BOYHOOD

§ 1

I was a Harbury boy as my father and grandfather were before me and as

you are presently to be. I went to Harbury at the age of fourteen. Until

then I was educated at home, first by a governess and then by my

father's curate, Mr. Siddons, who went from us to St. Philip's in

Hampstead, and, succeeding marvellously there, is now Bishop of

Exminster. My father became rector of Burnmore when I was nine; my

mother had been dead four years, and my second cousin, Jane Stratton,

was already his housekeeper. My father held the living until his

resignation when I was nearly thirty. So that all the most

impressionable years of my life centre upon the Burnmore rectory and the

easy spaciousness of Burnmore Park. My boyhood and adolescence

alternated between the ivied red-brick and ancient traditions of Harbury

(and afterwards Christ-church) and that still untroubled countryside.

I was never a town dweller until I married and we took our present house

in Holland Park. I went into London at last as one goes into an arena.

It cramps me and wearies me and at times nearly overwhelms me, but

there it is that the life of men centres and my work lies. But every

summer we do as we have done this year and go to some house in the

country, near to forests or moorland or suchlike open and uncultivated

country, where one may have the refreshment of freedom among natural and

unhurried things. This year we are in a walled garden upon the Seine,

about four miles above Château Galliard, and with the forest reaching up

to the paddock beyond the orchard close....

You will understand better when I have told you my story why I saw

Burnmore for the last time when I was one-and-twenty and why my memories

of it shine so crystalline clear. I have a thousand vivid miniatures of

it in my mind and all of them are beautiful to me, so that I could quite

easily write a whole book of landscapes from the Park alone. I can still

recall quite vividly the warm beauty-soaked sensation of going out into

the morning sunshine of the Park, with my lunch in a little green Swiss

tin under my arm and the vast interminable day all before me, the

gigantic, divinely unconditional day that only boyhood knows, and the

Park so great and various that it was more than two hours' going for me

to reach its eastern fences. I was only a little older then than you are

now. Sometimes I went right up through the woods to the house to

companion with Philip and Guy Christian and their sister--I loved her

then, and one day I was to love her with all my heart--but in those

boyish times I liked most to go alone.

My memories of the Park are all under blue sky and sunshine, with just a

thunderstorm or so; on wet days and cold days I was kept to closer

limits; and it seems to me now rather an intellectual conviction than a

positive memory that save for a few pine-clad patches in the extreme

south-east, its soil was all thick clay. That meant for me only

beautiful green marshes, a number of vividly interesting meres upon the

course of its stream, and a wealth of gigantic oaks. The meres lay at

various levels, and the hand of Lady Ladislaw had assisted nature in

their enrichment with lilies and water plants. There were places of

sedge and scented rush, amidst which were sapphire mists of

forget-me-not for long stretches, skirmishing commandoes of yellow iris

and wide wastes of floating water-lilies. The gardens passed insensibly

into the Park, and beyond the house were broad stretches of grass,

sun-lit, barred with the deep-green shadows of great trees, and animated

with groups and lines of fallow deer. Near the house was an Italianate

garden, with balustradings and statuary, and a great wealth of roses and

flowering shrubs.

Then there were bracken wildernesses in which the does lurked with the

young fawns, and a hollow, shallow and wide, with the turf greatly

attacked by rabbits, and exceptionally threadbare, where a stricken oak,

lightning-stripped, spread out its ghastly arms above contorted rotting

branches and the mysterious skeletons of I should think five several

deer. In the evening-time the woods behind this place of bones--they

were woods of straight-growing, rather crowded trees and standing as it

were a little aloof--became even under the warmest sunset grey and

cold--and as if they waited....

And in the distant corner where the sand was, rose suddenly a steep

little hill, surmounted by a wild and splendid group of pines, through

which one looked across a vale of cornfields at an ancient town that

became strange and magical as the sun went down, so that I was held

gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy

spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the

distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and

luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow

streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is what it

must have been.

There are persons to be found mixed up in those childish memories,--Lady

Ladislaw, tall and gracious, in dresses of floating blue or grey, or

thin, subtly folding, flowering stuffs, Philip and his sister, Guy, the

old butler, a multitude of fainter figures long become nameless and

featureless; they are far less vivid in my memory than the fine

solitudes of the Park itself--and the dreams I had there.

