Chapter 2

Every child passes into this secret stage; it closes in from its first
frankness; it carries off the growing jewel of its consciousness to hide
from all mankind.... I think I can see why this should be so, but I
cannot tell why in so many cases no jewel is given back again at last,
alight, ripened, wonderful, glowing with the deep fires of experience. I
think that is what ought to happen; it is what does happen now with true
poets and true artists. Someday I think it will be the life of all
normal human souls. But usually it does not seem to happen at all.
Children pass out of a stage--open, beautiful, exquisitely simple--into
silences and discretions beneath an imposed and artificial life. And
they are lost. Out of the finished, careful, watchful, restrained and
limited man or woman, no child emerges again....

I remember very distinctly how I myself came by imperceptible increments
of reservation to withdraw those early delicacies of judgments, those
original and personal standards and appreciations, from sight and
expression. I can recall specific moments when I perceive now that my
little childish figure stood, as it were, obstinately and with a sense
of novelty in a doorway denying the self within.

It was partly, I think, a simple instinct that drew that curtain of
silences and concealments, it was much more a realization that I had no
power of lucidity to save the words and deeds I sought to make
expressive from complete misunderstanding. But most of all it was the
perception that I was under training and compulsion for ends that were
all askew and irrelevant to the trend of my imaginations, the quality of
my dreams. There was around me something unfriendly to this inner
world--something very ready to pass from unfriendliness to acute
hostility; and if, indeed, I succeeded in giving anything of my inner
self to others, it was only, as people put it, to give myself away.

My nurses, my governess, my tutor, my father, the servants about me,
seemed all bent upon imposing an artificial personality upon me. Only in
a very limited sense did they want me. What they wanted was something
that could be made out of me by extensive suppressions and additions.
They ignored the fact that I had been born with a shape of my own; they
were resolved I should be pressed into a mould and cast.

It was not that they wanted outer conformity to certain needs and
standards--that, I think, would be a reasonable thing enough to
demand--but they wanted me to subdue my most private thoughts to their
ideals. My nurses and my governesses would rate me for my very feelings,
would clamor for gratitude and reproach me bitterly for betraying that I
did not at some particular moment--love.

(Only yesterday I heard Mademoiselle Potin doing that very same thing to
you. "It is that you do not care, Master Steve. It is that you do not
care. You do not want to care.")

They went too far in that invasion of my personal life, but I perceive
quite clearly the present need for most of the process of moulding and
subjugation that children must undergo. Human society is a new thing
upon the earth, an invention of the last ten thousand years. Man is a
creature as yet not freely and instinctively gregarious; in his more
primordial state he must have been an animal of very small groups and
limited associations, an animal rather self-centred and fierce, and he
is still but imperfectly adapted either morally or physically to the
wider social life his crowding interactions force upon him. He still
learns speech and computation and civility and all the devices of this
artificially extended and continually broadening tribal life with an
extreme reluctance. He has to be shaped in the interests of the species,
I admit, to the newer conditions; the growing social order must be
protected from the keen edge of his still savage individuality, and he
must be trained in his own interests to save himself from the
destruction of impossible revolts. But how clumsily is the thing done!
How we are caught and jammed and pressed and crippled into citizenship!
How excessive and crushing is the suppression, and how inadequate!

Every child feels that, even if every child does not clearly know it.
Every child presently begins to hide itself from the confused tyrannies
of the social process, from the searching inspections and injunctions
and interferences of parent and priest and teacher.

"I have got to be _so_," we all say deep down in ourselves and more or
less distinctly according to the lucidities of our minds; "but in my
heart I am _this_."

And in the outcome we all try to seem at least to be _so_, while an
ineffectual rebel struggles passionately, like a beast caught in a trap,
for ends altogether more deep and dangerous, for the rose and the star
and the wildfire,--for beauty and beautiful things. These, we all know
in our darkly vital recesses, are the real needs of life, the obediences
imposed upon us by our crude necessities and jostling proximities, mere
incidentals on our way to those profounder purposes....

