Present Concerns Read online

  We must wear clothes since the Fall. Yes, but inside, under what Milton called ‘these troublesome disguises’,1 we want the naked body, that is, the real body, to be alive. We want it, on proper occasions, to appear: in the marriage-chamber, in the public privacy of a men’s bathing-place, and (of course) when any medical or other emergency demands. In the same way, under the necessary outer covering of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual inequalities should be alive. It is there, of course, in our life as Christians: there, as laymen, we can obey—all the more because the priest has no authority over us on the political level. It is there in our relation to parents and teachers—all the more because it is now a willed and wholly spiritual reverence. It should be there also in marriage.

  This last point needs a little plain speaking. Men have so horribly abused their power over women in the past that to wives, of all people, equality is in danger of appearing as an ideal. But Mrs Naomi Mitchison has laid her finger on the real point. Have as much equality as you please—the more the better—in our marriage laws: but at some level consent to inequality, nay, delight in inequality, is an erotic necessity. Mrs Mitchison speaks of women so fostered on a defiant idea of equality that the mere sensation of the male embrace rouses an undercurrent of resentment. Marriages are thus shipwrecked.2 This is the tragi-comedy of the modern woman; taught by Freud to consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success. Merely for the sake of her own erotic pleasure, to go no further, some degree of obedience and humility seems to be (normally) necessary on the woman’s part.

  The error here has been to assimilate all forms of affection to that special form we call friendship. It indeed does imply equality. But it is quite different from the various loves within the same household. Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up—painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophising, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other: that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.

  We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man’s reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

  And that is why this whole question is of practical importance. Every intrusion of the spirit that says ‘I’m as good as you’ into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality; but let us undress every night.

  III

  THREE KINDS OF MEN

  There are three kinds of people in the world. The first class is of those who live simply for their own sake and pleasure, regarding Man and Nature as so much raw material to be cut up into whatever shape may serve them. In the second class are those who acknowledge some other claim upon them—the will of God, the categorical imperative, or the good of society—and honestly try to pursue their own interests no further than this claim will allow. They try to surrender to the higher claim as much as it demands, like men paying a tax, but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on. Their life is divided, like a soldier’s or a schoolboy’s life, into time ‘on parade’ and ‘off parade’, ‘in school’ and ‘out of school’. But the third class is of those who can say like St Paul that for them ‘to live is Christ’.1 These people have got rid of the tiresome business of adjusting the rival claims of Self and God by the simple expedient of rejecting the claims of Self altogether. The old egoistic will has been turned round, reconditioned, and made into a new thing. The will of Christ no longer limits theirs; it is theirs. All their time, in belonging to Him, belongs also to them, for they are His.

  And because there are three classes, any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disastrous. It overlooks the fact that the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always and necessarily unhappy. The tax which moral conscience levies on our desires does not in fact leave us enough to live on. As long as we are in this class we must either feel guilt because we have not paid the tax or penury because we have. The Christian docrine that there is no ‘salvation’ by works done according to the moral law is a fact of daily experience. Back or on we must go. But there is no going on simply by our own efforts. If the new Self, the new Will, does not come at His own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically.

  The price of Christ is something, in a way, much easier than moral effort—it is to want Him. It is true that the wanting itself would be beyond our power but for one fact. The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and finally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out. Begging is our only wisdom, and want in the end makes it easier for us to be beggars. Even on those terms the Mercy will receive us.

  IV

  MY FIRST SCHOOL

  ‘Next week would be no good,’ said the boy. ‘I’m going back to school on Friday.’ ‘Bad luck,’ said I. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the boy. And stealing a look at his face I saw that this was not stoicism. He really didn’t mind going back to school; possibly he even liked it.

  Was it merely envy of a generation happier than my own which filled me with a vague distaste at this discovery? One must not dismiss the possibility too lightly. The spirit that says ‘I went through it, why shouldn’t they?’ is a strong one and clever at disguises. But I believe I can, on this occasion, acquit myself. I was feeling, in a confused way, how much good the happy schoolboys of our own day miss in escaping the miseries their elders underwent. I do not want those miseries to return. That is just where the complexity of things comes in.

