THE LORD JUSTICE ON THE PROFESSOR.
1- ORD JUSTICE BOWEN has applied the sweet reason- ableness of the accomplished man of the world to the task of gently rebuking the rather excessive scorn of Pro- fessor Mahaffy for superficial and inadequate knowledge ; and the University Professor may, we hope, learn from the polished and delicately discriminating address of the great lawyer that there is a kind of culture which even time profes- sional work of education itself will not impart,—which, perhaps, indeed, it tends, in some degree, to exclude,—the culture which not only teaches a man the intellectual nicety of well-propor- tioned judgment, but prevents him from crowing over inferior competitors in his own province who have not had the same advantages as himself, nay, which makes him a little ashamed of himself when he has said in his heart, even of those who have acquired a very dubious and superficial culture indeed, " Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo," as Professor Mahaffy seems in- clined to say of those who have acquired the very inadequate culture which popular education has spread abroad and attempted to puff into a spurious sort of reputation. The Lord Justice has certainly displayed both his suavity and his reasonableness to the utmost advantage in dealing with Pro- fessor Mahaffy. How tranquilly he shows his full appreciation of the strength of the Professor's case, and how gently he makes the Dublin dignitary feel that he, too, is exaggerating the merits of his own privileged culture ! "Egotism," says the Lord Justice, "will spoil education as it spoils religion and spoils ethics." Yet is not Professor Mahaffy guilty of a certain class-egotism when, "under the influence of a temporary dis- quietude," he "jealously and suspiciously mounts guard" over his own educational blessings, as if he were keeping "an eye over his own luggage at a crowded railway-station" P Even our daily-increasing deficiency in the power of discriminating between the best and the second-rate in literature, which is due, of course, to the great number of new judges who fancy that they know the best, and really hardly even know the second-best, scarcely tells in Professor Mahaffy's favour. For does Professor Mahaffy himself get beyond appreciation of the second-best, when he treats elaborate University learning as if it were "the best," though it is only the beat when it is infused by that humanity, that universal sympathy for man- kind, to which nothing that can be even plausibly suspected of pedantry, can for a moment pretend P Does not Professor Mahaffy, in his zeal for distinguishing between the accurate teaching of a University and popular learning, make light of that sweet reasonableness without which even the most thorough knowledge is not, and cannot even bestow, the truest culture,— without which, indeed, it does not get beyond the culture of the pedagogue or the pedant, and fails to reach the higher standard of the cultivated man P Grant the superficiality of the new education; grant that "cheap thought, like light claret, can be produced upon an extensive scale ; " grant that the " by- ways of literature are given up, so to speak, to the literary bicyclist" who "travels in a costume peculiar to himself, and considers the landscape all his own." Still, if the protest made against the inadequacy of the new and shallow knowledge is set forth in a self-righteous spirit by the representative of a class-egotism which rather prefers that the Universities should manage to keep their literary acquirements to them- selves, and mounts guard over their special products as a man at a crowded railway-station mounts guard over his own private luggage, it is clearly not the protest of the highest kind of human culture, which, like Charity, " seeketh not her own," vaunteth not herself, is not puffed up. Professor Mahaffy does seem in a degree to seek his own, to vaunt his 'University scholarship, to be puffed up with class advantages, —whence it becomes pretty clear that Professor Mahaffy, with all his brightness and learning, has not caught the highest spirit of the literle Ituma2ziores. The Lord Justice insists, on the other hand, that learning itself • may issue in nothing better than a new kind of egotism, unless it is elevated and illuminated with the largest spirit of human fraternity. He values learning only as the most effectual master-key to a deep sense of human brotherhood, only because it opens to us the means of sympathy with the noblest minds and the highest experience of the past, and thus gives 1:13 access to the true end and aim of human culture. He thinks lightly of the luxury of a new delicacy, of a refined taste, of a select and aristocratic emotion, so far as it gives one a new sense of superiority to the herd ; he rates high, on the contrary, the wider range of human sympathy, the deeper ex- perienceof the restrictions and limitations of one's own mind, and the insight that we gain at the same moment into a new humility and a new source of power, to which learning alone can effectually introduce us. So long as learning is merely a new distinction, a new development of egotism, it does not give true culture. But so soon as it is desired because it opens to us a new reverence for the greater minds of all time, a new brotherhood with those who are higher than ourselves under conditions of life quite different from our own, it becomes the avenue to a better and wider and more subduing and chastening humanity.
This is very true, and the Lord Justice gets the better of the Professor in his view of education. Education, while it deepens the sense of caste, of intellectual privilege, of that mild com- passion for the rest of the world, which is in secret and in essence a sort of hugging of oneself, is not true culture,—is in some respects the very opposite of true culture. But is even that passion for human fraternity for which the Lord Justice pleads as the true guarantee of culture, any adequate and final protection against this petty attitude of self-satisfaction from which we are seeking to deliver ourselves P Rousseau preached human fraternity till it became a new and vulgar kind of tyranny,--' Be a man and a brother, and show it by sharing your property with me, or I will kill you.' That is. one sort of fraternity ; but it is certainly not a fraternity that humanises, it is a. false fraternity that hates while it exacts.. So far as we can judge, there is no guarantee, even in the communion with great minds, for that reverence with which alone it is fit that we should salute them and learn their lessons. There is something more needed than corn munioir with great minds, if we are not to come away from that communion with Horace's feeling, " Oai profanum vulgtis, et arceo." We do not gain reverence merely by gaining ex- perience even of all the finest culture of the past. The finest culture of the past is very apt to become a sort of spell to disenchant us with the vulgarity of the present, rather than to give us access to that higher and better life which lies con- cealed beneath superficial poverty and flatness. We believe that the literx humaniores will prove no talisman for true fraternity, without that spirit of worship for what is higher than humanity, which presents to us human things as a faint reflection of an order diviner than any which has realised itself here. It is this religious attitude towards human life,—whether past, present, or future,—as a very imperfect embodiment of a. divine ideal, which can alone redeem the liters humaniores from the spirit of what the Lord Justice calls egotism ; but which we should prefer to call that oligarchical fastidiousness to which culture, as such, is so painfully liable. So long as the humanities alone are in question, the humanities in the hands of a small' class are very apt to become inhumanities, as they did with Horace. The Lord Justice has answered the Professor with that delicate and discriminating irony of which he is a perfect master. But the spirit of fraternity to which he appeals so. earnestly has often been invoked in vain. And even he will invoke it in vain, unless he speaks in the name not only of human fraternity, but of that higher principle of reverence in which alone true fraternity can find its ground and its, justification.