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struggling with his cramped limbs, and taking a last look about him.

A cry broke from him. "Quick, Olaf! The blue light! I am frozen here. I cannot move yet. Fire the light, and help me afterwards."

Soon the Thorgrim and the sea around her were bathed in a ghastly glare. The engineer swarmed up the rigging to assist the mate, and even as he reached him an answering flare, small but certain, appeared away in the east.

"It is the steamer!" yelled Sigurd. "Tell the kaptan. Do not wait."

But the engineer insisted that it was Sigurd's duty, and so five minutes later the latter staggered into the cabin where the old man was sleeping, watched by the cook.

"Kaptan, the steamer comes. I have signalled her, and she has replied."

"So!" said Svendsen, getting up slowly. "If I had been sure of the steamer I would not"

The cook could contain himself no longer.

"You have the whale still!" he cried. "Oh kaptan, you have your thousandth whale!"

"Mutiny on my last trip!" said Captain Svendsen when he learned from Sigurd how his officers and crew had arranged, against his orders, to keep the whale in tow till the last possible moment. "Mutiny on my last trip!" But his eyes were kind.

As the Thorgrim steamed to meet the rapidly approaching steamer the old man stood on the afterdeck peering at the huge, dim shape wallowing astern. Hansen approached.

Chambers's Journal.

"The last of the coffee, kaptan," he said respectfully, presenting a steaming mug.

"Then you will drink it yourself, Hansen."

The cook protested.

"I have now drunk the last of the coffee five times," said Svendsen. "When did you taste coffee last?" he suddenly demanded.

"Four days ago, kaptan. It is nothing."

"So! Then you have saved your own coffee for me! Have you any more left?"

Hansen looked guiltily miserable. "Enough for two mugs," he stammered at last.

"For me?"

"Surely, kaptan."

"Then I drink this, and you will go now and take the two mugs yourself. The steamer will give us plenty soon. Now, go. No more mutiny."

The cook went, but halted halfway to the galley and retraced his steps.

"Kaptan, you-you will soon be telling your children and grandchildren about your thousandth whale”—

"My thousandth whale," said Kaptan Svendsen, smiling reflectively. He laid his hand on the other's shoulder. "Yes, it will be a fine story to tell. But I think, my good Hansen, the finest part of the story will be about my men on the Thorgrim."

And Hansen retired, rubbing his eyes, yet so pleased with all things that he divided the last of the coffee between Sigurd and the engineer.

J. J. Bell.

ESPRIT DE CORPS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.

Briefly, there is no esprit de corps in elementary schools. The question here raised concerns only the why and the how.

The why of the absence of esprit de corps from elementary schools is in one way simple enough. In another way, it is involved in the tangled skein of all our modern ideas of progress. The obvious cause of the defect is the lack of individuality both in schools and teachers. From John O'Groat's to Land's End, from Milford Haven to the Naze, Britain is dotted with elementary schools, all of substantially the same pattern. Go into a school in Northumberland and you might almost believe yourself in a school in Kent. The same maps hang on the walls; there are the same floors, the same cupboards, the same desks, the same school apparatus. Look inside the cupboards and you will find the same books, the same slates, the same pencils, the same everything. The teachers are the same, the teacher's minds are the same; and there in the desks sit the children receiving the same instruction given in the same voice according to the same methods. The syllabus of subjects is the same for all English latitudes and longitudes. Conditions are differentlocal circumstances, character, traditions, occupations; even the children are different at the start. But the curriculum is unyielding and universal, unyielding because universal.

At nine o'clock every morning of the school week thousands of teachers stand up before tens of thousands of children to instruct them in the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments. At 9.30 a.m. a tenth of the population of England is engaged in working sums; at 10.15 in writing exercises in

a copy-book. At four in the afternoon, thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of children return to their homes, irritated, tired or relieved as the case

can.

may be. The appalling uniformity of schools and teachers is nothing less than a nightmare to the imaginative mind. Conceive it and laugh at it who For my part, the spectacle of those patterned schools all over the land reminds me of the network of blockhouses which Lord Kitchener built in South Africa. They are the fortifications we have built against enlightenment, for the subjugation of individuality and the conquest and peaceable settlement of the whole world of joyful imagination.

