All Things Considered
understood by the overwhelming majority of the English nation. There
are no poor men at Oxford in the sense that the majority of men in the
street are poor. The very fact that the writer in the _Outlook_ can
talk about such people as poor shows that he does not understand what
the modern problem is. His kind of poor man rather reminds me of the
Earl in the ballad by that great English satirist, Sir W.S. Gilbert,
whose angles (very acute angles) had, I fear, never been rubbed down by
an old English University. The reader will remember that when the
Periwinkle-girl was adored by two Dukes, the poet added—
“A third adorer had the girl,
A man of lowly station;
A miserable grovelling Earl
Besought her approbation.”
Perhaps, indeed, some allusion to our University system, and to the
universal clash in it of all the classes of the community, may be found
in the verse a little farther on, which says—
“He’d had, it happily befell,
A decent education;
His views would have befitted well
A far superior station.”
Possibly there was as simple a chasm between Lord Curzon and Lord
Milner. But I am afraid that the chasm will become almost
imperceptible, a microscopic crack, if we compare it with the chasm
that separates either or both of them from the people of this country.
Of course the truth is exactly as the Bishop of Birmingham put it. I am
sure that he did not put it in any unkindly or contemptuous spirit
towards those old English seats of learning, which whether they are or
are not seats of learning, are, at any rate, old and English, and those
are two very good things to be. The Old English University is a
playground for the governing class. That does not prove that it is a
bad thing; it might prove that it was a very good thing. Certainly if
there is a governing class, let there be a playground for the governing
class. I would much rather be ruled by men who know how to play than by
men who do not know how to play. Granted that we are to be governed by
a rich section of the community, it is certainly very important that
that section should be kept tolerably genial and jolly. If the
sensitive man on the _Outlook_ does not like the phrase, “Playground of
the rich,” I can suggest a phrase that describes such a place as Oxford
perhaps with more precision. It is a place for humanising those who
might otherwise be tyrants, or even experts.
To pretend that the aristocrat meets all classes at Oxford is too
ludicrous to be worth discussion. But it may be true that he meets more
different kinds of men than he would meet under a strictly aristocratic
_regime_ of private tutors and small schools. It all comes back to the
fact that the English, if they were resolved to have an aristocracy,
were at least resolved to have a good-natured aristocracy. And it is
due to them to say that almost alone among the peoples of the world,
they have succeeded in getting one. One could almost tolerate the
thing, if it were not for the praise of it. One might endure Oxford,
but not the _Outlook_.
When the poor man at Oxford loses his angles (which means, I suppose,
his independence), he may perhaps, even if his poverty is of that
highly relative type possible at Oxford, gain a certain amount of
worldly advantage from the surrender of those angles. I must confess,
however, that I can imagine nothing nastier than to lose one’s angles.
It seems to me that a desire to retain some angles about one’s person
is a desire common to all those human beings who do not set their
ultimate hopes upon looking like Humpty-Dumpty. Our angles are simply
our shapes. I cannot imagine any phrase more full of the subtle and
exquisite vileness which is poisoning and weakening our country than
such a phrase as this, about the desirability of rubbing down the
angularities of poor men. Reduced to permanent and practical human
speech, it means nothing whatever except the corrupting of that first
human sense of justice which is the critic of all human institutions.
It is not in any such spirit of facile and reckless reassurance that we
should approach the really difficult problem of the delicate virtues
and the deep dangers of our two historic seats of learning. A good son
does not easily admit that his sick mother is dying; but neither does a
good son cheerily assert that she is “all right.” There are many good
arguments for leaving the two historic Universities exactly as they
are. There are many good arguments for smashing them or altering them
entirely. But in either case the plain truth told by the Bishop of
Birmingham remains. If these Universities were destroyed, they would
not be destroyed as Universities. If they are preserved, they will not
be preserved as Universities. They will be preserved strictly and
literally as playgrounds; places valued for their hours of leisure more
than for their hours of work. I do not say that this is unreasonable;
as a matter of private temperament I find it attractive. It is not only
possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible
to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be
maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a
task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure
innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so
good that one can treat everything as a joke—that may be, perhaps, the
real end and final holiday of human souls. When we are really holy we
may regard the Universe as a lark; so perhaps it is not essentially
wrong to regard the University as a lark. But the plain and present
fact is that our upper classes do regard the University as a lark, and
do not regard it as a University. It also happens very often that
through some oversight they neglect to provide themselves with that
extreme degree of holiness which I have postulated as a necessary
preliminary to such indulgence in the higher frivolity.
