Adventures among Books

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There appeared a naked hand and an arm, from the elbow down, beating upon
the floor till the house did shake again. "The Fiend next exclaimed that
if the candle were put out he would appear in the shape of Fireballs."

Let it be observed that now, for the first time, we learn that all the
scene occurred in candle-light. The appearance of floating balls of fire
is frequent (if we may believe the current reports) at spiritualistic
seances. But what a strange, ill-digested tale is Mr. Sinclair's! He
lets slip an expression which shows that the investigators were in one
room, the But, while the Fiend was diverting himself in the other room,
the Ben! The Fiend (nobody going Ben) next chaffed a gentleman who wore
a fashionable broad-brimmed hat, "whereupon he presently imagined that he
felt a pair of shears going about his hat," but there was no such matter.
The voice asked for a piece of bread, which the others were eating, and
said the maid gave him a crust in the morning. This she denied, but
admitted that something had "clicked" a piece of bread out of her hand.

The seance ended, the Devil slapping a safe portion of the children's
bodies, with a sound resembling applause. After many months of this
really annoying conduct, poor Campbell laid his case before the
Presbyters, in 1655, thirty years before the date of publication. So a
"solemn humiliation" was actually held all through the bounds of the
synod. But to little purpose did Glenluce sit in sackcloth and ashes.
The good wife's plate was snatched away before her very eyes, and then
thrown back at her. In similar "stirs," described by a Catholic
missionary in Peru soon after Pizarro's conquest, the cup of an Indian
chief was lifted up by an invisible hand, and set down empty. In that
case, too, stones were thrown, as by the Devil of Glenluce.

And what was the end of it all? Mr. Sinclair has not even taken the
trouble to inquire. It seems by some conjuration or other, the Devil
suffered himself to be put away, and gave the weaver a habitation. The
weaver "has been a very Odd man that endured so long these marvellous
disturbances."

This is the tale which Mr. Sinclair offers, without mentioning his
authority. He complains that Dr. Henry More had plagiarised it, from his
book of Hydrostatics. Two points may be remarked. First: modern
Psychical Inquirers are more particular about evidence than Mr. Sinclair.
Not for nothing do we live in an age of science. Next: the stories of
these "stirs" are always much the same everywhere, in Glenluce, at
Tedworth, where the Drummer came, in Peru, in Wesley's house, in heroic
Iceland, when Glam, the vampire, "rode the roofs." It is curious to
speculate on how the tradition of making themselves little nuisances in
this particular manner has been handed down among children, if we are to
suppose that children do the trick. Last autumn a farmer's house in
Scotland was annoyed exactly as the weaver's home was, and that within a
quarter of a mile of a well-known man of science. The mattress of the
father was tenanted by something that wriggled like a snake. The
mattress was opened, nothing was found, and the disturbance began again
as soon as the bed was restored to its place. This occurred when the
farmer's children had been sent to a distance.

One cannot but be perplexed by the problem which these tales suggest.
Almost bare of evidence as they are, their great number, their wide
diffusion, in many countries and in times ancient and modern, may
establish some substratum of truth. Scott mentions a case in which the
imposture was detected by a sheriff's officer. But a recent anecdote
makes me almost distrust the detection.

Some English people, having taken a country house in Ireland, were vexed
by the usual rappings, stone-throwings, and all the rest of the business.
They sent to Dublin for two detectives, who arrived. On their first
night, the lady of the house went into a room, where she found one of the
policemen asleep in his chair. Being a lively person, she rapped twice
or thrice on the table. He awakened, and said: "Ah, so I suspected. It
was hardly worth while, madam, to bring us so far for this." And next
day the worthy men withdrew in dudgeon, but quite convinced that they had
discovered the agent in the hauntings.

But they had not!

On the other hand, Scott (who had seen one ghost, if not two, and had
heard a "warning") states that Miss Anne Robinson managed the Stockwell
disturbances by tying horsehairs to plates and light articles, which then
demeaned themselves as if possessed.

Here we have _vera causa_, a demonstrable cause of "stirs," and it may be
inferred that all the other historical occurrences had a similar origin.
We have, then, only to be interested in the persistent tradition, in
accordance with which mischievous persons always do exactly the same sort
of thing. But this is a mere example of the identity of human nature.