  My first preparatory school was one of the last survivals of the kind depicted in Vice Versa,1 except for one detail. There were no informers. Whether the hirsute old humbug who owned it would have run the place by espionage if the boys had given him the chance, I do not know. The treacle-like sycophancy of his letters to my father, which shocked me when they came into my hands years afterwards, does not make it improbable. But he was given no chance. We had no sneaks among us. The Head had, indeed, a grown-up son, a smooth-faced carpet-slipper sort of creature apt for the sport; a privileged demi-god who ate the same food as his father though his sisters shared the food of the boys. But we ourselves were (as the Trades Unions say) ‘solid’. Beaten, cheated, scared, ill-fed, we did not sneak. And I cannot help feeling that it was in that school I imbibed a certain indispensable attitude towards mere power on the one hand and towards every variety of Quisling on the other. So much so that I find it hard to see what can replace the bad schoolmaster if he has indeed become extinct. He was
, sore against his will, a teacher of honour and a bulwark of freedom. The Dictators and the Secret Police breed in countries where schoolboys lack the No Sneaking Rule. Of course one must wish for good schoolmasters. But if they breed up a generation of the ‘Yes, Sir, and Oh, Sir, and Please, Sir brigade’, Squeers2 himself will have been less of a national calamity.

  And then, the end of term. The little pencilled calendar in the desk. Twenty-three days more, twenty-two days more, twenty-one days more . . . this time next week . . . this time the day after tomorrow . . . this time tomorrow . . . the trunks have come down to the dormitory. Bunyan tells us that when the Pilgrims came to the land of Beulah ‘Christian with desire fell sick; Hopeful also had a fit or two of the same disease’.3 How well I know that sickness! It was no mere metaphor. It thrilled and wobbled inside: passed along the spine with delicious, yet harrowing thrills: took away the appetite: made sleep impossible. And the last morning never betrayed one. It was always not less, but more, than desire had painted it: a dizzying exaltation in which one had to think hard of common things lest reason should be overset. I believe it has served me ever since for my criterion of joy, and especially of the difference between joy and mere pleasure. Those who remember such Ends of Term are inexcusable if ever, in later life, they allow mere pleasure to fob them off. One can tell at once when that razor-edged or needle-pointed quality is lacking: that shock, as if one were swallowing light itself.

  But one learned more even than that. At the beginning of each term the end was incredible. One believed in it of course, as a conventionally ‘religious’ person ‘believes’ in heaven. One disbelieved in it as such a person disbelieves in heaven. Consolations drawn from that source availed against the imminent horror of tomorrow’s geometry (geometry was the great flogging subject with us) just as much as talk about heavenly glory avails against a worldly man’s suspicion that he is getting cancer. The joys of home were, for the first half of the term, a mere ‘escapist’ phantom. Theoretically there was somewhere a world where people had comfortable clothes, warm beds, chairs to sit in, and palatable food: but one could not make it real to one’s mind. And then, term after term, the incredible happened. The End did really come. The bellowing and grimacing old man with his cane, his threats, and his ogreish facetiousness, the inky walls, the stinking shed which served both as a latrine and as a store for our play-boxes, all ‘heavily vanished’ like a dream.

  There was of course a darker miracle. For the first half of the holidays, Term was likewise unbelievable. We knew—would you call it knowing?—that we must go back: just as a healthy young man in peacetime knows—if you call it knowing—that his hand will some day be the hand of a skeleton: or as we all know that the planet will one day be uninhabitable, and (later) the whole universe will ‘run down’. But each time the unbelievable came steadily on, and happened. There came a week, a day, an hour when the holidays were over, ‘portions and parcels of the dreadful past’, as if they had never been. And that is why I have never since been able, even when I held a philosophy that encouraged me to do so, to take quite at its face value the apparent importance of Present Things. I can (quite often) believe in my own death and in that of the species, for I have seen that kind of thing happening. I can believe with nerves and imagination as well as intellect, in human immortality; when it comes it will be no more astonishing than certain other wakenings that I have experienced. To live by hope and longing is an art that was taught at my school. It does not surprise me that there should be two worlds.

  What is the moral of this? Not, assuredly, that we should not try to make boys happy at school. The good results which I think I can trace to my first school would not have come about if its vile procedure had been intended to produce them. They were all by-products thrown off by a wicked old man’s desire to make as much as he could out of deluded parents and to give as little as he could in return. That is the point. While we are planning the education of the future we can be rid of the illusion that we shall ever replace destiny. Make the plans as good as you can, of course. But be sure that the deep and final effect on every single boy will be something you never envisaged and will spring from little free movements in your machine which neither your blueprint nor your working model gave any hint of.4

  V

  IS ENGLISH DOOMED?

