WE are obliged to approach any church school through our own personal religious sentiments. We do all of us approach it in this way. Any religious institution is a tiny sample of the great question; and whatever we say of it is a little voice in the great chorus of humanity. We cannot isolate our subject: it is a part of the great subject, religion. We have no achromatic lens through which to view life. All that we see is colored by our own past, and surely, for any man to believe that in describing his youth or his school-days he can clear his mind of error, would be the greatest error and delusion of all. It seems safer, then, in dealing with such a tremulous matter, to lay it out as simply as one may, leaving others to be the judge of its value.
Some years ago I had a long illness; and during those periods of mental fixity which illness brings with it, my mind used to dwell in strange places. It would pause over some spot in the world—some room or field that I had seen, however casually, in former years—and would refuse to move on. It would choose its exact position so that the perspective of the place should be accurately seen, and there it would rest. Sometimes for days at a time it would remain as carefully placed as a camera, giving no reason for its choice, yet deriving some mysterious assistance from the scene. The places were always empty—never a person in them. There was, for example, a particular nook by a country roadside—a barred gate with elm trees bending above it and a meadow beyond—which I had passed by on the way to a child’s funeral some years before. This place opened itself up out of the picture-book of my memory, and for some weeks I lived within its influence—for there was no question that life streamed out of it to me.
Under these circumstances it was natural enough that I should sometimes have found myself back as St. Paul’s School, in Concord, New Hampshire, and should have wandered once more in the dreamland of boyhood. Indeed, during many months of convalescence, I lived in my imagination at St. Paul’s, always alone with the place, suffering it to move itself through me and present the most forgotten aspects, angles, and bits of scenery with silent, friendly precision. Immense sadness everywhere; immense power.
Now my connection with the school had been very short and quite unsatisfactory. I was sent there as a very small boy, remained less than three years, and then went home sick. I had, in fact, an acute attack of pneumonia which carried away with it a nervous breakdown from which I had been suffering; and it was several years before my health became fully re-established. In consequence of this experience my views about the school were thereafter quite gloomy. I regarded the place as a religious forcing-house, a very dangerous sort of place for any boy to go, especially if he were inclined by nature toward religion. I habitually abused the school, and I even took the trouble to go back there and have a quarrel with Dr. Coit about something he had said or done which seemed to me to deserve the reprobation of all just men. I poured over him a few vitriolic letters; and I still believe that the right was on my side in the matter, though perhaps I was wrong to assume the rôle of the Angel of Retribution.
It was at a date about twenty years after my leaving the school, and at the age of forty-odd, and through the medium of another and very severe illness, that my nature began to take up again the threads of St. Paul’s School influence, and to receive the ideas which Dr. Coit had been striving to convey, though in forms that would have been incomprehensible to himself. The school had somehow been carrying on its work within me through all these years.
Youth is a game of blindman’s buff, a romp and struggle in which we hold on fiercely and shout loudly, but know less as to whom we are holding or who is holding us than we shall ever know again. As we grow older we get true glimpses of things far away; and recognize at a distance what we could never understand so long as we were at close quarters with it. Middle age draws some curtains down, but lifts others; and of all the new visions that come when youth is past, there is none more thrilling than that new vision of the familiar past which shows us what unsuspected powers were at play within us. This experience is necessary and useful to us; and only thus can we come to understand the incredible subtlety of human influence.
Not long ago there was a St. Paul’s School dinner at which two hundred and fifty men met to hear speeches in praise of their school and of its influence. Among other proceedings there was a speech by one (not an alumnus) who was a prospective headmaster of the school. Now this speech was a religious appeal, and ended by a sort of burst of feeling, only a word or two long, to the effect that the world was “God’s World.” I cannot tell what it was that startled me in the reception of the speech by the audience; but I think it was the unexpected sincerity of the applause. It seemed as if all these men had been waiting all their lives to hear this thing said, and now gave a great triumphant, unconscious sigh and roar of relief to hear someone say it. I glanced critically about the room. The diners looked like any other set of diners. Why should they be so much moved by the mention of the works of God?—For they were not applauding the school, they were applauding the Creation. I looked and pondered, and presently I remembered that most of the men at the dinner had lived under the personal influence of Dr. Coit during their early and sensitive years. The fibres of their being had been searched and softened by contact with a nature whose depth made up for its every other deficiency.
“I myself,” I reflected, “am one of them. Perhaps my experience with the place is more typical than I had supposed. Perhaps each of these men was offered something at St. Paul’s School which he could not receive at the time, and therefore rejected, but which in later life he found again for himself in a new form, and thereafter accepted as part of his intimate nature.”
