but if Mr. Bowen takes a lesson he makes you work twice as hard as
other masters, but you like it twice as much and you learn far more."
He was the most unexpected man in conversation that could be imagined,
always giving a new turn to talk by saying something that seemed
remote from the matter in hand until he presently showed the
connection. So his teaching kept the boys alert, because its variety
was inexhaustible. He seemed to think that it did not greatly matter
what the lesson was so long as the pupil could be got to enjoy it. The
rules of the school and the requirements of the examinations for
which boys had to be prepared would not have permitted him to try to
any great extent the experiment of varying subjects to suit individual
tastes; but he was fond of giving lessons in topics outside the
regular course, on astronomy for instance, of which he had acquired a
fair knowledge, and on recent military history, which he knew
wonderfully well, better probably than any man in England outside the
military profession. When the so-called "modern side" was established
at Harrow, in 1869, he became head of it, having taken this post, not
from any want of classical taste and learning, for he was an admirable
scholar, and to the end of his life wrote charming Latin verses, but
because he felt that this line of teaching needed to be developed in a
school which had been formerly almost wholly classical. For
grammatical minutiae, for learning rules by heart, and indeed for the
old style of grammar-teaching generally, he had an unconcealed
contempt. He thought it unkind and wasteful to let a boy go on
puzzling over difficulties of language in an author, and permitted,
under restrictions, the use of English translations, or (as boys call
them) "cribs." Teaching was in his view a special gift of the
individual, which depended on the aptitude for getting hold of the
pupil's mind, and enlisting his interest in the subject. He had
accordingly no faith in the doctrine that teaching is a science which
can be systematically studied, or an art in which the apprentice ought
to be systematically trained. When he was summoned as a witness before
the Secondary Education Commission in 1894 he adhered, under
cross-examination, to this view (so far as it affected schools like
Harrow or Eton), refusing to be moved by the arguments of those among
the Commissioners who cited the practice of Germany, where Paedagogik,
as they call it, is elaborately taught in the universities. "I am
unable," he said, "to conceive any machinery by which the art of
teaching can be given practically to masters. That art is so much a
matter of personal power and experience, and of various social and
moral gifts, that I cannot conceive a good person made a good master
by merely seeing a class of boys taught, unless he was allowed to take
a real and serious part in it himself, unless he became a teacher
himself. I can understand that at a primary school you can learn by
going in and hearing a good teacher at work; but the teaching of a
class of older boys is so different, and has so much of the social
element in it, and it may vary so much, that I should despair of
teaching a young man how to take a class unless he was a long time
with me.... A master at a large public school is chiefly a moral and
social force; a master is this to a much less extent at a primary
school or in the ordinary day-schools, the grammar-schools of the
country. To deal with boys when you have them completely under your
control for the whole of every day is an altogether different thing,
and requires different virtues in the teacher from those that are
required in the case of day-schools."
Bowen may possibly have been mistaken, even as regards the teachers in
the great public boarding schools. His view seems to overlook or
disregard that large class of persons who have no marked natural
aptitude for teaching, but are capable of being, by special
instruction and supervised practice, kneaded and moulded into better
teachers than they would otherwise have grown to be. He felt so
strongly that no one ought to teach without having a real gift and
fondness for teaching that he thought such difference as training
could make insignificant in comparison with the inborn talent. Perhaps
he generalised too boldly from himself, for he had an enjoyment of his
work, and a conscientiousness in always putting the very best of
himself into it--how much was conscientiousness and how much was
enjoyment, no one could tell--as well as a quickness and vivacity
which no study of methods could have improved. As one of his most
eminent colleagues,[54] who was also his life-long friend, observes:
"The humdrum and routine which must form so large a part of a
teacher's life were never humdrum or routine to him, for he put the
whole of his abounding energies into his work, and round its driest
details there played and flickered, as with a lambent flame, his
joyous spirit, finding expression now perhaps in a striking parallel,
now in a startling paradox, now in a touch of humour, and once again
in a note of pathos."
The personal influence he exerted on the boys who lived in his House
was quite as remarkable as his "form-teaching." Stoicism and honour
were the qualities it was mainly directed to form. Every boy was
expected to show manliness and endurance, and to utter no complaint.
Where physical health was concerned he was indulgent; his House was
the first which gave the boys meat at breakfast in addition to tea
with bread and butter. But otherwise the discipline was Spartan,
though not more Spartan than that he prescribed to himself, and the
House was trained to scorn the slightest approach to luxury.
Arm-chairs were forbidden except to sixth-form boys. A pupil relates
that when Bowen found he was in the habit of taking two hot baths a
week the transgression was reproved with the words: "Oh boy, that's
like the later Romans, boy." His maxims were: "Take sweet and bitter
as sweet and bitter come" and "Always play the game." He never
preached to the boys or lectured them; and if he had to convey a
reproof, conveyed it in a single sentence. But he dwelt upon honour as
the foundation of character, and made every boy feel that he was
expected to reach the highest standard of truthfulness, courage, and
duty to the little community of the House, or the cricket eleven, or
the football team.
Some have begun to think that in English schools and universities too
much time is given to athletic sports, and that they absorb too
largely the thoughts and interests of the English youth. Bowen,
however, attached the utmost value to games as a training in
character. He used to descant upon the qualities of discipline,
good-fellowship, good-humour, mutual help, and postponement of self
which they are calculated to foster. Though some of his friends
thought that his own intense and unabated fondness for these
games--for he played cricket and football up to the end of his
life--might have biassed his judgment, they could not deny that the
games ought to develop the qualities aforesaid.
"Consider the habit of being in public, the forbearance, the
subordination of the one to the many, the exercise of judgment, the
sense of personal dignity. Think again of the organising faculty that
our games develop. Where can you get command and obedience, choice
with responsibility, criticism with discipline, in any degree remotely
approaching that in which our social games supply them? Think of the
partly moral, partly physical side of it, temper, of course, dignity,
courtesy.... When the match has really begun, there is education,
there is enlargement of horizon, self sinks, the common good is the
only good, the bodily faculties exhilarate in functional development,
and the make-believe ambition is glorified into a sort of ideality.
Here is boyhood at its best, or very nearly at its best. _Sursum
crura!..._ When you have a lot of human beings, in highest social
union and perfect organic action, developing the law of their race and
falling in unconsciously with its best inherited traditions of
brotherhood and common action, you are not far from getting a glimpse
of one side of the highest good. There lives more soul in honest play,
believe me, than in half the hymn-books."
These words, taken from a half-serious essay on Games written for a
private society, give some part of Bowen's views. The whole essay is
well worth reading.[55] Its arguments do not, however, quite settle
the matter. The playing of games may have, and indeed ought to have,
the excellent results Bowen claimed for it, and yet it may be doubted
whether the experience of life shows that boys so brought up do in
fact turn out substantially more good-humoured, unselfish, and fit for
the commerce of the world than others who have lacked this training.
And the further question remains whether the games are worth their
costly candle. That they occupy a good deal of time at school and at
college is not necessarily an evil, seeing that the time left for
lessons or study is sufficient if well spent. The real drawback
incident to the excessive devotion games inspire in our days is that
they leave little room in the boy's or collegian's mind either for
interest in his studies or for the love of nature. They fill his
thoughts, they divert his ambition into channels of no permanent value
to his mind or life; they continue to absorb his interest and form a
large part of his reading long after he has left school or college.
Nevertheless, be these things as they may, the opinion of a man so
able and so experienced as Bowen was, deserves to be recorded; and his
success in endearing himself to and guiding his boys was doubtless
partly due to the use he made of their liking for games.
He was never married, so the school became the sole devotion of his
life, and he bequeathed to it the bulk of his property, directing an
area of land which he had purchased on the top of the Hill to be
always kept as an open space for the benefit of boys and masters.
It need hardly be said that he loved boys as he loved teaching. He
took them with him in the holidays on walking tours. He kept up
correspondence with many of his pupils after they left Harrow, and
advised them as occasion rose. To many of them he remained through
life the model whom they desired to imitate. But he was very chary of
the exercise of influence. "A boy's character," he once wrote, "grows
like the Temple of old, without sound of mallet and trowel. What we
can do is to arrange matters so as to give Virtue her best chance. We
can make the right choice sometimes a little easier, we can prevent
tendencies from blossoming into acts, and render pitfalls visible. How
much indirectly and unconsciously we can do, none but the recording
angel knows. 'You can and you should,' said Chiffers,[56] 'go straight
to the heart of every individual boy.' Well, a fellow-creature's mind
is a sacred thing. You may enter into that arcanum once a year,
shoeless. And in the effort to control the spirit of a pupil, to make
one's own approval his test and mould him by the stress of our own
presence, in the ambition to do this, the craving for moral power and
visible guiding, the subtle pride of effective agency, lie some of the
chief temptations of a schoolmaster's work."
Such ways and methods as I have endeavoured to describe are less easy
to imitate than those which belong to the Arnoldine type of
schoolmaster. In Bowen's gaiety, in his vivacity, in the humour which
interpenetrated everything he said or did, there was something
individual. Teachers who do not possess a like vivacity, versatility,
and humour cannot hope to apply with like success the method of
familiarity and sympathy. Not indeed that Bowen stood altogether alone
in his use of that method. There were others among his contemporaries
who shared his view, and whose practice was not dissimilar. He was,
however, the earliest and most brilliant exponent of the view, so his
career may be said to open a new line, and to mark a new departure in
the teacher's art.
I have mentioned his walking tours. He was a pedestrian of extraordinary
force, rather tall, but spare and light, swift of foot, and tireless
in his activity. As an undergraduate he had walked from Cambridge to
Oxford, nearly ninety miles, in twenty-four hours, scarcely halting. At
one time or another he had traversed on foot all the coast-line and
great part of the inland regions of England. He was an accomplished
Alpine climber. His passion for exercise of body as well as of mind
was so salient a feature in his character that his friends wondered
how he would be able to support old age. He was spared the trial,
for he was gay and joyous as ever on the last morning of his life, and
he died in a moment, while mounting his bicycle after a long ascent,
among the lonely forests of Burgundy, then bursting into leaf under
an April sun.
His interest in politics provided him with a short and strenuous
interlude of public action, which varied the even tenor of his life at
Harrow. At the general election of 1880 he stood as a candidate for
the little borough of Hertford (which has since been merged in the
county) against Mr. Arthur Balfour, now (1902) First Lord of the
Treasury in England. The pro-Turkish policy of Lord Beaconsfield,
followed by the Afghan War of 1878, had roused many Liberals who
usually took little part in political action. Bowen felt the impulse
to denounce the conduct of the Ministry, and went into the contest
with his usual airy suddenness. He had little prospect of success at
such a place, for, like many of the so-called Academic Liberals of
those days, he made the mistake of standing for a small semi-rural
constituency, overshadowed by a neighbouring magnate, instead of for a
large town, where both his opinions and his oratory would have been
better appreciated. However, he enjoyed the contest thoroughly,
amusing himself as well as the electors by his lively and sometimes
impassioned speeches, and he looked back to it as a pleasant episode
in his usually smooth and placid life. He was all his life a strong
Liberal _vieille roche_, a lover of freedom and equality as well as of
economy in public finance, a Free Trader, an individualist, an enemy
of all wars and all aggressions, and in later years growingly
indignant at the rapid increase of military and naval expenditure. He
was also, like the Liberals of 1850-60 in general, a sympathiser with
oppressed nationalities, though this feeling did not carry him the
length of accepting the policy of Home Rule for Ireland, as to which
he had grave doubts, yet doubts not quite so serious as to involve
his separation from the Liberal party. Twice after 1880 he was on the
point of becoming a candidate for a seat in the House of Commons, but
whether his love for Harrow would have suffered him to remain in
Parliament had he entered it may be doubted. One could not even tell
whether he was really disappointed that his political aspirations
remained unfulfilled. Had he given himself to parliamentary life, his
readiness, ingenuity, and wit would have soon made him valued by his
own side, while his sincerity and engaging manners would have
commended him to both sides alike. His delivery was always too rapid,
and his voice not powerful, yet these defects would have been
forgotten in the interest which so peculiar a figure must have
aroused.
His peace principles contrasted oddly with his passion for military
history, a passion which prompted many vacation journeys to
battlefields all over Europe, from Salamanca to Austerlitz. He had
followed the campaigns of Napoleon through Piedmont and Lombardy,
through Germany and Austria, as well as those of Wellington in Spain
and Southern France.[57] This taste is not uncommon in men of peace.
Freeman had it; J. R. Green and S. R. Gardiner had it; and the
historical works of Sir George Trevelyan and Dr. Thomas Hodgkin prove
that it lives in those genial breasts also. It was a pleasure to be
led over a battlefield by Bowen, for he had a good eye for ground, he
knew the movements of the armies down to the smallest detail, and he
could explain with perfect lucidity the positions of the combatants
and the tactical moves in the game.
Twice only did he come across actual fighting, once at Dueppel in 1864,
during the Schleswig-Holstein war, and again in Paris during the siege
of the Communards by the forces that obeyed Thiers and the Assembly
sitting at Versailles. He maintained that the Commune had been
unfairly judged by Englishmen, and wrote a singularly interesting
description of what he saw while risking his life in the beleaguered
city. There was in him a great spirit of adventure, though the
circumstances of his life gave it little scope.
Travel was one of his chief pleasures, but it was, if possible, a
still greater pleasure to his fellow-travellers, for he was the most
agreeable of companions, fertile in suggestion, candid in discussion,
swift in decision. He cared nothing for luxury and very little for
comfort; he was absolutely unselfish and imperturbably good-humoured;
he could get enjoyment out of the smallest incidents of travel, and
his curiosity to see the surface of the earth as well as the cities of
men was inexhaustible. He loved the unexpected, and if one had written
proposing an expedition to explore Tibet, he would have telegraphed
back, "Start to-night: do we meet Charing Cross or Victoria?"
I have dwelt on Bowen's gifts and methods as a teacher, because
teaching was the joy and the business of his life, and because he
showed a new way in which boys might be stimulated and guided. But he
was a great deal besides a teacher, just as his brother Charles was a
great deal besides a lawyer. Both had talents for literature of a very
high order. Charles published a verse translation of Virgil's
_Eclogues_ and the first six books of the _Aeneid_, full of ingenuity
and refinement, as well as of fine poetic taste. Edward's vein
expressed itself in the writing of songs. His school songs, composed
for the Harrow boys, became immensely popular with them, and their use
at school celebrations of various kinds has passed from Harrow to the
other great schools of England, even to some of the larger girls'
schools. The songs are unique in their fanciful ingenuity and humorous
extravagance, full of a boyish joy in life, in the exertion of
physical strength, in the mimic strife of games, yet with an
occasional touch of sadness, like the shadow of a passing cloud as it
falls on the cricket field over which the shouts of the players are
ringing. The metres are various: all show rhythmical skill, and in all
the verse has a swing which makes it singularly effective when sung
by a mass of voices. Most of the songs are dedicated to cricket or
football, but a few are serious, and two or three of these have a
beauty of thought and perfection of form which make the reader ask why
a poetic gift so true and so delicate should have been rarely used.
These songs were the work of his middle or later years, and he never
wrote except when the impulse came upon him. The stream ran pure but
it ran seldom. In early days he had been for a while, like many other
brilliant young University men of his time, a contributor to the
_Saturday Review_. (There surely never was a journal which enlisted so
much and such varied literary talent as the _Saturday_ did between
1855 and 1863.) Bowen's articles were, like his elder brother's,
extremely witty. In later life he could seldom be induced to write,
having fallen out of the habit, and being, indeed, too busy to carry
on any large piece of work; but the occasional papers on educational
subjects he produced showed no decline in his vivacity or in the
abundance of his humour. Those who knew the range and the resources of
his mind sometimes regretted that he would do nothing to let the world
know them. But he was, to a degree most unusual among men of real
power, absolutely indifferent, not only to fame, but to opportunities
for exercising power or influence.
The stoicism which he sought to form in his pupils was inculcated by
his own example. It was a genial and cheerful stoicism, which checked
neither his affection for them nor his brightness in society, and
which permitted him to draw as much enjoyment from small things as
most people can from great ones. But if he had the gaiety of an
Irishman, he had a double portion of English reserve. He never gave
expression in words to his emotions. He never seemed either elated or
depressed. He never lost his temper and never seemed to be curbing it.
His tastes and way of life were simple to the verge of austerity; nor
did he appear to desire anything more than what he had obtained.
It is natural--possibly foolish, yet almost inevitable--that those
who perceive in a friend the presence of rare and brilliant gifts
should desire that his gifts should not only be turned to full
account for the world's benefit, but should become so known and
appreciated as to make others admire and value what they admire and
value. When such a man prefers to live his life in his own way, and do
the plain duties that lie near him, with no thought of anything
further, they feel, though they may try to repress, a kind of
disappointment, as though greatness or virtue had missed its mark
because known to few besides themselves. Yet there is a sense in
which that friend is most our own who has least belonged to the
world, who has least cared for what the world has to offer, who has
chosen the simplest and purest pleasures, who has rendered the
service that his way of life required with no longing for any wider
theatre or any applause to be there won. Is there indeed anything
more beautiful than a life of quiet self-sufficing yet beneficent
serenity, such as the ancient philosophers inculcated, a life which
is now more rarely than ever led by men of shining gifts, because the
inducements to bring such gifts into the dusty thoroughfares of the
world have grown more numerous? Bowen had the best equipment for a
philosopher. He knew the things that gave him pleasure, and sought no
others. He knew what he could do well. He followed his own bent.
His desires were few, and he could gratify them all. He had made life
exactly what he wished it to be. Intensely as he enjoyed travel, he
never uttered a note of regret when the beginning of a Harrow school
term stopped a journey at its most interesting point, so dearly did
he love his boys. What more can we desire for our friends than
this--that in remembering them there should be nothing to regret,
that all who came under their influence should feel themselves for
ever thereafter the better for that influence, that a happy and
peaceful life should be crowned by a sudden and painless death?
-----
[53] Since this sketch was written a very interesting _Life of Edward
Bowen_ by his nephew (the Hon. and Rev. W. E. Bowen) has
appeared. Some of his (too few) essays and a collection of his
school-songs are appended to it.
[54] Mr. R. Bosworth Smith.
[55] It is printed in the _Life_.
[56] "Chiffers" is the typical would-be imitator of Arnold.
[57] He remarked once that he had so nearly exhausted the battlefields
of the past that he must begin to devote himself to the
battlefields of the future.
EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
As with the progress of science new arts emerge and new occupations
and trades are created, so with the progress of society professions
previously unknown arise, evolve new types of intellectual excellence,
and supply a new theatre for the display of peculiar and exceptional
gifts. Such a profession, such a type, and the type which is perhaps
most specially characteristic of our times, is that of the Editor. It
scarcely existed before the French Revolution, and is, as now fully
developed, a product of the last eighty years. Various are its forms.
There is the Business Editor, who runs his newspaper as a great
commercial undertaking, and may neither care for politics nor attach
himself to any political party. America still recollects the familiar
example set by James Gordon Bennett, the founder of the _New York
Herald_. There is the Selective Editor, who may never pen a line, but
shows his skill in gathering an able staff round him, and in allotting
to each of them the work he can do best. Such an one was John Douglas
Cook, a man of slender cultivation and few intellectual interests,
but still remembered in England by those who forty years ago knew the
staff of the _Saturday Review_, then in its brilliant prime, as
possessed of an extraordinary instinct for the topics which caught the
public taste, and for the persons capable of handling those topics.
John T. Delane, of the _Times_, had the same gift, with talents and
knowledge far surpassing Cook's. A third and usually more interesting
form is found in the Editor who is himself an able writer, and who
imparts his own individuality to the journal he directs. Such an one
was Horace Greeley, who, in the days before the War of Secession, made
the _New York Tribune_ a power in America. Such another, of finer
natural quality, was Michael Katkoff, who in his short career did much
to create and to develop the spirit of nationality and imperialism in
Russia thirty years ago.
It was to this third form of the editorial profession that Mr. Godkin
belonged. He is the most remarkable example of it that has appeared in
our time--perhaps, indeed, in any time since the profession rose to
importance; and all the more remarkable because he was never, like
Greeley or Katkoff, the exponent of any widespread sentiment or potent
movement, but was frequently in opposition to the feeling for the
moment dominant.