tangle in which we are involved, I do not know. I fear not. I do not
think that the time is ripe. I do not believe that great movements can
be brought about by prophets, however enlightened their views, however
vigorous their personalities, unless there is a corresponding energy
below. An individual may initiate and control a great force of public
opinion; I do not think he can originate it. There is certainly a vague
and widespread discontent with our present results; but it is all a
negative opinion, a dissatisfaction with what is being done. The
movement must have a certain positive character before it can take
shape. There must arise a desire and a respect for intellectual things,
a certain mental tone, which is wanting. At present, public opinion
only indicates that the rising generation is not well trained, and that
boys, after going through an elaborate education, seem to be very
little equipped for practical life. There is no complaint that boys are
made unpractical; the feeling rather is that they are turned out
healthy, well-drilled creatures, fond of games, manly, obedient, but
with a considerable aversion to settling down to work, and with a firm
resolve to extract what amusement they can out of life. All that is, I
feel, perfectly true; but there is little demand on the part of parents
that boys should have intellectual interests or enthusiasms for the
things of the mind. What teachers ought to aim at is to communicate
something of this enthusiasm, by devising a form of education which
should appeal to the simpler forms of intellectual curiosity, instead
of starving boys upon an ideal of inaccessible dignity. I do not for a
moment deny that those who defend the old classical tradition have a
high intellectual ideal. But it is an unpractical ideal, and takes no
account of the plain facts of experience.
The result is that we teachers have forfeited confidence; and we must
somehow or other regain it. We are tolerated, as all ancient and
respectable things are tolerated. We have become a part of the social
order, and we have still the prestige of wealth and dignity. But what
wealthy people ever dream nowadays of building and endowing colleges on
purely literary lines? All the buildings which have arisen of late in
my University are either buildings for scientific purposes or clerical
foundations for ecclesiastical ends. The vitality of our literary
education is slowly fading out of it. This lack of vitality is not so
evident until you go a little way beneath the surface. Classical
proficiency is still liberally rewarded by scholarships and
fellowships; and while the classical tradition remains in our schools,
there are a good many men, who intend to be teachers, who enter for
classical examinations. But where we fail grievously is in our
provision for average men; they are provided with feeble examinations
in desultory and diffuse subjects, in which a high standard is not
required. It is difficult to imagine a condition of greater vacuity
than that in which a man leaves the University after taking a pass
degree. No one has endeavoured to do anything for him, or to cultivate
his intelligence in any line. And yet these are our parents in the next
generation. And the only way in which we stifle mental revolt is by
leaving our victims in such a condition of mental abjectness and
intellectual humility, that it does not even occur to them to complain
of how unjustly they have been treated. After all, we have interfered
with them so little that they have contrived to have a good time at the
University. They have made friends, played games, and lived a healthy
life enough; they resolve that their boys shall have a good time too,
if possible; and so the poor educational farce is played on from
generation to generation. It is melancholy to read the sonnet which
Tennyson wrote, more than sixty years ago, a grave and bitter
indictment of Cambridge--
"Because you do profess to teach,
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart."
That is the mistake: we do not feed the heart; we are too professional;
we concern ourselves with methods and details; we swallow blindly the
elaborate tradition under which we have ourselves been educated; we
continue to respect the erudite mind, and to decry the appreciative
spirit as amateurish and dilettante. We continue to think that a boy is
well trained in history if he has a minute knowledge of the sequence of
events--that is, of course, a necessary part of the equipment of a
professor or a teacher; but here again lies one of the fatal fallacies
of our system--that we train from the professorial point of view.
Omniscience is not even desirable in the ordinary mind. A boy who has
appreciated the force of a few great historical characters, who has
learnt generous insight into the unselfish patriotism that wins the
great victories of the world, who can see the horror of tyranny and the
wrongs done to humanity in the name of authority, who has seen how a
nation in earlier stages is best ruled by an enlightened despotism,
until it has learnt vigour and honesty and truth, who has: learnt to
perceive that political agitation only survives in virtue of the
justice which underlies its demands--a boy, I say, who has been taught
to perceive such things, has learnt the lesson of history in a way
which a student crammed with dates and facts may have wholly missed.
The truth is that we do not know what we are aiming at. Our school and
university systems aim at present at an austere standard of mental
discipline, and then fail to enforce it, by making inevitable
concessions to the mental weakness inherited from long generations
trained upon the system of starvation. The system, indeed, too often
reminds me of an old picture in Punch, of genteel poverty dining in
state; in a room hung with portraits, attended by footmen, two
attenuated persons sit, while a silver cover is removed from a dish
containing a roasted mouse. The resources that ought to be spent on a
wholesome meal are wasted in keeping up an ideal of state. Of course
there is something noble in all sacrifice of personal comfort and
health to a dignified ideal; but it is our business at present to fill
the dish rather than to insist on the cover being of silver.
