The Education of an Englishman
WE think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities. In this paper I am jotting down recollections of details and generalities of boyhood in an English school, fifty years ago.
Tolstoy has written, as the first sentence of his Anna Karenina: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Thus what is best in English boyhood of that period is identical with what is best in New England experience, of today or of that period. But every nation is bad in its own way. We cannot be social reformers all the time. In our off moments we view our peculiar domestic mixture of goods and evils with an affectionate tolerance of their incongruities, which we call ‘humour.’ So please remember in reading English literature that the humorous aspects of English life are in general minor symptoms of social defects.
Any account of a phase of national life must throw light on two things: (a) why the nation is as good as it is, and (b) why the nation is as bad as it is. If it be our own country which is in question, the combined complex fact is the country which we love, with its virtues and its defects.
Personal recollections are limited by personal experience. So these pages are not recollections of English education passim; but they are typical of one important phase, and apart from knowledge of this phase you cannot understand how England functioned during the latter sixty years of the nineteenth century. The limitations of these recollections can be defined by a reference to Anthony Trollope. His novels refer to the grown-up members of the same society. My recollections refer to the children of the families which he writes about. The fathers of the boys were archdeacons, canons, rectors in the Established Church, or officers in the Army, or small squires in the Southwest of England, or lawyers, or doctors. There was a sprinkling of boys from large commercial families.
Most of the moderate capital behind the professional families had come from commerce at no distant date. For us commerce meant trade, banking, shipowning. Manufactures belonged to the North of England, of which our knowledge was about as vague as it was of the United States. Of course we knew about it, and it was a subject for pride as a national asset, but we did not grasp what it really meant. Anyone who comes from the North of England can reciprocate this indifference of boyhood, from the opposite end.
The school was in Dorsetshire, at Sherborne, a small town of six thousand inhabitants. At that time there were three hundred boys. We were locally termed ‘The King’s Scholars,’ in allusion to the remodeling of the school in the sixteenth century by King Edward the Sixth. As time was reckoned in that district, this event was still a recent innovation. It was a blot on the scutcheon, introducing a modern vulgarity into what would otherwise have been an unbroken continuity of a thousand years.
Geography is half of character. The soil there is rich, loamy, and gravelly. The climate is formed by warm currents and warm moist winds from the South Atlantic. My own home was in the Southeast of England, where we are formed by the polar currents and Siberian winds which come down the North Sea, with interludes of South Atlantic weather from the English Channel. But the interludes in the East were the habitual climate in the West. England is the battleground for these opposed currents, polar on the eastern side, subtropical on the southwestern side. Dorsetshire was a rich agricultural district, with apple orchards, and woodlands, and ferns, and rolling grass downs. It did not matter which end of a shrub you put into the ground when planting it; the shrub was bound to grow six feet in the next year. The peasantry had an English dialect of their own, which an Easterner could hardly understand. They were a kindly folk; if a schoolboy on a country walk asked for water, he was given cider and no payment taken.
The town and school had all been founded together by Saint Aldhelm, who died in the year 709, after planting a monastery in that spot. Their importance in the scheme of things has been singularly level from that time on. Perhaps the chief importance came in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but minor ups and downs hardly count. The most distinguished of the scholars was King Alfred. His connection with the school was mythical, but undoubted. Indeed, vague traditions of the place went back beyond Alfred and beyond Aldhelm to King Arthur, who was said to have held his court on the site of the old British earthworks, amid the neighboring downs. (Every respectable district in the West of England claims King Arthur.) Certainly when you sat there, on Cadbury Castle, on a warm summer afternoon in the quiet of the dreaming landscape, it seemed eminently probable; and the school song accepted the tradition without question.
So far as sound was concerned, the chief elements were the school bell — a wretched tinkle by which our lives were regulated — and the magnificent bells of the big Abbey Church, which were brought from Tournai by Henry VIII when he returned from the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and given by him to the Abbey. These bells were a great factor in the moulding of the school character, the living voices of past centuries.
This æsthetic background was an essential element in the education, explanatory alike of inertia and of latent idealism. The education cannot be understood unless it is realized that it elucidated an ever-present dream world in our subconscious life.
