THE YOUNG GENERATION AND THE OLD
"There, it is to be feared, they will find the parents most in their
way. The normal father may endure his son being taught poetry, but he
will object to the instilling of opinion other than his
own."--_Outlook_.
"Fancy some imp of fifteen or sixteen assailing the author of his
being, a court-worn barrister or 'rattled' stockbroker, at his evening
meal: 'Father, I think Lord Bryce's bill for the reform of the House of
Lords radically unsound,' or suddenly asking his mother, who, good,
easy woman, is revolving in her mind the merits of a coat and skirt she
has seen that afternoon at Debenham's: 'Mother, what is your opinion of
the Trading with the Enemy Bill?'"--_Saturday Review_.
"Youth is asking questions as never before--asking awkward, burning
questions, which put its seniors in a flutter. The seniors, under
question, discover that they have no body of doctrine, and have never
till now dreamt of the need of any. If they are wise, they will put
away the taboo on politics and sit down with their juniors to hammer
these things out, and perchance clear their own minds in the
process."--_Westminster Gazette_.
By way of epilogue--an appeal to the parents.
What is it that the parents want from the schools? The question is
all-important; for by the spiritual law of demand and supply, what they
want they will get. It has been said that every nation has the
government it deserves. So it is with the press, and so it is with the
schools: we get what we want, and what we want is what we deserve.
What do we want?
There are some parents who take the public schools quite seriously as
places of professional training, places where their sons will be taught
to earn their livings, and they are encouraged in this notion by the
fact that several professional bodies insist on successful candidature
in some pass examination in school subjects as a first step towards
entrance into the profession, and thereby rivet these examinations upon
the schools. The result is not altogether bad. The examinations make
for a deplorable ossification of the curriculum; but they also set a
certain low standard, and drive a certain type of boy and master to
work, and, though the type of work is not very exalted, it is better
than nothing at all. On the individual boy the effect will be various.
"Look here," says the house master, "there's London Matric. at the end
of next term. Hadn't you better give up all this foolery with politics
and do a little real work?" The advice was taken, and perhaps we are
not sufficiently impartial to offer a valuable opinion on the result.
However, the boy was no fool, and the first part of the advice need
never have been given. Except in the case of boys, far too numerous,
who are taking examinations that ought never to have been imposed on
them, "modern aiders" and the like who are mugging up "prepared books"
of Virgil and Euripides, work for a pass examination ought not to mean
the cessation of all other intellectual activity.
There is another much more old-fashioned type of parent who stands for
everything that is traditional, who is seriously disturbed if his boy
wanders far afield from the old classical curriculum, who regards all
new subjects as foolish fads. It is this parent, helped by an
old-fashioned type of house master, who retains in a mild torture of
boredom the boys who linger wasting their time in the lower reaches of
the classical side.
But anything is better than nothing, and the attitude of many more
parents is purely cynical. They just leave it to the schoolmaster.
"Cynical" might seem a hard word with which to repay this compliment of
trust; but it is not, for there is really no compliment and no trust.
The parent does not really believe in the school-master's judgment. He
believes in him so little that he thinks it simply does not matter what
happens in the class-room, provided the boy seems to enjoy himself--how
many parents really _know_ whether their boys do enjoy themselves at
school?--and provided the house master is not actively complaining.
Now, there is only one hope, and that is that the parents should come
to look at this matter of their son's education politically.
School-time is a training, and we are all familiar enough with the idea
of training now. Before the war, as since, schools had their O.T.C.'s.
But these O.T.C.'s were wretched perfunctory affairs, boring everybody,
because we hardly any of us seriously envisaged them as a training,
only as an incubus. Now, we all see them as training for a part that
has got to be played, and the whole spirit is different. But the
country will soon be calling upon our public school boys to play
another and perhaps even more difficult part, and where is the training
for that? When the war is won we shall plunge into another maelstrom;
and it will all be politics, politics, politics. The leaders of labour
have roughly charted their course; they mean to make a new world for
the masses whether we like it or not, and they mean in the main right.
But what part are the public school men going to play? It is an
extremely difficult position, and the difficulties crop up not only in
the details, of which only mature experience can give a knowledge, but
in the elementary principles regulating our outlook, our attitude. And
that is where the public schools could come in with irresistible effect
if only they would brace themselves to the task. "Your king and
country need you," said the old recruiting poster of 1914. "Good God!
have they never wanted me till now?" was the natural rejoinder. In any
case they will not cease to want the public school boy when the war is
over.
