Largely, if not entirely, owing to the expansion of our common
school system--admirable in Ontario and Nova Scotia, but defective
in Quebec--and the influence of our universities and colleges, the
average intelligence of the people of this country is much higher
than it was a very few years ago; but no doubt it is with us as with
our neighbours--to quote the words of an eminent public speaker whose
brilliancy sometimes leads one to forget his higher criticism--I
refer to Dr. Chauncey Depew--"Speed is the virtue and vice of our
generation. We demand that morning-glories and century plants shall
submit to the same conditions and flower with equal frequency." Even
some of our universities from which we naturally expect so much seem
disposed from time to time to lower their standard and yield too
readily to the demand for purely practical education when, after all,
the great reason of all education is to draw forth the best qualities
of the young man, elevate his intelligence, and stimulate his highest
intellectual forces. The animating principle with the majority of
people is to make a young man a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or teach
him some other vocation as soon as possible, and the tendency is to
consider any education that does not immediately effect that result
as superfluous. Whilst every institution of learning must necessarily
yield something to this pervading spirit of immediate utility, it would
be a mistake to sacrifice all the methods and traditions of the past
when sound scholars at least were made, and the world had so many men
famous in learning, in poetry, in romance, and in history. For one I
range myself among those who, like James Russell Lowell and Matthew
Arnold, still consider the conscientious and intelligent study of the
ancient classics--the humanities as they are called--as best adapted
to create cultured men and women, and as the noblest basis on which
to build up even a practical education with which to earn bread and
capture the world. Goldwin Smith very truly says, "A romantic age
stands in need of science, a scientific and utilitarian age stands in
need of the humanities."[62] The study of Greek, above all others of
the humanities, is calculated to stimulate the higher qualities of
our nature. As Matthew Arnold adds in the same discourse from which
I have quoted, "The instinct for beauty is set in human nature, as
surely as the instinct for knowledge is set there, or the instinct for
conduct. If the instinct for beauty is served by Greek literature and
art as it is served by no other literature or art, we may trust to the
instinct of self-preservation in humanity for keeping Greek as part
of our culture." With the same great critic and thinker, I hope that
in Canada "Greek will be increasingly studied as men feel the need in
them for beauty, and how powerfully Greek art and Greek literature
can serve this need." We are as respects the higher education of this
country in that very period which Arnold saw ahead for America--"a
period of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency"--a tendency
to crowd into education too many matters; and it is for this reason
I venture to hope that letters will not be allowed to yield entirely
to the necessity for practical science, the importance of which I
fully admit, while deprecating it being made the dominant principle in
our universities. If we are to come down to the lower grades of our
educational system I might also doubt whether despite all its decided
advantages for the masses--its admirable machinery and apparatus, its
comfortable school-houses, its varied systematic studies from form to
form and year to year, its well managed normal and model schools, its
excellent teachers--there are not also signs of superficiality. The
tendency of the age is to become rich fast, to get as much knowledge
as possible within a short time, and the consequence of this is to
spread far too much knowledge over a limited ground--to give a child
too many subjects, and to teach him a little of everything. These are
days of many cyclopædias, historical summaries, scientific digests,
reviews of reviews, French in a few lessons, and interest tables.
All is digested and made easy to the student. Consequently not a
little of the production of our schools and of some of our colleges
may be compared to a veneer of knowledge, which easily wears off in
the activities of life, and leaves the roughness of the original and
cheaper material very perceptible. One may well believe that the
largely mechanical system and materialistic tendency of our education
has some effect in checking the development of a really original and
imaginative literature among us. Much of our daily literature--indeed
the chief literary aliment of large classes of our busy population
is the newspaper press, which illustrates in many ways the haste and
pressure of this life of ours in a country of practical needs like
Canada. When we consider the despatch with which a large newspaper has
to be made up, how reports are caught on the wing and published without
sufficient verification, how editorials have to be written _currente
calamo_, and often after midnight when important despatches come in, we
may well wonder that the daily issue of a newspaper is so well done.
With the development of confederation the leading Canadian papers
have taken, through the influence of the new condition of things, a
larger range of thought and expression, and the gross personalities
which so frequently discredited the press before 1867 have now become
the exception. If I might refer to an old and enterprising paper as
an example of the new order of things, I should point to the Toronto
_Globe_ under its present editorial management and compare it with
two or three decades ago. It will be seen there is a deeper deference
to an intelligent public opinion by an acknowledgment of the right
of a community to hear argument and reason even on matters of party
politics, and to have fair reports of speeches on both sides of
a question. In point of appearance, make-up, and varied literary
matter--especially in its literary department, its criticisms of
new books in all branches of literature--the Australasian press is
decidedly superior to that of Canada as a rule. The Melbourne _Argus_
and the Sydney _Herald_ compare with the best London journals, and
the reason is mainly because there is no country press in Australia
to limit the enterprise and energy of a newspaper publisher. Perhaps
it is as well for the general instruction of a community like ours
that there should be a large and active country press, and the people
not too much under the guidance of a few great journals in important
centres of political thought and action. For one I have more faith
in the good sense and reason of the community as a whole than in the
motives and disinterestedness of a few leaders in one or more cities
or towns. But I must also add that when we consider the influence a
widely disseminated press like that of Canada must exercise on the
opinions and sentiments of the large body of persons of whom it is
the principal or only literature, one must wish that there was more
independence of thought and honesty of criticism as well as a greater
willingness, or capacity rather, to study a high ideal on the part of
the press generally. However improved the tone of the Canadian press
may have become of late years, however useful it may be as a daily
record of passing events--of course, outside of party politics--however
ably it may discuss in its editorial columns the topics of the day,
it is not yet an influence always calculated to strengthen the mind
and bring out the best intellectual faculties of a reader like a book
which is the result of calm reflection, sound philosophic thought,
originality of idea, or the elevated sentiment of the great poet or
the historian. As a matter of fact a newspaper is too often in Canada
a reflex of the average rather than of the higher intelligence of the
country, and on no other ground can we explain the space devoted to
a football match, or a prize fight, or a murder trial, or degrading
incidents in the criminal life of men and women. For one, I am an
admirer of athletic and other sports calculated to develop health and
muscle, as long as they are not pursued to extremes, do not become the
end and aim of youth, or allowed to degenerate into brutality. All of
us do not forget the great influence of the Olympian, the Pythian and
other public games on the Greek character when the land was "living
Greece" indeed; but we must also remember that art and song had a part
in those contests of athletes, that they even inspired the lyric odes
of Pindar, that the poet there recited his drama or epic, the painter
exhibited his picture, and the intellectual was made a part of the
physical struggle in those palmy days of Greek culture. I have not yet
heard that any Canadian poet or painter or historian has ever been so
honoured, or asked to take part in those athletic games and sports to
which our public journals devote a number of pages which have not yet
been set apart for Canadian or any literature. The newspaper reporter
is nowadays the only representative of literature in our Pythia or
Olympia, and he assuredly cannot be said to be a Pindaric singer when
he exalts the triumphs of lacrosse or the achievements of the baseball
champion.