Erewhon Revisited

Having finished his early dinner, and not fearing that he should be either recognised at Fairmead or again enquired after from Sunch’ston, my father went out for a stroll round the town, to see what else he could find that should be new and strange to him.  He had not gone far before he saw a large building with an inscription saying that it was the Provincial Deformatory for Boys.  Underneath the larger inscription there was a smaller one—­one of those corrupt versions of my father’s sayings, which, on dipping into the Sayings of the Sunchild, he had found to be so vexatiously common.  The inscription ran:-

“When the righteous man turneth away from the righteousness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is a little naughty and wrong, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in righteousness.”  Sunchild Sayings, chap. xxii. v. 15.

The case of the little girl that he had watched earlier in the day had filled him with a great desire to see the working of one of these curious institutions; he therefore resolved to call on the headmaster (whose name he found to be Turvey), and enquire about terms, alleging that he had a boy whose incorrigible rectitude was giving him much anxiety.  The information he had gained in the forenoon would be enough to save him from appearing to know nothing of the system.  On having rung the bell, he announced himself to the servant as a Mr. Senoj, and asked if he could see the Principal.

Almost immediately he was ushered into the presence of a beaming, dapper-looking, little old gentleman, quick of speech and movement, in spite of some little portliness.

“Ts, ts, ts,” he said, when my father had enquired about terms and asked whether he might see the system at work.  “How unfortunate that you should have called on a Saturday afternoon.  We always have a half-holiday.  But stay—­yes—­that will do very nicely; I will send for them into school as a means of stimulating their refractory system.”

He called his servant and told him to ring the boys into school.  Then, turning to my father he said, “Stand here, sir, by the window; you will see them all come trooping in.  H’m, h’m, I am sorry to see them still come back as soon as they hear the bell.  I suppose I shall ding some recalcitrancy into them some day, but it is uphill work.  Do you see the head-boy—­the third of those that are coming up the path?  I shall have to get rid of him.  Do you see him? he is going back to whip up the laggers—­and now he has boxed a boy’s ears:  that boy is one of the most hopeful under my care.  I feel sure he has been using improper language, and my head-boy has checked him instead of encouraging him.”  And so on till the boys were all in school.

“You see, my dear sir,” he said to my father, “we are in an impossible position.  We have to obey instructions from the Grand Council of Education at Bridgeford, and they have established these institutions in consequence of the Sunchild’s having said that we should aim at promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number.  This, no doubt, is a sound principle, and the greatest number are by nature somewhat dull, conceited, and unscrupulous.  They do not like those who are quick, unassuming, and sincere; how, then, consistently with the first principles either of morality or political economy as revealed to us by the Sunchild, can we encourage such people if we can bring sincerity and modesty fairly home to them?  We cannot do so.  And we must correct the young as far as possible from forming habits which, unless indulged in with the greatest moderation, are sure to ruin them.

“I cannot pretend to consider myself very successful.  I do my best, but I can only aim at making my school a reflection of the outside world.  In the outside world we have to tolerate much that is prejudicial to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, partly because we cannot always discover in time who may be let alone as being genuinely insincere, and who are in reality masking sincerity under a garb of flippancy, and partly also because we wish to err on the side of letting the guilty escape, rather than of punishing the innocent.  Thus many people who are perfectly well known to belong to the straightforward classes are allowed to remain at large, and may be even seen hobnobbing with the guardians of public immorality.  Indeed it is not in the public interest that straightforwardness should be extirpated root and branch, for the presence of a small modicum of sincerity acts as a wholesome irritant to the academicism of the greatest number, stimulating it to consciousness of its own happy state, and giving it something to look down upon.  Moreover, we hold it useful to have a certain number of melancholy examples, whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to those who neglect cultivating that power of immoral self-control which shall prevent them from saying, or even thinking, anything that shall not immediately and palpably minister to the happiness, and hence meet the approval, of the greatest number.”

By this time the boys were all in school.  “There is not one prig in the whole lot,” said the headmaster sadly.  “I wish there was, but only those boys come here who are notoriously too good to become current coin in the world unless they are hardened with an alloy of vice.  I should have liked to show you our gambling, book-making, and speculation class, but the assistant-master who attends to this branch of our curriculum is gone to Sunch’ston this afternoon.  He has friends who have asked him to see the dedication of the new temple, and he will not be back till Monday.  I really do not know what I can do better for you than examine the boys in Counsels of Imperfection.”

So saying, he went into the schoolroom, over the fireplace of which my father’s eye caught an inscription, “Resist good, and it will fly from you.  Sunchild’s Sayings, xvii. 2.”  Then, taking down a copy of the work just named from a shelf above his desk, he ran his eye over a few of its pages.

He called up a class of about twenty boys.

“Now, my boys,” he said, “Why is it so necessary to avoid extremes of truthfulness?”

“It is not necessary, sir,” said one youngster, “and the man who says that it is so is a scoundrel.”

“Come here, my boy, and hold out your hand.”  When he had done so, Mr. Turvey gave him two sharp cuts with a cane.  “There now, go down to the bottom of the class and try not to be so extremely truthful in future.”  Then, turning to my father, he said, “I hate caning them, but it is the only way to teach them.  I really do believe that boy will know better than to say what he thinks another time.”

He repeated his question to the class, and the head-boy answered, “Because, sir, extremes meet, and extreme truth will be mixed with extreme falsehood.”

“Quite right, my boy.  Truth is like religion; it has only two enemies—­the too much and the too little.  Your answer is more satisfactory than some of your recent conduct had led me to expect.”

“But, sir, you punished me only three weeks ago for telling you a lie.”

