CHAPTER XXVI
COMPOSITION
“An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told.”
King John.
In the dark ages before (about) 1895 one of the subjects allotted to Standard V. was composition, and this was further explained to be “writing from memory the substance of a short story read out twice.” It was a very useful exercise, and many of my friends would be more valuable witnesses in a court of justice, and better company after dinner, if they had received this training. To be able to catch the point of a story and repeat it accurately is a rare accomplishment. I remember an instance in point.
I was staying with a doctor, a school manager; and at dinner I told him the old story of H. J. Byron, Sothern, and the great-coat. He laughed, and made a mental note of it for professional use. Next day at lunch he told me that it had brought him good fruit beyond expectation.
He had called at the Hall, and finding the daughters of the house assembled in the drawing-room, after he had seen his patient, he had told them the story thus:
“I heard a good story last night. H. J. Byron, you know, the man that wrote the plays, was going down Regent Street the other day, and met Sothern, the actor. It was a very cold day, and Sothern, noticing that Byron was lightly clad, exclaimed, ‘What a fellow you are, Byron; you never wear a great-coat.’ ‘No,’ said Byron, ‘I never was.’
“They all laughed consumedly, and in the middle of their laughter a girl friend called, and asked what was the joke.
“‘Oh,’ said one, ‘such a funny story the Doctor has just told us. Lord Byron, you know, that wrote the poetry, was going down—what street was it, Doctor?’
“‘Well, it’s immaterial, but it was Regent Street.’
“‘Oh, thanks, yes; and he met—who was it?’
“‘Sothern, the actor.’
“‘Of course, yes:’ and so he said to Sothern, ‘you never wear a great coat;’ so he said, ‘No, I never do.’ (Renewed laughter.)
“The caller pondered, and then remarked that she was awfully stupid, but she didn’t see the joke. The narrator pondered also, and finally confessed, ‘No more do I now, but we laughed very much when the Doctor told us.’”
I told the whole story to a friend, and he supplied me with a variant from a lower stratum of society. A Lancashire man went with a friend into a tailor’s shop to buy a coat. One was produced, and the purchaser asked the friend for his opinion.
“Seems a bit short, don’t it?” said the friend.
“Ah, lad, but it’ll be long enough before I get another.”
Three minutes later a third man found the friend in the street, still convulsed with laughter. “Why, what’s to do?” he asked.
The friend wiped his eyes and took breath: “Eh, it were Jack Robinson: he’s a funny feller. Ah went with him into yon shop, because he wanted an overcoat, d’ye see? And they brought him out one, and he tries it on and he says to me: ‘How does it look, Bill?’ he says. ‘Seems a bit short, don’t it?’ says I. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it ’ull be a pretty time afore I get another.’” And the friend was again convulsed.
But the third man was indignant: “Why, whativer was theer to laugh at?”
The friend “rubbed an elongated forehead with a meditative cuff”: “Ah reckon ah’ve got it a bit mixed,” he admitted, “but we laughed a good ’un at th’ toime.”
A third case may be quoted:
Twenty or more years ago there was an inquest that caused much excitement. A man—let us call him Miller—died suddenly. There was a post-mortem examination, and distinct traces of antimony were found. The public demanded vengeance, but soon cooled down, when it was disclosed at the enquiry that the deceased, whether by making or by saving money, had hasted to become rich. There was a luncheon party at the Canon’s house in Norceter, and the affaire Miller was discussed. Among the guests was old Sir John Surd, who, being very deaf, was allowed to have Lady Surd sitting next him. The Canon, a well-known humorist, gave novelty to the topic by remarking how singular it was that a man who was so fond of money should have died of anti-mony. There was laughter, and Sir John turned to his wife and privately asked for the joke.
“Oh, John,” shouted her Ladyship, “such a funny thing the Canon has said. Mr. Miller, you know, John, Miller—the Inquest?”
“Yes, yes.”
(All conversation ceased: all eyes were turned on the narrator, who became flurried.)
“Mr. Miller, you know. Well, the Canon said how funny it was that—er—Mr. Miller who—er—was so fond of money, MONEY, you know?”
“Yes, yes,” impatiently. (The guests begin to smile, and Lady Surd loses her head and plunges.)
“So fond of money, should have er—er—DIED OF TARTAR EMETIC!”
Now if these imperfect historians had been trained in Standard V. I should have lost three stories.
