Log: it was as if the school, after a long period of “go as you like,”
had been suddenly placed under a military dictatorship. Warre had nearly
been appointed headmaster in 1868; and though, during Hornby’s reign, he
continued to serve loyally as an assistant, it was evident that it
galled him to watch the nervelessness and vacillation with which the
government of the school was conducted: I have heard him at a “masters’
meeting” appeal to Dr. Hornby in terms which, however respectful in
form, conveyed a reproach which could hardly have been unnoticed: “Will
the headmaster insist upon his rule being kept? Will you pull us up,
sir, if we neglect it?” We listened in amusement, knowing full well that
Hornby would himself be the first to break his own rule, if it was one
that demanded either punctuality or perseverance.
One of Dr. Warre’s earliest innovations was to visit the different
Divisions in person while a lesson was going on; a very right and proper
course to take, but one which came rather as a shock to the assistant
masters of that time, who had been accustomed to consider their
class-rooms, like the proverbial Englishman’s house, as their “castles.”
We each wondered, not without anxiety, when his own turn would come.
When mine came, I was spared a lengthy inspection owing to an incident
which was as amusing as it was unforeseen. The next room happened to be
occupied that day by a colleague who was entirely unable to keep order;
and as neither the unfortunate man, nor his rowdy Division, was aware
that the headmaster was so near them, I had hardly begun my lesson when
there rose a terrific din from next door--shrieks, catcalls, peals of
laughter, stamping of feet, all the noises of a madhouse. With a wave of
his hand to me, the headmaster slipped swiftly from the room; and a
moment later I knew what had happened, not by hearing, but by the
instant _cessation_ of sound, for that wild uproar stopped as suddenly
as if it had been cleft with an axe, and was succeeded by a deep silence
more eloquent than words.
A few days later, Dr. Hornby, the new-made Provost, came up to a small
group of masters who were standing near the school-yard, and smilingly
asked us if we had been “inspected” yet. “I’m glad,” he added, with a
sigh of relief, “that they didn’t inspect _me_.”
Dr. Warre was in every way a contrast to Dr. Hornby. Far less sensitive
and refined, he had much more real sympathy, if not with the masters, at
any rate with the boys, and under a rough exterior showed on many
occasions a practical kindness which was quite wanting in his
predecessor. For example, the setting of “Georgics” (i.e. the writing of
500 lines of Virgil), one of the most senseless punishments in vogue at
that time, was always encouraged by Hornby. When Warre heard an
assistant master remark that he was “looking out for an opportunity” to
set a “Georgic” to a troublesome boy, he interrupted him with: “You
should look out _not_ to set him a ‘Georgic.’” He had that kindly
understanding of boyhood which is of great value to a teacher; and from
the point of view of those who believe that Eton is an ideal school, and
the “hub” of the universe, it is difficult to see how a better
headmaster than Dr. Warre could have been found; but he was a Tory of
the strictest type, and his appointment meant the indefinite
postponement of reform.
Enough has now been said to show why a ten-years’ sojourn as a master at
Eton was likely to bring disillusionment, even if outside influences had
not quickened the process. Socialism was even then “in the air”; and to
have become personally acquainted with Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter,
H. M. Hyndman, Henry George, William Morris, John Burns, H. H. Champion,
Belfort Bax, and other apostles of what was then termed “revolution,”
was not calculated to strengthen a waverer in the pure Etonian faith.
Still earlier, in the winter holidays of 1878-79, I had met at Coniston,
in the Lake District, an ardent disciple of Ruskin, Mr. William Harrison
Riley, who held communistic views; and in the course of some long walks
with him on the mountains, in which I acted as his guide, he more than
repaid the obligation by opening my eyes to certain facts which I had
previously overlooked. He brought me a message from another world.
This Riley, with all his fiery zeal, was a man of touching simplicity.