Inasmuch as the whole nature of St. Paul’s School resulted from the manner of its formation, we may begin by a glance at its early days. The inception of the place was as unheralded as any event could well be. Dr. Coit, being a man with a mission and a message, retired in 1856 to a farm in New Hampshire, and opened a school, having four or five pupils to start with. He would neither appeal to the public for funds nor advertise for scholars.[E] The school was, at first, a mere extension of his family circle and of himself; and as it grew, it remained a mere extension of himself. Persons became attached to this family circle one by one; and, whether they were boys or masters or servants, they thus, one by one, became members of a sort of invisible and visible church, or brotherhood—a society of the sanctuary. No opposing or critical influence could enter that circle. It rejected criticism as the jet of a fountain rejects a dried leaf. The whole system at St. Paul’s was really no system at all, but only the unconscious working out of one man’s nature in the formation of a school community. Perhaps the important part of any school is always no more than that.
Dr. Coit was a tall man in a long black coat; and, as he moved and walked about the paths and corridors, he remained always within an invisible tower of isolation, so that you could not be sure that his feet rested on quite the same ground as your own. Half the time he was in an abstraction, but this did not prevent him from seeing and observing everything and everybody, especially the individualities of boys, about whom he acquired a preternatural astuteness. He lived within that solitude which a great purpose and constant prayer sometimes cast about a man. There was a chasm between him and the rest of mankind which could not be bridged by trivial intercourse. Neither he nor the rest of mankind were at fault for the difference in tension between them. He was so charged with moral passion that many people could not receive the delivery of it.
I was never able to establish a relation with him, either as a boy of thirteen or subsequently. His low, vibrant voice, and his hand laid gently upon one’s shoulder caused such a strong physical, moral, and galvanic appeal to my sensibilities that I invariably burst into tears. I think I never got through an interview with him without weeping. The appeal which his nature made was the appeal of enormous human feeling, penned up in a narrow language, restricted by a narrow experience. This temperamental isolation was, of course, intensified by his becoming a school-master. How strongly the influence of such a man must have affected the little family circle of the early school may be imagined. He lived habitually in a state of such vivid religious feeling that his face was ablaze with zeal; and he settled down to teach school in a farmhouse, knowing all the while, seeing with his mind’s eye all the while, the future of the enterprise. We can imagine the fervor of the tiny community, and the awe in which it must have stood toward the great man.
And yet all of his austerity, all of his closely confined, ebullient vitality was no more than a love of men. Down to his last days Dr. Coit never took his solitary drives about the countryside without stopping to bestow upon his poorer neighbors small offerings of food from his own table. It was done furtively and almost as an indulgence of those warm personal feelings toward all humanity, of which his mission denied him the expression. Behind his towering zeal there was a suffering, benevolent, and humble person.
Dr. Coit had, as it were, no secular side to his human intercourse, and the social side of St. Paul’s School was, in consequence, always a little stiff and ecclesiastical. On the other hand, his romantic and spontaneous feelings were permitted the outlet of secular literature, both ancient and modern; and he inspired his school with a love of letters. You were somehow made welcome to the joys of reading. The old-fashioned family education and atmosphere of a gentleman’s home qualified the boarding-school book-shelf. An interest in cultivation often goes with high-pitched, ecclesiastical natures; witness the outburst of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and all that profound thought which makes that epoch in some ways outshine the Renaissance. Not only did Dr. Coit enjoy romantic literature, but he was himself like some character in mediæval romance—like Arthur, or Merlin; and the power of his personality was so great that whenever I am at St. Paul’s, I still feel as if the old Doctor were, somehow, not far away. I should hardly be surprised to see him step out from behind a clump of bushes on the margin of the stream, or to come across his rapt figure, on the athletic field, standing as I have seen him stand to watch the games, shading his eyes with his hand.
Dr. Coit was one of those saints who come into the world determined to found something: they are predestinate founders. They make and occupy the thing they found, repelling all the world beside, fleeing from all the world except this; and they generally become tyrants within the boundaries of their own creation. The tyrant founder-saint is a well-known figure in the Middle Ages; St. Bernard is a typical example; and Dr. Coit would have been more readily understood in any previous age of the world than he was in his own. He was in himself a piece of the Middle Ages, and to have known him is to have come in contact with all the piety, the romanticism, the mystery, the beauty, the depth and power of human emotion which flamed over Europe in Mediæval times, and which have been temporarily forgotten. To-day these provinces of human existence are abandoned to the art critic, to the moralist, and to the sentimental writer—to the very classes of persons who are the least likely to understand them. If we except the German philosophic historian, I suppose that no person in the world is so cut off by nature from an understanding of St. Francis or of Thomas Aquinas as is the modern æsthetic person, who cultivates a sympathetic interest in religion. The only hope of understanding the Middle Ages is through a living personal belief in Christianity.
