Sydney Smith | Page 3

obedience is extremely useful in forming the

disposition. Submission to tyranny lays the foundation of hatred,
suspicion, cunning, and a variety of odious passions....
"The wretchedness of school tyranny is trifling enough to a man who
only contemplates it, in ease of body and tranquillity of mind, through
the medium of twenty intervening years; but it 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