Chapter V: Part 5

How would I mend all this? Well, I would change methods in the first place. If one wanted to teach a boy French or German effectively, so that he would read and appreciate, one would dispense with much of the grammar, except what was absolutely necessary. In the case of classics it is all done the other way; grammar is a subject in itself; boys have to commit to memory long lists of words and forms which they never encounter; they have to acquire elaborate analyses of different kinds of usages, which are of no assistance in dealing with the language itself. It is beginning with the wrong end of the stick. Grammar is the scientific or philosophical theory of language; it may be an interesting and valuable study for a mind of strong calibre, but it does not help one to understand an author or to appreciate a style.

Then, too, I would sweep away for all but boys of special classical ability most kinds of composition. Fancy teaching a boy side by side with the elements of German or French to compose German and French verse, heroic, Alexandrine, or lyrical! The idea has only to be stated to show its fatuity. I would teach boys to write Latin prose, because it is a tough subject, and it initiates them into the process of disentangling the real sense of the English copy. But I would abolish all Latin verse composition, and all Greek composition of every kind for mediocre boys. Not only would they learn the languages much faster, but there would be a great deal of time saved as well. Then I would abolish the absurd little lessons, with the parsing, and I would at all hazards push on till they could read fluently.

Of course the above improvement of methods is sketched on the hypothesis that both Greek and Latin are retained. Personally I would retain Latin for most, but give up Greek altogether in the majority of cases. I would teach all boys French thoroughly. I would try to make them read and write it easily, and that should be the linguistic staple of their education. Then I would teach them history, mainly modern English history, and modern geography; a very little mathematics and elementary science. Such boys would be, in my belief, well-educated; and they would never be tempted to disbelieve in the usefulness of their education.

When I propound these ideas, my colleagues talk of soft options, and of education without muscle or nerve. My retort is that the majority of boys educated on classical lines are models of intellectual debility as it is. They are uninterested, cynical, and they cannot even read or write the languages which they have been so carefully taught.

What I want is experiment of every kind; but my cautious friends say that one would only get something a great deal worse. That I deny. I maintain that it is impossible to have anything worse, and that the majority of the boys we turn out are intellectually in so negative a condition that any change would be an improvement.

But I effect nothing; nothing is attempted, nothing done. I do my best--fortunately our system admits of that--to teach my private pupils a little history, and I make them write essays. The results are decidedly encouraging; but meanwhile my colleagues go on in the old ways, quite contented, pathetically conscientious, laboriously slaving away, and apparently not disquieted by results.

I am very near the end of my tether--one cannot go on for ever administering a system in which one has lost all faith. If there were signs of improvement I should be content. If our headmaster would even insist upon the young men whom he appoints obtaining a competent knowledge of French and German before they come here it would be something, because then, when the change is made, there would be less friction. But even a new headmaster with liberal ideas would now be hopelessly hampered by the fact that he would have a staff who could not teach modern subjects at all, who knew nothing but classics, and classics only for teaching purposes.

It does me good to pour out my woes to you; I feel my position most acutely at this time of year, when the serious business of the place is cricket. In cricket the boys are desperately and profoundly interested, not so much in the game, as in the social rewards of playing it well. And my worthy colleagues give themselves to athletics with an earnestness which depresses me into real dejection. One meets a few of these beloved men at dinner; a few half-hearted remarks are made about politics and books; a good deal of vigorous gossip is talked; but if a question as to the best time for net-practice, or the erection of a board for the purpose of teaching slip-catches is mentioned, a profound seriousness falls on the group. A man sits up in his chair and speaks with real conviction and heat, with grave gestures. "The afternoon," he says, "is NOT a good time for nets; the boys are not at their best, and the pros. are less vigorous after their dinner. Whatever arrangements are made as to the times for school, the evening MUST be given up to nets."

The result is a pedantry, a priggishness, a solemnity about games which is simply deplorable. The whole thing seems to me to be distorted and out of proportion. I am one of those feeble people to whom exercise is only a pleasure and a recreation. If I don't like a game I don't play it. I do not see why I should be bored by my recreations. An immense number of boys are bored by their games, but they dare not say so because public opinion is so strong. As the summer goes on they avail themselves of every excuse to give up the regular games; and almost the only boys who persevere are boys who are within reach of some coveted "colour," which gives them social importance. What I desire is that boys should be serious about their work in a practical, business-like way, and amused by their games. As a matter of fact they are serious about games and profoundly bored by their work. The work is a relief from the tension of games, and if it were wholly given up, and games were played from morning to night, many boys would break down under the strain. I don't expect all the boys to be enthusiastic about their work; all healthily constituted people prefer play to work, I myself not least. But I want them to believe in it and to be interested in it, in the way that a sensible professional man is interested in his work. What produces the cynicism about work so common in classical schools is that the work is of a kind which does not seem to lead anywhere, and classics are a painful necessity which the boys intend to banish from their mind as soon as they possibly can.

