Present Concerns Read online

  ‘In this time, place, and fortune,’ said Sidney’s Musidorus, ‘it is lawfull for us to speake gloriously’—for he spoke in the condemned cell.3 If England, departing from the practise of Greece and Rome, is about to banish the systematic study of her own literature, it is an honest pride to remember before the blow falls what fruits that study has borne during its short existence. They challenge comparison with those of any discipline whatever. We have lived scarcely a hundred years, we English scholars. In that time we have given our country the greatest dictionary in the world. We have put into print a vast body of medieval literature hitherto imprisoned in manuscript. We have established the text of Shakespeare. We have interpreted that of Chaucer. We have transmitted to our most recent poets the influence of our most ancient. We can claim as our own the rich humanity of Raleigh, the more astringent genius of W. P. Ker, the patient wisdom of R. W. Chambers, and (further back) such tough old giants as Skeat, Furnivall, York Powell, Joseph Wright. More recently at Cambridge we have begun an enquiry into the nature of literary experience which has no real precedent later than Aristotle. Most recently of all, at Oxford, we have (first of all Faculties in all Universities) conducted an Examination for Englishmen now behind barbed wire in Germany. We felt, as we read and re-read the answers, which told of so many hours usefully and delightedly passed in prison, that the labour had been immensely worth while. Here, we thought, was an incontestable witness to the value, not simply of ‘appreciation’, but of a steady march down centuries of changing sentiment, thought, and manners. Here, we thought, was a good augury for the future. We did not yet know that our prize, like Launcelot’s, was death.

  The Board of Education carries heavier metal than those who are merely scholars and Englishmen. If it resolves to sink us, it can. But it is desirable that a rather larger public should know what exactly it is that is going down.

  VI

  DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION

  Democratic education, says Aristotle, ought to mean, not the education which democrats like, but the education which will preserve democracy. Until we have realised that the two things do not necessarily go together we cannot think clearly about education.

  For example, an education which gave the able and diligent boys no advantage over the stupid and idle ones, would be in one sense democratic. It would be egalitarian and democrats like equality. The caucus-race in Alice, where all the competitors won and all got prizes, was a ‘democratic’ race: like the Garter it tolerated no nonsense about merit.1 Such total egalitarianism in education has not yet been openly recommended. But a movement in that direction begins to appear. It can be seen in the growing demand that subjects which some boys do very much better than others should not be compulsory. Yesterday it was Latin; today, as I see from a letter in one of the papers, it is Mathematics. Both these subjects give an ‘unfair advantage’ to boys of a certain type. To abolish that advantage is therefore in one sense democratic.

  But of course there is no reason for stopping with the abolition of these two compulsions. To be consistent we must go further. We must also abolish all compulsory subjects; and we must make the curriculum so wide that ‘every boy will get a chance at something’. Even the boy who can’t or won’t learn his alphabet can be praised and petted for something—handicrafts or gymnastics, moral leadership or deportment, citizenship or the care of guinea-pigs, ‘hobbies’ or musical appreciation—anything he likes. Then no boy, and no boy’s parents, need feel inferior.

  An education on those lines will be pleasing to democratic feelings. It will have repaired the inequalities of nature. But it is quite another question whether it will breed a democratic nation which can survive, or even one whose survival is desirable.

  The improbability that a nation thus educated could survive need not be laboured. Obviously it can escape destruction only if its rivals and enemies are so obliging as to adopt the same system. A nation of dunces can be safe only in a world of dunces. But the question of desirability is more interesting.

  The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority. At the present moment it would be very unrealistic to overlook the importance of the latter. There is in all men a tendency (only corrigible by good training from without and persistent moral effort from within) to resent the existence of what is stronger, subtler, or better than themselves. In uncorrected and brutal men this hardens into an implacable and disinterested hatred for every kind of excellence. The vocabulary of a period tells tales. There is reason to be alarmed at the immense vogue today of such words as ‘high-brow’, ‘up-stage’, ‘old school tie’, ‘academic’, ‘smug’, and ‘complacent’. These words, as used today, are sores: one feels the poison throbbing in them.

  The kind of ‘democratic’ education which is already looming ahead is bad because it endeavours to propitiate evil passions, to appease envy. There are two reasons for not attempting this. In the first place, you will not succeed. Envy is insatiable. The more you concede to it the more it will demand. No attitude of humility which you can possibly adopt will propitiate a man with an inferiority complex. In the second place, you are trying to introduce equality where equality is fatal.

  Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death.

  A truly democratic education—one which will preserve democracy—must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly ‘high-brow’. In drawing up its curriculum it should always have chiefly in view the interests of the boy who wants to know and who can know. (With very few exceptions they are the same boy. The stupid boy, nearly always, is the boy who does not want to know.) It must, in a certain sense, subordinate the interests of the many to those of the few, and it must subordinate the school to the university. Only thus can it be a nursery of those first-class intellects without which neither a democracy nor any other State can thrive.

