Chapter III: Part 3

THE ARTIST. Mine? Oh, not at all! They are merely two out of a thousand contemporary attempts to recover the naïve childlike vision of which I spoke. If you will compare them with a child’s drawing, or with a picture by a Navajo Indian, or with the sketch of an aurochs traced on the wall of his cave by one of our remote ancestors, you will note an essential difference. Those artists were not trying to be naïve and childlike; they _were_ naïve and childlike. The chief merit of our modern efforts, in my personal opinion, is in their quality as a challenge to traditional and mistaken notions of what art should be--an advertisement, startling enough, and sometimes maliciously startling, of the artist’s belief that he has the right to be first of all an artist.

THE QUESTIONER. Now we are coming to the point. What _is_ an artist?

THE ARTIST. I told you, a child. And by that, I mean one who _plays_ with his materials--not one who performs a set and perhaps useful task with them. A creator--

THE QUESTIONER. But a creator of what? Not of Beauty, by any chance?

THE ARTIST. Incidentally of Beauty.

THE QUESTIONER. There we seem to disagree. If those horrid pictures--

THE ARTIST. Suppose _you_ tell me what Beauty is.

THE QUESTIONER. It seems to me quite simple. Beauty is--well--a thing is either beautiful, or it isn’t. And--

THE ARTIST. Just so; the only trouble is that so few of us are able to agree whether it is or isn’t. You yourself have doubtless changed your opinions about what is beautiful many times in the course of your career as an art-lover; and the time may come when you will cherish some horrid nude of Matisse’s as your dearest possession. Let us admit, like the wise old poet, that Beauty is not a thing which can be argued about. It can only be produced.

THE QUESTIONER. But if we don’t know what Beauty is, how can we produce it?

THE ARTIST. I have already told you--as the incidental result of creative effort.

THE QUESTIONER. Effort to create _what_?

THE ARTIST. Oh, anything.

THE QUESTIONER. Are you joking?

THE ARTIST. I never was more serious in my life. And I should really inform you that I am merely repeating the familiar commonplaces of modern esthetics. Beauty is the incidental result of the effort to create a house, a sword,--

THE QUESTIONER. Or a shoe?

THE ARTIST. Yes. I have some peasant shoes from Russia which are very beautiful. You can see shoes which are works of art in any good museum.

THE QUESTIONER. But hardly in any boot-shop window!

THE ARTIST. Those shoes were not created--they were done as a set task. They were not made by peasants or craftsmen for pleasure--they were made by wage-slaves who did them only because they must. Do not for a moment imagine that it is the difference in materials or shape that matters--it is the difference in the spirit with which they are made. I have seen modern shoes which are works of art--because they were made by a bootmaker who is an artist and does what pleases himself.

THE QUESTIONER. Do they please anybody else?

THE ARTIST. Eh?

THE QUESTIONER. Would you be seen wearing them?

THE ARTIST. Would I be seen drinking my coffee from a cup that had been turned on a wheel by a man who loved the feel of the clay under his fingers and who knew just the right touch to give the brim? Was Richard Coeur du Lion’s sword less a sword because it had been made by an artist who dreamed over the steel instead of by a tired man in a hurry? I cannot afford to wear shoes made by my bootmaker-artist friend--but I wish I could, for they _fit_!

THE QUESTIONER. Will you give me his address?--I beg your pardon--Please go on.

THE ARTIST. I was about to say, you wrong the artist if you think that he is not interested in utility. It is only because utility has become bound up with slavery that artists and people with artistic impulses revolt against it and in defiance produce utterly and fantastically useless things. This will be so, as long as being useful means being a slave. But art is not an end in itself; it had its origin, and will find its destiny, in the production of useful things. For example--

THE QUESTIONER. Yes, do let us get down to the concrete!

THE ARTIST. Suppose you are out walking in a hilly country, and decide to whittle yourself a stick. Your wish is to make something useful. But you can’t help making it more than useful. You can’t help it, because, if you are not in a hurry, and nobody else is bossing the job, you find other impulses besides the utilitarian one coming in to elaborate your task. Shall I name those impulses?

THE QUESTIONER. If you will.

THE ARTIST. I am not a psychologist, but I would call them the impulse to command and the impulse to obey.

THE QUESTIONER. To command and obey _what_?

THE ARTIST. Your material, whatever it is--paint and canvas, words, sounds, clay, marble, iron. In this case, the stick of wood.

THE QUESTIONER. I’m afraid I do not quite--

THE ARTIST. The impulse to command comes first--the impulse to just show that stick who is master! the desire to impose your imperial will upon it. I suppose you might call it Vanity. And that impulse alone would result in your making something fantastic and grotesque or strikingly absurd--and yet beautiful in its way. But it is met and checked by the other impulse--the impulse to obey. No man that ever whittled wood but has felt that impulse. He feels that he must not do simply what he wants to do, but also what the wood _wants done_ to it. The real artist does not care to treat marble as if it were soft, nor paint and canvas as though they were three-dimensional. He could if he wanted to--but he respects his medium. There is an instinctive pleasure in letting it have its way. I suppose you might call it Reverence. And this Vanity and this Reverence, the desire to command and the desire to obey, when they are set free in the dream and effort of creation, produce something which is more than useful. That _something more_ is what we call Beauty.--Do you care to have me go further into the mechanics of beauty?