In this task the parents must co-operate. The normal father, we are
told, will object if his son brings home opinions other than his own.
But, in sober truth, if the son brings home the same opinions as the
fathers have always held, we are in a poor way. It was the fathers and
the grandfathers who brought the world to its present pass. It is the
sons who, starting with new principles from new beginnings, have got to
set it on a better road. The _Saturday Review_ and _The Westminster
Gazette_ offer us, in the quotations at the head of this chapter two
little vignettes of parentage. Which would you have?
The holidays occupy rather more than a quarter, and rather less than a
third of the year. If you asked what the boys do in the holidays, you
would ask a question that puzzles many boys themselves to answer. The
waste of school holidays is even more striking than the waste of school
terms. For education should not be, indeed, cannot be, limited to term
time. The proportion of boys who require "rest" in the holidays, even
for the first week or two, is small. A slack time, prolonged beyond a
week or so, bores most boys consumedly and ought to bore them all. We
are not thinking here of the favoured few who get their fill of fishing
and field sports. Such things have their limitations, perhaps, but
they offer at least a time of activity, resourcefulness, and keen
enjoyment. Most boys, however, live in quiet homes in towns, far from
the opportunity for such things, and how these pass the time is a
mystery even to themselves, as many have confessed to us. In plain
words, they _kill_ the time, and thereby acquire a most dangerous
accomplishment. Some few, it is true, make themselves endlessly useful
to their parents, and nothing could be better. But only a few homes
provide scope for an "odd-jobs man" of this type. For the bulk,
holidays are simply times of unemployment.
Now, when a schoolmaster ventures to offer advice about the holidays,
he might seem to be stepping presumptuously outside his own province;
but that plea for reticence is one we cannot admit. Term and holidays
alike are an education, and they interact upon one another so closely
that the schoolmaster not only may, but must, form his judgment upon
both. It is not for us to compile a detailed "Parent's Assistant."
Heaven forbid! Every home has its own problems and its own
opportunities, but surely there is no home in which the parents have
not a range of activities, professional, commercial, political, or
literary. So often, as it seems, from various motives, good and bad,
the boy remains more or less excluded from these long after he has
become capable of a certain partnership in his parents' interests. The
drawback of life at a public school is that it is highly artificial.
Call it as you please a barrack or a monastery, a boarding-school is
something cut off from the main streams of ordinary life. In the
holidays the boy renews contact with ordinary life, and that periodic
renewal is an essential part of his education. But surely his holidays
should bring him into contact with some more of life than its
superficial frivolities.
The kind of holidays we have in mind would make some call on the time
and energy of the parents; and perhaps it will be said that the time
and energy simply cannot be spared. Well, there was a time, fifteen
years or so before, when these same parents gave ungrudgingly any
amount of time and energy to the task of watching over the development
of the little child now rapidly approaching manhood. But the boy of
seventeen, though much more difficult to understand, is every bit as
fascinating as the child of two, and the parents' time and energy
devoted to the boy will be as certainly well spent.
And it will, we believe, bring a new happiness to many parents
themselves. As school-masters, our widest experience of parents--not
that we pretend it is very wide--is our experience of boys' talk about
their homes. Boys speak of their parents with deep affection and
respect, as a rule; but so very often they leave an impression that
they do not really know them. It is the commonest thing in the world
for fathers and sons, without any positive estrangement, to get
entirely out of touch with one another during the latter part of a
boy's school-time. The boy develops rapidly, and the greater part of
his development is quite concealed from the father. He returns home to
find his father "just the same," and apparently quite unable to divine
the new developments which the son is too proud to reveal uninvited.
Or maybe he does attempt to reveal them, and, bungling his task, finds
himself misunderstood, and lays the blame on the father. So often, as
it seems, the father might have helped matters by playing a rather more
active part, and going half, or even three-quarters, of the way to meet
his son's confidences. But there is a natural shyness of fathers
towards their sons at this stage, and shyness on one side begets
shyness and misunderstanding on the other. More than once a boy has
said to one of us, "What am I to do to get into touch with my father?
