Chapter III: Part 3

I wonder why this all-important subject has been so neglected. That it has is evident from the silly letters most boys write and the twaddle that gets into the school magazine. Why any one pays sixpence for the monthly _Radcastrian_ passes my comprehension. It consists of a facetious all too brief Editorial, badly strung together, followed by pages of description of games which interest no one except the players, and them only if they receive honourable mention, a sentimental piece of artificial versifying, a list of elevens and fifteens, promotions, colourless reports of debates and lectures, and a few letters of abuse. I'd guarantee to turn out a better journal from the weekly output of my form. The worst of it is that the average boy is interested in nothing at all, there is nothing that he wants to read about. So a tradition springs up that a school magazine shall be solely a chronicle of games.

I am now in the middle of writing reports. I wonder why it is that as soon as we are confronted by one of these queer documents all powers of criticism and expression desert us, and we, one and all, descend to a jargon which is quite meaningless. I find myself filling about a hundred of these slips with such idiotic remarks as "Industry adequate," "Painstaking," "Very fair but could work harder," "Lacks concentration," "Very weak but tries," "Neat and hard-working," and so on. When they are filled up they are about as much good as a guide to parents as when they are untouched. No one could possibly gauge a boy's merit or progress from these things. They remind me of marks, which as a criterion of a boy's terminal success are as bad a test as could be devised. I always feel that I am being paid £150 a year simply to do this sort of hack work, to fill up reports and to make out a weekly order for my form. All the rest of my work I give willingly without payment.

The first part of my summer holiday has been decided for me. To-morrow morning we leave for Salisbury Plain, where we are to camp out for ten days. To that I am looking forward immensely. Sharing a tent with seven boys in this house should bring me closer to them than ever and I ought to be able to learn something valuable about that most elusive and tricky thing, a boy's mind.

They are never quite natural in the presence of a master; perhaps they'll forget that I am one at Tidworth.

Our O.C. here is a strange fellow. I like him very much, but his views on life are diametrically opposed to my own. He is as hard as nails and is a twentieth-century Stoic. He despises all beautiful things; his bookshelves are lined with Kipling and guides to military strategy and tactics. He lives in and for the Corps. He is never happy unless he is in uniform. Like myself he is a mathematician, but he makes all his work as military as possible. Day and night he evolves schemes for field-days, outpost, advanced guard and other exercises; he is an expert scout, signaller, and drill-master. He demands the utmost punctilio in matters of ceremonial on parade: he coaches individually each boy who shoots on the range; he spends most of his holidays in barracks or on Army manœuvres as a lieutenant in the Special Reserve. He is one of the few men I know who is convinced that we are shortly to embark on a colossal European war, and naturally all the rest of Common Room laugh at him. He really is rather absurd, yet I cannot help but love him, he is so splendidly sure of himself. His is one of the rooms to which I feel any inclination to go when I feel lonely. He sits up to all hours of the night drawing maps and working out military problems from old examination papers, but he is always eager and ready for an argument. His principal bone of contention with me is that I don't "ginger up" the boys enough. He is a firm believer in the rod; he canes nearly all the boys in his House weekly, just to keep them up to the mark and himself in training. He detests my theories that boys should be taught in comfortable rooms with good pictures on the walls and æsthetic colours to delight their senses. He is one of those men who is suspicious of all Art as tending towards the immoral. They say he is admirable in camp, and that all the other Public School officers stand in awe of him because he knows his job so much better than they do. He certainly is unlike any other schoolmaster whom I have ever known. There is a sort of Straffordian "thoroughness" about him which makes him an idol in the sight of the boys who, to give them their due, certainly do bestow all their hero-worship on the Nietzschean superman when they find him.

IV

_August 10, 1910_

I am back in Chagford again after ten of the best days I can remember. Camp was one continuous round of sheer joy. The weather was good: they gave us plenty of work to do; I learnt an immense amount of soldiering and I have become quite as keen as any of them.

O'Connor, our O.C., has recommended me for a commission and I go into barracks at the Depot in Exeter next week. I had no idea that life under canvas could be so good. To be woken after a dreamless sleep at five on a perfect summer morning, to open the tent-flaps and look out on the gorgeous woods of the Pennings and then to dash up and have an icy shower-bath before first parade, to come in to breakfast with an appetite as keen as that of a baby, to spend the greater part of the day in the open air, washing up, cleaning the tent and my uniform, or running about as a scout searching for information, to shout rowdy songs in company with a couple of thousand other spirits as healthy and care-free as oneself, to gossip in the lines as the light gradually dwindles away at night, and last of all to be sung to sleep by the bugle's "last post" and "lights out," in short to live as man should live, in a sort of half-savage, wholly healthy way like this is one delirious dream. I loved every minute of it. Would that it could have continued for a hundred instead of ten days. The boys in my tent treated me exactly as one of themselves. I was ordered about by my section commander just like any other private; in fact, I was privileged enough to be taken by everybody just as a private, as if there were no Radchester and this was all. It was just one glorious "rag": the fight for food and drink as orderly of the day, the hustle to get everything cleared up in time for parade, the deadly funk lest one's buttons should not pass muster at the inspection, the fear lest one should do the wrong thing in close order drill on parade, and so bring ridicule down on the school or oneself from the tyrannical sergeants who bullied us into shape, everything was thoroughly good and I loved it.

