Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, vol 1 by George Otto Trevelyan (reading the story of the TXT) 📕

The mastery which a man exercises over himself, and the patience and forbearance displayed in his dealings with others, are generally in proportion to the value which he sets upon the objects of his pursuit. If we judge Macaulay by this standard, it is plain that he cared a great deal more for providing our Eastern Empire with an educational outfit that would work and wear than he ever cared for keeping his own seat in Parliament or pushing his own fortunes in Downing Street. Throughout his innumerable Minutes, on all subjects from the broadest principle to the narrowest detail, he is everywhere free from crotchets and susceptibilities; and everywhere ready to humour any person who will make himself useful, and to adopt any appliance which can be turned to account.

“I think it highly probable that Mr. Nicholls may be to blame, because I have seldom known a quarrel in which both parties were not to blame. But I see no evidence that he is so. Nor do I see any evidence which tends to prove that Mr. Nicholls leads the Local Committee by the nose. The Local Committee appear to have acted with perfect propriety, and I cannot consent to treat them in the manner recommended by Mr. Sutherland. If we appoint the Colonel to be a member of their body, we shall in effect pass a most severe censure on their proceedings. I dislike the suggestion of putting military men on the Committee as a check on the civilians. Hitherto we have never, to the best of my belief, been troubled by any such idle jealousies. I would appoint the fittest men without caring to what branch of the service they belonged, or whether they belonged to the service at all.”

[This, and the following extracts, are taken from a volume of Macaulay’s Minutes, “now first collected from Records in the Department of Public instruction, by H. Woodrow, Esq., M.A., Inspector of Schools at Calcutta, and formerly Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge.” The collection was published in India.]

Exception had been taken to an applicant for a mastership, on the ground that he had been a preacher with a strong turn for proselytising.

“Mr. – seems to be so little concerned about proselytising, that he does not even know how to spell the word; a circumstance which, if I did not suppose it to be a slip of the pen, I should think a more serious objection than the ‘Reverend’ which formerly stood before his name. I am quite content with his assurances.”

In default of better, Macaulay was always for employing the tools which came to hand. A warm and consistent advocate of appointment by competitive examination, wherever a field for competition existed, he was no pedantic slave to a theory. In the dearth of schoolmasters, which is a feature in every infant educational system, he refused to reject a candidate who mistook “Argos for Corinth,” and backed the claims of aspirants of respectable character who could “read, write, and work a sum.”

“By all means accept the King of Oude’s present; though, to be sure, more detestable maps were never seen. One would think that the revenues of Oude, and the treasures of Saadut Ali, might have borne the expense of producing something better than a map in which Sicily is joined on to the toe of Italy, and in which so important an eastern island as Java does not appear at all.”

“As to the corrupting influence of the zenana, of which Mr.

Trevelyan speaks, I may regret it; but I own that I cannot help thinking that the dissolution of the tie between parent and child is as great a moral evil as can be found in any zenana. In whatever degree infant schools relax that tie they do mischief.

For my own part, I would rather hear a boy of three years old lisp all the bad words in the language than that he should have no feelings of family affection—that his character should be that which must be expected in one who has had the misfortune of having a schoolmaster in place of a mother.”

“I do not see the reason for establishing any limit as to the age of scholars. The phenomena are exactly the same which have always been found to exist when a new mode of education has been rising into fashion. No man of fifty now learns Greek with boys; but in the sixteenth century it was not at all unusual to see old Doctors of Divinity attending lectures side by side with young students.”

“With respect to making our College libraries circulating libraries, there is much to be said on both sides. If a proper subscription is demanded from those who have access to them, and if all that is raised by this subscription is laid out in adding to the libraries, the students will be no losers by the plan. Our libraries, the best of them at least, would be better than any which would be readily accessible at an up-country station; and I do not know why we should grudge a young officer the pleasure of reading our copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson or Marmontel’s Memoirs, if he is willing to pay a few rupees for the privilege.”

These utterances of cultured wisdom or homely mother-wit are sometimes expressed in phrases almost as amusing, though not so characteristic, as those which Frederic the Great used to scrawl on the margin of reports and despatches for the information of his secretaries.

“We are a little too indulgent to the whims of the people in our employ. We pay a large sum to send a master to a distant station.

