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The New Machiavelli Chapter 2 Part 1 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter two, Section one of the New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells.
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  Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
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  Speaker 1: Antoniogus Bromsteed and my father one. I dreamt first of
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  Speaker 1: states and cities and political things when I was little
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  Speaker 1: boy and knickerbockers. When I think of how such things
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  Speaker 1: began in my mind, there comes back to me the
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  Speaker 1: memory of an enormous bleak room, with its ceiling going
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  Speaker 1: up to heaven, and its floor covered irregularly with patched
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  Speaker 1: and defective oilcloth, and a dingy mat or so, and
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  Speaker 1: a surround, as they call it, of dark stained wood.
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  Speaker 1: Here and there against the wall are trunks and boxes.
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  Speaker 1: There are cupboards on either side of the fireplace, and
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  Speaker 1: book shelves with books above them. And on the wall,
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  Speaker 1: and rather tattered, is a large yellow, varnished geological map
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  Speaker 1: of the south of England. Over the mantle is a
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  Speaker 1: huge lump of white coral rock and several big fossil bones.
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  Speaker 1: And above that hangs the portrait of a brainy gentleman,
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  Speaker 1: sliced in half and displaying an interior of intricate detail
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  Speaker 1: and much vigor of coloring. It is the floor I
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  Speaker 1: think of chiefly over the oil cloth of which assumed
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  Speaker 1: to be land spread towns and villages and forts of
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  Speaker 1: wooden bricks. There are steep square hills, geologically volumes of
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  Speaker 1: oree cyclopage of the Sciences, And the cracks and spaces
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  Speaker 1: of the floor, and the bare brown surround were the
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  Speaker 1: water channels and open sea of that continent of mine.
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  Speaker 1: I still remember with infinite gratitude the great uncle to
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  Speaker 1: whom I owe my bricks. He must have been one
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  Speaker 1: of those rare adults who have not forgotten the chagrin
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  Speaker 1: and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous West of
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  Speaker 1: England builder. Including my father, he had three neviews, and
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  Speaker 1: for each of them he caused a box of bricks
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  Speaker 1: to be made by an out of work carpenter. Not
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  Speaker 1: the insufficient supply of the toy shop, you understand, but
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  Speaker 1: a really adequate quantity of bricks made out of oak
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  Speaker 1: and shaped and smoothed bricks about five inches by two
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  Speaker 1: and a half by one and half bricks, and quarter
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  Speaker 1: bricks to correspond. There were hundreds of them, many hundreds.
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  Speaker 1: I could build six towers as high as myself with them,
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  Speaker 1: and there seemed quite enough for every engineering project I
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  Speaker 1: could undertake. I could build whole towns with streets and houses,
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  Speaker 1: and churches and citadels. I could bridge every gap in
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  Speaker 1: the oil cloth, and make causeways over crumpled spaces which
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  Speaker 1: I feigned to be morasses. And on a keel of
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  Speaker 1: whole bricks, it was possible to construct ships to push
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  Speaker 1: over the high seas to the remotest port in the room.
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  Speaker 1: And a discipline population that rose at last by sedulus,
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  Speaker 1: begging on birthdays and all convenient occasions, to well over
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  Speaker 1: two hundred of lead sailors and soldiers, horsefoot and artillery
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  Speaker 1: inhabited this world. Justice has never been done to bricks
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  Speaker 1: and soldiers by those who write about toys. The praises
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  Speaker 1: of the toy theater have been a common theme for essayists.
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  Speaker 1: The planning of the scenes, the painting and cutting out
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  Speaker 1: of the cast penny plain tuppence colored, the stink and
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  Speaker 1: glory of the performance, and the final conflagration. I had
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  Speaker 1: such a theater once, but I never loved it nor
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  Speaker 1: hoped for much from it. My bricks and soldiers were
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  Speaker 1: my perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests
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  Speaker 1: there was the mystery and charm of the implicated buildings
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  Speaker 1: one could make with long passages and steps and windows
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  Speaker 1: through which one peeped into their intricacies, And by means
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  Speaker 1: of slips of card, one could make slanting ways in
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  Speaker 1: them and send marbles rolling from top to base, and
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  Speaker 1: thence out into the hold of a waiting ship. Then
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  Speaker 1: there were the fortresses and gun emplacements and covered ways
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  Speaker 1: in which one soldiers went. And there was commerce, the
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  Speaker 1: shops and markets and store rooms full of nasturtium seed,
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  Speaker 1: thrift seed, looping beans, and such like provinda from the garden.
