Lore of Proserpine

  THE GODS IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE

  Who am I to treat of the private affairs of my betters, to evoke yourfragrant names, Felicite, Perpetua, loves of my tender youth? Shall Iforget thee, Emilia, thy slow smile and peering brown eyes of mischiefor appeal? Rosy Lauretta, or thee, whom I wooed desperately from afar,lured by thy buxom wellbeing, thy meek and schooled replies? And if Iforget you not, how shall I explore you as maladies, trace out thestages of your conquest as if you were spores? Never, never. Worshipwent up from me to you, and worship is religion, and religion issacred. So, my dears, were you, each of you in your turn, sacred inyour shrines. Before each of you in turn I fell down, suddenly, "_Comecorpo morto cadde_." And to each of you in turn I devoted those wakinghours which fancy had hitherto claimed of me. Yet this I do feel freeto say, by leave of you ladies, that calf-love has not the educativevalue of the genuine passion. It is blind worship by instinct; it is asign of awakening sense, but it is not its awakener. It is a lovelything as all quick or burning growth is, but it has little relationto the soul, and our Northern state is the more gracious thatconsummation of it is not feasible. Apart from the very obviousdrawbacks there is one not quite so obvious: I mean the earlyexhaustion of imaginative sympathy. Love, indeed, is an affair ofmaturity. I don't believe that a man, in this country, can love beforeforty or a woman before thirty-five. They may marry before that andhave children; and they will love their children, but very rarely eachother. I am thinking now of love at its highest rating, as thatpassion which is able to lift a man to the highest flight of which thesoul is capable here on earth--a flight, mind you, which it may takewithout love, as the poet's takes it, or the musician's, but which theordinary man's can only take by means of love. Calf-love is wholly asex matter, perfectly natural, mostly harmless, and nearly always abeautiful thing, to be treated tenderly by the wise parent.

  In my own case my mother treated it so, with a tact and a reverentialhandling which only good women know, and I had it as I had mumps andmeasles, badly, with a high temperature and some delirium but with noaggravation from outside. It ran its course or its courses and left mesane. One of its effects upon me was that it diverted the mind of myforensic self from the proceedings or aptitudes of my recondite. Ineither knew nor cared what my wayward tenant might be doing; indeed,so much was my natural force concerned in the heart-affair of themoment that the other wretch within me lay as it were bound in adungeon. He never saw the light. The sun to him was dark and silentwas the moon. There, in fact, he remained for some five or six years,while sex pricked its way into me intent upon the making of a man. He,maybe, was to have something to say to that, something to do withit--but not yet.

  So much for calf-love; but now for a more important matter. I left theGrammar School at S----, at the age when boys usually go to theirHarrow and Winchester, as well equipped, I daresay, as most boys of myyears; for with the rudiments I had been fairly diligent, and withsome of them even had become expert. I was well grounded in Latin andFrench grammar, and in English literature was far ahead of boys mucholder than myself. Looking back now upon the drilling I had at S----,I consider it was well done; but I have to set against the benefits Igot from the system the fact that I had much privacy and all thechance which that gives a boy to educate himself withal. My schoolhours limited my intercourse with the school world. Before and afterthem I could develop at my own pace and in my own way--and I did. Ibelieve that when I went to my great school I had the makings of aninteresting lad in me; but I declare upon my conscience that it wasthat place only which checked the promise for ten years or more, andmight have withered it altogether.

  My father was an idealist of 1851; he showed the enthusiasm and nursedin his bosom the hopes and beliefs of the promoters of theInternational Exhibition of that year. There was a plentiful plantingof foreign stock in England after that, and one of its weedy saplingswas an International Education Company, which out of a magniloquentprospectus and some too-confident shareholders bore one fruit, theLondon International College at Spring Grove. It never came tomaturity, and is now dropped and returned to the ground of all suchschemes. I suppose it had been on the stalk some fifteen years when Iwent to feed of it.