THE QUESTIONER. Well--er--I suppose now that we have got this far into the subject, we might as well get to the end of it. Go on!

THE ARTIST. What I am about to tell you is the only really important thing about art. Unfortunately, the facts at issue have never been studied by first-class scientific minds, and so they lack a proper terminology to make them clear. In default of such a scientific terminology, we are forced to use the word “rhythm” in the special sense in which artists understand it. You speak of the movements of a dance as being rhythmic. The artist understands the word to refer to the relation of these movements to each other and above all to the emotion which they express. And to him the whole world is a dance, full of rhythmic gestures. The gesture of standing still, or of being asleep, is also rhythmic; the body is itself a gesture--he will speak of the rhythm of the line of a lifted arm or a bent knee. Trees that lift their branches to the sky, and rocks that sleep on the ground have their rhythms--every tree and every rock its own special rhythm. The rhythm of a pine tree is different from that of a palm--the rhythm of granitic rocks different from that of limestone. So far the matter is simple enough. But the relations of these rhythms to each other are also rhythmic. These relations are in fact so manifold that they constitute a chaos. But in this chaos each person feels a different rhythm; and, according as he has the power, transmits his sense of it to us through a rhythmic treatment of his medium. In the presence of his work, we feel what he has felt about the world; but we feel something more than that--we feel also the rhythm of the struggle in the artist between his impulse to command and his impulse to obey. Our own impulses of vanity and of reverence go out to welcome his power and his faithfulness. And just as there are gay rhythms and sad rhythms in the gesture of movement, so there are magnificent rhythms and trivial rhythms in the gesture of a soul facing the chaos of the world. What has he found worth while to play with, and how has he played with it? What kind of creator is he? Ability to feel and express significant rhythm--that is nine-tenths of art.

THE QUESTIONER. But my dear fellow, how are we to teach all this to children?

THE ARTIST. Very simply: by giving them a knife and a piece of wood.

THE QUESTIONER. Well, really!

THE ARTIST. And crayons and clay and singing-games and so forth.--But perhaps you prefer to show them pictures of alleged masterpieces, and tell them, “This is great art!” They will believe you, of course; and they will hate great art ever afterwards--just as they hate great poetry, and for the same excellent reason: because, presented to them in that way, it is nothing but a damned nuisance. Yet the child who enjoys hearing and telling a story has in him the capacity to appreciate and perhaps to create the greatest of stories; and the child who enjoys whittling a block of wood has in him the capacity to appreciate and perhaps to create the greatest art!

THE QUESTIONER. Then you do not think children can be taught to appreciate art by looking at photographic reproductions of it?

THE ARTIST. I would hardly expect a Fiji Islander to become an appreciator of civilized music by letting him look at my phonograph records. The dingy-brownish photograph of a gloriously colored painting has even less educational value--for it lies about the original. Do you know that there are thousands and thousands of American school children who think that the great masterpieces of the world’s painting are the color of axle-grease? They are never told that their own free efforts with colored crayons are more like Botticelli in every sense than any photograph could possibly be; but it is true.

THE QUESTIONER. But don’t you want them to _respect_ Botticelli?

THE ARTIST. No. I want them to look at Botticelli’s pictures as they look at those of another child--free to criticize, free to dislike, free to scorn. For only when you are free to despise, are you free to admire. After all, who was Botticelli? Another child. Perhaps they may prefer Goya--

THE QUESTIONER. Or the Sunday comic supplement!

THE ARTIST. A healthy taste. And if they know what drawing is, though having used a pencil themselves, they will prefer the better comic pictures to the worse, and be ready to appreciate Goya and Daumier--who were the super-Sunday-supplement comic artists of their day.

THE QUESTIONER. Left to themselves they may come to like Goya, as you say; but will they ever come to appreciate such a masterpiece as Leonardo’s Last Supper without some more formal teaching?

THE ARTIST. Do you call it “teaching” to talk solemnly to children in language they cannot understand? If they are making pictures themselves, and being assisted in their enthusiastic experiments by a real artist instead of a teacher, they will naturally wonder why their friend should have the photograph of the Last Supper in the portfolio from which he is always taking out some picture in order to illustrate his answers to their questions. And having wondered, they will ask why, and their friend will tell them; and perhaps they will get some of their friends enthusiasm, and perhaps not. But they will know that the real human being who is like themselves _does_ like that picture.

THE QUESTIONER. But it makes no difference whether _they_ like it or not?

THE ARTIST. You can’t compel them to like it, can you? You can only compel them to pretend that they do.

THE QUESTIONER. Can’t you teach them what is called “good taste”?

THE ARTIST. Only too easily. And their “good taste” will lead them infallibly to prefer the imitations of what they have been taught to praise, and quite as infallibly to reject the great new art of their generation. They will think some new Whistler a pot of paint flung in the public’s face, and the next Cezanne a dauber.

THE QUESTIONER. Then you don’t approve of good taste!