Some of our classrooms were parts of the old monastery buildings. My own private study in the last two years at school was said to have been the Abbot’s cell. The evidence was vague and devoid of documents, but while you lived there it was indubitable. The new school buildings were in the old style, and built of material from the same quarry as that which, centuries earlier, had furnished the stone for the Abbey and the Monastery. This was the Ham Hill quarry. Old Mother Shipton, a prophetess of the early nineteenth century, prophesied that the end of the world would start from Ham Hill. I disbelieve her, because sheer inertia would keep Ham Hill going long after the rest of things had disappeared. To start anything at Ham Hill would constitute a miracle overtaxing credulity.
We had plenty of evidence that things had been going on for a long time. It never entered into anybody’s mind to regard six thousand years seriously as the age of mankind — not because we took up with revolutionary ideas, but because our continuity with nature was a patent, visible fact, and had been so since the days of Saint Aldhelm. There were incredible quantities of fossils about; more fossils than stones — or rather, the stones were built out of fossils, welded together.
The boys had thorough country tastes, and knew about the birds, and the ferns, and the foxes, and the gardens. Their fathers rode with the foxhounds, and so did their mothers and sisters. Those who did not hunt planted flowers in their gardens, knew all about the archæology of the neighborhood, and read Tennyson. Browning would have bothered them. Between whiles, they achieved a good deal of patronage of their social inferiors, with more or less brutality or kindliness, according to breeding and character.
The squire of the district was a very big man, owned half the county, and daily drove his own carriage with four horses — a four-in-hand, as we call it. He was an oldish man then, but he did everything in the grand manner. He and his wife were strict evangelical church people. They must have come under the influence of their neighbor, Lord Shaftesbury, the social reformer. His estates were well managed, with great liberality. This demoralized the neighborhood, because the ‘Old Squire’ was expected to pay for everything, and did so. He was the chairman of the Board of Governors of the school, and when he died he was succeeded by the Bishop of Salisbury. That sort of alternation had been going on from time immemorial. Nobody thought of it as old habit, or particularly cherished it for that reason; it was just the nature of things — either a Digby or the Bishop; there was no other alternative. Nobody in Sherborne ever did anything explicitly because it was traditional. That is a characteristic of modern progressive societies.
The squire lived in the new castle, a Tudor building of the age of Elizabeth. The old castle was on the other side of the lake in the park. Its Norman keep was blown to pieces by Cromwell’s soldiers, after it had been defended against the Parliament by the Countess Digby of that epoch. I do not know why the new castle got itself built half a century before the old castle was knocked down. But after all, the Digbys survived the Puritan soldiers, and so have their political principles of West Country Toryism. To-day the government of England is in the hands of West Country men with an industrial experience, — Baldwin and Austen Chamberlain, — who are endeavoring to adapt the Digby traditions to modern times. Chamberlain is Birmingham and Worcestershire, and Baldwin is a Shropshire man who has been a large ironmaster. When he was first Prime Minister, some of his workmen made a pilgrimage to Downing Street and held a bean-feast there.
In the old-world woodlands and orchards of the West Country, with its reminiscent landscape, a secret has been whispered down the generations: the secret of governing England in days when kindly sense and tolerance are required to heal its wounds.
The staff of the school, the headmaster and his colleagues, were all strong Liberals, classical scholars, and modernist churchmen. This was in strict accordance with the Rugby tradition, which had been established by Thomas Arnold, a full generation earlier. The Tory squires of the neighborhood, who governed the school, were conscientious men, and knew how a gentleman should be educated. According to the tradition, which stretched really beyond Arnold, this could only be done efficiently by gentlemen who had read the classics with sufficient zeal to convert them to the principles of Athenian democracy and Roman tyrannicide.
We were taught a good deal of history, very thoroughly so far as it went. But it was characteristically limited according to the prejudices shared equally by the Liberal schoolmasters, the Tory parents, and their children who were the scholars. Our reading was closely limited to those periods of history which, if we might trust our national pride, were closely analogous to our own. We did not want to explain t he origin of anything. We wanted to read about people like ourselves, and to imbibe their ideals. When the Bible said, ‘All these things happened unto them for ensamples,’we did not need a higher critic to tell us what was meant or how it came to be written. It was just how we felt.
