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Page 20
[Footnote 13: _Analects_, XI, CXI; VI, CXX.]
For the primitive in man is a beast whom it is hard to chain nor does
humanism with its semi-scientific, semi-sentimental laudation of all
natural values produce that exacting mood of inward scrutiny in which
self-control has most chance of succeeding. Hence here, as elsewhere
on the continent, and formerly in China, in Greece and in Rome, a sort
of neo-paganism has been steadily supplanting it.
To the study of this neo-paganism we now address ourselves. It is
the third and lowest of those levels of human experience to which we
referred in the first lecture. The naturalist, you may remember,
is that incorrigible individual who imagines that he is a law unto
himself, that he may erect his person into a sovereign over the whole
universe. He perversely identifies discipline with repression and
makes the unlimited the goal both of imagination and conduct. Oscar
Wilde's epigrams, and more particularly his fables, are examples of
a thoroughgoing naturalist's insolent indifference to any form of
restraint. All things, whether holy or bestial, were material for his
topsy-turvy wit, his literally unbridled imagination. No humanistic
law of decency, that is to say, a proper respect for the opinions of
mankind, and no divine law of reverence and humility, acted for him
as a restraining force or a selective principle. An immediate and
significant example of this naturalistic riot of feeling, with its
consequent false and anarchic scale of values, is found in the
film dramas of the moving picture houses. Unreal extravagance of
imagination, accompanied by the debauch of the aesthetic and moral
judgment, frequently distinguishes them. In screenland, it is the
vampire, the villain, the superman, the saccharine angel child,
who reign almost undisputed. Noble convicts, virtuous courtesans,
attractive murderers, good bad men, and ridiculous good men, flit
across the canvas haloed with cheap sentimentality. Opposed to them,
in an ever losing struggle, are those conventional figures who stand
for the sober realities of an orderly and disciplined world; the
judge, the policeman, the mere husband. These pitiable and laughable
figures are always outwitted; they receive the fate which indeed, in
any primitive society, they so richly deserve!
How deeply sunk in the modern world are the roots of this naturalism
is shown by its long course in history, paralleling humanism. It has
seeped down through the Protestant centuries in two streams. One is
a sort of scientific naturalism. It exalts material phenomena and the
external order, issues in a glorification of elemental impulses, an
attempted return to childlike spontaneous living, the identifying of
man's values with those of primitive nature. The other is an emotional
naturalism, of which Maeterlinck is at the moment a brilliant and
lamentable example. This exchanges the world of sober conduct,
intelligible and straightforward thinking for an unfettered dreamland,
compounded of fairy beauty, flashes of mystical and intuitive
understanding intermixed with claptrap magic, a high-flown
commercialism and an etherealized sensuality.
Rousseau represents both these streams in his own person. His
sentimentalized egotism and bland sensuality pass belief. His
sensitive spirit dissolves in tears over the death of his dog but he
bravely consigns his illegitimate children to the foundling asylum
without one tremor. In his justly famous and justly infamous
_Confessions_, he presents himself Satan-wise before the Almighty at
the last Judgment, these _Confessions_ in his hand, a challenge to the
remainder of the human race upon his lips. "Let a single one assert
to Thee, if he dare: I am better than that man." But his preachment
of natural and spontaneous values, return to primitive conditions,
was equally aggressive. If anyone wants to inspect the pit whence the
Montessori system of education was digged, let him read Rousseau, who
declared that the only habit a child should have is the habit of not
having a habit, or his contemporary disciple, George Moore, who says
that one should be ashamed of nothing except of being ashamed.
There are admirable features in the schooling-made-easy system. It
recognizes the fitness of different minds for different work; that
the process of education need not and should not be forbidding; that
natural science has been subordinated overmuch to the humanities; that
the imagination and the hand should be trained with the intellect.
But the method which proposes to give children an education along
the lines of least resistance is, like all other naturalism, a
contradiction in terms, sometimes a _reductio ad absurdum_, sometimes
_ad nauseam_. As long ago as 1893, when Huxley wrote his Romanes
lecture on _Evolution and Ethics_, this identity of natural and human
values was explicitly denied. Teachers do not exist for the amusement
of children, nor for the repression of children; they exist for
the discipline of children. The new education is consistently
primitivistic in the latitude which it allows to whim and in its
indulgence of indolence. There is only one way to make a man out of
a child; to teach him that happiness is a by-product of achievement;
that pleasure is an accompaniment of labor; that the foundation of
self-respect is drudgery well done; that there is no power in any
system of philosophy, any view of the world, no view of the world,
which can release him from the unchanging necessity of personal
struggle, personal consecration, personal holiness in human life.
"That wherein a man cannot be equaled," says Confucius, "is his work
which other men cannot see."[14] The humanist, at least, does not
blink the fact that we are caught in a serious and difficult world. To
rail at it, to deny it, to run hither and thither like scurrying rats
to evade it, will not alter one jot or one tittle of its inexorable
facts.
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