  Great changes in the life of a nation often pass unnoticed. Probably few are aware that the serious study of English at English Universities is likely to become extinct. The death-warrant is not yet signed, but it has been made out. You may read it in the Norwood Report.1 A balanced scheme of education must try to avoid two evils. On the one hand the interests of those boys who will never reach a University must not be sacrificed by a curriculum based on academic requirements. On the other, the liberty of the University must not be destroyed by allowing the requirements of schoolboys to dictate its forms of study. It is into this second trap that the writers of the Report have fallen. Its authors are convinced that what they mean by ‘English’ can be supplied ‘by any teacher’ (p. 94). ‘Premature external examination’ in this subject is deprecated (p. 96); and I am not clear when, if ever, the moment of ‘maturity’ is supposed to arrive. English scholars are not wanted as teachers. Universities are to devise ‘a general honours degree involving English and . . . some other subject’ (p. 97); not because English studies will thus flourish, but to suit the schools.

  No instructed person to whom I have talked doubts that these proposals, if accepted, mean the end of English as an academic discipline. A subject in which there are no external examinations will lead to no State scholarships; one in which no school teachers are required will lead to no livelihoods. The door into academic English, and the door out of it, have both been bricked up. The English Faculty in every University thus becomes a faculty without students. At some of the largest Universities, no doubt, there will still be a Professor of English, as there is a Professor of Sanskrit or of Byzantine Greek, and four or five students (in a good year) may attend his lectures. But as an important element in the intellectual life of the country the thing will be dead. We may confidently hope, indeed, that English scholarship will survive abroad, notably in America and Germany; it will not survive here.

  There are some who will welcome this result. English faculties have a habit of being obtrusive. The strongly modernist and radical character of the Cambridge Tripos, and what has been called (with exaggeration) the disquietingly Christian flavour of the Oxford ‘Schools’, may each, in its different way, offend. Taken together, they are certainly a warning that if you want a mass-produced orthodoxy you will be ill-advised to let the young study our national literature, for it is a realm where tout arrive; but I do not think the Report was inspired by such considerations. If it kills English scholarship it will probably have done so inadvertently; its views are the result of honest misunderstanding. It believes that ‘any teacher’ in the course of teaching his own special subject can teach clear and logical English. The view would have been plausible when the oldest of those who made the Report were themselves at school. For them all teachers had been trained in the Classics. The results of that discipline on English style were not, it is true, so good as is often claimed, but it removed at least the worst barbarisms. Since then the Classics have almost been routed. Unless English, seriously studied, succeeds to their place, the English which ‘any teacher’ inculcates in the course of teaching something else will be at best the reflection of his favourite newspaper and at worst the technical jargon of his own subject.

  The danger is lest the views of the Report should be generally approved (as they were possibly formed) under a misunderstanding of the real nature of English scholarship. Many will think it reasonable to examine children in Geography or (Heaven help us!) in Divinity, yet not in English, on the ground that Geography and Divinity were never intended to entertain, whereas Literature was. The teaching of English Literature, in fact, is conceived simply as an aid to ‘appreciation’. And appreciation is, to be sure
, a sine qua non. To have laughed at the jokes, shuddered at the tragedy, wept at the pathos—this is as necessary as to have learned grammar. But neither grammar nor appreciation is the ultimate End.

  The true aim of literary studies is to lift the student out of his provincialism by making him ‘the spectator’, if not of all, yet of much, ‘time and existence’. The student, or even the schoolboy, who has been brought by good (and therefore mutually disagreeing) teachers to meet the past where alone the past still lives, is taken out of the narrowness of his own age and class into a more public world. He is learning the true Phaenomenologie des Geistes; discovering what varieties there are in Man. ‘History’ alone will not do, for it studies the past mainly in secondary authorities. It is possible to ‘do History’ for years without knowing at the end what it felt like to be an Anglo-Saxon eorl, a cavalier, an eighteenth-century country gentleman. The gold behind the paper currency is to be found, almost exclusively, in literature. In it lies deliverance from the tyranny of generalisations and catchwords. Its students know (for example) what diverse realities—Launcelot, Baron Bradwardine, Mulvaney2—hide behind the word militarism. If I regard the English Faculties at our Universities as the chief guardians (under modern conditions) of the Humanities, I may doubtless be misled by partiality for studies to which I owe so much; yet in a way I am well placed for judging. I have been pupil and teacher alike in Literae Humaniores, pupil and teacher alike in English; in the History School (I confess) teacher only. If anyone said that English was now the most liberal—and liberating—discipline of the three, I should not find it easy to contradict him.