The Lighter Side of School Life Part 16

THE FATHER OF THE MAN

Among the higher English castes it is not good form to appear deeply interested in any thing, or to hold any serious views about anything, or to possess any special knowledge about anything. In fact, the more you know the less you say, and the more pa.s.sionately you are interested in a matter, the less you "enthuse" about it. That is the Public School Att.i.tude in a nutsh.e.l.l. It is a pose which entirely misleads foreigners and causes them to regard the English as an incredibly stupid and indifferent nation.

An American gentleman, we will say, with all an American's insatiable desire to "see the wheels go round" and get to the root of the matter, finds himself sitting beside a pleasant English stranger at a public dinner. They will converse, possibly about sport, or politics, or wireless telegraphy. The pleasant Englishman may be one of the best game shots in the country, or a Privy Councillor, or a scientist of European reputation, but the chances are that the American will never discover from the conversation that he is anything more than a rather superficial or diffident amateur. Again, supposing the ident.i.ty of the stranger is known: the American will endeavour to draw him out. But the expert will decline to enter deeply into his own subject, for that would be talking "shop"; and under no circ.u.mstances will he consent to discuss his own achievements therein, for that would be "side."

Shop and Side--let us never lose sight of them. An Englishman dislikes brains almost as much as he wors.h.i.+ps force of character. If you call him "clever" he will regard you with resentment and suspicion. To his mind cleverness is a.s.sociated with moral suppleness and sharp practice. In politics he may describe the leader of the other side as "clever"; but not his own leader. He is "able." But the things that he fears most are "shop" and "side." He is so frightened of being thought to take a pleasure in his work--he likes it to be understood that he only does it because he has to--and so terrified of being considered egotistical, that he prefers upon the whole to be regarded as lazy or dunderheaded.

In most cases the brains are there, and the cleverness is there, and above all the pa.s.sion for and pride in his work are there; but he prefers to keep these things to himself and present a careless or flippant front to the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MAN OF THE WORLD]

From what does this national self-consciousness spring? It has its roots, as already indicated, in the English public school system.

Consider. The public school boy, like all primitive types, invents his own G.o.ds and wors.h.i.+ps them without a.s.sistance. Now the primitive mind recognises two kinds of G.o.d--lovable G.o.ds and G.o.ds which must be squared. Cla.s.s A are wors.h.i.+pped from sheer admiration and reverence, because they are good and "able" G.o.ds, capable of G.o.dlike achievements.

To Cla.s.s B, however, homage is rendered as a pure measure of precaution, lest, being enormously powerful and remarkably uncertain in temper, they should turn and rend their votaries. Indeed, in their anxiety to avoid the unfavourable notice of these deities, the wors.h.i.+ppers do not hesitate to sacrifice one another. So it is with the schoolboy. Cla.s.s A consists of the G.o.ds he admires, Cla.s.s B of the G.o.ds he is afraid of.

First, Cla.s.s A.

What a boy admires most of all is ability--ability to do things, naturally and spontaneously. He wors.h.i.+ps bodily strength, bodily grace, swiftness of foot, straightness of eye, das.h.i.+ng courage, and ability to handle a bat or gun, or control the movements of a ball, with dexterity and--ease. Great emphasis must be placed on the ease. Owing to a curious kink in the schoolboy mind, these qualities depreciate at least fifty per cent. if they are not _natural_ qualities--that is, if they have been acquired by laborious practice or infinite pains. The water-funk who ultimately schools himself into a brilliant high-diver, or the overgrown crock who trains himself, by taking thought, into an effective athlete, is a person of no standing. At school sports you often hear such a conversation as this:

"Good time for the mile, wasn't it?"

"Yes; but look at the way he has been sweating up for it. He's been in training for weeks. Did you see Jinks in the high jump, though? He cleared five foot four, and never turned out to practice once. That's pretty hot stuff if you like!"

Or:

"Pretty useful, old Dobbin taking six wickets!"

"Oh, that rotter! Last year he could hardly get the ball within a yard of the crease. I hear he has been spending hours and hours in the holidays bowling by himself at a single stump. He's no earthly good, really."

It is the way of the world. The tortoise is a dreadfully unpopular winner. To an Englishman, a real hero is a man who wins a champions.h.i.+p in the morning, despite the fact that he was dead drunk the night before.

