III
In the year 1851 I was sent to a London suburban school, Stockwell Grammar School, chosen, I believe, because one of my brother’s college friends had been there and recommended it. The school was one of a small group founded in the thirties and scattered about the suburbs, much nearer the City than would now be considered a good situation. They were “in connection” with King’s College, London, and exclusively Anglican. The connection amounted to a yearly examination conducted by King’s College, a yearly prize, and certain small privileges if one went from the school to the College. At our school it was considered the proper thing to go on to King’s College, and there to take one of the scholarships. We did this nearly every year, for a good many years; and for a small school we really did wonderfully well at Cambridge afterwards, always in the mathematical tripos. Among the old boys of this small suburban school I may mention the late Sir George Grove, Director of the Royal College of Music; Sir Henry Harben, the statistician; the Rev. Charles Voysey, of the Theistic Church; W.H.H. Hudson, Professor of Mathematics at King’s College, London; Horace William Smith, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; Arthur N. Wollaston, C.I.E., the Oriental Scholar; Sir Henry Irving, the actor; and Charles Irving, C.M.G., late Auditor-General of the Straits Settlements and Resident Councillor of Malacca and Penang. For the rest, we had a good sprinkling of lawyers and clergymen, together with a solid phalanx of substantial City men. This is not a bad average in the thirty years’ life of an insignificant school.
There were about one hundred and twenty boys when I went there as a boarder with the headmaster. He was a graduate of some distinction in classical honours at Trinity College, Dublin; he was a solid scholar, but certainly not a fine scholar. His methods were of the old fashioned kind—the cast-iron kind—the boys were put through daily grammar and exercises, construing and parsing. The method as an educational discipline was no doubt admirable, but it gave no command of the language. Unfortunately the same method was applied to Greek and to French. It did not occur to schoolmasters of that time that our own language afforded ample scope for this kind of discipline, and that in Greek and French we might at least have been taught the language, leaving the syntax to take care of itself. I believe that the same ridiculous pretence at teaching French is still kept up; in our time we read Corneille and Racine. Imagine the usefulness of Racine in teaching modern French! The greatest linguist I have ever known began always with finding out the group of words in which a language might be said to begin: the common words—their likenesses and differences. He then began to translate; as for the grammar, he picked it up as he went along. Now in French there are three things necessary: (1) to read it easily, (2) to write it, and (3) to speak it. It is impossible to speak a language perfectly by any amount of study in an English school; nor can one learn to write it without a vocabulary. I learned French by reading it at home. Greek I could have learned in the same manner, but not writing Greek verses. However, we had the customary stumbling through so many lines of construing everyday; we had no teaching in literature or history, only grammar, parsing, and writing of exercises. Verses we did, of course, but the “head” was not strong in either Greek or Latin verses.
He was a good man and kindly, but his best qualities were concealed by an extraordinary nervousness; he had the greatest difficulty in speaking in public; if he preached, he read a ponderous discourse in an even monotone; he went into no kind of society; he had no friends. If a school can be advanced by the social qualities of its chief, then were we indeed in a bad way; no one was ever invited to the house; he spent all his evenings in his study, and his own amusement was in translating for Bohn’s Library, to which he contributed three or four volumes.
On one occasion he dropped into verse. He wrote a poem in blank verse. The subject was Geology. Dr. Johnson once said that the “Mediterranean Sea” was an excellent subject for a poem; it remains for someone to act on the suggestion. Geology may also be described as an excellent subject for a poem. I wonder if there is, anywhere, a copy to be procured of this effusion. Why my master wrote it, why he published it, what golden visions fired his brain with thoughts of fame, I know not. I am certain that he must himself have paid for the production. Publication, in the proper sense, it never had, because no bookseller ever showed it or offered it. If aspiring poets only realised this point, there would be a decrease in the printing of new poems. In after years I remember a man who had published a volume of verse at his own expense revealing the terrible truth to me of his own experience. Three copies of his book had been sold, two to his own brothers! One copy represented the whole of the Anglo-Saxon demand for that volume of verse. I once asked the publisher about it. He remembered nothing at all, neither the poem nor the poet. My master’s poem on Geology was written and printed, but genuine publication it lacked.
Stockwell, where our school was situated, was at that time a very good quarter, with many wealthy merchants and professional men and civil servants living in it. The place lay between the Clapham Road and the Brixton Road; it consisted of a dozen roads, all lined with stucco-fronted villas, large or small, in their gardens; the roads were planted with trees; the gardens with flowering shrubs; a leafy, peaceful, prosperous place. The boys looked to the City for their careers; but as merchants, stockbrokers, underwriters and principals, not as clerks. A few entered the professions, but not many. Clapham Common furnished one cricket ground; football was not yet played; for the smaller boys there was a playground on either side of the school.