And when I write thus of our selves I mean our bodies quite as much as
our imaginations; the two sides of us are covered up alike and put alike
into disguises and unnatural shapes, we are taught and forced to hide
them for the same reasons, from a fear of ourselves and a fear of the
people about us. The sense of beauty, the sense of one's body, the
freedom of thought and of desire and the wonder of life, are all
interwoven strands. I remember that in the Park of Burnmore one great
craving I had was to take off my clothes there altogether, and bathe in
a clear place among loosestrife and meadowsweet, and afterwards lie wet
and naked upon the soft green turf with the sun shining upon me. But I
thought also that that was a very wicked and shameful craving to have,
and I never dared give way to it.

§ 3

As I think of myself and all these glowing secrecies and hidden fancies
within, walking along beside old Siddons, and half listening to his
instructive discourse, I see myself as though I was an image of all
humanity under tuition for the social life.

I write "old Siddons," for so he seemed to me then. In truth he was
scarcely a dozen years older than I, and the other day when I exchanged
salutations with his gaitered presence in the Haymarket, on his way I
suppose to the Athenæum, it struck me that he it is who is now the
younger man. But at Burnmore he was eighteen inches or more above my
head and all the way of school and university beyond me; full of the
world they had fitted him for and eager to impart its doctrines. He went
along in his tweeds that were studiously untidy, a Norfolk jacket of one
clerically-greyish stuff and trousers of another somewhat lighter
pattern, in thick boots, the collar of his calling, and a broad-minded
hat, bearing his face heavenward as he talked, and not so much aware of
me as appreciating the things he was saying. And sometimes he was
manifestly talking to himself and airing his outlook. He carried a
walking-stick, a manly, homely, knobby, donnish walking-stick.

He forced the pace a little, for his legs were long and he had acquired
the habit of strenuous pedestrianism at Oxford with all the other
things; he obliged me to go at a kind of skipping trot, and he preferred
the high roads towards Wickenham for our walks, because they were
flatter and there was little traffic upon them in those days before the
motor car, and we could keep abreast and go on talking uninterruptedly.
That is to say, he could.

What talk it was!

Of all the virtues that the young should have. He spoke of courage and
how splendid it was to accustom oneself not even to feel fear; of truth,
and difficult cases when one might conceivably injure others by telling
the truth and so perhaps, perhaps qualify the rigor of one's integrity,
but how one should never hesitate to injure one's own self in that
matter. Then in another phase he talked of belief--and the
disagreeableness of dissenters. But here, I remember, there was a
discussion. I have forgotten how I put the thing, but in some boyish
phrasing or other I must have thrown out the idea that thought is free
and beliefs uncontrollable. What of conformity, if the truth was that
you doubted? "Not if you make an effort," I remember him saying, "not if
you make an effort. I have had my struggles. But if you say firmly to
yourself, the Church teaches this. If you dismiss mere carping and say
that."

"But suppose you can't," I must have urged.

"You can if you will," he said with a note near enthusiasm. "I have been
through all that. I did it. I dismissed doubts. I wouldn't listen. I
felt, _This won't do. All this leads nowhere._"

And he it was told me the classic story of that presumptuous schoolboy
who went to his Head Master and declared himself an atheist. There were
no dialectics but a prompt horse-whipping. "In after life," said Mr.
Siddons, with unctuous gratification, "he came to recognize that
thrashing as the very best thing that had ever happened to him. The
kindest thing."

"Yes," urged the obstinate rebel within me, "but--the Truth, that
fearless insistence on the Truth!"

I could, however, find nothing effective to say aloud, and Siddons
prevailed over me. That story made my blood boil, it filled me with an
anticipatory hatred of and hostility to Head Masters, and at the same
time there was something in it, brutally truer to the conditions of
human association than any argument.

