It is to this education, for life and not for literature, which I mean chiefly to advert in this chapter. Still, it may not be amiss to give a preliminary glance at the school education, not of the Athens merely, but of Scotland generally, because on that, it strikes me, Englishmen might find something both to learn and to imitate. The idea of having one or more schools in each parish, so established that no teacher can be appointed to them who is not well educated, and so endowed that they can never be corrupted as the free-schools so frequently are in England, or confined to the most opulent classes of society, as the better class of schools are in that country, is one of the best that ever entered into the imagination of any legislature. Even in the remotest and most thinly-inhabited parish of Scotland, the schoolmaster is a man of real information: not unfrequently the son of humble parents, who, finding that he evinced talents and a taste for learning, sent him to school, and to some one or other of those cheap universities in Scotland, where, judging from the number of illustrious names that they can boast of, learning is nothing the worse for its cheapness, till he was qualified for orders; but who, finding his influence insufficient for procuring him the ease and indolence of a parsonage, took, as his only alternative, the humbler and more laborious, but unquestionably more useful, office of parish schoolmaster. Young men of this description are one of the greatest blessings that a country can possess, and rather than that Scotland should lose them, it were more for her welfare that all the boasted philosophy, and all the brawling law of the Athens were at the bottom of the sea. They may be said not only to pursue learning for its own sake, and without any view either to honour or emolument, but also to follow the profession of teachers from the same disinterested motives. Since professions more lofty and lucrative than that of minister of the Scotch Kirk monopolized the sons of the wealthier Scotch—since the free sons of the mountains went to practise slavery in the west, and those of the plains to get wealth and liver complaints in the east, the ecclesiastical offices in Scotland have been almost exclusively filled by the sons of the poor. These almost invariably pass a part of their early life either as parochial schoolmasters or as tutors in private families. The tutors are those who have the best connexion, the most ambition, and the most fawning and obsequious habits. They are menial servants, and with the education of gentlemen they are sent to companion with butlers and valets, to humour the caprices of wayward children, and to hear the fooleries of booby “lairds,” and the scorn of assuming dames, who can see no merit but in being connected with this, that, or the other family, which has borne the same name, and inhabited the same lands since the first introduction of crows and cow-stealing. Connected with this office, at least in the majority of instances, there are humiliations to which no lad of spirit would submit for the sake of the present emolument. The hope, and generally the stipulation, of the tutor is, that his patron shall, when he has drudged and degraded himself for the requisite number of years, “bless him with a kirk;” and this abasement,—this bowing down before the patron, in order that they may, in due time, rise to the living, is one of the chief reasons why the Scotch parsons have swerved from that independence of feeling and of action, of which the example was set them by John Knox, and become as willing and obsequious worshippers at the feet even of delegated power, or of unmerited place, as imagination can picture to itself. If it were not that they are strained through this filter, we should never have had them declaring, ex cathedrâ, that the National Monument, a piece of gratuitous foolery, or vanity, or political patchwork, was “a most suitable and appropriate expression of gratitude to the Lord of Hosts.” If they had not been studying somewhere else than in their bibles, their answer would have been—
“The Being, whom we profess to worship, and under whose protection we certainly are, cannot be propitiated by votive offerings of stone and lime; and the gallant deeds of our brave countrymen, however gracefully they might be chiselled on the frieze of the ‘restored Parthenon,’ could not, in the slightest degree, redound to his glory, although they might, to a certain extent, flatter the vanity of men. The offerings which He requires are not swelling columns and fretted architraves: they are deeds—deeds of justice, beneficence, and mercy, done to our fellow men. After He has enumerated the most costly and splendid sacrifices-just for the purpose of declaring that in his sight they avail nothing—He delivers this simple but heavenly commandment, ‘Offer to God thanksgiving.’ To propose the erection of any edifice, therefore, as ‘a most suitable and appropriate expression of gratitude to the Lord of Hosts,’ savours little of the knowledge and still less of the spirit of Christianity; and if no edifice whatever could be such an expression, far less could a temple which had been erected for the worship of dead and useless idols.”
The filtration, or winnowing, or whatever process it may be called, which has separated and set apart the more flexible portion of the educated peasantry of Scotland for the peculiar service of the kirk, has been in an eminent degree favourable for the schools, which have thus reserved to them the most independent and generally also the most enthusiastically devoted to learning.
