WHILE I REMEMBER
STEPHEN McKENNA
_By Stephen McKenna_
WHILE I REMEMBER
THE SENSATIONALISTS
PART ONE: LADY LILITH
PART TWO: THE EDUCATION OF ERIC LANE
PART THREE: THE SECRET VICTORY
SONIA MARRIED
SONIA
MIDAS AND SON
NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE
THE SIXTH SENSE
SHEILA INTERVENES
_New York: George H. Doran Company_
WHILE I REMEMBER
BY
STEPHEN McKENNA
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
THOSE WHO MAY FORGET
"Two men I honour, and no third. First, the toil-worn Craftsman
that with earth-made Implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and
makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse;
wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal
as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable too is the rugged face,
all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it
is the face of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable
for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love
thee! Hardly-entreated Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for
us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed: thou wert our
Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
marred. For in thee too lay a god-created Form, but it was not to
be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and
defacements of Labour: and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know
freedom. Yet toil on, toil on: _thou_ art in thy duty, be out of it
who may; thou toilest for the altogether indispensable, for daily
bread.
"A second man I honour, and still more highly: Him who is seen
toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but
the bread of Life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards
inward Harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all
his outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when
his outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name
him Artist; not earthly Craftsman only, but inspired Thinker, who
with heaven-made Implement conquers Heaven for us! If the poor and
humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glorious toil
for him in return, that he have Light, have Guidance, Freedom,
Immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour: all else is
chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth."
THOMAS CARLYLE: _Sartor Resartus_.
"People who are old enough to write memoirs," says my friend Shane
Leslie in _The End of a Chapter_, "have usually lost their memory."
They have always, he might have added, lost the enthusiasm which
once inspired and is alone able to explain their part in what they
are trying to remember. Going farther, he might have challenged in
words, as his book challenged by implication, the belief that there
is any day in a man's life on which--though not an hour before--he
is entitled to set down his reminiscences; yet one page from the
journal of Alcibiades at twenty might well be more instructive than
three volumes of the wisdom of Socrates at seventy.
My reason for writing the present book is that I wish to record
certain impressions of a vanished generation while I remember
them clearly and sympathetically; my excuse for publishing it
is that the opinions and recollections of middle life are so
seldom articulate. Reminiscences of childhood, where they survive
undimmed, find their place in fiction and in autobiography;
reminiscences of youth and manhood, collected and chastened from
the sober angle of old age, are compressed into one patronising
chapter of every standard life; but we are hardly ever allowed
to look through the spectacles of thirty at the world as it
appears to the eyes of thirty. Sometimes we are, indeed, admitted
to the intimacy of a diary; but, if it has been composed with a
view to publication, we may suspect that behind the pretext of
self-communing the author is striking an attitude; if it was never
intended for publication, we may wonder whether it should ever have
been published. Possibly there is still room for recollections
that have frankly been written for publication before age has too
greatly blurred the outline of memory or distance eliminated too
ruthlessly the unimportant.
As the art of the novelist demands of him that he should first
and foremost be a spectator of life, so the accident of race
makes of him an involuntary critic if his lot be cast amid alien
surroundings, however congenial; and the further accident of health
not always robust may remove him a yet greater distance from the
active life of his generation. In so far as this detachment gives
him a separate standard of comparison, it may be not without value
in the review of past manners and ideals.
It is with the life of that generation and not with gossip
about this or that member of it that I am concerned. A new and
inexcusable terror is added to social intercourse when the
confidence, the indiscretion or the malice of a dinner-table is
industriously recorded and published; and it is still believed
by some who were trained in a tradition of reticence that
intimate portraits and studies should be withheld so long as the
originals or their friends can be offended or hurt by unsought
publicity. While a man of even thirty-three, spending most of his
life in London, may have met more than a few of the statesmen
and financiers, the sailors and soldiers, the artists, authors
and actors who have now chief place in the interest of their
countrymen, I feel that it would be impudent for him publicly to
scatter his unsolicited opinion on those whom he has been invited
to meet privately. This book will therefore be free from what has
been called an "index of improper names."
It would be no less impudent for him to assume that anyone is
interested in the insignificances of his private life. I venture
to write of this epoch because I hope to present some aspects
of it which might elude the historian who ranges over a wider
field, preeminently the aspect from the standpoint of youth. Any
autobiographical matter deserves no more honourable place than a
footnote and is included only to explain how and why one super was
found at certain times on a certain stage.
