DIPASCALUS 
 PATIENS 
 
 Jf jtl« JS« dREES
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
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 LOS ANGELES 
 
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 DIDASCALUS PATIENS
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 A SATIRE, A MEDLEY, A ROMANCE 
 
 BY 
 
 J. H. E. CREES, M.A.(Camb.), M.A., D.Lit.(Lond.) 
 
 HEADMASTER OF THE CRVPT GRAMMAR SCHOOL, GLOUCESTER 
 
 "si quid novisti rectius istis 
 Candidus imperii ; si non, his utere mecum." 
 
 ' ' Coscienza fusca 
 o della propria o dell' altrui vergogna 
 pur sentiri la tua parola brusca. 
 Ma nondimen, rimossa ogni menzogna, 
 tutta tua vision fa manifesta, 
 a lascia pur grattar, dov" e la rogna." 
 
 LONDON 
 SMITH, ELDER ^ CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 
 ^915 
 
 [All rights reserved]
 
 Printed by BALLANTyNK, Hanson b" Co 
 at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Educationists rarely condescend to define. 
 The author, exceptional in this as in other 
 matters, desires at the outset to indicate the 
 precise scope of the present book. It deals 
 with the joys and sorrows, the problems and the 
 trials of Secondary Education, of all types of 
 Secondary Education for boys, not omitting 
 the most ancient type of all, the Grammar 
 School. The words "Education" and "Pro- 
 fession," when used without qualification, will 
 usually therefore refer to Secondary Education 
 — not that the author thinks Elementary and 
 University instruction are not Education, but 
 because the word with this wide extension 
 becomes confusing from the great variety of 
 problems which confront those who wish to 
 educate young men of twenty-one and babies 
 of five or less. The problems of feminism and 
 of the Education of Woman are also avoided 
 by the author, as he has given insufficient 
 attention to the subjects. 
 
 The author views, from the repose of a 
 
 V 
 
 m tT" -^th. .*^. .
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Cathedral city, the proceedings of those local 
 and central administrators whom he has criti- 
 cised. His remarks are general, and have 
 no individual bearing ; he deals with types 
 rather than with individuals. He has engaged 
 in no controversy concerning himself person- 
 ally with the Board of Education, and his rela- 
 tionships with its Inspectors have been without 
 the slightest suspicion of friction. His own 
 good fortune does not prevent him from seeing 
 in the growth of centralisation, and the conse- 
 quent diminution of the powers and prestige 
 of the Headmaster, the gravest danger which 
 now threatens Hisfher Education. The Head- 
 master personifies his School. If his pres- 
 tige is impaired, he suffers, his colleagues 
 suffer equally, his School still more. Secondary 
 Education requires men, not measures. 
 
 One who holds such views has two alterna- 
 tives. He may speak out now, when existing ills 
 may yet be remedied, or, like Mr. Holmes, the 
 pensionary and the censor of Whitehall, he 
 may consent to a conspiracy of silence, and after 
 a long career devoted to the reduction of the 
 teacher to a state of routine slavery, he may 
 frame his indictment in the sunny clime of 
 Italy. The author prefers not to attack those 
 whose tombs line both sides of the Flaminian 
 
 vi
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Way, but to strike a blow for freedom which 
 may yet be effective. In those words of Dante 
 which are to be found on the title-page : 
 
 " Conscience dimmed, or by its own 
 Or other's shame, will feel thy saying sharp. 
 Thou notwithstanding, all deceit removed, 
 See the whole vision be made manifest, 
 And let them wince who have their withers wrung." 
 
 The role of candid critic is not always 
 pleasing nor gratefully appreciated. But the 
 author has attempted to see not only his side 
 of the question, but all the other sides. He 
 admits that there are failings discernible in 
 himself and his professional brethren, that not 
 all the arguments advanced by Assistant 
 Masters in support of the campaign for the 
 improvement of their condition — a most laud- 
 able aim — have equal force, that the sins of 
 local bodies are due rather to crass ignorance 
 than to malice. To all who profess some 
 interest in Education, and in particular to all 
 who claim to sit in authority — if only in an 
 arm-chair — he might have dedicated this book, 
 were it not that few of those for whom the 
 book is chiefly destined are likely to read it — 
 it is the usual fate of satires, tracts, and ad- 
 monitions — and fewer still would enter into 
 
 the point of view, Educational policy being 
 
 vii 
 
 N
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 largely controlled and inspired by the un- 
 educated and — much more alarming ! — the 
 half-educated. 
 
 The views herein set forth are rarely 
 expressed loudly and publicly, but they are 
 widely held. They find utterance whenever 
 two or three schoolmasters are gathered to- 
 gether. Desiring the expression of his opinions 
 to be as fresh and spontaneous as possible, the 
 author sedulously neglected to read any recent 
 books on Education until the first draft of his 
 book was completed. He found afterwards, 
 however, that the views expressed some years 
 ago by Messrs. Norwood and Hope^ on the 
 methods of the Board of Education and of 
 Local Educational Authorities had much in 
 common with his own, and that Dr. Hayward's 
 denunciation^ of Whitehall's attitude towards 
 the Elementary Teacher, and his description of 
 the outlook of the Elementary Teacher, amply 
 justified his own remarks on these subjects. 
 
 The reader will doubtless discover that the 
 book in its first draft was written before 
 that most epoch-making of all days, August 4, 
 1 9 14. Even since then opinion has moved in 
 
 * " Higher Education of Boys " (Murray). 
 " "The Psychology of Educational Administrators " (Ralph, 
 Holland & Co.). 
 
 viii
 
 PREFACE 
 
 some matters. For instance, with regard to 
 the doctrine of Formal Training discussed on 
 p. 196, Professor Welton^ has declared re- 
 cently that the attempt to observe and measure 
 faculties in isolation assumes an independence 
 of these faculties which is contrary to fact and 
 rejected by the psychologist. We have thus 
 the dilemma that " without artificial isolation 
 no imitation of the method of physics is 
 possible," and that the attempt to explain 
 " even the simplest piece of actual spiritual 
 life must remain purely and arbitrarily hypo- 
 thetical." In other words, the psychological 
 child resembles the economic man, whom 
 Ruskin and others have denounced ; there is 
 no such person. It is a step forward to have 
 this conceded. 
 
 The author has to acknowledge the courtesy 
 of the Editor of The Times in permitting him 
 to reprint in an appendix two letters which 
 originally appeared in the Educational Supple- 
 ment. In such letters, at meetings of the 
 Headmasters' Association, and elsewhere the 
 author has urged the danger of a predominant 
 
 ^ Professor Welton's views are quoted in The Times' Supple- 
 ment of June 1915, in an interesting review of Dr. W. G. 
 Sleight's " Educational Values and Methods." The reviewer 
 believes that "transfer of power" is universal. 
 
 ix
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Board of Education, both in relation to the 
 Teachers' Register and as reg-ards a national 
 examination system. At the time he seemed 
 almost alone, but there are signs that we are 
 revising our opinions, influenced perhaps or 
 repelled by the now too palpable results of 
 officialism in Germany. The writer was one 
 of the first to criticise Circular 849 in the 
 correspondence columns of The Times, and 
 urged that the Universities must still play a 
 prominent part in any examination system. 
 This thesis he maintained again at the January 
 191 5 meeting of the Headmasters' Associa- 
 tion, and was successful in carrying a rider 
 to the official resolution, to the effect that the 
 question whether ** Junior Local " examina- 
 tions should be taken or not ouorht to be a 
 
 o 
 
 matter for the Headmaster's discretion. Since 
 then the Liverpool Education Committee has 
 strongly criticised the Circular, and we find 
 The Times in recent articles suggesting that 
 the Universities should become the representa- 
 tives of the State in the work of inspection as 
 well as of examination, and opposing rigidity 
 in examinations. To a Board of Education 
 official, we read, the Board stands for an indis- 
 pensable means of progress, but a Board which 
 abstains from issuing certificates and labels, 
 
 X
 
 PREFACE 
 
 which will encourage rather than dominate, will 
 earn our gratitude. The Board would do well 
 to take no steps to put new regulations into 
 force ; delay will help us to a wise solution.^ 
 In other words, " Drop it." One is perhaps 
 justified in detecting here the symptoms of a 
 healthy reaction. 
 
 The era of stupendous change through 
 which we are now moving modifies in places 
 some of the judgments of the author. Amid 
 the clash of arms the Muses are silent. Edu- 
 cation is at present in the background, but it 
 will resume its prominence, and its problems 
 will assuredly thrust themselves again upon 
 our notice. The author is only confirmed in 
 his certainty as to the pernicious effects of 
 bureaucracy in Education, as he gazes at the 
 spectacle of a nation "servile and spoonfed," 
 whose most powerful intellects have " devoted 
 themselves for many years past to teaching in 
 German schools and colleges and universities 
 the gospel of aggressive force," to " inoculating 
 their fellow-countrymen with the virus of Anglo- 
 phobia." ^ It is the last degradation of one of 
 
 ^ These expressions of opinion are taken from articles in 
 the Supplements of April and July, 1915. 
 
 * The phrases are taken from a letter of the eminent 
 publicist, Sir Valentine Chirol, dated August 7, I9i4> which 
 appeared in The Times. 
 
 xi
 
 DIDASCALUSt FATTENS 
 
 the world's noblest forces. Surely, whatever 
 the future has in store, we shall not be tempted 
 to prefer the machine to the individual, the 
 material to the spiritual, but will spew out of 
 our mouths neo-Prussian ideals of Education, 
 realising that the greatest, and most glorious, 
 and most lasting revolutions in the history of 
 mankind are effected not by might nor by 
 power, but by the spirit. 
 
 J. H. E. .C. 
 
 September 191 5. 
 
 Xll
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Modem Juvenal i 
 
 A World of Educationists 4 
 
 Their Importunate Patronage of the Schoolmaster . . 4 
 
 CHAPTER n 
 
 The Hero as Schoolmaster 7 
 
 The Schoolmaster in Literature 7 
 
 Arnold 10 
 
 Thring 12 
 
 Kennedy 15 
 
 Bradley 18 
 
 The Assistant Master — a Type Portrayed ... 22 
 
 CHAPTER HI 
 
 The Parish Pump 29 
 
 The Misdeeds of Two Statesmen 31 
 
 Municipalised Education 32 
 
 Muddleham 37 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Teachers' Register 63 
 
 The Universities 66 
 
 The Public Schools and others 70 
 
 The Education Parliament 73 
 
 Autonomy not a State Service— the True Ideal . . 80 
 
 xiii 
 
 •*
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 Until Philosophers become Kings 
 Plato and the Platonic View of Mankind . 
 The Philosopher King alias the Bureaucrat 
 The Board of Education as it is 
 Inspectors as they are and should be 
 
 PAGE 
 
 86 
 
 87 
 
 88 
 
 97 
 117 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Lament of the Assistant Master 
 The Other Side of the Question 
 Plain Living and High Thinking 
 Improvement Necessary . . . 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 131 
 132 
 
 144 
 147 
 
 The Classics 151 
 
 Words, not Things 153 
 
 The Claims of the Ancients 156 
 
 The Grand Old Fortifying Curriculum . . . -159 
 
 Conversational Classics ....... 166 
 
 Some Remarks on Caesar, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Cicero, 
 
 Tacitus 170 
 
 Classics and the Average Boy 192 
 
 Starvation and a Plethora 193 
 
 Formal Training 196 
 
 Pabulum or Gymnastic ? . . . . . . . 200 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Examinations 
 
 The Human Boy — His Imperfections 
 Need of Written Tests 
 The Opponents of Examinations 
 Some suggested Improvements. 
 
 xiv 
 
 203 
 203 
 210 
 220 
 231
 
 CONTENTS 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Elementary Teacher 249 
 
 Mr. Holmes and Dr. Hayward on Him .... 250 
 
 The Present State of Elementary Education . . 255 
 
 Levelling Upward Needed ...... 257 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 The Grammar School 260 
 
 Its History. ....... 261 
 
 Its Scope and Influence 263 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Conclusion 266 
 
 The Life of a Schoolmaster a Venture .... 268 
 
 His Burdens ......... 269 
 
 The Potency of the Individual 281 
 
 Machinery and Organisation v. the Freedom of the Spirit 282 
 
 A Schoolmaster's Joys 283 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Two Letters to The Times ^ upon the Teachers' Register . 290 
 
 Index 305 
 
 XV 
 
 't
 
 THE SONG OF DID ASC ALUS 
 
 Myself the warp and woof I weave 
 My thoughts into my School^ 
 Both alchemist and crucible, 
 Hammer and anvil too. 
 
 The poet builds the master rhyme, 
 Lord of the mystic word; 
 I bring to birth the master deed. 
 And body forth a School. 
 
 I walk in a world oj images, 
 I live in a land of dreams, 
 I know the music well enough. 
 Only the words are slow. 
 
 O life of thrill and phantasy. 
 Triumph and smart in turn. 
 Discord and rarest harmony, 
 Darkness and radiant hues. 
 
 XVI
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE MODERN JUVENAL 
 
 " Semper ego auditor ? Nunquamne reponam ?" 
 
 Is one always to be a listener ? Must one 
 answer never a word to those presidential 
 addresses which have made Principal Outis so 
 hoarse ? Are Radical sentimentalists to escape 
 scot-free when they declaim to the world their 
 ideal of an educational policy or polity, and are 
 Unionist doctrinaires to sketch their rival pro- 
 gramme without let or hindrance ? Must I sit 
 quiet beneath that stream of soothing platitude 
 which is ever kept on tap by Professor Gorgias, 
 true type of rhetoric's perpetuum mobile ; must 
 I endure that interminable series, the mono- 
 logues of Professor Protagoras, a pundit of 
 many names and manifestations, monologues a 
 full column in length ? I confess with proper 
 tears that Mr, Sadler, whose vocation is sweet 
 
 A 
 
 H
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 reasonableness, has aroused my choler even 
 as the just Aristides irritated his less worthy 
 fellow-citizens. My ears still ring in leafy 
 June with fainter or louder echoes of many a 
 "stimulating" and "suggestive" causerie of 
 January. The views of this or that Professor 
 of Pedagogy on School desks, a subject of 
 infinite possibilities and of tenderest moment 
 to the " ischial tuberosities," ^ the cinemato- 
 graph, and the future of Education, are as 
 familiar to me as my own name. The columns 
 of our reviews and journals — halfpenny or half- 
 crown — bulge with all the favoured nostrums 
 of the reformer and the pet cliches of the 
 publicist. When one meets an educationist 
 in every railway carriage, it is the weakest 
 clemency to retard for the briefest space the 
 inevitable passage of pens and paper to the 
 dust-heap. And one has bile enough to float 
 a folio. 
 
 Surely this is the golden age of crank and 
 enthusiast, fanatic and charlatan. Preceding 
 epochs may have been lamentably impervious 
 to new ideas ; they may have stubbornly re- 
 sisted that solvent Novelty, in science and art, 
 religion and politics. We have changed all 
 
 ^ A phrase for which I am indebted to a recent educational 
 handbook. 
 
 2
 
 THE MODERN JUVENAL 
 
 that, and our forte is the broad view and the 
 open mind. Of anything that had its birth 
 but yesterday modern London is as tolerant as 
 ancient Athens. We have lost faith in every- 
 thing. We listen with the blandest interest 
 now to one who finds in a Pankhurst the 
 noblest figure in modern history, now to a 
 philosopher who glorifies instinct at the ex- 
 pense of reason. We flock to enjoy the con- 
 centrated discordance of a Schonberg, we gaze 
 with ardent admiration at the delirious night- 
 mares of a Futurist, and pay respectful homage 
 to the wearer of a blue wig. New modes of 
 dress and thoug-ht — the order is correct — new 
 habits, new theories of life rise like iridescent 
 bubbles from the turgid current of affairs, and 
 as one bursts another forms. We dabble in 
 everything and are profound in nothing. Nor 
 indeed do we desire to be profound. In this 
 bewildering medley of everything and nothing 
 one personage is strangely lacking. We are 
 too frivolous or too undecided to be earnest, and 
 therefore we lack the scourge of satire. Not 
 that the satirist finds his occupation gone, and 
 if he perished he would die of overwork rather 
 than of inanition. Amid the hosts of Aunt 
 Sallies that offer their smiling visages to the 
 slings and arrows of outrageous criticism what 
 
 3 
 
 '\
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 easier mark than " Education," and what more 
 suitable assailant than the Schoolmaster? 
 
 The educationist is abroad, or rather all the 
 world and his wife are now educationists — for is 
 not Mater a frequent contributor to the columns 
 of the Daily Telegraph, and are not all cases of 
 expulsion reviewed by the Daily Mail with its 
 jury of one million readers ? We have caught 
 the eye of the able editor, who on off-days 
 dilates **de omnibus rebus — et quibusdam aliis," 
 we have ousted the sea-serpent from his pride 
 of place in August, we have forced our way 
 annually into Government shop-windows, but 
 Pactolus does not yet flow through our back- 
 gardens. From Suffragists to Labour leaders, 
 from generals to journalists, from peers to panel 
 doctors, from eugenists to philanthropists, we 
 are all, gentle or simple, prudent or witless, 
 fluent, nay, competent exponents of educational 
 principles. The cant phrases of a Froebel or 
 a Montessori are now the mode, and our 
 Chesterfields are as free with advice — and as 
 tight with the purse-strings — as that pattern 
 of fine gentlemen. Is not a patron still one 
 who suffers his client to languish in penury, 
 and to die in a garret, and then forms a com- 
 mittee to erect a statue? We are alternately 
 scourged and patted on the back, we gain more 
 
 4
 
 THE MODERN JUVENAL 
 
 kicks than halfpence. But men cannot subsist 
 on invitations to breakfast or even — be it said 
 with bated breath — on commands to Royal 
 garden-parties. That it is men, not walls, 
 that make a city few deny. Yet to some 
 governing bodies education is still a branch 
 of architecture. What is an educationist ? 
 The qualifications are generously elastic. He 
 is a man with a typewriter — or at need a fluent 
 fountain-pen — and a complaisant editor. Our 
 oracles ingeminate progress. But they are 
 dumb when we inquire "in what direction?" 
 or confuse us by the multiplicity of their 
 counsels. We are a silent race. Our elo- 
 quence is rarely heard outside the four walls 
 of our class-rooms, and when we venture 
 beyond the limits of those halls in which we 
 lord it "maorno cum murmure montis," we cast 
 aside our thunders and lisp in gentlest accents. 
 The babbling stream of importunate platitude 
 runs on leavinsf us unmoved but not unruffled. 
 Yet even the worm will turn, and even the 
 schoolmaster exasperated into ferocity will 
 sometimes stand at bay. Truly he needs 
 the bludgeon of a Juvenal or the stiletto of 
 a Swift as a weapon of defence. Though we 
 have neither, we will, within the limits of our 
 powers, deal faithfully with our adversaries, 
 
 5
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 plying the stout stick of reason and the 
 truncheon of experience. 
 
 "But," says a critic, "you are out in your 
 metaphors. Your warfare is the warfare of 
 the knipfht of La Mancha." So be it ! We 
 will, in any case, tilt our lance if only at a 
 windmill. Our mark is of a goodly dimension ; 
 .we shall at any rate not smite the air. Or 
 if our Rozinante prove mutinous beyond his 
 wont, we will even sling our pocketful of stones 
 at Morgante and Malambruno, at Gog and 
 Magog, and all their compeers. If we cannot 
 slay Goliath, we may at least give him a head- 
 ache. Have at him !
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 " Huge he stood 
 With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear 
 The weight of mightiest monarchies." 
 
 "illi robur et £es triplex 
 circa pectus." 
 
 A PITIABLE figure does the Schoolmaster cut in 
 Hterature. No lyrist has hymned his joys or 
 sorrows, or celebrated the something attempted, 
 something done, which takes him to his couch 
 at an hour much later than the bedtime of the 
 Village Blacksmith. One at least of our mys- 
 tery has won poetic fame, but the dirge of the 
 Clifton mill casts no glorious halo round our 
 brows.^ The creator of Teufelsdrockh might 
 have written a chapter on the hero as school- 
 
 ^ I'm here at Clifton, grinding at the mill, 
 
 My feet for thrice nine barren years have trod ; 
 But there are rocks and waves at Scarlett still, 
 And gorse runs riot in Glen Cass — thank God ! 
 
 There is no silence here ; the truculent quack 
 Insists with acrid screech my ears to prod.
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 master, and surely would have done full justice 
 to the lyrico-romantic aspects of the subject, 
 but, to our heavy loss, he has refrained. What 
 a procession of brutalest of bullies, fawningest 
 of sycophants ; what a rout of the most fatuous 
 of pedants, the most ludicrous of harlequins, 
 the most childish of charlatans steps across the 
 boards as the mind summons up a pageant of 
 schoolmasters such as poet and novelist have 
 limned them ! What a character do memoir 
 and biography portray in no less vivid colours ! 
 Orbilius and Thwackum, Keate and Busby, 
 Squeers and Blimber, dominie Sampson (O 
 prodigious one !), and magister Holiday, what 
 a contemptible crew the world deems us ! 
 After terrific struggles an Arnold, Thring, 
 or Almond wins a loftier pedestal and " hovers 
 on the lips of men," but the rest pass by 
 one step into oblivion. It would have been 
 fitting that Virgil in anticipatory gratitude 
 for our services to him should have enrolled 
 
 Pragmatic fibs surround my soul and bate it 
 
 With measured phrase, that asks the assenting nod. 
 
 O broken life ! O wretched bits of being, 
 Unrhythmic, patched, the even and the odd ! 
 But Bradda still has lichens worth the seeing, 
 And thunder in her caves — thank God ! thank God ! 
 
 T. E. Brown. 
 8
 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 us in that holy band of prophets, priests, 
 philanthropists 
 
 " quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti, 
 inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes, 
 quique sui memores alios fecere merendo." ^ 
 
 But Virgil did not take the step downward (or 
 upward?) from the sage to the schoolmaster, 
 and Dante, his devoted follower, places Pris- 
 cian in a specially disgraceful corner of Male 
 Bolge. Ridicule is the world's revenge for 
 the terrors and tribulations of youth — it is a 
 damnatio memorise, deserved perhaps by our 
 tyranny, it is the aftermath of " oderint dum 
 metuant." 
 
 Yet the schoolmaster can be, and sometimes 
 is, a hero. Whether or not history is, as 
 Carlyle said, the biography of great men, the 
 history of our great schools is largely the 
 biography of our great Headmasters, a thrill- 
 ing series of epics in which perils are faced, 
 dangers overcome, and beasts fought with at 
 Ephesus. That cramping routine may gain the 
 mastery is the danger that lurks everywhere, 
 and well-nigh every school needs at times, and 
 often calls for vainly, a Hercules who shall 
 
 ^ " Holy bards who uttered strains worthy of Phoebus, or 
 they who by inventions furthered men's progress, and they 
 who by desert made others mindful of them." 
 
 9
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 clean out its Augean stables. Insubordinate 
 masters, mutinous boys, refractory and wrong- 
 headed Governors — and would it not seem 
 that the great Headmasters have too often 
 found in their governing bodies the greatest 
 difficulty of all ? — these are the lions in the 
 path. Yet not a few times have these same 
 monsters been constrained by the determina- 
 tion of some Greatheart to slink away, cowed, 
 crestfallen, and dejected. 
 
 Let us glance then at the history of a few 
 of the worthies of the past, thus gaining 
 some conception of what the ideal may be, 
 and observing how nearly it has been attained. 
 
 The leading events of Arnold's life should 
 be too well known to need repetition. Ap- 
 pointed Headmaster of Rugby in 1827, he soon 
 made good the prophecy that he would change 
 the face of education in England. Possessed 
 with a fiery earnestness that would break out 
 on all occasions, he was a strong man with all 
 the strong man's determination to carry a prin- 
 ciple to its extreme, if it be based on justice, 
 careless, as he once said, whether Rugby was 
 a School of three hundred or of fifty boys, but 
 resolved that it should be a School of honour- 
 able gentlemen with upright principles. The 
 condition on which he took office was that the 
 
 10
 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 trustees' remedy must be dismissal, not inter- 
 ference ; and he resisted all such interference, 
 deeming such resistance a duty not only to 
 himself but to the master of every foundation 
 school in England. His vehement personality 
 with its occasional stormy outbursts not un- 
 combined with manifestations of orreat kindness 
 towards his younger pupils, his bold and vivid 
 expression in the Rugby pulpit and elsewhere 
 of his views and decisions, make him the 
 Chatham of Headmasters without Chatham's 
 'Ercles vein. There is the same note of big- 
 ness, of intenseness, the same disregard of all 
 obstacles to his fixed purpose, leading almost 
 inevitably to the complete achievement of those 
 designs, that same imperiousness which, dan- 
 gerous quality as it is, seems an essential in 
 the equipment of a hero. A mind duly recep- 
 tive of novelties in the realm of thought, an 
 enthusiastic interest in all intellectual advance — 
 a quality which would have led him to resign his 
 Headmastership on the very ground that Head- 
 masters despite themselves must inevitably in 
 the course of ten or fifteen years lose their 
 freshness and sensitiveness to new things, and 
 that he must therefore seek another vocation — 
 an interest in intellectual advance not incon- 
 sistent with an adamantine adherence to the 
 
 II
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 fundamentals which he had accepted, a lofty- 
 dignity which was without a trace of pomposity, 
 which was entirely dissevered from a reverence 
 for the merely conventional, a feeling which 
 the truly great man with his real sense of 
 proportion and proper scale of values rarely 
 cherishes, an ardent love of learning in its 
 most highly intellectualised form, combined with 
 a conviction that intellect without strength of 
 character was as dust in the balance — when 
 we have other Arnolds we may look for other 
 Rugbies, scandalised as a Minister of Educa- 
 tion would be at such a portent. One won- 
 ders whether fifteen years at Rugby killed 
 Arnold/ A life lived at such high intellectual 
 and moral pressure could scarcely, one would 
 think, have been further prolonged. He was 
 
 indeed 
 
 " A fiery soul which working out its way, 
 Fretted the pigmy body to decay 
 And o'er-informed the tenement of clay." 
 
 In Thring we find a less commanding per- 
 sonality and a different point of view. Arnold 
 had held himself free to rid himself of mauvais 
 sujets in the interests of the School at large. 
 
 ^ Arnold became Professor of Modern History at Oxford, 
 a post for which in the encyciopoedic and prespcciaHstic age 
 of Scholarship men of his stamp were well fitted. O happy 
 they ! 
 
 12
 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 Thring, however, felt that the best in every 
 boy must be summoned forth, developed, and 
 encouraged, that the smoking flax must neither 
 be quenched nor the bruised reed be broken. 
 As every boy must have individual attention, 
 the numbers in any house were perforce limited. 
 Uppingham being at the outset largely a private 
 venture. Assistant Masters must needs combine 
 financial, intellectual, and moral qualifications 
 for their office, and it was necessary that they 
 should invest some capital in the School, with 
 doubtful prospects of a successful venture. The 
 disciplinary results of this policy were unsatis- 
 factory. Thring, who kept a copious diary,^ 
 a proceeding not on all grounds to be recom- 
 mended to an overwrought Headmaster, is ever 
 denouncing the misconceptions or the mis- 
 feasances of his colleagues and shareholders. 
 "I cannot govern these men, I have failed"; 
 more defiantly, " I am supreme here " ; despon- 
 dently again, " I am at my wits' end," such are 
 the remarks evoked by his co-partners' failure 
 to combine worldliness and other-worldliness 
 in their proper proportions. " How pleasant 
 my profession would be if I could only get rid 
 of the masters," he once observes, an interest- 
 
 ^ Much information as to Thring has been derived from 
 Parkin's Life. 
 
 13
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 ing aspiration for the evolution of a School in 
 vacuo. The outpourings of this autocrat by 
 temperament and by principle give no doubt 
 a wrong impression. Swiftly as the spasms 
 of depression approach and drive away the 
 memories of the hours of glorious exaltation, no 
 teacher passes his hours in unrelieved sadness. 
 The very process of clarifying one's thoughts 
 by setting them down on paper is a soothing 
 Aristotelian purgation, and at gracious intervals 
 we pass a cheering milestone or a day is lived 
 fitly to be noted with chalk. Thring can tell 
 us at times of great advance, of generous 
 support, of unstinted sympathy or unwavering 
 loyalty, of some speech to the School in which 
 he flatters himself — a life-like touch — that 
 arguments denouncing some misdeed or wrong- 
 ful practice have had a telling effect. Such 
 triumphs were doubtless rich compensations for 
 those hours in which he was " sick of parental 
 jaw," prepared, if necessary, " to defy the devil 
 and all his works," compensations even for the 
 grievous burden of financial risk which ever 
 weighed him down, and " the unnecessary 
 bloodsucking of those absurd but deadly little 
 jealousies, tempers, and perpetual baitings." 
 " Strange querulous sort of affair " as the diary 
 was, it assuredly served its purpose. 
 
 H
 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 How often, indeed, must a Headmaster of 
 normal sensibility smite his breast and chide 
 his heart like Odysseus of old, and give vent to 
 that noble outburst, " Endure, my heart ; yea, a 
 baser thing thou once didst bear," or murmur 
 to himself the Virgilian variant : 
 
 *' O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem." 
 
 How often, too, must he envy the self-con- 
 trolled their phlegm ! Perhaps these self-com- 
 munings evoke our sympathy but diminish our 
 reverence. Yet Thring, despite his diary, 
 achieved heroic things. Out of a small Gram- 
 mar School he created a great Public School 
 with a distinctive ethos. When epidemics 
 threatened and rural councils dallied, his trans- 
 ference of the School to Borth in Cardigan- 
 shire was a Napoleonic feat without parallel in 
 the annals of Headmastership.^ 
 
 From Uppingham we pass to Shrewsbury. 
 Benjamin Hall Kennedy is rather a polymath 
 than a paladin. Still the great scholar is 
 always something of a Titan. That man was 
 cast in heroic or at least Gargantuan mould 
 who delves deep into the mines of learning, 
 bears off in triumph many a massy ingot, yet 
 
 1 We owe to Thring also the Headmasters' Conference, the 
 first body in which Schoolmasters met in Parliament. 
 
 15
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 is not weighed down under the precious burden 
 but carries it lightly as a flower — inapt as 
 the image seems for one so clumsy in his build 
 and gait — or even flings it about with bois- 
 terous exuberance. Succeeding to the labours 
 of Butler — another great Headmaster whose 
 achievements have been worthily celebrated 
 by his grandson, Samuel Butler of Erewhon 
 fame — he made his School the most learned 
 School in England, and sent forth from his 
 Sixth Form scholars who, in all the various 
 competitions of the Universities, vanquished 
 with the utmost ease undergraduates of Oxford 
 or Cambridge who were their seniors by several 
 terms ; scholars who won more First Classes, 
 more University Prizes and Fellowships than 
 the pupils of any other School in England.^ 
 Kennedy showed the world what could be 
 accomplished in the intellectualising of a Public 
 School, a task which still might be taken in 
 hand in many seminaries. He is described^ 
 as a man of remarkable and impressive appear- 
 ance. " His well-cut features, dark, flashing 
 eyes, springing step, and dignified bearing are 
 
 ^ I do not seek to eulogise the pursuits of the " pot-hunter." 
 I believe, however, that the honours thus gained were the 
 outward and visible signs of a true love and ardent pursuit of 
 learning. 
 
 ^ How, Six Great Headmasters^ p. 99. 
 
 t6
 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 not easily forgotten by any who knew 
 him at that time. He could be bland and 
 playful on occasion, but on the other hand 
 he could terrify a small boy out of his wits 
 by the ferocity of his expression." The title 
 of greatest classical teacher of his century 
 seems justified by the long line of eminent 
 scholars which issued from the portals of 
 Shrewsbury during his reign. His teaching 
 " smik in, to a great extent owing to his as- 
 tounding vigour and quickness. . . . He seemed 
 to fill the room with his presence, a sort of 
 incarnate hoc age which only long practice in 
 Sixth Form life enabled one occasionally to 
 disregard." ^ He was steeped in the Classics 
 and everything concerned with them, and could 
 throw off" with equal facility an elegiac con- 
 demnation of papal aggression or a translation 
 of a summons to a committee meeting to dis- 
 cuss the momentous question of the laying of 
 some gas-pipes. His translations in class were 
 always vigorous and poetical, while his sonorous 
 voice and eye in a fine frenzy rolling could 
 inspire all with his enthusiasm. If he trans- 
 lated Demosthenes "he is not merely translat- 
 ing Demosthenes, he is Demosthenes speaking 
 
 1 " My Sixth Form," he said, " is the hardest Sixth Form in 
 England, and I intend it to be so." 
 
 17 B
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 extempore in English. The voice is modu- 
 lated in a most expressive manner — descrip- 
 tion, question, dilemma, invective, sarcasm — 
 all are rendered in their most appropriate tones. 
 But the voice gets louder and the pace quickens 
 as he nears the end, and when he stops you 
 might hear a pin drop." ^ 
 
 He endeared himself to his pupils, who found 
 that the flashes of lightning and claps of thunder 
 amid which he would formally expel perhaps 
 the whole Sixth Form, and announce to them 
 by what coach they would depart, were followed 
 by the sunniest weather. We may note also 
 that those who measure every School by its 
 numbers would be disconcerted here. At the 
 zenith of Kennedy's greatness the numbers did 
 not average more than 150, and even once fell 
 below 100, chiefly owing to the discomforts 
 that had to be endured in the Shrewsbury 
 boardinof-houses. 
 
 One more Headmaster shall be added to our 
 gallery. George Granville Bradley, like Thring 
 at Uppingham, created a School, but on different 
 lines. The injunction, " Be good, and let who 
 will be clever," is based upon a fallacy. Bradley, 
 without injury to the morals of Marlborough, 
 raised it to a much higher intellectual level 
 
 1 Mr. Heitland, quoted by How, p. Ii6. 
 18
 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 than Uppingham ever attained. He groaned 
 at first that he was doomed to teach a set of 
 " country parsons' sons drawn from the slowest- 
 witted class of the community," ^ but the par- 
 sons' sons soon proved that they could hold 
 their own with all comers. 
 
 Bradley had a special gift for teaching Latin 
 Prose. "He loved the subject and made it a 
 real engine of liberal education, stimulating 
 powerfully the observation and thought of his 
 pupils in the endeavour to express modern 
 ideas in the language of Cicero." ^ " Here was 
 a teacher born to the work, possessed by his 
 subject, rich in experience, with an energy that 
 seemed inexhaustible ; teaching, indeed, Latin 
 Prose, but finding in it an opening for endless 
 excursions into larger fields of language and 
 literature. At last, when wit, learning, de- 
 nunciation, jest, and earnest had done their 
 work, he would dictate a fair version of the 
 passage, in which every word seemed to have 
 its exact value and to fall into its proper 
 place." ^ 
 
 Too often in the past has an Assistant Master 
 at a Public School been an independent poten- 
 tate, and the annals of the great Schools contain 
 
 ^ How, p. 238. ' Ibid.^ p. 242. 
 
 ' Ibid., p. 244, quotation from Professor Butcher. 
 
 19
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 many records of vendettas long in duration as 
 the siege of Troy, of internecine strife without 
 truce and without cessation, terminated only 
 by the death or departure of one of the com- 
 batants. Bradley, who considered that a Head- 
 master should not only reign but govern, 
 insisted on being the real director of Marl- 
 borough. He hated all slackness, and his 
 censure of this, the deadliest of all scholastic 
 sins, knew no limits. Yet he was admired and 
 even loved by his masters, for if he preached 
 the need of strenuousness he gave an example 
 better than all precepts. For a young master 
 he summed up in a few pithy words the whole 
 duty of a schoolmaster : " I don't want a man 
 who will just give an hour's lesson and then go 
 off with his hands in his pocket, whistling an 
 air as if he had no more to do with his boys." ^ 
 As Mr. Thompson, the master in question, truly 
 adds, " Better this than a whole library of trac- 
 tates on education." Dean Stanley also tells 
 us : " If I were asked to name what most I 
 learned from him I should say it is the sense 
 of constant, stimulating, provoking, advancing 
 pressure, which he put on me and on all who 
 had to do anything with him ; that stimulated 
 effort of constantly probing things to the bottom, 
 
 ^ How, p. 255. 
 20
 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 that exactness of scholarship, that exactness of 
 historical information, that discontent with any- 
 thing vague or imperfect." 
 
 We have described Bradley's methods and 
 characteristics at some length, because it is well 
 that the world should understand what is meant 
 by a great teacher and Headmaster, because 
 from the practical point of view, as far as 
 intellectual efficiency and methodical organisa- 
 tion are concerned, Bradley, though not so 
 great a scholar as Kennedy, and certainly a 
 less original force than Arnold, must take a 
 very high place. We cannot wonder that men 
 like Tennyson sent their sons not to Marl- 
 borough but to Bradley, 
 
 So far our exemplars have been Head- 
 masters. We would not have it thought, 
 however, that Assistant Masters have not 
 produced their quota of heroes, their Bowens, 
 their T. E. Browns, their Irwins, a vast cloud 
 of witnesses indeed. The average School- 
 master, the average man, and the average 
 boy do not exist, but for all that we will essay 
 the delineation of the Schoolmaster of the 
 present. He shall be an Assistant, for we fear 
 that Councils and Departments are conspiring 
 to place the great Headmaster with the Great 
 Auk and the Mastodon. 
 
 21
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Our Schoolmaster, then, is one who perforce 
 practises plain living and high thinking. He 
 is required to be, if possible, as learned as a 
 Don, as athletic as a Fry, as genteel as a 
 physician, as upright as a bank-manager, as 
 moral as a parson. He cherishes a fugitive 
 and cloistered virtue. His pursuits, his in- 
 clinations, and his means confine him within 
 a small circle of acquaintances, and his inter- 
 course with the great world is slight. His 
 hand has been subdued to the material it 
 works in ; he has taken his School for better 
 or for worse, and would regard separation from 
 it with as much horror as a divorce. He lives 
 and has his being in a little world where, to a 
 large extent, his word is law ; he is restricted 
 by nothing save the co-ordinate jurisdiction 
 of his colleagues. He is not for the fashion of 
 these times where none will sweat but for 
 promotion, and he is a noble pattern of the 
 constant service of the antique world where 
 service sweat for duty, not for need. His 
 duties are never ended. He is expected, and 
 readily accepts the obligation, to regard all 
 that is connected with the School as his con- 
 cern. School holds dominion in his mind, 
 and School "shop" is the staple of his con- 
 versation. The limits of the School domain 
 
 22
 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 are his horizon, and he has no desire to mingle 
 with the members of the mercantile class who 
 socially take rank beside him. He does his 
 thinking for himself, and is therefore not so 
 sure in his opinions nor so vehement in their 
 enunciation as the quidnunc fresh from his 
 favourite journal. Reserved in manner and 
 reticent in expression of judgments on the con- 
 stitution of the universe, he shrinks from self- 
 advertisement with a maiden's shyness, and 
 regards blatancy as one of the seven deadly 
 sins. He shuns vulgarity as he would shun 
 the plague, and is repelled beyond all others 
 by the captain of industry, consumed as that 
 personage so often is by one sole-ruling idea, 
 contemptuous of aught else. How can he be 
 at ease with the worldling who has no soul, or 
 sold it long ago for a song ? So he stands 
 austerely aloof, hiding both his poverty and 
 his parts beneath a bushel. He struggles man- 
 fully on, a fitting impersonation of Juvenal's 
 shivering integrity, though you never catch his 
 teeth chattering. He is, as some would say, 
 a Helot who may not get drunk. 
 
 And what of his reward ? A tea-service or 
 an illuminated address in process of years, a 
 purse of gold even. Possibly, too, when his 
 years lie heavy on him, the bowstring or " the 
 
 23
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 sack" on the accession of a new Headmaster, 
 but never a pension, and rarely a salary ample 
 enough to compensate for the absence of a 
 pension. Our profession knows much of un- 
 regarded age in corners thrown, and many a 
 stalwart warrior must still, like Adam, look for 
 comfort to Him that providently caters for the 
 sparrow. 
 
 We must admit that our Schoolmaster's 
 susceptibilities, and his sensibilities, are fully, 
 even too fully developed. He broods at times 
 over a grievance which a microscope would 
 fail to reveal, and a colleague who treads upon 
 his toes will be denounced with suitable vigour. 
 But treat him as an equal, suggest rather than 
 prescribe, hint rather than command, and you 
 will find no more willing yoke-fellow. 
 
 He has a great liking for boys, though if he 
 
 is of the older school he will not wear his heart 
 
 upon his sleeve, and boys in turn like him 
 
 despite all their denunciations of him as a beast, 
 
 or for variety, a brute. For he has a real sense 
 
 of justice, and regards himself not as a tyrant 
 
 but as a judge. He knows the pleas that may 
 
 be advanced for youthful error as well as the 
 
 indictments which may be urged against it, and 
 
 he has as rich a store of sentiment as an old 
 
 bachelor should properly possess. His mastery 
 
 24
 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 of boys grows with advancing years, and the 
 circle of his influence extends in ever-widening 
 rinsrs. He knows all the minute differences in 
 the leading traits of unregenerate or regenerate 
 boyhood, though he is ever meeting with fresh 
 variations of the old themes. He has some- 
 times more influence than a parent, for he has 
 equal sympathy, greater understanding, and 
 ereater firmness. He can overawe the muti- 
 nous, reason with the froward, encourage the 
 dejected, admonish the thoughtless. Some- 
 times, not always, he has the sense of humour, 
 and then the ready jest or the apt rejoinder is 
 found a more useful weapon than the furious 
 denunciation or the bitter threat. To the 
 School to which maybe he has given his life he 
 is devoted with a single-hearted and unques- 
 tioning loyalty, he has made the grand refusal 
 and is profoundly thankful. As the years glide 
 by and the grey creeps over his temples, he be- 
 comes a landmark, a repository of precedents. 
 Old Boys write to him, and find themselves 
 pouring out their souls to the erstwhile marti- 
 net, the rock-like Rhadamanthys of earlier years. 
 He has age's great consolation — honour, re- 
 spect, and troops of friends. Heads may 
 come, and Heads may go, but he still guards 
 the interests of the School, and his old pupils 
 
 25
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 still can feel that all's well with the world. 
 Havine become the servant of all he finds him- 
 self master of all. He is consulted in difficul- 
 ties by the Headmaster, and the clouds are 
 soon dispelled. He has his own way always, 
 for he has learnt to manage Heads even more 
 easily than to manage boys. The Head may 
 rule the School and lord it over his Governors, 
 but it is our hero who subtly and invisibly 
 directs the Head. " Quod se minorem dis 
 gerit imperat." 
 
 To the world at large he seems reticent, and 
 finding him undisputatious you would vote him 
 a dull fellow if you met him in the train. But 
 he is skilled in a profound lore, and though he 
 has never in his life read a treatise on Child- 
 Study, to him the mind of boyhood is an open 
 book. Nothing boyish is alien to him. In 
 his intercourse with his colleagues he adopts 
 the sententious style ; he is perhaps too didactic, 
 too full of the mannerisms of the Class-Room, 
 from whose platform he can never descend. 
 He is conservative in his tendencies, profoundly 
 distrustful of the glib Professor of Pedagogy — 
 word that sets his teeth on edge — touring the 
 world like the Sophists of old with an eV/^a^fp 
 of eloquent platitudes culled from the book of 
 commonplaces which he keeps so carefully. 
 
 26
 
 THE HERO AS SCHOOLMASTER 
 
 He does not frequent professional meetings,^ 
 but meekly accepts their decisions, and lights 
 his pipe with their magazines, having previously- 
 perused them. He marvels at the modern 
 agitator and is his despair, for he lacks that 
 selfishness which is the prime characteristic of 
 the successful Trades-Unionist, and had as lief 
 be a psychologist as a politician. His integrity 
 is beyond reproach, his morals are blameless, 
 yet, thank Heaven ! — and it may be said with 
 perfect consistency — he is a man of the world, 
 neither a mystic nor a pietist. He is not con- 
 vinced that Paris is worth a mass, and will turn 
 neither his coat nor his collar, though he rarely 
 denounces those who have out-distanced him 
 in life's race by so doing. He belongs to an 
 irritable race, but all ends in smoke, and if you 
 pass near his common-room your nostrils are 
 saluted by the fumes of that cherished brand 
 with which he soothes his sorrows and forgets 
 his grievances. He is punctilious as to trifles, 
 and exacts a full meed of deference from his 
 younger colleagues. Like Cato, he gives his 
 little senate laws, but the senate generally 
 accepts them with acclamation. 
 
 Thus does he run his course, and as he 
 
 ' These occur in the hoHdays, and he has more wit than to 
 be there, as a modern Lady Fairfax might say. 
 
 27
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 ponders o'er the mysterious dispensations of the 
 Fates, and compares himself with the parvenu 
 who rolls past him in his motor, or with some 
 shopman with the touch of Midas, he ofttimes 
 strives to take comfort in the thought that it is 
 he and his colleagues after all who are the salt 
 of the earth. It may be he is right. 
 
 28
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 Venerable, time-honoured symbol of the local 
 
 patriot, fit emblem, with thy faded paint, thy 
 
 narrow stem, and thy continual cascade of the 
 
 Seven Sleepers, of the contracted mind, and 
 
 of the drip of never-ending controversy, with 
 
 what reverence, with v/hat anguish, must we 
 
 gaze upon thy battered, ancient features ! How 
 
 faint and feeble all our efforts to praise thee 
 
 fitly ! For in truth laid up in some Platonic 
 
 realm of abstract existences there must abide 
 
 an archetypal Parish Pump, the magnum opus 
 
 of some master-hand, some vates sacer, a 
 
 volume destined at some long future day to 
 
 pass into this world of shadows, but as yet, 
 
 outside the bounds of space and time, united 
 
 in coeval and co-honoured majesty with the 
 
 prime original of that supreme Tale of a Tub. 
 
 Tubs, as the greatest of satirists has told us, 
 
 are excellent playthings for the leviathan, yet 
 
 who would compare them with the linked 
 
 charm and usefulness of the Pump ? Only a 
 
 29
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Hardy could describe in all their fullness the 
 thronging activities that centre in it. Built 
 to commemorate whether some royal jubilee, 
 some triumph of the British arms, the death 
 or majority of some ** never-to-be-forgotten " 
 squireling, what associations does it cluster 
 round it, what controversies has it excited ! 
 Well might its eulogist, borrowing for the 
 nonce the sublime idea and rhythm of the 
 youthful Rutland, sighingly exclaim : 
 
 "Charters and statutes on the dust-heap dump. 
 Let trade and commerce leave us in the hump, 
 But spare, O gracious Heaven, spare our Parish Pump ! " 
 
 Infants have gamboled around it, small boys 
 have chalked upon it, have sucked the reluctant 
 rill that oozes from its sightless caverns, or in 
 all the exuberance of superfluous vigour have 
 wasted its sweetness on the desert paving- 
 stones, dogs have barked nigh at hand or 
 lapped its puddles, lovers have made it a 
 place of tryst, the village idiot has propped 
 his flaccid form against its massive bole, the 
 forsaken reveller staggering homeward has 
 invoked in its cool beverage a new spirit to 
 redress the balance of the old, or sought the 
 cold douche of returninor sense. As it stands 
 seemingly defiant of the laws of gravity, pour- 
 
 30
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 ing forth to its faithful votaries from abysmal 
 depths perennial streams of that liquid rightly- 
 hymned from Pindar to Sir Wilfred Lawson 
 as the best of all things, mightiest triumph of 
 hydrostatics — mysterious science ! — who can 
 withhold the meed of fitting praise, who wonder 
 that in dreams its figure gains fresh majesty, 
 and looming phantasmal in the visions of the 
 night assumes the semblance of the guillotine, 
 wringing from one perforce a slumbrous mori- 
 turus saluto ? 
 
 But enough of dithyrambs. The theme is 
 vast, so vast that one fragment only of the 
 mighty story may be attempted here, the deed 
 of two politicians, Balfour and McKenna, "par 
 nobile fratrum " despite divergences in creeds, 
 and how the twain in wanton flouting of a 
 famous precept, nailed to the pump a whole 
 profession's ears. 
 
