The cover image was restored by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

A SCHOOLMASTER'S
DIARY

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT
THE COMPLETE PRESS
WEST NORWOOD
LONDON

TO
ELSPETH TRAHERNE
WITHOUT WHOSE VALUABLE HELP I SHOULD
HAVE BEEN TOTALLY AT A LOSS WHAT TO
INCLUDE AND WHAT TO OMIT
IN MEMORY OF
PATRICK

CONTENTS

[INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR]

Patrick Traherne, only son of the Rev. Thomas Traherne of North Darley Vicarage, Derbyshire, was born on July 14, 1885. He was educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford, and immediately upon leaving the University he became a Public School master.

I well remember my first meeting with him. It was during my first term at Oxford. I had been reading "Centuries of Meditations" and in particular this passage, which I cannot refrain from quoting, because to it I owe my friendship with Patrick:

"Your enjoyment of the world is never right till every morning you wake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father's Palace: and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air, as Celestial Joys; you never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world. Till your spirit filleth the whole world and the stars are your jewels: till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all ages as with your walk and table: till you love men so as to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own, you never enjoy the world. You never enjoy the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it. There is so much blindness and ingratitude and damned folly in it. The world is a mirror of infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is the paradise of God, the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven."

I remember rushing, book in hand, late at night to Stapleton's rooms (Stapleton was a school-friend of mine, who had come up with me that term) and reading it to him as one of the finest things I had ever chanced upon. After I had finished I noticed that he was not alone; sitting in a far corner, in the depths of a 'Varsity chair, I now saw a fair-haired, fresh-faced undergraduate whom I had not up till that moment met. He broke in upon my enthusiastic discovery. "I am glad you like that," he began. "It is not very well known yet. The author of that book, Thomas Traherne, was an ancestor of mine: my name is Traherne too."

Somehow from that evening I have always associated Patrick with that glowing passage. We became fast friends and for the four years we were at Oxford, Stapleton, Traherne and I spent all our spare time together. We were known, for some obscure reason, as "The Three Musketeers."

We were none of us brilliant scholars, but we were deeply interested in the problems of life: we read a good deal in a desultory sort of way, but our main occupation was athletics. We all played football, tennis, hockey, and cricket, and managed to put in some time with the Beagles and on the track. On Sundays we used to roam far and wide over the country round Oxford: we were all lovers of Nature and (I venture to think) in every way quite ordinary undergraduates. Stapleton was taking orders, while Traherne and I meant to be schoolmasters. We were jovial and irresponsible in those days and certainly did not take ourselves seriously. We were not in the habit of getting drunk, but we were certainly not less rowdy than the majority of the men of our time: we enjoyed life to the full. In the "vacs" we would stay with one another in London in order to go the round of the theatres, or we would set out on walking tours through Wales or Devonshire.

I met Traherne's people a good deal. They were quite delightful, simple-minded folk, who took life as it came and always managed to see the comic side of everything. I know no house where peals upon peals of laughter were so frequent as in that vicarage of North Darley. Our four years at Oxford passed all too quickly. The other two managed to get a second class in their finals, I just scraped a third. We then separated, swearing however that nothing should really separate us. We wrote frequently and at great length to one another and tried to meet whenever possible. Gradually, however, we made new friends and were seized with different interests and somehow we became less regular in our correspondence and our meetings. It was not that we had ceased to care for each other, still less that "out of sight" was "out of mind"—I have never loved any man as I loved Traherne, but nevertheless we got out of touch.

I settled down quite happily to my job at Winchborough and became the stereotyped sort of plodding schoolmaster, while Stapleton passed from one curacy to another and finally had the good fortune to secure a living near London. So time went on. Then I began to notice Traherne's name in the papers. He had entered on his career as a writer. He was always indefatigable, though how he found time both to teach and to write I don't know. First of all he edited school books, then he wrote articles for the educational papers; soon I saw his name attached to critical papers in the magazines and reviews: he wrote middle-page articles for the daily press and short stories. Later I saw the announcement of a book by him, closely followed by another and then a third.

Naturally all this interested me a good deal. If he would not write to me I still could follow his career through his books.

