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The Upton Letters

by Arthur Christopher Benson · English · Gutenberg #4615 · 421,843 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Upton Letters

Author: Arthur Christopher Benson


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #4615]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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Produced by Don Lainson and Charles Aldarondo. HTML version
by Al Haines.










THE UPTON LETTERS


By

ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON



aedae muri' eseidon oneirata, koudepo aos.



1905






PREFACE


These letters were returned to me, shortly after the death of the
friend to whom they were written, by his widow. It seems that he had
been sorting and destroying letters and papers a few days before his
wholly unexpected end. "We won't destroy these," he had said to her,
holding the bulky packet of my letters in his hand; "we will keep them
together. T---- ought to publish them, and, some day, I hope he will."
This was not, of course, a deliberate judgement; but his sudden death,
a few days later, gives the unconsidered wish a certain sanctity, and I
have determined to obey it. Moreover, she who has the best right to
decide, desires it. A few merely personal matters and casual details
have been omitted; but the main substance is there, and the letters are
just as they were written. Such hurried compositions, of course, abound
in literary shortcomings, but perhaps they have a certain spontaneity
which more deliberate writings do not always possess. I wrote my best,
frankest, and liveliest in the letters, because I knew that Herbert
would value both the thought and the expression of the thought. And,
further, if it is necessary to excuse so speedy a publication, I feel
that they are not letters which would gain by being kept. Their
interest arises from the time, the circumstance, the occasion that gave
them birth, from the books read and criticised, the educational
problems discussed; and thus they may form a species of comment on a
certain aspect of modern life, and from a definite point of view. But,
after all, it is enough for me that he appreciated them, and, if he
wished that they should go out to the world, well, let them go! In
publishing them I am but obeying a last message of love.

T. B.
  MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
    Feb. 20, 1905.





THE UPTON LETTERS



MONK'S ORCHARD, UPTON,
  Jan. 23, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have just heard the disheartening news, and I write
to say that I am sorry toto corde. I don't yet know the full extent of
the calamity, the length of your exile, the place, or the conditions
under which you will have to live. Perhaps you or Nelly can find time
to let me have a few lines about it all? But I suppose there is a good
side to it. I imagine that when the place is once fixed, you will be
able to live a much freer life than you have of late been obliged to
live in England, with less risk and less overshadowing of anxiety. If
you can find the right region, renovabitur ut acquila juventus tua; and
you will be able to carry out some of the plans which have been so
often interrupted here. Of course there will be drawbacks. Books,
society, equal talk, the English countryside which you love so well,
and, if I may use the expression, so intelligently; they will all have
to be foregone in a measure. But fortunately there is no difficulty
about money, and money will give you back some of these delights. You
will still see your real friends; and they will come to you with the
intention of giving and getting the best of themselves and of you, not
in the purposeless way in which one drifts into a visit here. You will
be able, too, to view things with a certain detachment--and that is a
real advantage; for I have sometimes thought that your literary work
has suffered from the variety of your interests, and from your being
rather too close to them to form a philosophical view. Your love of
characteristic points of natural scenery will help you. When you have
once grown familiar with the new surroundings, you will penetrate the
secret of their charm, as you have done here. You will be able, too, to
live a more undisturbed life, not fretted by all the cross-currents
which distract a man in his own land, when he has a large variety of
ties. I declare I did not know I was so good a rhetorician; I shall end
by convincing myself that there is no real happiness to be found except
in expatriation!

Seriously, my dear Herbert, I do understand the sadness of the change;
but one gets no good by dwelling on the darker side; there are and will
be times, I know, of depression. When one lies awake in the morning,
before the nerves are braced by contact with the wholesome day; when
one has done a tiring piece of work, and is alone, and in that frame of
mind when one needs occupation but yet is not brisk enough to turn to
the work one loves; in those dreary intervals between one's work, when
one is off with the old and not yet on with the new--well I know all
the corners of the road, the shadowy cavernous places where the demons
lie in wait for one, as they do for the wayfarer (do you remember?), in
Bewick, who, desiring to rest by the roadside, finds the dingle all
alive with ambushed fiends, horned and heavy-limbed, swollen with the
oppressive clumsiness of nightmare. But you are not inexperienced or
weak. You have enough philosophy to wait until the frozen mood thaws,
and the old thrill comes back. That is one of the real compensations of
middle age. When one is young, one imagines that any depression will be
continuous; and one sees the dreary, uncomforted road winding ahead
over bare hills, till it falls to the dark valley. But later on one can
believe that "the roadside dells of rest" are there, even if one cannot
see them; and, after all, you have a home which goes with you; and it
would seem to be fortunate, or to speak more truly, tenderly prepared,
that you have only daughters--a son, who would have to go back to
England to be educated, would be a source of anxiety. Yet I find myself
even wishing that you had a son, that I might have the care of him over
here. You don't know the heart-hunger I sometimes have for young things
of my own to watch over; to try to guard their happiness. You would say
that I had plenty of opportunities in my profession; it is true in a
sense, and I think I am perhaps a better schoolmaster for being
unmarried. But these boys are not one's own; they drift away; they come
back dutifully and affectionately to talk to their old tutor; and we
are both of us painfully conscious that we have lost hold of the
thread, and that the nearness of the tie that once existed exists no
more.

Well, I did not mean in this letter to begin bemoaning my own sorrows,
but rather to try and help you to bear your own. Tell me as soon as you
can what your plans are, and I will come down and see you for the last
time under the old conditions; perhaps the new will be happier. God
bless you, my old friend! Perhaps the light which has hitherto shone
(though fitfully) ON your life will now begin to shine THROUGH it
instead; and let me add one word. My assurance grows firmer, from day
to day, that we are in stronger hands than our own. It is true that I
see things in other lives which look as if those hands were wantonly
cruel, hard, unloving; but I reflect that I cannot see all the
conditions; I can only humbly fall back upon my own experience, and
testify that even the most daunting and humiliating things have a
purifying effect; and I can perceive enough at all events to encourage
me to send my heart a little farther than my eyes, and to believe that
a deep and urgent love is there.--Ever affectionately yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  Jan. 26, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--So it is to be Madeira at present? Well, I know Madeira
a little, and I can honestly congratulate you. I had feared it might be
Switzerland. I could not LIVE in Switzerland. It does me good to go
there, to be iced and baked and washed clean with pure air. But the
terrible mountains, so cold and unchanged, with their immemorial
patience, their frozen tranquillity; the high hamlets, perched on their
lonely shelves; the bleak pine-trees, with their indomitable
strength--all these depress me. Of course there is much homely beauty
among the lower slopes; the thickets, the falling streams, the flowers.
But the grim black peaks look over everywhere; and there is seldom a
feeling of the rich and comfortable peace such as one gets in England.
Madeira is very different. I have been there, and must truthfully
confess that it does not suit me altogether--the warm air, the
paradisal luxuriance, the greenhouse fragrance, are not a fit setting
for a blond, lymphatic man, who pants for Northern winds. But it will
suit you; and you will be one of those people, spare and compact as you
are, who find themselves vigorous and full of energy there. I have many
exquisite vignettes from Madeira which linger in my mind. The high
hill-villages, full of leafy trees; the grassy downs at the top; the
droop of creepers, full of flower and fragrance, over white walls; the
sapphire sea, under huge red cliffs. You will perhaps take one of those
embowered Quintas high above the town, in a garden full of shelter and
fountains. And I am much mistaken if you do not find yourself in a very
short time passionately attached to the place. Then the people are
simple, courteous, unaffected, full of personal interest. Housekeeping
has few difficulties and no terrors.

I can't get away for a night; but I will come and dine with you one day
this week, if you can keep an evening free.

And one thing I will promise--when you are away, I will write to you as
often as I can. I shall not attempt any formal letters, but I shall
begin with anything that is in my mind, and stop when I feel disposed;
and you must do the same. We won't feel bound to ANSWER each other's
letters; one wastes time over that. What I shall want to know is what
you are thinking and doing, and I shall take for granted you desire the
same.

You will be happier, now that you KNOW; I need not add that if I can be
of any use to you in making suggestions, it will be a real
pleasure.--Ever yours,

T. B.



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,

T. B.



UPTON,
  Feb. 9, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--I hope you have got Lockhart's Life of Scott with
you; if not, I will send it out to you. I have been reading it lately,
and I have a strong wish that you should do the same. It has not all
the same value; the earlier part, the account of the prosperous years,
is rather tiresome in places. There is something boisterous,
undignified--even, I could think, vulgar--about the aims and ambitions
depicted. It suggests a prosperous person, seated at a well-filled
table, and consuming his meat with a hearty appetite. The desire to
stand well with prominent persons, to found a family, to take a place
in the county, is a perfectly natural and wholesome desire; but it is a
commonplace ambition. There is a charm in the simplicity, the
geniality, the childlike zest of the man; but there is nothing great
about it. Then comes the crash; and suddenly, as though a curtain drew
up, one is confronted with the spectacle of an indomitable and
unselfish soul, bearing a heavy burden with magnificent tranquillity,
and settling down with splendid courage to an almost intolerable task.
The energy displayed by our hero in attempting to write off the load of
debt that hung round his neck is superhuman, august. We see him
completing in a single day what would take many writers a week to
finish, and doing it day by day, with bereavements, sorrows,
ill-health, all closing in upon him. The quality of the work he thus
did matters little; it was done, indeed, at a time of life when under
normal circumstances he would probably have laid his pen down. But the
spectacle of the man's patient energy and divine courage is one that
goes straight to the heart. It is then that one realises that the
earlier and more prosperous life has all the value of contrast; one
recognises that here was a truly unspoilt nature; and that, if we can
dare to look upon life as an educative process, the tragic sorrows that
overwhelmed him were not the mere reversal of the wheel of fortune, but
gifts from the very hand of the Father--to purify a noble soul from the
dross that was mingled with it; to give a great man the opportunity of
living in a way that should furnish an eternal and imperishable example.

I do not believe that in the whole of literature there is a more noble
and beautiful document of its kind than the diary of these later years.
The simplicity, the sincerity of the man stand out on every page. There
are no illusions about himself or his work. He hears that Southey has
been speaking of him and his misfortunes with tears, and he says
plainly that such tears would be impossible to himself in a parallel
case; that his own sympathy has always been practical rather than
emotional; his own tendency has been to help rather than to console.
Again, speaking of his own writings, he says that he realises that if
there is anything good about his poetry or prose, "It is a hurried
frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young
people of bold and active disposition." He adds, indeed, a contemptuous
touch to the above, which he was great enough to have spared: "I have
been no sigher in shades--no writer of

     Songs and sonnets and rustical roundelays
     Framed on fancies and whistled on reeds."


A few days later, speaking of Thomas Campbell, the poet, he says that
"he has suffered by being too careful a corrector of his work."

That is a little ungenerous, a little complacent; noble and large as
Scott's own unconsidered writings are, he ought to have been aware that
methods differ. What, for instance, could be more extraordinary than
the contrast between Scott and Wordsworth--Scott with his "You know I
don't care a curse about what I write;" and Wordsworth, whose chief
reading in later days was his own poetry. Whenever the two are brought
into actual juxtaposition, Wordsworth is all pose and self-absorption;
Scott all simplicity and disregard of fame. Wordsworth staying at
Abbotsford declines to join an expedition of pleasure, and stays at
home with his daughter. When the party return, they find Wordsworth
sitting and being read to by his daughter, the book his own Excursion.
A party of travellers arrive, and Wordsworth steals down to the chaise,
to see if there are any of his own volumes among the books they have
with them. When the two are together, Scott is all courteous deference;
he quotes Wordsworth's poems, he pays him stately compliments, which
the bard receives as a matter of course, with stiff, complacent bows.
But, during the whole of the time, Wordsworth never lets fall a single
syllable from which one could gather that he was aware that his host
had ever put pen to paper.

Yet, while one desires to shake Wordsworth to get some of his pomposity
out of him, one half desires that Scott had felt a little more deeply
the dignity of his vocation. One would wish to have infused Wordsworth
with a little of Scott's unselfish simplicity, and to have put just a
little stiffening into Scott. He ought to have felt--and he did
not--that to be a great writer was a more dignified thing than to be a
sham seigneur.

But through the darkening scene, when the woods whisper together, and
Tweed runs hoarsely below, the simple spirit holds uncomplaining and
undaunted on his way: "I did not like them to think that I could ever
be beaten by anything," he says. But at length the hand, tired with the
pen, falls, and twilight creeps upon the darkening mind.

I paid a pious pilgrimage last summer, as you perhaps remember, to
Abbotsford. I don't think I ever described it to you. My first feeling
was one of astonishment at the size and stateliness of the place,
testifying to a certain imprudent prosperity. But the sight of the
rooms themselves; the desk, the chair, the book-lined library, the
little staircase by which, early or late, Scott could steal back to his
hard and solitary work; the death-mask, with its pathetic smile; the
clothes, with hat and shoes, giving, as it were, a sense of the very
shape and stature of the man--these brought the whole thing up with a
strange reality.

Of course, there is much that is pompous, affected, unreal about the
place; the plaster beams, painted to look like oak; the ugly
emblazonries; the cruel painted glass; the laboriously collected
objects--all these reveal the childish side of Scott, the superficial
self which slipped from him so easily when he entered into the cloud.

And then the sight of his last resting-place; the ruined abbey, so
deeply embowered in trees that the three dim Eildon peaks are
invisible; the birds singing in the thickets that clothe the ruined
cloisters--all this made a parable, and brought before one with an
intensity of mystery the wonder of it all. The brief life, so full of
plans for permanence; the sombre valley of grief; the quiet end, when
with failing lips he murmured that the only comfort for the dying heart
was the thought that it had desired goodness, however falteringly,
above everything.

I can't describe to you how deeply all this affects me--with what a
hunger of the heart, what tenderness, what admiration, what wonder. The
very frankness of the surprise with which, over and over again, the
brave spirit confesses that he does not miss the delights of life as
much as he expected, nor find the burden as heavy as he had feared, is
a very noble and beautiful thing. I can conceive of no book more likely
to make a spirit in the grip of sorrow and failure more gentle,
hopeful, and brave; because it brings before one, with quiet and
pathetic dignity, the fact that no fame, no success, no recognition,
can be weighed for a moment in the balance with those simple qualities
of human nature which the humblest being may admire, win, and
display.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  Shrove Tuesday, Feb. 16, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--One of those incredible incidents has just happened
here, an incident that makes one feel how little one knows of human
beings, and that truth, in spite of the conscientious toil of Mr. H. G.
Wells, does still continue to keep ahead of fiction. Here is the story.
Some money is missed in a master's house; circumstances seem to point
to its having been abstracted by one of the boys. A good-natured,
flighty boy is suspected, absolutely without reason, as it turns out;
though he is the sort of boy to mislay his own books and other portable
property to any extent, and to make no great difficulty under pressure
of immediate need, and at the last moment, about borrowing some one
else's chattels. On this occasion the small boys in the house, of whom
he is one, solemnly accuse him of the theft, and the despoiled owner
entreats that the money may be returned. He protests that he has not
taken it. The matter comes to the ears of the house-master, who
investigates the matter in the course of the evening, and interviews
the supposed culprit. The boy denies it again quite unconcernedly and
frankly, goes away from the interview, and wandering about, finds the
small boys of the house assembled in one of the studies discussing a
matter with great interest. "What has happened?" says our suspected
friend. "Haven't you heard?" says one of them; "Campbell's grandmother"
(Campbell is another of the set) "has sent him a tip of L2." "Oh, has
she?" says the boy, with a smile of intense meaning; "I shall have to
go my rounds again." This astonishing confession of his guilt is
received with the interest it deserves, and Campbell is advised to lock
up his money, or to hand it over to the custody of the house-master. In
the course of the evening another amazing event occurs; the boy whose
money was stolen finds the whole of it, quite intact, in the pocket of
his cricketing flannels, where he now remembers having put it. The
supposed culprit is restored to favour, and becomes a reliable member
of society. One of the small boys tells the matron the story of our
hero's amazing remark on the subject, in his presence. The matron
stares at him, bewildered, and asks him what made him say it. "Oh, only
to rag them," says the boy; "they were all so excited about it." "But
don't you see, you silly boy," says the kind old dame, "that if the
money had not been found, you would have been convicted out of your own
mouth of having been the thief?" "Oh yes," says the boy cheerfully;
"but I couldn't help it--it came into my head."

Of course this is an exceptional case; but it illustrates a curious
thing about boys--I mentioned it the other day--which is, their
extraordinary willingness and even anxiety to be thought worse than
they are. Even boys of unexceptionable principle will talk as if they
were not only not particular, but positively vicious. They don't like
aspersions on their moral character to be made by others, but they
rejoice to blacken themselves; and not even the most virtuous boys can
bear to be accused of virtue, or thought to be what is called "Pi."
This does not happen when boys are by themselves; they will then talk
unaffectedly about their principles and practice, if their interlocutor
is also unaffected. But when they are together, a kind of disease of
self-accusation attacks them. I suppose that it is the perversion of a
wholesome instinct, the desire not to be thought better than they are;
but part of the exaggerated stories that one hears about the low moral
tone of public schools arises from the fact that innocent boys coming
to a public school infer, and not unreasonably, from the talk of their
companions that they are by no means averse to evil, even when, as is
often the case, they are wholly untainted by it.

The same thing seems to me to prevail very widely nowadays. The
old-fashioned canting hypocrisy, like that of the old servant in the
Master of Ballantrae, who, suffering under the effects of drink, bears
himself like a Christian martyr, has gone out; just as the kind of
pride is extinct against which the early Victorian books used to warn
children, and which was manifested by sitting in a carriage surveying a
beggar with a curling lip--a course of action which was invariably
followed by the breaking of a Bank, or by some mysterious financial
operation involving an entire loss of fortune and respectability.