One very practical proof of the disbelief which the public has in
education is that, while the charges of public schools have risen
greatly in the last fifty years, the margin is all expended in the
comfort of boys, and in opportunities for athletic exercises; while
masters, at all but a very few public schools, are still so poorly paid
that it is impossible for the best men to adopt the profession, unless
they have an enthusiasm which causes them to put considerations of
personal comfort aside. It is only too melancholy to observe at the
University that the men of vigour and force tend to choose the Civil
Service or the Bar in preference to educational work. I cannot wonder
at it. The drudgery of falling in with the established system, of
teaching things in which there is no interest to be communicated, of
insisting on details in the value of which one does not believe, is
such that few people, except unambitious men, who have no special
mental bent, adopt the profession; and these only because the imparting
of the slender accomplishments that they have gained is an obvious and
simple method of earning a livelihood.
The blame must, I fear, fall first upon the Universities. I am not
speaking of the education there provided for the honour men, which is
often excellent of its kind; though it must be confessed that the
keenest and best enthusiasm seems to me there to be drifting away from
the literary side of education. But while an old and outworn humanist
tradition is allowed to prevail, while the studies of the average
passman are allowed to be diffuse, desultory, and aimless, and of a
kind from which it is useless to expect either animation or precision,
so long will a blight rest upon the education of the country. While
boys of average abilities continue to be sent to the Universities, and
while the Universities maintain the classical fence, so long will the
so-called modern sides at schools continue to be collections of more or
less incapable boys. And in decrying modern sides, as even headmasters
of great schools have been often known to do, it is very seldom stated
that the average of ability in these departments tends to be so low
that even the masters who teach in them teach without faith or interest.
It may be thought of these considerations that they resemble the
attitude of Carlyle, of whom FitzGerald said that he had sat for many
years pretty comfortably in his study at Chelsea, scolding all the
world for not being heroic, but without being very precise in telling
them how. But this is a case where individual action is out of the
question; and if I am asked to name a simple reform which would have an
effect, I would suggest that a careful revision of the education of
passmen at our Universities is the best and most practical step to take.
And, for the schools, the only solution possible is that the directors
of secondary education should devise a real and simple form of
curriculum. If they whole-heartedly believe in the classics as the best
possible form of education, then let them realize that the classics
form a large and complicated subject, which demands the WHOLE of the
energies of boys. Let them resist utilitarian demands altogether, and
bundle all other subjects, except classics, out of the curriculum, so
that classics may, at all events, be learnt thoroughly and completely.
At present they make large and reluctant concessions to utilitarian
demands, and spoil the effect of the classics to which they cling, and
in which they sincerely believe, by admitting modern subjects to the
curriculum in deference to the clamour of utilitarians. A rigid system,
faithfully administered, would be better than a slatternly compromise.
Of course, one would like to teach all boys everything if it were
possible! But the holding capacity of tender minds is small, and a few
subjects thoroughly taught are infinitely better than a large number of
subjects flabbily taught.
I say, quite honestly, that I had rather have the old system of
classics pure and simple, taught with relentless accuracy, than the
present hotchpotch. But I earnestly hope myself that the pressure of
the demand for modern subjects is too strong to be resisted.
It seems to me that, when the whole world is expanding and thrilling
with new life all around us, it is an intolerable mistake not to bring
the minds of boys in touch with the modern spirit. The history of
Greece and Rome may well form a part of modern education; but we want
rather to bring the minds of those who are being educated into contact
with the Greek and Roman spirit, as part of the spirit of the world,
than to make them acquainted with the philological and syntactical
peculiarities of the two languages. It may be said that we cannot come
into contact with the Greek and the Roman spirit except through reading
their respective literatures; but if that is the case, how can a system
of teaching classics be defended which never brings the vast majority
of the boys, who endure it, in contact with the literature or the
national spirit of the Greeks and Romans at all? I do not think that
classical teachers can sincerely maintain that the average product of a
classical school has any real insight into, or familiarity with, either
the language or the spirit of these two great nations.
