Exams for Victorian Age Civil Servants

In historian Niall Ferguson's book Empire he discusses the British rule of India in the Victorian Age. He says that for civil servant jobs, "competition was fierce, so fierce that selection had to be based on perhaps the toughest exams in history." It is worth browsing through the entire examination here.


Some of the Roman History Questions:

I would have liked to have heard the debate...

In 1865, the Governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre suppressed an uprising know as the Morant Bay Rebellion. In 1866, back in England a committee was formed urging that Governor Eyre be tried for murder. The Jamaica Committee consisted of John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spencer among others. A rival committee was also set up defending Eyre. It was composed of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, Charles Dickens, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. According to Wikipedia Eyre was twice charged with murder, but the cases never proceeded.  I'm not sure if these two committees ever met, but if they did, I would have liked to have heard that debate.  

Here is a news story from the August 7, 1868 New York Times about the affair.

Fable Narration Example

A couple of years ago I shared our family's use of Aesop's fables. We've recently begun again with written narrations for our oldest son. I tracked down a copy of Aesop Without Morals, which includes the complete fables all without the moral attached. Today my thirteen year old wrote this narration with a twist - he thought of a sonnet to illustrate the moral:

Once, two friends were walking through a dark quiet forest. All of a sudden a huge bear attacked them.  One of them climbed up into a tree but the other, not being able to climb, fell down as if he were dead; for we all know that a bear will not harm a dead man. The bear looked at the man on the ground and sniffed him several times, and then it walked off. The other man came down out of the tree and asked what the bear had whispered in the first man’s ear and the man answered: “don’t trust a man who leaves you when you are in trouble.”

And the moral of the story is, in Shakespeare’s words:

He that is thy friend indeed,

He will help thee in thy need:

If thou sorrow, he will weep;

If thou wake, he cannot sleep;

Thus of every grief in heart

He with thee doth take a part.

These are certain signs to know

Faithful friend from flattering foe

Sonnet  XXI 

The Function of Art...

"The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good." - Andrei Tarkovsky

Cry Wolf by Paul Lake

Paul Lake's political fable, Cry Wolf, is a marvel. I have read dozens of books out loud to the family but never have we read a book that generated as much discussion. And not only that, it was a real page turner. The fable tackles some difficult topics: immigration, political correctness, democracy, and religion. I have a feeling this book will serve as fodder for all kinds of future discussion as well. Must reading.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beautiful."

To repeat the shibboleth, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," is to say, "I, too, am a modern." The premodern man says, "Beauty is in the eye of the beautiful." He knows that ugly eyes - undisciplined, uneducated, vicious eyes - are blind. (from Pure by Mark Anderson, a fantastic little book)

Aphorisms on Liberalism

Either man has rights, or the people is sovereign. The simultaneous assertion of two mutually exclusive theses is what people have called liberalism.

Liberalism proclaims the right of the individual to degrade oneself, provided one’s degradation does not impede the degradation of one’s neighbor.

Modern liberalism no longer defends any of the “rights of man” except the right to consume.

Today’s conservatives are nothing more than liberals who have been ill-treated by democracy.

Tolerance consists of a firm decision to allow them to insult everything we seek to love and respect, as long as they do not threaten our material comforts. Modern, liberal, democratic, progressive man, as long as they do not step on his calluses, will let them degrade his soul.

A small sample of the aphorisms of Columbian reactionary Nicolas Gomez Davila

"The Loftiest Function of Art"

"The loftiest function of art is to mediate these two reciprocal spheres of being, to give access to the Divine in the realm of culture." Fr. Silouan Justiniano in The Road to Emmaus Vol. XIV, No. 3

It would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world

A Little dialogue from the end of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scott-King’s Modern Europe, between a school administrator and the classics professor:

Later the headmaster sent for Scott-King.

“You know,” he said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”

“I thought that would be about the number.”

“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?”

“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do.”

“I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn’t conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?”

“Oh yes. Often.”

“What I was going to suggest was—I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?”

“No, headmaster.”

“But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead.”

“Yes, headmaster.”

“Then what do you intend to do?”

“If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”

“There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take.”

The Pure

The heavenly world is revealed not to the learned but to the pure.-- Bishop Nikolai Velimirovic "The Prologue from Ochrid"

C.S. Lewis's Canon of Children's Literature

"I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story." (C.S. Lewis, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”)

If you are interested in children's literature, this article is a must read.