He was then working some land of Ruskin’s, at St. George’s farm, near
Sheffield, and he had come to Coniston to visit the Master, for whom he
felt and expressed an almost childlike veneration. By Mr. Ruskin’s
invitation I accompanied Riley to luncheon at Brantwood, and was greatly
struck by the meeting between the two--the devotion of the follower, and
the geniality of the sage. Early in the morning Riley, who was much
surprised by the luxuriance of the verdure at Coniston, as compared with
the grey desolation of the Sheffield hills, confided to me his intention
of taking as a present to Ruskin a clump of moss from a wall-top near
the hotel; but as there was hardly a wall in the district that was not
similarly covered, I suggested to him, as delicately as I could, that
it might be a case of carrying “coals to Newcastle.” Disregarding such
hints, he arrived at Ruskin’s door with a big parcel of the moss, and
gravely presented it as soon as the first salutations were complete. The
delightful charm of Ruskin’s manner was seen in this little incident: he
laughed--for who could have helped laughing?--yet took the gift--and
turned the subject--with a graciousness that could leave no hurt. A few
years later Riley migrated to Massachusetts, but took with him his
quenchless ardour for “the cause.” The last letter I received from him
concluded with the words: “My feeble hand still holds aloft the banner
of the ideal.”
I remember that one of the subjects on which Ruskin discoursed was the
poetry of Tennyson, who was still regarded by most people, certainly by
the _literati_ of Eton, as a thinker of extraordinary power. He was an
instance, said Ruskin, “of one who, with proper guidance, _might_ have
done something great”; as it was, he had written nothing of real value,
except, perhaps, _In Memoriam_. _Maud_ and _The Princess_ were
“useless,” _Enoch Arden_ “disgusting”; the hero of _Maud_ “an ass and a
fool,” and the war-spirit in the poem “downright mischievous.” Thus,
again, was sapped the simple faith of an Eton master, who knew by heart
a large portion of Tennyson’s poetry, including the whole of _Maud_.
In addition to such dangerous doctrines, Vegetarianism was now beginning
to be heard of in Eton; and this was in one respect a worse heresy than
Socialism, because it had to be practised as well as preached, and the
abstinence from flesh-foods could not fail to attract unfavourable
attention. There was a distinguished scientist among the Eton masters at
that time, Dr. P. H. Carpenter, a son of Dr. W. B. Carpenter; and when
he expressed a wish to speak with me on the subject of the new diet
which he heard I had adopted, I felt that a critical moment had arrived,
and as a novice in vegetarian practice I awaited the scientific
pronouncement with some awe. When it came, spoken with friendly
earnestness, it was this: “Don’t you think that animals were _sent_ us
as food?” I have since heard the same pathetic question asked many
scores of times. What can one say in reply to it, except that the
invoice has not yet been received?
A book of rare merit, filled with a multifarious store of facts about
the food question in relation to the humaner thought, is Mr. Howard
Williams’s _Ethics of Diet_, which was then appearing by instalments in
the magazine of the Vegetarian Society. I had the good fortune to make
Mr. Williams’s personal acquaintance, which was the beginning of a
valued friendship; I also had helpful correspondence with Professor F.
W. Newman, then President of the Vegetarian Society, and with Professor
J. E. B. Mayor, who afterwards succeeded to that post. Thus equipped, I
was not greatly impressed by the proofs which friendly colleagues
offered me of the “impossibility” of the humaner diet; nor was I
troubled when, of the two medical men with whom I was acquainted at
Eton, the one said to me: “Well, I will give you two years,”[12] and the
other, a rather foolish person whom the boys used to call “Mary,”
inquired with a look of puzzled despair at such incredible madness: “Do
vegetarians eat meat _by night_?” A vegetarian was of course regarded as
a sheer lunatic in the Eton of those days. Twenty-five years later Eton
had a vegetarian headmaster in Dr. Edward Lyttelton, who was an
assistant there in the ’eighties. “Little did I think,” he wrote to me,
“when we used to chaff you about cabbages, that it would come to this!”
It happened, in one of those years, that it fell to my lot to set the
subject for “Declamations,” a Latin theme on some debatable point, which
had to be composed and “spouted” annually by two of the sixth-form
boys, who took opposite sides in the discussion; and I chose for
subject, rather to Dr. Hornby’s disgust, the question of vegetarianism
(_An Pythagorei qui carne abstinent laudandi sint_). Another channel for
vegetarian propaganda was afforded by the Ascham Society, a learned and
select body organized by some of the masters, who met periodically to
read and discuss papers on ethical and literary subjects. It happened
that the members were hospitably invited to a dinner by one of their
colleagues, who specially announced a dish of roast veal as an
attraction: thus provoked, I could not but decline that treat in the
accredited Eton manner, a set of Latin verses, of which the conclusion
was obvious: Spare the calf, or let _me_ be excused:
Si non vis vitulo parcere, parce mihi.
