The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

This stricture applies to the press generally. How far it sacrifices to these meretricious purposes the serious function of educating the public has been painfully impressed on us by recent experience. Only one or two journals in England surpassed our drowsy politicians in sagacity and foresight. Though an extensive reader of German literature (scientific and historical), it had never been my business to follow political or military utterances; yet, when the war broke out and I looked back on Germany’s enormous output in this department, I realised that there had been in London for a year or two enough German literature to convince any moderate observer that war was fast approaching—and this was only a fragment of an enormously larger literature. Our press had ridiculed the one or two men and journals who warned the public of the danger. Further, when it transpired that our Government had met the crisis with painful slowness and inefficiency, nearly the whole press again conspired to check criticism, and it is probable that when the war is over the press will unite with the Churches in cultivating a foolish and dangerous contentment on the part of the public. Our press is, in fact, very largely an instrument of our corrupt party-system. It never initiates reform, and it mirrors, day by day, all the crimes and follies and maladies of our social order without the least resentment or the faintest suggestion of reconstruction. Journals are constantly appearing with the professed intention of correcting these defects, yet they are almost invariably spoiled by illiberalism in one or more departments of their work, or by gross exaggerations, hysterical language, or impracticable proposals.

All this is a reflection of the generally low state of public culture, and it will not alter until we devote serious care to the education of the general intelligence. We begin at school to cultivate the child’s imagination, though it is the quality of a child’s mind which least requires stimulating and is most in need of subordinating to intelligence. In later years, when the feeble intellectual stimulation we have given is exhausted, we have to appeal to the imagination or go unheard. “I have not read a book since I left school,” a music-hall artist observed to me. At twenty-five he had become incapable of doing more than look at illustrations, as he had done in his childhood. We go on until we make the imagination itself feeble on its constructive side. Miles of generally dauby and grotesque posters line our streets; tons of the trashiest literature for the young are discharged from marble palaces in the neighbourhood of Fleet Street; novels multiply until the general public takes the words author and novelist to be synonymous; and the daily organ of the millions tends more and more to be a collection of pictures of unimportant events and persons, with a very slender and peculiar quantity of news.

If we agree that democracy will advance until the majority rule in reality, and not merely in theory, these things must concern us. It is of little use to point to the occasional periodical with small circulation which endeavours to educate, to the occasional educative column in more important journals, or to the occasional lecture or serious concert or drama. The broad fact remains that our future rulers are increasingly encouraged to refrain from mental cultivation, to mistake an appeal to the imagination for knowledge, and to debase their taste more and more with raw representations of crime and passion. The working man reads with indignation of fashionable ladies struggling to find a place in court when a man is being tried for a series of sordid murders; and the working man then reads, day after day, a three-column verbatim report of the trial, and regrets that there is not more of it.

In order to meet this grave public need an earlier generation invented night-schools and Mechanics’ Institutes. Many of these still do useful work, but their number shrinks rather than increases. The Co-operative Movement, again, set up in the early days a fine ambition to educate its adult members, but this ambition has not been generally sustained in the vast modern movement. Hundreds of lecture-societies were founded, and hundreds (about seven hundred in Great Britain, I believe) exist to-day and do some excellent work; but many of the societies which adhered most faithfully to the educational ideal are in difficulties or extinct. The travel-lecture or funny lecture and the “popular” concert encroach more and more on the serious programme. Free libraries were another hope of the reformers of the last generation, and they are now endowed by millionaires and maintained by municipalities. They exhibit, perhaps, the saddest perversion of social ambition. Neither Mr. Carnegie nor any serious municipality thinks it a duty to provide gratuitous entertainment, but at least two-thirds of their resources are really devoted to this. The enormously greater part of the work of free libraries is to beguile the idle hours of young men and the idle days of young women with novels that rarely contain a particle of intellectual stimulation.

Public museums were another device for educating the mass of the people, and they have largely failed. There has been in recent years a little more regard for the public, as well as for students, but it is still painful to see crowds passing with bovine eyes amidst our accumulated treasures. The grouping and labelling are still too academic: the general scheme and the immense wealth of detail daze the eye of the inexpert. More guides and lecturers, in touch with and informally accessible to the public, and a closer association with University Extension and Gilchrist and other lectures, are very much needed. Saturday afternoon in the British Museum is a melancholy spectacle of wasted wealth. A small model museum, designed solely for the education of the general public, would be more useful in this respect than our magnificent national museum. Unfortunately, the small museums copy the academic defects of the larger. The curator of one, on whom I urged the needs of the public, replied wearily: “Well, it will take me three years to arrange my Cephalopods, and then I will see what I can do.”

