French & English

This chapter is very difficult to write, because I shall have to deal with what cannot be accurately ascertained. A man can hardly know how far he has been successful in the moral training of his own sons. As to the boys in the nearest school, he may ascertain what is taught them by their masters, but he cannot know the effects of the teaching on the formation of their characters; that can only be known much later, if at all. And when we pass to distant schools our knowledge must be so general and so vague that no trustworthy argument can be founded upon it.

The truth is that moral training is chiefly an affair of personal influence, and that influence of this kind is a special gift. For example, Dr. Arnold had the gift in the supreme degree, but a man might be placed in control of the same educational machinery and yet be destitute of it.

However, some general truths may be taken note of, and they may help us to understand the subject so far as it can be said to be intelligible.

First, you require material to work upon in a national moral sense, and here I have just said that the English have the advantage. The moral sense is (on the whole and in spite of many exceptions) very much stronger in England than in France. The English (except their men of the world) still retain in a great degree the healthy state of moral feeling which is capable of being really shocked and horror-stricken by turpitude and vice; the French lose this freshness of feeling very early in life, and look upon turpitude and vice very much as an English man of the world looks upon them, as a part of the nature of things too familiar to excite surprise. It does not follow that they themselves are base and vicious, but they know too much, and they know it too early, about the evil side of life.

The English, too, have a great advantage in the possession of a national institution which exists far more for moral training than for anything else. The Church of England is much less of a theocracy than the Church of Rome, and much more of a moral influence over the ordinary laity. Its clergy are nearer to the laity than the Roman Catholic clergy are, and their influence is on the whole a more pervading and efficient influence. The great difficulty about the moral training of the young is that it can only be done well and efficiently by authority. Ecclesiastical institutions invest the teacher with this authority far better than any others. The clerical teacher, with the Church behind him, is free from the perplexing task of reasoning about morals; he has only to require obedience. His very costume separates him from all laymen, and gives a weight and seriousness to his teaching that they cannot impart to theirs. For this reason almost all parents, until recent years, have been anxious to place their children under the authority of priests, and have often done so when they themselves had no belief in theological doctrines. They did not seek the theocratic power, but the moral power that was connected with it.

In course of time, however, a most formidable difficulty arises. Clerical education may be morally most beneficial, but it can only be so whilst the pupil himself is a sincere believer. If he is not, the effect of clerical education is not moral, but the contrary, as it compels him to learn the arts of dissimulation. The clergy do not say in plain terms that deceit and imposture are virtues; they class them, nominally, in the category of vices, but the intelligent pupil soon perceives that he is rewarded for practising them and punished for not practising them. “Many unbelievers,” said a truthful Frenchman to me, “come out of our clerical seminaries, but the acquired habit of dissimulation remains with them, and they are never plain and straightforward in after life.” Perhaps it may be said that I attach too much importance to truthfulness, that a certain degree of dissimulation is necessary in the world, and that it may as well be learned at school as in practical affairs. I only know that truthfulness is one of the social virtues, though it is often directly contrary to the interests of those who practise it. Being a social virtue, and favourable to public interests, it ought to be encouraged in public education. Now, it so happens, whether for good or evil, that the majority of French laymen of the educated classes are unbelievers, and I say that no moral purpose can be answered by bringing them up in habits of hypocrisy. I am told by those who are in a position to judge accurately, that is to say, by intelligent men who have lived all their lives in the University, that four out of every six professors are Agnostics, and that the proportion amongst the present generation of their pupils is even larger. Under these circumstances the idea of handing over the national University to the priests is inadmissible by any one who cares for liberty of conscience; and if the reader thinks that liberty of conscience is a luxury for Protestants only, and that Agnostics have no right to it, I cannot agree with him.

Unfortunately, however, it is found in practice that liberty of thought in religious matters not being itself founded upon authority, but on the exercise of individual reason, is unfavourable to moral authority, especially over the young. In fact, reason and authority are incompatible. We rule our children by authority when they are young, without stopping to reason; when they are grown up we endeavour to influence them by reason, but our authority, as such, has departed. The Church of Rome avoids this difficulty by founding all her teaching on authority. Even when she condescends to reason, every one knows that the principle of authority is behind and can be used, like a royal prerogative, to cut short discussion at any moment.

Now, as a matter of simple fact, it must be admitted that the moral authority of French lay teachers is inadequate. They have not the power of the priests, nor even of the English clergy. And the consequence is that a new generation of Frenchmen is growing up under insufficient moral control. I make no attempt to disguise the evil, but cannot see how it was to have been avoided. It is an evil which lies before every country in Europe as the authority of religion becomes relaxed. Meanwhile, lay education, if not morally so strong as one might desire, is at least producing a generation of young men who are frank and fearless, and have an unaffected contempt for sneaks and hypocrites of all kinds.

