Part 2
In political matters we find that for all practical purposes the Box Office reigns supreme. No misguided political impresario to-day would plant some incompetent young actor into a star part because he was a member of his own family. We may be thankful that all parties openly recognise that any political play to be produced must please the pit and gallery, and that any statesman actor, to be a success, must play to their satisfaction. No one wants the stalls and dress circle of the political circus to be empty, but it would be absurd to let a small percentage of the audience exercise too great an influence on the productions of the management.
As in politics, so in business, for here no sane man will be heard to deny that the Box Office test is the only test of merit. If the balance sheet is adverse, the business man may be a man of culture, brain-power, intellect, sentiment and good manners, but as a business man he is not a success, and Nature kindly extinguishes him and automatically removes him from a field of energy for which he is unfitted. It is really unfortunate that one cannot have a moral, social, and literary Bankruptcy Court, where, applying the Box Office test, actors, authors, artists, and statesmen might file their petitions and be adjudged politically, or histrionically, or artistically bankrupt, as the case might be, and obtain a certificate of the Court, permitting them to open a fried-fish shop, to start a newspaper, or to enter upon some simpler occupation which, upon evidence given, it might appear they are really fitted for.
It is the vogue to-day for those claiming to possess the literary and artistic temperament to shrink with very theatrical emphasis from the Box Office. They point out how the Box Office of to-day overrules the Box Office of yesterday, forgetting that the Box Office of to-morrow may reinstate the judgment of the inferior Court. Even if the Box Office is as uncertain as the law, it is also as powerful as the law. Of course a painter or writer has the advantage over the actor—if it be one—of appealing to a smaller Box Office to-day, in the hopes of attracting a large Box Office to-morrow. A man can write and paint to please a coming generation, but a man cannot act, or bring in Bills in Parliament, or bake or brew, or make candlesticks for anyone else than his fellow living men. Not that, for myself, I think there have ever been many writers or artists who wrote and painted for future generations. On the contrary, they wrote and painted largely to please themselves, but in so far as they cared for their wives and children, with an eye on the Box Office, and in most cases it was only because their business arrangements were mismanaged that their own generations failed to pay to come in. These failures were the exception. The greatest men, such as Shakespeare and Dickens, were immediate Box Office successes—others were Box Office successes in their own day, but have not stood the test of time. Nevertheless, it is something to succeed at any Box Office, even if the success be only temporary. Every man cannot be a Prime Minister, but is that any reason why he should not aspire to a seat on the Parish Council? When one turns to the lives of authors and artists, one does not find that the wisest and best were men who despised the test of the Box Office.
Goldsmith had the good sense to ‘heartily wish to be rich,’ but he scarcely went the right way about it. One remembers Dr. Johnson sending him a guinea, and going across to his lodgings to find that his landlady had arrested him for debt and that he had changed the guinea for a bottle of Madeira. Dr. Johnson immediately makes across to the bookseller and sells the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ for sixty pounds. The Box Office test absolutely settled the merit of the book in its own generation, and from then until now. One may regret that Goldsmith reaped so poor a reward, and that is what so constantly happens, not that the Box Office test fails to be a true test at revealing merit, but that, owing to superior business capacity, a very inferior author will for a time reap a bigger reward than a better author. This is generally the result of bad business management, and the cases even of authors and artists who are not discovered in their own lifetime, and are discovered by future generations, are rarer than one would suppose. It is an amusing modern craze among the _cognoscenti_ to assess the ability of a writer or an artist of to-day by the mere fact alone that he has few admirers of his own generation.
If one were to investigate the lives of great writers and painters, one would find, I think, that the majority wrote and painted for money and recognition, and that the one reward they really wished for was a Box Office success.
Dickens, who is perhaps the healthiest genius in English literature, writing of a proposed new publication, says frankly:
I say nothing of the novelty of such a publication, nowadays, or its chance of success. Of course I think them great, very great; indeed almost beyond calculation, or I should not seek to bind myself to anything so extensive. The heads of the terms which I should be prepared to go into the undertaking would be—that I be made a proprietor in the work, and a sharer in the profits. That when I bind myself to write a certain portion of every number, I am ensured _for_ that writing in every number, a certain sum of money.
