The Culture Squabble

And a Word or Two About Russia and the Psalms

OLIVER WAKEFIELD

OFFHAND one is disposed to say that the ideas at the bottom of the modern school experiment are not half bad. Association with educated people inclines one to almost any experiment, however mad, even to the omission of any education whateyer. Happy and useful lives have been and still may be lived without any Latin, geometry or algebra. On the other hand everyone knows that the forcing of Latin, geometry and algebra in a certain manner into a certain kind of head is not education; it is persecution. Doubt as to any new plan of culture emerges only when one begins to read in the magazines what its exponents are saying. about it. Not that they ever say anything outrageous and new. On the contrary they never say anything that was not said three centuries ago; but they say it in such a manner, that you dislike to believe it is true. Why is it that the man who makes frequent use of the word "apperception" is usually such an unfortunate person? Repeating the word "apperception" ought not of itself to ruin a mind. It may be that a mind has been already in some sort damaged before the habit of saying "apperception" becomes rooted in it. Then there are the "cultural values." How hard it is after reading two pages about them in a magazine to realize that culture as the writer evidently sees it could have any value at all!

I remember reading in some Atlantic Monthly paper on culture how horrible it was that a defenceless child should be made to repeat unintelligently the words bonus, bona, bonum.

I should have thought so too perhaps, if I had not read that Atlantic Monthly paper. But bonus, bona, bonum, when you compare them with the words of the writer of that paper are not so bad after all. Sometimes a bright child will remember them without very painful exertions to the age of thirty-five. Sometimes he profits so much from this and his other Latin lessons that he can in his manhood pronounce bona fide as two words in four syllables instead of a past participle of some strange verb —to bonify. I Believe he keeps this culture willingly. But, by Heaven! so long as I have any command over my own memory, I shall not permit it to retain for me one single sentence in that Atlantic Monthly culture-paper.

AN urbane writer, with some sense of proportion, some awareness of an antecedent world, might have triumphed easily in a much worse cause; and of course it is not the fault of a new educational plan if it is supported sometimes by persons whose own intellectual condition seems rather forlorn, for perhaps no sort of education could have saved them. Certainly Latin and algebra could not have done it, as one soon sees, when he reads on the opposite side some learned defender of the classics and mathematics, apparently surcharged with both, yet apparently injured beyond repair by his own advantages. And that is precisely the impression that is left on any anxious parent who seriously observes the usual culture squabble as it comes out in the magazines. He longs to; save the child from the ultimate fate of either party to it. He would hate in after life to have. the child explode like the gentleman who is so proud of his classic contents; he would hate to see the child some day cave in like the gentleman who is so proud tobe without them. For that unsatisfactory termination is almost the rule in these violent culture contests. Each combatant before he can reach his. adversary seems to go to pieces all by himself. Never by any chance does one kill the other, though you would suppose on the first inspection of each one of them that nothing could be easier to do.

However, it is better not to apply to the respective champions in a culture contest the principle that by their fruits ye shall know them, because both sorts of culture in that case will seem so disagreeable that you may be tempted to take your children out of school. That would be unwise, for, after all, the danger that they will grow up to be educational expert magazine contributors is comparatively slight.

The Russian Faux Pas

CHARLES I was at least tried by broadbrimmed Bradshaw, whereas the Czar was deposed without trial," sighs the London Saturday Review and it blames the British government for not having "lifted a finger" in the Czar's behalf and for now "slobbering fraternally over the anarchists who flung him from the throne." That Charles was beheaded and Nicholas was not is neither here nor there from the point of view of this fine old bulwark of gentility. To kill a king, as the Saturday Review would say, may be violence, but it is not incompatible with the etiquette of revolutions, and above all it is not un-English. To remove him from the throne abruptly, almost casually, is worse than an act of violence; it is distinctly bad form. It is the sort of thing one really cannot do and still remain a gentleman.

Not that the Saturday argues about it. Why argue about a thing that any well-bred person must feel in his bones? Everybody who is anybody knows that the right sort of people do not brush away a monarch as if he were a beetle or a broom-straw; there are formalities to be observed. Nor would the right sort of British government care to have anything to do with revolutionaries so lacking in any sense of the proper thing in revolutions. The Saturday is not so illiberal as to condemn revolutions, depositions, regicides and the like, but it does draw the line at a sort of brusquerie which, if persisted in, will ruin them as impressive political occasions. One can be a revolutionist without being positively coarse.

As to the British, government it should have broken with the Russian revolutionists the moment it perceived that their methods departed from those of. the High Court of Justice at Westminster Hall in 1649. It might have been sufficient explanation simply to send the Russian provisional government a copy of Gardiner's Civil War in England, as showing conclusively how that sort of thing ought always to be done. If more had been needed, it should have informed the Russian Provisional government that the deposition of Charles I was from the British point of view a model deposition and that since , in their deposition of Nicholas the Russians had either wilfully, or through carelessness, departed from that model in several respects, the situation had become intolerable. It should hive pointed out that the Russian deposition of 1917 was inferior to the English one of 1649 not only in the number and length of the speeches delivered but in solemnity, and it should have concluded with the unanswerable question, Where was your broad-brimmed Bradshaw?—unless in view of a possible re-adjustment in future these words were thought to have too sharp a sting. But op the whole, the actually wording of the ultimatum should not have been undertaken by the government itself. It should have been entrusted to some one in the office of the Saturday Review, if possible to this same connoisseur in depositions.

Softening the Psalms

HAT if the ungodly are froward from their mother's womb, and speak lies as soon as they are born, and are venomous as the poison of a serpent, even like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ears, the average congregation is never so dangerously stirred up about it that the Church of England need suppress all mention of the thing. To cut out the entire 58th psalm and all the imprecations in nine of the others seems rather a needless precaution on the part of the Church. An eminent canon who defends it says it is "an insult to the Divine Majesty" to use such words as "May I dip my feet in the blood of my enemies," but surely that depends on the person who says it and the occasion on which it is said. If one makes a personal application of it, say to the people next door, in whose blood one wishes to wade just as soon as divine service is over, it is, I admit, unseemly. But, read as a familiar quotation by a mild-faced young man in a white garment, with a voice that soothes rather than inebriates; read by elderly ladies in the pew ahead, it obviously does not imply the slightest murderous inclination.

"Break their teeth, oh, God, in their mouths, smite their jaw-bones," are violent words, no doubt, and if addressed by a prize-fighter to the heavenly throne as an instant appeal for professional co-operation, they would certainly be, as the critics say, un-churchmanlike. But when they are read in church no violent feelings are ever engendered; on the contrary the occasion is almost too serene.

Grant that; as critics say, all-such imprecations are expressions of "barbaric rage"; it does not follow that any member of the congregation will rage barbarously when he hears them quoted. Indeed he seldom does. And when the congregation mumbles in response a few good, round, Old Testament curses, the most anxious observer cannot fail to see that .the congregation means no mischief; in fact he will often doubt if it really means anything at all. When the family in the third pew speak of "washing their footsteps in the blood of the ungodly" they are not thinking of doing anything of the sort. A psalmodic imprecation incites no Anglican congregation to undesirable acts of vengeance; it incites it only to attempt a degree of vocal unity that it never by any chance attains. Quotations from an ancient poem are not likely to mean too much to any modem congregation. The chief danger seems to be that they do not mean enough.