"Well, anyhow," said Vincent at dinner, commenting on something that had
been said, "you may not get anything else out of a disagreeable affair like
that, but you get a sort of discipline."
"Come, hold on," said Father Payne; "that won't do, you know! Discipline,
in my belief, is in itself a bad thing, unless you not only get something
out of it, but, what is more, know what you get out of it. You can't
discipline anyone, unless he desires it! Discipline means the repressing of
something--you must be quite sure that it is worth repressing."
"What I mean," said Vincent, "is that it makes you tougher and harder."
"Yes," said Father Payne, "but that is not a good thing in itself, unless
there is something soft and weak in you. Discipline may easily knock the
good things out of you. There's a general kind of belief that, because the
world is a rough place, where you may get tumbles and shocks without any
fault of your own, therefore it is as well to have something rough about
you. I don't believe in that. The reason why a man gets roughly handled, in
nine cases out of ten, is not because he is obnoxious or offensive, but
because other people are harsh and indifferent. I want to apply discipline
to the brutal, not to brutalise the sensitive. If discipline simply made
people brave and patient, it would be different, but it often makes them
callous and unpleasant."
"But doesn't everyone want discipline of some kind?" said Vincent.
"Of the right kind, yes," said Father Payne. "Some people want a good deal
more than they get, and some a certain amount less than they get. It's a
delicate business. It is not always fortifying. Take a simple case. A bold,
brazen sort of boy who is untruthful may want a whipping; but a timid and
imaginative boy who is untruthful doesn't necessarily want a whipping at
all--it makes him more, and not less, timid. One of the most ridiculous and
persistent blunders in human life is to believe that a certain penalty is
divinely appointed for a certain offence. Our theory of punishment is all
wrong; we inflict punishment, as a rule, not to improve an offender, but
out of revenge, or because it gives us a comfortable sense of our own
justice. And the whole difficulty of discipline is that it is apt to be
applied in lumps, and distributed wholesale to people who don't all want
the same amount. We haven't really got very far away from the Squeers
theory of giving all the boys brimstone and treacle alike."
"Yes, but in a school," said Vincent, "would not the boys themselves resent
it, if they were punished differently for the same offence?"
"That is to say," said Father Payne, "that you are to treat boys, whom you
are supposed to be training, in accordance with their ideas of justice, and
not in accordance with yours! Why should you confirm them in a wholly
erroneous view of justice? Justice isn't a mathematical thing--or rather,
it ought to be a mathematical thing, because you ought to take into account
a lot of factors, which you simply omit from your calculation. I believe
very little in punishment, to tell you the truth; it ought only to be
inflicted after many warnings, when the offence is deliberately repeated. I
don't believe that the sane and normal person is a habitual and deliberate
offender. The kind of absence of self-restraint which makes people unable
to resist temptation, in any form, is a disease, and ought to be
segregated. I haven't the slightest doubt that we shall end by segregating
or sterilising the person of criminal tendencies, which only means a total
inability, in the presence of a temptation, to foresee consequences, and
which gratifies a momentary desire."
"But apart from definite moral disease," said Vincent, "isn't it a good
thing to compel people, if possible, into a certain sort of habit? I am
speaking of faults which are not criminal--things like unpunctuality,
laziness, small excesses, mild untrustworthiness, and so forth."
"Well, I don't personally believe in coercive discipline at all," said
Father Payne. "I think it simply gets people out of shape. I believe in
trying to give people a real motive for self-discipline: take
unpunctuality, for instance. The only way to make an unpunctual person
punctual is to convince him that it is rude and unjust to keep other people
waiting. There is nothing sacred about punctuality in itself, unless some
one else suffers by your being unpunctual. If it comes to that, isn't it
quite as good a discipline for punctual people to learn to wait without
impatience for the unpunctual? Supposing an unpunctual person were to say,
'I do it on principle, to teach precise people not to mind waiting,' where
is the flaw in that? Take what you call laziness. Some people work better
by fits and starts, some do better work by regularity. The point is to know
how you work best. You must not make the convenience of average people into
a moral law. The thing to aim at is that a man should not go on doing a
thing which he honestly believes to be wrong and hurtful, out of a mere
habit. Take the small excesses of which you speak--food, drink, sleep,
tobacco. Some people want more of these things than others; you can't lay
down exact laws. A man ought to find out precisely what suits him best; but
I'm not prepared to say that regularity in these matters is absolutely good
for everyone. The thing is not to be interfered with by your habits; and
the end of all discipline is, I believe, efficiency, vitality, and freedom;
but it is no good substituting one tyranny for another. I was reading the
life of a man the other day who simply could not believe that anyone could
think a thing wrong and yet do it. His biographer said, very shrewdly, that
his sense of sin was as dead as his ear for music--that he did not possess
even the common liberty of right and wrong. That's a bad case of atrophy!
You must not, of course, be at the mercy of your moods, but you must not be
at the mercy of your ethical habits either. Of the two, I am not sure that
the habit isn't the most dangerous."
"You seem to be holding a brief all round, Father," said Vincent.
"No, I am not doing that," said Father Payne, "but my theory is this. You
must know, first of all, what you are aiming at, and you must apply your
discipline sensibly to that. There are certain things in us which we know
to be sloppy--we lie in bed, we dawdle, we eat too much, we moon over our
work. All that is obviously no good, and all sensible people try to pull
themselves up. When you have found out what suits you, do it boldly; but
the man who admires discipline for its own sake is a sort of
hypochondriac--a medicine-drinker. I have a friend who says that if he
stays in a house, and sees a bottle of medicine in a cupboard, he is always
tempted to take a dose. 'Is it that you feel ill?' I once said to him.
'No,' he said; 'but I have an idea that it might do me good.' The
disciplinarian is like that: he is always putting a little strain upon
himself, cutting off this and that, trying new rules, heading himself off.
He has an uneasy feeling that if he likes anything, it is a sort of sign
that he should abstain from it: he mistrusts his impulses and instincts. He
thinks he is getting to talk too much, and so he practises holding his
tongue. The truth is that he is suspicious of life. He is like the
schoolmaster who says, 'Go and see what Jack is doing, and tell him not
to!' Of course I am taking an extreme case, but there is a tendency in that
direction in many people. They think that strength means the power to
resist, when it really means the power to flow. I do not think that people
ought to be deferential to criticism, timid before rebuke, depressed by
disapproval: and, on the whole, I believe that more harm is done by
self-repression, obedience, meekness than by the opposite qualities. I want
men to live their own lives fearlessly--not offensively, of course--with a
due regard to other people's comfort, but without any regard to other
people's conventions. I believe in trusting yourself, on the whole, and
trusting the world. I do not think it is wholesome or brave to live under
the shadow of other people's fears or other people's convictions. All the
people, it seems to me, who have done anything for the world, have been the
people who have gone their own way; and I think that self-discipline, or
external discipline meekly accepted, ends in a flattening out of men's
power and character. Of course you fellows here are learning to do a
definite technical thing--but you will observe that all the discipline here
is defensive, and not coercive. I don't want you to take any shape or
mould: I want you just to learn to do things in your own way. I don't ever
want you to interfere with each other's minds too much. I don't want to
interfere with your minds myself, except in so far as to help you to get
rid of sloppiness and prejudices. Here, I mustn't go on--it's becoming like
a prospectus! but it comes to this, that I believe in the trained mind, and
not in the moulded mind; and I think that the moment discipline ceases to
train strength, and begins to mould weakness, it's a thoroughly bad thing.
No one can be artificially protected from life without losing life--and
life is what I am out for."