flagrant violation of the Decalogue, it is a life-appointment. The salary is small, but what there is of it is tolerably certain to be paid; one can marry on it if he has the courage to live plainly. Your life-long associates will be gentlemen. Your chosen field of work, in science or philosophy or literature, stretches before you in tempting vistas. One-third of the year will be vacation time, and hence all your own-for labor, if your ambition holds; for rest, if you find it flagging. You have the opportunity to impress the best there is in yourself upon a perpetually renewed stream of youthful and more or less ardent minds, and in this thought what satisfaction for the didactic instinct, for the ineradicable schoolmaster that is lurking in us all! Can any profession offer a programme half so certain, under normal conditions, of a fair fulfilment ? Surely, the candle burns brightly at the beginning of the game.

As the years go by, does the college professor regret his choice? I know a few who would gladly change their calling, but only a few, and these are mainly men of energetic, practical cast, who now recognize that by entering another profession they might have quadrupled their income. Men of strong literary and scholarly bent are less likely to question the wisdom of their choice; and, indeed, of those outside the college circle, it seems to be the "literary fellows" who speak with most envy of the professor's lot. Aside from lazy midsummer guesses at what one might have been-and who does not hazard these at times? I find college teachers peculiarly contented.

To turn to the material side of things, the assurance of a fixed income is a source of permanent satisfaction, however disproportionate the income to the service that is rendered. To be sure, the salary of a full professor, the country over, is little if at all in excess of $2,000. In the larger universities it may rise to $3,000 or something more, but the men who receive above $4,000 are so few as scarcely to affect the general average. Aside from the bare possibility of a call to a richer institution, the college professor is not likely to be earning more at fifty than at thirty. Unlike most other professions, there is here no gradual increase of income, to give tangible evidence of a man's growth in power.

Unless one has taken the Northern Farmer's thrifty advice, and "gone where money is "when he married, his outlook as he faces old age is not reassuring. Pensions are extremely rare; college trustees are forced in most cases to be as ungrateful as republics. The cost of living has steadily risen in college towns, keeping pace with the general increase of luxury throughout the older communities. Here and there, particularly in the West, there are exceptions, but upon the whole the scale of necessary expenditure for a man fulfilling the various social duties required by his position is constantly growing greater. The professor's incidental income from books and lectures is ordinarily insignificant. When he has paid his bills he finds no margin left for champagne and terrapin. If he smokes at all, he invents ingenious reasons for preferring a pipe. He sees the light-hearted tutors sail for Europe every summer, but as for himself he decides annually that it will be wiser to wait just one year more. Once in awhile he will yield to the temptation to pick up a first edition or a good print, but Aldines and Rembrandt proofs are toys he may not dally with. In short, his tastes are cultivated beyond his income, and his sole comfort is in the Pharisaical reflection that this is better, after all, than to have more income than taste. If his meditations upon quaternions or Descartes or the lyric cry are liable to be interrupted by an insulting cook, striking for another dollar that he can ill spare, it is doubtless a device of Providence to keep him in healthy touch with actualities. It were a pity that in the colleges, of all places, high thinking and plain living should be quite divorced, and that the men whose duty it is to train American boys in citizenship as well as in letters should themselves have no need to practise the stern virtues of industry and thrift.

No man's satisfaction or dissatisfaction with his salary, however, affords a complete indication of his attitude toward his work. A more subtle arithmetic makes up the sum of failure or success. After ten, twenty, or thirty years of experience, the college professor may be analyst enough to pass verdict upon the result of his own efforts, but an outsider's estimate may even then be more accurate than his own. Besides, many a man's point of view be

comes insensibly but increasingly modified after he has entered upon his vocation, so that it is difficult for him to decide whether his early ambitions have been realized. There are two professional types, assuredly, that are admirably adjusted to their environment: the born investigator and the born teacher. Men belonging to the first of these classes find in research itself a sufficient recompense; their happiness is in widening the bounds of knowledge, and undermining stoutly intrenched stupidities, and adding to the effectiveness of human energy. Almost every college has one or more of these men. The larger institutions have many of them, and the college community is their rightful place. They deserve their bed and board-and their cakes and ale besides--even if they are too absent-minded to remember their lecture hours, or too feebly magnetic to hold the attention of undergraduates. An unerring process of differentiation is constantly at work, marking out the born scholars and scientists from those of their colleagues who possess scholarly and scientific tastes, but who learn by the time they are forty that they are never likely to produce anything. These latter men often make noteworthy drill-masters. Their respect for original scholarship grows as they come to recognize that it is beyond their own reach. Though they discover the futility of doing something for" science or literature themselves, they touch elbows daily with men who can, and they reflect something of the glory of it, and impart to their pupils a regard for sound learning.

