This much hope, however, can be extracted from the present state of
things. It is so fantastic, so mad, so apparently impossible, that no
scheme of reform need ever henceforth be discredited on the ground that
it is fantastic or mad or apparently impossible. It is the sensible
schemes, unfortunately, that are hopeless in England. Therefore I have
great hopes that my own views, though fundamentally sensible, can be
made to appear fantastic enough to have a chance.

First, then, I lay it down as a prime condition of sane society, obvious
as such to anyone but an idiot, that in any decent community, children
should find in every part of their native country, food, clothing,
lodging, instruction, and parental kindness for the asking. For the
matter of that, so should adults; but the two cases differ in that as
these commodities do not grow on the bushes, the adults cannot have
them unless they themselves organize and provide the supply, whereas the
children must have them as if by magic, with nothing to do but rub the
lamp, like Aladdin, and have their needs satisfied.




The Parents' Intolerable Burden

There is nothing new in this: it is how children have always had and
must always have their needs satisfied. The parent has to play the part
of Aladdin's djinn; and many a parent has sunk beneath the burden of
this service. All the novelty we need is to organize it so that instead
of the individual child fastening like a parasite on its own particular
parents, the whole body of children should be thrown not only upon the
whole body of parents, but upon the celibates and childless as well,
whose present exemption from a full share in the social burden of
children is obviously unjust and unwholesome. Today it is easy to find a
widow who has at great cost to herself in pain, danger, and disablement,
borne six or eight children. In the same town you will find rich
bachelors and old maids, and married couples with no children or with
families voluntarily limited to two or three. The eight children do not
belong to the woman in any real or legal sense. When she has reared
them they pass away from her into the community as independent persons,
marrying strangers, working for strangers, spending on the community the
life that has been built up at her expense. No more monstrous injustice
could be imagined than that the burden of rearing the children should
fall on her alone and not on the celibates and the selfish as well.

This is so far recognized that already the child finds, wherever it
goes, a school for it, and somebody to force it into the school; and
more and more these schools are being driven by the mere logic of facts
to provide the children with meals, with boots, with spectacles, with
dentists and doctors. In fact, when the child's parents are destitute or
not to be found, bread, lodging, and clothing are provided. It is true
that they are provided grudgingly and on conditions infamous enough to
draw down abundant fire from Heaven upon us every day in the shape of
crime and disease and vice; but still the practice of keeping children
barely alive at the charge of the community is established; and there is
no need for me to argue about it. I propose only two extensions of the
practice. One is to provide for all the child's reasonable human wants,
on which point, if you differ from me, I shall take leave to say that
you are socially a fool and personally an inhuman wretch. The other is
that these wants should be supplied in complete freedom from compulsory
schooling or compulsory anything except restraint from crime, though,
as they can be supplied only by social organization, the child must be
conscious of and subject to the conditions of that organization, which
may involve such portions of adult responsibility and duty as a child
may be able to bear according to its age, and which will in any case
prevent it from forming the vagabond and anarchist habit of mind.

One more exception might be necessary: compulsory freedom. I am sure
that a child should not be imprisoned in a school. I am not so sure that
it should not sometimes be driven out into the open--imprisoned in the
woods and on the mountains, as it were. For there are frowsty children,
just as there are frowsty adults, who dont want freedom. This morbid
result of over-domestication would, let us hope, soon disappear with its
cause.




