To You, Mr. Chips

by James Hilton

  This spirit of free criticism, even if it expresses itself no more momentously than as a classroom squib, is the sort of thing that makes English Conservatives liberal and keeps English Socialists conservative. It is the spirit that made Baldwin protest against Fascist brutality at the Albert Hall, that gives Citrine misgivings about Russia, and that united ninety per cent of Englishmen in fervent if soon-forgotten admiration of Dimitrov. It is the spirit that made Mr. Chips protest amidst the bomb explosions: “These things that have mattered for a thousand years are not going to be snuffed out because some stink-merchant invents a new kind of mischief.”

  Unfortunately, it looks as if they are going to be snuffed out. Mr. Chips was too valiant an optimist to face the tragic impasse of the twentieth century—the fact that civilisation, because in its higher manifestations it is essentially organised for peace, cannot long survive war—even a war supposedly undertaken on its behalf. There can be no war to end wars, because all wars begin other wars. There can be no such thing as a war to save democracy, because all wars destroy democracy. There could have been a peace to save what was left of democracy, but the chance of that came and went in 1919—the saddest year in all the martyrdom of man.

  Here the reader may protest that much of the above argument depends on the assumption that England and our institutions deserve to survive. There was a time when I would not by any means have taken this for granted. It was possible, then, to feel that the pre-War world, having encouraged or permitted a system that led to catastrophe, might as well be destroyed completely to make way for newer and better things. (It was possible, then, to say “newer and better” as glibly as one says “spick and span.”) It was possible, then, to decry the public-schools as the bulwark of a system that had had its day, to attack them for their creation of a class snobbery, to lampoon their play-the-game fetish and their sedate philistinism. That these attacks were partly justified one may as well admit. The public-schools do create snobbery, or at any rate the illusion of superiority; you cannot train a ruling class without such an illusion. My point is that the English illusion has proved, on the whole, humaner and more endurable, even by its victims, than the current European illusions that are challenging and supplanting it; that the public-school Englishmen who flock to a Noel Coward revue to join in laughs against themselves are patterned better than the polychromed shirt-wearers of the Continent who not only cannot laugh but dare not allow laughter. Granted that the long afternoon of English imperialism is over, that dusk is falling on a dominion wider if less solid than Rome’s. Granted that the world is tired of us and our solar topees and our faded kip-lingerie, that it will not raise a finger to save us from eclipse. Time will bring regrets, if any. For myself, I do not object to being called a sentimentalist because I acknowledge the passing of a great age with something warmer than a sneer.

  But the accusation of sentimentality comes oddly from those who extol the Russian collectivist as Rousseau extolled the noble savage. In some circles to-day it is even fashionable to decry the more literate occupations altogether and to redress the undoubted middle-class overweight in pre-War art by refusing hallmarks to anything modern that cannot call itself “proletarian.” This forces me to a confession (snobbish if you insist) that in my opinion a man need not be ashamed of having been educated—even at Brookfield and Cambridge. When I reflect on the manner in which the Gadarene pace of 1938 is being set by an ex-house-painter, I do not need to apologise for being an ex- public-schoolboy (comic phrase though it is), and I can even turn with relief to the visionary ideals of a man whose reputation, faded to-day, will bloom again as we remember him more and more wistfully in the years ahead. And Woodrow Wilson was an ex-schoolmaster.

  Let history write the epitaph—England, liberalism, democracy were not so bad—not so good, either, on all occasions, but better, maybe, in a longer retrospect. Some of us may even survive to make such a retrospect. All over the world to-day the theme and accents of barbarism are being orchestrated, while the technique of mass-hypnotism, as practised by controlled press and radio, is being schooled to construct a façade of justification for any and every excess. The English illusion is dying; “on dune and headland sinks the fire.” But there are other and fiercer fires. It is remarkable (if only a coincidence) that the first victims of the new ferocities have been countries in which there is a long tradition of cruelty (Chinese tortures, Ethiopian mutilations, Spanish bull-rings); one is almost tempted to a belief that the soil can be soured by ancestral lusts, and that English freedom from actual warfare within her own territories for two centuries has been, in effect, a cleansing and a purification. Perhaps this is too mystical for proof; perhaps it is just nonsense, anyway. But it is true that violence begets violence, that delight in the infliction of suffering is a poison in the bloodstream of nations as well as of individuals, and that soon we may be faced with the prospect of a world impelled to its doom by sadists and degenerates. In the next war (that is to say, in the war that has already begun) there will be no heroes charging splendidly to death because

  “ someone has blundered,”" but grey-faced morituri, prone in their steel coffins, diving to kill and be killed because, in the reckoning of authority, no one has blundered at all.

  Do not think I am blind to the faults of the age of which Mr. Chips and his type were the product as well as the makers. Its imperialism was, at its worst, smug, hypocritical, and predatory. Its laissez-faire capitalism resulted in such horrors as child-slavery in factories. Its vices were as solid as its virtues. But one fact does emerge from any critical analysis of the period beginning, roughly, with the Queen’s accession and ending with her death—that it was possible, during this time, for an intelligent man in Western Europe to look around his world and believe that it was getting better. He could see the spread of freedom, in thought and creed and speech, and—even more important—the spread of the belief that such an increase of freedom was an ultimate goal, even if it could not be immediately conceded. He could watch the transplantation of parliamentary government into lands where, though it might not wholly suit the soil, few doubted it would eventually flourish. He could believe that mechanical inventions were spreading civilisation because the chief mechanical invention of the time, the railway, was not (like the aeroplane) diabolically apt for use in warfare. He could observe each year new sunderings of barriers between lands until traveller and student could roam through Europe more freely than at any time since the break-up of Christendom.

  True that the boy Dickens toiled in a blacking factory, but he grew up free to scarify the system that had forced him to it; he had been a child-slave, but he was never a man-slave. True that Huxley was attacked for teaching that men and monkeys were somewhat the same; but he was never exiled for refusing to teach that Jews and Gentiles were altogether different. Scientists may have incurred the wrath of bishops for spreading what the latter considered to be evolutionary nonsense; they were never ordered by government to teach what every acknowledged authority considers to be Aryan nonsense. And while Karl Marx laboriously constructed his time-bomb to explode the bourgeoisie, his victims rewarded him with a ticket to the British Museum instead of a Leipzig trial, and a peaceful grave in Highgate Cemetery instead of a trench in front of a firing-squad.

  Occasionally throughout the ages, the clouds of history show a rift and through it the sun of human betterment shines out for a few deceptive moments over a limited area. The Greece of Pericles was one such time and place; parts of China under certain dynasties offered the spectacle of another; Paraguay under the Jesuit Communists was perhaps a third. These few have little in common save a crust of security over the prevalent turbulence of mankind; the crust was thin and its promise of permanence false. But Victorian England sealed the volcano more stoutly than it had ever been sealed before, so that a man and his son and his son’s son might live and die in the belief that the world would not witness certain things again. The crust, indeed, was such that even after the first shattering its debr
is is something to cling to—until the next.

  All of which may sound a huge digression in a book dedicated to the memory of an old school-master. But for me it is not so. I cannot think of my schooldays without the image of that incredible background—Zeppelins droning over sleeping villages, Latin lessons from which boys stepped into the brief lordliness of a second lieutenancy on the Somme. I cannot forget the little room where my friends and I fried sausages over a gas-ring and played George Robey records on the gramophone, and how, in that same little room with the sausages frying and the gramophone playing, one of us received a telegram with bad news in it, and how we all tried to sympathise, yet in the end arrived at no better idea than to open a hoarded tin of pineapple chunks to follow the sausages. I cannot forget cycling so often over the ridge of the Gog-magogs (which, as Mr. Chips always informed us, was the highest land between Brookfield and the Ural Mountains), and the soft fenland rain beginning to fall on Cambridge streets at dusk, with old men fumbling in and out of bookshops, and young men, spent after route-marches, scampering over ancient quadrangles. Those days were history, but most of us were too young to be historians, too young to disassociate the trivial from the momentous—gnarled desks and war-headlines, photogravure generals and the school butler who stood at the foot of the dormitory staircase and at lights-out warned sepulchrally—“Time, Gentlemen, Time.” It was Time in a way that so many of us could not realise. That warning marked the days during which, on an average, ten thousand men were killed.

  Mr. Chips would walk between the lines of beds in the dormitory and turn out the lights. He was an old man then, and it was impossible to think he had ever been much younger. He seemed already ageless, beyond the reach of any time that could be called. Schooldays are a microcosm of life—the boy is born the day he enters the school and dies the day he leaves it; in between are youth, middle-age, and the elderly respectability of the sixtth-form. But outside this cycle stands the schoolmaster, watching the three-year lifetimes as they pass him by, remembering faces and incidents as a god might remember history. An old schoolmaster, if he is well-liked and has dignity, is rather like a god. You can joke about him behind his back, but you must acknowledge him to his face while you love him a little carelessly in your hearts. This has been the relationship of good men and good gods since the world began.

  There was no single schoolmaster I ever knew who was entirely Mr. Chips, but there were several who had certain of his attributes and achieved that best reward of a well-spent life—to grow old beloved. One of them was my father. He did not train aristocrats to govern the Empire or plutocrats to run their fathers’ businesses, but he employed his wise and sweetening influence just as valuably among the thousands of elementary schoolboys who knew and know him still in a London suburb.

  2. GERALD AND THE CANDIDATE

  GERALD WAS EIGHT when he first went to stay with Uncle Richard. He had no parents, and the frequent prep.-school holidays had to be filled up somehow; that was the reason. He was a quiet boy, full of dreams. For weeks during the winter term at Grayshott (which was the prep.-school for Brookfield) he had talked to Martin Secundus about the visit: “I say, Martin, I’ll have to go into training—Uncle Richard always takes people such long walks when they go and stay with him. He’s a great explorer, you know. Once he was nearly killed in the jungle by a tiger. He can climb any mountain there is. And he lives in an old castle with a moat round it, and before you can get in you have to give the password.”