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  Speaker 1: Such stuff one stored in match boxes and pill boxes,
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  Speaker 1: or packed in sacks of old gloved fingers, tied up
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  Speaker 1: with thread, and sent off by wagons along the great
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  Speaker 1: military road to the beleague of fortress on the Indian frontier,
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  Speaker 1: beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps, and there
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  Speaker 1: were battles on the work. That great road is still
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  Speaker 1: clear in my memory. I was given. I forget by
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  Speaker 1: what benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians have lead. I
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  Speaker 1: have never seen such soldiers since. And for these my
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  Speaker 1: father helped me to make tepes of brown paper, and
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  Speaker 1: I settled them in a hitherto desolate country under the
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  Speaker 1: frowning nail studded cliffs of an ancient trunk. Then I
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  Speaker 1: conquered them and garrisoned their land alas they died, no
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  Speaker 1: doubt through contact with civilization, one my mother trod on,
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  Speaker 1: and their land became a wilderness again, and was ravaged
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  Speaker 1: for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast proportions,
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  Speaker 1: and out towards the coal Scuttle was a region near
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  Speaker 1: the impassable thickets of the Ragged Hearth Rug, where lived
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  Speaker 1: certain China zulus brandishing spears, and a mountain country of
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  Speaker 1: rudely piled bricks, con seeling the most devious and enchanting caves,
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  Speaker 1: and several mines of gold and silver paper. Among these
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  Speaker 1: rocks a number of survivors from a Noah's ark made
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  Speaker 1: of various dangerous, albeit frequently invalid, and crippled fauna. And
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  Speaker 1: I was wont to increase the uncultivated wildness of this
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  Speaker 1: region further by trees of privet twigs from the garden
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  Speaker 1: hedge and box from the garden borders. By these territories
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  Speaker 1: went my imperial road, carrying produce to and fro bridging
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  Speaker 1: gaps in the oil cloth tunneling through encyclopedic hills. One
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  Speaker 1: tunnel was three volumes long, defended as occasion required by
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  Speaker 1: camps of paper tents or brick blockhouses, and ending at
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  Speaker 1: last in a magnificently engineered ascent to a fortress on
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  Speaker 1: the cliffs commanding the Indian Reservation. My games upon the
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  Speaker 1: floor must have spread over several years and developed from
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  Speaker 1: small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion, and now that they stretch.
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  Speaker 1: I suppose from seven to eleven or twelve. I played
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  Speaker 1: them intermittently, and they bulk now in the retrospect far
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  Speaker 1: more significantly than they did at the time. I played
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  Speaker 1: them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods
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  Speaker 1: through the spring and summer. I was mostly out of doors,
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  Speaker 1: and school and classes caught me early, and in the
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  Speaker 1: retrospect I see them all not only magnified and transfigured,
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  Speaker 1: but foreshortened and confused together. A clockwork railway, I seemed
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  Speaker 1: to remember, came and went one or two clockwork boats,
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  Speaker 1: toy sailing ships that, being keeled, would do nothing but
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  Speaker 1: lie on their beam ends on the floor. A detestable
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  Speaker 1: lot of cavalry men, undersized and guilt all over, given
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  Speaker 1: me by a maiden aunt, and very much what one
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  Speaker 1: might expect from an aunt that I used as Nero
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  Speaker 1: used his Christians to ornament my public buildings, and I
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  Speaker 1: finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and Therewith blew the
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  Speaker 1: rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a
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  Speaker 1: brass cannon in the garden. I find this empire of
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  Speaker 1: the floor much more vivid and detailed in my memory
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  Speaker 1: now than many of the owners of the skirts and
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  Speaker 1: legs and boots that went gingerly across its territories, occasionally
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  Speaker 1: alas they stooped to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction
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  Speaker 1: the slow growth of whole days of civilized development. I
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  Speaker 1: still remember the hatred and disgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah,
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  Speaker 1: I was given warnings, did I disregard them. Coarse red
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  Speaker 1: hands would descend, plucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from ships,
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  Speaker 1: jumbling them up up in their wrong boxes clumsily so
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  Speaker 1: that their rifles and swords were broken, sweeping the splendid
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  Speaker 1: curves of the Imperial Road into heaps of ruins, casting
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  Speaker 1: the jungle growth of zululand into the fire. Well. Master Dick,
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  Speaker 1: the voice of this cosmic calamity, would say, you ought
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  Speaker 1: to have put my way last night. No, I can't
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  Speaker 1: wait until you have sailed them all away in ships.
