Therefore there is no question of providing the child with a carefully
regulated access to good art. There is no good art, any more than there
is good anything else in the absolute sense. Art that is too good for
the child will either teach it nothing or drive it mad, as the Bible has
driven many people mad who might have kept their sanity had they been
allowed to read much lower forms of literature. The practical moral is
that we must read whatever stories, see whatever pictures, hear whatever
songs and symphonies, go to whatever plays we like. We shall not like
those which have nothing to say to us; and though everyone has a right
to bias our choice, no one has a right to deprive us of it by keeping us
from any work of art or any work of art from us.

I may now say without danger of being misunderstood that the popular
English compromise called Cowper Templeism (unsectarian Bible education)
is not so silly as it looks. It is true that the Bible inculcates half
a dozen religions: some of them barbarous; some cynical and pessimistic;
some amoristic and romantic; some sceptical and challenging; some
kindly, simple, and intuitional; some sophistical and intellectual; none
suited to the character and conditions of western civilization unless it
be the Christianity which was finally suppressed by the Crucifixion, and
has never been put into practice by any State before or since. But the
Bible contains the ancient literature of a very remarkable Oriental
race; and the imposition of this literature, on whatever false
pretences, on our children left them more literate than if they knew
no literature at all, which was the practical alternative. And as our
Authorized Version is a great work of art as well, to know it was better
than knowing no art, which also was the practical alternative. It is
at least not a school book; and it is not a bad story book, horrible as
some of the stories are. Therefore as between the Bible and the blank
represented by secular education, the choice is with the Bible.




The Bible

But the Bible is not sufficient. The real Bible of modern Europe is the
whole body of great literature in which the inspiration and revelation
of Hebrew Scripture has been continued to the present day. Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zoroaster is less comforting to the ill and unhappy than the
Psalms; but it is much truer, subtler, and more edifying. The pleasure
we get from the rhetoric of the book of Job and its tragic picture of a
bewildered soul cannot disguise the ignoble irrelevance of the retort of
God with which it closes, or supply the need of such modern revelations
as Shelley's Prometheus or The Niblung's Ring of Richard Wagner. There
is nothing in the Bible greater in inspiration than Beethoven's ninth
symphony; and the power of modern music to convey that inspiration to
a modern man is far greater than that of Elizabethan English, which is,
except for people steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir Walter
Scott and Ruskin, a dead language.

Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are accessible
to architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and to the arts of
the stage. Every device of art should be brought to bear on the young;
so that they may discover some form of it that delights them naturally;
for there will come to all of them that period between dawning
adolescence and full maturity when the pleasures and emotions of art
will have to satisfy cravings which, if starved or insulted, may become
morbid and seek disgraceful satisfactions, and, if prematurely gratified
otherwise than poetically, may destroy the stamina of the race. And it
must be borne in mind that the most dangerous art for this necessary
purpose is the art that presents itself as religious ecstasy. Young
people are ripe for love long before they are ripe for religion. Only
a very foolish person would substitute the Imitation of Christ for
Treasure Island as a present for a boy or girl, or for Byron's Don Juan
as a present for a swain or lass. Pickwick is the safest saint for us in
our nonage. Flaubert's Temptation of St Anthony is an excellent book
for a man of fifty, perhaps the best within reach as a healthy study of
visionary ecstasy; but for the purposes of a boy of fifteen Ivanhoe and
the Templar make a much better saint and devil. And the boy of
fifteen will find this out for himself if he is allowed to wander in a
well-stocked literary garden, and hear bands and see pictures and spend
his pennies on cinematograph shows. His choice may often be rather
disgusting to his elders when they want him to choose the best before he
is ready for it. The greatest Protestant Manifesto ever written, as
far as I know, is Houston Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century: everybody capable of it should read it. Probably the History of
Maria Monk is at the opposite extreme of merit (this is a guess: I have
never read it); but it is certain that a boy let loose in a library
would go for Maria Monk and have no use whatever for Mr Chamberlain. I
should probably have read Maria Monk myself if I had not had the Arabian
Nights and their like to occupy me better. In art, children, like
adults, will find their level if they are left free to find it, and not
restricted to what adults think good for them. Just at present our
young people are going mad over ragtimes, apparently because syncopated
rhythms are new to them. If they had learnt what can be done with
syncopation from Beethoven's third Leonora overture, they would enjoy
the ragtimes all the more; but they would put them in their proper place
as amusing vulgarities.




