THE EDUCATION OF THE ADULT
IF it be granted that it is the interest and the duty of a nation to
develop the intelligence of its people, we must conclude that the work
is only half done, or not half done, by even an ideal system of what
is commonly called education. I am assuming that a time will come when
no youth or maiden will enter workshop or office before the age of
seventeen, if not eighteen; and that the better endowed minority of
our children will, without regard to their private resources, be
promoted to secondary, technical, and higher schools. This minority
will, on the whole, need no further attention. Cultural interest and
professional stimulation will ensure that their studies continue. But
the majority will fall lamentably short of the ideal of developed and
alert intelligence. The added three or four years will be enormously
valuable to the teacher, but in the majority of cases the intellectual
interest will still be so feeble that the distractions of life will at
once extinguish it.
If we speak of our actual world, not of an ideal world, this fact is
too patent to need proving. Forty-five years ago a band of enthusiasts
fought for the establishment of universal elementary education. The
survivors of that band confess that the splendid results they
anticipated have not been secured. One is, indeed, tempted sometimes
to wonder whether there was not more zeal for culture among the
workers half a century ago than there is to-day. When you listen to a
conversation, of workers or of average middle-class people, on
politics or theology or some other absorbing topic, you are astounded
at the slender amount of personal thinking and the slavery to phrases
which they have heard. Their minds seem to resemble the screen of a
kaleidoscope, on which the coloured phrases they have read in journals
or cheap literature weave automatic patterns. I speak, of course, of
the mass. I have given hundreds of scientific lectures to keen
audiences of working men, and I know that tens of thousands of them
have excellent collections of familiar books. But the result of
forty-five years of education is far from satisfactory. It was thought
that, when the people learned to read, and the ideas of an Emerson or
a Darwin could be appropriated by any man of moderate endowment, the
level of the race would rise materially. It has not risen as much as
was expected. The phrases are learned and repeated: the ideas are not
vitally assimilated, because the intellect is not sufficiently
developed.
Two classes of people will impatiently retort that there is no need
for further development. One class consists of those who dread a
higher intelligence in the workers because it leads to discontent with
their condition. To which one may reply that this concern comes too
late. One needs little intelligence to perceive the inequalities of
the distribution of wealth. The workers of the world have perceived
it, and, although only an extreme Socialist minority demands
equalisation, the mass of the workers demand a higher reward. Midway
between Australia and England, on the deck of a liner, I heard a group
of middle-class men and women contrasting the menace of the Australian
workers with the industrial content of the mother-country. We landed,
to find from the journals that the whole United Kingdom was punctuated
by strikes, agitations, and demands. It is too late. A distinguished
Belgian prelate was taken into a large foundry, and, observing the
workers, he impulsively cried: "What a slave's life!" "Hush,
they will hear you," said the manager. In repeating the experience
he added: "They have heard: it is too late." It will be better now
if, in the industrial struggle of the future, there is intelligence as
well as principle on both sides. If any large proportion of work in
the human economy requires the sacrifice of the intelligence, there is
something wrong with the work.
Curiously enough, the other class of people who are impatient of the
design to stimulate their minds consists of the mass of the workers
themselves. After eight or nine or ten hours of heavy muscular work
every day, they say, they have no inclination or fitness for serious
literature, serious lectures, or serious art. They prefer a drink, a
bioscope, a music-hall. Eight hours' work, eight hours' play,
eight hours' sleep; that is the ideal. A very natural and
symmetrical ideal, but--it is just the ideal which "the
capitalist" wishes them to cultivate, and this might suggest
reflection. Someone will do the thinking while they play. Democratic
government is a mischief and a blunder unless Demos is capable of
thinking. If the workers of the world have an ambition to control
their destinies, they must realise that their destinies are things too
large and complex and important to be controlled by men with sleepy
brains. There is no solution of the broad social problem of this
planet which does not imply that every adult man and woman, of normal
powers, shall be alert and informed and self-assertive enough to take
an intelligent part in its administration.
Therefore, it seems to many that a scheme of education which ceases to
operate at the age of fourteen, which teaches children to read and has
no further concern with what they read, which impresses on their
cortex a mass of facts of no utility or stimulation, is not a
fulfilment of a nation's duty, or a proper consideration of a
nation's interest. The grander lessons of history, the more
impressive truths of science, the vital features of economics and
sociology, the ennobling characters of fine art, cannot be even
faintly impressed on the young mind. Yet they can be impressed on the
minds of nearly all adults, and it would be an incalculable gain to
the race if they were. What is being done, and what might be done, to
effect this?
