Mr. Rolfe

by EDMUND WILSON

1

THE first days of my first fall at prop school were passed in complete confusion. We were always being shrieked at by bells, which uprooted us from what we were doing and compelled us to report somewhere else. We had to get there while the bell was still ringing, and I used to be swamped in the mob of boys pouring in and out of the classrooms and pushing along the corridors and porches, and finally arrive late in a panic.

One of the places in which I used to land was a room that was larger than the others and that had white classical busts above the blackboards and a dais for the master’s desk. This was the room to which I went for Greek, and I realized at the first recitation that what went on there was of a special nature. The master, who was tall and well-dressed and who loomed taller from sitting on the dais, had an aspect, an accent, and a manner unfamiliar to the point of seeming foreign.

He was blond, with drooping-lidded blue eyes and a high-domed oval head, which was very inadequately thatched with strands of thin yellow hair, and he wore a yellow drooping mustache of the kind that was supposed then to be English and which reminded me of a character called Mr. Batch who figured in the funny papers. His eyebrows were of the kind that arch outward and have the perpetually lifted look which conventionally indicates distress but also comports with irony, and his mustache concealed his mouth, so that his expression remained enigmatic, and you could never be sure whether he were smiling at you kindly or withering you with mock sweetness.

At any rate, as soon as he entered, he dominated the room to the last row of seats. From the moment he sat down at his desk, rearing bis long neck and his back very straight and setting out his book before him with a kind of sober direct ness that was a part of his approach to his subject, he kept the class in a state of tension as if they were witnessing a performance in which — and all too often without knowing their lines — they themselves were to he called upon to take part.

The first characteristics of Mr. Rolfe’s which impressed a new boy in his class were the wittiness, pungency, and promptitude of his sarcasm and the mercilessness of his demands. He put you on the spot for your assignment as none of the other masters did; he would not allow you to slide over anything, and it seemed that he would not help you; and if you failed, he made you feel by some caustic touch a criticism of your classroom personality. He evidently made tacit but definite assumptions about the classroom personalities of us all — I was supposed to he moony and inattentive — which one might feel did one less than justice. He had a way of going around the class in pursuit of the answer to some question, designating us as “First little gentleman . . . Second little gentleman,” and so forth, and pointing at us with the butt of his pencil, which could put you at a distance and be paralyzing.

And there were also his special drawl, which could be musical and yet so mocking, and his queer but distinguished accent. I knew that he was not: an Englishman, in spite of his British mustache and though he pronounced words like bath and advanced with what was called the “broad a.” Afterwards, when it came at the end of a sentence, he pronounced ahfterwúrds, with the accent on the last syllable. It seemed impossible to appeal to him outside of class or to establish with him the personal relation by which boys seek to protect themselves from masters, and one got to be afraid of being snubbed. If anyone were rash enough to ask him whether Xenophon, which we were to start next term, or the verbs in -μι, which were looming as the next ordeal in the grammar, were as hard as they were rumored to be, he would answer, glancing away: “Oh, very difficult! almost impossible.”

I had been rather badly trained at my previous school, and I at once resented Mr. Rolfe. I took to brooding over his sarcasms outside of class; and there were days when I was obsessed by his image and some brief and derisive remark of which I had been the victim that morning. The Greek class both excited and scared me.

One night I went to see him in his rooms. He had invited us to come to him for help, and I had finally taken courage to do so. He was engaged with someone else when I came in, and I shyly glanced about the room and then bent over the books on the table. The incident must have been one of those which sharply and suddenly mark the emergence of some new element into consciousness, because whenever I dream of going back to school and calling on Mr. Rolfe, it is never to the rooms in the now building into which he moved the year afterwards and in which I often saw him, but always to these earlier rooms where I could only have gone a few times and in which, when awake, I never place him.

These rooms were the rooms of a bachelor but not those of a bachelor schoolmaster: in their relative elegance and luxury, they reminded me rather of the apartment inhabited by a bachelor uncle; and Mr. Rolfe was lying back on a couch and giving attention to the passages presented to him less like a master after class than like a gentleman receiving at his ease. In the bookrack, with their titles upturned, I saw volumes of Bernard Shaw, and this sight somewhat startled and shocked me. I had not yet, at fourteen, read Shaw; but I had heard that he was a perverse and witty cynic, who considered himself superior to other people and who liked to wound his reader’s sensibilities.

Mr. Rolfe, when my turn came to talk to him, answered my questions with his usual aloofness; and I went out of the room convinced that he was a disciple of Bernard Shaw, and that his brilliant performance in the classroom at the expense of us poor Fourth-Formers had something to do with the scandalous plays and the arrogant and mischievous personality of which I had been hearing such disturbing accounts. I thought that I had conceived an antagonism, bitter and forever intransigent, against Shaw and Mr. Rolfe.

