In the course of the summer it was my lot to attend the Speech-Day
festivities of a certain school--indeed, I attended at more than one
such gathering, vocatus atque non vocatus, as Horace says. They are not
the sort of entertainments I should choose for pleasure; one feels
too much like a sheep, driven from pen to pen, kindly and courteously
driven, but still driven. One is fed rather than eats. One meets a
number of charming and interesting people, and one has no time to
talk to them. But I am always glad to have gone, and one carries away
pleasant memories of kindness and courtesy, of youth and hope.
This particular occasion was so very typical that I am going to try and
gather up my impressions and ideas. It was an old school and a famous
school, though not one of the most famous. The buildings large and
effective, full of modern and up-to-date improvements, with a mellow
core of antiquity, in the shape of a venerable little courtyard in
the centre. There were green lawns and pleasant gardens and umbrageous
trees; and it was a beautiful day, too, sunny and fresh, so that one was
neither baked nor boiled. The first item was a luncheon, at which I
sate between two very pleasant strangers and exchanged cautious views
on education. We agreed that the value of the classics as a staple of
mental training was perhaps a little overrated, and that possibly too
much attention was nowadays given to athletics; but that after all the
public-school system was the backbone of the country, and taught boys
how to behave like gentlemen, and how to govern subject races. We
agreed that they were ideal training-grounds for character, and that our
public-schools were the envy of the civilised world. In such profound
and suggestive interchange of ideas the time sped rapidly away.
Then we were gathered into a big hall. It was pleasant to see proud
parents and charming sisters, wearing their best, clustered excitedly
round some sturdy and well-brushed young hero, the hope of the race;
pleasant to see frock-coated masters, beaming with professional
benevolence, elderly gentlemen smilingly recalling tales of youthful
prowess, which had grown quite epical in the lapse of time; it was
inspiriting to feel one of a big company of people, all bent on being
for once as good-humoured and cheerful as possible, and all inspired by
a vague desire to improve the occasion.
The prizes were given away to the accompaniment of a rolling thunder
of applause; we had familiar and ingenuous recitations from youthful
orators, who desired friends, Romans, and countrymen to lend them their
ears, or accepted the atrocious accusation of being a young man;
and then a Bishop, who had been a schoolmaster himself, delivered an
address. It was delightful to see and hear the good man expatiate. I did
not believe much in what he said, nor could I reasonably endorse many
of his statements; but he did it all so genially and naturally that one
felt almost ashamed to question the matter of his discourse. Yet I could
not help wondering why it is thought advisable always to say exactly the
same things on these occasions. The good man began by asserting that
the boys would never be so happy or so important again in their lives as
they were at school, and that all grown-up people were envying them. I
don't know whether any one believed that; I am sure the boys did not,
if I can judge by what my own feelings used to be on such occasions.
Personally I used to think my school a very decent sort of place, but I
looked forward with excitement and interest to the liberty and life of
the larger world; and though perhaps in a way we elders envied the boys
for having the chances before them that we had so many of us neglected
to seize, I don't suppose that with the parable of Vice Versa before us
we would really have changed places with them. Would any one ever return
willingly to discipline and barrack-life? [Yes--ed.] Would any one under
discipline refuse independence if it were offered him on easy terms? I
doubt it!
Then the Bishop went on to talk about educational things; and he said
with much emphasis that in spite of all that was said about modern
education, we most of us realised as we grew older that all culture was
really based upon the Greek and Latin classics. We all stamped on the
ground and cheered at that, I as lustily as the rest, though I am quite
sure it is not true. All that the Bishop really meant was that such
culture as he himself possessed had been based on the classics. Now the
Bishop is a robust, genial, and sensible man, but he is not a strictly
cultured man. He is only sketchily varnished with culture. He thinks
that German literature is nebulous, and French literature immoral.
I don't suppose he ever reads an English book, except perhaps an
ecclesiastical biography; he would say that he had no time to read a
novel; probably he glances at the Christian Year on Sundays, and peruses
a Waverley novel if he is kept in bed by a cold. Yet he considers
himself, and would be generally considered, a well-educated man. I
believe myself that the reason why we as a nation love good literature
so little is because we are starved at an impressionable age on a diet
of classics; and to persist in regarding the classics as the high-water
mark of the human intellect seems to me to argue a melancholy want
of faith in the progress of the race. However, for the moment we all
believed ourselves to be men of a high culture, soundly based on the
corner-stone of Latin and Greek. Then the Bishop went on to speak of
athletics with a solemn earnestness, and he said, with deep conviction,
that experience had taught him that whatever was worth doing was worth
doing well. He did not argue the point as to whether all games were
worth playing, or whether by filling up all the spare time of boys
with them, by crowning successful athletes with glory and worship, by
engaging masters who will talk with profound seriousness about bowling
and batting, rowing and football, one might not be developing a
perfectly false sense of proportion. He told the boys to play games
with all their might, and he left on their minds the impression that
athletics were certainly things to be ranked among the Christian
graces. Of course he sincerely believed in them himself. He would have
maintained that they developed manliness and vigour, and discouraged
loafing and uncleanness. I am not at all sure myself that games as at
present organised do minister directly to virtue. The popularity of the
athlete is a dangerous thing if he is not virtuously inclined; while
the excessive organisation of games discourages individuality, and
emphasises a very false standard of success in the minds of many boys.
