



Produced by Paul Murray, Stephanie Eason and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









  CRITICAL MISCELLANIES

  BY
  JOHN MORLEY


  VOL. III.
  Essay 1: On Popular Culture


  London
  MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
  NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  1904




  ON POPULAR CULTURE

                                                                      PAGE

  Introduction                                                          1

  Importance of provincial centres                                      2

  Report of the Midland Institute                                       4

  Success of the French classes                                         5

  Less success of English history                                       6

  Value of a short comprehensive course                                 8

  Dr. Arnold's saying about history 'traced backwards'                  9

  Value of a short course of general history                           10

  Value of a sound notion of Evidence                                  16

  Text-books of scientific logic not adequate for popular objects      21

  A new instrument suggested                                           21

  An incidental advantage of it                                        23

  General knowledge not necessarily superficial                        25

  Popular culture and academic organisation                            25

  Some of the great commonplaces of study                              29

  Conclusion                                                           34




  ON POPULAR CULTURE

  AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE TOWN HALL, BIRMINGHAM (OCTOBER 5,
  1876), BY THE WRITER, AS PRESIDENT OF THE MIDLAND INSTITUTE.


The proceedings which have now been brought satisfactorily to an end
are of a kind which nobody who has sensibility as well as sense can
take a part in without some emotion. An illustrious French philosopher
who happened to be an examiner of candidates for admission to the
Polytechnic School, once confessed that, when a youth came before him
eager to do his best, competently taught, and of an apt intelligence,
he needed all his self-control to press back the tears from his eyes.
Well, when we think how much industry, patience, and intelligent
discipline; how many hard hours of self-denying toil; how many
temptations to worthless pleasures resisted; how much steadfast
feeling for things that are honest and true and of good report--are
all represented by the young men and young women to whom I have had
the honour of giving your prizes to-night, we must all feel our hearts
warmed and gladdened in generous sympathy with so much excellence, so
many good hopes, and so honourable a display of those qualities which
make life better worth having for ourselves, and are so likely to make
the world better worth living in for those who are to come after us.

If a prize-giving is always an occasion of lively satisfaction, my own
satisfaction is all the greater at this moment, because your
Institute, which is doing such good work in the world, and is in every
respect so prosperous and so flourishing, is the creation of the
people of your own district, without subsidy and without direction
either from London, or from Oxford, or from Cambridge, or from any
other centre whatever. Nobody in this town at any rate needs any
argument of mine to persuade him that we can only be sure of advancing
all kinds of knowledge, and developing our national life in all its
plenitude and variety, on condition of multiplying these local centres
both of secondary and higher education, and encouraging each of them
to fight its own battle, and do its work in its own way. For my own
part I look with the utmost dismay at the concentration, not only of
population, but of the treasures of instruction, in our vast city on
the banks of the Thames. At Birmingham, as I am informed, one has not
far to look for an example of this. One of the branches of your
multifarious trades in this town is the manufacture of jewellery. Some
of it is said commonly to be wanting in taste, elegance, skill; though
some of it also--if I am not misinformed--is good enough to be passed
off at Rome and at Paris, even to connoisseurs, as of Roman or French
production. Now the nation possesses a most superb collection of all
that is excellent and beautiful in jewellers' work. When I say that
the nation possesses it, I mean that London possesses it. The
University of Oxford, by the way, has also purchased a portion, but
that is not at present accessible. If one of your craftsmen in that
kind wants to profit by these admirable models, he must go to London.
What happens is that he goes to the capital and stays there. Its
superficial attractions are too strong for him. You lose a clever
workman and a citizen, and he adds one more atom to that huge,
overgrown, and unwieldy community. Now, why, in the name of common
sense, should not a portion of the Castellani collection pass six
months of the year in Birmingham, the very place of all others where
it is most likely to be of real service, and to make an effective mark
on the national taste?[1]

To pass on to the more general remarks which you are accustomed to
expect from the President of the Institute on this occasion. When I
consulted one of your townsmen as to the subject which he thought
would be most useful and most interesting to you, he said: 'Pray talk
about anything you please, if it is only not Education.' There is a
saying that there are two kinds of foolish people in the world, those
who give advice, and those who do not take it. My friend and I in this
matter represent these two interesting divisions of the race, for in
spite of what he said, it is upon Education after all that I propose
to offer you some short observations. You will believe it no
affectation on my part, when I say that I shall do so with the
sincerest willingness to be corrected by those of wider practical
experience in teaching. I am well aware, too, that I have very little
that is new to say, but education is one of those matters on which
much that has already been said will long bear saying over and over
again.

I have been looking through the Report of your classes, and two things
have rather struck me, which I will mention. One of them is the very
large attendance in the French classes. This appears a singularly
satisfactory thing, because you could scarcely do a hard-working man
of whatever class a greater service than to give him easy access to
French literature. Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a
pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good
book; and perhaps it is no more of an exaggeration to say that a man
who can read French with comfort need never have a dull hour. Our own
literature has assuredly many a kingly name. In boundless riches and
infinite imaginative variety, there is no rival to Shakespeare in the
world; in energy and height and majesty Milton and Burke have no
masters. But besides its great men of this loftier sort, France has a
long list of authors who have produced a literature whose chief mark
is its agreeableness. As has been so often said, the genius of the
French language is its clearness, firmness, and order; to this
clearness certain circumstances in the history of French society have
added the delightful qualities of liveliness in union with urbanity.
Now as one of the most important parts of popular education is to put
people in the way of amusing and refreshing themselves in a rational
rather than an irrational manner, it is a great gain to have given
them the key to the most amusing and refreshing set of books in the
world.

