COMPOSITION
“An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told.”
_King John._
In the dark ages before (about) 1895 one of the subjects allotted to
Standard V. was composition, and this was further explained to be
“writing from memory the substance of a short story read out twice.”
It was a very useful exercise, and many of my friends would be more
valuable witnesses in a court of justice, and better company after
dinner, if they had received this training. To be able to catch the
point of a story and repeat it accurately is a rare accomplishment. I
remember an instance in point.
I was staying with a doctor, a school manager; and at dinner I told him
the old story of H. J. Byron, Sothern, and the great-coat. He laughed,
and made a mental note of it for professional use. Next day at lunch he
told me that it had brought him good fruit beyond expectation.
He had called at the Hall, and finding the daughters of the house
assembled in the drawing-room, after he had seen his patient, he had
told them the story thus:
“I heard a good story last night. H. J. Byron, you know, the man that
wrote the plays, was going down Regent Street the other day, and met
Sothern, the actor. It was a very cold day, and Sothern, noticing that
Byron was lightly clad, exclaimed, ‘What a fellow you are, Byron; you
never wear a great-coat.’ ‘No,’ said Byron, ‘I never was.’
“They all laughed consumedly, and in the middle of their laughter a
girl friend called, and asked what was the joke.
“‘Oh,’ said one, ‘such a funny story the Doctor has just told us. Lord
Byron, you know, that wrote the poetry, was going down--what street was
it, Doctor?’
“‘Well, it’s immaterial, but it was Regent Street.’
“‘Oh, thanks, yes; and he met--who was it?’
“‘Sothern, the actor.’
“‘Of course, yes:’ and so he said to Sothern, ‘you never wear a great
coat;’ so he said, ‘No, I never do.’ (Renewed laughter.)
“The caller pondered, and then remarked that she was awfully stupid,
but she didn’t see the joke. The narrator pondered also, and finally
confessed, ‘No more do I now, but we laughed very much when the Doctor
told us.’”
I told the whole story to a friend, and he supplied me with a variant
from a lower stratum of society. A Lancashire man went with a friend
into a tailor’s shop to buy a coat. One was produced, and the purchaser
asked the friend for his opinion.
“Seems a bit short, don’t it?” said the friend.
“Ah, lad, but it’ll be long enough before I get another.”
Three minutes later a third man found the friend in the street, still
convulsed with laughter. “Why, what’s to do?” he asked.
The friend wiped his eyes and took breath: “Eh, it were Jack Robinson:
he’s a funny feller. Ah went with him into yon shop, because he wanted
an overcoat, d’ye see? And they brought him out one, and he tries it
on and he says to me: ‘How does it look, Bill?’ he says. ‘Seems a bit
short, don’t it?’ says I. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it ’ull be a pretty time
afore I get another.’” And the friend was again convulsed.
But the third man was indignant: “Why, whativer was theer to laugh at?”
The friend “rubbed an elongated forehead with a meditative cuff”: “Ah
reckon ah’ve got it a bit mixed,” he admitted, “but we laughed a good
’un at th’ toime.”
A third case may be quoted:
Twenty or more years ago there was an inquest that caused much
excitement. A man--let us call him Miller--died suddenly. There was a
post-mortem examination, and distinct traces of antimony were found.
The public demanded vengeance, but soon cooled down, when it was
disclosed at the enquiry that the deceased, whether by making or by
saving money, had hasted to become rich. There was a luncheon party at
the Canon’s house in Norceter, and the _affaire_ Miller was discussed.
Among the guests was old Sir John Surd, who, being very deaf, was
allowed to have Lady Surd sitting next him. The Canon, a well-known
humorist, gave novelty to the topic by remarking how singular it was
that a man who was so fond of money should have died of anti-mony.
There was laughter, and Sir John turned to his wife and privately asked
for the joke.
“Oh, John,” shouted her Ladyship, “such a funny thing the Canon has
said. Mr. Miller, you know, John, Miller--the Inquest?”
“Yes, yes.”
(All conversation ceased: all eyes were turned on the narrator, who
became flurried.)
“Mr. Miller, you know. Well, the Canon said how funny it was
that--er--Mr. Miller who--er--was so fond of money, MONEY, you
know?”
“Yes, yes,” impatiently. (The guests begin to smile, and Lady Surd
loses her head and plunges.)
“So fond of money, should have er--er--DIED OF TARTAR EMETIC!”
Now if these imperfect historians had been trained in Standard V. I
should have lost three stories.
