Part 4

These great Laws are not always put before young minds with due simplicity: we obscure them by our jargon. All children know that if they spread a pat of butter on a slice of bread, the bigger the slice is, the thinner the butter will be. We express this by saying that the thickness of the butter varies inversely as the surface of the slice. They can see that the same thing would happen if they had to butter the outside of a roll or dumpling that was as round as a Dutch cheese. We say, as before, that the thickness of the butter varies inversely as the surface of this globe of bread; and as the surface of a globe varies directly as the square of the distance between the surface and the centre, we end by saying that the thickness of the butter varies inversely as the square of the distance. Young minds understand the butter. Put ‘the force of attraction’ for ‘the thickness of the butter,’ and they will understand the Law of Universal Gravitation, as discovered by Sir Isaac Newton with the assistance of an apple.

Unluckily this easy way of learning things is like all aids to memory: more easily picked up than dropped again, when it has served its purpose. A friend of mine tells me that, out of all his Latin and Greek, the things that he remembers best are silly little rhymes that he was taught at school, “Common are to either sex, _Artifex_ and _Opifex_,” and other stuff like that. When I first went up to Cambridge, I confounded the Circle at Infinity with the Circular Points at Infinity till some one drew a circle for me and put two circular points in it like two eyes in a very fat face, and then added the Line at Infinity just where the mouth would come. And now I cannot go to Infinity without seeing this round face grinning at me as the Cheshire Cat grinned at Alice when she was in Wonderland.

In those days there were old Dons at Cambridge who rampaged like mad bulls, if you just waved red rags at them. If the Don was Mathematical, you waved the Method of Projections: if he was Classical, you waved Archæology. With the Method of Projections a short proof was substituted for a long proof, and the short proof was exact; but the old men had always used the long proof, and were indignant that the same results should

be obtained so easily; and they had influence enough to get the easy proof prohibited in the Mathematical Tripos. The old Classical men were just as cross with Archæology. They had learned to understand the Ancient World by years of patient study of its literature; and here were upstarts who could understand the Ancient World (perhaps better than they did) by merely looking at its statues, vases, coins and gems.

I remember two old Mathematicians dining with us; and after dinner they talked shop, and my father went to sleep in the middle of their talk. Recovering himself, he said, “I beg pardon, Mr X, I fear I dropped asleep while you were speaking.” Mr X replied, “Not at all, Mr Torr, not at all: it was Mr Y who was speaking when you went to sleep.”

At a railway-station Mr X was discoursing to some people on the mechanism of the locomotive-engine, continuing his discourse till the train was out of sight; and then he found it was the train he meant to take. He turned upon a porter for not telling him so; and when the porter said, “How was I to know where you were going to?”, he overwhelmed the porter by calling him “You Oaf.”

A girl was singing in a hay-field about the new-mown hay, and Mr Y rebuked her. If it was only new-mown, it was grass: it would not become hay till it had undergone a process of fermentation. She looked so sad that I struck in, saying ‘hay’ meant hedge. (I am not so sure about it now as I was then; but ‘hay’ sounds very like ‘haie,’ which is the French for ‘hedge,’ and Anglo-Saxon ‘hæg’ comes down to ‘hay’ as well as ‘dæg’ to ‘day.’) I declared that the grass had been hay from the time when it was hedged, that is, layed up for mowing; and, getting bolder, I declared it had been hay ever since the seeds were sown. The distinction is, you put in grasses that ripen in succession if you are sowing for pasture, and grasses that ripen simultaneously if you are sowing for hay. Mr Y said that he did not care for these distinctions, and walked away repeating ‘fermentation.’ And the girl was singing again.

On roads near Cambridge one often saw Dons walking steadily on till they came to a mile-stone, touching the stone with their hands, and then walking just as steadily back. They had found out by experience how many miles they needed for their afternoon walk, and they always walked that number of miles, neither more nor less. An undergraduate told me that he went out for a walk one Saturday afternoon with a foreign Jew, who was at Cambridge lecturing; and he wondered how the Sabbath Day’s Journey would work in. Instead of turning back at a mile-stone, the pious man took out a biscuit, put it down, and then walked on; and he did the same at every mile-stone that they passed. On getting back, my friend inquired about the biscuits; and the answer was quite clear--a Sabbath Day’s Journey is a certain distance from your home; and the Mishnah says that where your food is, there also is your home. The biscuits were his food, and every mile-stone was his home.

In 1882 the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge brought out a book on _The Hebrew Text of the Old Covenant_, two volumes and upwards of 1200 pages; and I used to see it at the house of a friend of mine, who died some years ago. Wishing to look at it again, I asked a bookseller to get it for me, but he could not hear of a copy of it anywhere, either new or second-hand: so I had the University Library copy sent down to me from Cambridge. Though it had been in the Library for close on forty years, there were only two pages in the whole of it that had their edges cut. Of course, a prophet is without honour in his own country, and Jarrett was only a minor prophet; but it seems strange that nobody had curiosity enough to see more of the book.