  ‘And what,’ you ask, ‘about the dull boy? What about our Tommy, who is so highly strung and doesn’t like doing sums and grammar? Is he to be brutally sacrificed to other people’s sons?’ I answer: dear Madam, you quite misunderstand Tommy’s real wishes and real interests. It is the ‘aristocratic’ system which will really give Tommy what he wants. If you let me have my way, Tommy will gravitate very comfortably to the bottom of the form; and there he will sit at the back of the room chewing caramels and conversing sotto voce with his peers, occasionally ragging and occasionally getting punished, and all the time imbibing that playfully intransigent attitude to authority which is our chief protection against England’s becoming a servile State. When he grows up he will not be a Porson;2 but the world will still have room for a great many more Tommies than Porsons. There are dozens of jobs (much better paid than the intellectual ones) in which he can be very useful and very happy. And one priceless benefit he will enjoy: he will know he’s not clever. The distinction between him and the great brains will have been clear to him ever since, in the playground, he punched the heads containing those great brains. He will have a certain, half-amused respect for them. He will cheerfully admit that, though he could knock spots off them on the golf links, they know and do what he cannot. He will be a pillar of democracy. He will allow just the right amount of rope to those clever ones.

  But what you want to do is to take away from Tommy that whole free, private life as part of the everlasting opp
osition which is his whole desire. You have already robbed him of all real play by making games compulsory. Must you meddle further? When (during a Latin lesson really intended for his betters) he is contentedly whittling a piece of wood into a boat under the desk, must you come in to discover a ‘talent’ and pack him off to the woodcarving class, so that what hitherto was fun must become one more lesson? Do you think he will thank you? Half the charm of carving the boat lay in the fact that it involved a resistance to authority. Must you take that pleasure—a pleasure without which no true democracy can exist—away from him? Give him marks for his hobby, officialise it, finally fool the poor boy into the belief that what he is doing is just as clever ‘in its own way’ as real work? What do you think will come of it? When he gets out into the real world he is bound to discover the truth. He may be disappointed. Because you have turned this simple, wholesome creature into a coxcomb, he will resent those inferiorities which (but for you) would not have irked him at all. A mild pleasure in ragging, a determination not to be much interfered with, is a valuable brake on reckless planning and a valuable curb on the meddlesomeness of minor officials: envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you’, is the hotbed of Fascism. You are going about to take away the one and foment the other. Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.

  VII

  A DREAM

  I still think (with all respect to the Freudians) that it was the concourse of irritations during the day which was responsible for my dream.

  The day had begun badly with a letter from L. about his married sister. L.’s sister is going to have a baby in a few months; her first, and that at an age which causes some anxiety. And according to L. the state of the law—if ‘law’ is still the right word for it—is that his sister can get some domestic help only if she takes a job. She may try to nurse and care for her child provided she shoulders a burden of housework which will prevent her from doing so or kill her in the doing: or alternatively, she can get some help with the housework provided she herself takes a job which forces her to neglect the child.

  I sat down to write a letter to L. I pointed out to him that of course his sister’s case was very bad, but what could he expect? We were in the midst of a life and death struggle. The women who might have helped his sister had all been diverted to even more necessary work. I had just got thus far when the noise outside my window became so loud that I jumped up to see what it was.

  It was the W.A.A.F.1 It was the W.A.A.F., not using typewriters, nor mops, nor buckets, nor saucepans, nor pot-brushes, but holding a ceremonial parade. They had a band. They even had a girl who had been taught to imitate the antics of a peacetime Drum Major in the regular army. It is not, to my mind, the prettiest exercise in the world for the female body, but I must say she was doing it very well. You could see what endless pains and time had gone to her training. But at that moment my telephone rang.

  It was a call from W. W. is a man who works very long hours in a most necessary profession. The scantiness of his leisure and the rarity of his enjoyments gives a certain sacrosanctity to all one’s engagements with him: that is why I have had an evening with him on the first Wednesday of every month for more years than I can remember. It is a law of the Medes and Persians. He had rung up to say that he wouldn’t be able to come this Wednesday. He is in the Home Guard, and his platoon were all being turned out that evening (all after their day’s work) to practise—ceremonial slow marching. ‘What about Friday?’ I asked. No good; they were being paraded on Friday evening for compulsory attendance at a lecture on European affairs. ‘At least,’ said I, ‘I’ll see you at church on Sunday evening.’ Not a bit of it. His platoon—I happen to know that W. is the only Christian it contains—were being marched off to a different church, two miles away; a church to which W. has the strongest doctrinal objections. ‘But look here,’ I asked in my exasperation, ‘what the blazes has all this tomfoolery got to do with the purposes for which you originally joined the old L.D.V.?’2 W., however, had rung off.

  The final blow fell that evening in Common Room. An influential person was present and I’m almost sure I heard him say, ‘Of course we shall retain some kind of conscription after the war; but it won’t necessarily have anything to do with the fighting services.’ It was then that I stole away to bed and had my dream.

