to which the term is restricted by Lady Charles Beresford--I doubt
whether marriage is much out of fashion. Statistics show a certain
decrease, it is true, but not an alarming one. Among the labouring
classes, I imagine men, and also women, still wed pretty frequently.
When people say, "Young men won't marry nowadays," they mean young men
in a particular stratum of society, roughly bounded by a silk hat on
Sundays. Now, when you and I were young (I take it for granted that you
and I are approaching the fifties) young men did marry; even within this
restricted area, 'twas their wholesome way in life to form an attachment
early with some nice girl in their own set, and to start at least with
the idea of marrying her. Toward that goal they worked; for that end
they endured and sacrificed many things. True, even then, the long
engagement was the rule; but the long engagement itself meant some
persistent impulse, some strong impetus marriage-wards. The desire of
the man to make this woman his own, the longing to make this woman
happy--normal and healthy endowments of our race--had still much
driving-power. Nowadays, I seriously think I observe in most young men
of the middle class around me a distinct and disastrous weakening of the
impulse. They don't fall in love as frankly, as honestly, as
irretrievably as they used to do. They shilly-shally, they pick and
choose, they discuss, they criticise. They say themselves these futile
foolish things about the club, and the flat, and the cost of living.
They believe in Malthus. Fancy a young man who believes in Malthus! They
seem in no hurry at all to get married. But thirty or forty years ago,
young men used to rush by blind instinct into the toils of
matrimony--because they couldn't help themselves. Such Laodicean
luke-warmness betokens in the class which exhibits it a weakening of
impulse. That weakening of impulse is really the thing we have to
account for.
Young men of a certain type don't marry, because--they are less of young
men than formerly.
Wild animals in confinement seldom propagate their kind. Only a few
caged birds will continue their species. Whatever upsets the balance of
the organism, in an individual or a race tends first of all to affect
the rate of reproduction. Civilise the red man, and he begins to
decrease at once in numbers. Turn the Sandwich Islands into a trading
community, and the native Hawaiian refuses forthwith to give hostages to
fortune. Tahiti is dwindling. From the moment the Tasmanians were taken
to Norfolk Island, not a single Tasmanian baby was born. The Jesuits
made a model community of Paraguay; but they altered the habits of the
Paraguayans so fast that the reverend fathers, who were, of course,
themselves celibates, were compelled to take strenuous and even
grotesque measures to prevent the complete and immediate extinction of
their converts. Other cases in abundance I might quote an I would; but I
limit myself to these. They suffice to exhibit the general principle
involved; any grave upset in the conditions of life affects first and at
once the fertility of a species.
"But colonists often increase with rapidity." Ay, marry, do they, where
the conditions of life are easy. At the present day most colonists go to
fairly civilised regions; they are transported to their new home by
steamboat and railway; they find for the most part more abundant
provender and more wholesome surroundings than in their native country.
There is no real upset. Better food and easier life, as Herbert Spencer
has shown, result (other things equal) in increased fertility. His
chapters on this subject in the "Principles of Biology" should be read
by everybody who pretends to talk on questions of population. But in new
and difficult colonies the increase is slight. Whatever compels greater
wear and tear of the nervous system proves inimical to the reproductive
function. The strain and stress of co-ordination with novel
circumstances and novel relations affect most injuriously the organic
balance. The African negro has long been accustomed to agricultural toil
and to certain simple arts in his own country. Transported to the West
Indies and the United States, he found life no harder than of old, if
not, indeed, easier. He had abundant food, protection, security, a kind
of labour for which he was well adapted. Instead of dying out,
therefore, he was fruitful, and multiplied, and replenished the earth
amazingly. But the Red Indian, caught blatant in the hunting stage,
refused to be tamed, and could not swallow civilisation. He pined and
dwined and decreased in his "reservations." The change was too great,
too abrupt, too brusque for him. The papoose before long became an
extinct animal.
