Part 13
Of his energy we have evidence in the _amount_ of material contained in his collected works. There was nothing dilatory about him, and here he again resembled his father, who had markedly the power of doing things at the right moment, and thus avoiding waste of time and discomfort to others. George had none of a characteristic which was defined in the case of Henry Bradshaw, as "always doing something else." After an interruption he could instantly reabsorb himself in his work, so that his study was not kept as a place sacred to peace and quiet.
His wife is my authority for saying that although he got so much done, it was not by working long hours. Moreover, the days that he was away from home made large gaps in his opportunities for steady application. His diaries show in another way that his researches by no means took all his time. He made a note of the books he read, and these make a considerable record. Although he read much good literature with honest enjoyment, he had not a delicate or subtle literary judgment. Nor did he care for music. He was interested in travels, history, and biography, and as he could remember what he read or heard, his knowledge was wide in many directions. His linguistic power was characteristic. He read many European languages. I remember his translating a long Swedish paper for my father. And he took pleasure in the Platt Deutsch stories of Fritz Reuter.
The discomfort from which he suffered during the meeting at Cambridge of the International Congress of Mathematicians in August 1912 was, in fact, the beginning of his last illness. An exploratory operation showed that he was suffering from malignant disease. Happily he was spared the pain that gives its terror to this malady. His nature was, as we have seen, simple and direct, with a pleasant residue of the innocence and eagerness of childhood. In the manner of his death these qualities were ennobled by an admirable and most unselfish courage. As his vitality ebbed away his affection only showed the stronger. He wished to live, and he felt that his power of work and his enjoyment of life were as strong as ever, but his resignation to the sudden end was complete and beautiful. He died on December 7, 1912, and was buried at Trumpington.
HONOURS, MEDALS, DEGREES, SOCIETIES, ETC.
_Order_. K.C.B. 1905.
_Medals_. {192a}
1883. Telford Medal of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
1884. Royal Medal. {192b}
1892. Royal Astronomical Society's Medal.
1911. Copley Medal of the Royal Society.
1912. Royal Geographical Society's Medal.
_Offices_.
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Plumian Professor in the University.
Vice-President of the International Geodetic Association, Lowell Lecturer at Boston U.S. (1897).
Member of the Meteorological and Solar Physics Committees.
Past President of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, {193} Royal Astronomical Society, British Association.
_Doctorates_, _etc._, _of Universities_.
Oxford, Dublin, Glasgow, Pennsylvania, Padua (Socio onorario), Gottingen, Christiania, Cape of Good Hope, Moscow (honorary member).
_Foreign or Honorary Membership of Academies_, _etc._
Amsterdam (Netherlands Academy), Boston (American Academy), Brussels (Royal Society), Calcutta (Math. Soc.), Dublin (Royal Irish Academy), Edinburgh (Royal Society), Halle (K. Leop.-Carol. Acad.), Kharkov (Math. Soc.), Mexico (Soc. "Antonio Alzate"), Moscow (Imperial Society of the Friends of Science), New York, Padua, Philadelphia (Philosophical Society), Rome (Lincei), Stockholm (Swedish Academy), Toronto (Physical Society), Washington (National Academy), Wellington (New Zealand Inst.).
_Correspondent of Academies_, _etc._, _at_
Acireale (Zelanti), Berlin (Prussian Academy), Buda Pest (Hungarian Academy), Frankfort (Senckenberg. Natur. Gesell.), Gottingen (Royal Society), Paris, St. Petersburg, Turin, Istuto Veneto, Vienna. {194}
XI WAR MUSIC
AN ADDRESS TO A SOCIETY OF MORRIS DANCERS DECEMBER 21, 1914
According to the _Dictionary of Music_ {195} the military march is meant "not only to stimulate courage but also to ensure the orderly advance of troops." In other words, military music serves to incite and to regulate movement. But these cannot always be discriminated. The tramp tramp of marching soldiers is ordered by the rhythm of the band. This is obvious, but we cannot say how far the bravery of the tune puts strength into tired legs, and this would be incitement,--and how far it is the unappeasable rhythm that forces the men to keep going, and this may perhaps be called regulation. There are occasions when the trumpet comes as a signal to troops waiting to make some sublime effort, and where the fierce imperious sound has a lift and a sting which perhaps no pre-concerted signal of a weaker type could give. This is an example of incitement, but in as much as it determines the moment of attack it is also a regulating agent.
