Part 6

Vastly different is the training of the English Curate. Private School, Public School, and University: cricket, football, rowing: elementary Greek and Latin, and a smattering of Law or History--these constitute his "atmosphere," his moral and mental discipline, between the ages of ten and twenty-three. Even more remarkable is his theological equipment. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he knows absolutely nothing about the Church of which he is to be a minister, her doctrines, history, or practical system. He has been enveloped from his youth up by a hazy atmosphere of Undogmatic Religion. I well remember that an Undergraduate friend of mine, who came to Oxford from Dr. Temple's Sixth Form at Rugby, declined to believe that there are two Sacraments. That there was a religious ceremony called "The Sacrament," for which some people stayed after the ordinary service, he was well aware, as also that infants were ceremonially sprinkled; but that this latter ceremony was a Sacrament he could not be induced to believe. During his last year at Oxford he informed himself better on this and some similar topics, and a year afterwards was preaching, with great acceptance, to a fashionable congregation. From what I knew of my friend's theological attainments, I should imagine that the Bishop's Examination could not have been a very terrifying process; but forty years earlier it must have been even less formidable. The Hon. and Rev. George Spencer (uncle of the present Lord Spencer) was destined from an early age for the Family Living in Northamptonshire. He hunted and shot, and danced, and travelled on the Continent, and held a commission in the Yeomanry. After two years at Trinity College, Cambridge, he took a "Nobleman's Degree," and, when he neared the canonical age of twenty-three, he wrote to the Bishop of Peterborough's Examining Chaplain offering himself for Ordination and asking advice as to his preparation. The examiner--ah, would that there were more like him!--wrote back:--

"It is impossible that I should ever entertain any idea of subjecting a gentleman with whose talents and good qualities I am so well acquainted as I am with yours to any examination except as a matter of form, for which a verse in the Greek Testament and an Article of the Church of England returned into Latin will be amply sufficient."

This reassuring letter was written on the 12th of October 1822, and on the 22nd of December next ensuing George Spencer was ordained Deacon and a year later Priest. "On the evening before the ordination, whilst the Bishop and various clergymen and their ladies and the candidates amused themselves with a rubber of whist, Mr. Spencer refused to play." And the refusal was considered, as perhaps it was, noteworthy.

The Movement which issued from Oxford in 1833 introduced some improvement into the method of conducting ordinations, as into other departments of the Church's work. The examination became, though not yet very serious, at least a little less farcical, and some attempt was made in charges and sermons to urge upon the candidates the gravity of what they were undertaking. But, according to the late Bishop Woodford, "the evenings, during which they were left to themselves, became evenings of social enjoyment, if not of boisterous merriment, in which the features of an old college supper-party were reproduced, rather than intervals of solemn thought and retirement."

Bishop Samuel Wilberforce raised the standard of what was expected in the way of Scriptural and theological knowledge; he made the examination a reality; he laid special stress on sermon-writing; and he made the Ember Week a season of spiritual retirement in which men about to take the most decisive step in life might be brought face to face with the responsibilities involved in their decision. The example set by Wilberforce was followed, sooner or later, by every bishop on the bench; the requirements have been raised, and the system has been developed and improved; but the credit of initiation belongs to that epoch-making episcopate, which began in 1845 and ended, through a false step made by a horse on the Surrey Downs, on the 19th of July 1873.

It soon became apparent to those who had the spiritual interests of the Church at heart that something more than twelve months' book-work and a week of religious retirement was required to wean the ordinary B.A. from the puerilities--if nothing worse--of his Undergraduate life, and to equip him for a life of Pastorship and Teachership. The sense of this need gave rise to the creation of Theological Colleges, where a man who looked forward to Holy Orders might, after taking his ordinary degree at Oxford or Cambridge, apply himself to the studies more specially necessary for his chosen work, and--even more important still--might acquire the habits of methodical and self-disciplined life. The idea took shape in such foundations as the Theological Colleges of Wells, Cuddesdon, Sarum, and Ely, the _Scholæ Cancellarii_ at Lincoln, and the Clergy School at Leeds. Fighting their way through all manner of strange misrepresentations about Monasticism and Mediævalism, they have in the course of years attained to recognition, popularity, and apparent stability. The bishops patronize them warmly, and incumbents who desire curates not wholly ignorant of their craft are increasingly unwilling to engage one who has not passed through a Theological College. That the broad result of the training given in these seminaries is a general increase in clerical efficiency I cannot doubt, but perhaps a layman may be permitted to point out some curious gaps and lapses in that training which go some way towards making clergymen less esteemed, and therefore less influential, than they ought to be.