THE ARTIST. Every artist despises it, and the people who have it. We know quite well that the people who pretend to like Titian and Turner, because they have been carefully taught that it is the thing to do, would have turned up their noses at Titian and Turner in their own day--because they were not on the list of dead artists whom it was the fashion to call great; they know moreover that these same people of good taste are generally incapable of distinguishing between a beautiful and an ugly wall-paper, between a beautiful and an ugly plate, or even between a beautiful and an ugly necktie! Outside the bounds of their memorized list, they have no taste whatever.

THE QUESTIONER. Cannot good taste be taught so as to include the whole of life?

THE ARTIST. It would take too much time. And thank God for that! For good taste is simply a polite pretense by which we cover up our lack of that real sense of beauty which comes only from intimate acquaintance with creative processes. The most cultivated people in the world cannot produce beauty by merely having notions about it. But the most uncultivated people in the world cannot help producing beauty if only they have time to dream as they work--if only they have freedom to let their work become something besides utilitarian.

THE QUESTIONER. You think, then, that education should not concern itself with good taste, but rather with creative effort?

THE ARTIST. Exactly.

THE QUESTIONER. You say that children are artists already?

THE ARTIST. And that artists are children.

THE QUESTIONER. Then the task of education in respect to them would seem to be easy!

THE ARTIST. No--on the contrary, infinitely hard!

THE QUESTIONER. What do you mean?

The Artist. I have said that children are artists and that artists are children. The task of education is to help them to _grow up_.

THE QUESTIONER. New difficulties!

THE ARTIST. And tremendous ones! But if I am to discuss them, you must keep still for a while and let me talk in my own fashion.

--Very well, ladies and gentlemen. Shall we adjourn for lunch, and when we reassemble here give the Artist the platform for half an hour? What is the sentiment of the meeting? The Ayes have it.

XVII. The Artist as a Child

Without any further delay, the Artist shall now address you.--Please take the platform, sir!

“My friends! We are gathered here today to consider how to implant in the youthful and innocent minds which are entrusted to our care the beneficent and holy influences of that transcendent miracle which we know as Art. Sacred and mysterious subject that it is, we approach it with bated--”

Wait! wait! There is some mistake here, I am sure. Just a moment!--

“We approach with bated breath these austere and sacred--”

Stop, I say!

“Austere and sacred regions--”

Usher, will you please throw this fellow out! He is not the man we were listening to this morning--he is a rank impostor, who has disguised himself as an artist in order to befuddle our deliberations with mystagogical cant. If you will pull off that false beard, I think you will find that he is a well-known Chautauqua lecturer.... Aha, I thought so!--Shame on you! And now get out of here as quickly as you can!--Ah, there comes the real Artist--late, as usual. What have you to say for yourself?

“I’m sorry--I got to thinking of something else, and nearly forgot to come back here. Which brings me at once to the heart of what I want to say. Artists, as I have said, are children--and, children that they are, they forget the errands upon which the world sends them. They forget, because these errands are not part of their own life. You reproach us with being careless and irresponsible--but if you will study the child at play or the artist at work, you will discover that he is not careless or irresponsible in regard to his own concerns. But this deep divorce between the concerns of the artist and the child and the concerns of the world is the tragic problem for which we now seek a solution. The world has been unable to solve it. It has only made the breach deeper.

“For the world does not know that its work can be play, that adult life can be a game like the games of children, only with more desperate and magnificent issues. It does not reflect that we gather sticks in the wood with infinite happy patience and labour to build our bonfires because those bonfires are our own dream creatively realized; and it cannot think of any better way to get us to bring in the wood for the kitchen stove than to say, ‘Johnny, I’ve told you three times to bring in that wood, and if you can’t mind I’ll have your father interview you in the woodshed.’ In brief, it presents our participation in adult life as meaningless toil performed at the bidding of another under coercion. And the whole of adult life gradually takes on this same aspect. We are to do the bidding of another in office or factory because otherwise we will starve.

“So the child-artist unwillingly becomes a slave. But there are some children who rebel against slavery. They prefer to keep their dreams. They are regarded with disapproval and anxiety by their families, who tell them that they must grow up. But they do not want to grow up into slavery. They want to remain free. They want to make their dreams come true.

“‘But who will pay for your dreams?’ the world asks. And it is not pleasant to face the possibility of starving to death. And so they comfort themselves with the illusion of fame and wealth. Sometimes their families are cajoled into investing in this rather doubtful speculative enterprise, and the child-artist becomes an artist-child, supported through life by his parents, and playing busily at his art. Sometimes the speculation turns out well financially, the illusion of success becomes a reality; but this, however gratifying to the artist as a justification of his career, is not his own reason for being an artist. The ‘successful’ artist has a childlike pleasure in the awe of really grown-up people at the material proofs of his importance; and if he has given hostages to fortune, if he must support a family of his own, he may ploddingly reproduce the happy accidents of his creative effort which gained him these rewards; but he feels that in so doing he has ceased to be a free man and become a slave--and all too often, as we know from the shocked comment of the world, he renounces these rewards, becomes a child at play again, and lets his wife and children get along as best they may. He yearns, perhaps, for fame--as a sort of public consent to his going on being a child. But whether he starves in the garret or bows from his limousine to admiring crowds, what he really wants of the world is just permission to play. He is not interested in the affairs of the world.