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  Speaker 1: I got my work to do, and do it I will,
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  Speaker 1: and in no time all my continents and lands were
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  Speaker 1: swirling water and swiping strokes of house flannel. That was
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  Speaker 1: the worst of my giant visitants. But my mother, too,
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  Speaker 1: dear lady, was something of a terror to this microcosm.
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  Speaker 1: She wore spring sided boots, a kind of boot now vanished,
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  Speaker 1: I believe, from the world, with dull bodies and shiny toes,
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  Speaker 1: and a silk dress with flounces that were very destructive
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  Speaker 1: to the more hazardous viaducts of the Imperial Road. She
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  Speaker 1: was always, I seemed to remember, fetching me, fetching me
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  Speaker 1: for a meal, fetching me for a walk, or detestable absurdity,
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  Speaker 1: fetching me for a wash and brush up. And she
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  Speaker 1: never seemed to understand anything whatever of the political systems
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  Speaker 1: across which she came to me. Also, she forbade all
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  Speaker 1: toys on Sundays except the bricks for church building and
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  Speaker 1: the soldiers for church parade, or a scriptural use of
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  Speaker 1: the remains of the Noah's ark mixed up with a
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  Speaker 1: wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know
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  Speaker 1: whether a thing was a church or not unless it
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  Speaker 1: positively bristled with cannon. And many a Sunday afternoon have
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  Speaker 1: I played Chicago with the fear of God in my heart,
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  Speaker 1: under an infidel predense that it was a new sort
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  Speaker 1: of arc. Rather elaborately done Chicago, I must explain, was
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  Speaker 1: based upon my father description of the pig slaughterings in
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  Speaker 1: that city, and certain pictures I had seen. You made
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  Speaker 1: your beasts, which were all the arc lot really provisionally
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  Speaker 1: conceived as pigs go up elaborate approaches to a central pen,
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  Speaker 1: from which they went down a cardboard slide, four at
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  Speaker 1: a time, and dropped most satisfyingly down a brick shaft
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  Speaker 1: and pit a litter over some steep steps to wear
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  Speaker 1: a head. Slaughter man Nay Noah, strung a cotton loop
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  Speaker 1: round their legs and sent them by pin hooks along
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  Speaker 1: a wire to a second slaughter man with a chipped foot,
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  Speaker 1: formerly Missus Noah, who, if I remember, rightly converted them
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  Speaker 1: into army sausage by means of a portion of the
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  Speaker 1: inside of an old Alarum clock. My mother did not
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  Speaker 1: understand my games, but my father did. He wore bright
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  Speaker 1: collared socks and carpet slippers when he was indoors. My
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  Speaker 1: mother disliked boots in the house, and he would sit
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  Speaker 1: down on my little chair and survey the microcosm on
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  Speaker 1: the floor with admirable understanding and sympathy. It was he
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  Speaker 1: who gave me most of my toys, and I more
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  Speaker 1: than suspect most of my ideas. Here's some corrugated iron,
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  Speaker 1: he would say, suitable for roofs and fencing, And hand
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  Speaker 1: me a lump of that stiff, crinkled paper that is
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  Speaker 1: used for packing medicine bottles or dick Do you see
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  Speaker 1: the tiger loose near the Imperial Road? Won't do for
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  Speaker 1: your cattle ranch? And I would find a bright new
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  Speaker 1: lead tiger, like a special creation, large in the world
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  Speaker 1: and demanding a hunting expedition and much elaborate effort to
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  Speaker 1: get him safely housed in the city menagerie beside the
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  Speaker 1: captured dragon crocodile tame now and his key lost, and
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  Speaker 1: the heart and spring gone out of him, and to
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  Speaker 1: the various irregular reading of my father. I owe the
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  Speaker 1: inestimable blessing of never having a boy's book in my boyhood,
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  Speaker 1: except those of Jules Verne. But my father used to
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  Speaker 1: get books for himself and me from the Bromsted Institute.
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  Speaker 1: Fenimore Cooper and main read and illustrated histories, one of
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  Speaker 1: the Russo Turkish War and one of Napier's expedition to Abyssinor.