That is the wholesome way of approaching a piece of literary work from the Box Office point of view. But Dickens well understood the inward significance of Box Office success and why it is a thing good in itself. As he puts it in answering the letter of a reader in the backwoods of America:
To be numbered among the household gods of one’s distant countrymen and associated with their homes and quiet pleasures; to be told that in each nook and corner of the world’s great mass there lives one well-wisher who holds communion with me in spirit is a worthy fame indeed, and one which I would not barter for a mine of wealth.
Dickens’s Box Office returns brought him a similar message from hundreds and thousands of his fellow-men to that contained in the letter from the backwoods of America, and though in the nature of things such messages can only come in any number through the Box Office, Dickens understood the meaning of a Box Office success, and had too honest a heart to pretend that he despised it.
Thackeray was of course absolutely dogmatic on the Box Office principle. He rightly regarded the Box Office as the winnowing machine separating chaff from wheat. He refused to whimper over imaginary men of genius who failed to get a hearing from the world. One of the first duties of an author, in his view, was that of any other citizen, namely, to pay his way and earn his living. He puts his cold sensible views into the mouth of Warrington reproving Pen for some maudlin observation about the wrongs of genius at the hands of publishers.
What is it you want? (asks Warrington). Do you want a body of capitalists that shall be forced to purchase the works of all authors who may present themselves, manuscript in hand? Everybody who writes his epic, every driveller who can and can’t spell and produces his novel or his tragedy—are they all to come and find a bag of sovereigns in exchange for their worthless reams of paper? Who is to settle what is good, bad, saleable, or otherwise? Will you give the buyer leave in fine to purchase or not?... I may have my own ideas of the value of my Pegasus, and think him the most wonderful of animals, but the dealer has a right to his opinion, too, and may want a lady’s horse, or a cob for a heavy timid rider, or a sound hack for the road, and my beast won’t suit him.
One cannot have the Box Office principle more correctly stated than it is in that passage. Nearly all the great writers seem to be of the same opinion, and for the same reasons and without being such a ‘whole-hogger’ as Dr. Johnson, who roundly asserted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,’ it seems undoubted that the motives of money and recognition have produced the best work that has been done.
Nor do we find that the painter is in this matter less sensible than his artistic brethren. The late Sir John Millais expresses very accurately the sensible spirit in which all great artists attend to the varied voices of critics as against the unanimous voice of the Box Office.
I have now lost all hope of gaining just appreciation in the Press; but thank goodness ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ Nothing could have been more adverse than the criticism on ‘The Huguenot,’ yet the engraving is now selling more rapidly than any other of recent time. I have great faith in the mass of the public, although one hears now and then such grossly ignorant remarks.
The artist then gives instances of public criticism in other arts with which he disagrees; but the only matter that I am concerned with is that in his own art, and for himself, he has arrived at the Box Office conclusion that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
I have searched through many biographies in hopes of finding the writer or artist who was wholly uninfluenced by the Box Office. If he existed, or was likely to exist, he would be found, one would think, in large numbers among those well-to-do folk who had ample means and could devote their lives to developing their genius and ability solely for the good of mankind. It must seem curious to those who despise the Box Office to find how little good work is achieved by men and women who are under no necessity of appealing to that institution for support.
If I had been asked to name any writer of my own time who was absolutely free from any truck with the Box Office, I should, before I had read his charming autobiography, have suggested Herbert Spencer. For indeed one would not expect to find a Box Office within the curtilage of a cathedral or a laboratory. Religion and science and their preachers have necessarily very little to do with the Box Office.
But Spencer was not only a great writer, but a keen scientific analyst of the facts of human life. He could not deceive himself—as so many of the literary folk do—as to his aims and objects. Looking back on the youthful valleys of his life from the calm mountain slopes that a man may rest on at the age of seventy-three, he asks himself
What have been the motives prompting my career? how much have they been egotistic, and how much altruistic? That they have been mixed there can be no doubt. And in this case, as in most cases, it is next to impossible to separate them mentally in such a way as to preserve the relations of amount among them. So deep down is the gratification which results from the consciousness of efficiency, and the further consciousness of the applause which recognised efficiency brings, that it is impossible for anyone to exclude it. Certainly, in my own case, the desire for such recognition has not been absent.
He continues to point out that this desire for recognition was ‘not the primary motive of my first efforts, nor has it been the primary motive of my larger and later efforts,’ and concludes, ‘Still, as I have said, the desire of achievement, and the honour which achievement brings, have doubtless been large factors.’
