Fears for the future and regrets for the past are alike forgotten during the last week. There are sad moments, but, as Arnold Lunn remarked, 'there is a world of difference between the pleasant sorrow of sentiment and the more real depression that coincides with an overdraft at the bank.' The last week is passed in a mood that I once heard described as 'happy-sad.' On the last Sunday in chapel the boy who is leaving endeavours to summon the appropriate emotion. He knows how he ought to feel. He has been instructed by so many stories. He is, in a way, an actor in a drama. He knows that the fag on the other side of the aisle is looking at him, is saying to himself: 'This is Jones's last chapel. What is he feeling?' And, like an actor, Jones does not want to disappoint his audience. He feels as he should feel. There is a lump at the back of his throat. But, on the whole, leaving is an exciting experience.
There is the auction of study furniture, when pictures that cost five shillings when they were new, fetch seven and six in their fourth year of service. There are the calls to be paid to masters, the 'good-byes' and 'good lucks.' It is the abdication of office when one is at the height of one's authority. It is a fine gesture that 'immeasurable power, unsated to resign,' to be able to step straight out from the lighted room, before the corroding forces of change have begun to work, and before habit has dulled applause. The exit is made at exactly the right moment. The curtain falls on a dramatic climax. And how rarely that happens.
In a temper of wistful sentimentality and self-satisfaction, arrayed in the colours of the old boys' society, the ex-public school boy leans out of the carriage window, waves good-bye to the friends who are catching a later train, makes and extracts promises to write, and watches as the train moves out of the station the familiar landmarks slip one by one behind him.
A sentimental, that is to say, a superficial emotion passes quickly. And it depends on the kind of life which awaits a boy, whether or not this sentimental regret will be followed by an acute sense of loss.
If he is going up to the university or to some remunerative and interesting employment, it is probable that he will forget school altogether in the fascination of a new life. If, however, he is destined for some dull unromantic post in the city, the thought of school will for a long time wake in him a deep, hopeless nostalgia. He will bring no enthusiasm to his work, and, as he sits at his high desk, balancing ledgers, computing insurance policies, adjusting income-tax returns, he will compare the monotony of his routine with the coloured movement and variety of school. As he walks to his office he will remind himself that at this moment the morning chapel is just ending. The school will be pouring across the courts. If he were there he would be walking arm in arm with some friend of his to the class-room, stopping on the way some intelligent friend to demand the elucidation of certain tiresome theorems. As he returns to the office after lunch he will say to himself: 'If I were there now I should be changing for football. I should have before me the prospect of a hard game and a bath afterwards, and a long, lazy evening in front of the games study fire.' And, at the end of the day, on his return to his home or diggings, he is lonely with the recollection of how often at such a time he has sat in the class-room waiting impatiently for the clock to strike, waiting for the moment of freedom when he can gather his books under his arm and rush back to the house to tea, to the four delightful hours of friendship and discussion that lie in that enchanted period between lock-up and lights out. School life never means so much to a boy as it does during his few months after he has left it. For he sees it transfigured in his imagination; he remembers nothing of the tiresome demands of routine, nothing of the friction between boys and masters, nothing of the long boring hours in form when he watched the patch of sunlight drift across the wall, nothing of the anxieties, the annoyances, the restrictions of a cloistered life. He sees it purged of the accidental, a city of his own fashioning.
It does not last, of course, this intense nostalgia. No young man can live for very long in the past. New interests come to him, he finds new fields for his ambition. He makes friends in his office. He joins a tennis club, he takes dancing lessons. He sets out in search of life. He ceases, at every vacant moment of the day, to compute what he would be doing were he at school instead of at an office. He thinks of the innings he intends to play next Saturday: his eyes pick out on the carpet an imaginary spot ten feet away from him, and he considers what shot he would play to a ball that pitched on it; he also perhaps wonders what exactly that charming lady with whom he had danced the night before, had meant when she had said, with a peculiar inflection in her voice: 'You're growing up.'
