The word success can of course be used in two senses. It may be used
with reference to a thing serving its immediate and peculiar purpose,
as of a wheel going around; or it can be used with reference to a thing
adding to the general welfare, as of a wheel being a useful discovery.
It is one thing to say that Smith’s flying machine is a failure, and
quite another to say that Smith has failed to make a flying machine.
Now this is very broadly the difference between the old English public
schools and the new democratic schools. Perhaps the old public schools
are (as I personally think they are) ultimately weakening the country
rather than strengthening it, and are therefore, in that ultimate sense,
inefficient. But there is such a thing as being efficiently inefficient.
You can make your flying ship so that it flies, even if you also make
it so that it kills you. Now the public school system may not work
satisfactorily, but it works; the public schools may not achieve what we
want, but they achieve what they want. The popular elementary schools do
not in that sense achieve anything at all. It is very difficult to point
to any guttersnipe in the street and say that he embodies the ideal
for which popular education has been working, in the sense that the
fresh-faced, foolish boy in “Etons” does embody the ideal for which the
headmasters of Harrow and Winchester have been working. The aristocratic
educationists have the positive purpose of turning out gentlemen, and
they do turn out gentlemen, even when they expel them. The popular
educationists would say that they had the far nobler idea of turning
out citizens. I concede that it is a much nobler idea, but where are the
citizens? I know that the boy in “Etons” is stiff with a rather silly
and sentimental stoicism, called being a man of the world. I do not
fancy that the errand-boy is rigid with that republican stoicism that
is called being a citizen. The schoolboy will really say with fresh
and innocent hauteur, “I am an English gentleman.” I cannot so easily
picture the errand-boy drawing up his head to the stars and answering,
“Romanus civis sum.” Let it be granted that our elementary teachers are
teaching the very broadest code of morals, while our great headmasters
are teaching only the narrowest code of manners. Let it be granted
that both these things are being taught. But only one of them is being
learned.
It is always said that great reformers or masters of events can manage
to bring about some specific and practical reforms, but that they never
fulfill their visions or satisfy their souls. I believe there is a real
sense in which this apparent platitude is quite untrue. By a strange
inversion the political idealist often does not get what he asks for,
but does get what he wants. The silent pressure of his ideal lasts much
longer and reshapes the world much more than the actualities by which he
attempted to suggest it. What perishes is the letter, which he
thought so practical. What endures is the spirit, which he felt to be
unattainable and even unutterable. It is exactly his schemes that are
not fulfilled; it is exactly his vision that is fulfilled. Thus the ten
or twelve paper constitutions of the French Revolution, which seemed so
business-like to the framers of them, seem to us to have flown away
on the wind as the wildest fancies. What has not flown away, what is a
fixed fact in Europe, is the ideal and vision. The Republic, the idea
of a land full of mere citizens all with some minimum of manners and
minimum of wealth, the vision of the eighteenth century, the reality
of the twentieth. So I think it will generally be with the creator of
social things, desirable or undesirable. All his schemes will fail,
all his tools break in his hands. His compromises will collapse, his
concessions will be useless. He must brace himself to bear his fate; he
shall have nothing but his heart’s desire.
Now if one may compare very small things with very great, one may say
that the English aristocratic schools can claim something of the same
sort of success and solid splendor as the French democratic politics.
At least they can claim the same sort of superiority over the distracted
and fumbling attempts of modern England to establish democratic
education. Such success as has attended the public schoolboy throughout
the Empire, a success exaggerated indeed by himself, but still positive
and a fact of a certain indisputable shape and size, has been due to the
central and supreme circumstance that the managers of our public schools
did know what sort of boy they liked. They wanted something and they
got something; instead of going to work in the broad-minded manner and
wanting everything and getting nothing.
The only thing in question is the quality of the thing they got. There
is something highly maddening in the circumstance that when modern
people attack an institution that really does demand reform, they always
attack it for the wrong reasons. Thus many opponents of our public
schools, imagining themselves to be very democratic, have exhausted
themselves in an unmeaning attack upon the study of Greek. I can
understand how Greek may be regarded as useless, especially by those
thirsting to throw themselves into the cut throat commerce which is
the negation of citizenship; but I do not understand how it can be
considered undemocratic. I quite understand why Mr. Carnegie has
a hatred of Greek. It is obscurely founded on the firm and sound
impression that in any self-governing Greek city he would have been
killed. But I cannot comprehend why any chance democrat, say Mr. Quelch,
or Mr. Will Crooks, I or Mr. John M. Robertson, should be opposed to
people learning the Greek alphabet, which was the alphabet of liberty.
