Chapter VIII: Reminiscent Narrative (1)

Reminiscent narrative is the grown-up prototype of the nursery favorite, “A story about the time when you were about my size.” Many people have found pleasure in writing their reminiscences, and have discovered that it is much pleasanter to write about the past than about the present, for it is often easier to discern and to tell the truth about events which no longer vitally concern us, than about those which still move our emotions deeply. We are able to write about our “dead selves” with a certain measure of affectionate or at least sympathetic detachment. Mistakes and achievements now long past may be recorded without smacking either of a Uriah Heep ’umbleness or of an uncomfortably priggish smugness. This detached tone runs through much reminiscent writing, and may become explicit in such a passage as Miss Portor’s, “I love the Raphael baby, and I am proud ever to have been so proud ... but before the other one that is me ... I bow my head on my hands.”

There are two obvious sources of interest in reminiscent narrative. The first is suggested by Hudson’s title, _Far Away and Long Ago_. Every one likes to know what other people ate and wore and said and did in other times and places. If other people’s experiences interest you, so will yours interest them. In a country so varied in surface and so wide in extent as the United States, scarcely two people in a group of adults will have had exactly the same early surroundings, and if we take into consideration the large admixture of foreigners with their old world background, we must realize that the “step-daughter of the prairie” brings a new vista to the forest bred, and such a book as _Upstream_ records a struggle entirely unknown to those born and reared in typical American security. It is easy enough to see romance in other people’s lives, but it is hard to see it in our own. A friend of mine who was born in a foreign country and whose family was long a part of the diplomatic service in many places tells how as a little girl she once burst out crying in the midst of one of her mother’s stories of her own quiet childhood in an obscure fishing village. “I shall never have any stories to tell my children; I’ve never been anywhere,” sobbed this juvenile globe trotter, consumed with envy of an experience, which, though pale and quiet, had for her the fascination of the remote and the unknown.

But even dwellers in the most familiar places have command of a sure spring of interest; for greater than our curiosity about material things is our interest in the inner life of the individual, how and why he laughed or wept, loved or hated--in brief, how he reacted to the elements that the fates mix in some measure in every life. We wish to know not merely what he did, but why he did it, and how he felt about it. Miss Portor’s reminiscences give us only two events, the taking of the two photographs, but she is able to tell us so much about her own feelings toward them, both then and now, that we live with her in those events. If you in like manner seize upon the unforgettable experiences of your own life, the feelings which still burn in your memory, you will not lack material upon which to try your hand.

In method, reminiscent narrative varies widely, depending upon its purpose. Madame Soskice tells us the stories of her childhood without explanation or apology just as she felt about them as a child. Neither her work nor _The Burglars_ shows any concern as to how the reader may regard the children pictured. Their naïve ideas and grotesque misapprehensions are neither explained nor apologized for. Their deeds and ideas stand, as children always stand, sublimely unrelated to an adult world. “The little boy” in the selection from Lord Frederick Hamilton, on the other hand, is seen through the eyes and memory of an older person; his ideas are frequently explained, and we sympathize with his groping toward adult standards. In some cases it is interesting to notice how a piece of reminiscence is given an effect of unity by means of emphasis upon some important element. Miss Portor, in _The Photograph_, uses the two events as a framework upon which to stretch her picture of her family, of the village, and of her own process of growing up. Even more strikingly, Nevinson uses Greek as a unifying device for his account of Shrewsbury School. The very landscape, the pupils’ amusements, their attitude toward their various studies and toward athletics are all illuminated for us by some relationship to his early study of Greek. Another writer might find such a unifying device in athletics, in his nationality, in his feeling toward school or toward his choice of a profession, in his experiences earning money, or in the influence of some member of his family.

Whatever method is used, most beginners will profit by observing the following points:

1. Begin without apology or mock heroics. Your reader is not
obliged to read unless he chooses. The reluctant story teller is a
bore in conversation; he is insufferable in print.

2. Give only enough explanation to enable the reader to follow the
story in hand. Observe how ruthlessly and how happily Mr. Grahame
has shorn off related but extraneous details of time, place, names,
and consequences in his pursuit of the burglars.

3. On the other hand, be generous with illuminating, picturesque,
and characteristic details--“the little boy with bare legs,” Harold
climbing down the porch “like a white rat,” and the cook’s wooden
leg. Remember that the reader cannot supply the details which are
so clear to your own mind.

F. del P.

MY FATE

LUDWIG LEWISOHN

In October, 1893, after an oral examination which, thanks to my mother’s instruction, I passed with ease, I was admitted to the High School of Queenshaven. The school building is plain and dignified, somewhat after the fashion of an English mansion of the eighteenth century. What the school has become in recent years I do not know. I have heard rumours of courses in bookkeeping and shorthand and other dexterities that have nothing to do with the education of youth. In my time it was a good school. The pupils were all boys and they were taught by men. They were young enough to be grounded in the necessities of a liberal education without having their callow judgment consulted, and to be caned when they were lazy or rowdy. The school had one grave fault: Greek was an elective study. Through this fault my life sustained an irreparable loss. Yet when I consider what might have happened to my mind if the school had been like the High Schools of 1921, I am filled with a sense of gratitude. For I was enabled to lay the foundations of a sound and permanent knowledge of Latin and French; I was taught to study with thoroughness and accuracy under pain of tangible and very wholesome penalties, and it was not the fault of the school that my mind was and is all but impervious to any form of mathematical reasoning.