I must say, however, that I was slightly startled at the attitude he adopted in his writings. When I knew him he was the cheeriest and most modest of men. From his writings the casual reader would imagine him to be a red-hot fire-brand, launching out against all the accepted codes by which we live. His method was that of "cock-shying" at a lot of "Aunt Sallies." He denounced everything, religion as at present practised, education, root and branch, the current codes of morality, the laws, politics—everything. There was a frightful acerbity in his language. One could detect the same boyish ardour which was the finest thing about him if one looked carefully and read between the lines, but his judgments were amazingly ill-considered. He seemed to lose all control of himself when he took up his pen. I wrote to remonstrate but he rarely replied, and when he did he would alternately change from a tone of humble apology to one of insolent contempt. It was easy to see that he was suffering from some appalling malady, a restlessness which threatened to destroy all the good that he was so anxious to do. At last the inevitable climax came: in a piteous letter he wrote to tell me that after eight years he had been ignominiously turned out, and that his career as a schoolmaster was at an end. From the language he used I feared lest he might be contemplating suicide, but his wife (who is one of the most charming women I have ever met and to whom he owes more than even he will ever realize) kept him from that.

On the other hand, there seemed to be considerable danger of his losing his reason. I went down to see him: I never saw a man so altered: he was completely broken. I sat up with him all through one night while he told me the whole story. It appears that he created enemies through his tactlessness wherever he went. Boys on the whole I should say, from what he said, understood him more or less, his peers not at all. He was always discontented with the average, always demanding an instant millennium. The war crushed him, the wretched estate of the poorer classes crushed him, the lack of intelligence among the country people with whom he lived crushed him, his colleagues' complacence that "all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds" crushed him. Poor devil, he must have suffered frightfully. He seemed abnormally sensitive. The least thing set him off: he always suspected that he had no sympathizers: he consistently managed to alienate those who really were trying their best to help him.

All through that night on which he poured out his soul to me I saw exactly how impossible it was for him to work in conjunction with any ordinary body of schoolmasters. What they denounced as disloyalty was with him honesty; he was so ferociously energetic that he could never rest: he must have his windmill to tilt against. There was no doubt that he was finding his break with Public School life very real tragedy. He was incapable of looking forward to anything else. I did my best to console him, to show him that life was only just beginning for him: but he swept away all the crumbs of consolation I produced and only just before I was leaving did he suggest any way in which I could help him. "I have besmirched my reputation," he said mournfully. "I can't clear myself. Will you try?"

"Of course I will, but how?" I replied.

"Take these," he said, suddenly producing five stout volumes. "Here is my diary for the last eight years. Go through it and select such passages as you think fit and show the world exactly what manner of man I was: 'Speak of me as I am: nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice; then must you speak of one that loved not wisely but too well,' just the bare truth. Justice is what I want, not charity."

It was the least I could do ... and now for some months I have been engaged upon this strange task. Even now I am afraid I have failed. These diaries were so incoherent, so much prominence was given to irrelevant matter, so little to the thousand things I wanted to know, but I have kept my promise, and this book is the result. I wish he could have lived to see it in the hands of the public who so misjudged him.

It is easy to see the tenets which Traherne held most dear: he looked upon education as the saving grace of a nation or an individual. The object of education with him was to develop imagination and sympathy, so that all men in the future should realize the value of Truth and Beauty, and be tolerant of other men's opinions. To this end he endeavoured to make his boys realize the importance of making the most of their brains: he rated the intellect highest of all.

He laid it down as a fundamental principle that each boy should be encouraged to be strongly individual and I don't think he quite realized the dangers which individualism brings in its wake. He hated tradition unless it could be proved that it served some useful purpose: he was averse from all forms of ceremonial. Consequently he set his face against the cult of "Bloodism." He does not seem in his diary at any rate to have dwelt on the humorous side of his colleagues: there is very little description of the vagaries of different masters, which I have found so extraordinarily amusing among my own acquaintances in usherdom.

He laid immense stress on the teaching of English and encouraged his boys to read omnivorously; by this means alone, he said, could they be expected to learn.