I began to like Greek, however, which I was only just beginning that year. The truth was that, in spite of his sarcasm, Mr. Rolfe invested everything he dealt with with a peculiar imagination and charm, and this held you even when you resented him. I got interested as I had never done with Latin, which I had not been taught especially well and which seemed to me something technical like algebra, with almost no relation to literature or human speech. The Greek words as he pronounced them or wrote them on the board in his clear and beautiful hand took on an aesthetic value; and when you came to understand his attitude, the recitation became a kind of game, which, though taxing, had its rewards and its amusements.

I came to see that he was not really cruel. Though severe in his conception of his duty toward his students and of their duty toward their work, he was not really the kind of master wdio takes a joy in humiliating his class. He never failed to acknowledge good work, though he liked to express his approval in Greek; and he told me one day, in his drawl that always sounded ironic, that if I continued as I had been doing I might become his favorite pupil. I decided, thinking it over, that he had meant it; but this won me no indulgence or tenderness, and he would curtly correct my vagaries.

It was characteristic of Mr. Rolfe, who aimed to do so much more for his pupils than get them through the college examinations, that he should one day have explained to us in passing the theory of the lost digamma, which he described as “a little thing like a tuning fork”; and it was characteristic of me, with my interest in literary arcana, that I should have become fascinated by the letters that had been dropped out of the Greek alphabet. Mr. Rolfe suggested that it might be better if I concentrated on those they had retained.

And I came to underst and that his rigor was really in the interests of Greek. I have found out from later experience that it. requires a rare blend of qualities for a man to teach Greek well: he must have a real taste for Greek (which seems rarer than a taste for Latin), a real feeling for its luminosity and subtlety, its nobility and naïveté, a lively imaginative picture of the society behind it; and at the same time he must be capable of insisting on the high degree of intellectual discipline required to keep the class up to the standard demanded by the difficulties of the subject — difficulties which do not consist merely in the more or less automatic application of formulas one has learned, but involve, along with accurate memory, a precision of feeling in which one can be trained by an adept but which cannot be learned by rote.

Mr. Rolfe was the perfect Hellenist. He made you get everything exactly right, and this meant a good deal of drudgery. But one was also always made to feel that there was something worth having there behind the paradigms and numbered paragraphs of Goodwin’s Greek grammar, the grim backs and fatiguing notes of the Ginn texts “for t he use of schools” — something exhilarating in the air of the classroom, something immense and shining. The prospect of knowing this marvelous thing lent the details excitement — and so it did the daily game between Mr. Rolfe and you, which really became quite jolly. You felt that he was not unkind, that he merely wanted people to learn Greek, that teaching people Greek was a serious purpose to which he was devoting his life, and that he only became really unpleasant with students who did not want to learn it.

I therefore began working hard to keep myself on the right side of his severity. Besides the appetite I had acquired for Greek, I was stimulated also by the fact that I had grown to enjoy his wit. The truth was that I had myself a satirical turn which I was just beginning to learn to exploit, and that I had never before met in the flesh a real past master of mockery. Hence my resentment, and hence my admiration. I was soon reading Bernard Shaw.

2

The Hill School in 1909 represented a combination of elements which must have made it unique among prep schools. It had been founded by the Reverend Matthew Meigs, a Presbyterian minister from Connecticut, who had settled in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and started a small school in an old stone house on a hill. In my time it was run by John Meigs, his son, who had extraordinarily enlarged and improved it and made for it a considerable reputation.

John Meigs, whom we always called “Professor,” was not really a schoolmaster, however. He had taken on his father’s school and accepted it as a career with reluctance; but, once he had done so, he had worked at it tremendously. He had no endowments and no wealthy patrons; and he had at first kept all the accounts, written out all the letters in longhand, and taught twenty-five hours a week as well as personally handled the discipline, the records, and the relations with parents. He had created the school from small beginnings — as a boy from a Pennsylvania farm of that period would buy coke ovens and build a big industry; and in spite of his New England origins, I have always assimilated John Meigs to the Pennsylvania Dutch of that countryside of the extreme western corner of Montgomery County.

A short, stocky man with a wide straight mouth and a square head that was made to seem even more cubelike by a nose flattened out in boxing, he resembled a successful manufacturer who had become something of a man of the world. He had gone to college at Lafayette instead of at Yale or Harvard; and the school had certain qualities of the back Pennsylvania of solid farmhouses and brick-streeted towns rather than of the Eastern seaboard, of Sewickley rather than Philadelphia. “Professor” had a certain smartness, but it was the smartness of a local man of substance, and not at all like the Episcopalian smartness that one sometimes found in the headmasters of the quite different New England schools. His hair, which was silver and parted in the middle, curled crisply at the corners of his forehead, and he liked to wear a. bright red tie, and sometimes a flower in his buttonhole, with a spotless white vest. As he would walk down from the platform after prayers, leading the rest of the school, stepping so firmly and yet jauntily, he was a figure that inspired confidence and in whom we could feel pride.

