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Work
by
Our children are being led to ruin by this system. They will become dons and think in Greek. The victim of the craze stops at nothing. He puns in Latin. He quips and quirks in Ionic and Doric. In the worst stages of the disease he will edit Greek plays and say that Merry quite misses the fun of the passage, or that Jebb is mediocre. Think, I beg of you, paterfamilias, and you, mater ditto, what your feelings would be were you to find Henry or Archibald Cuthbert correcting proofs of The Agamemnon, and inventing ‘nasty ones’ for Mr Sidgwick! Very well then. Be warned.
Our bright-eyed lads are taught insane constructions in Greek and Latin from morning till night, and they come for their holidays, in many cases, without the merest foundation of a batting style. Ask them what a Yorker is, and they will say: ‘A man from York, though I presume you mean a Yorkshireman.’ They will read Herodotus without a dictionary for pleasure, but ask them to translate the childishly simple sentence: ‘Trott was soon in his timber-yard with a length ‘un that whipped across from the off,’ and they’ll shrink abashed and swear they have not skill at that, as Gilbert says.
The papers sometimes contain humorous forecasts of future education, when cricket and football shall come to their own. They little know the excellence of the thing they mock at. When we get schools that teach nothing but games, then will the sun definitely refuse to set on the roast beef of old England. May it be soon. Some day, mayhap, I shall gather my great-great-grandsons round my knee, and tell them–as one tells tales of Faery–that I can remember the time when Work was considered the be-all and the end-all of a school career. Perchance, when my great-great-grandson John (called John after the famous Jones of that name) has brought home the prize for English Essay on ‘Rugby v. Association’, I shall pat his head (gently) and the tears will come to my old eyes as I recall the time when I, too, might have won a prize–for that obsolete subject, Latin Prose–and was only prevented by the superior excellence of my thirty-and-one fellow students, coupled, indeed, with my own inability to conjugate sum.
Such days, I say, may come. But now are the Dark Ages. The only thing that can possibly make Work anything but an unmitigated nuisance is the prospect of a ‘Varsity scholarship, and the thought that, in the event of failure, a ‘Varsity career will be out of the question.
With this thought constantly before him, the student can put a certain amount of enthusiasm into his work, and even go to the length of rising at five o’clock o’ mornings to drink yet deeper of the cup of knowledge. I have done it myself. ‘Varsity means games and yellow waistcoats and Proctors, and that sort of thing. It is worth working for.
But for the unfortunate individual who is barred by circumstances from participating in these joys, what inducement is there to work? Is such a one to leave the school nets in order to stew in a stuffy room over a Thucydides? I trow not.
Chapter one of my great forthcoming work, The Compleat Slacker, contains minute instructions on the art of avoiding preparation from beginning to end of term. Foremost among the words of advice ranks this maxim: Get an official list of the books you are to do, and examine them carefully with a view to seeing what it is possible to do unseen. Thus, if Virgil is among these authors, you can rely on being able to do him with success. People who ought to know better will tell you that Virgil is hard. Such a shallow falsehood needs little comment. A scholar who cannot translate ten lines of The Aeneid between the time he is put on and the time he begins to speak is unworthy of pity or consideration, and if I meet him in the street I shall assuredly cut him. Aeschylus, on the other hand, is a demon, and needs careful watching, though in an emergency you can always say the reading is wrong.