His correspondence with his old friends becomes spasmodic. He no longer writes to his house master once a month. The arrival of a letter with the school crest on it ceases to excite him as it did. The school magazine becomes full of names that are meaningless to him. He notes with disgust that Baxter, in his day a miserable little squirt, has got into the Eleven; and that that goggle-eyed ass, Barton, is head of the school. He asks himself at Christmas whether it is worth his while to renew his subscription, and decides that it is not. From time to time he reads in The Sportsman of the feats of his school Fifteen, and remarks without enthusiasm that 'Fernhurst must be pretty strong this year.' His school life has dropped from him as a coat that he has outgrown. It belongs to the past, and he is living in the future. School will not mean much to him for another twenty years, till the time comes, that is to say, when he will have to send his son to school.
Then will he recover his youth, and live again his school days in his son, only more intensely, because he will be living them in his imagination. In the achievements of his son he will recognise the ghost of his old ambitions. His son's career will be more personal to him than his own. He will take more pleasure in his son's successes than the boy will himself. Indeed a great deal of a boy's pleasure in his success lies in his appreciation of the happiness that it will bring to his father. At no time in their lives do father and son come so close to one another as during these years. And it is at first sight surprising that this intimacy should not produce that common ground on which difficulties may be openly discussed and quarrels healed. For in spite of this intimacy, the relations between father and son are very often superficial.
This statement may appear self-contradictory, but a little examination will show that this is not so. We do not necessarily confide in the people we love best. Let any man think of his friends and acquaintances, and he may be surprised to discover that he knows a great deal more about his acquaintances than his friends. I do not lay it down as a fact that he will make this discovery. I merely say that he may make it; certainly a great many will.
At school, where one has a vast number of acquaintances and a few friends, I used to wonder sometimes how best one could draw the dividing line between a friend and an acquaintance. And I decided that the difference lay in silence, that with a friend one could be silent, whereas with an acquaintance one could not. If a friend walked into one's study when one was busy, one smiled and went on with one's work; the friend picked up a book and read. But if an acquaintance came in, one immediately stopped what one was doing; one felt that silence would become embarrassing.
In the same way one does not, in the company of a real friend, feel the need of personal confidences. One likes being with him. That is enough. One sits over a fire and talks spasmodically, with long silences drifting into the conversation. But with a person of whom one is not particularly fond, such desultory conversation is not adequate. An acquaintance is not, in himself, sufficiently interesting—he is interesting in what he has done, or is doing. The need for confidences is essential. And so it is that most of us have acquaintances to whom we recount all our discreditable exploits, our romances, our financial enterprises, with whom we seem, in fact, remarkably intimate, but whose absence, were they to pass out of our lives, we should not greatly regret. The man who knows most about us very often matters least to us. This is not a generalisation. One cannot generalise about an abstraction like friendship, that has a different meaning and a different message for every individual man. But such relationships are a common experience; they are the more common in the degree that their subjects are the more reserved. And there is no more reserved class than that of past and present public school boys.
This is, at any rate, the only explanation that I can find for the superficial relations between son and father that are spread over so deep a trust and intimacy. They accept without appreciating this superficiality. The father comes down at half term, and he goes for a walk arm in arm with his son, along the slopes. They discuss home affairs and the external activities of school: football shop, cricket shop, house politics. They rarely touch on the boy's inner life; the father can only guess at what his boy is doing and thinking. Underneath their love for each other they are strangers.
On the important issues of school life they are both driven to accept the verdict of the house master or head master. And he, although he is working in the dark on both sides of him, is their only intermediary.
But the relationships between parents and children are too intricate for so short a book as this. Indeed, I doubt whether it is possible ever to tackle satisfactorily a subject, the nature of which alters with every individual case. One would be lost at once in a labyrinth of generalisations and exceptions; Lytton Strachey made no attempt to write a history of the Victorian era. He selected and analysed a few specimens; that is, I believe, the only way in which to deal with the complex subject of parenthood. And it can only be thus dealt with by the story-teller, by the man who says: 'I care nothing for general principles. But this is how things went for one family.' In a general study such as this, it is quite impossible to dogmatise from individual cases. But I would submit this facet of the relationship between father and son as an important one in the study of school society. It throws the need for co-operation almost entirely on the schoolmaster. It makes his responsibility greater than he knows.
Now there are three types of men to whom the scholastic profession makes its chief appeal. There is the brilliant scholar, the man with the double first, who will turn out to be either completely incompetent, or will become a head master. There is the athlete who takes a third, or at best a second in mods, and on the strength of a blue, returns as games master to his old school. Lastly, there is the idealist, the man who regards teaching as a calling and not a trade, the man who may be either an impossible crank or, in his own line, a genius.
