Tales of St. Austin's

by P. G. Wodehouse

  [14]

  NOTES

  Of all forms of lettered effusiveness, that which exploits the original work of others and professes to supply us with right opinions thereanent is the least wanted.

  _Kenneth Grahame_

  It has always seemed to me one of the worst flaws in our mistakensocial system, that absolutely no distinction is made between themaster who forces the human boy to take down notes from dictation andthe rest of mankind. I mean that, if in a moment of righteousindignation you rend such a one limb from limb, you will almostcertainly be subjected to the utmost rigour of the law, and you will belucky if you escape a heavy fine of five or ten shillings, exclusive ofthe costs of the case. Now, this is not right on the face of it. It iseven wrong. The law should take into account the extreme provocationwhich led to the action. Punish if you will the man who travelssecond-class with a third-class ticket, or who borrows a pencil andforgets to return it; but there are occasions when justice should betempered with mercy, and this murdering of pedagogues is undoubtedlysuch an occasion.

  It should be remembered, however, that there are two varieties ofnotes. The printed notes at the end of your Thucydides or Homer aredistinctly useful when they aim at acting up to their true vocation,namely, the translating of difficult passages or words. Sometimes,however, the author will insist on airing his scholarship, and insteadof translations he supplies parallel passages, which neither interest,elevate, nor amuse the reader. This, of course, is mere vanity. Theauthor, sitting in his comfortable chair with something short withineasy reach, recks nothing of the misery he is inflicting on hundreds ofpeople who have done him no harm at all. He turns over the pages of hisbook of _Familiar Quotations_ with brutal callousness, and forevery tricky passage in the work which he is editing, finds and makes anote of three or four even trickier ones from other works. Who has notin his time been brought face to face with a word which defiestranslation? There are two courses open to you on such an occasion, tolook the word up in the lexicon, or in the notes. You, of course, turnup the notes, and find: 'See line 80.' You look up line 80, hoping tosee a translation, and there you are told that a rather similarconstruction occurs in Xenophades' _Lyrics from a Padded Cell_. Onthis, the craven of spirit will resort to the lexicon, but the man ofmettle will close his book with an emphatic bang, and refuse to haveanything more to do with it. Of a different sort are the notes whichsimply translate the difficulty and subside. These are a boon to thescholar. Without them it would be almost impossible to prepare one'swork during school, and we should be reduced to the prosaic expedientof working in prep. time. What we want is the commentator whotranslates _mensa_ as 'a table' without giving a page and a halfof notes on the uses of the table in ancient Greece, with an excursuson the habit common in those times of retiring underneath it afterdinner, and a list of the passages in Apollonius Rhodius where the word'table' is mentioned.

  These voluminous notes are apt to prove a nuisance in more ways thanone. Your average master is generally inordinately fond of them, andwill frequently ask some member of the form to read his note onso-and-so out to his fellows. This sometimes leads to curious results,as it is hardly to be expected that the youth called upon will beattending, even if he is awake, which is unlikely. On one occasionan acquaintance of mine, 'whose name I am not at liberty to divulge',was suddenly aware that he was being addressed, and, on giving thematter his attention, found that it was the form-master asking him toread out his note on _Balbus murum aedificavit_. My friend is akind-hearted youth and of an obliging disposition, and would willinglyhave done what was asked of him, but there were obstacles, first andforemost of which ranked the fact that, taking advantage of hisposition on the back desk (whither he thought the basilisk eye ofAuthority could not reach), he had substituted _Bab Ballads_ forthe words of Virgil, and was engrossed in the contents of that modernclassic. The subsequent explanations lasted several hours. In fact, itis probable that the master does not understand the facts of the casethoroughly even now. It is true that he called him a 'loathsome, slimy,repulsive toad', but even this seems to fall short of the grandeur ofthe situation.

  Those notes, also, which are, alas! only too common nowadays, that dealwith peculiarities of grammar, how supremely repulsive they are! It isimpossible to glean any sense from them, as the Editor mixes upNipperwick's view with Sidgeley's reasoning and Spreckendzedeutscheim'ssurmise with Donnerundblitzendorf's conjecture in a way that seems toargue a thorough unsoundness of mind and morals, a cynical insanitycombined with a blatant indecency. He occasionally starts in areasonable manner by giving one view as (1) and the next as (2). So fareveryone is happy and satisfied. The trouble commences when he hasoccasion to refer back to some former view, when he will say: 'Thus wesee (1) and (14) that,' etc. The unlucky student puts a finger on thepage to keep the place, and hunts up view one. Having found this, andmarked the spot with another finger, he proceeds to look up viewfourteen. He places another finger on this, and reads on, as follows:'Zmpe, however, maintains that Schrumpff (see 3) is practically insane,that Spleckzh (see 34) is only a little better, and that Rswkg (see 97a (b) C3) is so far from being right that his views may be dismissed asreadily as those of Xkryt (see 5x).' At this point brain-fever sets in,the victim's last coherent thought being a passionate wish for morefingers. A friend of mine who was the wonder of all who knew him, inthat he was known to have scored ten per cent in one of these papers onquestions like the above, once divulged to an interviewer the fact thathe owed his success to his methods of learning rather than to hisability. On the night before an exam, he would retire to some secret,solitary place, such as the boot-room, and commence learning thesenotes by heart. This, though a formidable task, was not so bad as theother alternative. The result was that, although in the majority ofcases he would put down for one question an answer that would have beenright for another, yet occasionally, luck being with him, he would hitthe mark. Hence his ten per cent.

