All this, you remember, happened in those dark ages when there were no Schools of Design, before schoolmasters were invariably men of scrupulous integrity, and before the clergy were all men of enlarged minds and varied culture.In those less favoured days, it is no fable that there were other clergymen besides Mr Stelling who had narrow intellects and large wants, and whose income, by a logical confusion to which Fortune, being a female as well as blindfold, is peculiarly liable, was proportioned not to their wants but to their intellect - with which income has clearly no inherent relation.The Problem these gentlemen had to solve was to readjust the proportion between their wants and their income; and since wants are not easily starved to death, the simpler method appeared to be - to raise their income.There was but one way of doing this: any of those low callings in which men are obliged to do good work at a low price were forbidden to clergymen: was it their fault if their only resource was to turn out very poor work at a high price? Besides, how should Mr Stelling be expected to know that education was a delicate and difficult business? any more than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through rock should be expected to have wide views of excavation.Mr Stelling's faculties had been early trained to boring in a strait line, and he had no faculty to spare.But among Tom's contemporaries whose fathers cast their sons on clerical instruction to find them ignorant after many days, there were many far less lucky than Tom Tulliver.Education was almost entirely a matter of luck - usually of ill-luck - in those distant days.The state of mind in which you take a billiard-cue or a dice-box in your hand is one of sober certainty compared with that of old-fashioned fathers, like Mr Tulliver, when they selected a school or a tutor for their sons.Excellent men, who had been forced all their lives to spell on an impromptu phonetic system, and having carried on a successful business in spite of this disadvantage, had acquired money enough to give their sons a better star in life than they had had themselves, must necessarily take their change as to the conscience and the competence of the schoolmaster whose circular fell in their way and appeared to promise so much more than they would ever have thought of asking for - including the return of linen, fork, and spoon.It was happy for them if some ambitious draper of their acquaintance had not brought up his son to the Church and if that young gentleman, at the age of four-and-twenty, had not closed his college dissipations by an imprudent marriage: otherwise, these innocent fathers desirous of doing the best for their offspring could only escape the draper's son by happening to be on the foundation of a grammar school as yet unvisited by commissioners where two or three boys could have all to themselves the advantages of a large and lofty building, together with a head-master, toothless, dim-eyed and deaf, whose erudite indistinctness and inattention were engrossed by them at the rate of three hundred pounds a head - a ripe scholar, doubtless, when first appointed;but all ripeness beneath the sun has a further stage less esteemed in the market.
Tom Tulliver, then, compared with many other British youths of his time who have since had to scramble through life with some fragments of more or less relevant knowledge and a great deal of strictly relevant ignorance, was not so very unlucky.Mr Stelling was a broad-chested healthy man with the bearing of a gentleman, a conviction that a growing boy required a sufficiency of beef, and a certain hearty kindness in him that made him like to see Tom looking well and enjoying his dinner: - not a man of refined conscience or with any deep sense of the infinite issues belonging to everyday duties; not quite competent to his high offices; but incompetent gentlemen must live, and without private fortune, it is difficult to see how they could all live genteelly if they had nothing to do with education or government.
Besides it was the fault of Tom's mental Constitution that his faculties could not be nourished on the sort of knowledge Mr Stelling had to communicate.
A boy born with a deficient power of apprehending signs and abstractions must suffer the penalty of his congenital deficiency, just as if he had been born with one leg shorter than the other; a method of education sanctioned by the long practice of our venerable ancestors was not to give way before the exceptional dulness of a boy who was merely living at the time then present.And Mr Stelling was convinced that a boy so stupid at signs and abstractions must be stupid at everything else, even if that reverend gentleman could have taught him everything else.It was the practice of our venerable ancestors to apply that ingenious instrument the thumb-screw, and to tighten and tighten it in order to elicit non-existent facts: they had a fixed opinion to begin with, that the facts were existent, and what had they to do but to tighten the thumb-screw? In like manner, Mr Stelling had a fixed opinion that all boys with any capacity could learn what it was the only regular thing to teach: if they were slow, the thumb-screw must be tightened - the exercises must be insisted on with increased severity, and a page of Virgil be awarded as a penalty, to encourage and stimulate a too languid inclination to Latin verse.