It is very interesting to note that a man like Herbert Spencer recognises what a large part the Box Office played in his own work—work which was rather the work of a scientist than the work of a literary man.
In the modern education and in the Socialist doctrines that are preached, emulation, competition and success are spoken of almost as though they were evils in themselves. People are to have without attaining. Children and men and women are taught to forget that ‘they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize.’ It is considered bad form to remember that there is a Box Office, that it is the world’s medium for deciding human values; and that to gain prizes it is necessary to ‘so run that ye may obtain.’
These old-world notions are worth repeating, for however we may wish they were otherwise, they remain with us and have to be faced. And on the whole they are good. Success at the Box Office is not only to be desired on account of the money it brings in, but because it means an appreciation and belief in one’s work by one’s fellow-men. In professions such as the actor’s, the barrister’s, the politician’s, and to a great extent the dramatist’s, and all those vocations where a man to succeed at all must succeed in his own lifetime, the Box Office is, for all practical purposes, the sole test of merit. The suggestion—a very common one to-day—that a man can only make a Box Office success by pandering to low tastes, or indulging in some form of dishonesty or chicanery, is a form of cant invented by the man who has failed, to soothe his self-esteem and to account pleasantly to himself for his own failure. A study of the lives of great men will show that they all worked for the two main things, popular recognition and substantial reward, that are summed up in the modern phrase Box Office.
It may be that in some ideal state the incentive to work may be found in some other institution rather than the Box Office. It is the dream of a growing number of people that a time is nearly at hand when the Box Office results attained by the workers are to be taken away and shared among those high-souled unemployables who prefer talking to toiling and spinning. Such theories are nothing new, though just at the moment they may be uttered in louder tones than usual. St. Paul knew that they were troubling the Thessalonians when he reminded them ‘that if any would not work neither should he eat,’ and he added, ‘for we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies.’ St. Paul makes the sensible suggestion ‘that with quietness they work and eat their own bread.’ To eat your own bread and not someone else’s, you must work for it successfully and earn it. That really is the Box Office principle.
THE DISADVANTAGES OF EDUCATION.
“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: But a broken spirit drieth the bones.”
_Proverbs_ xvii., 22.
The Professors of dry bones have broken so many spirits in their machine that they will not grudge me a laugh at their little failings. A mere “man in the street” like myself can do little more than call attention to some of the weaknesses of our educational system, well understanding that the earnest Schoolmaster knows far more about the disadvantages of education than anything he can learn from his surviving pupils. For my part I have never made any secret of the fact that from my earliest days I disliked education, and had a natural, and I hope not unhealthy, distrust of schoolmasters. Let it here be understood with the greatest respect to the sex that “schoolmaster” embraces “schoolmistress.” Most school-boys that I remember have had that attitude of mind, but many remained so long in scholastic cloisters that the sane belief of their youth, that the schoolmaster was their natural enemy, became diminished and was ultimately lost altogether. Indeed, there are few minds that undergo the strain of years of toil among scholastic persons without becoming dulled into the respectable belief that schoolmasters are in themselves desirable social assets, like priests and policemen and judges. Now no small boy with a healthy mind believes this. He knows that the schoolmaster and the policeman are merely evidences of an imperfect social system, that no progress is likely to be made until society is able to dispense with their services, and though he cannot put these ideas into words he can and does act upon that assumption, and continues to do so until his natural alertness is destroyed and he is dragooned into at all events an outward observance of the official belief in the sanctity of schoolmasters.
Personally I have always regarded it as a matter of congratulation that I escaped from school at a comparatively early age, nor can I honestly say that I remember to-day anything that I formerly learnt at school, or that if I did remember anything I learnt, there,—except perhaps a few irregular French verbs—that it would be of the slightest use to me in the everyday business of life.
If I were, for instance, to model my methods of trial in the County Court upon the proceedings of Euclid, who spent his life in endeavouring to prove by words, propositions that were self-evident even in his own very rudimentary pictures, I should be justly blamed by a commercial community for wasting their time. Yet how many of the most precious hours of the best of my youth have been wasted for me by schoolmasters, who were so dull as not to perceive that Euclid, like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, was the writer of a book of nonsense? Not nonsense that can possibly appeal to the child of to-day, but nonsense that will always have its place in the library of those to whom the Absurd is as precious in life as the Beautiful.
