Mr. Thomas Hughes's attempt to provide a refuge in Tennessee for the
large class of young Englishmen whom he calls "Will Wimbles," after
one of Sir Roger de Coverley's friends in Addison's _Spectator_, is
said to be a failure, owing mainly to the poverty of the land and
the remoteness of the markets. An acute writer in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ maintains that there is another and more potent cause to be
found in the quality of the Will Wimbles. The Will Wimbles are the
young men who are educated in the public schools and universities,
or at least in the public schools, and are turned out into the world
between eighteen and twenty-one, without any special training
whatever, but with the manners and instincts of gentlemen, and with
entire willingness to take to any calling but the lower walks of
"trade." The great body of them are the sons of middle-class
parents--clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and small squires--whose means
are very moderate, and who have to submit to more or less privation
in order to send their sons to the public schools at all. They do it
in order to launch them in the world unmistakably in the gentle
class, and in order to enable them to form their first social
relations in that class. Unfortunately, however, as the writer in
the _Pall Mall Gazette_ points out, the tone and temper of the
public schools, and their way of looking at life, are the products
of a vague, but none the less powerful, assumption that every boy is
the son of a man with about five thousand pounds a year. The whole
atmosphere of the school is permeated with this assumption. The
boys' code of manners is formed in it. Their intercourse with each
other is more or less influenced by it, and they all look out on the
world, up to their last day at school, with the eyes of youths whose
home is a well-equipped manor-house surrounded by a prosperous
estate.
The love of the middle-class Englishman of every age for this point
of view is curiously exemplified in the social articles, not only in
the "society paper," properly so called, but in the _Saturday
Review_. The troubles and perplexities and minor disappointments
of life form a favorite topic with the writer of the "sub-leaders"
in this last-named paper, but they are always of the troubles,
perplexities, and disappointments of a landed gentleman who keeps
hunters, and has a stud groom and extensive covers. He hardly ever
examines the state of mind of anyone less well-to-do than a younger
son whose means only allow him to hunt two days in a week instead of
six, and who has to rely on invitations for his shooting. These and
their sisters, cousins, and aunts, apparently form the reviewer's
entire world, and the only world in which there are any social
phenomena worth discussion. It is, in other words, a world made up
exclusively of "gentlemen," and of the persons, male and female, who
wait upon them. Its sorrows are the sorrows of gentlemen, and arise
mostly out of the failure of some amusement, or the loss of the
money with which amusements are provided, the missing of some social
distinction, or the misconduct of "upper servants." It is, however,
really the only world that the English public-school boy or
university man sees, or hears of, or thinks about while in _statu
pupillari_. This is true, let his own home be never so modest, or
the sacrifices made by his father to secure him the fashionable
curriculum be never so painful. The result is, of course, that when
his "education" is finished, he is really only prepared for what is
technically called a gentleman's life. He has only thought of
certain employments as possible to him, and all these are
exceedingly hard to get. The manners of the great bulk of mankind,
too, are more or less repulsive to him, and so is a good deal of the
popular morality. In short, he is turned out a Will Wimble--or, in
other words, a good-hearted, kindly, gentlemanly, honorable fellow,
who is, however, entirely unfitted for the social _milieu_, in
which he must not only live, but make a living.
Mr. Hughes's idea has been that, though he dislikes trade, and is a
little too nice for it as now carried on, at least on the retail
side, he has an innate liking and readiness for agriculture, and
that, if enabled to till the soil under pleasant, or at least not
too novel, social conditions, he would do it successfully. Out of
this the Rugby, Tenn., experiment has grown, and if it has not
actually failed, as some say, it is certainly too early to pronounce
it a success. At all events, the signs that it is going to fail are
numerous. Among them is the deep disappointment of the settlers, few
of whom probably realized not only the monotony and drudgery of
labor in the fields--these things can be borne by men with stout
hearts and strong arms--but its effect in unfitting a man for any
kind of amusement. There has been much delusion on this subject in
this country, where far more is known by the reading class about all
kinds of manual labor than is known in England. The possibility of
working hard in the fields and keeping up at the same time some
process of intellectual culture, has been much preached among us
both by educational projectors and social reformers, though nearly
every man who listens to them here knows the effect of physical toil
in the open air in producing sleepiness and mental inertness. It is
not surprising, therefore, that it should find ready acceptance in
England among people who think ability to bear a hard day on the
moors after grouse, or a long run in the saddle after the hounds,
argues capacity to hoe potatoes or corn for twelve hours, and settle
down in the evening, after a bath and a good dinner, to Dante, or
Wallace, or Huxley.
Will Wimbles are much less common among us than in England. We
fortunately have not a dozen great endowments used in turning them
out, or a large and rich society occupied in spreading the
gentlemanly view of life. But they, nevertheless, are more numerous
than is altogether pleasant. The difficulty which our college
graduate experiences in getting room for what the newspapers call
his "bark" on the stream of life, is one of the standing jokes of
our light literature. We have no schools which take the place of the
English public schools in our scheme of education. But the view of
life which prevails in the English public schools and turns out the
Will Wimbles, is more or less prevalent in our colleges, and tends
to spread as the wealth of the class which sends its boys to college
increases. In other words, colleges are to a much greater extent
than they used to be places in which social relations are found,
rather than places of preparation for the active work of life. This
last character, indeed, they almost wholly lost when they ceased to
have the training of ministers as their main function. Scarcely any
man who can afford it now likes to refuse his son a college
education if the boy wants it; but probably not one boy in one
thousand can say, five years after graduating, that he has been
helped by his college education in making his start in life. It may
have been never so useful to him as a means of moral and
intellectual culture, but it has not helped to adapt him to the
environment in which he has to live and work; or, in other words, to
a world in which not one man in a thousand has either the manners or
cultivation of a gentleman, or changes his shirt more than once a
week, or eats with a fork.
College education is prevented from suffering as much from this
source in popular estimation in England as it does here, by the fact
that, owing to the peculiar political traditions of the country,
college-bred men begin life in a large number of cases in possession
of great advantages of other kinds, such as hereditary wealth. Here
they have almost all to face the world on their own merits, and in
so far as they face it feebly or unskilfully their defects are set
down in the popular mind to the fact that they went to college. If
the discredit ended here, it would perhaps be of small consequence.
But it may be safely said that the college graduate is never seen
groping about in a helpless and timid way for "a position," and
shrinking from the turmoil and dirt of some walks of life, without
spreading among the uncultivated a contempt for culture and
increasing their confidence in the rule of thumb. The mere "going to
college" is recognized as a sign of pecuniary ease, and of a desire
for social advancement, but not as preparation for the kind of work
which the bulk of the community is doing, and thus makes mental
culture seem less desirable, and cultivated men less potent,
especially in politics.
The question is a serious one for all colleges, and it is not here
only, but in England and France, that it is undergoing grave
consideration. In Germany society may be said to have been organized
as an appendage to the universities, but here the universities are
simply appendages to society, which is continually doubting whether
their existence can be justified.