of all the intellectual exercises with which we solace the idle hours that we devote to thought, none is more engaging and at the same time perplexing than that of endeavouring to form a clear conception of the age in which we live. naturally the difficulty lies, not in lack of materials on which to base an impression—indeed, we are embarrassed by the quantity of evidence that accumulates to our hand—but in the fact that it is hard to see things in true perspective when they are very near to the observer. the yet unborn historians of the present era will doubtless lack much of our knowledge, but they will be able to unravel in the quietude of their studies the tangled threads and stubborn knots that writhe beneath our fingers with the perpetual changeableness and uneasy animation of life p. 232itself. but if it is impossible to write dispassionately of a revolution while men are dying at the barricades and musket-balls are marring the bland uniformity of the wallpaper of the room in which we write, it is always open to the student of life to fall back on impressionism, the form of art that seeks to bludgeon life with a loaded phrase, rather than to woo her to captivity with chosen and honeyed words. and the brutal method is apt to prove the more efficacious, as with that frail sex that kisses, so i am told, the masculine hand that grants the accolade of femininity in that blessed state of bruiser and bruised that is nature’s highest conception of the relationship of the two sexes. while science greets the corpse with incomprehensible formul? and the conscientious artist gropes for his note-book of epithets to suit occasions, impressionism stops her dainty nose with her diminutive square of perfumed silk, and the dog is dead indeed.
we are all born impressionists, and it takes the education of years to eradicate the gift from our natures; many people never p. 233lose the habit of regarding life in this queer, straightforward fashion, and go to their graves obstinately convinced that grass is green and the sky is blue in dogged opposition to the scientists, didactic dramatists, eminent divines, philosophers, ?sthetic poets, and human beings born blind. some of these subtle weavers of argument would have us believe that impressionism means just the converse of the sense in which i am using the word; that, for instance, the fact that grass is green comes to us from indirect sources, as that of our own natures we would perceive it to be red or blue. but while we believe our impressions to be our own, we know that this theory has reached us indirectly, so we can well afford to ignore it. others, again, will have it that impressions are not to be trusted; and the majority of people, while rejecting or failing to comprehend the philosophic basis on which this doubt is founded, are only too willing to accept a theory that relieves them in some way of responsibility for their own individual actions. as a matter of fact, telling a man to mistrust his impressions is p. 234like bidding a mariner despise his compass. if our senses lie to us, we must live, perforce, in a world of lies.
but as i hinted above, the young are wont to rely on their impressions from the moment when a baby first parts its lips in howling criticism of life. children have implicit faith in the evidence of their senses until the grown-up people come along and tell grimy stories of perjured eyes and lying ears, and the unhappy fate of the unwise babes who trusted them. what is a child to do? usually it accepts the new theory of its own inherent blindness and deafness grudgingly, but it accepts it nevertheless. it begins to rely on the experience of older human beings, as if the miracle of its own life were no more than the toneless repetition of other lives that have been before it. wonder passes from its life, as joy passes from pencil and paper when the little fingers are made to follow certain predestined lines, instead of tracing the fancies of the moon. the child becomes sensible, obedient, quick at its lessons. it learns the beauty of the world from pictures and the love of its p. 235mother from books. in course of time its senses become atrophied through disuse, and it can, in truth, no longer see or hear. when this stage is reached the education of the individual is completed, and all civilisation’s requirements are satisfied.
i have described an extreme case, and the judicious reader will realise that the process is rarely completed in so short a time as the last paragraph suggests. but sooner or later most men and women come to believe in experience, and to this belief is due our tyrannous treatment of the young. i can conceive that an age will come that will shrink with horror from the excesses we commit in the name of education, and will regard us who force children to do their lessons against their will very much in the way in which we regard the slave-owners of the past, only with added indignation that our tyranny is imposed on the children’s minds, and not on the bodies of adults. let those conservative readers who find this comparison a little strained reflect for a moment on what it is that we have to teach the next generation, with what manner of p. 236wisdom we chain the children’s imaginations and brand their minds. we teach them in the first place to express themselves in sounds that shall be intelligible to us, and this, i suppose, is necessary, though i should like to doubt it. further, we invariably instruct them in the sciences of reading and writing, which seems to me frankly unfortunate. in utopia, as i conceive it, the child who thought there was anything worth reading would teach itself to read, as many children have done before it, and in the same way the rarer child who desired to express itself on paper would teach itself to write. that any useful purpose is served by the general possession of this knowledge i cannot see. even civilisation cannot rejoice that her children are able to read the sunday newspapers and scrawl gutter sentiments on the walls of churches.
beyond this we teach children geography, which robs the earth of its charm of unexpectedness and calls beautiful places by ugly names; history, which chronicles inaccurate accounts of unimportant events in the ears of those who would be better employed in p. 237discovering the possibilities of their own age; arithmetic, which encourages the human mind to set limits to the infinite; botany, which denotes the purposeless vivisection of flowers; chemistry, which is no more than an indelicate unveiling of matter; and a hundred other so-called arts and science, which, when examined without prejudice, will be found to have for their purpose the standardisation and ultimate belittlement of life.
in utopia, the average human being would not know how to read or write, would have no knowledge of the past, and would know no more about life and the world in general, than he had derived from his own impressions. the sum of those impressions would be the measure of his wisdom, and i think that the chances are that he would be a good deal less ignorant than he is now, when his head is full of confused ideas borrowed from other men and only half-comprehended. i think that our system of education is bad, because it challenges the right of the individual to think constructively for himself. in rustic families, where the father and p. 238mother have never learnt to read and the children have had the advantages of “scholarship,” the illiterate generation will always be found to have more intelligence than their educated descendants. the children were learning french and arithmetic when they should have been learning life.
and, after all, this is the only kind of education that counts. we all know that a man’s knowledge of latin or the use of the globes does not affect his good-fellowship, or his happiness, or even the welfare of the state as a whole. what is important is, that he should have passed through certain experiences, felt certain emotions, and dreamed certain dreams, that give his personality the stamp of a definite individual existence. tomlinson, the book-made man, with his secondhand virtues and secondhand sins, is of no use to any one. yet while we all realise this, we still continue to have a gentle, unreasoning faith in academic education; we still hold that a man should temper his own impressions with the experience of others.