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  Speaker 1: I read from end to end Stanley and Livingstone, lives
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  Speaker 1: of Wellington, Napoleon, and Garibaldi, and back volumes of Punch
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  Speaker 1: from which I derived conceptions of foreign and domestic politics.
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  Speaker 1: It has taken years of adult reflection to correct. And
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  Speaker 1: at home permanently we had Wood's Natural History, a brand
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  Speaker 1: new illustrated Green's History of the English People, Irving's Companions
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  Speaker 1: of Columbus, a great number of unbound parts of some
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: geographical work, a Voyage around the World I think it
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  Speaker 1: was called, with pictures of foreign places and class New Testament,
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  Speaker 1: with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: informing books. Bought at sales. There was a Sowerbys Botany,
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  Speaker 1: also with thousands of carefully tinted pictures of British plants,
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  Speaker 1: and one or two other important works. In the sitting
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  Speaker 1: room I was allowed to turn these over and even
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  Speaker 1: lie on the floor with them on Sundays and other
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  Speaker 1: occasions of exceptional cleanliness. And in the attic I found
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  Speaker 1: one day a very old, forgotten map after the fashion
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  Speaker 1: of a bird's eye view representing the Crimea that fascinated
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  Speaker 1: me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with
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  Speaker 1: a pin two. My father was a lank limbed man
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  Speaker 1: in easy, shabby tweed clothes and with his hands in
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  Speaker 1: his trouser pockets. He was a science teacher, taking a
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: number of classes at the Bronsted Institute in Kent under
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: the old Science and Art Department, visiting various schools, and
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: our resources were eked out by my mother's income of
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  Speaker 1: nearly one hundred pounds a year and by his inheritance
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: of a terrace of three palatial but structurally unsound stucco
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: houses near Bromsteed's Station. They were big, clumsy residences in
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  Speaker 1: the earliest Victorian style, interminably high and with deep damp
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: basements and downstairs coal cellars and kitchens that suggested an
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: architect vindictively devoted to the discomfort of the servant class.
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  Speaker 1: If so, he had overreached himself and defeated his end,
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: for no servant would stay in them, unless for exceptional wages,
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  Speaker 1: or exceptional tolerance of inefficiency, or exceptional freedom in repartee.
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  Speaker 1: Every store in the house was from twelve to fifteen
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  Speaker 1: feet high, which would have been cool and pleasant in
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: a hot climate, and the stairs went steeply up to
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  Speaker 1: end at last in attics to inaccessible for occupation. The
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  Speaker 1: ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical design, fragments of
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  Speaker 1: which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, and the wallpapers were bold
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  Speaker 1: and gigantic in pattern, and much variegated by damp and
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: ill mended rents. As my father was quite unable to
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: let more than one of these houses at a time,
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  Speaker 1: and that for the most part to eccentric and undesirable tenants,
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: he thought it politic to live in one of the
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: two others and devote the rent he received from the
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  Speaker 1: let one when it was let to the incessant necessary
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  Speaker 1: repairing of all three. He also did some of the
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: repairing himself, and smoking a bulldog pipe the while, which
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: my mother would not allow him to do. In the house,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: he cultivated vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual, and not always
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: successful manner in the unoccupied garden. The three houses faced north,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: and the back of the one we occupied was covered
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: by a grape vine that yielded I remember small green
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: grapes for pies in the spring, and imperfectly right black
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: grapes in favorable autumns for the purposes of dessert. The
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: grapevine played an important part in my life, for my
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: father broke his neck while he was pruning it when
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: I was thirteen. My father was what is called a
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: man of ideas, but they were not always good ideas.
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  Speaker 1: My grandfather had been a private schoolmaster and one of
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  Speaker 1: the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: had assisted him in his school until increasing competition and
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: small private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered. Thereupon,
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: my father had roused himself and had qualified as a
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in
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  Speaker 1: these days had charge of the scientific and artistic education
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: of the mass of the English population, and had thrown
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: himself into science teaching, and the earning of government grants,
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  Speaker 1: therefore with great, if transitory zeal and success. I do
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  Speaker 1: not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic time.