What is wanted is a class of lay principals with something like the moral authority of Dr. Arnold; but would Dr. Arnold have possessed that authority, or anything approaching to it, if he had been a layman?

I myself have known very intimately and for many years a French principal who would have delighted in exercising Arnold’s power for good if he had possessed it, but he was a layman only, and did not possess it.

In family life there may be a kind of sacerdotal authority in the head of the household when he exercises a sacerdotal function, when he compels his household to join him in family prayer and to listen respectfully whilst he reads and expounds the sacred books. The father assumes in that manner a moral authority that is not easily assumed in any other way.

Still, in many French families, the father is anxious to do what he can, and this is one of his strongest reasons against clerical education in the ecclesiastical seminaries. The clerical teachers, in their desire to establish an uncontested religious influence over the boys, look upon the father and mother as rivals, and do not permit the boys to return home, except during the vacations, even when the parents live in the very town where the seminary itself is situated. In this way home influence is almost annihilated, and clerical influence substituted for it. But the moralising and civilising power of the home influence may be too precious to be sacrificed, and, as a matter of fact, when the children are educated by laymen, it is almost the only influence of that kind that remains. In France it is especially the mother who civilises boys. Lads who are too much shut up in the lycées may get what the French call “instruction,” but they do not get what is called “education.” The pupils imprisoned in the ecclesiastical seminaries acquire, certainly, an oily smoothness of manner and a much greater degree of docility than the lycéens, because they have been more thoroughly broken in.

In England the home influences are much undervalued. Wealthy English parents soon despair of doing anything themselves for the moral training of their children, so they “pack them off” to some distant school to be placed under the influence of masters whom they have never seen and of whom nothing is really known except that they are in holy orders. If an Englishman has been educated at home, or even near home, he is generally rather ashamed of it, and unless he is exceptionally forcible in after life he is likely to be despised for it. Still, the boy must be born in very unfortunate circumstances whose father and mother could not, if they chose, do more for his moral training than a schoolmaster who has perhaps fifty to attend to without the parental interest in any of them. The worst of the distant-school system is that it deprives the home residence that remains of all beneficial discipline, for the boys are guests during the holidays, and the great business is to amuse them. Then they go away to follow some profession, and the father, as he thinks over his fond dreams of companionship and paternal influence, may reckon (if the now useless calculation can still interest him) for how many months or weeks that influence has been directly operative in the whole course of his children’s lives.

For this reason the English grammar schools, though despised because they are cheap and easily accessible to the middle classes, may have a better effect on the family life of the country than the fashionable public schools. The idea would be to get both good home education and good school education at the same time, especially when the parents have the luck to live in the country. Rural life is good for boys, both physically and mentally; it gives them a healthy interest in a thousand things, especially in a rudimentary kind of natural history, and it prevents them from acquiring the premature cynicism and sharpness that are amongst the most undesirable characteristics of young Parisians.

The root of the moral difficulty is that the natural world is non-moral, and the natural world is all we have to appeal to when the various forms of the supernatural have all equally been rejected. After that we may argue that morality, in the most comprehensive sense, is the only sound basis for human societies, and that all social interests are on the side of it. That, no doubt, is true, and it is a good subject for sound reasoning, but reason is not authority, it is only an attempt to persuade, and the boyish nature detests moral lecturing.

Boys, too, are sharp enough to perceive that all morality is abandoned by common consent in the dealings between nations. Both England and France have been thoroughly immoral in their dealings with weaker States, and in recent times Germany has shown herself no better. It is difficult to maintain fine moral theories in countries whose practice so openly contradicts them. Even the authoritative moral teaching of the English clergy, which may have had a good effect on the private lives of their pupils, has not given them anything like stern rectitude of judgment concerning foreigners; for the English aristocracy admired Louis Napoleon, certainly one of the lowest characters that ever existed. It was also entirely on the side of the immoral slave power in the United States.

The one great anxiety that torments thoughtful Englishmen, and still more thoughtful Frenchmen, in the present day, is the establishment of an accepted moral authority. I am able to perceive only one that might be efficacious, and that is a severe public opinion. It may be answered that public opinion exists already; and so no doubt it does, but chiefly to reward conformity and punish nonconformity in externals. We want a public opinion that would sustain and encourage every one in the practice of unostentatious virtues, especially in temperance, self-denial, and simplicity of life. As an example of what might be I may mention the French disapproval of debt. That is extremely strong, and as it is accompanied by the permission to live simply it does really operate as an effective restraint upon extravagance, at least in provincial life. The American disapproval of idleness, even in the rich, is another case in point, and in the English upper classes there is a general and salutary disapproval of everything that is held to be ungentlemanly. Notwithstanding what has been said in this chapter about the want of moral authority in laymen, they can effect something by combination. For example, military men are laymen, yet they keep up amongst themselves a splendid spirit of courage and self-sacrifice, and so do physicians and surgeons, with the addition of a manly charity and tenderness.