Mobilization

Those who see no prospect held out to them by this except a country in
which all the children shall be roaming savages, should consider, first,
whether their condition would be any worse than that of the little caged
savages of today, and second, whether either children or adults are
so apt to run wild that it is necessary to tether them fast to one
neighborhood to prevent a general dissolution of society. My own
observation leads me to believe that we are not half mobilized enough.
True, I cannot deny that we are more mobile than we were. You will still
find in the home counties old men who have never been to London, and who
tell you that they once went to Winchester or St Albans much as if they
had been to the South Pole; but they are not so common as the clerk who
has been to Paris or to Lovely Lucerne, and who "goes away somewhere"
when he has a holiday. His grandfather never had a holiday, and, if he
had, would no more have dreamed of crossing the Channel than of taking
a box at the Opera. But with all allowance for the Polytechnic excursion
and the tourist agency, our inertia is still appalling. I confess to
having once spent nine years in London without putting my nose
outside it; and though this was better, perhaps, than the restless
globe-trotting vagabondage of the idle rich, wandering from hotel to
hotel and never really living anywhere, yet I should no more have done
it if I had been properly mobilized in my childhood than I should have
worn the same suit of clothes all that time (which, by the way, I very
nearly did, my professional income not having as yet begun to sprout).
There are masses of people who could afford at least a trip to Margate,
and a good many who could afford a trip round the world, who are more
immovable than Aldgate pump. To others, who would move if they knew how,
travelling is surrounded with imaginary difficulties and terrors. In
short, the difficulty is not to fix people, but to root them up. We keep
repeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss, as if
moss were a desirable parasite. What we mean is that a vagabond does not
prosper. Even this is not true, if prosperity means enjoyment as well as
responsibility and money. The real misery of vagabondage is the misery
of having nothing to do and nowhere to go, the misery of being derelict
of God and Man, the misery of the idle, poor or rich. And this is one
of the miseries of unoccupied childhood. The unoccupied adult, thus
afflicted, tries many distractions which are, to say the least, unsuited
to children. But one of them, the distraction of seeing the world, is
innocent and beneficial. Also it is childish, being a continuation of
what nurses call "taking notice," by which a child becomes experienced.
It is pitiable nowadays to see men and women doing after the age of 45
all the travelling and sightseeing they should have done before they
were 15. Mere wondering and staring at things is an important part of
a child's education: that is why children can be thoroughly mobilized
without making vagabonds of them. A vagabond is at home nowhere because
he wanders: a child should wander because it ought to be at home
everywhere. And if it has its papers and its passports, and gets what
it requires not by begging and pilfering, but from responsible agents
of the community as of right, and with some formal acknowledgment of
the obligations it is incurring and a knowledge of the fact that these
obligations are being recorded: if, further, certain qualifications are
exacted before it is promoted from permission to go as far as its
legs will carry it to using mechanical aids to locomotion, it can roam
without much danger of gypsification.

Under such circumstances the boy or girl could always run away, and
never be lost; and on no other conditions can a child be free without
being also a homeless outcast.

Parents could also run away from disagreeable children or drive them out
of doors or even drop their acquaintance, temporarily or permanently,
without inhumanity. Thus both parties would be on their good behavior,
and not, as at present, on their filial or parental behavior, which,
like all unfree behavior, is mostly bad behavior.

As to what other results might follow, we had better wait and see; for
nobody now alive can imagine what customs and institutions would grow
up in societies of free children. Child laws and child fashions, child
manners and child morals are now not tolerated; but among free children
there would certainly be surprising developments in this direction. I do
not think there would be any danger of free children behaving as badly
as grown-up people do now because they have never been free. They could
hardly behave worse, anyhow.




Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs

A very distinguished man once assured a mother of my acquaintance that
she would never know what it meant to be hurt until she was hurt through
her children. Children are extremely cruel without intending it; and
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the reason is that they do not
conceive their elders as having any human feelings. Serve the elders
right, perhaps, for posing as superhuman! The penalty of the impostor
is not that he is found out (he very seldom is) but that he is taken
for what he pretends to be, and treated as such. And to be treated as
anything but what you really are may seem pleasant to the imagination
when the treatment is above your merits; but in actual experience it
is often quite the reverse. When I was a very small boy, my romantic
imagination, stimulated by early doses of fiction, led me to brag to a
still smaller boy so outrageously that he, being a simple soul, really
believed me to be an invincible hero. I cannot remember whether this
pleased me much; but I do remember very distinctly that one day this
admirer of mine, who had a pet goat, found the animal in the hands of a
larger boy than either of us, who mocked him and refused to restore the
animal to his rightful owner. Whereupon, naturally, he came weeping
to me, and demanded that I should rescue the goat and annihilate the
aggressor. My terror was beyond description: fortunately for me, it
imparted such a ghastliness to my voice and aspect as I under the eye of
my poor little dupe, advanced on the enemy with that hideous extremity
of cowardice which is called the courage of despair, and said "You let
go that goat," that he abandoned his prey and fled, to my unforgettable,
unspeakable relief. I have never since exaggerated my prowess in bodily
combat.

Now what happened to me in the adventure of the goat happens very often
to parents, and would happen to schoolmasters if the prison door of the
school did not shut out the trials of life. I remember once, at school,
the resident head master was brought down to earth by the sudden illness
of his wife. In the confusion that ensued it became necessary to
leave one of the schoolrooms without a master. I was in the class that
occupied that schoolroom. To have sent us home would have been to break
the fundamental bargain with our parents by which the school was bound
to keep us out of their way for half the day at all hazards. Therefore
an appeal had to be made to our better feelings: that is, to our common
humanity, not to make a noise. But the head master had never admitted
any common humanity with us. We had been carefully broken in to regard
him as a being quite aloof from and above us: one not subject to error
or suffering or death or illness or mortality. Consequently sympathy was
impossible; and if the unfortunate lady did not perish, it was because,
as I now comfort myself with guessing, she was too much pre-occupied
with her own pains, and possibly making too much noise herself, to be
conscious of the pandemonium downstairs.

A great deal of the fiendishness of schoolboys and the cruelty of
children to their elders is produced just in this way. Elders cannot be
superhuman beings and suffering fellow-creatures at the same time. If
you pose as a little god, you must pose for better for worse.