I wonder if you dream as I dreamt. I wonder whether indeed I dreamt as

now I think I did. Have I, in these latter years, given form and

substance and a name to things as vague in themselves as the urgencies

of instinct? Did I really go into those woods and waving green places as

one keeps a tryst, expectant of a fellowship more free and delicate and

delightful than any I knew. Did I know in those days of nymphs and

dryads and fauns and all those happy soulless beings with which the

desire of man's heart has animated the wilderness. Once certainly I

crawled slowly through the tall bracken and at last lay still for an

interminable while, convinced that so I should see those shadows

populous with fairies, with green little people. How patiently I lay!

But the stems creaked and stirred, and my heart would keep on beating

like a drum in my throat.

It is incredible that once a furry whispering half-human creature with

bright brown eyes came and for a time played with me near where the tall

ferns foam in a broad torrent from between the big chestnuts down to the

upper mere. That must have been real dreaming, and yet now, with all my

sanities and scepticisms, I could half believe it real.

§ 2

You become reserved. Perhaps not exceptionally so, but as all children

become reserved. Already you understand that your heart is very

preciously your own. You keep it from me and everyone, so much so, so

justifiably so, that when by virtue of our kindred and all that we have

in common I get sudden glimpses right into your depths, there mixes with

the swift spasm of love I feel, a dread--lest you should catch me, as it

were, spying into you and that one of us, I know not which, should feel

ashamed.

Every child passes into this secret stage; it closes in from its first

frankness; it carries off the growing jewel of its consciousness to hide

from all mankind.... I think I can see why this should be so, but I

cannot tell why in so many cases no jewel is given back again at last,

alight, ripened, wonderful, glowing with the deep fires of experience. I

think that is what ought to happen; it is what does happen now with true

poets and true artists. Someday I think it will be the life of all

normal human souls. But usually it does not seem to happen at all.

Children pass out of a stage--open, beautiful, exquisitely simple--into

silences and discretions beneath an imposed and artificial life. And

they are lost. Out of the finished, careful, watchful, restrained and

limited man or woman, no child emerges again....

I remember very distinctly how I myself came by imperceptible increments

of reservation to withdraw those early delicacies of judgments, those

original and personal standards and appreciations, from sight and

expression. I can recall specific moments when I perceive now that my

little childish figure stood, as it were, obstinately and with a sense

of novelty in a doorway denying the self within.

It was partly, I think, a simple instinct that drew that curtain of

silences and concealments, it was much more a realization that I had no

power of lucidity to save the words and deeds I sought to make

expressive from complete misunderstanding. But most of all it was the

perception that I was under training and compulsion for ends that were

all askew and irrelevant to the trend of my imaginations, the quality of

my dreams. There was around me something unfriendly to this inner

world--something very ready to pass from unfriendliness to acute

hostility; and if, indeed, I succeeded in giving anything of my inner

self to others, it was only, as people put it, to give myself away.

My nurses, my governess, my tutor, my father, the servants about me,

seemed all bent upon imposing an artificial personality upon me. Only in

a very limited sense did they want me. What they wanted was something

that could be made out of me by extensive suppressions and additions.

They ignored the fact that I had been born with a shape of my own; they

were resolved I should be pressed into a mould and cast.

It was not that they wanted outer conformity to certain needs and

standards--that, I think, would be a reasonable thing enough to

demand--but they wanted me to subdue my most private thoughts to their

ideals. My nurses and my governesses would rate me for my very feelings,

would clamor for gratitude and reproach me bitterly for betraying that I

did not at some particular moment--love.

(Only yesterday I heard Mademoiselle Potin doing that very same thing to

you. "It is that you do not care, Master Steve. It is that you do not

care. You do not want to care.")

They went too far in that invasion of my personal life, but I perceive

quite clearly the present need for most of the process of moulding and

subjugation that children must undergo. Human society is a new thing

upon the earth, an invention of the last ten thousand years. Man is a

creature as yet not freely and instinctively gregarious; in his more

primordial state he must have been an animal of very small groups and

limited associations, an animal rather self-centred and fierce, and he

is still but imperfectly adapted either morally or physically to the

wider social life his crowding interactions force upon him. He still

learns speech and computation and civility and all the devices of this

artificially extended and continually broadening tribal life with an

extreme reluctance. He has to be shaped in the interests of the species,

I admit, to the newer conditions; the growing social order must be

protected from the keen edge of his still savage individuality, and he

must be trained in his own interests to save himself from the

destruction of impossible revolts. But how clumsily is the thing done!

