in the solemnities of Good Friday, at least in the evening, for during
the day the celebration was uniform enough. Morning and afternoon
divine service. The whole church streamed with lights, for every one
held piously a taper in his hand. In the centre of the church lay,
under a high canopy, a wax figure of the dead body of Christ. Every
one, without distinction of sex, age, or rank, approached this figure,
and fervently kissed it. There was not a moment of quiet or repose,
but a constant moving to and fro of the restless multitude. Added to
this, the constant singing of a frightfully monotonous, mournful
liturgy, in the usual nasal tone. Late in the evening the solemnity
suddenly assumed a more imposing form. The canopy, with the figure of
Christ tastefully adorned with flowers, was borne through the streets,
priests and people, men and women, devoutly following, torch in
hand—the procession flowing on like a moving sea of lights. A peculiar
melancholy lay was sung, now in a low mournful tone, now breaking out
into loud bursts of grief. This dirge is for the dead Christ, who is
solemnly borne to the grave. The procession lasts for more than an
hour, when at length the image is again set down in the church, and
the former dirges and liturgies resound anew, only in a still more
mournful and inconsolable tone.
“I know not whether I am correct, yet I cannot help expressing what I
felt, that this nocturnal funeral procession involuntarily reminded me
of those grand processions by torchlight in the times of the ancient
Athenians, made to Eleusis at the great Eleusinian festival. The
ancient Greek origin of this peculiar celebration of Good Friday seems
the more evident to me, as I never witnessed in Rome, on the same
occasion, any public procession of a similar nature, at least not in
the streets, or accompanied by the whole of the people. The procession
in the Vatican on Good Friday, when the body of Christ is borne from
the Sistine chapel into that of St Paul, lasts but a few minutes, and
is only a piece of priestly pageantry, confined to the Pope and the
cardinals.
“It is not difficult, however, to imagine how the same feelings and
solemnities which marked the Eleusinian mysteries should have crept
imperceptibly into the Christian services of Easter. The Eleusinian
mysteries celebrate the grief of Demeter for the loss of her daughter
Proserpine, who was stolen away by Pluto; and then comes loud
rejoicing when this daughter issues forth again from the darkness of
the infernal regions, and unites with the joy-dispensing wine-god in
imparting to man the blessings of their mysteries. In the celebration
of the Christian festival of Easter there is the same display of
opposing emotions, the quick transition from grief to joy, from loss
to restoration, from the interment to the resurrection. New gods have
arisen, but the old worship is the same. As the ancient Greeks fasted
and prayed and did penance while Proserpine remained in the lower
world, so do the Greeks of Christendom fast and pray and do penance
for the death of the Saviour. And just as in the Eleusinian mysteries,
after these days of bitter mourning, there was the most extravagant
rejoicing over the return of Proserpine, drinking, and dancing, when
all
‘Beat the ground with violent foot—
For the unreined joy-intoxicated
Wanton celebration!
Each one danced the gracious,
Thrice graceful, and thrice holy
Mystical measure;’
so does now the Christian Greek pass at once from the rigid fasting of
Passion Week to the most unbridled license. The moment the bishop at
the midnight hour on Easter eve gives utterance to the much-longed-for
words, ‘Christ is risen; yea, He is risen indeed!’ loud rejoicings are
heard from all quarters, shrill screaming and shouting, constant
shooting, and throwing of rockets, roasting and eating the lamb, and
drinking unmixed wine. The first day of Easter is the only day on
which the Greek drinks except for thirst; so uniformly temperate is
he, indeed, that he detests nothing more than to see the German
stranger swaggering along, without shame, drunk in the open streets.”
All this is very characteristic and interesting enough, considering how
little is generally known in this country of the Greek Church; it is
sad, however, to think that the facts here given present so little
essentially different from that continental Rome with which we are so
familiar, and so much of the outward and sensuous trickery of what our
author recognises as mere heathenism. The low state of the Greek Church,
indeed, will be most readily appreciated from the fact, that while the
recitation of long prayers and litanies is going on diligently in a
thousand churches and chapels every morning, it is the rarest chance in
the world to find a Sunday or holiday when, even at Athens, such a thing
as a sermon or Christian address of any kind is delivered to the people.
