period in familiar converse with the Greek people, have felt that, in a remarkable degree, they have retained that quickness of intellectual perception, that eagerness for knowledge, which was so characteristic of their ancestors. It is well known, also, to persons who have looked into the recent history of this people, that the political revolution, by which they threw off the yoke of Turkish oppression, was preceded by an intellectual revolution which taught them to shake off the night of Turkish ignorance; and Corais is, in fact, a name not less mighty in the history of Greek liberty than Miaulis or Mavrocordato. Under these circumstances, that education should have been a main concern with the new Greek government was just what was to have been expected. To have shown indifference in such a matter would have argued a complete blindness to the finest capabilities of the materials under hand. Nor has Bavarian Otho, so far as we can see, laid himself open to any charge of neglect on this score. Mr Hettner, in the strictures which he pays in the above passage, proceeds, we are afraid, on a very insufficient basis of facts, and is also vulnerable in point of logic. It is far from being true, as he says, that a people must be educated from below upwards. The upper classes are everywhere more open to educational influences than the lower; and in semi-barbarous countries, such as Greece and Russia, it is a necessity which cannot be avoided, that the elements of intellectual culture shall, in the first place, be imported from the more advanced surrounding nations; and the importers of such merchandise must be the upper classes. To enable them to appropriate, elaborate, and assimilate the materials thus thrown in upon them, a university is the natural and most convenient, if not the absolutely indispensable instrument. How, it may be asked, is the state to obtain well-informed statesmen, lawyers, theologians, physicians, and teachers, without a university? Surely the judge must be made wise before the attorney, and the parish priest rather than the parishioner. A peasant may hew wood and draw water without learning, but scarcely will a gospel text be well expounded, or a surgeon’s cut dexterously performed. There appears to us, therefore, nothing blameworthy in a government of a new country erecting a university first, and parish schools afterwards. But the facts with regard to elementary education in Greece are by no means such as our German reporter represents. It may be quite true that the educational law of the Greek kingdom, according to which there should be a primary school in every δημος or _commune_, has not yet been everywhere carried out; it may be true, also, considering the immense extent of desolate districts in Greece, that some of the miserable ill-peopled villages that compose a district are at very inconvenient distances from the δημος where their school is situated; but this is only a hardship arising out of the general state of poverty in which the whole country lies, to which familiar analogies are at hand in the ecclesiastical condition of many of our own Highland parishes. And with regard to the general state of education among the lower orders of Greece, the writer can state, from personal observation, that it is by no means suffering generally from any such neglect as Mr Hettner imputes to the present government. During a tour of several weeks in continental Greece, the present writer was constantly in the habit of conversing with the peasant boys, as a sort of pleasant amusement after the fatigues of equestrian travel in the hot days of June; and as the conversation, however it might start, often ended with schooling and school-books, he had frequent opportunities of observing, not only the remarkable quickness of their juvenile Hellenic wit, but the general prevalence of a fair school-training among the rising generation. The subjects with which they seemed most conversant, and on which they always produced three well-thumbed school-books, were Greek history, Scripture history, and general geography. They very often also produced a Romaic New Testament; and there seemed to be not the least shyness (as there might be in Italy) of exhibiting a familiarity with its contents. The New Testament, indeed, in the Greek Church, does not seem to be a forbidden book at all. A certain class of priests, no doubt, with Oeconomus at their head, will look with shyness on the preachings of Protestant missionaries, and exhibit more or less of that tendency to monopolise the Scriptures in the hands of self-authorised interpreters, which is so characteristic of Popery; but in general the Greeks seem to entertain no suspicion that there is anything in the Scriptures contrary to their “orthodox faith;” and a jealous sacerdotal tyranny never was established in the East during the middle ages, and is not at all likely to be carried through now.[17]

As little of kindly or reasonable criticism do we find in Herr Hettner’s remarks on the influence of French literature on the living Greek mind, and on the existing literature of Greece generally. From the very nature of the case, as we have already said, the literature of Greece must, for a considerable period, be a literature of appropriation; and as the French language, for obvious reasons, happens to be the most generally known among the educated classes in that part of the world, it is as necessary that those who are in search of amusement should read French novels, as that those who are in search of strange philological erudition among ourselves should go to Germany. What our author means by his remark, that it is “a quite fruitless and premature endeavour in the Greeks to attempt the founding of a modern Greek literature,” it were hard to say. No literature, in the highest sense, can be founded till God sends forth original genius to found it; and it is true also that, except upon the basis of a certain degree of material prosperity, that extent of luxurious intellectual culture which we call a national literature cannot be expected to rise; but in the mean time, till the conditions favourable to such a higher development shall arise, the Greeks are busying themselves, and have been busying themselves since the time of Corais and Righas, mainly in appropriating whatever their need most loudly calls for, not only from French, but to a great extent also from German, Italian, and English sources; while, at the same time, they have not been averse to give whatever nurture was possible to the first germ and tender blade of an original and truly Hellenic modern literature. Into the details of this matter our limits do not allow us to enter; but were the purification of their language the only fruit which the renewed activity of the liberated Greek mind had produced, it would have deserved a more kindly mention than the cold sympathy of Mr Hettner allows. Those who know to what a state centuries of neglect and abuse had brought the fine language of Homer and Plato, will at once perceive the great public service performed by that band of patriotic translators and original writers who have, in the course of two generations, made Greek—pure Greek—a second time the grand organ of a national culture and a popular regeneration.[18]

