Chapter III: Part 3

"If Dives, who was buried in Hell, were to revisit the earth he would most surely have the _entrée_ to London's smartest set to-day. He would be literally pelted with invitations. And why not? Dives, so well groomed and turned out, with such a well-lined larder and so well-stocked a cellar, would be the very ideal host to cultivate. He would 'do you so well,' you would meet the 'right people at his place,' and you could always bring your 'latest friend.' Besides, what a good time one would have at his house-parties, where there would be no fear of being bored or dull!"[5]

[5] Here I seem to catch an echo of Dr. Pusey's sermon on "Why did Dives lose his soul?"

And yet again:--

"It was well when the winning-card fell into their hands, for then there was just a chance of some dressmaker or tradesman being paid something on account before becoming bankrupt. With such examples of the misuse of wealth before their eyes, it was a wonder there were not more Socialists than there actually were."

All the memories of my youth have been revived by Father Vaughan. Instead of 1906, 1876; instead of the Gothic gloom of Farm Street, the tawdry glare of St. Peter's, Eaton Square; instead of a Jesuit Father in the pulpit, a vigorous Protestant who renounces the Pope and all his works and glories in the Anglicanism of the Church of England. Grant those differences, which after all are more incidental than essential, and the sermons exactly reproduce those stirring days when the present Bishop of St. Andrews "shook the arsenal" of fashion, "thundered over" London, and achieved, as his admirers said, the supreme distinction of spoiling the London Season.

I am convinced that the Higher Critics of a later age, collating the Wilkinsonian tradition with such fragments as remain of Father Vaughan's discourses, will come to the conclusion that "Wilkinson" never existed (except in Wordsworth's ode to the Spade), but was a kind of heroic figure conceived by a much later generation, which had quivered under the rhetoric of a real person or persons called Vaughan; and the opinion of the learned will be sharply divided on such questions as whether Vaughan was one or many; if one, whether he was a Priest, a Cardinal, a Head Master, or an Independent Minister; or whether he was all four at different stages of his career.

XII

OXFORD

"Once, my dear--but the world was young then--
Magdalen elms and Trinity limes,--
Lissom the oars and backs that swung then,
Eight good men in the good old times--
Careless we and the chorus flung then.
Under St. Mary's chimes!

"Still on her spire the pigeons hover;
Still by her gateway flits the gown;
Ah, but her secret? You, young lover,
Drumming her old ones forth from town,
Know you the secret none discover?
Tell it--when _you_ go down."

What Matthew Arnold did for the interpretation of Oxford through the medium of prose, that Mr. Quiller-Couch has done through the medium of verse. In the poem from which I have just quoted two stanzas he conveys, as no one else has ever conveyed it in poetry, the tender and elusive charm of that incomparable place.

"Know you her secret none can utter--
Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?"

It is a hard question, and susceptible of some very prosaic and therefore inappropriate answers. The true answer can, I think, only be given by those for whom Oxford lies, half hid, in the enchanted past: "Tell it--when _you_ go down."

Some parts of the spell which Oxford exercises on those who are subjected to her influence are in no sense secret. We perceive them from the day when we first set foot within her precincts, and the sense of them abides with us for ever.

"If less insensible than sodden clay
In a sea-river's bed at ebb of tide,"

all sons of Oxford must realize her material beauty, her historical pre-eminence, her contribution to thought and culture, her influence on the religious life of England.

"Ah, but her secret? You, young lover."

There is nothing secret about all this; it is palpable and manifest; and yet it does not exhaust the spell. Something there is that remains undiscovered, or at best half-discovered--felt and guessed at, but not clearly apprehended--until we have passed away from the "dreaming spires"--the cloisters and the gardens and the river--to that sterner life for which these mysterious enchantments have been preparing us.

"Know you the secret none discover?"

If you do, that is proof that time has done its work and has brought to the test of practical result the influences which were shaping your mind and, still more potently, your heart, between eighteen and twenty-two. What that "secret" is, let an unworthy son of Oxford try to tell.

To begin with a negative, it is not the secret of Nirvana. There are misguided critics abroad in the land who seem to assume that life lived easily in a beautiful place, amid a society which includes all knowledge in its comprehensive survey, and far remote from the human tragedy of poverty and toil and pain, must necessarily be calm. And so, as regards the actual work and warfare of mankind, it may be. The bitter cry of starving Poplar does not very readily penetrate to the well-spread table of an Oxford common-room. In a laburnum-clad villa in the Parks we can afford to reason very temperately about life in cities where five families camp in one room. But when we leave the actualities of life and come to the region of thought and opinion, all the pent energy of Oxford seethes and stirs. The Hebrew word for "Prophet" comes, I believe, from a root which signifies to bubble like water on the flames; and in this fervency of thought and feeling Oxford is characteristically prophetic. It is a tradition that in some year of the passion-torn 'forties the subject for the Newdigate Prize Poem was Cromwell, whereas the subject for the corresponding poem at Cambridge was Plato. In that selection Oxford was true to herself. For a century at least (even if we leave out of sight her earlier convulsions) she has been the battle-field of contending sects. Her air has resounded with party-cries, and the dead bodies of the controversially slain have lain thick in her streets. All the opposing forces of Church and State, of theology and politics, of philosophy and science, of literary and social and economic theory, have contended for mastery in the place which Matthew Arnold, with rare irony, described as "so unruffled by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!" Every succeeding generation of Oxford men has borne its part in these ever-recurring strifes. To hold aloof from them would have been poltroonery. Passionately convinced (at twenty) that we had sworn ourselves for life to each cause which we espoused, we have pleaded and planned and denounced and persuaded; have struck the shrewdest blows which our strength could compass, and devised the most dangerous pitfalls which wit could suggest. Nothing came of it all, and nothing could come, except the ruin of our appointed studies and the resulting dislocation of all subsequent life. But we were obeying the irresistible impulse of the time and the place in which our lot was cast, and we were ready to risk our all upon the venture.

