It was not the boys only who found the Chapel services very tedious; for most of the masters were laymen, many of them unorthodox, and for these it was no agreeable duty to be victimized both on Sundays and on Saints’ Days for the sake of keeping up appearances before the school. Calculations are sometimes made of the number of years spent in prison by some hardened criminal or “gaol-bird.” Why does no one tell us how many hours, amounting to how many years, some zealous church-goer, or pew-bird, has spent on such devotions? Without claiming that distinction, I calculate that during some twenty years spent in connection with public school and University I passed several thousands of hours in church and chapel.
Human nature could not but chafe under the fearful dulness and length of the sermons in Eton College Chapel. Dr. Goodford, the Provost, was a sort of personified Doom; when once he mounted the pulpit he was in the saddle, so to speak, and rode his congregation well-nigh to despair with his merciless homilies, all uttered in that droning voice, with its ceaseless burr and inevitable cadence, which became to generations of Etonians as familiar as the Chapel bell itself. Scarcely less fearsome were some of the elder Fellows, retired masters, such as Bishop Chapman and the Rev. John Wilder, who were often let loose on us on Sunday mornings and blithely seized the opportunity: it was their field-day, and they were out to enjoy themselves, quite unconscious that what was pious sport to them was death to their unwilling audience. Small wonder that some assistant masters used to dread the weeks when they were on duty (“in desk” it was called); but providentially there were others who, disliking still more the labour of correcting Latin verses, were willing to barter “verses” for “desks”; that is, they would take so many of a colleague’s desks, while he in return would look over a stipulated number of exercises. Thus did the Muse come to the aid of her devotees:
Sic me servavit Apollo.
Perhaps the strangest form that religion took at Eton was that of missionary zeal; we used to have sermons periodically about carrying the gospel to “the heathen”; though if ever there was a benighted spot on earth, it was that pleasant school by the Thames. Some of the boys were at times infected by the passion for making proselytes: on one occasion an extremely dull and idle youth, who had lately left Eton, wrote to tell me, as his former tutor, that he had decided to become a missionary “to the poor perishing heathen”—in his case, the Chinese, a people much less ignorant and barbarous than many of their self-appointed rescuers.
“Divinity” was one of the studies most encouraged and fostered at Eton; one would have thought the place was a training-school for theologians, from the prominence that was given in examinations to this particular branch of learning. The result, as might have been expected, was the same as in the writing of Latin verses: a few boys became adepts in the Bible Dictionary, while the bulk of the school scarcely advanced beyond that stage of biblical knowledge exhibited by a certain Etonian who, when invited to write an account of St. James the Elder and St. James the Less, was able to give a brief description of the Elder, but was reduced, in the case of the Lesser saint, to the rather inadequate, though so far correct, statement that: “The other was another.”
We were perhaps somewhat overdone with the Saints at Eton: the masters who had to set the Sunday Questions were nearly as tired of asking about St. Peter and St. Paul as the boys of answering; and in the Chapel sermons we suffered, year after year, under the whole Hagiology, until some of us, it must be confessed, sighed in secret for the time:
When Reason’s rays, illuming all,
Shall put the Saints to rout,
And Peter’s holiness shall pall,
And Paul’s shall peter out.
But if Christianity was the nominal religion at Eton, the real creed was Respectability. To do the “proper thing”; not to offend against any of the conventional canons; to dress, walk, speak, eat and live in the manner prescribed by “good form”—this was the ever-present obligation which neither boy nor master could disregard. Any slip in matters of etiquette was regarded as deadly. There was a dark rumour about one of the masters, a good and worthy man, but very shortsighted, that by a tragic error in the High Street he had taken off his hat to his cook: it was only less dreadful than if he had failed to perform that act of courtesy in some case where it was required.
As is usual in barbarous societies, the number of things that were “taboo” was considerable. In the early ’eighties the bicycle and tricycle were frowned upon, not for boys only but for masters; and a lady living in Eton once received from Mrs. Hornby, who of course, was at the head of the Fashions, a message that to ride a tricycle was “not a nice thing to do.” Yet for the boys it was considered a nice thing to hunt and “break up” hares. I once witnessed the virtuous indignation of one of the masters, a clergyman, and a follower of the Eton hounds, when some rather “shady” incident of the hunt was reported to the headmaster; but Dr. Hornby soon set matters right by explaining that, as all hunting was cruel, he obviously could not take notice of any particular malpractice. That was the sort of reasoning with which any attempts to humanize Eton customs were parried and thwarted.
Yet new ideas could not be wholly excluded, even from that stronghold of the antique; there were, in fact, several members of Hornby’s staff who held views too advanced to be avowed in such surroundings. One of the least prejudiced men at Eton was the French Master, M. Roublot, who was a close personal friend of his German colleague, Herr Griebel; and it is pleasant to recall the fact that during the horrors of the Franco-German War, some ten years earlier than the period of which I am speaking, these two “enemies” had kept their friendship unbroken, and might be seen daily taking their walk together, just as if their countrymen were not insanely engaged in cutting each other’s throats.