called _The Contrast_. Small it is in length and substance, but
imposing in its English edition at least by reason of large print, vast
margins, thick paper, and all that makes a book physically impressive.
It is the sort of book that has the first sentence of Chapter I on page
nine. To the student of current events it is a very noteworthy book
indeed. It betrays the drift of a very complex group of forces at work
in our educational, journalistic, and literary world, a group of forces
desiring the separation of America from Europe, clamouring for the
disengagement of America from participation in the development of a new
phase of civilisation, and the arrest of that development.
Mr. Belloc is too often treated by American and English critics as a
merely comic figure. Comic figure no doubt this bulky, gesticulating
Frenchman is, with his pretensions to an enormous bibulousness, with
his affectation of a fastidious but non-existent scholarship, with
the immense emphasis of his wild impromptu classifications and his
magnificent caricature of a victorious dialectic. His prose style
becomes more and more wonderfully suggestive of the after-dinner
talker at his richest and jolliest. The sudden lapses into intense
whispering italics; the abrupt glorification of some phrase by the
thick loud enunciation of unexpected capitals! He is quick to imitate
any form of dignity, even the dignity of the scientific exponent at his
solemnest. Could anything be more sublimely funny, for instance, than
this pseudo-illuminating experiment to illustrate the profound truth
(in italics) that “_intense individual contact and energy make for
uniformity_”?
“Put a number of smooth, round balls upon a billiard table. Give them
each a slow and slight movement, and you will see no general movement
appearing. There will be little clatter, few and rare collisions.
Impart to them each a very rapid motion, that is, an individual
intensity, and while you raise very greatly the noise of the shocks
(which is a superficial phenomenon), and while you increase even more
the number and frequency of collisions (which is the cause of the
noise), you also soon develop a resultant of all the directions. If
the sharp speed of each be maintained you will soon perceive in the
movement of the whole a general swing, and all that great mass of balls
will be moving in a crowd. So it is with a human society.”
One likes to think of that rosy dinner party adjourned to the
billiard-room and “poon thesh soshial lawsh to pra’l tes’” by imparting
the motion as directed.
But apart from the almost wilfully preposterous side of Mr. Belloc
there is much to interest us in him profoundly. He is vigorously
expressive; he speaks for forces in our community that are more often
silently active; he gives resistances animation. The least original
of contemporary writers, he has retained the leading ideas of an
upbringing that was essentially Catholic and Latin in a practically
inflexible form. His world, after a few merely preparatory phases and
with a polite gesture to the Greeks, begins and ends with Rome. His
mind in this age of tumultuous growth is like a naughty and growing
child refusing to be put into larger clothes. And yet he is not blind
to the great volume of reality outside that narrow old-fashioned scheme
of his. He is not a blind man; he has at once vision and an extreme
obstinacy. He feels and denies the passing of mediaeval Europe, he
struggles against his realisation of the coming of a new order in the
world, which shall comprehend, for example, Siberia and China and
America, and a world-wide culture into which Islam and Christendom,
the wisdom of India and China and the science of Britain and Germany
and America and France and North Italy and Russia and Japan shall
alike fall and be fused. One probable factor in this synthesis will be
the English language, the great political and scientific traditions
it carries with it, and the band of English-speaking communities,
still growing and still crude, which will bring those traditions into
fruitful relationships with a thousand new conditions and a thousand
new climatic conditions. Rome will have a scarcely more important place
in an English-knitted world than Babylon.
And so Mr. Belloc beats himself against the growing strength of this
great net of civilised understandings. It does not exist. The languages
diverge. The Americans are more foreign to the British than any
Western Europeans. The British are a slightly detached part of some
general Western European culture. A Frenchman can understand Keats
and an American cannot. Americans are “egalitarian” and the British
profoundly aristocratic. The decay of British aristocracy is the end
of Britain, but there is always France to fall back upon. The American
military mind is French in spirit. A Bellocian storm of such assertions
swirls through the entire book, aggressive in manner, self-protective
in motive. He emerges where he began. The Americans do not belong
to “our” system--“_our_” meaning the intimate close brotherhood of
British and French and Italians and Spanish and so forth, the British
rather marginal to the Latin Catholic world. The Americans are a “New
Thing”--capitals; they are a new culture outside the Western European
culture. They are a “new race.” They must follow their own destinies
and “we” ours.
Mr. Belloc is writing for American as much as for English readers,
and he shows a care for their susceptibilities. But one or two
possibilities gleam through, possibilities of a reassuring sort for
his dear old Western European world. There may be biological forces at
work; “a new race, the fate of which, to survive or to die, we know
not.” Or this great new world may presently fall into social disorder,
division--and insignificance.