Where he failed most of all was in his inability to suffer fools gladly: he hated "sloppy" work either in colleague or boy; if he had only kept his hatred to himself, it might have been all right, but he was too honest, too impetuous. He would blurt out his natural feelings everywhere and expect everybody to see his point of view at once. Considering all things his colleagues were in some ways extremely long-suffering, for he was so sensitive that out of sheer nervousness and ineffectual anger he would show his worst side and hide his better nature. He must have seemed to those who only knew him superficially to be one mass of contradictions.

Take, for instance, his reading. He seems to have read everything of any note that appeared during these eight years, but his judgments on current writers are ludicrous: he hails any new-comer as a great genius, and yet at the same time he had a nice and exact taste in English literature and in talking could tell you just the strong and weak points of all big writers. In his written criticism he seems to have no standards at all. As he himself says, he was like a motor-car without brakes. His motor-power was very high, but he had no control over it: consequently he was always running away with himself and finishing up with incredible smashes whenever he started out on a literary or educational excursion.

I have been going through his letters to me of late, but I have not found any clue in them to the mania which has led to his downfall. In the diary, on the other hand, he lets himself go; the constant friction, the unrealized ideals find expression: on the surface, in his letters to his friends, he was charmingly lighthearted and humorous. One would never suspect the sæva indignatio which was ultimately to be his undoing, in anything but his published works.

I never met a man who was so different in his person from what you would expect after reading his books. To meet him at a dinner-party in London, to accompany him on a walking-tour, to play games with him, you would never guess that he had a care in the world. He seemed to enjoy life much in the same way as his great ancestor, the mystic, did. He was very devout, it is true, but his Christianity was of the optimistic Chestertonian sort, a kind of prizefighter's epicureanism, "Eat, drink, and be merry, but for the Lord's sake be careful not to get flabby." But suddenly, not so much in the holidays as in term time, some luckless creature would quite innocently introduce the topics of Socialism, Liberty, Religion, Morals, or Education, and at once Patrick would flush scarlet, stamp up and down his rooms and call down fire from Heaven on every existing institution. I never came across such an iconoclast. We who knew him understood that his frenzy was simply the burning ardour of the reformer who refuses to compromise: he was convinced that certain ideals were right and could not understand why the rest of mankind did not immediately forsake their old gods when he propagated his gospel of the new ones. Because he attempted to treat the boys with whom he came into contact as his intellectual equals, and never snubbed them, never punished or rewarded them, he expected every other master to employ the same methods.

"Show 'em," he would say, "that they've jolly well got to work if they want to get anything out of life; tell 'em that if they work to please a master, to avoid the cane, to secure a trumpery prize, or for any other reason than that work is a good thing in itself, they are committing an immoral and indecent act, and then there's just a chance that the intellect may grow. Not one boy in five hundred even uses ten per cent. of his brain-cells: the average man or boy has no idea of what real work means."

He kept a most valuable notebook in which he jotted down any views that commended themselves to him out of all the books on education that appeared.

I loved Patrick more than any friend I have ever had. I am a poor counsel for the defence for that very reason. I am more likely to do harm to his cause than good by lauding him in this way: my duty is to let his diary tell its own tale. It is a document over which I would fain dwell at great length and explain to you, but that would only serve to show that I feared your verdict. I send it out to the world with much trepidation lest I should even now have so hacked and curtailed it that it fails to show Traherne in his true character, but I have this at least to comfort me. There will be but few of those who already belong to the noblest profession in the world or who are shortly to join it who will not derive help from the light it sheds on a most difficult task.

The schoolmaster of the new age needs all the assistance he can get. Patrick Traherne destroyed himself in discovering what he here gives to the world, but the results of his discoveries may be more far-reaching than he knew.

He was one of those who are never happy unless they are fighting; the end once attained he would be lost. It may well be that the Stevensonian maxim which was always so much in his mind carried him through even at his last moments (he was killed in the battle of Cambrai, December 3, 1917), "After all to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." His failure may be a better augury than success would have been, for in the end of all, have not the world's failures been most frequently the world's redeemers?

I would add further that I cannot bring myself to accede to all his dicta. Had he been permitted to live, experience would have surely shown him that his youthful judgments are not infrequently grossly unfair; but I maintain that his theories are not necessarily less interesting because they are, in many cases, erroneous.

