There was another kind of love that was to confront Jowett. Disillusioned in his attempts to sustain Christianity by liberal theology, Jowett turned to Plato. Gladstone had spoken of the ‘shameless lusts which formed the incredible and indelible disgrace of Greece’, and Ruskin wondered at the ‘singular states of inferior passion which arrested the ethical as well as the formative progress of the Greek mind’. But the Aesthetic Movement began to get under way in the seventies and soon Pater’s mellifluous sentences began to be quoted and John Addington Symonds extolled the phallic ecstasy in Aristophanes. Indeed there was a falling-off of candidates for Greats and a shift towards law and the modern history school, where William Stubbs lectured (usually to classes of four or five undergraduates) on the safe subject of Parliament in the Middle Ages and never ventured later than the Thirty Years War. Greats was to recover in the eighties, when it scored twice as many firsts as history. Swinburne left no one in doubt where Jowett stood. He declared that it was impossible to confuse Jowett
with such morally and spiritually typical and unmistakable apes of the Dead Sea as Mark Pattison, or with such renascent blossoms of the Italian Renaissance as the Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers who is now in Aretino’s bosom. The cult of the calamus, as expounded by Mr Addington Symonds to his fellow calamites, would have found no acceptance or tolerance with the translator of Plato.
The translator of Plato did indeed on one occasion take action. A Balliol undergraduate, William Hardinge, sent Pater sonnets praising homosexual love. Pater responded by signing himself ‘Yours lovingly’. Jowett was told: confronted both, expelled Hardinge from Balliol and never spoke to Pater again.
Jowett left two legacies. The first he could not have foreseen, a legacy that influenced higher education throughout the twentieth century. Those who have read the most famous of all public school novels, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, will remember that at supper after the football match in which School house has defeated the School, young Tom hears the captain, ‘old Brooke’, say in his speech, ‘I know I’d sooner win two schoolhouse matches running than get the Balliol Scholarship any day.’ Of course other colleges offered scholarships but by ancient statute they might be confined to those who could claim descent from the founder of the college: ‘Founder’s Kin’. Or they were reserved for those from a particular school – at New College for Wykehamists or at King’s for Etonians. Or at Trinity and all other colleges at Cambridge they were awarded after an undergraduate had been in residence for a year or more. But by the end of the century the colleges, in response to the commissioners’ criticism that poor men of talent could not afford to enter the ancient universities, offered scholarships for the less well-to-do. The requirements for entry to the university remained as unexacting as possible: few wanted to frighten away the sons of the well-to-do, whose fees kept the colleges afloat.
The scholarship exam in each college did more than provide a bursary for poor undergraduates. It became the blue riband for the public schools and the grammar schools. Schools prided themselves on winning one or more each year. Later Oxford and Cambridge established examining boards that granted exemption from the modest university entrance exam. You were exempt if you obtained five credits in the School Certificate – a test that an intelligent fifteen-year-old or a clever fourteen-year-old could pass. What were schoolboys and – girls to do for the last three to four years at their school? The answer was to work for the scholarship exam in classics, or maths, or science, or history, or modern languages. When the Oxbridge examining boards set up a new sixth-form exam, the Higher Certificate or Advanced Level (A Level, as it was later called), it followed the pattern of the scholarship exam. Of course the colleges insisted that ancillary subjects must be taken as well as papers in the specialism that the candidate had chosen. A history specialist had to be tested in Latin and French and one other foreign language; a scientist in maths; but everyone knew that those who shone in their specialism were those who won the prize.
And so the notorious English specialism in secondary schools took root. Boys and girls chose which way they would jump as early as fourteen; and at fifteen opted either for maths and science or for the humanities. If for the latter, they never opened a maths textbook again. The system suited the dons: boys and girls arrived at the university knowing something about the scholarly debates in their specialism. It suited the professions: after leaving school a doctor could qualify in seven years, a lawyer in six. It suited the Treasury because the first degree took only three years. Boys and girls were content: no longer would those with a mathematical block have to try to master the calculus.
But did it suit the nation? During the twentieth century the complaints grew. Industry complained that graduates in science and engineering had such narrow minds, and commerce that arts graduates were innumerate. Even the Civil Service at last rebelled. They rebelled because critics argued that the skills which a civil servant needed at the end of the twentieth century were not tested by the kind of examination so dear to the hearts of the dons. In the nineteenth century the dons had got government to agree that entry to the public service should be met by a competitive examination on the same lines as the final examination in the universities. At one time all you had to do was to reproduce in the Civil Service or Foreign Service exam those qualities that had won you high honours in the university; though it must be said, you had to pass an interview. From time to time variations were introduced; and your examiners, who were dons themselves, might not sympathise with the spin that you put on your answers to questions. (When Keynes sat for the Civil Service exam he got his lowest mark for economics and as a result entered the India Office and not the Treasury.) No one dissented from the principle. It seemed self-evident-to Macaulay, to Charles Trevelyan, to Jowett and the younger dons. So indeed it seemed until the very end of the twentieth century.
The second legacy was the primacy of the tutors. Jowett’s reign saw the end of the old catechetical college lecture (in reality a class construing a text) and the rise of the tutorial. In 1869 the History Tutors Association formed: they arranged the lectures, supplied the examiners and determined what was to be taught. The professoriate was outflanked. Clerical fellowships declined: colleges did not want fellows who had an eye on the next benefice on offer.
There grew up in Oxford and Cambridge a posse of dons, often young bachelors, who like Jowett knew something of all of their men and a lot about some of them. At Balliol, it was noted, it was ‘possible for a tutor without taking Orders to be virtually a minister of religion’. An observer writing in the Church Quarterly Review thanked God for the work of John Conroy, a science tutor at Balliol, and for H. O. Wakeman, tutor at Keble; and at Balliol T. H. Green and Nettleship were renowned moralists.
Not everyone saw college tutors as deutero-clergymen. ‘They sit in their comfortable rooms and do nothing except cram in Latin and Greek for examinations,’ wrote one critic in the Nineteenth Century, and another in the same year, 1895, depicted the modern don as ‘an open derider of religion’. All was not well with Oxford, and the university had its critics in London. In 1866 Jowett was lamenting that not a twentieth part of the ability of the country came to the university, and Pattison two years later echoed him. An odious comparison was made between Oxford and the Grandes Écoles, in which Oxford was compared to ‘a great steam-hammer for cracking walnuts’. But then, as the Saturday Review observed, what was one to say when the Provost of Oriel said that Oxford existed to provide curates, not solicitors or surgeons? With the collapse of college incomes in the eighties fellowships became less attractive. Those formerly devoted to research were diminished or abolished. This in turn led to dissatisfaction among the college tutors, who now saw themselves as less well-paid than public schoolmasters with little leisure to pursue learning, compelled every year to begin teaching the same subjects to a new set of students. When in the past young dons taught for a spell and then left to fill college livings, they did not grow stale; but after twenty years the college tutor became dull and dispirited.
For a moment it looked