AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

me and he’s a nuisance to you and he’s a perfect plague to the servants.’”
Then, with an indescribable extreme of grinding and grating contempt: “‘So
we’ll Pay Some Man . . . .’”
I say I introduce this ancient anecdote for another reason; and it is partly
because I would suggest another answer. If ever the problem troubled me in
my boyhood, it did not force me in the direction of the lofty morality of
Robinson. The idea that I had come to school to work was too grotesque to
cloud my mind for an instant. It was also in too obvious a contrast with the
facts and the result. I was very fond of my friends; though, as is common at
such an age, I was much too fond of them to be openly emotional about it. But
I do remember coming, almost seriously, to the conclusion that a boy must go
to school to study the characters of his schoolmasters. And I still think that
there was something in it. After all, the schoolmaster is the first educated
grown-up person that the boy comes to see constantly, after having been
introduced at an early age to his father and mother. And the masters at St.
Paul’s were very interesting; even those of them who were not so obviously
eccentric as the celebrated Mr. Elam. To one very distinguished individual, my
own personal debt is infinite; I mean, the historian of the Indian Mutiny and of
the campaigns of Caesar--Mr. T. Rice Holmes. He managed, heaven knows
how, to penetrate through my deep and desperately consolidated desire to
appear stupid; and discover the horrible secret that I was, after all, endowed
with the gift of reason above the brutes. He would suddenly ask me questions
a thousand miles away from the subject at hand, and surprise me into
admitting that I had heard of the Song of Roland, or even read a play or two of
Shakespeare. Nobody who knows anything of the English schoolboy at that
date will imagine that there was at the moment any pleasure in such
prominence or distinction. We were all hag-ridden with a horror of showing
off, which was perhaps the only coherent moral principal we possessed. There
was one boy, I remember, who was so insanely sensitive on this point of
honour, that he could hardly bear to hear one of his friends answer an ordinary
question right. He felt that his comrade really ought to have invented some
mistake, in the general interest of comradeship. When my information about
the French epic was torn from me, in spite of my efforts, he actually put his
head in his desk and dropped the lid on it, groaning in a generous and
impersonal shame and faintly and hoarsely exclaiming, “Oh, shut it. . . . Oh,
shut up!” He was an extreme exponent of the principle; but it was a principle
which I fully shared. I can remember running to school in sheer excitement
repeating militant lines of “Marmion” with passionate emphasis and
exultation; and then going into class and repeating the same lines in the
lifeless manner of a hurdy-gurdy, hoping that there was nothing whatever in
my intonation to indicate that I distinguished between the sense of one word
and another.