TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL-DAYS. ΤΟ MRS. ARNOLD, OF FOX HOWE, THIS BOOK IS (WITHOUT HER PERMISSION) Dedicated BY THE AUTHOR, if he does, he is an outlaw-he has no protector but public opinion, and that a public opinion of the very lowest grade, the opinion of rude and ignorant boys. "What do schoolboys know of those deep questions of moral and physical philosophy, of the anatomy of mind and body, by which the treatment of a child should be regulated? "Why should the laws of civilization be suspended for schools? Why should boys be left to herd together with no law but that of force or cunning? What would become of society if it were constituted on the same principles? It would be plunged into anarchy in a week. "One of our judges, not long ago, refused to extend the protection of the law to a child who had been ill-treated at school, If a party of navvies had given him a licking, and he had brought the case before a magistrate, what would he have WHO OWES MORE THAN HE CAN EVER ACKNOWLEDGE thought if the magistrate had refused to protect him, on the ground that if such cases were brought before him he might have fifty a-day from one town only? OR FORGET TO HER AND HERS. "MY DEAR ——, "I blame myself for not having earlier suggested whether you could not, in another edition of Ton. Brown or another story, denounce more decidedly the evils of bullying at schools. You have indeed done so, and in the best way, by making Flashman the bully the most contemptible character; but in that scene of the tossing, and similar passages, you hardly suggest that such things should be stopped-and do not suggest any means of putting an end to them. "This subject has been on my mind for years. It fills me with grief and misery to think what weak and nervous children go through at school-how their health and character for life "It was some comfort to be under the old delusion that fear and nervousness can be enred by violence, and that knocking about will turn a timid boy into a bold one. But now we know well enough that is not true. Gradually training a timid child to do bold acts would be most desirable; but frightening him and ill-treating him will not make him courageous. Every medical man knows the fatal effects of terror, or agitation, or excitement, to nerves that are over-sensitive. There are are destroyed by rough and brutal treatment. of Arthur. different kinds of courage, as you have shown in your character "A boy may have moral courage, and a finely organized brain and nervous system. Such a boy is calculated, if judiciously educated, to be a great, wise, and useful man; but he may not possess animal courage; and one night's tossing, or that his usefulness is spoiled for life. I verily believe that hundreds of noble organizations are thus destroyed every year. Horse-jockeys have learnt to be wiser; they know that a highly nervous horse is utterly destroyed by harshness. A groom who tried to cure a shying horse by roughness and violence would be discharged as a brute and a fool. A man who would regulate his watch with a crowbar would be considered an ass. But the person who thinks a child of delicate and nervous organization can be made bold by bullying is no better. bullying, may produce such an injury to his brain and nerves "He can be made bold by healthy exercise and games and sports; but that is quite a different thing. And even these games and sports should bear some proportion to his strength and capacities. “I very much doubt whether small children should play with big ones-the rush of a set of great fellows at foot-ball, or the speed of a cricket-ball sent by a strong hitter, must be very alarming to a mere child, to a child who might stand up boldly enough among children of his own size and height. Look at half-a-dozen small children playing cricket by themselves; how feeble are their blows, how slowly they bowl. You can measure in that way their capacity. "Tom Brown and his eleven were bold enough in playing against an eleven of about their own calibre: but I suspect they would have been in a precious funk if they had played against eleven giants, whose bowling bore the same proportion to theirs that theirs does to the small children's above. "To return to the tossing. I must say I think some means might be devised to enable schoolboys to go to bed in quietness and peace-and that some means ought to be devised and enforced. No good, moral or physical, to those who bully or those who are bullied, can ensue from such scenes as take place in the dormitories of schools. I suspect that British wisdom and ingenuity are sufficient to discover a remedy for this evil, if directed in the right direction. The fact is, that the condition of a small boy at a large school is one of peculiar hardship and suffering. He is entirely at the mercy of proverbially the roughest things in the universe great schoolboys; and he is deprived of the protection which the weak have in civilized society: for he may not complain; "Now I agree with you that a constant supervision of the master is not desirable or possible--and that telling tales, or constantly referring to the master for protection, would only produce ill-will and worse treatment. "If I rightly understand your book, it is an effort to improve the condition of schools by improving the tone of morality and public opinion in them. But your book contains the most indubitable proofs that the condition of the younger boys at public schools, except under the rare dictatorship of an old Brooke, is one of great hardship and suffering. "A timid and nervous boy is from morning till night in a state of bodily fear. He is constantly tormented when trying to learn his lessons. His play-hours are occupied in fagging, in a horrid funk of cricket-balls and footballs, and the violent sport of creatures who, to him, are giants. He goes to his bed in fear and trembling,-worse than the reality of the rough treatment to which he is perhaps subjected. "I believe there is only one complete