The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

Therefore, it seems to many that a scheme of education which ceases to operate at the age of fourteen, which teaches children to read and has no further concern with what they read, which impresses on their cortex a mass of facts of no utility or stimulation, is not a fulfilment of a nation’s duty, or a proper consideration of a nation’s interest. The grander lessons of history, the more impressive truths of science, the vital features of economics and sociology, the ennobling characters of fine art, cannot be even faintly impressed on the young mind. Yet they can be impressed on the minds of nearly all adults, and it would be an incalculable gain to the race if they were. What is being done, and what might be done, to effect this?

The nation at present leaves it to commercial interest and to philanthropy to carry out, in some measure, this important function, and we may at once eliminate the commercial interest. It supplies, at a proper profit, what is demanded. A minority ask for cheap works of science and art and history, and several admirable series of manuals and serial publications are supplied. A majority, an overwhelming majority, asks only to be entertained, and there is a mighty flood of novels and amusing works, a rich crop of music-halls and bioscope-shows and theatres and skating rinks. It will readily be understood that, regarding happiness as the ultimate ideal, I regard entertainment as a proper part of life. The comedian and the story-teller and the professional football-player are rendering good service, and it is intellectual snobbery to murmur that they “merely entertain” people. A good deal of nonsense is written about sport and entertainment. Many of us can, with pleasant ease, suspend a severely intellectual task for a few hours to witness a first-class football match. One wonders if some of the ascetics who speak about “mudded oafs” and “the football craze” are aware that the game (except for professional players) occupies merely an hour and a half a week (or alternate week) for little more than half a year.

The mischief is that so much of our entertainment appeals to and fosters a state of mind or taste which does exclude culture. We have to-day an army of puritan scouts, watching our music-halls and cinematograph films, our picture-cards and novels, our open spaces by night and our bathing-beaches by day, calculating minutely what amount of dress or undress or sexual allusion they may permit. Certainly we need coercion in these matters. No one who moves amongst our average people, in any rank of society, can fail to recognise that there would be in time a volcanic outpour of sexuality if we did not impose restriction. Whether this chaste pruriency of the modern Churches is an admirable thing, and whether its hirelings are a desirable supplement to the police-force, need not be discussed here; but what amuses one is their intense zeal to detect the narrowest fringe of impropriety and their utter obtuseness to graver matters. I have sometimes, when waiting before a lecture in the dressing-room of a variety theatre, been confronted with a notice that “the curtain will be rung down on any artist who says ‘Damn’ or mentions the lodger,” or, more candidly (in the Colonies): “Don’t swear. We don’t care a damn, but the public does.” The general public would, if it were consulted, probably make the same reply as the framers of the notice, and would blame the police for the restriction of liberty. There is, in a word, an appalling poverty of taste in the general public, and it pays the purveyor of entertainment to adapt his wares to it as far as the police will permit. To this lamentable lack of taste and culture (in the broad sense) officials and moralists are entirely indifferent as long as the comédienne does not refer to the seventh commandment. The public may be as ignorant and vulgar as they like, but they must not give expression to a natural effect of this.

The music-hall and the bioscope are the great academies of our people to-day, and their work is largely stupefying. Sentimental songs of the most vapid description alternate with patriotic songs of a medieval crudeness and humorous songs which might have appealed to a prehistoric intelligence. Bloodthirsty melodramas, sensational scenes, and infinite variations of “The girl who did what we are forbidden to talk about,” evoke and inflame elementary emotions at the lowest grade of culture. Clergymen give certificates of high moral efficacy to crude representations of passion in high life which are designed to appeal to raw feelings. The posters alone—the eccentric costumes and daubed faces and attempts at novelty in the way of leering—warn away people of moderate taste or intelligence. The bioscope is almost as bad. Apart from a few excellent travel and scenic and scientific pictures, the show is a mass of crude faking and boorish horse-play which presupposes an elementary intelligence in the spectators. Pictorial post-cards add to the monstrosities and puerilities of this kind of public education, and a large proportion of the stories published, especially in the periodicals which are read by girls and boys and uneducated women, fall in the same category. We may trust that the idea will not occur to anyone of making a collection of our picture-cards, films, music-hall posters, novelties, etc., for preservation as typical amusements of the twentieth century.

It is stupid to watch this lamentable exposure of our low average of culture week by week with complete indifference until more underclothing is displayed than we think proper. The bioscope and music-hall—I speak of the majority—are not merely entertaining; they are undoing the work of the educator. They are fostering the raw and primitive emotions which it is the task of education to refine and bring under control, debasing public taste, and appealing to a standard which is essentially unintellectual. The idea that fun may be utterly stupid and crude, provided it is “clean,” is the idea of a narrow-minded fanatic, an enemy of society.

