excitable creature where small things were concerned--a parroquet
or the prospect of being able to print original letters of Ninon de
l'Enclos at Strawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of
Anne Boleyn, or Ranelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes."
What is not generally realised is that he was also a high-strung and
eager spectator of the greater things. I have already spoken of his
enthusiasm for wild nature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is
true he grew weary of them. "Such uncouth rocks," he wrote, "and such
uncomely inhabitants." "I am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if
I had eat them," he groaned in a later letter. But the enthusiasm was
at least as genuine as the fatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves
only that there were two Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic
enthusiasms was insincere. He was a devotee of romance, but it was
romance under the control of the comic spirit. He was always amused to
have romance brought down to reality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of
Scots, he said: "I believe I have told you that, in a very old trial of
her, which I bought for Lord Oxford's collection, it is said that she
was a large lame woman. Take sentiments out of their _pantoufles_, and
reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there
is!" But see him in the picture-gallery in his father's old house at
Houghton, after an absence of sixteen years, and the romantic mood is
uppermost. "In one respect," he writes, speaking of the pictures, "I am
very young; I cannot satiate myself with looking," and he adds, "Not
a picture here but calls a history; not one but I remember in Downing
Street or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them." And, if he
could not "satiate himself with looking" at the Italian and Flemish
masters, he similarly preserved the heat of youth in his enthusiasm
for Shakespeare. "When," he wrote, during his dispute with Voltaire on
the point, "I think over all the great authors of the Greeks, Romans,
Italians, French, and English (and I know no other languages), I set
Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew."
Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything
Dionysiac in his temperament. The furthest that one can go is to say
that he was a man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves.
Capricious in little things, he was faithful in great. His warmth of
nature as a son, as a friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in
tolerance and liberty, is so unfailing that it is curious it should
ever have been brought in question by any reader of the letters. His
quarrels are negligible when put beside his ceaseless extravagance of
good humour to his friends. His letters alone were golden gifts, but
we also find him offering his fortune to Conway when the latter was in
difficulties. "I have sense enough," he wrote, "to have real pleasure
in denying myself baubles, and in saving a very good income to make a
man happy for whom I have a just esteem and most sincere friendship."
"Blameable in ten thousand other respects," he wrote to Conway
seventeen years later, "may not I almost say I am perfect with regard
to you? Since I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?" "I am,"
he claimed towards the end of his life, "very constant and sincere to
friends of above forty years." In his friendships he was more eager to
give than to receive. Madame du Deffand was only dissuaded from making
him her heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit
her again. Ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving
pleasure and for his thoughtfulness regarding those he loved. The
earliest of his published letters was until recently one written at the
age of fourteen. But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of
Walpole letters, recently published, has been able to print one to Lady
Walpole written at the age of eight, which suggests that Walpole was a
delightful sort of child, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend,
or a pet:
Dear mama, I hop you are wall, and I am very wall, and I hop papa is
wal, and I begin to slaap, and I hop al wall and my cosens like there
pla things vary wall and I hop Doly phillips is wall and pray give my
Duty to papa.
HORACE WALPOLE.
and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruatuars are all wall.
and Mrs. Selwen has sprand her Fot and gvis her Sarves to you and I
dind ther yester Day.
At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship--the
"Triumvirate," as it was called, which included the two Montagus, and
the "Quadruple Alliance," in which one of his fellows was Gray. The
truth is, Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being
loved. "One loves to find people care for one," he wrote to Conway,
"when they can have no view in it." His friendship in his old age for
the Miss Berrys--his "twin wives," his "dear Both"--to each of whom he
left an annuity of £4000, was but a continuation of that kindliness
which ran like a stream (ruffled and sparkling with malice, no doubt)
through his long life. And his kindness was not limited to his friends,
but was at the call of children and, as we have seen, of animals.
"You know," he explains to Conway, apologising for not being able to
visit him on account of the presence of a "poor little sick girl" at
Strawberry Hill, "how courteous a knight I am to distrest virgins of
five years old, and that my castle gates are always open to them."
One does not think of Walpole primarily as a squire of children, and
certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp with the young, there
was little in him of a Dickens character. But he was what is called
"sympathetic." He was sufficient of a man of imagination to wish to see
an end put to the sufferings of "those poor victims, chimney-sweepers."
So far from being a heartless person, as he has been at times
portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist.
This was shown in his attitude to animals. In 1760, when there was a
great terror of mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all
dogs found in the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the Earl of
Strafford:
In London there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the
Russians: the streets are a very picture of the murder of the
innocents--one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The dear,
good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! how can anybody
hurt them? Nobody could but those Cherokees the English, who desire
no better than to be halloo'd to blood--one day Samuel Byng, the next
Lord George Sackville, and to-day the poor dogs!