  Another fruitful source of discomfort is provided by the type of masterwho lectures on a subject for half an hour, and then, with a blandsmile, invites, or rather challenges, his form to write a 'good, longnote' on the quintessence of his discourse. For the inexperienced thisis an awful moment. They must write something--but what? For the lasthalf hour they have been trying to impress the master with the factthat they belong to the class of people who can always listen best withtheir eyes closed. Nor poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrupsof the world can ever medicine them to that sweet sleep that they havejust been enjoying. And now they must write a 'good, long note'. It isin such extremities that your veteran shows up well. He does not betrayany discomfort. Not he. He rather enjoys the prospect, in fact, ofbeing permitted to place the master's golden eloquence on paper. So hetakes up his pen with alacrity. No need to think what to write. Heembarks on an essay concerning the master, showing up all his flaws ina pitiless light, and analysing his thorough worthlessness ofcharacter. On so congenial a subject he can, of course, write reams,and as the master seldom, if ever, desires to read the 'good, longnote', he acquires a well-earned reputation for attending in school andbeing able to express himself readily with his pen. _Vivatfloreatque_.

  But all these forms of notes are as nothing compared with the notesthat youths even in this our boasted land of freedom are forced to takedown from dictation. Of the 'good, long note' your French scholar mightwell remark: '_C'est terrible_', but justice would compel him toadd, as he thought of the dictation note: '_mais ce n'est pas lediable_'. For these notes from dictation are, especially on a warmday, indubitably _le diable_.

  Such notes are always dictated so rapidly that it is impossible to doanything towards understanding them as you go. You have to write yourhardest to keep up. The beauty of this, from one point of view, isthat, if you miss a sentence, you have lost the thread of the wholething, and it is useless to attempt to take it up again at once. Theonly plan is to wait for some perceptible break in the flow of words,and dash in lik
e lightning. It is much the same sort of thing asboarding a bus when in motion. And so you can take a long rest,provided you are in an obscure part of the room. In passing, I mightadd that a very pleasing indoor game can be played by asking themaster, 'what came after so-and-so?' mentioning a point of the orationsome half-hour back. This always provides a respite of a few minuteswhile he is thinking of some bitter repartee worthy of the occasion,and if repeated several times during an afternoon may cause muchinnocent merriment.

  Of course, the real venom that lurks hid within notes from dictationdoes not appear until the time for examination arrives. Then you findyourself face to face with sixty or seventy closely and badly writtenpages of a note-book, all of which must be learnt by heart if you wouldaspire to the dizzy heights of half-marks. It is useless to tell yourexaminer that you had no chance of getting up the subject. 'Why,' hewill reply, 'I gave you notes on that very thing myself.' 'You did,sir,' you say, as you advance stealthily upon him, 'but as you dictatedthose notes at the rate of two hundred words a minute, and as my brain,though large, is not capable of absorbing sixty pages of a note-book inone night, how the suggestively asterisked aposiopesis do you expect meto know them? Ah-h-h!' The last word is a war-cry, as you flingyourself bodily on him, and tear him courteously, but firmly, intominute fragments. Experience, which, as we all know, teaches, will intime lead you into adopting some method by which you may evade thistaking of notes. A good plan is to occupy yourself with the compositionof a journal, an unofficial magazine not intended for the eyes of theprofane, but confined rigidly to your own circle of acquaintances. Thechief advantage of such a work is that you will continue to write whilethe notes are being dictated. To throw your pen down with an air offinality and begin reading some congenial work of fiction would be agallant action, but impolitic. No, writing of some sort is essential,and as it is out of the question to take down the notes, what bettersubstitute than an unofficial journal could be found? To one whosecontributions to the School magazine are constantly being cut down tomere skeletons by the hands of censors, there is a rapture otherwiseunattainable in a page of really scurrilous items about those inauthority. Try it yourselves, my beamish lads. Think of somethingreally bad about somebody. Write it down and gloat over it. Sometimes,indeed, it is of the utmost use in determining your future career. Youwill probably remember those Titanic articles that appeared at thebeginning of the war in _The Weekly Luggage-Train_, dealing withall the crimes of the War Office--the generals, the soldiers, theenemy--of everybody, in fact, except the editor, staff and office-boyof _The W.L.T._ Well, the writer of those epoch-making articlesconfesses that he owes all his skill to his early training, when, ahappy lad at his little desk in school, he used to write trenchantly inhis note-book on the subject of the authorities. There is an examplefor you. Of course we can never be like him, but let, oh! let us be aslike him as we're able to be. A final word to those lost ones whodictate the notes. Why are our ears so constantly assailed withunnecessary explanations of, and opinions on, English literature? Preyupon the Classics if you will. It is a revolting habit, but too commonto excite overmuch horror. But surely anybody, presupposing a certainbias towards sanity, can understand the Classics of our own language,with the exception, of course, of Browning. Take Tennyson, for example.How often have we been forced to take down from dictation the miserablemaunderings of some commentator on the subject of _Maud_. A personreads _Maud_, and either likes it or dislikes it. In any case hisopinion is not likely to be influenced by writing down at express speedthe opinions of somebody else concerning the methods or objectivity andsubjectivity of the author when he produced the work.

  Somebody told me a short time ago that Shelley was an example ofsupreme, divine, superhuman genius. It is the sort of thing MrGilbert's 'rapturous maidens' might have said: 'How Botticellian! HowFra Angelican! How perceptively intense and consummately utter!' Thereis really no material difference.