THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
April 2, 19—.
My dear Alexa,—
The question put in the last paragraph of your last letter, to which I have perhaps been a little overlong in replying, is one which I should have thought I had already answered, answered, too, in the only way in which such questions can be answered satisfactorily—by actual practice. You know me well enough, I take it, to know that, like every other decently-honest man, when I have a conviction I act upon it. Mind, I say a conviction, not a mere opinion. Mere opinions, when they differ widely from the opinions held by those around us, we often do wisely to keep to ourselves. But convictions are of another stuff. When we have them (and we don’t have very many of them as a rule) we must out with them, both in word and deed, or we perish. Concealed convictions set up in the soul a moral and intellectual rot.
Well, now, you ask me, or seem to ask me, what are my views as to the amount of censorship that should be exercised over the reading of young women. That, I gather, was your particular point. More generally you seem to inquire what fruit of the tree of knowledge should still be forbidden to those of your sex after that cardinal day when they have put their hair up and let their skirts down.
Now, for once in a way, I yield to the temptation to reply by the stale rhetorical device of asking another question. What has been my practice with you, child—a practice deliberately adopted and resolutely persevered in, spite of the remonstrances of some who had every right to remonstrate, and of others who had none? Ever since you were sixteen or thereabouts—I don’t remember at what age exactly it was that you began to show unmistakable proofs of marked and hereditary (don’t smile!) intelligence—have you not had a free run of my library? A library, by the way, in which there is only one locked book-case, and that case kept locked, not because of the dangerous character of the contents, but onaccount of the expensive nature of the bindings. What happened when—but I won’t go on with these tiresome interrogatives. I will just recall to your memory what happened now and then when I saw in your hands a book about which, to express indefinitely my indefinite state of mind, I had my doubts. I just looked up from my table and said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t read that: it is rather dull and rather nasty”; or, “The only points about that book that have any merit are points you wouldn’t understand,” and, like the sensible girl you always were, you invariably put the books back in their shelves again. But I was not always in the library when you came there in search of literary refreshment, and once, only once, I remember I came upon you deep in a book about which I had no doubts at all. I noticed that you were rather more than half-way through it, and that you looked interested, though a little puzzled too. “Do you like that book?” I asked. “No—yes—perhaps—I don’t know—a little,” you stammered, and you blushed. Now, a blush does not in the least imply consciousness of guilt, or even of offence, as is commonlysupposed. People blush not when they find themselves in the prisoner’s dock, but, rather, when they are in a tight corner; more often still when they believe themselves to be suspected of something of which they are entirely innocent. When you have to deal with a child, Alexa, and you accuse it of, or question it concerning, some little delinquency, don’t, should it stammer and blush, leap to the conclusion that it is guilty. But this is by the way. “Don’t you wish me to read this book; shall I put it back?” you asked. “Oh, you had better finish it,” I said, and turned away to my work. I did not explain to you then, but I tell you now, because it has a definite bearing on the subject in hand, that I knew that, having already got half-way through it, your interest was awakened and your curiosity excited, and I knew that in a young woman or in a young man either, for the matter of that, excited or only half-gratified curiosity is—well, I can’t use too strong a term, so I will say, the very devil—the most devilish of all the legion of devils that beset the path of youth. I felt sure, too, that if I forbade you the reading of the second half of that book you would attachundue importance to what you had learned from the first half. You would see the thing—the evil thing, let us frankly call it—exaggerated out of all true proportion. You would conceive it to be worse than it really was, you would believe that it played a greater part in life than as a fact it does. Moreover, I did not feel sure—for you were, thank God, a very human girl, that you would not come back to that book when I was not there, and finish it in private, and thus do your own soul a thousand times more harm by the deception than any undesirable knowledge you might acquire could possibly do you.
You tell me that your question to me arose out of a discussion which took place a few nights ago between your host, your fellow-guests, and yourself: that it began an hour after dinner and lasted well away beyond the usual bed-time. Let me congratulate you, Alexa, on staying with such sensible people as the Mauleverers, and on being one of several guests as intelligent as yourself. By “sensible people” I mean people who are able, and who like, to talk after dinner for more than five consecutive minutes on anysubject under the sun. Such people in our, or in any other class, are rare, and are, I fancy, growing rarer. It can’t have escaped your intelligent observation, that ninety-nine-hundredths of the talk of to-day is about persons, and, as a rule, about uninteresting persons. The very fact that a subject is important, that it concerns us, that it has some bearing on our lives and thoughts, is sufficient to bar it out of what we ridiculously call “conversation.” Is anybody interested in anything? I often ask myself on my way home from a dinner or an evening out somewhere.
