Chapter VI: Eton (2)

At the end of the lecture the Provost returned thanks, and then Mr. Gladstone leapt to his feet and made an impassioned speech on classical education. The last sentence of his peroration was as follows: “But this, Mr. Provost, I venture to say, and say with confidence, and it is not a fancy of youth nor the whim of the moment, but the conviction forced upon me even more by the experience of life than by any reasoning quality, that if the purposes of education be to fit the human mind for the efficient performance of the greatest functions, the ancient culture, and, above all, the Greek culture, is by far the best and strongest, the most lasting, and the most elastic instrument that could possibly be applied to it.”

As he said these words his eyes flashed, he opened and raised his arms, and his body seemed to expand and grow tall. He seemed like the priest of culture speaking inspired words. His voice rolled out in a golden torrent, and as he said the words, “the best and strongest, the most lasting, the most elastic,” they seemed to come to him with the certainty of happy inspiration and with the accent of the unpremeditated. With these words his voice reached its highest pitch of crescendo, and then, slightly dying down, melodiously sank into silence.

This little speech showed me what great oratory could be.

At the end of my first year there was a prize called the Headmaster’s prize for French, for lower boys. I competed for this. It was always rather difficult to get a French prize at Eton, as there was usually a French or a Canadian boy who spoke and knew the language like a native. There was a special examination paper for this prize. I and a French boy, whose name I have forgotten, both got 95 marks out of 100. Then the papers were looked through again, and it was found that I had translated the French word _hôte_ by _host_, when it should have been guest, so the other boy was given the prize, but my tutor gave me a book as a consolation. The following year I competed for the Headmaster’s French prize for boys in fifth form, and that time I won it, much to the delight of Chérie and of everyone at Membland.

In fifth form we learnt German as an extra. German was taught by Mr. Ploetz, who knew the language; and by other masters, who didn’t. During the lessons of the latter, one paid no attention, and attended to one’s private affairs. Mr. Ploetz was an excellent, stimulating teacher, but most unpopular with the other masters. The boys liked him; he was a book collector, and had a fine library. He taught me a great deal, not of German, as I paid no attention to the regular work, but I picked up from him a mass of miscellaneous information. It was the fashion to rag during his lessons, and I outdid everyone in ingenious interruption during Mr. Ploetz’ lessons. It was not that he couldn’t keep order. He was extremely strict and competent, but one knew, with the fiendish intuition of boys, that his complaints would not be taken seriously by the other masters, or by one’s tutor. This was indeed the case. There were three forms of punishment at Eton. First of all, one could get a yellow ticket, which meant one had to do a punishment of some written kind and get the ticket signed by one’s tutor. We did not much like leaving out the yellow ticket in a prominent place for my tutor to see when he came round in the evening. If matters went further, one was reported to the Headmaster and received a white ticket. The white ticket was in force for a week. During that week leave was stopped, and if the slightest complaint was made by anyone, it meant being complained of to the Headmaster a second time and a flogging by the Headmaster. I was complained of by Mr. Ploetz to the Headmaster. As I guessed, the other masters took this far from seriously. “What have you been doing to _Mr. Ploetz_?” said my tutor. What I had been guilty of was overt rowdyism, combined with prolonged and unbearable impertinence, which if done to any other master would have been taken very seriously indeed. “What _have_ you been doing to Mr. Ploetz?” said another master to me, with a laugh, when he met me in the street. I received a white ticket, but I got through the week without further complaints, and I was never complained of again.

When I was in fifth form, the school library became a favourite haunt of mine, and Mr. Burcher, the librarian, a special friend. Mr. Burcher was a little dapper man, who was pained when we jumped over the tables, a favourite game of mine, or if we threw the books about. “Is it a joke,” he would ask plaintively, “or is it an insult?” But in that library, during my last year at Eton, I made by myself the discovery of English poetry, and read the works of Shelley in the three little volumes of the second Moxon edition of 1850, and the poems of Keats in Lord Houghton’s one-volume edition. On Sundays I used to go, rich with my new discoveries, to Norman Tower, and compare notes with Betty Ponsonby, who knew reams of English poetry by heart, and we would read each last new favourite poem. There is no joy in the world like this to discover these things for the first time. The shabby little Keats and Shelley, the green volumes of Tennyson, the three dark volumes of Matthew Arnold—what mines of fairy treasure they represented!

I made friends, through one of his pupils, with Arthur Benson. I had been in his division twice, but I had never known him well. One of the Coventrys, Willie Coventry, was his pupil, and he told Arthur Benson that I liked books and poetry, and had written a novel called _Elvira_, which was true (only it had to be destroyed after I had measles), and was going to write the libretto of an opera of which he, Coventry, was to write the music. He was not really musical, and did not know a note of music technically. He also intended, when I first made his acquaintance, to write a life of Mary Stuart; but this, like the opera, never got far.

