by Samuel Gower.
Originally published in Hood's Magazine (Henry Hurst) vol.7 #1 (Jan 1847).
One remark, made in the course of this paper, may need some qualification. It is contended that a young man should not be thrown into a false position, in which he must either exceed his allowed income, or present, in his style of living, a marked deviation from that of the men of his College. It is false shame which ruins half mankind, and its sway is the most despotic over the young and inexperienced. But it is not contended that no friendships ought to be formed at College, except such as are founded upon pocket-qualifications. If fortune have made a man a lord, whom nature intended to be a stable-boy, a congeniality of feeling, a similarity of pursuits, that true cement of all good fellowship, the "idem velle et idem nolle," may subsist between himself and his groom. I adduce an extreme case; because, between two extreme points, all intermediate points are included. Genuine friendship, like true love, overlooks all discrepancies. A man is not to be censured for marrying the woman he loves, although she happen to have a fortune; and the same assertion holds good with regard to the formation of friendships. Friendship itself hallows all intimacies formed genially in the natural course of events. The heart recognises no friendship as of any worth, (any farther than as a passenger's gold watch may be said to be of use to the thief who takes it,) which originated in manœuvring, and is cemented by the practice of hypocrisy. It is only love that is not true, friendship that is not genuine, that is contemptible. In many of the friendships formed at College there is, absolutely, no intermixture of baser matter. There is rarely to be found, there, that villainous exaction of a brute obsequiousness, on the one hand, and those mean concessions, on the other, which some novelists depict. That full play is there given to nature, which renders baseness almost impossible. It is a very fine thing for the third-rate novelist, who regards life with the eye of an old-clothes'-man, and who has acted, himself, as toad-eater general to the public, for a quarter of a century (as indeed who is better qualified?) to pourtray the toad-eater and tuft-hunter, whether of private or of College life. Writings like these, by their misrepresentations degrade the age in which we live into a sort of literary Lower Empire. Most pleasant it is to turn from such, to Charles Dickens, who does not think it beneath him to paint the homely actualities of life; whose satire is brought to bear upon the bad, the base, and the ridiculous; whose sympathies are with truth, love, honour, friendship, virtue, generosity, high principle, and kind feeling; and in whose works we do not see the essentially true and good sacrificed to, and superseded by, the merely conventional. These observations are all apropos as to friendships formed at College, as well as elsewhere. There are many subjects which we view more justly in proportion as we view them more generously. Many men would have been proud, in after life, to have been able to speak of having known Dr. Johnson at College, whom, had they, at one crisis of his College life, invited him to their rooms, he would have found it difficult to visit for want of shoes. Many men possessed of the scantiest means have distinguished themselves both at College and in after life, and nothing better proves that ours is, what it is alleged to be, a free country, than that none of its highest offices are shut against persevering merit; and that the career of honour of many of our most distinguished countrymen commenced at one or other of our leading Universities. This is an assertion which no ingenuity of special pleading can avail to contravene.
There is a topic of some interest connected with education, as conducted at each University, and one which, as yet, has been only slightly noticed. Most persons who have not thought upon the subject, and some who have, consider a course of education chiefly mathematical, as at Cambridge, preferable to a course of education exclusively classical, as at Oxford. What good on earth can accrue to a young man, in after life, it may be said, from the perusal of Ovid's Œnone Paridi, and the Odes of Anacreon? The truth is, that the main produced by any course of education consists in its disciplining and bringing into action, the powers of the mind. This will be pronounced a truism, and it is so; but there are truisms, and this is one of them, which are apt to be lost sight of, if not repeatedly placed in view. Truisms are truths to which common assent has given the authority and weight of axioms. Now, the study of the classics is the study of life through the medium of books; and thus it assists in not only educating the intellect, but in awakening, both to good and evil, that sometimes dormant, and sometimes dominant organ, the heart. The mathematics have to do only with space, size, form, figures, computations. It is only a portion of the mind which they call into action, and, with the heart, they have nothing to do; the heart, which in the opinion of many, may, however, be educated too soon. But, no—no part or quality of the mind, or heart, can be educated too soon, so long as the development is healthy, not morbid; so long as their powers are not brought immediately and convulsively, but steadily and naturally, into action. Something then depends upon temperament. We shall less frequently err, when we go with nature than against her. Should we seek to counteract her, it must be only by adopting her own slow methods of proceeding. Injudicious attempts to thwart nature, generally act inversely, always perniciously.
