MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON IWAS lecturing the other day to the senior boys of one of our 1 great public schools. I could ask for no more intelligent or appreciative audience ; and yet, when I talk to schoolboys, I am aware of a certain inner embarrassment. Is it that I remember all too vividly the days when I also was compelled to sit for an hour in a classroom and to listen to old gentlemen expounding to me the nature of the beautiful and the good ? Not that, at my school, we were often regaled by such academic discourses. The talks given to us by visitors from the outside world were mostly of a practical nature. We were told about English bird life and wild flowers, both of them subjects which, at that date, left me cold. Occasionally a clergyman would come down in the afternoon and talk to us about missionary work in'Formosa or upon the lower reaches of the Zambesi. I can recall a profoundly stimulating lecture upon the mating habits of eels—habits which appeared to me at the time to be so strenuous and far-flung as to be barely credible. ' But the only uplift lecture which has remained in my memory was one in which the headmaster of some rival school spoke to us about the privileges which we enjoyed. " Respondete natalibus," he urged, us, "live up to your birthright." I remember this appeal, since it aroused within me a conflict between snobbish self-gratification and egalitarian instinct. It was agreeable to be assured that we belonged to the upper classes ; yet even in those Edwardian days such satisfaction as this assurance gave me was clouded by doubt. I do not remember that I was actually bored by these lectures, but I do remember that I was acutely critical of the old men who gave them. More specifically do I recall the contempt aroused within me by the type of visitor who was anxious to assure us that when he was a lad he had been regarded as unpromising and indolent ; I was sickened by the aposiopesis of such an argument, by the implied conclusion, "Yet observe what a success I have made of life."
It is, I suppose, my recollection of the observant and coldly critical attitudes adopted by schoolboys to outside lecturers which renders me self-conscious. To me it appears but a short span of time since I also sat upon a bench and watched the gentlemen on the platform. To them the gulf between us must seem as immense as that between San Francisco and Shanghai. One becomes aware that one is seeking by small deprecatory quirks of language, by little touches of intimacy and understanding, to lessen the gulf between the generations ; that the boys are all too conscious that this pose of matey juvenility is unconvincing and shameful. One does not, of course, resort to those custard-bowls of eg,gy adulation which Socrates would pour upon the small black heads of Cleinias and Charmides. But one does seek, I fear, to conciliate so formidable an audience ; and in so doing one is not doing well. I comfort myself with the reflection that it must take many years of practice for. a man of over sixty to address with complete naturalness some two hundred boys of between fifteen and eighteen. Always there intrudes that sense of difference, that effort to diminish the difference, and that absurd endeavour to lessen the gulf by appearing more young, more vigorous, more sportive than in fact is true. I comfort myself also by considering that most of the boys are perfectly accustomed to such posturing upon the part of their lecturers ; that they bear no ; and that within a few minutes they will have forgotten all about the uneasy incident and will be running across mudded playgrounds coping with balls. Yet the uneasiness, the ache of infidelity, remains. It hung upon my conscience as I returned that evening to London. I sat in my compartment, gazing out upon the mists of a November evening, discontented with myself.
It may be—thus did I console my morbid mood—that one or perhaps two of those boys that afternoon had been interested perhaps, ptrhaps even stimulated, by my discourse. It has certainly happened
to me, and more than once, that an elderly major or colonel has introduced hims'eff to me at some reception and assured me that he remembered my giving a lecture at Charterhouse or Marlborough in 1932. Such encounters are a grave delight ; but they are rare. Yet assuredly if, by such lectures, one can instil into a single mind some new conception, some fresh habit of thought, one has accomplished an achievement. The life of a schoolmaster must seem a wearisome iteration of routine conducted against a background of sullen, and at times of active, hostility. Yet there must come moments when he is aware that he has kindled a spark, that in one young mind at least the lamp of curiosity has been lit ; and such moments must compensate for all those chill mornings and tired evenings, for all the other frustrated energies, even for those dark instants when the schoolmaster feels he does not wish ever again to see a human being under the age of thirty-five. At a public school, when some of the boys at least are emerging into manhood, such sudden intimations of value must be of frequent occurrence. Yet at a private school, where the boys are little more than mice scuttling, the drudgery of teaching those who do not wish to learn must at times be almost beyond human endurance. One offers them a whole world of varied beauty ; all that they absorb are a few pieces of information. One stocks their little heads with chunks of facts ; but very rarely to the master at a private school is it vouchsafed to see those heads starting to work on their own power.
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I had been talking that afternoon about "The Approach to Foreign Affairs." I had sought to convince them n that they, the educated elite, were in duty bound to acquire a reasoned and dis- passionate attitude towards that complicated subject. Under our modern system, I suggested, it was essential for any Government to conduct a foreign policy which had the support of the broad masses. The complexity of the subject was, however, so great that it was difficult to suppose that the proletariat could ever be induced to take an intellectual interest in external affairs ; there thus existed the temptation for any Government to secure mass support by resorting to such emotional appeals as fear, suspicion, anger, pride and even greed. There was an increasing danger therefore that foreign policy might become subservient to, and guided by, waves of popular emotion ; if these waves were in any sense to be canalised it was essential that the educated elite should acquire such correct habits of thought as would enable them to check unreasoned impulses and to act as sign-posts to a more sensible and balanced point of view. The elite therefore must pay more attention than hitherto to foreign affairs. I hope they understood that point ; it was impor- tant and true. It gave some answer at least to the inevitable question: "But even if I spend much time and trouble in seeking to understand foreign affairs, what is there that I can do about it ? " The answer is : "You can check the silliness of others." I certainly believe that if educated people were more intelligent about foreign affairs there would be less danger of opinions rushing madly to and fro like frightened sheep. Fewer and fewer people in a gush of relief would accept as "peace with honour" an agreement which was most dishonourable and which assuredly did not make for peace.
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Supposing that only three or four boys among those two hundred agreed with this contention and absorbed it ? Then assuredly it was well worth my while to stand for an hour as a zany upon the platform, exposed to the friendly but derisive criticism of the other one-hundred-and-ninety-six ? It was absurd at my age to feel so self-conscious about such episodes. I might even have done some good. I might perhaps have kindled some spark in one young mind, in two young minds, which would further enlightenment. It was morbid to be so spinsterish about the young. Comforted, fortified, consoled, I stalked along the platform in London, feeling that in very truth the world was beautiful and the future holy.
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