Last holidays we found we'd nothing sensible to talk to each other
about at all." It is difficult to advise, but the most obvious thing
to say is, presumably, to remind the boy that his father is but a human
being like himself; that possibly the boy is himself rather
unnecessarily enigmatic, and that instead of expecting the father to
make all the moves, the son might himself hold out a hand and help the
father to understand the changes that had taken place within him. That
is how the matter stands on the boy's side, and it may help some
fathers to know it.
One of our boys, we remember, wanted to discover something at first
hand of the real interests of employees in his father's firm. Whatever
he discovered, it made an excellent holiday interest for him. Among
other things, he attended some W.E.A. lectures, because he found that
the more intelligent men were interested by them. This was a boy of
rather unusual initiative; but we believe there are many boys who would
find a genuine interest in such matters, if the fathers gave them the
lead. Thus the wretched tradition that the holidays are for
unemployment would be gradually broken down, and games would take their
proper place--in holidays and term alike. Perhaps, too, the father on
looking back might find that there had been some "education" in it for
himself also.
The principle from which we started was that the public schools were
full of glorious possibilities, to-day largely unrealised. Is not the
same true of many homes?
APPENDIX
"It is quite evident that the boys have been encouraged to read
periodicals such as _The Nation_ and _The English Review_, and their
articles read like elaborate parodies. There is no particular harm in
allowing a clever boy to do monkey tricks of this type, but there is a
good deal of harm in printing it instead of gently deriding the
self-sufficiency of these youthful oracles."--_Church Times_.
"The most obvious fact about these articles is that the boys are
writing what they mean, and what they want to say, and that they are
able to do so because they feel sure of the community that forms their
audience."--Mr. Kenneth Richmond in _The New Age_.
[Of the three articles that follow, the first was printed in the first
issue of _The School Observer_; the second was written for the
suppressed sixth issue; the last was written on the day after the final
collapse of the whole experiment, and was, of course, never intended
for the paper at all.]
I
EDUCATION AND THE FUTURE
If workmen strike, if employers oppress, if prostitution flourishes, if
paper demagogues are allowed to rule, if poverty exists, if men fight,
whatever evil it is, the remedy lies at the root--education. All
reforms are mere palliatives until the fundamental reform of education
is perfected. There are no connecting links of argument. It is a
natural corollary, justified by any particular example that may be
traced.
It is another question whether education or lack of it is more
calculated to hasten the ultimate ideal of well-ordered anarchy, which,
consciously or unconsciously, we all entertain; but for the meanwhile
the affirmative assumption must be adopted. The sole remaining
question, then, is, By what means is education to rectify the immediate
evils?
While it is fairly generally established that the purpose of education
is efficient citizenship, it is clear that, owing to the diminished
proportion of the individual to the community, the purpose is being
gradually lost sight of. To borrow from scientific phraseology, the
tendency of the unit to remaining an "idiot" (in the Greek sense of the
word!) varies directly as the magnitude of the mass. And this is a
truism that public schools do not help to abolish. Although "school
patriotism" is invariably quoted as a denial of this, there prevails in
modern schools a definite inclination towards unsentimental cynicism in
the matter. This does not necessarily denote an unhealthy spirit, but
an increase of intellect that, whether with justification or not,
vaguely asks for something wider or more substantial.
Perhaps our grandfathers are right when they tell us that the modern
youth becomes a man sooner than his predecessors. Perhaps our
grandfathers are right when they tell us it is a pity.
However that may be, the two facts remain, that there is a rather
benighted tendency in the direction of intellectual activity, which the
public school spirit makes no effort to assist, and that the public
schools are inclined to produce gentlemen rather than citizens. Of
course the former make better advertisements. Yet they ought not to.
They would not in Germany. One day they will not here. The instance
shows that the Chestertonian "England of Romance" is really the one
that exists. The word "gentleman" is purely a romantic one, and a
gentleman a purely romantic though enviable figure. A state in the
future will not be able to thrive on gentlemen: it will need citizens.
It has cost me dear to write down this, for in my illogical mind (and
no one, by the way, save a politician, could have a logical one!) I
would choose without hesitation the gentleman. But that is probably
because, if I could, I would sell my quills for brushes.
