NEPHEWS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Southland Times, Issue 23740, 11 February 1939, Page 14

NEPHEWS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

(SPECIALLY WRITTEN FOR THE SOUTHLAND TIMES)

By

PROFESSOR F. SINCLAIRE.

I take my text from a story which, if it is not true, cries urgently to be invented. The widow of the poet Shelley, being about to decide on a school for her son, was advised by one of her friends to send him to a place where he would be taught to think for himself. “Oh, my God!” retorted Mrs Shelley. “Send him to a school where he will be taught to think like other people.” A reactionary utterance, flatly at variance with the principles of the Newest Education. I cannot help it I am a bit of an educationist myself; and since I am about to call attention to a weakness in our educational system, I may as well let the cat out of the' bag at once. I say then, that there are people who have a right to be reacti6nary, who have earned that right as a martyr’s crown.. If ever there was such a person, it was the woman who had to put up with Godwin for a father and Shelley for a husband. She had done considerably more than her duty, I should say, by advanced thinkers and their thoughts. From vegetarianism to the doctrine of human perfectibility, there was not much she had missed. That cry from a women’s common sense had in it not only ■ more worldly wisdom —which would not be saying much—than you will find in the theories of the two men of genius she had had. to live with, but perhaps a saner criticism of life, and at least' an illuminating and damaging commentary on her domestic experience of the theorists. Yes, there is a good deal to be said for Mrs Shelley as educationist; and if she could keep that sort of thing up, or maintain anything like the level of that one remark, I should have liked to hear her give a course of lectures on education. a «rnnnr. for UNCLES

A SCHOOL lUK UNLLLS At any rate, I adopt her golden maxim, though I purpose to give it a somewhat special application. As a habitual examiner, I'have reason to believe that, in spite of the vast strides we make almost daily in educational reform, there are still plenty of schools where the young are taught to think like the old. What I want is a school for the deserving old and elderly, where they shall be taught to think like the young; where —to adapt another and more famous saying—uncles shall think their nephews’ thoughts after them. So far as I know, there is no such institution. Nor is the want of it at all adequately supplied by- the generous private malevolence of the young. Their uncovenanted asperities are too sporadic to be really effective. The educatioh we uncles get from our nephews and nieces is desultory and scrappy.. It lacks .consecutiveness. What is needed is to bring it into line with the rest of our educational system,, and by dint of . organization, systematization, co-ordina-tion, and above all, standardization, to get the last ounce of efficiency out of it. Take my own case. (I speak as an uncle, the mouthpiece of an underrated and neglected section of the community.) Being, as my young friends tell me, scientifically and politically ineducable—“bonehead” is the word I think I have heard them use—l must confine my educational aspirations to the field of the arts. In the more robust idiom of my. juniors, my escape from life is into literature and music, and not—these are my words, not theirs—into psychology or communism. Now since, whether you like it or not, the world contains many people of the same sort, the question is, what can the young do for them? I can only repeat my proposal. I want a place where I can learn the right opinions, a depot or clearing house with a satisfactory card-index system, where I can go at any reasonable time and procure the latest standard opinion —the 1939 model—about D. H. Lawrence or Tennyson or Brahms; where I can be told authoritatively which authors and composers I must drop like hot bricks, and which I must take to my bosom, which to laugh at and which to be very solemn about. I want to be kept posted about changes in the critical wind and punctually informed of new apparitions in the sky of art. If not a school, I want at least

an efficient bureau of aesthetic meteorlogy. And why not? lam asking for nothing more than the organization of what already exists in a highly unsatisfactory state of disorganization. A COURSE OF JOYCE An illustration may serve to bring home to my readers the inadequacy of the rough-and-ready methods which are at present generally adopted by the young in the education of the old. It is now some eight or nine years since a young enthusiast took me in hand and gave me a course of James Joyce. My own unaided lights had carried me no further in that author than the book called “The Dubliners,”

the reading of which—l speak, remember, of the impressions of a self-taught student—had left me with the feeling that if Dubliners were ; really like that, I should not be greatly grieved to hear some morning that the Liffey had suddenly risen a few yards above its banks. However, with the aid of my instructor, I was quite willing to begin all over again. If the experiment proved, as it did, a failure, I make bold to say that the fault was not

wholly mine. In the effort to, be in the know about Joyce, I claim that I dared to do all that might become I followed the prescribed course of reading; I turned up to my friend’s tutorials; I faced the searchlight of his questions; I endured his disdain; I bored my way through “Ulysses.” I admit that, being only flesh and blood, I

furtively 1 skipped an occasional parenthesis of 40 or 50 pages, and that when I parted with Ulysses I did not feel at all like Calypso, who was, you remember, inconsolable. All these things, I say, I did, and to what end? I ever more came out by the same door by which I entered in. If I made no progress, I say again that the fault was not wholly mine. It was, I maintain, the impatience of my teacher, his inhuman pedantry, his godlike superciliousness, his delight in tallrincr nvpr rnv hpad. that, lost the