The first class of master plays, on the whole, a small part in the politics of school life. If he is incompetent he is ragged in form and his opinion carries no weight in the common room. If he is successful, he is a bird of passage, on his way to some rich head-mastership. He may become a house master for a while, but he is always looking beyond his immediate surroundings. He is ambitious. He does not regard one school as his compass. Always he is just outside the drama.
The second class, however, forms the backbone of tradition. The old boy comes back to his old school with an intense loyalty and with the intention of staying there for the rest of his life. His ambition is to have the best house in the best school in the best county. He is usually a very fine fellow indeed, but he represents eternally the spirit of reaction. He lives in the standards of his youth. He has had no opportunity of testing those standards in another environment. His whole life has moved within the circle of one school.
He imbibed as a boy the public school spirit, and he did not outgrow that spirit at the university—hardly a proof of mental elasticity. He has no sense of progress or of change in the world for which he is training the young. As things have been, so shall they be. The old boy turned house master is the most powerful force in the common room. He is the chief obstacle that the enthusiast has to face.
With regard to the enthusiast, one is tempted to put an asterisk against the heading and a footnote, 'Vide the novels of S. P. B. Mais passim,' and leave it at that. For Mr. Mais knows more about the reception of this type of master than any other man in the kingdom. He has himself a genius for teaching. I cannot imagine a better English master. He inspires enthusiasm in the confirmed slacker. He is an invaluable asset to any staff, and yet nearly everywhere he has been met by opposition. His own story, as set forth in A Schoolmaster's Diary, is typical of the young movement. Only there is this difference, that, whereas Mr. Mais has never yielded to the reactionary influences, the majority of young masters conform to the custom of the country. Their position is extremely difficult.
They leave Oxford with high ambitions. They have dissected and analysed the system, they have discovered the vital spot; they are eager to put their reforms into action. They have wonderful schemes for inspiring boys with a love of the beautiful, with an interest in politics and life. They are prepared to be ruthless in their battle; they will neither ask nor give quarter. They will not be fettered to the reactionary indolence of the intolerant and the effete. They have a mission and a purpose. They bring a sword. They arrive at school with a quenchless ardour.
Like the small boy home for the holidays, they want to do everything on the first day. Before they have had time to look round they are suggesting schemes for founding literary and dramatic circles: they want to open a political debating society where there shall be files of The Nation and The Daily News. They start a mile race at the speed of a hundred yards and find themselves alone in the void. Every one else is going at a very leisurely pace. There is no need for hurry. Their whole life is before them. The school has been in existence a very long while. It is moving in its own time to its duly appointed ends. The young enthusiast grows impatient: like most intense people he is tactless and makes mistakes. He ignores his colleagues, or interferes with their arrangements. He creates an atmosphere of opposition. This is, of course, what he has anticipated. The fight, he feels, is going to begin. But the nature of the fight is very different from what he had expected.
It is not waged with the intolerant and the effete, but with men whom he cannot help admiring. He cannot make himself hate his enemies. The old boy house master, it cannot be too often repeated, is a very fine fellow. And his point of view is reasonable. He has given his youth, his energy, his ambition to his school. He has cared for nothing else. He has allowed many of the good things of life to pass him because of this unwavering devotion, and it is natural that he should resent the intrusion of a young fellow who has not had time to learn to love the school, but who wants to overturn the most cherished privileges.
And his methods are so impeccably direct and honest. He does not go behind the young man's back to the head master. He has the young man into his study for a chat; he looks him straight in the face. He says: 'Come now, we've got to have this out.' And the young man finds it so desperately hard not to admire him. He endeavours to open a discussion: he states his case. For a moment he seems to forget the personal issue in the case. Confidence comes back to him. He develops his argument, and then, just when he feels that his grip is closing on the contest, he is beaten by that disarming sentimentality which is the most powerful of all the old boy's weapons.
'My dear fellow,' he will say, 'you have your point of view and I have mine. We are both in our own ways working for the good of the school; why must we quarrel? We are fighting the same fight. But we can do nothing unless we stand together. I've given my whole life to the cause; you are just beginning.'