How we are caught and jammed and pressed and crippled into citizenship!

How excessive and crushing is the suppression, and how inadequate!

Every child feels that, even if every child does not clearly know it.

Every child presently begins to hide itself from the confused tyrannies

of the social process, from the searching inspections and injunctions

and interferences of parent and priest and teacher.

"I have got to be _so_," we all say deep down in ourselves and more or

less distinctly according to the lucidities of our minds; "but in my

heart I am _this_."

And in the outcome we all try to seem at least to be _so_, while an

ineffectual rebel struggles passionately, like a beast caught in a trap,

for ends altogether more deep and dangerous, for the rose and the star

and the wildfire,--for beauty and beautiful things. These, we all know

in our darkly vital recesses, are the real needs of life, the obediences

imposed upon us by our crude necessities and jostling proximities, mere

incidentals on our way to those profounder purposes....

And when I write thus of our selves I mean our bodies quite as much as

our imaginations; the two sides of us are covered up alike and put alike

into disguises and unnatural shapes, we are taught and forced to hide

them for the same reasons, from a fear of ourselves and a fear of the

people about us. The sense of beauty, the sense of one's body, the

freedom of thought and of desire and the wonder of life, are all

interwoven strands. I remember that in the Park of Burnmore one great

craving I had was to take off my clothes there altogether, and bathe in

a clear place among loosestrife and meadowsweet, and afterwards lie wet

and naked upon the soft green turf with the sun shining upon me. But I

thought also that that was a very wicked and shameful craving to have,

and I never dared give way to it.

§ 3

As I think of myself and all these glowing secrecies and hidden fancies

within, walking along beside old Siddons, and half listening to his

instructive discourse, I see myself as though I was an image of all

humanity under tuition for the social life.

I write "old Siddons," for so he seemed to me then. In truth he was

scarcely a dozen years older than I, and the other day when I exchanged

salutations with his gaitered presence in the Haymarket, on his way I

suppose to the Athenæum, it struck me that he it is who is now the

younger man. But at Burnmore he was eighteen inches or more above my

head and all the way of school and university beyond me; full of the

world they had fitted him for and eager to impart its doctrines. He went

along in his tweeds that were studiously untidy, a Norfolk jacket of one

clerically-greyish stuff and trousers of another somewhat lighter

pattern, in thick boots, the collar of his calling, and a broad-minded

hat, bearing his face heavenward as he talked, and not so much aware of

me as appreciating the things he was saying. And sometimes he was

manifestly talking to himself and airing his outlook. He carried a

walking-stick, a manly, homely, knobby, donnish walking-stick.

He forced the pace a little, for his legs were long and he had acquired

the habit of strenuous pedestrianism at Oxford with all the other

things; he obliged me to go at a kind of skipping trot, and he preferred

the high roads towards Wickenham for our walks, because they were

flatter and there was little traffic upon them in those days before the

motor car, and we could keep abreast and go on talking uninterruptedly.

That is to say, he could.

What talk it was!

Of all the virtues that the young should have. He spoke of courage and

how splendid it was to accustom oneself not even to feel fear; of truth,

and difficult cases when one might conceivably injure others by telling

the truth and so perhaps, perhaps qualify the rigor of one's integrity,

but how one should never hesitate to injure one's own self in that

matter. Then in another phase he talked of belief--and the

disagreeableness of dissenters. But here, I remember, there was a

discussion. I have forgotten how I put the thing, but in some boyish

phrasing or other I must have thrown out the idea that thought is free

and beliefs uncontrollable. What of conformity, if the truth was that

you doubted? "Not if you make an effort," I remember him saying, "not if

you make an effort. I have had my struggles. But if you say firmly to

yourself, the Church teaches this. If you dismiss mere carping and say

that."

"But suppose you can't," I must have urged.

