WORK

With a pleasure that's emphatic

We retire to our attic

With the satisfying feeling that our duty has been done.

Oh! philosophers may sing

Of the troubles of a king

But of pleasures there are many and of troubles there are none,

And the culminating pleasure

Which we treasure beyond measure

Is the satisfying feeling that our duty has been done.

_W. S. Gilbert_

Work is supposed to be the centre round which school life revolves--the

hub of the school wheel, the lode-star of the schoolboy's existence,

and a great many other things. 'You come to school to work', is the

formula used by masters when sentencing a victim to the wailing and

gnashing of teeth provided by two hours' extra tuition on a hot

afternoon. In this, I think, they err, and my opinion is backed up by

numerous scholars of my acquaintance, who have even gone so far--on

occasions when they themselves have been the victims--as to express

positive disapproval of the existing state of things. In the dear, dead

days (beyond recall), I used often to long to put the case to my

form-master in its only fair aspect, but always refrained from motives

of policy. Masters are so apt to take offence at the well-meant

endeavours of their form to instruct them in the way they should go.

What I should have liked to have done would have been something after

this fashion. Entering the sanctum of the Headmaster, I should have

motioned him to his seat--if he were seated already, have assured him

that to rise was unnecessary. I should then have taken a seat myself,

taking care to preserve a calm fixity of demeanour, and finally, with a

preliminary cough, I should have embarked upon the following moving

address: 'My dear sir, my dear Reverend Jones or Brown (as the case may

be), believe me when I say that your whole system of work is founded on

a fallacious dream and reeks of rottenness. No, no, I beg that you will

not interrupt me. The real state of the case, if I may say so, is

briefly this: a boy goes to school to enjoy himself, and, on arriving,

finds to his consternation that a great deal more work is expected of

him than he is prepared to do. What course, then, Reverend Jones or

Brown, does he take? He proceeds to do as much work as will steer him

safely between the, ah--I may say, the Scylla of punishment and the

Charybdis of being considered what my, er--fellow-pupils euphoniously

term a swot. That, I think, is all this morning. _Good_ day. Pray

do not trouble to rise. I will find my way out.' I should then have

made for the door, locked it, if possible, on the outside, and, rushing

to the railway station, have taken a through ticket to Spitzbergen or

some other place where Extradition treaties do not hold good.

But 'twas not mine to play the Tib. Gracchus, to emulate the O.

Cromwell. So far from pouring my opinions like so much boiling oil into

the ear of my task-master, I was content to play the part of audience

while _he_ did the talking, my sole remark being 'Yes'r' at fixed

intervals.

And yet I knew that I was in the right. My bosom throbbed with the

justice of my cause. For why? The ambition of every human new boy

is surely to become like J. Essop of the First Eleven, who can hit a

ball over two ponds, a wood, and seven villages, rather than to

resemble that pale young student, Mill-Stuart, who, though he can

speak Sanskrit like a native of Sanskritia, couldn't score a single

off a slow long-hop.

And this ambition is a laudable one. For the athlete is the product of

nature--a step towards the more perfect type of animal, while the

scholar is the outcome of artificiality. What, I ask, does the scholar

gain, either morally or physically, or in any other way, by knowing who

was tribune of the people in 284 BC or what is the precise difference

between the various constructions of _cum_? It is not as if

ignorance of the tribune's identity caused him any mental unrest. In

short, what excuse is there for the student? 'None,' shrieks Echo

enthusiastically. 'None whatever.'

Our children are being led to ruin by this system. They will become

dons and think in Greek. The victim of the craze stops at nothing. He

puns in Latin. He quips and quirks in Ionic and Doric. In the worst

stages of the disease he will edit Greek plays and say that Merry quite

misses the fun of the passage, or that Jebb is mediocre. Think, I beg

of you, paterfamilias, and you, mater ditto, what your feelings would

be were you to find Henry or Archibald Cuthbert correcting proofs of

_The Agamemnon_, and inventing 'nasty ones' for Mr Sidgwick! Very

well then. Be warned.

Our bright-eyed lads are taught insane constructions in Greek and Latin

from morning till night, and they come for their holidays, in many

cases, without the merest foundation of a batting style. Ask them what

a Yorker is, and they will say: 'A man from York, though I presume you

mean a Yorkshireman.' They will read Herodotus without a dictionary for

pleasure, but ask them to translate the childishly simple sentence:

'Trott was soon in his timber-yard with a length 'un that whipped

across from the off,' and they'll shrink abashed and swear they have

not skill at that, as Gilbert says.

The papers sometimes contain humorous forecasts of future education,

when cricket and football shall come to their own. They little know the

excellence of the thing they mock at. When we get schools that teach

nothing but games, then will the sun definitely refuse to set on the

roast beef of old England. May it be soon. Some day, mayhap, I shall

gather my great-great-grandsons round my knee, and tell them--as one

tells tales of Faery--that I can remember the time when Work was

considered the be-all and the end-all of a school career. Perchance,

when my great-great-grandson John (called John after the famous Jones

of that name) has brought home the prize for English Essay on 'Rugby

_v._ Association', I shall pat his head (gently) and the tears

will come to my old eyes as I recall the time when I, too, might have

won a prize--for that obsolete subject, Latin Prose--and was only

prevented by the superior excellence of my thirty-and-one fellow

students, coupled, indeed, with my own inability to conjugate

_sum._

Such days, I say, may come. But now are the Dark Ages. The only thing

that can possibly make Work anything but an unmitigated nuisance is the

prospect of a 'Varsity scholarship, and the thought that, in the event

of failure, a 'Varsity career will be out of the question.

With this thought constantly before him, the student can put a certain

amount of enthusiasm into his work, and even go to the length of rising

at five o'clock o' mornings to drink yet deeper of the cup of

knowledge. I have done it myself. 'Varsity means games and yellow

waistcoats and Proctors, and that sort of thing. It is worth working

for.