On Another's Sorrow by William Blake

Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow’s share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird’s grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear—

And not sit beside the nest,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant’s tear?

And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
O no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

He doth give His joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.

O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.

Orlando Innamorato - A Forgotten Classic

“Neglect of Italian romances robs us of a whole species of pleasure and narrows our very conception of literature. It is as if a man left out Homer, or Elizabethan drama, or the novel. For like these, the romantic epic of Italy is one of the great trophies of the European genius: a genuine kind, not to be replaced by any other, and illustrated by an extremely copious and brilliant production. It is one of the successes, the undisputed achievements.”— C. S. Lewis

“One’s first encounter with any of these epics can be somewhat jarring; they are far and away the most wildly farraginous and gloriously irresponsible masterpieces in Western literature. They are at once heroic, comic, allegorical, lyrical, satirical, fabulous, and (occasionally) dark; they move with alarming ease between the metaphysical and the ribald, the allegorical and the brutal, the spiritual and the grotesque. The Innamorato might almost seem formless but for the ingenuity with which Boiardo continually weaves the innumerable strands of his story together into ever more diverting designs. At any moment in the story, a paladin might find himself confronted by a giant Saracen astride a galloping giraffe, or trapped in an enchanted castle oblivious of his own name, or beset by an army of demons, or challenged by an ogre, or lost in a fairy otherworld full of the most exquisite enchantments, or at the mercy of a sorcerer. And Boiardo—even more than Ariosto—is so irrepressibly inventive a fabulist that one often has the feeling that, but for the author’s mortality, the story need never come to an end.” — David B. Hart

John Buchan's Huntingtower

A retired grocer out for gentle walking tour winds up in some serious adventure with a modernist poet and a makeshift troupe of boy-scouts in John Buchan's Huntingtower. This is a fun adventure novel, with a little subtext of Romantic literature and Modernist poetry. I found it fully satisfying and the whole family enjoyed the ride.

  

Some Perks of a Charlotte Mason Education...

I'm a fan of the Scottish novelist John Buchan (1875-1940), though I had never read his novel Huntingtower. It sounded like a good read-a-loud for the family. We are just two chapters into the book, but my 12 year old and I are amazed at the way our reading experience has been enriched by having done the Ambleside Online curriculum for the last four years or so. The story takes place near the end of World War I and the book's hero is a retired Scottish grocer looking forward to a bit of adventure walking through the Scottish countryside. He is a bit of a literary man with a love of poetry; he even carries Isaac Walton's The Complete Angler with him on his journey which also refers to poems that we have recently read. We feel like we've met a kindred spirit; like we are insiders. We are getting the many references to history, great novels, and poetry that are part of the story.  It makes me wonder if he had a Charlotte Mason education himself.  Thanks Charlotte Mason and Ambleside Online.

Modernity is not primarily a historical era

Modernity is not primarily a historical era. It is an assortment of intellectual assumptions, biases, and tendencies to which humans have been susceptible from time immemorial. As a disorder, modernity has profoundly debilitating effects on the person, psychological as well as physiological effects. In extraordinary cases it may spread to social and political institutions, breeding decadence on a vast scale. There were isolated outbreaks of modernity even among the ancients, but it never attained to a level of an epidemic. As a designation of roughly the last five hundred years of Western history, the term modernity denotes an era during which every sector of society has been more or less infected. Today, modernity threatens to become a pandemic.

The typically modern individual suffers from a variety of ailments: melancholy; lethargy; malaise accompanied by a hauntingly vague disorientation; a sense of meaninglessness. In short, nihilism. Many try to escape their dis-ease by diverting attention away from their troubled minds through various bodily indulgences. The most popular of these diversions are of course alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, obsessive attachment to popular culture, extreme athletic exertions. Anything that inhibits thought. The typical modern society condones and even promotes these activities, in part because the markets upon which such societies depend profit from the products and services associated with them; also because these societies lack the spiritual resources to recognize them as pernicious.  (from PURE by Mark Anderson)

What is Poetry?

When Boswell asked Johnson to define poetry, the latter replied:

Why, sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.

Johnson's observation points to an aspect about poetry that we wish to emphasize: poetry encompasses a particular kind of sensibility rather than a particular kind of form. Thus, with regard to its form, one can think of examples of verse that are not poetic, and of prose that are. Both are potential vehicles of Truth and meaning, while their forms of expression will not necessarily determine their nature.

