Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 825
Leaving out the rotten schools and the snobbish schools, the decent boarding school has certain disciplines in life to offer, salutary and useful, not to be got elsewhere. One is the value of the break from home, of being compelled for the first time to stand on one’s own feet. It is in choking down the sobs of homesickness that we first learn how much home has meant, and how fond we are of it, and the humbler and more dilapidated the home, the more suffocating is the sob of affection for it. With the break from home we learn a whole lot of new values — as, for instance, that of the friend in need, the decent fellow who shows the new boy where everything is and where to put things away: first thing you know, you are talking to him about your home and how your mother had warned you not to pack your books the wrong way into your trunk, and he says that about half his stuff got bashed up on the train coming down, and so there you are two fellow adventurers, both smashed up by railway baggagemen. How eagerly a new boy at school reaches out for such contacts of friendliness, like the shoots of a young plant on hard ground; how quickly he responds to a kind accent in a master’s tone, to a hand upon his shoulder; with what penetration he sees that the old drill sergeant, even if half tipsy, isn’t half bad, and what encouragement he finds in a half wink and a “cheer up” from the jolly old janitor. Then, as the days go by and the weeks go by, and he begins to settle into the place and have his part in it, what a new life and pride — something about him, as it were, that is his, that he has made, a new integument about him like the shell put on by a crab.
It is this new integument — call it, if you like, this new fellowship — that gives the peculiar meaning to boarding-school friendship, even as the years go by and it all turns into retrospect, to broadening companionship and acquaintance. It is a commonplace, as often repeated as it is true, that the friendships made at boarding school are different in kind, deeper in meaning, than ordinary friendships. And how they last. I am not thinking here of the school friendships of men who were at school together and, to the good luck of circumstances, spent their life side by side. I am thinking rather of those who were boys together at school and for uncounted years, for long decades, never saw one another, life passing separately for each of them, yet bring them casually together after twenty years, after forty if you like, and the passage of the years is just as nothing, the call of the past bridges it in an instant.
Such has often been my experience, meetings with boys of the old school whom I had neither seen nor much thought about for half a lifetime. It was after one of my lectures in a great American city, a lecture to be followed by a reception, that they told me that there would be a Mr. Lyon at the reception who told them that he had been at Upper Canada College with me fifty years before. Did I remember him? Remember him? What a ridiculous question, remember Eph Lyon, three years senior to me, one of the stars of the First (Cricket) Eleven: a big, striking fellow — as a boy I put him at over six feet, say six and a half — in a cricket blazer, walking back from the wickets to the marquee scoring tent at the corner of the college cricket ground, amid the burst of applause that greeted his score of thirty not out? And I, a college junior, not even fit for the Third Eleven. Remember him? No, the only thing was the compliment that he remembered me.
So there he was, sure enough, in the crush of the reception, one of those stand-up-and-talk affairs where one lady was asking me what I thought of Galsworthy’s White Monkey (I hadn’t heard of it) and another telling me that I ought to have gone on lecturing another half hour. But for me Lyon was the feature of the reception. I admit that fifty years had altered him. He had turned from a Canadian schoolboy into an American businessman. He had lost about a foot in height and most of his width. He said the lecture was fine and that he never came to them, and then he asked me what became of Old Gentle, and I told him that all the old school buildings had been knocked down and the ground remade and rebuilt into great square blocks, and we stood there in the dust and memory of the falling schoolhouse, the wind from the chestnut trees of the college garden blowing in our faces. All about us was the babble of Galsworthy’s White Monkey and literary discussion, but the call of the years had carried us beyond it.
Or, similarly, I recall how one day at my club a message came to me to say that a gentleman from Arizona was downstairs in the lower hall who said he had been at school with me fifty years ago. I went down, and there he was, sure enough. Who would he be? Why, Jimmy Douglas, of course. Who else could he be, though I hadn’t seen him? We were in Form 2A together and in the old boardinghouse together in 1882. “Well, Jimmy!” I said as I asked him whether he remembered that he had said to me in 2A that he believed a fellow didn’t need algebra. Evidently he hadn’t needed it in Arizona, solid and prosperous, rugged and simple without it, and, as memory cleared away the haze from his features, unchanged since twelve years ago.
