Chapter VIII (2)

One word more. No one is more in sympathy (if I may be pardoned
for speaking of such an unimportant entity) than _I_ am, with
the efforts of such men as “A. N.” and Mr. Edwin Bean to
reproduce, or try to reproduce, in Australia as far as may be,
“that which is certainly best in the English Public schools,
viz., what is called the Public school spirit.” I have not the
least prejudice against English Public schools, at one of the
oldest and most conservative of which I was myself educated,
and from which I almost entirely derived the circle of my
most valued friends; nor yet against the Denominational and
Corporation schools here. I have only to remark to Mr. Bean,
what I am sure he will at once admit, that if the danger of
State schools is the excessive interference of the State,
the danger—nay, the absolute abuse—of endowed Public schools
is that they become mere feeders of the universities; and in
England to such an appalling extent was this the case that
the State absolutely had to alter and narrow its Indian Civil
Service examinations in order to bring them within reach of the
Public schools, which were being quite left out in the cold!
Doubtless, then, the Australian endowed Public schools would
have their danger too, a danger which “even no less a thinker
than Herbert Spencer,” as Mr. Bean says, has not perhaps, in
the application to artificial civilization of the laws of the
natural “struggle for existence and survival of the fittest,”
quite comprehended.

With all apologies to you for the amount of your “valuable
space” on which I have encroached in even this far too
perfunctory consideration of the matter in hand,

I am, etc.,

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_
_to grow old in darkness and pain!_”

_October, 1885._

CULTURE.

Everyone nowadays has something to say about Culture. Even the politicians have heard of it, and some morning we may read in our newspapers that one of them is of opinion that there is some meaning in the term. Naturally enough we have all of us for some time been groping after the thing itself. The Time-Spirit is like a skilful driver of sheep. He may have considerable trouble with his flock, but, thanks to his unruffled intelligence and the ceaseless exertions of his dog Genius, he brings them all in in time for the market. It is now almost a century since the Idea of Culture took definite shape in the mind of a single man, and ever since then the number of its followers has kept on increasing, until at last everyone, as I remarked, has now something to say about it. If, however, one enquires of people, not what they _think_ of Culture, (For everyone from the Vatican Œcumenical Council[11] to the author of “In Memoriam”[12] is agreed as to the advantage of it), but what culture _is_, one may go far for a satisfactory answer. Women are growing dissatisfied with the sphere of their work. What is it that they need? “More breadth of culture,” answers the Prince of Tennyson’s Princess readily enough, “more breadth of culture!” And it will be said that it is easy to see that what the Prince means is, that women should have thrown open to them the education that has so far been the monopoly of men. But is this Culture? is this the whole truth about it?—simply the giving to the many—to women, to the Middle-class and to the People—what is the education of the few? would that man in whose mind the Idea of Culture first took definite shape have been satisfied with the sight of ubiquitous Harrows and Etons and Grammar Schools of Melbourne and Geelong? There can be no doubt but that such a sight would have pleased, but it certainly would not have satisfied him. “Schools,” he would have said, “are of high importance, but what is taught in them is of importance still higher.”