I should have mentioned ere now, that the men who fill learned situations, or are engaged in literary pursuits in Scotland, ought, in genius, though perhaps not always in education, to be superior to men of the same description in England; for the expense of obtaining any thing like a literary education in the latter country is so great, and the disposition to obtain it is so contrary to the habits of the humbler, and even the middle ranks of the people, that the range of classes from whom the learned men of England can be taken, is far narrower than that from which Scotland can make her election. In England, a peasant or a small farmer never so much as dreams of giving his son a classical or a university education; and even among the wealthier yeomen and tradesmen this is seldom done, except with an immediate view to a church living, to which if the person so educated should not succeed, he returns back to the counter or the counting-house.
In Scotland, again, though the gates, at least of some species of knowledge, do not stand open so widely or so long as in England, yet they stand open to every class of the people; and thus, though the population of Scotland be not one-sixth part of that of England, the number of persons from whom the learned men of Scotland are chosen is perhaps greater; indeed, it is positively greater, for the whole two millions of the Scotch people are in this situation; and if all the classes in England who have the power and the will to educate their children be counted, they will be found far fewer than this. Now, as the means of obtaining liberal education descend in society, the quantity of talent must necessarily increase. In natural ability, a hundred peasants, at least a hundred peasant boys, are not necessarily inferior to the same number of scions of nobility; and as the total number of peasants exceeds the total numbers of the others, the whole quantity of natural capacity must be greater. Whatever, indeed, may be their differences after they grow up, and when all the varieties of advantage, opportunity, and habit have come into play, it cannot be denied that there is a point in the age of all classes of society at which their talents and capacities are in the precise ratio of their numbers; and it is equally true that, if they were all taken at this point, and subjected to the same discipline, the number of illustrious men that would be obtained from each class would also be in the precise ratio of the total number. But all classes in Scotland have, from infancy up to a certain period, the same facilities of being educated, and therefore, in obtaining a supply of learned and literary men, Scotland has the choice of the whole population.
But this is not the only advantage that results from throwing the gates of knowledge open to all the people, for those of the poorer classes who are sent to college have a chance of possessing greater natural abilities, and being more assiduous and successful in the cultivation of them, than those who are sent from the rich.
This may, at first sight, appear to be paradoxical, but its truth will become apparent upon very little reflection. The more seductive pleasures of youth to which the rich have access, are, independently of any other cause, sufficient to turn the scale in favour of the poor. To the rich, the hours spent in the prosecution of knowledge are hours taken from the enjoyment of pleasure, and as such they must ever be looked upon as a task and a drudgery. To the poor, on the other hand, the hours spent in the prosecution of knowledge are an abridgment of labour more irksome and severe, and therefore they must ever be regarded as relaxation and pleasure. Besides, the children of the rich are sent to college, not so much with a view to the perfection of education in the meantime, and the profitable application of it afterwards, as because it is the custom, or that their parents and guardians can afford the expense. The pupil who is born to wealth or to honours, considers his literary attainments not only as a merely subordinate accomplishment, but as one which stands in the way of others that he deems more consistent with his rank, and feels to be more consonant with his desires; while he to whom the same pursuit is present pleasure, and the hoped foundation of future honour and emolument, is certain not only to like it better, but to pursue it with more zeal and success. Of the illustrious names that have been famed in the pages of Scotch biography, a far greater proportion have sprung from humble life than are to be found in the annals of any other country. The fact is, that although the Scotch peasants have a strong desire to educate all their children, it is only the ones who are believed or found to possess a superior degree of genius that are educated for literature; and of the discoveries of original genius that are continually making in the provincial parts of Scotland a very curious book might be made. I shall mention one instance of the many:
