sectarian preachers, and the same air of thoughtful originality when
they deal with the obvious and ascertained. When I see a serious
essayist hailed as “the first wholly realistic and deductive moralist”
that the country, or the century, has produced, I naturally examine his
deductions with interest. What I find is a severe, but well-merited,
denunciation of the civilized world as hypocritical, because its
practice is not in accord with its profession. Readers of the New
Testament will recall the same divergence between the practice and the
profession of the Jews two thousand years ago. It has been neither
unknown nor unobserved in any age, in any land, amid any people since.
There were a great many clergymen preaching in Hannah More’s day, and
there are a great many clergymen preaching now. Churches and temples
and halls of every conceivable denomination, and of no conceivable
denomination, are open to us. There is something fair and square in
going to a place of which sermons are the natural product, and hearing
one. There is also something fair and square in taking a volume of
sermons down from the shelf, and reading one. I am not of those who
believe that a sermon, like a speech, needs to be spoken. A great
deal of quiet thinking goes with the printed page, and the reader
has one obvious advantage over the listener. He can close the book
at any moment without disedifying a congregation. But just as Hannah
More intruded her admonitions into the free spaces of life, so her
successors betray us into being sermonized when we are pursuing our
week-day avocations in a week-day mood, which is neither fair nor
square. It is the attitude of the nursery governess (Hannah was the
greatest living exemplar of the nursery governess), and there is no
escape from its unauthorized supervision.
When a hitherto friendly magazine prints nine pages of sermon under
a disingenuous title suggestive of domestic economy, and beginning
brightly, “What right has any one to preach?” we feel a sense of
betrayal. Any one has a right to preach (the laxity of church
discipline is to blame); but a sense of honour, or a sense of humour,
or a sense of humanity should debar an author from pretending he is
not preaching when he writes like this: “If we have a desire that seems
to us contrary to our duty, it means that there is a conflict within
us; it means either that our sense of duty is not a sense of the whole
self, or that our desire is not of the whole self. This then is to
be aimed at--the identity of duty and desire.” And so on, and so on,
through nine virtuous pages. The reluctance on the part of magazine
preachers to refer openly to God tends to prolixity. Thomas à Kempis,
reflecting on the same situation, which is not new, briefly recommends
us to submit our wills to the will of God. Monk though he was, he
understood that duty and desire are on opposite sides of the camp, and
refuse to be harmoniously blended. This is why living Christians are
called, and will be called to the end of time, the church militant.
A sanguine preacher in “The Popular Science Monthly” holds out a hope
that duty and desire may be ultimately blended through an adroit
application of eugenics. What we need, and have not got, is a race
which “instinctively and spontaneously” does right. Therefore it
behooves us to superinduce, through grafting and transplanting, “the
preservation and perpetuation of a human stock that may be depended
upon to lead moral lives without the necessity of much social
compulsion.” It sounds interesting; and though Mr. Chesterton loudly
asserts that eugenics degrade the race, we are too well accustomed to
these divergencies on the part of our preachers to take them deeply to
heart.
Mr. Chesterton has also used strong language (understatement is not
his long suit) in denouncing “the diabolical idiocy that can regard
beer or tobacco as in some sort evil or unseemly”; and I am disposed,
in a mild way, to agree with him. Yet when some time ago I read a
pleasantly worded little sermon on “An Artist’s Morality,” being
curious to know how a moral artist differed from a moral chemist, or a
moral accountant, the only concrete instance of morality adduced was
the abandonment of tobacco. As soon as the artist resolved to amend his
blameless life, he made the discovery that its chief element of discord
was his pipe. “As a thing of sudden nastiness, I threw it out of the
window, drawing in, almost reverently, a deep breath of cool October
air.”
