by Grant Allen
Observe, too, the essentially barbaric nature of the gentleman’s home — his trappings, his distinctive marks, his surroundings, his titles. He lives by choice in the wildest country, like his skin-clad ancestors, demanding only that there be game and foxes and fish for his delectation. He loves the moors, the wolds, the fens, the braes, the Highlands, not as the painter, the naturalist, or the searcher after beauty of scenery loves them — for the sake of their wild life, their heather and bracken, their fresh keen air, their boundless horizon — but for the sake of the thoroughly barbarous existence he and his dogs and his gillies can lead in them. The fact is, neither he nor his ancestors have ever been really civilised. Barbarians in the midst of an industrial community, they have lived their own life of slaying and playing, untouched by the culture of the world below them. Knights in the middle ages, squires in the eighteenth century, they have never received a tincture of the civilising arts and crafts and industries; they have fought and fished and hunted in uninterrupted succession since the days when wild in woods the noble savage ran, to the days when they pay extravagant rents for Scottish grouse moors. Their very titles are barbaric and military — knight and earl and marquis and duke, early crystallised names for leaders in war or protectors of the frontier. Their crests and coats of arms are but the totems of their savage predecessors, afterwards utilised by mediæval blacksmiths as distinguishing marks for the summit of a helmet. They decorate their halls with savage trophies of the chase, like the Zulu or the Red Indian; they hang up captured arms and looted Chinese jars from the Summer Palace in their semi-civilised drawing-rooms. They love to be surrounded by grooms and gamekeepers and other barbaric retainers; they pass their lives in the midst of serfs; their views about the position and rights of women — especially the women of the “lower orders” — are frankly African. They share the sentiments of Achilles as to the individuality of Chryseis and Briseis.
Such is the actual aristocrat, as we now behold him. Thus, living his own barbarous life in the midst of a civilised community of workers and artists and thinkers and craftsmen, with whom he seldom mingles, and with whom he has nothing in common, this chartered relic of worse days preserves from first to last many painful traits of the low moral and social ideas of his ancestors, from which he has never varied. He represents most of all, in the modern world, the surviving savage. His love of gewgaws, of titles, of uniform, of dress, of feathers, of decorations, of Highland kilts, and stars and garters, is but one external symbol of his lower grade of mental and moral status. All over Europe, the truly civilised classes have gone on progressing by the practice of peaceful arts from generation to generation; but the aristocrat has stood still at the same half-savage level, a hunter and fighter, an orgiastic roysterer, a killer of wild boars and wearer of absurd mediæval costumes, too childish for the civilised and cultivated commoner.
Government by aristocrats is thus government by the mentally and morally inferior. And yet — a Bill for giving at last some scant measure of self-government to persecuted Ireland has to run the gauntlet, in our nineteenth-century England, of an irresponsible House of hereditary barbarians!
III. SCIENCE IN EDUCATION.
I mean what I say: science in education, not education in science.
It is the last of these that all the scientific men of England have so long been fighting for. And a very good thing it is in its way, and I hope they may get as much as they want of it. But compared to the importance of science in education, education in science is a matter of very small national moment.
The difference between the two is by no means a case of tweedledum and tweedledee. Education in science means the systematic teaching of science so as to train up boys to be scientific men. Now scientific men are exceedingly useful members of a community; and so are engineers, and bakers, and blacksmiths, and artists, and chimney-sweeps. But we can’t all be bakers, and we can’t all be painters in water-colours. There is a dim West Country legend to the effect that the inhabitants of the Scilly Isles eke out a precarious livelihood by taking in one another’s washing. As a matter of practical political economy, such a source of income is worse than precarious — it’s frankly impossible. “It takes all sorts to make a world.” A community entirely composed of scientific men would fail to feed itself, clothe itself, house itself, and keep itself supplied with amusing light literature. In one word, education in science produces specialists; and specialists, though most useful and valuable persons in their proper place, are no more the staple of a civilised community than engine-drivers or ballet-dancers.
What the world at large really needs, and will one day get, is not this, but due recognition of the true value of science in education. We don’t all want to be made into first-class anatomists like Owen, still less into first-class practical surgeons, like Sir Henry Thompson. But what we do all want is a competent general knowledge (amongst other things) of anatomy at large, and especially of human anatomy; of physiology at large, and especially of human physiology. We don’t all want to be analytical chemists: but what we do all want is to know as much about oxygen and carbon as will enable us to understand the commonest phenomena of combustion, of chemical combination, of animal or vegetable life. We don’t all want to be zoologists, and botanists of the type who put their names after “critical species:” but what we do all want to know is as much about plants and animals as will enable us to walk through life intelligently, and to understand the meaning of the things that surround us. We want, in one word, a general acquaintance with the results rather than with the methods of science.
