All Things Considered
are human and imaginable as practical jokes. In fact, almost any act of
ragging or violence can be forgiven on this strict condition—that it is
of no use at all to anybody. If the aggressor gets anything out of it,
then it is quite unpardonable. It is damned by the least hint of
utility or profit. A man of spirit and breeding may brawl, but he does
not steal. A gentleman knocks off his friend’s hat; but he does not
annex his friend’s hat. For this reason (as Mr. Belloc has pointed out
somewhere), the very militant French people have always returned after
their immense raids—the raids of Godfrey the Crusader, the raids of
Napoleon; “they are sucked back, having accomplished nothing but an
epic.”
Sometimes I see small fragments of information in the newspapers which
make my heart leap with an irrational patriotic sympathy. I have had
the misfortune to be left comparatively cold by many of the enterprises
and proclamations of my country in recent times. But the other day I
found in the _Tribune_ the following paragraph, which I may be
permitted to set down as an example of the kind of international
outrage with which I have by far the most instinctive sympathy. There
is something attractive, too, in the austere simplicity with which the
affair is set forth—
“Geneva, Oct. 31.
“The English schoolboy Allen, who was arrested at Lausanne railway
station on Saturday, for having painted red the statue of General
Jomini of Payerne, was liberated yesterday, after paying a fine of £24.
Allen has proceeded to Germany, where he will continue his studies. The
people of Payerne are indignant, and clamoured for his detention in
prison.”
Now I have no doubt that ethics and social necessity require a contrary
attitude, but I will freely confess that my first emotions on reading
of this exploit were those of profound and elemental pleasure. There is
something so large and simple about the operation of painting a whole
stone General a bright red. Of course I can understand that the people
of Payerne were indignant. They had passed to their homes at twilight
through the streets of that beautiful city (or is it a province?), and
they had seen against the silver ending of the sunset the grand grey
figure of the hero of that land remaining to guard the town under the
stars. It certainly must have been a shock to come out in the broad
white morning and find a large vermilion General staring under the
staring sun. I do not blame them at all for clamouring for the
schoolboy’s detention in prison; I dare say a little detention in
prison would do him no harm. Still, I think the immense act has
something about it human and excusable; and when I endeavour to analyse
the reason of this feeling I find it to lie, not in the fact that the
thing was big or bold or successful, but in the fact that the thing was
perfectly useless to everybody, including the person who did it. The
raid ends in itself; and so Master Allen is sucked back again, having
accomplished nothing but an epic.
There is one thing which, in the presence of average modern journalism,
is perhaps worth saying in connection with such an idle matter as this.
The morals of a matter like this are exactly like the morals of
anything else; they are concerned with mutual contract, or with the
rights of independent human lives. But the whole modern world, or at
any rate the whole modern Press, has a perpetual and consuming terror
of plain morals. Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon
merely moral grounds. If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in
the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people
will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact
that it is wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of
a deficiency of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You
could not tell whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew
my grandmother. Some will call it vulgar, disgusting, and the rest of
it; that is, they will accuse it of a lack of manners. Perhaps it does
show a lack of manners; but this is scarcely its most serious
disadvantage. Others will talk about the loathsome spectacle and the
revolting scene; that is, they will accuse it of a deficiency of art,
or æsthetic beauty. This again depends on the circumstances: in order
to be quite certain that the appearance of the old lady has definitely
deteriorated under the process of being beaten to death, it is
necessary for the philosophical critic to be quite certain how ugly she
was before. Another school of thinkers will say that the action is
lacking in efficiency: that it is an uneconomic waste of a good
grandmother. But that could only depend on the value, which is again an
individual matter. The only real point that is worth mentioning is that
the action is wicked, because your grandmother has a right not to be
beaten to death. But of this simple moral explanation modern journalism
has, as I say, a standing fear. It will call the action anything
else—mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful.
One example can be found in such cases as that of the prank of the boy
and the statue. When some trick of this sort is played, the newspapers
opposed to it always describe it as “a senseless joke.” What is the
good of saying that? Every joke is a senseless joke. A joke is by its
nature a protest against sense. It is no good attacking nonsense for
being successfully nonsensical. Of course it is nonsensical to paint a
celebrated Italian General a bright red; it is as nonsensical as “Alice
in Wonderland.” It is also, in my opinion, very nearly as funny. But
the real answer to the affair is not to say that it is nonsensical or
even to say that it is not funny, but to point out that it is wrong to
spoil statues which belong to other people. If the modern world will
not insist on having some sharp and definite moral law, capable of
resisting the counter-attractions of art and humour, the modern world
will simply be given over as a spoil to anybody who can manage to do a
nasty thing in a nice way. Every murderer who can murder entertainingly
will be allowed to murder. Every burglar who burgles in really humorous
attitudes will burgle as much as he likes.
