VERYWHERE or almost everywhere among English-speaking peoples the monarchical principle is under notice to quit. In the school it is the boy and not the master who rules; even in the courts the judges interpreting the law go cautiously, in fear of public disfavour; finally, change has reached the home and the family, which were wont to be a dual monarchy—the mother ruling within the house and the father his own world outside. Just as business is a matter of committees and syndicates and corporations—the individual man a mere wheel or pulley in some immense machine which is controlled by a cold-blooded arithmetician—so, inside the home, the mother is superseded by an expert, some specialist in up-to-date science or quackery who occupies her place and asks to sit where she sat. Can we wonder that she sometimes leaves vacant her chair and goes in pursuit of distraction?

It is a curious change and means much; for one thing, the world has lost its two most picturesque figures—the master of the house and its mistress. When hospitality was hospitality, it meant that you were admitted for a brief while to bask in the smiles of two gracious sovereigns—the lord and the lady of the house that entertained you—their good-will, radiating forth to warm you, the real attraction, to which the wine and the food and the guests were only secondary, so much heart on their side creating a heart within your own narrow ribs. Now all is changed, and the entertainment is more important than the entertainers. We come to be pleased, we no longer come to please; the old delicious autocracy with its smiling court of sympathetic and affectionate guests has tumbled into the dust, the feelings of host and hostess, the home cookery and the old-fashioned house with its gathered associations are nothing to us; we demand to dine where the food and drink are up to date, so we dine at a restaurant, where are noise, distraction and confusion. I myself would sooner dine in a good man’s kitchen. Personal rule is at an end. The host used authoritatively to lead the talking and the hostess controlled it, for, though too busy to talk, she was never too busy to listen, and the guests took care that the conversation flowed in her direction and sought her approval. In my youth, after the dinner-things were removed, we sat around an ancient mahogany table, on which there was not, as in later times, any garish white cloth. It would have been gloomy but for the many-coloured reflections cast into its polished depths from wine-filled glasses and decanters and from the faces and dresses of the guests. Overhead were candelabra, the sole light in the room; outside the circle of diners such deep shadows that the faces looked like portraits by Rembrandt; and when, at the proper moment, the hostess and her ladies swept out of the room, leaving us to our men-talk, how lean would fall the entertainment! And it was our hostess we missed, so much divinity did hedge her.

The monarchical principle is extinct in the home, it is likewise extinct in the schools. I was educated at a school where the master ruled by terror. He was a Scotchman and knew no other method, and we were not in the least bit democratic. But if we trembled before him we did not fear one another. There were between fifty and sixty of us, a curious collection of diversities; not a boy in the place who had not something marked in him, either by his own strength or because of his home individuality. It was a time when parents had little money and travelling expenses were heavy, so that holidays were scanty and far apart. For instance, we never went home at Christmas. The cheap railway had not yet everywhere supplanted the mail coach. Yet we lived haunted by the thought of our homes,—it possessed us, it obsessed us, it was our food and drink with which we fed our imaginations and spiritually nourished ourselves. We would talk incessantly to one another of our homes; and friendships, our only solace in that abode of sternness, were made up of similarities of taste and experience in the matter of homes. The methods of education were, if you like, brutal; but the brutality made our homes all the dearer. We leaned heavily on the thought of our homes; while in our happiness, as in our misery, we possessed a faculty of concentration unknown to boys educated in the latitudinarian methods of the modern schools. Whether it was our first Latin author, Cornelius Nepos, or our Latin exercises, or the horrible Latin grammar of that period, or the big Latin dictionary or Greek lexicon—implements of education whose repulsiveness was supposed to add to their efficiency—or our letters from home, or our long talks of home and yearnings for home—no matter what the subject, we brought to it an intensity that would have been foreign to the careless boys of this effeminate age. I remember a boy under twelve who talked to me in whispers of his father and mother not being friendly, and of his mother preferring to him his younger brother. There was another boy whose trouble was that there was so little money at home. There was yet another very little boy, who would take me aside and read long letters from a beautiful sister married to a military officer in India. Depend upon it, there is nothing that concentrates the mind like having for schoolmaster a conscientious Scotchman teaching Greek and Latin in the old clumsy methods.