But to return to this matter of the parental or guardianly censorship of books. I am convinced that if the censor could be all-wise, and managed to use his restrictive powers effectively, his censorship would work for good. But in point of practical fact, not a parent or a guardian of us all is all-wise, or is able to make use of even such wisdom as he has. An “effective blockade,” as they call it in war time, over a young girl’s mind is almost impossible to establish. All sorts of contraband craft will manage to escape the vigilance of the blockading squadron, do wewhat we may. Still, on the whole, the thing is pretty thoroughly done in France. There the novel, the novel of ordinary life, the novel written by the best and most popular writers of the day, or of past days, is never suffered to fall into a young woman’s hands at all. Books for girls are things apart. They are written by inferior authors, and as a rule are dull and insipid beyond words. The French ideal of a young woman is that until she is married her mind, so far as a certain sort of knowledge is concerned, should be a sheet of white paper. And in most French families, outside Paris at any rate, the ideal is fairly well realised. Now then, if there be any value in that ideal—if it be an ideal worth maintaining or worth following, the outcome of it ought to be that the average French married woman should have a higher standard and habit of chastity and virtue than her sister in England, where no such rigorous supervision prevails. Well, she has not, Alexa, I can confidently assure you of that. Heaven forfend that I should say a word to her discredit. She is often delightful, though not quite so often as she herself imagines. But in the matter of conduct—woman-conductlet us call it, for want of a better term—she is not a bit better than our women over here. Observe I do not say that she is worse: to say that would be to be guilty of vulgar and insular British Philistinism; but to be quite safe I content myself by saying that she is not a bit better, and consequently, is not worth all the blockading trouble that is taken with her. I have met young French ladies who have been married less than a year, and, well—I need not amplify, but my intimacy with them has left me with the conviction that it was sheer waste of time and energy to be at such pains to preserve for twenty years an innocence that four or five months were enough so completely to dissipate and to destroy.
The question, it seems to me, leads directly to the larger issue: Is knowledge often hurtful? I say “often,” not “ever,” for in this life there are always exceptions. For the exceptions we cannot, try we never so carefully, provide. We must, willy-nilly, be guided by general rules. In what other department of life, then, is it even pretended that knowledge, the fullest knowledge, works for ill? Can you think of one? If atraveller were about to set out on a journey through some country where grew in rich luxuriance any number of tempting fruits, beautiful to look upon, delectable to the palate, but charged with deadly poison, and certain seriously to injure or to slay outright whosoever should pluck and eat, would it, or would it not, be desirable that that traveller should be furnished with all the knowledge available as to the number and the nature of these fruits, their habits of growth, the particular places where they were most likely to be found, the antidotes to their several poisons? Would you, if you could, prevent his reading printed treatises descriptive of them, or even poems and dramas that told of them in a poetic or a dramatic way? Who would be most likely to come through the journey unscathed—the traveller who was ignorant, or the traveller who was knowledgable? Surely the questions answer themselves. It is true, of course, that even the best-instructed voyager, hard put to it by hunger or thirst, and face to face with the temptation of some specially seductive fruit, might even so pluck, eat, and perish. The clamour of his senses might prove too urgentfor the resistance of his intelligence. But even so, by telling him all there was to tell, you would have done your best for him, wouldn’t you? And what poor chance would the similarly-tempted ignoramus have? Well, now, every young woman is just such a traveller, and life is for her just such a journey.
On my honour, I think I have put the case as fairly and as squarely as I know how. If knowledge be our safeguard, our only safeguard, in every other of life’s journeys, why in the name of all that is rational should ignorance be our best protection in this? Why should there be one little corner in the house of life in which the light shall not be suffered to shine?
You know Mr Findlater. He was here a night or two ago, and was very angry because one of his junior clerks, lately a Board School boy, had been detected in a small forgery. It was a very trifling affair, and did no harm to anyone but the poor silly lad who had been guilty of it. But Mr Findlater was full to the brim of indignation. Not with the lad—I’ll do him justice in that; he didn’t even intend to prosecute, he told me—butwith the whole system of national education. “This is what comes of Board Schools,” he declared. “You rate us for teaching these gutter brats to write, and the first use they make of their knowledge is to forge our names to cheques!” He did really, he said just that, and he is a man of not much less than ordinary intelligence! And, of course, if you come to think of it, if no one were taught to write no one could commit forgery, could they? And Mr Findlater’s argument was quite as good as the arguments of those who contend that a young woman’s virtue is best established on a foundation of ignorance.
And now it occurs to me that I have been wasting all the time taken in writing this letter. I feel sure that you put all this yourself, and put it quite as well, to your friends the other night. But then, you see, you have the inestimable advantage of a wise as well as a loving
Father.