Why should Radicals dislike Greek? In that language is written all
the earliest and, Heaven knows, the most heroic history of the Radical
party. Why should Greek disgust a democrat, when the very word democrat
is Greek?
A similar mistake, though a less serious one, is merely attacking
the athletics of public schools as something promoting animalism and
brutality. Now brutality, in the only immoral sense, is not a vice of
the English public schools. There is much moral bullying, owing to the
general lack of moral courage in the public-school atmosphere. These
schools do, upon the whole, encourage physical courage; but they do not
merely discourage moral courage, they forbid it. The ultimate result
of the thing is seen in the egregious English officer who cannot even
endure to wear a bright uniform except when it is blurred and hidden
in the smoke of battle. This, like all the affectations of our present
plutocracy, is an entirely modern thing. It was unknown to the old
aristocrats. The Black Prince would certainly have asked that any knight
who had the courage to lift his crest among his enemies, should also
have the courage to lift it among his friends. As regards moral courage,
then it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as
that they suppress it firmly. But physical courage they do, on the
whole, support; and physical courage is a magnificent fundamental. The
one great, wise Englishman of the eighteenth century said truly that if
a man lost that virtue he could never be sure of keeping any other. Now
it is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage is
connected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and Kiplingite are nowhere more at
one than in maintaining this. They have, I believe, some small sectarian
quarrel with each other, the one saying that courage must be abandoned
because it is connected with cruelty, and the other maintaining that
cruelty is charming because it is a part of courage. But it is all,
thank God, a lie. An energy and boldness of body may make a man stupid
or reckless or dull or drunk or hungry, but it does not make him
spiteful. And we may admit heartily (without joining in that perpetual
praise which public-school men are always pouring upon themselves) that
this does operate to the removal of mere evil cruelty in the public
schools. English public school life is extremely like English public
life, for which it is the preparatory school. It is like it specially in
this, that things are either very open, common and conventional, or else
are very secret indeed. Now there is cruelty in public schools, just as
there is kleptomania and secret drinking and vices without a name.
But these things do not flourish in the full daylight and common
consciousness of the school, and no more does cruelty. A tiny trio
of sullen-looking boys gather in corners and seem to have some ugly
business always; it may be indecent literature, it may be the beginning
of drink, it may occasionally be cruelty to little boys. But on this
stage the bully is not a braggart. The proverb says that bullies are
always cowardly, but these bullies are more than cowardly; they are shy.
As a third instance of the wrong form of revolt against the public
schools, I may mention the habit of using the word aristocracy with a
double implication. To put the plain truth as briefly as possible, if
aristocracy means rule by a rich ring, England has aristocracy and the
English public schools support it. If it means rule by ancient families
or flawless blood, England has not got aristocracy, and the public
schools systematically destroy it. In these circles real aristocracy,
like real democracy, has become bad form. A modern fashionable host
dare not praise his ancestry; it would so often be an insult to half the
other oligarchs at table, who have no ancestry. We have said he has
not the moral courage to wear his uniform; still less has he the moral
courage to wear his coat-of-arms. The whole thing now is only a vague
hotch-potch of nice and nasty gentlemen. The nice gentleman never refers
to anyone else’s father, the nasty gentleman never refers to his own.
That is the only difference, the rest is the public-school manner. But
Eton and Harrow have to be aristocratic because they consist so largely
of parvenues. The public school is not a sort of refuge for aristocrats,
like an asylum, a place where they go in and never come out. It is a
factory for aristocrats; they come out without ever having perceptibly
gone in. The poor little private schools, in their old-world,
sentimental, feudal style, used to stick up a notice, “For the Sons of
Gentlemen only.” If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to be
inscribed, “For the Fathers of Gentlemen only.” In two generations they
can do the trick.
*****