MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
July 11, 1904.
MY DEAR HERBERT,--I am going to pour out a pent-up woe. I have just
escaped from a very fatiguing experience. I said good-bye this morning,
with real cordiality, to a thoroughly uncongenial and disagreeable
visitor. You will probably be surprised when I tell you his name,
because he is a popular, successful, and, many people hold, a very
agreeable man. It is that ornament of the Bar, Mr. William Welbore,
K.C. His boy is in my house; and Mr. Welbore (who is a widower) invited
himself to stay a Sunday with me in the tone of one who, if anything,
confers a favour. I had no real reason for refusing, and, to speak
truth, any evasion on my part would have been checked by the boy.
It is a fearful bore here to have any one staying in the house at all,
unless he is so familiar an old friend that you can dispense with all
ceremony. I have no guest-rooms to speak of; and a guest is always in
my study when I want to be there, talking when I want to work, or
wanting to smoke at inconvenient times. One's study is also one's
office; boys keep dropping in, and, when I have an unperceptive guest,
I have to hold interviews with boys wherever I can--in passages and
behind doors. What made it worse was that it was a wet Sunday, so that
my visitor sate with me all day, and I have no doubt thought he was
enlivening a dull professional man with some full-flavoured
conversation. Then one has to arrange for separate meals; when I am
alone I never, as you know, have dinner, but go in to the boys' supper
and have a slice of cold meat. But on this occasion I had to have a
dinner-party on Saturday and another on Sunday; and the breakfast hour,
when I expect to read letters and the paper, was taken up with general
conversation. I am ashamed to think how much discomposed I was; but a
schoolmaster is practically always on duty. I wonder how Mr. Welbore
would have enjoyed the task of entertaining me for a day or two in his
chambers! But one ought not, I confess, to be so wedded to one's own
habits; and I feel, when I complain, rather like the rich gentleman who
said to John Wesley, when his fire smoked, "These are some of the
crosses, Mr. Wesley, that I have to bear."
I could have stood it with more equanimity if only Mr. Welbore had been
a congenial guest. But even in the brief time at my disposal I grew to
dislike him with an intensity of which I am ashamed. I hated his
clothes, his boots, his eye-glass, the way he cleared his throat, the
way he laughed. He is a successful, downright, blunt, worldly man, and
is generally called a good fellow by his friends. He arrived in time
for tea on Saturday; he talked about his boy a little; the man is in
this case, unlike Wordsworth's hero, the father of the child; and the
boy will grow up exactly like him. Young Welbore does his work
punctually and without interest; he plays games respectably; he likes
to know the right boys; he is not exactly disagreeable, but he derides
all boys who are in the least degree shy, stupid, or unconventional. He
is quite a little man of the world, in fact. Well, I don't like that
type of creature, and I tried to indicate to the father that I thought
the boy was rather on the wrong lines. He heard me with impatience, as
though I was bothering him about matters which belonged to my province;
and he ended by laughing, not very agreeably, and saying: "Well, you
don't seem to have much of a case against Charlie; he appears to be
fairly popular. I confess that I don't much go in for sentiment in
education; if a boy does his work, and plays his games, and doesn't get
into trouble, I think he is on the right lines." And then he paid me an
offensive compliment: "I hear you make the boys very comfortable, and I
am sure I am obliged to you for taking so much interest in him." He
then went off for a little to see the boy. He appeared at dinner, and I
had invited two or three of the most intelligent of my colleagues. Mr.
Welbore simply showed off. He told stories; he made mirthless legal
jokes. One of my colleagues, Patrick, a man of some originality,
ventured to dispute an opinion of Mr. Welbore's, and Mr. Welbore turned
him inside out, by a series of questions, as if he was examining a
witness, in a good-natured, insolent way, and ended by saying: "Well,
Mr. Patrick, that sort of thing wouldn't do in a law-court, you know;
you would have to know your subject better than that." I was not
surprised, after dinner, at the alacrity with which my colleagues
quitted the scene, on all sorts of professional excuses. Then Mr.
Welbore sate up till midnight, smoking strong cigars, and giving me his
ideas on the subject of education. That was a bitter pill, for he
worsted me in every argument I undertook.
Sunday was a nightmare day; every spare moment was given up to Mr.
Welbore. I breakfasted with him, took him to chapel, took him to the
boys' luncheon, walked with him, sate with him, talked with him. The
strain was awful. The man sees everything from a different point of
view to my own. One ought to be able to put up with that, of course,
and I don't at all pretend that I consider my point of view better than
his; but I had to endure the consciousness that he thought his own
point of view in all respects superior to mine. He thought me a
slow-coach, an old maid, a sentimentalist; and I had, too, the galling
feeling that on the whole he approved of a drudge like myself taking a
rather priggish point of view, and that he did not expect a
schoolmaster to be a man of the world, any more than he would have
expected a curate or a gardener to be. I felt that the man was in his
way a worse prig even than I was, and even more of a Pharisee, because
he judged everything by a certain conventional standard. His idea of
life was a place where you found out what was the right thing to do;
and that if you did that, money and consideration, the only two things
worth having, followed as a matter of course. "Of course he's not my
sort," was the way in which he dismissed almost the only person we
discussed whom I thoroughly admired. So we went on; and I can only say
that the relief I felt when I saw him drive away on Monday morning was
so great as almost to make it worth while having endured his visit. I
think he rather enjoyed himself--at least he threatened to pay me
another visit; and I am sure he had the benevolent consciousness of
having brought a breath of the big world into a paltry life. The big
world! what a terrible place it would be if it was peopled by Welbores!
My only consolation is that men of his type don't achieve the great
successes. They are very successful up to a certain point; they get
what they want. Welbore will be a judge before long, and he has already
made a large fortune. But there is a demand for more wisdom and
generosity in the great places--at least I hope so. Welbore's idea of
the world is a pleasant place where such men as he can make money and
have a good time. He thinks art, religion, beauty, poetry, music, all
stuff. I would not mind that if only he did not KNOW it was stuff. God
forbid that we should pretend to enjoy such things if we do not--and,
after all, the man is not a hypocrite. But his view is that any one who
is cut in a different mould is necessarily inferior; and what put the
crowning touch to my disgust was that on Sunday afternoon we met a
Cabinet Minister, who is a great student of literature. He talked about
books to Mr. Welbore, and Mr. Welbore heard him with respect, because
the Minister was in the swim. He said afterwards to me that people's
foibles were very odd; but he so far respected the Minister's success
as to think that he had a right to a foible. He would have crushed one
of my colleagues who had battled in the same way, with a laugh and a
few ugly words.
Well, let me dismiss Mr. Welbore from my mind. The worst of it is that,
though I don't agree with him, he has cast a sort of blight on my mind.
It is as though I had seen him spit on the face of a statue that I
loved. I don't like vice in any shape; but I equally dislike a person
who has a preference for manly vices over sentimental ones; and the
root of Mr. Welbore's dislike of vice is simply that it tends to
interfere with the hard sort of training which is necessary for success.
Mr. Welbore, as a matter of fact, seems to me really to augur worse for
the introduction of the kingdom of heaven upon earth than any number of
drunkards and publicans. One feels that the world is so terribly
strong, stronger even than sin; and what is worse, there seems to be so
little in the scheme of things that could ever give Mr. Welbore the
lie.--Ever yours,