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  Speaker 1: I was the child of my parents middle years. They
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  Speaker 1: married when my father was thirty five and my mother
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: passed forty, and I saw only the last decadent phase
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: of his educational career. The Science and Art Department has
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  Speaker 1: vanished altogether from the world, and people are forgetting it now.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: With the utmost readinous and generosity part of its substance
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: and staff and spirit survive more or less completely digested
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: into the Board of Education. The world does move on,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: even in its government. It is wonderful how many of
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: the clumsy and limited governing bodies of my youth and
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: early manhood have given place now to more scientific and
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: efficient machinery. When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: now a borough, was ruled by a strange body called
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: a local board. It was the age of boards, and
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: devastating control of a metropolitan Board of Works. Then there
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: were also school boards. I was already practically in politics
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: tentacles of the London County Council. It gives a measure
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: of the newness of our modern ideas of the state
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: to remember that the very beginnings of public education lie
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: within my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: patriotic people were shocked beyond measure the state doing anything
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: of the sort when he was born. Totally illiterate people
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: who could neither read a book nor write more than
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: perhaps a clumsy's signature were to be found everywhere in England,
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: and great masses of the population were getting no instruction
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  Speaker 1: at all. Only a few schools flourished upon the patronage
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: of exceptional parents. All over the country, the old endowed
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: grammar schools were to be found sinking and dwindling. Many
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: of them had closed altogether. In the new great centers
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: of population. Multitudes of children were sweated in the factories,
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: darkly ignorant and wretched, and the under equipped and understaffed
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: National and British schools, supported by voluntary contributions and sectarian rivalries,
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: made an ineffectual fight against his festering darkness. It was
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: a condition of affairs clamoring for remedies, but there was
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: an immense amount of indifference from prejudice to be over
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  Speaker 1: before any remedies were possible. Perhaps some day some industrious
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: and lucid historian will disentangle all the muddle of impulses
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: and antagonisms, the commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, humanitarian enthusiasm out
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: of which our present educational organization arose. I have long
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: since come to believe it necessary that all new social
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: institutions should be borne in confusion, and that at first
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: they should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: of government in the Victorian days was far too great,
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: and the general intelligence far too low, to permit the
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: state to go about the new business it was taking
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: up in a businesslike way to train teachers, build and
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: equip schools in dour pedagogic research, and provide properly written
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: school books. These things, it was felt, must be provided
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: by individuals local effort, And since it was manifest that
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: it was individual and local effort that were in default,
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: it was reluctantly agreed to stimulate them by money payments.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: The state set up a machinery of examination, both in
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: science and art and for the elementary schools, and payments
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: known technically as grants, were made in accordance with the
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: examination results attained to such schools as Providence might see
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: fit to send into the world. In this way, it
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: was felt the demand would be established that would, according
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: to the beliefs of that time, inevitably ensure the supply.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: An industry of grant earning was created, and this would
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: give education as a necessary by product. In the end,
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: this belief was found to need qualification, but grant earning
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: was still in full activity when I was a small boy,
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: so far as the Science and Art Department, and my
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: father a concerent earned. The task of examination was entrusted
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: to eminent scientific men, for the most part, quite unaccustomed
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: to teaching. You see, if they also were teaching similar
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: classes to those they examined, it was feared that injustice
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: might be done. Year after year, these eminent persons set
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the increasing
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: thousands of answers that ensued, and, having no doubt the
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: national ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: were careful each year to reread the preceding papers before
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: composing the current one, in order to see what it
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: was usual to ask. As a result of this, in
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: the course of a few years, the recurrence and permutation
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: of questions became almost calculable. And since the practical object
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: of the teaching was to teach people, not science, but
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: how to write answers to these questions, the industry of
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: grant earning assumed a form easily distinguished from any kind
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: of genuine education. Whatever other remarkable compromises had also to
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: be made with the spirit of the age. The unfortunate
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: conflict between religion and science prevalent at this time, was mitigated,
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: if I remember rightly, by making graduates in arts and
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: priests in the established church science teachers ex officio, and
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: leaving local and private enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books material.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: According to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: Private enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: A number of competing firms of publishers sprang into existence,
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: specializing in science and art department work. They set themselves
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: to produce textbooks that should supply exactly the quantity and
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: quality of knowledge necessary for every step age of each
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: of five and twenty subjects into which desirable science was divided,
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: and copies and models and instructions that should give precisely
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: the method and gestures esteemed as proficiency in art. Every