Artist Idolatry

But there are more dangerous influences than ragtimes waiting for people
brought up in ignorance of fine art. Nothing is more pitiably ridiculous
than the wild worship of artists by those who have never been seasoned
in youth to the enchantments of art. Tenors and prima donnas, pianists
and violinists, actors and actresses enjoy powers of seduction which in
the middle ages would have exposed them to the risk of being burnt
for sorcery. But as they exercise this power by singing, playing, and
acting, no great harm is done except perhaps to themselves. Far graver
are the powers enjoyed by brilliant persons who are also connoisseurs
in art. The influence they can exercise on young people who have been
brought up in the darkness and wretchedness of a home without art, and
in whom a natural bent towards art has always been baffled and snubbed,
is incredible to those who have not witnessed and understood it. He (or
she) who reveals the world of art to them opens heaven to them. They
become satellites, disciples, worshippers of the apostle. Now the
apostle may be a voluptuary without much conscience. Nature may have
given him enough virtue to suffice in a reasonable environment. But this
allowance may not be enough to defend him against the temptation and
demoralization of finding himself a little god on the strength of
what ought to be a quite ordinary culture. He may find adorers in
all directions in our uncultivated society among people of stronger
character than himself, not one of whom, if they had been artistically
educated, would have had anything to learn from him or regarded him
as in any way extraordinary apart from his actual achievements as an
artist. Tartuffe is not always a priest. Indeed he is not always a
rascal: he is often a weak man absurdly credited with omniscience and
perfection, and taking unfair advantages only because they are offered
to him and he is too weak to refuse. Give everyone his culture, and no
one will offer him more than his due.

In thus delivering our children from the idolatry of the artist, we
shall not destroy for them the enchantment of art: on the contrary, we
shall teach them to demand art everywhere as a condition attainable
by cultivating the body, mind, and heart. Art, said Morris, is the
expression of pleasure in work. And certainly, when work is made
detestable by slavery, there is no art. It is only when learning is
made a slavery by tyrannical teachers that art becomes loathsome to the
pupil.




"The Machine"

When we set to work at a Constitution to secure freedom for children, we
had better bear in mind that the children may not be at all obliged to
us for our pains. Rousseau said that men are born free; and this saying,
in its proper bearings, was and is a great and true saying; yet let it
not lead us into the error of supposing that all men long for freedom
and embrace it when it is offered to them. On the contrary, it has to
be forced on them; and even then they will give it the slip if it is not
religiously inculcated and strongly safeguarded.

Besides, men are born docile, and must in the nature of things remain so
with regard to everything they do not understand. Now political science
and the art of government are among the things they do not understand,
and indeed are not at present allowed to understand. They can be
enslaved by a system, as we are at present, because it happens to be
there, and nobody understands it. An intelligently worked Capitalist
system, as Comte saw, would give us all that most of us are intelligent
enough to want. What makes it produce such unspeakably vile results is
that it is an automatic system which is as little understood by those
who profit by it in money as by those who are starved and degraded by
it: our millionaires and statesmen are manifestly no more "captains
of industry" or scientific politicians than our bookmakers are
mathematicians. For some time past a significant word has been coming
into use as a substitute for Destiny, Fate, and Providence. It is "The
Machine": the machine that has no god in it. Why do governments do
nothing in spite of reports of Royal Commissions that establish the most
frightful urgency? Why do our philanthropic millionaires do nothing,
though they are ready to throw bucketfuls of gold into the streets? The
Machine will not let them. Always the Machine. In short, they dont know
how.

They try to reform Society as an old lady might try to restore a broken
down locomotive by prodding it with a knitting needle. And this is not
at all because they are born fools, but because they have been educated,
not into manhood and freedom, but into blindness and slavery by
their parents and schoolmasters, themselves the victims of a similar
misdirection, and consequently of The Machine. They do not want
liberty. They have not been educated to want it. They choose slavery and
inequality; and all the other evils are automatically added to them.

And yet we must have The Machine. It is only in unskilled hands under
ignorant direction that machinery is dangerous. We can no more govern
modern communities without political machinery than we can feed and
clothe them without industrial machinery. Shatter The Machine, and you
get Anarchy. And yet The Machine works so detestably at present that we
have people who advocate Anarchy and call themselves Anarchists.