I do not remember the various steps by which I came to be discussing
doubts so early in my life. I could not have been much more than
thirteen when that conversation occurred. I am I think perhaps
exceptionally unconscious about myself. I find I can recall the sayings
and even the gestures of other people far more distinctly than the
things I said and did myself. Even my dreams and imaginings are more
active than my positive thoughts and proceedings. But I was no doubt
very much stimulated by the literature lying about my home and the
gleans and echoes of controversies that played like summer lightning
round and about the horizons of my world. Over my head and after I had
gone to bed, my father and Siddons were talking, my cousin was listening
with strained apprehensions, there was a new spirit in my father's
sermons; it was the storm of Huxley-Darwin controversies that had at
last reached Burnmore. I was an intelligent little listener, an eager
reader of anything that came to hand, Mr. Siddons had a disposition to
fight his battles over again in his monologues to me; and after all at
thirteen one isn't a baby. The small boy of the lower classes used in
those days to start life for himself long before then.

How dramatic a phase it was in the history of the human mind when
science suddenly came into the vicarages, into all the studies and quiet
places that had been the fastnesses of conviction and our ideals, and
denied, with all the power of evidence it had been accumulating for so
long, and so obscurely and inaggressively, with fossils and strata, with
embryology and comparative anatomy, the doctrine of the historical Fall
and all the current scheme of orthodoxy that was based on that! What a
quickening shock it must have been in countless thousands of educated
lives! And my father after a toughly honest resistance was won over to
Darwinism, the idea of Evolution got hold of him, the idea that life
itself was intolerant of vain repetitions; and he had had to "consider
his position" in the church. To him as to innumerable other honest,
middle-aged and comfortable men, Darwinism came as a dreadful invitation
to go out into the wilderness. Over my head and just out of range of my
ears he was debating that issue with Siddons as a foil and my cousin as
a horrified antagonist. Slowly he was developing his conception of
compromise. And meanwhile he wasn't going out into the wilderness at
all, but punctually to and fro, along the edge of the lawn by the bed of
hollyhocks and through the little green door in the garden wall, and
across the corner of the churchyard to the vestry and the perennial
services and sacraments of the church.

But he never talked to me privately of religion. He left that for my
cousin and Mr. Siddons to do or not to do as they felt disposed, and in
those silences of his I may have found another confirmation of my
growing feeling that religion was from one point of view a thing
somehow remote and unreal, claiming unjustifiable interventions in the
detailed conduct of my life, and from another a peculiar concern of my
father's and Mr. Siddons', to which they went--through the vestry,
changing into strange garments on the way.

§ 4

I do not want to leave the impression which my last section may have
conveyed that at the age of thirteen or thereabouts I walked about with
Mr. Siddons discussing doubt in a candid and intelligent manner and
maintaining theological positions. That particular conversation, you
must imagine with Mr. Siddons somewhat monologuing, addressing himself
not only to my present self, but with an unaccustomed valiance to my
absent father. What I may have said or not said, whether I did indeed
dispute or merely and by a kind of accident implied objections, I have
altogether forgotten long ago.

A boy far more than a man is mentally a discontinuous being. The
drifting chaos of his mind makes its experimental beginnings at a
hundred different points and in a hundred different spirits and
directions; here he flashes into a concrete realization, here into a
conviction unconsciously incompatible; here is something originally
conceived, here something uncritically accepted. I know that I
criticized Mr. Siddons quite acutely, and disbelieved in him. I know
also that I accepted all sorts of suggestions from him quite
unhesitatingly and that I did my utmost to satisfy his standards and
realize his ideals of me.

Like an outer casing to that primordial creature of senses and dreams
which came to the surface in the solitudes of the Park was my
Siddonsesque self, a high-minded and clean and brave English boy,
conscientiously loyal to queen and country, athletic and a good
sportsman and acutely alive to good and bad "form." Mr. Siddons made me
aware of my clothed self as a visible object, I surveyed my garmented
being in mirrors and was trained to feel the "awfulness" of various
other small boys who appeared transitorily in the smaller Park when Lady
Ladislaw extended her wide hospitality to certain benevolent London
associations. Their ill-fitting clothing, their undisciplined outcries,
their slouching, their bad throwing and defective aspirates were made
matters for detestation in my plastic mind. Those things, I was assured,
placed them outside the pale of any common humanity.

