MR. MARK PATTISON ON ENGLISH CULTURE. THRec E
tor of Lincoln deserves credit for knowing his countrymen so well. Many speakers at Social Science meetings would have feared to commence a long lecture on a dry subject with an outpouring of intellectual scorn for the _audience assembled to hear it, but Mr. Mark Pattison is a hummuist as
well as a philosopher, and knows that Englishmen enjoy a scolding, if only it is couehed in an effective form. So he began his lecture
with about twenty epigrams, all intended to inform his listeners that they were rather contemptible idiots. They and the whole Eng- lish middle-class "grow up destitute of intellectual nourishment."
They "are characterised by an incapacity for ideas." They "pass self-complacent existences in outer darkness." The "worlds of science, of literature, poetry, and art are unopened to them." The "diffusion of wealth has only made the absence of refinement more conspicuous by contrast." Sentences like these, of course, pleased
the audience amazingly, and as the lecturer kept up the excite- ment, recurring every now and again to his theme, now deploring "the total absence of refinement " in English middle-class life, and again asserting "that middle-class men had not only ceased to value liberal education, but had ceased to know of its existence," the entire lecture was a success. Mr. Pattison was warmly thanked, and his discourse, next to Mr. Poynter's, has been of all others the most widely discussed, and on the whole, with most approval. So far from giving offence, the learned Rector has given great pleasure) and in the twenty or so comments on his speech which have passed before us, we have not seen the faintest evi- dence of annoyance, or protest, or wounded amour propre. All is thankfulness for the licking,—for, as we began by saying, the lecturer has humour, and knows his countrymen well.
It speaks well for the temper of Englishmen that they can take such a castigation so well, but their good-humour is no proof that the flogging was required ; rather it is evidence, if of anything, that the birch has been laid on with somewhat unnecessary severity. To stand an intellectual horse-whipping with a sense that it does you good is no bad proof of culture. There is always a certain difficulty in estimating the value of any assertion about the middle-class, because no one pretends to define exactly what the middle-class is ; but accepting it as meaning what Mr. Pattison evidently means, that is, as including all who could spend £100 a year on the education of a son, his censure strikes us as being far too ferocious. We question greatly if any class in the world undervalues liberal education less than the English middle- class. They may make mistakes as to what ought to be comprised inthe word, but they do not attempt to undervalue the thing itself. Mr. Smith, of Halifax, may not see that the cost of such an edu- cation is money well laid out, but the average Smith certainly is eager to see his son well taught, and spends money for that end more readily than for almost any other. The proof of this, if any were wanted, is the sudden growth of the Schoolmaster profession to one of great chances and rewards, the rise on every side of new prosperous public schools, and the immense development which any efficient foundation now inevitably receives. The old schools count hundreds of pupils where they counted tens, and a new school ascertained to have selected a first-rate head master mounts up into the hundreds in a single year. Hundreds of teachers are now better paid after five years' service than Government servants after twenty, and a first-class member of the profession has not done well unless he receives the income of a bishop. The number of middle-class lads sent abroad for thorough education increases every year, and the poorer members of the middle- class complain that the demand for culture is the heaviest tax on their resources,—but though complaining, meet it, often at extraordinary personal sacrifice. We know scarcely of any remark 80 common in the class as one deferring some pleasure or other until the educating business is done, or any subject of surprise so common as the way Brown, Smith, or Robinson manages to educate his sons. No doubt many of the schools thus patronised are inferior, but the fathers do the very utmost they can to discover the good ones, and as a matter of fact, the success of a school is usually exactly proportioned to its deserts. Girls, no doubt, are less fortunate than boys, because mothers demand, with some reason, other qualifications in schools than efficiency ; and a good many conventional etiquettes, some of them, it may be, most useful, stand in the way of thorough edu- cation. The demand for it, however, increases till it has surpassed the supply, till " Colleges " are choked, and hundreds of first-class men are making livings by delivering very excellent and careful lectures to young girls. At the same time, the desire for self-culti- vation undoubtedly increases among them more than it does among men, and thousands of girls never heard of out of doorsare acquiring at home a knowledge of languages, of literatures, and of art, which if not a liberal education is a very good basis for one. We should have said, in opposition to Mr. Pattison, that in professional households at least, and in those of merchants and manufacturers, the passion for instruction had risen to an almost inconvenient height, and that the brains of the young were at least as heavily taxed as is at all well for the welfare of the next middle-aged generation.