A glimpse into the Greek Church, as it exists at Athens, will now gratify the just curiosity of many of our readers. Take the following graphic account of the celebration of Easter:—

“_10th April._

“All is gaiety here to-day. It is Easter week, and Easter is the
principal festival of the Greek Church. Athens presents at this season
a remarkable appearance. The Greeks observe the fasts with great
strictness, therefore they indemnify themselves on Easter morning by
an exhibition of license, in which the paschal lamb performs the
principal part. I was told as a fact, that at Easter, in Athens alone,
from twelve to fifteen thousand, and throughout Greece more than two
hundred thousand, lambs and sheep are slaughtered and eaten. The
country people out of every part of Attica keep driving their flocks
into the city the whole week. The city of the goddess of wisdom is now
full of nothing but bleating lambs.

“When the Greek carries home his lamb, he slings it round his neck,
holding it by the feet crossed over his breast. This is to be seen
with us also; but the sight is especially attractive here, for it was
in this manner the ancients represent Hermes as the guardian and
multiplier of the flocks. So stood the statue of Hermes at Olympia,
Oechalia, and Tanagra. Small marble statues of this kind have even
come down to us, one of which is to be seen in the Pembroke collection
at Wilton House; another, a smaller one, here in the Stoa of Hadrian.
This representation, however, appears most frequently in the oldest
works of Christian art, in which the laden Hermes is turned into a
laden Christ, who often called himself the Good Shepherd, and
expressly says in the Gospel of St Luke, that when the shepherd finds
the sheep, he lays it joyfully on his shoulders.

“In Easter week a fair is also held, and much skill displayed in
decking out the wares. Candles are the chief article of trade; for no
Greek, on this occasion, enters a church without bearing in his hand a
candle or taper. These candles are mostly painted in variegated
colours, and prettily disposed in the booths according to their
different colours—some alike, others in direct contrast. The Greek
people are still sticking fast in old heathen customs and ways of
thinking. These booths, and the greater number of the shops also, are
decked out with all sorts of pictures and images on which the
possessors can lay their hands. They display images of the saints,
pictures of the battles of the Liberation War, portraits of Napoleon
and Frederick the Great, and, not unfrequently, even modern French
pictures of equivocal meaning, coloured and lithographed, all mixed up
together without any attempt at order. Round these pictures hang lamps
and candles, many of them adorned with gold tinsel and stripes of
coloured paper, often artistically twisted together to represent
chandeliers. In the midst of all this lumber stands a huge image of
Christ or of the Virgin; and the object of this is manifest. In true
heathen fashion, Christ and the Virgin are supposed to be really
present in their images, and enjoying the sight of these motley
groups, and lights are placed there that they may see them the better.
How rude and childish all this seems, and yet how entirely
corresponding to the most ancient image-worship!

“The remains of this ancient heathen tendency were especially evident
in the solemnities of Good Friday, at least in the evening, for during
the day the celebration was uniform enough. Morning and afternoon
divine service. The whole church streamed with lights, for every one
held piously a taper in his hand. In the centre of the church lay,
under a high canopy, a wax figure of the dead body of Christ. Every
one, without distinction of sex, age, or rank, approached this figure,
and fervently kissed it. There was not a moment of quiet or repose,
but a constant moving to and fro of the restless multitude. Added to
this, the constant singing of a frightfully monotonous, mournful
liturgy, in the usual nasal tone. Late in the evening the solemnity
suddenly assumed a more imposing form. The canopy, with the figure of
Christ tastefully adorned with flowers, was borne through the streets,
priests and people, men and women, devoutly following, torch in
hand—the procession flowing on like a moving sea of lights. A peculiar
melancholy lay was sung, now in a low mournful tone, now breaking out
into loud bursts of grief. This dirge is for the dead Christ, who is
solemnly borne to the grave. The procession lasts for more than an
hour, when at length the image is again set down in the church, and
the former dirges and liturgies resound anew, only in a still more
mournful and inconsolable tone.

“I know not whether I am correct, yet I cannot help expressing what I
felt, that this nocturnal funeral procession involuntarily reminded me
of those grand processions by torchlight in the times of the ancient
Athenians, made to Eleusis at the great Eleusinian festival. The
ancient Greek origin of this peculiar celebration of Good Friday seems
the more evident to me, as I never witnessed in Rome, on the same
occasion, any public procession of a similar nature, at least not in
the streets, or accompanied by the whole of the people. The procession
in the Vatican on Good Friday, when the body of Christ is borne from
the Sistine chapel into that of St Paul, lasts but a few minutes, and
is only a piece of priestly pageantry, confined to the Pope and the
cardinals.