There are no absolute distinctions between poetry and prose, for they are both, so far as they are intelligible, linguistic vehicles of the Truth. The specific aspect of words written or spoken - verse of prose - is an accidental feature; the essential distinction concerns words in whatever pattern or arrangement as manifestations of Truth.

While the form of the poem may vary, the distinguishing feature of the poetic sensibility lies in its orientation and receptivity to the Truth.  It is to perceive Truth as Presence.

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"Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl.  For poetry is not 'Devil's wine,' but God's wine."

From The Timeless Relevance of Traditional Wisdom by M. Ali Lakhani

Higher Education Today...

"Higher education today has little or nothing to do with understanding and appreciating the soul and the world; it all too often amounts to a certificate to an employer that the bearer has been both thoroughly vaccinated against all childishly idealistic desires and also reliably infected with all of the insatiable desires appropriate to adult workaholics. Furthermore, the best and the brightest, the "kalos kagathos" of our day, learn what they want to hear: that greed is good, and that private vices are the very public virtues that keep the economy strong and productive." - Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato's Gorgias by Nalin Ranasinghe

The good teacher...

The good teacher is a man or woman of exceptionally wide and lively intellectual interests. It is useless to think of teaching as a business, like banking or insurance: to learn the necessary quota of rules and facts, to apply them day by day as the bank-manager applies his, to go home in the evening and sink into a routine of local gossip and middle-brow relaxation (radio, TV, the newspaper, and the detective-story), to pride oneself on being an average citizen, indistinguishable from the dentist and the superintendent of the gas-works -- and then to hope to stimulate young and active minds. Teachers in schools and colleges must see more, think more, and understand more than the average man and woman of the society in which they live. This does not only mean that have a better command of language and know special subjects, such as Spanish literature and marine biology, which are closed to others. It means they must know more about the world, have wider interests, keep a more active enthusiasm for the problems of the mind and the inexhaustible pleasures of art, have a keener taste even for some of the superficial enjoyments of life -- yes, and spend the whole of their career widening the horizons of their spirit. Most people, as we see, stop growing between thirty and forty. They "settle down" -- a phrase which implies stagnation -- or at the utmost they "coast along," using their acquired momentum, applying no more energy, and gradually slowing down to a stop. No teacher should dream of doing this. His job is understanding a large and important area of the world's activity and achievement and making it viable for the young. He should expect to understand more and more of its as his years go by.

Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching, pp. 48-49

Academia in 1961

In June 1961 Eugene Rose wrote the following letter to his parents explaining why he was abandoning the world of higher education:

Dear Parents,

A hot day -- too much like summer for San Francisco.  I finally finished the thesis and turned it in last Friday, but they don't get around to sending out the degrees until September, for some reason.  For the time being I'm still involved in Chinese things, as I'm helping my former Chinese professor [Prof. G. Ming Shen] translate an article [from Chinese] on Chinese philosophy for a philosophical journal.  The hypocrisy of the academic world is nowhere more evident than in his case.  He knows more about Chinese philosophy than probably anyone else in the country, and studied with real Chinese philosophers and sages in China; but he can't get a job in any college here because he doesn't have degrees from American colleges, and because he isn't a fast talker - he's too honest, in short.

It's true that I chose the academic life in the first place, because God gave me a mind to serve Him with, and the academic world is where the mind is supposed to be used.  But after eight or nine years I know well enough what goes on in the universities.  The mind is respected only by a few of the "old fashioned" professors, who will soon have died out.  For the rest, it's a matter of making money; getting a secure place in life -- and using the mind as a kind of toy, doing clever tricks with it and getting paid for it, like circus clowns. The love of truth has vanished from people today; those who have minds have to prostitute their talents to get along.  I find this difficult to do, because I have too great a love of truth,  The academic world for me is just another job; but I am not going to make myself a slave to it.  I am not serving God in the academic world; I am just making a living.  If I am going to serve God in this world, and so keep from making my life a total failure, I will have to do it outside the academic world.  I have some money saved up, and the promise of some more by doing a little work, so I should be able to live frugally for a year doing what my conscience tells me I should do -- to write a book on the spiritual condition of man today, about which, by God's grace, I have some knowledge.  The book* will probably not sell, because people would rather forget about the things I am going to say; they would rather make money than worship God.

It is true that this is a mixed up generation.  The only thing wrong with me is that I am NOT mixed up, I know only too well what the duty of man is: to worship God and His Son and to prepare for the life of the world to come, NOT to make ourselves  happy and comfortable in this world by exploiting our fellow man and forgetting about God and His Kingdom.