 The tale of woe has its beginning in the 
 year of grace 1902, Then it was that Mr. 
 Balfour's Education Bill, blessed with a happier 
 fate than its two predecessors, passed on to 
 the Statute Book, and local authorities were 
 permitted, nay ! admonished, to take in hand 
 the work of administering and developing 
 Secondary Education. But — an equally im- 
 portant and far more controvertible step — the 
 
 31
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 old School Boards were abolished and Educa- 
 tion was consigned to the City and County 
 Councils, bodies already overburdened by their 
 other duties, and totally inexperienced. Edu- 
 cation became the younger sister of Baths and 
 Sewage, Tramways and Electricity, and there- 
 fore appointments to the Education Committee 
 were generally in the nature of consolation 
 prizes, awarded to those who were not fortunate 
 enough to be elected to the more important 
 Committees. Bodies which had gained at least 
 some experience of educational problems were 
 swept away at the very moment that greater 
 powers — powers the misuse of which was fraught 
 with consequences far more severe — were be- 
 stowed upon the municipalities. Though the 
 School Boards were not perfect, in many cases 
 men of some distinction who were repelled by 
 the vulgarities and petty controversies of ordi- 
 nary civic life were willing to come forward as 
 candidates for election, and the personnel of 
 the Boards, at any rate in favoured places, 
 compared advantageously with that of the 
 Town Councils, still more with that of the 
 Boards of Guardians. 
 
 The new bodies manifested much zeal in 
 furthering the advance of Secondary Educa- 
 tion. In some cases higher-grade schools were 
 
 32
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 converted into Secondary Schools by a few- 
 coats of paint and a new inscription over their 
 portals, and the painter's brush became a 
 magic wand. In other cases new schools 
 were founded which, as far as staff, methods, 
 and ideals were concerned, were on all fours 
 with those of the first class. Though a decade 
 is a short space in which to judge a school's 
 development, it is a safe assertion that not one 
 of the Schools of the new era shows any signs 
 of developing into a School of great ideals or 
 even of a hig-h intellectual standard. Science, 
 Mathematics, and Modern Languages are 
 naturally the most favoured subjects, but 
 where the pupils are well instructed they are 
 rarely well educated. Of the dignity of edu- 
 cation, of the delights of learning for its own 
 sake, of Geistlichkeit, in a word, they have no 
 glimmer of a conception.^ One explanation of 
 the failure of the new school is probably that 
 it has been boycotted, effectively but unosten- 
 tatiously, by members of the older universities, 
 
 ^ Not that I can descry amongst our Public Schools or 
 amongst our smaller Grammar Schools many shrines of intel- 
 lectualism. Far from it. But whatever their pupils may be 
 in the mass, they have at any rate contact with some men of 
 high enthusiasms ; certainly many individuals have passed 
 firom the Schools in question inspired with a high love of 
 learning, and in nearly all such Schools there is that quality 
 which Matthew Arnold rightly desiderated, dignity. 
 
 33 <^
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 whose aid must for the present be first invoked 
 in entering upon that most arduous task, the 
 building up of a great School. It is in the 
 smaller mushroom schools — schools of less 
 than one hundred boys — that the most flag- 
 rant examples of inefficiency are to be found. 
 Whitehall has steadily pursued the policy of 
 urging the building of a large number of small 
 inferior schools rather than the foundation of 
 a small number of large schools. A school 
 without its proper complement of specialist 
 masters must in the present day sink into the 
 slough of mediocrity, and the failure of these 
 schools is not less glaring because the Board 
 of Education cannot for very shame pronounce 
 them inefficient. The lot of a Headmaster in 
 a small Secondary School must be singularly 
 unblessed. A meagre stipend on which it is 
 vain for him to attempt any appearance of dig- 
 nity, a salary which he desperately strives to 
 increase by taking in boarders at a ruinous 
 rate,^ a few of these boarders, who are a vast 
 tax upon his attention and that of his wife, the 
 risk of an epidemic, and the still graver risk 
 that fees will not be paid, such are the ills that 
 
 * In the present enlightened age Dotheboys Hall has be- 
 come Dothemasters Hall, and Mr. Squeers has been starved 
 and satirised out of existence. 
 
 34
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 bring a premature old age. He has, perhaps, 
 also to importune his day-boys for their fees, 
 a pleasing task when their fathers are small 
 farmers ; and the writer has himself been pre- 
 sent at a Headmasterial address in which the 
 fees were requested with almost the eloquence 
 of a charity sermon, and in which virtue was 
 stimulated by the promise of a school half- 
 holiday when all were paid. And last of all 
 these woes — perhaps a slight infliction — the 
 Headmaster must teach whatever subjects 
 his coadjutors cannot or will not teach, from 
 agricultural chemistry to vocal music or manual 
 training-. 
 
 The Municipal and County Secondary 
 Schools were the first-fruits of Mr. Balfour's 
 legislation. In 1906 Mr. McKenna or his 
 advisers issued an ukase, epoch-making in its 
 effects, not upon the newer schools, which 
 needed no improvements of this sort, but upon 
 the many schools of older foundation which 
 had been ensnared into accepting a Govern- 
 ment grant, on which they were now depen- 
 dent. No school could receive a grant unless 
 a majority of its Governors were appointed 
 by a popularly-elected body, and unless free 
 scholars from elementary schools were annually 
 admitted to the extent of at least one quarter 
 
 35
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 of the admissions of the previous year.^ By 
 this regulation the great majority of the older 
 Endowed Schools and Grammar Schools were 
 delivered to the local authorities bound hand 
 and foot. 
 
 Eight years have passed since these calami- 
 tous regulations were issued — years which by 
 a just retribution have been spent by Mr. 
 McKenna in flitting uneasily from one depart- 
 ment to another, in being bullied by Lord 
 Charles Beresford and chased by suffragettes, 
 while Mr. Balfour in his turn has been attempt- 
 ing vainly to lead a mutinous opposition, and 
 sustaining General Election debacles. This 
 book must not aim at the severe appearance of 
 a scientific treatise, but the documentation of 
 Its statements would be easy, and in dealing 
 M'ith these important developments of local 
 government one may hope to make a slight con- 
 tribution to contemporary history. Evidence 
 is now accumulating which enables the student 
 to pass a verdict upon the policies of the two 
 
 1 Thus if, from September 1912 to July 1913, sixty boys 
 entered, fifteen " Free-Placers" must be admitted in September 
 1913. In many Schools the proportion of "Free-Placers" has 
 increased yearly, both because all admissions, even of boys 
 who might chance to stay only one term, are counted, and 
 also because once the process starts obviously the numbers 
 admitted increase by a regular progression. 
 
 36
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 statesmen and their results. The evidence is 
 to be found in official reports, in speeches at 
 educational conferences, and chiefly in every 
 local newspaper. 
 
 The local paper deserves almost as lofty a 
 panegyric as the parish pump itself. If, Reader, 
 it is your habit, as it should be, to explore your 
 own delightful native land, after you have 
 inspected the parish church, the market, and 
 all the local places of interest, neglect not to 
 demand of mine host a copy of the local 
 journal. North, South, East, and West, it 
 matters not. You will find much delectation 
 for the spirit, and much food for thought. The 
 future Gibbon, if we can conceive any who 
 wilbsubmit to the peine forte et dure of writing 
 a modern history, will doubtless con the files 
 of the great journals of our capital, but if he 
 has a mind to paint the modes, to depict the 
 everyday life of the twentieth century, he must 
 above all pore even to blindness over the 
 annals of the local press. 
 
 The local journalist must not be summed up 
 as a chronicler of small beer, he will slake his 
 thirst with skim-milk on occasion. He has an 
 insatiable appetite for details, however trivial, 
 and an unbounded interest in his neighbour, 
 however respectable. All is fish that comes 
 
 n
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 into his net, from the brilliant youthful success 
 of Master Percy Toddler, pupil of Miss Ange- 
 lina Jenkins, in a Scale and Arpeggio test, to 
 our esteemed townsman, Mr. Robinson's new 
 line of socks, for which our advertisement 
 columns may be consulted. It is indeed almost 
 a distinction not to appear occasionally in the 
 M2iddleham Merctny. All municipal storms 
 in a teacup, the question — on which the fate of 
 empires depends — whether the schoolmistress, 
 uncertificated of course, shall have ^5 per 
 annum more, or the master of the Workhouse 
 5^-, a week less, portraits of the latest happy 
 pair who have taken the fatal plunge, or of 
 the last respected inhabitant whose demise is 
 universally regretted, congratulations to some 
 Muddleham veteran who is eighty not out, epis- 
 tolary contributions from such ardent and un- 
 sleeping publicists as Nemo, Constant Reader, 
 Justice, Vigilant, afford the student of mankind 
 much entertainment. Not the least entertain- 
 ing part of the journal is the report of the 
 proceedings of the various bodies, in which 
 report Mr. Councillor Booby and Mr. Alder- 
 man Witless air their views at much length 
 and in inverse proportion to their judgment 
 and discretion. The climax of sensationalism 
 is reached in October. It is then de rigueur 
 
 38
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 for all candidates for re-election and their 
 supporters to speak with vehemence on every 
 subject. November gives us the speeches of 
 the successful and the rejected. The cynic 
 who reads the rival effusions of Blues and 
 Buffs, who have not altered much since Mr. 
 Pickwick's day, may derive a roguish pleasure 
 from proving out of the mouths of both parties 
 that there is no honest politician, no not one ; 
 that a river of beer has flowed or an abundance 
 of crowns has been scattered, that the intelli- 
 gence of the electors has been sadly befogged, 
 and their purity grossly stained. Confusion 
 is heightened by the difficulty of deciding the 
 point at issue, though men are certain, like 
 Caspar, that it was a famous victory. In this 
 realm of organised hypocrisy and concerted 
 calumny, it makes little difference whether 
 Blue or Buff secures election. Perhaps one 
 party has slightly more regard for the rate- 
 payer, and is slightly more resolved to keep 
 rates down, but both are emphatic in wear- 
 ing their rue with a difference. Indeed, the 
 spirit of faction seems almost some inheritance 
 from the primitive man, some blind subcon- 
 scious impulse which drives him to fight 
 his neighbour, he knows not why, he knows 
 not how. 
 
 39
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 It is then not so much the policy of these 
 bodies, if purblind cheese-paring can be dig- 
 nified with the title policy, as their personnel 
 that demands the juster criticism. A full 
 history of the proceedings of some local bodies 
 would resolve itself into a prose Dunciad. The 
 fact is dimly recognised even by the parties 
 concerned. Laments are poured forth at re- 
 gular intervals as to the difficulty of finding 
 men with adequate gifts of character and in- 
 tellect to perform duties which would seem to 
 demand some measure of ability. In Shake- 
 speare's time Dogberry and Verges were mem- 
 bers of the local police force ; they have now 
 been promoted to the deliberations of the 
 Watch Committee. Let an outsider, however, 
 hint any doubts as to the efficiency of our local 
 governors, and both parties will combine to 
 turn and rend him. In one of his most blazing 
 indiscretions Lord Salisbury declared that most 
 villages would prefer a circus to a parish 
 council. Some assemblies combine the two 
 attractions. A visit to such is at least as 
 exciting as a visit to a passing menagerie, and 
 indeed Wombwell or the orreat Lord Georee 
 might take a hint or two from the jigs and 
 antics of our village senators. There are 
 roughly two classes of members, those who 
 
 40
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 are useful and those who are not (the majority) ; 
 those who waste words and those who are 
 economical of them. The former show a 
 marked disposition to wrangle over the veriest 
 trifles, and to indulge in acrimonious person- 
 alities. " Silence is golden " is the inscription 
 above all others which should adorn the walls 
 of a Council Chamber, but when the reporter 
 hangs upon a man's lips, ready, anxious, to 
 take down every precious syllable, what orator 
 can resist the lure of fame, however transient ? 
 Moreover, some still cherish the delusion that 
 a public body which .'despatches its business 
 quickly is neglectful of its duties. The truth 
 is that all real work is done in committee, and 
 that if this work has received proper attention, 
 there is no need for another more public per- 
 formance of the same drama, this strutting and 
 posturing on a mimic stage. Young children 
 love to play at being somebody. In later years 
 we cannot indulo^e in these diversions unless 
 we are public men, and when a public body 
 meets merely to ratify the decisions of a con- 
 clave held behind the scenes, the farce is in 
 truth often well acted. Where efficiency exists 
 matters are generally in the hands of a junta, 
 which has acquired rightly or wrongly a repu- 
 tation for ability. Fowlers or Chamberlains 
 
 41
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 are rare, unfortunately, in small towns. Such 
 men, autocratic and intolerant of opposition 
 as they often are, can generally choose their 
 subordinates well, and under such a regime 
 the machine may work quite smoothly. But 
 if Mayors and Chairmen lack the qualities 
 of leadership, if the lathe painted to look like 
 iron is a woeful substitute for the heavier metal, 
 if the tin-pot mediocrity or the silver-plated 
 incompetent nominally rules, cruel is the lot of 
 those who work with them. Lewis Carroll de- 
 scribes with much humour the caucus race, a 
 competition in which people began when they 
 pleased and left off as they liked, and every- 
 body had a prize. This may not be an alle- 
 gory, but it is a lifelike description of a 
 Committee out of hand. Members speak as 
 they please and on what subjects they please, 
 and the joyous realm of Wonderland is realised 
 once more. True, everyone has not a prize, 
 but be it an attendance-officer, or a school- 
 keeper, or a rate-collector who is required, 
 each man does his best to secure the prize for 
 his own devoted friend. 
 
 The price of liberty is perpetual vigilance, 
 the price of popular control is perpetual sus- 
 picion. Yet any man who knew his business 
 and would condescend to deception could with 
 
 42
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 the utmost ease hoodwink an assembly of 
 amateurs and semi-literates,^ which has no 
 knowledge of the principles or the details of his 
 trade. " Quis custodiet custodes ? " The ques- 
 tion has been left unanswered by our states- 
 men. The heathen in their blindness bow 
 down to wood and stone, and in like manner 
 the Philistines of our public bodies have a 
 healthy fear of any Government Department, 
 and of its myrmidons. Perhaps even the 
 Mumbo Jumbo of Whitehall, with its muttered 
 incantations of " mandamus, vetamus, non sol- 
 vemus " (you must, you must not, no grant), is 
 better than absolutely nothing. 
 
 In handinof over to local elected bodies the 
 real control of Secondary Schools, Whitehall 
 hoped to secure from these bodies liberal sub- 
 ventions. Except in the North of England 
 and in London, the anticipation has not been 
 realised. Rates are the tradesman's bugbear 
 and the farmer's anathema. One must indeed 
 
 ^ Probably every town can supply its apt example of this 
 illiteracy. Here are three. In a certain Northern borough 
 a new road was called Avenue road, a phonetic reproduction of 
 the watchword of the chief advocate of the road. In a town 
 hard by, when it was proposed to put a gondola on a park 
 pond, a Councillor pressed for two in order that they might 
 breed. How often is a bequest made to a public body in the 
 moving phrase of the donor, " for hever and for hay " ! 
 
 43
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 agree with both as to the folly of assessing a 
 man's contribution to local needs by the size 
 of his house or shop, or the breadth of his 
 acres. There is a host of arguments which 
 are imponderable in the shopman's balance. 
 There is a world the other side of a trades- 
 man's counter into which few vaulting spirits 
 ever pass, and those whose attention is fixed 
 on big turnovers and cutting prices must stick 
 to their yard-measures or to their scales. The 
 farmer is still more miserly. Children must 
 shiver in rural schools lest the coal bill mount 
 too high, lest some bucolic humorist being 
 informed that the Schoolroom must be heated 
 to a temperature of 60° Fahrenheit should 
 reply that tomatoes can be grown at that tem- 
 perature.^ The payment of a dole of ;^30 
 per annum to uncertificated women teachers 
 is justified by the Chairman of an Education 
 Committee, who would be ashamed to treat 
 his own domestics so scandalously, on the 
 ground that they were once paid only ^15.^ 
 Local control is seen at its worst in the 
 
 * One would like to know whether the temperature of this 
 Committee room is kept down to the same level as that of the 
 Schools governed by it. Perhaps, however, the heat engendered 
 by financial controversies has some compensating influence. 
 
 * ^15 per annum comes to ^s- <^d. per week, "wealth beyond 
 the dreams of avarice," as Dr. Johnson would put it. 
 
 44
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 smaller towns, where life is still lived at a less 
 strenuous pace, and where people still have 
 time to mind one another's business. The 
 greater cities are assuredly not without fault. 
 The suggestion made by Lord Peel at a 
 recent conference ^ that the importance of 
 Parliament was decreasing as that of the muni- 
 cipalities was increasing, and that there was 
 coming into being a special race of municipal 
 statesmen not led away by legislation and 
 ambition and follies, but content to work solidly 
 and continuously on local administration, is 
 based on the optimistic fancies of a vivid 
 imaoflnation rather than on sober facts. Par- 
 liament may be decreasing in importance, but 
 it is not decreasing in power, and the demands 
 for unquestioning obedience made by Govern- 
 ment Departments, to which has been entrusted 
 the enforcement of many recent Acts of Par- 
 liament, are ever increasing. The weekly 
 debates of the London County Council will 
 show how much time is devoted to mere 
 party recriminations, and both where such 
 recriminations are the rule and elsewhere we 
 inevitably find that the great mass of busi- 
 ness leads merely to the establishment of a 
 second bureaucracy, which often joins issue with 
 
 * Imperial Health Conference, May 21, 1914. 
 
 45
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 the supreme bureaucracy, but often too com- 
 bines with it to oppress in common those who 
 are its subjects. The London County Council, 
 with its hideous blue forms and its cast-iron 
 regulations, is easily the first of these minor 
 tyrannies.^ It has shown much ingenuity in 
 devising methods of stifling the free expression 
 of opinion, and evidently regards the school- 
 master in his class-room and the clerk on his 
 stool as quantities of equal magnitude. 
 
 Thus in the manner indicated Secondary 
 Education, which once, fenced and guarded in 
 cloistral seclusion, was completely sundered 
 from the world of politics, has been caught up 
 and whirled away in the cog-wheels of the 
 caucus. The spheres of Secondary Education 
 and of Politics intersect but slightly, and there 
 is, thank Heaven ! no religious difficulty with 
 its cloud combats to distract us, but the habit of 
 looking at things from a political point of view, 
 of acting always with one's political associates 
 and of opposing always one's political enemies, 
 
 ^ Teachers must spend their holidays in attending lectures 
 if they are so bidden. These holidays may be arbitrarily 
 shortened without the teacher being consuUed. Teachers may 
 not publish any book which contains a reference to their con- 
 nection with the L.C.C. on the title-page. They must not 
 furnish any information with reference to their Schools to pro- 
 fessional bodies with a view to the discussion of professional 
 problems, e.g. double promotions during the School year. 
 
 46
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 a habit acquired elsewhere, is brought into the 
 peace and calm of the education committee 
 room. There are some compensations. If a 
 Headmaster be attacked by one section of the 
 Committee, the other section will be inclined 
 to support him. The log-roller, too, here plies 
 his craft. If A attacks some proposition, B 
 must unite with him whole-heartedly if he 
 desires A's support in other matters. Our 
 local Macchiavellis make full use of Pro- 
 vidence's graciousness in bestowing upon us 
 speech with which to disguise our thoughts. 
 Most speeches require the service of a com- 
 mentator well versed in the inner history of 
 events, who may reveal to us besides (i) what 
 the speaker said ; (2) what he thought ; (3) 
 what he desired the world to believe that he 
 thought. 
 
 The gallery, architecturally lacking though 
 it sometimes may be, is the most important 
 region of the council chamber, and there is a 
 tendency to address one's self to it. To attack 
 Secondary Education for the glorification of 
 Elementary Education, or still more pleasant 
 task, to visit upon the innocent head of the 
 Secondary Teacher some affront which the 
 Elementary Teacher has recently received, is 
 always thought good business, for Secondary 
 
 47
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Education is almost voteless. If one wished 
 to select from our ranks one who more than 
 any of his colleagues is associated with the 
 finest flower of humanity, sympathy, and 
 courtesy, perhaps the most votes would go 
 to the High Master of Manchester Grammar 
 School. However, some six or seven years 
 ago when trouble had arisen in the elementary 
 schools as to the use of corporal punishment, a 
 section of the Manchester City Council seized 
 the opportunity to propose that the annual 
 grant to the Grammar School should be re- 
 fused unless corporal punishment was abolished 
 there.^ The punishment inflicted on a particular 
 boy was grossly exaggerated ; photographs were 
 exhibited of the boy's back before and after Dr. 
 Paton's brutal treatment, photographs which 
 arrived at the Council Chamber via the United 
 States. The proposal was summarily defeated, 
 but if some City fathers of enlightened Man- 
 chester are capable of such tactics, it may easily 
 be imagined that the alcades of smaller towns 
 are capable of still worse. 
 
 The dictum so frequently uttered on Speech 
 Days, that the one way of building up a great 
 
 ' In Secondary Schools corporal punishment is usually 
 inflicted only by the Headmaster. In Elementary Schools 
 such punishment may be inflicted by any Certificated Assistant 
 Master. 
 
 48
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 School is to appoint a good Headmaster and to 
 give him a free hand is more honoured in the 
 breach than in the observance. Few bodies 
 believe that a Headmaster knows his own busi- 
 ness, and most have a morbid curiosity for petty- 
 details of management. Bodies concerned 
 with both Elementary and Secondary Educa- 
 tion are usually possessed with the view that 
 the Secondary Schoolmaster, in defiance of all 
 schemes and traditions, must be brought down 
 to the level of the Elementary Teacher. This 
 tendency can be corrected in only one way. 
 All Governing Bodies should contain repre- 
 sentatives nominated by the Universities 
 themselves, and, where it is possible, repre- 
 sentatives of those who are engaged in Second- 
 ary Education should also be members. The 
 expression of these two points of view by 
 persons who can give utterance to their 
 opinions without fear or favour would be an 
 invaluable corrective of the narrowness and 
 ignorance which are at present preponderantly 
 represented. One may hope that in time 
 Headmasters and Assistant Masters, who have 
 not been forced to postpone till too late a 
 day a retirement which depends upon a long- 
 expected pension, may take their places on 
 such boards, may speak with due force, and be 
 
 49 P
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 heard with due respect.^ Perhaps even in time 
 a more generous spirit may permeate the lower 
 as well as the higher educational strata. At 
 present, however, the local politician has an 
 ingrained distrust of all representatives of 
 higher education, and regards some elderly- 
 clergyman who said adieu to the University 
 thirty years or more ago as a true repre- 
 sentative of the University spirit.^ 
 
 Thus Education in being democratised has 
 so far been merely vulgarised, and resentment 
 is justifiable. The view here taken of the 
 effects of recent Departmental regulations is 
 not merely an individual eccentricity. It is the 
 view, rarely expressed perhaps, but almost uni- 
 versally held, by those engaged in Secondary 
 Education. Sir John McClure, President of 
 the Headmasters' Association, has declared ^ 
 that the result of the Education Act of 1902 
 was that Education "was put into the hands 
 
 1 It would be desirable, as a rule, that such Governors should 
 not be connected with the Schools to which their professional 
 career has been devoted. 
 
 ^ I am in no way disparaging the work done by such men 
 on many public bodies. I merely point out that they have 
 necessarily lost touch with the later developments of the 
 Universities and of Higher Education generally, and that re- 
 presentatives are needed in addition who are in the closest 
 contact with Education in its highest forms. 
 
 ' Presidential Address, 1914. 
 
 50
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 of the practical man. Henceforth ' municipa- 
 lise ' was to be the blessed word in education. 
 . . . One could wish, however, that it were 
 possible for these practical men to indicate the 
 end and leave the means to the judgment and 
 experience of the practical teacher. ... It is 
 constantly happening that the advice of per- 
 sons experienced in education is disregarded or 
 lightly esteemed, and undue prominence is given 
 to subjects which the practical man can best 
 appreciate even though they be of inferior 
 educational value." Sir John McClure is ac- 
 customed to weigh his words, and this con- 
 demnation loses none of its force, although 
 he will not take upon himself to condemn this 
 policy " which may be wise and far-seeing and 
 ultimately justify itself." The Times also com- 
 ments ^ on the "scanty provision of expert 
 knowledge " that has been made by the various 
 local councils, owing to the latitude left them, 
 " perhaps unfortunately," in the formation of 
 their education committees. The Headmaster 
 of Bristol Grammar School, Mr. Cyril Nor- 
 wood, who with Mr. Hope has produced a book 
 called " The Higher Education of Boys in Eng- 
 land," has much to say on the same theme. 
 Most local authorities, we are told with much 
 
 ^ Educational Supplement, March 1913. 
 51
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 force, are incapable of distinguishing between 
 Higher Elementary and Secondary Education. 
 They exclude co-opted educational experts. 
 They are too fond of beginning technical 
 instruction before a foundation has been 
 established on a predominantly literary basis. 
 Education is killed, our authors declare, when 
 the Headmaster is reduced to the level of a 
 second-rate municipal servant, the chief shop- 
 walker in a useful knowledge emporium. So 
 far indeed we have learnt chiefly what to avoid. 
 Governors should be men of liberal education, 
 acquainted with the Public School tradition. 
 The Headmaster's function is that of teaching 
 and leading, not clerking, and though Directors 
 of Education may be necessary, it is disastrous 
 to give them authority over Secondary Schools. 
 The five years which have passed since these 
 bitter judgments were passed have not dimi- 
 nished their force, and many still fervently look 
 forward to another world in which those who 
 have inflicted this doom upon an honourable 
 profession may have suitable punishments 
 assigned to them, to be imprisoned, perhaps, 
 with a host of municipal pundits, and to be 
 forced to supply a perpetual stream of small 
 talk, or to answer ad infinitum some of the 
 racking questions propounded on their own 
 
 52
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 forms. For us it is possible that things will 
 become worse before they become better. 
 
 The question of local control is bound up 
 with the larger question of Democracy, its 
 powers and limits. The roseate hues of 
 youthful Democracy have faded, and though 
 some prefer the dry light of noon to the 
 golden radiance of the morning, our feelings 
 too have chanofed. We have lost our illusions. 
 Democracy was an ideal ; it is a pis aller. We 
 are learning to understand more definitely what 
 Democracy is, and we find it, like all human 
 institutions, less attractive than it appeared at 
 first sight. A great Liberal like Lord Morley 
 admits that, however we define progress, De- 
 mocracy is not its only conditioning force. ^ 
 Democrat and Liberal are not co-extensive 
 terms. France is a Democracy, a much more 
 perfect Democracy than England can ever 
 be ; but there all are ^tatistes, none Liberals. 
 Here, too. Democracy is busily engaged in 
 riveting chains upon all its subjects, itself in- 
 cluded. Nor is Democracy yet, as Mazzini 
 defined it, the progress of all through all 
 
 ^ " Mill never taught that Democracy was the only guarantee 
 of steady and unbroken progress. He knew too much history." — 
 From Lord Morley's interesting review of Mr. L. T. Hobhouse's 
 " Democracy and Reaction" in his "Miscellanies." Much of 
 the matter of this paragraph is derived from this review. 
 
 53
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 under the leadership of the best and wisest. 
 High virtue and exalted wisdom are flowers 
 that rarely blossom in the polluted atmosphere 
 of politics, and the best and wisest, as a rule, 
 shrink from suing for the suffrages of their 
 countrymen. How often does one catch one- 
 self exclaiming, with a slight variation of 
 Madame Roland's apostrophe, O Democracy, 
 what crimes are wrought in thy name ! Of 
 old there was a close and cordial alliance be- 
 tween Democracy and Intellect. The great 
 blows for Liberty have been struck rather by 
 the thinker in his study than by the sansculotte 
 on his barricade. 
 
 " A breath of our inspiration 
 Is the life of each generation ; 
 A wondrous thing of our dreaming, 
 Unearthly, impossible seeming — 
 The soldier, the king and the peasant 
 Are working together in one, 
 Till our dream shall become their present, 
 And their work in the world is done. 
 
 They had no vision amazing 
 
 Of the goodly house they are raising, 
 
 They had no divine foreshadowing 
 
 Of the land to which they are going ; 
 
 But on one man's soul it hath broken, 
 
 A light that doth not depart. 
 
 And his look, or a word he hath spoken. 
 
 Wrought flame in another man's heart." 
 
 54
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 But the glorious succession of Liberal 
 thinkers, from Rousseau, with his thrilling 
 " Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in 
 chains," to Mill, the austere, devoted champion 
 of every cause of freedom, the dynasty which 
 slowly yet surely sapped and mined those 
 strongholds of tyranny which no forlorn hope, 
 no brilliant onset, however desperate, could 
 have stormed, has perished without offspring. 
 In spite of Trades' Union Congresses, which 
 pass in a few seconds, embedded in some 
 omnibus resolution,^ motions demanding the 
 confiscation of all educational endowments and 
 the establishment of a system of free Secondary 
 Education, the working-man ignores or despises 
 all education. The Trades' Union leader and 
 the Halfpenny Journalist have accomplished 
 the enthronement of unblushing ignorance ; for 
 the ignorance of the ordinary man, his lack 
 of grasp of questions which demand serious 
 thought, is astounding. Lord Sherbrooke told 
 us more than forty years ago that we must 
 educate our masters, but no one has yet dis- 
 covered a satisfactory method. We must not 
 now talk of educational ladders, the metaphor 
 
 ^ But while condemning omnibus resolutions, I must admit 
 that all Conferences, not merely Industrial Conferences, have 
 a weakness for arranging unwieldy agendas and for agreeing 
 to many important propositions without discussion. 
 
 55
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 has shifted to that of a highway. The Old 
 Toryism and the New Democracy curiously 
 agree, and the New Democracy has as blind a 
 disreorard for the interests of the nation as a 
 whole as the Old Toryism ever had. The 
 latter was for keeping the poor in their places 
 in respectful submission to their betters, the 
 former knows nothing of betters of any sort, 
 intellectual or otherwise, and is indignant that 
 poor boys of ability should have better chances 
 than their brothers, fearing they may rise out 
 of their class. The enlightened statesman 
 would before almost everything desire that 
 there should be a free passage from one class 
 to another, that worth by poverty depressed 
 may rise to its proper eminence, and that rank 
 or wealth not coupled with ability may sink 
 back to the obscurity from which it probably 
 arose a few generations back. He will seek 
 to promote this free "career of talent," both 
 because it is to the State's interest that the 
 State should from its highest to its lowest de- 
 partments be conducted with ability, and also 
 because he has no wish for his country to 
 arrive at the New Jerusalem via the Gehenna 
 of a bloody Revolution directed by these same 
 men of ability who have been denied all oppor- 
 tunity of advancement. He will regard all 
 
 56
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 justifications of the prevention of inter-mobility 
 of classes, all championship of the caste system, 
 under whatever mask disguised, as pernicious 
 doctrine at all times to be resisted. Nothing 
 has such miraculous effects as Education in 
 changing a man's outlook ; the clever man will 
 infallibly leave his class. His attitude will be 
 totally different ; he will not take Mr. Keir 
 Hardie as his Pope ; but then he will not take 
 any man as his Pope, and while his early ex- 
 periences give him insight and, it is to be 
 hoped, sympathy in his study of social prob- 
 lems, his Education will cause him to distrust 
 all panaceas and short-cuts. Perhaps, indeed, 
 the only real way in which the State can help 
 Higher Education is by providing, wherever 
 necessary — and there are still many places 
 where it is necessary — means for boys of ability 
 to obtain the highest culture. 
 
 This duty of the State must be carefully 
 distinguished from another duty which falls 
 upon the State as being at present the only 
 possible superintendent of Elementary Educa- 
 tion, that of giving the future worker with his 
 hands a suitable preparation for the business 
 of life, bearing most carefully in mind that 
 the worker is also a man and a citizen, even 
 though much that is taught is " ot no use" — ■ 
 
 57
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 venerable phrase ! The attitude of the Labour 
 Leader in defiance of a proverb referring to 
 the leadinsf of horses to trous^hs has been 
 described, the view of the ordinary " working- 
 man " who removes his child from School at 
 the earliest possible age to become a half-timer 
 must now be noted. Mr. Stephen Reynolds, 
 the author of " Seems So," is probably as good 
 an authority on the desires of the working-man 
 as anyone, and he sums up that attitude thus : 
 "They say that the children ought to be kept 
 at school till they're fifteen." ..." Fifteen ! 
 Why, they keeps 'em there two years too long 
 as 'tis, I reckon. I don't say a few o' 'em don't 
 rise through it ; ^ but they clever sort 'd rise 
 anyhow, wi'out forcing if the chance was offered 
 them. For the heft o' the likes o' us 'tis dif- 
 ferent. You may learn summut to school, or 
 you may not ; precious little o' it's any use ; 
 but I reckon you learns manlihood and woman- 
 lihood after you leaves school, an' the sooner 
 you begin to learn thic, the better. Education 
 is the biggest fraud ever forced upon us ; and 
 the most dangerous too ; for it has been held 
 forth so persistently and so loudly as a cure- 
 
 ^ Note that education is only a means of rising. But other 
 people, who should be more enlightened than the fisherman, 
 still seem to have this conception of education. 
 
 58
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 all, that even the poor themselves have been 
 very largely deceived." This is the authentic 
 note. One reason why Elementary Education 
 has not greatly improved is that the "working- 
 man " has not known or cared what educa- 
 tion is. 
 
 We must not, however, pass from the subject 
 without casting some grains of incense upon 
 the altar of Democracy. Freedom of Speech 
 was the Athenian's proudest boast — and Aris- 
 tophanes has survived to show how splendidly 
 tolerant the Athenian could be of criticism. 
 Freedom of Speech is perhaps the greatest 
 glory of the British Constitution also. All 
 Democracies need their Aristophanes, their 
 Socrates, their Rosa Dartles even, irritating 
 as all may be. We have passed our criti- 
 cisms upon society as it is, starting from the 
 truly Democratical premise that if all men are 
 equal, even a Headmaster is the equal of a 
 coal-heaver or a tram-conductor. Few Head- 
 masters of Day Schools are not anxious to 
 further the truly democratic ideal that a Secon- 
 dary School should be the meeting-ground of 
 boys of all classes, and therefore they have 
 resisted proposals which by their drastic provi- 
 sions would defeat this object, and would make 
 their Schools merely the happy hunting-grounds 
 
 59
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 of one single class, the proletariat or the " idle 
 rich," as the case may be. Most Headmasters, 
 animated as they are in general with a high 
 conception of their duty to all the boys com- 
 mitted to their charge, from the highest to 
 the lowest, have done infinitely more for the 
 advancement of popular education than the glib 
 cheap-jacks of the Council Chamber. Demo- 
 cracy may be in its great moments the noblest 
 of all polities,^ it may approach the realisation 
 of the Kingdom of God on earth ; but let us 
 have the democracy of Pericles, not of Jack 
 Cade. 
 
 Nor certainly do we view the small country- 
 town and its orovernors with unmitigated scorn. 
 Muddleham, if so we may christen it, is a delight- 
 ful place to dwell in by contrast with that " wen" 
 of Cobbett's, in which seven millions have the 
 madness to dwell. It is restful and soothino- ; 
 it has an ancient history, a castle, a battlefield, 
 or at least an inn where Prince Charles once 
 slept when fleeing from the Roundheads ; if it 
 is not surrounded by pleasing scenery, its situa- 
 tion must be exceptional. Its inhabitants are 
 
 ^ A point which needs no emphasis at present. But when 
 the storm and stress of the present time have passed away, 
 and the noble inspiration of an appalling crisis has waned, let 
 it be remembered still that Democracy in its grand moments 
 is a thing incomparable. 
 
 60
 
 THE PARISH PUMP 
 
 charming people, save when the tocsin sounds ; 
 its Councillors in private life are men of good- 
 will, but what is sport to them is death or 
 agony to their victims. Yet what a transfor- 
 mation might be effected in Muddleham if all 
 its people were transported for twelve months 
 into a great city's central roar, if they could 
 exchange the Pump for the Niagara-like streams 
 of Trafalgar Square, for the bustle of Brum- 
 magem's Corporation Street, or the grimness 
 and grime of Mancunian Piccadilly. They 
 would return more serious and more thought- 
 ful to the delights that Muddleham provides in 
 such full measure. Might we not even hope 
 that those who transact all their business in a 
 glare of publicity, those whose habitation is 
 only a house of glass, despite its many subter 
 ranean chambers, may finally arrive at the pro- 
 found truth that those who dwell in glass houses 
 must not throw stones ? 
 
 And we must part in friendship with the 
 pump too. We know as well as any its 
 sanctity and its importance. It should be 
 kept in clearest brightness, its flow should be 
 regular and its pipe unclogged. Its mechanism 
 should observe the due mean between too 
 oily ease and groaning rheumatism ; its liquid 
 
 should be uncontaminated, cool, tasteless, but 
 
 6i
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 not insipid. But does not all this lie within the 
 province of the Parish Plumber rather than of 
 the Parish Politician, and need the destinies of 
 our historic parties be annually involved in its 
 fortunes ? Let us strive to propitiate Nemesis. 
 Pumps are ancient, pumps are elemental. 
 Pumps are primeval, the earliest triumphs 
 doubtless of the Iron Age. But the whirligig 
 of time has its revenges, and; even the men of 
 Muddleham may yet submit perforce to the 
 indignity of water-works, may bow the knee 
 to an engineer with his gang of turncocks, may 
 endure the despotism — and demand-notes — of 
 a Water- Board, which will rear lofty dams 
 and towering aqueducts, and — tragic consum- 
 mation — in utter forgetfulness of a century 
 of ceaseless service, consign our pump to the 
 scrap-heap or the marine store. So passes 
 the glory of the pump. 
 
 62
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 In this sad medley of horrid arbitrariness and 
 insensate arrogance, in which men drest with 
 a brief authority play such tricks as make the 
 angels weep, what hope is there, what remedy 
 for the present discontents of those fast gripped 
 in the fetters of municipalism ? 
 
 Aid from the outside world is a vain hope. 
 The outside world, penetrated with the com- 
 fortable assurance that hours are short, pay 
 good, and holidays long, will turn a deaf ear 
 to the bitter cry of outcast schoolmasters. 
 Government has delivered them bound hand 
 and foot to their present masters, and will not 
 raise its little finger to improve their condi- 
 tion. Can they then manifest to the present 
 age the most shining example of that virtue 
 which is its sorest need, the virtue of minding 
 one's own business ? The seed has been sown 
 by Mr. Sadler ; ^ we wait to see whether it 
 will fructify. Mr. Sadler looks forward to the 
 
 ^ The Times, Educational Supplement, December 1913. 
 
 63
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 reign of Syndicalism, to the hour when the 
 teaching profession shall be self-governing and 
 autonomous. No Department shall issue its 
 decrees, no Inspector coerce his subjects, but 
 all shall rule all. His brethren shall deal, as 
 he deserves, with any errant master. We shall 
 not strike or shout because, I presume, all is 
 over, and we need not add " barrins: the shout- 
 ing." Our salaries will be generous, our pen- 
 sions adequate, and like the Lotus-Eaters, we 
 shall live in godlike blissfulness in a land 
 where it is always afternoon. Sing the Te 
 Deum. We have a Parliament. 
 
 But will it work ? The mountains have been 
 long in labour. Successive Permanent Secre- 
 taries have strenuously or indolently supported 
 or resisted the various schemes put forward by 
 distressed and vainly toiling leaders. The 
 torture of Tantalus is for the present ended. 
 The result, however ridiculous, is not a little 
 mouse, but a monster unwieldy, four-headed 
 and four-bodied, united in Siamese fashion by 
 the frailest of tissues. Will the four bodies 
 succeed in keeping in step ; will not they rather 
 wrench themselves violently asunder and assert 
 their separate existence ? And then will not 
 the panting Headmasters' Conference toil in 
 
 vain after the brilliant sprinters of the N.U.T., 
 
 64
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 who will no doubt make the running in the 
 Educational Handicap ? Shall we be able to 
 agree even in differing ? Such are questions 
 which the Sphinx alone can answer. 
 
 The Teachers' Register is the product of the 
 lucubrations of the Teachers' Council. The 
 Teachers' Council was begotten by Sir Robert 
 Morant, and is a body fearfully and wonderfully 
 made, so fearfully and wonderfully that its 
 construction cries for a sober and unvarnished 
 description. The Council is based, as Burke 
 of old thought our constitution was based, on a 
 system of checks and balances. The excessive 
 zeal for learning of the Universities is com- 
 pensated for by the banausic utilitarianism 
 of the teachers of Shorthand, the fine-drawn 
 culture of the older educational institutions is 
 atoned for by the untutored stridency of the 
 National Union of Teachers, and the unbend- 
 ing rigour of the Headmasters' Association is 
 tempered by the sweetness and light of the 
 Association of Women Teachers. We ask 
 inquiringly what is the greatest common 
 measure of the Regius Professor of Greek 
 and a village teacher ? The answer seems 
 to be, that ardent doctrinaire, Mr. Arthur 
 Acland. 
 
 What we call prophetically the scholastic pro- 
 
 63 ^
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 fession is a house of many mansions. There 
 are at least three main types of educational 
 institutions — that of the Elementary School, 
 that of the Secondary School, with its various 
 subdivisions, and that of the University. 
 
 The Universities will probably preserve their 
 pedestals undamaged. The Don is much more 
 and much less than a teacher. He is, or should 
 be, rather a supervisor, an inspirer, and a guide, 
 than an instructor of persons too indolent to 
 instruct themselves. Where men do not go 
 up to the Universities insufficiently grounded 
 they can in most cases teach themselves, given 
 the will to do so. Those who have taken up 
 Science require frequent advice and assistance 
 in the Laboratory, those who are pursuing the 
 humaner studies need help in Composition, 
 and all require occasional assistance in the 
 choice of books, suggestions as to their line 
 of reading, and hints as to difficulties. But 
 the 'Varsity man ought not to be fed from the 
 bottle or with the spoon. "The true Uni- 
 versity is a collection of books." It is a hard 
 saying, but there should be much truth in it. 
 The writer owes a debt beyond all computa- 
 tion to Cambridge, but it is not to the lecture 
 system that he owes most. It was a pleasant 
 thing to attend a course of lectures on Greek 
 
 66
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 Oratory given by a Jebb, to listen, yourself the 
 second, to Mayor, a scholar who had wandered 
 into the wrong age, as he garrulously reviewed 
 in his own discursive style and in the spirit of 
 a sixteenth-centurv scholar all thino^s in oreneral. 
 It was a notable experience to sit at the feet of 
 a Verrall discoursing on Euripides, or an Adam 
 expounding the Republic, for these men were as 
 great as Lecturers as they were as Scholars. 
 Yet were not all these things written in the 
 books of those mighty scholars ? But while 
 we concede that in these eminent instances 
 there was an inanalysable residuum, a some- 
 thing beyond all precise explanation which 
 made their lectures far more inspiring than 
 their books, in the case of the ordinary College 
 Don this added potency did not, could not, 
 exist. There is, or should be, a world of 
 difference between the lecture-room and the 
 class-room, even the Olympian regions of the 
 Sixth Form. 
 
 So the Lecturer is not a Teacher in the 
 School sense, and the University is not a more 
 advanced School. Moreover, the older Uni- 
 versities enjoy, and the younger Universities 
 would fain attain, complete freedom from 
 Governmental trammels. The ancient Uni- 
 versities smile gently at the youthful excesses 
 
 67
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 of Boards of Education — things of the day 
 before yesterday — striving so earnestly and so 
 enthusiastically to instruct all men and women 
 in the art of sucking eggs. If he is plied with 
 too many interrogations by his catechist, the 
 Oxford Head of a College will " dally with 
 his golden chain and smiling put the question 
 by," the Oxford Tutor with his delightfully 
 detached manner will let the Roman legions 
 thunder past, and then plunge in thought 
 aeain. Oxford and Cambrido-e are not of 
 yesterday, and we shall be spared for some 
 time yet the spectacle of a Gilbert Murray 
 marking a green attendance register, or the 
 presence at another Regius Professor's Lecture 
 of some minion of Mr. Pease, with notebook 
 bulging in his pocket, making a few sugges- 
 tions to the venerable scholar at the end of 
 his hour. 
 
 What is the magic spell of the ancient Uni- 
 versities ? Only an Arnold or a Pater could 
 describe it in its fullness. It seems to arise 
 from a largior sether, a subtle all-pervading 
 atmosphere of intellectuality, the genius loci 
 which combines so well the cult of work and 
 the cult of leisure, the infectious influence of 
 others interested in all things of the mind, the 
 contact with the adventurous spirit of youth 
 
 68
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 voyaging ever onward through strange seas 
 of thought, casting aside as hoary platitudes 
 the boldest novelties of last week, and epitomis- 
 ing in the brief compass of a single Term the 
 mental growth of a century. Knowledge rises 
 to another plane, when one can point the 
 finger at some captain of scholarship whose 
 fame resounds through Europe, can hear as 
 one passes by scraps of the conversation of 
 intellectual paladins, can behold in the flesh 
 men whose names have long been words of 
 power with us. But it is expedient at times 
 to "cut" the usual College lectures as fre- 
 quently as a lenient Tutor will permit. The 
 paradox is true that those who attend lectures 
 most regularly and take the fullest notes — we 
 speak not of the gentler sex, which without 
 exception displays a regularity of attendance 
 and an assiduity in recording the ipsissima 
 verba of even the obiter dicta and witticisms 
 of its lecturers never sufficiently to be praised 
 • — are often the cfreatest moral and intellectual 
 idlers. It is the duty of a lecturer to stimulate, 
 not to stifle thought ; it is not his duty to 
 save his readers the toil of hard reading by 
 supplying them with ready-made examination 
 answers. The greatest scholars, moreover, 
 are not necessarily the clearest expositors. 
 
 69.
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Some have reached the consummation of all 
 scholarship, the power to express the abstrusest 
 discoveries in language of the finest clarity, 
 but the manner of presentation of many others 
 would never satisfy a Professor of Method. 
 
 From these exalted regions we pass to the 
 wearers of the laticlave, the grand seigneurs 
 of the great Public Schools. They can be 
 always trusted to pass resolutions which bind 
 no one, not even themselves. Like people of 
 a different class they carry on flirtations in 
 their holidays. They coquette with demo- 
 cratic and other novelties, and forget or ignore 
 them during Term. They have no intention 
 of surrendering one whit of their prestige, or 
 of descending from their position of eminence 
 and mingling with the crowd, and no doubt 
 they are right. They are wealthy and need 
 no Government's largesse, they have traditions, 
 and they, and their masters, and their boys, 
 will brook no interference with them, they 
 are select and have no liking for "outsiders." 
 Their problems are totally different from those 
 of the municipal school, whose pupils come at 
 twelve or thirteen years of age and leave 
 generally long before sixteen, and their envis- 
 agement of their particular problems is totally 
 different. The agenda of the Headmasters' 
 
 70
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 Conference deals generally with very dis- 
 similar matters. What has it to do with 
 " Free-Placers " — many Headmasters would, 
 no doubt, ask what " Free-Placers " were — 
 with Government grants and their inadequacy, 
 or the scandal of boys leaving school at fourteen 
 or fifteen ? What, on the other hand, has the 
 Headmasters' Association to do with regula- 
 tions as to entrance to Sandhurst or examina- 
 tions for Naval Cadetships ? If an Admiralty 
 representative addresses it on the scarcity of 
 Naval Officers, there is a buzz of scornful com- 
 ments sotto voce on the folly of expecting its 
 members to prepare boys for such an expensive 
 service. It is the Headmasters' Conference 
 that represents the governing classes, and it 
 desires no infiltration of democratic principles. 
 There is a fault in the geological formation, 
 and no amount of fine words can alter 
 realities. 
 
 The older Grammar Schools are the middle 
 term. They follow in the wake of the Public 
 Schools and are sometimes little distinguishable 
 from them, but there is perhaps less of that 
 magnificent disregard of intellectual things 
 which marks the true Public School. Again, 
 the most modern Secondary Schools are in 
 spirit and in essentials practically advanced 
 
 71
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 elementary schools, completely subject to local 
 and departmental authority. 
 
