Ian Hay

“ Arthur Robinson was out of the room for perhaps three minutes. When he returned he was immediately conscious, from the guilty stillness which reigned, and the self-conscious air of detachment with which everybody was writing, that something was amiss. He glanced sharply at the little pile of money on his desk.
It had grown from fourteen-and-ninepence to twenty-seven-and-sixpence.
Life is full of compensations—even for schoolmasters. ”

“ The schoolboy's point of view is perfectly reasonable and intelligible. "I am lazy and scatterbrained," he says in effect. "I have not as yet developed the power of concentration, and I have no love of knowledge for its own sake. Still, I have no rooted objection to education, as such, and I suppose I must learn something in order to earn a living. But I am much too busy, as a growing animal, to have any energy left for intellectual enterprise. It is the business of my teacher to teach me. To put the matter coarsely, he is paid for it. ”

“ The chief bar to its smooth running is the inherent loyalty of boys to one another and their dislike of anything which savours of tale-bearing. Schoolboys have no love for those who go out of their way to support the arm of the Law, and a prefect naturally shrinks from being branded as a master's jackal. Hence, that ideal—a perfect understanding between a Housemaster and his prefects—is seldom achieved. What usually happens is that when the Housemaster is autocratically inclined he runs the House himself, while the prefects are mere lay figures ”

“ A book of this kind reproduces the spirit of the moment, often with surprising fidelity; but after all it is only the spirit of the moment. Its very applicability to the moment unfits it for any other position. Books, speeches, and jokes—very few of these breathe the spirit not only of the moment but of all time. When they do, we call them Classics. Tom Brown is a Classic, and probably Stalky too. They are built of material which is imperishable, because it is quarried from the bed-rock of human nature, which never varies, though architectural fashions come and go. ”

“ The average schoolboy, contemplating the elaborate arrangements made by those in authority for protecting him from himself—rules, roll-calls, bounds, lock-ups, magisterial discipline and prefectorial supervision—decides that the ordering and management of the school can be maintained without any active assistance from him; and he plunges joyously into Opposition with all the abandon of a good sportsman who knows that the odds are heavily against him. He breaks the Law, or is broken by the Law, with equal cheerfulness. ”

“ He must never attempt to acquire information by obvious cross-examination either of boy or master, or he will be accused of prying and interference; and he can never, or should never, discuss one of his colleagues with another. And yet he must have his hand upon the pulse of the School in such wise as to be able to tell which master is incompetent, which prefect is untrustworthy, which boy is a bully, and which House is rotten. In other words, he must possess a Red Indian's powers of observation and a woman's powers of intuition. He must be able to suck in school atmosphere through his pores. ”

“ Have you any theories about the teaching of boys?"
"None whatever," replied Arthur Robinson frankly.
"Good! There is only one way to teach boys. Keep them in order: don't let them play the fool or go to sleep; and they will be so bored that they will work like niggers merely to pass the time. That's education in a nutshell. ”

“ Many of the Cave-Dwellers dwell in caves because they find it more pleasant to read novels, or write letters, or develop photographs, or even do nothing, than listen to stale House gossip or indulge in everlasting small cricket in a corridor.
They are often the salt of the House, but they have no conception of the fact. They entertain a low opinion of themselves: they never expect to rise to any great position in the world: so they philosophically follow their own bent, and leave the glory and the praise to the athletes and their umbræ. ”

“ Arthur Robinson was a young man who did not suffer impudence readily.
"This is not precisely the moment," he rapped out, "for nice distinctions. The window is cracked, starred, splintered—anything you like. I want the name of the boy who damaged it. At once, please!"
Silence. Yet it was not the sullen, obstinate silence which prevails when boys are endeavouring to screen one another. One would almost have called it silent satisfaction. But Arthur Robinson was too angry and not sufficiently experienced to note the distinction. ”

“ Schoolboy gods have not altered. Strength, fleetness of foot, physical beauty, loyalty to one's House and one's School—youth still worships these things. There is the same admiration for natural brilliancy, be it in athletics or conversation or scholarship, and the same curious contempt for the plodder—even the successful plodder—in all departments of life. The weakest still goes to the wall. He is not bumped against it so vigorously as he used to be ”

“ Usually an old public-school boy himself, and proudly conscious that Classics had made him "what he was," the parent deferred entirely to the Headmaster's judgment, and entrusted his son to his care without question or stipulation. But a new race of parents has arisen, men who avow, modestly but firmly, that they have been made not by the Classics but by themselves, and who demand, with a great assumption of you-can't-put-me-off-with-last-season's-goods, that their offspring shall be taught something up-to-date—something which will be "useful" in an office. ”

“ He must keep a light hand on House politics, knowing everything, yet doing little, and saying almost nothing at all. If a Housemaster be blatantly autocratic; if he deputes power to no one; if he prides himself upon his iron discipline; if he quells mere noise with savage ferocity and screws down the safety-valve implacably upon healthy ragging, he will reap his reward. He will render his House quiet, obedient—and furtive. Under such circumstances prefects are a positive danger. ”

“ A schoolmaster's life is one long pose. His perpetual demeanour is that of a blameless enthusiast. A boy never hears a master swear—at least, not if the master can help it; he seldom sees him smoke or drink ”

“ Now you may rule men in two ways—either with a rapier or a bludgeon; but a man who can gain his ends with the latter will seldom have recourse to the former. The Headmaster who possesses on the top of other essential qualities the power of being uncompromisingly and divinely rude, is to be envied above all men. For him life is full of short cuts. He never argues. "L'école, c'est moi," he growls, and no one contradicts him. Boys idolise him. In his presence they are paralysed with fear, but away from it they glory in his ferocity of mien and strength of arm. ”