For example, in Roman history we stopped short at the death of Julius Cæsar. Freedom was over then. A gentleman could no longer say what he liked in the House of Lords or in the House of Commons — that is to say, in the Roman Senate or to the citizens in the Forum. Strictly speaking, we ought to have stopped when Cæsar crossed the Rubicon; but human nature is always illogical, and we — that is to say, masters and scholars — were urged on by curiosity to see how it ended, and also by secret sympathy with Cæsar, who was very like a great English landed magnate of cultivated mind and of sporting tastes, contesting his county parliamentary constituency, with a good chance of being unseated for bribery and corruption. Pompey was unpopular; he lacked the West Country touch. Cicero needed no explanation — he was the Roman substitute for a Lord Chancellor.
These things were not explained to us: the facts spoke for themselves. We read Tacitus and enjoyed his epigrams, though they were hard to translate into English terse enough to satisfy our masters, and we were not allowed to use English versions. Tacitus carried our sympathies along with him in his denunciation of a state of society which had lost all close analogy to the British Constitution. So we made no study of Imperial Rome; it lacked political interest.
I am not wandering from my subject. I am endeavoring to explain the direct relevance of a classical education half a century ago to the state of mind of an English schoolboy. The prayer which one of us in turn had to read daily in the school chapel told us that we were being trained ‘to serve God in Church and State,’ and we never conceived life in any other terms. The competitive conception of modern industry was entirely absent from our minds; also we were ignorant — comparatively ignorant — of the peculiar problems incident in such a society. The terms in which the Greeks and the Romans thought were good enough for us. What had not been said in Greek on political philosophy had not been said at all.
The Greeks reigned supreme in our minds. Roman gladiators, Roman debauchery, Roman grandiosity, the difficulties of writing Latin prose in the style of Cicero, the absence of a definite article in the Latin language, the Roman Emperors, and the Popes of Rome, all contributed to a feeling that Rome lacked any true intimate affinity with us. Looking backward, I think that our instincts were right. The social tone of Dorsetshire in the eighteenseventies was really very different from that of Rome at any time of its history, despite the analogies which caught our interest.
But Athens was the ideal city, which for two centuries had shown the world what life could be. I do not affirm that our image of Athens was true to the facts. It was something much better; it was alive. The Athenian navy and the British navy together ruled the seas of our imaginations. It was not oceans that we thought of, but narrow seas. Oceans are the discovery of the last halfcentury, so far as English schoolboys are concerned, and putting Robinson Crusoe aside as the exception to prove the rule. Our navy has never ruled the oceans. It ruled the seas. It caught its enemies rounding capes, or moored in bays, just as the Greeks did. Cape Trafalgar, Cape St. Vincent, and Aboukir Bay were read into Greek history. In those days, half a century ago, our main fleet was in the Mediterranean just where the Greek fleets sailed; and Russia was to us what Persia was to the Greeks. Scholars may demur to this analogy; but I am talking of schoolboys fifty years ago.
Herodotus and Thucydides, with Xenophon on the Ten Thousand, were the successful authors. We all of us cherished a secret hope of traveling in the East. The East then meant the eastern Mediterranean, including Syria and Egypt. Years ago, two twin brothers — my uncles, as it happens — met by accident in a back street of Damascus, neither knowing that the other was out of England. Happy men! They were traveling in the East.
Archæology and learning were secondary matters then, and, as I strongly suspect, are so now to many English archæologists. It was the flavor of the East that we hungered after, the product of our classical education. To understand what I mean, read Kinglake’s Eothen; it is short and very amusing. It is redolent of English mentality during the mid-nineteenth century.
The Greek insistence on the golden mean and on the virtue of moderation entered into our philosophy of statesmanship, sometimes reënforcing our natural stupidity, sometimes moderating our national arrogance. We conceived India through our knowledge of the East derived from the Greeks. Thus we took an immense interest in Alexander the Great. We forgot the loss of Greek liberty in the thrilling spectacle of a small European army making its way through a vast Eastern Empire. In Alexander at Issus we saw Clive at Plassey.
Decidedly, half a century ago a classical education had a very real relevance to the future lives of these English boys. Among the boys at that small school from 1870 to 1880 were a future commander-in-chief in India, a future general commanding in the Madras Presidency, a future bishop of all southern India. ‘To serve God in Church and State’ was no idle form of words to set before them.