It is curious to see how Mr. Sinclair plumes himself on this Devil of
Glenluce as a "moliminous rampier" against irreligion. "This one
Relation is worth all the price that can be given for the Book." The
price I have given for the volume is Ten Golden Guineas, and perhaps the
Foul Thief of Glenluce is hardly worth the money.

"I believe if the Obdurest Atheist among men would seriously and in good
earnest consider that relation, and ponder all the circumstances thereof,
he would presently cry out, as a Dr. of Physick did, hearing a story less
considerable, 'I believe I have been in the wrong all the time--if this
be true.'"

Mr. Sinclair is also a believer in the Woodstock devils, on which Scott
founded his novel. He does not give the explanation that Giles Sharp,
alias Joseph Collins of Oxford, alias Funny Joe, was all the Devil in
that affair. Scott had read the story of Funny Joe, but could never
remember "whether it exists in a separate collection, or where it is to
be looked for."

Indifferent to evidence, Mr. Sinclair confutes the Obdurest Atheists with
the Pied Piper of Hamelin, with the young lady from Howells' "Letters,"
whose house, like Rahab's, was "on the city wall," and with the ghost of
the Major who appeared to the Captain (as he had promised), and scolded
him for not keeping his sword clean. He also gives us Major Weir, at
full length, convincing us that, as William Erskine said, "The Major was
a disgusting fellow, a most ungentlemanlike character." Scott, on the
other hand, remarked, long before "Waverley," "if I ever were to become a
writer of prose romances, I think I would choose Major Weir, if not for
my hero, at least for an agent and a leading one, in my production." He
admitted that the street where the Major lived was haunted by a woman
"twice the common length," "but why should we set him down for an
ungentlemanly fellow?" Readers of Mr. Sinclair will understand the
reason very well, and it is not necessary, nor here even possible, to
justify Erskine's opinion by quotations. Suffice it that, by virtue of
his enchanted staff, which was burned with him, the Major was enabled "to
commit evil not to be named, yea, even to reconcile man and wife when at
variance." His sister, who was hanged, had Redgauntlet's horse-shoe mark
on her brow, and one may marvel that Scott does not seem to have
remembered this coincidence. "There was seen an exact Horse-shoe, shaped
for nails, in her wrinkles. Terrible enough, I assure you, to the
stoutest beholder!"

Most modern readers will believe that both the luckless Major and his
sister were religious maniacs. Poverty, solitude, and the superstition
of their time were the true demon of Major Weir, burned at the stake in
April 1670. Perhaps the most singular impression made by "Satan's
Invisible World Discovered" is that in Sinclair's day, people who did not
believe in bogies believed in nothing, while people who shared the common
creed of Christendom were capable of believing in everything.

Atheists are as common as ghosts in his marvellous relations, and the
very wizards themselves were often Atheists.

NOTE.--I have said that Scott himself had seen one ghost, if not two, and
heard a "warning." The ghost was seen near Ashestiel, on an open spot of
hillside, "please to observe it was before dinner." The anecdote is in
Gillis's, "Recollections of Sir Walter Scott," p. 170. The vision of
Lord Byron standing in the great hall of Abbotsford is described in the
"Demonology and Witchcraft ." Scott alleges that it resolved itself into
"great coats, shawls, and plaids"--a hallucination. But Lockhart remarks
("Life," ix. p. 141) that he did not care to have the circumstance
discussed in general. The "stirs" in Abbotsford during the night when
his architect, Bullock, died in London, are in Lockhart, v. pp. 309-315.
"The noise resembled half-a-dozen men hard at work putting up boards and
furniture, and nothing can be more certain than that there was nobody on
the premises at the time." The noise, unluckily, occurred twice, April
28 and 29, 1818, and Lockhart does not tell us on which of these two
nights Mr. Bullock died. Such is the casualness of ghost story-tellers.
Lockhart adds that the coincidence made a strong impression on Sir
Walter's mind. He did not care to ascertain the point in his own mental
constitution "where incredulity began to waver," according to his friend,
Mr. J. L. Adolphus.




