We left Bedford Park for a long thatched house at Howth, Co. Dublin. The
land war was now at its height and our Kildare land, that had been in the
family for many generations, was slipping from us. Rents had fallen more
and more, we had to sell to pay some charge or mortgage, but my father and
his tenants parted without ill-will. During the worst times an old tenant
had under his roof my father's shooting-dog and gave it better care than
the annual payment earned. He had set apart for its comfort the best place
at the fire; and if some man were in the place when the dog walked into
the house, the man must needs make room for the dog. And a good while
after the sale, I can remember my father being called upon to settle some
dispute between this old man and his sons.
I was now fifteen; and as he did not want to leave his painting my father
told me to go to Harcourt Street and put myself to school. I found a bleak
18th century house and a small playing-field full of mud and pebbles,
fenced by an iron railing from a wide 18th century street, but opposite a
long hoarding and a squalid, ornamental railway station. Here, as I soon
found, nobody gave a thought to decorum. We worked in a din of voices. We
began the morning with prayers, but when class began the head-master, if
he was in the humour, would laugh at Church and Clergy. "Let them say what
they like," he would say, "but the earth does go round the sun." On the
other hand there was no bullying and I had not thought it possible that
boys could work so hard. Cricket and football, the collection of moths and
butterflies, though not forbidden, were discouraged. They were for idle
boys. I did not know, as I used to, the mass of my school-fellows; for we
had little life in common outside the class-rooms. I had begun to think of
my school-work as an interruption of my natural history studies, but even
had I never opened a book not in the school course, I could not have
learned a quarter of my night's work. I had always done Euclid easily,
making the problems out while the other boys were blundering at the
blackboard, and it had often carried me from the bottom to the top of my
class; but these boys had the same natural gift and instead of being in
the fourth or fifth book were in the modern books at the end of the
primer; and in place of a dozen lines of Virgil with a dictionary, I was
expected to learn with the help of a crib a hundred and fifty lines. The
other boys were able to learn the translation off, and to remember what
words of Latin and English corresponded with one another, but I, who it
may be had tried to find out what happened in the parts we had not read,
made ridiculous mistakes; and what could I, who never worked when I was
not interested, do with a history lesson that was but a column of seventy
dates? I was worst of all at literature, for we read Shakespeare for his
grammar exclusively.
One day I had a lucky thought. A great many lessons were run through in
the last hour of the day, things we had learnt or should have learnt by
heart over night, and after not having known one of them for weeks, I cut
off that hour without anybody's leave. I asked the mathematical master to
give me a sum to work and nobody said a word. My father often interfered,
and always with disaster, to teach me my Latin lesson. "But I have also my
geography," I would say. "Geography," he would reply, "should never be
taught. It is not a training for the mind. You will pick up all that you
need, in your general reading." And if it was a history lesson, he would
say just the same, and "Euclid," he would say, "is too easy. It comes
naturally to the literary imagination. The old idea, that it is a good
training for the mind, was long ago refuted." I would know my Latin lesson
so that it was a nine days' wonder, and for weeks after would be told it
was scandalous to be so clever and so idle. No one knew that I had learnt
it in the terror that alone could check my wandering mind. I must have
told on him at some time or other for I remember the head-master saying,
"I am going to give you an imposition because I cannot get at your father
to give him one." Sometimes we had essays to write; & though I never got a
prize, for the essays were judged by hand-writing and spelling I caused a
measure of scandal. I would be called up before some master and asked if I
really believed such things, and that would make me angry for I had
written what I had believed all my life, what my father had told me, or a
memory of the conversation of his friends. There were other beliefs, but
they were held by people one did not know, people who were vulgar or
stupid. I was asked to write an essay on "men may rise on stepping-stones
of their dead selves to higher things." My father read the subject to my
mother, who had no interest in such matters. "That is the way," he said,
"boys are made insincere and false to themselves. Ideals make the blood
thin, and take the human nature out of people." He walked up and down the
room in eloquent indignation, and told me not to write on such a subject
at all, but upon Shakespeare's lines "to thine own self be true, and it
must follow as the night the day thou canst not then be false to any man."
At another time, he would denounce the idea of duty, and "imagine," he
would say, "how the right sort of woman would despise a dutiful husband;"
and he would tell us how much my mother would scorn such a thing. Maybe
there were people among whom such ideas were natural, but they were the
people with whom one does not dine. All he said was, I now believe right,
but he should have taken me away from school. He would have taught me
nothing but Greek and Latin, and I would now be a properly educated man,
and would not have to look in useless longing at books that have been,
through the poor mechanism of translation, the builders of my soul, nor
faced authority with the timidity born of excuse and evasion. Evasion and
excuse were in the event as wise as the house-building instinct of the
beaver.