It appears further that the professors themselves are not keen on
their lectures. If the lectures are called for they give them; if
not, the professor's feelings are not hurt. He merely waits and
rests his brain until in some later year the students call for his
lectures. There are men at Oxford who have rested their brains this
way for over thirty years: the accumulated brain power thus dammed
up is said to be colossal.
I understand that the key to this mystery is found in the operations
of the person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him,
that the students learn all that they know: one and all are agreed on
that. Yet it is a little odd to know just how he does it. "We go over
to his rooms," said one student, "and he just lights a pipe and talks
to us." "We sit round with him," said another, "and he simply smokes
and goes over our exercises with us." From this and other evidence I
gather that what an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of
students together and smoke at them. Men who have been systematically
smoked at for four years turn into ripe scholars. If anybody doubts
this, let him go to Oxford and he can see the thing actually in
operation. A well-smoked man speaks, and writes English with a grace
that can be acquired in no other way.
In what was said above, I seem to have been directing criticism
against the Oxford professors as such: but I have no intention of
doing so.
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