The generation which ended with the Peace of Versailles in 1919 is
likely to be cut off from all that follows more completely than any
of which we have record: a higher proportion of its youth has been
destroyed, and of those who remain hardly one has been left in the
place that he filled before the war; the standard and distribution
of wealth have changed; and former lines of social demarcation have
been obliterated. Though the old forms continue, the life that
inspires them is new: the schools and universities, the learned
professions and public services, the government itself are manned
from a different class and actuated by different ideals. It may be
not altogether wasted labour to sketch a corner of that old world
as it was known to the men who were reared in time to be sacrificed
in the late war.
Impelled by a common interest in changing fashions, Professor
Sir Denison Ross, Mr. Hugo Rumbold and I once agreed to compile
an encyclopædia of the catch-words and cant phrases, the popular
songs and popular dances, the endearments and greetings of the
last twenty years; though the work has not yet been begun, I am
not without hope that there may be published in our lifetime
a social survey of England which shall contain some few of the
things commonly considered to be below the dignity of history,
for the change in manners during the last generation is worthy of
an exhaustive treatise; it is at once the effect and the cause
of a corresponding change in morals; and, whatever progress
the future have in store, those who first drew breath in Queen
Victoria's reign may congratulate themselves, if it be a matter
for congratulation, on having passed in thirty years from the
civilisation of the Stone Age to that of the Cities of the Plain.
This book is as deliberately incomplete as the sketch-book of a
traveller who records some few of the scenes that he most wishes to
conjure up again and none that he would prefer to forget. Whether
my reminiscences and reflections at thirty-three or at any other
age are of interest to anyone I must leave my readers to determine,
comforting myself with the thought that the years through which
I have lived are themselves of interest and reminding those who
regard memoir-writing as a prerogative of septuagenarians that in
the life of most men there is a time when they are unable to look
forward with confidence and must be deemed fortunate if they can
look back without regret.
I have striven to avoid inaccuracy, but I have been compelled to
write at a distance from all works of reference.
S. McK.
_Talcahuano,
31 January, 1921._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I WESTMINSTER 17
II A SETTING AND A DATE 40
III CHRIST CHURCH 59
IV LONDON AND ELSEWHERE 80
V THE FRINGE OF POLITICS 100
VI ON THE EVE 132
VII THE FRINGE OF WAR 154
VIII AT THE LIBERAL GRAVE-SIDE 183
IX ON THE ROAD TO WASHINGTON--AND AFTER 201
X LONDON AGAIN 226
XI DEMOBILISATION 244
XII LITERARY TOTEMS 268
XIII POLITICS IN A DISSOLVING VIEW 290
XIV A MEMORY RETOUCHED 314
WHILE I REMEMBER
WHILE I REMEMBER
CHAPTER I
WESTMINSTER
"A man, whom the fond imagination of his worshippers invested with
the attributes of a god, gave his life for the life of the world;
after infusing from his own body a fresh current of vital energy
into the stagnant veins of nature, he was cut off from among the
living before his failing strength should initiate a universal
decay, and his place was taken by another who played, like all his
predecessors, the ever-recurring drama of the divine resurrection
and death.... The sceptic ... will reduce Jesus of Nazareth to the
level of a multitude of other victims of a barbarous superstition,
and will see in him no more than a moral teacher, whom the
fortunate accident of his execution invested with the crown, not
merely of a martyr, but of a god...."
J. G. FRAZER: _The Golden Bough_.
I
On the last Sunday of July, in the year 1906, Little Dean's
Yard filled slowly with sixty or seventy boys in evening dress.
All but about ten wore the black gown, which is one mark of the
Westminster Scholar, and, over the gown, a white surplice open
or buttoned according to the seniority of the wearer. It was not
yet ten o'clock in the morning; but on Election Sunday all King's
Scholars and Major Candidates appear in evening clothes, the Major
Candidates distinguished by carnations of the prized Westminster
pink which has been worn since the day, nearly a hundred years
ago, when the school rowed against Eton and settled that colour
question by trial of strength: the victors were to have pink, the
vanquished blue; and the deeper pink of Leander derives from the
Westminster founders of the club.
