CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - VIII: THE BROKEN RAINBOW
Through all this chaos, then we come back once more to our
main conclusion. The true task of culture to-day is not a task
of expansion, but very decidedly of selection--and rejection.
The educationist must find a creed and teach it. Even if it be not
a theological creed, it must still be as fastidious and as firm
as theology. In short, it must be orthodox. The teacher may
think it antiquated to have to decide precisely between the faith
of Calvin and of Laud, the faith of Aquinas and of Swedenborg;
but he still has to choose between the faith of Kipling and of Shaw,
between the world of Blatchford and of General Booth. Call it,
if you will, a narrow question whether your child shall be
brought up by the vicar or the minister or the popish priest.
You have still to face that larger, more liberal, more highly
civilized question, of whether he shall be brought up by Harms
worth or by Pearson, by Mr. Eustace Miles with his Simple Life
or Mr. Peter Keary with his Strenuous Life; whether he shall most
eagerly read Miss Annie S. Swan or Mr. Bart Kennedy; in short,
whether he shall end up in the mere violence of the S. D. F. ,
or in the mere vulgarity of the Primrose League. They say
that nowadays the creeds are crumbling; I doubt it,
but at least the sects are increasing; and education must
now be sectarian education, merely for practical purposes.
Out of all this throng of theories it must somehow select a theory;
out of all these thundering voices it must manage to hear a voice;
out of all this awful and aching battle of blinding lights,
without one shadow to give shape to them, it must manage somehow
to trace and to track a star.
I have spoken so far of popular education, which began too
vague and vast and which therefore has accomplished little.
But as it happens there is in England something to compare it with.
There is an institution, or class of institutions, which began
with the same popular object, which has since followed a much
narrower object, but which had the great advantage that it did
follow some object, unlike our modern elementary schools.
In all these problems I should urge the solution which is positive,
or, as silly people say, "optimistic." I should set my face, that is,
against most of the solutions that are solely negative and abolitionist.
Most educators of the poor seem to think that they have to teach the poor
man not to drink. I should be quite content if they teach him to drink;
for it is mere ignorance about how to drink and when to drink that is
accountable for most of his tragedies. I do not propose (like some
of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public schools.
I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make
them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working, but rather
to make it work; not to shut up churches, but rather to open them;
not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of property,
but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly universal
and property decently proper.
In many cases, let it be remembered, such action is not merely going
back to the old ideal, but is even going back to the old reality.
It would be a great step forward for the gin shop to go back
to the inn. It is incontrovertibly true that to mediaevalize
the public schools would be to democratize the public schools.
Parliament did once really mean (as its name seems to imply)
a place where people were allowed to talk. It is only lately
that the general increase of efficiency, that is, of the Speaker,
has made it mostly a place where people are prevented from talking.
The poor do not go to the modern church, but they went to the ancient
church all right; and if the common man in the past had a grave respect
for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had
some of his own. I therefore can claim that I have no vulgar itch
of innovation in anything I say about any of these institutions.
Certainly I have none in that particular one which I am now obliged
to pick out of the list; a type of institution to which I have
genuine and personal reasons for being friendly and grateful:
I mean the great Tudor foundations, the public schools
of England. They have been praised for a great many things, mostly,
I am sorry to say, praised by themselves and their children.
And yet for some reason no one has ever praised them the one
really convincing reason.
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.
These are the false accusations; the accusation of classicism,
the accusation of cruelty, and the accusation of an exclusiveness based
on perfection of pedigree. English public-school boys are not pedants,
they are not torturers; and they are not, in the vast majority of cases,
people fiercely proud of their ancestry, or even people with any ancestry
to be proud of. They are taught to be courteous, to be good tempered,
to be brave in a bodily sense, to be clean in a bodily sense;
they are generally kind to animals, generally civil to servants,
and to anyone in any sense their equal, the jolliest companions on earth.
Is there then anything wrong in the public-school ideal?
