1^8 " ENGLISH SAGA

little difFerence to the object of the new public school, which was
the training of character for a competitive world, and was as well
effected by the harsh discipline of the dormitory and the football
ground as by the Greek syntax. 'That the average boy responded
more readily to the former than to the latter, made the task of
the new school-master all the easier. But the loss in human
sympathy and intellectual alertness in those who were to become
the nation's rulers was to have serious consequences later.

At the Universities the tremendous early discipline of the
public school was relaxed. Here the freer and more liberal
model of the eighteenth century past was retained: a gentleman
was encouraged to choose his own life and tastes and to be a
scholar if he chose. But the harm as well as the good of the
public school system was already done. 'The average lad of
eighteen from Harrow or Rugby came up to Oxford or Cambridge
what his school had made him. If, as still frequently happened,
he came from a cultivated home or had an exceptionally brilliant
teacher, he might have wide sympathies and genuine love for
learning. But more normally he cared for nothing but sport which
he pursued in the academic groves with the same zest as on the
Sixth Form Ground or Old Big Side. He had character, integrity,
energy—the qualities needed for worldly success. But his
•emotional and intellectual development were stunted. For that
pason he fell the more readily into the unthinking worship of
material attainment that was the fault of his age. The poor
prize-man of the schools might still be the talk of the Upper
Common Room; on the long benches of Hall the man acclaimed
was the "Blue" and the "blood" with money to burn.

The commercial type created by. the conditions of the
urban middle-class homes and academies that had not yet
attained public school status—the nursery of Matthew Arnold's
tt Philistines"—has been drawn for all time by John Galsworthy
in the Forsyte "Saga. It valued strength, order, above all
things property:" it despised weakness, subtlety, width of
sympathy. It was redeemed by its native boyishness and
by a certain inherent kindliness in the English soul that no
pursuit of mammon could wholly eradicate; But to a foreigner
its superficial appearance was not congenial: these English
merchants with their.stiff, big-boned frames and repressed, self-
contained faces looked stupid, frigid and unfeeling, caring for
nothing but money and the animal pleasures of the chase and