Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence, page 1056
If I could, I would make my own boots and my own trousers and coats. I suppose even now I could if I would. But in Rome one must do as Rome does: the bourgeois is not worth my while, I can’t demean myself to epater him, and I am much too sensitive to my own isolation to want to draw his attention.
Although in Rome one must do as Rome does; and although all the world is Rome today, yet even Rome falls. Rome fell, and Rome will fall again. That is the point.
And it is to prepare for this fall of Rome that we conjure up a new system of education. When I say that every boy shall be taught cobbling and boot-making, it is in the hopes that before long a man will make his own boots to his own fancy. If he likes to have Maltese sandals, why, he’ll have Maltese sandals; and if he likes better high- laced buskins, why, he can stalk like an Athenian tragedian. Anyhow he’ll sit happily devising his own covering for his own feet, and machine-made boots be hanged. They even hurt him, and give him callosities. And yet, so far, he thinks their machine-made standardized nullity is perfection. But wait till we have dealt with him. He’ll be gay-shod to the happiness and vanity of his own toes and to the satisfaction of his own desire. And the same with his trousers. If he fancies his legs, and likes to flutter on his own elegant stem, like an Elizabethan, here’s to him. And if he has a hankering after scarlet trunk-hose, I say hurray. Chacun a son gout: or ought to have. Unfortunately nowadays nobody has his own taste; everybody is trying to turn himself into a eunuch Mr. Everyman, standardized to his collar-stud. A woman is a little different. She wants to look ultra-smart and chic beyond words. And so she knows that if she can set all women bitterly asking “Isn’t her dress Paquin?” or “Surely it’s Poiret,” or Lucile, or Cheruit, or somebody very Parisian, why, she’s done it. She wants to create an effect: not the effect of being just herself, her one and only self, as a flower in all its spots and frills is its own candid self. Not at all. A modern woman wants to hit you in the eye with her get-up. She wants to be a picture. She wants to derive her own nature from her accoutrements. Put her in a khaki uniform and she’s a man shrilly whistling K-K-K-Katie. Let her wear no bodice at all, but just a row of emeralds and an aigrette, and she’s a cocotte before she’s eaten her hors-d’oeuvre, even though she was a Bible worker all her life. She lays it all on from the outside, powders her very soul.
But of course, when the little girls from our schools grow up they will really consider the lily, and put forth their flowers from their own roots. See them, the darlings, the women of the future, silent and rapt, spinning their own fabric out of their own instinctive souls — and cotton and linen and silk and wool into the bargain, of course — and delicately unfolding the skirts and bodices, or the loose Turkish trousers and little vests, or whatever else they like to wear, evolving and unfurling them in sensitive form, according to their own instinctive desire. She puts on her clothes as a flower unfolds its petals, as an utterance from her own nature, instinctive and individual.
Oh, if only people can learn to do as they like and to have what they like, instead of madly aspiring to do what everybody likes and to look as everybody would like to look. Fancy everybody looking as everybody else likes, and nobody looking like anybody. It sounds like Alice in Wonderland. A well-dressed woman before her mirror says to herself, if she is satisfied: “Every woman would like to look as I look now. Every woman will envy me.”
Which is absurd. Fancy a petunia leaning over to a geranium and saying: “Ah, miss, wouldn’t you just love to be in mauve and white, like me, instead of that common turkey-red!” To which the geranium: “You! In your cheap material! You don’t look more than one-and-a-ha’penny a yard. You’d thank your lucky stars if you had an inch of chiffon velvet to your name.”
Of course, a petunia is a petunia, and a geranium is a geranium. And I’ll bet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Why? Because he was trying to cut a dash and look like something beyond nature, overloading himself. Without doubt Solomon in all his nakedness was a lovely thing. But one has a terrible misgiving about Solomon in all his glory. David probably unfolded his nakedness into clothes that came naturally from him. But that Jewish glory of Solomon’s suggests diamonds in lumps. Though we may be wrong, and Solomon in all his glory may have moved in fabrics that rippled naturally from him as his own hair, and his jewels may have glowed as his soul glowed, intrinsic. Let us hope so, in the name of wisdom.
