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Updated: May 21, 2025
As we said at the beginning of the chapter, the material of our experiments was the boys and them alone. We had made a short cut. We had made no effort to convert our colleague. We trusted to results for their conversion. But, as the preceding narrative will have shown, the greater our success, the greater became their irritation, when success was labelled "pacifism" and "priggery."
These political discussions disturbed them. They felt that their credentials as schoolmasters were being examined and found wanting. They accused the boys of priggery. It was a most false charge, for the boys were enthusiasts, and enthusiasm is a form of self-forgetfulness as priggery is a form of self-consciousness. Still priggery was the word.
And are you quite sure, my own dear, mature, efficient, and thoroughly productive friends and contemporaries, that it is not this expansion of youthful rubbish which makes the true movement of the centuries?... Poor stuff enough, very likely, they talked, those long-haired, loose-collared Romanticists of the Hôtel Pimodan and the literary cafés recorded by Balzac, Jeunes Frances, or whatever their names; and priggery, as well as blood-and-thunder, those lads round the table d'hôte at Strasburg, where Jung-Stilling noticed the entrance of a certain tall, Apolline young man answering to the name of Goethe.
The charge of "priggery" was added to the charge of "pacifism." On these two lines the opposition developed and ultimately triumphed. It was suggested that "the school would be empty in a couple of years," if political education continued. Here, it would seem, our critics were trading on their false idea of the parent, and believing what they wished to believe.
He said he was sorry to see any of his gang guilty of a breach of honour; that without honour PRIGGERY was at an end; that if a prig had but honour he would overlook every vice in the world. "But, nevertheless," said he, "I will forgive you this time, as you are a hopeful lad, and I hope never afterwards to find you delinquent in this great point."
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