“There are exceptions, of course. There are poets and musicians and painters who take an interest in the destinies of mankind; but this is regarded by their fellow-artists as a kind of heresy or disloyalty--much as school children (or college boys) regard the behaviour of one who really takes his school work seriously. The public also is accustomed to regard the artist as a child; they laugh at his ‘ideas’ about practical affairs--though often enough they adopt his ideas in dead earnest later. Shelley, for instance, proposed to conduct campaigns of education by dropping leaflets from balloons. ‘A quaint idea, characteristic of his visionary and impractical mind,’ said his biographers; and then, having laughed at the idea, the world in its Great War proceeds to adopt that idea and carry it out on a tremendous scale....

“When the child refuses to be a slave, he is thenceforth excluded by common consent from the affairs of the grown-up world. And as the breach widens between the artist and the world, as the world becomes more and more committed to slavery, the artist is more consciously and wilfully a child. He is forbidden by the growing public opinion of his group to write or sing about human destinies. ‘The artist must not be a propagandist,’ it is declared indignantly. And finally it comes to such a pass that it is not artistic good-form for the artist to tell stories which the public can understand--the painter is prohibited from making images which the common man is able to recognize--the musician scorns to compose tunes which anybody could dance to or whistle! And all this is simply the child’s defiance to the world--his games are his own, and the grown-ups can keep their hands off! If adult life is slavery (which it is), he will be damned before he will have anything to do with it.

“And he is damned--damned to a childishness which contains only the stubborn wilfulness of the child’s playing, but has forgotten its motive. That motive is different from his. He has changed from the child who played at being a man, to a man who plays at being a child. The child’s dreams were large, and his are small. The child took all life for his province--was by turns a warrior, a blacksmith, a circus-rider, a husband, a store-keeper, a fireman, a savage, an undertaker. The child-artist wanted to play at everything. The artist-child has renounced these magnificent ambitions. The world may conscript him to fight in its wars, but he refuses to bother his head as to what they are about; if he finds that he has to walk up-town because there is a street-car strike, he is mildly annoyed, but (I am describing an extreme but not infrequent type) he declines to interest himself in the labour movement; he escapes from the responsibilities of a serious love-affair on the ground that ‘an artist should never marry’; he pays his grocery bills, or leaves them unpaid, but the co-operative movement bores him; and so on! He is content to live in that little corner of life in which he can play undisturbed by worldly interests. This type, I have said, is not infrequent; its perfect exemplars, the artists who were so completely children that they did not even know of the existence of the outside world, are revered as the saints of art, and often as its martyrs, which in truth they were; and they are admired by thousands of young artists who only aspire to such perfection, while shamefacedly admitting that they themselves are tainted with ordinary human interests.

“This is what the world has done to us; it has made us choose between being children in a tiny sphere all our lives, or going into the larger world of reality as slaves. And I think we have made the right choice. For we have kept alive in our childish folly the flame of a sacred revolt against slavery. We have succeeded in making the world envious of our freedom. We have shown it the only way to be happy.

“But the artist cannot get along without the world. His art springs from the commonest impulses of the human race, and those impulses are utilitarian at root; the savage who scratched the aurochs on the wall of his cave was hungry for meat and desirous of luck in the hunting tomorrow; the primitive Greeks who danced their seasonal dances from which sprang the glory of dramatic art, wanted the crops to grow; and that which we call great art everywhere is great only because it springs from a communal hunger and fulfils a communal wish. When art becomes divorced from the aspirations of the common man, all its technical perfection will not keep it alive; it revolts against its own technical perfection, and goes off into quaint and austere quests for new truths upon which to nourish itself; and only when it discovers the common man and fulfils his unfulfilled desires, does it flourish again. Art must concern itself with the world, or perish.

“Nor can the world get along without the artist. Slavery cannot keep it going--it needs the free impulses of the creative spirit. It needs the artist, not as a being to scorn and worship by turns, but as the worker-director of its activities. It needs the artist as blacksmith, husband, and store-keeper--as teacher, priest, and statesman. Only so can it endure and fulfil its destinies.

“But if the artist is to be all these things, if he is to enter into the activities of the real world instead of running away from them, he must grow up. And that is the task of education: to make a man of him without killing the artist. We must begin, then, before the artist in him is killed; we must begin with the child. So far as I can see, the school as it exists at present is utterly and hopelessly inadequate to the task. It requires a special mechanism, which happily exists in the outside world, and need only be incorporated into the educational system, in order to provide a medium of transition between the dream-creations of childhood and the realistic creativity of adult life. This mechanism is the Theatre.”

XVIII. The Drama of Education

“But why--in the name of all that is beautiful!--_why_ the Theatre?”

Ah! Who uttered that agonized cry of protest?

He comes forward.

“It was I who spoke. Do not, I beg of you, as you love Beauty, have any truck with the Theatre. Leave it alone--avoid it--flee it as you would the pestilence! I know what I am talking about!”

And who, pray, are you?

“I am an Actor!”

Well, well!--this is rather curious.

“Not at all! Who should know better than the Actor the dreadful truth about the Theatre--that it is the home of a base triviality, the citadel of insincerity, the last refuge of everything that is banal in thought and action!”

Really, the Theatre seems to have no friends nowadays except the professors who teach play-writing in the colleges! But I think we should hear what our friend the Artist has to say in its defence.