"Never we wince, though none deplore us,
We who go reaping that we sowed;
Cities at cockcrow wake before us--
Hey, for the lilt of the London road!
One look back, and a rousing chorus!
Never a palinode!"

It is when we have finally sung that chorus and have travelled a few miles upon that road, that we learn the secret which we never discovered while as yet Oxford held us in the thick of the fight. We thought then that we were the most desperate partizans; we asked no quarter, and gave none; pushed our argumentative victories to their uttermost consequences, and made short work of a fallen foe. But, when all the old battle-cries have died out of our ears, we begin to perceive humaner voices. All at once we realize that a great part of our old contentions was only sound and fury and self-deception, and that, though the causes for which we strove may have been absolutely right, our opponents were not necessarily villains. In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford. All the time that we were fighting and fuming, the higher and subtler influences of the place were moulding us, unconscious though we were, to a more gracious ideal. We had really learnt to distinguish between intellectual error and moral obliquity. We could differ from another on every point of the political and theological compass, and yet in our hearts acknowledge him to be the best of all good fellows. Without surrendering a single conviction, we came to see the virtue of so stating our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of offending and alienating. We had attained to that temper which, in the sphere of thought and opinion, is analogous to the crowning virtue of Christian charity.

"Tell it--when _you_ go down."

Lately it has been my privilege to address a considerable gathering of Oxford undergraduates, all keenly alive to the interests and controversies of the present hour, all devotedly loyal to the tradition of Oxford as each understood it, and all with their eyes eagerly fixed on "the wistful limit of the world." With such an audience it was inevitable to insist on the graces and benedictions which Oxford can confer, and to dwell on Mr. Gladstone's dogma that to call a man a "typically Oxford man" is to bestow the highest possible praise.

But this was not all. Something more remained to be said. It was for a speaker who had travelled for thirty years on "the London road" to state as plainly as he could his own deepest obligation to the place which had decided the course and complexion of his life. And, when it was difficult to express that obligation in the pedestrian prose of an after-dinner speech, he turned for succour to the poet who sang of "the secret none discover." Wherever philosophical insight is combined with literary genius and personal charm, one says instinctively, "That man is, or ought to be, an Oxford man." Chiefest among the great names which Oxford ought to claim but cannot is the name of Edmund Burke; and the "Secret" on which we have been discoursing seems to be conveyed with luminous precision in his description of the ideal character: "It is our business ... to bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth; so to be patriots as not to forget we are gentlemen; to cultivate friendships and to incur enmities; to have both strong, but both selected--in the one to be placable, in the other immovable." Whoso has attained to that ideal has learnt the "Secret" of Oxford.

XIII

SCHOOLS FOR SHEPHERDS

"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed."

Why not? Because the Shepherds are so imperfectly trained for their business. This, at any rate, is the testimony of a Canon (sometime Examining Chaplain to a Bishop) who at the Diocesan Conference at Ely the other day declared that the clergy were "not qualified to provide instruction in Church Doctrine for the laity because they were not properly trained"; and further testified that "Nonconformist Ministers were much better trained" than the English Clergy. This testimony from a superior Shepherd is rather startling for the Sheep, and it suggests some interesting comparisons. It is, I take it, unquestionable that Nonconformist ministers and Roman Catholic priests alike have much more of a technical education than is thought necessary for their Anglican brothers. They are, so to say, caught early, and their studies from seventeen or eighteen onwards are directed steadily towards their appointed work in life. A Roman Seminarist learns his Latin and Greek as subsidiary to higher studies; he spends, I believe, two years in Philosophy and four in Theology, and is harassed by incessant examinations. The training of the youth who aspires to the Nonconformist ministry is of much the same kind. "Moral Theology," in other words the Science of the Confessional, he naturally does not learn; but, on the other hand, he is sedulously trained for the work of public speaking and preaching. "If you can't preach," said Spurgeon to his students at Stockwell, "it is a clear proof that God doesn't mean you to be a preacher, and you must choose some other occupation."