How Little We Know About Our Parents

The relation between parent and child has cruel moments for the parent
even when money is no object, and the material worries are delegated to
servants and school teachers. The child and the parent are strangers
to one another necessarily, because their ages must differ widely. Read
Goethe's autobiography; and note that though he was happy in his
parents and had exceptional powers of observation, divination, and
story-telling, he knew less about his father and mother than about most
of the other people he mentions. I myself was never on bad terms with
my mother: we lived together until I was forty-two years old, absolutely
without the smallest friction of any kind; yet when her death set me
thinking curiously about our relations, I realized that I knew very
little about her. Introduce me to a strange woman who was a child when
I was a child, a girl when I was a boy, an adolescent when I was an
adolescent; and if we take naturally to one another I will know more of
her and she of me at the end of forty days (I had almost said of
forty minutes) than I knew of my mother at the end of forty years. A
contemporary stranger is a novelty and an enigma, also a possibility;
but a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it
does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned:
the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is
beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact
in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and
weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning. If
I meet a widow I may ask her all about her marriage; but what son ever
dreams of asking his mother about her marriage, or could endure to hear
of it without violently breaking off the old sacred relationship between
them, and ceasing to be her child or anything more to her than the first
man in the street might be?

Yet though in this sense the child cannot realize its parent's
humanity, the parent can realize the child's; for the parents with their
experience of life have none of the illusions about the child that the
child has about the parents; and the consequence is that the child
can hurt its parents' feelings much more than its parents can hurt
the child's, because the child, even when there has been none of the
deliberate hypocrisy by which children are taken advantage of by their
elders, cannot conceive the parent as a fellow-creature, whilst the
parents know very well that the children are only themselves over again.
The child cannot conceive that its blame or contempt or want of interest
could possibly hurt its parent, and therefore expresses them all with
an indifference which has given rise to the term _enfant terrible_ (a
tragic term in spite of the jests connected with it); whilst the parent
can suffer from such slights and reproaches more from a child than from
anyone else, even when the child is not beloved, because the child is so
unmistakably sincere in them.




Our Abandoned Mothers

Take a very common instance of this agonizing incompatibility. A widow
brings up her son to manhood. He meets a strange woman, and goes off
with and marries her, leaving his mother desolate. It does not occur to
him that this is at all hard on her: he does it as a matter of course,
and actually expects his mother to receive, on terms of special
affection, the woman for whom she has been abandoned. If he shewed any
sense of what he was doing, any remorse; if he mingled his tears with
hers and asked her not to think too hardly of him because he had obeyed
the inevitable destiny of a man to leave his father and mother and
cleave to his wife, she could give him her blessing and accept her
bereavement with dignity and without reproach. But the man never dreams
of such considerations. To him his mother's feeling in the matter, when
she betrays it, is unreasonable, ridiculous, and even odious, as shewing
a prejudice against his adorable bride.

I have taken the widow as an extreme and obvious case; but there are
many husbands and wives who are tired of their consorts, or disappointed
in them, or estranged from them by infidelities; and these parents, in
losing a son or a daughter through marriage, may be losing everything
they care for. No parent's love is as innocent as the love of a child:
the exclusion of all conscious sexual feeling from it does not exclude
the bitterness, jealousy, and despair at loss which characterize sexual
passion: in fact, what is called a pure love may easily be more selfish
and jealous than a carnal one. Anyhow, it is plain matter of fact that
naively selfish people sometimes try with fierce jealousy to prevent
their children marrying.




Family Affection

Until the family as we know it ceases to exist, nobody will dare to
analyze parental affection as distinguished from that general human
sympathy which has secured to many an orphan fonder care in a stranger's
house than it would have received from its actual parents. Not even
Tolstoy, in The Kreutzer Sonata, has said all that we suspect about it.
When it persists beyond the period at which it ceases to be necessary to
the child's welfare, it is apt to be morbid; and we are probably wrong
to inculcate its deliberate cultivation. The natural course is for
the parents and children to cast off the specific parental and filial
relation when they are no longer necessary to one another. The
child does this readily enough to form fresh ties, closer and more
fascinating. Parents are not always excluded from such compensations:
it happens sometimes that when the children go out at the door the lover
comes in at the window. Indeed it happens now oftener than it used to,
because people remain much longer in the sexual arena. The cultivated
Jewess no longer cuts off her hair at her marriage. The British matron
has discarded her cap and her conscientious ugliness; and a bishop's
wife at fifty has more of the air of a _femme galante_ than an actress
had at thirty-five in her grandmother's time. But as people marry later,
the facts of age and time still inexorably condemn most parents to
comparative solitude when their children marry. This may be a privation
and may be a relief: probably in healthy circumstances it is no worse
than a salutary change of habit; but even at that it is, for the moment
at least, a wrench. For though parents and children sometimes dislike
one another, there is an experience of succor and a habit of dependence
and expectation formed in infancy which naturally attaches a child to
its parent or to its nurse (a foster parent) in a quite peculiar way.
A benefit to the child may be a burden to the parent; but people become
attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached
to them; and to "suffer little children" has become an affectionate
impulse deep in our nature.