But the Bishop was not invited that he might say unconventional things.
He was asked on purpose to bless things as they were, and he blessed
them with all his might.
Then he went on to say that the real point after all was character and
conduct; that intellect was a gift of God, and that conspicuous athletic
capacity was a gift--he did not like to say of God, so he said of
Providence; but that in one respect we were all equal, and that was in
our capacity for moral effort; and that the boy who came to the front
was not always the distinguished scholar or the famous athlete, but the
industrious, trustworthy, kindly, generous, public-spirited boy. This he
said with deep emotion, as though it were rather a daring and unexpected
statement, but discerned by a vigilant candour; and all this with the
air that he was testifying faithfully to the true values of life, and
sweeping aside with a courageous hand the false glow and glamour of
the world. We did not like to applaud at this, but we made a subdued
drumming with our heels, and uttered a sort of murmurous assent to a
noble and far from obvious proposition.
But here again I felt that the thing was somehow not quite as
high-minded as it seemed. The goal designated was, after all, the goal
of success. It was not suggested that the unrewarded and self-denying
life was perhaps the noblest. The point was to come to the front
somehow, and it was only indicating a sort of waiting game for the boys
who were conscious neither of intellectual nor athletic capacity. It was
a sort of false socialism, this pretence of moral equality, a kind of
consolation prize that was thus emphasised. And I felt that here again
the assumption was an untrue one. That is the worst of life, if one
examines it closely, that it is by no means wholly run on moral lines.
It is strength that is rewarded, rather than good desires. The Bishop
seemed to have forgotten the ancient maxim that prosperity is the
blessing of the Old Testament, and affliction the blessing of the
New. These qualities that were going to produce ultimate
success--conscientiousness, generosity, modesty, public spirit--they
are, after all, as much gifts as any other gifts of intellect and bodily
skill. How often has one seen boys who are immodest, idle, frivolous,
mean-spirited, and ungenerous attain to the opposite virtues? Not often,
I confess. Who does not know of abundant instances of boys who have
been selfish, worthless, grasping, unprincipled, who have yet achieved
success intellectually and athletically, and have also done well for
themselves, amassed money, and obtained positions for themselves in
after life. Looking back on my own school days, I cannot honestly say
that the prizes of life have fallen to the pure-minded, affectionate,
high-principled boys. The boys I remember who have achieved conspicuous
success in the world have been hard-hearted, prudent, honourable
characters with a certain superficial bonhomie, who by a natural
instinct did the things that paid. Stripped of its rhetoric, the
Bishop's address resolved itself into a panegyric of success, and
the morality of it was that if you could not achieve intellectual
and athletic prominence, you might get a certain degree of credit by
unostentatious virtue. What I felt was that somehow the goal proposed
was--dare I hint it?--a vulgar one; that it was a glorification of
prudence and good-humoured self-interest; and yet if the Bishop had
preached the gospel of disinterestedness and quiet faithfulness and
devotion, he would have had few enthusiastic hearers. If he had said
that an awkward and surly manner, no matter what virtues it concealed,
was the greatest bar to ultimate mundane success, it would have been
quite true, though perhaps not particularly edifying. But what I desired
was not startling paradox or cynical comment, but something more really
manly, more just, more unconventional, more ardent, more disinterested.
The boys were not exhorted to care for beautiful things for the sake of
their beauty; but to care for attractive things for the sake of their
acceptability.
