The Upton Letters - Arthur Christopher Benson (learn to read books TXT) 📗

comes the perennial difficulty of schoolboy honour; the one unforgivable offence is to communicate anything to masters; and an innocent-minded boy whose natural inclination to purity gave way before perpetual temptation and even compulsion might be thought to have erred, but would have scanty, if any, expression of either sympathy or pity from other boys; while if he breathed the least hint of his miserable position to a master and the fact came out, he would be universally scouted.

This is a horrible fact to contemplate; yet it cannot be cured by enactment, only from within. It is strange that in this respect it is entirely unlike the code of the world. No girl or woman would be scouted for appealing to police protection in similar circumstances; no man would be required to submit to violence or even to burglary; no reprobation would fall upon him if he appealed to the law to help him.

Is it not possible to encourage something of this feeling in a school? Is it not possible, without violating schoolboy honour, which is in many ways a fine and admirable thing, to allow the possibility of an appeal to protection for the young and weak against vile temptations? It seems to me that it would be best if we could get the boys to organise such a system among themselves. But to take no steps to arrive at such an organisation, and to leave matters severely alone, is a very dark responsibility to bear.

It is curious to note that in the matter of bullying and cruelty, which used to be so rife at schools, public opinion among boys does seem to have undergone a change. The vice has practically disappeared, and the good feeling of a school would be generally against any case of gross bullying; but the far more deadly and insidious temptation of impurity has, as far as one can learn, increased. One hears of simply heart-rending cases where a boy dare not even tell his parents of what he endures. Then, too, a boy's relations will tend to encourage him to hold out, rather than to invoke a master's aid, because they are afraid of the boy falling under the social ban.

This is the heaviest burden a schoolmaster has to bear; to be responsible for his boys, and to be held responsible, and yet to be probably the very last person to whom the information of what is happening can possibly come.

One great difficulty seems to be that boys will only, as a rule, combine for purposes of evil. In matters of virtue a boy has to act for himself; and I confess, too, with a sigh, that a set of virtuous boys banding themselves together to resist evil and put it down has an alarmingly priggish sound.

The most that a man can do at present, it seems to me, is to have good sensible servants; to be vigilant and discreet; to try and cultivate a paternal relation with all his boys; to try and make the bigger boys feel some responsibility in the matter; but the worst of it is that the subject is so unpleasant that many masters dare not speak of it at all; and excuse themselves by saying that they don't want to put ideas into boys' heads. I cannot conscientiously believe that a man who has been through a big public school himself can honestly be afraid of that. But we all seem to be so much afraid of each other, of public opinion, of possible unpopularity, that we find excuses for letting a painful thing alone.

But to leave this part of the subject, which is often a kind of nightmare to me, and to return to my former point; I do honestly think it a great misfortune that we tend to produce a type. It seems to me that to aim at independence, to know one's own mind, to form one's own ideas--liberty, in short--is one of the most sacred duties in life. It is not only a luxury in which a few can indulge, it ought to be a quality which every one should be encouraged to cultivate. I declare that it makes me very sad sometimes to see these well-groomed, well-mannered, rational, manly boys all taking the same view of things, all doing the same things, smiling politely at the eccentricity of any one who finds matter for serious interest in books, in art or music: all splendidly reticent about their inner thoughts, with a courteous respect for the formalities of religion and the formalities of work; perfectly correct, perfectly complacent, with no irregularities or angular preferences of their own; with no admiration for anything but athletic success, and no contempt for anything but originality of ideas. They are so nice, so gentlemanly, so easy to get on with; and yet, in another region, they are so dull, so unimaginative, so narrow-minded. They cannot all, of course, be intellectual or cultivated; but they ought to be more tolerant, more just, more wise. They ought to be able to admire vigour and enthusiasm in every department instead of in one or two; and it is we who ought to make them feel so, and we have already got too much to do--though I am afraid that you will think, after reading this vast document, that I, at all events, have plenty of spare time. But it is not the case; only the end of the half is at hand; we have finished our regular work, and I have done my reports, and am waiting for a paper. When you next hear I shall be a free man. I shall spend Easter quietly here; but I have so much to do and clear off that I probably shall not be able to write until I have set off on my travels.--Ever yours,

T. B.


THE RED DRAGON, COMPTON FEREDAY, April 10, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I was really too busy to write last week, but I am going to try and make up for it. This letter is going to be a diary. Expect more of it.--T. B.