“It is not difficult, however, to imagine how the same feelings and
solemnities which marked the Eleusinian mysteries should have crept
imperceptibly into the Christian services of Easter. The Eleusinian
mysteries celebrate the grief of Demeter for the loss of her daughter
Proserpine, who was stolen away by Pluto; and then comes loud
rejoicing when this daughter issues forth again from the darkness of
the infernal regions, and unites with the joy-dispensing wine-god in
imparting to man the blessings of their mysteries. In the celebration
of the Christian festival of Easter there is the same display of
opposing emotions, the quick transition from grief to joy, from loss
to restoration, from the interment to the resurrection. New gods have
arisen, but the old worship is the same. As the ancient Greeks fasted
and prayed and did penance while Proserpine remained in the lower
world, so do the Greeks of Christendom fast and pray and do penance
for the death of the Saviour. And just as in the Eleusinian mysteries,
after these days of bitter mourning, there was the most extravagant
rejoicing over the return of Proserpine, drinking, and dancing, when
all

‘Beat the ground with violent foot—
For the unreined joy-intoxicated
Wanton celebration!
Each one danced the gracious,
Thrice graceful, and thrice holy
Mystical measure;’

so does now the Christian Greek pass at once from the rigid fasting of
Passion Week to the most unbridled license. The moment the bishop at
the midnight hour on Easter eve gives utterance to the much-longed-for
words, ‘Christ is risen; yea, He is risen indeed!’ loud rejoicings are
heard from all quarters, shrill screaming and shouting, constant
shooting, and throwing of rockets, roasting and eating the lamb, and
drinking unmixed wine. The first day of Easter is the only day on
which the Greek drinks except for thirst; so uniformly temperate is
he, indeed, that he detests nothing more than to see the German
stranger swaggering along, without shame, drunk in the open streets.”

All this is very characteristic and interesting enough, considering how little is generally known in this country of the Greek Church; it is sad, however, to think that the facts here given present so little essentially different from that continental Rome with which we are so familiar, and so much of the outward and sensuous trickery of what our author recognises as mere heathenism. The low state of the Greek Church, indeed, will be most readily appreciated from the fact, that while the recitation of long prayers and litanies is going on diligently in a thousand churches and chapels every morning, it is the rarest chance in the world to find a Sunday or holiday when, even at Athens, such a thing as a sermon or Christian address of any kind is delivered to the people. This circumstance, which may be easily verified on the spot, is a plain proof that the ceremonial element in the Greek service has altogether overshadowed and almost absorbed the intellectual and moral: in other words, that an element characteristic of pure heathenism has been transplanted into the Christian soil, and allowed to grow to such luxuriance that the native vegetation, characteristic of Christianity, has almost entirely disappeared; for we never can forget that it was by the “foolishness of preaching,” and not by the nasal drone of drowsy litanies, that St Paul confounded the Epicurean philosophers on the Hill of Mars, and made the famous image of Diana of the Ephesians tremble in its silver shrine. A Christian church without preaching, is a Christian church without intelligence; and such a church cannot exist with any propriety in an age which prides itself in the general diffusion of knowledge, and among a people of whose character intellectual quickness has always been a more prominent trait than moral probity. Of all this, well-educated men in Greece—and of these there is no lack—are sufficiently aware. But over and above the fact that all churches are apt to display a remarkable obduracy in the matter of reform, in the case of the Greek Church an additional difficulty arises from patriotic and political considerations. In Greece, not only the devout believer, but the intelligent Greek who is not devout, is well aware that his Church is to the Greek, more than to any other people in Europe, the great bond of his nationality. It was within the bosom of this Church that freedom of mind, and of speech also, to a considerable extent, was preserved at Byzantium, in an age when the tyrannous spirit of imperial centralisation had choked every other utterance of individual life. It was the traditions, the service, and, to some extent also, the learning of the Greek clergy, which preserved the Greek language an inestimable heirloom to the Greek people during a long course of centuries, when Slavonic barbarism, Turkish bigotry, and Turkish oppression, successively threatened its extinction. It was, finally, a primate of the Greek Church, Germanós, the Archbishop of Patras, that in 1821 first planted the standard of independence among the mountain-peaks of the Northern Morea. Under these circumstances it is easy enough to understand how a certain amiable piety prevents the religious Greek from wishing to disturb his patriotic Mother Church with innovations, which, however plausible in their outset, might end in breaking up the unity of that venerable religious corporation which has hitherto kept together his disintegrated and scattered nationality. And if such considerations operate strongly with the devout Greek, the mere politician will, of course, feel them more strongly. To him the Church, even in its purest state, is only a convenient moral police; and an unreformed church which keeps a people together, is, as a political instrument, more valuable than a reformed church which disunites them. We see no likelihood, therefore, at the present moment, of any reform in the Greek Church, such as pious Protestant writers have hoped for. The political interest, not the religious, is at present the dominant power in the Greek mind. A single sentence from Lord Palmerston or Lord Aberdeen, pointing towards a division of Turkey, and a restoration of the Greek empire at Constantinople, would stir the whole nation much more deeply than did a late notable ecclesiastical pamphlet by Pharmacides, one of their most talented theologians. The painted candles and the gilt tinsel, the roasted lamb and the cracks of gunpowder, and, above all abominations, that inhuman nasal drone with which they chant their service, are likely to remain in the Greek ecclesiastical world a long season after the Greeks themselves have by a great majority voted them gone. Alas for poor humanity! So it happens in other churches also sometimes. The living are condemned to walk the streets with a dead corpse on their backs, and must call it an ornament.