CHAPTER XVII: THE BOY


As a humble student of savage life, I have found it necessary to make
researches into the manners and customs of boys. Boys are not what a
vain people supposes. If you meet them in the holidays, you find them
affable and full of kindness and good qualities. They will condescend to
your weakness at lawn-tennis, they will aid you in your selection of fly-
hooks, and, to be brief, will behave with much more than the civility of
tame Zulus or Red Men on a missionary settlement. But boys at school and
among themselves, left to the wild justice and traditional laws which
many generations of boys have evolved, are entirely different beings.
They resemble that Polynesian prince who had rejected the errors of
polytheism for those of an extreme sect of Primitive Seceders. For weeks
at a time this prince was known to be "steady," but every month or so he
disappeared, and his subjects said he was "lying off." To adopt an
American idiom, he "felt like brandy and water"; he also "felt like"
wearing no clothes, and generally rejecting his new conceptions of duty
and decency. In fact, he had a good bout of savagery, and then he
returned to his tall hat, his varnished boots, his hymn-book, and his
edifying principles. The life of small boys at school (before they get
into long-tailed coats and the upper-fifth) is often a mere course of
"lying-off"--of relapse into native savagery with its laws and customs.

If any one has so far forgotten his own boyhood as to think this
description exaggerated, let him just fancy what our comfortable
civilised life would be, if we could become boys in character and custom.
Let us suppose that you are elected to a new club, of which most of the
members are strangers to you. You enter the doors for the first time,
when two older members, who have been gossiping in the hall, pounce upon
you with the exclamation, "Hullo, here's a new fellow! You fellow,
what's your name?" You reply, let us say, "Johnson." "I don't believe
it, it's such a rum name. What's your father?" Perhaps you are
constrained to answer "a Duke" or (more probably) "a solicitor." In the
former case your friends bound up into the smoking-room, howling, "Here's
a new fellow says his father is a Duke. Let's take the cheek out of
him." And they "take it out" with umbrellas, slippers, and other
surgical instruments. Or, in the latter case (your parent being a
solicitor) they reply, "Then your father must be a beastly cad. All
solicitors are sharks. _My_ father says so, and he knows. How many
sisters have you?" The new member answers, "Four." "Any of them
married?" "No." "How awfully awkward for you."

By this time, perhaps, luncheon is ready, or the evening papers come in,
and you are released for a moment. You sneak up into the library, where
you naturally expect to be entirely alone, and you settle on a sofa with
a novel. But an old member bursts into the room, spies a new fellow, and
puts him through the usual catechism. He ends with, "How much tin have
you got?" You answer "twenty pounds," or whatever the sum may be, for
perhaps you had contemplated playing whist. "Very well, fork it out; you
must give a dinner, all new fellows must, and _you_ are not going to
begin by being a stingy beast?" Thus addressed, as your friend is a big
bald man, who looks mischievous, you do "fork out" all your ready money,
and your new friend goes off to consult the cook. Meanwhile you "shed a
blooming tear," as Homer says, and go home heart-broken. Now, does any
grown-up man call this state of society civilisation? Would life be
worth living (whatever one's religious consolations) on these terms? Of
course not, and yet this picture is a not overdrawn sketch of the career
of some new boy, at some schools new or old. The existence of a small
schoolboy is, in other respects, not unlike that of an outsider in a
lawless "Brotherhood," as the Irish playfully call their murder clubs.

The small boy is _in_ the society, but not _of_ it, as far as any
benefits go. He has to field out (and I admit that the discipline is
salutary) while other boys bat. Other boys commit the faults, and compel
him to copy out the impositions--say five hundred lines of Virgil--with
which their sins are visited. Other boys enjoy the pleasures of
football, while the small boy has to run vaguely about, never within five
yards of the ball. Big boys reap the glories of paperchases, the small
boy gets lost in the bitter weather, on the open moors, or perhaps (as in
one historical case) is frozen to death within a measurable distance of
the school playground. And the worst of it is that, as a member of the
great school secret society, the small boy can never complain of his
wrongs, or divulge the name of his tormentors. It is in this respect
that he resembles a harmless fellow, dragged into the coils of an
Anarchist "Inner Brotherhood." He is exposed to all sorts of wrongs from
his neighbours, and he can only escape by turning "informer," by breaking
the most sacred law of his society, losing all social status, and,
probably, obliging his parents to remove him from school. Life at
school, as among the Celtic peoples, turns on the belief that law and
authority are natural enemies, against which every one is banded.