And so we come back again to our question as to what Culture _is_ with a sense that the ready answers to it are only half answers. Now everyone has heard of Goethe, and everyone has read some of his writings—“Faust,” at any rate—and, as it is to Goethe that we owe the Idea of Culture (as indeed most things that are really good in the sphere of modern thought), it would be best to at once quote his own words on the matter, and see if we cannot find a definition, or at any rate a description, of Culture that shall satisfy us. Poetry, however, does not exactly lend itself to definitions of such things as this, or even to descriptions. In Faust himself the idea may be more or less, as they say, incarnated, but we plain practical people, who like things put as much in black and white as may be, have some difficulty in these matters, and would far rather hear of them in simple English prose which means what it says and says what it means, than in poetry (and particularly German poetry) which seems to us to do exactly the reverse. Well, then, let us turn away from this parabolic Goethe for a little, and see if we cannot find someone who shall be his expounder to us. And who else should this be, at any rate in this case, than he whom the newspapers like to call the Apostle of Culture, Mr. Matthew Arnold? Let us go to Mr. Matthew Arnold, and say: “Sir, you are constantly talking about Culture, and you have said many uncomplimentary things to us all about our want of it. Now would you be so kind as to tell us precisely what you _mean_ by it? And we warn you that we are plain practical people who like things put as much in black and white as may be, and that we have a decidedly poor opinion of your efforts to make us believe that ‘the Eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness’ is the same thing as our ‘loving and intelligent Governor of the Universe,’ and that it makes no difference to us when we eat our Christmas goose and plum-pudding whether we believe that we do so because those shepherds and those Three Kings _did_ come that day to Christ in the Bethlehem manger, to the accompaniment of an angelic concert, or did not. We want, Sir, a definition of this Culture of yours, or, if you cannot give us that (But, really now, you are so clever at definitions that we shall be quite disappointed if you cannot!), then you must give us a good description of it, so that we may be able to arrive at a proper decision about it.” Then an expression of bland patience would cross Mr. Arnold’s countenance, as he sat in his study chair, listening with that “native modesty” of which he has told us all, to the words of our curious foreman; and, after a short pause, he would perhaps answer: “Gentlemen, I am much honoured by this deputation and inquiry. Long ago in some remarks of mine on translating Homer.... But I will refer you to a more recent period. A new and revised edition of a little book of mine called ‘Literature and Dogma’ has just been issued in a cheap form by Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co. You will find that in the Preface to it the following words occur, which I venture to think may, on investigation, be found to answer the question with which I am now honoured. But, as you possibly may not remember it, (for I cannot expect you, any more than myself, to be always studying my works), I will quote it to you. ‘_Culture_,’ I said (Culture in italics)—‘_Culture_, knowing the best that has been thought and known in the world.’ I can give no better definition than this. ‘True Culture,’ I say again, ‘true Culture implies not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment.’ Or, yet again: ‘Culture is _reading_’ (Reading in italics), ‘but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system.’”—And with this, and a renewal of compliments on both sides, our jury bows itself out, and presently the sound of the closing hall-door mounts up to the silent chamber.

“But an awful pleasure bland
spreading o’er the Poet’s face,
when the sound climbs near his seat,
the encircled library sees;
as he lets his lax right hand
which the lightnings doth embrace
sink upon his mighty knees.”

This, then, it seems, is Culture—_knowing the best that has been thought and known in the world—not only knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment_—reading, _but reading with a purpose to guide it, and with system_. And is not this something like what Goethe meant in that enigmatic sentence of his, which we have heard so often quoted by people who understood it as much as we did: “Vom Halben zu entwöhnen; Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen resolut zu leben.” “I resolved to wean myself from halves, and to live for the Whole, the Good, the Beautiful.” But even now, even now that we know what it is (And after all, we say, what much more is it than saying that we ought to try for the best article, and not rest content with anything but the best article?), wherein are we, we plain practical people with our attachment to black and white, helped to the attainment of it? Culture, we are told, is reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it and with system. The purpose, it is presumed, is attainment, but what is the system? We are to have knowledge, and not only knowledge but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment. All very nice, we say, but how are we to get them? You say to a man who hobbles, “Run:” he is quite as capable of saying it as you are. Either show him how to run, or hold your tongue!—unless it be that he thinks he _is_ running, and even then it seems useless enough to undeceive him without you can teach him how to do what he now thinks he is. What, then, is this system of which you speak? what is the receipt for it? is it a system possible to _us_?

Well, I really have not the courage to go and face Mr. Arnold again. Handlers of the lightnings like he is can be so disagreeable when they please. Where is the joy of figuring in some ludicrous or contemptible attitude in their writings for the next few hundred years or so? It is all very well to say that we shall all of us be in our graves presently, and all equally ignorant of what our descendants may think of us, but the truth is no one likes to be held up to the nations as a fool or a knave, and especially if he be both. I see nothing for it but to let the oracle alone. I for one will have nothing to do with stirring up Phoibos again. I have done so more than once already, and am too grateful for a whole hide to tempt the arrows further. We must be our own Oidipous. At most we can reverently finger the Sibylline leaves, and see if anything of “pleasant to the eye and good for food” can be extracted therefrom.