And yet in a way it did us all good to listen to the great man. He was
so big and kindly and fatherly and ingenuous; he had made virtue pay; I
do not suppose he had ever had a low or an impure or a spiteful thought;
but his path had been easy from the first; he was a scholar and an
athlete, and he had never pursued success, for the simple reason that it
had fallen from heaven like manna round about his dwelling, with perhaps
a few dozen quails as well! Boys, parents, masters, young and old alike,
were assembled that day to worship success, and the Bishop prophesied
good concerning them. It entered no one's head that success, in its
simplest analysis, means thrusting some one else aside from a place
which he desires to fill. But why on such a day should one think of the
feelings of others? we were all bent on virtuously gratifying our own
desires. The boys who were left out were the weak and the timid, the
ailing and the erring, the awkward and the unpopular, the clumsy and the
stupid; they were not bidden to take courage, they were rather bidden
to envy the unattainable, and to submit with such grace as they could
muster. But we pushed all such vague and unsatisfactory thoughts in the
background; we sounded the clarion and filled the fife, and were at case
in Zion, while we worshipped the great, brave, glittering world.
What I desired was that, in the height of our jubilant self-gratulation,
some sweet and gracious figure, full of heavenly wisdom, could have
twitched the gaudy curtain aside for a moment and shown us other things
than these; who could have assured us that we all, however stupid and
dreary and awkward and indolent, however vexed with low dreams and ugly
temptations, yet had our share and place in the rich inheritance of
life; and that even if it was to be all a record of dull failure,
commonplace sinfulness cheered by no joyful triumph, no friendly
smile--yet if we fought the fault and did the dull task faithfully,
and desired to be but a little better, a little stronger, a little more
unselfish, that the pilgrimage with all its sandy tracts and terrifying
spectres would not be traversed in vain; and then I think we might have
been brought together with a sense of sweeter and truer unity, and might
have thought of life as a thing to be shared, and joy as a thing to be
lavished, and not have rather conceived of the world as a place full
of fine things, of which we were all to gather sedulously as many as we
could grasp and retain.
Or even if the good Bishop had taken a simpler line and told the boys
some old story, like the story of Polycrates of Samos, I should have
been more comfortable. Polycrates was the tyrant with whom everything
went well that he set his hand to, so that to avoid the punishment of
undue prosperity he threw his great signet-ring into the sea; but when
he was served a day or two later with a slice of fish at his banquet,
there was the ring sticking in its ribs. The Bishop might have said that
this should teach us not to try and seize all the good things we could,
and that the reason of it was not, as the old Greeks thought, that the
gods envied the prosperity of mortals, but that our prosperity was often
dashed very wisely and tenderly from our lips, because one of the worst
foes that a man can have, one of the most blinding and bewildering of
faults, is the sense of self-sufficiency and security. That would not
have spoilt the pleasure of those brisk boys, but would have given them
something wholesome to take away and think about, like the prophet's
roll that was sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly.
It may be thought that I have thus dilated on the Bishop's address for
the sole purpose of showing what a much better address I could have
made. That is not the case at all. I could not have done the thing at
all to start with, and, given both the nerve and the presence and the
practice of the man, I could not have done it a quarter as well, because
he was in tune with his audience and I should not have been. That was
to me part of the tragedy. The Bishop's voice fell heavily and steadily,
like a stream of water from a great iron pipe that fills a reservoir.
The audience, too, were all in the most elementary mood. Boys of course
frankly desire success without any disguise. And parents less frankly
but no less hungrily, in an almost tigerish way, desire it for their
children. The intensity of belief felt by a parent in a stupid or even
vicious boy would be one of the most pathetic things I know, if it were
not also one of the primal forces of the world.
And thus the tide being high the Bishop went into harbour at the top of
the flood. I don't even complain of the nature of the address; it was
frankly worldly, such as might have been given by a Sadducee in the
time of Christ. But the interesting thing about it was that most of
the people present believed it to be an ethical and even a religious
address. It was the ethic of a professional bowler and the religion of
a banker. If a boy had been for all intents and purposes a professional
bowler to the age of twenty-three, and a professional banker afterwards,
he would almost exactly have fulfilled the Bishop's ideal. I do not
think it is a bad ideal either. I only say that it is not an exalted
ideal, and it is not a Christian ideal. It is the world in disguise,
the wolf in sheep's clothing over again. We were taken in. We said to
ourselves, "This is an animal certainly clothed as a sheep--and we must
remember the old proverb and be careful." But as the Bishop's address
proceeded, and the fragrant oil fell down to the skirts of our clothing,
we said, "There is certainly a sheep inside."
