Some have begun to think that in English schools and universities too much time is given to athletic sports, and that they absorb too largely the thoughts and interests of the English youth. Bowen, however, attached the utmost value to games as a training in character. He used to descant upon the qualities of discipline, good-fellowship, good-humour, mutual help, and postponement of self which they are calculated to foster. Though some of his friends thought that his own intense and unabated fondness for these games—for he played cricket and football up to the end of his life—might have biassed his judgment, they could not deny that the games ought to develop the qualities aforesaid.
“Consider the habit of being in public, the forbearance, the subordination of the one to the many, the exercise of judgment, the sense of personal dignity. Think again of the organising faculty that our games develop. Where can you get command and obedience, choice with responsibility, criticism with discipline, in any degree remotely approaching that in which our social games supply them? Think of the partly moral, partly physical side of it, temper, of course, dignity, courtesy.... When the match has really begun, there is education, there 352 is enlargement of horizon, self sinks, the common good is the only good, the bodily faculties exhilarate in functional development, and the make-believe ambition is glorified into a sort of ideality. Here is boyhood at its best, or very nearly at its best. Sursum crura!... When you have a lot of human beings, in highest social union and perfect organic action, developing the law of their race and falling in unconsciously with its best inherited traditions of brotherhood and common action, you are not far from getting a glimpse of one side of the highest good. There lives more soul in honest play, believe me, than in half the hymn-books.”
These words, taken from a half-serious essay on Games written for a private society, give some part of Bowen’s views. The whole essay is well worth reading.[55] Its arguments do not, however, quite settle the matter. The playing of games may have, and indeed ought to have, the excellent results Bowen claimed for it, and yet it may be doubted whether the experience of life shows that boys so brought up do in fact turn out substantially more good-humoured, unselfish, and fit for the commerce of the world than others who have lacked this training. And the further question remains whether the games are worth their costly candle. That they occupy a good deal of time at school and at college is not necessarily an evil, seeing that the time left 353 for lessons or study is sufficient if well spent. The real drawback incident to the excessive devotion games inspire in our days is that they leave little room in the boy’s or collegian’s mind either for interest in his studies or for the love of nature. They fill his thoughts, they divert his ambition into channels of no permanent value to his mind or life; they continue to absorb his interest and form a large part of his reading long after he has left school or college. Nevertheless, be these things as they may, the opinion of a man so able and so experienced as Bowen was, deserves to be recorded; and his success in endearing himself to and guiding his boys was doubtless partly due to the use he made of their liking for games.
He was never married, so the school became the sole devotion of his life, and he bequeathed to it the bulk of his property, directing an area of land which he had purchased on the top of the Hill to be always kept as an open space for the benefit of boys and masters.
It need hardly be said that he loved boys as he loved teaching. He took them with him in the holidays on walking tours. He kept up correspondence with many of his pupils after they left Harrow, and advised them as occasion rose. To many of them he remained through life the model whom they desired to imitate. But he was very chary of the exercise of influence. “A 354 boy’s character,” he once wrote, “grows like the Temple of old, without sound of mallet and trowel. What we can do is to arrange matters so as to give Virtue her best chance. We can make the right choice sometimes a little easier, we can prevent tendencies from blossoming into acts, and render pitfalls visible. How much indirectly and unconsciously we can do, none but the recording angel knows. ‘You can and you should,’ said Chiffers,[56] ‘go straight to the heart of every individual boy.’ Well, a fellow-creature’s mind is a sacred thing. You may enter into that arcanum once a year, shoeless. And in the effort to control the spirit of a pupil, to make one’s own approval his test and mould him by the stress of our own presence, in the ambition to do this, the craving for moral power and visible guiding, the subtle pride of effective agency, lie some of the chief temptations of a schoolmaster’s work.”
Such ways and methods as I have endeavoured to describe are less easy to imitate than those which belong to the Arnoldine type of schoolmaster. In Bowen’s gaiety, in his vivacity, in the humour which interpenetrated everything he said or did, there was something individual. Teachers who do not possess a like vivacity, versatility, and humour cannot hope to apply with like success the method of familiarity and sympathy. Not indeed that Bowen stood altogether alone in his 355 use of that method. There were others among his contemporaries who shared his view, and whose practice was not dissimilar. He was, however, the earliest and most brilliant exponent of the view, so his career may be said to open a new line, and to mark a new departure in the teacher’s art.
