LEARNING OF THE ATHENS.
——“As a dog that turns the spit
Bestirs himself, and plies his feet,
To climb the wheel, but all in vain,
His own weight brings him down again,
And still he’s in the self-same place,
Where, at his setting out, he was;
So, in the circle of the arts,
Do they advance their nat’ral parts,
Till falling back still, for retreat,
They fall to juggle, cant, and cheat.”
IF, in her metropolitan status as the seat of Caledonian law, the Athens be fixed as the dog-star, as the seat of Caledonian learning, she has been and must be, changeful as the moon. If the wealth of her lawyers “swells like the Solway,” the renown of her philosophers “ebbs like its tide.” The very same cause which raises the one,—which makes all hearts envy, all eyes admire, all knees worship, and all tongues speak the Babylonish dialect of special pleaders, comes cold and curdling as December’s ice over every thing else; and though there may be an occasional spring of the living water of the mind, which has its source too deep, or its current too thoroughly imbued with the immortal fire, for submitting to the cold congelation; yet such glorious instances must be few and far between. Even in the law itself, there may be green branches, just as there are green branches on the Upas; but, like the Upas, the law, or indeed any thing else which is so overpowering in its influence as the law is in the Athens, must in itself monopolize all the greenness, and etiolate and wither every thing that attempts to grow under its broad and gloomy shade. Whatever promises the chief reward will, under any circumstances, always attract the chief talent; and the state of the whole British dominions, and of the Athens not less than any other portion of them, is at present such as not to be exceedingly favourable to the pursuits of abstract and recondite philosophy. Luxury has found out for all those who have money to spend without working for it,—whether they have it as a legitimate heritage from their natural parents, or as the adopted children of that great nursery-mother of idlers, the state, abundant employment,—full occupation from every hour that they can snatch from the pangs of intemperance and the pillow of sleep, not only without profound philosophy, but without thought of any description that reaches beyond the enjoyment of the moment; and the number of these persons, especially the latter division of them, is so very considerable, that, of the remaining independent portion of the British people, none can afford to be philosophic or learned upon any other terms than those of being paid for it,—taking it up, and following it as a trade, as much as other men do the boring of cannon, or the building of bridges. That this is unquestionably true of the whole country, may be established from the philosophical publications, whether regular or periodical, which make their appearance at the present day. Of the regular class, there has not, so far as I know, been published, within the last thirty years, in any part of the British dominions, a single original work, that will transmit the name of its author to posterity. There have indeed been books, and books in which there have been the details of new experiments, and occasionally scraps of theories; but, like successive days in the kalendar, the one has usurped the place and extinguished the remembrance of the other; and, at the present moment, the most unmarketable article which an author could carry to a bookseller would be a profound treatise on any of the sciences. With regard to periodical learning again, (I use the word “learning” as distinguished from and even opposed to literature,) the case is very nearly the same. The philosophical journals, of all the periodicals, have the most limited circulation, are the least read, and the least worth the reading,—just because the proprietors of them cannot afford to pay for the labour which it would require to make them better.
Now, if this be the case with the British dominions generally, and with the British metropolis, where every species of talent has the means of being stimulated to the greatest exertion, and where every exertion meets with the most ample reward, much more must it be the case in the Athens, where there is not only no adequate remuneration for the labours of learning, but where there is a more honoured and rewarded pursuit, constantly soliciting the choice, not only of the Athenian, but of the Scottish talent generally, away from it. It cannot be hoped, that when a man of very ordinary talents can get a comfortable living and honourable distinction in society, by managing the estates of Scotch lairds, or the causes of Scotch litigants, men of superior ability will consent to starve in obscurity for the love of learning or of science. Mankind have become to the full as mercenary in their intellectual as in their civil marriages; and the Athenian muses, like the Athenian maidens, pine in unwooed neglect, because they have no dowry.
The Athenian University was long the boast of the Athens, not only as a school of philosophy, and a school of medicine, but as a general school of learning; and, with the exception, perhaps, of the latter, the titles were, in the case of a few illustrious men, well earned. Those times have, however, gone by, and the Athenian university, pressed down by the general circumstances of the Athens, and yet more by the peculiar circumstances of its own patronage, has sunk to rise no more.
Universities, indeed, have much of the general character of stars,—they shine brightest when all else is dark, and fade, if they do not disappear, when illumination becomes general. While the people, generally speaking, are ignorant, they are lights in the path of learning; but when the people become generally well informed, they are not much better than lumber. This would be their fate in general illumination, under any circumstances; but it is peculiarly so, in the circumstances under which—or rather, in spite of which, knowledge is at present spreading over the British dominions. The same cause which renders abstract studies unprofitable, must render the systems of universities unpopular, except in so far as the name of being there is necessary for professional purposes; and where the name is all that men actually need, they will not burden themselves with much of the thing named. If it were not that there are such things as fellowships, fat dinners, facilities for juvenile dissipation, church and other livings, a key to certain offices, and a general nominal eclât, which in so far serves as a substitute for real information, it is very possible that several halls in Oxford and Cambridge would be abandoned to bats and spiders,—that “the two eyes of England” would be left “for daws to peck at;” and it was pretty plain to me, from the general tenour of the Athenian feeling, as expressed in the Athenian speech, that, if the attendance of certain classes of her university were not required for those who plaster the consciences of Caledonian sinners, and who bring down the tone of the Caledonian pulse, or the Caledonian purse, her learned Thebans would be allowed to deliver their prelections to the stones in the wall, and the beam of the timber. In as far, therefore, as I could see and reason from circumstances, there is much, both in the feeling of the people in the Athens, and in the causes by which that feeling is produced, to render the decline of learning certain on the one hand, while there is little or nothing of a counteracting tendency on the other.
In addition to this, in as far as the university is concerned, there is the infliction of perhaps the very worst patronage that could be devised or even imagined. I have noticed already, what a precious piece of work the corporations, or, as they are termed, “the councils” of the royal burghs are in Scotland. In itself, there is nothing to render that of the Athens better than any of the others; and, in close juxtaposition with it, there is something which tends to make it worse. The whole town-councils in Scotland are, their attention to their own personal interests excepted, ignorant, unreasoning, and passive tools in the hands of the ruling faction. If the actual leaders of that faction have not their actual residence in the Athens, it is there that they find the hands which do their work. Those hands belong to men, who not only have a better education than the Athenian magistrates, but who perform more important functions, and perform them in the face, and for the weal or the woe of the whole of Scotland. To them, therefore, the magistrates of the Athens are inferior; and this circumstance, taken in conjunction with the inferiority which the whole system of the Scotch burghs tends to stamp upon the magistrates, renders the said civic rulers of the Athens the most unfit patrons of a school of philosophy, or indeed of any thing learned or liberal, that human imagination could devise. Not only this; but the superior talents, at least the superior pretensions, of the other functionaries alluded to, will throw the civic worthies into their train as followers; and thus, whatever patronage they exercise, will have to sustain, in addition to their own sheer dulness, the dead deadening weight of the party politics of the country,—a combination of stupidity and slavery, under which that system were either greater or less than human, which could flourish in a rational and liberal manner.