 Such a heterogeneous bundle of conflicting 
 entitles is Secondary Education. We now 
 come to that strong, solid, and resistless mass, 
 mighty in the power of numbers, steadfast in 
 its firm resolve, whether it be to secure a 
 scale for Herefordshire teachers ^ or to obtain 
 some Cabinet Minister's head upon a charger. 
 These men claim with much truth that they 
 form the educational forward line, and they 
 can apply their weight remorselessly in a 
 scrimmage. 
 
 Here we have no vision, but at any rate a 
 purpose, and that purpose is to dominate any 
 national system of education hereafter to be 
 established, and to adapt it to its pleasure. 
 Elementary Headmasters are puppets, their 
 Secondary confreres must be puppets likewise. 
 Elementary Education is free. Secondary Edu- 
 cation shall be free. Elementary Teachers are 
 paid a salary which does not go beyond definite 
 maxima ; all Teachers are equal, and therefore 
 Secondary Teachers must not have a larger 
 
 ^ I in no way criticise the course thus taken by the National 
 Union of Teachers. I rejoice, on the contrary, at its first victory 
 in the attempt to secure a real living wage for its members, and 
 that it has so soon brought to its knees the purblind protago- 
 nists of bucolic obscurantism. 
 
 72
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 salary or a more liberal pension. Quod erat 
 demonstrandum ! 
 
 Such are the first three orders in our Con- 
 stituent Assembly, the Universities, Secondary, 
 and Elementary Education. Finally we have 
 a wondrous pageant of men in buckram, dis- 
 tinguished foreigners to most of us. Cretes 
 and Arabians, Parthians and Medes, dwellers 
 in Mesopotamia and Elamites, the enchanting 
 music of the Pied Piper has charmed them all 
 forth from every nook and cranny, Heaven 
 knows why, to dance a jig and tread a measure. 
 Let us, however, be not too austere. Even a 
 plumber is a man and a brother. In the riotous 
 rule of King Jack Frost, when pipes shed tears, 
 and taps gush forth in cataracts, shall we not 
 bear with more Christian patience the perfidious 
 procrastination of the professor of the healing 
 art, when we have been assured that his Gama- 
 liel was an F.R.P.A. or some other mysteriously 
 initialled person, a member of the same noble 
 craft as we ourselves ? ^ Thus in our new Par- 
 liament we have a jack of every trade. 
 
 Such then is the monster which, like Athene 
 
 ^ This is no exaggeration. A teacher of plumbing can rank 
 in the Register beside a Regius Professor, and when the author 
 urged at the Headmasters' Association that every registered 
 teacher should have a University Degree, it was seriously ad- 
 vanced that such a rule would exclude a teacher of plumbing. 
 
 n
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 in this alone, sprang forth in full panoply from 
 the head of Sir Robert Morant. All educa- 
 tional associations have at once passed resolu- 
 tions of welcome. Such is our politeness that 
 it is hard to imagine any act at all of our 
 supreme disposers that we would not greet with 
 similar effusion. But both those who were 
 present at those meetings, and the vast host of 
 those who were not, cherish their resentment, 
 or at least have their misgivings, and are fur- 
 tively examining the gift horse's teeth. One 
 can extract an ironic delight from the compari- 
 son of forecasts of the Registration Council 
 and its composition with the Council as it 
 actually is. Messrs. Norwood and Hope de- 
 clare that it should not include teachers of 
 dancing and sewing, but sewing is certainly 
 represented by the nominee of the Associations 
 of Teachers of Domestic Subjects, and dancing 
 comes under the head either of Music or Gym- 
 nastics. The Times in February 1912^ en- 
 larged on the difficulty, if not the impossibility, 
 of devising one condition of entry both suitable 
 and fair to all types of teachers in Secondary 
 Schools. An unwieldy alphabetical list of all 
 existing teachers, a mere directory of names, 
 would serve no useful purpose. Probably, 
 
 ^ In its Educational Supplement. 
 
 74
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 therefore, the Teachers' Council would decide 
 upon a register in compartments, each com- 
 partment to have its own conditions of admis- 
 sion. There would be free movement from 
 one compartment to another, and the same 
 name might appear in more than one compart- 
 ment at the same time. All compartments are 
 to be equal, and " there is no need even to 
 assume that Greek is more important than 
 clay-modelling!" It will be the duty of the 
 Council " to see that each candidate is qualified 
 to teach the subject he proposes to teach, ^ and 
 that he has sufficient general education to make 
 his teachinof effective." In a later number ^ it 
 is pointed out with much force that every 
 teacher must have reached some elementary 
 standard in general liberal education. "It may 
 be necessary to take a foreman from a dye- 
 works and employ him to teach dyeing to 
 working lads ; but such lads will not acquire 
 the art of dyeing any better because their 
 instructor is illiterate. Hence it may be sup- 
 posed that, although the Registration Council 
 will have nothing to say about the right of 
 public authorities to make use of such trades- 
 
 * This duty has been entirely ignored, as I have pointed out 
 in a letter to The Times reprinted in an Appendix to this book. 
 
 * September 1913. 
 
 75
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 men as supplementary instructors, it will make 
 short work of their claims — if such be advanced 
 — to be translated out of their avocation into 
 an incorporated profession." Again, the inclu- 
 sion of university representatives was merely 
 an after-thought, and it is not to be imagined 
 that university teachers will seek a place on the 
 register. It would be ludicrous to suppose that 
 " Q," the distinguished Cambridge Professor 
 of Literature, would gain anything by being 
 ranked as a professional teacher. What was 
 ludicrous in September 191 3 is now quite pos- 
 sible. Eminent authorities have been quite 
 wrong in their forecasts, but in a laudable de- 
 sire to give Mr. Pease's rickety banding every 
 chance, have taken an unusual pleasure in eating 
 their own words. 
 
 Who have applied for registration so far? 
 The monthly bulletins are not as yet very re- 
 assuring to the partisans of the Register. We 
 are told with many a flourish of trumpets what 
 men have applied, but the fact that the appli- 
 cants do not number five per cent, of those 
 eligible is carefully suppressed. The Vice- 
 Chancellor of Oxford, the Headmaster of Eton, 
 and Mr. Sadler are now registered teachers. 
 It would be interesting to hear from these 
 distinguished men what it feels like to be a 
 
 76
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 registered teacher, and whether the Confirma- 
 tion ceremony that they have undergone has 
 tended to their further edification. But when 
 we have passed by these eminent examples of 
 ostentatious humility, we find that our hidalgos 
 are splendidly isolated, and that most men and 
 women, preferring their guineas to their status, 
 are conspicuously absent. Various Principals 
 of Training Colleges have applied, and Kib- 
 worth Beauchamp is also represented on the 
 Register ! Be it known to all the ungeographic 
 that Kibworth Beauchamp is a pleasant village 
 on the Leicester-Market Harborough turnpike, 
 which rejoices in a mixed school of forty-seven 
 children. Doubtless it is modestly surprised 
 and gratified at the eminence thus thrust upon 
 it. For the rest of us it is a satisfaction to 
 know that the great heart of Kibworth beats 
 in harmony with the universe, that Mr. X.Y.Z., 
 His Majesty's Inspector, is registered, and that 
 therefore all's well with the world. 
 
 Should there be a Register at all ? As " Old 
 Fogey," that singularly wise contributor to the 
 Journal of Education, has said, the real need 
 of our profession is not registration, but re- 
 muneration. The financial difficulty is in most 
 quarters the real crux. It is impossible to per- 
 suade Governing Bodies to charge, or indeed 
 
 77
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 parents to pay, fees which are in any way 
 commensurate with the School expenses. An 
 education which cost £2^ will be procurable 
 for ^15 ; one which costs £\^ can be obtained 
 by the parent dirt-cheap at ;^3 or £/\^ per annum. 
 Government grants are shamefully meagre, en- 
 dowments are often non-existent. Somebody 
 or something must be sacrificed. The teacher 
 has hitherto been the victim. Yet sweated 
 industries are proverbially industries in which 
 a poor level of efficiency prevails, and the 
 epithets cheap and nasty join forces as usual in 
 the case of the inexpensive school. The " dirt- 
 cheap " commodity is never held in value, and 
 strange though it be, the great Schools owe 
 much of their prestige to the highness of their 
 fees. If some bold Minister of Education 
 should resolve that schoolmasters as well as 
 miners or agricultural labourers deserved a 
 minimum wage, he would go some way to- 
 wards justifying his existence. Such bold 
 deeds are, however, beyond the horizon of a 
 Minister of Education, who is wonderingf what 
 post he will obtain in the next Cabinet reshuffie. 
 Yet, true as it is that money is our greatest 
 need, the answer to our question is a decided 
 affirmative. Misdirected as our efforts may 
 have been, our desire to develop into a pro- 
 
 78
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 fession is based on a sound instinct. We need 
 more solidarity, we must confront our enemies 
 at the eate with more resolution, but we must 
 recognise that the mere word teacher is one of 
 the vaguest words in our language. The gulf 
 between the Shorthand instructor and the 
 Master of an Oxford College, between a 
 villaofe teacher and an Eton Housemaster, is 
 so overwhelmingly wide that no real bond of 
 connection is now, if ever, possible. Section- 
 alism may be an unpleasant word, but it is the 
 only working policy of the present day. The 
 Teachers' Council might, however, develop into 
 a very useful clearing-house if it were definitely 
 recognised that the Council as a whole must 
 devolve the settlement of all matters affecting 
 one section alone to the section concerned. In 
 cases where two or more sections are concerned, 
 those sections should confer with one another,^ 
 but in no case must one group attempt to coerce 
 another. 
 
 Devolution without Coercion is a line along 
 
 ^ Questions in which Elementary Teachers might differ from 
 Secondary Teachers are such matters as Fees (Free Secondary 
 Schools ?), Salaries, and Pensions, the age of transfer from the 
 Elementary School to the Secondary School. The Universities, 
 again, would rightly claim to settle the character of their 
 Entrance Examinations, Scholarship tests, &c. I note that 
 already Elementary Teachers are being urged to register in 
 large numbers in order to swamp the other registrees. 
 
 79
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 which considerable progress might be made. 
 It would be an outrage if some decision upon 
 matters entirely or chiefly concerning Second- 
 ary Education were imposed upon us by the 
 votes of Elementary Teachers or Technical 
 Instructors. Conversely, we have no right to 
 impose our views as to methods or policy in 
 the Elementary or in the University world 
 upon our unwilling associates. Was the con- 
 geries of the Registration Council the work 
 of some Macchiavelli ? Was it not thought 
 that an able and arbitrary permanent official 
 might mould such a body like wax to his 
 designs ? 
 
 The ideal of an autonomous profession, the 
 blameless syndicalism foreshadowed by Mr. 
 Sadler, is certainly attractive. We do not 
 desire to assume the attitude of the Sibyl, to 
 adopt a position of unbending resistance to all 
 representations made from the outside world — 
 such a position as is often adopted, for instance, 
 by the medical profession — but we are tired 
 of the meddling of clumsy outsiders and un- 
 scrupulous politicians, and we are confident'that 
 we could manage our affairs infinitely better 
 than can our present masters. An executive 
 committee could negotiate with Universities 
 
 re Examinations, appoint Headmasters when 
 
 80
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 vacancies occur,^ draft salary and pension 
 schemes, and settle all purely professional 
 matters without the slightest friction, without 
 appeals to the gallery, or local storms in a 
 tea-cup. And the arguments in favour of such 
 an aspiration gain fresh force when it is re- 
 membered that perhaps the alternative is a 
 State Service of Schoolmasters. This alter- 
 native has found favour with a few Assistant 
 Masters, but has been rejected in every other 
 quarter. It is hoped by some that the status 
 of a Civil Servant may bring with it better 
 emoluments. There is no security for this, 
 and our prospective official brothers, the post- 
 men, could tell us that when a body of people 
 become servants of the State the community 
 at large becomes their enemy whenever im- 
 proved salaries, for which the community at 
 large must pay, are demanded. And we must 
 in turn make many sacrifices. A Civil Servant 
 with the blind regard for routine which is the 
 condition of his efficiency, with his inability to 
 have opinions of his own on official matters, 
 
 * This, I fear, is not practicable at present, but what a relief 
 it would be to be rid of the present system of cabal and intrigue, 
 which results from entrusting, perhaps, the most important of 
 all duties to laymen, who do not know probably the difference 
 between an Oxford B.A. and an A.C.P., or between a dactyl 
 and a quadratic equation. 
 
 8l F
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 or on still wider matters, with his steady auto- 
 matic progress through his office, a progress 
 which, except in cases of flagrant incompetence 
 or neglect of duty, depends merely upon his 
 power of surviving his colleagues, is less than 
 a man. It is to be hoped that even the 
 seductive prospect of more liberal pay will not 
 ensnare many into choosing this death in life, 
 instead of the freer and more fruitful develop- 
 ment which is now open to them. 
 
 In what, then, can we trust? In ourselves. 
 " II faut cultiver son jardin." I have no 
 panacea to prescribe. But it is time to have 
 done with waiting upon politicians and depart- 
 ments. It is time to see what the individual 
 can do for the elevation of our profession, 
 and surely nearly all the good work that we 
 can hope to do depends upon individual effort. 
 Too long has hope flattered only to deceive. 
 Too lone have reverend si^niors caressed with 
 all their blandishments an obdurate Board. 
 They have stood upon their hind-legs, they 
 have jumped most obligingly through hoops, 
 they have sometimes barked and sometimes 
 whined — but never a lump of sugar ! The 
 bunch of carrots is always just before our 
 noses, and — let us for once, like the youthful 
 Pindar, sow our metaphors with a sack — it is 
 
 82
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 always jam yesterday and jam to-morrow, but 
 never jam to-day. The Board has put us 
 through all our tricks. Let us cease our antics, 
 and learn to grin and bear it. Each man can 
 make his valiant efforts to raise us out of the 
 slough in which we are so grievously bemired. 
 Let us trust to others for nothing, to ourselves 
 for everything. Let us withstand manfully all 
 encroachments upon our position, be the assail- 
 ants who they may. Our own agellus may be 
 indeed a little plot, but we can ear and harrow 
 it diligently, and in time by stoutly labouring 
 we may gain a crop of thirty, sixty, or even 
 an hundredfold. 
 
 But before we bid adieu to the Registration 
 Council, let us take our dark lanterns and climb 
 on a tour of inspection into this bed of Ware 
 in which so vast an assemblage seeks so fitful 
 a repose. Mark that recumbent form poised so 
 uneasily on the bed-frame's edge. Avoid him, 
 for he hears you not. He is a teacher of the 
 Deaf, who gained an entrance only at the 
 eleventh hour. Behold beyond him a musician, 
 a Professor of the Royal Academy, his head 
 pillowed uneasily on the sturdy form of an 
 instructor in Manual Training. Ah ! Trinculo' 
 truly there never was a stranger bed-fellow. 
 Do you mark that band of seven whose features 
 
 83
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 even in slumber preserve their native trucu- 
 lence ? They still have their boots on, and 
 with their constant muttering, " No blankets," 
 "No privilege," "No fees in Secondary Schools," 
 are much disturbing their neighbours from the 
 Universities, a Vice-Chancellor and the Head 
 of a College. After life's fitful fever the 
 Headmasters' Conference sleeps well, but he 
 will need all those bolsters with which he has 
 so thoughtfully provided himself to ward off 
 the avalanche-like descent of the Shorthand 
 Teacher, who is trembling down upon him from 
 a higher altitude at the rate of two hundred 
 words a minute. The bed-tester resounds 
 with the stertorous breathing of the Ling 
 Association, who appears every moment to be 
 on the point of choking. Almost the only 
 peaceful spectacle presented to our view is 
 the placid countenance of a Teacher of the 
 Blind, who seems even in his slumbers to 
 rejoice that he is recognised at last. The 
 ladies have partitioned off for themselves one 
 portion of the vast structure, and are at present 
 well content. But there are flashes of summer 
 lightning, and the suffrage tricolour is already 
 hoisted. There are signs, too, that they will 
 present an ultimatum demanding the surrender 
 of all the blankets, and the provision of fresh 
 
 84
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 pillow-cases, and a proper supply of eiderdown 
 quilts. The rival Associations of the Head- 
 masters and the Assistant Masters have evidently- 
 been pillow-fighting, and silence is here secured 
 by the fact that the Headmaster, whose pockets 
 are being rifled by his companion, is almost 
 strangled. But the hour grows late ; the 
 sleepers turn uneasily. Let us withdraw 
 warily without lament or serenade, without 
 apostrophe or questioning. Requiescant in 
 pace ! 
 
 ^5
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 "UNTIL PHILOSOPHERS BECOME KINGS" 
 —THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 I HAVE been reading once again the pages of that 
 divinest and most perverse, most inspiring and 
 most provoking, loftiest, and narrowest, most 
 beautiful and most bio^oted of all books, the "Re- 
 public." One must criticise Plato, that supreme 
 genius and desolating name, on bended knees, 
 but yet the words of criticism must be spoken. 
 Those who dream dreams or see visions are oft- 
 times gey ill to deal with, and no man would 
 choose a prophet as his next-door neighbour. So 
 Plato, in his highest moments, when his singing 
 robes are on, godlike, and seemingly transfigured 
 into something superhuman, can be the most 
 gloriously wrong-headed and wilful of all great 
 writers with but one exception.^ 'Tis but one 
 step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and how 
 often does our demi-god take it. And yet the 
 " Republic," one of the world's great seminal 
 books, that mighty symphony in a minor key, 
 
 ^ Ruskin. 
 
 86
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 yet ending on a note of serenity, has influenced 
 throughout the ages all men who have dreamt 
 of a happier society and a nobler common- 
 wealth, and all our glimpses of a better land 
 have suffered refraction through the prism of 
 the " Republic." 
 
 The great one lived in an age somewhat 
 resemblingr ours. It was the ag'e of a o;ood- 
 natured, somewhat flabby democracy,^ which 
 fleeced the "idle rich" to help the deserving 
 poor, which a little later declined to let its 
 flesh creep at Demosthenes' denunciation of 
 Macedonia, of a people inclined to put off 
 decisions, to believe that every politician had 
 his price, to abuse its ministers if things went 
 wrong, to take a mild enjoyment in the 
 squabbles of " Ins " and " Outs " when things 
 went swimmingly. Every man was an amateur 
 of politics — here perhaps there is a difference — 
 many men aided by the system of selection, the 
 lot, had held some minor public office, all had 
 frequently attended meetings of the ecclesia, 
 and many had acted as dicasts, judge and 
 juror in one. The ordinary man — even the 
 ordinary Athenian — is not intellectually a 
 marvellous spectacle. Plato, surveying from 
 
 ^ Epithets which would certainly have applied to us before 
 the outbreak of the present war. 
 
 ^7
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 his exalted throne a state in which the ordi- 
 nary man was everybody, and the thinker 
 and statesman a mere cipher, embittered per- 
 haps by lack of recognition of his greatness, 
 with all the milk of human kindness soured 
 within him through the self-sought doom of 
 his master Socrates, took some slight consola- 
 tion for his present misfortunes by bodying 
 forth an imaginary state in which the philo- 
 sopher was all in all. 
 
 It is a natural dressing for a grievous wound. 
 The life of men endowed with the painful- 
 glorious gift of the Platonic temperament is 
 an enacted tragedy. They fret and chafe 
 their passionate spirits at trifling obstacles, 
 they batter their heads upon the adamantine 
 portals of selfishness and that stupidity 'gainst 
 which the very gods must fight in vain, like 
 Ruskin who, nobly ^ and flamingly a champion 
 of right at all costs, possessor of the same 
 enthralling eloquence, and at length accepted 
 as a prophet by the most advanced thinkers, 
 is surely Plato's nearest resemblar in modern 
 times. They break their hearts and over- 
 tax their intellects as they agonise over the 
 
 ' Ruskin is exactly what Plato would have called an fpao-TTjj 
 of the true and beautiful, one who makes the true and the 
 beautiful the object of his passionate admiration. 
 
 88
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 heartlessness and indifference of times that 
 are out of joint. Like Cassandra they have 
 the gift of prophetic insight, like Cassandra, 
 too, they never win belief. But their mind 
 to them a kingdom is, and within its province 
 they are supreme. They hurl themselves in 
 Balaclava charges against the bastions and 
 redoubts of prejudice ; Don Quixote leads on 
 his squadrons with such ardour and devotion 
 that even his foemen scarce forbear to cheer. 
 It is magnificent, and it is, perhaps, triumphant 
 war. But the umpires can never adjudicate 
 till a century or two has passed, and some- 
 times need aeons rather than centuries, for 
 the human mind works slowly, and if the 
 processes of geology need their million years, 
 the intellect too needs its thousand. Yet 
 wisdom in the end is justified of its works, 
 and the most tremendous line of Lucan some- 
 times gains a fresh exemplification : 
 
 "Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni."^ 
 
 Thus does the philosopher exact his full 
 revenge from men. He sets them, all visible 
 to the lawgiver, in a crystal palace wondrous 
 as the sunny dome, the caves of ice that Kubla 
 
 ^ The conquering cause pleased the gods, the conquered 
 — Cato ; or shall we say Plato ? 
 
 89
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Khan decreed. It is " a miracle of rare device," 
 a realm of unearthly atmosphere and strange 
 beauty to which he condemns us, " a garden 
 bright with sinuous rills," worthy of a Poussin's 
 brush, a Paradise with glorious avenues, exqui- 
 site vistas, and waving glades, but at its gate 
 there stands an anorel with a flaming sword — 
 to keep men in. 
 
 And yet the fault may lie rather with man- 
 kind, so prone to lag behind its pioneers and 
 leaders, who press on with such eagerness to 
 the goal, which ever seems so close at hand. 
 It is not a commonwealth of mean conception 
 or of ignoble promise which we are bidden 
 enter. Life, not drab, indeed, but monoton- 
 ously brilliant, shall cease to " stain the white 
 radiance of eternity," and our hierophant, 
 "clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful," 
 recites to us a passionate strain to Orphic 
 music chanted. 
 
 The " Republic " is the most modern of all 
 books, and thrills with the principle of perpetual 
 youth. Mankind is a slow pupil in the things of 
 the spirit, but at length an age has come which 
 can appreciate the wisdom of Plato, and the 
 " Republic " has become the dernier cri of the 
 politician and the sociologist. It is the search 
 for justice, or rather righteousness, in the 
 
 90
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 individual which leads Plato to seek for right- 
 eousness writ large in the State. That right- 
 eousness, such is the infirmity of the race of 
 men, can only be secured by putting all men 
 under the strictest discipline, by the establish- 
 ment of a rigorous and comprehensive caste sys- 
 tem, by the closest supervision of the members 
 of the commonwealth even in matters usually 
 considered indifferent, by a more than Papal 
 inquisition into their thoughts, by a rigid 
 censorship of all poetry and literature, by com- 
 munity of property, by modern eugenics, by 
 myth and falsehood. All the lawgiver's scheme 
 is illustrated by a wealth of examples from the 
 history of the actual world and its development 
 — a violent contrast — by a splendour of imagi- 
 nation, a grandeur of eloquence, and a glorious 
 defiance of the spiritually weak and the creep- 
 ing matter-of-fact which has no parallel. 
 
 Such is the Apocalypse of Plato, and as 
 there sweeps down upon us the full tide of 
 that eloquence which is so un-Attic in its 
 lack of measure, in its disregard of those canons 
 of austere simplicity and economy which Greek 
 Rhetoric imposed on its practitioners, so un- 
 Attic in its frequent sublimity/ the real and 
 
 ^ Livingstone, " The Greek Genius " (pp. 183-203), enumerates 
 the points as to which Plato may be considered un-Hellenic. 
 
 91
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 the ideal seem merged in one, and we behold 
 the New Jerusalem coming down from the 
 heavens in all her bridal glory. But the spell 
 is broken, and the vision passes as the evangel 
 is expounded by less potent preachers. And 
 when we come to consider the realm of the 
 philosopher-king in all its complex relation- 
 ships, chilling doubt afflicts us, and we wonder 
 whether we are not trying to do Life's sum too 
 quickly, whether our short method gives a real 
 solution. 
 
 And how bridge the gulf between the chaos 
 of actuality and the cosmos of system? It is 
 the Tvpavi/og who must do it. And so, despite 
 disastrous experiences with the tyrant of real 
 life,^ who treated him far worse than his easily 
 tolerant fellow-citizens, he became his own 
 Demiurgus and called a world of the ideal 
 into existence to redress the balance of the 
 actual, and whether he still cherished the for- 
 lorn hope of philosophic tyranny, or whether 
 he abandoned it in despair, he continued to 
 frame constitutions, of which the tyrant philo- 
 sopher was the basic hypothesis. 
 
 A world in which there are no mistakes and 
 no waste, a gigantic Cosmos of system in which 
 all proceeds ruthlessly by a fatalistic precision 
 
 * Dionysius of Syracuse sold him as a slave. 
 92
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 to its appointed end — a world in which there 
 is no exuberance, for that is prodigal ; no 
 idleness, for that is criminal ; no controversy, 
 for that is disintegrating ; no passion, for love 
 laughs at lawgivers as well as at locksmiths ; 
 no religion, for that is irrational and primitive ; 
 a world in which the physician, the official, 
 and the inspector dog every step, is a won- 
 drous glittering spectacle from without. But 
 it is brilliant, with a hard, gem-like brilliancy. 
 Life, thank Heaven, may still be an adventure 
 and not an algebraical system, mechanically 
 solved according to an established method. 
 We do not desire to be uncomfortably healthy, 
 even if we can all inspect one another, and 
 can in revenge make all our neighbours equally 
 healthy. The world has in its course wit- 
 nessed many spectacles of tyranny — the tyranny 
 of the despot, grievous to the individual, but 
 often leaving to the mass of mankind a large 
 measure of freedom ; the tyranny of a Church, 
 and the tyranny of a class. The last phase of 
 tyranny appears to be approaching, the tyranny 
 of the bureaucrat flanked by the doctor and 
 inspector, the most insidious and all-pervading 
 of tyrannies — for if a man must be confined, it 
 is but a matter of degree whether his prison 
 be a Bastille or a State — that tyranny which, 
 
 93
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 if it ever be firmly established, the human race 
 will be at length constrained to rise up and 
 smash to fragments. We are all biologists 
 nowadays, and in our theorising on politics 
 we appeal for confirmation to the animal world. 
 The sluggard and the philosopher go to the 
 ant, and the theorist not only curiously admires 
 the commonwealth of the bees and their ela- 
 borate dwelling, tier upon tier, but would 
 reduce human life itself to a still more ela- 
 borate hive. But it is not without sis^nificance 
 that prisons as well as honeycombs have 
 cells. 
 
 In the edifice of bureaucratic domination the 
 corner-stone must be the educational system. 
 " I care not who rules the people," said Fletcher 
 of Saltoun, " if I make their songs." " I care 
 not what the government be called," says 
 our modern bureaucrat, "whether Socialism, 
 Toryism, Liberalism, or Kaiserism, provided 
 that I frame the educational code." Take the 
 teacher, feed him forcibly with your opinions, 
 formulas, and cliches, compel him in turn to 
 cram his pupils to the gullet in a similar pro- 
 cess, and you will get excellent pate de foie 
 gras. Already we see the enthusiast booming 
 his own nostrum — whether it be compulsory 
 cadet training, total abstinence, Manual Work, 
 
 94
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 Civics — attempting to cozen the Board of 
 Education into forcing upon those whose busi- 
 ness it is to teach the rising generation some 
 particular point of view or some particular 
 attitude. The shame, if such it be, of a State 
 Church prescribing to all the beliefs which 
 they are to hold, and the usages which they 
 are to observe, is as nothing to the shame of 
 a State Opinion Bureau, issuing its edicts as 
 to what we must say or do, how we must com- 
 port ourselves towards various movements, 
 indoctrinating us with whatever sentiments 
 may best suit our masters, poisoning the wells 
 of controversy, debasing the moral currency, 
 for as Gibbon has told us in a celebrated 
 epigram, the ruler considers only what opinions 
 are useful.^ 
 
 Lord Acton once planned a history of 
 Liberty. It was a noble thought, a striking 
 conception — Liberty, the guiding thread that 
 might lead a man unerringly through the in- 
 extricable error of human affairs. But the 
 labour proved too great. Had the historian's 
 life been prolonged a generation, the same 
 pen might have accomplished both Liberty's 
 eulogy and its funeral oration. The task 
 
 ^ There is, alas ! no need to cite an example in the present 
 year of grace. 
 
 95
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 would have been simple of deriving from the 
 ancient bigot with his fagot and Smithfield 
 fires the modern administrator with his 
 schedules and ordinances, his minutes and 
 red tape. Our centre of gravity has indeed 
 shifted. Under Queen Bess we punished 
 non-attendance at Church, under Kinof George 
 non-attendance at School. The bigot is dead, 
 the functionary stands in his shoes. " Le 
 roi est mort, vive le roi." The mechanistic 
 theory has penetrated the realm of political 
 science also. 
 
 The administrator's view is the same view 
 as that which Plato enunciated once with such 
 stern beauty. Mankind are slaves to their 
 passions and their prejudices ; men cannot 
 understand the true good or life's purpose ; 
 we must benevolently persuade, coerce, or 
 hoax ^ them into virtue, or rather into vir- 
 tuous conduct, and the less they understand 
 of our complex system, the less will they 
 thwart or mar our aims. We must have our 
 Arguses with one hundred eyes, and as many 
 ears, for only if we are omniscient can we 
 achieve omnipotence. Our Education Office 
 
 * We may, according to Plato, tell the people, not what is 
 true, but what is good for them to believe, as Mr. Livingstone 
 points out. 
 
 96
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 will not produce great citizens, but it shall 
 turn out thousands from one cast with extra- 
 ordinary precision, and it shall be a wondrous 
 calculating: machine with a marvellous com- 
 mand of statistics. 
 
 " Education and the Board of Education 
 are two very different things. Education 
 keeps her banking account" — which is piti- 
 ably small — " at Whitehall, but lives in a 
 region where the mind of the teacher meets 
 the mind of the scholar." So Sir Lewis 
 Selby-Bigge, the Permanent Secretary to the 
 Board of Education, to the Assistant Masters ! 
 Truth will out, even in an after-dinner speech. 
 Unhappily though the Board cannot pene- 
 trate into that region where teacher meets 
 scholar, it can put many obstacles in the way 
 of such meeting, and can prescribe the re- 
 gulations according to which the meeting 
 may take place. Mr. E. G. Holmes, a former 
 Inspector, and thus an accessory to the crime, 
 has lately turned King's evidence, and we 
 now know better what a pernicious influence 
 the Board has exercised upon Elementary 
 Education during the last thirty years and 
 more. And the methods of any body of 
 Government servants cannot in their essence 
 differ in dealing with different divisions of 
 
 97 G
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 the same thing. Testimony to the weak 
 points of the inspectorial system, as it is 
 carried out in Secondary Schools, is borne by 
 Messrs. Norwood and Hope. Inspectors, they 
 declare, are only equal, if not inferior, in in- 
 tellectual qualifications to those whom they 
 inspect. It is felt that appointments as In- 
 spectors are too often gained by the exercise 
 of private influence, and after a short term 
 of service, or no service at all, in a Secondary 
 School. The Board needs to be decentralised. 
 It should approve a scheme in broad outline 
 of the curriculum ; it should give room for 
 experiment ; it should leave the Headmaster 
 and his staff alone ; it should not require an 
 annual restatement of the School Time-tables 
 in every detail, nor that every change must 
 be approved, and every special time-table of 
 individual boys be sent up. Inspectors should 
 be experts, not men who have learnt to pull 
 wires, who have made a diplomatic marriage, 
 have proved their tact by their dullness, and 
 thus won their appointments. There should 
 be no intrigue or party spirit at the Board 
 of Education.^ 
 
 Many great men have borne testimony to 
 the undesirability of a system of State inter- 
 
 ^ From Norwood and Hope. 
 
 98
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 ference with higher education, and have dwelt 
 upon the disastrous consequences of " the dead 
 hand of outside power" being thrust "into the 
 heart-strings of a living work."^ The Bryce 
 Commission of 1894 declared in its report that 
 Education is a thing too intimately concerned 
 with individual preference and private life for 
 it to be desirable to throw the whole of it under 
 Government control. Westcott asserted that 
 "any regulation which will impair the freedom 
 and individuality of the teacher will just so far 
 prove destructive of that force which has been 
 hitherto most effective in forming English char- 
 acter." Huxley once said with regard to inter- 
 mediate education,^ " I have never favoured 
 the notion of State intervention in this direc- 
 tion," and Mill declares that "a general State 
 education is a mere contrivance for moulding 
 people to be exactly like one another ; in 
 proportion as it is efficient and successful it 
 establishes a despotism over the mind, lead- 
 ing by natural tendency to one over the 
 body." 
 
 What is the Board of Education ? Passing 
 by without further comment the fact that it is 
 
 ^ Thring. 
 
 ^ Quotations from a letter of Dr. Sibly, Journal of Edu- 
 cation^ June 191 1. 
 
 99
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 a mysterious phrase which denotes sometimes 
 its President, sometimes its Permanent Secre- 
 tary, sometimes a Second Division Clerk, and 
 sometimes an office boy, we arrive at the con- 
 clusion that it is perhaps first and foremost a 
 means of acquiring statistics, and to satisfy its 
 thirst for information numerous forms must be 
 filled up at different times during the year. If 
 these forms are not completed with absolute 
 precision in accordance with the Board's 
 desires, further information entailinof further 
 correspondence is sought. As captiousness 
 is a quality well developed amongst the clerks 
 •of the Education Office, further correspondence 
 often does arise. All this is very vexatious, 
 especially as no financial compensation is given 
 for the immense amount of secretarial work 
 which is involved, especially in large schools, 
 in the compilation of the information required. 
 This information is of a varied kind, and 
 ranges from such matters as the exact descrip- 
 tion of the calling of the father of a boy now at 
 school, the aforesaid father having died perhaps 
 ten years previously, to a full list of the text- 
 books now in use, or an exact account of the 
 way in which some Sixth Form specialist spends 
 every moment of the School time allotted to 
 his private preparation, or a full history of the 
 
 lOO
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 academical and professional career of some 
 temporary master who has spent a fortnight 
 in the School. The Board is, in short, a 
 curious impertinent, a Torquemada, a grand 
 Inquisitionist, which considers no scrap of 
 information as too paltry or too trifling. 
 
 It is next the supreme disposer in all matters 
 of curriculum. Full particulars of the time- 
 table of work of every master and of every boy 
 must be sent up yearly in October, and if the 
 amount of time allotted to the various subjects 
 seems improper, or if the curriculum does not 
 hit the fancy of the Board (Examiner, Second 
 Division Clerk, or what-not), the grant is with- 
 held. No deviation may be made from the 
 time-table without notice being given. More- 
 over, the Board issues a list of regulations with 
 which compliance must be made under the 
 same penalties. 
 
 All communications with the Board must be 
 made through a Correspondent ; the Head- 
 master is not recognised, and if he, through 
 forgetfulness or otherwise, communicates 
 directly with the Board, the reply goes to 
 the Correspondent, and there is further delay. 
 The Headmaster conducts the School, and 
 the Correspondent, at the end of the year, 
 signs a declaration that the School has been 
 
 lOI
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 carried on in accordance with the Board's 
 regulations. It is a humorous situation, and 
 reminds one of the editor of the German 
 SociaHst paper, whose chief or sole duty is to 
 go to prison for lese majeste, if necessary. 
 
 The Board also claims to be an exponent of 
 educational theory, and issues from time to 
 time encyclicals containing full recipes for the 
 instruction of the various subjects of the curri- 
 culum. These egregious productions are from 
 the pen of the Honourable W. N. Bruce, a son 
 of Lord Aberdare, who in his youthful days 
 obtained a Third Class in Moderations, but 
 was more distinguished as a Quarter-Miler. 
 In literary matters he does not make the pace 
 a violent one, and though he has the vanity 
 common to the fraternity, is probably a charm- 
 ing man in private life. At a recent dinner of 
 the Headmasters' Association, he favoured the 
 Headmasters with an account of the circum- 
 stances of the birth and later history of these 
 children of his imagination, and we gathered that 
 these twopenny ^ treatises on English, Manual 
 Training, &c., have had a wider circulation 
 than he had either desired or deserved. But 
 that perseverance which we associate with the 
 name of Bruce must now be nearly exhausted, 
 
 * 2^d. post free. 
 I02
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 the last hurdle must soon be taken, and Mr. 
 Bruce must seek fresh worlds to conquer. 
 Possibly he may discover some day that his 
 " magnum opus " in so many twopenny parts 
 is based on a delusion, the delusion that there 
 is one way, and one way alone, of teaching a 
 subject ; that the exponent of method gener- 
 ally enunciates either platitudes or formulas ; 
 that if the pupil has little to do with rule or 
 rote, still less has the teacher ; that the only 
 answer to the question, what is the best method, 
 is solvitur docendo, an answer which admits of 
 manifold interpretation ; that the ex cathedra 
 style is least of all suitable for discussions on 
 the art of teaching ; that even the best of all 
 methods may be unintelligently grasped and 
 slavishly followed ; and that God fulfils Himself 
 in many ways lest one good custom should 
 corrupt the world. 
 
 As the Board is an exponent of educational 
 theory, it naturally regards itself as an arbiter 
 of efficiency, and a list of schools recognised 
 by the Board as efficient is published annu- 
 ally. One looks in vain for the names of 
 some of England's greatest schools, and it is 
 a poor compensation to find that the list con- 
 tains the names of many new or struggling 
 seminaries upon which no person, however 
 
 103
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 charitably minded, could bestow the epithet 
 "efficient," and to which no person who knows 
 what constitutes a good education — not even 
 an Inspector — could ever send a son of his. 
 Thus we have this farcical situation. Not all 
 efficient Schools are on the Board's list ; some 
 inefficient Schools are. Many highly efficient 
 Schools are not on the Board's list, and the 
 Board would run the risk of incurring heavy 
 damages for libel if it branded as inefficient 
 Schools which have not submitted to the 
 sacred rite of inspection. Those who, like 
 Mr. Sadler, wish to see the State most inti- 
 mately concerned with Secondary 'Education 
 are forced to admit that, even with a national 
 system of education, it would be desirable 
 that there should exist some avowedly anti- 
 national schools which should be untrammelled 
 by State restrictions, so long as their drain- 
 age was satisfactory and their teachers well 
 qualified. 
 
 Yet at present the chains which bind us are 
 mainly of our own forging. No law enacts 
 that any or every school must be subjected 
 to the Board of Education and its domiciliary 
 visits, and in our school schemes the Board 
 merely appears as an authority armed with 
 certain judicial powers which may be exer- 
 
 104
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 cised upon appeal.^ The connecting link — 
 and a thin link it often is — is the cash nexus. 
 Never has there been a greater illusion. 
 Many a Board of Governors may have sur- 
 rendered itself to the dominion of Whitehall 
 in the hope of financial compensations. But 
 for every pound that the Board gives it de- 
 mands in the end two, three, or more. The 
 master-mind who devised the present system 
 of grants showed consummate skill in making 
 a little appear a lot. Such skill deserves re- 
 spectful recognition, and should be transferred 
 from the Education Office to the Treasury. 
 The system is based upon the theory that 
 the boy passes at the age of twelve from 
 the Primary to the Secondary School, and at 
 the age of eighteen, if he has not previously 
 succumbed to the temptation to " start life," 
 passes to the University. Theory does not 
 correspond with fact. Boys who are to have 
 a Secondary School Education should, it is 
 now generally recognised, in all cases enter 
 before the age of twelve, and a large number 
 of Schools of high efficiency and long-cherished 
 traditions admit boys in their Junior Depart- 
 
 ^ Only if provisions of the scheme are violated. The Board 
 exercises this jurisdiction merely as a successor to the Charity 
 Commissioners.
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 ments at the age of eight, or even earlier. 
 All these boys are thus, from the financial 
 point of view, a dead-weight, as the School 
 fee does not pay for the cost of their tuition, 
 and there is no Government grant. Yet all 
 who have to deal with these matters will 
 agree that a boy's loyalty to a School with 
 which he is connected for a period of many 
 years must be greater, his esprit de corps 
 higher, and his progress more rapid than that 
 of a boy who spends three years at a School 
 to be "finished," and who, like Charles Lamb, 
 atones for coming late by going early. How- 
 ever, a boy who is under the magic age of 
 twelve on July 31, i.e. six weeks at least 
 before the School year actually begins, even 
 if he lacks that age by a single day, can earn 
 no grant for another twelve months. Striking 
 an average, we may compute that a boy will 
 not begin to earn a grant, which at the most 
 is only £^ per annum, until he is twelve and 
 a half years of age. Thus if a School has, 
 as it should have, its complement of Juniors, 
 and also its Sixth Form boys who are pro- 
 ceeding at nineteen to the Universities, the 
 average grant per boy will work out at merely 
 £2> per head. Against this we must set the 
 time spent, or wasted, in compiling returns, 
 
 106
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 the money expended perforce in providing 
 new equipment — and a Full Inspection will 
 often result, e.g.^ in a requisition for new Science 
 Buildings at a cost of ;^2000, a raising of the 
 staff's salaries,^ £200, sundry other improve- 
 ments, ;^ioo — the necessity of admitting a 
 large number of boys from Elementary Schools 
 for nothing, and of submitting the School to 
 some more or less direct form of municipal 
 control, for which submission a large sum 
 might reasonably be claimed as moral and 
 intellectual damage. Our birthright has been 
 sold for a gallon or two of cabbage water. 
 
 Eulogies of the beneficent results of inspec- 
 tion sometimes appear in the educational jour- 
 nals. Let us take the most elaborate of all 
 inspections, the full inspection, which comes 
 every three or four years, and consider what it 
 amounts to. Jaded inspectors who have rushed 
 from the four ends of England swoop down 
 upon a School, interview flustered Masters, 
 and see excited Forms at work for a few hours. 
 Everyone is in a state of suppressed agitation, 
 and the School is in anything but a normal 
 
 ^ That object, of course, is entirely laudable, but the Board 
 should show a more practical interest by giving grants for 
 this specific purpose. The reader should note the dispro- 
 portion between the expenditure on improved buildings and 
 improved salaries., 
 
 107
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 condition. Some insight into the methods of 
 the School may undoubtedly be gained, and 
 some conception both of the general lines upon 
 which the School is working, and even of the 
 progress which it is making towards its ideals ; 
 but the true spirit of a School, if it be fortunate 
 enough to have an ethos of its own, escapes the 
 hurried glance. Few men teach before visitors 
 as they would in their absence, and it is quite 
 impossible to discover whether the teacher is a 
 moderate or a good disciplinarian, whether he 
 works his Forms hard week in and week out, 
 and whether he has that mysterious quality, 
 " drive." To test the last two points a written 
 examination is required, a thing which all 
 good Inspectors disdain. 
 
 But when we pass to methods there is no 
 arguing as to tastes. No two men can agree, 
 and certainly no two Inspectors. What is one 
 hierarch's meat is another's poison. Teachers 
 who are unwise enough to take outside sugges- 
 tions too seriously to heart may find at the 
 next shuffle of the Whitehall pack of cards 
 that what was once blessed is now banned, that 
 they must revise all their methods and start 
 anew, for as some one has said, " Nothing is 
 so dangerous as being too modern ; one is 
 apt to become old-fashioned quite suddenly." 
 
 1 08
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 The adoption of some methods " dates " one 
 fearfully. Apparently there is no universally 
 recognised body of doctrine enshrined in the 
 official archives, for though some circulars 
 read like the effusions of a milk-and-water 
 Athanasius, and dimly hint at weeping and 
 gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness of 
 damnation, it would seem that not all Inspec- 
 tors are conversant with the chief hierarch's 
 circulars, perhaps the wiser they. And so 
 what one urges, another may dissuade, and 
 those who are not too precipitate in change 
 may find their own cherished method, which 
 was but now demod4 the dernier cri again ; 
 for though official mills grind exceeding small, 
 they assuredly grind exceeding slow, and there 
 are pigeon-holes in Headmasters' studies and 
 Governors' offices as well as at Whitehall. 
 
 And then, after the inspectorial orgy has 
 ended, there are long conferences. Hundreds 
 of suggestions are made, unhappy Masters get 
 Inspection headaches and indigestions, Govern- 
 ing Bodies are interviewed and left in a state 
 of high bewilderment, comprehending nothing, 
 except that once again the purse-strings must 
 be loosed. After three or four months' interval 
 — there is no indecent haste — a printed report 
 comes down from London, its recommenda- 
 
 109
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 tions are discussed, and if much money is 
 involved in carrying the recommendations out, 
 the document is probably soon consigned to 
 the safe or the archive chest. All men breathe 
 more freely, some slumber peacefully for an- 
 other four years. 
 
 We have reached an epoch in the history 
 of the cult of the fetish especially interesting to 
 the anthropologist. The fetish of this enlight- 
 ened generation is the printed page. Printing 
 is indeed a marvellous art, an art more mar- 
 vellous than we usually recognise, but not 
 every printed thing deserves the awesome 
 reverence, the servile genuflexions with which, 
 in common with the Papuan or the Patagonian, 
 we adore it. The Governmental paper is a 
 woeful puzzle, expressed deliberately in lan- 
 guage not to be understanded of the vulgar. 
 One word must never be used when six will 
 suffice ; those who seek enlightenment from 
 such documents must merely be bewildered 
 and confounded, such are the general prin- 
 ciples on which the composers proceed. The 
 unhappy workman who frantically strives to 
 understand some clause of the Insurance Bill, 
 the Elementary teacher who attempts to grasp 
 the intent of some article in his code, the 
 professional man who endeavours to discover 
 
 no
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 his exact liability for Income-Tax/ which with 
 modern methods of preparing Budgets may 
 vary from week to week, are all victims of 
 the jargon fetish and its abracadabras. When 
 one rises from wrestling, whether with a Board 
 of Education's regulations, or with the rules 
 of a Railway Company, which also receive an 
 official imprimatur, or with some other depart- 
 mental memoranda or provisions, all framed 
 upon the principle, " Heads, I win ; Tails, you 
 lose," one's natural impulse is to go straight- 
 way and violate each one of this chain of 
 petty and vexatious ordinances, even though 
 individually the regulations may be unexcep- 
 tionable, or at anyrate based on some unex- 
 ceptionable theory. Thou shalt and Thou 
 shalt not hedge us in on every side. It is 
 an object lesson in the latest developments of 
 Democracy, as trust in the people, this seine 
 whose meshes are so elastic that it can im- 
 prison shrimp and crab-fish as well as cod 
 and sturgeon. Our souls are in the snare of 
 the fowler, and none will break it for us. But 
 as Inspectors, who blurt out the truth occa- 
 sionally, tell us, originality is not required in 
 our profession. 
 
 ^ The Secondary teacher — if his average income is ^i68 
 per annum, as we are told — is not troubled much by this anxiety. 
 
 Ill
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Why is it, then, that Whitehall is a beacon 
 light in the darkness to so many educationists, 
 and that Mr. Norwood,^ whom fortune seemed 
 to have doomed to an official existence, regards 
 the State as " the only guide out of the wilder- 
 ness," and looks to it to remove all obstacles 
 to its purposes, to standardise all Schools, and 
 to coerce the Universities into obedience to 
 its behests? It is in Mr. Norwood's case the 
 optimism of the idealist, who exclaims with 
 Archimedes, " Give me a lever of sufficient 
 strength and I will lift the world," and who 
 does not stop to consider whether he can con- 
 trol the tremendous forces which he has set 
 in motion. In other cases it is that politeness 
 and desire to prophesy smooth things which 
 characterises us when in session, and in other 
 cases it is the astuteness of the educational 
 monomaniac, who sees in the Board his only 
 hope of thrusting his nostrum upon the edu- 
 cational world. He must needs beslaver the 
 Board with fulsomest flattery ; he must always 
 in effect be saying, "George, be a king." 
 
 The birth of a new method is an interesting 
 
 ' The books of reference reveal the interesting fact that 
 Mr. Norwood, who achieved the high distinction of first place 
 on the list in the Home Service Competition, was a clerk in 
 the Admiralty for a year before he entered the profession 
 which he so much adorjis. 
 