All of which may seem a long way from the education of the people. But it isn’t really. It only means to say, don’t set up standards and regulation patterns for people. Don’t have criteria. Let every individual be single and self-expressive: not self-expressive in the self-conscious, smirking fashion, but busy making something he needs and wants to have just so, according to his own soul’s desire. Everyone individually and spontaneously busy, like a bird that builds its own nest and preens its own feathers, busy about its own business, alone and unaware.
The fingers must almost live and think by themselves. It is no good working from the idea, from the fancy: the creation must evolve itself from the vital activity of the fingers. Here’s the difference between living evolving work and that ideal mental business we call “handicraft instruction” or “handwork” in school today.
Dozens of high-souled idealists sit today at hand-looms and spiritually weave coarse fabrics. It is a high-brow performance. As a rule it comes to an end. But sometimes it achieves another effect. Sometimes actually the mind is lulled, by the steady repetition of mechanical, productive labour, into a kind of swoon. Gradually the idealism moults away, the high-brow resolves into a busy, unconscious worker, perhaps even a night-and-day slogger, absorbed in the process of work.
One should go to the extremity of any experience. But that one should stay there, and make a habit of the extreme, is another matter. A great part of the life of every human creature should pass in mindless, active occupation. But not all the days. There is a time to work, and a time to be still, a time to think, and a time to forget. And they are all different times.
The point about any handwork is that it should not be mind- work. Supposing we are to learn to solder a kettle. The theory is told in a dozen words. But it is not a question of applying a theory. It is a question of knowing, by direct physical contact, your kettle- substance, your kettle-curves, your solder, your soldering-iron, your fire, your resin, and all the fusing, slipping interaction of all these. A question of direct knowing by contact, not a question of understanding. The mental understanding of what is happening is quite unimportant to the job. If you are of an inquiring turn of mind, you can inquire afterwards. But while you are at the job, know what you’re doing, and don’t bother about understanding. Know by immediate sensual contact. Know by the tension and reaction of the muscles, know, know profoundly but for ever untellably, at the spontaneous primary centres. Give yourself in an intense, mindless attention, almost as deep as sleep, but not charged with random dreams, charged with potent effectiveness. Busy, intent, absorbed work, forgetfulness, this is one of the joys of life. Thoughts may be straying through the mind all the time. But there is no attention to them. They stream on like dreams, irrelevant. The soul is attending with joy and active purpose to the kettle and the soldering- iron; the mindless psyche concentrates intent on the unwilling little rivulet of solder which runs grudgingly under the nose of the hot tool. To be or not to be. Being isn’t a conscious effort, anyhow.
So we realize that there must be a deep gulf, an oblivion, between pedagogy and handwork. Don’t let a pedagogue come fussing about in a workshop. He will only muddle up the instincts.
Not that a schoolmaster is necessarily a pedagogue. Poor devil, he starts by being a man, and it isn’t always easy to turn a man into that thing. And therefore many a schoolmaster is a thousand times happier turning a lathe or soldering a kettle than expounding long division. But the two activities are incompatible. Not incompatible in the same individual, but incompatible with each other. So, separate the two activities. Let the pedagogue of the morning disappear in the afternoon. If he appears in a workshop, let it be before children who have not known him as a school-teacher.
And in the workshop, let real jobs be done. Workshops may be mere tin sheds, or wooden sheds. Let the parents send the household kettles, broken chairs, boots and shoes, simple tailoring and sewing and darning and even cooking, to the workshop. Let the family business of this sort be given to the children, who will set off to the work-shed and get the job done, under supervision, in the hours of occupation. A good deal can be done that way, instead of the silly theoretic fussing making fancy knickknacks or specimen parts, such as goes on at present.