Arthur Benson was most kind and interested, and it was arranged that on Sunday afternoons we should meet in his rooms and read out poetry. Arnold Ward, Mrs. Humphry Ward’s son, who was in College, joined us. We read out poetry; if we had written something ourselves, we left it with Arthur Benson for a week, he told us what he thought about it next time. I showed him a Fairies’ Chorus from my libretto. He said: “I don’t like those galloping metres, but I see you have got a good vocabulary.” My next effort was an Ode on the Tercentenary of Eton College, in which Fielding was mentioned as “the great wielder of the painting pen.” “Have you read Fielding?” asked Arthur Benson. I had not read Fielding. “I see,” said Arthur Benson, “you take him on trust.”

There was at that time a newspaper edited by two of the boys, called the _Mayfly_. I sent them my poem on Eton College, but they wisely refused it. The _Mayfly_, edited by Ramsay, was an amusing paper, but not quite as good as the _Parachute_, which had come out the year before, and was edited by Carr Bosanquet and others. This was a singularly brilliant newspaper. It only had three numbers, but they were most successful. There was at the same time an exceedingly serious newspaper called _The Eton Review_, edited, I think, by Beauchamp, which had articles about the Baconian theory, and other rather heavy topics. During my last summer a newspaper which had twenty editors, but only one number, came out, called _The Students’ Humour_. There was also a book published in 1891, called _Keate’s Lane Papers_, in which there is an excellent poem by J. K. Stephen, which has never been republished, called “The Song of the Scug.” It begins:

“There was a little scug
Who sat upon a rug,
With a dull and empty brain,
And would show his indecision
In a twopenny division,
With a friend of the same low strain.
And would eat a lot of cherries and see a lot of cricket,
Till his lips and his fingers were as sticky as the wicket,
But at last he came to be a bald old man
Who talked about as wildly as a bald man can.
And he said, by Gad;
When I was a lad,
And the very best dry bob alive,
I should have made a million,
But a man in the Pavilion
Was killed by my first hard drive.”

J. K. Stephen used often to come down to Eton, dressed always in slippers, a dark blue flannel blazer, and a dirty pink cap on the back of his head; and thus dressed, and reading a small book, I saw him serenely and unconsciously walk across the pitch during the Winchester match.

Arthur Benson stimulated our reading tremendously, and we were startled and interested by his frank heresies. He said he did not care for Milton’s _Lycidas_. He wished Shakespeare had been a modern and had written novels. He was indifferent to Shelley. He loathed Byron, but was none the less impressed, when one Sunday Arnold Ward read out the description of the battle of Talavera (_Childe Harold_, I. xxxviii.), and he admitted it was moving. He disliked Carlyle, Ruskin, and Thackeray. On the other hand, he introduced us to Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, FitzGerald, and many others, and encouraged us to go on liking anything we did like. By this time I had read many novels—Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_, _Pickwick_, a good deal of Scott (I was given the Waverley Novels for Christmas 1889), George Eliot’s _Adam Bede_, _The Mill on the Floss_, and quantities of poetry. Betty Ponsonby gave me Swinburne’s _Atalanta in Calydon_, but explained to me that the denunciations of God in it only applied to the Greek gods, and she and my Aunt M’aimée both changed the subject when I suggested reading Swinburne’s _Poems and Ballads_.

Willie Coventry and I found out that there was a competition going on at this time in a magazine called _Atalanta_ for who should write the best essay in 500 words. You were allowed to choose your own subject. Willie Coventry won it one month by writing an essay on Dr. Schliemann’s Excavations, a subject suggested to him by Arthur Benson. The next month I competed, and chose as my subject a poem by Edgar Allan Poe called “For Annie,” and I won the prize too.

In the summer of 1890 I went to stay at the Coventrys’ place at Croome Court in Worcestershire, and Willie Coventry came to Membland later in the same summer. The libretto I was writing for him never got further than a few lyrics, and his score never got further than a few bars and a triumphal march, which I composed, and even played at one of Miss Copeman’s afternoon parties. I can still play it now, if pressed.

I had a faint hope at one time that I might be able to get into the Boats. Arthur Benson had taken me out one day down stream and advised me to try. I could row well enough on the stroke side, but not so well on the bow side of the boat. I put my name down for Novice Eights, in which boys were tried, and one evening I started out full of hope. Unfortunately I was told to row bow in the boat. A tall Colleger stood up in the stern of the boat to coach us. No sooner had we started than there was a loud call: “Keep time, Bow—keep time, Bow!” and we had not gone much farther than the Brocas when I caught so violent a crab that the coach fell into the water, the boat was partially submerged, and we had to go back, some of us swimming. I was never allowed to row in company again, and earned the reputation of being the only person who had ever swamped a Novice Eight.

