Part 10
Charles the Second was wont to recall with bitter mirth a certain Sunday in Edinburgh when he was forced by his loyal Scotch subjects to hear six sermons, a heavy price to pay even for loyalty. Paris may have been worth one mass to Henry of Navarre; but all Scotland was not worth six sermons to Charles Stuart, and the memory of that Sunday sweetened his return to France and to freedom.
It is a far cry from Knox hurling the curses of his tribal God at alien tribesmen, from Wesley convicting his narrow world “of sin, and of justice, and of judgment,” even from that “good, honest and painful sermon” which Dr. Pepys heard one Sunday morning with inward misgivings and troubled stirrings of the soul, to the sterilized discourse which offends against no assortment of beliefs, and no standards of taste. Frederick Locker gives us in his “Confidences” a grim description of the funeral services of George Henry Lewes, at Highgate Cemetery. Twelve gentlemen of rationalistic views had gathered in the mortuary chapel, and to them a thirteenth gentleman, also of rationalistic views, but who had taken orders somewhere, delivered an address, “half apologizing for suggesting the possible immortality of some of our souls.”
This may indicate the progress of the ages; but does it also indicate the progress of the ages that the moral essay, which was wont to be satiric, is now degenerating into the printed sermon, which is sure to be censorious; that the very men who once charmed us with the lightness of their touch and the keen edge of their humour are now preaching thunderously? For years Mr. Chesterton gave us reason to be grateful that we had learned to read. Who so debonair when he was gay, who so incisive when he was serious, who so ready with his thrust, who so understanding in his sympathy? We trusted him never to preach and never to scold, and he has betrayed our trust by doing both. He calls it prophesying; but prophesying is preaching, plus scolding, and no one knows this better than he does.
The earth is a bad little planet, and we hope that other planets are happier and better behaved. But the vials of Mr. Chesterton’s wrath are emptied on the heads of people who do not read him, and who have no idea that they are being anathematized. Swift used to say that most sermons were aimed at men and women who never went to church, and the same sort of thing happens to-day. We, Mr. Chesterton’s chosen readers, are not capitalists, or philanthropists, or prohibitionists, or any of the things he abhors; and we wish he would leave these gentry alone, and write for us again with the old shining wit, the old laughter, the old mockery, which was like a dash of salt on the flavourless porridge of life.
Twenty-one years ago Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson published an American edition of the “Letters from a Chinese Official,” a species of sermon, it is true, but preached delicately and understandingly, in suave and gleaming sentences, its burden of thought half veiled by the graceful lightness of its speech. American readers took that book to heart. We could not make over the United States into a second China. “Some god this severance rules.” But we accepted in the spirit of reason a series of criticisms which were reasonably conveyed to our intelligence, and a great deal of good they did us.
Much has happened in twenty-one years, and few of us are so light-hearted or so reasonable as of yore. Is it because we have grown impatient of strictures that Mr. Dickinson’s sermons now seem to us a trifle heavy, his reproaches more than a trifle harsh? We did not mind being compared adversely to China, but we do mind being blamed for Germany’s transgressions. When, as the mouthpiece of suffering Europe, Mr. Dickinson says, “America is largely responsible for our condition,” a flat denial seems in order. America did not invade Belgium, she did not burn French towns, she did not sink merchant ships. It seems to be Mr. Dickinson’s impression that our entrance, not without provocation, into the war “prolonged” the struggle, to the grievous injury of the Allies as well as of the Central Powers. There is a veracious paragraph in one of Mr. Tarkington’s “Penrod” stories, which describes the bewilderment of an ordinary American boy who does something he cannot well help doing, and who is thrashed or rewarded by an irate or delighted father, according to a point of view which is a veiled mystery to him. So, too, the ordinary American adult gapes confusedly when a British pacifist tells him that, by fighting the war to a finish, he and his nation are to blame for the economic ruin of Europe.
There is the same misunderstanding between unprofessional as between sectarian preachers, and the same air of thoughtful originality when they deal with the obvious and ascertained. When I see a serious essayist hailed as “the first wholly realistic and deductive moralist” that the country, or the century, has produced, I naturally examine his deductions with interest. What I find is a severe, but well-merited, denunciation of the civilized world as hypocritical, because its practice is not in accord with its profession. Readers of the New Testament will recall the same divergence between the practice and the profession of the Jews two thousand years ago. It has been neither unknown nor unobserved in any age, in any land, amid any people since.