Not every teacher, of course, is an investigator manqué. Your born teacher is as rare as a poet, and as likely to die young. Once in awhile a college gets hold of one. It does not always know that it has him, and proceeds to ruin him by over-driving the moment he shows power, or to let another college lure him away for a few hundred dollars more a year.

But while he lasts, and sometimes, fortunately, he lasts till the end of a long life, he transforms the lecture-hall as by enchantment. Lucky is the alumnus who can call the roll of his old instructors, and among the martinets and the pedants and the piously inane can here and there come suddenly upon a man-a man who taught

him to think or helped him to feel, and thrilled him with a new horizon!

Sometimes it happens that the great teacher is also a great investigator, but that is a miracle. For a man to be either one or the other-not to speak of being both-requires singular vitality. Outsiders usually underestimate the obstacles to successful professorial work. With regard to one's own scholarly ambitions, particularly, the steady term-time strain, the thankless and idle sessions of committees, the variety of demands upon one's time and energy, combine to make one pay a heavy price for winning distinction. You must do, upon the average, as much teaching as your colleagues, and the time for your magnum opus must either be stolen from that due your classes, or you must accomplish two days' work in one. It is true that the number of hours of class-room instruction required of the professor varies greatly in different institutions. Sometimes a schedule of four hours per week is considered sufficient, in the case of men who have earned the right to devote themselves to advanced research. In the smaller colleges, and for the younger men in the larger ones, the schedule is often sixteen or twenty hours. Perhaps twelve would be a fair average for colleges and universities the country over. To teach college boys for two hours a day does not seem like a very severe task to one who has never tried it, but I have observed that most professors who have taught or lectured for two hours thoroughly well, putting their best powers into the task, are ready to quit. Few men can rivet the attention of fifty or a hundred students for one hour without feeling, five minutes after the end of it, that vitality has gone out of them. The emery-wheel that wears out fastest cuts the diamond best, and when a man boasts that he teaches without effort and weariness he has sufficiently described his teaching. Every college town has its own pitiful or tragic stories of professors who have broken down; they are usually the men whom the college could least afford to lose. It is no wonder that in the face of all this many professors cease trying to ride two horses at once; they either do their duty by their classes and let the dust gather on the leaves of the magnum opus, or else they get over their class work with

as little expenditure of energy as possible and give to the magnum opus their real strength. And the college would not be the microcosm it is if there were not some professors who abandon both ambitions after a little, becoming quite incurable though often very charming dead-beats; and this, I confess, is the most interesting type of all.

It is a pity that Mark Pattison, whose Memoirs throw so terribly frank a light upon the intellectual side of university life, did not leave behind him an essay upon Academic Sterility. He may have thought that Amiel's Journal pictured the malady for once and all, and certainly Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose Langham is an attempted personification of the class, has succeeded only in clothing with an English garb the self-distrust and impotence of will of the lonely Genevese professor. There can be no reasonable doubt that the academic atmosphere is unfavorable to creative vigor. Few vital books come out of the universities. One cause, beyond question, is the prevalence of the critical spirit. "Our knowledge petrifies our rhymes." A sophisticated sense that everything has been written, and better than it is likely to be written again, is not the stuff from which literature is bred. It may be that a mere over-accumulation of material prevents the scholar from ever turning his treasures to account; the monumental treatise becomes arrested, like Mr. Casaubon's, in the pigeon-hole stage. Often, too, he outlives his former intellectual interests, and his drawers are crammed with various half-completed pieces of work, melancholy reminders of enthusiasms that have now grown cold and long years that have been wasted. In morbid self-depreciation or well-grounded despair of making any contribution to the world's thought, and disgusted with class-room routine, many a gifted man, unwilling or unable to resign his chair, turns tramp. Careless of public opinion, he adopts some pet avocation for his vocation henceforth, makes an opiate out of a hobby, and settles down for the rest of his days into a fly-fisherman, or amateur photographer, or cross-country saunterer, or novel reader. It is then that he is worth knowing. May God forgive me," cried Sir Walter Scott to his Journal, "for thinking that anything can be made

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out of a schoolmaster!" Ah, shade of Sir Walter, out of a schoolmaster who has survived his illusions and is cheerfully planting his cabbages there may be made the most delightful companion in the world!

