MR. SHAW'S "PARENT'S ASSISTANT."* "WHAT a pity that so great
a man should have been so badly brought up," said Talleyrand of the Emperor Napoleon. When we consider the autobiographical vignettes which stand out from the particolonred background of Mr. Shaw's Treatise on Parents and Children, we feel inclined to echo the remark. Many people will object that Mr. Shaw is not a great man, hut we contend that a very respectable case can be made out for ranking him with the great. If he is sometimes waspish, superficial; prosy, he' undoubtedly is possessed of a singular power of popularizing abstract thought. Ile takes truths about education which had long slumbered, unread save by the passing antiquarian, in the pages of Maria Edgeworth, of Sara Coleridge, or even of Mrs. airmen°. He mixes them with a good many exhilarating and optimistic condemnations, a few butterfly references to Nietzsche, and one or two rather penetrating " marginalia " of his own, and, finally, he forces the astonished general public not only to read these educational truths, but even to reflect upon them. He has the gift of popular appeal, and he has the gift of stinging his readers into thought. When the mosquito sings we all listen.
After what we have just said, we must not, we suppose, cavil at his receipt for dressing thought into a palatable dish; but if one grumble may be allowed us—need we, must we, have so many capers in the sauce P Some of these which concern the ordinary attitude of mind of boys and girls are- calculated to spoil the appetite even of the most tolerant who should chance to know anything about the young ; for example, the dicta that all boys bate their school work, that they either fear or bate and despise their schoolmasters, that children do not love their homes, that they do not love their parents, that they are only prevented from running away from home by the coercion of parents and a crushing sense of having nowhere to go to. Has Mr. Shaw ever seen a homesick child ? Has Mr. Shaw ever seen a child at all? The following passage seems to infer that he has not: "Affection between adults (if they are really adult in mind and
• Misalliance, The Dark Lady of the Sonnet., and Fanny's First Play; with a Treatise an Parente and Ohildron. By Bernard Shaw, London: Constable and CO. Oa]
not merely grown-up children) and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or mean- ing it, cannot be called natural in fact the evidence shows that it is easier to love the company of a dog than of a commonplaee child between the ages of six and the beginnings of cootrolled maturity."
And again 1— "The nuisance [i.e., a child's society] becomes more and more intolerable as the grown-up person becomes more cultivated, more sensitive, and more deeply engaged in the highest methods of adult work."
As Gibbon says in a note in regard to a third- or fourth. century monkish story, "this statement seems probable, but is certainly false."
The care of children is, of course, a form of work, and if two pieces of work be carried on together by the same person a certain amount of friction will result. But we can assure him that there are a very considerable number of people of both sexes who agree with Lady Mary Wortley Moutagu in preferring "the noise of a nursery to the music of the opera." Of this we may say, indeed "It sounds improbable, but is certainly true." As to Mr. Shaw's dicta on the sickening and. festering evil of life at boys' schools, they are so uncommonly absurd that we cannot help believing that he has in this instance allowed himself the "sensual luxury" (his own phrase on the delight of schoolmasters in the cane) of some excellent rhetorical passages of abuse. Now abuse is no doubt more soothing to its author than any other species of rhetoric, but surely it cannot be just—justice is always Mr. Shaw's foible—to indulge in this luxury at the expense of others, even of schoolmasters. Indeed, Mr. Shaw as good as tells us that it is wrong: "Christ stands in the world for that institution of the highest humanity, that we, being members of one another, must not complain, must not scold, must not strike, nor revile, nor persecute, nor revenge, nor punish." And yet in the next breath he exhausts the resources of Roget's Thesaurus in calling names.
The reader will perhaps ask : "Why should Mr. Shaw suddenly concern himself so ferociously with education ?" We believe that the answer is that, having long realized that a change of heart in the human race is necessary to the success of Socialism, he has at last very wisely appreciated the fact that only in childhood can the heart be moulded to his desire, and being of a combative nature he has lightened his constructive labour by a few refreshing kicks all round at existing institutions. And in truth we still do a good deal that were better left undone. Did Mr. Shaw, we wonder, ever read the letters of Sara Coleridge, that wise and sweet-eyed theologian ? Probably not ; probably, indeed, he will think we owe him an apology for bringing in so futile a person as the poet's daughter. And yet we shall risk Mr. Shaw's ire and
quote 1—
"I think the present hard-working, over-busy, over-striving age, somewhat over-does the positive part of education and forgets the efficacy of the negative. Not to make children irreligious by dosing them with religion unskilfully administered—not to make them self-important by charging them on no account to be con- ceited. . not to create disgust or excite hypocrisy by attempting to pour sensibility, generosity, and other such good qualities, which cannot be supplied from without, but must well up from within, by buckets full into their hearts—not to cram them with knowledge which their minds are not mature enough to digest (such as Political Economy) the only result of which will be to make them little superficial coxcombs j—in short, to give nature elbow room, and not to put swathes on their minds, now we have left off lacing them upon their infant bodies, to trust more to happy influences and less to direct tuition, not to defeat our own purpose by over- anxiety, and to recollect that the powers of education are even more limited than those of circumstances, that nature and God's blessing [Mr. Shaw calls it 'the drive of the Life Pores'] are above all things, and to arm ourselves against the disappointment that may attend our best-directed and most earnest endeavours; all these considerations, I think, are treated too slightingly in the present day."
These humane and. luciferous words constitute, in fact, a summary of most of the constructive teaching of Parente and Children. There are also a certain number of arguments running counter to this, for the treatise is a little inclined to be self-contradictory. But, on the whole, Mr. Shaw is almost always on the aide of the angels, in spite of his occasional fits of sell-indulgence in words for words' sake. And, above all, as we said before, he knows how to make big readers reflect. Our systems of education may be held to be good or bad, but in neither case will it do them any sort of harm to be thought about, nay, attacked. The public, indeed, owes it
debt of fervent gratitude to anyone who will take the trouble to make it "sit up and take notice" about any conceivable subject in the world. And this debt of gratitude it now owes to Mr. Shaw, whether his opinions be new or old, Bedlainite or sober.
As for the remainder of the volume, Misalliance is an amusing, rollicking, if slightly nauseous, farce ; the preface to The Dark Lady of the Sonnets is dull, and the play itself but mediocre ; while Fanny's First Play — all but the critics' Induction and Epilogue, which are admirable—reads perhaps a trifle less well than it acts. Our business to-day, however, is not with Mr. Shaw the playwright, but Mr. Shaw the universal schoolmaster "laming" his colleagues to be school- masters.
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