eral welfare might come round
again to the loyal unit therein, and rest with him, as a privilege of
his individual being after all. The social type he preferred, as we
know, was conservative Sparta and its youth; whose unsparing discipline
had doubtless something to do with the fact that it was the handsomest
and best-formed in all Greece. A school is not made for one. It would
misrepresent Uthwart's wholly unconscious humility to say that he felt
the beauty of the askesis+ (we need that Greek word) to which he not
merely finds himself subject, but as under a fascination submissively
yields himself, although another might have been aware of the charm of
it, half ethic, half physical, as visibly effective in him. Its
peculiarity would have lain in the expression of a stress upon him and
his customary daily existence, beyond what any definitely proposed
issue of it, at least for the moment, explained. Something of that is
involved in the very idea of a classical education, at least for such
as he; in its seeming indirectness [211] or lack of purpose, amid so
much difficulty, as contrasted with forms of education more obviously
useful or practical. He found himself in a system of fixed rules, amid
which, it might be, some of his own tendencies and inclinations would
die out of him through disuse. The confident word of command, the
instantaneous obedience expected, the enforced silence, the very games
that go by rule, a sort of hardness natural to wholesome English youths
when they come together, but here de rigueur as a point of good
manners;--he accepts all these without hesitation; the early hours
also, naturally distasteful to him, which gave to actual morning, to
all that had passed in it, when in more self-conscious mood he looked
back on the morning of life, a preponderance, a disproportionate place
there, adding greatly to the effect of its dreamy distance from him at
this later time;--an ideal quality, he might have said, had he ever
used such words as that.

Uthwart duly passes his examination; and, in their own chapel in the
transept of the choir, lighted up late for evening prayer after the
long day of trial, is received to the full privileges of a Scholar with
the accustomed Latin words:--Introitum tuum et exitum tuum custodiat
Dominus! He takes them, not to heart, but rather to mind, as few, if
they so much as heard them, were wont to do; ponders them for a while.
They seem scarcely meant for him--word