The conclusion from all this, then, is that I was not holding Germany
up as a paragon just now, but leading up to an obvious improvement--a
gentleman-citizen. Whoever thinks he fulfils the conditions implicated
in the _rôle_ may know that not only is he an uncommon and a great man,
but also the embodiment of a high, practicable ideal; in the attainment
of which lies the solution of the whole educational question--how, of
the two component parts, to maintain the moral position of the first
and create one for the second.
Except for the few, favoured with a productive imagination, the public
school can as yet do nothing in this direction. It would be useless,
for instance, to crowd a dull, technical science of politics on an
already over-amended curriculum. One day it may not be useless. But
until a new species of governess can be bred, it is. Of the species in
question, I know of one example. There may be more, but not many,
though of course they are, I am aware, rapidly multiplying. The only
possible children's governess is the governess who attempts to teach
nothing except how to learn. The ideal education is undoubtedly an _à
la carte_ one, but as this is impossible both physically and because a
public school master has not the time to find out how to teach any
particular boy, the difficulty is solved if the boy has found out how
to learn from any particular master.
A man's life depends altogether on the first morsel of education he
receives, so that a governess's responsibility is colossal. And, of
course, a competent governess is a far holier thing than any parson's
wife. Not only must she teach not so much what he will have to learn
(which would scarcely encourage him in view of its magnitude) as how he
will have to learn (which could only make him eager to put the theory
to the test of practice--all the more so when he finds it succeeds),
but also she must attempt to discover and develop, even at this very
early stage, the seeds of mental independence and originality, which
alone can make him a competent citizen. Think how much easier
legislation would be in a state composed of such as these! It is the
only condition that really justifies democracy. There could be no
question of denying a people of this quality a voice in their own
government. Representation could no longer be a game for gamblers and
contortionists.
As things are, however, the progress of the public schools (and I have
been dealing exclusively with public-school classes) cannot make much
headway until they have clay to mould instead of granite to chisel. It
is not their fault if there is no way to teach the majority, and if the
few are thrown back on their own inadequate resources. The remedy lies
in some measure to ensure the right primary education. Seventy-five
per cent. of the public school boys have not had brilliant, discerning
governesses--or even mothers. There are not enough of either to go
round. So that the seventy-five per cent., possibly more, don't know
how to learn, and the mere twenty-five per cent. do. It is hard to
tackle effectively so intangible a problem as the correct primary
method of teaching, and the statesman, through whose instrumentality
this percentage is reversed, may give up politics for gold not had
brilliant, discerning governesses with a clear conscience. The first
step, therefore, is to reform the education of women. "Take care of
the women, the men will take care of themselves."
Nevertheless, be the solution what it may, the importance of the
subject cannot be over-estimated. One more illustration. The better
educated a man is, the more capable he is of soaring above the spirit
of national citizenship....
And the next stage is the spirit of world citizenship ... which, in the
course of many, many years, together, possibly, with the development of
Esperanto, means the brotherhood of men....
Then perpetual peace....
Then advancement to a primitive condition....
Then the much-dreamed-of well-ordered anarchy....
To continue till a second Milton is called upon to write as misty
history a second "Paradise Lost." ...
B.W.L.
II
"And He saw that it was good...."
Throughout the Universe which He had created He set a Great Road, and
on it was Man, at first invisible, but soon an infinite multitude. And
then unto Man, as to nothing else in His Universe, He gave the power to
move, and to walk on the Road, which He made to pass through all the
Great and Beautiful Worlds, coming at last to where He is, where all is
happy because all is good, and where nothing ends because there is the
End. And as He looked and beheld Man scattered out upon the great Road
as it wound about through the Universe, He thought to try His people,
and show by a certain proof whether they were possessed of the goodness
through which alone they could comprehend all things, and become able
to enter the realm of perfect goodness. And so He sent the semblance
of a great Fire into the Universe, which should seem utterly to destroy
all things which He had made, and to cut off the hope and possibility
of a future perception and life eternal.
