“Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
    Nor vexing Thee in death,
    And Thou rememberest of what toys
    We made our joys,
    How weakly understood
    Thy great commanded good,
    Then, fatherly not less
    Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
    Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
    ‘I will be sorry for their childishness.’”

This is where we may leave our problem; leave it, that is to say, if we have faithfully struggled with it, if we have tried to amend ourselves and to encourage others; if we have done all this, and reached a point beyond which progress seems impossible.  But we must not fling our problems and perplexities, as we are apt to do, upon the knees of God, the very instant they begin to bewilder us, as children bring a tangled skein, or a toy bent crooked, to a nurse.  We must not, I say; and yet, after all, I am not sure that it is not the best and simplest way of all!

IX

EDUCATION

I said that I was a public-school master for nearly twenty years; and now that it is over I sometimes sit and wonder, rather sadly, I am afraid, what we were all about.

We were a strictly classical school; that is to say, all the boys in the school were practically specialists in classics, whether they had any aptitude for them or not.  We shoved and rammed in a good many other subjects into the tightly packed budget we called the curriculum.  But it was not a sincere attempt to widen our education, or to give boys a real chance to work at the things they cared for; it was only a compromise with the supposed claims of the public, in order that we might try to believe that we taught things we did not really teach.  We had an enormous and elaborate machine; the boys worked hard, and the masters were horribly overworked.  The whole thing whizzed, banged, grumbled, and hummed like a factory; but very little education was the result.  It used to go to my heart to see a sparkling stream of bright, keen, lively little boys arrive, half after half, ready to work, full of interest, ready to listen breathlessly to anything that struck their fancy, ready to ask questions—­such excellent material, I used to think.  At the other end used to depart a slow river of cheerful and conventional boys, well-dressed, well-mannered, thoroughly nice, reasonable, sensible, and good-humoured creatures, but knowing next to nothing, without intellectual interests, and, indeed, honestly despising them.  I do not want to exaggerate; and I will frankly confess that there were always a few well-educated boys among them; but these were boys of real ability, with an aptitude for classics.  And as providing a classical education, the system was effective, though cumbrous; hampered and congested by the other subjects, which were well enough taught, but which had no adequate time given to them, and intruded upon the classics without having opportunity to develop themselves.  It is a melancholy picture, but the result certainly was that intellectual cynicism was the note of the place.