It is possible that the American public likes being preached to, just
as Hannah More’s British public liked being preached to. This would
account for the little sermons thrown on the screen between moving
pictures, brief admonishments pointing out the obvious moral of the
drama, deploring the irregularity of masculine affections, the
soulless selfishness of wealth; and asserting with colossal impudence
that the impelling purpose of the entertainment is to bring home to the
hearts of men an understanding of the misery they cause. As it is the
rule of moving-picture plays to change their scenes with disconcerting
speed, but to leave all explanatory texts on the screen long enough
to be learned by heart, these moral precepts dominate the show. The
franker its revelations, the more precepts are needed to offset them.
Rows of decent and respectable men, who accompany their decent and
respectable wives, are flattered by being accused of sins which they
have never aspired to commit.
“I must acknowledge that some writers upon ethical questions have been
men of fair moral character,” said Sir Leslie Stephen in a moment of
expansion which was no less wise than generous, seeing that he was
himself the author of two volumes of lay sermons, originally delivered
before ethical societies. Didacticism can go no further than in these
monitory papers. There is one on “The Duties of Authors,” which is
calculated to drive a light-minded or light-hearted neophyte from
a profession where he is expected in his most unguarded moments to
influence morally his equally unguarded readers. But Sir Leslie played
the game according to rule. A plainly worded notice on the fly-leaf
warned the public that the sermons were sermons, not critical studies,
or Alpine adventures. If they seem to us overcrowded with counsel,
this is only because they are non-religious in their character. When
religion is excluded from a sermon, there is too much room left for
morality. Without the vast compelling presence of God, the activities
of men grow feverish, and lose the “imperious sweetness” of sanctity.
If our preachers are trying to recivilize humanity, it behooves us,
perhaps, to be more patient with their methods. All civilizing formulas
are uneasy possessions. Ruskin evolved one, and no man could have been
more sincere or more insistent in applying it. So painfully did he
desire that his readers should think as he did, that he grew to look
upon the world with a jaundiced eye because it was necessarily full of
people who thought differently. Even Hannah More had a little formula
for the correction of England; but it gave her no uneasiness, because
she could not conceive of herself as a failure. Advice flowed from her
as it flows from her followers to-day. There was but one of her, which
was too much. There are many of them, and great is their superfluity.
The “Vanishing Sermon” has not vanished. It has only changed its
habitat. It has forsaken the pulpit, and taken up quarters in what was
formerly the strong-hold of literature.
The Battle-Field of Education
Readers of Jane Austen will remember how Mr. Darcy and Miss Bingley
defined to their own satisfaction the requirements of an accomplished
woman. Such a one, said Miss Bingley, must add to ease of manner and
address “a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing,
and the modern languages.” To which Mr. Darcy subjoined: “All this
she must possess, and she must have something more substantial in the
improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” Whereupon Elizabeth
Bennet stoutly affirmed that she had never met a woman in whom
“capacity, taste, application and elegance” were so admirably and so
formidably united.
Between an accomplished woman in Miss Austen’s day and an educated man
in ours, there are many steps to climb; but the impression conveyed
by those who now seek to define the essentials of education is that,
like Miss Bingley and Mr. Darcy, they ask too much. Also that they
are unduly influenced by the nature of the things they themselves
chance to know. Hence the delight of agitators in drawing up lists of
ascertainable facts, and severely catechizing the public. They forget,
or perhaps they never read, the serene words of Addison (an educated
man) concerning the thousand and one matters with which he would not
burden his mind “for a Vatican.”
With every century that rolls over the world there is an incalculable
increase of knowledge. It ranges backward and forward, from the latest
deciphering of an Assyrian tablet to the latest settling of a Balkan
boundary-line; from a disconcerting fossil dug out of its prehistoric
mud to a new explosive warranted to destroy a continent. Obviously
an educated man, even a very highly educated man, must be content, in
the main, with a “modest and wise ignorance.” Intelligence, energy,
leisure, opportunity--these things are doled out to him in niggardly
fashion; and with his beggar’s equipment he confronts the vastness of
time and space, the years the world has run, the forces which have sped
her on her way, and the hoarded thinking of humanity.