In the state he was a man of some consequence, quite active in local politics. He had, as one of the masters has told me since, no real interest in education whatever. But he did possess qualities which enabled him to organize a first-rate school. He had certainly a touch of the brutality characteristic of industrial Pennsylvania, but with it went the independence of the man who has built up his own business, and a downright and four-square directness in his dealings with students, parents, and faculty. The school was financially sound as I imagine few prep schools have been, and quite free from the tremors and depressions that reflect the inability to raise funds. Nor were there, as far as I was aware, any of those moral leaks which cause favoritism, ill-feeling, and inefficiency.

The efficiency of the Hill was perfect — as perfect as Bethlehem Steel. It was a legend at the time that no student who had been graduated from the Hill ever failed to get into college, because the drill we were given was so stiff and the tests we had to pass so difficult that entrance examinations became child’s play; and it was true that we mostly landed in the top sections of the college courses.

But this system had its injurious side. Every moment of our time was disposed of; our whole life was regulated by bells; and — till we reached the Sixth Form, at any rate — we had hardly an hour of leisure. The intention was beneficent, of course; but the remorseless paternalism of the Hill had something of the suffocating repressive effect of the mill town in which the company owns the workers’ houses, controls their contacts with the outside world, and runs the banks, the schools, and the stores. Save for walks in the country and excursions into town, for both of which we had to get permission, we were confined to the Hill grounds which rose like a segregated plateau in the midst of the little steel town, the narrow and cobbled streets where the greenery showed meager in spring, the slag pits and the blast furnaces that startled new boys and kept them awake at night by blazes that would light up the whole room.

The same ideals in John Meigs, however, which had produced this iron regime had secured for the Hill School some admirable tilings. Professor had seen to it that the equipment, the staff as well as the plant, was as good as it could possibly be. The buildings, the gymnasium, the tennis courts, the swimming pool, the showers, the ball fields, somewhat offset the drabness of our surroundings. And the masters, in order to keep us up to scratch, had to be first-rate, too.

Yet here, I believe, Professor must have been aiming at something beyond efficiency and may have contributed a certain creative genius, for he did get very able men who, though quite different from one another, did seem to work together and to feel a genuine interest in the school. In talking afterwards to boys from other schools, 1 never found the same enthusiasm for their masters that the Hill graduates had for theirs. Some of them, I came to realize, were quite above the usual prep-school level and would have adorned any university. Alfred Rolfe was one of them. It was characteristic ol John Meigs that he should have secured for Greek at the Hill an accomplished New Englander of the best tradition.

3

For that was what Mr. Rolfe was — a New Englander. And it was that about him that had seemed to me foreign.

He was moreover a special kind of New Englander: he came from Concord, Massachusetts; and tins, as I afterwards observed, was quite distinct from being a Bostonian (and Mr. Rolfe had gone to Amherst, not Harvard). He had that quality of homeliness and freshness that one finds in a Concordian like Thoreau, blent, as it was in Thoreau’s case, with a sharp mind and fine sensibility. The rustic expressions and accent with which he sometimes roughened his speech were a feature he knew how to make use of to set off his natural elegance, just as his very large feet and hands somehow enhanced the grace with which he went about his business, and as the touches of gruffness and brusqueness that had the sea captains of New England behind them gave his urbanity a greater authority.

All this side of him, in fact, was the rocklike base on which the flowers of Hellenism flourished: the sophistication of his comic sense, his exquisitely developed literary taste, and the benignant incandescence of his mind. Alfred Rolfe has been my only personal contact with the Concord of the great period, and I feel that if I had not known him, I should never really have known what it was, and what a high civilization it represented. For there was nothing about Mr. Rolfe either of the schoolmaster or of the provincial. He had in his early years studied in Germany, but he cared little for travel or cities, and now spent every school year in Pottstown and every summer in Concord; yet he always seemed to be enjoying the freedom of the great social world of men as well as of the great world of literature, just as Emerson did. His brother, Henry Winchester Rolfe, was also a classical scholar. I later read a book of his on Petrarch and discovered that my friend Rolfe Humphries, the Latinist and poet, had been named after him.

The manners we tended to learn at the Hill were a little on the heavy and flat side; and Mr. Rolfe, for all his dignity, moved among us with a charming ease and what can only be called a kind of blitheness. He was tall but not especially well-built: besides large hands and feet, he had shoulders that were narrow and sloping. He stooped and thrust forward his head as he walked; and in the skirted black frock-coat and striped trousers which were de rigueur for Sunday chapel, he looked like some long-legged Great Auk as he stalked back to his rooms after service. Yet he was one of the real ornaments of the school, perhaps its principal ornament.