Vastly different is the training of the English Curate. Private School, Public School, and University: cricket, football, rowing: elementary Greek and Latin, and a smattering of Law or History--these constitute his "atmosphere," his moral and mental discipline, between the ages of ten and twenty-three. Even more remarkable is his theological equipment. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he knows absolutely nothing about the Church of which he is to be a minister, her doctrines, history, or practical system. He has been enveloped from his youth up by a hazy atmosphere of Undogmatic Religion. I well remember that an Undergraduate friend of mine, who came to Oxford from Dr. Temple's Sixth Form at Rugby, declined to believe that there are two Sacraments. That there was a religious ceremony called "The Sacrament," for which some people stayed after the ordinary service, he was well aware, as also that infants were ceremonially sprinkled; but that this latter ceremony was a Sacrament he could not be induced to believe. During his last year at Oxford he informed himself better on this and some similar topics, and a year afterwards was preaching, with great acceptance, to a fashionable congregation. From what I knew of my friend's theological attainments, I should imagine that the Bishop's Examination could not have been a very terrifying process; but forty years earlier it must have been even less formidable. The Hon. and Rev. George Spencer (uncle of the present Lord Spencer) was destined from an early age for the Family Living in Northamptonshire. He hunted and shot, and danced, and travelled on the Continent, and held a commission in the Yeomanry. After two years at Trinity College, Cambridge, he took a "Nobleman's Degree," and, when he neared the canonical age of twenty-three, he wrote to the Bishop of Peterborough's Examining Chaplain offering himself for Ordination and asking advice as to his preparation. The examiner--ah, would that there were more like him!--wrote back:--

"It is impossible that I should ever entertain any idea of subjecting a gentleman with whose talents and good qualities I am so well acquainted as I am with yours to any examination except as a matter of form, for which a verse in the Greek Testament and an Article of the Church of England returned into Latin will be amply sufficient."

This reassuring letter was written on the 12th of October 1822, and on the 22nd of December next ensuing George Spencer was ordained Deacon and a year later Priest. "On the evening before the ordination, whilst the Bishop and various clergymen and their ladies and the candidates amused themselves with a rubber of whist, Mr. Spencer refused to play." And the refusal was considered, as perhaps it was, noteworthy.

The Movement which issued from Oxford in 1833 introduced some improvement into the method of conducting ordinations, as into other departments of the Church's work. The examination became, though not yet very serious, at least a little less farcical, and some attempt was made in charges and sermons to urge upon the candidates the gravity of what they were undertaking. But, according to the late Bishop Woodford, "the evenings, during which they were left to themselves, became evenings of social enjoyment, if not of boisterous merriment, in which the features of an old college supper-party were reproduced, rather than intervals of solemn thought and retirement."

Bishop Samuel Wilberforce raised the standard of what was expected in the way of Scriptural and theological knowledge; he made the examination a reality; he laid special stress on sermon-writing; and he made the Ember Week a season of spiritual retirement in which men about to take the most decisive step in life might be brought face to face with the responsibilities involved in their decision. The example set by Wilberforce was followed, sooner or later, by every bishop on the bench; the requirements have been raised, and the system has been developed and improved; but the credit of initiation belongs to that epoch-making episcopate, which began in 1845 and ended, through a false step made by a horse on the Surrey Downs, on the 19th of July 1873.

It soon became apparent to those who had the spiritual interests of the Church at heart that something more than twelve months' book-work and a week of religious retirement was required to wean the ordinary B.A. from the puerilities--if nothing worse--of his Undergraduate life, and to equip him for a life of Pastorship and Teachership. The sense of this need gave rise to the creation of Theological Colleges, where a man who looked forward to Holy Orders might, after taking his ordinary degree at Oxford or Cambridge, apply himself to the studies more specially necessary for his chosen work, and--even more important still--might acquire the habits of methodical and self-disciplined life. The idea took shape in such foundations as the Theological Colleges of Wells, Cuddesdon, Sarum, and Ely, the _Scholæ Cancellarii_ at Lincoln, and the Clergy School at Leeds. Fighting their way through all manner of strange misrepresentations about Monasticism and Mediævalism, they have in the course of years attained to recognition, popularity, and apparent stability. The bishops patronize them warmly, and incumbents who desire curates not wholly ignorant of their craft are increasingly unwilling to engage one who has not passed through a Theological College. That the broad result of the training given in these seminaries is a general increase in clerical efficiency I cannot doubt, but perhaps a layman may be permitted to point out some curious gaps and lapses in that training which go some way towards making clergymen less esteemed, and therefore less influential, than they ought to be.

1. The Clergy are not taught to be courteous. If they are courteous by nature and habit, well and good; but a rough Undergraduate, destitute of sympathy and tact and ignorant of social usage, passes through a Theological College and comes out as rough as he entered it. A Bear in Holy Orders is as destructive as a Bull in a China Shop.

2. The Clergy are not taught to manage money; they muddle their public accounts; they beg money for one object and use it for another; they seldom acknowledge what they receive by post; and they have absolutely no notion of cutting their coat according to their cloth. "Spend and beg, and the money will come from somewhere" is their simple and sufficient creed.

3. The Clergy are not taught business. They have not the faintest notion of conducting a public meeting. They lose their way in the agenda-paper of the most insignificant committee. They break appointments at their will and pleasure. They seldom answer letters, and are frankly astonished when their correspondents are annoyed.

4. The Clergy are not taught the Science of Citizenship. Outside their strictly professional studies (and, in some cases, the records of athleticism) they are the most ignorant set of young men in the world. They work hard and play hard, but they never read. They know nothing of books, nothing of history, nothing of the Constitution under which they live, of the principles and records of political parties, of the need for social reform or the means of securing it. They have a vague but clinging notion that Radicals are Infidels, and that Dissenters, if they got their deserts, would have their heads punched.

