THE DESTRUCTION OF GENIUS
Most people labour under the delusion that genius only makes its
appearance twice or thrice during a generation. It is certainly the fact
that a Napoleon, a Shakespeare, or a Beethoven, is only born once in a
century; and colossal intellects such as these are rightly regarded as
unnatural phenomena. But genius of a less high order is far more common
than is generally supposed. People are simply blind to it. Although it
surrounds them on all sides, they fail to recognise it. And nearly
everybody is busily engaged in helping to destroy it, with a perversity
that is as unconscious as it is criminal.
Those who have had the opportunity of observing the mental development
of an intelligent child that has not been subjected to the ordinary
processes of teaching, must have been struck with the originality of its
mind. If children are left to themselves, they will breed ideas at an
astonishing rate. Give an imaginative child of five or six some simple
object, such as a button or a piece of tape, and it will weave round it
a web of romance that would put many a poet or author to shame.
Naturally brought up children will chatter fascinating nonsense to the
very motes that float in a sunbeam; they will spin an Odyssey out of the
most trivial incident that has chanced to impress them. Every
commonplace object will be invested by them with mysterious and
fantastic attributes. When left to observe facts for themselves, they
will develop powers of reasoning and logic which no amount of cramming
and caning would ever succeed in driving into them.
There are probably few parents who have not been startled, at some
period or another, by hearing from the lips of a child an original
reflection that exhibited an unexpected degree of mental development.
Did it ever occur to them that some intellectual process must have been
going on in the child's mind to produce such powers of observation or
thought? There is a fallacious notion, founded upon pure want of
observation, that human beings are unable to form ideas or to think for
themselves until they have been put through an elaborate course of
mental gymnastics. A great deal of the process misnamed education is
directed towards this end, with the result that in nine cases out of ten
the brain is simply paralyzed and rendered incapable of performing its
proper functions.
The fact is, that people, whether young or old, cannot be forced to
think. It is a habit that must come of its own accord, and that can only
be stimulated by the most delicately-applied influences. Observant and
reflective parents, who have not chosen to leave the entire development
and upbringing of their children in the hands of nurses, will have
noticed that there is a natural tendency on the part of a child, if not
interfered with, to think and to expand its faculty of imagination. This
tendency is not shared to an equal extent by all children; there are, of
course, dissimilarities caused by varying degrees of intelligence. But
it is there, in however rudimentary and undeveloped a stage; and the
more backward it appears to be, the more care should be taken not to
destroy it or to check its natural growth.
Now, the whole machinery of education is brought to bear, from the
moment the child is of an age to receive any instruction, to strangle
the development of the thinking and imaginative faculties. That process
will be described presently. What I wish to point out first is that,
long before the school or the governess commences this operation, the
parents of the child, or those to whom they have delegated the duty of
taking charge of it during the tenderest and most momentous years of its
existence, are generally engaged in doing everything they can to bring
about the same pernicious result.
Of course the evil is committed in sheer ignorance. But it has been bred
for so many generations that individual judgment and common sense must
every day be becoming more rare. Therefore the evil spreads, and people
blame the introduction of railways and other mechanical improvements for
the diminishing supply of artistic and creative genius, whilst they are
in reality themselves busily employed in stifling its development.
There are two ways in which this unhappy result is brought about. In
the first place, there is the invariable custom of giving young children
toys which, far from stimulating the imagination, only serve to impress
upon their minds the commonplace facts of everyday life. It is really,
only in a different form, a part of the process by which, later on, the
education system drives out ideas and crams in facts.
To take a concrete instance, a doll is the plaything usually given to
little girls. At first sight nothing can appear more charming or
instructive than the gift to a little girl, who will one day be a wife
and a mother, of the miniature representation of a baby. There will be a
bath provided, in which she may learn to wash it. Everything will be
complete--soap, sponge, loofah, puff-box, and powder. The present will
be accompanied by a _layette_, so that the child may learn to dress her
infant and to change its clothes. Hair-brushes will teach her to keep
the doll's hair neat; and probably a dozen other toilet requisites, of
which the masculine mind has no notion or is expected to affect
ignorance, will be found ready at hand to inculcate the lesson of
nursery routine.
In this ingenious way the materialistic side of life is deliberately
forced upon the attention of the child. Everything is providently
supplied that would be calculated to occupy her attention with
commonplace facts instead of with fancies. The child is not encouraged
to make a living creature of this inanimate dummy, to tell it stories,
or to exercise her imagination in some other way. She is provided with a
round of prosaic and extremely material duties, and her mind is
carefully kept within these bounds by details of soap and
feeding-bottles, which do not offer scope for any flight of imagination.