It is only for convenience that I refer to the Middle Ages in order to explain Dr. Coit. His right to exist as a modern is incontestible: he was as modern as anyone else. He merely belonged to a type which, for the time being, has become rare. To us to-day, the tyrant founder-saint of the Middle Ages appears like a person not wholly a Christian. Judged by the standards of the New Testament, these men seem to be only half converted, or three-quarters converted, to Christianity, the rest of them remaining Tartar. The non-converted fraction of them makes them autocrats who trust no one but themselves, men of unfaith who rely on bolts and bars, on ordinances and arrangements.
At the worst, these enthusiasts are schemers, unscrupulous, crafty, and cruel. At the best they are merely opinionated, arbitrary, and lonely men. Their weakness is seen only in the fact that they have a slightly blind side, a side on which walk the favorites and hypocrites who have been formed in the shadow of their tyranny. The same parasites which grow upon autocracy in the great world seem often to appear in the miniature kingdom of a school.
That Christianity should have given rise to this peculiar kind of tyrant has often thrown me into wonderment. It seems as if any formulation of spiritual truth, uttered by a higher intelligence, were apt to act as an astringent upon the lower intelligence. The bread of life poisons many men. The formula means more than the neophyte is able to understand; and this overplus of meaning stimulates him to fierceness. The phenomenon may be observed on a small scale by anyone who will contrast the teachings of Froebel with the methods often found in kindergartens. Each mind in the world is capable of a different degree of abstraction; and when a mind is stretched to its widest and you give it still something more, you arouse passion. At any rate, the fact remains that Christ’s gentlest words have, as he predicted, become fire and sword in the world, and that through this fire and sword truth spreads. Men like Dr. Coit, for all their fury and for all their narrowness, leave peace in their wake, and bequeath to their followers not only gentleness, but breadth of view. Their unselfishness—their powerlessness to be other than they are—touches the heart of the world. Christ has been in their dungeons all the while.
I do not know whether it was the result of Dr. Coit’s own prophetic nature or the result of a more reasoned theory about the education of boys; but the fact remains that at St. Paul’s School you were encouraged to dream. You were permitted to wander alone in the woods. You were left much to yourself; and the fact that you were a thoughtful child, slow in development and perhaps backward in your studies was allowed for. They understood the need of letting God attend the child, and of not being too much worried about the outcome. There is a divergence of feeling among modern school-masters as to how much boys should be left to themselves. The freedom accorded to us at St. Paul’s resulted, no doubt, from the original domestic, non-institutional atmosphere of the place. A boy who is living at home in the country always has a good deal of time to himself. The school was at first a mere country home in which a clergyman conducted the education of boys—appending it to his own family life; and the traditions of boyhood-in-the-country survived as the school grew to more serious proportions. The place itself, moreover, was an example of independence and natural growth rather than of watched assistance. It was not the child of riches, receiving all that money and thought could give even from its birth onward; but was rather the child of hunger and thirst, thriving upon neglect, and gaining in character and in vigor throughout a youth of hardy loneliness.
To my mind the isolation of St. Paul’s is its strongest feature, its rarest influence. The founding of institutions is done to-day by the circulation of petitions, by the calling of friends into a circle and the issuing of stock or advertisements. Hardly any other method is deemed possible by practical men. The institutions thus founded are in very close touch with their public. They rely upon their patrons, and are controlled by their clients. They become the creatures of the age they live in. But St. Paul’s School was not the creature of any age. It was the child of one man who planted his house upon a hill. As it has owed nothing to the age, so it has remained inaccessible to the influences of the age. It is not in competition with other schools; it is not affected by the fluctuating and journalistic currents of contemporary thought; it has, one might say, no relation to the superficial influences in America. The place seems not to be a part of modern American life. We know, of course, that the school is in reality a part of that life, and relies, as every school must, on the community at large into which its roots extend. The apparent isolation of St. Paul’s comes from the fact that it represents few influences. These influences are everywhere prevalent, but they are not everywhere visible. The school seems to live to itself; but in reality it draws its life from those deep and invisible sources of religious feeling which exist, but which do not come to the surface in contemporary life.