Sixty years ago an Italian critic said that, in spite of all their defects, the English clergy were "Un clero colto e civile." Could as much be said to-day?

XIV

PILGRIMAGES

I use the word in something wider than Chaucer's sense, and yet in a sense not wholly different from his. For, though we no longer make an annual visit to the Shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, still we all feel bound, at least once a year, to go somewhere and do something quite out of our normal course. Perhaps, like Chaucer's friends, we "long" to do this in April, but the claims of business are generally too strong for us; so we have to content ourselves with admiring the peeps of greenery which begin to invade the soot of our urban gardens, and, if we are of a cultured habit, we can always quote Browning's Thrush or strain the kalendar so as to admit Wordsworth's Daffodils.

This notion of a yearly Pilgrimage as a necessity of rightly-ordered life seems to have fallen into a long abeyance. "Dan Chaucer" (for I love to be on easy terms with great men) described the social customs of the fourteenth century, and then the Pilgrimage seems to have been an established institution: "Tom Hughes" described those of the eighteenth, and this is what, writing in 1862, he says about the annual Pilgrimages of his own time:--

"I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies agreed together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of Medicine, body and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they continually distribute judiciously among the Doctors, stipulating only this one thing--that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty years ago--not a bit of it. The Browns did not go out of the county once in five years."

The Browns, as we all know, stood in Mr. Hughes's vocabulary for the Upper Middle Class of England--the class to which the clergy, the smaller squires, and the professional men belong; the class which in Chaucer's time contained the "Man of Lawe," the "Marchande," the "Franklyne," and the "Doctore of Phisyke"; and, although Mr. Hughes, who ought to know, says that in the earlier part of Queen Victoria's reign they were a stay-at-home class, they are now the most regular and the most zealous of Pilgrims. It was the majestic misfortune of the Duke in "Lothair" to have so many houses that he had no home. People so circumstanced do not need to go on Pilgrimages. After the autumn in a Scotch Castle, the winter in a country house in the Midlands, the spring in another in the Southern Counties, and the season in Grosvenor Square, people are glad of a little rest, and seek it in some "proud alcove" on the Thames or a sea-girt villa at Cowes. Unless their livers drive them to Carlsbad or their hearts to Nauheim, they do not travel, but display what Lord Beaconsfield called "the sustained splendour of their stately lives" in the many mansions which, in the aggregate, represent to them the idea of Home. I might perhaps on another occasion sketch the Grand Tour of Europe, on which, for educational purposes, the Earl of Fitzurse used to send his eldest son, young Lord Cubley; compressed, with his tutor and doctor, into a travelling-carriage, with a valet and a courier in the rumble. The Duke of Argyll's Autobiography has just told us what this kind of Pilgrimage was like; but to-day I am dealing with the present rather than the past.

It is the people with one house who go on Pilgrimages nowadays--the impoverished squire, the smoke-dried clergyman, the exhausted merchant, the harried editor. To these must be added all the inhabitants, male and female, of Lodging-land and Flat-land,--all "the dim, common populations" of Stuccovia and Suburbia. There are mysterious laws of association which connect classes with localities. Tradesmen love Margate; to clerks Scarborough is dear. The Semitic financier has long claimed Brighton for his own. Costermongers go hop-picking in Kent; artizans disport themselves on the nigger-haunted pier of Southend. Governed by some mysterious law of their being, schoolmasters make straight for the Alps. There they live the strenuous life and brave the perilous ascent; climb and puff and pant all day; rush in, very untidy and not very clean, to _table d'hôte_; and season their meal with the "shop" of St. Winifred's or the gay banter of Rosslyn Common-room. It is agreeable to watch the forced cordiality, the thin tutorial humour, with which they greet some quite irresponsive pupil who happens to have strayed into the same hotel; and I have often had occasion to admire the precocious dexterity with which the pupil extricates himself from this dreaded companionship. Of Mr. Gladstone it was said by his detractors that he had something of the Schoolmaster in his composition; and this trait was aptly illustrated when, during the summer holidays some fifty years ago, he met the late Duchess of Abercorn in a country house accompanied by her schoolboy son, Lord George Hamilton. Not many mornings had elapsed before Mr. Gladstone said to the boy's mother, "Duchess, don't you think it a pity that your son should spend his holidays in entire idleness? I should be happy to give him an hour's Homer every morning." The offer was accepted, and the foundation of Lord George's lifelong hostility to the Liberal leader was securely laid. It is the nervous dread of some such awful possibility which supplies wings to the boy's feet and lies to his tongue when he encounters Dr. Grimstone or Basil Warde in a Swiss hotel.

