Chapter I: AM willing to acknowledge that until lately, when I was privileged to (2)

And this being so, and the delights of the Golden Age always being kept in the back of our mind, as a favourable contrast to the present state of things, it is hardly surprising that in course of time, the memory of the earlier days of our life is apt to become gilded and resplendent, and very unlike the simple, up and down April existence that was really ours. The dull wet days, the lessons and the tears are all forgotten; it is the sunshine and the laughter and the play that remain. But it by no means follows that such hoarding up of pleasant memories tends to make a man discontented with his lot; it would rather seem that they impart something of their good humour to the mind in which they are stored, so that the sunshine of former jolly days returns to yield an aftermath of more sober joy, and to help to light out our later years with a becoming glow of cheerfulness. And on the other hand you will find that an habitually discontented man will be quite unwilling to own that the days of his youth, at all events, were happy.

There is no doubt that the most natural result of this glorification of our own childhood is a liking for children. Seeing them naughty or good, at work or at play, our minds straightway step back through the span of years to greet a little one who behaved in just such a way; and the sympathetic understanding thus engendered, shows us the surest way, both to manage children of our own, and to make friends with those of others.

It is impossible to conceive a man, bearing his own childhood in mind, behaving unjustly or unkindly to a child. For seeing that we perceive in every child a more or less distinct reflection of our own child nature, such conduct would be something suicidal. How much of the child is still contained within our mature mind is difficult to judge—some people have much more than others. And it is these people who can peel off their experience and knowledge like an athlete stripping for a race, and who can step out to play not only with the same spirit and excitement, but even with the same mental processes as a child; these are they who can readily obtain admission into the sacred circle of child games, and who can fancy, for just as long as the game lasts, that they are once more wandering in that fairy garden from whose easy paths of laughter and innocence our aching feet are banished for ever.

Here, then, is the cure for this nostalgia of childhood, which seizes the best of us from time to time, and causes us to batter vainly at fast-locked nursery doors, or to look sadly at the gaudy toyshops, robbed by the cynical years of their fit halo. When this melancholy falls on us, and we who are respectable forty feel like senile eighty, let us forthwith seek the company of little children, and so elude the fatal black dog. “Sophocles did not blush to play with children.” Why should we? And for those who are not fortunate enough to number in their acquaintance children of the right age and humour, here, as the cookery books say, is a tried receipt.

Take a copy of Mr. Barrie’s “Little White Bird,” together with a large bag of sweets, and sally to the park. The rest depends on your address, but for a shy man a puppy will prove an invaluable aid to the making of acquaintances. And if, as has happened to ourselves, at the end of a delightful afternoon a little lady of some seven years should, abjuring words, fling her arms round your neck and press an uncommonly sticky pair of lips on a cheek which, till that moment we will suppose better acquainted with the razor, why then, if not sooner, you will have learnt that the whole philosophy of growing old is the increasing pleasure you can take in the society of the young; this, once determined, a vista of most charming days lies before you, and sorrow for a nursery cupboard that has gone into the Ewigkeit will be forgotten in helping some diminutive neighbour to explore hers.

Southey was really stating this idea when he wrote in “The Doctor” that “A house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment, unless there is a child in it rising three years or a kitten rising six weeks,” though to our mind the presence of both would be the ideal arrangement, since the kitten would take the place of the puppy previously mentioned, for the child to play with.

If we wish to support age kindly, it is only to be done by surrounding ourselves with youth. And the laughter of children, surely the purest and sweetest of all music, will strike a responsive chord in our breasts, and will enable us to live through the years that wither, in all harmony and contentment.