Compared with this huge area of “general information,” how firm and
final were the educational limits of a young Athenian in the time of
Plato! The things he did not have to know fill our encyclopædias.
Copra and celluloid were as remote from his field of vision as were
the Reformation and the battle of Gettysburg. But ivory he had, and
the memory of Marathon, and the noble pages of Thucydides. That there
were Barbarians in the world, he knew as well as we do. Some, like
the Ethiops, dwelt so far away that Homer called them “blameless.”
Some were so perilously near that the arts of war grew with the arts
of peace. For books he had a certain delicate scorn, caught from his
master, Plato, who never forgave their lack of reticence, their fashion
of telling everything to every reader. But the suave and incisive
conversation of other Athenians taught him intellectual lucidity, and
the supreme beauty of the spoken word. “Late and laboriously,” says
Josephus, “did the Greeks acquire their knowledge of Greek.” That
they acquired it to some purpose is evidenced by the fact that the
graduate of an American college must have some knowledge of Plato’s
thinking, if he is to be called educated. Where else shall he see the
human intellect, trained to strength and symmetry like the body of an
athlete, exercising its utmost potency and its utmost charm? Where else
shall he find a philosophy which has “in all ages ravished the hearts
of men”?
A curious symptom of our own day is that we have on one hand a
strong and deep dissatisfaction with the mental equipment of young
Americans, and on the other an ever-increasing demand for freedom,
for self-development, for doing away with serious and severe study.
The ideal school is one in which the pupil is at liberty to get up
and leave the class if it becomes irksome, and in which the teacher
is expected to comport himself like the kind-hearted captain of the
Mantelpiece. The ideal college is one which prepares its students for
remunerative positions, which teaches them how to answer the kind of
questions that captains of industry may ask. One of the many critics of
our educational system has recently complained that college professors
are not practical. “The undergraduate,” he says, “sits during the four
most impressionable years of his life under the tuition and influence
of highly trained, greatly devoted, and sincere men, who are financial
incompetents, who have as little interest in, or understanding of,
business as has the boy himself.”
It does not seem to occur to this gentleman that if college professors
knew anything about finance, they would probably not remain college
professors. Learning and wealth have never run in harness since
Cadmus taught Thebes the alphabet. It would be a brave man who should
say which was the better gift; but one thing is sure: unless we are
prepared to grant the full value of scholarship which adds nothing
to the wealth of nations, or to the practical utilities of life, we
shall have only partial results from education. And such scholarship
can never be generally approved. It is, and must forever remain, says
Augustine Birrell, “in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble
word, essentially unpopular.”
The educational substitutes, now in vogue, are many, and varied,
and, of their kind, good. They can show results, and results that
challenge competition. Mr. Samuel Gompers, for example, writes with
pardonable complacency of himself: “When I think of the education I
got in the London streets, the training acquired by work in the shop,
the discipline growing out of attempts to build an organization to
accomplish definite results, of the rich cultural opportunities through
human contacts, I know that my educational opportunities have been very
unusual.”
This is, in a measure, true, and it is not the first time that such
opportunities have been lauded to the skies. “If a lad does not learn
in the streets,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, “it is because he has no
faculty of learning.”--“Books! Don’t talk to me of books!” said Sarah,
Duchess of Marlborough. “My books are cards and men.” It will even
be remembered that old Weller boasted to Mr. Pickwick of the tuition
he had afforded Sam by turning him at a tender age into the London
gutters, to learn what lessons they could teach.
Nevertheless, there is an education that owes nothing to streets, or
to work-shops, or to games of chance. It was not in the “full, vivid,
instructive hours of truancy” that Stevenson acquired his knowledge of
the English language, which he wrote with unexampled vigour and grace.