The acceptance of this offer of friendship and co-operation means defeat. The young man knows it. But it is so hard to refuse. The rebel in any sphere of life has no harder task than the cutting adrift from his own caste and the subsequent alliance with men of different upbringing and different standards. He sees, on the one hand, a vast number of noble, if bigoted men, men whom he can trust and admire. And, on the other side, as a setting for the few idealists in whose principles he believes, the arrayed forces of envy, greed, and malice. The temptation to cling to what he knows and what secretly he admires is too great. Most of the young enthusiasts give way soon. They join the forces of reaction.
And those that stand out are inevitably broken. What chance have they after all? The modern intellectual is something of a negativist. His tolerance is composed of indifference and uncertainty. He sees life in the words of Jurgen as a 'wasteful and inequitable process,' and does not discern clearly how to alter it. His philosophy is a series of disappointments. He is bound to go down before a bigotry that is certain of itself. The forces of reaction are so powerfully entrenched. The old boy house master knows exactly what he wants and how he proposes to get it. He advances down a straight road. His enemies pause and wonder and question themselves.
The bigot usually makes the best administrator. He is not worried by abstractions. He is certain of his ends and can devote all his attention to the means. The tolerant head master, the man who sees both points of view, is overcome in the end by preponderating faith and sincerity of reaction. The new man is invariably subjugated, or else is made to go. No head master would be anxious to take his side.
The games master type is intensely popular with parents and old boys. He represents for them the public school spirit. He is a fixed, immutable principle in which they can place their trust. They would be intensely worried were they to learn that the head master had taken the side of a new man against their old friend. The subject would be discussed in the clubs: 'There's trouble brewing at Fernhurst,' they would say. 'This new head master is a liberal. He's quarrelling with old Aiken. I don't like the look of it.' And the position of the school would be shaken. Parents would send their sons elsewhere. The numbers would drop. Unpleasant questions would be put to the head master at the next meeting of the governors. It is the old trouble of the merchant and his goods. Parents have to be placated. They have been assured that 'all is for the best in the best of all possible schools'; and, when they hear rumours of dissension they naturally imagine that something must be wrong with that particular school. It is not so everywhere. They remind the head master of his own official utterances. And it is not easy after prophesying smooth things to satisfy the complaints of those who find them hard.
A head master has to reach his ends through infinite tact and patience and through a long series of compromises. He has to be something of an opportunist. He has to give reasons other than the true ones for what he does. He has to promote progress secretly, while he advocates conservatism. And it is hard to remain true to oneself while playing the Jekyll and Hyde game. Motives become involved; there is too much diplomacy, and the forces of reaction, whatever else they be, are distinctly honest. Certainly he cannot allow the clumsy enthusiasm of a young man to complicate his vexed existence. And the young man has either to break or bend. Usually he bends. He has, after all, to consider his own career. He compromises with himself. He manages to persuade himself that he is not really yielding, but that he is adopting different tactics, attacking the enemy from another side. He decides to do his work of reform quietly, without ostentation. Other people can do their own way if they like.
That compromise is the start of a long process of self-deception. When he becomes a house master it will be so simple to put off parents with excuses. He will be able to justify himself, to say: 'These are stupid folk. They will worry me if I encourage them. I have my work to do. I must pacify them and get on with it.' And so the circle completes itself. The young man who sets out to reform school life, who brought to the task a fine, untried energy, ends in evasion, compromise and self-deception. Boys, parents, and masters are working at cross purposes.
There are certainly a large number of entries on the debit side of the ledger. It remains to be decided what hand has written these entries and whether it is possible to erase them. To a large extent they are due to four things: the moral issue; the cult of athleticism, which is regarded as an antidote to immorality; the conspiracy of silence that exists between parents and boys and masters, and the long period a boy spends at school—the six years that separate so unduly the junior from the senior, that accentuate the blood system, that erect a wall shutting out the world at large. School life is too much of a walled garden, too much of a world in itself. It has remained monastic, it has not established contact with the movements of the hour.
The ardent idealists with their thousand pretty schemes for the regeneration of mankind, find no difficulty in allotting a few panaceas to the Public School. We hear of the 'new world' and of the 'new spirit,' and there is glib talk about the phoenix and the ashes. A few laws have to be passed, a few peasants educated and there will be an end of competition. 'The strong will support the weak, the clever work unselfishly for the general good. Wealth and intellect will be placed at the service of the state. The relations of the sexes will be ordered by eugenics.'