Then a choir of strong, rough, boyish voices sang an old glee or
two--"Glorious Apollo" and "Hail smiling Morn," and a school song about
the old place that made some of us bite our lips and furtively brush
away an unexpected and inexplicable moisture from our eyes, at the
thought of the fine fellows we had ourselves sat side by side with
thirty and forty years ago, now scattered to all ends of the earth, and
some of them gone from the here to the everywhere, as the poet says. And
then we adjourned to see the School Corps inspected--such solemn little
soldiers, marching past in their serviceable uniforms, the line rising
and falling with the inequalities of the ground, and bowing out a good
deal in the centre, at the very moment that the good-natured old Colonel
was careful to look the other way. Then there was a leisurely game
of cricket, with a lot of very old boys playing with really amazing
agility; and then I fell in with an old acquaintance, and we strolled
about together, and got a friendly master to show us over the
schoolrooms and one of the houses, and admired the excellent
arrangements, and peeped into some studies crowded with pleasant
boyish litter, and talked to some of the boys with an attempt at light
juvenility, and enjoyed ourselves in a thoroughly absurd and leisurely
fashion. And then I was left alone, and walking about, abandoned myself
to sentiment pure and simple; it was hard to analyse that feeling which
was stirred by the sight of all those fresh-faced boys, flowing like
a stream through the old buildings, and just leaving their own little
mark, for good or evil, on the place--a painted name on an Honours
board, initials cut in desk or panel, a memory or two, how soon to
grow dim in the minds of the new generation, who would be so full of
themselves and of the present, turning the sweet-scented manuscript of
youth with such eager fingers, that they could give but little thought
to the future and none at all to the past. And then one remembered,
with a curious sense of wistful pain, how rapidly the cards of life were
being dealt out to one, and how long it was since one had played the
card of youth so heedlessly and joyfully away; that at least could not
return. And then there came the thought of all the hope and love that
centred upon these children, and all the possibilities which lay before
them. And I began to think of my own contemporaries and of how little
on the whole they had done; it was not fair perhaps to say that most
of them had made a mess of their lives, because they were honest,
honourable citizens many of them. It was not the poor thing called
success that I was thinking of, but a sort of high-hearted and generous
dealing with life, making the most of one's faculties and qualities,
diffusing a glow of love and enthusiasm and brave zest about one--how
few of us had done that! We had grown indolent and money-loving and
commonplace. Some of those we looked to to redeem and glorify the world
had failed most miserably, through unchecked faults of temperament. Some
had declined with a sort of unambitious comfort, some had fallen
into the trough of Toryism, and spent their time in holding fast to
conventional and established things; one or two had flown like Icarus so
near the sun that their waxen wings had failed them; and yet some of us
had missed greatness by so little. Was it to be always so? Was it always
to be a battle against hopeless odds? Was defeat, earlier or later,
inevitable? The tamest defeat of all was to lapse smoothly into easy
conventional ways, to adopt the standards of the world, and rake
together contentedly and seriously the straws and dirt of the street.
If that was to be the destiny of most, why were we haunted in youth with
the sight of that cloudy, gleaming crown within our reach, that sense
of romance, that phantom of nobleness? What was the significance of the
aspirations that made the heart beat high on fresh sunlit mornings,
the dim and beautiful hopes that came beckoning as we looked from our
windows in a sunset hour, with the sky flushing red behind the old
towers, the sense of illimitable power, of stainless honour, that came
so bravely, when the organ bore the voices aloft in the lighted chapel
at evensong? Was all that not a real inspiration at all, but a mere
accident of boyish vigour? No, it was not a delusion--that was life as
it was meant to be lived, and the best victory was to keep that hope
alive in the heart amid a hundred failures, a thousand cares.
As I walked thus full of fancies, the boys singly or in groups kept
passing me, smiling, full of delighted excitement and chatter, all
intent on themselves and their companions. I heard scraps of their
talk, inconsequent names, accompanied with downright praise or blame,
unintelligible exploits, happy nonsense. How odd it is to note that when
we Anglo-Saxons are at our happiest and most cheerful, we expend so much
of our steam in frank derision of each other! Yet though I can hardly
remember a single conversation of my school days, the thought of
my friendships and alliances is all gilt with a sense of delightful
eagerness. Now that I am a writer of books, it matters even more how I
say a thing than what I say. But then it was the other way. It was what
we felt that mattered, and talk was but the sparkling outflow of trivial
thought. What heroes we made of sturdy, unemphatic boys, how we repeated
each other's jokes, what merciless critics we were of each other, how
little allowance we made for weakness or oddity, how easily we condoned
all faults in one who was good-humoured and strong! How the little web
of intrigue and gossip, of likes and dislikes, wove and unwove
itself! What hopeless Tories we were! How we stood upon our rights and
privileges! I have few illusions as to the innocence or the justice
or the generosity of boyhood; what boys really admire are grace and
effectiveness and readiness. And yet, looking back, one has parted
with something, a sort of zest and intensity that one would fain
have retained. I felt that I would have given much to be able to have
communicated a few of the hard lessons of experience that I have learnt
by my errors and mistakes, to these jolly youngsters; but there again
comes in the pathos of boyhood, that one can make no one a present of
experience, and that virtue cannot be communicated, or it ceases to be
virtue. They were bound, all those ingenuous creatures, to make their
own blunders, and one could not save them a single one, for all one's
hankering to help. That is of course the secret, that we are here for
the sake of experience, and not for the sake of easy happiness. Yet one
would keep the hearts of these boys pure and untarnished and strong, if
one could, though even as one walked among them one could see faces on
which temptation and sin had already written itself in legible signs.