Nowadays the parable of the Pharisee and the publican is reversed. The
Pharisee tells his friends that he is in reality far worse than the
publican, while the publican thanks God that he is not a Pharisee. It
is only, after all, a different kind of affectation, and perhaps even
more dangerous, because it passes under the disguise of a virtue. We
are all miserable sinners, of course; but it is no encouragement to
goodness if we try to reduce ourselves all to the same level of
conscious corruption. The only advantage would be if, by our humility,
we avoided censoriousness. Let us frankly admit that our virtues are
inherited, and that any one who had had our chances would have done as
well or better than ourselves; neither ought we to be afraid of
expressing our admiration of virtue, and, if necessary, our abhorrence
of vice, so long as that abhorrence is genuine. The cure for the
present state of things is a greater naturalness. Perhaps it would end
in a certain increase of priggishness; but I honestly confess that
nowadays our horror of priggishness, and even of seriousness, has grown
out of all proportion; the command not to be a prig has almost taken
its place in the Decalogue. After all, priggishness is often little
more than a failure in tact, a breach of good manners; it is priggish
to be superior, and it is vulgar to let a consciousness of superiority
escape you. But it is not priggish to be virtuous, or to have a high
artistic standard, or to care more for masterpieces of literature than
for second-rate books, any more than it is priggish to be rich or
well-connected. The priggishness comes in when you begin to compare
yourself with others, and to draw distinctions. The Pharisee in the
parable was a prig; and just as I have known priggish hunting men, and
priggish golfers, and even priggish card-players, so I have known
people who were priggish about having a low standard of private virtue,
because they disapproved of people whose standard was higher. The only
cure is frankness and simplicity; and one should practise the art of
talking simply and directly among congenial people of what one admires
and believes in.

How I run on! But it is a comfort to write about these things to some
one who will understand; to "cleanse the stuff'd bosom of the perilous
stuff that weighs upon the heart." By the way, how careless the
repetition of "stuff'd" "stuff" is in that line! And yet it can't be
unintentional, I suppose?

I enjoy your letters very much; and I am glad to hear that you are
beginning to "take interest," and are already feeling better. Your
views of the unchangeableness of personality are very surprising; but I
must think them over for a little; I will write about them before long.
Meanwhile, my love to you all.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  Feb. 25, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--You ask what I have been reading. Well, I have been
going through Newman's Apologia for the twentieth time, and as usual
have fallen completely under the magical spell of that incomparable
style; its perfect lucidity, showing the very shape of the thought
within, its simplicity (not, in Newman's case, I think, the result of
labour, but of pure instinctive grace), its appositeness, its dignity,
its music. I oscillate between supreme contentment as a reader, and
envious despair as a writer; it fills one's mind up slowly and richly,
as honey fills a vase from some gently tilted bowl. There is no sense
of elaborateness about the book; it was written swiftly and easily out
of a full heart; then it is such a revelation of a human spirit, a
spirit so innocent and devoted and tender, and, moreover, charged with
a sweet naive egotism as of a child. It was written, as Newman himself
said, IN TEARS; but I do not think they were tears of bitterness, but a
half-luxurious sorrow, the pathos of the past and its heavinesses,
viewed from a quiet haven. I have no sympathy whatever with the
intellectual attitude it reveals, but as Roderick Hudson says, I don't
always heed the sense: it is indeed a somewhat melancholy spectacle of
a beautiful mind converted in reality by purely aesthetic
considerations, by the dignity, the far-off, holy, and venerable
associations of the great Church which drew him quietly in, while all
the time he is under the impression that it is a logical clue which he
is following. And what logic! leaping lightly over difficult places,
taking flowery by-paths among the fields, the very stairs on which he
treads based on all kinds of wide assumptions and unverifiable
hypotheses. Then it is distressing to see his horror of Liberalism, of
speculation, of development, of all the things that constitute the
primal essence of the very religion that he blindly followed. One
cannot help feeling that had Newman been a Pharisee, he would have
been, with his love of precedent, and antiquity, and tradition, one of
the most determined and deadly opponents of the spirit of Christ. For
the spirit of Christ is the spirit of freedom, of elasticity, of
unconventionality. Newman would have upheld in the Sanhedrim with
pathetic and exquisite eloquence that it was not time to break with the
old, that it was miserable treachery to throw over the ancient
safeguards of faith, to part with the rich inheritance of the national
faith delivered by Abraham and Moses to the saints. Newman was a true
fanatic, and the most dangerous of fanatics, because his character was
based on innocence and tenderness and instinctive virtue. It is rather
pathetic than distressing to see Newman again and again deluded by the
antiquity of some petty human logician into believing his utterance to
be the very voice of God. The struggle with Newman was not the struggle
of faith with scepticism, but the struggle between two kinds of
loyalty, the personal loyalty to his own past and his own friends and
the Church of his nativity, and the loyalty to the infinitely more
ancient and venerable tradition of the Roman Church. It was, as I have
said, an aesthetic conversion; he had the mind of a poet, and the
particular kind of beauty which appealed to him was not the beauty of
nature or art, but the beauty of old tradition and the far-off dim
figures of saints and prelates reaching back into the dark and remote
past.

He had, too, the sublime egotism of the poet. His own salvation--"Shall
I be safe if I die to-night?"--that, he confesses, was the thought
which eventually outweighed all others. He had little of the priestly
hunger to save souls; the way in which others trusted him, confided in
him, watched his movements, followed him, was always something of a
terror to him, and yet in another mood it ministered to his
self-absorption. He had not the stern sense of being absolutely in the
right, which is the characteristic of the true leaders of men, but he
had a deep sense of his own importance, combined with a perfectly real
sense of weakness and humility, which even disguised, I would think,
his own egotism from himself.

Again his extraordinary forensic power, his verbal logic, his exquisite
lucidity of statement, all these concealed from him, as they have
concealed from others, his lack of mental independence. He had an
astonishing power of submitting to his imagination, a power of
believing the impossible, because the exercise of faith seemed to him
so beautiful a virtue. It is not a case of a noble mind overthrown, but
of the victory of a certain kind of poetical feeling over all rational
inquiry.

To revert to Newman's literary genius, he seems to me to be one of the
few masters of English prose. I used to think, in old University days,
that Newman's style was best tested by the fact that if one had a piece
of his writing to turn into Latin prose, the more one studied it,
turned it over, and penetrated it, the more masterly did it become;
because it was not so much the expression of a thought as the thought
itself taking shape in a perfectly pure medium of language. Bunyan had
the same gift; of later authors Ruskin had it very strongly, and
Matthew Arnold in a lesser degree. There is another species of
beautiful prose, the prose of Jeremy Taylor, of Pater, even of
Stevenson; but this is a slow and elaborate construction, pinched and
pulled this way and that; and it is like some gorgeous picture, of
stately persons in seemly and resplendent dress, with magnificently
wrought backgrounds of great buildings and curious gardens. But the
work of Newman and of Ruskin is a white art, like the art of sculpture.

I find myself every year desiring and admiring this kind of lucidity
and purity more and more. It seems to me that the only function of a
writer is to express obscure, difficult, and subtle thoughts easily.
But there are writers, like Browning and George Meredith, who seem to
hold it a virtue to express simple thoughts obscurely. Such writers
have a wide vogue, because so many people do not value a thought unless
they can feel a certain glow of satisfaction in having grasped it; and
to have disentangled a web of words, and to find the bright thing lying
within, gives them a pleasing feeling of conquest, and, moreover,
stamps the thought in their memory. But such readers have not the root
of the matter in them; the true attitude is the attitude of desiring to
apprehend, to progress, to feel. The readers who delight in obscurity,
to whom obscurity seems to enhance the value of the thing apprehended,
are mixing with the intellectual process a sort of acquisitive and
commercial instinct very dear to the British heart. These bewildering
and bewildered Browning societies who fling themselves upon Sordello,
are infected unconsciously with a virtuous craving for "taking higher
ground." Sordello contains many beautiful things, but by omitting the
necessary steps in argument, and by speaking of one thing allusively in
terms of another, and by a profound desultoriness of thought, the poet
produces a blurred and tangled impression. The beauties of Sordello
would not lose by being expressed coherently and connectedly.

This is the one thing that I try with all my might to impress on boys;
that the essence of all style is to say what you mean as forcibly as
possible; the bane of classical teaching is that the essence of
successful composition is held to be to "get in" words and phrases; it
is not a bad training, so long as it is realised to be only a training,
in obtaining a rich and flexible vocabulary, so that the writer has a
choice of words and the right word comes at call. But this is not made
clear in education, and the result on many minds is that they suppose
that the essence of good writing is to search diligently for sparkling
words and sonorous phrases, and then to patch them into a duller fabric.

But I stray from my point: all paths in a schoolmaster's mind lead out
upon the educational plain.

All that you tell me of your new surroundings is intensely interesting.
I am thankful that you feel the characteristic charm of the place, and
that the climate seems to suit you. You say nothing of your work; but I
suppose that you have had no time as yet. The mere absorbing of new
impressions is a fatiguing thing, and no good work can be done until a
scene has become familiar. I will discharge your commissions
punctually; don't hesitate to tell me what you want. I don't do it from
a sense of duty, but it is a positive pleasure for me to have anything
to do for you. I long for letters; as soon as possible send me
photographs, and not merely inanimate photographs of scenes and places,
but be sure that you make a part of them yourself. I want to see you
standing, sitting, reading in the new house; and give me an exact and
detailed account of your day, please; the food you eat, the clothes you
wear; you know my insatiable appetite for trifles.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  March 5, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have been thinking over your last letter: and by
the merest chance I stumbled yesterday on an old diary; it was in
1890--a time, do you remember, when our paths had drifted somewhat
apart; you had just married, and I find a rather bitter entry, which it
amuses me to tell you of now, to the effect that the marriage of a
friend, which ought to give one a new friend, often simply deprives one
of an old one--"nec carus aeque nec superstes integer," I add. Then I
was, I suppose, hopelessly absorbed in my profession; it was at the
time when I had just taken a boarding-house, and suffered much from the
dejection which arises from feeling unequal to the new claims.

It amuses me now to think that I could ever have thought of losing your
friendship; and it was only temporary; it was only that we were fully
occupied; you had to learn camaraderie with your wife, for want of
which one sees dryness creep into married lives, when the first divine
ardours of passion have died away, and when life has to be lived in the
common light of day. Well, all that soon adjusted itself; and then I,
too, found in your wife a true and congenial friend, so that I can
honestly say that your marriage has been one of the most fortunate
events of my life.

But that was not what I meant to write to you about; the point is this.
You say that personality is a stubborn thing. It is indeed. I find
myself reflecting and considering how much one's character really
changes as life goes on; in reading this diary of fourteen years ago,
though I have altered in some superficial respects, I was confronted
with my unalterable self. I have acquired certain aptitudes; I have
learnt, for instance, to understand boys better, to sympathise with
them, to put myself in their place, to manage them. I don't think I
could enunciate my technique, such as it is. If a young master, just
entering upon the work of a boarding-house, asked my advice, I could
utter several maxims which he would believe (and rightly) to be the
flattest and most obvious truisms; but the value of them to me is that
they are deduced from experience, and not stated as assumptions. The
whole secret lies in the combination of them, the application of them
to a particular case; it is not that one sees a thing differently, but
that one knows instinctively the sort of thing to say, the kind of line
to pursue, the kind of statement that appeals to a boy as sensible and
memorable, the sort of precautions to take, the delicate adjustment of
principles to a particular case, and so forth. It is, I suppose,
something like the skill of an artist; he does not see nature more
clearly, if indeed as clearly, as he did when he began, but he knows
better what kind of stroke and what kind of tint will best produce the
effect which he wishes to record. Of course both artist and
schoolmaster get mannerised; and I should be inclined to say in the
latter case that a schoolmaster's success (in the best sense) depends
almost entirely upon his being able to arrive at sound principles and
at the same time to avoid mannerism in applying them. For instance, it
is of no use to hold up for a boy's consideration a principle which is
quite outside his horizon; what one has to do is to try and give him a
principle which is just a little ahead of his practice, which he can
admire and also believe to be within his reach.

Besides this experience which I have acquired, I have acquired a
similar experience in the direction of teaching--I know now the sort of
statement which arrests the attention and arouses the interest of boys;
I know how to put a piece of knowledge so that it appears both
intelligible and also desirable to acquire.

Then I have learnt, in literary matters, the art of expression to a
certain extent. I can speak to you with entire frankness and
unaffectedness, and I will say that I am conscious that I can now
express lucidly, and to a certain extent attractively, an idea. My
deficiency is now in ideas and not in the power of expressing them. I
have quality though not quantity. It amuses me to read this old diary
and see how impossible I found it to put certain thoughts into words.

But apart from these definite acquirements, I cannot see that my
character has altered in the smallest degree. I detect the same little,
hard, repellent core of self, sitting enthroned, cold, unchanging, and
unchanged, "like a toad within a stone," to borrow Rossetti's great
simile. I see exactly the same weaknesses, the same pitiful ambitions,
the same faults. I have learnt, I think, to conceal them a little
better; but they are not eradicated, nor even modified. Even with
regard to their concealment, I have a terrible theory. I believe that
the faults of which one is conscious, which one admits, and even the
faults of which one faintly suspects oneself, and yet supposes that one
conceals from the world at large, are the very faults that are
absolutely patent to every one else. If one dimly suspects that one is
a liar, a coward, or a snob, and gratefully believes that one has not
been placed in a position which inevitably reveals these
characteristics in their full nakedness, one may be fairly certain that
other people know that one is so tainted.

The discouraging point is that one is not similarly conscious of one's
virtues. I take for granted that I have some virtues, because I see
that most of the people whom I meet have some sprinkling of them, but I
declare that I am quite unable to say what they are. A fault is patent
and unmistakable. The old temptation comes upon one, and one yields as
usual; but with one's virtues, if they ever manifest themselves, one's
own feeling is that one might have done better. Moreover, if one tries
deliberately to take stock of one's good points, they seem to be only
natural and instinctive ways of behaving; to which no credit can
possibly attach, because by temperament one is incapable of acting
otherwise.

Another melancholy fact which I believe to be true is this--that the
only good work one does is work which one finds easy and likes. I have
one or two patiently acquired virtues which are not natural to me, such
as a certain methodical way of dealing with business; but I never find
myself credited with it by others, because it is done, I suppose,
painfully and with effort, and therefore unimpressively.

I look round, and the same phenomenon meets me everywhere. I do not
know any instance among my friends where I can trace any radical change
of character. "Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula
saeculorum."

Indeed the only line upon which improvement is possible seems to me to
be this--that a man shall definitely commit himself to a course of life
in which he shall be compelled to exercise virtues which are foreign to
his character, and any lapses of which will be penalised in a
straightforward, professional way. If a man, for instance, is
irritable, impatient, unpunctual, let him take up some line where he is
bound to be professionally bland, patient, methodical. That would be
the act of a philosopher; but, alas, how few of us choose our
profession from philosophical motives!

And even so I should fear that the tendencies of temperament are only
temporarily imprisoned, and not radically cured; after all, it fits in
with the Darwinian theory. The bird of paradise, condemned to live in a
country of marshes, cannot hope to become a heron. The most he can hope
is that, by meditating on the advantages which a heron would enjoy, and
by pressing the same consideration on his offspring, the time may come
in the dim procession of years when the beaks of his descendants will
grow long and sharp, their necks pliant, their legs attenuated.

And anyhow, one is bound in honour to have a try; and the hopefulness
of my creed (you may be puzzled to detect it) lies in the fact that one
HAS a sense of honour about it all; that one's faults are repugnant,
and that missing virtues are desirable--possunt quia posse videntur!

Thank you for the photographs. I begin to realise your house; but I
want some interiors as well; and let me have the view from your
terrace, though I daresay it is only sea and sky.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  March 15, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--You say I am not ambitious enough; well, I wish I could
make up my mind clearly on the subject of ambition; it has been brought
before me rather acutely lately. A post here has just fallen vacant--a
post to which I should have desired to succeed. I have no doubt that if
I had frankly expressed my wishes on the subject, if I had even told a
leaky, gossipy colleague what I desired, and begged him to keep it to
himself, the thing would have got out, and the probability is that the
post would have been offered to me. But I held my tongue, not, I
confess, from any very high motive, but merely from a natural dislike
of being importunate--it does not seem to me consistent with good
manners.

Well, I made no sign; and another man was appointed. I have no doubt
that a man of the world would say frankly that I was a fool, and,
though I am rather inclined to agree with him, I don't think I could
have acted otherwise.

I am inclined to encourage ambition of every kind among the boys. I
think it is an appropriate virtue for their age and temperament. It is
not a Christian virtue; for it is certain that, if one person succeeds
in an ambitious prospect, there must be a dozen who are disappointed.
But though I don't approve of it on abstract grounds, yet I think it is
so tremendous a motive for activity and keenness that it seems to me
that boys are the better for it. I don't believe that in education the
highest motive is always the best; indeed, the most effective motive,
in dealing with immature minds, is the thing which we have to discover
and use.

I mean, for instance, that I think it is probably more effective to say
to a boy who is disposed to be physically indolent, "You have a chance
of getting your colours this half, and I should like to see you get
them," than to say, "I don't want you to think about colours. I want
you to play football for the glory of God, because it makes you into a
stronger, more wholesome, more cheerful man." It seems to me that boys
should learn for themselves that there are often better and bigger
reasons for having done a thing than the reason that made them do it.

What makes an object seem desirable to a boy is that others desire to
have it too, and that he should be the fortunate person to get it. I
don't see how the sense of other people's envy and disappointment can
be altogether subtracted from the situation--it certainly is one of the
elements which makes success seem desirable to many boys--though a
generous nature will not indulge the thought.

But I am equally sure that, as one gets older, one ought to put aside
such thoughts altogether. That one ought to trample down ambitious
desires and even hopes. That glory, according to the old commonplace,
ought to follow and not to be followed.

