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 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. 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 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” 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 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, 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 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: “In appearance, as in everything else, he was unlike the typical schoolmaster: his thoughtful, handsome, somewhat sensuous features were altogether out of the common; and owing to his short sight he had a dreamy, mystic, inquiring way of looking at you which was sometimes a little disquieting to the schoolboy mind. There were occasions, too, when we dreaded his tart sayings (the very school books written by him bristled with epigrams), and listened with some anxiety to “Formerly wise men used to grow beards. Now other persons do so.” This sentence in Nuces, an exercise-book of William Johnson’s compilation, was supposed by us to be aimed at another assistant master, a bearded clergyman, bluff, honest, mannerless, and universally disliked, who went by the name of “Stiggins.” He had a detestable habit of standing at right angles to any one with whom he was conversing, while he looked straight away in front of him, his long red beard streaming down to his waist, and when he spoke, he jerked his words at you, as it were, from round the corner. His rudeness was a by-word; and the attempt sometimes made to excuse it, on the ground that it “was not intended,” did not appeal very strongly I think, either to masters or to boys: and justly, for surely the only sort of rudeness which can be pardoned is that which is intended. There are occasions, rare, but real, when it is necessary and wholesome to be rude; but to be rude without knowing it is the very acme of ill manners, and that was precisely the kind of discourtesy in which “Stiggins” was unequalled. The story of how “Stiggins” was once nearly thrown into Barnes Pool, a by-water of the Thames, by a It has often struck me as strange that I should owe to such a plain and unadorned barbarian as “Stiggins” my first introduction to Keats’s poems: he gave me, as a prize, Moxon’s edition of the works. He also “sent me up for good” (for Latin verses), an honour of which I was rather unpleasantly reminded, some twenty or more years afterwards, when he had retired from Eton to a country parsonage; for in order to raise funds for a proposed “restoration” of his church, he conceived the idea of soliciting “for the glory of God,” as he expressed it, a subscription from every Old Etonian who in bygone days had been “sent up for good” in his Division. There was a naÏve effrontery about this proposal which was quite characteristic of its author. The writing of Latin verse, so highly regarded at Eton, was a curious accomplishment. It was said by Coleridge in his Table Talk that Etonians acquired the art “by conning Ovid and Tibullus”: my recollection is that we read Ovid but rarely, and Tibullus not at all. Some of us certainly became proficient in making Latin verses of a kind; but our models were the renderings of English poems in such collections as the Arundines Cami or the SabrinÆ Corolla, rather than any Latin originals; and though we could turn out “longs and shorts” with facility, and even with neatness, I hardly think our productions would have passed muster in the Augustan age. Still, the versifier’s art, such as it was, brought us a certain gratification; and in the summer, when, as we all felt, the time of the But that we were savages, who, looking back on those bygone times, can doubt? Non angeli, sed Angli. “It was an era,” as Mr. Ralph Nevill has well remarked in his Floreat Etona, “when the sickening cant of humanitarianism, born of luxury and weakness, had not yet arisen, to emasculate and enfeeble the British race.” The hunting and breaking up of hares then, as now, was one of the recognized pastimes; indeed, even as late as the headmastership of Dr. Balston (1857-68), it had been permitted to the boys, as a variation from the hare-hunt, to pursue with beagles a mutilated fox deprived of one of his pads. There was the less excuse for these miserable practices, because an abundance and superabundance of Athletics, of course, took precedence of all intellectual pursuits. The Etonian, in our time, was but a dim legend of the past, and the genius of Praed and Moultrie had left no direct line of succession; nevertheless among the upper boys there was not an entire dearth of literary aspiration, and we had a school magazine, the Adventurer, which existed from the later ’sixties for about five years. One of its editors, a Colleger named C. C. Thornton, was the author of some extremely good verse; and among other contributors, towards the latter part of the Adventurer’s career, were Arthur A. Tilley, now a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge; E. C. Selwyn, afterwards headmaster of Uppingham School; J. E. C. Welldon, the popular Dean of Durham; Herbert W. Paul; George Campbell Macaulay; J. C. Tarver; and Sir Melville Macnaghten, who wrote as M2; also, if I mistake not, the nom de plume of “Tom” covered some early poems of Mr. F. B. Money-Coutts, now known as Baron Latymer. One of the best essays in the Adventurer was that on “Arbitration as a Substitute for War,” Apart from the Adventurer, the literary ambition of some of the Collegers sought irregular expression, in those far-off days, by supplying the Windsor press, when opportunity occurred, with exaggerated and absurdly inflated accounts of any exciting incident such as the outbreak of a fire. Nor was it only the local papers that allured us; for I remember how G. C. Macaulay and I once had a daring wager as to which of us should more egregiously hoax the Field with some story of a rare bird. He tried a too highly coloured anecdote of a bee-eater, and failed to win credence; while I, with a modest narrative of a supposed stork in Windsor Park (“can it have been a stork? I shall indeed feel myself lucky if my supposition be correct”), not only saw my letter inserted, but drew the gratifying editorial comment: “Most probably it was a stork.” Thus we made natural history and beguiled the idle hours. To look upon a group photograph of the Collegers of fifty years ago brings many memories to the mind. E. C. Selwyn, before we met at Eton, had been my schoolfellow at Blackheath Proprietary School, of which his father was headmaster; and our friendly We used to call Selwyn “bishop” in those days, either because of a distant relationship to Dr. G. A. Selwyn, the well-known Bishop of