Thirty-five or forty years ago—say in the late seventies or early eighties—some preparatory schools, and others that taught older boys but ranked below the great public schools in repute, taught so much of English Literature as might be comprised, at a rough calculation, in two or three plays of Shakespeare, edited by Clark and Aldis Wright; a few of Bacon’s Essays, Milton’s early poems, Stopford Brooke’s little primer, a book of extracts for committal to memory, with perhaps Chaucer’s “Prologue” and a Speech of Burke. In the great public schools no English Literature was studied, save in those which had invented “Modern Sides,” to prepare boys specially for Woolwich or Sandhurst or the Indian Civil Service; for entrance to which examinations were held on certain prescribed English Classics, and marks mainly given for acquaintance with the editors’ notes.
In the universities, the study of English Classics was not officially recognised at all.
Let us not hastily suppose that this neglect of English rested wholly on unreason, or had nothing to say for itself. Teachers and tutors of the old Classical Education (as it was called) could plead as follows:
“In the first place,” they would say, “English Literature is too easy a study. Our youth, at school or university, starts on his native classics with a liability which in any foreign language he has painfully to acquire. The voices that murmured around his cradle, the voice of his nurse, of his governess, of the parson on Sundays; the voices of village boys, stablemen, gamekeepers and farmers—friendly or unfriendly—of callers, acquaintances, of the children he met at Children’s Parties; the voices that at the dinner-table poured politics or local gossip into the little pitcher with long ears—all these were English voices speaking in English: and all these were all the while insensibly leading him up the slope from the summit of which he can survey the promised land spread at his feet as a wide park; and he holds the key of the gates, to enter and take possession. Whereas,” the old instructors would continue, “with the classics of any foreign language we take him at the foot of the steep ascent, spread a table before him (mensa, mensa, mensam …) and coax or drive him up with variations upon amo, ‘I love’ or τίπτω, ‘I beat,’ until he, too, reaches the summit and beholds the landscape:
But O, what labour!
O Prince, what pain!”
Now so much of truth, Gentlemen, as this plea contains was admitted last term by your Senate, in separating the English Tripos, in which a certain linguistic familiarity may be not rashly presumed of the student, from the Foreign Language Triposes, divided into two parts, of which the first will more suspiciously test his capacity to construe the books he professes to have studied. I may return to this and to the alleged easiness of studies in a School of English. Let us proceed just now with the reasoned plea for neglect.
These admirable old schoolmasters and dons would have hesitated, maybe, to say flatly with Dogberry that “to write and read comes by nature … and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity.” But in practice their system so worked, and in some of the public schools so works to this day. Let me tell you that just before the war an undergraduate came to me from the Sixth Form of one of the best reputed among these great schools. He wished to learn to write. He wished (poor fellow) to write me an essay, if I would set him a subject. He had never written an essay at school. “Indeed,” said I, “and there is no reason why you should, if by ‘essay’ you mean some little treatise about ‘Patriotism’ or ‘A Day in the Country.’ I will choose you no such subject nor any other upon any book which you have never read. Tell me, what is your Tripos?” He said, “the History Tripos.” “Then,” said I, “since History provides quite a large number of themes, choose one and I will try to correct your treatment of it, without offence to your opinions or prejudice to your facts.” “But,” he confessed, “at So-and-so”—naming the great public school—“we never wrote out an account of anything, or set down our opinions on anything, to be corrected. We just construed and did sums.” And when he brought me his first attempt, behold, it was so. He could not construct a simple sentence, let alone putting two sentences together; while, as for a paragraph, it lay beyond his farthest horizon. In short, here was an instance ready to hand for any cheap writer engaged to decry the old Classical Education.
What would the old schoolmasters plead in excuse? Why this, as I suggest—“You cite an extreme instance. But, while granting English Literature to be great, we would point out that an overwhelming majority of our best writers have modelled their prose and verse upon the Greek and Roman classics, either directly or through tradition. Now we have our own language gratis, so to speak. Let us spend our pains, then, in acquiring Latin and Greek, and the tradition. So shall we most intimately enjoy our own authors; and so, if we wish to write, we shall have at hand the clues they followed, the models they used.”
Now I have as you know, Gentlemen, a certain sympathy with this plea, or with a part of it: nor can so much of truth as its argument contains be silenced by a “What about Shakespeare?” or a “What about Bunyan?” or a “What about Burns?” I believe our imaginary pleader for the Classics could put up a stout defence upon any of those names. To choose the forlornest hope of the three, I can hear him demonstrating, to his own satisfaction if not to yours, that Bunyan took his style straight out of the Authorised Version of our
