have found myself back as St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire,
and should have wandered once more in the dreamland of boyhood. Indeed,
during many months of convalescence, I lived in my imagination at
St. Paul’s, always alone with the place, suffering it to move itself
through me and present the most forgotten aspects, angles, and bits of
scenery with silent, friendly precision. Immense sadness everywhere;
immense power.
Now my connection with the school had been very short and quite
unsatisfactory. I was sent there as a very small boy, remained less
than three years, and then went home sick. I had, in fact, an acute
attack of pneumonia which carried away with it a nervous breakdown from
which I had been suffering; and it was several years before my health
became fully re-established. In consequence of this experience my views
about the school were thereafter quite gloomy. I regarded the place
as a religious forcing-house, a very dangerous sort of place for any
boy to go, especially if he were inclined by nature toward religion. I
habitually abused the school, and I even took the trouble to go back
there and have a quarrel with Dr. Coit about something he had said or
done which seemed to me to deserve the reprobation of all just men.
I poured over him a few vitriolic letters; and I still believe that
the right was on my side in the matter, though perhaps I was wrong to
assume the rôle of the Angel of Retribution.
It was at a date about twenty years after my leaving the school, and
at the age of forty-odd, and through the medium of another and very
severe illness, that my nature began to take up again the threads of
St. Paul’s School influence, and to receive the ideas which Dr. Coit
had been striving to convey, though in forms that would have been
incomprehensible to himself. The school had somehow been carrying on
its work within me through all these years.
Youth is a game of blindman’s buff, a romp and struggle in which we
hold on fiercely and shout loudly, but know less as to whom we are
holding or who is holding us than we shall ever know again. As we
grow older we get true glimpses of things far away; and recognize at
a distance what we could never understand so long as we were at close
quarters with it. Middle age draws some curtains down, but lifts
others; and of all the new visions that come when youth is past, there
is none more thrilling than that new vision of the familiar past
which shows us what unsuspected powers were at play within us. This
experience is necessary and useful to us; and only thus can we come to
understand the incredible subtlety of human influence.
Not long ago there was a St. Paul’s School dinner at which two hundred
and fifty men met to hear speeches in praise of their school and of
its influence. Among other proceedings there was a speech by one (not
an alumnus) who was a prospective headmaster of the school. Now this
speech was a religious appeal, and ended by a sort of burst of feeling,
only a word or two long, to the effect that the world was “God’s
World.” I cannot tell what it was that startled me in the reception of
the speech by the audience; but I think it was the unexpected sincerity
of the applause. It seemed as if all these men had been waiting all
their lives to hear this thing said, and now gave a great triumphant,
unconscious sigh and roar of relief to hear someone say it. I glanced
critically about the room. The diners looked like any other set of
diners. Why should they be so much moved by the mention of the works of
God?--For they were not applauding the school, they were applauding the
Creation. I looked and pondered, and presently I remembered that most
of the men at the dinner had lived under the personal influence of Dr.
Coit during their early and sensitive years. The fibres of their being
had been searched and softened by contact with a nature whose depth
made up for its every other deficiency.
“I myself,” I reflected, “am one of them. Perhaps my experience with
the place is more typical than I had supposed. Perhaps each of these
men was offered something at St. Paul’s School which he could not
receive at the time, and therefore rejected, but which in later life he
found again for himself in a new form, and thereafter accepted as part
of his intimate nature.”
Inasmuch as the whole nature of St. Paul’s School resulted from the
manner of its formation, we may begin by a glance at its early days.
The inception of the place was as unheralded as any event could well
be. Dr. Coit, being a man with a mission and a message, retired in
1856 to a farm in New Hampshire, and opened a school, having four
or five pupils to start with. He would neither appeal to the public
for funds nor advertise for scholars.[E] The school was, at first, a
mere extension of his family circle and of himself; and as it grew,
it remained a mere extension of himself. Persons became attached
to this family circle one by one; and, whether they were boys or
masters or servants, they thus, one by one, became members of a sort
of invisible and visible church, or brotherhood--a society of the
sanctuary. No opposing or critical influence could enter that circle.
