Paul the Minstrel | Page 2

of commonplace and uninteresting duties.
It is very hard to make the simple choices of life assume a noble or an
inspiring form. One sees long afterwards in later life how fine the right
choice, the vigorous resistance, the honest perseverance might have
been; but the worst faults of boyhood have something exciting and
even romantic about them--they would not be so alluring if they had
not--while the homely virtues of honesty, frankness, modesty, and
self-restraint appear too often as a dull and priggish abstention from the
more daring and adventurous joys of eager living. If evil were always
ugly and goodness were always beautiful at first sight, there would be
little of the trouble and havoc in the world that is wrought by sin and
indolence.
I chose, not deliberately but instinctively, the old romantic form for the
setting of these tales, a semi-mediæval atmosphere such as belongs to
the literary epic; some of the stories are pure fantasy; but they all aim
more or less directly at illustrating the stern necessity of moral choice;
the difficulty is to get children to believe, at the brilliant outset of life,
that it will not do to follow the delights of impulse. And one of the
most pathetic parts of a schoolmaster's life is that he cannot, however
earnestly and sincerely he may wish to do so, transfer his own
experience to the boys, or persuade them that, in the simple words of
Browning, "It's wiser being good than bad." It may be wiser but it is
certainly duller! and the schoolmaster has the horror, which ought
never to be a faithless despair, of seeing boys drift into habits of
non-resistance, and sow with eager hand the seed which must almost
inevitably grow up into the thorns and weeds of life. If the child could
but grasp the bare truth, if one could but pull away the veil of the years
and show him the careless natural joy ending in the dingy, broken
slovenliness of failure! But one cannot; and perhaps life would lose all
its virtue if one could.
One does not know, one cannot dimly guess, why all these attractive

opportunities of evil are so thickly strewn about the path of the young
in a world which we believe to be ultimately ruled by Justice and Love.
Much of it comes from our own blindness and hardness of heart. Either
we do not care enough ourselves, or we cannot risk the unpopularity of
interfering with bad traditions, or we are lacking in imaginative
sympathy, or we sophistically persuade ourselves into the belief that
the character is strengthened by exposure to premature evil. The
atmosphere of the boarding-school is a very artificial one; its successes
are patent, its débris we sweep away into a corner; but whatever view
we take of it all, it is a life which, if one cares for virtue at all, however
half-heartedly, tries the mental and emotional faculties of the
schoolmaster to the uttermost, and every now and then shakes one's
heart to the depths with a terrible wonder as to how one can ever
answer to the account which will be demanded.
I do not claim to have realised my responsibilities fully, or to have done
all I could to lead my flock along the right path. But I did desire to
minimise temptations and to try to get the better side of the boys' hearts
and minds to emphasise itself. One saw masters who seemed to meddle
too much--that sometimes produced an atmosphere of guarded
hostility--and one saw masters who seemed to be foolishly optimistic
about it all; but as a rule one found in one's colleagues a deep and
serious preoccupation with manly ideals of boy-life; and in these stories
I tried my best to touch into life the poetical and beautiful side of virtue,
to show life as a pilgrimage to a far-off but glorious goal, with
seductive bypaths turning off the narrow way, and evil shapes, both
terrifying and alluring, which loitered in shady corners, or even
sometimes straddled horribly across the very road.
The romance, then, of these stories is coloured by what may be thought
to be a conventional and commonplace morality enough; but it is real
for all that; and life as it proceeds has a blessed way of revealing the
urgency and the unseen features of the combat. It is just because virtue
seems dry and humdrum that the struggle is so difficult. It is so hard to
turn aside from what seems so dangerously beautiful, to what seems so
plain and homely. But it is what we mostly have to do.

I saw many years ago a strange parable of what I mean. I was walking
through a quiet countryside with a curious, fanciful, interesting boy,
and