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