I can remember quite clearly when I was made aware that it was not part of everybody else’s life. The parents of a fellow pupil at my prep school had taken me out and in the course of the outing my friend’s father, who was in the rag trade, had waxed indignant about a Neville Chamberlain Budget. Always anxious to find some precociously grown-up subject to write about to my mother in my weekly letter home, I passed on this conversation, mentioning in particular the father’s objection to a tax rise that would hit the retail trade particularly hard, only to receive a long handwritten letter – the first and the last – from the Governor himself. Sadly, I haven’t kept the text, but its gist left a lasting mark. The Chancellor’s job, he emphasized, was not to please the rag trade, or any other private interest, but rather to take care of the nation’s solvency. A good Budget was almost by definition an unpopular Budget. He went on to cite his friend Walter Lippmann’s view that it was a government’s job to tax, conscript, command and prohibit, punish, and balance the budget, none of which responsibilities could usually be safely fulfilled without offending many individual members of the public. Inevitably, the conflict between the public interest and the private interest was most acute in time of war, when the balance had to be got right between the public interest in victory and the private interest of millions of mothers and fathers that their boys should return home alive; but in peacetime, too, there could be almost equally agonizing conflicts and he instanced his own recent duty at the Bank of England to take actions in the national interest that had inflicted cruel suffering on the unemployed.
Very recently, in Louis Menand’s excellent book The Metaphysical Club – mostly about late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American philosophers – I came across a ruling of the famous American Civil War veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was also one of my stepfather’s correspondents, and its chilling note had such a familiar ring that I am sure it was also included in that letter. Certainly it is in its spirit and comes in the course of a 1927 opinion by Holmes about a Virginian law permitting the involuntary sterilization of mentally incompetent persons. Menand rightly describes it as Holmes’s most ‘notorious opinion’* and it went as follows:
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may well call upon the best citizens for their lives.† It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices.
Whether or not that was the same quotation as the one recommended to me by my stepfather I shall never know; but, if not, it was certainly another equally stupefying.
And then at about the same time, as if to pile Pelion on Ossa, the critic John Davenport – whose war work was to teach English at Stowe for the duration – recommended me to read Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, wherein I came across a passage that included the following quotation from Boethius:
If any were visited with the falling sickness, madness, gout, leprosy, or any such dangerous disease, which was likely to be propagated from the father to the son, he was instantly gelded; a woman kept from all company of men; and if by chance, having some such disease, she were found to be with child, she with her brood were buried alive: and this was done for the common good, lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted [my italics].
To which Burton had added:
A severe doom, you will say, and not to be used amongst Christians, yet more to be looked into than it is. For now, by our too much facility in this kind, in giving way for all to marry that will, too much liberty and indulgence in tolerating all sorts, there is a vast confusion of hereditary diseases, no family secure, no man almost, free from some grievous infirmity or other, when no choice is had.
It was a heady brew. Clearly somebody, ‘lest the whole nation should be injured or corrupted’, had to do the nation’s dirty work; had to authorize difficult and sometimes cruel actions for the common good; had to be on the side of realism against sentimentality; had to resist giving way not only to every grievance (which was relatively easy) but also to manifestly worthy causes as well; had to rub society’s nose in the painful realities of keeping a great nation on course. No less clearly, careerist politicians – whose careers depended on retaining popular favour – were the last people who could be relied upon to grasp these nettles. So who were these indispensable somebodies who had to bear these public burdens? The inference from my stepfather’s letter was unavoidable: those indispensable somebodies most definitely included me.
I don’t remember being in the least pleased by this realization, still less proud. It seemed, at first, a terrifying prospect. All my schoolboy inclinations at Stowe were inclined towards private pleasures – particularly the pleasure of burying my head in a book – and against team spirit, which was the boarding-school idea of public duty. The last thing I wanted – at any rate in these early years – was to be made a prefect. Neither did I want to forgo the protection that the prefects – or at least the decent ones – provided the weak and cowardly (i.e. me) against the bullies.* So I wanted the best of both worlds: authority figures who at one and the same time both protected me and left me alone; who came to my aid in emergencies but otherwise allowed me to mind my own business. Officious busybody prefects who kept an eye on one all the time were more a liability than an asset. But unofficious prefects who noticed what was going on from a corner of the eye were the opposite. Even more to be desired were the few older boys who turned down the office of prefect but were natural authority figures on the side of justice and order requiring, by virtue of strong individual character, no official badge of office. Those paragons, however, are always very few on the ground and, not being among them, I did eventually accept being made a prefect, because one of that office’s privileges was frequent contact with the great founding headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh, who exercised authority with the lightest of reins in the manner of a connoisseur who appreciates quality and style in all its forms, as much in the dilettante aesthete who refuses to play games as in the captain of the school rugger XV who refuses to do anything else. He believed a well-ordered boarding school should not aim to turn out leadership material of a uniform sort but quality material for every different walk of life – quality top dogs and quality bottom dogs, quality politicians and quality voters, and even quality revolutionaries. ‘Don’t talk of a ruling class,’ he would say. ‘Call it a quality class, a class that contributes to the good society just as much by ‘‘being’’ as by ‘‘doing’’.’
As for how Stowe was different from, say, Eton, I think JF would have replied along the following lines: that whereas Eton had seen its function as that of civilizing primarily the sons of the old ruling class, and only secondarily the sons of the nouveaux riches whose parents wanted their offspring ‘aristocratized’, Stowe saw its function as that of turning out humane and gentrified meritocrats who would not take it for granted, or give the impression that they took it for granted, that they were ‘born to rule’. What JF wanted, in short, was the Etonian spirit in a more egalitarian frame, or, as he put it, ‘Etonians in grey flannels rather than in the archaic white tie and tails’. One was never left in doubt at Stowe that competitive individualism and equality of opportunity were the waves of the future; but neither was one left in doubt that it was the duty of an Old Stoic to ride these waves not just to his own personal advantage, but also to the advantage of the nation as a whole. Oblige, yes: JF tried hard to instil that; but he was rather less emphatic about noblesse. A gentrified or patrician meritocracy, not unlike the Wasp ascendancy on the East Coast of America, was JF’s ideal, which to some extent he achieved