Is not the same thing true of the middle class of England? Civilisation
and its works have come too quickly upon us. The strain and stress of
correlating and co-ordinating the world we live in are getting too much
for us. Railways, telegraphs, the penny post, the special edition, have
played havoc at last with our nervous systems. We are always on the
stretch, rushing and tearing perpetually. We bolt our breakfasts; we
catch the train or 'bus by the skin of our teeth, to rattle us into the
City; we run down to Scotland or over to Paris on business; we lunch in
London and dine in Glasgow, Belfast, or Calcutta. (Excuse imagination.)
The tape clicks perpetually in our ears the last quotation in Eries; the
telephone rings us up at inconvenient moments. Something is always
happening somewhere to disturb our equanimity; we tear open the _Times_
with feverish haste, to learn that Kimberleys or Jabez Balfour have
fallen, that Matabeleland has been painted red, that shares have gone
up, or gone down, or evaporated. Life is one turmoil of excitement and
bustle. Financially, 'tis a series of dissolving views; personally 'tis
a rush; socially, 'tis a mosaic of deftly-fitted engagements. Drop out
one piece, and you can never replace it. You are full next week from
Monday to Saturday--business all day, what calls itself pleasure (save
the mark!) all evening. Poor old Leisure is dead. We hurry and scurry
and flurry eternally. One whirl of work from morning till night: then
dress and dine: one whirl of excitement from night till morning. A snap
of troubled sleep, and again _da capo_. Not an hour, not a minute, we
can call our own. A wire from a patient ill abed in Warwickshire! A wire
from a client hard hit in Hansards! Endless editors asking for more
copy! more copy! Alter to suit your own particular trade, and 'tis the
life of all of us.
The first generation after Stephenson and the Rocket pulled through with
it somehow. They inherited the sound constitutions of the men who sat on
rustic seats in the gardens of the twenties. The second
generation--that's you and me--felt the strain of it more severely: new
machines had come in to make life still more complicated: sixpenny
telegrams, Bell and Edison, submarine cables, evening papers,
perturbations pouring in from all sides incessantly; the suburbs
growing, the hubbub increasing, Metropolitan railways, trams, bicycles,
innumerable: but natheless we still endured, and presented the world all
the same with a third generation. That third generation--ah me! there
comes the pity of it! One fancies the impulse to marry and rear a family
has wholly died out of it. It seems to have died out most in the class
where the strain and stress are greatest. I don't think young men of
that class to-day have the same feelings towards women of their sort as
formerly. Nobody, I trust, will mistake me for a reactionary: in most
ways, the modern young man is a vast improvement on you and me at
twenty-five. But I believe there is really among young men in towns less
chivalry, less devotion, less romance than there used to be. That, I
take it, is the true reason why young men don't marry. With certain
classes and in certain places a primitive instinct of our race has
weakened. They say this weakening is accompanied in towns by an increase
in sundry hateful and degrading vices. I don't know if that is so; but
at least one would expect it. Any enfeeblement of the normal and natural
instinct of virility would show itself first in morbid aberrations. On
that I say nothing. I only say this--that I think the present crisis in
the English marriage market is due, not to clubs or the comfort of
bachelor quarters, but to the cumulative effect of nervous
over-excitement.
XV.
_EYE_ VERSUS _EAR_.
It is admitted on all hands by this time, I suppose, that the best way
of learning is by eye, not by ear. Therefore the authorities that
prescribe for us our education among all classes have decided that we
shall learn by ear, not by eye. Which is just what one might expect from
a vested interest.