It is very quiet and tame at Chagford after that strenuous time, but I have never before realized how precious a thing a hot bath was, or clean sheets and a comfortable bed, and entire liberty with regard to the way in which one spends one's day. Chagford is becoming my home, my refuge from the world. Betty and Thomasin even came as far as Moretonhampstead in the motor-bus to meet me. I could have hugged them both for this. They were disappointed not to see Illingworth and it was hard to account for his absence. I said that he had gone to Switzerland to complete his education. I miss him even more here than I did at school. We sang all the old songs to-night and I read some more stories out of "The Arabian Nights." It is hard to imagine that three months have passed since I was last here. The village, they tell me, is crowded: all the summer visitors are now here. I don't like to hear that--I am jealous of my find. I don't like hordes of Londoners prying into my favourite nooks. I shall find banana-skins and orange-pips on the Wallabrook to-morrow, and probably the way to Cranmere will be indicated by a long succession of paper bags and bits of discarded bun.

I wish I could describe the fascination of the moor. As soon as I got to Exeter I saw the blue hills in the distance with their quaint, craggy tors, and my heart leaped within me. I wanted to get out of the train and run to greet them. By the time that we had climbed out of Newton to Bovey I was racing from side to side of the carriage to glut my eyes with the rich sights which met my eye wherever I looked, the white-washed cottages, the prosperous farms, the rookeries, the rock-strewn streams, the thick woods, the riot of many-coloured flowers, the red loam and real green fields--how different these from the poor parched pastures of Radchester; the square squat church towers, the tapering spires, the big mansions of the squirearchy, the slow plodding farm labourers in the winding lanes, the myriad animals squatting, running, flying, chasing and being chased; everything spoke to me of home and then at last at Moretonhampstead to be met by such dear creatures as Betty and Thomasin: my cup of happiness was indeed full.

_August 21, 1910_

I am to go back to Chagford as soon as I have finished my military training here in order to coach young Willoughby (whose brother was at New College with me last year) for Woolwich. He said that he didn't mind where he went and so he fell in at once with my suggestion of Chagford. I am not altogether liking life in barracks after my wild and free week at Chagford. There I got up when I liked, ordered what I liked for meals, was waited on hand and foot by Betty and Thomasin, lazed by the side of the Teign and bathed at frequent intervals in a deep pool which nobody knew of, far from all inquisitive eyes, and trapesed about the moor to my heart's content every day. I took a heap of books but except in the kitchen at nights, when I read aloud, I never had any temptation to open them. After the strenuous life of camp I was only too glad of the opportunity to meander and gossip. Life seems to move very slowly in these Devon villages. No one seems to have been married or to have died since I was last here: the same girls serve in the same shops, the same men occupy the same seats in the bar parlour at "The Half-Moon" and "The Goat and Boy"; the only change is the influx of visitors attired in immaculate flannels, who get excited because their copy of the _Times_ "was not sent up at the usual time to-day."

Thank Heaven, I've only got to endure ten days more of this: I am not overfond of the officers. They resent my presence, I think, because I am not a _pukka_ soldier: I never could be--I have not O'Connor's temperament. There is such an amazing amount of ritual and ceremony about the mess. There's not much to do except to drink and read the papers, and "get up" the parts of the "rifle," which bore me. The Sergeant-Major has taken me under his wing and given me tips preparatory to my exam., but I'm not so grateful as I ought to be. Every morning I go out on first parade, usually in a parlous funk about my clothes. Do I wear a sword or not? Whom exactly am I expected to salute? What are my duties? Everything is hazy: there is nothing definite laid down and frequently I loiter about all the morning only to find that I am not wanted. Most of the senior officers seem to spend their time filling up papers in the orderly room. In the afternoons they go off and play tennis or fish, and I am left to my own devices until dinner, which meal I am expected to attend. I have explored the city, which is an attractive one. The inhabitants are sleepy, but extraordinarily healthy-looking and rubicund of hue: the girls almost uncannily pretty.

Betty and Thomasin came in from Chagford for the day yesterday at my invitation and I took them out to lunch and tea, and we had a rare good time together. They are very anxious for my release and complain that Fernworthy View is very dull without me. Whether that be true or no, all blessings be upon their sweet heads for saying so.

I have had letters from heaps of Radcastrians who were in camp with me, declaring that they find home very slow and boring after the ecstatic days in camp.