The nation at present leaves it to commercial interest and to
philanthropy to carry out, in some measure, this important function,
and we may at once eliminate the commercial interest. It supplies, at
a proper profit, what is demanded. A minority ask for cheap works of
science and art and history, and several admirable series of manuals
and serial publications are supplied. A majority, an overwhelming
majority, asks only to be entertained, and there is a mighty flood of
novels and amusing works, a rich crop of music-halls and
bioscope-shows and theatres and skating rinks. It will readily be
understood that, regarding happiness as the ultimate ideal, I regard
entertainment as a proper part of life. The comedian and the
story-teller and the professional football-player are rendering good
service, and it is intellectual snobbery to murmur that they "merely
entertain" people. A good deal of nonsense is written about sport
and entertainment. Many of us can, with pleasant ease, suspend a
severely intellectual task for a few hours to witness a first-class
football match. One wonders if some of the ascetics who speak about
"mudded oafs" and "the football craze" are aware that the game
(except for professional players) occupies merely an hour and a half a
week (or alternate week) for little more than half a year.
The mischief is that so much of our entertainment appeals to and
fosters a state of mind or taste which does exclude culture. We have
to-day an army of puritan scouts, watching our music-halls and
cinematograph films, our picture-cards and novels, our open spaces by
night and our bathing-beaches by day, calculating minutely what amount
of dress or undress or sexual allusion they may permit. Certainly we
need coercion in these matters. No one who moves amongst our average
people, in any rank of society, can fail to recognise that there would
be in time a volcanic outpour of sexuality if we did not impose
restriction. Whether this chaste pruriency of the modern Churches is
an admirable thing, and whether its hirelings are a desirable
supplement to the police-force, need not be discussed here; but what
amuses one is their intense zeal to detect the narrowest fringe of
impropriety and their utter obtuseness to graver matters. I have
sometimes, when waiting before a lecture in the dressing-room of a
variety theatre, been confronted with a notice that "the curtain
will be rung down on any artist who says 'Damn' or mentions the
lodger," or, more candidly (in the Colonies): "Don't swear. We
don't care a damn, but the public does." The general public would,
if it were consulted, probably make the same reply as the framers of
the notice, and would blame the police for the restriction of liberty.
There is, in a word, an appalling poverty of taste in the general
public, and it pays the purveyor of entertainment to adapt his wares
to it as far as the police will permit. To this lamentable lack of
taste and culture (in the broad sense) officials and moralists are
entirely indifferent as long as the _comédienne_ does not refer to
the seventh commandment. The public may be as ignorant and vulgar as
they like, but they must not give expression to a natural effect of
this.
The music-hall and the bioscope are the great academies of our people
to-day, and their work is largely stupefying. Sentimental songs of the
most vapid description alternate with patriotic songs of a medieval
crudeness and humorous songs which might have appealed to a
prehistoric intelligence. Bloodthirsty melodramas, sensational scenes,
and infinite variations of "The girl who did what we are forbidden
to talk about," evoke and inflame elementary emotions at the lowest
grade of culture. Clergymen give certificates of high moral efficacy
to crude representations of passion in high life which are designed to
appeal to raw feelings. The posters alone--the eccentric costumes and
daubed faces and attempts at novelty in the way of leering--warn away
people of moderate taste or intelligence. The bioscope is almost as
bad. Apart from a few excellent travel and scenic and scientific
pictures, the show is a mass of crude faking and boorish horse-play
which presupposes an elementary intelligence in the spectators.
Pictorial post-cards add to the monstrosities and puerilities of this
kind of public education, and a large proportion of the stories
published, especially in the periodicals which are read by girls and
boys and uneducated women, fall in the same category. We may trust
that the idea will not occur to anyone of making a collection of our
picture-cards, films, music-hall posters, novelties, etc., for
preservation as typical amusements of the twentieth century.