remedy. It is not in magisterial supervision; nor in telling tales; nor in raising the tone of public opinion among schoolboys-but in the separation of boys of different ages into different schools. There should be at least three different classes of schools, the first for boys from nine to twelve; the second for boys from twelve to fifteen; the third for those above fifteen. And these schools should be in different localities. "There ought to be a certain amount of supervision by the master at those times when there are special occasions for bullying, e.g. in the long winter evenings, and when the boys are congregated together in the bedrooms. Surely it cannot be an impossibility to keep order and protect the weak at such times. Whatever evils might arise from supervision, they could hardly be greater than those produced by a system which divides boys into despots and slaves. "Ever yours, very truly, F. D." The question of how to adapt English public school education to nervous and sensitive boys (often the highest and noblest subjects which that education has to deal with) ought to be looked at from every point of view. I therefore add a few extracts from the letter of an old friend and school-fellow, than whom no man in England is better able to speak on the subject. : "What's the use of sorting the boys by ages, unless you do so by strength and who are often the real bullies? The strong young dog of fourteen, while the victim may be one year or two years older. I deny the fact about the bedrooms: there is trouble at times, and always will be; but so there is in nurseries;- my little girl, who looks like an angel, was bullying the smallest twice to-day. Bullying must be fought with in other ways,-by getting not only the Sixth to put it down, but the lower fellows to scorn it, and by eradicating mercilessly the incorrigible; and a master who really cares for his fellows is pretty sure to know instinctively who in his house are likely to be bullied, and, knowing a fellow to be really victimized and harassed, I am sure that he can stop it if he is resolved. There are many kinds of annoyance-sometimes of real cutting persecution for righteousness's sake-that he can't stop; no more could all the ushers in the world; but he can do very much in many ways to make the shafts of the wicked pointless. "But though, for quite other reasons, I don't like to see very young boys launched at a public school, and though I don't deny (I wish I could) the existence from time to time of bullying, I deny its being a constant condition of school life, and still more, the possibility of meeting it by the means proposed. "I don't wish to understate the amount of bullying that goes on, but my conviction is that it must be fought, like all school evils, but it more than any, by dynamics rather than mechanics, by getting the fellows to respect themselves and one another, rather than by sitting by them with a thick stick." And now, having broken my resolution never to write a Preface, there are just two or three things which I should like to say a word about. 66 Several persons, for whose judgment I have the highest respect, while saying very kind things about this book, have added, that the great fault of it is 'too much preaching;" but they hope I shall amend in this matter should I ever write again. Now this I most distinctly decline to do. Why, my whole object in writing at all was to get the chance of preaching! When a man comes to my time of life and has his bread to make, and very little time to spare, is it likely that he will spend almost the whole of his yearly vacation in writing a story just to amuse people? I think not. At any rate, I wouldn't do so myself. The fact is, that I can scarcely ever call on one of my contemporaries now-a-days without running across a boy already at school, or just ready to go there, whose bright looks and supple limbs remind me of his father, and our first meeting in old times. I can scarcely keep the Latin Grammar out of my own house any longer and the sight of sons, nephews, and godsons, playing trat-bat-and-ball and reading Robinson Crusoe, makes one ask oneself whether there isn't something one would like to say to them before they take their first plunge into the stream of life, away from their own homes, or while they are yet shivering after the first plunge. My sele object in writing was to preach to boys: if ever I write again, it will be to preach to some other age. I can't see that a man has any business to write at all unless he has something which he thoroughly believes and wants to preach about. If he has this, and the chance of delivering himself of it, let him by all means put it in the shape in which it will be most likely to get a hearing; but let him never be so carried away as to forget that preaching is his object. A black soldier in a West Indian regiment, tied up to receive a couple of dozen for drunkenness, sobriety in future, "Cap'n, if you preachee, preachee ; cried out to his captain, who was exhorting him to and if floggee, floggee; but no preachee and floggee too!" to which his captain might have replied, "No, Pompey, I must preach whenever I see a chance of being listened to, which I never did before; so now you must have it altogether; and I hope you may remember some of it." 66 There is one point which has been made by several of the reviewers who have noticed this book, and it is one which, as I am writing a Preface, I cannot pass over. They have stated that the Rugby undergraduates they remember at the Universities were a solemn array," "boys turned into men before their time," "a semi-political, semi-sacerdotal fraternity,' &c., giving the idea that Arnold turned out a set of young square-toes who wore long-fingered black gloves and talked with a snuffle. I can only say that their acquaintance must have been limited and exceptional. For I am sure that every one who has had anything like large or continuous knowledge of boys brought up at Rugby, from the times of which this book treats