Ae Sees ay vin ns rors es tee Ly See 9 as ik atic’ Ses bee sn Pat eae a ‘ - ‘ Ase ji 5 ta Ee eat 3 ‘) % STH Aeeihoe ss Se Pp ay arias ee ns RY OF PhING Qe “75 JAN 27 1932 A y Mie Ua COL gaicaL SENS Division Section Ls Clb) s L hid y' ; 7 # rh n AUP aes a J Tides ( < f © ath i Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library htips://archive.org/details/realboynewschool0Ohami THE REAL BOY And the New Schood ERY OF PRINE Kon EP > OWS NOADO BS ie ; Wes By i : A. E. HAMILTON, M.A. 5 5 KS 5 Bs i Bf KS BY Ke 5 i BY RS = ; NEW YORK | : : BON Teor ely B Ral Gielen : | DQ 2 5 ie »| Ke CimAmaAmAmAmAmAMAMAMATAMAMAmAmAmAMOAMAMAmAmAmAmAmAt COPYRIGHT 1925 cos BY BONI @& LIVERIGHT, Ine. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES —— 9 ee First printing, August, 1925 Second printing, January, 1926 Third printing, November, 1926 To KATHARINE WHOSE FIRESIDE WAS HOME AND FRIENDSHIP AND JOY TO MANY A LONELY KID. 4 ‘wh , Hy ‘| fe nes hy Oe Wa) Shion “ i ante 1p ; ate i the ry ' ; , ey ‘8 ' ro ‘if ih A Ae aoe i: ane bys CHAPTER ie |W DEY IV. V. XVII. CONTENTS Pro—EM—On Wuy aA TEACHER SHOULD WRITE A Book . SUNDAY SCHOOL LEssons AT WorkK THe Major Toucues Our HEartTs Anpb Leap Us Into TEMPTATION A GREAT TEACHER WELCOMES ME . SoME Boy THoucHts ABpoutT ‘THEIR ‘TEACHERS . WE EXpERIMENT Wi1TH DEMOCRACY . A Lay ConrFESSIONAL Nat WarrEN ReEaps NIETZSCHE . ON THE Way oF Boys witH Books . ON THE Way oF Boys WITH POETRY . A TEACHER Is HELPED By A WIFE . A Few Worps on History . Boy RELIGION IN THE MAKING . . A SHort ExpERIMENT IN CoORDINATION . THe Woop Spirit Catits Us Away . On THE RELATION OF Camp TO HOME AND SCHOOL MytAruMNi DALK: ABOUTOLABRRA tel! celtite XVIII. Wuat, THEN, ABouT GirLs? . PAGE 343 363 377 iM cy: na es aih BSS} i NR y N oe iy ae ; Wikseaernien oi | he fb te tf} ie rite —PROEM— ON WHY A TEACHER SHOULD WRITE A BOOK If you have built castles in the air your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. —THOREAU. I GALLOPING up a country road with a bunch of boys on horseback, I rose in my stirrups, turned around, waved an arm and shouted hello to a group of lads who stood aside to let the cavalcade go by. Suddenly the world turned black as a cave, then sparkled with stars, and vanished. I opened my eyes in a white hospital and was told that my skull had been fractured, that it must be trepanned and that my summer camping was over. Some months later I was set at liberty, told to go to Bermuda or the Mediterranean, forget about boys and do no work for a year or so. In response to these instruc- tions | moved onto a small island in the Andro- scoggin River, up in Maine, set my typewriter be- side a sunny window and began to write a book about II 12 THE ReBeAG BiOwY boys. It is my hope that this very personal sketch of one teacher’s partial success and larger failure to square some of the ideals of the school of tomorrow with the hard academic facts of education today will add, as it were, a small stone to the foundation work of the structure that is being reared in America for the joyous growth of our boys and girls. I say joyous growth because, if education is not for the joy of growing up through life, like a tree, to our fullest breadth and stature as creatures capable of happiness and hungry for it, then I am all wrong, and this book should not have been writ- ten. If education is for mere usefulness, agility in earning a living, efficiency in squaring with practical life, success in competitive endeavor; then I would leave it to our correspondence schools, our vocational guidance departments, and the extensively ramifying system of industrial education. Not that I belittle any honest effort to fit a boy or girl for a trade or profession in life. I am simply interested in educa- tion that goes beyond the training of body and mind for their jobs in life. I am interested in the educa- tion of the soul. Permit me to use the word soul in this book. I am somewhat informed concerning the latest discoy- eries and vocabulary of our psychological labora- tories. J know that to many the word soul has become an anachronism, like the word phlogiston in chemistry, or humor in medicine. Yet despite the way the soul has been dissected, analyzed, micro- in hitioe Ra beAlT BE Ory 13 analyzed, labeled and catalogued into its component parts, it still means to me as much as it ever did. It seems to me an immortal little word, like God and Spirit. Immortal words not for some mystic or transcendental reason, but because their meanings are plastic, resilient, subject to evolution and amen- able to a thousand changes in time and circumstance and place. I shall make no attempt to define them. I shall use them because, however conversant with the latest philosophies and texts psychological, I believe you will know what I mean. For I use them not philosophically, or theologically, but merely as good counters, still fitting to the life of boys and girls. If I were to choose a text, like the preachers, for what I have to say on education, I should borrow it from the scripture of a great and still somewhat misunderstood American who said that Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make other people so. If the school of tomorrow can teach us something of how to realize the substance of this little text, if we could turn its feeling into habits of action as well as convictions of mind, would our world not be a place more cheery to live in? Will you now take your rainproof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods and, afoot and 14 LEE wu RATE ARTS 1 BiG ey? light-hearted, take with me to the open road, the long brown path before us leading to the kingdom of heaven? For J take it that Jesus was right when he said that the kingdom of heaven was made of and for children. I feel, in writing this book, like gray Walt Whitman, that I have no chair, no church, no philosophy and only a desire to lead you, if you will, upon some knolls my feet have tramped in the land of growing boys and girls in search of an answer to the question: What, then, is education for? II I sent the manuscript of this book to one of my old teachers, a guide and friend of my academic days, Professor William H. Burnham, of Clark University. He returned it with some words which made me think that writing it had been worth while: ‘Modern studies have shown how little we under- stand children, especially boys perhaps in their early years. [he world of the boy is protected by instinc- tive defense mechanisms and a shell of boyhood con- ventions. ‘To carry out the simile at the risk of _ mixing metaphors, we may say that the real world of boyhood lies within this shell. Once in a while adults who are fortunate crack the shell here and there and get glimpses that suggest the world of boy life within. Occasionally some special student of child- hood has actually broken a little hole here and there and seen still more of the life inside. ‘You have been far more fortunate. You have actually penetrated this world so carefully protected, THE REAL BOY 15 placed your camera inside the shell and taken snap- shots of actual boy nature, photographed reality on the spot. Your book gives us a series of these photo- graphs, and as a collection they furnish not only objects of natural interest to all those responsible for boys, but opportunity for study and pregnant suggestions of what could be done if we really under- stood them. What you have called ‘wild boys’ are real boys, and those who prefer reality to the arti- ficial pictures based on the usual conventions will find a rich mine here.” Perhaps rather than photographing, I have sketched a series of psycho-graphs of some boys and of their teachers, just as I met and lived with them for a while. To these I have added only what my heart spoke to me at the time and a few comments suggested by the perspective that has come to me years later when looking over some of these pleasant pictures of memory. I wish these pictures to speak for themselves whenever they can. If they illustrate an educational principle or doctrine, that should be apparent, for I do not think there is anything theo- retically new in this book. I am merely trying to voice some of the joy there is to a teacher in being what he is, a teacher of children, and to show where this inward reward and over-compensation for all one’s efforts and occasional sacrifices has its roots. As a teacher I have been fascinated by the num- ber and variety of responses one is called upon to make toward the individuals in a group of pupils. So many registers, so many philosophies or ways of 16 TELE RE Ah BO Y¥ life to consider! The bright, peppery, alert fellows; one must react to them in their own language, at their own speed. ‘The slow, sure, ploddy ones who always get their lessons but never see a point you try to make until next day, or even next week if they ever see it at all. The bright-minded lazy ones, grow- ing too fast, unwilling to work when success comes so easily with little labor, thinking a task completed when it is only half done, trying always to pass muster on native intelligence and inherent ability; one has to battle with their nimble wits and out- maneuver their long deployings into juvenile logic. The dull, stupid, high-grade morons; generous, re- sponsive, lovable fellows utterly devoid of construc- tive intelligence; one marks time with them and must be satisfied if they merely learn to keep step and keep smiling. To deal with all these types in a group, yet always to think of the individual; to teach classes but remember that you are dealing with a boy, and not with an average; this is a constant test of one’s plasticity, resilience, adjustability, youth. [ believe that, as a teacher, I skipped among these boys without rule or formula, and trusting only to a few fundamental principles which had somehow become organic within me, and which I could not have set down in words if I had tried, at the time. Some of these principles are-now shadowily apparent to me, and in writing of them they have begun to take form; but always they seem to elude capture, Save as suggestions here and there. Sometimes tee: CREAT iB Ory 17 these are crisp and clear, but mostly they are evasive and slippery, like quick minnows, ever so tempting in a brook to the hand of a covetous boy. Would that I might catch them, string them and show them to you proudly in the sunlight; but then, if I could, I should have written quite another sort of book. I should have talked about my boys much more than [ have here tried to let them talk about themselves. And as to the education of boys, I have read hun- dreds of definitions, and of course, writing a book, I must attempt to add yet another to the generous list. Like one’s concept of God or Spirit or Soul, the idea of what education is for must remain plastic, evolving, and adjusting itself to circumstance and time. From my own experience, education is for an adventure in the fine art of living at one’s very hap- piest and best this very day, this very hour. Looking at my boys at their work or play, I have come to ask myself: “Is that child before me with a book, or trap, or pencil, or test-tube, or gun, or puzzle actually living this very minute as nearly up to the limit of his capacity for intensive joy as he possibly can?’ If he is, then he is being truly educated, (drawn-out) by that book, or trap, or pencil, or test-tube, or puzzle, or gun, according to my own pet definition. And as for merely learning things, I like what Samuel Butler has to say in that ponderous masterpiece, The Way of All Flesh where he tells us: ‘Never learn anything until you find you have been made uncomfortable for a long time by not 18 aR AL Ouy knowing it. Until then, spend your time growing bone and muscle.” ‘That, I know, is too broad a statement. I think we ought to feel uncomfortably ignorant, or consciously hungry for knowledge before going after it; but I see no reason for being uncom. fortable or hungry very long before starting out, It has been my principle, however, to try to get boys hungry and thirsty for knowledge before bring- ing it to them or sending them after it. Corollary to this I have tried to be ready to feed them savory and wholesome food when they have sprung upon me with a hungry question. If I had not the food at hand, I could at least point to a road, or a trail, or a track leading in its direction. Sometimes I thought it better to do this even when good things were on my table, steaming hot. Til If what I have to say has a pattern, this has evolved while I have been writing. The narrative has given it form, and so it rings true to life as it is, somewhat sketchy and full of holes. As I look back over it, the pattern is something like this: The boy, trying to adjust to school and to the ways of adults, only partially succeeds. ‘The school has not evolved from his own inner needs and wishes. Rather it has been thrust upon him, supposedly for his best interests, from without. ‘The boy, trying to adjust to the gang, succeeds almost immediately. The gang expresses its composite mind in strict ac- tea Ra ATES IBIOLY 19 cord with the progressive points of development in the minds of its members. It evolves along with them, adjusts itself to their inward changes and dis- appears as naturally as it began. It is a rough working model of what the school should be: an opportunity to learn about life by doing intensively those things which we most want to do at a particu- lar moment of living. ‘This may seem far from ap- parent in the first chapter. None of us will agree that, because a group of boys desire to become bandits, the school should provide opportunity for their education in banditry. I believe, however, that what I really mean will become clear in later chap- ters. So, too, with fear. I do not believe that anyone but an ardent fundamentalist would suggest that we adopt in our schools such a fear of the Lord as was the beginning of wisdom to my gang. Yet learning to fear aright must long remain one of the founda- tion stones of educational psychology. ‘The fear of ghosts is vanishing, even from boyhood. The fear of germs may follow it, when science shall have de- stroyed their power. But while there are evils, in- dividual and social in the world, this primordial in- stinct may healthfully remain with us, as a friendly warning signal like pain in a tooth, even if no longer as an important motive for action. William James and, following him, Bergson and Dewey, have brought instinctive feeling before us as more important in education than intellect or will, 20 UE ee Aes Gey and fundamental to both. To reach a boy’s head we must speak to his heart first, for what the heart feels, the head will later understand. ‘The artistry underlying a consistent practice of this principle is one of the theme-threads in my pattern of thought through this book. Its technique, it seems to me, is almost vital to good craftsmanship in teacherhood. The art of making wholesome, constructive, crea- tive things so strongly alluring that they draw one to them, and away from things less healthy, is an- other lesson we teachers must learn. ‘That this is possible and practical as well as ideal in principle has been amply proved already. All I have done is to set down some of my own joy in experiencing it at work. The perennial conflict between the desires of youth and the fears of adults concerning their relationship to youth has been most apparent to me in the fields of democracy and of sex. We are organically as conservative in regard to granting administrative or governmental powers to the youth in our care as the dynasties of kingdoms and empires have been all through history in relation to their subjects. Yet my experience among principals and teachers makes me think that we fear less the loss of our own power than the loss of the relatively facile ease with which we can control our pupils in the good old-fashioned way. We fear change because it means readjust- ment, patience and real labor if we are to guide the change constructively. We are lazy, and tradition, HE REAL. BOW 21 precedent, routine are such easy hammocks in which to lie! With sex there is this difference: that we adults are not sufficiently alive and receptive to the obvious facts in the moral atmosphere around us. Nor do we notice that the moral atmosphere, as concerned with sex, is changing quite radically from fog to sunlight. I do not say changing quickly, but radi- cally. My conviction does not come from what I read in print or hear in lectures, but what I am told by boys and girls and by young men and young women just graduating from boyhood and girlhood. We grown-ups fear this change not because we shall lose power or prestige or ease of living; but simply because we do not understand what is happening, and the fear of the unknown is upon us. Consequently, sex remains still a no-man’s land in education. I have made a few sorties into this no-man’s land and tried to battle there with what poor weapons | had against the insidious and grotesque mystery with which sex has been so monstrously surrounded. Armed with a handful of facts gathered from ex- perience, and with a few convictions resultant there- from, I have found myself face to face with a mil- lion fancies, superstitions, convictions, idealizations, cynicisms and interrogations which have driven me back time and time again into the seclusion of a solitary trench, or shell-hole as it were, in self- defense. I see no hope for constructive education in this 22 THE (RABAT sBOsY field so long as a humiliating censorship in America can keep out of the hands of its teachers such books as Doctor Stopes has written, as Margaret Sanger and Havelock Ellis would write if they had promise of an adequate audience. In a country where the maudlin imbecilities of puritanic theologians are al- lowed to circulate as authoritative sources of infor- mation upon sex, and where a teacher cannot obtain a copy of “Sex in Relation to Society’’ unless he proves that he is a lawyer or an M.D., only one thing is possible: experiment. And if you wish to read a politely expurgated drawing-room sketch of some aspects of this experiment, read Ben Lindsey’s book on the morals of modern youth. What influence does reading have upon the per- sonal life of a boy? ‘This question returned to me again and again as I watched my pupils over their books, or when they came to me to borrow one of mine.- Difficult of answer, this. Attitude, viewpoint, inward feeling toward a book: that is what counts. Not what a boy learns from it, but what it makes him feel is the test of his reading. Some of my alumni read Judge Lindsey, and put their feeling into words. ‘That gave me a hint as to what such writing meant in the world. For I doubt if it has much effect upon many people over twenty-five years of age. It talks about them, but not to them. William James was all too right about the setting, like putty, of the human mind. And the classics? I hope I shall not be taken (ar RE ACE BOTY 23 as a crank on the subject of college entrance require- ments in literature. Perhaps I have been peeved at the limitations they seem to set upon reading, and the waste of time they invoke on non-essentials. On the whole, however, they did not trouble me much as a teacher, or the boys as candidates for college. These requisites for examination were faced, mas- tered and forgotten as a necessary evil in one’s course through life. We read heaps of good books with pleasure and real profit despite all attempts to keep us in line with accepted standards. “Beyond good and evil’ have we gone today? A few of my boys read Nietzsche. Nat Warren quite worshiped him. More read Mencken, many more still have been swept, for a while, into the stream of thought in which Mencken swims so splashingly, and which constitutes a current which no one inter- ested in education can ignore. I speak here, of course, of the older lads and of my alumni. The younger fry, insofar as iconoclasm is concerned, were still back in the times of Colonel Ingersoll, as some of their religious speculations proved. If anything was apparent to me in the random comments of boy-mind upon God, Religion, Evolu- tion, Immortality and Death, it was that conceptions of the meaning of these words were plastic, and amenable to constant change. To Agpawan, my primitive pupil from the Philippines, life was indeed ‘fan ever-living adventure in readjustment, a contin- uous participation with God in the creation of a 24 THE REAL BOY better and better world.’ It seemed to me, dealing with mental stuff so flowing, so moldable, that the one cardinal impression to make upon it was that “our religion is still in the making, that it partakes of our faults, and that each generation of youths has the privilege of entering into it with free creativity.” I am grateful to Professor Coe for putting into words what I felt for so long a time when dealing with boys in groups or as individuals, on the subject of religion. History, it seemed to me, carried so much of the story of mankind in search for God, that one could almost take it as a text. History related us so often to the great Bibles of the world, and especially to that which we, as a people, have adopted officially as our own. History as a setting, as a vantage point for getting the present into perspective, and as a possible springboard into a happier future for man- kind, was my theme in dealing with this topic in school. Its heroes and villains seemed so graphic of relative moral values that the whole pageantry of life from the cave-men to Romain Rolland became a lesson at once philosophic and religious. But’I did not use these words in my approach to History with the boys! The architecture of our great cathedrals is a symbolic and beautifully imitative echo of tall trees, of vines and of flowers. To me these wonderful buildings are not so close akin to frozen music, as to crystallized woodland and petrified blossoms. So eri Win Role, Abe Oye 25 that when I walked with my boys under beech and oak and pine, I often felt atavistic reverberations of the days when religion first began its evolution, and it was around the Council Fire at camp that the spirit of religion seemed most vitally alive. I be- lieve I was not alone in this feeling, and that many of the boys shared it with me. My alumni returned to me, here and there, for a chat about old times. I visited them in their homes. Always we seemed to wish to sit by a fire, and often we did. They brought me their problems of life in the world outside of school. Not their busi- ness, or profession, or politics; but their still evolving attitudes toward those things which are most per- sonal, and most important: love, marriage, children, the integration and success of family life, the life of the spirit. What is love? Is monogamy feasible? Where does chastity begin and end? What qualities will children inherit? Is experimental sex experience a constructive prelude to marriage? Are trial mar- riages a help or a hindrance toward successful set- tling down to a happy family life? Can the attitude of the scientist replace and fulfill the place of religion in one’s soul? ‘These are a few of the questions to which I must reply not with theory, or tradition, or dogma, but with conviction backed by experience and with facts. Youth today wants facts. It is ready for them. It wants them from one who speaks with authority 26 THE REAL BOY and not as the scribes. What a position in which to place a teacher! What responsibility to bring upon his shoulders! How weakly one seems able to react to such pressure. We must do our level best, and hope that it may help; yet “living indeed is an art that everyone must learn but that none of us can teach.” Each one of our boys and girls is his own best teacher, and we of the cloth can do little more than stand beside him, like Mrs. Johnson of Fair- hope, ready to lend a hand in time of need. The relationship of a mature woman to the mind of a boy, especially that of a boy away from his family at boarding school, is full of possibilities for growth. The role of a partial foster-mother is here, as well as the art of the hostess. A word, or a sym- pathetic smile at the right moment may mark a turn- ing point in some creative line of thought or aspira- tion. I say creative because a boy is unconsciously, and at times quite consciously creating himself out of the constant flow of impressions to which he is exposed. It is the direction and guidance of these impressions when they begin to turn into attitudes and toward expression that is important. ‘The nod of a head or the shaking of a finger may make all the difference between better and best, if not between good and evil. In this book I have tried merely to set down a narrative of personal experience as a teacher. There is nothing new in educational theory here; but there is considerable testing of the old and of recent con- ras he A Pe BO) Ye 27 ceptions in the field of educational psychology. While the facts of a teacher’s life have led me to meditate now and then, it is the facts themselves which I should like to have speak, and I hope that what they have to say will prove worth reading. CHAPTER I SUNDAY SCHOOL LESSONS AT WORK Men do not despise a thief, if he steals to satisfy his soul when he is hungry; but if he be found, he shall restore seven-fold; he shall give all the sub- stance of his house. —PROVERBS VI, 30-31. I My practical education for life began in the Thieves’ Market. Here I got my first inkling of economics, sociology and ethics. Here I learned how the religious teachings of Sunday school may apply to everyday life. This course in economics, sociology and applied religion began when I was eight years old. Its lessons have colored the thought and feeling of a checkered career in educational ex- periences for quarter of a century during which I have tried hard to find a satisfying answer to the question: What is education for? Almost within the shadow of the National Palace in Mexico City there lies an open square of sandal- worn cobblestones known politely as E/ Volador or flying market, practically as El Baratillo or cheap- place, and truthfully as the Plaza de Rateros or market for thieves. A miniature Bagdad, a ma- terialized chapter from the Arabian Nights, this 28 fier te As) iC). Yt 29 market square became a magnet of perennial interest to us boys. Somewhat dull and deserted on week- days, on Sundays it became an animated kaleidoscope of humanity and of things. Things! a tired and threadbare word, but what a joyous word to early childhood. How the Baratillo teemed with things! Grinning Aztec idols; arrow-heads of flint, obsid- ian and quartz; flintlock pistols, caplock guns and pin-fire revolvers; army buttons, medals, chevrons, epaulets, gold braid; candlesticks, transits, micro- scopes, telescopes, daggers, poniards, swords mache- tes and small cannon; test-tubes, mortars, crucibles, retorts and electrical mysteries without number. Boyhood’s favorite pages from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue magically translated from print and pic- ture into seeable, feelable, smellable reality. I could fill pages from vivid memories of miscellaneous and fascinating junk. Let me add, because they bear intimately on my story, a string of amber beads, some miner’s picks, a roll of absorbent cotton and a bottle of glycerine. Feelable reality! We lifted brass duck-cannon to guess their weight. We felt the varying smoothness and roughness of arrow-heads, spear-points and chipped-stone knives. We discovered the delicate difference in balance-point of hatchets and pistols and guns. We looked through a score of good, bad and indifferent microscopes, telescopes and fieldglasses. Meerschaum and clay, pottery and stone, pumice and quartz, flexible steel and obdurate iron yielded 30 TH bye Rav Ade TB ON up a portion of their specific mysteries to our inquisi- tive touch. Covetable reality! ‘For by way of the hand the mind travels the enticing road to self-expression and self-fulfilment, and to that most priceless sort of happiness which is poised upon itself.”” True, Mr. Yeomans, our boy-minds traveled from the delight- ful experience of looking at and feeling things to the desire for self-fulfillment in their possession. First we began to buy. We attended Sunday school on Sunday mornings. Went not because we had to, but because we liked our teacher. She did not ask us questions from the Quarterly. She did not scold us for not knowing the golden text. She told us fascinating stories about Moses, David, Jonathan, Samson, Jezebel, Joseph, Esther, Herod, Jesus, Pilate and Saint Paul. We believed what she told us, and we talked about these real men and real women on our way to the Thieves’ Market after Sunday school was over. In our pockets chinked small change. If we had been given a quarter for the collection plate, we changed it for two dimes and a five-cent piece at the ice-cream store before we entered the house of God. Thus we could make a contribution of more than a mere tithe unto Jehovah and still have a sufficiency for purchases at the Baratillo. If our class col- lection seemed sometimes too light, our teacher made up the deficit with a contribution of her own. She did not investigate our financial standing. She some- HEAR EI ACL, eB OY; 31 times handed us a bright half dollar for ice-cream on our way home. I verily believe that she thought we went home. Her story of Achan troubled us slightly. You remember how Achan buried a goodly Babylonish garment, two hundred shekels of silver and a wedge of gold beneath his tent when he should have deliv- ered them up to Joshua for the service of Jehovah. And how, when he was discovered, all Israel stoned him with stones and burned him with fire and raised over him a great heap of stones as a monument to his crime. I remember worrying over the possible . personal application of this story to my own sin of keeping two dimes of a changed quarter and deliver- ing only a five-cent piece into the treasury of the Lord. I remember, too, how relieved I felt, when, sharing my perplexity with Merril, he settled the question with boylike precision: ‘‘Shucks! we're only just kids. God nor nobody thinks about this chicken-feed. ’Tain’t like a wedge of gold. Gee but I'd like to find a wedge of gold, though, some- wheres.” I believe I recall almost his very words. We forgot Achan and spent our chicken-feed ex- haustively among the Baraitillo stalls. Before dropping Achan here, however, may I say that our teacher’s stories in Sunday school car- ried no moral appendage. She gave us facts, or what she believed were facts, as interestingly as she knew how, and left us alone to draw our own con- clusions from those facts. Had she preached a short ce! OL ER Al BOY, sermon with the story of Achan as a text, the matter might have been closed for us. We would not have thought about it. We would have accepted her con- clusions. Perhaps we would have reformed and paid full measure of our substance unto God. Probably we should have continued our financial practice and chosen to take the consequences of our sin outright. But the intellectual element, our own temporary perplexity, would have vanished. As it was, this story stimulated us to do our own thinking, brief though that thinking was. It led toward an ac- quaintanceship with our own conscience. It precipi- tated a very juvenile, yet a none less ethical dis- cussion of moral values. I believe it contributed a particle to the evolution of our code of gang morals. Let us step from the story of Achan to the Baratillo again. Of real pickpockets, burglars, highwaymen and bandits I believe we boys saw very few. ‘They plied their trade outside the stone walls of the market, sold their goods to the owners of stalls by night and after business hours, keeping safely away from the eyes of the timid little policemen who wandered dutifully among the crowds on Sunday morning. But to us every cook, maid, stable-man, peddler and impecunious peon who sold a pair of shoes or a rusty key to a market tradesman was a probable criminal of rank from a pilfering servant to a Pancho Villa. Among these real and imaginary brigands, we TH REA BOY 33 boys began to moralize. We moralized because we wanted something. Morality is genetically a logical justification for desire and the fulfillment of desire. However abstruse, philosophical and even mystical it may later become, it has its roots in feeling, in wish. Mankind felt and wished very strongly before it began to think and to justify thought. So with us boys. We wanted things. We wanted more things than we had money to pay for. Things looked awfully good to us. A pearl-handled knife with half a dozen entrancing blades looked especially good to Hugo. At school, one Monday morning, Hugo sharpened a pencil with that knife. At recess — Merril asked him how he got the money to buy the expensive bit of hardware. Before recess was over every member of our gang had learned that Hugo had stolen that knife from a lame stall-keeper with one eye. Our feelings were chaotic. Our opinions were diverse. We postponed discussion until after school upon the ringing of the bell. Then Hugo moralized. As nearly as I can recall, he moralized like this: “The knife was stolen by somebody. ‘The stall- keeper had no right to buy it because it had been stolen. It only half belonged to the man who bought it. His price was so high that anyone would be cheated who bought it. It wasn’t so bad for me to steal the knife from that man as though I had swiped it from the man who really owned it. Was itp 34. THE Baby Aly." BiOvVYs I doubt if we thought Hugo was right, but neither did we condemn him as wrong. We pooled our opinions, and from the mixture there evolved a shadowy justification for Hugo’s act which seemed to grow up into each individual imagination as an irritating urge to go and do likewise. Our group mind was subtly turned toward a new field of activity and adventure. II On the following Sunday each one of us contrib- uted one or more things to a robber’s pool of stolen goods. We eyed our plunder with a mixed feeling of triumph, fear and promising anticipation of yet greater adventures. Intoxicated by the novelty of our initial success, we ceased to moralize and simply rejoiced in a thrilling fact. We were bandits, at one with David, Robin Hood, Captain Kidd and Jesse James. Our die was cast. Each was guilty, each was triumphant, a hero and a fellow criminal to himself and to his pals. “Team-work and loyalty had suddenly come into our lives, not as words, but in action. Doing hazardous things together drew us close to each other, united us in a common bond of fear and prideful hope. Our gang became a vital reality, a composite creature with a common purpose and with a common danger. We tingled with a new sensation. We entered a sudden and thrilling epoch of our lives. We encountered our first real problem as outlaws; how to use and enjoy our plunder, and SUAPT EG RST AD DT iB Ony, 35 yet keep it safely out of sight, away from the world of laws, of rights and wrongs. Instinctively we turned to mother-earth. With the same precision with which a dog will bury a bone, we turned earthwards for protection and decided to dig a cave. All the cave-lore of our omnivorous reading of forbidden nickel novels came pouring into an excited chatter of boy tongues. The genii of Aladdin never conjured up a more elaborately equipped and embellished cavern than our composite plan evolved that Sunday afternoon. I remember that it contained a swimming-pool, shower-baths, electric lighting and telephone system, divans, vaults, secret chambers, a business office, chemical laboratory, arsenal and a dungeon for hostages and kidnaped scions of our enemies, the rural police. Not only did this all seem possible and practical, but we planned immediate preliminaries and decided to begin work at once. I have mentioned some miner’s picks, a bottle of glycerine and some cotton on the Baraiillo stalls. Merril, a miner’s son, suggested that these things, together with some nitric acid were all we needed for engineering operations. We stole the picks, cot- ton and glycerine and. bought a phial of nitric acid for the home brewing of nitro-glycerine, according to Merril’s recipe. Modern science hand in hand with mankind’s primordial urge to scratch and dig inthe earth! Boy-mind, striking spark on boy-mind had lighted an architectonic dream. ‘he bandit be- 36 THE RAL BOY came the builder. Team-work again, and loyalty, united in a common purpose toward a shining goal. Money, barter, Sunday-school stories, school, baseball and even home now played a relatively in- significant part in our conscious lives. If money was scarce, brains were quick and fingers agile. If David had lived in a cave, we were about to inhabit a cavern that would make kings turn green with envy. If we neglected the geography of the school-room for the topography of rain-gullied hills, what booted a scolding from our teacher, or even an hour after school, so long as Saturdays and Sundays were free? As for home, we felt that we were seldom missed. Armed with picks, and with what we believed to be the materials for the manufacture of high ex- plosives, we sought a cave, or a place to dig a cave. Were I writing a story instead of a book on educa- tion, I could set down a series of adventures here possibly as enviable to a boy today as were the ex- ploits of Street and Smith heroes to us lads half a generation ago. We started to dig a hole into the thick walls of an adobe fortress near the castle of Chapultepec. The rural guards discovered and dis- persed us, confiscating our tools, revolvers, chemicals and miscellany, arresting Francis and throwing panic among our parents. We deliberately recouped our supplies, trudged far out into the canyon country of San Pedro, discovered a deep hollow under a thin, high waterfall and set to digging again. For- tunately for us, when we essayed a blast with our ASE Roi ATL +B OY 37 amateur nitro-glycerine, part of the cave fell in upon the charge before it could go off, and we moved on to a tepetate mine, a mile or so away. Tepetate is a soft, porous, conglomerate stone which is cut out in large cubes from cave-quarries. These quarries extended for hundreds of feet into the canyon sides and afforded us at least a partial realization of our dream. ‘The police frustrated our attempt to tap the telegraph wires for current to light our Edison bulbs, but we acquired a railroad lantern and some candles and began to make for ourselves a fortress and a home. Here we stored our small plunder, and here we lived our life until the hand of Jehovah reached down from heaven, shifted our center of interest and changed the tenure of our lives. Ill Jehovah, we boys had been taught in Sunday- school, was a jealous God, and while sometimes kindly and generous, he could also be vindictive and revengeful. There is little doubt in my mind that we boys feared the Lord. We certainly did not love him, or particularly like him. He was a sort of disembodied father, forever in a watchful mood and carrying a trunk strap or a switch. We feared him, and in this fear there lay the beginning of wisdom. We had learned that it was relatively easy to put things over on the police, on market-men, and 38 THE REAL BOY on our own parents. If the lazy police caught us, our parents came to the rescue and saved us from, or got us out of jail. Our brief sojourns in the calaboose were rather good fun, and certainly marks of distinction. Punishment at parental hands was sometimes physically painful, but soon over and easily forgotten. God, however, worked mysteri- ously, occultly and behind our backs, as it were. We believed in his hidden presence and dim fears of his possible wrath and punishment haunted our small hearts. Stories, like that of Adam or Esau, and the threat to cremate the heathen like stubble as recorded by Malachi, had rooted themselves in our imaginations. ‘The age of doubt had not yet come to us. We were thorough fundamentalists, and the power of these gray old stories was genuinely patent in our waking, mercurial lives. One day Francis and I were melting lead on his mother’s charcoal stove. We were commissioned to make bullets for our next fight with the greasers of Santa Maria. ‘These battles were not innocuous affairs. We fought with sling-shots and nigger- shooters charged with pebbles or lead balls. My nose was broken in one scrimmage and I was knocked senseless by a blow on the back of my head in an- other, to mention only my own wound-stripes. We prepared for war in earnest, and the making of bul- lets was one of our prized commissions. Francis, impatient with time, poured kerosene on the glowing coals. ‘The classic result followed, but without more EEE ROG AGL, SBiO WW: 39 grievous damage than singed eyebrows, scorched clothes and a kitchen which we were still trying to put to rights when Mrs. Kane discovered us. Parental inquiry extended, as usual, only over the surface of things and dealt merely with apparent facts. It neglected reasons, causes and background, dealing only with the results of faulty technical pro- cedure. And so happy was this brooding mother over her son’s escape from incinerary death that we boys sat at supper that evening conscious only of a miraculous escape at the hands of a graciously watch- ful God who had predestined us to grow up into upright and noble men. | IV I am trying to stick closely to what I feel is true regarding the working of our boy minds in these gangster days. I want action to speak wherever possible, instead of philosophizing. I do not at- tempt to explain the events that followed such a close shave to calamity as befell us in Mrs. Kane’s kitchen, but I believe this incident marked a turning point, an epoch in our lives. I believe that God, or providence, or chance, as you will, in the ancient garb of the Hebraic Jehovah touched and changed our ways. and, through our ways, our thinking and our education. On the Sunday following the explosion, Francis said that he could not go with us to the Baratillo. Astonished questioning brought forth the confession 40 THES (RRA eB Oy? that he had promised his mother that he would be good. I recall that we got a distinct impression that his resolve was partly founded on an inward grati- tude for delivery from a flaming death. He said that he would like to resign from the gang, as it did not seem fair to belong and yet refuse to go the way of his comrades. We went on without him, refusing his resignation, but with his words hid away in our hearts. Our>catch at the Thieves’ Market was insignificant that day. Merril remarked, on our way home (I have always remembered his words): ‘‘Fellows, I guess Ill swipe like hell next Sunday and then quit for good.” As a gang we had no moral leadership. Physically we followed Merril, for he was the strongest and most daring. Mentally, Francis led us, for his mind was quicker to plan and plot, elude and escape, de- cide and compromise. No one of us, however, was priest or prophet with a “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not.” We had no written or spoken code of law. We felt few negative tabus. Our action was largely on collective impulse, it was swayed by a tacit ma- jority expressed not in votes but in an atmosphere of agreement or disagreement very difficult to de- fine. Morally we hung, as it were, on the rim of our composite mind. Merril’s remark was individual, personal. Yet it permeated amongst us, and modi- fied our group morale, or “quality of the spirit of the whole.”’ We did not go again, as a gang, to the Volador. Ha ee RoE AT) BOY 41 On the Sunday following Merril’s declaration we de- cided to go to Chapultepec park and swipe. cannon balls. We expressed no reason for this change of way in words. Underneath our action had flowed a week of conscious and unconscious cerebration, partly concerning the right and wrong of stealing. Find- ing grape-shot in the walls of Chapultepec castle, or Molino del Rey (have you forgotten your school- day history of our Mexican war?), while prohibited by the police, failed to fall into our category of real stealing, even of stealing from the accomplices of thieves. No one, we felt, owned those ancient missiles of the war of 1847, unless indeed, they re- mained the property of the United States, whose cannon had fired them at the castle walls. We felt conscience free to lug off as many as we could hide underneath our coats. The thought of God hardly entered the fringe of our new equation. We left Him behind, as it were, to watch the Baraitillo that morning, and perhaps to miss us from our accustomed round among the stalls. I do not know, of course, but I feel that we all ex- perienced a sense of relief at this change in our Sun- day behavior, perhaps like that of Bunyan’s Chris- tian at the foot of the roadside cross. I believe, too, that we felt pleasantly that we were doing some- thing of which our generous, boy-blind parents would approve. For with all their seeming indifference to our leisure time, our parents loved us, and we loved them, more dearly perhaps than we knew. We were 42 THE REAL BOY youngsters between eight and twelve, and home to us all was more than a place to eat, and sleep, and get spanked or licked, according as a hand or a strap was used. I believe that the influence of home and of parents worked out into our evolving conceptions of personal and social life more steadily, though less vividly, than the realistic idea of God or the memor- able stories told us on Sunday mornings by Mrs. Walker. ‘These three spiritual forces played con- stantly into our personal lives and into the life of the gang, and it was through Mrs. Walker that our first definitely intellectual interest was born. Red rust on a sphere of iron shrapnel led Kenneth Walker to discuss oxidation with his mother. She followed up his interest with a set of test-tubes, an alcohol lamp and sundry chemicals in bottles and boxes, together with a thin, paper-bound book of experiments. He shared these with us, and our brief career in chemistry began. Spoiled rugs, marred dressers, stained bathtubs, noxious smells and a con- stant dread lest our homes be blown to atoms was part of the price our parents paid for the new en- thusiasm; but it brought us home, for a time, and our parents could think in terms of firemen instead of the police. Vv Now may I point out a few striking differences between the education a boy gets in his leisure time, and that which is rather forced upon him in school. THE REAL BOY 43 When I say that my own education began in the Thieves’ Market, I am not forgetful that at the same time I was attending school. For five days during the week we boys underwent an inductive process of dates, axioms, rules, definitions, stereo- typed questions and'stereotyped answers. We sub- mitted dutifully, were mildly proud of good report cards and examination marks, and joined the chorus of yelling delight when the session was over every afternoon. Doubtless there was value to us in the multiplication table, a few rudiments of spelling and grammar, and the knowledge that Columbus. discovered America in 1492. My only point here is that, while the Grammar School spoke to my head and induced a few obvious facts, the Thieves’ Mar- ket had talked directly to my heart and awoke cer- tain primitive feelings which were the foundation for some very real thinking about fundamental hu- man problems, and led to intense, vigorous and thoroughly educational activity. For, corollary to our banditry, cave life and partial civilization through test-tube and beaker and retort there came to us innumerable drawings- out which taxed our brains and muscles, tested our nerve and tried our moral stamina as _ in- dividuals and as members of a codperating group. We learned that a little lie like ‘‘we were playing ball” can cover a multitude of peccadillos, and a day or a week of doing otherwise than playing ball. We learned also that truth, when it came to 44 Tih EvGRah AT) (BO y bed-rock things, was our best ally and that in times of crisis it were best to depend upon it for salva- tion. We learned that we could be forgiven for wriggling into bull-fights, cock-fights and prohibited fiestas and fairs; but that lying was a sin against the Holy Ghost bringing anger first, and then sorrow to our parents. They could smile at us after a lick- ing for a sling-shot fight, but after the discovery of an untruth there was much weeping and wailing and genashing of teeth. We could deceive our parents as to our physical whereabouts and activities, but in questions of honor, we found that they, like God, looked beneath the outward appearance and straight into our hearts when there was doubt in their minds as to the integrity of the words of our mouths. This was perhaps the capital lesson of our youngster days. , Group loyalty demanded truth between us boys. Our words were good as gold when they related to the welfare of the gang. We were preposterous liars, even to each other, about our individual prow- ess, our fathers’ income, mothers’ jewelry, our mythical friends and wholly imaginary sweethearts; but when a statement bore on one’s relation to the gang, it rang true as a cathedral bell. That was Mrs. Walker’s test of truth. She told us to listen to the great bronze bells of the old cathedral, how clear and sound they rang on Sunday morning. Such was the ring of truth. We pondered this symbol and often referred to it in those rare moments of ene REAL BOY 45 seriousness when even a small boy turns philosopher and saint. Friendship, team-work and personal loyalties to each other were born and grew through the doing of constructive things together. We dug in the ground, made mortar, laid tepetate, knotted rope ladders, molded bullets, shot and cooked small game, fished and fought for each other and for that invisible spiritual reality, the gang. We taught each other to shoot and swim and ride horseback. No adult had a hand in our learning process as members of the gang, though we imitated older boys and read those marvelously colorful weeklies wherein walked the most vivid heroes of our imagination. Now I live in a new day. Scout Masters, Club Leaders, Big Brothers, Camp Directors and Coun- cilors, country-day schools and Sunday-vacation schools; innumerable agencies have sprung up around the idea that the primitive, instinctive urges of boyhood must be harnessed to constructive, char- acter-building aims. Ina later chapter I shall return to this dream of bringing to boy-soul some of the finer forms of expression for those deep motives and tendencies upon which the life of the spirit is built, and will show the dream in partial realization. CHAPTER II THE MAJOR TOUCHES OUR HEARTS The innermost essential of the child is soul. To afford it opportunity to lift itself out of the limita- tions of instinct into the freedom of purposeful will, should be the aim of education. —LockeE. I THE inner, instinctive savageries of boyhood are universal. So isits soul. I have watched the son of a Chicago multimillionaire rifle peanuts from a slot machine with a hooked wire. When I asked him if he had no money, he replied: ‘Sure, but what’s the fun buying peanuts when you can swipe them?” I have watched the son of a Bontoc-Igorote head- hunter reading the Gospel according to St. Mark. When I asked him why he read, he replied that he wanted to find out about God. I have seen the predatory instinct of my old gang at work alike in the after-school activities of Chicago’s north side, and on the sidewalks of New York east of Avenue A. Spitballs fly just as far and just as accurately in our élite country-day schools as they do in the classic little square buildings at our country cross- roads. Marbles for keeps, craps, cards, matched pennies and preposterous betting are generic and 46 Tei aR Ad BG) V 47 seasonal despite every effort at reform from above. Corn-silk, pipes, cigarettes . . . what boy escapes them entirely? Long before the teens small Eves begin to whisper softly to Adams in knee-pants about the taste of forbidden apples. Despite school walls, teachers, truant officers, superintendents and books, the real education of our youngsters goes on. They discover the world as it is, whatever our efforts to show them a world as it ought to be. We boys at the Grammar School in Mexico City were instinctively curious about the world in which we lived. We inquired diligently into the details of — bull-fighting, cock-fighting, prize-fighting and horse- racing because these things seemed paramount in our social order. The Spanish Inquisition had left deep marks in the folk-history of Mexico, and these we studied with all the avidity of scholars over their books. We constructed spanking-machines, thumb- screws, racks and grotesque Iron Maidens made of long pine boxes in which Bibles had been shipped to my father for distribution among the heathen. Cemeteries drew us with a mysterious magnetism, and each of us acquired one or more skulls and stray bones from the heaps in hidden corners where the remains were placed of those whose sepulchral rent had not been paid. Yet we were also inquisitive about the world of school, and we questioned its elements, though with but little enthusiasm. Soon after my eleventh birthday, Latin was pre- scribed for me. I was set to learning the words 48 THE REAL BOY tuba, tubae, tubam, tuba, which, being interpreted meant a trumpet, of a trumpet, for a trumpet and by a trumpet, I believe. Asking why these different spellings gave varied meanings to the word, I was told to learn my declension and not bother my teacher with premature questioning. For some oc- cult reason [ sulked and refused to learn or recite the lesson until my question was answered. I was mildly flogged with a dog-whip and told not to re- turn to school until I had mastered tuba and was ready to recite it by rote. I refused to return. My parents decided to board me out at school in the United States. I rejoiced and was exceedingly glad. We started north within a month. II On the steamer we read school catalogues. You know them; they are almost identically alike. Good paper, expensive and embossed covers, photographs taken from artistically flattering angles, aims and ideals stated in more or less pious language, and curricula, oriented toward college, similar almost word for word. The following paragraph, in one of these catalogues, led my parents to decide upon the school for me: “As they may be guided by wisdom from the Great Teacher they will seek to help every boy to- ward an earnest, true manhood. Onward and Up- ward is our motto, and onward and upward is the course pursued in all that will promote the highest eH GREAT, BOY: 49 interest of the sons committed to the care of the school. The aim of Mohegan is a high one, a school whose influence, whose whole atmosphere, will con- duce to the development of earnest, manly, Christian character.” Now with all my subsequent antipathy to the average American boarding school, despite the cant and hypocrisy and pious camouflage that I have found in so many private schools, I believe and main- tain that the man who wrote those words for his catalogue was earnestly sincere in what he said, and that he tried to live up to their spirit and letter according to his light. Major Waters was one of those Head Masters, or Principals, of American boarding schools whom one must respect and admire for his radiating in- tegrity of character, however one may disagree with his medieval philosophy, his narrowing religious horizon or his academic curriculum. ‘The influence of such men upon boys makes for sturdiness of char- acter through sheer force of contagion. They do not need to preach morality, or soundness of convic- tion, or strength of will. They are relatively silent men, but the lesson of their lives jumps across the gap between man and boy like a spark between elec- trodes. ‘They galvanize by what they are and do more than by what they say. I remember very few of the words Major Waters spoke, but I have always felt the deep impress of his life upon my early years. The only words I remember of Major’s are: 50 CE nav A) iB Oe “Ed, I believe you are a good boy” and “I am a little man, but I can fight!” ‘The first were said to me casually as he passed through his office where I was contemplating a 95 mark on my physiology paper. He spoke in a tone of voice that led his words from my ears down into my heart and lodged them there, untrue, but warm and comforting. I knew very well that I was not a good boy; but it was almost inspiring to. hear him say that he believed I was, and to hear him say it in that way. ‘There is more reality to a boy in a tone of voice than in a multitude of words. ‘The right inflection upon the proper syllable can mean more to him than an hour of impassioned sermonizing. A boy does not need many words froma man: He needs a few, and these freighted with sympathetic sincerity of feeling. He needs not logic, but faith. Such words were the Mayjor’s when he spoke them. “T am a little man, but I can fight!” thundered down upon our heads from the platform in front of our assembly-room desks. ‘The Major was short, stocky, gray and bald, with kindly blue eyes set in a firm and square-jawed face. His eyes registered a righteous anger that day, and we felt their right- eousness as well as their ire. A dozen of us had stuffed dummies in our beds the night before, crawled down a rope outside my window, raided a nearby cider-mill and rowed about the lake in boats until the phantom of false morning died. A prowling professor had found his habitually restless dormi- Pe RE AUT B Ory 51 tory all too quiet, discovered a dummy, set up an alarm and led to our arrest, one by one as we re- turned in the faint but revealing light of dawn. Now the Major fought, not against us boys, but against a principle of evil. He fought a battle of persuasion. Not content with mere discovery and punishment, he insisted that we learn where we had gone wrong, and why we should go right. He ham- mered away at us, individually and collectively until we were thoroughly convinced of our guilt. He kept fighting until we saw that decency and good sports- manship, both toward our school and toward our parents, were on his side of the issue. He was not content until every one of us was with him, shoulder to shoulder in support of the morale of his school, in preservation of the quality of the spirit of the whole, of which we were individual parts. He was a little man, but we felt that he had a big heart. He could fight, and he could win. We boys marched around the cinder-path with heavy rifles on our shoulders for many hours in memory of that exploit. If the result of our conduct had stopped there, if Major had been content, like the Mikado, to “let the punishment fit the crime,”’ we boys would have been damaged spiritually, and the morale of our school would have dropped a peg or two. As it was, Major turned our nocturnal lark into a lesson in righteousness. He dealt with us not as culprits, but as formative characters. His sympathy for us as growing boys was tempered with 52 TH Bs Rabea LR OA a firmness and with enough warranted anger to make us respond to both its appeal and its power. This was education of the soul. Here feeling and emotion were touched first, intellect second. He spoke to our heads, but he touched our hearts first, and then linked up our reason with his own and made us feel at one with him ona common job. His words were few, following that first dramatic statement, but they flew straight to their mark and hit hard. We boys pondered them as we marched out our appointed time at shoulder-arms. Our punishment was an educational experience. | It} The Major was a religious man, a professing Christian, but not pious. We boys knew the pious kind, and quickly labeled thus some of our professors at morning prayers. To their praying we never listened. From the invocation to Almighty God to the periodic Amen our thoughts wandered in their own green pastures or lay down by their favorite still waters. Our heads rested comfortably on our cushiony Bibles and occasionally we drowsed very closely to the boundary of sleep. We tacitly as- sumed that words of prayer were addressed to God and not tous. Perhaps He was indulgent enough to listen to even the cantiest of our instructors. Our own patience was not so enduring. I believe we all felt that God must listen when the Major spoke, priate Reh ALLA BOY, 53 however, for he spoke with authority and not as the scribes. We boys listened to the Major. His re- quests were brief and to the point. We all liked the quality of his voice and its tone. The redeeming feature of morning prayer was that we sang together. Sometimes we joked after- wards about the absurdly ridiculous words of our ancient gospel hymns and the clever among us paro- died them unmercifully if not wickedly. Their quaint melodies, however, and the partial harmony of blending voices got down below the surface of our thought and stirred feelings within us which only good music can arouse. I have found but lit- tle, since those days, that can equal those simple and often rhythmic melodies as a quiet tonic for the soul at the beginning or the close of day. On Sunday afternoons, however, it was our duty to hear the Bible expounded, usually by one of the minor professors. Afterwards the members of a most skeptical Bible Club met to indulge in juvenile higher criticism. We deliberately doubted, not so much the Bible, as our professor’s interpretation. We doubted not only the classic stories of the fall of Jericho, the stoppage of the sun in heaven at Joshua’s command and the parting open of the Red Sea; but we invaded the New Testament, seeking scientific justification for the miracles of Jesus and attempted to analyze the Lord’s Prayer. An ani- mated discussion behind my closed door once ar- rested Major Waters upon his journey down the 54 ED ER ea Ls Ci) Sr hall. Of course I cannot recall our words verbatim, but what he heard was something very much like this: Dorsey: The Bible says his side got pierced. Rocers: But I’ve seen pictures where it was his heart got hit. Pop: Well, water might have come from his side if the spear went through his stomach first. Couldn’t have come from his heart. That’s all blood. Rocers: Maybe the spear went through his stomach and then hit his heart too. A knock on my door, and Major inquired what the argument was about. I gave him the gist of our discussion. He listened with a sympathetic smile and asked us to postpone further argument until physiology class on Tuesday. He left us staring at each other in amazement at having escaped indict- ment for heresy or a call to his private office. On Tuesday we went to class in high anticipa- tion of an interesting hour. A sheep’s heart lay on the dissecting table and Major called us around him while he prepared to demonstrate with scalpel and tweezers and hooks. Tugging at the thin, tough membrane around the muscular organ, he explained its function as the pericardium, peri meaning around and cardium meaning heart. A watery fluid, acting as a lubricant to this hard working pump, he told us, lay between the muscular walls and the surround- ing sheath. Puncturing the pericardium, he showed TE OP) AGS Die 8 Dah OP'S 55 us a tiny stream of colorless liquid which flowed out onto the table and trickled to the floor. ‘Now,’ said Major, looking keenly at Rogers, then at Dorsey and lastly at me, “could it not be that the soldier who pierced the side of our Lord with his spear struck straight and true to the heart, and still might not it have seemed that both blood and water flowed from the wounded side?” I believe we nodded our heads, and that our lesson proceeded to more secular phases of physiology. There was no need for further theological discus- sion. Our Sunday’s argument was closed with the stroke of a scalpel, and yet we boys were left good leeway to continue thinking. Major presented us a question, after all. ‘‘Might it not have seemed?” were his words, or at least his meaning. He trusted us to think. Instead of being brought to a chamber of the inquisition we had come to a scientific labora- tory for the testing of truth. Looking back upon the Major’s demonstration, it seems naive enough, but there was sympathy there, and faith enough on Major’s part to leave us with a question in a field supposedly quite mystically dangerous. Here is an instance of good teacherhood in post- ponement. Major waited until time and circum- stance were most fitting to bring up his point. ‘This, it seems to me, is a technical acquirement in the art of teaching which will find fuller expression in the school of tomorrow than it does in our edu- cation today. 56 DHE. REAL BOY IV To us boys, Major Waters was an old man. I thought of him when Upton Sinclair characterized modern education as “‘a league of old men trying to make the young what the old want them to be.” Yet we boys respected and some of us loved the Major. He taught us some strong, deep life les- sons. While he did not teach us to think radically, neither did he dam our thoughts. He was not one of Kipling’s old men who “‘lift up the ropes that constrained our youth to bind on our children’s hands.’”’ Neither was he like Sinclair’s old peda- gogues upon whom “modern life comes rushing down like a storm and who have no idea what to do with it or how to handle it.” Major had an idea that he had learned something of the real meaning of life, of truth, of rightness and he wanted to share what he had learned with us. Still, Major was, as some of us younger teachers are today, facing some- what wistfully that “hailstorm of boys and girls” and asking, too, ‘“‘what are they? what do they mean? these strange, wild creatures, thrusting them- selves forward, demanding their rights, clamoring for new things never heard of by the old professors! Despising ‘Tennyson and demanding Bernard Shaw! Doubting the Bible, disputing property rights, questioning marriage, discussing outrageous things, divorce, birth-control, actually right in pub- lic!’ Major tried to lead our sometimes radical eR ASL B Orn Oy thinking into channels which he believed age-tested and found good. He did not repress or inhibit, he tried almost always to find a way to build. Once, however, Major failed me. I had walked into his office full of a desire to supplement my favorite study of physiology with a course in chem- istry. He said that I must complete a year of physics first. I asked him why and he answered that the curriculum so ordered it. I argued but Major was firm for his rules of procedure. He was probably busy with important matters of ad- ministration at the time and failed to grasp the significance of my enthusiasm or to appreciate my real interest in the underlying reason for having to study physics first. I felt, for the moment, that I had lost a friend. A few days later I asked permission to go to town to have my picture taken. I returned with a blank key, a small vise and a file. ‘That evening I transformed my blank into a pass-key and tried it on the door of the chemical laboratory. It turned the lock. I opened and closed the door, feeling like a cross between a burglar and a scientific pioneer. In the days following, while a few of my fellows played football and the rest stood rooting on the sidelines, our teachers among them, trying hard to be boys, I had the laboratory to myself. The first experiments in Remsen’s chemistry were not spec- tacular enough. I wanted color, smoke, noise. So 58 kB Roe 0B CA I became an empiricist, mixing small quantities from , this bottle with small quantities from that, or com- bining mysterious powders with liquids labeled in numbered letters which I did not understand. One day I left precipitately by the window, hearing the professor of chemistry talking in the hallway. Fortunately for me, I had broken a retort that afternoon and spread considerable confusion of glass and liquid in the sink which I was unable to clear away before my sudden departure. Suspicion followed and discovery overtook me. My key was confiscated and there was a faculty discussion con- cerning my fall from grace. ‘This departure from the path of rectitude was considered extraordinary for I had previously won a medal of solid gold for deportment and was considered a ‘‘wholesome influ- ence among the younger boys.’ It was at this point that Major failed me. Instead of looking below the surface of my act, analyzing its background and at- tempting to turn an error into a vital lesson, he stopped short with a justly merited reprimand. Having followed a resurgence of the predatory instinct of Thieves’ Market days, I was now left alone to handle this elemental quality in my nature by myself. Further, my approach to one whom I had hitherto considered a guide and friend was blocked. Corollary to these was the fact that a gen- uine thirst for knowledge and experience, for which I had chosen to take an unsocial and perhaps danger- ous risk was rebuked into stagnant quiescence. This AE REAL IBOY 59 sentence reveals the inadequacy of words to ex- press one’s exact meaning. A thirst can hardly become stagnant, and yet my desire was a thirst as real to my soul as thirst for water is to one’s body. It seemed to have been “rebuked ”’ into something that appears to my imagination as a pool whose outlet has been stopped, and in which begin to grow a myriad weedy things offensive to the nose and eye. Without apology for my action, I defend the eternal boy against his teacher. This was another opportunity for educational achievement, another » chance to transmute sin into virtue, if you please. Here is a typical case of failure to deal with a boy’s heart instead of merely with his mind. Yet even here I find manifest a fragment of that providence which sometimes seems to brood over growing child- hood and youth, for out of my very inward tribula- tion and conflict there suddenly opened another well- spring of interest, and I made a new friend. Reynolds, our teacher of Latin, was sorry for me. During study-hour, after my disgrace, he asked me if I had a headache and would like to go to bed. Since my head did not ache, he suggested that I go up to his room, look at his books or loaf around until he came upstairs. That was a treat. I went. On his book-shelf I found a copy of William James’ ‘Talks -to Teachers on Psychology and Some of Life’s Ideals.’”’ ‘The word psychology intrigued me. When Reynolds came in, he told me that Psyche 60 AOE RABAT UB Oy means soul, and ology means the knowledge of, or study of a thing. Psychology was the study of the mind, or soul. ‘“‘How would you like to be a psychologist, Pop?” he asked. Pop was a nickname given me because I used to place a tin can over the acetylene gas burner in my room, fill it with gas and then hold a match over a small hole in its top until an explosion followed and the can went kiting to the roof. All the boys called me Pop, but Reynolds was the only member of our faculty who was thus familiar. Even in class he called me Pop. I hated Latin, but I worked at it hard and got good marks because I liked Reynolds and wanted to please him. Naturally, when he asked me if I would like to become a psy- chologist I was thrilled to the marrow of my thin bones. The thought that he believed I might be- come an ologist of any kind was wine to my soul. My career in chemistry had just been slashed down in infancy. I was bitter inside at being mis- understood. My thinking during study-hour had been vindictively revengeful. I had even planned a cave up in the hills behind our school where I could chemicalize at will with plundered supplies and equipment, even as in days of yore. Now sud- denly my imagination was switched into another world, where perhaps I might travel in company with a sympathetic friend. St. Paul’s dictum that ‘video meliora proboque deteriora sequor’’ is not true to normal boyhood. Show a boy where and Neri REAL. BOY 61 how he can go right, with real interest, with genu- ine enthusiasm, and he will gladly go that way. I believe that the school of tomorrow will do consciously and intelligently and even artistically for a boy what a kind providence or a blind chance did for me in a very real crisis. With>the conviction that the first concern of education is with a child’s feeling, emotion, desire, our Majors and faculties of tomorrow will not let a strong wish turn inward upon itself, link up with simpler, primordial instincts and emerge in a negative or anti-social form. In- stead of asking what has come over a lad when he | goes wrong, they will ask themselves wherein they have failed to make good on their job of keeping him steered aright. ‘They will themselves be psy- chologists, but in the sense of being students of the soul, not merely of the intellect. Here I believe the tremendous influence of Freud and Stanley Hall will lend a strong and helping hand. After the spectacular and somewhat morbid smoke of half- baked Freudianism has cleared away, educators, I believe, will find that the pioneer work in the field “of instinct and feeling which has been done by Freud and his abler disciples is more fruitful in the study and understanding of childhood and adoles- cence than it will ever be in the psychoanalysis of grown-ups. Reynolds, however, knew nothing about Freud, nor did anyone in America at that time, I presume. Stanley Hall had published his monumental ‘‘Adoles- 62 DHE .REAL BOY cence’ but those huge red volumes were beyond a teacher’s purse, just as Doctor Hall’s vocabulary was far beyond the limits of our largest diction- aries. William James was the only person who wrote readably about psychology and his words were inspiration and finality among teachers. The word psychology, even among the more intelligent, was still shrouded in an occult and esoteric film of dubi- ous curiosity while, in our universities at least, its trend was almost entirely toward mind as intellect rather than toward mind as an instrument of feel- ing and instinct. So the psychology to which the kindly Reynolds introduced me was one of associa- tion, interest, attention, memory, ideation, apper- ception, habit and will. I did not understand these words, but I rattled them around on my tongue with: great gusto. When my fellows asked me what I meant, I adopted an air of mystical superiority and declared that it took a great deal of recondite reading in abstruse books before one could grasp the significance of these things. I read on and on. Reynolds encouraged me, despite falling marks in Latin, math and physics. My teachers wondered what was the mat- ter. My colleagues thought I was “‘going nuts.’”” My parents were worried lest I fail to graduate. Major Waters told me that I must get out of doors and hike, skate or snow-shoe on penalty of informing my parents that I was wasting my time and their money indoors over outside reading that was not ER ATS) <6 Yi 63 relevant to the purposes of my boarding-school edu- cation. He literally drove me into the woods. There I walked and talked with my chum Rogers. We discussed school life together. Not our les- sons, far from it, but our life as two boys among boys and their teachers. The bulk of our discus- sion was, of course, mere idle chatter, critical gos- sip. In a few of our positive points of agreement, however, I believe we typified: the general attitude of the whole group of students at Mohegan toward teachers and toward school. We were as one in our admiration for the little Major who could, and did, fight. We felt a genu- ine love for him, totally unmixed with fear when we thought of him as a friend of boys. Rebels at heart against such enemies of freedom as reveille, taps, drills, study-hour and Sunday services; we be- lieved that these things were good for our souls whenever we related them to the Major’s per- sonality, when we thought of them as a part of his will toward us as a friend. His spirit permeated all routine and necessity, gave them values where otherwise they might have been mere sand and thorns. His word, to which we listened, led fur- ther, however, and gradually showed us intrinsic values in taps and reveille and study-hour. He opened horizons for us, enlarged our vision. But he did so because he first captured our hearts. To the same words from the mouth of another teacher we might have listened with a grin. His pedagogy 64 THE REAL BOY may have been largely unconscious; but he followed the most important principle in educational psy- chology, trusting instinct and feeling as the motive power for right thinking translated into right con- duct. If he touched fear alive, as when he spoke of telling my parents about my waste of time; he followed that by an immediate appeal to my love of parent, school or what he called “going straight.” He never appealed to a boy’s fondness for him, however. Perhaps that is why we often did things because he wanted us to! His attitude was: ‘“‘Don’t do that because I want you to, but because it’s right.” Yet, for us, it would not have been right if Major had been other than he was. A thing was right, not abstractly, but concretely because we believed ina person. Later, the thing became right in itself perhaps, and the transfer from the Major to Rightness or Straightness was completed. If he awakened our combative instinct, as when he challenged us to fight; he followed his challenge with a smile and a chance for arbitration and for friendliness. But the fight was there, ready and forceful. The smile did not quite eclipse the mailed fist. Boys respect, admire and submit to superior force. This may be purely physical sometimes, or it may be moral, or spiritual, shall we say; but it must be strong, stronger than they. Boys are very quick to sense weakness. ‘They can seldom, if ever, be bluffed for long. Of course, they can be incar- fi Ear tome he By ca.) @) Yo 65 cerated, expelled, or merely kept in their seats and over their books by a weak adult clothed with suf- ficient authority. But they will not follow, they will not be governed, they will not submit. They will merely pretend. They will knuckle-under until they can escape. The Major we followed, because he led us with courage, and with a radiating convic- tion that he was leading us where we wanted to go. CHAPTER III AND LEAD US INTO, TEMPTATION The fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, as far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits, practical, emotional, and intellectual, systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be. —WILLIAM JAMES. I My father died before I could graduate from Mohegan and, returning to Mexico, I found myself earning a living as Timekeeper on a tropical branch of the Mexican Central Railroad. Rising before sunrise, I rode to our construction point on a hand- car and bossed a gang of peons until sundown. At noon I crawled under a culvert and read a big black book called “Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures.’’ Sometimes my interest in this book delayed my return to the track at one o'clock. I need not set down the language of our foreman here. Suffice it that when he reported to the Su- perintendent how my leisure time and some of the railroad’s time was spent, that functionary informed me that a fellow who preferred religion to rail- roading had better get a job as sexton of a church 66 THE REAL BOY 67 or secretary to the Y. M. C. A. He also handed me a pass to Mexico City with my pay and sent me into the third important epoch of my education for life. I did not apply for a job with the church or with the ““Y’’ but became a demonstrator for Packard, Buick and Winton automobiles of a now very ancient vintage. Incidentally, but very importantly, I met the incarnation of “‘good and evil” respectively in the persons of Bob Stockbridge and Hugh Pollock. Both were Englishmen. Both had keen, quick, receptive, penetrating and vigorously active minds. Both were © widely read and considerably experienced in the world of people and facts. Both were unschooled, but self-educated in their own peculiar ways. Of Hugh’s background I could learn but little. Robert Service has described him so succinctly that I can picture him vividly in a fragment of verse: ‘“There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t stay still; _, So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. “If they just went straight they might go far; They are strong, and brave and true; But they’re always tired of the things that are, And they want the strange and new. “They say: ‘Could I find my proper groove, What a deep mark I would make!’ So they chop and change, and each fresh move Is only a fresh mistake.” 68 Eh Te Raa AL By Gs y: Is it not so, as J. H. Robinson says, that “the truest and most profound observations on intelli- gence have in the past been made by the poets and, in recent times, by story-writers’”’ rather than by the philosophers and professional psychologists? Hugh crops out again and again in Service and in Kip- ling. He is cousin to Conrad’s Almayer and Lord Jim. Bob Stockbridge was his polar opposite. Bob resolved to become a chemist when he was thirteen years old. Apprenticing himself to an assayer he tended furnace, toted crucibles, weighed bullion, washed bottles and checked figures. At night, and even during breakfast and lunch, he read the history of chemistry. When I met him, in his later teens, his library contained drastically underlined and annotated volumes of Darwin, Hux- ley, Spencer, Tyndall, Fiske, Haeckel and James in addition to chemistry texts galore. He then had complete charge of the assaying laboratory and showed me a balance of over a thousand dollars in his bank. Physically a weakling when he had taken up his job, he was then a powerful and well- coordinated muscular and nervous engine capable of prolonged physical exertion and furnishing a splendid reservoir of energy for a delicately sensi- tive mind. I have never known such a living incar- nation of Huxley’s classic definition of education for lites) Yourrecalliit: ‘That man has had a liberal education who has nb hy RIB AT BOY 69 been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logic engine with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of great fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty whether of na- ture or of art, to hate all violence, and to respect others as himself.”’ In Bob there was, too, an element of deeply re- ligious mysticism which it is almost impossible to describe. Havelock Ellis calls it ‘‘the art of find- ing our emotional relationship to the world con- ceived as a whole.” It was the God-sense of Spi- noza, maker of fine lenses; of Kant, the logician who looked up at the stars in awe; of Linneus, the bot- anist who felt the presence of God in the opening of a flower; of Mendel-who found God’s laws at their work in the mathematical heredity of structure and color in sweet peas. “If,” says Ellis, “by sci- ence we mean the organization of an intellectual relationship to the world we live in adequate to give us some degree of power over that world, and if by mysticism we mean the joyful organization of an emotional relationship to the world conceived as a whole, the opposition we usually assume to exist between them is of comparatively modern 70 THE REAL BOY origin.” Stockbridge actually lived out this idea in action, though he never put it into words. When I read this sentence in ‘“The Dance of Life,’’ Bob’s face and figure seemed to emerge from the page like an animated picture. He was movie-photographed in verbal form. II Hugh, on the other hand, was a godless fellow. God, for him, was already quite dead. He thought that Andreyev’s picture of deity as a pitiful figure shrinking back into the gloom of a cave, a sputter- ing torch in his hand and growing smaller and smaller as he retired, like the giant in Maeterlinck’s ‘Betrothal,” was obsolete. God was not dying from the world, but utterly gone. So were right and wrong. Hugh believed that he had progressed, with Nietzsche, beyond good and evil. He re- garded Love as a plaything, without spiritual sig- nificance. Ellen Key was a pious old nun. Have- lock Ellis and Edward ‘Carpenter were priestly reactionaries in the temple of Eros. One of his fa- vorite mottoes came from the lips of Zarathustra: “Two different things wanteth a true man: danger and diversion. ‘Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”’ Toward women he took only the cave-man attitude voiced by the old crone who told Zarathustra: “Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip.” Bob, on the contrary, was almost Tennysonian Heyl eh EAT (BOY 71 in his romantic and chivalrous attitude toward womankind, and seemed to believe with all his heart that there was “no more subtle master under heaven than the maiden passion for the maid: “Not only to keep down the base in man But teach high thought, and amiable words And courtliness, and the desire of fame, And love of truth, and all that makes a man.” “How the hell you can take to that old monk Stockbridge and mess around with moldy philoso- phies when you ought to be off down the line en- joying life beats me. You'll become a cheap edi- tion of Paphnutius, too cheap even to use in a story. Keep on at this pace and you'll turn parson, but the church won’t have you because your head is full of Darwin.” I quote Hugh only from memory, but I recall quite vividly how, when I repeated his worry concerning me to Bob, he pulled from his shelf a copy of the ‘Songs of Kabir,” and read to me, quite exultantly: ‘Why put on the robe of a monk, and live aloof from the world in lonely pride? Behold my heart danceth in the delight of a hundred arts, and the creator is well pleased.” Stockbridge and I had been reading Spencer’s “Synthetic Philosophy” together; but we had also boxed, skipped rope, played tennis, ridden horse- 72 THE REAL BOY back, tramped fields, climbed mountains, gone swimming, attended concerts, opera, the theater and even attempted to learn to dance. Hugh lamented because we preferred these things to roulette, the races, gossip over highballs at the British Club and nocturnal visits to the dens of the Recabado and among the brilliantly lighted parlors further east. Looking back upon my own preference in this mat- ter, I do not believe I chose Bob’s way because it seemed good, and avoided Hugh’s because it seemed evil, but rather because Bob tempted me to things more joyous than did Hugh. My cloistered private-school education cut short, I was at seventeen earning a living and subject to those forces and influences which play upon us in our leisure hours and which educate us, draw us out, whether we will it or not. Friendship, the corner-stone of human relationships, and gossip, mother of psychology, became my school. Friend- ship brought me two sets of temptations, one nega- tive and pleasurable, the other positive and happy. I do not believe I chose between them. It seems to me that I was drawn into the second, and so away from the first, by the superiority of its mag- netism, its stronger pull upon my soul. Right here we have one of the cardinal principles of education upon which the school of tomorrow will be built: to aid mental and spiritual growth through the pro- gressive making of new lessons joyously attractive. My dictionary defines temptation as inducement, al- THERE TA Ts BOC, 73 lurement. It has been my experience as a teacher that only as I have been able to make learning at- tractive, alluring, were my results such as make teaching worth while. ‘Teaching has only been worth while to me as I have felt myself growing along with my pupils. At such times as I have lost the attitude of the learner and become a mere imparter of knowledge, my feeling has been that of a re- jected lover or a disappointed politician. When a teacher feels thus, he should turn to selling life insurance or clerking in a store. Bob made learning attractive to me through the contagion of his own enthusiasm. He read Darwin with all the avidity which my roommate at Mo- hegan had shown for Salammbo or Thais. He drummed the punching-bag so merrily that I fol- lowed his example for fear of missing some of his exultant pleasure in that rhythmic art. Had Hugh seemed so joyous over an evening at the Jockey Club as Bob was over the fission of paramecia under his microscope, I believe I might have joined Hugh’s nocturnal prowls instead of visiting the little box atop a flat Spanish roof where Stockbridge lived among his books. Bob was a true teacher because his teaching was a by-product of his own concen- trated enthusiasm for learning new things, for mas- tering problems, for winning a game or a fight. How can this spirit be translated into and made to permeate our schools of tomorrow? It is the purpose of this book to suggest a few possibilities 74 THE UR BA BOX by relating a few facts. First, however, let us visit Stockbridge in his den atop that red-tiled roof, Ill Anyone can read Huxley’s definition of an edu- cated man. Any one of us can exclaim, ‘“That’s. good!” close the book and feel that we have had crystallized for us a real idea. Bob tried to live that definition. Never, in so small a space, has there been gathered together such a varied miscellany of educational paraphernalia as littered and crammed his room. I should not say littered, for, with all the appearance of utter confusion there was an artistry of total effect, the artistry of the born lover and collector of things with a common meaning. Books were arranged and labeled on his ceiling- high shelves as we find them in bookstores: Poetry, drama, religion, philosophy, literature, science, chemistry. A compound microscope stood by the window, a transit in one corner and a punching bag in another. ‘Trapeze, rings and a rope ladder hung from the ceiling. Dumb-bells, Indian clubs and skip- ropes chummed with hiking shoes and sneakers under the bed. Colored pictures, a piano, a pho- nograph and clay bas-reliefs lent an accent from Bohemia to the somewhat Spartan atmosphere of strenuous endeavor. Plants flourished in pots by the window, and out on the roof. Crystals grew in covered glass “gardens,” beautiful fronds and galaxies of color, a delight to Bob’s artistic and THE REAL ROY 75 scientific selves alike. Golf-clubs, tennis-racket, ball- bat, riding-boots, hiking-staff, compass, camera and binoculars showed hard use and loving care, for Bob seemed to love his hard, tough, physical, inani- mate things as though each were alive and had a friendly soul.. Guns and fishing rod alone were dusty from disuse. He had graduated from killing into photography, and fish took too long a time to bite. Hours were golden to Bob. He lived mainly on hard whole-wheat bread, fruits, nuts, milk and cheese at this time; followed Irving Fisher, Chittenden, and Horace Fletcher in. dealing with proteins, carbohydrates and fats; neg- lected tea, coffee, tobacco and all “food poisons’”’ as he called them and followed Epicurus as a dietetic guide within this adopted horizon. He was, at the time I met him, adolescence per- sonified. No problem was insoluble, no difficulty but might be overcome, no height could not be scaled. Life was an endless row of sweet and va- ried nuts, to be cracked and eaten at strenuous leisure and with smacking gusto. Yet there were limits. Against things which he believed would in- terfere with his growth and development, he set himself like granite. His buoyant figure and con- tagiously radiant smile was conjured up when I read William WHard’s generous tribute to Theodore Roosevelt in the New Republic of January 25, 1919, a memorable appreciation of the finer quali- ties of the man. I quote a paragraph that mirrors 76 Bile ROE Net Daal Le ORNS Bob’s attitude toward the problem of choice be- tween one way of living and another, the key prob- lem of adolescence. ‘He was not simply life’s energy. . . . He was the irrelevant curiosity of it and the vagrant wan- dering of it and the finding of great magics in it and the perpetual amazement of it and its laughter. ieee didinot make ‘lifevanvend je Liteston shim was nothing but openings beyond, openings to ef- fort and chance and the joy of effort and chance, joy everlasting. ... He was instinctive energy; and he was creative curiosity; and he went on then to his greatest greatness. This insatiable taster of life never fell into the heresy which damns the taster. He knew there were poisons. He set them down from his lips. And he knew the pit in which even the innocent but indiscriminate thirst for all life and all sensation becomes a poisonous quicksand. He leaped over it... . He girt himself with choices and de- nials. ‘The heresy of self-expression as an end, the heresy of self-development as an end, he met and he conquered. Having perceived what things make life run on in joy forever, even when the joy of the runner is gone, he chose such things. ‘Things dif- ferent he left. He perceived them, but he left them. He had a genius for the whole of life, but he had an even greater genius for the wholesome. With him one seemed to roam the world without limit and yet to return without soil. To be sophisti- cated to the very verge of the ultimate human abyss and yet to be as clean as a clean animal—that was his most extraordinary achievement and his most extraordinary legacy in the possibilities of the art of living.” hie RIGA iB Oy 77 If Stockbridge was extreme in his aversion to ‘poisons,’ as in his antipathy to such relatively harmless indulgences as coffee and tea, he was at least never fanatical over trifles. He had merely fixed certain physiological habits, let them sink into the unconscious, and forged ahead with more im- portant issues in the game of life and of education for fuller living. If my friend was a Puritan it was in the sense in which Stuart Sherman pictures the essential qualities of the Puritan, “dissatisfaction with the past, courage to break sharply from it, a vision of a better life, readiness to accept a dis- — cipline in order to attain that better life, and a serious desire to make that better life prevail.” He actively incarnated the teaching of Emerson which Sherman sees reflected in the vision of all true Puri- tan spirit, “its unfailingly positive character; its relish for antagonisms and difficulty; its precept for the use of the spur; its restoration of ambition to its proper place in the formation of manly char- acter; its power to free the young soul from the fetters of fear and send him on his course like a thunderbolt; and above all, its passion for bring- ing the whole of life for all men to its fullest and fairest fruit.” IV Bob was a true teacher, and he was free to teach what he liked when he wanted to. Like Socrates of old, he gathered youngsters around him and fed 78 Te B Ree AaB Oe them upon nuts, raisins, fruits, bread, milk and ideas. Disciples gathered about him as they will gather around any strong personality with a message in his heart. Bob believed he had within him good tidings of great joy. He believed not only that, ‘The days that make us happy make us wise,”’ but that the days that make us wise make us happy. He had no love for mere knowledge though he did feel a keen delight in the power which knowledge brings when effectively codrdinated. He was exul- tant when an idea which had set his own heart to dancing and his very body leaping in the air got across from himself to another and kindled the sparkle of an eye. Nearly always he followed a new idea with the question, ‘“How will it work? What can it do? Can we use it?’ We were reading in Lyell’s geology one day. He slammed shut the book, sprang to his feet, seized me by the collar, shoved me through the door and exclaimed: ‘“That’s enough reading.) Let's) gol” io Wep hurried tome twenty miles into the hill country, scratched and dug for hours in sand and among rocks and com- pletely forgot our lunch in a quest for fossil bones. I returned home that day with a fossil tooth as large as my fist in my pocket and with my first con- ception of what the word geology really means. Besides, I had had a lesson in teacherhood, later to be turned to good account among my school- boys. THE REAL BOY 79 I felt, as it were, the old spirit of Grecian edu- cation breaking down my old idols and replacing them with fairer gods. Under its spell I seemed to aspire and to grow. Its secret lay in the mysterious contagion of individual enthusiasm, of joy in shar- ing happy things together. I could envy nothing in the disciples of Plato. Bob’s den and the wild woodlands of the Cordilleras were as real a school to me as any Athenian grove. Schole, leisure, was ours, and we drew each other out to our limits because our freedom to do so was unbounded. Like Voltaire we could ‘‘doubt everything.”’ Like Web- | ster we could say, “Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief!” We rejoiced in both Gladstone and Huxley, though we bet on Huxley as the winning gladiator. Nothing outside ourselves hampered our intellectual growth, governed as it was by our own hunger for the mental food we most desired at the time. Thus, at a rather critical time in my life, I was led by an angel, as it were, into temptations of physical, mental and spiritual health. ‘The process seemed abnormal to Hugh Pollock, and doubtless to numbers of our friends. Especially so in the realm of sex, for we were at the age when sex assumes enormous proportions and often eclipses everything else in life. Perhaps these years when sex was sublimated so largely into physical and mental activity together with a dash of mysticism have rendered me too little sympathetic with the 80 Te REAL iB Ow strains and stresses and confusions of young men struggling for orientation to life at this period. Yet I cannot say that I regret missing those varied and colorful experiences which some of my friends of those days like to talk about as characteristic of their later adolescence. On the whole harmless enough, occasionally unhealthy, sometimes tragic; they ap- pear to me as relatively valueless in one’s education for life, in one’s aim toward happiness in living. So too with alcohol, cards and the whole gamut of indoor amusements which Rito and I escaped except by way of occasional samples. It is not that we avoided evils, but rather that we did not waste much precious time over things that perhaps should have their, place later’ on, in life; if at all: Hugh) Pole lock did not become a drunkard or a gambler; but it seems to me that he missed some of the intoxi- cation of sunrise on a mountain-top which we en- joyed while he slept off the physiological results of a convivial evening. After all, temptations toward good and toward evil will always remain relative and their role in our lives is determined by our power of choice, or by our habits of choosing. This is no place for a discussion of determinism and free will. ‘The point of this chapter is that, as a teacher, these memories of Mexican days came back to me as a stimulus to keep exposing my pupils to as many opportunities as possible for doing those things which I had learned to enjoy most. The majority of these happened fortunately to be in eri eh tral eB OY, 81 accord with accepted educational traditions. Where they were not, I suffered some little friction with the academic world; but all through these I have held my conviction that the only true teaching lies in the giving of one’s best as it 1s, without much concern about what it should be, judged by other standards than one’s own. CHAPTER IV A GREAT TEACHER WELCOMES ME The problem of moral and religious education ts whether we can thoroughly civilize our barbaric and bestial proclivities and bring them into the harmony and unity of completed character. —G,. STANLEY HALL. 1 AT the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Virginia, there lie three things very precious to me: the gold medal I won for Deportment at Mohegan, my mother’s Bible, and two volumes of Stanley Hall’s “Adolescence” replete with juvenile marginalia. Just as Herbert Spencer had opened Bob’s eyes and mine to the fascinating panorama of the universe in process of creation at the hand of God; so had ‘‘Adolescence”’ revealed to us un- dreamed regions in the mind and soul of man. Reading this great book precipitated inside me such a chaos of interest, curiosity and inspiration that I dropped my job, said good-by to Stockbridge, and embarked on the ill-fated steamship Merida for another chapter of my education in the United States. I was resolved to go to college and then 82 ie ha AL iB Oy 83 do graduate work in psychology under President Hall at Clark University. About an hour after rereading the final chapter in ‘‘Adolescence”’ aboard ship, a small fruit steamer rammed its nose into the side of the Merida and the treasures I have mentioned, together with the rest of my worldly goods, found their last and briny resting place. ‘That shipwreck taught me at least one lesson very vividly. Underscored with red ink in my mother’s Bible were the words: “Lay not up for yourselves trea- sures upon earth, where moth and rust do corrupt, AUdMewoecrcmtiievesmbreake (ny anguystealpay ts 1OL where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” J remembered those words as I sat bobbing about on the waves of the Atlantic in a small row- boat that foggy, choppy night. But my heart re- mained with my treasures of earth and was ex- ceeding heavy until something happened that radically changed my sense of values concerning material possessions. It brought a new and bright illumination to the thought which Jesus spoke, and crystallized it for me as an educational principle. About a dozen fellow passengers were huddled together with me in the life-boat. The moonlight filtered through the fog sufficiently so that I could see what a young man beside me was doing with his hands. He was scribbling on a page torn from a pocket note-book. This he handed me, then struck aematch me miread: 84 CWE a eR ey bees GX “My paintings are all on board there. Tell the men to row back. Perhaps the Captain will let me get them. They are my whole life. I cannot talk or hear. Thank you. Wooprow.”’ My heart went out to this young artist who could not talk or hear, but I had watched our mast- head light dip and sway and disappear. I knew that his treasure was lost too. I told him, and he sank back against the side of the boat with such an expression of resignation and pain as only a Conrad can describe in words. Suddenly I was profoundly conscious of the mean- ing of the word relative and its cousin, relativity. They are favorite words of Herbert Spencer’s, and run through his “Synthetic Philosophy” like red beads strung loosely on a string. The immensity of the difference between my loss and that of Wood- row struck me so forcibly that I remember smiling at myself for grieving over so relatively insignifi- cant a tragedy as my own. I hope he did not see me smile. I wish that I might say that I had asked him for his note-book and written: ‘You have lost your pictures, but cheer up! You have your art.” As it was I sat thinking only of myself, thankful that so much of both the lost Bible and the lost medal had been stored away in my mind and heart, and heart, and that the memory of days of am- bition and hope are really sweeter far than a metal symbol of their resultant success. Are we not here very close to the core of educa- LG Hats a RAEO ATs 7B Oye 85 tion, to the very heart of the school of tomorrow: the idea of the relativity of spiritual values? II Landed safely off the coast of Virginia, I began a series of attempts to enter college. Without a certificate of graduation from High School, I found the task very difficult. Deans were very courteous but very firm for requirements. Finally, President Sanford, of Clark College, suggested that I call upon President Hall, of the University and state my case to him. Once or twice a student had been admitted to the University on trial, without aca- demic credentials. Like one on a dream of finding great riches, J rang the doorbell of Doctor Hall’s brick house. Instead of meeting an eminent authority, a great intellect, I found myself chatting freely and com- fortably with a most genial and sympathetic soul. Diffidence and apprehension vanished from my heart at our first handclasp. Worries over schooling and college melted miraculously into a vision of the possibility of a University career. I was asked not for diplomas or credits, but about what I had been doing and reading since I left Mohegan; and what I wanted most to do. ‘Come back tomorrow,”’ said the President, ‘‘with a written résumé of your personal history, and a list of books you have read and are ready to an- swer questions about. Perhaps we can admit you 86 RG RE AT BOY to the University on trial. It will then be up to you to stay in.” Could there be a more poetic justice in the academic world than that? An oral examination, conducted privately and in- dividually by several professors, and directed along lines of my own reading and interests, resulted in my admission to the University. I found that its principal characteristic was leisure time. There was a minimum of lecture and a maximum of time to loaf in or to work. Not once did I have to re- spond to a roll-call, never did I have to attend a lecture or a seminar. There seemed to be no rules whatever. There was atmosphere. ‘There was a spirit of almost palpable understanding. Students were nearly always on time to those lectures which they chose to attend. We kept our feet off the tables in the library. We worked hard, and al- most too constantly. It was up to us to “stay in.” It was for me to make good. I listened to Hall’s kaleidoscopic lectures, I at- tended his stimulating and socratic seminars, joined the Dream Club, analyzed my dreams and read the books he suggested. It was on our walks, how- ever, that I felt the reality of education. We walked the hard pavements of Worcester always in the direction of grass and trees. He loved to feel the pressure of his foot on turf. More than once we took off shoes and stockings as though, like Antzeus, we might draw strength from our mother earth. We swam in ponds and later skated THE REAL BOY 87 on them. We climbed hills, and we lay on our backs on fall leaves in the woods. Always we chatted, and drew each other out. I believe that in these rambles of ours I understood to the full the meaning of the words schole and educere from which come our school and education! So often the philosophy of psychogenesis which he had spoken to us from notes in the morning, would come bubbling over in boyish fun during our play in the afternoon. On the pebbly shore of a forbidden pond, lying in the sunshine, I re- member his feeling “‘atavistic echoes of our pelagic days,” and discoursing on a possible dendropsychosis leading us away from the University and into the woods. He made me feel that he had never writ- ten or spoken about any human quality or variant which he had not himself felt, experienced, or very personally understood. One of the great open se- crets of true teacherhood lies here. A still more vital one is the teaching for joy. Hall found deep, genuine happiness in passing along what he learned, hot from the griddle of his study. The spirit of the learner, of the learner for the sheer fun of learning and growing was combined with the spontaneous urge of the missionary, of the man filled full with a message for his fellow kind. Or rather, perhaps, as a poet who has to burst into song for the same reason that a rosebud un- folds its tight petals. As a disciple, I was magnetically attracted to 88 DARIO REE AI BiOvy, Stockbridge and to Stanley Hall because they were so vibrantly alive, because they were exuberantly curious, because they were buoyantly happy in the exercise of those faculties which made for the joy of growing as well as of being. They incarnated in personalities that elemental quality of mankind which Sherman calls the modern spirit, “a free spirit open on all sides to the influx of truth, even from the past . . . marked by an active curiosity, which grows by what it feeds upon, and goes ever inquiring for fresher and sounder information, not content until it has the best. . . . But since it seeks the best, it is, by necessity also a critical spirit, con- stantly sifting, discriminating, rejecting, and hold- ing fast to that which is good, only till that which is better is in sight. This endless quest, when it becomes central in life, requires labor, requires pain, requires a measure of courage; and so the modern spirit, with its other virtues, is an heroic spirit. As a reward for difficulties gallantly under- taken, the gods bestow on the modern spirit a kind of eternal youth, with unfailing powers of recupera- tion and growth.” Ill One thing is certain to me regarding any phi- losophy or attitude toward life that will lead our young folks on toward Stevenson’s “great task of happiness.”’ It must be plastic, it must be grow- ingly alive, it must be constantly evolving. For THE REAL BOY 89 as Professor Sherman so truly tells us, ‘fa great part of our lives, as we all feel in our educational period, is occupied with learning how to do and to be what others have been and have done before us. But presently we discover that the world is changing around us, and that the secrets of the masters and the experience of our elders do not wholly suffice to establish us effectively in our younger world. We discover within us needs, aspi- rations, powers of which the generation that edu- cated us seems unaware, or toward which it ap- pears to be indifferent, unsympathetic, or even actively hostile. We perceive gradually or with successive shocks of surprise that many things which our fathers declared true and satisfactory are not at all satisfactory, and are by no means true, for us. Then it dawns upon us, perhaps as an exhilarat- ing opportunity, perhaps as a grave and sobering responsibility, that in a little while we ourselves shall be the elders, the responsible generation. Our salvation in the day when we take command will depend, we believe, upon our disentanglement from the lumber of heirlooms and hereditary devices, and upon the free, wise use of our own faculties.”’ President Hall, whom I knew during the last years of his life, seemed to me to retain this spirit of‘eternal youth. He reminded me of Gladstone who, at eighty-three, turned upon a Parliament of old men and said: “I represent the youth and hope of England. The solution of these questions of the 90 Tae tREAL -BOv future belongs to us who are of the future, and not to you who are of the past.” In his later seven- ties, Doctor Hall felt much the same toward time, and wrote: “If my intellectual interests have been in the past and present, my heart lives in the future and in this sense I am younger than youth itself, the nature of which I would chiefly understand and appeal to.’ He gave.us, his pupils, a comprehensive set of tests or questions by which to roughly evalu- ate our own characters first, and then to apply to others if we would. These tests struck directly through all formality of learning and touched one’s plasticity for growth, one’s youth and aspiration of spirit. Note how very little they have to do with knowledge, and how much they deal with wisdom: How easily can you move up and down the plea- sure-pain scale so as not to be unduly exalted by success, or lose the power to react from disaster (which is the supreme lesson of the Cross and the Resurrection) ? What is your mobility up and down the age-scale, so as to keep in sympathetic touch with childhood, youth and those undeveloped, and also anticipate the lessons of old age? How far are you aggressive, independent, eager for and capable of leadership on the one hand; or born and taught only to serve and follow, on the other? How does your narrowness, selfishness and ego- ism compare with your wider interests in others, in WHE eRe A LT BOW gl causes, in the greater concerns of the community, state, nation and the world? How far is your sexual life controlled and subli- mated? How much do you love nature, the root of all natural sciences, literature and art? What are the number, direction and strength of your dominant interests, and how do you spend your leisure time? Are your instinctive feelings toward religion, so- cial, political and industrial institutions radical or conservative ? | How do you feel toward your own honesty, truth- fulness and perseverance? How far can you draw upon reserve moral energies without a collapsing reaction afterwards? What is the degree of vitality still left to you from the momentum of heredity? Kipling has condensed the substance of most of these questions into his immortal “If.’’ When the subject of mental tests has come up among my older boys at school, I have referred them to this chal- lenging poem as a broader and deeper test of per- sonal values than any intellectual tests as yet de- vised. The chief lesson of my university career, and my association with Stanley Hall was that of the comparative importance of intellect and feeling in education for life. Intellect as an instrument of life itself within us, knowledge as a means toward life more abundant; feeling expressed in action as the 92 VEE RIB AY OB OY true test of human values; these were new ideas to me. I began, at the university, amongst a world of books and lectures, to learn why “Knowledge is proud that it knows so much, wisdom is humble that it knows no more.” Psychology became for me not so much a study of mental processes in the labora- tory, but of soul processes in everyday life. Within the very walls of a room devoted to research in the minutiz of intellectual processes, I became a be- haviorist at heart. I emerged into a world of schoolboys quite convinced that, at least in my own day and generation, the soul would not be caught and measured and tabulated in the labora- tory. For me it still walked abroad, free and alive and smiling amusedly at ergographs, stop-watches, red and green lights, revolving cylinders and even at the metaphysical dissection of its dreams. And so, years later, despite the varied progress that has been made in so many branches of psychol- ogy, I review some personal experiences with boys as their teacher, still believing that when I use the word “‘boy-soul’”’ I am dealing with a reality, and not a myth! CHAPTER V SOME BOY THOUGHTS ABOUT THEIR TEACHERS I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. My life is not an apology, but a life. Do your thing and I shall know you. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Let us bow down and - apologize never more! —EMERSON. I AFTER running about over this broad America of ours attempting to lecture on such vast themes as “Heredity and Eugenics,” I settled down at last to a round or two of hard intellectual sparring at History and English, with a bunch of boys. Intervale was a school of tomorrow in embryo. Like so many human institutions it was largely the shadow of one dominant personality. ‘There lay its great initial strength and also its fatal weakness. Its founder was essentially a pioneer, not a settler. Inspiring as a promoter and organizer, as an ad- ministrator his vision too far outran its possibilities of realization. Restlessly energic, tending half a dozen irons in the fire at once, he trusted to the initial velocity which his hands had given it to carry 93 94 THE REAL. BOY the school straight on to its shining goal. It was as though he had laid an egg which needed his own warmth for hatching, and had then left it to a brood of foster parents relatively cold-blooded and each intent more upon his own individual aims than upon the triumph of the school. When he returned among the boys and their teachers the egg seemed to warm appreciably and one might hear a gentle pecking inside the crusting shell. One dreamed for the moment of the possible fulfillment of a cherished ideal. The impress of his frequent visits was tonic, but it was not lasting. ‘The school as an institution died finally, in infancy. Its spirit, however, is im- mortal. | Refitting the world to human nature. Refitting the school to the boy and girl. ‘Trusting youth where we did not understand it. To walk with rather than to lead our children on what Buddha called the upward path. To move forward, instead of back, to Jesus. To learn the law of the heart, “love,7-and the law of the will “serve.” To teach boys to live. That “to plow is to pray, to plant is to prophesy and that the harvest answers and fulfills.”’ These were a few of the ideas and ideals to which a hand- ful of human beings of the species teacher were set to living out in practice among a lot of none too gentle boys! A square mile of rolling farmland, a marvelously beautiful grove of maple and beech and oak, log classrooms and cabins and gymnasium, a sparkling. AHI TRB ATI B OvY 95 lake dropped like a jewel into a setting of green woodland; these were our physical heritage. Cows, horses, chickens, ducks, turkeys, dogs, sheep and even parrots and monkeys lived among us. Flower- beds and rose-clambered pergolas threw wondrous colors across our way. Equipment for farming, for gardening, for scientific work, music and art was generously supplied. A physical paradise for the boy. Let us meet a few of the lads who lived in the little cabins, sprinkled along the shore of our shin- ing Silver Lake. First my pupil Agpawan, for this young shoot from a tribe of Bontoc-Igorote head-hunters of the Philippines wanted to become a teacher, and this chapter is to reflect a few boy viewpoints upon this calling. Agpawan, a lad of fifteen or so, was one of those who are inwardly oriented, who look into their own hearts and try to find what is there. A poet, too, though not often in metered words. A little brown man of steel muscles and an almost perpetual smile a-twinkle in his round eyes and play- ing at the corners of his mouth. One day he handed me a creased and fingered leaf from a composition notebook. It was somewhat fuzzy with that dusty grayness which inevitably accumulates in the pockets of a boy. In crawly, painstaking hand he described himself standing in a doorway of his cabin, pausing a moment to look out at the world before starting for the barn to milk the cows. A gray beech tree grew beside his doorstep. Against its trunk he had 96 cee ROE ALL BOY rested a friendly hand while it seemed to speak to him like this: ‘‘Agpawan, I see you go out every day somewhere. Where do you go?’ What do you do? I have been in roots here all my life. I wonder what you people do who can move about and go from places to places here and there. Agpawan, tell me please about those things that do happen over the hill where you go in the morning.” He told the tree, in better English than many of _ his American schoolfellows could write, that he went across the hill to work and that he liked his work. There was a suspicion of tears in his eyes as he handed me this composition, and after I had read it he said to me: “Maestro, I am very stupid. My brain does not work. Something must be wrong with my mind. I cannot seem to study hard enough. What is the matter with me?” A few minutes’ conversation revealed to me what was the matter with Agpawan. Rising at four- thirty, he walked a mile to the barn, milked eight cows and then walked back to breakfast. He studied and attended classes, with an hour for lunch, until four in the afternoon. Then he worked with his hands until six. Two hours of study after supper followed by an attempt to sleep without sufficient covering for warmth completed the reasons for his feeling very stupid. When I revised his schedule of working hours he felt better physically, but he was ambitious without limit and his spirit drooped a bit. THE REAL BOY 97 Agpawan’s muscles seemed to ache for work as his mind thirsted for knowledge and his soul hungered for God. “I have found America so good,” he said, “that I want to tell my people about it. I want to teach I met him first with the thrashing gang in the barn- yard. The boys were pitching shocks of wheat from wagons in to the thumpy engines, bagging the ripe brown grain in burlap sacks and stowing it away in the feed room. Prickly wheat barbs migrated down their backs to nestle at the belt line in itchy discom- fort. J took my turn at work with them and watched Aggie’s bare brown muscles knotting, sliding, tens- ing, relaxing with all the ease and quickness of a squirrel and the grace of a mountain cat. His white teeth flashed smiles at me as I passed by, and I felt that I had discovered a rare soul. I knew that there was one boy at least who felt the spiritual purpose of the school, to teach boys to live through learning the real joy that lies in hard work of hand and arm as well as brain. Agpawan responded to every job with a smile, and he seemed firmly to believe that each task was designed for a specific purpose in his evolution into a teacher. His conception of teacher- hood was Oriental and his ambition, i, was pitched very high. The word teacher meant Master (maestro) to this boy. It had no savor of the pedagogue, defined in Webster under.number 1 as “‘a slave who led his master’s children to school and had charge of them 98 THE REAL) BOY generally.” The Greek pedagogues, you will re- member, had often to drive their master’s children home from school with a rod, so happy were the children of those days to be at school at all. Ag- pawan would have found it hard to believe Mr. Wells, who declares that ‘“‘by the standard of what she might be, America is an uneducated country.” He had come to the Promised Land of his dreams. Surely teachers here belonged to one of the special- ized and learned professions, as in India where one must qualify for this work by nobility of birth, dig- nity of conduct, faith in God and knowledge of the ways of the world. A true teacher, Pavananthi tells us, should be as solid as the earth, precious with mental treasures as is a mountain with silver and gold, impartial as the needle of a balance, and as agreeable as a full blown flower. It was quite won- derful to think that even one boy believed in you like that! His fellow students did not all agree with Agpa- wan about teachers and teaching. One of them, Lilly, did not like me. I long wondered why. One day I found relief in a fragment of his conversation with Hartman, for I discovered that I was not alone in his disfavor. Said he: ‘Well, Shafer may be all right, but he’s a teacher. ,They’re all alike, one breed, like this or that kind of dog. You can tell "em a mile off. Some better than others, but they’re all hypocrites and they’re all sort of female. Maybe women teachers are all right, but teaching’s no job Dre eRe RAAT.» B Oxy, 99 foraman. Just telling kids what to do and bossing them around. It’s probably because they can’t boss men. Cheap lot. If they ought to get more money, like Krupp says, why don’t they go make it instead of sticking to their soft jobs? [ll be so damn glad when I get through this school that I'll bust.” A gentle psychoanalysis of Lilly would probably reveal a sensitive spot perhaps due to a scolding, or a licking, or a bit of sarcasm which so often hurts harder and more lastingly than corporal punishment or direct reprimand. But Lilly was no fit subject for analysis. He slid from under questions like an oiled eel. His defensive carapace against the friend- liest approach on the part of his teachers was as hard and tight as the shell of a box-turtle. I do not think one of us got a look at anything but Lilly’s crust during the whole time he was with us. Heth liked me well enough, but he seemed to pity me, too. AA tall, lithe, husky Nordic with muscles toughened on shipboard and a mind swung to the practical issues of making a living and getting ahead, Heth had returned to schooling after a few years in the world of work and men. He loved to swing an ax, lift barrels, push heavy loads and box with his equals or betters in the ring. “Don’t you get tired of teaching?” he asked me one day. “It would be just plain everlasting hell to me to sit around like you do among us kids. Don’t you ever want to try anything else?” “Tve bossed peons on a railroad,” I replied, ‘‘and 100 SESW O VI DUAN ites O TN ¢ drawn pictures for catalogues. I’ve collected bills for a printer, cashiered for a maker of wagons, sold automobiles, peddled opals, run a small general store, tried bookkeeping for a mine and secretarying toa Bishop. I’ve runa cotton-waste mill, sold stocks and bonds for a bank, measured logs in a lumber- mill, edited a magazine for girls, reported and writ- ten editorials for a newspaper, lectured to Rotary and women’s clubs and now I am here at a job I really like.” “Well, I don’t get you at all. I should think that when you got shipwrecked on your way to become a teacher, you’d have taken that as a sign you ought to stick to business. I like this school. I suppose we fellows have got to have teachers, but how a man like you, who can do something else for a living, can stick around these classrooms cramming a lot of roughnecks for exams, well, it beats me.”’ } II I thought of Halley, our instructor in physics, a triumphant and yet a tragic epitome of conscientious teacherhood. He had taught for twenty-five years. With a wholesome spirit, a purpose integrated and clear, his methods were sound, his results apparent and lasting. In modern business his energy, intelli- gence and practical ability would have led him into marked success. He became and remained a suc- cessful teacher. When apart from the boys, how- Ler eR AT B Ovy. 101 ever, his naturally buoyant optimism seemed tinged - with a dash of bitterness always. There was a note of tragedy in his frequent half sigh, half exclama- Clone SoawW owe Gees. Oh iwellwuens Ah! I heard them through his door as I passed, and sometimes when he walked down the hall. An infrequent visitor, he was always warmly welcomed as a guest. One evening he almost relaxed and felt at home by my wife’s cozy fireside. ‘“We need a new children’s crusade,”’ he remarked. “fA new children’s crusade, with banners flying and voices shouting for new men, live men, men of action behind the teacher’s desk. We need a general strike of the children to convince the powers above us that education needs a revolutionary change in the personnel of its teacherhood. No new methods, no new theories, no new experiments. We need new ‘men and new women in positions of educational power. We need a new quality and caliber of teacher. . . . But what’s the use talking about these things? A crusade or a children’s strike! Pshaw! Fudge! May we have a little music this evening?” He ran a gnarled and acid-stained hand through his silver-white hair, stroked a somewhat bristly chin, shifted his feet to greater comfort and forgot his bitter-sweet conflict with life in the measures of Kreisler’s Rondino on a theme from Beethoven. Perhaps Halley was thinking about our colleague, Krupp, when he spoke of a general strike. I passed Don Romero’s cabin by starlight late one autumn 102 ly, Aree B7Acis BOY: evening and stopped to look in at the window. Four boys sat around a pine table, their unpolished boots upon it and their chairs tilted back at com- fortable angles against the walls. ‘[ext-books were strewn on the floor among empty cracker-packages, football gear and snoozing dogs. ‘Three of the boys chewed gum and one munched tobacco, spit- ting out the window opposite mine. ‘Their conversa- tion made me feel that I was myself an accursed eavesdropper. ‘“T feel good toward Cal even if he does teach math. He makes me feel as though I was some- body. But Krupp gets my goat. Always rubbering around as though you were doing what you oughtn’t. I don’t mind him when he jumps on me, but I hate like the devil to be spied on.” Which reminded me of a remark of Krupp’s at faculty meeting: ‘‘Nine out of ten of these boys hate me. That’s because I jump on them so much. Got to have discipline on the place. ‘They may hate me now, but they’ll appreciate me some day. ‘That’s what a teacher is up against.” The four boys had stopped studying in books and were discussing life, educating each other, drawing each other out. They were sacrificing the accumula- tion of knowledge for a growth in wisdom and understanding. ‘Their gossip about us teachers was an organic lesson in psychology, in man’s relation to the world and to his neighbor. I listened for a while and then wandered back into the night glad that the THE REAL BOY 103 boys were spending an evening like that. Had Krupp listened, instead of me, I wonder if he would have learned the why of the boys’ “hatred” which lay not in his discipline but in his distrust. Boys will stand a lot of discipline, a lot of “jump- ing on” and “bawling out’ and much hard work at disagreeable tasks so long as things are straight. When they go crooked, boyhood justly revolts. I remember finding the corners of Ryan’s lips so far turned down one day that I stopped and asked him what was wrong. Instead of an answer, I was in- volved in an explosion. « “Aw! this isn’t school, it’s jail. My dad pays out good money just so’s I can work my way through this outfit. Haven’t learned a thing today but that ashes blow in your face when you dump them off a wheel- barrow. Then they lie so about our work. Look at the movies they took of us in white clothes down at the barn. When do we ever wear white clothes except for a picture? And driving cows to pasture on horseback! ‘They ought to take our pictures plowing through the mud on foot like we usually go. Hell! (pardon me) Gosh! isn’t it enough to make a guy sore the way they lie about you?” Years later I had a letter from Ryan in which he said that Intervale days were the happiest of his life. He looked back upon hard work at wheel- barrow and ax as the best of all his lessons; yet who knows what an impress was made upon his outlook upon the world of school or business in 104. EY “REBCALIOY Bir Y: terms of honor and of truth? At heart a boy is a fundamentalist. To make an opportunist takes time. III Our principal was one of those many heads of American schools who are completely dominated by the academic powers above, against whom Halley had suggested a children’s crusade, or a general strike. He ruled our faculty-meetings from behind a wooden box filled with cards in alphabetical order on which were recorded the names and the academic standing of the boys. His aim was college exams. We discussed the contents of these cards when we should have been asking ourselves, about the boys, such questions as Stanley Hall used to put to us would-be teachers: What will help the boy find his pleasures in the things that are normal and wholesome and truly happy? What will help him to control, direct, sublimate passion? What are those things which furnish him mere subtle excuses for such self-indulgence as re- duces his own best tone? What will help him to fear aright, to hate aright, to wholesomely fear those things that make him less a man; to hate and to be ready to fight those things which to him can be classified as evil? Instead, the grind of figures and percentages went on while I wrote letters, Halley dreamed of his fire- Ey REA OBR Oy: 105 place and his books, and Dominguez, teacher of Spanish, dozed and sometimes snored. Dominguez was one of those travesties of teacher- hood whom the boys called a ‘‘skunk.”’ { was glad to note that, when this Spaniard left us, no one missed him. He had made no friends among the boys. His time with us had been brief and his influence had been hardly felt. He was succeeded by Senor Elie, a soft but refined and gentlemanly creature, so full of bookish information and so ready to dispense it that he reminded me of one of those big bellied bugs who hang themselves up that their luscious juices may be sucked out by their young for nutriment. A veritable Tomlin- son in referring to books and authors, authorities and precedents, he was yet so genial in his erudition that we all forgave him his bibliomania. His total contrast to Dominguez set him high in the estimation of the boys, who took to walking with him in our woodland and listening to such book-talk as only a Thomas Mosher could spray forth in tumbling words. In classes he was all for conjugating irreg- ular verbs, mastering grammatical pin-points and pronouncing only in purest Castilian; but the ex- uberant delight in his work, together with a ready sympathy for slow-plodding and forgetful youth won him a place in every lad’s heart. We felt that we had another real teacher among us. He, however, considered his work done in the classroom, and in his informal chats with the boys. 106 TE REA (BO Y. He thought that digging in the ground, wielding an ax, hammering spikes, pushing wheelbarrows and cutting ice on the lake were things to ‘“‘hire done by folk of less sensitive nerves than a teacher should have’ as he put it. He feared a slave-mindedness from labor and was freely frank as to his thoroughly aristocratic taste and practice. He stood beside me on the snowy shore of our lake one day during the ice-harvest. Pointing to Restrepo, who had come to us recently from an eminent and wealthy family in South America, he remarked: ‘‘Why should he be slaving like that? He should have enough exercise in the gymnasium. He should devote himself to his lessons, not to manual labor. He is to be a capi- talist, not a peon!”” Queer blind-spot in Senor Elie’s mind. The blind-spot of hereditary kings, priests, and sadly, too, of many an industrialist today. Per- haps of most teachers, too, who have not yet learned the vital relation of the hand and the larger muscle- groups to the discipline and training of the mind. To me it was a treat to behold that stalwart young man, whose acquaintance with snow and ice had been only that of long range vista of white- capped mountains, out upon our lake driving a team of horses to block out the winter’s supply of ice. Agpawan, coatless, hatless and sweating worked along beside him, shoveling off the snow with all the abandon of harvesting rice underneath a South Pacific sun. Wayang from Luzon, and Castillo from Cuba pushed and pulled with the iron-hooked poles, CHG RIA VB OY | 107 jostling recalcitrant cakes along to the waiting chain. Ice-cutting thrilled us all with the joy of long, hard team-work. Teacher and pupil, Nordic and Asiatic, Canadian and South American, we all worked shoulder to shoulder on a mental and spiritual level as straight and even as the ice upon which we planted our felted rubber boots. We were one, for a while, in the sweat of our faces and backs. We smiled at each other in the spirit of Stevenson’s: *‘I know what true happiness is, for I have done good work.” After every classroom lesson is utterly forgotten, those boys will remember the purple shadows of our beech trees on the snow when we sawed, shoveled, pushed, pulled and lifted ice together on the frozen lake. The boys’ attitude toward Elie was summed up for me one day when Jobbie and Mack were unload- ing a freight-car of coal as he passed by on his afternoon walk. ‘“Well, we have a damsite more fun than he does out of life. Here we shovel coal until it makes us feel good and we want to go swimming, and along he comes, lamps the car and stands there as though he was thinking mighty hard. ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ he says, ‘how man has improved transportation? If that car were a foot wider and two feet lower it would do better work still.’ It must be the devil to live in your upper story like that all the time, just thinking about things instead of doing them.” I thought, as I heard Mack reciting this fragment 108 AE Pe RAs: Cay of experience to Lilly, of Bernard Shaw’s remark about ‘‘those who can do; those who can’t teach.”’ I thought, too, of Leonardo da Vinci and his group of devoted pupils, of the great artists of the Renais- sance and their apprentices. It seemed to me that today, as well as in those times, it is largely those who do that teach and that even in our schools it is actions, not words alone, that educate our boys and girls. I liked, at that time, to think of the teacher as an artist. I used to say to myself of teaching what Napoleon said of power: “It is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out of it sounds and chords and harmonies.” Then I would catch a fleeting remark from one of the boys and fall, for the moment, into one of those bluely pessimistic spells which I imagined possessing Halley when he sighed out his periodic ‘Fudge !”’ IV The boys liked old Socrates and his method of questioning everything. Sometimes our discussions became merely scholastic argumentation about the donkey between two hay-stacks, but as a rule I felt that intellectual tennis, with a question for ball, proved excellent exercise for memory and imagina- tion. Acting as referee, however, placed me in the position of Abelard, who as a teacher would allow the presentation of both sides of a question, leaving it to his pupils to make their own decisions. Aer How R BAYT BOY 109 Of him, when he appeared in our review of classic teachers, my agile-minded little Gilmer had said: ‘Gee, that bird was as bad as the ‘Literary Digest!’ ” Medieval teachers, men of action like Leonardo and St. Dunstan pleased the boys better. Herman, our metal-smith, embodied something of their spirit. His classroom made me think of pictures I have seen of the workshop of Benvenuto Cellini. I have often wished, when visiting our public schools, that I might live to see the day when every one of them would possess such a clanging studio. Temperamental, too, was Herman. How vividly I recall the day when Castillo, a Cuban lad and perfect gentleman, brought to my den a copper frame enclosing the portrait of a beautiful Spanish girl. Would I help him etch a pictographic story of his trip from Cuba to America upon the frame? We worked out and sketched on a symboled story, and I went with the lad to Her- man’s shop for asphalt and acid. Upon learning our purpose that muscular smith turned upon me with fiery eloquence: ‘I haf for many years run dis shop by myself and God! I can still run it without help from outside. What all dis about symbals? De boys are crazy about de symbals. Why not go on with my shop as usual? Iam here de boss, and I will here remain de boss!” Before I was out of ear-shot, I caught part of a sequel to this declamation. Kitty, my wife, had 110 Tee | RA AGE BB OLY) asked permission to fashion a bowl some days before, and had been ostensibly welcome. But Herman: ‘‘Dese damn wimmims! Dey belongs at home. My wife only is welcome here, and only when I tell her to. What has wimmims to do with metal-craft ? This is artistic. It is for wimmims to cook and to upkeep their houses, not to be artists. Why in God do these professors’ wives everywhile butt into my shop ?”’ Herman was doubtless right. Yet both Kitty and I delighted in sampling everything that went on in our school community, and I enjoyed working with the boys upon their copper, silver, oak and pine. The trouble was I could no more conform than could they. We had ideas of our own. ‘They did not fit the rut. Ergo, troubles. Troubles mostly, however, which time turned into grins. If only corporal punishment had been allowed to each teacher instead of being reserved as a special privilege for our principal, how Herman would have swung the birch! He ached to castigate young rebels with views of their own, or small devilkins who called him “Charlie the Blacksmith.” For it was a metal-smith he was! He worked in silver, and sometimes in gold. The pride of a guild craftsman was his and the impudence of American youth was a constant crown of thorns upon his old-world brow. His symbol might well have been that of certain medieval pedagogues, a bundle of castigatory rods! One such master, says the history of peda- CUTE RIBAS LT BOW III gogy, left a record of no less than 911,000 canings, 121,000 floggings, 136,000 tips with the ruler, 10,200 ear-boxings, 700 boys condemned to stand on peas and 500 to wear fools’ caps. I could well imagine Herman jotting down his flagellations at the close of a successful day of discipline! How- ever, the poor man had to be content with the words of his mouth to express the tumult of his soul. Herman reminded me of one of those queer little stunted evergreens which Japanese merchants place | so temptingly in shop windows. He was an artist who never grew up. All the temperament, all the patient persistence, much of the technical skill of fingers and arm and not a little of that mysterious, undefinable creative spirit that makes the true artist was his; yet growth had ceased and he had become at his best a fair metal-smith, and a good teacher. Perhaps it was because he had ceased to develop that he remained so good a teacher as he was! Herman was a teacher whose arm was eternally busy, whose body never seemed to rest, who aimed at perfection and whose soul was constantly in pain because perfection persisted in eluding his grasp. He taught by sheer force of deed. For the young- sters he sometimes did too much, so restless was he for shop production. A miniature Benvenuto Cellini, he raged and roared at error, at slipshod work, at thoughtless mistakes. Yet his enthusiastic praise of good work was just as vehement and the boys were seldom weary of well-doing. His instruc- hie hehe Ra Es Bo Oy; tions were hurled in every direction at once through a windmill of energetic gesticulation. I always feared for boy skulls within range of his whirling hammer, yet [ have no record of casualties in his domain, save when self-inflicted, as when acid spilled or a file slipped meanly upon a thumb. The prod- ucts of his shop were multitudinous bits of copper ugliness, match-boxes, ink-wells, paper-knives, ciga- rette-trays and lamp shades with occasional redemp- tion in the form of a graceful hand-hammered bowl. I always rejoiced in the work, however, for the boys got acquainted with their hands as instruments of concrete production. They learned how hard metal can be tamed into submission. ‘They lived in the age of iron and bronze for a time. V Dad Haydn ruled in the wood-shop next door to Herman’s forge. Dad worked as continuously, strove just as hard for perfection, was just as scru- pulous and exacting; but he lived by rule of love for boys made manifest in perhaps all too patient rea- soning with error. Bringing with him from Sweden a long tradition of the cabinet-making art, he mourned our slipshod American handiwork with its opportune practicalness and avoidance of delicate finish. On his wall hung the motto: ‘In the elder days of art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part For the gods see everywhere.” fetishes Ado eB ONY; 113 Fine stuff for the few boys with artistic patience under their skins; but almost as unpractical as danc- ing to Bach for the average kid who wanted to make a shelf for his books, or a chair for his cabin, or a trap for a woodland rabbit. I remember when Zwick told Dad he wanted to make a chair. Dad began by showing the boy how mortices are made, pointing out seams that only a practiced eye would discover. He then set the boy to work planing a piece of oak down to an appointed pencil mark. Zwick spent an afternoon on that single piece of oak. He then figured how many hours it would take to make his chair. That evening he slipped into the commissary cellar, stole a prune-box and a soap-box, borrowed a hammer and a handful of nails from Kitty, found a plain pine board, and before taps had blown he was sitting in a fairly comfortable chair. The old world against the new! Art versus immediate achievement. With all due respect and admiration for the joyous work of the maker of fine cabinets, and with all sympathy for thoroughness in handi- craft, my heart went out to the boy who wanted a chair, and who snatched a short cut to the realization of his desire! Isamu seemed sent across the ocean for color and accent to our curious school community at Intervale. Bright of mind as a first-water diamond, strong as a steel spring, afire with ambition to learn to do things well; he was a pupil whom any teacher would welcome as an inspiration to his art. II4 THE READ BOY. One day he brought to my den a box of Japanese wood-carving tools, handmade and well worn, as though by years of hard use. ‘I want to make a set of spoons and forks from a block of chestnut,” he said. “I have my tools and know how to work with them; but Dad Haydn says I must first learn to plane a board with an American plane in his shop. He says that is the way to learn technique, and that all the boys must start wood-work in this way. He looked at my tools and smiled, as though they were only a curiosity and fit for a museum.” My heart was immediately with the boy instead of with my colleague of the faculty. I led Isamu down to our cabin-camp by the lakeside, emptied a small commissary shack of its impedimenta, helped the boy set up a work-bench and established a work- shop competitive to Dad’s. Here I hoped the boys would come to see Isamu use his tools in his own way. His handiwork, as evidenced by a small Jap god carved from olive-wood, was full of excellent promise. The boy’s attitude was that of the artist, the crea- tor. It was with his attitude that, as a teacher, I felt called upon to deal. My job was to give desire and impulse toward art an opportunity for expres- sion. Given scope and room, I could leave it then to work out its own salvation. Of course this prin- ciple is common practice in many of our schools to- day; but it was new to me then, an experiment, an adventure. ee Ra HATS vy) 115 A true teacher must keep sensitive to the view- point of youth. He must keep flexible and able to slide from the attitude of the adult teacher versed in the lore of this, and in the technique of that, over into the outlook of the boy or girl who has little more than a specific desire for a thing or things. And yet, realizing this, I found myself slipping now and then too far back into my own childhood, and failing to draw my boys up to and keep them on such maturer levels as they were really ready for. I now see a hundred places where my sympathy for boy- hood’s wishful point of view has led me to neglect that timely boost, that helpful upward pull which would have helped a youngster feel a notch of growth nicked into his staff of life. Still, 1 am glad to believe that I erred on this side of the educational ledger rather than on the other. For while I may sometimes have failed at a critical moment to lift a boy beyond himself, at least I can remember but few times when I exercised those all too facile powers of repression, those stultifying arrogancies of authority which it is so easy for teacherhood to assume in self-defense against, and sometimes in ageressive attack upon rebellious youth. And as for my ephemeral troubles with colleague or principal or patron or owner, they are all now stowed away in the comic supplement of memory, to be glanced at with a smile. 116 "Teta te Ass: BB OCy VI Halley taught chemistry as well as physics. The boys liked and admired him. They were somewhat afraid of him, too. Not much was “put over’ him in class. He made moral issues of honor and recti- tude and his approach was like that of Major Waters, at Mohegan, of whom he reminded me often. One day I overheard the following conversa- tion between McGee and Paulsen. “We were reducing lead oxide to metal in our crucibles this morning. Bill had some lead shot in his pocket. He passed it around. When Halley came to look, there was the lead, all fine and shiny. He said: “There, boys, patience and persistence is all that is required, just as I told you. Patience and persistence always bring results.’ And all the while it wasn’t patience but birdshot.”’ I told the boys that I had overheard their conver- sation in the hall. I told them that I did not believe they were dishonest, but that their fun had not been quite square. ‘They were not in the mood, however, for an ethical discussion. The boys knew what Halley would say and do if he discovered their | prank. I assured them that I would say not a word to Halley, or to anyone, but that I wished them to think about another side of this event besides its fun. Later Paulsen asked if he might relate a dream he had had the night before. In this dream, he said, he had found himself trying to discover a language PUPA REP NAA? Bi@O-Y 117 which neither God nor Jesus could understand in order that he might swear in it without risk of punishment. “When I’m awake,” he said, “of course I don’t believe you go to hell for swearing, nor for putting birdshot into lead oxide. I think hell is inside of you when you go wrong, and you've got to decide when you’re wrong by yourself. I don’t think the birdshot was very wrong because it was just in fun. If Halley found it out and said ‘damn’ it wouldn’t be wrong for him either, because he would have been mad when he said ‘damn.’ I guess he would be right about our being wrong, but I guess we’re right about our being right because it was a joke.”’ Thus spoke boyhood, and the gong rang in the hallway. I wondered what Halley would have thought about Pauley’s dream and its consequent philosophy. My thoughts wandered back to the moralizing of gang days in Mexico! Halley taught the boys better English than could I. Listening to him ripple along in a matchlessly clear style describing the habits of a rose-bush to his informal class in botany made me feel like a clod- hopping boor. He talked as Huxley or Stevenson would write. His diction was music to my ears, and I felt sure the listening boys must learn more from him in clearness of word expressing clarity of thought than ever they could from grammar lessons or composition. My enunciation by comparison was slovenly, my pronunciation at times uncertain and I 118 RE Re eae eG OY, dropped. often into boy slanguage for the sake of short-cutting an idea. Then, too, he could glow over a rose-bush with an enthusiasm I could never muster for a sentence or a clause. I felt, when I saw him in our garden, that I was in the presence of another Linneus who, at the unfolding of a blossom could say: ‘“T saw God in his glory passing near me, and bowed my head in worship.” For a time I felt the boy’s attitude toward profes- sorship hanging about me like the odor of a labora- tory. The official weight of my title was. oppressive. The dignity and reserve considered necessary in a member of a faculty was irksomely irritating and seemed so silly. I felt sure every boy could see through it clearly enough whenever I tried wearing it like a mask or a dress coat. Only on our work- jobs, when some of us teacher folk joined the boys, grimed our hands, sooted our faces and soaked our shirts and overalls with sweat, did I feel normal and like a human being on two feet. As professors we were indeed a sessile lot, seemingly impractical and bookish and to be tolerated as good-naturedly as possible until graduation day. The boys were so alive, so real, so direct, so penetrating. Yet even they, as though by a process of instinctive imitation, seemed to don masks when they came into the pres-’ ence of dignified adults. So eager did I seem to break through this mutual reserve that upon writing prtieloe Re ATT I Bi Osy 11g down some of my views, I received a letter from the founder of our school whom we affectionately called “Doc,” saying: “You will be disappointed more than once. You will see your intentions and enthusiasms fail. The appeal of friendliness and love will not suffice. There is too much of the past in human nature. Authority and force are still big factors in successful government. You create for yourself during the first year of teaching an atmosphere that persists in the school tradition. You create in yourself certain habitual reactions that can be altered only slowly. Reserve, the willingness to use force if necessary, insistence upon discipline and recognition of the vast difference between your status as an adult and the undeveloped though eager mind of the boy; all these are necessary to real success in teaching.” Yet it was only when I forgot reserve, faced a youngster as boy to boy or man to man and acted on that delightful plane of friendship where all differ- ences of age or sex or job or race melt away that I was truly happy in my work. Of course much of the past lies strung and knotted within us. One need not read Nietzsche to know that much within us 1s still worm. But I had to choose between dealing with the past and with the worm by force, and trying an experiment in friendliness. What if I sometimes failed? I chose failure in my way rather than ap- parent success after the manner of Krupp. It seemed to me that I must choose between the handshake and 120 SDH SoS RA ee BiOyy) the club, and I chose the former because it made me happier. Whenever I slipped into the past, and tried discipline by force, I felt unhappy, however I may have seemed to get results. It was not surface re- sults that I inwardly wished. I wanted mutual un- derstanding and accord of heart as well as brain. So, as a teacher, between the good-natured toler- ance of Heth, the querulous pessimism of Halley in his moods of depression, and the atmosphere of forceful discipline to which the school had largely surrendered I lapsed often into gloomy doubtings about my choice of a work in life. Intervale, at such times, became a cindery place of burnt-out educa- tional values, and we teachers merely cold clinkers scattered on the upward path of youth, itchy and irritating to its feet. But again, with the sparkle in some boy’s eye, would return the feeling of artis- try in teacherhood, and I would tingle with enthu- siasm for what I would, for a while at least, believe was the most important job in the world. CHAPTER VI WE EXPERIMENT WITH DEMOCRACY To the educator for whom the problems of de- mocracy are at all real, the vital necessity appears to be that of making the connection between the child and his environment as complete and intelli- gent as possible, both for the welfare of the child: and for the sake of the community. —JoHN Dewey. I I cAME to Intervale several years after it had been founded on ‘“‘Doc’s” dynamic youth and inex- haustible enthusiasm for an idea. It had been a school literally built by the boys and for the boys. I believe its first years were truly epic. Its history should have been written with the minute persever- ance of a Boswell. Ina letter written by one of the teachers in those pioneer days I find: ‘Here are six miles of oak logs being spliced and notched into a single whole, a school-house with eleven classrooms. Dormitories above the class- rooms will house the boys. A huge gymnasium, also made of logs and measuring 106 x 62 feet will be one of the biggest constructions of its kind in the world, and built by boys! I21 122 DDE) (Rob Ai B Oy ‘Do you see them lifting, hauling, chopping, hew- ing, measuring, fitting, plumbing, leveling, nailing, bolting? Do you notice the order and precision? They have evolved it themselves with the help of but a few fundamental suggestions. ‘They all, big and little, rise at four-thirty in the morning, take a setting-up plunge in the lake, munch a sandwich and drink a glass of milk. Sharp at five they are at work, and, with a short intermission for breakfast, keep at it until half-past noon. After dinner they may spend the rest of the day as they please, but no town, no sweet-shop, no _ out-of- bounds. Life in the woods and by the lake is full and its delights inexhaustible. “They are free from one until eight (which is bedtime) but never an afternoon passes but a gang of volunteers puts in hours of work at the common task of building a home.” When I came to Intervale very few boys were left who had helped saw and fit together the huge logs of which the buildings were made. We inherited the results of pioneer work, and only Big Bill re- membered the clearing of the land, the digging of foundations and the mixing of cement for laying of corner-stones. My wife, whom the boys called Kitty, once read a verse from Kipling by our fire- light which went straight to Bill’s heart: | “Well I know who’ll take the credit—all the clever chaps that followed— Came, a dozen men together—never knew my desert fears; AR TUM aA rAd eee SO Deg oye) Tracked me by the camps I'd quitted, used the water-holes I’d hollowed. They'll go back and do the talking. ‘They’ll be called the pioneers!” The most devoted and loyal lad on the place, he felt himself an integral part of the physical matrix of the school. His love was laid in the very mortar and stones and logs and spikes and roadways which were now our heritage. He had strained to heavy lifting, jammed his fingers, bruised his shins, and the sturdy strokes of his double-fitted ax had reluc- tantly felled some of the beautiful trees which had to go to make room for our cabins. ‘The plaster which he had troweled in between the logs, boys now picked out with their fingers to throw at each other’s heads. The double-decked Dutch tables he had helped saw and plane and mortise and polish were now comfortable resting places for hobnailed boots. Still, the spirit of the old pioneer days tried to live among us. The idea that boys had built the school, and that the school belonged to the boys tried hard to become a tradition. We should have considered ourselves organic links between the past and the future in an industrial democracy of boys. Some- how this concept never gripped me. I could never quite get it across to my boys because I failed to feel it deeply. Big Bill alone radiated some of the primal stuff of the place, but he too would soon go and the school would remain. 124 THE REAL BOY Our jobs were softer than those of Bill’s day. We pulled weeds, sprayed plants, picked berries, repaired furniture, mowed lawns, shoveled coal, sifted ashes, milked cows, fed chickens, built chicken- coops, cleaned stables, sawed ice and split wood. But our great plant itself was too ponderous a thing to tear down and rebuild every year, as Hanford Henderson used to do with the buildings of his summer camp. We were settlers in a land already pioneered. Why Bill should want to knock a fellow down for marring one of the carved panels over a fireplace was hard for the boys to understand. To them it was a bit of fumed oak indented with letters which read ‘“To Teach Boys to Live.” To Bill it was a thing alive with rich memories of the days when it was carved, and polished and set carefully, lovingly in its appointed place. . There was something of the hero about Bill. He was the kind of human stuff that Nethardt loves to work into his sagas of the Middle West. Clearing the land, breaking the soil and laying the logs for our school had helped to make him so. ‘The pride of ownership was his, and we felt his presence as that of a soldier or a patriot devoted to the defense and development of his country. But he alone was left of that group of boys and men who had lived in tents and transformed a prairie wilderness into a community of besouled houses, graceful lawns and gardens laughing under tons of gloriously luxuriant roses. Our boys might learn to swing an ax like UPR A eanB Oy) 125 Bill, but they could never feel his loyalty and devo- tion to the school. It was supreme. ‘Maestro,’ said Agpawan one day, “I hear a man talk about the socialism. He said men who make the roads ought to ride on them in automo- bile, not the men who just buy automobile to ride on the road. He said people who so ride ought to work building roads. He said cities belong to men who build them, who do the work. Perhaps like the school belongs to Bill and Doc and boys who make it. When I hear him, the man sounded good. Afterward, when I think about it, I get disturbed in my mind whether he is right. But my mind will not think very much. Tell me what you think.” To tell the truth, I did not think, for I had not thought. My interests had never included eco- nomics, although I had enjoyed charming talks with Florence Kelley, Harry Laidler, Bouk White and Scott Nearing on Socialism. I had read somewhat of Wells and Shaw and the Fabians, but had failed utterly to follow Sidney Webb or Karl Marx into hard figures and logic. My sympathies had always been with the Russian revolutionists who wanted to get rid of the Czar, just as they were with my great- grandparents who wanted to get rid of King George. But I could not make a clear-cut statement to Agpa- wan about Socialism except that it involved a dream of change from our present economic system over into one which some people believed would be better. 126 THE MRA TOR OY. That struck a cheerful chord in Aggie’s heart, and we decided to learn all we could about this dream. II Our school catalogue said that Intervale was a de- mocracy of boys. Boys came here to learn how to live in the democracy of the United States of America. They were to be trained into a vision and into something of the technique of leadership in such a democracy. Their parents were folk quite satis- fied with an economic system which enabled them to send their boys to a boarding-school. Doc, our founder, was an enthusiastic industrialist with a truly democratic heart and a brain more like that of a Napoleon than of a Henry Ford. He had all the semblance of a Thomas Jefferson in bathrobe and worn slippers; but I always fancied catching glimpses, beneath that dressing-gown, of a steel cuirass, and seemed to hear the rattle of a sword. In temperament and economic vision, Doc im- pressed me as a curious mental cross between Lenin and E. H. Gary. Philosophically he seemed to swing in great strokes from St. Francis to Nietzsche. Ask him for his coat and he would give you his shirt also, with collar and necktie thrown in. Op- pose his personal will and he seemed ready to step upon you with the indifference of a boy exterminat- ing caterpillars. Perhaps he tried to find an Aristo- telian golden-mean between these ambivalent oscil- lations. To us, his associates in education, he ney RiROA TT Bi ye £27 remained a man of mystery and a most lovable per- sonal friend. In the school, Doc seemed eloquently in favor of a boy democracy as an item of creed, but most chary as tovits becoming.a practice. Ele, did not fear it; tremblingly, as did Seeds, our principal; but he would not trust it far. -A friend and admirer of Henry Ford, he believed in a Fordian democracy built of a series of small oligarchies. Each minor king, prince, baron, duke and knight was a necessary chessman on a great organization board, dominated by the mind of the supreme power, a power utterly democratic in conviction and principle—but wise as to their use! This curious dualism permeated our body politic as a school. I watched its influence among the teachers and among the boys. In Agpa- wan it took form in picturesque thinking. ‘*‘. wonder much about the soul of man,’ he said to me, after a rather hazy conversation about poli- tics in democracy. His naively primitive mind seemed to want to dive down below the general and the abstract and to discover the personal and the concretely human. “A book says the soul is in the front of the brain. Where, then, is the soul in a tree? Professor Halley say they grow and eat and sleep and breathe. But he say they have not brains. Have man seen the soul in the brain? My people in Bontoc will want to know. If I to be a teacher, I must know, too. Is there a book about the soul? I do not mean the Bible, but some book that tells 128 SL Ey oR Bio B.Oay where the soul live and how many kinds there are. I feel the soul inside me, but I do not know, I must find out.’ Thus Agpawan, and I felt within him a struggling desire to know about fundamental differ- ences between not only men and trees, but men and men. I wished we might read Sumner’s “Folk Ways” together and watch the divergent growth of original soul-stuff into the two great dominant groups of mankind in the Orient and the Occident of the world. Perhaps only with such a background could so curiously inward-working a mind as his understand the soul of masses and classes. For, ‘Social classes, plebeians, patricians, proletarians, aristocrats, all have a common esprit de corps, which modifies character, sentiment, conduct and thought. Above all this is the soul of humanity it- self, the realm in which only the great religious founders have successfully wrought and which our psychology of today is only just beginning to under- stand.” What would Agpawan find in America? A primi- tive, woodsy cave-man wafted across the ocean and landed in a little oasis of our great throbbing indus- trial democracy, in search of the soul of man! From the jungle and the rice-field he seemed to have come not from another land alone, but from an- other age. He came, searching for the soul and for a message of a new social order for his people. We fed him algebra, grammar, theology and congres- sional politics as mirrored in the Literary Digest, CURE IN eA Te BG) e\e 129 his subsidiary classroom text. We told him of our national democracy, and of its miniature type in our school community. In my classes he heard discus- sion and argument like the following: We had been reading about the attempts of the Non-Partisan League to establish a chain of codp- erative banks. Clayto arose and asked why we sat in class discussing democracy and codperation when we so picturesquely failed to practice them. He made a speech. “Look at Windish at the chicken farm. Gets: good eggs from the hens that we feed and water and clean house for. Sells those eggs to the hotel while the school buys storage eggs for us boys to eat who work on the hen-farm. Farm’s supposed to be in cooperation with the school. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t tell us that the school is a democratic outfit run by the boys. What have we got to say about these things? Nix!” I mentioned this speech at our next faculty meet- ing, and made another plea for a student council, where the boys might have at least a nominal hand at governing the school, where they might get a bit of parliamentary practice. “Tt would be just like Russia,” said Seeds, our principal. ‘These boys are not ready for govern- ment. They'd make as big a mess of it as have the Bolsheviki. [hey couldn’t handle administrative problems. They are immature and don’t know their 130 PRISE AC Dobe IONS own minds. ‘They’d not be hollering for student government if you didn’t stimulate and encourage them. If you want a boy democracy, why not limit it to your own classes ?”’ There were twenty boys in English III. I wanted to know each one of them and to work with them personally on their own line of interest. So, fol- lowing Seeds’ suggestion, I asked them to organize the class so that I should be liberated from all ad- ministrative duties and thus able to devote myself to teaching. Murdo, the huskiest, was made Sheriff. Chambers, the brainiest, became Secretary. I was elected President and given indefinite leave of absence, with the Secretary installed at my desk. The class read books or wrote letters or composi- tions under such discipline as their own Sheriff ad- ministered, while one of the boys at a time came to me, by my fireside for mutual education or “draw- ing out.” So well did this experiment work, that I applied it to my classes of younger boys, who responded with equal enthusiasm and maintained their own disci- pline as well in every way as I had maintained disci- pline for them. Once a week we gathered together in our classroom, once a week we met as a group by Kitty’s fireside. The remaining periods were spent in the way I have sketched. I shall, in Chapter VII set down some samples of my cozy conversa- tions with the boys. VEE Ry ANT, \ BIG) Y: 131 III Krupp was a German militarist of the old school, and had served in our own National Guard as an officer at one time. He believed in the discipline of the barracks, and attempted to introduce it into his - cottage-dormitory. Shoes, for instance, must be lined up underneath the bed, toes pointing out and touching a certain crack between the boards. The boys had no inherent objection to lining up shoes on parade, but they did resent Krupp’s utterly un- humorous approach to the matter. They resented the rattle of his sword. So when Krupp was off at a monthly Turnverein, a committee visited his quarters, dumped his furni- ture onto the piazza roof, knotted his sheets into amorphous wads, emptied bureau drawers upon the floor and replaced them, upside down, in their proper places and set his bed, one leg in air off the eaves. Krupp returned rockily over the trolley-station hill by the light of a monstrous moon. His fantas- tic gait was so ludicrous to the watchful boys that they almost spoiled the fun of surprise by laughing him into suspicions. However, he merely tiptoed from room to room, only once stopping to request quietude. When Krupp was full of imitation Ger- man beer he was a most pacific and amiable crea- ture. When he reached his room, tears came in- stead of such florid anger as would have inflamed him had he been sober. He sat mournfully in his 132 THE REAL ) BOW room upon the one remaining chair until morning, with its chilly reaction to a convivial night wakened rage in his heart and he strode wrathfully in upon Seeds. Poor principal! ‘The boys came to ‘him with complaints against the teachers, and the teach- ers with grievances against the boys. ‘This time, however, the boys were solidly against Prussianism in Westville and, in such times of war-time tension, there was room only for compromise. It was agreed that if Krupp’s household goods were re- instated, he would deliver the discipline of the dorm into the hands of a committee, of which he was to be merely an advisory member. Krupp submitted, as Germany later submitted, not to an idea but to a superior force. Force has so long been a dominant factor in most schools, as in nations and peoples, that it held over as a tradition even in this attempt at a democratic experiment. It cropped out, now and then, in its most malignant form. Agpawan was so touched with the treatment of Lundley, that he came to me with wide open Philippino-brown eyes and asked: ‘Do those men have the soul ?”’ Lundley was a_ good-natured, rubber-spined, handsome, fun-loving fellow who delighted in girls and dancing, hated the monastic side of our stag-life at the school and sometimes slipped away to a nearby dance-hall for an evening. Krupp had caught him in the act and threatened dire punish- ment for the morrow. ‘Well, it’s worth it, any- SIT on HaeAr Le oy hs eve 133 how,”’ the boy had replied, making worse his crime. Three members of the faculty seized him next day. Two held him down while a third caned him with a tough switch of iron-wood from our beautiful grove by the lake. I met Krupp that afternoon. He caught me amiably by the arm, beaming smiles. ‘Say, you ought to have seen the way we laid it onto Lundley this morning. It was great. He won't get into mischief for a while. I held him and Brough held him and Seeds nearly wore out a stic on him.” | Reform Lundley? A few days later Krupp’s room was rough-housed again. Lundley was brought on the carpet before the faculty. Would he promise to obey the law, keep discipline, mind his business, remain loyal to the school, refuse to join such escapades as the boys had staged? If not, he would go home. He preferred to go home. He came to me afterwards to say good-by. “It’s damn hard on my folks, but it’s good luck for me. I like the school all right, but some of you teachers don’t know what being a boy is. I reckon you’ve mostly all forgotten. I’m sorry to go, and glad to go, both.” Said Seeds to me: “I find it salutary to fire at least one boy every year. Puts the fear of God into the hearts of the others if they see it really happen, and not merely hear it talked about.” This particular brand of the fear of the Lord was made manifest to me a few hours later by Big Bill, the 134 THE REAL BOY most loyal of all boys to the school. ‘That firing of Lundley made me so damn (excuse me) mad that I could run off to the army, or anywhere, to get out of this hole. He wasn’t any worse than the rest of the gang. They fired him just for an excuse to fire somebody, and because he was in wrong with Krupp.” How true it is that we teacher folk forget that we were ever boys. How tragically we lose what- ever sense of humor we once had! How pitiful that a boy like Bill should have to say ‘“‘excuse me” for using the word damn exactly where that misused little word belongs, when he talks to one of us. Again I suggested a student council for Intervale. I believed that if we could air our indignations as well as our spontaneous ideas of any sort, we would have less individual gossip, frittery argument and unharnessed emotion in our midst. To see a boy like Big Bill drop into an attitude of don’t-care-ness was like witnessing a crime. Damns are sometimes healthy explosives, but shoulder-shrugs in the face of an issue are not. I feared a drift in Bill from “damn”’ to “I should worry!” My boys framed a constitution in their history classes, and asked Seeds to consider it. He refused. He believed I was plotting with the boys for the overthrow of his own school government. I apolo- gized and filed the draft of the constitution among my records of Intervale days. However, I could not quite give up the hope that pa aR ANG BOY, 135 we might some day organize a boys’ court. For the memory of a visit to the Ford Republic, an indus- trial school for boys just outside Detroit was strong within me. A small boy judge presided over the bench there. Two Jewish lads were brought before him, accused of selling oranges dishonestly. After carefully listening to the case, he rested both elbows on the desk before him, pressed his chin between his hands and delivered a judgment worthy of Portia or Ben Lindsey. | ‘You two guys are innocent of dishonesty. Sell- ing things too high is your business. ‘The guys that get stuck, they suffer, but it’s their fault for being so dumb as to get stuck. But it’s mean to sell or- anges to thirsty kids just after a hot ball game for the price you asked. You ought to be decent. This court can’t sentence you on the charges against you. But this court ruled last time that nobody in this school should call you kids Sheenies because every kid ought to be treated alike here no matter about his religion. We passed that rule because we thought you was decent guys. Now you’ve behaved just like Sheenies what are a bum sort of Jew instead of a good sort of Jew. Now the court rules that it’s all right to call you Sheenies again until you’ve done different and proved that you can be decent as the rest of the guys.” This boy judge was allowed to think for himself. The school and the boys trusted him. He could keep 136 CEA RA ANT B®) 2Y, with mercy. Boys are apt to be overhiarsh in their as been my his job as Judge only so long as he a justice judgments against each other, and it experience that we adults are often called upon to reason boy-nature into a merciful mood. I wanted to discover boys like that at Intervale. The court would reveal them. They exist in almost any large group of intelligent boys. But Intervale, planned to ‘“Teach Boys to Live,”’ was not quite ready to let the boys think for themselves when it came to the prac- tical issues of school government or discipline. If ‘‘Doc”’ had been with us, I believe we should have had a court. Seeds was scared. Yet, despite our failure at democracy, the boys in my day grew to love the school for its primitive elements so close to the generic soul of adolescence: woods, water, hard work in a spirit of fun, the crea- tion of rough, strong necessary things, and added to these were firelight and food, candle-light and music, dogs, and the making of friendships. Letters from Intervale boys continue to breathe something of the immortal spirit that dwelt there among us, as it dwells in countless schools only awaiting fuller chan- nels for expression, only needing more confidence, less fear, a little more imagination, sympathy and love of youth in evolution. It is the spirit of faith in the dream of youth, its vision of the infinite possi- bilities of growth and attainment not in the world of money or of power, but in the realm of soul. CHAPTERUVIL A LAY CONFESSIONAL The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. —EMERSON. I po not quote Emerson as a mere chapter-head embellishment, but because he knew boys, and be- cause he saw in them so much of that eternal quality of youth which must be kept alive among men and women if our world is to be a free and happy place in which to live: the quality of self-reliant indepen- dence of thought and action. ‘‘How a boy is master of society! Independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift summary way of boys, as good, bad, interest- ing, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers him- self never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. 137 138 Aba HN ORT VAN bye 8a Og As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds whose affections must now enter into his account.” I had read these words long before entering a classroom as a teacher. They rang true to my own adolescence, and true in the last two sentences to my adult days. I resolved that my classroom and my hearthside should be places where a boy might feel free to speak his own mind straight and clear and as nearly in his own language as his growing set of inhibitions would allow. The divergence between the vocabulary of boy- hood and that of respectable maturity helps build the intangible but ever so real and tough a wall that stands between one generation and the next. We adults preserve our full knowledge of the words and phrases picked up in our school-days and some- times we exercise them in the smokers of Pullman cars, in corners of our clubs or the lobbies of hotels. They continue to thrive in lumber camps, racing stables, in the army and aboard ships. They avoid print, and even Mr. Mencken piously neglects them in his study of The American Language. Yet they belong, by right, to the unshackled lingo of boy- hood. I have never been able to sense anything im- moral or indecent about them. Generic, crisp, straight to the point, they make our dictionary equivalents seem blunderingly clumsy, hypocritical and unreal. I feel, when I speak to a boy about THE REAL BOY 139 some relatively simple physiological process in re- spectable polysyllables, very much as I would feel if I had always to call a daisy chrysanthemum leu- cantheum, or say leptinotarsa decemlineata when I meant potato-bug. Yet in one sense, I am glad that my boys at In- tervale compromised with society (“‘everywhere in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members’) and spoke to me quite boyishly, but under their own censorship. Otherwise, I could not, at times, record their words in this book. Their acceptance of our decorous traditions en- ables me to jot down their sayings with a close approach to precision. I was under contract with myself at this time to write at least a page a day about some occurrence which would redeem the past twenty-four hours from leaden semblance to dead routine. ‘The tread- mill of daily grind and regurgitation in a boarding- school is punctuated with a note or color of real accent now and then. I made it my business to hunt for these and set them down on paper. Life can so easily become merely a series of repetitions that I feared I might lose its savor if I did not look de- liberately for its spice. I feared getting into the habit of doing today what I had done yesterday because that is the most facile thing to do. I was afraid of capture by what Bertrand Russell calls the law of universal laziness. A teacher succumbs to this law perhaps more quickly than any other la- 140 THE REAL BOY borer except a government clerk; and so I sought for partial salvation in my diary. Recording stray conversations with my boys did indeed bring me color and accent and spice. Turn over a few pages with me from this journal. They were filled as soon after a boy had left me as I found it possible, or as a nightcap before retiring. I West Jackson, half American, quarter Scotch and quarter Indian, as he put it; a brown, husky lad of fourteen, weighing 140 pounds, and handsome as a young Jove, has been down to call. ‘We fixed Karl’s (the monitor) bed with strings so his mattress will fall to the floor when he gets in. We’ve got it in for him because he’s so uppish running the dorm. ‘Treats us like German privates. Yesterday he went into a pail of water. We'll civi- lize him yet.” | A pause, and then a shift from Karl to Eros. “Say, folks don’t think much of puppy-love, do they? But I’ve had the same girl for five years. Here’s her picture. Isn’t she pretty nice? I hammered out a copper acorn for her in the shop. She hung it on her wall. It’s the Indian symbol for loyalty. Want her to be loyal to me until we grow up and get married.” That was all. No discussion of sex or marriage, such as the boys sometimes precipitate from their questioning minds. Everything was settled, final. He skipped from sweetheart to father. THE REAL BOY 141 “My father was a lawyer. Lived in Arizona. Nobody called him Mister. Called him Kindly Jackson because he was so good about collecting his fees. Used to say he liked human nature be- cause it always paid up sooner or later if you trusted it. Old nigger he saved from hanging paid up as soon as he could. ‘[hat’s why they called him Kindly.” The boy didn’t want conversation. He wanted monologue. Someone to talk to. Someone who would listen. He rambled on among a dozen rooms and corridors of memory and out into bright sunshiny piazzas of imagination. Tramp talk, wandery here and there at whimsy will. ‘A boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”’ “Kind of like you. Don’t usually like teachers. They’re always lamping you to see if you’re doing something that ain’t right. You don’t seem to be a Sherlock Holmes all the time. Bet I could light a cigarette right now and you wouldn’t go squeal on me to Seeds!” “Do you like to smoke, West?” I asked. “Not much. Don’t believe I’d think of it if it weren't against the rules. Kind of like to sneak off behind the powerhouse with the guys, though, and put one over on Seeds. We call it the ‘butt-end trail’ down there, and we always lamp him coming before he can lamp us. It’s kind of fun, but I guess smok- ing isn’t so good for you if you want to keep your wind. Which is worse, a cigarette or a pipe or a cigar or chewing?” 142 TPHEVREAL BOY Kitty came in with a plate of fudge. Our taste turned from tobacco to chocolate, and so did our conversation. 2 Amo tumbled in today, wiping sweat from his face, his hands grimy with honest dirt, his boots still muddy where the door-scraper had failed on its job. “Gee, but Brough makes you hustle. We've worked like dogs laying the foundation of the calf- shed. Didn’t have tools to’go around. Brough must be descended from that old Pharaoh who told the Yids to make bricks without any hay. And then he says we're lazy!” Brough runs the work-jobs. How so adipose a man can be so energetic and ubiquitous beats me. He is everywhere at once, and can do a bit of every- thing. One of my boys made a cartoon of him, a pair of whirling fists amidst flying chips. He teaches trigonometry, also, surveying the surround- ing country with his boys. He keeps everyone busy, drives the boys hard, but drives himself harder. A man who does that wins respect, and loyalty. ‘But I like it!” continued Amo. “Like the feel of it. It must be making something out of a fellow, that kind of stuff. The guys all kick about it some, and cuss Brough; but he makes us stick to a thing until it’s done. Guess we'll thank him for it some- time.” 3 Paul has returned from a sojourn in the hospital. He evidently suffered from heart-trouble there, as well as from a broken arm. Lick aey eRe AB Oy: 143 “Ts it good for a fellow my age to be in love with a woman so much older?’ (Paul is seventeen.) “That nurse showed me what real love is. I had only imagined it before. But I get to wondering whether I ought to go on loving her. She could al- most be my mother. But she was awful sweet.” He told me the old, old story: acquaintance, friendliness, sympathy, motherliness turned to pas- sionate affection and drawing first filial, then equally passionate response; the dawn of ecstatic illusion in a youngster with its backfire into doubt mixed with desire. : “Paul,” I said, ‘‘charge that up to experience. Not necessarily the best experience for a young man, but better than many others which boys go through. Don’t fool yourself into thinking she taught you what real love is. You got a taste of only some of its elements, fragmentary, half-baked elements of such a love-life as may some day be yours.”’ “But what shall I do about her? Cut her out entirely ?” ‘Let your correspondence simmer down to an occasional friendly letter, Paul. Get off the lover basis as soon as you can. You'll have the memory of an interesting, if not a truly happy experience. Cash in on it as such. No use lamenting it. But don’t bank on such experiences as necessary to your happiness, or to your discovery of what real love is. Look ahead to the girl of about your own age whom you ll really want as a wife, and as the mother of your children. Save up the best of you for her and for your job together. Be grateful, if you feel like it, to your nurse, for she meant you no harm and has 144 AH aR EAST 5B @) sy; done you none perhaps. But be glad that you’ve graduated from that fragment of love, and can look forward to something more worthwhile, and happier.” Paul left the feeling with me, when he went away, that I had said something worth his thinking about. What more can a teacher ask? 4 Baker is athletic, and dances. He loves good music, and begs me to run a record or two for him whenever he drops in to chat. He cannot endure rag-time or jazz unless his muscles are in motion. ‘Then it’s music; but when you have to sit still to it, it makes you feel like hell,” he declared. Yesterday, after some Chopin preludes and Brahms waltzes, I put on Liszt’s ‘“‘Liebestraum,”’ which Kitty has just acquired. Its silvery cataract of shimmering notes brought a scowl to his usually smileful face. “Gee, but that’s rotten! Why do they spoil a thing by jumbling up the noises and spilling them out like that?” Agpawan, however, sat wrapped in a mantle of bliss. The only music he had known before coming to America was that of the tom-tom and war-drum, the fierce yell-songs of returning head-hunters, and the notes of birds in bush and tree. “Not like this music that comes from a box,” he said. ‘‘We sing just up and down and up and down: With RH At BOW 145 ‘‘Penotolac nan olo nan isa ay Foso, no quo tai fenotoa Nan aliwidco.”’ Which, he informed me, being interpreted, means “‘T killed and took the head of this man because he killed my friend.” 5 Grady came in with a story of weak will. Says he can’t stop smoking. Worried about sex. Been reading some of those damnably pietistic sex-instruc- tion books. Enough to loosen anyone’s will, those sentimental effusions. He seemed to want under- standing and sympathy. I have both, but he’ll not get a symptom of either until he braces up. Pitiful kid, in a way, but he’ll not know that I think he’s pitiful. Maybe I was a bit rough on him, but I spoke out what I thought. [I said: “Grady, you’re the mushiest, flabbiest, whiniest saphead who ever shufiled around these grounds and tried to keep awake through a class. When a kid with tough muscles and some pep comes down here with a story of troubles, I listen to it, and try to help him. I can’t do a thing for you. Get to work on the woodpile in the afternoon instead of worming yourself into soft jobs. Get into the gym and play ball. Take some boxing from Nat. Come back here in a week or so and tell me what you’ve been doing to get hardened up and I[’ll talk to you. I have no use for watery mush.” He went away with firmer lips and a stiffer hand- shake. If I had been comforting, and sympathetic, 146 TeRE? RV AL BOY he would probably have left me with tears of grati- tude and a smile of sentimental joy. He will come back. 6 “T jess wish I could get that slick guy of a Kaiser! I would take some hot grease from that pan and pour a little drop in one side of his nose, and a little drop in the other and then run some down his neck. I'd cut little holes in his skin and put him in that big bowl of acid Mr. Halley has in the laboratory. I'd have Mr. Windish’s peacock come and sit on the rim of the bowl and peck at that Kaiser’s eyes. Guess I'd light a fire under the bowl, too.” Thus Spic Solar as Castillo fried potatoes in a skillet over an oil-stove while I lay on his bed in the cabin, awaiting a taste of pigeon. Spic had almost shed tears at the trapping of a skunk. Spic had staged a fight in a bathtub between Thor, the Irish-terrier, and four white rats, but he had run away when the scrap began, averse to wit- nessing the small beasties suffer. Spic was the most gentle and benign of all imaginable boys. I marveled at this artistic technique of inquisitorial torment. ‘You didn’t want to see your white rats eaten, Spic,’’ I ventured. ‘‘How could you torture one of your own kind?” ‘That Kaiser guy is not our kind. He made the war. He’s a hell of a guy. I think I could do any- thing to him and nothing would be too bad.” ere ye RR ACT Bb Oi ye 147 I whistled a bit of melody from “The Mikado,” about the punishment fitting the crime, while Cas- tillo put pigeon and potatoes on our tin plates. 7 Restrepo comes to us to learn English. He is keenly ambitious, works hard, and is acquiring a clear enunciation despite his environment of Ameri- can boys. ‘Tonight he came down after supper wondering: ‘““Whay does the bois swallow deir wurds so much? I say ‘please pass de butter’ and they do not understand me. I run all de wurds together into one and the other; like ‘pleaspassdebu-r-r’ and they understand queek. When I pronouce T in water, they laugh, but if I say wh-r-r like they, eet ees all right.”’ He sits at table where, when tapioca is wanted, the request is made for fish-eyes and glue; where water is sky-juice and milk is cow-juice; where one slings the grease and laps up the suds and slings his teeth into the sinkers. I am supposedly his teacher of English, but much of his education will come from his fellow-kind in their leisure hours. 8 Kitty left Frank and me by the crackling beech- logs with buttered popcorn and cocoa. “Do you have to be married in order to be happy?” asked Frank. “Stories tell you about living happy after you’re married, but some folks don’t. What is hap- piness, anyhow?” 148 EDR MGA 3) Ye Never having found a categorical or satisfactory definition of happiness, I spoke from memory. “Frank, the happiest day in my life was when I first saw the Pacific Ocean. After five hours of hard work, I reached the top of a mountain in Mexico. I took off my clothes for coolness and scrambled up a big bowlder which rose above the scrubby pines around me and seemed to lift me right up into the very center of a sunshiny universe. I stood naked and alone in a glorious bath of wind and sun. Range after range of mountains melted away into the sky- line around me. White little villages rode like bobbing corks on great blue waves. ‘To westward the ranges broke, like a drawn curtain, and a great half-circle of burning silver hurt my eyes with its sharp brilliance. It was the Pacific. “T felt suddenly happy. It wasn’t just the bird- song in the little pines below me, blending with the wind-song in the feathery needles; or the gorgeous beauty of all that I saw with my eyes; or the feel of sunlight and wind on my body; but perhaps a com- pound or resultant of all these added to the joy of hard work well done and something long desired suddenly won. Probably other elements entered this composite feeling, unconscious memories of past cheerful things in my life, or perhaps even in the lives of my ancestors for centuries and ages past, but, anyhow, I was supremely happy for perhaps half an hour or a little more.”’ I believe I was quite eloquent. Frank listened with large eyes. He seemed to catch some of the feeling which returned to me, like a dim and ghostly memory, and echo as though from another world. THe EAT, BO y 149 ‘And is that the way you feel when you are married ?” “Marriage, Frank, is not like climbing a moun- tain and finding happiness all in a sweet lurnp, as it were. It’s more like the fun of the climb. It’s the fun of doing things together with someone you love to do things with. Maybe it is happiness spread out thin over a number of days or years, as you spread butter on bread to make it taste better when you eatvit,” ‘This cocoa is awful good,” Frank answered, and we talked about how garter-snakes may feel when they are prisoned in your pocket. 9 Aggie got a yellow slip from Seeds today saying that his load of study is too heavy and that he must drop a subject. He came to me and said he would rather drop algebra than anything else. “T cannot teach the algebra to my people in Bon- toc. They would not understand what it means for, or how use it in life. I think my people’s boys would like the history. Some or all will want to learn English. I like civics because my people must learn to self-government themselves. So I choose to drop the algebra.” But algebra trains the mind, Seeds said. Brough, teacher of math, agreed. So Agpawan must drop civics and proceed with his struggles with x and y and z, and the cubes and squares of this disembodied number and that. 150 THE REAL BOY I asked Brough if it would not be as reasonable to ask Murdo, our star basket-ball center to quit throw- ing baskets for practice and take to his room with dumb-bells and Indian-clubs for training, as to ask Aggie to train his mind on algebra for teaching civil government to Philippinos. But Brough laughed and said I must be joking; that anyone could see the difference in training methods at a glance! Since Aggie is condemned to algebra, I shall en- courage him in the delusion about its gymnastic value, for why should the boy be miserable about his fate? No use adding gloom to disappointment. But in my heart I shall feel very sore when I see this sensitive, poetic, nature-loving, God-fearing little brownie of the jungles heading for his daily forty minutes of xyz and parenthesis squared. IO Lyell thinks he may be a pervert. Came down with a book, another of those pious perversions of religiosity and false puritanism that somehow fall into the hands of normal boys and convince them that they suffer from some malignant moral cancer which only sentimental prayers will cure. Told me the threadbare story of being ‘led astray’ by a homosexual teacher in another school. Said he had hoped, feared, despaired, contemplated suicide, fought back again into hope but was finally convinced, by this book, that there was probably something organically wrong within him. His worry had turned from thought and act to morbid specula- tion concerning the very structure of his person, of his character, as though the Great Potter’s hand had HE OREAL” BOW} 151 shaken in making him, and damned him into the class of beings now catalogued as homosexuals. We delved into his past life deeply and widely enough to convince me that the lad might be merely passing through a phase of development, twisted askew for a time, which should mark simply another step in the building, the integrating of his person- ality. I am not competent to deal clinically with abnor- mal cases, but I feel that a teacher may safely try to shift a boy’s thought from worry and fear into how- ever an unscientific channel of divergent attention. Lyell says he has a sweetheart in the sunny south, a thousand miles from here. We have agreed that he shall devote most of his English composition time to writing letters to her, which I shall read for sug- gestion and criticism and which he will revise until periect for artistry.in fields romantic... Hes to switch from thinking about pathology into dreams of the future tempered into everyday chatter about the present. I feel, sometimes, like an amateur psychoanalyst when these lads come to me with their more sensi- ‘tive problems. I wonder if we teachers should not cultivate something of the patient technique of Freud and then, if we can guess the way, follow analysis by a psychosynthesis, at least in preclusive suggestion. II “Mr. Hamilton, I just discovered that if you spell God backward you get dog. Do you think God cares about that?” 152 TH BOR BAD) BOY. Frank seems quite God-conscious. Queer little gnome. Introspective, and sensitive to the meaning of things. I replied: ‘“T hope God cares for dogs as much as you do. He made them, and perhaps he loved them so well that he gave them his own name spelled backward just to remember him’by. I don’t know; but I hardly think either God or dogs care much about spelling. Let’s go down to the kennels and see how Gee is growing. His commissary department seems to stay altogether too big for his legs.”’ We reached the kennels. Bobbie and Johnnie were fighting as mildly and as persistently as usual, charging, circling, feinting, leaping, rolling, scurry- ing, nabbing, growling, yapping and occasionally grappling hard and earnest in a turmoil of flying ears and legs. Gee was lolling on his back, paws in air, playing with a string. ‘“Thought Gee was going to be a father dog; but 1»? look, he’s got nipples for milk! I tried to explain rudimentary nipples as vestiges from some dim past unisexual day, and pointed out that we men, like most mammals, carry anatomical reminders of ancient times in the same way. I did not use these long words, and Frank seemed to be satisfied for the moment. He leaped to the next question. ‘Why do pigs and dogs have runts in their lit- ters?’ ‘To which I confessed ignorance of the mechanism by which the runt was evolved, but specu- ehh ek EAC oR Ovi 153 lated upon the possible languishing behind in growth of the unfittest for uterine life. “This seemed to fill the bill, but it led to further hereditary speculation. ‘Did you say in class that sometimes dogs got hare-lip? And do you suppose they get it because their mother saw a rabbit while she was having pups?” I recited all I knew of my friend Bill Blades’ experiments with hare-lip dogs at the Carnegie Institution and felt pumped dry of all my smatter- ings of hereditary science before Frank grew tired of my eloquence and suggested that Gee have a bath in kerosene for fleas. 12 John put a crystal of cobalt-nitrate into a clear solution of sodium silicate, and watched it grow into a beautiful, fronding fern-plant of delicately irradi- ant crystals. He wrote a vivid description of this whole process as a composition for English III; rewrote it for better wording, perfect spelling and the best of penmanship and got marked high. He wrote the composition in his biology note- book, although the experiment was done in the chem- ical laboratory, and for his course in chemistry. By showing the possible relationships of growth in life and in non-living matter, he got due credit for the work in biology. His sketches were so well done that I chalked him down for a ninety point in drawing. 154 Drie RA ORB OY, This is what I would call a real co-relation of studies. It lacks the direct point of contact between studies and work-jobs outside, but it is certainly a ‘lonely case of real academic synthesis. We teachers are still a competitive lot. We must rush our boys through our own specific courses toward a standardized goal. We must see to it that our algebra 1s done, whether a boy’s history and Latin progress or not. We must see that a boy gets his Latin, whether his spelling is up to mark or not. We must keep him after school on spelling when he sacrifices spelling to biology or history. When a boy’s mind is nicely warmed up to crystal- lography, or to a discussion of racial traits in history, CLANG! goes a bell, and he must shift his body ‘and mind and spirit off into Cesar, Cicero or Ge- nung. But Johnny has set down concretely a definite case of possible co-relation, of time-saving, of class-syn- thesis. And besides that, he has written an excellent letter home to his mother, telling her about it! He came down tonight to let me read it. We talked very little. I believe about all I had to say was: “John, that’s simply fine!” 13 Too warm for a fire this evening, when Dummy came down to talk. I lit the stub of a yellow candle, and set it on the broad arm of my big chair. We watched the single flame together in silence for a THE REAL. BOY 155 while. Electric sea-blue at its base, burning gold through its center, musky yellow and vanishing into elusive wraiths of burnt sienna at its peak .. . how warm the little candle threw its beams... . like a good deed, in a naughty world. The black wick curled over and poked a head of fiery crimson out from the blue of the flame. Dummy asked why the flame curled over like that, instead of standing straight. I told him how good old Mr. Paine, of Silver Bay, had been bothered with the old-time necessity of snuffing candle-wicks. He guessed that they must be frequently cut to rid them of accumulating carbon, which prevented thorough oxidation at the end. If the wick could only reach out into the air, it might oxygenate without carbonizing; in fact he found that it did so when he bent the wick outward and kept it so bent. At last he hit upon the simple device of making candle-wicks of three strands of string instead of two, and of plaiting these strands together, with an extra hard pull on one of the strands, tending to curl the whole plait in the direction of the pull. He found that, just as the strands were curved in the plaiting, so too, they curved when burning in a candle, poking the end of the composite string suf- ficiently out of the body of the flame to bring it in contact with the air, where it oxygenated fully and glowingly, without accumulating carbon. Dummy looked at the candle, smiled, and re- marked, “Well, Pll be damned!”’ 156 DHE REAL BOY 14 Hawkins loves birds. He delights in listening to Kellog’s bird-songs on our Vic. He spends class- periods in the woods, sitting quietly to await some stray chirper who will sing a few bars to him that he may judge whether Kellog is right or wrong in his interpretation. He tries to write compositions about birds, but the little fellows seem too swiftly elusive for his thought and pen. Some of the boys say he takes advantage of my faith in his bird-love, and puts over a good time on me when he ought to be grinding away in class or study-hall. But I know that Hawkins loves birds. We arose before dawn one morning last week to listen to bird-song together. He met me at the edge of camp, a green bird-book in his hand. We walked through the squdgy swamp and over the re- silient marshland toward the western beechwood. Suddenly a great brown mallard duck rose noisily from a yard beyond our feet and flew over the hill- range to our right. “Golly! there must be a nest there!’’ And Haw- kins darted toward the spot where the mother had risen. He almost plunged into the midst of eight brown eggs, smoky-warm in the coolness of morning and nested in filmiest down. “Can I lie here until she comes back?’ And I left the lad lying still on his tummy a few yards from the nest, with the stiff marsh grass beaten back in a swath that he might see the mother bird plainly. Peis Re A Te BOW 157 That evening, by Kitty’s fireside, he related in sparkle-eyed excitement the story of his adventure. The mother had returned, most uneasily and doubt- ful, finally to settle on her eggs, only to fly away again, straight northward as before when he moved a bit for comfort. “T left her because I knew it would bother her to have me nearby. I guess those eggs will hatch better if we leave her alone.”’ I have visited the mother since then. Twice she has remained, motionless but keenly observant with her dark hazel eyes; twice she has flown over the hill. I shall remember her, tenderly, but I shall more joyfully remember Hawkins, who missed a morning of schooling to gain a few intense rich hours of adventurous living in our waving marsh- land. . 15 A glorious tree grows in my den. Its short branches are laden with hardwary, drygoodsy fruit. Two base-ball mitts, one soldier’s kit, one duffle- bag, one ruck-sack; a hunting-knife, hatchet and compass hanging from a web belt; three wool skull- caps, four poncho-straps; one red and one tartan bandanna; two first-aid kits, one trench shovel, one Stetson army hat, and one Japanese lucky-pup on a silk cord. In one corner of this den of mine stand a rifle and a shot-gun. On the wall nearby hangs a Colt re- volver in a Texas case (relic of my Mexican days). On my desk is an ash-tray, and a blackened virgin- briar pipe which I seldom smoke, but which seems to belong there. 158 THER RAE BOY These items are not for atmosphere; they are at- mosphere. ‘They belong. ‘They help keep me kid- dish at heart. I like them. ‘The boys like them. I ought to have a fishing-outfit and a set of traps; but I do not care for fishing, and I dislike the idea of trapping; they wouldn’t belong. I mention them today because of my pipe. John- son was in this morning and spied it. “I never saw you smoke,” he said. ‘Thought you didn’t. Glad you do. It doesn’t seem quite right for a man not to smoke. I’m off tobacco until I’m twenty- one, on a bet. But I feel like losing the bet and getting a pipe sometimes. What’s your idea of smoking for boys?” I told him my idea was like his father’s; that it is by far better for a lad to keep a bet against it until he was of age, at least. In that way one would avoid any possible, even slight, damage to growth and development; and one would lay the foundation for a possible genuine temperance in the use of a thing which may, or may not, have a defi- nitely human value. The physiology, psychology and perhaps the philosophical background of tobacco has yet to be written. I am not at all certain that a custom, fast becoming universal among men, and threatening to invade womankind, is either good or evil. It is probably a little of both, and presumably more evil than good not because of its intrinsic self, as because of our natural tendency to intemperance in the use of all things pleasurable. “Well, I’m glad if you do smoke, you keep your pipe out there on your desk and not hidden away TREPa ak ACE BI OLY 159 somewheres, out of sight of us boys,’ was John- son’s parting word. 16 Treadwell brings Rover to class every day. Rover lies curled in his master’s lap, or asleep be- neath his chair, silent and comfortable. The de- votion of these two is touching. If the dog would behave as well elsewhere as here, I don’t see why he has to lie outside the door in the cold. I pass him there sometimes, and he looks up, big eyed, at me, entreating intercession in behalf of a place beside his master. ‘Please have Treadwell take that dog out of class, he bothers me,” piped up Tuffy Hyatt today. ‘““What’s the matter with Rover?” I asked. ‘Make me jealous. I want a dog, too. Seeing him there with Tread and both of them so happy, makes me kind of sick.” I wish every boy in my classes had a dog. I wish that dog would come to class. It would be up to the boy to maintain such order that the dog could stay, like Treadwell’s. I sometimes think a dog in the lap of a boy is worth more in point of boy-culture than all the English and history I can pump into a lad from behind my battered desk. At times I make a round of the little cabins down in camp at night. My welcome always seems warmer when a dog rises, with his master, to greet me in out 160 oD ED RSE AUT © 8) cy of the cold. ‘This bunking in your own cabin, among your traps on the wall, beside your black stove with water warming on it for cocoa between study-hour and taps, and your dog under the table; this is living! There is a movement before the faculty to es- tablish a dog-colony and systematize dogdom. ‘The tikes are to be kenneled individually, way down near the woods somewhere, that their howling may not disturb professorial sleep at night. A committee of boys is to be appointed to regulate the feeding and exercise of the dogs, en masse. I trust this motion will fail. I want the dogs to live at home with the boys. I shall exert all my small voting strength to that end. And I hope the dogs will continue to slip out into the moonlight sometimes and howl to their warm little hearts’ content. 17 Grady came back, as I expected he would. Said our talk had set him up. Told me what he’d been doing. Still a little worried about his sex life. Said he hadn’t got it under control. “Grady,” I said, “your trouble is largely physi- ological. You’re making it a mental struggle. You’ve got a wrong slant on sex. You still see something dangerous in dream-emissions, you still think you’re ruining your health when you bring on an emission consciously. That is about as gro- tesque as though you were terrified at dreaming about eating too much mince pie, or thought you Te EPR ALL.©. B Ony 161 were bound for the hospital if you overate on Welsh rarebit. ‘Mince pie and rarebit are not the best of foods. Dreams and masturbation are not the best forms of relief from sexual tension. But these things are not dangerous unless you become a glutton in their indulgence. Masturbation can sometimes grow into a harmful habit, just as drinking or smoking can. It is founded on an appetite stronger than anything except hunger. One sometimes feels as intense a desire to satisfy sex hunger as one does when he has missed three or four meals and wants a steak. It is unpleasant to starve either sex or food hunger; but we need fear neither until conditions are ex- treme. ‘The world says you must wait until you’re old enough to be married before you satisfy sex hunger normally. I guess the world is right in requiring a period of discipline, or training, like the American Indians did when they made a young man wait until he had built a house and killed a deer and seen a sign before he could choose a wife. Look at it that way. Do the best you can under a set of trial conditions. But don’t worry. “Tf you can, let dreams take care of your physi- ological sex life. If you sometimes go under to appetite and get relief consciously, look at it as though you had broken training for your team by eating pie, or smoking a cigarette. Cuss yourself out for a minute, then buck up and forget it and go ahead trying to work and play as best you know how while on the road to the place where your sex life 162 ‘DE. REA BOY can be normal. Just don’t let the thing haunt you or worry you. There’s nothing there worth worry- ing about, and the worst thing you can possibly do to yourself is to let sex get muddling around in your mind as such a mysterious and awful thing. In reality it’s as simple as digesting and eliminating food. Civilization has made it monstrously com- plex, mystical and terrifying, distorting our view and making us miserable. “Tf you want to think about it, come down and think out loud to me. That’s a safety-valve, as it were. I can talk to you in your present mood. I couldn’t before, when you were mushy. Just re- member that there’s probably not a grown-up healthy man that you know who has not gone through this same sort of thing, experienced what you have, wor- ried like you, and come out all right, just as you will. Now beat it and get some sleep before mid- night.” Such conversations between teacher and pupil usu- ally began, tritely enough, on tomorrow’s lesson, yesterday’s composition, or an immediate question concerning an event of today. Face to face in the seclusion of a firelit room, however, we soon felt an atmosphere of leisure and comradery which led speech away from “the petty round of irritating concerns. and duties’ and off into the greener pas- tures of the personal and intimate; from mind- stuff to heart-stuff, as it were. Differences of age, knowledge, position seemed to melt away into a chatty oneness between boy and boy. We felt at ete RAB AAC (BB OvY 163 home with one another. There was nothing of class- room tension, no need to consider what the other fellows might be thinking, not a trace of the com- petitive or exhibitionist element. A stray question or remark would break the ice for one of those friendly personal exchanges which reveal ourselves to one another as we truly are, not as we are sup- posed to be. ‘The word education, from educo, to draw out, fitted snugly to its simplest definition. CHAPTER VIII NAT WARREN READS NIETZSCHE In the days of one’s youth, in one’s period of ap- prenticeship, it is of far more importance to make oneself an effective instrument than it is to know precisely how and where the instrument is going to be employed. Temper the iron; sharpen the blade; and rest assured that the world will use it by and by. —S. P. SHERMAN. I SEEDS threw Nat Warren into my classroom one afternoon. Seeds was fat and burly. Nat was small and slight. The boy came through the door as though he had been hurled from a catapult. He literally tumbled into a chair in a rear corner of the room and sat looking out of the window, trying to conceal insistent tears. After a moment’s surprise we proceeded with our work. I said nothing to Nat and he said nothing to me. After class he bolted out of the room and vanished. For several days Nat came to class, sat gloomily in his corner and disappeared as soon as the session was over. Finally he stopped at my desk and asked me what I wanted him to do. ‘What do you yourself want to do, Nat?” I asked. 164 Nera REALL BAD TY 165 “T don’t want to do anything at all in this class,”’ he answered. ; “All right, Nat, continue doing nothing.” And the matter was ended for a time. A day or two later I met the boy on our campus and asked him if he had yet discovered what he wanted to do in the group, of which he was at least a silent part. He looked at me with the hard, cold eyes of a self- centered boy for a moment, then glanced off up the hill toward official headquarters and said: ‘“There’s just two things I want to do. One is to quit this school. ‘The other is to beat up Mr. Seeds. I'd like to smash his face.” ‘Why don’t you do one or both of the things you’d most like to do, Nat?” The lad looked back at me registering surprise and incredulity. “Td run away if it wasn’t for my dad. He’s sent me here, and it would hurt him if I beat it. He’s been mighty good to me and I don’t want to hurt him. And I’m not big enough or strong enough to smash Seeds.”’ ‘Would you like to be strong enough to lick Mr. Seeds? If you thought you could do it, would you try to get that strong?” “Sure I would. I’d work ten years on it.”’ “All right, Nat, begin with a bit of work for English. Come to my room after dinner. [I'll give you a book about Theodore Roosevelt, telling how he got strong because he was sick and tired of being weak. Read that and then we'll talk about the next 166 LE a Raman BIO yy: step. Write me a letter, or a composition, some- time, about the school and the teachers, and about why Mr. Seeds threw you into my class as he did. Perhaps there are two sides to this. Id like to know the whole story.” Nat came in the evening. Besides the Roosevelt biography, I gave him several copies of a physical culture magazine, suggesting that he look them through. I do not think he quite believed I could be serious about getting strong so that he could realize his belligerent ambition. His glance was a trifle furtive, but I caught hope in it also, the hope that he had found a friend. He left me with the first real smile that I had seen upon his face. There followed from this fireside chat a series of adventures in friendship and teacherhood, covering ten years in time and thousands of miles in space. Were I a novelist instead of an amateur in educa- tion, I should turn Nat’s story into a counter- plotted romance of intense personal relationships between boy and teacher, boy and father, boy and girl, boy and woman, boy and boy. Suffice it in this book to touch only on a few facets of the lad’s career. ‘They throw bright glints of light upon certain influences which school has upon the evolving character of youth. Of all the: mercurial, ubiquitous, versatile, kalei- doscopic kids I ever knew, Nat was the apex and champion. Two years after his resolve to get strong and “beat up Seeds’’ this erstwhile sallow, TH NRO AL, «BOY. 167 nervous, somewhat sickly youth was helping me teach swimming to a bunch of boys. He taught them boxing also, and trapeze, soccer, football, hockey, wrestling, jiu-jitsu and gymnasium stunts. His muscles were hard as a full blown motor tire. His nerves were quick as those of a squirrel. His smile was almost perpetual. He incarnated a contagious euphoria that spread out on all sides among the boys and made him a perennial center of active en- thusiasms. He no longer thought of smashing Seeds. He now enjoyed the thrill of being strong, as boys go, and of putting strength into vigorous action among his fellows. Pointing at Seeds across the campus one day, he smiled and said: ‘Now that I feel as though I could lick him, I don’t want to. It’s better to be friends. He’s not half so bad as I thought.” II With increasing physical strength there came to Nat a growing restlessness and wanderlust. He stuck valiantly to his self-imposed training but in the period between school and summer-camp he caused Seeds to come to me, saying: “I told you so. I said you couldn’t keep that kid at work. He’s a vagrant in body and mind. Why you want to try to make a councilor out of such material I can’t see. Now you'll get just what I mean.” For Nat had disappeared. I found him in a hotel 168 CSET Heats roman aabs COSY: running an elevator: “God! Mr. Hamilton, just had to get away for a while. Be back before camp opens. Going to stick to my job. Just must havea change after such a dose of school. Foolishness but it'll do me good. I’ll come back. Don’t tell I’m here.” And the lad was off with two fat ladies and a thin man into the upper regions of his new domain. He did come back. Before the summer was gone he had won over Seeds, who offered him a job during the following school term as director of gymnasium work. All Nat had needed was being believed in, being trusted where he was not understood. His quick, temperamental somersaults, his blundering into places where cautious pedagogues feared to tread and his explosive emotional outbursts over right and wrong as he saw them led one sometimes to doubt the soundness of his heart. I had taken a chance on trusting that boy, believing in him through whatever happened for as long as my patience would last. It was sorely strained sometimes. Once or twice it almost snapped. For a time it became part of a real endurance test in teacherhood and friend- ship. I have always rejoiced that my patience won. Nat has proved to me through years of struggle and turmoil in the gradual integration of a strong and positive character that a boy is a creature worth trusting and forgiving not seven times, but seventy times seven times. Again and again he has brought home to me the partial truth of those homely lines: TER EAL BOY 169° “Better trust all and be deceived, And weep that trust and that deceiving, Than doubt one heart, that, if believed, Had blessed one’s life with true believing. “‘Oh, in this mocking world too fast The doubting fiend o’ertakes our youth: Better be cheated to the last Than lose the blessed hope of truth.” My relationship with this boy has involved very much of the same feeling that one would experience in handling a porcupine. He has bristled with mis- takes of both feeling and judgment toward the world of his fellows like a prickly-pear. But those of you who have tasted the luscious heart of a tuna when thirsty on a horseback ride across a desert know that one can well forgive the fruit its protective habiliment of vicious little thorns. So, too, with Nat. Through all his primitively defensive carapace of belligerent and egoistic reactions toward his fel- low-kind, I have felt the truth which Emerson spoke for us when he said: “All young persons thirst for a real existence for a real object—for something great and good which they shall do with their heart. Meanwhile they all pack gloves, or keep books, or travel, or draw indentures, or cajole old women.” So with Nat. He thirsted for something great and good that he might do with all his mind, and with all his heart, and with all his soul. Nat was quintessentially boy. He was of the 170 TER Le BON energic, restless, experimental stuff that makes boot- leggers and foreign missionaries, gamblers or fa- natics on social reform. He believed, doubted, ac- cepted, tested, and rejected things with equal vigor. He was a darting, blundering intellectual chaos dur- ing his early adolescent years but, mothlike, he seemed ever fluttering fitfully toward a light. Curt- osity led him and self-will drove him on. At Inter- vale he set up a barber-shop and did violence to the boy hair crop. He ran a clandestine store where one might buy cookies, sweet drinks and junk. Ex- pert at matching pennies and Yankee trading he was always relatively affluent. He taught table-manners by fining his fellows a nickel for every error of eti- quette. Afflicted with a huge boil, he exhibited it to curious youth at a penny a look. Boys who made bowls, candlesticks, paper-cutters and ink-wells at the metal shop found a ready purchaser for their wares in Nat who resold them at double their cost or gave them away with éclat. Dissatisfied with the school food, he rode freight cars to town and brought back commissary supplies for himself and his fellows at risk of life or limb. Studying only enough to “get by,” he yet came to me often witha deep curiosity for light upon things obscure or irri- tating to his unfolding mind. Left-handed, Nat disliked writing. Compositions or letters were a dread. Finally I elicited a good piece of writing from the lad. I asked him what he would most like to talk about at that particular HHS READY BOY Tr minute. He said: ‘This place and its teachers; but I can’t do that, you wouldn’t let me write what I think.” With my promise that his product would remain a secret between us, he scrawled out a boyish indictment of authority such as a teacher seldom sees. Years afterward the boy’s father produced this effusion from a box of precious letters and asked me to read it to him. I had completely for- gotten its text, remembered its spirit, the same spirit of rebellion against authority as made us revolt against taxation without representation, and was later incarnated in the tyrannies of Kaiser William and Mitchell Palmer. But its major theme was an invective against unbelief. ‘“T don’t care much about Seeds swatting me on the head or firing me into that room but I hate for him not to believe me when [ tell him my father said I didn’t have to take any English, that’s what hurts me most.” This composition, of some eight close-packed pages, broke the ice. It liberated boy-thought into written boy-word. ‘Thereafter writing was easier and more pleasant, a channel of expression, a safety- valve, a confessional, a weapon of defense. ‘This led me to shift from suggesting subjects for written work in class, and to ask for written expressions of emo- tion. The shift seemed to take us from exercises in memory and chirography into crystallizing on paper a sheer spontaneity of spirit. When some- 172 SHER A LB OY thing was not ready to bubble over, inkwise onto paper, we waited until it was. Ill My boys browsed in their reading. I believed they would read whatever really caught their inter- est and kindled their imagination. Bernard Shaw once told Henri Bernstein, that “you must be care- ful what books you give to adults, for they may be corrupted; but children may read anything. Chil- dren up to the age of sixteen may read anything and everything. After that age their books should be carefully chosen for them.” I felt this exagger- ated dictum to be true only in so far as my boys felt free to discuss their reading with us oldsters who perhaps have gained somewhat of a perspective on life. A book like Jurgen, however, would be about as intelligible and as interesting to a fourteen-year- old girl as the book of Revelation and would hardly need to be discussed at all. I was surprised, how- ever, when Nat, sixteen years of age, brought Zarathustra down to my fireside and opened it at a page which he had diligently scored with red crayon. “Verily, not in backworlds and redeeming blood- drops; but in the body do they also believe most; and their own body is for them the thing in itself. Hearken, my brethren, to the voice of the healthy body; a more upright and pure voice it is . . . per- fect and square-built; and it speaketh of the mean- ing of the earth.” THE REAL BOY 178 He sprang to his feet, snapped the book together, waved it twice around his head, then whirled into a waiting chair, exclaiming: “Gosh! isn’t that good cospel? Isn’t that better than Sunday-school? Lis- ten!” ‘Passion for power: but who would call it passion, when the height longeth to stoop for power! Verily, nothing sick or diseased is there in such longing and descending !”’ “This fellow is hard, Mr. Hamilton. Hard as rocks. No Y. M.C. A. mush about him. [ like this bird. Didn’t know philosophers talked like that. Always thought they haggled about the fourth di- mension or something. This fellow talks about life. Why don’t folks like him? Was he a German? Did he really cause the war?” I looked at the clear- eyed lad, sitting tensely on the edge of my big chair, one hand gripping the arm-rest, the other clench- ing the book as though it were a missile about to be hurled, and replied: ‘Tm glad you found Nietzsche. Fits your present mood. Lots to be assimilated from him if inter- preted aright. Great poet. Likely to be misread, like Darwin. One can apply him all wrong. Some folks need a bit of his iron in their system. I don’t think that you do. You’re hard enough. Too hard in spots. And you haven’t learned the hardness of what folks call the Golden Rule. Just try that out literally for a day. See if it isn’t as hard as any 174 TR OR BA TB Oy: of Nietzsche’s aphorisms. See if it isn’t happier, too. I’m all with you for the strong body, and for the earth-things; but don’t get it into your head that being a Christian is mushy. ‘The Y is partly a product of Christianity and partly of churchianity. It has its soft and mushy spots, but it carries a harder backbone than you think. You know I am not much of a churchman, Nat. I talk to you not in terms of church or philosophy but of friendship. I should like to see you mix a little of the gospel of St. Mark with your newly discovered gospel of the superman. ‘There are different orders and quali- ties of power. I should like to talk to you about them some day when we have more time.”’ Years later, when we read Nat’s composition to- gether, his father said tome: ‘I believe at’ was Nietzsche who formed my boy’s philosophy. I see in his thought and action so much of the will to power, so much of primitive, caveman hardness coy- ering whatever of finer spirit there is in him. Why should a young man come in contact with such ideas? Where did he find Nietzsche? What is the anti- dote?”’ In watching Nat’s meteoric career through ado- lescence into manhood, I wondered often if we hu- mans are not relatively immune to any ideas other than those which fit our own type and temperament. I saw in Nat’s mind a perpetual battle-ground be- tween conflicting sets of ideas. If he heard, on Sun- day: “Blessed are they that mourn,” he read on Agi vB, BAe: BeOvye 175 Monday: “I am hostile to the spirit of gravity, deadly hostile, supremely hostile, originally hostile!” If the lad went to church, he came to me afterward to read to me with delight: “Oh, just look at those tabernacles which those priests have built for them- selves! Churches they call their sweet-smelling caves! Oh, that falsified light, that mustified air! Where the soul may not fly aloft to its height! Only when the clear sky looketh again through ruined roofs, and down upon grass and red poppies on- ruined walls—will I again turn my heart to the seats of this God.”’ While, of the clergy: ‘‘As corpses they thought to live; in black draped they their corpses; even in their talk do I still feel the evil flavor of chatnel houses.’ And of good or evil: ‘‘As if there were but one foot-bridge to the future!”’ Nat was essentially sensitive to ideas; but he had no use for grave ones, for solemnity, for any but active, sparkling, happy ones. ‘Since humanity came into being, man hath enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brethren, is our original sin!” How deftly, how snugly, such a sentence as this would square with the mind of such a resiliently plastic organism of muscle and nerve as Nat’s! He was one of those whom Thomas a Kempis describes as companions of Christ’s table, but not of his absti- nence; who desire to rejoice with him, but not to suffer with him; who would follow him to the break- ing of bread, but not to the drinking of the chalice of his passion. He was the stuff which Joseph Con- 176 A REALE BOs: rad has so remarkably crystallized in the hero of his story, “Youth.” He fought his fears and his slumps, and laid them. He sprang back always into the buoyancy of spirit which a thoroughly healthy body creates. Yet his ego (if there really is such a thing) seemed to harden perceptibly under the concept of a will-to-power, and of an end justifying a means. ‘This worried me, as his teacher, for I was not immune, as Nat was, to gravity and felt my- self afflicted with a sort of proselytic interest in the welfare of his soul. I wanted him to be exultantly happy, but I had learned, from my Stockbridge- Pollock days that indeed there is more than one foot- bridge to one’s future. Nat was typical of the genus Boy, but he was an exaggerated type, emphatic and spectacular in most of the qualities that make up boyhood. He was a good laboratory specimen, as it were, in which to study the psychology and educa- tional possibilities of adolescence. I could almost see ideas at work in his brain, and I could watch for and note results of ideas in action, in growth of judgment, in perspective and feeling toward life. My influence as a teacher was tested hard in this boy. ‘The artistry of teacherhood was tried and years later, when I talked with Nat’s father, I felt that somehow it was found wanting. ‘Thus far you seem to have failed to introduce my boy to the life of the spirit,’ said Mr. Warren. “He still lives in a cave and comes out with a club. I believe the finer qualities are there. His mother AE Geo? ROW AL Ta". B © yg Wi, and father have discovered the higher happiness of the spiritual world, the world of sympathy and ideals. Both have lived in it and found it more joyous a place to live than anywhere else. Why has not Nat ever journeyed there? I am saddened at his will-to-power, his seeming insensitivity to finer things. Especially am I saddened when I think of the old agaoce me her fruit talleth not/far from the tree.” Yet I had introduced Nat again to the New Testament, I had exposed him to Thomas a Kempis, | I had reasoned with him by firelight, I had argued with him belligerently on our walks together. Years after our Intervale days he said to me: “Logically I get your point of view. I see something in it. I[ think you’re right. But I feel the other way. Can’t help it. Nothing has been able to take the place of the ideas of strength, will, power and hardness away from me. Guess I’m a selfish cuss. All I can say is that | am grateful that you gave me an anti- dote for this sort of thing. One needs to know the other side. ‘That’s only good sportsmanship. It has helped me keep steadier than I might have stayed, given me perspective, balance. I sometimes wish I could feel toward the golden rule the way I do toward the will to power. It simply doesn’t work on me that way! I guess ideas fit us for what we are deep down inside, don’t they?” At Intervale Nat was the only boy who, to my knowledge, read Nietzsche. I believe he shared his copy of Zarathustra with Amo his cabin mate. But 178 EE RE AG BOY I got no reactions from that son of a somewhat mystical astronomer. As for the other boys, their reading was in other pastures and only a few pre- cocious youngsters and three or four of the older boys well on toward the end of high-school days showed signs of interest in philosophy from books. Let this chapter on Nat Warren, then, be a bridge between my chats with boys by firelight and ember- glow and our acquaintance together with books. CHAPTER IX ON THE WAY OF BOYS WITH BOOKS The intellect will always profit by the acquisition of any knowledge whatsoever, for thus what is use- less will be expelled from it, and what is fruitful will remain. It is impossible either to hate or to love a thing without first acquiring a knowledge of ite —lLEONARDO DA VINCI. I In our Intervale library the boys read ‘‘Popular Science,’ ‘‘Popular Mechanics,” ‘‘The Outlook,”’ ‘The Independent” and the “Literary Digest.” In their rooms I found stray copies of “Snappy Stories,” ‘The Cosmopolitan,” “‘Detective Stories” and ‘“The Smart Set.” Mr. Mencken philosophized in the latter at this time. Some of the older lads enjoyed the wine of his occasional wit and the perplexing smoke of what they called his “hard-boiled” attitude toward contemporary life. Most of the boys did not like his points of view, but they read them, and they thought and talked about them. Years later some of these boys bought Mencken’s little essays in book form, or borrowed mine. They seemed to share my own feeling toward them. It was akin to the physical sensation I experienced one 179 180 |UD HGR ALS Bi sy; day when eating vanilla ice-cream covered with beef- gravy on a bet. Mencken temporarily upset one’s sense of values. He would ask, for instance, ‘‘What causes men to be faithful to their wives: habit, fear, poverty, lack of imagination, lack of enterprise, stu- pidity, religion? . . . Why are we all so greatly affected by statements that we know are not true? e.g. in Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, the Declaration of Independence and the CIII Psalm.”’ He would say things so contrary to our historic texts; as of Lincoln for instance: “One hears in the Sunday-schools that Abe was an austere and pious fellow, constantly taking the name of God in whispers, just as one reads in the school history-books that he was a shining idealist, holding all his vast powers by the magic of an inner and ineffable virtue. Imagine a man getting on in American politics, interesting and enchanting the boobery, sawing off the horns of other politicians, elbowing his way through primaries and conventions, by the magic of virtue! Abe, in fact, must have been a fellow highly skilled at the great art of gum- shoeing. . . . His official portraits both in prose and in daguerreotype show him wearing the mien of a man about to be hanged; one never sees him smil- ing. Nevertheless, one hears that, until he emerged from Illinois, they always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of inescapable record that his career in the State legislature was indistinguish- able from that of a Tammany Nietzsche.” WHEY (REAE -B Oy, 181 In boy language the two attitudes of mind which would most frequently arise from a case of this kind would be: ‘‘Him! he wasn’t so perfect as we’ve been made to believe he was!”’ And: “Gee! what a good job he did with himself in spite of what he had to go through!” ‘The first reaction would of course be the most common. To lead to the second viewpoint is a teacher’s most frequent job. It has been a delight to me quite often to help reconstruct a hero with a boy after an attack of iconoclasm or of doubt. With any attempt at censorship of knowl- edge, as an easy way out of such a taxing piece of work as reconstruction sometimes involves, I have almost religiously had nothing to do. I recall my ire when, to get Herndon’s “Lincoln” from the Boston Public Library I had to go to a man of influence and have the book pried loose from the shelf expurgatorius by special edict. I saw and see no reason why any American boy should not know how Lincoln escaped by so small a margin his first entrance upon matrimony. I recall with amusement my first acquaintance with the fact that Washington had red hair, and see no reason why any brick-top of a school kid should not point with pride to this historic circumstance. That Walt Whitman was an old bachelor who gave to the world five or six ille- gitimate children as well as a volume or two of poems may be a slightly different matter. I see no reason why we should deliberately acquaint our youngsters with the domestic and ex-domestic rela- 182 Dy EPEC RT AT. Gry tions of great poets like Whitman, or great novelists like Wells, or charming intellectual gymnasts like Mr. Mencken. By their works ye shall know them for what they are to the world, and as for our boys and girls, the less they are acquainted with Havelock Ellis’ ‘Studies in the Psychology of Sex,”’ and the better they know the spirit and letter of his “Little Essays on Love and Virtue” the richer will be the background and the stronger will be the foundations of their beginning life’s adventure in pursuit of hap- piness. This, at least, was my attitude toward my boys in relation to their reading. I preferred that they know that Amy Lowell occasionally wrote good verse than that she was supposed to smoke cigars in her bathtub, but if they stood upon a pile of gossip and peeked over the transom of her bathroom, I tried to turn that experience into something as con- structive as I could. That the day-dreams, the ambitions, the resolu- tions and adolescent philosophy of my boys were touched deeply by their reading I have had occa- sional proof and very frequent intimation. The romantic chivalry of Tennyson I have seen strike root into most unpromising mental soil. Neihardt and Masefield and Conrad have kindled imaginary epics in boy-souls that have worked toward, if not into, a vital realization in life’s adventure. The poetry of Nietzsche most vibrantly touched Nat and the manner of its working within him reminds me of what Professor Sherman has pointed out regard- PLA eR CAT, 1B ny, 183 ing Sir Philip Sidney who, “following Aristotle, placed poetry above history and philosophy be- cause of its power to kindle will to action; because of its superior potency in the formation of char- acter and in leading and drawing us to as high a per- fection ‘as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodgings, can be capable of.’ ”’ I remember so well the evening which brought Polixander to my hearthside. He read Robert Ser- vice aloud while I sketched in charcoal from plaster casts. Coming to the lines: “And hunger, not of the belly kind, that’s banished with bacon and beans; But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means. He asked: ‘‘Were you ever hungry like that? Is wanting to be in love just another way of being hungry?” I laid aside my charcoal and took from my shelf a much lent copy of Luther Gulick’s ‘‘Dynamic of Manhood” in which we read together of the several hungers of man: the hunger for food, for friends, for woman, and for God. The power of that book lies in the fact that Doc- tor Gulick was primarily a poet, and only afterwards a physician, a reformer, an educator and an or- ganizer. Polixander, a tall, awkward, sensitive, hard-working Russian Jew devoured it as a hungry boy would end a caramel pie. It fitted his type of 184 THE (READ BOY mind. Yet, too, it fitted Nat’s, and if ever there was a physical and mental contrast between two boys of seemingly opposite types, I had one here. The very vividness of their contrast led me to wonder again about one’s predilection or immunity to ideas, and to hope that at least a few of the highest and finest conceptions to which humanity is heir might fit equally well the hard-fisted, plunging, erratic and feudal Nat and the open-handed, reticent, studiously consistent and socialistic Polixander. But do not mistake me. My fireplace did not become a psychological laboratory. It remained a place of friendship, and my speculations came after- wards, in retrospect. If it partook at all of lessons or teacherhood, it was only in the old Greek sense of schole, leisure, and leisure to be oneself, spon- taneous and unafraid. II My concern was with what a book might lead a boy to think and feel and do, not with what he could remember about its content. Naturally I was at sword-points with college entrance examinations. They test memory and fragmentary knowledge, not feeling or wisdom. ‘They are aimed at a boy’s head and not at his heart. I was not averse to testing memory, or probing for scraps of knowledge; but these impending exams seemed constantly to shunt us off, as teacher and student, from what I believed eee RE ATs Bi iy 185 was education for life. Yet Stanley Hall, one of the most radical of America’s educators, wrote me: “You are up against a monstrosity and tyranny which enslaves our whole secondary system. There would be danger that your school would be dropped from the accredited list, and that would lose it students. It would have to go over to the indepen- dents, who are out in the cold, and the steam roller would go triumphantly over you as though nothing had happened.” This letter came on a day when I snatched from my smaller boys that thick, ugly, stiff-jointed, scratchy and utterly imbecile “Mother Language’”’ text and consigned it to my repudiated book-shelf. This merciless rhetoric was a crime of violence against every tender cell in a boy’s brain. It seemed to me about as useful an instrument for the cultiva- tion of a boy’s spirit as a pair of pliers or a crow- bar would be in the growing of a carnation. ‘Why don’t you write a better text yourself?” Seeds asked, as he found me stuffing those dreary volumes into the darkest corner I could find. But I wanted no text at all. I wanted my boys to read good books, to write spontaneous letters, to speak straight and clear while standing on their feet. I thought that it was up to me as a teacher to draw these boys into wanting to do these things. I felt a desire to teach, as though teaching were an instinct within me irksome of bookish inhibitions. ‘This hid- eous printed monstrosity seemed to lie, sluggish and 186 OH RAG ALTON BIO, slimy across my path. It seemed to have invaded my classroom like a cuckoo in the nest of a robin. It didn’t belong. So, too, though less poignantly, did college examinations seem to shove themselves into my way, and into the path of my pupils. I resented them, but I had to face them and deal with them. It was evident that I must compromise. My problem was how to compensate for such a compromise, how, in a measure, to teach boys to live and to learn about some of the very finest things in human evolution while at the same time cramming them for college. How could I make Burke interesting? How could I humanize Carlyle? Were the dates in Myers’ ‘History’? memorable for more than mere figures? Would it be possible to squeeze one single micro- scopic drop of emotion from Brander Matthews? Could we not enjoy “Twelfth Night” without worm- ing our way through its notes and concordance at the back of our texts half as thick as the whole book? The genus boy is a laughing animal, not a solemn mole. Valpo McGee was one of these laughing animals. Reckless, rollicking, devil-may-care, fizz-water and dynamite lad that he was, he scoffed at ancient forms and classic pomp, insistent that story, poem, essay or play come down to earth and speak to him in his own language. Shakespeare, bosh! Milton, hell! Macaulay, devil take him and his like! Yet when we read “Twelfth Night” as a comedy, he settled back into his chair and chuckled merrily with the rest Caan, SR AMIC | (BO) 'Y: 187 of us from beginning to end. We became actors and critics and audience in one. ‘These chaps aren’t so bad,” said Valpo, “once you get next to them and what they’re driving at. It’s the getting at it that makes me sore. This story is all right if you don’t have to think about remembering all the junk in the notes about words and meanings. In fact I rather like it.’ The approach to which he had been ac- customed was that of making Shakespeare an instru- ment of philology, an archeological hunting ground for mummified English words. Yet when a boy spontaneously questioned the meaning of a word, when he himself was interested in getting at a defini- tion, lexicography became fun. In one of the notes in “Twelfth Night,” for instance, cropped up the word eunuch. Don wanted to know what it meant. The remainder of our class period became a dis- cussion in physiology. I drew a rough diagram on the blackboard of our system of ductless glands, starting with the pineal and pituitary and coming down through thyroid, parathyroid, thymus, adrenals and gonads. A crude blood-vessel system in red chalk, sprinkled with im- mensely magnified symbols of the various hormones in varying colors lent me a graphic background for an extemporaneous lecture. The boys were interested in the physiology of in- ternal secretions, but they were still more keenly alive to the mental influences emanating from this interrelated system of chemical laboratories within 188 NUH EW Re AL eB Oy; us. That one’s moods, dreams, ideas, impulses and emotions are related to an interior and silently mys- terious chemistry, seemed quite astounding. Capons, oxen, horses, geldings and eunuchs we reviewed briefly in their historical and physiological setting with reference to interstitial cells and as a background for the point of greatest interest. That sO many secondary sexual characters, not only phys- ical but mental and spiritual as well are definitely related to the normal functioning of a certain group of microscopic cells was a revelation to nearly all of these lads. ‘hey were not at all ignorant of ordi- nary sex functions. They were not prudish or re- ticent about them, or seemingly self-conscious in their discussion. Here we had struck a new theme con- cerned with the subtleties of their inward mechanism and I welcomed the chance which William Shake- speare gave me to share with the boys the little that I happened to know. I needed to point no moral. The missionary tendency within me, a family heritage, is forever tempting me to spoil a story, or a set of facts with an unnecessary appendage of morality although I know so well that our best morality springs unbidden and unconscious and indirectly from any vital truth. I counted it, therefore, a successful day when I let a story carry its message in its own way to whoever would receive it. I have never yet found in our reading a subject related directly to sex which, when met without any RoE AL eB OW 189 undue emphasis and treated squarely as a matter of course like baseball or pie, did not lend itself to as unruffled a discussion as any other topic of interest. Youngsters of English VIII went with me to see a spectacular movie called “Intolerance.”’ ‘The lurid sex element seemed to shed itself from the pin- feathers of their dawning adolescence and their chief interest remained with battering-rams, crashing walls, beheaded men, springing catapults and pour- ing lead. They wrote about this movie afterwards for class-work. Women were almost wholly absent from their reporting. Frank, however, spoke of the woman taken in adultery, and in class he asked who she was, what she had done, and what Jesus had written about her in the sand. I told him and his classmates that adultery meant a woman’s living as a wife with a man who was not her husband, or a man’s living as a husband with a woman who was not his wife. Some Jewish men had found a woman guilty of this way of living and were going to stone her to death, according to Jew- ish custom. “But what did Jesus write in the sand?” Frank insisted. “YT don’t know,” I replied. ‘Probably nobody knows. He told those men that if any one of them had never done wrong, they might throw stones at the woman who had done wrong. ‘The story says that the men drifted away, leaving Jesus alone with the woman and writing in the sand with his finger. 190 | PH ERE AL. BOY Someone ought to write a story or a poem about that writing in the sand.” That was all. We returned to arrows, spears and shields. I felt that the job was done, that the question had been answered to boy satisfaction and that I need follow it no further at that time. Yet the hope remained that our discussion had stirred feeling. I hoped that it had led some boys to feel what tolerance is. Again, I believe I should have spoiled a bit of teacherhood had I[ talked about tolerance. Am I wrong? Is the church right in telling one of those wonderful old stories, and then spending an hour talking about its moral applica- tion? I remember pondering upon this theme very often while at Intervale. III If a wholesome book so held a boy that I had to speak to him three times and then poke him in the _ ribs to remind him that a bell had rung and he must away to algebra class I believe that book was an instrument of real education. I had to do that once to Treadwell, buried deaf to the world in ‘‘Bob, Son of Battle.” Such books as “Green Mansions” do their work that way, and ‘The Aztec Treasure House,” ‘““The Brushwood Boy,” ‘‘Les Miserables” and ‘The Three Musketeers.” I have never had to supplement the ringing of a bell with a poke in the ribs when a boy was reading Macaulay, Carlyle, ieotd eho) HN 2A Io’ 5B © AY: Igl Milton, Addison or even Shakespeare. Upon these ancient artists a teacher must work, as he must work with algebra or Latin. Most emphatically I am not “‘agin the classics.” Most positively I am not in favor of mere easily cheerful tasks for youth. I wish them to pray not for “tasks equal to their powers, but for powers equal to their tasks.’ But it is for the teacher, as artist, to create cheerful, happy attitudes toward such tasks as are timely to youth in its several ages, or nodes, and into which its soul will drive with a thrill of joy in the effort! Now the creation of attitudes is a job whose tools are furnished by the fledgling science of psychology. If modern psychology has made any definite, clear- cut contributions to the art of teacherhood, one of the most important is certainly the demonstration that the training of children toward attitudes, or sets of mind, consists largely in the acquirement of condi- tioned reflexes. The plasticity and moldability of those psychic tendencies which lie far deeper than perceptions and ideas is an age-old fact of startlingly new significance in the light of a practical technique of approach and procedure. This is not a book on psychology, and so I refer anyone not already famil- iar with the role of the conditioned reflex in relation to attitudes or rudimentary philosophies of life, to that splendid book of William Burnham’s, “The Normal Mind.” That volume stands out above the 192 PIPE REE BOY rank jungle of recent psychiatric writings, a tower of refuge in the sunlight, like Watson’s ‘‘Behavior- ism.” Take a boy’s attitude toward the classics, for in- stance. No one is educated, for intellectual life at least, who has not a working acquaintance with Mil- ton, Carlyle, Burke, Dante and their fellow lights of bygone days. The school introduces a pupil to these luminaries either as boresome enemies or as possible friends. There is also a middle course, that of ac- quainting our youngsters with these great ones as dumb-bells, Indian clubs, rings, bars and gymnasium ropes by which to get in trim for an event of mental athletics, the passing of college exams. I tackled Burke this way. After reading aloud to my class a few pompously circumlocuitous paragraphs from the great speech on conciliation, I looked up and said, quite seriously: ‘‘Now isn’t that a splendid piece of clear-cut, graphic picture-writing? Don’t you fairly see the things he’s talking about as though they were on a movie screen?’ ‘To which Jobbie, with bogus seriousness in his eye, responded: ‘Yes, sir!” Abbott, however, knowing me better, spoke out what he thought. ‘That stuff is more like blowing smoke into your brain than filling it with ideas. Didn’t I read somewhere that the fellows in Parlia- ment who listened to Burke went to sleep? I’m sure I should now if you'd keep on reading.” MeSH eats ALL B GYy: 193 “Say,” added Chamberlain, “if that stuff had been read to us last year, the air would have been full of erasers and chalk. If we thought you were serious you couldn’t get away with it. Why have we got to go through with that sort of thing?” I said that were it not that college entrance ex- aminations are devised as though to avoid testing one’s real grasp of a subject as a whole, and merely attempt to trip up memory with some stick or stone of isolated fact, I would make Burke simple for them within a half an hour. I believe that entrance exams are growing less vicious, if not distinctly more in- telligent since my Intervale days; but leafing through them then, I was appalled at the way they choked thought and strained memory for utterly irrelevant details. Facing the boys, I said that I would ac- quaint them with Burke disrobed of his cloudy elo- quence and in plain United States. For I believed in Burke and in the job he undertook. It seemed a shame that American boys should know Burke as a mere phrase factory. So, reducing his oration to such an approach to Bruce Barton English as I was able, I voiced it forth from behind my desk and failed, at least, to put anyone to sleep. We had the gist of it, and we should have been allowed to remain content with that. It was necessary, however, to tackle the thing as a gymnastic job, for these boys were headed toward college and must answer ques- tions. So I put the original text up to them as a 194 MEL WEG RRNA BC) oY discipline for mental muscles, to be faced and put through in the spirit of the training camp. They gritted their teeth, dug their toes into the ground and we conquered that particular epic in less than a week of hard work. Karl alone stood out against my methods. Karl was sixteen, and a typical Teuton. Round head, flaxen hair, gray-blue eyes, tough muscled and hum- ming with energy, he was all for formal discipline, drill, drive, master. He said [ violated true teacher- hood in my tactics. Declared that college require- ments are products of evolution, the best tests that mankind has yet devised for his fellow-man’s men- tality. One should learn to vault them with the stout pole of his disciplined learning, leap over into college as one would clear a fence. He said that I was not honest in my role as a teacher, that I was not loyal to the ethics of my profession when I became a vocal pony to make Burke easy for the boys. His candor and frankness charmed me, and I breathed a prayer of thanksgiving that I was such a teacher as could be approached so bluntly with the rude truth as a lad saw it. “Karl,” I said, “your attitude toward Burke and the college exams is far different from that of these American boys. You have brought over with you a military trend of mind, a willing submission to con- stituted academic authority, and unquestioning belief in the solid rightness of established educational tra- Ee REAL BOY 195 ditions. You ask me to tell you what to do, and then make you do it. There is a certain value in your set of mind. It would certainly be easier for me as a teacher looking forward to showing boys into college if they would all approach this question in your way. But these fellows are of a different breed. They doubt, they question, they demand to be shown. Their mental attitude is still in the mak- ing. It is for me not merely to give them instruc- tion, but to try and help them to a point of view.” ‘You Americans,” he replied, “are wonderfully wasteful. ‘These boys waste time as their mothers and your restaurants waste bread. You waste your time talking to thesé chaps. Why ask them what they think? Why not just tell them what to do? You are a teacher, you ought to know what their attitude should be; you should merely see that they live up to it. ‘hey are here to learn, you to teach.”’ Karl had read the Bible through three times, be- ginning almost as soon as he could read. He had translated parts of it from Greek into German and then into English. He had been preordained for the ministry, with Prussian precision of forethought and all his schooling had been classically formal. His attitude was that of the old-time scholar, the scho- lastic; hardly that of the philosopher, and certainly not that of the enlightened scientist forever asking how and why. He liked Carlyle. There is no doubt that Carlyle has given us a masterful and sympathetic introduction to Bobbie 196 UH BR ATS ROY: Burns. He has brought Mohammed out of the dis- tant desert and led him up to shake our hand. His picturesque, impressionistic splashings of color in celebration of the French Revolution are charming to a tough-minded and literary adult. But he was also a master at beclouding straight and simple thoughts in inky verbal clouds and time is too pre- cious a heritage of youth to be thrown away in ex- ploration among rhetorical nebule. We _ pass through this world but once. We were a group of human souls gathered together under the motto, ““To Teach Boys to Live,’’ and my own conviction was that the way to do so was to live right now and here. Part of our living must be with books. When a book proved, on the very actual test of reading it, to be little more than worm-powder, flying into our spiritual nostrils in choking whirlwinds and turning interest into gasps for breath I closed it and chose another. I had to trust the literary appetite of my pupils, their own taste and their own conviction of how things tasted. If Macaulay and Carlyle tasted bitter when served in small type, I tried to make them palatable by the spoken word, and in a measure succeeded. ‘True, my students marched into exami- nations and answered questions about books they had never actually read; but their answers hit the mark, hit it intelligently and with a background of real interest. Was my pragmatic approach and tech- gique unjust ? AGT eRe ATT B OLY, 197 IV For the lesser classicists I had little patience and no interest in behalf of my boys. College exams asked, ‘“‘Who was Cynewulff; what was the chief characteristic of Cedmon’s writings? What do you remember of Mandeville’s travels?” Let the col- leges ladle out these things to such of our youth as crave erudition, who are true antiquarians at heart. So with the minutiz of history. In this sense I feel that Henry Ford is right. Why remember Ameno- phis III, or Tushratta, King of Mitani, or even the cultured Nabonidus? Let us forget them after we have casually read about what they did or thought. Let them sink into the unconscious, their story a mere pin-point star in the nebulous massing of galaxy upon galaxy of minute impressions within our mys- terious soul. Let us read our classics or our histories as Wells and Van Loon wrote theirs, for an atti- tude, for an orientation, for a point of view, for a philosophy of life. Not what we learn about the story of mankind, but how we feel toward the story we are helping make today, based on our emotional impressions of what men and women have thought and done; this, it seems to me, is what our delving into books is for. “What have we to do With Kaikobad the Great, or Kaikhosru? Let Zal and Rustum bluster as they will, Or Hatim call to supper—heed not you. 198 AT Ba ROR ATS, 1B OY ‘Whether at Naishapur or Babylon Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.” Open with me a teacher’s copy of college entrance questions in English. Number one: ‘‘Write a brief character sketch of three of the following: Jarvis Lorry, Duke of Burgundy, John Ridd, Isabelle Coyle, Mr. Burchell, Gurth, Captain Brown, Jerry Cruncher, Squire Cass, Mrs. Dr. Primrose, Hepzi- bah Pyncheon, Jeremy Stickles, Cedric, Mrs. Jami- son, Beatrix, Mathew Maule, Priscilla Lammeter, Duke of Hamilton.” Now what does a hard-mus- cled, agile-minded son of an American business man want to write about Hepzibah Pyncheon or Jeremy Stickles? Or even John Ridd, for that matter, the only dynamically appealing character in this whole bunch of classic heroes. ‘The boys liked ‘Lorna _ Doone.” Some of them read Blackmore’s story word for word. But all of them preferred it told in installments by Karl Llewellyn beside an evening fire. As to writing an analysis of his character, I doubt if more than one or two would do so except under compulsion of dire necessity. Is there some deep esoteric reason, which I, as a teacher, cannot under- stand, why hundreds of hours of precious time should be devoted to the puppets of Thackeray, Addison, Goldsmith, or even Dickens and Scott for the sake of remembering their names and mental composi- DHE REAL BOY 199 tion? To read “Oliver Twist” for the fun of reading is enlightening. ‘To read and then to write a brief book review while the impression is warm is at least rational. But to read because the content of a book must be remembered against a far-off examination date makes unnecessary work out of something that should be joyous educational play. ‘There lies my principal objection, not to our classics, but to our method of approach. Even Isabelle Coyle and Mr. Burchell may be worth our time if taken just for fun! | If evolution is, in part, adjustment to environ- ment; if the telephone, the movie, the radio, the popular science magazines, the automobile and their kindred mechanisms are creating for us an environ- ment where, to survive, we must register a multitude of impressions quickly, in tabloid and concentrated form; then is it not the educator’s job to do in all departments what Wells and Van Loon have done for history? Such literary characters as our school children are still supposed to remember, amble with merciless slowness through thousands of pages of leisurely style and construction. Must the kids fol- low them with careful caution in order to be able to emit a stereotypically correct answer in imitation of another’s description, opinion or whim? Again let me say that I am all in favor of any child or youth devouring every word that Dickens ever wrote, or Thackeray, or even Addison if he genuinely thrills to the job and will miss his supper for it. But forced 200 ey ke Ab Ly. B Ory reading is fatal to an attitude of interest, of friend- liness toward books, and I still believe I was right in proposing to my boys that they give an author the benefit of only a hundred pages. If he failed by then to engage such interest as would carry his reader through with enthusiasm, he had better be dropped, perhaps to be returned to later on. In this way I believe that I got more real, intensive, lastingly memorable reading done by my handful of wild boys than is usually the case with youth of their caliber and age. And, what is infinitely more important still, I helped to build a friendly attitude toward books. All the foreign boys of my teacherhood days came to me with attitudes, with sets of mind, toward learn- ing, toward books, toward school which were posi- tive, and usually clear. They came to me with an open desire to learn. They came with a conviction, or an illusion, that what I would teach them was what they wanted and needed in their lives as my pupils. Not so with the average American youth who took books, school and teacher as an unescap- able matter of course, if not as a temporary affliction to be endured. I do not think that I have ever _ resented or lamented the latter viewpoint, I have merely seen in it an indication that we have failed, in America, to present schooling to our boys and girls as a thing of immediate, joyous interest with an understandable purpose and promise. ‘That is our job in the schools of tomorrow. THE REAL BOY 201 My foreign boys were receptive because they were full of illusions. They were almost reverent toward classical authority because the attitude was bred in their bone, as it were. They were surprised and even shocked at Henry Ford’s viewpoint of his- tory, and wondered how a man of that frame of mind could be so great a power in the land. These lads were partly of Karl’s opinion that our educa- tional scheme, and our college requirements and courses were founded upon the best elements which capped a long and progressive evolution. They be- lieved in the authority of Homer, and looked open- eyed upon me when I would listen to one of their American fellows commenting upon Greek myths, as Heth, for instance, when he exploded: “I can’t quite go this fairy-tale stuff. It gets my goat to read such nonsense. ‘These old guys may have believed all this, but what’s it got to do with us, and our edu- cation today?” I had recalled our text-book Odys- sey, with its antique style, its tediously long periods of description, and its slow progress of action. To the movie-minded boys it was a drudgery and, I thought, an unnecessary drudgery to plow through a sticky mud of words in order to get a vital human story. The simple, fluid story of the Odyssey in Bulfinch’s ‘“‘Age of Fable” was not only more read- able, but in every way better adapted to the mind of a modern boy. It gave us all the action, all the nomenclature necessary both for immediate enjoy- ment, and also for meeting almost any question that 202 He ORY EAR OBO might come from the college entrance board. With most of the boys it chimed in cheerfully enough, but Heth, and Murdo, and Jobbie remained obdurate disciples of their hero, Henry Ford. Kobayashi scullioned in our kitchen and came to me in the evening for special instruction in syntax and grammatical technicalities which I had difficulty in refurbishing against the hour of his courteous in- road upon my time. He was a fine looking, well built, gentlemanly Jap, always superlatively apolo- getic of his ignorance and density of mind, always keenly alive and alert to every phase of knowledge that we might consider together. Unlike my demo- cratic American lads, who would pound into our front hall in their hobnail boots direct from the barn, Kobayashi would always go first to his cabin, after the dishes were done, change to clean linen and shined shoes and come to me with a dim fragrance of sandalwood dbout him, as though he had stepped from some Buddhist temple. He would bring his tattered dictionary, thumb-worn and finger greasy, resembling some of those old family Bibles of the days when folk really read the Holy Book. “I read him through and through again,” he said one eve- ning. “I like him better as I do of books of the story, pardon me, better than I do of books of the story. I mark every word I do not remember of last time, pardon me, from last time. Excuse please, the greasiness, I sometimes go from kitchen to my cabin direct to look for a word I have heard and do THE REAL BOY 203 not know.” I borrowed that dictionary and showed it to all my classes through the day. I told them that here was a symptom of the kind of work which had put Japan so quickly into the front rank of na- tions in the world. Necker was my brightest pupil. He came from Canada where the schools put good English first and where, if this boy was a fair sample, they teach one how to study. Grammar, composition, literature, spelling and penmanship each in a separate class period were included in his eleven course program. Now, at Intervale, he must cram these subjects into four periods of forty minutes each per week. Yet despite this handicap, his method of study carried him not only through his task, but beyond its limits. He would deliberately block out the work according to what had to be done, stick to each separate job consistently until he was sure that he had mastered it, and then tackle the next. He went about his study dutifully, almost solemnly as though he were a ward nurse on duty. For Necker, education was for solid success in adult life. He looked forward to long pants and a roll-top desk, a stenographer and perhaps a chauffeur. He was ready, willing and even eager to pay the price. His attitude was inte- grated, his purpose was sure, his plan of action ad- justed to his desire and to his ability. Books were mere tools. Classics he would read as he would take a doctor’s prescription. He was game for any- thing that spelled progress toward success. 204, THE REAL BOY Restrepo, too, was a joy. Fresh from the tropics of Colombia, he proposed to me that we learn Eng- lish not through a primer, but by tackling Remsen’s chemistry right off the bat! I translate his Spanish, to which it was a keen pleasure to listen: ‘Why not learn the meaning of the terms I am going to use in technical school instead of the names you teach children? I will soon pick up cow and dog and knife and fork and spoon. Is it not as easy to remember one new word as another? Shall we not learn the more difficult words in our lessons, and leave the easy ones for the dinner-table and the campus?” His proposal delighted my soul, and we started im- mediately with Remsen. Halley, in his laboratory, backed my work in English, and the boy made rapid progress in both. The dizzy intertwistings and in- terminglings of our English words confused and puzzled the lad at first. Why spell read (past) and read (present) alike? Why pronounce the i in written differently from the iin write? Why change the 1 to o in wrote? I threw up hands in despair at the why; but responded as well as I could to the how. I wondered whether, if we sent our American boys to Colombia, and set them up against such difficulties as Restrepo had to contend with among us, they would evince as much energy and enthusi- asm for study. If so, we ought to revolutionize our whole educational scheme and pack all our boys and girls off to foreign countries. They would acquire their formal training in less than half the time it Mine AL BOY 205 takes them here. ‘The classics Restrepo read for ‘culture, for background. His attitude was one of deference toward the literature of all nations or peoples. He approached it with a somewhat re- ligious zeal. A few of my boys felt this way toward poetry, and it was in that field I found my greatest joy in boys with relation to books. CHAPTER X ON THE WAY OF BOYS WITH POETRY It was evidently a serious mistake to tell men and women that poetry would improve them. Perhaps when this fallacy is forgotten, the mass of men will appreciate good poetry again. —JoHN McClure. i PROFESSOR HALLEY dropped in for an omelet and a cup of tea by Kitty’s fire one evening. Such a Chesterfield of manners, diction, dress! His vocabu- lary, his enunciation, his precise mortising of words into crisp sentences made me feel that, as a teacher of English, I was a slang-slinging corrupter of the verbal morality of youth. Halley was uncannily prim, proper and precise. Picking a copy of Bob Service from my shelf, he skimmed through a few pages, walked over to where I stood and, pointing with his acid-stained finger to the lines: “The freedom, the freshness, the farness; O God, how I’m stuck on it all.” He exclaimed: ‘How can you possibly regard that as poetry, Mr. Hamilton? How can you wish your boys to become acquainted with an author who writes such banali- 206 etietor Ra ACL, ab Ory, 207 ties? They say you have introduced them to this Robert Service; but to what vulgarity!” I took the book from his hand and, turning a few pages, read: ‘“’There’s sunshine in the heart of me, My blood sings in the breeze; The mountains are a part of me, Ipmytellow, to theltreéscaes. Looking up, I saw the true nature-man sparkling in the professor’s gray eyes. “Is that all? Go on,” he said. I continued: “Then every star shall sing to me Its song of liberty, And every morn shall bring to me Its mandate to be free; “In every throbbing vein of me. I'll feel the glad earth call: O, body, heart and brain of me, Praise him who made it all!” ‘I beg your pardon,” bowed the courtly little naturalist. ‘I must send for that book. One is apt to come to such hasty conclusions. Only one wishes that a man who can write like that would be careful what he allows to get into print.” We discussed poetry far into the night. This chronic evolutionist finally conceded to me a wisp of rightness in my crude genetic philosophy. I be- lieved that savage boyhood could he led from Sam McGee to The Three Voices. I believed that be- 208 SOE RR ALL eB Ory, fore a lad could thrill to Kipling’s Recessional, he must go through some such stages of growth as might be represented by Gunga Din, Danny Deever, Mandalay, The Feet of the Young Men, Tomlinson, McAndrew’ s Hymn, and If. Just as there is every variety of response to a specific bit of poetry in any random group of boys; so does the individual response vary in accord with the period of development, or appreciative evolu- tion. Our standard school curriculum recognizes this, dimly. We admit that Mother Goose should precede The Lady of the Lake, and that Gray’s Elegy should come before L’Allegro or Comus. What our curriculum fails, as a whole, to realize is that: ‘We will not acknowledge that old stars fade or alien planets arise (That the sere bush buds or the desert blooms or the ancient well-head dries), Or any new compass wherewith new men adventure ‘neath new skies.”’ But I hold no brief against the curriculum so long as a teacher is free, as | was, to roam far afield and garner friendly poems for my lads wherever I willed. With this liberty to become acquainted with verse that made direct and sympathetic appeal to the mind and heart of boyhood before me, I could tolerate the discipline of reading Milton with my youngsters, or The Lays of Ancient Rome. Pr RoE AT. BOY 209 Brown and Millender came bounding into Kitty’s hearth-room one evening brandishing a pair of cotton-tail rabbits fresh from their traps in the swamp. Soon the quarry was fried in bread-crumbs and cut into steaming segments with a long hunting knife. ‘Please read us about Hugh Glass and his rabbit,” begged Brown, so I took down Neihardt’s epic and read: “He felt the gnaw of hunger like a rage. And once, from dozing in a clump of sage, A lone jackrabbit bounded. As a flame Hope flared in Hugh, until the memory came Of him who robbed a sleeping friend and fled. “The rabbit paused to scan the crippled bear That ground its teeth as though it chewed a root. But when, in witless rage, Hugh drew his boot And hurled it with a curse, the hare loped off, Its critic ears turned back, as though to scoff At silly brutes that threw their legs away.” This is the stuff boy dreams are made of. Nei- hardt fed the soul while Kitty satisfied the hunger of their bodies for roast rabbit. It was a joyous partnership. And do any of our classic models in prescribed literature show cleaner rhyme or clearer picture? Why not Neihardt and Masefield and John McClure on our lists for reading today? Must we await their death and canonization before our boys may listen to their music? Some boys at certain periods are, of course, to- tally and hermetically immune to poetic appeal, or 210 SECA Ea RELY ART BiCyay even to the tickle of a rhymy jingle. Such was Pa Comely, who came to me one day for a “piece of poem to quote on college exams.’’ I failed to get a ripple of interest in the jazziest of Kipling or the crassest of Service or the soupiest of Eddy Guest. Walt Mason failed me, and Whitcomb Riley, while Whitman almost passed muster because his lines did not rhyme. ‘I reckon I like that fellow better because he doesn’t twist regler sentences all up to make the tail words jingle and lose all the sense of what he’s sayin’ to yah.” We finally agreed that, for Pa, all poetry was equally bad and decided to learn some lines from Hamlet which, obviously enough, would be of real possible value upon exami- nation. Pa learned them dutifully and precisely and with a sense of real accomplishment. His interest in the memorized verbal form was genuine, his de- light in its mastery was apparent. Whether or not Pa, then a lovable old man of seventeen, ever reached a node in life of poetic appreciation, he had at least spent several hours of effort heartily and pleasantly on his job. II Circumstances, too, make a vast difference in a boy’s attitude toward verse. Maple sugar! I find written in my Interlaken diary. ‘“The trees are bleeding a drippy, translucent sweetness into shiny gallon cans. Lessons, thank God, are shelved for a while. We live in the woods, eb ORE AL BOW, Dit feed fires with brush, watch iron pots boiling, and sleep in blankets beside them upon beds of fallen leaves. “Last night Kit curled up beneath her poncho by the biggest kettle and told me to appoint watches until four of the morning when she would inspect the simmering sap. The watch-boys gathered quietly by the fire. Aggie, Baker, Frank and Castillo sat close by the chattering logs, looking upward now and then to watch the blue-gray wraiths of hardwood smoke go wandering off among the branches over-. head.” ‘Say!’ whispered Frank, “this would be the time I could listen to a poem and not get sick of it.” Whereupon I pulled from my pocket one of those beautiful little Japan Vellum books which Thomas Mosher used to print in Portland. ‘‘Let’s see if you can,” I said, and turned to: ‘The Bells of Youth are ringing in the gateways of the South: The bannerets of green are now unfurled: Spring has arisen with a laugh, a wild-rose in her mouth, And is singing, singing, singing thro’ the world.” Glancing at Frank’s face, I knew I could read all four verses, and continued. At the poem’s close I knew that I could read on through many pages of The Hour of Beauty. Never before had I tried reading Fiona McLeod with the boys. It would ud CELERY WRG Ee Aes, UB Oey; never do in a classroom. Bob Service, Kipling, Masefield and some of Neihardt are vigorous enough to survive that arid atmosphere; but even John McClure would wilt and wither there, and blow to dust like the powdered chalk upon our chairs and floor. And yet, out here by the firelight underneath the trees, my practical-minded young trapper, Frank, listened, wide-eyed and solemn, to: ‘“Wave, wave green branches, wave me far away To where the forest deepens, and the hill winds, sleeping, stay: Where Peace doth fold her twilight wings, and through the heart of day ‘There goes the rumor of the passing hours, grown faint and gray.” Memories of those Intervale bivouacs under the budding maples will be lifetime treasures to all of us, boys and grown-ups who made sirup and sugar to- gether in welcome of Spring. The poetry of wood- land and firelight, of starshine and moonglow, of rose-dawn and scarlet sundown were ours. And the fun of Herman. For,. like the traditional spot of humor on a dramatic stage, he walked among us, relieving tensions with a laugh. Herman, too, essayed the making of sugar. His gallon tomato-cans were scrubbed to immaculate brilliance. He had purchased the last word in shiny metal taps. His auger was sharp and oiled. His enthusiasm was wondrous to behold. But he worked alone instead of with the gang, and he was not a ett eR A Dy Ss Oe 213 dendrologist. His acquaintance with metals was wide and deep, but for wood he had scant use. That was for carpenters and lumbermen. A tree was to Herman atree. So, while good fortune led him at times to tap a sugar-maple, the law of chance di- rected his ignorance toward a variety of oak, beech, hickory and chestnut. If the boys had exercised a modicum of self-control, the poor man would have tried to boil his medley of conflicting saps into a rare new sirup. Ihe youngsters laughed too soon, however, and chagrin and disappointment ended a springtime experiment for this really deserving soul before its proper time. Of my poetry by firelight, Herman was tolerantly skeptical. “What for so much words? Words! Words! Let us do more things with our hands, and not so many with our tongues. A boy he needs to make things, not so much hear things. The poetry is for when one is old and must sit by his fire to keep warm.” Which reminded me of a little talk to my class- room boys by T. C. O’Donnell, editor of ‘‘Outing,” who blew in one day with a breath of the wonderful Dune country about him, and told us to read with an eye to old age. “I’m building a book-shelf for old age,” he said. “Things that I’ll want to read over again, things that never grow stale, but, like Benedictine, or Chartreuse, or Madeira, grow cheerier and mellower with time.” He did not ask the boys if they knew 214. AE Re ART 3B Oye what those good wines were; but skipped right along. ‘Joseph Conrad goes on that shelf, a volume at a time. (I never buy a complete set of an author’s works.) Conrad is monstrously different from most men who are writing today. Real men, real stuff there, boys; no movie wind-ups in flowers and kisses. You can’t forget his men and women. You'll want to meet them again, years after your first acquain- tance. And fairies? Don’t you believe in fairies? Too bad. They are very real to me, in books. Dun- sany’s ‘‘Book of Wonder”’ is on my shelf, and all his fairy-lore will be. What's the difference if there are no fairies outside of books? ‘There certainly are fairies between the covers, marvelous beings such as never could live in the everyday world outside. And poetry! Mr. Hamilton tells me you like Nei- hardt, and some of John McClure, Vachel Lindsay and Robert Frost. ‘There’s lots more. Find your favorites. Buy them. Put them on your. shelf for keeps. Read them every year or so. Make friends with them over a long acquaintance. ‘They’ll stand by you later on. It’s hard for us youngsters to think of growing old, but we all will, if we live. A shelf of good books is a spiritual insurance policy. It will pay you in the coin that moth and rust do not corrupt, and which burglars can’t break in and steal.” III “T like poetry when it is written in the modern language I can understand,’ wrote Agpawan, the hier AT BON 215 primitive. ‘When it speaks of the beautiful, sweet and wonderful things such as river, rock, sky, love and others, that also gives me amusement and con- solation to my soul. But Chaucer’s poem I do not like. Nor Mr. Milton. They are very old lan- guage. I would be very far behind if I try learn what they mean. Others would pass me by in at- taining advantages of life while I learn.” I wondered if this were symptomatic of an in- sidious attack of Americanitis; if Aggie were be- ginning to feel our feverish competitive push of things. I trusted it was a simple, boylike reaction to what fits a boy’s ken; a liking for what goes right to the heart without too long a circuit through the head. That is what boys want from a book, or a poem: appeal direct to the feeling-self, to the imagination, to the emotional-motor centers, if you please. ‘That is what they liked about Tolstoi’s ‘Confessions,’ a rather tedious book to me, but one that spoke to the latter years of adolescence with a straight hit. _“That man talks plain. You can understand him without trying to. He calls a spade a spade and a shovel a shovel. I don’t mind him even if he is a classic.””’ Thus Abbott, on Tolstoi in our class- room. ‘The word classic carried a foggy and sepul- chral atmosphere, seemingly inherited as a tradition from class to class far back into school history. From the upper regions the palpable enmity would filter to the lower strata of younger boys and load 216 CEB Rete ANT. Bi Oy: a book, however intrinsically readable, with an in- cubus which must be over-ridden before that book could find a real acceptance and welcome. This traditional antipathy was not a little due to the sheer physical make-up of our prescribed read- ing. School texts are ugly things in black and white and dismal brown and gray. Ours were at least, and even such a treasure as “Lorna Doone’’ was housed as drably as the most accursed of typo- graphical crimes, ‘“The Mother Language,” which, when Wayne kicked it across the study-hall floor, received exactly the treatment it deserved at the heel of indignant youth. As a lover of books I therefore took it upon myself as a pleasant privilege to introduce the boys to printed words in settings somewhat fitted to their value. ‘This took all the courage I could muster, and every ounce of trust I had in the boys. For I was very jealous of the books upon my shelves, and despite the dim echoes of that philosophically enlightening shipwreck, which gave me such a new perspective on the relative values of mere things, I cherished my new library most fondly. It is with real joy that I can here set down as true, mirabile dictu though it seem, that I carry not a single regret over sharing those choice volumes of mine with two or three score wild youngsters over four or five years of time. Of course I preached a small sermon over every book I lent, sending it forth from my den with a benediction and welcoming it back as though with a TE REAL BOY 217 prayer of true thanksgiving; but the boys caught my feeling for books, and I was as glad that they absorbed something of my attitude toward the ma- terial thing even as I was happy when they really enjoyed its soul. “‘T like this book you lent me,” said George Perry, bringing it back to me wrapped neatly in a fitted cover of brown paper (material interest on the loan)! “Kind of fairy-story and philosophy, isn’t it? Sort of poetic. Queer thing. I couldn’t un- derstand parts of it. Got it, though, when she called her husband a lob-eared, crock-kneed, fat- eye. Funny that a teacher should lend a guy a book about a girl who goes and lives naked in a cave with a man, even if the man was a sort of curious god.” “George,” I answered, “I had forgotten about Caitilin’s living in the cave without any clothes on; but I should have lent you the book just the same even if I had remembered her nakedness. Cer- tainly I don’t believe any harm could come to you from reading such a happy story.” “It was darn decent. Not like magazine stories. They let you imagine things too much. Have you any more books like this?” There was not another book like ‘“The Crock of Gold” in my collection, or elsewhere, I guess. My copy had gone through many lendings. Its mar- gins were annotated by at least a dozen hands. Chapters or paragraphs were marked with the 218 ELE, REAL BO ay) initial or symbol of him or her who had particularly liked them. One practical materialist had scribbled: ‘Not rational according to human laws’ alongside the paragraph containing: “The Thin Woman hated her own child, but she loved the Gray Woman’s baby, and the Gray Woman loved the Thin Woman’s infant but could not abide her own.” The mind of adolescence is an eternal treat. On the margins of my books its symptoms are sprinkled in many a comic solemnity. IV It seemed a part of my religion to refrain from attempting any prosaic definition of poetry to my pupils. Sometimes our texts cried out for analysis, dissection, veritable vivisection of the word. AIl- ways I retired into mystical aloofness, or retreated into a purely poetic definition. ‘Poetry, the hand that wrings, Bruised albeit at the strings, Music from the soul of things.” seemed to me a clearer statement of fact than any of those intellectually tickling expositions which one finds in Brander Matthews, Max Eastman, Hudson. Maxim, Lafcadio Hearn, or even John McClure, who puts it thus: ‘Poetry as a form of utterance distinct from prose is simply music in words—an attempt to create beauty in rhythm and tone. Its sole distinguishing characteristic is its Ee RATT BIG) TY: 219 harmonization of syllables and rhythm. There is no such thing as a poetic idea.” I have always pre- ferred to rejoice under the delusion of the poetic idea, and to believe that Mr. McClure most ex- quisitely contradicts himself when he says (and this is the kind of definition I like to give a boy or girl) : ‘Poetry? The voice that leaps up With the Springing Water And thunders out of the mountain.”’ A final, prosy definition of poetry such as would rejoice the hearts of those who concoct entrance exams for college, always makes me think of Her- bert Spencer’s conception of life as “‘a definite com- bination of heterogeneous changes, both simultane- ous and successive, in correspondence with external co-existences and sequences.”’ And my feeling, upon reading such a definition of life, is best expressed in the poetry of Fiona McLeod: ‘For having found, I know I shall have clasped a wandering wind And built a house of snow.”’ If pressed too hard for precision of statement, I could quote such a charmingly clouded generality as: ‘Poetry is an advance beyond prose as painting is an advance beyond hieroglyphics, and as music is an advance beyond poetry.”’ For often did my hard- headed lads insist on knowing why folk committed 220 The aR AL (BOY words to verse. We tried to practice doggerel or jingle to get a touch, perhaps, of the poet’s feel- ing for musical wording. Very few boys, however, got further than the pleasure which Arthur Guiter- man must enjoy when he writes about “‘silver salt- shakers at John Wanamaker’s.” Something of the mystery lying behind mere transposition of words so that their syllables approach music (as in McClure’s illustration of “beautiful exceedingly” as contrasted to ‘“‘exceedingly beautiful’) reached Ag- pawan, who brought me one day a vers libre to his friend Wayang: “O thee I love Longing to see thee, When thee wast come Send me a word So I shall meet thee And shake hands With a dance.”’ This, I believe, was true poetic expression from the brown lad’s primitive soul. Dole, on the other hand, who consciously willed to become a writer of verse for the moral elevation of mankind, oozed forth such saccharine dribble that I hesitated to en- courage his efforts. His pencil must have stuck to the paper on which he wrote. Such treacle would have meshed the keys of a typewriter inextricably. His effusions seemed indicative of a rubber spine, and indeed he was one of the most docile, para- Lalit AY BOY, 221 sitical and soft-shelled kids who ever slid, jelly- like across my trail. He was the type which makes poetry cloysomely effeminate to our adolescent cave- men of high-school age. With Dole on the one hand, and Pa Comely on the other, I strove to introduce my boys to true poetry, without letting them know that I was strug- gling at all. I believe that it was because I de- liberately awaited the inward hint or hunch that the time and circumstance were ripe for verse that our sessions by candle-light, or emberglow within doors, and by our laughing little fires in the woods, or out among those wondrous dunes of Lake Michigan, proved so memorably happy. I have even brought candles into our classroom, hauled down the shades, drawn chairs into a friendly circle and read poetry when it seemed the momentary thing to do. Per- haps, as my boys have sometimes insisted, I am a nut on the handling of poetry; but place, surround- ings, atmosphere seem to me such powerful factors (perhaps conditioning reflexes!) in one’s introduc- tion to such an elusive and delicate art, that I have chosen rather to err in their favor than against their subtle influence. There was occasional parental objection to Whit- man, whom the boys cared little for, on the whole, and Masefield, whom the boys followed as though he were a football captain or a champion of the ring.. Masefield said damn instead of darn, and spoke of whores when he meant them (like Kip- 222 Uy Ae ORAL ae B On. ling, or the Holy Bible), instead of hedging into some soothing euphemism. The Everlasting Mercy made many converts for me, not to Masefield alone, but to poetry as a fine and virile art. A man who could write in musical meter about a bloody prize- fight so magnetically, could also win a boy’s feeling for such lines as almost antiphonally followed a crude realism, as for instance: “Fach one could be a Jesus mild, Each one has been a little child, A little child, with laughing look, A lovely, white unwritten book; A book that God will take, my friend, As each goes out at journey’s end.” My old friend Stockbridge, from Mexico, dropped in upon us at Intervale one day. He brought me a copy of “Leaves of Grass.” He would convert the world to Whitman. Ignatius Loyola would have faded into dim insignificance as compared to Bob in point of missionary eloquence and zeal. The boys, however electrified by Bob’s personal, magnetic charm, yet failed to transfer their interest to Whit- man, save only, perhaps, in Captain, My Captain, which “had a certain swing.’’ After this explosive visit of my energetic friend, Whitman remained on its shelf and I trusted the boys would some day grow to appreciative dimensions; but I saw they could not be forced. Well I remembered Bob, full- flushed of ebullient adolescence, upbraiding me for pig RATS. OBO): 223 my acquaintance with Oscar Wilde. That was in the days when his poetic horizon was bounded by the “Kasidah,” the “Rubatyat,”’ and the ‘Songs of Kabir.”” He seized my poor little copy of ‘The Happy Prince,” and, glancing through in his rapidly absorptive way, growled out: “Shame on you for wasting time on such stuff! A love-sick fool weep- ing for a red-rose, an impossible nightingale sing- ing herself to death for him and his stupid girl! And this Wilde, a degenerate poseur anyhow. Shame on your taste, I say!’ Times had changed, and my friend would have remembered that occa- sion with perhaps an incredulous smile had I brought it to mind. Each of us has his own rate of progress, his own determined nodes of response, and we teachers must simply be patient, experiment géntly and, when the budding moment comes, be ready with whatever our hunch, our intuition, tells us is the thing the kid then needs, wants, and hungers for. To what end, for what purpose did I strive to acquaint young savages with poetry, going far out of my appointed way asa teacher to do so? Simply and wholly because I was happy in the thought that a few of these boys might then, or later, get some of the deep enjoyment which had come to me from my friendship with the poets, old and new. Had I felt forced to administer poetry only in aca- demic doses for ulterior purposes of college, or of graduation, I should have presented to my classes, 224 THE REAL BOY for a memory exercise, that little Arbor-Day gem of Ambrose Bierce’s: ‘“‘Hlasten, children, black and white, Celebrate the yearly rite. Every pupil plant a tree; It will grow some day to be Big and strong enough to bear A School Director hanging there.” How far did I succeed? I do not know. I have never sent out mimeographed questionnaires to my pupils. A few pictures of memory remain very vivid and very sweet to me, however, and from them | conclude that my efforts were not all in vain. I might set down just one of these. In the wonderful Duneland of northern Indiana, immortalized already by the deft etchings of Earl Reed, my boys camped in the summer-time, living, naked and brown, a life almost wholly their own. Some of us oldsters hung about the fringes of boy- life, occasionally taking an awkward, adult part in its work and play. I used to sit at the top of the tallest dune and look down, as it were, on the royal domain of boyland, a community apparently all suf- ficient unto itself. One evening the moon climbed up slowly behind me among the cedar and tamarack, flooding the roll- ing waste of sand below with sufficient creamy light to reveal two score little pup-tents circling around the big black fireplace where waffles and pancakes WHER AL BOY 225 were born every morning, and where ‘‘dogs’’ and marshmallows roasted at night. Thirteen little good-night fires still flickered in the lake-breeze. Off in a bunch of poplar a red glow rose and fell among the branches. The lazy swash of easy surf upon the shore built a rhythmic background for wisps of song and the notes of a piccolo that floated up to me from somewhere among the crouchy little bushes and long tasseled grasses of the nearer dune- side. The boys were sleeping soundly, for they were - wholesomely tired. Running naked all day in the sun (bodies baked and all immune to blisters now), chasing snakes, catching turtles, spearing bullfrogs in the marshland behind the wall of hills; fighting in trenches and over the burning sand; plunging into the lake whenever the council permitted, and hauling driftwood over long distances for supper and evening fires, their lot was one upon which sound sleep followed fast and hard. Forty ma- hogany imps, eyes aglow to the magic of the camp- fire story half an hour before were now immovable logs, paired off under brown canvas beneath the eye of the moon. From the dune-top I slid down and wandered toward the shadowy grove of poplars where fire- light still rose and fell, uttering the sweet smell of driftwood mixed with green. Six of our older lads, the Junior Councilors, lay like spokes about a hub of crackling branches, while Castillo, his back against 226 SE BN EDs Boa O ENG a ghostly poplar, read to them in picturesque Castilian-English: ‘Here by the perc s flicker Deep in my blanket curled I long for the peace of the pine-gloom When the scroll of the Lord is unfurled When the wind and the wave are silent And world is singing to world.” Was there not enough compensation in what I saw and heard to cheerfully justify a teacher’s some- times struggling endeavors to make poetry not a task, or a discipline, or a duty, but a joy? CHAPTER XI HOW A TEACHER IS HELPED BY A WIFE Thus we are put in training for a love which knows not sex, or person, nor partiality, but which seeketh virtue and wisdom everywhere. —EMERSON. I THE boys of English II asked for a vacation from all composition for a week, and requested that I write for them instead. Lorenzo gravely wrote upon our blackboard the topic for my theme: “My Courtship and Marriage’”’ “And you tell the truth now!” he said. “We've read about Miles Standish and Enoch Arden and Lorna Doone, and a lot of love stories out of books. Now you get down to date. Make it snappy and tell the truth.” I promised to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but could not agree to tell the whole truth. I told the boys how I had once written a letter about married life to a friend, and suddenly found myself flat upon my back gasping for breath upon the floor. Kitty had glanced over my shoulder as 227 228 yee Tl) ART ACI BOY I wrote, and that letter became but a scattering of fragments which I afterward gathered up with a broom. To be sure she had planted a forgiving kiss upon my forehead later, ruffed my hair and smiled most radiantly at her tempestuous onslaught; but she also threatened assault and battery when- ever I might wax too minute in descriptions of her domestic domain. The boys swore secrecy, however, and I was commanded to write with all the fearless freedom which I preached to them anent their com- positions. It was a fair challenge, and I accepted it. In the first installment I resorted to crass subter- fuge instead of labor. Burrowing into a bunch of old letters, I found a long description of: night sounds and sights in the Maine woods, redolent with effusive attempts at literary style. This I copied down, and presented it to the expectant boys as symptomatic of the influence of love upon one’s creative talent. After listening with courteous pa- tience to such banal verbiage, Lorenzo piped up with: “Say, that’s worse than the classics! Did you copy it from a book? Might as well read to us from Macaulay or somebody. We want a story, a real story. You’re slacking on the job. We didn’t ask you to write about trees and birds and lakes and the moon, but about yourself and Kitty!” Lorenzo was dead right. I had slipped into peda- gogy, dodging the issue. I had the temerity to Apes Bolan. B cy) 229 think that I was going to teach a lesson in English Composition! I retreated into a defense mechanism which merely exhibited an all too common cowardice in the face of a concrete issue. Have we not here one of the standard fallacies of school education? The side-stepping of the immediate and personal; the delving into the past; the attempt at illumina- tion from outside authority; the withdrawal into books, symbols and sublimations? Against it youth rebels. It asks for the bread of romance, and we hand it the stone of a platitude. But these boys wanted more than fun, more than mere romance. Conversations with some of them after class showed me that they looked forward to something of the background in courtship and marriage of two people who seemed to live happily together. For Kitty and I lived not merely a con- ventionally cheerful and routinely contented life in those days, but one of ebullient frolic and laughter, of sham-battle, strenuous but good-natured rivalry and contention with each for his or her own sphere of rights. I believe that we were fun for the boys. Our hearthside was a haven of refuge for many a lad who drifted there out of his loneliness like a moth to a lighted window. It was home to them, and friendship and inward cheer on homesick days and gloomy hours. To many married folk come causes of belligerence unstudied and unstaged. Kitty and I planned our scraps with all the deliberation of a Napoleonic 230 THE VR EAL BOY battle. One morning war was declared swiftly. She kicked me out of bed, suddenly and without warning. I rattled noisily to the floor, bringing Bunny downstairs with reprimand and threat. I swore vengeance and registered scorn for our neigh- bor upstairs. Later, when Kit made the bed, I threw a small, willowy rocking chair in her direction. It came spinning back toward me very straight. I dodged. It bounced upon our woven rug, knocked the black frying pan from its hook on the hearthside wall onto a glass pitcher, broke a cup and two plates, and stood rocking dizzily in the middle of the room when Seeds stepped in to ask with a surprised smile what might be going on. Much later still I heard that one of the boys had heard that Mrs. Brough had heard that Mrs. Seeds had heard that the Hamiltons carried their marital squabbles to the point of physical violence and actually threw furni- ture at each other! I knew, however, that when such gossip trickled as far out as the boys, it was welcomed with a smile of understanding. I wrote about that incident to a friend. She failed to read a touch of humor between the lines, and came from Chicago, post-haste with heart-balm for our domestic casualties! I found her in rapt con- versation with Kitty, fires of battle in the latter’s eyes and, sensing danger, I moved toward my study door. Kitty blocked the way. ‘What have you been writing to Hazel, you wretch?” But I slipped loin ATG) B Oty 231 greasily around her and locked myself within my den. The boys had this story, too, before supper- time. It was too good for Kit to keep and I was greeted in the dining-room with rollicking laughter and much clatter of knives and forks against glasses and plates. Again, a snow-bath brought me rather comic pub- licity at Kitty’s hands when I failed to follow her injunction to go forth into such pastimes properly Glad inkas bathrobe.) 1vhad’ joineda) half dozen .of the hardier lads in one of our frequent night-battles, naked and unashamed among the snow-drifts. We pelted each other with gobs and balls of snow, chased one another, tripping, slapping, tackling and mauling until we were as warm as breakfast rolls and our skins seemed to sing like the morning stars for joy that they were made. Returning full speed from camp, hungry for the glow of our fireside, | found door and windows locked and fancied some- one peeping at me through the curtains with a most mischievous smile. I knocked and rattled and pushed in vain, begging for mercy; but, like the penitent emperor who waited barefoot on the threshold of a pope, I seemed condemned to stand or hop in the frosty air until morning. Finally, risk- ing discovery, I slipped through the back hall of our building and into my fireless study where I was kept prisoner until I promised faithfully never to go snow- bathing again with only a towel for apparel. Small wonder that boys, wise to such stories as 232 Or Ee RV AaB Gy these, wanted more, and demanded them when it was my turn to write, instead of read and correct, a composition. II My wife sat by the window one morning sorrow- fully ripping up a pair of blue bloomers. Pious gossip of the petticoated sovereignty of community women had irked on her nerves too long. It had begun when, that fall, Kit had played tennis with the boys in her bathing suit after a swim in the lake. Swimming, skating, snowshoeing, basket-ball, tennis and long camping and canoeing trips had given her gracefully powerful legs, enviable legs per- haps to those who grew so suddenly conscientious about proprieties. She had compromised with so- ciety by appearing in bloomers and middy after a committee of faculty wives had presented their plea for conventions to our principal. Bloomers, while rather ugly in themselves, had at least left her with a freedom of action not to be found in skirts. But her athletic calves remained too undignified in the eyes of those who had our moral welfare at heart, and again she submitted to established tradition, donning plaid skirts, too long for comfort but still too short for complete conformity to local standards of decorum. Romulo found her at the work of sartorial revision and exclaimed: “It’s a shame! That will make you grow old inside as well as out. OTs b nis LANL AaB Oy: 233 I shall feel as though I were coming to visit a member of the faculty instead of a friend. Why do you have to do it ?” Kitty answered in a way that rescued her sister members of the faculty from all blame for her course; but also in a way which might have horri- fied some of them had they listened at our door to the conversation which followed between woman and boy. Pointing to a pair of baby booties that lay on the table, she remarked: ‘“Aren’t those pretty?” ‘For you?” asked Romulo. Kit nodded. ‘Good! I'll be glad when there are a lot of little Romulos running about in my own home. Isn’t it fine that acquired characters aren’t handed on by heredity? My deafness came from scarlet fever and is not the hereditary kind. I can be married, my doctor says, without being afraid for my children.” Romulo was partially deaf, but the good Lord had compensated him richly in acute powers of ob- servation, concentration and sympathy. He read with uncanny understanding, won all our observa- tion contests, applied himself with fruitful resolu- tion to all tasks and responded to suggestion with an enthusiasm lamentably lacking among most of his fellows. His naiveté was exquisite and his frank- ness and spontaneity were lovely to behold. He dropped in often to read Emerson aloud to Kitty while she sewed or knitted. The essay on Compen- sation was his favorite. “It hits me where I live,” he would say. 234. “DOP ras thes BO sy" It was not my wife’s waffles and cocoa alone that brought boys to her somewhat primitive home by the fireplace. They came with such half baked dreams as a boy often longs to talk over with his mother or an older sister. Kitty was a good listener, and while she must have smiled inside very often while she listened to the solemnities of adolescence, her ready sympathy was always tonic to the boys. One day I found McGee sharing roast chicken, sweet potatoes, fruit salad and real coffee with Chambers and Murdo by our fire. Standing in the doorway’s shadow, I caught this fragment of phi- losophy before I was discovered and invited in: ‘““That’s the hell about this war business (pardon me, Kitty). Just get wanting to do something aw- ful bad, and then you’ve got to go off for two or three years in the army. It’s like a play. Not that I don’t want to go; but I want to go at the wrong time. I could lay off the coming back with hero medals if I could hurry up the time I could get married and settle down.” Now no one could picture McGee settled down. He was the most un- settled and unsettling boy in our community. I asked Kit how she had come to let him in beside the fre again. I had thought him dropped from her list and quite completely anathema. “Well,” she said, ‘‘he’s been home and come back quite changed. Of course this engagement will not last; but it really has settled him down a bit, and he came to me this afternoon asking me to help him DHE REAL iBOY 235 stop smoking, so he shall have another chance. Good kid, at that.” Some of the boys who wished to stop, or cut down smoking brought their tobacco or cigarettes to Kitty, promising not to smoke unless they came to her for materials. She would not allow them to smoke in her home, and she made them put up a stiff fight for their own tobacco before she would let them have it to take off behind the power-house where most of the clandestine smoking was done. Dome and Van, indeed, had built themselves an elaborate smoking parlor in the swamp at some distance from ~ the Fatima Trail as the boys called the path from the power-house into the woods. They had fur- nished it with a table and some chairs for the en- ~ tertainment of a few of the elect at poker, tobacco and occasional bottled beer from town. The den was raided, by Seeds at last, with consequent pub- licity which resulted in the multiplication of such hiding-places here and there throughout our wood- land. While I believed Kitty’s method was helpful to those boys who wanted to go slow in the use of the epic weed, my own attitude was that the morality of smoking belonged in the domain of the athletic coach. Here is strictly a physiological matter which every boy can clearly understand. A word from the basket-ball coach should be sufficient. If that does not work, hardly any other method will. The ful- minations of anti-cigarette leaguers from our school 236 REA TB: Oy, platform, the lectures and threats of our principal and even the “Little White Slaver” campaign staged by Thomas Edison and Henry Ford seemed to have about as much practical effect upon smoking among our boys as the prohibition amendment has had upon drinking beer at Yale. ‘Mrs. Seeds said that Seeds doesn’t smoke be- cause it might hurt his brain.” I heard Birney re- mark one day. ‘If it hurts one’s brain, then Seeds ought to be the last bird on earth to be afraid of it.” Thus the comeback of a boy. One day I found a group of boys in solemn con- clave with Kitty. Bushie’s pipe had been stolen. The upper stratum of the boys was convulsed with emo- tion, for that tooth-worn, blackened briar with its marvelous incrustation of highly enviable ‘“‘cake” had become a household character in West Hall. Its loss was a group tragedy as well as a deep grievance for its distracted owner. It was a short, squatty, bulldog pipe with cloudy amber stem and a thin gold band. It was sweet as honey in the honeycomb, and always sheathed reverently in gray buckskin. A covetable pipe indeed, a temptation of the devil, and as seductive an item as ever led to the breaking of two commandments. Woe to the culprit if he were found! For one cannot steal a pipe like that as one would borrow a shirt, or a tie, or a sweater in a time of pinch. A pipe is a very primitively per- sonal belonging to a boy, a thing of pride, like a knife, or a gun, or a fishing-rod or a set of traps. THe UREA BOY 237 The mental roots of such possessive feelings may run back, as Doctor Hall would say, to our fore- bears who guarded hearth-fires with their blood and lives. For the pipe is a diminutive and portable hearth, a miniature camp-fire, carried with us per- haps as a reminder of days when life was vital with grim realities. Bushie’s pipe had become al- most as lovable as Treadwell’s dog, and I do not wonder the boy looked as though he had lost a dog or a friend. ‘The boys suspected confiscation, and I saw thunderclouds gathering above Krupp’s head. Kitty came to his rescue, however, with a policy © of watchful waiting which was rewarded, within a few days, by the mysterious return of the pipe to its owner. ‘The electric tension of group-at- mosphere had been evidently too much for some- one to bear. We seem to live in the days of Poe or Sherlock Holmes! My wife was indulgent toward me, and allowed me an occasional lapse into vice. On Sunday morn- ing I might forego breakfast, sleep monstrously late and smoke one cigarette in a bathtub of hot water while I read Kipling. Why Kipling in a hot bath, I do not know, but it had become a habit. Accus- tomed as I was to cold showers and snow-baths, the degenerate luxury of a steaming tub seemed wickedly welcome, and a cigarette after a week of evening pipes was romantic. Once, only once, I sank still lower in the scale of human evil. Bunny knocked on the bathroom door and came in with 238 gE NUD td Dp ws ot ORY 6 a great mug of hot toddy, the mischief of malice in his eye. Lemoned and sugared to the taste of an English squire, that beverage went to my heart and then to my head. Bunny read to me from Kipling as I sipped slowly, in sublime comfort. ‘You may talk of gin and beer . .. but when it comes to slaughter ("a twisty piecevof rag’) 7) eaeanaene friend’s voice seemed to trail off into the humming of bees among apple-blossoms, the buzz of a saw- mill, the rush of tumbling waters over angry rocks. Well it was that Bunny stayed and saved me from a watery and alcoholic death. ‘That ought to be a lesson to you, young man,” he said afterwards, “in the physiological limits of the human body when subjected to external and internal heat.” Some- how the boys never heard this story. Perhaps it was because Kitty did not hear it, either! I was driven, at times, as though by the force of repressed mischief within me, to play at being a boy again among the youngsters who surrounded me. Sometimes this amounted to an infraction of those supposedly necessary differentiations between ma- turity and youth, and led to temporary tensions be. tween me and my colleagues of the faculty. Kitty made cream-tomato soup one day for Barney and Van, who were incarcerated in the faculty-house with German measles. I coveted that soup, for I was well acquainted with its taste. The boys refused to share it with me, saying that Kit would make me some downstairs if I wanted it and THE REAL BOY 239 were as hungry as were they. I insisted, however, and was about to help myself when Polixander and Marco responded to cries for help from the invalids, and I was suddenly enveloped in a mattress, tied securely and dragged downstairs to my own quar- ters. Freeing myself, and finding the door of our temporary hospital locked tight, I ran outside and deliberately threw snowballs in at the window, one of them at least falling into the chafing-dish of cooling soup. Later, writing at my desk with an eye and ear cocked for reprisals, I heard strange sounds underneath the floor. Then I saw a crowd of boys outside peering in at me. I smiled and continued my work. ‘They remained, as though awaiting some expected phenomenon. Presently Senor Elie stormed downstairs from his room above me in cyclonic vociferousness. I stepped into the hall to ask him what was up. He passed me, fire- eyed and clenched of fist, rushing up the cinder- path to Seeds’ private office. On the air I smelled a taint of chlorine gas, obnoxiously pungent. The boys outside had vanished. Underneath my room I found a can of some concoction from Halley’s laboratory, smoking dismally. ‘The fumes, rather than penetrating the floor above had seeped through the walls and dislodged poor Elie from his quar- ters instead of punishing my culpable self. The philippic which he delivered to Seeds about the re- lation of pupil to teacher and teacher to pupil must have been a classic of eloquence, if I might judge 240 MEE RoR AT | B.OvY from Poli’s version thereof, as heard through the office walls. Now I do not think I shall be accused of advo. cating the technique of the Katzenjammer Kids as an adjunct to our school curriculum with boys; but I do think, as I look back over some of these in- cidents at Intervale, that there should be a great deal more fun between adults and children, pupil and teacher, than I have found thus far. It does seem to me that we grown-ups forget how to play. We grow afraid that fun will interfere with our processional of dignity through life. After all, it is quite possible to shift from the register of play into that of hard work, from the wild freedom of recess into the necessary restraint of a classroom. And I have found that the more free I have been on the campus or in the woods with my boys, the more cheerfully we have been able to adjust to the artificial and relatively gloomy atmosphere of an indoors over books. ‘The same boys who have crammed me down a trapdoor in our classroom floor and kept me there a prisoner until I promised a ransom by being more specific in the writing of my composition on Courtship and Marriage, would, when the bell rang, treat me with all the businesslike respect which they accorded Brough, who would never have allowed such a liberty even if he had been of the slight proportions necessary for entrance into that dungeon. ‘The boys respected, pase ALT B Oay 241 admired and liked Brough fully as much as they did me, I believe; but that genial teacher of mathe- matics, it seemed to me, missed lots of fun! Kitty’s relationship to the boys also meant much to me in other and more quiet fields than that of mere fun. I was almost glad when a boy got sick! It brought us such an opportunity for getting ac- quainted. No early-morning rush, no drill, no bells, no study-hours. Just leisure. One could drop in for a chat at any time and be thrice welcome. One could relax. Kit returned one morning from Charlie’s cold little den where she had taken him a breakfast of cocoa, toast, jam and grapes, on a tray with a candle and a rose for sweetness and light. A gloomy day. The candle was at once a tonic and a bene- diction. ‘The rose was almost like a mother’s face. The lad was happy to be laid up. She told him the history of her mahogany tray. © How Mill had made it for her with deft fingers, and carved it graciously with her symbol. Told him of the rough little hut in the woods that Mill had built in memory of a fine friendship, as elo- quent a temple in its primal way as the Taj Mahal with its enshrined memory of a great love. She made easy the way for a talk between Charlie and me on the loyalties of friendship when I called. I shared with him some words of Luther Gulick’s about a friend. 242 PPE REAL | BOC ‘He has believed in me for twenty-seven years. He has believed in me at times when others have _ not, and when my belief in myself had received some hard, unsettling knocks. His belief in me has been one of the strengthening and steadying forces of my life. He has been loyal to me, and I have felt this when I was not with him, as much as when I was. He has always seemed to understand what I meant, or was driving at, even when I did not succeed or even try to state it. He has shared with me his longings, hopes, and struggles. We like to be together. When I am in trouble it seems to hurt him, and when he is troubled it certainly hurts me. He has been a rare friend, in that he has let me grow and change my ideas. Most of my friends seem to demand that I shall remain what they first knew and liked me for.” Charlie’s cold gave us a chance to be friendly against the warm background of Kit’s breakfast, the lighted candle, and the opening rose. Ill Agpawan brought in a handful of green moss sprinkled over with tiny gray trumpets that seemed to have been placed there, like dim gems in a soft setting by the hand of God himself. The boy did not ask its name, Latin or English. He wished merely to share the spirit of the lovely thing. “It was so pretty I bring it to Kitty for your house. If you put it in some water I think it will not die. Perhaps it be happier in the woods on the rock where I find it; but then it does not make TA ew ine LG A BI OY 243 you happier, for you might not find it there. Here the boys will come see it too. They do not go often far into the woods. Maybe it was not wrong for me to bring it.” Taking Wordsworth from the shelf, I told Aggie he was indeed “‘a lover of the meadows and the woods and mountains; and of all that we behold from this green earth; of all the mighty world of eye and ear—both what they half create, and what perceive; well pleased to recognize in nature and the language of the sense, the anchor of our purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of our: hearts and souls and all our moral being.” I feel quite sure that he was one of those who feel that subtle ‘“‘presence that disturbs one with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of set- ting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man.” Often the boys brought small gifts tc Kit. Aggie brought her the very spirit of the woods. He lived more poetry than he could ever write. While Kitty welcomed flowers and mosses from the woods, she set limits to contributions in ento- mology. Carter set a large iron pot full of earth- worms beside my desk and asked me to keep it safe from bait-hungry boys. The long sleek worms came out at night, prowling around the periphery of the pot, seldom frequenting the central surface of their prison. ‘They darted down into their holes when 24.4 SURG RB BET. B Oy I switched on a light. It was fun catching them and pulling them gently from the earth. Darwin advocated a quick jerk, but my technique was evi- dently poor, for I always broke them in two if I tried his method. So did the boys. We chose slower and safer means. Kitty did not object to the worms so long as I kept mud from her living-room floor. She allowed me to cultivate the friendship of spiders, too. Opie, a fat and gorgeously speckled specimen, lived in a corner by my window. Frank liked to come in and watch him enmesh flies. When the west wind stormed across our lake and wrecked Opie’s beautiful parlor, the boy sat for almost a whole morning watching the systematic reconstruc- tion of that symmetrical web. Agpawan drifted in, too, and marveled at the design and pattern which he imagined must reside in Opie’s brain. Frank commented on the mechanical skill of the geome- trist’s deft fingers. Thus poetry and science, or science and mysticism perhaps. What a short gap between them! Or is the gap only imaginary? Are we either Platonists or Aristotelians? It seems to me that most of us are a blend of the two. It was fun to try to harmonize the viewpoints of Aggie and Frank into a single wonderment at the miracle of life in action before us. But when Frank brought in a wasp one day, to pitch a battle between this winged savage and the hungry spider, Kitty burst in upon us with a final flat. A wasp was altogether too mobile. I could not offer satisfactory guarantee Mie On, AD EB Cie 245 of its behavior. The window must open, and it must go! It went. Ikey was mobile, too, but he remained too indis- posed to arouse Kitty’s fear for her hair. Ikey flew in at my window one night and hung upon my rain- coat with his hookie little claws. A nervous wretch, he would break into querulous little tipy-taps with his soft, leathery wings now and then and squeak, weakly, as though for a drink or a bit of food. But he would not eat the grasshoppers which Mil- linder brought to him from the pasture. Nor would he drink sweetened milk from my finger. In fact,. he punctured my skin with his sharp teeth as a sign of gratefulness for my efforts. I put him in a glass jar at night, but he crackled there like a Fourth of July celebration and I had to turn him out and let him hang where he pleased in my study. Kitty was not very mournful when the creature died and two of the smaller boys removed him for burial in the garden. “Why does the devil have bat’s wings?’ asked Stone, watching the ceremonies. ‘Sometimes I ° don’t believe there’s a devil. It would be fun if there was one. More fun than angels. I was awful disappointed when [ learned that angels were men. While I thought they were women, I liked them. They were pretty. Men oughtn’t to be pretty like that. It was like Santa Claus when I learned there aren’t any angels. I wonder if the same thing will happen to God, and he'll go, too.” 246 THE REAL BOY The bell clanged before we could enter into theo- logical discussion and Ikey was left buried in the earth from which Carter had extricated his fish- worms. Later Hugo set up a wooden cross to mark the last resting-place of the little creature with wings like those of the devil. With all her lenience toward entomology and its invasion of our quarters, Kitty still insisted on some measure of civilization in her husband. I must wear white collars and a clean shirt at meal-times. I must shine my shoes for Sunday. I should remember to brush my hair before answering a knock at our door. If I was “to teach boys to live’ I must set them an example in good manners. So I compro- mised and, at meal-times and on Sundays, was quite presentable in society. I enjoyed our privilege of wearing flannel shirts to classes as well as to work, and shoes that were old and comfortable. The visits of the barber to our school were infre- quent, and how boys love to run their fingers through long and tousled hair as they lean over books at study time! Yet a Sunday change into stiff collars, tight shoes, creased trousers and oiled hair was quite tonic to our souls. Even Agpawan was quite acceptable once a week in a necktie and vest. But after a whole day of dress-parade, how gratefully we dropped back into our old clothes again! At Kitty’s fireside the flannel shirt, the open collar and the corduroy pants running down into high laced boots were quite in order, provided soles Tho He ROE A Ly. BOY 247 were not muddy and hands were scrubbed to suf- ficient whiteness for the passing of toast or the stirring of cocoa. Kit had one strong rival for the devotion of the boys in the realm of food. Mrs. Arthur made pies so thick, so sweet, so flaky of crust that only the swifter boys were able to obtain one. At four o’clock there was a daily marathon to her cottage across the farm. ‘The big boys got there first, and left nothing for the smaller fry until Mrs. Arthur, compassionate, made it a rule to hide some of her handiwork for them in a closet. She also placed > .a lower price upon these, knowing the difference in home allowances between older and younger boys. The boys ran for pie, but they stayed at the cot- tage for Art, a primitive caveman in overalls, blue flannel shirt and hobnailed boots. Long, sinewy, large of paw as Lincoln, skin tanned darker than an Indian, fiery of temper and sarcastic of wit, Art was an eternal puzzle to us all. His face was sat- urnine, as they call such faces in books. He smiled too sympathetically to call it Satanic, but he would have made a wonderful Mephisto. I believe the boys were always a trifle afraid he would eviscerate them with a knife, or fill them with lead from his shot-gun behind the door. Art was a real man to these lads. We teachers by comparison were biped bookworms with heads full of knowledge and hearts bursting with dis- 248 PHE REAL BOY cipline and order. While we might prattle about dead men and lifeless figures, Art would loosen up with grim remarks about life as it was this very minute. He might explode with: ‘“Godammit, now, I’m telling you!” and spit a stream of brown tobacco-juice down a knothole in the floor of his front porch; but what he had to say was real and immediate. Sometimes he would talk about things which beloved parents at home would have been shocked to know were a part of their boy’s educa- tion at school. He would talk about such things ungrammatically, but with a vigor that made them unforgettable. And his sense was sound. If I had_ had a boy at Intervale, I should not have wanted him to miss acquaintance with Art as he sat, chair back-tilted and feet high on the railing, in the midst of a group of pie-eating youngsters. In fact, I should have seen to it that my boy got there, first or last, to get a memorable and spicy impression of that genial roughneck philosopher. Pie was one of the few edibles which Kitty could not cook upon our open hearth. ‘The boys would sometimes bring one back from Mrs. Arthur’s to eat beside our crackling logs, for there was only an iron stove at the farmhouse. One evening I found a symposium upon one’s greatest likes and dislikes in life, conducted over pie and cocoa, with Frank presiding. I was drawn into its vortex and com- manded to jot down on paper, rapidly and in the order in which they came to mind, the things which THE REAL BOY 244 I liked most. My list, which I have kept as a souvenir of that occasion, reads as follows: Browning’s ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra,’’ Beethoven’s Noc. turne in G Major, James Stephen’s “‘The Crock of Gold,” hot coffee on a cold morning, Lamb’s Es. says, Chopin’s Funeral March, swimming by star. light, rye bread and cheese with buttermilk, my wife, Darwin’s ‘“The Descent of Man,” kids, naked and full of the devil, Mount Orizaba, firelight, prickly pears, Rodin’s ‘La Vielle Haultemiere,” The Book of Ecclesiastes, waffles with maple sirup, Isa- dora Duncan’s dancing, poker... . 3 Here my time was cut short. The boys now chal- lenged me to reassemble these items in the order of their importance, and dared me to put my wife other than first upon the list! Kitty smiled, and relieved me of any commitment whatever by launching a dis. cussion upon relative values, and upon the impossi. bility of making satisfactory categories without going into details of comparison impossible with things so different in nature as a waffle and a mountain or a symphony. Such were some of the hours spent together by teacher and boy and teacher’s wife. I am sure that after all I ever said or did among my pupils is for- gotten, that Kitty’s waffles, doughnuts, roast rabbit, coffee and tomato-soup in their setting of candle- light, music and singing kettle over flaming log will remain vivid memories of happy hours and that 250 CH ae Buy, through them all will play the winsome smile of a charming hostess who loved “kids.” Had Kitty felt, however, that, as a member of the faculty she must entertain the boys, had we felt it our duty or obligation to be sociable, what a differ- ent atmosphere there would have been in our home! I remember how dismally proper we boys felt at Mohegan when we were invited as guests to Mrs. Water’s elegant living-room. Doubtless those re- ceptions were good for our manners as gentlemen of society; but I doubt if they ever touched our souls. A dim memory of thin sandwiches and very sweet cocoa remains with me, with vague recollections of perfumed ladies in silk gowns with pompadour hair. There may have been a fire on the hearth. I do not recall it. ‘These ‘‘at-homes” were relieving accents to our monastic days, but I do not grow homesick for a return of those rare occasions, as Intervale boys tell me they have grown for a leg of chicken to be gnawed when sitting on a chopping block while Fritz Kreisler played his Liebeslied from an oaken cabinet. Kitty had learned the art of the hostess in the woods. She had learned to cook by open fires built next to sheltering rocks. She could do many things with a few, but well chosen tools. She could build three fires on the hearth, each for its appointed work, and broil on one while she fried on another and boiled on the third. Afterwards she would fuse these fires together into a friendship blaze by which to talk, or to dream in silence. Lr ee RAST Po, BiG ive 251 “Low blowing winds from out a midnight sky The falling embers and a kettle’s croon: These three, but O, what sweeter lullaby Ever woke beneath a winter’s moon?” I sat by one of these evening fires after the fiasco of my first attempt at writing the composition which the boys prescribed, resolving to do better on the following Monday. CHAPTER XII A FEW WORDS ON HISTORY Man is explicable by nothing less than all his his- tory. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. There is prop- erly no history; only biography. All that Shake- speare says of a king, yonder slip of a boy who reads in the corner, feels to be true of himself. —EMERSON. I THE current of history swept me away, saving me from the perplexity of finishing the composition on my courtship and marriage. After several failures at attempted enlistment in the army, due to under- weight, I was finally admitted into the First Indiana Infantry by a sympathetic sergeant who must have put his foot on the scale when he weighed me. When I returned to Intervale in a khaki uniform and carry- ing a gun, which the Captain said I might show to the boys, my contract was canceled and I was allowed to lecture upon the war instead. History, not for knowledge but for imaginative joy, and for the purpose of sketching in a biographi- cal background for our own lives, had been my motive as I faced my classes. Knowledge, I felt, would accumulate as a necessary by-product of our 252 aeRO EAI BOW 253 interest in the romance of mankind. I depended little upon questions, examinations, themes, or text; but watched how a boy would read a book, or a news- paper, or listen to a story, or bring me a question of his own. Curriculum history was a much more plastic and mobile item than literature and it pre- sented a wide range of subsidiary interests, especi- ally as we drifted towards an active part in the great war. The war brought us that more interesting history which has not been written because it has not yet occurred. Ajax, Achilles, Charlemagne, Richard, © Napoleon, Washington and Grant suddenly became dimly distant and archaic figures, hardly comparable to Joffre, Foch and Pershing. Our vision of men and events was thrown completely out of perspective. The boys pored over required reading in ancient his- tory with the avidity of one trying to read a descrip- tion of the burning of Rome while his own house was ablaze. We lived in a vital present and a fascinating future. We cared more for what would happen to- morrow morning than for all that had occurred since mankind left trees or caves and began to live in houses. ‘Time flew with the speed of bullets. Yet even current history from newspapers and journals was somewhat disembodied and hollow. I tried to squeeze educational values from the hundred neologisms of the hour, the patriotic eloquence of editors, and the speeches of our President. The boys, however, wanted military drill in uniform, with 254 MPO SR EEEAY BOY lots of sham-battle. Parents backed this desire, and I wondered if Intervale would become a military school under pressure of wartime. Modern warfare, we older people saw, was a vast engineering enterprise. It required the use of complicated machinery, and the coordination of myriad lines of practical and technical work, some of it very highly specialized. Fundamentally, the ability to handle tools, the habit of team-work on jobs, and capacity for long, strenuous labor seemed the prerequisites for a potential soldier, and not merely the mastery of an army field-manual. If Intervale was to contribute its best toward the win- ning of the war, we thought it better to devote our energies to fundamentals. We did not know how long the war would last. We felt that a boy who lacked training in these foundation elements of modern strife would be handicapped, however much he might drill and shoot at targets. So we stood out for a while against militarization. Living on seven hundred acres of farm-land, we had the resources of a diminutive nation to draw upon, and to get ready to defend. Farm tools and shop tools were ours. We built roads, dug ditches for drainage, made repairs, harvested crops, sawed and chopped wood for use instead of coal as fuel. Indoors there awaited geography, history, chemis- try, physics and mathematics. Was not this enough? But our alumni were joining the army, some of our seniors disappeared and sent us word that they ata EA BOY) 255 were trying for the navy, or the air-corps, or train- ing camp. Yet, despite the logic of reason, my heart went out to the little fellows who wanted to be set on guard duty and learn to charge bayonets! War I might abhor, like Richard Le Gallienne, but the sound of drums and the “quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum’’ was still very sweet to my ears. How I had thrilled at pictures of Admiral Dewey, resplendent in blue and gold against a back- ground of flaming cannon and bursting shell, back in the days of our Spanish war. My head told me | that I should try to teach the great lessons of war- fare behind the lines; but my fingers ached to beat a march with drumsticks at the head of a company of charging youngsters! David spilling water from his helmet, the handful at Marathon, Horatio, Galahad, Saladin, Washing- ton at Valley Forge and Lee at Appomattox: these remain a precious heritage to the youth of the world forever. Perhaps out of the Great War would be distilled a few stories comparable to these. France and Belgium, of course, were luminous with the glory of good losing, of epic sportsmanship; but their story was too vast for us at the time. Even the personal heroes of the war loomed too large for per- spective. Empey and Private Pete and the gloomy Kitchener spoke more personally to us than Joffre. Newspaper headlines eclipsed any ideas or rumina- tions that might come to us from “Mr. Britling Sees 256 Jeli “REALL > Bo Ooy It) Through.” Wel lived,as. it) were, inastog charged with electric excitement. II “A man of weak character thinks vaguely. A man of clear intellectual decisions acts with precision and is free from vacillation. A country of educated men acts coherently, smites swiftly, plans ahead; a country of confused education is a country of essen- tial muddle.” This thought of Wells’ went with me up the hill to class one morning. The boys wanted to know what they were being educated for, especially as regards the aftermath of war. ‘“‘Is it practical? Where will it get me? What will the war do to the world that concerns my schooling now?” If I could have shifted them onto a national register of thinking and feeling! If we could have dragged America out of history books, and civics, and newspapers and made it vividly apparent that this acreage of ours and our actual population of men and women and boys is America! ‘To shift the questions in their minds from ‘‘What will education do for me?” to “What can I do to make me better able to do something for America!” We should get more democracy right here, have a student council or congress, elections, districts, court and a working machinery of government motivated by a definitive purpose to get certain specific things done if we (as America) were to do things coherently, smite swiftly, and plan ahead. ret he BALI. \B Gay; 257 I look back now and think of those days when the boys demanded military training, when they made me drum that they might march. For all about me I find youngsters in khaki, see them drilling near our high-schools under army appointees. I meditate with William C. Allen, recalling that “prior to 1914 even Germany, with all her sins, did not put her youth of our high school age under military train- ing. .. . Is America, after belaboring with vehe- ment Bneeeh and two million men the Prussianism of Germany, now, almost unrealized by herself, assum- ing the burdens and hazards of a Prussianism trans- - ported to America ?” Mr. Allen thinks and feels in terms of friendliness and happy social and political and economic rela- tionships between peoples. He has put into words what I, as a foreign-born American citizen, with a childhood spent in a neighboring nation, and having taught boys in America from a number of foreign countries, feel, expresses my own inward reaction to the trends all about me in these so-called reconstruc- tion years. Says Mr. Allen: ‘“The people abroad do not understand us; they are asking: ‘Why this pushing of the military spirit among the youth of America, why these training camps, these training corps in the high schools, why this development of attention to the possible scien- tific slaughter of masses of men with the latest kill- ing machinery ? Whom is America intending to attack?’ America needs friends—are we supinely 258 ME REAL \B-OvY drifting into a course that is depriving us of them? How shall we meet this real national menace? Shall we pursue the old, old alluring system of arming which all history teaches eventually leads to national rivalries, exhaustion and disaster? Shall the innate idealism of our splendid boys be misdirected into relying upon methods of defense that our own gen- eration has proved to be an awful sham? Shall not our moral and political position be strengthened by allaying the apprehensions of other peoples as to our designs regarding them? Will it not be infinitely safer and more profoundly in harmony with a sane conception of real patriotism to instruct our high school boys in the principles of international justice and good will?” I am tempted to quote here the words of still an- other observer, a man of business who believes that ‘children have always been, and will continue to be, the most engaging and distinguished arrivals on the shore of the Present from the old Sea of Life stretch- ing behind us everywhere.” Says Mr. Yeomans: ‘“We show too many indications in America that we have learned nothing from the intolerant regimen- tation which caused the downfall of a people by mak- ing efficiency, intellect and conceit take the place of understanding and sympathy. ... The thing that causes all the trouble in the world is the undernour- ished and starved soul. It can live only on one diet, part of which can be provided by science, but most of which is composed of mysteries which can not be weighed or analyzed and which are the determining factors in human relationships, and the essential Tie REAL BOW 259 nutriment of the soul. You can train it in strength and you can train it in self-control but you must also train it in sympathy. and in love in equal measure or in its demoniac frenzy it will surely tear the world to pieces and destroy itself.” History, to contribute its part to a training in sym- pathy and brotherly love, must point more and more to the biographies of sympathetic and lovable indi- viduals. It must concentrate on Buddha, Jesus, Asoka, Lincoln, Lee and their kindred spirits as molders of the highest human destiny. It must recognize the soul as the most important and effec- - tive part of any human being, and point to great souls. instead of to great Czesars, Napoleons, and their modern national, political and industrial suc- cessors. For history one might say what Doctor Eliot of Harvard has said of the religion of the future, that it ‘will pay homage to all righteous and loving persons who in the past have exemplified, and made intelligible to their contemporaries, intrinsic goodness and effluent good will. It will treasure up allalesmonhuman excellence: and) virtue.) Ltyiwill reverence the discoverers, teachers, martyrs, and apostles of liberty, purity, and righteousness.”’ The world conference on education carried through so dramatically by the National Education Association is a symbol and symptom of what is going to happen in the vital field of applied history: “There were Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Prot- estant, Christian and Pagan, but there was spirit 260 deHiE) "REAL .BOY of religion, the intermingled spirit of Confucius, of Buddha, of Zoroaster, of Mohammed, and of Christ. ‘This spirit exemplified the choicest of the teachings of these great philosophers who taught the religion and philosophy which affect humanity vitally and eternally. There was the spirit of fraternity and brotherly love. ‘The close of the conference was marked by a remarkable demonstration symbolic of world-unity. Quite unconsciously, it seemed, each person in the assembly caught the hand of his neighbor; someone began singing Auld Lang Syne, and they clasped hands in an historic circle—Hindu, English, Ger- man, French, Chinese, Greek and Italian—a cross- section of the world, joining hands across the tradi- tional political borders of nations—all united in one great purpose, the education of the youth of the world.” Already, says Augustus O. Thomas, from whose report I have quoted, there are a million teachers federated into a definitive program of international education. The World Federation, born of the first World Conference on Education has begun such an experiment in the teaching of history as one can believe in with all his soul. Its single principle is “to make the children of one country love the chil- dren of another’ and I, for one, believe this to be just as possible as to make the children of one coun- try hate those of another, a fact we have all too clearly seen and felt. , Furthermore, history must be taught and learned Apri RIE ALE SBUOVY 261 in the spirit of the scientist, not of the national patriot. Its technique must be that of ‘“‘group co- operation in pursuit of social truth,” leading toward a cosmopolitan, or international mind. As Harry Overstreet puts it in an illuminating paper aimed against the practice of debating in schools because debates are founded upon the principle of fighting to win: “Our problem is to develop in our students a con- stant readiness to regard every disputed issue—from the simplest issues of everyday life to the most com- plicated issues of politics—not as a signal for intel- lectual battle, but as an opportunity for a fascinating, creative effort toward the working out of an effective agreement. When we have succeeded in doing this, we shall achieve in our students the first essential of the international mind.”’ Surely history, with such an evolutionary back- ground as Wells gives it, and Van Loon, and Hillyer, is basically cultural, ethical, moral and religious. Why all this uproar about courses in ethics, moral instruction and religious training for our schools? No story of mankind is complete which does not in- clude all the major elements of religion, ethics, phi- losophy and art. It throws us constantly into the realm of conduct. It brings us under the shadow of the Almighty. It expands and explains Carruth’s little masterpiece of evolution in poetic form. It is the mountain-peaks of human thought which we need to scale in learning the art of life. History speaks 262 RILE READ BOY them for us. The details we can readily omit. The secret of good teacherhood lies largely in the answer he may receive to Stevenson’s favorite prayer, “Tord, teach us to Omit!” My boys were responsive to questions such as ‘What part of history am I, right now? What can Ido? Where shall I stand? Whom shall I follow? What does the past show me about the rules of the game today? Who was finer stuff, Napoleon or Gladstone, Cesar or St. Francis, Galahad or Launcelot?’’ History to these boys became an inti- mate biography of heroes and villains. At least, I felt that it should become so. I believed that it was only through an understanding of the contrast be- tween hero and villain that a philosophy of history could be learned and become a part of that education which Wells calls ‘‘the preparation of the individual for an understanding and willing codperation in the world’s affairs.” I have entitled this chapter ‘““A Few Words on History” because, looking back upon those war-time days when this was one of my subjects, I am be- wildered at the thought of having tried to compre- hend the vastness of the storm amidst which we lived, and moved, and had our being. I remember a chaos of newspapers, journals, speeches, lectures and bond- selling campaigns; but what really counted with us was the intimately personal. A card from Heth saying only ‘“The ship on which [ sailed has arrived safely overseas” meant more to us than the scream- Aen he RR AI BOY, 263 ing headlines about new battle-fronts. To send a pipe to one of our Intervale boys in the Marines was an event of much keener interest to me than subscrib- — ing for a Liberty Bond. ‘The war itself we had to take for granted. We could not learn history from it, we were a living part of it, however distant from trenches and no-man’s land. Allow me, then, to re- treat from so huge a theme with merely this passing word and return to the boys with their thoughts and feelings as they moved in other realms. We shall touch on History again in Chapter XIV. CHAPTER XIII BOY RELIGION IN THE MAKING .- In his moral attributes God is for every man the multiplication to infinity of all the noblest, tender- est, and most potent qualities which that man has ever seen or imagined in a human being. —CHARLES W. ELIOT. I Boys came to me at Intervale predisposed either toward or against orthodox concepts of God and religion, or else inquisitive about them. My diary records that on one Monday morning God entered English VIII by way of Frank Edmunds, who quoth: ‘Wonder am I an evolutionist or not? Now Art (our farmer mechanic and versatile man of all jobs) is a free-thinker, he says, and believes in evo- lution. Wish I knew what it was all about. He says it’s better than God; but it seems sort of mixed up. A lot of fossils and animals and geology.” To which Charlie Baker piped up: “There must be some sort of God to keep evolution running. How could it work if somebody wasn’t working it?’ And to which Marco, the cynic: ‘‘Well, we’re all ferti- 264 Ea Re ICCAD? BO) aye 265 lizer when we’re croaked, so what’s the difference anyhow ?”’ We hopped through that class period in ani- mated fragments of discussion from corporeal de- composition to stellar nebula, from nebule to jelly-fish and horned coral, from coral to planets, planets to monkeys, monkeys to appendices and ear- muscles, back to monkeys and planets again with all the nimble agility of boy-mind, which knows no obstacle, but leaps about the entire universe accord- ing to its whimsical will. The thoughts of youth are short, short thoughts, and indefinitely variable. I ran down to my den, and brought back Langdon Smith’s comically profound little poem, ‘‘When you were a tadpole and I was a fish,” to which the boys listened with a sort of amused awe. ‘That started a theosophical tangent into metempsychosis and re- incarnation; but I switched back to Darwin and promised to tell the story of the voyage of the Beagle and how the idea of evolution first took scientific form. “But what do you think of evolution?’ demanded Frank. I took chalk, and wrote upon the board, Walt- mason style: ‘A fire-mist and a planet, a crystal and a cell, a jelly-fish and a saurian, and caves where Cave Men dwell: then a sense of love and beauty, and a face turned from the clod: some call it Evolution, and others call it God.” 266 oR RAO vB Ou: ‘That is my idea, Frank,” I replied. ‘Herbert Carruth has put my conception of God and Evolution into a very small space of words. But it would take me a long time to make my own meaning clear to you all. If you like, we’ll start a class in evo- lution and make it a part of our history work, as the idea of evolution certainly ought to lie back of a study of human history.” ‘The boys voted aye, and it was to be. I quoted T. R. on the value of Bible-reading one day in English IV. Dorian kept turning the pages of a school Bible while I talked. When I was through he asked if he might read and, permission granted, he began: 66 48. And in the mountains of Shamir and Jatir, Secoh 49. And Danah and Kirjathsanah, which is Debir 50. And Anab, and Eshtemoth, and Anim.”’ ‘Sixteen paragraphs like that on one page, Mr. Hamilton. Several chapters following filled with the same sort of stuff. Seem to be whole books full of the names of dead people. Why should anybody but a preacher buy a book like that? Why not cut out all such dusty stuff and leave just a few good stories and maybe some poetry, like the psalms, al- though most of them don’t sound much good.”’ Is not the boy right? The convict who found that there are 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,173 (DeARE eel (Ey) BQ ty, 267 verses, 773,692 words and 3,586,489 letters in the Bible enjoyed his one solitary job of reading it word for word. He also discovered that the 21st verse of the 7th chapter of Ezra contains all the letters of the alphabet except the letter J; that the longest verse is the 9th verse of the 8th chapter of Esther and the shortest the 35th verse of the 11th chapter of St. John. This jail-bird, like an old Civil-War veteran friend of mine who reads the Bible through once a year, is entitled to all the joy he can wring from Hebraic genealogy and Mosaic hygiene; but I had been asked as a teacher to recommend the read- ing of the Bible to my boys. I could do so only with reservations. I failed to feel the talismanic spiritual effect of reading about the mountains of Shamir and Jatir, and I looked forward to an ab- breviated Bible, about 150,000 words long and written not in modern English, but in the King James words attributed to Moses, David, Solomon, Job and the Saints. I have no quarrel with the in- spiringly readable old Anglican Bible, but only with its accumulation of utterly irrelevant lumber. I should like boys to enjoy the heart of the great book with the same relish that has been mine. Why must we present them with volumes from some of whose pages merely dust arises to irritate their eyes? Austin threatened to make way with the row of “Bible Story” books on our shelf before I should afflict the class with them. ‘They were used as texts 268 LAE REAL BOY the year before. A dreary, unillustrated set of schoolly volumes. ‘There was no danger that I should use them. ‘“Ain’t even the real Bible stuff,’ declaimed Jobbie) oS ileveliread wall’ the nealedopesvoomenar them old guys who were in so strong with God put over pretty raw deals sometimes. Abe, Ike and Jake and Joseph turned some tricks on folks that preachers wouldn’t recommend today.” He began to grow eloquent, as though visited by a pentecostal gift of tongues; but even the free atmosphere of our classroom could not be charged with his vivid memories of a certain “Bible in Burlesque” which he had one day perused in an old book-store. Later he and I agreed that it was only right to others, holding different views and feelings, that we should keep cynical iconoclasms to ourselves unless there was very patent demand for their expression. Re- membering my Mohegan days, I hoped that we might together enjoy a liberal discussion of such biblical themes as might crop up in our midst. I discovered, however, much to my regret, that some- times a certain censorship as well as a certain gui- dance, was called for. My battle for the Bible continued. I did not want a spirit of cynicism to grow among the older boys. But neither did I want an uncritical acceptance of the book as a fetish or talisman. I wished it read with as much independence and broadness of mind as a lad could bring to it. A dip into our youngsters’ Tera hneA TD BOW 269 memories did not indicate any close acquaintance with even the high-lights of biblical biography. Wayang, whose early training in a Mission school came to his rescue, rated highest, 65, and the others tapered down to zero. Catchy guess-work most of it, blind shots, hoping some would hit. Moses, I found, was: a follower of Jesus, leader of the dis- ciples, born in bulrushes, a “profit,” king of the Israelites, leader of the Christians who left Egypt. Pharaoh was king of the Philistines, Persians, Jews, Egyptians, and a wise prophet. Aaron was: some relation to Cain, son of Moses, man with a rod © who made water out of rocks. Ruth was: a Jewish lady who married a king and had no parents, wrote a book of the Bible, wept at Jesus’ Cross, gave Christ a drink of water, found Moses in the bulrushes. The Ark of the Covenant was: a book where the spirit of the Lord was kept, a boat built for God, a thing that brought luck to whoever had it, the place where God lived when the world was flooded. There were some correct answers. ‘These samples indicate, not a sense of humor, but a distortion of mental imagery, akin to that of a little girl of three who told me, after Sunday-school, that “‘Jesus she is a nice lady who wears long curls like my mama’s, has white clothes and lives south-west,” a perfectly genuine and naive statement of what, to the child, were the facts in the case. In Ancient History we struck the early Christian Church. Lorenzo wanted to know why if Joseph 240 PiU REAL. BOY was not the father of Jesus, the latter was descended from David who was an ancestor of Joseph and not of Mary. An age-old question, but ever bobbing up anew. How easily the boy mind penetrates these theological clouds. How difficult it is for a teacher to compromise, or to shelve, or to side-step such an issue. For the boy there is no question of etymol- ogy, or exegesis, or higher criticism. For him a statement is true, or it lies. Yet when there is room for doubt, he is fair enough, witness Ryan, who de- clared: “Never was any flood at all. Nile just over- flowed one day and a guy called Noah got into a big boat while other people drowned. Maybe he took some cows and sheep and dogs with him. Then folks made it into a big story. Some of those stories were good, though. I like the way Samson beat up those . . . what do you call them? I read the Bible pretty near through to get a shot-gun from my dad:? We read together about Babylonian tablets, and archeological discoveries bearing out biblical lore. My head grew puzzled as to how all these historical fragments might be fitting themselves into the heads of the boys, either as knowledge, or as a part of their actual or possible religion. What was my job as a teacher of boys? It was a relieving tonic and anodyne to retreat to Agpawan, the one soul among all these many who seemed to be deliberately build- ing something within him from this apparent chaos. MEE REE AIL BOON 271 II Agpawan wished to teach his people about God, and the soul. He was a typical Prometheus, a torch-bearer, a passer-on, a self-forgetter and a very possible source of spiritual contagion if set down amidst a primitive people who would listen to his words with open hearts. I was sorry that he wished to go to church one Sunday, for what we found there was typical of just that theological bunkum with which rural America teems. I used to grow indignant that preachers were paid so little. Now I know the reason why, and wonder that they are paid as generously for their canned wares as church statistics show. I used to think it a pity that our country churches were dying out so fast. After the experience J had with Agpawan, I marvel that there are people enough so parched of soul as pomeiakceuticite existence possibiey. at) all.) tne memory of that frenetic little red-haired man with windmill arms and a voice like a fine file drawn across the rim of a glass tumbler will remain with me for years. His exegesis of the gospel of Jesus would have been grotesquely comical had not Agpawan sat beside me. I thought I could feel him wriggle with sheer pain. It was joy to step out from that ugly, airless, dismal church into the star- lit night. When we reached the walnut trees, Agpawan grasped my arm in his strong brown hand 272 THE REAL BOY and said, ‘‘Maestro, one feels nearer to God out herets ‘The moon is full,’ I wrote one night in my journal. “The frozen lake lies like a great green plate of glass. Stars shine almost painfully bright in the sky despite the flooding moonlight. ‘The air is still, and crisp, and sweet to one’s lungs and blood. But the boys are all crouched over their tables and desks. ‘They are worrying over sub- stantive clauses, or reading about a dead French king, or solving a problem in disembcdied numbers. When nights are so glorious as this one, why not worship their splendor with nocturnal holiday? Why should a printed calendar determine our days or nights of celebration? Why not reap the moon- lit harvest of joy that awaits us this very hour? Tomorrow? Why, tomorrow I myself may be with yesterday's seven thousand years! It seems almost criminal to keep those boys in their cabins over books and papers on a night such as this. Oh, to beat my drum and lead them all forth and turn study-hour into the joy of living!” After writing thus I was not content to stay indoors. If I could not rouse the whole school to join me, at least I could take a walk with one of the boys, and so I pried Agpawan from his meditations upon x squared minus y squared over z in parenthesis cubed, and we started around the lake. ‘The ice was crackling and groaning like a gigantic bullfrog. ‘Trees snapped like small caliber rifles. ‘The light snow on the THE REAL BOY 273 shore-line was crisp as singing dune-sands under our feet. I believe we grew literally drunk with the beauty of the moon shadows and the wine-dry tingle of the frosty air. Aggie was spellbound and ecstatic by turns. He would run, jump, gesticulate and shout; then sink into an almost funereal pace of musing silence before breaking into words. “Better than much hunting,” he said. ‘I love woods and night alone. I love them for themselves. They make me forget ugly things. Make me forget that Mr. Roosevelt shoots lions. Make me feel happy thought again.” 7 Aggie had borrowed my copy of “African Game Trails,” and its gory pictures of scientific butchery had taken their place among the little brown man’s constellation of “ugly things.’’ Here was a direct descendant of a long line of Igorote head-hunters, a boy of the Bontoc bush nourished with ululating war- songs and bred among brandishing spears, yet so responsive to the witcheries of winter moonlight that even Mr. Roosevelt’s pardonable killings be- came happily forgettable. “Aggie,” I said. “You say this is better than hunting. Do you not like to hunt?” “Yes, Maestro; but I like this better. I like better, too, that idea of hunt animals with camera instead of gun. I take a camera to the Philippines. I teach my people the new way. Tonight I feel love for animals, like for man. ‘This night is so beauti- ful. It makes everything so except the ugly things. 274 HE REwWL BOY I forget them, or remember them without it hurt.” Again and again I have found that the night has power to draw-out, to educate our souls. Little fires before bed-time; music floating up to the tents and cabins and tree-houses from the lake at the hour when boys are drifting to sleep; a walk down that “ribbon of moonlight,” the friendly road; conversa- tion alternate with silence atop a gray bowlder underneath the stars; floating off into dream-land at the bottom of a canoe: these influences, circum- stances, atmospheres are always ready to lend their helping hand to teacherhood. ‘Their subtle values have scarce been tapped. Ill My boys of English VIII each wrote an im- promptu, classroom biography of Jesus. I asked that they write briefly, telegraphically, simply giving me the high-spots in their memory of his story. From the bunch I have picked a series of sentences which, when strung together, give a pretty fair com- posite picture of Jesus in the mind of a boy, simple, straightforward and almost entirely shorn of mys- tical fringes. ‘There was once a man called Jesus who was a carpenter but turned into a preacher and was killed by the Jews. Some say he was the son of God and some say that the Holy Ghost was his father. When he was twelve he got talking to some old men in a church and his folks went home without him. A lot THe RE ANWR OY. 275 of kids got killed when Jesus was born because a king was scared that he might grow up and be a king too. One day a woman poured oil on his feet and mopped it up with her hair. Jesus said if you get hit on one side of the face to turn around and get hit on the other. He was called The Lamb of God. He walked on water and didn’t sink. He caught fishes and made them grow into more fishes to'feed/a lotvot people! \One’man got up.a tree to see Jesus go by and Jesus told him to get down and go have dinner with him somewheres. He cured people. One time he raised a dead man from a cemetery. Once a pigeon flew down when Jesus was taking a bath in a river and lit on him. Jesus was walking one day after he died and his friends didn’t recognize him. He was crucified up on a hill with two robbers on each side of him. He had a crown of thorns put on him by the soldiers. He was a good man and shouldn’t have been killed. It was Judas who snitched on him and got him caught.” This, I say, is an epitome from a batch of com- positions. I do not think it does justice to the at- titude even of my somewhat specialized group of high-school boys. I do not cite it as typical of boy- mind at all. Jesus probably entered their souls and affected their thinking processes in very different guise from that reflected in their written words. I recall a conversation with Hugo, recorded in my journal which suggests what I mean. ‘Is there any such thing as Jesus?” asked Hugo. “TI don’t half believe it, but half I do. I did some- 276 THES-REAL BOY thing wrong the other day and I knew it was wrong. None of you teachers knew it, nor the boys, but I had a feeling inside that Jesus knew it and was watching me. Guess I got the idea in Sunday- school. It isn’t God. He don’t seem to bother me. It’s just Jesus; but I can’t really believe he’s chasing after me to see what Ido. I wonder if there is any such thing.” ‘Don’t you suppose it’s your conscience?” I re- plied. ‘‘Maybe your mind has put the idea of Jesus there where your conscience belongs. Conscience is that part of you which has learned the difference be- tween right and wrong. It tells you in what the Bible calls a ‘still small voice’ what you ought to do, and what you ought not.”’ i; ButlismtJesusirealie’ ‘‘Jesus was a man who had some firm ideas as to what is right and wrong. He spoke them hard. He spoke them so hard it hurt folks who thought differ- ently. It got him into trouble, and he was finally killed for speaking out what he thought. But his ideas have lasted for two thousand years and most folks haven’t been able to live up to them, but a lot of people are trying. ‘These ideas have helped build up that part of our selves which we call conscience. In a sense it may be Jesus who was speaking to you, because a man lives in his words sometimes long after he himself is dead, like one’s mother who dies and leaves memories of what she has said in our mind.’ “Well, anyhow, I did something wrong, and didn’t seem to care about that; but I worried about Jesus. I guess if it was only my conscience I won’t bother about it any more.” Did I do violence to a possible mental and moral Mitten AST B GY vip hys watch-dog within the lad in my attempt to answer his question as best I knew how? His reaction puzzled me. It was my desire to acquaint my boys with the character of Jesus in such a way that a strong, vig- orous impression might be made. Not like that of my own boyhood when Jesus was a gentle, motherly soul on whose shoulder one might weep in time of trouble. Thus are first impressions made, and how they last! I wished my boys to carry with them pic- tures of Jesus elbowing his way into the temple crowd, a scourge in his hand; or telling the devil to go back to hell out on the desert; or standing erect before Pilate, the Roman governor and making him feel ashamed of himself and all his tinsel power. But most of my boys came to me with their impres- sions firmly fixed, most of them mythical, cloudy and theologic. I worked here, as it were, in clay already hardened in the sun. “Are you a Catholic?’ Edmunds asked, picking up my small copy of Thomas a Kempis and leafing over the pencil-marked pages. ‘There was inquisitiveness among the boys as to what my religion might be. ‘They seem to have classified all the other members of the faculty, ex- cepting Halley, perhaps; and every once in a while a controversy crops up as to what brand was mine. I presumed Edmunds would spread the news of St. Thomas, and arouse new speculation. 278 THE Rea BiOey “JT sincerely like certain things the Catholic Church has given us,” I answered; ‘‘and this is one of them. While I cannot swallow his philosophy whole, any more than I can that of St. Paul or Her- bert Spencer, I do taste, swallow and digest parts of him with great relish and spiritual profit. Perhaps you will, too, some day. ‘These things are for us each individually, I guess, and a little book like that is to be read, not talked about.” I asked him to sit down and read me some of the marked paragraphs; just for fun. These were among them: ‘The more a man is united within himself, and in- teriorly simple, the more and higher things doth he understand without labor; because he receives the light of understanding from above. ‘‘A pure, simple, and steady spirit is not dissipated by a multitude of affairs, because he performs them all to the honor of God, and endeavors to be at rest within himself, and free from all seeking of himself. ‘A good and devout man first disposes his works inwardly which he is to do outwardly. ‘Oh! if men would use as much diligence in root- ing out vices and planting virtues as they do in pro- posing questions, there would not be so great evils committed, nor scandals among the people.” ‘“That’s something like the Bible, ain’t it? Do the Catholics use the same Bible as we do, or is it different ?”’ My talk with this inquisitive boy following his Te ERE AT, BOW 279 question inspired me to start a course in compara- tive religions, and to show how much of essential oneness there is in all of them, despite their childish schisms and minutie. Of course I did no such thing, for time was precious, and we were to read “The Vicar of Wakefield” and learn to tell con- junctions from adverbs. IV “Mr. Hamilton, I don’t get you at all. Some- times I think you’re an atheist. ‘Then I see you lead the boys in the Lord’s prayer at council-fire. You mark up those Nychee books as though they was gospel; but then you tell Nat to live by the golden rule and he comes exploding to me about both the Bible and Nychee. You don’t go to church, but you know more about the Bible than the preach- ers, I'll bet. You’ve got a book about a Catholic Saint on the mantelpiece and, have made Aggie think that this Saint Francis was some ball of fire. What are you, anyway? I don’t get you.” Thus Heth, who browsed among my books, but seldom, if ever, read one through. I listened to the lad a bit wistfully, I guess, and a ttine perplexed’ of (spirits) Perhapsiayt teacher should wear a definite label. Perhaps he should have a definitive, understandable religious platform from which to speak to these boys who like to pigeonhole their fellows and their elders, and to recognize them as Protestant, Catholic, Democrat, 280 OH aRs Avis’ B'O'Y Republican, Deist or Atheist, or, woe upon them, Socialist. It was apparent that I seemed to Heth, vigorous, practical mortal that he was, as a bit cloudy and disembodied and without foundation. I recall feeling this way toward Stanley Hall, whom I was never able to brand as Platonist, or Pragma- tist, or Hegelian, or Pagan, or Unitarian or any- thing save supremely Hallian. So, pawing around in my imagination for a tag, I finally replied: Well, Heth, I guess I’m a geneticist!” To which my stal- wart sailor-lad: “And what the devil is that?” [ pointed to five huge red volumes on my shelf. ‘Read those, Heth, and maybe you'll discover what I mean.” He read the titles, weighed one of the books on the palm of his broad hand, and exclaimed: “My God!” A friend sent me a modern prayer-book ‘‘for use with the boys, in place of the older texts.” It was made up of talk about the effectiveness of prayer, and quotations from ancient and modern theologues who had said reasonably short prayers to Deity. There was a quaint monotony about it, rather pleasant for a time; but one thinks with deep sympathy of a God who would really have to listen to its contents, end- lessly repeated by a host of souls. On the whole it read very stupidly. I knew how my boys would re- act. hey did not have a chance. Not even Agpa- wan saw it. Agpawan delighted in some of the metered prayers of the Bible, and never tired of Fiona’s rune beginning: ie een EAT BOY 281 ‘“O spirit that broods upon the hills And moves upon the face of the deep And is heard in the wind.” But the practicalisms of pulpiteers, gathered into a prosy anthology with notes, interpolations, and tor- tuous explanations are beyond the boundaries of any- thing squaring with the mind of Boy! pc nietamsaidu lec, haveryouna prayer. could learn, so I could say it on occasion? ‘Times crop up when one ought to know a good prayer, and I haven’t been able to find anything that sounded as though I could feel it.’’ I reached to my ever re- sponsive shelf, and handed him an opened copy of eles), ‘Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man. Help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces. Let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to awake with smiles, give us to labor smiling. Let us lie down without fear and awake and rise with exultation.”’ Luther Gulick came to my aid with these boys in their desire to know what the word God meant. He presents, in his little ‘Dynamic of Manhood,”’ the idea of a discipline, of a real striving, of a detailed, systematic approach to the problem. However short he may fall of leading us to God; yet at least 282 EE A GB Ow. he proposes a way of action, and not of mere reverie or meditation. “Most of what we know about God as Father and Friend comes to us through the life and charac- ter of Christ. That is, God has shown Himself most clearly in the person of Christ. He has in- fluenced the course of history more than any other person, and is the greatest personality of history. God shows himself through personality. “Exercise your friendship capacity by selecting some person to whom you wish to be closer—your mother, for example. Think through your relations with her. How long since you last wrote to her? Do you think about her affairs and interests, and ask her how definite matters are getting on? Did you ever think of sending some special thing—book —flowers—to her on the day when, with pain and with deep love, she brought you into the world? In general, what can you do to deepen and to increase the vividness and the reality of your relation to your mother. . . . You will find that a few minutes of this kind at the beginning of each day will help create an atmosphere of friendliness and warmth about you, an assurance of happiness ready to make its way into consciousness at any moment. ‘The point is this, that we grow in those direc- tions in which we think and act. God is to be known in direct proportion as the power to love and under- stand love grows, hence deliberately plan and think these things through. . . . Plan your day in ac- cordance with the best that you know in all re- SHectsiie a He follows with several vibrant pages of prac- HER ALL BOY 283 tical suggestions, which, if my lads were actually to follow, they would get a feeling of an approach to something desirable and satisfying, even though they failed to interpret this something mystically or theologically, as might Polixander or Agpawan. God must have been keenly amused one day if he looked in, as I did, upon the spectacular and graphic argument between Nat and Dole. They fought over the absoluteness of right and wrong. Down the middle of Nat’s cabin ran a crack. On one side there was a pine-knot, and across it, on the other, a splotch of blue ink. The boys squatted by these land- marks, Dole most philosophically calm, Nat dynam- ically vibrant with partisan emotion. He held Dole’s blackened briar pipe above the crack, a tem- porary symbol for God. | Good-natured hells and damns were flung across the separating space. Such a torrent of argument, such flow of invective, derision, expository defini- tion, pleading, tacking, scouting, debouching, en- flading and scattered maneuvering of mental forces I have seldom witnessed. [ seemed carried bodily back into the scholastic times of the early Christian philosophers. Finally they arrived at a breathless compromise, as I remember it, about like this: ‘“‘There is an absolute standard of right and wrong . . . we don’t know what this standard is . each must build his own standard and take his chance on its being in accord with the absolute 284 THE RIAL BO Y standard which was made by God for purposes of his own.” The boys, when they at last noticed me in their doorway, were all for beginning the battle again, with myself as referee. I insisted that their com- promise sounded to me thoroughly pragmatic and practical, why waste more words? ‘They wanted a definition of pragmatism. I promised to give them one some day. For one morning, those two lads had philosophized enough ! Vv ‘Who is Billy Sunday?” asked Frank, the inquisi- tive. I mounted my desk, took off my coat, rolled up my shirt-sleevs, gesticulated wildly and ‘shouted: “You little devils! Come out of that sink of iniquity! You mice! You rats! You skunks! If you don’t come out of there mighty sudden, you'll deserve all that’s coming to you in hell hereafter!” Mr. Brough, unaccustomed to hear my voice raised to such pitch and vehemence, came darting down the hall and looked into our classroom. I explained that I was describing Billy Sunday to the boys; but his lips curled in the wrong direction for a smile and he stamped back to his mathematics room. “But what good are such preachers, anyhow?” queried Tink, the sensitive, the esthete. ‘That stuff would get my goat. Say, why don’t churches pay taxes? Doesn't Billy Sunday have to pay a tax ep Rw A IB OY, 285 same as a circus for his tents, or are his tents same as churches?” ‘The bell rang, and class closed on further radical questionings. Nat and Amo turned their small cabin into a pub- lic library, devoted mainly to books and magazines on how to get strong. Nat proselyted among the boys in behalf of what he called “the body beauti- Tulse eliseideay ot beauty) was ‘that, of a Sandow- but his attitude toward physical development was wholesome, and he had my blessing. He asked me if a few boys might drop in for a few minutes after taps for a final word or two before going to bed. A strange request, but I granted it. One night I dropped in to see what happened. ‘There, by the light of a tall, sputtery candle, Parson Alfalfa was reading from the Bible to half a dozen kids in pajamas and bathrobes. As I entered he was dron- ing along: “But he said unto me, Behold, thou shalt conceive, and bear a son; and he shall drink no wine nor strong drink, neither eat any unclean thing: for the child shall be called a Nazarite to God from the womb to the day of his death.”” The Parson looked up, smiled at me, and continued reading. “Then Manoah entreated the Lord, and said. . .” etc. At the end of the chapter he closed the book, knelt down and, the boys following him in approxi- mate unison, repeated the Lord’s prayer. ‘Then, with a quiet good-night to Nat and Amo and myself, the boys filed off to their cabins. I followed them into the crisp black night, feeling it hardly oppor- 286 PoE REAL BOY tune to ask, just then, what this curious performance signified. ‘Nat, why did you start a Bible class down there?” I asked, after council-fire one evening. “Well, Chief, Brown came to school and im- mediately got the name Parson Alfalfa. He wouldn’t play games on Sunday. MHe’d sneak off and read the Bible. Mooned around all day. I just hated him. Wondered whether to knock all that out of him, or whether we’d better do some- thing with his stuff. Amo suggested harnessing the guy to our library and starting a Bible class. The kids want that sort of thing, some of ’em. Seem to enjoy it. So I started him on Samson. ‘That’s a good strong-man story and it went over all right. Now some of the kids, at least, like the Parson and he isn’t so lonesome.”’ I marveled at my pagan Nat, and felt Amo’s quiet, somewhat mystical influence back of the per- formance. The nightly reading together might grow to be a happy custom for a few of the boys and I wished it well. Parson Alfalfa fared less happily at the hands of Parsons, Hirsch & Co., than with Nat and Amo. Hearing of the Bible class, these cynics invited Al- falfa to their den and asked him to start another class. ‘Then, like the mischievous Virginian of Owen Wister’s tale, they heckled him with questions which he answered in all solemnity until, their patience shredded by his dogged persistence and de- peli etre ha hy Are 9S Ory 287 votion to truth, they razzed him unmercifully and pitched him out into the rainy night. VI “Tf the stars should appear one night in a thou- sand years, how would men believe and adore and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown?” ‘This ques- tion from Emerson fell on all too practical ears when I suggested a starlight walk for my small tikes of English I. ‘But we know it isn’t the City of God, or any other city,’ piped up Belshe. “And we know the moon’s nothing but a dead world, all cold and no- body living on it. The moon’s good for something because you can see by it; but the stars don’t give enough light for you to see your way around; they’re just pretty sometimes, but I don’t see that they count for very much to us.” The night before Amo had pointed out Spika, Sagittarius, the Northern Cross and the Eagle to me. I had gone up to class full of enthusiasm for stars and looked forward to a night session with some of the boys out under the wheeling constellations. Belshe’s cold practicality dampened my spirits and I could not muster enough courage to quote Bourdil- lon’s exquisite lines about “The night has a thou- sand eyes, the day but one,’ which were ready to bubble over before that young materialist spoke his mind. 288 PREv RAL BOY I dropped stars, and took to spelling from Cody’s ‘One Hundred Percent Speller,’’ merely suggesting that if any boy wished to walk with me by starlight that evening, I would be at home right after study- hour. Frank appeared, of course, and Hawkins, Necker and Don Castillo. We walked in the woods, for I prefer a few stars at a time, through the branches of trees, to the whole mob of the heavens at once. We built a tiny fire, just bright enough to throw stray shadows here and there among the tree-trunks and float smoke wraiths up among the leaves. Lying down, face upward toward the holes in the roof of the woods we caught a sprinkle of starshine here and there and chatted a bit concerning time and space and light. But I had no heart for astronomy or constella- tions or the names of stars or planets. That seemed too practical, too like my small imp Belshe; so we just enjoyed an hour of lying by a little fire, upon dry leaves, and looking up at an occasional twinkle from ‘‘heaven.”’ To stay up all night should be an adventure for every boy at school. To hear the woods awaken at the faint gray birth of dawn is alone an experience he will always remember with joy. Bird-song before sunrise, and the soft slow looming of tree-trunks out of the night and into the misty half-light of earliest morning become precious treasures of the soul. One should watch a little fire through the night Tere eR ATSB Ony 289 with a friend, in alternate periods of drowsy silence and of quiet talk; but he should also walk out the night alone by himself, listening to the tiny voices of a myriad animate things, and to that “‘little noise- less noise among the leaves, born of the very sigh that silence heaves.” Not only is our daily life so noisy and fretful and full of light and color that we really need a contrast in change to keep our balance right; but there is, it seems to me, a genuinely primitive, if not a spiritual touch upon one’s soul at the hands of Whitman’s enfolding night. For can we not, we sophists of the age of Bergson and Loeb and Karl Pearson, can we not yet hold that: ‘The Soul is also real—it too is positive and direct; No reasoning, no proof has establish’d it, Undeniable growth has establish’d it.” Let us believe it, for boys, at least! Let us give our boys those things, those circumstances that work into their undeniable growth of body and mind that subtle something which no reasoning or proof has established, but which all of us at some time have felt; even as when: “The press of my foot to the earth springs a hun- dred affections.’’ For every boy is a poet at heart, however much he may hate Milton or be bored with Goldsmith or balk at Wordsworth. I believe my lads who have experienced night right through from 290 ani OO RIEVATS, OB @oy sundown to homeward walk in dawnlight, have felt as our good gray poet did when he said: ‘‘T think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air, and all great poems, also; I think I could stop, here myself, and do miracles.” After all, it is feeling first which makes us poets. The words may follow and we may write them, or they may not and we may be still; but we have all at least lived a bit of poetry, whether written after- ward or vanished on the air. The boys liked to have me drop around to their cabins after taps for a word of good-night. It some- times seemed the golden hour of all the day to me, a time when one could, in the fewest spoken words, build up his structure of friendliness between boy and man. Stepping up to Ed and Simon’s door one evening I overheard the most picturesque bit of proselyting that has ever reached my ears. Said the diminutive Simon: “T know I’m a Jew by race, but I’ve turned Chris- tian by religion. I don’t feel ashamed. I feel as though I’d seen a light in a dark place. I want you to see it too. It’s very good to be a Christian in the truth of it, not just by name.” “But isn’t your old religion just as good?” re- turned the somewhat sleepy Ed. ‘“Wasn’t Jesus a Jew? Why can’t you stay Jew and still be a Chris- tian if Jesus was a Jew? Anyhow, I don’t like churches.”’ MPH RIECALL | sBiOW) 291 “Sure Jesus was a Jew, but he taught a new re- ligion, a better one than they had. I’ve been con- verted, and I’m going to join the Christian church. I'll do it at Christmas time. I wish you would too. Won’t you?” “Can it, old man, until some other time. I don’t see how you get that way. I’m sleepy. Good- night.” Had the eternal spirit of missionary and martyr reincarnated itself in this mite of a lad? How long would this fervor last? Howcame it about? What strange things were going on inside these curly heads, whose insides we teacher folk so very seldom see | As a teacher in a non-sectarian school, it was not my province to deal with religious doctrine. Adoles- cence is so strongly religious at heart, however, that, as we have seen, questions of religion and the- ology cropped up quite often in class and out. For the churches in our neighborhood I had as little lik- ing as the boys. ‘Their nominal Christianity was static, moldy, unwholesome. Our Sunday services at school were innocuous, and their tedium was re- lieved by the fact that we all appeared in starched collars and shiny shoes and took on a demeanor of solemnity which was partly real. Morning prayers in the gymnasium were livened with song, although our singing was often followed by a somewhat scoldy preachment in community ethics, especially in the wake of some boyish escapade. On the whole I be- 292 HSE RE ALL BOY lieve the religious life of Intervale as a group of men and boys was rather barren and _ neglected. When the boys did ask for the bread of a way of life, they were handed the cobblestones of formal dogma. How true it is, so many times, as Havelock Ellis has put it that: ‘When the impulse of religion first germinates in the young soul, the ghouls of the churches rush out of their caverns, seize on the unhappy victim of the divine influence and proceed to assure him that his rapture is, not a natural manifestation as free as the sunlight and as gracious as the unfolding of a rose, but the manifest sign that he has been branded by a supernatural force and fettered forever to a dead theological creed. ‘Too often he is thus caught by the bait of his own rapture; the hook is firmly fixed in his jaw and he is drawn whither his blind guides will; his wings droop and fall away; so far as the finer issues of life are concerned, he is done for and damned.” Yet what could I do? Had I myself anything happier to offer? What was my gospel, my religion? Always when questioning myself thus, I was led to think of the woods, of my walks under the trees with the boys, of our friendship fires at night in the open, and of Kitty’s hearthside indoors. ‘These were symbols of my own religion, if indeed I had one. It would not formulate itself into a creed. It seemed to avoid words and seek a refuge in such things as were dearest to my heart. Firelight or ire HATER Ory 293 candle-light, the reading of good books together, listening to Bach’s concerto for two violins or Bee- thoven’s funeral march, or wisps from MacDowell. Friendly chats, accented by periods of silence, con- templating emberglow. Doing primitive things to- gether with my fellows, felling trees, climbing rocks, cooking meals, sleeping under rain clouds or stars. Always when I puzzled over religion my thoughts harked to such things as these. So I contented my- self, at Intervale, with such fragments of relation- ship to my pupils as came to'us unbidden at rare times when circumstance and spirit opened the way. Around our council-fire during our summer session, a religious spirit seemed to come and dwell in our midst which was more general, more formal and yet still plastic, alive and, I hope, evergreen and growing. Let us return again, in Chapter XV, to the relig- ious spirit of the out-of-doors which has been lived and spoken of and written about by so many healthy souls. But first I would mention a short, incon- clusive experiment in teacherhood which bridged my life at Intervale across to that of summer camping. CHAPTER XIV A SHORT EXPERIMENT IN COORDINATION Education must become again in intention and spirit religious. The impulse of devotion, to universal service, and to a complete escape from self, will re- appear again, stripped and plain, as the recognized fundamental structural impulse in human society. —H.G. WELLs. I INTERVALE, a seedling school of tomorrow, was torn up by its young roots and hurled into the Gehen- na of our unreasoning war-mindedness. It could not survive the political, social and economic lynching of its founder, our beloved “‘Doc.”’ He was tramped on, as a stepping stone to power, by a notorious petty politician who failed to realize his ambition, thank the Lord, despite the huge publicity given him by his cowardly attack upon “Doc” as an agent of the Kaiser. We are all too drably familiar with the his- tory of such raids upon American citizens of Ger- man descent to call for more than a passing reference here. I need only say that the concrete foundation of our log Club-House at Intervale was celebrated by the press as a gun-emplacement for German artil- lery; beautiful German lithographs of wheat-fields, 294 GNSS hie DA baal i Oba 295 oaks in the Black Forest and ancient castles on the Rhine upon our corridor walls were labeled as in- struments for the Prussianization of American Youth; and I myself was branded by gossip as a traitor attempting to slide into the army as a spy. One may smile at these things now; but they were not without some elements of tragedy at the time. We teachers scattered and became realtors, auto- mobile agents or mere teachers again in other schools. I returned to journalism, but grew so home- sick for howling youngsters and a wood-pile that when Mr. Cogan called upon me and described a marvelous “school of tomorrow” of which I might become Head-Master,” I deserted my typewriter and took up my second experiment in teacherhood. Westbrook was a tiny private school, set pic- turesquely on a hillside in Connecticut, where about twenty boys ranging in age from ten to seventeen were gathered together under one roof. For a short time a group of three men and three women worked there amidst that handful of boys as doers and learn- ersvasmwelleas in the role,oL) teacher.) |Hor antew months the varied phases of a school curriculum were melted into a single major theme with a definite and common aim and method. The day’s physical labor in necessary chores was done rapidly, but thoroughly, in a spirit of willing codperation. Physical training, outside of athletics, was centered in the dance. Eve- nings went to firelight stories, music and tramps or snow-ball battles in the open air. On the whole we 296 PHE REAL BOY lived for a season close to the spirit of Stevenson’s prayers ‘When the day returns, return to us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts, eager to labor, eager to be happy.” My first act upon arriving at Westbrook was to clear out every desk and drawer and shelf of all text-books. Nothing remained with the boys save pencil, paper, pen and ink. ‘Then I furnished each with a large, loose-leaf note-book. On my desk in our assembly room I placed the first volume of Wells’ “Outline of History.’ On our shelves were put some dictionaries, an encyclopedia, a World AIl- manac and a Bible. The boys were divided roughly into two sections, older and younger, in accord with physiological and mental age as nearly as I could judge it without elaborate tests. [hese groups met me in turn, then went to one or other of three teachers who followed my lead in adventuring with the boys among events of the past, of today, and of tomorrow. The last sentence in paragraph three of volume one in our only text-book reads (of the sun): “Its bulk is a million and a quarter times that of the earth.’’ This brought my first question from the boys: ‘‘How much is the bulk of the earth?” I asked if anyone knew. No one did. I asked if it would be of interest to find out. Unanimous agreement. patie geh hA EB OY: 297 Closing the book, and stepping to the blackboard, we entered first plane and then solid geometry. One by one I set down the simple arithmetic rules for finding the diameter, circumference and area of a circle, and then of a sphere with a closing formula as to its bulk or cubic contents. “These went down into our loose-leaf note-books. Miss Martin and I would now be available to any boy who needed help in learning how to find the contents of a sphere, or the bulk of our world. I thought I had made a fine beginning in codrdinated studies, History and Math ematics ! | Of course the need for variety of interest was felt very soon; but Wells afforded it in plenty. On page four we found, next day, that: ‘‘So hot is the sun’s atmosphere that iron, nickel, copper, and tin are present in it in a gaseous state.”’ To which Billy Fellows: ‘‘How can anybody know that? No body’s ever been there to find out! He’d be burned up alive.” So Billy was appointed to write us a brief description, and draw a sketch of the spectro- _ scope, which he would find in the encyclopedia, and tell us how man can discover what chemical elements are present in stars and suns. “But why should a spectroscope go into a history book?” He inquired. I explained that we were building history in loose- leaf form, so that when we came to the time when man discovered the spectroscope, we might then slip sketch and description into its proper place. ‘Gosh, it'll be an awful long time before we get filled up - 298 He Bea eee (Tei) ae that far, won't it?’ We agreed that it might take long. And so we read on together through pleasant days of very real work upon such high-lights in our text as I chose to single out for special effort. We tacked into botany, physiology, elemental chemis- try, physics and even fragmentary Latin, as well as dwelling daily in the land of mathematics, good English, spelling and drawing. The codperation of my colleagues was sympathetic and complete, parents seemed happily content, and the boys had sometimes to be driven out to recess from their note-books. Re- cess brought us together in hard play, and our after- noons were devoted mainly to outdoor or manual jobs. When evening came, we were quite ready for stories and music by the open fire, with pop-corn or candy-pull for spice. The younger boys followed the same plan, save that their mathematics, for instance, dealt in much smaller integers when measuring surfaces and con- tents. It was my personal job as a teacher to sim- plify general principles so that all could follow. This was fascinating work, and kept me mentally alive. Outside my group periods, I wandered among the boys, lending a hand here and there with their work, especially in drawing and trying my best to work upon the principle of the stimulus of success; finding merit and things worthy of compliment, and dealing with error only afterward, as though of but little importance. For I had the awful memory of a salesman’s visit re REA BO x 299 to Intervale. He set up a magic-lantern in my class- room. He threw huge enlargements of boy compo- sitions upon a screen. Every error, duly scored in red, stood out vividly with the effect of spilled blood. As a visual emphasizer of mistakes this engine was a masterpiece. Its principle was that of the musical neophyte who had studied so closely the errors and faults in musical compositions that he could detect them whenever they occurred. A delightful way to listen to a symphony or opera! ‘The salesman as- sured me that his instrument was being adopted by the leading progressive schools, and was truly a part. of the equipment of the schools of tomorrow. To which I replied that I preferred premature interment to having to adopt either such an appliance or such a method of instruction. It does seem to me that here, if anywhere, the school of tomorrow is to differ from those of the past and of today; that we shall deal more and more with trial and success, and less and less with mere trial and error. At Westbrook we often varied our classroom work to embrace lessons out of doors, as when Obrey found a long, tough grape vine hanging from an oak and we spent two whole days as Indians chasing Daniel Boone. That story, too, was recorded in our note-books, awaiting its proper setting in time and place. But it was its action that remained with us, and will remain, a vital memory. One of the boys chopped off that grape vine near its base and it made a marvelous swing! Not until every one of us had 300 AHeE VREAIL VB OvyY been Daniel and all the rest of us his pursuing ene- mies were we content to come back inside four walls, and next day there was nothing to do but repeat the play for good measure. “Acting History” began to become a tradition, and it promised to compete keenly with our work upon the story of mankind. One day Donald sat on the topmost branch of a maple in our yard, declaiming Sam McGee. Willard shouted lines from Masefield in the basement. Buddy howled up attic, and, behind the doors of my own large room, small Joseph struggled with the clear diction of the Gettysburg Address. A group of boys sat with me, listening to Bob kill the High- wayman from Alfred Noyes. Aubrey wandered lonely as a cloud on the brown fields behind our school home reciting lines from Kipling. A few youngsters sang with Mademoiselle about the piano. Thus was Westbrook school in session one day when inquisitive visitors arrived, prepared by hearsay to find us each and all bent over loose-leaf note-books drawing historical maps. It had so happened that we had voted a declamation contest, and each boy had chosen his part, not necessarily historical, but still to fit our bulging history books now merrily in the building. I had no thought of shifting our pro- cedure for the accommodation of guests. They could take what they. found as it was. II After lunch, we cleared table, helped wash dishes, THE REAL BOY 301 swept rooms and halls and classrooms, dusted out erasers, washed boards, emptied waste-baskets, sharpened pencils for the morrow, washed floors and windows when they needed it and, in general, made things tidy for the community. Many hands made light work. Then we sawed wood by shifts, and played. During snow-time we skated, tobogganed, sledded, snow-shoed, skied, built forts, fought bat- tles and enjoyed old-time Intervale snow-baths be- hind the school by moonlight. Before supper we spent an hour in study, that is in reading, or drawing, or working our individual problems for tomorrow. All ran smoothly until Springtime. The fragrance of fresh sod, mingling with a faintest suggestion of the odor of apple-bloom-to- come wafted through the windows of our school- home on the hill one April morning and settled in our hearts. I closed our “Outline of History,” whis- pered a few electric words in the ear of our long- legged Aubrey, who shot out through the doorway as though he had been flung from a catapult. Soon he was back with a message from our cook, and pre- sently all of us, teachers and pupils and scurrying dogs were off down the pike with springing step and with laughter on our faces, echoing an April song of freedom in our hearts. How we spent that first sunshiny day of Spring- time is of no moment here. Anyone can picture a score of wild boys turned loose from however so pleasant a series of walls and doors and windows, 302 THE* REAL BOY enclosing them for a week or so of cloudy drizzle, out into warm sunlight and a balmy southern breeze. Perhaps anyone can imagine, also, the look of aston- ishment and no little chagrin on the face of the proud owner of that pioneer school when he returned, that morning, with some important visitors, and found his school had vanished completely, leaving nothing but furniture and fixtures to suggest its one-time existence. All the way from New York on the train these visitors had been told in glowing terms of the unique educational plan under which the Westbrook boys were living and learning to live. Grim silence and desertion met and abode with them until time for their departure. The smiling colored cock, when questioned, could only reply: “Lawdy, Mr. Cogan, how’s I goin’ to know where they be? Just skipt off and went, with all the bread and butter and cocoa and milk in ma kitchen. Not a word where, or when they'd be comin’ back. Just plumb skidoo, and me here to hold de fort ’til they gets back.” When we returned Mr. Cogan spoke. Such a spontaneous variation of program must not occur again. ‘To this I could not commit myself, for the Good Lord might send another such day as this all unawares, and how could I tell how our hearts might respond to its call? Were we not working under the principle of freedom to grow as the spirit might move? Sorry I was for what had come to pass, but when the Red Gods made their medicine, the young GH Selb Ai) BOG 303 men’s feet would turn. I had accepted an offer of complete academic freedom very literally, and upon my own interpretation of its spirit. Meanwhile, interest in our loose-leaf story of man- kind kept warm and flared now and then into real flames by way of its perpetual variety, its adapta- bility to mood and its constant appeal to action, espe- cially in drawing. Figures from problems in plane and solid geometry (which we called arithmetic), diagrams of astronomic distances and geological strata, all in three or four colors of ink appealed to almost every boy, mechanically minded as most boys: are. Pictures of cotylosaurs, pterodactyls, bronto- sauri, Heidelberg men, Neanderthal skulls, and stone age weapons we copied from Horrabin’s draw- ings, or from such books and magazines as were at hand. When an embryo cartoonist wished Cro- Magnon men to shoot archzopterix with machine- guns, I was glad to welcome his caricatures into our text. Boy geologists reconstructed the most amazing of impossible creatures from stray bones found in the diggings of their fertile imagination. We played utter havoc with fact, and yet our very grotesqueries helped fix the major truths of our studies the firmer in mind. So at Westbrook we studied grammar, composi- tion, penmanship, spelling and drawing without knowing that we were studying. The first drafts for the histories were done in pencil for correction, and only the final copy, in ink, was included in the 304. dy, BEES UR BATS BOTY record. Some of the boys kept their rough sketches as museum samples of what a lot of work went into making a perfect sheet. Not only did we cover sub- jects usually compartmented into separate classes. or courses; but we forgot there were such formal methods while we lost ourselves trying to do one all absorbing thing. On the inside covers of our his- tories we pasted that dedication of a book in Gaelic by a monk of the Twelfth Century: “Neither for gold nor for gifts did I undertake this work so great and difficult—only I prayed that my book might be beautiful.” My enthusiasm for the “Story of Mankind,” how- ever, so eclipsed the necessary emphasis upon college requirements that parents began to inquire as to how we were preparing the boys for entrance examina- tions. I trusted that we should learn enough, in our work as it was, to carry through; but I could give no formal guarantee. Parents were delighted with the progress of the note-book histories and with the health and happiness of the boys, but: “Will Tom get into Yale? Will William be ready for Prince- ton? Can his note-book carry Henry into Cornell ?” What could I say? Regretfully, therefore, I ten- dered my resignation as Head-Master in favor of someone who cared more for fitting boys for college than indulging a fascinating experiment in education. I felt no bitterness in this. “he world is constructed thus. My method was too radical, too premature. Tie Ee Aer ts Gaye 305 Il Nat Warren had come to me at Westbrook. Bolted away from college, tired of its compart- mented courses, circumambient lectures, fraternities and jazz. He wanted action; clamored for a job. Still Nietzschean, he came to us full of enthusiasm for hard muscles and tense nerves. ‘Only the noblest things are very hard. ‘This new command, O my brothers, I lay upon you—become hard!’ Those words seemed to have become his motto. I talked over with him Nietzche’s ideal of the Dancer,. “strong, vigorous, yet harmonious and well bal- anced.’ I proposed that he join Miss Esther in eurythmics with our boys. He shied at the word eurythmics, but he took me seriously when I pre- sented to him the spirit of the dance as Havelock Ellis has phrased it: ‘“The dance of the athlete and acrobat rather than the make-believe of the ball- room, for behind the easy equipoise of such dancing lie patient training and effort. The chief character of good dancing is its union of the maximum of well balanced grace; that the whole muscular system is alive to restrain any excess; so that however wild and free the movement may seem it is always mea- sured. Excess would mean ignominious collapse.”’ So we introduced dancing at Westbrook with all the hope and enthusiasm of Greeks in the time of Pericles. Fortunately Miss Esther was a young woman who incarnated the very spirit of ‘‘the land 306 THE REAL “BOY of happy dancing’ and who threw herself into our plan for athletics to music with such sympathetic energy that even our most prosaic boys were soon caught all unawares in the subtle and magnetic poetry of motion. Heretofore the boys had gone through, every morning, the dreary, mechanical, jerky, jumpy, angu- lar process called ‘‘setting up.” This standardized set of motions to the snappy rhythrn of counted num- bers doubtless has its place in the absence of any- thing better; but how sorrily far removed from Plato’s idea of the muscular training of youth! You recall his words: “Rhythm and harmony are made familiar to the souls of youth, that they may grow more graceful and harmonious, and so be of service both in words and deeds; for the whole life of man stands in need of grace and harmony.” Is it simply because the intensive training of the dance is so much more difficult that we side-step its discipline and resort to a poor substitute? Or is it American hurry that dictates a cutting short of time for the attainment of results? ‘Ted Shawn’s experience in the army certainly proved to our physical-training experts that the discipline of the dance is more in- tensively vigorous than the hardest work at “‘setting up.’ Sheer lack of time, of course, was dead against the adoption of dance training as a physical measure for military ends. However, we at Westbrook had time for the added effort that must go into the mak- ing of a good dancer. Perini Rot Aslan Oey 307 Awkward myself to the point of grotesqueness, unable so much as to dance the one-step without vio- lence to other toes than mine; yet I thrilled, as though by Freudian over-reaction against my own inferiority complex in this regard, to the idea of training our boys in the rudiments of genuine danc- ing. For, if J had not experienced, at least I had seen the results of such foundation-laying, even as Miss Hinman has stated them: “Concentration of attention, gained by necessity for quick grasp of direction; alertness, necessary for application of direction; excellent codrdination of mental and phy- sical powers; grace and harmony through increas- ingly better control of muscle and nerve; better pos- ture; and doubtless better health through the effect upon respiration, circulation and general exhilaration of bodily and mental tone.’ So that, with Nat and Miss Esther, I felt my appointed mission to our youngsters was equipped admirably toward its goal and, with vivacious music from our piano at hands of one who could at least give us the full rhythm of good music, Westbrook took on an aspect of the Greek schole which rejoiced my soul. IV There was nothing pretty or dainty or even con- spicuously delicate about our dancing at Westbrook. For seven years Miss Esther had kept herself under a regular, daily discipline of joyous but hard physical work. The things her body did in response to music 308 UAE Ra B'O¥ looked so flowingly facile that they brought a first wave of easy tolerance over the minds of the boys who watched. Then they tried to do those simple, easy things and found them utterly impossible to do. The same was true with Nat’s various athletic stunts, except that the stunts were much more quickly mas- tered than the finely controlled movements of the dance. Once the dance was brought home to the boys as a superlative athletic achievement, they were keen for its preliminary discipline. The music helped, of course, for we are all muscularly musical creatures and mere exposure to the simplest tom-tom rhythm will awaken the instinct to dance. I took small groups of our boys to watch Esther at work. Her teacher was a musician and painter of landscapes, real and imaginary, and a marvelous in- terpreter of the human figure in strenuous action. Her studio shone with quick, vivid pastels of her pupil, crystallized in mid-air, or prone on the solid earth as the music might have swept her when the deft hand of the artist caught the mood in colored line. Trees, also, and hills, marshland and stretch- ing field, river and brook and wisps of sky-blue lake seemed to extend the limits of the room as though by magic into a far reaching panorama of the great out-of-doors. And here the two women worked to- gether, while at times the boys sat watching. The teacher as doer and as learner was apparent here. The boys caught the spirit in their teacher, one who learned while she taught, who worked hard Abdel iDs ANID P OU bya AsO IN ¢ 309 toward her own perfection while she called for rigor- ous labor on the part of her pupils. Nat also became a learner, and a new world was opened to him into which he plunged with enthusiasm, and from whence he radiated his own joy of accomplishment... It was these qualities in teacherhood that made the dance grip our boys as it did. At first it was a mere wel- come graduation from the routine of setting-up drill. Slowly it became a real interest, and, at least for some of the lads, a real joy. V Our music was mostly catchy rhythms or melodies from MacDowell, the waltzes of Brahms, old bal- lads like Duke Marlboro and the folk-dance fa- vorites from Miss Burchenal’s collection. As for jazz, the records which I hid away were never called for. They were forgotten. Had the boys demanded them, I would have brought them forth, if only for contrast. Our school piano was devoted to music. We trusted that the boys would absorb all the marvelous modernities of jazz in due course without our help. They doubtless did or will in college, where, when last I visited frat-house and dormitory the favorite song was one entitled ‘Red Hot Mama” which I heard a mob of sophomores sing through at least a score of times beside a rock- ing piano before it switched into “If he do do two time one time, he won’t do one time no more.”’ 310 THE REAL BOY Now I do not believe that the sexual physiology, so obviously the ideational motive of such wide- spread phonograph songs as these and their like has any grave and lasting significance for our callowly sophisticated youth. ‘Those sophomores were not singing lessons in physiology, but they were shouting to a catchy, syncopated rhythm to which they could clap and stamp and twist their necks to soul’s con- tent, and with athletic vigor. I merely regret the pitifully narrow limits of our favorite rhythms, as those of the ballroom dance. I am not at all convinced that, as Stanley Hall has said, ‘‘there is a literature so bad that one had far better go through life illiterate than to read, and music so corrupting and neurotic that the densest ignorance of this great art is better than knowledge or acquaintance with it.”” There may be worse music than that which we have canned from the effluvia of the “barbary coast” for our drawing-rooms and sorority dances; but I have never heard it. Yet I cannot believe that it viciously corrupts any but the organically corruptible. It makes its mark, yes. It lowers one’s sensitiveness, it reduces one’s apprecia- tive tone perhaps; and yet even at that, the mere fact that these rhythms are primitive, barbaric, if you please, and that we, as perpetual barbarians at heart respond so quickly to them, gives me food for thought. Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, perhaps the first formulated principle of the dawning science of psy~ TEA RG ANG mn b.@.Y) Sit chology, leads one to wonder where, in education, has barbaric music its place? Just as the drama may vicariate for our instinctive urge to cross swords and draw blood; just as the dance opens channels of ex- pression for a hundred pent up feelings. and emotions upon a vastly varying scale; may not even jazz hold cathartic, if not constructive values? I have watched a dining-room full of kids, be- witched with ragged syncopation of a cacophonous school orchestra. Waiters jigged down the aisles with their trays of rattling plates. Spoons and forks and knives tapped in time at every table. Biscuits and butter were passed in rhythmic rise and fall from boy to boy. My own fingers drummed on the table-cloth, and my feet beat time on the floor. Something was lacking, however. What we needed was to dance. All we could do was to move certain of our smaller muscles in time with a rhythm which called upon us to leap, whirl, run, kick, wave our arms and bend our bodies down and up and back and around. I remembered the name of the music which the orchestra murdered that day, and pur- chased its phonographic record later for an experi- ment. Gathering many of these same boys around a roaring fire, I set the music to blaring through a huge wooden horn. We were stark naked, after a swim in the lake. We were moved into action to keep warm. ‘The music set us first to keeping time with slaps and stamping, then with the beginnings of a war-dance around the fire. Bunglingly awkward, 312 As Rab A 5 OY our muscles tried desperately to codrdinate them- selves, to follow the tingling musical desire of our starved nerves. ‘The performance was grotesque, but at last we were dancing, and the travesty upon music was redeemed by sublimation into muscular activity. I wondered at Westbrook if perhaps I did violence to savage boyhood by setting it to work upon rhythms and melodies too complex for their stage of ontogenic evolution. I was torn between the desire to acquaint these youngsters with the best music that I knew, and the tear lest I be committing as grave an educational error as I would were I to try to teach a child to read before it had learned to talk, or the notes of the scale before it could hum a tune. Could one, should one compromise between Mac- Dowell and Bert Williams? Between Beethoven and the nameless originator of the tango? VI We did not try to compromise at Westbrook. We remained devoted to good music. ‘The experi- ment was of too short a duration to warrant a con- clusion as to how nearly right we were. So, too, was our time too short to judge the result of our attempt at codrdinated studies. For with the coming of Spring and the approach of summer, it seemed best to turn the school back into the hands of Cogan, its owner, who would direct it more nearly in accord with accepted traditions of preparatory ARIE AIL) BO Y 313 schools. College loomed ahead of the boys, and I too easily forgot this grim, hard fact! So Kitty packed our candlesticks, waffle iron and books, and we departed, not without regrets, toward yet another adventure in education. On the road we reviewed together our work with the boys and while we found that the histories had only progressed through the time of neolithic man in Europe, they had been the nucleus for such inten- sive, interested and fruitful effort that our experi- ment seemed successful in principle, at least. Fail though I did to carry it through, I still believe that this plan or others like it, would fill a crying need in the lives of boys between eleven and fifteen. They need a dominating major interest, a focal point, a philosophic theme if you please, around which to gather whatever fragments of knowledge such an interest will find. ‘This principle is already in prac- tice, as John Dewey and his daughter Evelyn have shown us, in many a progressive school. My only point here is that History seems to me the most cath- olic and embracing theme one can choose as a major for such a school curriculum. ‘The growth of the human mind in such an historical setting as, for in- stance, James Harvey Robinson has made for it, appeals to me as the most enlightening study to which our youth can devote its hours at school. Both the psychology we have learned to call Beha- viorism, and that which is known as Genetic become 314 AS CRAB Os integral in such a study, but without their somewhat abstruse labels. Thus, I believe, a knowledge of self can be obtained with little danger of too much intro- spection, which even physiology is likely to bring on if it becomes a dominant interest. What we need to know about in this day of intricate social and inter- national relationships is the larger self, the self of humanity as a whole, instead of the individual alone. I would almost reverse the tenets of the psychoan- alyst, for boys and girls at least, and strive to lead them to see themselves reflected in the mirror of an anthropological history of mankind. Let it be for us, who are older, to turn to introspection and analy- sis. Youth is the time to get acquainted with one’s neighbor, and, as nearly as possible, to learn to love one’s neighbor as himself. CHAPTER XV THE WOOD SPIRIT CALLS US AWAY I will arise and go now, for always, night and day, I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. —W. B. YEATs. I CHARLES W. ELioT said that ‘‘the organized summer camp is America’s most significant contri- bution to the educational systems of the world.” Kitty and I decided to become a part of this contri- bution. We purchased an abandoned farm on the shore of a small lake in Maine and where only poor corn, scrub apples and granite bowlders had grown before, we tried to raise a crop of boys. The old farmhouse which for years had shel- tered tramps and porcupines and stray fishermen soon yielded to hammer, saw and nails and became a home where Kitty hung her Intervale copper by the fireplace, set up the candlesticks and ranged our books upon the mantel. Some of the Intervale boys came to us as Council- 315 316 TLHEWREAL “BOY ors, and found waffles and coffee on the hearthside as in days gone by. Nat Warren came, and Empty Dome; Burt and Bill Hales who, as tiny youngsters, had learned to swim with me in Silver Lake now came to teach watersports to tenderfoot campers. Amo, the astronomer’s son, brought us a telescope, promising star-lore. Llewellyn brought his story- teller’s pack and set of boxing-gloves. If Agpawan had only been with us an Intervale galaxy would have been complete. We set to work in all the spirit that must have animated the pioneer days of the old school, for there was much to do by way of clearing land and building shelter. “The sound of the ax, the spade, the brush-hook, saw and hammer filled the air by day, and at evening we listened to the crackle of birch-logs on the hearth. ‘The barn, new shingled and refloored, reared its hand-hewn oak timbers above a square foundation of split stone. It housed our dining-room, kitchen, carpentry-shop, art-studio, library, office, store- rooms and play-lofts. Once harboring horses and cows and hay, and later moldering into typical abandoned wreckage, it now became a rainy-day paradise for howling youngsters. So here, on an open hillside sloping toward a sand- beach on the lake, bounded by a fire-wood jungle and a sweep of beautiful pines, I began yet an- other experiment in the art of teacherhood. Here, at last, I felt free of principals, faculty, directors, trustees, owners and college exams. With me were glee eA ib Guy, 17 a handful of young men keen for hard work, re- sponsive to and patient with the errant whims of boyhood, loyal to the Camp idea and, withal, friendly toward one another. Let me say here, however, before speaking of the trials and joys of working with a council group, that we were far from free of strong differences of opinion, periodic clashes, and occasional fights to grim finish. I do believe, though, that even our hardest battles were animated on both sides by a conviction that we stood for the best interest of the boy or the group for which we fought. Our warfare was almost entirely on the field of education, and over ways and means of ‘doing the job for the kid.” II What was our camp idea? Again I confess to the purely personal. I looked out first into my groups of boys, resolved that they should get some- thing from camp that I had missed in my boyhood days. Where I had learned things wrong, or only half right, I intended that they should learn them in the very best way possible. JI wanted them to have the joy that comes of mastering the principles of a thing, whether it be mumbledepeg, swimming or modeling a bust. In Mexico I learned to swim by being pushed into a pool of muddy water. Surviving this initiation, I plunged in myself, and learned the stinging ‘‘belly- flop.” For years the dog-paddle and the wild splash 318 Uy ab a RBA BOY: were my equivalents for swimming and diving. Our gang called it swimming if one kept his head above water, and going in head-first was a dive. Now God has put enough of the artist within me to make me thrill to the beauty of a straight, clean dive into clear water from a high place. I had learned, from Doctor Luther Gulick and his aquatic son Halsey, how to teach boys to dive. It was a real teacher’s joy to me to watch our little campers float off into space, backs arched, legs and feet tight together, heads up, arms outspread in angel-wing, swooping down to ‘“‘the cool silver shock of the lake’s living water’ with the clean stab of a feathered arrow. In Mexico I learned to shoot with an uncertain revolver bought from a pawnbroker and kept hidden under my mattress at home. My targets were cans and bottles along the roadside, sheets of paper nailed against tree-trunks, and pumpkins in a farmer’s field. Once our gang practiced marksmanship by trying to nip off corn-stalks with bullets, until an irate old woman appeared with a riddled market-basket which we had struck by reason of our thoughtless aim. So at Camp we built a neat rifle-house, ranged Win- chester targets against a high embankment, protected the gallery with ropes, set danger signals where they were needed and hired an instructor versed in shoot- ing-lore from the discovery of gunpowder down to the mechanism of the latest automatic. I believe in riflery because of its clearly obvious training in con- centration, accuracy of judgment, patient persistence era be AVE eB OLY: 319 and conscientious care of a physical thing. Our rifles had always to be cleaned and kept cleaned, barrel, mechanism and stock. With all my ingrained antipathy to war, and despite my prejudice against hunting gray-squirrel or deer or any but our posi- tively harmful wild-life, I yet believe in the value of a rifle as a boy’s possession, and of the lessons that lie in its care and right use. I learned to drum by beating two sticks to rhythm. A few tolerable marches, three or four calls, and a sad imitation of the long roll is my entire repertoire. Yet [ can teach a boy to drum aright, and I can keep him busy at flam and tap until he masters their rudi- ments because I regret the wrong ‘“‘setting’’ of my codrdinations and have a missionary desire to save another soul from my own sin. So, too, with the piano; for while I cannot teach its ways myself, I caused two of these instruments to be carted over our rough roads and deposited at camp so that some of our campers might keep in practice, or learn a bit from those of the council who, like Bill, could play and teach. My own career upon the keys ended when I rebelled against practice which prevented my playing My Country ’Tis of Thee as I felt that it should be played. Sent home as an “‘incorrigible’’ by my teacher, I found myself musically adrift and now that it is too late to learn even simple lessons with- out great effort and drain of time, all to little pur- pose, I have made up for my regrets by tiding other boys across periods of crisis similar to mine. Music 320 a AE Re ATTS Bi Oey, at Camp, especially our singing of old and local bal- lads around the evening fire, seems so much nearer real than it ever did to me in school. Again the trees make a difference, and above them the stars or the clouds, or the moon. It is at such times, when music does not seem to need to be learned, but when it just bubbles from one’s heart up through one’s throat and floats off with the wood-smoke among the branches, that I feel we have caught something of its inner meaning and magic. Remembering the cave-days of our gang in Mex- ico, and realizing how much of the caveman still re- mains in boy soul, cave life at camp became an art. To dig and timber a cave so that safety and comfort and romance are alike assured, required time and thought and real engineering. ‘The simplest practical cave in a caveless country is simply a cellar dug and then roofed over with plank and turf. Whatever its nature, if a cave be real, it lends itself to a great variety of activities that draw out a boy to his limits of ingenuity and pains. It becomes an idea around which a host of subsidiary ideas cluster. It is good training ground for the imagination. A whole book should be written on cave-lore for modern boys. Shelters, shacks and shanties, next to caves, be- come focal points for camp activities on land. Like pirate ships and pioneer rafts upon the water, they play their role as centralizers, as nuclei of action. Then, too, they carry the atmosphere of possession, of homesteading. They mean more to a boy than urna RoE Ass, UB On; 321 his tent or his bungalow or his dormitory room. He has built his rude cabin. He fortifies it against wind and rain and imaginary enemies. He decorates it with such art as he may conjure up from within his soul. He welcomes friends to share with him his own habitation. He alters, expands or remodels it. He may even desert it for another, better built and of happier location. A little adult guidance helps him fashion a livable home which he will remember long after other elements of camp life have faded from memory. To my boyhood gang an ax or a hatchet was for. hacking ugly holes in trees to blaze a trail, or for chopping down a tree for the sheer fun of hearing it fall. At camp an ax was a constructive tool, to be kept keen-edged and bright and ready for instant use in a definite, purposeful way. ‘The principles of forestry, as well as occasional practical need, called for the cutting down of tree or sapling. There were trails to cut and clearings to make for cabins. We talked these things out first. The boys learned how and where and when to chop. They were shown, by the rings of a pine-stump, how it takes some fifty years for God to make a tree which can be felled and killed in as many minutes by a small boy with a small ax. Our boys learned to think before striking, and I believe that many of them learned to love trees somewhat as Joyce Kilmer loved them when he wrote: S22 SD tal SREEPAE : OBiOvy: “T think that I shall never see AY Poemmovely asa trees My pals of Baratillo days carried bowie-knives, Spanish daggers, poniards, long-bladed case-knives and an occasional stiletto. We seldom used them, but, like the wonderful bull’s-eye lanterns of Steven- son’s youth, we carried them ever with us under our coats, mysterious, -symbolical. My campers were allowed a hunting-knife only after they had demon- strated that they could use a jack-knife well, and care for it almost as a scientist cares for his microscope. Few boys did so, of course. Most of their knives remained dull, rusty and full of sand and fuzz. The few who learned this lesson, however, and won their prize, were worth the time and effort that went into an apparently impossible job, that of teaching a modern boy devotion and patient care of a small, common, material thing. I never canoed in boyhood. Camp brought me rich compensation for what I had missed. To paddle throvgh the silent gray marshes by moon- light and down the widening creek suddenly to slip out onto the silvered expanse of the lake with a small boy up in the bow holding his breath at the beauty of it all; that made up for much that might have been my own experience at his age. Every boy should experience the adventurous romance of Hiawatha during those years of imaginative play- time that never come again. ‘The canoe, as a part and symbol of our finest truly American tradition, TIE ae TA oe Gye 323 should belong to the education of our boys and girls just as importantly or even more importantly than lessons learned at school. ‘To discover how friendly, how safe, how tractable, how easily and quickly responsive a canoe is when you have mastered it is an emotional experience of immeasurable value. It is such lessons as these that make for joy in life, that give one not only happy memories to turn to, but give one the practical, immediate means to grow young and buoyant again in whatever later years one may pick up his paddle and launch his graceful cratt.. lappy ) Dangerous?) Treacherous? 1 Some: parents of boys have asked. Yes, until you know its ways and whims, and how marvelously it will respond to the wrist-turn of a paddle, a slight shift of ballast and center of gravity. Not to avoid diff- culties or dangers, but how to meet and surmount them is yet another lesson which the canoe brings home and helps to make organic in our nature. There is no setting-up drill except the dance, per- haps, comparable to canoe-practice before breakfast. I loved to watch the sweep of our great, sturdy war- canoes plowing over the shimmering surface of the lake in the early morning, eleven sunbaked boys singing at their paddles: ‘Stroke to the song, brother, Stroke to the song, And it’s stroke, stroke, speed her along, Swing to the song, and you'll never go wrong! Shoulder to shoulder we’ll speed her along.” 324 ah FORA Ts BOY; Cross rest! Paddle forward! One, two, stroke, stroke, stroke! Back-water! Lift paddles! Salute! All to the cadence of Llewellyn’s chantey, grays and greens out for competitive canoe practice. No taxing race, no straining of nerve and muscle for a goal. Simply hard work mixed with cheerful play in friendly rivalry. The race, the strain, the tax on re- serve and second-breath all have their place in the growing life of the boy; but at camp they were the exception, not the rule. The lads competed generally as teams, doing good work, living up to a standard and going the standard one better whenever they could. Practice for the glory of the group’s team- work primarily, with the dream of victory only dim in the distance and always tempered with the thought of losing with a smile from a good sportsman’s heart. Obey first, discuss afterwards! This law of Camp applied especially upon the water in canoes. No- where as right amidst the possibilities of danger and of tragedy is this lesson learned so well. ‘That in obedience to law is found the fullest liberty is a hard lesson, but one made vividly apparent in a twenty-five-foot canoe just as well as upon a ship at sea. And sailing! I only read about it in my gang- hood days. Once I started to run away from home for Vera Cruz where a chum of mine agreed to meet me. We would build a raft and sail to Texas. My mother, however, found me trying to open our big saguan gate with the wrong key one night and sent THE REALE BOY 325 me gently back to bed. When morning came she shifted my enthusiasm from sailing to mountaineer- ing, so that I first learned the feel of rope and rudder at our summer camp. ‘When you introduce a boy to a sailboat,” says Mr. Yeomans, “you do him a great service. First because the elements, wind and water, are exceed- ingly important things to get on some sort of terms with—to recognize their humors, their playfulness and their range, and the premonitions of each. Second, because the tradition of the sail is an old and very fascinating one, and the more you know of it, the more the construction and performance of a ship get into your essential interests, the more likely you are to respect everything whose useful- ness has made it beautiful—which grew in beauty as it grew in serviceability.” It was the reading of this paragraph that led me to introduce a sailboat to my boys at camp. Pirates, traders, explorers, admirals and fishermen grew up overnight. ‘Treasure islands were discovered galore, and the somewhat stereotyped camp activity of the treasure hunt took on new life and led to a hundred new adventures. I believe that sailboat represents the very best investment in educational equipment that I ever made. From it the boys learned more vital lessons, great and small, than from any other single factor in the physical matrix of camp. Only after actually sailing in our pirate-ship, or learning the essentials of mast and gear and sail in 326 TA EB oR RAL BOY one of the war canoes did I think it time to take our boys down to the “stern and rockbound coast” where we could look out and see: ‘Those splendid ships, each with her grace, her glory, Her memory of old song or comrade’s story, Still in my mind the image of life’s need, Beauty in hardest action, beauty in deed.” For then, I thought, we could really feel as well as see the poetry of their motion and the gracefulness of their mass and line against the blue of sea and sky. Then, too, our seaside stories would hold a fuller meaning. Conrad, Masefield, McFee, O’Brien and Melville, with Kipling and Stevenson, were partly in our muscles as well as in our ears. For us landsmen, hillmen desiring our hills, the sail- boat and the sailing canoe had introduced us to the born sailor’s desire for ‘The sight of salt water unbounded, The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded, The immense and contemptuous surges.” By the flare of driftwood on the moon-creamed sand, we traveled among atolls and icebergs, rounded the Horn, dropped in at Tyre and Sidon, or watched the flying fishes on the road to Mandalay. There is an artistry in choosing a setting for a story, as well as in its telling. ‘“The Aztec Treasure House,”’ that boy-soul masterpiece of Janvier’s, is VE RE, AN rgiinls Oye 327 told best under a jutting cliff on a hill or mountain- side, with hills and lakes and rivers and valleys melt- ing away around one into the panorama of dim ranges against a far horizon. Not, however, mind you, as a lesson in topography, but merely for back- ground in color and form! Dramatizing our favorite stories, our songs and ballads, and fragments of our life at camp were so interesting and inclusive that we had no time for imported plays, already written. We built dramatics spontaneously, on the inspirational spur of the moment. Here “Cap” Llewellyn shone. He should have been a professional dramatist instead of a pro- fessor of law. At Intervale he began visioning Bible stories on the stage. He told them at council fires then. Later, at camp, came his opportunity to put them into action. ‘The boys responded joyously. They became ba-a-a-a-ing sheep, responsive to the crook of young David, the shepherd. They turned into she-bears, devouring the children who laughed at Elijah’s bald head. They were warriors in Joshua’s army, and angels of the heavenly host. But they acted out stories, not theology. For this I was criticized most severely by pious people, who were shocked at the language of American boyhood when placed in a setting of Palestine thirty centuries ago. I remember the look upon the face of an amiable camp directress when Fred, our valiant David, strode out upon the stage and faced a gigantic Goliath on stilts and exclaimed: 328 VHE REAL BOY ‘Think you’re some guy, don’t you? Think because you're so big you can put it over everybody in our camp! You’re just one hell of a big bully, that’s all, and you’re going to get yours right now!” The slingshot whirled, the wad of paper whizzed toward the giant’s head and his laugh turned into a groan of pain as he fell at David’s feet. ‘What language for boys to use in a Biblical play!’ whispered the lady to her neighbor on the long pine pench. But her companion seemed too heartily amused to join in a discussion of Sunday- schoo! proprieties. The language the boys used was their own. It was not written for them, to be memorized and parroted. ‘Their own resources, both of word and action, were their only salvation from stage-fright, or from the disappointment of their fellows. I do not remember a single instance of lines learned ‘‘by heart” to be repeated. Surely there was enough of that in the lives of the boys in school during the winter months. Here they were gripped by the spirit of a story, they itched to act it out. One or two rehearsals and they were ready to stand or fall by virtue of their spontaneous artistry. As for lan- guage, that which my boys used, while sometimes not grammatical, and perhaps a trifle slangy, was as sharp-pointed as they could make it and as true to their own interpretation of time and place and person as anything of Shakespeare’s or Eugene O’Neill’s. “T should think it would be dangerous to your NE Ere R i AIR Oo 329 reputation as a camp director to allow your boys to talk like that in a Bible play,’ remarked our guest afterwards. ‘Perhaps so. I’ll take a chance on dangers,” I replied. III Horses, like canoes, bring with them an element of danger into the life of a boy. I vividly remember being dragged, foot in stirrup, over the cobbly street of a Mexican village, across a stone-flagged court- yard, and deposited on the dirty floor of a dark stable . . . and all because I had not learned to dismount aright. At camp I employed an ex-cowboy to teach the boys how to get on, get off, ride, and care for a horse. By care I mean everything that pertains to the management of a riding horse. For in Mexico I had always relegated saddling, bridling, blanketing, cooling down, feeding and watering to a moso, or personal servant. Consequently, when first I introduced horses to camp, it was mostly through visual memory only that I could teach a boy what to do. I have often swept out our stables in camp alongside the son of some wealthy capitalist whose home was servanted completely and where almost everything physically possible had been done for the lad before he landed at our barn. But to me the joy of getting a necessary chore done quickly and prop- erly came late. I believe it belongs very early in the life of every boy, city or country bred. And to care 330 STE) RGRAY TIO GB OY: for and love a horse is a spiritual experience as real and vital as it is difficult, or impossible to de- scribe in words. Only the love between boy and dog can surpass it in its peculiar field of sympathetic friendliness. The element of danger in a boy’s re- lation to a horse turns into an asset. he element of conquest preliminary to friendliness lends a deep, intangible educational value graphically memorable in such stories as that of Alexander’s training in horsemanship at behest of his father, Philip. I have seen physical courage literally bud and blossom and bloom during a summer’s relationship between a boy and a western pony. We boys of the Union Church Sunday-school in Mexico fought with our bare fists when we were not ~ battling with stones at long range. We knew nothing of Queensberry rules except that there was something quite unforgivable in hitting below one’s belt. Sheer bulk, reach, energy and endurance counted for every- thing with us, and we knew almost nothing of the boxer’s skill. I found in Llewellyn a man for camp who not only liked boxing and boys, but who pos- sessed constructive imagination. Boys are always running into each other, tripping one another up, suddenly swatting their neighbor for no reason at all, and falling into petty squabbles about a thousand trifles of everyday life. When one of these quarrels reached the boiling point, or exploded into a scrap, this fistic councilor of ours would pull two bellig- erents apart, sit down between them, attempt a Ee RORY ALE Oay 331 reasonable adjudication of their case and, failing, would set time for a grudge fight. At the hour appointed the two temporary enemies would meet face to face in a squared circle, don well-fitting gloves and, before an assemblage of their fellows and a referee, shook hands and turned their emotion into muscular expression. We made a lesson of their failure to adjust a difference of viewpoint by way of argument and conclusion. The grudge fight did not determine who was right and who was wrong. It liberated a pent-up, primitive instinct into a primal form of expression when other and more civilized » methods failed. Besides that it taught something of physical courage, or codrdination, of skill and of good sportsmanship in “meeting triumph or dis- aster and treating those impostors just the same.” Myself a rather skinny, light-boned and awkward individual, I took a keen delight in watching the bodily development of our lads at camp. Nat Warren, who became my chief councilor, had made himself the very pink of fitness through long years of hard discipline and devotion to a physical ideal. The boys worshiped him as a muscular hero. The contagion of his enthusiasm for the body beautiful was almost epidemic. I supported his almost exclu- sive concentration upon the neuro-muscular system, for I felt that underneath it there lay so many of the finer spiritual qualities that need a sound and healthy body as a soil in which to grow. Sheer physical courage, for instance, easily melts into the R32 ah EAR BACL CBO YY mental resolution to face new problems squarely, tackle them with energy and master them with pre- cision. In countless little ways does the sportsman- ship of the track, the ring, the mat, the cruising course, draw out one’s courtesy of behavior amount- ing to no less than sympathy and understanding. As a hero, boys worshiped Nat and followed his example not only on the horizontal bar or stroking with a paddle, but in the field of helpful service, and in doing unto others as one would have others do to oneself. Qualities of leadership developed as a by-product, and I felt that, in our camp, at least, there was no reason to lament Mr. Sharp’s conten- tion that American education lacks the element of training for authority. Obey and follow first, that you may command and lead later, became not a written or spoken, but a felt and acted motto in our community. The privilege of helping grow a crop of healthy, happy boys; the sense of building something, creating something, contributing something of real, if some- times of intangible, value to the world of my fellow- man was with me at camp. It was with me as it had never been before in any undertaking. I had, at various times in my career, kept time on a rail- road, kept books, cashiered; sold stock, books, hats and automobiles; collected rent and bills; managed a cotton-waste mill; functioned as secretary to a whole- sale junk dealer, a mine president and a bishop; reported for newspapers, written editorials, edited Up Eee SE AST (1B) Oy 333 a magazine and taught school. Never, until I started camping with boys, did I feel that I was wholly myself, wholly useful and active to the limit of my small powers. Camp drew me out, to the point of complete weariness, if not to exhaustion, by the time the season was over. I could not be tem- perate because the job was so fascinatingly absorbent of my every energy. A born teacher from a heredi- tary line of teachers, I had apparently found the element in which teacherhood thrives freely, and grows to the fullness of its stature. So I felt at . that time, however I may now look back at a thousand errors and failures and stupid blunders in my campwise course. Here at camp, without the incubus of all those factors which hedge and limit a teacher in his work, from principals and college exams to required texts and ringing gongs, I felt free to educate (draw out) the boys who came to me according to the promptings of my inner spirit, and I felt that our little organ- ization of boys and young men was my first real school, my first real schole (leisure). IV One evening our lake lay still as a sheet of rose- crystal quartz. The sun had set, and its afterglow suffused the sky almost to noonline, touching the lake into a reflective softness of color that seemed to radiate from its quiet depths. Clouds streaked and curled in the sky as though Elihu Vedder had 334 THE REAL BOY laid them there with his brush to look down at their clear image in the tree-fringed basin of our cove. The melting vignette of hardwood seemed more vivid on the surface of the water than against the western skyline. Venus burned, pale and golden, above the marshland where the peepers had begun their evensong. Hawkins wandered out of the pine grove and stood beside me as day melted into night. I believe we felt the same age-old mystery of quie- tude which Sidney Lanier tried so hard to put into words when he wrote: “OQ, what if a sound should be made! O, what if a bound should be laid To this bow and string tension of beauty and silence aspiring— To the bend of beauty, the boy, or the hold of silence, the string.”’ Finally I spoke, very softly, as though we were watching a deer. “Jim, go get my Hudson Bay blanket, and two blankets of your own. Get your paddle and mine. We're off to follow the sunset!” The boy vanished, his swift moccasins leaving scarce a trace of sound as he dashed among the pines on a carpet of soft needles. Presently he appeared again beside me, as though he had risen out of the ground. We launched Llewellyn’s gray canoe. I need mention here only one adventure of our journey through the night and into the misty morn- ing. We had settled comfortably into our blankets iste Rely AST B OAy, 335 after the usual wriggling preliminaries when one’s toes insist upon poking one’s neighbor in the ribs, and when one bumps nose against thwart unless he remembers distances; and, with a few words about the soothing roll of our safely ballasted craft, we drifted toward dreamland. The moon had risen long before, and we were floating amidlake in the gentlest of summer breezes. Our drowsiness was broken again and again, as though by some imperious call to open our eyes and look out upon the silver glory of the watery world around us. Once I raised my head just in time to see Jim’s, down stern, rise too for a look around. “Look!” he shouted to me in a whisper. We beheld a duck. We held our breath, hoping it would fly across the moon, for that is almost a miracle. It did! Flew straight between us and the cream-white disk amidst the feathery clouds. Three fellow wild-duck followed, but only their leader crossed the moon, eclipsing it for an instant with the flap of wide wings. Days later I found Jim making crude pencil sketches of wild ducks. He had chosen a duck, silhouetted against the moon as his symbol and, hav- ing won his blank paddle for good campership, he wished to decorate it with the symbol in design. It was all matter-of-fact enough on the surface. We worked out a design together, transferred it to the paddle with carbon paper, chose colors, and finally we had a handsome paddle blade in blue and orange and black. Yet to me, and to him, that material fact 336 inkl do RECA Io B Ou stood for a spiritual experience. We had enshrined a memory in color and form. ‘That symbol lived. If Art at camp was symbolistic and primitively crude, at least it had its roots in feeling and in desire for expression. The paddles painted by my boys varied down the scale from real works of juvenile art to mere grotesques, but, knowing something of what went into their making, I could read into the crudest of them a soul’s dim artistry. I will not say beauty, for only a very few of our paddles could claim kinship to that word, yet the spirit that under- lies the creation of beautiful things strove to find expression. In the rough-and-tumble craftsmanship of the boys I caught an echo from Emerson, who said, you will remember: ‘The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, a wonderful expres- sion of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and, therefore, most intelligible to those souls who have these attributes.”’ Take a lemon pie, for instance. Teddy liked lemon pie above all things in heaven above, or on the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. When the spirit of symbols permeated the atmos- phere of camp and boys were following Jim in a desire to find a symbol of their own, Ted leaped to lemon pie with a conclusive finality that was as solid as the granite bowlders on our shore. Into that bit of pastry he read his own interpretation of the good, PPE een hy An Bi Oye 337 the beautiful, the true. It was, for the moment, his highest concrete mode of expression for the boy soul of him. Funny? Yes, but very real, and serious, and important. In decorating his paddle with a lemon pie, bright yellow on a field of cerulean blue, Ted became acquainted for the first time with brush and paint and palette. I watched him at his work, and helped him, with the same feeling which Doctor Gulick used to have for a boy playing a mouth organ. ‘That was the one musical expression, he said, that could com- pare in loveliness with Beethoven’s Heroica in full — symphony. I must admit that I have caught as much joy in the contemplation of Ted’s paddle as has come to me when standing before one of Monet’s glorious gardens, or an Abbey panel. ‘The gnomish solemnity of the lad, the sweat of his wrinkled brow as he strove to keep yellow paint within the confines of a circling line, the triumphant glow of joy when his work was ready to dry in the sun: Cellini himself could never have registered such symptoms of the boiling artist’s flux within. It seemed to me that lemon pie had been given a winged soul of its own, and I walked proudly with Ted through the smiles of his fellows and those of our senior council, con- scious of a hand lent to real creation. In later years at camp, Ted outgrew this symbol and adopted another and more conventional sign for his shield, but his artistic impulse when we painted a tent and campfire on the larger blade of 338 ERE (RRA Dy BOM his maturer days was tinctured with the pale cast of reason. It did not spring, like sudden bird-song, direct from a thoughtless heart. It was no longer a feeling akin to mine when first I beheld the Pacific. Rather it was more like that which came to me when I climbed in search of another such experience as only comes once, perhaps, in a lifetime. And yet, that primary impulse, that first expression, had set its pattern deep in Ted’s soul somewhere and helped make joyous his later trials and successes in “‘art.”’ Vv I have spoken of Ted’s paddle as a “shield,” for this was our equivalent of the Arthurian tradition. As the knights carried shields in blank until by some act of valorous service they might decorate them with a pictograph or symbol of achievement, so we awarded a clean, blank, unvarnished paddle to all those boys who graduated from the stage of neophyte campers and entered our inner circle at council fire. Later, when they had seen a sign, like Hawkins, or proven to me quite conclusively, like Teddy, that their ambition or supreme desire or boy ideal had taken form in a picture; they might dec- orate the blade as moved by the spirit within them. The heart of camp was our council fire. Here we gathered in three concentric circles on Sunday eve- . ning around a little friendly blaze. Here we re- viewed the happiest thought and action of the week gone by. All things negative were tabu. It was an eit mehe ty A ee Ei Gay 339 hour set aside for the plus sign, for all things con- structive, helpful, tonic. Acts of thoughtfulness, of courtesy, of good sportsmanship were mentioned briefly, but specifically, sometimes with names, some- times without. No moral embellishments, no ser- monizing, just clear facts stated in a spirit of good- will-toward-men. No printed paragraph can convey the feeling-tone of the firelit atmosphere radiated from the hearts of forty growing boys fused together for the moment in cheerfully serious contemplation of some of the finer, deeper things of life and its erowth in the fellowship of the open air. We sang. together, too, and listened to glorious stories, epics from the past, freighted with the true heroism of man and womankind. Then we closed the day, and the week, arm resting on neighbor’s shoulder in a friendship circle under the stars. Thus we stood, thankful in unison for what life had brought us in those words, spoken so long ago, whose poetry grips one’s heart today with the same power with which it held the hearts of our fathers, and theirs for cen- turies behind us. “Then away to sleep soundly until the call of a new day sent us plunging into the brisk wakefulness of the morning lake. It always seemed to me that at our council-circle all creeds melted into one. We have stood there together, Catholic, Protestant, Hebrew and Pagan, ‘in tune with the infinite.” For a little while, at least, we have felt together what Elbert Hubbard used to call ‘the brotherhood of consecrated lives.” 340 THE.“RBAL BO Y: The vision of Rousseau’s beautiful hymn was ours not merely in melody and words, but in reality, for the mists of daily hurry and confusion were rolled away for the time, and we knew each other better, and each at his very best. Boys do not forget the unconscious lessons learned at times like these. They are not learned for repeti- tion, nor for examination, they are learned for life. The educational artistry of the council-circle is only at its dawning. Seton Thompson, through the Woodcraft League, has given it perhaps its most vital impulse. Its spirit will ramify and permeate and lodge, a spark here and there, until there are a thousand council fires tomorrow for every one today. As for me, I can never forget the glint of our flickering flames upon the orange moon on Jim’s paddle, and the yellow disk of Teddy’s pie: ‘For no divine intelligence, or art, or fire, or wine, is high delirious as that rising lark—the child’s soul and its daybreak in the dark.” CHAPTER XVI ON THE RELATION OF CAMP TO HOME AND SCHOOL Are you faithful to things? Do you teach as the land and the sea? Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? Animating now to life itself? —WaLtT WHITMAN. I met George in his apartment home of seventeen rooms and six baths. He was sitting on an uphol- stered chair of French court pattern, his thin white hands resting on a mahogany tabourette littered with manicure tools. A young woman sat before him, polishing his nails. A governess stood behind him attempting to civilize a shock of unruly, bushman- like hair. He looked up at me with big, sleepy eyes and asked: ‘‘Are you the man that runs the camp?” We lunched together on a breakfast-porch, green and colorful with exotic plants. A butler and as- sistant butler presented dishes from which their young master might make a selection of whatever he wished to eat. I watched his choices with min- gled astonishment, amusement and pity. Afterwards he called the chauffeur and com- 341 342 aA ReEMAT a Baye manded: “Take Mr. Hamilton to Mr. Porter’s house, and make it snappy!” His parents had not been at home. He ruled there with all the juvenile arrogance of a prince in a story book. It was agreed that he come to camp, but that I give his tutor a job as one of my coun- cilors. This I did because the tutor was a fine young fellow who could doubtless be helpful, and because he had promised to wean George away from his foster-fatherhood within the first week of our season. So George, age eight and sole heir to some sixty million dollars, came to camp and spent his first night on a loft in our big barn. His tutor slept beside him, and held his hand until he went to sleep. Next day he moved into a tent and bade the coun- cilor good-night without a tear. He encountered me the following morning as I helped some boys police our kitchen yard. I asked George if he were going to help. He stamped a small foot on the grass and replied: ‘“My father hires you to work for me. Do you think I’m going to work for you?” A month went by. George wrote to his mother that he would like to have her visit him at camp. In about three weeks she drove out to where a crooked river wound among banks of red clay and asked if George were camping there with the boys. Two elegant daughters accompanied the mother, and terror ran through the hearts of the score or so of naked youngsters who were digging caves and play- ing cannibal along the river edge. ‘There was a THE REAL BOY 343 tumultous shout for George and a scurrying for short gray pants. George hastily arrayed himself in a sleeveless shirt, two woolen stockings, which would not stay up, and a pair of torn trousers. His arms and face and legs were sun-browned almost to iodine. His bushman hair was full of sand and caked with clay. His eyes were bright and shone like a squirrel’s. I felt proud of the handiwork of sun and wind and water and clay upon that once anemic, hot-house plant. Not so, however, his sis- ters and mother. ‘They had come expecting to find the boy ready to accompany them to a seaside hotel for dinner! Of course this is an extreme case. Not many boys go to camp who are heirs to sixty million dollars and whose parents think more about the condition of hair, pants and outer ear than they do about what has gone on inside the boy’s soul during two months of eating and living with the earth. Every director of a good summer camp has stacks of letters of real and deep appreciation for what has happened to a boy’s body and character while he was away from home. Some of these letters show specific trans- fers of training from camp-life into home-life and school-life. ‘Transfers of attitude might better ex- press what takes place. Let me catalog a few of these briefly from my sheaf of correspondence: Bob went to camp positively inimical, in many ways, to his brother Bill. I believe one of the hap- piest moments of my life was when, at your council- 344 ee ER Beet BON ty. fire, I saw Bob slap Bill on the back, congratulating him upon the winning of his paddle. I hoped that spirit would last, carry over into our home. It has! I believe it was the influence of the group that worked the miracle. Social pressure, so to speak, liberated brotherly love, or sympathy, or pride. Whatever it was, Bob’s attitude was changed toward his younger brother, and the change has set! It is this group influence, this social pressure, which differentiates organized camp life from how- ever campy a summer may be afforded a boy within his own family circle. Many a father has said to me: ‘‘We have a family camp, with boating, canoe- ing, yachting, out-door sports of every kind. Why should I send my boy to you?” The positive in- fluence of the group mind, of the sublimated gang, so to speak, is all I can place against such argument. Its value is becoming more and more apparent as boys return home from family vacations while their friends come back from camp. ‘There are values in each, and a boy should experience both. Dick will now eat green vegetables. It may seem a very insignficant thing to be so happy about; but I tell you that it means a great deal tome. His food habits at home were a constant source of worry to me. His prejudices were almost dangerous to his health. Now he eats almost everything with aban- don and our cook has to strive hard to keep up her reputation, for Dick is constantly talking about those wonderful meals at camp. Eas RIAL) Bi Ov 345 Of course it was fresh air, vigorous exercise and the influence of the group again, as well as appetiz- ing meals which brought about this change of atti- tude, or habit. ‘The newer knowledge of nutrition makes the food habits of growing children loom so important to us nowadays that it is certainly no “very insignificant thing’ that camp can and does play a role in improving them. In many camps that I know there is being made a very intelligent, even a scientific approach to diet because of its vital bear- ing on the health of the camper with its consequent reflection upon the whole caliber of the camp as an organization. The mental food habits of children are being studied along lines laid down in our schools by Doctor Emerson, of Boston, and here I see an opportunity for very definite codperation and co- ordination between camp and school and home. It was hard on Carl to be tried and convicted by a court of his peers that way. I am so glad that he took his medicine as he did. ‘That he should bite another boy in a fight was quite tragic to me. But that he should admit his wrong and go through with his punishment (which was really more of a life lesson than a punishment, after all) makes me feel almost glad that he did wrong. If the court had merely ostracized him, without giving him that ob- vious chance to reinstate himself with his group, I think Carl would have suffered more than he bene- fited. As it was, he had a chance to come back, and I am so happy that he did, and so soon. 346 THE REAL BOY Boy court procedure can go entirely wrong as a means of education if the boys do not understand the cardinal principle of camp court practice. . That is, that it is the boy himself who counts, counts first. The group is to be considered only secondly. This, of course, reverses our current adult court procedure, which aims first at the protection of society. But it is in accord with the principles on which Ben Lindsey and others have been working in our juvenile courts, and it is a principle which every boy juryman or judge can understand if it is presented intelligently. Always I have put up to my boys in court the fact that one of their fellows has done wrong, and that it is up to the court to show him how to go right. The group, of course, will benefit by his learning his lesson, but that he learn it for himself is the im- portant thing, the vital thing. This tempers justice with mercy, and not only does the culprit learn, but the whole group takes another step in constructive socialization. I find it necessary, however, to ‘‘rub this in” at the beginning of every court procedure, and even to break in upon this procedure if neces- sary to keep that spirit alive through every move. The camp should keep in close touch with the parent, and even with the school, if possible, con- cerning matters of major discipline, matters of moral growth. Too easily this contact is broken. ‘Too easily there may be three distinct methods of ap- proach to the boy at work upon him. Correspon- dence if not a personal interview between director, THE REAL BOY 347 parent and teacher can do a great deal to unify methods of relationship to the important question of discipline, when discipline is necessary. Camp life has been so interesting to Henry that his school work seems in danger of suffering. He has already begun to contrast the play-way of learn- ing things at camp with the work-way of learning them in school. He is restless with the discipline of the classroom. He says that his teachers are “not full of fun, like the councilors . . . they are crabby and dull.” Of course this is partly true, for camp is really a vacation and school is a vocation, for . the time; but what am I going to do about this atti- tude of Henry’s toward school? I want him to like his lessons, and his teachers. Will camp ‘“‘spoil”’ him for both? To which I had to reply that I could only hope teachers and school will become more councilor-like and camp-like, for one can hardly be expected to employ crabby councilors in order to avoid contrasts. The fact remains, however, that educational summer camping may, now and then, make school life pall and grow dull by comparison. I believe that its present freedom to adopt the most enlightened methods of teaching lessons, however, will make the summer camp a large leaven in the whole educational lump and that the school must adopt more and more of these methods in order to keep up with the new leadership which the summer camp is. slowly, but surely, assuming, at least in its genuinely educational units. 348 AE RAE ASIS BMY The way you have made letter-writing interesting to the boys has banished my one great fear about camp for my son. I was afraid that we would-get too far out of touch with each other, for it is like pulling teeth to get him to write a letter to anyone. Howard has not only written regularly, but he has written as though he really wanted to write, as though he had something he wished to tell me and that I would like to hear. I believe that we grew closer to one another instead of farther apart. I have caught youngsters crying at letter-writing time not because they did not love their parents, or hated to write, but simply because they could not yet translate emotion. into the right combination of graphite and paper. ‘hey decided that they didn’t like letter-writing when in fact they just didn’t know what to say first or how to say it if they did. Placing a blackboard against the wall of our din- ing-room, where we wrote our weekly letters, I would ask Tom what, to him, was the happiest happening of the week. He would stand up and tell me. Then Dick and Harry would do likewise until we had the gist of the week before us. Then I would ask for suggestions for pictures or cartoons to illustrate our text. These were simple, crude, obvious. Any boy could either copy them or modify them according to his whim. This was not merely giving them a model, it was presenting a stimulus and a suggestion. Sometimes, of course, there was mere copying. Mostly it resulted in attempts at variation, and now ere Alls Gy, . 349 and then it led to originality. Always, however, our activity carried interest and was alive. Letter-writ- ing ceased to be a chore and became fun. ‘The pic- tures helped greatly, for, as an old Chinese proverb has it, a single picture 1s worth a thousand words. Witness the charm of Van Loon’s “Story of Man- kind,” and his ‘Story of the Bible,” or, better still, his inimitable ‘Wilbur the Hat.” Alan has an allowance. At school he banks it and does business by check. Can you not make an effort at camp to continue a boy’s education in money mat- | ters? Only indirectly, I replied. We try to keep boys so occupied with creating whatever things are neces- sary out of the materials of their environment that they will forget for a while that money or banks exist. Surely there is time enough in the winter, at home and at school, for all the lessons in busi- ness and finance that a boy needs. At camp we try to become as nearly primitive as possible. If Alan loses his hatchet he suffers from the loss acutely, for a hatchet is a very necessary implement in the woods. His allowance covers the cost of a new one, but under pioneer conditions of life he would not have an allowance to fall back upon. It is too much to expect him to make a new hatchet out of stone or bronze, but he must either shift as best he may without one, find his own again, or definitely earn a new one. ‘That is about as near as we get to 350 LOVE REA) Beye education in money matters at camp. The boys get closer, for checks come in letters from home. Our effort then is to lead the boy to forget his check, and its power to procure things extraneous to camp life. Usually we succeed. Sometimes the boy wins and buys a steel fishing rod and nickel-plated reel to replace his pole cut in the woods and adorned with a wooden spool. Then I lament our failure in tech- nique and resolve to do better next time. Jack seems more orderly at home than he was before he went to camp. But Bill is less so. Jack has acquired a pride in keeping his tools sharp and bright and where they belong. He makes up his own bed and his room is neat. Bill seems glad of a chance not to have to make his bed or keep things straight. He behaves as though a certain pressure has been removed since leaving camp, and feels at liberty to be “‘sloppy,” as the boys call untidiness. Why should this be so? Jack was the older of these brothers and lived in a tent governed by the group withinit. They elected their own “‘scout,’’ as they called the leader, every week. Every member of the group of six had his chance at leadership. The pride these boys took in their habitation and its surroundings was a re- sultant of the group-mind. The pressure upon each individual to keep him near his best was that of the tent as a composite unit of camp. ‘The attitude eis hey RIERA OB OY. 351 toward neatness of person, of things, of surround- ings was based on the spirit of the gang. Bill, the younger brother, lived under direction of an adult councilor, who, while he strove in his way toward making his bungalow democratic, still exercised considerable influence directly over the boys. Neatness and order were the result either of a liking for the councilor and desire to please him, or of a submission to his will and authority. Of course this difference of conditions under which the boys lived does not account for their attitude toward orderliness at home; but I believe it may be considered. Individual differences of in- herent temperament are probably accountable more than anything else in cases of this kind. Yet there remains a point here worth thinking about. I believe that the more we can accomplish in molding boy attitudes through the pressure or dis- cipline of the boy-group, the nearer we will approach the ideal of helping to form character through an appeal to the best inward desires of the individual boy. We approach here the kernel of democracy, of service to one’s fellow-man even at cost of labor to oneself, or even pain. For it is sometimes quite painful to a boy to put off an intense and immediate desire to catch a fish down by a big rock on the shore in order to sweep a tent or make up a cot. His whole attitude toward this task, however, is hap- pier, more constructive, if the pressure upon him is one of the group mind, and not that of ‘‘authority 352 THE REAL | BOY from above.” Of course this is a trite educational principle; but I am merely reiterating it because it applies in so many ways to the relationship of camp to home, and to school, and crops out again and again in such concrete cases as the one I have here set down. Sam says you do not have “nature study”’ at camp. But I find that he has learned more about wild things and their habits than he has ever known before. If you have been able to do so much more for the boys in nature-lore than the school has done through the winter without “nature study,” then what could you not do if you included this in your camp program? The truth of the matter is that we concentrated very largely on nature-lore, but we had no classes, no instructor, no ‘‘nature-walks,”’ no texts, and no formal demonstrations. I regretted not having a specialist in this field, but they are so difficult to find and keep! Of course there are hundreds of teachers of botany and natural science, but the school- teacher is not the type of person one wants in a summer camp, especially in the realm of nature study. They make of it too much a study and too little a spontaneous experience. If one could find such combined nature men and nature teachers as Professor Palmer, of Cornell, or Professor Sharp, of Boston University, and draft them into sum- mer camping, we would soon evolve a race of nature lovers such as has never been seen before THE REAL BOY 353 on the face of the earth. As it is, we must do all we can to enrich the lives of boys and girls with such intimate acquaintance with living things in the woods and fields and water as best we are able. Surely the summer camp, with its wealth of out-of-doors material can supplement the school and the home immeasurably, but it must do so by a careful exclu- sion of the spirit of the “‘lesson”’ or of the classroom from its program. I felt it a real compliment to be told that, with our meager equipment for real nature-lore work, Sam had gone home with a stimu- lated interest in wild life, and at the same time ap- parently unconscious that we had made persistent effort to bring this interest about! Not one councilor at camp, but every councilor should be a naturalist at heart. If he comes with- out knowledge, he should at least bring with him the spirit of the learner, and the very fact that he wants to learn all he can about the floral and faunal popu- lation of his summer environment will make of him a good teacher. The binocular, the field note- book, the bird book, animal book, tree book, flower book, convenient for the pocket, should be a part of his equipment. Microscope, scalpel, bone saw, camera, net, collection box or specimen case should not be the property of one individual intent, as it were, upon a specialty. Every hike, every hour of apparently idle play in a boat on the swamp or upon the lake should add something to the nature- lore of camp. And not merely to make collections, 354 DE) ROB PAI BONY: as of butterflies or bugs, but to observe habits of wild life at first hand should be the cardinal prin- ciple of such an interest at camp. ‘There is little need for a museum, except that it gives an oppor- tunity for sharing with others what one has himself discovered. ‘To hunt the bird without a gun, and love the wild flower but leave it on its stem, is the deeper lesson to be learned. Here the summer camp has a supreme advantage over the city school, and there should be some day a definite codrdinative co- operation between the two in this important phase of fundamental education. I don’t want anything said to my boy about life in relation to sex. I want him to get his views about reproduction and all that pertains to sex from my- self or from his mother. If any problem arises in this connection, please communicate with me before it is handled. I will give instructions as to pro- cedure. Thus one father wrote to me. Another wrote me in a vein diametrically opposite: One of the reasons for sending Bert to camp is that I believe he can get from you some of the knowl- edge of vital facts in life which I am not able to give him. I do not know how to approach the boy. With all my desire to do so, I am kept back, prob- ably by my own early training or the lack of it. I hope that I may count on you for this. While a teacher in a private school voiced things thusly: CREE ere RIB ACTS Bi Gay: 355 We have tried teaching sex biology and sex hy- giene in our school as a part of our courses in natural science and physiology. Somehow I do not feel that we get very far with the boys. It is all too academic. The question itself is too personal, too emotional, especially when it comes to the older boys, to be treated merely as so much algebra or botany. At camp, it seems to me, there will be freedom for a personal approach to each individual problem as it arises. You have more leisure, more opportunity for dealing with an individual instead of with a class or group. The influence of home training upon a boy counts here beyond measure. It counts for camp, as well as for the boy. I have made it a point to try to dis- cover a boy’s aititude toward sex, and something of his knowledge in order to know how to handle him in relation to his fellow campers. ‘This can only be done very indirectly, for reactions must be un- studied and spontaneous. ‘Through reciprocal con fidence between myself and my Junior Council of older campers whom I have grown to know and trust, and who know and trust me, I have been able to gather a great deal of information which I could never have obtained direct. These boys came to me with questions or suggestions or with reports of things seen or overheard because they knew that they were not acting as disciplinary spies, but as friendly codperators for the best interests of their fellows. They knew that there was not the slightest element of crime and punishment in the equation. 356 OO Rea Ova They were sure of my absolute confidence in them- selves, and in their comrades. ‘Their role was inter- mediary between myself and the morale of our camp- ers rather than between myself and any individual boy. They felt a responsibility of leadership, of co- directorship with myself and with some of my Sen- ior Council. And yet they did so without any undue assumption of authority because they had learned to understand the principles upon which camp was founded, where authority was at its minimum and friendliness ruled instead. My campers have been mostly pre-adolescent, and adolescent only in the first three or four years of this nodal period. They have been an exceptionally superior group of boys both in intelligence and in refinement of home life. In this respect I have not been dealing with an average group of boys. The contrast between their viewpoint of sex, and that of a few boy gangs in New York City with which | have become acquainted is very vivid. When I say, therefore, that the sexual problem of the pre-ado- lescent and adolescent boy has been at a minimum in this camp group, I am speaking of an exception, and not of a rule. While I think that our camp has considerably influenced the forming of boy attitudes toward matters of sex, and especially of sexual phys- iology, I do not see that we have here a major problem. Perhaps it might become so if the rela- tion of camp to home and school were better co- ordinated. It may be that there is a field here for THE REAL BOY 357 a great deal of constructively reciprocal work be- tween these three factors in the life of a boy. I am delighted that the boys who returned this fall to our school from your camp have shown a marked increase in athletic interest. Not only do they bring back a new repertoire of games and stunts, but their spirit is more sportsmanlike than ever. I notice a distinct change from the individ- ually competitive element over into unit or group competitions. Team-work, and striving for the glory of the side or unit, seems to have gripped them, even the younger boys not yet in the co- operative or team-work age. It was Doctor Luther Gulick who, as head of the Public School Athletic League in New York City, gave the greatest stimulus toward this shift from individual to group competitions, the replacement of the few stars by the whole team as an object of devotion. This principle had become organic in the morale of our camp athletics, so that, when it reflected itself in the school activities of the boys later, it was but a return in intensified form of a tradition which began in public school athletics many years ago. Looking forward myself to what Stuart Sherman has called ‘“The Stadium Age” for America in the field of recreation and leisure time, I feel that school and camp can reciprocate best of all in the domain of physical development through the fun of athletics, wood sports and (in time) the dance. 358 THE REAL BOY If I were sure that you would have no Jews in your camp next summer, I would be glad to send Robert to you. I noticed a sprinkling of Jewish boys when I visited you in July, and I think that is very unfortunate. For, however nice those boys may have been, you will be shutting yourself off from many others, like Robert, for instance, who might come if you were more discriminating. You really must con- sider the social life the boys are going into, and the homes from which they come. To which I could only reply, of course, that Rob- ert might doubtless find a camp better fitted to his future social needs. It is gratifying to me to note that this was the single instance of parental objec- tion to my policy of accepting a boy on his own merit, without reference to faith or race or social strata. I have refused to take Jewish boys, just as I have refused Protestants and Catholics, and I have been sometimes misunderstood when [ have done so; but it has always been either because I did not want that particular boy in camp, or because we had no place left for another camper. When some of my friendly advisors have warned me that if my camp remained open to Jews it would soon be swamped by a flood of them, I replied that so long as this flood was composed of the quality and caliber of the Jewish boys we had already admitted, I was quite as willing to be swamped by them as by an inundation of Pres- byterians who might come up to the same standard. As it is, I have seen no symptoms of being over- run by either. DE ei dds PRGA De ba oft ONE sph) But I have noticed the tendency in the field of sum- mer camps to gravitate toward religious groups. There are Catholic camps, and Christian Science camps, Baptist, Methodist, Theosophist, Presbyte- rian, Spiritualist and Socialist. This, of course, is regrettable to one who believes a boy will grow into fuller and better proportions in a religiously cosmopolitan group than within the limits of a single cult. My own ideal camp community would consist of about sixty boys coming to me from thirty different: religious isms. I should like two Japs, two Philip- pinos, two East Indians, two American Indians, two American Nordic Presbyterians and so on until a wide cosmopolitan territory was covered. I believe each one of them would respond, if he were a healthy, normal, intelligent and sensitive lad, to the unlabeled religion of friendliness in the open air, and with the things of the out-of-doors. I believe that we could all easily forget, for a while, about Advent, Swaraj, Sacraments, Passover, Hell, Heaven and their kindred symbolisms and live in a holy communion with the sun, the moon, the stars and the people of the earth and air as did St. Francis after the pattern of his Lord. However, in even such an un-utopian community as our little camp was, I believed that the best prepa- ration for whatever society a boy was to enter in America was that of rubbing up against as many dif- ferent types of mind as could be brought together in 360 TH Bo RRA B Ory: a free atmosphere of work and play. I had to be discriminating only as to the quality of the type, and even that was a difficult thing to do, for my heart has gone out just as sympathetically toward Mike Brennan, the toughest nut on Barrow Street, as it has toward George of the manicured nails and sixty millions. My instinct of self-preservation alone has kept me from bringing Mike to camp as an antidote for George. Yet George approached Mike during the summer he was with us, and much closer than I should ever like to see Mike become like George! Here the camp begins to be dominated by our in- corrigible mania for standardization. We must adopt entrance exams, evolve requirements, keep the pace. The relative leisure of camp life is already threatened by the carrying over of school traditions, of athletic organizations, of the academic time- clock and routine. Quantity production involves us here just as it does in automobiles or pins. To re- duce a camp fee means of necessity to increase the number of campers. [hat means more organiza- tion, with consequent standardization of practice and routine of procedure. George and Mike must fit the routine. If Mike is a Catholic and has to go to Mass on Sunday, he will! draft a councilor from his job, or involve a special trip of the bus to town and back. If George is a Christian Scientist and cannot take a dose of castor oil after raiding an apple tree in early August, the Department of First Aid is up against a problem not fitted to its sphere. DPE RE ACD B'@ vi 361 So it were better that Mike go to a parochial camp, and George to one of Mrs. Eddy’s persuasion. I cite these not as typical, but as model cases that will arise as the Fordization of summer camps follows that of our Public School System. There is no use regretting this; one must face the issue. A partial answer lies in the devotion of a few camp directors to the small-unit idea. Fortunately if such directors are able men and women, the prices they can com- mand for their service to a small number of boys or girls will compensate for the lesser number of camp- ers. Unfortunately it will make such camps select and, as related to the whole body of summer camps, undemocratic. One may hope, but he can hardly believe, that our summer camps, with their golden opportunity for supplementing the routinized school with two months or more of real leisure for constructive fun, will escape the contagion of organized standards and practice. One dreads the picture which Weare Hol- brook makes of our way of “helping the kiddies’’: Whereupon the adult males, glowing benevolently, divide themselves into playground committees, soda- water committees, shoot-the-chute committees, com- mittees on awards, entries, classification, eligibility, judging, starting, stopping, cheering, back-patting, _hand-clapping. The children, dazzled by badges, prizes and patronizing ovations are dragged from their home-made games and thrust into a custom- tailored carnival where every smile is supervised. 362 SA ee Relea eB aye Remembering my gangster days in Mexico, and in the face of the fact that I have tried to give boys at camp some of the constructive things which were not in my lot as a youngster, I still wonder if, in our attempt to make play an education, we may not swing too far. Under our growing system of points, awards and honors, for instance: Little Wilbur doesn’t even take a stroll to the old Sloo without putting on his pedometer so that he can get credit for 1.7 miles on his hiking record. When he accumulates a grand total of 200 miles he will become a C grade pioneer in the Trail-Makers’ Club of the Junior Chamber of Commerce. I sincerely hope that we camp directors are not becoming the kind of professional playmate which Mr. Holbrook has pictured, swiftly suppressing the inherent originality of boy mind until it fits the man- made mold and is ready to misunderstand the gen- eration which is to follow it into the world. Nor the kind who is going to ask: “Huck Finn, have you done your good deed today?” CHAPTER XVII MY ALUMNI TALK ABOUT LIFE The well educated man retains in maturity the readiness of youth for making changes that are needed when they are needed. Education, then, is to aim at variability in the student, a cultivated variability. —GEo. A. CoE. I OnE of the happy privileges of a teacher is that of conversations with former pupils after they have stepped from school into the busy life of what one calls “‘the world.” At such times the questions haunt me: “‘What has history, literature, poetry, drawing and my personal relationship to this boy amounted to? How does it touch his life? What has it done to make his life richer and happier?” I find that I care almost nothing for what he may remember about Shakespeare or Milton or Wells. I am in- terested in his attitude, his point of view, his phi- losophy of life. For, after all, as Professor Coe puts it: “The question is not what baggage is one traveling with? But, in what direction is one going? From what country to what country?” Of course my alumni come back to talk about their business or profession, about politics and current 363 364 DHE RE AT Bio wy events. But what most concerns these young men is sex, marriage, love, friendship and the family. That is because they are facing the very palpable current change in the minor, or subsidiary standards of thought and conduct which relate to sex and society. And, free and self-reliant though they are, many times, they still are hungry for friendly sug- gestion, if not for advice. One night I lay asleep in my tiny cabin on the shore of a lonely woodland pond. ‘The opening of my door awakened me and I[ heard my name spoken low and very sweetly by a truly golden voice. ‘The only access to the cabin was by ferry, unless one clambered down a huge jumble of great bowlders piled up for a hundred feet or more behind me in the woods. My own canoe was the only craft on the pond, and I knew that it rested on its rack by the dock. How, then, had this voice discovered my whereabouts? A dim round light traveled across the room in my direction after I had said a sleepy hello and who are you. It became the dial of a wrist-watch, and, holding out my hand, I clasped a small firm hand in return and the voice above me said: ‘Don’t you know who I am?’”’ Then the screen door opened again and there followed a patter of paws across the floor. A cold nose nudged the top of my head. Once more the door creaked and in tramped a pair of hunting shoes, shaking the cabin with the weight they carried above them. A flash- light blinded me for an instant, then revealed a beau- der eR EA Eo oR OY 365 tiful oval face set in a wide frame of gold-brown curls and smiling down at me like a materialized spirit from nowhere. I had never seen that face before, nor heard its voice, so my bewilderment in- creased. The wrist-watch hand was withdrawn from mine, seized the light and turned it upon the amused countenance of Bob Grant, an old Intervale boy who plunged immediately into an historic explanation of this inroad upon my lonely quietude at midnight. ‘‘Do you remember the days when I used to ride from school to the post office with the mail?” he asked. I did remember, vividly, those cold winter mornings when he used to saddle up a shaggy roan pony, sling the mail bags across the saddle, leap on with a crisp gee-up, and gallop away across the rolling prairie. JI used to wonder what the boy dreamed about on those long before-breakfast rides, for I had spent hundreds of hours on horseback in my boyhood and knew that it was then that one dreamed in his most colorful and active visions of the world to be his some day. “God, how I hated that job, and how I loved it!” he exclaimed. ‘‘Cold! my fingers felt frozen what- ever gloves I wore. My feet were numb. My breath would turn to ice on the sheepskin collar of my mackinaw. I’d rub my nose in that ice to keep it from feeling gone. I seemed to ache all over before I got home with the mail. But I was proud of that job! Felt like a part of Uncle Sam. Felt like Bill Cody on his route across the plains with a 366 TH ES Ren CAL oy Bs) One trust that had to be carried through. Almost saw Indians and bandits along the way. Used to dream of going west to rustle cattle, own a ranch, get rich. I'd think of getting married and sitting by a fire at night, like you and Kitty. Seemed to warm me up a little to think about that. Wondered if my wife would make waffles as good as Kit’s. Thought about children, and wondered if birth-control were right. Guess I knew everything about birth-control even in those days. Don’t see why all this fuss about it nowadays. Are people really so ignorant? Re- member how I used to talk to you about marriage? You were the only grown-up I would talk to. Sur- prised me, the way you’d speak to a kid! You'd answer questions about sex just as you would about history or spelling. Sometimes I would ask you about things I knew already just to see what you'd say. You never side-stepped anything. Guess that’s the reason I’ve come back to you now to talk about marriage. I wonder if I’m really in love? How is a fellow going to know? And if he does know, how is he going to know he’s in love with the right girl to tie up"to for theyrest’ ot his liter’ “But how did you get here?” I interrupted. “And who is this you’ve brought with you? Put an end to the mystery and then reminisce, if you must!” ‘Be patient. We'll show you how we got here after breakfast. [his is Hester Lawson. We've come to ask you whether we shall be married. Not that we'll take your advice, but we want to talk it List g MA Toe Cry 367 over with you, just as we’ve talked it over ourselves. A third person helps, you know, if he’s really a friend and understands. We both feel dead sure we're in love, but being in love is one thing; getting married is quite another. Do you remember the book you gave me when I graduated from Inter- vale, Cornelia Parker’s “An American Idy!’?? Well, I decided that nothing less than that sort of mar- ried life would satisfy me. Hester and I have read it through. We wonder if we’re built for that sort of a life together. That book sounds true, but how do we know it’s the whole truth? Can things pan out so happily as that? How do we know that we can fit our minds together so? Everything fine now, but how about ten years from now, or twenty? And children, what about them? Are acquired char- acters inheritable? Will we have such a devil of a time with our kids as my dad has had with me and with my brothers? You know something about the hell it has been for him. Hester and I want chil- dren. I’dstay a bachelor if it weren’t for kids. But everywhere, all around us, people so unhappy in their homes. Kids such a gamble. Always turning out dead against what you’d want them to be. How can one tell beforehand? Can’t, I guess, but we want to talk about it all anyhow, and here we are!”’ ‘You’ve certainly staged a romantic setting for a discussion,” I replied. ‘‘Let’s built a fire, settle down comfortably over a pipe and see how far we can travel before breakfast.” 368 TBE Rav AL BOY, I cannot set down here a report of our triangular conversation before flaming beech logs, beginning a little after midnight and lasting until sunlight paled the glow of embers into opalescent memories of our friendly, soul-warming fire. Suffice it that a young man and a young woman talked through me to each other more freely, more frankly, more thoroughly than even they would talk to each other about the most important thing in their lives at that moment. I felt like a chemical catylizer, useful only as a medium of interchange of elements, doing my part merely by force of presence in the equation. For here, again, “‘living is an art that everyone must learn, but no one can teach.” Yet one may help others learn by merely being on hand at the right moment! Bob’s experience among girls and women since leaving school had convinced him that the impor- tance of sex alone has been unduly magnified when it comes to the relationship of man and woman in the important phases of their life together. His conclusions were based on observation and expe- rience in that world of romantic experiment which Ben Lindsey has pictured for us so vividly in his writings on modern youth. Mere sex experience had taught him little about those fundamentals upon which his reason and intuition (‘hunch,” he cailed it) told him that the constructive friendship of happy marriage should be builded. It was psychol- ie eR EB ALL WB Ong 369 ogy and not physiology that perplexed him. So, too, with Hester. After breakfast we went down to the shore of the lake where they showed me a tiny canoe in which they had paddled, with their dog and blanket-rolls, across my pond. It had ridden atop their Ford for hundreds of miles, ready for any water deep enough to hold it up. Romance in that canoe, and in that Ford! ‘They had embarked upon a trial honey- moon, as it were, and yet they were sufficiently in- telligent already in the ways of our world to know that this was quite different from a trial marriage. Believing in the values of trial marriage, they were not illusioned into the belief that their experience together was more than a prelude to such an experi- ment or testing ground. ‘Suppose we were back at Intervale,’”’ said Bob. “Tf I had asked you then if you believed in trial marriage, what would you have said? Would you, as a teacher, have recommended it to me as some- thing to plan for and look forward to?” “Bob,” I replied, “is it not quite apparent that most marriages in America are trial marriages? Are we not dealing with a name, or label, instead of with the reality, when we make a distinction? ‘The divorce rate indicates, but it does not cover, the ex- perimental fact of most marriages. Certainly I hope that, except where children enter the equation, there may be more of the kind of intelligent ap- proach which you and Hester are making to the 370 SPURTE RAS ai Gaya problem, and a more open social mind toward what you and so many others are doing. When the child enters, then I think there needs to be a very definite modification of our whole attitude, but that is a long story!” When we returned to the cabin, I read to them a few stray pages from Stuart Sherman’s “Talks with Cornelia,” and closed with the paragraph where he says: ‘‘T hope that, when they feel the ache of the soul’s ultimate solitude and are restless and full of vague desires they may be capable of lucid introspection; that they may be frank and plain with themselves, and call things by their right names, and say to them- selves something like this: ‘I am filled with tedium and passionate craving. I shall be hard to satisfy, for [am thirsty for a deep draught of human felicity. What I crave is not described or named in the phys- 1ologies. I crave beauty, sympathy, sweetness, in- centive, perfume, difference, vivacity, wit, cleanness, grace, devotion, caprice, pride, kindness, blitheness, fortitude. I will not look for these things where I know they cannot be found, nor under conditions in which I know they cannot be maintained. But if I find them, and where they thrive, I shall wish to express my joy by some great act of faith and the hazard of all I hope to “be. And I shall not like the town clerk to be the sole recorder of my dis- covery and my faith. I shall wish witnesses, high witnesses, whatever is august and splendid in the order of the world, to enwheel me round and bid me welcome to that order.’ That is the sort of self- Ter ERE AT eB Ory 371 realization to which hope our sons and daughters are coming.” Bob and Hester had listened attentively, medi- tatively. ‘That stuff seems to speak to your heart,” said Bob. “You don’t quite understand it, but it listens true. I guess we can only do our best, going the way we feel is right. We both want something big. Perhaps, after all, we’ve got to find it by the method of trial and success. I hope we’re not wrong in the way we tackle it.” i II Bob’s attitude, and Hester’s, was wholesome, con- structive and gave promise of an approach to mar- riage at once intelligent and romantic. Not so, however, with Jim Davis. Jim made me feel, when he had grown to calendar manhood, that my methods were wrong, my philosophy abnormal, my very example of only negative influence. I watched him among his fellows, an average modern Penrod (is not Booth Tarkington’s variety obsoles- cent, and will it not soon become as extinct as the dodo or the dinosaur?), paying his fines for speed- ing and for parking without lights, getting occa- sionally drunk, flitting from one affinity to another, “getting by” fairly well on his job, eating, drinking and making merry today because tomorrow one might die. He incarnated the nebulous philosophy of modern: youth, as we find it sketched in our “‘lit- 372 AE (RANE Boy erature’ of today. He bubbled fun continuously, slept occasionally and was altogether what is cur- rently known as a regular guy (a term, of course, which may be completely supplanted by another by the time this book goes to press). Yet he too came to me once in a while confessing his sins of commis- sion, wondering what good there was in it all, reso- lute to get married and settle down, perplexed as to what girl to marry, curious in regard to children and heredity and begging for a tailor-made philoso- phy of life with which to walk away into eternal contentment. He seemed utterly lacking in ground- work, in spiritual foundation. I could discover no roots to follow down. Doubtless there were some. I merely failed in my search. As for any definite influence in the boy’s life as a teacher, it seemed as though I might just as well have never known him. He seemed to drift, rudderless, before spo- radic gusts of circumstance and time. Helen, Jim’s favorite girl, was one of those daughters whom so many mothers are talking about as hers talked to me one day in her presence. ‘Why can’t girls today take our word for things? Why must they experiment? Why must they run risks and enter dangers? ‘They will surely suffer by drifting wrong instead of going right. Why can they not learn from our experiences instead of hay- ing to go through their own?” Jim had been bringing Helen home after mid- night instead of before. There seemed to be some- Cet RAL BOY 373 thing inherently wrong with post-midnight hours in her mother’s mind. Maternal fear of the auto- mobile and the dance seemed to me so naive. This good mother sat fearing things that had already happened long ago. The dance and the automobile had led, as Ben Lindsey has shown in terms of sta- tistical figures, to their commonly predictable re- sult with this daughter. She had lost a once price- less “‘virtue’’ without any apparent result, tragic or otherwise. She was one of the typical flappers of the ‘intelligentsia’ who are contributing to current humor as well as to moral philosophy. There 1s much more truth than fiction in the story (which I have not yet seen in print) of the young lady who, when her mother regretted the coming of another child, said to her: “O mother! if you had only asked me, I could have told you how to avoid another kid.” JI do not repeat this here for fun, but to emphasize a cardinal point in regard to the part which a knowledge of birth-control is playing in the minds, not only of young men and women. but of boys and girls. Bob Grant, at Intervale, was not alone in his speculations about marriage, children and methods of controlling birth. Jim Davis and Helen had no fear of the child as a possible consequence of their experimental relationship. Bob and Jim, Hester and Helen, are only typical of young men and women whom I have known whose education in sex began at school, but not in the classroom. My point 374 THE REAL BOY is that there remains a vast difference between such attitudes toward sex as those of Bob’s and Jim’s, Hester’s and Helen’s. And the educational question here is not one of knowledge, but one of guidance into attitude, or point of view. Cornelia Parker’s ‘‘An American Idyl’ had led both Bob and Hester to desire something in life that transcended sex per se, that carried them into the larger and more fascinat- ing complexities of reciprocal adjustment on the plane of ideas. Jim and Helen had plunged emo- tionally into a series of experiences, not without precedent, but still quite contrary to the accepted standards of parental authority at least. They be- lieved, I think, that out of these experiences was to come something of the wisdom of life, as well as its knowledge. Both these young people talked matters over with me, and both of them seemed completely immune to suggestion in any other direc- tion than that of emotional sex relationships. I marveled at this, and wondered how much their early childhood training might have to do with the bent, with the almost complete set of their minds in this regard. Perhaps an intelligent psychoanalysis would have told their story. III _ The priest, the doctor and the lawyer have always maintained a confessional as a part of their job. The psychoanalyst is with us to stay for a long time to come. These professionals deal prin- THeb ROE AT. BONY: 375 cipally, at least in their confessionals, with sickness and with sin. They try to tell us how we may go right after we have gone wrong to the point where we come to them with our woes. The teacher, too, has dealt principally with errors. Only recently in our own educational system has the method of trial and success begun to replace the doctrine of progress through trial and error and the mere correction of mistakes. I wonder if it is not time for a positive confessional. I wonder especially whether there might be some day in every school a teacher whose function it would be primarily to listen to the inner- most ideals and aspirations of adolescence? Of course they already exist, such teachers, here and there. I do not believe their number can be mul- tiplied by some normal school course for their quan- tity production. I merely hazard the hope that more of this type will be found, and given time for that leisure which is so necessary for the friendly and reciprocal relationship between maturity and youth. Or perhaps each teacher may some day come to feel that, like the physician or the man of law, it is his privilege and duty to act as a lay-confessor; yet not so much for the troublous perplexities of young folks as for their highest (and usually most wistful and hidden) ambitions and desires. When one’s old pupils come back to talk about their children, how old and grandparental it makes one feel! How one wonders: ‘‘What have I done, as a teacher, toward making the home life of Dirk, 376 WD Ea RU AT B Oey) or Bob, or Margaret, happier in relation to mate- hood and to children?” For is not that the capital. question, after all, if education is to be for growth in joy toward happiness in this world of ours? Are not other things relatively insignificant except for complacent bachelors and the new type of woman which feminine freedom has given us, and who pre- fers a career to a life? Perhaps in Haldane’s day of ectogenic babies, twelve a year; or in some stand- ardized scientific Utopia of the future, other view- points may be more important. Just now, however, children are born to women in the old-fashioned way, except that among the more intelligent their birth is controlled in accord with circumstances more favorable to their development and welfare. So it seems to me that even looking forward considerably into the future, we teachers may say to ourselves, with our friend Angelo Patri: “IT look a thousand years ahead and I see not men, ships, inventions, buildings, poems, but children, shouting, happy chil- dren.”’ CHAPTER XVIII WHAT, THEN, ABOUT GIRLS? Knowledge, far from being imposed upon children, ought to be treasure which they find in their frolic- some search after the wonderful and the beautiful; they should seek knowledge on the run, and find it with an exulting shout, as they find flowers in the woods in spring. —SARAH CLEGHORN. I Tuts book began in the belief that education is for joyous mental growth through life. Its theme is a teacher’s joy in watching and having a small part in the evolution of boy-soul. It is finished in a day when those influences of evil which Nicholas Murray Butler has dubbed ‘‘the new barbarians,” are swarming from their musty caves bent upon set- ting their own limits to the growth of children’s minds. In Tennessee a fellow teacher of mine is hauled into court for stating in prose some of the things which the first chapter of Genesis states in poetry. My boys at Intervale used to marvel at the good guesswork of the bard who described the earth as once without form and void, and pictured the coming of light out of darkness, and of man from the dust of the ground. How epically he preluded Carruth’s: 377 378 A Ost ce Cah Gl Eau rg Sk PNG A fire mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian, And caves where cave men dwell. Then a sense of law and beauty And a face turned from the clod; Some call it Evolution And others call it God. My daughter learned this verse when she was three years old. New meanings have come into it for her month by month and year by year. More will be found as she begins her frolicsome search after knowledge in astronomy, geology, anthropol- ogy and other ologies, all of them facets of one mysterious logos, the dream of the scientist, the prophet and the philosopher. Already the child is amazed to think of nebular universes ten million light years away from where she stands. Already her mind grows somewhat dizzy when it tries to think of an electron whirling around its nucleus within an atom at the rate of seven thousand mil- lion times in a millionth of a second. This very young woman has watched divers sink into the sea. She has seen her father sail off into the clouds of heaven on a great aluminum bird whirring louder than a legion of partridges. She has looked at diatoms under a microscope and marveled at their symmetry and color. She has begun to read in books. She listens to voices a thousand miles away over wires, and across the mysterious ether. I contemplate her in somewhat THE REAL BOY 379 wistful wonder as she grows upward and outward into a world of freedom, opportunity and ad- venture such as her grandparents never dreamed, and which her parents find it difficult to grasp. Her father wishes to walk with her in the fasci- nating fields awaiting her search for knowledge on the run and her finding it with an exulting shout as she now finds flowers in the woods in springtime. He knows that the best way to learn and to grow is to teach. He would like to be her teacher, and the teacher of-her fellow children in the school of tomorrow. But he has grown somewhat crassly material in his desires, wants books that cost five and ten dollars a volume, longs for travel with her over the surface of this globe and through the clouds that brood over it above our heads, and upon its blue-green waters in a boat. He finds that he can- not have and do these things upon the wages of a teacher. So he thinks about education for his daugh- ter, and looks about for the new school for girls, as he has dreamed about the school of tomorrow for boys. What do I want to find for her in school? It is something which, as yet, I have not found. It does not dwell in those public schools which I have visited, not even in Number 45, The Bronx, where Angelo Patri has approached the Dalton Plan in his courageous efforts to leaven the vast politico-educa- tional lump. I fear that when I choose a school for my daughter, I shall fall into the class of fathers 380 HE Ra AYE VB GY which Dallas Lore Sharp considers undemocratic, if not snobbish. Yet even in such private schools as I have been privileged to scan, I have thus far failed to find what I want. Many of the schools which John Dewey and Miss Evelyn Dewey have described as the most progressive have welcomed me and I have held interesting converse with some of their pupils. Schools in Kansas City, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, Dayton, Colum- bus, Boston and New York have severally shown me their educational wares. Most of them impress me as mere frosting on our academic cake. I contrast them with the rough primitiveness and relative free- dom of a possible Intervale and wonder toward what intellectual embroidery our educational taste is turning. Under Miss Cook, at the Francis Parker School in Chicago, to be sure, I found an atmosphere of democracy and hard-work with considerable lati- tude of choice as to what one shall do and how it shall be done. The woodsy, handicraft spirit of Mr. Vanderlip’s school at Scarborough so hypno- tized me that I forgot the words of The Lord’s Prayer when I was asked to lead in morning as- sembly. “—Two Montessori Schools revealed groups of boys and girls all happy at jobs already second nature to my daughter. It seemed to me rather tragic that children should go to school in order to learn how to lace shoes and set tables. Conversa- tions with some of Mrs. Johnson’s pupils from Fair- EG ae AE TB OnY 381 hope and Greenwich made me think that a real teacher’s dreams can come true in life today. The feeling of constructive freedom which came to me when wandering among Miss Parkhurst’s little boys and girls at the Children’s University School, was refreshingly tonic. One does not wonder that the Dalton Plan has been so welcome in England and in China, and one hopes that its influence will spread far and wide through America, too. In the Lincoln School of New York City the Dalton Plan seems to be mingling happily with Dr. Caldwell’s own ideas so that children in that great hive of experi- mental industry seem to be absorbing some of the very best elements of a dawning synthesis in educa- tional methods. II I took with me, on a trip to Washington, two children of the Lincoln School. An almost religious antipathy to anything red was amusingly manifest in their mental attitude. The fear or hatred of any- thing red, or even pink, seemed to have been in- culcated with all the precision with which the Cath- olic Church indocrinates the fear of God or rever- ence for the Pope. No clear perception of what the word red means was apparent, but the term seemed to cover any ideas, influences or movements contrary to the solid status quo of society and industry as it 7s in America today. Perhaps my impression is wrongly founded. Probably Dr. Caldwell could 382 THE REAL BOY show me that it is erroneous. But I like to meditate upon the spontaneous reactions of pupils rather than upon the theories or convictions of those who ad- minister or teach, and I set down this impression merely to illustrate the point of my closing chapter. The polar opposite of the attitude of these pupils of the Lincoln School is that of the Manumit School, at Pawling, New York. Boys and girls are destined to graduate from Manumit with diplomas held like field-marshal batons, ready to direct battles in the struggle between Capital and Labor. Again, this is but a personal impression. Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. - Finke might persuade me that it is the aim of Manu- mit to open children’s minds to the other side of what they consider the great class conflict. But I have spent hours among their pupils, and it seems to me that if my daughter became one of them, she would absorb the elements of a radical sociological creed. ‘Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed,”’ said Huxley, and if there is one thing I wish my daughter to possess in her intellectual life, it is the attitude of the true scientist. Perhaps I am a trifle antiquated in harking back to Herbert Spencer, but it seems to me that only in the empiric viewpoint of an Aristotle can one learn to know “how utterly beyond not only human knowledge but human con- ception is the universal power of which nature, and life and thought are manifestations.’’ Perhaps I am practically and pragmatically wrong in my intense HEHE REAL BOY 383 desire that my daughter shall keep a wholly open mind, even to the point of retaining the viewpoint of a Romain Roland in the face of an international issue, or, of an Einstein, refusing to sign a manifesto of his closest comrades. I am registering, however, my present conviction regarding the most important element in my daughter’s education for life. I wish for her, more than anything else, the attitude or way of thinking, of the true scientist, who is also the true philosopher and sometimes the true poet as well. Ill Will she find this way of mental life in school? Is there a school which has adopted the cardinal principle of Roman Catholic education relative to the fixing of a spiritual attitude toward the universe and yet dedicated to crystallizing the fundamental viewpoint of science. instead of theology? Give to such a school the first seven years of a child’s life, and the world of creed and prejudice could then be free to do its worst. Just as the church, Catholic or Protestant, can almost guarantee to close the mind hermetically against all possibility of spiritual growth beyond the limits of its own dogma, so a school might assure a father like myself that in its care his child might graduate with the conviction that her mind is free to grow to the utmost limit of its power. I do not mean that I wish my daughter to become an evolutionist, for evolution is but a theory, and 384 THE REAL BOY the attitude of the true scientist is as far beyond the limits of this theory as the viewpoint of the evolutionist is above the conception of original sin or eternal damnation. The hypothesis of evolution is just now a better intellectual tool than the as- sumption of creation at the hands of an anthropo- morphic god. But it remains, at best, a tool. I want my daughter’to drop this tool just as soon as she finds another better suited to her purpose of enjoying the fine art of living. I believe that the art of living is best manifest in the spirit of service to one’s fellow man, and I hope that my daughter will be one of those who will help “build the lofty structure of human society on the sure and simple foundation of man’s organism.”’ I wish for her that “open eyed, sensitive observation, not pretending to know prematurely, ready to throw away all pre- possessions and to follow Nature whithersoever her caprices may lead.’’ And I pray that she may find, with Havelock Ellis, that this instinctive search after the causes of things is a new faith leading ever into happier realms of thought and feeling. It is joy that I wish for my daughter, and I know no higher, more intensive joy than that of the open, growing mind. And I pray that she be never content with things as they are. I want her to be a revolutionist. Her ancestors on my mother’s side fought under red hats in the French Revolution. Her great-great- grandparents on my father’s side fought under what- THE REAL BOY 385 ever hats they could find in the revolution against taxation without representation. But she need not don a uniform and shoulder a gun! As Edwin Slosson says: “Revolutions in science never go back-. ward and they differ from political revolutions in that nothing worth saving is lost in the transaction. The new theory must always include all that the old one does and more. No man’s work is proved wrong. Revolutions in science do not destroy; they extend.” May she always be restless for new horizons, like that genial dog in Christopher Morley’s literary gem. May she ever be seeking where the blue be- gins. Let her follow Loeb, and Carrel and Ein- stein. Yet may she carry a Shakespeare in her pocket, and read, too, ever and anon in the great book where she will be asked: Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who shut up the sea with doors when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? When I made the cloud the garment thereof, And thick darkness a swaddling band for it, And brake up for it my decreed place, And set bars and doors, And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther: And here shall thy proud waves be stayed. If she go to school in America at the dawn of what Stuart Sherman has ‘called “‘the stadium age”’ in education, may she become one of Herbert Spen- cer’s good animals. May she learn early the mean- TH RIGA TY BOs ing of motherhood under the new dispensation of a woman’s choice as to the number and time-distribu- tion of her children. May she absorb the experi- ences of life like a sponge, and react to them with the electric delight of a squirrel. May she depend more upon platitudes than upon theories of educa- tion. Kipling’s. “If,” the book of Ecclesiastes, the Rubaiyat and a few of the sayings of Jesus are suf- ficient for her spiritual foundation. With F. E. Smith, may she see good in all religions, but tie to the narrow creed of none; honor true heroes and reformers, but worship none; listen to all men and women, but accept the opinions of none; learn of all men and all women, but follow none; be all things tc all men and all women, but maintain her integrity and sincerity and freedom of soul. And may her education for joyous growth include an abounding sense of humor, so that when her little boy plays hookey from his school of day-after-to- morrow, she will smile with a warm inward delight when he reports to her what he had been doing, even as that youngster did to Hardwicke Nevin: I put my lips to the rose and chewed its leaves; I shook a squirrel down, and tore my pants; I went in for a swim; and pulled corn sheaves To get some silk and smoke it at the ants; Then in a tree top very comfortable, I hollered to a lady: “Go to Hell!” THE END : ot i