As for Walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after
writer that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them
mainly for gossip's sake. It cannot be denied that he made no great
fight for good causes while he sat in the House of Commons. Nor had he
the temper of a ruler of men. But as a commentator on politics, and a
spreader of opinion in private, he showed himself to be a politician
at once sagacious, humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events.
His detestation of the arbitrary use of power had almost the heat
of a passion. He detested it alike in a government and in a mob. He
loathed the violence that compassed the death of Admiral Byng and the
violence that made war on America. He raged against a public world that
he believed was going to the devil. "I am not surprised," he wrote in
1776, "at the idea of the devil being always at our elbows. They who
invented him no doubt could not conceive how men could be so atrocious
to one another, without the intervention of a fiend. Don't you think,
if he had never been heard of before, that he would have been invented
on the late partition of Poland?" "Philosophy has a poor chance with
me," he wrote a little later in regard to America, "when my warmth
is stirred--and yet I know that an angry old man out of Parliament,
and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal." The
war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed
over with airs of bullying." War at any time was, in his eyes, all
but the unforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened
into contempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but
it is a pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to
petty larceny." As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his
comment on the Wilkes riots, when he declares:
I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the
destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that
terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power--which cowards call out for as
protection, and knaves are so ready to grant.
Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded them
with an aristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance
was that which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It
was of the mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory:
"They were, as George Montagu said of our earthquakes, _so tame you
might have stroked them_." When near the end of his life the September
massacres broke out in Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he
denounced the French with the hysterical violence with which many
people to-day denounce the Bolshevists. He called them "_inferno-human_
beings," "that atrocious and detestable nation," and declared that
"France must be abhorred to latest posterity." His letters on the
subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may be said against them, are
not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They are the letters of the
same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row had
broken out between the manager and the audience in Drury Lane Theatre,
had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried angrily from his
box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics never got beyond an
angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of him:
The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. Only think of my
being a popular orator! But what was still better, while my shadow
of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the
chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat, and
pulling off his hat, said, "Mr. Walpole, what would you please to
have us do next?" It is impossible to describe to you the confusion
into which this apostrophe threw me. I sank down into the box, and
have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse.
There you have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank
down into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might
save the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and
his friends.
This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist.
He was a connoisseur of great actions, not a practiser of them. At
Strawberry Hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health
with the aid of iced water and by not wearing a hat when out-of-doors
to compose the greatest works of art of their kind that have appeared
in English. Had he written his letters for money we should have praised
him as one of the busiest and most devoted of authors, and never have
thought of blaming him for abstaining from statesmanship as he did from
wine. Possibly he had the constitution for neither. His genius was a
genius, not of Westminster, but of Strawberry Hill. It is in Strawberry
Hill that one finally prefers to see him framed, an extraordinarily
likeable, charming, and whimsical figure.
Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among
correspondents. One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and men
of a deeper and more imaginative tenderness. But how incomparable he
is as an acquaintance! How exquisite a specimen--hand-painted--for the
collector of the choice creatures of the human race!
THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH
By J. C. STOBART
There is no doubt whatever about the need for it. Search high or low in
our social world, you will find it full of laments and dissatisfaction.
In the Services Commanding Officers complain that their subalterns,
even though they have been through the Classical course at Public
Schools and Universities, cannot write a clear report. Headquarters
themselves issue their orders and regulations in barbarous,
unintelligible jargon. Government Departments, manned by Greatsmen,
wrap themselves in phrases of pompous obscurity, and Cabinet Ministers
couch their decisions or agreements in terms of such ambiguity as to
leave nobody certain of their meaning. It would, however, be unjust to
attribute bad English entirely to upper-class education, classical or
modern. The business man in his "esteemed favours," though he may be
more terse and polite, is not always able to convey what he intends.
He lays the blame, when he fails to do so, upon the faulty education
of his clerks and stenographers. The masses of the public too often
show in practice that they simply cannot understand printed rules and
directions. It is naturally too much to expect a universal diffusion of
taste or elegance in the use of our language; but even when we feel the
need of fine words to express deep feeling we choose for an obituary
lines like these:
There's a lonely grave somewhere,
Where our dear and brave boy sleeps;
There's a little home in England,
Where mother and all of us weep.
or these:
Who knew that when he went away,
Departing from his door,
How or when he would come back,
Or whether never more?
For he who went away in health,
In battle soon waylaid,
Which took him in the prime of life,
To lie in a distant grave.
No, there is little doubt of the need for teaching clearness and
improving taste. As for correct and grammatical writing, one week's
study of a popular daily newspaper yielded the following excerpts from
a collection of two-score:
In the last resort we have to depend upon a jury drawn from the
people to convict the scoundrel who has tainted our public life, and
unless that jury does not do its duty, unless it is backed by the
public sentiment of the people....
