XX EDUCATION

          As the great end of human society is to become wiser and better, this ought, therefore, to be the principal view of every man, in every station of life.         
          THE BACHELOR’S CLUB

BENNETT LAWRIE’S education began at the age of six, when, with his sister, Ph?be, he was every morning taken by Tibby to a little dame’s school where he learned the alphabet, the multiplication table, writing, and the stories of the Bible. He was also allowed to draw and taught to embroider little mats with rough silk and to make balls with pieces of wool. In five years he made a great many balls, but he was not allowed to play with them, for they were given to the poor.

When he was ten he passed from this establishment to Wellington House, where there were no girls, but a great many rough boys who frightened him. Among them were his two elder brothers, who afforded him no protection but rather supplied the others with material for teasing. Bennett could not understand that small boys should fight merely out of bluster and cockiness. He only wanted to fight when rage mastered him, and then he was out to kill. He only had one fight at that school and that was enough, for he cut open his adversary’s eye and tore the lobe of his ear away from his scalp. Thereafter he suffered from collective rather than individual bullying.

He learned arithmetic as far as fractions, algebra as far as surds, the first, second and third books of Euclid, English composition and literature, French grammar, composition and easy translations, Latin grammar, composition and [Pg 211]easy translations, Scripture (the books of Samuel, Kings, and the Acts of the Apostles in rotation), geography, history (Tudor and Stuarts alternatively), elocution and dancing. Without being in the least interested in anything, he had no difficulty in memorising for the purposes of each day the tasks that were set before him. He was said to be intelligent, industrious and eager in his work and generally satisfactory in his conduct. At the end of each year he found himself with a prize, though he knew not how or why, and his mother became quite amiable to him. There remained one member of her husband’s family with whom she had not (as yet) quarrelled, namely Bennett’s Aunt Louisa, an ex-governess who had retired upon receipt of a legacy and taken up her residence in our town in order to be near her brothers, James the failure, whom she loved, and Keith the successful merchant, whom she both feared and disliked. This gentle lady offered to pay Bennett’s fees, twelve guineas a year, at the Grammar School, and thither accordingly he repaired with a brand new handbag and a quaking heart to find himself one of five hundred boys, of all shapes and sizes and classes and nationalities and religions—the town in little. In his first term he was in the Lower Third Form, and sat between the son of a cab-driver and the son of a millionaire mill-owner.

It does not matter very much what the young are taught, but it does matter enormously who teaches them. The curriculum of the Grammar School was the curriculum of Wellington House administered in larger and more unpleasant doses. Games were not compulsory, and only one hour per week was allowed for them. What the parents wanted and what they got was a good, hard, thorough grounding and no nonsense. There may have been an ideal in the place once upon a time—(it was founded by a Bishop)—but that ideal had produced no offspring, and there were no little ideals to grow up with Bennett’s generation. Science had been added to the available subjects to be crammed into the boys’ heads, for the voice of Huxley was loud in the land; but though Bennett devoted two hours a week to physics and chemistry, [Pg 212]he never got beyond a vague notion that light and heat were not all they seemed, and a jocular idea that chemistry meant making a bad smell.

He was moved up regularly once a year, but he learned no history beyond George III, he devoted four terms to the study of the Acts of the Apostles, he dropped Latin in favour of German; having learned by heart the rivers and capitals of Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and drawn maps of all of them, he left geography behind, and having studied the Tudors and the Stuarts until he was sick of them, he was suddenly, by promotion, switched away from England, and directed to apply himself to the Thirty Years’ and the Seven Years’ Wars in Germany. Having partially grasped what they were about he was promoted into the middle of the French Revolution. Robespierre was not beheaded when he left school, and he never connected the upheaval in France with the rise of Napoleon.

His instruction in languages was entirely grammarian, and he had no notion but that the works of Corneille, Racine, Goethe and Schiller and Gustav Freytag might have been written expressly to be annotated by the various Masters and Bachelors of Arts whose names appeared on the title-pages of his text-books. He drew skeletons, profiles of girls and caricatures in the margins, and beyond cramming enough of the notes and the dictionary to satisfy his masters he took no further interest in them. He was never asked to do so.

