Schools and governesses are better now, but some of the old confusions still hover round the education of a girl. Nowadays everybody airs his views about the public schools in print, but there is a certain element of simplicity in a boy’s education: in most cases, after all, he has got to be prepared for a definite profession. There is no definite profession for which little Alice is to be prepared, unless she takes the reins into her own hands in time, as some of our older Alices are learning to do. There is still the impression abroad, even among the wage-earning classes, that, until it is more or less discernible whether and what she is going to marry, it does not matter very much what she learns or what she does, provided that she keeps out of mischief. In those families, especially, where in the last resort it is not necessary for the daughters to earn their living in the labour market, this policy of drift is most obvious. A little French, a little music, a little history, a little recitation of approved poets—that is the recipe for the education of a “nice, refined girl.” As if any girl worth her salt would be content with a diet of spoon feeding. It is only those who have never learnt anything that imagine any useful learning to be possible without the desire to know more than it was good for you to be taught. The child’s mind is a bursting reservoir of energy, and it is hard that it should be wasted by being drained to make imitation waterfalls in an artificial garden. It usually shows a tendency to flow in some definite direction: why, in Heaven’s name, should it be diverted?
The two great needs in education are enthusiasm and personality, enthusiasm in the pupil and personality in the teacher. Personality is the great wizard who can produce water from stones and gold mines from sand. It would be better to learn skittles from a great man than all the graces in the world from a mere practitioner of knowledge. No system is bad enough to withstand the electric influence of personality, and none is so good that it will succeed if there is no personality to give it life. We have strong characters in England: it is a matter in which we flatter ourselves that we are not behind the rest of the world: yet so often our schoolmasters and schoolmistresses seem to be inanimate beings, mere machines for hearing lessons, setting papers and giving marks. Those to whom learning has been a perfunctory business bear the signs of it all their lives. There are too many of them, and the majority of them are women. They are the people who care to know nothing for its own sake; they regard the suggestion that one could read any book but a light novel as humorous; there is no subject that they can discuss intelligently or with any sign of original reflection. Where they so far rouse themselves as to express views, the views will be nothing but the expression of their appetites, desires and prejudices given by the particular penny paper which they read. They have no interests outside housekeeping, and they don’t take the trouble to do even that scientifically. One sees them in shoals in teashops and on beaches, with their cheap novel in their hand and a vaguely discontented look upon their faces. Their discontent is not surprising, for how can anyone be contented who has never taken a lively interest in anything but food and clothing? If little Alice’s mother lets her become as one of these she is cruelly betraying a sacred trust: she is doing her best to turn the living thing to which she gave birth into a dead one. If she has not the personality herself to turn Alice’s enthusiasms, about which there will be no doubt at all, to good account, then let her have the sense to look for somebody who has.
Little Alice before long will probably make clear what she wants to learn: if so, she may as well learn it. Nobody has yet formulated the end of education with final completeness: it is largely a matter of acquiring good habits and an internal harmony which ensure smooth and profitable running when the engine is competent to run by itself. It certainly does not matter much what is learnt, provided that it is learned thoroughly and with eagerness. Some people insist that mastery of tools is the ideal of education: but what are little Alice’s tools? They are partly physical, partly emotional and partly intellectual: her great charm, in contrast to her sisters in Latin countries and in America, is that she is not encouraged to learn the use of her physical attractions and feminine emotions too early. Mastery of tools and mastery of self are formulas better applicable to the maturer education of the young man. The tools of a woman are hardly suitable in the hands of a little girl, whose older self is still to be. If I were to invent a formula for little Alice it would be something like “happiness, eagerness and enthusiasm.” If she has these while she is young, misery, apathy and boredom are not likely to be hers when she is older.
Barbara has finished her song, and has settled down to give the Teddy Bear a teaparty. There she sits, the acutest judge and observer of her father in all the world. She is gathering memories which will never leave her, as I gathered them from my father—the smell of his shaving soap in the morning, the scratch of his rougher cheek in the good-night kiss, the feel of his clothes, the tones of his voice in pleasure and in anger, his difficult standard of good manners, his awful moments of irritation when he was almost too dreadful to look on and his voice was like the rumbling of an earthquake, his little mysterious jokes with my mother at which I laughed without in the least knowing why, the way in which he could be humoured, the hush that was expected when he was said to be tired or busy, his real but diffident sympathy in tragedies, the jolly way he took sovereigns out of his waistcoat pocket, his one glorious outburst when bicycling against the driver of an obstructive dray, the radiance shed by his approval and the gloom of his, as I now suspect, often legendary displeasure, his never failing urbanity, of a consistency almost comic, amid the extemporary and the haphazard. A sensitive plate is now taking in my own foibles and mannerisms. When in after years that plate is fully developed and the results are contemplated with amused commiseration, I shall be content if there is no injured comment on the chance given to the owner and developer of that plate of becoming what she ought to be, an Englishwoman of the best kind.
[CHAPTER III]
BIG GIRLS
When I was about nine years old my cousins took me to an entertainment at the girls’ school which all but one of them had lately left. Never shall I forget the awkward fear with which I faced a room full of mature and stately beings for whose benefit the conjurer had been summoned. I wondered how he would dare to conjure lightly before an assembly of so many incarnations of Minerva. There was Olympian superiority upon their brows and their flowing locks were surely ambrosial. The one relief was that to them, apparently, I did not exist, though some younger sprites in shorter skirts giggled embarrassingly when I tripped over a chair. Their accomplishments, too, were miraculous; they played such runs upon the piano and the violin, they recited with such aplomb “The Jackdaw of Rheims,” they even did a German play of which, as I was told many years later by my cousin, none of them understood a word. The goddesses graciously unbent when the conjurer was pleased to be facetious and miraculous after the manner of his kind. He delighted me too, that conjurer, but he was the cause, none the less, of my greater humiliation. He needed an accomplice, or shall we say a butt, upon the stage, and, basely taking advantage of my solitary masculinity, he called me out. The Minervas could no longer ignore my miserable existence. There I was exposed to their censorious gaze, a thing in breeches, a most obvious compound of “toads and snails and puppy dogs’ tails,” placed in one of the less dignified positions of this world with no fellow to support me. I held things for the conjurer and they disappeared, I tied knots which were as water, money issued from my nose and perspiration from my forehead. I had to assure the goddesses that I saw no deception, as if all the assurance to be found in that room was not on their side rather than on mine: I even had to pronounce the ridiculous word “Abracadabra” at the critical moment of a more than usually mystifying illusion. Finally I had to hold a glass of water covered with a silk handkerchief. To my inconsolable despair I dropped the glass, which broke with a hideous crash upon the stage. Blushing scarlet and covered with confusion I was invited to make way for “one of the young ladies who no doubt had a steadier hand than a dissipated young man.” I slunk away into obscurity, hating all conjurers and fearing all big girls more than ever.
“Maud is not yet seventeen
But she is tall and stately”
No lines by an English poet have better crystallised the impression of English womanhood at the moment of its emergence from the chrysalis. The impression, of course, is enormously heightened when it is conveyed in the mass, as in a ceremony at a girls’ school or the sight of the same school progressing formally to church en crocodile. A boy, in the glory of his physical strength and agility, may find it easy to forget the stateliness of one or two, as I did that of my cousins, but no boy exists who would not quail before a combined manifestation.