146 



NATURE 



[June 16, 1904 



writing to liis tutor, Jim asivs — " WIio tlie miscliief is 

 Prof. Bolton/ " 



The butterfly man, Hcrr Niigeli, turns out to be a 

 doctor and, after inspecting the knee, actually goes 

 away to fetch bandages, &c., thereby winning Jim's 

 heart ; his companion is the architect. The three soon 

 become the best of friends. 



Mr. Slade explains in due course who Prof. Bolton 

 is — paying him the well deserved compliment of 

 describing him as " one of the centres of gravity of 

 the world's entomology." In this letter, he refers 

 to Prof. Gardner as 



" The Chamberlain of Oxford, who does not see 

 why things should always go on exactly as they have 

 done for fifty years or so and who clearly and reso- 

 lutely puts out his opinion that there is room for 

 improvement and that we must become less of a big 

 school and more of a real University." 



He asks Jim for his opinion of Gardner's book, as 

 that of a " friendly person not wholly without intelli- 

 gence " who has lately been himself through the mill 

 whicli, according to Gardner, " is very much out of 

 order and needs new scientific appliances to make 

 it grind well." The opinion comes a good deal later : 

 that it may be well to keep the essential principle of 

 Greats but to adjust it to new needs, finding a way 

 somehow to give a man a chance of keeping his kettle 

 really on the boil. 



Jim develops apace in the free Swiss air under 

 professorial guidance. In acknowledging the arrival 

 of the books, he confesses that he has not yet recovered 

 the taste for reading. " I feel," he says, " with a 

 friend devoted to natural history who complained that 

 he had not time to read, ' lor as long as there is light 

 I want to be looking at things.' Books may be made 

 for men, but I deny that man was made for books." 



In the next letter or two, the subject discussed is the 

 need of treating every subject from a scientific point of 

 view, Mr. Slade remarking : — 



" It is astonishing what nonsense able men will 

 sometimes write, just because they don't know even 

 the elementary laws of scientific investigation." And 

 he then dwells on the importance of attention to style 

 in writing — of attention " to the ' ars rhetorica,' which 

 is after all in its proper sense only the result of a 

 conscientious effort to think clearly and get down your 

 meaning neatly- Rhetoric need not mean adornment, 

 though it is often used in that sense. No one would 

 call Darwin a rhetorican, yet he was one in so far as 

 he positively refused to let any sentence stand of which 

 the meaning was not clear in his mind and pellucid 

 to the reader." 



Matthew Arnold is referred to on the same subject. 

 The letter ends in a P.S., in which the following most 

 appropriate passage from Roger Ascham's " Schole- 

 master " is quDted : — 



" .'Vll soch Authors, as be fullest of good matter and 

 right judgement in doctrine, be likewise always most 

 proper in wordes, most apte in sentence, most plain 

 and pure in uttering the same." 



" If I am not mistaken," Mr. Slade adds, " this 



would have delighted Darwin." His appreciation of 



Darwin is indeed very noticeable ; it is much to be 



desired that the example which Darwin has set — his 



NO. 1807, '^OL. 70I 



modesty, his reverence of fact and of exactness — should 

 be brought home to humanists generally. Jim hits 

 the nail on the head in a subsequent reply in saying : — 



" I never had enough to say to trouble much about 

 how I said it ; I think that's probably the mischief 

 rather than rhetoric — want of stuff and the necessity 

 of writing an essay when you know nothing about the 

 subject and care less. &c. " 



We seldom realise how often " want of stuff " is at 

 the root of schoolboy failures. The discussion may be 

 commended to the many schoolmasters who, thinking 

 to teach English composition,' vainly require their 

 pupils to write essays on subjects of which they know 

 practically nothing and in which they cannot take the 

 slightest interest. It is worth noting that Prof. 

 Gardner takes up a similar attitude in his " Oxford 

 at the Cross Roads " : — 



"If men were set to write out clearly what they had 

 really learned, it would be an excellent training. But 

 I think that to set men to write on subjects about 

 which they know little and about which under the 

 conditions they can learn but little is not merely in- 

 expedient but radically immoral. It trains the writer 

 to conceal his ignorance, to pretend to know what he 

 does not know, to cultivate sophistries of all kinds. 

 And worst of all, a man who has once learned the 

 fatal art of writing plausibly, without knowledge, will 

 scarcely in after life be persuaded to take the pains 

 necessary in order to discover the truth of things." 



We next come to a very important dissertatio de 

 examinationibus. After the I.C.S. exam. Jim 

 writes : — 



" My mental liver is out of order as well as my 

 bodily one. They do their work well at Wren's and 

 we slaved away in the heat all day like convicts ; the 

 unlucky lecturers seem to bemoan their fate and 

 would fain go into things a little further than they 

 dare, but they are slaves of the lamp too — the glorious 

 illuminating lamp of competitive exam." 



In writing of his failure to pass the exam, he gives 

 utterance to a truth which we too often lose sight of in 

 considering examinations : — 



" These . . . (adjective to taste) competitive exam- 

 inations do as much harm as good by damaging more 

 than half the competitors for no reason at all." 



In his reply, Mr. Slade proceeds to " uncork him- 

 self " in a very noteworthy manner : — 



" Exams there must be of one kind or another; but 

 the less we have of exams that do not positively help 

 us in education the better we shall be as a nation. 

 . . . We in England have become so completely 

 salted, soused and pickled in these exams, that we 

 no longer use our natural intelligence in judging of 

 them. We take them for granted and never or rarely 

 inquire into their effect on the human mind. We have 

 lost the power of summing up the general result of 

 them on the nation during a long series of decades. 

 ... I am strongly inclined to think that our system 

 of exams has seriously damaged the natural intelli- 

 gence of the nation by almost destroying the fresh- 

 ness of interest which a fair average of boys ought to 

 take in their work and by robbing them of much 



ihe Ma 



1 It is quite likelv that we may progress apace. I n' 

 number of iheSi'ifo/ II'otM an interesting article on the teaching of English 

 by a master at Haileybury College— who actually urges that English boys 

 should be taught English by much reading of English books and by speak- 

 ing : who can say there is no hope for the future when such things are 

 happening? 