I passed into the rough and tumble of school life with a distinct shudder. There was no direct hazing but there was a good deal of rather cruel horse-play. You were apt to be tripped up and thrown on your back, to have pins and needles stuck viciously into you, to be held under the pump until you nearly choked. Also, during the first year, I was taunted with being a foreigner and a Jew. One boy especially tormented me--a tallish fellow with a huge mouth always distorted by idiotic laughter, hateful, offstanding ears and small, greenish eyes. I was no match for him in strength and he persisted in cuffing and thumping and taunting me. I tried to avoid him, for I shrank from the thought of touching him as shudderingly as I did from his touch. Then, one day he clapped me brutally on the back and yelled with laughter. Two scarlet lights danced before my eyes and I leapt at his throat. Boys hurried from all sides of the playground and formed a ring around us. Cries arose: “Fight fair!” I remembered how the contemptuous thoughts raced through my brain. Fight fair! Oh yes, give the over-grown lout a chance to trounce me as a reward for months of bruises and insults. I didn’t want to fight him and suffer more undeserved pain and humiliation. I wanted to hurt him, to hurt him so effectively that he would never again dare lay his red, bony claws on me. I did. A teacher had to come into the yard and order me to be torn from my gasping and bloody victim. I had no trouble after that....

Gradually, too, I fell in with a group of boys that belonged to the gentler families of Queenshaven. I shall have more to say of them later, for these classmates passed together through school and college with me and so lived on terms of daily intimacy with me for eight years. Through their companionship, at all events, I soon felt at home in the school, an equal among equals in play and study.

I have said that our teachers were men. Real men, I hasten to add, not the spiritual starvelings who are content nowadays with the wage-slavery of the High School. The salaries of these Queenshaven teachers were rather better than such salaries are today and the purchasing power of money was of course far greater. The principal was the only man I have ever known who truly embodied the peculiar ideal of the Christian gentleman. He had both sweetness and strength, profound piety and wide charity. I can still see the beautiful benevolence in his searching blue eyes and hear his clear, bell-like voice. I do not know whether he consciously thought of the methods of Arnold of Rugby; it is certain that he practiced them. The better natured of my schoolmates and I never resented his punishments; we knew he was incapable of inflicting them until in his kind and manly judgment forgiveness would have been morally harmful to the offender. His influence and example drew me back to the Methodist church.... It is a sad reflection that this good man’s end was pitiful. A trusted brother in the church absconded with all our principal’s modest savings. They were small enough, for he was liberal in his charities beyond the bounds of discretion. But this blow both in its moral and in its physical aspect overwhelmed him. He fell into a state of melancholia and I remembered him, in later years, a mild, vague-eyed, broken figure on the Queenshaven streets.

I shall not linger over the burly and severe but sound pedagogue who taught us history and physics nor over the graceful youth--still young and vivid in his middle age--who taught French and German with a stringent accuracy and sternness that added virility to his Greek profile and his curving locks. It is on our teacher of Latin that I must dwell. I cannot estimate his influence over me. To this day I find myself using locutions and mannerisms that are ultimately traceable to him. He was--I beg his pardon for writing of him as in the past, but to me he lives only in the past, though admirably and fruitfully to others in the present--he was the son of an Italian gentleman, obviously of gentle lineage and exquisite breeding. His face and head and hands and form had in them something indescribably Roman. Roman of the empire. But for his severer modern morals he might have been a friend of Petronius and, like him, an _arbiter elegantiarum_. Or, from another point of view, a gentleman of the age of Queen Anne--a friend of Addison. Of course this does not render the whole man. But he was singularly free from all the modern maladies of the soul--a devout Catholic with a frugal and pagan delight in the good things of the world, a lover of the arts without morbid intensity or perverting ambitions, a believer in that golden mean which he interpreted so well. I need hardly say that the particular objects of his tireless and exquisite zeal were Vergil and Horace and, among English writers, Milton and Tennyson and Thackeray.

As a teacher he was strict, though always with a light touch--stinging the lazy and loutish by some ironic turn of speech. He taught us to appreciate a fine and mellow Latinity as well as the human warmth and living power of the literature we read. But he was tireless, too, in the humbler portions of his task. I find I know my Latin accidence and syntax better to-day than graduate students who “major” in Latin at our universities. And I can still hear his voice as, repeating some line of Vergil, he first awakened me to the magic of a great and perfect style:

“... et jam nox umida coelo
praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos.”

It was in the third year of High School. He was teaching us to scan Vergil. We were repeating a passage in unison. Suddenly he swung on his heels and pointed his finger straight at me: “That is the only boy who has a natural ear for verse!” he cried. A keen, strange quiver went through me. I realized the meaning suddenly of that constant scribbling which I had been impelled to during the preceding months. I had a gift for literature! I knew it now; I never doubted it again. My fate had found me.

