There is no one whose opinion on this question of secondary education is
more worthy of our attention than that of Mr. Matthew Arnold. Our debt
of gratitude to him for the general advancement of the Idea of Culture,
not only at home, but everywhere where our language is spoken, is so
great that we have begun to accept it almost as an impersonal fact. The
work which he did long ago, and has never ceased to recapitulate, for
the cause of middle-class secondary education, can only be appreciated
by those whose attention has been turned to it more especially. This,
I hope, will hold me excused to him for quoting here from a letter of
his to me, some expressions of his, and the more so as they seem to
show something like a modification of the view he has so far publicly
enunciated. “I think,” he says, “I see signs that the education question
is likely to present itself at no distant date in this wise: ‘Shall
the majority give public money for any education except the education
necessary for every citizen?’ The education necessary for every citizen
will be somewhat extended in scope, but no account will be taken of the
higher culture hitherto deemed necessary for a leisured and governing
class, and to which so great a mass of endowment has been made to
contribute. On the Continent of Europe a great change will be produced
if this new view prevails, for the endowments have in general been
seized by the State, and the State has directly subsidised secondary and
superior instruction. In England it has not, but the endowments which
these instructions enjoyed have been left to them. Probably they will
not be taken away, but further public aid will hardly be given. Nor do
I think it will be given in the Colonies; and as there the endowment of
secondary and superior instruction is inconsiderable, these instructions
will be, as they are now, at a great disadvantage. The wealthiest people
will send their sons to be educated in England; private schools will, of
course, exist locally, but I do not think they will have influence enough
to create a class and a power out of those they train. Society will
thus be, on the whole, much more homogeneous than with the old nations
of Europe; but, as in the United States, this condition of things will
have its own dangers and drawbacks. The best way to meet them is for
individuals to keep up a love of genuine culture in themselves, and so to
create an even larger force in the nation to favour it.” Of the truth,
or very probable truth, of the educational future here drawn out, there
can, alas, be little question. M. Renan, whose work for France can well
be paralleled with that of Mr. Arnold for us, takes an even gloomier
view. We may count ourselves lucky, he says, if Democracy will consent,
not to encourage, but to tolerate independent study. Democracy, he says,
again, is the advent of universal mediocrity, of that most terrible of
mediocrities, the aggressive. “Great qualities,” cried Empedocles, facing
the same problem as we do,
“Great qualities are trodden down,
and littleness united
is become invincible.”
If this, then, is to be the case in Europe, what will it be in America,
and still more in Australia? Aristocracies may not be ideal, but they
have their use: they establish a certain high tone of social intercourse
which is certainly valuable as one element in a really fine civilization;
and, when they have passed away, it still lives as a tacit influence.
France to-day, for instance, is a republic, but her outward manners,
despite all that has happened, bear something of the mark of the Grand
Siècle. England, again, is swinging away with heavy speed from her
old ideal of Puritanism, and yet, as Mr. Arnold says so well, “the
seriousness, solemness, and devout energy of Puritanism are a prize once
won, never to be lost; they are a possession to our race for ever.”
But America? but Australia? America is not leavened by Puritanism as
England is, neither has she any hereditary tone of social intercourse
to be compared with that of England, not to say of France. America must
settle her own problem for herself, despite all the outer influence which
is brought to bear on her: two hundred miles out from the Amazon mouth
the water is still fresh, but it is salt at last. But consider this
Australia where the Puritanism only began to operate when its sincerity
was souring into cant, where the tone of social intercourse flourishes
in the hands of those who attain to it as the imitation of an imitation!