* * * * *
As the fire rolls on, devouring all that it meets, humanity on the Road
sees its advance, and realises that in the course of a few hours the
Universe will be reduced to a smouldering cinder, that its hopes for a
future life, where the Road ends, is cut short and never to be
realised, and that apparently its former belief, albeit a vague and
ill-defined one, in a God who is all-merciful and kind, was altogether
an illusion, and merely a cause for false confidence and
self-righteousness. And how will it stand the test? Would the good or
the bad element in human nature assert itself in the face of absolute
annihilation? It is obvious that with such a position several of the
possible and no doubt ordinary motives for goodness, such as the idea
of doing good in order to reap benefits or escape punishment in a
future existence, and of doing good for the sake of having it
recognised among others, are excluded from the proposition. Even the
idea of doing good because it is in accordance with a "will of God" is
excluded, since the idea of destruction coming from the direction of
the End is unheard of to man, and is in direct contradiction to his
ideas of God. We are brought, therefore, down to the very foundation;
and the question we have to answer becomes--Is one of the elements of
human nature a feeling of necessity to pursue goodness for its own
sake, quite apart from any motives?
In the first place, when a supreme danger such as that already
described is rapidly approaching humanity, if such a thing could be,
what would be the immediate result? We know that with the ordinary
dangers, such as shipwreck and air-raid, the tendency among people
gathered together in large numbers is to panic, to herd together and
become temporarily deprived of normal reasoning powers. Would this be
the result of the sight of approaching universal destruction? Surely
not. Panic is the result, I believe, not of approaching danger simply,
but necessarily of a danger which threatens to affect some of a number
of people more than others, and which there is a possibility of
avoiding. It is entirely the element of uncertainty or suspense which
causes panic among numbers of people. Now this is an important point
in the argument. It seems very easy to defeat it on the grounds that
animals almost invariably herd together and panic in the face of
danger, and that such action cannot be due to the element of
uncertainty and suspense, since this necessitates the employment of
calculative and reasoning faculties which animals presumably do not
possess. The justification is to be found in a closer examination of
the part played by the uncertainty in producing the panic which is
common to men and animals. In the face of danger, as in everything
else, man's first instinct is to reason and calculate, and his
calculation results in finding the danger either avoidable and
uncertain, which is almost always the case, or unavoidable and
inevitable. If the danger is found avoidable, fear is the immediate
result. Fear as we know it has come into being with reason, but at the
same time, as will be seen later, it is only reason which can triumph
over and destroy fear. This fear then brings about the destruction of
reason, and the animal standard is reached, from which time the man
behaves in the same way as the animals, to whom the danger is merely
something out of the ordinary. He then comes under the domination of
the instinct to panic. It will thus be seen that all the mental
processes which came before the reversion to the animal standard in
men, are unknown to animals, and are the outcome of the purely human
faculty of reason. However, if reason can by any means retain its
foothold and its entirety, there will neither be fear nor the
consequent breakdown of reason and the domination of panic. Now this
is the position in the other case, the case in which reason finds the
danger unavoidable. In the case of a danger which is unavoidable there
will be no panic. It is this fact which accounts for the bravery of
numbers of people going to their death on board a sinking ship; but
such a position has never--or very seldom, indeed--avoided a relapse,
to a certain extent, to panic, inasmuch as there is a possibility of
avoiding the danger, and a possibility that some may survive, while
others are doomed to perish.
In the face of universal destruction, therefore, there will be no fear
and no panic. The fact that he is facing annihilation together with
the rest of humanity would have an extraordinary influence on each
individual, which, of course, would be just the same if he alone was
aware of the danger. I remember very well an evening at school when I
was told and convinced by several boys older than myself that (I even
remember the date) on June 18th the earth was going to be destroyed.
It had been proved, I was told, beyond the shadow of a doubt that on
that particular date some natural phenomenon would take place which
would inevitably entail the destruction of everything living on the
earth. This forms an interesting parallel to the present case; for at
the time I was only about eight years old, and I had very scanty ideas
about God and future life. To me the earth was the Universe. And,
furthermore, for about an hour most of us thoroughly believed that the
destruction of the earth, or the End of the World as we called it, was
at hand. Of course, it might be said that there is no real parallel,
since we were only children; but I believe that argument to be
absolutely fallacious. In the matter of fundamental tendencies and
characteristics of human nature one cannot assume such divisions.
Since the present state of good and evil in human nature has taken
thousands of years to become evolved, it seems unlikely that there can
be caused in the individual at present any fundamental change. I
therefore contend that as soon as personality and independence of
character becomes evident in the individual, both the good and the evil
in his nature will be present in the same way and in the same relation,
although not necessarily in the same proportions or degrees, as they
will be throughout the greater part of his life. This personality
becomes evident without any doubt at a very early age, certainly by the
age of eight; and in so far as the development of good and evil is
dependent upon the development of character, it seems likely that these
elements will be more clearly marked in the child of eight than in the
second infancy of the man of eighty.
