A CITY OF LEARNING.
AMERICA is the land of contrasts. As her physical atmosphere is brilliant and generally devoid of the misty effects and half-tones of Europe, so is her social life clearly defined. There is no shading, no suggestion of neutral tints. Even the American intellect is much the same. All is clear, at times hard and metallic, but always more straightforward and sincere than is the mind of Europe. The Old World is so conscious of a prolonged past, its sympathies and its judgment are so apt to be divided, its long experience leads it to so distrust sudden resolutions, it sees life to be so complex, that it often hesitates to act. In the New World, however, man does not brood, he acts, and he considers action as the true end of life. He is resolute, practical, he sees one thing clearly, and goes for that. Consequently America as a, whole does not present the same total effect as Europe. In Europe we see the merging of tones, the shading of mental and moral qualities into one another ; the bare outlines of the structure are concealed under the flowing draperies of custom and time. In America, on the contrary, each element of life stands out clearly; virtue and vice, vulgarity and culture, greed and self-denial, are more distinct shapes, jostling each other on the broad highways of life, and giving an impression of fatal collision and utter collapse which is by no means justified by the real facts. We have been led to make these reflections by the remarkable project for a "city of learning" contained in the letter of Mr. George F. Parker, United States Consul at Birmingham, which appeared in the Times on Monday. If there is a city in the wide world which is the home of the practical, of the material, of " smartness " in the American sense, whose social life stands out with the clearness of a rock in the desert, and upon whose life the brooding spirit of poetry and mysticism never descends, it is San Francisco ; and yet it is close by this intensely modern and feverish city that it is proposed to found a great seat of learning which rivals in its conception the Benedictine monasteries of the Middle Ages. What deeper contrast could be imagined ?
The contrast is even deepened when we recollect the way in which California's two great Universities have been founded. Both are endowed by Senators, themselves millionaires, one of whom made his wealth by railways, the other by mines. Stanford University at Palo Alto is the great monument to the late Senator Stanford, and the other seat of learning will be an even more striking monument to the late Senator Hearst, though it seems to be his widow who is actually providing for the carrying out of the scheme. What this scheme is Mr. Parker tells us. There is at present at Berkeley, in California, a .beautiful place overlooking the Bay of San Francisco, ,an institution called the University of California, which has existed some thirty years, a part of whose income is derived from land subsidies, and part from a tax of 2 cents. on each £20 of the taxable wealth of the State. This tax yields annually about £50,000, besides which the Uni- versity receives .Z8,000 annually from the United States, and possesses resources of about .21,800,000, so that it is a wealthy institution from an English point of view. It has also two thousand three hundred students, which number is expected to rise to five thousand after ten years, or two thousand more than are to be found at Oxford. It is proposed now to convert this institution into a "city of learning," and for this purpose Mrs. Hearst, widow of the late Senator Hearst, has advanced the enormous funds needed. It may be asked why an institution already doing so well should require money, and this leads direct to the central idea of the scheme, which is that of building a new and splendid series of palaces or temples of learning. The existing buildings are to be, apparently, done away with ; and on the site on which they stand twenty-eight buildings, "all mutually related," are to be reared, and designs for this splendid project are now invited from the architects of the world. There will be, it is announced, "no definite limitations of cost, material, and style, so far as the plans are concerned." Full discretion is to be left to the designer, and we gather that he is to have ample time in order to carry out his work,—a vital point, as it seems to us. An international jury of five men will award the architectural prize, and the programme has already been prepared by Professor Guadet, of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.
