Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  These things being so, the authorities who have charge of our public education, primary, secondary, and tertiary, have decided in their wisdom — to do and compel the exact contrary. Object-lessons and the visible being admittedly preferable to rote-lessons and the audible, they have prescribed that our education, so called, shall be mainly an education not in things and properties, but in books and reading. They have settled that it shall deal almost entirely and exclusively with language and with languages; that words, not objects, shall be the facts it impresses on the minds of the pupils. In our primary schools they have insisted upon nothing but reading and writing, with just a smattering of arithmetic by way of science. In our secondary schools they have insisted upon nothing but Greek and Latin, with about an equal leaven of algebra and geometry. This mediæval fare (I am delighted that I can thus agree for once with Professor Ray Lankester) they have thrust down the throats of all the world indiscriminately; so much so that nowadays people seem hardly able at last to conceive of any other than a linguistic education as possible. You will hear many good folk who talk with contempt of Greek and Latin; but when you come to inquire what new mental pabulum they would substitute for those quaint and grotesque survivals of the Dark Ages, you find what they want instead is — modern languages. The idea that language of any sort forms no necessary element in a liberal education has never even occurred to them. They take it for granted that when you leave off feeding boys on straw and oats you must supply them instead with hay and sawdust.

  Not that I rage against Greek and Latin as such. It is well we should have many specialists among us who understand them, just as it is well we should have specialists in Anglo-Saxon and Sanskrit. I merely mean that they are not the sum and substance of educational method. They are at best but two languages of considerable importance to the student of purely human evolution.

  Furthermore, even these comparatively useless linguistic subjects could themselves be taught far better by sight than by hearing. A week at Rome would give your average boy a much clearer idea of the relations of the Capitol with the Palatine than all the pretty maps in Dr. William Smith’s Smaller Classical Dictionary. It would give him also a sense of the reality of the Latin language and the Latin literature, which he could never pick up out of a dog-eared Livy or a thumb-marked Æneid. You have only to look across from the top of the Janiculum, towards the white houses of Frascati, to learn a vast deal more about the Alban hills and the site of Tusculum than ever you could mug up from all the geography books in the British Museum. The way to learn every subject on earth, even book-lore included, is not out of books alone, but by actual observation.

  And yet it is impossible for any one among us to do otherwise than acquiesce in this vicious circle. Why? Just because no man can dissociate himself outright from the social organism of which he forms a component member. He can no more do so than the eye can dissociate itself from the heart and lungs, or than the legs can shake themselves free from the head and stomach. We have all to learn, and to let our boys learn, what authority decides for us. We can’t give them a better education than the average, even if we know what it is and desire to impart it, because the better education, though abstractly more valuable, is now and here the inlet to nothing. Every door is barred with examinations, and opens but to the golden key of the crammer. Not what is of most real use and importance in life, but what “pays best” in examination, is the test of desirability. We are the victims of a system; and our only hope of redress is not by sporadic individual action but by concerted rebellion. We must cry out against the abuse till at last we are heard by dint of our much speaking. In a world so complex and so highly organised as ours, the individual can only do anything in the long run by influencing the mass — by securing the co-operation of many among his fellows.

  Meanwhile, I believe it is gradually becoming the fact that our girls, who till lately were so very ill-taught, are beginning to know more of what is really worth knowing than their public-school-bred brothers. For the public school still goes on with the system of teaching it has derived direct from the thirteenth century; while the girls’ schools, having started fair and fresh, are beginning to assimilate certain newer ideas belonging to the seventeenth and even the eighteenth. In time they may conceivably come down to the more elementary notions of the present generation. Less hampered by professions and examinations than the boys, the girls are beginning to know something now, not indeed of the universe in which they live, its laws and its properties, but of literature and history, and the principal facts about human development. Yet all the time, the boys go on as ever with Musa, Musæ, like so many parrots, and are turned out at last, in nine cases out of ten, with just enough smattering of Greek and Latin grammar to have acquired a life-long distaste for Horace and an inconquerable incapacity for understanding Æschylus. One year in Italy with their eyes open would be worth more than three at Oxford; and six months in the fields with a platyscopic lens would teach them strange things about the world around them that all the long terms at Harrow and Winchester have failed to discover to them. But that would involve some trouble to the teacher.

  What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys’ schooling interfere with their education!

  XVI. THE POLITICAL PUPA.

  I have picked up on the moor the chrysalis of a common English butterfly. As I sit on the heather and turn it over attentively, while it wriggles in my hands, I can’t help thinking how closely it resembles the present condition of our British commonwealth. It is a platitude, indeed, to say that “this is an age of transition.” But it would be truer and more graphic perhaps to put it that this is an age in which England, and for the matter of that every other European country as well, is passing through something like the chrysalis stage in its evolution.