Now there is no such impulse to suffer our sisters and brothers,
our aunts and uncles, much less our cousins. If we could choose our
relatives, we might, by selecting congenial ones, mitigate the repulsive
effect of the obligation to like them and to admit them to our intimacy.
But to have a person imposed on us as a brother merely because he
happens to have the same parents is unbearable when, as may easily
happen, he is the sort of person we should carefully avoid if he were
anyone else's brother. All Europe (except Scotland, which has clans
instead of families) draws the line at second cousins. Protestantism
draws it still closer by making the first cousin a marriageable
stranger; and the only reason for not drawing it at sisters and brothers
is that the institution of the family compels us to spend our
childhood with them, and thus imposes on us a curious relation in which
familiarity destroys romantic charm, and is yet expected to create a
specially warm affection. Such a relation is dangerously factitious and
unnatural; and the practical moral is that the less said at home about
specific family affection the better. Children, like grown-up people,
get on well enough together if they are not pushed down one another's
throats; and grown-up relatives will get on together in proportion
to their separation and their care not to presume on their blood
relationship. We should let children's feelings take their natural
course without prompting. I have seen a child scolded and called
unfeeling because it did not occur to it to make a theatrical
demonstration of affectionate delight when its mother returned after an
absence: a typical example of the way in which spurious family sentiment
is stoked up. We are, after all, sociable animals; and if we are let
alone in the matter of our affections, and well brought up otherwise,
we shall not get on any the worse with particular people because they
happen to be our brothers and sisters and cousins. The danger lies in
assuming that we shall get on any better.

The main point to grasp here is that families are not kept together at
present by family feeling but by human feeling. The family cultivates
sympathy and mutual help and consolation as any other form of kindly
association cultivates them; but the addition of a dictated compulsory
affection as an attribute of near kinship is not only unnecessary,
but positively detrimental; and the alleged tendency of modern social
development to break up the family need alarm nobody. We cannot break up
the facts of kinship nor eradicate its natural emotional consequences.
What we can do and ought to do is to set people free to behave naturally
and to change their behavior as circumstances change. To impose on
a citizen of London the family duties of a Highland cateran in the
eighteenth century is as absurd as to compel him to carry a claymore and
target instead of an umbrella. The civilized man has no special use
for cousins; and he may presently find that he has no special use for
brothers and sisters. The parent seems likely to remain indispensable;
but there is no reason why that natural tie should be made the excuse
for unnatural aggravations of it, as crushing to the parent as they are
oppressive to the child. The mother and father will not always have
to shoulder the burthen of maintenance which should fall on the Atlas
shoulders of the fatherland and motherland. Pending such reforms and
emancipations, a shattering break-up of the parental home must remain
one of the normal incidents of marriage. The parent is left lonely and
the child is not. Woe to the old if they have no impersonal interests,
no convictions, no public causes to advance, no tastes or hobbies! It is
well to be a mother but not to be a mother-in-law; and if men were cut
off artificially from intellectual and public interests as women are,
the father-in-law would be as deplorable a figure in popular tradition
as the mother-in-law.

It is not to be wondered at that some people hold that blood
relationship should be kept a secret from the persons related, and that
the happiest condition in this respect is that of the foundling who, if
he ever meets his parents or brothers or sisters, passes them by without
knowing them. And for such a view there is this to be said: that our
family system does unquestionably take the natural bond between members
of the same family, which, like all natural bonds, is not too tight to
be borne, and superimposes on it a painful burden of forced, inculcated,
suggested, and altogether unnecessary affection and responsibility which
we should do well to get rid of by making relatives as independent of
one another as possible.




The Fate of the Family

The difficulty of inducing people to talk sensibly about the family is
the same as that which I pointed out in a previous volume as
confusing discussions of marriage. Marriage is not a single invariable
institution: it changes from civilization to civilization, from religion
to religion, from civil code to civil code, from frontier to frontier.
The family is still more variable, because the number of persons
constituting a family, unlike the number of persons constituting a
marriage, varies from one to twenty: indeed, when a widower with a
family marries a widow with a family, and the two produce a third
family, even that very high number may be surpassed. And the conditions
may vary between opposite extremes: for example, in a London or Paris
slum every child adds to the burden of poverty and helps to starve the
parents and all the other children, whereas in a settlement of pioneer
colonists every child, from the moment it is big enough to lend a hand
to the family industry, is an investment in which the only danger is
that of temporary over-capitalization. Then there are the variations
in family sentiment. Sometimes the family organization is as frankly
political as the organization of an army or an industry: fathers being
no more expected to be sentimental about their children than colonels
about soldiers, or factory owners about their employees, though the
mother may be allowed a little tenderness if her character is weak. The
Roman father was a despot: the Chinese father is an object of worship:
the sentimental modern western father is often a play-fellow looked to
for toys and pocket-money. The farmer sees his children constantly: the
squire sees them only during the holidays, and not then oftener than he
can help: the tram conductor, when employed by a joint stock company,
sometimes never sees them at all.

