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that a student should expect a classicist to live classically. The man who teaches Shakespeare or Homer runs the supreme risk. This is surely as it should be. Charisma in a teacher is not a mystery or nimbus of personality, but radiantexemplification to which the student contributes a correspondingly radiant hunger for becoming.”
    Little wonder that William Arrowsmith’s favorite play was Sophocles’
Philoctetes
and his favorite scene that in which Philoctetes allows the young Neoptolemus to hold the bow of Heracles. For Arrowsmith this sacerdotal moment represents the handing on of the heroic ideal—and is an emblem of the proper function of education.
    Throughout history the exemplary teacher has never been just an instructor in a subject; he is nearly always its living advertisement. Socrates or Alfred North Whitehead, Diotima or Albert Einstein, each represents the learning he or she expounds. Writing of the critic and teacher John Crowe Ransom, the poet Anthony Hecht recalled that “Mr. Ransom did not lecture, he inquired, and he invited the class to join his inquiry. . . . For one learned from him, not facts or positions, but a posture of the mind and spirit, a humanity and courtesy, a manly considerateness that inhabited his work as it did his person.”
    Character, then, counts. The famous nineteenth-century master of Balliol, Benjamin Jo we tt, consistently advocated the delight of hard work. “The object of reading for the Schools,” he said, “is not primarily to obtain a first class [degree], but to elevate and strengthen the character for life.” To a lazy student he added, “You are a fool. You must be sick of idling. . .. But the class matters nothing. What does matter is the sense of power which comes from steady working.” No lesson, in or out of the classroom, is more important than that one. The patient accretion of knowledge, the focusing of all one’s energies on some problem inhistory or science, the dogged pursuit of excellence of whatever kind—these are right and proper ideals for life. Only by loving fiercely can we hope to be rewarded; only through such intensity do we make ourselves worthy of what we love.
    Yet like God, teachers sometimes move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform. Consider the opposing examples of the no-nonsense classicist Maurice Bowra and Richard Cobb, a historian of modern France. Of Bowra, the cultural historian Noel Annan writes, “He would approach the Michelangelo Holy Family, pause, regard it as if it were a recalcitrant colleague, deliver judgement, ‘Greatest work of man,’ and plod along to the next.” Of Cobb, his student Colin Jones says that “undergraduates . . . told of tutorials spent with him variously asleep, drunk, talking for hours about Georges Simenon and other favoured French novelists, or going down on all fours and barking like a dog. His teaching life was interspersed with wild carousing, scandalous behaviour, perpetual spats with the Master of his college; he was thrown out of more hotels and bars than any Oxford professor of history before (and even since).” Certainly both these eminent scholars lived up to what the philosopher George Santayana whimsically described as the chief function of dons: “to expound a few classic documents, and to hand down as large and pleasant a store as possible of academic habits, maxims, and anecdotes.”
    Above all, though, teachers and mentors should never let rules constrict their humanity. So insists Samuel Pickering, the model for the English teacher in the film
Dead Poets Society
, “To educate for the future, one must educate for the moment. Classes should sprawl beyond particular subjects. In digressions lie lessons.Expose students to possibilities. Let them know about your fondness for china, birds, tag sales, and gardening. Talk to them about economics and sociology, to be sure, but also about places you have been