The chapter of bullying among boys is one on which a man enters with
reluctance. Boys are, on the whole, such good fellows, and so full of
fine unsophisticated qualities, that the mature mind would gladly turn
away its eyes from beholding their iniquities. Even a cruel bully does
not inevitably and invariably develop into a bad man. He is, let us
hope, only passing through the savage stage, in which the torture of
prisoners is a recognised institution. He has, perhaps, too little
imagination to understand the pain he causes. Very often bullying is not
physically cruel, but only a perverted sort of humour, such as Kingsley,
in "Hypatia," recognised among his favourite Goths. I remember a feeble
foolish boy at school (feeble he certainly was, and was thought foolish)
who became the subject of much humorous bullying. His companions used to
tie a thin thread round his ear, and attach this to a bar at such a
height that he could only avoid breaking it by standing on tiptoe. But
he was told that he must not break the thread. To avoid infringing this
commandment, he put himself to considerable inconvenience and afforded
much enjoyment to the spectators.

Men of middle age, rather early middle age, remember the two following
species of bullying to which they were subjected, and which, perhaps, are
obsolescent. Tall stools were piled up in a pyramid, and the victim was
seated on the top, near the roof of the room. The other savages brought
him down from this bad eminence by hurling other stools at those which
supported him. Or the victim was made to place his hands against the
door, with the fingers outstretched, while the young tormentors played at
the Chinese knife-trick. They threw knives, that is to say, at the door
between the apertures of the fingers, and, as a rule, they hit the
fingers and not the door. These diversions I know to be correctly
reported, but the following pretty story is, perhaps, a myth. At one of
the most famous public schools, a praepostor, or monitor, or sixth-form
boy having authority, heard a pistol-shot in the room above his own. He
went up and found a big boy and a little boy. They denied having any
pistol. The monitor returned to his studies, again was sure he heard a
shot, went up, and found the little boy dead. The big boy had been
playing the William Tell trick with him, and had hit his head instead of
the apple. That is the legend. Whether it be true or false, all boys
will agree that the little victim could not have escaped by complaining
to the monitor. No. Death before dishonour. But the side not so seamy
of this picture of school life is the extraordinary power of honour among
boys. Of course the laws of the secret society might well terrify a
puerile informer. But the sentiment of honour is even more strong than
fear, and will probably outlast the very disagreeable circumstances in
which it was developed.

People say bullying is not what it used to be. The much abused
monitorial system has this in it of good, that it enables a clever and
kindly boy who is high up in the school to stop the cruelties (if he
hears of them) of a much bigger boy who is low in the school. But he
seldom hears of them. Habitual bullies are very cunning, and I am
acquainted with instances in which they carry their victims off to lonely
torture cells (so to speak) and deserted places fit for the sport. Some
years ago a small boy, after a long course of rope's-ending in out-of-the-
way dens, revealed the abominations of some naval cadets. There was not
much sympathy with him in the public mind, and perhaps his case was not
well managed. But it was made clear that whereas among men an unpopular
person is only spoken evil of behind his back, an unpopular small boy
among boys is made to suffer in a more direct and very unpleasant way.

Most of us leave school with the impression that there was a good deal of
bullying when we were little, but that the institution has died out. The
truth is that we have grown too big to be bullied, and too good-natured
to bully ourselves. When I left school, I thought bullying was an
extinct art, like encaustic painting (before it was rediscovered by Sir
William Richmond). But a distinguished writer, who was a small boy when
I was a big one, has since revealed to me the most abominable cruelties
which were being practised at the very moment when I supposed bullying to
have had its day and ceased to be. Now, the small boy need only have
mentioned the circumstances to any one of a score of big boys, and the
tormentor would have been first thrashed, and then, probably, expelled.

A friend of my own was travelling lately in a wild and hilly region on
the other side of the world, let us say in the Mountains of the Moon. In
a mountain tavern he had thrust upon him the society of the cook, a very
useless young man, who astonished him by references to one of our
universities, and to the enjoyments of that seat of learning. This youth
(who was made cook, and a very bad cook too, because he could do nothing
else) had been expelled from a large English school. And he was expelled
because he had felled a bully with a paving-stone, and had expressed his
readiness to do it again. Now, there was no doubt that this cook in the
mountain inn was a very unserviceable young fellow. But I wish more boys
who have suffered things literally unspeakable from bullies would try
whether force (in the form of a paving stone) is really no remedy.