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: section of each book was written in the idiom found
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: to be most satisfactory to the examiners, and test questions
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: extracted from papers set in former years were appended to
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: every chapter. By means of these lasts, the teacher was
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: able to train his class to the very highest level
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: of grant earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: other methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: with questions and then dictated model replies. That was my
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: father's method of instruction. I attended his classes as an
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: elementary grant eurner from the age of ten until his death,
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: and it is so I remember him sitting on the
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: edge of a table, smothering a yawn occasionally and giving
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: out the infallible formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: in rows of desks before him. Occasionally he would slide
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: to his feet and go to a blackboard on an
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: easel and draw on that very slowly and deliberately in
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: colored chalks a diagram for the class to copy in
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: colored pencils. And sometimes he would display a specimen or
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: the institute in which he taught was equipped with a
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: certain amount of apparatus prescribed as necessary for subject this
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: and subject that by the Science and Art Department, And
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: this my father would supplement with maps and diagrams and
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: drawings of his own. But he never really did experiments,
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: except that in the class in systematic Botany he sometimes
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: made us tease common flowers to pieces. He did not
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: do experiments if he could possibly help it, because in
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: the first place, they used up time and gas for
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: the Bunsen burner and good material in a ruinous fashion.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: And in the second they were in his rather careless
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: and sketchy hands, apt to endanger the apparatus of the
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: institute and even the lives of his students. Then thirdly,
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: real experiments involved washing up, and moreover, they always turned
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: out wrong and sometimes misled the two observant learner very
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: seriously and open demoralizing controversies. Quite early in life I
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the unscientific perversity of
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: nature and the impassable gulf that is fixed between systematic
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: science and elusive fact. I knew, for example, that in science,
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: whether it be Subject twelve organic chemistry or Subject seventeen
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: animal physiology, when you blow into a glass of lime water,
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue to blow,
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: the stuff from the lime water bottle until your crimson
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: in the face and painful under the ears, and it
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: never becomes cloudy at all. And I knew too that
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: in science, if you put potassium chlawate into a retort
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: and heated over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: may be collected over water, whereas in real life, if
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: you do anything of the sort, the vessel cracks with
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: a loud report, the potassium chlawate descends, sizzling upon the flame,
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: the experimenter says, oh damn, with astonishing heartiness and distinctness,
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: and a lady's student in the back seats gets up
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: and leaves the room. Science is the organized conquest of nature,
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: and I can quite understand that ancient libertine refusing to
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: cooperate in her own undoing. And I can quite understand
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: too my father's preference for what he called an illustrative experiment,
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: which was simply an arrangement of the apparatus in front
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: of the class with nothing whatever by way of material,
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: and the buns and burn are clean and cool, and
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: then a slow, luminous description of just what you did
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: put in it when you were so ill advised as
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: to carry the affair beyond illustration, and just exactly what
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: ought anyhow to happen when you did. He had considerable
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: powers of vivid expression, so that in this way he
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: could make us see all he described. The class, freed
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: without flinking. And if any part was too difficult to draw,
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: then my father would produce a simplified version on the
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: blackboard to be copied instead. And he would also write
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: on the blackboard any exceptionally difficult but grant turning words
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: such as emperiumatic or botrioidal, some words in constant use
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: he rarely explained. I remember once sticking up my hand
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: and asking him, in the full flow of description, please, sir,
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: what is floculent? The precipitate is yes, sir, But what
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: does it mean? Oh floculent, said my father floculent? Why
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: he extended his hand and arm and twiddled his fingers
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: for a second in the abb like that, he said.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: I thought the explanation sufficient. But he paused for a
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: moment after giving it, as in a flockbird, you know,
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: he added, and resumed his discourse. Three. My father, I
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical offing affairs
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical incompetence, practical enterprise,
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: and a thoroughly sanguine temperament in a manner that I
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: have never seen paralleled in any human being. He was
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: always trying to do new things in the briskest manner,
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: under the suggestion of books or papers, or his own
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: spontaneous imagination. And as he had never been trained to
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: do anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: extensive and thorough. At one time he nearly gave up
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: his classes for intensive culture, so enamored was he of
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: its possibilities, the peculiar pungency of the manure he got
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: in pursuit of a chemical theory of his own has
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: scarred my olfactory memories for a lifetime. The intensive culture
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: phase is very clear in my memory. It came near
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: the end of his career, and when I was between
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: eleven and twelve, I was mobilized to gather caterpillars on
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: several occasions and assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: by lantern light that wrecked my preparation work for school
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: next day. My father dug up both lawns and trench
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: and manured in spasms of immense vigor, alternating with periods
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: of paralyzing distaste for the garden, and for weeks he
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every meal.