It rejected criticism as the jet of a fountain rejects a dried leaf.
The whole system at St. Paul’s was really no system at all, but only
the unconscious working out of one man’s nature in the formation of a
school community. Perhaps the important part of any school is always no
more than that.
[E] The land and funds were, during the early years, supplied by Dr.
George C. Shattuck, of Boston, who had, I believe, long harbored
the idea of founding a school, and who gave his county house and
farm to the purpose.
Dr. Coit was a tall man in a long black coat; and, as he moved and
walked about the paths and corridors, he remained always within an
invisible tower of isolation, so that you could not be sure that his
feet rested on quite the same ground as your own. Half the time he
was in an abstraction, but this did not prevent him from seeing and
observing everything and everybody, especially the individualities
of boys, about whom he acquired a preternatural astuteness. He
lived within that solitude which a great purpose and constant prayer
sometimes cast about a man. There was a chasm between him and the rest
of mankind which could not be bridged by trivial intercourse. Neither
he nor the rest of mankind were at fault for the difference in tension
between them. He was so charged with moral passion that many people
could not receive the delivery of it.
I was never able to establish a relation with him, either as a boy of
thirteen or subsequently. His low, vibrant voice, and his hand laid
gently upon one’s shoulder caused such a strong physical, moral, and
galvanic appeal to my sensibilities that I invariably burst into tears.
I think I never got through an interview with him without weeping. The
appeal which his nature made was the appeal of enormous human feeling,
penned up in a narrow language, restricted by a narrow experience. This
temperamental isolation was, of course, intensified by his becoming
a school-master. How strongly the influence of such a man must have
affected the little family circle of the early school may be imagined.
He lived habitually in a state of such vivid religious feeling that
his face was ablaze with zeal; and he settled down to teach school in
a farmhouse, knowing all the while, seeing with his mind’s eye all the
while, the future of the enterprise. We can imagine the fervor of the
tiny community, and the awe in which it must have stood toward the
great man.
And yet all of his austerity, all of his closely confined, ebullient
vitality was no more than a love of men. Down to his last days Dr. Coit
never took his solitary drives about the countryside without stopping
to bestow upon his poorer neighbors small offerings of food from his
own table. It was done furtively and almost as an indulgence of those
warm personal feelings toward all humanity, of which his mission denied
him the expression. Behind his towering zeal there was a suffering,
benevolent, and humble person.
Dr. Coit had, as it were, no secular side to his human intercourse,
and the social side of St. Paul’s School was, in consequence, always a
little stiff and ecclesiastical. On the other hand, his romantic and
spontaneous feelings were permitted the outlet of secular literature,
both ancient and modern; and he inspired his school with a love of
letters. You were somehow made welcome to the joys of reading. The
old-fashioned family education and atmosphere of a gentleman’s home
qualified the boarding-school book-shelf. An interest in cultivation
often goes with high-pitched, ecclesiastical natures; witness the
outburst of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and
all that profound thought which makes that epoch in some ways outshine
the Renaissance. Not only did Dr. Coit enjoy romantic literature, but
he was himself like some character in mediæval romance--like Arthur, or
Merlin; and the power of his personality was so great that whenever I
am at St. Paul’s, I still feel as if the old Doctor were, somehow, not
far away. I should hardly be surprised to see him step out from behind
a clump of bushes on the margin of the stream, or to come across his
rapt figure, on the athletic field, standing as I have seen him stand
to watch the games, shading his eyes with his hand.