He was an admirable after-dinner speaker and always in demand for banquets. He cultivated the dry, solemn, drawling manner which Mark Twain had made the fashion but which became very New England in his hands. His face, when he was not in conversat ion, tended to lapse into a Saint Bernard sadness, and he liked to exploit this for comic effect. He was wonderful at “morning exercises,” where the reading of profane literature had been substituted for passages from the Bible. His fine voice, deep, resonant, and rich, was not the voice of a school elocutionist who loves to playact for his students, but always remained personal and in some special way colloquial: what it was rich in were nuances of humor and perceptions of the values of style. And the rhythms of poetry to Mr. Rolfe seemed something natural and dear; it was as if they represented a dreaminess which, for all his Yankee common sense, was a part of his everyday life and did not require a condition of trance.

The first time that you heard him read aloud a passage of Homer in class, you knew what Homer was as poetry, and no amount of construing and syntactical analysis could blur the effect of that rhythm. We used also to read Browning’s plays with him, for fun, between chapel and midday dinner on Sunday, and he would easily disentangle the speeches of such things as A Blot in the ’Scutcheon and get out of them their own kind of music. Somet imes at morning exercises he would read from the New England writers, and he would give them a kind of distinction which I had not known was there. In those days we had been brought up on the New Englanders and by the time we came to read for ourselves had decided they were childish and a bore. But Mr. Rolfe could put, say, Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom I did not at that time think amusing, in an attractively different light. When he did scenes from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, he really made you hear the people in that ideal Boston boardinghouse: you felt that he had boarded there himself, and that the quality of the talk in its way had been good. His rendering of “The Wonderful Onc-Hoss Shay” was one of his most brilliant performances. When the deacon swore as deacons do with an “I dew vum ”or an “I tellyeou” the voice of the old man would come through with a sudden dramatic realism that startled us and made us laugh.

He had certainly the sense of audience. When, in the absence of Professor and Mrs. Meigs, he would preside at our meals in the big dining room, one fell his presence even here as one did during a recitation. While he would be waiting for the boys to assemble, he would stand up with folded arms, joking with the Sixth-Formers beside him; then he would press the buzzer and say the brief grace, — “Bless, O Father, thy gifts to our use and us to thy service: for Christ’s sake. Amen,” — in which, many times though I heard it, the words never seemed merely a rite, but something said and felt. At the end of the meal, when it would sometimes happen that a general silence fell as we waited for the buzzer to release us, he would mutter some amusing remark which would be caught by the whole room and bring a laugh; if the buzzer stuck, as it sometimes did, he would make it a whole little comedy and would send us out quite lighthearted from the then rather close and crowded dining room and its Pennsylvania Dutch food.

There was a moment, I remember, when he read something which impressed him about the importance of drawing in the stomach in order to carry oneself more correctly; and he used to preach this to us half-humorously as he attempted to practice it himself. As I watched him one day in the dining room, throwing back his shoulders and pulling in his chin, which was round and rather recessive, I thought of his luxurious lounging on the couch and armchair of his apartment. And there was also his gesture which was so much of a betrayal of his effortful and Spartan pose: a wandering of his hand to his necktie and breast, as a woman fingers a necklace, which came from the something poetic — the something almost romantic — in him.

I remembered how he had warned us once in class that it was impossible to study properly when sunk in the comfort of an easy chair; and I realized that in Mr. Rolfe a certain strain of the sybarite co-existed with the rectitude and the discipline. I recognized it thus very early because I myself was rather on the sybarite side. I incurably disliked athletics, carried myself very badly, and loved to read in bed. And at this moment I became aware, though I did not of course formulate it then, that what made Mr. Rolfe interesting, and gave him a sort, of preciousness and rarity, was his having reached just that point when a tough and well-tried stock first gets the freedom to smile and to play, to work at belles-lettres for their own sake.

At some point in our early stages of Greek Mr. Rolfe had handed us over for a term or two to his assistant; and by the time I got back to him again, I was no longer so much afraid of him. The Greek class still imposed a certain tension, but it stimulated for the literary students a very keen interest in Greek. Mr. Rolfe worked us awfully hard, harder than any other master; but we did feel that we were getting Homer and not just boning out an assignment every day. We had to scan every line and understand every form, and we had to translate every word into an English that was worthy of the original. It was as serious to give clumsy equivalents as to miss out on a case or a mood, and would bring down on us his tartest derision. He accepted as a standard for the proper tone of a successful Homeric translation the passage by Dr. Hawtrey cited by Matthew Arnold in his essay on translating Homer: “Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia” — and made us commit it to memory.

With all his exacting demands, he had many entertaining devices for relieving the dryness of our drudgery. We were encouraged to think of όδύρομαι as oh, dear! oh, my!; we were taught that when γάρ begins a sentence it is always pronounced yar, on the principle on which children are told that a guinea pig’s eyes will fall out if you hold it up by its tail; and we were made to learn the speeches of the trial of Orontas in Xenophon and act it out in class. At the end, when Orontas was led into the tent and put to death in a mysterious manner, the boy who played him was taken into the hall and gruesome sounds were heard.