But

It is because a college faculty exhibits this surprising range of types, illustrative, in little, of almost every variety of success and failure known to the greater world, that it furnishes so perpetually interesting a spectacle. No man who has returned to his own Alma Mater to teach is likely to forget the impressions received at those first faculty meetings, where he has met, on terms of absolute equality, the gentlemen whose corporate action decided so many vital issues- -as it then seemed-in his own undergraduate life. What a revelation to find that the faculty" are very much like other men; with prejudices and favorite animosities; capable of being much confused by a motion to amend an amendment, and much relieved by a proposition to refer to a committee; the younger ones rigid and the older ones lenient in enforcing the letter of the law; all of them glad to adjourn, and retire to their own toil or their own decorous beer and skittles! what mastery of parliamentary fence on the part of old gentlemen who have been making and withdrawing motions for half a century! What deep wrath among the disciplinarians over that vote to restore the erring half-back (needed in November) to full standing in his class! full standing in his class! What subtle argumentation, pro and con, over Smith's petition to be excused from chapel on the ground of his physician's written statement that Smith's eyelids are liable to inflammation upon sudden exposure to the morning air! What passionate denunciation of the faculty's past injustice in the famous Robinson case, pronounced by some sunnytempered philosopher who has just persuaded himself that whenever the student body differs with the faculty on a moral question the students are surely in the right! And is it not singular that over that question of Jones's rank, which any man in the room could settle satisfactorily enough in two minutes if left to himself, two or three dozen educated and experienced gentlemen should sit in futile misery for half an hour, only at the end of it to follow, sheeplike, some obstinate motion that takes them

through precisely the wrong hole in the wal!? Until the psychology of mobs gets written, there will be no understanding the ways of "faculty action." Even when we shall have learned that the normal powers of the two or three dozen men are under some strange, paralyzing inhibition, shall we be able to explain why the inhibition should proceed from the most thick-headed man in the room?

To those gentlemen who grow old in the sheltered academic life a thousand whimsicalities and petty formalities attach themselves, like barnacles to the bottom of a ship long at anchor. No man can teach ten years without escaping them. Unbeknown to himself, he is already on the way to becoming a "character," and people are smiling at him in their sleeves. If he finds himself at a reception, he buttonholes a colleague and talks shop. The habit of addressing boys without contradiction leaves him often impotent in the sharp giveand-take of talk with men, and many a professor who is eloquent in his class-room is helpless on the street or in the club or across the dinner-table. Sometimes he perceives this, and makes pathetic efforts to grow worldly. Faculty circles have been known to experience strange obsessions of frivolity, and to plunge desperately into dancing lessons or duplicate whist. Both the remedy and the disease have their comic aspects, and yet I know of no circles where the twilight hour of familiar talk is more delightful, where common instincts and training and old associations touch the ordinary courtesies of life with a more peculiar charm, where mutual pride is so little spoiled by familiarity, and where lifelong friendships, undisturbed by the accidents frequent in the greater world, grow so intimate and touching as the evil days draw nigh.

A professor's attitude toward the undergraduates is a good test of his personality, but a still better one may be found in their attitude toward him. They are shrewd judges of character, intolerant of shams, and demoniacally ingenious in finding the weak places in a man's armor. If he is a shirk or an ignoramus, they know it as soon as he perhaps sooner. Your college student is a strange compound of reverence and irreverence, conservative and anarchist, man and boy. If you decide

to treat him as a youngster, he straightway astonishes you by his maturity; if you thereupon make up your mind to consider him henceforth as a man, he will be guilty of prompt and enthusiastic lapses into juvenility. An American college is half public school, half university. Toward professors whom they like, students are finely loyal, though the curious alternations of popularity which fall to some teachers at the hands of successive classes are quite beyond the reach of analysis. If they do not like a professor, and can get the whip hand over him, undergraduates know how to demonstrate that twenty is the age of perfect cruelty. In few college recitation rooms, nowadays, is there anything said about the whip hand, but it is always there, on one side or the other. Every lecturehall witnesses a daily though possibly unconscious struggle of talent, training, and character against the crowd. The lecturer usually wins, because he knows he must, but many a one who has never experienced defeat invariably rises, like Gough, with knees that tremble. Laboratory and seminary methods of instruction alter these conditions, of course, and bring the professor at once into informal and even intimate relation with his pupils. Upon the whole the contact with college classes is agreeable to a man of friendly tempera

ment.