Dr. Coit was one of those saints who come into the world determined to
found something: they are predestinate founders. They make and occupy
the thing they found, repelling all the world beside, fleeing from
all the world except this; and they generally become tyrants within
the boundaries of their own creation. The tyrant founder-saint is a
well-known figure in the Middle Ages; St. Bernard is a typical example;
and Dr. Coit would have been more readily understood in any previous
age of the world than he was in his own. He was in himself a piece of
the Middle Ages, and to have known him is to have come in contact with
all the piety, the romanticism, the mystery, the beauty, the depth and
power of human emotion which flamed over Europe in Mediæval times,
and which have been temporarily forgotten. To-day these provinces of
human existence are abandoned to the art critic, to the moralist, and
to the sentimental writer--to the very classes of persons who are the
least likely to understand them. If we except the German philosophic
historian, I suppose that no person in the world is so cut off by
nature from an understanding of St. Francis or of Thomas Aquinas as is
the modern æsthetic person, who cultivates a sympathetic interest in
religion. The only hope of understanding the Middle Ages is through a
living personal belief in Christianity.
It is only for convenience that I refer to the Middle Ages in order to
explain Dr. Coit. His right to exist as a modern is incontestible: he
was as modern as anyone else. He merely belonged to a type which, for
the time being, has become rare. To us to-day, the tyrant founder-saint
of the Middle Ages appears like a person not wholly a Christian. Judged
by the standards of the New Testament, these men seem to be only half
converted, or three-quarters converted, to Christianity, the rest of
them remaining Tartar. The non-converted fraction of them makes them
autocrats who trust no one but themselves, men of unfaith who rely on
bolts and bars, on ordinances and arrangements.
At the worst, these enthusiasts are schemers, unscrupulous, crafty, and
cruel. At the best they are merely opinionated, arbitrary, and lonely
men. Their weakness is seen only in the fact that they have a slightly
blind side, a side on which walk the favorites and hypocrites who have
been formed in the shadow of their tyranny. The same parasites which
grow upon autocracy in the great world seem often to appear in the
miniature kingdom of a school.
That Christianity should have given rise to this peculiar kind of
tyrant has often thrown me into wonderment. It seems as if any
formulation of spiritual truth, uttered by a higher intelligence, were
apt to act as an astringent upon the lower intelligence. The bread of
life poisons many men. The formula means more than the neophyte is
able to understand; and this overplus of meaning stimulates him to
fierceness. The phenomenon may be observed on a small scale by anyone
who will contrast the teachings of Froebel with the methods often found
in kindergartens. Each mind in the world is capable of a different
degree of abstraction; and when a mind is stretched to its widest and
you give it still something more, you arouse passion. At any rate, the
fact remains that Christ’s gentlest words have, as he predicted, become
fire and sword in the world, and that through this fire and sword
truth spreads. Men like Dr. Coit, for all their fury and for all their
narrowness, leave peace in their wake, and bequeath to their followers
not only gentleness, but breadth of view. Their unselfishness--their
powerlessness to be other than they are--touches the heart of the
world. Christ has been in their dungeons all the while.
I do not know whether it was the result of Dr. Coit’s own prophetic
nature or the result of a more reasoned theory about the education
of boys; but the fact remains that at St. Paul’s School you were
encouraged to dream. You were permitted to wander alone in the woods.
You were left much to yourself; and the fact that you were a thoughtful
child, slow in development and perhaps backward in your studies was
allowed for. They understood the need of letting God attend the child,
and of not being too much worried about the outcome. There is a
divergence of feeling among modern school-masters as to how much boys
should be left to themselves. The freedom accorded to us at St. Paul’s
resulted, no doubt, from the original domestic, non-institutional
atmosphere of the place. A boy who is living at home in the country
always has a good deal of time to himself. The school was at first
a mere country home in which a clergyman conducted the education
of boys--appending it to his own family life; and the traditions of
boyhood-in-the-country survived as the school grew to more serious
proportions. The place itself, moreover, was an example of independence
and natural growth rather than of watched assistance. It was not the
child of riches, receiving all that money and thought could give even
from its birth onward; but was rather the child of hunger and thirst,
thriving upon neglect, and gaining in character and in vigor throughout
a youth of hardy loneliness.