1. The Clergy are not taught to be courteous. If they are courteous by nature and habit, well and good; but a rough Undergraduate, destitute of sympathy and tact and ignorant of social usage, passes through a Theological College and comes out as rough as he entered it. A Bear in Holy Orders is as destructive as a Bull in a China Shop.

2. The Clergy are not taught to manage money; they muddle their public accounts; they beg money for one object and use it for another; they seldom acknowledge what they receive by post; and they have absolutely no notion of cutting their coat according to their cloth. "Spend and beg, and the money will come from somewhere" is their simple and sufficient creed.

3. The Clergy are not taught business. They have not the faintest notion of conducting a public meeting. They lose their way in the agenda-paper of the most insignificant committee. They break appointments at their will and pleasure. They seldom answer letters, and are frankly astonished when their correspondents are annoyed.

4. The Clergy are not taught the Science of Citizenship. Outside their strictly professional studies (and, in some cases, the records of athleticism) they are the most ignorant set of young men in the world. They work hard and play hard, but they never read. They know nothing of books, nothing of history, nothing of the Constitution under which they live, of the principles and records of political parties, of the need for social reform or the means of securing it. They have a vague but clinging notion that Radicals are Infidels, and that Dissenters, if they got their deserts, would have their heads punched.

Sixty years ago an Italian critic said that, in spite of all their defects, the English clergy were "Un clero colto e civile." Could as much be said to-day?

XIV

PILGRIMAGES

I use the word in something wider than Chaucer's sense, and yet in a sense not wholly different from his. For, though we no longer make an annual visit to the Shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, still we all feel bound, at least once a year, to go somewhere and do something quite out of our normal course. Perhaps, like Chaucer's friends, we "long" to do this in April, but the claims of business are generally too strong for us; so we have to content ourselves with admiring the peeps of greenery which begin to invade the soot of our urban gardens, and, if we are of a cultured habit, we can always quote Browning's Thrush or strain the kalendar so as to admit Wordsworth's Daffodils.

This notion of a yearly Pilgrimage as a necessity of rightly-ordered life seems to have fallen into a long abeyance. "Dan Chaucer" (for I love to be on easy terms with great men) described the social customs of the fourteenth century, and then the Pilgrimage seems to have been an established institution: "Tom Hughes" described those of the eighteenth, and this is what, writing in 1862, he says about the annual Pilgrimages of his own time:--

"I have been credibly informed, and am inclined to believe, that the various Boards of Directors of Railway Companies agreed together some ten years back to buy up the learned profession of Medicine, body and soul. To this end they set apart several millions of money, which they continually distribute judiciously among the Doctors, stipulating only this one thing--that they shall prescribe change of air to every patient who can pay, or borrow money to pay, a railway fare, and see their prescription carried out. If it be not for this, why is it that none of us can be well at home for a year together? It wasn't so twenty years ago--not a bit of it. The Browns did not go out of the county once in five years."

The Browns, as we all know, stood in Mr. Hughes's vocabulary for the Upper Middle Class of England--the class to which the clergy, the smaller squires, and the professional men belong; the class which in Chaucer's time contained the "Man of Lawe," the "Marchande," the "Franklyne," and the "Doctore of Phisyke"; and, although Mr. Hughes, who ought to know, says that in the earlier part of Queen Victoria's reign they were a stay-at-home class, they are now the most regular and the most zealous of Pilgrims. It was the majestic misfortune of the Duke in "Lothair" to have so many houses that he had no home. People so circumstanced do not need to go on Pilgrimages. After the autumn in a Scotch Castle, the winter in a country house in the Midlands, the spring in another in the Southern Counties, and the season in Grosvenor Square, people are glad of a little rest, and seek it in some "proud alcove" on the Thames or a sea-girt villa at Cowes. Unless their livers drive them to Carlsbad or their hearts to Nauheim, they do not travel, but display what Lord Beaconsfield called "the sustained splendour of their stately lives" in the many mansions which, in the aggregate, represent to them the idea of Home. I might perhaps on another occasion sketch the Grand Tour of Europe, on which, for educational purposes, the Earl of Fitzurse used to send his eldest son, young Lord Cubley; compressed, with his tutor and doctor, into a travelling-carriage, with a valet and a courier in the rumble. The Duke of Argyll's Autobiography has just told us what this kind of Pilgrimage was like; but to-day I am dealing with the present rather than the past.