S. P. B. M.

The names both of people and places mentioned
in this book are entirely fictitious. Patrick
Traherne did not portray any specific Public
School or living person in his diary.

THE BEGINNING (1909). P. T. quoting William Blake:

I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

THE END (1917). P. T. quoting T. W. H. Crosland:

If I should ever be in England's thought
After I die,
Say, "There were many things he might have bought
And did not buy.

"Unhonoured by his fellows he grew old
And trod the path to hell,
But there were many things he might have sold
And did not sell."

[I]

September 20, 1909

It is very strange and frightening: all the boys seem to me to be grown men and I, a veritable minnow in a sea of Tritons, but I suppose really they are quite bovine and regard me much as cows regard human beings—as their natural master. I wonder! I confess I am in a panic about my ability to keep order. On several nights in the "vac" I had nightmares of classes of unruly boys refusing to obey me, shouting, throwing things about and generally making nuisances of themselves and a fool of me.

My first impressions of Radchester are not very comforting. It is like coming to a desert island to be pitchforked out at a wayside station miles from anywhere, with only the sea to the east, and flat dike-lands to the west, north, and south. There are no houses within sight. Certainly there is nothing to distract one's attention from one's duty: outside the lodge gates all is barren.

The first thing for me to do is to furnish my rooms. Alas, where am I to procure the means to do this?

At present in my sitting-room there is nothing but a frayed carpet, a few rickety chairs, a table, unstable on its legs, and an enormous bookcase and cupboard combined. My bedroom is ugly, bare and damp, with no fireplace. Apparently they encourage us to be Spartan in our mode of living here. How different from the Oxford of three months ago.

I had a long talk with the Head Master to-night. He is an imposing-looking man, a sound disciplinarian I should imagine, one who gives no quarter. It is hard to associate him with the priesthood. He has less of the clergyman in him than any parson I have ever met. He gave me many "tips" about my work and laid stress in every other sentence about the necessity of exercising firmness from the start. He obviously looks upon me as willing, but lacking in experience and scholarship. I appear to have been selected rather on athletic than intellectual grounds. My "Blue" has gained for me this important post and I am evidently expected to play games daily. Well, I shan't mind that; I cannot conceive how men exist without daily exercise. Thank Heaven, I'm not in an office. After all, £150 a year and my "keep" is quite an adequate salary for a man of twenty-four without encumbrances.

There is something monastic about the life here: only one other master except the Chief is married: women are obviously not encouraged.

The staff live for the most part in Common Room: we breakfast and dine there, have lunch in the School Dining Hall with the boys, and have tea in our own rooms.

I got my first impressions of my colleagues at dinner to-night. Most of them were very hilarious and good-humoured, full of talk about the Alps, Scotland, Cornwall, cricket tours, golf, climbs, bathing, fishing and every sort of outdoor pursuit in which they had indulged during the last eight weeks. They were all obviously glad to see each other and be back at work.

Somehow they didn't strike me as being typical "ushers" at all. Quite a dozen of them appear to be men about my own age, healthy, jovial and without a care. One or two of the older men look haggard and wan, but then again others look like prosperous gentlemen-farmers or country squires, hale, hearty, well fed and contented.

After dinner Hallows, who is games master (an old captain of the Oxford "Rugger" team), asked me to his rooms: some half-dozen of us sat there drinking whisky and smoking until chapel-time. They were all genial and friendly and we talked mainly about historic incidents in bygone Inter-University matches.

In chapel I saw the whole school for the first time. I was exceedingly nervous and imagined myself to be the cynosure of all eyes. I thought that they were all taking stock of me and sizing me up. I must remember to be strict from the very beginning. The start is everything.

September 27, 1909

I am gradually getting used to the routine. Certainly the breaking of the ice was very trying. Luckily I had prepared my lessons carefully before I went into form, so I had plenty to say, which prevented my extreme nervousness from being too apparent, and I punished two boys heavily for talking while I was trying to teach. On the whole most of them appear to be tractable. What does amaze me is their abysmal ignorance.

