SOCIAL SETTLEMENTS.
THE opening of the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Bloomsbury last Saturday, and the speeches of Lord Peel and Mr. Morley, have set the world asking, What is the good of these Settlements ? Are they, as some people argue, merely places for the dissemination of diluted sentiment about literature, science, and art,—halls devoted to a kind of tepid and priggish self-glorification, or are they really useful and practical institutions,—institutions which do the work they put before them, and do not merely talk about it? Though Social Settlements are, like all other human institu- tions, liable to their own special failings and abuses, and though they seldom, or rather never, accomplish all that they intend, we incline, on the whole, to a favourable answer to the questions just put. They do some harm and they do some good, but if a balance is struck the good most distinctly pre- vails. Let us, however, before we attempt to show where they succeed and where they fail, consider what it is that they ought to do. If we search out the ruling ideal we shall be the better able to see how far they are likely to carry it into practice.
The Social Settlement movement has, we take it, a double mother-thought. The notion of the founders of the idea was first to bring into the lives, not necessarily of the poorest, but of the less well-off and hardest- worked section of our city population something of the spirit of humane learning and of that sweetness and light which resides, or at any rate ought to reside, in our Universities and seats of learning. They are, or ought to be, spiritual candles set up on a candle-stick in a dull and materialised world at which men may light their individual tapers. But such lights are most needed where the world is most dark and dreary from mere materialisation, and these, too, are the very places from which men cannot escape and get to the regular centres of light. What more reason- able than to establish small centres of learning and light —University chapels-of-ease—in different parts of that huge London which is so active in everything that is material, so inclined to neglect the things of the mind. To create Settlements devoted to the spread of the spirit of learn- ing, of beauty, and of all that is contrasted with mere materialism was, then, one of the two fundamental ideas which we have mentioned. The other moved on parallel lines to the first. It was to use such Settlements for organising and encouraging humanising social work of the more practical kind. The people who lived in the Settlements were, each after his own fashion, to do work such as is afforded in unfailing supplies by our elementary schools, our charities, our hospitals, our workhouses, and the endless movements and institutions which are busy with London life. These institutions are perpetually wanting volunteers, and it was felt that if a portion of these volunteers could be got to live actually in or near their social work, and could help and encourage each other by co-operation, great advantages would accrue to the actual and practical social and charitable work that has some- how got to get itself done in London. No one will, of course, deny that this second object is worth attaining, nor, again, that it is attainable. As to the spread of what we may call the University spirit, more apology is necessary. A good many people will be found to call it frankly rubbish and humbug. They will argue that the working class and lower middle class people among whom the sweetness and light are to be spread do not in the least care for these things, and that the last thing in the world they want to hear about is Dante or the Frieze of the Parthenon. The things they want to hear about are boilers and the wonders of machinery. A little veneer of sham culture will only bore one half and make the other half silly and stuck-up. A man who knows by rote such words as Phidias, Pallas Athene, the Pan-Athenaic procession, and so forth has not cultivated his spirit or found geist, but merely made a fool of himself. Your half-culture merely turns an honest artisan into a pretentious, self- important donkey.' We venture to say that those who argue thus know nothing whatever about the working classes. They assume that the working classes are all on one intellectual plane,—a sort of sect or order all moved by similar desires and feelings. Nothing, of course, could really be farther from the truth. The working classes are no more a sect than are the Income-tax payers. In one class, as in the other, there are infinite varieties of men. Among the working men and lower middle class there are thousands of indi- viduals who have a real and genuine love of learning and of culture for its own sake, and also a genuine love of beauty in all its forms. There are men who, if born in a richer class, would surround themselves with books and pictures, and would belong to literary and historical and artistic clubs and societies. Situated as they are, however, they have little opportunity to cultivate and encourage these tastes. If they are very lucky, or, again, if they have genius, they may be able to acquire true culture in spite of all their physical disadvantages. But then most men are not geniuses, but have merely a little taste. If their taste for non-materialistio things is gratified it develops and improves. If not gratified it gradually dies away. But if a man on thirty shillings or a couple of pounds a week happens to live near a Settlement, his chances of cultivating his tastes