These stories were all written at a very happy time of my life, and
they were first published when I was a master at Eton with a
boarding-house. A house-master is not always a happy man. It is an
anxious business at best. Boys are very unaccountable creatures, and
the years between boyhood and adolescence are apt to represent an
irresponsible mood. From the quiet childhood at home the boys have
passed to what is now, most happily, in the majority of cases, a
carefully guarded and sheltered atmosphere--the private school. My own
private school was of the old-fashioned type, with a very independent
tone of tradition; but nowadays private schools are smaller and much
more domesticated. The boys live like little brothers in the company
of active and kindly young masters; and then they are plunged into the
rougher currents of public schools, with their strange and in many
ways barbarous code of ethics, their strong and penetrating
traditions. Here the boys, who have hitherto had little temptation to
be anything but obedient, have to learn to govern themselves, and to
do so among conventions which hardly represent the conventions of the
world, and where the public opinion is curiously unaffected either by
parental desires, or by the wishes, expressed or unexpressed, of the
masters. A house-master is often in the position of seeing a new set
of boys come into power in his house whom he may distrust; but the
sense of honour among the boys is so strong that he is often the last
person to hear of practices and principles prevailing in his house of
which he may wholly disapprove. He may even find that many of the
individual boys in his house disapprove of them too, and yet be unable
to alter a tone impressed on the place by a few boys of forcible, if
even sometimes unsatisfactory, character. But at the time at which
these stories were written the tone of my own house was sound,
sensible, and friendly; and I had the happiness of living in an
atmosphere which I knew to be wholesome, manly, and pure. I used to
tell or read stories on Sunday evenings to any boys who cared to come
to listen; and I remember with delight those hours when perhaps twenty
boys would come and sit all about my study, filling every chair and
sofa and overflowing on to the floor, to listen to long, vague stories
of adventure, with at all events an appearance of interest and
excitement.
One wanted to do the best for the boys, to put fine ideas, if one
could, into their heads and hearts. But direct moral exhortation to
growing boys, feeling the life of the world quickening in their veins,
and with vague old instincts of love and war rising uninterpreted in
their thoughts, is apt to be a fruitless thing enough. It is not that
they do not listen; but they simply do not understand the need of
caution and control, nor do they see the unguarded posterns by which
evil things slip smiling into the fortress of the soul.
Every now and then I used to try to shape a tale which in a figure
might leave an arresting or a restraining thought in their minds; or
even touch with a light of romance some of the knightly virtues which
are apt to be dulled into the aspect of commonplace and uninteresting
duties.
It is very hard to make the simple choices of life assume a noble or
an inspiring form. One sees long afterwards in later life how fine the
right choice, the vigorous resistance, the honest perseverance might
have been; but the worst faults of boyhood have something exciting and
even romantic about them--they would not be so alluring if they had
not--while the homely virtues of honesty, frankness, modesty, and
self-restraint appear too often as a dull and priggish abstention from
the more daring and adventurous joys of eager living. If evil were
always ugly and goodness were always beautiful at first sight, there
would be little of the trouble and havoc in the world that is wrought
by sin and indolence.
I chose, not deliberately but instinctively, the old romantic form
for the setting of these tales, a semi-mediæval atmosphere such as
belongs to the literary epic; some of the stories are pure fantasy;
but they all aim more or less directly at illustrating the stern
necessity of moral choice; the difficulty is to get children to
believe, at the brilliant outset of life, that it will not do to
follow the delights of impulse. And one of the most pathetic parts of
a schoolmaster's life is that he cannot, however earnestly and
sincerely he may wish to do so, transfer his own experience to the
boys, or persuade them that, in the simple words of Browning, "It's
wiser being good than bad." It may be wiser but it is certainly
duller! and the schoolmaster has the horror, which ought never to be a
faithless despair, of seeing boys drift into habits of non-resistance,
and sow with eager hand the seed which must almost inevitably grow up
into the thorns and weeds of life. If the child could but grasp the
bare truth, if one could but pull away the veil of the years and show
him the careless natural joy ending in the dingy, broken slovenliness
of failure! But one cannot; and perhaps life would lose all its virtue
if one could.