He so naturally shied away from the tone of the textbook and the classroom that it was actually difficult for him to remember the wording of the rules as they were given in the book. There is a principle of Homeric versification which was formulated somewhat as follows: “The penthemimeral caesura gives the line an anapaestic movement, from which it is often recalled by the bucolic diaeresis.” We would be called upon to demonstrate this by rapping it out on our seat-arms with pencils; but Mr. Rolfe, when he cited the rule, would resist the abstract language of the grammarian by stumbling over the second part and turning the “from which it is often recalled” into “from which it is frequently rescued.” The whole thing thus got a faint comic flavor; anti this little involuntary touch has always remained in my mind as an example of his putting in its place the academic side of his subject.

The impulse to parody was strong in him, though he usually indulged it quite lightly. When Tennyson’s Enoch Arden was read once at morning exercises, Mr. Rolfe suggested that the poem really needed another line at the end, which ought to run as follows: —

I was thus tremendously flattered when he complimented me on a parody of Browning which I had published in the school magazine. And later, when another old Hill boy and I had invented, as freshmen at college, an imaginary figure of speech, I was surprised at the amusement it seemed to afford him when we told him about it on a visit. “ Thipsis . . . thipsis,” he murmured to himself at some later moment of the conversation.

In my last year of school, when I lived above him, I used to go and read in his rooms. It was one of the paradoxes of the Hill, which excelled in literary activity, that Professor, in installing his extraordinary equipment, should almost completely have neglected the library. He must have conceived books as something to be administered in calculated doses by the masters in the different departments. He could never have had any interest in making literature generally available, for the two or three small rooms called the library contained almost nothing up-to-date, and they were full of ancient textbooks and works of reference that had belonged to the Reverend Matthew Meigs and went back to the eighteenth and even to the seventeenth century.

There were not even good editions of the classics, and I almost put out my eyes my first year on a copy of Vanity Fair in double columns of microscopic type. (This deficiency was long ago remedied: the library is now, I un derst and, first-rate.)

But at least half a dozen of the masters had considerable private libraries, which they encouraged us to use. And Mr. Rolfe’s was among the most interesting, as it was certainly much the handsomest. He went in for wellbound sets, and he kept up with contemporary literature as no other of the masters did. The new volumes of Chesterton and Shaw continued to appear on his table, and I used to sit and read them on his couch. Sometimes he would come in, greet me briefly, put on a pair of pince-nez, sit down in a large armchair and silently correct his papers.

I was still shy with him: for all his humor, he was one of the most remote of the masters. With his conviction of intellectual superiority and a sensitive personal pride, there was one thing that was quite impossible for him — a capacity that makes life easier for schoolmasters: he could not be a good fellow with the boys, he could not meet them on their own level. The masters who lived in the Sixth Form Flat took turns keeping order in the halls, and most of them could do it quite amiably; but it went against the grain with Mr. Rolfe. When one of our bedtime rough houses became too long and too loud, he would suddenly appear in his bathrobe like the Statue in Don Giovanni and freeze us to the marrow. A few cutting words would silence us and send us rather sulky to bed. His rebuke had been so evidently hostile that it made us feel hostile, too.

But I who admired him so much was embarrassed by what I felt was the indecency of his having to do this kind of thing at all. I felt that he hated our seeing him in his bathrobe, that he ought never to be seen in a bathrobe; and I pictured him lying in bed, as I so loved to do at home, enjoying some book from the well-stocked bookcase which I had seen through the door beside his bed without being able to make out the contents. How he must have loathed and resented being distracted from his reading by our scuttlings and shrieks, being obliged to climb two flights of stairs and pit himself against a whole roomful of ribald and breathless boys. He liked to live in his rooms like a man at his club, and one felt that it was very unjust that he should not be able to complain to the management.

4

Against one element of life at the Hill School Mr. Rolfe by his very tone and presence furnished a constant correction. The Hill had an evangelical side which it required some stubbornness to stand up to. This was mainly, I have always understood, due to the influence of Mrs. Meigs, who was always known as Mrs. John. The school had passed through a series of disasters — three fires and a typhoid epidemic in which a hundred students and masters had been ill; and it may be that this had had the effect of stimulating in the Meigses a desperate faith in and dependence on God. But what I was aware of at the time when I was in school was simply that we were agitated systematically by a rotation of visiting evangelists. We had to go not only to chapel, but also — under irresistible pressure — to t he meetings of a school Y.M.C.A.; and we were always being summoned to listen to special exhortations.

At the bottom of the scale of our speakers was the reformed debauchee and bad egg who testified to the miracle of his salvation. He always had what the stage calls a “straight man” with him who gave him his cue and showed him off with an attitude that fell between that of a man with a trained ape and the “ feeder ” of a team of comics. These bums who had been saved used to seem to me still very unpleasant people, who had already reached such an advanced state of corruption that their new respectability looked precarious, and one listened apprehensively to their boasts about their virtue as if one feared they might go to pieces as soon as the performance was over.