The gentleman, who at this moment takes the highest station among the philosophers of the Athens, and who would have been entitled to no mean place even when her philosophy was in the zenith of its splendour, is of humble though highly respectable extraction. His father rented a small farm in the kingdom of Fife, and had it not been that accident revealed the genius of the infant philosopher, first to the village parson, next through his advice to learned professors of St. Andrew’s, and, lastly, through the wisdom of that advice, to the world at large, his experiments might have been confined to composts for the fields, instead of compositions for the furtherance of science; and his speculations, instead of grasping the globes of the earth and the heavens, might never have soared above a globe-turnip. That the loss that science would thus have sustained would have been great, even the enemies of the philosopher (and there is no philosopher without enemies, especially in the Athens) must allow; for the lines of his discovery have not only been boldly drawn, but have been drawn in situations which no other philosopher has attempted. If, therefore, the discovery which I am about to relate, singular as those who are not conversant with the modes in which genius, when left to itself, developes itself, may consider it to be, had not been made, a blank page would have remained in the book of knowledge, which is now full and fair in its characters of wisdom. The future philosopher, as was once the case with nearly all the nascent philosophers of Scotland, and may still be the case with a few, not the worst of them, divided the year between the study of learning, and the observation of nature. When winter had spoiled the fields of their beauty, and driven the shepherds and cow-herds into the villages, he went to school, where the Proverbs of Solomon, Ruddiman’s Rudiments of the Latin Tongue, and Dilworth’s Arithmetic, by turns expanded his wisdom, or perplexed his ingenuity; and when the fields were again in flower and the birds in song, he was sent forth to observe the progress of vegetable and animal life, notice the revolutions of suns, and feel the practical philosophy of wind and rain. In order that there might be economy as well as information in his employment during the latter season, he was enjoined to attend to the movements of his father’s cows, as well as to those of nature; and until he had reached nearly the end of his twelfth year, it remained doubtful whether cattle or causation was to be the future business and glory of his life. In the summer of that year, however, the die was cast, and never was turning-up more philosophically fortunate, or more fortunate for philosophy. In one of those village libraries, which often contained more rich variety of lore than is to be found among the countless volumes of even an Athenian repository of books, he had found a thumbed and boardless copy of Simpson’s Euclid, which might in its time have perplexed the wits of ten successive classes at St. Andrew’s. By that strong intuition which ever characterizes superior genius, even at its earliest dawn, he found out that this was a volume worthy of being read, and throwing aside the Shorter Catechism of the Kirk, which had been furnished him by his parents for his recreation, as well as the exploits of George Buchannan, the History of Buckhaven, the exquisite biography of Paddy from Cork, and the sweet songs of Sir James the Rose, and the Laird of Coull’s Ghost, with which he had contrived to furnish himself, he set fondly and furiously to work upon Simpson’s Euclid, preparing his floor, and drawing his diagrams in the same manner, though not exactly in the same materials, as the philosophers of antiquity. The smooth grassy sod answered all the purposes of the abacus, and the cows generously supplied him in a substitute for the sand. Spreading and smoothing that substitute with his bare foot, he engraved upon it with his finger the mystic lines and letters; and, with book in hand, proceeded to establish the elementary principles of geometry, heedless though the cows should, in the mean time, scale the fence, and carry the neighbouring corn by a coupe de la bouche.
One day as he was occupied in this learned work, the parson of the village happened to be on the other side of the hedge, pacing backwards and forwards, and cudgelling his reluctant and retentive brains for as much of the raw material of sermonizing as would serve to put him and his parishioners over the ensuing Sunday. While he paced and pleaded with the sluggish spirit, his ear was assailed by a continued mumbling of voice through the hedge, which caught so much stronger a hold of him than he could do of his sermon, that his steps and his study were both brought to a dead stand, and his outward ears perked up in the fondest attitude of listening. Ministers as well as men often remember the words of that of which they were never able to grapple with the meaning; and thus, though the old parson did not exactly comprehend the extent of that proposition, the diagram of which the young philosopher had traced upon his soft abacus, and the demonstration of which he was rehearsing in very solemn tones, yet he remembered that such words had been used by one of the professors in that part of his academic course which he had never understood. That which is known is always simple, and that which is not known, however simple it may be in itself, is always accounted the very depth of wisdom. The parson was astonished, and, for a moment, he doubted the evidence of those ears upon which he had had to depend through a long life. He tried the one, it caught, “The angles at the base of an isosceles triangle;” he tried the other, it continued the enunciation, “are equal to one another.” He poked his head half way through the hedge, and the auxiliary testimony of his eyes and spectacles confirmed that of his ears. He saw the abacus, the book, and the student, and forthwith descended to the village, big and puffing with the tale. A visit from the parson at any other hour than that of dinner, is always an ominous matter to some of the family of a Scotch peasant. If the young folks be children they dread the catechism. If more advanced, there are occasional terrors of that Scotch tread-mill, which is trodden alone and in presence of the assembled congregation. The mother of the philosopher had nothing to dread upon either of those grounds, but still she felt all the glow of a woman’s curiosity, when the parson approached her husband with so hasty steps and so important looks.
“Well, Mr. Lascelles,” said the parson, “you must take care of Jock, and that forthwith, for I am thinking that he is a genus.”