A Large Section Of Society Was Inimical To The Kind Of Education That
The Earl Of Chesterfield Prescribed For His Son.
The earl was well aware
of it, indeed, and marked with repugnance divers young bucks of his day
with leathern breeches and unpowdered hair, who would exclaim; "Damn
these finical outlandish airs, give me a manly resolute manner.
They
make a rout with their graces, and talk like a parcel of dancing
masters, and dress like a parcel of fops; one good Englishman will beat
three of them."[384]
Even during the height of the Grand Tour in the latter half of the
seventeenth century, thoughtful minds, observing the effects of a
foreign education as seen not only in the courtiers of Charles II., but
in the dozens of obscure country gentlemen who painfully sought to
acquire the habit of a Parisian Marquis by education abroad, noticed the
weak points of such a system. The Earl of Clarendon thought it
pernicious to send boys abroad until after they had gone through Oxford
or Cambridge. There was no necessity for their getting the French accent
at an early age, "as if we had no mind to be suspected to be
Englishmen." That took them from their own country at just the age when
they ought to have severe mental discipline, for the lack of which no
amount of social training would make them competent men. "They return
from travel with a wonderful confidence which may very well be called
impudence ... all their learning is in wearing their clothes well; they
have very much without their heads, very little within; and they are
very much more solicitous that their periwigs fit handsomely, than to
speak discreetly; they laugh at what they do not understand, which
understanding so little, makes their laughter very immoderate. When they
have been at home two or three years, which they spend in the vanities
which they brought over with them, fresh travellers arrive with newer
fashions, and the same confidence, and are looked upon as finer
gentlemen, and wear their ribbons more gracefully; at which the others
are angry, quit the stage, and would fain get into wiser company, where
they every day find defects in themselves, which they owe to the ill
spending that time when they thought only of being fine gentlemen."[385]
When these products of a French education could not remain in town, but
were obliged to live on their estates amid rough country squires, it
went hard with them. "They will by no means embrace our way," says The
Country Gentleman in Clarendon's Dialogue of the Want of Respect Due to
Age, "but receive us with cringes and treat us with set speeches, and
complain how much it rains, that they cannot keep their hair dry, or
their linnen handsome one hour. They talk how much a better country
France is and how much they eat and drink better there, which our
neighbors will not believe, and laugh at them for saying so. They by no
means endure our exercises of hunting and hawking, nor indeed can their
tender bodies endure those violent motions. They have a guitar or some
other fiddle, which they play upon commonly an hour or so in their beds
before they rise, and have at least one French fellow to wait upon them,
to shave them, and comb their periwig; and he is sent into the kitchen
to dress some little dish, or to make some sauce for dinner, whom the
cook is hardly restrained from throwing into the fire. In a word, they
live to and within themselves, and their nearest neighbors do not know
whether they eat and drink or no."[386]
Not only were the recreations of their country neighbours violent and
unrefined, according to the English Messieurs, but that preoccupation
with local government, which was the chief duty of the country
gentleman, was beyond the capacity of those who by living abroad had
learned little of the laws and customs of their own country. Clarendon
draws a sad picture of the return of the native who was ashamed to be
present at the public and private meetings for the administration of
justice, because he had spent in dancing the time when he might have
been storing knowledge, and who now passed his days a-bed, reading
French romances of which he was tired.
Locke also set forth the fallacies of the Grand Tour in his Essay of
Education. He admitted that fencing and riding the Great Horse were
looked upon as "so necessary parts of breeding that it would be thought
a great omission to neglect them," but he questioned whether riding the
Great Horse was "of moment enough to be made a business of."[387]
Fencing, he pointed out, has very little to do with civil life, and is
of no use in real warfare, while music "wastes so much of a young man's
time, to gain but a moderate skill in it, and engages often in such odd
company, that many think it much better spared."[388] But the feature of
travel which was most mercilessly analysed by Locke was the Governor. He
exposed the futility of sending a boy abroad to gain experience and to
mingle with good society while he was so young as to need a guardian.
For at the age when most boys were abroad - that is, from sixteen to
twenty-two - they thought themselves too much men to be governed by
others, and yet had not experience and prudence enough to govern
themselves. Under the shelter of a Governor they were excused from being
accountable for their own conduct and very seldom troubled themselves
with inquiries or with making useful observations of their own.
While the Governor robbed his pupil of life's responsibilities on one
hand, he hampered him, on the other, in any efforts to get into good
company:
"I ask amongst our young men that go abroad under tutors what one is
there of an hundred, that ever visits any person of quality?
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