Of course this superiority of sight over hearing is pre-eminently true
of natural science--that is to say, of nine-tenths among the subjects
worth learning by humanity. The only real way to learn geology, for
example, is not to mug it up in a printed text-book, but to go into the
field with a geologist's hammer. The only real way to learn zoology and
botany is not by reading a volume of natural history, but by collecting,
dissecting, observing, preserving, and comparing specimens. Therefore,
of course, natural science has never been a favourite study in the eyes
of school-masters, who prefer those subjects which can be taught in a
room to a row of boys on a bench, and who care a great deal less than
nothing for any subject which isn't "good to examine in." Educational
value and importance in after life have been sacrificed to the teacher's
ease and convenience, or to the readiness with which the pupil's
progress can be tested on paper. Not what is best to learn, but what is
least trouble to teach in great squads to boys, forms the staple of our
modern English education. They call it "education," I observe in the
papers, and I suppose we must fall in with that whim of the profession.
But even the subjects which belong by rights to the ear can nevertheless
be taught by the eye more readily. Everybody knows how much easier it is
to get up the history and geography of a country when you are actually
in it than when you are merely reading about it. It lives and moves
before you. The places, the persons, the monuments, the events, all
become real to you. Each illustrates each, and each tends to impress the
other on the memory. Sight burns them into the brain without conscious
effort. You can learn more of Egypt and of Egyptian history, culture,
hieroglyphics, and language in a few short weeks at Luxor or Sakkarah
than in a year at the Louvre and the British Museum. The Tombs of the
Kings are worth many papyri. The mere sight of the temples and obelisks
and monuments and inscriptions, in the places where their makers
originally erected them, gives a sense of reality and interest to them
all that no amount of study under alien conditions can possibly equal.
We have all of us felt that the only place to observe Flemish art to the
greatest advantage is at Ghent and Bruges and Brussels and Antwerp; just
as the only place to learn Florentine art as it really was is at the
Uffizi and the Bargello.
These things being so, the authorities who have charge of our public
education, primary, secondary, and tertiary, have decided in their
wisdom--to do and compel the exact contrary. Object-lessons and the
visible being admittedly preferable to rote-lessons and the audible,
they have prescribed that our education, so called, shall be mainly an
education not in things and properties, but in books and reading. They
have settled that it shall deal almost entirely and exclusively with
language and with languages; that words, not objects, shall be the facts
it impresses on the minds of the pupils. In our primary schools they
have insisted upon nothing but reading and writing, with just a
smattering of arithmetic by way of science. In our secondary schools
they have insisted upon nothing but Greek and Latin, with about an equal
leaven of algebra and geometry. This mediæval fare (I am delighted that
I can thus agree for once with Professor Ray Lankester) they have thrust
down the throats of all the world indiscriminately; so much so that
nowadays people seem hardly able at last to conceive of any other than a
linguistic education as possible. You will hear many good folk who talk
with contempt of Greek and Latin; but when you come to inquire what new
mental pabulum they would substitute for those quaint and grotesque
survivals of the Dark Ages, you find what they want instead is--modern
languages. The idea that language of any sort forms no necessary element
in a liberal education has never even occurred to them. They take it for
granted that when you leave off feeding boys on straw and oats you must
supply them instead with hay and sawdust.
Not that I rage against Greek and Latin as such. It is well we should
have many specialists among us who understand them, just as it is well
we should have specialists in Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. I merely mean
that they are not the sum and substance of educational method. They are
at best but two languages of considerable importance to the student of
purely human evolution.
Furthermore, even these comparatively useless linguistic subjects could
themselves be taught far better by sight than by hearing. A week at Rome
would give your average boy a much clearer idea of the relations of the
Capitol with the Palatine than all the pretty maps in Dr. William
Smith's Smaller Classical Dictionary. It would give him also a sense of
the reality of the Latin language and the Latin literature, which he
could never pick up out of a dog-eared Livy or a thumb-marked Æneid. You
have only to look across from the top of the Janiculum, towards the
white houses of Frascati, to learn a vast deal more about the Alban
hills and the site of Tusculum than ever you could mug up from all the
geography books in the British Museum. The way to learn every subject on
earth, even book-lore included, is not out of books alone, but by actual
observation.
