Delphi complete works of.., p.559
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 559
The standardization of education is a thing of our immediate time, a present problem with no past parallel, a small cloud of danger which may later on obscure the sky. On this continent, at least, we are so anxious to make the entry into all professions a matter of provable merit that we are trying to cut and dry every performance, to indicate exactly the content of each branch and part of knowledge, to leave nothing to the individual spontaneity of the teacher and the pupil, with the result that a huge educational machine is being created from Maine to California and from Halifax to Vancouver in which every teacher is going to be like every other teacher and every text-book the same as every other text-book.
As I see it, this very similarity and uniformity defeats its own end. There is not enough room left for individual variety, individual genius. People of exception to mark the path of the nation are at least as necessary as the mass who trample it smooth. In education spontaneous effort is best brought out by the cultivating of differences not of similarities. One good text-book is not as good as two bad ones. One queer teacher — something of a crank and eccentric — may be of more cultural value than a whole boxful as alike as ninepins. As life becomes more uniform in America, personality, individuality, tends to disappear. America gains, of course, enormously in immediate power from the similarity of its people. There are no revolutions in Boston, no monarchist plots in Idaho. The foreign culture of New Orleans has passed away along with the polygamy of Utah. The South has been northernized and the West has been easternized. Everywhere there are the same schools, colleges, churches, the rotary clubs, and the Y.M.C.A., all constituting the most wonderful political and social unity ever witnessed. In the British Empire there is nothing to compare with it. There is less uniformity in the people as between two neighbouring counties in England than as between Maine and California.
But such cultural results can only be attained at a certain price and risk. Even in industry there is always the lurking fear that standardization may mean stagnation. An industry equipped at vast expense with plant and machinery for one special piece of production in which it creates an unrivalled order and cheapness, cannot well change. China, no doubt, became standardized, in its own humble way, thousands of years ago, and inventive genius languished and died. America not yet. We are told that Mr. Henry Ford relinquished a hundred million dollars in order to change the popular model of the Ford car — a titanic effort against the creeping paralysis of standardization. But the inherent tendency of mass-production to run into a fixed mould and solidity is ever there. It is the ghost behind the scene at the industrial banquet.
In the British Empire we are, industrially and culturally, only at the beginning of standardization. In industry, especially in England itself, we need it. There is no doubt, even to outsiders without business experience and technical knowledge, that the industrial plant of England needs to be overhauled and reorganized from top to bottom. It is probable, also, that at present there is not enough uniformity, or rather not enough unity and contact among the varied educational systems of the Empire. There are in existence bodies such as the British Association in which all the Empire shares. There is a conspicuous element of exception in the existence of the Rhodes scholars, past and present, who form, link by link, a sort of intellectual chain of Imperial contact. Medicine and science are more or less assimilated throughout the Empire, but mainly for the reason that they are everywhere international. But in the cultivation of the liberal arts, the education of the arts colleges shows very little contact, very little knowledge of one part of the Empire with another, very little of the mutual support which it ought to be possible to extend. It would not be possible in this book without departing from its proper sphere to attempt to enter the field indicated and to discuss the co-ordination of education throughout the Empire. But there are certain aspects of culture, of literature and art which lie in close connection with economic life, and in which intellectual life and material welfare act and react upon one another. I am thinking here of the field presented by books, songs, dramas, broadcasts and moving pictures. To what extent shall we try to control these things in the interests of Imperial unity? I am aware that the whole British tradition is in favour of entire freedom in the world of arts and literature, and I am well aware that the republic of letters is a nobler ideal than the stimulation by a forced draught of the ardour of national authorship.
The whole British tradition is in favour of letting people read what they want to read, see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. If they want to read Norwegian drama and laugh at American humour, let there be no “tax on enlightenment” to stop them from doing so. This is a noble doctrine, a fundamental idea of the British people and, for generations, a bed-rock basis of British public policy. There was no attempt to prohibit or penalize in England the works of Robert Burns or Walter Scott, or to keep Shakespeare out of Scotland. The attitude contrasts with that of many well-meaning people — in Canada, let us say — who look on Canadian authorship as a thing to be encouraged like Canadian cheese and Canadian apples. To them a Peterborough poet is welcomed in the same way as a Peterborough ham, and the consumption of American fiction deplored like the consumption of American pickles.
With such an attitude as this I have no sympathy, except as with the misguided idea of patriotism which lies behind it. But in regard to a large part of the field of literary and cultural output newer circumstances have arisen to overwhelm and alter the earlier doctrine of absolute freedom of exchange and absolute freedom of intercourse. The production of magazines and books, dramas and moving pictures has now become a series of large-scale industries, which are no longer mere matters of art but also large matters of business. In one at least of these things — the moving picture — the commercial and economic aspect utterly and absolutely overwhelms its artistic aspect. A poet writes a poem all by himself. He doesn’t even need a pen and ink. If too poor to buy a pen and ink he can sing or recite his poem to any sympathetic ear. No more than that is needed for art. Even if he writes it or prints it, that is but a simple matter for a few copies, and if the virtue is there it will circulate for its own sake, in wider and wider circles, and if the virtue is not there the voice of the singer falls unheard and the paper is lost in the rubbish heap.