There were a great many clergymen preaching in Hannah More’s day, and there are a great many clergymen preaching now. Churches and temples and halls of every conceivable denomination, and of no conceivable denomination, are open to us. There is something fair and square in going to a place of which sermons are the natural product, and hearing one. There is also something fair and square in taking a volume of sermons down from the shelf, and reading one. I am not of those who believe that a sermon, like a speech, needs to be spoken. A great deal of quiet thinking goes with the printed page, and the reader has one obvious advantage over the listener. He can close the book at any moment without disedifying a congregation. But just as Hannah More intruded her admonitions into the free spaces of life, so her successors betray us into being sermonized when we are pursuing our week-day avocations in a week-day mood, which is neither fair nor square. It is the attitude of the nursery governess (Hannah was the greatest living exemplar of the nursery governess), and there is no escape from its unauthorized supervision.
When a hitherto friendly magazine prints nine pages of sermon under a disingenuous title suggestive of domestic economy, and beginning brightly, “What right has any one to preach?” we feel a sense of betrayal. Any one has a right to preach (the laxity of church discipline is to blame); but a sense of honour, or a sense of humour, or a sense of humanity should debar an author from pretending he is not preaching when he writes like this: “If we have a desire that seems to us contrary to our duty, it means that there is a conflict within us; it means either that our sense of duty is not a sense of the whole self, or that our desire is not of the whole self. This then is to be aimed at--the identity of duty and desire.” And so on, and so on, through nine virtuous pages. The reluctance on the part of magazine preachers to refer openly to God tends to prolixity. Thomas à Kempis, reflecting on the same situation, which is not new, briefly recommends us to submit our wills to the will of God. Monk though he was, he understood that duty and desire are on opposite sides of the camp, and refuse to be harmoniously blended. This is why living Christians are called, and will be called to the end of time, the church militant.
A sanguine preacher in “The Popular Science Monthly” holds out a hope that duty and desire may be ultimately blended through an adroit application of eugenics. What we need, and have not got, is a race which “instinctively and spontaneously” does right. Therefore it behooves us to superinduce, through grafting and transplanting, “the preservation and perpetuation of a human stock that may be depended upon to lead moral lives without the necessity of much social compulsion.” It sounds interesting; and though Mr. Chesterton loudly asserts that eugenics degrade the race, we are too well accustomed to these divergencies on the part of our preachers to take them deeply to heart.
Mr. Chesterton has also used strong language (understatement is not his long suit) in denouncing “the diabolical idiocy that can regard beer or tobacco as in some sort evil or unseemly”; and I am disposed, in a mild way, to agree with him. Yet when some time ago I read a pleasantly worded little sermon on “An Artist’s Morality,” being curious to know how a moral artist differed from a moral chemist, or a moral accountant, the only concrete instance of morality adduced was the abandonment of tobacco. As soon as the artist resolved to amend his blameless life, he made the discovery that its chief element of discord was his pipe. “As a thing of sudden nastiness, I threw it out of the window, drawing in, almost reverently, a deep breath of cool October air.”
It is possible that the American public likes being preached to, just as Hannah More’s British public liked being preached to. This would account for the little sermons thrown on the screen between moving pictures, brief admonishments pointing out the obvious moral of the drama, deploring the irregularity of masculine affections, the soulless selfishness of wealth; and asserting with colossal impudence that the impelling purpose of the entertainment is to bring home to the hearts of men an understanding of the misery they cause. As it is the rule of moving-picture plays to change their scenes with disconcerting speed, but to leave all explanatory texts on the screen long enough to be learned by heart, these moral precepts dominate the show. The franker its revelations, the more precepts are needed to offset them. Rows of decent and respectable men, who accompany their decent and respectable wives, are flattered by being accused of sins which they have never aspired to commit.
“I must acknowledge that some writers upon ethical questions have been men of fair moral character,” said Sir Leslie Stephen in a moment of expansion which was no less wise than generous, seeing that he was himself the author of two volumes of lay sermons, originally delivered before ethical societies. Didacticism can go no further than in these monitory papers. There is one on “The Duties of Authors,” which is calculated to drive a light-minded or light-hearted neophyte from a profession where he is expected in his most unguarded moments to influence morally his equally unguarded readers. But Sir Leslie played the game according to rule. A plainly worded notice on the fly-leaf warned the public that the sermons were sermons, not critical studies, or Alpine adventures. If they seem to us overcrowded with counsel, this is only because they are non-religious in their character. When religion is excluded from a sermon, there is too much room left for morality. Without the vast compelling presence of God, the activities of men grow feverish, and lose the “imperious sweetness” of sanctity.