And yet it is impossible for any one among us to do otherwise than
acquiesce in this vicious circle. Why? Just because no man can
dissociate himself outright from the social organism of which he forms a
component member. He can no more do so than the eye can dissociate
itself from the heart and lungs, or than the legs can shake themselves
free from the head and stomach. We have all to learn, and to let our
boys learn, what authority decides for us. We can't give them a better
education than the average, even if we know what it is and desire to
impart it, because the better education, though abstractly more
valuable, is now and here the inlet to nothing. Every door is barred
with examinations, and opens but to the golden key of the crammer. Not
what is of most real use and importance in life, but what "pays best" in
examination, is the test of desirability. We are the victims of a
system; and our only hope of redress is not by sporadic individual
action but by concerted rebellion. We must cry out against the abuse
till at last we are heard by dint of our much speaking. In a world so
complex and so highly organised as ours, the individual can only do
anything in the long run by influencing the mass--by securing the
co-operation of many among his fellows.
Meanwhile, I believe it is gradually becoming the fact that our girls,
who till lately were so very ill-taught, are beginning to know more of
what is really worth knowing than their public-school-bred brothers. For
the public school still goes on with the system of teaching it has
derived direct from the thirteenth century; while the girls' schools,
having started fair and fresh, are beginning to assimilate certain newer
ideas belonging to the seventeenth and even the eighteenth. In time they
may conceivably come down to the more elementary notions of the present
generation. Less hampered by professions and examinations than the boys,
the girls are beginning to know something now, not indeed of the
universe in which they live, its laws and its properties, but of
literature and history, and the principal facts about human development.
Yet all the time, the boys go on as ever with Musa, Musæ, like so many
parrots, and are turned out at last, in nine cases out of ten, with just
enough smattering of Greek and Latin grammar to have acquired a
life-long distaste for Horace and an inconquerable incapacity for
understanding Æschylus. One year in Italy with their eyes open would be
worth more than three at Oxford; and six months in the fields with a
platyscopic lens would teach them strange things about the world around
them that all the long terms at Harrow and Winchester have failed to
discover to them. But that would involve some trouble to the teacher.
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our
boys' schooling interfere with their education!
XVI.
_THE POLITICAL PUPA._
I have picked up on the moor the chrysalis of a common English
butterfly. As I sit on the heather and turn it over attentively, while
it wriggles in my hands, I can't help thinking how closely it resembles
the present condition of our British commonwealth. It is a platitude,
indeed, to say that "this is an age of transition." But it would be
truer and more graphic perhaps to put it that this is an age in which
England, and for the matter of that every other European country as
well, is passing through something like the chrysalis stage in its
evolution.
But, first of all, do you clearly understand what a chrysalis is driving
at? It means more than it seems; the change that goes on within that
impassive case is a great deal more profound than most people imagine.
When the caterpillar is just ready to turn into a butterfly it lies by
for a while, full of internal commotion, and feels all its organs slowly
melting one by one into a sort of indistinguishable protoplasmic pulp;
chaos precedes the definite re-establishment of a fresh form of order.
Limbs and parts and nervous system all disappear for a time, and then
gradually grow up again in new and altered types. The caterpillar, if it
philosophised on its own state at all (which seems to be very little the
habit of well-conducted caterpillars, as of well-conducted young
ladies), might easily be excused for forming just at first the
melancholy impression that a general dissolution was coming over it
piecemeal. It must begin by feeling legs and eyes and nervous centres
melt away by degrees into a common indistinguishable organic pulp, out
of which the new organs only slowly form themselves in obedience to the
law of some internal impulse. But when the process is all over, and--hi,
presto!--the butterfly emerges at last from the chrysalis condition,
what does it find but that instead of having lost everything it has new
and stronger legs in place of the old and feeble ones; it has nerves and
brain more developed than before; it has wings for flight instead of
mere creeping little feet to crawl with? What seemed like chaos was
really nothing more than the necessary kneading up of all component
parts into a plastic condition which precedes every fresh departure in
evolution. The old must fade before the new can replace it.
