126 



NATURE 



[October i, 19 14 



some Greek text that has been edited over and over 

 again. These men rave about the glory of youth and 

 beauty as preached by the Greeks, but their enthusi- 

 asm is not shown in any practical way. We must 

 believe that this enthusiasm exists, because these men 

 tell us themselves that they experience it. But what 

 is a fair man to say when he hears his friends talk 

 of the beauties of Sophocles and Euripides if he knows 

 that these friends never read Shakespeare or Jane 

 Austen, or Goldsmith, or Dickens? I have not re- 

 ferred to the fact that classical scholarship leads to 

 power and wealth in the Church and State, to palaces 

 and baronies, to purple and fine linen. Leaving such 

 things out of account, I have a suspicion that this 

 worship of classics is like one's fondness for the 

 rhymes, often rubbishy rhymes, tBat associate them- 

 selves with our infancy and boyhood, or like Johnson's 

 belief that his wife was amiable and beautiful. It 

 is even possible that the verv best scholar is of 

 but little use to the world. It would be easy to 

 show that, since the sixteenth century, the classical 

 pedant has done little but spoil the rich English 

 language of our Bible. We want now a man like 

 Bishop Pecock to delatinise our language. 



Let us, however, consider a boy of another class — 

 the boy called clever, say, one in twenty of the whole. 

 At the age of twenty or twenty-one, stale and tired 

 with the reception of ancient learning, of other men's 

 thoughts, he gains a fine scholarship at the universiK-, 

 where he is supposed to be almost a free man, and 

 all the use he can make of his freedom is to go on 

 absorbing ancient learning, keeping his nose to the 

 grindstone as if he were still a schoolboy. Treated 

 as a boy from seventeen to twenty-one, he remains a 

 boy till he is twenty-four, and he cannot help becoming 

 a small-minded, though clever and learned, man, who 

 fails to see that literature is no longer the possession 

 of a small class. Yet if he had left school for the uni- 

 versity at sixteen or seventeen, we might hope that 

 university freedom and association with others and 

 with learned men might have made him great, a great 

 poet, a man of cultivated imagination, fit to become 

 a great writer, a great philosopher, a great politician, 

 a ruler of men. One of the curses of intellectual 

 England is due to schoolmasters keeping men at 

 school and treating them as bovs to the age of twenty 

 or twenty-one. They take scholarships as stall-fed 

 cattle take prizes at agricultural shows. 



Our famous writers had, like Burns, no school 

 education, or else only a short school education. Boys 

 went to the university too early after the Renaissance, 

 and Bacon entered Cambridge at the age of thirteen. 

 Shakespeare, thank God, was only at a grammar 

 school, and is supposed not to have completed even 

 that short course of school work. Even Ben Jonson, 

 who was so proud of his learning and rather scorned 

 Shakespeare for his "small Latin and less Greek," 

 had only a short school education. Phineas Fletcher 

 went to Cambridge at sixteen. Massinger went to 

 Oxford at eighteen. Of the school time of some of 

 our most original writers we have but little informa- 

 tion, but that it must have been short we have indirect 

 proof. Beaumont's first play was produced at the 

 age of twenty-one. Waller entered Parliam?nt and 

 wrote his first poem at eighteen. Dryden went to 

 Oxford at seventeen. Milton went to Cambridge at 

 seventeen. Addison went to Oxford at fifteen. The 

 whole of Pope's school education was four-and-^-half 

 years. Swift went to Dublin University at fifteen. 

