THE OLD BOY AS SCHOOLMASTER AND PARENT
Fears for the future and regrets for the past are alike forgotten during
the last week. There are sad moments, but, as Arnold Lunn remarked,
'there is a world of difference between the pleasant sorrow of sentiment
and the more real depression that coincides with an overdraft at the
bank.' The last week is passed in a mood that I once heard described as
'happy-sad.' On the last Sunday in chapel the boy who is leaving
endeavours to summon the appropriate emotion. He knows how he ought to
feel. He has been instructed by so many stories. He is, in a way, an
actor in a drama. He knows that the fag on the other side of the aisle
is looking at him, is saying to himself: 'This is Jones's last chapel.
What is he feeling?' And, like an actor, Jones does not want to
disappoint his audience. He feels as he should feel. There is a lump at
the back of his throat. But, on the whole, leaving is an exciting
experience.
There is the auction of study furniture, when pictures that cost five
shillings when they were new, fetch seven and six in their fourth year
of service. There are the calls to be paid to masters, the 'good-byes'
and 'good lucks.' It is the abdication of office when one is at the
height of one's authority. It is a fine gesture that 'immeasurable
power, unsated to resign,' to be able to step straight out from the
lighted room, before the corroding forces of change have begun to work,
and before habit has dulled applause. The exit is made at exactly the
right moment. The curtain falls on a dramatic climax. And how rarely
that happens.
In a temper of wistful sentimentality and self-satisfaction, arrayed in
the colours of the old boys' society, the ex-public school boy leans out
of the carriage window, waves good-bye to the friends who are catching a
later train, makes and extracts promises to write, and watches as the
train moves out of the station the familiar landmarks slip one by one
behind him.
A sentimental, that is to say, a superficial emotion passes quickly. And
it depends on the kind of life which awaits a boy, whether or not this
sentimental regret will be followed by an acute sense of loss.
If he is going up to the university or to some remunerative and
interesting employment, it is probable that he will forget school
altogether in the fascination of a new life. If, however, he is destined
for some dull unromantic post in the city, the thought of school will
for a long time wake in him a deep, hopeless nostalgia. He will bring no
enthusiasm to his work, and, as he sits at his high desk, balancing
ledgers, computing insurance policies, adjusting income-tax returns, he
will compare the monotony of his routine with the coloured movement and
variety of school. As he walks to his office he will remind himself that
at this moment the morning chapel is just ending. The school will be
pouring across the courts. If he were there he would be walking arm in
arm with some friend of his to the class-room, stopping on the way some
intelligent friend to demand the elucidation of certain tiresome
theorems. As he returns to the office after lunch he will say to
himself: 'If I were there now I should be changing for football. I
should have before me the prospect of a hard game and a bath afterwards,
and a long, lazy evening in front of the games study fire.' And, at the
end of the day, on his return to his home or diggings, he is lonely with
the recollection of how often at such a time he has sat in the
class-room waiting impatiently for the clock to strike, waiting for the
moment of freedom when he can gather his books under his arm and rush
back to the house to tea, to the four delightful hours of friendship and
discussion that lie in that enchanted period between lock-up and lights
out. School life never means so much to a boy as it does during his few
months after he has left it. For he sees it transfigured in his
imagination; he remembers nothing of the tiresome demands of routine,
nothing of the friction between boys and masters, nothing of the long
boring hours in form when he watched the patch of sunlight drift across
the wall, nothing of the anxieties, the annoyances, the restrictions of
a cloistered life. He sees it purged of the accidental, a city of his
own fashioning.
It does not last, of course, this intense nostalgia. No young man can
live for very long in the past. New interests come to him, he finds new
fields for his ambition. He makes friends in his office. He joins a
tennis club, he takes dancing lessons. He sets out in search of life. He
ceases, at every vacant moment of the day, to compute what he would be
doing were he at school instead of at an office. He thinks of the
innings he intends to play next Saturday: his eyes pick out on the
carpet an imaginary spot ten feet away from him, and he considers what
shot he would play to a ball that pitched on it; he also perhaps wonders
what exactly that charming lady with whom he had danced the night
before, had meant when she had said, with a peculiar inflection in her
voice: 'You're growing up.'
