Persons and Places: Early Memories and Schooling

by GEORGE SANTAYANA

5

OF EARLY childhood I have some stray images, detached and undatable, called up occasionally for no reason, after the fashion of dreams. Indeed, sometimes I suspect that they may be fragments of old dreams, and not genuine recollections; but in that case, where did the old dreams come from?

These images are all visual. I remember the sota de copas or knave of cups in the Spanish cards, with which I was playing on the floor, when I got entangled in my little frock, which had a pattern of white and blue checks; and I can see the corner of the room, our antesala, where I was crawling, and the nurse that helped me up. I also remember sitting in my mother’s lap, rather sleepy, and playing with a clasp that could run up and down the two strands of her long gold chain, made of flexible scales; she wore a large lace collar, and had on a silk gown which she called el vestido de los siete colores, because the black background was sprinkled with minute six-petaled flowers, each petal of a different color, white, green, yellow, brown, red, and blue.

Clothes and colors evidently had a great fascination for me: the emphasis may have been partly borrowed and verbal, because I heard the women constantly talking chiffons; but the interest was congenial. I have always been attentive to clothes, and careful about my own; and in those days of innocence, it was by no means indifferent to me whether with my white summer dress I wore the plain everyday blue sash, which I despised, or the glossy and fresh silk tartan that made me feel more like myself.

Another set of memories can be dated as not later than my third year, because they introduce my half-brother Robert, who left Avila when I was three and he was twelve. We occupied the same little room behind our mother’s and next to the schoolroom; and I remember our pillow fights, or rather games, because Robert had a tender heart and was nice to his baby brother. He was forbidden to purloin any part of my food, but might stick out his tongue in the hope, not always disappointed, that with my fork I might delicately place a morsel upon it.

It was a feat of equilibrium on my part, as well as of magnanimity, and I remember it for both reasons. Also the crisp potato omelet, fried in oil, that I had for supper, and that I still pine for and seldom obtain; and the napkin, white on the black and red table cover, on which the feast was spread. The first toy I can remember was also in Robert’s time at Avila, for it was given me by his Alsatian tutor, Herr Schmidt: a velvety gray mouse that could be wound up to run across the floor.

And finally I can remember distinctly the occasion of Robert’s departure. We all went to the station to see him off; for my father was taking him as far as London, from where his cousin Russell Sturgis (the Evangelical major with the side-whiskers and shapely calves) was to convey him to America to be put to school. But it is not any emotion connected with leavetaking for an indefinite absence that remains in my mind: only the image of young Robert’s back, walking before me at a particular corner where we had to go in single file. He wore a long gray coat with a braided mantelette or short cape covering the shoulders; above which I can still see his gray cap and the tightly curling brown hair escaping and bulging out under it. Whether I was actually walking too or was being carried does not appear from the picture.

That Robert should have had an Alsatian tutor in Avila (who also taught the girls) may seem odd. It was one of those unstable and unsatisfactory compromises that were involved in the circumstances of my parents’ marriage. For a time they lived in Madrid, in the flat where I was born. But Madrid has a bad climate, with great heat in summer and cold winds in winter; it made a second residence necessary for the hot months, and was expensive and, for my mother, socially distasteful. Moreover, she had to go back to Boston to her property and to the family of her first husband. My father knew it, but kept finding reasons for putting the thing off.

Finally, very characteristically, my mother took the law into her own hands, secretly made all the arrangements, and one afternoon escaped with all of us, save my father, in the express train for Paris. There my father’s remonstrances reached her. They were so eloquent, or backed by such threats of action (since he had a right at least to retain me), that we all finally returned.

It had been agreed that we should live in Avila. But what education could Robert or the girls receive there? None! Therefore a private tutor was imperative, and somehow a young Alsatian was found who seemed to possess all the requirements. French and German were native languages for him, he spoke a little English and would soon learn Spanish. His demands were modest and his character apparently excellent. So Herr Schmidt was installed as a boarder with a poor widow who lived on the ground floor, and there were daily lessons in the sunny little room at the back of the house which became the schoolroom.

