OF all the intellectual exercises with which we solace the idle hours
that we devote to thought, none is more engaging and at the same time
perplexing than that of endeavouring to form a clear conception of the
age in which we live. Naturally the difficulty lies, not in lack of
materials on which to base an impression—indeed, we are embarrassed by
the quantity of evidence that accumulates to our hand—but in the fact
that it is hard to see things in true perspective when they are very near
to the observer. The yet unborn historians of the present era will
doubtless lack much of our knowledge, but they will be able to unravel in
the quietude of their studies the tangled threads and stubborn knots that
writhe beneath our fingers with the perpetual changeableness and uneasy
animation of life itself. But if it is impossible to write
dispassionately of a revolution while men are dying at the barricades and
musket-balls are marring the bland uniformity of the wallpaper of the
room in which we write, it is always open to the student of life to fall
back on impressionism, the form of art that seeks to bludgeon life with a
loaded phrase, rather than to woo her to captivity with chosen and
honeyed words. And the brutal method is apt to prove the more
efficacious, as with that frail sex that kisses, so I am told, the
masculine hand that grants the accolade of femininity in that blessed
state of bruiser and bruised that is Nature’s highest conception of the
relationship of the two sexes. While science greets the corpse with
incomprehensible formulæ and the conscientious artist gropes for his
note-book of epithets to suit occasions, impressionism stops her dainty
nose with her diminutive square of perfumed silk, and the dog is dead
indeed.
We are all born impressionists, and it takes the education of years to
eradicate the gift from our natures; many people never lose the habit of
regarding life in this queer, straightforward fashion, and go to their
graves obstinately convinced that grass is green and the sky is blue in
dogged opposition to the scientists, didactic dramatists, eminent
divines, philosophers, æsthetic poets, and human beings born blind. Some
of these subtle weavers of argument would have us believe that
impressionism means just the converse of the sense in which I am using
the word; that, for instance, the fact that grass is green comes to us
from indirect sources, as that of our own natures we would perceive it to
be red or blue. But while we believe our impressions to be our own, we
know that this theory has reached us indirectly, so we can well afford to
ignore it. Others, again, will have it that impressions are not to be
trusted; and the majority of people, while rejecting or failing to
comprehend the philosophic basis on which this doubt is founded, are only
too willing to accept a theory that relieves them in some way of
responsibility for their own individual actions. As a matter of fact,
telling a man to mistrust his impressions is like bidding a mariner
despise his compass. If our senses lie to us, we must live, perforce, in
a world of lies.
But as I hinted above, the young are wont to rely on their impressions
from the moment when a baby first parts its lips in howling criticism of
life. Children have implicit faith in the evidence of their senses until
the grown-up people come along and tell grimy stories of perjured eyes
and lying ears, and the unhappy fate of the unwise babes who trusted
them. What is a child to do? Usually it accepts the new theory of its
own inherent blindness and deafness grudgingly, but it accepts it
nevertheless. It begins to rely on the experience of older human beings,
as if the miracle of its own life were no more than the toneless
repetition of other lives that have been before it. Wonder passes from
its life, as joy passes from pencil and paper when the little fingers are
made to follow certain predestined lines, instead of tracing the fancies
of the moon. The child becomes sensible, obedient, quick at its lessons.
It learns the beauty of the world from pictures and the love of its
mother from books. In course of time its senses become atrophied through
disuse, and it can, in truth, no longer see or hear. When this stage is
reached the education of the individual is completed, and all
civilisation’s requirements are satisfied.
I have described an extreme case, and the judicious reader will realise
that the process is rarely completed in so short a time as the last
paragraph suggests. But sooner or later most men and women come to
believe in experience, and to this belief is due our tyrannous treatment
of the young. I can conceive that an age will come that will shrink with
horror from the excesses we commit in the name of education, and will
regard us who force children to do their lessons against their will very
much in the way in which we regard the slave-owners of the past, only
with added indignation that our tyranny is imposed on the children’s
minds, and not on the bodies of adults. Let those conservative readers
who find this comparison a little strained reflect for a moment on what
it is that we have to teach the next generation, with what manner of
wisdom we chain the children’s imaginations and brand their minds. We
teach them in the first place to express themselves in sounds that shall
be intelligible to us, and this, I suppose, is necessary, though I should
like to doubt it. Further, we invariably instruct them in the sciences
of reading and writing, which seems to me frankly unfortunate. In
Utopia, as I conceive it, the child who thought there was anything worth
reading would teach itself to read, as many children have done before it,
and in the same way the rarer child who desired to express itself on
paper would teach itself to write. That any useful purpose is served by
the general possession of this knowledge I cannot see. Even civilisation
cannot rejoice that her children are able to read the Sunday newspapers
and scrawl gutter sentiments on the walls of churches.
Beyond this we teach children geography, which robs the earth of its
charm of unexpectedness and calls beautiful places by ugly names;
history, which chronicles inaccurate accounts of unimportant events in
the ears of those who would be better employed in discovering the
possibilities of their own age; arithmetic, which encourages the human
mind to set limits to the infinite; botany, which denotes the purposeless
vivisection of flowers; chemistry, which is no more than an indelicate
unveiling of matter; and a hundred other so-called arts and science,
which, when examined without prejudice, will be found to have for their
purpose the standardisation and ultimate belittlement of life.
In Utopia, the average human being would not know how to read or write,
would have no knowledge of the past, and would know no more about life
and the world in general, than he had derived from his own impressions.
The sum of those impressions would be the measure of his wisdom, and I
think that the chances are that he would be a good deal less ignorant
than he is now, when his head is full of confused ideas borrowed from
other men and only half-comprehended. I think that our system of
education is bad, because it challenges the right of the individual to
think constructively for himself. In rustic families, where the father
and mother have never learnt to read and the children have had the
advantages of “scholarship,” the illiterate generation will always be
found to have more intelligence than their educated descendants. The
children were learning French and arithmetic when they should have been
learning life.
And, after all, this is the only kind of education that counts. We all
know that a man’s knowledge of Latin or the use of the globes does not
affect his good-fellowship, or his happiness, or even the welfare of the
State as a whole. What is important is, that he should have passed
through certain experiences, felt certain emotions, and dreamed certain
dreams, that give his personality the stamp of a definite individual
existence. Tomlinson, the book-made man, with his secondhand virtues and
secondhand sins, is of no use to any one. Yet while we all realise this,
we still continue to have a gentle, unreasoning faith in academic
education; we still hold that a man should temper his own impressions
with the experience of others.