His correspondence with his old friends becomes spasmodic. He no longer
writes to his house master once a month. The arrival of a letter with
the school crest on it ceases to excite him as it did. The school
magazine becomes full of names that are meaningless to him. He notes
with disgust that Baxter, in his day a miserable little squirt, has got
into the Eleven; and that that goggle-eyed ass, Barton, is head of the
school. He asks himself at Christmas whether it is worth his while to
renew his subscription, and decides that it is not. From time to time he
reads in _The Sportsman_ of the feats of his school Fifteen, and
remarks without enthusiasm that 'Fernhurst must be pretty strong this
year.' His school life has dropped from him as a coat that he has
outgrown. It belongs to the past, and he is living in the future. School
will not mean much to him for another twenty years, till the time comes,
that is to say, when he will have to send his son to school.
Then will he recover his youth, and live again his school days in his
son, only more intensely, because he will be living them in his
imagination. In the achievements of his son he will recognise the ghost
of his old ambitions. His son's career will be more personal to him than
his own. He will take more pleasure in his son's successes than the boy
will himself. Indeed a great deal of a boy's pleasure in his success
lies in his appreciation of the happiness that it will bring to his
father. At no time in their lives do father and son come so close to one
another as during these years. And it is at first sight surprising that
this intimacy should not produce that common ground on which
difficulties may be openly discussed and quarrels healed. For in spite
of this intimacy, the relations between father and son are very often
superficial.
This statement may appear self-contradictory, but a little examination
will show that this is not so. We do not necessarily confide in the
people we love best. Let any man think of his friends and acquaintances,
and he may be surprised to discover that he knows a great deal more
about his acquaintances than his friends. I do not lay it down as a
fact that he will make this discovery. I merely say that he may make it;
certainly a great many will.
At school, where one has a vast number of acquaintances and a few
friends, I used to wonder sometimes how best one could draw the dividing
line between a friend and an acquaintance. And I decided that the
difference lay in silence, that with a friend one could be silent,
whereas with an acquaintance one could not. If a friend walked into
one's study when one was busy, one smiled and went on with one's work;
the friend picked up a book and read. But if an acquaintance came in,
one immediately stopped what one was doing; one felt that silence would
become embarrassing.
In the same way one does not, in the company of a real friend, feel the
need of personal confidences. One likes being with him. That is enough.
One sits over a fire and talks spasmodically, with long silences
drifting into the conversation. But with a person of whom one is not
particularly fond, such desultory conversation is not adequate. An
acquaintance is not, in himself, sufficiently interesting--he is
interesting in what he has done, or is doing. The need for confidences
is essential. And so it is that most of us have acquaintances to whom we
recount all our discreditable exploits, our romances, our financial
enterprises, with whom we seem, in fact, remarkably intimate, but whose
absence, were they to pass out of our lives, we should not greatly
regret. The man who knows most about us very often matters least to us.
This is not a generalisation. One cannot generalise about an abstraction
like friendship, that has a different meaning and a different message
for every individual man. But such relationships are a common
experience; they are the more common in the degree that their subjects
are the more reserved. And there is no more reserved class than that of
past and present public school boys.
This is, at any rate, the only explanation that I can find for the
superficial relations between son and father that are spread over so
deep a trust and intimacy. They accept without appreciating this
superficiality. The father comes down at half term, and he goes for a
walk arm in arm with his son, along the slopes. They discuss home
affairs and the external activities of school: football shop, cricket
shop, house politics. They rarely touch on the boy's inner life; the
father can only guess at what his boy is doing and thinking. Underneath
their love for each other they are strangers.
On the important issues of school life they are both driven to accept
the verdict of the house master or head master. And he, although he is
working in the dark on both sides of him, is their only intermediary.
But the relationships between parents and children are too intricate for
so short a book as this. Indeed, I doubt whether it is possible ever to
tackle satisfactorily a subject, the nature of which alters with every
individual case. One would be lost at once in a labyrinth of
generalisations and exceptions; Lytton Strachey made no attempt to write
a history of the Victorian era. He selected and analysed a few
specimens; that is, I believe, the only way in which to deal with the
complex subject of parenthood. And it can only be thus dealt with by the
story-teller, by the man who says: 'I care nothing for general
principles. But this is how things went for one family.' In a general
study such as this, it is quite impossible to dogmatise from individual
cases. But I would submit this facet of the relationship between father
and son as an important one in the study of school society. It throws
the need for co-operation almost entirely on the schoolmaster. It makes
his responsibility greater than he knows.
