CHAPTER VII.
In the summer of 1822 “Public Education” was published. Every effort had been made to work up the school to a high degree of excellence. “I am perfectly aware,” Rowland Hill wrote, “that much must be done before our school is fully prepared to stand the minute, and, perhaps, in many cases, invidious inspection which will take place in consequence of our inviting attention. I am also convinced of the necessity of making very vigorous improvements in my own mind. I hope I have already done much, and I am determined to accomplish more.” The Exhibition, or Speech-day, of June, 1822, had been a great success. “It was,” old Mr. Hill wrote to his eldest son, “a night of triumphant excellence.” Under the date of August 4th, 1822, Rowland Hill records in his Journal:—
“We have every reason at present to be pleased with the reception the book has met with. It has not yet received much attention from reviewers. An article has, it is true, appeared in the ‘Monthly Magazine,’ speaking of it in terms of the highest praise, and it has been noticed in terms of general commendation in several of the newspapers; but I allude chiefly to the private expression of the opinions of people of the highest literary rank The book appears to interest its readers in a very unusual manner. It seems to be spreading a kind of education mania in the world.... Jeremy Bentham is a man who will not be forgotten in the world; though neglected by a great part of his countrymen, he is held in the highest esteem by the enlightened and honest.... To him, as the author of a work on education, and as a man of the greatest influence, Matthew presented a copy of our book. A short time after he received an invitation to dine with Mr. Bentham. He was received in the most flattering manner. Mr. Bentham informed him that, when he first saw the book, disgusted as he had often been by the vague generalities of treatises on education, he threw it aside without looking into it. Shortly after, however, he opened the book, with very slight hopes of discovering anything worth reading. His attention was very soon fixed; he gave it to his reader, a young man of seventeen, who, to use Mr. Bentham’s own phrase, went ‘chuckling all the way through it.’ Mr. Bentham was so delighted with the work that he kept it on a little shelf constantly within reach, and opened it many times during dinner.”
Bentham sent a friend to inspect the school. “He certainly did not neglect his duty, for he would take nothing on credit. Such inspections as these, however, far from displeasing us, are exactly what we want.”
So favourable was the inspector’s report, that Bentham placed two Greeks at Hazelwood at his own expense. He circulated the Magazine that the boys published among his friends, and even sent a contribution to its pages in a letter franked by Joseph Hume:—
“Queen’s Square Place, Westminster,
“April 11th, 1823.
“Proposed for the ‘Hazelwood Magazine,’ with Mr. Bentham’s love to the good boys thereof, that they may consider which of the two modes of discipline is preferable.
“Extract from the Morning Chronicle, April 11th, 1823.
“‘An active Schoolmaster.—According to the ‘German Pedagogic Magazine,’ vol. 3, p. 407, died lately in Spain, a schoolmaster who for fifty-one years had superintended a large institution with old-fashioned severity. From an average inferred by means of recorded observations, one of the ushers had calculated that in the course of his exertions he had given 911,500 canings, 124,000 floggings, 209,000 custodes, 136,000 tips with the ruler, and 22,700 tasks to get by heart. It was further calculated that he made 700 boys stand on peas, 600 kneel on a sharp edge of wood, 5,000 wear the fool’s cap, and 1,700 hold the rod. How vast the quantity of human misery inflicted by a single perverse educator.’—Whitehaven Gazette.”
Bentham wrote to Dr. Parr “in high terms of the system, saying that it had caused him to throw aside all he had done himself.” He kept up his interest in the school, and some years later, in company with Mrs. Grote, at whose house he was staying, visited Rowland Hill at Bruce Castle. “Mr. Bentham,” he wrote on September 15th, 1827, “paid us a visit on Wednesday, and went away highly delighted. I never saw him in such spirits before. It is the first time he has left his home since his return from Paris (in 1825).” The fame of Hazelwood rapidly spread. The Greek Committee placed two young Greeks in the school:—
“His Excellency the Tripolitan Ambassador has informed us that he has sent to Tripoli for six young Africans, and the Algerine Ambassador, not to be outdone by his piratical brother, has sent for a dozen from Algiers. The Persian Ambassador also thinks it would be much to the advantage of the monarchy he represents to put a few persons under our guidance. If these worthies should come, we must look out for a Mosque.”
