The Modern Athens 24
It must be allowed that, if its patronage were at all in decent hands,
the constitution of the Athenian university is not bad. The salaries
of the professors are all so small that if the livings are worth the
acceptance of men of talent, they must be chiefly made up of the small
annual fees payable by the students. This is a very wholesome plan, and
tends more to reward every one according to his real merits than that
which obtains at most other places. The patronage, however, with the
three elements of civil ignorance, political influence, and clerical
intrigue, arranged against the single and undefined good of the
institution, is more than enough to paralyze all the good which that
principle, properly supported, or even let alone, would be capable of
effecting.
Those evils have begun to pervade the whole system. As the Athens
is the grand seat of lawyers, there will always be students for the
law classes, increasing with the increase that there is for lawyers;
but in every thing else the poison of decay has been infused, and
the decay itself has become visible. With the exception of Leslie,
who has written some very flaming articles in the Edinburgh Review,
and some books in which the path to geometry is made a little more
thorny than ever; of Jamieson, who has been most learned on slate and
granite; and Wilson, who has indited some pretty lake poetry, and
some pitiful political prose, of which he is said to be now highly
ashamed,--I did not hear that any of the Athenian professors have put
in a single claim for immortality. Even in her anatomical school, that
upon which she rested her fame the longest and the most securely, the
recent falling off has been great; and of all those who now shine in
the lists of her _senatus_ there is none able to hold the book for
Gregory, or the scalpel for old Monro, or light the furnace for Black.
I understand that for the fragments of her medical school that remain,
the Athens is almost wholly dependant upon private lecturers; that
the students pay their fees and enter their names at the college, not
with any view of attending the classes there, but because the fees
and entries are necessary for the ceremony of graduation. But for the
celebrity of her professors, the Athens possesses no advantages as
the locality of a medical school. From the nature and pursuits of the
Athenian society, there is neither that variety of patients, nor that
variety of cases, which is found in cities even of equal population,
where a large portion of the people are engaged in manufactures. That
it is as good in this respect as Glasgow begins to be doubted, as a
considerable number of medical students now attend the Glasgow college
in preference; and that it is any way comparable to London, as a school
of surgery, no one can suppose. If the medical glory of the Athenian
college continue to decrease as it has done for some time, that college
will soon become, like the Athens herself, a pensionary upon the law
and the politics of Scotland.
But if there be those causes of mortality in the college, there is
not much hope of life in any of the other philosophic institutions of
the Athens. Royal societies are no where much better than coteries
of old wives; and, judging from their recent pursuits, that of the
Athens can form no exception to the general character. That a poet
and novelist should be the president of such an institution, is proof
that the number of Athenian philosophers cannot be great; and however
successful and deserving of success such a person may be in his other
and lighter capacity, he is not the most likely man to give soundness
and solidity to the speculations of philosophers. The fact is, that
with the exception of the teacher of a class, and the editor of an
Encyclopedia, (who are of course but very heavy and humdrum persons,)
and a wisdom-struck squire or two, who take to the amusement of the
small philosophy of mosses and muscle-shells rather than the small
carpentry of snuff-boxes and fiddles, and who would be quite eclipsed
in any other place, there is nothing in the Athens which can be called
an amateur philosopher, and of the professional ones I have already
spoken.
In their philosophical opinions, the Athenians are an absolute
pendulum; and when the history of their swingings this way and that
way is looked at, they seem to be a pendulum which has no continued
stimulus of motion, but of which the oscillations, though not fewer in
number, gradually become more and more insignificant in range. While
David Hume was lord of the ascendant, the Athenians doubted every thing
but their own wisdom and importance; under Adam Smith, they considered
“moral sentiments” as being valuable only in “theory,” and learned
“economy” in their “politics,” by bringing all their disposable votes
and vices to the best market. Under Robertson, they knew all history;
and with Blair, every sentence was taken from the storehouse of the
Belles Lettres, and measured by the gauge of Rhetoric. When Reid and
Dugald Stewart turned the tables upon the sceptics, the Athenians were
entirely composed of intellectual or of active powers, and they were
drawn and held by the sweetest cords of association. With Playfair,
they attempted to go quietly to the very depth of philosophic systems;
and anon, they started to the moon with Dr. Brewster. While Leslie was
new, they burned and sweated with him in all the ardour of radiant
caloric; and now they lie upon mossy banks, prepared for them by
Brewster, Jamieson, and Sir George, and listen to the tales of Sir
Walter, or to the ghost stories of Dr. Hibbert. Thus have opinions
changed, and importances have faded away; but the Athenians have in
their nature remained the same. So change the phases of the moon, now
beamy, anon blank; now pushing her horns eastward, now westward,--but
still the same dark globe, without light save that which it has at
second-hand from another.
