tiou with hicli they have been met, provokes con-
sideration of the habitual academic attitude in face
of progress — an attitude whereof this is nothing-
more than a normal instance. The strenuous resist-
ance which the Universities have offered to the
present and every former measure for their own
improvement, is not simply to be dismissed with
contempt as the mere natural selfishness of a body
corporate. It is rather a cumulative and culminat-
ing illustration of that very vice which more than
all others provokes the Reformers'" onslaught. We
accuse the Universities of being, above all things,
antiquated — of failing adequately to minister to the
necessities of the time. AVe charge them with the
worst faults of Conservatism — with narrow aims and
outworn methods ; and for answer they raise a shriek
of horror at remedies to which the plain symptoms
of the sickness are as earthquakes are to pills.
Could there possibly be a clearer confession of back-
wardness.? Surely we may clincli our philippics
with an ex ore tuo. Surely the Lord hath delivered
them into our hand.
There is a coarse common-sense about Dr. John-
son's ideal of the University as a place where every-
thing should be tauglit, from Persian prosody
upwards. But in all rational education there is
implied an art of ignorance as Avell as an art of
knowledge.' Not all things are to be known, or even
taught ; but the best ideas, the truest and the most
fruitful are to be published. And in a rough way,
and for all practical purposes, the newest ideas are
the best. I am not pleading the cause of every
premature intellectual birth, or every wandering
wind of doctrine ; thougli, in nine cases out of ten,
that unctuous text is simjjly a libel upon progress.
But, after all, a living heresy is better than a dead
ortliodoxy : the coinage of Decius might be unim-
peachable in weiglit and fineness, but after their
age-long coma the seven sleepers found that it would
no longer buy them bread. 'Hang the age!' said
Charles Lamb, ' I will write for antiquity,' and the
Professors have done in earnest what he threatened
to do in jest. Rightly interpreted, the past is little
other than a beacon, but to the Universities it has
been a will-o'-the-wisp, and so, for the most part,
they lie floundering. Within the limits of our own
island, how much have the Universities done for
furtherance of the national intellectual life ; how
far, in any age, have they been on a level with the
best thought of the time, or in sympathy with its
foremost thinkers . It has always been the boast of
Oxford and Cambridge that they give England its
politicians and its pastors ; but it should be remem-
bered that the Church is accessible only through the
college, and that hitherto, at least, our governors
have been drawn from those classes to whom a
University education is as much matter of routine as
an eight o'clock dinner. As regards our statesmen,
indeed, it is very questionable if the Universities
liave not done them positive harm. Oxford gave
Charles Fox his store of Latin quotations, which he
could very well have wanted, but it also gave liim
his contempt of political economy, which nothing
could redeem. And of the two greatest politicians
of our own time, it is notable that the one was
never at public school or college, while the other
reckons among the number of his disadvantages the
spirit which he inhaled at Christ Church.
In imaginative art again, the impotence of the
Univei-sities has been long notorious ; the forces of
literature are not of their guidance or begetting.
It is tedious to iterate the stock instances of Burns
and Shakespeare — to tell again how Pope was
educated privately, and how Shelley left Oxford in
disgrace ; but one may be permitted a reference to
that latest of literary developments, the novel.
Alike the founders of fiction and their most
distinguished successors have been men who owed
everything to the outside world and notliing
to the Universities, save perhaps the impetus
which was born of revolt against them. It is
mere impudence to answer, as is often done,
that the Universities have no power over artistic
genius, and make no pretence to foster it. If
that be true, why then this perpetual teaching
of the classics, why is the best part of a student's
time devoted to works proposed as the eternal
archetypes of literature.? Not that the study of
Greek and Roman antiquity is unprofitable, but it
sliould be a study which will qualify for some better
task than the sterile one of editing and emendation.
We owe to Bentley the discovery of the digamma,
and to Porson the truth about the Three Holy
Witnesses. But the Decline and Fall is the work
of one who scorned and hated his alma mater, and
it was left for the unacademic Grote to write the
first tolerable history of Greece.
In the world of speculation too, the Universities have for centuries back been the main forces of resistance. One has only to read the sharp sayings of Bacon, or Hobbes, or Locke, to see how these recognised in the holders of college endowments the most powerful champions of routine in thought. Of Descartes' system Hallam says that it had no chance of acceptance in the Universities, because these were bigoted to the authority of Aristotle. Locke and Newton were introduced to the Continent by Voltaire ; and the name of Voltaire reminds us that the brilliant band of eighteenth-century j[7^ifosophes, undoubtedly the most potent of all modern
