Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
to take the place of the Philistines whom they are superseding; and
they too, like the middle class, will be encouraged to sit down at
the banquet of the future without having on a wedding garment, and
nothing excellent can then come from them. Those who know their
besetting faults, those who have watched them and listened to them,
or those who will read the instructive account recently given of them
by one of themselves, the Journeyman Engineer, will agree that the
idea which culture sets before us of perfection,--an increased
spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness,
increased light, increased life, increased sympathy,--is an idea
which the new democracy needs far more than the idea of the
blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own
industrial performances.
Other well-meaning friends of this new power are for leading it, not
in the old ruts of middle-class [42] Philistinism, but in ways which
are naturally alluring to the feet of democracy, though in this
country they are novel and untried ways. I may call them the ways of
Jacobinism. Violent indignation with the past, abstract systems of
renovation applied wholesale, a new doctrine drawn up in black and
white for elaborating down to the very smallest details a rational
society for the future,--these are the ways of Jacobinism. Mr.
Frederic Harrison and other disciples of Comte,--one of them, Mr.
Congreve, is an old acquaintance of mine, and I am glad to have an
opportunity of publicly expressing my respect for his talents and
character,--are among the friends of democracy who are for leading it
in paths of this kind. Mr. Frederic Harrison is very hostile to
culture, and from a natural enough motive; for culture is the eternal
opponent of the two things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism,-
-its fierceness, and its addiction to an abstract system. Culture is
always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the
bent of human destiny than their friends like. A current in people's
minds sets towards new ideas; people are dissatisfied with their old
narrow stock of Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon [43] ideas, or any
other; and some man, some Bentham or Comte, who has the real merit of
having early and strongly felt and helped the new current, but who
brings plenty of narrownesses and mistakes of his own into his
feeling and help of it, is credited with being the author of the
whole current, the fit person to be entrusted with its regulation and
to guide the human race. The excellent German historian of the
mythology of Rome, Preller, relating the introduction at Rome under
the Tarquins of the worship of Apollo, the god of light, healing, and
reconciliation, observes that it was not so much the Tarquins who
brought to Rome the new worship of Apollo, as a current in the mind
of the Roman people which set powerfully at that time towards a new
worship of this kind, and away from the old run of Latin and Sabine
religious ideas.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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