In course of time the neighbourhood began to decay; the wealthy merchants and the professional men and city solicitors moved farther out; smaller houses were put up; a commercial education was desired rather than a classical; the school decayed. In 1870 or 1871 my old friend the head-master resigned. Then happened a terrible tragedy. He was about sixty-seven years of age; he had saved little or nothing; he fell into anxieties about the future; and one day—no one knows why—no one can offer any theory—he murdered his wife. He was tried and found guilty. There was no defence; there was no cause discovered, not the least shadow of a cause; jealousy was out of the question from one of his age towards a wife as old; no one has ever been able to suggest any probable or possible cause of the crime. Meantime people were greatly moved about it. The man was old; he was a clergyman; his life had been blameless; he was always, as a schoolmaster, kindly and good-tempered; he never fell into rages with the boys. The doctors, for their part, would not certify that he was insane. In the end they kept him in prison—but not at Broadmoor; and some years later he died in his convict’s cell.
The mathematical master was a very different man. He was cheerful and jovial; he was also a very good teacher of his subject. He obtained a close fellowship at Cambridge, and went back there, lived in his college for the rest of his life, and became well known for his breezy conversation and his cultivation of the art of dining.
When I recall the boys who were there with me, two or three only stand out in my memory as remarkable. There were two brothers, Cubans, sent to England in order to learn English. They taught me the implacable hatred which the Cuban feels for the Spaniard; they longed to get back in order to take part in the next rebellion, and to help in driving the Spaniards into the sea. I wonder if they lived to see the deliverance of their island and its transference to another and a greater Power.
There was another boy who, I now understand, must have been a Eurasian. His story was very strange. On his arrival from India he was received into the house of a certain very well-known member of Parliament, financier and politician, who for some years, I believe until his death, paid the boy’s school bills. He had no other friend in England and none, so far as he knew, in India. He never went away for the holidays, and as he was not an engaging youth, no one ever invited him. It was a lonely, miserable boyhood. Now it happened that about the year 1855 his patron died. It was then intimated that there was no more money; that the boy could not, therefore, as he had been always led to expect, be brought up to a profession, but must learn a trade. So after having gone through five or six years of the classical mill, with associates all intended for the liberal professions or for the better side of the City, the boy was taken away and apprenticed to a watchmaker. When his time was expired he called upon his old master, received from him whatever facts he knew connected with his history, and said that he was going back to India, in order to find his father and his own people. The facts were few indeed, only that the financier had formerly certain near relations somewhere or other in India. So he disappeared. I wonder if he ever did find his father; or if he still wanders about that broad country seeking and finding not.
Another boy I remember. He started life after leaving school with every chance, as it appeared, of a prosperous career; he succeeded to the management of a great business; was thought certain to become a very rich man; he was a member of a City company; he would speak of ambitions connected with the Mansion House itself. After he left I saw no more of him; but in course of time I heard rumours of incompetence; then of dismissal; he had been turned out of his managing directorship. His chance was gone. I lost sight of him altogether and forgot his existence, until many years later, when my name was tolerably well known as a novelist. I then received a letter in which this old schoolfellow, bursting into a gush of affection and reminiscence, told me his story as he wished it put, artlessly betraying a variegated career of failure, and ending with a request that I would at once send him £200, and would also write him a “long and chatty letter,” as from an old and still affectionate friend. He wanted, you see, a testimonial of respectability. What he would have done with the letter, had I fallen into the trap, would have been to show it about and to use it, probably, for purposes of deception.
However, most of the boys, I believe, turned out well; those who are still living are substantial, but they are very few. I met one the other day, to whom the City has been a Tom Tiddler’s Ground. “Have you heard,” he said, “that Lawrence is dead?” Lawrence, one of the last of the schoolfellows, boy or man, was always called by his Christian name. So Lawrence was dead, and there was another link snapped.
There were many curious and pleasant places within reach of Stockwell. Clapham Common, on the south, the first of the Surrey heaths. It was surrounded by stately mansions, sacred to the memory of Wilberforce, Thornton, and Macaulay, standing amidst broad lawns with splendid cedars. The common itself was left absolutely untouched; winter water-ways made little ravines; there were ponds, there were no roads, there was gorse and fern. It was our playground. Beyond lay Wandsworth Common, another wild heath with a lake called the Black Sea wherein, it was rumoured, gigantic pike attacked and bit great holes in the boy who ventured to swim across.