Ludwig Lewisohn. _Upstream._ By permission of
Boni and Liveright, Publishers.

THE PHOTOGRAPH

LAURA SPENCER PORTOR

In the days when I was a child--before “films” were so much as heard of--there was a photographer, a certain photographer, very particular, who might have figured in the Arabian Nights as some one of importance.

A photographer was then very much a person in the community. If we were a people of nicety as to precedents, I think he would have stood, in all our reckonings, fourth in the realm: minister, doctor, lawyer--_photographer_--with mere bankers, cooks, icemen, aldermen, and mayor, following subservient. Everyone, sometime, somehow, sooner or later, came at last to the photographer. In the flat glass show case that hung outside the steps leading to his upper parlor, they all hung, some of them fiercely in high collars, some of them frightened, in low ones; but all there.

I was prepared for a visit to the “photograph parlor” with some occasion, I assure you, the process being long, painstaking, and full of admonition. I was now nearly three years old and there was needed, I suppose, an official photograph to send to distant and inquiring aunts and uncles.

I recall the photographer perfectly, or my composite recollections of later years--for he remained long with us--serve me perfectly. He had masses of curly hair through which he often temperamentally ran his delicate long fingers; a poetic personality; and eyes that never left you for so much as an instant, once the real ordeal had begun; and an index finger that flew up and remained rigid at unaccountable moments. He had imagination; for he was repeatedly referring to a little bird, and asking me to look at it, which I did my utmost to see, but which for me was never there.

After sundry final preparations I was ushered into the strange “parlor.” I was parted from my mother’s hand, as a ship from her moorings; was for a moment lost, then saved; for the photographer took me in tow. I was guided to a velours chair, and allowed, no, assisted, to climb upon it. There was some talk on the photographer’s part, I believe, of naturalness. Then, almost immediately, he began dancing back and forth intensely, fantastically, with lithe poses and bendings of his lissom body this side and that; his eyes half closed, fixed all the while on me, with a rapt attention I had never before received.

“A _lit_-tle more to one side! There!”

He even took my head delicately between his terribly firm fingers and turned it ever so little. Why? I should have preferred it as it was. At last his assistant under his direction--a rather elderly man he was, and disillusioned I think, bent, and with long fingers too, but bony and no hair to run them through--placed some sort of a terrible iron thing I never saw nor could have imagined at the back of my head.

During all this, the photographer’s eyes never left me. What was it he saw? Then up flew his forefinger.

“So! Keep that!”

(Keep what?)

He flew like a dragon fly to the hooded instrument, ducked his head under the hood, lost his own head, it seemed, took on the hooded head of the instrument, _became_ the instrument as it were, so that it now had human arms and legs clothed in a checked suit, and in this metamorphic condition, proceeded with an unaccountable section of the Eleusinian mysteries.

So, this was the manner in which one had one’s picture taken! Was that all? Bless you, no! We had but begun! He suddenly turned into a man again, and the instrument degenerated into a mere instrument.

We made, I cannot imagine, how many false starts. The index finger would fly up. I would be recommended to watch the little bird I could not see. The old assistant would stand ready to click the instrument. The photographer would count three. So! Now! Off we were, surely! But no! Something was suddenly altogether a mistake. What was the matter? I wish I could tell you. I suppose I must have altered infinitesimally his precious pose. So, _da capo_. Well! Now! There! So! Up would go the index finger. We are off now!

No! by my strapped slippers, we are not! Spoiled again!

Then he would run his fingers really wildly through his hair. Patience! Reconstruction. I knew I was not to blame. I was healthy and well disposed, and eager to do my part, but he wanted something better than the best.

I do not know how long he worked feverishly, but I have still the perfectly good-natured, secure, contented likeness which seems to have resulted--not because of, but in spite of all this frenzy; a baby likeness showing as nothing else in the world could the immeasurable distance between our two worlds, his and mine.

I was showing it laughingly, perhaps a little wistfully, to an artist friend of mine the other day. He appeared to be startled almost by its certainty, its poise.

“Good Lord, how wise! How _secure_! It is like the Raphael babies! I’ve always thought they _knew_; some knowledge you could not shake.”

The mistake is, of course, to limit the observation to the Raphael babies. Of course children of that age _do_ know, but it is a sad mistake to say you cannot shake their knowledge. This I can prove to you, if you are in doubt, by another photograph, taken two years later, when I was of the tenderly advanced age of five. It was no official photograph like the first, but a hasty unofficial matter, an emergency affair, a tintype, and taken in a hurry. And this is its story:

There was in our home, as in most homes of its class of that day, a deep tradition of family affection. We were told, I cannot imagine how early, that we must love one another. In the prayers we said at night, tiny as we three youngest ones were, we asked God severally to bless each member of the household, naming them, before we severally asked Him to “make us a good girl”; and these petitions, linked with a shadow and possibility of our perhaps “dying before we waked,” gave love, I am inclined to think, in our inadequate conception of it a certain solemn tone.