I have mentioned his walking tours. He was a pedestrian of extraordinary force, rather tall, but spare and light, swift of foot, and tireless in his activity. As an undergraduate he had walked from Cambridge to Oxford, nearly ninety miles, in twenty-four hours, scarcely halting. At one time or another he had traversed on foot all the coast-line and great part of the inland regions of England. He was an accomplished Alpine climber. His passion for exercise of body as well as of mind was so salient a feature in his character that his friends wondered how he would be able to support old age. He was spared the trial, for he was gay and joyous as ever on the last morning of his life, and he died in a moment, while mounting his bicycle after a long ascent, among the lonely forests of Burgundy, then bursting into leaf under an April sun.
His interest in politics provided him with a short and strenuous interlude of public action, which varied the even tenor of his life at Harrow. At the general election of 1880 he stood as a candidate for the little borough of Hertford (which has since been merged in the county) against 356 Mr. Arthur Balfour, now (1902) First Lord of the Treasury in England. The pro-Turkish policy of Lord Beaconsfield, followed by the Afghan War of 1878, had roused many Liberals who usually took little part in political action. Bowen felt the impulse to denounce the conduct of the Ministry, and went into the contest with his usual airy suddenness. He had little prospect of success at such a place, for, like many of the so-called Academic Liberals of those days, he made the mistake of standing for a small semi-rural constituency, overshadowed by a neighbouring magnate, instead of for a large town, where both his opinions and his oratory would have been better appreciated. However, he enjoyed the contest thoroughly, amusing himself as well as the electors by his lively and sometimes impassioned speeches, and he looked back to it as a pleasant episode in his usually smooth and placid life. He was all his life a strong Liberal vieille roche, a lover of freedom and equality as well as of economy in public finance, a Free Trader, an individualist, an enemy of all wars and all aggressions, and in later years growingly indignant at the rapid increase of military and naval expenditure. He was also, like the Liberals of 1850-60 in general, a sympathiser with oppressed nationalities, though this feeling did not carry him the length of accepting the policy of Home Rule for Ireland, as to which he had grave doubts, yet doubts not 357 quite so serious as to involve his separation from the Liberal party. Twice after 1880 he was on the point of becoming a candidate for a seat in the House of Commons, but whether his love for Harrow would have suffered him to remain in Parliament had he entered it may be doubted. One could not even tell whether he was really disappointed that his political aspirations remained unfulfilled. Had he given himself to parliamentary life, his readiness, ingenuity, and wit would have soon made him valued by his own side, while his sincerity and engaging manners would have commended him to both sides alike. His delivery was always too rapid, and his voice not powerful, yet these defects would have been forgotten in the interest which so peculiar a figure must have aroused.
His peace principles contrasted oddly with his passion for military history, a passion which prompted many vacation journeys to battlefields all over Europe, from Salamanca to Austerlitz. He had followed the campaigns of Napoleon through Piedmont and Lombardy, through Germany and Austria, as well as those of Wellington in Spain and Southern France.[57] This taste is not uncommon in men of peace. Freeman had it; J. R. Green and S. R. Gardiner had it; and the historical works of Sir George Trevelyan 358 and Dr. Thomas Hodgkin prove that it lives in those genial breasts also. It was a pleasure to be led over a battlefield by Bowen, for he had a good eye for ground, he knew the movements of the armies down to the smallest detail, and he could explain with perfect lucidity the positions of the combatants and the tactical moves in the game.
Twice only did he come across actual fighting, once at Düppel in 1864, during the Schleswig-Holstein war, and again in Paris during the siege of the Communards by the forces that obeyed Thiers and the Assembly sitting at Versailles. He maintained that the Commune had been unfairly judged by Englishmen, and wrote a singularly interesting description of what he saw while risking his life in the beleaguered city. There was in him a great spirit of adventure, though the circumstances of his life gave it little scope.