From a College Window, Arthur Christopher Benson [best novels to read for beginners TXT] 📗

We can all force ourselves to express interest in the tastes and idiosyncrasies of others, we can ask questions, we can cultivate relations. The one way in which we can all of us improve, is to commit ourselves to a course of action from which we shall be ashamed to draw back. Many people who would otherwise drift into self-regarding ways do this when they marry. They may marry for egotistical reasons; but once inside the fence, affection and duty and the amazing experience of having children of their own give them the stimulus they need. But even the most helpless celibate has only to embark upon relations with others, to find them multiply and increase. After all, egotism has little to do with the forming or holding of strong opinions, or even with the intentness with which we pursue our aims. The dog is the intentest of all animals, and throws himself most eagerly into his pursuits, but he is also the least egotistical and the most sympathetic of creatures. Egotism resides more in a kind of proud isolation, in a species of contempt for the opinions and aims of others. It is not, as a rule, the most successful men who are the most egotistical. The most uncompromisingly egotist I know is a would-be literary man, who has the most pathetic belief in the interest and significance of his own very halting performances, a belief which no amount of rejection or indifference can shake, and who has hardly a good word for the books of other writers. I have sometimes thought that it is in his case a species of mental disease, because he is an acute critic of all work except his own. Doctors will indeed tell one that transcendent egotism is very nearly allied to insanity; but in ordinary cases a little common sense and a little courtesy will soon suppress the manifestations of the tendency, if a man can only realize that the forming of decided opinions is the cheapest luxury in the world, while a licence to express them uncompromisingly is one of the most expensive. Perhaps the hardest kind of egotism to cure, is the egotism that is combined with a deferential courtesy, and the power of displaying a superficial sympathy, because an egotist of this type so seldom encounters any checks which would convince him of his fault. Such people, if they have natural ability, often achieve great success, because they pursue their own ambitions with relentless perseverance, and have the tact to do it without appearing to interfere with the designs of others. They bide their time; they are all consideration and delicacy; they are never importunate or tiresome; if they fail, they accept the failure as though it were a piece of undeserved good fortune; they never have a grievance; they simply wipe up the spilt milk, and say no more about it; baffled at one point, they go quietly round the corner, and continue their quest. They never for a moment really consider any one's interests except their own; even their generous impulses are deliberately calculated for the sake of the artistic effect. Such people make it hard to believe in disinterested virtue; yet they join with the meek in inheriting the earth, and their prosperity seems the sign of Divine approval.

But apart from the definite steps that the ordinary, moderately interesting, moderately successful man may take, in the direction of a cure for egotism, the best cure, after all, for all faults, is a humble desire to be different. That is the most transforming power in the world; we may fail a thousand times, but as long as we are ashamed of our failure, as long as we do not helplessly acquiesce, as long as we do not try to comfort ourselves for it by a careful parade of our other virtues, we are in the pilgrim's road. It is a childish fault, after all. I watched to-day a party of children at play. One detestable little boy, the clumsiest and most incapable of the party, spent the whole time in climbing up a step and jumping from it, while he entreated all the others to see how far he could project himself. There was not a child there who could not have jumped twice as far, but they were angelically patient and sympathetic with the odious little wretch. It seemed to me a sad, small parable of what we so many of us are engaged all our lives long in doing. The child had no eyes for and no thoughts of the rest; he simply reiterated his ridiculous performance, and claimed admiration. There came into my mind that exquisite and beautiful ode, the work too, strange to say, of a transcendent egotist, Coventry Patmore, and the prayer he made:


"Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Nor vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
'I will be sorry for their childishness.'"


This is where we may leave our problem; leave it, that is to say, if we have faithfully struggled with it, if we have tried to amend ourselves and to encourage others; if we have done all this, and reached a point beyond which progress seems impossible. But we must not fling our problems and perplexities, as we are apt to do, upon the knees of God, the very instant they begin to bewilder us, as children bring a tangled skein, or a toy bent crooked, to a nurse. We must not, I say; and yet, after all, I am not sure that it is not the best and simplest way of all!


IX


EDUCATION

I said that I was a public-school master for nearly twenty years; and now that it is over I sometimes sit and wonder, rather sadly, I am afraid, what we were all about.

