It is not easy for any one under thirty to picture himself in six years' time. We look back and remember ourselves six years ago in the discomfort and disquiet of khaki. What a lot has happened since then. Who can tell what the next six years may hold? Very few men under thirty can look far ahead, and the new boy at a Public School who can see his life mapped out for six years naturally does not look beyond them. He hardly realises that there is a world outside. He will have to travel so far before he reaches it. He comes to consider his Public School not as a prelude, but as the whole sphere in which his personality has to move. Certain prizes and certain honours await him. He does not pause to think whether those prizes and those honours will be of much or little service to him after he has put the cloistered world behind him. Not only is he incapable of viewing his life under the hard light of eternity, he is incapable of viewing it under the light of the fifty odd years of traffic that wait for him among phenomena. He accepts unquestioningly the standards and values of his school. He does not feel that he is preparing for a contest. That phase of endeavour belonged to his 'prep.' He has started the race.
There is a big difference between four years and six. It is a wall over which even the fag can peer on tiptoe. The passage of ambitions and loyalties and jealousies is much more swift. It is possible to consider four years as a prelude; and as soon as public school life is regarded as a prelude the scale of values becomes changed. The boy begins to wonder whether he is doing his best to fit himself for after life. He will cease to be contented with the honours that come to him on the way. Because his school is a fixed institution, because the scope of his masters is fixed within its walls, there is a tendency to regard him as an inhabitant and not a sojourner there. That is what the schoolboy should never be allowed to forget—that he is passing through one phase of his life into another; it is because he has forgotten that that he so often pauses bewildered and irresolute on the threshold of life.
CHAPTER XIV CONCLUSION
Were the moral question to be tackled sensibly, and were the reduction of the age limit to modify the 'blood' system, and insist upon the fact that school life is only a prelude, I believe that athletics would occupy their proper place in the life of the school. The social force of religion depends, to a large extent, on the appreciation of the importance of what will follow the 'here and now.' During the war, when the future was insecure, and no one could see anything certainly beyond the limits of a fortnight's leave, the country plunged recklessly in search of pleasure. No one looked ahead. No one paused to consider what would be the harvest of their sowing.
The eyes of the preparatory school boy are fixed upon the future. He knows that the successes and failures of the moment are unimportant. He knows that a strenuous contest lies in wait for him. In consequence there is at a Preparatory School little of the fanatical devotion that colours the fabric of public school life. I remember a house master once saying that it was impossible for a member of a house side to do much work while the house matches were in progress. And, as the house matches covered a period of six weeks, this was a pretty generous allowance. At the same time the house master only spoke the truth: it was practically impossible to do much work during the house matches term; we could think of little else. Every evening we would discuss at considerable length the afternoon's punt-about and the morrow's match. We would devise schemes for the better outwitting of our opponents. We would discuss the weakness and strength of individual players. And the majority of masters, certainly of house masters, shared this fervour. It is true that a certain house master, when presented with the excuse for an indifferent prose that house matches were too exciting, remarked: 'I don't know whom they excite, they don't excite me.' But this assertion was belied by his subsequent behaviour on the touchline. During house matches there is an educational moratorium. In peace time the energies and interests of a nation are directed into a thousand different channels, but in war time every interest is secondary to that of war. And, while house matches are in progress, the atmosphere of a house is not unlike that of a nation that is at war. Individual members may have their private troubles, but they realise that these troubles are of small account at such a time. And, though it is no doubt admirable for the individual to feel himself of less importance than the community, it will hardly be conceded that self-negation in such a cause is likely to prove of any very permanent value to him.
Now there are those who will urge that boy nature cannot be altered, that it is natural for a boy to worship games, and that you cannot expect him to be otherwise. But that I shall never believe is so. For myself, I know that I play cricket and football as keenly as I did seven years ago, that I spend a great many evenings with a Wisden in my hands; but that I manage to get through a fair amount of work between each January and December. That is not in itself a fair argument. One cannot arraign the enthusiasms of sixteen before the enthusiasms of twenty-three any more than one can arraign the enthusiasms of twenty-three before those of forty. There is no more fallacious argument than the 'when you have reached my age, young man.' At different stages of our life we are vexed by different problems. At twenty-three our sexual life is of vast importance; it stretches before us, a wide field for courage, enterprise, adventure. In the man of forty, curiosity has been satisfied. He has settled many of the problems that perplexed him when he was a young man. And he says: 'My dear fellow, all this that is worrying you does not really matter.' But he is wrong. It does matter to a young man of twenty. And nothing is trivial that has ever exercised deeply the human spirit.
In a world that is in flux the permanence or impermanence of any emotion is of less matter than its intensity while it lasts. Sooner or later everything must desert us. Is the brain a useless possession because it will one day soften. Are teeth less efficacious now because one day they will decay. Is a young man of twenty going to listen to the impotent man of sixty who mutters: 'Young man, the charms of woman are a snare and an illusion. When you have reached my age you will be no longer moved by them.' For that is where the 'when you are my age, young man,' argument finally lands us. And it is not fair to say to a boy of seventeen: 'This mad excitement about games is absurd. In six years even you will have outgrown it.' It is for us to decide whether this mad excitement is the natural expression of a boy's temperament, or whether it is the peculiar growth of a peculiar environment.
I will take as an example Sandhurst as it was in the autumn of 1916. It was composed almost entirely of boys straight from the Public Schools, and I should imagine that the average age of a company was about eighteen, the age, that is to say, at which most of them would have been about to start on their last year. They brought with them the standards of public school life. One would have expected them to establish their standards at Sandhurst. They did nothing of the sort. There was nothing that bore the least approach to a blood system. There were seniors and juniors, that was all. There was no fierce cult of athleticism. The G.C. who scored tries in company matches was not granted a general permission to drive his bayonet through college furniture. In the daily life games played a prominent part. Indeed, the under officer whose company did not make use of the ground allotted to it would have had to face an unpleasant half-hour with the commandant. But games never became the business of life. They were played for their own sake. They were untouched by professionalism. If a three-quarter missed a pass five yards from the line he did not bury himself in a far corner of the anteroom, apart from the gaiety of his companions. The average company side played just as keenly as a house fifteen at school. While we were on the field we were as desperately anxious to win. But we did not spend the morning in a state of nervous irritation, nor did the issue of the contests drive us to deep despondency, or to hysterical elation. A certain intensity had passed. Yet I do not think that ever before had I derived such pleasure from the actual playing of the game as I did at Sandhurst.