The Provocation to Anarchism

What is valid in Anarchism is that all Governments try to simplify their
task by destroying liberty and glorifying authority in general and their
own deeds in particular. But the difficulty in combining law and
order with free institutions is not a natural one. It is a matter of
inculcation. If people are brought up to be slaves, it is useless and
dangerous to let them loose at the age of twenty-one and say "Now you
are free." No one with the tamed soul and broken spirit of a slave can
be free. It is like saying to a laborer brought up on a family income of
thirteen shillings a week, "Here is one hundred thousand pounds: now you
are wealthy." Nothing can make such a man really wealthy. Freedom and
wealth are difficult and responsible conditions to which men must be
accustomed and socially trained from birth. A nation that is free at
twenty-one is not free at all; just as a man first enriched at fifty
remains poor all his life, even if he does not curtail it by drinking
himself to death in the first wild ecstasy of being able to swallow as
much as he likes for the first time. You cannot govern men brought up
as slaves otherwise than as slaves are governed. You may pile Bills
of Right and Habeas Corpus Acts on Great Charters; promulgate American
Constitutions; burn the chateaux and guillotine the seigneurs; chop
off the heads of kings and queens and set up Democracy on the ruins of
feudalism: the end of it all for us is that already in the twentieth
century there has been as much brute coercion and savage intolerance, as
much flogging and hanging, as much impudent injustice on the bench
and lustful rancor in the pulpit, as much naive resort to torture,
persecution, and suppression of free speech and freedom of the press,
as much war, as much of the vilest excess of mutilation, rapine, and
delirious indiscriminate slaughter of helpless non-combatants, old
and young, as much prostitution of professional talent, literary and
political, in defence of manifest wrong, as much cowardly sycophancy
giving fine names to all this villainy or pretending that it is "greatly
exaggerated," as we can find any record of from the days when the
advocacy of liberty was a capital offence and Democracy was hardly
thinkable. Democracy exhibits the vanity of Louis XIV, the savagery
of Peter of Russia, the nepotism and provinciality of Napoleon, the
fickleness of Catherine II: in short, all the childishnesses of all the
despots without any of the qualities that enabled the greatest of them
to fascinate and dominate their contemporaries.

And the flatterers of Democracy are as impudently servile to the
successful, and insolent to common honest folk, as the flatterers of
the monarchs. Democracy in America has led to the withdrawal of ordinary
refined persons from politics; and the same result is coming in England
as fast as we make Democracy as democratic as it is in America. This is
true also of popular religion: it is so horribly irreligious that nobody
with the smallest pretence to culture, or the least inkling of what
the great prophets vainly tried to make the world understand, will have
anything to do with it except for purely secular reasons.




Imagination

Before we can clearly understand how baleful is this condition of
intimidation in which we live, it is necessary to clear up the confusion
made by our use of the word imagination to denote two very different
powers of mind. One is the power to imagine things as they are not:
this I call the romantic imagination. The other is the power to imagine
things as they are without actually sensing them; and this I will call
the realistic imagination. Take for example marriage and war. One man
has a vision of perpetual bliss with a domestic angel at home, and of
flashing sabres, thundering guns, victorious cavalry charges, and routed
enemies in the field. That is romantic imagination; and the mischief it
does is incalculable. It begins in silly and selfish expectations of
the impossible, and ends in spiteful disappointment, sour grievance,
cynicism, and misanthropic resistance to any attempt to better a
hopeless world. The wise man knows that imagination is not only a means
of pleasing himself and beguiling tedious hours with romances and fairy
tales and fools' paradises (a quite defensible and delightful amusement
when you know exactly what you are doing and where fancy ends and facts
begin), but also a means of foreseeing and being prepared for realities
as yet unexperienced, and of testing the possibility and desirability of
serious Utopias. He does not expect his wife to be an angel; nor does he
overlook the facts that war depends on the rousing of all the murderous
blackguardism still latent in mankind; that every victory means a
defeat; that fatigue, hunger, terror, and disease are the raw material
which romancers work up into military glory; and that soldiers for the
most part go to war as children go to school, because they are afraid
not to. They are afraid even to say they are afraid, as such candor is
punishable by death in the military code.