The accused was ordered to pay £3, or a month's imprisonment in
default. At Paignton, in Devon, a gigantic plum-pudding is made and
distributed to the poor, which in 1897 weighed 250 lb.
... the officers closed on him. In throwing him to the ground the
revolver dropped from his hand.
The charge is 50 per cent. higher than the same sheet may be bought
in the street just outside. But what is a penny to an American?
---- ---- had an unfortunate experience. While seated in his
greenhouse it was wrecked by the wind, and on being extricated it
was ascertained that both his legs were broken above the knee,
necessitating his removal to the infirmary.
Provocation has been given by the hostile and shifty conduct of the
Tibetan authorities, since the signing of the Treaty of 1800, which
would have justified earlier punishment.
While riding in a hansom at Southport a runaway horse dashed into the
conveyance, and the shaft of the trap penetrated her body, pinning
her to the hansom, and causing almost instantaneous death.
But if you come to estimate a day's work--even in foot-pounds--the
woman who cleans, bakes, washes, and takes to school six children,
carries water and tramps upstairs and down for sixteen hours a day,
need not fear comparison as to kinetic energy even with a miner
working eight hours.
What is the schoolmaster doing about it? He is teaching a great variety
of languages ancient and foreign, sciences, arts and crafts, and among
other things he is believed to teach "English." He has found out that
it does not come by nature, and that a mastery of the English language
cannot be assured by teaching something quite different. But as to the
best method of teaching boys and girls to write, read, and appreciate
good English there is a controversy. Just as in most other branches of
education there is a traditional method and a reformed method. Upon the
latter some of us build hopes of extraordinarily great achievements,
and if these hopes lead us into impatience we must ask for pardon.
Though Mr. Mais[2] justly claims credit for originality
in departing occasionally from the fixed lines of English
teaching as it is practised in the Public Schools, his "Course"
mainly follows the traditional modes and is directed to the
preparation of pupils for the orthodox type of examination.
The nature of the course is indicated by the chapter-headings;
for example: "Grammar and Syntax--Analysis, Parsing and Synthesis--
Punctuation--Vocabulary--Letter-writing--Reproduction--Paraphrase--
Dictation--Précis--Prosody--Figures of Speech--Indirect Speech--
Essay-writing--Examination Papers." There are, beside these
thoroughly normal chapters, six pages on Elocution, Debating,
Lecturing, Acting, etc., a useful list of cheap books for a home
library, more than fifty critical pages on Shakespeare, and a
regrettable[3] twenty-page chapter entitled "Short History of English
Literature." I think the author is trying to shake off a yoke which is
not entirely congenial to him. But if he will make boys write essays
on Scandinavia, explain Synecdoche, paraphrase Keats, "condense the
_Vision of Mirzah_ to 300 words," he cannot complain if he is mistaken
for one of the old regime and guillotined in distinguished company.
[2] _An English Course for Schools_. By S. B. P. Mais,
Assistant Master at Tonbridge School and Examiner in
English to the University of London. Grant Richards
Ltd.; 6s. net.
[3] _e.g._ "R. L. Stevenson represents the incurably
romantic and is followed by Kipling and Conrad."
The traditional method begins with the copy-book and proceeds by
way of dictation and formal exercises to its goal in the essay.
Dictation is the core and kernel of it, for even when the exercise is
called "composition" the subjects are so chosen that the pupil needs
detailed guidance throughout and the results are practically uniform.
The writing is accompanied by reading and grammar, but the reading
is severely limited and the text is obscured by comment and minute
explanation. Poetry is not only studied with notes: it is analysed
and paraphrased and parsed. The grammar, which is also traditional,
is alien both in its method and terminology. The people who invented
"English" in the middle of the nineteenth century were the classical
grammarians who knew only one way of teaching a language, and had
been forced under pressure from indignant parents to put "English"
on the syllabus. They gave it an hour a week: they spent that hour
in parsing, in declining uninflected nouns, in conjugating, in
insisting that because the complement of a Latin or Greek copulative
verb is in concord with its subject therefore "It's _me_" must be
wrong in English. They did violence to our tongue in other ways to
make a Teutonic language fit a Latin system, introducing all sorts
of unnecessary complications of gender, mood and case, which do not
exist. They transferred to English the whole cumbrous system of Latin
grammatical terminology and then set harmless English children to
explain their hideous technicalities. All because they had an hour
to waste and were determined to waste it in the manner to which they
were accustomed. They were assisted in this ambition by the Scotch
professors of rhetoric who were especially strong in figures of speech.