I think one ought to pursue one's own line, to do one's own business to
the best of one's ability, and leave the rest to God. If He means one
to be in a big place, to do a big work, it will be clearly enough
indicated; and the only chance of doing it in a big way is to be
simple-minded, sincere, generous, and contented.

The worst of that theory is this. One sees people in later life who
have just missed big chances; some over-subtle delicacy of mind, some
untimely reticence or frankness, some indolent hanging-back, some
scrupulousness, has just checked them from taking a bold step forward
when it was needed. And one sees them with large powers, noble
capacities, wise thoughts, relegated to the crowd of unconsidered and
inconsiderable persons whose opinion has no weight, whose suggestions
have no effectiveness. Are they to be blamed? Or has one humbly and
faithfully to take it as an indication that they are just not fit, from
some secret weakness, some fibre of feebleness, to take the tiller?

I am speaking with entire sincerity when I say to you that I think I am
myself rather cast in that mould. I have always just missed getting
what used to be called "situations of dignity and emolument," and I
have often been condoled with as the person who ought to have had them.

Well, I expect that this is probably a very wholesome discipline for
me, but I cannot say that it is pleasant, or that use has made it
easier.

The worst of it is that I have an odd mixture of practicality and
mysticism within me, and I have sometimes thought that one has damaged
the other. My mysticism has pulled me back when I ought to have taken a
decided step, urging "Leave it to God"--and then, when I have failed to
get what I wanted, my mysticism has failed to comfort me, and the
practical side of me has said, "The decided step was what God clearly
indicated to you was needed; and you were lazy and would not take it."

I have a highly practical friend, the most absolutely and admirably
worldly person I know. In talk he sometimes lets fall very profound
maxims. We were talking the other day about this very point, and he
said musingly, "It is a very good rule in this world not to ask for
anything unless you are pretty sure to get it." That is the cream of
the worldly attitude. Such a man is not going to make himself tiresome
by importunity. He knows what he desires, he works for it, and, when
the moment comes, he just gives the little push that is needed, and
steps into his kingdom.

That is exactly what I cannot do. It is not a sign of high-mindedness,
for I am by nature greedy, acquisitive, and ambitious. But it is a want
of firmness, I suppose. Anyhow, there it is, and one cannot alter one's
temperament.

The conclusion which I come to for myself and for all like-minded
persons--not a very happy class, I fear--is that one should absolutely
steel oneself against disappointment, not allow oneself to indulge in
pleasing visions, not form plans or count chickens, but try to lay hold
of the things which do bring one tranquillity, the simple joys of
ordinary and uneventful life. One may thus arrive at a certain degree
of independence. And though the heart may ache a little at the chances
missed, yet one may console oneself by thinking that it is happier not
to realise an ambition and be disappointed, than to realise it and be
disappointed.

It all comes from over-estimating one's own powers, after all. If one
is decently humble, no disappointment is possible; and such little
successes as one does attain are like gleams of sunlight on a misty
day.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  March 25, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--You are quite right about conventionality in education.

One of my perennial preoccupations here is how to encourage originality
and independence among my boys. The great danger of public-school
education nowadays, as you say, is the development of a type. It is not
at all a bad type in many ways; the best specimens of the public-school
type are young men who are generous, genial, unembarrassed, courageous,
sensible, and active; but our system all tends to level character, and
I do not feel sure whether it levels it up or levels it down. In old
days the masters concerned themselves with the work of the boys only,
and did not trouble their heads about how the boys amused themselves
out of school. Vigorous boys organised games for themselves, and
indolent boys loafed. Then it came home to school authorities that
there was a good deal of danger in the method; that lack of employment
was an undesirable thing. Thereupon work was increased, and, at the
same time, the masters laid hands upon athletics and organised them.
Side by side with this came a great increase of wealth and leisure in
England, and there sprang up that astonishing and disproportionate
interest in athletic matters, which is nowadays a real problem for all
sensible men. But the result of it all has been that there has grown up
a stereotyped code among the boys as to what is the right thing to do.
They are far less wilful and undisciplined than they used to be; they
submit to work, as a necessary evil, far more cheerfully than they used
to do; and they base their ideas of social success entirely on
athletics. And no wonder! They find plenty of masters who are just as
serious about games as they are themselves; who spend all their spare
time in looking on at games, and discuss the athletic prospects of
particular boys in a tone of perfectly unaffected seriousness. The only
two regions which masters have not organised are the intellectual and
moral regions. The first has been tacitly and inevitably extruded. A
good deal more work is required from the boys, and unless a boy's
ability happens to be of a definite academical order--in which case he
is well looked after--there is no loop-hole through which intellectual
interest can creep in. A boy's time is so much occupied by definite
work and definite games that there is neither leisure nor, indeed,
vigour left to follow his own pursuits. Life is lived so much more in
public that it becomes increasingly difficult for SETS to exist; small
associations of boys with literary tastes used to do a good deal in the
direction of fostering the germs of intellectual life; the net result
is, that there is now far less interest abroad in intellectual things,
and such interests as do exist, exist in a solitary way, and generally
mean an intellectual home in the background.

In the moral region, I think we have much to answer for; there is a
code of morals among boys which, if it is not actively corrupting, is
at least undeniably low. The standard of purity is low; a vicious boy
doesn't find his vicious tendencies by any means a bar to social
success. Then the code of honesty is low; a boy who is habitually
dishonest in the matter of work is not in the least reprobated. I do
not mean to say that there are not many boys who are both pure-minded
and honest; but they treat such virtues as a secret preference of their
own, and do not consider that it is in the least necessary to interfere
with the practice of others, or even to disapprove of it. And then
comes the perennial difficulty of schoolboy honour; the one
unforgivable offence is to communicate anything to masters; and an
innocent-minded boy whose natural inclination to purity gave way before
perpetual temptation and even compulsion might be thought to have
erred, but would have scanty, if any, expression of either sympathy or
pity from other boys; while if he breathed the least hint of his
miserable position to a master and the fact came out, he would be
universally scouted.

This is a horrible fact to contemplate; yet it cannot be cured by
enactment, only from within. It is strange that in this respect it is
entirely unlike the code of the world. No girl or woman would be
scouted for appealing to police protection in similar circumstances; no
man would be required to submit to violence or even to burglary; no
reprobation would fall upon him if he appealed to the law to help him.

Is it not possible to encourage something of this feeling in a school?
Is it not possible, without violating schoolboy honour, which is in
many ways a fine and admirable thing, to allow the possibility of an
appeal to protection for the young and weak against vile temptations?
It seems to me that it would be best if we could get the boys to
organise such a system among themselves. But to take no steps to arrive
at such an organisation, and to leave matters severely alone, is a very
dark responsibility to bear.

It is curious to note that in the matter of bullying and cruelty, which
used to be so rife at schools, public opinion among boys does seem to
have undergone a change. The vice has practically disappeared, and the
good feeling of a school would be generally against any case of gross
bullying; but the far more deadly and insidious temptation of impurity
has, as far as one can learn, increased. One hears of simply
heart-rending cases where a boy dare not even tell his parents of what
he endures. Then, too, a boy's relations will tend to encourage him to
hold out, rather than to invoke a master's aid, because they are afraid
of the boy falling under the social ban.

This is the heaviest burden a schoolmaster has to bear; to be
responsible for his boys, and to be held responsible, and yet to be
probably the very last person to whom the information of what is
happening can possibly come.

One great difficulty seems to be that boys will only, as a rule,
combine for purposes of evil. In matters of virtue a boy has to act for
himself; and I confess, too, with a sigh, that a set of virtuous boys
banding themselves together to resist evil and put it down has an
alarmingly priggish sound.

The most that a man can do at present, it seems to me, is to have good
sensible servants; to be vigilant and discreet; to try and cultivate a
paternal relation with all his boys; to try and make the bigger boys
feel some responsibility in the matter; but the worst of it is that the
subject is so unpleasant that many masters dare not speak of it at all;
and excuse themselves by saying that they don't want to put ideas into
boys' heads. I cannot conscientiously believe that a man who has been
through a big public school himself can honestly be afraid of that. But
we all seem to be so much afraid of each other, of public opinion, of
possible unpopularity, that we find excuses for letting a painful thing
alone.

But to leave this part of the subject, which is often a kind of
nightmare to me, and to return to my former point; I do honestly think
it a great misfortune that we tend to produce a type. It seems to me
that to aim at independence, to know one's own mind, to form one's own
ideas--liberty, in short--is one of the most sacred duties in life. It
is not only a luxury in which a few can indulge, it ought to be a
quality which every one should be encouraged to cultivate. I declare
that it makes me very sad sometimes to see these well-groomed,
well-mannered, rational, manly boys all taking the same view of things,
all doing the same things, smiling politely at the eccentricity of any
one who finds matter for serious interest in books, in art or music:
all splendidly reticent about their inner thoughts, with a courteous
respect for the formalities of religion and the formalities of work;
perfectly correct, perfectly complacent, with no irregularities or
angular preferences of their own; with no admiration for anything but
athletic success, and no contempt for anything but originality of
ideas. They are so nice, so gentlemanly, so easy to get on with; and
yet, in another region, they are so dull, so unimaginative, so
narrow-minded. They cannot all, of course, be intellectual or
cultivated; but they ought to be more tolerant, more just, more wise.
They ought to be able to admire vigour and enthusiasm in every
department instead of in one or two; and it is we who ought to make
them feel so, and we have already got too much to do--though I am
afraid that you will think, after reading this vast document, that I,
at all events, have plenty of spare time. But it is not the case; only
the end of the half is at hand; we have finished our regular work, and
I have done my reports, and am waiting for a paper. When you next hear
I shall be a free man. I shall spend Easter quietly here; but I have so
much to do and clear off that I probably shall not be able to write
until I have set off on my travels.--Ever yours,

T. B.



THE RED DRAGON,
  COMPTON FEREDAY,
    April 10, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I was really too busy to write last week, but I am going
to try and make up for it. This letter is going to be a diary. Expect
more of it.--T. B.


April 7.--I find myself, after all, compelled to begin my walking tour
alone. At the last moment Murchison has thrown me over. His father is
ill, and he is compelled to spend his holidays at home. I do not
altogether like to set off by myself, but it is too late to try and
arrange for another companion. I had rather, however, go by myself than
with some one who is not absolutely congenial. One requires on these
occasions to have a companion whose horizon is the same as one's own. I
daresay I could find an old friend, who is not also a colleague, to go
with me, but it would mean a certain amount of talk to bring us into
line. Then, too, I have had a very busy term; besides my form work, I
have had a good deal of extra teaching to do with the Army Class boys.
It is interesting work, for the boys are interested, not in the
subjects so much, as in mastering them for examination purposes. Yet it
matters little how the interest is obtained, as long as the boys
believe in the usefulness of what they are doing. But the result is
that I am tired out. I have lived with boys from morning to night, and
my spare time has been taken up with working at my subjects. I have had
hardly any exercise, and but a scanty allowance of sleep. Now I mean to
have both. I shall spend my days in the open air, and I shall sleep, I
hope, like a top at nights. Gradually I shall recover my power of
enjoyment; for the worst of such weeks as I have been passing through
is that they leave one dreary and jaded; one finds oneself in that dull
mood when one cannot even realise beautiful things. I hear a thrush
sing in a bush, or the sunset flames broadly behind the elms, and I say
to myself, "That is very beautiful if only I could feel it to be so!"
Boys are exhausting companions--they are so restless, so full-blooded,
so pitilessly indifferent, so desperately interested in the narrow
round of school life; and I have the sort of temperament that will
efface itself to any extent, if only the people that I am concerned
with will be content. I suppose it is a feeble trait, and that the best
schoolmasters have a magnetic influence over boys which makes the boys
interested in the master's subjects, or at least hypnotises them into
an appearance of interest. I cannot do that. It is like a leaden weight
upon me if I feel that a class is bored; the result is that I arrive at
the same end in my own way. I have learnt a kind of sympathy with boys;
I know by instinct what will interest them, or how to put a tiresome
thing in an interesting way.

But I shudder to think how sick I am of it all! I want a long bath of
silence and recollection and repose. I want to fill my cistern again
with my own thoughts and my own dreams, instead of pumping up the muddy
waters of irrigation. I don't think my colleagues are like that. I sate
with half-a-dozen of them last night at supper. They were full of all
they meant to do. Two of the most energetic were going off to play
golf, and the chief pleasure of the place they were going to was that
it was possible to get a round on Sundays; they were going to fill the
evening with bridge, and one of them said with heart-felt satisfaction,
"I am only going to take two books away with me--one on golf and the
other on bridge--and I am going to cure some of my radical faults." I
thought to myself that if he had forborne to mention the subjects of
his books, one might have supposed that they would be a Thomas-a-Kempis
and a Taylor's Holy Living, and then how well it would have seemed! Two
more were going for a rapid tour abroad in a steamer chartered for
assistant masters. That seemed to me to be almost more depressing. They
were going to ancient historical places, full of grave and beautiful
associations; places to go to, it seemed to me, with some single
like-minded associate, places to approach with leisurely and untroubled
mind, with no feeling of a programme or a time-table--and least of all
in the company of busy professional people with an academical cicerone.

Still, I suppose that this is true devotion to one's profession. They
will be able, they think, to discourse easily and, God help us,
picturesquely about what they have seen, to intersperse a Thucydides
lesson with local colour, and to describe the site of the temple of
Delphi to boys beginning the Eumenides. It is very right and proper, no
doubt, but it produces in me a species of mental nausea to think of the
conditions under which these impressions will be absorbed. The
arrangements for luncheon, the brisk interchange of shop, the cheery
comments of fellow-tradesmen, the horrible publicity and banality of
the whole affair!

My two other colleagues were going, one to spend a holiday at
Brighton--which he said was very bracing at Easter, adding that he
expected to fall in with some fellows he knew. They will all stroll on
the Parade, smoke cigarettes together, and adjourn for a game of
billiards. No doubt a very harmless way of passing the time, but not to
me enlivening. But Walters is a conventional person, and, as long as he
is doing what he would call "the correct thing," he is perfectly and
serenely content. The sixth and last is going to Surbiton to spend the
holidays with a mother and three sisters, and I think he is the most
virtuously employed of all. He will walk out alone, with a terrier dog,
before lunch; and after lunch he will go out with his sisters; and
perhaps the vicar will come to tea. But then it will be home, and the
girls will be proud of their brother, and will have the dishes he
likes, and he will have his father's old study to smoke in. I am not
sure that he is not the happiest of all, because he is not only
pursuing his own happiness.

But I have no such duties before me. I might, I suppose, go down to my
sister Helen at the Somersetshire vicarage where she lives so full a
life. But the house is small, there are four children, and not much
money, and I should only be in the way. Charles would do his best to
welcome me, but he will be in a great fuss over his Easter services;
and he will ask me to use his study as though it was my own room, which
will necessitate a number of hurried interviews in the drawing-room, my
sister will take her letters up to her bedroom, and the doors will have
to be carefully closed to exclude my tobacco smoke.

This is all very sordid, no doubt, but I am confronted with sordid
things to-day. The boys have just cleared off, and they are beginning
to sweep out the schoolrooms. The inky, dreary desks, the ragged books,
the odd fives-shoes in the pigeon-holes, the wheelbarrows full of
festering orange-peel and broken-down fives-balls: this is not a place
for a self-respecting person to be in. I want to be mooning about
country lanes, with the smell of spring woods blowing down the valley.
I want to be holding slow converse with leisurely rustic persons, to be
surveying from the side of a high grassy hill the rich plain below, to
hear the song of birds in the thickets, to try and feel myself one with
the life of the world instead of a sordid sweeper of a corner of it.
This is all very ungrateful to my profession, which I love, but it is a
necessary reaction; and what at this moment chiefly makes me grateful
to it is that my pocket is full enough to let me have a holiday on a
liberal scale, without thinking of small economies. I may give pennies
to tramps or children, or a shilling to a sexton for showing me a
church. I may travel what class I choose, and put up at a hotel without
counting the cost; and oh! the blessedness of that. I would rather have
a three-days' holiday thus than three weeks with an anxious calculation
of resources.

April 8.--I am really off to the Cotswolds. I packed my beloved
knapsack yesterday afternoon. I put in it--precision is the essence of
diarising--a spare shirt, which will have to serve if necessary as a
nightgown, a pair of socks, a pair of slippers, a toothbrush, a small
comb, and a sponge; that is sufficient for a philosopher. A pocket
volume of poetry--Matthew Arnold this time--and a map completed my
outfit. And I sent a bag containing a more liberal wardrobe to a
distant station, which I calculated it would take me three days to
reach. Then I went off by an afternoon train, and, by sunset, I found
myself in a little town, Hinton Perevale, of stone-built houses, with
an old bridge. I had no sense of freedom as yet, only a blessed feeling
of repose. I took an early supper in a small low-roofed parlour with
mullioned windows. By great good fortune I found myself the only guest
at the inn, and had the room to myself; then I went early and
gratefully to bed, utterly sleepy and content, with just enough sense
left to pray for a fine day.

My prayer is answered this morning. I slept a dreamless sleep, and was
roused by the cheerful crowing of cocks, which picked about the back
yard of the inn. I dressed quickly, only suspending my task to watch
the little dramas of the inn yard--the fowls on the pig-sty wall; the
horse waiting meekly, with knotted traces hanging round it, to be
harnessed; the cat, on some grave business of its own, squeezing
gracefully under a closed barn door; the weary, flat-footed duck,
nuzzling the mud of a small pool as delicately as though it were a rich
custard. I was utterly free; I might go and come as I liked. Time had
ceased to exist for me, and it was pleasant to reflect, as I finished
my simple breakfast, that I should under professional conditions have
been hurrying briskly into school for an hour of Latin Prose. The
incredible absurdity and futility of it all came home to me. Half the
boys that I teach so elaborately would be both more wholesomely and
happily employed if they were going out to farm-work for the day. But
they are gentlemen's sons, and so must enter what are called the
liberal professions, to retire at the age of sixty with a poor
digestion, a peevish wife, and a family of impossible children. But it
is only in such inconsequent moments that I allow myself to think thus
slightingly of Latin Prose. It is a valuable accomplishment, and, when
I have repaired the breaches made by professional work in the mental
equilibrium, I shall rejoin my colleagues with a full sense of its
paramount importance.