This is a melancholy jeremiad, I am well aware; but it is also a frame of mind which grows upon me; and, to come back to my original proposition, it is the stupidity of virtuous men which is responsible for the continuance of this arid, out-of-joint system.--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
July 22, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--. . . I took a lonely walk to-day, and returned through a new quarter of the town. When I first knew it, thirty years ago, there was a single house here--an old farm, with a pair of pretty gables of mellow brick, and a weathered, solid, brick garden-wall that ran along the road; an orchard below; all round were quiet fields; a fine row of elms stood at the end of the wall. It was a place of no great architectural merit, but it had grown old there, having been built with solidity and dignity, and having won a simple grace from the quiet influences of rain and wind and sun. Very gradually it became engulphed. First a row of villas came down to the farm, badly planned and coarsely coloured; then a long row of yellow-brick houses appeared on the other side, and the house began to wear a shy, regretful air, like a respectable and simple person who has fallen into vulgar company. To-day I find that the elms have been felled; the old wall, so strongly and firmly built, is half down; the little garden within is full of planks and heaps of brick, the box hedges trodden down, the flowers trampled underfoot; the house itself is marked for destruction.

It made me perhaps unreasonably sad. I know that population must increase, and that people had better live in convenient houses near their work. The town is prosperous enough; there is work in plenty and good wages. There is nothing over which a philanthropist and a social reformer ought not to rejoice. But I cannot help feeling the loss of a simple and beautiful thing, though I know it appealed to few people, and though the house was held to be inconvenient and out of date. I feel as if the old place must have acquired some sort of personality, and must be suffering the innocent pangs of disembodiment. I know that there is abundance of the same kind of simple beauty everywhere; and yet I feel that a thing which has taken so long to mature, and which has drunk in and appropriated so much sweetness from the gentle hands of nature, ought not so ruthlessly and yet so inevitably to suffer destruction.

But it brought home to me a deeper and a darker thing still--the sad change and vicissitude of things, the absence of any permanence in this life of ours. We enter it so gaily, and, as a child, one feels that it is eternal. That is in itself so strange--that the child himself, who is so late an inmate of the family home, so new a care to his parents, should feel that his place in the world is so unquestioned, and that the people and things that surround him are all part of the settled order of life. It was, indeed, to me as a child a strange shock to discover, as I did from old schoolroom books, that my mother herself had been a child so short a time before my own birth.

Then life begins to move on, and we become gradually, very gradually, conscious of the swift rush of things. People round us begin to die, and drop out of their places. We leave old homes that we have loved. We hurry on ourselves from school to college; we enter the world. Then, in such a life as my own has been, the lesson comes insistently near. Boys come under our care, little tender creatures; a few days seem to pass and they are young and dignified men; a few years later they return as parents, to see about placing boys of their own; and one can hardly trace the boyish lineaments in the firm-set, bearded faces of manhood.

Then our own friends begin to be called away; faster and faster runs the stream; anniversaries return with horrible celerity; and soon we know that we must die.

What is one to hold on to in such a swift flux of things? The pleasures we enjoy at first fade; we settle down by comfortable firesides; we pile the tables with beloved books; friends go and come; we acquire habits; we find out our real tastes. We learn the measure of our powers. And yet, however simple and clear our routine becomes, we are warned every now and then by sharp lessons that it is all on sufferance, that we have no continuing city; and we begin to see, some later, some earlier, that we must find something to hold on to, something eternal and everlasting in which we can rest. There must be some anchor of the soul. And then I think that many of us take refuge in a mere stoical patience; we drink our glass when it is filled, and if it stands empty we try not to complain.

Now I am turning out, so to speak, the very lining of my mind to you. The anchor cannot be a material one, for there is no security there; it cannot be purely intellectual, for that is a shifting thing too. The well of the spirit is emptied, gradually and tenderly; we must find out what the spring is that can fill it up. Some would say that one's faith could supply the need, and I agree in so far as I believe that it must be a species of faith, in a life where our whole being and ending is such an impenetrable mystery. But it must be a deeper faith even than the faith of a dogmatic creed; for that is shifting, too, every day, and the simplest creed holds some admixture of human temperament and human error.

To me there are but two things that seem to point to hope. The first is the strongest and deepest of human things, the power of love--not, I think, the more vehement and selfish forms of love, the desire of youth for beauty, the consuming love of the mother for the infant--for these have some physical admixture in them. But the tranquil and purer manifestations of the spirit, the love of a father for a son, of a friend for a friend; that love which can light up a face upon the edge of the dark river, and can smile in the very throes of pain. That seems to me the only thing which holds out a tender defiance against change and suffering and death.

