A system of education somewhat similar to that developed at Antioch is used in the schools attached to factories in Soviet Russia. All such systems are but the modern extensions and systematizations of the traditional Hebrew system of education. ‘He who does not teach his son a trade,’ so it is written in the Talmud, ‘virtually teaches him to steal.’ St. Paul was not only a scholar; he was also a tent-maker. The ideal of the scholar and the gentleman originated among the slave-owning philosophers of Athens and Ionia. It is one of the ironies of history that the modern world should have taken over from the Hebrews all that was worst in their cultural heritage—their ferocious Bronze-Age literature; their paeans in praise of war; their tales of divinely inspired slaughter and sanctified treachery; their primitive belief in a personal, despotic and passionately unscrupulous God; their low, Samuel-Smilesian notion that virtue deserves a reward in cash and social position. It is, I repeat, one of the ironies of history that we should have taken over all this and have rejected the admirably sensible rabbinical tradition of an all-round education, at once academic and technical, in favour of the narrow and immoral ideal of the Hellenic slavers.
To perfect the Antioch system, it would probably be necessary to extend its provisions from the student to the teaching body. The fossil professor is a familiar object to those who have rambled through university towns. The onset of petrifaction might be delayed if teachers were given periodically, not merely sabbatical, but also non-sabbatical years—years during which they would have to work at some job entirely unconnected with the academic world.
A good deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the education of the emotions through the arts. In many schools and colleges, music, ‘dramatics,’ poetry and the visual arts are used more or less systematically as a device for widening consciousness and imparting to the flow of emotion a desirable direction.
Music, for example, may be used to teach a number of valuable lessons. When they listen to a piece of good music, people of limited ability are given the opportunity of actually experiencing the thought- and feeling-processes of a man of outstanding intellectual power and exceptional insight. (This applies, of course, to all the arts; but there is reason to believe that more people are able to participate, and participate more intensely, in the experience of the music-maker than in that of the painter, say, or the architect, or perhaps even the imaginative writer.) The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
Music also serves to teach a very valuable kind of emotional co-operation. Singing and playing instruments together, people learn, not only to perform complicated actions requiring great muscular skill and the mind’s entire attention, but also to feel in harmony, to be united in a shared emotion.
Coming next to literature, we see that the acting of plays can also be used for the purpose of emotional training. By playing the part of a character who is either very like or very unlike himself, a person can be made aware of his own nature and of his relations with others. To some extent, it may be, the watching of plays can serve the same purpose. We must, however, be on our guard against attributing to drama educative virtues which, at any rate in its present form, it certainly does not possess. In relation to the modern play or film, it is sheer nonsense to talk about the Aristotelian catharsis. A Greek tragedy was much more than a play; it was also a cathedral service, it was also one of the ceremonies of the national religion. The performance was an illustration of the scriptures, an exposition of theology. Modern dramas, even the best of them, are none of these things. They are, essentially, secular. People go to them, not in order to be reminded of their philosophy of life, not to establish some kind of communion with their gods, but merely to ‘get a kick,’ merely to titillate their feelings. The habit of self-titillation grows with what it feeds upon. For the Greeks, dramatic festivals were ‘solemn and rare.’ For us they are an almost daily stimulant. Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.
All arts can be used as a form of self-abuse; but masturbation through the drama is probably the worst form of artistic debauchery, and for this reason: acting is one of the most dangerous of trades. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process. (In the Oneida community it was found that ‘prima donna fever,’ as John Noyes called it, could produce disruptive effects of extraordinary magnitude. Noyes, who was a psychologist of genius and the shrewdest of practical moralists, took the greatest pains to prevent a recrudescence of this disease, which has been the ruin of so many actors and virtuosi.[14]) Acting inflames the ego in a way which few other professions do. For the sake of enjoying regular emotional self-abuse, our societies condemn a considerable class of men and women to a perpetual inability to achieve non-attachment. It seems a high price to pay for our amusements.
The chief educative virtue of literature consists in its power to provide its readers with examples which they can follow. To some extent, all human beings are, in Jules de Gaultier’s phrase, ‘bovaristic’—that is to say they have a capacity for seeing themselves as they are not, for playing a part other than that which heredity and circumstances seem to have assigned to them. The heroine of Flaubert’s novel came to a tragic end; but there is no reason why all bovaristic behaviour should turn out so disastrously as it did in the case of the original Mme Bovary. There is good bovarism as well as bad bovarism. Educationists have always known this fact and, from time immemorial, have tried to mould the character of their pupils by providing them with literary models to be imitated in real life. Such models may be mythical, historical or fictional. Hercules and Thor are instances of the first kind of heroic model; Plutarch’s statesmen and soldiers and the saints of the Christian calendar are instances of the historical model; Hamlet and Werther, Julien Sorel and Alyosha Karamazov, Juliet and Lady Chatterley are instance of fictional heroes and heroines upon whom, at one time or another, great numbers of human beings have patterned themselves.
In all cases, whether mythical, historical or fictional, some measure of literary art is necessary; if the story is told inadequately, the pupil will remain unimpressed, will feel no desire to imitate the model set before him. Hence the importance, even in ethical instruction, of good art. Moreover, every generation must produce its stock of imitable models, described in terms of an art which is not merely good, but also up-to-date. Old good art can never have the same appeal as new good art; for most people, indeed, it cannot rival with new bad art. More people bovarize themselves upon the models provided by the pulp magazines than upon those provided by Shakespeare. There are two reasons for this. The first is that, though crude and incompetent, the pulp magazines deal with contemporary characters, while Shakespeare, though incomparable in his power to ‘put things across,’ is more than three hundred years out of date; the second must be sought in the fact that the moral effort required to imitate Shakespeare’s heroes, and even his villains, is far greater than that which is needed to imitate the personages of pulp-magazine fiction. Pulp-magazine stories are transcriptions of the commonest and easiest day-dreams—dreams of sexual titillation, of financial success, of luxury, of social recognition. Shakespeare’s personages are on a larger scale.
They embody the hardly realizable, extravagant day-dreams of paranoiacs—of men who dream of being lovers uniquely faithful, proud saviours of their country uniquely disinterested and uniquely adored, villains uniquely vengeful and malignant. In this context it is worth remarking that except for the Duke in Measure for Measure—and he is scarcely a human being, only a symbol—Shakespeare gives no picture of a non-attached human being. Indeed, good pictures of non-attached men and women are singularly rare in the world’s literature. The good people in plays and novels are rarely complete, fully adult personages. They are either a bit deficient, like Dostoievsky’s epileptic Prince Mishkin, like Gorki’s virtuous but imbecile hermit, or Dickens’s charitable but utterly infantile Cheerybles, or else, like Pickwick, they are made lovable by being represented as eccentric to the point of absurdity; we can tolerate their superiority in virtue because we feel superior in common sense.
Finally and most frequently they are shown as being good without being intelligent, like Colonel Newcome, or the peasant who talks to Tolstoy’s Pierre in prison. These individuals are personally good within an abominably bad system which they do not even question. Men who are profoundly good without being intelligent have
