Culture and Anarchy | Page 6

I want to introduce here in England an institution
like the French Academy. I have indeed expressly declared that I
wanted no such thing; but let us notice how it is just our worship of
machinery, and of external doing, which leads to this charge being
brought; and how the inwardness of culture makes us seize, for
watching and cure, the faults to which our want of an Academy inclines
us, and yet prevents us from trusting to an arm of flesh, as the Puritans
say,--from blindly flying to this outward machinery of an Academy, in
order to help ourselves. For the very same culture and free inward play
of thought which shows us how the Corinthian style, or the whimsies
about the One Primeval Language, are generated and strengthened in
the absence of an [xi] Academy, shows us, too, how little any Academy,
such as we should be likely to get, would cure them. Every one who
knows the characteristics of our national life, and the tendencies so
fully discussed in the following pages, knows exactly what an English
Academy would be like. One can see the happy family in one's mind's
eye as distinctly as if it was already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the
Bishop of Oxford, Mr. Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr.
Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve,-- everything which is influential,
accomplished, and distinguished; and then, some fine morning, a

dissatisfaction of the public mind with this brilliant and select coterie, a
flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala.
Clearly, this is not what will do us good. The very same faults,--the
want of sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in right
reason, the dislike of authority,--which have hindered our having an
Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature, would also
hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which
would really correct them. And culture, which shows us truly the faults,
shows us this also just as truly.
[xii] It is by a like sort of misunderstanding, again, that Mr. Oscar
Browning, one of the assistant-masters at Eton, takes up in the
Quarterly Review the cudgels for Eton, as if I had attacked Eton,
because I have said, in a book about foreign schools, that a man may
well prefer to teach his three or four hours a day without keeping a
boarding-house; and that there are great dangers in cramming little
boys of eight or ten and making them compete for an object of great
value to their parents; and, again, that the manufacture and supply of
school-books, in England, much needs regulation by some competent
authority. Mr. Oscar Browning gives us to understand that at Eton he
and others, with perfect satisfaction to themselves and the public,
combine the functions of teaching and of keeping a boarding-house;
that he knows excellent men (and, indeed, well he may, for a brother of
his own, I am told, is one of the best of them,) engaged in preparing
little boys for competitive examinations, and that the result, as tested at
Eton, gives perfect satisfaction. And as to school-books he adds, finally,
that Dr. William Smith, the learned and distinguished editor of the
Quarterly Review, is, as we all know, [xiii] the compiler of
school-books meritorious and many. This is what Mr. Oscar Browning
gives us to understand in the Quarterly Review, and it is impossible not
to read with pleasure what he says. For what can give a finer example
of that frankness and manly self- confidence which our great public
schools, and none of them so much as Eton, are supposed to inspire, of
that buoyant ease in holding up one's head, speaking out what is in
one's mind, and flinging off all sheepishness and awkwardness, than to
see an Eton assistant-master offering in fact himself as evidence that to
combine boarding-house- keeping with teaching is a good thing, and
his brother as evidence that to train and race little boys for competitive

examinations is a good thing? Nay, and one sees that this frank-hearted
Eton self- confidence is contagious; for has not Mr. Oscar Browning
managed to fire Dr. William Smith (himself, no doubt, the modestest
man alive, and never trained at Eton) with the same spirit, and made
him insert in his own Review a puff, so to speak, of his own
school-books, declaring that they are (as they are) meritorious and
many? Nevertheless, Mr. Oscar Browning is wrong in [xiv] thinking
that I wished to run down Eton; and his repetition on behalf of Eton,
with this idea in his head, of the strains of his heroic ancestor,
Malvina's Oscar, as they are recorded by the family poet, Ossian, is
unnecessary. "The wild boar rushes over their tombs, but he does not
disturb their repose.