  Actually Gerald had never seen Uncle Richard or where he lived. Everything was new to him—the house and the town and the kind of country, the journey there in the train that went “You-can-if-you-like—You-can-if-you-like,” and not just “No, you mustn’t—No, you mustn’t,” like the local train to Grayshott; and the first meeting at twilight on Browdley station platform with Uncle Richard. The platform was made of wooden planks, and as Gerald walked along it the thump—thump—thump made him think of his second favourite “pretend”—that he was a great general, marching at the head of soldiers—“Follow me, my men!” But he was soon back at his chief and almost permanent “pretend”—that he was the engine-driver of the Scotch express, which was half an hour late with the King and Queen on board, and the King had said to the station-master: “My good fellow, I must arrive in time,” and the stationmaster had answered: “Well, your Majesty, that’s going to be a difficult matter, but we have one man, Gerald Holloway, whom we can try. If anyone can get you there, he will.” Steadily, steadily, throughout the night, a hand always on the throttle-lever, eyes peering ahead … that was how it went on. Very often the King knighted him as the station clock struck the hour at which the train was due to arrive.

  But this time Gerald hadn’t a chance to think as far as that, because of Uncle Richard.

  “Well, my boy,” said Uncle Richard, in a very loud, gruff voice. Then he arranged with a porter about having Gerald’s trunk and tuck-box sent on, and after that began to walk away towards the ticket-barrier. Gerald was sorry to be whisked off the platform so soon; he rather wanted to look at the engine—it was a Four-Four-Nought. None of the grown/up people he knew had any idea what a Four-Four-Nought was; but Gerald considered it quite everyday knowledge.

  “So you’re Gerald,” said Uncle Richard, when they came to the street.

  Gerald said he was.

  “You’ll have to speak up a bit, my boy—I’m a little deaf. Gerald, eh? Well, you’ve come here at a lively time, and no mistake.” And he made a noise in his throat which Gerald thought was like something, if he could only think what. It sounded like “wuff-wuff.” “Yes, a right-down lively time. Better make a good start, young shaver, and wear your colours.”

  Whereat Uncle Richard halted under a lamp and fished in his pocket, producing after some search a large red rosette which he stooped and pinned to the lapel of Gerald’s overcoat. Gerald looked up at him with an interest that suddenly quickened to excitement. Was it possible that here, at last, was a grown-up who knew the things that really mattered in the world? From that moment, at any rate, he was aware that Uncle Richard was not to be classed with any other people. He smiled, privately to himself, and then with open friendliness at the big face that overtopped his own.

  “There you are, my boy. Red’s for Liberal. Consequently is, the folks’ll know what you are.”

  Gerald did not understand this at all, but he was quite contented as he trotted along. He knew he was going to like Uncle Richard.

  Uncle Richard lived at Number 2, The Parade, which was the best house in Browdley’s best street—a double pre-eminence signalised by the fact that none of the other streets in Browdley had front gardens, and none of the other front gardens in the Parade was as big as Uncle Richard’s. His, indeed, was about the size of a railway waiting-room, and nothing grew in it except some evergreens that were really ever-black. Nevertheless, the social gulf proclaimed by them and by their cindery soil was immense. They made the Parade the Park Lane of Browdley. Uncle Richard’s was the end house of a row of twelve—grimy, bay-windowed, and ornamented in the most florid mid-Victorian style; and Browdley, in point of fact, was just a Northern industrial town of some eight or ten thousand inhabitants, mostly employed in the local industries of iron-founding and calico-printing. In the junior geography form at Grayshott, noisy with talk of capes and bays and county towns and what belonged to whom, the word “Browdley” was unknown. It was the sort of place that nobody ever went to and that nobody had ever heard of.

  But that, if he had known anything about it when he was eight, would have seemed to Gerald just a part of the vast grown-up conspiracy to avoid seeing things as they really were. As he and Uncle Richard walked through the streets from the station to the Parade, he was quite sure about Browdley and equally sure about himself in it. With that red rosette in his coat-lapel he was a knight, flaunting his banner and about to do something heroic; and Uncle Richard was clearly another knight; and Browdley was the beautiful and mysterious place where they bot
h had to do whatever it was.

  The streets of that magic city were glittering with bright windows, and Gerald’s eyes, as he walked along, could just peer over the sills and sometimes under the drawn blinds. Wonderful sights—an old man leaning over a fire, a woman peeling potatoes at a table covered with dishes, a little girl sitting on a high stool in front of a piano. Such people might have been seen elsewhere, but they would not have been the same; and that was because he was with Uncle Richard, and they were both wearing those red rosettes.

  Soon they came to the house. It had a street lamp outside it that shone a green light, and whenever afterwards Gerald mentioned this and Aunt Lavinia said (as she sometimes did): “What nonsense, Gerald! Did anyone ever see a street lamp with a green light!”—Gerald used to reply: “Well, it was a green light, and it made the house look wonderful. And there was a dragon on the front door.” Whereupon Aunt Lavinia would usually say: “Don’t take any notice of him, Mrs. So-and-so. He romances.” But there was this green light, and the dragon on the front door was the brass knocker, which seemed to Gerald exactly like a dragon.