In concluding these hasty notices of the present condition of so famous a city, may we be allowed to express a hope that the pedantic habits fostered by our schools and universities, of considering modern Greece and modern Greeks as things with which scholars have nothing to do, may forthwith be given up. Greece and the Greeks are no longer what they were under the Turks—very different, as we have seen, in some respects, from what they were when visited by Wordsworth. Like Pompeii, which slumbered for centuries within the ashes of Vesuvius, and then came to light suddenly one of these modern days, to astonish us with the resurrection of a lost people, and a forgotten epoch; so a Greek people and a Greek language have certainly risen from the dead since the commencement of this century, and their living presence cannot be ignored. We should advise our academical men, unless they are ambitious of imitating the obdurate conservatism of the Greek Church, to throw off at once the capricious pronunciation of the Greek language, which was imposed on Europe by the pleasant conceit of Erasmus, and take up again that living tradition of the Byzantine elders, from which Erasmus himself, and all our great early scholars, drew their inspiration. They will thus not only do a thing reasonable and scholarly in itself, but resume at once that direct connection with the living Greek language which the present bastard pronunciation renders on our part so difficult. In Europe the railways and steamboats, as we constantly hear, have annihilated space and time; and a scholarly trip to the Acropolis is neither so difficult nor so expensive an affair now as it was thirty years ago. Athens, no doubt, is a bad school for quantity; but there are many things in Greek as important as long and short syllables; and some very important things certainly there are which a scholar may learn in Athens, not so readily to be picked up at Oxford or Cambridge. We hope the day is not far distant when it will be considered as natural for a scholar to take part of his Greek education in Greece, as for a sculptor to drink in beauty from the marble treasures of the Vatican and the Capitol; and when no philologist will consider himself properly qualified for his work, who has not heard Greek lectures under the shadow of Lycabettus, and made classic vows at the tombs of Otfried Mueller on Colonus.

A FEW MORE WORDS ON UNIVERSITY REFORM.

The long vacation is over, and the streets of Oxford have once more resumed their sombre gaiety. Dons in the dignity of long tassels, and freshmen in that _bizarre_ conjunction of all varieties of snuff-coloured coats and short black gowns, which seems at present to embody the undergraduate sense of the beautiful, meet in mid High Street—each regarding the other with a mild astonishment, and a benevolent consciousness of superiority. Term has begun; and it is generally believed that those reverend seniors, whom by a pleasant euphemism we in Oxford call the “Heads of Houses,” are hard at work making arrangements, with the fear of Lord John before their eyes, to set those houses in order; or to see what sop they can afford to throw to that seven-headed Cerberus, which, under the name of “Her Majesty’s Commission,” is barking at their gates. There has been a long foreboding lull; but surely there are throes in the Alma Mater’s womb; “_parturiunt Collegia_”—we trust the rest of the quotation would ill apply; though no doubt many a young tutor has come up with a plan of University Reform ripe for production, the result of three months’ sea-side gestation during the “long.” “What are you going to do at Oxford?” has been a question oftener asked than answered during these summer holidays. Indeed, what answer there has been was too often to this effect, “Probably nothing.” Too probably; and yet, not only the Home Secretary, but the public, are expecting something. It is of little avail now to question the legality or the expediency of the Royal Commission; whether we like it or not, it is now a great fact—like the repeal of the Corn Laws, or the cholera. And, whether or not the authorities of the University may please to recognise it, the public, who have an interest in these great public institutions, must recognise it, and have a right to a voice in the question. If we are to have, as we must have, University Reform, let us have it of the right quality; and in order to this it must come from the right hands. It must not be the amateur performance of clever theorists, but the mature result of practical experience, aided by calm and dispassionate inquiry. This we have not had, and for this it is that we are waiting. Oxford _must_ set herself to the task; her best and truest sons must wrest, as they may easily, the ill-grasped weapon from the enemy’s hand, and turn it to their own defence. No purism of consistency, no fear of touching the unclean thing, must deter them from the task. The skilful pilot does not refuse to take the helm because he alone foresaw the danger, and would not have put to sea. It may seem very grand and heroic for the Senate of Oxford to sit still in their seats of office, though the enemy is within their walls, scorning to recognise his presence; but in their case none will mistake the reverend conclave for divinities, and their fall will be at the best but a caricature of the Romans. We live in an age of compromise, as Home Secretaries and Chancellors of Exchequer can amply testify: it may not be dignified, but it is practically convenient; no man makes a martyr of himself nowadays for a theory; he “accepts the position;” he eats and gives thanks. And in this temper of our times, undignified as it is, may lie the salvation of Oxford. Already one result of it has been, that the Government before which the report of her Majesty’s Commissioners now lies, is of quite another composition than that under which it issued; and however Oxford may still be disposed to question the jurisdiction of the court, and the legality of their warrant, she has no longer any cause, on the whole, to challenge the jury. She has, at all events, such privileges as we consider sufficient justice to foreigners; half aliens, half fellow-citizens, may be no unfair panel. Heaven send her a good deliverance!

