<SPAN name="vol_1_chap_02"></SPAN>
<h3>Volume One--Chapter Two.</h3>
<h4>The Flame.</h4>
<p>The various agencies which society has placed at the disposal of a parent had been at
work on Edwin in one way or another for at least a decade, in order to equip him for just
this very day when he should step into the world. The moment must therefore be regarded as
dramatic, the first crucial moment of an experiment long and elaborately prepared.
Knowledge was admittedly the armour and the weapon of one about to try conclusions with
the world, and many people for many years had been engaged in providing Edwin with
knowledge. He had received, in fact, “a good education”—or even, as some
said, “a thoroughly sound education;” assuredly as complete an equipment of
knowledge as could be obtained in the county, for the curriculum of the Oldcastle High
School was less in accord with common sense than that of the Middle School.</p>
<p>He knew, however, nothing of natural history, and in particular of himself, of the
mechanism of the body and mind, through which his soul had to express and fulfil itself.
Not one word of information about either physiology or psychology had ever been breathed
to him, nor had it ever occurred to any one around him that such information was needful.
And as no one had tried to explain to him the mysteries which he carried about with him
inside that fair skin of his, so no one had tried to explain to him the mysteries by which
he was hemmed in, either mystically through religion, or rationally through philosophy.
Never in chapel or at Sunday school had a difficulty been genuinely faced. And as for
philosophy, he had not the slightest conception of what it meant. He imagined that a
philosopher was one who made the best of a bad job, and he had never heard the word used
in any other sense. He had great potential intellectual curiosity, but nobody had thought
to stimulate it by even casually telling him that the finest minds of humanity had been
trying to systematise the mysteries for quite twenty-five centuries. Of physical science
he had been taught nothing, save a grotesque perversion to the effect that gravity was a
force which drew things towards the centre of the earth. In the matter of chemistry it had
been practically demonstrated to him scores of times, so that he should never forget this
grand basic truth, that sodium and potassium may be relied upon to fizz flamingly about on
a surface of water. Of geology he was perfectly ignorant, though he lived in a district
whose whole livelihood depended on the scientific use of geological knowledge, and though
the existence of Oldcastle itself was due to a freak of the earth’s crust which
geologists call a “fault.”</p>
<hr>
<h4>Two.</h4>
<p>Geography had been one of his strong points. He was aware of the rivers of Asia in
their order, and of the principal products of Uruguay; and he could name the capitals of
nearly all the United States. But he had never been instructed for five minutes in the
geography of his native county, of which he knew neither the boundaries nor the rivers nor
the terrene characteristics. He could have drawn a map of the Orinoco, but he could not
have found the Trent in a day’s march; he did not even know where his drinking-water
came from. That geographical considerations are the cause of all history had never been
hinted to him, nor that history bears immediately upon modern life and bore on his own
life. For him history hung unsupported and unsupporting in the air. In the course of his
school career he had several times approached the nineteenth century, but it seemed to him
that for administrative reasons he was always being dragged back again to the Middle Ages.