What we want is for every child to be handy: physically adaptable, and handy. If a boy shows any desire to go forward in any craft, he will have his opportunity. He can go on till he becomes an expert. But he must start by being, like Jack at sea, just a handy man. The same with a girl.
Let the handwork be a part of the family and communal life, an extension of family life. Don’t muddle it up with the mindwork. Mindwork at its best is theoretic. Our present attempts to make mindwork “objective” and physical, and to instil theoretic mathematics through carpentry and joinery is silly. If we are teaching arithmetic, let us teach pure arithmetic, without bothering with piles of sham pennies and shillings and pounds of sham sugar. In actual life, when we do our shopping, every one of our calculations is made quickly in abstraction: a pure mental act, everything abstracted. And let our mental acts be pure mental acts, not adulterated with “objects.” What ails modern education is that it is trying to cram primal physical experience into mental activity — with the result of mere muddledness. Pure physical experience takes place at the great affective centres, and is de facto pre-mental, non-mental. Mental experience on the other hand is pure and different, a process of abstraction, and therefore de facto not physical.
If our consciousness is dual, and active in duality; if our human activity is of two incompatible sorts, why try to make a mushy oneness of it? The rapport between the mental consciousness and the affective or physical consciousness is always a polarity of contradistinction. The two are never one save in their incomprehensible duality. Leave the two modes of activity separate. What connexion is necessary will be effected spontaneously.
XI
The essence of most games, let us not forget, lies in the element of contest: contest in force, contest in skill, contest in wit. The essence of work, on the other hand, lies in single, absorbed, mindless productivity. Now here again we have done our best to muck up the natural order of things. All along the line we have tried to introduce the mean and impoverishing factor of emulation into work-activities, and we have tried to make games as little as possible contests, and as much as possible fanciful self-conscious processes.
Work is an absorbed and absorbing process of productivity. Introduce this mean motive of emulation, and you cause a flaw at once in the absorption. You introduce a worm-like arriere-pensee; you corrupt the true state. Pah, it makes us sick to think of the glib spuriousness which is doled out to young school-teachers, purporting to be “theory of education.” The whole system seems to be a conspiracy to falsify and corrupt human nature, introduce an element of meanness, duplicity, and self-consciousness. Emulation is a dirty spirit, introduced into work, a petty, fostered jealousy and affectation. And this is true whether the work be mental or physical.
On the other hand, rivalry is a natural factor in all sport and in practically all games, simple, natural rivalry, the spirit of contest.
Again let us draw attention to a duality in the human psychic activity. There is the original duality between the physical and the mental psyche. And now there is another duality, a duality of mode and direction chiefly: the natural distinction between productive and contestive activities. The state of soul of a man engaged in productive activity is, when pure, quite distinct from that of the same man engaged in some competitive activity.
Let us note here another fatal defect in our modern system. Having attempted, according to ideals, to convert all life and all living into one mode only, the productive mode, we have been forced to introduce into our productive activities the spirit of contest which is original and ineradicable in us. This spirit of contest takes the form of competition: commercial, industrial, spiritual, educational, and even religious competition.
Was ever anything more humiliating than this spectacle of a mankind active in nothing but productive competition, all idea of pure, single-hearted production lost entirely, and all honest fiery contest condemned and tabooed? Here is the clue to the bourgeois. He will have no honest fiery contest. He will have only the mean, Jewish competition in productivity, in money-making. He won’t have any single, absorbed production. All work must be a scramble of contest against some other worker.
Is anything more despicable to be conceived? How make an end of it? By separating the two modes. By realizing that man is in at least one-half of his nature a pure fighter — not a competitor competing for some hideous silver mug, or some pot of money — but a fighter, a contester, a warrior.
We must wake again the flashing centres of volition in the fierce, proud backbone, there where we should be superb and indomitable, where we are actually so soft. We can move in herds of self-sacrificing heroism. But laughing defiance has gone out of our shop-keeping world.