The cricket drew to an end; the shadows began to lengthen on the turf.
The mimic warriors were disbanded. The tea-tables made their appearance
under the elms, where one was welcomed and waited upon by cheerful
matrons and neat maidservants, and delightfully zealous and inefficient
boys. One had but to express a preference to have half-a-dozen
plates pressed upon one by smiling Ganymedes. If schools cannot alter
character, they certainly can communicate to our cheerful English boys
the most delightful manners in the world, so unembarrassed,
courteous, easy, graceful, without the least touch of exaggeration or
self-consciousness. I suppose one has insular prejudices, for we are
certainly not looked upon as models of courtesy or consideration by our
Continental neighbours. I suppose we reserve our best for ourselves.
I expressed a wish to look at some of the new buildings, and a young
gentleman of prepossessing exterior became my unaffected cicerone. He
was not one who dealt in adjectives; his highest epithet of praise was
"pretty decent," but one detected an honest and unquestioning pride in
the place for all that.
Perhaps the best point of all about these schools of ours, is that the
aspect of the place and the tone of the dwellers in it does not vary
appreciably on days of festival and on working days. The beauty of it is
a little focused and smartened, but that is all. There is no covering up
of deficiencies or hiding desolation out of sight. If one goes down to
a public-school on an ordinary day, one finds the same brave life, the
same unembarrassed courtesy prevailing. There is no sense of being taken
by surprise; the life is all open to inspection on any day and at any
hour. We do not reserve ourselves for occasions in England. The meat
cuts wholesomely and pleasantly wherever it is sampled.
The disadvantage of this is that we are misjudged by foreigners because
we are seen, not at our best, but as we are. We do not feel the need of
recommending ourselves to the favourable consideration of others;
not that that is a virtue, it is rather the shadow of complacency and
patriotism.
But at last a feeling begins to arise in the minds both of hosts
and guests that the play is played out for the day, that the little
festivity is over. On the part of our hosts that feeling manifests
itself in a tendency to press departing guests to stay a little longer.
An old acquaintance of mine, a shy man, once gave a large garden-party
and had a band to play. He did his best for a time and times and
half-a-time; but at last he began to feel that the strain was becoming
intolerable. With desperate ingenuity he sought out the band-master,
told him to leave out the rest of the programme, and play "God Save the
King,"--the result being a furious exodus of his guests. Today no such
device is needed. We melt away, leaving our kind entertainers to the
pleasant weariness that comes of sustained geniality, and to the sense
that three hundred and sixty-four days have to elapse before the next
similar festival.
And, for myself, I carry away with me a gracious memory of a day
thrilled by a variety of conflicting and profound emotions; and if I
feel that perhaps life would be both easier and simpler, if we could
throw off a little more of our conventional panoply of thought, could
face our problems with a little more candour and directness, yet I
have had a glimpse of a community living an eager, full, vigorous life,
guarded by sufficient discipline to keep the members of it wholesomely
and honourably obedient, and yet conceding as much personal liberty of
thought and action as the general interest of the body can admit. I have
seen a place full of high possibilities and hopes, bestowing a treasure
of bright memories of work, of play, of friendship, upon the majority of
its members, and upholding a Spartan ideal of personal subordination to
the common weal, an ideal not enforced by law so much as sustained by
honour, an institution which, if it does not encourage originality, is
yet a sound reflection of national tendencies, and one in which the
men who work it devote themselves unaffectedly and ungrudgingly to
the interests of the place, without sentiment perhaps, but without
ostentation or priggishness. A place indeed to which one would wish
perhaps to add a certain intellectual stimulus, a mental liberty, yet
from which there is little that one would desire to take away. For if
one would like to see our schools strengthened, amplified and expanded,
yet one would wish the process to continue on the existing lines, and
not on a different method. So, in our zeal for cultivating the further
hope, let us who would fain see a purer standard of morals, a more
vigorous intellectual life prevail in our schools, not overlook the
marvellous progress that is daily and hourly being made, and keep the
taint of fretful ingratitude out of our designs; and meanwhile let
us, in the spirit of the old Psalm, wish Jerusalem prosperity "for our
brethren and companions' sakes."