These were the last few flying moments of the last scene. Six years
ago the seniors in the swelling group, escaping from the thunder
of traffic in Victoria Street and Broad Sanctuary, had entered
the silent backwater of Little Dean's Yard as Minor Candidates;
their parents or the masters of their preparatory schools led
them under the arch and past the fives' courts; they turned shyly
wondering eyes at Home Boarders, Rigaud's, Grant's, College and
Ashburnham, at the Bursary and the head master's house; then they
were shepherded through the Inigo Jones doorway and up the steps
into School. It was the first day of the Challenge, wherein the
candidates of other days met all-comers in a disputation--lasting a
week or more--on the elements of learning and those who outlasted
their opponents were elected to scholarships. Now, after six years,
they were competing for the close scholarships and exhibitions at
Christ Church and at Trinity, Cambridge. The written work was over;
on Election Monday would come the _viva voce_, then the annual
cricket match between the King's Scholars and the Town Boys on
Vincent Square, then Election dinner in College Hall enlivened by
the Greek, Latin and English epigrams which Westminster subsidises;
then on Election Tuesday, still in evening dress, they would attend
the school service in Abbey for the last time and for the last time
answer "_Adsum_" at roll-call; the results of Election would be
read out, the prizes distributed, the office-holders would divest
themselves of office and they would walk down School for the last
time, into their houses, out of them again and into the world.
The Captain of the King's Scholars came out of College; the Head
Town Boy joined him at the entrance to the cloisters; next to them
were the other two School Monitors. The involuntary began; and the
procession passed through the nave and under the organ loft: first
the choir, then the Abbey clergy and the Dean of Westminster; the
Dean of Christ Church and the Master of Trinity; the examiners from
Oxford and Cambridge; the Head Master of Westminster; the assistant
masters in gowns and hoods; the King's Scholars in surplices, gowns
and evening dress, those of them who were leaving chastened by the
thought that, after the Election Tuesday service two days later,
they would enter the Abbey as members of the public only.
Westminster is so much the embodiment and shrine of English history
that even the alien and the iconoclast cannot spend six years in
the shadow of the Abbey without becoming steeped in the spirit and
associations of the place. It is the influence of such foundations
that makes of English life its present compromise between the
rational and the traditional. From their places in the stalls
could be seen the arches of the triforium which are filled at
coronations by the Westminster Scholars: no king, they assert, can
be duly crowned unless he is acclaimed by their triple shout of
"_Vivat Rex_". It is their privilege to be present in Palace Yard
when the soveran opens Parliament; Scholars and Town Boys walk,
of unchallenged right, into the gallery of the House of Commons,
Scholars--in cap and gown--into the gallery of the House of Lords
and, on Sundays, on to the Terrace; when the Courts of Justice
were at Westminster, they could wander unchecked into Westminster
Hall. Their daily service takes place in the Poets' Corner; they
are present at State funerals, their confirmation is held in Henry
VII's chapel; and the whole Abbey is their heritage. Is not the
school descended lineally from that group of lay scholars whom the
monks of Westminster taught? Is not the monks' dormitory their
Great School? Among the documents discovered of late years in the
Abbey Muniment Room is a record, under the year 1284, of _expensæ_,
being provision for the teaching of scholars, and a further record,
under the year 1339, of payments for "Westminster School." Already
old when Winchester and Eton were founded, with its roots struck
deep in the Abbey's earliest history and with its life immemorially
intertwined with the life of the Abbey, the two have remained side
by side until Westminster is the last of the London schools to
resist the pressure which has already urged younger rivals from
their seats. Changing slowly with the slow unfolding of English
history, the school was refounded by Queen Elizabeth on a secular
footing; and the monitor of the week, kneeling with his back to
Busby's birch-table[1] and facing the school, returns thanks "_pro
fundatrice nostra Regina Elizabetha_" on the spot where Robert
South prayed "_pro rege Carolo_" on the 30th of January, 1649. It
retains, by the Act of Uniformity, its "almost unique privilege of
using Latin in religious offices", though--as a concession to the
Reformers--the monkish pronunciation was abandoned for that which
was the universal English form until misguided empiricists set
up confusion where none existed before by introducing a "modern"
method.
Since that new Tower of Babel was erected, Westminster has watched
other foundations arguing and striving to discover the correct
pronunciation of classical Latin. Despite the periodical rebukes
of its rivals, it has held stubbornly to its course, knowing
that there is no sure means of recreating the speech of Cicero
and that Westminster at least is too deeply bedded in the past
to bend before each new breeze of educational fashion. A hundred
customs are preserved to teach new generations that progress need
not be divorced from the historic sense: when the bell rings for
prayers at the end of afternoon school, a Second Election knocks
with his cap at the doors of the form-rooms adjoining school and
calls out, "_Instat quinta_", or, on "plays" (half-holidays),
"_Instat sesquiduodecima_", although the actual hour is now nearly
one o'clock; a Second Election has knocked thus since the time
was told from a single clock and shouted through the school by a
junior; before prayers begin, the doors are locked, and, when they
are opened, one of the School Monitors[2] mounts guard outside to
repel a chance raid by the "sci's"[3] of the neighbourhood who in
less orderly days carried on a town-and-gown warfare against the
school. At the lowest, such customs are a picturesque survival,
like the Latin play acted in College Dormitory, the Pancake Greeze
on Shrove Tuesday, the countless phrases and customs which only a
Westminster understands and which all Westminsters love; perhaps,
too, they foster, in the alien and the iconoclast, a sense of the
past. Abbey and School are a monument to continuity and ordered
progress; in 1906, they were a monument at which the leaving
seniors had been involuntarily staring for half a dozen years.
