Читать книгу Pen Portraits and Reviews - Bernard Shaw - Страница 15

Now why, it may be asked, do I, who said, and said truly, that Butler was “in his own department the greatest English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century,” now attack him in his grave by thus ruthlessly insisting on his failings? Well, I do so precisely because I want to carry on his work of demonstrating the falsehood and imposture of our “secondary education” and the mischief of treating children as wild beasts to be tamed and broken instead of as human beings to be let develop. Butler held up his father to ridicule and infamy, and exclaimed, “This is what your public school, your university, your Church, made of him.” But the world replied, “Oh, yes: that is all very well; but your father was a rotter and a weakling: all public school and university men are not like him.” Now if, as is at last possible with this ruthlessly faithful memoir of him in our hands, we can say, “This is what your public school and your university and your country parsonage made, not of a rotter and a weakling, but of a man of genius who was all his life fiercely on his guard against their influence,” then we can go one better than Butler, and make his ghost cry “Splendid! Dont spare me. Rub it in; and more power to your elbow!”

For we must not deceive ourselves. England is still governed from Langar Rectory, from Shrewsbury School, from Cambridge, with their annexes of the Stock Exchange and the solicitors’ offices; and even if the human products of these institutions were all geniuses, they would finally wreck any modern civilized country after maintaining themselves according to their own notions at the cost of the squalor and slavery of four-fifths of its inhabitants. Unless we plough up the moral foundations of these places and sow them with salt, we are lost. That is the moral of the great Butler biography.