His career and mental development were exactly those of ninety-five per cent. of the boys who passed through the institution, except that he suffered more from fear. Fear was the directing force of the machinery. The High Master was a bearded man with a huge voice, with which he bullied his assistants. The senior members of the staff bullied the junior members, and, without being given any standard of right and wrong, the boys were punished, punished, punished: detentions, impositions, enforced drills, thrashings. The school was enormously successful, and everybody was immensely satisfied with it, though there was never a boy grown man who could look back with pleasure [Pg 213]on the years spent in its toils. There were periodical attempts made to pump up the spirit of loyalty—esprit de corps—but they always flagged under the general listlessness. The boys understood that they attended day after day to be educated, a process which they regarded as extremely unpleasant, as indeed it was, and only tolerable in that its end was always in sight. The clever boys who were kept until they were nineteen and stuffed for Oxford and Cambridge and the professions were pitied rather than admired. There was nothing admirable in Oxford and Cambridge to those who knew nothing of them, save the second and third-class men who were so poor as to be glad of the miserable pittance granted them for the instruction of generations of Bennett Lawries and the sons of cab-drivers and millionaire mill-owners.

After his first term in the Fifth Form Mrs. Lawrie quarrelled with Bennett’s aunt Louisa. Her subsidy was withdrawn, and Bennett left school with a mind untrained except in memory, and stored only with a curious litter of knowledge absolutely unrelated to the facts of his existence.

Education, like charity, should begin at home. Bennett had spent eleven years in being educated, but he had been taught nothing at all of the place in which he lived. He had not been told why it was, what it was, nor for what purpose it existed and grew and expanded. He knew nothing of its history except that it had once had a Latin name and had been occupied by the Romans, and that Oliver Cromwell had passed through or near it with his Roundheads. Everything that was told him was presented to him in such a desiccated form that his gorge rose at it and he could swallow it only with an effort. In a city of Puritans it seemed meet and right that education, like religion and life, should be made as unpleasant as possible.

The only real education that Bennett ever got was in his daily walk to and fro over the two miles that separated his home from the school. He could cover the distance in three ways: either he could go through slums and [Pg 214]under factories and engineering shops along the low ground, or he could take the high ground behind the Albert Station and soon come to suburbs and the streets where the middle classes gathered, or he could pass through the Jews’ quarter down by the Assize Courts and the gaol. Most often he chose the third way. The mysterious, large-headed, thick-featured creatures with their oily, beady eyes exercised a strange fascination over him. He liked their Kosher shops, their bills written in weird characters, the women with their hard stiff wigs, the men with their queer gnarled legs and their feet loosely hinged at the ankles. He always looked at their feet, because a boy at school had once pointed out to him how the Jews always wore their boots down on the outside edge of the sole. He never knew why the Jews were there in such large numbers, but they interested him. They were romantic. All the cleverest boys at school were Jews. They seemed to learn everything with an extraordinary facility. . . . Almost his only friend at school was a Jew named Kraus, whose father and mother were in Roumania, and at intervals they would send him over a hamper containing queer fishes and black olives and rose-leaf jam, and then Bennett would go home with Kraus and have an orgy. Once Kraus gave him some unleavened bread, and Bennett kept it as a curiosity, and frightened himself with pretending that the tragedy of the Passover was come again, and that the angels would not mark his house because he was not a Jew and had no right to the bread.

Kraus had an aunt who was a musician and a singer. She sang so sweetly that Bennett was moved to tears and fell violently in love with her, though he would not admit it to himself, for all thought of love disgusted him. It was Kraus who revealed to Bennett the mystery of his birth, and in the filthiest way possible explained to him the process by which he had his being. It took Bennett some time to recover from the despair into which the revelation threw him, but it never occurred to him to doubt the truth of his friend’s statements. The filthiness was in the world and not in Kraus. They became more intimate, and [Pg 215]their talk was almost always dirty, though innocent. It was a swaggering pose, their way of equalising matters with the bawdiness of the world that lay before them.

