NOTES

xxvii. "Les pays qui comme les Etats-Unis ont cree un enseignement populaire considerable sans instruction superieure serieuse, expieront longtemps encore leur faute par leur mediocrit intellectuelle, leur grossierete de moeurs, leur esprit superficiel, leur manque d’intelligence generale.”

[Preamble] culture and anarchy

[1] In one of his speeches a year or two ago, that fine speaker and famous Liberal, Mr. Bright, took occasion to have a fling at the friends and preachers of culture.  “People who talk about what they call culture!” said he contemptuously; “by which they mean a smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin.”  And he went on to remark, in a strain with which modern speakers and writers have made us very familiar, how poor a thing this culture is, how little good it can do to the world, and how absurd it is for its possessors to set much [2] store by it.  And the other day a younger Liberal than Mr. Bright, one of a school whose mission it is to bring into order and system that body of truth of which the earlier Liberals merely touched the outside, a member of the University of Oxford, and a very clever writer, Mr. Frederic Harrison, developed, in the systematic and stringent manner of his school, the thesis which Mr. Bright had propounded in only general terms.  “Perhaps the very silliest cant of the day,” said Mr. Frederic Harrison, “is the cant about culture.  Culture is a desirable quality in a critic of new books, and sits well on a possessor of belles lettres; but as applied to politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action.  The man of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive.  For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal.  No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him.  But the active exercise of politics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution and enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has carefully rooted up, lest they damage the delicacy of his critical olfactories.  Perhaps they are the only class [3] of responsible beings in the community who cannot with safety be entrusted with power.”

Now for my part I do not wish to see men of culture asking to be entrusted with power; and, indeed, I have freely said, that in my opinion the speech most proper, at present, for a man of culture to make to a body of his fellow-countrymen who get him into a committee-room, is Socrates’s:  Know thyself! and this is not a speech to be made by men wanting to be entrusted with power.  For this very indifference to direct political action I have been taken to task by the Daily Telegraph, coupled, by a strange perversity of fate, with just that very one of the Hebrew prophets whose style I admire the least, and called “an elegant Jeremiah.”  It is because I say