But for the unfortunate individual who is barred by circumstances from

participating in these joys, what inducement is there to work? Is such

a one to leave the school nets in order to stew in a stuffy room over a

Thucydides? I trow not.

Chapter one of my great forthcoming work, _The Compleat Slacker_,

contains minute instructions on the art of avoiding preparation from

beginning to end of term. Foremost among the words of advice ranks this

maxim: Get an official list of the books you are to do, and examine

them carefully with a view to seeing what it is possible to do unseen.

Thus, if Virgil is among these authors, you can rely on being able to

do him with success. People who ought to know better will tell you that

Virgil is hard. Such a shallow falsehood needs little comment. A

scholar who cannot translate ten lines of _The Aeneid_ between the

time he is put on and the time he begins to speak is unworthy of pity

or consideration, and if I meet him in the street I shall assuredly cut

him. Aeschylus, on the other hand, is a demon, and needs careful

watching, though in an emergency you can always say the reading is

wrong.

Sometimes the compleat slacker falls into a trap. The saddest case I

can remember is that of poor Charles Vanderpoop. He was a bright young

lad, and showed some promise of rising to heights as a slacker. He fell

in this fashion. One Easter term his form had half-finished a speech of

Demosthenes, and the form-master gave them to understand that they

would absorb the rest during the forthcoming term. Charles, being

naturally anxious to do as little work as possible during the summer

months, spent his Easter holidays carefully preparing this speech, so

as to have it ready in advance. What was his horror, on returning to

School at the appointed date, to find that they were going to throw

Demosthenes over altogether, and patronize Plato. Threats, entreaties,

prayers--all were accounted nothing by the master who had led him into

this morass of troubles. It is believed that the shock destroyed his

reason. At any rate, the fact remains that that term (the summer term,

mark you) he won two prizes. In the following term he won three. To

recapitulate his outrages from that time to the present were a

harrowing and unnecessary task. Suffice it that he is now a Regius

Professor, and I saw in the papers a short time ago that a lecture of

his on 'The Probable Origin of the Greek Negative', created quite a

_furore_. If this is not Tragedy with a big T, I should like to

know what it is.

As an exciting pastime, unseen translation must rank very high.

Everyone who has ever tried translating unseen must acknowledge that

all other forms of excitement seem but feeble makeshifts after it. I

have, in the course of a career of sustained usefulness to the human

race, had my share of thrills. I have asked a strong and busy porter,

at Paddington, when the Brighton train started. I have gone for the

broad-jump record in trying to avoid a motor-car. I have played

Spillikins and Ping-Pong. But never again have I felt the excitement

that used to wander athwart my moral backbone when I was put on to

translate a passage containing a notorious _crux_ and seventeen

doubtful readings, with only that innate genius, which is the wonder of

the civilized world, to pull me through. And what a glow of pride one

feels when it is all over; when one has made a glorious, golden guess

at the _crux_, and trampled the doubtful readings under foot with

inspired ease. It is like a day at the seaside.

Work is bad enough, but Examinations are worse, especially the Board

Examinations. By doing from ten to twenty minutes prep every night, the

compleat slacker could get through most of the term with average

success. Then came the Examinations. The dabbler in unseen translations

found himself caught as in a snare. Gone was the peaceful security in

which he had lulled to rest all the well-meant efforts of his guardian

angel to rouse him to a sense of his duties. There, right in front of

him, yawned the abyss of Retribution.

Alas! poor slacker. I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of

most excellent fancy. Where be his gibes now? How is he to cope with

the fiendish ingenuity of the examiners? How is he to master the

contents of a book of Thucydides in a couple of days? It is a fearsome

problem. Perhaps he will get up in the small hours and work by candle

light from two till eight o'clock. In this case he will start his day a

mental and physical wreck. Perhaps he will try to work and be led away

by the love of light reading.

In any case he will fail to obtain enough marks to satisfy the

examiners, though whether examiners ever are satisfied, except by Harry

the hero of the school story (Every Lad's Library, uniform edition, 2s

6d), is rather a doubtful question.

In such straits, matters resolve themselves into a sort of drama with

three characters. We will call our hero Smith.

_Scene:_ a Study

_Dramatis Personae:_

SMITH

CONSCIENCE

MEPHISTOPHELES

_Enter_ SMITH (_down centre_)

_He seats himself at table and opens a Thucydides._

_Enter_ CONSCIENCE _through ceiling_ (R.), MEPHISTOPHELES

_through floor_ (L.).

CONSCIENCE (_with a kindly smile_): Precisely what I was about to

remark, my dear lad. A little Thucydides would be a very good thing.

Thucydides, as you doubtless know, was a very famous Athenian

historian. Date?

SMITH: Er--um--let me see.

MEPH. (_aside_): Look in the Introduction and pretend you did it

by accident.

SMITH (_having done so_): 431 B.C. _circ_.

CONSCIENCE _wipes away a tear_.

CONSCIENCE: Thucydides made himself a thorough master of the concisest

of styles.

MEPH.: And in doing so became infernally obscure. Excuse shop.

SMITH (_gloomily_): Hum!

MEPH. (_sneeringly_): Ha!

_Long pause_.

CONSCIENCE (_gently_): Do you not think, my dear lad, that you had

better begin? Time and tide, as you are aware, wait for no man. And--

SMITH: Yes?

CONSCIENCE: You have not, I fear, a very firm grasp of the subject.

However, if you work hard till eleven--

SMITH (_gloomily_): Hum! Three hours!

MEPH. (_cheerily_): Exactly so. Three hours. A little more if

anything. By the way, excuse me asking, but have you prepared the

subject thoroughly during the term?