On the west one could easily reach the Battersea Fields. As I recollect this place, it was most dreary and miserable; a broad flat, lower than the river, and protected by an embankment. On the bank stood the once famous Red House tavern, now long forgotten, and beside it the pigeon-shooting ground. This sport went on continually. If a pigeon escaped he was potted by men who carried guns and lay waiting for him outside the grounds. Battersea Church was on the wall of the Fields, the transformation of a great part of which into Battersea Park took place between 1851 and 1858.
In summer our favourite rambles were farther afield, in the direction of Champion Hill, Herne Hill, Dulwich, and even Penge. No one visiting these places at the present day can understand their loveliness before they were built over. Dulwich, with its ancient college and its inn, its greenery and its orchards, was surely the sweetest village in the world. I always looked about in case I might come upon Mr. Pickwick, who was then a resident, but I was never privileged to see him. The hanging woods of Penge in autumn were lovely beyond the power of words. Its Common on the Hill had been enclosed long before—in 1824—Howe laments the fact in that year; but in the fifties Penge, Norwood and Sydenham formed a group of suburbs still rural, still covered with woods and gardens, and as beautiful as any country village. As yet there were neither omnibuses nor railway. The people who went into the City drove in their own carriages or rode their own horses. Any morning along the Clapham Road there were still many who rode into town.
We were not great at games at the school. There was a cricket club, but my short sight disqualified me from any game of ball; in the winter there was hockey on Clapham Common. I think that football had not yet come in; in fact athletics, in such schools as this was, hardly existed. On the other hand we took long walks; we walked to Richmond, and rode ponies in the Park; we walked to Putney, and took boats on the River; we jumped the Effra, in the Dulwich Fields; we had a gymnastic bar and did things of strength; sometimes we wrestled; sometimes we fought. On the whole it was a healthy kind of life, with plenty of outdoor exercise.
For my own part, I had a form of recreation all my own, of which I said nothing, because the other boys would not understand it. I had friends at Camberwell and Brixton, who asked me two or three times a term to dinner on a half-holiday. On such occasions I used to get away at two and walk all the way into the City of London, which was to me then, as it has been ever since, a place of mystery, full of things to be discovered. Nothing could be more delightful than to wander about, not knowing where, so long as one was in the City. Sometimes I would light upon St. Paul’s, and hear the service; sometimes, but rarely, I would find a City church open; sometimes I would climb the Monument in order to look down upon the labyrinth of streets. Sometimes I found myself in streets that I knew: Paternoster Row—that was the place of books, and I regarded the narrow lane with awe and longing; or in Little Britain—I knew that street from Washington Irving; or in Newgate Street, which was then one long double row of butchers’ shops; or by the old bastion of London Wall; or in Cloth Fair, then a lovely monument of picturesque gables, overhanging windows and dirt of Tudor antiquity. Once I found myself in Goswell Street, and looked about for Mrs. Bardell, just as beside the Monument I looked about for the residence of Mrs. Todgers, or the square in which Tim Linkinwater lived. If I could only remember the City as it was! But nothing is more difficult to recall than the aspect of a street or a house before destruction and rebuilding.
It was in the summer of 1854 that I became captain of the school and left it with a barrowful of prizes. It was a small triumph, I daresay, to be captain of a little suburban school with a hundred boys, but it pleased everybody, including myself. As for what I knew—well, I believe I had less real knowledge of Latin and Greek than at twelve, but I suppose I knew more grammar. My mathematical knowledge was much better; we had gone through most of the subjects then known as the “three day” subjects, because they covered the ground of the first three days of the Cambridge mathematical tripos; and what was more, I knew them very fairly, through the accident of being taught mathematics more intelligently and with more heart than classics. I was taken out of my proper line, which was certainly the latter, and made to go in for mathematics, which I could follow and learn and master, but in which I had no original power whatever. In other things, I could read French fairly well, from private reading; and I could read German almost as well. As for science, I knew nothing whatever about it. We only went through a little book of question and answer on political economy; we learned geography by making maps; if we learned history at all, I have forgotten in what way. We wrote an essay every week, which we had to divide and arrange in a certain fixed order—such as the Preface; the Reasoning; the Simile; the Quotation; the Illustration; the Argument; and the Conclusion. It was by this simple rule of thumb that the first lessons in arrangement and in construction were then taught, but I doubt if there could have been devised any better way of directing the mind unconsciously to obtain a sense of proportion and lucidity of arrangement. To this day, when I read an essay constructed loosely and confusedly I say, “My friend, you were never taught to divide your argument into those sections which make it more forcible and more attractive.”