II
It is probable that few of them had much attention to spare for
the sermon on that Election Sunday. At eighteen they had spent a
third of their life at Westminster; it is a foundation in which
son succeeds father and brother follows brother, as witness the
carved and painted names of Madans and Waterfields, Goodenoughs and
Phillimores up School, and on a September night of 1900 tradition
had set them in the footsteps of their families and had sought a
place for them in the old houses, there to serve and perhaps to
suffer, to learn and, later, to rule.
"You will sometimes be punished when you do not deserve it", was
the wise parting advice of one preparatory-school headmaster;
"before giving vent to your indignation, reflect how much oftener
you have deserved punishment without receiving it."
It is but fair to say that this consoling philosophy was little
required at Westminster: provided that he incurred no suspicion
of "side", there was so general a disposition to help the strange
newcomer that he suffered little; and even his service was
made easy for him. The "shadow", in Westminster language, was
instructed at once in the rules and customs of the house by a
senior fag, his "substance", who shouldered his sins for the first
fortnight and was theoretically liable to suffer vicariously
for his shortcomings; after the days of grace a new boy could
be fagged, though this involved little more than fetching and
carrying, washing cups, filling saucepans and preparing call-over
lists; he could also be "tanned", with an instrument appropriately
designated a "pole"; but, though this was less agreeable, corporal
punishment was not employed with undue frequency. There was always
a right of appeal, too, with the menace of two extra strokes if the
appeal was dismissed; but, as it was a point of honour never to
appeal, the sufferer could only comfort himself with the thought
that a tanning was over more quickly than "lines" or "drill" and
with the hope that he might fall into weak or inexpert hands. Of
bullying there was little; of systematic oppression and torture
of the weak by the strong there was none at all, though the small
boys of that generation (as of every other) believed that, if a
companion was offensive, their right and duty impelled them to drum
the offensiveness out of him.
The war has caused the English people to examine searchingly its
scheme of education and especially that public-school system
which trains the sons of the well-to-do for future eminence in
government, the public services and the learned professions.
There have been many books and much discussion: the English love
of finding fault with cherished institutions while approving the
result has led to a hazy belief that the English public-schoolboy
is the finest raw material in the world, but that only his inborn
superiority has saved him from destruction by a burthen of useless
learning, devastating ignorance, insane athleticism and vicious
associations. It is more than time to suggest that his excellence
is a delicate bloom nurtured and saved by the public school from
the criminal neglect of his parents and that most critics, failing
to distinguish between the phases through which every boy passes,
have written down as chronic disease what was but temporary
green-sickness.
Few men can speak with knowledge of more than one school, but
there is little risk in the assertion that the natural history of
the public-schoolboy is broadly the same at all times and places.
Withdrawn at an early age from the dry-nursing of his natural
guardians, he is flung into a vast adolescent society and left to
struggle through as best he may: his parents commonly escape the
embarrassment of explaining to him the elements of physiology,
preferring that he should learn them from the gloating confidences
of other boys hardly less ignorant than himself. Native chastity
of soul keeps some unsmirched, but most go through an ugly period
of foul tongues, foul minds and sometimes foul propensities which
the school seeks to circumvent by vigilance and hard physical
discipline. During the middle phase, this blind, misunderstood
groping towards maturity comes to be gradually controlled; and, in
the last, the adult boy is seen as a clean-living, clean-speaking,
rather solemn blend of scholar, sportsman and despot, very
conscious of his responsibilities and zealous to repress the
primitive exuberance by which he himself was afflicted two or three
years earlier.
Before public schools are denounced for making boys licentious of
habit and obscene of tongue, parents might ask themselves what
preventive measures they themselves have taken. And, before any
one attacks the insistence on athletics in public schools, he
might ask himself what better physical discipline he can propose
and whether this derided love of sport is inculcated at school or
at home. If a boy were not compelled by fear of punishment to take
part in games, he would be coerced by the opinion of parents who
would not understand nor tolerate a son without the Englishman's
normal and natural preoccupation with sport; and, though compulsory
games are easy to ridicule, they do not kill the chivalry of good
sportsmanship: an early Westminster memory is of a football shield
passing, after long and honourable contest, from one house to
another; while the head and captain of the winning house fetched
away the trophy, the losing house lined up to cheer their victors
and, if possible, to drown the cheers of the winning house for the
one that had lost.