It is stupid to watch this lamentable exposure of our low average of
culture week by week with complete indifference until more
underclothing is displayed than we think proper. The bioscope and
music-hall--I speak of the majority--are not merely entertaining; they
are undoing the work of the educator. They are fostering the raw and
primitive emotions which it is the task of education to refine and
bring under control, debasing public taste, and appealing to a
standard which is essentially unintellectual. The idea that fun may be
utterly stupid and crude, provided it is "clean," is the idea of a
narrow-minded fanatic, an enemy of society.
When we pass to the next cultural level of entertainment--the better
music-hall, the metropolitan type of theatre, the concert, the novel,
etc.--we have a vast provision of entertainment which amuses or
interests without cultural prejudice; rising at times to a positive
measure of artistic education or intellectual stimulation. Two things
only need be noticed here. The first is the stupidity of the kind of
censorship which we tolerate; of which little need be said, since it
is generally recognised. The amateur moral censorship of art reaches
the culmination of its absurdity in our dramatic inquisition. The
dramatist may deal with sex-passion as pruriently and provokingly as
he likes, provided he leaves enough to the spectator's facile
imagination; but he must not attempt to raise love as an intellectual
issue. Our people may feel love: they must not think about it as a
serious problem.
The other, and more needed observation, regards the novel. There are
novels of fine artistic value, like those of Phillpotts: novels of
great intellectual use, like those of Wells: and novels of a general
and more subtle educational value, like those of Meredith. There are
novels which, like the melodrama, counteract education by their low
standard of art and intelligence, and there are novels--the great
majority--which entertain without prejudice. Since we have as much
right to be entertained as to be instructed, novel-reading is a normal
part of a normal life. Seeing, however, that a very large proportion
of the community read nothing but novels, it has been felt that the
novel might be used as a vehicle of instruction, and the didactic or
historical novel has become an institution. Many believe that they are
being educated when they read this literature.
Against this comforting assumption it is necessary to protest. Even
the greatest historical novelists, Dumas and Scott, have taken
remarkable liberties with the known facts, and added to the picture of
the time a mass of imaginative detail. Many historical novels, like
_Quo Vadis_ or Kingsley's _Hypatia_, misrepresent personalities or
periods for controversial purposes; and the bulk of modern historical
novels are worthless jumbles of fact and imagination. It is, as a
rule, the same with the sociological novel. You must know the facts in
advance--you must know where the facts end and the fiction begins--or
else merely regard the book as a form of entertainment. Lately I read
a serious historical work, by a distinguished writer, in which Hypatia
(who was fifty or sixty years old when she was murdered) is described
as a "girl-philosopher"; clearly because Kingsley, for controversial
purposes, thought fit in his novel to make her a young and rather
foolish maiden. Thousands of people take their convictions from
"novels with a purpose," especially religious or sociological
novels, without reflecting that the author may legitimately give them
either fact or fiction. Such novels are often profoundly mischievous.
A conscientious didactic novelist like Mr. Wells aims rather at
raising issues and stimulating reflection, and in this Mr. Wells has
done splendid service. Others have done equal disservice, and have
used artificially constructed characters for the purpose of raising
prejudice against certain ideas, or have misled by a calculated
mixture of fact and fiction. It was in recommending to the public one
of these novels--an exceptionally silly and crude piece of work--that
the Bishop of London described Christianity as "woman's best
friend."
Religious literature is particularly offensive in this respect, but I
will give special consideration to it later. Our press-criticism of
books is a very imperfect system of checking the vagaries and
prejudices of authors. The criticisms are very frequently marked by
ignorance of the subject and by personal or doctrinal hostility to the
author, while the more learned and conscientious journals often show
the most ludicrous pedantry. I once published a novel, pseudonymously,
and was amused to read in a London weekly, which takes great pride in
the smartness of its reviews, that the author had neither an
elementary knowledge of the art of writing nor an elementary
acquaintance with the subject on which he wrote. I had already at that
time written about twenty volumes, and I had had twelve years'
intimate experience of the monastic life with which the book was
concerned. Mr. Clement Shorter, not knowing the author, had generously
described the book as "a brilliant novel." On another occasion an
historical work of mine was gravely censured, though no specific
errors were noted in it, by our leading literary organ, on the ground
that I was not an expert on the period. I looked up the same
journal's critique of a work written on the same historical period
by an academic authority, and published by his university, and I found
that, though there were dozens of errors in the work, it had passed
the censor with full honours. I add with pleasure that some of the
most generous notices of my works have appeared in papers (such as
_The Daily Telegraph_ and _The Spectator_) to which my ideas must be
repugnant. But most literary men agree with me that reviewing is, to a
large extent, prejudiced and incompetent, and few of us would cross a
room to read ordinary press-notices of our books.
