rficial bonhomie, who by a natural
instinct did the things that paid. Stripped of its rhetoric, the
Bishop's address resolved itself into a panegyric of success, and
the morality of it was that if you could not achieve intellectual
and athletic prominence, you might get a certain degree of credit by
unostentatious virtue. What I felt was that somehow the goal proposed
was--dare I hint it?--a vulgar one; that it was a glorification of
prudence and good-humoured self-interest; and yet if the Bishop had
preached the gospel of disinterestedness and quiet faithfulness and
devotion, he would have had few enthusiastic hearers. If he had said
that an awkward and surly manner, no matter what virtues it concealed,
was the greatest bar to ultimate mundane success, it would have been
quite true, though perhaps not particularly edifying. But what I desired
was not startling paradox or cynical comment, but something more really
manly, more just, more unconventional, more ardent, more disinterested.
The boys were not exhorted to care for beautiful things for the sake of
their beauty; but to care for attractive things for the sake of their
acceptability.

And yet in a way it did us all good to listen to the great man. He was
so big and kindly and fatherly and ingenuous; he had made virtue pay; I
do not suppose he had ever had a low or an impure or a spiteful thought;
but his path had been easy from the first; he was a scholar and an
athlete, and he had never pursued success, for the simple reason that it
had fallen from heaven like manna round about his dwelling, with perhaps
a few dozen quails as well! Boys, parents, masters, young and old alike,
were assembled that day to worship success, and the Bishop prophesied
good concerning them. It entered no one's head that success, in its
simplest analysis, means thrusting some one else aside from a place
which he desires to fill. But why on such a day should one think of the
feelings of others? we were all bent on virtuously gratifying our own
desires. The boys who were left out were the weak and the timid, the
ailing and the erring, the awkward and the unpopular, the clumsy and the
stupid; they were not bidden to take courage, they were rather bidden
to envy the unattainable, and to submit with such grace as they could
muster. But we pushed all such vague and unsatisfactory thoughts in the
background; we sounded the clarion and filled the fife, and were at case
in Zion, while we worshipped