 112
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 study in genetics. Some person, generally 
 not a teacher, or not a successful teacher, is 
 possessed with the idea that he has discovered 
 somethinpf which will revolutionise the world. 
 All the great discoveries in education have 
 been made many times over, but no matter. 
 He reads a paper at some meeting, which is 
 received with much politeness, but scarcely 
 seriously discussed. The journals add their 
 compliments, and the method is fairly launched. 
 Some enterprising publisher, who is always 
 issuing books which no teacher wants — and 
 apparently selling some — brings out a series, 
 or constructs apparatus based on the method, 
 and there are flattering reviews. A friend, or 
 friends, of the new prophet start a correspon- 
 dence in various papers explaining the benefits 
 of the new method. The log-rolling process 
 continues, and Inspectors begin to hint that 
 the new method might be tried. The sugges- 
 tion is adopted, generally by those teachers 
 who have least confidence in themselves, and 
 they make frightful mistakes. In a year or two 
 it is discovered, and acknowledged " sub rosa," 
 that the method has failed hopelessly, and it 
 gives way to a more " up-to-date " successor. 
 The much-belauded Montessori system, 
 
 based upon the view that the child must find 
 
 113 H
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 out its own aptitude and then develop it at 
 its own pleasure, may, in the hands of Madame 
 Montessori herself, have been successful in 
 developing the faculties of mentally deficient 
 children of tender years. Indeed, it is doubt- 
 ful whether the education — in its vaguest 
 sense — of children in their early years should 
 be very systematic, or at any rate elaborately 
 methodical. The shades of the prison-house 
 fall around the child early enough in any case. 
 It is, however, safe to predict that the poor 
 Montessori teacher will be not merely inferior 
 to the poor Froebel teacher, but immeasurably 
 inferior. To all great teachers the rules are 
 their very obedient servants, and there is 
 method in their lack of method. But the 
 ordinary teacher cannot cast method to the 
 winds without meeting with disaster. 
 
 This method is very old.^ Goethe in 
 " Wilhelm Meister" tells us of an abbe who 
 held that education ought in every case to 
 be adapted to the inclinations: " If we con- 
 sider well, we shall find that every capability, 
 however slight, is born with us ; that there is 
 no vague general capability in men. It is our 
 ambiguous, dissipating education that makes 
 
 * Dr. Hayward points out in his book how many theories 
 are for the present out-of-date. 
 
 114
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 men uncertain : it awakens wishes when it 
 should be animating tendencies ; instead of 
 forwarding our real capacities, it turns our 
 efforts towards objects which are frequently 
 discordant with the mind which aims at them." 
 To this "whim" a family of four were sub- 
 jected. In the case of two, Lothario and 
 Natalia, the results were satisfactory ; but as 
 for Friedrich, the countess, who had herself 
 been trained according to these paradoxes, 
 fears that he will fall a victim to this " experi- 
 ment in pedagogy." That boys and girls of 
 more advanced years will ever fall victims also 
 is very improbable. The counter-influences 
 are too strong. " No Dogma, no Dean," 
 Disraeli once told Dean Stanley. ** No re- 
 pression of the individual, no time-table, no 
 curriculum, no Board of Education," is an 
 unanswerable chain of logic. 
 
 To speak more generally, the new method 
 is too often the child of complaisance, credu- 
 lity, and conceit, and nothing in that case can 
 save it permanently. No new method has no 
 intermixture of good. All contain some truth 
 seen out of focus. What there is of good in 
 the ** new " method will survive and endure, 
 but how often, alas ! in the world of ideals 
 Atlantis proves a mere Laputa. 
 
 115
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 But our own Laputans have lost their flap- 
 pers, and it will be hard to recall them to 
 realities. The idea underlying all the expres- 
 sions of opinion of the Fellows of this Academy 
 is that the teacher, being ignorant of his own 
 business, must be instructed by those who are 
 expert. " Lame ducks " may be found in our 
 profession as in all professions, but it may be 
 questioned whether there is in England out- 
 side the Universities a body of men which 
 can challenge a comparison with us in point 
 of academic distinctions, and in point of cul- 
 ture combined with man-of-the-worldliness. 
 We have not attached much importance to 
 theoretic training, but being educated men we 
 naturally refer to general principles ; we cannot 
 help meditating on^our profession and its prob- 
 lems, and theorising upon the mass of par- 
 ticulars that daily come before our notice. We 
 have accumulated a number of guiding prin- 
 ciples as well as a great body of professional 
 lore, and as men of the world we have 
 attained a certain skill in applying them. We 
 are impatient, perhaps too impatient, of the 
 benevolent efforts of Good Samaritans, whose 
 professional career would terminate after a 
 single hour with a class of average high spirits 
 
 and average mischief. Tradition records that 
 
 ii6
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 one delightful discourser on education was 
 usually late for his classes, and when he 
 arrived oft slumbered. In this case not dis- 
 cipline but diligence was lacking. Of another 
 shining light of progress it is related that 
 when he was an Assistant Master a bet was 
 made and won by one of his pupils that he 
 would shave himself during "prep " undetected. 
 Of such material are great educationists made. 
 And when a Government emissary enters our 
 studies, however polished his manners — and to 
 give Whitehall its due, its representatives 
 generally satisfy the highest social standards 
 — we are apt to regard as a nuisance one 
 who through having a fragmentary acquaint- 
 ance with the circumstances of forty schools 
 is presumed to be infallible as regards any 
 one, and we are tempted to inquire, at least 
 mentally, what is our visitor's authority, and 
 who gave him that authority ? 
 
 Inspectorships are like the Order of the 
 Garter, there is no merit about them. Few 
 Inspectors have enjoyed much experience in 
 teaching of any description. One eminent 
 official once occupied the honorific post of 
 tutor to an Oriental prince. It is doubtful 
 whether such an occupation gives a man much 
 insight into the problems of English educa- 
 
 117
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 tion, and the post of bear-leader may result 
 in the leader's acquiring certain bearish quali- 
 ties. Aspirants to inspectorial status, after 
 making their election sure, usually spend 
 a year teaching. If they then obtain a 
 nomination, they may prescribe to all and 
 sundry the principles on which they must 
 act, as difficult a task as that of the curate of 
 twenty-three who instructs elderly Christians 
 in the rudiments of righteousness. Unless 
 he is too indiscriminate in his censure, the 
 Inspector may then go on criticising till his 
 pension falls due. 
 
 Yet he is, perhaps, more to be pitied than 
 to be blamed, and the critic may often feel, 
 " But for the grace of God, there go I." He 
 is condemned to the nomadicity of the Wan- 
 dering Jew, to sleep in sheets of dubious 
 dryness, to sit or talk in draughty coffee- 
 rooms — how feelingly he complains of the 
 inns of England — to pass on like the phan- 
 tom Dutchman, ever seeking the perfect 
 pedagogue and never finding him. He is 
 always imbibing educational cocktails, and 
 like his close parallel, the tea-taster, he 
 suffers from an unrelenting indigestion. He 
 lives on orts and scraps of learning. Who 
 
 can blame the jaded one if he sometimes 
 
 ii8
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 shows a preference for the bizarre and 
 freakish, if finding a teacher instructing his 
 class reclining full length on a form or 
 standing on his head, he should feel inclined 
 to describe him as highly original and stimu- 
 lating ? 
 
 One thing is obvious. Those who believe in 
 Inspectors cannot accept the present condition 
 of affairs. The chief safeguard now against 
 oppression or meddling is that the hierarchy- 
 is too small to perform thoroughly the duties 
 that its admirers would assign to it. An 
 Inspector who visits a School but once a 
 Term has a poor opportunity of detecting 
 the teacher's nefarious proceedings, or of 
 pointing out his faults. He has, one pre- 
 sumes, many reports to make, and is con- 
 stantly being called away to other areas to 
 take part in full inspections. In the case of 
 a big school it would indeed be necessary for 
 him to be quartered on the premises. He is 
 supposed to be proficient in one subject or 
 group of subjects, but must inspect in all.^ 
 This gives his dicta at times the charm of 
 novelty, as a Classical man's views on the 
 
 ^ This will not apply to full inspections, except in the case of 
 very small Schools. 
 
 119
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 methods of teaching Mathematics, or a Scien- 
 tist's views on how to teach English Litera- 
 ture are often a surprise to those who have 
 been teaching these subjects all their lives. 
 Again, if an Inspector is to be both the in- 
 tellectual and professional superior of the 
 inspected, his salary must be raised consider- 
 ably, in order that the position may be eagerly 
 sought by those who have held high rank 
 in the profession. Critics ought not always 
 to be those who have failed in their vocation, 
 but the most fulsome panegyrists of the hier- 
 archy have so far failed to observe this need 
 for Inspectors of a different stamp. And yet 
 they imagine that men like the Headmasters 
 of Rugby and St. Paul's, who would never 
 at present consent to be "promoted" to the 
 Inspectorate, will under a national system 
 meekly submit to the judgment of those who 
 have never been able to attain to any exalted 
 position as teachers. 
 
 Is there a place, then, for the Inspector in 
 our educational world ? Yes, I think. The 
 best of men are at times ensnared in the toils 
 of routine, and, worst of all, are ignorant of 
 the fact. I do not suofo-est that these men 
 should give up one routine to adopt another 
 still more elaborate routine, but an occasional 
 
 120
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 talk with an intelligent man of wide experi- 
 ence in educational problems, who can put 
 fresh points of view before a teacher and 
 force him not merely to entrench himself 
 behind the impregnable ramparts of non pos- 
 sumus, but in mere courtesy to consider other 
 aspects perhaps before disregarded, and to 
 arorue out the reasons for his own methods, 
 and the reasons for and against other people's 
 methods, should be productive of valuable 
 results. The possibility of a call from some 
 one who may note that we are indifferent 
 and careless has a bracing effect upon all of 
 us. These criticisms and suggestions — with 
 the tactful Inspector they will generally be 
 the latter — will be criticisms and suggestions, 
 not instructions, and failure to comply with 
 them should involve no financial or other 
 penalty. We live in a world where more 
 evil is wrought through ignorance and mis- 
 understanding than in malice prepense. If a 
 teacher is ignorant of what other people are 
 doinof, and of what the best teachers are 
 achieving, he will, unless he has reached the 
 age at which further change is hopeless, be 
 grateful for information and suggestions im- 
 parted in a conciliatory manner. 
 
 Matthew Arnold objects to such a system 
 
 121
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 in a passage worth quoting : ^ " Many an 
 English squire in like manner wishes for the 
 stimulant of inspection, while he is determined 
 to keep his school entirely independent. In 
 other words, he wishes to have an inspector 
 down from London occasionally, as he would 
 have a landscape-gardener or an architect, 
 to talk to him about his school, to hear his 
 advice, and to be free to dismiss him as he 
 might dismiss the landscape-gardener or the 
 architect the moment his advice becomes 
 unpalatable. He wishes to have a public 
 functionary to act as showman to his school 
 once a year. But it is not for this that the 
 State pays its servants. State supervision is 
 useless if it can be rejected the moment 
 it becomes a reality, the moment it tends 
 to enforce general reason against individual 
 caprice. The counsels of inspection to be of 
 any real worth must be in some way or other 
 authoritative." 
 
 Is Saul also among the prophets of Authori- 
 tarianism ? one asks. Is the sworn opponent 
 of dogmatic Christianity to establish a new 
 dogfma ? The Board of Education is not an 
 Athanasius contra mundum possessed alone 
 
 ^ Huxley, "Thoughts on Education from Matthew Arnold," 
 p. 36. 
 
 122
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 of the truth. There is at present, as Dr. 
 Hayward has pointed out in his criticisms 
 of the Board, no generally accepted body of 
 educational doctrine based on the investiga- 
 tions of an exact science, and men must, at 
 present at least, rely on individual reason and 
 resist a quite spurious authority. Secondly, 
 it is so often the man and not the method 
 that counts, and the great teacher can break 
 all the rules and yet achieve miracles. Think, 
 reader, how many of the striking teachers that 
 you and I, and all of us, knew in our youth, 
 would now be ranked as old fogeys. And 
 yet they made men. And, finally, if the 
 teacher is poor or bad, it is probably useless 
 for him to attempt to change his methods, and 
 he must go on as best he can. In fact, this 
 is the course in which all prudent Inspectors 
 now acquiesce. *' Quieta non movere " and 
 "Don't worry" are not heroic policies, but 
 when several futile attempts have been made 
 to effect amendments, the old hand shrugs his 
 shoulders and tries no more. 
 
 Who shall the Inspector of our sketch be .'* 
 An ex-Schoolmaster, of course, with fifteen 
 years or more experience in the class-room. 
 He will have neither the divine fervour nor 
 
 the untiring vigour of youth, neither its por- 
 
 123
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 tentous earnestness nor its delightful certainty 
 as to everything, but he will lack the frantic 
 fussiness of age, and will have acquired the 
 mellowed cynicism of middle life. He will 
 have seen too many rival theories shoot up 
 like rockets, explode in dazzling coruscations 
 and fade into blank nothingness, to allow him- 
 self to be carried away by any veering wind 
 of doctrine. He neither swears by nor at any 
 man or thing, and his favourite quotation is 
 " Que sgais-je ? " He may have lost a little of 
 his freshness and mental edge, but he is richly 
 dowered with experience ; and his farewell to 
 the class-room as an occupant, and his appear- 
 ances there as visitor, have given him an 
 intellectual stimulus which will stave off intel- 
 lectual atrophy for at least another ten years. 
 He will be well paid — for how in the present 
 stage of civilisation can he descend upon a 
 school and criticise men who are earning as 
 much or more than he ? — and he will not be 
 either overworked or perfunctory, as he must 
 be now. He will have much sympathy with 
 the new generation which has succeeded to his 
 own, and though inclined to be a " laudator 
 temporis acti," will make all allowances for 
 those who had not the sfood fortune to be 
 born when Plancus was consul. He has a 
 
 124
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 great aversion for bunkum, will not take 
 youthful earnestness au grand s^rieux, but will 
 poke fun at its high-faluting language. He 
 will play to perfection the role of armchair 
 critic, and will be the guide, counsellor, and 
 friend of those whom he criticises. His kindly 
 admonitions will be listened to with composure 
 at any rate, especially when the sufferers re- 
 member that the torturer is one of themselves, 
 and that he has made room for some rising 
 man to take his place as Head or Assistant 
 Master. 
 
 But this is an ideal picture. If we decide 
 upon a State system of education the hierarchy 
 must include the teacher, and not leave him 
 without the charmed circle. Much of what 
 Dr. Hayward says ^ in his spirited attack upon 
 the Elementary Inspector is equally true of his 
 Secondary colleague. He is the result of the 
 choice of chance, and there can be no real 
 sympathy or understanding existing between 
 him and the men of equal or greater ability but 
 of inferior status whom he essays to supervise. 
 
 " He doth bestride the world 
 Like a Colossus, and we petty men 
 Walk under his huge legs and peep about 
 To find ourselves dishonourable graves." 
 
 ^ " The Psychology of Educational Administrators." 
 
 125
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 And yet we were born free as Caesar in most 
 cases. 
 
 Messrs. Norwood and Hope believe that a 
 School runs no more risk of losing its indivi- 
 duality by being helped and guided to its 
 highest self-realisation than a boy who is sub- 
 jected to the same process. The analogy is 
 entirely false. The master is always working 
 for the time when his pupil shall have reached 
 the goal of independence of thought and judg- 
 ment, for the time when he shall act for 
 himself. The relationship between boy and 
 master and the difference in intellect and ex- 
 perience in no way correspond with any differ- 
 ence between a Headmaster and an Examiner 
 sitting in his room at Whitehall. It is possible 
 that the Examiner is not fit to black the 
 Headmaster's boots ; in any case there are 
 strong odds that the Headmaster is the peer 
 of the Examiner. The authors are too modest. 
 Dr. Hayward has pointed out in his lively 
 book that there are no master-minds at White- 
 hall, none whose names instinctively recur to 
 men as reputed authorities on any branch of 
 Educational Science. There are certainly not 
 half a dozen Norwoods at Whitehall ; but with 
 all respect to the brilliant Headmaster of 
 
 Bristol, there are, I believe, half a dozen men 
 
 126
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 of equal calibre engaged in teaching in our 
 Public and Grammar Schools. We are not 
 babes and sucklings, nor are we puppets to 
 be manipulated by a hand one hundred miles 
 away. 
 
 Again we must return to first principles, 
 tiresome as any principles at all are to most 
 men and to most readers. No compromise 
 can bridge the gulf between the two opposing 
 theories, the one that men are sheep which 
 must be shepherded — a theory leading to 
 Csesarism or philosophic despotism ; the other 
 that men are flesh and blood and apprehensive, 
 whom the statesman or the expert must per- 
 suade by sweet reasonableness — a theory 
 tending to genuine democracy, not the spurious 
 democracy of the present day. The vogue of 
 the sheep-dog conception of the State is largely 
 the damnosa hereditas of Matthew Arnold, 
 whose influence on Secondary Education, de- 
 spite many noble passing utterances, has been 
 in many ways pernicious. As Arnold said 
 with wearisome iteration, Secondary Education 
 must be organised — i.e. converted into an ela- 
 borate machine. Complexity of organisation 
 may be an urgent need in many things, but 
 Education is, above all other arts and profes- 
 sions, that which can profit least and may lose 
 
 127
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 most from machinery. No one has spoken 
 with more unerring insight than Arnold of this 
 " strange disease of modern life, with its sick 
 hurry, its divided aims, its heads o'er-taxed, its 
 palsied hearts," of men who pursue 
 
 " Our business with unslackening stride — 
 And see all sights from pole to pole 
 And glance, and nod, and bustle by 
 And never once possess our soul 
 Before we die." 
 
 Sublimely said. But while Dr. Jekyll urged 
 
 men to possess their souls — have we no souls ? 
 
 Mr. Hyde, H.M.I., from his Pisgah heights 
 
 proclaimed the glories of the coming age of 
 
 System, when the quintessence of wisdom 
 
 should descend in sheaves and circulars, and 
 
 all the lucubrations of the highly-placed official 
 
 should be credited with a verbal inspiration 
 
 which the Scriptures did not possess in the 
 
 gospel according to St. Matthew Arnold. We 
 
 are to be in future merely a well-drilled body 
 
 of educators, as obedient as Jesuits, and as 
 
 unscrupulous. We must never make speeches 
 
 to one another, and our books must be 
 
 anonymous. If we are obstinate the machine 
 
 will crush us as quickly, as heedlessly, and 
 
 as thoroughly as a flying motor-car flattens 
 
 out a chicken, not because it has any malice, 
 
 128
 
 THE NEW HIERARCHY 
 
 but because we are in the way. We must at 
 any moment stand and deliver any informa- 
 tion required, evolving what we do not know 
 from our imaeination. We must be walled in 
 on all sides by prohibitions and trussed up 
 in red tape, for Whitehall presses hard the 
 doctrine of origfinal sin. We must efface our- 
 selves, for Whitehall, which should say to the 
 good teacher, " Be yourself," to the moderate 
 teacher, " Do your best," and to the bad 
 teacher, " Go," says to all, " Be myself." 
 Some there are who cherish the fond hope 
 that we shall be able to make the best of both 
 worlds, that we shall enjoy all the advantages 
 of undisturbed tenure, ample salaries, and 
 adequate pensions (advantages in which we 
 are now luxuriating !), and yet be free as air. 
 It is a vain delusion. Our masters could not 
 grant us such freedom even if they would. 
 Not even the all-powerful bureaucrat can eat 
 his cake and have it, nor can his servants. 
 
 The spirit of a great School is not found 
 in Blue Books, nor does it reside in pigeon- 
 holes. It is the rare product of a long line 
 of devoted labourers who have handed on the 
 torch of life. It is an inspiration which no 
 State functionary can impart, and none should 
 
 seek to take away. Let those neighbours of 
 
 129 I
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 burning Ucalegon, whose houses are still 
 intact, turn upon the blaze the hose of common 
 sense with all their speed. The fine saying 
 of Professor Raleigh is as profoundly true in 
 the case of a School as in the case of a Uni- 
 versity. The State can fashion the body — 
 in the hope only that the soul may enter it. 
 
 130
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE LAMENT OF THE ASSISTANT MASTER 
 
 But I am checked in angry and impatient 
 tones by one who has long listened with ill- 
 concealed annoyance. " You have discoursed 
 of Pumps and Hierarchies, you have celebrated 
 fulsome eulogies of inspired Headmasters, 
 must I not have some niche within your 
 temple ? You have denounced the wrongs of 
 your oppressed confreres, you have lashed the 
 Shallows and the Bumbles, have you reserved 
 none of your invective for the more bitter 
 woes of the Assistant Master ? " 
 
 To my imaginary interlocutor I would thus 
 reply. I too can make the Horatian boast, 
 "militavi non sine gloria." I too, after despe- 
 rate combats with more or less of glory, have 
 left my shield a trophy for the enemy. I have 
 heard the chimes at midnight in the hot times 
 of turbulent youth ; I have uttered whirling 
 words in common rooms, that haven of the 
 hard-driven. For a few moments I will gaze 
 into the dark backward and abysm of time — 
 
 131
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 for so it seems, slight though the tale of 
 years may be — and seek to call to mind those 
 halcyon days before I was promoted to the 
 dubious distinction, enjoyed but for a few 
 months, of youngest Headmaster in England. 
 The various Schools with which I had ac- 
 quaintance as an Assistant Master blend 
 together in the memory, but an image dim, 
 yet not altogether blurred, reveals itself. 
 
 There are at least two sides to every 
 question. In those far-off days I grasped one 
 point of view with great clearness, especially 
 as I thought it occasionally ignored by those 
 in authority, but now I perceive that there 
 were many others. I envied then my Head 
 his power of instant command, that quick 
 decision to which it seemed natural that all 
 should yield instant obedience, and perhaps 
 thought it was an unfair advantage. I now 
 can recogfnise what a strong- shield of defence 
 my Head's authority was. We lived in a world 
 of School, well fenced from the complaints of 
 censorious parents, and from the criticism or 
 converse of illiterate Governors, a blessing 
 never to be sufficiently acknowledged. At 
 times we murmured about boys' shortcomings 
 or each other's foibles ; we did not denounce 
 
 Councillor X's lack of scruple or Alderman Z's 
 
 132
 
 LAMENT OF ASSISTANT MASTER 
 
 vulgarity, for we knew little of the existence of 
 these worthies, and cared less. We did not 
 read the local paper ; we did not attend muni- 
 cipal levies or bow down to municipal officials, 
 our duty was confined to teaching our pupils 
 and to keeping them in proper order. Our 
 hasty expressions, our occasional outbursts, our 
 possible errors of tact — matters which doubtless 
 gave our Head a world of trouble — were all 
 smoothed over, and the impossible feat was 
 daily achieved of calming indignant parents, 
 tonine down harsh utterances and trenchant 
 actions without severe fault-finding and without 
 diminution of our prestige. Irrational and ill- 
 balanced creature as the parent sometimes is, 
 incapable of ruling his household or of allowing 
 others to do so, he is a blunderer rather than 
 a criminal, and he was tamed into docility 
 rather than frightened into frenzy. I have 
 learnt since, good Sir, what you can never 
 learn till you too are degraded into a Head- 
 master — how much of the diplomat must needs 
 lie beneath the exterior of the despot. 
 
 I would crave your attention for a few 
 moments still longer. I diligently read my 
 "A.M. A.," that Dionysius' ear of the Head- 
 master, which, if he is a subscriber, is so 
 thoughtfully sent to him a day in advance of 
 
 ^33
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 his staff, I find as I look through the issues 
 of the last four years, as they lie before me on 
 my table, that much water has flowed beneath 
 the bridges since the days when I was a 
 member of the Council of the Assistant 
 Masters' Association. The journal aptly mini- 
 sters to a deep-seated need of mankind, the 
 need of blowing off steam occasionally. I can 
 give violent utterances their proper discount ; 
 I know that everything must not be taken au 
 pied de la lettre ; but I should be alarmed if 
 an outsider, reading some of the naive and un- 
 tutored effusions of its correspondents, imagined 
 that the mighty intellects of our profession 
 were narrowed within the limits of their Asso- 
 ciation's organ. Your aims are still perhaps 
 the same, your methods how different ! 
 
 In the first place, you feel that you are 
 desperately in need of money, and insist on 
 having it at all costs. Heaven knows that 
 there is need enough. I leave it to another to 
 cast the first stone. But there are other ways 
 of attractinof attention besides standincr on one's 
 head, and some of your own members venture 
 to hint that the salary propaganda is being 
 overdone. After all, what shall it profit a 
 Schoolmaster if he pull every wire and lose 
 his own soul ? 
 
 134
 
 LAMENT OF ASSISTANT MASTER 
 
 Then you are a Trades-Union. That need 
 not alarm you ; so are lawyers and medical 
 men. But what sort of a Trades-Union ? It 
 is right that the strong should support the 
 weak, that the " intellectual " should stand 
 shoulder to shoulder with the rank and file. 
 The " intellectuals," indeed, have never failed 
 in their duties, and have always to a large 
 extent officered and led the Assistant Masters' 
 Association. If now the Association decides 
 to adopt the methods of most Trade-Unions, 
 to exploit the able for the benefit of the in- 
 competent, to put the mediocrity on a couch of 
 down, but to fling the brilliant man on a bed of 
 Procrustes ; if the able man is not to do his best 
 lest he should put out of countenance, the idler 
 who will not, and the incompetent who cannot, 
 do any best ; if a minimum of attainments is to 
 secure a maximum of salary, then the advance 
 of the Association will be prejudicial to the 
 advance of Education. Such a policy will not 
 win the world's support, even if it be preluded 
 by perfervid eulogies of the Schoolmaster as 
 the noblest work of God. Once a School- 
 master always a Schoolmaster, and though 
 the fire of youth may wane, the eye be 
 dimmed, the natural force be so much abated 
 that competence is impossible, the School- 
 
 135
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 master must remain ** charmed, sacrosanct, in 
 spell-bound permanence," as firmly rooted as 
 a rector, and more immovable than a judge. 
 May no Headmaster be conceded this sacro- 
 sanctity. 
 
 But what of your orientation? The Head- 
 master ! voila I'ennemi ! No doubt there has 
 been some justification for this view. Some 
 Headmasters have orone about like fire-breath- 
 ing dragons, seeking whom they may slay ; 
 some have boasted to awe-struck candidates 
 for appointment that they have their Governors 
 " under their thumb." Some have regarded 
 their Assistants as employees, whose first duty 
 is a pliant docility. A Headmaster of a Public 
 School, who is now a Canon Residentiary, once 
 neglected to return his testimonials to an ap- 
 plicant for a post in his School. The Assis- 
 tant Master — he was young and untamed then 
 — wrote in barbed phrases requesting their 
 return. They were returned, and with them 
 came an angry, scolding note advising the 
 recipient to " keep a civil tongue in his head." 
 The phrase and the attitude are dying out. 
 Many Headmasters have been members of 
 your Association, and cannot for very shame 
 recant their former utterances ; few Head- 
 masters are happily enough circumstanced to 
 
 136
 
 LAMENT OF ASSISTANT MASTER 
 
 boast that their Governors are their footstool ; 
 the Headmaster of Market Bosworth Grammar 
 School has retired to a cure of souls after 
 the Battle of Bosworth Field had^ been waged 
 so fiercely for a couple of years upon the front 
 page of your magazine.^ It is you who com- 
 pile black lists, not we. There are indeed 
 occasional confessions that Governing Bodies' 
 little fingers are thicker than Headmasters' 
 loins, and the air is thick with denunciations 
 of committees which attempt to pay io| 
 months' salary for a. year's work,^ or which 
 seek in defiance of pledged words to econo- 
 mise by reductions of Assistants' salaries, or 
 of Inspectors of slight experience who suggest 
 the dismissal of seasoned Masters. But when 
 you have cut the claws and filed the teeth 
 of the monster that has so long oppressed 
 you, what then ? The King's Government 
 must still be carried on, unless you would " i' 
 the Commonwealth by contraries execute all 
 things, no name of magistrate, no sovereignty." 
 Some would put a Headmaster's power in 
 
 1 This device has been adopted from the National Union of 
 Teachers. 
 
 - The Master, who must be paid monthly for this trick to 
 succeed, is given notice which expires at the end of July, his 
 successor is engaged from the middle of September. Even the 
 stupidest of animals have a certain low cunning. 
 
 ^Z7
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 commission/ and would face cheerfully the 
 prospect of government by Masters' Meeting. 
 But whatever other virtues a Masters' Meet- 
 ing may have, it has not the gift of rapid 
 decision. Too many of us live in a world of 
 nicely-balanced probabilities, and it is an un- 
 bearable agony for a hnely-poised intellect to 
 come to a hasty conclusion. We need Alex- 
 anders to cut Gordian knots rather than vastly 
 analytic Hamlets to palter and procrastinate. 
 Others look to the State. Beware lest the 
 fairy godmother of your imagination prove a 
 malign stepmother. The State has done little 
 for you except bombard you with circulars and 
 harry you with Inspectors who can cut a throat 
 with a whispered slander in a Headmaster's 
 study. It has, it is true, produced paper 
 schemes by the dozen for providing you with 
 pensions not more lavish than those to which 
 elementary teachers are entitled. 
 
 Yes ! you may soon realise that Codlin's 
 your friend, not Short, and that there are some 
 advantages in a buffer state. After all, even 
 the most absolute of Headmasters from the 
 most selfish of motives desires his School to 
 
 ^ Professor Armstrong would have the Headmaster and his 
 Assistants turn and turn about ! Does he adopt this method 
 in his own Laboratory ? 
 
 138
 
 LAMENT OF ASSISTANT MASTER 
 
 be a success. A despot, but an intelligent 
 despot, he will get the last ounce of work out 
 of his Assistants ; but when he has a good 
 steed he will be anxious to keep him, and 
 anxious therefore for him to have a comfort- 
 able stable and a well-filled manger. 
 
 Your members may be divided into two 
 classes — those who attend its meetings, and 
 those (the majority) who do not. The divi- 
 sional meetings are not too well attended ; the 
 general meeting of January 19 14 — of an Asso- 
 ciation containing 5000 members — was attended 
 by a bare hundred ! Those who attend meet- 
 ings, laudably anxious to keep up the general 
 spirits, talk on their highest note. Nothing is 
 damaged, not even the ceiling. The School- 
 master is not a firebrand, and even those lofty 
 spirits who are transported out of themselves 
 by their own eloquence are in the performance 
 of their duties probably as humdrum as their 
 duller brethren. Those who talk of Emer- 
 gency Funds to support strikes, or to protect 
 those who are unjustly treated, or to secure 
 less well-defined aims, will certainly find, as 
 correspondents of the A.M. A. have not failed 
 to point out, that the solidarity of an Associa- 
 tion which is composed of all sorts and condi- 
 tions of men, from the plutocratic House-Master 
 
 139
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 of Eton to the ex-elementary teacher of some 
 municipal school, would be at once destroyed 
 by any reckless measures. This result would 
 be regrettable in the extreme. It is desirable 
 that somebody should be able to speak for all 
 Secondary Schoolmasters, and if this province 
 should be left unoccupied it will at once be 
 invaded by the National Union of Teachers, 
 which has long been sighing for fresh realms 
 to conquer. 
 
 The present programme of your Associa- 
 tion appears to be better salaries, adequate 
 pensions, fixity of tenure, the right of appeal 
 against dismissal, the appointment of Assist- 
 ant Masters to sit on all Governing Bodies, 
 and the abolition of the present Examination 
 system. Some of your proposals are highly 
 reasonable, some are more controversial, but 
 remember that the world at large will con- 
 sider one question and no other, the question 
 whether efficiency will be promoted by the 
 carrying out of your proposals. 
 
 It is a pity to spoil a good case by 
 over-statement. It is true that salaries are 
 higher in France and Germany, but it is dis- 
 ingenuous to ignore the fact that the startinof 
 salary in these countries is much smaller, and 
 
 that a German master requires several years, 
 
 140
 
 LAMENT OF ASSISTANT MASTER 
 
 and a course of training to boot, to attain to 
 the salary which an EngHshman can com- 
 mand forthwith. It is unfair to leave out of 
 consideration the fact that Frenchmen and 
 Germans are hedged in by a series of re- 
 strictions which find no parallel in England, 
 where our only restraints are those unwritten 
 laws to which most of us can give a cheerful 
 obedience. It is a tortuous manoeuvre to draw 
 up a model ranging from ^150 to ;^300 per 
 annum, a scale which nine-tenths of us would 
 regard as a visionary hope, and then at the 
 request of London members to evolve a scale 
 still higher. Differential treatment of any sort 
 has always been sternly rejected. The scale 
 is based on the fundamental falsity that all 
 men are equal, an axiom that is particularly 
 false in a Secondary School, where all men 
 are at least different.^ Still, the difficulties of 
 rigidly individual treatment are so great that 
 Headmasters and Governing Bodies are likely to 
 accept the scale system — rule-of-thumb though 
 it be — as the most economical of time and 
 trouble. But unless several scales, suitably 
 graded, are in existence, much injustice will 
 
 ^ The conclusions of Science are here at one with common 
 experience. See the address of the President of the British 
 Association, 1914. 
 
 141
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 be done. Ceteris paribus a Double First is 
 entitled to a much higher pecuniary recogni- 
 tion of his labours than a poll-degree man, 
 and between the passmen who do so much 
 valuable work as Form and Junior Masters 
 and the mighty intellects of Sixth Form 
 Masters and Heads of Departments, there is 
 an intermediate class of able men, often ex- 
 tremely good teachers, whose important func- 
 tion it is to keep the work of the middle 
 school up to a high standard. We are some- 
 times told that the instructor in Clay-Modelling 
 or Gymnastics is as essential a part of the 
 School as the Greek Composition Master. 
 Let those who adopt this line of argument 
 never forget the strenuous labours of the 
 Laboratory boy ceaselessly — while he is under 
 surveillance, at any rate — plying his ** swab " 
 and ever cleaning his test-tubes, or the kindly 
 offices of the dames, without whom our abodes 
 would so soon be uninhabitable, who invade 
 our class-rooms at the moment of dismissal 
 and char and scour so vigorously. Those 
 who have not yet scaled these lofty heights 
 of equalitarianism will hold that in any scien- 
 tific system of remuneration the three grades 
 above mentioned would certainly be recognised, 
 but the Assistant Masters' Association offers 
 
 142
 
 LAMENT OF ASSISTANT MASTER 
 
 no guidance as to the proper method of deal- 
 ing with abiHties and qualities of this sort. 
 They have filled in imagination the pockets of 
 the least highly qualified with untold wealth, 
 and the rest they have sent empty away. And 
 this is the more regrettable as in the nature 
 of things all men cannot be Headmasters. 
 Some do not desire this destiny (O fortunati 
 nimium !), and have prudently chopped up 
 for firewood the Field-Marshal's baton with 
 which their knapsack was once cumbered. 
 To such men adequate consolation prizes 
 should be offered, but their Association is 
 indifferent. 
 
 Moreover, candour will compel the admis- 
 sion that not all present Schoolmasters are 
 by any computation worth ;^300 per annum. 
 Indeed, could some Cromwell by a stroke of 
 the pen raise every man's salary to-morrow 
 to that figure, I do not hesitate to say that 
 the results would be calamitous. That natural 
 process by which are weeded out the indifferent 
 who find the monetary rewards too small, and 
 the incompetent, whose other troubles are too 
 weighty, would at once come to an end, and 
 with its end would also fade the prospect 
 of any speedy improvement of the world of 
 Secondary Education. Whereas, the results 
 
 143
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 of a steady, continuous, but not necessarily 
 steep rise of salaries spread over many 
 years would be unreservedly beneficent and 
 lasting. 
 
 Comparisons with other professions are 
 not so striking or so clear in the application 
 as we are sometimes told. In spite of all our 
 anxieties, our sickness rate is low, as we find 
 when we come to form a professional benefit 
 society.^ If we have less hours a week 
 actual work — arduous though the work may 
 be — two half-holidays or more a week, and 
 long vacations, we shall never convince our 
 paymasters that they ought to reward us 
 as liberally as other men of similar abilities 
 and traininof elsewhere. A government official 
 requires some compensation for the degrada- 
 tion that resides in being an official, for the 
 fact that he is now merely a highly-organised 
 machine. We have the inestimable advantage 
 of ample leisure for self-culture, and we must 
 pay the price cheerfully. We enjoin upon 
 the world that it must use its leisure more 
 nobly, that a liberal education is the key to 
 a proper use of leisure and a proper conception 
 of man's place in the universe ; we inculcate 
 
 ^ See advertisement of Secondary and University Teachers' 
 Provident Society. 
 
 144
 
 LAMENT OF ASSISTANT MASTER 
 
 by implication the need of returning to the 
 paths of simplicity, the need of substituting 
 contentment for enjoyment ; we declare that 
 merit does not always reside in a motor-car, 
 and that a eood conscience is better than all 
 Rockefeller's dollars ; we preach the evangel 
 of quiet and peace in substitution for a whirl- 
 ing round of distracting and exhausting plea- 
 sures. Rightly and truly. We must not 
 then be as the Philistines. On this new 
 journey the Schoolmaster must take the first 
 step. He must show that contentment can 
 abide with a competence, that a well-stored 
 mind is a lasting treasure. Like the x^thenian, 
 he must cherish a love of culture that has 
 no taint of effeminacy, and a love of the beauti- 
 ful based on frugality. He must be moderate 
 in his pleasures ; his wife must not be an 
 expensive luxury who gives her days to golf 
 and scandal, and her nights to bridge. For 
 as in the days of Job, wisdom still cannot be 
 gotten for gold, nor shall silver be weighed 
 for the price thereof. Milton was paid ji^io 
 for "Paradise Lost" — a small reward, making 
 all the necessary allowances. Bach profited 
 nothing, financially speaking, from many of 
 his finest compositions. We expound to our 
 pupils the weighty oracles of the Classics, 
 
 145 K
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 that a simple life is the greatest wealth/ that 
 far beyond aught else is a life of peaceful 
 contemplation. Like the parson in Chaucer, 
 we must teach but first practise it ourselves. 
 
 For unto us should have been revealed the 
 great open secret of the universe, the truth 
 so often hidden from the great ones of the 
 earth, revealed to the humble-wise and 
 prudent, that to be is better than to have, 
 the sacrifice of self better than the trampling 
 down of others, that such self-abnegation con- 
 quers in the race both first and last. Recog- 
 nition may not come to us, nor gratitude. Boys 
 are thoughtless creatures who take so much for 
 granted, official superiors are not always fully 
 appreciative. But that we have spent our- 
 selves and been spent ; have given our best 
 freely and for nothing ; have lavished our all 
 on some institution dear to us, and have re- 
 joiced to do so, finding it brick, perchance, and 
 leaving it marble ; that we have toiled strenu- 
 ously and incessantly, and have been misunder- 
 stood or even vilified for our pains; that we have 
 given our souls for our pupils ; that after all 
 our labours we are still unprofitable servants — 
 these are the untold riches which we all may win. 
 
 ^ " Divitiae grandes homines sunt vivere parce." 
 " Sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri." 
 
 146
 
 LAMENT OF ASSISTANT MASTER 
 
 Yet I agree with everything in the Salaries 
 
 Propaganda, except the reasoning. The advo- 
 
 catus diaboli has finished pleading. Can any 
 
 argument justify the grim reality that the 
 
 average salary of an Assistant Master is ^i68 
 
 per annum ? A thousand times no ! The 
 
 workman is worthy of his hire, whether he 
 
 labours with sinew or with intellect. His 
 
 salary should suffice to enable him to live 
 
 in reasonable comfort and in simple dignity, 
 
 to marry, to educate as well as he has been 
 
 educated as many children as it shall please 
 
 Heaven to give him ; to secure his wife from 
 
 the daily martyrdoms of household drudgery, 
 
 to ensure him periodical holidays which will 
 
 not merely be absences from School, to permit 
 
 him to continue the study of literature and 
 
 the arts and sciences, to exorcise for good the 
 
 spectre of an old age in the workhouse. It is 
 
 right and proper that the Schoolmaster should 
 
 consider his time his School's, that he should 
 
 never limit his service to the hours of School 
 
 attendance, but conversely it is madness to 
 
 expect generous devotion and loyal service 
 
 from the driven slaves of sweated labour. It 
 
 is an offence that cries to Heaven that men 
 
 who physically, intellectually, morally, and 
 
 professionally are fitted above almost every 
 
 147
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 other class to carry on the race should be 
 doomed by the inadequacy of their stipends 
 to a threefold vow of poverty, celibacy, and 
 obedience, or at best to a long-deferred and 
 probably childless marriage. That futile per- 
 son, the Eugenist, should long ago have ini- 
 tiated a crusade for the better payment of the 
 Schoolmaster. As it is, we have the ghastly 
 fact that the birth-rate in Schoolmasters' house- 
 holds is probably lower than that in the house- 
 holds of any other profession. 
 
 If it be true, as we have asserted, that in 
 education everything depends upon the teacher, 
 if a good teacher is a very expensive product, 
 and if therefore an adequate supply of teachers 
 who are not mumblers of formulas, nor me- 
 chanical instructors, but men with a vivid 
 perception of the things which they teach— 
 and a keen interest in man and the world is 
 the greatest need of the present day — the case 
 for a revision of men's ideas as to what 
 constitutes proper remuneration for a teacher 
 becomes unanswerable. If all machines re- 
 quire adequate power and occasional lubrica- 
 tion, a School too — though we have pointed 
 out that it is not to machinery that we must 
 look for the aptest parallel to a teacher — will 
 run all the more smoothly if there is plenty 
 
 148
 
 LAMENT OF ASSISTANT MASTER 
 
 of petrol in the petrol tanks, and plenty of 
 lubricator in the crank case. 
 
 It has been necessary to suggest that there 
 are two sides to this as to other questions. 
 But my sympathies are wholly on the side 
 of the angels. The spectacle of a Master 
 huCTaincT the vision of an Eldorado in the 
 intervals between visits to an empty cupboard 
 is a painful one to any man of feeling. Our 
 profession is less and less considered by the 
 prudent parent when he is planning the future 
 of his sons. The Schoolmaster is sweated 
 in order that the " working man " may have 
 cheap schools, which he does not want, or at 
 any rate does not appreciate,^ or that the busi- 
 ness man may save on his boys what he 
 spends on motors, or on golf, or his wife's 
 dresses. The attempt to secure better salaries 
 for the Schoolmaster — and if the Assistant 
 Master with ^i6o per annum is one of the 
 shabby genteel, the Headmaster with ;^300 
 per annum is also a splendid pauper — may 
 be justified on all grounds. I only hope that 
 the Schoolmaster in venturing into the stormy 
 
 ^ Little as a Headmaster favours the Departmental thirst 
 for statistics, I should be interested to know how many 
 "Free-Placers" leave school within two years of their entry, 
 how many within three, what small remnant is left after four 
 years, and what infinitesimal proportion stay longer. 
 
 149
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 world of politics and municipal intrigue may 
 not soil himself too deeply, and that to gain 
 a higher wage he may not be constrained to 
 imitate one whose hand 
 
 " Like the base Indian threw a pearl away 
 Richer than all his tribe." 
 
 150
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 At length we have reached the central things, 
 the arcana of our profession at last reveal 
 themselves. If a study of the teacher, an 
 appraisement of his merits, a recital of his 
 sufferings, and a denunciation of his masters 
 are necessary to the treatment of our theme, 
 surely the object of the teacher's labours, that 
 to which his hand is subdued, must form the 
 climax of our meditations. Given the teacher, 
 what shall he teach ? 
 
 The writer was not brought up in the " grand 
 old fortifying curriculum " of the Classics — 
 perhaps as he views its effect upon some 
 of its blase products he should be grateful. 
 He passed not from Classics to the more 
 modern subjects, but by some strange destiny 
 inverted the process. After dallying as a 
 schoolboy with Mathematics, the Sciences, and 
 Modern Languages, he found suddenly that 
 he was in danger of starving on this thin diet, 
 discovered in an instant secret affinities thai" 
 
 151
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 had doubtless long existed, renounced his alle- 
 giance to the Moderns, enlisted in the ranks 
 of the Ancients, and contrived by grievous 
 labour, despite the handicap of years, to get 
 level with most of his rivals in the race of 
 learning. If he loves the Classics with a sur- 
 passing love, he has at least tried all things 
 and, he hopes, is holding fast to the good. 
 
 Though this is an age of fetishes, our 
 fetishes are not the fetishes of the eighteenth 
 or the early nineteenth century. The Classics 
 must now be defended against every assailant 
 who questions their efficacy. We have still 
 an Established Church ; we have no Estab- 
 lished Curriculum. We need not shed too 
 many tears. Establishments too often lead 
 straight to formalism and lukewarmness. The 
 divine spontaneity and fervour with which the 
 once new doctrine was disseminated is dis- 
 persed amongst a thousand devotees, and its 
 intensity is weakened. The spark of inspira- 
 tion, crushed by the mass of torpid votaries, 
 fails to kindle them. So too with us the 
 joyous enthusiasm of the Renaissance, that 
 happy age in which the student might almost 
 daily behold new planets swim into his ken, 
 passed away in time, and Classicism became, 
 instead of a new religion, merely a convention. 
 
 152
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 The gentleman of the eighteenth century 
 believed in Latin Grammar, imparted as a 
 rule by the aid of violent floggings, as fer- 
 vently and as unquestioningly as he believed 
 in the Protestant Succession. But Latin 
 Grammar and Protestantism are both now 
 out of fashion, and the old eulogies of the 
 literature of Greece and Rome are heard 
 less often, or are delivered in less dogmatic 
 or even in apologetic strains. We are in- 
 veigled, not driven into the Classical parlour ; 
 we are told, to overcome our reluctance, that 
 Euripides was a kind of Bernard Shaw, and 
 ^schylus an Athenian Browning, and such- 
 like absurdities. 
 
 But we still must ask, What is the basis 
 of our instruction ? Words, not things. 
 It was Rousseau who first thus criticised 
 Literature as being merely the study ot 
 words, not things ; and it was Disraeli who 
 gave the criticism a still wider currency. 
 And yet the visionary whose resounding 
 phrases shook all Europe and produced the 
 mightiest of all revolutions, and the modern 
 Macchiavelli with his mordant phrase and 
 Asiatic rhectoric, knew as well as most men 
 the potency of words for good as well as 
 evil. Despised and rejected as the poet and 
 
 153
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 philosopher may be, they have their full 
 revenge. 
 
 " With wonderful deathless ditties 
 We build up the world's great cities, 
 And out of a fabulous story 
 We fashion an empire's glory. 
 One man with a dream at pleasure 
 Shall go forth and conquer a crown, 
 And three with a new song's measure 
 Can trample a kingdom down. 
 
 A breath of our inspiration 
 
 Is the life of each generation, 
 
 A wondrous thing of our dreaming 
 
 Unearthly, impossible seeming, 
 
 The soldier, the king, and the peasant 
 
 Are working together in one, 
 
 Till our dream shall become their present 
 
 And their work in the world be done. 
 
 They had no vision amazing 
 
 Of the goodly house they were raising. 
 
 They had no divine foreshowing 
 
 Of the land to which they are going. 
 
 But on one man's soul it hath broken, 
 
 A light that doth not depart. 
 
 And his look, or a word he hath spoken, 
 
 Wrought flame in another man's heart." 
 
 It is through words that we gain an entrance 
 within the mind of man ; by them we plumb 
 the depths of personality, and divine dimly 
 the soul's emotions, joys and sorrows, hopes 
 
 154
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 and fears. But now at least in war's mid- 
 fury, when the halcyon days of the peace 
 that reigned a year ago seem a dim fancy 
 or an impossible ideal, when all Europe is 
 resounding with the tramping of armed men, 
 when honour, country, and plighted faith are 
 magic runes whose potency can move millions 
 to entire self-sacrifice for an abstraction, a 
 "scrap of paper," who will dare to exalt the 
 material above the spiritual, to value words 
 less than maxim guns and howitzers, to deny 
 their awful beauty, their thronging associa- 
 tions, and their overwhelming force ? 
 
 So, too, with Music. Music can reach the 
 inner sanctuary of the mind direct ; it falls 
 upon us finely divided like flakes of snow. In 
 one short strain a master can show us all the 
 kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof. 
 Yet "Alexander's Feast," the astounding tour 
 de force of a consummate virtuoso, proves that 
 words can have the resonance of the King of 
 Instruments. Even in celebrating the power 
 of Music glorious John throws down his gage 
 in a tremendous challenge and demonstrates 
 triumphantly words' supremacy. O mighty 
 mistress Rhetoric, dressing noble thoughts in 
 noble vesture of pomp and magnificence, en- 
 dowed with the boundless might of an Eastern 
 
 155
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 monarch, making into princes and great ones 
 of the earth whatever thou decreest ! 
 