This contempt for the plodder extends also to the scholastic sphere. A boy has no great love or admiration for learning in itself, but he appreciates brilliance in scholars.h.i.+p--as opposed to hard work. If you come out top of your form, or gain an entrance scholars.h.i.+p at the University, your friends will applaud you vigorously, but only if they are perfectly certain that you have done no work whatever. If you are suspected of midnight oil or systematic labour, the virtue is gone out of your performance. You are merely a "swot." The general att.i.tude appears to be that unless you can take--or appear to take--an obstacle in your stride, that obstacle is not worth surmounting. This leads to a good deal of hypocrisy and make-believe. For instance:

"Pretty good, Sparkleigh getting a Schol, wasn't it?" remark the rank and file to one another. "He never did a stroke of work for it, and when he went up for his exam. he went on the bust the night before. Jolly good score off the Head: he said he wouldn't get one!... Grubbe? Oh yes, he got one all right. I should just think so! The old sap! We'd have rooted him if he hadn't!"

But let us be quite frank about Sparkleigh. He has won his Scholars.h.i.+p, and has done it--in the eyes of the School--with one hand tied behind him. But Scholars.h.i.+ps are not won in this way, and no one is better aware of the fact than Sparkleigh. His task, to tell the truth, has been far more difficult than that of the unheroic Grubbe. Grubbe was content to accept the stigma of "swot" because it carried with it permission to work as hard and as openly--one had almost said as flagrantly--as he pleased. But Sparkleigh, who had to maintain the att.i.tude of a man of the world and a scholastic Gallio and yet work just as hard as Grubbe, was sorely put to it at times. He must work, and work desperately hard, yet never be seen working. None of the friends who slapped him on the back when the news of his success arrived knew of the desperate resorts to which the boy had had recourse in order to obtain the time and privacy necessary for his purpose. On Sunday afternoons he would disappear upon a country walk, ostentatiously exhibiting a cigarette case and giving his friends to understand that his walk was the statutory three-mile qualification of a _bona-fide_ traveller. In reality he sat behind a hedge in an east wind and contended with Thucydides.

And there was his demeanour in school. On Thursdays, for instance, the Sixth came in from four till six and composed Latin Verses. On these occasions the Head seldom appeared, the task of presiding over the drowsy a.s.sembly falling to a scholarly but timid young man who was mortally afraid of the magnates who sat at the top bench. Sparkleigh would take down the appointed pa.s.sage as it was dictated and read it through carelessly. In reality he was committing it to memory. Then:

"Wake me at a quarter to six," he would say to his neighbour, yawning.

And laying his head upon his arms, he would rest motionless until aroused at the appointed moment.

But he was not asleep. For an hour and three-quarters that busy fertile brain would be pulling and twisting the English verse into Latin shape, converting it into polished Elegiacs or rolling hexameters. Then, sleepily raising his head, and casting a last contemptuous glance over the English copy, Sparkleigh would take up his pen, and in the remaining quarter of an hour scribble out a full and complete fair copy--to the respectful admiration of his neighbour Grubbe, who, covered with ink and surrounded by waste paper, was laboriously grappling with the last couplet.

There are many Sparkleighs in school life--and in the larger world as well. They are not really deceitful or pretentious, but they are members of a society in which revealed ambition is not good form. That is all.

There is one curious relaxation of the schoolboy's vendetta against ostentatious industry. You may work if you are a member of the Army Cla.s.s. The idea appears to be that to cultivate learning for its own sake is the act of a pedant and a prig, but if you have some loyal, patriotic, and gentlemanly object in view such as the obtaining of the King's Commission, a little vulgar application of your nose to the grindstone may be excused and indeed justified. But you must be careful to explain that you are never never going to do any work again after this.

As already noted, these characteristics puzzle the foreigner. The Scotsman, for instance, though even more reserved than the Englishman, is not nearly so self-conscious; and to him "ma career"--to quote John Shand--is the most important business in life. Success is far too momentous a thing to be jeopardised by false modesty; so why waste time and spoil one's chances by pretending that it is a mere accident in life--the gift of chance or circ.u.mstance? The American, too, cannot understand the pose. His motto is "Thorough." American oarsmen get their crew together a year before the race, and train continuously--even in winter they row in a stationary tub under cover--until by diligent practice they evolve a perfect combination. Englishmen would never dream of taking such pains. They have a vague feeling that such action is "unsportsmanlike." In their eyes it is rather improper to appear so anxious to win. Once more we find ourselves up against the shame of revealed ambition. The public school spirit again!

So much for the G.o.ds a boy admires. Now for the G.o.ds he is afraid of.