We have said before, that the Commissioners’ report can scarcely be satisfactory to any one but the authors; it is wonderful, and, as the charity-boy said, somewhat disappointing, to go through so much, and learn so little. Engrossed, as it would seem, almost exclusively by the one grand panacea for all University discords—the professoriate idea—they have either altogether overlooked, or very slightly touched upon, defects and abuses which every honest member of the University had long since groaned over in secret—of which many had complained aloud. It seems as if the clever gentlemen to whom her Majesty sent greeting, impressed with an awful sense of duties as arduous as they were unusual, had felt themselves excused from noticing facts that were obvious to meaner eyes, and that “knowledge, ability, and discretion” so egregious as theirs, could only fitly be employed in grand conceptions and comprehensive theories of regeneration. The words of their Commission, to ordinary ears, conveyed only powers and instructions to “inquire into and report upon the state, discipline, studies, and revenues of the University;” but they, by an inspiration peculiar, perhaps, to commissioners, as all the moral and intellectual virtues are, we now know, to professors, interpreted these words in a transcendental sense, or rather, perhaps, read them by a cipher supplied from Downing Street. Still these words stand, in their innocent simplicity, on the outside of the Blue-book; but on opening it we find what has been sarcastically, but quite as reasonably, called “suggestions for the constitution of _a_ University.”[19] That it would have no longer been _the_ University upon which they were commissioned to report, was in their eyes, perhaps, of little consequence. It is possible that their Report, if less original, might have been more practical, had they but contented themselves with humbler aims. Nay, the very witnesses themselves seem to have been infected by the important presence in which they stood, and with few exceptions to have rather aimed at remodelling everything according to an ideal standard of their own, than to be willing to address themselves to the real defects and anomalies of the existing system. There are abuses on which the most careless undergraduate could have borne important testimony, and which every honest tutor will confess with pain, on which this Report evinces either the strangest insensibility, or the most perverse conservatism.

First and most prominent, as regards the studies of the place, stands the crying evil, which might almost have claimed a Commission to itself,—that the real work of the University is done by private tutors. How tenderly and delicately the Commissioners deal with this—which we are surely not singular in considering a gigantic anomaly—may be seen by those who have the patience to read page 89 of their production. Fondly placing in the foreground, in the ardent words of Mr Lowe—himself an able and successful private tutor—the “manifold advantages” of the system, they touch lightly on its defects, and faintly hint at partial remedies. Admitting that “the amount paid for private tuition by many individuals far exceeds that which is paid for college tuition”—(it would, we believe, have been nearer the truth to say that the sum paid annually for the former more than doubles the college charges for the latter)—they congratulate themselves upon the fact, that the practice is less general at Oxford that at Cambridge. But when they tell us, as a serious piece of information, the result of six months’ laborious inquiry, the product of seven printed papers of questions, and the combined evidence of “the great majority of PROFESSORS” and “persons of note” (p. 1), that “of late years many candidates for an ordinary degree have had recourse to assistance from private tutors,” we feel that the veriest freshman—supposing freshmen ever to read Blue-books—must laugh in the face of her Majesty’s Commissioners. “Many candidates for an ordinary degree.” Indeed! Why, two men out of three, in some colleges, who are going up even for “little-go,” “have recourse,” &c. &c.; or, in the less Johnsonian language of undergraduates, “take a coach.” If the Commissioners did not know this, they are pretty nearly the only Oxford men who do not know it. We may indeed plead in their excuse that the “persons of note,” who have been evidently their favourite witnesses, have themselves found this branch of instruction both lucrative and honourable; and besides the natural and amiable tendency in all minds to be somewhat partial judges of those employments in which we have spent the best, the busiest, and, therefore, not the least happy years of life, there is another consideration which, however unwillingly and unconsciously, will always have its weight with poor weak human nature. “Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth,” is an argument no less cogent now than formerly.