And then there is the faith in the vast creative mind that bade us be; mysterious and strange as are its manifestations, harsh and indifferent as they sometimes seem, yet at worst they seem to betoken a loving purpose thwarted by some swift cross-current, like a mighty river contending with little obstacles. Why the obstacles should be there, and how they came into being, is dark indeed. But there is enough to make us believe in a Will that does its utmost, and that is assured of some bright and far-off victory.

A faith in God and a faith in Love; and here seems to me to lie the strength and power of the Christian Revelation. It is to these two things that Christ pointed men. Though overlaid with definition, with false motive, with sophistry, with pedantry, this is the deep secret of the Christian Creed; and if we dare to link our will with the Will of God, however feebly, however complainingly, if we desire and endeavour not to sin against love, not to nourish hate or strife, to hold out the hand again and again to any message of sympathy or trust, not to struggle for our own profit, not to reject tenderness, to believe in the good faith and the good-will of men, we are then in the way. We may make mistakes, we may fail a thousand times, but the key of heaven is in our hands. . . .--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
July 29, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--You must forgive me if this is a very sentimental letter, but this is the day that, of all days in the year, is to me most full of pathos--the last day of the summer half. My heart is like a full sponge and must weep a little. The last few days have been full to the brim of work and bustle--reports to be written, papers to be looked over. Yesterday was a day of sad partings. Half-a-dozen boys are leaving; and I have tried my best to tell them the truth about themselves; to say something that would linger in their minds, and yet to do it in a tender and affectionate way. And some of these boys' hearts are full to bursting too. I remember as if it were yesterday the last meeting at Eton of a Debating Society of which I was a member. We were electing new members and passing votes of thanks. Scott, who was then President and, as you remember, Captain of the Eleven, sate in his high chair above the table; opposite him, with his minute-book, was Riddell, then Secretary--that huge fellow in the Eight, you recollect. The vote of thanks to the President was carried; he said a few words in a broken voice, and sate down; the Secretary's vote of thanks was proposed, and he, too, rose to make acknowledgment. In the middle of his speech we were attracted by a movement of the President. He put his head in his hands and sobbed aloud. Riddell stopped, faltered, looked round, and leaving his sentence unfinished, sate down, put his face on the book and cried like a child. I don't think there was a dry eye in the room. And these boys were not sentimental, but straightforward young men of the world, honest, and, if anything, rather contemptuous, I had thought, of anything emotional. I have never forgotten that scene, and have interpreted many things in the light of it.

Well, this morning I woke early and heard all the bustle of departure. Depression fell on me; soon I got up, with a blessed sense of leisure, breakfasted at my ease, saw one or two boys, special friends, who came to me very grave and wistful. Then I wrote letters and did business; and this afternoon--it is fearfully hot--I have been for a stroll through the deserted fields and street.

So another of these beautiful things which we call the summer half is over, never to be renewed. There has been some evil, of course. I wish I could think otherwise. But the tone is good, and there have been none of those revelations of darkness that poison the mind. There has been idleness (I don't much regret that), and of course the usual worries. But the fact remains that a great number of happy, sensible boys have been living perhaps the best hours of their life, with equal, pleasant friendships, plenty of games, some wholesome work and discipline to keep all sweet, with this exquisite background of old towers and high-branching elms, casting their shade over rich meadow-grass; the scene will come back to these boys in weary hours, perhaps in sun-baked foreign lands, perhaps in smoky offices--nay, even on aching deathbeds, parched with fever.

The whole place has an incredibly wistful air, as though it missed the young life that circulated all about it; as though it spread its beauties out to be used and enjoyed, and wondered why none came to claim them. As a counterpoise to this I like to think of all the happiness flowing into hundreds of homes; the father and mother waiting for the sound of the wheels that bring the boy back; the children who have gone down to the lodge to welcome the big brothers with shouts and kisses; and the boy himself, with all the dear familiar scene and home faces opening out before him. We ought not to grudge the loneliness here before the thought of all those old and blessed joys of life that are being renewed elsewhere.

But I am here, a lonely man, wondering and doubting and desiring I hardly know what. Some nearness of life, some children of my own. You are apt to think of yourself as shelved and isolated; yet, after all, you have the real thing--wife, children, and home. But, in my case, these boys who are dear to me have forgotten me already. Disguise it as I will, I am part of the sordid furniture of life that they have so gladly left behind, the crowded corridor, the bare-walled schoolroom, the ink-stained desk. They are glad to think that they have not to assemble to-morrow to listen to my prosing, to bear the blows of the uncle's tongue, as Horace says. They like me well enough--for a schoolmaster; I know some of them would even welcome me, with a timorous joy, to their own homes.

