Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 827
Now when this happened there was in the class, somewhere on a back bench, a boy of thirteen whose name was Arthur Currie who had entered the school that autumn. He was destined to become one of the celebrated men of our Canadian Dominion, Arthur Currie, later on General Sir Arthur Currie, Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian Overseas Forces of the Great War, the victor of Vimy Ridge, a really great man. I had occasion to know it, as I served under him for the thirteen years during which he was principal of McGill. I used in those years, in public speeches, to refer to the parallel fact that Aristotle had taught Alexander the Great of Greece, and to say that in my opinion Aristotle had nothing on me. And since like all other speakers I prefer an old joke to a new, I worked this one overtime for thirteen years.
As a matter of fact, I didn’t know General Currie as a boy at Strathroy School, but, with his usual and phenomenal memory, he recalled me. When he came to McGill I went, as in duty bound, to pay my respects to him in his office, and I said, for I had just been reading, as had everybody, his full biography in the newspapers, “I think, General Currie, I must have had the honour of teaching you when I was a teacher in training at Strathroy in 1888.” He gave me a closer and more scrutinizing look. “Why, yes,” he said, “I recognize you now; you were the young man to whom Jimmy Wetherell, the principal, said that he admired your brains more than your manners.”
The work of the teachers-in-training course was easy and agreeable and companionable. Hard it was certainly not, and it was useful, provided that the quantity was kept down to the proportions then existing and not extended out of all reason, as I think it to be today. As examination work we had to study two or three books, one on school management, with discussion of such things as ventilation, et cetera, and one on the outline of the history of education. This last was very interesting, but a little of it went a long way. I should think that any trained student could get all that he needed of the history of education in a week of reading, I mean as far as its utility in actual teaching goes. Beyond that he could study it till he was grey with increasing interest to himself. The trouble with so many of our new curriculum subjects is that they confuse what is agreeable reading for old men with what is necessary reading for young ones. As I see it, the whole of sociology lies in this field, a wonderful subject of reflection for riper years but hopelessly artificial as a class study for youth.
The training school ended with examinations, a school entertainment, and good-bye and good will all round. I found myself a qualified secondary-school teacher of the province of Ontario and a specialist in Latin, Greek, French, German, and English. I presume that I still am.
Being a specialist is one thing, getting a job is another. So I found myself back at the old farm with nothing to do but send in applications for such teaching jobs as I could hear of or find advertised in the papers. Among other things, I had the honour of being an applicant for a job on the staff of the newly founded and not yet opened Bishop Ridley College, at St. Catherine’s, a school that has since traced a long and honourable record of over half a century. I doubt very much whether my application, to use an upstate expression, caused any headache to the trustees, seeing that my application for the position of modern-language master went in alongside of that of H. J. Cody, the successful applicant who had just taken his degree in arts that year. Cody had had a phenomenal record universally first in everything, so that in his year the lists in all the languages, as in English and history, began (1) H. J. Cody, and should have added, And the rest nowhere. He began here that long and distinguished life of service to the Church and to education which sees him now as president of the University of Toronto. I remember, by the way, when we, his college contemporaries, heard that Cody had gone into the Church, we looked on it as a case of a good man gone astray. We realised the success he was thus renouncing as a great criminal lawyer or criminal politician, for his college eminence was so outstanding that he could easily have reached out for any of the great prizes of life. There was no other way for any college contemporary to escape competing against Cody except to take a dive clear into another faculty, and even at that he would be apt in medicine to come up alongside the similar record of Lewellys F. Barker, later on the famous Dr. Barker of Baltimore, who was always first in every class in each subject. I remember that years later I asked Barker if this was literally true and he told me that there had been an exception, that once he had been put into third class, and that in the very subject which he regarded as his best and on which he had written voluminous examination answers, all, he was certain, correct. Barker told me further that very soon after the occurrence, when he had come to know the examiner in question as a fellow doctor and fellow examiner, he asked him if he recalled how and why the third class happened. “Most certainly,” answered the examiner. “I put you in third class because I wanted answers not a whole damn book.” Those who know the vagaries of examiners will realise the truth of the story. Barker carried the bitterness of it throughout the years and never forgave the injustice. He was fond of telling the story, and at his death it appeared in many of the notices written of his career.