Then there was a man who had made a specialty of preaching to boys’ schools and colleges and whose line was a lachrymose and mealymouthed virility. He used to read us Kipling in a way that did much to disgust me with that writer, and announce that he was thoroughly accustomed to answering young men’s questions of whatsoever kind and that he would be glad to talk to any boys who should wish to come to him after the lecture. An imitation of “Weeping Bob’s” speeches lias long been current among old Hill men and is one of the things that bind them together. “Moys,” he used to say in his deep adhesive voice, “I want to speak to you first of all anout the use of foul and filthy language. Moys: they have a nog up in Alaska that they call the mlue-mlack nog. He is known as the mlue-mlack nog because the insine of his mouth is mlue-mlack. And I want to say to any moy who has the impulse to innulge in foul language that, if he gives way to this impulse and hamitually uses oaths and inneccnt expressions, the insinc of his mouth — spir-it-u-ally speaking — will mecome mlue-mlack like the mouth of the mluemlack nog! ”

A more sophisticated level was represented by a liberal preacher from New York. He was well-dressed in a secular way, and dynamic, free-spoken, and pear-shaped. His line was to shock and be witty, to be modern in the interests of the evangelist’s God. He was also of course social-minded, and I remember a characteristic touch by which he hoped to make us feel, and to convince himself that he felt, a warm sympathy for the laboring classes: “Coming up on the train today, I sat opposite an Italian workman. He was dressed in his work-clothes; he had been sweating; but there was nothing dirty about him except the grime of his work. I caught his breath and it smelled of garlic, but it was a good breath; it was wholesome, not foul.”

And then of course there were the two-fisted missionaries who shook us down for funds to Christianize and modernize China.

At the center of all this activity stood a kind of special myth of sin and regeneration. The legend that was handed on from one class at the Hill to another had it that Professor in his college days had been a very fast young man, who was known as “Cigarette Jack,” and that Mrs. John had snatched him as what used to be called a brand from the burning and had made him into the man we knew. This may very well not have been accurate, but it was what we had come to believe: it was like the miraculous conversion from which a cult or an order dates. It was the archetype of the spiritual drama which we seemed to be expected to enact. There was the able and promising hoy, well-fitted to be a leader of men, and this boy succumbed to temptation: he gambled, he smoked, he drank; he went with a class of women who were not so much bad as misguided. But he was caught on the edge of the abyss and saved for the life of service. I am afraid that there was a little the impression created that you had to have taken the dip toward perdition or you could not belong to the elite.

The members of the Sixth Form were summoned every year by Mrs. John to a series of individual interviews in which the state of their souls was probed. These interviews took place in a room at the top of the Meigs house which was significantly called “The Sky Parlor,” and I have heard the most grueling accounts of the scenes that sometimes took place on these occasions. But I evidently did not seem a good prospect, because when my turn came to go, Mrs. John had forgotten the appointment. She was writing at her desk and was surprised to sec me; but she made me sit down and told me gently that the literary type of boy had his temptations, too—the temptation, for example, to become so much absorbed in his interests that he neglected his relation to his fellows, and she prayed with me a moment and let me go. I walked back to my room relieved and yet feeling a little let down that I had not been considered capable of the more exciting kind of temptation.

The result of this teaching, together with the paternalism which put us under a strain at school but did not train us to stand on our own feet, was that Hill boys had a reputation of slipping badly at college. (This is no longer true today: the evangelism has disappeared and the paternalism been very much modified.) If they were not of the serious-minded kind (as, I must say, a good many of them w ere — in which case they had a decided advantage over boys from most other schools), they were likely to cease working, abruptly; and the pattern of conduct suggested by the school myth could stamp itself so forcibly on the mind that the first round of drinks or the first pickup might plunge them into disorder or despair.

I do not know what Mr. Rolfe thought of all this side of the Hill; I do not know even what his religious beliefs were. He might have been a liberal Congregationalist or a conventional Episcopalian. He never talked about religion, and when he presided at chapel, he read the Bible in such a way as to make it seem noble and beautiful just as he did Homer. I particularly remember his reading the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, which did not interest our moralistic evangelists. When he prayed, it was never for salvation, but simply for moral stimulus to enable us to get through our work or get along with our fellows.

5

My own Presbyterian religious training had involved a certain amount of churchgoing and had more or less familiarized me with the Bible, but I had never known what it was to feel faith as something vital; and from the moment I had begun to think about such things for myself, my reactions toward religion had been negative. Under the constant stimulation of the Hill School, however, I tried hard to keep God in my cosmos. I was unable to accept as real for myself— that is, as having serious claims on me — anything that 1 could not recognize as a part of my own experience, so I had to try to translate my moments of exalted or expansive feeling into terms of the religious illumination about which 1 was constantly hearing — just as I imagine the eighteenth-century Deists, who had drawn all the rationalistic conclusions, attempted still to postulate a Deity who would be somehow the fountainhead of reason. But the fact irreducibly remained that I didn’t have the revelatory experience, that I didn’t even want it; that my attitude toward our repertoire of dervishes seemed inevitably to become more humorous, and that what had at first been a certain awed respect for this side of the activity of the school began to give way to the conviction that it was all in awful taste.