There is another case of the thing that I mean. Why on earth do the
newspapers, in describing a dynamite outrage or any other political
assassination, call it a “dastardly outrage” or a cowardly outrage? It
is perfectly evident that it is not dastardly in the least. It is
perfectly evident that it is about as cowardly as the Christians going
to the lions. The man who does it exposes himself to the chance of
being torn in pieces by two thousand people. What the thing is, is not
cowardly, but profoundly and detestably wicked. The man who does it is
very infamous and very brave. But, again, the explanation is that our
modern Press would rather appeal to physical arrogance, or to anything,
rather than appeal to right and wrong.
In most of the matters of modern England, the real difficulty is that
there is a negative revolution without a positive revolution. Positive
aristocracy is breaking up without any particular appearance of
positive democracy taking its place. The polished class is becoming
less polished without becoming less of a class; the nobleman who
becomes a guinea-pig keeps all his privileges but loses some of his
tradition; he becomes less of a gentleman without becoming less of a
nobleman. In the same way (until some recent and happy revivals) it
seemed highly probable that the Church of England would cease to be a
religion long before it had ceased to be a Church. And in the same way,
the vulgarisation of the old, simple middle class does not even have
the advantage of doing away with class distinctions; the vulgar man is
always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished
is vulgar.
At the same time, it must be remembered that when a class has a
morality it does not follow that it is an adequate morality. The
middle-class ethic was inadequate for some purposes; so is the
public-school ethic, the ethic of the upper classes. On this last
matter of the public schools Dr. Spenser, the Head Master of University
College School, has lately made some valuable observations. But even
he, I think, overstates the claim of the public schools. “The strong
point of the English public schools,” he says, “has always lain in
their efficiency as agencies for the formation of character and for the
inculcation of the great notion of obligation which distinguishes a
gentleman. On the physical and moral sides the public-school men of
England are, I believe, unequalled.” And he goes on to say that it is
on the mental side that they are defective. But, as a matter of fact,
the public-school training is in the strict sense defective upon the
moral side also; it leaves out about half of morality. Its just claim
is that, like the old middle class (and the Zulus), it trains some
virtues and therefore suits some people for some situations. Put an old
English merchant to serve in an army and he would have been irritated
and clumsy. Put the men from English public schools to rule Ireland,
and they make the greatest hash in human history.
Touching the morality of the public schools, I will take one point
only, which is enough to prove the case. People have got into their
heads an extraordinary idea that English public-school boys and English
youth generally are taught to tell the truth. They are taught
absolutely nothing of the kind. At no English public school is it even
suggested, except by accident, that it is a man’s duty to tell the
truth. What is suggested is something entirely different: that it is a
man’s duty not to tell lies. So completely does this mistake soak
through all civilisation that we hardly ever think even of the
difference between the two things. When we say to a child, “You must
tell the truth,” we do merely mean that he must refrain from verbal
inaccuracies. But the thing we never teach at all is the general duty
of telling the truth, of giving a complete and fair picture of anything
we are talking about, of not misrepresenting, not evading, not
suppressing, not using plausible arguments that we know to be unfair,
not selecting unscrupulously to prove an _ex parte_ case, not telling
all the nice stories about the Scotch, and all the nasty stories about
the Irish, not pretending to be disinterested when you are really
angry, not pretending to be angry when you are really only avaricious.
The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of
public schools is exactly that—that there is a whole truth of things,
and that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy.
If any one has the smallest doubt of this neglect of truth in public
schools he can kill his doubt with one plain question. Can any one on
earth believe that if the seeing and telling of the whole truth were
really one of the ideals of the English governing class, there could
conceivably exist such a thing as the English party system? Why, the
English party system is founded upon the principle that telling the
whole truth does not matter. It is founded upon the principle that half
a truth is better than no politics. Our system deliberately turns a
crowd of men who might be impartial into irrational partisans. It
teaches some of them to tell lies and all of them to believe lies. It
gives every man an arbitrary brief that he has to work up as best he
may and defend as best he can. It turns a room full of citizens into a
room full of barristers. I know that it has many charms and virtues,
fighting and good-fellowship; it has all the charms and virtues of a
game. I only say that it would be a stark impossibility in a nation
which believed in telling the truth.