It is all very jolly, and unless to-day one subscribes unfalteringly to this belief in a new world, one is called a reactionary and a materialist. The millennium, we are told, is round the corner. The finest intellects of thirty centuries may have failed to find it, but the farm labourer has only to spend a few half-hours with an English grammar to discover it at his feet. It must be very nice to believe all that, to be able to comfort oneself in dark moments with the assurance that for one's children's children life will be a happy hunting ground. It must be a drug more potent than laudanum, more sweet than hashish. But it is of small avail in the dust and traffic of humanity. In the case of the Public Schools we shall do well to examine what is at hand and prescribe what cures we may, without the indulgence of distant speculation.
The four main objects of criticism, then, are the moral question, the evil of athleticism, the false scale of values that is inculcated at a Public School, and the subsequent conspiracy of silence. On the moral question the advanced idealists have talked more and to less purpose than on any other phase of school life. They have written of the discovery of the soul, of the unfolding of the flower. They have maintained that through art and literature the boy's emotional nature will be directed to a higher, a nobler conception of life. The psycho-analyst speaks of 'sublimation,' and they have fastened on to this cliché. Was not this what they had been saying so long, in other words—the sublimation of the sexual impulse?
Now, in the case of a celibate priest or a maiden lady it is, no doubt, highly desirable and perhaps possible to sublimate an impulse which has been and in all probability will be, denied natural satisfaction. But it is a pretty hopeless job to sublimate an impulse that has every hope and prospect of complete, direct, and natural realisation; and that is the task that the advocates of flowers and poetry and the dawn have set themselves. If we are to change the moral tone of a Public School we shall have to find either an alternative system, or we shall have to modify in some way the existing system.
Two alternatives are offered: co-education and the day school. In neither case should immorality be general or serious, and the number of romantic friendships correspondingly slight. It seems hardly possible that a normal healthy boy would be attracted by a smaller boy when, at a school like Bedales, he would be constantly in the company of young and charming scholars. And though the day boarder lives for the greater part of his day in a monastic society, he spends the majority of his spare time outside it. And during the week-ends he has full opportunity to continue any romance on which he may have embarked during the previous holidays. Although it is only possible for me to speak here from second-hand information, it can be assumed, I think, that at the co-educational and day school the moral question must sink to comparative unimportance. It has to be considered, however, whether this relegation compensates for the consequent disadvantages.
Co-education is, of course, a new game, and it is difficult to write of it with confidence. At a lecture that I gave about three years ago, a young woman rose from the back of the hall and asked 'what Mr. Waugh thought about co-education?' I had, as a matter of fact, thought about it very little, but I felt that I could hardly confess as much. I said, therefore, something about 'co-education being excellent for delicate and sensitive boys who would find Public Schools too rough for them.' The young woman then indignantly demanded what the girls had done to deserve the companionship of only delicate and sensitive boys. It was an unanswerable protest, but having since then thought the matter over more carefully, I believe that, if the same question were put to me to-day I should make the same reply. It may be that such a reply would be based only on prejudice and a preconceived idea. But, after all, the evil that one knows is better than the evil that one does not know. And who would wish away his school days.
If you were to ask a small boy of thirteen whether he would prefer to go to Uppingham or Bedales, he would promptly reply 'Uppingham.' If, two years later, you were to say to him: 'Would you rather have gone to Bedales than Uppingham?' he would reply: 'Lord, no.' If at the end of his last term, when it was all over, you were to ask him whether he regretted his choice, he would say: 'Good God, no!' And, twenty years afterwards, when the time had come for him to decide where he should send his son, were you to ask him yet again: 'Bedales or Uppingham?' he would reply without hesitation, 'Uppingham.'
Why, after all, should he depart from an old allegiance. He knows nothing of Bedales, nothing of the troubles and adversities that his son will have to face there. He will be unable to help him, he will be denied that greatest privilege of fatherhood, the unquestioning trust of the son who knows that his father has trod every inch of the way before him. Father and son rarely come so close to one another as they do during those five years at a Public School. They are living practically the same life; the father finds his lost youth in the son. Is it likely that he will abandon such a certainty for a supposed and uncertain good. The public school system was formed round certain distinct traits in the British character. It is the expression of the national temperament. Nearly every one is happy at a Public School. It is the manner of life that we enjoy, that is in sympathy with our tastes and customs. The reformers may say what they will. You cannot turn a dog from the food it loves. This attitude to co-education may be illogical, it may be prejudiced, it may be reactionary—I do not know. One can only restate the fact that we are content to be old-fashioned people.