I scribble this diary with a vile pen, and ink like blacking, on the
corner of my breakfast-table. I have packed my knapsack, and in a few
minutes I shall set out upon my march.

April 9.--I spent an almost perfect day yesterday. It was a cool bright
day, with a few clouds like cotton-wool moving sedately in a blue sky.
I first walked quietly about my little town, which was full of delicate
beauties. The houses are all built of a soft yellow stone, which
weathers into a species of rich orange. Heaven knows where the
designers came from, but no two houses seem alike; some of them are
gabled, buttressed, stone-mullioned, irregular in outline, but yet with
a wonderful sense of proportion. Some are Georgian, with classical
pilasters and pediments. Yet they are all for use and not for show; and
the weak modern shop-windows, which some would think disfigure the
delicate house-fronts, seem to me just to give the requisite sense of
contrast. At the end of the street stands the church, with a stately
Perpendicular tower, and a resonant bell which tells the hour. This
overlooks a pile of irregular buildings, now a farm, but once a great
manor-house, with a dovecote and pavilions; but the old terrace is now
an orchard, and the fine oriel of the house looks straight into the
byre. Inside the church--it is open and well-kept--you can trace the
history of the manor and its occupants, from Job Best, a rich mercer of
London, whose monument, with marble pillars and obelisks, adorns the
south aisle; his son was ennobled, whose effigy--more majestic still,
robed and coroneted, with his Viscountess by his side, and her dog
(with his name, Jakke, engraven on his shoulder)--lies smiling, the
slender hands crossed in prayer. But the house was not destined to
survive. The Viscount's only daughter, the Lady Penelope, looks down
from the wall, a fair and delicate lady, the last of her brief race,
who, as the old inscription says with a tender simplicity, "dyed a
mayd." I cannot help wondering, my pretty lady, what your story was;
and it will do you no hurt if one, who looks upon your gentle face,
sends a wondering message of tenderness behind the veil to your pure
spirit, regret for your vanished charm, and the fragrance of your soft
bloom, and sadness for all sweet things that fade.

The manor, so I learn, was burnt wantonly by the Roundheads--there was
a battle hereabouts--on the charge that it had harboured some followers
of the king; and so our dreams of greatness and permanence are
fulfilled.

The whole church was very neat and spruce; it had suffered a
restoration lately. The walls were stripped of their old plaster and
pointed, so that the inside is now rougher than the outside, a thing
the ancient builders never intended. The altar is fairly draped with
good hangings behind, and the chancel fitted with new oak stalls and
seats, all as neat as a new pin. As I lingered in the church, reading
the simple monuments, a rosy, burly vicar came briskly in, and seeing
me there, courteously showed me all the treasures of his house, like
Hezekiah. He took me into the belfry, and there, piled up against the
wall, were some splendid Georgian columns and architraves, richly
carved in dark brown wood. I asked what it was. "Oh, a horrible pompous
thing," he said; "it was behind the altar--most pagan and unsuitable;
we had it all out as soon as I came. The first moment I entered the
church, I said to myself, 'THAT must go,' and I have succeeded, though
it was hard enough to collect the money, and actually some of the old
people here objected." I did not feel it was worth while to cast cold
water on the good man's satisfaction--but the pity of it! I do not
suppose that a couple of thousand pounds could have reproduced it; and
it is simply heart-rending to see such a noble monument of piety and
careful love sacrificed to a wave of so-called ecclesiastical taste.
The vicar's chief pride was a new window, by a fashionable modern firm;
quite unobjectionable in design, and with good colour, but desperately
uninteresting. It represented some mild, unemphatic, attenuated saints,
all exactly alike, languidly and decorously conversing together,
weighed down by heavy drapery, as though wrapped in bales of carpets.
In the lower compartments knelt some dignified persons, similarly
habited, in face exactly like the saints above, except that they were
fitted out with unaccountable beards--all pretty and correct, but with
no character or force. I suppose that fifty years hence, when our taste
has broadened somewhat, this window will probably be condemned as
impossible too. There can be no absolute canon of beauty; the only
principle ought to be to spare everything that is of careful and solid
workmanship, to give it a chance, to let time and age have their
perfect work. It is the utter conventionality of the whole thing that
is so distressing; the same thing is going on all over the country, the
attempt to put back the clock, and to try and restore things as they
were; history, tradition, association, are not considered. The old
builders were equally ruthless, it is true; they would sweep away a
Norman choir to build a Decorated one; but at all events they were
advancing and expanding, not feebly recurring to a past period of
taste, and trying to obliterate the progress of the centuries.

About noon I left the little town, and struck out up a winding lane to
the hills. The copses were full of anemones and primroses; birds sang
sharply in the bushes which were gemmed with fresh green; now and then
I heard the woodpecker laugh as if at some secret jest among the
thickets. Presently the little town was at my feet, looking small and
tranquil in the golden noon; and soon I came to the top. It was grassy,
open down-land up here, and in an instant the wide view of a rich
wooded and watered plain spread before me, with shadowy hills on the
horizon. In the middle distance I saw the red roofs of a great town,
the smoke going peacefully up; here was a shining river-reach, like a
crescent of silver. It was England indeed--tranquil, healthy,
prosperous England.

The rest of the day I need not record. It was full of delicate
impressions--an old, gabled, mullioned house among its pastures; a
hamlet by a stream, admirably grouped; a dingle set with primroses; and
over all, the long, pure lines of upland, with here and there, through
a gap, the purple, wealthy plain.

I write this in the evening, at a little wayside inn, in a hamlet under
the hill. The name alone, Wenge Grandmain, is worth a shilling. It is
very simple, but clean, and the people are kind; not with the
professional manner of those who bow, smiling, to a paying guest, but
of those who welcome a wanderer and try to make him a home. And so, in
a dark-panelled little parlour, with a sedate-ticking clock, I sit
while the sounds of life grow fainter and rarer in the little street.



THE CROSSFOXES INN,
  BOURTON-ON-THE-WOLD,
    April 16, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I have now been ten days on my travels, but for the last
week I have pitched my moving tent at Bourton. Do you shudder with the
fear that I am going to give you pages of description of scenery? It is
not a SHUDDER with me when I get a landscape-letter; it is merely that
leaden dulness which falls upon the spirit when it is confronted with
statements which produce no impression upon the mind. I always, for
instance, skip the letters of travel which appear about the third
chapter of great biographies, when the young gentleman goes for the
Grand Tour after taking his degree.

But imagine this: a great, rich, wooded, watered plain; on the far
horizon the shadowy forms of hills; behind you, gently rising heights,
with dingles and folds full of copsewood, rising to soft green downs.
There, on the skirts of the upland, above the plain, below the hill,
sits the little village, with a stately Perpendicular church tower. The
village itself of stone houses, no two alike, all with character;
gabled, mullioned, weathered to a delicate ochre--some standing back,
some on the street. Intermingled with these are fine Georgian houses,
with great pilasters, all of stone too; in the centre of the street a
wall, with two tall gate-posts, crowned with stone balls; a short lime
avenue leads to a stately, gabled manor-house, which you can see
through great iron gates. The whole scene incredibly romantic,
exquisitely beautiful.

My favourite walk is this. I leave the little town by a road which
winds along the base of the hill. I pass round a shoulder, wooded and
covered to the base with tangled thickets, where the birds sing
shrilly. I turn up to the left into a kind of "combe." At the very
farthest end of the little valley, at the base of the steeper slopes
but now high above the plain, stands an ancient church among yews. On
one side of it is a long, low-fronted, irregular manor-house, with a
formal garden in front, approached by a little arched gate-house which
stands on the road; on the other side of the church, and below it, a no
less ancient rectory, with a large Perpendicular window, anciently a
chapel, in the gable. In the warm, sheltered air the laurels grow
luxuriantly; a bickering stream, running in a deep channel, makes a
delicate music of its own; a little farther on stands a farm, with barn
and byre; in the midst of the buildings is a high, stone-tiled
dovecote. The roo-hooing of the pigeons fills the whole place with a
slumberous sound. I wind up the hill by a little path, now among
thickets, now crossing a tilted pasture. I emerge on the top of a down;
in front of me lie the long slopes of the wold, with that purity and
tranquillity of outline which only down-land possesses. Here on a spur
stands a grass-grown camp, with ancient thorn-trees growing in it.
Turning round, the great plain runs for miles, with here and there a
glint of water, where the slow-moving Avon wanders. Hamlets, roads,
towers lie out like a map at my feet--all wearing that secluded,
peaceful air which tempts me to think that life would be easy and happy
if it could only be lived among those quiet fields, with the golden
light and lengthening shadows.

I find myself wondering in these quiet hours--I walk alone as a
rule--what this haunting, incommunicable sense of beauty is. Is it a
mere matter of temperament, of inner happiness, of physical well-being;
or has it an absolute existence? It comes and goes like the wind. Some
days one is acutely, almost painfully, alive to it--painfully, because
it makes such constant and insistent demands upon one's attention. Some
days, again, it is almost unheeded, and one passes through it blind and
indifferent. It is an expression, I cannot help feeling, of the very
mind of God; and yet the ancient earthwork in which I stand, bears
witness to the fact that in far-off days men lived in danger and
anxiety, fighting and striving for bare existence. We have established
by law and custom a certain personal security nowadays; is our sense of
beauty born of that security? I cannot help wondering whether the old
warriors who built this place cared at all for the beauty of the earth;
and yet over it all hangs the gentle sadness of all sweet things that
have an end. All those warriors are dust; the boys and girls who
wandered a century ago where I wander to-day, they are at rest too in
the little churchyard that lies at my feet; and my heart goes out to
all who have loved and suffered, and to those who shall hereafter love
and suffer here. An idle sympathy, perhaps, but none the less strong
and real.

But now for a little human experience that befell me here. I found the
other day, not far from the church, an old artist sketching. A refined,
sad-looking old fellow, sunburned and active, with white hair and
pointed beard, and a certain pathetic attempt, of a faded kind, to
dress for his part--low collar, a red tie, rough shooting-jacket, and
so forth. He seemed in a sociable mood, and I sate down beside him. How
it came about I hardly know, but he was soon telling me the story of
his life. He was the tenant, I found, of the old manor-house, which he
held at a ridiculous rent, and he had lived here nearly forty years. He
had found the place as a young man, wandering about in search of the
picturesque. I gathered that he had bright dreams and wide ambitions.
He had a small independence, and he had meant to paint great pictures
and make a name for himself. He had married; his wife was long dead,
his children out in the world, and he was living on alone, painting the
same pictures, bought, so far as I could make out, mostly by American
visitors. His drawing was old-fashioned and deeply mannerised. He was
painting not what was there, but some old and faded conception of his
own as to what it was like--missing, I think, half the beauty of the
place. He seemed horribly desolate. I tried, for his consolation and my
own, to draw out a picture of the beautiful refined life he led; and
the old fellow began to wear a certain jaunty air of dignity and
distinction, which would have amused me if it had not made me feel
inclined to cry. But he soon fell back into what is, I suppose, a
habitual melancholy. "Ah, if you had known what my dreams were!" he
said once. He went on to say that he now wished that he had taken up
some simple and straightforward profession, had made money, and had his
grandchildren about him. "I am more ghost than man," he said, shaking
his dejected head.

I despair of expressing to you the profound pathos that seemed to me to
surround this old despondent creature, with his broken dreams and his
regretful memories. Where was the mistake he made? I suppose that he
over-estimated his powers; but it was a generous mistake after all; and
he has had to bear the slow sad disillusionment, the crushing burden of
futility. He set out to win glory, and he is a forgotten, shabby,
irresolute figure, subsisting on the charity of wealthy visitors! And
yet he seems to have missed happiness by so little. To live as he does
might be a serene and beautiful thing. If such a man had large reserves
of hope and tenderness and patience; if he could but be content with
the tranquil beauty of the wholesome earth, spread so richly before his
eyes, it would be a life to be envied.

It has been a gentle lesson to me, that one must resolutely practise
one's heart and spirit for the closing hours. In the case of successful
men, as they grow older, it often strikes me with a sense of pain how
passionately they cling to their ambitions and activities. How many
people there are who work too long, and try to prolong the energies of
morning into the afternoon, and the toil of afternoon into the peace of
evening. I earnestly desire to grow old gracefully; to know when to
stop, when to slip into a wise and kindly passivity, with sympathy for
those who are in the forefront of the race. And yet if one does not
practise wonder and receptivity and hope, one cannot expect them to
come suddenly and swiftly to one's call. There comes a day when a man
ought to be able to see that his best work is behind him, that his
active influence is on the wane, that he is losing his hold on the
machine. There ought to come a patient, beautiful, and kindly dignity,
a love of young things and fresh flowers; not an envious and regretful
unhappiness at the loss of the eager life and its brisk sensations,
which betrays itself too often in a trickle of exaggerated
reminiscences, a "weary, day-long chirping."

This is a harder task, I suppose, for an old bachelor than for a father
of children. I have sometimes felt that adoption, with all its risks,
of some young creature that you can call your own, would be a solution
for many loveless lives, because it would stir them out of the
comfortable selfishness that is the bane of the barren heart.

Of course, a schoolmaster suffers from this less than most professional
men; but, even so, it is melancholy to reflect how the boys one has
cared for, and tried to help, drift out of one's sight and ken. I have
no touch of the feeling which they say was characteristic of
Jowett--and indeed is amply evidenced by his correspondence--that once
a man's tutor he was always his tutor, even though his pupil became
grey-headed and a grandfather. One must do the best for the boys and
look for no gratitude; it often comes, indeed, in rich measure, but the
schoolmaster who craves for it is lost.

Well, it is time to stop. I sit in a little, low raftered parlour of
the old inn; the fire in the big hearth flickers into ash, and my
candles flare to their sockets. I leave the place to-morrow; and such
is the instinct for permanence in the human mind, that I feel depressed
and melancholy, as though I were leaving home.--Ever your affectionate,

T. B.



THE BLUE BOAR,
  STANTON HARDWICK,
    April 21, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I have made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon. I now
feel overwhelmed with shame to reflect that, though my chief
preoccupations apart from my profession have been literary, I have
never visited the sacred place before. For an Englishman who cares for
literature not to have been to Stratford-on-Avon is as gross a neglect
as for an Englishman who has any sense of patriotism not to have
visited Westminster Abbey.

And now that I have been there and returned, and have leisure to think
it all over, I feel that I have been standing on the threshold of a
mystery. Who, when all is said and done, was this extraordinary man?
What were his thoughts, his aims, his views of himself and of the
world? If Shakespeare was Shakespeare, he seems, to speak frankly, to
have had a humanity distinct and apart from his genius. Here we have
the son of a busy, quarrelsome, enterprising tradesman--who eventually
indeed came to grief in trade--of a yeoman stock, and bearing a common
name. His mother could not write her own signature. Of his youth we
hear little that is not disreputable. He married under unpleasant
circumstances, after an entanglement which took place at a very early
age; he was addicted to poaching, or, at all events, to the illegal
pursuit of other people's game. Then he drifts up to London and joins a
theatrical company--then a rascally kind of trade--deserting his wife
and family. His life in London is full of secrets. He is a man of
mysterious passions and dangerous friendships. He writes plays of
incomparable depth and breadth, touching every chord of humour, tragedy
and pathos; certain rather elaborate poems of a precieux type, and
strange sonnets, revealing a singular poignancy of unconventional
feelings. But here, again, it is difficult to conceive that the writer
of the Sonnets, who touched life so intensely at one feverish point,
should have had the amazing detachment and complexity of mind and soul
that the plays reveal. The notices of his talk and character are few
and unenlightening, and testify to a certain easy brilliance of wit,
but no more. Before he is thirty he is spoken of as both "upright" and
"facetious"--a singular combination.

Then he suddenly appears in another aspect; at the age of thirty-two he
is a successful, well-to-do man. And then his ambition, if he had any,
seems to shift its centre, and he appears to be only bent upon
restoring the fortunes of his family, and attaining a solid municipal
position. He buys the biggest house in his native place; from the
proceeds of his writings, his professional income as an actor, and from
his share in the playhouse of which he is part owner, he purchases
lands and houses, he engages in lawsuits, he concerns himself with
grants of arms. Still the flood of stupendous literature flows out; he
seems to be under a contract to produce plays, for which he receives
the magnificent sum of L10 (L100 of our money). He writes easily and
never corrects. He seems to set no store on his writings, which stream
from him like light from the sun. He adapts, collaborates, and has no
idea of what would be called a high vocation.

At forty-seven it all ceases; he writes no more, but lives prosperously
in his native town, with occasional visits to London. At fifty-two his
health fails. He makes business-like arrangements in the event of
death, and faces the darkness of the long sleep like any other good
citizen.

Who can co-ordinate or reconcile these things? Who can conceive the
likeness of the man, who steps in this light-hearted, simple way on to
the very highest platform of literature--so lofty and unattainable a
place he takes without striving, without arrogance, a throne among the
thrones where Homer, Virgil, and Dante sit? And yet his mind is set,
not on these things, but on acres and messuages, tithes and
investments. He seems not only devoid of personal vanity, but even of
that high and solemn pride which made Keats say, with faltering lips,
that he believed he would be among the English poets after his death.