I was an impressionable child, and easily devoted. Besides my much elder brothers and sisters, I had two sisters rather close to my own age. A day came when the one nearest to me in years went away with some older relative, an aunt, I believe, to the East, for a long visit; eight months indeed.

I know I must at first have missed her very much. But I think I had always a certain zest for life. The wind blew as mysteriously in the tree tops as it ever did; the birds built in quite as fascinating half-secret places; the lilacs waved incredible plumes announcing that the roses were about to arrive. Amid all this present glory the sister who was absent faded gradually, in my memory.

Who can trace the beginnings of terror in early years? I wakened at last to the hideous realization that I had lost her; not in a bodily sense, not in a sense of absence or loneliness, for I knew she was in the world still, but in a terrible sense--as though a witch had caught me by the hair, or I had caught my feet in the hideous net of some spell--she was obliterated--_I could not remember what she looked like!_

There are terrors of many kinds in life. I know. I have met not a few; but for abysmal terror, that realization, it sometimes seems to me, leads them all. Blackness without a gleam of light, depth without a bottom. Downright mental panic. I know I made a few desperate efforts. “Jeanette!” Her name I knew, and often heard spoken; I could remember things she had done and said; but not form or feature.

My mother was away that day; but I was blessed by a special providence with an older sister some seventeen years older than myself--who was compounded of all that was best and most sympathetic in the world. I rushed to her; was held close in her arms; but could tell her nothing for sobbing.

When she at last got the circumstances from me, her delicate handling of it was, I think, very nearly as good as the mercy of God; only it was debonair besides, in good measure.

She kissed me, and laughed, and said that she was just thinking that minute that in all that time Jeanette might have forgotten what I looked like! (Think of the delicacy of her putting it that way!) So, let us go to the photographer’s and have a little tintype taken of myself; let us send it this very day to Jeanette; and let us ask her to send us one of herself in return.

So, my disloyalty was blotted out, and all tears were wiped away from my eyes. I was dressed quickly, a lace fichu was put about my neck, my drooping leghorn was set upon my head; I think I must have felt that goodness and mercy would follow me all the days of my life and I would dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

No appointment was necessary. There was no art to the taking of this picture. It was to be a tintype precisely because these partook of immediacy and expedition. The young temperamental photographer with his zeal for perfection was not even there; only the old one, bent, kind, disillusioned.

Well, it is a different picture, I tell you, that second one--utterly different. Good God! What life does to one! And how early it begins! That complacent, secure, Raphael child, who knew everything, and was so sure--for how short a while was she allowed her knowledge and her sovereignty! Then, the second and unofficial photograph! Such a darling child, but one whose scepter had been finally taken from it. Already a certain nostalgia had irrevocably touched me. I only tell you the truth: every line of that photograph droops--not tragically, but enough, enough. Already, you could not mistake it, that child had sounded the depths of its own fallible humanity.

I have both photographs beside me. I love the Raphael baby, and I am proud ever to have been so proud--and to have had that pride recorded by the all-seeing sun and a temperamental photographer with a passion for perfection; but before that other one that is me--(how much sadness already; and how soon!) before that other one I bow my head on my hands.

By kind permission of the author, Laura Spencer
Portor.

MY CHILDHOOD

LORD FREDERICK HAMILTON

I was born the thirteenth child of a family of fourteen, on the thirteenth day of the month, and I have for many years resided at No. 13 in a certain street in Westminster. In spite of the popular prejudice attached to this numeral, I am not conscious of having derived any particular ill-fortune from my accidental association with it.

* * * * *

Looking down the long vista of sixty years with eyes that have already lost their keen vision, the most vivid impression that remains of my early childhood is the nightly ordeal of the journey down “The Passage of Many Terrors” in our Irish home. It had been decreed that, as I had reached the mature age of six, I was quite old enough to come down-stairs in the evening by myself without the escort of a maid, but no one seemed to realize what this entailed on the small boy immediately concerned. The house had evidently been built by some malevolent architect with the sole object of terrifying little boys. Never, surely, had such a prodigious length of twisting, winding passages and such a superfluity of staircases been crammed into one building, and as in the early “sixties” electric light had not been thought of, and there was no gas in the house, these endless passages were only sparingly lit with dim colza-oil lamps. From his nursery the little boy had to make his way alone through a passage and up some steps. These were brightly lit, and concealed no terrors. The staircase that had to be negotiated was also reassuringly bright, but at its base came the “Terrible Passage.” It was interminably long, and only lit by an oil lamp at its far end. Almost at once a long corridor running at right angles to the main one, and plunged in total darkness, had to be crossed. This was an awful place, for under a marble slab in its dim recesses a stuffed crocodile reposed. Of course in the daytime the crocodile _pretended_ to be very dead, but every one knew that as soon as it grew dark, the crocodile came to life again, and padded noiselessly about the passage on its scaly paws seeking for its prey, with its great cruel jaws snapping, its fierce teeth gleaming, and its horny tail lashing savagely from side to side. It was also a matter of common knowledge that the favourite article of diet of crocodiles was a little boy with bare legs in a white suit.