I think we all feel there is something very wrong in it, but a blinding
network of newspaper phraseology obscures and entangles us; so that it
is hard to trace to its beginning, beyond all words and phrases.
the faults in this great English achievement.
Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objection to the English
public school is its utterly blatant and indecent disregard
of the duty of telling the truth. I know there does still
linger among maiden ladies in remote country houses a notion
that English schoolboys are taught to tell the truth, but it
cannot be maintained seriously for a moment. Very occasionally,
very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell lies,
which is a totally different thing. I may silently support
all the obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe,
without once telling a lie. I may wear another man's coat,
steal another man's wit, apostatize to another man's creed,
or poison another man's coffee, all without ever telling a lie.
But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the
very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth.
From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether
a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can
be used on his "side" when he is engaged in "playing the game."
He takes sides in his Union debating society to settle whether
Charles I ought to have been killed, with the same solemn
and pompous frivolity with which he takes sides in the cricket
field to decide whether Rugby or Westminster shall win.
He is never allowed to admit the abstract notion of the truth,
that the match is a matter of what may happen, but that Charles I
is a matter of what did happen--or did not. He is Liberal or Tory
at the general election exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge
at the boat race. He knows that sport deals with the unknown;
he has not even a notion that politics should deal with the known.
If anyone really doubts this self-evident proposition,
that the public schools definitely discourage the love of truth,
there is one fact which I should think would settle him.
England is the country of the Party System, and it has always
been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone
out of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System,
whatever its conveniences or inconveniences, could have been
created by people particularly fond of truth?
The very English happiness on this point is itself a hypocrisy.
When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that
he himself is a liar. David said in his haste, that is, in his honesty,
that all men are liars. It was afterwards, in some leisurely official
explanation, that he said the Kings of Israel at least told the truth.
When Lord Curzon was Viceroy he delivered a moral lecture to
the Indians on their reputed indifference to veracity, to actuality
and intellectual honor. A great many people indignantly discussed
whether orientals deserved to receive this rebuke; whether Indians
were indeed in a position to receive such severe admonition.
No one seemed to ask, as I should venture to ask, whether Lord Curzon
was in a position to give it. He is an ordinary party politician; a party
politician means a politician who might have belonged to either party.
Being such a person, he must again and again, at every twist and turn of
party strategy, either have deceived others or grossly deceived himself.
I do not know the East; nor do I like what I know. I am quite ready to
believe that when Lord Curzon went out he found a very false atmosphere.
I only say it must have been something startlingly and chokingly false
if it was falser than that English atmosphere from which he came.
The English Parliament actually cares for everything except veracity.
The public-school man is kind, courageous, polite, clean, companionable;
but, in the most awful sense of the words, the truth is not in him.
This weakness of untruthfulness in the English public schools,
in the English political system, and to some extent in the English
character, is a weakness which necessarily produces a curious
crop of superstitions, of lying legends, of evident delusions
clung to through low spiritual self-indulgence. There are so many
of these public-school superstitions that I have here only space
for one of them, which may be called the superstition of soap.
It appears to have been shared by the ablutionary Pharisees,
who resembled the English public-school aristocrats in so
many respects: in their care about club rules and traditions,
in their offensive optimism at the expense of other people,
and above all in their unimaginative plodding patriotism
in the worst interests of their country. Now the old human
common sense about washing is that it is a great pleasure.
Water (applied externally) is a splendid thing, like wine.
Sybarites bathe in wine, and Nonconformists drink water;
but we are not concerned with these frantic exceptions.
Washing being a pleasure, it stands to reason that rich people can
afford it more than poor people, and as long as this was recognized
all was well; and it was very right that rich people should offer
baths to poor people, as they might offer any other agreeable thing--
a drink or a donkey ride. But one dreadful day, somewhere about
the middle of the nineteenth century, somebody discovered
(somebody pretty well off) the two great modern truths,
that washing is a virtue in the rich and therefore a duty
in the poor. For a duty is a virtue that one can't do.