I came through the pleasant water-meadows and entered the streets of
the busy town. Everything, from bank to eating-shop, bears the name of
Shakespeare; and one cannot resist the thought that such local and
homely renown would have been more to our simple hero's taste than the
laurel and the throne. I groaned in spirit over the monstrous
playhouse, with its pretentious Teutonic air; I walked through the
churchyard, vocal with building rooks, and came to the noble church,
full of the evidences of wealth and worship and honour. I do not like
to confess the breathless awe with which I drew near to the chancel and
gazed on the stone that, nameless, with its rude rhyme, covers the
sacred dust. I cannot say what my thoughts were, but I was lost in a
formless, unuttered prayer of true abasement before the venerable
relics of the highest achievements of the human spirit. There beneath
my feet slept the dust of the brain that conceived Hamlet and Macbeth,
and the hand that had traced the Sonnets, and the eye that had plumbed
the depths of life. That was a solemn moment, and I do not think I ever
experienced so deep a thrill of speechless awe. I could not tear myself
away; I could only wonder and desire.

Presently, by the kind offices of a pleasant simple verger, I did more.
I mounted on some steps he brought, and looked face to face at the bust
in the monument.

I cannot share in the feelings of those who would consider it formal or
perfunctory. There was the high-domed forehead, like that of Pericles
and Walter Scott; there were the steady eyes, the clear-cut nose; and
as for the lips--I never for an instant doubted the truth of what I
saw--I am as certain as I can be that they are the lips of a corpse,
drawn up in the stiff tension of death, showing the teeth below. I am
absolutely convinced that here we get as near to the man as we can get,
and that the head is taken from a death-mask. What injures the dignity
and beauty of the face is the plumpness of the chin that testifies to
the burgher prosperity, the comfortable life, the unexercised brain of
the later days. I saw afterwards the various portraits; I suppose it is
a matter of evidence, but nothing convinced me of truth, not even the
bilious, dilapidated, dyspeptic, white face of the folio engraving,
with the horrible hydrocephalous development of skull. That is a
caricature only. The others seem mere fancies.

Then I saw patiently the other relics, the foundations of New Place,
the schoolhouse--but all without emotion, except a deep sense of shame
that the only records allowed to stand in the long, low-latticed room
in which the boy Shakespeare probably saw a play first acted, are
boards recording the names of school football and cricket teams. The
ineptitude of such a proceeding, the hideous insistence of the athletic
craze of England, drew from me a despairing smile; but I think that
Shakespeare himself would have viewed it with tolerance and even
amusement.

But most of these relics, like Anne Hathaway's Cottage, are restored
out of all interest, and only testify to the silly and frivolous
demands of trippers.

But, my dear Herbert, the treasure is mine. Feeble as the confession
is, I do not think I ever realised before the humanity of Shakespeare.
He seemed to me before to sit remote, enshrined aloof, the man who
could tell all the secrets of humanity that could be told, and whose
veriest hints still seem to open doors into mysteries both high and
sweet and terrible. But now I feel as if I had been near him, had been
able to love what I had only admired.

I feel somehow that it extends the kingdom of humanity to have realised
Shakespeare; and yet I am baffled. But I seem to trace in the later and
what some would call the commonplace features of the man's life, a
desire to live and be; to taste life itself, not merely to write of
what life seemed to be, and of what lay behind it. I am sure that some
such allegory was in his mind when he wrote of Prospero, who so
willingly gave up the isle full of noises, the power over the dreaming,
sexless spirits of air and wood, to go back to his tiresome dukedom,
and his petty court, and all the dull chatter and business of life. I
am sure that Shakespeare thought of his art as an Ariel--that dainty,
delicate spirit, out of the reach of love and desire, that slept in
cowslip-bells and chased the flying summer on the bat's back, and that
yet had such power to delude and bemuse the human spirit. After all,
Ariel could not come near the more divine inheritance of the human
heart, sorrow and crying, love and hate. Ariel was but a merry child,
lost in passionless delights, yearning to be free, to escape; and
Prospero felt, and Shakespeare felt, that life, with all its stains and
dreariness and disease and darkness, was something better and truer
than the fragrant dusk of the copse, and the soulless laughter of the
summer sea. Ariel could sing the heartless, exquisite song of the
sea-change that could clothe the bones and eyes of the doomed king; but
Prospero could see a fairer change in the eyes and heart of his lonely
darling.

And I am glad that even so Shakespeare could be silent, and buy and
sell, and go in and out among his fellow-townsmen, and make merry. That
is better than to sit arid and prosperous, when the brain stiffens with
stupor, and the hand has lost its cunning, and to read old
newspaper-cuttings, and long for adequate recognition. God give me and
all uneasy natures grace to know when to hold our tongues; and to take
the days that remain with patience and wonder and tenderness; not
making haste to depart, but yet not fearing the shadow out of which we
come and into which we must go; to live wisely and bravely and sweetly,
and to close our eyes in faith, with a happy sigh, like a child after a
long summer day of life and delight.--Ever yours,

T. B.



THE BLUE BOAR,
  STANTON HARDWICK,
    April 25, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--Since I last wrote I have been making pious pilgrimages
to some of the great churches hereabouts: to Gloucester, Worcester,
Tewkesbury, Malvern, Pershore. It does me good to see these great poems
in stone, beautiful in their first conception, and infinitely more
beautiful from the mellowing influences of age, and from the human
tradition that is woven into them and through them. There are few
greater pleasures than to make one's way into a Cathedral city, with
the grey towers visible for miles across the plain, rising high above
the house roofs and the smoke. At first one is in the quiet country;
then the roads begin to have a suburban air--new cottages rise by the
wayside, comfortable houses, among shrubberies and plantations. Then
the street begins; the houses grow taller and closer, and one has a
glimpse of some stately Georgian front, with pediment and cornice;
perhaps there is a cluster of factories, high, rattling buildings
overtopped by a tall chimney, with dusty, mysterious gear, of which one
cannot guess the purport, travelling upwards into some tall, blank
orifice. Then suddenly one is in the Close, with trees and flowers and
green grass, with quaint Prebendal houses of every style and date,
breathing peace and prosperity. A genial parson or two pace gravely
about; and above you soars the huge church, with pinnacle and parapet,
the jackdaws cheerily hallooing from the lofty ledges. You are a little
weary of air and sun; you push open the great door, and you are in the
cool, dark nave with its holy smell; you sit for a little and let the
spirit of the place creep into your mind; you walk hither and thither,
read the epitaphs, mourn with the bereaved, give thanks for the record
of long happy lives, and glow with mingled pain and admiration for some
young life nobly laid down. The monuments of soldiers, the sight of
dusty banners moving faintly in the slow-stirring air, always move me
inexpressibly; the stir and fury of war setting hither, like a quiet
tide, to find its last abiding-place. Then there is the choir to visit.
I do not really like the fashion which now generally prevails of paying
a small sum, writing your name in a book, and being handed over to the
guidance of some verger, a pompous foolish person, who has learnt his
lesson, delivers it like a machine, and is put out by any casual
question. I do not want to be lectured; I want to wander about, ask a
question if I desire it, and just have pointed out to me anything of
which the interest is not patent and obvious. The tombs of old knights,
the chantries of silent abbots and bishops, are all very affecting;
they stand for so much hope and love and recollection. Then sometimes
one has a glow at seeing some ancient and famous piece of history
presented to one's gaze. The figure of the grim Saxon king, with his
archaic beard and shaven upper-lip, for all the world like some
Calvinistic tradesman; or Edward the Second, with his weak, handsome
face and curly locks; or the mailed statue of Robert of Normandy, with
scarlet surcoat, starting up like a warrior suddenly aroused. Such
tombs send a strange thrill through one, a thrill of wonder and pity
and awe. What of them now? Sleepest thou, son of Atreus? Dost thou
sleep, and dream perchance of love and war, of the little life that
seemed so long, and over which the slow waves of time have flowed?
Little by little, in the holy walls, so charged with faith and
tenderness and wistful love, the pathetic vision of mortality creeps
across the mind, and one loses oneself in a dream of wonder at the
brief days so full of life, the record left for after time, and the
silence of the grave.

Then, when I have drunk my fill of sweet sights, I love to sit silent,
while the great bell hums in the roof, and gathering footsteps of young
and old patter through the echoing aisles. There is a hush of
expectation. A few quiet worshippers assemble; the western light grows
low, and lights spring to life, one after another, in the misty choir.
Then murmurs a voice, an Amen rises in full concord, and as it dies
away the slumberous thunder of a pedal note rolls on the air; the
casements whirr, the organ speaks. That fills, as it were, to the brim,
as with some sweet and fragrant potion, the cup of beauty; and the
dreaming, inquiring spirit sinks content into the flowing, the aspiring
tide, satisfied as with some heavenly answer to its sad questionings.
Then the stately pomp moves slowly to its place--so familiar, perhaps
trivial an act to those who perform it, so grave and beautiful a thing
to those who see it. The holy service proceeds with a sense of
exquisite deliberation, leading one, as by a ladder, through the
ancient ways, up to the message of to-day. Through psalm and canticle
and anthem the solemnity passes on; and perhaps some single slender
voice, some boyish treble, unconscious of its beauty and pathos, thrown
into relief, like a fountain springing among dark rocks, by the slow
thunders of the organ, comes to assure the heart that it can rest, if
but for a moment, upon a deep and inner peace, can be gently rocked, as
it were, in a moving boat, between the sky and translucent sea. Then
falls the rich monotone of prayer; and the organ wakes again for one
last message, pouring a flood of melody from its golden throats, and
dying away by soft gradations into the melodious bourdon of its close.

Does this seem to you very unreal and fantastic? I do not know; it is
very real to me. Sometimes, in dreary working hours, my spirit
languishes under an almost physical thirst for such sweetness of sound
and sight. I cannot believe that it is other than a pure and holy
pleasure, because in such hours the spirit soars into a region in which
low and evil thoughts, ugly desires, and spiteful ambitions, die, like
poisonous flowers in a clear and wholesome air. I do not say that it
inspires one with high and fierce resolution, that it fits one for
battling with the troublesome world; but it is more like the green
pastures and waters of comfort; it is pleasure in which there is no
touch of sensual appetite or petty desire; it is a kind of heavenly
peace in which the spirit floats in a passionate longing for what is
beautiful and pure. It is not that I would live my life in such
reveries; even while the soft sound dies away, the calling of harsher
voices makes itself heard in the mind. But it refreshes, it calms, it
pacifies; it tells the heart that there is a peace into which it is
possible to enter, and where it may rest for a little and fold its
weary wings.

Yet even as I write, as the gentle mood lapses and fades, I find myself
beset with uneasy and bewildering thoughts about the whole. What was
the power that raised these great places as so essential and vital a
part of life? We have lost it now, whatever it was. Churches like these
were then an obvious necessity; kings and princes vied with each other
in raising them, and no one questioned their utility. They are now a
mere luxury for ecclesiastically minded persons, built by slow
accretion, and not by some huge single gift, to please the pride of a
county or a city; and this in days when England is a thousandfold
richer than she was. They are no longer a part of the essence of life;
life has flowed away from their portals, and left them a beautiful
shadow, a venerable monument, a fragrant sentiment. No doubt it was
largely superstition that constructed them, a kind of insurance paid
for heavenly security. No one now seriously thinks that to endow a
college of priests to perform services would affect his spiritual
prospects in the life to come. The Church itself does not countenance
the idea. Moreover, there is little demand in the world at large for
the kind of beauty which they can and do minister to such as myself.
The pleasure for which people spend money nowadays has to have a
stirring, exciting, physical element in it to be acceptable. If it were
otherwise, then our cathedrals could take their place in the life of
the nation; but they are out of touch with railways, and newspapers,
and the furious pursuit of athletics. They are on the side of peace and
delicate impressions and quiet emotions. I wish it were not so; but it
would be faithless to believe that we are not in the hand of God still,
and that our restless energies develop against His will.

And then there falls a darker, more bewildering thought. Suppose that
one could bring one of the rough Galilean fishermen who sowed the seed
of the faith, into a place like this, and say to him, "This is the
fruit of your teaching; you, whose Master never spoke a word of art or
music, who taught poverty and simplicity, bareness of life, and an
unclouded heart, you are honoured here; these towers and bells are
called after your names; you stand in gorgeous robes in these storied
windows." Would they not think and say that it was all a terrible
mistake? would they not say that the desire of the world, the lust of
the eye and ear, had laid subtle and gentle hands on a stern and rugged
creed, and bade it serve and be bound?


    "Thy nakedness involves thy Spouse
     In the soft sanguine stuff she wears."


So says an eager and vehement poet, apostrophising the tortured limbs,
the drooping eye of the Crucified Lord; and is it true that these
stately and solemn houses, these sweet strains of unearthly music,
serve His purpose and will? Nay, is it not rather true that the serpent
is here again aping the mildness of the dove, and using all the
delicate, luxurious accessories of life to blind us to the truth?

I do not know; it leaves me in a sad and bewildered conflict of spirit.
And yet I somehow feel that God is in these places, and that, if only
the heart is pure and the will strong, such influences can minister to
the growth of the meek and loving spirit.--Ever yours,

T. B.

I don't know what has happened to your letters. Perhaps you have not
been able to write? I go back to work to-morrow.



UPTON,
  May 2, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--My holidays are over, and I am back at work again. I
have got your delightful letter; it was silly to be anxious. . . .

To-day I was bicycling; I was horribly preoccupied, as, alas, I often
am, with my own plans and thoughts. I was worrying myself about my
work, fretting about the thousand little problems that beset a
schoolmaster, trying to think out a chapter of a book which I am
endeavouring to write, my mind beating and throbbing like a feverish
pulse. I kept telling myself that the copses were beautiful, that the
flowers were enchanting, that the long line of distant hills seen
across the wooded valleys and the purple plain were ravishingly
tranquil and serene; but it was of no use; my mind ran like a
mill-race, a stream of thoughts jostling and hurrying on, in spite of
my efforts to shut the sluice.

Suddenly I turned a corner by a little wood, and found myself looking
over into the garden of a small, picturesque cottage, which has been
smartened up lately, and has become, I suppose, the country retreat of
some well-to-do people. It was a pretty garden; a gentle slope of
grass, borders full of flowers, and an orchard behind, whitening into
bloom, with a little pool in the shady heart of it. On the lawn were
three people, obviously and delightfully idle; an elderly man sate in a
chair, smiling, smoking, reading a paper. The other two, a younger man
and a young woman, were walking side by side, their heads close
together, laughing quietly at some gentle jest. A perambulator stood by
the porch. Both the men looked like prosperous professional people,
clean-shaven, healthy, and contented. I inferred, for no particular
reason, that the young pair were man and wife, lately married, and that
the elder man was the father-in-law. I had this passing glimpse, no
more, of an interior; and then I was riding among the spring woods
again.

Of course it was only an impression, but this happy, sunshiny scene, so
suddenly opened to my gaze, so suddenly closed again, was like a
parable. I felt as if I should have liked to stop, to take off my hat,
and thank my unknown friends for making so simple, pleasant, and sweet
a picture. I dare say they were as preoccupied in professional matters,
as careful and troubled as myself, if I had known more about them. But
in that moment they were finding leisure simply to taste and enjoy the
wholesome savours of life, and were neither looking backward in regret
nor forward in anticipation. I dare say the jokes that amused them were
mild enough, and that I should have found their conversation tedious
and tiresome if I had been made one of the party. But they were
symbolical; they stood for me, and will stand, as a type of what we
ought to aim at more; and that is simply LIVING. It is a lesson which
you yourself are no doubt learning in your fragrant, shady garden. You
have no need to make money, and your only business is to get better.
But for myself, I know that I work and think and hope and fear too
much, and that in my restless pursuit of a hundred aims and ambitions
and dreams and fancies, I am constantly in danger of hardly living at
all, but of simply racing on, like a man intoxicated with affairs,
without leisure for strolling, for sitting, for talking, for watching
the sky and the earth, smelling the scents of flowers, noting the funny
ways of animals, playing with children, eating and drinking. Yet this
is our true heritage, and this is what it means to be a man; and, after
all, one has (for all one knows) but a single life, and that a short
one. It is at such moments as these that I wake as from a dream, and
think how fast my life flows on, and how very little conscious of its
essence I am. My head is full from morning to night of everything
except living. For a busy man this is, of course, to a certain extent
inevitable. But where I am at fault is in not relapsing at intervals
into a wise and patient passivity, and sitting serenely on the shore of
the sea of life, playing with pebbles, seeing the waves fall and the
ships go by, and wondering at the strange things cast up by the waves,
and the sharp briny savours of the air. Why do I not do this? Because,
to continue my confession, it bores me. I must, it seems, be always in
a fuss; be always hauling myself painfully on to some petty ambition or
some shadowy object that I have in view; and the moment I have reached
it, I must fix upon another, and begin the process over again. It is
this lust for doing something tangible, for sitting down quickly and
writing fifty, for having some definite result to show, which is the
ruin of me and many others. After all, when it is done, what worth has
it? I am not a particularly successful man, and I can't delude myself
into thinking that my work has any very supreme value. And meanwhile
all the real experiences of life pass me by. I have never, God forgive
me, had time to be in love! That is a pitiful confession.

Sometimes one comes across a person with none of these uneasy
ambitions, with whom living is a fine art; then one realises what a
much more beautiful creation it is than books and pictures. It is a
kind of sweet and solemn music. Such a man or woman has time to read,
to talk, to write letters, to pay calls, to walk about the farm, to go
and sit with tiresome people, to spend long hours with children, to sit
in the open air, to keep poultry, to talk to servants, to go to church,
to remember what his or her relations are doing, to enjoy garden
parties and balls, to like to see young people enjoying themselves, to
hear confessions, to do other people's business, to be a welcome
presence everywhere, and to leave a fragrant memory, watered with sweet
tears. That is to live. And such lives, one is tempted to think, were
more possible, more numerous, a hundred years ago. But now one expects
too much, and depends too much on exciting pleasures, whether of work
or play. Well, my three persons in a garden must be a lesson to me;
and, whatever may really happen to them, in my mind they shall walk for
ever between the apple-trees and the daffodils, looking lovingly at
each other, while the elder man shall smile as he reads in the
Chronicle of Heaven, which does not grow old.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  May 9, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--I am going back to the subject of ambition--do you
mind?

