CORRESPONDENCE.
THE SCHOOLMASTER'S TREATMENT IN BOOKS.
[ToTHE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:]
SIR,—The schoolmaster is often said to be abroad : if he is wise he will remain there and carefully eschew the study of contemporary journalism ; he has not fared well in the fields of literature ; Creakle was, unless memory is playing pranks, a bullet-headed bully, Squeers a tyrant, Blimber a humbug, Feeder, B.A., an ass. Dickens's experience of schoolmasters would seem to have been—like Sam Weller's knowledge a London inns—extensive and peculiar. Goldsmith's experi- ence as an usher belongs to fact rather than to fiction, but it was not such as to throw much of a halo round the profession which Mr. Gladstone has publicly proclaimed to be a " noble " one. If "Tom Brown's Schooldays" has done a good deal for boys, it also did much for masters ; the figure of "the Doctor" is full of dignity, yet he is human, and even the grave young assistant-master is not ridiculous. If we think of literature in general, and not merely of fiction, we do not find much mention of the schoolmaster in the Bible; we hear of the schools of the Prophets, but nothing about the masters. If Samuel was one, he was probably not much of a success. At any rate his own sons turned out somewhat ill. Possibly he followed with unwise fidelity the methods and remon- strances of Eli, whose sons' character and conduct go far to show that mild expostulation may not invariably suffice. Theword "schoolmaster" occurs once in a well-known passage,. and as it forms a link, so to say, between the law and gospel, a member of the profession would like to keep it there ; most of us know that we have no right to do so, but that it must retire in favour of the old and trusted slave who led his master's boy from home to school. Gamaliel obviously had pupils who were proud to be brought up at his feet, but he cannot quite be called a schoolmaster, and so the credit of his "right judgment" and his philosophic calm can form no. nimbus for a master's " mortarboard " to-day.
The mention of the Bible naturally suggests Shakespeare to some minds ; schoolmasters cannot complain that they are ignored by that marvel of a man, yet they can find but scant pleasure in reading the remarks of Holofernes; he talks Latin, it is true, but he talks nonsense also ; alliteration is his ruling passion, his remarks on pronunciation are of interest; "he elepeth a calf cauf " may be enshrined in memory at least by a successor in trade who has had the happiness to hear a boy repeat Milton's "in heaven ycleped Euphrosyne" as "in heaven yelped Euphrosyne." Most boys- forget most of the few things they learn at school, but if they remember any Latin " tag " at all it is the one about plagosus Orbilius—Orbilins of the heavy hand—and the master at Falerii, who was flogged back to his schoolroom by his boys. No, it cannot be said that schoolmasters appear in a favour- able light upon the field of fiction or in the pages of what passes for history,—such fiction and such history, we mean, as are likely to come within the cognisance of the man in the street, the man on the knifeboard of a 'bus,—such a man as. writes these words.
Bat never were such hard things said of him as are to be found in some journals of to-day. It is not long ago that one brilliant journal was at pains to prove that no school- master could, from the mere fact of teaching boys, have any sense of humour ; his silly earnestness, his way of making- molehills into mountains, forbade the possibility of having humour. This same journal had declared in earlier days that no more hateful charge could be brought against any man, or class of men, than that of lacking this sense. One person who happens to be a schoolmaster ceased from that day forward to take in that journal; he fancied it had appealed to some sense of humour in him. Finding on such infallible. authority that he had, and could have, none, he saved his money for some other purpose. Scarcely had he recovered from this blow, delivered some ten years ago, when lately there appeared in other pages a letter saying that every schoolmaster of the present day is an "emasculated prig.' One does not know exactly what this means, but it looks as if it must prove a very dreadful thing to be. To be a prig is bad enough ; the addition of a participle with five syllables adds to the horror of the thing. As a tree may be known by its fruits, the nature of a master may be gathered from a know- ledge of the boys whom he tries to teach and train. The writer
of the letter in question speaks of "British boys" as being -" soft, pappy, emotional, rhetorical;" they may be, but they do not look it and do not know themselves to be so. We have all heard of a man who did not know that he talked prose ; some of us know boys who do not know themselves to be rhetorical; there may be some who do not even know the weaning of the word.
The one thing certain is that schoolmasters were always wrong. When caning was the fashion they were cursed as Creakles ; now that what one wily boy called "the kind dodge" is the proper thing, they are proclaimed to be -" emasculated prigs ; " " Ivan " the writer is Ivan the terrible indeed, more terrible than Messrs. Birch and Swishtail of fiction, and the Rodwell Roper who was a fact; but terrible as he is, he may meet his match in some of the emotional softies, some of the pappy rhetoricians with whom his fond fancy peoples our public schools to-day.
J. F. C.
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