If I May

Some Old Companions

In the days of the last-war-but-thirty-seven, when (as you will remember) the Peers were fighting the People, Lord Curzon defended the hereditary system by telling us that it worked very well in India, where a tailor’s son invariably became a tailor. The obvious answer, if anyone bothered to give it, was that the tailor’s son, having had his career mapped out for him at birth, presumably prepared to be a tailor, whereas a peer’s eldest son, as far as one observed, did not prepare to be a statesman. Indeed, the only profession in this country to which one is apprenticed in one’s childhood is that of royalty. The future King can begin to learn the “tactful smile,” the “memory for faces,” the knowledge of foreign languages and orders, almost as soon as he begins to learn anything. He alone need not regret his youth and say, “If only I had been taught this, that, and the other instead!”

These gloomy reflections have been forced on me by the re-discovery of all those educational books which I absorbed, or was supposed to have absorbed, at school and college. They made an imposing collection when I had got them all together; fifty mathematical works by eminent Den, from a well-thumbed, dog’s-eared Euclid to a clean uncut copy of Functions of a Quaternion. It is doubtful if you even know what a quaternion is, still less how it functions; probably you think of it as a small four-legged animal with a hard shell. You may be right--it is so long since I bought the book. But once I knew all about quaternions; kept them, possibly, at the bottom of the garden; and now I ask myself in Latin (for I learnt Latin too), “Cui bono?” How much better if I had learnt this, that, and the other instead!

History for instance. How useful a knowledge of history would be to me now. To lighten an article like this with a reference to what Garibaldi said to Cavour in ’53; to round off a sentence with the casual remark, “As was the custom in Alexander’s day”; to trace back a religious tendency, or a fair complexion, or the price of boots to some barbarian invasion of a thousand years ago--how delightfully easy it would be, I tell myself, to write with such knowledge at one’s disposal. One would never be at a loss for a subject, and plots for stories, plays, and historical novels would be piled up in one’s brain for the choosing. But what can one do with mathematics--save count the words of an article (when written) with rather more quickness and accuracy than one’s fellow writer? Did I spend ten years at mathematics for this? The waste of it!

But perhaps those years were not so waste…