He dislikes the place. The collector is uncivil; the surgeon quarrels with him; and he must be moved. The expenses of the journey have to be defrayed. Another man is to be transferred from a place where he is comfortable and useful. Our masters run from station to station at our cost, as vapourised ladies at home run about from spa to spa. All situations have their discomforts; and there are times when we all wish that our lot had been cast in some other line of life, or in some other place.”

With regard to a proposed coat of arms for Hooghly College, he says

“I do not see why the mummeries of European heraldry should be introduced into any part of our Indian system. Heraldry is not a science which has any eternal rules. It is a system of arbitrary canons, originating in pure caprice. Nothing can be more absurd and grotesque than armorial bearings, considered in themselves.

Certain recollections, certain associations, make them interesting in many cases to an Englishman; but in those recollections and associations the natives of India do not participate. A lion, rampant, with a folio in his paw, with a man standing on each side of him, with a telescope over his head, and with a Persian motto under his feet, must seem to them either very mysterious, or very absurd.”

In a discussion on the propriety of printing some books of Oriental science, Macaulay writes

“I should be sorry to say anything disrespectful of that liberal and generous enthusiasm for Oriental literature which appears in Mr. Sutherland’s minute; but I own that I cannot think that we ought to be guided in the distribution of the small sum, which the Government has allotted for the purpose of education, by considerations which seem a little romantic. That the Saracens a thousand years ago cultivated mathematical science is hardly, I think, a reason for our spending any money in translating English treatises on mathematics into Arabic. Mr. Sutherland would probably think it very strange if we were to urge the destruction of the Alexandrian Library as a reason against patronising Arabic literature in the nineteenth century. The undertaking may be, as Mr. Sutherland conceives, a great national work. So is the breakwater at Madras. But under the orders which we have received from the Government, we have just as little to do with one as with the other.”

Now and then a stroke, aimed at Hooghly College, hits nearer home.

That men of thirty should be bribed to continue their education into mature life “seems very absurd. Moghal Jan has been paid to learn something during twelve years. We are told that he is lazy and stupid; but there are hopes that in four years more he will have completed his course of study. We have had quite enough of these lazy, stupid schoolboys of thirty.”

“I must frankly own that I do not like the list of books. Grammars of rhetoric and grammars of logic are among the most useless furniture of a shelf. Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That is worth all the grammars of rhetoric and logic in the world. We ought to procure such books as are likely to give the children a taste for the literature of the West; not books filled with idle distinctions and definitions, which every man who has learned them makes haste to forget. Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme? Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis? I am not joking, but writing quite seriously, when I say that I would much rather order a hundred copies of Jack the Giant-killer for our schools than a hundred copies of any grammar of rhetoric or logic that ever was written.”

“Goldsmith’s Histories of Greece and Rome are miserable performances, and I do not at all like to lay out 50 pounds on them, even after they have received all Mr. Pinnock’s improvements. I must own too, that I think the order for globes and other instruments unnecessarily large. To lay out 324 pounds at once on globes alone, useful as I acknowledge those articles to be, seems exceedingly profuse, when we have only about 3,000

pounds a year for all purposes of English education. One 12-inch or 18-inch globe for each school is quite enough; and we ought not, I think, to order sixteen such globes when we are about to establish only seven schools. Useful as the telescopes, the theodolites, and the other scientific instruments mentioned in the indent undoubtedly are, we must consider that four or five such instruments run away with a year’s salary of a schoolmaster, and that, if we purchase them, it will be necessary to defer the establishment of schools.”

At one of the colleges at Calcutta the distribution of prizes was accompanied by some histrionic performances on the part of the pupils.

“I have no partiality,” writes Macaulay, “for such ceremonies. I think it a very questionable thing whether, even at home, public spouting and acting ought to form part of the system of a place of education. But in this country such exhibitions are peculiarly out of place. I can conceive nothing more grotesque than the scene from the Merchant of Venice, with Portia represented by a little black boy. Then, too, the subjects of recitation were ill chosen. We are attempting to introduce a great nation to a knowledge of the richest and noblest literature in the world. The society of Calcutta assemble to see what progress we are making; and we produce as a sample a boy who repeats