That there should be a spot in the United States having the atmosphere of another world, that is the valuable and wonderful part of St. Paul’s School. To plunge a boy even for the fraction of a year into this pool is to give him a new outlook upon humanity. What is it that we lack in America? Why, we lack variety. Our interests and pleasures, our occupations in social, in commercial, in religious life are all so stamped with the identical pattern—each of them is so like the rest—our views and feelings are so narrow—that to put an American youth to school in Central Asia for a year or two, under the Grand Llama, would be apt to make a man of him. We need to give our boys an insight into some species of life that belongs to the great world, the historic world, the empire of the soul. We cannot snatch this life from Europe without running the danger of that expatriation which makes men shallow. We must find and create centres of it upon our own shores—centres of social life devoted to unworldly aims. Not only for our children, but for ourselves have we felt this need. New well-springs in our heart and intelligence are unlocked by living for some period of our lives in such a community; and the earlier in life we can receive this experience the richer will it leave us.
A school is far more than the school community which gives it a name. A school is the whole body of graduates, friends, and fosterers, whose affections are attached to the place, whose memories go back to it, whose character has been formed by it. These people, though they exist dispersedly, have an influence in common. They belong to a club. They are united by one of the strongest ties that can bind men together. This club is as much a part of the school as the school itself. The stream of boys flowing from the club to the school constitutes a sort of river of time, a perpetual current of the ideas of the founder, an immortality of influence. This stream must change, of course, but it changes slowly—so great is the conservatism of boys at school, and of old boys sending their sons to a school. I suppose that of all human institutions a boys’ school is, by its nature, the most traditional and old-fashioned. The boys regard themselves as the school, and regard the masters as necessary figureheads; and in any large school, where the mass and volume of young life rolls on without much possible interference from above, there is a good deal of truth in the conception.
When one hears other people talking about their pet school there is a personal ring to the conversation which does not always please us. The truth is that the foundation of a school is a matter of personal magnetism, and that any school becomes a sort of clan or clique. It is no accident that certain particular boys are sent to a certain particular school. They go there as the needle swings to the pole. They flow there as the ants flow to their native hill. The matter is settled by personal affinity.
This is a fact about all leadership; only it receives very visible proof in the case of school-masters. Every man’s followers are given to him by destiny; and a leader of men may see himself in this looking-glass if he have a mind to do so. It will give him a truer picture of his own soul than he will find elsewhere in the world. The followers of any man resemble each other, and, of course, they also resemble their leader; though their resemblance to the leader is not always apparent, but belongs rather to the category of spiritual mysteries.
Dr. Coit himself was an ecclesiastic, rustling with dogma and vestment and having ritual and anathema in his very being. And yet, as a matter of fact, he did attract to himself persons who at first sight do not seem to resemble him at all. The parents who sent their boys to the school were, as a rule, a somewhat commonplace and very valuable sort of people. They were good, straight-forward, God-fearing burghers, who wished their sons to become honorable men, and were rather deficient in business and social ambition for their children. These people, quite often, did not like Dr. Coit, nor understand him; but they felt that he would do for their sons what they wished done. They were warm people: he was a hot person. Their quiet natures responded to his great religious faith by an act of personal trust; and that was enough for Dr. Coit, for he wanted the boys.
After the death of the first Doctor there followed a mitigation of religious discipline at the school and a relaxation in the social atmosphere. The quality of the place, however, remained the same. The volume of life rolled with its old momentum. The characteristic charm of the place remained unchanged. In the practical working of the organization there ensued, I believe, great disturbances; but they did not affect the spirit of the place so far as an alumnus could observe. The same magic wave was over all as before. Indeed, for my own part, I never could thoroughly enjoy St. Paul’s School while the old Doctor was alive. His peace came to me only after he had departed; and whenever I am at Concord it seems to roll through the fields and to overspread the grounds like a mist. In returning to St. Paul’s, or in taking leave of it, my imagination is always haunted by the idea of the place as it must have been in its infancy—the farmhouse, the family group, and the intense soul of the Doctor. When I think of that passionate fountain of life, rising and bubbling in the remote New Hampshire wilderness, in a solitude as complete as that of Abraham on the plains of Mamre, I cannot but be moved. Here was faith indeed! A project all aim and no means. If a strange quietude lies over the acres of St. Paul’s School to-day, and steeps in a perpetual peace the little community which this fiery soul left behind him, it is because in this place a man once wrestled with invisible antagonists and saw ladders going up into heaven, with the angels ascending and descending upon them. The school is a monument to this vision—a heap of stones cast there, one by one, by followers and by witnesses.
The fiftieth anniversary of the school brought together all its adherents and fosterers and old boys, and peopled Concord for a day with the race of gentle burghers that had followed the Doctor. It was a touching assemblage; because here in these people was to be found the peace of which he had all his life preached so much and felt so little. He had attained it in others. He had left it as a dower and an inheritance to the institution that he loved almost too passionately. Out of the strong had come forth sweetness.