It would be far better to place a bundle of rags in the arms of a little
girl, and to tell her to imagine it to be a baby. She would, if left to
herself, with no other resource than her own invention, soon learn to
exercise her dormant powers of imagination and originality.
With the same lack of forethought boys are surrounded from earliest
infancy with objects designed to keep their minds within the narrow
limits of fact. Their playthings are ships, fire-engines, miniature
railways, water-pumps, and such-like. The imagination is allowed as
little play as possible. Interest is carefully concentrated upon the
mechanical details of spars, sails, rigging, watertight compartments,
wheels, rods, cranks, levers, and the thousand-and-one items which go to
make up a mechanical contrivance. Great care is taken in constructing
toy models to reproduce at least the chief points of the original, in
order to give them a supposititious educational value. The parents then
fondly imagine that, in stocking the nursery with these abominations,
they are largely assisting in the development of the boy's mind.
To people who do not understand children it is difficult to convey any
adequate idea of the fatal result produced upon the dawning intellect by
this introduction of materialism into the nursery. The imaginative will
at once say that the contention is too far fetched. Certainly the
pernicious effects of such toys as have been described are not easily
discernible; therein lies the insidiousness of this retarding process.
But to those who have watched, as I have done, the natural development
of an intelligent child's powers of reflection and imagination--unchecked
by dolls or toy locomotives--there will be neither absurdity nor
exaggeration in what I have written.
Toys in themselves are harmless and unobjectionable things, though every
observant person who has had much to do with young children will readily
concede how superfluous they are as a means of amusement. The average
child will treasure up a button or a shell long after it has destroyed,
or maybe forgotten the existence of, the most elaborate and expensive
toy. That is a commonplace of the nursery. But it does not seem to
convey either meaning or moral to the majority of parents.
The second way in which the thinking and imaginative faculties are
impeded in their development is by the discouragement of, or by the
injudicious answers given to, the questions asked by children. At a
certain age the latter become inquisitive about everything in the
universe. They ply their elders with perpetual questioning; and it must
be acknowledged that many of their interrogations are highly
inconvenient and unanswerable.
It is very difficult for the average person to reply offhand to
elementary questions such as, Why does the sun shine? What makes the
wind blow? How does a seed grow into a tree? and so forth. Few people
have the patience to answer the numerous inquiries of an intelligent
child; and sooner than expose their ignorance, parents will generally
quench this thirst for knowledge at the outset by a flat prohibition.
The selfish desire for peace prompts them to refuse the solicited
information altogether, or, worse still, to return answers calculated to
kill imaginative ideas or to impress the child's mind with a bare and
prosaic materialism.
They do not stop to think of the immense harm that may be done to the
child by throwing cold water upon its first attempts at research.
Children, it must be remembered, do not possess the perseverance and
determination which often come to the rescue of original genius at a
later period. However active their minds may be, they are also timid,
and shrink back quickly under the influence of unsympathetic treatment.
The fact should be patent to everybody that children strive constantly
to use the brains with which Nature has endowed them. Being naturally
imaginative and original, these faculties only need ordinary
encouragement to develop and flourish. Yet the entire method of bringing
up children, from the cradle to the school bench, is directed towards
stifling all originality and substituting for it a stock of commonplace
ideas and conventional knowledge.
The process is begun at home. It takes its root in conventionality, the
curse of all individuality and progress. Parents, brought up to be the
slaves of custom, carry on the imbecile traditions that have been handed
down to them from former generations, without stopping to consider
whether they are rational or foolish. It is good enough for the majority
of people that the imbecile things they do were done by their
forefathers before them; and no tradition is more rigidly followed than
that which prescribes the manner of bringing up children.
It would have been thought that those who had themselves suffered from
the effects of bad methods would be careful not to repeat the mistakes
with their own children. But that is the worst aspect of the evil. Its
chief operation consists in hedging round the intelligence with
conventionalities to such an extent as to exclude vigorous and
independent thought. The most intelligent people often find the utmost
difficulty in attempting to shake off the prejudices inculcated during
the early years of life.
Many, before accomplishing this end, have had to pass through a long
period of suffering and adversity. But the average mind is generally a
hopeless case. There must be strong inward impulses, or the necessary
measure of initiative and courage will not be forthcoming. Everybody who
chooses to think for himself knows that it is an operation which does
not usually entail pleasant consequences.
So much for the part played by the parent. The school system stands on a
different plane altogether, and must be considered by itself. For
parents there is, as has been pointed out, a certain amount of excuse.
For the school system there is none.