THE ARTIST. “There is nothing wrong with the Theatre except what is wrong with the whole of modern life. Our newspapers are base and trivial, our politics are insincere, and the products of our slave-system of production have a banality which Broadway could scarcely surpass. In all these fields of effort, as in the Theatre, the creative spirit has surrendered to the slave-system. But in the Theatre, and in no place else in the world, we find the modes of child-life, of primitive creative activity, surviving intact into adult life. What is costume but the ‘dressing-up’ of childhood, the program with its cast of characters but a way of saying ‘Let’s pretend!’--what, in short, is the Playhouse but a house of Play? It is all there--the singing and dancing, the make-believe, the whole paraphernalia of child creativity: it is true that the game is played by children who are not free to create their own dreams, who must play always at some one else’s bidding, half children and half slaves! But--and this is its importance to us--the Theatre is the place where the interests of the child meet and merge into those of the adult. It is the natural transition between dreams and realities. And it is thereby the bridge across the gulf that separates art from the world.

“Let me explain. When I use the phrase ‘The Theatre,’ I am not thinking of the dramatic arts in any restricted and special sense. For the Theatre, as the original source of all the arts, the spring from which half a hundred streams have poured, into the separate arts of music, dancing, singing, poetry, pageantry, and what not--the Theatre in its historic aspect as the spirit of communal festivity--is significant to us not as the vehicle of a so-called dramatic art, separate and distinct from the arts which go to make it up, but rather as the institution which preserves the memory of the common origin of all these arts and which still has the power to unite them in the service of a common purpose. In the Theatre, as in the child’s playing, they are not things alien from each other and isolate from life, but parts of each other and of a greater thing--the expressing of a common emotion.

“So when I speak of making the Theatre a part of the educational system in the interest of art and artists, I mean to suggest a union of all the arts in the expression of communal purposes and emotions through a psychological device of which the Theatre, even in its contemporary form, stands as a ready-to-hand example.

“I cannot be sufficiently grateful to the Theatre for continuing to exist, in however trivial or base a form. Suppose it had perished for ever from the earth! Who would be so daring a theorist as to conceive the project of bringing together the story-teller, the poet, the musician, the singer, the dancer, the pantomimist, the painter, in the co-operative enterprise of creating ‘one common wave of thought and joy lifting mankind again’? Who, if such a thing were proposed, would have any idea what was being talked about? As it is, however, I can point to any musical comedy on Broadway and say, ‘What I mean is something like that, only quite different!’

“Different, because the communal emotions which these artists would have joined themselves together to express would hardly be, if they were left free to decide the question themselves, the mere emotions of mob-anxiety, mob-lasciviousness and mob-humour which are the three motifs of commercial drama. No, you have to pay people to get them to take part in that dull and tawdry game! When they do things to suit themselves, as they sometimes adventurously do even now, it is something that it is more fun to play at. As free men and women they cannot help being artists, they must needs choose that their play shall be a ‘work of art whose rhythms fulfil some deep wish of the human soul.--’”

“Just a moment! Some one, I think, wants to ask a question.--Louder, please!”

“I said--this is all very well as a plea for a Free Theatre, but what has it to do with Education?”

THE ARTIST. “Evidently I have not made myself clear. The problem of Education with respect to Art is to keep alive the child’s creative impulses, and use them in the real world of adult life. We don’t want to kill the artist in him; nor do we want to keep him a child all his life in some tiny corner of the world, apart from its serious activities. We don’t want the slave who has forgotten how to play, nor the dreamer who is afraid of realities. We want an education which will merge the child’s play into the man’s life, the artist’s dreams into the citizen’s labours. The Theatre--”

“Excuse me, but what I can’t see is how a Children’s Theatre is going to do all that! Even if you put a theatre in every school-building--”

THE ARTIST. “You quite mistake my meaning. I would rather confiscate the theatres and put a school into each of them; and so, for that matter, would I do with the factories! But, unfortunately, I am not Minister of Public Education. In default of that, what I propose is small enough--but it is not so small as you suppose when you think that I want to set children to rehearsing plays and making scenery for a school play. I propose rather that the spirit of the Theatre--the spirit of creative play--should enter into every branch of the school work, until the school itself becomes a Theatre--a gorgeous, joyous, dramatic festival of learning-to-live.

“Think how real History would become if it were dramatized by the children themselves! I do not mean its merely picturesque moments, but its real meanings, acted out--the whole drama of human progress--a group of cave-men talking of the days before men knew how to make fire--Chaldean traders, Babylonian princes, Egyptian slaves, each with his story to tell--Greek citizens discussing politics just before the election--a wounded London artisan hiding from the King’s soldiers in a garret, and telling his shelterer the true story of Wat Tyler’s rebellion--a French peasant just before the Revolution, and his son who has been reading a strange book by that man Rousseau in which it is declared that there is no such thing as the Divine Right of Kings....

“Mathematics as an organized creative effort centering around real planning and building and measuring and calculating....

“Geography--a magnificent voyaging in play all round the world and in reality all round the town and surrounding countryside.... A scientific investigation of the natural resources of the community, its manufactures, exports and imports, discussed round bonfires in the woods by the committee at the end of a long day’s tramp, and the final drawing up of their report, to be illustrated on the screen by photographs taken by themselves.... The adventure of map-making....