Well, but it is not to be expected that esprit de corps can rise or flourish under uniformity. The very breath of its nostrils is the belief that the "corps" is something unique and incomparable. You cannot have an esprit de corps as big as the world, or even as big as a county. To develop esprit de corps there requires to be something peculiar, something privileged, something quite unattainable anywhere else. It does not at all matter whether the peculiarity or the privilege is small in itself or even ridiculous. The value lies in its being peculiar. Uniformity, in fact, is the one thing that esprit de corps cannot tolerate.

Turn now to that Dantean vision of the elementary schools of England, and find if you can a foothold for the spirit. Where lies the uniqueness of a school of which the pattern is in London and the examples everywhere? Why should children be attached to one school rather than another, to one set of teachers rather than another, to one tradition rather than another, when they

know and feel that four or five million children have exactly such a school, such teachers, such traditions?

Esprit de corps is absent from our elementary schools because individuality is absent; and until that is introduced and made possible, our children will continue to grow up as they do now, ashamed of their schools, contemptuous of their teachers, and worst of all, suspicious and unfriendly towards each other.

The question remains whether esprit de corps is possible in elementary schools at all; and the problem carries us at once into the profounder issues. I have no hesitation in saying that the danger to Europe (for elementary schools on the Continent are little different from elementary schools in England) of uniformity is at least as serious as the danger to Rome of the Goths. The demons of uniformity are the Goths of Europe. Now it is unfortunately true that a good deal of Progressivism is no more than a movement of Goths. For it is the great leveller, the feller of ancient institutions and privileges. The very word, privileges, is as a red rag to a bull to the majority of Progressives. They hate it and all its works. In the blessed name of Democracy, death to Privilege!

Consider the position of an Education Authority, popularly elected, and possessed of Progressive ideas. Under the impulsion of a democratic desire, obscure, vague and ill-defined, but always in the same direction, the Education Authority creates for itself an image, a Utopian aspiration. And what is it? The very image we have already seen in our mind's eye of a land dotted with schools of the same pattern. To be quite explicit, that odious picture is the ordinary Progressivist's beatific vision. He would fain see the land like that-and not in respect of schools only.

Perversely enough, there is reason on his side. The plea for special privileges, special treatment, special attention is met by the obvious reply that a public authority must be impartial, must not make fish of one and fowl of another, must not in fact individualize. And against this conception of justice which of us can direct our guns? For it is useless to urge that justice consists in inequality to the unequal, in bartering privileges for responsibilities, in just that act of making fish of fish and fowl of fowl. This, he rightly says, is simple negative. What is our positive alternative? Our positive alternative, of course, is that almost forbidden word aristocracy. Call it if you will-as I understand the better sort of Progressivists are astutely beginning to call it-the Hierarchy. The idea at least is the same, namely, the classification of children, schools, institutions, yes, the whole State, in the ancient Platonic way of iron and brass and silver and gold. But that is democratic injustice, and the future, they say, belongs to democracy.

Regarding the problem, then, of the creation of esprit de corps in elementary schools, it would seem at first sight insoluble. For if esprit de corps depends, as plainly it does, upon specially granted and guarded differences and privileges; and if the aim of democratic Progressivists is to abolish, and to maintain and guard the abolition, of all differences and privileges-then, clearly, esprit de corps and Progressivist schools are mutually polarized. On the other hand, it is possible that even they will one day be appalled at the sight of their handiwork. In the flush of their youthful enthusiasm, the parade ground of elementary education, where our young barbarians are drilled and dragooned into usefully useless citizens, presents a very different scene from that which they will have when the

flush has cooled. Already we hear the cry go up: "How dull the teachers are! How dull the children are becoming. How dull the world is!" And if on that gray morning there are a few of the better Progressivists, the men of the Hierarchy, perhaps the prospect of another reflection will lie near to them -the prospect of a democracy deliberately willing itself an aristocracy.

In plain practical terms, the issue for the moment is between the policy of uniformity and the policy of multiformity. With our young men seeing visions and our old men dreaming dreams, it does not appear to me hopeless to expect that before very long Education Authorities may begin to cultivate with set purpose those very differences which hitherto they have aimed at suppressing. What is to prevent civic pride, for instance, rising to the height of making its schools unique and expressive? The Infinite is infinite in an infinite number of ways. And there is no one model school, but an indefinite number of model schools. The London County Council should and might build London schools for London; other County Councils should and might build schools of another pattern for themselves. Esprit de corps is, after all, a spiritual thing, but it grows amid differences.

If in our great public schools esprit de corps is the thing we say it is, then no sacrifice is too great if we can create it in our elementary schools. And I am here suggesting that the means, the only means, is for the Education Authorities to turn upon themselves and their old ideas, to have done with uniformity, of which even they have had enough, and deliberately, sanely and steadily, to begin the process of differentiating, classifying and individualizing the elementary schools under their charge.