Once his form had “got” as far as the infancy of his own father, and
concerning this period he had learnt that “great dissatisfaction prevailed among the
labouring classes, who were led to believe by mischievous demagogues,” etcetera. But
the next term he was recoiling round Henry the Eighth, who “was a skilful warrior
and politician,” but “unfortunate in his domestic relations;” and so to
Elizabeth, than whom “few sovereigns have been so much belied, but her character
comes out unscathed after the closest examination.” History indeed resolved itself
into a series of more or less sanguinary events arbitrarily grouped under the names of
persons who had to be identified with the assistance of numbers. Neither of the
development of national life, nor of the clash of nations, did he really know anything
that was not inessential and anecdotic. He could not remember the clauses of Magna Charta,
but he knew eternally that it was signed at a place amusingly called Runnymede. And the
one fact engraved on his memory about the battle of Waterloo was that it was fought on a
Sunday.</p>
<p>And as he had acquired absolutely nothing about political economy or about logic, and
was therefore at the mercy of the first agreeable sophistry that might take his fancy by
storm, his unfitness to commence the business of being a citizen almost reached
perfection.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Three.</h4>
<p>For his personal enjoyment of the earth and air and sun and stars, and of society and
solitude, no preparation had been made, or dreamt of. The sentiment of nature had never
been encouraged in him, or even mentioned. He knew not how to look at a landscape nor at a
sky. Of plants and trees he was as exquisitely ignorant as of astronomy. It had not
occurred to him to wonder why the days are longer in summer, and he vaguely supposed that
the cold of winter was due to an increased distance of the earth from the sun. Still, he
had learnt that Saturn had a ring, and sometimes he unconsciously looked for it in the
firmament, as for a tea-tray.</p>
<p>Of art, and the arts, he had been taught nothing. He had never seen a great picture or
statue, nor heard great orchestral or solo music; and he had no idea that architecture was
an art and emotional, though it moved him in a very peculiar fashion. Of the art of
English literature, or of any other literature, he had likewise been taught nothing. But
he knew the meaning of a few obsolete words in a few plays of Shakespeare. He had not
learnt how to express himself orally in any language, but through hard drilling he was so
genuinely erudite in accidence and syntax that he could parse and analyse with superb
assurance the most magnificent sentences of Milton, Virgil, and Racine. This skill,
together with an equal skill in utilising the elementary properties of numbers and
geometrical figures, was the most brilliant achievement of his long apprenticeship.</p>
<p>And now his education was finished. It had cost his father twenty-eight shillings a
term, or four guineas a year, and no trouble. In younger days his father had spent more
money and far more personal attention on the upbringing of a dog. His father had enjoyed
success with dogs through treating them as individuals. But it had not happened to him,
nor to anybody in authority, to treat Edwin as an individual. Nevertheless it must not be
assumed that Edwin’s father was a callous and conscienceless brute, and Edwin a
martyr of neglect. Old Clayhanger was, on the contrary, an average upright and respectable
parent who had given his son a thoroughly sound education, and Edwin had had the good
fortune to receive that thoroughly sound education, as a preliminary to entering the
world.</p>
<hr>
<h4>Four.</h4>
<p>He was very far from realising the imperfections of his equipment for the grand entry;
but still he was not without uneasiness. In particular the conversation incident to the
canal-boat wager was disturbing him. It amazed him, as he reflected, that he should have
remained, to such an advanced age, in a state of ignorance concerning the origin of the
clay from which the crocks of his native district were manufactured. That the Sunday
should have been able to inform him did not cause him any shame, for he guessed from the
peculiar eager tone of voice in which the facts had been delivered, that the Sunday was
merely retailing some knowledge recently acquired by chance. He knew all the
Sunday’s tones of voice; and he also was well aware that the Sunday’s brain
was not on the whole better stored than his own. Further, the Sunday was satisfied with
his bit of accidental knowledge. Edwin was not. Edwin wanted to know why, if the clay for
making earthenware was not got in the Five Towns, the Five Towns had become the great seat
of the manufacture. Why were not pots made in the South, where the clay came from? He
could not think of any answer to this enigma, nor of any means of arriving by himself at
an answer. The feeling was that he ought to have been able to arrive at the answer as at
the answer to an equation.</p>
<p>He did not definitely blame his education; he did not think clearly about the thing at
