IV.

This morning I had a letter from a friend in London asking when I am

going to set up my "Crank School" in London. I began to think about the

word Crank. What is a Crank? Usually the name is applied to people who

wear long hair, eat vegetarian diet, wear sandals . . . or something in

that line. A Crank therefore is someone who differs from the crowd, and

I am led to conclude that the Crank not only differs from the crowd but

is usually ahead of the crowd.

According to Sir Martin Conway the crowd has no head; it can only feel.

Hence it comes that the main feature of a crowd is its emotion. When we

study the street crowd, the mob, this fact is evident; but can we say the

same of other crowds . . . the Public School crowd, the Church, the

Miners, the Doctors? I think so. The anger that Alec Waugh's book, _The

Loom of Youth_, aroused in the public schools was not a thought-out

anger; it came from the public school emotion. So with vivisection; the

doctors' rage at the anti-vivisectionists is not an intellectual rage; it

is simply a professional emotion. Just before I left London I happened

one night to be in a company of men who were arguing about

Re-incarnation. I had no special views on the subject, but I soon found

myself supporting the crowd that was sceptical about Re-incarnation. The

reason was that the leader of the anti-reincarnation crowd happened to be

a man called Neill. It is highly probable that if two rag-and-bone men

got into a scrap in a public house they would support each other simply

out of a professional crowd emotion.

That the crowd has no head is evident when we read the popular papers or

see the popular films. The most successful papers are those that touch

the passions of the mob. I proved this one week last spring. Judges

were beginning to introduce the "cat" for criminals, as a means to stem

the crime wave. I sat down and wrote an article on the subject, pointing

out that this was a going back to the days of barbarism when lunatics

were whipped behind the cart's tail. I made a strong plea for the

psychological treatment of the criminal, basing my plea on the fact that

crime is the result of unconscious workings of the mind, and stating that

instead of sending a poor man to penal servitude we ought to analyse his

mind and cure him of his anti-social tendencies.

I thought it a jolly good article, and when a prominent Sunday paper

returned the manuscript to me I was surprised. My surprise left me on

the following Sunday when the same paper blared forth an article by

Horatio Bottomley. His title was: "Wanted--the Cat!"

My article was more thoughtful, more humane, more scientific. Why, then,

was it suppressed? The answer is simple: it did not fit in with the

passions of the crowd. It becomes clear why our best public

men--editors, cabinet ministers, publicists are not great thinkers. They

must keep in touch with the crowd; they must express the emotions of the

crowd.

The attitude of the crowd to the anti-crowd person, the Crank, is never

one of contemptuous indifference. It is always distinctly hostile. If I

travel by tube from Hampstead to Piccadilly without a hat the other

travellers stare at me with mild hostility. Why? Conway, in _The Crowd

in Peace and War_, an excellent book, says that this hostility comes from

fear. A crowd is always afraid of another crowd, because the only force

that can destroy a crowd is a rival crowd. Every individual who differs

from the herd is suspect because he is perhaps the nucleus of a rival

crowd. That is why the world always crucifies its Christs.

The Crank School, then, is a school where anti-crowd people send their

children. It is the school _par excellence_ of the Intelligentsia. The

tendency of every Crank School is to exaggerate the difference between

the crank and the crowd; hence its adoption of an ideal and its

concomitant crazes. I cannot for the life of me see why ideals are

associated with vegetarianism, long hair, Grecian dress, and sandals,

just as I cannot see why art should attach itself to huge bow-ties, long

hair, and foot-long cigarette holders.

The Crank School holds up an ideal. It plasters its walls with busts of

Walt Whitman and Blake; it hangs bad reproductions of Botticelli round

the walls; it sings songs to Freedom; it rhapsodises about Beethoven and

Bach. The children of the Crank Schools are, I rejoice to say, not

cranks. They leave the boredom of Bach and seek the jazz record on the

gramophone; they ignore the pictures of Whitman and Blake and study _The

Picture Show_ or _Funny Bits_. Many of them think more highly of Charlie

Chaplin than of William Shakespeare.

I say again that I rejoice in this; it serves the Crank School people

jolly well right. I cannot see by what right educators force what they

consider good taste down the children's throats. That is a return to the

old way of authority, of treating the child's mind as a blank slate. If

the Crank Schools are to improve, they must drop their high moral purpose

tone and come down to earth. They must realise that Charlie Chaplin and

_John Bull_ have their place in education just as Shakespeare and

Beethoven have their place. We do not want to turn out cranks who will

form a new superior crowd; we want to turn out men and women who will

readily join the conventional crowd and help it to reach better ideals.

This question of good taste is a sore one with me. I think it fatal to

impose good taste on any child; the child must form his own taste. I

know that it is possible to cultivate good taste and to become a very

superior cultivated person, but I know that the human, erring, vulgar,

music-hall, Charlie Chaplin part of such a person's make-up is not

annihilated; it is merely repressed into the unconscious.

I have a theory that each of us has a definite amount of human nature,

some of it high, some of it low, or, to phrase it differently, some of it

animal, some of it spiritual. We can repress one part, and then we

become either a saint or a sinner; the better way is to be both saint and

sinner, to look life straight in the face, condemning no one, judging no

one.

* * * * *

Macdonald was re-reading _A Dominie Dismissed_ to-night, and he looked up

and said: "Look here, you've got an awful lot of swear-words in this

book!"

"That," I said, "has a cause, Mac. They aren't really swear-words; the

world has grown out of being shocked at a 'damn,' but I am willing to

admit that there are more damns and hells than is usual. They are

symptomatic; they date back to my early days when swearing was a crime

punishable with the strap. They are simply symbols of my freedom. Most

bad language is from a like cause. When you foozle on the first tee

there is no earthy reason why you should say 'Hell' rather than 'Onions'!

But if onions had been taboo when you were a child you would find

yourself using the word as a swear. The curse word is the link that

joins your foozle with the nursery; whenever you curse you regress, that

is, you go back to the infantile."

"But," said Mac, "you don't mean to say that if swearing were permitted

to children that they wouldn't curse when they were grown up?"

"I don't think they would," I said. "Nor would there be any unprintable

stories if we had a frank sex education. It's a sad fact, Mac, but

nine-tenths of humour is due to early suppression and repression."

"Seems to me," said Mac with a laugh, "that if everybody were

psycho-analysed, the world would be a pretty dull place."

* * * * *

A few days ago I found a pot of light paint in Mac's workshop, and,

impelled by heaven only knows what unconscious process, I painted my

bicycle blue. This morning, the paint being dry, I rode forth into an

unsympathetic world. Women came to their doors to stare at my machine,

and as they stared they broke into laughter. When I reached the village

of Cordyke the school was coming out, and I was greeted with a howl of

derision. I thought it a good instance of crowd psychology; I was

different from the crowd, and I evoked laughter and derision.

After cycling a few miles, I came to an old man breaking stones at the

bottom of a hill. On my approaching he threw down his hammer and turned

to stare at my cycle. I dismounted.

"Almichty me!" he said with surprise. "That's a michty colour!"

"It's unusual," I said, as I lit a cigarette.

He fumbled for his clay pipe.

"I've seen black anes, and I wance saw a silver-plated ane, but I never

heard tell o' a blue bike afore," he said. "Did you pent it?"