  But, first of all, do you clearly understand what a chrysalis is driving at? It means more than it seems; the change that goes on within that impassive case is a great deal more profound than most people imagine. When the caterpillar is just ready to turn into a butterfly it lies by for a while, full of internal commotion, and feels all its organs slowly melting one by one into a sort of indistinguishable protoplasmic pulp; chaos precedes the definite re-establishment of a fresh form of order. Limbs and parts and nervous system all disappear for a time, and then gradually grow up again in new and altered types. The caterpillar, if it philosophised on its own state at all (which seems to be very little the habit of well-conducted caterpillars, as of well-conducted young ladies), might easily be excused for forming just at first the melancholy impression that a general dissolution was coming over it piecemeal. It must begin by feeling legs and eyes and nervous centres melt away by degrees into a common indistinguishable organic pulp, out of which the new organs only slowly form themselves in obedience to the law of some internal impulse. But when the process is all over, and — hi, presto! — the butterfly emerges at last from the chrysalis condition, what does it find but that instead of having lost everything it has new and stronger legs in place of the old and feeble ones; it has nerves and brain more developed than before; it has wings for flight instead of mere creeping little feet to crawl with? What seemed like chaos was really nothing more than the necessary kneading up of all component parts into a plastic condition which precedes every fresh departure in evolution. The old must fade before the new can replace it.

  Now I am not going to work this perhaps somewhat fanciful analogy to death, or pretend it is anything more than a convenient metaphor. Still, taken as such, it is not without its luminosity. For a metaphor, by supplying us with a picturable representation, often enables us really to get at the hang of the thing a vast deal better than the most solemn argument. And I fancy communities sometimes pass through just such a chrysalis stage, when it seems to the timid and pessimistic in their midst as if every component element of the State (but especially the one in which they themselves and their friends are particularly interested) were rushing violently down a steep place
to eternal perdition. Chaos appears to be swallowing up everything. “The natural relations of classes” disappear. Faiths melt; churches dissolve; morals fade; bonds fail; a universal magma of emancipated opinion seems to take the place of old-established dogma. The squires and the parsons of the period — call them scribes or augurs — wring their hands in despair, and cry aloud that they don’t know what the world is coming to. But, after all, it is only the chrysalis stage of a new system. The old social order must grow disjointed and chaotic before the new social order can begin to evolve from it. The establishment of a plastic consistency in the mass is the condition precedent of the higher development.

  Not, of course, that this consideration will ever afford one grain of comfort to the squires and the parsons of each successive epoch; for what they want is not the reasonable betterment of the whole social organism, but the continuance of just this particular type of squiredom and parsonry. That is what they mean by “national welfare;” and any interference with it they criticise in all ages with the current equivalent for the familiar Tory formula that “the country is going to the devil.”

  Sometimes these great social reconstructions of which I speak are forced upon communities by external factors interfering with their fixed internal order, as happened when the influx of northern barbarians broke up the decaying and rotten organism of the Roman Empire. Sometimes, again, they occur from internal causes, in an acute, and so to speak, inflammatory condition, as at the French Revolution. But sometimes, as in our own time and country, they are slowly brought about by organic development, so as really to resemble in all essential points the chrysalis type of evolution. Politically, socially, theologically, ethically, the old fixed beliefs seem at such periods to grow fluid or plastic. New feelings and habits and aspirations take their place. For a while a general chaos of conflicting opinions and nascent ideas is produced. The mass for the moment seems formless and lawless. Then new order supervenes, as the magma settles down and begins to crystallise; till at last, I’m afraid, the resulting social organism becomes for the most part just as rigid, just as definite, just as dogmatic, just as exacting, as the one it has superseded. The caterpillar has grown into a particular butterfly.

  Through just such a period of reconstruction Europe in general and Britain in particular are now in all likelihood beginning to pass. And they will come out at the other end translated and transfigured. Laws and faiths and morals will all of them have altered. There will be a new heaven and a new earth for the men and women of the new epoch. Strange that people should make such a fuss about a detail like Home Rule, when the foundations of society are all becoming fluid. Don’t flatter yourself for a moment that your particular little sect or your particular little dogma is going to survive the gentle cataclysm any more than my particular little sect or my particular little dogma. All alike are doomed to inevitable reconstruction. “We can’t put the Constitution into the melting-pot,” said Mr. John Morley, if I recollect his words aright. But at the very moment when he said it, in my humble opinion, the Constitution was already well into the melting-pot, and even beginning to simmer merrily. Federalism, or something extremely like it, may with great probability be the final outcome of that particular melting; though anything else is perhaps just as probable, and in any case the melting is general, not special. The one thing we can guess with tolerable certainty is that the melting-pot stage has begun to overtake us, socially, ethically, politically, ecclesiastically; and that what will emerge from the pot at the end of it must depend at last upon the relative strength of those unknown quantities — the various formative elements.

  Being the most optimistic of pessimists, however, I will venture (after this disclaimer of prophecy) to prophesy one thing alone: ‘Twill be a butterfly, not a grub, that comes out of our chrysalis.