 If, then, we ally ourselves with the Humanists 
 rather than with the Realists, Humanism in- 
 evitably leads us back to the Greeks and 
 Romans. No scholar will rail at other branches 
 of learning which do not claim his allegiance ; 
 the educated man will, to the extent of his 
 ability, range through all. But we needs 
 must seek the highest, and the great authors 
 of Greece and Rome are literature's noblest 
 patterns, its most glorious achievement. 
 French, with its subtle nuances, is the ideal 
 language of the diplomat. There is much 
 charm in what Mr. Leathes calls " graceful 
 manoeuvring " with its idioms ; the French 
 spirit has found imperishable expression in 
 both verse and prose. But the Frenchman is 
 the child of the Roman — he is proud of the 
 filiation — and we find everywhere in his litera- 
 ture footprints that impel us to retrace our 
 steps. So, too, with Spanish and Italian. 
 German, that harsh and uncouth tongue, has 
 the great names of Goethe and Schiller to 
 recommend it ; but it is an inferior substitute 
 for the grandeur of Latin and the divine grace 
 of Greek. And the ancient languages have 
 the incomparable advantage of methods of 
 
 156
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 teaching which are the fruit of the experience 
 of centuries, of a drill and discipline which 
 every Classical master has picked up in his 
 boyhood, a great help to effective teaching. 
 French and German are modern rivals for 
 which methods of teaching are only now being 
 evolved, and their study is marred by a subtly 
 pervading or even a crudely expressed utili- 
 tarianism. It is of course possible to study 
 French and German in a liberal manner, to 
 steep oneself in their Classics, to inhale deep 
 breaths of their spirit. But boys and masters 
 are nearly always thinking of use, and to make 
 French and German instruments of the loftiest 
 culture it will be first necessary to evolve a 
 new race of Modern Language Teachers. So 
 far they have but rarely risen to their great 
 arofument, and sound and advanced as their 
 instruction may be, they teach for the most 
 part in a narrow, even in a shopman's, spirit. 
 The dialogue with the waiter, the parley with 
 the railway guard, the arrival of a consignment 
 of silks or cognac, such are the matters which 
 absorb attention, and perhaps the greatest 
 blessinor that a strong^ Classical side can confer 
 upon a School is that it ennobles and liberalises 
 in some measure the conception of instruction 
 in every subject of the Curriculum. Take care 
 
 157
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 of the Classics, and the Moderns will take care 
 of themselves, is a maxim which has much 
 truth in it at the present day. 
 
 Man and the external world are the two 
 things in the universe, according to man's 
 audacious or even profane classification, and 
 to him the greater of these is man. His 
 triumphs in the spiritual world are as great 
 as his victories in the material world, and 
 Cadmus must be enthroned beside Prome- 
 theus. As for the future, despite the wizar- 
 dries of Science's magicians and the marvellous 
 new toys that Science bestows upon us in such 
 profusion every decade, the world will never 
 become one huge garage. Mankind is man's 
 proper study — man is the first subject in our 
 Curriculum, man and his history. History, 
 requiring as it does a colossal memory, a 
 mastery of a vast mass of particulars, the see- 
 ing eye of the imagination, the mature judg- 
 ment of the statesman, is the greatest and most 
 difficult of all subjects. But it is History in its 
 largest sense, the history not only of a man's 
 deeds but also of his thoughts as expressed in 
 poetry, philosophy, art, and language. And 
 the life of the ancients is the most instructive 
 of all studies, because in its unfeudal character 
 it is most like our present civilisation, and yet 
 
 158
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 most unlike it in the absence of the mechanical 
 and all that that implies. The history of the 
 human race without the history of Greece 
 and Rome is a book with its most important 
 chapters unwritten, and a man who is com- 
 pletely ignorant of the history of the ancients 
 might have some difficulty in proving that he 
 was an educated man. 
 
 It has been the glory of the greatest English 
 Schools that they have realised the priceless 
 value of Classical Literature, and that the suc- 
 cession of great and enthusiastic masters and 
 of diligent and well-instructed pupils has rarely 
 failed in England.^ Many an unknown Arnold 
 or mute, inglorious Kennedy has laboured 
 successfully to inspire those committed to his 
 charge with that same love which animated 
 himself. The discipline was long, the formal 
 drill elaborate, but it produced a race of 
 scholars. There were brave men before Aga- 
 memnon, and even in the dark ages of English 
 education there were many without doubt who 
 would deserve a tomb in our Valhalla. Cole- 
 ridge has told us of one : . 
 
 " At school [Christ's Hospital] I enjoyed the 
 inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though 
 
 ^ I of course admit that these pupils are not the majority.
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 at the same time, a very severe master, the Reve- 
 rend James Bowyer. He early moulded my 
 taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, 
 of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of 
 Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare 
 Lucretius (in such extracts as I then read), Terence, 
 and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not 
 only with the Roman poets of the so-called silver 
 and brazen ages, but with even those of the 
 Augustan era, and on grounds of plain sense and 
 universal logic to see and assert the superiority of 
 the former in the truth and nativeness both of 
 their thoughts and diction. At the same time 
 that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he 
 made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons ; 
 and they were the lessons, too, which required 
 most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape 
 his censure.! I learned from him that poetry, 
 even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the 
 wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as 
 that of science ; and more difBcult — because more 
 subtle, more complex and dependent on more 
 and more fugitive causes. In the truly great 
 poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, 
 not only for every word, but for the position of 
 every word, and I well remember, that availing 
 himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didy- 
 mus, he made us attempt to show with regard to 
 each, why it would not have answered the same 
 
 ^ We are sometimes told that English has never been 
 taught well in English schools. Here is one example to the 
 contrary. 
 
 1 60
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 purpose ; and wherein consisted the pecuHar fit- 
 ness of the word in the original text. 
 
 " In our own EngHsh compositions (at least for 
 the last three years of our school education) he 
 showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, 
 unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same 
 sense might have been conveyed with equal force 
 and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp and lyre. 
 Muse, Muses and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus and 
 Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In 
 fancy I can almost hear him now exclaiming, 
 * Harp ? Harp ? Lyre ? Pen and ink, boy, you 
 mean. Muse, boy, Muse ? Your nurse's daugh- 
 ter, you mean. Pierian spring ? Oh aye ! the 
 cloister pump, I suppose. . . . 
 
 " [His severities] neither lessen nor dim the 
 deep sense of my moral and intellectual obliga- 
 tions. He sent us to the University excellent 
 Latin and Greek scholars and tolerable Hebraists. 
 Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the 
 good gifts which we derived from his zealous 
 and conscientious tutorage. He is now gone to 
 his final reward, full of years and full of honours, 
 even of those honours which were dearest to his 
 heart as gratefully bestowed by that school, and 
 still binding him to the interests of that school in 
 which he had been himself educated, and to which 
 during his whole life he was a dedicated thing." ^ 
 
 We will quote another example of old-new 
 methods from Coleridge : 
 
 ^ " Biographia Litteraria." 
 
 l6l L
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 " Other modes of teaching, modes by which 
 children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies, 
 and prodigies with a vengeance have I known 
 thus produced — prodigies of self-conceit, shallow- 
 ness, arrogance and infidelity ! Instead of storing 
 the memory during the period when the memory 
 is the predominant faculty, with facts for the after 
 exercise of the judgment, and instead of awaken- 
 ing by the noblest models the fond and unmixed 
 love and admiration which is the natural and 
 graceful temper of early youth ; these nurslings of 
 improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and 
 decide, to suspect all but their own and their 
 lecturer's wisdom, and to hold nothing sacred 
 from their contempt, but their own contemptible 
 arrogance." ^ 
 
 Like all other things, methods of teaching 
 have their day and cease to be. Though the 
 old methods taught thoroughness and attention 
 to detail, there were some who could never 
 see the wood for the trees. The pupil jour- 
 neyed on, day by day, plunging more deeply 
 into a pitiless jungle — to him without a clue — 
 a labyrinth from which too many a victim 
 never gained release. To some the " grand 
 old curriculum " has seemed a prison-house 
 from which the captives must be released at all 
 costs. This opinion has been expressed fully 
 
 ^ " Biographia Litteraria," 
 162
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 and repeatedly by Mr. A. C. Benson, whose 
 own experience may have led him to take a 
 very depressing view of the situation. But is 
 there any recipe for earnestness in high places .'* 
 The illustrious youth whose gold spoon has 
 been an ever-present possession, into whose 
 lap Fortune has cast all her treasures with 
 both hands, who knows no desire which he 
 cannot gratify, who finds scarcely a single 
 luxury beyond his reach, will he ever consent 
 to scorn delights and live laborious days ? 
 The enthusiasm of the dilettante, the zeal of 
 the dabbler may be found in his habitations, 
 but not that rigorous discipline and profound 
 concentration which only the " res angusta 
 domi " can give. The aristocracy of England 
 has admired learning — from the outside — and 
 cherished culture — on the surface ; but it has 
 always preferred that other people should do 
 its study for it, and nurtures a secret contempt 
 for scholars, philosophers, poets, artist-fellows, 
 and all the rest of the canaille. The estab- 
 lished Religion and the established system of 
 education were maintained by it, because all 
 changes are dangerous and the mob might 
 uprise suddenly, but it has disdained both the 
 intenseness of the devotee and the laborious- 
 
 ness of the scholar. The general atmosphere 
 
 163
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 of a great Public School is necessarily un- 
 intellectual, and the substitution of Huxley for 
 Homer, or of Roscoe for Virgil, or of car- 
 pentry for Latin Verse will not lead to the 
 accomplishment of that most necessary of all 
 ends, the intellectualisation of the great Public 
 Schools. 
 
 But in those Schools which are not cramped 
 by traditions and the lore of ages, the teach- 
 ing of Classics has in recent years been 
 vitalised. Men have recognised that with 
 the necessary qualifications the ancients were 
 men of like passions with ourselves, and not 
 masterly expositors of rules of syntax or of 
 grammatical usage. It has been found that 
 as much could be accomplished in a shorter 
 time, and by pupils who start at a later age 
 and travel, therefore, at a greater speed, as by 
 those who almost from their earliest infancy 
 have quafted from the Pierian fount, and that 
 the opportunities thus gained of securing a 
 wider range of interests and a closer contact 
 with modern life are producing a type of 
 scholar who with his vast range of culture 
 has a broader outlook than that man of extra- 
 ordinary yet narrow accomplishments, the 
 classical scholar of the old school. Such 
 
 scholars have been nurtured, and are being 
 
 164
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 nurtured, under the influence of such con- 
 summate masters both of Classicism and the 
 broadest culture, as Jebb, Butcher, and Gilbert 
 Murray. They have shown, and will continue 
 to show, that there is simply no comparison 
 between the classical scholar of the new type 
 and the products of any other kind of culture, 
 and that even from the point of view of use 
 the " Greats " type of man makes the best 
 Administrator, Advocate, or Schoolmaster. 
 
 Our aim in learning Latin and Greek is 
 primarily to gain an introduction to life in 
 all its richness and all its complexity through 
 reading the ancient authors. We cannot 
 (alas !) converse with Cicero or chat with 
 Sophocles, and we have not, fortunately, to 
 jabber with Greek slaves or haggle with 
 Roman charioteers or litter-bearers, and there- 
 fore the need of Greek or Roman con- 
 versation is small. No doubt the power of 
 expressing one's thoughts fluently on the spur 
 of the moment in another language is a valu- 
 able gift. However, in the present day most 
 schoolboys acquire to some extent the power 
 of speaking in French, and it is questionable 
 whether the power derived from this accom- 
 plishment is much enhanced in value if one 
 speaks two languages rather than one. There 
 
 165
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 is a tendency to exaggerate the potency of the 
 spoken over that of the written word. At 
 the same time it must always be remembered 
 that the ancients read their literature aloud, 
 and that the full effect of a fine passage is 
 not obtained until the passage has been read 
 aloud, pronounced as nearly as possible as the 
 ancients would have pronounced it. 
 
 Let us admit, then — and we owe a debt 
 to the votaries of conversational Classics for 
 reminding us — that Latin and Greek are both 
 languages in which the potency of the spoken 
 word can scarcely be exaggerated, that Latin 
 is pre-eminently the language of the rhetori- 
 cian, the master of sounds and rhythms as 
 well as of phrases, that Virgil unrecited and 
 Cicero — or Tacitus in his grand moments — 
 undeclaimed are indeed dead, but that when 
 read with proper emphasis and fitting modula- 
 tions we discover a new world rich in the 
 subtlest suggestion, pregnant with the pro- 
 foundest meaning. But the attempt to make a 
 child of twelve scale the heights of Parnassus 
 without guide or rope, or thread his way 
 through the devious paths of Latin prose 
 unaided by any reference to his mother tongue 
 in his painful struggles to understand a lan- 
 guage so different, must in the generality of 
 
 i66
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 cases lead to failure. As Bagehot says in 
 his Essay on B^ranger, " Literature enables 
 nations to understand one another. Oral 
 intercourse hardly does this. In English a 
 distinguished foreigner says not what he 
 thinks, but what he can." And our efforts 
 even if they were successful would be largely 
 misdirected. As Mr. Warde-Fowler observes,^ 
 the difficulty is that after a couple of years of 
 the Direct Method the boy "does not feel 
 himself at all at home when he is introduced 
 to real literature, but rather finds himself in 
 an atmosphere where he cannot breathe quite 
 freely or naturally. And yet the goal is . . . 
 not to talk Latin, but to read the great litera- 
 ture of a language which, if I am not mis- 
 taken, has in all its forms been an even 
 nobler medium of written than of spoken 
 thought." We learn Latin not to chatter 
 glib nothings or to read concocted accounts 
 of visits to the seaside, but to come into 
 contact with the minds of the great ones of 
 the past ; and I prefer a Caesar to a Sonnen- 
 schein, a Virgil to a Rouse. 
 
 The coryphaeus of all Classical linguists 
 is Dr. Rouse of Cambridge. He is pas- 
 sionately convinced that there is only one 
 
 ^ " Quo Vaditis?"— " Latin Teaching," July 1914. 
 
 167
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 way of teaching the Classics, and many a 
 letter to the papers is an evidence of his 
 zeal. He is surrounded by a band of 
 devoted worshippers, who are adepts at the 
 art of the rolling log, and can indulge in the 
 pastime all the more freely as they have con- 
 trived to capture the leading Classical organ. 
 King Charles's head has a terrible habit of 
 appearing in every composition that the Doctor 
 puts his hand to, and his zeal for his doctrines 
 knows no measure. He is the exact antithesis 
 of the normal Headmaster of a Public School, 
 with his careful attention to convention, his 
 suspicion of novelty, and sometimes his lack 
 of keenness as to anything. In spite of his 
 undoubted ability and remarkable energy, 
 there is not infrequently a soup^on of the 
 ludicrous about his propaganda. What op- 
 ponent would not be disarmed by such trans- 
 parent guilelessness, who must not smile at 
 this earnestness and simplicity which no gleam 
 of humour ever relieves, who cannot admire 
 the enthusiasm with which he flings himself 
 into every matter which claims his interest, 
 from the cause of all causes to Handwork 
 or the Scouting Movement ? Some years 
 ago the Governors of the Perse School — 
 
 whose idiosyncrasies are worthy of their de- 
 
 i68
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 voted Head — advertised for a new Principal. 
 It was only the Perse way of demonstrating 
 that the Doctor was a selected candidate for 
 the High-Mastership of St. Paul's, and when 
 St. Paul's with bad taste chose another as 
 its ruler Cambridge breathed again. But the 
 years are passing, " eheu fugaces," and there 
 is no prospect that any of the more famous 
 Schools will lisp in Latin or in Greek yet 
 awhile. 
 
 Should conversational methods be pro- 
 scribed? Certainly not. If a man believes 
 in methods, even though he deceive himself, 
 he will probably be more successful with these 
 methods than with others. It is perfectly true 
 that boys have started Greek too early, and 
 have spent too much time upon it, and have 
 been beaten by boys who have started later 
 and had a better all-round education. But 
 this discovery has not been made by Dr. 
 Rouse alone. ^ The dangers of the Oral Method 
 are obvious. The pupil deceives his master, 
 who thinks that he knows more Classics than 
 he does, perhaps deceives himself. His master 
 dare not subject him to a grammatical test, and 
 
 * For example, Mr. Went at Leicester, by improved methods, 
 has produced a Craven Scholar, a Chancellor's Medallist, and 
 a Fellow of King's, besides other excellent Scholars. 
 
 169
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 mustneeds, therefore, denounce all examinations. 
 The Scots, who are a canny race, put this ques- 
 tion first to Dr. Rouse when he essayed a pro- 
 paganda north of the Tweed, and even he 
 admitted that boys trained on such a method 
 could not undergo such an ordeal. Nor does 
 the method, which should lead to extraordinarily 
 good results in composition, seem to have this 
 effect beyond all other methods. Whenever 
 a Perse boy gets a first in Classics there is 
 a great flourish of trumpets, but the perfor- 
 mance is not strikingly frequent. The method 
 has been adopted, but generally by unskilled 
 teachers, who have no ideas of their own and 
 must perforce accept others'. The conse- 
 quences have been disastrous, as Inspectors 
 will tell you in private, and the Direct 
 Method in untrained hands is undoubtedly 
 the worst of all methods. Happily the mis- 
 take is soon realised and, according to pub- 
 lishers, many schools which plunged into the 
 Direct Method have after a brief experience 
 abandoned it. 
 
 There is delight in praising, though the 
 praiser sit alone. On whatever lines we teach 
 it, what a delightful subject Classics is to teach, 
 whether it be Cicero, Plato, or Euripides, to 
 
 the Sixth Form boy, a product of the twen- 
 
 170
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 tieth century, or declensions and conjugations 
 to the small boy, who has not lost yet his 
 overwhelming thirst for knowledge and his 
 delightful unconsciousness. He must be an 
 unhappily constituted man, me iudice, whose 
 anofer does not melt, whose enthusiasm does 
 not kindle, as he expounds even a chapter of 
 Caesar, or reveals the mysteries of a Final 
 Clause. As for the higher walks of Classics, 
 to teach here should not be work, it is a 
 recreation ; and happy we who are so rarely 
 fortunate as to be able to reason with interested 
 hearers on " Providence, Foreknowledge, Will 
 and Fate," and to feel that while we are enjoy- 
 ing ourselves, we are also doing useful work. 
 By some happy dispensation the two authors 
 that our pupils first come into contact with 
 are Caesar and Virgil. The more the writer 
 teaches Caesar the more he is lost in admira- 
 tion of both the style and the man, the greatest 
 man of the greatest nation of antiquity, de- 
 scribinof his actions in langfuag-e at once nervous 
 and simple, terse and impressive, never con- 
 descendino^ once to those arts of rhetoric 
 which form so grlorious a robe to the Latin 
 language, narrating with the eloquence of 
 simple facts and plain recital one of the most 
 
 brilliant achievements in Rome's long career 
 
 171
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 of conquest.^ Nothing goes down with boys 
 less than "bunkum," and there is no "bun- 
 kum " in Caesar's Commentaries. Without 
 elaboration, without tinsel and without glitter, 
 Caesar sets forth the tale of his achievements, 
 and attains the highest pitch of art, the con- 
 cealment or even the avoidance of all art. 
 But though there is no striving after effect, 
 the effects are there, and the story of the 
 invasion of Britain, the adventures of the 
 beleaguered Cicero, the description of the siege 
 of Alesia, and of the customs of the Gauls and 
 Romans, incline us to the belief that there are 
 few peaks of Literature which Caesar could 
 not have scaled. In an acre of exuberant 
 advertisement and pinchbeck celebrities, it is 
 well that a boy at the threshold of his life 
 should meet with and dimly appreciate the 
 majestic simplicity, the unstudied greatness of 
 Caesar. 
 
 Of Virgil the magician, who could speak 
 adequately ? " Non mihi si centum linguae 
 sint oraque centum, ferrea vox." I have read 
 and re-read him with ever intenser delight, 
 until I could never write two pages on any 
 
 ^ I am, of course, aware of Mommsen's view that " the Com- 
 mentaries " are a party pamphlet in disguise. Even if this be 
 so, it would not modify my conclusions. 
 
 172
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 subject without desiring to quote him. The 
 more we read him, the more we find in him. 
 He grows not on us, but into us. The boy, 
 a novice in life's battle, unhampered by a 
 throng of memories, burden and delight at 
 once, translates Virgil with an unrelenting 
 speed and ease which wins him his master's 
 envy. No other poet is so rich with time's 
 spoils, none has so rich a content. If there 
 be an ultimate distinction between Classic 
 and Romantic, between the master of con- 
 summate power who has won through the 
 time of storm and stress, and has at last 
 achieved the perfect marriage of form and 
 matter, and the writer who is mastered by 
 his fleeting inspirations and pours forth in 
 disordered profusion his imperious longings, 
 his passionate regrets and thrilling fancies, 
 then Virgil is assuredly the exemplar of the 
 poet's artificium, that craftsmanship so rich, 
 so copious, so elaborate. And yet no poet 
 is so full of haunting thoughts and phrases, 
 that open to us dim vistas of personality ; no 
 poet exercises so rare a magic over words, ex- 
 alting them, as one has said, beyond their usual 
 force, lifting them to their nth. power. With 
 his pietas, his pity, no poet is in closer touch 
 with modern feeling. Is not all the .^neid
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 but an expansion of "sunt lacrimse rerum," 
 with its groping feeling for human woes and 
 misfortunes, its amateurish battle-pieces and 
 perfunctory butcheries, in which the poet is 
 thinking rather of sons cast on the pyre before 
 their parents' eyes than of the glory of the 
 slayer, with its sympathetic yearning to share 
 the woes of those whom some dark destiny 
 has sorely tried, with its pictures of woman 
 deserted by her lover, or of a father cherish- 
 ing his innocent babe, with its " majestic sad- 
 ness for the doom of human kind"? The 
 age of Virgil was an age of civic con- 
 vulsion, massacre, and ruthless cruelty, an 
 age in which the fable of the dragon's teeth 
 seemed to be re-enacted. May we not then 
 regard as a pioneer of morality the poet 
 who m.akes a character declare^ that experi- 
 ence of misfortune has taught her kindness to 
 the unhappy ? 
 
 There are weaknesses in the -^neid — the 
 poem was unrevised, and the poet would 
 have consiofned it to the flames. But these 
 blemishes scarcely influence our judgment on 
 the poem as a whole, and it is difficult to 
 agree with those who somewhat absurdly re- 
 gard the Georgics as Virgil's masterpiece. 
 
 ^ " Haud ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco." — DiDO.
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 The -^neid is a chryselephantine statue to 
 Rome's greatness, and it will endure as long 
 as or longer than the memory of Rome's 
 power endures. 
 
 " Now thy Forum roars no longer, 
 
 fallen every purple Caesar's dome — 
 Tho' thine ocean-roll of rhythm 
 
 sound for ever of Imperial Rome, 
 
 Now the Rome of slaves hath perish'd 
 
 and the Rome of freemen holds her place, 
 
 I, from out the Northern Island, 
 
 sunder'd once from all the human race, 
 
 I salute thee, Mantovano, 
 
 I that loved thee since my day began, 
 Wielder of the stateliest measure 
 
 ever moulded by the lips of man." 
 
 How many a haunting line has embedded 
 itself in the memory, a line perchance learnt 
 carelessly and easily, perpetually recurring in 
 later years, seeming to have some strange 
 significance ! Such was the " heu, fuge crude- 
 les terras et litus avarum " that rang in Augus- 
 tine's ears, such is the line which the unhappy 
 Charles chanced upon in the Bodleian, " sed 
 cadat ante diem, mediaque inhumatus arena," 
 such are the overpoweringly beautiful lines 
 
 175
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 describing with such passionate pathos the 
 early death of Marcellus : 
 
 " manibus date lilia plenis 
 purpureos spargam flores, animamque nepotis 
 his saltern adcumulem donis et fungar inani 
 munere."^ 
 
 Lines which may fitly also represent the in- 
 adequacy of all tributes to the greatest of all 
 masters. 
 
 There is romance enough in Virgil too, if 
 one will look for it. As we read of the 
 approach of early dawn, the fading of the 
 stars, the sudden glimpse of hills afar, and 
 Italy low on the horizon, we perceive with a 
 sudden thrill " the lio^ht which never was on 
 land or sea" shining with unmistakable radi- 
 ance upon the land so long promised to the 
 storm-tost mariners and so long deferred.^ 
 
 ^ Translation of these lines: 
 
 " Ah, flee the ruthless land and the shore of greed." 
 " But let him fall — ere day — unburied — on mid-shore." 
 " Bring me lilies with full hands, let me strew bright flowers 
 and heap these gifts at least upon the spirit of my descendant, 
 an empty boon." 
 
 ^ The exquisite music of this passage, with its repetition of 
 " Italiam," demands notice. It reminds one of the musical 
 device of canonical imitation : 
 
 " Procul obscuros colles, humilemque videmus 
 Italiam. Italiam primus conclamat Achates, 
 Italiam laeto socii clamore salutant." 
 The art is perfect. 
 
 176
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 I have learnt to love Virgil by teaching 
 him to successive years of schoolboys. The 
 delight of reading Virgil once is great, that 
 of reading him twice is greater, that of read- 
 ing him for the tenth time is infinitely greater. 
 Emerson once said, very absurdly, that Plato 
 was the same to us at twenty as at sixty. 
 At twenty, to use a musical metaphor, we 
 know only our notes, the interpretation is 
 beyond us, though I grant that we think that 
 we have penetrated to his essence ; but a life 
 passed like Dr. Henry's in the pursuit of 
 everything connected with Virgil would not 
 be ill spent. If a Classical student acquired 
 only such a familiarity with Virgil, and per- 
 haps Horace, that he could quote them as 
 freely as he should be able to quote his 
 Bible, I should consider his course of study 
 amply justified. " Homere a fait Virgile, 
 dit-on ; si cela est, c'est sans doute son plus 
 bel ouvrage." ^ 
 
 Our ancestors in their greater wisdom made 
 their pupils learn large quantities of Virgil 
 and also of Horace, and we may agree with 
 Arnold that it is difficult to exaggerate the 
 share "the turning over and over in their 
 mind, and masticating, so to speak, in early 
 
 ^ Voltaire, Appendix to the " Henriade." 
 
 177 M
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 life, as models of their Latin verse, such 
 things as Vergil's 
 
 * Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem,' 
 
 or Horace's 
 
 ' Fortuna saevo laeta negotio ' 
 
 has had in forming the high spirit of the upper 
 class in France and England, the two countries 
 where Latin verse has most ruled the schools, 
 and the two countries which most have had, 
 or have, a high upper class and a high upper 
 class spirit. Character is capable of being 
 taught, learnt, and assimilated ; beauty hardly ; 
 and it is for enabling us to learn and catch some 
 power of antiquity, that Greek or Latin com- 
 position is most to be valued." Poetry is not 
 necessarily didactic, but great poetry has often 
 been so, and it is well that our youth should 
 absorb the quintessence of human wisdom dis- 
 tilled as it is into the works of Virgil and his 
 dear friend Horace. 
 
 The personality of Horace is the most charm- 
 ing and individual imaginable. He was, if one 
 must give way to the bad habit of discovering 
 modern analogues, a Roman Thackeray pene- 
 trated with a sense of the oddity of things, one . 
 who dearly loved to pull the leg, and who had 
 
 178
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 watched with a playful malice the com^die 
 humaine, the progress and tribulations of the 
 bore, the virago, and the vulgarian, yet a poet 
 with a heart, with a genius for friendship, with 
 a love of country which flame out with rare 
 grandeur in those mighty odes, which in 
 their massive structure and clear outlines may 
 worthily be compared with those pyramids 
 that he so confidently boasted he would out- 
 live. But he was uncomfortable in his singing 
 robes ; he preferred a lounging deshabille in 
 slippers, and the trait can be recognised even 
 in the Odes. If other poets are the poets of 
 the climax, it was Horace's delight to be the 
 poet of the anti-climax. " Equanimity," as 
 Bagehot has said, " has its place in literature ; 
 the poetry of equipoise is possible," and Horace 
 prefers to end on a piano rather than on a 
 screaming fortissimo. Like the poet who, after 
 an impassioned outburst against blind guides 
 and false prophets, in calmer mood bethinks 
 himself of to-morrow with its fresh woods and 
 pastures new, he knows the secret of economy, 
 and will tell us with studied simplicity of 
 Regulus' departure to the cruelest of deaths, 
 as he passed through the impeding throng as 
 though after a tiring day in the courts he 
 
 sought a respite from the tediousness of busi- 
 
 179
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 ness in the rural scenes of Samnite Venafrum 
 or Spartan Tarentum.^ How might a man 
 pray that if ever time of crisis came and some 
 momentous decision must be made, he migfht 
 in the spirit of Regulus calmly and with no 
 false heroics meet the issue ! 
 
 " This is the happy Warrior, this is He 
 That every Man in arms should wish to be." 
 
 " Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past." 
 It is almost Horace's greatest characteristic. 
 
 Youth with its terrific earnestness often 
 rails at Horace for his flippancy, his shallow- 
 ness, and I confess in sackcloth and in ashes 
 that as I read the indictment, the errors of 
 my youth recur to me. But it takes all kinds 
 of poets to make a literature ; it is part of 
 Horace's charm that he is not always au 
 
 ^ " Noble indeed, for though he knew 
 What tortures that barbarian crew 
 Had ripe for him, he waved aside 
 The kin that did his purpose chide, 
 The thronging crowds that strove to stay 
 His passage, with an air as gay 
 As though at close of some decree 
 Upon a client's lawsuit, he 
 Its dreary coil were leaving there 
 To green Venafrum to repair. 
 Or to Tarentum's breezy shore. 
 Where Spartans built their town of yore." 
 
 Martin's Translation. 
 1 80
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 grand serieux. Life is real, life is earnest. 
 Yes! but as our poet tells us also, " dulce 
 est desipere in loco." Life is not all like a 
 Prelude of Rachmaninoff ; it has its occa- 
 sional Scherzos and Humoreskes. And as 
 one grows older one finds in his Satires, and 
 above all in his Epistles, a mellowed wisdom, 
 an ardent, real love of golden moderation ex- 
 pressed in terms of sweetest reasonableness 
 that to many have been more helpful than 
 a sterner, harder gospel. Horace is not only 
 the lyrist in his glittering trappings as he so 
 often poses, he is the genial man of the 
 world, who has lost all his illusions, but is 
 still unsoured, whom life has treated fairly 
 gently, and who is grateful to it for its pre- 
 cepts ; who has learnt not that it is wicked 
 to be base, but that it is stupid to be a fool ; 
 who has discovered that it is a waste of energy 
 to cherish vaulting ambitions, or unbounded 
 desires ; who cannot be perfervid if he tries, 
 but is not a heartless, self-centred egoist ; who 
 enjoys, even if somewhat lazily, the panorama 
 of life as it unrolls itself before him, and 
 gently mocks at the parvenu and the upstart 
 who have fretted and fumed so much to e^in 
 so little, power and riches, and the ridicule 
 
 of their neighbours. He does not attempt 
 
 i8i
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 to lash the foolish and the base into virtue 
 like Juvenal ; he scarcely even attempts to 
 laugh them into common sense. He leaves 
 it to time and to Nature, who will see to it 
 that the runagates continue in scarceness. 
 He does not hate men or very much despise 
 them, but he is conscious that he knows a 
 better way. It is not a very lofty creed, but 
 in his clear vision of things, his sense of pro- 
 portion, his appreciation of values, his dis- 
 regard of the trifling and ephemeral, however 
 brilliantly tricked out, Horace rises to real 
 greatness ; and indeed this kindly lack of 
 idealism, which we cannot call cynicism, has 
 seemed to some a working hypothesis of 
 existence and its problems, which has saved 
 them from frenzied beatingf of their head 
 against the adamantine walls of Fate, from 
 the resolve to curse God and die. He is 
 the privileged friend of the mighty, " his 
 tone is that of prime ministers " ; he was the 
 ornament if not the idol of a select circle, 
 fastidious in its tastes. Yet none has ex- 
 pressed more nobly and with more force the 
 pride of the man who has made his own 
 career. I do not envy the man who can 
 read without a thrill the story of the little 
 
 Venusian boy, whose father, a debt-collector, 
 
 182
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 or even a fish-dealer as rumour has it, deter- 
 mined to give his son the best of instruc- 
 tion regardless of all expense. Few lines in 
 ancient Literature have a more personal touch 
 than those in which Horace describes in 
 tender retrospect that devotion lavished so 
 ungrudgingly which beyond all else had made 
 him what he was. 
 
 Style is not, as some one has said, the 
 antiseptic that saves from corruption what 
 would otherwise perish. It is far more than 
 that. It is the vital principle which pervades 
 the whole organism and alone delivers it from 
 dissolution. A critic of great discernment 
 has said that manner is fine matter, that in 
 some poets even, the sound is the sense. 
 Horace beyond all others perhaps exemplifies 
 this inspired dictum. Other men have told 
 us of the virtues of tenacity, of the strength 
 of a good conscience resisting the whole world, 
 but none has produced the grandeur of the 
 •' iustum et tenacem propositi virum," rising 
 up massive in its rock-line intent like one of 
 the great works of Nature, a Beachy Head 
 or a Land's End, from the waves that vainly 
 beat upon it. An Alcaic Ode of Horace is 
 one of the grandest things in literature ; it 
 is like some strong, stirring theme of John 
 
 183
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Sebastian's proclaimed upon tiie King of 
 Instruments, tyrannous in its force, triumphant 
 in its resonance, shaking the pillars and vault- 
 ing arches with its pomp and majesty, waking 
 tumultuous echoes in aisle and transept, yet 
 hiding rich complexities beneath bold out- 
 lines. And the same master-hand has worked 
 at many a slighter ode in which the idle 
 minstrel of a trifling hour — tenuis, as he loved 
 to call himself — takes some slender theme, 
 some tender frailest flower blooming on slopes 
 of Helicon or near some rock-line temple of 
 the Muses, and creates a perfection of grace 
 and charm in petto truly akin to the greatness 
 in big things which he manifests elsewhere. 
 If Classical poetry means impeccable perfec- 
 tion combined with unfailing inspiration, it can 
 maintain its ground against all the assaults 
 of the Romanticists. 
 
 So Roman poetry is rhetorical. There is 
 no need to apologise. Some literatures and 
 some writers can effect their purpose with 
 such divine gentleness of touch that the transi- 
 tion from thought to thought's expression 
 seems accomplished in an instant. It is thus 
 with the greatest of the Greeks ; it is thus in 
 the realm of JVlusic with Mozart. Yet if at 
 times in Roman Literature we recognise that 
 
 184
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 the virtuoso with his tours de force Is not 
 enthroned upon the loftiest seat, if we perceive 
 the strain and effort — triumphantly success- 
 ful though they be — if we realise that the 
 joyous spontaneity of the inventus mundi was 
 not to be for a nation late in the ages, slow 
 in initiative yet an apt pupil, we win the 
 highest satisfaction at the greatest moments 
 of Roman poetry, and they are many ; but we 
 admit that in this genre poets of the second 
 order are not second-rate but fifth-rate. We 
 realise at once how needful is the artist's craft 
 when we turn to Lucretius. A poet who 
 drove his Pegasus very hard, he has passages 
 of a grandeur unsurpassed ; but his sublimities 
 are oases in a Sahara of exploded physics 
 and sterile dogmatism. In spite of Cicero's 
 eulogy — carmina multae tamen artis — he could 
 not achieve the synthesis of science and emo- 
 tion. His passion and his learning, locked 
 in watertight compartments, cannot interpene- 
 trate. It is a dreadful confession, but Lucre- 
 tius can be a bore. Perhaps even Memmius 
 first discovered this. 
 
 There is then in Latin only one step from 
 the poet to the poetaster. Read Virgil, 
 Horace, Lucretius, all of him if you can, 
 Catullus, that most Ariel- and Puck-like of all 
 
 ■85
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Roman poets, or you have missed much world- 
 literature. Ovid is a supremely able racon- 
 teur, who is sufficiently praised and con- 
 demned by the epithet " clever," Propertius 
 and Tibullus are tastes which many indivi- 
 duals indulge, but the rest are highly efficient 
 verse-machines, who have mistaken rhetoric 
 for poetry. Roman Comedy, if it had come 
 to an untimely end, would not have been a 
 grievous loss, and we would readily barter it 
 for Menander, some of the lost tragedies of 
 Greece, or the lyric poets. One name alone 
 we must except, that of Juvenal, the first and 
 greatest of the satirists as we know them. 
 Can a satirist be a poet-f* Perhaps not, but 
 as we read this molten rhetoric, with its im- 
 passioned glow, as we listen to that avalanche 
 of declamation, that fury of invective in which 
 every line is a sword-thrust, every word a blow, 
 we are overwhelmed by the onset and the 
 frenzy of this gladiator of literature, and we 
 are beset with such a storm of emotions that 
 we are scarcely disposed to precise definitions 
 of Juvenal's power. Juvenal tells us that it 
 is difficult not to write a satire, but it is still 
 more difficult to write a satire. Make the 
 attempt, Reader, if you are incredulous. Find- 
 ing the range is difficult ; your Aunt Sallies 
 
 i86
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 move perversely just as your missiles reach 
 them ; your shrapnel whirrs and screams, but 
 your foes keep well under cover. The adver- 
 sary is elusive, the punch-ball floats out of 
 reach just when the knock-out blow is on its 
 way — one has to do with persons, not per- 
 sonalities, one must attack types yet not be 
 vague. And yet the satire of a Juvenal or 
 of our own master, Swift, seems the simplest 
 thing in the world. Was Juvenal an ardent 
 lover of virtue, who in an age of licence and 
 outspokenness dealt with sins and sinners in 
 the open way with Roman directness, or, as 
 so often, was the prude concealed behind the 
 mask of the preacher? Was it his manners 
 or his morals that were faulty? It is a riddle 
 never to be solved. In any case, should the 
 trial scene in " The Frogs " ever be again 
 enacted in the underworld, and should Roman 
 verse-writers contend for the primacy, some 
 of Juvenal's lines will weigh with the 
 heaviest. 
 
 But Latin prose is as grand a thing as 
 Latin poetry, and the Roman Empire was not 
 a nobler monument of Rome's conquering 
 spirit and organising power than was the 
 Latin period. Rhetoric in verse sets many 
 
 teeth on edge ; but Rhetoric in prose is but 
 
 187
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 a pardonable trimness of apparel, a laudable 
 desire to please. As Newman says in a 
 slightly different context, "The elocution of a 
 great intellect is great. His language ex- 
 presses not only his great thoughts but his 
 great self. Certainly he might use fewer 
 words than he uses, but he fertilises his 
 simplest ideas and germinates with a multi- 
 tude of details, and prolongs the march of his 
 sentences, and sweeps round to the full dia- 
 pason of his harmony as if KuSei yaioou, rejoicing 
 in his own vig-our and richness of resource. 
 I say a narrow critic will call it verbiage, when 
 really it is a sort of fullness of heart parallel to 
 that which makes the merry boy whistle as he 
 walks, or the strong man, like the smith in 
 the novel, flourish his club when there is no 
 one to fight with." The "lactea ubertas," the 
 milky richness of Cicero, especially the Cicero 
 of the Cato Major and Laelius, of the essays 
 on Old Age and Friendship, and of the works 
 which deal with Oratory, is a perpetual delight. 
 All Cicero's works are fascinating in their in- 
 timate revelations, for no man has so freely 
 "given away" the secrets of his personality. 
 Cicero as a politician may be contemptible, 
 as a barrister unprepossessing, but as a man 
 
 he achieved real greatness. Few people have 
 
 i88
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 dared to reveal their grotesque vanities and 
 their odious pettinesses with such frankness 
 as Cicero has done in his letters and speeches, 
 and few of those who have cultivated a greater 
 reticence would have stood a comparison with 
 Cicero. If Virgil's chief virtue is his pietas, if 
 Tacitus would claim before all others gravitas, 
 Cicero, by universal consent, would bear away 
 the two virtues of humanitas and urbanitas. 
 What do we find in him ? A noble enthusiasm 
 for letters which completely conquered the 
 severe practicality ingrained in every Roman 
 — the sensitiveness of the artist, a generous 
 nature free from all taint of cruelty in a cruel 
 age, a burning patriotism, though associated 
 too exclusively with one scheme of politics, a 
 conscience, a gift which was in that as in 
 many ages a barrier to political success, an 
 overflowing kindness for all his friends and 
 dependents, a courtesy which flourished in his 
 power over words. Those who have read 
 the essays on Old Age and Friendship — and 
 every schoolboy should read them — know with 
 what charming ease Cicero can express him- 
 self on subjects which have an interest for 
 all, with what a light dignity, rising at times 
 to lofty eloquence, he can deal with themes 
 
 so simple yet so profound. As a statesman 
 
 189
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Cicero ended with a crashing fiasco, but 
 Augustus was right when he told his little 
 grandson that the opponent whom he had pro- 
 scribed was a great and good man. 
 
 Livy, the facile narrator whose fluent pen 
 achieved a history of Rome in one hundred 
 and forty books, is too monotonously brilliant 
 to some tastes, perfect as his style is, and 
 stirring as are the stories which he tells. He 
 is a historian without technique in the modern 
 scientific sense, or philosophy ; and yet, as he 
 himself observed, the greatness of his theme, 
 the portrayal of Rome and the virtues by which 
 the tiny commonwealth of the seven hills rose 
 to world-wide power, did not fail to inspire him 
 with the true Roman spirit, and he rises in- 
 sensibly to a lofty height as he records the 
 Titanic struggle between Hannibal and the 
 Roman nation. But comparing him with 
 Tacitus, one feels at times that he is merely a 
 literary chef. Tacitus is the impersonation of 
 the Roman noblesse — haughty in its contempt 
 of all the outer world, jealous of its privileges, 
 suspicious of its masters, haunted even yet 
 by memories of former greatness. With all 
 his limitations, Tacitus is supreme in his deli- 
 neation of character, in his mastery of the 
 
 more sombre hues of the palette, in his power 
 
 190
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 of vivid and condensed description. Great as 
 are the Histories and the Annals, he rises to 
 his most majestic eloquence in his biography 
 of his father-in-law Agricola, and the conclu- 
 sion of this eloge is the high-water mark even of 
 Latin prose. Tacitus is not Cicero, but there 
 was no need for him to dance to the Ciceronian 
 measure. He is Tacitus, and that is sufficient 
 eulogy. 
 
 Had a boy read but one book of Caesar 
 and one book of Virgil, I should count the 
 time which he had spent at Latin well justified. 
 If his study can be prolonged so that he reads 
 the immortal tale of Sinon and the grievous 
 fall of Troy, as told in the second book of 
 the yEneid, a fiery scroll of lamentation and of 
 woe, the sorrows of Dido (Bk. IV) and the 
 descent of ^neas to the underworld (Bk. VI), 
 some Odes of Horace, the De Senectute and 
 the De Amicitia, and the Agricola, he has the 
 quintessence of Latin Literature, and I should 
 feel that the seed had been well sown, and 
 that even the cares of this world and the 
 deceitfulness of riches would not altogether 
 choke it. 
 
 I have spoken of Latin authors first, and 
 indeed I find in no Greek authors the thrill of 
 sympathy and affection which I find in Virgil 
 
 191
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 and Horace. Perhaps the very greatness 
 of the Greek masters, of Homer, ^schylus, 
 Sophocles, Plato, and Thucydides, who tower 
 above all mountain peaks of literature how- 
 ever high, and oft conceal their crests in 
 clouds, gives them this aloofness. Were I 
 to deny their supremacy I should be a madman. 
 If I am wrong in my preferences, or rather 
 unfortunate in my sympathies, it is a joy to 
 know that time with its further education 
 will set me right, and that I shall have the 
 delight of discovering ever fresh reasons why 
 I should both love and admire the great 
 Greeks still more than I do now. Mean- 
 while, I content myself with denying that Latin 
 is a second-rate and second-hand literature, 
 by opposing to its critics the names of Virgil 
 and Horace, Cicero and Tacitus.^ 
 
 But no master, whatever his private predi- 
 lections, can contemplate without dismay a 
 School in which Greek does not flourish. 
 There has been much discussion as to ** Classics 
 and the average boy." The average boy even 
 in the twentieth century will not always be a 
 
 ^ The reader must not for one moment imagine that my 
 admiration for the Greeks is less than it should be. I am only 
 concerned here to vindicate the essential [greatness of Latin 
 literature. 
 
 192
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 mechanic, and should know as much of Greece 
 and its history as is possible. The phrase 
 " Classics and the average boy " is mislead- 
 ing. We are generally vague in our termi- 
 nology when we discuss educational questions, 
 and in this case we mean the average boy 
 whose father has ;^5000 a year, and who stays 
 at School generally till i8 or 19. The Schools 
 that he frequents are still predominantly Clas- 
 sical, and it will still be well for him to make 
 full use of his opportunities. It is perhaps 
 unfortunate for him that Classics are here a 
 tradition and that enthusiasm is scouted, but 
 if he is kept to his work he should have read 
 some books of Homer, the most glorious and 
 spontaneous of all writers, a play or two of 
 i^schylus and Euripides, a book of Thucydides 
 and of Herodotus, and certainly some dialogue 
 of Plato. 
 
 Once again we are muddled in our expres- 
 sions when we say that too much time is 
 devoted to Classics in Schools. It may be 
 true that the time given to Classics in the 
 older-established Schools is excessive, though 
 this time is being diminished, but Secondary 
 Schoolboys generally speaking are starved in 
 Classics. They have little Latin and no 
 Greek. This is wrong for many reasons. It 
 
 193 N
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 converts the priceless gift of a knowledge of 
 the great Classical languages into a social 
 barrier, which, it is alleged, is ever in the way 
 of aspiring intellect, whether it seeks entrance 
 to the Universities or to the higher branches 
 of the Civil Service. Is the remedy the ex- 
 clusion of the Classics from the curriculum 
 of Universities and of Civil Service Exami- 
 nations ? Surely not. The poor boy, making 
 all allowance for environment, is intellectually 
 much the same as the rich boy, and a due 
 proportion of able but poor boys will, given 
 the opportunity, become the Bentleys and 
 Porsons, or the Jebbs and the Murrays of 
 the future. If the Classics are the noblest 
 instrument of mental discipline yet devised — 
 and they are — this heritage should be the in- 
 alienable right of every able boy who desires 
 it. The Board of Education has under its 
 control the Municipal Schools of the country, 
 and if it is justified in asserting itself at all, 
 it would be justified in insisting that a boy 
 who goes to a Municipal School should not 
 be forced into advanced Mathematics or ad- 
 vanced Science, whatever his personal apti- 
 tudes may be, but that opportunities must be 
 given him, either at his own School or by 
 transference to another, of pursuing the noblest 
 
 194
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 and the most glorious of all studies.^ More 
 Classics in Secondary Schools is a crying 
 need, and for this we might cheerfully concede 
 less Classics in the Public Schools. Those 
 who love Classics and observe that its pre- 
 dominance is yearly diminishing must seek, 
 if they are wise, to tap fresh sources of supply. 
 If we will resolve to agitate for more Classics 
 we shall light upon many a prospective Bentley 
 starving for lack of proper mental nourishment. 
 As it is now, one of the most promising Clas- 
 sical Scholars that the author knows is the 
 son of a labourer, and a recent Chancellor's 
 Medallist at Cambridge came from an Ele- 
 mentary School. 
 
 We are sometimes told, even by Masters 
 of Trinity, that translations will suffice. But 
 great literature is untranslatable, and trans- 
 planted from its own habitat it withers and 
 dies. No translation, however able, is more 
 than a dim reflection of the glories of the 
 original. Those whom age or circumstances 
 prevent must use translations, but others should 
 not. A translation of Homer, or ^schylus, 
 or Virgil is not good enough for Dr. Butler — 
 
 ^ The Board has insisted that every Secondary School should 
 give its boys an opportunity of learning Latin if they so 
 desire, but there is reason to think that this regulation has 
 been whittled down in practice.
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 nor for the writer — nor for any youth of 
 mettle. 
 