“(You get the idea, don’t you? You see _why_ it is more real than ordinary education--_because_ it is all play!)

“And all these delightful games brought together in grand pageants--instead of examinations!--every half year....

“That is what I mean.

“Making whatever teaching of art there may be, part and parcel with these activities--and using the school-theatre, if one exists, _not_ to produce Sheridan’s ‘Rivals’ in, but as a convenience to the presentation of the drama of their own education; but in any case making all their world a stage, not forgetting that first and best stage of all, God’s green outdoors!

“No, I say, I do not want to put a theatre into every school--I want every school to be a Theatre in which a Guild of Young Artists will learn to do the work of the world without ceasing to be free and happy.

“I hope I have succeeded in making myself clear?”

XIX. The Drama of Life

As to his immediate proposals, I think the Artist has made himself quite clear. But he opened up an interesting vista of possibilities when he spoke of being Minister of Public Education. He said he couldn’t do certain things because he wasn’t Minister of Public Education. What we would like very much to know is what he would do if he were!--Do you mind telling us?

THE ARTIST. “In the first place I would set fire to--But you are sure I am not taking up your time unduly?”

No, no! Go on!

THE ARTIST. “I would set fire to the coat-tails of all the present boards of education who are now running our educational system in complete indifference to the interests of the child. I would institute democratic control: turn the school system over to the National Guild of Young Artists. My career as an educational autocrat would necessarily stop right there, so far as the internal revolutionizing of education is concerned--for what I have been telling you is simply what I think the children themselves would do with the schools if they were allowed to run them.

“But Education, as I understand it, does not stop short with the school--it extends throughout all life. It is what I would call the civilizing process. And there is much to be done to many departments of life before they can become part of a real civilizing process. I will describe only one, but not the least fundamental of these changes--the democratizing of the Theatre. Or rather, as I should say, turning it into a school.

“A school of what? you will ask. A school of life, of aspiration, of progress, of civilization. It can be all these things if it becomes the People’s Theatre. Therefore, as Minister of Public Education, I propose to confiscate the Theatres and turn them over to the People.

“But again, when I speak of ‘The Theatre,’ I do not mean merely the buildings in which plays are given. I mean all those arts which are part of communal creativity. I propose to unite them all in communal festivals of human progress. I do not propose that we shall begin by holding classes in the Hippodrome--though that will come. I propose to begin with solemn and magnificent national holiday pageants similar to those which were so frequently and gorgeously celebrated during the days of the great French Revolution--”

At this moment a policeman approaches the stage.

“I wish to warn the speaker that everything he says is being taken down in shorthand by one of our men, and if he wants to finish his speech the less he says about Revolution the better. That’s all.”

THE ARTIST. “Thank you! I should have said, during the days of a certain great political and social upheaval which laid the foundations of modern life in general, and of our gallant ally, the French Republic, in particular. The historic festivals of which I speak were in charge of the great artists and composers of the nation, and their art and music were used to express the common emotion and purpose of the People. So it will be with ours. Our artists will unite to express the new ideals of mankind, and together with each other and with the People, will lay the foundations of a new and democratic art.

“It is here that the theatres, which will already be in charge of the guilds of artists, will come into play. For the new art must have a solid basis in popular emotions such as only the theatre can give. They will therefore present plays which criticize the old slave-system, satirize its manners, its traditional heroes, its ideals; plays which invest with tragic dignity the age-long struggle of the People against oppressive institutions and customs; plays which creatively foreshadow a new popular culture and morality; and plays which celebrate the final victory of the People in their revolutionary strug--”

Another policeman:

“Are ye making an address on education, or trying to incite to riot? L’ave that word Revolution alone.--This is the second time we’re warning ye.”

THE ARTIST. “I’m sorry. I had hoped to show the influence of the national aspirations of a great Celtic people upon their artistic life, and the final flowering of their dreams in a certain political and social upheaval--”

THE POLICEMAN. “Oh, ye mean the Irish Revolution? That’s different! Ye’re all right. Go on!”

THE ARTIST. “My time, however, is short. I shall leave to your imagination the means to be used in furthering these aims by the democratization of technical artistic culture. I shall speak only of its spiritual aspects. The Theatre, as I have said, will take the lead in preparing for the new day by presenting plays which will teach the People courage and confidence in their destiny, teach them to scorn the ideals of the traditional past, deepen their sense of community with the People in all lands in their world-wide struggle for freedom, and make them face the future with a clear and unshakable resolution, an indomitable will to victory.

“If I had time, I should like to tell you how this educational program is already being carried out, in spite of the greatest difficulties, by a certain Slavic nation--”

Another interruption!--by a red-faced, dictatorial, imperatorial personage who has been sitting there all this time, swelling with rage and awaiting his opportunity. He speaks:

“Officer! I am a member of the Board of Education, and I demand that you arrest that man as a Bolshevik agitator!”

(Tumultuous scenes.)

XX. Curiosity

Let us, my friends, pass over this unfortunate incident, and get on to the next thing as quickly as possible. The next thing on our program is Truth. The one who best understands Truth is undoubtedly the Philosopher.--Here he is, and we shall commence without delay. Will some one volunteer to conduct the examination? Thank you, madam. Go right ahead.

THE LADY. We wish to ask you a few questions.