A defence of the public-school system would deserve at least as
much space as the critics have given to attacking it. This is
neither the place nor time to engage in the endless controversy;
it was not the place nor time, fifteen years ago, for any who sat
thinking of their own school and of the days that they had spent
there.
III
Many of those who were leaving must have wondered where the
outgoing draft would be in another six years' time. Westminster
contains about three hundred boys, drawn chiefly from the
professional classes, and in turn sends a steady stream of recruits
to the civil service and the learned professions. Barristers and
doctors abound; government servants are to be discovered richly
distributed through Whitehall, India and the colonies; the school
has its share of clergymen and more than its share of soldiers.
In less than six years all would have come down from Oxford
and Cambridge, unless any had had the good fortune to secure a
fellowship; and, while those who were destined for a profession had
already decided on their careers, those who dreamed of public life
and looked, perhaps, towards the north transept where, in white
marble and late-won peace, Beaconsfield and Gladstone stood side
by side, may have preferred to keep locked in their own hearts the
ideals which they had diffidently set before themselves.
The changing and strengthening aspirations of a boy have won as
little space in all the crop of analytical school literature as
have the vagaries of his religious faith or the evolution of
his civic morals. The Victorians, indeed, in strict accordance
with formula, loaded their hero with vague disquiet which was
only relieved when he recalled that he had ceased to receive
the sacraments; a later generation arrested him in full flight
to perdition by intervening opportunely with a soul-steadying
preparation for confirmation; the Catholic propagandists habitually
threw a sympathetic priest across his path in the course of a
holiday ramble; and, if there be a school literature of dissent, I
doubt not but that some harassed hero found peace in the practice
of Congregationalism. It was recognised, therefore, that the
faith of childhood is not infrequently discarded at school; it
was assumed with less justification that boys undergo spiritual
distress at such a time; and, as the hero of a novel is not
expected to suffer as long or as acutely as any one in life, one
or other of the conventional escapes could always be chosen. It
is hard to remember a book in which the hero sheds his belief
in super-natural religion as lightheartedly as once he outgrew
his faith in Santa Claus; and, even if it be assumed from private
knowledge and experience that many schoolboy heroes have passed
through this spiritual transformation, it is harder to recall even
one who has been described as constructing a new system to take the
place of that which has been overthrown.
This reconstruction, nevertheless, was being attempted twenty
years ago, in the aftermath of the higher criticism, by all boys
with a speculative bent of mind; they were distinguished from
their predecessors by inherited scepticism; and their natural
history, to venture once more on a generalization from admittedly
incomplete data, was roughly the same everywhere in England.
Were it reasonable to fancy for a moment that modern boys were
distressed when their faith left them, severe blame would attach
to the timorous, indolent or dishonest parents who shirk the
burden of explaining and who teach as truth what they themselves
believe to be untrue, hoping that, when their children are older,
they will somehow have learned better at the hands of masters,
who are debarred from religious controversy, or of boys, who can
only contribute an equal ignorance. In fact, the boy who lost his
faith in revealed religion lost it more slowly, but no whit more
painfully than his belief in fairies; he no longer wrote to his
fellows, as Gladstone and Manning would write, to discuss the
state of his soul; he sought no spiritual director and asked no
one to pray for him, though he may have wondered why his parents
preserved a grotesque imposture for so long. In reading and in
discussion he had absorbed ideas of biological evolution, of
geological testimony and of religion studied comparatively; he
applied to historical Christianity the tests which he had been
taught to use on the history of Greece and Rome, accepting nothing
that could not be proved by evidence and rejecting the pretensions
of faith as he rejected the statements of a secular historian
that his history was literally inspired. Already he had heard
that the Old Testament was no longer accepted as heretofore; he
may even have learned that, for thousands of years before Christ,
countless gods were sacrificed annually by crucifixion or other
means and that a Barabbas was annually released to the people;
the distillation continued until he was left with the residuum
that a man named Jesus Christ, claiming or having claimed for him
a divine fatherhood, was crucified after a short life of healing
and teaching; there were, he found, no independent contemporary
documents, and the fullest accounts, written many years after
the events they described, were inspired by the devotion of his
followers, whose critical judgement, however, was on a level of
education to be expected in one harassed and turbulent corner of
the Roman Empire.