Now there are three types of men to whom the scholastic profession makes
its chief appeal. There is the brilliant scholar, the man with the
double first, who will turn out to be either completely incompetent, or
will become a head master. There is the athlete who takes a third, or at
best a second in mods, and on the strength of a blue, returns as games
master to his old school. Lastly, there is the idealist, the man who
regards teaching as a calling and not a trade, the man who may be either
an impossible crank or, in his own line, a genius.
The first class of master plays, on the whole, a small part in the
politics of school life. If he is incompetent he is ragged in form and
his opinion carries no weight in the common room. If he is successful,
he is a bird of passage, on his way to some rich head-mastership. He may
become a house master for a while, but he is always looking beyond his
immediate surroundings. He is ambitious. He does not regard one school
as his compass. Always he is just outside the drama.
The second class, however, forms the backbone of tradition. The old boy
comes back to his old school with an intense loyalty and with the
intention of staying there for the rest of his life. His ambition is to
have the best house in the best school in the best county. He is usually
a very fine fellow indeed, but he represents eternally the spirit of
reaction. He lives in the standards of his youth. He has had no
opportunity of testing those standards in another environment. His whole
life has moved within the circle of one school.
He imbibed as a boy the public school spirit, and he did not outgrow
that spirit at the university--hardly a proof of mental elasticity. He
has no sense of progress or of change in the world for which he is
training the young. As things have been, so shall they be. The old boy
turned house master is the most powerful force in the common room. He is
the chief obstacle that the enthusiast has to face.
With regard to the enthusiast, one is tempted to put an asterisk against
the heading and a footnote, '_Vide_ the novels of S. P. B. Mais
_passim_,' and leave it at that. For Mr. Mais knows more about the
reception of this type of master than any other man in the kingdom. He
has himself a genius for teaching. I cannot imagine a better English
master. He inspires enthusiasm in the confirmed slacker. He is an
invaluable asset to any staff, and yet nearly everywhere he has been met
by opposition. His own story, as set forth in _A Schoolmaster's Diary_,
is typical of the young movement. Only there is this difference, that,
whereas Mr. Mais has never yielded to the reactionary influences, the
majority of young masters conform to the custom of the country. Their
position is extremely difficult.
They leave Oxford with high ambitions. They have dissected and analysed
the system, they have discovered the vital spot; they are eager to put
their reforms into action. They have wonderful schemes for inspiring
boys with a love of the beautiful, with an interest in politics and
life. They are prepared to be ruthless in their battle; they will
neither ask nor give quarter. They will not be fettered to the
reactionary indolence of the intolerant and the effete. They have a
mission and a purpose. They bring a sword. They arrive at school with a
quenchless ardour.
Like the small boy home for the holidays, they want to do everything on
the first day. Before they have had time to look round they are
suggesting schemes for founding literary and dramatic circles: they want
to open a political debating society where there shall be files of _The
Nation_ and _The Daily News_. They start a mile race at the speed of a
hundred yards and find themselves alone in the void. Every one else is
going at a very leisurely pace. There is no need for hurry. Their whole
life is before them. The school has been in existence a very long while.
It is moving in its own time to its duly appointed ends. The young
enthusiast grows impatient: like most intense people he is tactless and
makes mistakes. He ignores his colleagues, or interferes with their
arrangements. He creates an atmosphere of opposition. This is, of
course, what he has anticipated. The fight, he feels, is going to begin.
But the nature of the fight is very different from what he had expected.
It is not waged with the intolerant and the effete, but with men whom he
cannot help admiring. He cannot make himself hate his enemies. The old
boy house master, it cannot be too often repeated, is a very fine
fellow. And his point of view is reasonable. He has given his youth, his
energy, his ambition to his school. He has cared for nothing else. He
has allowed many of the good things of life to pass him because of this
unwavering devotion, and it is natural that he should resent the
intrusion of a young fellow who has not had time to learn to love the
school, but who wants to overturn the most cherished privileges.
And his methods are so impeccably direct and honest. He does not go
behind the young man's back to the head master. He has the young man
into his study for a chat; he looks him straight in the face. He says:
'Come now, we've got to have this out.' And the young man finds it so
desperately hard not to admire him. He endeavours to open a discussion:
he states his case. For a moment he seems to forget the personal issue
in the case. Confidence comes back to him. He develops his argument, and
then, just when he feels that his grip is closing on the contest, he is
beaten by that disarming sentimentality which is the most powerful of
all the old boy's weapons.