for learning, literature, or art are enormously increased, and accordingly the pleasure and profit which he gets out of life. Surely it is worth while to provide facilities for the development of such minds. Even looked at from the basest point of view, it would pay to do so. Give freer play to a man's love of literature, and you will kindle his brain and make it brighter and more active. The man whose brain is stimulated and made active by con- tact with great poets and great thinkers is not the worse but the better mechanic. If people would only remember that what they really work with is not their hands, but their brains, they would not imagine that time spent on culti- vating the brain and giving it power and flexibility is time thrown away, but would see that it is time most usefully devoted. When all is said and done, the materialist is a very poor utilitarian. In implanting, then, if possi- ble, the true University feeling, the love of letters and of humane learning, among the inhabitants of the poorer quarters of London, the residents in the Social Settlements are doing most excellent work. They cannot too strongly preach the doctrine that a nation does not live by machinery alone, and that what are infinitely more important are humanities" in their widest sense. But though we may speak warmly in praise of the ideal that underlies the University Settlements, we are not unconscious of the difficulty of carry- ing out this ideal. There lie in wait for the University resident many snares. The worst and greatest of these is priggish- ness. Priggishness always has been, and always will be, the vice of the cultivated, and the tendency towards it is inten- sified a hundredfold in those who teach and preach culture to others. Yet priggishness; is in reality the destroyer of
culture, and overcomes and uproots it. Culture should widen men's minds, or it is not culture. Priggishness is narrow- mindedness with a turned-up nose. Thus the man who lets priggishness grow on him is taking away with one band what he gives with the other. Sentimentality is a hardly leas fatal, though possibly a more amiable fault in the resident of a University Settlement. The settler who gushes is lost. The sensible learner is soon disgusted by gush, and the man who likes, or rather does not resist, gush will soon be demoralised into a gusher himself. But if gush is un- pleasant in a man who knows something of his subject, it is ten times worse in one who does not even know whether he has or has not got a decent opportunity for gush. It is disagreeable to see a man gush over the Venus of Milo Gushing over the Venus de Medici produces positive nausea. But though the resident must not gush, he must also not be cold and academic. His must be the wide mind. They are the liberal arts and sciences which he represents and upholds, and be must put zeal and enthusiasm into his work. Uncul- tivated people are supposed to be uncritical. In reality, their fault is often to be too critical. "Plenty of criticism, and all of it bad," is the verdict which has too often to be passed on the ignorant man who hurriedly brings his mind to bear upon a great subject—and "cracks a weak voice to too lofty a tune." He who wishes to cultivate the liberal mind will never over- stimulate the critical faculty in the half-educated.
But we have no intention of setting forth rules for the creation of the perfect University resident. We merely wish to point out that there are dangers and difficulties in this as in every other form of social work. We want, however, before we leave the subject, to note that even if, as the enemies of the Settlements say, the Settlements did no practical good to the people among whom they are placed, they would still be useful. The so-called bringing together of classes is no doubt largely "clap-trap but at any rate the Settlements enable the settlers, and through them thousands of their friends and relations, to know what nonsense is talked about the poorer classes in this country. They soon learn that the poor are not a distinct or special class, but infinitely graduated, and shading off im- perceptibly into the class above. They see, too, that the poor are men and women with like feelings and interests and enthusiasm to their own, not the strange creatures of the novelist, beings as aloof from the well-to-do as the people of Mars. Again, they see that the social hate and envy which the rich often imagine is felt by the poor does not exist. The ordinary poor man's feelings towards the professional with £800 or £1,000 a year are very like the professional's feelings towards the Duke of Westminster or Mr. Astor,—by no means one of frenzied and consuming rage. Lastly, they learn at first hand what the copy-books teach, and note that happiness does not depend upon money half so much as on health, or, still more, as on temperament. There are plenty of happy rich, but also plenty of happy poor. To learn these things at first hand is to learn mach. Therefore, as we have said, even if the Settlements had no effect on the people they are meant for, they would be worth establishing. But they do have an effect, and a good effect, on the people among whom they are planted ; and in twenty years' time we doubt not that there will be thousands of men and women in London in whom the lamp of the spirit will be burning more steadily and more clearly, and so more happily, because of interests in literature, in art, or in science kindled at a University Settlement.
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