If you believe at all in evolution and progress, and the descent of man from more primitive types, with its wonderfully hopeful corollary, the ascent of man to higher things, you must acknowledge at once that education has necessarily been, and always must be, a great set back to onward movement. A schoolmaster can only teach what he knows, and if one generation only learns what the last generation can teach there is not much hope of onward movement.
Schoolmasters are apt to believe that the hope of the younger generation depends upon their assimilating the ideas of their pastors and masters, whereas the true hope is that they will not be so long overborne by authority, as to make their young brains incapable of rejecting at all events some of the false teaching that each generation complacently offers to the next.
We need not accept the new generation entirely at its own valuation, nor need we disturb ourselves about the exaggerated under-estimate with which one-and-twenty sets down for naught the wisdom of fifty. But unless we pursue education as a preparation for the betterment of the human race we are beating the air. And the responsibility is a great one. For the mind of a child, as Roger Ascham says, is “like the newest wax, most able to receive the best and fairest printing!” But, alas! it is equally able to receive printing of an inferior type. Every one of us, I should imagine, half believes something to-day that he knows to be untrue because it was impressed on the wax of his child-mind by some well-meaning but ignorant schoolmaster.
One of the gravest disadvantages about education is the way it thwarts progress by teaching young folk that which, to say the least of it, is uncertain. If education were to be strictly confined by the schoolmaster to the things he really knew, what a quantity of lumber could be trundled out of the schoolroom to-morrow. Teaching should be kept to arts, accomplishments and facts—opinions and theories should have no place whatever in the schoolroom.
Open any school book of a hundred years ago and read its theories and opinions, and remember that these were thrust down the throats of the little ones with the same complacent conceit that our opinions and theories of to-day are being taught in the schools. And yet we all know that theories and opinions in the main become very dead sea-fruit in fifty or a hundred years, whilst the multiplication table remains with us like the Ten Commandments, a monument of everlasting truth.
This chief disadvantage of education will probably continue with us for many generations, until it is recognised as immoral and wicked to warp a child’s mind by teaching things to it as facts which are at the best only conjectures, in the hope that in after life it may take some side in the affairs of the world, which the teacher, or the committee of the school, is interested in. The true rule should of course be to teach children, especially in State Schools, only ascertained facts, the truth of which all citizens, who are not in asylums, agree to be true.
My view of the ideal system of education is much the same as Mr. Weller senior’s. You will remember that he said to Mr. Pickwick about his son Sam, “I took a great deal of pains with his eddication, sir! I let him run in the streets when he were very young and shift for his self. It’s the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.” I could not ask any body of schoolmasters to adopt this principle, though it is one that seems to me thoroughly sound. Put into other and more scholastic words, it may be made a copy-book sentiment. Emerson says much the same thing as old Tony Weller, when he writes, “That which each can do best only his Maker can teach him,” and the spirit of the Maker of the Universe seems to me at least as likely to be met with in Market Street as in a committee room of the Manchester Town Hall, where the destinies of our national education are so ably managed by citizens of respectability and authority.
Some such preface as this is needed if I am to make it clear to you why I choose the disadvantages of education rather than the advantages, as the subject matter of my essay. One should always try to speak on something one really believes in heartily and thoroughly. The advantages of education have been spread before us during the last fifty years by every writer of importance—a writer of no importance may fairly give an idle hour to the other side of the picture.
In any commercial country it should not be necessary to apologise for the endeavour to make a rough balance-sheet describing the liabilities of education; even if we are all convinced that the assets of education are more than enough to meet the liabilities and that we are educationally solvent. Nor am I really stating anything very new or startling, for all thinkers and writers on education seem beginning at last to discover that education is only a means to an end, and that when you have no clear idea of what end you hope to arrive at it is not very probable that you will choose the right means.
If a man wanted to travel to Blackpool and was so ignorant as to imagine that Blackpool was in the neighbourhood of London, he would probably in the length of his journey lose many beautiful hours of the sea-side and spend them in the stuffy atmosphere of a railway train. This would be of little importance to the community if it was only the case of an individual man—a schoolmaster for instance. But what if the man had taken a party of children with him? thereby losing for them wonderful hours of digging on the sand, or seeing Punch or Judy, or listening to a Bishop preaching—that indeed would be a serious state of things for everyone.
One of the great disadvantages of modern education is that few of its professors and teachers, and fewer of its elected managers, have the least idea where they are going to. The authorities shoot out codes and prospectuses and minutes and rules and orders, and change their systems with the inspired regularity of a War Office.