It was a worship of the spectacle of happiness; especially of the
spectacle of youth. This is what the old Universities in their noblest
aspect really are; and this is why there is always something to be said
for keeping them as they are. Aristocracy is not a tyranny; it is not
even merely a spell. It is a vision. It is a deliberate indulgence in a
certain picture of pleasure painted for the purpose; every Duchess is
(in an innocent sense) painted, like Gainsborough's "Duchess of
Devonshire." She is only beautiful because, at the back of all, the
English people wanted her to be beautiful. In the same way, the lads at
Oxford and Cambridge are only larking because England, in the depths of
its solemn soul, really wishes them to lark. All this is very human and
pardonable, and would be even harmless if there were no such things in
the world as danger and honour and intellectual responsibility. But if
aristocracy is a vision, it is perhaps the most unpractical of all
visions. It is not a working way of doing things to put all your
happiest people on a lighted platform and stare only at them. It is not
a working way of managing education to be entirely content with the mere
fact that you have (to a degree unexampled in the world) given the
luckiest boys the jolliest time.
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