I don’t know what idealistic cobwebs the German Minerva might have spun there had not her labors been interrupted; but presently a German Cupid had flown in over the flowerpots in the open window, and tangled those learned threads. For although this was before the Franco-Prussian War, young Schmidt showed all the sentimentality and push of a pure German; he believed in discipline and thoroughness, and the duty of founding all instruction on German geography, in the native language; so that between the difficult and most clearly articulated names of Harzgebirge and Riesengebirge he would whisper in Susana’s ear: “Je vous dime avec rage.” My half-sister was hardly sixteen, and he had to be sent away, which no doubt he thought a great injustice; for he wrote a long letter explaining his worthiness to be Susana’s husband, and his willingness to go to America and establish himself there — on nothing a year.

It was this collapse of superior international education at home that had made it urgent to send at least Robert at once to school in America, and that separated me from my elder brother for the next five years. Two more years elapsed before my mother and sisters also departed. I remember nothing of that interval; but after they went my uncle Santiago, with his wife Maria Josefa and his daughter Antoñita, came to live with us.

My aunt Maria Josefa was frankly a woman of the people. She was most at home in her kitchen, in a large blue apron that covered most of her skirt; and I shall never forget the genuine fresh taste of the fried peppers and eggs, and the great soft cake or torta that came from her hands. She was a native of Jaén, with a strong but pleasant Andalusian accent and exaggerated rhetoric. Her every word was a diminutive or an augmentative, and her every passion flowed out in endless unrestrained litanies of sorrow or endearment. She could hardly read or write, and her simplicity or humility was so great that she would casually observe that her daughter Antoñita had been a siete mesina or seven-months child; from which anyone could gather the reason for her marriage.

Not the person, tia Maria Josefa, in whose hands my mother could have wished to leave me at the age of five! But my mother’s mind was made up and inflexible; it was made up abstractly, in scorn of particulars and of consequences. She had put off her departure only too long, and now she must go. She seems to have trusted Maria Josefa as one might a devoted old nurse; and this trust was deserved, because in relation to me Maria Josefa behaved perfectly.

During the three years that I was separated from my mother I went more or less to school. It was a large darkish room on the ground floor in the public building directly opposite our house; but the entrance was not in our street, and I had to go round the Oñate tower into the lane at the back, where the school door was. We children stood in corros or circles round the teacher — who was, I think, sometimes only an older lad — and recited the lesson after him. I don’t remember any individual questions or answers, nor any reading or writing, yet we did learn somehow to read and write.

6

My first voyage —if I hadn’t been deadly seasick — might have initiated me into the life of primitive mariners, for we sailed the high seas in an open boat. It was a little freight steamer plying from Bilbao to Cardiff, hardly more than a tug; and though it had a small bridge and a deckhouse aft, it was open to the sky forward, and visibly freighted with reddish earth, which I believed was iron ore. The Bay of Biscay confirmed its bad reputation; but on the third day there were sunshine and smooth sparkling water, and I recovered instantly.

We were then in Bristol Channel, in sight of the Welsh coast; smooth grassy hillsides, graygreen in the slight mist and dotted with little white houses. But there was something far more interesting for me to watch: several boats with white sails, probably small yachts, bending and tacking in the almost imperceptible breeze. A British note — a first hint to me of that brave, free, sporting side of the youthful Anglo-Saxon character which I was later to love so much.

The next day we traveled to Liverpool, where I remember nothing but the docks, with long inclined ways, paved with cobblestones, leading down between great warehouses to the water’s edge. There we crept into a small rowboat that was to convey us to our ship. Several large vessels were riding at anchor in the stream; my father pointed to the ugliest and most dwarfish of them and said that this would be ours. No help for it now, I reflected; but at once my eye was attracted by a line of little flags running from stem to stern, over the top of the two masts. What did that mean? My father explained that dressing the ship in that fashion, although a British vessel, was a compliment courteously paid to the United States, because most of the passengers were Americans, who on that day were celebrating the anniversary of their Declaration of Independence. This incident has fixed the date of my first sailing to America unerringly in my mind: it was the Fourth of July, 1872.