"Very unfortunate and all that," said Mr. Siddons, "and uncommonly good
of Lady Ladislaw to have them down. But dirty little cads, Stephen,
dirty little cads; so don't go near 'em if you can help it."

They played an indecent sort of cricket with coats instead of a wicket!

Mr. Siddons was very grave about games and the strict ritual and proper
apparatus for games. He believed that Waterloo was won by the indirect
influence of public school cricket--disregarding many other contributory
factors. We did not play very much, but we "practised" sedulously at a
net in the paddock with the gardener and the doctor's almost grown-up
sons. I thought missing a possible catch was an impropriety. I
studiously maintained the correct attitude, alert and elastic, while I
was fielding. Moreover I had a shameful secret, that I did not really
know where a ball ought to pitch. I wasn't clear about it and I did not
dare to ask. Also until I was nearly thirteen I couldn't bowl overarm.
Such is the enduring force of early suggestion, my dear son, that I feel
a faint twinge of shame as I set this down for your humiliated eyes. But
so it was. May you be more precocious!

Then I was induced to believe that I really liked hunting and killing
things. In the depths of my being I was a gentle and primitive savage
towards animals; I believed they were as subtle and wise as myself and
full of a magic of their own, but Mr. Siddons nevertheless got me out
into the south Warren, where I had often watched the rabbits setting
their silly cock-eared sentinels and lolloping out to feed about
sundown, and beguiled me into shooting a furry little fellow-creature--I
can still see its eyelid quiver as it died--and carrying it home in
triumph. On another occasion I remember I was worked up into a ferocious
excitement about the rats in the old barn. We went ratting, just as
though I was Tom Brown or Harry East or any other of the beastly little
models of cant and cruelty we English boys were trained to imitate. It
was great sport. It was a tremendous spree. The distracted movements,
the scampering and pawing of the little pink forefeet of one squawking
little fugitive, that I hit with a stick and then beat to a shapeless
bag of fur, haunted my dreams for years, and then I saw the bowels of
another still living victim that had been torn open by one of the
terriers, and abruptly I fled out into the yard and was violently sick;
the best of the fun was over so far as I was concerned.

My cousin saved me from the uttermost shame of my failure by saying
that I had been excited too soon after my dinner....

And also I collected stamps and birds' eggs.

Mr. Siddons hypnotized me into believing that I really wanted these
things; he gave me an egg-cabinet for a birthday present and told me
exemplary stories of the wonderful collections other boys had made. My
own natural disposition to watch nests and establish heaven knows what
friendly intimacy with the birds--perhaps I dreamt their mother might
let me help to feed the young ones--gave place to a feverish artful
hunting, a clutch, and then, detestable process, the blowing of the egg.
Of course we were very humane; we never took the nest, but just
frightened off the sitting bird and grabbed a warm egg or so. And the
poor perforated, rather damaged little egg-shells accumulated in the
drawers, against the wished-for but never actually realized day of glory
when we should meet another collector who wouldn't have--something that
we had. So far as it was for anything and not mere imbecile
imitativeness, it was for that.

And writing thus of eggs reminds me that I got into a row with Mr.
Siddons for cruelty.

I discovered there was the nest of a little tit in a hole between two
stones in the rock bank that bordered the lawn. I found it out when I
was sitting on the garden seat near by, learning Latin irregular verbs.
I saw the minute preposterous round birds going and coming, and I found
something so absurdly amiable and confiding about them--they sat
balancing and oscillating on a standard rose and cheeped at me to go and
then dived nestward and gave away their secret out of sheer
impatience--that I could not bring myself to explore further, and kept
the matter altogether secret from the enthusiasm of Mr. Siddons. And in
a few days there were no more eggs and I could hear the hungry little
nestlings making the minutest of fairy hullabaloos, the very finest spun
silk of sound; a tremendous traffic in victual began and I was the
trusted friend of the family.