Yesterday in chapel one of my colleagues preached rather a fine sermon
on Activity. The difficulty under which he laboured is a common one in
sermons; it is simply this--How far is a Christian teacher justified in
recommending ambition to Christian hearers? I think that, if one reads
the Gospel, it is clear that ambition is not a Christian motive. The
root of the teaching of Christ seems to me to be that one should have
or acquire a passion for virtue; love it for its beauty, as an artist
loves beauty of form or colour; and the simplicity which is to be the
distinguishing mark of a Christian seems to me to be inconsistent with
personal ambition. I do not see that there is any hint of a Christian
being allowed to wish to do, what is called in domestic language
"bettering" himself. The idea rather is that the all-wise and
all-loving Father puts a man into the world where he intends him to be;
and that a man is to find his highest pleasure in trying to serve the
Father's will, with a heart full of love for all living things. A rich
man is to disembarrass himself of his riches, or at least be sure that
they are no hindrance to him; a poor man is not to attempt to win them.
Of course it may be possible that the original Christians were intended
to take a special line while the faith was leavening the world, and
that a different economy was to prevail when society had been
Christianised. This is a point of view which can be subtly defended,
but I think it is hard to find any justification for it in the Gospel.
Ambition practically means that, if one is to shoulder to the front,
one must push other people out of the way; one must fight for one's own
hand. To succeed at no one's expense is only possible to people of very
high character and genius.

But it is difficult to see what motive to set before boys in the
matter; the ideas of fame and glory, the hope of getting what all
desire and what all cannot have, are deeply rooted in the childish
mind. Moreover, we encourage ambition so frankly, both in work and
play, that it is difficult to ascend the school pulpit and take quite a
different line. To tell boys that they must simply do their best for
the sake of doing their best, without any thought of the rewards of
success--it is a very fine ideal, but is it a practical one? If we gave
prizes to the stupid boys who work without hope of success, and if we
gave colours to the boys who played games hard without attaining
competence in them, we might then dare to speak of the rewards of
virtue. But boys despise unsuccessful conscientiousness, and all the
rewards we distribute are given to aptitude. Some preachers think they
get out of the difficulty by pointing to examples of lives that battled
nobly and unsuccessfully against difficulties; but the point always is
the ultimate recognition. The question is not whether we can provide a
motive for the unsuccessful; but whether we ought not to discourage
ambition in every form? Yet it is the highest motive power in the case
of most generous and active-minded boys.

In the course of the sermon the preacher quoted some lines of Omar
Khayyam in order to illustrate the shamefulness of the indolent life.
That is a very dangerous thing to do. The lovely stanzas, sweet as
honey, flowed out upon the air in all their stately charm. The old
sinner stole my heart away with his gentle, seductive, Epicurean grace.
I am afraid that I felt like Paolo as he sate beside Francesca. I heard
no more of the sermon that day; I repeated to myself many of the
incomparable quatrains, and felt the poem to be the most beautiful
presentment of pure Agnosticism that has ever been given to the world.
The worst of it is that the delicate traitor makes it so beautiful that
one does not feel the shame and the futility of it.

This evening I have been reading the new life of FitzGerald, so you may
guess what was the result of the sermon for me. It is not a wholly
pleasing book, but it is an interesting one; it gives a better picture
of the man than any other book or article, simply by the great
minuteness with which it enters into details. And now I find myself
confronted by the problem in another shape. Was FitzGerald's life an
unworthy one? He had great literary ambitions, but he made nothing of
them. He lived a very pure, innocent, secluded life, delighting in
nature and in the company of simple people; loving his friends with a
passion that reminds one of Newman; doing endless little kindnesses to
all who came within his circle; and tenderly loved by several
great-hearted men of genius. He felt himself that he was to blame; he
urged others to the activities which he could not practise. And yet the
results of his life are such as many other more busy, more
conscientious men have not achieved. He has left a large body of good
literary work, and one immortal poem of incomparable beauty. He also
left, quite unconsciously, I believe, many of the most beautiful,
tender, humorous, wise letters in the English tongue; and I find myself
wondering whether all this could have been brought to pass in any other
way.

Yet I could not conscientiously advise any one to take FitzGerald's
life as a model It was shabby, undecided, futile; he did many silly,
almost fatuous things; he was deplorably idle and unstrung. At the same
time a terrible suspicion creeps upon me that many busy men are living
worse lives. I don't mean men who give themselves to activities,
however dusty, which affect other people. I will grant at once that
doctors, teachers, clergymen, philanthropists, even Members of
Parliament are justified in their lives; then, too, men who do the
necessary work of the world--farmers, labourers, workmen, fishermen,
are justifiable. But business men who make fortunes for their children;
lawyers, artists, writers, who work for money and for praise--are these
after all so much nobler than our indolent friend? To begin with,
FitzGerald's life was one of extraordinary simplicity. He lived on
almost nothing, he had no luxuries; he was like a lily of the field. If
he had been a merely selfish man it would have been different; but he
loved his fellow-men deeply and tenderly, and he showered unobtrusive
kindness on all round him.

I find it very hard to make up my mind; it is true that the fabric of
the world would fall to pieces if we were all FitzGeralds. But so, too,
as has often been pointed out, would it fall to pieces if we all lived
literally on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount. Activities are for
many people a purely selfish thing, to fill the time because they are
otherwise bored; and it is hard to see why a man who can fill his life
with less strenuous pleasures, books, music, strolling, talking, should
not be allowed to do so.

Solve me the riddle, if you can! The simplicity of the Gospel seems to
me to be inconsistent with the Expansion of England; and I dare not say
off-hand that the latter is the finer ideal.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  May 15, 1904.


MY DEAR HERBERT,--You ask if I have read anything lately? Well, I have
been reading Stalky & Co. with pain, and, I hope, profit. It is an
amazing book; the cleverness, the freshness, the incredible originality
of it all; the careless ease with which scene after scene is touched
off and a picture brought before one at a glance, simply astounds me,
and leaves me gasping. But I don't want now to discourse about the
literary merits of the book, great as they are. I want to relieve my
mind of the thoughts that disquiet me. I think, to start with, it is
not a fair picture of school life at all. If it is really
reminiscent--and the life-likeness and verisimilitude of the book is
undeniable--the school must have been a very peculiar one. In the first
place, the interest is concentrated upon a group of very unusual boys.
The Firm of Stalky is, I humbly thank God, a combination of boys of a
rare species. The other figures of boys in the book form a mere
background, and the deeds of the central heroes are depicted like the
deeds of the warriors of the Iliad. They dart about, slashing and
hewing, while the rank and file run hither and thither like sheep,
their only use being in the numerical tale of heads that they can
afford to the flashing blades of the protagonists; and even so the
chief figures, realistic though they are, remind me not so much of
spirited pictures as of Gillray's caricatures. They are highly
coloured, fantastic, horribly human and yet, somehow, grotesque.
Everything is elongated, widened, magnified, exaggerated. The
difficulty is, to my mind, to imagine boys so lawless, so unbridled, so
fond at intervals of low delights, who are yet so obviously
wholesome-minded and manly. I can only humbly say that it is my belief,
confirmed by experience, that boys of so unconventional and daring a
type would not be content without dipping into darker pleasures. But
Kipling is a great magician, and, in reading the book, one can
thankfully believe that in this case it was not so; just as one can
also believe that, in this particular case, the boys were as mature and
shrewd, and of as complete and trenchant a wit as they appear. My own
experience here again is that no boys could keep so easily on so high a
level of originality and sagacity. The chief characteristic of all the
boys I have ever known is that they are so fitful, so unfinished. A
clever boy will say incredibly acute things, but among a dreary tract
of wonderfully silly ones. The most original boys will have long lapses
into conventionality, but the heroes of Kipling's book are never
conventional, never ordinary; and then there is an absence of
restfulness which is one of the greatest merits of Tom Brown.

But what has made the book to me into a kind of Lenten manual is the
presentation of the masters. Here I see, portrayed with remorseless
fidelity, the faults and foibles of my own class; and I am sorry to say
that I feel deliberately, on closing the book, that schoolmastering
must be a dingy trade. My better self cries out against this
conclusion, and tries feebly to say that it is one of the noblest of
professions; and then I think of King and Prout, and all my highest
aspirations die away at the thought that I may be even as these.

I suppose that Kipling would reply that he has done full justice to the
profession by giving us the figures of the Headmaster and the Chaplain.
The Headmaster is obviously a figure which his creator regards with
respect. He is fair-minded, human, generous; it is true that he is
enveloped with a strange awe and majesty; he moves in a mysterious way,
and acts in a most inconsequent and unexpected manner. But he generally
has the best of a situation; and though there is little that is
pastoral about him, yet he is obviously a wholesome-minded, manly sort
of person, who whips the right person at the right time, and generally
scores in the end. But he is a Roman father, at best. He has little
compassion and no tenderness; he is acute, brisk, and sensible; but he
has (at least to me) neither grace nor wisdom; or, if he has, he keeps
them under a polished metallic dish-cover, and only lifts it in
private. I do not feel that the Headmaster has any religion, except the
religion of all sensible men. In seeming to despise all sentiment,
Kipling seems to me to throw aside several beautiful flowers, tied
carelessly up in the same bundle. There should be a treasure in the
heart of a wise schoolmaster; not to be publicly displayed nor drearily
recounted; but at the right moment, and in the right way, he ought to
be able to show a boy that there are sacred and beautiful things which
rule or ought to rule the heart. If the Head has such a treasure he
keeps it at the bank and only visits it in the holidays.

The "Padre" is a very human figure--to me the most attractive in the
book; he has some wisdom and tenderness, and his little vanities are
very gently touched. But (I daresay I am a very pedantic person) I
don't really like his lounging about and smoking in the boys' studies.
I think that what he would have called tolerance is rather a deplorable
indolence, a desire to be above all things acceptable. He earns his
influence by giving his colleagues away, and he seems to me to think
more of the honour of the boys than of the honour of the place.

But King and Prout, the two principal masters--it is they who spoil the
taste of my food and mingle my drink with ashes. They are, in their
way, well-meaning and conscientious men. But is it not possible to love
discipline without being a pedant, and to be vigilant without being a
sneak? I fear in the back of my heart that Kipling thinks that the
trade of a schoolmaster is one which no generous or self-respecting man
can adopt. And yet it is a useful and necessary trade; and we should be
in a poor way if it came to be regarded as a detestable one. I wish
with all my heart that Kipling had used his genius to make our path
smoother instead of rougher. The path of the schoolmaster is indeed set
round with pitfalls. A man who is an egotist and a bully finds rich
pasturage among boys who are bound to listen to him, and over whom he
can tyrannise. But, on the other hand, a man who is both brave and
sensitive--and there are many such--can learn as well as teach
abundance of wholesome lessons, if he comes to his task with some hope
and love. King is, of course, a verbose bully; he delights in petty
triumphs; he rejoices in making himself felt; he is a cynic as well, a
greedy and low-minded man; he takes a disgusting pleasure in detective
work; he begins by believing the worst of boys; he is vain, shy,
irritable; he is cruel, and likes to see his victim writhe. I have
known many schoolmasters and I have never known a Mr. King, except
perhaps at a private school. But even King has done me good; he has
confirmed me in my belief that more can be done by courtesy and decent
amiability than can ever be done by discipline enforced by hard words.
He teaches me not to be pompous, and not to hunger and thirst after
finding things out. He makes me feel sure that the object of detection
is to help boys to be better, and not to have the satisfaction of
punishing them.

Prout is a feeble sentimentalist, with a deep belief in phrases. He is
a better fellow than King, and is only an intolerable goose. Both the
men make me wish to burst upon the scene, when they are grossly
mishandling some simple situation; but while I want to kick King, when
he is retreating with dignity, my only desire is to explain to Prout as
patiently as I can what an ass he is. He is a perfect instance of
absolutely ineffective virtue, a plain dish unseasoned with salt.

There are, of course, other characters in the book, each of them
grotesque and contemptible in his own way, each of them a notable
example of what not to be. But I would pardon this if the book were not
so unjust; if Kipling had included in his gathering of masters one
kindly, serious gentleman, whose sense of vocation did not make him a
prig. And if he were to reply that the Headmaster fulfils these
conditions, I would say that the Headmaster is a prig in this one
point, that he is so desperately afraid of priggishness. The manly man,
to my mind, is the man who does not trouble his head as to whether he
is manly or not, not the man who wears clothes too big for him, and
heavy boots, treads like an ox, and speaks gruffly; that is a pose, not
better or worse than other poses. And what I want in the book is a man
of simple and direct character, interested in his work, and not ashamed
of his interest; attached to the boys, and not ashamed of seeming to
care.

My only consolation is that I have talked to a good many boys who have
read the book; they have all been amused, interested, delighted. But
they say frankly that the boys are not like any boys they ever knew,
and, when I timidly inquire about the masters, they laugh rather
sheepishly, and say that they don't know about that.

I am sure that we schoolmasters have many faults; but we are really
trying to do better, and, as I said before, I only wish that a man of
Kipling's genius had held out to us a helping hand, instead of giving
us a push back into the ugly slough of usherdom, out of which many good
fellows, my friends and colleagues, have, however feebly, been
struggling to emerge.--Ever yours,

T. B.



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,

T. B.



UPTON,
  May 28, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I am bursting with news. I am going to tell you a
secret. I have been offered an important Academical post; that is to
say, I received a confidential intimation that I should be elected if I
stood. The whole thing is confidential, so that I must not even tell
you what the offer was. I should have very much liked to talk it over
with you, but I had to make up my mind quickly; there was no time to
write, and, moreover, I feel sure that when I had turned out the pros
and cons of my own feelings for your inspection, you would have decided
as I did.

You will say at once that you do not know how I reconciled my refusal
with the cardinal article of my faith, that our path is indicated to us
by Providence, and that we ought to go where we are led. Well, I
confess that I felt this to be a strong reason for accepting. The
invitation came to me as a complete surprise, absolutely unsought, and
from a body of electors who know the kind of man they want and have a
large field to choose from; there was no question of private influence
or private friendship. I hardly know one of the committee; and they
took a great deal of trouble in making inquiries about men.

But, to use a detestable word, there is a strong difference between an
outward call and an inward call. It is not the necessary outcome of a
belief in Providence that one accepts all invitations, and undertakes
whatever one may be asked to do. There is such a thing as temptation;
and there is another kind of summons, sent by God, which seems to come
in order that one may take stock of one's own position and capacities
and realise what one's line ought to be. It is like a passage in a
labyrinth which strikes off at right angles from the passage one is
following; the fact that one MAY take a sudden turn to the left is not
necessarily a clear indication that one is meant to do so. It may be
only sent to make one consider the reasons which induce one to follow
the path on which one is embarked.

I had no instantaneous corresponding sense that it was my duty to
follow this call. I was (I will confess it) a little dazzled; but, as
soon as that wore off, I felt an indescribable reluctance to undertake
the task, a consciousness of not being equal to it, a strong sense that
I was intended for other things.

I don't mean to say that there was not much that was attractive about
the offer in a superficial way. It meant money, power, position, and
consequence--all good things, and good things which I unreservedly
like. I am like every one else in that respect; I should like a large
house, and a big income, and professional success, and respect and
influence as much as any one--more, indeed, than many people.

But I soon saw that this would be a miserable reason for being tempted
by the offer, the delight of being called Rabbi. I don't pretend to be
high-minded, but even I could see that, unless there was a good deal
more than that in my mind, I should be a wretched creature to be
influenced by such considerations. These are merely the conveniences;
the real point was the work, the power, the possibility of carrying out
certain educational reforms which I have very much at heart, and doing
something towards raising the general intellectual standard, which I
believe to be lower than it need be.

Now, on thinking it out carefully, I came to the conclusion that I was
not strong enough for this role. I am no Atlas; I have no deep store of
moral courage; I am absurdly sensitive, ill-fitted to cope with
unpopularity and disapproval. Bitter, vehement, personal hostility
would break my spirit. A fervent Christian might say that one had no
right to be faint-hearted, and that strength would be given one; that
is perfectly true in certain conditions, and I have often experienced
it when some intolerable and inevitable calamity had to be faced. But
it is an evil recklessness not to weigh one's own deficiencies. No one
would say that a man ignorant of music ought to undertake to play the
organ, if the organist failed to appear, believing that power would be
given him. Christ Himself warned His disciples against embarking in an
enterprise without counting the cost. But here I confess was the
darkest point of my dilemma--was it cowardice and indolence to refuse
to attempt what competent persons believed I could do? or was it
prudent and wise to refuse to attempt what I, knowing my own
temperament better, felt I could not attempt successfully?

Now in my present work it is different. I know that my strength is
equal to the responsibility; I know that I can do what I undertake. The
art of dealing with boys is very different from the art of dealing with
men, the capacity for subordinate command is very different from the
capacity for supreme command. Of course, it is a truism to say that if
a man can obey thoroughly and loyally he can probably command. But
then, again, there is a large class of people, to which I believe
myself to belong, who are held to be, in the words of Tacitus, Capax
imperii, nisi imperasset.

Then, too, I felt that a great task must be taken up in a certain
buoyancy and cheerfulness of spirit, not in heaviness and diffidence.
There are, of course, instances where a work reluctantly undertaken has
been crowned with astonishing success. But one has no business to think
that reluctance and diffidence to undertake a great work are a proof
that God intends one to do it.

I am quite aware of the danger which a temperament like my own runs, of
dealing with such a situation in too complex and subtle a way. That is
the hardest thing of all to get rid of, because it is part of the very
texture of one's mind. I have tried, however, to see the whole thing in
as simple a light as possible, and to ask myself whether acceptance was
in any sense a plain duty. If the offer had been a constraining appeal,
I should have doubted. But it was made in an easy, complimentary way,
as if there was no doubt that I should fall in with it.