The case of the day school cannot be so summarily dismissed. At a first sight indeed it appears to possess all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of a Public School. A boy acquires esprit de corps, but is saved from wild partisanship. He strengthens the qualities of courage and independence as fully as he would at a Public School, and the home influence is maintained. His moral lapses, if any, are likely to be occasioned by the attractions of the other sex. My friend, Mr. Oscar Browning, has indeed often assured me that the day school is the only possible solution of the difficulty, and in a symposium on the English Public Schools he wrote that 'House rivalries and the overwhelming importance of house matches cannot exist in day schools where boys live with their families, nor is school life likely to be so communal.' Many other educational authorities, whose testimony one must respect, have expressed their faith in day schools. Certainly the claim of the day school must be carefully examined. And it is with diffidence that I approach the task.
At most boarding schools the day boy is looked down upon. For some obscure reason the day boy always seems to be inferior to the boarder. He is rarely prominent in games or work. One ceases, indeed, to regard him as a member of the school. He comes into form, he writes his prose, he attends corp parade, he plays his games. But, at six o'clock, when the bell rings for tea and the intimate life of the day begins, he collects his books and hurries across the courts and passes into another life.
The period between lock-up and lights out is in retrospect the most charming part of the day. The troubles of the day are over. Lessons have to be prepared in prep., but they will not be heard till the next morning. Time enough to worry about that after breakfast. It is after tea that one packs twelve people into a study measuring eight feet by four and discusses the prospects of the house in the Two Cock, the 'latest case,' and Evans's chance of getting into the Fifteen. Prep. is but a pause in the discussions of these momentous trivialities. After prayers there is an hour in which to brew coffee and renew the endlessly attractive conversation. These are the times of friendship and good feeling, and they are lost to the day boarder. Like the new boy, he is outside the life of the school. He moves in a different environment; he has different interests, he cannot enter into the eager loyalties and aversions of house politics. In a school such as Clifton, where there are a large number of day boys, the position is, of course, different. The day boy there occupies a definite social status. Instead of being attached to a house for games, he is grouped into that sector of the town in which he happens to live. His friends are leading much the same life as he is. But it can scarcely be denied that the day boarder loses a great deal of the charm of a communal life.
What does he gain to compensate for that loss?
He is protected to a large extent from the moral lapses peculiar to a Public School. He will develop through normal channels. Though, as he will in chapel and in his school listen to addresses that are based on the accepted official attitude, it is a little doubtful whether he will find himself in this respect much more satisfactorily educated than the boarder. At any rate he should be saved the disquieting experiences of a romantic friendship, and he will be less of a slave to the partisanship and house feeling. But does he gain anything else?
We hear a great deal about the value of home influence, but what does home mean for the day boy? He rushes home at the end of the day, has his tea, and then settles down to prepare his lessons. By the time he has finished them it is time for him to go to bed. He has had little opportunity for talking either to his father or his mother. In the morning he has only time to rush his breakfast and hurry off to school. It must be remembered also that the parents who send their sons to day schools are usually not particularly well off. It is one thing to come home at the end of a hard day to the quiet seclusion of a warm and cosy study where everything will be quiet and undisturbed. It is another thing to come back to a house that is making strenuous efforts to get things straight before the master of the house returns. Middle-aged business men expect to find things made snug for them; they do not want schoolboys kicking about the place at the end of the day.
Nothing is more uncomfortable than breakfast in the average suburban family. There is the flutter over the post, the opening and shutting of the paper, the constant glances at the clock. There is a banging of doors, and running up of stairs, and the shouting over banisters. A sigh of relief is heard when the front door closes behind the wage-earner.
In a large, well-run house the domestic machinery moves so smoothly that it is unnoticed. In a small suburban villa these moments of arrival and departure provide constant friction, and it is from the small suburban villa that the majority of day boarders are recruited.