  The scheme, in fact, sprang out of enthusiasm and had no bottom inexperience. It may be true that all men are brothers, but it is notlogical to infer from that that all brothers are the better for eachother's society. The raw Brazilians, Chilians, Nicaraguans and whatnot who were drawn from their native forests and plunged into thecompany of blockish Yorkshire lads, or sharp-faced London boys, wereonly scared into rebellion and to demonstration after their manner.They used the knife sometimes; they hardly ever assimilated; and theytaught us nothing that we were the better of knowing. Quite thecontrary. We taught them football, I think, and I remember a negrofrom Bermuda, a giant of a fellow who raged over the ground like agoaded bull when that game was being played, to the consternation ofhis opponents. He had a younger brother with inordinately long arms,like a great lax ape, a cheerful, grinning, harmless creature as Iremember him. He was a football player too; his hug was that of anoctopus which swallowed you all. As for the English, in return fortheir football lore they received the gift of tobacco. I learned tosmoke at fifteen from a Chilian called Perez, a wizened,preternaturally wise, old youth. Nobody in the world could have beenwise as he looked, and nobody else in the school as dull as he reallywas. Over this motley assembly was set as house-master a ferociousScotchman of great parts, but no discretion; and there wereassistants, too, of scholarship and refinement, who, if they had hadthe genius for education, without which these things are nothing,might have put humanity into some of us. When it was past the time Idiscovered this, and one of them became my friend and helper. I thendiscovered the tragedy of our system from the other side. For thepain is a two-edged sword, and imbrues the breast of the pedagogueeven while it bleeds the pupil to inanition. That poor man, scholar,gentleman, humourist, poet, as he was, held boys in terror. Hemisdoubted them; they made him self-conscious, betrayed him intostrange hidden acts of violence, rendered him incapable of instructionexcept of the most conventional kind. All his finer nature, hishumanism, was paralysed. We thought him a poor fool, and got a crudeentertainment out of his antics. Actually he was tormenting in aflame; and we thought his contortions ridiculous. God help us all, howare we to get at each other, caged creatures as we are! But this isindeed a tragic business, and I don't want you to tear your hair.

  I remained at Spring Grove, I think, four or five years, a barren,profitless time. I remember scarcely one gleam of interest whichpierced for more than a few moments the thick gloom of it. The cruel,dull, false gods of English convention (for thought it is not) held mefast; masters and pupils alike were jailers to me. I ate and drank oftheir provision and can recall still with nausea the sour, staletaste, and still choke with the memory of the chaff and grit of itsquality. Accursed, perverse generation! God forbid that any child ofmine should suffer as I suffered, starve as I starved, stray where Iwas driven to stray. The English boarding-school system is that of thestraw-yard where colts are broken by routine, and again of thefarmyard where pups are walked. Drill in school, _laissez-faire_ outof it. It is at once too dull and too indolent to recognise characteror even to look for it; it recks nothing of early development or late;it measures young humanity for its class-rooms like a tailor, with theyard measure. The discipline of boy over boy is, as might be expected,brutal or bestial. The school-yard is taken for the world in small,and so allowed to be. There is no thought taken, or at least betrayed,that it is nothing more than a preparation for the world at large.There is no reason, however, to suppose that the International Collegewas worse than any other large boarding-school. I fancy, indeed, thatit was in all points like the rest. There were no traces in my time ofthe Brotherhood of Man about it. A few Portuguese, a negro or two werethere, and a multitude of Jews. But I fancy I should have found thesame sort of thing at Eton.

  I was not in any sense suited to such a place as this; if I had been
sent to travel it had been better for me. I was "difficult," notbecause I was stiff but because I was lax. I resisted nothing exceptby inertia. If my parents did not know me--and how should they?--if Idid not know myself, and I did not, my masters, for their part, madeno attempt to know me nor even inquired whether there might beanything to know. I was unpopular, as might have been expected, madeno friends, did no good. My brother, on the other hand, was an idealschoolboy, diligent, brisk, lovable, abounding in friendships, good athis work and excellent at his play. His career at Spring Grove was onelong happy triumph, and he deserved it. He has a charming nature, andis one of the few naturally holy persons I know. Wholesome, thank God,we all are, or could be; pious we nearly all are; but holiness is arare quality.