While the Schoolmaster limits his aspirations to the Alps, the Oxford or Cambridge Don, having a longer vacation at his command, takes a more extended view, and urges his adventurous Pilgrimage along roads less trite. A few years ago an Oxford Don resolved to strike out what was then a quite new line, and spend his Long Vacation in Portugal. Conscious of insufficient acquaintance with the Portuguese language, he repaired to Mr. Parker's excellent shop in the Turl and enquired for a Portuguese Phrase-book. After some research, that never-failing bookseller produced "The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English." The book had an instant and a deserved success. The preface sets forth that "a choice of familiar dialogues, clean of gallicisms and despoiled phrases, it was missing yet to studious Portuguese and Brazilian youth; and also to persons of other nations that wish to know the Portuguese language." To supply this felt want Pedro Carolino compiled his hand-book for "the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we dedicate him particularly." Among those studious persons was our Pilgrim-Don, who naturally turned in the first instance to a dialogue headed

"FOR TO TRAVEL

When do you start?

As soon as I shall have to finish a business at Cadiz.

Have you already arrested a coach?

Yes, sir, and very cheap.

Have you great deal of effects?

Two trunks and one portmanteau.

You may prepare all for to-morrow. We shall start at the coolness.

The way, is it good?

Very good.

At which inn shall stop us?

In that of the Sun, it is the best. The account mount is little. The supper, the bed, and the breakfast shall get up at thirty franks.

That seems to me a little dear."

The next dialogue follows in the natural order:--

"FOR TO BREAKFAST

John, bring us some thing for to breakfast.

Yes, sir; there is some sausages and some meat pies. Will you that I bring the ham?

Yes, bring him, we will cut a steak.

Put an nappe cloth upon this table.

Give us some plates, any knifes, and some forks, rinse the glasses.

I have eaten with satisfaction some pudding, sausages, and some ham. I shall take some tea.

Still a not her cup?

I thank you it is enough."

Breakfast over, the traveller engages a guide and starts out

"FOR TO SEE THE TOWN

We won't to see all that is it remarquable here.

Come with me, if you please. I shall not folget nothing what can to merit your attention. Here we are near to cathedraly. Will you come in there?

We will first go to see him in oudside, after we shall go in there for to look the interior."

A day of sight-seeing concludes happily with the ever-welcome dialogue--

"FOR TO DINE

Give us a rice soup.

What wine do you like best?

Bourgogne wine.

Give us some beef and potatoes, a beefsteak to the English.

What you shall take for dessert?

Give us some Hollande cheese and some prunes.

I will take a glass of brandy at the cherries.

Gentlemen, don't forget the waiter."

Parsimony is a bond which makes the whole world kin, and it is interesting to find embedded in 182 closely-printed pages of "despoiled phrases" two such characteristic specimens of sound English as "That seems to me a little dear" and "Don't forget the waiter."

XV

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

"Gentlemen," said Dr. Blimber to his pupils on the eve of the holidays, "we will resume our studies on the twenty-fifth of next month." But that adjournment, I think, was for Christmas, and we are now in what Matthew Arnold's delicious schoolboy called "the glad season of sun and flowers." Very soon, in Dr. Farrar's romantic phrase, "the young life which usually plays like the sunshine over St. Winifred's will be pouring unwonted brightness into many happy English homes." Or, to take Mr. Snawley's darker view of the same event, we shall be in the thick of one of "those ill-judged comings home twice a year that unsettle children's minds so."

The associations of the moment, so different in their effects on different natures, have awoke the spirit of prophecy in the late Head Master of Eton, Dr. Warre, who, projecting his soul into futurity, sees dark days coming for the "Public Schools" as that phrase has been hitherto understood. It was clear, said Dr. Warre, after distributing the prizes at Shrewsbury, "that ere long the Public Schools would have to justify not only their _curriculum_, but, it might be, their very existence. The spirit of the age seemed to be inclined towards Utilitarianism, and it was now tending to undervalue the humanities and the culture that attended them, and to demand what it appreciated as a useful and practical training--_i.e._ something capable of making boys breadwinners as soon as they left school. He did not say that view would ultimately prevail, but the trend of public opinion in that direction would necessitate on the part of Public Schools a period of self-criticism, and very probably a reorganization of _curricula_. But there was another problem to be faced which would become more serious as the century waxed older, and that was a new phase of competition. As secondary education expanded, secondary day-schools would be provided regardless of expense, and it was idle to think this would have no effect upon great Public Schools. What would be weighed in the balance, however, was the value of the corporate life and aggregate influence of the Public Schools upon the formation of character."

When ex-Head Masters begin to see visions and Old Etonians to dream dreams, the ordinary citizen, with his traditional belief in the virtue and permanence of Public Schools, must rub his eyes in astonishment. What is going to happen next? Is Eton to abandon "taste" and take to "useful knowledge"? Is Harrow to close its Boarding Houses and become a village Day School once more? Are Wykeham's "seventy faithful boys" (as the late Lord Selborne called them in his first attempt at verse) no longer to "tund" or be "tunded"? Is Westminster to forswear its Latin Play, and replace the "Phormio" and the "Trinummus" with "Box and Cox" and "Ici on Parle Français"?