But, says Mr. Pattison, they do not go to the Universities :—
" The neat point of contact between the Universities and our national life which may be noticed is their degree of popularity. They are re- spected, but they are not popular, institutions. It is not nneommesen this view to hear a comparison drawn between the some 5,000 &MAW', in our Universities and the some 20,000 who people the Universities of Germany. But these comparative figures do not much aid the imagine. tion to estimate the popularity of a University education among us, On account of the vast number of differences between the two coantriea which would have to be taken into account. One difference alone dis- concerts the whole parallel,—i.e., the far greater wealth of this country. If the numbers of the University students were compared, not with the population of England and Germany respectively, but with the amounts of realised property in each country, the difference would be made to appear still greater in favour of Germany. Bat, apart from any com- parison, it cannot be thought that with a population of 21,000,000, and realised property of some 6,000 millions of pounds, 5,000 students is at all a satisfactory fraction of our youth as the total of those who are brought within the scope of a liberal education. The population-tables show that the number of persons in England and Wales between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, both included, is over 1,600,000. Now, in the calculations of elementary-school attendance, it is usual to assume one-seventh as the proportion of those children who are attending a higher class of school than the public elementary schooL This would give 228,500 as the number of young persons of both sexes between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, of whom nearly half, say, 114,000, would be males. Of this 114,000 educable material_only some 5,000 are to be found in our Universities. Taking in all the Colleges and all other institutions which offer instruction of a liberal kind for adult males from eighteen to twenty-one, I think 6,000 would be a large allowance for the total number of students who could be mustered alto- gether. This state of things can be described as nothing less than a state of national destitution,—an intellectual blight."
It is, perhaps, not unnatural for a man who, although he is much else, is first of all a University Don, to deny that a man who has never been at a University has had a liberal educa- tion, but is that sweeping assertion quite true ? The statistics are evidently all wrong, for Mr. Pattison must deduct from his 114,000 all those households whose heads dislike University education for its imagined religious fruits,—that is, an immense pro- portion of Nonconformists, Catholics, Evangelicals, and sceptics-; all who cannot afford the expense during the long interval now required for thorough education, that is, really from 17 to 24; and all who for any reason are compelled to introduce their children into active life at an early age ; but we will not press that point, as no doubt at least ten times the present number might, as far as direct obstacles are concerned, be sent up for a University course. That they are not sent up is true, and is, as regards many of them, to be regretted ; but it is not to be regretted so much as Mx. Pattison thinks, nor is the failure to send them dictated by the contempt for education which he imagines. It proceeds from an infinite variety of causes, one of the most powerful being the distrust felt in modern society, and with reason, for the capacity of young men to bear the pecuniary tempta- tions of University habits. Thousands of men could, as Mr. Pattison says, pay the £150 a year for three years which will maintain a lad at the University, but are utterly unable to face the chance of his spending three or four hundred, to be paid afterwards in a lump in the form of debts. They will face anything sooner than lose all control of their children's expenditure, while still re- sponsible for it. The new generation is not extravagant in the sense of the old wild "extravagance," but it is habitually expensive, and that to a degree which parents in ordinarily prosperous circum- stances acutely dread. Then there is the doubt whether the University does ensure a liberal education to all who attend it. Mr. Pattison takes no notice of that doubt, but parents are keen, and a good many of them are of the opinion of the lady who, being told that University men were always well educated, and highly instructed, and thoroughly refined, remarked, in medita- tive doubt, "Dear me, is that so? I have dined with a good many curates, and I never noticed it." And many more doubt whether the result of University training is always so beneficial, whether gentlemanly manners, and a smattering of classics, and the ability to row or jump are quite worth all the cost, and risk, and time expended in obtaining them. A notion that a University education is not a liberal education, or in- deed an education at all, is very widely diffused, and if Mr. Pattison will look round Oxford, is not altogether without justi- fication. We have no doubt he could, if he tried, pick out two hundred young men there more densely ignorant of everything worth knowing than a similar number of young men in any other position in the world,—young men to whom Mr. Mark Pattison would talk with an inner feeling that, undergraduates as they were, he would as soon talk to babies or ploughboys. And finally, there are thousands of parents who, able to afford the University for their sons, and able also to understand thoroughly what liberal education is, deliberately decide that their sons shall not go there ; that they are not the kind of men on whom gregarious education, through lectures on the classics, or science, or anything else, will have a liberalising effect ; that they will be educated sooner and better by being released from the status pupillaris, by being set to choose their own culture, and by being forced to make their own way. The reasons which make many an aristocrat prefer travel, or the army, or diplomacy, to a long-protracted schooling weigh heavily with many a middle-class man, who not only does not despise a liberal education for his son, but rejects the idea of a University for him in order to secure it. He dis- cerns by a kind of instinct that pupilage instead of educating is deteriorating his son, depriving him of self-reliance, and forcing him to exercise his self-educating powers in a direction so dis- tasteful or so unfitted to his mind that he will never make the best of himself. The specialty of our race is the capacity for action, and though Mr. Pattison may not believe it, there is a heavy per-centage of lads in England who can be cultivated only through action, who positively lose mental power in enforced study, and would gain more true culture through the reflection stimulated by contact with life than through the reflection pro- voked by distasteful reading. Is an Oxford Don, after all, so much more liberally educated than an engineer as successful in his own profession?
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