Even should one be fortunate enough to escape the crocodile’s jaws, there were countless other terrors awaiting the traveller down this awe-inspiring passage. A little farther on there was a dark lobby, with cupboards surrounding it. Anyone examining these cupboards by daylight would have found that they contained innocuous cricket-bats and stumps, croquet-mallets and balls, and sets of bowls. But as soon as the shades of night fell, these harmless sporting accessories were changed by some mysterious and malign agency into grizzly bears, and grizzly bears are notoriously the fiercest of their species. It was advisable to walk very quickly, but quietly, past the lair of the grizzlies, for they would have gobbled up a little boy in one second. Immediately after the bears’ den came the culminating terror of all--the haunt of the wicked little hunchbacks. These malignant little beings inhabited an arched and recessed cross-passage. It was their horrible habit to creep noiselessly behind their victims, tip ... tip ... tip-toeing silently but swiftly behind their prey, and then ... with a sudden spring they threw themselves on to little boys’ backs, and getting their arms around their necks, they remorselessly throttled the life out of them. In the early “sixties” there was a perfect epidemic of so-called “garrotting” in London. Harmless citizens proceeding peaceably homeward through unfrequented streets or down suburban roads at night were suddenly seized from behind by nefarious hands, and found arms pressed under their chins against their windpipe, with a second hand drawing their heads back until they collapsed insensible, and could be despoiled leisurely of any valuables that they might happen to have about them. Those familiar with John Leech’s _Punch Album_ will recollect how many of his drawings turned on this outbreak of garrotting. The little boy had heard his elders talking about this garrotting, and had somehow mixed it up with a story about hunchbacks and the fascinating local tales about “the wee people,” but the terror was a very real one for all that. The hunchbacks baffled, there only remained a dark archway to pass, but this archway led to the “Robbers’ Passage.” A peculiarly bloodthirsty gang of malefactors had their fastnesses along this passage, but the dread of being in the immediate neighbourhood of such a band of desperadoes was considerably modified by the increasing light, as the solitary oil lamp of the passage was approached. Under the comforting beams of this lamp the little boy would pause until his heart began to thump less wildly after his deadly perils, and he would turn the handle of the door and walk into the great hall as demurely as though he had merely traversed an ordinary everyday passage in broad daylight. It was very reassuring to see the big hall blazing with light, with the logs roaring on the open hearth, and grown-ups writing, reading, and talking unconcernedly, as though unconscious of the awful dangers lurking within a few yards of them. In that friendly atmosphere, what with toys and picture-books, the fearful experiences of the “Passage of Many Terrors” soon faded away, and the return journey upstairs would be free from alarms, for Catherine, the nursery-maid, would come to fetch the little boy when his bedtime arrived.

Catherine was fat, freckled, and French. She was also of a very stolid disposition. She stumped unconcernedly along the “Passage of Terrors,” and any reference to its hidden dangers of robbers, hunch-backs, bears, and crocodiles only provoked the remark, “Quel tas de bêtises!” In order to reassure the little boy, Catherine took him to view the stuffed crocodile reposing inertly under its marble slab. Of course, before a grown-up the crocodile would pretend to be dead and stuffed, but ... the little boy knew better. It occurred gleefully to him, too, that the plump French damsel might prove more satisfactory as a repast to a hungry saurian than a skinny little boy with thin legs. In the cheerful nursery, with its fragrant peat fire (we called it “turf”), the terrors of the evening were quickly forgotten, only to be renewed with tenfold activity next evening, as the moment for making the dreaded journey again approached.

The little boy had had the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ read to him on Sundays. He envied “Christian,” who not only usually enjoyed the benefit of some reassuring companion, such as “Mr. Interpreter,” or “Mr. Greatheart,” to help him on his road, but had also been expressly told, “Keep in the midst of the path, and no harm shall come to thee.”

This was distinctly comforting, and Christian enjoyed another conspicuous advantage. All the lions he encountered in the course of his journey were chained up, and could not reach him provided he adhered to the Narrow Way. The little boy thought seriously of tying a rolled-up tablecloth to his back to represent Christian’s pack; in his white suit, he might perhaps then pass for a pilgrim, and the strip of carpet down the centre of the passage would make an admirable Narrow Way, but it all depended on whether the crocodile, bears, and hunchbacks knew, and would observe the rules of the game. It was most improbable that the crocodile had ever had the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ read to him in his youth, and he might not understand that the carpet representing the Narrow Way was inviolable territory. Again, the bears might make their spring before they realized that, strictly speaking, they ought to consider themselves chained up. The ferocious little hunchbacks were clearly past praying for; nothing would give them a sense of the most elementary decency. On the whole, the safest plan seemed to be, on reaching the foot of the stairs, to keep an eye on the distant lamp and to run to it as fast as short legs and small feet could carry one. Once safe under its friendly beams, panting breath could be recovered, and the necessary stolid look assumed before entering the hall.