In consequence the day boy starts his day's work at a disadvantage. It is like playing a cricket match on an opponent's ground. One arrives a little jaded. The boarder is on the spot. He has twenty-five minutes' leisure between chapel and breakfast. It is possible, of course, that he will pass these twenty-five minutes in a feverish attempt to prepare the 'con' for which he had been allotted an hour on the time-table of the previous night. But that is his own fault. He has every chance of starting the day fresh.
I cannot think that the rush of getting off in the morning and the journey to school can be good for a boy of fifteen. It is a strain for a full-grown man. That twenty minutes' jolt in tubes and lifts is exhausting. No one arrives at the office perfectly fresh. By the time one gets back at night one is really tired. The tube journey at the end of a hard day completes one's weariness. And on top of that weariness the day boarder has to do an hour and a half's preparation. It is not the ideal setting for successful work.
The day boy is also leading two lives at the same time. He cannot shut them away in watertight compartments. They overlap. It is, no doubt, for the business man a great privilege and a great relief to be able to return at the end of the day to a quiet evening in his wife's company. But then he has not got to work at home, and work implies friction. The worker wants an absence of outside influences. He wants the company of quiet folk who make no particular demands on his energy and patience, with whom his relations are superficial and for whom he does not particularly care.
Many writers make a failure of marriage because they put their study too near their nursery. The imaginative worker wants to be alone, not only while he is working, but for an hour before he starts working and for an hour after he has finished working. In many ways the army is the ideal career for a writer. He can do his two hours' writing after tea, have his bath and change, and go down to the ante-room, where he can read his paper quietly and chat superficially with people who make no demands on him. Wherever there is an intimate relationship there is friction. The proper adjustment of his work to his personal life is the most delicate task a man has to tackle. It is beyond the compass of a small boy. For the very reason that a boy loves his parents there will be friction; a strain will be placed, that is to say, upon his energy and patience. The boarder has fewer worries and, in consequence, is happier than the day boy.
The advocates of 'home influence' must also remember that the day boy takes his home for granted. We cannot appreciate the value of anything till we have either lost it, or become separated from it. Home means a great deal to the boarder. Holidays mark for him a complete change of life, to the day boy holidays mean little save the pleasurable cessation of certain irksome duties. He can stay in bed longer in the morning, he has not got to hurry his breakfast, a free day lies in front of him. He will not have to waste his time over Latin Prose and Thucydides. During the term-time he has, except during week-ends, very few opportunities of intimate conversation with his parents, and because he has come to regard their presence as a natural environment he does not, during the holidays, make, as the boarder does, special efforts to see as much of them as possible. The influence of a place need be no more effective because one happens to live in it than the influence of a person because one happens to be in his, or her, company. It depends on the value set on the place or person. The boarder values his home more highly than the day boy. The influence of home is more likely to be felt by him than by the day boy. Letters from home are an event in the boarder's life. They mean more than a walk on Sunday morning, and the hours are counted to the half-term visit.
The day boy also comes far less into contact with masters than the boarder does. Indeed the head master of a school can only have a superficial knowledge of the boys that are entrusted to him. He sees them in the form room and on the cricket field. But he does not watch the development of the boy's character through his reactions towards and away from the intrigues, romances, and jealousies of house politics. There is no constant theme, only a few uncertain motifs. The head master has not sufficient material upon which to work. The discovery of so many clues is denied to him. Every boy at some time or other must pause and wonder how much his head master really knows about him. It is a subject, for most of us, of disquieting conjecture. But the day boy can dismiss it with an easy conscience. School for him is a place in which he works and plays, but does not live. Indeed he is a child of no man's land, passing between two countries, a true citizen of neither.
There are those who say that parents are the only people who understand their children, and will maintain that it is criminal to take young boys away from their parents at an impressionable age and place them in charge of schoolmasters who can know nothing about them. But parents are, as a matter of fact, as likely to make mistakes as any one else.
We find in anything what we bring to it. And parents expecting their sons to be brave, truthful, obedient, clever, find them so. An outside opinion is of extreme value, and a house master or a head master is the ideal person to give it. When a house master and a father meet on equal grounds and discuss the son's welfare honestly, the auspices could hardly be more fortunate. They so rarely meet, because parents and schoolmasters do not trust each other, because they have adopted the false position of buyer and seller; the combination remains, however, none the less ideal.
