At Large - Arthur Christopher Benson (readict TXT) 📗

as much gifts as any other gifts of intellect and bodily skill. How often has one seen boys who are immodest, idle, frivolous, mean-spirited, and ungenerous attain to the opposite virtues? Not often, I confess. Who does not know of abundant instances of boys who have been selfish, worthless, grasping, unprincipled, who have yet achieved success intellectually and athletically, and have also done well for themselves, amassed money, and obtained positions for themselves in after life. Looking back on my own school days, I cannot honestly say that the prizes of life have fallen to the pure-minded, affectionate, high-principled boys. The boys I remember who have achieved conspicuous success in the world have been hard-hearted, prudent, honourable characters with a certain superficial bonhomie, who by a natural instinct did the things that paid. Stripped of its rhetoric, the Bishop's address resolved itself into a panegyric of success, and the morality of it was that if you could not achieve intellectual and athletic prominence, you might get a certain degree of credit by unostentatious virtue. What I felt was that somehow the goal proposed was--dare I hint it?--a vulgar one; that it was a glorification of prudence and good-humoured self-interest; and yet if the Bishop had preached the gospel of disinterestedness and quiet faithfulness and devotion, he would have had few enthusiastic hearers. If he had said that an awkward and surly manner, no matter what virtues it concealed, was the greatest bar to ultimate mundane success, it would have been quite true, though perhaps not particularly edifying. But what I desired was not startling paradox or cynical comment, but something more really manly, more just, more unconventional, more ardent, more disinterested. The boys were not exhorted to care for beautiful things for the sake of their beauty; but to care for attractive things for the sake of their acceptability.

And yet in a way it did us all good to listen to the great man. He was so big and kindly and fatherly and ingenuous; he had made virtue pay; I do not suppose he had ever had a low or an impure or a spiteful thought; but his path had been easy from the first; he was a scholar and an athlete, and he had never pursued success, for the simple reason that it had fallen from heaven like manna round about his dwelling, with perhaps a few dozen quails as well! Boys, parents, masters, young and old alike, were assembled that day to worship success, and the Bishop prophesied good concerning them. It entered no one's head that success, in its simplest analysis, means thrusting some one else aside from a place which he desires to fill. But why on such a day should one think of the feelings of others? we were all bent on virtuously gratifying our own desires. The boys who were left out were the weak and the timid, the ailing and the erring, the awkward and the unpopular, the clumsy and the stupid; they were not bidden to take courage, they were rather bidden to envy the unattainable, and to submit with such grace as they could muster. But we pushed all such vague and unsatisfactory thoughts in the background; we sounded the clarion and filled the fife, and were at case in Zion, while we worshipped the great, brave, glittering world.

What I desired was that, in the height of our jubilant self-gratulation, some sweet and gracious figure, full of heavenly wisdom, could have twitched the gaudy curtain aside for a moment and shown us other things than these; who could have assured us that we all, however stupid and dreary and awkward and indolent, however vexed with low dreams and ugly temptations, yet had our share and place in the rich inheritance of life; and that even if it was to be all a record of dull failure, commonplace sinfulness cheered by no joyful triumph, no friendly smile--yet if we fought the fault and did the dull task faithfully, and desired to be but a little better, a little stronger, a little more unselfish, that the pilgrimage with all its sandy tracts and terrifying spectres would not be traversed in vain; and then I think we might have been brought together with a sense of sweeter and truer unity, and might have thought of life as a thing to be shared, and joy as a thing to be lavished, and not have rather conceived of the world as a place full of fine things, of which we were all to gather sedulously as many as we could grasp and retain.

Or even if the good Bishop had taken a simpler line and told the boys some old story, like the story of Polycrates of Samos, I should have been more comfortable. Polycrates was the tyrant with whom everything went well that he set his hand to, so that to avoid the punishment of undue prosperity he threw his great signet-ring into the sea; but when he was served a day or two later with a slice of fish at his banquet, there was the ring sticking in its ribs. The Bishop might have said that this should teach us not to try and seize all the good things we could, and that the reason of it was not, as the old Greeks thought, that the gods envied the prosperity of mortals, but that our prosperity was often dashed very wisely and tenderly from our lips, because one of the worst foes that a man can have, one of the most blinding and bewildering of faults, is the sense of self-sufficiency and security. That would not have spoilt the pleasure of those brisk boys, but would have given them something wholesome to take away and think about, like the prophet's roll that was sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly.

