Paul the Minstrel

Paul the Minstrel and Other
Stories, by

Arthur Christopher Benson This eBook is for the use of anyone
anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You
may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project
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Title: Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories Reprinted from The Hill of
Trouble and The Isles of Sunset
Author: Arthur Christopher Benson
Release Date: May 19, 2007 [EBook #21536]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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PAUL THE MINSTREL AND OTHER STORIES

Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset
BY
ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON
FELLOW OF MAGDALENE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1911
[All rights reserved]
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
"I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something that
never was, never will be--in a light better than any light that ever
shone--in a land no one can define or remember, only desire--and the
forms divinely beautiful--and then I wake up with the waking of
Brynhild."
SIR E. BURNE-JONES

PREFACE
These stories were all written at a very happy time of my life, and they
were first published when I was a master at Eton with a boarding-house.
A house-master is not always a happy man. It is an anxious business at
best. Boys are very unaccountable creatures, and the years between
boyhood and adolescence are apt to represent an irresponsible mood.
From the quiet childhood at home the boys have passed to what is now,
most happily, in the majority of cases, a carefully guarded and sheltered

atmosphere--the private school. My own private school was of the
old-fashioned type, with a very independent tone of tradition; but
nowadays private schools are smaller and much more domesticated.
The boys live like little brothers in the company of active and kindly
young masters; and then they are plunged into the rougher currents of
public schools, with their strange and in many ways barbarous code of
ethics, their strong and penetrating traditions. Here the boys, who have
hitherto had little temptation to be anything but obedient, have to learn
to govern themselves, and to do so among conventions which hardly
represent the conventions of the world, and where the public opinion is
curiously unaffected either by parental desires, or by the wishes,
expressed or unexpressed, of the masters. A house-master is often in
the position of seeing a new set of boys come into power in his house
whom he may distrust; but the sense of honour among the boys is so
strong that he is often the last person to hear of practices and principles
prevailing in his house of which he may wholly disapprove. He may
even find that many of the individual boys in his house disapprove of
them too, and yet be unable to alter a tone impressed on the place by a
few boys of forcible, if even sometimes unsatisfactory, character. But at
the time at which these stories were written the tone of my own house
was sound, sensible, and friendly; and I had the happiness of living in
an atmosphere which I knew to be wholesome, manly, and pure. I used
to tell or read stories on Sunday evenings to any boys who cared to
come to listen; and I remember with delight those hours when perhaps
twenty boys would come and sit all about my study, filling every chair
and sofa and overflowing on to the floor, to listen to long, vague stories
of adventure, with at all events an appearance of interest and
excitement.
One wanted to do the best for the boys, to put fine ideas, if one could,
into their heads and hearts. But direct moral exhortation to growing
boys, feeling the life of the world quickening in their veins, and with
vague old instincts of love and war rising uninterpreted in their
thoughts, is apt to be a fruitless thing enough. It is not that they do not
listen; but they simply do not understand the need of caution and
control, nor do they see the unguarded posterns by which evil things
slip smiling into the fortress of the soul.

Every now and then I used to try to shape a tale which in a figure might
leave an arresting or a restraining thought in their minds; or even touch
with a light of romance some of the knightly virtues which are apt to be
dulled into the aspect