He learns to make allowance for undergraduate conventionalities, and does not expect enthusiasm where enthusiasm would be bad form. On their part, students generously overlook the whims and crotchets of a favorite professor; they even pardon his amazement at the ways of intercollegiate diplomacy, or his radical scepticism as to the intellectual discipline involved in foot-ball.

In one sense, indeed, he is supposed to know very little about the men whom he teaches. The in loco parentis theory has long been doomed-at least, in the larger institutions-and so far as direct observation is concerned the professor is as ignorant of what is going on in a student's room as if it were in the South Seas. But for all that he can make skilful guesses from a hundred signs, and when the seniors file upon the Commencement platform for their degrees that silent circle of professors often know them better than their mothers. It is pleasant to meet these fellows after

ward, either on the old campus, or at some remote railway junction, or at midnight in a foreign city, and pick up for a moment the dropped threads of acquaintance. Sometimes one learns in these accidental ways that his instruction counted for more than was apparent at the time; he makes the discovery that someone has taken pains to remember words that he himself has long forgotten. Herein lies half the zest of teaching. One blazes away into the underbrush, left barrel and right barrel, vaguely enough as it seems, but some of the shots are sure to tell. Young men are, after all, so susceptible to impression, so responsive to right feeling, that though the fine reserve of youth may not betray it at the moment, they nevertheless bear away from their instructor the best he has to give them. This may be poor enough,

but it is something.

When a professor grows tired of moralizing about his colleagues or his pupils, he always has the president to fall back upon. So have the undergraduates, for that matter, and their parents, and the alumni, and the trustees, and the general public-and the newspaper reporters. The college president who can conduct himself to the satisfaction of this varied body of critics, and enjoy at the same time the approval of his own conscience, is a gifted man. A president must have many qualifications for his office—I have heard a cautious observer say—but his first need is a thick skin. Undoubtedly, by some wise provision of Nature, the skin grows thicker with exposure, but there is a curiously prevalent impression that a president's conscience is liable to a corresponding induration. A cynical-minded friend of mine, of large discourse in these matters, avers that such are the temptations peculiar to the office, that of all the college presidents he has known, only two remained Christians. These two-if I may be permitted to say so without discourtesy to the others are both dead.

Whatever be the foundation for such impious generalizations, no one will deny that an American college president has a task of extraordinary difficulty. His problems have been met, upon the whole, with consummate skill. Every type of president has done something to advance the cause of higher education in America:

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the sleek "promoter," the sectarian fanatic, the close-mouthed business manager, the far-sighted educator, the blameless clergyman. These types appear and disappear and blend, but meantime the great cause itself goes lumbering steadily forward.

He

Two generations ago, the place held by the college professor in the community must have vastly tickled his vanity. Those rules in vogue in New England, requiring students to doff their hats when four rods from a professor (two rods only for a tutor, alas!) were emblematic of the universal homage paid him in a college town. I suppose there is no man of us so great nowadays, even on great occasions, as those old fellows were continuously. Town and college had then a solidarity of interest that is now unknown, except in a few instances of fortunate survival. The commanding position of the professor in the community was often a deserved recognition of his services to the local public. Here and there may still be found a man of the old type, an agitator for all good causes, an orator in town meeting, a politician within the bounds of dignity; but I find it a common complaint among the townspeople in academic communities that your modern professor is a Gallio. may turn out occasionally to manifest his interest in some crisis of the church or school or state, but in general he sticks to his library. This criticism is often shortsighted, particularly in reference to politics. The professor who patiently teaches his classes, week in and week out, to think straight, to see that two and two make four on either side of the Atlantic, and that "stealing will continue stealing," serves his country better than a hundred "spell-binders" in the last frantic days of a campaign. But upon the whole there is ground for the current complaint as to the college teacher's unconcern for public questions. He remains in one sense a leading figure in his community; there are certain things he may not do without losing caste; the butcher, with a vague feeling of his importance, charges him a couple of extra cents per pound, and the suave Armenian refugee, noting the real Bokhara on his floor, pockets the professorial two dollars, and thinks in his Oriental heart that it ought to have been five. Yet in