"You can if you will," he said with a note near enthusiasm. "I have been

through all that. I did it. I dismissed doubts. I wouldn't listen. I

felt, _This won't do. All this leads nowhere._"

And he it was told me the classic story of that presumptuous schoolboy

who went to his Head Master and declared himself an atheist. There were

no dialectics but a prompt horse-whipping. "In after life," said Mr.

Siddons, with unctuous gratification, "he came to recognize that

thrashing as the very best thing that had ever happened to him. The

kindest thing."

"Yes," urged the obstinate rebel within me, "but--the Truth, that

fearless insistence on the Truth!"

I could, however, find nothing effective to say aloud, and Siddons

prevailed over me. That story made my blood boil, it filled me with an

anticipatory hatred of and hostility to Head Masters, and at the same

time there was something in it, brutally truer to the conditions of

human association than any argument.

I do not remember the various steps by which I came to be discussing

doubts so early in my life. I could not have been much more than

thirteen when that conversation occurred. I am I think perhaps

exceptionally unconscious about myself. I find I can recall the sayings

and even the gestures of other people far more distinctly than the

things I said and did myself. Even my dreams and imaginings are more

active than my positive thoughts and proceedings. But I was no doubt

very much stimulated by the literature lying about my home and the

gleans and echoes of controversies that played like summer lightning

round and about the horizons of my world. Over my head and after I had

gone to bed, my father and Siddons were talking, my cousin was listening

with strained apprehensions, there was a new spirit in my father's

sermons; it was the storm of Huxley-Darwin controversies that had at

last reached Burnmore. I was an intelligent little listener, an eager

reader of anything that came to hand, Mr. Siddons had a disposition to

fight his battles over again in his monologues to me; and after all at

thirteen one isn't a baby. The small boy of the lower classes used in

those days to start life for himself long before then.

How dramatic a phase it was in the history of the human mind when

science suddenly came into the vicarages, into all the studies and quiet

places that had been the fastnesses of conviction and our ideals, and

denied, with all the power of evidence it had been accumulating for so

long, and so obscurely and inaggressively, with fossils and strata, with

embryology and comparative anatomy, the doctrine of the historical Fall

and all the current scheme of orthodoxy that was based on that! What a

quickening shock it must have been in countless thousands of educated

lives! And my father after a toughly honest resistance was won over to

Darwinism, the idea of Evolution got hold of him, the idea that life

itself was intolerant of vain repetitions; and he had had to "consider

his position" in the church. To him as to innumerable other honest,

middle-aged and comfortable men, Darwinism came as a dreadful invitation

to go out into the wilderness. Over my head and just out of range of my

ears he was debating that issue with Siddons as a foil and my cousin as

a horrified antagonist. Slowly he was developing his conception of

compromise. And meanwhile he wasn't going out into the wilderness at

all, but punctually to and fro, along the edge of the lawn by the bed of

hollyhocks and through the little green door in the garden wall, and

across the corner of the churchyard to the vestry and the perennial

services and sacraments of the church.

But he never talked to me privately of religion. He left that for my

cousin and Mr. Siddons to do or not to do as they felt disposed, and in

those silences of his I may have found another confirmation of my

growing feeling that religion was from one point of view a thing

somehow remote and unreal, claiming unjustifiable interventions in the

detailed conduct of my life, and from another a peculiar concern of my

father's and Mr. Siddons', to which they went--through the vestry,

changing into strange garments on the way.

§ 4

I do not want to leave the impression which my last section may have

conveyed that at the age of thirteen or thereabouts I walked about with

Mr. Siddons discussing doubt in a candid and intelligent manner and

maintaining theological positions. That particular conversation, you

must imagine with Mr. Siddons somewhat monologuing, addressing himself

not only to my present self, but with an unaccustomed valiance to my

absent father. What I may have said or not said, whether I did indeed

dispute or merely and by a kind of accident implied objections, I have

altogether forgotten long ago.

A boy far more than a man is mentally a discontinuous being. The

drifting chaos of his mind makes its experimental beginnings at a

hundred different points and in a hundred different spirits and

directions; here he flashes into a concrete realization, here into a

conviction unconsciously incompatible; here is something originally

conceived, here something uncritically accepted. I know that I

criticized Mr. Siddons quite acutely, and disbelieved in him. I know

also that I accepted all sorts of suggestions from him quite

unhesitatingly and that I did my utmost to satisfy his standards and

realize his ideals of me.

