"HOWLERS" UP TO DATE.
FIVEyears ago all the younger and more able-bodied mem- of the academic world were hastening to exchange IVE hers the pen for the sword and to become pupils once more—in the sternest of all schools. Much water has flowed under the bridges since those breathless days of anxiety and activity of August, 1914. ,But at last the process has been reversed. Khaki has been laid aside, the. gown ,has been resumed. -The .demobilized pedagogue has beaten his sword into a ploughshare---not indeed the implement of agriculture, but that in use in the examination- hall—and once more he finds himself confronted as in happier days with masses of answers to examination-papers to be read and marked, but fortunately not inwardly digested, -in some alto- gether impossibly short space of time. There is something very like a thrill of excitement about renewing acquaintance after all these years with the- British- schoolboy as he is examined. Has the war produced any effect on him ? Has it changed that complete indifference to the trammels of chronology, probability, and grammar that distinguished him in the days before the Deluge ?
. As first flush it is impossible to detect any difference. -It is really something of:a relief to find that the -war has not staled his infinite capacity for confusing- kings and continents, centuries and circumstances. Majuba Hill "`was where Clive avenged the Black Hole of Calcutta," Admiral Byng " was responsible for the loss of Monaco," " Owen Glendower better known as Strongbow." Many incidents •have contributed to the fol- lowing : " Arthur Wellesley was sent out to defeat Arabi Pasha at Porto' Novo, but a more competent general was sent outsto relieve the garrisons. So Gordon was sent." It would be a task for the Higher Criticism to differentiate between the sources of such an account, or of—" Canning and Castlereagh -defeated the Family Compact and thereby frustrated Louis XIV2sschemea." Nor has the war reduced in -any appreciable degree another characteristic of the 'British schoolboy, his-wonderful faculty for attributing to the most unlikely people the most inappropriate achievements. Lord Shaftesbury- is saddled with the respon- sibility for the exchange of Heligoland against " an unimportant island. We have now seen his mistake." Adam Smith figures on the one hand as " the-man who defended Arcot in Palestine against Napoleon," and on the other as •" a zoological professor who travelled a. great deal in the. South Sea Islands- and wrote The Human Man,' following it up with The Species of Human Living." -After this it is •not remarkable to learn that "Newman was one of the chief supporters of the Chartists," or that "Cobbett was -a: great explorer : he discovered South Africa. and sailed round the world." Byron again is "probably the finest essay- writer England has- ever possessed : he ranks high with Shake- speare and Wordsworth." Yet another authority tells us : " Byron's poems were of the :long or , Homeric type, :notably The Ring eend the Book ' which is immensely long."
It would have' been remarkable indeed ' had the war taught Jones aawsaus- to think -before he wrote,• to measure, his words more carefully, laeabstain from: those wonderful figureaoltspeeoh
and mixed metaphors in which Jones major indulged in 1914. There has been no reduction of the crop of rare and refreshing Mgt which to the weary examiner is as a spring of water in the desert--unconseious and inimitable epigrams such as "Henry WIL lived highly and liked a change of wives," and "John Ball preached an inferior quality of Lollardism "—the product as a rule of a combination of ignorance, originality, and recklessness. "The Anglican movement was that people thought Bishops were continuations of the Apostles. It was caused by people reading Scott's novels and wishing for the old customs again." "The Armed Neutrality expresses the part England played in the second stage of the Napoleonic Wars." " John was lamentably tactless, as was shown by the way in which he murdered Arthur of Brittany " [problem : How to commit a murder tactfully 7] Walpole " was one of the, perhaps for- tunately, few who could speak French. He was called ' Prime Minister' really a term of reproach." Again we find him intro- ducing the Excise Bill " to limit the death-rate of Excisemen," and there is a fine candour and a true generosity in the judgment : " Walpole is blamed for bribery and corrupting but we cannot blame him for doing a thing better than others do it." Only the British schoolboy could have been responsible for the statement that " Pitt's ancestors contrived to forget his doc- trines," or for the verdict that " Mary well deserved the name of ' Bloody Mary' for though her reign was a short one a good many men found time to die." The character of Charles James Fox naturally lends itself to description : " a man of great oratory powers but peculiar tastes : he wore red. shoe-heels and dyed his wig blue." The awful condemnation that Fox was "`lazy and classical " (post hoc and obviously propter hoc) can only have emanated from a seminary devoted to the New Learning of to-morrow which will eschew the more human letters and regard a knowledge of the classics as at once useless and part and parcel of the Black Art. But the classics have their defenders still. " Fox," we are told, " was a mixture of bad and good, an inveterate gambler but classical" But careful examination does reveal one direction in which the war has without doubt made its influence felt. Jones minimus has always been addicted to read the present into the remotest past, and to regard the twelfth century as endowed with the majority of the institutions of the twentieth. Once he meets anything that can be called a Parliament, he invests it with all the powers and privileges and procedure of to-day. " There was no burnings in Mary's reign when Parliament was sitting for fear of Questions in the House of Commons " indicates a greater familiarity with the Parliaments adorned by Messrs. Pemberton Billing and Bottomley than with those of Tudor times. Nor is it exactly a fourteenth-century way of describing Richard II.'s action during the Peasants' Revolt to say that " he suppressed it by calling out the military." Occasionally Jones minimus hedges when he cannot account for the non-appearance of some institu- tion he had expected to meet. " When Elizabeth came to the throne the Army had been disbanded, at least it was not present." That Alfred " contributed frequently to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle " is natural enough, and that Brindley should have "built the Manchester Ship Canal " need surprise nobody, while the death of Huskisson at the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway only just misses being brought really up to date by being attributed to " a motor accident." How long will it be before Smith quartus in all good faith and sincerity gives an aeroplane crash the credit ?