To my mind the isolation of St. Paul’s is its strongest feature, its
rarest influence. The founding of institutions is done to-day by the
circulation of petitions, by the calling of friends into a circle and
the issuing of stock or advertisements. Hardly any other method is
deemed possible by practical men. The institutions thus founded are in
very close touch with their public. They rely upon their patrons, and
are controlled by their clients. They become the creatures of the age
they live in. But St. Paul’s School was not the creature of any age.
It was the child of one man who planted his house upon a hill. As it
has owed nothing to the age, so it has remained inaccessible to the
influences of the age. It is not in competition with other schools;
it is not affected by the fluctuating and journalistic currents of
contemporary thought; it has, one might say, no relation to the
superficial influences in America. The place seems not to be a part
of modern American life. We know, of course, that the school is in
reality a part of that life, and relies, as every school must, on the
community at large into which its roots extend. The apparent isolation
of St. Paul’s comes from the fact that it represents few influences.
These influences are everywhere prevalent, but they are not everywhere
visible. The school seems to live to itself; but in reality it draws
its life from those deep and invisible sources of religious feeling
which exist, but which do not come to the surface in contemporary life.
That there should be a spot in the United States having the atmosphere
of another world, that is the valuable and wonderful part of St. Paul’s
School. To plunge a boy even for the fraction of a year into this
pool is to give him a new outlook upon humanity. What is it that we
lack in America? Why, we lack variety. Our interests and pleasures,
our occupations in social, in commercial, in religious life are all
so stamped with the identical pattern--each of them is so like the
rest--our views and feelings are so narrow--that to put an American
youth to school in Central Asia for a year or two, under the Grand
Llama, would be apt to make a man of him. We need to give our boys an
insight into some species of life that belongs to the great world,
the historic world, the empire of the soul. We cannot snatch this
life from Europe without running the danger of that expatriation
which makes men shallow. We must find and create centres of it upon
our own shores--centres of social life devoted to unworldly aims. Not
only for our children, but for ourselves have we felt this need. New
well-springs in our heart and intelligence are unlocked by living for
some period of our lives in such a community; and the earlier in life
we can receive this experience the richer will it leave us.
A school is far more than the school community which gives it a name.
A school is the whole body of graduates, friends, and fosterers, whose
affections are attached to the place, whose memories go back to it,
whose character has been formed by it. These people, though they exist
dispersedly, have an influence in common. They belong to a club. They
are united by one of the strongest ties that can bind men together.
This club is as much a part of the school as the school itself. The
stream of boys flowing from the club to the school constitutes a sort
of river of time, a perpetual current of the ideas of the founder,
an immortality of influence. This stream must change, of course, but
it changes slowly--so great is the conservatism of boys at school,
and of old boys sending their sons to a school. I suppose that of
all human institutions a boys’ school is, by its nature, the most
traditional and old-fashioned. The boys regard themselves as the
school, and regard the masters as necessary figureheads; and in any
large school, where the mass and volume of young life rolls on without
much possible interference from above, there is a good deal of truth in
the conception.
When one hears other people talking about their pet school there is
a personal ring to the conversation which does not always please us.
The truth is that the foundation of a school is a matter of personal
magnetism, and that any school becomes a sort of clan or clique. It
is no accident that certain particular boys are sent to a certain
particular school. They go there as the needle swings to the pole. They
flow there as the ants flow to their native hill. The matter is settled
by personal affinity.
This is a fact about all leadership; only it receives very visible
proof in the case of school-masters. Every man’s followers are given
to him by destiny; and a leader of men may see himself in this
looking-glass if he have a mind to do so. It will give him a truer
picture of his own soul than he will find elsewhere in the world.
The followers of any man resemble each other, and, of course, they
also resemble their leader; though their resemblance to the leader is
not always apparent, but belongs rather to the category of spiritual
mysteries.