It is the people with one house who go on Pilgrimages nowadays--the impoverished squire, the smoke-dried clergyman, the exhausted merchant, the harried editor. To these must be added all the inhabitants, male and female, of Lodging-land and Flat-land,--all "the dim, common populations" of Stuccovia and Suburbia. There are mysterious laws of association which connect classes with localities. Tradesmen love Margate; to clerks Scarborough is dear. The Semitic financier has long claimed Brighton for his own. Costermongers go hop-picking in Kent; artizans disport themselves on the nigger-haunted pier of Southend. Governed by some mysterious law of their being, schoolmasters make straight for the Alps. There they live the strenuous life and brave the perilous ascent; climb and puff and pant all day; rush in, very untidy and not very clean, to _table d'hôte_; and season their meal with the "shop" of St. Winifred's or the gay banter of Rosslyn Common-room. It is agreeable to watch the forced cordiality, the thin tutorial humour, with which they greet some quite irresponsive pupil who happens to have strayed into the same hotel; and I have often had occasion to admire the precocious dexterity with which the pupil extricates himself from this dreaded companionship. Of Mr. Gladstone it was said by his detractors that he had something of the Schoolmaster in his composition; and this trait was aptly illustrated when, during the summer holidays some fifty years ago, he met the late Duchess of Abercorn in a country house accompanied by her schoolboy son, Lord George Hamilton. Not many mornings had elapsed before Mr. Gladstone said to the boy's mother, "Duchess, don't you think it a pity that your son should spend his holidays in entire idleness? I should be happy to give him an hour's Homer every morning." The offer was accepted, and the foundation of Lord George's lifelong hostility to the Liberal leader was securely laid. It is the nervous dread of some such awful possibility which supplies wings to the boy's feet and lies to his tongue when he encounters Dr. Grimstone or Basil Warde in a Swiss hotel.

While the Schoolmaster limits his aspirations to the Alps, the Oxford or Cambridge Don, having a longer vacation at his command, takes a more extended view, and urges his adventurous Pilgrimage along roads less trite. A few years ago an Oxford Don resolved to strike out what was then a quite new line, and spend his Long Vacation in Portugal. Conscious of insufficient acquaintance with the Portuguese language, he repaired to Mr. Parker's excellent shop in the Turl and enquired for a Portuguese Phrase-book. After some research, that never-failing bookseller produced "The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English." The book had an instant and a deserved success. The preface sets forth that "a choice of familiar dialogues, clean of gallicisms and despoiled phrases, it was missing yet to studious Portuguese and Brazilian youth; and also to persons of other nations that wish to know the Portuguese language." To supply this felt want Pedro Carolino compiled his hand-book for "the acceptation of the studious persons, and especially of the Youth, at which we dedicate him particularly." Among those studious persons was our Pilgrim-Don, who naturally turned in the first instance to a dialogue headed

"FOR TO TRAVEL

When do you start?

As soon as I shall have to finish a business at Cadiz.

Have you already arrested a coach?

Yes, sir, and very cheap.

Have you great deal of effects?

Two trunks and one portmanteau.

You may prepare all for to-morrow. We shall start at the coolness.

The way, is it good?

Very good.

At which inn shall stop us?

In that of the Sun, it is the best. The account mount is little. The supper, the bed, and the breakfast shall get up at thirty franks.

That seems to me a little dear."

The next dialogue follows in the natural order:--

"FOR TO BREAKFAST

John, bring us some thing for to breakfast.

Yes, sir; there is some sausages and some meat pies. Will you that I bring the ham?

Yes, bring him, we will cut a steak.

Put an nappe cloth upon this table.

Give us some plates, any knifes, and some forks, rinse the glasses.

I have eaten with satisfaction some pudding, sausages, and some ham. I shall take some tea.

Still a not her cup?

I thank you it is enough."

Breakfast over, the traveller engages a guide and starts out

"FOR TO SEE THE TOWN

We won't to see all that is it remarquable here.

Come with me, if you please. I shall not folget nothing what can to merit your attention. Here we are near to cathedraly. Will you come in there?

We will first go to see him in oudside, after we shall go in there for to look the interior."

A day of sight-seeing concludes happily with the ever-welcome dialogue--

"FOR TO DINE

Give us a rice soup.

What wine do you like best?

Bourgogne wine.

Give us some beef and potatoes, a beefsteak to the English.

What you shall take for dessert?

Give us some Hollande cheese and some prunes.

I will take a glass of brandy at the cherries.

Gentlemen, don't forget the waiter."

Parsimony is a bond which makes the whole world kin, and it is interesting to find embedded in 182 closely-printed pages of "despoiled phrases" two such characteristic specimens of sound English as "That seems to me a little dear" and "Don't forget the waiter."

XV

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

"Gentlemen," said Dr. Blimber to his pupils on the eve of the holidays, "we will resume our studies on the twenty-fifth of next month." But that adjournment, I think, was for Christmas, and we are now in what Matthew Arnold's delicious schoolboy called "the glad season of sun and flowers." Very soon, in Dr. Farrar's romantic phrase, "the young life which usually plays like the sunshine over St. Winifred's will be pouring unwonted brightness into many happy English homes." Or, to take Mr. Snawley's darker view of the same event, we shall be in the thick of one of "those ill-judged comings home twice a year that unsettle children's minds so."