 The arguments in favour of a Classical 
 curriculum have been sometimes based upon 
 what is known as the doctrine of Formal 
 Training ; that " faculties can be trained by 
 any medium requiring the use of desirable 
 powers, and that in some mysterious way the 
 faculty will overflow or be adaptable to other 
 uses than those in which it is trained." It is 
 denied by a correspondent of The Times} and 
 by many psychologists, that ** there is such a 
 thing as an overflow of a faculty to benefit or 
 strengthen its use in other subjects than that 
 in which it is trained, unless there is some 
 identity in the subject to which it overflows." ^ 
 It is some consolation to be told this at a time 
 when such extravagant claims are being made 
 by the advocates of handwork as to the power 
 that all manual crafts have of developing the in- 
 tellect generally, and of promoting neatness and 
 a sense of order. If there is no overflow of 
 faculty in such cases, if, for example, the writer 
 
 ^ See Correspondence, " Classics and the Average Boy." 
 ^ " Only as far as there are common elements — if by elucida- 
 tion, discussion, and exhortation one pursuit can be made 
 plausibly and consciously symbolic of another, a certain 
 transfer may be made." — Dr. Hayvvard, " Educational Aims 
 and Methods." 
 
 196
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 could not improve his power of writing Latin 
 Verse or English Prose by learning how to mend 
 his punctures or to repair a buckled wheel, he 
 still feels justified in touring the country in his 
 usual thriftless way and incidentally benefiting 
 the repair trade whenever he sustains disaster. 
 But there is an important proviso in this nega- 
 tive, " unless there is some identity of subject." 
 Latin and Greek Literature deal, as we have 
 said, with words, with man and all his relations 
 with his fellow-men, as citizens of a state, and 
 members of a smaller community. After all, 
 there is a considerable identity between train- 
 inor to understand the mode of thought of the 
 citizen of Greece and Rome and the develop- 
 ment of an understanding of the principles upon 
 which a citizen of the modern world must regu- 
 late his relationships with his fellow-citizens. 
 We best understand the working of principles 
 by seeing them illustrated in concrete examples. 
 It is easy to refute this doctrine in its extreme 
 form, if it is held that the mind is divided into 
 compartments which can in no way at all affect 
 one another. It may be that it is the result of 
 a habit of abstraction which is the besetting 
 infirmity of the scientific mind.^ At any rate, 
 all who are in the habit of studying their own 
 
 1 F. W. West. 
 
 197
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 minds can find examples of cases in which one 
 acquired capacity has aided another capacity. 
 The doctrine denies that there is such a thing 
 as a trained mind or a great man. The mind 
 has only been trained in one special faculty, 
 outside which it is useless ; the man is great 
 only in his particular sphere of action, and out- 
 side that is a nonentity. If this is so, as has 
 been well said, " Culture, in the wide and 
 accepted use of the word, becomes an im- 
 possible ideal, and specialism is our only 
 refuge." But the greatest geniuses have more 
 often than not, even though they were not 
 Leonardos, Shakespeares, Goethes, shown 
 their myriad-mindedness by their power of 
 plunging into the most varied activities and 
 achieving success ; and to come to a much 
 lower level, it is the man who can display 
 the greatest versatility, the greatest mental 
 alertness in turnina- from one branch of know- 
 ledge to another, that mankind rightly agrees 
 to recognise as the most highly cultured man, 
 as the most highly trained mind. Psycho- 
 logists have done Education a service by 
 pointing out the looseness of our conceptions 
 as to the influence which one subject may have 
 upon another. But if psychologists are unable 
 
 to reconcile with actual experience their present 
 
 198
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 theorisings, it will be necessary for them to 
 return to their laboratories and work out the 
 question anew/ 
 
 Much work still lies before the enthusiast for 
 Classical studies. He must never be apolo- 
 getic, for he is fighting the battle, not of Latin 
 and Greek, priceless possessions as they are, 
 but of the Humanities. The tendencies which 
 are workino^ against the studies of the Classics 
 are not one whit less hostile to any liberal 
 conceptions of the study of modern languages, 
 or even of our own language.^ Till French 
 and German are taught as the languages of 
 Corneille, Racine, and Pascal, or of Goethe 
 and Schiller, and after that consummation is 
 achieved, a School needs a vigorous and en- 
 thusiastic Classical side to exhibit its pattern 
 of what the study of a language means. We 
 are serving the ends, too, of our own language 
 
 ^ The question is, of course, an old one. Cicero in the " De 
 Oratore" has an interesting discussion on the matter, with 
 special reference to Oratory. Again, Thucydides in his report 
 of that wonderful Funeral Oration of Pericles, which mirrors 
 the Athenian spirit for all time, makes it evident that the most 
 intellectual of all cities excelled by reason of the many-sided- 
 ness and mental alertness of its citizens. A recent work of 
 Dr. Sleight's suggests that psychologists are modifying their 
 opinion on this matter. 
 
 2 I note that the French Ambassador thinks that the standard 
 of French in English Schools has gone down as the result of 
 new methods. 
 
 199
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 and its unrivalled literature by studying those 
 writers who more than others have made liter- 
 ature into a fine art. No language can be 
 reallv understood unless the learner knows an- 
 other language, and it is in truth the most 
 signal proof of Greece's literary greatness and 
 marvellous literary power that the Greeks 
 alone — the exception that proves the rule — 
 did not need the discipline of another language 
 to aid them both to understand their own 
 tongue and to develop its full glories. 
 
 The question may be asked, " Are the 
 Classics a mental pabulum or a gymnastic ? " 
 I boldly answer ** Both." In Education as in 
 the industrial world the by-product is often 
 as precious as — even more precious than — the 
 product. It is not even necessary to decide 
 which is product and which is by-product. 
 The mind has its thousand sinews, and they 
 need only too much a resolute development, 
 the mind should hunger for its daily food even 
 like the body. There can be little wrong with 
 any system of education which can supply both 
 these needs. 
 
 The greatest danger threatens the Classics, 
 not from the ill-directed fury of the Philistine — 
 he has been bombarding us for nearly a century 
 with inadequate results— but from the boredom 
 
 200
 
 THE CLASSICS 
 
 of the elegant scholar. To him the Classics 
 have always been a primrose path. Taught 
 Classics as a matter of course, he has never 
 had to face a difficulty. He half fails to 
 appreciate the richness of his heritage, and 
 half despises those who have not imbibed the 
 Classical traditions, or who have missed the 
 Classical culture. There should be no Helots 
 of Education, or at any rate Helotage should 
 not depend upon social status or financial 
 stability. There is a mighty river to be 
 tapped, a new tributary which might add its 
 streams to the strong current of Classicism, 
 in those Secondary Schools which have not 
 so far given in their allegiance. Our Bentleys 
 are not to be despised even if they come from 
 Board Schools, our Persons are worth having 
 even when presented us by the Municipalities. 
 Such an aspirant to the noblest of all Cultures 
 must now needs say at the end of a hard-won 
 fight, " With a great price won I this freedom." 
 Doubtless the freedom was worth its price, the 
 struggle an epic of adventure. But may a 
 happier chance in future times enable him to 
 answer proudly, " But I was freeborn." 
 
 Still, as in the days when Arnold ingemi- 
 nated Culture, the need is great, the Phili- 
 stines are strong. Though "Kultur" has 
 
 *~> o 
 
 20I
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 been trampled in the mire by Prussian ruf- 
 fianism, Culture can still give "sweetness and 
 light." Culture may still be a haven and a refuge 
 in all our tribulation. 
 
 " Thy light alone — like mist o'er mountains driven, 
 Or music by the night-wind sent 
 Through strings of some still instrument, 
 Or moonlight on a midnight stream — 
 Gives grace and truth to Ufe's unquiet dream. 
 ...... 
 
 I vowed that I would dedicate my powers 
 
 To thee and thine — have I not kept the vow ? " 
 
 202
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 We pass now to a much-vexed question, a 
 question in the discussion of which more ink 
 has been spilt by the savants of Education than 
 on perhaps any other subject, the question of 
 Examinations, their use and abuse. 
 
 Of all the many ways in which men have 
 been divided, one of the most important is 
 the distinction between those who look to 
 the ideal and those who look to the actual. 
 In the realm of educational theory there are 
 those who hold fast to the position so nobly 
 adopted by Mr. Chadband towards the " human 
 boy." They know but little of him in flesh 
 and blood, being generally unmarried or child- 
 less, but they melt into the most mawkish 
 sentimentality at the sight of any of these 
 bright, interesting, and lively creatures. They 
 point out, truly enough, that much of our edu- 
 cational practice is based consciously or un- 
 consciously on the doctrine of original sin. 
 
 They depict, in colouring of the rosiest pink, 
 
 203
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 beatific innocence trailing its clouds of glory 
 after it, still haunted by radiant visions of a 
 lost Paradise, while joyous youth is in all 
 probability making faces at its admirers behind 
 their backs. Education for these our prophets 
 must be a primrose path, children must do 
 what they like, as they like. They must be 
 prepared for the hard school of Hfe, with its 
 cruel buffets and liofhtninof knock-out blows, 
 by a glorious apprenticeship of happy-go-lucky 
 butterflydom. 
 
 In the world of theories Metempsychosis is 
 the normal process. A century ago the prim- 
 rose path had even then its champions, and the 
 great Sir Walter broke a lance against them in 
 a passage of much interest to the historian of 
 Education. " I am aware," he says, " I may 
 here be reminded of the necessity of rendering 
 instruction agreeable to youth, and of Tasso's 
 infusion of honey into the medicine prepared 
 for a child ; but an age in which children are 
 taught the driest doctrines by the insinuating 
 method of instructive games has little reason 
 to dread the consequences of study being ren- 
 dered too serious or severe. The history of 
 England is now reduced to a game at cards — 
 the problems of Mathematics to puzzles and 
 
 riddles — and the doctrines of Arithmetic may, 
 
 204
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 we are assured, be sufficiently acquired by 
 spending a few hours a week at a new and 
 complicated edition of the Royal Game of 
 Goose." He describes only to condemn the 
 methods of Waverley,^ a boy of quick parts 
 but indolent disposition. " While he read for his 
 amusement he foresaw not that he was losing 
 for ever the opportunity of acquiring habits 
 of firm and assiduous application, of gaining 
 the art of controlling, directing, and concen- 
 trating the powers of his mind for earnest in- 
 vestigation." In reading such a passage as this, 
 or Newman's diverting description in one of 
 
 his University essays of Mr. B , who had 
 
 been brought up on similar lines, we recognise 
 the familiar face of a very modern doctrine. 
 
 Such a conception of youthful human nature 
 and of its proper training is often associated 
 with the doctrine that Education must be 
 mainly the development of character, a noble 
 view which, unhappily, being interpreted, 
 means that the boy plays games — in or out 
 of School — spends a certain number of hours 
 at his studies, listens to sundry admonitions, 
 perhaps attends sundry services, and leaves 
 School on the threshold of manhood with the 
 intellectual development of a Zulu, or the three 
 
 1 Waverley was Scott himself. 
 205
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 R's of those ancient Persians, whose educa- 
 tional accomplishments were limited to riding, 
 shooting, and telling the truth. Alas ! as 
 Euripides once lamented, that the gods have 
 given men no token of sincerity or of quackery. 
 Every cheapjack who is incapable of training 
 a pupil's mind, every Headmaster who cannot 
 make his boys work or is too indolent to 
 attempt the task, can prate of the superiority 
 of character to intellect. Doubtless, as far as 
 the antinomy does exist, character is superior 
 to intellect, but how often the doctrine is the 
 last refuge of the incompetent. More than 
 aught else do we need to get rid of our hor- 
 rible suspicion of the intellect, our craven dread 
 of ideas of all sorts, do we need to make a 
 clean sweep of the inefficients, who disguise 
 their ignorance and charlatanry, masquerading 
 in the guise of pioneers and reformers. An 
 Elizabethan Archbishop rightly justified his 
 love of a learned clergy when he said, that as 
 to their piety they might deceive him some- 
 times, as to their learning never. 
 
 The boy, then, as he is to those who know, 
 is not wholly innocent nor entirely perfect, but 
 a creature by reason of his very touch of earth 
 quite as charming as the figment of the vision- 
 ary's imagination. He is resigned to the in- 
 
 206
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 evitable, and performs his tasks if his masters 
 insist ; he is interested in his work up to a 
 point, but he has no liking for the drudgery 
 which is essential to all achievement and to all 
 progress.^ It is a characteristic of us all upon 
 occasion. The most ardent of Headmasters, 
 who finds his labours a sport and his work a 
 pleasure, would not submit to the soulless task 
 of compiling Board of Education returns except 
 under dire necessity. Some stimulus, some in- 
 centive, must be found both for the man and 
 for the boy so similarly circumstanced. It may 
 be fear of punishment, or, better, hope of a 
 reward, but few will submit to the dust and 
 discipline without the hope of winning the 
 palm. It is that last infirmity of noble mind 
 — and of ignoble matter. 
 
 Thus would the cynicism of forty, brought at 
 last by hard experience to accept the facts of 
 life, reply to those who seek to make Educa- 
 tion merely interesting. Learning may not be 
 a desert with a few oases, but it is a journey 
 through many an arid tract, with only occa- 
 sional green meadows and smiling gardens, 
 with only a few view-points of the land of 
 promise, which ever lies so far before it. It 
 
 ^ There are "swots," of course, but the very word sufficiently 
 indicates the boy's normal attitude towards learning. 
 
 207
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 is a journey to the realms of gold indeed, but 
 the traveller arrives wearied and footsore, and 
 there is need of much encouragement by the 
 way. By the rack of his brain as well as by 
 the sweat of his brow must man win his hard- 
 won livelihood. 
 
 So much by way of prelude. Assuming that 
 in any educational system there must be tests 
 of learning, and that these tests are necessarily 
 matters of great importance, we will now con- 
 sider what should be the principles underlying 
 any system of examination. 
 
 Those who believe that the State should 
 play some part, though perhaps not the only 
 part, in any educational system, would naturally 
 hold that School examinations should above all 
 be State-controlled. Diversity of method there 
 must and should be, and none should be pro- 
 scribed. All good methods should, however, 
 fulfil one common end, that of producing 
 scholars well grounded in the subjects of their 
 study. The State might therefore rightly test 
 the different methods, and its Examiners would 
 naturally in their reports point out what 
 methods appear to be most successful, what 
 least. There is room certainly for standardi- 
 sation in attainment, though not in methods, 
 and a State-organisation should be particularly 
 
 208
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 well fitted for carrying out an elaborate system 
 embracing the whole country, and the informa- 
 tion gained as to the attainments of all the 
 Secondary pupils of England would form a 
 highly valuable census. It would be possible 
 roughly to adopt a uniform system of Form 
 nomenclature, and we should escape the 
 scandal of a system, or lack of system, in which 
 a Headmaster styles a Form a Sixth Form 
 which would not be a Fourth Form in a 
 School with a reasonable standard of attain- 
 ments. 
 
 Even here rigidity must not be too severe. 
 It should be possible for individual Schools, 
 which were able to incur the additional ex- 
 pense, to submit syllabuses of their own of 
 equal difficulty, but on different lines. Some 
 member of the examining staff should visit 
 each School and discuss both before and after 
 the examination all matters and problems con- 
 nected with it. The Examiners should be ex- 
 teachers of long experience, and should meet 
 together, not merely to set the papers and to 
 prepare the class lists, but also periodically 
 to deliberate upon modifications of syllabus, to 
 confer with bodies representing actual teachers, 
 and to interchange views on such matters. A 
 teacher might be allowed to send up at the 
 
 209 o
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 time of the examination a list of his pupils 
 in order of merit, which could be compared 
 with the actual examination order. It would 
 not necessarily follow that the teacher's order 
 would be the correct one, though it should 
 be in most cases. Undoubtedly the final 
 decision would be left with the Examiners, 
 who would roughly remind us upon occasion 
 that all our geese were not swans. 
 
 Another question which at once arises is, 
 What is the basis of the examination ? Literary, 
 to our mind, rather than oral. We wish to 
 train our pupils to use their own language 
 with care and precision, and they must there- 
 fore set down their views and knowledge on 
 paper. The written word is a far more 
 powerful instrument of mental development 
 than the spoken word. The most highly 
 cultivated persons are less particular in the 
 expression of their thoughts in conversation 
 than they should be, and ordinary colloquial 
 language is an appalling medium for the 
 conveying of ideas. Our mother-tongue is a 
 language which dies daily. We have fallen 
 from the King's English to Heaven knows 
 whose lingo. Jargon and verbiage, slang 
 and sloppiness, tyrannise over us ; we are 
 satisfied with the baldest expression of our 
 
 2IO
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 views ; ^ we are content with the most slipshod 
 approximation to our meaning ; our sentences 
 break up in the middle and teem with ana- 
 coluthon and aposiopesis, and we are guilty in 
 every twenty-four hours of a whole Newgate 
 Calendar of linguistic crimes. Such a debased 
 idiom is English as it is spoken. 
 
 Of course the adoption of the written test 
 will handicap the glib, ready boy, who is 
 devoid of nervousness and who grasps every- 
 thing as quickly as he lets go of it. But we 
 wish to discover the sound intellects, the re- 
 tentive memories, the boys who grasp what 
 they have learnt, and do not forget it within 
 three weeks. An examination is like a cricket 
 match. Many who perform wonders at the 
 nets cut a poor figure "in the middle." For- 
 tunately after an examination the rejected can 
 always abuse the umpire, a proceeding which 
 our national pastime frowns upon. 
 
 From the circumstance that the examina- 
 tion is mainly literary, will follow that the 
 preparation will not be merely oral, as it is 
 in so many Schools. There will be frequent 
 tests of the pupil's knowledge on paper during 
 the School year. From these tests all will 
 
 1 W^itness the terrible phrase " sort of" prefixed to a verb, 
 paralleled by the more plebeian " like." 
 
 211
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 in some measure acquire a power of getting 
 to essentials, a faculty of expressing concisely 
 and clearly what they know, of giving — such 
 a rare literary phenomenon — a plain answer 
 to a plain question. Power over one's own 
 language will be considerably developed, and 
 Composition will be taught better by this 
 method than by any other. ^ 
 
 It goes without saying that even if different 
 examining bodies should continue to exist, 
 they would each enjoy separate spheres of 
 influence. A salutary rule would be one 
 School, one examination — at any rate for each 
 separate grade of attainment existing in a 
 School. Schools would be discouraged from 
 sending in the same boys for more than one 
 examination during the School year. The 
 boys presented for examination should be boys 
 of not less than an average age of fifteen, 
 and the examination should always be the test 
 of a whole Form's work, and not of specially 
 selected boys. 
 
 The various examining bodies initiated a 
 work of reform at a time when it was sorely 
 needed, and when there existed no other 
 
 *■ The Historical Association recently denounced written 
 examinations in History. I can only describe the Associa- 
 tion's attitude as silly beyond conception. 
 
 212
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 bodies able and willing to do the work. They 
 possessed an academic standing and an im- 
 partiality which were above question, and they 
 achieved a right of entry into Schools where 
 any attempt at State interference would at 
 that time have been hotly resented, even had 
 the State felt itself able to undertake the 
 duty. The fact that some of their methods 
 have been susceptible of abuse, or that it is 
 possible now to see how some things might 
 have been better done, does not detract from 
 the merit of those who gave their energies to 
 remove the evils which they saw around them. 
 The more extended use of competitive exami- 
 nations had in many ways a beneficial influence 
 upon English education, stimulating the ener- 
 gies of many individual teachers and pupils, 
 and delivering some Schools from torpor and 
 indolence. 
 
 I must now inform the reader that the views 
 set forth in the last paragraph are mine, but 
 their expression is a literal transcript of the 
 judgment of that Consultative Committee of 
 the Board of Education which has recently 
 condemned examinations so severely.^ No 
 arguments in favour of examinations can be 
 put more forcibly than this Committee has 
 
 ^ " Report on Examinations in Secondary Schools," pp. 28, 70. 
 
 213
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 put them. It only remains for me to expand 
 and to emphasize them. 
 
 He who wishes to get some conception of 
 the fearful condition of "middle-class" edu- 
 cation fifty or sixty years ago, can find it 
 forcibly described in "Friendship's Garland" 
 and other works of Matthew Arnold. Pre- 
 tentious, fraudulent, quack-like, covering with 
 stucco sham its interior of lath and plaster. 
 Dr. Archimedes Silverpump's Academy had 
 neither the dignity nor the intellectual stimulus 
 of the great Public Schools, and could offer 
 little in their place. It was the golden age 
 of the Blimber or the Squeers, and there was 
 no one with authoritative claims to appraise 
 their merits. At length in 1858 the University 
 of Oxford, followed soon by the sister Uni- 
 versity, established a series of examinations 
 at local centres. Since that date it has always 
 been possible to test in some ways the claims 
 made by any School to a high standard of 
 intellectual attainment. Schools have willingly 
 submitted themselves to these tests, and have 
 profited much by learning how their pupils 
 compared with pupils of a similar age else- 
 where, and by ascertaining what standard of 
 attainment in the opinion of a University 
 
 should be reached in various subjects by pupils 
 
 214
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 of a given age. Where failures have resulted, 
 the inquiry into the reasons of failure has often 
 led to the discovery of flaws in organisation or 
 in teachinof. 
 
 A healthy influence has also been exercised 
 on Education by the change from selection by 
 patronage to selection by open competition in 
 the appointment of Civil Servants. " The 
 effect," to quote Lord Morley's words,^ "of 
 such a change has been enormous, not only 
 on the efficiency of the service, but on the 
 education of the country, and by a thousand 
 indirect influences, raising and strengthening 
 the social feeling for the immortal maxim that 
 the career should be open to the talents. The 
 lazy doctrine that men are much of a muchness 
 gave way to a higher respect for merit, and to 
 more effectual standards of competency." 
 
 One will admit at once that it seems strange 
 at first sight that one man may get a Civil 
 Service post because he is one mark ahead 
 of another. But the fact remains that there 
 is only one place for two candidates. In cases 
 of such close order I would have no objection 
 to the adoption of the time-honoured method 
 of tossing up, or of the scriptural practice of 
 casting lots, but the results would be equally 
 
 1 "Life of Gladstone," i. 510. 
 215
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 unsatisfactory to the defeated candidate. Better, 
 far better, to appoint a man because he is a 
 mark ahead of his rival than because he is 
 a cousin of somebody, or tlie son of the butler 
 of a noble lord, the old, vicious, and oligar- 
 chic system which examinations swept away. 
 
 Any stone will serve for an educationist in 
 a hurry, and many are the arguments which 
 have been used against examinations and 
 examining bodies. That their certificates are 
 not interchangeable, that Schools are forced 
 unwillingly to take examinations which there 
 should be no need to take, that picked pupils 
 are sent in but the rest neglected, that the 
 same boy is put in again and again for the 
 same examination to gain prizes, that the 
 system leads to advertisement, to cramming, 
 and to severe physical strain ; these are all 
 criticisms which have been levelled aoainst 
 existing arrangements. These are charges 
 which, if well founded, should certainly suggest 
 a reformation of the system, but not neces- 
 sarily its abolition. The objections that 
 selected pupils only are sent in, that success- 
 ful Schools indulge in vulgar and exaggerated 
 advertisement, are matters that might, as 
 things now stand, be easily dealt with as 
 
 matters of professional ethics by a Com- 
 
 216
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 mittee of Headmasters, or by a determined 
 Board of Education ; for most of these abuses, 
 where they exist, exist mainly in Schools 
 inspected by the Board. A few scathing 
 reports to the Governors of such Schools 
 dealing with the errors of those responsible 
 for these evils would soon put an end to the 
 use of examinations for commercial purposes ; 
 for no member of a learned profession likes 
 to be branded as a tradesman or a vulgarian, 
 especially when he has a sneaking suspicion 
 that the stigma is well merited. All certi- 
 ficates should count pro tanto, and this con- 
 summation is being gradually attained. We 
 cannot reasonably expect that different Uni- 
 versities will never have different views as 
 to the terms on which students should be 
 admitted within their portals, or that Cam- 
 bridge may not expect proficiency in different 
 subjects from those which Bristol demands. 
 The two Universities may vary as widely in 
 their standard for entrance as in their standard 
 for Honorary Degrees.^ 
 
 For other evils the best remedy is without 
 
 ' The reader is invited to compare the names of those 
 deemed worthy of such honour at Oxford or Cambridge or 
 London, at any time during the last ten years, with those with 
 which the University of Bristol made its debut and set the 
 world aghast. 
 
 217
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 doubt the development of a higher standard 
 of ethics in the profession, chiefly by attract- 
 ing as many highly qualified men as possible 
 into it. The man of high intellectual gifts 
 will generally, one may hope, pay that careful 
 attention to detail which examinations, like all 
 proper tests, demand, but he will never harness 
 his immortal soul to any examination syllabus. 
 Whatever he teaches he will teach carefully 
 and thoroughly ; but he will not condescend to 
 sacrifice his own individuality for any number 
 of distinctions, however brilliant. We must 
 endeavour to work out our own salvation. 
 Some of us, we are told, have no moral back- 
 bone. If that is so, we must endeavour to 
 develop our own strength of will, not call upon 
 some mightier external power to save us from 
 ourselves and to compel us into virtue. There 
 are possibilities of moral progress in the one 
 method, there are none in the other. 
 
 There is no measure in many of the criti- 
 cisms. A case is quoted of a girl who took 
 five examinations in one year, and then wish- 
 ing to become a teacher found that she must 
 take yet another. We shall not scruple to 
 throw to the wolves to tear and rend the 
 girl's Headmistress, who plainly did not know 
 
 her business, but must add that we ourselves 
 
 218
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 have had no personal experience of Schools 
 in which such excesses of examinationism are 
 tolerated, and would certainly never permit 
 them in our own. One examination will 
 generally secure any desired exemption, pro- 
 vided, of course, that the proper number of 
 subjects are taken and that the candidate 
 passes in all. Like many other Headmasters, 
 we would obdurately refuse to disintegrate our 
 School by preparing for a host of different 
 yet similar examinations. In our profession 
 a little resolution goes a long way, and timely 
 firmness would generally put a summary 
 conclusion to the dreadful imaginings which 
 beset the nerveless Principal. Indeed, the 
 Consultative Committee admit with perceptible 
 regret that they did not find such an exces- 
 sive recourse to examinations as they had 
 expected. 
 
 The charge that examinations lead to phy- 
 sical strain was found not proven in the case 
 of boys. '* Probably the average boy has a 
 greater power of resistance to pressure than 
 the average girl. Johnson long ago remarked 
 that a boy cannot be taught faster than he 
 will learn." ^ If that was so in the days of the 
 rod, it is still more true in the days of moral 
 
 ^ Report, p. 95. 
 219
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 suasion. The evidence as to over-strain re- 
 lated chiefly to girls, who are probably " at 
 once more ambitious and conscientious." 
 
 To what, then, are due the criticisms of 
 examination ? The criticisms emanate chiefly 
 from four types : the unsuccessful examinee, 
 the indolent teacher, the crank, and the 
 feminist. 
 
 The first class araue that examinations are 
 no tests, because they themselves have failed 
 to gain appreciation. It is distressing to find 
 the world unregardful, but it is the fate of all 
 at different times. The writer has had his 
 reverses, but he picked himself up and en- 
 deavoured to abuse the umpires as little as 
 possible, a sound, if somewhat unpretentious 
 policy. Examinations as intellectual tests, and 
 they do not claim to be more, are far more 
 often than not confirmed in later years by 
 achievements in life's hurly-burly. 
 
 How else can the indolent schoolmaster 
 
 save his face than by blaming the examiner ? 
 
 We all at times receive "facers," when pupils 
 
 of whom we have expected much disappoint. 
 
 But upon reflection we generally find that 
 
 there were flaws in our favourites which we 
 
 in our easy optimism had passed over, and had 
 
 hoped that others would pass over, but flaws 
 
 220
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 which were magnified only too clearly under 
 the remorseless microscope of the examiner. 
 If we have done our best, we say no more ; 
 but if we have an uneasy feeling that we have 
 neglected this matter or been careless in that, 
 conscience compels us to hang some one, and 
 the examiner makes vicarious atonement. 
 
 The crank is of necessity sworn foe of 
 any system which casts too brilliant a search- 
 light upon the deficiencies of his system. The 
 crank is one who sees everything out of per- 
 spective. He exaggerates the importance of 
 some principle, good probably in itself, and 
 teaches his subject badly through concentrat- 
 ing on one point and neglecting all else. He 
 is thrilled with pleasure as he rides his 
 hobby ; suddenly confronted with an examina- 
 tion hurdle, he puts his unpractised steed to 
 it — and abruptly finds himself resting un- 
 pleasantly and at full length, on terra firma at 
 last. He recovers self-esteem in time, but 
 ** never again ! " The burnt child always 
 dreads the fire. 
 
 It is one of the hardest lessons that a 
 teacher has to learn, the harder the better 
 his intellectual equipment, the more richly 
 stored his mind, that the capacity of the 
 adolescent's intellect is limited, " vitse summa 
 
 221
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam." ^ The 
 teacher sets forth, if we may use again our 
 former metaphor, on a journey somewhere with 
 his host of pupils ; but as he journeys on he 
 passes byways of attractive lure, he perceives 
 hills in the distance whose recesses he would 
 fain explore, whose heights he would fain 
 scale, fair Siren forms bid him stay by the way 
 and take refreshment, but with deaf ears and 
 half-shut eyes he passes on, though sore beset, 
 for his goal is somewhere, not the mirages of 
 Cloudcuckooland. The half is greater than the 
 whole, and in a book of Virgil, or a hundred 
 years of a nation's history, in a few proposi- 
 tions of Geometry, or a dozen experiments in 
 Chemistry, the true teacher can find lessons 
 of profoundest import, and can soon shake off 
 the shackles of a syllabus. 
 
 For the educational enthusiast knows little of 
 Psychology, though the word is ever on his 
 lips. The spade, not the sponge, is the symbol 
 of our labours. We read one hundred pages 
 in an hour, one book of Virgil or a speech of 
 Cicero in forty minutes, we absorb facts and 
 ideas through our pores. We are masters in 
 some sense of the world and all its history, 
 we exult in all the opulence of modern life, 
 
 ; i Life's short span forbids us to cherish hopes unbounded. 
 
 222
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 that overpoweringly rich fabric which Litera- 
 ture, Science, and Art have wrought for us, 
 the heritage of many generations. We love to 
 trace things in all their bearings, we know 
 that everything has some significance and 
 some connexion with everything, mysteriously 
 intertwined. And we love to unravel these con- 
 nexions, subtle and profound in turn, and still 
 we forget that our hearers are not yet intel- 
 lectual gymnasts, that our tender fledglings 
 cannot soar so strongly on the wing, that 
 when we whirl them with the rush of an 
 express o'er hill and dale, past lake and 
 mountain, their vision is merely blurred by 
 the succession of rapid images, and that at 
 the end of the trip which we have so vastly 
 enjoyed, our victims will be merely unbearably 
 tired, possessed of scarcely one definite mental 
 impression of all the miles of countryside that 
 have rushed past them. The mind has its 
 retina too, and requires its -^^ of a second for 
 a proper appreciation of things. Fourteen and 
 forty must needs move at different paces. 
 We need not be afraid to be definite and 
 precise, bare and humdrum as our lessons 
 may appear to the teeming fancy of that most 
 delightful discourser, Professor Gorgias. 
 
 Above all, then, the teacher must avoid the 
 
 223
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 showman's tricks, must shun that delusive 
 exaltation engendered of unbridled exuberance 
 poured out upon a defenceless class. Point 
 de zele, no airiness. Let our listeners walk 
 before they run, and run before they fly. In 
 securing such an end even an examination 
 syllabus may play its humble part. No School 
 need, after all, blush to be the home of those 
 who know ; thinking may, and will, we hope, 
 come afterwards. Feeding precedes digestion ; 
 the receptive faculties must develop before the 
 creative. 
 
 The teacher and the business-like parent 
 concur for once in their attitude towards exa- 
 minations. The parent of this type, being 
 under no delusion as to his son's character, 
 does not credit him with virtues which are 
 foreign to him. He knows what the enthu- 
 siast ignores, that his boy requires some 
 stimulus, some incentive to steady application, 
 and he remembers the days of his own boy- 
 hood. For once he is right, and ideals must 
 yield to common sense. 
 
 The feminist objects to examinations, be- 
 cause they reveal with brutal candour woman's 
 physical and intellectual handicap. Reasons 
 of physiology prevent a girl of sixteen from 
 
 attaining the standard of a boy of fifteen with- 
 
 224
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 out a prodigious expenditure of both physical 
 and mental effort, without undergoing a strain 
 which finds no parallel in the boy. Every 
 boy, even the most diligent, has a disregard 
 of " grind " and a lack of scrupulosity which 
 arouse a sneaking sympathy in the master's 
 heart, but which curiously compare with the 
 hypersensitive if not slavish conscientiousness 
 of the girl, who almost kills herself in frantic 
 endeavours to complete tasks beyond her 
 powers. In subjects such as English she 
 learns so fully her editor's notes and her 
 teacher's dicta, and she reproduces them so 
 laboriously, that she is perhaps a better exa- 
 mination candidate than the boy, but in sub- 
 jects like Mathematics or Latin Prose, which 
 demand highly developed powers of reasoning, 
 she is confronted with obstacles that she can 
 rarely overcome. It must be admitted that 
 the condemnation of girls to take the same 
 examinations at the same age as boys is one 
 of the greatest of those wrongs to women 
 of which we often hear. However, we are 
 confronted with the probability that if pro- 
 posals were made to institute an entirely 
 different examination system for girls, woman, 
 with some lack of logic, would at once denounce 
 
 this differential treatment as a slur upon her. 
 
 225 p
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 What alternative is there to the examination 
 system which will not land us back again in 
 the morasses of nepotism ? Some would make 
 a School record the deciding factor, a slightly- 
 improved form of the testimonial system. But 
 we gain a doubtful aid from a system which 
 records in a book every idle deed and every 
 thoughtless act, if it is to be really complete, 
 yet has no recording angel to erase its tale of 
 venial offences with a tear, as the pious pro- 
 fanity of the immortal Uncle Toby was once 
 blotted from remembrance. On the other hand, 
 if only the grossest offences are recorded, we 
 are no better off than we were, for no Head- 
 master willingly describes any of his pupils as 
 undesirables or " scallywags." Many people 
 have, with Cecil Rhodes, desired to lay stress 
 on the need of character, as well as, or instead 
 of, intellect. We grant the importance of 
 character, but the difficulties of character esti- 
 mates are seldom appreciated. On the small 
 stage of School few boys reveal their capa- 
 bilities in so clear a light that a prediction of 
 their future development in character, or even 
 in intellect, can be made with invariable accu- 
 racy of prevision. It is scant kindness to 
 a boy to brand him as the most virtuous boy 
 
 in a School ; and let it be remembered, on the 
 
 226
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 other side, that we may describe a person 
 as a duffer, but if we declare him a villain 
 we come within the ambit of the law of libel. 
 The greatest virtue of examinations is indeed 
 that they give us a rough idea of a boy's 
 attainments, and that is all that they profess 
 to do. Any person whose fortune it has been 
 to read a few hundred testimonials knows with 
 what relief we turn to a man's academic record 
 after reading the glowing panegyrics of his 
 supporters, and many a time must we ponder 
 over that mysterious dispensation by which 
 the enthusiasm of a man's backers is in inverse 
 proportion to his academic achievements. In 
 life as we find it, however, it is not true that 
 all men of wide intellectual interests and 
 high intellectual capacity have been awarded 
 Second Classes.^ There are exceptions, and 
 not all would like to be judged by their ex- 
 amination records. But in the scholastic world, 
 at any rate, those who disregard examinations 
 are taking a lOO to i chance in their dis- 
 favour. Let them beware of welshers. 
 
 The outcry against examinations is especially 
 unfortunate at a time when so many small and 
 
 ^ A recent writer in the " A.M. A." declares that Education 
 requires big men, not brains. That writer gained a Double 
 Third at Oxford. And are the grapes so sour ? 
 
 227
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 new Schools are in existence. Inspectors come 
 round periodically and speak indulgently of the 
 bantlings which they themselves have cradled, 
 but a School needs something more than this 
 delusive patronage. It needs to become ac- 
 quainted with the standards of attainment, 
 which are possible elsewhere, and it needs to 
 compare its own standards yearly with these 
 other standards, and to ascertain whether it 
 is progressing or standing still. Again, the 
 examination tests the individual, not the class, 
 and it is absurd to put the Inspector's esti- 
 mate of a class's work, based on the haphazard 
 questionings of a few boys, beside the elaborate 
 testing of the work of each of the boys of whom 
 the class is composed. One of the most valu- 
 able things in the ** Local " system is the 
 detailed information given as to the work of 
 each candidate in each subject, and his work 
 is classed as distinguished, good, moderately 
 good, pass, failure, bad failure. It is such in- 
 formation that Schoolmasters require. The 
 ideologue, however, ignores all this, and prob- 
 ably does so because he is simply and entirely, 
 being a theorist, ignorant of such a point of view.^ 
 
 ^ Mr. F. H. Colson {Times, Educational Supplement, Feb- 
 ruary 191 2) fully deals with this matter. I agree almost entirely 
 with his conclusions. 
 
 228
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 There are some psychologists, on the other 
 hand, who think it Hkely that the intel- 
 lectual tests of the future will be still more 
 frequent, more searching, but perhaps more 
 scientific/ Though a man is more than a 
 phrase, and a mind more than a decimal, even 
 if carried to its fifth place, it would be unwise 
 to deny that the "intellective indices" of a 
 boy or man will be an important factor in the 
 estimate formed of his capacity. In fact, the 
 advanced guard who are now engaged in one 
 of their periodical denunciations of examina- 
 tions may find, as so often happens in the 
 world of Education, that the line of advance 
 has suddenly changed, and that they must 
 perforce bring up the rear. 
 
 Examination statistics, like all other sta- 
 tistics, need careful handling. For example, 
 before forming a judgment upon a School's 
 success in any particular year, one needs to 
 know whether whole Forms were presented 
 for examination or merely picked pupils ; 
 whether the boys in question were older or 
 younger than the average candidate through- 
 out the country ; whether the year's results 
 are exceptional or averagely good ; whether 
 the proportion of boys who are up to the 
 
 ^ Dr. Hayward, " Educational Aims and Methods." 
 
 229
 
 DIDASCALUS PATTENS 
 
 examination standards is high compared with 
 the number of boys in the School ; whether 
 most boys merely pass or gain Honours or 
 First Classes, and how, again, the proportion 
 of Honours gained compares with the pro- 
 portion of candidates throughout the country 
 who gain Honours or First Classes. After 
 these elaborate calculations have been per- 
 formed — calculations which are, of course, be- 
 yond the powers of the man in the street — 
 the results will furnish much valuable informa- 
 tion to the expert. The man in the street, 
 I fear, must be left to his own ignorance. 
 Whether a boy gains a " Senior Local " First 
 Class or a high First at Oxford, or a Fourth in 
 Responsions, he has to his sympathetic ad- 
 mirers merely "passed his Exam.," the only 
 phrase they know. But this does not neces- 
 sarily condemn examination statistics. If we 
 condemn such statistical exercises as have 
 been just described, what must our censure of 
 Whitehall statistics be ? Will the hierarchs 
 of Mr. Pease dare to throw the first stone ? 
 
 Examinations have been condemned more 
 or less comprehensively and vigorously in the 
 resolutions of many bodies. But it is the 
 defect of our profession that we will give any 
 resolution our benison to avoid hurting any 
 
 230
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 man's feelings, provided that we need not act 
 upon it. The number of those attending meet- 
 ings of the various associations is very small, 
 and those present have certainly no mandate 
 from the absent ones to deal with any question. 
 The only possible method of eliciting the pro- 
 fession's views is that of the questionnaire, and 
 this method ought to be adopted in all matters 
 of importance. An inquiry made more than 
 two years ago showed that Headmasters were 
 very lukewarm, to say the least, on the matter, 
 and did not seem to groan under the tyranny 
 of the system very loudly. It is unfortunate 
 that the Assistant Masters' Association have 
 denounced with such indisciplined ardour the 
 examination system, as their action might give 
 rise to the impression that the Association 
 merely desired that its members might have an 
 easy time. In spite of the vote of perhaps two 
 hundred members, I do not believe that the 
 majority of Assistant Masters desire any very 
 radical change in the system, provided that 
 they have not to prepare their pupils for five 
 examinations in one year, if we must quote the 
 favourite example of the critics. 
 
 Some general principles on which the con- 
 duct of examinations must be based have 
 already been suggested. Non Utopias fingo. 
 
 231
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 I have ceased to dream dreams, and am not 
 old enough to see visions ; but perhaps it 
 remains to make some suggestions in view 
 of the present situation. It appears possible 
 that the Board of Education may in time 
 secure the dominating control of Secondary 
 Education. It is therefore desirable that, just 
 as in everyday life we have Judges to protect 
 us from the impositions of the Executive, so 
 we must have an independent examining body, 
 whose decisions may in some degree serve to 
 correct the arbitrary judgments of Whitehall. 
 These bodies will fitly be the Universities 
 Oxford, Cambridge, and London, and in time 
 to come the still more modern ones ; and 
 nothing can be better than that the Uni- 
 versities should come into close contact with 
 Secondary Education, and by imposing high 
 standards of attainment promote its continuous 
 advance. The ancient Universities, with their 
 prestige and experience, will still play the 
 leading part in examining work, and the 
 modern fin de siecle Universities, which are 
 in danger of developing into mere Schools of 
 Technical Instruction, may find it difiicult to 
 appropriate to themselves a local sphere of 
 influence, much as they may desire it. At any 
 
 rate, Schools must be free to decide whether 
 
 232
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 they will be examined by a territorial or by 
 a national university. It would be a great 
 misfortune for a School in the Bristol area, 
 for instance, to be forced under the domination 
 of that University^ — which circularises indeed 
 periodically all Schools within fifty miles 
 radius — even though, if we may judge from 
 the standard of the honorary degree, the ex- 
 aminations would present few terrors for the 
 worst prepared candidate. 
 
 Such an independent authority will still 
 more be needed. A School which has been 
 doing satisfactory work can now appeal to 
 the evidence of examinations if charges of 
 inefficiency are brought against it, and justify 
 itself at any rate before the tribunal of pro- 
 fessional or public opinion. The official, 
 whether he be an educationist, an Inland 
 Revenue agent, or a valuer, requires some 
 bridle of his zeal. On the other hand, if the 
 Board of Education really desired to gain 
 some insight, not merely into the methods 
 adopted in Schools, but also into their success, 
 
 ^ The objections to such a University are briefly, that by its 
 instrument of government it has been made merely a glorified 
 Municipal School, that though a University should be self- 
 governing, a Council of laymen dominates it, that the tenure 
 of its staff is precarious. The conferring of honorary degrees 
 which caused such scandal was the act of this Council. 
 
 ^2>Z
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 it would do well to scrutinise occasionally the 
 performances of particular Schools in external 
 examinations. The Consultative Committee 
 point out with cruel candour the uselessness 
 of recognition by the Board/ " As absence 
 from the list may be due to such totally dis- 
 tinct causes, it does not in itself convey much 
 information to the public. Further, even the 
 inclusion of a school's name in the list, and 
 the consequent mention of this fact in the 
 school prospectus, supply the public only with 
 rather limited information. It assures a parent 
 that the school has reached a certain standard 
 fixed by the Board. But of the relative 
 value of the different schools on the list it 
 tells him nothing. Further, for all he knows, 
 the school may be practically inefficient, and 
 already threatened with removal from the 
 list." Curiously enough in the one matter in 
 which the State could have done yeoman 
 service to Secondary Education by the estab- 
 lishment of a proper examination system, it 
 has shown a magnificent disregard of co- 
 operation and correlation. The examinations 
 for entry into the Civil Service have, as the 
 recent report of the Royal Commission points 
 out, had no regard for the curriculum and 
 
 1 Report, p. 86.
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 organisation of Schools, and instead of giving 
 practical assistance to Education by framing 
 syllabuses which might harmonise with that 
 system of Education over which the State 
 now exercises such wide supervisory powers, 
 have favoured private enterprise and flung 
 their prospective employees into the arms of 
 crammers, who really deserved that much- 
 abused title. It is indeed, as has well been 
 said, "an anomaly of the first magnitude that 
 the Civil Service Commissioners should be 
 allowed to carry on their guerilla operations 
 without interference on the flank, so to speak, 
 of the educational system of the country. 
 Their examinations dictate courses of study 
 and impose standards of value which are 
 wholly unconnected with the economy of the 
 Schools." If the various examinations for 
 Intermediate Appointments be abolished, and 
 examinations for candidates of the age of six- 
 teen and eighteen respectively be substituted, 
 the State will for once have done much to 
 assist the Secondary School. 
 
 Few teachers object to the examination of 
 their pupils by an external authority. Exami- 
 nations induce the teacher "to treat his sub- 
 ject thoroughly ; they make him so arrange 
 his lessons as to cover with intellectual 
 
 235
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 thoroughness a prescribed course of study 
 within appointed limits of time ; they impel him 
 to pay attention not only to his best pupils, 
 but also to the backward and the slower 
 amongst those who are being prepared for 
 the examination ; they make him acquainted 
 with the standard which other teachers and 
 their pupils are able to reach in the same 
 subject in other places of education."^ One 
 knows exactly where one is, and yet one's 
 supremacy in the class-room still remains un- 
 challenged, whereas examining one's own 
 pupils is like auditing one's own accounts. 
 Dr. Paton is afraid that the freedom of the 
 teacher may be impaired. " The external ex- 
 amination imposes upon the school a rigid 
 curriculum of a nature almost entirely bookish, 
 which prevents the school from developing on 
 its own lines. ... It also effectually prevents 
 the special cultivation of some leading subject, 
 which in the hands of a specially qualified 
 and enthusiastic head teacher might be made 
 focal to the whole curriculum, and infuse all 
 the other subjects with a contagious spirit of 
 purpose and interest."^ We hope that the 
 Board will note the need of freedom for the 
 
 ^ " Report on Examinations," p. 103. 
 " Report, p. 78. 
 
 236
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 teacher, so ably emphasized by a persona grata, 
 but these criticisms certainly do not apply to 
 the syllabuses of Oxford and Cambridge, which 
 range between the wide limits of Spanish, 
 Dutch, and Esperanto, Biology and Mechanical 
 Drawing. The rigidity of which he complains 
 is found in the syllabuses of the Lancashire 
 and other County Councils — in other words, 
 of amateurs who have no business to meddle 
 with the work of examining. It may also be 
 doubted whether any School, particularly if it 
 is of small size, should be allowed to be a 
 School of one subject, especially if its pupils 
 are wont to leave early. 
 
 The examination system will not do any 
 pioneer work in educational theory. That is 
 not its function, but rather to test the working 
 of theories in practice. Its task is to follow 
 slightly behind educational opinion, adjusting 
 its syllabuses and its organisation in harmony 
 with the views of the most competent teachers. 
 Still it must follow, not lag behind, and Ex- 
 aminers will therefore hold frequent confer- 
 ences with teachers, and will themselves also 
 be ex-teachers of ripe experience in every 
 case. They will not themselves receive the 
 experimenter with open arms, but their maxim 
 will be "securus iudicat orbis terrarum." And 
 
 237
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 when the educational world, or any consider- 
 able fraction of it, has decided that a method 
 is worth trying, the Examiner will at once 
 proceed to test the method, accommodating 
 the new prophet in all things as far as may 
 be, yet insisting firmly but kindly that he 
 must take his place upon the operating table 
 and submit to a test rigorous but unbiased 
 and impersonal. 
 
 Public opinion will slowly but persistently 
 make for simplicity instead of multiplicity, and 
 all schools will do what all wise Headmasters 
 do now, and insist on their pupils taking 
 one sort of examination in different grades at 
 different ages, and gaining exemption, if need 
 be, from other examinations by success in the 
 one School examination. Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge might be persuaded to join forces, as 
 they have done with such success in the joint 
 Boards Examination, and the coalition would 
 probably dominate the examination system. 
 With a large number of candidates it would 
 be possible to pay the chief Examiner's high 
 fees, and to secure men of great ability and 
 professional experience, but University Dons 
 who had had no experience in teaching would 
 be excluded. Here once ag-ain the ex-teacher 
 
 would have a very important role to play. 
 
