True Patriot Love by Michael Ignatieff Page B
Authors: Michael Ignatieff
Tags: History, Non-Fiction
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least, Nicholas Ignatieff, eldest son of a White Russian count, who taught history and politics, chaired the League of Nations club and every summer took boys out west to ride in the Alberta hills. The strategy of eccentricity—of opening anelite school to the new immigration that was changing Canada—was deliberate. As Grant said,
I am not greatly concerned whether the boys of this school turn out High Tories or Red Tie Socialists; though on the whole I hope they will steer a middle course. I am greatly concerned that they shall not turn out conventional individualists, careful only of their own.
He himself astonished the boys by writing an article for the college magazine on “damn, the finest of expletives.” He was seen besting a fellow master at a swearing match. Robertson Davies, one of his pupils, remembered being taken on a walk around the running track with the memorable phrase, “Walk with me and I’ll tell you all about the Oscar Wilde scandal.” This he proceeded to do with a richness of detail and use of words that Robertson Davies thought only boys knew. He often led the boys in prayer on Sunday nights, and once, he burst out with a paraphrase of Martin Luther that Robertson Davies remembered all his life: “Live in the large! Dare greatly, and if you must sin—sin nobly!”
By now, Maude and William were living in a large house on the college grounds and the long-awaited son, George Parkin Grant, born right after the Armistice of 1918, was named for both his grandfathers. Soon that son was experiencing the special embarrassment of attendinghis father’s school. George Parkin, now Sir George, died in 1922. Maude mourned her father and William completed a biography, begun by Sir John Willison but left unfinished at his death. The chapter on Parkin as headmaster of Upper Canada weaves a delicate path, respectful of his father-in-law’s greatness but delicately hinting that a lifetime of oratory in the pulpits of empire had turned his head.
As for the Grant girls, they were attending local schools and playing on the hockey rinks in front of the headmaster’s house on the school grounds. In the summers, William and Maude would take the children up to the cottage at Otter Lake, near Georgian Bay, and it was there that he would take them out at night to name the stars.
Deep inside him and then in public utterance, too, his view of the war changed. He now questioned the illusions that had filled his head in 1914. As he told the Upper Canada boys in one of his addresses, “What a world we were going to make! Once the legions of Germany and of her allies had been smashed, how we would go on to smash all the accumulated sins and futilities of the ages. How far away it all seems.”
As the Roaring Twenties took hold of Toronto, he now wondered whether the war had achieved anything more than great desolation, followed by heedless consumption and selfishness. He looked about him and saw “an age of easy money”—too many boys had too much of it—and he found it a struggle to hold on to the ideals that had ledmen to heroic sacrifice. As early as 1919, he concluded a memorial service for the fallen with the words, “One last word, said from my heart. We honour these fallen men.… But let that not lead us to glory war.”
He became an outspoken champion of the returning war veterans, spending hours writing letters demanding compensation and medical help for those who came home wounded. He became a supporter of the League of Nations and this, rather than imperial federation, became the ruling cause of his later life. At the memorial address in 1924, he admonished his audience: “We must learn to think internationally and to quench the narrow predatory nationalism which masquerades as patriotism.”
He was revisiting and revising the furnace-hot emotions he had felt in August 1914. His son, George, now a teenager, remembered his father’s anguished revisions of earlier certainties, this struggle to
I am not greatly concerned whether the boys of this school turn out High Tories or Red Tie Socialists; though on the whole I hope they will steer a middle course. I am greatly concerned that they shall not turn out conventional individualists, careful only of their own.
He himself astonished the boys by writing an article for the college magazine on “damn, the finest of expletives.” He was seen besting a fellow master at a swearing match. Robertson Davies, one of his pupils, remembered being taken on a walk around the running track with the memorable phrase, “Walk with me and I’ll tell you all about the Oscar Wilde scandal.” This he proceeded to do with a richness of detail and use of words that Robertson Davies thought only boys knew. He often led the boys in prayer on Sunday nights, and once, he burst out with a paraphrase of Martin Luther that Robertson Davies remembered all his life: “Live in the large! Dare greatly, and if you must sin—sin nobly!”
By now, Maude and William were living in a large house on the college grounds and the long-awaited son, George Parkin Grant, born right after the Armistice of 1918, was named for both his grandfathers. Soon that son was experiencing the special embarrassment of attendinghis father’s school. George Parkin, now Sir George, died in 1922. Maude mourned her father and William completed a biography, begun by Sir John Willison but left unfinished at his death. The chapter on Parkin as headmaster of Upper Canada weaves a delicate path, respectful of his father-in-law’s greatness but delicately hinting that a lifetime of oratory in the pulpits of empire had turned his head.
As for the Grant girls, they were attending local schools and playing on the hockey rinks in front of the headmaster’s house on the school grounds. In the summers, William and Maude would take the children up to the cottage at Otter Lake, near Georgian Bay, and it was there that he would take them out at night to name the stars.
Deep inside him and then in public utterance, too, his view of the war changed. He now questioned the illusions that had filled his head in 1914. As he told the Upper Canada boys in one of his addresses, “What a world we were going to make! Once the legions of Germany and of her allies had been smashed, how we would go on to smash all the accumulated sins and futilities of the ages. How far away it all seems.”
As the Roaring Twenties took hold of Toronto, he now wondered whether the war had achieved anything more than great desolation, followed by heedless consumption and selfishness. He looked about him and saw “an age of easy money”—too many boys had too much of it—and he found it a struggle to hold on to the ideals that had ledmen to heroic sacrifice. As early as 1919, he concluded a memorial service for the fallen with the words, “One last word, said from my heart. We honour these fallen men.… But let that not lead us to glory war.”
He became an outspoken champion of the returning war veterans, spending hours writing letters demanding compensation and medical help for those who came home wounded. He became a supporter of the League of Nations and this, rather than imperial federation, became the ruling cause of his later life. At the memorial address in 1924, he admonished his audience: “We must learn to think internationally and to quench the narrow predatory nationalism which masquerades as patriotism.”
He was revisiting and revising the furnace-hot emotions he had felt in August 1914. His son, George, now a teenager, remembered his father’s anguished revisions of earlier certainties, this struggle to
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