Then one morning I was filled with amazement and anguish. There was a
rock torn down and lying in the path; a paw had gone up to that little
warm place. Across the gravel, shreds of the nest and a wisp or so of
down were scattered. I could imagine the brief horrors of that night
attack. I started off, picking up stones as I went, to murder that sandy
devil, the stable cat. I got her once--alas! that I am still glad to
think of it--and just missed her as she flashed, a ginger streak,
through the gate into the paddock.

"_Now_ Steve! Now!" came Mr. Siddons' voice behind me....

How can one explain things of that sort to a man like Siddons? I took my
lecture on the Utter Caddishness of Wanton Cruelty in a black rebellious
silence. The affair and my own emotions were not only far beyond my
powers of explanation, but far beyond my power of understanding. Just
then my soul was in shapeless and aimless revolt against something
greater and higher and deeper and darker than Siddons, and his
reproaches were no more than the chattering of a squirrel while a storm
uproots great trees. I wanted to kill the cat. I wanted to kill whatever
had made that cat.

§ 5

Mr. Siddons it was who first planted the conception of Life as a Career
in my mind.

In those talks that did so much towards shaping me into the likeness of
a modest, reserved, sporting, seemly, clean and brave, patriotic and
decently slangy young Englishman, he was constantly reverting to that
view of existence. He spoke of failures and successes, talked of
statesmen and administrators, peerages and Westminster Abbey. "Nelson,"
he said, "was once a clergyman's son like you."

"England has been made by the sons of the clergy."

He talked of the things that led to failure and the things that had made
men prominent and famous.

"Discursiveness ruins a man," I remember him saying. "Choose your goal
and press to it."

"Never do anything needlessly odd. It's a sort of impertinence to all
the endless leaders of the past who created our traditions. Do not
commit yourself hastily to opinions, but once you have done so, stick to
them. The world would far rather have a firm man wrong, than a weak man
hesitatingly right. Stick to them."

"One has to remember," I recall him meditating, far over my head with
his face upturned, "that Institutions are more important than Views.
Very often one adopts a View only to express one's belief in an
Institution.... Men can do with almost all sorts of Views, but only with
certain Institutions. All this Doubt doesn't touch a truth like that.
One does not refuse to live in a house because of the old symbols one
finds upon the door.... If they _are_ old symbols...."

Out of such private contemplations he would descend suddenly upon me.

"What are _you_ going to do with your life, Steve?" he would ask.

"There is no happiness in life without some form of service. Where do
you mean to serve? With your bent for science and natural history, it
wouldn't be difficult for you to get into the I.C.S. I doubt if you'd do
anything at the law; it's a rough game, Steve, though the prizes are
big. Big prizes the lawyers get. I've known a man in the Privy Council
under forty--and that without anything much in the way of a family....
But always one must concentrate. The one thing England will not stand is
a loafer, a wool-gatherer, a man who goes about musing and half-awake.
It's our energy. We're western. It's that has made us all we are."

I knew whither that pointed. Never so far as I can remember did Mr.
Siddons criticize either myself or my father directly, but I understood
with the utmost clearness that he found my father indolent and
hesitating, and myself more than a little bit of a mollycoddle, and in
urgent need of pulling together.

§ 6

Harbury went on with that process of suppressing, encrusting, hardening,
and bracing-up which Mr. Siddons had begun. For a time I pulled myself
together very thoroughly. I am not ungrateful nor unfaithful to Harbury;
in your turn you will go there, you will have to live your life in this
British world of ours and you must learn its language and manners,
acquire its reserves and develop the approved toughness and patterning
of cuticle. Afterwards if you please you may quarrel with it. But don't
when the time comes quarrel with the present conditions of human
association and think it is only with Harbury you quarrel. What man has
become and may become beneath the masks and impositions of civilization,
in his intimate texture and in the depths of his being, I begin now in
my middle age to appreciate. No longer is he an instinctive savage but a
creature of almost incredible variability and wonderful new
possibilities. Marvels undreamt of, power still inconceivable, an empire
beyond the uttermost stars; such is man's inheritance. But for the
present, until we get a mastery of those vague and mighty intimations at
once so perplexing and so reassuring, if we are to live at all in the
multitudinousness of human society we must submit to some scheme of
clumsy compromises and conventions or other,--and for us Strattons the
Harbury system is the most convenient. You will have to go to the old
school.