The Cunard steamship Samaria of that date was a vessel of 3000 tons, with a squat red smokestack between two stumpy masts, and a bowsprit like a sailing ship. Sails were indeed often set — in order, it was said, to steady her, but probably also to help her along; for never was a vessel more distinctly an old tub. She stood high, black, and short above the water, looking rusty and almost derelict; however she bore us safely, if not steadily, to Boston in twelve days.

The day of our arrival was very warm, with the damp suffocating heat of the New England summer; there was naturally some confusion in landing, and everything seemed odd and unaccountable. It was a sordid scene. I saw no stone quays, such as I associated with ports, at Bilbao, at Portugalete, and lately on a grand scale at Liverpool. No docks; only a wooden pier raised precariously on slimy piles, with the stained sea water running under it; and on it a vast wooden shed, like a barn, filled with merchandise and strewn with rubbish. America was not yet rich, it was only growing rich; people worked feverishly for quick returns, and let the future build for the future.

But along came my brother Robert. I shouldn’t have recognized him, nor he me, after those five years: a youth not yet eighteen, of middle height, with a narrow chest and sloping shoulders, and a straw hat with a bright blue ribbon; yet the tightly curling brown hair, quite dry and brittle (we both grew prematurely bald), was unmistakably Robert’s; besides, he spoke Spanish, and very soon I was quite at home with him. But I had never seen a man in a straw hat before, and the blue ribbon didn’t please me.

Robert somehow guided us and dispatched our things to Beacon Street; it was a complicated process and a complicated journey, a ferry and two horsecars, besides three short walks, but it was economical — ten cents each for the trip, and twenty-five cents to send the trunk by express; whereas a “hack” (a hired landau) would have cost five dollars.

Events looked forward to with trepidation, when at length they occur, often fall flat. I was going to see my mother and sisters again after three years! Husband and wife were to be reunited! Well, when Robert said, “This is our house,” and we walked up a little flight of stone steps to a half-open door in a row of doors, belonging to a narrow high house exactly like the house next to it, nobody seemed to inhabit the house or any of the others. It was the dead season, July 16, and the whole street was deserted. However, before we got to the last step, a second door further in was opened; we were expected; there were faces peering out; Susana and Josefina in white dresses, and, much smaller, my mother wearing a cap and looking very grave.

We kissed each other all round, and Susana cried. (We had forgotten to kiss Robert at the wharf.) Why did Susana cry? Was it mere excitement, nerves? Or was she already — she was twenty-one — secretly regretting Spain and her beaux jours? They took us into the dining room to show us the “beautiful view” from the back of the house — a great expanse of water, with a low line of nondescript sheds and wooden houses marking the opposite bank. It was Bostonian to show us the view first; but we noticed that this dining room was hung with many oil paintings — little Dutch or classic Italian landscapes, still life, and over the mantelpiece an old portrait: some Elizabethan worthy in a ruff and puffed sleeves, with a large ring on his fat forefinger.

My father naturally had begun by examining these pictures — all copies, of course; and we learned that the Elizabethan gentleman was supposed to be Lord Burleigh, but that “Uncle Henry,” whose pictures these had been, had bought it because he thought the personage looked like a Sturgis and might have been one of his ancestors. My father must have been amused at this, it was so typical of the Sturgises. As for me, what interested me was to find the large sofa so soft when I sat on it. One might ride on the springs as if on horseback.

It was inevitably Susana who took me in tow and who began to teach me English. I learned some verses by rote, about a bird’s nest, out of a brightly colored and highly moral book for young children. They ended, as I pronounced them, as follows: —

The moral of this was wasted on me. I was not a young child, and if I had had an impulse to steal any bird’s nest or bird’s eggs, or even to climb any tree, it would not have been these nursery rhymes that could have dissuaded me. But I had no such impulse, and no such opportunity, which made this moralizing, like all moralizing, ring hollow in my ears.