_September 15, 1910_

I passed my exam. all right at Exeter and very glad I was to shake the dust of the barracks square from my feet and once more to get back to my beloved Chagford.

Willoughby is a Wykehamist, who is trying to get into "The Shop" in November. His mathematics are sound but his English is lamentable. He seems to have read nothing except, quaintly enough, Norwegian sagas: he is always quoting "Burnt Njal." I find him excellent company: and he has ravished the hearts of most of the girls who are staying here. It is much gayer than it was when I was last here; we have had three gorgeous dances. I wish I did not feel such a fool at these shows. Radchester has unfitted me for all these society gatherings. I feel abominably out of it; it is so long since I used to dance regularly. I get in a paralytic fear lest I should tread on my partners' toes. I imagine that I am wooden, gawky and stiff, in spite of my partner's eulogies on my ease and lightness.

We play tennis, golf and cricket a good deal and even got up some amateur theatricals, in which I took the part of Myngs in a Pepys play. These people are as different as possible from the north-country manufacturers. None of them have much money, but they all possess honoured names and an intense pride of birth: Cruwys, Polwhele, Chichester, Acland, Trefusis, or Champernowne. I wish we boasted such names at Radchester. They are all exceedingly kind to me. I feel thoroughly happy and at ease when I am gossiping with the villagers or running about on the moor with Willoughby, who is very slack about walking, and always wants to hire a car; he has heaps of money and is certainly lavish with it. He flirts outrageously with all the girls he comes across, but he is healthy and altogether lovable.

We work all the mornings and sometimes at night. I don't think there is much doubt about his getting in. He is beginning to take quite an interest in his English work and constantly bewails the fact that he never discovered at school what a delightful subject it is. He is interested in all sides of life and like Illingworth is afraid of nothing. If he wants to get into conversation with any one he just does it, whereas, however much I wanted to, I should always hold back through fear, what of I don't quite know.

I have tried to set down on paper exactly how this country affects me, but I cannot do it. I envy Eden Phillpotts and Trevena more than I can say. I look for romance in the faces of the passers-by and try to weave stories about the villagers but they all fail to materialize. I cannot make any of them live in my pages; they are all dolls. I haven't really been taught to observe properly. Willoughby comes back from a garden-party and can conjure up an exact picture of all the old frumps, the parsons, the retired civilians, their lovely daughters ... every one. He knows the colour of their eyes and hair, peculiarities of their hands and bodies, the material of which their clothes are made, together with their colour and shape.

I talk to a girl for an hour, find her captivating, come home, essay to describe her and fail entirely. I can't even remember whether she is dark or fair, what sort of frock she wore, what was the colour of her eyes, or whether her features are regular or not. I suppose I don't look at people enough. I simply daren't. I can't scrutinize: I wish I could overcome this bashfulness. All the time I keep on thinking what a fool all these people must imagine me to be. But all the same there are one or two types here who interest me a good deal. The captain of the cricket team is a retired colonel of an Indian regiment, an old M.C.C. man who lives for the game and curses us roundly when we fail to come up to his expectations. When we win he praises us extravagantly, when we lose his language becomes positively Oriental. He never misses an opportunity of net-practice and requires us to be equally keen. His one aim in life is to go through a season without losing a single match. In August he always invites the most famous cricketers he knows to come and stay with him, but they do not always come off on these tricky wickets and he gets much more furious with them if they fail than he does with us.

The doctor is another good type: he is very handsome and beloved of every one. He bears his honours lightly so long as every one gives in to him, but he sulks like any two-year-old child if he is crossed in any way. He likes to keep himself surrounded by pretty girls and as there is no dearth of them he has a good time.

One of the best points about Chagford is the way in which every one collects at different houses without any special invitation. I find that the Chagford people have done me no end of good. They've laughed me out of a good deal of my awkwardness. Though I am much slower at making friends than Willoughby, I have ceased to regard all mankind as hostile to me.

