Part 5

Among the Classical tutors, two of the most enlightened spirits, men of great personal charm, were Mr. E. S. Shuckburgh, afterwards lecturer at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the Rev. Duncan Tovey, who a few years later took the Eton living of Worplesdon. Shuckburgh, though himself most impatient of the old traditions, and sympathizing largely with the newer thought, was of a very critical habit of mind, and used to delight, for argumentative purposes, in dwelling on the difficulties and shortcomings of the reforms which some of us advocated. Tovey was a literary man (his works on Gray and Thomson are well known), out of his element in such a place as Eton, but in his happier moods a most delightful talker and companion. Mrs. Tovey, too, had a lambent wit which could play lightly round the anomalies of Eton life. She once wrote a charming list of some imaginary books of fiction, the authorship of which she assigned to various local celebrities: one of the works, the supposed creation of an Eton upholsterer notorious for his big bills, had a title which might make the fortune of a modern philosophical novelist: “Man’s Time; a Mystery.”

Some of the junior masters played a useful part in challenging the old superstitions. Mr. J. D. Bourchier, afterwards a famous correspondent of _The Times_ in south-east Europe, was the first rider of the bicycle at Eton, and incurred much obloquy through his persistence in a practice which no Eton master could then countenance with safety. My brother-in-law, J. L. Joynes, jun., was a still worse offender. He had been impressed by Henry George’s _Progress and Poverty_, and in the summer holidays of 1882 travelled with George in Ireland. By a ridiculous blunder of the Irish Constabulary, the two were arrested and locked up as dangerous conspirators; and, though they were quickly discharged when the magistrates discovered the error, the whole Press of the country rang with amused comments. The Government had to apologize to Henry George as an American citizen; and an account of the fiasco, written by Joynes, and published in _The Times_, caused great scandal in Etonian circles, where publicity was regarded, not without good reason, as the thing of all things to be deprecated. Great, then, was the horror of the Eton authorities when, a few weeks later, an advertisement announced Joynes’s forthcoming volume, _Adventures of a Tourist in Ireland_. In hot haste he was informed by the headmaster that he must choose between his mastership and his book: he chose the latter, and resigned his post. That was the result, as a patriotic colleague and friend pointed out to me, of giving heed to “a mouldy American.” Thus fallen from the high estate of an Eton mastership, Joynes became a leading spirit in the Social Democratic Federation; and by him I was introduced to many well-known socialists whose names will be mentioned later on.

During the sixteen years of his headmastership Dr. Hornby dismissed no fewer than four assistants, and was himself involved at times in serious conflicts with the Governing Body. A weak man, he was obstinate to the last degree when once engaged in controversy; as was shown by his determination to get rid of Mr. Oscar Browning, who, whatever the merits of their quarrel, was worth much more to Eton than Hornby himself. It was not generally known that three other assistant masters proffered their resignations as a protest against Mr. Browning’s dismissal; a most ill-judged step, because matters had then reached a point where either Hornby or Browning had to go. The resignations were accepted, and the three mutineers had to ask leave to withdraw them, which they did with as good a grace as they could muster. Thus the headmaster triumphed; but it was a victory that brought him little credit, and it was a lucky day for Eton when, on the death of Dr. Goodford, he was appointed to the Provostship in 1884.

Dr. Warre, succeeding Dr. Hornby, was like King Stork following King 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.