The concluding passage from _The Golden Bough_, of which a few
words have been quoted at the beginning of this chapter, defines,
in prose of rare beauty, the attitude of an agnostic towards
Christianity. "A man," wrote Sir James Frazer, "whom the fond
imagination of his worshippers invested with the attributes of a
god, gave his life for the life of the world; after infusing from
his own body a fresh current of vital energy into the stagnant
veins of nature, he was cut off from among the living before his
failing strength should initiate a universal decay, and his place
was taken by another who played, like all his predecessors, the
ever-recurring drama of the divine resurrection and death.... It
was played in Babylonia, and from Babylonia the returning captives
brought it to Judæa, where it was acted, rather as an historical
than a mythical piece, by players who, having to die in grim
earnest on a cross or gallows, were naturally drawn rather from
the gaol than the green-room. A chain of causes which, because we
cannot follow them, might in the loose language of daily life be
called an accident, determined that the part of the dying god in
this annual play should be thrust upon Jesus of Nazareth, whom the
enemies he had made in high places by his outspoken strictures
were resolved to put out of the way. They succeeded in ridding
themselves of the popular and troublesome preacher; but the very
step by which they fancied they had simultaneously stamped out his
revolutionary doctrines contributed more than anything else they
could have done to scatter them broadcast not only over Judæa but
over Asia; for it impressed upon what had been hitherto mainly an
ethical mission the character of a divine revelation culminating in
the passion and death of the incarnate Son of a heavenly Father.
In this form the story of the life and death of Jesus exerted an
influence which it could never have had if the great teacher had
died, as is commonly supposed, the death of a vulgar malefactor. It
shed round the cross on Calvary a halo of divinity which multitudes
saw and worshipped afar off; the blow struck on Golgotha set a
thousand expectant strings vibrating in unison wherever men had
heard the old, old story of the dying and risen god. Every year, as
another spring bloomed and another autumn faded across the earth,
the field had been ploughed and sown and borne fruit of a kind
till it received that seed which was destined to spring up and
overshadow the world. In the great army of martyrs who in many ages
and in many lands, not in Asia only, have died a cruel death in
the character of gods, the devout Christian will doubtless discern
types and forerunners of the coming Saviour--stars that heralded
in the morning sky the advent of the Sun of Righteousness--earthen
vessels wherein it pleased the divine wisdom to set before
hungering souls the bread of heaven. The sceptic, on the other
hand, with equal confidence, will reduce Jesus of Nazareth to the
level of a multitude of other victims of a barbarous superstition,
and will see in him no more than a moral teacher whom the fortunate
accident of his execution invested with the crown, not merely of a
martyr, but of a god. The divergence between these views is wide
and deep. Which of them is the truer and will in the end prevail?
Time will decide the question of prevalence, if not of truth. Yet
we would fain believe that in this and in all things the old maxim
will hold good--_Magna est veritas et prævalebit_."
The sceptics of the last Victorian decade left school as agnostics;
of their number, the more reflective set themselves to fill the
vacuum. As a boy, with a prospect of life too long to measure,
has an equal distaste for the sentimentality of heaven and for
the melodrama of hell, he probably concerned himself little with
the condition that he could only attain eternal life by believing
in the divinity of Christ. Scepticism may have forced him to
doubt whether eternity was intelligible and to be certain that it
was undesirable; but his knowledge of history and his taste for
speculative enquiry suggested that eternity in another existence
might be less important than the conditions on which his present
existence was carried on: the ethics of Christianity were more
valuable, in his eyes, than its dogma.
It is here that the reconstruction commonly began, with the
question: "If there be no God, no eternal life, no reward for
virtue, nor punishment for evil, why should any one strive after
godliness? The policeman, indeed, watches for a breach of the
civil law, but only a fool would clothe the naked or feed the
hungry without thought of reward. Hitherto this was said to be
'right', 'charitable', 'kind'; but why _should_ any one be kind or
charitable?"
The answer of history was that every member of every community
gained in security and comfort by the comfort and security of the
community and that none was tolerable in which fear and injustice,
want and cruelty were permitted; in his own interest every man must
strive to eradicate them, for the other members were his daily
neighbours. Side by side with the teaching of the biologists, who
destroyed with their theory of evolution the belief in a special
creation, there came into the common stock of ideas the teaching
of the utilitarians, who offered a new criterion for private and
public conduct. While Christian dogma might be an obsolete shortcut
to an eternity which few desired and fewer still could contemplate,
Christian ethics remained the noblest and gentlest counsel to
perfection. At length reconstruction found itself back at the
injunction that a man should love his neighbour as himself.