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods,
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: is a thing as exacting as a baby. Its moods
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: have to be watched. It does not wait upon the
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: cultivator's convenience, but has times of its own. Intensive culture
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: greatly increases this disposition to trouble mankind. It makes a
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged, and demoralize an over
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: irritated garden. My father got at cross purposes with our
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: two packs at an early stage. Everything grew wrong from
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: the first to last. And if my father's manures intensified
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: nothing else, they certainly intensified the primordial curse. The peas
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: were eaten in the night before they were three inches high.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: The beams bore nothing but blight. The only apparent result
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: of a spraying of the potatoes was to develop upon
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: Joine the cat for being ill indoors. The cucumber frames
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: were damaged by the catapulting of boys going down the
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: lane at the back, and all your cucumbers were mysteriously embittered.
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: That lane, with its occasional passers by, did much to
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: wreck the intensive scheme. Because my father always stopped work
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: and went indoors if anyone watched him. His special manure
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: was apt to arouse a troublesome spirit of inquiry in
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: hardy natures. In digging his rose and shaping his patches,
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: he neglected the guiding string and trusted to his eye
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: altogether too much, and the consequent obliquity, and the various
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: windbreaks and scarecrows he erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: he began and never finished, by which everything was to
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: be watered at once by means of pieces of gutter
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: from the roof and outhouses of Number two, and a
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: large and particularly obstinate clump of elder bushes in the
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: by axe or by fire, combined to give the gardens
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: under intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderly appearance. He
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: took steps towards the diversion of our house drain under
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: the influence of the sewage utilization society, but happily he
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: stopped in time. He hardly completed any of the operations
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: he began. Something else became more urgent, or simply he
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: tired a considerable air of the Number two territory, was
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: never even dug up. In the end, the affair irritated
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: him beyond endurance. Never was a man less haughticulturally minded.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: The clamor of these vegetables he had launched into the
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: world for his service and assistance wore out his patients.
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: He would walk into the garden the happiest of men
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: after a day or so of disregard, talking to me
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: of history perhaps, or social organization, or summarizing some book
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: he had read he talked to me of anything that
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: interested him, regardless of my limitations. Then he would begin
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: to note the growth of the weeds. This won't do,
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: he would say, and pull up a handful. More weeding
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: would follow, and the talk would become fragmentary. His hands
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: would become earthy, his nails black weeds would snap off
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: would darken. He would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: Curse these weeds, he would say from his heart. His
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: discourse was at an end. I have memories too of
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: his sudden, unexpected charges into the tranquility of the house,
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: his hands and clothes intensively enriched. He would come in
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: like a whirlwind, This damn stuff all over me and
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: the agricultural chemistry class at six bah ah. My mother
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: would never learn not to attempt to break him of
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: swearing on such occasions. She would remain standing a little
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: stiffly in the scullery, refusing to assist him to the
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: adjectival towel he sought. If you say such things, he
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: would dance with rage and hurl the soap about the towel.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: He would cry, flicking SuDS from big fingers in every direction.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: The towel. I'll let the blithering class slide. If you
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: don't give me the towel, I'll give up everything. I
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: tell you everything. At last, with the failure of the lettuces,
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: came the breaking point. I was in the little arbor
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: learning Latin irregular verbs when it happened. I can see
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: him still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain,
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the world
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery of
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: with bast only a week or so before, and now
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: half were rotten, and half had shot up into tall,
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and slogged.
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: Great wipes he made, and in each stroke he said,
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: take that. The air was thick with flying fragments of
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: abortive salad. It was a fantastic massacre. It was the
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: French revolution of that cold tyranny, the vindictive o throw
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: of the pampered, vegetable aristocrats. After he had assuaged his
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: passion upon them, he turned for other prey. He kicked
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: holes in two of our noblest marrows flicked off the
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame. Something
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: of the awe of that moment returns to me as
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: I write of it. Well, my boy, he said, approaching
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: with an expression of beneficent happiness. I've done with gardening.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: Let's go for a walk like reasonable beings. I've had
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: enough of this. His face was convulsed for an instant
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: with bitter resentment, pandering to cabbages. End of Chapter two,
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: Section one