examination day,--the possession of information and the
power to make use of it; and the humanist who would win prizes at his
school or gain high honours at his University, must therefore regard
the memorable doings and the imperishable sayings of his fellow-men,
not as things to be imagined and felt, admired and loved, wondered at
and pondered over, but as things to be pigeon-holed in his memory, to
be taken out and arranged under headings, to be dissected and
commented on and criticised.[30]

Of the part that memory plays in the education of our humanist, I
need not speak. An undue burden is probably laid upon it; but that is
a matter of minor importance. What is of supreme importance is that
in cultivating his critical faculty with an almost intensive culture,
while they starve, or at any rate leave untended, his more vital and
more emancipative faculties of imagination and sympathy, our Great
Public Schools and Universities are doing him a serious and lasting
injury. Let us take the case of a young man of energy and ability who
has just left Oxford or Cambridge, having won high honours in one of
the humanistic "schools." Let us assume that, like so many of his
kind, he has a keenly critical mind, but is deficient in imagination
and sympathy; and let us then try to forecast his future. That the
faith of his childhood, undermined by his criticism, has already
fallen to pieces or will shortly do so, is more than probable. That
he will be too unimaginative to attempt to construct a new faith out
of the ruins of the old, is practically certain. His lack of faith,
in the broader sense of the word, will incapacitate him for high
seriousness (which he will regard as "bad form"), and _a fortiori_
for enthusiasm (which he will shun like the plague), and will
therefore predispose him to frivolity. Being fully persuaded, owing
to his lack of imaginative sympathy, that his own outlook on life is
alone compatible with mental sanity, and yet being too clear-sighted
to accept that outlook as satisfactory, he will mingle with his
frivolity a strain of bitterness and discontent,--the bitterness of
self-corroding scepticism, and the discontent which grows apace
through its very effort to ignore its own existence. In a word, his
attitude towards life will be one of _cynicism_,--that blend of
hardness and bitterness with frivolity which exactly inverts the
ideal of the modern poet, when he dreams of an age in the far-off
future,