Dr. Coit himself was an ecclesiastic, rustling with dogma and vestment
and having ritual and anathema in his very being. And yet, as a matter
of fact, he did attract to himself persons who at first sight do not
seem to resemble him at all. The parents who sent their boys to the
school were, as a rule, a somewhat commonplace and very valuable sort
of people. They were good, straight-forward, God-fearing burghers, who
wished their sons to become honorable men, and were rather deficient
in business and social ambition for their children. These people,
quite often, did not like Dr. Coit, nor understand him; but they felt
that he would do for their sons what they wished done. They were warm
people: he was a hot person. Their quiet natures responded to his great
religious faith by an act of personal trust; and that was enough for
Dr. Coit, for he wanted the boys.
After the death of the first Doctor there followed a mitigation of
religious discipline at the school and a relaxation in the social
atmosphere. The quality of the place, however, remained the same.
The volume of life rolled with its old momentum. The characteristic
charm of the place remained unchanged. In the practical working of the
organization there ensued, I believe, great disturbances; but they did
not affect the spirit of the place so far as an alumnus could observe.
The same magic wave was over all as before. Indeed, for my own part, I
never could thoroughly enjoy St. Paul’s School while the old Doctor was
alive. His peace came to me only after he had departed; and whenever
I am at Concord it seems to roll through the fields and to overspread
the grounds like a mist. In returning to St. Paul’s, or in taking leave
of it, my imagination is always haunted by the idea of the place as it
must have been in its infancy--the farmhouse, the family group, and the
intense soul of the Doctor. When I think of that passionate fountain
of life, rising and bubbling in the remote New Hampshire wilderness,
in a solitude as complete as that of Abraham on the plains of Mamre, I
cannot but be moved. Here was faith indeed! A project all aim and no
means. If a strange quietude lies over the acres of St. Paul’s School
to-day, and steeps in a perpetual peace the little community which
this fiery soul left behind him, it is because in this place a man
once wrestled with invisible antagonists and saw ladders going up into
heaven, with the angels ascending and descending upon them. The school
is a monument to this vision--a heap of stones cast there, one by one,
by followers and by witnesses.
The fiftieth anniversary of the school brought together all its
adherents and fosterers and old boys, and peopled Concord for a day
with the race of gentle burghers that had followed the Doctor. It was
a touching assemblage; because here in these people was to be found
the peace of which he had all his life preached so much and felt so
little. He had attained it in others. He had left it as a dower and an
inheritance to the institution that he loved almost too passionately.
Out of the strong had come forth sweetness.
THE ÆSTHETIC.
There are two distinct functions of the mind with regard to art:
first, the creative function; second, the enjoying function. The first
is the rôle of the artist, the second, the rôle of the public. The
difference between these two rôles is that in the artist’s rôle the
active part--the part that counts, the part that makes the beholder
have sensations--is unconscious. The artist should be wholly creator,
and not at all spectator. If, while he works, there is anything in him
that applauds and enjoys as a spectator might do, this part will leave
a touch of virtuosity, of self-consciousness, of exaggeration, in his
work. If the matter be humorous, this exaggeration will perhaps appear
in the form of smartness; if the matter be serious, as sentimentality
or melodrama.
The artist must not try to enjoy his own work by foretaste, or he
will injure it. His æsthetic sense must not be active during the
hours of creation; it must be consumed in the furnace of unconscious
intellectual effort. The _reductio ad absurdum_ of the view here
suggested would be somewhat as follows:--The supremely great artist
would be indifferent to the fate of his own works, because he would
not know they were great. The whole creature would have become so
unconscious during the act of creation that there would be nothing left
over which should return to mankind and say, “See this great work!”
This seems to have happened in the case of Shakespeare.
It must be confessed that there are very great artists in whose work we
find a self-conscious, self-appreciatory note. There is, at times, such
a note in Dante, and in Goethe. And it seems to me that even here the
note a little deflects our attention from the matter in hand. Not by
reason of this element, but in spite of it, does their work prevail.