The parson here has become a great pal of mine. He is young, extraordinarily well-read, athletic, and madly keen about his work. It is a treat, by way of a change, to leave the roysterers and sit smoking in his study and talk about books and education and social problems. His life is full to the brim with that happiness which comes from service. It seems to me an ideal existence to try to keep the vision splendid before the eyes of these moor-folk, to comfort them in their distress.... I have often thought of taking Orders. I don't quite know what keeps me back. I can conceive no finer life than that led by the preacher. Of all men in history I think I should like to have been John Wesley. At home nothing delights me so much as taking my father's Bible Classes or preaching to his Sunday afternoon congregations from the lectern. I've read the Thirty-nine Articles again lately: I don't like the thought of swearing my allegiance to them, but there are heaps of parsons who do excellent work without regarding a great many of them. I like visiting the cottagers and for the most part they seem to like me. I know that at home they all expect me "to go into the Church," as they call it, in the end. The difficulty is about the call. Is the Church my vocation? One thing I would not do and that is to take Orders solely with a view to preferment at school.... No, I could not become a parson unless I felt a clear call and it is that call that I am so uncertain of. I don't like separating myself from my fellow-men by wearing a sombre garb. I believe that it is possible to fulfil one's life-mission quite as well by remaining among the laity. Certainly points of ecclesiastical etiquette give rise to no wild enthusiasms or hatred in my breast. I was educated as a High Churchman and I like incense and vestments, good music and ritual, but I am quite happy with the Evangelicals. I could never get so tempestuously wrathful about minor points of doctrine as that flamboyant, truculent paper that represents the Catholic Anglican party does. I attend Wesleyan chapels and Roman Catholic churches and from all of them I derive some measure of comfort. I have been reading the lessons in church here for the last few Sundays.

Willoughby always laughs at my church-going; like most of the visitors he never enters a place of worship. I see no reason why any man should unless he feels the need of it. I do. He doesn't, and there's an end of it. The psalms and collects and hymns uplift me and the sermons I look forward to more than anything in the week. There is always some strain of philosophy in sermons which appeals to me. I certainly dislike chapel at school, solely because it is compulsory. The sermons, too, there are curiously uneven. Most of the parsons on the staff are good, conscientious Christians, but some are devoted to dogma and others to moral conduct, and they tend to separate these two features of religion absolutely, which I am certain is a mistake.

It is like our Divinity lessons: one has to test whether a boy has done his preparation by asking all sorts of silly questions, while all the time one is longing to preach, to point out the inspiration, to expound the Bible as a complete guide to life. It is very difficult to reconcile the two. My best Divinity scholars are certainly my least reliable boys as regards Christian practice.

I wish I knew where the solution lies. I am tempted always to let the exact knowledge go and preach from a text whenever I go in to class. The object of education is to fit a boy for life, so that he may learn to conduct himself honourably and valiantly wherever he goes. Does our present system succeed in doing this? If not, it is a very serious shortcoming. What we want is much more Christian doctrine taught--it ought to pervade every lesson. There is still far too great a tendency to regard Sundays, chapels, and the Divinity lessons as something quite outside the ordinary things of life: boys are not made to perceive that their whole life is a religion and that where there is no religion there is no life, and that to try to live according to one code of ethics on Sundays and an entirely opposite one all the rest of the week is simply to kill either the spiritual or the material.

During these holidays I have devised several new schemes for next term: I don't know how many of them I shall bring to fruition. I've been reading a good many books on school life lately, but they all seem to me to lack something, I don't quite know what it is. Most novelists at one time or another try their hand at a Public School novel--but I expect that the next generation will smile at our present efforts, just as we do at "Eric, or Little by Little."

H. A. Vachell in "The Hill" wrote a most readable novel and certainly portrayed that amazingly sentimental side that is really very prominent in the human boy. He hates and loves whole-heartedly. Other men and boys become the whitest of heroes and the blackest of villains in his eyes. But beyond this there was nothing of truth to life in what was an exceedingly successful book.

Arnold Lunn in his counterblast to this, "The Harrovians," dwelt too distinctly on the reverse side of the picture, on the more drab side of life at school. He is certainly truer in his descriptions but somehow he missed the soul: "The Harrovians" and "The Hill" are both like Academy pictures.

I don't know if the real Public School novel will ever be written: I don't quite know if it can. In the first place, to make it both readable and true, you must take an exceptional boy like Denis Yorke in St. John Lucas's "The First Round," or those immortal scamps in "Stalky and Co."

The average boy's life is too humdrum to make material for a book: of course a good journalist could make an excellent chapter out of an account of a house or school match. Most novelists are quite bad at this journeyman sort of writing. Modern writers are trying different tactics. The popular way at present is to focus the reader's attention on Common Room. Boys are dull compared with men; their conversations inept; all the normal plots round which novels spin i.e. love-making, are out of place in a boy's life, so clever Hugh Walpole in "Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill" has approached nearer than any one else in presenting at once a readable, exciting and true picture of a certain sort of school. Certainly there are men on the Radchester staff who might have walked straight out of the pages of this remarkable novel. Anything truer than that sordid, lurid picture of the petty jealousies that exist between grown man and man at a school has never been written.

"But surely," said the parson here to me the other night, while we were discussing this, "no two cultivated men of the world would be at daggers drawn simply over a ridiculous umbrella."

"That's just the hideousness of it all," I replied. "Men do behave in that incomprehensible way at schools. They are like naughty children: you'd never believe that they are graduates, picked men, both intellectually and physically. You'd never believe how spiteful and inhuman men can be to one another until you've lived with them in a school. I suppose we see too much of one another. I cannot believe that all schools are like Radchester, but certainly Hugh Walpole must have suffered at one not unlike it."

