BOOKS
Beasts with background
Eric Christiansen
Among the slumbering volcanoes which darken the horizon of English conversation there is one inscribed 'My School Experiences.' When it wakes, its fumes are not quite as noxious as those of the one labelled 'Education', but they are so far apart that it is difficult to make a comparison. Almost anything sets it off.
For example it is still possible for members of the upper and middling classes to claim that they have been robbed of their spontaneity, originality, and joie de vivre at school; or would have been, had they not resisted the robbery. There are various responses to such claims. Polite foreigners stifle their hysterical laughter. Coarse natives fall asleep on the spot. It makes no difference. There is more to come, and nothing can stop it.
Men who would expect to be pelted with broken victuals for recounting their dreams publish their equally fantastic, boring, and trivial recollections of The Big House, assured of solemn attention. They always find listeners, because the rule is that listen- ing to A's schoolroom saga gives B the in- alienable right to trot out his own. And so it goes on.
I am all for Private Education, if only it were. But they will talk about it, as if the whole thing were public property. Who, after hearing revelations of this kind, would believe that the Public School Man ever stood condemned for his marbly reticence and narrow sense of decorum? When it comes to the childhood memory stakes, his emblem is seldom the Spartan boy, endur- ing the bite of the fox in silence. It is more often a boy of softer mould, deafening the neighbourhood with shrieks of 'Ouch! Yaroo!' at the nibbling of a small white mouse.
How much better it would be if these artless raconteurs would recognise that there already exists a copious written literature on the subject. A title, a chapter number, or even, for scholars, a page reference would then suffice to recall almost every conceivable incident of any man or woman's schooldays to such of their acquaintance as chose to explore the matter further. And now we have the perfect introduction to this troubled back- water of romance in Isabel Quigly's The Heirs of Tom Brown.
It concerns stories about Public Schools and would-be Public Schools from 1857 to the present day. The authoress believes that the schools themselves and the stories about them followed parallel paths of develop- ment. Thus, Tom Brown represents a debased but sympathetic popularisation of Dr Arnold's idea of school as a cucumber- frame for what his son called `friends and helpers of mankind.' Eric is Farrar's less cheerful view of the same thing: school as trial and redemption. Then as the schools developed into seminaries for imperial civil servants and officers, Reed wrote The Fifth Form at St Dominic's and established a set of conventions governing the plots, characterisation, and attitudes of a host of successors, coarser in grain than the great originals. In these, games, school-pride, class-pride, and sentimental friendship were upheld as the highest goals; religion, learn- ing, and humanity were left out. By 1900, the stories and the schools grew monotonous and stupid. Complacency reigned whjle rebellion simmered. Authors produced more and more intense celebra- tions of homosexuality and snobbery among boys (The Hill, The Harrovians, The Oppidans) or used school as a background for studies of adults in torment (Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, The Lanchester Tradition). Finally, by the 1940s, the schools lost their unchallenged self- con fidence, and the empire began to melt away. The stories became so diverse and so critical in tendency that they stopped being School Stories in the classical sense. Only Greyfriars kept the tradition alive, as a simple-minded fantasy for the excluded masses.
This is certainly a convenient scheme, and Miss Quigly pursues it with wit and charity; but I am not sure that it quite covers the facts. The stories she considers most important, Tom Brown, Vice Versa, Stalky, and Mike are too good to fit into that kind of pattern. They are set in schools, but schools are not the limit of their horizons. Their heroes are boys, but their appeal is adult, whether humorous or serious. They reflect not what the schools actually were, but what their authors
thought about life in general. The origins, aim, and ethos of the institution did no more than colour what Hughes, AnsteY Kipling, and Wodehouse wrote.
There was a school story industry which fits the Quigly scheme rather more comfort- ably, and although her asperity is alwaYs pleasant, she is too free with it when dealing with these minor works. She disapproves of some of their complacency, and of others for their insufficiently radical criticisms of the school system. That seems a waste of in- dignation. Horse and Hound is unlikely to run a rousing condemnation of fox- hunting. The disrespect for learning, women, foreigners, Jews, and nouveaux riches found in such works is not really sinister. It would be strange if this one branch of light literature had differed from the others in not finding these subjects ridiculous. Such were the conventions of the day, and they were not confined to Public Schools or originated by them.
However, it would be wrong to blame Miss Quigly for airing her prejudices, since she does so in a way that is more entertain- ing than that chosen by most of the writers she considers. Perhaps she is unfair to KiPl' ing when she gives the impression (shared also by H. G. Wells) that he glorifies torture in 'The Moral Reformers.' That is the story in which Stalky and his friends torment two bound and helpless bullies. The torture is there, but the victims are near-adults, and have themselves been bullying a child. The child was without redress, because the rules allowed the strong to misuse their strength. Stalky merely followed the rules in the onlY way that the bullies understood; they followed them to do evil, he followed them to do good. It is very ugly, but it is a lesson in justice, not sadism.
Kipling took morals seriously; far more seriously than most of the other school story tellers. He also respected learning, far more than the disfigurement of Kings books in another Stalky episode would sug- gest. 'Regulus' is not mentioned by Miss Quigly, but it should be, because it stands out as one of the very few stories which concern the central and most distinctive feature of the old Public Schools, the studY of the classics. It tells how the boy' barbarians learn and follow the spirit of the fifth in Horace's third book of Odes, the one that begins `Coelo tonantem credidimus Jovem.' Their arid but cultivated beak believed that this experience saved them from being 'beasts without background' like the science specialists.
It is conceivable that this sort of awaken' ing did occur in real life, but presumablY Kipling greatly overestimated its effects' since it is now precluded by the curricula 01 modern schools of every variety. Nor was it ever the stuff of fiction. Nor was the monotony and routine and dumb ac- quiescence which always made up most of school life, whatever the spirit of the age happened to be. Books about boredom don't sell. The books Miss Quigly considers did sell, and who can blame them for being rather more exciting than the real thing?
Previous page
