XVII
JOY
Dr. Arnold somewhere says that the schoolmaster's experience of
being continually in the presence of the hard mechanical high
spirits of boyhood is an essentially depressing thing. It seemed to
him depressing, just because that happiness was so purely
incidental to youth and health, and did not proceed from any sense
of principle, any reserve of emotion, any self-restraint, any
activity of sympathy. I confess that in my own experience as a
schoolmaster the particular phenomenon was sometimes a depressing
thing and sometimes a relief. It was depressing when one was
overshadowed by a fretful anxiety or a real sorrow, because no
appeal to it seemed possible: it had a heartless quality. But again
it was a relief when it distracted one from the pressure of a
troubled thought, as when, in the Idylls of the King, the sorrowful
queen was comforted by the little maiden "who pleased her with a
babbling heedlessness, which often lured her from herself."
One felt that one had no right to let the sense of anxiety
overshadow the natural cheerfulness of boyhood, and then one made
the effort to detach oneself from one's preoccupations, with the
result that they presently weighed less heavily upon the heart.
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