Well, I had a very anxious day; but I simply (I may say that to you)
prayed that my way might be made clear; and the result was a
conviction, which rose like a star and then, as it were, waxed into a
sun, that the quest was not for me.

And so I refused; and I am thankful to say that I have had, ever since,
the blessed and unalterable conviction that I have done right. Even the
conveniences have ceased to appeal to me; they have not even, like the
old Adam in the Pilgrim's Progress, pinched hold of me and given me a
deadly twitch. Though the picturesque mind of one who, like myself, is
very sensitive to "the attributes of awe and majesty," takes a certain
peevish pleasure in continuing to depict my unworthy self clothed upon
with majesty, and shaking all Olympus with my nod.

But if Olympus had refused to shake, even though I had nodded like a
mandarin?

I am sure that I shall not regret it; and I do not even think that my
conscience will reproach me; nor do I think that (on this ground alone)
I shall be relegated to the dark circle of the Inferno with those who
had a great opportunity given them and would not use it.

Please confirm me if you can! Comfort me with apples, as the Song says.
I am afraid you will only tell me that it proves that you are right,
and that I have no ambition.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  June 4, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I have nothing to write about. The summer is come, and
with it I enter into purgatory; I am poured out like water, and my
heart is like melting wax; I have neither courage nor kindness, except
in the early morning or the late evening. I cannot work, and I cannot
be lazy. The only consolation I have--and I wish it were a more
sustaining one--is that most people like hot weather better.

I will put down for you in laborious prose what if I were an artist I
would do in half-a-dozen strokes. There is a big place near here,
Rushton Park. I was bicycling with Randall past the lodge, blaming the
fair summer, like the fisherman in Theocritus, when he asked if I
should like to ride through. The owner, Mr. Payne, is a friend of his,
and laid a special injunction on him to go through whenever he liked.
We were at once admitted, and in a moment we were in a Paradise. Payne
is famed for his gardeners, and I think I never saw a more beautiful
place of its kind. The ground undulates very gracefully, and we passed
by velvety lawns, huge towering banks of rhododendron all ablaze with
flower, exquisite vistas and glades, with a view of far-off hills. It
seemed to me to be an enchanted pleasaunce, like the great Palace in
The Princess. Now and then we could see the huge facade of the house
above us, winking through its sunblinds. There was not a soul to be
seen; and this added enormously to the magical charm of the place, as
though it were the work of a Genie, not made with hands. We passed a
huge fountain dripping into a blue-tiled pool, over a great cockleshell
of marble; then took a path which wound into the wood, all a mist of
fresh green, and in a moment we were in a long old-fashioned garden,
with winding box hedges, and full of bright flowers. To the left, where
the garden was bordered by the wood, was set a row of big marble urns,
grey with age, on high pedestals, all dripping with flowering creepers.
It was very rococo, like an old French picture, but enchanting for all
that. To the right was a long, mellow brick wall, under which stood
some old marble statues, weather-stained and soft of hue. The steady
sun poured down on the sweet, bright place, and the scent of the
flowers filled the air with fragrance, while a dove, hidden in some
green towering tree, roo-hooed delicately, as though her little heart
was filled with an indolent contentment.

The statue that stood nearest us attracted my attention. I cannot
conceive what it was meant to represent. It was the figure of an old,
bearded man, with a curious brimless hat on his head, and a flowing
robe; in his hands he held and fingered some unaccountable object of a
nondescript shape; and he had an unpleasant fixed smile, which he
seemed to turn on us, as though he knew a secret connected with the
garden which he might not reveal, and which if revealed would fill the
hearers with a secret horror. I do not think that I have often seen a
figure which affected me so disagreeably. He seemed to be saying that
within this bright and fragrant place lay some tainted mystery which it
were ill to tamper with. It was as though we opened a door out of some
stately corridor, and found a strange, beast-like thing running to and
fro in a noble room.

Well, I do not know! But it seems to me a type of many things, and I
doubt not that the wise-hearted patrician, the former owner, who laid
out the garden and set the statue in its place, did so with a purpose.
It is for us to see that there lies no taint behind our pleasures; but
even if this be not the message, the heart of the mystery, may not the
figure stand perhaps for the end, the bitter end, which lies ahead of
all, when the lip is silent and the eye shut, and the heart is stilled
at last?

The quiet figure with its secret, wicked smile, somehow slurred for me
the sunshine and the pleasant flowers, and I was glad when we turned
away.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  June 11, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--Yes, I am sure you are right. The thing I get more and
more impatient of every year is conventionality in every form. It is
rather foolish, I am well aware, to be impatient about anything; and
great conventionality of mind is not inconsistent with entire
sincerity, for the simple reason that conventionality is what
ninety-nine hundredths of the human race enjoy. Most people have no
wish to make up their own minds about anything; they do not care to
know what they like or why they like it. This is often the outcome of a
deep-seated modesty. The ordinary person says to himself, "Who am I
that I should set up a standard? If all the people that I know like
certain occupations and certain amusements, they are probably right,
and I will try to like them too." I don't mean that this feeling is
often put into words, but it is there; and there is for most people an
immense power in habit. People grow to like what they do, and seldom
inquire if they really like it, or why they like it.

Of course, to a certain extent, conventionality is a useful, peaceful
thing. I am not here recommending eccentricity of any kind. People
ought to fall in simply and quietly with ordinary modes of life, dress,
and behaviour; it saves time and trouble; it sets the mind free. But
what I rather mean is that, when the ordinary usages of life have been
complied with, all sensible people ought to have a line of their own
about occupation, amusements, friends, and not run to and fro like
sheep just where the social current sets. What I mean is best explained
by a couple of instances. I met at dinner last night our old
acquaintance, Foster, who was at school with us. He was in my house; I
don't think you ever knew much of him. He was a pleasant, good-humoured
boy enough; but his whole mind was set on discovering the exact code of
social school life. He wanted to play the right games, to wear the
right clothes, to know the right people. He liked being what he called
"in the swim." He never made friends with an obscure or unfashionable
boy. He was quite pleasant to his associates when he was himself
obscure; but he waited quietly for his opportunity to recommend himself
to prominent boys, and, when the time came, he gently threw over all
his old companions and struck out into more distinguished regions. He
was never disagreeable or conceited; he merely dropped his humble
friends until they too were approved as worthy of greater distinction,
and then he took them up again. He succeeded in his ambitions, as most
cool and clear-headed persons do. He became what would be called very
popular; he gave himself no airs; he was always good company; he was
never satirical or critical. The same thing has gone on ever since. He
married a nice wife; he secured a good official position. Last night,
as I say, I met him here. He came into the room with the same old
pleasant smile, beautifully dressed, soberly appointed. His look and
gestures were perfectly natural and appropriate. He has never made any
attempt to see me or keep up old acquaintance; but here, where I have a
certain standing and position, it was obviously the right thing to
treat me with courteous deference. He came up to me with a genial
welcome, and, but for a little touch of prosperous baldness, I could
have imagined that he was hardly a day older than when he was a boy. He
reminded me of some cheerful passages of boyhood; he asked with kindly
interest after my work; he paid me exactly the right compliments; and I
became aware that I was, for the moment, one of the pawns in his game,
to be delicately pushed about where it suited him. We talked of other
matters; he held exactly the right political opinions, a mild and
cautious liberalism; he touched on the successes of certain politicians
and praised them appropriately; he deplored the failure of certain old
friends in political life. "A very good fellow," he said of Hughes,
"but just a little--what shall I say?--impracticable?" He had seen all
the right plays, heard the right music, read the right books. He
deplored the obscurity of George Meredith, but added that he was an
undoubted genius. He confessed himself to be an ardent admirer of
Wagner; he thought Elgar a man of great power; but he had not made up
his mind about Strauss. I found that "not making up his mind about" a
person was one of his favourite expressions. If he sees that some man
is showing signs of vigour and originality in any department of life,
he keeps his eye upon him; if he passes safely through the shallows, he
praises him, saying that he has watched his rise; if he fails, our
friend will be ready with the reasons for his failure, adding that he
always feared that so-and-so was a little unpractical.

I can't describe to you the dreariness and oppression that fell upon
me. The total absence of generosity, of independent interest, weighed
on my soul. The one quality that this equable and judicious critic was
on the look-out for was the power of being approved. Foster's view
seemed to knock the bottom out of life, to deprive everything equally
of charm and individuality.

The conversation turned on golf, and one of the guests, whom I am
shortly about to describe, said bluffly that he considered golf and
drink to be the two curses of the country. Our polite friend turned
courteously towards him, treated the remark as an excellent sally, and
then said that he feared he must himself plead guilty to a great
devotion to golf. "You see all kinds of pleasant people," he said, "in
such a pleasant way; and then it tempts one into the open air; and it
is such an excellent investment, in the way of exercise, for one's age;
a man can play a very decent game till he is sixty--though, of course,
it is no doubt a little overdone." We all felt that he was right; he
took the rational, the sensible view; but it tempted me, though I
successfully resisted the temptation, to express an exaggerated dislike
of golf which I do not feel.

The guest whose remark had occasioned this discourse is one of my
colleagues, Murchison by name--you don't know him--a big, rugged, shy,
sociable fellow, who is in many ways one of the best masters here. He
is always friendly, amusing, courteous. He holds strong opinions, which
he does not produce unless the occasion demands it. He keeps a good
deal to himself, follows his own pursuits, and knows his own mind. He
is very tolerant, and can get on with almost everybody. The boys
respect him, like his teaching, think him clever, sensible, and
amusing. There are a great many things about which he knows nothing,
and is always ready to confess his ignorance. But whenever he does
understand a subject, and he has a strong taste for art and letters,
you always feel that his thoughts and opinions are fresh and living.
They are not produced like sardines from a tin, with a painful
similarity and regularity. He has strong prejudices, for which he can
always give a reason; but he is always ready to admit that it is a
matter of taste. He does not tilt in a Quixotic manner at established
things, but he goes along trying to do his work in the best manner
attainable. He is no genius, and his character is by no means a perfect
one; he has pronounced faults, of which he is perfectly conscious, and
which he never attempts to disguise. But he is simple, straightforward,
affectionate, and sincere. If he were more courageous, more fiery, he
would be, I think, a really great man; but this he somehow misses.

The two men, Foster and Murchison, are as great a contrast as can well
be imagined. They serve to illustrate exactly what I mean. Our friend
Foster is perfectly correct and admirably pleasant. You would never
think of confiding in him, or saying to him what you really felt; but,
on the other hand, there is no one whom I would more willingly consult
in a small and delicate point of practical conduct--and his advice
would be excellent.

But Murchison is a real man; he knows his limitations, but he takes
nothing second-hand. He brings his own mind and character to bear on
every problem, and judges people and things on their own merits.

Of course one does not desire that conventional people should strive
after unconventionality. That produces the most sickening
conventionality of all, because it is merely an attempt to construct a
pose that shall be accepted as unconventional. The only thing is to be
natural; and, after all, if one merely desires to see how the cat jumps
and then to jump after it, it is better to do so frankly and make no
pretence about it.

But I am sure that it is one's duty as a teacher to try and show boys
that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are
one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown
this. I found--I am now speaking of intellectual things--that certain
authors were held up to me as models which I was unfortunate enough to
dislike. Instead of making up my own mind about it, instead of trying
to see what I did admire and why I admired it, I tried feebly for years
to admire what I was told was admirable. The result was waste of time
and confusion of thought. In the same way I followed feebly, as a boy,
after the social code. I tried to like the regulation arrangements, and
thought dimly that I was in some way to blame because I did not. Not
until I went up to Cambridge did the conception of mental liberty steal
upon me--and then only partly. Of course if I had had more originality
I should have perceived this earlier. But the world appeared to me a
great, organised, kindly conspiracy, which must be joined, in however
feeble a spirit. I have learnt gradually that, after a decent
compliance with superficial conventionalities, there are not only no
penalties attached to independence, but that there, and there alone, is
happiness to be found; and that the rewards of a free judgement and an
authentic admiration are among the best and highest things that the
world has to bestow. . . .--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  June 18, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I am sick at heart. I received one of those letters this
morning which are the despair of most schoolmasters. I have in my house
a boy aged seventeen, who is absolutely alone in the world. He has
neither father or mother, brother or sister. He spends his holidays
with an aunt, a clever and charming person, but a sad invalid (by the
way, in passing, what a wretched thing in English it is that there is
no female of the word "man"; "woman" means something quite different,
and always sounds slightly disrespectful; "lady" is impossible, except
in certain antique phrases). The boy is frail, intellectual, ungenial.
He is quite incapable of playing games decently, having neither
strength or aptitude; he finds it hard to make friends, and the
consequence is that, like all clever people who don't meet with any
success, he takes refuge in a kind of contemptuous cynicism. His aunt
is devoted to him and to his best interests, but she is too much of an
invalid to be able to look after him; the result is that he is allowed
practically to do exactly as he likes in the holidays; he hates school
cordially, and I don't wonder. He fortunately has one taste, and that
is for science, and it is more than a taste, it is a real passion. He
does not merely dabble about with chemicals, or play tricks with
electricity; but he reads dry, hard, abstruse science, and writes
elaborate monographs, which I read with more admiration than
comprehension. This is almost his only hold on ordinary life, and I
encourage it with all my might; I ask about his work, make such
suggestions as I can, and praise his successful experiments and his
treatises, so far as I can understand them, loudly and liberally.

This morning one of his guardians writes to me about him. He is a
country gentleman, with a large estate, who married a cousin of my
pupil. He is a big, pompous, bumble-bee kind of man, who prides himself
on speaking his mind, and is quite unaware that it is only his position
that saves him from the plainest retorts. He writes to say that he is
much exercised about his ward's progress. The boy, he says, is fanciful
and delicate, and has much too good an opinion of himself. That is
true; and he goes on to lay down the law as to what he "needs." He must
be thrown into the society of active and vigorous boys; he must play
games; he must go to the gymnasium. And then he must learn
self-reliance; he must not be waited upon; he must be taught that it is
his business to be considerate of others; he must learn to be obliging,
and to look after other people. He goes on to say that all he wants is
the influence of a strong and sensible man (that is a cut at me), and
he will be obliged if I will kindly attend to the matter.

Well, what does he want me to do? Does he expect me to run races with
the boy? To introduce him to the captain of the eleven? To have him
thrust into teams of cricket and football from which his incapacity for
all games naturally excludes him? When our bumble-bee friend was at
school himself--and a horrid boy he must have been--what would he have
said if a master had told him to put a big, clumsy, and incapable boy
into a house cricket eleven in order to bring him out?

Then as to teaching him to be considerate, the mischief is all done in
the holidays; the boy is not waited on here, and he has plenty of
vigorous discipline in the kind of barrack life the boys lead. Does he
expect me to march into the boy's home, and request that the boy may
black his own boots and carry up the coals!

The truth is that the man has no real policy; he sees the boy's
deficiencies, and liberates his mind by requesting me, as if I were a
kind of tradesman, to see that they are corrected.

Of course the temptation is to write the man an acrimonious letter, and
to point out the idiotic character of his suggestions. But that is
worse than useless.

What I have done is to write and say that I have received his kind and
sensible letter, that he has laid his finger on the exact difficulties,
and that naturally I am anxious to put them straight. I then added that
his own recollection of his school-days will show that one cannot help
a boy in athletic or social matters beyond a certain point, that one
can only see that a boy has a fair chance, and is not overlooked, but
that other boys would not tolerate (and I know that he does not mean to
suggest this) that a boy should be included in a team for which he is
unfit, simply in order that his social life should be encouraged. I
then point out that as to discipline there is no lack of it here; and
that it is only at home that he is spoilt; and that I hope he will use
his influence, in a region where I cannot do more than make
suggestions, to minimise the evil.

The man will approve of the letter; he will think me sensible and
himself extraordinarily wise.

Does that seem to you to be cynical? I don't think it is. The man is
sincerely anxious for the boy's welfare, just as I am, and we had
better agree than disagree. The fault of his letter is that it is
stupid, and that it is offensive. The former quality I can forgive, and
the latter is only stupidity in another form. He thinks in his own mind
that if I am paid to educate the boy I ought to be glad of advice, that
I ought to be grateful to have things that I am not likely to detect
for myself pointed out by an enlightened and benevolent man.

Meanwhile I shall proceed to treat the boy on my own theory. I don't
expect him to play games; I don't think that it is, humanly speaking,
possible to expect a sensitive, frail boy to continue to play a game in
which he only makes himself ridiculous and contemptible from first to
last. Of course if a boy who is incapable of success in athletics does
go on playing games perseveringly and good-humouredly, he gets a
splendid training, and, as a rule, conciliates respect. But this boy
could not do that.

Then I shall try to encourage the boy in any taste he may exhibit, and
try to build up a real structure on these slender lines. The great
point is that he shall have SOME absorbing and wholesome instinct. He
will be wealthy, and in a position to gratify any whim. He is not in
the least likely to do anything foolish or vicious--he has not got the
animal spirits for that. I shall encourage him to take up politics; and
I shall try to put into his head a desire to do something for his
fellow-creatures, and not to live an entirely lonely and self-absorbed
life.

I have a theory that in education it is better to encourage aptitudes
than to try merely to correct deficiencies. One can't possibly
extirpate weaknesses by trying to crush them. One must build up
vitality and interest and capacity. It is like the parable of the evil
spirits. It is of no use simply to cast them out and leave the soul
empty and swept; one must encourage some strong, good spirit to take
possession; one must build on the foundations that are there.

The boy is delicate-minded, able and intelligent; he is an interesting
companion, when he is once at his ease. If only this busy, fussy,
hearty old bore would leave him alone! What I am afraid of his doing is
of his getting the boy to stay with him, making him go out hunting, and
laughing mercilessly at his tumbles. The misery that a stupid, genial
man can inflict upon a sensitive boy like this is dreadful to
contemplate.