 238
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 The Examiner would have had a long ex- 
 perience of boys, and would make it his aim, 
 as it is the aim of most Examiners at present, 
 to discover what his candidates knew rather 
 than what they did not know. He has no 
 desire to trick his candidates, and he will see 
 that they do not trick him. Even at present, 
 as far as the writer's experience extends, there 
 is very little to complain of as to the quality 
 of the papers set. The papers are nearly 
 always a fair test of the work done, and if 
 the boy fails it is his own fault. The writer 
 has frequently acted as Examiner, and knows 
 that an Examiner is above all anxious to pre- 
 serve a continuity of standard. He does not 
 set startlingly new questions, however much 
 he might desire to do so, as the results, though 
 perhaps excellent in the long run, would be 
 disastrous at that examination. He is there- 
 fore generally humdrum, and is perhaps abused 
 for being so, but he prefers the lancet to the 
 tomahawk. 
 
 One desirable reform which is perhaps past 
 praying for is that, despite the Maenads and 
 their outcry, no girl be allowed after some 
 future date to take the present examinations, 
 but that a system of examinations organised 
 and entirely managed by women be substituted. 
 
 239
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 The fact that girls take examinations originally 
 
 intended only for boys is a great hardship for 
 
 girls, and involves the great danger for boys 
 
 that the insistent outcry of women-teachers for 
 
 a lowering of the standard may be successful. 
 
 There is no reason why such a newly-created 
 
 system should not prove highly satisfactory. It 
 
 would be a step toward the prayer of Lilia in 
 
 " The Princess " : 
 
 " O I wish 
 That I were some great princess ! I would build 
 Far off from men a college like a man's, 
 And I would teach them all that men are taught. 
 We are twice as quick." 
 
 No argument has been advanced that con- 
 vinces me that any harm is done to boys by 
 submitting them to a test at the age of fifteen 
 and to another at the age of sixteen, the latter 
 corresponding to what is known as " Matricula- 
 tion " standard. With proper teaching and a 
 proper spirit of work, boys of normal intelli- 
 gence will reach this standard at the age of 
 sixteen. If the boy is working for a Scholar- 
 ship at the University, or for a Civil Service 
 appointment, he will need no further test for 
 two years. If he has no very definite aims, 
 he will likewise need no test. He has reached 
 
 a certain standard ; he has worked, perhaps, so 
 
 240
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 far because he is obedient, or because he has 
 followed the line of least resistance. He now 
 may begin to understand dimly at least what 
 education is ; he is fit to be emancipated from 
 the stricter discipline of set tests ; he may 
 expatiate somewhat, and walk according to his 
 fancy in the pleasing paths of knowledge. 
 Until all boys who enter our Schools have 
 first gained this standard, and then learnt by 
 the further study of at least a year that edu- 
 cation is not merely the attainment of a certain 
 modicum of knowledo-e, the diligent walking in 
 certain much-beaten tracks, higher education that 
 deserves the name will cease to become a living 
 reality, possessed by more than an elect few. 
 The Examination tests are, according to this 
 view, seen to be needed at an earlier stage in 
 the School life, at the ages of fifteen or sixteen, 
 than is always at present deemed necessary. 
 Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen or 
 nineteen, indeed, they may be an impediment 
 to the attainment of such a wider outlook and 
 a wider range as the faculties which have been 
 strengthened by the more rigorous discipline 
 of earlier tests should easily achieve. We 
 believe that in a properly-ordered School such 
 a standard can be attained at an average age 
 of sixteen. If our bureaucrats must meddle 
 
 241 Q
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 with Schools, they could achieve most by 
 securing firstly that every boy should remain 
 till he has gained this standard, and secondly, 
 by encouraging, through grants or otherwise, 
 such boys to remain at least another year. 
 For if the progress made between fifteen 
 and sixteen is double the progress made in 
 the previous year, probably the advance made 
 in the next year will be equal to both these 
 advances put together, and the prospective 
 man in the street will have become the student 
 in the arm-chair. At any rate, if examinations 
 be forbidden before the age of sixteen by 
 direct ukase, it is certain that the boys from 
 the elementary school, for whom Whitehall 
 has so touching a regard, will leave School 
 before they take any examination or attain 
 any high standard at all. Whereas, if they be 
 allowed to take some " Junior Local " Exami- 
 nation, and are successful, their parents may 
 be encouraged to allow their children to pro- 
 long their stay at School to a much later date. 
 Even the Headmaster would like to confirm 
 or correct his view of a boy's ability by an 
 external test at this age. In short, the refusal 
 of permission for boys to take a junior examina- 
 tion would at present be a smashing blow to the 
 
 more modern and to the municipalised school. 
 
 242
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 As to the " Matriculation " examination at 
 the age of sixteen, two things must be clearly- 
 borne in mind. The word Matriculation is 
 a misnomer. It is not to be assumed that 
 the boy of sixteen is fit to become a Uni- 
 versity Student. In spite of all the blandish- 
 ments of modern Universities, he should re- 
 main at School till the age of eighteen or 
 nineteen, and if his School is properly equipped 
 he will make great progress. The University, 
 which will no longer be a kind of higher 
 Secondary School, will take up the task where 
 the School leaves it, and will carry on its 
 students to a still higher stage. Nor will this 
 " Matriculation " examination entitle a boy 
 to a leaving certificate, for this term will 
 once again give rise to the false impression 
 that a boy's work at School is ended now 
 that he has aained this "leaving certificate." 
 No more mischievous policy could be adopted. 
 
 Such an examination machinery would not 
 be well suited to the great Public Schools 
 which take their boys at fourteen and keep 
 them till nineteen, for they will not in a 
 mere space of a year have had sufficient time 
 to make much progress with their pupils. The 
 fact remains, however, that the Public Schools, 
 more than any other Schools, suffer from 
 
 243
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 being under-examined rather than over-exa- 
 mined, and that too many boys pass right 
 through the School without ever attaining a 
 most moderate intellectual standard. A more 
 rigid system of external examinations to which 
 every boy was subjected would force these 
 Schools for very shame to abandon those low 
 standards which they so complacently accept 
 at present. 
 
 I see no reason to accept the view that 
 candidates should not be divided into classes, 
 or that high proficiency in different subjects 
 should not be recognised. Some pupils need 
 the curb, but far more need the spur. If can- 
 didates merely "pass their examinations," we 
 are exchanging our more or less precise stan- 
 dards of attainment for the shallow conceptions 
 of the man in the street, whose favourite for- 
 mula is that So-and-so has "passed in his 
 examination," fostering the detestable and mis- 
 chievous heresy that all men are intellectually 
 equal, and encouraging all those who have any 
 tendency towards indolence to indulge it to 
 their hearts' content. Cramming is a crime ; 
 but it is not generally recognised that the 
 worst form of cramminof is not the crammino- 
 of facts. That form of surfeit nature can set 
 
 right in its own way. The swiftly-got learning 
 
 244
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 of the examinee will pass from him as lightly 
 as it was acquired, and as the critic points out, 
 not recognising that here is cause for bound- 
 less thanksgiving, not matter for regret, the 
 portentous mass of erudition will melt away in 
 one summer's holiday. A more deadly form 
 of cramming is the cramming of ideas, the 
 attempt to make the boy's point of view ap- 
 proximate to that of the mature man, the cult 
 of the imagination, of self-expression, in a 
 word, the fostering of intellectual precocity — 
 that defiance of nature's courses which consists 
 in putting old heads on young shoulders — 
 which characterises so many of the methods 
 of to-day. 
 
 Our Speech Days are often distinguished by 
 the egregious utterances of various celebrities, 
 who, with the best of intentions, console for 
 their failure that numerous class which gains 
 no Prizes by exalting character over intellect. 
 It is a consolation which most boys, who have 
 at least no particular claims to distinction, do 
 not require. Comfortable words, which in 
 effect mean that dullness or indolence does 
 not matter, are not the regimen that most 
 English boys need. They need rather the 
 heartiest encouragement to row themselves 
 out. " Who has not watched the headlong 
 
 245
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 speed of a race, the chariots swallowing the 
 ground before them as they pour along in a 
 torrent from their floodgates, when the drivers' 
 youthful hopes are at their height, and the 
 bounding heart is drained by each eager pulsa- 
 tion ? There are they, with their ever-ready lash 
 circling in the air, bending forward to let the 
 reins go. On flies the wheel, swift and hot 
 as fire ; now they ride low, now they seem to 
 tower aloft, shooting through the void air and 
 rising against the sky. No stint, no stay, 
 while the yellow sand mounts up in a cloud, 
 and each is sprinkled with the foam and breath 
 of those behind him. That is what ambition 
 can do ; that is the measure of their zeal for 
 success." ^ Thus has the mighty master pic- 
 tured youth's love of victory. And if progress 
 can be achieved by methods of competition 
 which have some analogy even to the methods 
 of athletics, let the young barbarian in his 
 early youth be allowed the stimulus of rivalry 
 and the glory of success. As he grows older, 
 discreetly handled, he will grow wiser, but — it 
 is a hard saying — enthusiasm for the things of 
 the spirit, education's rarest product, is still a 
 by-product. The Headmaster may dislike the 
 
 ' From Conington's fine translation of Virgil, " Georgics," 
 III, 105 seq. 
 
 246
 
 EXAMINATIONS 
 
 prolonged ritual of Speech Day and all its 
 paraphernalia, and its orgy of self-glorification, 
 but he feels that it is well that his pupils have 
 been subjected to external tests and have done 
 themselves credit, though whether the outside 
 world knows or understands is a much slighter 
 matter. He knows the mischievous implica- 
 tion of exhortations to goodness at the expense 
 of cleverness ; he knows that goodness is not 
 the logical opposite of cleverness, and that he 
 who can combine both qualities is humanity's 
 finest flower. He knows, too, that the sins of 
 ignorance, misunderstanding, and prejudice — 
 in other words, lack of "cleverness" — far out- 
 weigh the sins of wanton, flaunting wickedness. 
 From the crime of Calvary to the desolations 
 of twentieth-century commercialism, from the 
 age of brute barbarianism and medieval super- 
 stition to the age of Prussian " blood and iron," 
 how many an evil deed lies at the door of 
 those who knew not what they did ! And to 
 hold the balance justly we set against " Be 
 good, and let who will be clever," the sombre 
 but equally one-sided estimate, " tantum religio 
 potuit suadere malorum." 
 
 Think not, Reader, that we have devoted 
 too much time to the soulless craft of examina- 
 tion. Like all other vocations, teaching has 
 
 247
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 its poetry and its prose. Its poetry is found 
 in inaugural addresses or Speech Day orations, 
 its prose in our daily labours, our assiduous 
 attention to machinery, our compilation — hor- 
 resco referens — of Government statistics. The 
 true schoolmaster, however heroic, must plant 
 his feet upon the earth, far though his head 
 may reach toward the clouds. Like all 
 geniuses, he is ever cultivating his capacity 
 for small things, and is not ashamed to take 
 an interest even in an examination result. It 
 could not be otherwise. Were he merely the 
 rhapsodist, the inspired dreamer of Prize Days 
 and of Conferences, he would be the figure on 
 the prow indeed, cunningly fashioned by the 
 artist's skill into the semblance of a godlike 
 hero or a nymph divinely fair, a Bellerophon 
 or a Galatea, a Hercules or an Arethusa, but 
 not the pilot at the wheel, master of the lore of 
 log and compass, conning each fathom's change 
 upon the chart, marking the quicksand, shun- 
 ning the sunken reef and deadly mine, facing 
 the storm, braving the hurricane, and by his 
 sleepless labour bringing his good ship safe 
 and sound to haven. 
 
 248
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE ELEMENTARY TEACHER i 
 
 But what of our elementary brother, thrall of 
 civic administrator and o-overnmental bureau- 
 crat, inarticulate and ineffective, but given a 
 leader, stridently vocal and shrilly importunate ; 
 strange blend of drill-sergeant, dreamer, and 
 adviser of the universe ; weak, and the tyrant's 
 butt as an individual, but flattered and 
 feared collectively ; singly, indeed helpless, 
 but gathered into a mighty host of 100,000, a 
 many-headed monster which — teste Sir Robert 
 Morant — leaves no permanent offlcial's head 
 quite safe upon his shoulders ? He must take 
 his place in our gallery of portraits, though he 
 has hardly yet attained the self-esteem or the 
 repose of the Old Master. 
 
 Upon this subject the writer professes no 
 
 ^ This chapter deals with the Elementary Teacher only so 
 far as he is a poliiician and a publicist. Privately, he is as 
 placid and eupeptic as most people, and, from the point of view 
 of a Secondary Headmaster, almost the best type of parent. 
 
 249
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 authority, and he knows only the outside both 
 of the Elementary School and its Teachers. 
 Let these gleanings, therefore, be regarded 
 as merely an individual impression to be cor- 
 rected by a study of " The Schoolmaster," 
 clarion-voiced, by a perusal of the reports of 
 Conferences of Elementary Teachers, and by 
 every other method. 
 
 Mr. Holmes, with unflattering bluntness, 
 has told us the truth according to his gospel. 
 The Elementary Teacher is insufficiently ac- 
 quainted with the doctrines of Buddhism, and 
 both teaches and practises a Religion which is 
 only a sublimated system of payment by results. 
 Instead of regulating his life on the principles 
 of some Eastern Sage, he regulates it by our 
 British rule of thumb. With brilliant excep- 
 tions he falls into a g^roove, becomes the crea- 
 ture of rote and rule, and needs firm guidance 
 from benevolent officials of hiofher social and 
 academical antecedents. He is, we gather, 
 a child of routine, who must support his totter- 
 ing footsteps by leaning on some weightier 
 stay, slavishly obedient to rule and formula, 
 devourer of all crumbs of doctrine that fall 
 from the master's table, from his youth up, 
 from that early date when he began his 
 apprenticeship, perchance by sweeping out his 
 
 250
 
 THE ELEMENTARY TEACHER 
 
 School in the early morning,^ guiltily yet 
 angrily conscious of his shortcomings, but turn- 
 ing and rending all who dare suggest defect, 
 snarling and howling with his fellows as the 
 pack sweeps in full cry after some erring 
 official. It is scarcely strange that the latter 
 feels that he holds a wolf by the ears whenever 
 he attempts to deal with elementary education. 
 What is the phrase which gives the key to 
 all these varying actions? Dr. Hayward has 
 found it, and has diagnosed the evil. It is 
 "malignant egoism." The poison of malig- 
 nant egoism hourly secreted, hourly courses 
 through the veins and penetrates the system, 
 to be discharged upon the first enemy that 
 crosses his path. Every man is as good as 
 his neighbour — and better ; every man, so at 
 at least he thinks, is as capable as his neigh- 
 bour of accomplishing his neighbour's task. 
 But even in Elementary Education there must 
 be differences of status. Who, then, shall win 
 promotion .'* That to Dr. Hayward is the crux 
 of the situation. Promotion cometh neither 
 
 ^ As we are told a leading Welsh educational official began 
 his career. All honour to him 1 
 
 " Who sweeps a room to make it clean, 
 Makes that and the action fine." 
 
 We presume, however, that the march of time has put an 
 end to these exactions.
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 from the East nor the West, but from a 
 kindred interest in Freemasonry, from a com- 
 mon frequentation of a political Club, or from 
 sidesmanship at some church whose clergy 
 have much influence. Promotion is the one 
 theme of converse, it is the one gage of 
 battle, the fons et origo of wordy wrangles and 
 furious struggles. The conquering cause may 
 please the gods of the Council Chamber, but 
 the conquered cause still pleases Cato, and he 
 nearly chokes himself with his own bile. Pro- 
 motion is " a gamble, an ignominy, and a 
 scandal in some places," and the more elusive 
 aspects of a teacher s work evade the appraise- 
 ment of unskilled censors. Lack of success 
 breeds bitterness, bitterness engenders cyni- 
 cism, and cynicism carelessness. As for the 
 inspector, he is feared but not respected. He 
 is merely an outsider of another class, at once 
 unpractical and arbitrary, who thrusts his 
 nose into everything and thinks himself a 
 superior creation. All must bow down before 
 the idol of Whitehall, and the deepness of their 
 genuflexions and the completeness of their 
 prostrations only intensify their loathing for 
 their oppressors, who are enemies outside 
 the pale. Some teachers have even been 
 known to devise codes by means of which 
 
 252
 
 THE ELEMENTARY TEACHER 
 
 abstruse calculations or knotty problems may be 
 solved by the master and the solutions passed 
 on to his pupils.^ The teacher naturally enough 
 in present conditions has only a dim notion of 
 what Education is. It seems a vast, intri- 
 cate machine with flying shafts and revolving 
 pistons, in which he is merely a cog-wheel. 
 He teaches what he is told to teach as he is 
 told to teach, and if he is not a born teacher 
 with a vocation, soon drifts into idleness and 
 incuriousness, and is abused by more energetic 
 colleagues most frequently. His ideas are often 
 scanty, and he greedily gulps down the phrases 
 which his more gifted fellows, the B.A.'s or 
 B.Sc.'s, ladle out so lavishly at Easter Confer- 
 ences. There he will prove his culture by un- 
 grammatical effusions, demonstrate his breadth 
 of view by vindictive onslaughts upon a Cabinet 
 Minister, attest his chivalry by howling down 
 the supporters of a pro-Suffragist resolution. 
 Timon of Athens, Diogenes, and Jack Cade 
 combined, he is ready for any resolution which 
 may sweep from their pedestal the " Haves " 
 and enofulf them amonq- the " Have-Nots." 
 
 ^ I do not suggest that this is at all common, but an Ele- 
 mentary Teacher himself has told me of another teacher who, 
 when parts of speech were being parsed orally for the Inspector, 
 would rest his face on his left hand if " noun " were the answer, 
 and on his right if " verb," &c.
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Such, rightly or wrongly, does the Elemen- 
 tary Teacher seem, dilating in professional con- 
 clave upon professional topic, however placid or 
 good-humoured or good-hearted he may be 
 beside the domestic hearth. What is the 
 cause of all these failings if Messrs. Holmes 
 and Hayward are justified in their criticisms ? 
 Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat. 
 The teacher has not been taught. He ^ en- 
 tered professional life at the mature age of 
 fourteen or fifteen, in the scanted hours of 
 leisure he received exiguous instruction from 
 his Headmaster, himself a teacher with a 
 similar career and with perhaps even less 
 educational opportunities, and finally, if he was 
 one of Fortune's favourites, he reached a Train- 
 ing College, whose curriculum, being adapted 
 to the attainments of its students, was similar 
 to that of a higher or even lower Secondary 
 School. There he was crammed with pepton- 
 ised Psychology and desiccated Pedagogy — 
 sciences which he was not educationally fitted 
 to acquire. Thence he returned to the Pri- 
 mary School and engaged in the colossal task 
 of instructing a public meeting of sixty children 
 at once — for his superiors, like Charlemagne, 
 would have him teach in platoons and in- 
 * i.e. the majority of present teachers.
 
 THE ELEMENTARY TEACHER 
 
 form in battalions — and aided by a vigorous 
 if mechanical discipline, something which he 
 had at any rate acquired, actually achieved the 
 miracle of imparting something to his charges. 
 
 So at least it seemed a few years back. 
 The Board School child could write a good 
 " hand " and do his sums correctly. Now 
 under the regime of self-expression and self- 
 realisation his " hand " is less beautiful and 
 his Arithmetic is far to seek. Whether he 
 has a more intelligent appreciation of the uni- 
 verse is a more doubtful question, but at any 
 rate the old thoroughness has departed. 
 
 Examinations in Elementary Schools of 
 children of tender years had doubtless a per- 
 nicious influence, and the system of payment 
 by results was all the more vicious, as the 
 teacher was bound to instruct all that came 
 to him who could not be classified as imbeciles. 
 We have changed all that, with what results ? 
 Principal Griffiths ^ declares that " it appears 
 difficult to find distinct evidence of improve- 
 ment in any way commensurate with the 
 sacrifices which have been made." The storm of 
 criticism which this utterance evoked suggested 
 an uneasy feeling that the statement was true. 
 
 1 Presidential Address to the Educational Science section 
 British Association, 191 3.
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 The writer has occasionally examined Elemen- 
 tary school-children of presumably more than 
 ordinary intelligence, candidates for Scholar- 
 ships in Secondary Schools. Their work 
 compared unfavourably in most respects with 
 that of Secondary schoolboys of the same 
 age. The Arithmetic was done best, but their 
 understanding of their native English was 
 limited, and their power of expressing them- 
 selves upon the simplest subjects was small. 
 Questions on History and Geography could 
 not be set as the boys had been too busy 
 carpentering or performing prodigies with 
 pairs of scissors to learn much about the 
 country or the planet which they inhabited.^ 
 Reading was in nearly every case a lifeless 
 drone, and the dropped aspirates could have 
 been shovelled away. A study of the ex- 
 Elementary scholar on Sunday as he parades 
 the streets, or of that still more horrible phe- 
 nomenon the factory girl, reveals no power 
 of self-expression and self-realisation, except 
 of a somewhat revolting type. I do not 
 criticise — he would be a bold man who would 
 
 ^ It will, of course, be remembered that classes in Secondary 
 Schools are much smaller, and that the home surroundings of 
 most Secondary schoolboys render it easier for them to make 
 good progress in such subjects as English, History, and 
 Geography. 
 
 256
 
 THE ELEMENTARY TEACHER 
 
 assert that he could enter a class of sixty 
 and do better — I merely state facts which 
 many have observed. The only apparent 
 remedy is that the State, which has so long 
 cast its aegis over the Elementary School, 
 should now attempt to make it really efficient. 
 If no class contained more than thirty children, 
 and if every teacher had gained at least a 
 pass-degree, Elementary Education would be 
 a more costly thing, but what a reformation 
 might be achieved I 
 
 But as great a need would be the develop- 
 ment of the individuality of the teacher. He 
 must not feel that if he gets interfering with 
 ihe machinery it will crush his bones to powder 
 and tear his flesh to ribbons ; he must not be 
 compelled to submit fearfully but angrily to 
 huge, passionless, irresistible forces into which 
 he is forbidden to pry. Dr. Hayward, with 
 an official's zeal, would make a middle-man 
 do all the thinking — " Many teachers would 
 be perfectly satisfied " — he would even abolish 
 Head-teachers, for the advantages are more 
 contingent than the disadvantages. But I am 
 convinced that no progress can be made in 
 this direction. If, as has been contended in 
 previous chapters, the teacher must give free 
 play to his individuality, the need is as great 
 
 257 R 
 
 ■^
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 in Elementary as in Higher Education. Lev- 
 elling perhaps is needed, but levelling upwards, 
 and the prestige and position of the Elementary 
 Teacher must be raised, not the prestige of the 
 Secondary Teacher lowered. Will this truth 
 ever be recognised by those who have to deal 
 with Elementary Education ? 
 
 Rapprochement, then, may be desirable, but 
 it will not be achieved on the basis of our 
 surrender at discretion to the exacting claims 
 of omniscience and supermanity sometimes 
 advanced by fevered orators. "The elemen- 
 tary school for the poor is an institution which 
 has no remote history. . . . The secondary 
 school has a long history ; through a series 
 of changes it goes back, in every European 
 country, to the beginning of civilised society 
 in that country ; from the time when this 
 society had any sort of organisation, a certain 
 sort of schools and schooling existed, and 
 between that schooling and the schooling 
 which the children of the richer class of 
 society at this day receive there is an un- 
 broken connection."^ Unless its leaders are 
 absolutely witless, Secondary Education is not 
 likely to surrender its primacy. The present 
 system of training Elementary Teachers is per- 
 
 * M. Arnold, "A French Eton," p. 218, 
 
 258
 
 THE ELEMENTARY TEACHER 
 
 haps bad from two points of view. It takes 
 a boy whose secondary education is not yet 
 finished away from his school to learn to 
 teach. It sends' him back one day per week, 
 in which he learns nothing, but cumbers the 
 ground. Meanwhile, as others tell us, he has 
 lost touch with Elementary Schools, and has not 
 acquired the remarkable power of keeping order 
 possessed by the old Pupil-Teacher, Having 
 in the year of Student-Teachership forgotten 
 much of what he has learnt, he goes to a 
 Training College to recapture the knowledge 
 which he has lost, and finally leaves without 
 getting within measurable distance of a 
 degree.^ Yet in one respect the system is 
 full of hope. If in the future every Elementary 
 Teacher has spent some years at a Secondary 
 School, and many Secondary Headmasters, 
 little as some have prized the privilege, have 
 trained the future Elementary Teacher, the wall 
 between Elementary and Secondary will have 
 been already broken down. We shall under- 
 stand one another and esteem one another, and 
 the teaching profession will be a solid fact and 
 not a visionary ideal. 
 
 ^ One notes with regret that at many Training Colleges 
 students are discouraged from working for a degree.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL 
 
 We have said much of Schools in general, but 
 still the question remains and calls for an 
 answer, "What is the typical English School?" 
 — if there be a typical School. Not the large 
 Public School, despite its world-wide fame, 
 assuredly not the *' Secondary " School — odious 
 and late-coined designation — flaring with its 
 bright red bricks and smirking with its 
 brand-new equipment. It is, as I believe, 
 the Grammar^ School, that venerable home 
 of learning planted in almost every town that 
 can deserve the title, whose birth dates back 
 to immemorial antiquity. Picture it, recalling 
 Arnold's noble eulogy of Oxford, with its 
 young barbarians at play, its buildings un- 
 pretentious, yet with the exquisite sense of 
 purpose and fitness that time alone can give, 
 rearing its head proudly yet quietly with all 
 the mellowed charm of centuries, haunted not 
 by the fret and fever of a turbid age, but by 
 
 ^ Grammar being " the study of humanistic literature," though 
 this conception was sometimes narrowed. 
 
 260
 
 THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL 
 
 the peaceful influences of the past. Few of our 
 ancient smaller towns lack some individual dis- 
 tinction, whether they be "set in a gleaming 
 river's crescent curve," nestling beneath some 
 rolling hillside, or perched on some vantage 
 point with noble views around. Few Grammar 
 Schools, however plain and homely, lack some 
 suggestion of a long placid course, some sem- 
 blance of a haunt of immemorial peace, whether 
 they be enisled with sturdy oaks and soaring 
 elms, coyly retiring from the slight busyness of 
 a country roadside, or stablished in some hal- 
 lowed precinct with minster tower raised glori- 
 ously behind its trees, with their grey stone so 
 restful in the sunshine, symbolising so happily 
 the quietness of strength and permanence. 
 
 Not that it has the doubtful happiness of 
 no history. Many its vicissitudes. The zeal 
 of early days died away, the civil strife of 
 Cavalier and Roundhead left its fatal traces, 
 the stagnant torpor of the eighteenth century 
 wasted its strength. But Hercules from time 
 to time has visited it with club and lionskin, 
 has cleansed stables and slain monsters. There 
 have been enow of such as for their bellies' 
 sake creep and intrude and climb into the 
 fold. The administrators of its foundation 
 have wasted its substance in riotous livino-, 
 the glutton and the wine-bibber have appro- 
 
 261
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 priated its revenues, bestowing upon their trust 
 only the light of countenances as empurpled 
 as the everlasting bonfire-light of Bardolph.^ 
 Yet it still survives ; it points to its long line 
 of zealous masters, of distinguished or at least 
 deserving pupils, to an archbishop perhaps, 
 or a famed scholar, or to some perfervid 
 genius of literature whose boyish years of 
 quietude in a grey, sleepy city were so strange 
 a prelude to the stormy sequel of a sojourn 
 in Bohemia. It is cherished by the citizens 
 with a love that none of yesterday's creations 
 can evoke ; it lives its tranquil life but slightly 
 ruffled by the angel visits of Whitehall's 
 myrmidons, and it repudiates indignantly the 
 title Sleepy Hollow. There is some subtle 
 charm that steals into the soul as one paces 
 its precincts or strolls across its playing fields, 
 when one bethinks oneself that here were heard 
 of yore the drums and tramplings of past con- 
 quests, that there once raged the battle's onset, 
 that day when the besiegers pressed on to 
 scale the City ramparts, that under those two 
 mounds, whose lines sweep on unswerving into 
 an angle of the School's demesne, ran and 
 still runs the bulwark of the City raised in the 
 
 ^ One writer describing the principalities and powers of such 
 a town half a century ago, speaks of their " illiteracy — vain, 
 fat-witted, beery, excessively conservative." 
 
 262
 
 THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL 
 
 days of Roman lordship, or even when history 
 and tradition fail to relate a tale at all. The 
 outer world affects each one of us, and there 
 must indeed be a greater harmony between 
 mind and its surroundings in this home of 
 calm than in the crowded city's central roar 
 amid the hum of traffic, the deafening crash 
 of wheels on cobble-stones, and the jarring 
 cry of trade and all its votaries. Truly in 
 such a temple of tranquillity we realise the 
 goodly pasturage of Plato, and our scholars 
 there " may drink in good from every quarter, 
 and noble deeds and emanations may strike 
 upon their eyes and ears like a gale wafting 
 health from salubrious lands, winning them 
 imperceptibly from their earliest childhood into 
 resemblance, love, and harmony with the true 
 beauty of reason." ^ 
 
 The Grammar School, with all human insti- 
 tutions, may have a twofold progress. Like 
 Galloway, its line may have run brightly 
 through many a far-famed sire, and yet like 
 Galloway again it oft has ended in a mire — 
 as a mixed school with needlework and agri- 
 cultural chemistry as its summit of achieve- 
 ment. Its function is, or should be still, as 
 in the past, to be the focus of culture and 
 enlightenment in its own district ; to preach 
 
 ^ Davies and Vaughan's " Translation of the Republic." 
 
 263
 
 DIDASCALUS FATTENS 
 
 by deeds, not words, the dignity of learning 
 and the delights of humanism ; to make men, 
 not mechanics ; to guard the citadel of know- 
 ledge. The greater — how frequently they are 
 the richer — Schools have gloriously succeeded, 
 and though the product of the Grammar School 
 is sometimes sneered at by the College Don, 
 how often has he held his own with the alumni 
 of more famous seminaries ; how often has the 
 torch of knowledge — dimly though it has 
 burnt at times — been kept alight through 
 some Close Scholarship, gift of some pious 
 donor, which has maintained unbroken the 
 connection between School and University. 
 
 Its boys are of all sorts and conditions, and 
 as a School which calls itself Muddleham 
 School — or Middlemarch School, or Sleepy 
 Hollow if you insist — it is the School of 
 Muddleham, or these other places. It knows 
 no very subtle distinction between Juniors 
 and Seniors, and ranges betwixt the wide 
 limits of ten or twelv.- years, from the 
 views and customs of the Palaeolithic Aoe to 
 the last cry of the twentieth century, from 
 barbarism to the most intellectualised culture. 
 Its boys are socially the mean, with all its 
 golden virtues, cultivating neither the gami- 
 nerie of the gutter-snipe, nor slavishly honour- 
 ing the Public School boy's fetish of good 
 
 264
 
 THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL 
 
 form. They are spoilt at times by incapable 
 parents, but wealth being limited, the process 
 rarely can go far. They have an affection for 
 that School in which some will spend so many 
 years, which is a potent source of strength to 
 it. They will work if they must — would you 
 have our young barbarians walking Bentleys 
 or incipient Faradays ? It is a little world 
 in which they and their masters live and 
 have their being — cloistral, secluded, far from 
 the madding cries of all those controversies 
 which shake the larger cities. Government 
 may seek to galvanise it into a more restless 
 activity, but distance lends enchantment to the 
 view even of Whitehall, and Sleepy Hollow, 
 most delightful of abodes, still tranquilly pur- 
 sues the daily round, lagging resignedly behind 
 the latest fashion, whate'er it be, untroubled by 
 the neuropathic fretfulness of those who dwell 
 in " wens." It is a joyous privilege to pass on 
 peacefully from year to year, building slowly, 
 but a solid, lasting structure. Happy the 
 man who has been called to this vocation ! 
 Must he not, despite all difficulties and depres- 
 sion, feel many a time that the lines are cast 
 in pleasant places, must not his heart, in that 
 divine last phrase of Thackeray's, not once but 
 
 often " throb with an exquisite content" ? 
 
 265
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 "Is there no life but these alone? 
 Madman or slave, must man be one ? " 
 
 How, then, do I think of my profession ? Nobly. 
 The choice of Hercules is too often now the 
 choice of Hobson. I, however, have never re- 
 gretted that I made the grand refusal, that 
 I spurned officialism and a competence, the 
 attractions of a drab existence spent in com- 
 posing minutes fortified by an annual auto- 
 matic rise of salary and an inevitable pension 
 at the end, for the delights and woes of a 
 profession which is still a glorious adventure, 
 with its prospects of mediocrity, failure, suc- 
 cess, and successes worse than failure, but a 
 profession in which a man may still possess 
 his soul. I love my profession as much as 
 any man this side idolatry. Despite the fre- 
 quent flamboyancy of our leaders, despite the 
 eulogies that I have listened to ad nauseam, 
 despite the profanation of high language used 
 
 without restraint and at times without sin- 
 
 266
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 cerity, I still believe that mine is the noblest 
 profession. 
 
 How should I advise those about to teach? 
 Must my answer, like Mr. Punch's, be in the 
 negative ? 1 must ask a further question 
 before I make reply. Do you, like Arnold 
 the poet, who suffered ecthlipsis, not Her 
 Majesty's Inspector, desire to be "like all 
 the other men you see " ? Do you wish to 
 pursue the official's progress, from habit to 
 routine, from routine to blind tradition, from 
 blind tradition to senility and a Companion- 
 ship of the Bath ? Do you wish, like Lyd- 
 gate in Middlemarch, to cherish a basil plant 
 to feed on your brains ? 
 
 " For most men in a brazen prison live, 
 Where in the sun's hot eye 
 With heads bent o'er their toil they languidly 
 Their minds to some unmeaning taskwork give, 
 Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall ; 
 And as year after year 
 Fresh products of their barren labour fall 
 From their tired hands, and rest 
 Never yet comes more near, 
 Gloom settles slowly down over their breast, 
 And while they try to stem 
 The waves of mournful thought by which they are 
 
 prest, 
 Death in their prison reaches them 
 Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest." 
 
 267
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 If you speak to me of " schoolmastering " — 
 bete noire of a word — I can guess at once that 
 you have no vocation. If Hfe is impossible 
 without a Daimler, if existence is unendurable 
 with less than a thousand a year, become a 
 lawyer, a vendor of patent medicines, or a 
 company promoter, but not a schoolmaster. 
 If you are attracted by the prospect of associa- 
 tion with the freshness of a rising generation, 
 of a life lived in sympathy with beings who 
 have faults indeed, but not the faults of a 
 civilisation steeped in formulas and hypocrisy, 
 if you hate and abhor "bunkum," then enlist 
 in our ranks. You may be so fortunate as to 
 find serene, unclouded happiness. You may 
 find, like the mariner in Arnold, that there 
 prevail " despotic on life's sea. Trade winds 
 that cross it from eternity." 
 
 " Awhile he holds some false way undebarred 
 By thwarting signs and braves 
 The freshening wind and blackening waves. 
 And then the tempest strikes him, and between 
 The lightning bursts is seen 
 Only a driving wreck. 
 
 And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck 
 With anguished face and flying hair, 
 Grasping the rudder hard, 
 
 Still bent to make some port he knows not where, 
 Still standing for some false, impossible shore." 
 
 268
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 What then ? The fate of the helmsman, 
 
 beaten upon by the winds and buffeted by 
 
 the waves, is still to be preferred to the living 
 
 death of the toiler in the brazen prison. As 
 
 Chapman finely says : 
 
 " Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea 
 Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind 
 Even till his sailyards tremble, his masts crack, 
 And his rapt ship runs on her side so low 
 That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air. 
 There is no danger to a man that knows 
 What Hfe and death is." 
 
 Yet descending from these regions, we will 
 
 admit the heavy burden of our enforced 
 
 frugality. The admission holds with regard 
 
 to all save the principalities and powers among 
 
 us. If it is increasingly recognised that it is 
 
 in the interests of a Headmaster that his 
 
 Assistants should be adequately recompensed, 
 
 it may some day be also recognised that the 
 
 Assistant Masters' interests demand that the 
 
 Headmaster too should have his reward, and 
 
 with it the prestige which still in many cases 
 
 attends him. It will be regarded as an axiom 
 
 that neither should the one be shabbily genteel, 
 
 nor the other a splendid pauper. We may 
 
 be spared the ironic spectacle of a House 
 
 Master from Harrow coming to address a 
 
 body of Headmasters, whose income averaged 
 
 269
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 ;^438 per annum, on the need of better salaries 
 for Assistant Masters/ In any case, dignity- 
 forbids us to shout for pourboires and to 
 scream for backsheesh, following the methods 
 of the youthful somersaulters who infest the 
 routes to Goodwood or Epsom. 
 
 Mr. R. F. Cholmeley, of Owen's School, 
 Islington, the energetic Secretary of the Head- 
 masters' Association, is the ablest exponent 
 of such methods. In a series of articles which 
 appeared simultaneously in many provincial 
 papers he has pleaded, so that he who runs 
 may read, the cause of the penurious teacher. 
 But despite the altruistic force and fervour of 
 the advocate, the articles are after all but a 
 vast begging letter of many thousand words. 
 Our fugleman is undoubtedly a skilled publicity 
 agent. He has shed every single prejudice 
 of Marlborough and Oxford, and had he not 
 achieved eminence in his present profession 
 would have made a fortune as an advertiser. 
 What regrion is not full of our labours ? Under 
 Mr. Cholmeley's beneficent regime we may 
 almost expect as we travel homewards to our 
 well-earned holiday to find staring in our faces 
 flaming appeals for *' Proper Pay for Peda- 
 
 ^ This actually happened at the meeting of the Headmasters' 
 Association in January 1913. 
 
 270
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 gogues " and " Tender Treatment for Trained 
 Teachers " ; we shall discover with embarrassed 
 modesty that our virtues are familiar as house- 
 hold words, as the advantages of Pears' Soap 
 and Beecham's Pills. Mr. Cholmeley's patter, 
 if the word may be pardoned, has penetrated 
 everywhere. He and Mr. Eustace Miles are 
 shining examples of what the grand old forti- 
 fying classical curriculum can achieve even in 
 the business world. They grip you with their 
 first "ad.," and their "follow-up" ensnares the 
 half-bewildered victim. What a subject for 
 the cartoonist is Mr. Cholmeley, as he rifles 
 John Bull's pockets, eloquently adjuring him 
 the while to hitch his waggon to a star ! ^ 
 
 But if we need more money we also need a 
 fresher outlook. If the soldier and the sailor's 
 eye grows dim, their natural force abated, it is 
 equally necessary in our warfare of the spirit 
 that some should leave the fighting line 
 to go on half-pay. There are innumerable 
 situations in which the Schoolmaster is 
 almost indispensable for the performance of 
 
 ^ I gladly admit that throughout the whole of this cam- 
 paign Mr. Cholmeley, whose devotion to what he considers the 
 interests of his profession is undoubted, has been thinking of 
 his professional brethren rather than of himself, and, in common 
 with many members of the Headmasters' Association, have 
 been indebted to him for much kindly service and willing aid. 
 
 271
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 most necessary functions. He is needed on 
 Governing Bodies (very badly), he is required 
 as a writer upon educational theory (oh ! how 
 much !), he is cried out for as an Inspector 
 and an Examiner, he is demanded as an ad- 
 ministrator. All pension schemes, therefore, 
 which do not provide opportunities for men 
 (from forty upwards) who so desire to give up 
 active teaching work and to engage in other 
 branches of educational activity, neglect one of 
 the two great aims of any Pension Scheme, the 
 attainment of efficiency. Moreover, less than 
 all others, dare we embrace the heresy that 
 the lifelong process of education is for us 
 finished. We need our fallow years, as well as 
 the years of heavy culture and fruitful yield. 
 
 The Hierarchy and the Parish Pump are 
 twin causes. The Schoolmaster is ground at 
 present between the upper millstone of a bur- 
 eaucratic Board and the lower millstone of a 
 caucus-ridden assembly. The grand eighteenth 
 century — turbulent, mutinous, and rhetorical, 
 which needed no drawbridge, moat, or cas- 
 tellated front to defend the house which it 
 so proudly termed its castle — has passed away, 
 and our abodes from cellar to attic, from drains 
 to drawing-room, are open to the inspection 
 of the minions of authority. Democracy was 
 
 272
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 once a figure — it has developed into figures. 
 We thirst for statistics, and we celebrate the 
 apotheosis of ciphering. From another point 
 of view, Government may now be typified in 
 the form of a sheep-dog. As it rounds us 
 up, it barks and worries, though, we are told, 
 like all good sheep-dogs, it rarely bites. Yet, 
 as it drives us whither we are unwilling to 
 go, to the pasture or the market now, but to 
 the abattoir to-morrow, we are not grateful 
 for its attentions. As we have pointed out 
 in earlier chapters, we are tending towards a 
 situation resembling a nightmare, or one of 
 Mr. H. G. Wells' Anticipations. Under the 
 malign influence of Plato the ascetic and the 
 puritan, who, despite the wonders that he has 
 achieved in liberating men's spirits, had not 
 the smallest conception of what liberty means, 
 we are to be confined in a prison with the 
 latest improvements and with perfect sanita- 
 tion, but yet a prison. Gone is that delight- 
 fully fresh enthusiasm with which Herodotus, 
 the finest raconteur in the world of literature, 
 treats of the merits of Democracy. We wor- 
 ship the Juggernaut of Efficiency — and we 
 fling ourselves and our dependants under it 
 as it proceeds mid anthems and alleluias on 
 its triumphal passage. We once admired and 
 
 273 S
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 held up for imitation the methods of the ant, 
 but a more advanced nature study will soon 
 induce us to practise the perversions of the 
 cuckoo. The scale of values has shifted, and 
 we place the administrator above the teacher, 
 the man of schedules, circulars, and memoranda 
 above the genius who laughs at them. We 
 submit ourselves to a Board of Education and 
 its edicts, though this Board may be at times 
 the office-boy, at others a Second Division 
 Clerk, at others an Examiner, at others an ex- 
 Party Whip, but never an ex-teacher. Even 
 some who look with hope to the establishment 
 of a national system of Education admit the 
 need of some non-national schools which may 
 preach and practise the doctrine of rebellion 
 against, or independence of, the State. The 
 cynic declares that regulations, like things 
 more toothsome, are made but to be broken, 
 that it passes the wit of man to go through 
 twelve solid months without some infringement 
 small or great of that Niagara of commands, 
 monitions, and suggestions which descends 
 upon us. Rabbis profoundly versed in lore 
 Talmudic loved to speculate on what might 
 happen could one man live a single day with- 
 out infringement in jot or tittle of the Law 
 
 and its accretions. They decided that the 
 
 274
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 consequences of the Fall would be revoked. 
 Such was virtue — whose sight, according to 
 Plato, would kindle the most passionate ad- 
 miration — to those blind guides pent in their 
 panoply of Pharisaism, case-hardened in their 
 creed of cunning caution. It is to such dull 
 unreasoning obedience to a code that benumbs, 
 to a letter that killeth, that we are gradually 
 being driven, to an age wherein we shall pre- 
 lude all our actions by an " I am instructed," 
 as the clerks do. " Ah ! must. Designer 
 Infinite, ah! must thou char the wood, ere 
 thou canst limn with it ? " 
 
 Inspection at present oscillates between 
 tyranny and farcicality. If Whitehall is in- 
 deed to supervise Secondary Education, it 
 will be necessary largely to increase its inspec- 
 torial staff. The present system of selecting 
 Inspectors merely according to the predilec- 
 tions of high officials at Whitehall must cease. 
 The Inspector of the future, if he is to fulfil 
 his duties properly, will be one of ourselves, 
 not a politely distant stranger, queer compound 
 of lounger, spy, and English gentleman. He 
 will have some acquaintance with the science 
 of Education so called,^ tested and verified bv 
 
 1 " At present it is an outrage to speak of examining or 
 inspecting the work of a teacher." — Hayward.
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 long experience, possibly he will have views, 
 not crotchets. One often wonders what the 
 present-day Inspector thinks of those whom 
 he inspects. The Inspector of the ideal future 
 will be sometimes at least an ex-Headmaster, 
 often one who has not caught the judge's 
 eye for a Headship, but always one who 
 has a thorough sympathy with those who 
 are members of the same craft, and there 
 will be no impassable gulf between Dives 
 and Lazarus, whether of status, nature, or of 
 class. 
 
 Nor, again, will the sluices of Whitehall 
 always remain locked. That Whitehall, when 
 requested to aid, should gravely permit us to 
 appeal to the nearest Town Council, will not 
 always be considered a suitable solution of a 
 serious problem. We shall some day before 
 the arrival of the Greek Kalends have our 
 mess of pottage, but those whose tastes do 
 not include a liking for the Governmental 
 cuisine will, one must hope, still cater for 
 themselves, and still retain their patrimony 
 of independence. 
 
 What will be the future of Muddleham as 
 an educational authority ? I cannot tell. I 
 think it unlikely, however, in whatever direc- 
 tion matters may develop, that local obscur- 
 
 276
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 antism will continue to play its pranks in- 
 definitely, but that either a gigantic bureau- 
 cracy will be established, to which the present 
 bureaucracy is nothing, and that Schools and 
 Post Offices alike will be subjected to central 
 management, and to central management alone, 
 or — a better way — that our profession will 
 assert itself, and claim and win autonomy. 
 King Log has been followed by King Stork — 
 though in justice to ourselves we must deny 
 that we had ever sought a change of ruler — 
 it remains for Zeus himself to take his turn. 
 Muddleham has tried and failed — is at times 
 uneasily conscious of its failure. Mediocrity, 
 like water, finds its own level, and will not 
 altogether regret retirement from the scene it 
 never adorned. Give Muddleham its due. 
 It fervently believes that it is its brother's 
 keeper, and it quarrels, struggles, and retails 
 scandal, because it is intensely interested in its 
 neighbours. It is because it loves its neigh- 
 bour so dearly that it does battle with him, 
 and hard knocks are given and taken in 
 the same spirit as the loving spouse of Wap- 
 ping or Whitechapel accepts the blows and 
 buffetings of her too ardent goodman. It is 
 rather a question of taste or of idiosyncrasy 
 than of morals. Yet still we claim our freedom, 
 
 277
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 whether against priest or politician, pundit or 
 pubHcist. The cobbler should stick to his last, 
 the tradesman's purview does not extend far 
 beyond the rampart of his counter. Let him 
 remember that, and we in our turn will 
 remember with due meed of gratitude the 
 punctual hand that bestows on us our daily- 
 bread, our beef and mutton, our milk and 
 morning paper, regarding our ministers neither 
 with patrician contempt nor with sycophantic 
 admiration. 
 
