Leaving now the external survey of the city by help of its material
framework, its characteristic buildings and predominant styles, for the
deeper psychological survey of the citizens themselves, we may
conveniently begin with these also in their process of development--in
fact, our method compels us to this course. We enter then a school; and
if we bring fresh eyes we may soon be agreed that the extraordinary
babel of studies its time-table and curriculum reveal, is intelligible
from no single one of the various [Page: 112] geographic or historic
points of view we have traversed from mountain to sea, or from past to
present. But this unprecedented conflict of studies becomes at once
intelligible when viewed apart from any and every definite theory of
education yet promulgated by educationists, and even acquires a fresh
theory of its own--that of the attempted recapitulation of the survivals
of each and all preceding periods in their practical or speculative
aspects, particularly the later legends and literatures, their rituals
and codes. Thus, the inordinate specialisation upon arithmetic, the
exaggeration of all three R's, is plainly the survival of the demand for
cheap yet efficient clerks, characteristic of the recent and
contemporary financial period.
The ritual of examinations with its correlation of memorising and
muscular drill is similarly a development of the imperial order,
historically borrowed from the Napoleonic one; the chaotic "general
knowledge" is similarly a survival of the encyclopædic period; that is,
of the French Revolution and the Liberal Movement generally; the Latin
grammar and verses are of course the survivals of the Renaissance, as
the precise fidelity to absurd spelling is the imitation of its proof
readers; the essay is the abridged form of the mediaeval disputation;
and only such genuine sympathy with Virgil or Tacitus, with Homer or
Plato as one in a thousand acquires, is truly Roman or Greek at all.
The religious instruction, however, re-interpreted by the mediaeval
Church or the Reformation, has still its strength in some of the best
elements of patriarchal literature; while the fairy tale, by which all
this superincumbent weight of learning is sometimes alleviated, is the
child's inheritance from the matriarchal order. Finally, the apple and
the ball, at the bottom of this whole burden of books, complete the
recapitulation; as the one, the raw fruit; the other, the ready missile,
of primeval man. Our child then is heir of all the ages more fully than
he or his teachers commonly realise. The struggle for mastery of the
schools is thus no temporary feud, but an unending battle; one destined
to increase rather than diminish; for in this there is the perpetual
clash of all the forces of good heredity and evil atavism, of all the
new variations also, healthy or diseases.
[Page: 113] D--THE APPLIED SOCIOLOGY OF THE PRESENT
The city and its children thus historically present a thoroughly
parallel accumulation of survivals or recapitulations of the past in the
present. Few types nowadays are pure, that is, keep strictly to their
period; we are all more or less mixed and modernised. Still, whether by
temporal or spiritual compulsion, whether for the sake of bread or
honour, each mainly and practically stands by his order, and acts with
the social formation he belongs to. Thus now the question of the
practical civics, that is, of the applied sociology, of each individual,
each body or interests may be broadly defined; it is to emphasise his
particular historic type, his social formation and influence in the
civic whole, if not indeed to dominate this as far as may be. We are all
for progress, but we each define it in his own way. Hence one man of
industrial energy builds more factories or slums, another as naturally
more breweries to supply them; and in municipal or national council his
line of action, conscious or unconscious, remains congruent with these.
Representative government fails to yield all that its inventors hoped of
it, simply because it is so tolerably representative of its majorities;
and there is thus great truth in the common consolation that our
municipal governments, like larger ones, are seldom much worse than we
deserve. Each social formation, through each of its material activities,
exerts its influence upon the civic whole; and each of its ideas and
ideals wins also its place and power. At one time the legal and
punitive point of view, directing itself mainly to individual cases, or
the philanthropic, palliating sufferings, dispute the foremost places;
and now in their turn hygienic or educational endeavours arise, towards
treating causes instead of waiting for consequences. Such endeavours are
still undeniably too vague in thought, too crude in practice, and the
enthusiast of hygiene or education or temperance may have much to answer
for. But so, also, has he who stands outside of the actual civic field,
whether as philistine or aesthete, utopist or cynic, party politician or
"mug-wump." Between all these extremes it is for the united forces of
civic survey and civic service to find the middle course. [Page: 114] We
observe then in the actual city, as among its future citizens, that our
action is generally the attempt to mould both alike to some past or
passing social formation, and, therefore, usually towards the type to
which our interest and our survey incline, be this in our own city or
more probably in some earlier one. Even in the actual passing detail of
party politics we are often reminded how directly continuous are the
rivals with puritan London, with royalist Oxford; but still more is this
the case throughout the history of thought and action, and the intenser
the more plainly; for it is in his highest moments of conviction and
decision that the Puritan feels most in sympathy with the law or the
prophets of Jerusalem, the scholar with Athens; or that the man of
action--be he the first French republican or the latest
imperialist--most frankly draws his inspiration from the corresponding
developments of Paris. It is a commonplace of psychology that our
thought is and must be anthropomorphic; a commonplace of history that it
has been Hebraomorphic, Hellenomorphic, Latinomorphic, and so on by
turns.
This view has often been well worked out by the historian of inventions
and discoveries, of customs or laws, of policies or religions, as by the
historian of language or the fine arts. What we still commonly need,
however, is to carry this view clearly into our own city and its
institutions, its streets and schools and homes, until either in the
private spending or public voting of the smallest sum we know exactly
whether we are so far determining expenditure and influence towards
enlarging, say, the influence and example of renascent Florence in one
generation or of decadent Versailles in another. There is no danger of
awaking this consciousness too fully; for since we have ceased
consciously to cite and utilise the high examples of history we have
been the more faithfully, because sub-consciously and automatically,
continuing and extending later and lower developments.