I went to Rendle's. I just missed getting into college; I was two places
below the lowest successful boy. I was Maxton's fag to begin with, and
my chief chum was Raymond, who is your friend also, and who comes so
often to this house. I preferred water to land, boats to cricket,
because of that difficulty about pitch I have already mentioned. But I
was no great sportsman. Raymond and I shared a boat, and spent most of
the time we gave to it under the big trees near Dartpool Lock, reading
or talking. We would pull up to Sandy Hall perhaps once a week. I never
rowed in any of the eights, though I was urged to do so. I swam fairly
well, and got my colors on the strength of my diving.

On the whole I found Harbury a satisfactory and amusing place, I was
neither bullied nor do I think I greatly bullied, and of all that
furtive and puerile lasciviousness of which one hears so many hints
nowadays--excitable people talk of it as though it was the most
monstrous and singular of vices instead of a slightly debasing but
almost unavoidable and very obvious result of heaping boys together
under the inefficient control of a timid pretentious class of men--of
such uncleanness as I say, scarcely more than a glimpse and a whisper
and a vague tentative talk or so reached me. Little more will reach you,
for that kind of thing, like the hells of Swedenborg, finds its own.

I had already developed my growing instinct for observance to a very
considerable extent under Siddons, and at Harbury I remember myself, and
people remember me, as an almost stiffly correct youth. I was pretty
good at most of the work, and exceptionally so at history, geology, and
the biological side of natural science. I had to restrain my interest in
these latter subjects lest I should appear to be a "swat," and a
modern-side swat at that. I was early in the sixth, and rather a
favorite with old Latimer. He incited me to exercise what he called a
wholesome influence on the younger boys, and I succeeded in doing this
fairly well without any gross interventions. I implied rather than
professed soundly orthodox views about things in general, and I was
extremely careful to tilt my straw hat forward over my nose so as just
not to expose the crown of my head behind, and to turn up my trousers
with exactly that width of margin which the judgment of my
fellow-creatures had decided was correct. My socks were spirited without
being vulgar, and the ties I wore were tied with a studious avoidance
of either slovenliness or priggish neatness. I wrote two articles in the
Harburonian, became something of a debater in the Literacy and
Political, conducted many long conversations with my senior
contemporaries upon religion, politics, sport and social life, and
concealed my inmost thoughts from every human being. Indeed, so
effective had been the training of Harbury and Mr. Siddons, that I think
at that time I came very near concealing them from myself. I could
suppress wonder, I could pass by beauty as if I did not see it, almost I
think I did not see it for a time, and yet I remember it in those years
too--a hundred beautiful things.

Harbury itself is a very beautiful place. The country about it has all
the charm of river scenery in a settled and ancient land, and the great
castle and piled town of Wetmore, cliffs of battlemented grey wall
rising above a dense cluster of red roofs, form the background to
innumerable gracious prospects of great stream-fed trees, level meadows
of buttercups, sweeping curves of osier and rush-rimmed river, the
playing fields and the sedgy, lily-spangled levels of Avonlea. The
college itself is mostly late Tudor and Stuart brickwork, very ripe and
mellow now, but the great grey chapel with its glorious east window
floats over the whole like a voice singing in the evening. And the
evening cloudscapes of Harbury are a perpetual succession of glorious
effects, now serene, now mysteriously threatening and profound, now
towering to incredible heights, now revealing undreamt-of distances of
luminous color.