Communication of life can only be through a living agency. And culture, which is the life of mind, can only be imparted through man to man. Book learning, or scriptural texts, may merely make us pedants. They are static and quantitative; they accumulate and are hoarded up under strict guards. Culture grows and moves and multiplies itself in life.
The students of the European Universities not only have their human environment of culture in their society, they also acquire their learning direct from their teachers. They have their sun to give them light; it is the sun of the human relationship between the teachers and the students. We have our hard flints, which give us disconnected sparks after toilsome blows; and the noise is a great deal more than the light. These flints are the abstractions of learning; they are solid methods, inflexible and cold.
To our misfortune we have, in our own country, all the furniture of the European University - except the human teacher. We have, instead, merely purveyors of book-lore, in whom the paper god of the bookshop seems to have made himself vocal. And, as a natural result, we find our students to be 'untouchable', even to our Indian professors. These teachers distribute their doles of mental food, gingerly and from a dignified distance, raising walls of note-books between themselves and their students. This kind of food is neither relished, nor does it give nourishment. It is a famine ration strictly regulated, to save us, not from emaciation, but only from absolute death. It holds out no hope of that culture which is far in excess of man's mere necessity; it is certainly less than enough, and far less than a feast.
Until we are in a position to prove that the world has need of us and cannot afford to do without us, that we are not merely hangers-on of the world- culture - beggars who cannot repay - so long must our sole hope lie in gaining others' favours. And these we must extort, sometimes by lamentations, sometimes by flattery, sometimes by menial service, and show other constitutional methods of wagging tails.
No one will feel any anxiety to minister to us, to save us, if we have nothing to offer worthy of being reverently accepted. But whom are we to blame? Where is there space enough, lying fallow on this earth, for men who merely live and do not produce? How can they build an infirmary as big as the country itself? The hard fact must be laid to heart that we shall never get anything even if it be given to us. For it is only the lake, and not the desert, which can accept and retain a contribution from the heaven's cloud because, in its depth, the receiving and the giving have become one. Only to him who hath is given, otherwise the gift is insulted and he, also, who receives it.
But we have been so used to living on beggars' doles that we cannot bring ourselves really to believe in this truth. We are always afraid lest we should lose some petty advantage in our attempts to acquire true learning, lest our preparedness for clerical work should be delayed, lest the English of our petition-writing lose its correct grammatical whine. Our education to us is like the carriage to a horse; a bondage, the dragging of which merely serves to provide it with food and shelter in the stable of its master; the horse has not the same freedom of relationship with the carriage as its owner, and therefore the carriage ever remains for it an imposition of beggarly necessity.
The students of the European Universities not only have their human environment of culture in their society, they also acquire their learning direct from their teachers. They have their sun to give them light; it is the sun of the human relationship between the teachers and the students. We have our hard flints, which give us disconnected sparks after toilsome blows; and the noise is a great deal more than the light. These flints are the abstractions of learning; they are solid methods, inflexible and cold.
To our misfortune we have, in our own country, all the furniture of the European University - except the human teacher. We have, instead, merely purveyors of book-lore, in whom the paper god of the bookshop seems to have made himself vocal. And, as a natural result, we find our students to be 'untouchable', even to our Indian professors. These teachers distribute their doles of mental food, gingerly and from a dignified distance, raising walls of note-books between themselves and their students. This kind of food is neither relished, nor does it give nourishment. It is a famine ration strictly regulated, to save us, not from emaciation, but only from absolute death. It holds out no hope of that culture which is far in excess of man's mere necessity; it is certainly less than enough, and far less than a feast.
Until we are in a position to prove that the world has need of us and cannot afford to do without us, that we are not merely hangers-on of the world- culture - beggars who cannot repay - so long must our sole hope lie in gaining others' favours. And these we must extort, sometimes by lamentations, sometimes by flattery, sometimes by menial service, and show other constitutional methods of wagging tails.
No one will feel any anxiety to minister to us, to save us, if we have nothing to offer worthy of being reverently accepted. But whom are we to blame? Where is there space enough, lying fallow on this earth, for men who merely live and do not produce? How can they build an infirmary as big as the country itself? The hard fact must be laid to heart that we shall never get anything even if it be given to us. For it is only the lake, and not the desert, which can accept and retain a contribution from the heaven's cloud because, in its depth, the receiving and the giving have become one. Only to him who hath is given, otherwise the gift is insulted and he, also, who receives it.
But we have been so used to living on beggars' doles that we cannot bring ourselves really to believe in this truth. We are always afraid lest we should lose some petty advantage in our attempts to acquire true learning, lest our preparedness for clerical work should be delayed, lest the English of our petition-writing lose its correct grammatical whine. Our education to us is like the carriage to a horse; a bondage, the dragging of which merely serves to provide it with food and shelter in the stable of its master; the horse has not the same freedom of relationship with the carriage as its owner, and therefore the carriage ever remains for it an imposition of beggarly necessity.
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