all. But, as a woman with a vague discomfort dimly fears cancer, so he dimly feared that
there might be something fundamentally unsound in this sound education of his. And he had
remorse for all the shirking that he had been guilty of during all his years at school. He
shook his head solemnly at the immense and nearly universal shirking that continually went
on. He could only acquit three or four boys, among the hundreds he had known, of the
shameful sin. And all that he could say in favour of himself was that there were many
worse than Edwin Clayhanger. Not merely the boys, but the masters, were sinners. Only two
masters could he unreservedly respect as having acted conscientiously up to their
pretensions, and one of these was an unpleasant brute. All the cleverness, the
ingenuities, the fakes, the insincerities, the incapacitaties, the vanities, and the
dishonesties of the rest stood revealed to him, and he judged them by the mere essential
force of character alone. A schoolmaster might as well attempt to deceive God as a boy who
is watching him every day with the inhuman eye of youth.</p>
<p>“All this must end now!” he said to himself, meaning all that could be
included in the word “shirk.”</p>
<hr>
<h4>Five.</h4>
<p>He was splendidly serious. He was as splendidly serious as a reformer. By a single
urgent act of thought he would have made himself a man, and changed imperfection into
perfection. He desired—and there was real passion in his desire—to do his
best, to exhaust himself in doing his best, in living according to his conscience. He did
not know of what he was capable, nor what he could achieve. Achievement was not the matter
of his desire; but endeavour, honest and terrific endeavour. He admitted to himself his
shortcomings, and he did not under-estimate the difficulties that lay before him; but he
said, thinking of his father: “Surely he’ll see I mean business! Surely
he’s bound to give in when he sees how much in earnest I am!” He was
convinced, almost, that passionate faith could move mountainous fathers.</p>
<p>“I’ll show ’em!” he muttered.</p>
<p>And he meant that he would show the world... He was honouring the world; he was paying
the finest homage to it. In that head of his a flame burnt that was like an altar-fire, a
miraculous and beautiful phenomenon, than which nothing is more miraculous nor more
beautiful over the whole earth. Whence had it suddenly sprung, that flame? After years of
muddy inefficiency, of contentedness with the second-rate and the dishonest, that flame
astoundingly bursts forth, from a hidden, unheeded spark that none had ever thought to
blow upon. It bursts forth out of a damp jungle of careless habits and negligence that
could not possibly have fed it. There is little to encourage it. The very architecture of
the streets shows that environment has done naught for it: ragged brickwork, walls
finished anyhow with saggars and slag; narrow uneven alleys leading to higgledy-piggledy
workshops and kilns; cottages transformed into factories and factories into cottages,
clumsily, hastily, because nothing matters so long as “it will do;” everywhere
something forced to fulfil, badly, the function of something else; in brief, the reign of
the slovenly makeshift, shameless, filthy, and picturesque. Edwin himself seemed no
tabernacle for that singular flame. He was not merely untidy and dirty—at his age
such defects might have excited in a sane observer uneasiness by their absence; but his
gestures and his gait were untidy. He did not mind how he walked. All his sprawling limbs
were saying: “What does it matter, so long as we get there?” The angle of the
slatternly bag across his shoulders was an insult to the flame. And yet the flame burned
with serene and terrible pureness.</p>
<p>It was surprising that no one saw it passing along the mean, black, smoke-palled
streets that huddle about Saint Luke’s Church. Sundry experienced and fat old women
were standing or sitting at their cottage doors, one or two smoking cutties. But even
they, who in child-bed and at gravesides had been at the very core of life for long years,
they, who saw more than most, could only see a fresh lad passing along, with fair hair and
a clear complexion, and gawky knees and elbows, a fierce, rapt expression on his
straightforward, good-natured face. Some knew that it was “Clayhanger’s
lad,” a nice-behaved young gentleman, and the spitten image of his poor mother. They
all knew what a lad is—the feel of his young skin under his “duds,” the
capricious freedom of his movements, his sudden madnesses and shoutings and tendernesses,
and the exceeding power of his unconscious wistful charm. They could divine all that in a
glance. But they could not see the mysterious and holy flame of the desire for
self-perfection blazing within that tousled head. And if Edwin had suspected that anybody
could indeed perceive it, he would have whipped it out for shame, though the repudiation
had meant everlasting death. Such is youth in the Five Towns, if not elsewhere.</p>
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