in. talking over my head, that lost tne day and spoiled all.' I have sometimes heard people say that Shakespeare was spoiled for them at. school. That is where Joyce was spoiled for me. Young people, give us better schools, or we perish in our ignorance! “AND A WEARY WIDE SPACE” One incident in my Joycean studies

has recently been brought back to my mind. It belongs to the elementary stage when it was still Joyce without tears. My “blandus doctor” was still encouraging me with’ the "easier” things, and the day was yet far in the future when, with the gesture of a ' head master presenting a bright pupil with a copy of Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” and an air of pride in his pupil which I fear was ironical, he was to put into my hand a volume of “Ulysses,” with the remark, “You can now read anything of Joyce.” ! One of those easier exercises had been the fable of “The Mookse and The Gripes.” The opening paragraph of this fable I have just come across in a work on Modern Prose Style, by Mr Bonamy Dobree. It is- too long to quote here, but the opening sentence may serve to give a taste of its quality: “Eins within a space and a weary wide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse.” On this passage Mr ’Dobree makes the same comment as was made by my young mentor. “It’s one of the simpler passages,” and “there is no difficulty about it if we know a little German.” I can only say to Mr Dobree what I said to my own teacher, that I am not going to learn German for the sake of Mr Joyce or of anybody else. Like one of my betters, I have a head with few compartments, and those not spacious, but such as they are, I will furnish them in my own way. X=PYE? And that reminds me that when I enrol in the school for the elderly, there is one condition on which I must insist. My teachers must deny themselves the pleasure of telling me, as often as I speak disrespectfully of those brilliant young modems, Mr X and Miss Z, that if I had lived a century ago I should probably have been talking in the same way about Wordsworth and Keats. It is very possible. What does not follow is that Mr X and Miss Z are the Wordsworth and the Keats of this generation. They

may still only be the pye and the Mrs Hernans. But the new writers are the least part of the problem of senile education. Any or all of them you can doggedly ignore, if only you have the courage to brazen it out. Like Plato’s wise man, you can shelter under a wall till they have blown over. The reading of one’s contemporaries is nowhere set down by any of the world’s great moralists as part of the whole duty of man. Ido not see why we should bow down before those idols of the clique—for what is the whole of our generation but a clique in comparison with the vast company of the dead who have not read our contemporaries and of the unborn who will hot read them? The major prob- ' lem is, I say, to keep decently abreast of the incessant and kaleidoscopic revaluation of old and (one thought) t more or less settled reputations. THE GREAT FAILURES For here, too, as some old philosopher remarked, all things flow. I have just been reading some volumesof modern critical essays. Among the writers who come up for examination in these volumes are Scott, Byron, Bunyan, and Tennyson. Of these four candidates for contemporary approbation three get a dead plough and only the fourth passes with distinction. Scott, I learn from this bulletin, is a bom story teller, but alas, the man has no style, no constructive ability, no brains, no literary morals, the last offence, being merely aggravated by the soundness of' his commercial morals. (We who have loved Scott since our race began were aware of many flaws in his work, but we preferred to love without magnifying glasses.) As for Byron, he was not only a thoroughly despicable fellow—a twopenny poet and a farthing man—a vulgar insolent ' silly affected malignant cad and charlatan—but “emphatically” not a poet, who nevertheless (we are told) is “alive for evermore” because, cad and twopenny poet as he was, he contrived to write inimitable satires. It 'is strange! Scott and Byron fail; but Tennyson—ah. Tennyson is the boy! He passes brilliantly. If he ' has a peer, it is, as I learn from another essay, “the little nightingale,” better known as Alexander Pope. But Bunyan—let us draw a veil over the modem revelation of his commonplaceness and his diabolism. Suffice it to say that the revaluation of Bunyan sent me back to Mr Bernard Shaw’s eloquent eulogy—forty or fifty years old, it is true—and I found myself murmuring, in my bewilderment, “I wish they had let me alone.”

I know, of course, that it is not good to be let alone, and that these frequent revaluations are both legitimate and necessary. It is good to be jolted out of the ruts; but the good life, I submit, consists in more than a succession of jolts. Even on the jolty trip I have just made through those volumes of criticism, there have been moments of pleasure. One who has been faithful to Tennyson through thick and thin and has for 20 years been predicting a Tennysonian revival was not above the pleasure of saying when he read Tennyson’s name in the list of passes, “I told you so.” The moral seems to be that if you can ‘keep alive long enough, and will stick to your own predilections, you will some day wake up to find yourself fashionabje. The difficulty is to cut a decent figure at any given moment of the intervening months. Only the young can help us there. But will they? This article—l take the words out of their mouths—will have shown them how great is the need.