CHAPTER III
School Days
CURIOUSLY ENOUGH Gilbert does not in the Autobiography speak of any school except St. Paul's. He went however first to Colet Court, usually called at that time Bewsher's, from the name of the Headmaster. Though it is not technically the preparatory school for St. Paul's, large numbers of Paulines do pass through it. It stands opposite St. Paul's in the Hammersmith Road and must have been felt by Gilbert as one thing with his main school experience, for he nowhere differentiates between the two.
St. Paul's School is an old city foundation which has had among its scholars Milton and Marlborough, Pepys and Sir Philip Francis and a host of other distinguished men. The editor of a correspondence column wrote a good many years later in answer to an enquirer: "Yes, Milton and G. K. Chesterton were both educated at St. Paul's school. We fancy however that Milton had left before Chesterton entered the school." In an early life of Sir Thomas More we learn of the keen rivalry existing in his day between his own school of St. Anthony and St. Paul's, of scholastic "disputations" between the two, put an end to by Dean Colet because they led to brawling among the boys, when the Paulines would call those of St. Anthony "pigs" and the pigs would call the Paulines "pigeons"—from the pigeons of St. Paul's Cathedral. Now, however, St. Anthony's is no more, and St. Paul's School has long moved to the suburbs and lies about seven minutes' walk along the Hammersmith Road from Warwick Gardens. Gilbert Chesterton was twelve when he entered St. Paul's (in January 1887) and he was placed in the second Form.
His early days at school were very solitary, his chief occupation being to draw all over his books. He drew caricatures of his masters, he drew scenes from Shakespeare, he drew prominent politicians. He did not at first make many friends. In the Autobiography he makes a sharp distinction between being a child and being a boy, but it is a distinction that could only be drawn by a man. And most men, I fancy, would find it a little difficult to say at what moment the transformation occurred. G.K. seems to put it at the beginning of school life, but the fact that St. Paul's was a day-school meant that the transition from home to school, usual in English public-school education,* was never in his case completely made. No doubt he is right in speaking in the Autobiography of "the sort of prickly protection like hair" that "grows over what was once the child," of the fact that schoolboys in his time "could be blasted with the horrible revelation of having a sister, or even a Christian name." Nevertheless, he went home every evening to a father and mother and small brother; he went to his friends' houses and knew their sisters; school and home life met Daily instead of being sharply divided into terms and holidays.
[* The terminology for English schools came into being largely before the State concerned itself with education. A Private School is one run by an individual or a group for private profit. A Public School is not run for private profit; any profits there may be are put back into the school. Mostly they are run by a Board of Governors and very many of them hold the succession to the old monastic schools of England (e.g., Charterhouse, Westminster, St. Paul's). They are usually, though not necessarily, boarding schools, and the fees are usually high. Elementary schools called Board Schools were paid for out of local rates and run by elected School Boards. They were later replaced by schools run by the County Councils.]
This fact was of immense significance in Gilbert's development. Years later he noted as the chief defect of Oxford that it consisted almost entirely of people educated at boarding-schools. For good, for evil, or for both, a boy at a day-school is educated chiefly at home.
In the atmosphere of St. Paul's is found little echo of the dogma of the Head Master of Christ's Hospital. "Boy! The school is your father! Boy! The school is your mother." Nor, as far as we know has any Pauline been known to desire the substitution of the august abstraction for the guardianship of his own people. Friendships formed in this school have a continual reference to home life, nor can a boy possibly have a friend long without making the acquaintance and feeling the influence of his parents and his surroundings. . . . The boys' own amusements and institutions, the school sports, the school clubs, the school magazine, are patronised by the masters, but they are originated and managed by the boys. The play-hours of the boys are left to their several pleasures, whether physical or intellectual, nor have any foolish observations about the battle of Waterloo being won on the cricket-field, or such rather unmeaning oracles, yet succeeded in converting the boys' amusements into a compulsory gymnastic lesson. The boys are, within reasonable limits, free.*
[* MS. History of J.D.C. written about 1894.]
Gilbert calls the chapter on his school days, "How to be a Dunce," and although in mature life he was "on the side of his masters" and grateful to them "that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes," he still contrasts childhood as a time when one "wants to know nearly everything" with "the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know about something I did not want to know."