This is the essence of Mr. Belloc’s argument to estrange Americans and
Europeans, and particularly the Americans and British. Is it sound? So
far as the differences go one concedes the vividness of Mr. Belloc’s
vision. (His opening account of the different qualities of American and
European scenery, by the way, is an amazingly good piece of writing.)
But do the Americans present either a new race or even a new culture?
I deny both these propositions. They are racially a still largely
unfused mixture of Europeans, and the novel features of their social
and cultural life merely mark a new phase into which the British and
the European and the Slav cultures are all following America. That is
to say, I do not believe that America is diverging upon a line of her
own, but is simply ahead along a path that the other great constituents
of the coming world community must all presently follow.
Let us state the case briefly and simply. Nobody who knows anything
of the facts of the case regards the citizen of the United States
as a sort of transplanted Britisher; but with the exception of
certain coloured millions and certain Red Indian survivals they are
manifestly transplanted Europeans, whose political institutions were
originally built up in reaction to the Hanoverian monarchy and as a
development of and in close sympathy with European liberalism and
British nonconformity. This community of transplanted Europeans had
the good fortune to have no strong military neighbour, and it had an
almost virgin continent into which to expand. This good fortune enabled
the States to realise very swiftly the full social and political
possibilities of steamboat, railway, and electric communication.
They have developed a great State on the modern scale, with an
unprecedented unity and uniformity of general ideas. A little too
favoured by their immunities, they have not perhaps made so good a
pace as they might have done with their general elementary education,
but altogether their progress has been marvellous. The congested
and entangled States of Western Europe--I leave out the Russian and
British systems, which are neither of them truly European--are destined
to achieve an ultimate unity under the same irresistible forces of
transport that have expanded and held together the American United
States. Their unification may be complicated or arrested by the
unavoidable interweaving of the Slav and British systems with their
destinies, and it is surely impossible for anyone outside the Belloc
type of mentality to imagine either English-speaking or Latin-speaking
America having neither voice nor share in the European part of this
recrystallisation of the world’s affairs.
In this new order of life into which our kind is passing, Roman
Christendom will become a local tradition and a province, just as
Sumeria was swallowed up in Babylonia and just as the Empires of
Babylon and Egypt became memories and provinces in the Empire of Rome.
We are not developing new races, but merely mingling those we have, and
our cultures do not so much differentiate as fuse, so we may reasonably
hope to have at last one creative culture, with many aspects, replacing
the partial civilisations of the past.
Fate has imposed it upon Mr. Belloc that he should see these things
and deny them. His lot, I think, might have been happier had he been
born and settled in some rich little town in the South of France, and
there sat in the café, drinking his good red wine and orating and
denying, without the irritation of having seen and known. But it was
decreed that he should go to America and come back to report a strange
and terrible land where the mountains are not really mountains nor the
rivers rivers, and where a strange race grows outside the pale.
And, an exile in modern England, he has been forced, too, to turn his
eyes into the depths of the past and see how life arose and how it
has come to be man and will pass beyond man. And that also he denies,
with much banging of the little round drum of a table on the terrasse.
The American is a phantom and geology a lie; the only true world is
Latin-made Europe, and if Heaven had not created it specially for jolly
men, Mr. Belloc would; and in the warmth and congenial friendliness of
it, Mr. Belloc will sit fighting reality with voice and gesture until
the good red wine runs out and the sun goes down upon him for the last
time.
XXIV
A CREATIVE EDUCATIONAL SCHEME FOR BRITAIN: A TENTATIVE FORECAST
22.2.24
The Labour Government of Great Britain starts its career with a
conservative discretion that should reassure even the most excitable
inmates of the Rothermere journalistic institutions. For this year at
any rate we shall get little that we might not have had from a rather
left-handed Liberal Cabinet. The Social Revolution is in no hurry to
arrive.
The recognition of Russia is all to the good; and the treatment of
foreign politicians in office as though they were statesmen and the
serious little visits and talks, are full of promise. If you treat a
politician as a statesman sufficiently it is possible that he will
become one. It is to be hoped that the economies upon military things
will have a certain courage, and that we may see the last of costly
Guards’ uniforms and such-like gilt on the Royal gingerbread, this
year. A democratic monarchy with a Labour Prime Minister should wear
plain clothes. But these are minor matters. The immediate test of
the Labour Government’s quality will be its treatment of national
education. There is no excuse for just carrying on. The British
educational policy since the war has been mean and deadly. The children
insist upon growing up, and at present most of them for all practical
purposes achieve the status of unemployed adults or undertrained
blacklegs at fourteen. Secondary and higher education is a dislocated
muddle.
I do not want to undervalue British education. Compared with other
countries the common citizen of Britain is well educated and
well informed. He is--though many Americans are loath to realise
this--better educated and better informed than the average American
common citizen. But compared with what is needed in a great modern
State he is pitifully and dangerously under-educated. It is
impossible for a Labour Government to realise its ideal of a highly
organised community inspired not by profit-hunting but by the spirit
of co-operative service, and working and producing abundantly for
the common good, with the British population at the present level
of education. To raise that level is a necessary condition to the
successful extension of public service into economic life and the
replacement of the money scramble by economic order.