Meanwhile I was trying in vain in January 1889 to get a job in a school. Unexpectedly I got one at the beginning of February through the good offices of an old friend, the “Mr. Park” who had been for some years our tutor on the old farm. Park, after his tutorship ended in 1881, had gone back to college, finished his course in arts, and had gone into teaching and at this time occupied the position of headmaster of Uxbridge High School. He wrote to me to say that a modern-language teacher was needed at the school and if I applied for the post he didn’t doubt that his recommendation would get it for me. This turned out to be true, and in due course I drove over to Uxbridge and found myself installed as teacher of modern languages in the bright new red brick high school that had recently been added to the town’s attractions.
Uxbridge was then a town of about fifteen hundred people, situated nowhere in particular on the high ground between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe, one of those agricultural centres that grew up around a gristmill and a sawmill when the settlers moved in, grew to a certain extent, and then planted trees in the street to replace the shattered forests and fell asleep under the trees. Uxbridge, as its name shows and as the adjacent township of Brock indicates, belongs among the settlements that followed the Great War (once so called) when the Battle of Waterloo and Lord Uxbridge as a Waterloo hero and General Brock’s heroic death at Queenstown Heights were memories of yesterday. Around the town was settled a fine class of British people, and as beside my village of Sutton, its main street, with a flood of light from the shop-windows, looked quite metropolitan. It had the usual equipment of taverns and churches but was a clean, bright, orderly little place, dull as ditch-water but quite unaware of the fact.
From the old farm to Uxbridge was a distance of eighteen miles. Today, travelling in a motorcar over gravelled roads, there is hardly time to get well settled down in the car in a trip for such a distance. But in 1889 it was a real pilgrimage, not to be done there-and-back in a day, up and down over one sand hill after another, in winter through hill cuttings blocked with snow, in spring among sunken roads covered with spring floods. Nowadays, of course, all such distances have shrunk to nothing; Toronto Sunday trippers ran out to and beyond Uxbridge to fish in the streams or drive through Uxbridge (apart from the Main Street) itself without noticing that it is there. Such as it was, the town became my home for the next half year, and I owe it all the gratitude that goes with the payment of a first salary.
I had no trouble with teaching from the very start, no difficulty in doing it, no question of discipline. There are certain people who from the moment they step into a classroom present themselves as easy marks to pupils inclined to disorder, who even provoke disorder among pupils inclined to silence and attention. I remember such among those who taught me at Upper Canada College as does everyone else among those who taught him at his school. Very generally the recollection of such incompetents is among the fondest memories retained across the years. Pupils or students look back to the memory of “old Billy,” or whoever it was who couldn’t keep order, with a singular gratitude, with a laughing memory that is all attention. Such incompetents cannot be trained out of it. They are hopeless from the start. I remember (years later than Uxbridge) how General Currie at McGill undertook to explain the principles of class discipline to a young, incompetent teacher attached to my department whose students were turning his classroom into a bear garden. “Mr. Smith,” said the general, “you can’t keep order. Now listen, you were a soldier in my army, weren’t you?” “Yes sir.” “In France, weren’t you?” “Yes sir.” “Well, then, can’t you take the first of these miserable young —— (General Currie here used his own private vocabulary) who starts trouble in the class out on the campus and try to kill him?” “Yes sir,” said Mr. Smith. Yet within another month or so the class had Mr. Smith beaten to a standstill. He had to give up teaching and was out in a cruel world without resources. I have often wondered what would have happened if Mr. Smith had murdered a McGill student on the campus. But no doubt General Currie was right. The mere intent to murder, the murderous look, was all that was needed. Poor Smith couldn’t command it.