Under such circumstances phrases like The Influence of Home Life, The
Family, The Domestic Hearth, and so on, are no more specific than The
Mammals, or The Man In The Street; and the pious generalizations founded
so glibly on them by our sentimental moralists are unworkable.
When households average twelve persons with the sexes about equally
represented, the results may be fairly good. When they average three the
results may be very bad indeed; and to lump the two together under
the general term The Family is to confuse the question hopelessly. The
modern small family is much too stuffy: children "brought up at home"
in it are unfit for society. But here again circumstances differ. If the
parents live in what is called a garden suburb, where there is a good
deal of social intercourse, and the family, instead of keeping itself to
itself, as the evil old saying is, and glowering at the neighbors over
the blinds of the long street in which nobody knows his neighbor and
everyone wishes to deceive him as to his income and social importance,
is in effect broken up by school life, by out-of-door habits, and by
frank neighborly intercourse through dances and concerts and theatricals
and excursions and the like, families of four may turn out much less
barbarous citizens than families of ten which attain the Boer ideal of
being out of sight of one another's chimney smoke.

All one can say is, roughly, that the homelier the home, and the more
familiar the family, the worse for everybody concerned. The family ideal
is a humbug and a nuisance: one might as reasonably talk of the barrack
ideal, or the forecastle ideal, or any other substitution of the
machinery of social organization for the end of it, which must always
be the fullest and most capable life: in short, the most godly life. And
this significant word reminds us that though the popular conception of
heaven includes a Holy Family, it does not attach to that family
the notion of a separate home, or a private nursery or kitchen or
mother-in-law, or anything that constitutes the family as we know it.
Even blood relationship is miraculously abstracted from it; and the
Father is the father of all children, the mother the mother of all
mothers and babies, and the Son the Son of Man and the Savior of his
brothers: one whose chief utterance on the subject of the conventional
family was an invitation to all of us to leave our families and follow
him, and to leave the dead to bury the dead, and not debauch ourselves
at that gloomy festival the family funeral, with its sequel of hideous
mourning and grief which is either affected or morbid.




Family Mourning

I do not know how far this detestable custom of mourning is carried in
France; but judging from the appearance of the French people I should
say that a Frenchwoman goes into mourning for her cousins to the
seventeenth degree. The result is that when I cross the Channel I seem
to have reached a country devastated by war or pestilence. It is really
suffering only from the family. Will anyone pretend that England has
not the best of this striking difference? Yet it is such senseless and
unnatural conventions as this that make us so impatient of what we call
family feeling. Even apart from its insufferable pretensions, the family
needs hearty discrediting; for there is hardly any vulnerable part of it
that could not be amputated with advantage.




Art Teaching

By art teaching I hasten to say that I do not mean giving children
lessons in freehand drawing and perspective. I am simply calling
attention to the fact that fine art is the only teacher except torture.
I have already pointed out that nobody, except under threat of torture,
can read a school book. The reason is that a school book is not a work
of art. Similarly, you cannot listen to a lesson or a sermon unless the
teacher or the preacher is an artist. You cannot read the Bible if you
have no sense of literary art. The reason why the continental European
is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the
Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of
literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
To read a dull book; to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermon or
lecture; to stare at uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings: nothing,
short of disease, is more dreadful than this. The violence done to our
souls by it leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which have
never been properly studied by psycho-pathologists. Yet we are so inured
to it in school, where practically all the teachers are bores trying
to do the work of artists, and all the books artless, that we acquire
a truly frightful power of enduring boredom. We even acquire the notion
that fine art is lascivious and destructive to the character. In church,
in the House of Commons, at public meetings, we sit solemnly listening
to bores and twaddlers because from the time we could walk or speak we
have been snubbed, scolded, bullied, beaten and imprisoned whenever we
dared to resent being bored or twaddled at, or to express our natural
impatience and derision of bores and twaddlers. And when a man arises
with a soul of sufficient native strength to break the bonds of this
inculcated reverence and to expose and deride and tweak the noses of our
humbugs and panjandrums, like Voltaire or Dickens, we are shocked and
scandalized, even when we cannot help laughing. Worse, we dread and
persecute those who can see and declare the truth, because their
sincerity and insight reflects on our delusion and blindness. We are
all like Nell Gwynne's footman, who defended Nell's reputation with his
fists, not because he believed her to be what he called an honest woman,
but because he objected to be scorned as the footman of one who was no
better than she should be.