“In short,” says the specialist, with his familiar sneer, “you want a smattering.”
Well, yes, dear Sir Smelfungus, if it gives you pleasure to put it so — just that; a smattering, an all-round smattering. But remember that in this matter the man of science is always influenced by ideas derived from his own pursuits as specialist. He is for ever thinking what sort of education will produce more specialists in future; and as a rule he is thinking what sort of education will produce men capable in future of advancing science. Now to advance science, to discover new snails, or invent new ethyl compounds, is not and cannot be the main object of the mass of humanity. What the mass wants is just unspecialised knowledge — the kind of knowledge that enables men to get comfortably and creditably and profitably through life, to meet emergencies as they rise, to know their way through the world, to use their faculties in all circumstances to the best advantage. And for this purpose what is wanted is, not the methods, but the results of science.
One science, and one only, is rationally taught in our schools at present. I mean geography. And the example of geography is so eminently useful for illustrating the difference I am trying to point out, that I will venture to dwell upon it for a moment in passing. It is good for us all to know that the world is round, without its being necessary for every one of us to follow in detail the intricate reasoning by which that result has been arrived at. It is good for us all to know the position of New York and Rio and Calcutta on the map, without its being necessary for us to understand, far less to work out for ourselves, the observations and calculations which fixed their latitude and longitude. Knowledge of the map is a good thing in itself, though it is a very different thing indeed from the technical knowledge which enables a man to make a chart of an unknown region, or to explore and survey it. Furthermore, it is a form of knowledge far more generally useful. A fair acquaintance with the results embodied in the atlas, in the gazetteer, in Baedeker, and in Bradshaw, is much oftener useful to us on our way through the world than a special acquaintance with the methods of map-making. It would be absurd to say that because a man is not going to be a Stanley or a Nansen, therefore it is no good for him to learn geography. It would be absurd to say that unless he learned geography in accordance with its methods instead of its results, he could have but a smattering, and that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A little knowledge of the position of New York is indeed a dangerous thing, if a
man uses it to navigate a Cunard vessel across the Atlantic. But the absence of the smattering is a much more dangerous and fatal thing if the man wishes to do business with the Argentine and the Transvaal, or to enter into practical relations of any sort with anybody outside his own parish. The results of geography are useful and valuable in themselves, quite apart from the methods employed in obtaining them.
It is just the same with all the other sciences. There is nothing occult or mysterious about them. No just cause or impediment exists why we should insist on being ignorant of the orbits of the planets because we cannot ourselves make the calculations for determining them; no reason why we should insist on being ignorant of the classification of plants and animals because we don’t feel able ourselves to embark on anatomical researches which would justify us in coming to original conclusions about them. I know the mass of scientific opinion has always gone the other way; but then scientific opinion means only the opinion of men of science, who are themselves specialists, and who think most of the education needed to make men specialists, not of the education needed to fit them for the general exigencies and emergencies of life. We don’t want authorities on the Cucurbitaceæ, but well-informed citizens. Professor Huxley is not our best guide in these matters, but Mr. Herbert Spencer, who long ago, in his book on Education, sketched out a radical programme of instruction in that knowledge which is of most worth, such as no country, no college, no school in Europe has ever yet been bold enough to put into practice.
What common sense really demands, then, is education in the main results of all the sciences — a knowledge of what is known, not necessarily a knowledge of each successive step by which men came to know it. At present, of course, in all our schools in England there is no systematic teaching of knowledge at all; what replaces it is a teaching of the facts of language, and for the most part of useless facts, or even of exploded fictions. Our public schools, especially (by which phrase we never mean real public schools like the board schools at all, but merely schools for the upper and the middle classes) are in their existing stage primarily great gymnasiums — very good things, too, in their way, against which I have not a word of blame; and, secondarily, places for imparting a sham and imperfect knowledge of some few philological facts about two extinct languages. Pupils get a smattering of Homer and Cicero. That is literally all the equipment for life that the cleverest and most industrious boys can ever take away from them. The sillier or idler don’t take away even that. As to the “mental training” argument, so often trotted out, it is childish enough not to be worth answering. Which is most practically useful to us in life — knowledge of Latin grammar or knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in, physical, social, moral? That is the question.