Our school course was a curious mixture of imaginative appeal and precise, detailed knowledge. We had no interest in foreign languages. It was Latin and Greek that we had to know. They ware not foreign languages; they were just Latin and Greek; nothing of importance in the way of ideas could be presented in any other way. Thus we read the New Testament in Greek. At school — except in chapel, which did not count — I never heard of anyone reading it in English. It would suggest an uncultivated religious state of mind. We were very religious, but with that moderation natural to people who take their religion in Greek.
The difficulty as to the Old Testament was surmounted by reading the Septuagint in class on Sunday afternoons, though the lower forms had to descend to the vulgarity of the King James Bible. In this Greek presentation of religion the passion for accurate philology sometimes overcame the religious interest. I remember the headmaster stopping a boy who, when translating into English before the assembled class, reeled off the familiar phrase, ’Alas, alas, the glory of Israel hath departed,’ with ‘No, no, laddie: The glory of Israel has gone away as a colonist.’
A few days ago the head of a Canadian university called on me. He turned out to be from the same school; he went there the term after I left. We called to mind these Septuagint lessons, and agreed that in some way they were among the valuable elements of our school training. The Platonizing Jews of Alexandria are mixed in my mind with monastery buildings in Dorsetshire on warm Sunday afternoons in May. When I try to recall how we thought of the Jews, I think that it is accurately summed up in the statement that we believed them to be inspired, but otherwise unimportant.
We studied some mathematics, very well taught; some science and some French, both very badly taught; also some plays of Shakespeare, which were the worst feature of all. To this day I cannot read King Lear, having had the advantage of studying it accurately at school. The failure of the science and of the French was not the fault of the masters. An angel from Heaven could not have persuaded us to take them seriously. Again I am not defending us, but am recording facts.
There was a strict monitorial system. In fact, the discipline out of the classroom depended entirely on the head boys in each house. These boys were chosen merely according to their standing in the intellectual life of the school. If the prefects were also athletic and of high character, the system worked very well; otherwise it worked very badly. In my own schooldays, for about half the time it worked badly and for the other half extremely well. There was some teasing, but no gross bullying. When I was ‘head of the school,’ I remember caning a boy before the whole school for stealing. Again I am recording, and not defending. I consulted the headmaster privately, and he told me that the alternative was expulsion.
In respect to games we were much more independent than modern English schoolboys or undergraduates at any American university. We had lovely playing fields surrounded by intimate scenery such as, in all the world, only the West of England can provide. We managed the games ourselves, and trained ourselves. We played cricket, and football, and fives, because we enjoyed those games and for no other reason. Efficiency, what crimes are committed in thy name! To-day, throughout English schools, the games are supervised by the younger masters. Fifty years ago at Sherborne no master either played a game or interfered with advice, except by the express invitation of the boy who was captain of the games. We were not efficient; we enjoyed ourselves. Also, perhaps in consequence of that freedom from supervision, we were on the best of terms with the masters, and were always pleased when any of the younger members of the staff accepted our invitation to play, an invitation which was regularly forthcoming on every occasion.
In the particular ‘house’ — that is to say, set of dormitories — where I lived, there were ninety boys and four baths. Again I am recording and not defending. Of course there were washbasins in our bedrooms, the water being put there in jugs. Labor was cheap in those days, and plumbing was barely in its infancy. Fifty years before that time, the boys washed under a pump in the school yard. They also managed to serve God in Church and State, so little are some things affected by modern conveniences.
We rose — nominally — at 6.30 A.M. and were in chapel at 7 A.M., if our state of dress, or undress, enabled us to pass the prefect at the chapel door. If not, we had to write out some lines in Greek. I remember cuffing a big boy over the head because I found him twisting the arm of a small boy; but I apologized afterward, because I found that the small boy had called his elder ‘a captain of Barbary apes’; this was unpermissible insolence in the school world.
Altogether we were a happy set of boys, receiving a deplorably narrow education to fit us for the modern world. But I will disclose one private conviction, based upon no confusing research, that, as a training in political imagination, the Harvard School of Politics and of Government cannot hold a candle to the old-fashioned English classical education of half a century ago.