I have had a great many talks about education with the parson while I have been here: he is very keen on raising the age-limit to sixteen in elementary schools. At present he says that the education they get is of no use to them. There are heaps of boys and girls of eighteen and nineteen in Chagford who can neither read nor write, although they were taught to do both when they were children: as soon as they go on to the farms they find that these accomplishments are not marketable, and so they forget them in an incredibly short space of time. Apparently, too, the standard of morality in village life is deplorably low. When the youths attend church it is, only too frequently, so that they may ogle the girls: the church makes a good rendezvous. Neither drunkenness nor immorality have decreased with the spread of education, nor are the people any more thrifty or ambitious.

The farmers are as ignorant as they were before the Corn Laws were repealed. Altogether he draws a lurid, hopeless picture of the country yokel.

There must be at bottom a wonderfully fine instinct at the heart of every Englishman for, however bad the system of education may be, and that it is bad from the highest to lowest I am becoming surer every day, he still makes a good thing of life.

The Public School product is a fine specimen of a man: he is strictly honest in all his dealings, he will never turn his back on a "pal," he is capable of handling men with sympathy, he can adapt himself at short shrift to almost any circumstance: if only he could be prevailed upon not to despise learning and beauty no other type of man could touch him.

I have lately been trying to understand more of foreign countries through their fiction, particularly Russia. Years ago I read and loved Tolstoi's "Resurrection"; last week I tried to get through "Anna Karenin" and failed. I can't explain quite why, unless it is that Dostoievsky has supplanted him in my estimation. I never read any one in the least like Dostoievsky. I think "The Brothers Karamazov" is the greatest novel I ever read. No man rises from it with exactly the same outlook on life which he had when he sat down to it. Dostoievsky seemed in that book to be on the point of discovering all that hurt and puzzled us about the world: every now and then we seem to get a glimpse millions of years ahead into a timeless, limitless space where truth and beauty at last prevail, and misery and suffering are no more. Everything that he writes seems to turn on this word "suffering." Light, not salvation, comes to man through his capacity to suffer. The characters in "The Brothers Karamazov" are not human beings at all: they are disembodied spirits with an amazing power of self-analysis: this gloomy introspectiveness is the chief feature of all Russian writing. They seem to know so much more than we do about the actions of the human heart: their sympathy with humanity is deeper than ours: we are too apt to dismiss from our thoughts what we do not immediately understand--the more complex a man's character the more we shun him, but the Russian seeks to disintegrate it and account for his contradictory traits: how Iago must appeal to the Russian mind. They appear to be a nation of Hamlets. Those that are not are Lucifers.

I am not pleased with the German mind. There is, in their plays at any rate, an awful playing with fire. Nietzsche paralyses me--this will to power would be frightful if it were ever given full play. The present effect of their refined system of education seems to drive the flower of their youth to suicide. English stupidity is better than German kultur if that is what love of learning leads to. There must be some middle way.

It is a relief to turn to American fiction. All the world seems to be passing through a stage of transition much as it did in the days of the Romantic Revival.

Then all Europe was bothered about the Brotherhood of Man and the Return to Nature; nowadays we are casting off all the conventions of our fathers and pressing towards the rights of the individual to be a law unto himself.

In "Jean Christophe" Romain Rolland seems to be expressing on the Continent what Wells, Bennett, J. D. Beresford, Gilbert Cannan and others are trying to express here, that the young man of to-day is not content to accept religion, or the codes of morality or conduct which his father believed in and acted upon. The new age asks the right to discover a fresh religion for itself and to live according to the light of its own reason. The hero of the modern novel, if hero he can be called, is feckless and unsteady: like Dostoievsky he is continually on the look-out for what is round the corner. He prefers misery to happiness, for out of intense misery and unhappiness he learns to harden himself, in Hugh Walpole's words, by this means alone can he come to real adequate manhood and subdue fear and hypocrisy.

The most outstanding characteristic of the new school of hero is his selfishness: he thinks of no one but himself. It does not matter very much that he should be unhappy: he deserves to be and he almost seems to delight in being so, but unfortunately he brings every one else with whom he comes into contact into a like state--his womenfolk, his parents, are left heart-broken while he continues on his wild way, Mazeppa-like, riding rough-shod over old-established prejudices, subverting the minds of the young, overturning traditions and setting up new gods only to desert them in their turn.

I certainly prefer this new generation to the decadents of the nineties; at least we are spared artificiality, idle philandering, and that delicate languor of lilies and harping on vice as a desirable thing. Our new heroes are never dirty-minded though they frequently perform rotten things. If only they would not think so much they might be quite decent beings.

Unfortunately all these supermen lack the one great essential of all true men, they have no glimmer of humour in their composition. They are so deadly in earnest to find out the meaning of life that they have no time to turn aside and browse in the pastures which Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Charles Lamb and Dickens so enjoyed; the comic spirit seems to be dead in us.