Marching is still of importance,--in spite of the part taken by railways in modern strategy. I should like to know whether the magnificent marches of the Russians are made to the accompaniment of a band or of the regimental choir. One sees in our volunteer army the tendency to sing on the march. But it must be allowed that neither words or tunes are
## particularly inspiring. The Englishman is habitually afraid of being
solemn, and though his marching songs may contain good things they are apt to be treated in a light spirit. There is one which includes the words, "Rule, Rule, Britannia!" and "God Save the Queen!" but these famous phrases serve as chorus to lighthearted fragments, _e.g._ nursery rhymes, such as "Little Miss Muffett." I regret to add that even this classic is not respectfully used. It should run, "There came a great spider and sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffett away." I forget the precise words of the parody, except its ending, "And Little Miss Muffett said, 'Bother the creature!'" I still remember the fine effect of German soldiers heard many years ago singing the "Wacht am Rhein" on the march. Once, too, I listened to Zouaves, and no greater contrast can be imagined. It was hardly more than a murmur, a chatter of diverse scraps, and had no inspiring effect. These magnificent troops may need no artificial stimulus, but ordinary folk are certainly kept going by martial music. I remember, as a boy, marching to the tune of the "British Grenadiers," which has foolish words, and is not striking from a musical point of view, but it seemed to take us along. This march-tune comes in finely in Rudyard Kipling's story of the _Drums of the Fore and Aft_. An untried British regiment is cut up by Afghans and retires in a helter-skelter rush, leaving behind two boys of the Band, who strike up the "British Grenadiers" with the solitary squeak of a fife and the despairing roll of a drum. The answer comes in a great cheer from the Highlanders and Gurkas waiting on the heights, and in a charge that turns defeat into victory. I wish that Kipling had allowed the boys to survive, but the tragedy of their death is after all the effective close. To return to marching-tunes. For average people all that is needed is a well marked rhythm: "John Brown's body," etc., is an admirable march, though taken from its context of tramping soldiers it is hardly a fine tune. But so far as words are concerned it must be allowed that the refrain, "His soul goes marching along," is in the right mood for a war song.
It may be objected that if all I want is rhythm I should be satisfied with instruments of percussion alone. To this I reply that the effect of drums is splendidly martial. I was at Aix at the outbreak of the war, and every day the regiment quartered there used to march out to the music of drums, and of bugles which played simple tunes on the common chord. When the buglers were out of breath, the drums thundered on with magnificent fire, until once more the simple and spirited fanfare came in with its brave out-of-doors flavour--a romantic dash of the hunting song, and yet with something of the seriousness of battle. And indeed this is the sort of melody that suits the dauntless spirit of our allies. As I watched these men, so soon to fight for their country, I was reminded of that white-faced boy pictured by Stevenson, striding over his dead comrades, the roll of his drum leading the living to victory or death. Drums are said (incorrectly I believe) to be made of donkey's skin, and Stevenson imagines how, after death, the poor beast takes this magical revenge for the blows received in life, by leading cruel man to destruction. The old English military music seems to have been played by drums alone. King Charles I issued a warrant in the following words: {198a} "Whereas . . . the March of this our nation so famous in all honourable achievements and glorious warres of this our Kingdom in forraigne parts was through the negligence and carelessness of drummers . . . so altered and changed from the ancient gravity and majestic thereof as it was in danger utterly to have been lost and forgotten. . . ." He therefore wills and commands drummers to play only what is recorded in the curious old notation of that day. It must be remembered that drums and trumpets had something of the sacredness of Royalty in the 17th century. No one was allowed to play them in public without a license from the Sergeant Trumpeter, {198b} an officer who certainly existed a few years ago, and may, for all I know, still survive. In the 17th century it was a post of some dignity, and gave its holder the title of Esquire.
During the great retreat in the winter of 1914 the effect of music was magnificently illustrated. Mr. Conan Doyle {199} writes, "Exhausted as the troops were, there could he no halt or rest until they had extricated themselves from the immediate danger. At the last point of human endurance they still staggered on through the evening and the night time, amid roaring thunder and flashing lightning, down the St. Quentin road. Many fell from fatigue, and having fallen continued to sleep. . . . In the case of some of the men the collapse was so complete that it was almost impossible to get them on. Major Tom Bridges, of the 4th Royal Irish Dragoons being sent to round up and hurry forward 250 stragglers at St. Quentin, found them nearly comatose with fatigue. With quick wit he bought a toy drum, and accompanied by a man with a penny whistle he fell them in and marched them, laughing in all their misery, down the high road towards Ham." When he stopped he found that the men stopped also, so he was compelled to march and play the whole way to Roupy.