And here, perhaps, I may be permitted to remark that it seems a pity
that Racine is so constantly used as a school-book, instead of some of
the moderns who are nearer to ourselves in ideas and manners. Racine
is a great and admirable writer; but what you want for ordinary
readers who have not much time, and whose faculties of attention are
already largely exhausted by the more important industry of the day,
is a book which brings literature more close to actual life than such
a poet as Racine does. This is exactly one of the gifts and charms of
modern French. To put what I mean very shortly, I would say, by way of
illustration, that a man who could read the essays of Ste. Beuve with
moderate comfort would have in his hands--of course I am now speaking
of the active and busy part of the world, not of bookmen and
students--would, I say, have in his hands one of the very best
instruments that I can think of; such work is exquisite and
instructive in itself, it is a model of gracious writing, it is full
of ideas, it breathes the happiest moods over us, and it is the most
suggestive of guides, for those who have the capacity of extensive
interests, to all the greater spheres of thought and history.

This word brings me back to the second fact that has struck me in your
Report, and it is this. The subject of English history has apparently
so little popularity, that the class is as near being a failure as
anything connected with the Midland Institute can be. On the whole,
whatever may be the ability and the zeal of the teacher, this is in my
humble judgment neither very surprising nor particularly mortifying,
if we think what history in the established conception of it means.
How are we to expect workmen to make their way through constitutional
antiquities, through the labyrinthine shifts of party intrigue at
home, and through the entanglements of intricate diplomacy
abroad--'shallow village tales,' as Emerson calls them? These studies
are fit enough for professed students of the special subject, but such
exploration is for the ordinary run of men and women impossible, and I
do not know that it would lead them into very fruitful lands even if
it were easy. You know what the great Duke of Marlborough said: that
he had learnt all the history he ever knew out of Shakespeare's
historical plays. I have long thought that if we persuaded those
classes who have to fight their own little Battles of Blenheim for
bread every day, to make such a beginning of history as is furnished
by Shakespeare's plays and Scott's novels, we should have done more to
imbue them with a real interest in the past of mankind, than if we had
taken them through a course of Hume and Smollett, or Hallam on the
English Constitution, or even the dazzling Macaulay. What I for one
should like to see in such an institution as this, would be an attempt
to compress the whole history of England into a dozen or fifteen
lectures--lectures of course accompanied by catechetical instruction.
I am not so extravagant as to dream that a short general course of
this kind would be enough to go over so many of the details as it is
desirable for men to know, but details in popular instruction, though
not in study of the writer or the university professor, are only
important after you have imparted the largest general truths. It is
the general truths that stir a life-like curiosity as to the
particulars which they are the means of lighting up. Now this short
course would be quite enough to present in a bold outline--and it need
not be a whit the less true and real for being both bold and
rapid--the great chains of events and the decisive movements that have
made of ourselves and our institutions what we and what they are--the
Teutonic beginnings, the Conquest, the Great Charter, the Hundred
Years' War, the Reformation, the Civil Wars and the Revolution, the
Emancipation of the American Colonies from the Monarchy. If this
course were framed and filled in with a true social intelligence--men
would find that they had at the end of it a fair idea--an idea that
might be of great value, and at any rate an idea much to be preferred
to that blank ignorance which is in so many cases practically the only
alternative--of the large issues of our past, of the antagonistic
principles that strove with one another for mastery, of the chief
material forces and moral currents of successive ages, and above all
of those great men and our fathers that begat us--the Pyms, the
Hampdens, the Cromwells, the Chathams--yes, and shall we not say the
Washingtons--to whose sagacity, bravery, and unquenchable ardour for
justice and order and equal laws all our English-speaking peoples owe
a debt that can never be paid.

Another point is worth thinking of, besides the reduction of history
for your purposes to a comprehensive body of rightly grouped
generalities. Dr. Arnold says somewhere that he wishes the public
might have a history of our present state of society _traced
backwards_. It is the present that really interests us; it is the
present that we seek to understand and to explain. I do not in the
least want to know what happened in the past, except as it enables me
to see my way more clearly through what is happening to-day. I want to
know what men thought and did in the thirteenth century, not out of
any dilettante or idle antiquarian's curiosity, but because the
thirteenth century is at the root of what men think and do in the
nineteenth. Well then, it cannot be a bad educational rule to start
from what is most interesting, and to work from that outwards and
backwards. By beginning with the present we see more clearly what are
the two things best worth attending to in history--not party intrigues
nor battles nor dynastic affairs, nor even many acts of parliament,
but the great movements of the economic forces of a society on the one
hand, and on the other the forms of religious opinion and
ecc