To my mind the isolation of St. Paul’s is its strongest feature, its rarest influence. The founding of institutions is done to-day by the circulation of petitions, by the calling of friends into a circle and the issuing of stock or advertisements. Hardly any other method is deemed possible by practical men. The institutions thus founded are in very close touch with their public. They rely upon their patrons, and are controlled by their clients. They become the creatures of the age they live in. But St. Paul’s School was not the creature of any age. It was the child of one man who planted his house upon a hill. As it has owed nothing to the age, so it has remained inaccessible to the influences of the age. It is not in competition with other schools; it is not affected by the fluctuating and journalistic currents of contemporary thought; it has, one might say, no relation to the superficial influences in America. The place seems not to be a part of modern American life. We know, of course, that the school is in reality a part of that life, and relies, as every school must, on the community at large into which its roots extend. The apparent isolation of St. Paul’s comes from the fact that it represents few influences. These influences are everywhere prevalent, but they are not everywhere visible. The school seems to live to itself; but in reality it draws its life from those deep and invisible sources of religious feeling which exist, but which do not come to the surface in contemporary life.
That there should be a spot in the United States having the atmosphere of another world, that is the valuable and wonderful part of St. Paul’s School. To plunge a boy even for the fraction of a year into this pool is to give him a new outlook upon humanity. What is it that we lack in America? Why, we lack variety. Our interests and pleasures, our occupations in social, in commercial, in religious life are all so stamped with the identical pattern—each of them is so like the rest—our views and feelings are so narrow—that to put an American youth to school in Central Asia for a year or two, under the Grand Llama, would be apt to make a man of him. We need to give our boys an insight into some species of life that belongs to the great world, the historic world, the empire of the soul. We cannot snatch this life from Europe without running the danger of that expatriation which makes men shallow. We must find and create centres of it upon our own shores—centres of social life devoted to unworldly aims. Not only for our children, but for ourselves have we felt this need. New well-springs in our heart and intelligence are unlocked by living for some period of our lives in such a community; and the earlier in life we can receive this experience the richer will it leave us.
A school is far more than the school community which gives it a name. A school is the whole body of graduates, friends, and fosterers, whose affections are attached to the place, whose memories go back to it, whose character has been formed by it. These people, though they exist dispersedly, have an influence in common. They belong to a club. They are united by one of the strongest ties that can bind men together. This club is as much a part of the school as the school itself. The stream of boys flowing from the club to the school constitutes a sort of river of time, a perpetual current of the ideas of the founder, an immortality of influence. This stream must change, of course, but it changes slowly—so great is the conservatism of boys at school, and of old boys sending their sons to a school. I suppose that of all human institutions a boys’ school is, by its nature, the most traditional and old-fashioned. The boys regard themselves as the school, and regard the masters as necessary figureheads; and in any large school, where the mass and volume of young life rolls on without much possible interference from above, there is a good deal of truth in the conception.
When one hears other people talking about their pet school there is a personal ring to the conversation which does not always please us. The truth is that the foundation of a school is a matter of personal magnetism, and that any school becomes a sort of clan or clique. It is no accident that certain particular boys are sent to a certain particular school. They go there as the needle swings to the pole. They flow there as the ants flow to their native hill. The matter is settled by personal affinity.
This is a fact about all leadership; only it receives very visible proof in the case of school-masters. Every man’s followers are given to him by destiny; and a leader of men may see himself in this looking-glass if he have a mind to do so. It will give him a truer picture of his own soul than he will find elsewhere in the world. The followers of any man resemble each other, and, of course, they also resemble their leader; though their resemblance to the leader is not always apparent, but belongs rather to the category of spiritual mysteries.
Dr. Coit himself was an ecclesiastic, rustling with dogma and vestment and having ritual and anathema in his very being. And yet, as a matter of fact, he did attract to himself persons who at first sight do not seem to resemble him at all. The parents who sent their boys to the school were, as a rule, a somewhat commonplace and very valuable sort of people. They were good, straight-forward, God-fearing burghers, who wished their sons to become honorable men, and were rather deficient in business and social ambition for their children. These people, quite often, did not like Dr. Coit, nor understand him; but they felt that he would do for their sons what they wished done. They were warm people: he was a hot person. Their quiet natures responded to his great religious faith by an act of personal trust; and that was enough for Dr. Coit, for he wanted the boys.
After the death of the first Doctor there followed a mitigation of religious discipline at the school and a relaxation in the social atmosphere. The quality of the place, however, remained the same. The volume of life rolled with its old momentum. The characteristic charm of the place remained unchanged. In the practical working of the organization there ensued, I believe, great disturbances; but they did not affect the spirit of the place so far as an alumnus could observe. The same magic wave was over all as before. Indeed, for my own part, I never could thoroughly enjoy St. Paul’s School while the old Doctor was alive. His peace came to me only after he had departed; and whenever I am at Concord it seems to roll through the fields and to overspread the grounds like a mist. In returning to St. Paul’s, or in taking leave of it, my imagination is always haunted by the idea of the place as it must have been in its infancy—the farmhouse, the family group, and the intense soul of the Doctor. When I think of that passionate fountain of life, rising and bubbling in the remote New Hampshire wilderness, in a solitude as complete as that of Abraham on the plains of Mamre, I cannot but be moved. Here was faith indeed! A project all aim and no means. If a strange quietude lies over the acres of St. Paul’s School to-day, and steeps in a perpetual peace the little community which this fiery soul left behind him, it is because in this place a man once wrestled with invisible antagonists and saw ladders going up into heaven, with the angels ascending and descending upon them. The school is a monument to this vision—a heap of stones cast there, one by one, by followers and by witnesses.
The fiftieth anniversary of the school brought together all its adherents and fosterers and old boys, and peopled Concord for a day with the race of gentle burghers that had followed the Doctor. It was a touching assemblage; because here in these people was to be found the peace of which he had all his life preached so much and felt so little. He had attained it in others. He had left it as a dower and an inheritance to the institution that he loved almost too passionately. Out of the strong had come forth sweetness.