Arthur Murphy: Education Information
Emery, John Pike. Arthur Murphy: An Eminent Dramatist of the Eighteenth Century.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1946.
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The young widow remained in Dublin with James and Arthur until December, 1735; she then sold all her property there and journeyed to England on the advice of her brother Jeffrey, who had already settled in London. Although later events suggest that Jeffrey’s advice to his sister sprang mainly from his own interests, nothing could have been more favorable for the future literary career of Arthur than the family’s establishment in the English capital.
At this time Arthur Murphy stayed in London only a short period. Mrs. Arthur Plunket, his mother’s sister, lived in Boulogne-sur-Mer, and she invited him to live with her. Early in 1736 he sailed for France and was added to the large number of his aunt household, which included “five sons and four daughters, who behaved with the greatest affection to young Arthur.” In 1738 illness forced Mrs. Plunket to leave for southern France; she sent her sons to their father, who was in London, and her daughters to Montreal.
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What should be done with Arthur Murphy? It will gradually become apparent that Fortune favored him. In his tenth year and already in France, he was entered by his Catholic mother, who still remained in England, at the English Jesuit College of St.-Omer, a short distance east of Boulogne-sur-Mer.
In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the EnglishCollege at St.-Omer maintained not only the usual high standards of Jesuit education but also a distinct reputation of its own that dated from the sixteenth century…. [W]hen Murphy arrived at school in February 1738, he found for the most part modern buildings; at the same time, he was immersed in an atmosphere of respected traditions and of a mellowed educational system.
The rector or president of the college, who was subject to a “provincial,” was assisted by a prefect of studies or supervisor of the masters. Arthur Murphy, who entered college under the name Arthurus French because of a British law prohibiting British natives from attending foreign Catholic schools, was assigned to the young Thomas Stanley, under whom he studied for six years in six “schools.” Each year the master advanced and took with him the successful students; the successive major divisions were: Little Figures, Great Figures, grammar, Syntax, Poetry, and Rhetoric. All these studies, which were mainly literary, were called “Stuida inferiora or Humanities” and “correspond to the classical course of the high school and part of the college.” Murphy writes that he “knew no object of attention” at St.-Omer except “Greek and Latin”; however, it seems probably to that some extent he studied at least history and geography in connection with such a historian as Tacitus.
On the basis of the general syllabus for Jesuit colleges and of Murphy’s later literary career, it is safe to assume that the young reader was particularly interested in the classical dramatists, Cicero, Vergil, Horace, Juvenal, Tacitus, Sallust, Vida, Homer, Aristotle, and Jacques Vaniere, a Jesuit. One can mention scarcely any Latin author of even minor rank from whose works Murphy does not at some time quote, and it is almost
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impossible to overestimate his final knowledge of Latin literature. Although he continued his classical reading throughout his life, he was introduced to most of these writers at St.-Omer.
The written exercises at St.-Omer may have included English translations, Latin translations of English works, and original Latin and Greek themes in prose and verse. Murphy later published at various time translations of all the works of Tacitus and of certain productions of Sallust, Cicero, Vida, and Vaniere; two imitations of satires of Juvenal, Latin translations, and Latin poems; and the germs of many of these compositions originated in what Murphy would have called his youthful lucubrations. One surmises that the students also engaged in Latin conversation and that Murphy thus unknowingly prepared himself for the party that Dr. John Douglas, the future Bishop of Salisbury, gave for Samuel Johnson about 1760.
The Jesuit schools by no means neglected the study and presentation of dramas, but the morals of the students were guarded by the expurgation of all suggestive passages. In the classroom Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus,, and Terence probably received the most attention, and in the courtyards and theaters of the colleges the comedies of the Latin dramatists vied in popularity with religious, allegorical, and historical plays. At first almost all the plays were acted in Latin; later, especially after 1700, they were often performed in the vernacular. The audience frequently included people from the neighboring districts.
The study and acting of plays resulted in the most important influence of St.-Omer on the student Arthur; in 1757 he wrote:
From the first Day that I dipt in Plautus and Terence I have had an inordinate Affection for the Drama: All my Studies were entirely subservient to this great End…When at WestminsterSchool I was accounted a very good Actor.
In this anonymous dramatic criticism in the LondonChronicle, Murphy substituted for “St.-Omer” “WestminsterSchool,” which his brother James had attended; and it seems certain that Murphy the future actor served his first apprenticeship at college. The talent of Murphy the dramatist was nourished by this early contact with plays, and one specific “aim of the comic drama” of the Jesuits, the satirizing of “puerilities and ineptitudes, which could be treated on the stage without any detriment to the moral conscience,” impressed young Murphy so intensely that it formed the core of his conception of comedy throughout his entire dramatic career.
Arthur achieved enviable success as a student. “From the middle of the second year” he “obtained the first place...and except three times maintained his ground throughout five successive years”; in 1744 he was “at the head of rhetoric, and the first boy in the college.” He was greatly aided by a remarkable memory…..
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Murphy always regarded his six years at St.-Omer as the happiest period of his life. In Jesuit schools there “was ordinarily a full holiday every week, usually Wednesday or Thursday,” and the “Jesuits recognized the importance of games at a period when they were little esteemed by others.” In the classroom the boys studied for not more than five hours a day. However, Murphy enjoyed the actual work most of all; on December 7, 1797, he wrote to his old master, Thomas Stanley: “It is to that education that I am indebted for all the pleasures of my life: from you, Sir, I imbibed an early taste for Literature, and, I will add, for morals.” He steeped himself in classical literature with gusto, and later -- in society, in his criticism of literature, architecture, and music, and in his other writings -- Murphy can only with difficulty be called other than a classicist.
After the completion of the prescribed years in Latin and Greek, the Jesuit student could study philosophy, natural sciences, ethics, and mathematics, but Murphy did not continue his courses beyond the humanities. This step was fortunate: he would have disliked mathematics and the sciences, and such intensive application in those fields and a sojourn of several additional year in France would have done more harm than good to his career. About the middle of 1744, at the age of sixteen, he left St.-Omer for London.
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After some casual conversation, French asked his nephew to construe and repeat a few lines from Vergil and then posed a fairly simple arithmetical problem that baffled the newly returned student. “Can’t you answer that question?” his uncle demanded. “Then I would not give a farthing for all you know.” Ordering that his nephew buy Cocker’s arithmetic, French added an invective against going to Mass and left.
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It was probably early in 1747 that French decided to exert pressure on the unresponsive Arthur, who had evidently shown no signs of a familiarity with Cocker’s arithmetic, for, by the following August, Murphy had completed a course at an academy where he learned accounting and bookkeeping. His uncle immediately obtained for him a position as a clerk in the countinghouse of Edmund Harrold, “an eminent merchant” of Cork, and in the same month Murphy began the journey to his native land.
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Strangely enough, the most important result of his sojourn in Cork was his mastery of French. As a child he probably acquired a smattering when he lived in Boulogne-sur-Mer for approximately two years; and, even though the Jesuits of St.-Omer gave no formal attention to the language, he presumably increased his knowledge at school. Later in London he may have begun to read French on a limited scale.