Sydney Smith | Page 3

is quite as real, and quite as acute, while it lasts, as any of the sufferings of mature life: and the utility of these sufferings, or the price paid in compensation for them, should be clearly made out to a conscientious parent before he consents to expose his children to them."
Lady Holland tells us that in old age her father "used to shudder at the recollections of Winchester," and represented the system prevailing there in his youth as composed of "abuse, neglect, and vice." And, speaking of the experience of lower boys at Public Schools in general, he described it as "an intense system of tyranny, of which the English are very fond, and think it fits a boy for the world; but the world, bad as it is, has nothing half so bad."
"A man gets well pummelled at a Public School; is subject to every misery and every indignity which seventeen years of age can inflict upon nine and ten; has his eye nearly knocked out, and his clothes stolen and cut to pieces; and twenty years afterwards, when he is a chrysalis, and has forgotten the miseries of his grub state, is determined to act a manly part in life, and says, 'I passed through all that myself, and I am determined my son shall pass through it as I have done'; and away goes his bleating progeny to the tyranny and servitude of the Long Chamber or the Large Dormitory. It would surely be much more rational to say, 'Because I have passed through it, I am determined my son shall not pass through it. Because I was kicked for nothing, and cuffed for nothing, and fagged for everything, I will spare all these miseries to my child.'"
And, while he thus condemned the discipline under which he had been reared, he had no better opinion of the instruction. Not that he was an opponent of classical education: on the contrary, he had a genuine and reasoned admiration for "the two ancient languages." He held that, compared to them, "merely as vehicles of thought and passion, all modern languages are dull, ill-contrived, and barbarous." He thought that even the most accomplished of modern writers might still be glad to "borrow descriptive power from Tacitus; dignified perspicuity from Livy; simplicity from Caesar; and from Homer some portion of that light and heat which, dispersed into ten thousand channels, has filled the world with bright images and illustrious thoughts. Let the cultivator of modern literature addict himself to the purest models of taste which France, Italy, and England could supply--he might still learn from Virgil to be majestic, and from Tibullus to be tender; he might not yet look upon the face of nature as Theocritus saw it; nor might he reach those springs of pathos with which Euripides softened the hearts of his audience."
This sound appreciation of what was best in classical literature was accompanied in Sydney Smith by the most outspoken contempt for the way in which Greek and Latin are taught in Public Schools. He thought that schoolmasters encouraged their pupils to "love the instrument better than the end--not the luxury which the difficulty encloses, but the difficulty--not the filbert, but the shell--not what may be read in Greek, but Greek itself?"
"We think that, in order to secure an attention to Homer and Virgil, we must catch up every man, whether he is to be a clergyman or a duke, begin with him at six years of age, and never quit him till he is twenty; making him conjugate and decline for life and death; and so teaching him to estimate his progress in real wisdom as he can scan the verses of the Greek Tragedians."
He desired that boys should obtain a quick and easy mastery over the authors whom they had to read, and on this account he urged that they should be taught by the use of literal and interlinear translations; but "a literal translation, or any translation, of a school-book is a contraband article in English schools, which a schoolmaster would instantly seize, as a custom-house officer would seize a barrel of gin."
Grammar, gerund-grinding, the tyranny of the Lexicon and the Dictionary, had got the schoolboys of England in their grasp, and the boy "was suffocated with the nonsense of grammarians, overwhelmed with every species of difficulty disproportionate to his age, and driven by despair to pegtop or marbles"; while the British Parent stood and spoke thus with himself:--
"Have I read through Lilly? Have I learnt by heart that most atrocious monument of absurdity, the Westminster Grammar? Have I been whipt for the substantives? whipt for the verbs? and whipt for and with the interjections? Have I picked the sense slowly, and word by word, out of Hederich? and shall my son be exempt