A young boy is mostly regarded as something quite outside the pale of sympathy and understanding. Only his mother can endure him, and she because, as many think, love has made her blind. Yet in himself he is of all beings the most ingenuously and ingeniously human, and a veritable fountain of imaginative desire, who, if he do but retain his spontaneity, may become a Charles Lamb or a Coleridge or a Shelley; or, if he be built on the grand scale, a Dante or a Michael Angelo. The mission of the modern school is for the boys themselves to take in hand this little boy and, by force of their own rude animalism and with joyous pressure, strip him of everything exceptional and compel him to take on another likeness. I remember an English lady telling me that she had been to visit a great public school to see her son, a little boy. She told me that at a distance she could not distinguish him from any other boy; and she smiled helplessly as she added that it was the ambition of every little boy in that famous school to be exactly like the other little boys. And yet we wonder that the world no longer produces distinguished individualities. This mother knew that her boy would come back to her the average boy, to grow into the average man, like his father, like his uncle, like everybody else. A friend of mine, a most interesting man, very happy in his hobbies and in his dreams and visions and beliefs, a poet though without learning, and without the sweet accomplishment of verse, lamented that he had not been kept longer at school, where, as he said, he might have had all the “nonsense knocked out of him.” The poor fellow does not know how happy and interesting he is; he only knows that his wife and all his friends find him different from other people and on this account disapprove of him. Yet there was an old French artist in 1830 who advised his friends to cultivate their faults carefully.

The old methods were brutal and made the boys brutal, yet they, at any rate, did not break down and insidiously destroy singularity of character as is being done every day by the democratic methods of modern schools. A celebrated master of Eton in the eighteenth century said, “My business is to teach Greek, not morality.” In that robust century people did not take much thought about one another. You might be unhappy and all astray, but they let you alone; provided you did your Greek right, your morals were your own affair. Chatham may have left Eton a “cowed” boy, as he implied he did, yet he brought with him an individuality of a quality so angular and so challenging that it is impossible to believe it could have survived had it been ground between the upper and nether millstones of modern school-boy life. These schools, both in America and in England, with their great prestige and with the boys in full control, have become so powerful in moulding character that it is no longer accurate to say “the boy is father of the man,” but rather, “the school-boy is father of the man.” In Ireland things are different. The old brutal methods being discarded, the boys do not fear the master, neither do they fear each other, and the explanation is that the Irishman, man and boy, gentle and simple, is much more of an aristocrat than a democrat. He belongs to his home and to his family; he has the passion for home and family, he passes through school or college without really belonging to either of them.

For that reason the home among the Irish remains stronger than any school or college, exactly the reverse of what has happened in England and may happen in America. When I say an Irishman, gentle or simple, is an aristocrat, I do not mean that he is a person of class or wants to be one, or that he bears the slightest resemblance to the modern English nobleman, but I do mean that he likes to think that he is a person of distinction, and that he differs from all other men, and values himself accordingly. Nature herself would, if we did not thwart her, evolve each man on a different plan; as she makes every leaf and every twig and every tree in the forest different from all its fellows. She has an Irish delight in diversity, and smiles to see her sturdy children each fighting for its own hand.

The typical Irish family is poor, ambitious, and intellectual; and all have the national habit, once indigenous in “Merry England,” of much conversation. In modern England they like a dull man and so they like a dull boy. We like bright men and bright boys. When there is a dull boy we send him to England and put him into business where he may sink or swim; but a bright boy is a different story. Quickly he becomes the family confidant, learning all about the family necessities; with so much frank conversation it cannot be otherwise. He knows every detail in the school bills and what it will cost to put him through the university, and how that cost can be reduced by winning scholarships and prizes. As he grows older he watches, like an expert, the younger brothers coming on, and is eager to advise in his young wisdom as to their prospects. He studies constantly, perhaps overworks himself while his mother and sisters keep watch; and yet he is too serious, and they on their side are too anxious for compliments. It is indeed characteristic of the Irish mother that, unlike the flattering mothers of England, she loves too anxiously to admire her children; with her intimate knowledge there goes a cautious judgment. The family habit of conversation into which he enters with the arrogance of his tender years gives him the chance of vitalizing his newly acquired knowledge. Father, mother, brothers and sisters are all on his mind; and the family fortunes are a responsibility. He is not dull-witted, as are those who go into business to exercise the will in plodding along some prescribed path; on the contrary, his intellect is in constant exercise. He is full of intellectual curiosity, so much conversation keeping it alive, and therein is unlike the English or the American boy. Indeed, he experiences a constant temptation to spend in varied reading the time that should be given to restricted study. He is at once sceptical and credulous, but, provided his opinions are expressed gaily and frankly, no one minds. With us intellect takes the place which in the English home is occupied by the business faculty. We love the valour of the free intellect; so that, the more audacious his opinion, the higher rise the family hopes. He and all his family approve of amusement—to do so is an Irish tradition unbroken from the days before St. Patrick; but they have none. They are too poor and too busy; or rather they have a great deal, but it is found in boyish friendships and in the bonds of the strongest family affection, inevitable because they are Irish and because they have hopes that make them dependent upon one another. The long family talks over the fire, the long talks between clever boys on country walks—these are not the least exciting amusements—even though they bear no resemblance to what is called “sport.”