CHAPTER VIII.
LITERATURE OF THE ATHENS.
_Pol._ What do you read, my lord?
_Ham._ Words, words, words!
_Pol._ What is the matter, my lord?
_Ham._ Between who?
_Pol._ I mean the matter that you read, my lord.
_Ham._ Slanders, Sir.
SHAKSPEARE.
IF there be nothing by which the Athens really profits so much as her
law, there is nothing of which she is so ready, or so willing to boast,
as her literature. That is, as it were, her Benjamin--her youngest-born
child--the darling of her dotage, so to speak; and it is loved and
lauded in proportion to the lateness of its appearance.
In the whole literature of Scotland there is, indeed, a wonderful
hiatus,--an interruption, for which it would be impossible to account,
if one were not to look at her political and religious history.
Previous to the Reformation, the bards of Scotland sung as sweetly,
and her monks were as full and fabulous in their chronicles as those
of any other part of the world; and that dawn of intellect--that
day-spring of the mind, shone as warmly and as well upon the bleak
hills of Caledonia, as upon the green pastures of more fertile lands.
The classical elegance, and the keen and searching satire of Buchannan,
the stern and stubborn eloquence of Knox, and the polished but manly
sentences of Melville, will bear a comparison with any thing that
appeared contemporaneously in other countries: but after them, there
comes a dreary and desolate blank; and while other nations are rapidly
running the career of knowledge, adding book to book, and illustrious
name to illustrious name, Scotland appears not in the catalogue, except
in a manner which is even more melancholy than if she appeared not at
all. How is this to be accounted for? In theory it would be impossible:
with the facts before one, it becomes the easiest thing in the world.
No sooner had the morning of the Reformation shone upon Scotland, than
her horizon was obscured by the clouds of civil war; and scarcely
were her men prepared for taking up the pen for the information and
amusement of their fellows, when they were obliged to draw the sword
for their defence; and that energy which in happier times would have
trimmed the lamp of science, and tuned the harp of song, was obliged
to struggle night and day, if so be that it could preserve but a spark
of liberty, or even keep the life. That despotism and debauchery, which
Mary the Regent and Mary the Queen attempted, through their French
connexions, and by means of their French mercenaries, to introduce
into Scotland, was of itself sufficient to render the intellectual
improvement of the country stationary for an age; and though the
resistance with which it met tended not only to preserve but to
strengthen the free spirit of the people, it forbade the cultivation of
the arts of peace. The conduct of James, all shuffling and pedantic as
it was, did not, while he remained in Scotland, tend to make matters
improve; and upon his removal to England, Scotland may be said to
have been given up to that delegated despotism of influence, which,
under various forms and names, has continued to afflict her to the
present day, and must so continue till an uniformity of civil and
political law be established over the whole island. From the beginning
of the troubles under Charles, to the Revolution in 1688, the state
of Scotland was such as to leave literature entirely out of the
question. The great body of the people--at least of that part of them
who otherwise might have studied, or rewarded the study of literature,
were not only driven from all places congenial for literary purposes,
but even from the fastnesses of the mountains, and the caves of the
rocks; and though a Scotchman was occasionally returning from foreign
parts to let his countrymen know what the rest of the world were doing,
terror and oppression were too general for promoting any imitation.
At that time, too, one half the extent of Scotland was in a state of
the most abject ignorance: the feudal law, in the Highlands, was in
full exercise; and when all the chiefs could not read, it was not to
be expected that there would be much taste for literature among their
vassals. Thus, it was not till the termination of the second rebellion
in favour of the Stuarts, in 1745, that the people of Scotland
generally began to have a literary taste. A sure foundation for such a
taste had, indeed, been previously laid, in the provision that within
every parish in Scotland there should not only be a school, but a
school so regulated as that the poorest, as well as the most opulent,
might reap the benefit of it; but up to this period, and indeed for
some time after, the literature of those schools was confined to the
catechisms of the church and the reading of the Bible; and if any
literary work found its way into a Scotch farm-house or cottage, if
large, it was a treatise on mystic or polemical divinity, and if small,
it was a legendary ballad, or a sermon by some pious divine, whose
style was not the most classical, or his language the most easily
understood.
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