If Christ were to walk in this world today, do you know what would happen to Him?  He would be placed in a mental institution and given psycho-therapy, just as would the saints.  The world would crucify Him today just as it did 2000 years ago, for the world has not learned a thing, except more devious forms of hypocrisy.  And what would happen, if, in one of my classes at the university, I would one day tell my students that all the learning of this world is of no importance beside the duty of worshipping God, accepting the truth -- but men hate the truth, and that is why they would gladly crucify Christ again if he came amidst them.

I am a Christian, and I am going to try to be an honest Christian.  Christ told s to give all our money away and follow Him.  I am very far from doing this. But I am going to try to take no more money than I need to live on; if I can earn this by working a year or two at a time in a university, all right.  But the rest of my time I am going to try to serve God with the talents He has given me.  This year I have the chance to do this, so I shall do it.  My professor, being a Russian [the love of God seems to be more deeply imbedded in the Russians than in other peoples] has not tried to talk me out of leaving the academic world for a year; he knows too well that the love of truth, the love of God, is infinitely more important than the love of security, of money, of fame.

I can only follow my conscience; I cannot be false to myself.

Love,

Eugene

Liturgy, Theology, and Asceticism

“Christianity involves liturgy, theology, and asceticism the way a pancake involves flour, milk and eggs: They are ingredients to the end result. Leave one out and you don’t have exactly the same thing any more.”  David W. Fagerberg

How much education do you need to understand this sentence?

"When he found himself immured in a dank and noisome dungeon, and knew that all the grim darkness of a medieval fortress lay between him and the outer world of sunshine and well-metalled high roads where he had lately been so happy, disporting himself as if he had bought up every road in England, he flung himself at full length on the floor, and shed bitter tears, and abandoned himself to dark despair."

According to the "Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level Formula", 30 years of education is required.
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Where did it come from?  The classic children's book, The Wind in the Willows.   

Words and Life

"To live without speaking is better than to speak without living. For the former who lives rightly does good even by his silence, but the latter does no good even when he speaks. When words and life correspond to one another they are together the whole of divine philosophy."  Isidore of Pelusium

The Loss of Faith and Poetry in the West

Not only was faith lost in the West, but also poetry, which in the absence of living convictions became transformed into a barren amusement; and the more exclusively poetry sought imagined pleasure alone, the more tedious it became.

Only one serious thing was left to man, and that was industry. For man, the reality of existence survived only in his physical person. Industry rules the world without faith or poetry. In our time, it unites and divides people. It determines one’s fatherland; it delineates classes; it lies at the base of state structures; it moves nations; it declares war, makes peace, changes mores, gives direction to science, and determines the character of culture. Men bow down before it and erect temples to it. It is the real deity in which people sincerely believe and to which they submit. ~ Ivan Kireyevsky

Repost: 1000 Good Books or What Everyone Should Have Read

This post continues to get a lot of hits and in the hopes that more people will purchase John Senior's excellent book, here it is again:

John Senior, in the appendix of his book The Death of Christian Culture, provides a large list of "good" books.  He argues that in order to read the "great" books of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine and St. Thomas, we need to "replenish the cultural soil that has been depleted" and create a place where those works can thrive by cultivating "an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes and adventures: the thousand books of Grimm, Anderson, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest."

Take a look at Senior's list (and the rest of the book is well worth reading).  [Amazon.com allows one to view most of the list through its "Look Inside" function]

Ancient Grammar Defined

From The Grammar of Dionysius Thrax

Dionysius Thax's Grammar was used for centuries in the Middle Ages.  Here is how he defines "grammar" and "reading" at the beginning of his textbook:
 

I. On Grammar

Grammar is an experimental knowledge of the usages of languages as generally current among poets and prose writers.  It is divided into six parts:

1. Trained reading with due regard to Prosody [proper pronunciation]

2. Explanation according to poetical figures. [interpretation]

3. Ready statement of dialectical peculiarities and allusions [recitation of words and narratives]

4. Discovery of Etymology.

5. An accurate account of analogies. [conclusions from comparisons]

6. Criticism of poetical productions, which is the noblest part of grammatic art. [judgement]

II. On Reading

Reading is the rendering of poetic or prose productions without stumbling or hesitancy.  It must be done with due regard to expression, prosody, and pauses.  Through the expression we learn the merit of the piece; from prosody, the art of the reader; and from pauses, the meaning intended to be conveyed.  In this way we read tragedy heroically, comedy conversationally, elegiatics thrillingly, epics sustainedly, lyric poetry musically, and dirges softly and plaintively.  Any reading done without due observance of these rules degrades the merits of the poets and makes the habits of readers ridiculous.