There was another voyage, rich in its promise of ultimate rewards, but so perilous that it would only be undertaken under escort. That was to the housekeeper’s room through a maze of basement passages. On the road two fiercely-gleaming roaring pits of fire had to be encountered. Grown-ups said this was the furnace that heated the house, but the little boy had his own ideas on the subject. Every Sunday his nurse used to read to him out of a little devotional book, much in vogue in the “sixties,” called _The Peep of Day_, a book with the most terrifying pictures. One Sunday evening, so it is said, the little boy’s mother came into the nursery to find him listening in rapt attention to what his nurse was reading him.

“Emery is reading to me out of a good book,” explained the small boy quite superfluously.

“And do you like it, dear?”

“Very much indeed.”

“What is Emery reading to you about? Is it about Heaven?”

“No, it’s about ’ell,” gleefully responded the little boy, who had not yet found all his “h’s.”

Those glowing furnace-bars; those roaring flames ... there could be no doubt whatever about it. A hymn spoke of “Gates of Hell” ... of course they just called it the heating furnace to avoid frightening him. The little boy became acutely conscious of his misdeeds. He had taken ... no, stolen an apple from the nursery pantry and had eaten it. Against all orders he had played with the taps in the sink. The burden of his iniquities pressed heavily on him; remembering the encouraging warnings Mrs. Fairchild, of _The Fairchild Family_, gave her offspring as to their certain ultimate destiny when they happened to break any domestic rule, he simply dared not pass those fiery apertures alone. With his hand in that of his friend Joseph, the footman, it was quite another matter. Out of gratitude, he addressed Joseph as “Mr. Greatheart,” but Joseph, probably unfamiliar with the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, replied that his name was Smith.

The interminable labyrinth of passages threaded, the warm, comfortable housekeeper’s room, with its red curtains, oak presses and a delicious smell of spice pervading it, was a real haven of rest. To this very day, nearly sixty years afterwards, it still looks just the same, and keeps its old fragrant spicy odour. Common politeness dictated a brief period of conversation, until Mrs. Pithers, the housekeeper, should take up her wicker key-basket and select a key (the second press on the left). From that inexhaustible treasure-house dates and figs would appear, also dried apricots and those little discs of crystallised apple-paste which, impaled upon straws, and coloured green, red and yellow, were in those days manufactured for the special delectation of greedy little boys. What a happy woman Mrs. Pithers must have been with such a prodigal wealth of delicious products always at her command! It was comforting, too, to converse with Mrs. Pithers, for though this intrepid woman was alarmed neither by bears, hunchbacks, nor crocodiles, she was terribly frightened by what she termed “cows,” and regulated her daily walks so as to avoid any portion of the park where cattle were grazing. Here the little boy experienced a delightful sense of masculine superiority. He was not the least afraid of cattle, or of other things in daylight and the open air; of course at night in dark passages infested with bears and little hunchbacks.... Well, it was obviously different. And yet that woman who was afraid of “cows” could walk without a tremor, or a little shiver down the spine, past the very “Gates of Hell,” where they roared and blazed in the dark passage.

From _The Days Before Yesterday_ by Lord
Frederick Hamilton. Copyright 1920, George H.
Doran Company, Publishers.

SHREWSBURY SCHOOL

HENRY W. NEVINSON

“High the vanes of Shrewsbury gleam,
Islanded in Severn Stream;
The bridges from the steepled crest
Cross the water east and west.

“The flag of morn in conqueror’s state
Enters at the English gate;
The vanquished eve, as night prevails,
Bleeds upon the road to Wales.”

--_A Shropshire Lad._

In my old school upon the Severn, I can see now that we were not educated at all: no scientific methods were tried upon us. I doubt if any of the masters had ever heard there was such a thing as a science of education. To them education was a natural process which all decent people went through, like washing: and their ideas upon it were as unscientific as was our method of “swilling,” when we ran down naked from the bedrooms to sheds in the backyards, sluiced cold water over us with zinc basins, and then came dripping back to dry upstairs. And yet I do remember one young mathematician whose form by the end of his hour was always reduced to a flushed and radiant chaos: and when the other masters complained he replied that this was part of his “system.” So I suppose that he at all events was scientific, and had possibly studied Pädagogik in Germany.

The others were content to teach what they had learned, and in the same manner. Most of them were Shrewsbury boys themselves, and because Greek had been taught there for more than three centuries, they taught Greek. Of course, we had Latin too, and up to the sixth form, our time was equally divided between the two languages; but Latin, as being easier and rather more connected with modern life, never ranked so high, and we turned to it with the relief which most men feel when the ladies rise from the dinner table. Latin prose, it is true, was thought more of than Greek prose, and no doubt there was some instinctive reason why. I suspect that in reality it is the more difficult: for it was the unconscious rule of our ancient tradition that of two subjects the more difficult was the better worth learning, provided always that both were entirely useless.

