IV
Affection in Education
The place of Affection, and the need of it, as an educative force in school-life, is a subject which is beginning to attract a good deal of attention. Hitherto Education has been concentred on intellectual (and physical) development; but the affections have been left to take care of themselves. Now it is beginning to be seen that the affections have an immense deal to say in the building up of the brain and the body. Their evolution and organisation in some degree is probably going to become an important part of school management.
School friendships of course exist; and almost every one remembers that they filled a large place in the outlook of his early years; but he remembers, too, that they were not recognised in any way, and that in consequence the main part of their force and value was wasted. Yet it is evident that the first unfolding of a strong attachment in boyhood or girlhood must have a profound influence; while if it occurs between an elder and a younger school-mate, or—as sometimes happens—between the young thing and its teacher, its importance in the educational sense can hardly be overrated.
That such feelings sometimes take quite intense and romantic forms few will deny. I have before me a letter, in which the author, speaking of an attachment he experienced when a boy of sixteen for a youth somewhat older than himself, says:—
“I would have died for him ten times over. My devices and plannings to meet him (to come across him casually, as it were) were those of a lad for his sweetheart, and when I saw him my heart beat so violently that it caught my breath, and I could not speak. We met in——, and for the weeks that he stayed there I thought of nothing else—thought of him night and day—and when he returned to London I used to write him weekly letters, veritable love-letters of many sheets in length. Yet I never felt one particle of jealousy, though our friendship lasted for some years. The passion, violent and extravagant as it was, I believe to have been perfectly free from sex-feeling and perfectly wholesome and good for me. It distinctly contributed to my growth. Looking back upon it and analysing it as well as I can, I seem to see as the chief element in it an escape from the extremely narrow Puritanism in which I was reared, into a large sunny ingenuous nature which knew nothing at all of the bondage of which I was beginning to be acutely conscious.”
Shelley in his fragmentary “Essay on Friendship” speaks in the most glowing terms of an attachment he formed at school, and so does Leigh Hunt in his “Autobiography.” Says the latter:—
“If I had reaped no other benefit from Christ Hospital, the school would be ever dear to me from the recollection of the friendships I formed in it, and of the first heavenly taste it gave me of that most spiritual of the affections.… I shall never forget the impression it made on me. I loved my friend for his gentleness, his candour, his truth, his good repute, his freedom even from my own livelier manner, his calm and reasonable kindness.… I doubt whether he ever had a conception of a tithe of the regard and respect I entertained for him, and I smile to think of the perplexity (though he never showed it) which he probably felt sometimes at my enthusiastic expressions; for I thought him a kind of angel.”
It is not necessary, however, to quote authorities on such a subject as this.[51] Any one who has had experience of schoolboys knows well enough that they are capable of forming these romantic and devoted attachments, and that their alliances are often of the kind especially referred to as having a bearing on education—i.e., between an elder and a younger. They are genuine attractions, free as a rule, and at their inception, from secondary motives. They are not formed by the elder one for any personal ends. More often, indeed, I think they are begun by the younger, who naively allows his admiration of the elder one to become visible. But they are absorbing and intense, and on either side their influence is deeply felt and long remembered.
That such attachments may be of the very greatest value is self-evident. The younger boy looks on the other as a hero, loves to be with him, thrills with pleasure at his words of praise or kindness, imitates, and makes him his pattern and standard, learns exercises and games, contracts habits, or picks up information from him. The elder one, touched, becomes protector and helper; the unselfish side of his nature is drawn out, and he develops a real affection and tenderness towards the younger. He takes all sorts of trouble to initiate his protégé in field sports or studies; is proud of the latter’s success; and leads him on perhaps later to share his own ideals of life and thought and work.
Sometimes the alliance will begin, in a corresponding way, from the side of the elder boy. Sometimes, as said, between a boy and a master such an attachment, or the germ of it, is found; and indeed it is difficult to say what gulf, or difference of age, or culture, or class in society, is so great that affection of this kind will not on occasion overpass it. I have by me a letter which was written by a boy of eleven or twelve to a young man of twenty-four or twenty-five. The boy was rather a wild, “naughty” boy, and had given his parents (working-class folk) a good deal of trouble. He attended, however, some sort of night-school or evening class and there conceived the strongest affection (evidenced by this letter) for his teacher, the young man in question, quite spontaneously, and without any attempt on the part of the latter to elicit it; and (which was equally important) without any attempt on his part to deny it. The result was most favorable; the one force which could really reach the boy had, as it were, been found; and he developed rapidly and well.