  I dreamed that a number of us bought a ship and hired a crew and captain and went to sea. We called her the State. And a great storm arose and she began to make heavy weather of it, till at last there came a cry ‘All hands to the pumps—owners and all!’ We had too much sense to disobey the call and in less time than it takes to write the words we had all turned out, and allowed ourselves to be formed into squads at the pumps. Several emergency petty officers were appointed to teach us our work and keep us at it. In my dream I did not, even at the outset, greatly care for the look of some of these gentry; but at such a moment—the ship being nearly under—who could attend to a trifle like that? And we worked day and night at the pumps and very hard work we found it. And by the mercy of God we kept her afloat and kept her head on to it, till presently the weather improved.

  I don’t think that any of us expected the pumping squads to be dismissed there and then. We knew that the storm might not be really over and it was as well to be prepared for anything. We didn’t even grumble (or not much) when we found that parades were to be no fewer. What did break our hearts were the things the petty officers now began to do to us when they had us on parade. They taught us nothing about pumping or handling a rope or indeed anything that might help to save their lives or ours. Either there was nothing more to learn or the petty officers did not know it. They began to teach us all sorts of things—the history of shipbuilding, the habits of mermaids, how to dance the hornpipe and play the penny whistle and chew tobacco. For by this time the emergency petty officers (though the real crew laughed at them) had become so very, very nautical that they couldn’t open their mouths without saying ‘Shiver my timbers’ or ‘Avast’ or ‘Belay’.

  And then one day, in my dream, one of them let the cat out of the bag. We heard him say, ‘Of course we shall keep all these compulsory squads in being for the next voyage: but they won’t necessarily have anything to do with working the pumps. For, of course, shiver my timbers, we know there’ll never be another storm, d’you see? But having once got hold of these lubbers we’re not going to let them slip back again. Now’s our chance to make this the sort of ship we want.’

  But the emergency petty officers were doomed to disappointment. For the owners (that was ‘us’ in the dream, you understand) replied, ‘What? Lose our freedom and not get security in return? Why, it was only for security we surrendered our freedom at all.’ And then someone cried, ‘Land in sight’. And the owners with one accord took every one of the emergency petty officers by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his trousers and heaved the lot of them over the side. I protest that in my waking hours I would never have approved such an action. But the dreaming mind is regrettably immoral, and in the dream, when I saw all those meddling busybodies going plop-plop into the deep blue sea, I could do nothing but laugh.

  My punishment was that the laughter woke me up.

  VIII

  BLIMPOPHOBIA

  It may well be that the future historian, asked to point to the most characteristic expression of the English temper in the period between the two wars, will reply without hesitation, ‘Colonel Blimp’.1 No popular cartoonist can work in a vacuum. A nation must be in a certain state of mind before it can accept the kind of satire which Mr Low was then offering. And we all remember what that state of mind was. We remember also what it led to; it led to Munich, and via Munich to Dunkirk. We must not blame Mr Low (or Mr Chamberlain or even Lord Baldwin) much more than we blame ourselves. All of us, with a very few exceptions, shared the guilt, and all, in some measure, have paid for it.

  For this state of mind many causes
might be given; but I want at present to draw attention to one particular cause which might be overlooked. The infection of a whole people with Blimpophobia would have been impossible but for one fact—the fact that seven out of every ten men who served in the last war, emerged from it hating the regular army much more than they hated the Germans. How mild and intermittent was our dislike of ‘Jerry’ compared with our settled detestation of the Brass Hat, the Adjutant, the Sergeant-Major, the regular Sister, and the hospital Matron! Now that I know more (both about hatred and about the army) I look back with horror on my own state of mind at the moment when I was demobilised. I am afraid I regarded a Brass Hat and a Military Policeman as creatures quite outside the human family.

  In this I was certainly very wrong. It may even be that the whole war machine of the last war was not in the least to blame for the impression it produced on those who went through it. My present purpose is not to settle a question of justice, but to draw attention to a danger. We know from the experience of the last twenty years that a terrified and angry pacifism is one of the roads that lead to war. I am pointing out that hatred of those to whom war gives power over us is one of the roads to terrified and angry pacifism. Ergo—it is a plain syllogism—such hatred is big with a promise of war. A nation convulsed with Blimpophobia will refuse to take necessary precautions and will therefore encourage her enemies to attack her.

  The danger of the present situation is that our Masters have now been multiplied. This time it is not only the Brass Hat and the Military Police; it is our Masters in Civil Defence, in the Home Guard, and so forth. Signs have already appeared, if not of bitter resentment against them, at any rate of an anxiety lest they should not abdicate, and that completely, at the first possible moment. And here comes the catch. Those who wish for whatever reason to keep their fellow-citizens regimented longer than is necessary will certainly say that they are doing so in the interests of security. But I say that the disappearance of all these Masters at an early date is just what security demands.