The one thing men have not learned to do is to stick up for their own instinctive feelings, against the things they are taught. The trouble is, we are all caught young. Little boys are trundled off to school at the age of five, and immediately the game begins, the game of enslaving the small chap. He is delivered over into the hands of schoolmistresses, young maids, middle-aged maids, and old maids, and they pounce on him, and with absolute confidence in their own powers, their own rightness, and their own superiority, they begin to “form” the poor little devil. Nobody questions for a moment the powers of these women to mould the life of a young man. The Jesuits say: Give me a child till he is seven, and I will answer for him for the rest of his life. — Well, schoolmistresses are not as clever as Jesuits, and certainly not as clear as to what they are about, but they do the trick, nevertheless. They make the little boy into an incipient man, the man of today.
Now I ask you, do you really think that schoolmistresses are qualified to form the foundations of a man? They are almost all excellent women, and filled with the best of motives. And they have all passed some little exam, or other. But what, in the name of heaven, qualifies them to be the makers of men? They are all maids: young maids, middling maids, or old maids. They none of them know anything about men: that is to say, they are not supposed to know anything about men. What knowledge they have must be surreptitious. They certainly know nothing about manhood. Manhood, in the eyes of the schoolmistress, and especially the elderly schoolmistress, is something uncalled-for and unpleasant. Men, in the pleasant opinions of schoolmistresses, are mostly grown-up babies. Haven’t the babies all been through the mistress’s hands, and aren’t the men almost identically the same?
Well, it may be so! It may be that men nowadays are all grown-up babies. But if they are, it is because they were delivered over in their tenderest years, poor little devils, to absolute petticoat rule; mothers first, then schoolmistresses. But the mother very quickly yields to the schoolmistress. It is amazing what reverence ordinary women have for the excellent old-maid mistress of the infants’ school. What the mistress says is gospel. Kings are no more kings by divine right, but queens are queens and mistresses, mistresses straight from God. It is amazing. It is fetish-worship. And the fetish is goodness.
“Oh, but Miss Teacher is so good, she’s awfully good,” say the approving mothers, in luscious voices. “Now, Johnny, you must mind what Miss Teacher says, she knows what is best for you. You must always listen to her!”
Poor Johnny, poor little devil! On the very first day it is: “Now, Johnny dear, you must sit like a good little boy, like all the other good little boys.” And when he can’t stand it, it is: “Oh, Johnny dear, I wouldn’t cry if I were you. Look at all the other good little boys, they don’t cry, do they, dear? Be a good little boy, and teacher will give you a teddy-bear to play with. Would Johnny like a teddy-bear to play with? There, don’t cry! Look at all the other good little boys. They are learning to write — to write! Wouldn’t Johnny like to be a good little boy, and learn to write?”
As a matter of fact, Johnny wouldn’t. At the bottom of his heart, he doesn’t in the least want to be a good little boy and learn to write. But she comes it over him. Dear teacher, she starts him off in the way he must go, poor little slave. And once started, he goes on wheels, being a good little boy like all the other good little boys. School is a very elaborate railway system where good little boys are taught to run upon good lines till they are shunted off into life, at the age of fourteen, sixteen, or whatever it is. And by that age the running-on-lines habit it absolutely fixed. The good big boy merely turns off one set of rails on to another. And it is so easy, running on rails; he never realizes that he is a slave to the rails he runs on. Good boy!
Now the funny thing is that nobody, not even the most conscientious father, ever questions the absolute rightness of these school-marms. It is all for dear little Johnny’s own good. And these school-marms know absolutely what Johnny’s own good is. It is being a good little boy like all the other good little boys.
But to be a good little boy like all the other good little boys is to be at last a slave, or at least an automaton, running on wheels. It means that dear little Johnny is going to have all his own individual manhood nipped out of him, carefully plucked out, every time it show a little peep. Nothing is more insidiously clever than an old ma; fingers at picking off the little shoots of manhood as they sprout from a growing boy, and turning him into that neutral object, little boy. It is a subtle, loving form of mutilation, and absolutely believe in it. “Oh, but I want him to be a good boy!” She fails to remember how bored she gets with her good-boy husband. Good boys are very nice to mothers and schoolmistresses. But as men, they make a wishy-washy nation.