If our preachers are trying to recivilize humanity, it behooves us, perhaps, to be more patient with their methods. All civilizing formulas are uneasy possessions. Ruskin evolved one, and no man could have been more sincere or more insistent in applying it. So painfully did he desire that his readers should think as he did, that he grew to look upon the world with a jaundiced eye because it was necessarily full of people who thought differently. Even Hannah More had a little formula for the correction of England; but it gave her no uneasiness, because she could not conceive of herself as a failure. Advice flowed from her as it flows from her followers to-day. There was but one of her, which was too much. There are many of them, and great is their superfluity. The “Vanishing Sermon” has not vanished. It has only changed its habitat. It has forsaken the pulpit, and taken up quarters in what was formerly the strong-hold of literature.
The Battle-Field of Education
Readers of Jane Austen will remember how Mr. Darcy and Miss Bingley defined to their own satisfaction the requirements of an accomplished woman. Such a one, said Miss Bingley, must add to ease of manner and address “a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages.” To which Mr. Darcy subjoined: “All this she must possess, and she must have something more substantial in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” Whereupon Elizabeth Bennet stoutly affirmed that she had never met a woman in whom “capacity, taste, application and elegance” were so admirably and so formidably united.
Between an accomplished woman in Miss Austen’s day and an educated man in ours, there are many steps to climb; but the impression conveyed by those who now seek to define the essentials of education is that, like Miss Bingley and Mr. Darcy, they ask too much. Also that they are unduly influenced by the nature of the things they themselves chance to know. Hence the delight of agitators in drawing up lists of ascertainable facts, and severely catechizing the public. They forget, or perhaps they never read, the serene words of Addison (an educated man) concerning the thousand and one matters with which he would not burden his mind “for a Vatican.”
With every century that rolls over the world there is an incalculable increase of knowledge. It ranges backward and forward, from the latest deciphering of an Assyrian tablet to the latest settling of a Balkan boundary-line; from a disconcerting fossil dug out of its prehistoric mud to a new explosive warranted to destroy a continent. Obviously an educated man, even a very highly educated man, must be content, in the main, with a “modest and wise ignorance.” Intelligence, energy, leisure, opportunity--these things are doled out to him in niggardly fashion; and with his beggar’s equipment he confronts the vastness of time and space, the years the world has run, the forces which have sped her on her way, and the hoarded thinking of humanity.
Compared with this huge area of “general information,” how firm and final were the educational limits of a young Athenian in the time of Plato! The things he did not have to know fill our encyclopædias. Copra and celluloid were as remote from his field of vision as were the Reformation and the battle of Gettysburg. But ivory he had, and the memory of Marathon, and the noble pages of Thucydides. That there were Barbarians in the world, he knew as well as we do. Some, like the Ethiops, dwelt so far away that Homer called them “blameless.” Some were so perilously near that the arts of war grew with the arts of peace. For books he had a certain delicate scorn, caught from his master, Plato, who never forgave their lack of reticence, their fashion of telling everything to every reader. But the suave and incisive conversation of other Athenians taught him intellectual lucidity, and the supreme beauty of the spoken word. “Late and laboriously,” says Josephus, “did the Greeks acquire their knowledge of Greek.” That they acquired it to some purpose is evidenced by the fact that the graduate of an American college must have some knowledge of Plato’s thinking, if he is to be called educated. Where else shall he see the human intellect, trained to strength and symmetry like the body of an athlete, exercising its utmost potency and its utmost charm? Where else shall he find a philosophy which has “in all ages ravished the hearts of men”?
A curious symptom of our own day is that we have on one hand a strong and deep dissatisfaction with the mental equipment of young Americans, and on the other an ever-increasing demand for freedom, for self-development, for doing away with serious and severe study. The ideal school is one in which the pupil is at liberty to get up and leave the class if it becomes irksome, and in which the teacher is expected to comport himself like the kind-hearted captain of the Mantelpiece. The ideal college is one which prepares its students for remunerative positions, which teaches them how to answer the kind of questions that captains of industry may ask. One of the many critics of our educational system has recently complained that college professors are not practical. “The undergraduate,” he says, “sits during the four most impressionable years of his life under the tuition and influence of highly trained, greatly devoted, and sincere men, who are financial incompetents, who have as little interest in, or understanding of, business as has the boy himself.”
