The Secret Glory by Arthur Machen--Delphi Classics (Illustrated) by Arthur Machen

Author:Arthur Machen [MACHEN, ARTHUR]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Parts Edition 3 of 29 by Delphi Classics
Publisher: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
Published: 2018-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

III

A FEW YEARS ago a little book called Half-holidays attracted some attention in semi-scholastic, semi-clerical circles. It was anonymous, and bore the modest motto Crambe bis cocta; but those behind the scenes recognised it as the work of Charles Palmer, who was for many years a master at Lupton. His acknowledged books include a useful little work on the Accents and an excellent summary of Roman History from the Fall of the Republic to Romulus Augustulus. The Half-holidays contains the following amusing passage; there is not much difficulty in identifying the N. mentioned in it with Ambrose Meyrick.

“The cleverest dominie sometimes discovers” — the passage begins— “that he has been living in a fool’s paradise, that he has been tricked by a quiet and persistent subtlety that really strikes one as almost devilish when one finds it exhibited in the person of an English schoolboy. A good deal of nonsense, I think, has been written about boys by people who in reality know very little about them; they have been credited with complexities of character, with feelings and aspirations and delicacies of sentiment which are quite foreign to their nature. I can quite believe in the dead cat trick of Stalky and his friends, but I confess that the incident of the British Flag leaves me cold and sceptical. Such refinement of perception is not the way of the boy — certainly not of the boy as I have known him. He is radically a simple soul, whose feelings are on the surface; and his deepest laid schemes and manœuvres hardly call for the talents of a Sherlock Holmes if they are to be detected and brought to naught. Of course, a good deal of rubbish has been talked about the wonderful success of our English plan of leaving the boys to themselves without the everlasting supervision which is practised in French schools. As a matter of fact, the English schoolboy is under constant supervision; where in a French school one wretched usher has to look after a whole horde of boys, in an English school each boy is perpetually under the observation of hundreds of his fellows. In reality, each boy is an unpaid pion, a watchdog whose vigilance never relaxes. He is not aware of this; one need scarcely say that such a notion is far from his wildest thoughts. He thinks, and very rightly, doubtless, that he is engaged in maintaining the honour of the school, in keeping up the observance of the school tradition, in dealing sharply with slackers and loafers who would bring discredit on the place he loves so well. He is, no doubt, absolutely right in all this; none the less, he is doing the master’s work unwittingly and admirably. When one thinks of this, and of the Compulsory System of Games, which ensures that every boy shall be in a certain place at a certain time, one sees, I think, that the phrase about our lack of supervision is a phrase and nothing more.

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