Each with his own formula, the young agnostics of the last
generation worked by discussion, reading and reflection to a new
imperative; and those who found satisfaction in Christian ethics
as a guide to conduct found also that the Christianity which they
had fashioned for themselves was a militant faith. Injustice and
fear, suffering and cruelty are not to be eradicated by private
renunciations and protests; those who care enough for beauty to
wish the world beautiful have to make the world beautiful. And the
machine in which the form of the world is changed seemed in those
days to be politics.[4]
Vast as had been the progress of recorded history, vaster progress
remained to be accomplished if civilisation was not to be judged an
hypocrisy or a failure; and, though the saddest limitation of youth
be its utter misunderstanding of the obstacles in the way of any
change, its most glorious endowment is surely its impulsive desire
to realise its ideals. Impatient of muddle, intolerant of laziness,
sensitive to beauty and fiercely sympathetic with suffering, youth
glances with disgust at the meanness and squalor that desecrate
every part of its world and offers the generous ardour of a
world-builder to set it right. Childhood with its wooden blocks and
sand-castles, boyhood with its tools and engines, youth with its
instruments and diagrams are the constructive times of life: there
is little that lusty youth will not make, nothing that impatient
youth is afraid to reform; its heroes are the great conquerors
and builders who tidied some corner of a dilapidated world, the
explorers who sought new worlds to tidy, even the prophets and
lawyers who tried to bring uniformity into religion and society.
In a thousand hours of meditation or wrangling the boys of that
generation hammered out each his own formula of political change.
The ethics of private property and communism, of war and peace,
of equal democracy and paternal despotism, of the national ideal
and the ideal of internationalism were argued at school from the
standpoint which had been taken up at home and at home from a
standpoint which had been startlingly occupied at school. Whatever
had been the inherited preconceptions, every political doctrine
was now required to justify itself: the party which had enjoyed
almost unbroken tenure of office for nearly a fifth of a century
fell from power in 1905, to be succeeded by one which brought up
for settlement or readjustment all the old problems of domestic
controversy and many that were new.
IV
It is easy to guess the political path chosen by an Irish boy
brought up in England and sent to a tory stronghold by a father
who had reared him on the pure milk of late-Victorian radicalism;
it is not difficult to imagine what lions beset that path. The
way of the minority politician in a public school is hard but
stimulating: while the Boer war continued, any doubts of British
wisdom or justice in South Africa were ill-received and answered by
violence; for two years more, since free trade had been abandoned
by Mr. Chamberlain, a solitary free-trader would be beaten to
his knees by phrases about dying industries, dumping and unfair
competition; and, all the while, there was little chance of
agreement between those who would have solved the Irish difficulty
by holding Ireland under the sea for five minutes and any one who
was never able to forget the sailing of crowded emigrant ships from
Queenstown and the keening which rose to Heaven in acknowledgment
of British rule.
Only in the dignified atmosphere of the Debating Society, when a
general election had sent hundreds of radicals to Parliament and
proved that radicals existed, in hundreds of thousands, outside
it, did radical policy get a hearing. Political interest revived
sharply in 1905 and 1906: more than ever did the rising politicians
use their privilege of attending debates in the House of Commons.
It has been said that politics are made tolerable in England by
the fact that hardly any one takes them seriously except the
politicians, who are for the most part not English; but they are
dangerous food for the young in the expectations that they arouse
and in the disillusionment that they entail. After nearly twenty
years of tory rule, the liberals in 1905 were healed of their long
domestic dissensions and assured of a majority; the ministry so
judiciously chosen by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was overwhelming
in its varied strength; with the pacification of South Africa
and the repatriation of the indentured Chinese labourers, the
dark infamy of the Boer war and of a calamitous plunge into Rand
politics were to be forgotten; social reform was sketched with a
bold hand; a message of peace and good-will was sent to the other
powers.
So vast was the ministerial majority after the election of 1906
that a liberal prime minister, for the first time since 1880,
seemed able to fulfil his promises without having to balance the
claims of ill-assorted groups or to consider the vague menace of
the House of Lords; the ambitions of the Liberal League had been
defeated, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had survived the efforts
of his more spirited colleagues to kick him upstairs. In 1906,
for those who cared to see the world beautiful and would spend
their ardour to make it beautiful, there was still a sufficient
part of the population illiterate, hungry and diseased, rendered
miserable by fear and savage by injustice to keep the social
reformers employed; Ireland, Egypt and India all demanded a change
of administrative system. Those were days in which it seemed good
to be a liberal.