THE PHILOSOPHER. Certainly, madam. What about?

THE LADY. About Truth.

THE PHILOSOPHER. Dear, dear!

THE LADY. Whom are you addressing?

THE PHILOSOPHER. I beg your pardon!--It was only an exclamation of surprise. It has been so long since anybody has talked to me about Truth. How quaint and refreshing!

THE LADY. Please do not be frivolous.

THE PHILOSOPHER. I am sorry--but really, it _is_ amusing. Tell me, to which school do you belong?

THE LADY. To the Julia Richmond High School, if you must know--though I don’t see what that has to do with Truth.

THE PHILOSOPHER. Oh! You mean you are a school-teacher!

THE LADY. Certainly. Doesn’t that suit you?

THE PHILOSOPHER. It delights me. I feared at first you might be a Hegelian, or even a Platonist. Now that I find you are a Pragmatist like myself--

THE LADY. Pragmatist? Yes, I have heard of Pragmatism. William James--summer course in Philosophy. But why do you think I am a Pragmatist?

THE PHILOSOPHER. A school-teacher _must_ be a pragmatist, madam, or go mad. If you really believed the human brain to be an instrument capable of accurate thinking, your experiences with your pupils and your principal, not to speak of your boards of education, would furnish you a spectacle of human wickedness and folly too horrible to be endured. But you realize that the poor things were never intended to think.

THE LADY. That’s true; they’re doing the best they can, aren’t they? They just _can’t_ believe anything they don’t want to believe!

THE PHILOSOPHER. That is to say, man is not primarily a thinking animal--he is a creature of emotion and action.

THE LADY. Especially action. They are always in such a hurry to get something done that they really can’t stop to think about it! But I’m afraid all this is really beside the point. What we want to know is why the school fails so miserably in its attempt to teach children to think?

THE PHILOSOPHER. Perhaps it is in too much of a hurry. But are you sure you really want children to learn to think?

THE LADY. Of course we do!

THE PHILOSOPHER. The greatest part of life, you know, can be lived without thought. We do not think about where we put our feet as we walk along an accustomed road. We leave that to habit. We do not think about how to eat, once we have learned to do it in a mannerly way. The accountant does not think about how to add a column of figures--he has his mind trained to the task. And there is little that cannot be done by the formation of proper habits, to the complete elimination of thought. The habits will even take care of the regulation of the emotions. For all practical purposes, don’t you agree with me that thinking might be dispensed with?

THE LADY. I hardly know whether to take you seriously or not--

THE PHILOSOPHER. Can you deny what I say?

THE LADY. But--but life isn’t all habit. We must think--in order to make--decisions.

THE PHILOSOPHER. It is not customary. We let our wishes fight it out, and the strongest has its way. But I once knew a man who did think in order to make his decisions. The result was that he always made them too late. And what was worse, the habit grew upon him. He got to thinking about everything he wanted to do, with the result that he couldn’t do anything. I told him that he’d have to stop thinking--that it wasn’t healthy. Finally he went to a doctor, and sure enough the doctor told him that it was a well known disease--a neurosis. Its distinguishing mark was that the patient always saw two courses open to him everywhere he turned--two alternatives, two different ways of doing something, two women between whom he must choose, two different theories of life, and so on to distraction. The reason for it, the doctor said, was that the patient’s will, that is to say the functioning of his emotional wish-apparatus, had become deranged, and the burden of decision was being put upon a part of the mind incapable of bearing it--the logical faculty. He cured my friend’s neurosis, and now he thinks no more about the practical affairs of life than you or I or anybody else. So you see thinking is abnormal--even dangerous. Why do you want to teach children to think?

THE LADY. Well--it is rather taken for granted that the object of education is learning to think.

THE PHILOSOPHER. But is that true? If it is, why do you teach your children the multiplication table, or the rule that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides--unless in order to save them the trouble of thinking? By the way, what is the capital of Tennessee, and when did Columbus discover America?

THE LADY. Nashville, 1492. Why?

THE PHILOSOPHER You didn’t have to stop to think, did you? Your memory has been well trained. But if you will forgive the comparison, so has my dog’s been well trained; when I say, ‘Towser, show the lady your tricks,’ he goes through an elaborate performance that would gladden your heart, for he is an apt pupil; but I don’t for a moment imagine that I have taught him to think.

THE LADY. Then you don’t want children taught the multiplication table?

THE PHILOSOPHER.. I? Most certainly I do. And so far as I am concerned, I would gladly see a great many other short cuts in mathematics taught, so as to save our weary human brains the trouble of thinking about such things. I am in fact one of the Honorary Vice-Presidents of the Society for the Elimination of Useless Thinking.

THE LADY. I am afraid you are indulging in a jest.

THE PHILOSOPHER.. I am afraid I am. But if you knew Philosophers better you would realize that it is a habit of ours to jest about serious matters. It is one of our short-cuts to wisdom. Read your Plato and William James again. Delightful humorists, both of them, I assure you. I fear you went to them too soberly, and in too much of a hurry.

THE LADY. Doubtless your jokes have a historic sanctity, since you say so, but I do not feel that they have advanced our inquiry very much.

THE PHILOSOPHER. I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes. What do you want to know?

THE LADY. I want to know what is the use of thinking?