To begin with, however, does it not seem best to say at once that, after all, there is no receipt for not saying and doing foolish things except not to be foolish? No system in the world will give wings to a worm. On the other hand, there is really no reason why the descendants of that worm should not one day navigate the sky; and, as a matter of fact, they do. Similarly with the stupidest and the most degraded of us, I cannot see why a single moment should be lost in attempting to better them. The earth is likely to be inhabitable for the next eight millions of years or so, it seems, and I am sure that is long enough for us. We need not be in such a hurry as the Socialists would have us, nor yet creep along on all fours in the Conservative manner; but we must not, of course, undervalue either fashion or progress, since both wheels and a drag are important parts of a carriage in uneven country. But here again, as is always the case, we are brought face to face with the question, not only of the wheels and the drag, not only of the carriage itself, and not only of even the driver of it, but of the end of the journey. “The purpose,” we said a moment ago in our ready way, “is, it is presumed, attainment, but what is the system?—Never mind,” we say, “about where we are going to: let us hear about the carriage we are going in! Let us have Etons and Harrows and Melbourne and Geelong Grammar Schools everywhere, and then we shall be alright. Let us resolve to have the best article, and not rest content with anything but the best article, and that’s all!”

Alas, for the impatience of mankind! In order to _try_ for the best article, not to say to _have_ it, must we not first know what the best article _is_? should we not know where we are going to, before we construct our carriage and purchase our horses? And yet, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, are we not content to _go_, and leave more or less to chance where we are going _to_? do we not waste half our lives in overcoming difficulties with which we ought to have had nothing to do? It is so easy to talk and to act: it is so difficult to think, and mould your words and actions to your thoughts rather than your thoughts to your words and actions. It is the weary old tale of the more haste and the less speed, the weary old tale that is for ever new. And yet we will not listen to it. Sooner than trouble ourselves with the _whys_ of things, we will throw ourselves with energy into the first _hows_ that present themselves, and leave the rest to chance, or, as Dr. Moorhouse’s good “unintelligent orthodox” people say, to God. But nothing real, nothing lasting, is achieved in this way. Nature does not work in this way: God does not work in this way. The beasts do and the vast majority of men do, and that is why, in Hamlet’s words, life is such “an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.” No, if we are to understand, not only Culture but anything at all, we must begin at the very beginning: we must learn the _whys_. Take care of the _whys_, we might say, and the _hows_ will take care of themselves. And let us not for a moment be deceived by those who tell us that our fathers got along very well without inquiring into the _whys_, into the causes of things, and so can we. This is not so. Whatever success has been achieved has been achieved by a recognition, conscious or unconscious it may be, of the causes of the thing worked upon. Instead of our fathers having had any success from their ignorance of causes, or their reliance on good fortune, they have had success in despite in these, and only so far as they banished the one and knew how to turn to account the other.

And Culture? what has this to do with Culture? Everything!—In this, as in so many other cases, we concentrate all our attention on the _how_ and leave the _why_ to take care of itself. “More breadth of Culture, more breadth of Culture,” cry the Princes and the Priests, and everyone else, in emulous chorus. But when they are asked what they _mean_ by Culture—what Culture _is_, then they have no answer ready save one (as Shelley says),

“pinnacled dim in the intense inane;”

and this sort of thing will, in the end, satisfy no man.

Well, we have heard what Culture _is—knowing the best that has been thought and known in the world_. But we have been brought up sharply at the very next step: _Culture is reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it_. What is the purpose? Attainment. Yes, but _how_? _how_ and _why_?

But before we try to answer that, let us think a moment whether the expounder of our parabolic Goethe has given us a definition that is quite satisfactory. We have nothing to say against his definition of Culture itself. It expresses Goethe’s “the Whole, the Good and the Beautiful” perfectly. But what about this second definition? what about Culture being reading, but reading with a purpose to guide it? Is this a pure parallel equivalent of the first, or has it something of a limitation in it? Can we, indeed (supposing us the happy possessors of a certain purpose and system), achieve a knowledge of the best that has been thought and known in the world—of the Whole, the Good and the Beautiful—by reading, and by reading only? is this what Goethe has to say to us? is this the lesson of Goethe’s life? If it is, why is it that he lays such stress on the absolute personal experience of things? If Faust could have achieved Truth in his study, why does Goethe show us his achievement of it by taking him away from his reading, and flinging him in the arms, first of Love and then of Life? Faust does not leave his reading and his thinking behind him: they accompany him everywhere, from Margarete’s bedroom to the witch-revel on the Brocken. And what does this mean but that, to achieve a knowledge of the best that the world has thought and known, two things are necessary—reading and experience; or, in the same words, thought and knowledge. No amount of reading will compensate for want of experience. It is useless for me to think I have attained to Truth, if I have never felt her absolute presence. Is idealization the essence of true love? Is there a more real inspiration to be found in the faëry princesses of Shelley, than in the breathing women of Wordsworth? Idealization is good, but it must have a firm foundation in reality, or it is barren of anything but fantasticality. So it is with thought and knowledge. No man who has not himself lived and loved can tell us the truth of love and life. Gibbon had immense reading, and a purpose and a system in it (I do not here enter upon their precise nature), and his history of the Decline and Fall of Rome is in many respects quite admirable, but he does not attain to truth in it. And why? Because he has not experience, he has not knowledge. All his reading, all his purpose, all his system will not compensate for the want of their corollary. No, Culture, the achieving of the best that has been thought in the world, is not reading, not reading with any purpose or system that has been or will ever be devised. Culture is the combination of reading with experience, of thought with knowledge. The one thing acts as a check on the other; the one is the spirit and the other the body; the one, in Shakspere’s words, the “judgment” and the other the “blood,” and in their “co-mingling” is found the perfect man. The purpose, the system remain unchanged. We have only, as it seems to me, to develop our second definition: to say that Culture _is reading and experience, but reading and experience with a purpose to guide them, and a system_.