“We will rejoice over them,” wrote old Mr. Hill to his son, “when winds and seas have wafted them to port. Think not this proceeds from incredulity. So much good fortune as to be the means of sending civilization, and of darting one ray of liberty upon the wilds of Africa, seems too much to hope for.”
Wilberforce, the venerable champion of negro emancipation, and Grote, the future historian of Greece, went to Birmingham to inspect the school. Grote heard the boys construe Homer. Even at that time enough was known of his studies in Greek to make the young master who was taking the class feel not a little nervous. Two of Mrs. Grote’s nephews were removed from Eton and placed at Hazelwood. Five years later Grote, writing to Rowland Hill to introduce a friend, says, “I have taken the liberty of mentioning to him the high opinion which I entertain of the Hazelwood system.” The elder of the two nephews on leaving Cambridge went over to Stockholm as a kind of apostle of the new learning. “Public Education” had been translated into Swedish by Count Frölich, and a company was formed in Sweden to found a “Hillian School.” Professor Säve, of the University of Upsala, stayed a month at Hazelwood, carefully studying the system. But even a Professor could not master such a system in a month, and aid was called for from England. The young Cambridge man offered himself as a volunteer in the great cause. He went over to Stockholm, and for many a year helped to keep the faith pure and undefiled in the Hillska Skola.
Lord John Russell sent Dr. Maltby to inspect the school, and Dr. Maltby some years later on, when Bishop of Durham, gave out the prizes. “The number of visitors here,” wrote Mr. M. D. Hill when on a visit to his father’s house, “is immense. It is quite a nuisance. They sometimes have three or four parties at a time, and not a day passes without some.” The Marquis of Lansdowne, the Earl of Clarendon, Lord Auckland, Lord Kinnaird, Sir George Napier, Sir George Pollock, Brougham, De Quincey, Roscoe, Malthus, Joseph Hume, Nassau Senior, Robert Owen, W. J. Fox, Basil Hall, Babbage, and Lardner were all interested in Hazelwood, and not a few of them sent pupils there. Some of them even wished to reform the constitution. “We have had, on the whole,” wrote old Mr. Hill to his son, “a pleasant interview with Mr. Hume and Dr. Gilchrist. They wish to set us right in two important particulars. First—That we should compel all to remain when the Committee comes to be chosen. Second—That the votes be all secret on that and all other occasions. We are quite obstinate on both questions, and, in conformity with usage, persist in old ways. You will be most highly amused with the honourable gentleman’s penetrative inspection, when it shall become safe to tell all. He is, however, a right good fellow. The Doctor set out with a grammatical examination, but presently delapsed into an etymological disquisition and lecture, exquisitely amusing and, as I maintain, highly instructive.” In January, 1825, “Public Education” was criticised in the “Edinburgh Review,” and criticised in the most friendly spirit. The “London Magazine” followed a year later with a long, and a still more friendly, article by De Quincey. M. Jullien, the editor of the “Revue Encyclopédique,” himself inspected the school, and then published in his Review an article on the book. The ex-President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, who was at that time organising the University of Virginia, sent for the work. Mr. Bowring wrote to say that he had himself sent out a copy to the President of Haiti. Many pupils were sent to Hazelwood from abroad, chiefly from the newly-founded Republics of South America. The school almost at one bound sprang into fame. “It was a celebrity,” Rowland Hill wrote in his old age “which I now think was excessive, and which was followed in some instances by disappointment.” Yet at the time it might well have seemed to the young man that his early dreams were not the children of an idle brain. He might well have thought that he had already done much towards rendering his name illustrious in after ages.[63] In his letters, however, I find few signs of triumph. In his Journal, unfortunately, a break of many years begins about this time. He had begun to keep it for the sake of practice in composition, and his lesson was now learnt. “I can now employ my time to greater advantage, and I rather grudge the little attention which I still devote to my history.”