One might extend this criticism to the general work of the press as
the great popular educator. We must, however, reflect that the press
is hampered by restrictions which the public ought to bear in mind: a
journal is always a commercial transaction with a particular section
of the public, and it is generally pledged to political partisanship.
It is only just to remark that this materially restricts the
educational ambition of many journalists. The public themselves are to
blame that a large section of our press devotes so much space to
sensational murders, adulteries, burglaries, royal births and
marriages, wars and other crimes and follies. Sunday journals often
contain twenty columns of this rubbish, and the worst parts of it are,
with the most disgusting hypocrisy, thrust into prominence by
especially large head-lines announcing "A Painful Case." One
imagines the working man spending five or six hours of the Sabbath
reading this sort of stuff. Great and grave things, which he ought to
know, are happening all over the world, but he must have sharp eyes if
he is to catch the obscure little paragraphs which--if there is any
reference at all--tell him how many have been put to death in Russia
in the last quarter, or how the republican experiment fares in
Portugal, or how democracy advances in Australia or the United States.
The space is needed for pictures of burned mansions and notorious
murderers and the commonplace relatives of politicians, for verbatim
reports of divorce and criminal cases, for inquests and royal
processions, and for the magnificent speeches of Cabinet Ministers and
would-be Cabinet Ministers.
This stricture applies to the press generally. How far it sacrifices
to these meretricious purposes the serious function of educating the
public has been painfully impressed on us by recent experience. Only
one or two journals in England surpassed our drowsy politicians in
sagacity and foresight. Though an extensive reader of German
literature (scientific and historical), it had never been my business
to follow political or military utterances; yet, when the war broke
out and I looked back on Germany's enormous output in this
department, I realised that there had been in London for a year or two
enough German literature to convince any moderate observer that war
was fast approaching--and this was only a fragment of an enormously
larger literature. Our press had ridiculed the one or two men and
journals who warned the public of the danger. Further, when it
transpired that our Government had met the crisis with painful
slowness and inefficiency, nearly the whole press again conspired to
check criticism, and it is probable that when the war is over the
press will unite with the Churches in cultivating a foolish and
dangerous contentment on the part of the public. Our press is, in
fact, very largely an instrument of our corrupt party-system. It never
initiates reform, and it mirrors, day by day, all the crimes and
follies and maladies of our social order without the least resentment
or the faintest suggestion of reconstruction. Journals are constantly
appearing with the professed intention of correcting these defects,
yet they are almost invariably spoiled by illiberalism in one or more
departments of their work, or by gross exaggerations, hysterical
language, or impracticable proposals.
All this is a reflection of the generally low state of public culture,
and it will not alter until we devote serious care to the education of
the general intelligence. We begin at school to cultivate the
child's imagination, though it is the quality of a child's mind
which least requires stimulating and is most in need of subordinating
to intelligence. In later years, when the feeble intellectual
stimulation we have given is exhausted, we have to appeal to the
imagination or go unheard. "I have not read a book since I left
school," a music-hall artist observed to me. At twenty-five he had
become incapable of doing more than look at illustrations, as he had
done in his childhood. We go on until we make the imagination itself
feeble on its constructive side. Miles of generally dauby and
grotesque posters line our streets; tons of the trashiest literature
for the young are discharged from marble palaces in the neighbourhood
of Fleet Street; novels multiply until the general public takes the
words author and novelist to be synonymous; and the daily organ of the
millions tends more and more to be a collection of pictures of
unimportant events and persons, with a very slender and peculiar
quantity of news.
If we agree that democracy will advance until the majority rule in
reality, and not merely in theory, these things must concern us. It is
of little use to point to the occasional periodical with small
circulation which endeavours to educate, to the occasional educative
column in more important journals, or to the occasional lecture or
serious concert or drama. The broad fact remains that our future
rulers are increasingly encouraged to refrain from mental cultivation,
to mistake an appeal to the imagination for knowledge, and to debase
their taste more and more with raw representations of crime and
passion. The working man reads with indignation of fashionable ladies
struggling to find a place in court when a man is being tried for a
series of sordid murders; and the working man then reads, day after
day, a three-column verbatim report of the trial, and regrets that
there is not more of it.