This circumstance, which may be easily verified on the spot, is a plain
proof that the ceremonial element in the Greek service has altogether
overshadowed and almost absorbed the intellectual and moral: in other
words, that an element characteristic of pure heathenism has been
transplanted into the Christian soil, and allowed to grow to such
luxuriance that the native vegetation, characteristic of Christianity,
has almost entirely disappeared; for we never can forget that it was by
the “foolishness of preaching,” and not by the nasal drone of drowsy
litanies, that St Paul confounded the Epicurean philosophers on the Hill
of Mars, and made the famous image of Diana of the Ephesians tremble in
its silver shrine. A Christian church without preaching, is a Christian
church without intelligence; and such a church cannot exist with any
propriety in an age which prides itself in the general diffusion of
knowledge, and among a people of whose character intellectual quickness
has always been a more prominent trait than moral probity. Of all this,
well-educated men in Greece—and of these there is no lack—are
sufficiently aware. But over and above the fact that all churches are
apt to display a remarkable obduracy in the matter of reform, in the
case of the Greek Church an additional difficulty arises from patriotic
and political considerations. In Greece, not only the devout believer,
but the intelligent Greek who is not devout, is well aware that his
Church is to the Greek, more than to any other people in Europe, the
great bond of his nationality. It was within the bosom of this Church
that freedom of mind, and of speech also, to a considerable extent, was
preserved at Byzantium, in an age when the tyrannous spirit of imperial
centralisation had choked every other utterance of individual life. It
was the traditions, the service, and, to some extent also, the learning
of the Greek clergy, which preserved the Greek language an inestimable
heirloom to the Greek people during a long course of centuries, when
Slavonic barbarism, Turkish bigotry, and Turkish oppression,
successively threatened its extinction. It was, finally, a primate of
the Greek Church, Germanós, the Archbishop of Patras, that in 1821 first
planted the standard of independence among the mountain-peaks of the
Northern Morea. Under these circumstances it is easy enough to
understand how a certain amiable piety prevents the religious Greek from
wishing to disturb his patriotic Mother Church with innovations, which,
however plausible in their outset, might end in breaking up the unity of
that venerable religious corporation which has hitherto kept together
his disintegrated and scattered nationality. And if such considerations
operate strongly with the devout Greek, the mere politician will, of
course, feel them more strongly. To him the Church, even in its purest
state, is only a convenient moral police; and an unreformed church which
keeps a people together, is, as a political instrument, more valuable
than a reformed church which disunites them. We see no likelihood,
therefore, at the present moment, of any reform in the Greek Church,
such as pious Protestant writers have hoped for. The political interest,
not the religious, is at present the dominant power in the Greek mind. A
single sentence from Lord Palmerston or Lord Aberdeen, pointing towards
a division of Turkey, and a restoration of the Greek empire at
Constantinople, would stir the whole nation much more deeply than did a
late notable ecclesiastical pamphlet by Pharmacides, one of their most
talented theologians. The painted candles and the gilt tinsel, the
roasted lamb and the cracks of gunpowder, and, above all abominations,
that inhuman nasal drone with which they chant their service, are likely
to remain in the Greek ecclesiastical world a long season after the
Greeks themselves have by a great majority voted them gone. Alas for
poor humanity! So it happens in other churches also sometimes. The
living are condemned to walk the streets with a dead corpse on their
backs, and must call it an ornament.
