UPTON,
Feb. 3, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--It seems ages since we said good-bye--yet it is not a
week ago. And now I have been at work all day correcting exercises,
teaching, talking. I have had supper with the boys, and I have been
walking about since and talking to them--the nicest part of my work.
They are at this time of the day, as a rule, in good spirits,
charitable, sensible. What an odd thing it is that boys are so
delightful when they are alone, and so tiresome (not always) when they
are together. They seem, in public, to want to show their worst side,
to be ashamed of being supposed to be good, or interested, or
thoughtful, or tender-hearted. They are so afraid of seeming better
than they are, and pleased to appear worse than they are. I wonder why
this is? It is the same more or less with most people; but one sees
instincts at their nakedest among boys. As I go on in life, the one
thing I desire is simplicity and reality; pose is the one fatal thing.
The dullest person becomes interesting if you feel that he is really
himself, that he is not holding up some absurd shield or other in front
of his shivering soul. And yet how hard it is, even when one
appreciates the benefits and beauty of sincerity, to say what one
really thinks, without reference to what one supposes the person one is
talking to would like or expect one to think--and to do it, too,
without brusqueness or rudeness or self-assertion.
Boys are generally ashamed of saying anything that is good about each
other; and yet they are as a rule intensely anxious to be POPULAR, and
pathetically unaware that the shortest cut to popularity is to see the
good points in every one and not to shrink from mentioning them. I once
had a pupil, a simple-minded, serene, ordinary creature, who attained
to extraordinary popularity. I often wondered why; after he had left, I
asked a boy to tell me; he thought for a moment, and then he said, "I
suppose, sir, it was because when we were all talking about other
chaps--and one does that nearly all the time--he used to be as much
down on them as any one else, and he never jawed--but he always had
something nice to say about them, not made up, but as if it just came
into his head."
Well, I must stop; I suppose you are forging out over the Bay, and
sleeping, I hope, like a top. There is no sleep like the sleep on a
steamer--profound, deep, so that one wakes up hardly knowing where or
who one is, and in the morning you will see the great purple
league-long rollers. I remember them; I generally felt very unwell; but
there was something tranquillising about them, all the same--and then
the mysterious steamers that used to appear alongside, pitching and
tumbling, with the little people moving about on the decks; and a mile
away in a minute. Then the water in the wake, like marble, with its
white-veined sapphire, and the hiss and smell of the foam; all that is
very pleasant. Good night, Herbert!--Ever yours,