down to this day, will bear me out in saying, that the mark by which you may know them, For those who believe with me in public school education, is, their genial and hearty freshness and youthfulness the fact stated in the following extract from a note of Mr. of character. They lose nothing of the boy that is G. de Bunsen will be hailed with pleasure, especially now that worth keeping, but build up the man upon it. our alliance with Prussia (the most natural and healthy is their differentia as Rugby boys; and if they never European alliance for Protestant England) is likely to be so much stronger and deeper than heretofore. Speaking of this had it, or have lost it, it must be not because they book, he says, "The author is mistaken in saying that public were at Rugby, but in spite of their having been schools, in the English sense, are peculiar to England. Schul there; the stronger it is in them the more deeply Pforte (in the Prussian province of Saxony) is similar in antiquity and institutions. I like his book all the more for you may be sure have they drunk of the spirit of having been there for five years." their school. This 2 THE BROWN FAMILY-TOM BROWN'S BIRTHPLACE. and put up with, if you and I are to jog on comfortably together. You shall hear at once what sort of folk the Browns are, at least my branch of them; and then, if you don't like the sort, why cut the concern at once, and let you and I cry quits before either of us can grumble at the other. In the first place, the Browns are a fighting family. One may question their wisdom, or wit, or beauty, but about their fight there can be no question. Wherever hard knocks of any kind, visible or invisible, are going, there the Brown who is nearest must shove in his carcase. And these carcases for the most part answer very well to the characteristic propensity; they are a square-headed and snakenecked generation, broad in the shoulder, deep in the chest, and thin in the flank, carrying no lumber. Then for clanship, they are as bad as Highlanders; it is amazing the belief they have in one another. With them there is nothing like the Browns, to the third and fourth generation. "Blood is thicker than water," is one of their pet sayings. They can't be happy unless they are always meeting one another. Never were such people for family gatherings, which, were you a stranger, or sensitive, you might think had better not have been gathered together. For during the whole time of their being together they luxuriate in telling one another their minds on whatever subject turns up; and their minds are wonderfully antagonistie, and all their opinions are downright beliefs. Till you've been among them some time and understand them, you can't think but that they are quarrelling. Not a bit of it: they love and respect one another ten times the more after a good set family arguing bout, and go back, one to his curacy, another to his chambers, and another to his regiment, freshened for work, and more than ever convinced that the Browns are the height of company. He certainly did teach us-thank God for it!that we could not cut our life into slices and say, "In this slice your actions are indifferent, and you needn't trouble your heads about them one way or another; but in this slice mind what you are about, for they are important"-a pretty muddle we should have been in had he done so. He taught us that, in this wonderful world, no boy or man can tell which of his actions is indifferent and which not; that This family training too, combined with their turn by a thoughtless word or look we may lead astray a for combativeness, makes them eminently quixotic. brother for whom Christ died. He taught us that They can't let anything alone which they think going life is a whole, made up of actions and thoughts and THE Browns have become illustrious by the pen wrong. They must speak their mind about it, annoy longings, great and small, noble and ignoble; there- of Thackeray and the pencil of Doyle, within the ing all easy-going folk; and spend their time and fore the only true wisdom for boy or man is to bring memory of the young gentlemen who are now money in having a tinker at it, however hopeless the the whole life into obedience to Him whose world matriculating at the Universities. Notwithstanding job. It is an impossibility to a Brown to leave the we live in, and who has purchased us with His blood; the well-merited but late fame which has now fallen most disreputable lame dog on the other side of a and that whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever we upon them, any one at all acquainted with the family stile. Most other folk get tired of such work. The do, we are to do all in His name and to His glory; must feel, that much has yet to be written and said old Browns, with red faces, white whiskers, and bald in such teaching, faithfully, as it seems to me, follow- before the British nation will be properly sensible of heads, go on believing and fighting to a green-old ing that of Paul of Tarsus, who was in the habit how much of its greatness it owes to the Browns.. For age. They have always a crotchet going, till the old of meaning what he said, and who laid down this centuries, in their quiet, dogged, home spun way, they man with the scythe reaps and garners them away for standard for every man and boy in his time. I have been subduing the earth in most English troublesome old boys as they are. think it lies with those who say that such teaching counties, and leaving their mark in American forests will not do for us now, to show why a teacher in the and Australian uplands. Wherever the fleets and nineteenth century is to preach a lower standard than armies of England have won renown, there stalwart sons of the Browns have done yeomen's work. With the yew bow and cloth-yard shaft at Cressy and Agincourt-with the brown bill and pike under the brave Lord Willoughby-with culverin and demiculverin against Spaniards and Dutchmen-with hand-grenade and sabre, and musket, and bayonet, under