One does not know, one cannot dimly guess, why all these attractive
opportunities of evil are so thickly strewn about the path of the
young in a world which we believe to be ultimately ruled by Justice
and Love. Much of it comes from our own blindness and hardness of
heart. Either we do not care enough ourselves, or we cannot risk the
unpopularity of interfering with bad traditions, or we are lacking in
imaginative sympathy, or we sophistically persuade ourselves into the
belief that the character is strengthened by exposure to premature
evil. The atmosphere of the boarding-school is a very artificial one;
its successes are patent, its débris we sweep away into a corner; but
whatever view we take of it all, it is a life which, if one cares for
virtue at all, however half-heartedly, tries the mental and emotional
faculties of the schoolmaster to the uttermost, and every now and then
shakes one's heart to the depths with a terrible wonder as to how one
can ever answer to the account which will be demanded.
I do not claim to have realised my responsibilities fully, or to have
done all I could to lead my flock along the right path. But I did
desire to minimise temptations and to try to get the better side of
the boys' hearts and minds to emphasise itself. One saw masters who
seemed to meddle too much--that sometimes produced an atmosphere of
guarded hostility--and one saw masters who seemed to be foolishly
optimistic about it all; but as a rule one found in one's colleagues a
deep and serious preoccupation with manly ideals of boy-life; and in
these stories I tried my best to touch into life the poetical and
beautiful side of virtue, to show life as a pilgrimage to a far-off
but glorious goal, with seductive bypaths turning off the narrow way,
and evil shapes, both terrifying and alluring, which loitered in shady
corners, or even sometimes straddled horribly across the very road.
The romance, then, of these stories is coloured by what may be thought
to be a conventional and commonplace morality enough; but it is real
for all that; and life as it proceeds has a blessed way of revealing
the urgency and the unseen features of the combat. It is just because
virtue seems dry and humdrum that the struggle is so difficult. It is
so hard to turn aside from what seems so dangerously beautiful, to
what seems so plain and homely. But it is what we mostly have to do.
I saw many years ago a strange parable of what I mean. I was walking
through a quiet countryside with a curious, fanciful, interesting boy,
and we came to a little church off the track in a tiny churchyard full
of high-seeded grasses. On the wall of the chancel hung an old trophy
of armour, a helmet and a cuirass, black with age. The boy climbed
quickly up upon the choir-stalls, took the helmet down, enclosed his
own curly head in it, and then knelt down suddenly on the altar-step;
after which he replaced the helmet again on its nail. "What put it
into your head to do that?" I said. "Oh," he said lightly, "I thought
of the old man who wore it; and they used to kneel before the altar in
their armour when they were made knights, didn't they? I wanted just
to feel what it was like!"
Life was too strong for that boy, and he was worsted! He won little
credit in the fight. But it had been a pretty fancy of his, and
perhaps something more than a fancy. I have often thought of the
little slender figure, so strangely helmeted, kneeling in the summer
sunlight, with Heaven knows what thoughts of what life was to be; it
seems to me a sorrowful enough symbol of boyhood--so eager to share in
the fray, so unfit to bear the dinted helm.
And yet I do not wish to be sorrowful, and it would be untrue to life
to yield oneself to foolish pity. My own little company is broken up
long ago; I wonder if they remember the old days and the old stories.
They are good citizens most of them, standing firmly and sturdily,
finding out the meaning of life in their own way and contributing
their part to the business of the world. But some of them have fallen
by the way, and those not the faultiest or coarsest, but some of fine
instinct and graceful charm, who evoked one's best hopes and most
affectionate concern.
If one believed that life were all, that there was no experience
beyond the dark grave and the mouldering clay, it would be a miserable
task enough to creep cautiously through life, just holding on to its
tangible advantages and cautiously enjoying its delights. But I do
most utterly believe that there is a truth beyond that satisfies our
sharpest cravings and our wildest dreams, and that if we have loved
what is high and good, even for a halting minute, it will come to
bless us consciously and abundantly before we have done with
experience. Many of our dreams are heavy-hearted enough; we are
hampered by the old faults, and by the body that not only cannot
answer the demands of the spirit, but bars the way with its own urgent
claims and desires. But whatever hope we can frame or conceive of
peace and truth and nobleness and light shall be wholly and purely
fulfilled; and even if we are separated by a season, as we must be
separated, from those whom we love and journey with, there is a union
ahead of us when we shall remember gratefully the old dim days, and
the path which we trod in hope and fear together; when all the trouble
we have wrought to ourselves and others will vanish into the shadow of
a faded dream, in the sweetness and glory of some great city of God,
full of fire and music and all the radiant visions of uplifted hearts,
which visited us so faintly and yet so beckoningly in the old frail
days.