My pronunciation improved rapidly and unawares. I then had a good ear and a flexible tongue, and the fact that English was a foreign language to me positively helped me to learn it well and to speak it, for instance, much better than Susana or Robert, or most of the boys in my successive schools. The irregularity of English sounds and their subtlety was an interesting challenge: far from irritating, it attracted me, and made me sensitive to its fine shades; so that even before I had heard an English voice or lived in England, my English was good. In 1887, I met Lady Stanley of Alderley, a great and venerable personage; and after we had exchanged a few phrases, Lady Stanley said, “But how well you speak English!” That is a backhanded compliment that one ordinarily prefers not to hear, since it implies that one evidently speaks like a foreigner. But in this case, as I was considered a Spaniard, it was not rude; and I explained that I had been educated in Boston. “But you haven’t an American accent,” the lady insisted. I reminded her of the culture of Boston, and protested that all my English was American, as I had been but three days in London. “No,”she admitted, “you haven’t a London accent. You speak like Queen Victoria.”Let this stand as early testimony to my English speech: I spoke like Queen Victoria.¹

7

Our house was, at that time, one of the last on the water-side of Beacon Street, and there was still many a vacant lot east of it, where on passing in sharp wintry weather it was prudent to turn up one’s coal collar against the icy blast from the river; as also, for the matter of that, at every cross-street. On the opposite side there were straggling groups of houses.

Ours was one of two houses exactly alike; yet as they were only two, we could distinguish ours without looking at the number displayed in large figures on the semicircular glass panel over the front door: for ours was the house to the left, not the one to the right. The pair were a product of that “producer’s economy,” then beginning to prevail in America, which first creates articles and then attempts to create a demand for them — an economy that has flooded the country with breakfast foods, shaving soaps, poets, and professors of philosophy.

Our twin houses had been designed to attract the buyer, who might sell his bargain again at a profit if he didn’t find it satisfactory; and this was precisely the ground on which my mother was persuaded to buy her house, not expecting a financial crisis and a sudden but prolonged disinclination on the part of the consumer to buy anything that he didn’t need.

The advantages in our house were in the first place social or snobbish: that it was in Beacon Street and on the better or fashionable waterside of that street. It offered attractions also for the investor; the town was rapidly spreading in that direction, land values were sure to go up, and the house would become every year more central and more desirable. Finally, it was a small house, with only two rooms on each of the principal floors: comfortable and cozy, therefore, for a rich spinster or for an ambitious young married couple; especially as with its reception room and large dining room on the ground floor, and its front and back parlors upstairs, it lent itself to entertaining on a moderate scale.

That it had only two decent bedrooms, one bathroom, and no backstairs, wouldn’t matter with a very small family. But we happened to be a family of five, demanding five separate rooms. My mother therefore turned the front parlor into a bedroom for herself, while my sisters occupied the two good rooms on the second floor, and Robert, the cook, the housemaid, and I had the four small cubicles in the mansard or French roof.

At least, this was the ultimate and normal arrangement; but when my father and I arrived, the family prejudice against doubling up had to be overcome for the time being. Not, however, in the case of my father and mother; for she resigned the front parlor to him and moved to one of the rooms above, the two girls being crowded into the other, while I was tucked, as a waif new to the New World, not only into Robert’s room but into his bed, which happened incongruously to be a large double one. My mother had taken on her furniture from previous tenants or from “Aunt Lizzie”; and the double beds, not being wanted, had a tendency to pass out of sight into the upper regions; one falling in this way to Robert’s lot. But this cohabitation with my elder brother didn’t last long; it was contrary to my mother’s instinct and habits; and soon a small bed was provided for me and I was moved into the little room adjoining Robert’s, as into my own castle.

To this unsuitable residence our habits adapted themselves as well as might be. The small room beside the front door became our family sitting room. It was sunny and cozy; on cold evenings when the furnace proved insufficient, it could be at once warmed and ventilated by lighting the fire; and by day it afforded us the feminine Spanish entertainment of looking out of the window and watching, a little below our own level, the stray passers-by.

The back wall of our family sitting room was covered by a large bookcase with glass doors, which contained the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Lane’s Arabian Nights, and a lot of old books that nobody opened. But we had a few Spanish books and could get others from the Boston Public Library. In this way I read Oliver Optic’s stories for boys, doting on the seafaring and the oceanic geography; also Abbott’s Lives, of which I remember Alexander the Great and Mary Queen of Scots. We also had Motley’s and Prescott’s pseudo-Spanish histories; but I knew enough to spew them out of my mouth at the first tasting.