For this reason Mr. C. P. Trevelyan is for me the most interesting and
hopeful of all the new Labour Ministers. With his family tradition of
high scholarship and liberal innovation, and with the new ferment of
modern creative ideas in his mind, we may hope for a very bold and
broad handling of the problems of British education. To him is given
the opportunity of welding the disconnected parts, some quite good
and some extremely inadequate or defective, which make up the British
educational resources of to-day, into what may be the first completely
comprehensive modern educational system in the world.
The first thing needed for the achievement of such a task is a complete
and final recognition of the fact that such an education must go on
at least to the age of sixteen, and that it must include a general
knowledge of the history of the world and mankind, the elements of
political and economic science, some knowledge of the methods and scope
of biological and physical science, and a reasonable acquaintance with
and use of at least one foreign language. The raising of the leaving
age to sixteen was promised some years ago by Mr. Fisher, probably
the feeblest statesman who has ever been overruled by his political
associates. That promise was made when Britain was to become a land fit
for heroes under the eloquent gestures of Mr. Lloyd George. It is for
Mr. Trevelyan now to make that promise a reality.
But it is not only upward that the school age should extend, but also
downward. It should be possible for poor parents who cannot afford
a nursery to send their children to the people’s schools at a quite
tender age. The children of prosperous people have a governess, or in
towns go to some properly equipped infant school, by the time they are
four or five. The children of the working-class woman knock about
at home with a mother too busy to give them sufficient educational
attention, and their only open air is the street. They miss the
beginnings of drawing and modelling and such-like play; they do not get
sufficiently talked to; they get little or no music; they start with
that much handicap. Vile attempts at economy in British education have
meant a grave retrogression in this respect. The schools have to be
reopened to infants, and the facilities for infant teaching restored
and extended. The public infant school must be the day-nursery of the
poor.
Both these extensions of the school age will require more teachers. And
even as it is, the British schools are scandalously understaffed. Not
only is that so, but many of the existing staffs are under-trained and
under-educated for their work. I cannot conceive of British education
as a satisfactory system with less than quadruple the number of
teachers at work than are now employed.
Moreover they have to be better teachers. When British elementary
education was organised in the ’seventies of the last century it was
done in the shabbiest and cheapest way possible. Those were the days
when Englishwomen of the prosperous classes would become half frantic
with jealousy and hate and derision at the idea of a housemaid wearing
a fringe or the cook going out in pretty clothes on a Sunday. That was
the spirit of the time. It was intolerable to them that the poor man’s
“brats” should be taught by really educated persons. The prospective
teachers of the general public, therefore, were not sent through the
Universities and made a part of the general comity of educated men
and women. They were put apart into mean, bleak, restricted training
colleges of their own, and everything was done to establish and
maintain a sense of social inferiority in their minds. They were
intended to feel the superiority of the parson and the lordship of
the manufacturer and the squire. Never has a profession risen to
self-respect against such obstacles and disadvantages as the British
elementary teachers. It is for Mr. Trevelyan to complete the expansion
and liberalisation of these training colleges, to see that they get at
last the staffs, libraries, laboratories, and facilities of interchange
necessary to incorporate them completely in the university system of
the land. Or else to hand them over to the local authorities as lunatic
asylums or something of that sort or to reconstruct them to meet the
housing shortage, or just simply to dynamite them and send the whole of
the next generation of teachers through the Universities.
Having secured an adequate supply of soundly trained and educated
teachers, and with the whole youthful population--except those
attending the many excellent private preparatory schools in
Britain--going up to the age of sixteen, at least, to the publicly
maintained schools, it will be possible for Mr. Trevelyan to give his
mind to the very urgent problem of grading schools. The organisers of
elementary education in Britain, like the American fathers, seem to
have thought that a school was just a school. But children under the
age of twelve require very different educational surroundings from
those between twelve and sixteen. The Junior school may well be a mixed
village school as close to mother as possible, a small school, bright
and homelike. The Second school needs to be larger, and with a various
staff; children are already differentiating after twelve, there must be
a choice of studies, one child’s education is another child’s poison.
Moreover, the equipment needed at the second stage is greater and more
various. Educational centres are indicated here, and the automobile to
collect the youngsters comes happily into the world at this stage to
enable both Britain and America to meet the demands of an advancing
civilisation upon rural youth.
Over most of Britain the market towns lie at eight or ten miles apart;
the roads converge upon them, they are the natural places for the
Second schools. Here is a very pretty and, I should think, a very
congenial task of reorganisation for Mr. Trevelyan. Like Edward VI of
England, it may be his destiny to write his name upon England with a
trail of new and reconstructed schools.