“ The grumbler can be pacified by a word or chastened by a rebuke; but a man burning under a sense of real injustice and wrong will never be efficient again until his injuries are redressed. If a colleague, again, comes to him with a scheme of work, or organisation, or even play, he is quick to see how far the scheme is valuable and practicable, and how far it is mere fuss and officiousness. He is enormously patient over this sort of thing, for he knows that an untimely snub may kill the enthusiasm of a real worker, and that a little encouragement may do wonders for a diffident beginner. ”

“ But with the growth of national education and class jealousy—the two seem to go hand-in-hand—the working classes of this country began to point out to the Government, not altogether unreasonably, that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. "Why," they inquired bitterly, "should we be the only people educated? Must the poor always be oppressed, while the rich go free? ”

“ As a successful Headmaster of my acquaintance once brutally but truthfully expressed it: "You simply have to employ a certain amount of low cunning if you are going to keep a school going at all." And he was right. A man unendowed with the divine gift of rudeness would, if he spent his time answering the criticisms or meeting the objections of colleagues or parents or even boys, have no time for anything else. ”

“ That is to say, upon an appointed date a gentleman comes down from London, spends the day as the guest of the Headmaster; and after being conducted about the premises from dawn till dusk, departs in the gloaming with his brain in a fog and some sixteen guineas in his pocket.
He is a variegated type, this Super-Inspector. Frequently he is a clever man who has failed as a schoolmaster and now earns a comfortable living because he remembered in time the truth of the saying: La critique est aisé, l'art difficile. ”

“ Schoolgirls, we are given to understand, are prone to open their hearts to one another, or to some favourite teacher, with luxurious abandonment. Not so boys. Up to a point they are frankness itself: beyond that point lie depths which can only be plumbed by instinct and intuition—qualities whose possession is the only test of a born Housemaster. ”

“ Other masters would set impositions or give a boy the lesson to write out: Dumaresq, denying himself cricket or squash, would come into his form-room and wrestle with perspiring defaulters all during a hot afternoon until the task was well and truly done. Boys learned more from him in one term than from any other master in a year; but their days were but labour and sorrow. During the previous term a certain particularly backward member of his form had incurred some damage—to wit, a fractured collar-bone—during the course of a house-match. ”

“ Among the higher English castes it is not good form to appear deeply interested in any thing, or to hold any serious views about anything, or to possess any special knowledge about anything. In fact, the more you know the less you say, and the more passionately you are interested in a matter, the less you "enthuse" about it. That is the Public School Attitude in a nutshell. It is a pose which entirely misleads foreigners and causes them to regard the English as an incredibly stupid and indifferent nation. ”

“ Though a Head still exercises enormous personal power, for good or ill, a school no longer stands or falls by its Headmaster, as in the old days, any more than a country stands or falls by its King, as in the days of the Stuarts. Public opinion, Housemasters, the prefectorial system—these have combined to modify his absolutism. But though a bad Headmaster may not be able to wreck a good school, it is certain that no school can ever become great, or remain great, without a great man at the head of it. ”

“ And here we encounter another thoroughly British characteristic. A Briton has a great capacity for minding his own business. He dislikes undertaking a responsibility which is not his by right. But persuade him that a task is indubitably and officially his, and he will devote his life to it, however unthankful or exacting it may be. In the same way many a schoolboy never takes his rightful place in his House or School simply because he does not happen to possess any of the restricted and accidental qualifications which school law demands of its leaders. ”

“ As his tenure of the House seldom exceeds ten or fifteen years, he has to exercise considerable commercial enterprise in order to make a sufficient "pile" to retire upon—as Binks tertius sometimes discovers to his cost. In other words, a scholar and gentleman's reward for a life of unremitting labour in one of the most exacting yet altruistic fields in the world is a licence to enrich himself for a period of years by "cornering" the daily bread of the pupils in his charge. And yet we feel surprised, and hurt, and indignant, when foreigners suggest that we are a nation of shopkeepers. ”

“ No Old Boy ever comes home from abroad without paying a visit to his former Housemaster. Rich, poor, distinguished, or obscure—they all come. They tell him of their adventures; they recall old days; they deplore the present condition of the School and the degeneracy of the Eleven; they fight their own battles over again. ”

“ A Manby of my acquaintance once came upon twenty-two young gentlemen in a corner of the cricket-field, who, having privily abandoned the orthodox game arranged for their benefit that afternoon, were indulging in a pleasant but demoralising pastime known as "tip-and-run." Manby, addressing them as "slack little swine, a disgrace to the House," chastised them one by one, and next half-holiday made them play tip-and-run under a broiling sun and his personal supervision from two o'clock till six.
A House with a Manby at the head of it is safe. It can even survive a weak Housemaster. ”

“ The larger his audience the more exuberant he becomes: he reaches his zenith at a breaking-up supper or in the back benches on Speech Day. One is tempted to feel that when reduced to his own society he must suffer severely from depression.
Then there is the Man of the World. He is a recognised authority on fast life in London and Bohemian revels in Paris. He is a patron of the drama, and a perfect mine of unreliable information as to the private life of the originals of the dazzling portraits which line his study—and indeed half the studies in the House. ”

“ An American gentleman, we will say, with all an American's insatiable desire to "see the wheels go round" and get to the root of the matter, finds himself sitting beside a pleasant English stranger at a public dinner. They will converse, possibly about sport, or politics, or wireless telegraphy. The pleasant Englishman may be one of the best game shots in the country, or a Privy Councillor, or a scientist of European reputation, but the chances are that the American will never discover from the conversation that he is anything more than a rather superficial or diffident amateur. ”

“ 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. ”