  If I were to try and set down here the really happy memories which Ihave of Spring Grove they would be three. The first was the revelationof Greece which was afforded me by Homer and Plato. The surging musicand tremendous themes of the poet, the sweet persuasion of the sophistwere a wonder and delight. I remember even now the thrill with which Iheard my form-master translate for us the prayer with which the_Phaedrus_ closes: "Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt thisplace...." Beloved Pan! My knowledge of Pan was of the vaguest, andyet more than once or twice did I utter that prayer wandering alonethe playing field, or watching the evening mist roll down the ThamesValley and blot up the elm trees, thick and white, clinging to the daylike a fleece. The third Iliad again I have never forgotten, nor thetwenty-fourth; nor the picture of the two gods, like vulture birds,watching the battle from the dead tree. Nor, again, do I ever fail torecapture the beat of the heart with which I apprehended some ofHomer's phrases: "Sandy Pylos," Argos "the pasture land of horses," or"clear-seen" Ithaca. These things happened upon by chance in the dustyclass-room, in the close air of that terrible hour from two to three,were as the opening of shutters to the soul, revealing blue distances,dim fields, or the snowy peaks of mountains in the sun. One seemed tolift, one could forget. It lasted but an instant; but time is of noaccount to the inner soul, of no more account than it is to God. Ihave never forgotten these moments of escape; nor can I leave Homerwithout confessing that his books became my Bible. I accepted histheology implicitly; I swallowed it whole. The Godhead of theOlympians, the lesser divinity of Thetis and Alpheios and Xanthos wereindisputable. They were infinitely more real to me than the deities ofmy own land; and though I have found room for these later on in life,it has not been by displacing the others. Nor is there any need forthat, so far as I see. I say that out of Homer I took his Gods; I addthat I took them instantly. I seemed to breathe the air of theirbreath; they appealed to my reason; I knew that they had existed anddid still exist. I was not shocked or shaken in my faith, either, byanything I read about them. Young as I was and insipient, I wasprepared for what is called the burlesque Olympus of the Iliad, sogrievous to Professor Murray. I think I recognised then, what seemsperfectly plain to me now, that you might as well think meanly of aGod of Africa because the natives make him of a cocoanut on a stick,as of Zeus and Hera because Homer says that they played peccanthusband and jealous wife. If Homer halted it is rash to assume thatHephaistos did. The pathetic fallacy has crept in here. Mythology wasone of the few subjects I diligently read at school, and all I got outof it was pure profit--for I realised that the Gods' world was notours, and that when their natures came in conflict with ours some suchinterpretation must always be put upon their victory. We have a morallaw for our mutual wellbeing which they have not. We translate theirdeeds in terms of that law of ours, and it certainly appears like astanding fact of Nature that when the beings of one order come intocommerce with those of another the result will be tragic. There isonly a harmony in acquiescence, and the way to that is one of bloodand tears.

  Brooding over all this I discerned dimly, even in that dusty, brawlingplace, and time showed me more and more clearly, that I had alwaysbeen aware of the Gods and conscious of their omnipresence. It seemedplain to me that Zeus, whose haunt is dark Dodona, lorded it over theEnglish skies and was to be heard in the thunder crashing over theelms of Middlesex. I knew Athene in the shrill wind which battledthrough the vanes and chimneys of our schoolhouse. Artemis was Lady ofmy country. By Apollo's light might I too come to be led. Poseidon ofthe dark locks girdled my native seas. I had had good reason to knowthe awfulness of Pan, and guessed that some day I should couch withKore the pale Queen. I called them by these names, since these namesexpressed to me their essence: you may call them what you will, and somight I, for I had not then reasoned with myself about names. By theirnames I knew them. The Gods were there, indeed, ignorantly worshippedby all and sundry. Then the Dryad of my earlier experience came upagain, and I saw that she stood in such a relation to the Gods as Idid, perhaps, to the Queen of England; that she, no less than they,was part of a wonderful order, and the visible expression of thespirit of some Natural Fact. But whether above all the Gods andnations of men and beasts there were one God and Father of us all,whether all Nature were one vast synthesis of Spirit havinginnumerable appearance but one soul, I did not then stay to inquire,and am not now prepared to say. I don't mean by that at all that Idon't believe it. I do believe it, but by an act of religion; forthere are states of the individual mind, states of impersonal soul inwhich this belief is a positive truth, in the which one exults madly,or by it is humbled to the dust. Religion, to my mind, is the resultof this consciousness of kinship with the principle of Life; all theemotion and moral uplifting involved in this tremendous certainty, andall the lore gathered and massed about it--this is Religion. Young asI was at the time I now speak of, ignorant and dumb as I was, I had mymoments of exultation and humility,--moments so wild that I wastransported out of myself. I left my body supine in its narrow bed andsoared above the stars. At such times, in an aether so deep that theblue of it looked like water, I seemed to see the Gods themselves, ashining row of them, upon the battlements of Heaven. I called HeavenOlympus, and conceived of Olympus as a towered city upon a white hill.Looming up out of the deep blue arch, it was vast and covered thewhole plateau: I saw the walls of it run up and down the ridges, inand out of the gorges which cut into the mass. It had gates, but Inever saw forms of any who entered or left it. It was full of light,and had the look of habitancy about it; but I saw no folk. Only atrare moments of time while I hovered afar off looking at the wonderand radiance of it, the Gods appeared above the battlements in ashining row--still and awful, each of them ten feet high.

  These were fine dreams for a boy of sixteen in a schoolhousedormitory. They were mine, though: but I dreamed them awake. I awokebefore they began, always, and used to sit up trembling and wait forthem.