His health was breaking down under his heavy labour. Writing to his eldest brother a fortnight after the beginning of the summer holidays of 1822, he says:—
“You complain, and with justice, that I do not write to you. To tell the truth, since the holidays commenced I have done nothing at all. I can scarcely say how the time has passed; all I know is that it is gone. The exertions previous to the exhibition were succeeded by a languor of which I have not yet been able to rid myself. It was not my intention to have left home these holidays, for there is much that I wish to do, but every one tells me I am thin and pale.... Arthur and Frederic are much in the same predicament with myself.”
He had much wanted, he said, to go to Scotland, with letters of introduction to the officer who was conducting the trigonometrical survey. Owen’s establishment at New Lanark had also “a strong magnetic influence.” A year later (1823) he again excuses his neglect to write to his brother. “Writing a letter always costs me a headache.” He had just enjoyed a six weeks’ tour through the north of England and Scotland:—
“Through Westmoreland and Cumberland I of course walked, and never spent four days more pleasantly than in viewing the delightful scenery those counties afford. At New Lanark I was received in the most hospitable manner by the Owens. I spent two days and a-half there very pleasantly and profitably. In the management of the children neither rewards nor punishments are employed. The consequences are that the children appear very happy, very healthy, many very intelligent, and many very inattentive and disorderly; but when I consider that the children in the schools are nearly all under ten years of age, and that what they are taught is effected without any pain whatever being intentionally inflicted, I cannot be sure that theirs is not the correct mode of proceeding.”
During this tour he was free from pain nearly all the time:—
“But the very morning after my return the pain returned, and has not yet left me, though it is not so bad as at first.... I am cruelly disappointed to find that so much time and money should have been expended to so little purpose, as it at present appears.”
Three months later he describes his fear of a relapse into “the maddening state of mind” from which he had but lately escaped.
In the spring of 1824 he writes:—
“I cannot condense my efforts as I used to do. I am obliged to take more time for everything.”
A few months later his brother Matthew writes to him:—
“I am very glad to hear of your recovery. If I were you, I would let the exhibition go to the Devil rather than overwork myself.... Depend upon it, you will never be paid either in fame or profit for any exertion in that barren spot. Spare yourself for better times.”
When the summer holidays began, he took a trip to Paris:—
“I visited one of the floating baths on the Seine, when, forgetful of my weak state, I plunged at once into deep water. Immediately the attendants hurried forward to my rescue with long, slender poles, like boat-hooks, and were very angry, as though I had intended suicide. And, in fact, I found that I was quite too weak to swim.”
It was in vain that his brother urged him to spare himself. Whatever he put his hand to, he did with all his might. A year later (September, 1825) he was once more dangerously ill. “Mr. Hodgson,”[64] his father wrote, “prohibits all hints even about business. He says that the serious aspect assumed by the carbuncle is clearly the effect of mental excitation, and that your brother’s is the first instance of such a turn in a person under forty that has come under his observation.... It is a sad thing to be paralysed at the instant of high water in our affairs. Disappointment is, however, no new thing to us, and patience may work a retrieval, as it has done in times past.”
Two days later he again writes:—
“Though it were vain to disguise the fears which intrude themselves on your mother’s mind and my own, still we have Mr. Hodgson’s assurance that all will go well, provided the dear boy’s mind can be kept from painful excitement.... Mr. Hodgson has told your mother that, as soon as Rowland recovers, he shall strongly advise him, as a medical friend, to abandon any plan that shall demand unusual energy. These, my dear boy, are damping suggestions. My fear is that they will be unavailing, and that a life so truly valuable will be lost in splendid but abortive efforts.”
The severe operations which he had to undergo he bore with the utmost fortitude. During the worst of them he never uttered a sound, but merely said when it was over, “Come, that’s no trifle.” Bodily pain at all times of his life he endured with silent patience.
