Mother's Chronicles - Book Four

18

St. Paul's School

The three terms at St. Paul's School begin in January, April and September; the largest number of entrants being in September. Both M. M. Ghose and A. A. Ghose entered the School in the Autumn term of 1884. While Mano's guardian was named as 'W. H. Drewett,' Sri Aurobindo's was listed as 'Mr. Ackroyd': GHOSE, ARAVINDA ACKROYD.

A. A. Ghose was elected to St. Paul's by competitive examination as a Foundationer. The Foundation Scholars received remittance of part of their fees, and were regarded as the intellectual elite of the school.

It was the High Master, Dr. Walker, who examined Sri Aurobindo and elected him. He found the boy so well grounded in Latin and other subjects that he "took up Aurobindo himself to ground him in Greek and then pushed him rapidly into the higher classes of the school."

Dr. Walker was "a heavy and formidable figure, with bushy white beard, gleaming eyes, resonant voice, a strong smell of Havannah leaf," recalls Laurie Magnum,¹ "immense

1. In an article, "St. Paul's School Fifty Years Ago" (1933), reproduced by Purani in Sri Aurobindo in England.

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kindness, intimate knowledge of everybody, an exact classical scholar, a rough enemy but a firm friend, untiring in energy and impatient of indolence."

Dr. Walker never took any of the ordinary classes. He had his own method of teaching and an uncanny insight into the strong and weak parts in a student. "Dr. Walker never had any fixed hours of teaching. But he took part in the teaching of the 'special' class, coming in and going out as he chose. . . . The 'special' contained two groups of boys: those who had just entered the school, and those who were in process of transition from one part of it to another. They sat in the General Hall and they wrote exercises of various kinds by themselves and they received individual and not class teaching. Mr. Walker would go round and examine these exercises, and thus, at the very start of a boy's school career, he had the opportunity of forming a judgment as to his abilities. When these had been fairly gauged, he was put into a form, the standard of which was judged to be fitted for him. Thus no boy automatically began his career at the bottom of the school, and many boys were saved from spending a term or more in a form where the majority of the work was too easy for them. The majority, however, were boys of exceptional promise, who by one or two spells of individual teaching were enabled to move up the school more rapidly than they otherwise would by skipping one or two classes in the order upwards. This had at least three great advantages in the case of the best scholars. It spared them the wear and tear of working their way through every class; it prevented their interest from flagging by reason of

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their work being too easy for them; and it brought them quickly to the top classes, where the work done had an interest of its own."

Thus A. A. Ghose, who had not been taught any Greek by Rev. Drewett, was coached in it in the 'special' class, and as he was found to be exceptionally intelligent, he was pushed up rapidly into the upper forms.

The most formative years of Sri Aurobindo's life were therefore influenced by two Englishmen — Reverend W. H. Drewett and Dr. R W. Walker. When he left St. Paul's, Sri Aurobindo was a young man of seventeen.

During those six years at St. Paul's how was A. A. Ghose faring ? "Up to the age of fifteen I was known as a very promising scholar at St. Paul's. After fifteen I lost this reputation. The teachers used to say that I had become lazy and was deteriorating."

Nirod, one of the doctors attending on Sri Aurobindo, asked, "How was that?"

Sri Aurobindo replied, "Because I was reading novels and poetry. Only at the examination time I used to prepare a little. But when now and then I wrote Greek and Latin verses my teachers would lament that I was not utilizing my remarkable gifts because of laziness."

Even a cursory glance at some of his class reports will bear out Sri Aurobindo's own recollection of half a century later.

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A. A. Ghose entered the school in the sixth class, was promoted to the seventh in 1885, to the Middle Eight in 1886, and then to the highest form, the Upper Eight, in 1887.

Class VII Christmas 1885

History seems to have been a favourite subject with the boy.

Class VII July 1886

Then the boy was in Upper VIII, and fifteen.

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Class U VIII December 1887

That Sri Aurobindo gave his attention to the classics at Manchester and at St. Paul's, we now know. But "even at St Paul's in the last three years he simply went through his school course and spent most of his spare time in general reading, especially English poetry, literature and fiction, French literature and the history of ancient, mediaeval and modern Europe. He spent some time also over learning Italian, some German and a little Spanish." He spent much time too in writing poetry.

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Class U VIII July 1888

The fact of the matter was that "the school studies during this period engaged very little of his time; he was already at ease in them and did not think it necessary to labour over them any longer." As for mathematics, Sri Aurobindo jokingly said, "Euclid was bad enough. When Riemann came in it was time for me to give up mathematics." And yet he was not only well grounded in algebra and plane geometry but also had taken two years of 'analytical conies.'

Then it was the last term, and he was seventeen. He now paid more attention to his studies, because he needed to obtain a scholarship to go to college.

Class U VIII Christmas 1889

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All the same, in spite of his later disclaimer, Aravinda A. Ghose was able to win the Bedford Prize in History. In 1889 he was awarded the Second Prize in the Butterworth Prize Examination "for knowledge of English Literature, especially Shakespeare."

Only Shakespeare? No, no! He participated with distinction in a debate on 'the inconsistency of Swift's political views.' This was on 5 November 1889 at the meeting of the School Literary Society. On 19 November he took part in a debate on Milton. A. A. Ghose was an active member in the St. Paul's School Literary Society. Already in 1887, he had joined the Union, another school society. And, yes, in spite of his lack of fluency and accuracy in spoken French, he did speak in the School's French Debating Society, supporting the motion "Que la langue de Volapuk devrait être étudiée par tout le monde." ["That the Volapuk language¹ should be studied by everyone"]. In fact, his knowledge of French literature was quite extensive, and in time he acquired such mastery of this language that he even wrote poems in French, at least two fragments of which have survived. In one of them, an eremite calls to the gods:

Vous qui brisez la loi de la nuit éternelle!

O vous qui appelez à vos sommets ardus

Les pantins de la terre. . . .²

1.An artificial international language like Esperanto, created a few years earlier.

2.You who break the law of the eternal night!

O you who call to your arduous summits

The puppets of the earth....

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Dr. Walker was once again proved right in his student. Aravinda Ackroyd Ghose secured many prizes, and won an open scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. We shall be coming to that. However, we must also know the conditions in which the three brothers lived in England during these years.

And, er, I was forgetting to mention the sweet secret Purani shares with us. He says that Sri Aurobindo "had with him for many years an illustrated edition of the Arabian Nights which he had himself selected as a prize." Dinendra Kumar Roy, who was in Baroda for two years to help Sri Aurobindo improve his Bengali, recalls with enthusiasm the deluxe edition of the Arabian Nights. "Never before had I seen such a voluminous edition of the Arabian Nights, it was like a sixteen-volume Webster 1 And with innumerable illustrations."

As for Dr. F. W. Walker, among all the boys of exceptional promise whom he had taught, he put A. A. Ghose above them all. B. C. Pal, in his Character Sketches writing on Sri Aurobindo, informs us that in 1908, "The old Head Master of this school is reported to have said . . . that of all the boys who passed through his hands during the last twenty-five or thirty years, Aravinda was by far and above the most richly endowed in intellectual capacity."

St. Paul's School showed its pride in its Old Pauline when it separated out Sri Aurobindo's class reports from the school's records, along with those of two other Old Paulines, G. K. Chesterton and Field Marshall Montgomery.

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