In Sir Henry Newbolt's _Song of the Great Retreat_ (_The Times_, Dec. 16, 1914), this triumphant success is described:
"Cheerly goes the dark road, cheerly goes the night, Cheerly goes the blood to keep the beat: Half a thousand dead men marching on to fight, With a little penny drum to lift their feet."
This song ought to be especially interesting to our Society, because the effect of a small drum and a penny whistle is roughly the same as that of the pipe and tabor, and these are the traditional instruments for English Folk Dances. It is perhaps worth noting that they must in old days have been used in war, for there is an illustration in an ancient manuscript of a taborer piping at the head of a body of troops marching out from a town.
Man is a social animal, and his natural strength lies in community of
## action with his fellows. It is this which gives music its power over
masses of men, the pulsation of the drum, the blare of the answering trumpets, or the strident voice of the bagpipe cry to them in tones which cannot be misunderstood, binding them into a brotherhood of courage and obedience. But a society of Morris Dancers does not need to be reminded of the noble effect of human movement controlled by music. The word 'caper' has somewhat ridiculous associations, but we have learned to respect it for what it implies: the finely ordered strenuous movement of strong bodies leaping in rhythmic dance. It suggests something pagan and prehistoric, a physical religion of astonishing beauty. Some of our Morris men are now giving all the vigour of their young bodies to a great and just cause. Let us wish them a victorious home-coming.
XII THE TEACHING OF SCIENCE {201}
It is not difficult to sympathise with what Dr. Birkbeck aimed at in founding the College which bears his name. His idea seems to have been, that whatever a man's calling may be, he is the better for accurate knowledge of the things with which he deals. This is a sufficiently obvious statement. But if for the word 'accurate' we substitute 'scientific,' it is no longer a platitude--at least it is not so in the ears of the semi-educated. For we can still find people who believe in the "practical man" as opposed to one whom they probably call a scientist. One would like to know more of the conception of science formed by the unscientific. They are probably unaware that science is eminently practical in asserting that only to be true which rests on wide and accurate generalisation. It is also practical wisdom to hold, as science does, that truth is temporary and relative, and is in fact merely the best conclusion that can be drawn in the present state of knowledge. To many people science is wearisome and somewhat ridiculous, and these qualities appear in the naturalist of fiction. Thus when even George Eliot draws a coleopterist, he is made a feeble old man shuffling to and fro among his ridiculous beetles. And on the French stage I have seen a botanist treated in the same spirit.
Positiveness and bumptiousness are also supposed to be our attributes. In the 'New Republic' the characters said to represent Huxley and Clifford are completely disguised by their pompous pretentiousness.
It is not difficult to describe the ideals of science, but it is only too easy to fall short of them. It is easy for instance to become a sectarian, to belong to a school, and to be literally incapable of fairness towards the opposition. This was plainly seen at the incoming of evolution, and it was one of the many glories of Sir Charles Lyell that he could accept the 'Origin of Species,' and that, in the words of Hooker, he could under-pin his work with an evolutionary foundation and find his edifice stronger than ever. But we need not consider the battles of giants; we are much more likely to be concerned with the mentally dwarfed or deformed--with the dangerous man who makes positive statements on insufficient data, or suffers from that other vice of not being able to confess ignorance. The only lectures which impressed me, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, were those of the late Sir George Humphry; and his most striking words were confessions of complete ignorance about many parts of physiology. Here is an instance of an opposite state of things, of a want of courage. An eminent chemist was asked why common salt thrown on the fire gives a blue flame. Now the chemist was a German, and having been brought up in that land of stoves, probably had not performed an experiment so easily made in the home of open fires. So he rashly answered, "It does not burn blue, it is impossible, sodium-salts give a yellow flame." On this my friend fetched the salt and threw a handful on to the glowing coals--with the result that the eminent chemist rose up and fled in silence from the room. He gave an admirable example of how not to behave. He ought not in the first place to have denied the fact _a priori_, and when he was convicted he should have been glad to learn.
It has been said that in scientific work accuracy is the most valuable quality and the hardest to attain. Accuracy alone may strike us as a dull quality to be so highly rated. When a given result has been obtained in eleven successive experiments, and fails on the twelfth occasion, it is the accurate-minded man who makes a wise use of the failure. It ought to arouse in us a flame of curiosity, lighting in us a whole posse of theories, which force us to vary our procedure and finally enable us to solve the difficulty.
Most of us are inclined to treat an unexpected result in a cavalier spirit, pushing it aside as "only an exception," whereas it should be received as possibly a personage of distinction in disguise, and not as a rude disturber of our pet ideas.
