"But surely," said the parson here to me the other night, while we were discussing this, "no two cultivated men of the world would be at daggers drawn simply over a ridiculous umbrella."
"That's just the hideousness of it all," I replied. "Men do behave in that incomprehensible way at schools. They are like naughty children: you'd never believe that they are graduates, picked men, both intellectually and physically. You'd never believe how spiteful and inhuman men can be to one another until you've lived with them in a school. I suppose we see too much of one another. I cannot believe that all schools are like Radchester, but certainly Hugh Walpole must have suffered at one not unlike it."
I have had a great many talks about education with the parson while I have been here: he is very keen on raising the age-limit to sixteen in elementary schools. At present he says that the education they get is of no use to them. There are heaps of boys and girls of eighteen and nineteen in Chagford who can neither read nor write, although they were taught to do both when they were children: as soon as they go on to the farms they find that these accomplishments are not marketable, and so they forget them in an incredibly short space of time. Apparently, too, the standard of morality in village life is deplorably low. When the youths attend church it is, only too frequently, so that they may ogle the girls: the church makes a good rendezvous. Neither drunkenness nor immorality have decreased with the spread of education, nor are the people any more thrifty or ambitious.
The farmers are as ignorant as they were before the Corn Laws were repealed. Altogether he draws a lurid, hopeless picture of the country yokel.
There must be at bottom a wonderfully fine instinct at the heart of every Englishman for, however bad the system of education may be, and that it is bad from the highest to lowest I am becoming surer every day, he still makes a good thing of life.
The Public School product is a fine specimen of a man: he is strictly honest in all his dealings, he will never turn his back on a "pal," he is capable of handling men with sympathy, he can adapt himself at short shrift to almost any circumstance: if only he could be prevailed upon not to despise learning and beauty no other type of man could touch him.
I have lately been trying to understand more of foreign countries through their fiction, particularly Russia. Years ago I read and loved Tolstoi's "Resurrection"; last week I tried to get through "Anna Karenin" and failed. I can't explain quite why, unless it is that Dostoievsky has supplanted him in my estimation. I never read any one in the least like Dostoievsky. I think "The Brothers Karamazov" is the greatest novel I ever read. No man rises from it with exactly the same outlook on life which he had when he sat down to it. Dostoievsky seemed in that book to be on the point of discovering all that hurt and puzzled us about the world: every now and then we seem to get a glimpse millions of years ahead into a timeless, limitless space where truth and beauty at last prevail, and misery and suffering are no more. Everything that he writes seems to turn on this word "suffering." Light, not salvation, comes to man through his capacity to suffer. The characters in "The Brothers Karamazov" are not human beings at all: they are disembodied spirits with an amazing power of self-analysis: this gloomy introspectiveness is the chief feature of all Russian writing. They seem to know so much more than we do about the actions of the human heart: their sympathy with humanity is deeper than ours: we are too apt to dismiss from our thoughts what we do not immediately understand—the more complex a man's character the more we shun him, but the Russian seeks to disintegrate it and account for his contradictory traits: how Iago must appeal to the Russian mind. They appear to be a nation of Hamlets. Those that are not are Lucifers.
I am not pleased with the German mind. There is, in their plays at any rate, an awful playing with fire. Nietzsche paralyses me—this will to power would be frightful if it were ever given full play. The present effect of their refined system of education seems to drive the flower of their youth to suicide. English stupidity is better than German kultur if that is what love of learning leads to. There must be some middle way.
It is a relief to turn to American fiction. All the world seems to be passing through a stage of transition much as it did in the days of the Romantic Revival.
Then all Europe was bothered about the Brotherhood of Man and the Return to Nature; nowadays we are casting off all the conventions of our fathers and pressing towards the rights of the individual to be a law unto himself.