And a virtue is generally a duty that one can do quite easily;
like the bodily cleanliness of the upper classes.
But in the public-school tradition of public life, soap has become
creditable simply because it is pleasant. Baths are represented
as a part of the decay of the Roman Empire; but the same baths
are represented as part of the energy and rejuvenation of
the British Empire. There are distinguished public school men,
bishops, dons, headmasters, and high politicians, who, in the course
of the eulogies which from time to time they pass upon themselves,
have actually identified physical cleanliness with moral purity.
They say (if I remember rightly) that a public-school man is
clean inside and out. As if everyone did not know that while
saints can afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean.
As if everyone did not know that the harlot must be clean,
because it is her business to captivate, while the good
wife may be dirty, because it is her business to clean.
As if we did not all know that whenever God's thunder cracks
above us, it is very likely indeed to find the simplest man
in a muck cart and the most complex blackguard in a bath.
There are other instances, of course, of this oily trick
of turning the pleasures of a gentleman into the virtues of
an Anglo-Saxon. Sport, like soap, is an admirable thing, but,
like soap, it is an agreeable thing. And it does not sum up
all mortal merits to be a sportsman playing the game in a world
where it is so often necessary to be a workman doing the work.
By all means let a gentleman congratulate himself that he has
not lost his natural love of pleasure, as against the blase,
and unchildlike. But when one has the childlike joy it
is best to have also the childlike unconsciousness; and I do
not think we should have special affection for the little boy
who ever lastingly explained that it was his duty to play Hide
and Seek and one of his family virtues to be prominent in Puss
in the Corner.
Another such irritating hypocrisy is the oligarchic attitude towards
mendicity as against organized charity. Here again, as in the case
of cleanliness and of athletics, the attitude would be perfectly
human and intelligible if it were not maintained as a merit.
Just as the obvious thing about soap is that it is a convenience,
so the obvious thing about beggars is that they are an inconvenience.
The rich would deserve very little blame if they simply said
that they never dealt directly with beggars, because in modern
urban civilization it is impossible to deal directly with beggars;
or if not impossible, at least very difficult. But these people do not
refuse money to beggars on the ground that such charity is difficult.
They refuse it on the grossly hypocritical ground that such
charity is easy. They say, with the most grotesque gravity,
"Anyone can put his hand in his pocket and give a poor man a penny;
but we, philanthropists, go home and brood and travail over
the poor man's troubles until we have discovered exactly
what jail, reformatory, workhouse, or lunatic asylum it will
really be best for him to go to." This is all sheer lying.
They do not brood about the man when they get home, and if they
did it would not alter the original fact that their motive for
discouraging beggars is the perfectly rational one that beggars
are a bother. A man may easily be forgiven for not doing this
or that incidental act of charity, especially when the question
is as genuinely difficult as is the case of mendicity.
But there is something quite pestilently Pecksniffian about
shrinking from a hard task on the plea that it is not hard enough.
If any man will really try talking to the ten beggars who come
to his door he will soon find out whether it is really so much
easier than the labor of writing a check for a hospital.
For this deep and disabling reason therefore, its cynical
and abandoned indifference to the truth, the English public
school does not provide us with the ideal that we require.
We can only ask its modern critics to remember that right
or wrong the thing can be done; the factory is working,
the wheels are going around, the gentlemen are being produced,
with their soap, cricket and organized charity all complete.
And in this, as we have said before, the public school really has
an advantage over all the other educational schemes of our time.
You can pick out a public-school man in any of the many
companies into which they stray, from a Chinese opium
den to a German Jewish dinner-party. But I doubt if you
could tell which little match girl had been brought up
by undenominational religion and which by secular education.
The great English aristocracy which has ruled us since the
Reformation is really, in this sense, a model to the moderns.
It did have an ideal, and therefore it has produced a reality.