THE PHILOSOPHER. Ah, my jest was not in vain, if it provoked you to that. I should call that question the evidence of a real thought.

THE LADY. Well, what is the answer?

THE PHILOSOPHER. Oh, please don’t stop, now that you have made such a good start! Think again, and answer your own question.

THE LADY. Hm....

THE PHILOSOPHER. Yes?

THE LADY. I was thinking of Newton and the apple. If it hadn’t been for Newton’s ability to think, he would never have formulated the law of gravitation.

THE PHILOSOPHER. And what a pity that would have been--wouldn’t it?

THE LADY. You mean that it makes very little practical difference to us?

THE PHILOSOPHER. It would if the town were being bombarded. The Newtonian calculations are considered useful by the artillery schools. But it is true that it was Newton and not an artillery officer who made them.

THE LADY. You mean that the artillery captain would have been too intent on practical matters?

THE PHILOSOPHER. And in too much of a hurry. Then there’s the steam-engine. Useful invention--the very soul of hurry. Who invented it--some anxious postilion who thought horses were too slow? Or somebody whose mind was so empty of practical concerns that it could be intrigued by a tea-kettle? And by the way, it was Stephenson, wasn’t it, who applied the steam-principle to locomotion? I’ve a very poor memory, but I think Watt’s engine was just a toy. No practical use whatever. Other people found out the practical uses for it. Arkwright. Fulton. Hoe. Et cetera.

THE LADY. I see. The results of thinking may be put to use afterward, but the motive for thinking is not the desire to produce such results. I wonder if that is true?

THE PHILOSOPHER. What is the common reproach against philosophers and scientists?

THE LADY. That they are impractical. But inventors--

THE PHILOSOPHER. Did you ever know an inventor?

THE LADY. Yes....

THE PHILOSOPHER. Was he rich?

THE LADY. He starved to death.

THE PHILOSOPHER. Why?

THE LADY. Because every one said that his invention was very wonderful, but not of the slightest use to anybody.... Yes, it’s true.

THE PHILOSOPHER. That the results of thinking do not provide the motive for thinking?

THE LADY. Yes.

THE PHILOSOPHER. Then what is the motive for thinking?

THE LADY. Just--curiosity, I suppose!

THE PHILOSOPHER. Disinterested curiosity?

THE LADY. Yes.

THE PHILOSOPHER. Then in the interests of scientific truth we should cultivate disinterested curiosity?

THE LADY. Doubtless.

THE PHILOSOPHER. How would you go about doing so?

THE LADY. I don’t know.

THE PHILOSOPHER. By hurriedly thrusting upon the minds of the children in your charge so great a multitude of interests as to leave them no time to wonder about anything?

THE LADY. That would hardly seem to be the way to do it. But--

THE PHILOSOPHER. When Newton looked at his famous apple, was there anyone there who said, “Now, Newton, look at this apple. Look at this apple, I say! Consider the apple. First, it is round. Second, it is red. Third, it is sweet. This is the Truth about apples. Now let me see if you have grasped what I have told you. What are the three leading facts about apples? What! Don’t you remember? Shame on you! I fear I will have to report you to the mayor!”--did anything like that happen?

THE LADY. Newton was not a child.

THE PHILOSOPHER. You should have talked to Newton’s family about him. That is just what they said he was! I will admit that if you left children free to wonder about things instead of forcing the traditional aspects of those things upon their attention, they might not all become great scientists. But are you a great archaeologist?

THE LADY. No!

THE PHILOSOPHER. Did you ever go on a personally conducted tour of the ruins of Rome, and have the things you were to see and think pointed out to you by a guide?

THE LADY. Yes, and I hated it!

THE PHILOSOPHER. You are not a great archaeologist and you never expect to be one, and yet you thought you could get more out of those ruins yourself than with the assistance of that pesky guide. You preferred to be free--to see or not to see, to wonder and ponder and look again or pass by. And don’t you think the children in your charge might enjoy their trip a little more if they didn’t have to listen to the mechanically unctuous clatter of a guide?

THE LADY. If one could only be sure they wouldn’t just waste their time!

THE PHILOSOPHER. Madam, are you quite sure that you, as a teacher, are not wasting _your_ time?

THE LADY. You make me wonder whether that may not be possible. But sheer idleness--

THE PHILOSOPHER. Was Newton busy when he lay down under that tree? Did he have an appointment with the apple? Did he say he would give it ten minutes, and come again next day if it seemed worth while? What is disinterested curiosity, in plain English?

THE LADY. Idle curiosity--I fear.

THE PHILOSOPHER. I fear you are right. Then you would say that the way to approach Truth, in school and out, is to cultivate idle curiosity?

THE LADY. I did not intend to say anything of the kind. But you compel me to say it.

THE PHILOSOPHER. I compel you? Deny it if you wish!

THE LADY. I thought you were going to answer my questions, and you have been making me answer yours!

THE PHILOSOPHER. That is also an ancient habit of our profession. But since you have now arrived, of your own free will, at an inescapable if uncomfortable conclusion, you can now have no further need for my services, and I bid you all good day!

XXI. The Right to be Wrong

One moment!--I take it, my friends, we are agreed in demanding of the Philosopher that he condescend to some concrete and practical suggestions in regard to education.--Briefly, please!