For the first few days I was talking over their heads the whole time. In mathematics I went too fast. In English I took it for granted that they knew something about the subject: I am gradually finding out that they know nothing. What is worse, only a very few of them want to know anything. They exhaust all their energies and keenness on games: they have none left for work. It is looked upon as a gross breach of good form to take anything but the most perfunctory interest in class. I find that I am falling into the most insidious of traps. I am picking out favourites. There are two boys, Benbow and Illingworth, both in my English set, who have shown up essays quite outside the common: they care about things: they read: they express a novel point of view: they are rebels against tradition. I have given them the run of my rooms and implored them to borrow what books they like from my shelves and to come to tea whenever they like.

I am beginning to find that I prefer the company of boys to that of my colleagues. Most of the staff seem to have reached the limit of their learning when they took their Finals. My Finals only served to show me what an ignorant ass I am. Perhaps it's a good thing to take a low class in "schools." At any rate it leaves you under no false impression as to your own level of intelligence and attainments.

A week of this life has taught me quite a number of useful things:

(1) That it is quite easy to keep order. A number of men here get persistently "ragged," but that seems to me to be due to their lack of humour, their uncertain temper, and their misunderstanding of the boy mind.

(2) I hate having to correct work at night. It is merely a mechanical drudgery and does the boy no good, for he does not strive to understand a mistake unless you correct it while he is with you, and one would be far better employed reading. Correction of exercises must have been instituted to prevent masters from getting into mischief in their idle hours.

(3) I dislike compulsory chapel. I like services when I do not feel bound to go: they become merely a meaningless jingle of words when one is forced to attend when one is not in the mood.

(4) I love playing "footer" with the House every day. I have got to know already quite intimately a number of boys whom I should have regarded as wasters in form. This seems to me to prove that a master should share so far as he can in every activity in order to try to get at the point of view of the boys from every angle. I have therefore joined the Corps, the Debating Society and the Choir.

(5) I object intensely to the mark system. It inculcates selfishness, destroys any chance of getting any co-operative spirit in a form, and is thoroughly immoral. It tends to make boys work from a mercenary motive: they think of nothing but rewards and punishments: they even cheat when they get the chance in order to rise to a high place in the week's order. These orders bother me. Every Saturday night we have to collect all sorts of marks from other masters, scale and readjust them and produce an order, which takes up about two hours of valuable time. I don't mind giving up time to any useful end, but I do resent doing so for a senseless one.

November 1909

The monastic system is getting on my nerves. I find myself longing to hear a baby crying, a girl laughing, or any noises of the street. We are too much aloof from the outside world. I thought reading would be a sufficient antidote. Most of my colleagues don't read at all. They "haven't time." Lately I have taken to going off to Scarborough on Saturday evenings, treating myself to a good dinner at the Regent (we are allowed no drinks in Common Room except water: Hallows alone drinks seltzer), and then going on to a show at the theatre or promenading the Winter Gardens and watching the shop-girls and men dance. These people have an irresistible fascination for me. It is a wonderful relaxation to chatter amiably to these girls and men, and hear their point of view of life, so many poles apart from that of the Radchester Common Room. From one of these in particular, a very pretty girl of about eighteen, with masses of corn-coloured hair and violet eyes, a complexion like a Devon dairymaid and a figure light as a fairy, I have learnt a good deal of another side of life. Her name is Vera Buckley: she works in a large milliner's shop. We meet and dance together now every Saturday night. At first when she learnt that I was a schoolmaster at Radchester she was suspicious and cold, but now we are firm friends and she talks unflaggingly about her hopes and fears, her likes and dislikes. She is a welcome change from the Tapers and Tadpoles of Common Room, who argue interminably upon the day's play and the moral defalcations of boys in their respective houses and forms.

I dined with the Head Master last night and found myself quoting from a new book on education. Just before I left, he took me aside and said, "The less you read about education the better. All this new-fangled talk about new ideas cuts at the very roots of the great tradition on which the Public Schools were built up. I never engage a man who has taken a diploma in the theory of education: he can never keep order, he can't teach, he makes the boys rebel against their lot and is altogether very dangerous. I like your keenness and I think you have made a good beginning, but I warn you now against thinking that there is any reform needed, and suggest that you read no more upon a subject which you are called upon to practise, not to theorise about."