The evil, we have said, is a gigantic one. It is for this reason—because its roots are spread so wide and deeply, and because it involves so many interests, and shelters itself under such powerful patrons—that a Royal Commission, that λᾶας ἀναιδης’ trenchant and unsparing of minor delinquencies, recoils from it. Well may Mr Foulkes in his evidence, unquoted by Commissioners, call it “one of the curses of our days.”[20] Even Mr Congreve,—himself an able private tutor, and on other points a witness after the Commissioners’ own heart—denounces it as “a great evil”[21] both for pupil and tutor. But in this case, with all deference to names which seem to carry with them all the weight due to practical experience, the unacademical common sense of the public sees its way pretty clearly. Like railway mismanagement and hotel charges, the force that is to move this mountain must come from without. We must be our own Commissioners. And first we say,—though with some hesitation, in the presence of such tried logicians as the Commissioners and their witnesses,—that in almost all the arguments, _pro_ and _con_, there has been an _ignoratio elenchi_. With all submission to such authorities, the question is not, whether it be or be not popular with undergraduates, as giving them some taste of the German heaven of “_Lernfreiheit_” and “_Lehrfreiheit_;”[22] or convenient for M.A.’s, as “retaining within the University many able men whom it is not possible”[23] otherwise to provide for, and “affording a field for public competition and display;” whether it promote that “intercourse and confidence” between the pupil and the tutor of his own choice, which he refuses to his legitimate college instructors; whether it be an “unhealthy stimulus,” or an opportunity of “direct personal contact and privacy invaluable to the student;”[24] whether the moral influence acknowledged to be thus acquired by men whom the University does not even recognise as teachers be used for good or for evil; nor even whether it be, as one gentleman in his evidence has waggishly described it, and as the Commissioners have printed in apparent innocence of the joke,[25] desirable as an “investment for a certain amount of loose private capital”[26] (well known to abound in undergraduate pockets), and safe to bear a good interest when the pupil in his turn becomes tutor;—all these, important and interesting questions as they may be in themselves, are quite beside the real issue. Turn and twist it how you will, the fact resolves itself into the plain words of Mr Melville,—“the work of the University is done by an order not recognised by that system whose operations it so extremely influences.”[27] “Unauthorised adventurers,”[28] as they are not unfairly styled by one of themselves, usurp the teaching which the University professes to commit only to hands carefully and deliberately selected, and for whose fidelity she possesses the strongest guarantees. Granted that these men are, as most of them are undoubtedly, clever, hardworking, fully equal to their position—granting even what cannot be asserted in all cases, even by the warmest admirers of the system, that they are all in principle, in private character, and habits of life, what we look for in the guides and instructors of youth,—still is it reasonable, is it decent, that these magnificent institutions, endowed with ample revenues for the promotion of sound learning, and receiving the flower of the youth of England in solemn trust for the highest purposes of education, should leave them, after all, to pick up this education as they may, by the wayside? If Universities and Colleges cannot educate _as_ Universities and Colleges, what can they do? Are they really, as their enemies would call them, mighty shams—hoary hypocrisies? It is because we believe that these questions admit at once of an indignant answer,—an answer which has already sprung to the lips of many an energetic teacher—that we here ask them. But it is because her Majesty’s Commissioners have apparently thought them neither worth asking nor answering, that they need to be asked again and again.

The absurdity of the present system of private tuition is indeed so patent, that only long-established custom, and the infection of example, mixed with some considerations of self-interest already alluded to, can have shut the eyes of so many, within the academic walls themselves, to an abuse which, so far as the public is concerned, has surely only to be fully exposed and understood to be condemned unanimously. A young man enters a college at Oxford, and thereby becomes a member of the University, devoting to this object four of the best years of his life, and incurring expenses which, even with prudence, are necessarily considerable. Often, as we all know, this step cannot be taken without much resolved self-denial on the part of parents, sometimes not without some postponing, in the case of an eldest or talented son, of the interests of younger brothers and sisters. But these family sacrifices are cheerfully made, in the feeling that they will purchase for the object of them the highest inheritance which a father can insure for a son—a first-rate education; an education which, unless his own abilities or industry fail him, shall enable him hereafter to move _pari passu_ through life by the side of the eldest-born of any noble in the land, and stand in any presence unabashed by a sense of inferiority. These advantages, which University distinction is to purchase for him, are scarcely of less value, in the world of English society, than its more legitimate and solid fruits—the improvement of the mind, and the material for future usefulness. The path to all these brilliant possibilities lies through the portals of Oxford; and the youth who enters them, finds all the machinery which is to produce these great results apparently in its place, and in fair working order. It is idle for a Royal Commission to tell us how, in ruder times, ruder engines were contrived to do the same work; that there were days when tutors were not, and professors were all in all; that tedious exercises and disputations supplied, or failed to supply, the stimulus which examinations do now: we can all guess, and have a right to suppose, that the means and appliances for education have altered like everything else, and that the great national seminaries have not been behindhand with minor institutions in adapting themselves to the growth of human learning. How prælectors fell, and college tutors rose, is of little consequence, except to the educational antiquarian. Whether the University, or his college, or both, be responsible for his teaching, it is certain that every man who matriculates does so under an implied engagement that he is to be taught. Nor does there seem, to the uninitiated eye, to be any lack of teachers. Not to mention the long list of public functionaries who figure in the University Calendar—professors of Greek, of Hebrew, of Divinity, of Ancient and Modern History, of Geometry, of Moral, Natural, and Experimental Philosophy, of Astronomy, of Logic, Geology, Chemistry, and Political Economy—quite exclusive of any by-hours which he may devote to Music or to Medicine—even if he should be indisposed to avail himself of the services of the Lord Almoner’s reader in Arabic, or to study Anglo-Saxon or Sanscrit under their respective professors,—within the walls of his own college there is ample provision for his intellectual wants. Passing over the Bursar and the Dean—whom he will find somewhat dry nurses—the new _alumnus_ must have been very unfortunate in his selection, if he does not find three tutors at the least ready to welcome him, besides a mathematical lecturer and divinity reader; he may be lucky enough, also, to obtain (according to the Calendar) the services of a “catechetical” or a “humanity lecturer,” whatever those may be. At any rate, here seems quite enough to satisfy any moderate appetite for learning. But he soon finds that this showy and apparently well-appointed staff is considered quite inadequate to its duties; nay, confesses itself to be so. If his Latin prose be not quite Ciceronian, or if his irregular Greek verbs be more than usually irregular, his best friends warn him earnestly of the necessity of “putting on a coach for Little-go;” if he be a promising scholar, and likely to win distinction for himself and his college, his tutor, with a cautious compliment, and the kindest intentions, suggests his “reading with Mr So-and-so.” No one seems to entertain the idea that his appointed pastors and masters can either save him from being “plucked,” or train him for his place in the class list. He finds college lectures are regarded as matters of routine, like Temple dinners: a course of the former, duly attended, makes a B.A., as a course of the latter, duly eaten, makes a barrister, each being a sort of _causa formalis_. Nay, in many cases the regular University or rather College course of instruction is regarded as interfering with that which, look at it as we will, is and must be the main object with three-fourths of its recipients—the obtaining a degree. Nothing is more common than for a young man, who is a candidate for honours, during the term or two previous to his examination, to apply to the authorities of his college “to be excused lectures;” and the request is commonly granted: that is, in plain words, because the time is approaching which is to test his acquirements under his _alma mater’s_ teaching, that very teaching is to be withdrawn as useless—nay, worse than useless—for the end proposed. Can anything be more preposterous? What, in the name of common sense, was the use of that apparatus of tutors classical, mathematical, and catechetical, if not to prepare him for this said examination? In what is he to be “examined,” if not in the progress which, with their help and guidance, he is supposed to have made?

