THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

2

My father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and

with his hands in his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher,

taking a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under

the old Science and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools;

and our resources were eked out by my mother's income of nearly a

hundred pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three

palatial but structurally unsound stucco houses near Bromstead

Station.

They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style,

interminably high and with deep damp basements and downstairs

coal-cellars and kitchens that suggested an architect

vindictively devoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If so,

he had overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant

would stay in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional

tolerance of inefficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every

storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which

would have been cool and pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs

went steeply up, to end at last in attics too inaccessible for

occupation. The ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical

design, fragments of which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and

the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern and much

variegated by damp and ill-mended rents.

As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses

at a time, and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable

tenants, he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and

devote the rent he received from the let one, when it was let, to

the incessant necessary repairing of all three. He also did some of

the repairing himself and, smoking a bull-dog pipe the while, which

my mother would not allow him to do in the house, he cultivated

vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful manner

in the unoccupied gardens. The three houses faced north, and the

back of the one we occupied was covered by a grape-vine that

yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and

imperfectly ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes

of dessert. The grape-vine played an important part in my life, for

my father broke his neck while he was pruning it, when I was

thirteen.

My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not

always good ideas. My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster

and one of the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father

had assisted him in his school until increasing competition and

diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of small

private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered.

Thereupon my father had roused himself and had qualified as a

science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in these

days had charge of the scientific and artistic education of the mass

of the English population, and had thrown himself into science

teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if

transitory zeal and success.

I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic

time. I was the child of my parents' middle years; they married

when my father was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw

only the last decadent phase of his educational career.

The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the

world, and people are forgetting it now with the utmost readiness

and generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive,

more or less completely digested into the Board of Education.

The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how

many of the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and

early manhood have given place now to more scientific and efficient

machinery. When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was

ruled by a strange body called a Local Board-it was the Age of

Boards-and I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the

breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and

devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there

were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics

before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading

tentacles of the London County Council.

It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State

to remember that the very beginnings of public education lie within

my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic

people were shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of

the sort. When he was born, totally illiterate people who could

neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature,

were to be found everywhere in England; and great masses of the

population were getting no instruction at all. Only a few schools

flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the

country the old endowed grammar schools were to be found sinking and

dwindling; many of them had closed altogether. In the new great

centres of population multitudes of children were sweated in the

factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the under-equipped and

under-staffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary

contributions and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight

against this festering darkness. It was a condition of affairs

clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of

indifference and prejudice to be overcome before any remedies were

possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian

will disentangle all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the

commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian

enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose.

I have long since come to believe it necessary that all new social

institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they

should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust

of government in the Victorian days was far too great, and the

general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about

the new business it was taking up in a businesslike way, to train

teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and

provide properly written school-books. These things it was felt

MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and since it was

manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in

default, it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money

payments. The State set up a machinery of examination both in

Science and Art and for the elementary schools; and payments, known

technically as grants, were made in accordance with the examination

results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit to

send into the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would be

established that would, according to the beliefs of that time,

inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry of "Grant earning" was

created, and this would give education as a necessary by-product.

In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grant-

earning was still in full activity when I was a small boy. So far

as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the

task of examination was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the

most part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also

were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it was feared

that injustice might be done. Year after year these eminent persons

set questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the

increasing thousands of answers that ensued, and having no doubt the

national ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they were

careful each year to re-read the preceding papers before composing

the current one, in order to see what it was usual to ask. As a

result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and

permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the

practical object of the teaching was to teach people not science,

but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant-

earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind of genuine

education whatever.

Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of

the age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science

prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by

making graduates in arts and priests in the established church

Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and private

enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according

to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district. Private

enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books. A number of

competing firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising in

Science and Art Department work; they set themselves to produce

text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of

knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty

subjects into which desirable science was divided, and copies and

models and instructions that should give precisely the method and

gestures esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book

was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the

examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former

years were appended to every chapter. By means of these last the

teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of

grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other

methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils with

questions and then dictated model replies.

That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes

as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death,

and it is so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table,

smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible

formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of

desks before him. Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to

a blackboard on an easel and draw on that very slowly and

deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in

coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or

arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the Institute in

which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus

prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the

Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with

maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.

But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in

systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to

pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it,

because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen

burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second

they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger

the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.

Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up. And moreover

they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant

learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies. Quite

early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the

unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is

fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for

example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic

Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a

glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue

to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the

stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face

and painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And

I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a

retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and

may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do anything

of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium

chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says

"Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady

student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.

Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite

understand that ancient libertine refusing to cooperate in her own

undoing. And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference

for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an

arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing

whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool,

and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it

when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond

illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you

did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in

this way he could make us see all he described. The class, freed

from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life

without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then

my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be

copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any

exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as

"empyreumatic" or "botryoidal."

Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once

sticking up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description,

"Please, sir, what is flocculent?"

"The precipitate is."

"Yes, sir, but what does it mean?"

"Oh! flocculent! " said my father, "flocculent! Why-" he extended

his hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air.

"Like that," he said.

I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment

after giving it. "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and

resumed his discourse.