There was a Professor at Oxford at whose blunders people laughed, forgetting that his blunders were only a by-product of a large output of learning. But once, when I was joining others in the laugh, we were all reduced to silence by a question from a friend of his, “Do any of you know of any other man in England who would sit for two hours up to his neck in a Syrian sewer in order to copy an inscription?”

There was also a Don I went to see whenever I was in Oxford--he was always ready for a talk on Dante or Strabo--and I usually found him seated in an easy-chair exactly in front of the fire with Minos and Rhadamanthus seated on foot-stools on each side of it. They were cats; and he had given them these names (when kittens) on returning from a tour in Crete. He had travelled a good deal, and was able to tell me that Albanians really had got tails--a fact that I had never been able to ascertain. The tails are very short, only the last few bones of the spine; and they are only on people whose Pelasgian ancestry has not been swamped by intermarrying with other races.

In my brother’s time at Cambridge there was a story of a Senior Wrangler lecturing an undergraduate for forty minutes on the theory of the common pump, and the undergraduate then asking him, “But why does the water go up?” There were men like that who could not get their knowledge out, and there were other men who could--it came down like a thunderstorm that goes streaming off the surface and does not sink into the ground. They did not teach you much of what they meant to teach, but every now and then they would come out with something that implied a mode of reasoning or a point of view which was entirely new to you. And these illuminating things made up for all the rest.

There is talk enough now of the training of teachers and the art of teaching. These men had no such training, and would have scoffed at it as a mere trick by which a silly man could make the most of what he knew. And possibly there are schoolteachers now whose knowledge would look small unless they made the most of it. Education now means class-rooms, attendances, inspections, salaries, and such like things, and very little of what it used to mean; and I fear that it may someday meet the fate of monasteries under Henry VIII. The monasteries saved learning from extinction in the depths of the Dark Ages, and afterwards they were the guardians of the poor: yet they were all swept away, for no shortcomings of their own, but just because there were so many of them that they ate the country up.

I remember an old lady saying it would be horrible if her maids could read--she would not be able to leave her letters lying about. That was before the Education Act of 1870, but was only a faint echo of things said in 1807. “From the first dawning of that gracious benevolence, which issued spontaneously from the bosoms of their present Majesties, in promoting the instruction of the poor by the establishment of Sunday Schools, the Surveyor has looked forward with a sort of dread to the probable consequences of such a measure.” That is on page 465 of _A General View of the Agriculture of the County of Devon_ by Charles Vancouver, Surveyor to the Board of Agriculture. It also says, page 469, “How will it be possible to suppress communications and a concert among the multitude, when they are all gifted with the means of corresponding and contriving schemes of sedition and insurrection with each other?... The Surveyor thus respectfully submits to the consideration of the Honourable Board the propriety of opposing any measures that may rationally be supposed to lead to such a fatal issue.” But in some ways he was right. If there is agriculture, there must be labourers. He preferred “exciting a general emulation to excel in all their avocations,” page 468, rather than making them despise these avocations without fitting them for any others.

When the Education Act was passed in 1870, nobody expected more than the three R’s and nobody expected less--I remember what a talk there was about it at the time--but more has been attempted and much less has been done, at any rate, in village schools. There is the child that can’t learn, and the child that won’t. Not many years ago a small girl in the village made up her mind that she wouldn’t learn no Readin’ nor ‘Ritin’ and couldn’t learn no ‘Rithmetic; and she didn’t learn ’n, though she made attendances and thereby earned the school some money in the shape of Government grants. But she did not look far enough ahead. She was quite happy without her R’s till she came to the age of Flirtation; but then she found she could not read the little notes that she received, nor write notes in reply; and she did not much like asking other folk to read her the contents of notes that were intended for herself alone. And so she found that education has its uses after all. But even if it has its uses, it also has its risks: at least, some people think so. An old man here was asked to witness the execution of a Deed, and signed the Attestation with very great misgivings. “There now, if ’t ’ad bin for anyone but you, I’d ’ve bin mazin’ coy o’ that. I’ve heerd of men a-losin’ thousan’s by just settin’ hand to paper.” A man here, not much older than myself, escaped all schooling and has prospered greatly; and he tells me he has never set hand to paper, and this is why he is so prosperous. When people sign agreements, they do not always see the full effect of them; and he avoids that risk. He signs nothing but his cheques, and they are often for substantial sums.