“Oh yes; why, so I did; I had forgotten.  But then you overdid it.  Still it was a step in the right direction.”

“And now, my boy,” he said to a very frank and ingenuous youth about half way up the class, “and how is truth best reached?”

“Through the falling out of thieves, sir.”

“Quite so.  Then it will be necessary that the more earnest, careful, patient, self-sacrificing, enquirers after truth should have a good deal of the thief about them, though they are very honest people at the same time.  Now what does the man” (who on enquiry my father found to be none other than Mr. Turvey himself) “say about honesty?”

“He says, sir, that honesty does not consist in never stealing, but in knowing how and where it will be safe to do so.”

“Remember,” said Mr. Turvey to my father, “how necessary it is that we should have a plentiful supply of thieves, if honest men are ever to come by their own.”

He spoke with the utmost gravity, evidently quite easy in his mind that his scheme was the only one by which truth could be successfully attained.

“But pray let me have any criticism you may feel inclined to make.”

“I have none,” said my father.  “Your system commends itself to common sense; it is the one adopted in the law courts, and it lies at the very foundation of party government.  If your academic bodies can supply the country with a sufficient number of thieves—­which I have no doubt they can—­there seems no limit to the amount of truth that may be attained.  If, however, I may suggest the only difficulty that occurs to me, it is that academic thieves shew no great alacrity in falling out, but incline rather to back each other up through thick and thin.”

“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Turvey, “there is that difficulty; nevertheless circumstances from time to time arise to get them by the ears in spite of themselves.  But from whatever point of view you may look at the question, it is obviously better to aim at imperfection than perfection; for if we aim steadily at imperfection, we shall probably get it within a reasonable time, whereas to the end of our days we should never reach perfection.  Moreover, from a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.”  He then turned to his class and said—­

“And now tell me what did the Sunchild tell us about God and Mammon?”

The head-boy answered:  “He said that we must serve both, for no man can serve God well and truly who does not serve Mammon a little also; and no man can serve Mammon effectually unless he serve God largely at the same time.”

“What were his words?”

“He said, ’Cursed be they that say, “Thou shalt not serve God and Mammon, for it is the whole duty of man to know how to adjust the conflicting claims of these two deities.”’”

Here my father interposed.  “I knew the Sunchild; and I more than once heard him speak of God and Mammon.  He never varied the form of the words he used, which were to the effect that a man must serve either God or Mammon, but that he could not serve both.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Turvey, “that no doubt was his exoteric teaching, but Professors Hanky and Panky have assured me most solemnly that his esoteric teaching was as I have given it.  By the way, these gentlemen are both, I understand, at Sunch’ston, and I think it quite likely that I shall have a visit from them this afternoon.  If you do not know them I should have great pleasure in introducing you to them; I was at Bridgeford with both of them.”

“I have had the pleasure of meeting them already,” said my father, “and as you are by no means certain that they will come, I will ask you to let me thank you for all that you have been good enough to shew me, and bid you good-afternoon.  I have a rather pressing engagement—­”

“My dear sir, you must please give me five minutes more.  I shall examine the boys in the Musical Bank Catechism.”  He pointed to one of them and said, “Repeat your duty towards your neighbour.”

“My duty towards my neighbour,” said the boy, “is to be quite sure that he is not likely to borrow money of me before I let him speak to me at all, and then to have as little to do with him as—­”

At this point there was a loud ring at the door bell.  “Hanky and Panky come to see me, no doubt,” said Mr. Turvey.  “I do hope it is so.  You must stay and see them.”

“My dear sir,” said my father, putting his handkerchief up to his face, “I am taken suddenly unwell and must positively leave you.”  He said this in so peremptory a tone that Mr. Turvey had to yield.  My father held his handkerchief to his face as he went through the passage and hall, but when the servant opened the door he took it down, for there was no Hanky or Panky—­no one, in fact, but a poor, wizened old man who had come, as he did every other Saturday afternoon, to wind up the Deformatory clocks.

Nevertheless, he had been scared, and was in a very wicked-fleeth-when-no-man-pursueth frame of mind.  He went to his inn, and shut himself up in his room for some time, taking notes of all that had happened to him in the last three days.  But even at his inn he no longer felt safe.  How did he know but that Hanky and Panky might have driven over from Sunch’ston to see Mr. Turvey, and might put up at this very house? or they might even be going to spend the night here.  He did not venture out of his room till after seven by which time he had made rough notes of as much of the foregoing chapters as had come to his knowledge so far.  Much of what I have told as nearly as I could in the order in which it happened, he did not learn till later.  After giving the merest outline of his interview with Mr. Turvey, he wrote a note as follows:—­“I suppose I must have held forth about the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but I had quite forgotten it, though I remember repeatedly quoting my favourite proverb, ’Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.’  To this they have paid no attention.”

By seven his panic about Hanky and Panky ended, for if they had not come by this time, they were not likely to do so.  Not knowing that they were staying at the Mayor’s, he had rather settled it that they would now stroll up to the place where they had left their hoard and bring it down as soon as night had fallen.  And it is quite possible that they might have found some excuse for doing this, when dinner was over, if their hostess had not undesignedly hindered them by telling them about the Sunchild.  When the conversation recorded in the preceding chapter was over, it was too late for them to make any plausible excuse for leaving the house; we may be sure, therefore, that much more had been said than Yram and George were able to remember and report to my father.

After another stroll about Fairmead, during which he saw nothing but what on a larger scale he had already seen at Sunch’ston, he returned to his inn at about half-past eight, and ordered supper in a public room that corresponded with the coffee-room of an English hotel.