One day in my Sixth Form year when I was coming back to school on the train, I did at last have a sort of revelation, which was, however, as it were, in reverse. I always had to change in Philadelphia, and, as I usually had to wait for my train, I had got into the habit of killing time in Wanamaker’s book department. There I bought one by one all the volumes of Bernard Shaw and even, when there were no more to buy — at the moment I graduated — Archibald Henderson’s enormous biography. But I had not yet got to this, and on the occasion of which I speak was reading Major Barbara, At the end of the preface about money and religion, I came to the following words; “At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.” For a moment I was jolted a little; but I looked out the window at the landscape, rather muddy and sordid with winter, and reflected that this was perfectly true, that I knew perfectly well it was true, and that I ought to have admitted it before; and the flickering childish faith to which I had been giving artificial respiration expired then and there.

I have never thought of religion since save as a delusion entertained by other people which one has to try to allow for and understand. On the train another Hill boy had sat down lieside me, and I had reluctantly suspended my reading to have a little conversation with him. He was the simple and candid type. He was built stoutly and went in for football and took the Y.M.C.A. seriously. I derived an ironic pleasure from the realization that, whereas for him our ridiculous prep-school revivalism would still have the power to plunge him into struggles, earnest labors, sleepless nights, my faith had passed quietly out on the stretch between Norristown and Phoenixville, between two passages of banal conversation in which I had descended politely to his level. I felt as I had never felt before that such people as he were barbarians.

Professor Meigs had died that autumn — the ordeal of the typhoid epidemic was thought to have weakened his heart; and Mr. Rolfe took over as headmaster. The alumni gave a chapel as memorial, and we were using it by the spring of our commencement. We were to have for our last Sunday service of the year a very famous New York preacher whom we had never heard before. It was as if he were the climax and crown of our whole circus procession of evangelists. But this high point of the theological hierarchy marked for me the nadir of faith. I had heard a great deal about this man. He had long been a public figure. He had been associated with Henry Ward Beecher, and he had later been associated with Theodore Roosevelt. He was one of those preachers of the turn of the century who had been trying to bring the Christianity of the churches into contact with industrial and social problems, and he had published several books on the subject, and even, late in life, turned journalist.

I had therefore, I think, been prepared for something a little more bracing than the figure that appeared in the chapel. He was, to be sure, seventy-seven, but he looked older — he was the oldest-looking person I had ever seen. His white beard was long and stringy, and grew out all around his face. It was the kind of undisciplined beard that we associate with Hebrew prophets, but this old man had none of the fire of a prophet. His eyes under their straggling eyebrows had a grayness almost of blindness, and even his skin was gray. His rather long bottle-ended nose had pores so enormous that you could see them plainly as he passed by the pews up the aisle. He was supported on either side by one of the adoring Meigs ladies, and he seemed as limp in his long black robe as a Punch-and-Judy puppet from which the performer’s hand has been removed. I remembered the scene years later when I saw the Diaghilev ballet do Stravinsky’s L’Oiseau de Feu: the figure of Kastcheï the Deathless, the enchanter of the Russian fairy-tales, in his flimsy and hirsute senility, reeling back and forth across the stage as the egg that contains his life is tossed from hand to hand, and finally, as it cracks, collapsing into the arms of his faithful attendants while the captives stream out of his castle — this vision has blended in my memory with the image of that Sunday morning service.

It may be that the religious basis of the school had already been somewhat weakened by the breakdown and death of Professor and by the conduct of public ceremonies by the moderate Mr. Rolfe, whose authority was mainly cultural; it may be that this spokesman of the Church at grips with social problems would have seemed a little less deliquescent if Professor had been there behind him. But the whole occasion seemed to me disgusting.

The sermon itself was feeble. The subject was immortality, and this old man, who had prided himself on his modernism, announced in a quavering voice that, though we, as young men with our lives before us, might not at this time be disposed to think seriously about immortality, it would come, when we got to be old, to seem “ve-ery impo-ortant indeed.” This seemed to me a menace based on the fear of death; and I decided then and there that I should nevermore believe in immortality.

6

Mr. Rolfe ran the school for a time, though I imagine he much preferred teaching. I continued to see him occasionally, and I found that my admiration for him held up as few schoolboy admirations do. At first I used to send him books at Christmas, and when he wrote to thank me for them, he never pretended to have enjoyed them more than he had. He acknowledged Compton Mackenzie’s Youth’s Encounter, about which I had written him a hyperbolic letter, with what I thought was the pointed suggestion that "μηδέѵ ἂϒαѵ ¹ is a good motto.” I imagine that my own writings after I got out of college were not of a kind that he particularly approved. He used to kid me about the liberal weekly for which during some years I wrote, in a way that I thought rather old-fogeyish.

