The Modern Athens 27

The Modern Athens 27

There is another thing against their permanence. Men, whether official

or not, are never fond of having that brought prominently forward in

which themselves do not excel. Now if one were to pitch upon the very

weakest point--the blank as it were in the official men of Scotland,

and of the Athens, that upon which one would pitch would be literature.

The civic part of them, from their education, their associates, and

the whole tenour of their lives, can neither love a book, nor, indeed,

know any thing about it; and if the opposition and liberal men of

the Athens, who after all are by very much the majority, are utterly

unable or unwilling to support even one literary man, it is not to be

supposed that the other party who are fewer in number, and ever fearful

of exposure, can have more ability or more disposition. No doubt, such

of the writers for Blackwood as know the extreme barrenness of the

ruling men in the Athens, in all matters of taste and information, and

the more fond and forcible predilection which they have for dining in

taverns and carousing in ale-houses, and who have marked that those

ears which are deaf as their kindred clay to every voice of elegance or

of criticism, are open as their mouths for a dinner, or their hands for

a bribe, when grossness usurps the place of taste, and ribaldry comes

in the stead of science,--no doubt those writers have risked a hope in

supplying husks for the Athenian swine; but though the deeds have been

immoral, the remembrance of them will not be immortal; and though there

may always be a few that, seeking their chief pleasure, and finding

their only renown in their own debauchery, are pleased to see deeds

worthless as their own,

 

“Register’d to fame eternal,

In deathless pages of diurnal;”

 

Yet even this would not have succeeded with the public generally, at

any period, and it perhaps could have had less chance at no period than

it has at present, when the rapid spread of intercourse and information

is, in spite of all official and other efforts to the contrary,

diffusing a more rational taste even down to the very humblest classes

of society. Men in office, however inferior and second-rate that office

may be, and however mean may be their own tastes, and grovelling their

own habits, will not--dare not, continue long to pride themselves in,

or even privately to encourage, that from which the peasantry turn

away in disgust; and, ere many additional years have been added to

the Kalendar, it will be found that those superior spirits who lent

themselves to this work for a time, in the hope that it would serve

them as a stepping-stone for getting into office, will become ashamed

of it in consequence of having obtained their objects, or disgusted,

because that which they must have felt as a degradation, has to them,

also, proved a deception.

 

But, whatever of good or of evil, of liveliness or of licentiousness,

of the misapplication of talent, or the miserable labour of that which

is no talent at all, may be found in the school of writing, of which

Blackwood’s Magazine hitherto forms the chief specimen, the Athens

assuredly has neither the merit nor the demerit of originating that

school; and if all support, except what the Athens could give it, were

to be withdrawn, the remainder of its existence would not exceed one

month.

 

Having heard a great deal about the intellectuality of the Athens, and

its superiority in genius, in taste, and in literature, above every

other city in the world, I made a point of examining, with all the

care and candour that I could exercise. I began too, with a strong,

yes, a very strong prejudice in its favour; for it had been rung

again and again in my ears, that, compared with what was to be found

here, the whole world beside was an empire of dulness. But my fond,

and as it proved to be my foolish prejudice, became less and less,

at every step; and, whether I would or not, I was compelled to see,

that the greater part of the name which somehow or other the Athens

has gotten, has been gotten through the unceasing brazen-frontedness

of her own self-idolatry. In various parts of the Athens, I found men

_pirouetting_ in small evolutions of what they call philosophy. One,

for instance, worshipping the wings of a butterfly; and another drawing

lines and circles upon a human skull, and measuring the talents and

propensities of the unknown owner very gravely with a pair of compasses

and scale; a third, taking up the visions of Robert Owen of New Lanark,

was bewildering himself in an attempt so to arrange the human race,

as that the square of the oblique diagonal of conduct should be equal

to the two squares of the base of nature, and the perpendicular of

education; a fourth was proving by coal and limestone, that the globe

had been boiled; and a fifth, by porphyry and basalt, that it had been

roasted. One learned professor, the very apex of the triangle of the

Athenian science,--who, in his time, has tested hell, as it were--has,

in the ardour of his inquiries after and into things hot and cold,

alternately deputed his

 

----------------“delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling regions of the thick-ribb’d ice,”--

 

was reported to me, (for I did not _then_ see him,) not exactly

 

