In addition to such dangerous doctrines, Vegetarianism was now beginning to be heard of in Eton; and this was in one respect a worse heresy than Socialism, because it had to be practised as well as preached, and the abstinence from flesh-foods could not fail to attract unfavourable attention. There was a distinguished scientist among the Eton masters at that time, Dr. P. H. Carpenter, a son of Dr. W. B. Carpenter; and when he expressed a wish to speak with me on the subject of the new diet which he heard I had adopted, I felt that a critical moment had arrived, and as a novice in vegetarian practice I awaited the scientific pronouncement with some awe. When it came, spoken with friendly earnestness, it was this: “Don’t you think that animals were sent us as food?” I have since heard the same pathetic question asked many scores of times. What can one say in reply to it, except that the invoice has not yet been received?
A book of rare merit, filled with a multifarious store of facts about the food question in relation to the humaner thought, is Mr. Howard Williams’s Ethics of Diet, which was then appearing by instalments in the magazine of the Vegetarian Society. I had the good fortune to make Mr. Williams’s personal acquaintance, which was the beginning of a valued friendship; I also had helpful correspondence with Professor F. W. Newman, then President of the Vegetarian Society, and with Professor J. E. B. Mayor, who afterwards succeeded to that post. Thus equipped, I was not greatly impressed by the proofs which friendly colleagues offered me of the “impossibility” of the humaner diet; nor was I troubled when, of the two medical men with whom I was acquainted at Eton, the one said to me: “Well, I will give you two years,”[12] and the other, a rather foolish person whom the boys used to call “Mary,” inquired with a look of puzzled despair at such incredible madness: “Do vegetarians eat meat by night?” A vegetarian was of course regarded as a sheer lunatic in the Eton of those days. Twenty-five years later Eton had a vegetarian headmaster in Dr. Edward Lyttelton, who was an assistant there in the ’eighties. “Little did I think,” he wrote to me, “when we used to chaff you about cabbages, that it would come to this!”
It happened, in one of those years, that it fell to my lot to set the subject for “Declamations,” a Latin theme on some debatable point, which had to be composed and “spouted” annually by two of the sixth-form boys, who took opposite sides in the discussion; and I chose for subject, rather to Dr. Hornby’s disgust, the question of vegetarianism (An Pythagorei qui carne abstinent laudandi sint). Another channel for vegetarian propaganda was afforded by the Ascham Society, a learned and select body organized by some of the masters, who met periodically to read and discuss papers on ethical and literary subjects. It happened that the members were hospitably invited to a dinner by one of their colleagues, who specially announced a dish of roast veal as an attraction: thus provoked, I could not but decline that treat in the accredited Eton manner, a set of Latin verses, of which the conclusion was obvious: Spare the calf, or let me be excused:
Si non vis vitulo parcere, parce mihi.
Thus gradually the conviction had been forced on me that we Eton masters, however irreproachable our surroundings, were but cannibals in cap and gown—almost literally cannibals, as devouring the flesh and blood of the higher non-human animals so closely akin to us, and indirectly cannibals, as living by the sweat and toil of the classes who do the hard work of the world.[13] To speak of this, with any fulness, in such a society as that of Eton, except to the two or three friends who held a similar belief, would have been an absurdity; and I do not think I exaggerated, in the first chapter of this book, when I described the discovery as bringing with it a sense of being cut off from one’s neighbours by interminable leagues of misunderstanding. I was living in partibus infidelium. It became a necessity to leave a place where there could be no sympathetic exchange of thought upon matters which were felt to be of vastly more importance than the accepted religion and routine.
I treasure the recollection of the interview in which I took farewell of Dr. Warre. Most kindly he expressed his regret that I had lost faith in that public school system to which he himself, as all Etonians are aware, devoted a lifetime of unsparing service. “It’s the Vegetarianism,” he gravely remarked; and I understood him to mean that it was the abandonment of the orthodox diet that had led, by inevitable weakening of the mens sana in corpore sano, to my apostasy in regard to Education. When I told him that Socialism must take its share of blame, as having been at least an auxiliary cause, he was really shocked. “Socialism!” he cried, in his hearty tones. “Then blow us up, blow us up! There’s nothing left for it but that.”
It is strange to reflect that between thirty and forty years ago the mere mention of Socialism should have suggested desperate acts of violence: the term was then the bugbear, for the time being, of the respectable classes, who always keep on hand some convenient scare-word, for the purpose of making an alarm. “Anarchism” has since served its turn; “Bolshevism” is the latest. Something to fear, something to hate, seems to be an indispensable requirement; hence the periodical outbreak of war-cries and flogging-crazes; it matters little what the bogey is, so long as there is a vendetta of some kind, even if it be only, for a diversion, a campaign against the sparrow or the rat. There is no surer token of the barbaric mind than this capricious state of panic, described by George Meredith as “all stormy nightcap and fingers starving for the bell-rope.”
My one irreparable loss in leaving Eton was not that of culture or scholarship or social position, but of the game of Fives; for I used to think that the evolution of the Eton fives-court, the original of which was a flagged space between two buttresses of the Chapel (“Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense”), was the most valuable contribution ever made by the school to the well-being of mankind. Fives is a great game; and to have played it with such master-hands as A. C. Ainger, E. C. Austen-Leigh, Edward Lyttelton, or C. T. Studd, was a privilege neither to be forgotten nor to be replaced. I used afterwards to dream at times that I was again engaged in the game—“serving,” perhaps, or taking the service, or enjoying a duel of long sweeping strokes on the outer court, or mixed up in one of those close-fought rallies that centred round the “pepper-box”; until a perfect shot from one side or the other had sent the ball to its resting-place in “dead man’s hole.”
My parting gift to the school was an article entitled “Confessions of an Eton Master,” which appeared in the Nineteenth Century in January, 1885, and led to a good deal of discussion on the Eton system of education.