We may repeat here that these pages propose mainly to show one thing:
that progress ought to be based on principle, while our modern progress
is mostly based on precedent. We go, not by what may be affirmed
in theory, but by what has been already admitted in practice.
That is why the Jacobites are the last Tories in history
with whom a high-spirited person can have much sympathy.
They wanted a specific thing; they were ready to go forward
for it, and so they were also ready to go back for it.
But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending
situations that they had not the excitement of creating.
Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform.
They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted.
Just as the rivalry of armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism,
so the rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky inheritance.
Men have votes, so women must soon have votes; poor children
are taught by force, so they must soon be fed by force;
the police shut public houses by twelve o'clock, so soon they
must shut them by eleven o'clock; children stop at school till
they are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty.
No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles,
no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this
mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent.
It is a good way to prevent real revolution.
By this logic of events, the Radical gets as much into
a rut as the Conservative. We meet one hoary old lunatic
who says his grandfather told him to stand by one stile.
We meet another hoary old lunatic who says his grandfather told
him only to walk along one lane.
I say we may repeat here this primary part of the argument,
because we have just now come to the place where it is most
startlingly and strongly shown. The final proof that our
elementary schools have no definite ideal of their own is the fact
that they so openly imitate the ideals of the public schools.
In the elementary schools we have all the ethical prejudices
and exaggerations of Eton and Harrow carefully copied
for people to whom they do not even roughly apply.
We have the same wildly disproportionate doctrine of
the effect of physical cleanliness on moral character.
Educators and educational politicians declare, amid warm cheers,
that cleanliness is far more important than all the squabbles
about moral and religious training. It would really seem
that so long as a little boy washes his hands it does not matter
whether he is washing off his mother's jam or his brother's gore.
We have the same grossly insincere pretense that sport always
encourages a sense of honor, when we know that it often ruins it.
Above all, we have the same great upperclass assumption
that things are done best by large institutions handling
large sums of money and ordering everybody about; and that
trivial and impulsive charity is in some way contemptible.
As Mr. Blatchford says, "The world does not want piety, but soap--
and Socialism." Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas soap
and Socialism are two hobbies of the upper middle class.
These "healthy" ideals, as they are called, which our politicians
and schoolmasters have borrowed from the aristocratic schools and
applied to the democratic, are by no means particularly appropriate
to an impoverished democracy. A vague admiration for organized
government and a vague distrust of individual aid cannot be made
to fit in at all into the lives of people among whom kindness means
lending a saucepan and honor means keeping out of the workhouse.
It resolves itself either into discouraging that system of prompt
and patchwork generosity which is a daily glory of the poor,
or else into hazy advice to people who have no money not to give
it recklessly away. Nor is the exaggerated glory of athletics,
defensible enough in dealing with the rich who, if they did not romp
and race, would eat and drink unwholesomely, by any means so much
to the point when applied to people, most of whom will take a great
deal of exercise anyhow, with spade or hammer, pickax or saw.
And for the third case, of washing, it is obvious that the same sort
of rhetoric about corporeal daintiness which is proper to an ornamental
class cannot, merely as it stands, be applicable to a dustman.
A gentleman is expected to be substantially spotless all the time.
But it is no more discreditable for a scavenger to be dirty than for
a deep-sea diver to be wet. A sweep is no more disgraced when he is
covered with soot than Michael Angelo when he is covered with clay,
or Bayard when he is covered with blood. Nor have these extenders
of the public-school tradition done or suggested anything by way
of a substitute for the present snobbish system which makes cleanliness
almost impossible to the poor; I mean the general ritual of linen
and the wearing of the cast-off clothes of the rich. One man moves
into another man's clothes as he moves into another man's house.
No wonder that our educationists are not horrified at a man picking
up the aristocrat's second-hand trousers, when they themselves
have only taken up the aristocrat's second-hand ideas.
CHESTERTON-WHAT'S WRONG - VIII: THE BROKEN RAINBOW