From a College Window | Page 2

other people. Well, the answer to that is that it helps our
sense of balance and proportion to know how other people are looking
at life, what they expect from it, what they find in it, and what they do
not find. I have myself an intense curiosity about other people's point of
view, what they do when they are alone, and what they think about.
Edward FitzGerald said that he wished we had more biographies of
obscure persons. How often have I myself wished to ask simple, silent,
deferential people, such as station-masters, butlers, gardeners, what
they make of it all! Yet one cannot do it, and even if one could, ten to
one they would not or could not tell you. But here is going to be a
sedate confession. I am going to take the world into my confidence, and
say, if I can, what I think and feel about the little bit of experience
which I call my life, which seems to me such a strange and often so
bewildering a thing.
Let me speak, then, plainly of what that life has been, and tell what my

point of view is. I was brought up on ordinary English lines. My father,
in a busy life, held a series of what may be called high official positions.
He was an idealist, who, owing to a vigorous power of practical
organization and a mastery of detail, was essentially a man of affairs.
Yet he contrived to be a student too. Thus, owing to the fact that he
often shifted his headquarters, I have seen a good deal of general
society in several parts of England. Moreover, I was brought up in a
distinctly intellectual atmosphere.
I was at a big public school, and gained a scholarship at the University.
I was a moderate scholar and a competent athlete; but I will add that I
had always a strong literary bent. I took in younger days little interest
in history or polities, and tended rather to live an inner life in the region
of friendship and the artistic emotions. If I had been possessed of
private means, I should, no doubt, have become a full-fledged dilettante.
But that doubtful privilege was denied me, and for a good many years I
lived a busy and fairly successful life as a master at a big public school.
I will not dwell upon this, but I will say that I gained a great interest in
the science of education, and acquired profound misgivings as to the
nature of the intellectual process known by the name of secondary
education. More and more I began to perceive that it is conducted on
diffuse, detailed, unbusiness-like lines. I tried my best, as far as it was
consistent with loyalty to an established system, to correct the faulty
bias. But it was with a profound relief that I found myself suddenly
provided with a literary task of deep interest, and enabled to quit my
scholastic labours. At the same time, I am deeply grateful for the
practical experience I was enabled to gain, and even more for the many
true and pleasant friendships with colleagues, parents, and boys that I
was allowed to form.
What a waste of mental energy it is to be careful and troubled about
one's path in life! Quite unexpectedly, at this juncture, came my
election to a college Fellowship, giving me the one life that I had
always eagerly desired, and the possibility of which had always seemed
closed to me.
I became then a member of a small and definite society, with a few

prescribed duties, just enough, so to speak, to form a hem to my life of
comparative leisure. I had acquired and kept, all through my life as a
schoolmaster, the habit of continuous literary work; not from a sense of
duty, but simply from instinctive pleasure. I found myself at once at
home in my small and beautiful college, rich with all kinds of ancient
and venerable traditions, in buildings of humble and subtle grace. The
little dark-roofed chapel, where I have a stall of my own; the galleried
hall, with its armorial glass; the low, book-lined library; the panelled
combination-room, with its dim portraits of old worthies: how sweet a
setting for a quiet life! Then, too, I have my own spacious rooms, with
a peaceful outlook into a big close, half orchard, half garden, with
bird-haunted thickets and immemorial trees, bounded by a slow river.
And then, to teach me how "to borrow life and not grow old," the
happy tide of fresh and vigorous life all about me, brisk, confident,
cheerful young men, friendly, sensible, amenable, at that pleasant time
when the world begins to open its rich pages of experience, undimmed
at present by