And so for the third part of education, games and physical instruction and drill. We are all on the wrong tack again. In the elementary schools physical instruction is a pitiful business, this Swedish drill business. It is a mere pettifogging attempt to turn the body into a mental instrument, and seems warranted to produce nothing but a certain sulky hatred of physical command, and a certain amount of physical self-consciousness.
Physical training and Sandowism altogether is a ridiculous and puerile business. A man sweating and grunting to get his muscles up is one of the maddest and most comical sights. And the modern athlete parading the self-conscious mechanism of his body, reeking with a degraded physical, muscular self-consciousness and nothing but self-consciousness, is one of the most stupid phenomena mankind has ever witnessed. The physique is all right in itself. But to have your physique in your head, like having sex in the head, is unspeakably repulsive. To have your own physique on your mind all the time: why, it is a semi-pathological state, the exact counterpoise to the querulous, peevish invalid.
To have one’s mind full of one’s own physical self, and to have one’s own physical self pranking and bulging under one’s own mental direction is a good old perversion. The athlete is perhaps, of all the self-conscious objects of our day, the most self-consciously objectionable.
It is all wrong to mix up the two modes of consciousness. To the physique belongs the mindless, spontaneous consciousness of the great plexuses and ganglia. To the mind belongs pure abstraction, the idea. To drag down the idea into a bulging athletic physique; and to drag the body up into the head, till it becomes an obsession: horror.
Let the two modes of consciousness act in their duality, reciprocal, but polarized in difference, not to be muddled and transfused. If you are going to be physically active, physically strenuous and conscious, then put off your mental attention, put off all idea, and become a mindless physical spontaneous Consciousness.
Away with all physical culture. Banish it to the limbo of human prostitutions: self-prostitution as it is: the prostitution of the primary self to the secondary idea.
If you will have the gymnasium: and certainly let us have the gymnasium: let it be to get us ready for the great contests and games of skill. Never, never let the motive be self-produced, the act self- induced. It is as bad as masturbation. Let there be the profound motive of battle. Battle, battle; let that be the word that rouses us to pure physical efforts.
Not Mons or Ypres, of course. Ah, the horror of machine explosions! But living, naked battle, flesh-to-flesh contest. Fierce, tense struggle of man with man, struggle to the death. That is the spirit of the gymnasium. Fierce, unrelenting, honourable contest.
Let all physical culture be pure training: training for the contest, and training for the expressive dance. Let us have a gymnasium as the Greeks had it, and for the same purpose: the purpose of pure, perilous delight in contest, and profound, mystic delight in unified motion. Drop morality. But don’t drop morality until you’ve dropped ideal self-consciousness.
Set the boys one against the other like young bantam cocks. Let them fight. Let them hurt one another. Teach them again to fight witii gloves and fists, egg them on, spur them on. Let it be fine balanced contest in skill and fierce pride. Egg them on, and look on the black eye and the bloody nose as insignia of honour, like the Germans of old.
Bring out the foils and teach fencing. Teach fencing, teach wrestling, teach ju-jutsu, every form of fierce hand-to-hand contest. And praise the wounds. And praise the valour that will be killed rather than yield. Better fierce and unyielding death than our degraded creeping life.
We are all fighters. Let us fight. Has it come down to chasing a poor fox and kicking a leather ball? Heaven, what a spectacle we should be to the Lacedaemonian. Rouse the old male spirit again. The male is always a fighter. The human male is a superb and godlike fighter, unless he is contravened in his own nature. In fighting to the death he has one great crisis of his being.
What, are we going to revoke our own being? Are we going to soften and soften in self-sacrificial ardour till we are white worms? Are we going to get our battle out of some wretched competition in trade or profession?
We will have a new education, where a black eye is a sign of honour, and where men strip stark for the fierce business of the fight.
