Part 11

However, the barbarian, when roused to action, 15 is a very different being from the barbarian at rest. "The Turk," says Mr. Thornton, "is usually placid, hypochondriac, and unimpassioned; but, when the customary sedateness of his temper is ruffled, his passions ... are 20 furious and uncontrollable. The individual seems possessed with all the ungovernable fury of a multitude; and all ties, all attachments, all natural and moral obligations, are forgotten or despised, till his rage subsides." A similar 25 remark is made by a writer of the day: "The Turk on horseback has no resemblance to the Turk reclining on his carpet. He there assumes a vigor, and displays a dexterity, which few Europeans would be capable of emulating; no 30 horsemen surpass the Turks; and, with all the indolence of which they are accused, no people are more fond of the violent exercise of riding."

So was it with their ancestors, the Tartars; now dosing on their horses or their wagons, now 5 galloping over the plains from morning to night. However, these successive phases of Turkish character, as reported by travelers, have seemed to readers as inconsistencies in their reports; Thornton accepts the inconsistency. "The 10 national character of the Turks," he says, "is a composition of contradictory qualities. We find them brave and pusillanimous; gentle and ferocious; resolute and inconstant; active and indolent; fastidiously abstemious, and 15 indiscriminately indulgent. The great are alternately haughty and humble, arrogant and cringing, liberal and sordid."[39] What is this but to say in one word that we find them barbarians?

[39] Bell's Geography.

According to these distinct moods or phases 20 of character, they will leave very various impressions of themselves on the minds of successive beholders. A traveler finds them in their ordinary state in repose and serenity; he is surprised and startled to find them so different from what 25 he imagined; he admires and extols them, and inveighs against the prejudice which has slandered them to the European world. He finds them mild and patient, tender to the brute creation, as becomes the children of a Tartar shepherd, kind 30 and hospitable, self-possessed and dignified, the lowest classes sociable with each other, and the children gamesome. It is true; they are as noble as the lion of the desert, and as gentle and as playful as the fireside cat. Our traveler observes 5 all this;[40] and seems to forget that from the humblest to the highest of the feline tribe, from the cat to the lion, the most wanton and tyrannical cruelty alternates with qualities more engaging or more elevated. Other barbarous 10 tribes also have their innocent aspects--from the Scythians in the classical poets and historians down to the Lewchoo islanders in the pages of Basil Hall.

[40] Vid. Sir Charles Fellows' Asia Minor.

But whatever be the natural excellences of 15 the Turks, progressive they are not. This Sir Charles Fellows seems to allow: "My intimacy with the character of the Turks," he says, "which has led me to think so highly of their moral excellence, has not given me the same favorable 20 impression of the development of their mental powers. Their refinement is of manners and affections; there is little cultivation or activity of mind among them." This admission implies a great deal, and brings us to a fresh 25 consideration. Observe, they were in the eighth century of their political existence when Thornton and Volney lived among them, and these authors report of them as follows: "Their buildings," says Thornton, "are heavy in their proportions, 30 bad in detail, both in taste and execution, fantastic in decoration, and destitute of genius. Their cities are not decorated with public monuments, whose object is to enliven or to embellish." Their religion forbids them every sort of 5 painting, sculpture, or engraving; thus the fine arts cannot exist among them. They have no music but vocal; and know of no accompaniment except a bass of one note like that of the bagpipe. Their singing is in a great measure recitative, 10 with little variation of note. They have scarcely any notion of medicine or surgery; and they do not allow of anatomy. As to science, the telescope, the microscope, the electric battery, are unknown, except as playthings. The compass 15 is not universally employed in their navy, nor are its common purposes thoroughly understood. Navigation, astronomy, geography, chemistry, are either not known, or practiced only on antiquated and exploded principles. As to their 20 civil and criminal codes of law, these are unalterably fixed in the Koran....

Compare the Rome of Junius Brutus to the Rome of Constantine, 800 years afterwards. In each of these polities there was a continuous 25 progression, and the end was unlike the beginning; but the Turks, except that they have gained the faculty of political union, are pretty much what they were when they crossed the Jaxartes and Oxus. Again, at the time of Togrul Beg, the 30 Greek schism also took place; now from Michael Cerularius, in 1054, to Anthimus, in 1853, Patriarchs of Constantinople, eight centuries have passed of religious deadness and insensibility: a longer time has passed in China of a similar political inertness: yet China has preserved at 5 least the civilization, and Greece the ecclesiastical science, with which they respectively passed into their long sleep; but the Turks of this day are still in the less than infancy of art, literature, philosophy, and general knowledge; and we may 10 fairly conclude that, if they have not learned the very alphabet of science in eight hundred years, they are not likely to set to work on it in the nine hundredth.