In order to meet this grave public need an earlier generation invented
night-schools and Mechanics' Institutes. Many of these still do
useful work, but their number shrinks rather than increases. The
Co-operative Movement, again, set up in the early days a fine ambition
to educate its adult members, but this ambition has not been generally
sustained in the vast modern movement. Hundreds of lecture-societies
were founded, and hundreds (about seven hundred in Great Britain, I
believe) exist to-day and do some excellent work; but many of the
societies which adhered most faithfully to the educational ideal are
in difficulties or extinct. The travel-lecture or funny lecture and
the "popular" concert encroach more and more on the serious
programme. Free libraries were another hope of the reformers of the
last generation, and they are now endowed by millionaires and
maintained by municipalities. They exhibit, perhaps, the saddest
perversion of social ambition. Neither Mr. Carnegie nor any serious
municipality thinks it a duty to provide gratuitous entertainment, but
at least two-thirds of their resources are really devoted to this. The
enormously greater part of the work of free libraries is to beguile
the idle hours of young men and the idle days of young women with
novels that rarely contain a particle of intellectual stimulation.
Public museums were another device for educating the mass of the
people, and they have largely failed. There has been in recent years a
little more regard for the public, as well as for students, but it is
still painful to see crowds passing with bovine eyes amidst our
accumulated treasures. The grouping and labelling are still too
academic: the general scheme and the immense wealth of detail daze the
eye of the inexpert. More guides and lecturers, in touch with and
informally accessible to the public, and a closer association with
University Extension and Gilchrist and other lectures, are very much
needed. Saturday afternoon in the British Museum is a melancholy
spectacle of wasted wealth. A small model museum, designed solely for
the education of the general public, would be more useful in this
respect than our magnificent national museum. Unfortunately, the small
museums copy the academic defects of the larger. The curator of one,
on whom I urged the needs of the public, replied wearily: "Well, it
will take me three years to arrange my Cephalopods, and then I will
see what I can do."
We need a comprehensive and serious organisation and development of
our resources for educating the adult. Our Education Department needs
to throw out a new wing with the purpose of preventing the utter waste
of its work upon young children. Institutions like the British Museum
ought to be relieved of the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury
and one or two other somnolent gentlemen, and made the centre of a
splendid and energetic system of popular instruction and stimulation.
From such centres the educational officials (as distinct from learned
curators and youths from Oxford and Cambridge who look upon the public
as a nuisance) might issue attractive invitations and publications,
and be prepared to welcome the non-student, either with "showmen"
who understand the public mind or by a general and affable
accessibility of the whole staff. Municipal museums and libraries and
picture-galleries could be organised on similar lines by the
Department, and useful private foundations, such as the Bishopsgate
Institute, could be invited to co-operate, without interference in
their management. The supply of novels ought to be restricted to the
great masters of every country and a few moderns. The rich supply of
serious literature ought to be made attractive and easily accessible
to the public by good bibliographical guidance and constant lectures.
These things are, of course, being done. It is not so much the local
officials one quarrels with as the nation and its leaders. We want an
immense co-ordination and development of our resources and efforts out
of national funds. Lecture-societies and all kinds of educative
centres and institutes--there are thousands in the country--need to be
affiliated, encouraged, advised, and supplemented. The State should
not even shrink from publishing. The trade supplies only the actual
demand: the State must create a new and larger demand. Music would be
an integral part of this scheme of education, and here again we have a
large material ready for organisation.