Humanity, always dreaming of a happy race, free, fantastic, and at
ease, has sometimes pictured them in some mystical island, sometimes in
some celestial city, sometimes as fairies, gods, or citizens of
Atlantis. But one method in which it has often indulged is to picture
them as aristocrats, as a special human class that could actually be
seen hunting in the woods or driving about the streets. And this never
was (as some silly Germans say) a worship of pride and scorn; mankind
never really admired pride; mankind never had any thing but a scorn for
scorn. It was a worship of the spectacle of happiness; especially of
the spectacle of youth. This is what the old Universities in their
noblest aspect really are; and this is why there is always something to
be said for keeping them as they are. Aristocracy is not a tyranny; it
is not even merely a spell. It is a vision. It is a deliberate
indulgence in a certain picture of pleasure painted for the purpose;
every Duchess is (in an innocent sense) painted, like Gainsborough’s
“Duchess of Devonshire.” She is only beautiful because, at the back of
all, the English people wanted her to be beautiful. In the same way,
the lads at Oxford and Cambridge are only larking because England, in
the depths of its solemn soul, really wishes them to lark. All this is
very human and pardonable, and would be even harmless if there were no
such things in the world as danger and honour and intellectual
responsibility. But if aristocracy is a vision, it is perhaps the most
unpractical of all visions. It is not a working way of doing things to
put all your happiest people on a lighted platform and stare only at
them. It is not a working way of managing education to be entirely
content with the mere fact that you have (to a degree unexampled in the
world) given the luckiest boys the jolliest time. It would be easy
enough, like the writer in the _Outlook_, to enjoy the pleasures and
deny the perils. Oh what a happy place England would be to live in if
only one did not love it!
WOMAN
A correspondent has written me an able and interesting letter in the
matter of some allusions of mine to the subject of communal kitchens.
He defends communal kitchens very lucidly from the standpoint of the
calculating collectivist; but, like many of his school, he cannot
apparently grasp that there is another test of the whole matter, with
which such calculation has nothing at all to do. He knows it would be
cheaper if a number of us ate at the same time, so as to use the same
table. So it would. It would also be cheaper if a number of us slept at
different times, so as to use the same pair of trousers. But the
question is not how cheap are we buying a thing, but what are we
buying? It is cheap to own a slave. And it is cheaper still to be a
slave.
My correspondent also says that the habit of dining out in restaurants,
etc., is growing. So, I believe, is the habit of committing suicide. I
do not desire to connect the two facts together. It seems fairly clear
that a man could not dine at a restaurant because he had just committed
suicide; and it would be extreme, perhaps, to suggest that he commits
suicide because he has just dined at a restaurant. But the two cases,
when put side by side, are enough to indicate the falsity and
poltroonery of this eternal modern argument from what is in fashion.
The question for brave men is not whether a certain thing is
increasing; the question is whether we are increasing it. I dine very
often in restaurants because the nature of my trade makes it
convenient: but if I thought that by dining in restaurants I was
working for the creation of communal meals, I would never enter a
restaurant again; I would carry bread and cheese in my pocket or eat
chocolate out of automatic machines. For the personal element in some
things is sacred. I heard Mr. Will Crooks put it perfectly the other
day: “The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.”
My correspondent says, “Would not our women be spared the drudgery of
cooking and all its attendant worries, leaving them free for higher
culture?” The first thing that occurs to me to say about this is very
simple, and is, I imagine, a part of all our experience. If my
correspondent can find any way of preventing women from worrying, he
will indeed be a remarkable man. I think the matter is a much deeper
one. First of all, my correspondent overlooks a distinction which is
elementary in our human nature. Theoretically, I suppose, every one
would like to be freed from worries. But nobody in the world would
always like to be freed from worrying occupations. I should very much
like (as far as my feelings at the moment go) to be free from the
consuming nuisance of writing this article. But it does not follow that
I should like to be free from the consuming nuisance of being a
journalist. Because we are worried about a thing, it does not follow
that we are not interested in it. The truth is the other way. If we are
not interested, why on earth should we be worried? Women are worried
about housekeeping, but those that are most interested are the most
worried. Women are still more worried about their husbands and their
children. And I suppose if we strangled the children and poleaxed the
husbands it would leave women free for higher culture. That is, it
would leave them free to begin to worry about that. For women would
worry about higher culture as much as they worry about everything else.
I believe this way of talking about women and their higher culture is
almost entirely a growth of the classes which (unlike the journalistic
class to which I belong) have always a reasonable amount of money. One
odd thing I specially notice. Those who write like this seem entirely
to forget the existence of the working and wage-earning classes. They