It was fortunate that there was no sense of failure in his plans to heighten his illness. He had none of that misery to encounter which, as he had written, would come upon him should Hazelwood not succeed. His success seemed complete. In 1819 the new school-house had opened with sixty-six pupils. Year after year for seven years the numbers steadily rose till, by 1826, there were 150. Rugby did not at that time number so many. When he was lying on his sick-bed his father wrote—“Applications (for admittance) are almost become a source of anxiety, unless they were made pleasant by a greater portion of health and strength to meet them.” I have been told by one who was then living in Birmingham that so great for a time was the eagerness to get boys into Hazelwood that, when the school was full, strangers often sought the advocacy of a common friend, in the hope of still securing a place for their son. The very thoroughness of the success was a great misfortune. The steady growth of the new school during its first few years was due to its real merits. The two youngest sons had joined their elder brothers in the management, and for some years there were four of them all working harmoniously together, and with the greatest energy. “Public Education” did not at first rapidly swell the numbers. But when Jeffrey in the “Edinburgh Review,” and De Quincey in the “London Magazine,” both blew a loud blast in its praise, then the tide of prosperity set in with far too sudden and too full a flood. The heads of the young schoolmasters were by no means turned by their success. They found themselves confronted with fresh difficulties. Rowland Hill had before this become painfully aware of his own shortcomings. But these were brought more than ever home to him by his very success, for it lifted him at once into a higher class of society. Men of rank and men of learning sent their children to be educated at Hazelwood. The expectations that “Public Education” raised were undoubtedly too high. The young authors wrote with thorough honesty. But they were writing about their own inventions and their own schemes; and, like all other inventors and schemers, they had a parental fondness for the offspring of their own brains. The rapid increase in the number of pupils was, moreover, as it always must be, a great source of danger to the discipline. In any school it is always a very hazardous time when the proportion of new boys is large. But in such a school as Hazelwood, with its complicated system of self-government, the hazard must have been unusually great. Out of 117 boys, with whom the school opened in January, 1825, only sixty-three had been in it more than seven months. At the very time, therefore, when Rowland Hill might with good reason have looked to enjoy some rest from his prolonged toil, a fresh strain was thrown upon him. It is not wonderful that he sank under it for a time, almost broken, as it seemed, in health and spirits.
In the midst of his hard work, a few months before the second of the two illnesses, he had been suddenly called upon to face a new difficulty. He had been bent on founding a great school, which should serve as a kind of model to the whole country. “I had refrained from writing to you,” he wrote to his eldest brother, when he was regaining his strength, “because I knew it to be important to my speedy recovery to keep down as much as possible all those associations connected with the little school, and with the great school, which so uniformly arise in my mind whenever I write to you, let the subject be what it may.”
Even so early as the year 1820 he had recorded in his Journal:—
“All our plans are necessarily calculated for great numbers, and I contend that, where the strength of the teachers is proportionate, a school cannot be too numerous. If we had 500 instead of 70 boys, I would make this place a Paradise. Till we have some such number, the effects of our system, great as they have already been, cannot be justly appreciated. I have some hopes that in time we may be able to explode the foolish ideas that private education and limited numbers are desirable.”
A few years later he began to see that it was not in a suburb of Birmingham that even he could make a Paradise. He saw that to carry out his plans the day must come when he should move to the neighbourhood of London. There was still much, he felt, to be done before he should be ready to take this step. But from a clear sky there came a clap of thunder. He was suddenly filled with alarm lest his plans should be forestalled. He was startled to learn that Bentham had one day said to Matthew Hill, “I have been thinking whether, if a sucker were taken from your Hazelwood tree and planted near London, it would grow.” In February, 1825, Matthew wrote that Brougham had just told him that he, John Smith,[65] and James Mill had resolved to found a school at London on the Hazelwood plan immediately. “Brougham has some money in hand, and J. Smith has offered to find the rest at four per cent. Brougham says that Burdett, Hobhouse, and Mill are strongly in favour of Hazelwood.”[66] Rowland Hill was not a little alarmed at the news, and with some reason, too. “Will it not be well,” he wrote back to his brother, “to inform Brougham that we have it in contemplation to establish a metropolitan school ourselves? If he knows this already, I think his conduct is very strange.” The brothers were not long in coming to a decision. They resolved to act upon Bentham’s thought with all speed, and plant near London a sucker from the Hazelwood tree.