The truth is, schoolmastering in Britain has become a vast vested interest in the hands of men who have nothing to teach us. They try to bolster up their vicious system by such artificial arguments as the “mental training” fallacy. Forced to admit the utter uselessness of the pretended knowledge they impart, they fall back upon the plea of its supposed occult value as intellectual discipline. They say in effect:— “This sawdust we offer you contains no food, we know: but then see how it strengthens the jaws to chew it!” Besides, look at our results! The typical John Bull! pig-headed, ignorant, brutal. Are we really such immense successes ourselves that we must needs perpetuate the mould that warped us?
The one fatal charge brought against the public school system is that “after all, it turns out English gentlemen!”
IV. THE THEORY OF SCAPEGOATS.
“Alas, how easily things go wrong!” says Dr. George MacDonald. And all the world over, when things do go wrong, the natural and instinctive desire of the human animal is — to find a scapegoat. When the great French nation in the lump embarks its capital in a hopeless scheme for cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Panama, and then finds out too late that Nature has imposed insuperable barriers to its completion on the projected scale — what does the great French nation do, in its collective wisdom, but turn round at once to rend the directors? It cries, “A Mazas!” just as in ‘71 it cried “Bazaine à la lanterne!” I don’t mean to say the directors don’t deserve all they have got or ever will get, and perhaps more also; I don’t mean to deny corruption extraordinary in many high places; as a rule the worst that anybody alleges about anything is only a part of what might easily be alleged if we were all in the secret. Which of us, indeed, would ‘scape whipping? But what I do mean is, that we should never have heard of Reinach or Herz, of the corruption and peculation, at all if things had gone well. It is the crash that brought them out. The nation wants a scapegoat. “Ain’t nobody to be whopped for this ’ere?” asked Mr. Sam Weller on a critical occasion. The question embodies the universal impulse of humanity.
Tracing the feeling back to its origin, it seems due to this: minds of the lower order can never see anything go wrong without experiencing a certain sense of resentment; and resentment, by its very nature, desires to vent itself upon some living and sentient creature, by preference a fellow human being. When the child, running too fast, falls and hurts itself, it gets instantly angry. “Naughty ground to hurt baby!” says the nurse: “Baby hit it and hurt it.” And baby promptly hits it back, with vicious little fist, feeling every desire to revenge itself. By-and-by, when baby grows older and learns that the ground can’t feel to speak of, he wants to put the blame upon somebody else, in order to have an object to expend his rage upon. “You pushed me down!” he says to his playmate, and straightway proceeds to punch his playmate’s head for it — not because he really believes the playmate did it, but because he feels he must have some outlet for his resentment. When once resentment is roused, it will expend its force on anything that turns up handy, as the man who has quarrelled with his wife about a question of a bonnet, will kick his dog for trying to follow him to the club as he leaves her.
The mob, enraged at the death of Cæsar, meets Cinna the poet in the streets of Rome. “Your name, sir?” inquires the Third Citizen. “Truly, my name is Cinna,” says the unsuspecting author. “Tear him to pieces!” cries the mob; “he’s a conspirator!” “I am Cinna the poet,” pleads the unhappy man; “I am not Cinna the conspirator!” But the mob does not heed such delicate distinctions at such a moment. “Tear him for his bad verses!” it cries impartially. “Tear him for his bad verses!”
Whatever sort of misfortune falls upon persons of the lower order of intelligence is always met in the same spirit. Especially is this the case with the deaths of relatives. Fools who have lost a friend invariably blame somebody for his fatal illness. To hear many people talk, you would suppose they were unaware of the familiar proposition that all men are mortal (including women); you might imagine they thought an ordinary human constitution was calculated to survive nine hundred and ninety-nine years unless some evil-disposed person or persons took the trouble beforehand to waylay and destroy it. “My poor father was eighty-seven when he died; and he would have been alive still if it weren’t for that nasty Mrs. Jones: she put him into a pair of damp sheets.” Or, “My husband would never have caught the cold that killed him, if that horrid man Brown hadn’t kept him waiting so long in the carriage at the street corner.” The doctor has to bear the brunt of most such complaints; indeed, it is calculated by an eminent statistician (who desires his name to remain unpublished) that eighty-three per cent. of the deaths in Great Britain might easily have been averted if the patient had only been treated in various distinct ways by all the members of his family, and if that foolish Dr. Squills hadn’t so grossly mistaken and mistreated his malady.
The fact is, the death is regarded as a misfortune, and somebody must be blamed for it. Heaven has provided scapegoats. The doctor and the hostile female members of the family are always there — laid on, as it were, for the express purpose.
