which has honestly appeared to many a renascence of patriotism, seems to
us to have none of the marks of patriotism--at least, of patriotism in
its highest form? Why has the adoration of our patriots been given
wholly to qualities and circumstances good in themselves, but
comparatively material and trivial:--trade, physical force, a skirmish
at a remote frontier, a squabble in a remote continent? Colonies are
things to be proud of, but for a country to be only proud of its
extremities is like a man being only proud of his legs. Why is there not
a high central intellectual patriotism, a patriotism of the head and
heart of the Empire, and not merely of its fists and its boots? A rude
Athenian sailor may very likely have thought that the glory of Athens
lay in rowing with the right kind of oars, or having a good supply of
garlic; but Pericles did not think that this was the glory of Athens.
With us, on the other hand, there is no difference at all between the
patriotism preached by Mr. Chamberlain and that preached by Mr. Pat
Rafferty, who sings 'What do you think of the Irish now?' They are both
honest, simple-minded, vulgar eulogies upon trivialities and truisms.
I have, rightly or wrongly, a notion of the chief cause of this
pettiness in English patriotism of to-day, and I will attempt to expound
it. It may be taken generally that a man loves his own stock and
environment, and that he will find something to praise in it; but
whether it is the most praiseworthy thing or no will depend upon the
man's enlightenment as to the facts. If the son of Thackeray, let us
say, were brought up in ignorance of his father's fame and genius, it is
not improbable that he would be proud of the fact that his father was
over six feet high. It seems to me that we, as a nation, are precisely
in the position of this hypothetical child of Thackeray's. We fall back
upon gross and frivolous things for our patriotism, for a simple reason.
We are the only people in the world who are not taught in childhood our
own literature and our own history.
We are, as a nation, in the truly extraordinary condition of not knowing
our own merits. We have played a great and splendid part in the history
of universal thought and sentiment; we have been among the foremost in
that eternal and bloodless battle in which the blows do not slay, but
create. In painting and music we are inferior to many other nations; but
in literature, science, philosophy, and political eloquence, if history
be taken as a whole, we can hold our own with any. But all this vast
heritage of intellectual glory is kept from our schoolboys like a
heresy; and they are left to live and die in the dull and infantile type
of patriotism which they learnt from a box of tin soldiers. There is no
harm in the box of tin soldiers; we do not expect children to be equally
delighted with a beautiful box of tin philanthropists. But there is
great harm in the fact that the subtler and more civilized honour of
England is not presented so as to keep pace with the expanding mind. A
French boy is taught the glory of Molière as well as that of Turenne; a
German boy is taught his own great national philosophy before he learns
the philosophy of antiquity. The result is that, though French
patriotism is often crazy and boastful, though German patriotism is
often isolated and pedantic, they are neither of them merely dull,
common, and brutal, as is so often the strange fate of the nation of
Bacon and Locke. It is natural enough, and even righteous enough, under
the circumstances. An Englishman must love England for something;
consequently, he tends to exalt commerce or prize-fighting, just as a
German might tend to exalt music, or a Flamand to exalt painting,
because he really believes it is the chief merit of his fatherland. It
would not be in the least extraordinary if a claim of eating up
provinces and pulling down princes were the chief boast of a Zulu. The
extraordinary thing is, that it is the chief boast of a people who have
Shakespeare, Newton, Burke, and Darwin to boast of.
The peculiar lack of any generosity or delicacy in the current English
nationalism appears to have no other possible origin but in this fact of
our unique neglect in education of the study of the national literature.
An Englishman could not be silly enough to despise other nations if he
once knew how much England had done for them. Great men of letters
cannot avoid being humane and universal. The absence of the teaching of
English literature in our schools is, when we come to think of it, an
almost amazing phenomenon. It is even more amazing when we listen to the
arguments urged by headmasters and other educational conservatives
against the direct teaching of English. It is said, for example, that a
vast amount of English grammar and literature is picked up in the course
of learning Latin and Greek. This is perfectly true, but the
topsy-turviness of the idea never seems to strike them. It is like
saying that a baby picks up the art of walking in the course of learning
to hop, or that a Frenchman may successfully be taught German by helping
a Prussian to learn Ashanti. Surely the obvious foundation of all
education is the language in which that education is conveyed; if a boy
has only time to learn one thing, he had better learn that.
We have deliberately neglected this great heritage of high national
sentiment. We have made our public schools the strongest walls against a
whisper of the honour of England. And we have had our punishment in this
strange and perverted fact that, while a unifying vision of patriotism
can ennoble bands of brutal savages or dingy burghers, and be the best
thing in their lives, we, who are--the world being judge--humane,
honest, and serious individually, have a patriotism that is the worst
thing in ours. What have we done, and where have we wandered, we that
have produced sages who could have spoken with Socrates and poets who
could walk with Dante, that we should talk as if we have never done
anything more intelligent than found colonies and kick niggers? We are
the children of light, and it is we that sit in darkness. If we are
judged, it will not be for the merely intellectual transgression of
failing to appreciate other nations, but for the supreme spiritual
transgression of failing to appreciate ourselves.
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD