Читать книгу Seventy Years Among Savages - Henry S. Salt - Страница 4

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Thought would destroy their paradise!

No more: where ignorance is bliss

’Tis folly to be wise.

Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.

IF it be true, as scientists tell us, that the period of boyhood corresponds, in human development, with an early phase of savagery, and that the individual boy is himself an epitome of the uncivilized tribe, it may be said with still greater confidence that an English public school, or “boy-farm,” where life is mostly so ordered as to foster the more primitive habits of mind, is essentially a nursery of barbarism—a microcosm of that predatory class whose members, like the hunters of old, toil not, neither do they spin, but ever seek their ideal in the twofold cult of sport and soldiership. Certainly the Eton of the ’sixties and ’seventies, whatever superficial show it might make of learning and refinement, was at heart a stronghold of savagery—a most graceful, easy-going savagery, be it granted; for savages, as we know, are often a very pleasant people.

In some reminiscences, Eton under Hornby, published in 1910, I gave a description of the public-school education of fifty years ago, a system probably not much worse than that of to-day; and the conclusion reached was that as Eton never really changes, it is best to regard her, as she regards other institutions, in a mood of good-natured unconcern, and as a subject less for argument than for anecdote. Eton has been pre-eminently the school “where ignorance is bliss,” and in a much wider sense than that intended by the poet Gray in his famous ode “On a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” For, if it be true of schoolboys that “thought would destroy their paradise”—that is, the thought merely of the personal ailments of mature age—how much more disturbing would be the contemplation of the vast social wrongs that fill the world with suffering! Of such sombre thought Eton knew nothing, but basked content in the warmth of her own supreme self-satisfaction; and the Eton life was probably the most enjoyable of all hitherto invented forms of heedless existence. It is, then, of the pleasures of Eton that I would speak, and of some of the more distinguished of her sons with whom it was my privilege to be acquainted.

Long before I was admitted to Eton as a King’s Scholar, I had a personal link with the school in the fact that John Moultrie, the friend of Praed, and contributor to that most noteworthy of school magazines, the Etonian—himself a Colleger at Eton from 1811 to 1819—was my great-uncle. At Eton and Cambridge, Moultrie’s career had been a brilliant one; he was the “Gerard Montgomery” of the Etonian—in Praed’s words “the humorous Moultrie, and the pathetic Moultrie, the Moultrie of ‘Godiva,’ and the Moultrie of ‘My Brother’s Grave,’ ”—but his later career did not fulfil the promise of his youth. The vivid and extravagant fancy of his early poems was succeeded by a more homely and sober style, and the pastor-poet in his “Dream of Life” even referred apologetically to the levities of his youthful muse.[1] Yet he still retained in some measure the poet’s vision; and when Rector of Rugby he was famous for the powerful interpretation which he gave to Shakespeare in his reading of the Plays. Him I remember at his rectory in the early ’sixties, a dignified, kindly old man, with a quaint mixture of humour and pathos, of ruggedness and gentleness, in his manner. Many stories were current in Rugby of his eccentricities and absent-mindedness; on one occasion when he had brought a lengthy sermon to an end, he is said to have startled his congregation by substituting for the usual formula the equally familiar post-prandial one: “For what we have received, the Lord make us truly thankful.”

It was from this Etonian worthy that I first heard of Eton; and though I little foresaw that nearly twenty years of my life would be spent there as boy and master, it thus came about that in the summer of 1866 I found myself being “coached” for an Eton scholarship by the Rev. C. Kegan Paul, formerly “Conduct” (Chaplain) at Eton, who held the Eton living of Sturminster Marshall in Dorsetshire.

Mr. Paul, afterwards founder of a well-known publishing firm, was then a radical parson of very “broad” views, a friend of Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and many other Liberals. A man of fine taste, he also possessed a large fund of vivacity and spirits, which, with his unvarying kindness, made him very popular among his pupils; indeed, only at Eton itself could there have been a more delightful life, regarded from the boyish point of view, than that which we led in those summer months, fishing, bathing, bird’s-nesting. The one cloud on our horizon was the impending rite of Confirmation, which some of us had to undergo at Blandford, and for which Mr. Paul prepared us. I have always felt grateful to him for the simplicity of his method, which was free from the morbid inquiries then common in schools. I think he asked me only one question: “Is it wrong to doubt?” This was a problem in which I felt no sort of concern; making a bold shot, I replied “No,” and was gratified to find that I had answered correctly.

At Eton my tutor was Mr. Francis Warre Cornish, one of the gentlest and most accomplished of men, the very antithesis of the bullying, blustering schoolmaster of the good old type which even then was not wholly superseded. Much loved by those of his pupils who learnt to know him intimately, Mr. Cornish was a good deal hampered in his dealings with boys by his shyness and diffidence; he lacked that gift of geniality which is essential to a successful teacher. This I discovered at an early date, when, in the course of the entrance examination, I was told to show him the rough copy of my Latin verses. It was to these, as it turned out, that I mainly owed my election; but it somewhat depressed me when my prospective tutor, after reading the lines with a sad and forlorn expression, handed them back to me with no more cheering remark than: “Too many spondees.” Years afterwards, when Mr. Cornish, competing for a headmastership, was described in a testimonial as “trembling on the brink of poetic creation” (an odd certificate for such a post), I remembered his criticism of my youthful verses, and could not help thinking that his own poetic genius would also have benefited by a larger infusion of the sprightly or dactylic element. His nature was decidedly spondaic; but he was a kind and courteous gentleman, in the best sense of the word, and in a less rough environment than that of a public school his great abilities would have found ampler scope.

Much the same must be said of Dr. J. J. Hornby, who succeeded the rigid Dr. Balston in the headmastership of Eton in 1868. It was a marvel that a man who loved leisure and quietude as he did, and who seemed always to desire to doff rather than to don the formalities of high office, should have deliberately sought preferment in a profession which could not have been very congenial to him. Not that he lacked the reputed qualities of a ruler: he had a stately presence, a most courteous manner, a charming sense of humour, and the rare power of interesting an audience in any subject of which he spoke. But, behind these external capabilities, he had a fatal weakness—slackness, perhaps, is the proper term—which loosened the reins of authority, and made his headmastership a period of which Eton had no reason to be proud. “Idleness holds sway everywhere,” wrote an Eton boy at that time, “and such idleness! As a man who has never had dealings with the Chinese can have but a faint idea of what swindling is, so a man who has never been at Eton has but a poor conception of what idleness is.”[2] What wonder, when the headmaster was himself as unpunctual as a fourth-form boy?

Hornby was too retiring, too sensitive, to govern a great school. I was in his Division for two years, almost at the beginning of his headmastership; and I can see him still as he sat at his oak table in the middle of the sixth-form room, toying with a pencil, and looking at us somewhat askance, as if to avoid either scrutinizing or being scrutinized, for he was not of the drill-master kind, who challenge their class and stare them down. We liked him the better for it, but divined that he was not quite at ease; and it occurred to one of us that he was aptly described in that terse phrase which Tacitus applied to a Roman emperor: Capax imperii nisi imperâsset (“Every inch a ruler—if only he had not ruled”). There was a certain maladroitness, too, about him which at times set us wondering; until some one suggested that we should look up the cricket records, and see how he had acquitted himself in that supreme criterion of greatness, the Eton and Harrow match. We did so, and found that he had hit his own wicket. Thus all was explained, our worst misgivings confirmed.

The want of discipline in some of the classrooms was appalling. My first term was spent in the “lag” Division of Fifth Form, a very rowdy one, then taken by a most accomplished classical scholar known as “Swage,” or “Swog,” and a more unpleasant introduction for a new boy could hardly have been devised. So great was the uproar, and so frenzied the attempts of the unfortunate “Swage” to suppress it, that it was as dangerous to be a member of the class as it is for a well-disposed citizen to be mixed up in a street-riot; for among so many tormentors there was no security against being mistaken for a ringleader. “Swage’s” schoolroom was on the ground floor and close to the road; and one of the first scenes I witnessed was a determined attempt on the part of some of the bigger boys to drive a stray cow into the room; they got her to the doorway, but there she was met and headed back by “Swage” himself, shouting at the top of his voice and flourishing his large door-key. That was the sort of game that went on almost daily. It was currently reported, and I believe with truth, that “Swage” once set a punishment to a bird. To sing and to whistle were common practices in his Division; and when a bird perched near the window and chirruped in an interval of the din, he rounded on it blindly with a cry of “A hundred lines.”

There was a story, too, that a letter which he once wrote to the headmaster, complaining of one of his private pupils who persisted in knocking loudly on his study door, bore a brief after-cry more eloquent than many words: “P.S. He is knocking still.”

To fall into the hands of boys, as this ill-fated master had done—and his lot was shared by several others—was to be a captive among savages: they did not kill and eat him, it is true, but that was the extent of their tender mercies, and every day he was brought out afresh to be baited and worried.

Such was the state of affairs when Hornby was made headmaster; and it became worse rather than better under his lax and listless regime. Yet no one who has any knowledge of the history of corporal punishment will be surprised to hear that he was a frequent wielder of the rod. Seldom did a day pass without a visit from the Sixth Form Præpostor to one or more of the Divisions, to bid some culprit “stay after school”; and on those occasions the conduct of the class was a good indication of the light in which the punishment was regarded. As the fatal hour approached, the eyes of all would be riveted on the offender, who maintained a dauntless demeanour to the last; pantomimic gestures would indicate the nature of the penalty which he was shortly to undergo; watches would be held up to emphasize the dreadful fact that, as in the case of Dr. Faustus, time was on the wing; and there would be audible surmises as to “how many” he would get. The victim’s friends, indeed, were hardly so considerate and sympathetic as the circumstances might have been expected to demand.

Flogging is an old institution which has found mention in every book written about the school, and which could never be omitted from any discourse upon Eton. It used to be the custom, in the holidays, for parties of Windsor trippers to be shown over the school buildings under the leadership of a woman—the wife, presumably, of one of the College servants—who gave an oral explanation of the “sights.” When the headmaster’s room was reached, the guide of course drew attention to that awful emblem of authority, the “block”; and after pointing out the part which it played in the correction of offenders, she would add, in a croaking voice befitting the solemnity of the subject: “They receive the punishment upon their seats.” That was a true, but rather inadequate description of a practice which only a very barbarous society could tolerate. A flogging was a disgusting sight even to the two “lower boys” who then had to act as “holders-down”; still more so to the Sixth Form Præpostor whose duty it was to be present; most of all, one would suppose, to the headmaster. It has been described as “an operation performed on the naked back by the headmaster himself, who is always a gentleman, and sometimes a high dignitary of the Church.”[3]

The Lower Master, at the time of which I am speaking, was the Rev. F. E. Durnford, nicknamed “Judy,” described in Eton under Hornby as “a strange, laughable, yet almost pathetic figure, with whimsical puckered visage and generally weather-beaten aspect, like a sort of Ancient Mariner in academic garb.” He, too, used the birch freely in his domain of Lower School, but his castigations were of a more paternal kind, and between the strokes of the rod he would interject moral reproofs in his queer nasal voice, such as: “You nahty, nahty boy!” It was said that during the punishment he would even enter into conversation with the offender, especially when he knew his “people” personally, and that on one occasion he was overheard to inquire of a boy on the block: “Have you seen your uncle lately?” a question which, in the circumstances, would at first sight seem irrelevant, but was probably intended to awaken repentance in the criminal by directing his thoughts to some pious and respected relative. To the upper boys, “Judy” Durnford was a never-failing amusement; his every gesture was noted by them; as when, in correcting exercises, if some word or phrase eluded his memory, he would sit scratching his temples vigorously, and exclaiming: “It runs in me head.”

Among Dr. Hornby’s assistant masters were several others whose eccentricities have been a fruitful subject of anecdote and legend. Russell Day, a quiet and insignificant-looking little man, had a mordant wit and gift of ready epigram, which caused him to be dreaded alike by master and boys. “Friend, thou hast learned this lesson with a crib: a crib is a thing in which thou liest,” was his remark in the course of a Theocritus lesson to a member of his Division, from whom I heard the story full forty years later. There were two boys of the name of Bankes, one known afterwards as a distinguished K.C., the other a lazy youth who never knew his lessons and was wont to mumble the Greek or Latin very slowly in order to postpone the moment of discovery. On one of these occasions Day leaned back in his chair and said in his drawling tones: “Bankes, Bankes, you remind me of the banks where the bees suck and with their murmuring make me sleep.” I remember how a friend and schoolfellow of mine named Swan, who was a pupil of Day’s, showed me a copy of his Latin verses which had drawn the following annotation: “Olor! You cycnus.” Not less characteristic was Day’s curt dismissal of a youth named Cole (report says it was the future director of the Bank of England): “Then, Cole, you may scuttle.” Nor did he hesitate to turn his wit against his colleagues or himself. He called his pony “Lucifer,” because, as he said, “When you see him coming, it announces the approach of Day.”

A still more remarkable teacher was William Johnson, author of “Ionica,” who afterwards took the name of Cory, a man of real genius, whose enforced departure from Eton (for he did not leave, as was currently supposed, from some sudden whim of his own) was the tragedy of his lifetime, a “strange wounding,” as he calls it in one of his published letters. Of “Billy Johnson” many descriptions have been written. Here is a passage from one of them: