THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS AS MIRRORS OF THE AGE
Social importance of Eton, Harrow, and other great schools, as
representing the social evolution of the epoch. The conventional
mistake that the new wealth has been injurious to the social tone or
scholarly studies of public schools. In the case of Eton the historic
details and educational statistics prove the falseness of the
statement. Progress of the school shown by success in the new as well
as old examinations during the incriminated period of the last forty
years. New social elements have increased the value but not the
expense of Eton. The fourteenth Earl of Derby as a typical Eton
product.
The whole region of public elementary and secondary education, whose
improvement is so conspicuous an incident in the recent domestic or social
annals of the time, has now been indicated at sufficient length and
minutely enough to convey an accurate notion of the facts. One may,
therefore, pass to those educational levels which stand a little higher,
and up to which recent reforms of popular education are, as has been seen,
gradually assisting the progress of Board School children. The
sociological feature of the present reign has already been described in
these pages as a process less of revolution, than of evolution; of the
natural incorporation of new elements into an old fabric, of the
harmonious assimilation on the part of a polity that is the growth of
centuries, of the ideas and types that are the products of to-day. These
processes can nowhere be witnessed more crucially in operation than at
those little worlds, the great public schools such as Eton and Harrow,
which, as they have ever been, are the faithful microcosms of the great
worlds that lie beyond them. Many of the accounts of Eton which
periodically find their way into print seem inspirations from Baron
Munchausen. The school that during centuries has been the special training
ground for the country gentlemen of England, which was once to such an
extent the nursery of future lords spiritual and temporal as to enable Dr
Keate to include among his titles to respect the fact of his having
flogged in their youth the whole Bench of Bishops,[41] is conventionally
represented as corrupted at its heart by the predominating influence of
the sons of the 'new rich' on its classic soil. The parent who wishes his
son to be at the school where his sire, and his sires before him, had
been, is disgusted by reading romantic accounts of the bank balances in
Windsor town kept for their boys by the plutocrats, Saxon or Semitic, of
the City. It may, therefore, be said authoritatively that thus far
research has failed to bring to light a single instance of the new rich
Etonian who possesses during his school days a banking account of his own.
Now, not less than formerly, the lad who returns to his tutor's or his
dame's with a L5 note in his pocket is looked upon by his comrades as in
luck.
Forty years ago, when a Public School Commission was making its enquiry,
the cry of the commercial Croesus swamping the country squire was first
raised. The most practical proof of its hollowness is that the expenses of
Eton, if still prohibitive to many parents, have not increased of recent
years. What has rather happened is that the school outlay has been
remodelled. The charges are to-day inclusive. If comparatively fresh items
figure in the school accounts, the incidental outlay on casual
subscriptions and a long catalogue of extras is now superseded. The real
cost of Eton and of other schools like it is what the individual boy
chooses, or what his friends allow. The expensive habits of the Etonian
are more a domestic, than a scholastic, growth. No advocate of the
_nouveau riche_ theory has ever asserted that the scale of living in the
clubs of Pall Mall has become insufferably profuse since gentlemen
enriched by commerce, prone, like Mr Mantalini, to despise details of
petty cash, have been made free of these establishments. There is not, nor
has there ever been, the slightest danger of the Etonian or Harrovian of
the old aristocratic order being corrupted by plutocratic schoolfellows.
The son of Sir Gorgius Midas in real life proves to be a quiet, sensible
lad, with a just and shrewd sense of the value of money, and perhaps less
likely to waste his father's substance in the 'sock shops' under the
shadow of Windsor Castle than his form comrade, the son of the squire whom
Sir Gorgius could buy up half a dozen times over. At other places than
the great public schools of England, a studious boy may find himself more
in the way of amassing knowledge. Nowhere will he learn so many lessons
useful for the daily conduct of life, which books do not impart. Nowhere
will he have such opportunities for the acquisition, the development and
the display of practical common sense. So far back as the later fifties of
this century, an Eton master, the late Mr Durnford, the respected father
of him who still represents the same family on the Eton staff, alluding to
the decline in the manufacture of Longs and Shorts in pious Henry's
shades, could say: 'Latin verses are with us things of the past.' There
is, however, no reason, as the list of Eton honours at Oxford or Cambridge
will show, for imputing to Eton any decline in the essentials of classical
scholarship. Since the new wealth is supposed to have contaminated the
standard of plain living and high thinking among the old gentry, in 1851,
the famous son of a famous father, a name venerable in the Law Courts and
on the Thames, J. W. Chitty, an old Etonian, won at Oxford a first class
Vinerian Scholarship, followed by a Fellowship at Exeter. About the same
time R. G. W. Herbert the late Permanent Head of the Colonial Office
carried off, as a scholar of Balliol, the Hertford and the Ireland, and a
Fellowship at All Souls. The late Lord Carnarvon was not so infected by
the plutocratic idleness of Eton as to miss when at Christ Church the
highest honours of the Classical Schools.
