MR. JACKSON, a tall, short-sighted clergyman with the green moustache, and classical tutor at St. Stephen’s College, was accustomed to dine en garçon every Saturday night in Hall, instead of en famille at home, and after two or three glasses of port, play a rubber of whist in the room of one of his colleagues. To-night the gathering was planned to take place at Mr. Butler’s rooms in the Fellows’ Buildings, and it was with great pleasure that he had heard his host ask Waters and Alison to complete the four. They were all Classical dons, tutors and lecturers, and it was completely characteristic of them that they continued to play whist rather than bridge, which they considered a debased and easy variety of dummy whist. All four had minds of the same academic calibre, and they constituted in this very Conservative college the stronghold and inner defences of Conservatism. Chief among its tenets was the doctrine that Latin and Greek were the sole and essential instruments of education that should be used on the mind of the young, just as cricket and football and rowing were a young man’s proper physical exercises. In later life you could play golf and lawn-tennis and croquet, even as in later life you could learn French and Italian, in which, no doubt, there were many light and agreeable pieces of literature to be enjoyed. But until you had attained to maturity all these minor diversions had best be eschewed. “A fellow,” as Mr. Jackson was fond of saying, “who can write a decent set of Greek Iambics, or translate a piece of Gibbon into Thucydidean Greek, has a trained mind, which can without difficulty acquire any other subject of human knowledge with which his profession makes it desirable that he should be acquainted.”
This creed Mr. Jackson put into practice every day of the term. Greek was the special subject that he taught, and week by week his pupils, besides attending his lectures, which just now were concerned with the Peloponnesian war, made renderings of English verse into Iambics and English prose into its possible equivalent in Thucydidean or Platonic Greek. The point of these exercises really was to cram into the rendering as many tags from classical authors as could be dragged in. When a set of Iambics were plentifully besprinkled with phrases and unusual usages from Æschylus or Sophocles, Mr. Jackson considered them a good effort of scholarship, and never paused to reflect whether it might not be merely a specimen of the most comical Baboo Greek.
Everything connected with classical Greek was an unrivalled instrument of education in his regard, and thus his pupils were also thoroughly instructed in Greek history. They might be as ignorant as a sucking child on the subject of French, Italian or English history; their claims, as regards history, to be educated rested solely on their knowledge of Greek history. Similarly it was nice to know dates; he had no objection to anyone being aware of the year in which Constantinople fell into the hands of Osman, or England into those of William the Conqueror. But it was necessary to salvation to have on the tip of your tongue the date of the death of Pericles. Subsequently, in Greek history, the classical age ceased, and that nation and language had not the good luck to interest Mr. Jackson any further at all.
His loyal conspirator and coadjutor in keeping the Greek flag flying was Waters, who was to make one of the four to-night, and since his host Butler held the same views with regard to Latin as he to Greek, and had asked Alison, his Latin fellow-conspirator, to complete the table, Jackson felt justified in expecting a pleasant evening. It was not that he intended or expected that anybody would talk “shop” with regard to education; simply he felt happier and more at ease in the presence of classical scholars than in that of mathematicians or natural scientists. With natural scientists he had, however, a bond in common (when they did not bring into prominence their doleful heresy that natural science or natural history could possibly be considered an instrument of education), for he himself had for years been an enthusiastic collector of fresh-water shells. But that was his hobby, over which he unbent his mind, laying no claim to be an educated man because he had a very considerable knowledge of this branch of conchology, any more than Butler considered it a title to culture that he had a completer knowledge of Handel’s music than any living man, or probably any dead one, including Handel himself.
Jackson strolled along the broad gravel path towards Butler’s rooms, passing groups of undergraduates on the way, to some of whom, his own pupils, he nodded; practically he knew none others, even by sight. Jim and Birds were among those he knew, who, since smoking in the court was forbidden, discreetly held their cigarettes behind their backs as Mr. Jackson passed them. But though short-sighted, he had a keen sense of smell, and pleasantly enough made a rather neat Latin quotation about incense.
From Butler’s room came the loud resonance of a piano, which quite drowned the noise of his knocking, and entering, he found that sardonic colleague deeply engaged at his piano on the last movement of Handel’s Occasional Overture. Butler’s method of playing was to put his face very near the music, plant a firm foot on the loud pedal, and add the soft pedal for passages marked piano. He preserved an iron and unshakable tempo, counting the requisite number of beats to each bar in an audible voice, and not stopping till he got to the end of his piece unless the book fell off the music-rest, when he turned the page. When that occurred, he continued counting while he picked it up.
To-night no such interruption occurred, and it was not till he had reached the last loud chord that he observed Jackson’s appearance.
“That’s a glorious thing you were playing,” observed he pleasantly, as he put his cap and gown in the window-seat. “Glorious. They can’t write such music now.”
Butler gave a short sarcastic laugh.
“They can’t indeed,” he said. “Modern music is just trash: there’s no other word for it. The other day when I was up in town I went—good evening, Waters—I went to a concert in order to hear Handel’s violin sonata, and had to sit through a piece of Debussy. If it hadn’t been for the question of manners, I should have put back my head and howled like a dog.”