To return to the personal incident. I recall very vividly now the
half-hour which followed my conviction of Universal destruction, and,
of course, I realise my actual feelings and their probable causes more
clearly now than I did at the time. The real force of my conviction
only lasted for about an hour, but in that time, and aided no doubt by
a rather strained imagination, I was, I feel convinced, in the same
position as any one of the individuals on that great Road as they see
the Fire approaching and devouring the entire Universe.
As the affair was being explained to me I remember I was terrified, but
very soon, and as soon as I realised the situation, which it must be
remembered the people on the Road would do almost instantaneously, this
feeling entirely left me. And the next feeling, a very forcible one,
was rather extraordinary, being as it was an overpowering feeling of
solitude. It was evening, and twenty or thirty of us were all in a
large classroom together, and for many minutes I felt more lonely than
I ever had before; I felt cut off from all those around me, and I see
that, as Peer Gynt would have said, "I had become myself." As has
already been said, I was not frightened, and what I did in those
minutes was to work. It was "prep-time," and it is an interesting
fact, as bearing out what has already been said both about the
establishment of individuality with consequent opportunities of
concentration, and also about the maintenance of reason, that I was
able to "do" in those minutes, and do better than usual, the work that
generally demanded more than the allotted hour.
Very soon, however, the feeling of solitude passed away and its place
was taken by a feeling of exactly the opposite nature, a feeling of
Unity, of extraordinary fellowship, followed by a wonderful sensation
of happiness. All this sounds rather grotesque, and the continued use
of these rather meaningless epithets is very ineffectual in expressing
what they are meant to convey. But it must be remembered that the
position is altogether an extraordinary one; and the feelings and
sensations resulting from such a position were extraordinary at the
time and still are extraordinary. The position seems quite unique; it
is difficult to imagine where and how else that same mental condition
could be produced: older people would not have credited the story even
for the short time that we did, and younger children would not have had
the independence of thought and imagination to picture and contemplate
the situation. At the time it was my good fortune to experience things
which I have never experienced before or since, and which I believe few
ever have experienced.
However, you ask for a return to the question of whether goodness is an
immanent reality in human nature; you ask perhaps, in view of the
incident described, "If it had been in your power to do something at
that time which was supremely pleasurable but at the same time contrary
to your moral ideas, would you have done it?" The answer, which is
mainly contained in or drawn from what has gone before is--No; and the
direct reason is, because, in the conditions produced by the position
described, nothing but what is good remains in the human nature. The
bed-rock has been reached, and it is good; the causes of evil and of
its continuance are removed.
Ever since man has led a corporate life it seems probable that one
outstanding evil has prevailed, in greater or less degrees according to
the rate and amount of progress made by any community. And this evil
is the lack and suppression of individuality. It seems impossible to
account for it, except by simply saying that it is, and has always been
a characteristic tendency of human nature; however, this is the most
encouraging answer possible, because it assumes that this evil can
eventually be eradicated. No one can surely deny that there is a lack
of individuality at present; its chief manifestations, of course, are
to be found in hatred, and in the spirit of competition and rivalry; it
produces a clash between individual opinions and actions which is so
apparent that it cannot be denied, and need not be enlarged upon. But,
apart from these more obvious manifestations, this failing has been
responsible for the production and continuance of _all_ that is evil in
man. Human nature is the foundation of our life, of that foundation
every individual is entitled to partake; and, furthermore, that
foundation is good. Every individual possesses a portion of this
foundation as his right; and what is the result, under these
circumstances, of lack of individuality? Surely the result is that
some parts of those individual sections, parts which are in some cases
similar to and in other cases different from parts of other individual
sections, are used as the foundation, while the remainder is left
unused. For, for the most part, men either employ those parts of their
portion of the foundation of goodness which are common to as many other
individual sections as possible, or, like Alceste, the parts which are
definitely opposed to most others. In any case where the foundation is
undeveloped and unused there grows, like a poisonous growth, sin, which
is made of and feeds upon the material of the good foundation, which
has been put to the wrong use. Sin and evil are not separate, in the
strict sense, from good. It seems inconceivable that good and evil
should have had different origins, and should have existed as rival
elements in human nature without the one having by this time triumphed
over the other.