When we pass to the next cultural level of entertainment—the better music-hall, the metropolitan type of theatre, the concert, the novel, etc.—we have a vast provision of entertainment which amuses or interests without cultural prejudice; rising at times to a positive measure of artistic education or intellectual stimulation. Two things only need be noticed here. The first is the stupidity of the kind of censorship which we tolerate; of which little need be said, since it is generally recognised. The amateur moral censorship of art reaches the culmination of its absurdity in our dramatic inquisition. The dramatist may deal with sex-passion as pruriently and provokingly as he likes, provided he leaves enough to the spectator’s facile imagination; but he must not attempt to raise love as an intellectual issue. Our people may feel love: they must not think about it as a serious problem.

The other, and more needed observation, regards the novel. There are novels of fine artistic value, like those of Phillpotts: novels of great intellectual use, like those of Wells: and novels of a general and more subtle educational value, like those of Meredith. There are novels which, like the melodrama, counteract education by their low standard of art and intelligence, and there are novels—the great majority—which entertain without prejudice. Since we have as much right to be entertained as to be instructed, novel-reading is a normal part of a normal life. Seeing, however, that a very large proportion of the community read nothing but novels, it has been felt that the novel might be used as a vehicle of instruction, and the didactic or historical novel has become an institution. Many believe that they are being educated when they read this literature.

Against this comforting assumption it is necessary to protest. Even the greatest historical novelists, Dumas and Scott, have taken remarkable liberties with the known facts, and added to the picture of the time a mass of imaginative detail. Many historical novels, like Quo Vadis or Kingsley’s Hypatia, misrepresent personalities or periods for controversial purposes; and the bulk of modern historical novels are worthless jumbles of fact and imagination. It is, as a rule, the same with the sociological novel. You must know the facts in advance—you must know where the facts end and the fiction begins—or else merely regard the book as a form of entertainment. Lately I read a serious historical work, by a distinguished writer, in which Hypatia (who was fifty or sixty years old when she was murdered) is described as a “girl-philosopher”; clearly because Kingsley, for controversial purposes, thought fit in his novel to make her a young and rather foolish maiden. Thousands of people take their convictions from “novels with a purpose,” especially religious or sociological novels, without reflecting that the author may legitimately give them either fact or fiction. Such novels are often profoundly mischievous. A conscientious didactic novelist like Mr. Wells aims rather at raising issues and stimulating reflection, and in this Mr. Wells has done splendid service. Others have done equal disservice, and have used artificially constructed characters for the purpose of raising prejudice against certain ideas, or have misled by a calculated mixture of fact and fiction. It was in recommending to the public one of these novels—an exceptionally silly and crude piece of work—that the Bishop of London described Christianity as “woman’s best friend.”

Religious literature is particularly offensive in this respect, but I will give special consideration to it later. Our press-criticism of books is a very imperfect system of checking the vagaries and prejudices of authors. The criticisms are very frequently marked by ignorance of the subject and by personal or doctrinal hostility to the author, while the more learned and conscientious journals often show the most ludicrous pedantry. I once published a novel, pseudonymously, and was amused to read in a London weekly, which takes great pride in the smartness of its reviews, that the author had neither an elementary knowledge of the art of writing nor an elementary acquaintance with the subject on which he wrote. I had already at that time written about twenty volumes, and I had had twelve years’ intimate experience of the monastic life with which the book was concerned. Mr. Clement Shorter, not knowing the author, had generously described the book as “a brilliant novel.” On another occasion an historical work of mine was gravely censured, though no specific errors were noted in it, by our leading literary organ, on the ground that I was not an expert on the period. I looked up the same journal’s critique of a work written on the same historical period by an academic authority, and published by his university, and I found that, though there were dozens of errors in the work, it had passed the censor with full honours. I add with pleasure that some of the most generous notices of my works have appeared in papers (such as The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator) to which my ideas must be repugnant. But most literary men agree with me that reviewing is, to a large extent, prejudiced and incompetent, and few of us would cross a room to read ordinary press-notices of our books.

One might extend this criticism to the general work of the press as the great popular educator. We must, however, reflect that the press is hampered by restrictions which the public ought to bear in mind: a journal is always a commercial transaction with a particular section of the public, and it is generally pledged to political partisanship. It is only just to remark that this materially restricts the educational ambition of many journalists. The public themselves are to blame that a large section of our press devotes so much space to sensational murders, adulteries, burglaries, royal births and marriages, wars and other crimes and follies. Sunday journals often contain twenty columns of this rubbish, and the worst parts of it are, with the most disgusting hypocrisy, thrust into prominence by especially large head-lines announcing “A Painful Case.” One imagines the working man spending five or six hours of the Sabbath reading this sort of stuff. Great and grave things, which he ought to know, are happening all over the world, but he must have sharp eyes if he is to catch the obscure little paragraphs which—if there is any reference at all—tell him how many have been put to death in Russia in the last quarter, or how the republican experiment fares in Portugal, or how democracy advances in Australia or the United States. The space is needed for pictures of burned mansions and notorious murderers and the commonplace relatives of politicians, for verbatim reports of divorce and criminal cases, for inquests and royal processions, and for the magnificent speeches of Cabinet Ministers and would-be Cabinet Ministers.