Page:Scottishartrevie01unse.djvu/95

Rh tiou with hicli they have been met, provokes con- sideration of the habitual academic attitude in face of progress — an attitude whereof this is nothing- more than a normal instance. The strenuous resist- ance which the Universities have offered to the present and every former measure for their own improvement, is not simply to be dismissed with contempt as the mere natural selfishness of a body corporate. It is rather a cumulative and culminat- ing illustration of that very vice which more than all others provokes the Reformers'" onslaught. We accuse the Universities of being, above all things, antiquated — of failing adequately to minister to the necessities of the time. AVe charge them with the worst faults of Conservatism — with narrow aims and outworn methods ; and for answer they raise a shriek of horror at remedies to which the plain symptoms of the sickness are as earthquakes are to pills. Could there possibly be a clearer confession of back- wardness.? Surely we may clincli our philippics with an ex ore tuo. Surely the Lord hath delivered them into our hand. There is a coarse common-sense about Dr. John- son's ideal of the University as a place where every- thing should be tauglit, from Persian prosody upwards. But in all rational education there is implied an art of ignorance as Avell as an art of knowledge.' Not all things are to be known, or even taught ; but the best ideas, the truest and the most fruitful are to be published. And in a rough way, and for all practical purposes, the newest ideas are the best. I am not pleading the cause of every premature intellectual birth, or every wandering wind of doctrine ; thougli, in nine cases out of ten, that unctuous text is simjjly a libel upon progress. But, after all, a living heresy is better than a dead ortliodoxy : the coinage of Decius might be unim- peachable in weiglit and fineness, but after their age-long coma the seven sleepers found that it would no longer buy them bread. 'Hang the age!' said Charles Lamb, ' I will write for antiquity,' and the Professors have done in earnest what he threatened to do in jest. Rightly interpreted, the past is little other than a beacon, but to the Universities it has been a will-o'-the-wisp, and so, for the most part, they lie floundering. Within the limits of our own island, how much have the Universities done for furtherance of the national intellectual life ; how far, in any age, have they been on a level with the best thought of the time, or in sympathy with its foremost thinkers .'' It has always been the boast of Oxford and Cambridge that they give England its politicians and its pastors ; but it should be remem- bered that the Church is accessible only through the college, and that hitherto, at least, our governors have been drawn from those classes to whom a University education is as much matter of routine as an eight o'clock dinner. As regards our statesmen, indeed, it is very questionable if the Universities liave not done them positive harm. Oxford gave Charles Fox his store of Latin quotations, which he could very well have wanted, but it also gave liim his contempt of political economy, which nothing could redeem. And of the two greatest politicians of our own time, it is notable that the one was never at public school or college, while the other reckons among the number of his disadvantages the spirit which he inhaled at Christ Church. In imaginative art again, the impotence of the Univei-sities has been long notorious ; the forces of literature are not of their guidance or begetting. It is tedious to iterate the stock instances of Burns and Shakespeare — to tell again how Pope was educated privately, and how Shelley left Oxford in disgrace ; but one may be permitted a reference to that latest of literary developments, the novel. Alike the founders of fiction and their most distinguished successors have been men who owed everything to the outside world and notliing to the Universities, save perhaps the impetus which was born of revolt against them. It is mere impudence to answer, as is often done, that the Universities have no power over artistic genius, and make no pretence to foster it. If that be true, why then this perpetual teaching of the classics, why is the best part of a student's time devoted to works proposed as the eternal archetypes of literature.? Not that the study of Greek and Roman antiquity is unprofitable, but it sliould be a study which will qualify for some better task than the sterile one of editing and emendation. We owe to Bentley the discovery of the digamma, and to Porson the truth about the Three Holy Witnesses. But the Decline and Fall is the work of one who scorned and hated his alma mater, and it was left for the unacademic Grote to write the first tolerable history of Greece.

In the world of speculation too, the Universities have for centuries back been the main forces of resistance. One has only to read the sharp sayings of Bacon, or Hobbes, or Locke, to see how these recognised in the holders of college endowments the most powerful champions of routine in thought. Of Descartes' system Hallam says that it had no chance of acceptance in the Universities, because these were bigoted to the authority of Aristotle. Locke and Newton were introduced to the Continent by Voltaire ; and the name of Voltaire reminds us that the brilliant band of eighteenth-century j[7^ifosophes, undoubtedly the most potent of all modern