I have had the feeling of my disabilities brought home to me lately in a special way. There is a boy in my house that I have tried hard to make friends with. He is a big, overgrown creature, with a perfectly simple manner. He has innumerable acquaintances in the school, but only a very few friends. He is amiable with every one, but guards his heart. He is ambitious in a quiet way, and fond of books, and, being brought up in a cultivated home, he can talk more unaffectedly and with a more genuine interest about books than any boy I have ever met. Well, I have done my best, as I say, to make friends with him. I have lent him books; I have tried to make him come and see me; I have talked my best with him, and he has received it all with polite indifference; I can't win his confidence, somehow. I feel that if I were only not in the tutorial relation, it would be easy work. But perhaps I frightened him as a little boy, perhaps I bored him; anyhow the advances are all on my side, and there seems a hedge of shyness through which I cannot break. Sometimes I have thought it is simply a case of "crabbed age and youth," and that I can't put myself sufficiently in line with him. I missed seeing him last night--he was out at some school festivity, and this morning he has gone without a word or a sign. I have made friends a hundred times with a tenth of the trouble, and I suppose it is just because I find this child so difficult to approach that I fret myself over the failure; and all the more because I know in my heart that he is a really congenial nature, and that we do think the same about many things. Of course, most sensible people would not care a brass farthing about such an episode, and would succeed where I have failed, because I think it is the forcing of attentions upon him that this proud young person resents. I must try and comfort myself by thinking that my very capacity for vexing myself over the business is probably the very thing which makes it easy as a rule for me to succeed.

Well, I must turn to my books and my bicycle and my writing for consolation, and to the blessed sense of freedom which luxuriates about my tired brain. But books and art and the beauties of nature, I begin to have a dark suspicion, are of the nature of melancholy consolations for the truer stuff of life--for friendships and loves and dearer things.

I sit writing in my study, the house above me strangely silent. The evening sun lies golden on the lawn and among the apple-trees of my little orchard; but the thought of the sweet time ended lies rather heavy on my heart--the wonder what it all means, why we should have these great hopes and desires, these deep attachments in the short days that God gives us. "What a world it is for sorrow," wrote a wise and tender-hearted old schoolmaster on a day like this; "and how dull it would be if there were no sorrow." I suppose that this is true; but to be near things and yet not to grasp them, to desire and not to attain, and to go down to darkness in the end, like the shadow of a dream--what can heal and sustain one in the grip of such a mood?--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
Aug. 4, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have just been over to Woodcote; I have had a few days here alone at the end of the half, and was feeling so stupid and lazy this morning that I put a few sandwiches in my pocket and went off on a bicycle for the day. It is only fifteen miles from here, so that I had two or three hours to spend there. You know I was born at Woodcote and lived there till I was ten years old. I don't know the present owner of the Lodge, where we lived; but if I had written and asked to go and see the house, they would have invited me to luncheon, and all my sense of freedom would have gone.

It is thirty years since we left, and I have not been there, near as it is, for twenty years. I did not know how deeply rooted the whole scene was in my heart and memory, but the first sight of the familiar places gave me a very curious thrill, a sort of delicious pain, a yearning for the old days--I can't describe it or analyse it. It seemed somehow as if the old life must be going on there behind the pine-woods if I could only find it; as if I could have peeped over the palings and seen myself going gravely about some childish business in the shrubberies. I find that my memory is curiously accurate in some respects, and curiously at fault in others. The scale is all wrong. What appears to me in memory to be an immense distance, from Woodcote to Dewhurst, for instance, is now reduced to almost nothing; and places which I can see quite accurately in my mind's eye are now so different that I can hardly believe that they were ever like what I recollect of them. Of course the trees have grown immensely; young plantations have become woods, and woods have disappeared. I spent my time in wandering about, retracing the childish walks we used to take, looking at the church, the old houses, the village green, and the mill-pool. One thing came home to me very much. When I was born my father had only been settled at Woodcote for two years; but, as I grew up, it seemed to me we must have lived there for all eternity; now I see that he was only one in a long procession of human visitants who have inhabited and loved the place. Another thing that has gone is the mystery of it all. Then, every road was a little ribbon of familiar ground stretching out to the unknown; all the fields and woods which lay between the roads and paths were wonderful secret places, not to be visited. I find I had no idea of the lie of the ground, and, what is more remarkable, I don't seem ever to have seen the views of the distance with which the place now abounds. I suppose that when one is a small creature, palings and hedges are lofty obstacles; and I suppose also that the little busy eyes are always searching the nearer scene for things to FIND, and do not concern themselves with what is far. The sight of the Lodge itself, with its long white front among the shrubberies and across the pastures was almost too much for me; the years seemed all obliterated in a flash, and I felt as if it was all there unchanged.