And if that is true of average boys educated on this system, what is it
that classical teachers profess to have given them? They will say grip,
vigour, the fortified mind. But where is the proof of it? If I saw
classically educated boys flinging themselves afterwards with energy
and ardour into modern literature, history, philosophy, science, I
should be the first to concur in the value of the system. But I see,
instead, intellectual cynicism, intellectual apathy, an absorbing love
of physical exercise, an appetite for material pleasures, a distaste
for books and thought. I do not say that these tendencies would at once
yield to a simpler and more enlightened system of education; but the
results of the present system seem to me so negative, so
unsatisfactory, as to justify, and indeed necessitate, the trying of
educational experiments. It is terrible to see the patient
acquiescence, the humble conscientiousness with which the present
system is administered. It is pathetic to see so much labour expended
upon an impossible task. There is something, of course, morally
impressive about the courage and loyalty of those who stick to a
sinking ship, and attempt to bale out with teacups the inrush of the
overwhelming tide. But one cannot help feeling that too much is at
stake; that year by year the younger generation, which ought to be sent
out alive to intellectual interests of every kind, in a period which is
palpitating with problems and thrilled by wonderful surprises, is being
starved and cramped by an obstinate clinging to an old tradition, to a
system which reveals its inadequacy to all who pass by; or, rather, our
boys are being sacrificed to a weak compromise between two systems, the
old and the new, which are struggling together. The new system cannot
at present eject the old, and the old can only render the new futile
without exercising its own complete influence.
The best statesmanship in the world is not to break rudely with old
traditions, but to cause the old to run smoothly into the new. My own
sincere belief is that it is not too late to attempt this; but that if
the subject continues to be shelved, if our educational authorities
refuse to consider the question of reform, the growing dissatisfaction
will reach such a height that the old system will be swept away root
and branch, and that many venerable and beautiful associations will
thereby be sacrificed. And with all my heart do I deprecate this,
believing, as I do, that a wise continuity, a tendency to temperate
reform, is one of the best notes of the English character. We have a
great and instinctive tact in England for avoiding revolutions, and for
making freedom broaden slowly down; that is what, one ventures to hope,
may be the issue of the present discontent. But I would rather have a
revolution, with all its destructive agencies, than an unintelligent
and oppressive tyranny.
X
AUTHORSHIP
I have been sometimes consulted by young aspirants in literature as to
the best mode of embarking upon the profession of letters; and if my
inquirer has confessed that he will be obliged to earn his living, I
have always replied, dully but faithfully, that the best way to realize
his ambition is to enter some other profession without delay. Writing
is indeed the most delightful thing in the world, if one has not to
depend upon it for a livelihood; and the truth is that, if a man has
the real literary gift, there are very few professions which do not
afford a margin of time sufficient for him to indulge what is the
happiest and simplest of hobbies. Sometimes the early impulse has no
root, and withers; but if, after a time, a man finds that his heart is
entirely in his writing, and if he feels that he may without imprudence
give himself to the practice of the beloved art, then he may formally
adopt it as a profession. But he must not hope for much monetary
reward. A successful writer of plays may make a fortune, a novelist or
a journalist of the first rank may earn a handsome income; but to
achieve conspicuous mundane success in literature, a certain degree of
good fortune is almost more important than genius, or even than talent.
Ability by itself, even literary ability of a high order, is not
sufficient; it is necessary to have a vogue, to create or satisfy a
special demand, to hit the taste of the age. But the writer of
belles-lettres, the literary writer pure and simple, can hardly hope to
earn a living wage, unless he is content to do, and indeed fortunate
enough to obtain, a good deal of hackwork as well. He must be ready to
write reviews and introductions; to pour out occasional articles, to
compile, to edit, to select; and the chances are that if his livelihood
depends upon his labour, he will have little of the tranquillity, the
serenity, the leisure, upon the enjoyment of which the quality of the
best work depends. John Addington Symonds makes a calculation, in one
of his published letters, to the effect that his entire earnings for
the years in which he had been employed in writing his history of the
Italian Renaissance, had been at the rate of about L100 a year, from
which probably nearly half had to be subtracted for inevitable
incidental expenses, such as books and travelling. The conclusion is
that unless a man has private resources, or a sufficiently robust
constitution to be able to carry on his literary work side by side with
his professional work, he can hardly afford to turn his attention to
belles-lettres.
Nowadays literature has become a rather fashionable pursuit than
otherwise. Times have changed since Gray refused to accept money for
his publications, and gave it to be understood that he was an eccentric
gentleman who wrote solely for his own amusement; since the inheritor
of Rokeby found among the family portraits of the magnates that adorned
his walls a picture of the novelist Richardson, and was at the pains of
adding a ribbon and a star, in order to turn it into a portrait of Sir
Robert Walpole, that he might free his gallery from such degrading
associations.