“To be imprisoned in the viewless wind,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world,”

 

but to have made one of the most singular experiments upon the said

winds themselves, that ever entered into a philosophic head. This

learned personage, whom the Athenian magistrates had at one time

refused to expel from the city “_cum avisamento eorum ministrorum_,”

upon the alleged ground of his being a conjuror, had made long and

laborious experiments in all sorts of heating and cooling, physical and

metaphysical. When other matters and fires were nearly exhausted with

him, it struck him that it would excite mortal wonder, and win immortal

renown, if he could bring atmospheric air to a red heat. He foresaw,

that if he should succeed in this experiment, it would be farewell to

both gas and steam; and there would be no need of dangerous boilers,

castiron pipes, smoking chimneys, and all the other casualties of the

new power and the new light. If this degree of temperature could be

communicated to the atmosphere, the fondest dreams of mankind would be

realized,--the midnight air might be rendered more glorious than the

sun; winter might be driven within the polar circle; the precinct of

the Holyrood might be made fragrant with spices, and fat with olives;

and the vine might clothe the now naked crags, green with never-fading

leaves, and purple with perennial grapes. That which promised so many

and so delightful advantages was worth trying, and so the philosophic

personage is reported to have gone about his experiment in this wise:--

 

He procured a bagpipe; and having dissected away the chanter, the

drones, and the bellows,--making the stumps secure with ligatures, he

carried the inflated bag to a neighbouring barn, and set two brawny

peasants a-threshing it with their flails, while he stood by, wishing

and wondering as to the result. What that result was, I was unable to

learn, and indeed I made not much inquiry respecting it,--and I mention

it only as one of the many instances in which I heard the Athenians

boast of their philosophy.

 

But if they have no literary men, as such, of whom they can boast, they

have about as little title to put on airs about their literary taste.

In that, as well as in all other matters, they are idolaters; and it

may be truly said of them, as was said of the people of the elder

Athens, that the most conspicuous of their altars is “to the Unknown

God.” So long as Jeffrey was deemed infallible, they ventured no

opinion upon any point, until they knew how he had delivered himself.

When, for instance, he had, as he thought, blasted the laurels of Byron

in the bud, the cry that ran through the Athens was, “What a silly

fool to attempt to write poetry? But the Review has done his business.

_He_ will write no more at any rate.” When the retribution of the

“Scotch Reviewers” was hurled back, the worshippers of the Athens were

astonished, but they said nothing. The fact is, that they neither have

opinions of their own in such matters, nor have they leisure to form

them.

 

The observations which I had occasion to make respecting the dramatic

taste of the Athenians are equally applicable to their taste, not only

in literature, but in every thing else. In youth their education is

too superficial, and when they grow up, the drudgery of the law, to

which so many of them are doomed, and which influences the habits of

the whole, together with that dissipation in which they indulge as

habitually and more deeply than any people with whom I am acquainted,

give a turn to their minds which is the very opposite of literary.

These causes will be more fully developed in the following chapter;

but there is one fact which is very remarkable, which the Athenians

themselves may as well be left to explain. Of the men who, from time

to time, have become illustrious in the Athens for their scientific or

literary attainments, hardly one has been born, and very few have been

educated, within her walls. They have almost uniformly been provincial

Scotchmen, and not a few of them have been students at the provincial

universities. So that while the Athens has not much to boast of in the

literary way, the little of which she can boast is not wholly her own.

Perhaps this is another of the desolations of the widowed metropolis.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IX.

 

EDUCATION OF THE ATHENS.

 

 

Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.--POPE.

 

 

IF there be one cause to which, more than others, we are to look for

an explanation of those peculiarities that distinguish the inhabitants

of one place from the inhabitants of others, that cause is education.

I do not mean that education which is given, or attempted to be given,

at schools and colleges, but that which is produced by the contact and

collision of those with whom young men associate at that important

period when they are beginning to think and to act for themselves.

There is no doubt that more of the character of society in the Athens

depends upon this circumstance than upon any thing else, as, so far as

my observation extended, there is more peculiarity in the treatment of

the Athenian youth at this period than in any other city of the British

empire.

 

It is to this education, for life and not for literature, which I mean

chiefly to advert in this chapter. Still, it may not be amiss to

give a preliminary glance at the school education, not of the Athens

merely, but of Scotland generally, because on that, it strikes me,