We were a strictly classical school; that is to say, all the boys in the school were practically specialists in classics, whether they had any aptitude for them or not. We shoved and rammed in a good many other subjects into the tightly packed budget we called the curriculum. But it was not a sincere attempt to widen our education, or to give boys a real chance to work at the things they cared for; it was only a compromise with the supposed claims of the public, in order that we might try to believe that we taught things we did not really teach. We had an enormous and elaborate machine; the boys worked hard, and the masters were horribly overworked. The whole thing whizzed, banged, grumbled, and hummed like a factory; but very little education was the result. It used to go to my heart to see a sparkling stream of bright, keen, lively little boys arrive, half after half, ready to work, full of interest, ready to listen breathlessly to anything that struck their fancy, ready to ask questions--such excellent material, I used to think. At the other end used to depart a slow river of cheerful and conventional boys, well-dressed, well-mannered, thoroughly nice, reasonable, sensible, and good-humoured creatures, but knowing next to nothing, without intellectual interests, and, indeed, honestly despising them. I do not want to exaggerate; and I will frankly confess that there were always a few well-educated boys among them; but these were boys of real ability, with an aptitude for classics. And as providing a classical education, the system was effective, though cumbrous; hampered and congested by the other subjects, which were well enough taught, but which had no adequate time given to them, and intruded upon the classics without having opportunity to develop themselves. It is a melancholy picture, but the result certainly was that intellectual cynicism was the note of the place.

The pity of it is that the machinery was all there; cheerful industry among masters and boys alike; but the whole thing frozen and chilled, partly by the congestion of subjects, partly by antiquated methods.

Moreover, to provide a classical education for the best boys, everything else was sacrificed. The boys were taught classics, not on the literary method, but on the academic method, as if they were all to enter for triposes and scholarships, and to end by becoming professors. Instead of simply reading away at interesting and beautiful books, and trying, to cover some ground, a great quantity of pedantic grammar was taught; time was wasted in trying to make the boys compose in both Latin and Greek, when they had no vocabulary, and no knowledge of the languages. It was like setting children of six and seven to write English in the style of Milton and Carlyle.

The solution is a very obvious one; it is, at all costs to simplify, and to relieve pressure. The staple of education should be French, easy mathematics, history, geography, and popular science. I would not even begin Latin or Greek at first. Then, when the first stages were over, I would have every boy with any special gift put to a single subject, in which he should try to make real progress, but so that there would be time to keep up the simpler subjects as well. The result would be that when a boy had finished his course, he would have some one subject which he could reasonably be expected to have mastered up to a certain point. He would have learnt classics, or mathematics, or history, or modern languages, or science, thoroughly; while all might hope to have a competent knowledge of French, English, history, easy mathematics, and easy science. Boys who had obviously no special aptitude would be kept on at the simple subjects. And if the result was only that a school sent out boys who could read French easily, and write simple French grammatically, who knew something of modern history and geography, could work out sums in arithmetic, and had some conception of elementary science--well, they would, I believe, be very fairly educated boys.

The reason why intellectual cynicism sets in, is because the boys, as they go on, feel that they have mastered nothing. They have been set to compose in Greek and Latin and French; the result is that they have no power of composing in any of these languages, when they might have learnt to compose in one. Meanwhile, they have not had time to read any English to speak of, or to be practised in writing it. They know nothing of their own history or of modern geography; and the blame is not with them if they find all knowledge arid and unattractive.

I would try all sorts of experiments. I would make boys do easy precis-writing; to give a set of boys a simple printed correspondence and tell them to analyse it, would be to give them a task in which the dullest would find some amusement. I should read a story aloud, or a short episode of history, and require them to re-tell it in their own words. Or I would relate a simple incident, and make them write it in French; make them write letters in French. And it would be easy thus to make one subject play into another, because they could be made to give an account in French of something that they had done in science or history.

At present each of the roads--Latin, Greek, French, mathematics, science--leads off in a separate direction, and seems to lead nowhere in particular.

The defenders of the classical system say that it fortifies the mind and makes it a strong and vigorous