And then they remarked with pain and surprise that their method did not
succeed. Their scholars did not appreciate good literature when it was
taught to them. They lacked originality in their composition. They were
tongue-tied in their speaking and muddled in their writing. There was
once a man who determined to teach his monkey to sing "Voi che sapete,"
an air of which he was inordinately fond. So he took an old stocking
with a hole in the toe and two holes in the heel and turned it inside
out in order to conceal the holes, and crammed it full with shavings
and breadcrumbs and fried it carefully and fed the monkey on it. When
he complained that the monkey's voice was no better at the end of the
course, his friends used to explain that it was because he was an old
man and had lived in the reign of Queen Victoria.
Remember that this "English" teaching has been well tried for more
than fifty years. Substantially, the course we are considering now
does not differ in its methods from books like Dalgleish's _English
Composition in Prose and Verse based on Grammatical Synthesis_ of
1864 or Dr. William Smith's _English Course_. The subject subsists as
a shuttlecock in a perpetual game of Badminton between examiners and
teachers. If you ask the examiner of English why he continues to set
such stupid questions, he replies quite rightly that he is forced to
do so by the stupidity of the schoolmasters who teach it. If you ask
the schoolmaster why he makes his "English" the dullest subject in the
syllabus, he will probably answer that he is preparing for the London
Matriculation. If you look for an explanation of the method, you might
surmise that the aim is to secure accuracy in grammar at all costs.
But that is not the aim. Mr. Mais explains it in a paragraph which he
might well set for analysis of pronouns: "Of all our failings as a
nation, this is the most marked. In our talk we are reticent; in our
writing we are incoherent and slipshod. Every schoolmaster knows from
sad experience that the average boy cannot produce a readable essay on
any subject, however hard he may try. He strives by every means in his
power to instil a sense of originality in his classes, to teach his
boys and girls to observe...." Originality and observation!
To take the second first, every scoutmaster knows that observation can
be taught, but not by dictation. Probably there is no faculty of the
mind which responds so readily to training and practice. By systematic
questioning a young child can be taught to notice the common objects
by the wayside on his morning walk, the goods in the shop windows, the
flowers in the garden, to remember them and describe them afterwards
with great fidelity. A good teacher of infants can easily teach a
child of six or seven to observe minute differences, to compare and
contrast similar objects, such as the bulb of the iris and the corn
of the crocus. This kind of observation is commonly appropriated by
science, and it is indeed the same faculty which the physicist employs
afterwards with his fine balances and test-tubes. But it is also, when
reproduced in language, the beginning of good English. Words are the
balances. Careful description in words, written and spoken, of things
actually seen is, when developed fully, more than half of the business
of poets, journalists, and novelists. A few gifted mortals like Balzac,
Gissing, or Hardy may possess the faculty by nature, but any one may
acquire it through early training and continuous practice. It can be
lost almost as easily as it is won.
Can originality be taught? Less easily perhaps than observation. Real
originality, in the sense of creative power, or what in its highest
form we call "Inspiration," cannot be taught in school. Who taught
Blake to see the tiger burning bright in midmost eighteenth-century
London? There are some men born, apparently, to be our masters. Ideas
flow not into them but out of them. They are the mainsprings of our
mechanism. We attribute their origin to the wandering breath of some
holy spirit. But in a humbler sense children can certainly be trained
to be original, just as they can be trained by opposite methods to
be commonplace, slavish, imitative, genteel, conventional, correct,
and accommodating. These virtues are taught with great diligence and
success in many schools, public and private. In the earliest stage
you copy in a beautiful copperplate handwriting words like "England
Expects Every," and you read aloud very slowly from a little book
which contains these words in immense type: SHUN THAT OX HE IS SHY. You
recite in chorus after teacher, you correct your speech by mimicking
her accents and gestures. You sit, stand, or march to numbers at the
word of command. In the next stage you are promoted to dictation, and
once a fortnight you write a composition. But as the theme is Duty or
The Elephant or something about which you can hardly be expected to
have connected notions, you are given the headings, told what to say,
have your mistakes carefully underlined, and are then presented with a
model or fair copy. Any departure from the normal, whether in spelling
or in ideas, is heavily penalised, and no credit is given for positive
merit. In the next stage you learn the art of letter-writing by
studying celebrated models, you paraphrase good poetry into bad prose,
you analyse and parse and explain grammatical terms, you summarise and
expand, you turn direct into indirect speech and generally feed your
mind with a generous diet of cold minced hash.
If I were a little boy trained for years and years according to this
plan, I hope I should be grateful to my teachers for all the trouble
they had taken with me. But, if they then turned round upon me and
reproached me with not being _original_, I should be sorely tempted to
commit a breach of good English and say "That is the limit!"
In the pedagogical and psychological sense these methods are twenty
years behind the times. They have been exploded in theory and disproved
in practice. Each subject in its turn has fought its battle with
the Dictation Method, and everywhere, except perhaps in religious
instruction, the principle has been decided. In drawing, the freehand
copy has given place to direct observation; in mathematics, mechanical
working of rules and examples has been replaced by intelligence and
problems. Even physical exercises are no longer mere drill.