Of Greek our knowledge was both peculiar and limited. We were allowed no devices to make the language in the least interesting, no designs, or pictures, or explanations. We had no idea what the Greek plays looked like on the stage, or why Demosthenes uttered those long-winded sentences. We knew nothing of the Dantesque pride underlying the tortured prose of Thucydides, and when a sixth-form master told us that the stupendous myth at the end of the Phaedo appeared to him singularly childish, we took no notice of the remark one way or the other. We only knew that the passage was easy, just as Homer was easy, and the choruses hard. The greater part of the school believed that Greek literature was written as a graduated series of problems for Shrewsbury boys to solve, and when a sixth-form boy was asked by a new master whether he did not consider the Prometheus a very beautiful play, he replied that he thought it contained too many weak caesuras.

So there was nothing in the least artistic about our knowledge. No one expected to find either beauty or pleasure in what we read, and we found none. Nor were we scientific; we neither knew nor cared how the Greek words arose, or how the aorists grew, and why there were two of them, like Castor and Pollux. After all these things do the Germans seek, but us they never troubled. Our sole duty was to convert, with absolute precision, so much Greek into so much English. No possible shade of meaning or delicate inflection on the page was allowed to slide unnoticed. The phases of every mood with all its accompanying satellites were traced with the exactitude of astronomy. No one cared much about beauty of language provided the definite meaning was secure. Yet beauty sometimes came by accident, just as happiness comes, and I first learned what style is from the renderings of the head-boy when he mounted the “rostrum.” He was himself an antique Roman; his eagle nose, wide mouth, and massive chin, the low, broad brow, with black curls growing close to the square-backed head, were made to rule nations. But not long since he died in the serviceable obscurity of a mastership, for which his knowledge of Greek was his only qualification. It is true he was our captain of football, but he owed that position to his Greek rather than his play.

When as a new boy I was first taken for a walk out of bounds on a Sunday afternoon by one of the upper sixth, who is now an earthly saint, we went to a hillside with a long blue vision of western mountains, and while I had no thought or eyes for anything but them, he continued to talk quietly of Greek--the significance of various forms, the most telling way of turning this meaning or that, especially, I remember, the cunning idioms by which the idea of “self” might be rendered in verse, either with emphasis or modesty. So it was. The school breathed Greek, and through its ancient buildings a Greek wind blew. To enter the head-room--a dim, panelled chamber which the upper sixth used as a study--was to become a scholar. I doubt if good Greek verse could be written anywhere else. Winged iambics fluttered through the air; they hung like bats along the shelves, and the dust fell in Greek particles. Now the school is moved to the further side of the river, and its grey and storied stone is exchanged for cheerful brick. Our old head-room has become the housekeeper’s parlor in some citizen’s dwelling, but on the hearthstone at eventide beside her petticoats squats the imperishable Lar, real as a rat, though not so formidable, and murmurs iambics to himself.

Other subjects besides Greek were taught, but no one ever learned them. There was French, for instance, taught by an aged Englishman who had outlived three generations of mortal head-masters, and, besides his wig, was supposed gradually to have acquired an artificial body that would last forever. To us he was important because he registered the punishments, and had the reputation of a very bloodhound for detecting crime. Certainly he was the best comic reader I ever heard, and when he read prayers at night the whole school used to howl like a rising and falling wind, following the cadence of his voice. But nobody learned French of him. Once, because I had shown him decent politeness he assigned me a prize. I could honestly say I knew less French than any one this side the Channel; and yet I should never have outlived a certain stigma attaching to imaginary knowledge of anything so paltry, if nature had not given me the power of running long distances without fatigue. But, unhappily for me, to prove that power I had to wait from summer till autumn, when the school huntsman led out his pack in white to scour the wild country west of the town--a country of yellow woods and deep pools, where water-fowl rose, and of isolated limestone hills, the promise of Wales. Each run followed a course fixed by old tradition. Foxes were seldom sent out, and were never supposed to be caught. We ran for the sake of running, just as we learned Greek for the sake of learning it.

Mathematics were held in scarcely less contempt than French. We had two wranglers to teach us, but they never taught anyone. Their appearance in form was hailed with indecent joy. As one of the classical masters said, it was like the “Cease fire” on a field-day, and the whole body of boys abandoned themselves at once to relaxation. In the lower forms far-sailing darts were seen floating through the air as at a spiritualist seance; in the upper we discussed the steeple-chase or did Greek verses. A boy who really knew any mathematics was regarded by ourselves and the masters as a kind of freak. There was no dealing with him. His mathematical marks got him into forms beyond his real knowledge--his knowledge of Greek. He upset the natural order of things. He was a perpetual ugly duckling, that could not emit iambics. So his lot was far from enviable, and happily I remember only two such cases.