Any man who has engaged in the work of educating and stimulating the
general public will realise how urgently some such scheme is needed,
and how splendid a service it would render. He will realise also that
the task will be formidable. I do not for a moment conceive the
general public as thirsting for culture. That is very largely due to
the way in which the work has hitherto been done. The recent success
of small but authoritative manuals of science and history, and of
several cheap series of literary works of high value, shows that a
fairly large public responds to every enlightened effort to assist
them. It will become very much larger when the work is organised on a
national scale and conceived as a really important function of the
State. That even then the majority of the nation would rush to the
reconstructed libraries and museums and lecture or concert-halls no
one will imagine for a moment. We do not undo in a few years the
effect of centuries of evil traditions. I am assuming, however, that
these various reforms I am discussing will proceed more or less
simultaneously, and will enormously assist each other. The abolition
of war would release rich funds for educational purposes: the
reorganisation of industry would provide a little more leisure and
capacity for mental recreation: other reforms would give a general
intellectual stimulation. Even now, however, much of this work could
be done. If we think it sufficient that our people remain in a
condition of elementary literacy and half-developed intelligence, if
we fancy that the _race_ will advance because it sets aside a special
caste of scholars for the promotion of culture, we may regard our
actual situation without concern. But if we desire that general
alertness of mind and decision of character which a democratic rule
implies, we cannot be indifferent. Aristocrats justly rail at the
democracy of Athens and Rome; it was an uneducated democracy--literate,
but uneducated, like ours. We need to advance, if we are not to
recede; and the uplifted race of the days to come will honour the
generation that taught men the compatibility of culture and
entertainment.
I am speaking, in the main, of the mass of the workers, but it would
be entirely unjust to insinuate that they alone need adult education.
The conventions of social life, the extraordinary slavery to fashions
and artificial rules, betray an intellectual flabbiness in the
wealthier members of society which just as urgently calls for
stimulation. We seem at times quite incapable of drawing a line
between acts of real courtesy and taste, which imply a certain grace
or delicacy of character, and conventional usages which have no
rational basis. The insistence on these conventional usages is part of
that general slavery to false traditions which I am assailing.
The most flagrant instance of this weakness of mind and character is
the docility with which we meet changes of fashion in dress, or retain
eccentric forms of clothing. Hardly any other feature so strongly
impresses the close observer with the fact that the race, as a whole
(and I speak only of civilised communities), advances little in
intelligence and self-possession in spite of the progress made by its
intellectual experts. One would say that here, especially, we need a
strong draught of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche,--the gospel
of self-assertion, of strong personality, of severe reasoning,--but I
have not observed that our modern Nietzscheans differ much from their
neighbours in such matters. Yet the commercial expansion of modern
times is making this tyranny of fashion more ludicrous than it ever
was before.
The fashion-plates and descriptions contained in ladies' journals
have always provoked the furtive smile of the male. A coterie of
tradesmen, who are eager to promote business, and of wealthy ladies
who are equally eager to show that their purses are unlimited, decree
that the hat or costume shall continually vary in shape and colour.
The Anglo-French jargon of the sartorial journalist then impresses on
a larger circle of ladies the need of alertness and the horror of
being _démodée_,--it would be proof of incapacity to say "out of
fashion,"--and, as the season approaches, the proclamation of the
forthcoming colour or model is awaited with more feverish anxiety than
the announcement of the national budget. Schools of artists are
secretly inventing some variation--the wider the variation the
better--on the thousands of costumes which have already graced the
feminine frame, or discussing bold suggestions of reviving an ancient
model which has long disappeared even from the shops of
wardrobe-dealers. Privileged ladies rise in prestige by obtaining and
whispering advance information. At length the shop-windows blaze with
the new colour, the journals depict an ingenious new combination of
edges and folds and puckers, and womanhood plunges to the bottom of
its purse with an eagerness to avoid the suspicion of financial
stringency; while the discarded hats and dresses percolate
romantically through lower strata of society. Is it not good for
trade?
The masculine smile is, however, wearing thinner, as the absurd
despotism is now almost as great among the stronger sex. Here also a
group of commercial mathematicians evolve, every few months, a new
combination of brim and crown and curve, and artists design new
patterns of cloth and new contours of garment, and tyrannical
journalists hold up to public execration the man of means or position
who dares to find last year's fashion sufficiently comfortable or
decorative. "Not worn now, sir," says the shopman, with indulgent
smile, when you go to renew the hat or coat that has pleased you. The
bewildering thing is, not that manufacturers should be eager to sell
us new garments every few weeks, but that we bow with such docility to
this ludicrous fiction of monarchy. Long trousers or short trousers,
creased trousers or turned-up trousers, tight coats or loose coats,
bowlers or trilbys--we listen submissively to the mandate, without the
least consideration of our appearance or convenience.
