It is possible that the American public likes being preached to, just as Hannah More’s British public liked being preached to. This would account for the little sermons thrown on the screen between moving pictures, brief admonishments pointing out the obvious moral of the drama, deploring the irregularity of masculine affections, the soulless selfishness of wealth; and asserting with colossal impudence that the impelling purpose of the entertainment is to bring home to the hearts of men an understanding of the misery they cause. As it is the rule of moving-picture plays to change their scenes with disconcerting speed, but to leave all explanatory texts on the screen long enough to be learned by heart, these moral precepts dominate the show. The franker its revelations, the more precepts are needed to offset them. Rows of decent and respectable men, who accompany their decent and respectable wives, are flattered by being accused of sins which they have never aspired to commit.
“I must acknowledge that some writers upon ethical questions have been men of fair moral character,” said Sir Leslie Stephen in a moment of expansion which was no less wise than generous, seeing that he was himself the author of two volumes of lay sermons, originally delivered before ethical societies. Didacticism can go no further than in these monitory papers. There is one on “The Duties of Authors,” which is calculated to drive a light-minded or light-hearted neophyte from a profession where he is expected in his most unguarded moments to influence morally his equally unguarded readers. But Sir Leslie played the game according to rule. A plainly worded notice on the fly-leaf warned the public that the sermons were sermons, not critical studies, or Alpine adventures. If they seem to us overcrowded with counsel, this is only because they are non-religious in their character. When religion is excluded from a sermon, there is too much room left for morality. Without the vast compelling presence of God, the activities of men grow feverish, and lose the “imperious sweetness” of sanctity.
If our preachers are trying to recivilize humanity, it behooves us, perhaps, to be more patient with their methods. All civilizing formulas are uneasy possessions. Ruskin evolved one, and no man could have been more sincere or more insistent in applying it. So painfully did he desire that his readers should think as he did, that he grew to look upon the world with a jaundiced eye because it was necessarily full of people who thought differently. Even Hannah More had a little formula for the correction of England; but it gave her no uneasiness, because she could not conceive of herself as a failure. Advice flowed from her as it flows from her followers to-day. There was but one of her, which was too much. There are many of them, and great is their superfluity. The “Vanishing Sermon” has not vanished. It has only changed its habitat. It has forsaken the pulpit, and taken up quarters in what was formerly the strong-hold of literature.
The Battle-Field of Education
Readers of Jane Austen will remember how Mr. Darcy and Miss Bingley defined to their own satisfaction the requirements of an accomplished woman. Such a one, said Miss Bingley, must add to ease of manner and address “a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages.” To which Mr. Darcy subjoined: “All this she must possess, and she must have something more substantial in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” Whereupon Elizabeth Bennet stoutly affirmed that she had never met a woman in whom “capacity, taste, application and elegance” were so admirably and so formidably united.
Between an accomplished woman in Miss Austen’s day and an educated man in ours, there are many steps to climb; but the impression conveyed by those who now seek to define the essentials of education is that, like Miss Bingley and Mr. Darcy, they ask too much. Also that they are unduly influenced by the nature of the things they themselves chance to know. Hence the delight of agitators in drawing up lists of ascertainable facts, and severely catechizing the public. They forget, or perhaps they never read, the serene words of Addison (an educated man) concerning the thousand and one matters with which he would not burden his mind “for a Vatican.”
With every century that rolls over the world there is an incalculable increase of knowledge. It ranges backward and forward, from the latest deciphering of an Assyrian tablet to the latest settling of a Balkan boundary-line; from a disconcerting fossil dug out of its prehistoric mud to a new explosive warranted to destroy a continent. Obviously an educated man, even a very highly educated man, must be content, in the main, with a “modest and wise ignorance.” Intelligence, energy, leisure, opportunity—these things are doled out to him in niggardly fashion; and with his beggar’s equipment he confronts the vastness of time and space, the years the world has run, the forces which have sped her on her way, and the hoarded thinking of humanity.
Compared with this huge area of “general information,” how firm and final were the educational limits of a young Athenian in the time of Plato! The things he did not have to know fill our encyclopædias. Copra and celluloid were as remote from his field of vision as were the Reformation and the battle of Gettysburg. But ivory he had, and the memory of Marathon, and the noble pages of Thucydides. That there were Barbarians in the world, he knew as well as we do. Some, like the Ethiops, dwelt so far away that Homer called them “blameless.” Some were so perilously near that the arts of war grew with the arts of peace. For books he had a certain delicate scorn, caught from his master, Plato, who never forgave their lack of reticence, their fashion of telling everything to every reader. But the suave and incisive conversation of other Athenians taught him intellectual lucidity, and the supreme beauty of the spoken word. “Late and laboriously,” says Josephus, “did the Greeks acquire their knowledge of Greek.” That they acquired it to some purpose is evidenced by the fact that the graduate of an American college must have some knowledge of Plato’s thinking, if he is to be called educated. Where else shall he see the human intellect, trained to strength and symmetry like the body of an athlete, exercising its utmost potency and its utmost charm? Where else shall he find a philosophy which has “in all ages ravished the hearts of men”?
A curious symptom of our own day is that we have on one hand a strong and deep dissatisfaction with the mental equipment of young Americans, and on the other an ever-increasing demand for freedom, for self-development, for doing away with serious and severe study. The ideal school is one in which the pupil is at liberty to get up and leave the class if it becomes irksome, and in which the teacher is expected to comport himself like the kind-hearted captain of the Mantelpiece. The ideal college is one which prepares its students for remunerative positions, which teaches them how to answer the kind of questions that captains of industry may ask. One of the many critics of our educational system has recently complained that college professors are not practical. “The undergraduate,” he says, “sits during the four most impressionable years of his life under the tuition and influence of highly trained, greatly devoted, and sincere men, who are financial incompetents, who have as little interest in, or understanding of, business as has the boy himself.”
It does not seem to occur to this gentleman that if college professors knew anything about finance, they would probably not remain college professors. Learning and wealth have never run in harness since Cadmus taught Thebes the alphabet. It would be a brave man who should say which was the better gift; but one thing is sure: unless we are prepared to grant the full value of scholarship which adds nothing to the wealth of nations, or to the practical utilities of life, we shall have only partial results from education. And such scholarship can never be generally approved. It is, and must forever remain, says Augustine Birrell, “in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble word, essentially unpopular.”