BRUCE CASTLE, TOTTENHAM.
As soon as Rowland had somewhat recovered his strength, he began to explore the country round London, in the quest after a suitable house. The search was a long one. “I have,” he wrote in March, 1826, “with the exception of a small district which I am just going to explore, and a part of Essex, examined every great road from London.” At length his efforts were crowned with success. In the old mansion which had for ages borne the name of Bruce Castle, standing in the beautiful fragment of what once had been a wide park, he found a home for his new school. He had always been keenly alive to the charms both of scenery and antiquity. Here he found the two happily combined. The park, indeed, was but small, yet so thick was the foliage of the stately trees, and so luxuriant the undergrowth of the shrubberies, that its boundaries failed to catch the eye. High overhead the rooks, from time immemorial, had had their homes in the lofty elms. The wood-pigeons built on the topmost branches of a noble cedar of Lebanon, and the cuckoo, with his two-fold shout, never forgot there the return of spring. The kingfisher has been seen perching on a branch that overhung the pool in which the water-hen has reared her young. Hard by the main building stood an ancient tower, where the owls, year after year, made their nest—a tower which was standing when Elizabeth visited the mansion, and when Henry VIII. met there his sister, Queen Margaret of Scotland. Ancient though it is, it does not go back to days when both the house and manor took their name from their owner, the father of King Robert Bruce. The foundations of earlier buildings have been found deep beneath the lawn. On two of the bricks of the house there can still be read the first letters of names which were carved, as the date tells, when a Stuart was King in England. Through a narrow gate in the western boundary of the park, the path leads, across a quiet lane, into the churchyard. Here, as tradition told, the wall had been broken down when the last of the Lords Coleraine died, who had once owned the manor, and through the gap the body had been carried to its resting-place. Close by this little gate rose a graceful Lombardy poplar to the height of 100 feet—a landmark to all the country round. Through the trees, when winter had stripped them of their leaves, was seen from the windows of the Castle an ancient church-tower of singular beauty: ivy had covered it to the coping-stone with the growth of full two hundred years. When the foliage of summer hid it from the view, nevertheless it made its presence known by a peal of bells famous for their sweetness. The sound of the summoning bell might well inspire lofty thoughts and high aims, for it had once hung in the Citadel of Quebec, and had rung out the alarm when Wolfe stormed the heights of Abraham. The bells still remain, but the ivy has yielded to the ruthless hand of an ignorant restorer. The tower is ivy-mantled no more; and the graceful work of two long centuries has been in a moment wantonly cast away.
This beautiful home was doubly endeared to Rowland Hill, for here he brought his bride, and here he spent the first six years of his wedded life. In the same summer that he left Hazelwood he had married the playmate of his childhood. His affection for her had grown with his growth, and had never for a moment wavered. He had long loved her with the deep but quiet love of a strong nature. He was no Orlando to character his thoughts on the barks of trees. Even to his Journal, though he kept it hidden from every eye but his own, he never entrusted his secret. Two years before he kept his golden wedding-day he noticed, it would seem, this silence so uncommon in a lover. “From motives of delicacy,” he noted down, “I avoided in my Journal all mention of my early attachment to C——.” If his early records were silent in her praise, yet, when he came to write the history of the great work of his life, he spoke out with no uncertain accents. “I cannot record my marriage,” he wrote, “without adding that my dear wife’s help in my subsequent toils, and not least in those best known to the public, was important, perhaps essential, to their success.” An old-fashioned friend of his family, who knew well how hard she had laboured in helping her husband in his great work, on hearing some one say that Mr. Rowland Hill was the Father of Penny Postage, quaintly remarked, “Then I know who was its Mother. It was his wife.”