But let us examine matters more closely, and we may discover some of the causes of this remarkable state of things. Our friend, whom we have matriculated, is, we will assume, of modest acquirements, and proposes (under the old system) to take up for his degree, Herodotus, Virgil, portions of Cicero, and four plays of Euripides. But the lectures which he has to attend (for he has seldom much choice of his own in the matter) are one in Livy, one in Horace, and one in Plato’s Republic; in which latter college tutor No. 1 is supposed to be great, having edited some new readings. All very desirable subjects, no doubt, but not exactly what he requires at present. One hour of Alcestis were worth more to him than a cycle of Republics; the tense of a verb in μι is to him, at this conjuncture, a subject of more anxiety than the destinies of Rome or Carthage. Or, granted that he is fortunate enough to be in a Herodotus lecture; he gets through five chapters in an hour, thrice a-week, in a class of seventeen, including one freshman who cannot construe a line together decently, and stutters into the bargain, and another from the sixth form at Eton, who rattles it all off in a tone perfectly inaudible to any one except himself, and, it is supposed, the tutor. Why, at this rate, it will take him about two academical years more to get through the five books of the old historian in which he is to be examined! If he be a candidate for high honours, the case is just the same, or even worse; either there are no college lectures on the subject in which he needs special assistance, or they are attended by such an ill-assorted class, containing men of all grades of scholarship and no scholarship, that he either cuts them altogether or goes to them with disgust, and brings away from them little of more value than a leading-string abstracted with much patience and vigilance from his next neighbour’s gown, or a series of bad pencil-caricatures of the tutor. He has done more than waste an hour—he has begun, or encouraged, a habit of idleness that may haunt him during his life.

Now, only let us transfer ourselves in fancy, for one moment, from this great University to one of our public schools. There, a father pays some hundred and fifty pounds per annum for his son’s education—a large deduction from the income of many fathers, yet, perhaps, considering all things, not too much. We agree with the Commissioners in having no fancy for very cheap education. But supposing that at this public school the instruction given in the school itself by the recognised head master and assistants was considered, both by boys and masters, as quite insufficient, and indeed, of itself, worth very little at all, but that there were residing in the town or village in which the said school was located several very clever gentlemen of undoubted scholarship, having indeed, in their time, been amongst the head boys there, and carried off all the prizes; that to these gentlemen (paying extra for the privilege, of course) all boys who wished to learn could resort, and, in fact, did resort, and thereby got on surprisingly (not that the head master knew much about them, but believed them to be respectable), saving thereby considerable trouble both to head and assistant masters, who, in fact, could not _undertake_, though it might be possible, to educate at all without such assistance, holding that, nevertheless, their school was an excellent school, admitted to be such (else how did so many boys go there?), and turned out most unexceptionable scholars;—would not the fathers, and the public generally, think this rather a strange way of doing business, and that the education might go on quite as effectually in the hands of the clever gentlemen aforesaid, at a clear saving of a hundred or so of the original guineas, which seemed a good deal to pay to the head master for mere board and lodging, and the use of his name? Why is it that a state of things which would not be tolerated in any decent grammar-school is considered “unavoidable”—“beneficial”—nay, even “a valuable element”[29] in the great schools of the nation?