Rodney and St. Vincent, Wolfe and Moore, Nelson and Wellington, they have carried their lives in their hands; getting hard knocks and hard work in plenty, which was on the whole what they looked for, and the best thing for them; and little praise or pudding, which indeed they, and most of us, are better without. Talbots and Stanleys, St. Maurs, and suchlike folk, have led armies and made laws time out of mind; but those noble families would be somewhat astounded-if the accounts ever came to be fairly taken-to find how small their work for England has been by the side of that of the Browns. However, I won't say that the Reviewers have not a certain plausible ground for their dicta. For a short time after a boy has taken up such a life as Arnold would have urged upon him, he has a hard time of it. He finds his judgment often at fault, his body and intelleet running away with him into all sorts of pitfalls, and himself coming down with a crash. The more seriously he buckles to his work the oftener these mischanees seem to happen; and in the dust of his tumbles and struggles, unless he is a very extraordinary boy, he may often be too severe on his comrades, may think he sees evil in things innocent, may give offence when he never meant it. At this stage of his career, I take it, our Reviewer comes across him, and, not looking below the surface (as a Reviewer ought to do), at once sets the poor boy down for a prig and a Pharisee, when in all likelihood he is one of the humblest and truest and most childlike of the Reviewer's acquaintance. But let our Reviewer come across him again in a year or two, when the "thoughtful life" has become habitual to him, and fits him as easily as his skin; and, if he be honest, I think he will see cause to reconsider his judgment. For he will find the boy grown into a man, enjoying every-day life, as no man can who has not found out whence comes the capacity for enjoyment, and Who is the Giver of the least of the good things of this world-humble, as no man can be who has not proved his own powerlessness to do right in the smallest act which he ever had to do-tolerant, as no man can be who does not live daily and hourly in the knowledge of how Perfect Love is for ever about his path, and bearing with and upholding him. 1 "To him (Arnold) and his admirers we owe the substitution of the word earnest for its predecessor 'serious.""-Edin burgh Review, No. 217, p. 183. And the most provoking thing is, that no failures knock them up, or make them hold their hands, or think you, or me, or other sane people in the right. Failures slide off them like July rain off a duck's back feathers. Jem and his whole family turn out bad, and cheat them one week, and the next they are doing the same thing for Jack; and when he goes to the treadmill, and his wife and children to the workhouse, they will be on the look-out for Bill to take his place. However, it is time for us to get from the general to the particular; so, leaving the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets, and whose general diffusion I take to be the chief cause of that empire's stability, let us at once fix our attention upon the small nest of Browns in which our hero was hatched, and which dwelt in that portion of the Royal county of Berks which is called the Vale of White Horse. Most of you have probably travelled down the Great Western Railway as far as Swindon. Those These latter, indeed, have until the present genera- of you who did so with their eyes open, have been tion rarely been sung by poet, or chronicled by sage. aware, soon after leaving the Didcot station, of a They have wanted their "Sacer vates," having been fine range of chalk hills running parellel with the too solid to rise to the top by themselves, and not railway on the left-hand side as you go down, and having been largely gifted with the talent of catching distant some two or three miles, more or less, from hold of, and holding on tight to, whatever good things the line. The highest point in the range is the happened to be going, the foundation of the fortunes White Horse Hill, which you come in front of just of so many noble families. But the world goes on its before you stop at the Shrivenham station. If you way, and the wheel turns, and the wrongs of the love English scenery and have a few hours to spare, Browns, like other wrongs, seem in a fair way to get you can't do better, the next time you pass, than stop righted. And this present writer having for many at the Farringdon-road or Shrivenham station, and years of his life been a devout Brown-worshipper, and make your way to that highest point. And those who moreover having the honour of being nearly connected with an eminently respectable branch of the great Brown family, is anxious, so far as in him lies, to help the wheel over, and throw his stone on to the pile. However, gentle reader, or simple reader, whichever you may be, lest you should be led to waste your precious time upon these pages, I make so bold as at once to tell you the sort of folk you'll have to meet care for the vague old stories that haunt country sides all about England, will not, if they are wise, be content with only a few hours' stay: for, glorious as the view is, the neighbourhood is yet more interesting for its relics of bygone times. I only know two English neighbourhoods thoroughly, and in each, within a circle of five miles, there is enough of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life. believe this to be the case almost throughout the I YOUNG ENGLAND-WHITE HORSE country, but each has a special attraction, and none can be richer than the one I am speaking of and going to introduce you to very particularly; for on this subject I must be prosy; so those that don't care for England in detail may skip the chapter. Oh young England! young England! You who are born into these racing railroad times, when there's a Great Exhibition, or some monster sight, every year; and you can get over a couple of thousand miles of ground for