第97章 CHAPTER IV(2)

In the persons of their discretionary heads, the two enterprises were from the outset animated with widely divergent ideals and aspirations in matters of scholarship, and with singularly dissimilar and distinctive traits of character, resembling one another in little else than a sincere devotion to the cause of scholarship and an unhampered discretion in their autocratic management of affairs; but it is an illuminating comment on the force of circumstances governing these matters, that these two establishments have gone down to substantially the same kind and degree of defeat, -- a defeat not extreme but typical, both in kind and degree. In the one case, the more notorious, the initial aim (well known to persons intimately in touch with the relevant facts at the time) was the pursuit of scholarship, somewhat blatant perhaps, but none the less sincere and thoughtful; in the companion-piece it was in a like degree the pursuit of scientific knowledge and serviceability, though, it is true, unschooled and puzzle-headed to a degree. In both enterprises alike the discretionary heads so placed in control had been selected by individual businessmen of the untutored sort, and were vested with plenary powers. Under pressure of circumstances, in both cases alike, the policy of forceful initiative and innovation, with which both alike entered on the enterprise, presently yielded to the ubiquitous craving for statistical magnitude and the consequent felt need of conciliatory publicity; until presently the ulterior object of both was lost in the shadow of these immediate and urgent manoeuvres of expediency, and it became the rule of policy to stick at nothing but appearances.

So that both establishments have come substantially to surrender the university ideal, through loss of effectual initiative and courage, and so have found themselves running substantially the same course of insidious compromise with "vocational" aims, undergraduate methods, and the counsels of the Philistines. The life-history of each, while differing widely in detail of ways and methods, is after all macle up, for the greater part, of futile extensions, expansions, annexations, ramifications, affiliations and pronunciamentos, in matters that are no more germane to the cause of learning than is the state of the weather. In the one case, the chase after a sufficient notoriety took the direction of a ravenous megalomania, the busiest concern of which presently came to be how most conspicuously to prolong a shout into polysyllables; and the further fact that this clamorous raid on the sensibilities of the gallery was presently, on a change of executive personnel, succeeded by a genial surrender to time and tide, an aimless gum-shod pusillanimity, has apparently changed the drift of things in no very appreciable degree.(12*)In the companion-piece, the enterprise has been brought to the like manner and degree of stultification under the simple guidance of an hysterically meticulous deference to all else than the main facts. In both cases alike the executive solicitude has come to converge on a self-centred and irresponsible government of intolerance, differing chiefly in the degree of its efficiency. Of course, through all this drift of stultification there has always remained -- decus et solamen -- something of an amiably inefficient and optimistic solicitude for the advancement of learning at large, in some unspecified manner and bearing, some time, but not to interfere with the business in hand.