And so, having disposed somewhat of the _why_, we come back to the _how_, the purpose and the system. In reality the two are one. Mr. Arnold speaks once of Goethe’s “profound impartiality,” and elsewhere he lays the greatest stress on that which alone can help criticism “to produce fruit for the future”—_disinterestedness_. By _disinterestedness_ he means the sincere endeavour, the pure and simple endeavour, to get at the truth of things, to see them as they really are. And what is this but Goethe’s determination to “wean himself from halves,” from partial views of things? Now nothing is easier than to say that you seek for Truth and Truth only, and nothing is more difficult to do. Who is there that does not make this profession? And yet how few, how infinitely few, are those who turn it into practice! And why is this? The answer of course is because, say what they may, the pursuit of most men is merely relative. I no more attain to Truth by saying “Go to, I will attain to it,” than I should fly over the moon by a like formula. It is only the really honest and sincere, the really pure and simple endeavour to find Truth that makes me competent to even set out in search of it, and it is only by the ceaseless use of a system of resolute patience and clear-sightedness that I can hope to proceed with any success upon my way. This is indeed a hard saying; but who, except him who ought to feel it least, feels that Truth is a goal to be won by rose-crowned processions to the sound of cymbals and dances? Some people, indeed, have a conviction that a special exception has been made in their case, and that what has been hidden from the wise and prudent has been revealed to babes and sucklings; and I am sure it is a pleasant sight enough to see the way the babes and sucklings enjoy this idea, and will continue to do so as long as the milk lasts. (And, indeed, at this very hour when the milk is running rather low, what a dismal howl the poor little things are setting up, and how on earth are we ever going to wean them?) No, it is only by utter and unwearying honesty, by the obstinate determination to admit of no delusion or illusion, however attractive, however pleasant to our souls, that we can hope to attain to anything like Truth. How often, when we think we have found the jewel, must we put it down and remove ourselves, now to this side, now to that, to be sure that the cutting is indeed flawless! how much must we give up, and how much must we win, before our mind is trained to, as it were, of itself, effortlessly, spontaneously, look at things with that patient clear-sightedness which reaches to their essence! This, then, is our purpose in Culture, and this our system, and this is the fruit of it—a habit of thought which shall have _not only thought and knowledge, but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment_. And so our scheme is complete.