Lichfield, or because we thought him almost certainly destined to attain to episcopal rank: his scholarship, not to mention his defence of Moses, seemed to warrant no less. J. E. C. Welldon, who did become a bishop, was another most genial schoolfellow, famous in the football field no less than in the examination room. I remember running second to him in a handicap quarter-mile race, in which he was allowed a good many yards’ start, and with that advantage just managed to keep the rest of us in the rear. Herbert Paul, unlike Welldon or Selwyn, was by no means designated for a bishopric. I recall him, a sceptic even in boyhood, standing in Upper Passage, where Collegers often held informal discussion, as, with thumbs in waistcoat pockets, he would hold forth, already a fearless disputant, on matters human and divine. Among other figures in the group are Dr. Ryle, Dean of Westminster; Sir Richmond Ritchie; Mr. George Campbell Macaulay; Mr. C. Lowry, head of Very provocative of reminiscence, too, are the illustrations, printed in books about Eton, of the College servants, the College buildings, and many well-remembered faces and scenes. Take, for example, a picture of “Old College Servants” in Mr. Ralph Nevill’s Floreat Etona. There stands the old College porter, Harry Atkins, whom, to our disgrace, we used to bombard on dark winter nights in his little lodge at the gateway into School Yard, hurling missiles at his door from behind the pillars of the cloisters under Upper School, and trusting to our superior fleetness of foot when he was goaded into a desperate charge. There, too, are Culliford, the butler, and Westbrook, the cook, who were treated by us with far greater respect than the equally respectable Atkins, as presiding over departments in which our own personal comforts were more closely concerned, and from whose hands, on the occasion of banquets in the College Hall, the smaller Collegers would try to beg or snatch dainties as they carried them up from the kitchen. Among the least prominent members of the group is one Wagstaffe, designated “scullion”; yet, humble though he was in appearance, his name had become a household word among the boys; for the somewhat unappetizing dough which formed the base of the puddings served to the Collegers was then known as “the Wagstaffe,” on the supposition, presumably, that the under part of the pudding was the creation of the under-cook. I do not think I could eat that pudding now; but looking on the worthy Wagstaffe’s image again, I feel that we wronged him To the College Hall there came daily, for the remnants of bread and other victuals, a number of poor old alms-women; and if any further proof be needed of the exceeding thinness of the veneer by which our youthful savagery was overlaid, it will be found in our treatment of those humble folk, who were of much more use in the world than ourselves. We named them “the hags”; and one of our amusements was to construct for them what was called a “hag-trap.” A large square piece of bread was hollowed out in the centre through a hole bored in the side, and when the cavity had been filled up with mustard, pepper, salt, etc., the opening was plugged, and the bread left lying on the table as a bait for some unwary victim who should carry it to her home. Whether the Eton Mission in Hackney Wick has so ameliorated the hearts of later generations of Etonians that a “hag-trap” would now be an impossibility, I do not know; but in those days we certainly had not the smallest atom of sympathy with the working classes, except perhaps with those College servants who were known to us personally, and who ministered to our wants. We did not pretend to regard the working man as a brother. Once, when I was travelling with some Eton friends, a sweep who was standing on the platform tried to enter our carriage just as the train was about to start. Instantly we seized the door, and held it closed from the inside; and after a short struggle (the black man’s anxious eyes still haunt me), the victory remained with us, for the train begun to move, and the sweep was left behind. That was our idea of Fraternity. Was it Waterloo that was won in the Eton Playing Fields? I have sometimes thought it must have been Peterloo. But let me turn from the recollection of childish deeds Even in the holidays our grave responsibilities did not wholly cease; for it was a custom for sixth-form youths to be sent as tutors to lower boys who needed “coaching” at their homes. On two occasions it fell to my lot to perform that service for a lively but very backward boy at Evans’s House, Charley Selwyn, nephew of the Bishop of Lichfield; and the awe which I felt at sojourning in a bishop’s palace helped to fix more firmly in my memory some of the impressions which I got there. Dr. George Augustus Selwyn was the most stalwart champion of “muscular Christianity.” His face was He explained that some other guests who were coming to Lichfield that day were—non-Etonians. But in spite of the large and lion-like geniality of the bishop, there were anxious moments when the sight of some indolent or slovenly action caused his quick temper to give way, and then one knew not whether to tremble or be inwardly amused at the forms which his anger would take. Once, on a dull Sunday afternoon (the Sundays were dull at the Palace), he overheard his nephew yawning wearily and saying he did not know what to do. “What!” cried the bishop. “A Christian boy not know what to do on a Sunday afternoon!” Then, in terrible tones: “Go and fetch your Greek Testament.” Forthwith, while I made haste to escape from that scene of wrath, the wretched boy had to undergo a long lesson from his uncle. On another occasion it was my pupil’s sister, a very beautiful child of ten or twelve, who caused an eruption Eton, then, was the school where ignorance was bliss, but the bliss was very dear while it lasted, and it would have been dearer still if we had more fully realized the nature of the change that was to follow—the difference between University and School. As the end of the last summer term drew near, we felt more and more the pang of the parting that was to come; and when it was time to write our Vale—that last copy of the weekly verses, in which we were allowed, for once, to substitute English for Latin—we naturally likened ourselves to some prophetic dreamer of sad dreams, or to some despairing convict who sees his approaching fate. So I, who write, feel ever on my heart Such dim presentiment, such dull despair: Me, too, a doom awaits; I, too, must part, And change a careless life for toil and care. Doubtless many such elegies periodically found their way, as mine did, into Dr. Hornby’s waste-paper basket. |