THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the contemporary

developments he will presently be called upon to influence and

control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and

ruling social man. It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and

set up for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is

impossible not to feel how infinitely more effectually-given

certain impossibilities perhaps-the job might be done.

My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of

elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it. Here all about

me was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic

forces, that filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that

stirred my imagination to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school

not only offered no key to it, but had practically no comment to

make upon it at all. We were within three miles of Westminster and

Charing Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were all

within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were going on under

our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with election placards, now the

Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in procession

through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside

news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing

discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty,

imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row,

Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling

costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames-such was

the background of our days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and

through the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all

these things. We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was

necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest

played games. We dipped down into something clear and elegantly

proportioned and time-worn and for all its high resolve of stalwart

virility a little feeble, like our blackened and decayed portals by

Inigo Jones.

Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin

and Greek. We were taught very badly because the men who taught us

did not habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them

any more now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine

monasteries. At the utmost our men read them. We were taught these

languages because long ago Latin had been the language of

civilisation; the one way of escape from the narrow and localised

life had lain in those days through Latin, and afterwards Greek had

come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and amazing ideas. Once

these two languages had been the sole means of initiation to the

detached criticism and partial comprehension of the world. I can

imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and Roper,

teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive

Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily,

impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely,

patriotically, because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the

irresistible stimulus to a new phase of history. That was long ago.

A new great world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school,

had assimilated all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on

to new and yet more amazing developments of its own. But the City

Merchants School still made the substance of its teaching Latin and

Greek, still, with no thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream

amidst the harvesting.

There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went

up to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of

our curriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted

that it was impossible to write good English without an illuminating

knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and

failed to button up a sentence in saying so. His main argument

conceded every objection a reasonable person could make to the City

Merchants' curriculum. He admitted that translation had now placed

all the wisdom of the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely

a field of endeavour remained in which modern work had not long

since passed beyond the ancient achievement. He disclaimed any

utility. But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these

grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed.

Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly discipline

for the mind.

He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior

Classic!

Yet in a dim confused way I think be was making out a case. In

schools as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available,

the sort of assistant who has been trained entirely on the old

lines, he could see no other teaching so effectual in developing

attention, restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet

systematic adjustment. And that was as far as his imagination could

go.

It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end

them; the curriculum and the social organisation of the English

public school are the crowning instances of that. They go on

because they have begun. Schools are not only immortal institutions

but reproductive ones. Our founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, Iam

sure, of Gates' pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have

dealt with them disrespectfully. But public schools and university