THE FOLLY OF EDUCATION

OF all the intellectual exercises with which we solace the idle hours that we devote to thought, none is more engaging and at the same time perplexing than that of endeavouring to form a clear conception of the age in which we live. Naturally the difficulty lies, not in lack of materials on which to base an impression—indeed, we are embarrassed by the quantity of evidence that accumulates to our hand—but in the fact that it is hard to see things in true perspective when they are very near to the observer. The yet unborn historians of the present era will doubtless lack much of our knowledge, but they will be able to unravel in the quietude of their studies the tangled threads and stubborn knots that writhe beneath our fingers with the perpetual changeableness and uneasy animation of life itself. But if it is impossible to write dispassionately of a revolution while men are dying at the barricades and musket-balls are marring the bland uniformity of the wallpaper of the room in which we write, it is always open to the student of life to fall back on impressionism, the form of art that seeks to bludgeon life with a loaded phrase, rather than to woo her to captivity with chosen and honeyed words. And the brutal method is apt to prove the more efficacious, as with that frail sex that kisses, so I am told, the masculine hand that grants the accolade of femininity in that blessed state of bruiser and bruised that is Nature’s highest conception of the relationship of the two sexes. While science greets the corpse with incomprehensible formulæ and the conscientious artist gropes for his note-book of epithets to suit occasions, impressionism stops her dainty nose with her diminutive square of perfumed silk, and the dog is dead indeed.

We are all born impressionists, and it takes the education of years to eradicate the gift from our natures; many people never lose the habit of regarding life in this queer, straightforward fashion, and go to their graves obstinately convinced that grass is green and the sky is blue in dogged opposition to the scientists, didactic dramatists, eminent divines, philosophers, æsthetic poets, and human beings born blind. Some of these subtle weavers of argument would have us believe that impressionism means just the converse of the sense in which I am using the word; that, for instance, the fact that grass is green comes to us from indirect sources, as that of our own natures we would perceive it to be red or blue. But while we believe our impressions to be our own, we know that this theory has reached us indirectly, so we can well afford to ignore it. Others, again, will have it that impressions are not to be trusted; and the majority of people, while rejecting or failing to comprehend the philosophic basis on which this doubt is founded, are only too willing to accept a theory that relieves them in some way of responsibility for their own individual actions. As a matter of fact, telling a man to mistrust his impressions is like bidding a mariner despise his compass. If our senses lie to us, we must live, perforce, in a world of lies.

But as I hinted above, the young are wont to rely on their impressions from the moment when a baby first parts its lips in howling criticism of life. Children have implicit faith in the evidence of their senses until the grown-up people come along and tell grimy stories of perjured eyes and lying ears, and the unhappy fate of the unwise babes who trusted them. What is a child to do? Usually it accepts the new theory of its own inherent blindness and deafness grudgingly, but it accepts it nevertheless. It begins to rely on the experience of older human beings, as if the miracle of its own life were no more than the toneless repetition of other lives that have been before it. Wonder passes from its life, as joy passes from pencil and paper when the little fingers are made to follow certain predestined lines, instead of tracing the fancies of the moon. The child becomes sensible, obedient, quick at its lessons. It learns the beauty of the world from pictures and the love of its mother from books. In course of time its senses become atrophied through disuse, and it can, in truth, no longer see or hear. When this stage is reached the education of the individual is completed, and all civilisation’s requirements are satisfied.

I have described an extreme case, and the judicious reader will realise that the process is rarely completed in so short a time as the last paragraph suggests. But sooner or later most men and women come to believe in experience, and to this belief is due our tyrannous treatment of the young. I can conceive that an age will come that will shrink with horror from the excesses we commit in the name of education, and will regard us who force children to do their lessons against their will very much in the way in which we regard the slave-owners of the past, only with added indignation that our tyranny is imposed on the children’s minds, and not on the bodies of adults. Let those conservative readers who find this comparison a little strained reflect for a moment on what it is that we have to teach the next generation, with what manner of wisdom we chain the children’s imaginations and brand their minds. We teach them in the first place to express themselves in sounds that shall be intelligible to us, and this, I suppose, is necessary, though I should like to doubt it. Further, we invariably instruct them in the sciences of reading and writing, which seems to me frankly unfortunate. In Utopia, as I conceive it, the child who thought there was anything worth reading would teach itself to read, as many children have done before it, and in the same way the rarer child who desired to express itself on paper would teach itself to write. That any useful purpose is served by the general possession of this knowledge I cannot see. Even civilisation cannot rejoice that her children are able to read the Sunday newspapers and scrawl gutter sentiments on the walls of churches.