In concluding these hasty notices of the present condition of so famous
a city, may we be allowed to express a hope that the pedantic habits
fostered by our schools and universities, of considering modern Greece
and modern Greeks as things with which scholars have nothing to do, may
forthwith be given up. Greece and the Greeks are no longer what they
were under the Turks—very different, as we have seen, in some respects,
from what they were when visited by Wordsworth. Like Pompeii, which
slumbered for centuries within the ashes of Vesuvius, and then came to
light suddenly one of these modern days, to astonish us with the
resurrection of a lost people, and a forgotten epoch; so a Greek people
and a Greek language have certainly risen from the dead since the
commencement of this century, and their living presence cannot be
ignored. We should advise our academical men, unless they are ambitious
of imitating the obdurate conservatism of the Greek Church, to throw off
at once the capricious pronunciation of the Greek language, which was
imposed on Europe by the pleasant conceit of Erasmus, and take up again
that living tradition of the Byzantine elders, from which Erasmus
himself, and all our great early scholars, drew their inspiration. They
will thus not only do a thing reasonable and scholarly in itself, but
resume at once that direct connection with the living Greek language
which the present bastard pronunciation renders on our part so
difficult. In Europe the railways and steamboats, as we constantly hear,
have annihilated space and time; and a scholarly trip to the Acropolis
is neither so difficult nor so expensive an affair now as it was thirty
years ago. Athens, no doubt, is a bad school for quantity; but there are
many things in Greek as important as long and short syllables; and some
very important things certainly there are which a scholar may learn in
Athens, not so readily to be picked up at Oxford or Cambridge. We hope
the day is not far distant when it will be considered as natural for a
scholar to take part of his Greek education in Greece, as for a sculptor
to drink in beauty from the marble treasures of the Vatican and the
Capitol; and when no philologist will consider himself properly
qualified for his work, who has not heard Greek lectures under the
shadow of Lycabettus, and made classic vows at the tombs of Otfried
Mueller on Colonus.
A FEW MORE WORDS ON UNIVERSITY REFORM.
The long vacation is over, and the streets of Oxford have once more
resumed their sombre gaiety. Dons in the dignity of long tassels, and
freshmen in that _bizarre_ conjunction of all varieties of
snuff-coloured coats and short black gowns, which seems at present to
embody the undergraduate sense of the beautiful, meet in mid High
Street—each regarding the other with a mild astonishment, and a
benevolent consciousness of superiority. Term has begun; and it is
generally believed that those reverend seniors, whom by a pleasant
euphemism we in Oxford call the “Heads of Houses,” are hard at work
making arrangements, with the fear of Lord John before their eyes, to
set those houses in order; or to see what sop they can afford to throw
to that seven-headed Cerberus, which, under the name of “Her Majesty’s
Commission,” is barking at their gates. There has been a long foreboding
lull; but surely there are throes in the Alma Mater’s womb; “_parturiunt
Collegia_”—we trust the rest of the quotation would ill apply; though no
doubt many a young tutor has come up with a plan of University Reform
ripe for production, the result of three months’ sea-side gestation
during the “long.” “What are you going to do at Oxford?” has been a
question oftener asked than answered during these summer holidays.
Indeed, what answer there has been was too often to this effect,
“Probably nothing.” Too probably; and yet, not only the Home Secretary,
but the public, are expecting something. It is of little avail now to
question the legality or the expediency of the Royal Commission; whether
we like it or not, it is now a great fact—like the repeal of the Corn
Laws, or the cholera. And, whether or not the authorities of the
University may please to recognise it, the public, who have an interest
in these great public institutions, must recognise it, and have a right
to a voice in the question. If we are to have, as we must have,
University Reform, let us have it of the right quality; and in order to
this it must come from the right hands. It must not be the amateur
performance of clever theorists, but the mature result of practical
experience, aided by calm and dispassionate inquiry. This we have not
had, and for this it is that we are waiting. Oxford _must_ set herself
to the task; her best and truest sons must wrest, as they may easily,
the ill-grasped weapon from the enemy’s hand, and turn it to their own
defence. No purism of consistency, no fear of touching the unclean
thing, must deter them from the task. The skilful pilot does not refuse
to take the helm because he alone foresaw the danger, and would not have
put to sea. It may seem very grand and heroic for the Senate of Oxford
to sit still in their seats of office, though the enemy is within their
walls, scorning to recognise his presence; but in their case none will
mistake the reverend conclave for divinities, and their fall will be at
the best but a caricature of the Romans. We live in an age of
compromise, as Home Secretaries and Chancellors of Exchequer can amply
testify: it may not be dignified, but it is practically convenient; no
man makes a martyr of himself nowadays for a theory; he “accepts the
position;” he eats and gives thanks. And in this temper of our times,
undignified as it is, may lie the salvation of Oxford. Already one
result of it has been, that the Government before which the report of
her Majesty’s Commissioners now lies, is of quite another composition
than that under which it issued; and however Oxford may still be
disposed to question the jurisdiction of the court, and the legality of
their warrant, she has no longer any cause, on the whole, to challenge
the jury. She has, at all events, such privileges as we consider
sufficient justice to foreigners; half aliens, half fellow-citizens, may
be no unfair panel. Heaven send her a good deliverance!
