PAUL THE MINSTREL
AND OTHER STORIES
Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble
and The Isles of Sunset
BY
LONDON
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1911
[All rights reserved]
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
"I mean by a picture a beautiful, romantic dream of something thatnever was, never will be—in a light better than any light that evershone—in a land no one can define or remember, only desire—and theforms divinely beautiful—and then I wake up with the waking ofBrynhild."
Sir E. Burne-Jones
PREFACE[vii]
These stories were all written at a very happy time of my life, andthey were first published when I was a master at Eton with aboarding-house. A house-master is not always a happy man. It is ananxious business at best. Boys are very unaccountable creatures, andthe years between boyhood and adolescence are apt to represent anirresponsible mood. From the quiet childhood at home the boys havepassed to what is now, most happily, in the majority of cases, acarefully guarded and sheltered atmosphere—the private school. My ownprivate school was of the old-fashioned type, with a very independenttone of tradition; but nowadays private schools are smaller and muchmore domesticated. The boys live like little brothers in the companyof active and kindly young masters; and then they are plunged into therougher currents of public schools, with their strange and in manyways barbarous code of ethics, their strong and penetratingtraditions. Here the boys, who have hitherto had little temptation tobe anything but obedient, have to learn to govern themselves, and todo so among conventions which hardly represent the conventions of theworld, and where the public opinion is curiously unaffected either byparental desires, or by the wishes, expressed or unexpressed, of themasters. A house-master is often in the position of seeing a new setof boys come into power in his house whom he may distrust; but thesense of honour among the boys is so strong that he is often the lastperson to hear of practices and principles prevailing in his house ofwhich he may wholly disapprove. He may even find that many of theindividual boys in his house disapprove of them too, and yet be unableto alter a tone impressed on the place by a few boys of forcible, ifeven sometimes unsatisfactory, character. But at the time at whichthese stories were written the tone of my own house was sound,sensible, and friendly; and I had the happiness of living in anatmosphere which I knew to be wholesome, manly, and pure. I used totell or read stories on Sunday evenings to any boys who cared to cometo listen; and I remember with delight those hours when perhaps twentyboys would come and sit all about my study, filling every chair andsofa and overflowing on to the floor, to listen to long, vague storiesof adventure, with at all events an appearance of interest andexcitement.
One wanted to do the best for the boys, to put fine ideas, if onecould, into their heads and hearts. But direct moral exhortation togrowing boys, feeling the life of the world quickening in their veins,and with vague old instincts of love and war rising uninterpreted intheir thoughts, is apt to be a fruitless thing enough. It is not thatthey do not listen;