These enquiries, and others like them, are forced on our attention by such subversive discourse as Dr. Warre's; and that incursion of rampant boyhood which begins with the beginning of August reinforces the eloquence of the ex-Head Master. The Retreat of the Ten Thousand, which used to worry us in our youth, was not half so formidable an affair as the Advance of the Ten Thousand, schoolboys though they be, who just now overrun the land. There they are, an army ever increasing in numbers and maintained at an immense expense. Whatever commercial and agricultural depression may have effected in other quarters, it did not touch the schools of England. The greater schools are full to overflowing; provincial schools have doubled and trebled their numbers; and every Elizabethan and Edwardian foundation in the Kingdom has woke from slumber and celebrated at least a Tercentenary. And all this is not done for nothing. Private schoolmasters take shootings in Scotland; the proprietors of Boarding-houses at the Public Schools buy villas in the Riviera, and build pineries and vineries at home; meanwhile the British Parent eyes his diminishing income and his increasing rates, and asks himself, in the secrecy of his own heart, what Tommy is really getting in return for the £200 a year expended on his education. The answer takes various forms. Perhaps Tommy is following the "grand, old fortifying classical curriculum" which sufficed for Lord Lumpington, and enabled the Rev. Esau Hittall to compose his celebrated "Longs and Shorts on the Calydonian Boar." In this case the parent says, with Rawdon Crawley, "Stick to it, my boy; there's nothing like a good classical education--nothing," but he generally is too diffident about his own accomplishments to subject his sons to a very searching test. Perhaps one boy in a hundred learns enough Latin and Greek at school to fit him for a good place in the Classical Tripos or a "First in Mods." This, if he is meant to be a schoolmaster, is a definite and tangible result from his father's investment; if he is intended for any other profession the advantage is not so clear. If he is to be a Soldier, no doubt there is the "Army Class" or the "Modern School," where, indeed, he is exempted from Greek, is taught some mathematics, and acquires some very English French and German; but, in spite of these privileges, he generally requires a year's residence at a crammer's before he has a chance for Sandhurst. For the ordinary life of the Professions the Public School makes no preparation whatever. Tommy may have acquired "taste," but he is no more qualified to be, as Dr. Warre says, a "bread-winner" than he was the day he began school-life.

Matthew Arnold, in his delightful essay on "An Eton Boy," says, with regard to that boy's prowess as Master of the Beagles:--

"The aged Barbarian will, upon this, admiringly mumble to us his story how the Battle of Waterloo was won in the Playing Fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have been prepared in those Playing Fields as well as victories--disasters due to an inadequate mental training, to want of application, knowledge, intelligence, lucidity."

With "taste" we commonly hear "tone" combined in the eulogies of Public Schools. The Parent, who knows (though he would not for the world admit) that Tommy has learnt nothing at St. Winifred's or Rosslyn which will ever enable him to earn a penny, falls back upon the impalpable consolation that there is "a very nice tone about the school." Certainly Eton imparts manners to those who have not acquired them at home, and in this respect Radley is like unto it. But, taking the Public Schools as a whole, it can scarcely be denied that, however faithfully they cultivate the ingenuous arts, they suffer Youth to be extremely brutal. If this be urged, the Parent will shift his ground and say, "Well, I like boys to be natural. I don't wish my son to be a Lord Chesterfield. Character is everything. It is the religious and moral influence of a Public School that I think so valuable." As to the Religion taught in Public Schools, it is, as Mr. T. E. Page of Charterhouse recently said with artless candour, exactly the same commodity as will probably be offered by the County Councils when the Education Bill has become law; and it is worth noting that, though Bishops shrink with horror at the prospect of this religion being offered to the poor, they are perfectly content that it should be crammed down the throats of their own sons. As to the morality acquired at Public Schools, a clergyman who was successively an Eton boy and an Eton master wrote twenty-five years ago: "The masters of many schools are sitting on a volcano, which, when it explodes, will fill with horror and alarm those who do not know what boys' schools are, or knowing it, shut their eyes and stop their ears." It must be admitted that the British Parent, dwelling on the slopes of that volcano, regards its chronic menace and its periodical activities with the most singular composure.

In years gone by Harrow, like most other places where there was a Public School accessible to day boys, was a favourite resort of widowed ladies whose husbands had served in the Indian Army or Civil Service. These "Indian Widows," as he called them, so pestered Dr. Vaughan, then Head Master, that he said in the bitterness of his soul: "Before I came to Harrow I thought 'Suttee' an abomination; but now I see that there is a great deal to be said for it." It is easy enough to see why Head Masters dislike the Home Boarding system. It defeats the curious policy by which assistant masters pay themselves out of their boarders' stomachs, and it brings all the arrangements of teaching and discipline under the survey, and perhaps criticism, of the parents; but, in spite of magisterial objections, the Home Boarding system is probably the only and certainly the most efficacious method of coping with those moral evils which all schoolmasters not wilfully blind acknowledge, and which the best of them strenuously combat. In that extension of Day Schools which Dr. Warre foresees lies the best hope of a higher tone in public education.

The British Parent knows the weaknesses of the Public School system. He knows that he gets a very doubtful return for his money--that his son learns nothing useful and very little that is ornamental; is unsuitably fed, and, when ill, insufficiently attended; exposed to moral risks of a very grave type; and withdrawn at the most impressible season of life from the sanctifying influences of Motherhood and Home. He knows all this, and, knowing it, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he sends all his boys to a Public School. Why? Partly because every one goes to a Public School and he has no wish to be eccentric or faddish; partly because the boys are tiresome at home and he wants peace; partly because, in existing conditions, he does not know how to get them educated while they are under his roof. But the strongest reason is none of these. He sends his sons to Eton or Harrow because he was there himself, has felt the glamour and learnt the spell; because some of his happiest memories hover round the Playing Fields or the Hill; because there he first knew what Friendship meant and first tasted the Romance of Life.