But an educational system that secures merely a proper education
for every British boy or girl up to the age of sixteen is only the
broad foundation of a complete State education. The English “Public
Schools,” which are not really public at all, and which retain their
boys in a state of loutish athleticism two years or more after
they should be at college; the miscellany of “upper-class” girls’
schools; the Universities, that are partly continuation colleges
and partly Universities for real intellectual work and interchange,
much incommoded by undergraduates’ “rags,” solemn athleticism, and
a pervading adolescent clamour; the antiquated and boring legal and
medical professional training; and, indeed, the whole tangle of
class-conscious, middle- and upper-class educational institutions
in Britain, would be enormously benefited, and I hope will be
benefited, by a bold--even though it were at the time an entirely
unsuccessful--attempt at reorganisation upon modern lines.
Once people have been set thinking about these things they will never
stop as they are. The mischief at present is that we take the most
preposterous arrangements for granted because we are used to them. It
will not be necessary to stir the venerable quiet, the tradition, and
ripe usages of Oxford and Cambridge very greatly. Somewhere the fine
traditions of classical scholarship and stylistic mathematics should be
preserved, and these seem to be their appointed refuges. But there is
now a constellation of other and more conveniently situated provincial
Universities which are still miserably cramped and poor. For all that,
several are doing quite first-class University work. And there exists
now in London, in spite of neglect and misdirection, a great group of
literary, artistic, scientific, and legal institutions which cry aloud
to be grouped and correlated upon broad and congenial lines as the
effective intellectual nucleus of the British Empire, and even perhaps
of the English-speaking world. It is to the loosely co-ordinated
institutions within and without the present so-called University of
London that I hope Mr. Trevelyan will chiefly direct his attention as
the apex of the pyramid I hope to see arising, based on the existing
preparatory school, on the re-fashioned “Public School,” relieved
of its too mature seniors, and on the revised and strengthened free
Junior and Second schools which should take the place of our existing
elementary schools.
XXV
PORTUGAL AND PROSPERITY: THE BLESSEDNESS OF BEING A LITTLE NATION
1.3.24
For several weeks just recently I was cut off from Britain and America
and most of the things that interest me in the world by a postal
strike in Portugal. It was an original sort of strike. The little
dears went to their offices and so forth, and just did nothing until
the Government kept a promise to raise salaries. Telegrams and letters
coagulated in masses that are still incompletely dissolved. Some of
the more humorous of the strikers mixed up the letters, and delivered
considerable numbers at the wrong addresses, where many perished
miserably. Meanwhile I read the Lisbon _Diario de Noticias_, which has
about as much foreign news as the _West Sussex Gazette_, and meditated
on Portugal. To which country I had come, by the by, because it was
within three days’ post of England and a most convenient cable centre.
Portugal has a climate that is always interesting and generally
delightful. It has its wild phases of sea-wind and passionate rain, and
then the only thing to do here at Estoril--except work--is to go to
the western headlands and see the green Atlantic waves hit the cliffs
and explode into vast mountains of sunlit foam. And to get caught and
drenched by a rainstorm, and so home. Or the north wind blows, and
usually it is the north wind that blows, and then the air is as keen
and sweet as Alpine air and the sky is blazing blue. The flowers are
astonishing. There is purple iris in all the water courses; the banks
are alive with periwinkle and tall spikes of antirrhinum; in the woods
are endless scillas and rock roses. The other day I walked over a
shrubby moorland and there I came upon a great multitude of upstanding
clumps of a sort of white heather, rather big and round with the tips
and shadows just tinged with pink, and everywhere among these clumps
there crept a gentian-blue flower--lithospermum I think it is. And not
a soul was there to appreciate this lavish loveliness except myself and
another chance wanderer from the beaten track.
Wet or fine, the air of Portugal has a natural happiness in it, and
the people of the country should be as happy and prosperous as any
people in the world. The country has a magnificent position, and great
overseas possessions. Lisbon is the natural port of Europe for South
America and West Africa. The olive and the orange and such-like things
can be grown here under the best conditions. The very various and
great, though largely undeveloped, mineral wealth includes radioactive
deposits of world-wide importance. And so forth. There is indeed all
the material here for great prosperity. As a matter of fact, I have
never seen a less prosperous-looking nation. Great poverty prevails
throughout this land. I have never seen anywhere, not even in Russia,
working people so ill-clad, so patched and ragged, so manifestly
neglected and under-nourished. And there is also a vast amount of
preventable disease. The women are old at thirty, bearing children to
die; the men are bent at fifty. The poorer houses are hovels, and half
the population is illiterate. And yet it is not a low-grade population.
It is varied in type and complexion, but there is a conspicuously high
proportion of intelligent and interesting faces, and the manners of the
people have much of that geniality of the air they breathe.