ATHLETICS.
[TO THE RDrroa OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—The discontent which has been visible in the Spectator for some weeks, beginning with the article on "Mind and Body," on May 30th, has come to a head in your article on " Athletics " on July 18th. Both articles are so suggestive that it seems worth while to copy out exactly the view which you support, and to suggest some further considerations. You speak of (May 30th) "the steady decline of the higher intellectual interests in our Universities. There is no teacher past middle age who does not see how very much the ardour of intellectual investigation has fallen off since he first began to teach." (July 18th) " The decline of that ardour for study which was once fairly common, both in Oxford and Cambridge. Fewer than formerly throw themselves into the arms of learning with the true feeling of the scholar. Passion seems to have passed away from the reading man."
To take the points which cannot be disputed. First, you argue in the last article that the work of the average first- class man has immensely improved all round. To use an expression which occurs in an article on another subject (July 11th), the "mental muscle" has been greatly de- veloped; the ordinary able man is made more capable. Secondly, your correspondent, "W. K. S.," June 6th, rightly says, that one of the present distinctions at the University is between the " strenuous and scholarly man of affairs " and the "strenuous scholar pure and simple." Yes ; one of our duties is to produce men of trained ability; the Government has to be carried on, and the social problems of the day task all the mental muscle and trained intelligence that can be developed. Much of the influence of Jowett was directed to this end, as will be seen by looking (say in the University Calendar) at the positions held by his pupils in public life, quite as much as in the world of scholarship. Thirdly, "the Uni- versities are perhaps nurseries of benevolent spirits." That implies a good deal, and is due to many causes, of which two perhaps are these : the study of Plato instead of scholastic philosophy, and the influence of T. H. Green, who brought philosophy from heaven to earth, widened its meaning, and made it from an abstraction into a life.
Now the debateable points. You say that there is danger to the best "ten or dozen men in the year" lest some of their "vitality be intercepted;" and that this danger comes from athletics. It is well that our atten- tion should be drawn to these ten or dozen, when the tendency is rather to aim at a high average of mediocrity. "Make a few saints," said Keble. The statement that "passion has passed away from the reading man" seems to require modifying. After all, Oxford makes for life. The passion for inquiry and for thought is there. St. Paul and Plato, Green and Wordsworth, are assimilated by the thoughtful : ideas live. The air is full of discussion, though the questions are not so much scholastic as social and literary : the subjects for the debating society or for the " weekly college essay" show it. There are, it must be admitted, dangers that beset the reading man and tend to dissipate his passion. Perhaps there are two in particular. One is this seething ferment of ideas round him. It is hard for a man of quick sensibility not to be distracted. No remark was more frequent in Jowett's month at Collections " than " You are doing too many things." Still, on the whole, it does little harm. A man's natural bent comes out afterwards, and the remnant is still saved. We still have in England the recluse, the visionary, the mystic, the dreamer, the quietist, the scholar ; few, it is true, for we all catch the contagion of getting on," as Matthew As.nold said ; the spirit of Odysseus still burns within him, "as when one saveth the seed of fire on an upland farm." Yet repose is hard, and more time is wanted for the digesting and assimilating of ideas. The passion, whose disappearance you lament, is there, but it is displayed not on one, but on many sides of activity ; the energy is transformed. Vivicta vie anal pervencit. The second danger is the able tutor. The work which he does is so good that the best men are in danger of not being able to revolt from it. A certain waywardness in pupils is not undesirable, though bath genius and originality are improved by having their fire and spirit controlled by the tutor. Behind the able tutor stands the able schoolmaster at the large boarding, or so-called public, schools. The work in school and the activities cut of school are so closely organised
that the boy who can escape being organised hardly exists. The freshness of mind which was displayed, for example, in his schooldays by the writer of "A Son of Belial, the Autobiography of Nitram Tradleg," is made to run less wild. Not that boarding-school training kills all independence; it transforms it rather in its effort to produce a completely developed man, not a product developed on cue side and deficient on others. Still, our men are over-lectured and over-instructed ; it is partly due to the great amount of work now required for the "schools," partly to the tutorial view that the average man has to be driven through them somehow. The best men may well be thankful that they are left alone to themselves in the Long, which remains unbroken.
I have hardly left myself space to touch upon the second half of your argument, that "this want of passion is due to athletics." I should say that the "ten or a dozen " are quite unaffected by them, even if that form of recreation is taken. Whatever form physical exuberance assumes, whether in Mark Pattison, with his hunting in vacation and " skiffing" in term ; or in Thomas Arnold, with his "expatiating," as he called it, and his gymnastics ; or in Keble, " the greatest boy " of all his pupils, the spirit still lives.
Finally, "there is no teacher past middle age who does not see how very much the ardour of intellectual investigation has fallen off since he began to read." Sorely persons " past middle age " have said this since the beginning of time. When, too, was this golden age, when " the relative merits of Hume and Sir William Hamilton, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Ruskin, were passionately contested"? Was it in the days (1861) when Mark Pattison could say (Sermon III.):—" We step out of our studies with hearts dilated with the magnificent outlines of the Temple of Knowledge in which we dream that we minister, and we find ourselves not in an academical auditory, but among the lower forms of a grammar-school "?
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