THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

5

These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above

and below and before me. They had an air of being no more than

incidents, interruptions.

The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City

Merchants School. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the

mooning explorations of the south-eastern postal district which

occupied the restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere

interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant

spaces between the woven threads of a school-boy's career. School

life began for me every morning at Herne Hill, for there I was

joined by three or four other boys and the rest of the way we went

together. Most of the streets and roads we traversed in our

morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of

rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's London have

passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of them

again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a

hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main

gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-

proportioned kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are

imposing new science laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the

old playing fields are unaltered except for the big electric trams

that go droning and spitting blue flashes along the western

boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I have not

been inside the school to see if it has changed at all since I went

up to Cambridge.

I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a

mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's

estate and developed a more and more comprehensive view of our

national process and our national needs, Iam more and more struck

by the oddity of the educational methods pursued, their aimless

disconnectedness from the constructive forces in the community. I

suppose if we are to view the public school as anything more than an

institution that has just chanced to happen, we must treat it as

having a definite function towards the general scheme of the nation,

as being in a sense designed to take the crude young male of the

more or less responsible class, to correct his harsh egotisms,

broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the contemporary

developments he will presently be called upon to influence and

control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and

ruling social man. It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and

set up for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is

impossible not to feel how infinitely more effectually-given

certain impossibilities perhaps-the job might be done.

My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of

elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it. Here all about

me was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic

forces, that filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that

stirred my imagination to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school

not only offered no key to it, but had practically no comment to

make upon it at all. We were within three miles of Westminster and

Charing Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were all

within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were going on under

our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with election placards, now the

Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in procession

through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside

news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing

discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty,

imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row,

Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling

costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames-such was

the background of our days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and

through the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all

these things. We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was

necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest

played games. We dipped down into something clear and elegantly

proportioned and time-worn and for all its high resolve of stalwart

virility a little feeble, like our blackened and decayed portals by

Inigo Jones.

Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin

and Greek. We were taught very badly because the men who taught us

did not habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them

any more now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine

monasteries. At the utmost our men read them. We were taught these

languages because long ago Latin had been the language of

civilisation; the one way of escape from the narrow and localised

life had lain in those days through Latin, and afterwards Greek had

come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and amazing ideas. Once

these two languages had been the sole means of initiation to the

detached criticism and partial comprehension of the world. I can

imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and Roper,

teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive

Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily,

impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely,

patriotically, because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the

irresistible stimulus to a new phase of history. That was long ago.

A new great world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school,

had assimilated all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on

to new and yet more amazing developments of its own. But the City

Merchants School still made the substance of its teaching Latin and

Greek, still, with no thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream

amidst the harvesting.

There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went

up to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of

our curriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted

that it was impossible to write good English without an illuminating

knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and

failed to button up a sentence in saying so. His main argument

conceded every objection a reasonable person could make to the City

Merchants' curriculum. He admitted that translation had now placed

all the wisdom of the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely

a field of endeavour remained in which modern work had not long

since passed beyond the ancient achievement. He disclaimed any

utility. But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these

grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed.

Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly discipline

for the mind.

He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior

Classic!

Yet in a dim confused way I think be was making out a case. In

schools as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available,

the sort of assistant who has been trained entirely on the old

lines, he could see no other teaching so effectual in developing

attention, restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet

systematic adjustment. And that was as far as his imagination could

go.

It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end

them; the curriculum and the social organisation of the English

public school are the crowning instances of that. They go on

because they have begun. Schools are not only immortal institutions

but reproductive ones. Our founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, Iam

sure, of Gates' pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have

dealt with them disrespectfully. But public schools and university

colleges sprang into existence correlated, the scholars went on to

the universities and came back to teach the schools, to teach as

they themselves had been taught, before they had ever made any real

use of the teaching; the crowd of boys herded together, a crowd

perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by

means of spontaneously developed institutions. In a century, by its

very success, this revolutionary innovation of Renascence public

schools had become an immense tradition woven closely into the

fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful people ceased

to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but that

only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. Since

most men of any importance or influence in the country had been

through the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade

them that it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit

of man could devise. And, moreover, they did not want their

children made strange to them. There was all the machinery and all

the men needed to teach the old subjects, and none to teach whatever

new the critic might propose. Such science instruction as my father

gave seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the classical

grind. It was certainly an altogether inferior instrument at that

time.

So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages

for seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We

would sit under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures

who had fallen into an enchanted pit, and he would do his

considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a

Greek play. If we flagged he would lash himself to revive us. He

would walk about the class-room mouthing great lines in a rich roar,

and asking us with a flushed face and shining eyes if it was not

"GLORIOUS." The very sight of Greek letters brings back to me the

dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our class-room, the banging of

books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, his

deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding of his creaking

boots. Glorious! And being plastic human beings we would consent

that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering

reverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely.

We all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these

strange sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the

Gothic intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the

stabbing lights, the heights and broad distances of our English

tongue. That indeed was the chief sin of him. It was not that he

was for Greek and Latin, but that he was fiercely against every

beauty that was neither classic nor deferred to classical canons.

And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it

best? We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical

difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely,

helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with

the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest,

of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not

believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe

in. We thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and

costumes of our school performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as

yet to touch these things to life again. It was like the ghost of

an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and condensed

into a gritty dust of construing as one looked at it.

Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the

leathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall…

And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the

evening light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract,

London in black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like

the very loom of Time. We came out into the new world no teacher

has yet had the power and courage to grasp and expound. Life and

death sang all about one, joys and fears on such a scale, in such an

intricacy as never Greek nor Roman knew. The interminable

procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, bearing countless

people we knew not whence, we knew not whither. Hansoms clattered,

foot passengers jostled one, a thousand appeals of shop and boarding

caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights of window and street

mingled with the warm glow of the declining day under the softly

flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards, the shouting

news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe.

One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice of Topham

was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote

gesticulations…

That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to

living interests where it might have done so. We were left

absolutely to the hints of the newspapers, to casual political

speeches, to the cartoons of the comic papers or a chance reading of

some Socialist pamphlet for any general ideas whatever about the

huge swirling world process in which we found ourselves. I always

look back with particular exasperation to the cessation of our

modern history at the year 1815. There it pulled up abruptly, as

though it had come upon something indelicate…

But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge

adjustments of the nineteenth century? Flack was the chief

cricketer on the staff; he belonged to that great cult which

pretends that the place of this or that county in the struggle for

the championship is a matter of supreme importance to boys. He

obliged us to affect a passionate interest in the progress of county

matches, to work up unnatural enthusiasms. What a fuss there would

be when some well-trained boy, panting as if from Marathon, appeared

with an evening paper! "I say, you chaps, Middlesex all out for a

hundred and five!"

Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the

first class. I applied myself industriously year by year to

mastering scores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval

were the places nearest Paradise for me. (I never went to either.)

Through a slight mistake about the county boundary I adopted Surrey

for my loyalty, though as a matter of fact we were by some five

hundred yards or so in Kent. It did quite as well for my purposes.

I bowled rather straight and fast, and spent endless hours acquiring

the skill to bowl Flack out. He was a bat in the Corinthian style,

rich and voluminous, and succumbed very easily to a low shooter or

an unexpected Yorker, hut usually he was caught early by long leg.

The difficulty was to bowl him before he got caught. He loved to

lift a ball to leg. After one had clean bowled him at the practice

nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to make him feel

nice again.

Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits. He has

been observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly

respectable club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into

a strange brief dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his

umbrella, a roofer, over the trees towards Buckingham Palace. The

hit accomplished, Flack resumed his way.

Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror,

needlessly alert.