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.
It came about owing to the fact that I have several prefects (elected
solely for their "beefiness") in my low mathematical sets. They
never do any work and altogether set a rotten example to the others.
Of late I have been punishing these boys very heavily, to the great
astonishment of themselves and no little enjoyment of the other boys.
One of these giants complained to Hallows, his House-master, who came
to me in a towering rage and told me that I was subverting the whole
of the Public School tradition, lowering the dignity of the prefects
and--Heaven knows what besides.
"How the blazes are these fellows going to keep order when the rest of
the school see that a young new master can defy them at will and set
them punishments which degrade them in the sight of their own fags?"
"Wouldn't it be a good idea," I replied, "if prefects were not elected
until they had risen high enough in the school not to have 'fags' in
their forms? After all, one of the reasons for coming to school is to
work, though we seem to do our best to gloss over that inconvenient
fact."
I have had a series of visits lately from Stapleton, who was at Oxford
with me: he has been appointed curate at Todsdale, an enormous mining
town, and the life there is nearly killing him. The eternal squalor
and dreariness of the life, the pettiness of the routine at the Clergy
House, the lack of any intellectual or æsthetic interests all bid fair
to send him out of his mind.
He usually comes over on a motor-bicycle on Thursday afternoons, and
pours out all his troubles as we walk up and down the seashore: he
reads to me his sermons, he gives me graphic accounts of the quarrels
about ceremonial and duty that occur daily over meals in the Clergy
House, of some of the hovels he has to visit, of his opponents among
the laity and so on. He seems to be getting mixed up with some
mill-girl in a way I can't quite understand: it sounds as if her
people were trying their hardest to secure him as a husband for their
daughter: perhaps they know that he has considerable private means,
for the average curate is not much of a catch in the eyes of the
north-country factory worker: he has no prospects.