Like an outer casing to that primordial creature of senses and dreams

which came to the surface in the solitudes of the Park was my

Siddonsesque self, a high-minded and clean and brave English boy,

conscientiously loyal to queen and country, athletic and a good

sportsman and acutely alive to good and bad "form." Mr. Siddons made me

aware of my clothed self as a visible object, I surveyed my garmented

being in mirrors and was trained to feel the "awfulness" of various

other small boys who appeared transitorily in the smaller Park when Lady

Ladislaw extended her wide hospitality to certain benevolent London

associations. Their ill-fitting clothing, their undisciplined outcries,

their slouching, their bad throwing and defective aspirates were made

matters for detestation in my plastic mind. Those things, I was assured,

placed them outside the pale of any common humanity.

"Very unfortunate and all that," said Mr. Siddons, "and uncommonly good

of Lady Ladislaw to have them down. But dirty little cads, Stephen,

dirty little cads; so don't go near 'em if you can help it."

They played an indecent sort of cricket with coats instead of a wicket!

Mr. Siddons was very grave about games and the strict ritual and proper

apparatus for games. He believed that Waterloo was won by the indirect

influence of public school cricket--disregarding many other contributory

factors. We did not play very much, but we "practised" sedulously at a

net in the paddock with the gardener and the doctor's almost grown-up

sons. I thought missing a possible catch was an impropriety. I

studiously maintained the correct attitude, alert and elastic, while I

was fielding. Moreover I had a shameful secret, that I did not really

know where a ball ought to pitch. I wasn't clear about it and I did not

dare to ask. Also until I was nearly thirteen I couldn't bowl overarm.

Such is the enduring force of early suggestion, my dear son, that I feel

a faint twinge of shame as I set this down for your humiliated eyes. But

so it was. May you be more precocious!

Then I was induced to believe that I really liked hunting and killing

things. In the depths of my being I was a gentle and primitive savage

towards animals; I believed they were as subtle and wise as myself and

full of a magic of their own, but Mr. Siddons nevertheless got me out

into the south Warren, where I had often watched the rabbits setting

their silly cock-eared sentinels and lolloping out to feed about

sundown, and beguiled me into shooting a furry little fellow-creature--I

can still see its eyelid quiver as it died--and carrying it home in

triumph. On another occasion I remember I was worked up into a ferocious

excitement about the rats in the old barn. We went ratting, just as

though I was Tom Brown or Harry East or any other of the beastly little

models of cant and cruelty we English boys were trained to imitate. It

was great sport. It was a tremendous spree. The distracted movements,

the scampering and pawing of the little pink forefeet of one squawking

little fugitive, that I hit with a stick and then beat to a shapeless

bag of fur, haunted my dreams for years, and then I saw the bowels of

another still living victim that had been torn open by one of the

terriers, and abruptly I fled out into the yard and was violently sick;

the best of the fun was over so far as I was concerned.

My cousin saved me from the uttermost shame of my failure by saying

that I had been excited too soon after my dinner....

And also I collected stamps and birds' eggs.

Mr. Siddons hypnotized me into believing that I really wanted these

things; he gave me an egg-cabinet for a birthday present and told me

exemplary stories of the wonderful collections other boys had made. My

own natural disposition to watch nests and establish heaven knows what

friendly intimacy with the birds--perhaps I dreamt their mother might

let me help to feed the young ones--gave place to a feverish artful

hunting, a clutch, and then, detestable process, the blowing of the egg.

Of course we were very humane; we never took the nest, but just

frightened off the sitting bird and grabbed a warm egg or so. And the

poor perforated, rather damaged little egg-shells accumulated in the

drawers, against the wished-for but never actually realized day of glory

when we should meet another collector who wouldn't have--something that

we had. So far as it was for anything and not mere imbecile

imitativeness, it was for that.

And writing thus of eggs reminds me that I got into a row with Mr.

Siddons for cruelty.

I discovered there was the nest of a little tit in a hole between two

stones in the rock bank that bordered the lawn. I found it out when I

was sitting on the garden seat near by, learning Latin irregular verbs.