This wretched power of allowing ourselves to be bored may seem to give
the fine arts a chance sometimes. People will sit through a performance
of Beethoven's ninth symphony or of Wagner's Ring just as they will sit
through a dull sermon or a front bench politician saying nothing for two
hours whilst his unfortunate country is perishing through the delay
of its business in Parliament. But their endurance is very bad for the
ninth symphony, because they never hiss when it is murdered. I have
heard an Italian conductor (no longer living) take the _adagio_ of that
symphony at a lively _allegretto_, slowing down for the warmer major
sections into the speed and manner of the heroine's death song in a
Verdi opera; and the listeners, far from relieving my excruciation by
rising with yells of fury and hurling their programs and opera glasses
at the miscreant, behaved just as they do when Richter conducts it. The
mass of imposture that thrives on this combination of ignorance with
despairing endurance is incalculable. Given a public trained from
childhood to stand anything tedious, and so saturated with school
discipline that even with the doors open and no schoolmasters to stop
them they will sit there helplessly until the end of the concert or
opera gives them leave to go home; and you will have in great capitals
hundreds of thousands of pounds spent every night in the season on
professedly artistic entertainments which have no other effect on fine
art than to exacerbate the hatred in which it is already secretly held
in England.

Fortunately, there are arts that cannot be cut off from the people by
bad performances. We can read books for ourselves; and we can play
a good deal of fine music for ourselves with the help of a pianola.
Nothing stands between us and the actual handwork of the great masters
of painting except distance; and modern photographic methods of
reproduction are in some cases quite and in many nearly as effective in
conveying the artist's message as a modern edition of Shakespear's plays
is in conveying the message that first existed in his handwriting. The
reproduction of great feats of musical execution is already on the
way: the phonograph, for all its wheezing and snarling and braying, is
steadily improving in its manners; and what with this improvement on the
one hand, and on the other that blessed selective faculty which enables
us to ignore a good deal of disagreeable noise if there is a thread
of music in the middle of it (few critics of the phonograph seem to be
conscious of the very considerable mechanical noise set up by choirs
and orchestras) we have at last reached a point at which, for example,
a person living in an English village where the church music is the only
music, and that music is made by a few well-intentioned ladies with
the help of a harmonium, can hear masses by Palestrina very passably
executed, and can thereby be led to the discovery that Jackson in F and
Hymns Ancient and Modern are not perhaps the last word of beauty and
propriety in the praise of God.

In short, there is a vast body of art now within the reach of everybody.
The difficulty is that this art, which alone can educate us in grace of
body and soul, and which alone can make the history of the past live for
us or the hope of the future shine for us, which alone can give delicacy
and nobility to our crude lusts, which is the appointed vehicle of
inspiration and the method of the communion of saints, is actually
branded as sinful among us because, wherever it arises, there is
resistance to tyranny, breaking of fetters, and the breath of freedom.
The attempt to suppress art is not wholly successful: we might as well
try to suppress oxygen. But it is carried far enough to inflict on huge
numbers of people a most injurious art starvation, and to corrupt a
great deal of the art that is tolerated. You will find in England plenty
of rich families with little more culture than their dogs and horses.
And you will find poor families, cut off by poverty and town life
from the contemplation of the beauty of the earth, with its dresses of
leaves, its scarves of cloud, and its contours of hill and valley, who
would positively be happier as hogs, so little have they cultivated
their humanity by the only effective instrument of culture: art. The
dearth is artificially maintained even when there are the means of
satisfying it. Story books are forbidden, picture post cards are
forbidden, theatres are forbidden, operas are forbidden, circuses are
forbidden, sweetmeats are forbidden, pretty colors are forbidden, all
exactly as vice is forbidden. The Creator is explicitly prayed to, and
implicitly convicted of indecency every day. An association of vice and
sin with everything that is delightful and of goodness with everything
that is wretched and detestable is set up. All the most perilous (and
glorious) appetites and propensities are at once inflamed by starvation
and uneducated by art. All the wholesome conditions which art imposes on
appetite are waived: instead of cultivated men and women restrained by
a thousand delicacies, repelled by ugliness, chilled by vulgarity,
horrified by coarseness, deeply and sweetly moved by the graces that art
has revealed to them and nursed in them, we get indiscriminate rapacity
in pursuit of pleasure and a parade of the grossest stimulations in
catering for it. We have a continual clamor for goodness, beauty,
virtue, and sanctity, with such an appalling inability to recognize
it or love it when it arrives that it is more dangerous to be a great
prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple
folk out of their savings. Do not for a moment suppose that uncultivated
people are merely indifferent to high and noble qualities. They hate
them malignantly. At best, such qualities are like rare and beautiful
birds: when they appear the whole country takes down its guns; but the
birds receive the statuary tribute of having their corpses stuffed.