Now, leave this theoretical consideration of it for a moment, and see with what result it has been applied to actual things. It has been applied, it is being applied, everywhere and to almost everything. Take the domain of Science, where it has, so far, been applied in a manner which appeals most to most people—practical success, as we call it. There is no need for me to sing the praises of this practical success. It rises all round me in choruses and peans and hosannas. What I want to say about it is, that all this practical success is due solely and entirely to the fact that its creators have applied that purpose and system of ours on, it is true, a more virgin soil than most, but also with a more thoroughness than any. Look at the patience and clear-sightedness that breathes and shines in every page Darwin wrote! It was well said of him, that you could be sure no one would state the case against anything he had to say more fully than he did himself. What a serenity the man had, what depths of power and peace! It was my privilege to have had for father one who, to his own depths of serenity, and power, and peace, added those drawn from his friendship with this great Darwin, and from an unrivalled appreciation of his work. When I think of that method of the pursuit of the truth of things which I have myself seen in the late Professor Leith Adams, my father, I seem to myself to despair of ever thoroughly mastering the reality of anything at all. I am overwhelmed with the mystery of Butters’ Spelling Book: I dare not lift up my eyes to criticise a barrel-organ, and the young lady so painfully practising scales there is a whole heaven above me. We cannot too much praise the complete singleness of heart and soul with which the Scientists have faced their problems. When I compare Lord Tennyson’s consideration of the Struggle in Nature in _In Memoriam_, with Darwin’s in his _Descent of Man_, the radical insincerity of the former, I confess, disgusts me, and I fear to do some one or other of its good qualities an injustice. What intellectual exercise all this despair is! The poet’s mind is made up before he starts, and all this paraphernalia of doubt is really simply to show that he can enter into the opposite point of view to his own, and yet retain his original convictions! What is the sum total of it? That here is a man of the past, born into a present from which none but those of the future can evolve that future. Five are five and ten are ten, and he adds them together and makes seven! With how different a temper does Darwin face his problem! He has become “as a little child” in his simple attitude towards things. “Where’er thou leadest, will I follow thee.” And it was just because this was so, that what he had to say to us prevails more and more; for, having attained to the secret of the purpose and system of patience and clear-sightedness, he had not only knowledge but right tact and justness of judgment, forming themselves by and with judgment; and so he achieved Truth for himself and for others. Nor does the good of such a man, his life and his work, end here. He has communicated to all who have anything to do with his work, his secret or something of his secret, even as Goethe did before him. Why, here we have Professor Huxley warning the coming race of Scientists against taking for granted the very things in the discovery and revelation of which he has himself toiled all his life, and the cry has been taken up with enthusiasm. “All is possible,” said Professor Clifford, “to him who doubts.” What an admirable temper is this. Imagine Cardinal Newman warning the young Catholics against taking the Infallibility of the Church for granted! Or Lord Tennyson assuring us that that fine personal individuality theory of his (“I am I, thou art thou,” and so on) must not be considered by young Churchmen as finally settled! And yet it is in the possession or non-possession of this temper, I say, that lies the essential difference between the men of the past and the men of the future. Mr. Arnold laments that Cardinal Newman, “that exquisite and delicate genius,” was not born a little later, so that the Time-Spirit might have touched and transformed him. The same may be said of Lord Tennyson, and will be said in another fifty years. But let us have an end to such laments. To these men, as to their contemporaries, the light came, and they chose the twilight where others chose the dawn, and, having had their hour of victory in the applause of the mass of their time, the doubters and the believers, let us recognize that, at any rate as influences on thought, they are but ghosts in the bright daytime, speechless and ineffectual.

I have, despite myself, been singing the praises of the Scientists. And why not? Have they not shown us that they have (as Darwin says so gracefully of Mr. Wallace) “an innate genius for solving difficulties?” But they, too, have their assailable side. I have spoken of Professor Clifford. His talent we were all bound to admire, and his sincerity; but how wonderfully inept he was when he came to consider things outside his own immediate sphere! We all remember what he had to say about Christianity. He had the same narrowness towards Christianity that the Christians have towards Science. In them it is excusable, perhaps. Circumstances have been all against them. They have had such little opportunity of attaining to the secret of the purpose and system of Culture. It has taken its rise outside their pale, and has been combated as a foe, and is still combated. But in a man who _had_ this secret, how inexcusable the not being able to apply it outside his own immediate sphere! and how doubly inexcusable to apply to his opponents that very method which had made them so! Really he should have known better. And unfortunately there are so many of the young Scientists that are following in his footsteps, and not in the footsteps of Darwin. And this is a great misfortune, and should be struggled against with all our powers. But otherwise (since I cannot end here with the note of blame), how truly admirable is the temper of these men when they are only let alone in their own sphere! Compare the teaching of Science in our colleges and universities with that of Literature! And yet, slow as is the progress of Literature in its application of the purpose and system of Culture to things, it _is_ a progress. The success of that charming series of biographies, the English Men of Letters—nay, of the little shilling Literature Primers—is a sign of it. And the same thing, too, is being done with regard to Philosophy; but, so far, the men of Science have the lead, and they deserve it; for, as I have said, theirs has been the most complete singleness of heart and soul with which Truth has been sought out, they have the most thoroughly applied the secret of the purpose and system of Culture.