In the sixth, it was Saturday mornings which were given to this innocent pursuit of mathematics, and to it we owed our happiest hours of peace. To go up School Gardens on a bright summer day, to cross the leisurely street of the beautiful country town, to buy breakfast (for an ancient tradition kept us strenuously underfed), to devour it slowly and at ease, knowing there was only mathematics before us that morning, to be followed by the long afternoon and Sunday--that was a secure and unequalled joy, and whenever mathematics are mentioned, I still feel a throb of gratitude for those old pleasures. Our one lesson on Sunday was a difficulty to the masters. Of course there was the Greek testament to fall back upon, but its Greek was so easy and so inferior to ours that it became a positive danger. We were sometimes given a Latin catechism, by some Protestant Father of the sixteenth century, denouncing Transubstantiation, but that also we had to read with caution lest it should influence our Latin prose. Once we waded through Dr. Westcott’s _Gospel of the Resurrection_, a supposed concession to those of us who were going to Oxford. On Sunday evenings we learnt cantos of the _In Memoriam_ by heart, and explained them next morning by suggesting how they might be turned into Greek or Latin lyrics. Then the real labor of life began again with Greek, and so the weeks rolled on without a change. Once, it is true, our greatest master got an afternoon hour for the teaching of wisdom to the sixth, and we really tried to listen, for he stood six foot four and had been captain of football at Oxford. But it was no good. Wisdom was far too easy and unimportant for us, and we let her voice cry in vain. Of such diversions as physical science or mechanics we never even heard, though their absence was perhaps sufficiently compensated for by the system of fagging, under which all the lower forms learnt the arts of lighting fires and plain cooking for the upper sixth. The new-boys were also practiced in public oratory, having in turn to proclaim the athletic announcements for the day, standing on the breakfast-table. The proclamation began with “O-Yes!” three times repeated, and ended with “God save the Queen, and down with the Radicals!” Anyone was at liberty to throw bread, sugar, or boots at the crier during his announcement; and many of my schoolfellows have since displayed extraordinary eloquence on public platforms and in the pulpit.

In politics our instruction was entirely practical. For centuries the school had been divided into bitterly hostile camps--day-boys and boarders--doing the same work, sitting side by side in form, but never speaking to each other or walking together, or playing the same games. No feud of Whig and Tory, or Boer and Briton, was so implacable as ours. “Skytes” we called them, those hated day-boys, for whom the school was founded--mere Scythians, uncouth and brutish things that sacrificed the flesh of men and drank from a human skull. Out of school hours we did not suffer them within school gates. They were excluded even from the ball-court, except for fights. They were compelled to pay for separate football and cricket fields; and in football they adopted the vulgar rules of Association, while we aristocrats of tradition continued to cherish an almost incomprehensible game, in which, as in a Homeric battle, the leaders did the fighting, while the indistinguishable host trampled to and fro in patient pursuit of a ball which they rarely touched, but sometimes saw. The breach may have begun when Elizabeth was Queen, or in the days of Cavaliers and Roundheads, and there is no knowing how long it would have lasted but for the wisdom of that wise master already mentioned. Whilst I was still there, myself a red-hot boarder, he began delicately to reason, amid the choking indignation of both sides, whose rancor increased as reason shook it. No reformer ever set himself to a task so hopeless, and yet it was accomplished. Within a year we were playing football under Association rules together, and before the old school was removed the wrath of ages was appeased.

For the rest, I cannot say that the ingenuous art of Greek, though we learnt it faithfully, softened our manners much, or forbade us to be savages. One peculiar custom may stand for many as an instance of the primitive barbarity which stamps upon any abnormal member of a herd. Since the last Pancratium was fought at Olympia, no such dire contest has been seen among men as our old steeple-chase. Clad in little but gloves--a little which grew less with every hundred yards--the small band of youths tore their way through bare and towering hedges, wallowed through bogs, plunged into streams and ponds, racing over a two miles of country that no horse would have looked at. The start was at the Flash side of the Severn, and if I had cleared the first stream and the hedge beyond it with one clean bound, as my young brother did, I would have it engraved on my tombstone: “He jumped the Flash ditch, R. I. P.” The winner of the race was, of course, the boy who came in first; but the hero of the school was he from whom the most blood was trickling at the finish, and who showed the bravest gashes on his face as he walked down the choir of St. Mary’s at next morning’s service. The course for the display of all this heroism was marked by the new boys, whose places as “sticks” were allotted by the huntsman the day before, the whole school accompanying them, and by immemorial custom the most unpopular new-boy of the year was always set at the last post,--a slippery stump of ancient tree projecting in the very midst of a particularly filthy pond. As we drew nearer and nearer the place, all of us advancing at a gentle trot, one could see the poor creature growing more and more certain that he was the boy. We all exchanged smiles, and sometimes his name was called out, for all, except himself, had agreed who it would probably be. At last the pond was reached, and we stood round it in a thick and silent circle, awaiting the public execution of a soul. The boy’s name was called. He came sullenly forward and made a wild leap for the stump. Invariably he fell short, or slipped and plunged headlong into the stagnant water, whilst we all yelled with satisfaction. Wallowing through the black slush and duckweed, he clambered on to the tree at last, and stood there in the public gaze, declared the most hateful boy in the school. Upon himself the ceremony had not always the elevating effect at which, I suppose, we aimed. For I remember one disappointed moralist in the fourth form remarking, “Frog’s pond doesn’t seem to have done that fellow any good. He wants kicking again.”