The Lighter Side of School Life by Ian Hay (important books to read txt) 📗

[209]

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 gods and worships them without assistance. Now the primitive mind recognises two kinds of god—lovable gods and gods which must be squared. Class A are worshipped from sheer admiration and reverence, because they are good and "able" gods, capable of godlike achievements. To Class 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 worshippers do not hesitate to sacrifice one another. So it is with the schoolboy. Class A consists of the gods he admires, Class B of the gods he is afraid of.

First, Class A.

What a boy admires most of all is ability—ability to do things, naturally and spontaneously. He worships bodily strength, bodily grace, swiftness of foot, straightness of eye, dashing courage, and ability to handle a bat or gun, or control the movements of a ball, with dexterity[210] 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[211] dreadfully unpopular winner. To an Englishman, a real hero is a man who wins a championship 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 scholarship—as opposed to hard work. If you come out top of your form, or gain an entrance scholarship 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 attitude 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!...[212] 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 Scholarship, and has done it—in the eyes of the School—with one hand tied behind him. But Scholarships 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 attitude 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[213] 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 assembly 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 passage 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[214] 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 Class. 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