I suppose I had a very happy childhood; but I certainly was not in the least conscious of it at the time. I was a very quiet, busy child, with all sorts of small secret pursuits of my own to attend to, to which lessons and social engagements were sad interruptions; but now it seems to me like a golden, unruffled time full of nothing but pleasure. Curiously enough, I can't remember anything but the summer days there; I have no remembrance of rain or cold or winter or leafless trees--except days of snow when the ponds were frozen and there was the wild excitement of skating. My recollections are all of flowers, and roses, and trees in leaf, and hours spent in the garden. In the very hot summer weather my father and mother used to dine out in the garden, and it seems now to me as if they must have done so all the year round; I can remember going to bed, with my window open on to the lawn, and hearing the talk, and the silence, and then the soft clink of the things being removed as I sank into sleep. It is a great mystery, that faculty of the mind for forgetting all the shadows and remembering nothing but the sunlight; it is so deeply rooted in humanity that it is hard not to believe that it means something; one dares to hope that if our individual life continues after death, this instinct--if memory remains--will triumph over the past, even in the case of lives of sordid misery and hopeless pain.

Then, too, one wonders what the strong instinct of permanence means, in creatures that inhabit the world for so short and troubled a space; why instinct should so contradict experience; why human beings have not acquired in the course of centuries a sense of the fleetingness of things. All our instincts seem to speak of permanence; all our experience points to swift and ceaseless change. I cannot fathom it.

As I wandered about Woodcote my thoughts took a sombre tinge, and the lacrimae rerum, the happy days gone, the pleasant groups broken up to meet no more, the old faces departed, the voices that are silent--all these thoughts began to weigh on my mind with a sad bewilderment. One feels so independent, so much the master of one's fate; and yet when one returns to an old home one begins to wonder whether one has any power of choice at all. There is this strange fence of self and identity drawn for me round one tiny body; all that is outside of it has no existence for me apart from consciousness. These are fruitless thoughts, but one cannot always resist them; and why one is here, what these vivid feelings mean, what one's heart-hunger for the sweet world and for beloved people means--all this is dark and secret; and the strong tide bears us on, out of the little harbour of childhood into unknown seas.

Dear Woodcote, dear remembered days, beloved faces and voices of the past, old trees and fields! I cannot tell what you mean and what you are; but I can hardly believe that, if I have a life beyond, it will not somehow comprise you all; for indeed you are my own for ever; you are myself, whatever that self may be.--Ever yours,

T. B.

P.S.--By the way, I want you to do something for me; I want a MAP of your house and of the sitting-rooms. I want to see where you usually sit, to read or write. And more than that, I want a map of the roads and paths round about, with your ordinary walks and strolls marked in red. I don't feel I quite realise the details enough.

SENNICOTTS,
HONEY HILL,
EAST GRINSTEAD,
Aug. 9, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--I am making holiday, with the voice of praise and thanksgiving, like the people in the Psalm, and working, oh! how gratefully, at one of my eternal books. Depend upon it, for simple pleasure, there is nothing like writing. I am staying with Bradby, who has taken a cottage in Sussex. He has had his holiday, so that he goes up to town every day; it does not sound very friendly to say that this arrangement exactly suits me, but so it is. I work and write in the morning, walk or bicycle in the afternoon, and then we dine together, and spend peaceful evenings, reading or talking.

But this is not the point. I came in yesterday to tea, saw an unfamiliar hat in the hall, and found to my surprise James Cooper, whom you remember at Eton as a boy. I knew him a little there, and saw a good deal of him at Cambridge; and we have kept up a very fitful correspondence at long intervals ever since.

I am ashamed to confess that I was bored, though I trust to Heaven I did not show it; I had come back from my ride brimming over with ideas, and was in the condition of a person who is holding his breath, dying to blow it all out. Cooper said that he had heard that I was in the neighbourhood, and he had accordingly come over, a considerable distance, to see me. He is in business, and appears to be prospering. We had tea, and there was a good deal to talk about; but Cooper showed no signs of moving, and said at last that he thought he would stay and see Bradby--perhaps dine with us. So we walked about the garden, and I gradually became aware, with regret and misery, that I was in the presence of a bore. Yes, James Cooper is a bore! He had a great deal to say, mostly on subjects with which I was not acquainted. He has become a botanist, and seemed full to the brim of uninteresting information. He stayed till Bradby came, he dined, he talked. At last he decided he must go; but he talked in the hall, he talked in the porch. He pressed us to come over and see him, and it was evidently a great pleasure to him to meet us again. Since his visit I have been pondering deeply. What is one's duty in these matters? How far ought loyalty to old friends to go? I confess that I am somewhat vexed and dissatisfied with myself for not being more simply pleased to see an old comrade--actae non alio rege puertiae, and all that. But what if the old comrade is a bore? What are the claims of friendship on busy men? I have a good many old friends in all parts of England--ought I to use my holidays in touring about to see them? I am inclined to think that I am not bound to do so. But suppose that Cooper goes away, and says to another friend that I am a man who forgets old ties; that he took some trouble to see me, and found me absorbed, and not particularly glad to see him? I hope, indeed, that this was not his impression; but boredom is a subtle thing, and it is difficult to keep it out of one's manner, however religiously one tries to be cheerful. Well, if he DOES feel thus, is he right and am I wrong? His whole life lies on different lines to my own, and though we had much in common in the old pleasant days, we have not much in common now. It is quite possible that he thinks I am a bore; and it is even possible that he is right there too. But, que faire? que penser? I can honestly say that if Cooper wanted my help, my advice, my sympathy, I would give it him without grudging. But is it a part of loyalty that I must desire to see him, and even to be bored by him? I am inclined to think that if I had a simpler, more affectionate nature, I should probably NOT be bored, but that in my gladness at the sight of an old friend and the reviving of old memories, the idea of criticism would die a natural death.

