_ CHAPTER LXVI. OF DISCIPLINE
"Well, anyhow," said Vincent at dinner, commenting on something that had been said, "you may not get anything else out of a disagreeable affair like that, but you get a sort of discipline."
"Come, hold on," said Father Payne; "that won't do, you know! Discipline, in my belief, is in itself a bad thing, unless you not only get something out of it, but, what is more, know what you get out of it. You can't discipline anyone, unless he desires it! Discipline means the repressing of something--you must be quite sure that it is worth repressing."
"What I mean," said Vincent, "is that it makes you tougher and harder."
"Yes," said Father Payne, "but that is not a good thing in itself, unless there is something soft and weak in you. Discipline may easily knock the good things out of you. There's a general kind of belief that, because the world is a rough place, where you may get tumbles and shocks without any fault of your own, therefore it is as well to have something rough about you. I don't believe in that. The reason why a man gets roughly handled, in nine cases out of ten, is not because he is obnoxious or offensive, but because other people are harsh and indifferent. I want to apply discipline to the brutal, not to brutalise the sensitive. If discipline simply made people brave and patient, it would be different, but it often makes them callous and unpleasant."
"But doesn't everyone want discipline of some kind?" said Vincent.
"Of the right kind, yes," said Father Payne. "Some people want a good deal more than they get, and some a certain amount less than they get. It's a delicate business. It is not always fortifying. Take a simple case. A bold, brazen sort of boy who is untruthful may want a whipping; but a timid and imaginative boy who is untruthful doesn't necessarily want a whipping at all--it makes him more, and not less, timid. One of the most ridiculous and persistent blunders in human life is to believe that a certain penalty is divinely appointed for a certain offence. Our theory of punishment is all wrong; we inflict punishment, as a rule, not to improve an offender, but out of revenge, or because it gives us a comfortable sense of our own justice. And the whole difficulty of discipline is that it is apt to be applied in lumps, and distributed wholesale to people who don't all want the same amount. We haven't really got very far away from the Squeers theory of giving all the boys brimstone and treacle alike."
"Yes, but in a school," said Vincent, "would not the boys themselves resent it, if they were punished differently for the same offence?"
"That is to say," said Father Payne, "that you are to treat boys, whom you are supposed to be training, in accordance with their ideas of justice, and not in accordance with yours! Why should you confirm them in a wholly erroneous view of justice? Justice isn't a mathematical thing--or rather, it ought to be a mathematical thing, because you ought to take into account a lot of factors, which you simply omit from your calculation. I believe very little in punishment, to tell you the truth; it ought only to be inflicted after many warnings, when the offence is deliberately repeated. I don't believe that the sane and normal person is a habitual and deliberate offender. The kind of absence of self-restraint which makes people unable to resist temptation, in any form, is a disease, and ought to be segregated. I haven't the slightest doubt that we shall end by segregating or sterilising the person of criminal tendencies, which only means a total inability, in the presence of a temptation, to foresee consequences, and which gratifies a momentary desire."
"But apart from definite moral disease," said Vincent, "isn't it a good thing to compel people, if possible, into a certain sort of habit? I am speaking of faults which are not criminal--things like unpunctuality, laziness, small excesses, mild untrustworthiness, and so forth."
"Well, I don't personally believe in coercive discipline at all," said Father Payne. "I think it simply gets people out of shape. I believe in trying to give people a real motive for self-discipline: take unpunctuality, for instance. The only way to make an unpunctual person punctual is to convince him that it is rude and unjust to keep other people waiting. There is nothing sacred about punctuality in itself, unless some one else suffers by your being unpunctual. If it comes to that, isn't it quite as good a discipline for punctual people to learn to wait without impatience for the unpunctual? Supposing an unpunctual person were to say, 'I do it on principle, to teach precise people not to mind waiting,' where is the flaw in that? Take what you call laziness. Some people work better by fits and starts, some do better work by regularity. The point is to know how you work best. You must not make the convenience of average people into a moral law. The thing to aim at is that a man should not go on doing a thing which he honestly believes to be wrong and hurtful, out of a mere habit. Take the small excesses of which you speak--food, drink, sleep, tobacco. Some people want more of these things than others; you can't lay down exact laws. A man ought to find out precisely what suits him best; but I'm not prepared to say that regularity in these matters is absolutely good for everyone. The thing is not to be interfered with by your habits; and the end of all discipline is, I believe, efficiency, vitality, and freedom; but it is no good substituting one tyranny for another. I was reading the life of a man the other day who simply could not believe that anyone could think a thing wrong and yet do it. His biographer said, very shrewdly, that his sense of sin was as dead as his ear for music--that he did not possess even the common liberty of right and wrong. That's a bad case of atrophy! You must not, of course, be at the mercy of your moods, but you must not be at the mercy of your ethical habits either. Of the two, I am not sure that the habit isn't the most dangerous."
"You seem to be holding a brief all round, Father," said Vincent.
"No, I am not doing that," said Father Payne, "but my theory is this. You must know, first of all, what you are aiming at, and you must apply your discipline sensibly to that. There are certain things in us which we know to be sloppy--we lie in bed, we dawdle, we eat too much, we moon over our work. All that is obviously no good, and all sensible people try to pull themselves up. When you have found out what suits you, do it boldly; but the man who admires discipline for its own sake is a sort of hypochondriac--a medicine-drinker. I have a friend who says that if he stays in a house, and sees a bottle of medicine in a cupboard, he is always tempted to take a dose. 'Is it that you feel ill?' I once said to him. 'No,' he said; 'but I have an idea that it might do me good.' The disciplinarian is like that: he is always putting a little strain upon himself, cutting off this and that, trying new rules, heading himself off. He has an uneasy feeling that if he likes anything, it is a sort of sign that he should abstain from it: he mistrusts his impulses and instincts. He thinks he is getting to talk too much, and so he practises holding his tongue. The truth is that he is suspicious of life. He is like the schoolmaster who says, 'Go and see what Jack is doing, and tell him not to!' Of course I am taking an extreme case, but there is a tendency in that direction in many people. They think that strength means the power to resist, when it really means the power to flow. I do not think that people ought to be deferential to criticism, timid before rebuke, depressed by disapproval: and, on the whole, I believe that more harm is done by self-repression, obedience, meekness than by the opposite qualities. I want men to live their own lives fearlessly--not offensively, of course--with a due regard to other people's comfort, but without any regard to other people's conventions. I believe in trusting yourself, on the whole, and trusting the world. I do not think it is wholesome or brave to live under the shadow of other people's fears or other people's convictions. All the people, it seems to me, who have done anything for the world, have been the people who have gone their own way; and I think that self-discipline, or external discipline meekly accepted, ends in a flattening out of men's power and character. Of course you fellows here are learning to do a definite technical thing--but you will observe that all the discipline here is defensive, and not coercive. I don't want you to take any shape or mould: I want you just to learn to do things in your own way. I don't ever want you to interfere with each other's minds too much. I don't want to interfere with your minds myself, except in so far as to help you to get rid of sloppiness and prejudices. Here, I mustn't go on--it's becoming like a prospectus! but it comes to this, that I believe in the trained mind, and not in the moulded mind; and I think that the moment discipline ceases to train strength, and begins to mould weakness, it's a thoroughly bad thing. No one can be artificially protected from life without losing life--and life is what I am out for." _