But the moving picture. No single Shakespeare can create one. There must be a vast apparatus and contraption of cameras, of cardboard towns, of supers and scenery, and reaching out from the chains of theatres and tons of advertizing — millions upon millions of dollars of invested capital. Against all this, the individual is lost and hopeless. The doctrine of the freedom of the republic of letters when applied to the free importation and exhibition of foreign moving pictures absolutely breaks down.
The Americans appreciated and seized and exploited the moving picture earlier and better than any other people. They deserve all the credit that accrues from that. A practical result of this is that now all the world looks at American moving pictures. In England and in the Empire we look at very few others. If we found that all over the Empire we read exclusively American poetry and thought our own to be poor stuff beside it, there would be nothing to do about it except to pray for new brains or emigrate to the United States. But is this so, in regard to moving pictures? Is there nothing that we can do, or ought to do about it?
The motion picture came into the commercial world under the name of the vitascope in 1896. It showed 1,000 feet of pictures so measured to correspond in time with the “turn” of a vaudeville artist. It showed pictures of moving things — a marvellous novelty; pictures of a moving train, pictures of horses jumping. It made a vast sensation. Then the novelty wore out, and the flickering black and white pictures lost their attraction. People couldn’t sit for ever and watch a photographic train running or see a photographic cow milked in a black and white barnyard. Reality was better. At that stage imagination came to the aid of mechanical invention. A picture was made up (1903) called The Life of an American Fireman. Here were seen firemen sliding down a pole, leaping into a wagon, roaring at full speed (13 miles an hour) through the street. A house is seen burning. A woman and child appear at the window. A printed “legend” tells the audience that these are the chief fireman’s wife and child. A man going up a ladder, the chief fireman! A man carrying down a woman and child! Chief fireman eating supper with his rescued family. And with this the “photoplay” came into the world, with an incalculable effect on the character, happiness and destiny of mankind.
There is no need to recount the story of the success of the moving picture. All the world knows how it grew from the crude beginnings as the American Fireman and the Great Train Robbery to the vast Hollywood panoramas of to-day. The point before us at present is that the Americans grasped its full commercial significance and made it their own. The motive was overwhelmingly that of business — how to make money — not art, not patriotism. The motion picture for all its millionaire paraphernalia is the lowest of the arts. It is saturated, permeated, penetrated by the business motive. It is there for money. That is why the industry deserves to be treated not as an art but as a commercial enterprise. I do not mean that the motive force is altogether commercial. The urge of art comes in. Making up a scenario is creative. “Producing” it is creative. The longing of the country girl to be a great screen artist has in it something of the quality of the child who wants to be a painter — that and sheer vanity. But in the motion picture business the true art side is overwhelmed, as I say, by the other factors. The picture is there first, last and foremost to make money. It must avoid anything and everything that doesn’t pay. “Art for art’s sake” has no meaning when a “production” costs a million dollars.
The Americans, I repeat, have the credit of having first truly appreciated the possibilities of the moving picture. It had to make its way against the prejudice of the educational classes. It had to appeal to the crowd, to the common people, to the young. Its price was ten cents. At that it needed an audience of many millions. It must suit itself to their taste and level itself to their understanding. Hence at the beginning people who had had a classical and literary education failed to sympathize with the moving picture. Its poor black and white simplicity, its crude pathos, its elementary heroics appealed to the newsboy rather than to the professor. In the long run the newsboy was right and the professor was wrong. People of “classical education” in every age are apt to be impervious to newer forms of art and letters. The mould of their minds is set. In England, at least until yesterday, what is called educated taste in art and letters ruled more than in America where the word “highbrow” sweeps it jeeringly aside. In England the best known magazines, newspapers and reviews are written for educated people only. In America, overwhelmingly and with but few conspicuous exceptions, newspapers and magazines are written for the man on the street. Hence the moving picture found its proper psychological environment for its growth in America and made the United States its home. With each stage of growth it grew further on what it fed on, and fed more and more as it grew. Hence its position became more and more entrenched. Advantages of climate and such were only incidental. Nature has made fifty Hollywoods where commerce selected only one. The real advantage was in the psychological setting — the American mind free from the artistic prejudice of old-world culture; the American mechanical ingenuity to create “fade outs” and “cut backs” and make a ten-story building with one story of it real and the rest in tiny cardboard; and, above all, in the vast American industrial class with its high wages and easy standard of living, and ten cents to spend in tens of millions.