We have said before, that the Commissioners’ report can scarcely be
satisfactory to any one but the authors; it is wonderful, and, as the
charity-boy said, somewhat disappointing, to go through so much, and
learn so little. Engrossed, as it would seem, almost exclusively by the
one grand panacea for all University discords—the professoriate
idea—they have either altogether overlooked, or very slightly touched
upon, defects and abuses which every honest member of the University had
long since groaned over in secret—of which many had complained aloud. It
seems as if the clever gentlemen to whom her Majesty sent greeting,
impressed with an awful sense of duties as arduous as they were unusual,
had felt themselves excused from noticing facts that were obvious to
meaner eyes, and that “knowledge, ability, and discretion” so egregious
as theirs, could only fitly be employed in grand conceptions and
comprehensive theories of regeneration. The words of their Commission,
to ordinary ears, conveyed only powers and instructions to “inquire into
and report upon the state, discipline, studies, and revenues of the
University;” but they, by an inspiration peculiar, perhaps, to
commissioners, as all the moral and intellectual virtues are, we now
know, to professors, interpreted these words in a transcendental sense,
or rather, perhaps, read them by a cipher supplied from Downing Street.
Still these words stand, in their innocent simplicity, on the outside of
the Blue-book; but on opening it we find what has been sarcastically,
but quite as reasonably, called “suggestions for the constitution of _a_
University.”[19] That it would have no longer been _the_ University upon
which they were commissioned to report, was in their eyes, perhaps, of
little consequence. It is possible that their Report, if less original,
might have been more practical, had they but contented themselves with
humbler aims. Nay, the very witnesses themselves seem to have been
infected by the important presence in which they stood, and with few
exceptions to have rather aimed at remodelling everything according to
an ideal standard of their own, than to be willing to address themselves
to the real defects and anomalies of the existing system. There are
abuses on which the most careless undergraduate could have borne
important testimony, and which every honest tutor will confess with
pain, on which this Report evinces either the strangest insensibility,
or the most perverse conservatism.
First and most prominent, as regards the studies of the place, stands
the crying evil, which might almost have claimed a Commission to
itself,—that the real work of the University is done by private tutors.
How tenderly and delicately the Commissioners deal with this—which we
are surely not singular in considering a gigantic anomaly—may be seen by
those who have the patience to read page 89 of their production. Fondly
placing in the foreground, in the ardent words of Mr Lowe—himself an
able and successful private tutor—the “manifold advantages” of the
system, they touch lightly on its defects, and faintly hint at partial
remedies. Admitting that “the amount paid for private tuition by many
individuals far exceeds that which is paid for college tuition”—(it
would, we believe, have been nearer the truth to say that the sum paid
annually for the former more than doubles the college charges for the
latter)—they congratulate themselves upon the fact, that the practice is
less general at Oxford that at Cambridge. But when they tell us, as a
serious piece of information, the result of six months’ laborious
inquiry, the product of seven printed papers of questions, and the
combined evidence of “the great majority of PROFESSORS” and “persons of
note” (p. 1), that “of late years many candidates for an ordinary degree
have had recourse to assistance from private tutors,” we feel that the
veriest freshman—supposing freshmen ever to read Blue-books—must laugh
in the face of her Majesty’s Commissioners. “Many candidates for an
ordinary degree.” Indeed! Why, two men out of three, in some colleges,
who are going up even for “little-go,” “have recourse,” &c. &c.; or, in
the less Johnsonian language of undergraduates, “take a coach.” If the
Commissioners did not know this, they are pretty nearly the only Oxford
men who do not know it. We may indeed plead in their excuse that the
“persons of note,” who have been evidently their favourite witnesses,
have themselves found this branch of instruction both lucrative and
honourable; and besides the natural and amiable tendency in all minds to
be somewhat partial judges of those employments in which we have spent
the best, the busiest, and, therefore, not the least happy years of
life, there is another consideration which, however unwillingly and
unconsciously, will always have its weight with poor weak human nature.
“Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth,” is an argument no
less cogent now than formerly.
The evil, we have said, is a gigantic one. It is for this reason—because
its roots are spread so wide and deeply, and because it involves so many
interests, and shelters itself under such powerful patrons—that a Royal
Commission, that λᾶας ἀναιδης’ trenchant and unsparing of minor
delinquencies, recoils from it. Well may Mr Foulkes in his evidence,
unquoted by Commissioners, call it “one of the curses of our days.”[20]
Even Mr Congreve,—himself an able private tutor, and on other points a
witness after the Commissioners’ own heart—denounces it as “a great
evil”[21] both for pupil and tutor. But in this case, with all deference
to names which seem to carry with them all the weight due to practical
experience, the unacademical common sense of the public sees its way
pretty clearly. Like railway mismanagement and hotel charges, the force
that is to move this mountain must come from without. We must be our own
Commissioners. And first we say,—though with some hesitation, in the
presence of such tried logicians as the Commissioners and their
witnesses,—that in almost all the arguments, _pro_ and _con_, there has
been an _ignoratio elenchi_. With all submission to such authorities,
the question is not, whether it be or be not popular with
undergraduates, as giving them some taste of the German heaven of
“_Lernfreiheit_” and “_Lehrfreiheit_;”[22] or convenient for M.A.’s, as
“retaining within the University many able men whom it is not
possible”[23] otherwise to provide for, and “affording a field for
public competition and display;” whether it promote that “intercourse
and confidence” between the pupil and the tutor of his own choice, which
he refuses to his legitimate college instructors; whether it be an
“unhealthy stimulus,” or an opportunity of “direct personal contact and
privacy invaluable to the student;”[24] whether the moral influence
acknowledged to be thus acquired by men whom the University does not
even recognise as teachers be used for good or for evil; nor even
whether it be, as one gentleman in his evidence has waggishly described
it, and as the Commissioners have printed in apparent innocence of the
joke,[25] desirable as an “investment for a certain amount of loose
private capital”[26] (well known to abound in undergraduate pockets),
and safe to bear a good interest when the pupil in his turn becomes
tutor;—all these, important and interesting questions as they may be in
themselves, are quite beside the real issue. Turn and twist it how you
will, the fact resolves itself into the plain words of Mr Melville,—“the
work of the University is done by an order not recognised by that system
whose operations it so extremely influences.”[27] “Unauthorised
adventurers,”[28] as they are not unfairly styled by one of themselves,
usurp the teaching which the University professes to commit only to
hands carefully and deliberately selected, and for whose fidelity she
possesses the strongest guarantees. Granted that these men are, as most
of them are undoubtedly, clever, hardworking, fully equal to their
position—granting even what cannot be asserted in all cases, even by the
warmest admirers of the system, that they are all in principle, in
private character, and habits of life, what we look for in the guides
and instructors of youth,—still is it reasonable, is it decent, that
these magnificent institutions, endowed with ample revenues for the
promotion of sound learning, and receiving the flower of the youth of
England in solemn trust for the highest purposes of education, should
leave them, after all, to pick up this education as they may, by the
wayside? If Universities and Colleges cannot educate _as_ Universities
and Colleges, what can they do? Are they really, as their enemies would
call them, mighty shams—hoary hypocrisies? It is because we believe that
these questions admit at once of an indignant answer,—an answer which
has already sprung to the lips of many an energetic teacher—that we here
ask them. But it is because her Majesty’s Commissioners have apparently
thought them neither worth asking nor answering, that they need to be
asked again and again.