Thus gradually the conviction had been forced on me that we Eton
masters, however irreproachable our surroundings, were but cannibals in
cap and gown--almost literally cannibals, as devouring the flesh and
blood of the higher non-human animals so closely akin to us, and
indirectly cannibals, as living by the sweat and toil of the classes who
do the hard work of the world.[13] To speak of this, with any fulness,
in such a society as that of Eton, except to the two or three friends
who held a similar belief, would have been an absurdity; and I do not
think I exaggerated, in the first chapter of this book, when I described
the discovery as bringing with it a sense of being cut off from one’s
neighbours by interminable leagues of misunderstanding. I was living _in
partibus infidelium_. It became a necessity to leave a place where there
could be no sympathetic exchange of thought upon matters which were
felt to be of vastly more importance than the accepted religion and
routine.
I treasure the recollection of the interview in which I took farewell of
Dr. Warre. Most kindly he expressed his regret that I had lost faith in
that public school system to which he himself, as all Etonians are
aware, devoted a lifetime of unsparing service. “It’s the
Vegetarianism,” he gravely remarked; and I understood him to mean that
it was the abandonment of the orthodox diet that had led, by inevitable
weakening of the _mens sana in corpore sano_, to my apostasy in regard
to Education. When I told him that Socialism must take its share of
blame, as having been at least an auxiliary cause, he was really
shocked. “Socialism!” he cried, in his hearty tones. “Then blow us up,
blow us up! There’s nothing left for it but that.”
It is strange to reflect that between thirty and forty years ago the
mere mention of Socialism should have suggested desperate acts of
violence: the term was then the bugbear, for the time being, of the
respectable classes, who always keep on hand some convenient scare-word,
for the purpose of making an alarm. “Anarchism” has since served its
turn; “Bolshevism” is the latest. Something to fear, something to hate,
seems to be an indispensable requirement; hence the periodical outbreak
of war-cries and flogging-crazes; it matters little what the bogey is,
so long as there is a vendetta of some kind, even if it be only, for a
diversion, a campaign against the sparrow or the rat. There is no surer
token of the barbaric mind than this capricious state of panic,
described by George Meredith as “all stormy nightcap and fingers
starving for the bell-rope.”
My one irreparable loss in leaving Eton was not that of culture or
scholarship or social position, but of the game of Fives; for I used to
think that the evolution of the Eton fives-court, the original of which
was a flagged space between two buttresses of the Chapel (“Tax not the
royal Saint with vain expense”), was the most valuable contribution ever
made by the school to the well-being of mankind. Fives is a great game;
and to have played it with such master-hands as A. C. Ainger, E. C.
Austen-Leigh, Edward Lyttelton, or C. T. Studd, was a privilege neither
to be forgotten nor to be replaced. I used afterwards to dream at times
that I was again engaged in the game--“serving,” perhaps, or taking the
service, or enjoying a duel of long sweeping strokes on the outer court,
or mixed up in one of those close-fought rallies that centred round the
“pepper-box”; until a perfect shot from one side or the other had sent
the ball to its resting-place in “dead man’s hole.”
My parting gift to the school was an article entitled “Confessions of an
Eton Master,” which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ in January,
1885, and led to a good deal of discussion on the Eton system of
education.
V
CANNIBAL’S CONSCIENCE
If any one should be educated from his infancy in a dark cave till
he were of full age, and then should of a sudden be brought into
broad daylight ... no doubt but many strange and absurd fancies
would arise in his mind.--From BACON’S _Advancement of Learning_.
“Do you think me a cannibal?” is the remark often made by a cheery
flesh-eater, when enjoying his roast beef in the presence of a
vegetarian; and it may not be denied that such is the thought which
commonly suggests itself, for the more highly developed nonhuman animals
are very closely akin to man. “We do not eat negroes,” says Mr. W. H.
