CULTURE, THE KEY OF LIFE.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 5304, 10 March 1884, Page 2

CULTURE, THE KEY OF LIFE.

The word Education has of late been so abominably misused, that the term Culture is now very generally adopted by those who are desirous of indicating clearly, that they speak of the true work of Education, namely, a preparation for the fullest enjoyment of life, as opposed to mere schooling. The writer is not here making any attempt at an essay on this important subject. He has simply been struck by the value of certain passages in a work lying before him, "The New Republic," to be found on the shelves of many of our book-lending institutions, and would induce those who sometimea bestow a thought on what life is, and whether it can be made more of, to read the book carefully. One lady, addressing a friend, says : " You've made culture seem so nice that I feel positively quite ashamed to thiok how seldom now I look at a line of poetry, &c." To which a gentleman replies that Society must read a great deal as a body, but that all its members need not. Nothing startles me more than when I find sometiaies how very far, if they have had any serious experience of the world and life, a very little poetry will go." A young lady answers: "I expect that we are naturally more introspective than men, and so in what concerns ourselves, a very little will make ua cultivated ; although we don't certainly get so easily as men that indifferent way of looking on life as a whole, &c." Again: " Poetry does not only enable us to appreciate what we have already experienced, but it puts us in the way of getting new experiences. This v?as Wordsworth's special claim for poetry, thatjt widened our sympathies, living us, not new quotations, but new culture." Ah! says another, consider for a momeut the wonderful social eftect of even the culture Wordsworth himself gave us. Consider the effect of it on a common worldly woman, let her be girl, or matron, who, without it, would be nothing but a half mechanical creature, living, as far as her interests vent, a wretched hand to mouth existence of their distraction, or eager anxious scheming for herself or her daughters. Cultivate her, I say, just in this one direction— give her but this one fragment of culture, a lovejof nature — and all the mean landscape of her mind will be lit up with a sudden beauty, as the beam of ideal sunshine breaks across it, with its " light that never was on sea or land." I don't say that such a woman will become better for this, but she will become more interesting. In a girl, however pretty, what is there to interest a man if he reads nothing in her face from night to night, but that she is getting daily more worn, and faded in the search for a rich husband? Or even to go a step higher in the unthinking uncultivated flirt, so common in every class of society. What is there in her that a man will not soon discover to be insipid and wearying ? But give ncr one genuine, one disinterested taste, and all is changed. If I had an audience about me of young ladies, whom it was not too late to advise — girls entering on the world determined to run the worldly course, and to satisfy all the expectations of the most excellent and lowest-minded of cbaperones — I would say this to them :" I have no doubt you are all ignorant ; of course you are all vain. That to make a brilliant match is your great object, jou all avow. A certain sort of flirting, of which the less said the better, is your disinterested taste. I know all this, I should say, and I can't help it ; nor do 1 ask yon to alter ocio of these points for the better." But this Ido ask you to do : " Try to add something else to them, Try to win for yourselves one taste of a truer and deeper sort. Study Wordsworth, and some parts of Shelley ; open out your sympathies, by their aid, in just one direction. "Learn to love the sea, and the wcods, and the wild flowere, with all their infinite changes of $cent, and colour, gu<J

sound, the purple moor, the brown mountain stream, the rolling mists, the wild smell of the heather. Let all these things grow to "haunt you like a passion." Learn in this way the art of " desiring more in this world than any understand." You'Jl perhaps find it a little dull at first, but go on, and don't be disheartened ; and then — by-and*by— by-and*by, go and look in the looking-glass, and " f atudy your own face. Hasn't some new look, child, come into your ey6s, and given them an expression— a something that they wanted before ? Smile. Hasn't your smile some strange meaning in it that it never used to have ? You are a little more melancholy, perhaps, but no matter. The melancholy is worth its cost. You are now a mystery, men can't see through you at a glance as they did ; and so, as some say, *' You^lhave "iheir curiosity on your side," and that alone— even that will have increased your value tenfold in our Babylonian marriage-marketj The same speaker Gays : ' Some think that books and culture are a kind of substitute for the life led by some. But no mistake can be greater. Culture is not a substitute for life, but the key to it." It is to the cultured, to those who have read and thought that all exercise, all distraotions mental or bodily yield to their finer keener pleasures. Culture fits us to see into, to taste and discriminate the passions, interests, relations and absurdities of of life. Such are some gleamings from a remarkable book that will repay the perusal of those who have " eyes to see 1" — Contributed.