They leave jesting to the music-hall artiste--they have no room for laughter in their scheme of existence. This is where the great American short-story writer scores so heavily. He is incurably romantic and yet alive and alert: he is interested in all humanity and like all sympathetic observers of erring mankind, he can afford to laugh not at but with them at the absurdity of things.

I find in J. M. Synge the best epitome of this age. He has a superb intellect (most of the young writers are prodigiously clever), his style is clear, simple, forcible and exact, and he tears up all our old ideas by the roots. In "The Playboy of the Western World" he has offended his own people of Ireland for all time. They cannot understand the universality of the theme. He did not write his play to show how excellent a thing it is to be a parricide, though incidentally he does carry on the Shavian idea that sons owe no duty to their parents--they did not ask to be born. What he did set out to do was to show how the feckless, unappreciated lout may realize that he has a soul, and how easily he stands alone without love of women or any other sentimental prop when he has found it. Stanley Houghton is another exponent of the twentieth-century philosophy. "Hindle Wakes" merely shows that the new theories of life have spread not only to the other sex, but to mill-girls and shop-girls. Fanny was willing to spend a week-end in the society of a man simply for enjoyment, and refused to bind herself to him for the rest of her life just to satisfy an effete convention. What she wanted and meant to have was freedom: she was well able to take care of herself; she was earning a good wage and had become self-supporting. Her parents might turn her out; she was not, on that account, like the forsaken mistress of the nineties, therefore bound to go on the streets. She could live her life in her own way, beholden to no man.

We are passing through grave and strenuous times and it is quite obvious that we shall have to adapt ourselves to new conditions: "new truths make ancient good uncouth."

We have come a long way from the sentimental, the artificial, the Restoration attitude to life. In the new age men and women are coming to work side by side, are beginning to understand one another better and do not contemplate seductions or marriage whenever they meet.

What are our schools doing to prepare their pupils for this new world? Nothing at all so far as I can see. Masters do not trouble to read the very obvious signs in the sky. At girls' schools I am told the same old methods of stringent secrecy about everything that matters are carried out. The girl of to-day leaves school with an outlook on life formed on an incomplete acquaintance with the world of Jane Austen. There has been no gradual unfolding of the new ideas--what an awakening lies before some of the wives of the next generation. But boys are in no happier case. They are being brought up to believe that they will go out into a world exactly similar to that in which their fathers lived. Theirs too will be a troublous time before they learn the lesson. I don't quite see how the problem is to be tackled. It is scarcely possible to give readings from all the modern novelists to schoolboys: the outspokenness of this new writing is frightening even to adult minds.

What we want is more knowledge; the zeal of the present day is for facts. We want the truth at all costs: we don't mind how much it hurts. We are not like the men who have to create a God if there isn't one, we are able to bear anything except shams and lies; we recognize one aristocracy only, the aristocracy of intellect and truth.

As an honest man I feel that I ought to resign my post at Radchester after reading these moderns, because I am paid to go on retailing hypocritical untruths to my boys. Having caught me out in one falsification they will be suspicious of me altogether. I wonder how much Illingworth and Jefferies already look on me as a charlatan--but then, according to my lights I was proclaiming my faith ... and now, well I find it hard to put down how I stand with regard to the new school of thought. After all, these men are all experimentalists, they are in the position of men who are testing the scaffolding of a house: they say our edifice is insecure, that our props are rotten, that the architects who built our house of life were jerry-builders, but how do we know that these men are any better? I am so afraid of offending the susceptibilities of one of my charges that I dare tell them nothing, but on the other hand, surely it were better for them to be guided now than to be flung without a guide into the maelstrom of conflicting public opinion when they leave school.

If only some of my colleagues had read these new writers it would be so much more helpful. But all books since Dickens and Thackeray are taboo at school as new-fangled and hence ephemeral. The attitude to life of the mid-Victorians is the attitude we ourselves are expected not only to adopt for ourselves but to teach. No wonder we are looked upon as hopeless old fogies by our boys as soon as they leave us.

The old idea that fiction was written as Fielding wrote it, solely for our amusement and not at all for our instruction, appears still to prevail pretty well everywhere, so that even the most omnivorous readers here in Chagford do not take the new men seriously; they think that they are trying to shock and startle us but have no sort of propagandist theory at the back of their minds. It is the same with the theatre. People resent the thought that they might learn something of value by listening to a play: they go to the theatre to be amused, not to be preached at, consequently they miss the point of quite half the plays they see. They are very good lessons for every one except ourselves, but _we_ never need correction.