At Uxbridge I didn’t have to murder or threaten to murder any of my pupils. Instinctively I went at class order in the right way, and when you know how, it is very simple. It is the beginning which counts. Face the class. Begin talking to them at once. Get to business, not with one of them but with all of them. Talk: don’t mumble. Face them: don’t turn your back. Start work: don’t get fumbling about with a class list of names and a roll call, which you may pronounce correctly or may not. Leave all that till later. Start work, and, once started, they are lost as far as disorder goes. In fact they won’t expect any. Above all, don’t try to be funny; feeble teachers attempt a footing of fun as a means of getting together. The real teacher descends to fun only when he has established a sufficient height to descend from.
So there I was with my class, all bright and easy with Pass Matriculation French, out of Pass Matriculation French book, rippling merrily around. As I was only just turned nineteen, the senior pupils were nearly as old as I was, one or two perhaps quite as old and one at least a good deal older. He was preparing for the ministry, and with my help he ultimately got there. The others in the senior class were preparing for Pass Matriculation into the University of Toronto, Arts, Science, or Medicine. Of these, my first pupils, local pride in Uxbridge still honours the memory of Colonel Sharpe who gave his life in the Great War.
The teaching of Matriculation French and German was easy to me because I had been trained in exactly that kind of stuff. In reality it belonged to that futile and worthless brand of teaching French in Ontario which has so long disfigured the otherwise high standard of the province. It was based purely and simply on the final goal of a worthless examination consisting of translating English into French and French into English. Observe the result. Pronunciation didn’t matter. Whether I pronounced well or ill, and whether my class pronounced still worse or rather better, was of no consequence. There was no test in pronunciation, no requirement of reading out loud. Nor did it matter in the least whether they understood French when they heard it spoken. There was no test in dictation, no question and answer, nothing but written French — dead as a dead language. On the other hand, there was a regular egg dance of ingenuity in translating verbal phrases and such back and forward — things like “Give him some of it; do not give him any of it. Speak to me of them; do not speak to me of them,” and so on, endlessly. Anybody who has ever learned to translate in this way will never be able to speak or use French. The English words crowd into his mind. What he does is to think in English and translate into French. In German things are not so bad. The two idioms, being so similar in translation, keep tending to merge into actual use of language, if one will let it do so.
The whole fault with Ontario French arises in the Provincial examination and floods back to the source from that, like water checked by a dam. Once introduce dictation as a test of comprehension and reading aloud as a test of pronunciation, and the whole thing would alter. As it is, Ontario French isn’t in it with French learned out of a phrase book as best one can with pronunciation given by those who know it. In any case, language for use can be learned only word by word and phrase by phrase. We learn to say carte blanche by saying carte blanche; learning off a list of feminines won’t help.
But there is my class waiting. I must get back to them.
My salary was seven hundred dollars a year and seemed a lot of money: $59.33 a month. In a way it was a lot of money. Board in Uxbridge in 1889 was twelve dollars a month, washing about two dollars. All the clothes I would need in a year would represent about one hundred dollars, or eight dollars a month, drinks (meaning, say, a couple of glasses of beer a day, at five cents a glass) about two dollars and a half a month, the bars being closed on Sunday. That was all the necessary expenses, and all the remaining money was extra. One hardly knew what to do with it. There were, of course, no moving pictures, no soda fountains, no motorcars, no paid dances, no slot machines, none of the hundred-and-one odd expenses that make the life of young people today one continuous expenditure of money big or little. I forgot tobacco in my list above: call it a plug of “T and B” once a month at twenty-five cents.