A class of experimentalists exists from whom we all suffer--namely, cooks. How happy we should be if they possessed this lively desire to understand their own lapses from good cookery! It may be urged in excuse, that although the essence of cooking is the application of heat to food, not one cook in a thousand has a thermometer in her oven. I hope that some of the ladies who have in these laboratories learned to believe in accuracy, will become missionaries among the ignorant and insist on this simple reform.
There is a type of accuracy of a very different kind which may become an actual vice. For instance, the desire to weigh things to 1-10 mg. which should only have been weighed to a centigram, measuring to 1-10 mm., and calculating averages to several places of decimals. In such a science as Botany this may be positive waste of time. Sachs, the great German botanist, in whose laboratory I worked, was never tired of complaining of this "sogenannte Genauigkeit," (this so-called accuracy). I am told that Lord Rayleigh, whose physical inquiries demand in some cases excessive and minute accuracy, has a wonderful instinct for knowing when and where he may relax his methods.
I have been compelled to use the words 'science' and 'scientific' because these terms have become firmly adherent to a group of subjects such as Physics, Chemistry, Geology, Botany, etc., and cannot now be detached from them. Unfortunately 'scientific' is used in another sense as implying accuracy of experimental method and in deduction from results. So that in calling ourselves scientific men we run the risk of seeming to claim a monopoly of method, as though we pretended to be somehow superior to the trained workers in other branches. The current use of the word seems therefore to cast unjust suspicion on literature. I wish that the word _science_ could be restored to its original meaning of knowledge, or the art of knowing; but words (like organisms) are evolved, and against evolution the gods fight in vain. In any case I hope it will be believed that in speaking of knowledge I have taken instances from what is usually called science, not out of disrespect to literature, but like Dr. Johnson in a different affair--from ignorance.
I imagine Dr. Birkbeck to have had no idea that this institution would be so extensively used for preparing people for examinations. I doubt whether he would have liked it, but respect to the pious memory of a founder may be exaggerated, and since there is no getting rid of examinations, the next best thing is to make the art of coaching as little harmful as may be to pupil and teacher. I do not mean to speak slightingly of coaching as a whole, for a great deal of it is only a very skilful way of imparting knowledge, but it will be allowed that some of it is not educative in a broad sense.
You will remember that Mr. Brooke, in _Middlemarch_, was in the habit of mildly investigating questions which he always threw over because he foresaw they would "carry him too far." I confess to feeling very like Mr. Brooke when I attempt to balance the interests of teacher and student. In that comfortable period, the 18th century, things were all in favour of the teacher. The poet Gray, who was Professor of History at Cambridge, could never decide whether to lecture in Latin or English, and ended by never lecturing at all.
It is now easier to find cases where the teacher is the victim and slave of his pupils, and has no time or strength to continue his own education.
This has at least two bad results, and probably more than that number: (1) From want of time for reading the teacher can hardly avoid falling behind in a rapidly progressive subject such as one of the natural sciences, and consequently the University or College that enslaves him is injuring its own property. (2) He has no time to do any original work, and this is even worse for him (and therefore, as before, for the College). He ceases to be on intimate terms with the plants or animals or chemical substances with which he has to deal, and his teaching must necessarily lose that vigour and freshness that comes from first-hand personal knowledge. It is downright cruelty to deny time for research to those who vehemently desire to add something to the fabric of human knowledge.
The hampered teacher reminds me of a certain migratory bird living with clipped wings in a Zoological Garden: when the migrating season came round the unfortunate prisoner started to walk, and was to be seen pressing its breast against the bars at the north end of its pen. I hope that nowadays all Colleges realise that they must not prison their birds, but give them the means of satisfying their natural instinct for fresh and self-gained knowledge. The students are in one way better off than their masters, since laboratory work is generally new to them and has therefore some of the charm of discovery.
In what I have said to-night I have confined myself to Natural Science, in which alone I have had experience of teaching or examining. On the literary side of things I am, I fear, a Philistine, or _enfant terrible_. I belong to that class of persons (which has at least the merit of being very large) who have hardly opened a Greek or Latin book since the day they passed their Little-go.
I grudge the time that is given at school to making small boys groan over books not well suited to them, while French and German are, or were in my day, all but untaught. If I had had good oral teaching in modern languages (such, for instance, as that given at the Perse School in Cambridge) I could forgive my teachers. We should without tears have learned to talk fluently and write correctly in at least one modern language, and for the sake of this I could perhaps have borne the weariness of Greek and Latin grammar. If it were not for the tyranny of examinations, classical teaching might be put to its proper use, which is not to serve as an instrument of torture, but to enable us to read ancient authors.