THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

only the last decadent phase of his educational career.

  The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the

  world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness

  and generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive,

  more or less completely digested into the Board of Education.

  The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how

  many of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and

  early manhood have given place now to more scientific and efficient

  machinery. When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was

  ruled by a strange body called a Local Board-it was the Age of

  Boards-and I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the

  breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and

  devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there

  were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics

  before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading

  tentacles of the London County Council.

  It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State

  to remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within

  my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic

  people were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of

  the sort. When he was born, totally illiterate people who could

  neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature,

  were to be found everywhere in England; and great masses of the

  population were getting no instruction at all. Only a few schools

  flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the

  country the old endowed grammar schools were to be found sinking and

  dwindling; many of them had closed altogether. In the new great

  centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the

  factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and

  under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary

  contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight

  against this festering darkness. It was a condition of affairs

  clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of

  indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were

  possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian

  will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the

  commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian

  enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.

  I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social

  institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they

  should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust

  of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the

  general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about

  the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train

  teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and

  provide properly written school-books. These things it was felt

  MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and since it was

  manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in

  default, it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money

  payments. The State set up a machinery of examination both in

  Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and payments, known

  technically as grants, were made in accordance with the examination

  results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit to

  send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would be

  established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,

  inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of "Grant earning" was

  created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.

  In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grant-

  earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far

  as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the

  task of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the

  most part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also

  were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it was feared

  that injustice might be done. Year after year these eminent persons

  set questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the

  increasing thousands of answers that ensued, and having no doubt the

  national ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they were

  careful each year to re-read the preceding papers before composing

  the current one, in order to see what it was usual to ask. As a

  result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and

  permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the

  practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science,

  but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-

  earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine

  education whatever.

  Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of

  the age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science

  prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by

  making graduates in arts and priests in the established church

  Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and private

  enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according

  to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district. Private

  enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books. A number of

  competing firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising in

  Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to produce

  text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of

  knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty

  subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and

  models and instructions that should give precisely the method and

  gestures esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book

  was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the

  examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former

  years were appended to every chapter. By means of these last the

  teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of

  grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other

  methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils with

  questions and then dictated model replies.

  That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes

  as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death,

  and it is so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table,

  smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible

  formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of

  desks before him. Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to

  a blackboard on an easel and draw on that very slowly and

  deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in

  coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or

  arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the Institute in

  which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus
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br />   prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the

  Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with

  maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.

  But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in

  systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to

  pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it,

  because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen

  burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second

  they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger

  the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.

  Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up. And moreover

  they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant

  learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies. Quite

  early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the

  unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is

  fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for

  example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic

  Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a

  glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue

  to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the

  stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face

  and painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And

  I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a

  retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and

  may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do anything

  of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium

  chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says

  "Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady

  student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.

  Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite

  understand that ancient libertine refusing to cooperate in her own

  undoing. And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference

  for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an

  arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing

  whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool,

  and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it

  when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond

  illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you

  did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in

  this way he could make us see all he described. The class, freed

  from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life

  without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then

  my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be

  copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any

  exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as

  "empyreumatic" or "botryoidal."

  Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once

  sticking up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description,

  "Please, sir, what is flocculent?"

  "The precipitate is."

  "Yes, sir, but what does it mean?"

  "Oh! flocculent! " said my father, "flocculent! Why-" he extended

  his hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air.

  "Like that," he said.

  I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment

  after giving it. "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and

  resumed his discourse.

  3

  My father, Iam afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical

  affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical

  incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine

  temperament, in a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any

  human being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest

  manner, under the suggestion of books or papers or his own

  spontaneous imagination, and as he had never been trained to do

  anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were

  extensive and thorough. At one time he nearly gave up his classes

  for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the

  peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical

  theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memories for a lifetime.

  The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near

  the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve. I

  was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and

  assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that

  wrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up

  both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour

  alternating with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And

  for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every

  meal.

  A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a

  thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to he watched; it does

  not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its

  own. Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to

  trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged

  and demoralised and over-irritated garden. My father got at cross

  purposes with our two patches at an early stage. Everything grew

  wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified

  nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse. The

  peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the

  beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a

  spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for

  being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the

  catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your

  cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its

  occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme,

  because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one

  watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome

  spirit of inquiry in hardy natures.

  In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding

  string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the

  consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he

  erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and

  never finished by which everything was to be watered at once by

  means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2,

  and a large and particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the

  abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe

  or by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a

  singularly desolate and disorderly appearance. He took steps

  towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence of the

  Sewage Utilisation Society; but happily he stopped in time. He

  hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else

  became more urgent or simply he tir
ed; a considerable area of the

  Number 2 territory was never even dug up.

  In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a

  man less horticulturally-minded. The clamour of these vegetables he

  had launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out

  his patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men

  after a day or so of disregard, talking to me of history perhaps or

  social organisation, or summarising some book he had read. He

  talked to me of anything that interested him, regardless of my

  limitations. Then he would begin to note the growth of the weeds.

  "This won't do," he would say and pull up a handful.

  More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary.

  His hands would become earthy, his nails black, weeds would snap off

  in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would

  darken. He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment.

  "CURSE these weeds!" he would say from his heart. His discourse was

  at an end.

  I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the

  tranquillity of the house, his hands and clothes intensively

  enriched. He would come in like a whirlwind. "This damned stuff

  all over me and the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah!

  AAAAAAH!"

  My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing

  on such occasions. She would remain standing a little stiffly in

  the scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he

  sought.

  "If you say such things-"

  He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. "The towel!" he

  would cry, flicking suds from big fingers in every direction; "the

  towel! I'll let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the

  towel! I'll give up everything, I tell you-everything!"…

  At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I

  was in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it

  happened. I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still

  echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for

  all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery

  of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up with bast only a week or

  so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall

  slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and slogged. Great