Another time, in my club also, a man said, “Let me introduce my cousin,” and I exclaimed as I shook hands with what looked like a tall, very dignified and formal gentleman but which I knew wasn’t, but was just a schoolboy in disguise. “Why! Hullo! Friday!” He laughed. It is amazing how quickly the barriers break down. “Friday, all right,” he said, “but no one has called me that for forty years.” “You remember,” I said, “how you entered Upper Canada College alongside of a boy from Cobourg called Crusoe, and after the master had written down Crusoe’s name he said to you, ‘I suppose you must be Friday’?” With that the scene rose before us, the typical master’s joke, that goes such a long way with a class, the subservient laughter, and afterward, in the playground, the nickname Friday, plastered on and there for keeps.
All that, I say, is apropos of the question, What is there in a boarding school? — to which the answer is that there is a heap. Incidentally, though I forgot to mention it before, in my day a boarding school still carried the advantage that it gave athletics, games, and the life surrounding them. This exclusive aspect is gone in our present age, when athletics and sports are universal and the new and wholesome worship of health, strength, and fitness is a dominant idea of the day. Yet even in athletics the bond of union for the boarding school is always closer and more real.
For me my first initiation into boarding-school life and into the valley of tears of homesickness in February 1882 was brief enough. I entered at an awkward time scholaretically, though it fitted the financial quarters of the year, because all the subjects had been begun and for the moment I didn’t fit in anywhere. The class in algebra had begun at New Year’s, and I hadn’t had any, so the master in charge said to one of the boys, “McKeown, take this boy to the back of the room and explain to him what algebra is.” McKeown did so, and I don’t believe that even the great Arabian scholar, Ibn Ben Swot, who invented algebra and gave it its Arabic name, could have put it more exactly where it belonged, as mystery, than did McKeown of Form 2A in 1882. McKeown set out his Todhunter’s Algebra and some bits of paper on a desk. He opened Todhunter at a page marked Examples and all spotted with x, y, and z, mixed with figures. I had never seen algebra before. “Now,” said McKeown, “you take x,” and he wrote it down. “We’ll say it’s ten.” “Is it?” I said. “Say it is,” said McKeown. “Then, you see, x plus one equals eleven.” “But,” I persisted, “how do you know x is ten?” “I don’t,” said McKeown. “Say it’s twelve if you like.” “No, no,” I said, “I only meant how much is x?” “Oh, I don’t know,” said McKeown, and of course that is exactly what Ibn Ben Swot would have said, only McKeown felt ashamed of ignorance and Ibn Ben exulted in it. Indeed he would have explained that the whole point of algebra is that it enables us to deal with unknown quantities, so much of this and so much of that, and find out all sorts of results connected with it, without giving them any single fixed meaning.
I spent three or four days in such class exercises and in standing up, utterly homesick, and chorusing out declensions and conjugations, after the old-fashioned system of the day, and in living through clattering meals that I could hardly eat for homesickness, and in night study, and in the nursery bedroom with my two brothers, and then the fourth or fifth day brought it all suddenly to a close. I woke up in the morning with a headache and my stomach was as red as a lobster, and that was scarlatina. So the lady matron of the boardinghouse took me in charge and packed up a bag of my things and said, “And now come and see what a nice little house we have out behind the school!” It didn’t look to me like a nice little house; in fact it looked just like a brick coal shed converted into two rooms as a “sanatorium,” which is just what it was. This was before the days of isolation hospitals and trained nurses. So there I was, established in the sanatorium under the care of an old dame, a kinder and a cleaner version of Mrs. Gamp. My illness was nothing and was over in a day, and then the next day somehow my mother turned up and I didn’t care how long I stayed isolated, drawing pictures and having her read out loud to me.