We need a comprehensive and serious organisation and development of our resources for educating the adult. Our Education Department needs to throw out a new wing with the purpose of preventing the utter waste of its work upon young children. Institutions like the British Museum ought to be relieved of the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury and one or two other somnolent gentlemen, and made the centre of a splendid and energetic system of popular instruction and stimulation. From such centres the educational officials (as distinct from learned curators and youths from Oxford and Cambridge who look upon the public as a nuisance) might issue attractive invitations and publications, and be prepared to welcome the non-student, either with “showmen” who understand the public mind or by a general and affable accessibility of the whole staff. Municipal museums and libraries and picture-galleries could be organised on similar lines by the Department, and useful private foundations, such as the Bishopsgate Institute, could be invited to co-operate, without interference in their management. The supply of novels ought to be restricted to the great masters of every country and a few moderns. The rich supply of serious literature ought to be made attractive and easily accessible to the public by good bibliographical guidance and constant lectures. These things are, of course, being done. It is not so much the local officials one quarrels with as the nation and its leaders. We want an immense co-ordination and development of our resources and efforts out of national funds. Lecture-societies and all kinds of educative centres and institutes—there are thousands in the country—need to be affiliated, encouraged, advised, and supplemented. The State should not even shrink from publishing. The trade supplies only the actual demand: the State must create a new and larger demand. Music would be an integral part of this scheme of education, and here again we have a large material ready for organisation.

Any man who has engaged in the work of educating and stimulating the general public will realise how urgently some such scheme is needed, and how splendid a service it would render. He will realise also that the task will be formidable. I do not for a moment conceive the general public as thirsting for culture. That is very largely due to the way in which the work has hitherto been done. The recent success of small but authoritative manuals of science and history, and of several cheap series of literary works of high value, shows that a fairly large public responds to every enlightened effort to assist them. It will become very much larger when the work is organised on a national scale and conceived as a really important function of the State. That even then the majority of the nation would rush to the reconstructed libraries and museums and lecture or concert-halls no one will imagine for a moment. We do not undo in a few years the effect of centuries of evil traditions. I am assuming, however, that these various reforms I am discussing will proceed more or less simultaneously, and will enormously assist each other. The abolition of war would release rich funds for educational purposes: the reorganisation of industry would provide a little more leisure and capacity for mental recreation: other reforms would give a general intellectual stimulation. Even now, however, much of this work could be done. If we think it sufficient that our people remain in a condition of elementary literacy and half-developed intelligence, if we fancy that the race will advance because it sets aside a special caste of scholars for the promotion of culture, we may regard our actual situation without concern. But if we desire that general alertness of mind and decision of character which a democratic rule implies, we cannot be indifferent. Aristocrats justly rail at the democracy of Athens and Rome; it was an uneducated democracy—literate, but uneducated, like ours. We need to advance, if we are not to recede; and the uplifted race of the days to come will honour the generation that taught men the compatibility of culture and entertainment.

I am speaking, in the main, of the mass of the workers, but it would be entirely unjust to insinuate that they alone need adult education. The conventions of social life, the extraordinary slavery to fashions and artificial rules, betray an intellectual flabbiness in the wealthier members of society which just as urgently calls for stimulation. We seem at times quite incapable of drawing a line between acts of real courtesy and taste, which imply a certain grace or delicacy of character, and conventional usages which have no rational basis. The insistence on these conventional usages is part of that general slavery to false traditions which I am assailing.

The most flagrant instance of this weakness of mind and character is the docility with which we meet changes of fashion in dress, or retain eccentric forms of clothing. Hardly any other feature so strongly impresses the close observer with the fact that the race, as a whole (and I speak only of civilised communities), advances little in intelligence and self-possession in spite of the progress made by its intellectual experts. One would say that here, especially, we need a strong draught of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche,—the gospel of self-assertion, of strong personality, of severe reasoning,—but I have not observed that our modern Nietzscheans differ much from their neighbours in such matters. Yet the commercial expansion of modern times is making this tyranny of fashion more ludicrous than it ever was before.

The fashion-plates and descriptions contained in ladies’ journals have always provoked the furtive smile of the male. A coterie of tradesmen, who are eager to promote business, and of wealthy ladies who are equally eager to show that their purses are unlimited, decree that the hat or costume shall continually vary in shape and colour. The Anglo-French jargon of the sartorial journalist then impresses on a larger circle of ladies the need of alertness and the horror of being démodée,—it would be proof of incapacity to say “out of fashion,”—and, as the season approaches, the proclamation of the forthcoming colour or model is awaited with more feverish anxiety than the announcement of the national budget. Schools of artists are secretly inventing some variation—the wider the variation the better—on the thousands of costumes which have already graced the feminine frame, or discussing bold suggestions of reviving an ancient model which has long disappeared even from the shops of wardrobe-dealers. Privileged ladies rise in prestige by obtaining and whispering advance information. At length the shop-windows blaze with the new colour, the journals depict an ingenious new combination of edges and folds and puckers, and womanhood plunges to the bottom of its purse with an eagerness to avoid the suspicion of financial stringency; while the discarded hats and dresses percolate romantically through lower strata of society. Is it not good for trade?