Hudson, “although their pigmented skin, flat feet and woolly heads
proclaim them a different species--even monkey’s flesh is abhorrent to
us, merely because we fancy that that creature, in its ugliness,
resembles some old men and some women and children that we know. But the
gentle, large-brained social cow ... we slaughter and feed on her
flesh--monsters and cannibals that we are.” No apology, then, shall be
made for the heading of this chapter. There is a very real likeness, not
only between anthropophagy and other forms of flesh-eating, but between
the excuses offered by cannibals and those offered by flesh-eaters.
Forty years ago, the possibility of living healthily on a non-flesh diet
was by no means so generally admitted as it is now; and consequently
very naïve and artless objections used to be advanced against abstinence
from butcher’s-meat. Mr. Kegan Paul told me that he had once heard a
lady say to F. W. Newman: “But, Professor, don’t you feel very weak?” to
which the Professor sturdily replied: “Madam, feel my calves.” “What on
earth do you live on?” used to be a frequent question at Eton in those
days, the implication being that there is no “variety” in the vegetarian
diet; an amusing complaint, in view of what Richard Jefferies has
described as “the ceaseless round of mutton and beef to which the dead
level of civilization [_sic_] reduces us.” So obvious is this monotony
in the orthodox repasts that the _Spectator_, a good many years ago,
published an article headed, “Wanted, a New Meat,” in which it was
explained that what is needed is some new and large animal, something
which “shall combine the game flavour with the substantial solidity of a
leg of mutton.” The _Spectator’s_ choice ultimately fell upon the eland,
but not before the claims of various other “neglected animals,” among
them the wart-hog, had been conscientiously debated.
That the cannibal conscience is somewhat guilty and ill at ease seems
evident from the nature of the arguments put forward by the apologists
of flesh-eating; else why did Dr. P. H. Carpenter suggest that the lower
animals were “sent” to us for food, when, as a scientist, he knew well
the absurdity of that remark? Why not say frankly what Nathaniel
Hawthorne wrote in his _English Notebook_ that “the best thing a man
born in this island can do is to eat his beef and mutton, and drink his
porter, and take things as they are, and think thoughts that shall be so
beefish, muttonish, and porterish, that they shall be matters rather
material than intellectual”? The reckless hardihood of a simple and
barbarous people is essentially _un_conscious, just as the action of a
hawk or weasel is unconscious when it seizes its prey; but when
consciousness is once awakened, and a doubt arises as to the morality of
the action, the habit begins of giving sophistical reasons for practices
that cannot be justified. Herman Melville tells us in his _Typee_ that
the Polynesians, being aware of the horror which Europeans feel for
anthropophagy, “invariably deny its existence, and, with the craft
peculiar to savages, endeavour to conceal every trace of it.” The
existence of flesh-eating cannot be denied; but do we not see a savage’s
craft in the shifty and far-fetched reasons alleged for its continuance?
It is only fair to “the noble savage” to draw this distinction between
the natural barbarism and the sophisticated, between the real necessity
for killing for food and the pretended necessity. Commander Peary, the
Arctic explorer, once wrote in the _Windsor Magazine_, under the title
of “Hunting Musk Oxen near the Pole,” a story of the genuine hunger, and
expressed a doubt whether a single one of his readers knew what hunger
was. He was actually in a famishing state when a herd of Musk Oxen came
in view: “The big black animals,” he said, “were not game, but meat, and
every nerve and fibre in my gaunt body was vibrating with a savage lust
for that meat, meat that should be soft and warm, meat into which the
teeth could sink and tear and rend.” Here was a savagery that can at
least be understood and respected, that did not need to postulate the
“sending” of the oxen for its subsistence; yet, strange to say, Peary’s
story would be voted disgusting in many a respectable household which
orders its “home-killed meat” from the family butcher and employs a cook
to disguise it. Certainly, if there is a “noble savage,” we must
recognize also the ignoble variety that has developed the “conscience”
of which I speak.
To this “cannibal’s conscience” we owe those delightful excuses, those
flowers of sophistry, which strew the path of the flesh-eater and lend
humour to an otherwise very gruesome subject. By far the most
entertaining of them is what may be called the academical fallacy,
inasmuch as it seems to have a special attraction for learned men--the
argument that it is a kindness to the animals themselves to kill and eat
them, because otherwise they would not be bred at all, and so would miss
the pleasures of existence. This “Canonization of the Ogre,” as it has
been named, was propounded by Professor D. G. Ritchie, Sir Leslie
Stephen, Sir Henry Thompson, Dr. Stanton Coit, and other distinguished
publicists,[14] every one of whom, with the single exception of Dr.