The bête noire of his later years was progressive education. He used to compose little poems on the subject and was very amusing about it. I had a sort of idea at first that I ought to be on the other side, since my magazine supported John Dewey, but the more I read of Mr. Rolfe’s satire, which reached me through the Hill School alumni bulletin, the more I felt that there was something to be said for his position. Wasn’t it true that in order to train children to do anything really well, you had to break them to an exacting discipline as he had done with us in Greek? Without that you couldn’t do anything with Greek — you couldn’t do anything with anything. How many schoolboys could be counted on to know what was going to be worth learning for them — my father had told me to take Greek, there was no reason I should have chosen it for myself — or to acquire this discipline through natural bent?

Mr. Rolfe may of course to some extent have misunderstood and misrepresented what was proposed for progressive education; but when I came later on to see somet hing of the teaching in both progressive schools and the ordinary kind, I was appalled by the slackness of the training. Where would our American railroads and ships and buildings and bridges and bathrooms be if the techniques of engineering were taught as the arts and humanities are — so that students are graduated from college, and not merely from progressive colleges, and even take M.A. degrees without being able to write a straight English sentence, let alone having any idea of the top human achievements in their fields in the past?

It did not really help to point out that much of our old-fashioned teaching was uninspired. As far as inspiration went, Mr. Rolfe could not teach us an irregular declension without lending its cadences poetry; and one felt that it was doubtful whether progressive education would increase the number of inspired teachers. On the other hand, it probably did tend to make people trust unduly to vague ideas and currents of feeling, to the Rousseau is t innate disposition of human beings to do well if left to themselves.

This trust in the instincts of humanity is perhaps only a transference from the Heavens to our hearts of the old idea of Providence; and whatever kind of God Mr. Rolfe believed in, this God had not arranged the world so that anything could he accomplished without somebody in particular doing it, and doing it with conscious ellort. You had to find out about Homer by digging at the Greek lexicon and grammar: you couldn’t find out about it by reading an outline of literature written by somebody else; and he had to teach you Greek; Greek wouldn’t teach itself. He did not depend for this purpose on the natural rectitude of our inclinations — either his own or ours — any more than he did on the evangelistic Christ who was supposed to come to your rescue and give you a bracer of salvation as the victims of dementia praecox are supposed to be roused to normality by the jolt of a shot of insulin.

Mr. Rolfe of course thus represented both the American individualistic tradition which has cultivated the readiness to think and act for oneself without looking to God or the State as something outside oneself, as well as the older Humanistic tradition: the belief in the nobility and beauty of what man as man has accomplished, and the reverence for literature as the record of this. I had been exposed at the Hill to this Humanistic spirit at the same time as to the inspirational religion which has always remained associated in my mind with the industrial background of Pottstown; and the Humanism had continued to serve me when the religion had come to seem false. The thing that shone for me through Xenophon and Homer in those classrooms of thirty years ago has shone for me ever since.

And at the Hill Mr. Rolfe himself long survived the fading-out of that evangelism. There was a time when I tended to think of him as drying up and growing crabbed at school; but I ran into him one day at Columbia, where he was supervising examinations, and was struck by his kindliness and the attractiveness of his face, which seemed to have become terribly sad. In the crowd of assembled teachers from a variety of schools and colleges, he still stood out as a distinguished figure who did not seem to belong to that company.

An old Hill friend has written me recently of seeing him a few years ago: “I sat next to him at luncheon. He was then eighty years old and told me that the doctors had said he was in perfect health except for low blood pressure. I told him to drink burgundy or bourbon, and he said that I seemed to speak with authority and experience. He said grace, and when I told him it was a new grace, he said he’d be glad to sound the buzzer again and deliver the old grace for dessert.”

I wrote Mr. Rolfe when he was finally retiring from the Hill. In replying, he told me that he still expected to take a few classes, “ but I shall have plenty of time to write, if I can think of anything to write about. . . . I am sorry about Greek,” he said. “I used to think it would last my day, but it hasn’t quite done so”; and he wished me good luck in Greek.

He died last June in Concord, and it seems very queer that he should be gone: I had thought of him, as I wrote him, as a permanent element, who persisted through the changes at the Hill and the wars and revolutions of the world. After all, there was always Mr. Rolfe; and now, as I write this memoir, I feel suddenly how very far back into the past the line he was carrying went: to Emerson with his self-dependence, and “The Wonderful OneHoss Shay” with its satire on the too-perfect Calvinist system, to the days when people went to Germany for the purpose of studying Greek, to Matthew Arnold, to Bernard Shaw, one now almost as old-fashioned as the other. And I try to tighten my grip on this thread of which I realize that I, too, am trying to keep hold of the end. Since it runs back so far into the past, back so far beyond even all that, it may be possible — and it seems to me important — to carry it further still.