So the moving picture is there. Statistics made up a year or so ago, give some idea of its colossal size and the strength of its entrenched position. An average feature picture costs from $200,000 to $300,000. Larger scale productions run up to $2,000,000. Four years ago the investment in the business was estimated at $1,500,000,000 and it increases yearly. One great company alone produces 900,000,000 feet of film a year. About 800,000,000 feet of film is exported every year. There are 50,000 moving picture houses in the world, in the United States 20,000, in Germany 4,000, in France 3,000, in Great Britain 3,500. The great bulk of the supply to these picture theatres is American. The American pictures, carrying with them the American message, American ideas, American goods, American advertising, go all over the world. The Far East took 4,000,000 feet of Americanism in 1913 and absorbed 54,000,000 feet in 1925. In the artistic sense there is no real competitor except Germany; and in the whole matter, as art, as production, as commerce, as influence, England and the English are nowhere.
The only thing more surprising than this is the feeble complacency of the English in accepting it. Such legislation as there is, like the duty on American films, is without real effect; the fraction per cent law merely induces the American owners of English picture houses to put on a fraction per cent of inferior English stuff beside which the American shines with a bright light.
The effect commercially is incalculable. Not only is the industry in itself a huge national asset, but it serves as a huge advertising medium for national goods. To use the true American phrase, it helps to “sell” the United States. Britishers, Australians, Canadians, Polynesians and Turks sit at the picture and admire the smoothly gliding American car, the magnificence of American metropolitan hotels and the luxury of American transport. Beside all this “home” seems but a poor place. There rises and grows the legend of America — great, powerful and luxurious in a broken and beaten world.
In this way, the American moving picture flickering away in the dark silence of 50,000 “palaces” converts the world to its ideas, shows to the world the epic pageant of American history, the history of a land of heroes casting out the tyranny of Europe; shows to the world the Great War won by America; shows how a great people and a great President, vexed to the heart at the conflicts of a benighted Europe, sent out an army and conquered it, and then, returning home, refused all territory and all reward, performing its task at cost and nothing more.
In all these there is not meant to be any word of criticism against the United States. If they set their history in a high and patriotic light for their young people they are only doing what every nation has done, and England as much as any. National history without a certain infusion of lies would not be a strong enough stimulant for the young; or if not lies, at least a warm and generous colouring of the truth. I remember that when, as a little boy in England, I first read of the wars between England and France, I was given to understand that the English were always victorious. As soon as they saw the French they gave one wild “hurrah” and swept the French off the field. At sea any French fleet was at once sent to the bottom with one true British broadside. The history books did not explain how it was that such poor nuts as the French were the dominant power in the world for at least a century. In these books, of course, the Prussians had no part in winning Waterloo except a complimentary entrance to shake hands with Wellington after it was over; just as in the American books Cornwallis was conquered by George Washington without the French fleet that held him prisoner.
With all of this kind of thing there is no need to quarrel here. The discussion belongs in the higher atmosphere of world-wide humanism. The Americans, in regard to history, to patriotism, to moving pictures and to the dissemination of their own ideas and their own standards are only doing what we all do, or would like to.
The problem here is to discuss what we are going to do about it. The answer to this question, as I understand it, is the entirely Christian precept to do to the Americans what the Americans would do to us. In the past when the United States found that they could not compete with British cotton and woollen goods because of England’s initial advantages and long lead, they shut them out. In the past when the United States found that its makers could not compete with English rails and structural steel and tin plate, they cut them out. In the present when the United States find that their farming class do not want to import Canadian eggs and Canadian cream and Canadian maple sugar, they cut them out.
If any foreign nation had established a moving-picture industry that sent films to the United States, that seized and held the whole market, there is no doubt what they would do or how right they would be in doing it. They would shut it out with whatever duties prohibitions or legislation were necessary to keep it out. Then they would try to build up in their own country a better industry than the one they excluded. That is what they have always done in the past and that is where they have succeeded.
Let us suppose then that we exclude from the Empire the American moving picture — not half, not partly, but altogether. Let us suppose that we gave, by joint Empire legislation of the United Kingdom and any participating Dominions, two years’ notice, or three if two is not enough. Without such notice the prohibition would merely create disaster for picture-house owners, employees and scores of others. But with two years’ notice, or three, the industry can reform and recreate itself on British ground. Leaving out British India there are 66,500,000 white people in the Empire with the “picture habit” already acquired with some 60,000,000 more black and yellow people ready to acquire it. The game is worth the candle, even if the candle is the biggest battery of electric arcs that ever hung in Hollywood. Think what an influx of capital and energy would be let loose by such a project! The Empire has not one, but a dozen suitable places, there are cloudless climates and desert sand and forests all grouped together as required; or Arctic snows ready to use if we care to break away from the Hollywood tradition that life all happens in the sunshine. Observe further that under such a plan, with two years’ notice, the actors and the personnel have nothing to lose and much to gain. There would be a regular gold rush into the new British movies. We should get back our lost Charlie Chaplins and our Mary Pickfords. British theatre managers would lose nothing: if the pictures were good enough the same public will be there. The gain to British capital and investment would be enormous. But greatest of all would be the gain to British ideals and ideas now dethroned. And if we failed, we could at any moment resume our present humble and admiring status.