I saw the minute preposterous round birds going and coming, and I found

something so absurdly amiable and confiding about them--they sat

balancing and oscillating on a standard rose and cheeped at me to go and

then dived nestward and gave away their secret out of sheer

impatience--that I could not bring myself to explore further, and kept

the matter altogether secret from the enthusiasm of Mr. Siddons. And in

a few days there were no more eggs and I could hear the hungry little

nestlings making the minutest of fairy hullabaloos, the very finest spun

silk of sound; a tremendous traffic in victual began and I was the

trusted friend of the family.

Then one morning I was filled with amazement and anguish. There was a

rock torn down and lying in the path; a paw had gone up to that little

warm place. Across the gravel, shreds of the nest and a wisp or so of

down were scattered. I could imagine the brief horrors of that night

attack. I started off, picking up stones as I went, to murder that sandy

devil, the stable cat. I got her once--alas! that I am still glad to

think of it--and just missed her as she flashed, a ginger streak,

through the gate into the paddock.

"_Now_ Steve! Now!" came Mr. Siddons' voice behind me....

How can one explain things of that sort to a man like Siddons? I took my

lecture on the Utter Caddishness of Wanton Cruelty in a black rebellious

silence. The affair and my own emotions were not only far beyond my

powers of explanation, but far beyond my power of understanding. Just

then my soul was in shapeless and aimless revolt against something

greater and higher and deeper and darker than Siddons, and his

reproaches were no more than the chattering of a squirrel while a storm

uproots great trees. I wanted to kill the cat. I wanted to kill whatever

had made that cat.

§ 5

Mr. Siddons it was who first planted the conception of Life as a Career

in my mind.

In those talks that did so much towards shaping me into the likeness of

a modest, reserved, sporting, seemly, clean and brave, patriotic and

decently slangy young Englishman, he was constantly reverting to that

view of existence. He spoke of failures and successes, talked of

statesmen and administrators, peerages and Westminster Abbey. "Nelson,"

he said, "was once a clergyman's son like you."

"England has been made by the sons of the clergy."

He talked of the things that led to failure and the things that had made

men prominent and famous.

"Discursiveness ruins a man," I remember him saying. "Choose your goal

and press to it."

"Never do anything needlessly odd. It's a sort of impertinence to all

the endless leaders of the past who created our traditions. Do not

commit yourself hastily to opinions, but once you have done so, stick to

them. The world would far rather have a firm man wrong, than a weak man

hesitatingly right. Stick to them."

"One has to remember," I recall him meditating, far over my head with

his face upturned, "that Institutions are more important than Views.

Very often one adopts a View only to express one's belief in an

Institution.... Men can do with almost all sorts of Views, but only with

certain Institutions. All this Doubt doesn't touch a truth like that.

One does not refuse to live in a house because of the old symbols one

finds upon the door.... If they _are_ old symbols...."

Out of such private contemplations he would descend suddenly upon me.

"What are _you_ going to do with your life, Steve?" he would ask.

"There is no happiness in life without some form of service. Where do

you mean to serve? With your bent for science and natural history, it

wouldn't be difficult for you to get into the I.C.S. I doubt if you'd do

anything at the law; it's a rough game, Steve, though the prizes are

big. Big prizes the lawyers get. I've known a man in the Privy Council

under forty--and that without anything much in the way of a family....

But always one must concentrate. The one thing England will not stand is

a loafer, a wool-gatherer, a man who goes about musing and half-awake.

It's our energy. We're western. It's that has made us all we are."

I knew whither that pointed. Never so far as I can remember did Mr.

Siddons criticize either myself or my father directly, but I understood

with the utmost clearness that he found my father indolent and

hesitating, and myself more than a little bit of a mollycoddle, and in

urgent need of pulling together.