Beyond this we teach children geography, which robs the earth of its charm of unexpectedness and calls beautiful places by ugly names; history, which chronicles inaccurate accounts of unimportant events in the ears of those who would be better employed in discovering the possibilities of their own age; arithmetic, which encourages the human mind to set limits to the infinite; botany, which denotes the purposeless vivisection of flowers; chemistry, which is no more than an indelicate unveiling of matter; and a hundred other so-called arts and science, which, when examined without prejudice, will be found to have for their purpose the standardisation and ultimate belittlement of life.

In Utopia, the average human being would not know how to read or write, would have no knowledge of the past, and would know no more about life and the world in general, than he had derived from his own impressions. The sum of those impressions would be the measure of his wisdom, and I think that the chances are that he would be a good deal less ignorant than he is now, when his head is full of confused ideas borrowed from other men and only half-comprehended. I think that our system of education is bad, because it challenges the right of the individual to think constructively for himself. In rustic families, where the father and mother have never learnt to read and the children have had the advantages of “scholarship,” the illiterate generation will always be found to have more intelligence than their educated descendants. The children were learning French and arithmetic when they should have been learning life.

And, after all, this is the only kind of education that counts. We all know that a man’s knowledge of Latin or the use of the globes does not affect his good-fellowship, or his happiness, or even the welfare of the State as a whole. What is important is, that he should have passed through certain experiences, felt certain emotions, and dreamed certain dreams, that give his personality the stamp of a definite individual existence. Tomlinson, the book-made man, with his secondhand virtues and secondhand sins, is of no use to any one. Yet while we all realise this, we still continue to have a gentle, unreasoning faith in academic education; we still hold that a man should temper his own impressions with the experience of others.

ON COMMON SENSE

ABOUT this time last year I was fortunate enough to go to a very nice children’s party, or, rather, a very nice party for children. I add the appreciative epithet because there was only one grown-up person there, and that person was not I; and when all is said it may be stated confidently that the fewer the grown-ups the better the children’s party. Nevertheless, although there was only one grown-up for about thirty children, and she the most charming and tactful of girls, I had not been long in the place of fairy-lamps before I discovered that with one exception I was the youngest person there. I had come out that night in the proper party frame of mind. My shoes were tight and my mind was full of riddles of which I had forgotten the answers, and as I drove along in a four-wheeler—who ever went to a party in anything else?—I noticed that the stars smelt of tangerine oranges. When I reached the house everything looked all right. The place was very busy, and there were lots of white frocks and collars, and pink faces.

Yes, it ought to have been a jolly party, but it came about twenty years too late, and the children, I had almost added, were about twenty years too old. Instead of forgetting everything else in the whirl and clamour of play and dancing, they were, it seemed to me, too busy registering the impressions to enjoy themselves. One of them, a child of eleven, was already smitten with a passion for the _mot juste_. “My tongue,” she told me gravely, “is like a cloud”; and, later, “a marigold is like a circus.” She had a crushing word for a comrade who was looking at herself in a mirror. “But you don’t _really_ look as nice as you do in the looking-glass!” The other children did not seem much better, and I stood forlornly in their midst, as a child stands among the creased trouser-legs of its elders, until I saw a scared little face in a corner apart from the rest. “Why aren’t you playing?” I asked. The child looked me straight in the face, and burst into a thousand tears. At least here was something young, something not wholly wise. We sat together, exchanging grave confidences all the evening.

Possibly this is a queer way in which to start an article on common sense, but there is more than madness in my method, for I feel assured that the children have derived their new wisdom—a senseless wisdom, a wisdom of facts—from their absurd parents. The latest creed, the belief that comfort for the masses prevents remorse in the individual, may be well enough in its way, but it creates a very bad atmosphere in which to bring up children. They are taught that life is an agglomeration of facts, and no sort of miracle, and by learning these facts like little parrots they lose the whole thrill and adventure of life. They do not go out to kill dragons, because they know that there are no dragons there. Chivalry survived with children long after common sense had killed it as dead as mutton in the adult mind. But now they, too, have found it out, and there are only a few silly poets and mad lovers to keep the memory of Quixote green.