It may be thought that I have thus dilated on the Bishop's address for the sole purpose of showing what a much better address I could have made. That is not the case at all. I could not have done the thing at all to start with, and, given both the nerve and the presence and the practice of the man, I could not have done it a quarter as well, because he was in tune with his audience and I should not have been. That was to me part of the tragedy. The Bishop's voice fell heavily and steadily, like a stream of water from a great iron pipe that fills a reservoir. The audience, too, were all in the most elementary mood. Boys of course frankly desire success without any disguise. And parents less frankly but no less hungrily, in an almost tigerish way, desire it for their children. The intensity of belief felt by a parent in a stupid or even vicious boy would be one of the most pathetic things I know, if it were not also one of the primal forces of the world.

And thus the tide being high the Bishop went into harbour at the top of the flood. I don't even complain of the nature of the address; it was frankly worldly, such as might have been given by a Sadducee in the time of Christ. But the interesting thing about it was that most of the people present believed it to be an ethical and even a religious address. It was the ethic of a professional bowler and the religion of a banker. If a boy had been for all intents and purposes a professional bowler to the age of twenty-three, and a professional banker afterwards, he would almost exactly have fulfilled the Bishop's ideal. I do not think it is a bad ideal either. I only say that it is not an exalted ideal, and it is not a Christian ideal. It is the world in disguise, the wolf in sheep's clothing over again. We were taken in. We said to ourselves, "This is an animal certainly clothed as a sheep--and we must remember the old proverb and be careful." But as the Bishop's address proceeded, and the fragrant oil fell down to the skirts of our clothing, we said, "There is certainly a sheep inside."

Then a choir of strong, rough, boyish voices sang an old glee or two--"Glorious Apollo" and "Hail smiling Morn," and a school song about the old place that made some of us bite our lips and furtively brush away an unexpected and inexplicable moisture from our eyes, at the thought of the fine fellows we had ourselves sat side by side with thirty and forty years ago, now scattered to all ends of the earth, and some of them gone from the here to the everywhere, as the poet says. And then we adjourned to see the School Corps inspected--such solemn little soldiers, marching past in their serviceable uniforms, the line rising and falling with the inequalities of the ground, and bowing out a good deal in the centre, at the very moment that the good-natured old Colonel was careful to look the other way. Then there was a leisurely game of cricket, with a lot of very old boys playing with really amazing agility; and then I fell in with an old acquaintance, and we strolled about together, and got a friendly master to show us over the schoolrooms and one of the houses, and admired the excellent arrangements, and peeped into some studies crowded with pleasant boyish litter, and talked to some of the boys with an attempt at light juvenility, and enjoyed ourselves in a thoroughly absurd and leisurely fashion. And then I was left alone, and walking about, abandoned myself to sentiment pure and simple; it was hard to analyse that feeling which was stirred by the sight of all those fresh-faced boys, flowing like a stream through the old buildings, and just leaving their own little mark, for good or evil, on the place--a painted name on an Honours board, initials cut in desk or panel, a memory or two, how soon to grow dim in the minds of the new generation, who would be so full of themselves and of the present, turning the sweet-scented manuscript of youth with such eager fingers, that they could give but little thought to the future and none at all to the past. And then one remembered, with a curious sense of wistful pain, how rapidly the cards of life were being dealt out to one, and how long it was since one had played the card of youth so heedlessly and joyfully away; that at least could not return. And then there came the thought of all the hope and love that centred upon these children, and all the possibilities which lay before them. And I began to think of my own contemporaries and of how little on the whole they had done; it was not fair perhaps to say that most of them had made a mess of their lives, because they were honest, honourable citizens many of them. It was not the poor thing called success that I was thinking of, but a sort of high-hearted and generous dealing with life, making the most of one's faculties and qualities, diffusing a glow of love and enthusiasm and brave zest about one--how few of us had done that! We had grown indolent and money-loving and commonplace. Some of those we looked to to redeem and glorify the world had failed most miserably, through unchecked faults of temperament. Some had declined with a sort of unambitious comfort, some had fallen into the trough of Toryism, and spent their time in holding fast to conventional and established things; one or two had flown like Icarus so near the sun that their waxen wings had failed them; and yet some of us had missed greatness by so little. Was it to be always so? Was it always