To meet the requirements of the Code it was necessary for school
teachers to have a stock of simple anecdotes, and to this end
publishers brought out collections of stories, sometimes serious,
moral, improving; sometimes more or less humorous; but nearly always
quite unsuitable. Our children have a very limited vocabulary, and
the long words and involved sentences that occur in such compilations
completely bewildered them. Or, if by any chance there was a simpler
story, it would probably have only one incident; and, being of so
elementary a type, would be inadequate for the latter part of the
school year, when we expected two or more stages in the plot. For
instance: (1) Androcles meets a lion in pain and removes a thorn from
his foot. (2) The lion, being invited to eat Androcles, recognizes his
benefactor and declines the meal.
But Androcles was not our style of hero. An experienced school manager
once pointed out to me the need for educating the faculty of humour in
children. “Look at old Whackem,” he said, indicating the master, “there
is no surgical operation that would have any effect on that man’s
humorous receptivity. He ought to have been caught young.” I banished
Androcles and the like, and collected the stories which Mark Twain
disliked, the stories with “a snap” to them: these I put into simple
English, and then tried to get the class to find the snap. In an old
portfolio I find half a dozen of them, almost illegible with age, and
they bring back memories of much of that “unquenchable laughter” which
I tried to teach Standard V. to share with Olympus.
How popular was “The Lady Doctor”!--she who in vol. i. took out the
patient’s eye, and put it on a table, while she was arranging bandages.
But (vol. ii.) the landlady’s cat ate the eye, thinking it was its
dinner. In vol. iii. the lady doctor killed the cat, took out its eye,
put it in the unsuspecting patient’s head, and sent him away whole.
“But the ungrateful patient complains that he is always looking for
mice, and that the sight of a dog makes his hair stand on end.”
More popular still was Boccaccio’s story of the crane. I believe it has
appeared in all the languages of Europe, but not in school anecdote
books. May I repeat it here? Those who know it have their remedy.
The original, which is slightly altered for school use, is in the
Decameron, VI. Day, IV. Novel:
A dishonest cook was one day roasting a crane for her master’s supper.
When it was done, it looked so nice that she thought she must just
taste it, and she tore off a leg and ate it. When the rest of the
bird was served up for supper, the master saw what had been done, and
angrily scolded her for taking the leg. “Oh, master,” she said, “those
birds have only one leg.”
“Only one leg, woman? Come with me in the morning to the river bank,
and I will teach you better than that.”
So in the morning they went; and there were half a dozen cranes, each
standing, as is the way of cranes, on one leg. “There, master,” she
said, “what did I tell you? only one leg!” The master clapped his
hands, and said “Shoo! shoo!” and all the birds put down the
other legs, ran a few yards, and flew away.
“What did I tell you?” he said, “Two Legs!”
“Ah,” said she, “but if you’d have clapped your hands and said
Shoo, shoo, at that crane last night, maybe he’d have put down
another leg and flown away, and you’d have lost your supper.”
The difficulty was with the girls. In a mixed school, while the boys
were laughing, the girls in the same class would be reflecting that the
cook “didn’t ought to have took the leg,” speculating also whether they
should write “crain” like “rain,” or “creign” like “reign.” Androcles
is their man.
But even the boys failed me sometimes. This was notable in the extreme
case of the Speculative Maid and the Hamburg lottery. I told it to my
best boys’ school with much confidence:
“There was a lottery in Hamburg last year, and the first prize was
£1,000. The tickets were sold in the Town Hall, and the Mayor was there
to see fair-play. About an hour after they began to sell, a servant
girl came in a great hurry and said she wanted to buy No. 23. They
told her it was sold already. She cried so much that the Mayor asked
whether another ticket wouldn’t do as well: she could have No. 21. But
she said ‘No,’ she must have 23, and no other. The Mayor was so sorry
for her, that he sent a clerk to the man who bought No. 23, and asked
him to change it. This was done without any trouble, and the girl went
away happy. When the lottery was drawn, No. 23 won the first prize of
£1,000, and the Mayor was so much surprised that he sent for the girl
and asked her what made her think of that number.
“Well,” she said, “it was this way: I had a dream that No. 7 won it;
and then I dreamt again that 7 won; and then a third time I dreamt that
7 won; and I said to myself ‘three sevens is 23,’ and I came here and
got it.”
And when I had got to the end, the whole class rose deferentially from
their seats, and said, “Three sevens are 21.”
