11. "Mere Amateurs"

"He was a mere amateur; but still, he did some good work in science."

Increasingly of late years I have heard these condescending words
uttered, in the fatherland of Bacon, of Newton, of Darwin, when some
Bates or Spottiswoode has been gathered to his fathers. It was not so
once. Time was when all English science was the work of amateurs--and
very well indeed the amateurs did it. I don't think anybody who does me
the honour to cognise my humble individuality at all will ever be likely
to mistake me for a _laudator temporis acti_. On the contrary, so far as
I can see, the past seems generally to have been such a distinct failure
all along the line that the one lesson we have to learn from it is, to
go and do otherwise. I am one on that point with Shelley and Rousseau.
But it does not follow, because most old things are bad, that all new
things and rising things are necessarily and indisputably in their own
nature excellent. Novelties, too, may be retrograde. And even our
great-grandfathers occasionally blundered upon something good in which
we should do well to imitate them. The amateurishness of old English
science was one of these good things now in course of abolition by the
fashionable process of Germanisation.

Don't imagine it was only for France that 1870 was fatal. The sad
successes of that deadly year sent a wave of triumphant Teutonism over
the face of Europe.

I suppose it is natural to man to worship success; but ever since 1870
it is certainly the fact that if you wish to gain respect and
consideration for any proposed change of system you must say, "They do
it so in Germany." In education and science this is especially the case.
Pedants always admire pedants. And Germany having shown herself to be
easily first of European States in her pedant-manufacturing machinery,
all the assembled dominies of all the rest of the world exclaimed with
one voice, "Go to! Let us Germanise our educational system!"

Now, the German is an excellent workman in his way. Patient, laborious,
conscientious, he has all the highest qualities of the ideal
brick-maker. He produces the best bricks, and you can generally depend
upon him to turn out both honest and workmanlike articles. But he is not
an architect. For the architectonic faculty in its highest developments
you must come to England. And he is not a teacher or expounder. For the
expository faculty in its purest form, the faculty that enables men to
flash forth clearly and distinctly before the eyes of others the facts
and principles they know and perceive themselves, you must go to France.
Oh, dear, yes; we may well be proud of England. Remember, I have already
disclaimed more than once in these papers the vulgar error of