"I may have failed, my School may fail;
I tremble, but thus much I dare:
I love her. Let the critics rail,
My brethren and my home are there."

XVI

SCHOOLS AND BOARDING-HOUSES

"Any two meals at a Boarding-House are together less than one square meal." This pleasing postulate was, I believe, in the first instance evolved from the bitter experience of a hungry mathematician who, at this season of the year, sought change of air and scene at Margate or Herne Bay. But to-day I use the word "Boarding-House" in that more restricted sense which signifies a Master's house for the accommodation of boys at a Public School. My reason for discussing the subject is that a stray sentence in my last chapter, about the profits derived from such Boarding-Houses, caused dire offence. I am the most docile creature alive, and the rebukes which I have incurred caused me, as the French say, to make a return upon myself. I subjected my conscience to severe cross-examination. I asked whether what I had written was wholly or even approximately true, or entirely false; and whether, if true, it was offensive or indelicate. Here is the sentence in all its unglossed brutality: "The proprietors of Boarding-Houses at the Public Schools buy villas in the Riviera and build pineries and vineries at home." Now, of course, a Schoolmaster is nothing if not critical, and, in superintending the studies of his young friends, he rightly insists on the most scrupulous accuracy of phrase and figure. Not for the construing boy is the plea, dear to Biblical critics, that "the wider divergence is the higher unity." The calculating boy must not, if he values his peace, mistake inference for demonstration. Woe betide the excuse-making boy if he protests that he has spent an hour over his lesson when his tutor can show that he could only have spent fifty-five minutes. This Chinese exactness is all very well in the schoolroom, but tends to become a bore in the intercourse of social life. An Assistant Master, stung into activity by my recent strictures on Public Schools, has swooped down upon me with all the fierce alacrity which he would display in detecting a false quantity or an erroneous deduction. "Villas in the Riviera! Who buys Villas in the Riviera? Give, name, date, and place by return of post, or--write out five hundred lines." "What do you mean by Pineries and Vineries? I and my colleagues at St. Winifred's only grow cucumbers; and the Composition-Master, though he has large private means, gets his grapes from the Stores. Retract and apologize, or be for ever fallen."

Now really, when I read all this virtuous indignation, I am irresistibly reminded of the Bishop in "Little Dorrit," who, when all the guests were extolling Mr. Merdle's wealth, spoke pensively about "the goods of this world," and "tried to look as if he were rather poor himself." In vain I protested that I meant no injurious allusion to Monte Carlo, and proposed to substitute "Mansions in the Isle of Wight" for "Villas in the Riviera." The substitution availed me nothing. "You say 'Mansions.' Do you really know more than one? And how do you know that the schoolmaster who bought it did not marry a wife with a fortune? You cannot investigate his marriage settlements, so your illustration counts for nothing." In the same conciliatory spirit, I urged that "Pineries and Vineries" was a picturesque phrase invented by Lord Randolph Churchill to describe the amenities of a comfortable country house, not of the largest order; but my pedagogue was not to be pacified. "If you didn't mean Pineries and Vineries, you shouldn't have said so. It creates a bad impression in the parents' minds. Of course no reasonable person could object to one's having gardens, or stabling, or a moderate shooting, or a share of a salmon river; but parents don't like the notion that we are living in luxury. They have a nasty way of contrasting it with the nonsense which their boys tell them about tough meat and rancid butter."

At this point I began to see some resemblance between my correspondent and Matthew Arnold's critic in the _Quarterly_ of October 1868--"one of the Eton Under-Masters, who, like Demetrius the Silversmith, seems alarmed for the gains of his occupation." For, in spite of all corrections and deductions, I cannot help regarding Public Schoolmasters as a well-paid race. Of course, it is true that their incomes are not comparable to those of successful barristers or surgeons, or even Ministers of State; but, on the other side, their work is infinitely easier; their earnings begin from the day on which they embark on their profession; and no revolution of the wheel of State can shake them from their well-cushioned seats. I am quite willing to admit that, on the figures supplied by my correspondent, he and his colleagues at St. Winifred's are not making so much money as their predecessors made twenty or thirty years ago. But, as far as I can understand, this diminution of incomes does not arise from diminution of charges, but only from the fact that the force of public opinion has driven schoolmasters to recognize, rather more fully than in days gone by, some primary needs of boy-nature. When the Royal Commission of 1862 was enquiring into the boarding arrangements of a famous school, one of the Commissioners was astonished to find that, in spite of the liberal charge for board, the boys got nothing but tea and bread and butter for breakfast. Apparently wishing to let the masters down easy, he suggested that perhaps eggs also were provided. To this suggestion the witness's answer was monumental: "Eggs, indeed, are not provided, but in some houses a large machine for boiling eggs is brought in every day; so that, if the boys bring their eggs, they are boiled for them." Surely the Master who first conceived this substitution of hardware for food deserved a permanent place among Social Economists; but "the bigots of this iron time," though they may not actually "have called his harmless art a crime," have resolved that, when a father pays £200 a year for his boy's schooling, the boy shall have something more substantial than bread and butter for breakfast. This reform alone, according to my correspondent, knocked some hundreds a year off each House-Master's income.