Now, let us again leave our consideration of these things, and see wherein this question of Culture concerns us plain practical people with our attachment to black and white; how does it, in a word, come into our daily life. I can only answer as before, everywhere!—The other day the son of a friend of mine, (say) Jones, wished to apprentice himself as a brewer, or, rather, wished to start as a brewer at once. His father sent him to a well-known brewer to be, as the father said, put through his paces. The young man returned crestfallen. What was the matter? The father could not understand it, and I was set to find it out.—“_Tom hasn’t enough Culture_,” I reported.—“What do you mean?” asked the father.—“He doesn’t know the best that has been thought and known in the world in the matter of brewing,” I replied, “I should advise a course of practical chemistry.”—“But I’m sure X ..., the brewer’s father, didn’t know anything about chemistry, or his father before him.”—“Probably; but, if _X_ ... didn’t, I expect he’d have to give up brewing,” I said. And it is the same in everything. More and more the perception that things move by fixed laws, which must be obeyed if we would direct ourselves with success, spreads and intensifies. The necessity of moulding our words and actions to our thoughts, rather than our thoughts to our words and actions, is becoming apparent to all men who would avoid the workhouse, actual or metaphorical. The _whys_ of things press upon us. It is no use contenting ourselves with the _hows_. If we do, someone else finds out the _whys_, and we are left in the lurch. The other day an intelligent sheep-breeder told me an amusing tale. He had with much trouble and cost purchased in Tasmania a small stud of prize sheep, which he took up to his station in the North. The flower of the first generation he sent to a neighbouring show. The wool of the sheep was thick and close, unlike that of the locky sheep which are considered the best there. His sheep was laughed at by all the judges, who wondered such a sensible man should have sent such a senseless sheep! These judges were deficient in Culture: they did not know the best that has been thought and known in the world in the matter of sheep-breeding. The sheep of these men were shearing on an average less by more than two pounds of wool than the sheep of the more scientific sheep-breeders further south! It is a question, then, whether their children will be so jubilant when they are brought face to face with the competition of an enormously increased home wool-production, and a still more enormously increased wool-production from South America. You cannot now with impunity be wanting in Culture. The stream of life flows too fast for the straws that want to go exploring back-waters, or stopping to admire the scenery.

And Australia—this Australia in which we live—what a need for Culture is here! I see nothing here of the best, and much of the worst. Take this very question of sheep-breeding. Australia is in advance of England, for sheep-breeding is the staple support of the one country, and only an item in the produce of the other. But in what a backward state it is to what, as a staple support, it ought to be! By what rough and ready methods things are still done here. What a dearth of real intelligence there is! of that patience and clear-sightedness which is the secret of the purpose and system of Culture. Who seems to see that in this, as in all matters, the _why_ is the important matter on which the _how_ will follow, and not the reverse? There is abundance of shrewdness to hand, and finger and thumb wisdom, but who sees that the great necessity is sheer knowledge? Australia was made by men of this stamp, and they still rule it, but their rule is passing, as it was bound to pass, before the unruffled intelligence of the Time-Spirit. These were the men who gave us our absurd nomenclature of birds and flowers. If they saw a bird was black and had one dissonant cry, they called it a jay, and it sufficed. A flower is yellow and little: call it a primrose. And so on. Then their children arose in their turn, and found themselves rich, and took to building cities, and we have (what Mr. Sala calls) Marvellous Melbourne, with the Picture-gallery and Statue-gallery which we know, and the crowning glory of its Government House, perhaps the most hideous hospital in existence. Or the good Sydney people would like to decorate their Post-office with emblematic sculpture, and the result is, what has at last become, the mockery of a Continent. And at last, too, the Picture Gallery at Melbourne is coming into disrepute, and some day, perhaps, the Government House will do the same. It would be pleasant, I think, to see it turned into an asylum. No nation that calls itself civilized stands in more need of Culture, of the best that has been thought and known in the world, in each and every branch of it, than Australia does. Some faint perception of this seems positively to be beginning to dawn upon its complacency. Let us do all we can to forward this. “The Australians,” said an Australian to me the other day, “are much more fond of beautiful things than the English.” “Alas,” I answered, “that is not saying much, but I have not yet remarked it.” No, the one commendable wish that the Australians have, is that they really do want the best article in things, and for the best article they are ready to pay. The unfortunate thing is, that there seems nothing in which they are yet qualified to know the best article when they see it! “We want fine pictures,” say the Victorians, and they are befooled by ship-loads of London tea-trays, which no one but members of Assembly and the wives of tradespeople and squatters would take for anything else.—And yet, how is it possible for me to continue to pile up anathemas like this against these Australians for whom I hope so much, unless it be that I think in this way to do the little best I can towards helping to the realization of my hopes? But this is an old tale now, and we will say no more of it.