On the face of it this is a grand scheme, reminding one of those famous competitions in Italy in which Brunelleschi and Michael Angelo took part. There is the making or the marring of a magnificent idea in the project unveiled in Mr. Parker's letter. Let us say at once that the conception does honour to the nascent citizenship of the Pacific States, and that it is worthy of a nation whose rich men have already done so much for the higher culture. It is, indeed, significant (and it is I part of the striking American contrasts we have dwelt on) that so many American wealthy men, whose money has come from coal or iron, or railways or banking, when they turn to consider how they shall endow the public with their surplus wealth, are not governed by merely utilitarian considerations. They do not so readily build hospitals or free libraries or workmen's clubs, as endow seats of learning with vast sums. This is a sign of the idealism which, as Lowell said, lay hid in the American character. Perhaps we may see even more in it than praiseworthy generosity. The danger of all modern new countries, of Australia and South Africa even more than the United States, is to fall into the slough of mere materialism, to be immersed in business, to think, hear, feel, know nothing else. We all admit that the life of the State must have a physical basis, but that the superstructure should be merely material would be the collapse of civilisation. We think there are growing signs that America feels this danger, and that a reaction is coming. The restlessness of the masses, the rising wave of indignation against wealthy monopolies, the greater willingness of educated men to enter the political arena, the warning voice of the Churches, both Protestant and Catholic, the building of such a superb institution as the new Boston Public Library, adorned by the first artists in the world,—these and other signs of a reaction against materialism of life are manifest. But there is no surer sign than the endowment of great schools of learn- ing,—not the little sectarian Colleges so numerous in America, and so little helpful, as a rule, to culture, but of grand Universities which shall stand as a protest against the theory that moneymaking is the end of life, and which shall give voice to the claims of the soul. We indulge the hope that the projected "city of learning" on the slopes of the Pacific has arisen out of a conviction of this kind ; we trust that it has grown out of a desire to identify California in the thought of the world with something else than mines, ranches, and newly enriched millionaires.
But there is danger that the scheme may be marred both on its material and intellectual sides. The present site of the University is spoken of as being two hundred and seventy-five acres. It seems to us that no buildings worthy to embody the idea of a "city of learning" can be erected on such a narrow ground. A space of ten times that extent should be chosen, a space of noble woodlands, of water, of leafy avenues and grassy meadows. California has room enough, in all conscience, with a territory one-third as large again as that of the United Kingdom, and with only half the population of London. To cramp such an institution within narrow bounds while rich stock-raisers have estates miles long would be fatal to the material side of the scheme. So would unworthy or unsuitable architecture. The World's Fair at Chicago was an astonishing revelation of the genius of American architecture when unfettered by ignorance, red-tape, and political "pulls." What was done there in lath and plaster for a few months should be done in California in atone and marble for centuries. There should be not merely fine conceptions, but beauty of detail,—the usual defect in a country which does not realise that all the noble buildings of Europe took decades, and even gene- rations, for their accomplishment. The architect (how one would delight in filling such a place and securing the immortality of a Michael Angelo, an Erwin of Steinbach, or a Bramante !) should, of course, have an absolutely free hand, and there should be no idea of completing the buildings before 1920 at the earliest. Immense strength for the resistance of earthquakes should be an element, and shady cloisters for a sunny clime should be another. A modification either of Spanish architecture or of the finest Romanesque of North Italy would seem to be most suitable; but there should, we think, be some variety of type within the enclosure. Why not, indeed, employ different architects, each of whom should work out his own design, but in subordination to a grand and har- monious whole ?
But the scheme may be marred on its intellectual, or, to be more accurate, on its spiritual, side. Institutions of great worth are not brought into being by the fiat of wealth or the decisions of a committee ; they are the product of ages. There is nothing of value in the world that is not of slow growth, adapting itself, bit by bit, to new neeeds. "Raw haste, half-sister to delay," is the curse of our time, the curse of new countries, and it is especially fatal to the proper growth of a great seat of learning. Let the University of California grow naturally, we would therefore say; let no hard scheme be devised. Wise management and lavish expenditure may accomplish much in a comparatively brief time, as we see in the case of the University of Berlin, which, founded so recently as 1809, is now the greatest seat of learning in Europe. But then Berlin was initiated by a King who had behind him scholars almost unrivalled in the world of learning, and California cannot boast a Fichte or Wilhelm von Humboldt. And, once more, let not the "city of learning" be a mere busy hive of specialising, a mere collection of intellectual Gradgrinds intent on collecting facts. The great Universities of the Middle Ages were bent on real culture, on the training of the will, the intellect, the affections ; their scholarship was related to life, as was that of the schools of Athens in their best days. What the modern world most needs is the systematising of the vast body of knowledge we possess, and the utilising it for the highest public life and the noblest spiritual ends. We do not need to add to the number of mere mathematicians, mere logicians, mere philologists, mere engineers, mere anatomists ; we have enough, and perhaps to spare, of all these. What the world needs is a. lofty and rounded type of character, an original intellect, a larger and higher personality, which shall guide and elevate this weltering mass of democracy, so low in its aims, so helpless in its outlook. If the " city of learning" can do that for us, who will not be sager to take a ticket thither on the first opportunity ?
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