Three years later when according to the conventional view the 'rich
vulgarians,' as the Mrs Major Pompley of _My Novel_ calls them, must have
entirely crowded out the sons of squires as well as the humanities
themselves, another country gentleman's son, the late Edward Herbert who
died at Marathon in 1870, had as his brother scholar at Balliol, also from
Eton, another son of a Western squire, Edmond Warre, to-day Headmaster of
his old school. In the same year the son of a 'squarson' to employ Sidney
Smith's useful term, also an Etonian, Henry Barter of Merton, the evil
associations of plutocracy notwithstanding, won the highest mathematical
together with second class classical honours at Oxford, and was only just
beaten by the present Bishop of Hereford, for the University Scholarship
in mathematics. This list of instances belongs to the era (the fifties)
when the corruptions of the new wealth were most rampant at Eton, seems to
refute the mechanical charge; that list may be closed with the name of a
country gentleman's son, since then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Michael
Hicks-Beach, who, Eton and Christ Church notwithstanding, took a first
class in the Modern History schools in 1858. About the same time the
member of a Liverpool mercantile family, the son of a great statesman, W.
H. Gladstone, had not at Eton so unlearned all he had been taught
elsewhere as to be prevented from winning a studentship at Christ Church.
His contemporary at Eton, A. C. Swinburne, the poet, won at Oxford the
Taylor scholarship for modern languages about the same time. The catalogue
might be extended indefinitely. The representative names likely to convey
the fullest idea to the general reader have now been mentioned. A further
selection of patronymics would confuse rather than instruct or interest.
It will be enough to say that in or since the sixties down to 1896, of the
highest honours in the Schools or in the Colleges at Oxford 400 were
obtained by the sons of country gentlemen who, notwithstanding the new
wealth had like their fathers before them been sent to Eton and who were
not apparently quite demoralized by that ordeal. At Cambridge the total of
Academic distinctions won by Etonians of the same grade as at Oxford, is
as might have been expected higher, and amounts in round numbers to 550. A
competent judge in these matters, speaking with no personal prejudice in
favour of the school of Henry VI.[42] or of its Cambridge sister King's
College, but with much experience of classical examinations, J. Y.
Sargent, told the present writer not long ago, that Eton was the one
school in England whose boys could write tolerable Greek prose.
Any social change that may have come over the place since the introduction
of the new wealth into the country would seem to be very different in fact
from that described by fiction. The presence of a large number of boys
whose parents derive their income from no hereditary acres and whose
domestic associations are therefore different from those of the country
gentleman's son has indeed produced an effect, but one which is the very
opposite of its current misrepresentation. Before the Victorian era
opened, well-to-do commercial fathers were, as readers of _Coningsby_ will
remember, in the habit of sending their sons to the seat of education most
in vogue with the titled and untitled patricians of the realm. Such
influence as these have had has proved notoriously healthful to the whole
school community. The newcomers have with scarcely an exception been
trained from childhood to an adequate appreciation of the value of money
and are the last boys in the world to be permitted to squander it for mere
show. Before their advent to the place, Eton might have been charged with
narrowness or partiality in the composition of its life; congenial enough
as the training ground of peers, opulent commoners, diplomatists, and
other destined dignitaries of State or Church, but less salutary for lads
who had their own way to make in the world, and who while doing so, must
expect to come into collision with the men of the City, the office, and
the shop. The genius of every great English school is essentially
democratic. Boys are valued by their fellows not for what they have, but
for what in themselves they are; not for the antiquity of their family
descent, nor for the depth of their father's purse. The boy who dazzled
his mates with the glitter of sovereigns fresh from the Mint would be
suppressed as promptly by the public opinion of the place as the toady or
the parasite. To-day no English lad is so little likely idly to waste his
parents' cash as the young Etonian.
There is no school which so far as social discipline is concerned better
enables its boys to dispense with the University and yet lose so little
by not going there, or which turns out its boys such ready-made little men
of the world as the foundation of Henry VI. That this is to-day the
special attribute of Eton, possessed by it in common perhaps with Harrow,
is due to the circumstance of its having become representative of the
entire life, commercial, not less than squirearchical or patrician, urban
not less than rural, of the whole country. The truth is that the _nouveau
riche_, as he is represented by the popular imagination, is the product of
romance, or the creation of the stage. The antagonism between the socially
emancipated of yesterday and the descendants of houses which had become
considerable before constitutional government in England was known is
imaginary and in direct contradiction of the experiences of daily life.