§ 6

Harbury went on with that process of suppressing, encrusting, hardening,

and bracing-up which Mr. Siddons had begun. For a time I pulled myself

together very thoroughly. I am not ungrateful nor unfaithful to Harbury;

in your turn you will go there, you will have to live your life in this

British world of ours and you must learn its language and manners,

acquire its reserves and develop the approved toughness and patterning

of cuticle. Afterwards if you please you may quarrel with it. But don't

when the time comes quarrel with the present conditions of human

association and think it is only with Harbury you quarrel. What man has

become and may become beneath the masks and impositions of civilization,

in his intimate texture and in the depths of his being, I begin now in

my middle age to appreciate. No longer is he an instinctive savage but a

creature of almost incredible variability and wonderful new

possibilities. Marvels undreamt of, power still inconceivable, an empire

beyond the uttermost stars; such is man's inheritance. But for the

present, until we get a mastery of those vague and mighty intimations at

once so perplexing and so reassuring, if we are to live at all in the

multitudinousness of human society we must submit to some scheme of

clumsy compromises and conventions or other,--and for us Strattons the

Harbury system is the most convenient. You will have to go to the old

school.

I went to Rendle's. I just missed getting into college; I was two places

below the lowest successful boy. I was Maxton's fag to begin with, and

my chief chum was Raymond, who is your friend also, and who comes so

often to this house. I preferred water to land, boats to cricket,

because of that difficulty about pitch I have already mentioned. But I

was no great sportsman. Raymond and I shared a boat, and spent most of

the time we gave to it under the big trees near Dartpool Lock, reading

or talking. We would pull up to Sandy Hall perhaps once a week. I never

rowed in any of the eights, though I was urged to do so. I swam fairly

well, and got my colors on the strength of my diving.

On the whole I found Harbury a satisfactory and amusing place, I was

neither bullied nor do I think I greatly bullied, and of all that

furtive and puerile lasciviousness of which one hears so many hints

nowadays--excitable people talk of it as though it was the most

monstrous and singular of vices instead of a slightly debasing but

almost unavoidable and very obvious result of heaping boys together

under the inefficient control of a timid pretentious class of men--of

such uncleanness as I say, scarcely more than a glimpse and a whisper

and a vague tentative talk or so reached me. Little more will reach you,

for that kind of thing, like the hells of Swedenborg, finds its own.

I had already developed my growing instinct for observance to a very

considerable extent under Siddons, and at Harbury I remember myself, and

people remember me, as an almost stiffly correct youth. I was pretty

good at most of the work, and exceptionally so at history, geology, and

the biological side of natural science. I had to restrain my interest in

these latter subjects lest I should appear to be a "swat," and a

modern-side swat at that. I was early in the sixth, and rather a

favorite with old Latimer. He incited me to exercise what he called a

wholesome influence on the younger boys, and I succeeded in doing this

fairly well without any gross interventions. I implied rather than

professed soundly orthodox views about things in general, and I was

extremely careful to tilt my straw hat forward over my nose so as just

not to expose the crown of my head behind, and to turn up my trousers

with exactly that width of margin which the judgment of my

fellow-creatures had decided was correct. My socks were spirited without

being vulgar, and the ties I wore were tied with a studious avoidance

of either slovenliness or priggish neatness. I wrote two articles in the

Harburonian, became something of a debater in the Literacy and

Political, conducted many long conversations with my senior

contemporaries upon religion, politics, sport and social life, and

concealed my inmost thoughts from every human being. Indeed, so

effective had been the training of Harbury and Mr. Siddons, that I think

at that time I came very near concealing them from myself. I could

suppress wonder, I could pass by beauty as if I did not see it, almost I

think I did not see it for a time, and yet I remember it in those years

too--a hundred beautiful things.

Harbury itself is a very beautiful place. The country about it has all

the charm of river scenery in a settled and ancient land, and the great

castle and piled town of Wetmore, cliffs of battlemented grey wall

rising above a dense cluster of red roofs, form the background to

innumerable gracious prospects of great stream-fed trees, level meadows

of buttercups, sweeping curves of osier and rush-rimmed river, the

playing fields and the sedgy, lily-spangled levels of Avonlea. The

college itself is mostly late Tudor and Stuart brickwork, very ripe and

mellow now, but the great grey chapel with its glorious east window

floats over the whole like a voice singing in the evening. And the

evening cloudscapes of Harbury are a perpetual succession of glorious

effects, now serene, now mysteriously threatening and profound, now

towering to incredible heights, now revealing undreamt-of distances of

luminous color. Assuredly I must have delighted in all those aspects, or

why should I remember them so well? But I recall, I mean, no confessed

recognition of them; no deliberate going-out of my spirit, open and

unashamed, to such things.