Children now know many things of which their grandfathers had never heard, but I doubt their being so observant or so shrewd: they get too much from print. There was a very cultivated man who was often in this neighbourhood some years ago, and he delighted in reading novels about Devon and the West, but was quite unconscious that he was in the midst of the real thing. He was so accustomed to getting his impressions out of books that he had lost the power of getting them in any other way. The children have not come to that, and never may; but they are being overdosed with books. There is a history in use at Lustleigh school that gives three chapters to the times before the Romans came: the Stone and Bronze and Iron Ages. But here at Lustleigh we have the real thing close at hand--there are hut-circles within a mile of the school, and at Torquay, only fifteen miles away, there is Kent’s Cavern itself and a Museum containing what was found there, the best evidence in England for the Stone Age periods. Children would learn a great deal more by seeing the real thing than they will ever learn by reading of it in a book. And books are sometimes wrong. This history says that the Britons came over here about 400 B.C., and it calls them Britons all through the chapter; but another history (in the same series) always calls these people Celts, and says that the Britons were a cross-breed between the Celtic invaders and the old inhabitants. Which of these statements are the children to believe?

I have lately been looking through the books that are in use in Lustleigh school. One of them, a geography of the World, makes the Bosporos wider than the Dardanelles. It might be better not to teach geography at all than teach it wrong. Another one, a geography of Europe, goes out of its way to say that Marseilles is one of the oldest cities in the Mediterranean. This is quite untrue--Marseilles was not founded until 600 B.C.--and even if it were true, it would not be a thing worth teaching to children in an elementary school here. In another one, a geography of England and Wales, the first chapter starts with this--“Our country really forms a part of the Continent of Eurasia, though not now joined to it. Eurasia is the name given to the Continents of Europe and Asia. Eurasia is only separated from the Continent of Africa by a canal.” Well, at the geological period when our country was joined to the Continent, Africa also was joined to it near Gibraltar and near Sicily: so, if our country really forms a part of the Continent, Africa must really form a part of it as well. And the word Eurasia could not possibly mean Europe and Asia: it is only the jargon of half-educated men.

Logically one may begin geography with Space, the Solar System, our rotating globe, the oceans and the continents, and so on; but children may do better by beginning at the other end with maps of places where they live. I have sent Lustleigh school a map of Lustleigh, 6 ft. wide and 4 ft. high, Ordnance Survey, 25 inches to the mile, or one square inch for each square acre, with the acreage of all the fields and gardens printed on them. On that map the children see their homes and other things they know; and having seen how these are mapped, they get a better notion of what maps really mean. A map is easily misunderstood. At one point the Bosporos is less than half a mile in width--no wider than the estuary of the Teign--and thus would be invisible on ordinary maps unless its width was much exaggerated. With this exaggeration and different colouring on each side, the maps make people think there is a great gulf fixed between the Europeans and the Asiatics there; whereas, as all Levantines say, Europe really ends at the Balkans.

Another of those school-books says that the beginning of a letter (my dear So-and-so) is to be called the Salutation, and the address is to be called the Superscription. That is a pretty bit of pedantry for a village school. It also says that words of opposite meaning, such as ‘far’ and ‘near,’ are known as Antonyms. That is jargon, and quite wrong. (Antonyms could only be produced by antonomasia, and therefore would be substituted words, like ‘Carthaginis Eversor’ for Scipio and ‘Iron Duke’ for Wellington.) The authors of those books all claim experience in the art of teaching; but that does not make up for their imperfect knowledge of the subjects they have taught. What is the good of teaching children that the reign of George the Third “was marked by disaster and disgrace”? They have heard of Trafalgar and of Waterloo. Yet one of their school-books says this. Another one says that Edward the First gave England “a Parliament in which all classes were represented.” The serfs were far the largest class: they were not represented at all; and very few of the free men had any voice in choosing representatives.

When children are learning about England and its place in Europe and the World, they might as well be taught that English is an Aryan language, and that all Aryan languages have grown from the same roots, whereas Semitic languages are of another growth. ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’ Change ‘England’ into ‘English,’ and the answer is the same. Children could be taught Grimm’s Law which shows how words assume a different shape in different languages. They need not learn the languages: merely a few words on a list to give them mastery of their mother tongue. Time would be better spent on this than on their physical drill, a thing for children in a slummy town but quite superfluous here.

Amongst other useful things, the children have been taught to run along in single file and leap an obstacle; and I scoffed at this, not seeing how very useful it might be. One sunny day a worthy man was lying on the grass, flat on his back, dead drunk; and they ran along and leaped over him in single file in the way they had been taught at school, just clearing his capacious waistcoat which stood up like a dome.

