However, some of us have known more than one Headmaster, and upon us devolves the solemn duty of distilling our various experiences into a single essence.
What are the characteristics of a _great_ Headmaster? Instinct at once prompts us to premise that he must be a scholar and a gentleman. A gentleman, undoubtedly, he must be; but nowadays scholarship--high classical scholarship--is a hindrance rather than a help. To supervise the instruction of modern youth a man requires something more than profound learning: he must possess _savoir faire_. If you set a great scholar--and a great scholar has an unfortunate habit of being nothing but a great scholar--in charge of the multifarious interests of a public school, you are setting a razor to cut grindstones. As well appoint an Astronomer Royal to command an Atlantic liner. He may be on terms of easy familiarity with the movements of the heavenly bodies, yet fail to understand the right way of dealing with refractory stokers.
A Headmaster is too busy a personage to keep his own scholarship tuned up to concert pitch; and if he devotes adequate time to this object--and a scholar must practise almost as diligently as a pianist or an acrobat if he is to remain in the first flight--he will have little leisure left for less intellectual but equally vital duties. Nowadays in great public schools the Head, although he probably takes the Sixth for an hour or two a day, delegates most of his work in this direction to a capable and up-to-date young man fresh from the University, and devotes his energies to such trifling details as the organisation of school routine, the supervision of the cook, the administration of justice, the diplomatic handling of the Governing Body, and the suppression of parents.
So far then we are agreed--the great advantage of dogmatising in print is that one can take the agreement of the reader for granted--that a Headmaster must be a gentleman, but not necessarily a scholar--in the very highest sense of the word. What other virtues must he possess? Well, he must be a majestic figurehead. This is not so difficult as it sounds. The dignity which doth hedge a Headmaster is so tremendous that the dullest and fussiest of the race can hardly fail to be impressive and awe-inspiring to the plastic mind of youth. More than one King Log has left a name behind him, through standing still in the limelight and keeping his mouth shut. But then he was probably lucky in his lieutenants.