On the part of the teachers and on
The Monthly Review.
LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXIV.

1780

behalf of the teachers, however, a good deal remains to be done. A uniform national system, in the first place, fails to attract; in the second place repels; and in the third place, destroys individuality in a teacher. The spirit of a place is in part at least due to the spirit of its principal persons; and if in our schools the predominant spirit is dulness, the dulness of a frost-nipped enthusiasm, there is little wonder the place is without attraction. As I have said, it is the universalizing of our syllabus-makers that lays the dead hand on all initiative. And I am convinced the only remedy is in the same direction as already pointed out, the direction of privilege. Let it be the teacher's privilege, in return for his responsibility, to alter, amend, and create syllabuses for his own school. In a very little while, it does not matter to a boy whether he learned at school Botany or Hydrostatics; whether the Rule of Three was taught before Vulgar Frac tions, or the Geography lesson included the Capes of India. What does matter is whether he came into contact with a free and independent mind, from which his own mind might catch a contagion of freedom and independence.

Therefore, I say, by all means give teachers more liberty in the construction of their curricula. Make differences, and have them made. For let us remember that the hope of Europe lies in its great individuals. They alone can save Europe from the fate of China. If by some means the devastations of democracy can be checked, it must be in its stronghold that the war must be raged. Esprit de corps is a thing of the spirit; the creation of esprit de corps is a spiritual act. But only by such means will our elementary schools become the nursery of aristocracy, and thereby, strangely enough, the saviour of democracy.

Board School Teacher.

THE POETRY OF HYMNS.

The Bishop of Bristol, in condemning the new English Hymnal on theological grounds, also took occasion to refer in disparaging terms to its claim to the title of poetry. With its the ology we have here nothing to do, but a book which announces itself as "a collection of the best hymns in the English language," and claims "to combine in one volume the worthiest expressions of all that lies within the compass of the Christian creed," challenges an investigation of its poetical merits. This aspect of the question has been almost totally neglected by all parties. The bishops have attacked the book, each "tolling and chiming" against it from his respective tower, as Dr. Newman says, the High Church party have eagerly defended it, but, for the most part, no suspicion of its exceeding badness as poetry seems to have crossed the minds of the combatants. Yet surely from their own point of view it is a question, "Has error been made attractive by this book?" or "Is the truth presented here in winning guise?"

*

The book emanates from the advanced party in the English Church. Now, as Mr. Matthew Arnold pointed out, the Oxford Movement satisfied "that keen longing for beauty and sweetness" which is a vital human instinct, and which Puritanism had starved and repressed. It is this divine element in the Catholic religion which constitutes the real danger to the national Protestantism, and in this element the present book, in so far as It is new, is entirely wanting. Among the Tractarian leaders and their followers were real poets. Newman, Keble. Faber, Neale, Hawker of Morwenstow, may all be so described. The great scholar and salut, John Mason

Neale, by his translations of ancient and mediæval hymus opened the eyes of the ordinary Englishman to the treasures of the Christian past. Such hymus as "Jesu, the very thought of Thee," "Art thou weary, art thou languid?" "Brief life is here our portion," "O happy band of pilgrims," have become part of English life. They are translations which are better than the originals. The present writer well remembers the impression made upon him as a boy by Dr. Neale's rendering of "Alleluia, dulce carmen":

Alleulia, song of sweetness, Voice of joy that cannot die.

How the lengthening twilight was flooded with that glad, eager music, until one almost saw the fiery faces of the glorious choir! Everything of Dr. Neale's, indeed, has the magic of natural sounds and sights.

But now come Mr. Percy Dearmer and Mr. Athelstan Riley, representing the same faith and cause that Neale and Keble did, to compile the perfect hymnal for us. The book is not without its merits. It includes, for instance, Mrs. Alexander's magnificent rendering of the "Lorica" of St. Pat rick, that noble poem with the Pantheist element in it, which is always found in Celtic Christianity. (But where, by the way, is Fra Jacopone's lovely hymn, the Franciscan "Stabat Mater" of the Nativity?) It gives the hymns as the authors wrote them. Bishop Ken's verse about the Guardian Angel is given in "Glory to Thee, my God, this night." and the Sybil is restored to the "Dies Irae," from which she is absent in every English version except Crashaw's.

It is when the compilers begin to

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