UPTON,
May 21, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have been wondering since I wrote last whether I
could possibly write a school story. I have often desired to try. The
thing has hardly ever been well done. Tom Brown remains the best. Dean
Farrar's books, vigorous in a sense as they are, are too sentimental.
Stalky & Co., as I said in my last letter, in spite of its amazing
cleverness of insight, is not typical. Gilkes' books are excellent
studies of the subject, but lack unity of theme; Tim is an interesting
book, but reflects a rather abnormal point of view; A Day of My Life at
Eton is too definitely humorous in conception, though it has great
verisimilitude.
In the first place the plot is a difficulty; the incidents of school
life do not lend themselves to dramatic situations. Then, too, the
trivialities of which school life is so much composed, the minuteness
of the details involved, make the subject a singularly complicated one;
another great difficulty is to give any idea of the conversations of
boys, which are mainly concerned with small concrete facts and
incidents, and are lacking in humour and flexibility.
Again, to speak frankly, there is a Rabelaisian plainness of speech on
certain subjects, which one must admit to be apt to characterise boys'
conversation, which it is impossible to construct or include, and yet
the omission of which subtracts considerable reality from the picture.
Genius might triumph over all these obstacles, of course, but even a
genius would find it very difficult to put himself back into line with
the immaturity and narrow views of boys; their credulity, their
preoccupations, their conventionality, their inarticulateness--all
these qualities are very hard to indicate. Only a boy could formulate
these things, and no boy has sufficient ease of expression to do so, or
sufficient detachment both to play the part and describe it. A very
clever undergraduate, with a gift of language, might write a truthful
school-book; but yet the task seems to require a certain mellowness and
tolerance which can only be given by experience; and then the very
experience would tend to blunt the sharpness of the impressions.
As a rule, in such books, the whole conception of boyhood seems at
fault; a boy is generally represented as a generous, heedless,
unworldly creature. My experience leads me to think that this is very
wide of the mark. Boys are the most inveterate Tories. They love
monopoly and privilege, they are deeply subservient, they have little
idea of tolerance or justice or fair-play, they are intensely and
narrowly ambitious; they have a certain insight into character, but
there are some qualities, like vulgarity, which they seem incapable of
detecting. They have a great liking for jobs and small indications of
power. They are not, as a rule, truthful; they have no compassion for
weakness. It is generally supposed that they have a strong sense of
liberty, but this is not the case; they are, indeed, tenacious of their
rights, or what they suppose to be their rights, but they have little
idea of withstanding tyranny, they are incapable of democratic
combination, and submit blindly to custom and tradition. Neither do I
think them notably affectionate or grateful; everything that is done
for them within the limits of a prescribed and habitual system they
accept blindly and as a matter of course, while at the same time they
are profoundly affected by any civility or sympathy shown them outside
the ordinary course of life. I mean that they do not differentiate
between a master who takes immense trouble over his work, and
discharges his duties with laborious conscientiousness, and a master
who saves himself all possible trouble; they are not grateful for
labour expended on them, and they do not resent neglect. But a master
who asks boys to breakfast, talks politely to them, takes an interest
in them in a sociable way, will win a popularity which a laborious and
inarticulate man cannot attain to. They are extremely amenable to any
indications of personal friendship, while they are blind to the virtues
of a master who only studies their best interests. They will work, for
instance, with immense vigour for a man who praises and appreciates
industry; but a man who grimly insists on hard and conscientious work
is looked upon as a person who finds enjoyment in a kind of
slave-driving.
Boys are, in fact, profound egoists and profound individualists. Of
course there are exceptions to all this; there are boys of deep
affection, scrupulous honesty, active interests, keen and far-reaching
ambitions; but I am trying to sketch not the exception but the rule.
You will ask what there is left? What there is that makes boys
interesting and attractive to deal with? I will tell you. There is, of
course, the mere charm of youthfulness and simplicity. And the
qualities that I have depicted above are really the superficial
qualities, the conventions that boys adopt from the society about them.
The nobler qualities of human nature are latent in many boys; but they
are for the most part superficially ruled by an intensely strong
mauvaise honte, which leads them to live in two worlds, and to keep the
inner life very sharply and securely ruled off from the outer. They
must be approached tactfully and gently as individuals. It is possible
to establish a personal and friendly relation with many boys, so long
as they understand that it is a kind of secret understanding, and will
not be paraded or traded upon in public. In their inner hearts there
are the germs of many high and beautiful things, which tend, unless a
boy has some wise and tender older friend--a mother, a father, a
sister, even a master--to be gradually obscured under the insistent
demands of his outer life. Boys are very diffident about these matters,
and require to be encouraged and comforted about them. The danger of
public schools, with overworked masters, is that the secret life is apt
to get entirely neglected, and then these germs of finer qualities get
neither sunshine or rain. Public spirit, responsibility, intellectual
interests, unconventional hopes, virtuous dreams--a boy is apt to think
that to speak of such things is to incur the reproach of priggishness;
but a man who can speak of them naturally and without affectation, who
can show that they are his inner life too, and are not allowed to flow
in a sickly manner into his outer life, who has a due and wise reserve,
can have a very high and simple power for good.
But to express all this in the pages of a book is an almost impossible
task; what one wants is to get the outer life briskly and sharply
depicted, and to speak of the inner in hints and flashes.
Unfortunately, the man who really knows boys is apt to get so
penetrated with the pathos, the unrealised momentousness, the sad
shipwrecks of boy life that he is not light-hearted enough to depict
the outer side of it all, and a book becomes morbid and sentimental.
Then, too, to draw a boy correctly would often be to produce a sense of
contrast which would almost give a feeling of hypocrisy, because there
are boys--and not unfrequently the most interesting--who, if fairly
drawn, would appear frivolous, silly, conventional in public, even
coarse, who yet might have very fine things behind, though rarely
visible. Moreover, the natural, lively, chattering boys, whom it would
be a temptation to try and draw, are not really the most interesting.
They tend to develop into bores of the first water in later life. But
the boy who develops into a fine man is often ungainly, shy, awkward,
silent in early life, acutely sensitive, and taking refuge in bluntness
or dumbness.
The most striking instances that have come under my own experience,
where a boy has really revealed the inside of his mind and spirit, are
absolutely incapable of being expressed in words. If I were to write
down what boys have said to me, on critical occasions, the record would
be laughed at as impossible and unnatural.
So you see that the difficulties are well-nigh insuperable. Narrative
would be trivial, conversation affected, motives inexplicable; for,
indeed, the crucial difficulty is the absolute unaccountableness of
boys' actions and words. A schoolmaster gets to learn that nothing is
impossible; a boy of apparently unblemished character will behave
suddenly in a manner that makes one despair of human nature, a black
sheep will act and speak like an angel of light. The interest is the
mystery and the impenetrability of it all; it is so impossible to
foresee contingencies or to predict conduct. This impulsiveness, as a
rule, diminishes in later life under the influence of maturity and
material conditions. But the boy remains insoluble, now a demon, now an
angel; and thus the only conclusion is that it is better to take things
as they come, and not to attempt to describe the indescribable.--Ever
yours,