I suppose one's early adolescence is necessarily the period of maximum

shyness in one's life. Even to Raymond I attempted no extremities of

confidence. Even to myself I tried to be the thing that was expected of

me. I professed a modest desire for temperate and tolerable achievement

in life, though deep in my lost depths I wanted passionately to excel; I

worked hard, much harder than I allowed to appear, and I said I did it

for the credit of the school; I affected a dignified loyalty to queen

and country and church; I pretended a stoical disdain for appetites and

delights and all the arts, though now and then a chance fragment of

poetry would light me like a fire, or a lovely picture stir unwonted

urgencies, though visions of delight haunted the shadows of my

imagination and did not always fly when I regarded them. But on the

other hand I affected an interest in games that I was far from feeling.

Of some boys I was violently jealous, and this also I masked beneath a

generous appreciation. Certain popularities I applauded while I doubted.

Whatever my intimate motives I became less and less disposed to obey

them until I had translated them into a plausible rendering of the

accepted code. If I could not so translate them I found it wise to

control them. When I wanted urgently one summer to wander by night over

the hills towards Kestering and lie upon heather and look up at the

stars and wonder about them, I cast about and at last hit upon the

well-known and approved sport of treacling for moths, as a cloak for so

strange an indulgence.

I must have known even then what a mask and front I was, because I knew

quite well how things were with other people. I listened politely and

respected and understood the admirable explanations of my friends. When

some fellow got a scholarship unexpectedly and declared it was rotten

bad luck on the other chap, seeing the papers he had done, and doubted

whether he shouldn't resign, I had an intuitive knowledge that he

wouldn't resign, and I do not remember any time in my career as the

respectful listener to Mr. Siddons' aspirations for service and

devotion, when I did not perceive quite clearly his undeviating eye upon

a bishopric. He thought of gaiters though he talked of wings.

How firmly the bonds of an old relationship can hold one! I remember

when a few years ago he reached that toiled-for goal, I wrote in a tone

of gratified surprise that in this blatant age, such disinterested

effort as his should receive even so belated a recognition. Yet what

else was there for me to write? We all have our Siddonses, with whom

there are no alternatives but insincerity or a disproportionate

destructiveness. I am still largely Siddonsized, little son, and so, I

fear, you will have to be.

§ 7

The clue to all the perplexities of law and custom lies in this, that

human association is an artificiality. We do not run together naturally

and easily as grazing deer do or feeding starlings or a shoal of fish.

We are a sort of creature which is only resuming association after a

long heredity of extreme separation. We are beings strongly

individualized, we are dominated by that passion which is no more and

no less than individuality in action,--jealousy. Jealousy is a fierce

insistence on ourselves, an instinctive intolerance of our

fellow-creatures, ranging between an insatiable aggression as its

buoyant phase and a savage defensiveness when it is touched by fear. In

our expansive moments we want to dominate and control everyone and

destroy every unlikeness to ourselves; in our recessive phases our homes

are our castles and we want to be let alone.

Now all law, all social order, all custom, is a patch-up and a

concession to this separating passion of self-insistence. It is an

evasion of conflict and social death. Human society is as yet only a

truce and not an alliance.

When you understand that, you will begin to understand a thousand

perplexing things in legislation and social life. You will understand

the necessity of all those restrictions that are called

"conventionality," and the inevitableness of the general hostility to

singularity. To be exceptional is to assert a difference, to disregard

the banked-up forces of jealousy and break the essential conditions of

the social contract. It invites either resentment or aggression. So we

all wear much the same clothing, affect modesty, use the same phrases,

respect one another's "rights," and pretend a greater disinterestedness

than we feel....

You have to face this reality as you must face all reality. This is the

reality of laws and government; this is the reality of customs and

institutions; _a convention between jealousies_. This is reality, just

as the cat's way with the nestlings was reality, and the squealing rat

one smashed in a paroxysm of cruelty and disgust in the barn.

But it isn't the only reality. Equally real is the passionate revolt of

my heart against cruelty, and the deep fluctuating impulse not to

pretend, to set aside fear and jealousy, to come nakedly out of the

compromises and secretive methods of every-day living into the light,

into a wide impersonal love, into a new way of living for mankind....