The associations of the moment, so different in their effects on different natures, have awoke the spirit of prophecy in the late Head Master of Eton, Dr. Warre, who, projecting his soul into futurity, sees dark days coming for the "Public Schools" as that phrase has been hitherto understood. It was clear, said Dr. Warre, after distributing the prizes at Shrewsbury, "that ere long the Public Schools would have to justify not only their _curriculum_, but, it might be, their very existence. The spirit of the age seemed to be inclined towards Utilitarianism, and it was now tending to undervalue the humanities and the culture that attended them, and to demand what it appreciated as a useful and practical training--_i.e._ something capable of making boys breadwinners as soon as they left school. He did not say that view would ultimately prevail, but the trend of public opinion in that direction would necessitate on the part of Public Schools a period of self-criticism, and very probably a reorganization of _curricula_. But there was another problem to be faced which would become more serious as the century waxed older, and that was a new phase of competition. As secondary education expanded, secondary day-schools would be provided regardless of expense, and it was idle to think this would have no effect upon great Public Schools. What would be weighed in the balance, however, was the value of the corporate life and aggregate influence of the Public Schools upon the formation of character."

When ex-Head Masters begin to see visions and Old Etonians to dream dreams, the ordinary citizen, with his traditional belief in the virtue and permanence of Public Schools, must rub his eyes in astonishment. What is going to happen next? Is Eton to abandon "taste" and take to "useful knowledge"? Is Harrow to close its Boarding Houses and become a village Day School once more? Are Wykeham's "seventy faithful boys" (as the late Lord Selborne called them in his first attempt at verse) no longer to "tund" or be "tunded"? Is Westminster to forswear its Latin Play, and replace the "Phormio" and the "Trinummus" with "Box and Cox" and "Ici on Parle Français"?

These enquiries, and others like them, are forced on our attention by such subversive discourse as Dr. Warre's; and that incursion of rampant boyhood which begins with the beginning of August reinforces the eloquence of the ex-Head Master. The Retreat of the Ten Thousand, which used to worry us in our youth, was not half so formidable an affair as the Advance of the Ten Thousand, schoolboys though they be, who just now overrun the land. There they are, an army ever increasing in numbers and maintained at an immense expense. Whatever commercial and agricultural depression may have effected in other quarters, it did not touch the schools of England. The greater schools are full to overflowing; provincial schools have doubled and trebled their numbers; and every Elizabethan and Edwardian foundation in the Kingdom has woke from slumber and celebrated at least a Tercentenary. And all this is not done for nothing. Private schoolmasters take shootings in Scotland; the proprietors of Boarding-houses at the Public Schools buy villas in the Riviera, and build pineries and vineries at home; meanwhile the British Parent eyes his diminishing income and his increasing rates, and asks himself, in the secrecy of his own heart, what Tommy is really getting in return for the £200 a year expended on his education. The answer takes various forms. Perhaps Tommy is following the "grand, old fortifying classical curriculum" which sufficed for Lord Lumpington, and enabled the Rev. Esau Hittall to compose his celebrated "Longs and Shorts on the Calydonian Boar." In this case the parent says, with Rawdon Crawley, "Stick to it, my boy; there's nothing like a good classical education--nothing," but he generally is too diffident about his own accomplishments to subject his sons to a very searching test. Perhaps one boy in a hundred learns enough Latin and Greek at school to fit him for a good place in the Classical Tripos or a "First in Mods." This, if he is meant to be a schoolmaster, is a definite and tangible result from his father's investment; if he is intended for any other profession the advantage is not so clear. If he is to be a Soldier, no doubt there is the "Army Class" or the "Modern School," where, indeed, he is exempted from Greek, is taught some mathematics, and acquires some very English French and German; but, in spite of these privileges, he generally requires a year's residence at a crammer's before he has a chance for Sandhurst. For the ordinary life of the Professions the Public School makes no preparation whatever. Tommy may have acquired "taste," but he is no more qualified to be, as Dr. Warre says, a "bread-winner" than he was the day he began school-life.

Matthew Arnold, in his delightful essay on "An Eton Boy," says, with regard to that boy's prowess as Master of the Beagles:--

"The aged Barbarian will, upon this, admiringly mumble to us his story how the Battle of Waterloo was won in the Playing Fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have been prepared in those Playing Fields as well as victories--disasters due to an inadequate mental training, to want of application, knowledge, intelligence, lucidity."