flanking a noble and beautiful river—I
was observing all this when a number of young men and
maids came out of a high-school and unconsciously assumed
possession of the street. It was a great and
impressive sight; it was a delightful sight.
They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly;
so interested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so
convinced (without any conceit) that their importance
transcended all other importances, so gently pitiful
toward men and women of forty-five, and so positive
that the main function of elders was to pay school-fees,
that I was thrilled thereby. Seldom has a human
spectacle given me such exciting pleasure as this
gave. (And they never suspected it, those preoccupied
demigods!) It was the sheer pride of life that I saw
passing down the street and across the badly laid
tram-lines! I had never seen anything like it.
I immediately desired to visit schools. Profoundly
ignorant of educational methods, and with a strong
distaste for teaching, I yet wanted to know and understand
all about education in America in one moment—the
education that produced that superb stride and carriage
in the street! I failed, of course, in my desire—not
from lack of facilities offered, but partly from lack
of knowledge to estimate critically what I saw, and
from lack of time. My experiences, however, though
they left my mind full of enigmas, were wondrous.
I asked to inspect one of the best schools in New
York. Had I been a dispassionate sociological
student, I should probably have asked to inspect one
of the worst schools in New York—perhaps
one of the gaunt institutions to be found, together
with a cinema-palace and a bank, in almost every block
on the East Side. But I asked for one of the
best, and I was shown the Horace Mann School.
* * * *
*
The Horace Mann School proved to be a palace where
a thousand children and their teachers lived with
extreme vivacity in an atmosphere of ozone from which
all draughts and chilliness had been eliminated.
As a malcontent native of the Isle of Chilly Draughts,
this attribute of the atmosphere of the Horace Mann
School impressed me. Dimensionally I found that
the palace had a beginning but no end. I walked
through leagues of corridors and peeped into unnumbered
class-rooms, in each of which children were apparently
fiercely dragging knowledge out of nevertheless highly
communicative teachers; and the children got bigger
and bigger, and then diminished for a while, and then
grew again, and kept on growing, until I at last entered
a palatial kitchen where some two dozen angels, robed
in white but for the moment uncrowned, were eagerly
crowding round a paradisiacal saucepan whose magic
contents formed the subject of a lecture by one of
them. Now these angels were not cherubs; they
were full grown; they never would be any taller than
they were; and I asked up to what age angels were
kept at school in America. Whereupon I learned
that I had insensibly passed from the school proper
into a training-school for teachers; but at what point
the school proper ended I never did learn. It
seems to me that if I had penetrated through seven
more doors I should have reached Columbia University
itself, without having crossed a definite dividing-line;
and, anyhow, the circumstance was symbolic.