MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE decorous mansion now tenanted by the National Book League at No. 7 Albemarle Street was once the most fashionable hostelry of Regency London. It was known by the name of its proprietor as "Grillions Hotel." It was here that the Prince Regent greeted Louis XVIII on his triumphant passage from Hartwell to the Tuileries. It was in fact in the hall of Grillions Hotel that Louis XVIII became so moved by the occasion as to forget his customary caution and to attribute his restoration " to the counsels of Your Royal Highness, to this glorious country, and to the steadfastness of its inhabitants." This unfortunate remark was reproduced the next morning in the public prints, whereby the Tsar of Russia, who regarded himself as the Agamemnon of Kings, as the sole liberator of Europe, was deeply offended. The effect of this momentary lapse of tact on the part of Louis XVIII was so damaging and prolonged that the Tsar was tempted, after the Hundred Days, to oppose a second restoration of the Bourbons and to offer the crown of France to Bernadotte. All of which shows that one should remember, even in moments of enthusiasm, not to be so polite to one person as to be rude to another ; and lends to the hall of No. 7 Albemarle Street an agreeable touch of historical specula- tion. It is unlikely that, under the ingenious but austere management of the National Book League, the hall of No. 7 will ever again echo to such a pregnant indiscretion. The building is now devoted to the varied and useful activities of the National Book League and especially to the fascinating exhibitions which from time to time are held in the ground-floor rooms. The most recent of these exhibitions is that organised by Mr. Arnold Muirhead and entitled The English at School. It is an exhibition which will provide pleasure, instruc- tion and amusement to old and young alike.
The development of our national system of education is analogous to the development of our town and county planning. The charitable bequests and royal grants under which institutions were endowed for the instruction of indigent scholars were in the course of centuries transformed into public schools devoted exclusively to the education of the sons of the nobility and gentry. The schools founded by the several religious denominations, those which were established by private enterprise for purposes of profit, and those which were financed by educational experimenters, formed by the beginning of the nineteenth century a pattern as intricate and jumbled as that presented by our towns and villages. One can examine in Albemarle Street a copy of the Treasury Minute of August 3oth, 1833, under which a sum of £2o,000 was devoted, with the approval of Parliament, to assist public education. A sharp little note in the catalogue reminds us that in the same year as this initial grant was made a far larger sum was voted by the House of Commons for the repair of the Royal Mews. Assuredly we have traversed a long road between 1833 and the Butler Act. Students of the development of public education will find many items to awake their curiosity and enhance their satisfaction. They will find a first edition of Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster, dated 157o ; they will find an edition of Joseph Lancaster's Improvements in Education, which was the textbook of the Lancastrian system, an experiment which fascinated the Whigs of pre-reform days ; and they will find Matthew Arnold's careful reports on elementary schools, and be reminded with a start that this most underestimated poet was professionally, and for thirty- five years, an Inspector of Schools.
Those whose interest in education is less specialised will concen- trate upon the exhibits which suggest to us how completely the general conception of education and child psychology has altered during the last fifty years. The prospectuses of the several private boarding-schools dating from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries indicate how great was the importance attached by our ancestors to the study of deportment. Even as long ago as 1518
Johannes Sulpitius was intent, as subsequent teachers have been intent, on instructing schoolchildren to blow their noses. " A napkyne," he writes, " se that thou have in redines, Thy nose to clene from all fyithynes." Mr. Richard Weste, writing in 1619, was distressed by the habit (so frequently observed in little boys who are highly strung and, as such, obnoxious to masters) of allowing their faces to crease or twitch:—
" Nor wrinkled let thy countenance be, Still going to and fro, For that belongs to hedge-hogs right, They wallow even so."
Oswald Dykes in 1700 strikes a less materialistic note:—
" Mony's the Root of Evil and Disgrace And makes fond boys extravagantly base.
But what Ingenious Education brings Are generous and Unmercenary things."
By the nineteenth century the emphasis on elegance becomes even more marked. We have Mrs. Peter Giorgi writing a handbook on the Rules for the General Conduct and Deportment of Young Ladies, destined to move in Fashionable Circles. As the twentieth century approaches we find masters much troubled by the problem of velocipedes, and the headmaster of Haileybury writes to the head- master of Marlborough soliciting comradely advice as to how to cope with the unseemly practice among the assistant masters of smoking in their studies or even in the public streets.
Two showcases are reserved for the implements of punishment. There is a life-sized birch ; there are several different sorts of canes. There are linen headbands to be worn upon the forehead, bearing such inscriptions as " Gossiping," " Rudeness and Disrespect," " Inattention during Prayers," or somewhat abruptly " Dunce." The psychiatrists will gloat over these exhibits, regarding them as out- dated as the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, rejoicing in the sweeter, simpler mode which is now inculcated. Yet as one pores over these ingenious exhibits one is left with the impression that schoolchildren remain for ever much the same. Charles Darwin, a most serious man in later years, would doodle on the fly-leaf of his atlas when a pupil at Shrewsbury School. John Ford in 1848 would complain to his" mother that the bigger boys ate most of the cake she sent him. Richard Barnett in 1693 would ask his father in a lovely Italian script to send some venison to a master who had been good to him. Amelia Mildmay would display in simpering sentences the immense virtue by which she was inspired. Some even of the school reports are preserved and indicate that masters are not always infallible as judges of character. G. K. Chesterton, when eighteen plus, is reproved for his " slow-moving, tortuous imagination " and his incompetence in Greek composition. And there, upon the shelves, are the battered Latin primers, the bound copies of the Boys' Own Paper or The Captain which we knew so well, and the sight of which stirs into movement the old carp which slumber in the ponds of memory.
A mother, especially a fond mother, visiting this exhibition might be tempted to decide that her own babies must be educated at home. I beg her not to surrender to this fantasy. The sole advantage which a boy derives from being "educated privately" is that when in after years he becomes an Archbishop, a Judge or a Cabinet Minister, there will be no one to exclaim: " But they must be insane! He was at m'tutor's in 1898—a really ghastly little worm he was." It is, I admit, a serious but not uncommon misfortune to be saddled throughout life by the reputation one acquired at thirteen. Yet this inconvenience is but slight in comparison to the denial of those opportunities for painful adjustment which a boarding-school pro- vides. Not for all the world would I Lave missed my school days ; not for all the world would I go through them again.
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