The greatest of these is Convention. The first, and perhaps the only, thing that a boy learns at a public school is to keep in his appointed place. If he strays out by so much as a single pace, he is "putting on side," and is promptly sacrificed. Presumption is the deadliest sin in school life, and is usually punished with a ferocity out of all proportion to the offence. In moderation, Convention is a very salutary deity. None of us are of much use in this world until we have found our level and acquired the virtues of modesty and self-suppression. It is extremely good for a cheeky new boy, late c.o.c.k of a small preparatory school and idol of a doting family, to have to learn by painful experience that it is not for him to raise his voice in the course of general conversation or address himself to any but his own immediate order until he has been a member of the school for a year at least.

These are what may be termed self-evident conventions, and it does no one any particular harm to learn to obey them. But the great G.o.d Convention, like most absolute monarchs, has grown distinctly cranky and eccentric in some of his whims. A sensible new boy knows better than to speak familiarly to a superior, or take a seat too near the fire, or answer back when unceremoniously treated. But there are certain laws of Convention which cannot be antic.i.p.ated by the most intelligent and well-meaning beginner. For instance, it may be--and invariably is--"side" to wear your cap straight (or crooked), or your jacket b.u.t.toned (or unb.u.t.toned), or your hair brushed (or not), or to walk upon this side of the street (or that). But which? It is impossible to solve these problems by any process save that of dismal experience. And, as in a maturer branch of criminology, ignorance of the Law is held to be no excuse for infraction of the Law. I once knew a small boy who, trotting back to his House from football and being pressed for time, tied his new white sweater round his neck by the sleeves instead of donning it in the ordinary fas.h.i.+on. That evening, to his great surprise and extreme discomfort, he was taken out and slippered by a self-appointed vigilance committee. To wear one's sweater tied round one's neck, it seemed, was the privilege of the First Fifteen alone. Who shall tell how oft he offendeth?

And even when the first years are past and a position of comparative prominence attained, the danger of Presumption is not outdistanced. A boy obtains his House colours, we will say. His friends congratulate him warmly, and then sit down to wait for symptoms of "side." The newly-born celebrity must walk warily. Too often he trips. Our first success in life is very, very sweet, and it is hard to swallow our exultation and preserve a modest or unconscious demeanour when our heart is singing.

But the lesson must be learned, and ultimately is learned; but too often only after a cruel and utterly disproportionate banishment to the wilderness. Can we wonder that the Englishman who has achieved greatness in the world--the statesman, the soldier, the athlete--always exhibits an artificial indifference of manner when his deeds are mentioned in his presence? In nine cases out of ten this is not due to proverbial heroic modesty: it is caused by painful and lasting memories of the results which followed his first essays in self-esteem.

The other G.o.d which schoolboys dread is Public Opinion. They have little fear of their masters, and none whatever of their parents; but they are mortally afraid of one another. Moral courage is the rarest thing in schoolboy life. Physical courage, on the other hand, is a _sine qua non_: so much so that if a boy does not possess it he must pretend that he does. But if he exhibits moral courage the great majority of his fellows will fail to recognise it, and will certainly not appreciate it.

They do not know its meaning. Their fathers have extolled it to them, and they have heard it warmly commended in sermons in chapel; but they seldom know it when they meet it. If an obscure and unathletic prefect reports a muscular and prominent member of the House to the Housemaster for some gross and demoralising offence, they will not regard the prefect as a hero. Probably they will consider him a prig, and certainly a sneak. The fact that he has sacrificed all that makes schoolboy life worth living in the exercise of his simple duty will not occur to the rank and file at all. Admiration for that sort of thing they regard as an idiosyncrasy of pastors and masters.

It is not until he becomes a prefect himself that the average boy discovers the meaning of the word character, and whether he possesses any of his own. If he does, he begins straight-way to make up for lost time. He sets yet another G.o.d upon his Olympus and keeps him at the very summit thereof from that day forth for the rest of his life. As already noted, the Englishman is suspicious of brains, despises intellectuality, and thoroughly mistrusts any superficial appearance of cleverness; but he wors.h.i.+ps character, character, character all the time. And that is the main--the only--difference between the English man and the English boy. The man appreciates moral courage, because it is a sign of character. It is the only respect in which the English Peter Pan grows up.

Finally, we note a new factor in the composition of the Public School Type--the military factor. Ten years ago school Cadet Corps were few in number, lacking in efficiency, and thoroughly lax in discipline. Routine consisted of some very inert company drills and some very intermittent cla.s.s-firing, varied by an occasional and very disorderly field-day.

Real keenness was confined to those boys who had a chance of going to Bisley as members of the shooting eight. The officers were middle-aged and short-winded. It was not quite "the thing" to belong to the Corps--presumably because _anybody_ could belong to it--and in any case it was not decorous to be enthusiastic about it.

