A GREAT PERSONALITY
faIkes and Dulwich, 1885-1914. By W. R. M. Leake and Others. (The Alleyn Club. 7s. 6d.)
Tins beautiful book is a record of Gilkes's noble service at Dulwich for twenty-nine years, but it is at my own school of Shrewsbury that I best remember him. For he came as a master to the Schools, full of honours for learning, football, and cricket, on the very day when I entered as a painfully shy and incapable new-boy early in 1873. At my first sight of him I wondered whether to call him a Viking or a captain of Athenian hoplites, he was so tall (6 ft. 5 in.), so finely built, so calmly dignified in everything he did, so perfect a type of manhood. In 'his presence I felt at once the peculiar awe due to intense admiration touched with personal affection that many feel for exceptional greatness ; and that sense of awe remained with me till I was far advanced in middle-age, and he was growing old. It remains with me still when I recall his memory and read this book, though it is now sixteen years since he died.
These personal references may perhaps be excused, for he was beyond comparison the greatest man I have ever known, and his inexplicable friendship towards me was the highest honour of my long life. When I failed, as I often failed, he was the man who drew me out of the Slough of Despond. After an acute disappointment at Oxford, he asked me to stay alone with him in a cottage at Church Stretton (upon the Marches of Wales, to which by birth he belonged), and we went line by line through the dramas of The Electra and Macbeth, on which he afterwards published a small book that should be in the hands of every student and teacher. He induced Dr. Moss to take me on as a temporary master in the Schools, and he chose me to act with him in levelling the future cricket ground for the new school, we working like navvies with wheelbarrows and picks, though he had far greater admiration for the real navvies who worked at our side. I have kept all the letters he repeatedly wrote to me till the labour of Dulwich absorbed him entirely. He sent me the manuscripts of his books for suggestions, especially on military points after I became a war-correspondent, and whenever I visited him at Dulwich, he received me as though
we had never parted. No one could desire a more splendid honour than such a man's friendship. - When in 1885 he accepted the Mastership of Dulwich, we felt that our old School must fall to ruin. It did not, for his tradition was faithfully carried on by his fonner colleague's, such as E. B. Moser and Arthur Chance. But he himself deeply- regretted leaving the beautiful place with which he had been connected, boy and man, for about twenty-five years, first under that great scholar Kennedy, and then under Moss, as Headmasters. During his first years at Dulwich he was far from happy. The change from a boarding school of under two hundred boys to a day school of some five hundred (which increased to about seven hundred) was hard. It was much more difficult to bring personal influence to bear upon boys who spent most of their time in their homes under the control of unknown parents. Both parents and masters distrusted him, chiefly because it took them some time to understand his habitual irony, always hard for the English to understand. They regarded him as aloof, cold and hesitating, and even aspeak. He always had some difficulty in restraining his natural humour. Defending his attitude of reserve, he once said to Mr. Leake, who has compiled this book, " You know, I have to be very careful ; I was meant by nature for a buffoon." And, indeed, like the Socrates of Plato, his mind was always pervaded with humour. He generally spoke with some hesitation as though not quite certain of the truth he had in mind, and many people thought there must be a streak of softness behind " the monumental façade." The words are from the late Sir Arthur Hirtzel's estimate, who was head of the school for two years. A few sentences from his admirable account of Gilkes included in this book will show the common mistake :
" Malcontents made their trial and proved their error. Gilkes never gave way. He pursued his purpose quietly and with apparently unruffled serenity. He never showed impatience or anger . . . His outlook on life was that of the Plato of the Socratic Dialogues. The worth of human personality, the unity of virtue, the unique value of objective truth and the importance of penetrating to it by obstinate questionings, through the fog of sophistry and confused thinking and conventional half-truths or overemphasis of everyday life—these were the things he had learnt himself and wanted us to learn. In the spirit of his admiration for Socrates was his own tentativeness of approach, bordering on hesitation ; his habitual understatement ; his discouragement in literary style—in essay- writing, for example—of exaggeration, and, in all circumstances, of pretentiousness and pretence of every kind."
Of the almost childlike simplicity of his irony Mr. Leake gives a good example. One hot afternoon in July, brilliant sunshine ()inside, the windows open, and the sound of insects. Suddenly a different sound—a horse and cart moving over the gravel. They came to a standstill, there was a quick jerk of the reins, a slight movement of the horse, and a prompt raucous voice uttered the words, " Grrr, yer bloody — 1" Indignation made Gilkes hesitate a little more than usual, but he said " D-don't s-say that to your horse ; he doesn't like it," with a marked emphasis on each of the last words. " Right yer are, Mister ! " was the answer.
The book is full of deep instances of his method and purpose in teaching. I well remember the polite irony of his answer to H. G. Wells, who had attacked him for his bad style in a letter defending the study of Greek, which in those days was being assailed as old and useless. It was an interesting coincidence that in those years Gilkes's master in engineering and applied science was L. W. Sanderson, whom Wells after- wards lauded so highly and justly as Headmaster at Oundle. Gilkes's real answer came in his little book, A Day at Dulwich, in which he analyses the difference between the Greek and English ideals of ordinary life. It runs to four and a half pages of the present book, and should be learnt by heart by anyone who is teaching Greek or wishes to have a noble ideal for his life.
-But, omitting the extraordinary success to which Gilkes led the school in all athletics and in learning (13 or even 17 scholarships in a year were not unusual), and omitting the fine distinction of his staff of masters, I conclude with a sentence by the Rev. R. N. Douglas, late Headmaster of Giggleswick : " Nearly fifty years after leaving school I catch myself, when a choice has to be made, saying to myself, ' What would Gilkes think ? ' " I dimly remember that Aristotle somewhere says, " The good man is both a Motive and a standard of goodness." Like that Headmaster I often still ask myself the same question, but the standard is far above me. HENRY W. NEVINSO`F.
Previous page