Indeed, the only things that are permanent in this extravagant
procession of fashions are the things that are ugly, inconvenient, or
unhealthy, especially on the masculine side. The silk hat and the hard
felt hat linger as if in these extraordinary creations the
manufacturer had discovered the ideal head-covering. The swallow-tail
coat survives as if æsthetics could advance no further in the
attiring of wealthy men; even the buttons at the back, to which our
fiery ancestor attached his sword, must not be abandoned. The more
comfortable dinner-jacket remains a privileged client at the gate
until some audacious peer or prince will dispel the oppressive
reverence for the ancient swallow-tail; and peers and princes know how
dangerous it is to tamper with the spirit of reverence. The starched
collar and shirt are as rigidly prescribed as sacred vestments on high
occasions. The lady must still hang a thick and heavy screen of cloth
from her hips; first having it made too long and then holding it up
with her hand in order to escape the rich organic deposit on our
streets and the filth with which we suffer "domestic pets" to make
our squares hideous. Her abdominal organs must, if one may credit the
marvellous photographs published by the corset-makers, be
reconstructed every few years to accommodate the latest scheme of
body-curves. And from these upper reaches of our intellectual world,
the tyranny descends through level after level of the community until
it lays its last stern injunctions on the junior clerk and the
post-office assistant; or passes beyond the seas and compels the
Chinaman or the Japanese to discard his beautiful robe in favour of a
frock-coat and silk hat, or a striped tweed and bowler, when he
presents himself at the entrance-gate to civilisation.
We find an almost equally ludicrous tyranny of tradition or fashion in
almost every part of the ritual of social life. Twenty years ago I
issued from a rite-bound monastery into the free life of the world, to
find it similarly swathed in ritual bonds. I purchased, and stealthily
mastered, the "ceremonial" (as we used to call our rite-book) of
this new world--a book on "etiquette"--and led for some months a
strenuous and exacting life. I entered drawing-rooms with a nervous
recollection of about a score of rules that had to be observed in the
first five minutes, while the ritual of the mundane table entailed for
a long time a good deal of furtive observation of my fellows and
trembling under the butler's eye. To this day I am not quite clear
at what precise angle the elbow must stand in shaking hands. Social
life is overspread by a network of these prescriptions of the
unwritten law or the judicial decisions of the aristocracy which we
call "manners." There is, as a rule, so little discrimination
between the formal rules of an artificial code and the real impulses
of a gentlemanly nature that one has often to listen gravely and
silently while ladies commend the "perfect manners" of a man whom
one knows to be an adventurous ninny or a beast.
We need a new conception of civilisation, a sustained stimulation of
the intelligence throughout life, a strong infusion of the Nietzschean
gospel of personality and self-assertion. Some day we shall regard
education as half of the nation's serious business, and will devote
half our national revenue to it. Let it not be imagined that this
suggests a generation of dour and frightfully serious people who never
smoke or play bridge. I omit the function of entertainment only
because it has never been neglected. The supreme business of a State
is to make its people happy, strong, and prosperous. We shall approach
the ideal when we abolish war and reduce pauperism and crime by
registering all workers, organising all industry, reforming justice
and the penal system, and removing the morally diseased.
In those days education will be a vast, humane, scientific scheme for
guiding the growth of human embryos into industrious and orderly
citizens, and enabling the adult citizen pleasurably to cultivate his
mind and taste. The development of each child will be followed as the
development of a pupil is followed in the Jesuit Society, but with a
care to develop its individuality fully, in harmony with the
individualities of others. The child will not pass from the sphere of
the educator at puberty, with unformed mind and character, to swell
the great army of the intellectually listless. Ruskin's noble ideal
of "as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and
happy-hearted human creatures" will replace the narrow standards of
our Education Department, with which the child can have no sympathy.
From the first dawn of intelligence it will feel that a well-wishing
parent, the community, is training it to derive all the joy it can
from life, consistently with the joy of others and the day's duties,
when its turn comes to don the _toga virilis_. It will have learned by
that time that a development of its characteristic human powers is the
richest possession it can have, and, coming to adolescence, will not
at once cast aside the work of the teacher and dissipate its energy in
the crude indulgence of elementary passions and futile imaginings.
Neither child nor adult will shrink from work which stimulates the
intelligence or refines the taste, and a fine alert race, impatient of
untruth, injustice, and suffering, will set itself to develop fully
the resources of this planet.