In every aspect of life, then, from its highest to its lowest, let us remember this idea of Culture, let us make for the best article, and be secure in its possession. The other day a Melbourne lady was saying to me how pretty and charming a place the Fitzroy Gardens were as a public park. “But the brown plaster statues,” I said, “and the concrete water-shrines.” And this Melbourne lady frankly declared her allegiance to these things, and, when in my disagreeable unsatisfied way I began to compare them with the marble copies from the Antique which are to be seen in the Inner Domain and Botanical Gardens in Sydney, she frankly told me that _after all_ it was only _a matter of opinion_, and _my_ opinion was this and _hers_ was that! “And so,” I said, “my dear lady, it is, _after all_, only _a matter of opinion_ whether the Apollo of the Belvidere or the Venus of Milo is more beautiful or less beautiful than the statue of Burke and Wills in Collins Street, not to say the brown-plaster statues in the Fitzroy Gardens?” And then this Melbourne lady, who had read many novels and magazines, and several volumes of sermons and even popular “philosophy books,” maintained her original assertion with the charming assurance of her sex; and I could only think that it was a pity she had not Culture—did not know the best, or even the second or third best, of what has been known and thought in the world in the matter of sculptural beauty, for then she would not have helped to persuade her husband to vote for the erection of any more brown-plaster statues and concrete water-shrines in the public places of his city. But, as it is, I am so thankful that the Sydney people have decorated one of their public places with really fine marble copies from the Antique (which none of these Australians, with their superior love for beautiful things has yet, so far as I am aware, thought of defacing), that I wonder at myself for thinking of saying it is a pity to see beside these so many poor modern and perhaps colonial products; for who can be wise—do I say in an hour, in a day, in a year, in a life-time? nay, rather, in a generation? Certainly not the architects and public decorators of Australia. Let us be thankful for what we have got, and diligently go on showing our thankfulness by asking for more.

But no; the time has passed when silly people can say that silliness is, _after all_, only a _matter of opinion_—or, if it has not passed, then we ought all of us to be striving our utmost to make it be passed. Culture is possible to so many! Its text-books are no longer in the hands of the incompetent: we have really no excuse for thinking Mr. Martin Tupper is preferable as a poet to Lord Tennyson, or Miss Eliza Cook to Mr. Arnold; and I will confess that I look with suspicion on the intellectual attainments of a man who sees no difference in the _opinion_ of Darwin or Professor Huxley and of the popular Theologians and Mr. Lilly. Look, I say, at the text-books of Culture now, of the best which has been known and thought in the world. We have all seen Professor Huxley’s little primer of Physiology. Well, that is for Science. Then there is Mr. Stopford Brooke’s little primer of English Literature. That is for Literature; and these are only examples. Really, now, we _have_ no excuse for reading the wrong books and thinking the wrong thoughts any more. And we have not, either, to confine ourselves to the thought of our own language. Everywhere excellent translations of noteworthy works are to be found. We would get to know something of the literature of Greece? At the end of Mr. Jebbs’ excellent little primer of Greek Literature, we shall find a list of the best translations. We have heard people talking of Professor Haeckel and his wonderful physiological work? Good translations of his best-known books are to hand. And so on throughout the whole domain of thought.

Let us sum up and conclude. We see, then, I think, what Culture is, and what is the purpose and system which should form and guide it. There is only one thing more to say about it, and that is that Culture, in this sense of the word, is the distinct product of our own times. No other country at no other time possessed it. The Jews possessed an unrivalled insight into Religion, into the sense of Righteousness. It is to a Jew that we owe most of what is best in Religion. Indeed, to the great majority of us his name is still a synonyme for Religion. But Righteousness is not the sole necessity of life—there is also Beauty. “Beauty,” says Keats,

“beauty is truth, truth beauty: this is all
ye know on earth or that ye need to know.”