In matters which affect every member of a body similarly, the combined
influence of all those members should be brought to bear; but where
every individual can "be himself" and interpret and use his portion of
the foundation of goodness in the complete way for which he was made
and intended, without affecting others, he should be allowed to
influence them or be influenced by them, without interference on the
part of any other individual. Since this has not been the case, we
have had the continuance of sin, and until it is the case, there always
will be sin.
Now, in the position described, complete individuality is established
and evil ceases to exist and becomes a thing of the past. With the
near prospect of universal destruction, there is immediately a
cessation of progress; and then, as in the incident described, there
comes complete individuality--every individual becomes himself. With a
common destruction inevitable and with the establishment of
individuality, co-operation in its true sense prevails, and with it the
surpassing and disappearance of evil; and then that wonderful happiness
... of all this I am convinced. I remember well the effect for an hour
or so among a few of us that evening. The contrast between the
atmosphere in the little room in which the most impressed of us
gathered during that time, which was free, I know, from everything but
good, and that of a day or two later when we made fun of the whole
affair, is so marked that my opinion on the matter is very definite.
Goodness alone there was at the beginning, and goodness alone there
will be at the end. No man is the cause of his own downfall, but he
alone as an individual can be the maintainer of his foothold.
Individuality in all that concerns the individual, alone can make and
keep life clean and sweet. If this individuality could, by such means
as education, be established, there would be constituted a _uniting_
force through humanity which could lead it, in the course of time, in
the way it should go.
* * * * *
And as He raised the semblance of the Fire from the Universe, He looked
upon Man and saw that he was good.
J. A. A. J.
III
THE DREAM
How much of our life seems and is a dream! How often we feel ourselves
carried off our feet and borne along on a tide of circumstances, tossed
backwards and forwards on a sea of conflicting events, now hurried
along by a current of opinion, now blinded with the spray of false
accusation, then motionless for a moment, trying to collect our
shattered thoughts before the next onslaught: but all the time out of
touch, consciously, with what is going on, utterly powerless, trying to
gather up the threads and recover consciousness. Any action that we
take, any word that we utter, is done without thought, without
knowledge, and without any result. And yet neither the cause nor the
effect are, strictly speaking, physical. The position is a mental
attitude, in this case mental helplessness, and this is dependent
solely upon the relation of the mind to exterior circumstances. When
we are fully conscious, we are ourselves each the centre of a little
world, which includes all that concerns us, and the appearance of this
depends entirely upon its particular meaning for us. We do not,
cannot, under these circumstances, see anything exactly as it is: its
appearance is influenced by its importance for us or by the degree of
approval, or disapproval which we ourselves attach to it. When our
life becomes a dream, our sphere is broken into and usurped by the
changing of values, shapes, and appearance of things within it. The
old familiar forms are transfigured and tampered with, our mistaken or
incomplete idea of persons is revealed, and a host of new and
inexplicable forms appear; with the result that we are literally
bewildered, and instead of regarding things with reference to their
influence upon us, we see things as they are in themselves--when we can
see at all--and feel what they actually do to us.
There can be no one who is not aware of this experience, in a greater
or a less degree. I speak of it as dreaming because that is the
analogy which best represents the circumstances, all of which have been
explained except one. In the same way as we are not conscious that
what we have been dreaming is a dream until we awake, so in these
periods of our actual life in which we are deprived of will and are
borne along by exterior circumstances and forces, we are not aware of
our helplessness, of our utter weakness, of the significance of what we
have seen and heard, until we have regained consciousness and woken
again to our freedom.
In this sense I have recently had a dream, and only since have I
realised that what I dreamt was fact; and then I was able to place it
all within my sphere--its ideas, its causes, and its effects have
become or are becoming the familiar forms and shapes, in the midst of
which I am, like a spider at the centre of its web, placed with my
hands on every thread. And this is that dream.