April 7.--I find myself, after all, compelled to begin my walking tour alone. At the last moment Murchison has thrown me over. His father is ill, and he is compelled to spend his holidays at home. I do not altogether like to set off by myself, but it is too late to try and arrange for another companion. I had rather, however, go by myself than with some one who is not absolutely congenial. One requires on these occasions to have a companion whose horizon is the same as one's own. I daresay I could find an old friend, who is not also a colleague, to go with me, but it would mean a certain amount of talk to bring us into line. Then, too, I have had a very busy term; besides my form work, I have had a good deal of extra teaching to do with the Army Class boys. It is interesting work, for the boys are interested, not in the subjects so much, as in mastering them for examination purposes. Yet it matters little how the interest is obtained, as long as the boys believe in the usefulness of what they are doing. But the result is that I am tired out. I have lived with boys from morning to night, and my spare time has been taken up with working at my subjects. I have had hardly any exercise, and but a scanty allowance of sleep. Now I mean to have both. I shall spend my days in the open air, and I shall sleep, I hope, like a top at nights. Gradually I shall recover my power of enjoyment; for the worst of such weeks as I have been passing through is that they leave one dreary and jaded; one finds oneself in that dull mood when one cannot even realise beautiful things. I hear a thrush sing in a bush, or the sunset flames broadly behind the elms, and I say to myself, "That is very beautiful if only I could feel it to be so!" Boys are exhausting companions--they are so restless, so full-blooded, so pitilessly indifferent, so desperately interested in the narrow round of school life; and I have the sort of temperament that will efface itself to any extent, if only the people that I am concerned with will be content. I suppose it is a feeble trait, and that the best schoolmasters have a magnetic influence over boys which makes the boys interested in the master's subjects, or at least hypnotises them into an appearance of interest. I cannot do that. It is like a leaden weight upon me if I feel that a class is bored; the result is that I arrive at the same end in my own way. I have learnt a kind of sympathy with boys; I know by instinct what will interest them, or how to put a tiresome thing in an interesting way.

But I shudder to think how sick I am of it all! I want a long bath of silence and recollection and repose. I want to fill my cistern again with my own thoughts and my own dreams, instead of pumping up the muddy waters of irrigation. I don't think my colleagues are like that. I sate with half-a-dozen of them last night at supper. They were full of all they meant to do. Two of the most energetic were going off to play golf, and the chief pleasure of the place they were going to was that it was possible to get a round on Sundays; they were going to fill the evening with bridge, and one of them said with heart-felt satisfaction, "I am only going to take two books away with me--one on golf and the other on bridge--and I am going to cure some of my radical faults." I thought to myself that if he had forborne to mention the subjects of his books, one might have supposed that they would be a Thomas-a-Kempis and a Taylor's Holy Living, and then how well it would have seemed! Two more were going for a rapid tour abroad in a steamer chartered for assistant masters. That seemed to me to be almost more depressing. They were going to ancient historical places, full of grave and beautiful associations; places to go to, it seemed to me, with some single like-minded associate, places to approach with leisurely and untroubled mind, with no feeling of a programme or a time-table--and least of all in the company of busy professional people with an academical cicerone.

Still, I suppose that this is true devotion to one's profession. They will be able, they think, to discourse easily and, God help us, picturesquely about what they have seen, to intersperse a Thucydides lesson with local colour, and to describe the site of the temple of Delphi to boys beginning the Eumenides. It is very right and proper, no doubt, but it produces in me a species of mental nausea to think of the conditions under which these impressions will be absorbed. The arrangements for luncheon, the brisk interchange of shop, the cheery comments of fellow-tradesmen, the horrible publicity and banality of the whole affair!

My two other colleagues were going, one to spend a holiday at Brighton--which he said was very bracing at Easter, adding that he expected to fall in with some fellows he knew. They will all stroll on the Parade, smoke cigarettes together, and adjourn for a game of billiards. No doubt a very harmless way of passing the time, but not to me enlivening. But Walters is a conventional person, and, as long as he is doing what he would call "the correct thing,"