'T. E. B.'1

I

THE MAN

IT was in 1860 that I knew him first; and the occasion of my knowing him was this. The old Crypt Grammar School had been founded in 1509or was it 1519?-by a burgess of the City, one John Cooke; 2 had served its term, so far as 'certain poor boys' were concerned, for many years; had gone to wreck and confusion, and ceased from fulfilling its purpose for many others; had come

1 Letters of Thomas Edward Brown, Author of Fo'c's'le Yarns. Edited, with an Introductory Memoir, by Sidney T. Irwin. (London: A. Constable and Co., Ltd., 1900.) In two volumes.

'He is buried in the Cathedral, he and his wife Joan; and there is a monument to them in the nave of that noble fane which I have considered many times, and can see before me as I write. It is in the wall, and, if I mistake not, is railed off from the general. In the centre is a lozenge with an appropriate inscription; and on the right hand of the lozenge, in an attitude of prayer, is John Cooke, in the costume of the period, and behind him in a diminuendo, a sort of vanishing quantity, are his eight sons, all kneeling, and all costumed, and all praying. And on the left hand of the lozenge is Joan his wife, also in the costume of the period; and behind her, in a diminuendo, a sort of vanishing quantity, are her seven daughters. As a small boy, I looked much at them: wondering, especially, if they went on like that in real life. Also how, if they (the eight sons) dressed like that, they escaped being stoned in Gloucester streets.

into the hands of divers persons having authority, and had by them been purged of its iniquities, and given a fresh start in life, with a sufficient income, and a great capacity for useful work among the offspring of the middling and the lower middle-classes. I do not know its history in detail; but I imagine it to have been badly misgoverned and mishandled, and to have fallen so low that only on reform and change from the foundations upwards could there be any hope for it. Well, reform it got, and change -as absolute, both, as the Chancery Commissioners could give; and they set the seal upon their work by the discovery and appointment of a competent staff. In the attainment of this object they succeeded perfectly; and the best of their gift, though the City knew it not, was the headmaster. He was not more than thirty; his career had been one of exceptional and peculiar brilliancy; he was a double-first (Classics and Modern History); he had a gift of exciting and a gift of teaching. Unfortunately for us, the boys he might have shaped and trained, he was also a man of character and genius; and, as I now know, his patience had been somewhat hardly tried during the time of his servitorship at the House.' He was intolerant of interference especially such futile interference as he must endure; he was contemptuous of comment —above all, such ignorant and pettifogging comment as he got. His critics were impudent; I think they thought he was going to run the school on Pinnock and Mangnall's Questions, and the like, and were disgusted beyond measure to find that he meant his boys to have decent books-books which

cost money, and could not be done without. He, on his part, was insolent, as he had every right to be, considering the stamp and quality of his assailants; and that he stooped to their level, and did battle with them in the local prints, is, as I now see, a proof that he was uncomfortable from the first, and could in nowise realise the kind of illiteracy-vain, fat-witted, beery, excessively conservative-into whose midst he had descended.1 Be this as it may, he was a failure, and in Mr. Irwin's memoir his passage through the sleepy grey city of my birth, his conduct of the old Crypt School is referred to merely as 'the Gloucester episode.' That he hated the memory is plain; and it may be that I wrong his noble ghost in treating of it as I have done. But I do not think so. It is a platitude that everything depends on the point of view. And I am fain to say that his point of view is not mine. From his, the Gloucester episode' was, I take it, an unpleasing and ridiculous experiment. From

1 The point is, that he had to deal with the sons of a class which hated scholarship, and knew nothing of letters. He would have been, I take it, less out of his element at the Cathedral School, whereat there was an atmosphere of reading, a tradition of the humanities (so to speak): where the mortar-board (if I may so put it) had been worn for generations, so that when we of the Crypt began to go abroad in that head-gear, the Cathedral School boys mixed and intertwined their tassels with blue, to distinguish themselves from us, the upstarts, who had laid hands on the hitherto inviolable black. Brown's misfortune(it might so well have been his opportunity !)—was that he had to create a tradition, and that time and his material were against him. As to his material: when he was last with me he recalled the performance of a youth, who-(the Head and his assistants had to teach us cricket!)-being sent out to field, protested, to the master in charge, in these terms:- Look 'ere, Sur, what I wants to know is, when 'll it be my turn to knawck.' As to time, perhaps he was impatient. But, given his temperament, could he have been aught else?

mine, it was an unqualified success: since it made him known to me, and opened to me ways of thought and speech that well! since it came upon me like a call from the world outside—the great, quick, living world-and discovered me the beginnings, the true materials, of myself.1

'Tis wellnigh forty years ago that the revelation came to me; and that it came through him has ever been a joy to mind and heart. That it came to me here and there-in broken lights, at odd moments, on remote occasions-that neither is, nor has ever been, anything to the purpose. The matter of that purpose is that he was T. E. B., the man of genius -the first I'd ever seen; and that, being so, he took hold upon me with a grip he never knew, and led me out into the nearer distances-into the shadows at the edge of the great sea-to a point I might never have reached without him. What he did for me, practically, was to suggest such possibilities in life and character as I had never dreamed. He was singularly kind to me1 at a moment when I needed kindness even more than I needed encouragement. The occasion was an examination; I did surprisingly well without knowing it; he rejoiced in the effect, and did what he could to reward me for my share in it. The names were called, and mine

1 Thus (the italics are mine)-thus another pupil, Mr. H. F. Brown-He was a "widener." He made one feel that there was something beyond the school, beyond successful performances at lessons or at games; there was a whiff of the great world brought in by him.'

Much as the Regius Professor, Jacobson, had been kind to him at Oxford-and, mutatis mutandis, on the same grounds; but the gift of books was of infinitely greater consequence in my case than Jacobson's had been in his.

mine! was once and again the first: to the astonishment, it may be the disgust, of the listening benches; and after that, the school dismissed, there was an interview. Shall I ever forget its meanest circumstance? I trow not; and the thing is, that he forgot it no more than I, but spoke of it the last time I saw him-a year or two before he died. I could not follow him far on that occasion. Old memories were too much for me. It was close on forty years since it had happened; an infinite deal of water had gone under the bridges in the meanwhile; life had had its fill of pupil and master both, and there had been joy and achievement and trouble for both master and pupil, and it may be that death had drawn us closer to each other than all else. Yet he remembered that interview, and would fain have spoken of it. I was younger-much youngerthan he, and could say nothing. I meant to have it out with him the next time; but there was none. When, in due course, he came again to England, I got a joyous letter from him from Cardiff, dilating gaudily upon a certain essay on Robert Burns, which (it appeared) had filled him with pride and happiness. But he got no farther than Clifton. There the brave, brilliant, helpful life fell on a sudden and a happy close. There the amazing temperament, the great heart, the thrice-filled brain, the inexhaustible and unfailing gift of sympathy, the infinite understanding of things human which went to the making of that unique thing, 'T. E. B.'-there, I say, these gifts lapsed, and he passed into the past. There are many, very many living, on whose lives his mark is indelible. There There are many, not so