  Beyond that, I hold all prediction premature. We may guess and we may hope, but we can have no certainty. Save only the certainty that no element will outlive the revolution unchanged — not faiths, nor classes, nor domestic relations, nor any other component factor of our complex civilisation. All are becoming plastic in the organic plasm; all are losing features in the common mass of the melting-pot. For that reason, I never trouble my head for a moment when people object to me that this, that, or the other petty point of detail in Bellamy’s Utopia or William Morris’s Utopia, or my own little private and particular Utopia, is impossible, or unrealisable, or wicked, or hateful. For these, after all, are mere Utopias; their details are the outcome of individual wishes; what will emerge must be, not a Utopia at all, either yours or mine, but a practical reality, full of shifts and compromises most unphilosophical and illogical — a practical reality distasteful in many ways to all us Utopia-mongers. “The Millennium by return of post” is no more realisable to-day than yesterday. The greatest of revolutions can only produce that unsatisfactory result, a new human organisation.

  Yet, it is something, after all, to believe at least that the grub will emerge into a full-fledged butterfly. Not, perhaps, quite as glossy in the wings as we could wish; but a butterfly all the same, not a crawling caterpillar.

  XVII. ON THE CASINO TERRACE.

  I have always regarded Monte Carlo as an Influence for Good. It helps to keep so many young men off the Stock Exchange.

  Let me guard against an obvious but unjust suspicion. These remarks are not uttered under the exhilarating effect of winning at the tables. Quite the contrary. It is the Bank that has broken the Man to-day at Monte Carlo. They are rather due to the chastening and thought-compelling influence of persistent loss, not altogether unbalanced by a well-cooked lunch at perhaps the best restaurant in any town of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc pieces which I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary god of roulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless haste, by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that rapacious deity, and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the terrace, on a brilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across the zoned and belted bay towards the beautiful grey hills of Rocca-bruna and the gleaming white spit of Bordighera in the distance. ’Tis a modest tribute, my poor little forty francs. Surely the veriest puritan, the oiliest Chadband of them all, will allow a humble scribbler, at so cheap a yearly rate, to purchase wisdom, not unmixed with tolerance, at the gilded shrine of Fors Fortuna!

  For what a pother, after all, the unwise of this world are wont to make about one stranded gambling-house, in a remote corner of Liguria! If they were in earnest or sincere, how small a matter they would think it! Of course, when I say so, hypocrisy holds up its hands in holy horror. But that is the way with the purveyors of mint, cumin, and anise; they raise a mighty hubbub over some unimportant detail — in order to feel their consciences clear when business compels them to rob the widow and the orphan. In reality, though Monte Carlo is bad enough in its way — do I not pay it unwilling tribute myself twice a year out of the narrow resources of The Garret, Grub Street? — it is but a skin-deep surface symptom of a profound disease which attacks the heart and core in London and Paris. Compared with Panama, Argentines, British South Africans, and Liberators, Monte Carlo is a mole on the left ankle.

  “The Devil’s advocate!” you say. Well, well, so be it. The fact is, the supposed moral objection to gambling as such is a purely commercial objection of a commercial nation; and the reason so much importance is attached to it in certain places is because at that particular vice men are likely to lose their money. It is largely a fetish, like the sinfulness of cards, of dice, of billiards. Moreover, the objection is only to the kind of gambling. There is another kind, less open, at which you stand a better chance to win yourself, while other parties stand a better chance to lose; and that kind, which is played in great gambling-houses known as the Stock Exchange and the Bourse, is considered, morally speaking, as quite innocuous. Large fortunes are made at this other sort of gambling, which, of course, sanctifies and almost canonises it. Indeed, if you will note, you wi
ll find not only that the objection to gambling pure and simple is commonest in the most commercial countries, but also that even there it is commonest among the most commercial classes. The landed aristocracy, the military, and the labouring men have no objection to betting; nor have the Neapolitan lazzaroni, the Chinese coolies. It is the respectable English counting-house that discourages the vice, especially among the clerks, who are likely to make the till or the cheque-book rectify the little failures of their flutter on the Derby.

  Observe how artificial is the whole mild out-cry: how absolutely it partakes of the nature of damning the sins you have no mind to! Here, on the terrace where I sit, and where ladies in needlessly costly robes are promenading up and down to exhibit their superfluous wealth ostentatiously to one another, my ear is continuously assailed by the constant ping, ping, ping of the pigeon-shooting, and my peace disturbed by the flapping death-agonies of those miserable victims. Yet how many times have you heard the tables at Monte Carlo denounced to once or never that you have heard a word said of the poor mangled pigeons? And why? Because nobody loses much money at pigeon-matches. That is legitimate sport, about as good and as bad as pheasant or partridge shooting — no better, no worse, in spite of artificial distinctions; and nobody (except the pigeons) has any interest in denouncing it. Legend has it at Monte Carlo, indeed, that when the proprietors of the Casino wished to take measures “pour attirer les Anglais” they held counsel with the wise men whether it was best to establish and endow an English church or a pigeon-shooting tournament. And the church was in a minority. Since then, I have heard more than one Anglican Bishop speak evil of the tables, but I have never heard one of them say a good word yet for the boxed and slaughtered pigeons.