And it really all comes from the habit of preventing children from
being troublesome. You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how
troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo
only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse.
You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not
suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly
unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental
protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single
danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down
all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in
freedom. You have men who imagine themselves to be ministers of religion
openly declaring that when they pass through the streets they have
to keep out in the wheeled traffic to avoid the temptations of the
pavement. You have them organizing hunts of the women who tempt
them--poor creatures whom no artist would touch without a shudder--and
wildly clamoring for more clothes to disguise and conceal the body, and
for the abolition of pictures, statues, theatres, and pretty colors.
And incredible as it seems, these unhappy lunatics are left at large,
unrebuked, even admired and revered, whilst artists have to struggle for
toleration. To them an undraped human body is the most monstrous, the
most blighting, the most obscene, the most unbearable spectacle in the
universe. To an artist it is, at its best, the most admirable spectacle
in nature, and, at its average, an object of indifference. If every rag
of clothing miraculously dropped from the inhabitants of London at noon
tomorrow (say as a preliminary to the Great Judgment), the artistic
people would not turn a hair; but the artless people would go mad and
call on the mountains to hide them. I submit that this indicates a
thoroughly healthy state on the part of the artists, and a thoroughly
morbid one on the part of the artless. And the healthy state is
attainable in a cold country like ours only by familiarity with the
undraped figure acquired through pictures, statues, and theatrical
representations in which an illusion of natural clotheslessness is
produced and made poetic.

In short, we all grow up stupid and mad to just the extent to which we
have not been artistically educated; and the fact that this taint of
stupidity and madness has to be tolerated because it is general, and is
even boasted of as characteristically English, makes the situation all
the worse. It is becoming exceedingly grave at present, because the last
ray of art is being cut off from our schools by the discontinuance of
religious education.




The Impossibility of Secular Education

Now children must be taught some sort of religion. Secular education is
an impossibility. Secular education comes to this: that the only reason
for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you do not you
will be caned. This is worse than being taught in a church school that
if you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell is presented as
the instrument of something eternal, divine, and inevitable: you cannot
evade it the moment the schoolmaster's back is turned. What confuses
this issue and leads even highly intelligent religious persons to
advocate secular education as a means of rescuing children from the
strife of rival proselytizers is the failure to distinguish between
the child's personal subjective need for a religion and its right to
an impartially communicated historical objective knowledge of all the
creeds and Churches. Just as a child, no matter what its race and color
may be, should know that there are black men and brown men and yellow
men, and, no matter what its political convictions may be, that
there are Monarchists and Republicans and Positivists, Socialists and
Unsocialists, so it should know that there are Christians and Mahometans
and Buddhists and Shintoists and so forth, and that they are on the
average just as honest and well-behaved as its own father. For example,
it should not be told that Allah is a false god set up by the Turks and
Arabs, who will all be damned for taking that liberty; but it should be
told that many English people think so, and that many Turks and Arabs
think the converse about English people. It should be taught that Allah
is simply the name by which God is known to Turks and Arabs, who are
just as eligible for salvation as any Christian. Further, that the
practical reason why a Turkish child should pray in a mosque and an
English child in a church is that as worship is organized in Turkey in
mosques in the name of Mahomet and in England in churches in the name
of Christ, a Turkish child joining the Church of England or an English
child following Mahomet will find that it has no place for its worship
and no organization of its religion within its reach. Any other teaching
of the history and present facts of religion is false teaching, and is
politically extremely dangerous in an empire in which a huge majority of
the fellow subjects of the governing island do not profess the religion
of that island.

But this objectivity, though intellectually honest, tells the child
only what other people believe. What it should itself believe is quite
another matter. The sort of Rationalism which says to a child "You must
suspend your judgment until you are old enough to choose your religion"
is Rationalism gone mad. The child must have a conscience and a code
of honor (which is the essence of religion) even if it be only a
provisional one, to be revised at its confirmation. For confirmation is
meant to signalize a spiritual coming of age, and may be a repudiation.
Really active souls have many confirmations and repudiations as their
life deepens and their knowledge widens. But what is to guide the child
before its first confirmation? Not mere orders, because orders must
have a sanction of some sort or why should the child obey them? If, as a
Secularist, you refuse to teach any sanction, you must say "You will
be punished if you disobey." "Yes," says the child to itself, "if I am
found out; but wait until your back is turned and I will do as I like,
and lie about it." There can be no objective punishment for successful
fraud; and as no espionage can cover the whole range of a child's
conduct, the upshot is that the child becomes a liar and schemer with an
atrophied conscience. And a good many of the orders given to it are not
obeyed after all. Thus the Secularist who is not a fool is forced to
appeal to the child's vital impulse towards perfection, to the divine
spark; and no resolution not to call this impulse an impulse of loyalty
to the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, or obedience to the Will of God,
or any other standard theological term, can alter the fact that the
Secularist has stepped outside Secularism and is educating the child
religiously, even if he insists on repudiating that pious adverb and
substituting the word metaphysically.




