Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

We are obliged to approach any church school through our own personal religious sentiments. We do all of us approach it in this way. Any religious institution is a tiny sample of the great question; and whatever we say of it is a little voice in the great chorus of humanity. We cannot isolate our subject: it is a part of the great subject, religion. We have no achromatic lens through which to view life. All that we see is colored by our own past, and surely, for any man to believe that in describing his youth or his school-days he can clear his mind of error, would be the greatest error and delusion of all. It seems safer, then, in dealing with such a tremulous matter, to lay it out as simply as one may, leaving others to be the judge of its value.

Some years ago I had a long illness; and during those periods of mental fixity which illness brings with it, my mind used to dwell in strange places. It would pause over some spot in the world—some room or field that I had seen, however casually, in former years—and would refuse to move on. It would choose its exact position so that the perspective of the place should be accurately seen, and there it would rest. Sometimes for days at a time it would remain as carefully placed as a camera, giving no reason for its choice, yet deriving some mysterious assistance from the scene. The places were always empty—never a person in them. There was, for example, a particular nook by a country roadside—a barred gate with elm trees bending above it and a meadow beyond—which I had passed by on the way to a child’s funeral some years before. This place opened itself up out of the picture-book of my memory, and for some weeks I lived within its influence—for there was no question that life streamed out of it to me.

Under these circumstances it was natural enough that I should sometimes have found myself back as St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire, and should have wandered once more in the dreamland of boyhood. Indeed, during many months of convalescence, I lived in my imagination at St. Paul’s, always alone with the place, suffering it to move itself through me and present the most forgotten aspects, angles, and bits of scenery with silent, friendly precision. Immense sadness everywhere; immense power.

Now my connection with the school had been very short and quite unsatisfactory. I was sent there as a very small boy, remained less than three years, and then went home sick. I had, in fact, an acute attack of pneumonia which carried away with it a nervous breakdown from which I had been suffering; and it was several years before my health became fully re-established. In consequence of this experience my views about the school were thereafter quite gloomy. I regarded the place as a religious forcing-house, a very dangerous sort of place for any boy to go, especially if he were inclined by nature toward religion. I habitually abused the school, and I even took the trouble to go back there and have a quarrel with Dr. Coit about something he had said or done which seemed to me to deserve the reprobation of all just men. I poured over him a few vitriolic letters; and I still believe that the right was on my side in the matter, though perhaps I was wrong to assume the rôle of the Angel of Retribution.

It was at a date about twenty years after my leaving the school, and at the age of forty-odd, and through the medium of another and very severe illness, that my nature began to take up again the threads of St. Paul’s School influence, and to receive the ideas which Dr. Coit had been striving to convey, though in forms that would have been incomprehensible to himself. The school had somehow been carrying on its work within me through all these years.

Youth is a game of blindman’s buff, a romp and struggle in which we hold on fiercely and shout loudly, but know less as to whom we are holding or who is holding us than we shall ever know again. As we grow older we get true glimpses of things far away; and recognize at a distance what we could never understand so long as we were at close quarters with it. Middle age draws some curtains down, but lifts others; and of all the new visions that come when youth is past, there is none more thrilling than that new vision of the familiar past which shows us what unsuspected powers were at play within us. This experience is necessary and useful to us; and only thus can we come to understand the incredible subtlety of human influence.

Not long ago there was a St. Paul’s School dinner at which two hundred and fifty men met to hear speeches in praise of their school and of its influence. Among other proceedings there was a speech by one (not an alumnus) who was a prospective headmaster of the school. Now this speech was a religious appeal, and ended by a sort of burst of feeling, only a word or two long, to the effect that the world was “God’s World.” I cannot tell what it was that startled me in the reception of the speech by the audience; but I think it was the unexpected sincerity of the applause. It seemed as if all these men had been waiting all their lives to hear this thing said, and now gave a great triumphant, unconscious sigh and roar of relief to hear someone say it. I glanced critically about the room. The diners looked like any other set of diners. Why should they be so much moved by the mention of the works of God?—For they were not applauding the school, they were applauding the Creation. I looked and pondered, and presently I remembered that most of the men at the dinner had lived under the personal influence of Dr. Coit during their early and sensitive years. The fibres of their being had been searched and softened by contact with a nature whose depth made up for its every other deficiency.

“I myself,” I reflected, “am one of them. Perhaps my experience with the place is more typical than I had supposed. Perhaps each of these men was offered something at St. Paul’s School which he could not receive at the time, and therefore rejected, but which in later life he found again for himself in a new form, and thereafter accepted as part of his intimate nature.”

Inasmuch as the whole nature of St. Paul’s School resulted from the manner of its formation, we may begin by a glance at its early days. The inception of the place was as unheralded as any event could well be. Dr. Coit, being a man with a mission and a message, retired in 1856 to a farm in New Hampshire, and opened a school, having four or five pupils to start with. He would neither appeal to the public for funds nor advertise for scholars.[E] The school was, at first, a mere extension of his family circle and of himself; and as it grew, it remained a mere extension of himself. Persons became attached to this family circle one by one; and, whether they were boys or masters or servants, they thus, one by one, became members of a sort of invisible and visible church, or brotherhood—a society of the sanctuary. No opposing or critical influence could enter that circle. It rejected criticism as the jet of a fountain rejects a dried leaf. The whole system at St. Paul’s was really no system at all, but only the unconscious working out of one man’s nature in the formation of a school community. Perhaps the important part of any school is always no more than that.

[E] The land and funds were, during the early years, supplied by Dr. George C. Shattuck, of Boston, who had, I believe, long harbored the idea of founding a school, and who gave his county house and farm to the purpose.