But now a social personage is hardly ashamed of writing a book, of
travels, perhaps, or even of literary appreciations, so long as it is
untainted by erudition; he is not averse to publishing a volume of mild
lyrics, or a piece of simple fiction, just to show how easy it is, and
what he could do, if only, as Charles Lamb said, he had the mind. It
adds a pleasant touch of charming originality to a great lady if she
can bring out a little book. Such compositions are indubitably books;
they generally have a title-page, an emotional dedication, an
ultra-modest preface, followed by a certain number of pages of
undeniable print. It is common enough too, at a big dinner-party, to
meet three or four people, without the least professional dinginess,
who have written books. Mr. Winston Churchill said the other day, with
much humour, that he could not reckon himself a professional author
because he had only written five books--the same number as Moses.* And
I am far from decrying the pleasant labours of these amateurs. The
writing of such books as I have described has been a real amusement to
the author, not entailing any particular strain; the sweet pride of
authorship enlarges one's sympathies, and gives an agreeable glow to
life. No inconvenient rivalry results. The little volumes just flutter
into the sunshine, like gauzy flies from some tiny cocoon, and spread
their slender wings very gracefully in the sun.
* This sentence was, of course, written before the publication by Mr.
Churchill of the Life of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill.
I would not, then, like some austere critics, forbid such leisurely
writers as I have described to indulge in the pleasant diversion of
writing books. There are reviewers who think it a sacred duty to hunt
and chase these amiable and well-meaning amateurs out of the field, as
though they had trespassed upon some sacred enclosure. I do not think
that it is necessary or even kind to do this. I would rather regard
literature as a kind of Tom Tiddler's ground, where there is gold as
well as silver to be picked up. Amateurs tend, it is true, rather to
scatter gold and silver in the field of literature than to acquire it;
and I had just as soon, after all, that they should lavish their
superfluous wealth there, to be picked up by honest publishers, as that
they should lavish it in other regions of unnecessary expenditure. It
is not a crime, when all is said, to write or even to print an inferior
book; I would indeed go further, and say that writing in any shape is
at worst a harmless diversion; and I see no reason why people should be
discouraged from such diversion, any more than that they should be
discouraged from practising music, or making sketches in water-colour,
because they only attain a low standard of execution in such pursuits.
Indeed, I think that hours devoted to the production of inferior
literature, by persons of leisure, are quite as well bestowed as hours
spent in golfing and motoring; to engage in the task of writing a book
implies a certain sympathy with intellectual things; and I am disposed
to applaud and encourage anything which increases intellectual
appreciation in our country at the present time. There is not too much
of it abroad; and I care very little how it is acquired, if only it is
acquired. The only way in which these amateurs can be tiresome is if
they insist upon reading their compositions aloud in a domestic circle,
or if they request one to read a published book and give them a candid
opinion. I once stayed with a worthy country gentleman who, evening
after evening, after we had returned from shooting, insisted on reading
aloud in the smoking-room, with solemn zest, the novel on which he was
engaged. It was heavy work! The shooting was good, but I am not sure
that it was not dearly purchased at the price. The plot of the book was
intricate, the characters numerous; and I found it almost impossible to
keep the dramatis personae apart. But I did not grudge my friend the
pleasure he took in his composition; I only grudged the time I was
obliged to spend in listening to it. The novel was not worth writing
from the point of view of its intrinsic merits; but it gave my old
friend an occupation; he was never bored; he flew back to his book
whenever he had an hour to spare. It saved him from dulness and ennui;
it gave him, I doubt not, many a glowing hour of secret joy; it was an
unmixed benefit to himself and his family that he had this indoors
resource; it entailed no expense; it was simply the cheapest and most
harmless hobby that it is possible to conceive.
It is characteristic of our nation to feel an imperative need for
occupation. I suppose that there is no nation in the world which has so
little capacity for doing nothing gracefully, and enjoying it, as the
English. This characteristic is part of our strength, because it
testifies to a certain childlike vitality. We are impatient, restless,
unsatisfied. We cannot be happy unless we have a definite end in view.
The result of this temperament is to be seen at the present time in the
enormous and consuming passion for athletic exercise in the open air.
We are not an intellectual nation, and we must do something; we are
wealthy and secure, and, in default of regular work, we have got to
organize our hours of leisure on the supposition that we have something
to do. I have little doubt that if we became a more intellectual nation
the change would be signalized by an immense output of inferior books,
because we have not the student temperament, the gift of absorbing
literature. We have a deep instinct for publicity. If we are
athletically gifted, we must display our athletic prowess in public. If
we have thoughts of our own, we must have a hearing; we look upon
meditation, contemplation, conversation, the arts of leisurely living,
as a waste of time; we are above all things practical.