 Goldsmith, after a most erratic school time, 

 entered Dublin when he was fifteen. Our 

 present school system is to keep a boy with 

 his nose to the classics grindstone from the age of 

 eleven to the age of twenty, and copies the German 



NO. 2344, VOL. 94] 



system. The result is the same in Germany and 

 England. Genius is very common in both countries, 

 jjut 99 per cent, of it is destroyed by the schools. It 

 is, however, when we come to study the average boy — 

 nineteen in twenty of all boys — that the system looks 

 most devilish. In Germany it is worse than in 

 England. There even the average boy submits, and 

 plods hard all the time, because there is a great 

 reward for him — a diminution in his time of military 

 service. Well, the result for the average German 

 boy is that he becomes stupefied, dull, and loses all 

 initiative. The average English boy gets much less 

 of these evil effects, because he neglects his school- 

 room work and keeps his mind active and his soul 

 alive by means of football and cricket. It is from 

 this great characteristic, that knowledge and wisdom 

 come from doing, and not from abstract reasoning, 

 that the British race rules the world. We learn all 

 that induces common-sense from observation and ex- 

 periment. I often used to observe that a boy whose 

 face was attractive because of its brightness and 

 intelligence in the cricket field, seemed when he 

 entered my classroom as if an isolating veil of un- 

 intelligence suddenly covered his face. He had settled 

 for life that* he could not understand the classroom 

 work, and he refused to make any more efforts. Even 

 the clever boy's soul is to some extent protected by 

 his sports, so that in every way less harm is done in 

 England than in Germany. Still, the system pro- 

 duces, even from clever boys, only clever, dull men, 

 fit to be barnacles in the public services. The system 

 may be said to give a good training for lawyers — the 

 necessary clever kind of lawyer of the Law Courts 

 and Chambers who is mute in the House of Commons. ^ 

 But it destroys the higher qualities of men and makes 

 them narrow. It ought to be remembered that Lord 

 Somers was the only great lawyer who was also a 

 great man. Poor boys cannot get this training unless 

 they are so unlucky as to get scholarships, or are 

 induced to attend university extension lectures; and 

 it results that nearly all our best writers, writers with 

 imagination and originality and initiative and indi- 

 viduality, have been boys of the common people. 

 Although poor boys are most frightfully handicapped 

 for the race to distinction, I do not think that the 

 poor child is much handicapped by mere heredity, for 

 he is naturally nearly equal to a boy of the highest 

 lineage. Natural selection up to the time of the first 

 great civilisations, when there were comfortable 

 houses and palaces — say, 100,000 years ago— together 

 with the effects since then of revolutions and wars of 

 conquest, involving slavery of the conquered, have 

 created a wonderful equality among the individuals 

 of mixable races. 



For the average boy at a public school the school 

 work is a terrible uphill grind all the time ; a soul- 

 destroying, stupefying business, so stupefying that he 

 makes no complaint, he merely suffers. He feels that 

 he is a failure, learning nothing that can be of spiritual 

 or material value to him in his future life. Of course, 

 he can pass examinations ; anybody can be crammed 



' The acuteness of a lawyer in finding the meaning of a document is very 

 wondrrful. Almost any mental power can be cultivated to such a very high 

 de.ree that it almost ^eems diabolical. A trained person after passing a 

 shop window rapidly is able to describe everj' object in the window, although 

 the objects may be very numerous and curiously different. Vet this same 

 man may not be at all clever m other ways. In patent cases a clever judge 

 fakes in the most elementary scientific knowle'^ge with very great difficulty. 

 The readers of the hundreds of newspaper articles of any morning— a« like 

 one another as herrings -are awed with their display of culture, of dei th of 

 thought, o' knowledge, and with, what is more astounding than anything 

 else, an infinitely perfect Oxford p >lish: Watrhina the per''ormances of an 

 Oxford man of letters is like watchinj a good billi.Trd player or a skilled 

 musician. His mind is filled with the thoughts of other men, pigeonholed 

 ready f'r us". It is extraordinary that a man can have been so educated as 

 to be a good debafr, to be able to make a fine speech, that he mav have 

 t»ken a degree at Oxford, that he may have passed examinations in classics, 

 philosophy, and mathematics, and yet be exceedingly ignorant, illogical; 

 and unscientific. 