It is not “human contact” that can be always trusted to teach men how
to pronounce that language correctly. This is an educational nicety
disregarded by a practical and busy world. One of the best-informed
women I ever knew, who had been honoured by several degrees, and who
had turned her knowledge to good account, could never pronounce the
test word, America. One of the ablest and most influential lawyers I
ever knew, a college man with an imposing library, came no nearer to
success. The lady said “Armorica,” as if she were speaking of ancient
Brittany. The gentleman said “Amurrica,” probably to make himself
intelligible to the large and patriotic audiences which he addressed
so frequently and so successfully. The license allowed to youth may
be held accountable for such Puck’s tricks as these, as well as for
grammatical lapses. A superintendent of public schools in Illinois
has decided on his own authority that common usage may supplant
time-worn rules of speech; and that such a sentence as “It is I,” being
“outlawed” by common usage, need no longer be forced upon children who
prefer to say “It is me.”
Because the direct products of education are so limited, and the
by-products of such notable importance, we permit ourselves to speak
contemptuously concerning things which must be learned from books,
without any deep understanding of things which must be learned from
people armed with books, and backed by the authority of tradition. When
Goethe said that the education of an Englishman gave him courage to be
what nature had made him, he illuminated, after his wont, a somewhat
shadowy subject. William James struck the same note, and amplified it,
not too exhaustively, in “Talks to Teachers”: “An English gentleman is
a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a creature who, for all
the emergencies of life, has his line of behaviour distinctly marked
out for him in advance.”
If this be the result of a system which, to learned Germans, lucid
Frenchmen, and progressive Americans, has seemed inadequate, they
may revise, or at least suspend, their judgment. And Englishmen who
have humorously lamented the wasted years of youth (“May I be taught
Greek in the next world if I know what I _did_ learn at school!” said
the novelist, James Payn), need no longer be under the obligation of
expressing more dissatisfaction than they feel.
In the United States the educational by-products are less clear-cut,
because the force of tradition is weaker, and because too many boys are
taught too long by women. The difficulty of obtaining male teachers has
accustomed us to this anomaly, and we have even been heard to murmur
sweet phrases concerning the elevating nature of feminine influence.
But the fact remains that a boy is destined to grow into a man, and
for this contingency no woman can prepare him. Only men, and men of
purpose and principle, can harden him into the mould of manhood. It is
a question of character, which great by-product of education cannot
be safely undervalued even in a busy and clever age. “It was always
through enfeeblement of character,” says Gustave Le Bon, “and not
through enfeeblement of intellect, that the great peoples disappeared
from history.”
And this truth paves the way for an assertion which, however
controvertible, is not without strong support. Of all the direct
products of education (of education as an end in itself, and not as an
approach to something else), a knowledge of history is most essential.
So, at least, it seems to me, though I speak with diffidence, being
well aware that makers of history, writers of history, and teachers of
history, have agreed that it is an elusive, deceptive and disputable
study. Yet it is the heart of all things, and every intellectual
by-path leads to this central theme. Most firmly do I believe with “the
little Queen-Anne man” that
“The proper study of mankind is man”;
and how shall we reach him save through the pages of history? It is
the foundation upon which are reared the superstructures of sociology,
psychology, philosophy and ethics. It is our clue to the problems of
the race. It is the gateway through which we glimpse the noble and
terrible things which have stirred the human soul.
A cultivated American poet has said that men of his craft “should
know history inside out, and take as much interest in the days of
Nebuchadnezzar as in the days of Pierpont Morgan.” This is a spacious
demand. The vast sweep of time is more than one man can master, and the
poet is absolved by the terms of his art from severe study. He may know
as much history as Matthew Arnold, or as little as Herrick, who lived
through great episodes, and did not seem to be aware of them. But Mr.
Benét is wise in recognizing the inspiration of history, its emotional
and imaginative appeal. New York and Pierpont Morgan have their tale
to tell; and so has the dark shadow of the Babylonian conqueror, who
was so feared that, while he lived, his subjects dared not laugh; and
when he died, and went to his appointed place, the poor inmates of Hell
trembled lest he had come to rule over them in place of their master,
Satan.
“The study of Plutarch and ancient historians,” says George Trevelyan,
“rekindled the breath of liberty and of civic virtue in modern
Europe.” The mental freedom of the Renaissance was the gift of the
long-ignored and reinstated classics, of a renewed and generous belief
in the vitality of human thought, the richness of human experience.
Apart from the intellectual precision which this kind of knowledge
confers, it is indirectly as useful as a knowledge of mathematics or of
chemistry. How shall one nation deal with another in this heaving and
turbulent world unless it knows something of more importance than its
neighbour’s numerical and financial strength--namely, the type of men
it breeds. This is what history teaches, if it is studied carefully and
candidly.
How did it happen that the Germans, so well informed on every other
point, wrought their own ruin because they failed to understand the
mental and moral make-up of Frenchmen, Englishmen and Americans? What
kind of histories did they have, and in what spirit did they study
them? The Scarborough raid proved them as ignorant as children of
England’s temper and reactions. The inhibitions imposed upon the port
of New York, and the semi-occasional ship which they granted us leave
to send from it, proved them more ignorant than kittens of America’s
liveliest idiosyncrasies.
In the United States an impression prevails that the annals of Asia
and of Europe are too long and too complicated for our consideration.
Every now and then some educator, or some politician who controls
educators, makes the “practical” suggestion that no history prior to
the American Revolution shall be taught in the public schools. Every
now and then some able financier affirms that he would not give a fig
for _any_ history, and marshals the figures of his income to prove its
uselessness.
Yet our vast heterogeneous population is forever providing problems
which call for an historical solution; and our foreign relations would
be clarified by a greater accuracy of knowledge. To the ignorance of
the average Congressman and of the average Senator must be traced
their most conspicuous blunders. Back of every man lies the story of
his race. The Negro is more than a voter. He has a history which may be
ascertained without undue effort. Haiti, San Domingo, Liberia, all have
their tales to tell. The Irishman is more than a voter. He has a long,
interesting and instructive history. It pays us to be well informed
about these things. “The passionate cry of ignorance for power” rises
in our ears like the death-knell of civilization. Down through the
ages it has sounded, now covetous and threatening, now irrepressible
and triumphant. We know what every one of its conquests has cost the
human race; yet we are content to rest our security upon oratorical
platitudes and generalities, upon the dim chance of a man being reborn
in the sacrament of citizenship.
In addition to the things that it is useful to know, there are things
that it is pleasant to know, and pleasure is a very important
by-product of education. It has been too long the fashion to deny,
or at least to decry, this species of enjoyment. “He that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow,” says Ecclesiastes; and Sir Thomas Browne
musically bewails the dark realities with which “the unhappiness of our
knowledge too nearly acquainteth us.” But it was probably the things he
did, rather than the things he knew, which soured the taste of life in
the Hebrew’s mouth; and as for Sir Thomas Browne, no man ever derived
a more lasting satisfaction from scholarship. His erudition, like his
religion, was pure profit. His temperament saved him from the loudness
of controversy. His life was rich within.
This mental ease is not so much an essential of education as the reward
of education. It makes smooth the reader’s path; it involves the
capacity to think, and to take delight in thinking; it is the keynote
of subtle and animated talk. It presupposes a somewhat varied list of
acquirements; but it has no official catalogue, and no market value.
It emphatically does not consist in knowing inventories of things,
useful or otherwise; still less in imparting this knowledge to the
world. Macaulay, Croker, and Lord Brougham were men who knew things on
a somewhat grand scale, and imparted them with impressive accuracy;
yet they were the blight rather than the spur of conversation. Even
the “more cultivated portion of the ignorant,” to borrow a phrase
of Stevenson’s, is hostile to lectures, unless the lecturer has the
guarantee of a platform, and his audience sits before him in serried
and somnolent rows.