To meet the requirements of the Code it was necessary for school teachers to have a stock of simple anecdotes, and to this end publishers brought out collections of stories, sometimes serious, moral, improving; sometimes more or less humorous; but nearly always quite unsuitable. Our children have a very limited vocabulary, and the long words and involved sentences that occur in such compilations completely bewildered them. Or, if by any chance there was a simpler story, it would probably have only one incident; and, being of so elementary a type, would be inadequate for the latter part of the school year, when we expected two or more stages in the plot. For instance: (1) Androcles meets a lion in pain and removes a thorn from his foot. (2) The lion, being invited to eat Androcles, recognizes his benefactor and declines the meal.
But Androcles was not our style of hero. An experienced school manager once pointed out to me the need for educating the faculty of humour in children. “Look at old Whackem,” he said, indicating the master, “there is no surgical operation that would have any effect on that man’s humorous receptivity. He ought to have been caught young.” I banished Androcles and the like, and collected the stories which Mark Twain disliked, the stories with “a snap” to them: these I put into simple English, and then tried to get the class to find the snap. In an old portfolio I find half a dozen of them, almost illegible with age, and they bring back memories of much of that “unquenchable laughter” which I tried to teach Standard V. to share with Olympus.
How popular was “The Lady Doctor”!—she who in vol. i. took out the patient’s eye, and put it on a table, while she was arranging bandages. But (vol. ii.) the landlady’s cat ate the eye, thinking it was its dinner. In vol. iii. the lady doctor killed the cat, took out its eye, put it in the unsuspecting patient’s head, and sent him away whole. “But the ungrateful patient complains that he is always looking for mice, and that the sight of a dog makes his hair stand on end.”
More popular still was Boccaccio’s story of the crane. I believe it has appeared in all the languages of Europe, but not in school anecdote books. May I repeat it here? Those who know it have their remedy. The original, which is slightly altered for school use, is in the Decameron, VI. Day, IV. Novel:
A dishonest cook was one day roasting a crane for her master’s supper. When it was done, it looked so nice that she thought she must just taste it, and she tore off a leg and ate it. When the rest of the bird was served up for supper, the master saw what had been done, and angrily scolded her for taking the leg. “Oh, master,” she said, “those birds have only one leg.”
“Only one leg, woman? Come with me in the morning to the river bank, and I will teach you better than that.”
So in the morning they went; and there were half a dozen cranes, each standing, as is the way of cranes, on one leg. “There, master,” she said, “what did I tell you? only one leg!” The master clapped his hands, and said “Shoo! shoo!” and all the birds put down the other legs, ran a few yards, and flew away.
“What did I tell you?” he said, “Two Legs!”
“Ah,” said she, “but if you’d have clapped your hands and said Shoo, shoo, at that crane last night, maybe he’d have put down another leg and flown away, and you’d have lost your supper.”
The difficulty was with the girls. In a mixed school, while the boys were laughing, the girls in the same class would be reflecting that the cook “didn’t ought to have took the leg,” speculating also whether they should write “crain” like “rain,” or “creign” like “reign.” Androcles is their man.
But even the boys failed me sometimes. This was notable in the extreme case of the Speculative Maid and the Hamburg lottery. I told it to my best boys’ school with much confidence:
“There was a lottery in Hamburg last year, and the first prize was £1,000. The tickets were sold in the Town Hall, and the Mayor was there to see fair-play. About an hour after they began to sell, a servant girl came in a great hurry and said she wanted to buy No. 23. They told her it was sold already. She cried so much that the Mayor asked whether another ticket wouldn’t do as well: she could have No. 21. But she said ‘No,’ she must have 23, and no other. The Mayor was so sorry for her, that he sent a clerk to the man who bought No. 23, and asked him to change it. This was done without any trouble, and the girl went away happy. When the lottery was drawn, No. 23 won the first prize of £1,000, and the Mayor was so much surprised that he sent for the girl and asked her what made her think of that number.
“Well,” she said, “it was this way: I had a dream that No. 7 won it; and then I dreamt again that 7 won; and then a third time I dreamt that 7 won; and I said to myself ‘three sevens is 23,’ and I came here and got it.”
And when I had got to the end, the whole class rose deferentially from their seats, and said, “Three sevens are 21.”