What I have suffered from all my life is making friends too easily. It is so painful to me being with a person who seems to be dull, that I have always instinctively tried to be interested in, and to interest my companion. The result has been--I am making a very barefaced confession--that I have been often supposed to be more friendly than I really am, and to allow a certain claim of loyalty to be established which I could not sincerely sustain.--Ever yours,

T. B.

KNAPSTEAD VICARAGE,
BALDOCK,
Aug. 14, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--A curious little incident occurred to me yesterday--so curious, so inexplicable, that I cannot refrain from telling it to you, though it has no solution and no moral so far as I can see. I am staying with an old family friend, Duncan by name--you don't know him--who is a parson near Hitchin. We were to have gone for a bicycle ride together, but he was called away on sudden business, and as the only other member of the party is my friend's wife, who is much of an invalid, I went out alone.

I went off through Baldock and Ashwell. And I must interrupt my story for a moment to tell you about the latter. Above a large hamlet of irregularly built and scattered white houses, many of them thatched, most of them picturesque, rises one of the most beautiful, mouldering church towers I have ever seen. It is more like a weather-worn crag-pinnacle than a tower; it is of great height, and the dim and blurred outlines of its arched windows and buttresses communicate a singular grace of underlying form to the broken and fretted stone. I fear that it must before long be restored, if it is to hold together much longer; all I can say is that I am thankful to have seen it in its hour of decay. It is infinitely patient and pathetic. Its solemn, ruinous dignity, its tender grace, make it like some aged and sanctified spirit that has borne calamity and misfortune with a sweet and gentle trust. A little farther on in the village is another extraordinarily beautiful thing. The road, while still almost in the street, passes across a little embankment; and on the left hand you look down into a pit, like a quarry, full of ash-trees, and with a thick undergrowth of bushes and tall plants. From a dozen little excavations leap and bicker crystal rivulets of water, hurrying down stony channels, uniting in a pool, and then moving off, a full-fed stream, among quiet water-meadows. It is one of the sources of the Cam. The water is deliciously cool and clear, running as it does straight off the chalk. No words of mine can do justice to the wonderful purity and peace of the place. I found myself murmuring over those perfect lines of Marvell--you know them?--

"Might a soul bathe there and be clean,
And slake its drought?"

These two sights, the tower and the well-head, put my mind into tune; and I went on my way rejoicing, with that delicate elation of spirit that rarely visits one. Everything I saw had an airy quality, a flavour, an aroma, I know not how to describe it. Now I caught the sunlight on the towering greenness of an ancient elm; now a wide view over flat pastures, with a pool fringed deep in rushes, came in sight; now an old manorial farm held up its lichened chimneys above a row of pollarded elms. I came at last, by lanes and byways, to a silent village that seemed entirely deserted. The men, I suppose, were all working in the fields; the cottage doors stood open; near the little common rose an old high-shouldered church, much overgrown with ivy. The sun lay pleasantly upon its leaded roof, and among the grass-grown graves. I left my bicycle by the porch, and at first could not find an entrance; but at last I discovered that a low, priest's door that led into the chancel, was open. The church had an ancient and holy smell. It was very cool in there out of the sun. I turned into the nave, and wandered about for a few moments, noting the timbered roof, the remains of old frescoes on the walls; the tomb of a knight who lay still and stiff, his head resting on his hand. I read an epitaph or two, with the faint cry of love and grief echoing through the stilted phraseology of the tomb, and then I went back to the altar.

On a broad slab of slate, immediately below the altar steps, lay something dark; I bent down to look at it, and then realised, with a curious sense of horror, that it was a little pool of blood; beside it lay two large jagged stones, also stained with blood, which had dried into a viscous paste upon them. It seemed as if the stoning of some martyr had taken place, and that, the first horrible violence done, the deed had been transferred to the open air. What made it still stranger to me was that in the east window was a rude representation of the stoning of Stephen; and I have since discovered that the church is dedicated to him.