Upon the whole, it may be asserted, not invidiously, but in accordance with fact and truth, that Oxford has sent forth more persons eminent as statesmen, lawyers, and practical men of the world, than Cambridge. How is this, then? How do these different courses of study operate upon the mind in after life? Does the mind wearied with mathematical pursuits seek compensation by a devotion of its powers to pursuits of a literary, rather than scientific character? Does the mind educationally exercised and expanded by the study of the classics, subsequently indemnify itself by cultivating the exact sciences? Something like this may, occasionally, happen, but very rarely. The mind, having, once received, commonly retains its bias. This, then, seems to be the correct solution of the question. The mathematics teach nothing but mathematics, and employ only a certain portion of the powers of the mind; while the classics give employment to the whole mind, and therefore more tend to enlarge and expand it. The exclusive study of the mathematics gives the mind great power, within a certain range; but that range has its limits. The range embraced within the compass of the classics is almost without limits. If exemplars and models of correctness in the actual subjects of study be exacted, an Ode of Horace is as perfect an entity in itself as a problem of Euclid, An error in figures would not more certainly vitiate a series of mathematical calculations, than would one word misplaced destroy the beauty of a whole Ode. The exclusive study of the mathematics predisposes persons to reduce to a mathematical form questions which do not admit of it, or which, admitting of it, would be more easily solved by logical analysis.
The result of education is attained, if men, by any means, gain knowledge, and learn how to reason. The man who has neither learned to read or write is sure to acquire much information through the medium of his senses, and, traditionally, from conversation; and he will learn to reason upon what he observes and hears—man being, by nature, and independently of education, a reasoning animal. But, having applied himself to the study of the classics, he learns, during such study, if fully followed up, how to employ every faculty. To know words thoroughly is to know things thoroughly. The details of philology embrace much of the secret history of the progress of our species. While investigating these, a man learns to occupy himself with sorting into order those items which, however minute, make up the sum total of the evidence that should be present to the mind, and the smallest of which, in casting up the balance of probabilities, it is unsafe to disregard. Elephants can pick up pins as well as carry castles on their backs; and it is to a similar union of versatility and strength that the mind of the student of classical literature attains, or may attain. It is not unlike power, diversely acquired, diversely manifested, and exercised upon different subjects, which the acute critic, and the profound mathematician, possess and display. We witness, in the works of either, the acts of a mind which discipline and practice have made prompt, accurate, and perfect. It has always appeared to me that the study of the classics is better calculated an that of mathematics to accomplish this result.
In speaking of University education, it must be understood that we speak of it as a mode of general and preparatory education. It is not knowledge that is so much the end proposed by it, as the acquisition of an enlarged, acute, and profound capacity of knowing. The period allotted to such general education being past, that which is special—Divinity, Law, Medicine—is, for the most part, to come. In the almost new, important, and lucrative avocation of civil engineering, particularly in its relation to railway enterprise, the education should perhaps be in a great degree mathematical, and otherwise special, from the very first. But even in this, or any pursuit, a man cannot be too much a man, or, as common parlance has it, too much a gentleman. There are persons who will not be made to understand that Oxford and Cambridge teach, and profess to teach, the transcendental, rather than the utilitarian; and that the former should be precursory to @ man's entrance into the pursuits of active life in his own allotted sphere, is always desirable. Most of our readers will remember "Ned Testy's" brief commentary on Euclid in the "Miseries of Human Life." He said he had read it through, and it all seemed to him to amount pretty much to this: "Says A to B, C; says D to E, F; no, says G, H; I demand who A was?" There is a parody, also, of a question in arithmetic which; as not, perhaps, being familiar to all the readers of Hood's, may here be introduced for the amusement of those to whom it is new,—"Given, the amount of tonnage of a vessel, and the number of the ship's crew: required to know the name of the captain." This is not only humorous in itself, but it affords a fair instance of the many questions which cannot be answered by employing closet-powers of reasoning or calculation, and in order to obtain a reply to which, we must, like a countryman who has lost his way in the streets of London, civilly apply for information to any person or persons we think likely to give it us.
There are more points of likeness—mental, moral, and physical—than of dissimilitude, between the dustman and the duke, the day labourer and the philosopher. This is one of the lessons which a truly liberal education teaches us. There was some sort of truth, as well as humour, in the saying of the countryman, respecting the astronomer—"he may look through his glass and see what he may among the stars, but he cannot get any nearer to them than we can." Mentally speaking, we do get nearer to anything which we see and know more of than others; but that man has the happiest temperament, or, what is better, the most happily constituted mind, who can extract, from the most vulgar insolence, a lesson of just humility. He remains an essentially low bred man, and has failed to learn one of the noblest lessons which a liberal education should teach, who despises any one; who, to use Scripture words, does not "honour all men."