Now I am not going to work this perhaps somewhat fanciful analogy to
death, or pretend it is anything more than a convenient metaphor. Still,
taken as such, it is not without its luminosity. For a metaphor, by
supplying us with a picturable representation, often enables us really
to get at the hang of the thing a vast deal better than the most solemn
argument. And I fancy communities sometimes pass through just such a
chrysalis stage, when it seems to the timid and pessimistic in their
midst as if every component element of the State (but especially the one
in which they themselves and their friends are particularly interested)
were rushing violently down a steep place to eternal perdition. Chaos
appears to be swallowing up everything. "The natural relations of
classes" disappear. Faiths melt; churches dissolve; morals fade; bonds
fail; a universal magma of emancipated opinion seems to take the place
of old-established dogma. The squires and the parsons of the
period--call them scribes or augurs--wring their hands in despair, and
cry aloud that they don't know what the world is coming to. But, after
all, it is only the chrysalis stage of a new system. The old social
order must grow disjointed and chaotic before the new social order can
begin to evolve from it. The establishment of a plastic consistency in
the mass is the condition precedent of the higher development.
Not, of course, that this consideration will ever afford one grain of
comfort to the squires and the parsons of each successive epoch; for
what _they_ want is not the reasonable betterment of the whole social
organism, but the continuance of just this particular type of squiredom
and parsonry. That is what they mean by "national welfare;" and any
interference with it they criticise in all ages with the current
equivalent for the familiar Tory formula that "the country is going to
the devil."
Sometimes these great social reconstructions of which I speak are forced
upon communities by external factors interfering with their fixed
internal order, as happened when the influx of northern barbarians broke
up the decaying and rotten organism of the Roman Empire. Sometimes,
again, they occur from internal causes, in an acute, and so to speak,
inflammatory condition, as at the French Revolution. But sometimes, as
in our own time and country, they are slowly brought about by organic
development, so as really to resemble in all essential points the
chrysalis type of evolution. Politically, socially, theologically,
ethically, the old fixed beliefs seem at such periods to grow fluid or
plastic. New feelings and habits and aspirations take their place. For a
while a general chaos of conflicting opinions and nascent ideas is
produced. The mass for the moment seems formless and lawless. Then new
order supervenes, as the magma settles down and begins to crystallise;
till at last, I'm afraid, the resulting social organism becomes for the
most part just as rigid, just as definite, just as dogmatic, just as
exacting, as the one it has superseded. The caterpillar has grown into a
particular butterfly.
Through just such a period of reconstruction Europe in general and
Britain in particular are now in all likelihood beginning to pass. And
they will come out at the other end translated and transfigured. Laws
and faiths and morals will all of them have altered. There will be a new
heaven and a new earth for the men and women of the new epoch. Strange
that people should make such a fuss about a detail like Home Rule, when
the foundations of society are all becoming fluid. Don't flatter
yourself for a moment that your particular little sect or your
particular little dogma is going to survive the gentle cataclysm any
more than my particular little sect or my particular little dogma. All
alike are doomed to inevitable reconstruction. "We can't put the
Constitution into the melting-pot," said Mr. John Morley, if I recollect
his words aright. But at the very moment when he said it, in my humble
opinion, the Constitution was already well into the melting-pot, and
even beginning to simmer merrily. Federalism, or something extremely
like it, may with great probability be the final outcome of that
particular melting; though anything else is perhaps just as probable,
and in any case the melting is general, not special. The one thing we
can guess with tolerable certainty is that the melting-pot stage has
begun to overtake us, socially, ethically, politically,
ecclesiastically; and that what will emerge from the pot at the end of
it must depend at last upon the relative strength of those unknown
quantities--the various formative elements.
Being the most optimistic of pessimists, however, I will venture (after
this disclaimer of prophecy) to prophesy one thing alone: 'Twill be a
butterfly, not a grub, that comes out of our chrysalis.