The Catholic author of a recent book ("Schools," by Lieut.-Col. Raleigh
Chichester), is very hard on "Protestant Schools," and thinks that the
Catholic system of constant watching is a remedy for bullying and other
evils. "Swing-doors with their upper half glazed, might have their
uses," he says, and he does not see why a boy should not be permitted to
complain, if he is roasted, like Tom Brown, before a large fire. The
boys at one Catholic school described by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, "are
never without surveillance of some sort." This is true of most French
schools, and any one who wishes to understand the consequences (there)
may read the published confessions of a _pion_--an usher, or "spy." A
more degraded and degrading life than that of the wretched _pion_, it is
impossible to imagine. In an English private school, the system of
_espionnage_ and tale bearing, when it exists, is probably not unlike
what Mr. Anstey describes in _Vice Versa_. But in the Catholic schools
spoken of by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, the surveillance may be, as he
says, "that of a parent; an aid to the boys in their games rather than a
check." The religious question as between Catholics and Protestants has
no essential connection with the subject. A Protestant school might, and
Grimstone's did, have tale-bearers; possibly a Catholic school might
exist without parental surveillance. That system is called by its foes a
"police," by its friends a "paternal" system. But fathers don't exercise
the "paternal" system themselves in this country, and we may take it for
granted that, while English society and religion are as they are,
surveillance at our large schools will be impossible. If any one regrets
this, let him read the descriptions of French schools and schooldays, in
Balzac's _Louis Lambert_, in the "Memoirs" of M. Maxime du Camp, in any
book where a Frenchman speaks his mind about his youth. He will find
spying (of course) among the ushers, contempt and hatred on the side of
the boys, unwholesome and cruel punishments, a total lack of healthy
exercise; and he will hear of holidays spent in premature excursions into
forbidden and shady quarters of the town.

No doubt the best security against bullying is in constant occupation.
There can hardly (in spite of Master George Osborne's experience in
"Vanity Fair") be much bullying in an open cricket-field. Big boys, too,
with good hearts, should not only stop bullying when they come across it,
but make it their business to find out where it exists. Exist it will,
more or less, despite all precautions, while boys are boys--that is, are
passing through a modified form of the savage state.

There is a curious fact in the boyish character which seems, at first
sight, to make good the opinion that private education, at home, is the
true method. Before they go out into school life, many little fellows of
nine, or so, are extremely original, imaginative, and almost poetical.
They are fond of books, fond of nature, and, if you can win their
confidence, will tell you all sorts of pretty thoughts and fancies which
lie about them in their infancy. I have known a little boy who liked to
lie on the grass and to people the alleys and glades of that miniature
forest with fairies and dwarfs, whom he seemed actually to see in a kind
of vision. But he went to school, he instantly won the hundred yards
race for boys under twelve, and he came back a young barbarian,
interested in "the theory of touch" (at football), curious in the art of
bowling, and no more capable than you or I of seeing fairies in a green
meadow. He was caught up into the air of the boy's world, and his
imagination was in abeyance for a season.

This is a common enough thing, and rather a melancholy spectacle to
behold. One is tempted to believe that school causes the loss of a good
deal of genius, and that the small boys who leave home poets, and come
back barbarians, have been wasted. But, on the other hand, if they had
been kept at home and encouraged, the chances are that they would have
blossomed into infant phenomena and nothing better. The awful infancy of
Mr. John Stuart Mill is a standing warning. Mr. Mill would probably have
been a much happier and wiser man if he had not been a precocious
linguist, economist, and philosopher, but had passed through a healthy
stage of indifference to learning and speculation at a public school.
Look again, at the childhood of Bishop Thirlwall. His _Primitiae_ were
published (by Samuel Tipper, London, 1808), when young Connop was but
eleven years of age. His indiscreet father "launched this slender bark,"
as he says, and it sailed through three editions between 1808 and 1809.
Young Thirlwall was taught Latin at three years of age, "and at four read
Greek with an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him." At
seven he composed an essay, "On the Uncertainty of Human Life," but "his
taste for poetry was not discovered till a later period." His sermons,
some forty, occupy most of the little volume in which these _Primitiae_
were collected.