THE POETRY OF IGNORANCE.
IT is unthinkable at the present day that the humblest class should once more give birth to a folk-lore. No songs, no romances, no superstitions even, are coming upwards from there. Here and there fragmentary survivals suggest the imaginative wealth of the past. The fairies are dead, the ghosts are gone, the saints hold no converse with men, and there is no healing power in their bones. Nature means nothing to the humblest class, and they do not know the mean- ing of romance. A new St. Francis could not get a following. The very poor are utterly prosaic. Or, if we must modify this perhaps too sweeping statement, we would say that their imagination work& only in one direction, and that a moral one. They are very kind, kinder than the peasantry who understood St. Francis. They live in the actual, look neither before nor after, and have apparently lost their memories. No traditions survive. No class carries out so literally as the least wealthy class the injunction to forget the things that are behind. For them the words "alteration" and "improvement" have become almost synonymous. As a rule their educated friends take the fact of this new materialism for granted, and explain it by pointing to the hard physical conditions of their lives. But are those conditions any harder than they were P Have they any less leisure or any more suffering than formerly P Heaven forbid ! It is obvious that their lot has improved. Their extraordinary good temper proves them to suffer less. The temper of the crowd has altered amazingly for the better. Is it not to mental rather than to physical conditions that we must look to understand the strange atrophy which has taken hold of one side of their minds P There are now no entirely uneducated people. The eight or nine years' teaching provided by the State gives the able boy the power to learn anything. It does not give it to the lazy or to the stupid, and it seldom gives it to the boy who comes out of a home which is below the fluctuating level that is called the poverty line. He struggles against instruction till he is fourteen, when the struggle ends in success. Education is supposed to develop the imagination, and so no doubt it does in large enough doses. A very little seems to have a precisely opposite effect. A. little instruction is a negative kind of thing. It clears away ignorance and puts nothing in its place. It may be compared to the burning of weeds, which are noisome or beautiful according to where they are found. A little teaching explains nothing, but it carries home the conviction that all things are explicable, and thus destroys the sense of wonder. For instance, in the slightly educated people whom it is the fashion to call " simple " such a marvellous thing as wireless telegraphy creates no sense of astonishment. They look on it as a "new improvement" like another. To them it is no more wonderful to get a message from an instrument than it is to get water from a tap. The ordinary person does not know exactly how it is done, but the plumber understands the one, and some other sort of workman understands the other. "It is quite simple when you know how." "We could explain it," the uneducated suppose, "if it happened to be our job." That a cinematograph should reproduce exactly scenes from the other side of the world does not impress them either. The pictures reproduced may give the greatest pleasure, but the wonder of the whole thing hardly occurs to them. If for a moment they are moved to think about it, the mystery is soon set at rest by some one who "knows a man that works at it," and who can explain in a moment how it is done. The most complicated of scientific discoveries take in their minds the proportions of a trick. Talking of tricks, very often one may see the same mental defect in children. Even the lowest form of the marvellous does not astonish a stolid child. There is nothing more disappointing than to take a certain type of child to a conjuring display. Nothing but the comic or dramatic side of the performance strikes him. He laughs if a rabbit comes out of his hat, but he does not wonder how it got there. "It was put there, of coarse," he says. But how P That does not interest him. The man put it there ; that is his work. Again, it is possible among very intelligent children to observe the way in which a little knowledge may for a while appear to arrest the growth of the imagination. The conversation of his elders will often arouse in a child a keen interest in a subject., or even in an art, of which he may technically know nothing. He dreams of it all day long, and his dreams in some incomprehensible way nourish him mentally. But when once he begins to grind at the subject his keenness is gone. The teacher destroys his dreams, and gives him dull statements in their place.
But to return to grown-up people of little education. An instance of the dull acceptance of the astonishing is the wny in which the wonderful cures effected at hospitals affect
the minds of those who do not think. The doctors know how to do it. It is nothing wonderful when you know how, it is again their work, and of course they understand it, as we all should if it happened to be ours. When the pilgrims went to the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury they saw fewer wonders, only no one pretended to understand them, and the mystery of the whole thing impressed their souls and fired their imaginations. In regard to facts their minds were underfed. They flourished mentally, when they did flourish, upon faith, and their descendants are un- developed for want of it. There is no mental substitute for the thought of the supernatural. Without a sense of mystery the human mind seems incapable of coming to perfection. Mystery is, after all, its natural element, coming as we do out of the dark, and going back as we must into the dark.
Again, a little instruction seems very largely to have destroyed the sense of worship in "simple" people. To say that the lowest class is no longer religions is absurd. While men love and die they will look to God, but worship in the ordinary sense of the word, public worship, might, unless a change comes over the mind of the mass, be in danger of dying out. They do not know what it means. Pleasure in public worship might perhaps be called the patriotism of religion. Among the poorest class it has ceased to exist.. We have eradicated superstition—and pulled up the wheat with the tares. There is now no mystery to their minds about a church, and no great good to be got by going there. A man can pray anywhere. It is not necessary to sit in church for an hour and a half in order to formulate a few petitions. Church is connected in their thoughts with "clubs " and " sermons " and " singing." It is the clergyman's job to see that all these things are properly kept up. He understands it, and they do not; but if it were their business they would. The atmo- sphere of miracle hung about churches long after the Reformation had thrown down their altars. Some Presence was there which the brushing away of ignorance has for the moment rendered invisible.
It is among the highly instructed that we must now look for "simplicity." It is they who stand dumbfounded before the miracles of science, whose imagination is nourished by mystery, in whom alone the poetry of ignorance survives. It is they who collect the dreams of the past, and realize that they are precious—the dreams which were the outcome of a sense of ignorance. It is they who still look for cures not wrought by doctors but by will—new miracles which they dream will bring back the faith of the world. It is the highly educated who concern themselves with superstitions now; they who think about ghosts, who cling to the hope of a proof that the dead are alive. It is they who worship, they who dream of an unseen Presence in the House of God. They are passing out of the stage of mental self-satisfaction. Suddenly upon the educated there has fallen a conviction of ignorance, and it is bringing them back to simplicity—not back in their steps, but back by a very long way round. It is a strange reversal of positions, and one the effects of which are as yet impossible to foresee. In a new and very true sense, the first are once more last and the last first.
Previous page