It is by the master hand of Shakspeare that we see Dogberry represented as petting and patronising Verges, a much more sensible man than himself, and calling him "good man," and observing that when "two men ride on horseback one must ride behind." This is simply amusing; but it is truly delightful to see how unconsciously and unsufferingly Verges submits to this. Dogberry is not more unconscious of his own shallow-patedness and self-conceit, than Verges is of any injustice being done him by such humiliating comparisons. Perhaps Dogberry might have been a few hundred pounds richer than Verges. But no:—such a supposition sullies the sweetness of this picture of good temper. Shakspeare was painting general nature, and not the particular conventional. It is this kindliness of feeling, above most other lessons in value, which a liberal education, such as is received at our Universities, teaches those who have the heart as well as head to learn it; and those, who so learn, are many, not few, in number.
There are some who may require to be informed that the examinations for honours at Cambridge, are, more than ninety-nine times in an hundred, de facto of a composite kind, embracing both the classics and mathematics. Although the examination be not, necessarily, of this composite character, they are such as above said—de facto: and a man must feel himself very strong in mathematics, or be guilty of great temerity, who should hope to obtain honours by furnishing evidences of attainments in mathematics only, without the aid of such evidences, also, as may be producible by him, of his classical attainments. Cambridge, besides the de facto composite character of its general examination, has, also, its classical tripos for those who trust solely to their classical attainments for distinction.
In conclusion, not only are the blossoms of a classical education more showy and more fragrant than those of an education exclusively mathematical, but its fruits would seem to be of equal, if not of superior, flavour. A man may read Euclid, but he cannot read Virgil, without being more of a Christian and a gentleman for it; always premising, that he cannot have lived in a Christian land and era, unimbued with the spirit of that Christianity, to which the poems of Virgil were immediately precursory, and of which portions of them per all but prophetic. War, in the Æneid, is rather spoken of as a means and a necessity, than with the North-American-Indian unction with which Homer pourtrays it.
We are indebted to Homer, among much that is noble and touching, and not simply bloodthirsty, for the portraiture, in one line, no doubt generally true to nature, of Machaon, the Physicial and Surgean-General to the forces,—
Φιλος δην ανφρωποις παντας γαρ Φιλεεσκεν
But it would be an endless—although endlessly agreeable—and not perfectly apposite undertaking, to traverse now the enchanted ground of ancient fiction. Perhaps the reader will be willing to accompany me, through some off its pleasant and less multitudinously en bye-paths, on some future occasion.
There is one popular error to which we have before partially alluded, but which, in conclusion, we must, in more direct words, unscrupulously expose. Many writers, from want of either judgment or due information, have condemned Oxford and Cambridge as places where nothing useful is taught. Should it be averred that it is rather the transcendental than the utilitarian that is there taught, the statement would be correct. The truth is, that a general and special education cannot consistently, with a due economy of time and of mental energy, be simultaneously pursued. It is not to the point to say that the student in medicine, after having taken his bachelor's degree at Oxford or Cambridge, has to place himself under the tuition of eminent anatomists, and instructors in physic and surgery, elsewhere, in order to accomplish himself in his profession. Of course he has; and so has the student in law to accomplish himself in his profession, by subsequently reading with some learned professor of law. A five years' bonâ fide residence at Oxford or Cambridge, at least during the whole of every term time, would be requisite to him who should expect the Universities to teach him all, as well special as general, which it behoves him to learn, in order fully to qualify him to commence practice in either of the two learned secular professions. He would quit his Alma Mater, even at the expiration of that period, having that before him still to learn which much and long practice, and unremitted study, alone can teach. If it be only said that Oxford and Cambridge are not the best special schools of instruction in medicine and surgery, it is simply a fact which admits of no denial. Whether it would be better or not that they should become so, is a question on both sides of which much might be said. As it is, the student in medicine, whose heart is set upon thoroughly qualifying himself for his profession, and who has the means of following out his views, goes to London, Dublin, Edinburgh, or Paris, to learn that which may indeed be learned, but is learned by few, at Oxford or Cambridge. The Undergraduate of the former University is engaged in other pursuits than that of perfecting himself in anatomy during his stay there. But he will make none the worse lawyer, physician, or surgeon, for having first become as much a scholar as it behoves every member of a learned profession, and every gentleman, to be. If his subsequent special education be imperfect, it is not Oxford or Cambridge that is to blame for this. It may be said of each University that it has its professors, its schools, its advantages;—but how many are there who take advantage of these advantages? To speak at once ad rem, how many subjects are dissected yearly at each University? Let the number be contrasted with that of those dissected at the anatomical schools of London, Dublin, Paris, or Edinburgh, and the conclusion will be sufficiently clear. The reason of this is equally so. The reading man—the bonâ fide student—is too much occupied in the pursuit of the general course of education appointed him, to have contemporary leisure for attending to the special also. No man who should devote much of his time to law, or medicine, would take a high Wrangler's degree at Cambridge, or become a First Classman at Oxford. He who, with whatever diligence, should apply, at one and the same time, to both the general and special, would find his mind rather crowded with a mass of heterogeneous lumber, than either generally accomplished, or specially well-informed.
Hampstead, Nov. 1846.