What are these facts by which we are to guide our lives, of which, indeed, our lives are to consist? One of the simplest, one that has come to have the force of a proverbial expression, is the fact that two and two make four, and this is one of the first things we teach our children.

I have a friend who suspects that in moments of intense consciousness two and two, weary of making four, would make five for a change. I have heard it argued against him by mathematicians that the fourness of four—four’s very existence, as it were—depends on its being related to two in the subtle fashion suggested by the well-known dogma, but I can discern no grounds for this assertion. Consider the fate that would befall a man who went for a ride on an omnibus for the purpose of making use of this one fact. He might be aware that the fare to Putney was fourpence, and, proud of his mathematical knowledge, might pay his fare in two instalments of twopence. What would be his consternation to find that, as he reached his journey’s end, he would have to pay another penny because he had not paid his fourpence in one lump sum? In terms of ’bus fares, two and two do not make four, and I would multiply examples of such exceptions to the accepted rule.

But even if two and two really did make four, the fact would remain supremely useless. However cunningly it was conveyed, the statement would not abate one tear from the sorrows of a child, nor would it brighten, even for an instant, the eyes of a dying man. You could not win a girl with it, because the man who counts his kisses is damned from the start. A poet could not turn it into song; it would draw no briefest flame from the ashes of a storyteller’s fire. The thing is cold, inhuman; it is made for lawyers and politicians, and the persons who argue their lives away on matters of no importance. We who are simpler never put two and two together for the purpose of making four, for four is of no more use to us than a nice brace of twos. The infinite is the answer of all our mathematical problems, and if we cannot find it we are quick to sponge the sum off our slates. The belief that two and two make four leads most people to think four a better fellow than two; to hold, for instance, that a man with four millions must be richer than a man with two, though the groans of our pauper millionaires never cease to admonish our national cupidity. Two and two make just what your heart can compass, neither more nor less, and, if your unit is worthless, they make nothing at all.

Facts are worse than useless, for they limit the journeys of the human mind; but there is a common sense not founded on facts that represents the extreme limits of our intellectual pilgrimages. It is common only in this: it is true for all humanity when humanity is wise enough to accept it. Shakespeare had it deliciously, and even now we are only beginning to learn the things he knew. For instance—

“We are such stuff as dreams are made of,
And our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

This seems more wisely true to us to-day than it did to the men and women of his age, but it was as true when he wrote it as it is now. Or again—

“Men must abide
Their going hence even as their coming hither,
Ripeness is all.”

This is the true common sense—all that we know, all that we shall know; but this is not the thing that we teach the children in our schools, nor is it the light by which most of us guide our lives. We invent trivial rules and conventions to belittle the life we have to lead, and make marks in the dust with our fingers to cheat an uncheatable fate. We add illusion to illusion in coward hopes of outliving the greatest illusion of all. We add folly to folly, and lie to lie, and are content that the results of our labours should be unwisdom and untruth. We add two to two and worship the mournful constancy of four.

I began my article on common sense with a children’s party; I must end it, I suppose, somewhere within the limits of our unhoping lives. When the night of a hundred kisses draws to a close, and Dawn, with her painted smile, creeps like a spy into the room, men and women believe that they can see things as they really are. The earth is grey to their eyes, though not more grey than their own tired flesh, and their little hearts are quick to believe that grey is the normal colour of life. The sun comes up and tints the world with rose, and they forget their sorrow, as they have so often forgotten it before, and go their boasting way through the world they believe their own. Around them, in the light that is not the sun’s, the shadows tremble—shadows of the dead, shadows of the yet unborn. The wise cannot tell them apart.

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THE END

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The Gresham Press,

UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED,

WOKING AND LONDON.