in the past; and the family has with many great thinkers, especially in economics, been the unit in society. Yet analogy justifies the expectation that those aggregates of men will survive in the future. that are able so to establish community of sentiment within them as to count as units in the struggle for existence. The public schools notoriously breed a spirit which makes its unit of patriotism at any rate larger than the family. In so doing it prepares the way (if, indeed, more should not be said) for an extension of the conception held by the next generation as to the social unit or community. These simple considerations, which at once present themselves to the mind of a bio-sociological student, seem curiously enough to have escaped the censors and the defenders of our public schools; yet they are sufficiently serious, such is the sweep of their content, to outweigh all other considerations, and to establish the incalculable importance to the English stock, if they would survive in the unceasing struggle for life, of maintaining the system of public school education. In conclusion, an unnoticed change in English society may be mentioned which has occasioned many undiscerning strictures on the public schools, but which is in reality of promise for the future. It is often said, that the public school boy leaves with no adequate knowledge of any subject. The true subject of such an observation is, of course, the boy who leaves, an unfledged tyro, from the fourth or fifth forms after a year or two at the school. In point of fact, though such a boy arrogates to himself the name of public schoolman, he is nothing of the sort. He is the modern representative by lineal descent of the old home-student taught by a private tutor. Any old book that pictures social life a hundred or two hundred years ago reveals the vast number of English boys then educated by tutors; to-day it is the fashion to send nearly all boys to a public school. But a large percentage were and are far less than men of genius, and these, leaving school with little learning, to the mind of the thoughtless are failures that condemn the system. But, if they be compared with their kin, the boys taught anciently by private tutors, although they know no more than their predecessors, they have the advantage of them in many other ways; and, above all, in those all-important respects that have been insisted on above. They have been fitted generally for to-day's environment by the cross-influences of actual parents and foster fathers, and, above all, contact with other specimens of the English boy; and they have in especial been trained to regard the unit of social effort as larger than the individual or the family. XXXII. THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IN FICTION. BY HAROLD Child. NOTHING in the history of this subject is more remarkable than the lack of material before the early years of the last century. We need not, perhaps, expect to find much interest in education to father an interest in life at a public school; but, considering the age, the dignity, and the tradition, lofty and quaint, of the old foundations, we might expect to find some novelist dwelling on his school-days with something of the tenderness shown by Charles Lamb or Thackeray. Search among early novels for descriptions of school life is a barren labour. High spirited writers like Smollett and Fielding give us only what Marryatt, Henty, and Ballantyne gave us later amusing escapades, with a chance for the curious to dispute whether the pedagogue in "Roderick Random" is or is not John Love, of Dumbarton, and whether Trulliber is or is not Oliver. The school buildings were Gothic, and they were not ruins; they were, therefore, neither polite nor picturesque. Tradition was little valued. The age between Vaughan and Wordsworth had small love of children; its boys were to be seen as little and birched as much as possible, but never heard nor studied; and it must be concluded that in those days of hardship the affection for the school which feeds the root of the modern school story was only to be found in rare spirits like Lamb. And Lamb's affection, when analysed, is little more than the regret such spirits feel for all, good and bad, that is past. Let Boyer tell the little weeping Coleridge that the school is his father, mother, brother, and the rest of his relations. In saying so Boyer is half a century and more ahead of his time; and to the children themselves the school was a place of torment, with some few alleviations, not a place of joy, with some few troubles. Few men could look back with pleasure on their school-days. We learn more of public school life from Augustus Trollope's bitter recollections of Winchester than from all his brother's novels. Even Thackeray, fondly as he dwells on his Greyfriars, is chiefly concerned, when you come to examine him, with what happened on holidays, not within the walls of the Charterhouse. And his "Dr. Birch and his young Friends" - the hasty Christmas task of a man who wanted to draw pictures-tells little or nothing about the school. The author has discovered that a school, as we put it now, “is a little world," and is busy proving it by describing the individual inhabitants of it, whom he sees as men in miniature. Had he treated it differently, still Archbishop Wigsley's College is no more a public school than Dotheboys Hall or Dr. Blimber's Academy. Such institutions could take no pride in a past they did not own; lacking the corporate spirit, they could feel no esprit de corps. Meanwhile the old schools were small and obscure, to a great extent "close," and even family foundations, too often ill-governed and neglectful of their heritage and dignity. It was not till fifteen years after the death of the man who created the public school spirit that a disciple of Arnold wrote a brave, annoying, invaluable book, which explained the public school spirit to the world, and became the parent of a small but vigorous family. The author of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" cannot claim to be the first in the field. Thackeray's lines: Go, lose or conquer as you can; Be each, pray God, a gentleman, were written some years after Arnold's death, and express, quite independently, the ideal of Arnold and Hughes-they say nothing of the means or the detail. The detail is that combination of qualities known as "muscular Christianity," though the phrase is of later origin; the means is sop's dish of tongues, the school, the school, and again the school. The ideal is the ideal of the good sportsman, of the man who "plays the game," and something more; and it is to this day the ideal of the schoolboy in the average, and of the schoolmaster. The presence of the muscular element no one will deny; the presence of the Christian element, as understood by a mixed body of religious and irreligious temperaments, must not be overlooked. The patience that will accept hardship or ill-treatment in silence is a different thing from the patience of the sportsman, who bides his time to win or to kill; mental and physical "fitness" is preserved not only for the sake of games and prizes. The value of the ideal the good that it includes, and all the good that it does not includethis is no place to discuss. The importance of "Tom Brown" lies in the fact that it expounded and so helped vastly to create the ideal, and that it laid stress for the first time on the new means, the spirit of the school. That the author, in his last chapter but one, should deal a heavy blow at his own ideal by allowing his hero to fill up the eleven by favouritism, does not detract from the value of the picture as a whole. Regarded from this aspect, the two books that followed, Farrar's "Eric" (1858) and "St. Winifred's" (1862), may be almost wholly neglected. There is no trace here of the public school spirit; the school is nothing, the individual character everything. The |