Full of life and happiness I set out with another, one who was a friend
and had lived with me for a time, sharing the same hopes, methods, and
ideals. Laughing as we went, with the smiling world around us and the
glad faces of those we knew, we made our way to the house of one who,
older than ourselves, had inspired and befriended in us those hopes and
ideals. And there we learnt from him that the authorities of the
community, the institution to which we belonged, had taken offence at
our methods and by suppressing them had destroyed our aims and all that
was most dear to us. As we sat there in silence, my mind cast back
over the time--it was little more than a year--since our outlook had
been entirely changed. I saw the school a throbbing piece of mechanism
with its bells, its clocks, and its governors, set down in a place of
great beauty. Blind to anything of beauty, it worked with a rhythm and
a precision which became a twentieth-century development (although it
had been set up in 1557, and was still running on very nearly its
original lines--which was the reason, so they say, of why it "worked"
so "well"). I saw it at work and was myself made part of its raw
material. Into its hungry mouth there went childhood at its best, full
of energy, with every kind of ability, talent and promise, enterprise
and ambition; through its teeth, its moulds, and its classrooms they
passed, until they issued from the end a single and singular type of
humanity, moulded, stamped, docketed and numbered--to take their place,
or rather, and this is the saddest note of all, their very numerous and
different places in the world.
While this was passing through my mind we got up and went out for a
walk.
And then there came the War, and the men and institutions of Europe
were put to a supreme test. And the immediate result was that men
began to think, began to look about them, and realising the palpable
evil of war, began to wonder whether they had not been mistaken in
their values and systems. Men soon came to realise that they did not
fulfil their entire duty if they followed as nearly as possible in the
footsteps of their great-grandfathers, but that as the world moved it
behoved them to move; that each man is made with the possibility of
every attitude and achievement as seeds within him; that circumstances
alone had caused him to live on some of these and not on others; that
intolerance was therefore a crime of the most unpardonable character;
that it was wrong and unprofitable to let one's self be borne along on
the surface of the world's tide--and that it was every man's duty to
use the world as he finds it for the development and fulfilment of all
that is best within him, and not to depend upon one thing and reject
another, favour one opinion, and oppose or even disregard another. And
those in the school who first realised this, determined not to submit
to the guiding and moulding of this mechanical institution, but to look
at the world around and outside them--its beauty, its methods, its
effects, its possibility, its wonder and its joy, and to develop for
themselves, under the guidance and suggestion of those whom they
trusted, their own powers, with their own principles to guide them and
their own aims to reach.
And in the carrying out of this plan and in the suggesting of it to
others and in witnessing the results in others and in the institution
to which they belonged, they, and later I and all those who followed
them, found great happiness--a happiness which I felt could come from
nowhere else, and certainly a happiness such as I had never before
experienced. A greater facility in all intellectual activity, and in
avoiding and fighting everything which one felt to be wrong, a greater
confidence, and determination through self-dependence in all things,
are some of the natural immediate fruits of a self-conceived basis of
thought and action which refused to accept blindly everything that was
handed down or dealt out.
The permanent results in the shape of statistics and concrete evidence
are proof and witness to the rightness of the undertaking. But now it
is all of the past--the reasons are irrelevant; suffice it that they
are iniquitous, and more than iniquitous, since they have murdered what
is right.
And now we had come, after passing through a great field of green corn
rustling in the light wind, to a fence, on which we sat. My
retrospective thoughts had now caught up to the present--but I was
still dreaming. All that I thought was unconscious, out of my control
and wonderful. Our attempt had been very beautiful, had been a work of
art, and in many ways had come to a beautiful and artistic end. Like a
great and wonderful bubble, wrought in many and enchanting colours, it
rose up complete at that moment from its birthplace and deathbed--and I
was happy again.
Then from the place down below us--that place in which we had striven
and apparently failed--I seemed to hear the voice of those who opposed
and hated us in our ways--those who were making the school into a
machine again--and were rejoicing in it, as they pumped in the oil:
"The Germans are verrmin--it is your work in life to _krrussch_ them!"
And at that very moment there came by three German prisoners--passed
us, jumped over the fence and were gone; but the likeness! it was more
than striking; never, never shall I forget it--and I was convinced.
The school, its very self, its soul, had struggled to its feet, and as
a little child was taking its first conscious steps--the most
beautiful, perhaps, that it was ever destined to take--when they, those
mechanicians, with their mailed fists smote it in the face, crushed it
heartlessly to the ground, with Louvain and Belgium not only before
their eyes but on their very lips.
"Oh, this world is a rotten place," he said, at my side.
"I wonder," I murmured in reply, and I still do....
J. A. A. J.