We will not touch here upon a charge more than insinuated in some of the evidence volunteered before the Commission against college tutors, of incapacity or inattention; first, because we firmly believe that the charge is in the main untrue, and, at all events, less true now than it has ever been; and, secondly, because no amount of diligence, no quintessence of scholarship, could enable any man to make an hour’s lecture with a class of from twelve to twenty young men of various calibre that which a catechetical lecture should be. Mr Lowe is quite right in saying that “the plan”—if by this he means the present plan—“of teaching in large lectures is inexpressibly odious and disgusting to the forward student.”[30] Until this evil be remedied, no tutor can do his work with profit or with satisfaction. But it must be borne in mind, that when private tuition is so universal, the public tutor has not fair play. It is hard to judge, from what college lectures are, of what they might be, if they were attended in a different spirit. Few men work heartily who do not hope to see some fruit of their travail: the criminal at the treadmill works with double disgust when he knows that he is grinding nothing. Once let the pupil think that his teacher cannot teach, and let the teacher _know_ that he thinks so, and it is true—he cannot. On this point Mr Foulkes, himself a college tutor, speaks with equal sense and honesty. “Pupils,” says he, “make light of their college lectures in comparison with those of their private tutor; and college tutors, finding their lectures ill got up or remembered, are apt to grow apathetic, and relax in their diligence.” They were more than mortal if they did not. A dull audience, the Commissioners confess, may make even a professor dull;—to borrow an illustration from the Report (which has throughout a tendency to the poetical), a tutor with an inanimate class is “Pyrrhus” without “his Epirots”[31]—an eagle with clipped wings.

It is undeniable that the existing tutorial staff, in every College, is insufficient for the demands upon its labours; the remedy for this insufficiency, in any minor educational establishment where reason and common sense hold a commission of inquiry, would be to increase it. But before we discuss this question, it may be well to examine whether all is done which might be done even as things stand at present. What is the actual amount of work performed by a college tutor? We may gather pretty accurately from the evidence volunteered by, we are bound to suppose, not the least energetic of those who are so employed. Thirteen lectures in the week, of one hour each, is a fair average of the actual instruction given by each tutor;[32] how many hours besides may be spent in preparation for each lecture is, of course, a question impossible for any but themselves to answer. Now let us take the case of the head master of one of our public schools, who may surely be assumed, without offence, to be fully the college tutor’s equal in scholarship and in social position. His work ordinarily begins at seven in the morning, and continues, with perhaps two hours intermission, till twelve; to which, on “whole schooldays,” about three days in the week, must be added two hours in the afternoon; making, in all, some twenty-two hours in the week, allowing for some extra half-holidays. This allows no time for looking over and correcting written exercises—an important and laborious part of every schoolmaster’s work. And this, we must remember, continues for nearly nine months in the year, instead of six, involving a question which we may have to discuss hereafter. Now, why should there be this enormous disproportion? Why is the college tutor to work a little more, on an average, than two hours in the day, and the schoolmaster a little less than four? It may indeed be answered, that college tutors are not so well paid; but considering that the value of this office, when combined with a fellowship (which surely, in these days, may be considered as implying _some_ educational duties), averages about £450 per annum, and that its cares and responsibilities are comparatively light, it may be questioned whether the position is not quite as desirable. It must be borne in mind, also, that many men perfectly qualified by academical honours for a college tutorship, are content to accept under-masterships, which, with harder and more distasteful work, and often less emolument, offer a position immeasurably inferior in the eyes of society, and certainly presenting a great contrast, to a man of cultivated mind, to the collegiate life of Oxford. Even if the advantages of such a life are not all that they might be—if the common-room has its petty jealousies, and party bitterness, and men thrown constantly together see too much of each other’s weaknesses—still, a University, as a place of residence, has its attractions for minds of almost every character, except those who, from apathy or cynicism, set themselves firmly against the doctrine that man is a social animal. Where, unless he have the _entrée_ of the literary or political society of London itself, which few can have—where will a man to whom “the humanities,” in their widest sense, are something more than the cram of the schools—who believes in his heart that there are subjects which are as really and truly interesting to the human intellect as the growth of turnips or the price of stocks—find anything approaching to a companionship of thought and feeling, if not in collegiate society? To call such society “narrow-minded,” to say that it has its mannerisms and its pedantries, is true enough: they are defects incidental to all society. Never were yet three schoolboys, who walked arm-in-arm, that had not a creed and a shibboleth of their own; but surely the narrowest track that ever the soul of college fellow moved in was the liberty of the prairie, compared to the round of dull conventionalities which delight our “excellent neighbourhoods” in the country. At all events, there will always be an abundance of ripe scholars and sensible men, to whom the social position, and the congenial work, even with the present modest emoluments of a college tutor, will be an object quite sufficient, even if, in this active age, we add a little to their work. An extra early hour in the morning—say from eight to nine—would be a wonderful incentive to the energies of many a freshman, who is now hugging himself every morning in bed with the comfortable reflection, that in his new sphere he is emancipated from the odious “first lessons” of Harrow or Eton. Another hour in the evenings devoted to Horace or Aristophanes—say three times a-week—would hardly interfere with those pleasant dinner-parties, or social cup of coffee, to which the tutor naturally looks as the reward of his labours, and with which we are sure it would be rank ingratitude for any stranger to intermeddle, who has been welcomed, as all strangers are welcomed, to those classic hospitalities. It is only fair to say, that more than one college might be quoted, where, of late, tutors have been seen imposing upon themselves some such additional labours, and doing their utmost to make college tuition a reality. Much also might be done by a better division of the work assigned to each, and the more judicious classifying of their pupils—points which are at present in most colleges grievously neglected.