three pound ten, in a five weeks' holiday; why don't you know more of your own birthplaces You're all in the ends of the earth, it seems to me, as soon as you get your necks out of the educational collar, for midsummer holidays, long vacations, or what not. Going round Ireland with a return ticket, in a fortnight; dropping your copies of Tennyson on the tops of Swiss mountains; or pulling down the Danube in Oxford racing-boats. And when you get home for a quiet fortnight, you turn the steam off, and lie on your backs in the paternal garden, surrounded by the last batch of books from Mudie's library, and half bored to death. Well, well! I know it has its good side. You all patter French more or less, and perhaps German; you have seen men and cities, no doubt, and have your opinions, such as they are, about schools of painting, high art, and all that; have seen the pictures at Dresden and the Louvre, and know the taste of sour krout. All I say is, you don't know your own lanes that confounded Great Western hadn't carried away But to return to the said Vale of White Horse, the you never heard of this before; but wonder or not, as you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England, which wiser folk than you know nothing of, and care nothing for. Yes, it's a magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates and ditch and mounds, all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old rogues left it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land, some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't bear anybody to over-look them, and made their eyrie. The ground falls away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world? You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious. There is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called; and here it lies, just as the Romans left it, except that cairn on the east side, left by Her Majesty's corps of Sappers and Miners the other day, when they and the Engineer officer had finished their sojourn there, and their surveys for the Ordnance Map of Berkshire. It is altogether a place that you won't forget,-a place to open a man's soul and make him prophesy, as he looks down on that great Vale spread out as the garden of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind; and to the right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance, along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway" ("the Rudge" as the country folk and woods and fields. Though you may be chock-full of science, not one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or bee-orchis, which grow in the next wood, or on the down three miles off, or what the bog-bean and wood-sage are good for. And as for the country legends, the stories of the old gable-ended farmhouses, the place where the last skirmish was fought in the civil wars, where the parish butts stood, where the last highwayman turned to bay, where the last ghost was laid by the parson, they're gone out of date altogether. Now, in my time, when we got home by the old coach, which put us down at the cross-roads with our boxes, the first day of the holidays, and had been driven off by the family coachman, singing "Dulce domum" at the top of our voices, there we were, fixtures, till black Monday came round. We had to cut out our own amusements within a walk or a ride of home. And so we got to know all the country folk, and their ways and songs and stories, by heart; and went over the fields, and woods, and hills, again and again, till we made friends of them all. We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys; and you're young cosmopolites, belonging to all counties and no countries. No doubt it's all right, I dare say it is. This is the day of large views and glorious humanity, and all that; but I wish back-sword play hadn't gone out in the Vale of White Horse, and that WHITE HORSE HILL. and ganders of the people; and these roads are old-call it), keeping straight along the highest back of the And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west, and are on the Ash-down. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for Englishmen, more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our One of the moralists whom we sat under in our Alfred won his great battle, the battle of Ashdown youth,-was it the great Richard Swiveller, or Mr. ("Escendum" in the chroniclers), which broke the Stiggins ?-says, "We are born in a vale, and must Danish power, and made England a Christian land. take the consequences of being found in such a The Danes held the camp and the slope where we are situation." These consequences, I for one am ready standing the whole crown of the hill in fact. "The to encounter. I pity people who weren't born in a heathen had beforehand seized the higher ground," as vale. I don't mean a flat country, but a vale: that old Asser says, having wasted everything behind them is, a flat country bounded by hills. The having from London, and being just ready to burst down on your hill always in view if you choose to turn the fair vale, Alfred's own birthplace and heritage. towards him, that's the essence of a vale. There he And up the heights came the Saxons, as they did at is for ever in the distance, your friend and companion; the Alma. "The Christians led up their line from you never lose him as you do in hilly districts. the lower ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree, marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have seen)." Bless the old chronicler! does he think nobody ever saw the "single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day, just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since; an old single And then what a hill is the White Horse Hill! There it stands right up above all the rest, nine hundred feet above the sea, and the boldest, bravest shape for a chalk hill that you ever saw. Let us go up to the top of him, and see what is to be found there. Ay, you may well wonder and think it odd |