Part 6

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.