In the autumn of 1890 Hugo and I went up to London for long leave. My father and mother were staying at my sister Elizabeth’s house in Grosvenor Place, and there we heard about the financial crisis in Baring Brothers, which had nearly ended in a great disaster. When we went back to Membland at Christmas everything was different. There was no Christmas party, and the household was going through a process of gradual dissolution. Chérie was leaving us, the stables were empty, and the old glory of Membland had gone for ever.

All through the next year I was engrossed with the discoveries I was making in English literature. In the summer I sent a poem to _Temple Bar_, then edited by George Smith, and to my great surprise it was printed, and I received a cheque for a guinea. During that same summer I had a little book of poems privately printed at Eton, called _Damozel Blanche_, consisting of ballads and lyrics.

I was now a member of the House Debating Society, in which we used to have heated discussions on such subjects as whether sports were brutalising or not, whether conscription was a good thing, whether General Booth’s scheme was a sound one, and whether Mary Queen of Scots had been improperly beheaded.

There was another debating society founded before I left Eton, called _Le Cercle des Débats_, in which we made speeches in French, and I remember M. Hua making a passionate speech in favour of England relinquishing her hold upon Egypt. I spoke several times at this debating society, and in the report on the debate as to whether Monte Carlo should be allowed to exist, it is recorded that: “M. Baring croyait que c’était un mauvais endroit mais que cela ne devrait pas être supprimé.”

The summer of the Eton Tercentenary, 1891, was great fun, especially the concert, when Hubert Parry’s beautiful setting to Swinburne’s “Ode” was performed. I sang among the baritones. My mother came down for the concert, and Hubert Parry conducted himself. There was an interesting exhibition in the school hall, and it was there that I made the acquaintance of Mrs. Cornish. My Aunt M’aimée introduced me to her, and I soon became a great friend of the Cornish family, and was invited by them to go out on water-parties down stream to the Bells of Ousley and Runnymede, and to have supper with them afterwards. I enjoyed these water-parties as much as anything at Eton.

In the summer holidays of 1891 I went to stay with Chérie, who had left us. She lived with her friend, Miss Charlesworth, in a little house called Waterlooville, near Cosham, in Hants, and realised the dream of her life, namely, to have a large garden of her own full of hollyhocks and sunflowers and sweet peas.

In the Michaelmas half of 1891 I competed for the Prince Consort’s French prize. I had already done so the last year, but I was then too young to compete with sixth-form boys, who were much older, and I was not expected to get a place, but I came out third. This year it was my great ambition to get the prize. I thought of nothing else. We had to read several books—Molière’s _L’Avare_, Alfred de Vigny’s _Cinq Mars_, Taine’s _Voyage aux Pyrénées_, Victor Hugo’s _Ruy Blas_, and Brachet’s _Grammaire Historique_. Besides this, we were examined in unseen translations from and into French, and we had to write a French essay. We were examined by a Monsieur Hammonet. I worked extremely hard for this examination, and had extra lessons in the evenings from M. Hua. So did the other competitors. My serious rival was Grand d’Hauteville, who I think was a French Canadian, and who spoke French fluently. The examination took five days, and as it went on I became more and more convinced that I had not done well and could not possibly win the prize. When it was over, there was a long interval of agonising suspense before the result was made known.

One afternoon I received a summons from my Uncle Henry Ponsonby to go and see him at Windsor. I found him, not at Norman Tower, but in a room somewhere in the Castle, and he told me that the Queen had just received the news of the result of the Prince Consort’s prize. She was the first to get this news; the news was that I was first and had got the prize. I at once sent a telegram to my mother and to Chérie, and walked back to Eton, drunk with triumph and delight to tell my tutor.

The news was not published for some days, and I told nobody, I think, except my tutor and Dunglass. But it came out at last, and was published in the _Times_ and on the board at Eton. My father and mother came down to see me, and my father gave me his own watch: a _Breguet_, the Demidoff _Breguet_. It was then settled that I was not to go back to Eton, but to go to Germany to learn German and prepare for the Diplomatic Service competitive examination.

Dunglass went on messing with Hugo and myself until I left Eton. We had three or four fags and they bored us, and we could never find things for them to do. Dunglass developed into a fine Eton football player, and got his House Colours and then his Field Colours. He was a new boy the same half as I was, and our alliance lasted unbroken through my Eton life. One half we learnt bird-stuffing together, and when our mess funds used to run short Dunglass used to say: “I’ve marked off an uncle,” and one of his many uncles used to come down and tip us. Our mess was a lively one, and when there was a whole holiday on Friday, which necessitated Friday’s work being done on Thursday, an arrangement which used to be called doing Friday’s business, we used to sing in a loud chorus a song, the words of which were:

“Why not to morrow?
Why not to-morrow?
Why, because to-morrow is to-day!”