At the end of the half I shall write a letter about the boy's work, and
delicately hint that, if he is encouraged in his subject, he may attain
high distinction and eventually rise to political or scientific
eminence. The old bawler will take the fly with a swirl--see if he does
not! And, if I can secure an interview with him, I will wager that my
triumph will be complete.

Does this all seem very dingy to you, my dear Herbert? You have never
had to deal with tiresome, stupid people in a professional capacity,
you see. There is a distinct pleasure in getting one's own way, in
triumphing over an awkward situation, in leading an old buffer by the
nose to do the thing which you think right, and to make him believe
that you are all the time following his advice and treasuring up his
precepts. But I can honestly say that my chief desire is not to amuse
myself with this kind of diplomacy, but the real welfare of the child.
I know you will believe that.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  June 25, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--This is not a letter; it is a sketch, an aquarelle out
of my portfolio.

Yesterday was a hot, heavy, restless day, with thunder brewing in the
dark heart of huge inky clouds; a day when one craves for light, and
brisk airs, and cold bare hill-tops; when one desires to get away from
one's kind, away from close rooms and irritable persons. So I went off
on my patient and uncomplaining bicycle, along a country road; and then
crossing a wide common, like the field, I thought, in the Pilgrim's
Progress across which Evangelist pointed an improving finger, I turned
down to the left to the waterside In the still air, that seemed to
listen, the blue wooded hills across the river had a dim, rich beauty.
How mysterious are the fields and heights from which one is separated
by a stream, the fields in which one knows every tree and sloping lawn
by sight, and where one sets foot so rarely! The road came to an end in
a little grassy space among high-branching elms. On my left was a farm,
with barns and byres, overhung by stately walnut trees; on the right a
grange among its great trees, a low tiled house, with white casements,
in a pleasant garden, full of trellised roses, a big dovecote, with a
clattering flight of wheeling pigeons circling round and round. Hard
by, close to the river, stands a little ancient church, with a timbered
spire, the trees growing thickly about it, dreaming forgotten dreams.

Here all was still and silent; the very children moved languidly about,
not knowing what ailed them. Far off across the wide-watered plain came
a low muttering of thunder, and a few big drops pattered in the great
elms.

This secluded river hamlet has an old history; the church, which is
served from a distant parish, stands in a narrow strip of land which
runs down across the fields to the river, and dates from the time when
the river was a real trade-highway, and when neighbouring parishes,
which had no frontages on the stream, found it convenient to have a
wharf to send their produce, timber or bricks, away by water. But the
wharf has long since perished, though a few black stakes show where it
stood; and the village, having no landing-place and no inn, has dropped
out of the river life, and minds its own quiet business.

A few paces from the church the river runs silently and strongly to the
great weir below. To-day it was swollen with rain and turbid, and
plucked steadily at the withies. To-day the stream, which is generally
full of life, was almost deserted. But it came into my head what an
allegory it made. Here through the unvisited meadows, with their huge
elms, runs this thin line of glittering vivid life; you hear, hidden in
dark leaves, the plash of oars, the grunt of rowlocks, and the chatter
of holiday folk, to whom the river-banks are but a picture through
which they pass, and who know nothing of the quiet fields that surround
them. That, I thought, following a train of reflection, is like life
itself, moving in its bright, familiar channel, so unaware of the broad
tracts of mystery that hem it in. May there not be presences, unseen,
who look down wondering--as I look to-day through my screen of leafy
boughs--on the busy-peopled stream that runs so merrily between its
scarped banks of clay? I know not; yet it seems as though it might be
so.

Beneath the weir, with its fragrant, weedy scent, where the green river
plunges and whitens through the sluices, lies a deep pool, haunted by
generations of schoolboys, who wander, flannelled and straw-hatted, up
through the warm meadows to bathe. In such sweet memories I have my
part, when one went riverwards with some chosen friend, speaking with
the cheerful frankness of boyhood of all our small concerns, and all we
meant to do; and then the cool grass under the naked feet, the
delicious recoil of the fresh, tingling stream, and the quiet stroll
back into the ordered life so full of simple happiness.


    "Ah! happy fields, ah! pleasing shade,
      Ah! fields beloved in vain!"

sang the sad poet of Eton--but not in vain, I think, for these old
beautiful memories are not sad; the good days are over and gone, and
they cannot be renewed; but they are like a sweet spring of youth,
whose waters fail not, in which a tired soul may bathe and be clean
again. They may bring back

    "The times when I remember to have been
      Joyful, and free from blame."


To be pensive, not sentimental, is the joy of later life. The thought
of the sweet things that have had an end, of life lived out and
irrevocable, is not a despairing thought, unless it is indulged with an
unavailing regret. It is rather to me a sign that, whatever we may be
or become, we are surrounded with the same quiet beauty and peace, if
we will but stretch out our hands and open our hearts to it. To grow
old patiently and bravely, even joyfully--that is the secret; and it is
as idle to repine for the lost joys as it would have been in the former
days to repine because we were not bigger and stronger and more
ambitious. Life, if it does not become sweeter, becomes more
interesting; fresh ties are formed, fresh paths open out; and there
should come, too, a simple serenity of living, a certainty that,
whatever befall, we are in wise and tender hands.

So I reasoned with myself beside the little holy church, not far from
the moving stream.

But the time warned me to be going. The thunder had drawn off to the
west; a faint breeze stirred and whispered in the elms. The day
declined. But I had had my moment, and my heart was full; for it is
such moments as these that are the pure gold of life, when the scene
and the mood move together to some sweet goal in perfect unison.
Sometimes the scene is there without the mood, or the mood comes and
finds no fitting pasturage; but to-day, both were mine; and the
thought, echoing like a strain of rich sad music, passed beyond the
elms, beyond the blue hills, back to its mysterious home. . . .

There, that is the end of my sketch; a little worked up, but
substantially true. Tell me if you like the kind of thing; if you do,
it is rather a pleasure to write thus occasionally. But it may seem to
you to be affected, and, in that case, I won't send you any more of
such reveries.

You seem very happy and prosperous; but then you like heat, and enjoy
it like a lizard. My love to all of you.--Ever yours,

T. B.



UPTON,
  July 1, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--What you say about forming habits is very interesting.
It is quite true that one gets very little done without a certain
method; and it is equally true that, if one does manage to arrive at a
certain definite programme for one's life and work, it is very easy to
get a big task done. Just reflect on this fact; it would not be
difficult, in any life, to so arrange things that one could write a
short passage every day, say enough to fill a page of an ordinary
octavo. Well, if one stuck to it, that would mean that in the course of
a year one would have a volume finished. Sometimes my colleagues
express surprise that I can find time for so much literary work; and on
the other hand if I tell them how much time I am able to devote to it
they are equally surprised that I can get anything done, because it
seems so little. This is the fact; I can get an hour--possibly two--on
Tuesday, two hours on Thursday, one on Friday, two on Saturday, and one
or two on Sunday--nine hours a week under favourable circumstances, and
never a moment more. But writing being to me the purest pleasure and
refreshment, I never lose a minute in getting to work, and I use every
moment of the time. That does not include reading; but by dint of
having books about, and by working carefully, so that I do not need to
go over the same ground twice, I get through a good deal in the week. I
have trained myself, too, to be able to write at full speed when I am
at work, and I can count on writing three octavo pages in an hour, or
even four. The result is, as you will see, that in a term of twelve
weeks, I can turn out between three and four hundred pages. The curious
thing is that I do better original work in the term-time than in the
holidays. I think the pressure of a good deal of mechanical work, not
of an exhausting kind, clears the brain and makes it vigorous. Of
course it is rather scrappy work; but I lay my plans in the holidays,
make my skeleton, and work up my authorities; and so I can go ahead at
full steam.

But I have strayed away from the subject of habits; and the moral of
the above is only that habits are easy enough if you like the task
enough. If I did not care for writing, I should find abundance of
excellent reasons why I should not do it.

Pater says somewhere that forming habits is failure in life; by which I
suppose he means that if one gets tied down to a petty routine of one's
own, it generally ends in one's becoming petty too--narrow-minded and
conventional. I don't suppose he referred to method, because he was one
of the most methodical of men. He wrote down sentences that came into
his mind, scattered ideas, on small cards; when he had a sufficient
store of these, he sorted them and built up his essay out of them.

But I am equally aware that habit is apt to become very tyrannical
indeed, if it is acquired. In my own case I have got into the habit of
writing only between tea and dinner, owing to its being the only time
at my disposal, so that I can hardly write at any other time; and that
is inconvenient in the holidays. Moreover, I like writing so much,
enjoy the shaping of sentences so intensely, that I tend to arrange my
day in the holidays entirely with a view to having these particular
hours free for writing; and thus for a great part of the year I lose
the best and most enjoyable part of the day, the sweet summer evenings,
when the tired world grows fragrant and cool.

One ought to have a routine for home life certainly; but it is not
wholesome when one begins to grudge the slightest variation from the
programme. I speak philosophically, because I am in the grip of the
evil myself. The reason why I care so little for staying anywhere, and
even for travelling, is because it disarranges my plan of the day, and
I don't feel certain of being able to secure the time for writing which
I love. But this is wrong; it is vivendi perdere causas, and I think we
ought resolutely to court a difference of life at intervals, and to
learn to bear with equanimity the suspension of one's daily habits. You
are certainly wise, if you find it suits you, to secure the morning for
writing. Personally my mind is not at its best then; it is dulled and
weakened by sleep, and it requires the tonic of routine work and bodily
exercise before it expands and flourishes.

Another grievous tendency which grows on me is an incapacity for
idleness. That will amuse you, when you remember the long evenings at
Eton which we used to spend in vacant talk. I remember so well your
saying after tea one evening, in that poky room of yours with the
barred windows at the end of the upper passage, "How delightful to
think that there are four hours with nothing whatever to do!" Do you
remember, too, that night when we sate at tea, blissfully, wholesomely
tired after a college match? John and Ellen, those strange, gruff
beings, came in to wash up, carrying that horrible, steaming can of
tea-dregs in which our cups were plunged: they cleared the table as we
sate; it was over before six, and it was not till the prayer-bell rang
at 9.30 that we became aware we had sate the whole evening with the
table between us. What DID we talk about? I wish to Heaven I could sit
and talk like that now! That is another thing which grows upon me, my
dislike of mere chatting: it is not priggish to say it, because I
regret and abominate my stupidity in that respect. But there is nothing
now which induces more rapid and more desperate physical fatigue than
to sit still and know I have to pump up talk for an hour.

The moral of all this is that YOU must take good care to form habits,
and _I_ must take care to unform them. YOU must resist the temptation
to read the papers, to stroll, to talk to your children; and _I_ must
try to cultivate leisurely propensities. I think that, as a
schoolmaster, one might do very good work as a peripatetic talker. I
have a big garden here--to think that you have never seen it!--with a
great screen of lilacs and some pleasant gravel walks. I never enter
it, I am afraid. But if in the pleasant summer I could learn the art of
sitting there, of having tea there, and making a few boys welcome if
they cared to come, it would be good for all of us, and would give the
boys some pleasant memories. I don't think there is anything gives me a
pleasanter thrill than to recollect the times I spent as a boy in old
Hayward's garden. He told me and Francis Howard that we might go and
sit there if we liked. You were not invited, and I never dared to ask
him. It was a pleasant little place, with a lawn surrounded with trees,
and a summer-house full of armchairs, with an orchard behind it--now
built over. Howard and I used at one time to go there a good deal, to
read and talk. I remember him reading Shakespeare's sonnets aloud,
though I had not an idea what they were all about--but his rich,
resonant voice comes back to me now; and then he showed me a MS. book
of his own poems. Ye Gods, how great I thought them! I copied many of
them out and have them still. Hayward used to come strolling about; I
can see him standing there in a big straw hat, with his hands behind
him, like the jolly old leisurely fellow he was. "Don't get up, boys,"
he used to say. Once or twice he sate with us, and talked lazily about
some book we were reading. He never took any trouble to entertain us,
but I used to feel that we were welcome, and that it really pleased him
that we cared to come. Now he lives in a suburb, on a pension: why do I
never go to see him?

"La, Perry, how yer do run on!" as the homely Warden's wife said to the
voluble Chaplain. I never meant to write you such a letter; but I am
glad indeed to find you really settling down. We must cultivate our
garden, as Voltaire said; and I only wish that the garden of my own
spirit were more full of "shelter and fountains," and less stocked with
long rows of humble vegetables; but there are a few flowers here and
there.--Ever yours,

T. B.



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,

T. B



UPTON,
  July 16, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I declare that the greatest sin there is in the world is
stupidity. The character that does more harm in the world than any
other is the character in which stupidity and virtue are combined. I
grow every day more despondent about the education we give at our
so-called classical schools. Here, you know, we are severely classical;
and to have to administer such a system is often more than I can bear
with dignity or philosophy. One sees arrive here every year a lot of
brisk, healthy boys, with fair intelligence, and quite disposed to
work; and at the other end one sees depart a corresponding set of young
gentlemen who know nothing, and can do nothing, and are profoundly
cynical about all intellectual things. And this is the result of the
meal of chaff we serve out to them week after week; we collect it, we
chop it up, we tie it up in packets; we spend hours administering it in
teaspoons, and this is the end. I am myself the victim of this kind of
education; I began Latin at seven and Greek at nine, and, when I left
Cambridge, I did not know either of them well. I could not sit in an
arm-chair and read either a Greek or a Latin book, and I had no desire
to do it. I knew a very little French, a very little mathematics, a
very little science; I knew no history, no German, no Italian. I knew
nothing of art or music; my ideas of geography were childish. And yet I
am decidedly literary in my tastes, and had read a lot of English for
myself. It is nothing short of infamous that any one should, after an
elaborate education, have been so grossly uneducated. My only
accomplishment was the writing of rather pretty Latin verse.

And yet this preposterous system continues year after year. I had an
animated argument with some of the best of my colleagues the other day
about it. I cannot tell you how profoundly irritating these wiseacres
were. They said all the stock things--that one must lay a foundation,
and that it could only be laid by using the best literatures; that
Latin was essential because it lay at the root of so many other
languages; and Greek, because there the human intellect had reached its
high-water mark,--"and it has such a noble grammar," one enthusiastic
Grecian said; that an active-minded person could do all the rest for
himself. It was in vain to urge that in many cases the whole foundation
was insecure; and that all desire to raise a superstructure was
eliminated. My own belief is that Greek and Latin are things to be led
up to, not begun with; that they are hard, high literatures, which
require an initiation to comprehend; and that one ought to go backwards
in education, beginning with what one knows.

It seems to me, to use a similitude, that the case is thus. If one
lives in a plain and wishes to reach a point upon a hill, one must make
a road from the plain upwards. It will be a road at the base, it will
be a track higher up, and a path at last, used only by those who have
business there. But the classical theorists seem to me to make an
elaborate section of macadamised road high in the hills, and, having
made it, to say that the people who like can make their own road in
between.

How would I mend all this? Well, I would change methods in the first
place. If one wanted to teach a boy French or German effectively, so
that he would read and appreciate, one would dispense with much of the
grammar, except what was absolutely necessary. In the case of classics
it is all done the other way; grammar is a subject in itself; boys have
to commit to memory long lists of words and forms which they never
encounter; they have to acquire elaborate analyses of different kinds
of usages, which are of no assistance in dealing with the language
itself. It is beginning with the wrong end of the stick. Grammar is the
scientific or philosophical theory of language; it may be an
interesting and valuable study for a mind of strong calibre, but it
does not help one to understand an author or to appreciate a style.

Then, too, I would sweep away for all but boys of special classical
ability most kinds of composition. Fancy teaching a boy side by side
with the elements of German or French to compose German and French
verse, heroic, Alexandrine, or lyrical! The idea has only to be stated
to show its fatuity. I would teach boys to write Latin prose, because
it is a tough subject, and it initiates them into the process of
disentangling the real sense of the English copy. But I would abolish
all Latin verse composition, and all Greek composition of every kind
for mediocre boys. Not only would they learn the languages much faster,
but there would be a great deal of time saved as well. Then I would
abolish the absurd little lessons, with the parsing, and I would at all
hazards push on till they could read fluently.

Of course the above improvement of methods is sketched on the
hypothesis that both Greek and Latin are retained. Personally I would
retain Latin for most, but give up Greek altogether in the majority of
cases. I would teach all boys French thoroughly. I would try to make
them read and write it easily, and that should be the linguistic staple
of their education. Then I would teach them history, mainly modern
English history, and modern geography; a very little mathematics and
elementary science. Such boys would be, in my belief, well-educated;
and they would never be tempted to disbelieve in the usefulness of
their education.

When I propound these ideas, my colleagues talk of soft options, and of
education without muscle or nerve. My retort is that the majority of
boys educated on classical lines are models of intellectual debility as
it is. They are uninterested, cynical, and they cannot even read or
write the languages which they have been so carefully taught.

What I want is experiment of every kind; but my cautious friends say
that one would only get something a great deal worse. That I deny. I
maintain that it is impossible to have anything worse, and that the
majority of the boys we turn out are intellectually in so negative a
condition that any change would be an improvement.

But I effect nothing; nothing is attempted, nothing done. I do my
best--fortunately our system admits of that--to teach my private pupils
a little history, and I make them write essays. The results are
decidedly encouraging; but meanwhile my colleagues go on in the old
ways, quite contented, pathetically conscientious, laboriously slaving
away, and apparently not disquieted by results.

I am very near the end of my tether--one cannot go on for ever
administering a system in which one has lost all faith. If there were
signs of improvement I should be content. If our headmaster would even
insist upon the young men whom he appoints obtaining a competent
knowledge of French and German before they come here it would be
something, because then, when the change is made, there would be less
friction. But even a new headmaster with liberal ideas would now be
hopelessly hampered by the fa

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