The old school at Lustleigh was founded by Parson Davy in 1825; and he gave land to endow it, and set forth its objects in his deed of gift, 4 August 1825. It was “for the educating and instructing of the poor children, being parishioners of the said parish, on the principles of the established Church of England, in reading and needlework, in learning their catechism, and in such other proper and useful learning for poor children as is hereinafter directed and appointed,” namely, “teaching the boys reading and spelling, and the girls reading and spelling and knitting and needlework, and also instructing such poor children in such other proper and useful learning as the majority of the feoffees shall think proper and direct,” the feoffees being the eight persons whom he thereby enfeoffed of the land as trustees.

Within my recollection there used to be a dozen children at the school, or sometimes a few more. The endowment was not large enough to make it a free school, and there were fees to pay. If parents could not manage it, there were always people who would pay the fees for any promising child; and thus admission to the school was rather like admission to the Navy now that competitive examination has been replaced by interview. It was, of course, a mixed school, boys and girls together. They were taught Scripture by the Rector and other subjects by a Dame; and the Dame enforced her teaching with a stick. And she (or her predecessor) lived in the old school-house itself, a building with four rooms.

Then came the Education Act of 1870, and the old school-room was not thought nearly good enough for elementary teaching then, though it was just about as good as some of those old rooms at Harrow in which much better work was done. A new building was erected a little higher up the hill, and the old Dame and her pupils moved up there at the end of 1876. The old school was shut up, and its endowment is now frittered away in prizes at the new school and a Sunday school. I always wish the old school had been kept alive as a nucleus for a secondary school here. The endowment seemed too small: yet Harrow began with very little more--“our House was built in lowly ways, God brought us to great honour.”

The old school-house has a tablet in the wall, with the date of 1825 and then these words, “Built by subscription | and endowed with Lowton Meadow in Moreton | for supporting a school for ever | by the Rev. William Davy | curate of this parish.” His motives were set forth in his _Apology for giving Lowton Meadow to the Parish of Lustleigh_, a leaflet that he printed with his own printing-press. “Whereas from my long service in that church I have a strong regard and hearty desire for its present and future welfare, and being from repeated proofs too unhappily convinced of the unœconomical and profligate disposition of my immediate successors, and being willing in my lifetime to do the greatest and most lasting good with the little property I have in fee, I do hereby with the consent of my son (who by good conduct and kind providence is sufficiently provided for) offer to give to the officiating minister and churchwardens of the parish of Lustleigh all that one close or meadow called Morice or Lowton Meadow in Moreton Hampstead to have and to hold the same with the rents and profits thereof from and after the 25th of March 1824 in trust for ever for the support and maintenance of a school for poor children in the parish of Lustleigh aforesaid in the house to be erected in the parish town for that purpose.”

The inscription and the leaflet both have the words ‘for ever,’ and these words are also on two patens that he had given to the church. They are “for the use of the Sacrament for ever”; and there is the same inscription on a chalice given by Edward Basill, who was Rector from 1660 to 1698. No doubt Davy copied Basill here, and hence applied ‘for ever’ to his later gift; and there is no question what ‘for ever’ meant--his gifts were to be kept.

The patens have not yet been sold, but the meadow has. The adjoining owner wanted it, and wanted it very badly, as he had erected a pair of semi-detached residences close up to the hedge. And it was sold him for £300, or £25 less than Davy gave for it a century ago. As a matter of business, the thing seemed indefensible; and as a matter of sentiment, it certainly was vile.

Sir Joshua Reynolds was born at Plympton, and in the zenith of his fame the Corporation made him Mayor. He acknowledged this by sending down his portrait, painted by himself, to be hung in the Town Hall. Finding it was worth a good round sum, the Corporation sold it.--Of course, Parson Davy was not as eminent a man as Sir Joshua, but he was the only man of any eminence who ever lived in Lustleigh, at any rate, the only one in the Dictionary of National Biography. It was at Lustleigh that he did the work on which his reputation rests--I have described it in my first _Small Talk_, pages 32 to 34--and for forty years, as curate for an absent pluralist, he was devoted to the interests of the place. It was as scandalous for Lustleigh to sell a gift of his as for Plympton to have sold Sir Joshua’s.

The strange thing is that Davy should have made a gift to Lustleigh, knowing what had happened to the gift of Robert Phipps. By his Will (2 October 1676) Phipps gave £40 to be bestowed in lands of inheritance, the rents and profits whereof were to be employed to buy linen cloth at Easter for such old men and women of the parish of Lustleigh as had none or little relief from the parish, the linen cloth to be dowlas of 10d. per yard or thereabouts, and each poor man or woman to have three yards. The linen was distributed until 1802, and then the trust-fund disappeared, and has not been heard of since. It had not been invested in land; and this may have been the reason why Davy chose to give a piece of land in his own lifetime rather than bequeath a sum of money by Will.