V
It would have been a meagre tribute to the spell of Westminster
if some of those who, in passing out of Abbey on that last Sunday
of Election Term, passed also out of their pupilage, did not look
forward from the threshold of manhood in a spirit of dedication; it
would have been an admission of dubious gratitude if, in bidding
farewell that afternoon under the trees of College Garden, they
had not confessed their debt to the school. In six years some few
of them had developed into fair scholars along lines of education
which had not then been so bitterly attacked as they have been
since: no one, indeed, aimed to make them proficient in preparing a
manifest and detecting an escape of sewer gas; in their curriculum
the financial possibilities of Spanish and Russian were ignored,
like all other adjuncts to a sound commercial training; and, though
the art of Asia and the letters of Ethiopia have since been urged
as an alternative to Greek and Latin, they stuck insularly to the
literature and history of the civilisation from which all the great
modern civilisations of Europe derive. Those who cared to work
contrived to cover a wide field even in that English literature
which is popularly thought to be excluded from public-school study;
for the rest, it should be recognised that a point is quickly
reached at which those who do not wish to work can no longer be
compelled. At the lowest computation, all had received at least a
grounding in the humanities and an equipment for profounder study
of subjects that by pressure of time could not be exhausted at
school.
In addition, they were for five or six years disciplined to a
system, yielding obedience as unquestioningly as afterwards they
exacted it.
"This we learned from famous men,
Knowing not its uses,
When they showed, in daily work,
Man must finish off his work--
Right or wrong, his daily work--
And without excuses....
This we learned from famous men
Teaching in our borders,
Who declared it was best,
Safest, easiest, and best--
Expeditious, wise and best--
To obey your orders.
Some beneath the further stars
Bear the greater burden:
Set to serve the lands they rule,
(Save he serve no man may rule),
Serve and love the lands they rule;
Seeking praise nor guerdon...."
They learned initiative and responsibility; they were trained to
subordinate the individual to the community; and they acquired
a code which at its worst was limited and foolish, at its best
exalted and honourable. If the panorama of a public school has
its ugly patches, so has the panorama of life; if the prejudices
were many, they were fewer than the prejudices encountered on
leaving school; if the honour was circumscribed, its boundaries
were reached perhaps less quickly than the boundaries of honour
in later life. The convention that there is at best an armed
neutrality between boy and master leads the boy to a diplomatic
economy of truth not always distinguishable from disingenuousness;
in his dealings with seniors, contemporaries and juniors he is
honest, truthful and substantially just. As he is taught to accept
undeserved punishment without complaining, so he learns to avow the
undetected misdeeds by which a fellow might suffer; never to fail
the team, the house, the school or a single friend, always to hide
emotion and to be in hard physical condition may be crude social
ethics, but they are neither unworthy nor fruitless in their effect
on public life. Twenty years ago it would have been unnecessary
to put forward these claims, but the querulous aftermath of the
war has involved the public schools in ill-defined suspicion; yet
the leader of a crusade would find no more ardent, generous and
upright spirits than in old British public-schoolboys of seventeen
to twenty-two; and, before the worldling discharges his gibes at
their honour and their code, he might stay to reflect whether the
administration of empire, as carried out in two hemispheres by the
sons of these long-suffering schools, must yield pride of place,
for integrity and devotion, to the public services of Germany
and France, Italy and Spain, America and Japan, whether, too, the
scandals and treacheries which have broken the monotony of English
public life in the last ten years are due to excess of these
derided qualities or to want of them.
If, on the last Sunday, many lacked the detachment to set out in
detail their debt to Westminster, all could acknowledge their love
and treasure their last moments. Next morning the Major Candidates
were imprisoned in a form-room leading to School and summoned
one by one to stand before a long table for the _viva voce_
examination. There followed the match between the King's Scholars
and the Town Boys. Next morning those who were leaving rose and for
the last time put on dress clothes and a gown for their last day at
Westminster.
After the breaking-up service in the Abbey, they assembled in
School for call-over. The results of Election and the removes were
read out, the prizes distributed, the prize epigrams recited by
their authors and rewarded with one of the silver pennies that
come to Westminster in the distribution of the Maundy. Armed with
a birch ("rod"), one of the School Monitors was despatched down
the gangway between the lower forms to find and escort to the
head master's dais a young offender who paid for his too frequent
presence in penal drill by being publicly flicked across the back
of the hand. Then the Captain and three School Monitors stood up
and in turn were handed the birch which they reversed and gave back
to the head master; as soon as they had been discharged of their
dignity and duties, the new School Monitors were handed the birch
in token of office. At the "_Oremus_" the new Captain knelt facing
the school and read the Latin prayers; with the "_Ire licet_" was
born a new generation of Old Westminsters.
In an interview with the Dean of Christ Church, those who had been
elected to the House were told the day on which they had to present
themselves in Oxford.