Let me add two wholly irrelevant appendices—appendicitis is the disease of the story-teller: First, was it Huxley or Tyndall, who, after hearing this, said it was the only dream story that ever carried conviction to his mind? Secondly, I was told on the highest authority that the story is traditional in the Deanery of Westminster, because it was told there at the dinner table of Arthur P. Stanley; whose bent was not scientific: and when it came to an end, all laughed except the Dean, who, after some thought, said he could not see the joke: but, after increased laughter of the others, hazarded the surmise that “perhaps three times seven is not 23?”
This irreceptivity caused me grave disquiet. Was it possible that by diligent practice a child should convert himself into a sort of “graph” or “phone,” capable of reproducing a story with absolute accuracy without intelligent comprehension? Was it not possible to superadd a test? I tried the experiment thus: the story was of the usual type, and I told it to a large mixed class, boys and girls:
“A French officer, coming into a wineshop in Paris, heard an old soldier boasting of his battles, his wounds and losses. ‘I have lost my right arm,’ he said, lastly, ‘but it was for France and the Emperor; and for them I would gladly give the other arm.’ ‘That is all very fine,’ remarked the officer; ‘it is easy to boast when you are safe, but if it came to the real thing, it might be different.’ The brave man rose from his seat, drew his sword, and cut off the other arm.”
“Now, children,” I concluded, “write that story, and at the bottom say what is wrong with it.”
The best of the boys were already chuckling: other boys joined in more slowly: even the careworn teacher of the class, after staring hard at me for two or three minutes, came up, and confidentially informed me that he had got it, though at first it seemed a hard thing. But the girls sat dull-eyed and resentful of the novelty. At the end of twenty minutes they had reproduced the story word for word; and the most intelligent of them had appended the criticism, “It was very wrong of the man to cut off the arm which God had given him.”
Emboldened by success, I tried another:
“A Boer farmer wished to sell his cattle to a Scotch dealer. They met at the nearest hotel and agreed that the price should be £7 10s. a head: there were fifty of them, and, as the Boer said he was no scholar, the Scotchman made out the bill; ‘fifty head of cattle at £7 10s.,’ he said, ‘just £350,’ and he gave the farmer a cheque for the money, and rode off with the cattle. But the Boer did not feel quite sure it was right; and when he got to the next hotel, he borrowed a Ready Reckoner, which showed that the price should have been £375. Full of fury, he galloped after the Scotchman, caught him up, and charged him with cheating.
“‘Eh, man,’ said the rogue, ‘what makes you think it was £375?’
“‘I found it in the Ready Reckoner at Smith’s Hotel,’ said the Boer.
“‘Pooh, pooh, man,’ said the other, ‘I know that Reckoner: it is last year’s.’
“And the Boer rode back content.
“There is the story. Write at the end, What the Boer ought to have said.”
It was at the end of the last century that a philosopher discovered that reproducing anecdotes was not educative: it gave no play to the imagination: what we wanted was original thought. Now the stories required attention, concentration, accuracy, and considerable knowledge of the laws of composition; and the better course would have been to add what required originality, retaining what required accuracy. But in education, as in other things, it is the man of one idea who moves and gets his way. My stock of stories became waste paper.
The search for originality was too often pursued in a remarkable manner. No one reads Campbell now, and no boy could retaliate with the lines—
“For there’s nothing original in me
Excepting Original Sin.”
but it was easy to offer passive resistance, and to let the teacher do the originating. The latter began by providing “heads,” accompanied with copious comments; then he supplied rough scribbling-books, in which the children wrote their crude attempts. Then he wrote on the blackboard a jejune essay, which the class copied verbatim into their show-books. These were offered to us as the first fruits of original thought.
Occasionally we got the real article, and I treasure the following essay (faithfully transcribed from the MS.) as 18 carat gold:
My Favourite Hero.
A good while ago I heard of a man called Arthur Wellesley. His first school he went too was in France. He was called the Duke of Wellington. He was a grand speaker, and spoke about a great man named Napolean. He was captured by the Romans and took to prison. They let him off iff he would not go back to the Britons. Wellington was sent to an island and he escaped in a punt and went back to his own country. There he stayed for a long while when he died. He was a very strong and healthy man.
That is genuine. The following Essay I give as it was told to me, without further warranty.
A boy was told to write an essay on the Seven Ages of Man. Not having read As you like it, he evolved this out of his inner consciousness:
“When he is young, he thinks of the bad things he will do when he grows up: this is the age of innocence.
“When he is grown up, he does some of them: this is the prime of life.
“When he is very old, he is sorry for what he has done: this is dotage.”