The Mouse and His Child

We just finished reading The Mouse and His Child as a family and it passes the great children's literature test - the adults enjoyed it just as much as the children.  In the story, a windup mouse and his child, hooked together by the hands, go on an Odyssey to find home, freedom, and fellowship.  They encounter much evil, crime, war and death, destructive philosophies, and the drudgery of work as they seek to become self-winding.  I don't want to give away too much of the story which is at times poignant, scary, funny, profound, puzzling, and exciting.  This goes on my top ten list of favorite children's books and it also would make for some great high school or adult discussions of its literary structure and philosophy.
   

Literary Analysis in Avonlea

They had studied Tennyson's poem in school the preceding winter, the Superintendent of Education having prescribed it in the English course for the Prince Edward Island schools. They had analyzed and parsed it and torn it to pieces in general until it was a wonder there was any meaning at all left in it for them, but at least the fair lily maid and Lancelot and Guinevere and King Arthur had become very real people to them, and Anne was devoured by secret regret that she had not been born in Camelot. Those days, she said, were so much more romantic than the present. (from Ann of Green Gables)

Socratic Education

"the education of the intellect, by awakening the principle and method of self-development, was his proposed object; not any specific information that can be conveyed into it from without; not to assist in storing the passive mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if the human soul were a mere repository or banqueting-room; but to place it in such relations of circumstances as should gradually excite that germinal power that craves no knowledge but what it can take up into itself—what it can appropriate and reproduce in fruit of its own. To shape—to dye—to paint over and to mechanize the mind, he resigned, as their proper trade, to the sophists; against whom he urged open and unremitting war.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Do not be overwhelmed by the mud!

"If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that" (I Timothy 6:8).

 The apostles of God taught others that which they themselves fulfilled in their own lives. When they had food and clothing they were content. Even when it occurred that they had neither food nor clothing they were content. For their contentment did not emanate from the outside but emanated from within. Their contentment was not so cheap as the contentment of an animal, but costly, more costly and more rare. Internal contentment, the contentment of peace and love of God in the heart, that is the contentment of greater men, that was the apostolic contentment.

In great battles, generals are dressed and fed as ordinary soldiers and they do not seek contentment in food nor in clothes but in victory. Victory is the primary principle of contentment of those who battle. Brethren, Christians are constantly in battle, in battle for the victory of the spirit over the material, in battle for conquest of the higher over the lower, man over beast. Is it not, therefore, absurd to engage in battle and not to worry about victory but to concern oneself with external decorations and ornaments? Is it not foolish to give to one's enemies the marks of identification? Our invisible enemy [Satan] rejoices at our vanity and supports us in every vain thought. The invisible enemy occupies us with every possible unreasonable pettiness and idleness only to impose upon our minds the heavy forgetfulness relative to that for which we are here on earth. The invisible enemy [Satan] presents to us the worthless as important, the irrelevant as essential and that which is detrimental as beneficial only in order to achieve victory and to destroy us forever.

O Lord, Holy, Mighty and Immortal, Who created us from the mud and breathed a living soul into mud, do not allow, O Lord, that the mud overwhelms! Help our spirit that it always be stronger than the earth.

By St. Nikolai Velimirovich

The Crisis of the Modern Philosophy

"A philosopher's renown is increased more by inventing a new error than by repeating a truth that has already been expressed by others."

"In a traditional civilization it is almost inconceivable that a man should claim an idea as his own; and in any case, were he to do so, he would thereby deprive it of all credit and authority, reducing it to the level of a meaningless fantasy:  if an idea is true, it belongs equally to all who are capable of understanding it; if it is false, there is no credit in having invented it."

"To be a 'genius', in the profane sense of the word, amounts to very little, and is utterly incapable of making up for the lack of true knowledge."

Rene Guenon in The Crisis of the Modern World

A Curriculum for Bards

1. In addition to English, at least one ancient language probably Greek or Hebrew, and two Modern languages would be required.
2. Thousands of lines of poetry in these languages would be learned by heart.
3. The library would contain no books of literary criticism, and the only critical exercise required of students would be the writing of parodies.
4. Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
5. Every student would be required to look after a domestic animal and cultivate a garden plot...W.H. Auden from The Dyer's Hand & Other Essays