Bennett had no corrective. No grown person ever held out a hand to save him from his dark thoughts and uneasy desires when they came to him, nor troubled to enquire into what pitfalls he might be tumbling. Instructed by Kraus he went the way of all flesh and lost his peace of mind and the bloom of his boyhood. All around him he saw darkness and ugliness, but never any beauty. The one place in his daily walks that his imagination fastened on was the gaol, and he dreamed of prisoners and policemen and arrestments.

His friendship with Kraus lasted for three years, during which Bennett fell in and out of love (with absurd chivalry and nobility) with his sisters’ friends. The rupture came when one day Kraus filled the whole of their walk home with an account—largely invented—of an adventure with a loose factory girl whom he had encountered in the street seeking whom she might devour. A black abyss yawned at Bennett’s feet, his brain whirled, and he said:

“You’ll go to Hell.”

Kraus replied with an obscene jingle which they had often chanted together, and offered to call for Bennett that night.

“I don’t ever want to see you again,” said Bennett, and he washed his hands of Kraus. Thereafter for the short remaining period of his term at school he avoided the Jewish quarter and took the high road through the most respectable-seeming middle-class streets.

The hours of the school were five, three in the morning and two in the afternoon, with three-quarters of an hour for lunch. This was not provided eatably in the school-building, and as, for most of the boys, the mid-day meal was the most serious of the day, they went, according to their means, to the various restaurants in the locality. Bennett was allowed sixpence a day, and used to repair to one of three or four cheap eating-houses, all in cellars. Here he saw men and youths of the type with which his future life would be spent—warehousemen and clerks, [Pg 216]all scraping as much off their food allowance as they could to pay for beer and betting and billiards and tobacco. They were all dull and timid and white-faced, foul-mouthed very many of them, and the conditions under which their food was placed before them were so uninviting that they hurried through their meals as quickly as possible. On the whole Bennett envied them because they were not at school and were independent and doing work for which they were paid. . . Very often he felt too timid or too listless to eat, and he saved the sixpence for his own purposes. When he did that he found it very hard to keep awake during the two hours in the afternoon, and very often he had his homework increased by a long imposition.

In the holidays he was required to read one of the romances of Sir Walter Scott with a view to examination on them when the school re-opened. This begot in him a loathing for Sir Walter from which he never recovered. He was always being examined—every term, every midterm; in some subjects, once a week. As information had been forced into him piecemeal, so piecemeal it was pumped out of him. . . . Perhaps this is a wise provision. Perhaps, having fed their little boys’ minds with bran for weeks on end, it is merciful of the pedagogues at the end of term to administer an emetic. Every term the examinations cleaned Bennett out, and by regular repetition of this process he was no further on at the end of five years than he was at the beginning. They even tried to rob him of his delight in Shakespeare by making him learn the stupid hotch-potch of the notes of some Cambridge pundit instead of helping him to discover the glory of the verses and confirming him in his taste for it.

Nothing was ever done to help him to understand the processes of his own existence, or to direct the forces stirring in him, or to pick his way through the whirling maze of divers emotions in which every now and then he lost himself. He was affectionate; no appeal was made to his affections. He was romantic; no food was forthcoming for his hunger. Spiritually and emotionally he was starved; mentally he was grossly and unsuitably fed. His was the average condition of the average boy in the [Pg 217]most touching, perhaps the most beautiful period of the average man’s life.

He was told that he must be confirmed. Like the minister who prepared him, he understood nothing of the significance of the ceremony, but contact with one or two religiously minded young men released the pent-up emotion in him and it rushed out in such a flood that he was like to drown. He clutched at the first cause that came to hand, turned to the first manly and inspiring personality that he encountered, the rector of St. Saviour’s, and he embraced the High Church creed and all its tenets, prejudices, and shibboleths.

Only an accident had saved him from the worst consequences of his education.