The son of the new man of one generation as to his tastes, his prejudices,
his politics, his pursuits, the performance of his duties, the choice of
his pleasures, becomes, in the next, socially indistinguishable from the
scion of the oldest nobility. On all points he has unconsciously, as is
the way with the imitative race of boys, modelled himself after the
pattern of those country gentlemen, divines, civilians, soldiers, and
sailors, who are for the most part the reverse of plutocratic, and whose
sons have been brought up at home under conditions which would make them
physically intolerant of the bad taste that may be defined as a missing of
the due proportion of relative things. The Lancashire trader's son who at
school finds himself next in form to the boy of ancient family is quick to
imbibe the social traditions and intuitions with which the atmosphere is
charged. He has been sent to school to make acquaintances perhaps as well
as to learn; but certainly not to dazzle his schoolfellows by the glitter
of his father's gold. If the Manchester lad possesses more pocket money
than some of those in his 'house,' he is pretty certain also to set them a
wise example in the careful spending of it. The truth is that with the
whole system of public examinations and with literary competitions
narrowing the entrance to all kinds of professional life, the genius of
the place at the great public schools has undergone the same modifications
as at the Universities. The schoolboy who has obtained his exeat for a few
days as he bounds off to the station to catch his train, may be thought to
have left all care behind him. Enjoyment, however, is very probably not
the reason of his visit to his friends in London.
Sandhurst or Woolwich examinations, competitions for the home or foreign
service at Burlington House are quite as likely to be the object in view
as the visit to the dentist by day or to the theatre by night. This early
acquaintance with the responsibilities of life exerts a sobering influence
on the most constitutionally volatile of Eton or Harrow striplings. The
lad whose path of pleasure is darkened by the shadow of the ubiquitous
examiner loses prematurely the juvenile appetite for veal and ham pies,
jam tarts, ginger beer, even for cocoanut paste. When there are not
examinations at a distance, the ingenuity of Oxford and Cambridge provides
the machinery for them hard by the Playing Fields on the Thames or Byron's
Tree at Harrow on the Hill. 'Posing' in some form goes on all the year
round. It has become in effect obligatory on the public school boy to
obtain before going up to the University the certificate which frees him
from the Littlego examination, or which if he enters on other careers,
secures him an analogous dispensation.
The higher certificates in the University examinations are not easy to
obtain. They uniformly indicate a high standard of proficiency. The
success of Eton in these ordeals has been steadily progressive during the
last twenty years. From 39 in 1875 the Eton candidates had risen to 88 in
1896. The total of certificates and distinctions won by these, an
aggregate of 1,413 candidates, was, during this period of twenty years,
1,516. Meanwhile the number of Eton boys who, without passing through an
intermediary stage at the professional crammers, take good places direct
from their school in the Indian and Home Civil Service competitions has
increased during the last few years by something like 10 per cent. The
Eton 'Army' class is also doing well. The number of boys proceeding to
Sandhurst and even to Woolwich straight from school as others proceed
straight to the University increases annually. These statistics go some
way towards disproving the conventional reproach made largely by ignorance
against the most representative of English public schools of being
socially and economically demoralized, or intellectually sunk in indolence
by the malignant influences of the new wealth. If there were any truth in
such an accusation, the maintenance of the traditional standard of
scholarly excellence in exceptional cases would not be combined, as
to-day it is, with the visibly demonstrated improvement in the work of the
rank and file of the boys. The truth is, that at all our great schools,
Eton like the rest, the new elements among the boys have tended to produce
a wholesome change in the public opinion of the place distinctly
favourable to a higher average of school industry. The ideal Etonian of
history is, and seems likely long to continue, the fourteenth Earl of
Derby, translator of the _Iliad_, and perhaps the most brilliant
parliamentary debater of the century. 'He saps like Gladstone, and he
fights like Spring.' So runs Lord Lytton's spirited and familiar line
concerning this most typical of Eton worthies. No one would have welcomed
more warmly than he the statistical evidence here given that under its
latest Headmaster, the study of the new ologies, and the manual mechanics
practised in the Eton workshops which Dr. Warre has established have not
ousted the older humanities from their place, and that, the new wealth
notwithstanding, it has ceased to be a reproach against any boy at the old
school that he is a sap.[43]