Coit, prudently evaded discussion of the question when the flaw in his
reasoning was pointed out, viz. that existence cannot be compared with
non-existence. Of existence it is possible to predicate certain
qualities--good or bad, happiness or unhappiness--but of non-existence
we can predicate nothing at all; we must first have the actual ground of
existence to argue from, and he who bases his reasoning on the
non-existent is building upon the treacherous sands.
“The Pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon,”
wrote Sir Leslie Stephen in his _Social Rights and Duties_. Sir Leslie
was repeatedly invited to make some answer to the criticisms which this
dictum called forth; but courageous champion of intellectual freedom
though he was, he preferred in this instance to take refuge in silence.
To no one but Dr. Stanton Coit has philosophy been indebted for a full
exposition of a comfortable theory which may be expressed (with the
alteration of one word) in Coleridge’s famous lines:
He prayeth best who _eateth_ best
All things both great and small.
“If the motive that might produce the greatest number of happiest
cattle,” said Dr. Coit, “would be the eating of beef, then beef-eating,
so far, must be commended. And while heretofore the motive has not been
for the sake of cattle, it is conceivable that, if vegetarian
convictions should spread much further, love for cattle would (if it be
not psychologically incompatible) blend with the love of beef, in the
minds of the opponents of vegetarianism.”[15] According to this ethical
dictum, it will be seen, mankind will continue to eat cows, sheep, pigs,
and other animals for conscience sake--we must be, not conscientious
objectors to butchery, but conscientious _promoters_ of it. So far, Dr.
Coit only set forth in greater detail the argument stated by Professor
Ritchie, Sir Leslie Stephen, and the other casuists in cannibalism; but
now we come to that “psychological incompatibility” to which in a
parenthesis he referred.
“But we frankly admit,” he continued, “that it is a question
whether the love of cattle, intensified to the imaginative point of
individual affection for each separate beast, would not destroy the
pleasure of eating beef, and render this time-honoured custom
psychologically impossible. We surmise that bereaved affection at
the death of a dear creature would destroy the flavour.”
Nothing in controversy ever gave me keener satisfaction than to have
drawn this “surmise,” this pearl of great price, from Dr. Stanton Coit
in the very serious columns of the _Ethical World_. It shows clearly, I
think, why his co-adjutors in the metaphysic of the larder were wise in
their avoidance of discussion.
It seems to be a benign provision of Nature that those who allege
altruistic reasons for selfish actions invariably make themselves
ridiculous. “What would become of the Esquimaux?” was one of the
questions often put to advocates of vegetarianism; probably it is the
only instance on record of any solicitude for the welfare of that remote
people. Then, again, we were frequently asked: “What would become of the
animals?” the implication being that under a vegetarian regime there
would be large numbers of uneaten and neglected quadrupeds left straying
about the earth. An artist friend of mine once drew an amusing picture
to illustrate this “Flesh-Eaters’ Dilemma.” A gentleman and lady,
sitting at a well-ordered dinner-table, are terribly inconvenienced by
an invasion, through the conservatory door, of a number of such
superfluous animals: a cow is putting her head through the window; a
sheep is snatching at the bread; a pig is playing with a rabbit on the
floor; and in the distance a forlorn ox is seen lying in desperation
against the garden gate.
Such are some of the sophisms of which cannibal’s conscience is
prolific. They belong to that class of subterfuge which Bacon designated
_eidola specus_, “idols of the cave,” as lurking in the inmost and
darkest recesses of the human mind. “Fallacies of the Cave-Dweller”
might perhaps be a fitting name for them; for they seem to be
characteristic of the more primitive and uncivilized intelligence.
VI
GLIMPSES OF CIVILIZATION
Wealth is acquired by overreaching our neighbours, and is spent in
insulting them.--WILLIAM GODWIN.
In the ’eighties there were two movements especially attractive to one
who was breaking away from the old academical traditions, to wit,
Socialism, the more equitable distribution of wealth; and
Simplification, the saner method of living. William Godwin, in many ways
a true prophet, had foreshadowed the need of both these reforms in that
pungent sentence of his _Political Justice_.