THE VICTORIAN AS INTELLECTUAL
667
prives him of the claim to it. For if to be an intellectual is as natural
as breathing, it can be no more remarkable than breathing.
If
it has
the status of an ordinary vocation, it does not enjoy the extraordinary
status of an avocation.
If
it is no special distinction which the in–
dividual must laboriously earn, if it comes to him as a right rather
than a reward, if it is an incidental by-product of class and family
rather than the result of application and dedication, then the much–
acclaimed Victorian intellectual may be not an intellectual at all,
but rather a cultured gentleman whose occupation happens to be
writing. The distinction is important in a discussion of modern Eng–
lish culture and, specifically, in a discussion of the phenomenon of
Stephen-Ramsay.
One of the peculiarities of the intellectual
qua
gentleman, which
may account for his natural, artless manner, is the survival of the
schoolboy in him. That Leslie Stephen was a product of both Eton
(he had been sent there in obedience to a doctor's prescription that
this delicate, sensitive boy get "fresh air, humdrum lessons, and a
rigorous abstinence from poetry") and of Cambridge are among the
primary facts of his intellectual life. For to the Englishman, school
is not a passing stage to be outgrown, but a permanent, metaphysical
condition. It is, in fact, the only relation to the metaphysical that
many English intellectuals experience. The English equivalents for
the philosophical extremes toward which men temperamentally in–
cline may be seen as the antitheses of Rugby and Eton, Oxford and
Cambridge. So it appears to be of the order of a law of nature that
while Matthew Arnold derived from Rugby and Oxford, Leslie
Stephen should be of the genus Eton-Cambridge.
The contrast between Eton and Rugby or between Cambridge
and Oxford is reflected in a contrast of religious temper. At Eton, as
Stephen was fond of recalling, there was none of the "cant" about
Christian behavior or Christian gentlemen so common at Rugby, none
of the moralizing sermons, like the famous one of Dr. Arnold about
the vices by which "great schools were corrupted and changed from
the likeness of God's temple to that of a den of thieves." No one
at Eton pretended that religion had anything to do with the school–
boy's life of cribbing, lying, cheating, stealing and bullying. The old
fossil droning on in the college chapel about "the duties of the mar-
