Compton Mackenzie
IN the course of arranging my library I came across The Cock-house at Fellsgarth by Talbot Baines Reed. I was carried back to the early summer of 1891 when it was appearing serially in the Boy's Own Paper, and I read it first. About the same time I read in the young Strand Magazine the first of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes called A Scandal in Bohemia. I wish that some new edition of those adventures and memoirs of Sherlock Holmes would reproduce the original illustrations. The later illustrations have all seemed pretty feeble shadows of the original. seen for many weeks, and by the time he returned ' rides ' bad been declared illegal.
It was by the behaviour of the loutish Modern Class at Colet Court that I measured the behaviour of the Modern side at Fellsgarth and the triumph of the Classical side therein related by Talbot Baines Reed was the very milk and honey of reading.
"Ever since certain well-meaning governors two years agot had succeeded in forcing upon Fellsgarth the adoption of a Modern side, the School had been rent by factions whose quarrels sometimes bordered on civil war. . . .
"The old set, consisting mostly of the classical boys, felt verY sore on the question. . . . If boys, said they, wanted to learn science and modern languages, let them, but don't let theta come fooling around at Fellsgarth and spoiling the reputation of a good old classical school. There were plenty of schools where fellows could be brought up in a new-fangled way. Let them go to one of these, and leave Fellsgarth in peace to her dead authors."
With memories of that Modern Class at Colet Court the utterly caddish behaviour of the Modern seniors at Fellsgarth was exactly what I should have expected from them, and their willingness to wreck the chances of the School in the great match against their rivals of Rendlesham by refusing to plaY because Yorke, the Captain, had picked eight from the Classical side and six from the Modern side seemed to my prejudiced mind exactly what one would ,liave expected from Moderns. That prejudice lasted through my school days until I went up to Oxford. In November, 1902, I was writing in The Oxford Point of View, the review I had been editing since my second term: "The motion which proposed to do away with Greek in Responsions was thrown out by 23 votes, and in the light of the recent clamour for a useful and unornamental education, such a small majority is woefully significant. However, not withstanding the undoubted claims of a Sound Commercial Education to our consideration, we very humbly suggest tlia; there are technical schools eager to teach, and that the University of is not a very stern Alma Mater. If Greek is to be abolished in Responsions, why not Latin? And if the plea of wasted time is put forward by intending scientists, surely it may be argued with equal justification that the enforced study of Euclid and Arithmetic is a trying ordeal for many others who are not intending scientists. Apart from Ole utilitarian view, which really has nothing to do with the sub' ject, it would be a pity if Oxford should cease to be co11. servative even of her own conservatism. Nobody, not even an intending scientist, confers a privilege upon Oxford by taking up his abode here : it is Oxford which confers the honour bY allowing him to do so."
That's what I thought at nineteen, and I am bound to con* fess that it represents fairly on the whole what I think 52 years later. What an odd point of view it will seem to the Oxford of this year 1954 in which the Classical Association baS just celebrated its jubilee.
Yet all the precious work done by the Classical Association has not compensated for what I believe to be the harm don° to education by the abolition of Greek for Responsions. Ono of the younger dons who worked hardest to achieve thiS disaster was the late Sir John Myres. The argument that the Greek learnt at school is forgotten in later life does not sea to me valid. I have forgotten all the mathematics I learnt at school, but the torment I endured from quadratic equationS was at least as great as my ' modern ' contemporaries endured from Greek conditional sentences.
Previous page
