A Treatise on Parents and Children

By art teaching I hasten to say that I do not mean giving children / lessons in freehand drawing and perspective. I am simply calling / attention to the fact that fine art is the only teacher except torture. / I have already pointed out that nobody, except under threat of torture, / can read a school book. The reason is that a school book is not a work / of art. Similarly, you cannot listen to a lesson or a sermon unless the / teacher or the preacher is an artist. You cannot read the Bible if you / have no sense of literary art. The reason why the continental European / is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the / Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of / literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless. / To read a dull book; to listen to a tedious play or prosy sermon or / lecture; to stare at uninteresting pictures or ugly buildings: nothing, / short of disease, is more dreadful than this. The violence done to our / souls by it leaves injuries and produces subtle maladies which have / never been properly studied by psycho-pathologists. Yet we are so inured / to it in school, where practically all the teachers are bores trying / to do the work of artists, and all the books artless, that we acquire / a truly frightful power of enduring boredom. We even acquire the notion / that fine art is lascivious and destructive to the character.

In church, in the House of Commons, at public meetings, we sit solemnly listening to bores and twaddlers because from the time we could walk or speak we / have been snubbed, scolded, bullied, beaten and imprisoned whenever we / dared to resent being bored or twaddled at, or to express our natural / impatience and derision of bores and twaddlers. And when a man arises / with a soul of sufficient native strength to break the bonds of this / inculcated reverence and to expose and deride and tweak the noses of our / humbugs and panjandrums, like Voltaire or Dickens, we are shocked and / scandalized, even when we cannot help laughing. Worse, we dread and / persecute those who can see and declare the truth, because their / sincerity and insight reflects on our delusion and blindness. We are / all like Nell Gwynne's footman, who defended Nell's reputation with his / fists, not because he believed her to be what he called an honest woman, / but because he objected to be scorned as the footman of one who was no / better than she should be.