V

_October 1, 1910_

I have joined the _Times_ Book Club. I find that I cannot get along without a constant supply of new books. I want to keep abreast of modern thought at all costs. I don't see why, because I am condemned to teach Descartes and Pythagoras, I should deny myself Henry James or Bourget. I find that standard works are not enough. There are times when Pope palls on me, when Dickens and Thackeray ask to be given a rest. At such times I want to read some of the new school, the men who have broken away from the old traditions and carved out a new world. Perhaps if I were not in such a deadly fear of getting into a groove I should not pin my faith so largely to these very restless and rather morbid young men, but a schoolmaster seems to be expected to stifle any growth that a nation might be showing signs of, to prevent youth from essaying out of the beaten tracks into the many virgin jungles that surround life.

This term so far is going fairly smoothly. We have a new German master who gets unmercifully "ragged"; O'Connor looks upon him with extreme suspicion. He thinks that the German Government have sent him here purposely to spy out this part of the country. A more harmless fellow than Koenig it would be hard to find. O'Connor really is a prodigious ass. In the first place the man is very nervous: he has no idea of keeping order. Boys have a habit of entering his classroom by the window; they also burn bonfires in his waste-paper basket; they bring mice into form and chase them all over the room; they cheer when any boy gets good marks and hiss when any one fails to score. Altogether his sets derive a considerable amount of amusement from him and we in Common Room profess to be shocked but are in reality secretly pleased to think how infinitely superior we are to him. Nothing gives a man self-confidence so quickly as to see another one making a havoc of his job.

Benson is also getting "ragged," not so much by the boys as by some of the younger members of the staff. Last term we started a club which meets nightly in his rooms and "rouses the welkin with a succession of catches." We drink whisky and consume vast quantities of fruit and cake, while he plays to us on the piano or violin and we shout snatches from the latest musical comedy.

Benson's forte lies in the subject of boys' smoking. He is certain that boys use the music-rooms to smoke in. To encourage him in this idea, several of us have lately dropped cigarette ends in different parts of the building; these he discovers, picks up and treasures, revealing them to us later. He has a wonderful scheme (which he thinks is his own but which in reality we have put him up to) by which he means to catch the miscreants red-handed.

Half of the club are to sit in darkness and silence in one room, the other half in another: we are all to listen until we hear the boys come in, and at a given signal dash out upon them from two directions and so catch them.

Jackson and I have been deputed by the others to dress up and do the smoking; we are to get out of the window after smoking two or three cheap cigarettes one night and then be chased up and down the shore. That is, Benson will do the chasing, the others will slip back in the dark to consume whisky and wait for his return. He will then be told and the sight of his face ought to be good to see.

_October 24, 1910_

We have brought off the rag: it didn't turn out as we expected. Both Jackson and I elaborated the jest. I was produced in a (pretended) faint, covered with mud and bleeding at the nose, after a supposed fight with one of the boys, who "in the end got away by pushing me into a pond." I put so much realism into this that Benson was quite concerned about me. I felt an awful pig and so seriously did Benson take it that we did not feel that we could let him know the truth of the matter.

I have been restless again of late and to cure myself have taken to going into Scarborough and roaming round the streets at night. I find this an excellent remedy. I love watching crowds, especially a seaside crowd. They are so obviously out to enjoy life once work for the day is over. They are hail-fellow-well-met with everybody. I don't know why I get so fascinated with the life of the streets: no one else at Radchester ever thinks of any other strata of society than his own.

I want to probe the drama of life: each lighted window conjures up some vision of domestic comedy or tragedy to me. I want to know. I want to play eavesdropper to whisperers in the dark: I scent romance at every corner of the street. Partly I attribute this to reading O. Henry's short stories. "We live _by_ habits, but _for_ adventure" would seem to be the foundation of his belief about life. The skirts of Romance are always swishing past us; we just hear faintly the sound of her tread, we see dimly the sheen of her garments, but we are so bolstered up and surrounded by convention that we dare not give chase, much as we should like to. So Romance for us, as O. Henry says, comes to mean a mere matter of a marriage or two, a few old letters, and a ball programme stuffed away in a drawer--the memory of one scent-laden evening, and for the rest, our existence consists of a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.

I find that my boys love these American short stories, with their quaint extravagances of language, their three-fold surprise upon surprise, their outspokenness and world-wide sympathies with every sort of man and woman, from train-robber to shop-girl and man about town to murderer and convict.

I have been reading lately Edmund Holmes's book on "What Is and What Might Be." He seems to express the ideals of education better than any one I have ever read: yet no one on the staff does more than sneer or laugh at him as an idealist and an impracticable dreamer. I like particularly his six instinctive desires of youth. Every child, he says, wants passionately (1) to talk and listen, (2) to act (in the dramatic sense), (3) to draw, paint, and model, (4) to dance and sing, (5) to know the why of things, and (6) to construct things. To develop all these six instincts he declares is the true aim of all real education.