During the first years Susana and Robert would read aloud to us in the evening, at first in Spanish: Don Quixote and Un Servilón y un Liberalito by the pious lady-novelist “Fernán Caballero.” Then, because our interesting Spanish books were exhausted, or because Robert, especially, found English easier, they shifted to Shakespeare, and read Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet, of which I remember liking the first and thinking the second inexpressibly silly. There the practice died out. We had no more reading aloud, but Susana and I often read the same books separately. When I became fond of poetry, I tried to interest her in it, but failed. She liked nothing I showed her except Byron’s Don Juan, because, she said, it was as good as prose.

The walls of this little sitting room were hung exclusively with engravings, most of which had adorned “Uncle Henry’s” house. There were official large portraits of Napoleon the Third and the Empress Eugenie in their regalia, theatrically posed and very pompous; also an affecting scene in an English churchyard, full of yew and weeping willow, and showing a brave little boy and a sweet little girl, sitting and holding hands on the edge of a newly made grave, strewn with wild flowers, while above their heads a large white angel in muslin, the spirit of their departed mother, spread her hands and her great wings over them in protection and blessing.

To take away the taste of this, like a savory after a milk pudding, there hung near it a framed collection of Poor Richard’s Proverbs, with quaint little eighteenth-century illustrations for each maxim. I learned most of them by heart, but can remember only Early to bed and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise and Three removes are as bad as a fire. I wished Franklin had said something crushingly true and materialistic about the Angel Mother and about Napoleon the Third’s corsets and waxed mustache; but I was willing to nurse illusions about the Empress Eugénie. She had been the queen of fashion in her day, she was Spanish, and she might be said to look a little like Susana idealized.

8

Of Miss Welchman’s Kindergarten in Chestnut Street, my first school in Boston, I remember only that we had cards with holes pricked in them, and colored worsted that we were invited to pass through the holes, making designs to suit our own fancy. I suppose this was calculated to develop artistic originality, not to convince us how trivial that originality is, and how helpless without traditional models.

I remember also that I used to walk home with another boy, not so old as I, but also much older than the other children; and that one day — this must have been in spring, for there was a bush with red flowers in his grass plot — he said something very strange as he left me, and ran up the steps into his house. I reported what he had said to Susana, who pronounced it pantheism: perhaps it was that those red flowers were opening because God was awakening in them. This shows how far my English had got in that kindergarten and how we lisped metaphysics there.

The Brimmer School, where I went during the next winter, 1873-1874, was the public grammar school of our city district, although more than a mile from our house, in the depths of the South End. I had to walk the whole level length of Beacon Street, cross the Common, and go some distance downhill in Tremont Street to Common Street, where the school was situated, looking like a police station. It was a poor boys’ free school, the roughest I was ever in, where the rattan played an important part, although usually behind the scenes, and where there was an atmosphere of rowdiness and ill-will, requiring all sorts of minor punishments, such as standing in the corner or being detained after school.

I don’t know what lessons we had, except that there were oral spelling-matches, in which naturally I didn’t shine. A word spelled aloud (as some Americans like to do facetiously, instead of pronouncing it) still puzzles me and leaves me dumb. Nevertheless, partly because I was older and bigger than most of the boys, I soon became “monitor,” and had my little desk beside the teacher’s, a woman, facing the whole class. This distinction was invidious, and there were attempts at chasing me or hooting at me when we got out of school.

By a happy chance it was possible to transfer me the next year to a much better school, the historic Latin School, where from the earliest times until my day, at least, all well-educated Bostonians had been prepared for college. The School Committee in the city government had that year decided to try an experiment and establish a preparatory course of two years, to precede the six traditional classes. The experiment was not long continued, but I profited by it, and passed eight full years in the Latin School, thus being more of a Latin School boy than almost anybody else. We were not lodged during those preliminary years in the regular schoolhouse, but at first in Harrison Avenue, and later in Mason Street.