The greatest excitements of Eton life were, I always thought, the House football matches for the House Cup. There was the Eton and Harrow match, of course, but while I was at Eton these matches were unexciting and Eton never won, and Dunglass and I agreed that there were few things we enjoyed more than driving away from Lord’s. Nothing surpassed the excitement of the House matches. One year, I think it was the year before I left, we were supposed to have a small chance of getting beyond first ties, but our House played so well together that they got into the ante-final. They then drew Cornish’s, who had a strong side of powerfully built boys. An epic match followed. Durnford’s played as if inspired; they got three rouges to nil, but failed to convert them into goals, and the game was almost over. Then, in the last five minutes of the game, Cornish’s scored a rouge, and being far the heavier team converted it into a goal, and won the match. Never was there a more exciting match.

During my last year my chief friends in the House, besides Dunglass, were Leslie Hamilton, who went into the Coldstream Guards and was killed in the war, and Crum; and outside the House, Gerald Cornish. He, too, killed in the war.

Arthur Benson was my greatest friend among the masters, and I used constantly to have tea with him, and have long talks about books and every other sort of thing. My last half I was up to Mr. Luxmoore, who was to be a lifelong friend.

The last days of my last half were like a dream. I was hardly conscious of the reality of things, and I did not yet fully realise that my Eton life was coming to an end. There was no more work to do. The battle for the Prince Consort’s prize had been fought and won. It was, as Eton triumphs go, a small triumph—small indeed compared with such glories as surround those who get the Newcastle, stroke the Eight, or play in the Field, or at Lord’s in the Eleven; but such as it was, it gave me as much joy and triumph as my being could hold, and nothing in after life could ever touch the rapture of the moment when I knew I had got it.

Now there was nothing left to do but to make every moment seem as long as possible and to say good-bye. Good-bye to the School Library, my favourite haunt at Eton, the scene of so much hurried, scrambled work, of such minute consultations of ecclesiastical authorities for Sunday Questions, or of translations of Virgil and Horace, and the Greeks; of such long and serious discussions of future and present plans and literary topics, schemes and dreams, poems, plays, operas, novels, romances, with Willie Coventry and Gerald Cornish. Good-bye to the leather tables where numberless poems had been copied out on the grey Library foolscap paper, which for some reason we used to call _electric-light_ paper; tables over which we had leapt in wild steeplechases, while Burcher protested, where so many construes had been prepared, and so many punishments scribbled, and where the great poets of England had been surreptitiously discovered, and the accents of Milton and Keats overheard for the first time, and the visions of Shelley and Coleridge discerned through the dust of the daily work and above the din of chattering boys. Good-bye to the playing fields, to South Meadow, the Field, to Upper School, and to Williams’ inner room, full of prizes and redolent with the smell of tree-calf and morocco, where I had so often dreamt of getting prizes and wondered what I should choose if I ever managed to get the Prince Consort’s prize. Good-bye to the Brocas, to Upper Hope and Athens and Romney Weir,

“Where the lock-stream gushes,
Where the cygnet feeds,”

and to all the reaches of the river. Good-bye to Windsor and Norman Tower, and to the chimes of the inexorable school clock; to my little room with its sock cupboard, bureau, and ottoman, to Little Brown’s and to Phœbe, and then to one’s friends: to my Dame and to my tutor, and to Arthur Benson, and the unforgettable readings and talks in his house.

I went to Williams’ to choose my prize, and while I was there Mr. Cornish strolled in, and seeing what I was doing, he said: “Of course you will choose a lot of little books—boys always do—but what you ought to do is to get Littré’s Dictionary or all Sainte Beuve.” This was asking too much in the way of sense, and I compromised. I chose a Shakespeare in twelve volumes, bound in tree calf, a Milton in three volumes, and a few other small books. My tutor gave me two volumes of Ruskin; Mr. Luxmoore gave me a volume of Ruskin as well. Arthur Benson gave me _Ionica_. Just before leaving I had the honour of dining with my tutor, which made one feel already as if one was entering a new world. The hour struck when I was actually leaving Eton. Up to that last moment all had been excitement and fun, but when I was actually sitting in the train and crossing the fifteen arches railway bridge, and Windsor Castle and the trees of the Brocas came into sight, the whole of the past, the Eton past, surged up and overwhelmed me like a flood, and I realised in that last fleeting glimpse of the trees, the river, and the grey Castle all that Eton life had meant, and what it was that in leaving Eton I was saying good-bye to.