* * * * *

It is true that in the last quarter of a century 15 efforts have been made by the government of Constantinople to innovate on the existing condition of its people; and it has addressed itself in the first instance to certain details of daily Turkish life. We must take it for granted that it 20 began with such changes as were easiest; if so, its failure in these small matters suggests how little ground there is for hope of success in other advances more important and difficult. Every one knows that in the details of dress, carriage, 25 and general manners, the Turks are very different from Europeans: so different, and so consistently different, that the contrariety would seem to arise from some difference of essential principle. "This dissimilitude," says Mr. Thornton, "which pervades the whole of their habits, is so general, even in things of apparent insignificance, as almost to indicate design rather than accident...." 5

To learn from others, you must entertain a respect for them; no one listens to those whom he contemns. Christian nations make progress in secular matters, because they are aware they have many things to learn, and do not mind from 10 whom they learn them, so that he be able to teach. It is true that Christianity, as well as Mahometanism, which imitated it, has its visible polity, and its universal rule, and its especial prerogatives and powers and lessons, for its disciples. 15 But, with a Divine wisdom, and contrary to its human copyist, it has carefully guarded (if I may use the expression) against extending its revelations to any point which would blunt the keenness of human research or the activity of 20 human toil. It has taken those matters for its field in which the human mind, left to itself, could not profitably exercise itself, or progress, if it would; it has confined its revelations to the province of theology, only indirectly touching 25 on other departments of knowledge, so far as theological truth accidentally affects them; and it has shown an equally remarkable care in preventing the introduction of the spirit of caste or race into its constitution or administration. 30 Pure nationalism it abhors; its authoritative documents pointedly ignore the distinction of Jew and Gentile, and warn us that the first often becomes the last; while its subsequent history has illustrated this great principle, by its awful, and absolute, and inscrutable, and irreversible 5 passage from country to country, as its territory and its home. Such, then, it has been in the Divine counsels, and such, too, as realized in fact; but man has ways of his own, and, even before its introduction into the world, the inspired 10 announcements, which preceded it, were distorted by the people to whom they were given, to minister to views of a very different kind. The secularized Jews, relying on the supernatural favors locally and temporally bestowed on 15 themselves, fell into the error of supposing that a conquest of the earth was reserved for some mighty warrior of their own race, and that, in compensation of the reverses which befell them, they were to become an imperial nation. 20

What a contrast is presented to us by these different ideas of a universal empire! The distinctions of race are indelible; a Jew cannot become a Greek, or a Greek a Jew; birth is an event of past time; according to the Judaizers, 25 their nation, as a nation, was ever to be dominant; and all other nations, as such, were inferior and subject. What was the necessary consequence? There is nothing men more pride themselves on than birth, for this very reason, 30 that it is irrevocable; it can neither be given to those who have it not, nor taken away from those who have. The Almighty can do anything which admits of doing; He can compensate every evil; but a Greek poet says that there is one thing impossible to Him--to undo what is 5 done. Without throwing the thought into a shape which borders on the profane, we may see in it the reason why the idea of national power was so dear and so dangerous to the Jew. It was his consciousness of inalienable superiority that 10 led him to regard Roman and Greek, Syrian and Egyptian, with ineffable arrogance and scorn. Christians, too, are accustomed to think of those who are not Christians as their inferiors; but the conviction which possesses them, that they have 15 what others have not, is obviously not open to the temptation which nationalism presents. According to their own faith, there is no insuperable gulf between themselves and the rest of mankind; there is not a being in the whole world but is 20 invited by their religion to occupy the same position as themselves, and, did he come, would stand on their very level, as if he had ever been there. Such accessions to their body they continually receive, and they are bound under 25 obligation of duty to promote them. They never can pronounce of any one, now external to them, that he will not some day be among them; they never can pronounce of themselves that, though they are now within, they may not some day 30 be found outside, the Divine polity. Such are the sentiments inculcated by Christianity, even in the contemplation of the very superiority which it imparts; even there it is a principle, not of repulsion between man and man, but of good fellowship; but as to subjects of secular 5 knowledge, since here it does not arrogate any superiority at all, it has in fact no tendency whatever to center its disciple's contemplation on himself, or to alienate him from his kind. He readily acknowledges and defers to the superiority in 10 art or science of those, if so be, who are unhappily enemies to Christianity. He admits the principle of progress on all matters of knowledge and conduct on which the Creator has not decided the truth already by revealing it; and he is at 15 all times ready to learn, in those merely secular matters, from those who can teach him best. Thus it is that Christianity, even negatively, and without contemplating its positive influences, is the religion of civilization. 20

III. UNIVERSITIES

WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY?

If I were asked to describe as briefly and popularly as I could, what a University was, I should draw my answer from its ancient designation of a _Studium Generale_, or "School of Universal Learning." This description implies 5 the assemblage of strangers from all parts in one spot--_from all parts_; else, how will you find professors and students for every department of knowledge? and _in one spot_; else, how can there be any school at all? Accordingly, in its simple 10 and rudimental form, it is a school of knowledge of every kind, consisting of teachers and learners from every quarter. Many things are requisite to complete and satisfy the idea embodied in this description; but such as this a University seems 15 to be in its essence, a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse, through a wide extent of country.