It does not seem to occur to this gentleman that if college professors knew anything about finance, they would probably not remain college professors. Learning and wealth have never run in harness since Cadmus taught Thebes the alphabet. It would be a brave man who should say which was the better gift; but one thing is sure: unless we are prepared to grant the full value of scholarship which adds nothing to the wealth of nations, or to the practical utilities of life, we shall have only partial results from education. And such scholarship can never be generally approved. It is, and must forever remain, says Augustine Birrell, “in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble word, essentially unpopular.”
The educational substitutes, now in vogue, are many, and varied, and, of their kind, good. They can show results, and results that challenge competition. Mr. Samuel Gompers, for example, writes with pardonable complacency of himself: “When I think of the education I got in the London streets, the training acquired by work in the shop, the discipline growing out of attempts to build an organization to accomplish definite results, of the rich cultural opportunities through human contacts, I know that my educational opportunities have been very unusual.”
This is, in a measure, true, and it is not the first time that such opportunities have been lauded to the skies. “If a lad does not learn in the streets,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, “it is because he has no faculty of learning.”--“Books! Don’t talk to me of books!” said Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. “My books are cards and men.” It will even be remembered that old Weller boasted to Mr. Pickwick of the tuition he had afforded Sam by turning him at a tender age into the London gutters, to learn what lessons they could teach.
Nevertheless, there is an education that owes nothing to streets, or to work-shops, or to games of chance. It was not in the “full, vivid, instructive hours of truancy” that Stevenson acquired his knowledge of the English language, which he wrote with unexampled vigour and grace. It is not “human contact” that can be always trusted to teach men how to pronounce that language correctly. This is an educational nicety disregarded by a practical and busy world. One of the best-informed women I ever knew, who had been honoured by several degrees, and who had turned her knowledge to good account, could never pronounce the test word, America. One of the ablest and most influential lawyers I ever knew, a college man with an imposing library, came no nearer to success. The lady said “Armorica,” as if she were speaking of ancient Brittany. The gentleman said “Amurrica,” probably to make himself intelligible to the large and patriotic audiences which he addressed so frequently and so successfully. The license allowed to youth may be held accountable for such Puck’s tricks as these, as well as for grammatical lapses. A superintendent of public schools in Illinois has decided on his own authority that common usage may supplant time-worn rules of speech; and that such a sentence as “It is I,” being “outlawed” by common usage, need no longer be forced upon children who prefer to say “It is me.”
Because the direct products of education are so limited, and the by-products of such notable importance, we permit ourselves to speak contemptuously concerning things which must be learned from books, without any deep understanding of things which must be learned from people armed with books, and backed by the authority of tradition. When Goethe said that the education of an Englishman gave him courage to be what nature had made him, he illuminated, after his wont, a somewhat shadowy subject. William James struck the same note, and amplified it, not too exhaustively, in “Talks to Teachers”: “An English gentleman is a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a creature who, for all the emergencies of life, has his line of behaviour distinctly marked out for him in advance.”
If this be the result of a system which, to learned Germans, lucid Frenchmen, and progressive Americans, has seemed inadequate, they may revise, or at least suspend, their judgment. And Englishmen who have humorously lamented the wasted years of youth (“May I be taught Greek in the next world if I know what I _did_ learn at school!” said the novelist, James Payn), need no longer be under the obligation of expressing more dissatisfaction than they feel.
In the United States the educational by-products are less clear-cut, because the force of tradition is weaker, and because too many boys are taught too long by women. The difficulty of obtaining male teachers has accustomed us to this anomaly, and we have even been heard to murmur sweet phrases concerning the elevating nature of feminine influence. But the fact remains that a boy is destined to grow into a man, and for this contingency no woman can prepare him. Only men, and men of purpose and principle, can harden him into the mould of manhood. It is a question of character, which great by-product of education cannot be safely undervalued even in a busy and clever age. “It was always through enfeeblement of character,” says Gustave Le Bon, “and not through enfeeblement of intellect, that the great peoples disappeared from history.”
And this truth paves the way for an assertion which, however controvertible, is not without strong support. Of all the direct products of education (of education as an end in itself, and not as an approach to something else), a knowledge of history is most essential. So, at least, it seems to me, though I speak with diffidence, being well aware that makers of history, writers of history, and teachers of history, have agreed that it is an elusive, deceptive and disputable study. Yet it is the heart of all things, and every intellectual by-path leads to this central theme. Most firmly do I believe with “the little Queen-Anne man” that
“The proper study of mankind is man”;
and how shall we reach him save through the pages of history? It is the foundation upon which are reared the superstructures of sociology, psychology, philosophy and ethics. It is our clue to the problems of the race. It is the gateway through which we glimpse the noble and terrible things which have stirred the human soul.