I still regard the study of Greek as invaluable training in accuracy, subtlety of thought and sense of form; but I am not so ready as once to go to the stake for Greek in preference to all other subjects. Again, I still hold that the character-moulding in a great public school is adequate--conceivably, however, as fine characters might be moulded in other ways, and there are moments when I sympathetically recall O'Rane's impatient oft-repeated outcry that England survived in spite of her public schools.
The good and bad were so inextricably mixed. Cricket and football kept us physically fit and morally clean; we learned something of co-ordination and discipline--as other nations may perhaps learn those same lessons from military training. We picked up an enduring and light-hearted acquaintance with responsibility and acquired among members of our own class a rigid sense of even-handed justice which I seem always to find breaking down when that same class is weighed in the scales against another. Most doubtful blessing of all, we were brought up to the public-school standard of conduct.
No foreigner, no Englishman unless he be of the public-school class, will ever understand that strange medley. It is triumphantly characteristic of higher social England in its inconsistency, its intolerance and its inadequacy; in its generosity, too, its loftiness and its pragmatical efficiency. I never 'sneaked' though the price of silence were an undeserved thrashing; I never lied to master or monitor, though I have adorned my crimes before appearing in the dock; I never entered for an examination with dates or names scrawled on my cuff, though I habitually used translations, and syndicated my work with others in my form. The standard forbade the one and allowed the other, and I have spent half my life doing things that are rationally unjustifiable and only to be defended on the ground that they were Good Form. For all my Radicalism I was not brave enough to fling down the challenge.
There _is_ no Radicalism in schools--I had no business to use the word. After devastating the Debating Society with proposals for disembowelling kings or strangling priests, I have gone back to my study and duly thrashed some junior who forewent the age-old custom of walking bareheaded past Burgess's house. Never once dared I stand up to the conventional, "Thou shalt not brag. Thou shalt not affect an interest in thy work. Thy neighbours' likes and dislikes shall be thine." The list could be extended indefinitely, and for ten years after leaving Melton I was to find those queer schoolboy limitations and inconsistencies reproduced throughout the governing class in England. "One must pay a cardsharper," says Tolstoi, in describing Vronsky's code of principles, "but need not pay a tailor ... one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman ... one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; ... one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one, and so on."