But the Officers' Training Corps has changed all that. At last the hand of peace-loving and somnolent Headmasters has been forced by the action of a higher power. Now the smallest public school has its Corps, subsidised by the State and supervised by the War Office. Three years ago, in Windsor Great Park, King George reviewed a perfectly equipped and splendidly organised body of seventeen thousand schoolboys and undergraduates; and these were a mere fraction of the whole. The O.T.C.

is undeniably efficient. Its officers hold His Majesty's commission, and have to qualify for their posts by a course of attachment to a regular body. Frequently the C.O. is an old soldier. Discipline and obedience of a kind hitherto unknown in schools have come into existence. That is to say, A has learned to obey an order from B with prompt.i.tude and despatch, not because A is in the Fifteen while B is not, but because A is a sergeant and B is a private; or to put the matter more simply still, because it is an Order. Conversely, A gives his orders clearly and confidently because he knows that he has the whole weight of military law behind him, and need not pause to worry about athletic status or caste distinctions.

It may be objected that we are merely subst.i.tuting a military caste for an athletic caste; but no one who knows anything about boys will support such a view. The new caste will help to modify the despotism of the old: that is all. And undoubtedly the system breeds _initiative_, which is not the strong point of the average schoolboy. In the Army everyone looks automatically for instruction to the soldier of highest rank present, whether he be a brigadier in charge of a field-day or the oldest soldier of three privates engaged in guarding a gap in a hedge.

It is these low-grade delegations of authority which force initiative and responsibility upon boys who otherwise would shrink from putting themselves forward, not through lack of ability or character, but through fear of Presumption. And here we encounter another thoroughly British characteristic. A Briton has a great capacity for minding his own business. He dislikes undertaking a responsibility which is not his by right. But persuade him that a task is indubitably and _officially_ his, and he will devote his life to it, however unthankful or exacting it may be. In the same way many a schoolboy never takes his rightful place in his House or School simply because he does not happen to possess any of the restricted and accidental qualifications which school law demands of its leaders. Now, aided by the initiative and independence which elementary military training bestows, he is encouraged to come forward and take a share in the life of the school from which his own respect for schoolboy standards of merit has previously debarred him. All he wants is a little confidence in himself and a little training in responsibility. The Officers' Training Corps is doing the same work among public schoolboys to-day that the Boy Scout movement is doing so magnificently for his brethren in other walks of life.

II

But we need not dip into the future: we are concerned only with the past and its effect upon the present.

What manner of man is he that the English public school system has contributed to the service of the State and the Empire? (With the English public schools we ought fairly to include Scottish public schools conducted on English lines.) How far are the characteristics of the boy discernible in the Man? The answer is:--Through and through.

In the first place, the Man is usually a Conservative. So are all schoolboys. (Who shall forget the turmoil which arose when a new and iconoclastic Housemaster decreed that the comfortable double collar which had hitherto been the exclusive property of the aristocracy might--nay, must--be worn by all the House irrespective of rank?)

Secondly, he is very averse to putting himself forward until he has achieved a certain _locus standi_. A newly-elected Member of Parliament, if he happens to be an old public-school boy, rarely if ever addresses the House during his first session. He leaves that to Radical thrusters and Scotsmen on the make. He does this because he remembers the day upon which he was rash enough to rise to his feet and offer a few halting observations on the occasion of his first attendance at a meeting of the Middle School Debating Society. ("Who are you," inquired his friends afterwards, "to get up and jaw? Have you got your House colours?")

Thirdly, he declines upon all occasions, be he scholar, or soldier, or lawyer, to discuss matters of interest relating to his profession; for this is "shop." He remembers the historic "ragging" of two harmless but eccentric members of the Fifth at school, who, dwelling in different Houses, were discovered to be in the habit of posting one of Cicero's letters to one another every evening for purposes of clandestine and unnatural perusal at breakfast next morning.

If he rises to a position of eminence in life or performs great deeds for the State, he laughs his achievements to scorn, and attributes them to "a rotten fluke," remembering that that was what one of the greatest heroes of his youth, one Slogsby, used to do when he had made a hundred in a school match.

If he is created a Judge or a Magistrate or a District Commissioner he is especially severe upon sneaks and bullies, for he knows what sneaking and bullying can be. For the open law-breaker he has a much kindlier feeling, for he was once one himself. He is intensely loyal to any inst.i.tution with which he happens to be connected, such as the British Empire or the M.C.C., because loyalty to School and House is one of the fundamental virtues of the public school boy.

Lastly, compulsory games at school have bred in him an almost pa.s.sionate desire to keep himself physically fit at all times in after life.