These are the gifts of the Irish home; among the poor, affection infinite as the sea, which, because of an idleness which is not their fault, has had full scope to grow into an intensity of longing that makes it sometimes hungry as the sea; among the better-off, ambition also and a free intellect; and in everybody an ancient philosophy of human nature which warms rather than chills human relations.

The English boy has an entirely different history. He enters some famous historical school, anxious, like his parents and all his aunts and cousins, that he be stamped and sealed with its approval. His desire is to be an Eton, Harrow, or Rugby boy, after which he will become an Oxford or Cambridge man, marked in his accent, clothes, and manner with the sign-manual of his university. For the Irish boy this is as impossible as it is repugnant. His home is stronger than his school and his college. In the great English schools the boys manage one another; a system of rules and of etiquette has democratically grown up which all must obey; this kind of docility is English and not Irish. Our boys cannot thus surrender themselves, for behind the Irish boy is the drama of a full home life. There is no such drama in English home life—it is prosperous, uneventful, and lies icily cold in the lap of law. The Irish home, in which so much happens, awaits its novelist; but, alas! English readers won’t read novels about Ireland, and Irish readers are too few to make their custom worth anybody’s attention. All we know is that the Irishman is, boy and man, a detached personality. He is often the gayest and most sociable of beings, and a true comrade, and he may be able to adapt himself to every situation, yet he remains apart; even with his friends he is inscrutable, he cannot be read. And this to my mind is right, for no one should be able to read another’s secret, except the mother who bore him, and sometimes a sweetheart. The ordinary well-to-do Englishman has no secrets, for you can read them all in his bank-book, in his Catechism, in the rules of his club and the laws of his country. He is an admirable citizen on whom you can calculate as on a railway time-table. The English mother when she parts from her boy at the school doors may sigh to think that she has lost her boy, yet be proud to think that he will return remodelled into the smart Eton or Harrow boy. The Irish mother has no such hopes and no such fears; her boy will come back what he was when he left her side, and though he go to India, and rule provinces, with many well-trained public-school Englishmen working under him, he will still remain the passionate Irish boy of her heart’s desire.

The great factor in the Irish education is not the school, but the Irish home, unique in its combination of small means, intellect, and ambition with conversation. Without this conversation the home would not be Irish. From every manor-house and cabin ascends the incense of pleasant talk; it is that in which we most excel. With us all journeys end in talkers’ meeting; “we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks,” said Oscar Wilde. When any Irish reform is proposed—and they are innumerable—I always ask, how will it affect our conversation? France has her art and literature, England her House of Lords, and America her vast initiative; we have our conversation. We watch impatiently for the meals, because we are hungry and thirsty for conversation; not for argument’s sake or to improve ourselves, but because we spontaneously like one another. We like human voices and faces and the smiles and gestures and all the little drama of household colloquy, varying every moment from serious to gay, with skill, with finesse; we like human nature for its own sake, and we like it vocal—that is why we talk; we even like our enemies, on the Irish principle that it is “better to be quarrelling than to be lonesome.” Arthur Symons, staying in a pilot’s cottage on the west of Ireland, said to my daughter: “I don’t believe these people ever go to bed.” No, they have so much to say to one another.

“England,” said Bernard Shaw, “cannot do without its Irish and Scots to-day because it cannot do without at least a little sanity.” Both these nations are conversational.

The home must play its part vigorously if the race is to be saved for affection and happiness, and if we would bring back the conditions from which spring art and poetry.