Mutual education, in a large sense of the word, 20 is one of the great and incessant occupations of human society, carried on partly with set purpose, and partly not. One generation forms another; and the existing generation is ever acting and reacting upon itself in the persons of its individual members. Now, in this process, books, I need scarcely say, that is, the _litera scripta_, are one special instrument. It is true; and 5 emphatically so in this age. Considering the prodigious powers of the press, and how they are developed at this time in the never intermitting issue of periodicals, tracts, pamphlets, works in series, and light literature, we must allow there 10 never was a time which promised fairer for dispensing with every other means of information and instruction. What can we want more, you will say, for the intellectual education of the whole man, and for every man, than so exuberant 15 and diversified and persistent a promulgation of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will ask, need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us? The Sibyl wrote her prophecies upon the leaves of the forest, and wasted 20 them; but here such careless profusion might be prudently indulged, for it can be afforded without loss, in consequence of the almost fabulous fecundity of the instrument which these latter ages have invented. We have sermons in stones, 25 and books in the running brooks; works larger and more comprehensive than those which have gained for ancients an immortality, issue forth every morning, and are projected onwards to the ends of the earth at the rate of hundreds of 30 miles a day. Our seats are strewed, our pavements are powdered, with swarms of little tracts; and the very bricks of our city walls preach wisdom, by informing us by their placards where we can at once cheaply purchase it.

I allow all this, and much more; such 5 certainly is our popular education, and its effects are remarkable. Nevertheless, after all, even in this age, whenever men are really serious about getting what, in the language of trade, is called "a good article," when they aim at something 10 precise, something refined, something really luminous, something really large, something choice, they go to another market; they avail themselves, in some shape or other, of the rival method, the ancient method, of oral instruction, of present 15 communication between man and man, of teachers instead of learning, of the personal influence of a master, and the humble initiation of a disciple, and, in consequence, of great centers of pilgrimage and throng, which such a method of 20 education necessarily involves.

If the actions of men may be taken as any test of their convictions, then we have reason for saying this, viz.: that the province and the inestimable benefit of the _litera scripta_ is that of 25 being a record of truth, and an authority of appeal, and an instrument of teaching in the hands of a teacher; but that, if we wish to become exact and fully furnished in any branch of knowledge which is diversified and complicated, we must consult 30 the living man and listen to his living voice.... No book can convey the special spirit and delicate peculiarities of its subject with that rapidity and certainty which attend on the sympathy of mind with mind, through the eyes, the look, the accent, and the manner, in casual expressions 5 thrown off at the moment, and the unstudied turns of familiar conversation. But I am already dwelling too long on what is but an incidental portion of my main subject. Whatever be the cause, the fact is undeniable. The general 10 principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the color, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already. You must imitate the student in French 15 or German, who is not content with his grammar, but goes to Paris or Dresden: you must take example from the young artist, who aspires to visit the great Masters in Florence and in Rome. Till we have discovered some 20 intellectual daguerreotype, which takes off the course of thought, and the form, lineaments, and features of truth, as completely and minutely, as the optical instrument reproduces the sensible object, we must come to the teachers of wisdom 25 to learn wisdom, we must repair to the fountain, and drink there. Portions of it may go from thence to the ends of the earth by means of books; but the fullness is in one place alone. It is in such assemblages and congregations of 30 intellect that books themselves, the masterpieces of human genius, are written, or at least originated.

The principle on which I have been insisting is so obvious, and instances in point are so ready, that I should think it tiresome to proceed with 5 the subject, except that one or two illustrations may serve to explain my own language about it, which may not have done justice to the doctrine which it has been intended to enforce.

For instance, the polished manners and 10 high-bred bearing which are so difficult of attainment, and so strictly personal when attained,--which are so much admired in society, from society are acquired. All that goes to constitute a gentleman,--the carriage, gait, address, gestures, 15 voice; the ease, the self-possession, the courtesy, the power of conversing, the talent of not offending; the lofty principle, the delicacy of thought, the happiness of expression, the taste and propriety, the generosity and forbearance, the 20 candor and consideration, the openness of hand--these qualities, some of them come by nature, some of them may be found in any rank, some of them are a direct precept of Christianity; but the full assemblage of them, bound up in the 25 unity of an individual character, do we expect they can be learned from books? are they not necessarily acquired, where they are to be found, in high society? The very nature of the case leads us to say so; you cannot fence without an 30 antagonist, nor challenge all comers in disputation before you have supported a thesis; and in like manner, it stands to reason, you cannot learn to converse till you have the world to converse with; you cannot unlearn your natural bashfulness, or awkwardness, or stiffness, or other 5 besetting deformity, till you serve your time in some school of manners. Well, and is it not so in matter of fact? The metropolis, the court, the great houses of the land, are the centers to which at stated times the country comes up, as to 10 shrines of refinement and good taste; and then in due time the country goes back again home, enriched with a portion of the social accomplishments, which those very visits serve to call out and heighten in the gracious dispensers of them. 15 We are unable to conceive how the "gentleman-like" can otherwise be maintained; and maintained in this way it is....