I do not myself see what advantages the day school possesses over the boarding school, save those that are concerned with a particular facet of morality, and beyond the weakening of a partisanship that is inclined to put a boy in blinkers. There are some very fine day schools in the country, but the day school, especially of recent years, has tended to become an alternative for parents with large families who cannot afford to send their sons to expensive boarding schools. And, after all, the suggestion that day schools should be generally substituted for boarding schools is obviously impracticable.
Many of the finest Public Schools are situated in remote parts of the country, others in small towns that were once honoured with a monastery. How are these venerable institutions to be converted into day schools. A few retired colonels might possibly form a colony in Shoreham and send their sons to Lancing. A convenient train would take them to Brighton, where they might walk on the promenade and recall the reckless adventures of their youth. But civilisation draws us to big towns for our livelihood. However much the stockbroker might wish to send his son as a day boarder to Shrewsbury, he would find it quite impossible to do so. The town of Shrewsbury would provide no scope for his activities. He could not possibly settle there. A scheme that would involve the complete alteration of the public school system can only be called a revolution. A reformer has to work on his existing material. He cannot say—wash it out and start again. He cannot put back the clock.
Mr. Oscar Browning has said that when he went to Eton in 1851 only five schools could lay claim to the dignity of being called a Public School. There must be at least fifty first-class Public Schools to-day; they are nearly all boarding schools, and every few years a comparatively unknown school proves itself a worthy competitor to older foundations. It is not the slightest use to say, even if we believed it, that day schools are better than boarding schools and leave the matter there. A politician might with equal ability draw up an elaborate defence of the feudal system. It may very well be that we should be all more happy if we could reconstruct society on a feudal basis: we might just as well express a belief that our efficiency would be increased were a kindly providence to dower us with wings. It may be, though I doubt it, that the advocates of the day school are in the right, that under such a system of education immorality and the blood system would pass. But it is for us to discover some method by which the existing system may be so modified as to produce of itself the required change.
Now it is very tempting for a controversialist, when he has completed the arraignment of his enemies, to slip hastily over the policy he himself proposes to adopt. I wonder how many letters have been addressed to the press during the last seven years in which the writer, having stated in strong terms the calamities to which a certain line of thought or policy has reduced the country, has demanded in a final paragraph that 'something should be done before it is too late.' He suggests perhaps a 'change of spirit.'
It is a good weapon that 'change of spirit.' We can all of us, when occasion demands, indulge in spirited invective; we can all detect numberless flaws and inequalities in the existing social system. Why, for instance, does our income run to three instead of to four figures. Why are we paying away a third of that small sum in income-tax? The flow of indignation is swift, and by the time we have written our 950 words, it is not hard to devote the remaining '50' to a general appeal for 'some one to do something before it is too late.' Every contributor to the press has saved his argument like that some time or another. And, in the case of Public Schools, the trouble is that we can do little save repeat the parrot cry of 'a change of spirit.' For it is 'a change of spirit' more than anything else that is needed.
We are kept wondering, however, how that change is to be effected. S. P. B. Mais used to say that 'Literature would save us.' But literature is only a part of life, one channel of self-expression, and in the case of Mr. Mais one is troubled by the knowledge that he, himself, is in many ways the ideal schoolmaster. He has a genius for teaching. He happens to have taught literature and mathematics, and because he taught them so successfully he has imagined that they are the panacea. He is too modest to realise any subject that he taught would have assumed the qualities of a panacea, that it was he and not his subject that was important. He could rouse his form, if he wished, to a high pitch of enthusiasm by a lecture on the properties of Cherry Boot Polish. But 'he is alone, the Arabian Bird.'
Martin Browne suggests religion. And, no doubt, for the truly religious boy many of the difficulties of school life would be smoothed out. Unfortunately, however, religion plays, and will play, a small part in a boy's life at school. A boy has been told to believe certain things by his parents, and he has accepted these beliefs unquestioningly and without enthusiasm. They have not been tested by experience. They are not real to him. Religion, in its truest form, rises out of the conflict of a man's life. Faith is subconscious thought. I do not think you can expect the average small boy to be deeply influenced by religion. His religion, if he has one, is an unswerving devotion to his house and school. He would be ready to sacrifice himself for what he considered to be the school's service.
Forty years ago a captain of my old house died after a kick on the head received in the Three Cock, the big house match of the year. The brass on the chapel wall which is dedicated to his memory,—