At the end of so many weeks I went back to the old farm and in the intervals of convalescence went up and down to the red school twice a week, learning Latin. After Easter I went back to Upper Canada, but in less than no time it had all changed, all began to feel familiar and easy. The lessons were to me a mere nothing, because they had shoved me a class down and I knew it all, and with that I began to make a few timid friendships and to feel proud of walking with my friends down King Street all in college cricket caps (dark blue and white) and hearing people say as they passed, “Those are Upper Canada boys.” Oh my! Eh what! I remember how my bygone friend Chic Sales, that great artist of the comic, told me that the first time he heard someone say in a hotel rotunda, “Look, that’s Chic Sales!” he threw his head up so high with pride that he tripped his left foot behind his right and made a sort of stage fall into the air. Chic had the imitation down to perfection. That is exactly how my twelve-year-old associates and I felt when someone said, “Upper Canada boys!” Then came the springtime and the cricket season of May and June. The college grounds all beautiful, great days on Saturday afternoons, cricket matches and heroes, and receptions with great talk, ice cream and cakes, and then, ecstatic beyond wonder, the close of the term, the school breaking up in a torrent of oratory, exhorting us to be gentlemen, packing trunks, and off to take the train to go home for the holidays. My brothers and I went down to the little old Toronto and Nipissing Station at the foot of Berkeley Street two hours before the train was due to be made up and “fooled around” among the cinder head beside the bay, waiting to start home, and there wasn’t a dull minute in all the two hours.
We came back as boarders that autumn, and after that, as I said before, I stayed on at Upper Canada, passing all through the school as a boarder and as a day boy and finally as a boarder again. My brother Jim dropped out to go to “my remarkable uncle” in Winnipeg, and Dick presently grew so tall that they couldn’t keep him there any longer. Dick couldn’t learn anything by any known academic process. They promoted him out of the first form into the second on the ground that he was nearly six feet high, but they refused to carry him beyond six feet. So Dick dropped out and back to the old farm, now occupied only by Old Tommy, the hired man. Then presently there came the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, which brought after it that autumn an outbreak of placards calling for recruits for the Northwest Mounted Police. Dick ran true to form, made his way to Ottawa, was accepted, and then off to the Regina barracks. My younger brother Charlie filled in in his place at Upper Canada as a day boy alongside of me.
I look back to the education I received in those years and I find in it plenty to think about. It was what is, or was, called a splendid classical education, as it was for a couple of hundred years, in England and America, looked on as the mainstay of national culture, the keystone in the arch of civilization; and before that in England it was the only kind of education and it was embedded deep in theology and so intimately connected with the Church that it was inseparable from it. Any form of education not connected with the Church was held to belong to the devil, as witness the education for which Oxford in its infant years imprisoned or secluded Roger Bacon for ten years. There was the Church’s education and the devil’s education. In the long run the devil’s education has won out. Any nation whose leaders are not trained in it will no longer survive; any nation whose life is not based on it, whose people are not equipped with it, cannot last a generation. In other words, the “survival quality” that was attributed to the old classical education has passed away, or is visibly passing away, with the generation of the present leaders.
People who admit they know nothing of the history of education among English-speaking peoples may tolerate a few words of explanation. All through the Middle Ages the only education (we are speaking broadly) was that of the Church. It was carried on in Latin. When the modern age began, say about A.D. 1500, and printing multiplied books, education widened and included a lot of what had been the education of the Greek and Romans, such as the philosophy of Aristotle, which in no way contradicts the teaching of the Church and could be read side by side with it, and the great poems and plays of the Greeks, of Homer and the tragedians, and those of Rome, such as Vergil’s account of how Aeneas escaped from the fall of Troy and founded the Roman nation, and the great histories, Thucydides’ History of Greece, and the works of Livy and Tacitus and Julius Caesar in Latin of Demosthenes and of Cicero. All this made such an imposing body of literature, especially when set off in the new glory of print on vellum, that there was in vernacular English, or indeed in any vernacular, nothing like it at all. It was so to speak the world’s literature, containing all the wisdom of the world. Even when people in England such as Shakespeare began to write things that were bitter no one knew it or admitted it. Many people still don’t. A Greek professor, especially if growing old and apt to sit under a tree and fall asleep over Theocritus, will tell you, of course, that Greek literature is unsurpassed. Nor can you contradict him, since you don’t know it except by telling him that the Chinese classics are better still.
