THREE ROTTEN CULTURES.
TN the remarkable book, reviewed elsewhere, on "Roman
Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire" Professor Dill has drawn a striking picture of culture as it existed during the decadence of Rome, and during the time when the barbarians were breaking up the "eternal" Empire. His description will seem to most of the few Englishmen who have ever given the subject a thought almost a new account. They have imbibed the idea that while culture continued for centuries to exist in the Eastern Empire, chiefly because its people spoke Greek, it had gradually died away in the West, and with the incursion of the barbarians suddenly disappeared. That, however, was not the case. In the last ages of the Western Empire- A.D. 360-475—culture not only existed, but had become uni- versal among the noble families and rich proprietors, who survived for a long period the extinction of the middle class, and appear latterly to have ceased to excite Imperial jealousy. They had, indeed, become servile to an astounding point, but not unintellectual ; they studied regularly from generation to generation in the Universities scattered over the Empire, and in mature life in the seclusion of their provincial estates they, as we now express it, "kept up their reading." They had a preferential claim to important offices; they were, perhaps, in intellectual attainment farther above the people than any other class in Europe ever has been, and they maintained all over the Empire a kind of learned freemasonry. The Emperors were not only, as we have said, not jealous of their attainments, but they admired them, and the only class who were as sure as the nobles of promotion were the " rhetores," rhetoricians, as we call them, but who were more nearly akin in kind to our own public school masters. Even the barbarian chiefs, who seem to have spared the Roman nobles, or at all events to have eaten them up last, respected their attainments and conse- quent refinement, and would gladly have seen some of those advantages enjoyed by their own energetic officers. Of all this culture, however, nothing came. The cultivated class, though it must have been exceedingly numerous, produced nothing, originated nothing, and enlarged no single field of knowledge. They utterly ignored history, either past or present. There were a poet or two among them, valuable chiefly for a few pleasing descriptions, but without a trace of lyric energy; and a few writers of letters, remarkable mainly for the care with which their authors avoided the smallest reference to the wonderful changes in the world then passing around them. The truth is, their education was an utterly false one. It produced refinement, but had no effect either on character or ability. Deprived of freedom, with no channel for healthy effort except official life, and entirely indifferent to what we now class under the word " science " —much more indifferent, indeed, than the Arabs showed themselves five centuries later—the cultured class of decaying Rome fell back upon the old masterpieces, studied them with minute care without imbibing their spirit, maintained long controversies over their shades of meaning, and became, in fact, dilettante grammarians. They knew words with a certain exquisiteness of knowledge, but words only. They could write verses like those of Statius, and letters like those of Cicero, but the verses had no poetry in them, and the letters no pungency. Their most serious efforts took the form of panegyrics on the powerful, which in their slavish adulation would disgust even Orientals, who have never quite lost in their worst periods a power of satire. Naturally when the times grew more and more terribly earnest such knowledge died out, until at last such intellec- tual darkness settled upon Western Europe, that it seems to most observers now as if there had been no twilight be- tween the brilliancy of the Empire and the gloom of the Dark Ages, as if with the success of the barbarians a curtain had rushed down between savagery and civilisation.
The account should interest Englishmen, for they are being brought into close contact with two cultures almost exactly resembling that of decaying Rome, and for one of them they are immediately responsible. The Chinese literati are edu- cated just as the nobles of dying Rome were educated. They feed upon a few classics and nothing else, study them with minute care, are promoted according to their knowledge of them, can quote them for ever, and regard the power of quoting them as the power which divides them from the vulgar. They talk of them among themselves, and so far as outsiders can tell, really feel deep respect for men distinguished for special knowledge of their own peculiar learning. That knowledge, and the mental effort required to attain it, refines, and in a certain way "civilises," them, giving them in particular the amenity of speech of which the Roman nobles were proud, so that by the testimony of all impartial observers you can always tell a Chinaman who has received a Mandarin's education, but there the benefit of their culture ends. It does not alter their characters, or enlarge their abilities, or enable them to originate anything, even in liters- tare. They are indifferent to science, mere imitators in art, and in politics utterly selfish and corrupt, as the Roman nobles were except in the few cases in which Christianity— which they assimilated very slowly—had given them a new and more vigorous mental life. The very first condition of advance in China, by the consent alike of the Europeans, who take in that Empire the place of the barbarians in Rome, and of their own reforming class, is to break the power of the cultured, and replace them by a more hopeful and teachable, if less instructed, class. Chinese sailors or builders would probably govern better, certainly more efficiently, than Chinese Mandarins.
For the other culture of nearly the same kind we ourselves, as we have said, are responsible. It is that of the graduates of Bombay and Bengal. We are taking yearly thousands of Mahrattas and Bengalees, who are naturally among the most intelligent of mankind, and are setting them to learn the masterpieces of English literature. In a way they do learn them, as the Roman nobles learned their classics,—that is, they learn their words without imbibing one particle of their spirit. They probably do not rely on their memories so exclusively as Mr. Steevens in the re- markable account of them published in the Daily Mail of Friday, the 10th inst., appears to think ; but they devote the whole power of most acute minds to acquiring just so much knowledge of English ideas as will enable them to pass for a degree. That degree once obtained, they are, they think, cultivated men, put forward their claim to all official posts, as did also the Roman nobles, and are proud, as they were, of the distance between themselves and the uninstructed vulgar. Like them, they have a freemasonry of their own, talking to each other in English as the Romans talked in Greek; like them, they are indifferent to science and the constructive arts; like them, they regard with a kind of timid scorn the forceful barbarians by whom they nevertheless are ruled ; like them, they employ as a means of rising language of outrageous adulation ; like them, they demand aEl receive a respect from the commonalty which is increased by the fact —which Mr. Steevens either does not know or despises—that a large proportion of them are men with ancient pedigrees, Brahmins of the purest blood ;—and, like them, they seem to have in politics no sort of efficiency whatever. Whether they are as corrupt as the Romans we do not know—certainly that is not true of all of them—and their rulers have not been too just to them in the matter of salaries ; but, like them, they are disposed to tolerate corruption if only the corrupt have birth, culture, and what they consider manners. The great difference between them and Romans of the fourth and fifth centuries is that they are more like Greeks, retain under all their affectations a wonderful natural acuteness, and in the one study which they never pursue in English—meta- physics—display marvellous insight and some originality. We do not think, as many do, that they will become formid- able to our rule, any more than the Roman "cultured class" became formidable to the barbarians, but we do believe that in educating them on so false a system we have made the second great blunder of our rule—the first is closing too many careers—and have diffused, instead of true light, a mere imitation of it. We have, too, made a very respectable class permanently unhappy. The graduates are unfitted for any careers except in Government offices, and for every three of them there is even now but one appointment By and by there will be thirty applicants for every vacancy, and if, as Mr. Steevens says, undergraduates who do not pass are so completely boycotted, even in the marriage market, that suicide is often their resource, there will be a terrible amount of latent thoughtful disaffection, culminating in Bombay, though not in Bengal, in frequent assassinations. Whether there is any remedy we are not certain. To abandon at once an experiment so vast as the secondary education of a continent while its subjects warmly approve it, is a daring undertaking from which even a Government like that of India may reasonably shrink. But of this we do feel certain. that education in India as hitherto pursued is of no more value than the education of nobles in the later Roman period, or of Chinese Mandarins now, and like theirs will ultimately fall, probably with a crash.
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