  An apologue, if you please. On the sacred road from Athens to Eleusis,about midway of its course, and just beyond the pass, there is a forkin it, and a stony path branches off and leads up into the hills.There, in the rock, is a shallow cave, and before that, where once wasan altar of Aphrodite, the ruins of her shrine and precinct may beseen. As I was going to Eleusis the other day, I stopped the carriageto visit the place. Now, beside the cave is a niche, cut square in theface of the rock, for offerings; and in that niche I found a freshbunch of field flowers, put there by I know not what dusty-footwayfarer. That was no longer ago than last May, and the man who didthe piety was a Christian, I suppose. So do I avow myself, withoutderogation, I hope, to the profession; for no more than Mr. RobertKirk, a minister of religion in Scotland in the seventeenth century,do I consider that a knowledge of the Gods is incompatible with beliefin God. There is a fine distinction for you: I believe that Godexists; I infer him by reason stimulated by desire. But I know thatthe Gods exist by other means than those. If I could be as sure of Godas I am of the Gods, I might perhaps be a better Christian, but Ishould not believe any less in the Gods.

  * * * * *

  I found religion through Homer: I found poetry through Milton, whose_Comus_ we had to read for examination by some learned Board. If anyone thing definitely c
ommitted me to poesy it was that poem; and ashas nearly always happened to me, the crisis of discovery came in aflash. We were all there ranked at our inky desks on some drowsyafternoon. The books lay open before us, the lesson, I suppose,prepared. But what followed had not been prepared--that some one beganto read:

  "The star that bids the shepherd fold Now the top of Heav'n doth hold; And the gilded car of day His glowing axle doth allay In the steep Atlantic stream"--

  and immediately, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, it waschanged--for me--from verse to poetry; that is, from a jingle to asignificant fact. It was more than it appeared; it was transfigured;its implication was manifest. That's all I can say--except this, that,untried as I was, I jumped into the poetic skin of the thing, and feltas if I had written it. I knew all about it, "_e'l chi, e'l quale_"; Iwas privy to its intricacy; I caught without instruction thealternating beat in the second line, and savoured all the good words,_gilded car_, _glowing axle_, _Star that bids the shepherd fold_._Allay_ ravished me, young as I was. I knew why he had called theAtlantic stream _steep_, and remembered Homer's "[Greek: Stugoshudatos aipa rheethra]." Good soul, our pedagogue suggested _deep_! Iremember to this hour the sinking of the heart with which I heard him.But the flash passed and darkness again gathered about me, the normaldarkness of those hateful days. "Sabrina fair" lifted it; my skyshowed me an amber shaft. I am recording moments, the reader willremember, the few gleams which visited me in youth. I was far from thetime when I could connect them, see that poetry was the vesture ofreligion, the woven garment whereby we see God. Love had to teach methat. I was not born until I loved.

  My third happy memory is of a brief and idyllic attachment, veryfervent, very romantic, entirely my own, and as I remember it, now,entirely beautiful. Nothing remains but the fragrance of it, and itsdream-like quality, the sense I have of straying with the belovedthrough a fair country. Such things assure me that I was not whollydead during those crushing years of servitude.

  But those are, as I say, gleams out of the dark. They comfort me withthe thought that the better part of me was not dead, but buried herewith the worse. They point also to the truth, as I take it to be, thatthe lack of privacy is one of the most serious detriments ofpublic-school life. I don't say that privacy is good for all boys, orthat it is good for any unless they are provided with a pursuit. It istrue that many boys seek to be private that they may be vicious, andthat the having the opportunity for privacy leads to vice. But that isnearly always the fault of the masters. Vice is due to the need formental or material excitement; it is a crude substitute for romance.If a boy is debarred from good romance, because he doesn't feel it orhasn't been taught to feel it, he will take to bad. It is nothing elseat all: he is bored. And remembering that a boy can only think of onething at a time, the single aim of the master should be to give everyboy in his charge some sane interest which he can pursue to the death,as a terrier chases a smell, in and out, up and down, every nerve bentand quivering. There is a problem of the teaching art which theCollege at Spring Grove made no attempt to solve while I was there.You either played football and cricket or you were negligible. I wasbad at both, was negligible, and neglected.

  I suspect that my experiences are very much those of other people, andthat is why I have taken the trouble to articulate them, and perhapsto make them out more coherent than they were. We don't feel in imagesor think in words. The images are about us, the words may be at hand;but it may well be that we are better without them. This world is atight fit, and life in it, as the Duke said of one day of his ownlife, is "a devilish close-run thing." If the blessed Gods and thelegions of the half-gods in their habit as they live, were to be asclear to us as our neighbour Tom or our chief at the office, whatmight be the lot of Tom's wife, or what the security of our high stoolat the desk? As things are, our blank misgivings are put down tonerves, our yearning for wings to original sin. The policeman at thestreet corner sees to it, for our good, that we put out of sight thesethings, and so we grow rich and make a good appearance. It is onlywhen we are well on in years that we can afford to be precise and,looking back, to remember the celestial light, the glory and thefreshness of the dream in which we walked and bathed ourselves.