So here then was the education that went into the rising glory of England and with the earliest beginnings of the United States. Oddly enough it carried with it a fringe, which kept growing and expanding, of mathematics and physics that had not been part of the education of the Greeks at large. The Greeks abhorred anything practical (just as Oxford one hundred years ago tried to ignore “stinks,” meaning chemistry), and they never had any decent system of calculation by numbers on paper, so that Greek mathematics was queer, odd, ingenious stuff, as if one worked out puzzles for puzzles’ sake. It was complicated and difficult enough, as when they speculated on the kind of curves made by slicing through a cone (conic sections), an enquiry carried on “just for fun” in their time. Only one part of their Greek mathematics, the art of field measurement, or geometry, was especially developed into a complete and rounded form, particularly in Egypt, in the great Greek centre of learning in Alexandria. This was because in Egypt, with each annual flood of the Nile, land measurement by sight lines had a special importance. Hence the treatise of Euclid came into our education intact and stayed there till into the present century.
To what the Greeks had of mathematics, the new English classical education, as it got consolidated after, say, A.D. 1500, added all that went with the wonderful system of calculating by giving figures a “place value” (so that, for example, the figure two may mean two, or twenty, or two hundred, and so on). We are so accustomed to this that we take it for granted and no longer see how wonderful it is. The Greeks and Romans and all the ancient nations fooled round with it and got even as close to it as the method of counting of beads on strings, et cetera, but they never learned how to put it on paper and so make the figures add and subtract and multiply in our present marvellous and simple method of columns and places. It was the Hindus who worked this out, but the Arabs put the cap on it by inventing the use of the figure zero, the round 0 for nothing that means everything.
Luckily for English education, mathematics developed side by side with classical education not as an equal partner but as an adjacent. This was partly by the genius of the nation which tends to produce men of exception as seen in Napier, who invented logarithms, Isaac Newton, who invented calculus and went, in an effortless way, beyond all known boundaries, and Halley, who invented Isaac Newton by keeping him at work. Nor could even Halley keep him at it for good. It is odd that Newton, who lived to a great old age, was all done with science relatively early in life, pursued no more discoveries, and felt proud to be in Royal Service as the Master of the Mint.
But what made mathematics for England was its connection with navigation. When the era of colonial expansion brought England on to the seven seas, navigation by means of mathematical astronomy became the peculiar privilege and pursuit of the British. The Portuguese and the Spanish had known only the beginnings of it. Columbus was really, in spite of some tall talk on his part, quite ignorant. He merely threw a chunk of wood overboard to see how fast the ship was going. The English forged ahead. The Elizabethans “took the sun.” Isaac Newton himself explained that longitude at sea could be accurately known each day at noon as soon as someone could invent a clock to keep time at sea. Even at that the admiralty prize of ten thousand pounds went begging till late in the eighteenth century. But with the use of chronometrics and sextants and the compilations of astronomical tables worked out on shore and applied at sea, and ingenious mathematical tables of logarithms to apply them with, British navigators led the world. It was the British Government that sent out astronomers with captains to observe the transit of Venus in the South Pacific in 1769. After which the use of mathematics got mixed up with the glory of Old England and Britannia ruling the waves, and no scheme of English education was complete without it. Not that English schools took to it gladly. We are told (in the Memoirs of General Lyttelton) that even at Eton the study of mathematics was tolerated rather than appreciated as late as the sixties of the last century.