Of course, nobody wants Johnny to be a bad little boy. One would like him to be just a boy, with no adjective at all. But that is impossible. At the very best schools, where there is most “freedom,” the subtle, silent compulsion towards goodness is perhaps strongest. Children are all silently, steadily, relentlessly bullied into being good. They grow up good. And then they are no good.
For what does goodness mean? It means, in the end, being like everybody else, and not having a soul to call your own. Certainly you mustn’t have a feeling to call your own. You must be good, and feel exactly what is expected of you, which is just what other people feel. Which means that in the end you feel nothing at all, all your feeling has been killed out of you. And all that is left is the artificial stock emotion which comes out with the morning papers.
I think I belong to the first generation of Englishmen that was really broken in. My father’s generation, at least among the miners where I was brought up, was still wild. But then my father had never been to anything more serious than a dame’s school, and the dame, Miss flight, had never succeeded in making him a good little boy. She had barely succeeded in making him able to write his name. As for his feelings, they had escaped her clutches entirely: as they escaped the clutches of his mother. The country was still open. He fled away from the women and rackapelted with his own gang. And to the end of his days his idea of life was to escape over the fringe of virtue and drink beer and perhaps poach an occasional rabbit.
But the boys of my generation were caught in time. We were sent at the ripe age of five to Board-schools, British schools, national schools, and though there was far less of the Johnny dear business, and no teddy-bear, we were forced to knuckle under. We were forced on to the rails. I went to the Board-school. Most of us, practically all, were miners’ sons. The bulk were going to be miners themselves. And we all hated school.
I shall never forget the anguish with which I wept the first day. I was captured. I was roped in. The other boys felt the same. They hated school because they felt captives there. They hated the masters because they felt them as jailers. They hated even learning to read and write.
The endless refrain was: “When I go down pit you’ll see what —
sums I’ll do.” That was what they waited for: to go down pit, to escape, to be men. To escape into the wild warrens of the pit, to get off the narrow lines of school.
The schoolmaster was an excellent, irascible old man with a white beard. My mother had the greatest respect for him. I remember he flew into a rage with me because I did not want to admit my first name, which is David. “David! David!” he raved. “David is the name of a great and good man. You don’t like the name of David? You don’t like the name of David!” He was purple with indignation. But I had an unreasonable dislike of the name David, and still have, and he couldn’t force me into liking it. But he wanted to.
And there it was. David was the name of a great and good man, so I was to be forced to like it. If my first name had been Ananias or Ahab, I should have been excused. But David! no! My father, luckily, didn’t know the difference between David and Davy of the safety-lamp.
But the old schoolmaster gradually got us under. There were occasional violent thrashings. But what really did the trick was not the thrashing, but the steady, persistent pressure of: Honest, decent lads behave in my way, and no other. — And he got the lads under. Because he was so absolutely sure he was right, and because mothers and fathers all agreed he was right, he managed pretty well to tame the uncouth colliery lads during the six or seven years he was responsible for them. They were the first generation to be really tamed.
With what result? They went down pit, but even pit was no more the happy subterranean warren it used to be. Down pit everything was made to run on lines, too, new lines, up-to-date lines; and the men became ever less men, more mere instruments. They married, and they made what the women of my mother’s generation always prayed for, good husbands. But as soon as the men were good husbands, the women were a tiresome, difficult, unsatisfied lot of wives, so there you are! Without knowing it, they missed the old wildness, and were bored.
The last time I was back in the Midlands was during the great coal strike. The men of my age, the men just over forty, were there, standing derelict, pale, silent, with nothing to say, nothing to do, nothing to feel, and great hideous policemen from God-knows-where waiting in gangs to keep them on the lines. Alas, there was no need. The men of my generation were broken in; they’ll stay on the lines and rust there. For wives, schoolmasters and employers of labour it is perhaps very nice to have men well broken in. But for a nation, for England, it is a disaster.