FOOTNOTES:
[113] The Pall Mall Gazette of January 27 contained a leader on "Compulsory Education," and that of January 29 one upon a speech of the Bishop of Oxford on the same subject, made at a meeting in connection with the National Society, held at Tunbridge Wells on the preceding day. In the Gazette of January 30 appeared a letter referring to these articles, headed "Sixty Years Ago," and signed "One who has walked four miles to the Parish School." It described the writer's early home, situate in some lowland parish north of the Tweed, and divided into five or six estates, such as "Whinny-hills" and "Weary-faulds," the lairds of which were shortly called "Whinny" or "Weary" after their properties. In this primitive village, where supervision, much less compulsion, in education was never heard of, "no child grew up without learning to read," and the morals of the parish were on the whole good; the children quarrelled, but did not steal.—The reader will remember that the second title of "Waverley" is "'Tis Sixty Years Since."
[From "The Glasgow Herald," June 5, 1874. Also reprinted in "The Times" of June 6, 1874.]
THE VALUE OF LECTURES.[114]
Rome, 26th May, 1874.
My dear Sir: I have your obliging letter, but am compelled by increase of work to cease lecturing except at Oxford—and practically there also—for, indeed, I find the desire of audiences to be audiences only becoming an entirely pestilent character of the age. Everybody wants to hear—nobody to read—nobody to think; to be excited for an hour—and, if possible, amused; to get the knowledge it has cost a man half his life to gather, first sweetened up to make it palatable, and then kneaded into the smallest possible pills—and to swallow it homœopathically and be wise—this is the passionate desire and hope of the multitude of the day.
It is not to be done. A living comment quietly given to a class on a book they are earnestly reading—this kind of lecture is eternally necessary and wholesome; your modern fire-working, smooth-downy-curry-and-strawberry-ice-and-milk-punch-altogether lecture is an entirely pestilent and abominable vanity; and the miserable death of poor Dickens, when he might have been writing blessed books till he was eighty, but for the pestiferous demand of the mob, is a very solemn warning to us all, if we would take it.[115]
God willing, I will go on writing, and as well as I can. There are three volumes published of my Oxford lectures,[116] in which every sentence is set down as carefully as may be. If people want to learn from me, let them read them or my monthly letter Fors Clavigera. If they don't care for these, I don't care to talk to them.
Truly yours,
J. Ruskin.