I felt so rich on receipt of my first salary that I hired a “livery rig” (charge one dollar for the trip), a cutter, and drove over to the old farm, one afternoon to go there and back the next. I have always hated the care of horses from my early recollections of chores on the farm, but of course I could, like anybody else, drive a horse if I had to. I remember that a wild blizzard came on that evening with big snowdrifts and that I turned into a farmhouse, half frozen, to thaw out, or to thaw the horse out, I forget which. When I got home I gave ten dollars of my salary to my mother, the first instalment of relief to her finance, seeming like the first relief of Lucknow. It proved to be only the first of plenty, for as the years went by my brothers and I were able to give her help, and then when two or three of us became well off we were able to banish all her money perplexities and give her everything she needed. The long evening of her life, for she lived to be ninety, paid her back dividends on her past devotion. The cottage beside the river which my sister Rosamond built for her use at Sutton remains, a marvel of beauty of site and scene which even the passing motor tourist pauses a moment to admire. My mother lived there in a network of perpetual correspondence and casual visits from children and grandchildren, her house a sort of family centre, a No. 10 Downing Street, reaching out across the continent. She was so habituated to being in debt that, manage as she would, Mother always carried a little cloud of debt along with her. But it made no difference. We wiped it off the slate every now and then and let it go at that. Perhaps, after all, there is more in raising a large family, in spite of all that it entails, than many young women of today are inclined to think.
I worked away contentedly enough at Uxbridge. But of course the situation carried with it the drawback that, as I reckoned it, I was getting nowhere. I had dropped out of college and saw no way to get back and finish the two years towards my degree. To try to save money to do so on my high-school salary would have taken years and years. To settle down and try to make my life and get married and live on a high-school salary was a thing I never thought of for a moment. I tried to do a little odd study at my college books but did not get very far, and in any case teaching every day from nine to four was sufficiently tiring to leave little energy for anything else. Teaching, like anything else, is immensely tiring to a novice; later on it gets less and less so in proportion to one’s ability to teach. But it is never easy, except to people who can’t teach at all or don’t try to.
On such terms I finished out my first half year at Uxbridge and went up to Lake Simcoe for those summer holidays beside the lake which have played such a large part in my life for over half a century. My mother had again rented the old parsonage, the ancient tumble-down habitation of the first parson of Georgina of which I spoke before. I had also a sailboat, acquired in Toronto a year or two before from a remnant of my mother’s temporary affluence and my father’s temporary gains of the Winnipeg boom. It was what was called a double lugger, but I put it into a higher class when I brought it to Lake Simcoe by getting a local farmer boatbuilder to convert it into a single-masted sloop. Operations of this sort, which sound as if they ought to cost a couple of hundred dollars, then represented only about five dollars plus the price of a little paint. That was the first of a series of sailboats of varying sizes and rigs which I sailed on Lake Simcoe and its sister lake, Couchiching, from those days until now.
The marvellous thing of the good old summertime of those days was how little it all cost. I remember some years ago, at my present country house in Orillia, a medical man, a contemporary of mine, explaining to a group of people how he and another medical student used always to take a six weeks’ holiday of summer camping and that all it cost them was twenty-five dollars each. The up-to-date auditors could scarcely believe it, but my medical friend was easily able to prove and over-prove it. He and his fellow students owned between them a canoe and a tent and blankets. So there was their lodging for nothing. For food they had a certain amount of canned beef and canned salmon or sardines, which, along with fish that cost nothing but the easy catching, represented a meal bill of, say, ten cents a day each. For milk they went to farmhouses along the lake and got all they wanted at five cents a quart, and the farm people felt so mean at charging anything that they “threw in” a lot of vegetables; or they bought vegetables and the farm people felt so mean that they threw in the milk; and if the campers came back a second day the farm people threw it all in. So there was their board. For light they had a coal-oil lantern at twenty-five cents a month. As to drinks, it is astonishing how little young people (not old soaks) drank before the days of prohibition: an odd glass or two of beer, when in reach of a bar, at five cents a drink, and a bottle of rye whiskey at seventy-five cents a quart for first-class liquor, carried along in the canoe for a “snifter” in the evening. Calculated this way, one wonders how the two medical students could spend as much as twenty-five dollars each on their trip.