More than once in my life I have crossed a desert in all that regards myself, my thoughts, or my happiness; so that when I look back over those years, I see objects, I see public events, I see persons and places, but I don’t see myself. My inner life, as I recall it, seems to be concentrated in a few oases, in a few halting-places, Green Inns, or Sanctuaries, where the busy traveler stopped to rest, to think, and to be himself. I say the busy traveler, because those long stretches of spiritual emptiness were filled with daily actions and feelings, later often with giving lectures and writing books; yet all was done under some mechanical stimulus — the college bell, the desk, the pen, or the chapter planned: old thoughts and old words flowing out duly from the reservoir, until the college bell rang again, and the water was turned off. Of myself in those years I have no recollection; it is as if I hadn’t existed, or only as a mechanical sensorium and active apparatus doing its work under my name. Such a period now seems to begin and to last for two thirds of my Latin School days.

I remember my first headmaster at the Latin School, Mr. Gardner by name: a tall gaunt figure in some sort of flowing long coat, — of course not a gown, — with a diminutive head like the knob of a mannikin. The insignificant occiput was enlarged, however, as if by a halo, by a great crop of dusty brown hair.

One day on his rounds of inspection the headmaster found us having our French lesson. A headmaster has to pretend to know everything, and the pretense soon becomes a conviction. Mr. Gardner at once took over the duty of teaching us his super-French. “The French word bonne,” he said, “is pronounced in Paris — I have been in Paris myself—exactly as the English word bun.” Now, I had heard a good deal of French out of school. There had been the French bonne Justine, the Alsatian tutor who loved avec rage, and the Catholic families in Boston who chatted in French together. And hadn’t I inherited from my sisters La Jeune Abeille du Parnasse Français and couldn’t I say by heart: —

If bonne sounds exactly like bun, would Mr. Gardner maintain that couronne, save for that first letter, sounds exactly like you run? I was as sure that it was as ridiculous to call a bonne a bun as to call a bun a bonne. But apparently headmasters were like that; and I kept my phonetic science to myself with the immense satisfaction of feeling that I knew better than my teacher.

I may add that at that time our French master was not a Frenchman, but a Yankee farmer named Mr. Capen, whom we called Old Cudjo, and who had a physiological method of imparting a Parisian accent — there was no need to accompany the headmaster to Paris. He would open his mouth wide, like the hippopotamus at the zoo, and would insert a pencil, to point out exactly what parts of the tongue, lips, palate, or larynx we should contract or relax in order to emit the pure French sounds of u, an, en, in, un, and on. Nobody laughed. I think the boys were rather impressed for the moment by the depth of Mr. Capen’s science, and the hopelessness of profiting by it. He was not a man to be trifled with. He had a most thunderous way of playing what he called voluntaries on the piano; and rumor had it that he had stolen a march, under a heavy handicap of years, on his own son, by marrying the girl his son was engaged to.

Scraps of rude, quaint, grotesque humanity: bits of that Dickensian bohemia still surviving in my day in certain old-fashioned places. But the image that for me sets the key to them all appeared when we moved to the Bedford Street schoolhouse. It seemed a vast, rattling old shell of a building, bare, shabby, and forlorn to the point of squalor; not exactly dirty, but worn, shaky, and stained deeply in every part by time, weather, and merciless usage.

It had been built in a hurry, and not to last long. No blackboard was black; all were indelibly clouded with ingrained layers of old chalk; the more you rubbed it out, the more you rubbed it in. Every desk was stained with generations of ink spots, cut deeply with initials and scratched drawings. What idle thoughts had been wandering for years through all those empty heads in all those tedious school hours! Even in the best schools, almost all schooltime is wasted. Now and then something is learned that sticks fast; for the rest the boys are merely given time to grow and are kept from too much mischief.

And the teachers, though it is not possible for me now to distinguish them all in memory, were surely not out of keeping with their surroundings: disappointed, shabby-genteel, picturesque old Yankees, with a little bitter humor breaking through their constitutional fatigue. I dare say that for them as for me the school was a familiar symbol of fatality. They hadn’t chosen it, they hadn’t wanted it, they didn’t particularly like it; they knew no reason why it should be the sort of school it was; but there it stood, there they somehow found themselves entangled; and there was nothing else practicable but to go on there, doing what was expected and imposed upon them.