How little do we care how well or badly a boy talks, reads, acts, sings, reasons or constructs. If we were to model ourselves on a right system we should pay as much attention to the development of a boy's æsthetic as to his physical side.

As it is we distrust music, painting, acting and reading as effeminate and degrading. We look on the cult of the beautiful as in some degree immoral: O'Connor's theory of Spartan ugliness, of working always in a room as bare as a barracks, unrelieved by colours or comfortable surroundings, is looked on as the ideal method of training youth. Subjects are taught just in so far as they are distasteful: the fact that one can work hard at anything just because it is interesting is regarded as impossible. If one begins to argue you are countered by the shibboleth of "mental discipline," which is supposed to be the final word on any topic of controversy. If grammar grind provides a mental discipline, grammar grind must therefore be invaluable, quite apart from its utilitarian aspect. Consequently boys are taught many things which serve no useful purpose and lead nowhere simply because it is good for them to have to perform arduous, pointless tasks without asking the "why" of them, in direct contravention of Mr. Holmes's theory. The fact that beautiful natural surroundings connote that the mind also assimilates a beauty of demeanour is entirely lost sight of, or flatly contradicted. I should like to impose upon our leading educationists of the old regime one task which they would find distasteful--a very severe "mental discipline" and hence very good for them--I mean a compulsory reading of Mr. Holmes's book: it would do them a world of good.

I find that my greatest joy in life these days is having boys to tea. However much one may mix with them in games, in hall, in form, in debating societies and elsewhere, one somehow misses the personal relationship, whereas at these tea-parties boys are altogether natural and throw off the protective mask they usually wear before masters.

I like to see them pottering about the room, picking books from the shelves, looking at photographs in albums, arguing frenziedly among themselves quite regardless of me, with unrestrained freedom of diction.

Some of the younger ones of course simply regard my rooms as a refuge, a place where it is possible to keep warm in front of a fire, instead of having to sit on the hot-water pipes in the passages, a tuck-shop where one doesn't have to pay and where "bloods" don't come and turn you out of the good seats.

But several who come solely for food stay frequently to talk and unburden themselves of their troubles. It is then that I begin to think that after all there may be some chance of my doing good work as a schoolmaster. I cannot rid myself of the feeling that most of my time here is wasted. I cannot pretend that my mathematical teaching is really successful. Apparently good mathematical tutors are extremely rare: all through the school the standard here is lamentable. We keep on trying new methods and new textbooks, but with very little result. We can secure a dozen good classical scholarships at the University every year, whereas one mathematical exhibition every three years is considered extremely good. Mathematics, like English, is better taught at the grammar and secondary schools than at the Public Schools. I suppose they get more capable teachers at schools which are directly responsible to the Board of Education. I cannot believe that the material they work with is better. Of course, one reason why the secondary schools score so heavily in science and mathematical scholarships is because boys educated at these places know that they will have to depend entirely upon their own efforts to secure a living, whereas the Public School boy usually knows that if he fails entirely to make good there still remains some sinecure or other which he will be able to obtain through his family's influence. This and the fact that he will be rich anyhow combine to make him careless about taking every advantage of improving his mind while he is at school. To do any work which isn't definitely required is to call down upon a boy's head from his friends insult and abuse. The principle of "work for work's sake" is unknown to them: incentives of all sorts have to be provided, the honour of the House, the sporting tendencies of the master who takes them, the possibility of a prize, the fear of punishment, any and every device is employed except the right one.

_December 21, 1910_

I have had my fill of refereeing in House matches this term. Nothing is so calculated to bring one into bad odour with a House or with other members of Common Room. I only do it because they never can get any one else. One strives to be scrupulously fair, and the result is that the whole game devolves into a series of whistles and free kicks. The excitement of playing in a House match causes quite the majority of boys to forget that they are merely playing a game: they try to do everything in their power to secure the advantage, however alien to the spirit of the game. They are told before they go on to the field that unless they lose their tempers and fight from the very beginning they will not do themselves justice, which in itself is counsel of a most doubtful kind; they certainly act up to instructions. Every decision the referee gives is construed as a direct piece of favouritism, and conversation and argument run high on a doubtful try for weeks after the event.

Another thing that I have come up against this term is the dignity of the prefects.

As one grows older one forgets the awe in which these mighty men are held by the school, mighty, that is, if they have been elected for their physical prowess: they are of no account if they are prefects merely because of their intellectual attainments. I have been trying quietly to counteract this state of things by being peculiarly courteous and dignified in my treatment of the scholars and rather hail-fellow-well-met with the "games bloods." They are certainly obtuse, but they quite quickly saw through this. Of course a "games blood" takes infinitely higher rank than any assistant master under thirty, in fact than all of us except the House-masters: he resents being patronized by such an upstart, for instance, as myself. Consequently, by my action in this matter I have let myself in for a feud which may last for years. I have deeply offended the real rulers of the school.