Let me add two wholly irrelevant appendices--appendicitis is the
disease of the story-teller: First, was it Huxley or Tyndall, who,
after hearing this, said it was the only dream story that ever carried
conviction to his mind? Secondly, I was told on the highest authority
that the story is traditional in the Deanery of Westminster, because
it was told there at the dinner table of Arthur P. Stanley; whose bent
was not scientific: and when it came to an end, all laughed except
the Dean, who, after some thought, said he could not see the joke:
but, after increased laughter of the others, hazarded the surmise that
“perhaps three times seven is not 23?”
This irreceptivity caused me grave disquiet. Was it possible that by
diligent practice a child should convert himself into a sort of “graph”
or “phone,” capable of reproducing a story with absolute accuracy
without intelligent comprehension? Was it not possible to superadd a
test? I tried the experiment thus: the story was of the usual type, and
I told it to a large mixed class, boys and girls:
“A French officer, coming into a wineshop in Paris, heard an old
soldier boasting of his battles, his wounds and losses. ‘I have lost my
right arm,’ he said, lastly, ‘but it was for France and the Emperor;
and for them I would gladly give the other arm.’ ‘That is all very
fine,’ remarked the officer; ‘it is easy to boast when you are safe,
but if it came to the real thing, it might be different.’ The brave man
rose from his seat, drew his sword, and cut off the other arm.”
“Now, children,” I concluded, “write that story, _and at the bottom say
what is wrong with it_.”
The best of the boys were already chuckling: other boys joined in more
slowly: even the careworn teacher of the class, after staring hard at
me for two or three minutes, came up, and confidentially informed me
that he had got it, though at first it seemed a hard thing. But the
girls sat dull-eyed and resentful of the novelty. At the end of twenty
minutes they had reproduced the story word for word; and the most
intelligent of them had appended the criticism, “It was very wrong of
the man to cut off the arm which God had given him.”
Emboldened by success, I tried another:
“A Boer farmer wished to sell his cattle to a Scotch dealer. They
met at the nearest hotel and agreed that the price should be £7 10s.
a head: there were fifty of them, and, as the Boer said he was no
scholar, the Scotchman made out the bill; ‘fifty head of cattle at £7
10s.,’ he said, ‘just £350,’ and he gave the farmer a cheque for the
money, and rode off with the cattle. But the Boer did not feel quite
sure it was right; and when he got to the next hotel, he borrowed a
Ready Reckoner, which showed that the price should have been £375. Full
of fury, he galloped after the Scotchman, caught him up, and charged
him with cheating.
“‘Eh, man,’ said the rogue, ‘what makes you think it was £375?’
“‘I found it in the Ready Reckoner at Smith’s Hotel,’ said the Boer.
“‘Pooh, pooh, man,’ said the other, ‘I know that Reckoner: it is last
year’s.’
“And the Boer rode back content.
“There is the story. Write at the end, _What the Boer ought to have
said_.”
It was at the end of the last century that a philosopher discovered
that reproducing anecdotes was not educative: it gave no play to the
imagination: what we wanted was original thought. Now the stories
required attention, concentration, accuracy, and considerable knowledge
of the laws of composition; and the better course would have been to
add what required originality, retaining what required accuracy. But
in education, as in other things, it is the man of one idea who moves
and gets his way. My stock of stories became waste paper.
The search for originality was too often pursued in a remarkable
manner. No one reads Campbell now, and no boy could retaliate with the
lines--
“For there’s nothing original in me
Excepting Original Sin.”
but it was easy to offer passive resistance, and to let the teacher do
the originating. The latter began by providing “heads,” accompanied
with copious comments; then he supplied rough scribbling-books, in
which the children wrote their crude attempts. Then he wrote on the
blackboard a jejune essay, which the class copied verbatim into their
show-books. These were offered to us as the first fruits of original
thought.
Occasionally we got the real article, and I treasure the following
essay (faithfully transcribed from the MS.) as 18 carat gold:
My Favourite Hero.
A good while ago I heard of a man called Arthur Wellesley. His
first school he went too was in France. He was called the Duke of
Wellington. He was a grand speaker, and spoke about a great man named
Napolean. He was captured by the Romans and took to prison. They
let him off iff he would not go back to the Britons. Wellington was
sent to an island and he escaped in a punt and went back to his own
country. There he stayed for a long while when he died. He was a very
strong and healthy man.
That is genuine. The following Essay I give as it was told to me,
without further warranty.
A boy was told to write an essay on the Seven Ages of Man. Not having
read _As you like it_, he evolved this out of his inner consciousness:
“When he is young, he thinks of the bad things he will do when he
grows up: this is the age of innocence.
“When he is grown up, he does some of them: this is the prime of life.
“When he is very old, he is sorry for what he has done: this is
dotage.”