It is to be feared that the British schoolboy's teachers and text- books have no small share of the responsibility for this failing. There is one book which has the supreme merit of making the past live, of bringing out the differences between the way things were done and people went on in the Middle Ages and under the Jameses and the Georges, but it is not given to all pedagogues to appreciate the merits of The Introductory History of England, any more than it is given to other writers to share the imaginative power and vividness of Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher. Too few teachers seem to realize that to Jones minimus one past century is indis- tinguishable. from another, that he regards all periods in which the motor-bicycle and the aeroplane- did not exist as equally benighted and devoid of all that makes life endurable. It is not the average boy's fault if he pictures all England in the seven- teenth century as being as responsive to the voice of one-crier as we are to-day under the regime of the Northeliffe.Press, or if he fails to realize that to the North Country moss-troopers who followed the Red Rose England south of Trent was a -far less 'familiar country than are Queensland and Saskatehtwan-to the-
Tynesider of to-day. No doubt social and economic history studied, as it too often is, divorced from the story of men and events is even more likely to produce false doctrine, heresy, and schism than is the study of so-called " political " history unillu- minated by some idea of social conditions. Still, to impart to Jones minimus some inkling of the difficulties of getting about the country in Chaucer's time, of the way in which armies were levied in Tudor and Stuart times, of the police system before the days of Sir Robert Peel, is highly desirable, even if it would infallibly reduce the number of blunders which support the examiner on his progress through piles of examination-papers.
But where the last five years have left their mark is on the answers to any question which touches directly or indirectly on wars and their side-issues. Before 1917 one would never have read that " the Black Death caused a great drainage on the man- power of the nation," and there is more than an echo of the days of rationing and of the efforts to increase home production when we are told how Wellington " found no food-stuffs growing on the rocky soil of Spain." One might perhaps have been told before 1914 that " Alfred's fyrd was the basis of our present T.F.," but certainly not that "Alfred raised the fyrd who came for the duration of the war." Nor again would Florence Nightin- gale, " that angle of mercy " as one author terms her, have gone out " to the Crimea on account of the break-down of the Red Cross arrangements," or have " come to the help of the first-aid depot of the armies," or have taken out with her " a band of voluntary workers." To have administrative deficiencies in the Crimea summed up in the indictment that " the men suffered terribly for they never received the parcels sent out from home " prepares one• to some extent to find Lord Raglan and his successors. escaping with the modified censure that " in the Crimea the blunders of the generals in the field were as nothing to those of the Army Council at home." Again, to be told that `` before the Crimea there was no Field Training and the Supply Column practically did not exist " is distinctly suggestive of preparation for " Certificate A" of the O.T.C., and to the same source may be traced the " revised version " of Culloden : "the Highlanders melted away before the withering effects of con- trolled rifle fire." The same influence is certainly detected in the statement that " Fairfax commanded the New Model Army with 0. Cromwell as O.C. Cavalry." The Royal United Service Institution would doubtless pay handsomely for " Copy No. 16" of " Operation Order No. 33 " by " B. General 0. Cromwell, O.C. Cavalry," or even for the appropriate " A.F." rendered in triplicate for the supply of the established number of " Testa- ments, Old " to be delivered to B Squadron, Ireton's Regiment.
The influence of the communiqué is very dearly marked when one is informed that " the Light Brigade captured their first objective, only to find that no reinforcements were forthcoming to consolidate the positions they had won." But there is an ultra-modern touch, almost a suspicion of Soviet methods of conducting campaigns, in another version of the story of the Six Hundred: " The poor Light Brigade, well aware of their perils and knowing, to use the words of Wordsworth's poem, ' someone had blundered,' did not wait to ask or to have their opinions taken by their officers but charged."
The author of the statement that " the communications of the Army in the Crimea were defective—witness the loss of life engendered by the useless charge of the Light Brigade due to careless transmission of an order," was obviously an enthusiastic member of his school Signal Section, as was also the youth who wrote of the improvement in the dissemination of news at the end of the eighteenth century: " they did it with signallers who used flags and the Morse code." The shortcomings, real or alleged, of Government Departments make themselves felt in a new account of the loss of Calais : " in Mary's reign we lost Calais because our Secret Service was so inefficient. Philip under. took to look after the Intelligence Department but did it very badly." There is a reminiscence of the controversies over recruiting of the period before the Military Service Act in a description of seutage : " Scutage resulted in the knights ceasing to go to war themselves, likewise their peace-loving retainers. Vide keeping your gardner [sic] and chauffeur back at the beginning of the war." Present discontents cast their shadow over the paper when Ket's rebellion is ascribed to " speculation in houses," and Pitt's chief anxieties include " the
housing problem," or when Johnson's definition of Excise is given as " a, tax levied by hateful rascals hired• by the profiteers."
There is an echo of a golden age gone beyond recall when one is told that Rowland " introduced Penny Postage similar to that which was used before the war," and perhaps there is more than a little truth in the statement: "Utopia meana.` No Man's
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