Those teachers were stray individuals; they had not yet been standardized by educational departments and pedagogy. Some were like village schoolmasters or drudges—elderly men, like Mr. Capen, with crotchets, but good teachers, knowing their particular book and knowing how to keep order, and neither lax nor cruel. Others, especially Mr. Fiske, afterwards headmaster, and Mr. Groce were younger, with a more modern education.

I was an unprofitable though not unappreciative pupil to Mr. Fiske, because I didn’t learn my Greek properly. That was not his fault. If I could have had him for a private tutor I should have become a good Grecian: it would have added immensely to my life and to my philosophy. But I was only one of forty; I was expected to study dryly, mechanically, without the side-lights and the stimulus of non-verbal interest attached to the words. In Latin, I could supply these side-lights and nonverbal interests out of my own store. Latin was the language of the Church, it was old Spanish. The roots were all my roots. But Greek roots were more often foreign and at first unmeaning. I learned and remembered well what I could learn from Mr. Fiske without studying.

Very different was dapper Mr. Groce, our teacher of English composition and literature, a little plump man, with a keen, dry, cheerful, yet irritable disposition, a sparkling birdlike eye, and a little black mustache and diminutive chin-beard. I suspect that he was too intelligent to put up patiently with all the conventions. Had he not been a public-school teacher, dependent on the democratic hypocrisies of a government committee, he might have said unconventional things. This inner rebellion kept him from being sentimental, moralistic, or religious in respect to poetry; yet he understood perfectly the penumbra of emotion that good and bad poetry alike may drag after them in an untrained mind. He knew how to rescue the structural and rational beauties of a poem from that bog of private feeling. To me this was a timely lesson, for it was precisely sadness and religiosity and grandiloquence that first attracted me in poetry; and perhaps I owe to Mr. Groce the beginnings of a capacity to distinguish the musical and expressive charm of poetry from its moral appeal. At any rate, at sixteen, I composed my first longish poem, in Spenser’s measure, after Childe Harold and Adonais, full of pessimistic, languid, Byronic sentiments, describing the various kinds of superiority that Night has over Day. It got the prize.

My lachrymose prize poem about the beauties of darkness was not my only effusion. The habit of scribbling mocking epigrams has accompanied me through life and invaded the margins of my most serious authors. Mockery is the first puerile form of wit, playing with surfaces without sympathy: I abounded in it. During the winter of 1880-1881 our class, then the second class, formed a society to meet once a week in the evening and have a debate. We hired a bare room in Tremont Street, opposite the Common, with a few benches or chairs in it; someone would propose a resolution or advance an opinion, and the discussion would follow.

When my turn came, I read a little satire on all our teachers, in verse, saying very much what I have said about them here; only that my account was more complete, included them all, and treated them less kindly. It had a great success, and the boys wanted to have it printed. Printed it was, but not as it originally stood. “Holy Moses,” for instance, which was the nickname current for our headmaster, Moses Merrill, was changed to the less irreverent and more exact phrase, “lordly Moses,” and many other things were modified. Then the whole was enveloped in a tirade, of a sentimental sort, about the Bedford Street schoolhouse, which was about to be abandoned for a new building in the South End.

A lot of copies were printed, perhaps two or three hundred; and on the day of our public Farewell Declamation in the Hall, the headmaster somehow got wind of its existence, and said, “We hear that one of the boys has written a poem about leaving this old schoolhouse: will he get up and read it.” I had a copy in my pocket: I got up, and read the longish sentimental part and then sat down again, leaving out the personalities. For the moment all was well; but other boys and some outsiders got copies; and the disrespectful gibes at the teachers became public under their noses.

When school met again, Mr. Merrill made us a long speech; but nothing more happened, and official sentiment towards me was not unfavorably affected. My class had to elect the lieutenant colonel of the Boston School Regiment, the colonel that year coming from the English High School; and by a majority of one vote they elected Dick Smith, and then me unanimously for major of our battalion. But the headmaster reversed the order, and appointed me lieutenant colonel and Dick Smith major, without giving reasons; at which legal but arbitrary exhibition of favoritism on the headmaster’s part, Dick Smith’s father took him out of the school and I became both lieutenant colonel and major, both offices being almost sinecures.