I cannot give you the smallest hint of explanation. Indeed, pondering over it, I cannot conceive of any circumstances which can in any way account for what I saw. I wandered out into the churchyard--for the sight gave me a curious chill of horror--and I could see nothing that could further enlighten me. A few yards beyond stood the rectory, embowered in thickets. It seemed to be deserted; the windows were dark and undraped; no smoke went up from the chimneys. It suddenly appeared to me that I must be the victim of some strange hallucination, So I stepped again within the church to see if my senses had played me false. But no! there were the stones, and the blood beside them.

The sun began to decline to his setting; the shadows lengthened and darkened, as I rode slowly away, with a shadow on my spirit. I felt I had somehow seen a type, a mystery. These incidents do not befall one by chance, and I was sure, in some remote way, that I had looked, as it were, for a moment into a dark avenue of the soul; that I was bidden to think, to ponder. These tokens of violence and death, the blood outpoured, in witness of pain, in the heart of the quiet sanctuary, before the very altar of the God of peace and love. What is it that we do that is like that? What is it that _I_ do? I will not tell you how the message shaped itself for me; perhaps you can guess; but it came, it formed itself out of the dark, and in that silent hour a voice called sharply in my spirit.

But I must not end thus. I came home; I told my tale; I found my friend returned. He nodded gravely and wonderingly, and I think he half understood. But his wife was full of curiosity. She made me tell and retell the incident. "Was there no one you could ask?" she said; "I would not have rested till I had solved it." She even bade me tell her the name of the place, but I refused. "Do you mean to say you don't WANT to know?" she said. "No," I said; "I had rather not know." To which, rather petulantly, she said, "Oh, you MEN!" That evening a neighbouring parson, his wife, and daughter, came to dine. I was bidden to tell my story again, and the same scene was re-enacted. "Was there no one you could find to ask?" said the girl. I laughed and said, "I daresay I could have found some one, but I did not want to know. I had rather have my little mystery," I added; and then we men interchanged a nod, while the women looked sharply at each other. "Is it not quite incredible?" my friend's wife said. And the daughter added, "I, for one, will not rest till I have discovered."

That, I suppose, is the difference between the masculine and the feminine mind. You will understand me; but read the story to your wife and daughters, and they will say, "Was there no one he could have asked?" and "I would not rest till I had discovered." Meanwhile I only hope that my maiden's efforts will prove unavailing.--Ever yours,

T. B.

GREENHOWE,
SEDBERGH,
Aug. 21, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--I suppose I am very early Victorian in my tastes; but I have just been reading Jane Eyre again with intense satisfaction. (I will tell you presently WHY I have been reading it.) I read it first as a boy at Eton, and I must have read it twenty times since. I know that much of it is grotesque, but it seems to me that its grotesqueness is not absurd, any more than the stiff animals and trees or hills in the early Italian pictures are absurd; one smiles, not contemptuously, but tenderly at it all.

Again, there are two ways of treating a work of art. If a portrait, for instance, is intensely realistic and true to its original, one says, "How lifelike!" If it is widely unlike the original, one can always say, "How symbolical!" Of the first kind of portrait one may say that it brings the man before you; of the latter you may say that the artist has striven to paint the soul rather than the body. Well, I think it is fair to call Jane Eyre symbolical. Some of the people depicted are very true to life. The old, comfortable, good-humoured housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax; Bessie the nursemaid; Adele, the little French girl, Mr. Rochester's ward; the two Rivers sisters--they are admirable portraits. But Mr. Rochester, the haughty Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park, Miss Ingram, who says to the footman, "Leave that chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding," St. John Rivers, the blue-eyed fanatic--these are caricatures or types, according as you like to view them. To me they are types: characters finely conceived, and only exaggerated because Charlotte Bronte had never mixed with people of that species in ordinary life. But I think that one can see into the souls of these people in spite of the exaggerations of speech and gesture and behaviour which disfigure them. Yet it is not primarily for the character-drawing that I value the book. What attracts me is the romance, the beauty, the poetry of the whole, and a special union of intellectual force, with passion at white heat, which breathes through them. The love scenes have the same strange glow that I always feel in Tennyson's "Come into the garden, Maud," where the pulse of the lover thrills under one's hand with the love that beats from the heart of the world. And then, too, Charlotte Bronte seems to me to have had an incomparable gift of animating a natural scene with vivid human emotions. The frost-bound day, when the still earth holds its breath, when the springs are congealed, and the causeway is black with slippery ice, in that hour when Jane Eyre first sees Mr. Rochester; and again the scene in the summer garden, just before the thunderstorm, when Mr. Rochester calls her to look at the great hawk-moth drinking from the flower chalice. Such scenes have a vitality that makes them as real to me as scenes upon which my own eyes have rested.