 We have pointed out that the gravest objec- 
 tion to a State system of Education is that 
 such a system sets up barriers to freedom of 
 opinion and its expression. Every State ser- 
 vice must have its own discipline, and we must 
 either accept the official view or abandon the 
 official status. Did a State system now exist, 
 were there established a hierarchy carefully 
 graded, with Minister of Education at the apex 
 and village teacher at the bottom, methods 
 and systems must be stereotyped, changes 
 would be effected merely at the suggestion 
 of those favoured persons who had the ear of 
 the Minister. Criticism would be an act of 
 indiscipline, and such books as this — tragic 
 consummation ! — could not be written, or at 
 
 least published. But our profession needs, 
 
 278
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 above all else, the free breath of criticism, 
 whether of existing methods or of proposed 
 chanq-es of method. We must resist the cant 
 of progress, we must have freedom to hiss 
 as well as to applaud, to hoot the actors off 
 the stage as well as to recall them time and 
 again. A little mutual antipathy will healthily- 
 alternate with much mutual admiration. There 
 has been much improvement in English educa- 
 tion during the last twenty years, the dry 
 bones are clothed with flesh, the four winds 
 of heaven have breathed upon them. Let us 
 not mistake effect for cause. Improvements 
 have resulted from the slow, steady, silent 
 workings of tendency in individuals, not from 
 Whitehall revolutions wrought by the stroke 
 of some clerk's pen. We cannot pronounce 
 as yet whether the Teachers' Register will be 
 a mausoleum, the tomb of an ideal, or a hortus 
 siccus of strange specimens, but we may hope 
 that we may have a better conception of what 
 a teaching profession might be, and we can 
 cultivate a better understanding with the mem- 
 bers of at least our branch of it. One would 
 desire too, turning aside from all questions 
 of administration, that the widest and loftiest 
 conceptions of Education may have power to 
 
 prevail, that neither we nor our overlords will 
 
 279
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 be contented with the beggarly elements. The 
 highest and the first vocation of all is to be 
 men, and therefore liberal and vocational 
 Education do not move on divergent lines, 
 but being produced ever so far will meet. 
 The true conception of Education and the 
 noblest description of the working of the most 
 finely cultivated intellect are still enshrined in 
 those lofty sentences and exquisite cadences — 
 cadences which haunt the mind unceasingly — 
 in which Newman sixty years ago portrayed 
 the beau ideal of Education. That ideal is 
 " the clear, calm, accurate vision and compre- 
 hension of all things as far as the finite 
 mind can embrace them, each in its own 
 place, and with its own characteristics upon it. 
 It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of 
 history, it is almost heart-searching from its 
 knowledge of human nature, it has almost 
 supernatural charity from its freedom from 
 littleness and prejudice, it has almost the 
 repose of faith, because nothing can startle 
 it, it has almost the beauty and harmony of 
 heavenly contemplation, so intimate is it with 
 the eternal order of things and the music of 
 the spheres." 
 
 " Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas," 
 280
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 or as Arnold has enoflished it : 
 
 " And he was happy if to know 
 Causes of things, and far below 
 His feet to see the lurid flow 
 Of terror and insane distress 
 And headlong fear be happiness." 
 
 But be it noted that the perfect man is a con- 
 
 templator of all time and all existence. He 
 
 has therefore the insight of the man of 
 
 Science ^ as well as the sensibility of the poet. 
 
 Knowledge is but one kingdom, though it has 
 
 many provinces. Though perhaps two men 
 
 only, Plato and Goethe, have achieved the 
 
 perfect synthesis, the poet, the philosopher, 
 
 and the scientist are all one, and that truth is 
 
 beauty, beauty truth, is still all that we know, 
 
 and need to know. 
 
 Our aim is to produce the flawless harmony 
 
 and joyous discipline of perfect freedom, and 
 
 in our Schools the Headmaster must have his 
 
 share of freedom, the Assistant Master his, and 
 
 the boy finally must be trained gradually but 
 
 surely to deserve his. 
 
 " Ah ! freedom is a noble thing. 
 Freedom makes men to have liking ! 
 Freedom all solace to man gives ! 
 He lives at ease that freely lives." 
 
 ^ The word Science is often narrowly applied to investiga- 
 tions of what more properly is called Natural Science. This 
 is, of course, an incorrect use of the term. 
 
 281
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 The old poet has quaintly but truly expressed 
 an all but universal feeling-. 
 
 The establishment, therefore, of local bur- 
 eaucracies subsidiary to the greatest of all 
 bureaucracies should be stoutly resisted. The 
 middleman is a parasite of many industries, the 
 educational middleman is a great encumbrance 
 to the teacher. In an L.C.C. Secondary 
 School the Headmaster, who should be the 
 energising principle that calls out from each 
 and all their proper activity, who needs, like 
 Nelson, a blind eye to turn sometimes towards 
 orders and regulations, is merely a superior 
 clerk. To all intents and purposes the School 
 is worked from Spring Gardens, governed by 
 blue forms and red tape. The result is inevit- 
 able. With automatic methods of instruction, 
 automatic rules of procedure, and automatic 
 rises of salary, the teaching automaton teaches 
 automatically. Education Officers can compre- 
 hend methods which are cast-iron, arrange- 
 ments which can easily be summarised on 
 stereotyped forms — they object to originality 
 or personality. On the other hand, if men are 
 willing to submit themselves to this machine, 
 without doubt the School can run itself — 
 the due number of forms are completed, the 
 
 due statistics compiled, the due salary paid 
 
 282
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 with pleasing regularity. Yet Education is 
 not merely the pressing of a button. Out- 
 wardly the School is working with much suc- 
 cess, in reality it is a living corpse, restrained 
 from decomposition by all the aids of Science, 
 but with all its vital functions in suspense. 
 
 It is delightful to turn from the politics of 
 Education to take one last glance at our pro- 
 fession and all for which it stands. In all the 
 many troubles of his stormy career, in his 
 anxieties as to the foundation of a Catholic 
 University, in his attempt to establish a Mis- 
 sion at Oxford, in the suspicions cast upon his 
 orthodoxy, Newman, the greatest exponent of 
 the noblest principles of Education, found a 
 haven of refuge in the tranquil precincts of 
 the Oratory School, taking a class in some 
 Latin author, preparing a performance of some 
 play of Terence. The heaving billows of sec- 
 tarian controversy and party strife surge up to 
 our walls, and sometimes smite against our 
 portals, but they gain no entrance. Within 
 we are supreme, by prescription, by prestige, 
 and by the strongest of all titles — merit. The 
 most cocksure of amateurs will tell us what to 
 do, but he will never venture on a demonstra- 
 tion in our presence, and in our class-rooms. 
 The most verbose of censors is tongue-tied 
 
 283
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 when he crosses our thresholds, and wanders 
 uneasily, as fish out of water, embarrassed and 
 apologetic. We are the TrpocprjTai, and it lies 
 with us to interpret to our pupils the glories of 
 literature and the nature of things ; to feel first, 
 and then to inspire others w^th our enthusiasms. 
 We are told that we mould character. It is a 
 bad metaphor, especially in reference to pupils 
 who have passed beyond the years of earliest 
 childhood. Our pupils are not clay in the 
 hands of the potter ; they are ourselves in 
 posse, and it is for us gradually and surely so 
 to develop their faculties that they may at 
 length pass from intellectual nonage to intel- 
 lectual independence. It is not ours to supply 
 them with a body of doctrine or a theory of 
 the universe ; it is for us to bestow on them a 
 far more precious gift, the power of balanced 
 judgment, the keen-edged sword of intellect, 
 the power to distinguish between the good and 
 the better, to see, if not the myriad sides that 
 every question has, at least two or three of 
 them. Yet even at that the intimacy of master 
 and pupil is a most potent force. Here is an 
 inspiring instance. In 1863, after a two years' 
 tenure of the Mastership of the Crypt Grammar 
 School, a man of genius left Gloucester dis- 
 heartened, broken in spirit. His stay had been 
 
 284
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 unhappy ; he had battled with those respon- 
 sible for the administration of the School ; he 
 had waged wordy war in local papers with 
 anonymous scurrility. The iron had entered 
 his soul. Sick at heart, he returned to the 
 ranks of the Assistant Masters. Apparently 
 his work at Gloucester had terminated in 
 crushing failure. Thirty years afterwards, one 
 who had entered the Crypt School in August 
 1 86 1, a weakly boy on crutches, wrote the 
 essay "T.E.B.," a glowing testimony to the 
 greatness of "the widener," with his "whiff of 
 the great world " about him, a magnificent 
 eulogy of a poet that seemed to his admirer 
 the equal of Tennyson, an imperishable record 
 of a lasting friendship between master and 
 pupil. " Be that as it was, he was a failure. 
 . . . From his" [point of view, it] "was an 
 unpleasing and ridiculous experiment. From 
 mine it was an unqualified success. He opened 
 to me ways of thought and speech that — well ! 
 — since it came upon me like a call from the 
 world outside — the great, quick, living world — 
 and discovered me the beginnings, the true 
 materials of myself." The writer was W. E. 
 Henley, and if Brown had accomplished no- 
 thing else at Gloucester, the fact that he was 
 enabled to give Henley the inspiration, the 
 
 285
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 driving force, that urged him with indomitable 
 courage into a great and strenuous career as 
 literary gladiator is another laurel on the brow 
 of that forceful teacher of whom so many- 
 Clifton boys can tell. 
 
 So the Schoolmaster can write upon the 
 hearts of his pupils, even though it be with 
 invisible ink. Yet the glow of sympathy, or 
 the fervour of grateful recollection may restore 
 to sight the dimmed inscription of years long 
 past. A great Schoolmaster who has given his 
 life's energy to his School enjoys no little fame 
 wherever two or three whom he once taught 
 have met together. When our fuimus comes to 
 be written, may the words of Virgil be quite ap- 
 propriate : " I have lived the course of destiny, 
 and a mighty shade I pass below. I have 
 stablished a mighty city and have beheld walls 
 of my own foundation." ^ Yet let there not 
 be too many walls, and too few of the men 
 that make a city. 
 
 We are artists, but being artists we have 
 the defects of our qualities. The De Pro- 
 fundis follows our Te Deums so speedily. We 
 are egoists doubtless, but the world would 
 
 ^ " vixi, et quern dederat cursum fortuna, peregi 
 et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago, 
 urbem praeclaram statui ; mea moenia vidi." 
 286
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 do well to exploit our egoism. We are like 
 Horace sometimes, " iratus ut placabilis essem," 
 quick-tempered but placable, and we have not 
 fully developed the capacity for suffering (adult) 
 folly gladly. Stupidity in high places is 
 grievously trying, and it is hard to kick against 
 the pricks. But the grand lines of Juvenal 
 bid men deem happy those who have learnt in 
 the hard school of life to endure its worries and 
 not to be restive under the yoke.^ It is life's 
 lesson for Didascalus too. 
 
 At a time when the human race appears 
 to be pressing forward blindly into the prison- 
 house of Socialism, I take comfort in the 
 thought that once again — it may be soon, it 
 may be after many years — men will refuse 
 to chew the bitter cud of bureaucracy, and 
 will turn with loathing from those who trust 
 to remedy all human ills by one sovereign 
 panacea ; that after many a struggle of the 
 victims, and many an agony breaking the 
 stoutest heart, the human spirit will gain eman- 
 cipation ; that the human mind is mightier 
 than all the fetters devised for its restraint, 
 and that in the end it will burst and shatter 
 
 ^ " magna quidem sacris quce dat praecepta libellis 
 victrix fortunse sapientia ; ducimus autem 
 hos quoque felices, qui ferre incommoda vitce, 
 nee iactare iugum, vita didicere magistra." 
 287
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 all the devices of despot and administrator. 
 In such a newly-delivered state Education 
 must again be free from the paralysing grip 
 of the official. For it is the liberation of the 
 spirit, and works through forces incalculable, 
 blowing like the wind wherever they list. It 
 is the product of no machine, however intri- 
 cate, of no organisation, however elaborate. 
 Vainly, then, do men hope by formulas and 
 recipes to educate their subjects. For it cost 
 more to redeem their souls, so that they must 
 leave that alone for ever. 
 
 288
 
 r ENVOI 
 
 Rapt child of fervent midnight hours ^ 
 
 Record of hopes and fears, 
 Got book, to tell of majiy a mood, 
 
 Gladness and strength and tears. 
 
 Prisoned within a codes constraint 
 
 We bow the sulle?i head, 
 Narrow the bounds that compass us, 
 
 Strait is the path we tread. 
 
 Thou Shalt Not like a rampart bold 
 
 Afflicts with chilling dread. 
 Thou Shalt with menace lowering 
 
 Rears opposite its head. 
 
 Oft as I muse on those who must 
 
 Tyrannic hests obey, 
 The teller and the tale seem one, 
 
 And I am We or They. 
 
 The plowers ploughed my back, juethought. 
 Long furrows, yea, they made. 
 
 But yet, perchance, with no scant meed 
 I too the debt repaid. 
 
 Rend we our choking bands of tape. 
 Shatter the chains which bind, 
 
 Let hitn who teaches win at last 
 Freedom of heart and mind. 
 
 289
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Two letters by the author on the subject of 
 the Teachers' Register which appeared in The 
 Times Educational Supplements of January 
 1914 and April 1915. 
 
 THE TEACHERS' REGISTER 
 
 A CRITICISM OF THE CONDITIONS 
 
 To the Editor of " The Times." 
 
 Sir, — The educational " palaver," as Carlyle 
 would no doubt have termed it, has now been 
 opened, and the various associations are holding 
 their annual orgy of "stimulating" and "sug- 
 gestive " papers and addresses. Perhaps, then, 
 the present is no inappropriate time for a careful 
 examination of the proposals and machinery for 
 registration adopted by the Teachers' Council. 
 
 So far the chorus of acclamation has been un- 
 broken in its harmony, though each critic, to 
 judge from your Sitppleineiit, has his own reserves. 
 My strongest claim for an opportunity of criticis- 
 ing unfavourably in your columns the provisions 
 recently adopted must be that I disagree to a large 
 extent with the eulogists of the work that the 
 Council has accomplished. " Minorities must 
 suffer," we have been told, but they are, neverthe- 
 less, sometimes in the right. May one still small 
 
 290
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 voice of opposition be allowed to raise itself, even 
 though it be a voice crying in the wilderness ? 
 
 The unity of the profession, Sir William Anson 
 declares, is a catchword. I would merely sugi^est 
 that it must be for years yet an impracticable ideal. 
 The project of welding together in one common 
 organisation with common sympathies and a 
 common policy representatives of the universities, 
 of the secondary and elementary schools, and of 
 the occasional teacher — parens scholaruin alitor et 
 infrequens — men of conflicting views and divergent 
 methods, is as surely chimerical as would be at 
 present the union in one body of the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury and his suffragans with repre- 
 sentatives of the Plymouth Brethren, Mormonism, 
 the Salvation Army, Christian Science, and other 
 irregular corps of the Church Militant. What 
 community of interest can reasonably exist 
 between the head of an Oxford college and a 
 teacher of shorthand, and, despite the intellectual 
 gymnastic of the classics, what is the greatest 
 common measure of an instructor in eurhythmies 
 and the Regius Professor of Greek ? " Necessity 
 acquaints us with strange bedfellows," and few 
 more motley gatherings can ever have been 
 grouped together than that fortuitous concourse 
 of educational atoms which met under the presi- 
 dency of Mr. Acland in four different rooms. 
 
 Co-operation is necessarily difficult, and if 
 higher education is to hold its own in such a 
 scheme the educational parliament must be 
 divided, as other parliaments have been in the 
 past, into its several orders. If we come to a 
 
 291
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 counting of noses the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, 
 alas ! is no better off than his neighbour ; and we 
 arrive at the result, extraordinary in a parliament 
 of education, that the representatives of the most 
 highly developed culture are in the minority. 
 Education, from one point of view the least 
 democratic thing in the world, takes an ironic 
 delight in demonstrating that all men are not 
 equal, that the same course of training will result 
 in one case in miraculous success, in another in 
 abject failure. However, in our parliament Bristol 
 and Birmingham can outvote Oxford, Sheffield and 
 Leeds will swamp Cambridge, and the National 
 Union of Teachers with its seven representatives 
 is the master of them all. Is it not better to stand 
 aside altogether rather than to go through the 
 farce of expressing opinions which the might of 
 Sir James Yoxall's legions can at once overwhelm? 
 The grand seigneurs of the educational world 
 spend much of their time in posing as Philippe 
 Egalite. The attitude is pleasing, and I would be 
 the last to deny that levelling is desirable. Unless, 
 however, the levelling is in an upward, not a 
 downward, direction, the results can only be 
 disastrous. The principalities and powers of 
 education can best serve their fellow-workers 
 in other spheres not by yielding up their prestige 
 or even their privileges, but by pressing for the 
 bestowal of a greater meed of esteem and in- 
 dependence upon sister Cinderella, bullied and 
 sweated as she so often is by the ignorant or 
 even illiterate Bumbles who control her destinies, 
 despised and dictated to by inspectors of the 
 
 292
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 Holmes type, a slave who finds herself daily more 
 hopelessly immured in the prison-house of cramp- 
 ing, soulless routine. The very tribulations of the 
 elementary teacher convince me that the true 
 interests of education demand, not the reduction 
 of the Headmaster of Eton to the position of a 
 village teacher, but the exaltation in prestige and 
 position of the village teacher till he enjoys some- 
 thing of the respect and freedom of action which 
 pertain to the Headmaster of Eton. 
 
 I urge these general considerations against the 
 present proposals, but the scheme is open to 
 criticism in many of its details also. I am not 
 qualified to pass on to the Register without attesta- 
 tion of my merits from another, but I have already 
 performed this service for others. It may be a 
 matter of interest to record that a mere statement 
 that the applicant is not unfit will suffice. This 
 impressive litotes, this statement that the applicant 
 '< has been guilty of no serious moral delinquency," 
 to quote a phrase from a testimonial which has 
 become a classic, will not in some quarters be 
 accepted in the spirit in which it is offered. There 
 is much virtue in the phrase, however, and I fore- 
 see a long procession of " lame ducks " passing 
 through the wide portals of " not unfit " aided by 
 such an open sesame. If a headmaster is unable 
 to constrain his conscience even to this negative 
 testimonial, the afflicted applicant may have re- 
 course to some member of a governing body, 
 some justice of the peace, or other responsible 
 persons, who are doubtless gifted with the power 
 of recognising the " not unfit " teacher at sight. 
 
 293
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 While one admits that in any scheme vested 
 interests must be regarded and some time hmit 
 appointed, one regrets that it was necessary to 
 damn a whole profession with the faint praise of 
 " not unfit." 
 
 Turning to the qualifications required after 
 December, 191 8, one experiences a graver shock. 
 After having long cherished the delusion that I 
 was a member of a learned profession, I find now 
 that the minimum qualification is the passing of 
 the examination qualifying for recognition as a 
 certificated teacher in an elementary school, an 
 examination below even matriculation standard, a 
 stock of attainments which many schoolboys not 
 of Macaulay's breed would hold in derision. I 
 share with Mr. Gary Gilson a sense of disappoint- 
 ment that this is the case, though I do not share 
 his optimistic feeling that things will all come 
 right in the end. 
 
 That crime against democracy, a register with a 
 double column, has been averted, with curious 
 results. A man may, for instance, be placed on 
 the Register upon the results of a test in music, 
 woodwork, or bookkeeping. He is then free to 
 teach whatever subject he pleases, deluding the 
 public by the statement that he is on the Register, 
 which is true enough. So far as the Teachers' 
 Council is concerned, once the necessary guinea 
 is paid it matters not whether the applicant 
 lectures on Greek in a university, teaches French 
 in a secondary school, or presides over the sing- 
 ing classes of an elementary school. Among the 
 ironies of the situation, and they are many, the 
 
 294
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 most striking is that university and secondary 
 teachers have for the most part declared them- 
 selves satisfied with the academic qualifications 
 required, while elementary teachers have not 
 only expressed the gravest dissatisfaction, but 
 have even threatened to smash the Register unless 
 amendments are made. 
 
 The advocates of the new Register have been 
 in too much of a hurry to think out their reasons 
 for the faith that is within them. It is simply un- 
 true to say that the new Register insists on a high 
 standard of attainments, and yet Sir John McClure 
 commits himself in his haste to this statement. 
 Nor is it a safeguard against the charlatan, as Pro- 
 fessor Jevons and Mr. Legge aver. A man who 
 has the elementary certificate is quite free to open 
 a school and to profess to give his pupils a 
 secondary education. He is on the Register. 
 Headmasters of secondary schools will not be 
 deceived by applicants for appointments, but if 
 governing bodies, as some suggest, are to insist 
 upon the appointment of registered teachers alone, 
 and are to be taught to believe that those on the 
 Register have alone attained to educational salva- 
 tion, it will be but another proof of the innocence 
 of some governing bodies in matters educational. 
 Nor are we quite ready yet for the transvaluation 
 of values which some desire. It is well that 
 men should know how to teach. There are two 
 methods — one that of attendance at a training 
 college, another the " docendo disces " method, 
 the course adopted by 95 per cent, of the pre- 
 sent generation of secondary teachers, advocates 
 
 295
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 of "training" included. But it is absolutely 
 essential that the teacher should have something 
 to teach, and if we must choose between two evils, 
 infinitely greater harm can be wrought by the ill- 
 informed teacher with a smattering of psychology 
 than by a highly-educated man who learns his craft 
 by degrees — as, indeed, does the " trained " man. 
 
 Whether it is still possible to amend the serious 
 defects enumerated I cannot say. I fear, however, 
 that our leaders, like the Prince in Hans Andersen, 
 are exulting in their gay new garb while their 
 nakedness is patent to those around them. Is 
 further make-believe desirable ? My answer must 
 be in the negative, and for the present I must 
 boldly assert that, judged from the standpoint of 
 secondary education, the new Register ought to 
 be a failure and is an imposture. — I am, Sir, your 
 obedient servant, 
 
 J. H. E. Crees. 
 
 Crypt Grammar School, 
 Gloucester, /rtw/ary 19 14. 
 
 THE REGISTER: A CRITICISM 
 
 To the Editor of " The Tunes." 
 
 Sir, — In your Supplement of January, 19 14, you 
 were good enough to permit me to set forth a 
 number of objections to the proposed Teachers' 
 Register. Your recent article, " In the Balance," 
 prompts me to review, with your kind consent, 
 the situation as it now appears to a hostile critic. 
 
 296
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 The situation appears to be this. Of perhaps 
 150,000 men and women engaged in all the 
 branches of education recognised by the Registra- 
 tion Council, about 5500 have made application 
 during the fifteen months which have passed since 
 the conditions of registration were announced. 
 Few secondary teachers, and still fewer elementary 
 teachers in proportion, have applied. 
 
 It is in the nature of bulletins to mislead ; 
 those of the Registration Council are particularly 
 misleading. Only the initiated could discover that 
 as yet merely an insignificant proportion of those 
 eligible have applied, that at present we need to 
 know not who have applied but who have not. 
 Twice we have learnt that Dr. Sadler is registered, 
 which seems to suggest that that distinguished man 
 counts as two ordinary mortals. His valency is 
 greater still, but such computations seem opposed 
 to the equalitarian principles on which the Register 
 is based. In the list of nonentities who have ap- 
 plied, including inspectors who do not teach, we 
 see occasionally — rari nantes in gurgite vasto — 
 the name of a schoolmaster of some eminence. 
 If such a one needs a long twelvemonth to make 
 his decision, it becomes an interesting exercise in 
 the Rule of Three to calculate the length of time 
 required by a dweller in remote Western wilds. 
 Hope springs eternal in the official breast. Pro- 
 gress, we learn, is as rapid as was expected, is 
 more rapid than was the case with the previous 
 Register. In other words, if one fiasco differs 
 from another fiasco in discredit the present 
 Register is a slightly less discreditable fiasco than 
 
 297
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 its predecessor. It would be interesting to have 
 the computation of a mathematician as to the 
 number of decades required to secure a completely 
 registered profession, allowance being made for 
 wastage through death or ill-health, for unsuccess- 
 ful applications — are we all efficient ? — and other 
 causes. An optimist might indulge the hope that 
 the energetic secretary's attainment of centenarian 
 status and the achievement of his most dearly- 
 cherished ideal might nearly synchronise. Might 
 not a branch office be opened in the Elysian 
 Fields for the benefit of the myriads who still 
 hesitate ? Assuredly they will not be inscribed on 
 Mr. Roscoe's books otherwise, unless they attain 
 to a longevity rarely found except in the remotest 
 nooks of Ireland or the early chapters of Genesis. 
 May the Register continue to make progress at its 
 present speed ! 
 
 Obviously lack of enthusiasm is the feeling 
 which predominates. The entrance fee is small, 
 and had the Register been ardently desired it 
 would have been complete in six months. The 
 war did not begin till more than seven months 
 after the publication of the conditions, and there- 
 fore cannot be held responsible. Registration, 
 though strongly supported by the officials of the 
 N.U.T., in all probability appeals very little to the 
 rank and file, for it is merely a visionary enhance- 
 ment of status. Some teachers, we are informed, 
 are paying their guineas by instalments. Whether 
 they are deducting 4^. a week from their miserable 
 wage, or registering under the three years' system, 
 it is a startling fact and casts a lurid light upon 
 
 298
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 the conditions under which some teachers have 
 to work. " Nil habet infehx paupertas durius in 
 se quam quod ridiculos homines facit." What 
 teachers who cannot find a guinea for such a vital 
 matter require is not an imaginary equahty with 
 the Headmaster of Eton or the Master of Trinity, 
 but a strong trade union which shall secure them 
 a living wage. 
 
 But the secondary teacher who does not go to 
 conferences, modestly inarticulate and undemon- 
 strative by nature — and he is in a great majority — 
 is influenced by other motives. At once the defect 
 and the strength of the representative system is 
 that the representative never represents. The 
 nominal leaders of secondary education are either 
 men of high intellectual gifts who do not really 
 understand the point of view of their followers, or 
 less gifted masters in London schools who swim 
 with the ofBcial tide. They are never backwoods- 
 men. In the art of war it has recently been 
 demonstrated that premature advances result in 
 hasty retreats, and in our own more peaceful 
 world there are frequent examples of faulty leading. 
 Of course the grand seigneur can condescend. To 
 him the difference between a municipal secondary 
 school and a higher-grade school seems triflingly 
 small. Not so to those in question. The moun- 
 tain at a distance seems one rounded mass, but 
 as one approaches nearer one finds a multitude of 
 irregularities, gaps and projections, elevations and 
 depressions. Similarly, it is an established fact 
 that the slighter the distinction of rank or status 
 the more rigorously do men expect it to be ob- 
 
 299
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 served. A course of conferences seems to pro- 
 duce the conference mind, a type which inclines 
 to the philanthropic platitude, which delights in 
 attendance at Ministerial levies, where it courts 
 and is courted, in dalliance with Under-Secre- 
 taries and conclaves with hierarchs, which loves 
 diplomacy for its own sake, not assuredly for its 
 Dead Sea fruit, which being generally incarnate 
 in a skilled rhetorician, dabbles in a vague cosmo- 
 politanism and welters in a nebulous fraternity, 
 because denunciations of sectionalism and a per- 
 fervid sentimentalism afford more scope for its often 
 admirable rhetoric. One can but turn on the hose 
 of common sense and point out once again that 
 village teachers and regius professors, instructors 
 in carpentry and sixth-form composition masters 
 form a team which needs very skilful driving, and 
 that our phaeton ^ will have many sharp corners to 
 turn. To say that all are equal in the realm of 
 intellect is treason. It is cant also, though well- 
 meant cant. We live not in different streets, but 
 in different worlds, and our greatest common 
 measure is zero. 
 
 The secondary schoolmaster is of necessity dis- 
 appointed at and disgusted with the new arrange- 
 ments. He had hoped to become a member of a 
 learned profession, of a profession which guarded 
 the entrance to its ranks most jealously and opened 
 only to merit. He finds himself a nondescript 
 surrounded by nondescripts, finds that the qualifi- 
 cation of a university degree which he had hoped 
 would be essential is completely ignored, and that, 
 
 ^ The author wrote " Phaethon." 
 300
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 following a Scriptural precedent, the Registration 
 Council has gone into the highways and byways 
 and compelled men to come in. Let me refer 
 here, Sir, to two pronouncements in your own 
 Supplements. In February, i9i2,you pointed out 
 the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of devising 
 one condition of entry suitable and fair to all 
 types of teachers, and favoured a register by 
 compartments, with free movement from one com- 
 partment to another. In September, 191 3, the 
 necessity of every teacher's attaining some ele- 
 mentary standard in general liberal education was 
 emphasized with much force. " It may be neces- 
 sary to take a foreman from a dyeworks and 
 employ him to teach dyeing to working lads, but 
 such lads will not acquire the art of dyeing any 
 better because their instructor is illiterate. Hence 
 it may be supposed that, although the Registration 
 Council will have nothing to say about the right 
 of public authorities to make use of such trades- 
 men as supplementary instructors, it will make 
 short work of their claims — if such be advanced 
 — to be translated out of their avocation into a 
 learned profession." Again, the inclusion of uni- 
 versity representatives was regarded merely as an 
 afterthought. " It would be ludicrous to suppose 
 that ' Q,' the eminent Professor of Literature at 
 Cambridge, would be assisted in the discharge of 
 his office by being ranked as a professional teacher." 
 Following the admirable precedent of Burke's 
 colleague at Bristol, I most respectfully and em- 
 phatically say ditto to the Editor of The Times. 
 Unhappily the backwoodsman cannot or will 
 
 301
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 not come up to town to express his views. If 
 by some exception he does, he obediently passes 
 all resolutions which his leaders put forward, be- 
 cause otherwise he will be " stultified " — blessed 
 word ! He makes a mental reservation to register, 
 next year, or at the Greek kalends, the later date 
 for preference, meekly returns home and pas- 
 sively resists. His leaders threaten and hint of 
 Sibylline books, but that is a game which, as he 
 thinks, two can play at. " If one resolution is 
 ineffective, try two," is his leaders' axiom ; but 
 they are still left in the unhappy plight of pleni- 
 potentiaries without a mandate. For the back- 
 woodsman, meek but stubborn — stubborn, if you 
 will, with the perversity of the ass — can neither 
 be cajoled nor thwacked into acquiescence. He 
 refuses to let his Balaams either drive or lead 
 him a yard farther than he desires. Being by 
 some strange freak of nature unvocal, he cannot 
 remonstrate with his riders, but he gently deposits 
 them at the fitting moment in the nearest ditch 
 or quagmire, and scarcely troubles to watch their 
 flounderings. He is a Hamlet at the time for 
 action, and would have been of great assistance 
 in working out the ancient problem of the ass 
 and the two bundles of hay. Yet one touch of 
 asininity makes him and his riders kin. Only the 
 blunders of very clever men indeed could have 
 landed us and themselves in the present impasse. 
 
 Still the ass thinks hard. Did space permit I 
 could have wished to develop at length the view 
 that our great need at present is the questionnaire , 
 the Referendum. What is required is not the 
 
 302
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 views of those schoolmasters who happen to be in 
 London in the first week of January, but the views 
 of all schoolmasters (and of all schoolmistresses). 
 Leaders would not then be involved in the humi- 
 liation of guaranteeing to Whitehall what they 
 could not by any possibility fulfil. A referendum 
 on the Register would probably be a great sur- 
 prise, but as the success of the Register depends 
 upon the attitude of the individual teacher, not 
 on the views of leaders, however eminent, it would 
 be well to recognise that one has to hasten slowly 
 in this unenlightened country, and even that the 
 cant of progress is as unlovely as the cant of 
 retrogression. 
 
 Nor can I here attempt to show how the in- 
 adequacy of our representation is almost a com- 
 plete barrier to the expression of diversity of 
 view, as, e.g.j in the examinations question. Five 
 or six distinct views were put forward on this 
 subject at the Headmasters' Association's recent 
 meeting, but we have only one representative, who 
 does not on all points represent the views of the 
 majority of his colleagues, and whose catchword 
 is, "Trust the Board of Education." 
 
 But progress towards professional independence 
 cannot lie in this direction. The first debate of 
 the Council was not impressive — indeed, seemed 
 designed to bring the Council into contempt. 
 Emphasis was laid by the chairman on the neces- 
 sity of working in close connexion with the Board 
 of Education and of securing its sanction and 
 support, the very point that an astuter President 
 would have warily avoided. I had hoped that 
 
 303
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 the Council would have had the courage to assert 
 its separate existence, but it is idle to suggest that 
 a Duma manipulated by a Permanent Secretary, 
 a doctrinaire, and a Junta, is the heaven-sent con- 
 stitution which is destined to give us the dignity 
 of a profession. Even the dominion of a bur- 
 eaucracy without disguise would be preferable to 
 the fitful motions of a corpse which even a strong 
 Government voltage can galvanise into only a 
 spasmodic activity. We must return to basic 
 facts and tackle the question afresh. Individuals 
 will not be driven, bark the sheep-dogs ever so 
 loudly. The present Register is for the secondary 
 teacher an outrage, for the elementary teacher a 
 superfluous luxury. We require a Council which 
 is not an omnium gatherum, an assemblage of im- 
 posing battalions of men and women in buckram, 
 and a Register in which no teacher, secondary 
 or elementary, can be enrolled unless he pos- 
 sesses a degree. Till this is secured aloofness is 
 a service to English education, the best and the 
 most prudent policy. 
 
 " Changing pawns is a futile plan. 
 Make a sweep of the chessboard, I'm your man." 
 
 I am. Sir, yours faithfully, 
 
 J. H. E. Crees. 
 
 Crypt Grammar School, 
 Gloucester, April 191 5. 
 
 304
 
 INDEX 
 
 Acton, Lord, his History of Lib- 
 erty, 95 
 
 " A.M.A.," The (Journal of Assist- 
 ant Masters), its characteristics, 
 133; its correspondence columns, 
 
 134 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, on Inspectors' 
 functions, 122 ; his damnosahere- 
 ditas, 127; on the "strange dis- 
 ease of modern life," 128 ; on the 
 memorisation of Latin poetry, 
 177 ; on bad Schools, 219 ; poems 
 quoted, 267, 268, 281 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, Headmaster of 
 Rugby, appointed in 1827, 10 ; 
 his earnestness, 10; his person- 
 ality, II 
 
 Assistant Master, the, a type por- 
 trayed, 22 ; his troubles, 23 ; his 
 potency, 25 ; his characteristics, 
 26 ; his advantages, 133, 144 ; a 
 contrast with France and Ger- 
 many, 141 ; his plain living and 
 high thinking, 144; his inade- 
 quate reward, 147; the "sweat- 
 ing" of him, 149 
 
 Assistant Masters' Association, the, 
 a Trades-Union, 135 ; its pro- 
 gramme, 135, 140 ; its orienta- 
 tion, 136 ; its members and their 
 attendance at meetings, 139 ; its 
 attitude towards examinations, 
 231 
 
 Bagehot, on Horace, 179 
 
 Balfour, Mr. Arthur, his Education 
 Bill of 1902, 31 
 
 Bradley, George Granville, Head- 
 master of Marlborough, his teach- 
 ing of Latin Prose, 19 ; his views 
 and methods, 20 
 
 Bristol University, its Honorary 
 Degrees, 217 ; defects of consti- 
 tution, 233; its attempts at 
 aggrandisement, 233 
 
 Brown, T. E., dirge of Clifton, 7 ; 
 Henley's appreciation of, 285 
 
 Bruce, the Hon. W. N., circulars 
 on teaching, 102 
 
 Bureaucracy, in education, ix ; its 
 manipulation of systems of educa- 
 tion, 94 ; cannot eat its cake and 
 have it, 129 ; its rigorous disci- 
 pline, 278 ; local bureaucracies, 
 282 ; its bitter cud, 287 
 
 C^SAR, as a School text, 171 ; the 
 man and his style, 171 
 
 Caucus, race, 42 ; cogwheels of, 46 
 
 Character in education, versus intel- 
 lect, 206, 246 ; not moulded, 284 
 
 Cholmeley, Mr. R. F. , his propa- 
 ganda, 270 
 
 Cicero, his fascination, 188 ; his 
 revelation of personality, 188 ; 
 his hunmnitas, 189 
 
 Civil Service Commission and ex- 
 aminations, 234 
 
 Classics, the, past predominance 
 of, 152 ; suitable basis of instruc- 
 tion, 153; superiority to French 
 and German, 156 ; adverse views, 
 162 ; revitalised in recent days, 
 164 ; purpose of study of, 165 ; 
 Conversational Classics, 166, 169; 
 delights of, 170 ; Latin literature 
 not second-rate, 192; "and the 
 average boy," 193; a starvation 
 diet of, in many schools, 193 ; 
 should not be a social barrier, 
 194 ; more needed in Secondary 
 Schools, 19s ; need of firmer 
 attitude, 199 ; both pabulum and 
 gymnastic, 200 
 
 Codlin, not Short, the Master's 
 friend, 138 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., on Boyer, 159; 
 on modes of teaching, 162 
 
 Consultative Committee (of Board 
 of Education), Report on Ex- 
 aminations, 213, 219 
 
 Crypt Grammar School, Gloucester, 
 T. E. B.'sMastershipof,284,28s; 
 W. E. Henley enters in 1861, 285 
 
 305 
 
 u
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Cuckoo, its perversions practised, 
 
 274 
 Culture a haven of refuge, 201 
 
 Dante, quoted, vii ; and Priscian, 
 
 9 
 Democracy, a pis aller, 53 ; the 
 
 New and the Old Toryism, 56; 
 in its grand moments incom- 
 parable, 60; freedom of speech 
 its greatest and most necessary 
 virtue, 59; the latest form, in; 
 its alliance with the bureaucrat, 
 
 273 
 
 Dionysius of Syracuse sells Plato 
 into slavery, 92 note 
 
 Dionysius' ear, the, of Head- 
 masters, 133 
 
 Dryden, his "Alexander's Feast," 
 
 155 
 
 Education, debasement of, 95; 
 keeps its banking account at 
 Whitehall, 97 ; its literary bases, 
 153 ; the primrose path of, 204 ; 
 development of character, 205 ; 
 its beau ideal, 280 ; the School- 
 master's function, 284; is the 
 freedom of the spirit, 281, 288 
 
 Education, Board of, and Educa- 
 tion, 97; needs decentralisation 
 (Norwood), 98; a "curious im- 
 pertinent," loi ; its influence on 
 curricula, loi ; its encyclicals, 
 102; their futility, 103; as an 
 exponent of educational theory, 
 103 ; its recognition as efficient, 
 103; its doles, 105; its belief in 
 original sin, 129; its Niagara of 
 commands, 274 
 
 Eighteenth Century, turbulent, 
 mutinous, and rhetorical, 272 
 
 Eldorado, Assistant Masters' vis- 
 ions of, 149 
 
 Elementary Teacher, en masse, 
 249 ; unacquainted with Budd- 
 hism, 250; promotion of, 251; 
 his difficulties, 254 ; need of 
 greater individuality, 257; atti- 
 tude towards Secondary Educa- 
 tion, 258 
 
 English, modern, a debased idiom, 
 211 
 
 Equalitarianism, absurdities of, 
 142 ; Lord Morley on, 215 
 
 Examinations, their stimulus 
 needed, 207 ; desirability of 
 greater uniformity in, 208; 
 teachers to be consulted about, 
 209 ; their basis literary, 210 ; 
 compared with Cricket matches, 
 211 ; multiplicity to be depre- 
 cated, 212 ; their abuse, 216, 218 ; 
 their services in the past, 214; 
 do not lead to excessive strain, 
 219; their critics, 220; their test 
 of airiness, 222; the parent and, 
 224 ; girls and, 224, 239 ; needed 
 by new Schools, 228 ; suggestions 
 re, 231 ; from average age of 
 fifteen, 240 
 
 Formal Training, various views 
 on, 196; latest modification of 
 doctrine, v 
 
 Galleries, importance of, in 
 Council Chambers, 47 
 
 German Schools, Anglophobia of, 
 ix 
 
 Grammar Schools, the mean be- 
 tween Public and Municipal 
 Schools, 71 ; the typical English 
 School ? 260 ; its vicissitudes, 
 261 ; its tranquillity, 263 ; its 
 function, 263 ; its boys, 264 
 
 Griffiths, Principal, and Elemen- 
 tary Education, 255 
 
 Hayvvard, Dr., on Board of Edu- 
 cation, 123; on the Inspector of 
 Elementary Schools, 125 ; on 
 malignant egoism, 251; on Head- 
 Teachers, 257 
 
 Headmaster, importance of his 
 powers, 49 ; mode of appoint- 
 ment of, 81; mediatising function 
 of, 133; an enlightened despot, 
 139 ; often inadequately paid, 
 209 ; the energising principle of 
 a School, 282 
 
 Henley, W. E. , enters the Crypt 
 School in 1861, 285; his debt to 
 T. E. Brown, 285 
 
 Holmes, Mr. E. G., his methods, 
 vi ; on the Board of Education, 
 97 ; and the Elementary Teacher, 
 250 
 
 Hope, Mr. A. See Mr. Cyril 
 Norwood 
 
 306
 
 INDEX 
 
 Horace, personality of, 178; equi- 
 poise of, 179 ; philosophy, 181 ; 
 Alcaics, 183; workmanship of, 184 
 
 Ink, invisible, used by School- 
 masters, 286 
 
 Inspections, "Full," 107; oscillate 
 between tyranny and farcicality, 
 
 27s 
 
 Inspectors, Arguses of one hundred 
 eyes, 96; defects of, 98, 119; 
 disagreements of, 108; manners 
 of, 117 ; resemblance of, to 
 Knights of the Garter, 117; no- 
 madic life of, 118 ; place in edu- 
 cational systems of, 120 ; the 
 ideal, 123 ; more needed, 275 
 
 Intellective indices, 229 
 
 Jargon, in Government papers, 
 no; tyranny of, 210 
 
 " Junior Locals," 242 
 
 Juvenal, power of his invective, 
 186 ; satire of, 187 ; grandeur of 
 lines, 187 ; lines re endurance, 287 
 
 Kennedy, Benjamin Hall, Head- 
 master of Shrewsbury, his learn- 
 ing,-i5 ; hiswork at Shrewsbury, 16 
 
 Kibworth Beauchamp, village on 
 Leicester - Market Harborough 
 turnpike, 77; represented on 
 Teachers' Register, 77 
 
 Kultur, xi ; trampled under foot by 
 Prussian ruffianism , 202 
 
 Laputans, without flappers, 116 
 Latin, see Classics 
 Latin poetry, rhetorical, 184 
 Latin prose, Bradley's teaching of, 
 
 19; monument of the Roman 
 
 mind, 187 
 Learning, a journey through arid 
 
 tracts, 207 
 Liberty, Lord Acton's conception 
 
 of, 9S 
 
 Livy, a literary chef? 190 
 
 Local paper, its small - beer 
 chronicles, 37 ; its perennial in- 
 terest, 37. 
 
 Log-rollers, feats of, on local 
 bodies, 47 
 
 London County Council, its bureau- 
 cratic methods, 46 ; treatment of 
 Headmasters, 282 
 
 Lucan, quoted, 89 
 Lucretius, grandeur of, 185 ; occa- 
 sionally wearisome, 185 
 
 Master's Meeting, government 
 
 by, 138 
 Matriculation (Examination) a mis- 
 nomer, 243 
 McClure, Sir John, on municipalised 
 
 Education, 50 
 M'Kenna, Mr. R., regulations of, re 
 " Free Placers," 1906, 35 
 
 Methods, new, origin of, 112 ; chil- 
 dren of complaisance, credulity, 
 and conceit, 115 
 
 Modernity, its danger, 108 
 
 Monomaniac, astuteness of educa- 
 tional, 112 
 
 Montessori system, 113; anticipa- 
 tion of, in Goethe, 114 
 
 Muddleham, the Mercury, 38; its 
 charm, 60; its limitations, 61; 
 its School, 264 ; its future, 276 
 
 Municipalised Education, 32; in- 
 fluenced by elections, 39 ; per- 
 sonnel of those in authority, 40 ; 
 debates, 41, 47'. the caucus, 42; 
 rates, 43 
 
 Municipal Secondary Schools, 33; 
 weaknesses of, 34 ; levelling 
 downward, 49 
 
 Music, power of, 155 
 
 Newman, Cardinal, on richness of 
 style, 188; on Education, 280; 
 as a teacher, 283 
 
 Norwood, Mr. Cyril, vni ; on local 
 bodies, 51 ; on a Teachers' 
 Register, 74; on Inspectors, 98 ; 
 on State control of Secondary 
 Education, 112, 126 
 
 N.U.T. (National Union of 
 Teachers), its forward move- 
 ment, 64 ; and Herefordshire 
 teachers, 72 ; its programme, 72 ; 
 its conferences, 253 
 
 ' ' Old Fogey " in Journal of Edu- 
 cation, 77 
 O'Shaugnessy, poem quoted, 54 
 
 Paton, Dr., and the Manchester 
 City Council, 48 ; on Examma- 
 tions, 236 
 
 IP"]
 
 DIDASCALUS PATIENS 
 
 Plato, his " Republic," 86, 90 ; his 
 intransigeance, 88 ; his ideal 
 state, 89 ; his philosopher king, 
 92 ; a real tyrant, 93 ; his malign 
 influence, 273 ; his synthesis of 
 poet, philosopher, and scientist, 
 281 
 
 Pottage, mess of, date of arrival, 276 
 
 Printing, fetish of, no 
 
 Public Schools, aloofness of, 70 ; 
 appreciation of the Classics, 159 
 
 Pump, Parish, its symbolism, 29; 
 its importance, 30 ; a twin cause 
 with that of "The Hierarchy," 
 276 
 
 Records, School, 226 
 
 Register, The Teachers', its ano- 
 malies, 73 ; its inclusion of 
 plumbing and sewing, 74 ; its 
 succis d'esti??ie, 76 ; its future 
 prospects, 279 ; its desirability in 
 some form, 78 ; letters of the 
 author re, 290, 296 
 
 Registration Council, its miscel- 
 laneous character, 65 
 
 Reynolds, Mr. Stephen, on Educa- 
 tion (in "Seems So")), 58 
 
 Rouse, Dr. W. H. D., his methods 
 of teaching Classics, 167 
 
 Ruskin, his resemblance to Plato, 
 86; his championship of right- 
 eousness, 88 
 
 Sadler, Dr., sweet reasonableness 
 of, I ; on Syndicalism, 63, 80 ; 
 desire for Secondary Education 
 to be connected with State, 104 ; 
 a registered teacher, 70 
 
 Salaries, scales of, 141 ; need of 
 discrimination, 142 
 
 School, spirit of great, 129 
 
 Schoolmaster, in literature, 7 ; his 
 high intellectual gifts, 16 ; and 
 the official, 266; his need of 
 freshness of outlook, 271 ; the 
 defects of his qualities, 286 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, on "primrose 
 methods" of Education, 204 
 
 Secondary Education, a bundle of 
 conflicting entities, 72; in the 
 cogwheels of the caucus, 46 ; 
 
 should not be interfered with by 
 State, 99 
 
 Selby-Bigge, Sir Lewis, on Educa- 
 tion, 97 
 
 Sheepdog conception of State, 127 
 
 Shelley, quoted, 202 
 
 Silverpump, Dr. Archimedes, his 
 academy, 214 
 
 Simplicity of life, need of, 145 
 
 Sin, original, the educationalist and, 
 303 ; belief of the Board of Edu- 
 cation in, 129 
 
 Style, not an antiseptic but a vital 
 principle, 183 
 
 Tacitus, his gravitas, i8g ; an 
 impersonation of the Roman 
 noblesse, igo ; his Agricola, 191 
 
 Tennyson and feminism, 240 
 
 Thompson, Francis, quoted, 275 
 
 Thring, Edward, Headmaster of 
 Uppingham, his point of view, 
 13 ; his financial and other 
 troubles, 13 ; his diary, 13 
 
 Ti?nes Education Supplement, 
 quoted, 63, 74 ; letters by the 
 author in, 290, 296 
 
 Tomatoes, comparative hardiness 
 of, and School children, 44 
 
 Tyranny, its phases, 93 ; philo- 
 sopher, 92 
 
 Uncertificated Women Teach- 
 ers, ;^3o per annum an adequate 
 wage, 44 
 
 Unity of profession, now a visionary 
 ideal, 259 
 
 Universities, their function, 66; 
 their spell, 68 ; their part in 
 examining, 232 ; proper age of 
 entry, 243 
 
 Verrall, Dr. A. W. , on Euripides, 
 
 67 
 Virgil, quoted, 9; the magician, 
 
 172 ; greatness of his .^^neid, 
 
 174 ; his art and romance, 176 ; 
 
 his pietas, 189 
 
 Went, Rev. James, his achieve- 
 ments at Leicester in Classics, 
 169 
 
 Printed by Ballantvne, Hanson <5r> Co. 
 Edinburgh &-= London
 
 By the same Author 
 
 The Reign of the Emperor Probus 
 
 (University of London Press, 5^. net.) 
 
 THE TIMES, November i, 19 12. 
 
 "A very erudite examination of the reign of one of the best 
 of the later Emperors (he reigned A.D. 276-282) by a Cam- 
 bridge historian (Headmaster of the Crypt Grammar School, 
 Gloucester)." 
 
 THE TABLET, November i, 191 2. 
 
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