The Puppet Show of Memory. Baring Maurice
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had employed base subterfuges to shirk music lessons, and I and Dunglass had insulted dear kind Mr. Morsh. We apologised to Mr. Morsh, and things went more smoothly; but I gave up the organ and had lessons on the pianoforte instead. Mr. Barnby was quite right, but he got no sympathy from the other masters, who continued to treat music as an utterly unimportant side issue which must give way to everything else. The result being, of course, that directly boys found that music lessons made it more difficult for them to get through their work, they gave up learning music. I have never stopped meeting people in after life who are naturally musical, and bitterly regretted not having been taught music seriously as boys; and if parents were wise they would insist on music being taken seriously, if they pay for music lessons for their boys. But as yet parents have done no such thing. Besides music lessons, there was the musical society, which consisted of an orchestra and a chorus, and performed a cantata at the school concert at the end of the half. I belonged to this later, and we sang Parry’s setting to Swinburne’s Eton “Ode” at the Eton Tercentenary Concert in June 1891. Mr. Barnby used to conduct, and had an amazing knack of discovering someone who was not singing, or singing a wrong note. The concerts were, I used to think, intensely enjoyable. There was an atmosphere of triumph about them when the swells used to walk in at the beginning in evening clothes, and coloured scarves, which stood for various achievements either on the river, the cricket or the football field. As each hero walked in there were thunders of applause. Then a treble or an alto used to sing a song that reduced the audience to tears: “Lay my head on your shoulder, Daddy,” or “The Better Land.” There was a boy called Clarke, who used to sing year after year till his voice broke. He had a melting voice. During my last half at Eton there was a boy called Herz, who sang “Si vous n’avez rien à me dire,” with startling dramatic effect, exactly like a French professional. But the best moment of all was when the Captain of the Boats sang the solo in the Eton Boating Song, whether he had got a voice or not, and then the whole school sang the “Carmen Etonense” at the end. What an audience it was! How they yelled and roared when a song pleased them! I used sometimes to go to St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, and Sir Walter Parratt used to let me sit in the organ loft. I heard Bach’s “Passion Music of St. Matthew” in this way, and Sir Walter said: “You must be as still as a mouse.”
I have said there were two kinds of masters: those who were ragged and those who were not. The master who was most ragged was a mathematical master called Mr. Mozley. He punished, but could never stop the stream of impertinent comment that went on through the hours of his instruction. One day we got a boy called Studd to practise “God save the Queen” at his open window. His window looked out on to a yard, and Mr. Mozley’s schoolroom was on the ground floor of the house next door to ours and looked out on to the same yard. The windows were open. It was a hot summer’s afternoon, and the strains of “God save the Queen” came in through Mr. Mozley’s window. Every time the tune began we stood up. “Sit down,” cried the Mo, or Ikey Mo, as he was called. “National Anthem, sir,” we said; “we must stand up.” There was a short pause. Then the tune began again. Again we all stood up. Mr. Mozley rushed to the window, but there was no sign of any violinist. For ten minutes there was no interruption, and then, just when Mr. Mozley, by a shower of punishments, thought he had got the division in hand once more, the tune began again, and again we all stood up with plaintive, resigned faces, as though nobody minded the interruption more than we did.
Another master who was mercilessly ragged was Mr. Bouchier,[4] who was deaf, and afterwards a famous Times correspondent at Sofia—a man who could do what he liked with the Bulgars, but who could not manage a division of Eton boys. The boys took mice into his schoolroom, and ultimately he had to go away.
There were masters who were stimulating teachers and roused the interest of boys in topics outside the ordinary routine of work, and others who kept scrupulously to the routine. The latter were the fairest, for when outside topics were discussed probably only a minority of the boys listened. It was above the heads of many. Arthur Benson kept scrupulously to the routine; he made it as interesting as he could, but rarely diverged on to stray topics, and never on to such topics that would only interest a few of the boys. Edward Lyttelton did exactly the opposite. When I was in his division there were about half a dozen boys who were advanced, and had got shoved up into his division by a rapid rise. The others were solid, stolid dunces. Edward Lyttelton devoted his time to the intelligent, and spent much time in conversation on such topics as ritual in Church, the reign of Charlemagne, and the acting at the Comédie française. He carried on teaching by asking a quantity of questions which entailed a great deal of interesting comment and argument. In the meantime the dunces ragged. I was good at answering his questions, but I joined in the ragging, nevertheless, partly from a sense of loyalty to raggers in general. The result was that at the end of the half I was top of his division for the school-time, but I forfeited the prize owing, as he said in my report, to my incorrigible babyishness. My tutor thought this unfair, and gave me a book instead of the prize. Mr. Rawlins, who was afterwards Lower Master and then Vice-Provost, was a good teacher, but his chief hobby was grammar, and he talked far above our heads. I startled him one day. We were construing an Ode of Horace, where a phrase occurred mentioning the difficulty of removing her cubs from, I think, a Gætulan lioness.[5] He said, “There is a parallel to that in French poetry.” I said, “Yes,” and quoted the lines from Hernani I had known for so long:
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