The Upton Letters, Arthur Christopher Benson [red seas under red skies txt] 📗

in dealing with the language itself. It is beginning with the wrong end of the stick. Grammar is the scientific or philosophical theory of language; it may be an interesting and valuable study for a mind of strong calibre, but it does not help one to understand an author or to appreciate a style.

Then, too, I would sweep away for all but boys of special classical ability most kinds of composition. Fancy teaching a boy side by side with the elements of German or French to compose German and French verse, heroic, Alexandrine, or lyrical! The idea has only to be stated to show its fatuity. I would teach boys to write Latin prose, because it is a tough subject, and it initiates them into the process of disentangling the real sense of the English copy. But I would abolish all Latin verse composition, and all Greek composition of every kind for mediocre boys. Not only would they learn the languages much faster, but there would be a great deal of time saved as well. Then I would abolish the absurd little lessons, with the parsing, and I would at all hazards push on till they could read fluently.

Of course the above improvement of methods is sketched on the hypothesis that both Greek and Latin are retained. Personally I would retain Latin for most, but give up Greek altogether in the majority of cases. I would teach all boys French thoroughly. I would try to make them read and write it easily, and that should be the linguistic staple of their education. Then I would teach them history, mainly modern English history, and modern geography; a very little mathematics and elementary science. Such boys would be, in my belief, well-educated; and they would never be tempted to disbelieve in the usefulness of their education.

When I propound these ideas, my colleagues talk of soft options, and of education without muscle or nerve. My retort is that the majority of boys educated on classical lines are models of intellectual debility as it is. They are uninterested, cynical, and they cannot even read or write the languages which they have been so carefully taught.

What I want is experiment of every kind; but my cautious friends say that one would only get something a great deal worse. That I deny. I maintain that it is impossible to have anything worse, and that the majority of the boys we turn out are intellectually in so negative a condition that any change would be an improvement.

But I effect nothing; nothing is attempted, nothing done. I do my best--fortunately our system admits of that--to teach my private pupils a little history, and I make them write essays. The results are decidedly encouraging; but meanwhile my colleagues go on in the old ways, quite contented, pathetically conscientious, laboriously slaving away, and apparently not disquieted by results.

I am very near the end of my tether--one cannot go on for ever administering a system in which one has lost all faith. If there were signs of improvement I should be content. If our headmaster would even insist upon the young men whom he appoints obtaining a competent knowledge of French and German before they come here it would be something, because then, when the change is made, there would be less friction. But even a new headmaster with liberal ideas would now be hopelessly hampered by the fact that he would have a staff who could not teach modern subjects at all, who knew nothing but classics, and classics only for teaching purposes.

It does me good to pour out my woes to you; I feel my position most acutely at this time of year, when the serious business of the place is cricket. In cricket the boys are desperately and profoundly interested, not so much in the game, as in the social rewards of playing it well. And my worthy colleagues give themselves to athletics with an earnestness which depresses me into real dejection. One meets a few of these beloved men at dinner; a few half-hearted remarks are made about politics and books; a good deal of vigorous gossip is talked; but if a question as to the best time for net-practice, or the erection of a board for the purpose of teaching slip-catches is mentioned, a profound seriousness falls on the group. A man sits up in his chair and speaks with real conviction and heat, with grave gestures. "The afternoon," he says, "is NOT a good time for nets; the boys are not at their best, and the pros. are less vigorous after their dinner. Whatever arrangements are made as to the times for school, the evening MUST be given up to nets."

The result is a pedantry, a priggishness, a solemnity about games which is simply deplorable. The whole thing seems to me to be distorted and out of proportion. I am one of those feeble people to whom exercise is only a pleasure and a recreation. If I don't like a game I don't play it. I do not see why I should be bored by my recreations. An immense number of boys are bored by their games, but they dare not say so because public opinion is so strong. As the summer goes on they avail themselves of every excuse to give up the regular games; and almost the only boys who persevere are boys who are within reach of some coveted "colour," which gives them social importance. What I desire is that boys should be serious about their work in a practical, business-like way, and amused by their games. As a matter of fact they are serious about games and profoundly bored by their work. The work is a relief from the tension of games, and if it were wholly given up, and games were played from morning to night, many boys would break down under the strain. I don't expect all the boys to be enthusiastic about their work; all healthily constituted people prefer play to work, I myself not least. But I want them to believe in it and to be interested in it, in the way that a sensible professional man is interested in his work. What produces the cynicism about work so common in classical schools is that the work is of a kind which does not seem to lead anywhere, and classics are a painful necessity which the boys intend to banish from their mind as soon as they possibly can.

This is a melancholy jeremiad, I am well aware; but it is also a frame of mind which grows upon me; and, to come back to my original proposition, it is the stupidity of virtuous men which is responsible for the continuance of this arid, out-of-joint system.--Ever yours,

T. B.


UPTON, July 22, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--. . . I took a lonely walk to-day, and returned through a new quarter of the town. When I first knew it, thirty years ago, there was a single house here--an old farm, with a pair of pretty gables of mellow brick, and a weathered, solid, brick garden-wall that ran along the road; an orchard below; all round were quiet fields; a fine row of elms stood at the end of the wall. It was a place of no great architectural merit, but it had grown old there, having been built with solidity and dignity, and having won a simple grace from the quiet influences of rain and wind and sun. Very gradually it became engulphed. First a row of villas came down to the farm, badly planned and coarsely coloured; then a long row of yellow-brick houses appeared on the other side, and the house began to wear a shy, regretful air, like a respectable and simple person who has fallen into vulgar company. To-day I find that the elms have been felled; the old wall, so strongly and firmly built, is half down; the little garden within is full of planks and heaps of brick, the box hedges trodden down, the flowers trampled underfoot; the house itself is marked for destruction.

It made me perhaps unreasonably sad. I know that population must increase, and that people had better live in convenient houses near their work. The town is prosperous enough; there is work in plenty and good wages. There is nothing over which a philanthropist and a social reformer ought not to rejoice. But I cannot help feeling the loss of a simple and beautiful thing, though I know it appealed to few people, and though the house was held to be inconvenient and out of date. I feel as if the old place must have acquired some sort of personality, and must be suffering the innocent pangs of disembodiment. I know that there is abundance of the same kind of simple beauty everywhere; and yet I feel that a thing which has taken so long to mature, and which has drunk in and appropriated so much sweetness from the gentle hands of nature, ought not so ruthlessly and yet so inevitably to suffer destruction.

But it brought home to me a deeper and a darker thing still--the sad change and vicissitude of things, the absence of any permanence in this life of ours. We enter it so gaily, and, as a child, one feels that it is eternal. That is in itself so strange--that the child himself, who is so late an inmate of the family home, so new a care to his parents, should feel that his place in the world is so unquestioned, and that the people and things that surround him are all part of the settled order of life. It was, indeed, to me as a child a strange shock to discover, as I did from old schoolroom books, that my mother herself had been a child so short a time before my own birth.

Then life begins to move on, and we become gradually, very gradually, conscious of the swift rush of things. People round us begin to die, and drop out of their places. We leave old homes that we have loved. We hurry on ourselves from school to college; we enter the world. Then, in such a life as my own has been, the lesson comes insistently near. Boys come under our care, little tender creatures; a few days seem to pass and they are young and dignified men; a few years later they return as parents, to see about placing boys of their own; and one can hardly trace the boyish lineaments in the firm-set, bearded faces of manhood.

Then our own friends begin to be called away; faster and faster runs the stream; anniversaries return with horrible celerity; and soon we know that we must die.

What is one to hold on to in such a swift flux of things? The pleasures we enjoy at first fade; we settle down by comfortable firesides; we pile the tables with beloved books; friends go and come; we acquire habits; we find out our real tastes. We learn the measure of our powers. And yet, however simple and clear our routine becomes, we are warned every now and then by sharp lessons that it is all on sufferance, that we have no continuing city; and we begin to see, some later, some earlier, that we must find something to hold on to, something eternal and everlasting in which we can rest. There must be some anchor of the soul. And then I think that many of us take refuge in a mere stoical patience; we drink our glass when it is filled, and if it stands empty we try not to complain.

Now I am turning out, so to speak, the very lining of my mind to you. The anchor cannot be