Then, again, as regards Sanitation. Here, certainly not before it was wanted, reform has made its appearance, and the injured House-Master has had to put his hand in his pocket. When I was at a Public School, in that Golden Age of Profits to which my correspondent looked back so wistfully, the sanitary arrangements were such as to defy description and stagger belief. In one Pupil-Room there was only the thickness of the boarded floor between the cesspool and the feet of the boys as they sat at lessons. In my own house, containing forty boarders, there were only two baths. In another, three and even four boys were cooped together, by day as well as by night, in what would, in an ordinary house, be regarded as a smallish bedroom. Now all this is changed. Drainage is reconstructed; baths are multiplied; to each boy is secured a sufficient air-space at lessons and in sleep. The Sanitary Engineer is let loose every term--

"What pipes and air-shafts! What wild ecstasy!"

But the "ecstasy" is confined to the bosom of the Engineer as he draws up his little account, and the House-Master moans, like Mr. Mantalini, over the "Demnition Total."

Yet another such deduction must be borne in mind. Volumes of nonsense have been written about the Fagging System. Sentimental writers have gushed over the beautiful relation which it establishes between Fag-Master and Fag. Some, greatly daring, have likened it to the relation of elder and younger brothers. Others, more historically minded, have tried to connect it with the usages of Chivalry and the services rendered by the Page to the Knight. As a matter of fact, it was, as "Jacob Omnium," himself an Old Etonian, pointed out fifty years ago, "an affair of the breeches pocket." As long as younger boys could be compelled (by whatever methods) to clean lamps and brush clothes and toast sausages and fill tubs for elder boys it was obvious that fewer servants were required. One of the most brilliant Etonians now living has said that "to see a little boy performing, with infinite pains and hopeless inadequacy, the functions of a domestic servant, might have moved Democritus to tears and Heraclitus to laughter." That Fagging has its uses, more especially in the case of spoilt boys brought up in purse-proud homes, few Public Schoolmen will deny; but the British Parent tends increasingly to draw a distinction between the duties of a fag and those of a footman; and the wages-bill becomes an increasingly important item in the House-Master's expenditure.

What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? It is, as I have repeatedly said, that a Boarding-School, whether public or private, is not the ideal method of educating boys; but, pending that great increase of Day-Schools for the sons of the upper classes which Dr. Warre foresees, it is the only method practically available for the great majority of English parents. Whether the instruction imparted in the Public Schools is or is not worth the amount which it costs is a matter of opinion; and, indeed, as long as the parent (who, after all, has to pay) is satisfied, no one else need trouble himself about the question. As to domestic arrangements and provision for health and comfort, it may be frankly conceded that the Schoolboy of to-day is much better off than his father or even his elder brother was; and that the improvements in his lot have tended to diminish the profits on which the House-Master used to grow rich.

* * * * *

_P.S._--Having the terrors of the ferule before my eyes, let me hasten to say, with all possible explicitness, that in my account of my correspondence with the outraged Schoolmaster, I have aimed at giving a general impression rather than a verbal transcript.

XVII

SQUARES

All true lovers of Lewis Carroll will remember that Hiawatha, when he went a-photographing, "pulled and pushed the joints and hinges" of his Camera,

"Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid."

But it is not of squares in the mathematical sense that I speak to-day, but rather of those enclosed spaces, most irregularly shaped and proportioned, which go by the name of "Squares" in London.

It is in sultry August that the value of these spaces is most clearly perceived; for now the better-disposed owners fling open the gates of their squares and suffer them to become, at least temporarily, the resting-places of the aged and decrepit, and the playgrounds of the children. To extend these benefits more widely and to secure them in perpetuity are objects for which civic reformers have long striven; and during the present session of Parliament[6] (for, as Dryasdust would remind us, Parliament is not prorogued but only adjourned) two Acts have been passed which may do something at least towards attaining the desired ends. One of these Acts provides that, in cases where "Open Spaces and Burial Grounds" are vested in Trustees, the Trustees may transfer them to the Local Authorities, to be maintained for the use and service of the public. The other forbids for all time the erection of buildings on certain squares and gardens which belong to private owners, those owners having consented to this curtailment of their powers. The conjunction of "Burial Grounds" with "Open Spaces" in the purview of the former Act has a rather lugubrious sound; but in reality it points to one of the happiest changes which recent years have brought to London.

[6] August 1906.

"A hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed--here, in a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring 'our dear brother here departed' to receive Christian burial. With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate--with every villainy of life in action close on death and every poisonous element of death in action close on life,--here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two; here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside; a shameful testimony to future ages that civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together."

When Dickens wrote that hideous description, worthy to be illustrated by Hogarth in his most realistic mood, he did not exaggerate--he could not exaggerate--the obscenity of burial-grounds in crowded cities. To-day they are green with turf and bright with flowers, and brighter still with the unconquerable merriment of childhood at play among the dim memorials of the forgotten dead. What is true of the particular spot which Dickens described is true all over London; and the resting-places of the departed have been made oases of life and health in this arid wilderness of struggling and stifled humanity.