Again, I know no writer who has caught the poetry of the hearth like Charlotte Bronte. The evening hours, when the fire leaps in the chimney, and the lamp is lit, and the homeless wind moans outside, and the contented mind possesses its dreams--I know nothing like that in any book.

Indeed, I do not know any books which give me quite the sense of genius that Charlotte Bronte's bring me. I find it difficult to define where the genius lies; but the love which she dares to depict seems to me to have a different quality to any other love; it is the passionate ardour of a pure soul; it embraces body, mind, and heart alike; it is a love that pierces through all disguises, and is the worship of spirit for spirit at the very root of being; such love is not lightly conceived or easily given; it is not born of chance companionship, of fleshly desire, of a craving to share the happiness of a buoyant spirit of sunshine and sweetness; it is rather nurtured in gloom and sadness, it demands a corresponding depth and intensity, it requires to discern in its lover a deep passion for the beauty of virtue. It is one of the triumphs of Jane Eyre that the love she feels for Mr. Rochester pierces through those very superficial vices which would be most abhorrent to the pure nature, if it were not for the certainty that such vice was the disguise and not the essence of the soul. And here lies, I think, the uplifting hopefulness of Jane Eyre, the Christ-like power of recognising the ardent spirit of love behind gross faults of both the animal and the intellectual nature.

I do not know if you ever came across a book--I must send it you if you have not seen it--which moves me and feeds my spirit more than almost any book I know--the Letters and Journals of William Cory. He was a master at Eton, you know, but before our time; and his life was rather a disappointed one; but he had that remarkable union of qualities which I think is very rare--hard intellectual force with passionate tenderness. I suppose that, as far as mental ability went, he was one of the very foremost men of his day. He had a faultless memory, great clearness and vigour of thought, and perfect lucidity of expression. But he valued these gifts very little in comparison with feeling, which was his real life. It always interests me deeply to find that he had the same opinion of Charlotte Bronte that I hold; and indeed I have always thought that, allowing for a difference of nationality, he was very much the kind of man whom she depicted in Villette as Paul Emmanuel.

Personality is, after all, the ultimate foundation of art, and I think that what I value most of all in Charlotte Bronte's books is the revelation of herself that they afford. The shy, frail, indomitable, ardent creature, inured to poverty and hardness, without illusions, without material temptations, but all aglow with the sacred fire--such is the character that here emerges. Charlotte Bronte as a writer seems to me like a burning-glass which concentrates on one intense point the fiercest fire of the soul. I would humbly believe that there is much of this spirit in the world, but that it seldom co-exists with the artistic power, the intellectual force, that enables it to express itself.

And now I will tell you what has made me take up Jane Eyre again at this time. I was bicycling a day or two ago in a secluded valley under the purple heights of Ingleboro'. I passed a little village, with a big building standing by a stream below the road, called Lowood. It came into my head as a pleasant thought that some place like this might have been the scene of the schooldays of Jane Eyre; but I thought no more of it, till a little while after I saw a tablet in the wall of a house by the wayside. I dismounted, and behold! it was the very place, the very building where Charlotte Bronte spent her schooldays. It was a low, humble building, now divided into cottages. But you can still see the windows of the dormitory, the little kitchen garden, the brawling stream, the path across the meadows, and, beyond all, the long line of the moor. In a house just opposite was a portrait of Mr. Brocklehurst himself (his real name was Carus-Wilson), so sternly, and I expect unjustly, gibbetted in the book. That was a very sacred hour for me. I thought of Miss Temple and Helen Burns; I thought of the cold, the privation, the rigour of that comfortless place. But I felt that it was good to be there. I drew nearer in that hour to the unquenched spirit that battled so gloriously with life and with its worst terrors and sorrows, and that wrote so firmly and truly its pure hopes and immortal dreams. . . .--Ever yours,

T. B.

ASHFIELD,
SETTLE,
Aug. 27, 1904.

DEAR HERBERT,--You ask me to send you out some novels, and you have put me in a difficulty. It seems hardly worth while sending out books which will just be read once or twice in a lazy mood and then thrown aside; yet I can find no others. It seems to me that our novelists are at the present moment affected by the same wave which seems to be passing over the whole of our national life; we have in every department a large number of almost first-rate people, men of talent and ability; but very few geniuses, very few people of undisputed pre-eminence. In literature this is particularly the case; poets, historians, essayists, dramatists, novelists; there are so many that reach a high level of accomplishment, and do excellent work; but there are no giants, or they are very small ones. Personally, I do not read a great many novels; and I find myself tending to revert again and again to my old favourites.