'My dear fellow,' he will say, 'you have your point of view and I have
mine. We are both in our own ways working for the good of the school;
why must we quarrel? We are fighting the same fight. But we can do
nothing unless we stand together. I've given my whole life to the cause;
you are just beginning.'
The acceptance of this offer of friendship and co-operation means
defeat. The young man knows it. But it is so hard to refuse. The rebel
in any sphere of life has no harder task than the cutting adrift from
his own caste and the subsequent alliance with men of different
upbringing and different standards. He sees, on the one hand, a vast
number of noble, if bigoted men, men whom he can trust and admire. And,
on the other side, as a setting for the few idealists in whose
principles he believes, the arrayed forces of envy, greed, and malice.
The temptation to cling to what he knows and what secretly he admires
is too great. Most of the young enthusiasts give way soon. They join the
forces of reaction.
And those that stand out are inevitably broken. What chance have they
after all? The modern intellectual is something of a negativist. His
tolerance is composed of indifference and uncertainty. He sees life in
the words of Jurgen as a 'wasteful and inequitable process,' and does
not discern clearly how to alter it. His philosophy is a series of
disappointments. He is bound to go down before a bigotry that is certain
of itself. The forces of reaction are so powerfully entrenched. The old
boy house master knows exactly what he wants and how he proposes to get
it. He advances down a straight road. His enemies pause and wonder and
question themselves.
The bigot usually makes the best administrator. He is not worried by
abstractions. He is certain of his ends and can devote all his attention
to the means. The tolerant head master, the man who sees both points of
view, is overcome in the end by preponderating faith and sincerity of
reaction. The new man is invariably subjugated, or else is made to go.
No head master would be anxious to take his side.
The games master type is intensely popular with parents and old boys. He
represents for them the public school spirit. He is a fixed, immutable
principle in which they can place their trust. They would be intensely
worried were they to learn that the head master had taken the side of a
new man against their old friend. The subject would be discussed in the
clubs: 'There's trouble brewing at Fernhurst,' they would say. 'This new
head master is a liberal. He's quarrelling with old Aiken. I don't like
the look of it.' And the position of the school would be shaken. Parents
would send their sons elsewhere. The numbers would drop. Unpleasant
questions would be put to the head master at the next meeting of the
governors. It is the old trouble of the merchant and his goods. Parents
have to be placated. They have been assured that 'all is for the best in
the best of all possible schools'; and, when they hear rumours of
dissension they naturally imagine that something must be wrong with that
particular school. It is not so everywhere. They remind the head master
of his own official utterances. And it is not easy after prophesying
smooth things to satisfy the complaints of those who find them hard.
A head master has to reach his ends through infinite tact and patience
and through a long series of compromises. He has to be something of an
opportunist. He has to give reasons other than the true ones for what he
does. He has to promote progress secretly, while he advocates
conservatism. And it is hard to remain true to oneself while playing the
Jekyll and Hyde game. Motives become involved; there is too much
diplomacy, and the forces of reaction, whatever else they be, are
distinctly honest. Certainly he cannot allow the clumsy enthusiasm of a
young man to complicate his vexed existence. And the young man has
either to break or bend. Usually he bends. He has, after all, to
consider his own career. He compromises with himself. He manages to
persuade himself that he is not really yielding, but that he is adopting
different tactics, attacking the enemy from another side. He decides to
do his work of reform quietly, without ostentation. Other people can do
their own way if they like.
That compromise is the start of a long process of self-deception. When
he becomes a house master it will be so simple to put off parents with
excuses. He will be able to justify himself, to say: 'These are stupid
folk. They will worry me if I encourage them. I have my work to do. I
must pacify them and get on with it.' And so the circle completes
itself. The young man who sets out to reform school life, who brought to
the task a fine, untried energy, ends in evasion, compromise and
self-deception. Boys, parents, and masters are working at cross
purposes.
There are certainly a large number of entries on the debit side of the
ledger. It remains to be decided what hand has written these entries and
whether it is possible to erase them. To a large extent they are due to
four things: the moral issue; the cult of athleticism, which is regarded
as an antidote to immorality; the conspiracy of silence that exists
between parents and boys and masters, and the long period a boy spends
at school--the six years that separate so unduly the junior from the
senior, that accentuate the blood system, that erect a wall shutting out
the world at large. School life is too much of a walled garden, too much
of a world in itself. It has remained monastic, it has not established
contact with the movements of the hour.