A very little realistic imagination gives an ambitious person enormous
power over the multitudinous victims of the romantic imagination. For
the romancer not only pleases himself with fictitious glories: he also
terrifies himself with imaginary dangers. He does not even picture what
these dangers are: he conceives the unknown as always dangerous. When
you say to a realist "You must do this" or "You must not do that," he
instantly asks what will happen to him if he does (or does not, as the
case may be). Failing an unromantic convincing answer, he does just as
he pleases unless he can find for himself a real reason for refraining.
In short, though you can intimidate him, you cannot bluff him. But
you can always bluff the romantic person: indeed his grasp of real
considerations is so feeble that you find it necessary to bluff him even
when you have solid considerations to offer him instead. The campaigns
of Napoleon, with their atmosphere of glory, illustrate this. In
the Russian campaign Napoleon's marshals achieved miracles of bluff,
especially Ney, who, with a handful of men, monstrously outnumbered,
repeatedly kept the Russian troops paralyzed with terror by pure
bounce. Napoleon himself, much more a realist than Ney (that was why
he dominated him), would probably have surrendered; for sometimes the
bravest of the brave will achieve successes never attempted by the
cleverest of the clever. Wellington was a completer realist than
Napoleon. It was impossible to persuade Wellington that he was beaten
until he actually was beaten. He was unbluffable; and if Napoleon had
understood the nature of Wellington's strength instead of returning
Wellington's snobbish contempt for him by an academic contempt for
Wellington, he would not have left the attack at Waterloo to Ney and
D'Erlon, who, on that field, did not know when they were beaten, whereas
Wellington knew precisely when he was not beaten. The unbluffable
would have triumphed anyhow, probably, because Napoleon was an academic
soldier, doing the academic thing (the attack in columns and so forth)
with superlative ability and energy; whilst Wellington was an original
soldier who, instead of outdoing the terrible academic columns with
still more terrible and academic columns, outwitted them with the thin
red line, not of heroes, but, as this uncompromising realist never
hesitated to testify, of the scum of the earth.




Government by Bullies

These picturesque martial incidents are being reproduced every day in
our ordinary life. We are bluffed by hardy simpletons and headstrong
bounders as the Russians were bluffed by Ney; and our Wellingtons
are threadbound by slave-democracy as Gulliver was threadbound by the
Lilliputians. We are a mass of people living in a submissive routine to
which we have been drilled from our childhood. When you ask us to take
the simplest step outside that routine, we say shyly, "Oh, I really
couldnt," or "Oh, I shouldnt like to," without being able to point out
the smallest harm that could possibly ensue: victims, not of a rational
fear of real dangers, but of pure abstract fear, the quintessence of
cowardice, the very negation of "the fear of God." Dotted about among
us are a few spirits relatively free from this inculcated paralysis,
sometimes because they are half-witted, sometimes because they are
unscrupulously selfish, sometimes because they are realists as to money
and unimaginative as to other things, sometimes even because they are
exceptionally able, but always because they are not afraid of shadows
nor oppressed with nightmares. And we see these few rising as if by
magic into power and affluence, and forming, with the millionaires who
have accidentally gained huge riches by the occasional windfalls of our
commerce, the governing class. Now nothing is more disastrous than
a governing class that does not know how to govern. And how can this
rabble of the casual products of luck, cunning, and folly, be expected
to know how to govern? The merely lucky ones and the hereditary ones do
not owe their position to their qualifications at all. As to the rest,
the realism which seems their essential qualification often consists not
only in a lack of romantic imagination, which lack is a merit, but
of the realistic, constructive, Utopian imagination, which lack is
a ghastly defect. Freedom from imaginative illusion is therefore no
guarantee whatever of nobility of character: that is why inculcated
submissiveness makes us slaves to people much worse than ourselves,
and why it is so important that submissiveness should no longer be
inculcated.

And yet as long as you have the compulsory school as we know it, we
shall have submissiveness inculcated. What is more, until the active
hours of child life are organized separately from the active hours of
adult life, so that adults can enjoy the society of children in reason
without being tormented, disturbed, harried, burdened, and hindered
in their work by them as they would be now if there were no compulsory
schools and no children hypnotized into the belief that they must tamely
go to them and be imprisoned and beaten and over-tasked in them, we
shall have schools under one pretext or another; and we shall have all
the evil consequences and all the social hopelessness that result from
turning a nation of potential freemen and freewomen into a nation of
two-legged spoilt spaniels with everything crushed out of their nature
except dread of the whip. Liberty is the breath of life to nations; and
liberty is the one thing that parents, schoolmasters, and rulers spend
their lives in extirpating for the sake of an immediately quiet and
finally disastrous life.


Notes on this etext:

     This text was taken from a printed volume containing the
     plays "Misalliance", "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets",
     "Fanny's First Play", and the essay "A Treatise on Parents
     and Children".

     Notes on the editing:  Italicized text is delimited with
     underlines ("_").  Punctuation and spelling retained as in
     the printed text. Shaw intentionally spelled many words
     according to a non-standard system.  For example, "don't" is
     given as "dont" (without apostrophe), "Dr." is given as "Dr"
     (without a period at the end), and "Shakespeare" is given as
     "Shakespear" (no "e" at the end).  The pound (currency)
     symbol has been replaced by the word "pounds".