IX.
School is a foretaste of life. A boy in a large Copenhagen school would become acquainted, as it were in miniature, with Society in its entirety and with every description of human character. I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness.
In our quarter of an hour's playtime it was easy to see how cowardice and meanness met with their reward in the boy commonwealth. There was a Jewish boy of repulsive appearance, very easy to cow, with a positively slavish disposition. Every single playtime his schoolfellows would make him stand up against a wall and jump about with his feet close together till playtime was over, while the others stood in front of him and laughed at him. He became later a highly respected Conservative journalist.
In lesson time it was easy to see that the equality under one discipline, under the hierarchy of merit, which was expressed in the boys' places on the forms, from highest to lowest, was not maintained when opposed to the very different hierarchy of Society. On the lowest form sat a boy whose gifts were exceedingly mediocre, and who was ignorant, moreover, from sheer laziness; to him were permitted things forbidden to all the others: he was the heir of a large feudal barony. He always came late to school, and even at that rode in followed by a groom on a second horse. He wore a silk hat and, when he came into the schoolroom, did not hang it up on the peg that belonged to him, where he was afraid it might be interfered with, but in the school cupboard, in which only the master was supposed to keep his things; and the tall hat crowning so noble a head impressed the masters to such an extent that not one of them asked for it to be removed. And they acquiesced like lambs in the young lord's departure half-way through the last lesson, if the groom happened to be there with his horse to fetch him.
It seemed impossible to drive knowledge of any sort into the head of this young peer, and he was taken from school early. To what an extent he must have worked later to make up for lost time was proved by results. For he became nothing less than a Minister.