Natural Selection as a Religion

We must make up our minds to it therefore that whatever measures we may
be forced to take to prevent the recruiting sergeants of the Churches,
free or established, from obtaining an exclusive right of entry to
schools, we shall not be able to exclude religion from them. The most
horrible of all religions: that which teaches us to regard ourselves
as the helpless prey of a series of senseless accidents called Natural
Selection, is allowed and even welcomed in so-called secular schools
because it is, in a sense, the negation of all religion; but for school
purposes a religion is a belief which affects conduct; and no belief
affects conduct more radically and often so disastrously as the belief
that the universe is a product of Natural Selection. What is more, the
theory of Natural Selection cannot be kept out of schools, because
many of the natural facts that present the most plausible appearance
of design can be accounted for by Natural Selection; and it would be so
absurd to keep a child in delusive ignorance of so potent a factor
in evolution as to keep it in ignorance of radiation or capillary
attraction. Even if you make a religion of Natural Selection, and
teach the child to regard itself as the irresponsible prey of its
circumstances and appetites (or its heredity as you will perhaps call
them), you will none the less find that its appetites are stimulated by
your encouragement and daunted by your discouragement; that one of its
appetites is an appetite for perfection; that if you discourage this
appetite and encourage the cruder acquisitive appetites the child will
steal and lie and be a nuisance to you; and that if you encourage its
appetite for perfection and teach it to attach a peculiar sacredness
to it and place it before the other appetites, it will be a much nicer
child and you will have a much easier job, at which point you will,
in spite of your pseudoscientific jargon, find yourself back in the
old-fashioned religious teaching as deep as Dr. Watts and in fact
fathoms deeper.




Moral Instruction Leagues

And now the voices of our Moral Instruction Leagues will be lifted,
asking whether there is any reason why the appetite for perfection
should not be cultivated in rationally scientific terms instead of being
associated with the story of Jonah and the great fish and the thousand
other tales that grow up round religions. Yes: there are many reasons;
and one of them is that children all like the story of Jonah and the
whale (they insist on its being a whale in spite of demonstrations by
Bible smashers without any sense of humor that Jonah would not have
fitted into a whale's gullet--as if the story would be credible of a
whale with an enlarged throat) and that no child on earth can stand
moral instruction books or catechisms or any other statement of the case
for religion in abstract terms. The object of a moral instruction book
is not to be rational, scientific, exact, proof against controversy, nor
even credible: its object is to make children good; and if it makes them
sick instead its place is the waste-paper basket.

Take for an illustration the story of Elisha and the bears. To the
authors of the moral instruction books it is in the last degree
reprehensible. It is obviously not true as a record of fact; and the
picture it gives us of the temper of God (which is what interests an
adult reader) is shocking and blasphemous. But it is a capital story for
a child. It interests a child because it is about bears; and it leaves
the child with an impression that children who poke fun at old gentlemen
and make rude remarks about bald heads are not nice children, which is
a highly desirable impression, and just as much as a child is capable
of receiving from the story. When a story is about God and a child,
children take God for granted and criticize the child. Adults do the
opposite, and are thereby led to talk great nonsense about the bad
effect of Bible stories on infants.

But let no one think that a child or anyone else can learn religion from
a teacher or a book or by any academic process whatever. It is only
by an unfettered access to the whole body of Fine Art: that is, to the
whole body of inspired revelation, that we can build up that conception
of divinity to which all virtue is an aspiration. And to hope to find
this body of art purified from all that is obsolete or dangerous
or fierce or lusty, or to pick and choose what will be good for any
particular child, much less for all children, is the shallowest
of vanities. Such schoolmasterly selection is neither possible nor
desirable. Ignorance of evil is not virtue but imbecility: admiring
it is like giving a prize for honesty to a man who has not stolen your
watch because he did not know you had one. Virtue chooses good from
evil; and without knowledge there can be no choice. And even this is a
dangerous simplification of what actually occurs. We are not choosing:
we are growing. Were you to cut all of what you call the evil out of
a child, it would drop dead. If you try to stretch it to full human
stature when it is ten years old, you will simply pull it into two
pieces and be hanged. And when you try to do this morally, which is what
parents and schoolmasters are doing every day, you ought to be hanged;
and some day, when we take a sensible view of the matter, you will be;
and serve you right. The child does not stand between a good and a
bad angel: what it has to deal with is a middling angel who, in normal
healthy cases, wants to be a good angel as fast as it can without
killing itself in the process, which is a dangerous one.