What can be so disastrous for Australia as the thrusting into power of
a class of this sort, to be followed by a class which is to the first
as the first is to its prototype in England? How this future presents
itself has already been considered here. Mr. Marcus Clarke’s picture
of it stands like a perpetual nightmare. What hope, then, remains to
us except in that very “higher culture hitherto deemed necessary for
a leisured and governing class,” which Mr. Arnold tells us our local
private schools will not have influence enough to create as “a class and
a power?” Is the only aristocracy possible to us to be, not a broad one
like that of Athens, but a narrow one like that of Rome? We all know the
picture Juvenal has painted of the decadence of this last, and Johnson’s
application of it to the London of his time is not a memory altogether
pleasant. “The lustre of a capital,” says M. Renan, with his eye on
that of his own country, “springs from a vast provincial dung-heap,
where millions of men lead an obscure life, in order to bring forth some
brilliant butterflies which come to burn themselves in the light.” And
if for capital we substitute plutocracy, and for butterflies creatures
of a nature less savoury, we see something like the sort of future with
which we are threatened here. Political life at present in Europe can
scarcely be called noble, but here in Australia it is positively so base
that there is a danger of its becoming the monopoly of men whose verbose
incompetence is only equalled by their jovial corruption. The Plutocracy,
such as it is, is being thrown in upon itself. Its present generation,
it is true, is content to work—and, indeed, can find its only happiness
in work; but this will not be so with the next, and still less with
the third, generation. The desire to enjoy will grow into a lust, and
this lust will spread. The end of this we know, and there will not lack
writers to look back upon the present, even as so many of us look forward
to the future, with a sort of eager envy. Well, and what is to be done to
prevent this, if it is to be prevented? To cease from trying to obtain a
secondary education for the Upper-class? to obtain Australian Rugbies,
not only for the Plutocracy, but for the Upper-class, and for any one of
the People that has the care to climb up to them and the best education
which his age and country can afford him? to create a class and power
that shall, in their turn, create a really fine civilization?—are we to
cease from all direct struggle for this, and meet the present crisis by
simply trying “to keep up the love of genuine culture in ourselves, and
so to create an ever larger force in the nation to favour it?” I cannot
believe that this is so; I cannot even believe that, good way as it is,
it is “the best way.” We have all been reading lately what Mr. Arnold had
to say in favour of this indirect method, this creation of a Remnant that
should at last become a power, and I am sure I should be the last person
to say a word against it. All I have to say is, that I have too much
belief in the power of institutions (a power “the benefits of which,” Mr.
Arnold has just been telling us, “he had not properly appreciated” before
his trip to America) to neglect anything that could bring them to the
side of Culture. I appreciate the indirect method, and I believe that,
in the long run, it is the method which gives permanent solidity, but I
cannot blind myself to the immense importance of the direct method. If
it is necessary to conduct a river into a city, the pipes must first be
made, and care taken that they are not too small. The French Revolution
was a violent attempt and a premature one, and yet, such as it was, it
brought a greater volume of happiness into France than the abortive
attempt that we made in England. _We_ have still to face the problem of
the happiness of the few and the debasement of the many, and I cannot see
that it is an easier problem to resolve than that which is presenting
itself to the French just at present. I still, then, must continue to
believe that it is not wise in England, and how much more in America,
and how much more in Australia, to refrain from the direct struggle for
a higher education for our Upper-class. Our aim is not for the few but
for the many, and not for elementary Culture for the many, but for the
possibilities of a really fine Culture. We have, too, our distrust of
Remnants. We dread their tendency to take to lotus-eating. They are apt
to care so little for the propagation of either their species or their
Culture.
“Let us alone! What pleasure can we have
to war with evil? Is there any peace
in ever climbing up the climbing wave?”
It is with difficulty, with great and perpetual difficulty, that a Goethe
can keep his duty to his art and his duty to his neighbour at the perfect
poise. It is so hard to keep your duty to yourself from running into your
duty to your selfishness. Light, and the love of light, and the love
of bringing light to others, is after all impossible without a certain
admixture of heat. Let us, then, still continue to nourish our enthusiasm
for a direct purpose, which shall be the future to that great mass of
average human beings who are thoughtlessly moulded by whatever they find
is strong enough to mould them. Let us be jealous of individuals. “_Non
Angli, sed angeli._”
“_Leave not a human soul_
_to grow old in darkness and pain!_”
_October, 1885._
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