I attempted a defence but he refused to listen. Patting me gently on the back he said, quite kindly, "When you are my age you'll see the truth of what I've been telling you: youth is always in a great hurry to bring about the millennium. It never realizes that no millennium can be brought about by merely destructive criticism. Remember that all these writers are outside the profession and are writing in total ignorance of the conditions under which we labour."

He succeeded in making me feel very arrogant, very youthful, and very much of a fool.

After all he has some right on his side. Boys do understand the system of marks and of punishment and I suppose the way of least resistance is the best. Anyway it is far easier to make a boy work through fear than it is through love of the work: to rouse enthusiasm in the work itself is an exceedingly arduous business. The difficulty is that I hate the idea of caning a boy almost as much as some of the staff relish it. They satisfy a sort of bestial lust by lashing a small boy and hearing him yell. They would be horrified at the suggestion, but I am certain that this is true. One has only to watch a man's eyes when he gives an account of some of his more successful efforts in this direction. On the other hand, I firmly believe that there is a type of boy who can understand no other form of treatment. I only wish such types would not come under my jurisdiction.

I find that I am becoming unpopular with Hallows. One very wet afternoon I organized a paper-chase which was an overwhelming success: about two hundred boys turned out and we caught the hares about four o'clock, after a very tricky run over a well-laid course. Unfortunately every one was late for "roll." By getting up this entertainment on a "half" when there was nothing else to do I found myself launched into about six rows.

Apparently every boy has to pass the doctor before he is allowed to run on a paper-chase; whips had not been arranged for to see that the "laggers" did not drop out en route and find solace in a cottage or public-house; I had no list of starters to compare with those who finished to see whether any runners had died by the wayside, and, most flagrant of all, I had upset "roll." I am afraid I shall never hear the last of this. Hallows refuses to speak to me, but most loudly and pointedly speaks of me in no uncertain tone of voice whenever I enter Common Room: the direct upshot is that paper-chases are to be made compulsory on days when there are no games, and a printed list of rules to this end has been put up on the school board.

I suspect that Hallows framed them, for they are calculated to remove any innocent pleasure that any boy might have derived from cross-country running and implant in his heart an undying detestation of this particular branch of exercise. I am afraid the truth is that Hallows is jealous: I had overstepped my province in getting up this run. He is the manager of all the school athletics and I had committed an unforgivable offence in not asking his leave.

I am beginning to see signs of mutual jealousy everywhere. Each tutor criticizes every other master's method of teaching, comparing it (adversely, of course) with his own.

House-masters resent any humane intercourse between members of their houses and junior assistant masters, though by the laws of common sense it would seem obvious that the senior boys would prefer the society of men only a little older than themselves as likely to be more in sympathy with their ideas, more helpful in their troubles than the elder members of the staff whom they, quite rightly, place on an unapproachable pedestal.

December 1909

Now that examinations are upon us I have been attempting to revise my mathematical and English work, with appalling results. My math. sets appear to have learnt nothing: just a glimpse here and there of an idea, all mixed up with the most amazing nonsense. I must have gone too fast. Some of them have certainly tried to work. Perhaps it is that mathematics is not the Queen of Sciences, after all, at any rate for the unformed mind. I know that in my own school days I was successful at it owing to a natural aptitude without understanding in the least its practical usefulness.

There are boys who go again and again over the same ground, term after term, working out quadratic equations, formidable and unwieldy algebraic fractions, solving problems about triangles, parallelograms and circles quite mechanically and perfectly without the ghost of an idea as to what they all mean or what bearing they have on practical life. They are, if questioned, content to talk about "mental discipline" and "the more odious a task is the better it is for one's education" in a manner unbearably priggish and foolish.

If a boy can work out a hundred examples correct to type, most of us seem to think that we are teaching him something. On the contrary, I believe that the only point in mathematical teaching is the training of the mind to think logically and exactly, and to detect all vague and shallow fallacies in argument or writing.

According to this theory the better a boy was at mathematics the better he would be at English, whereas the truth is that the able mathematician is rarely able to express himself in writing at all, and certainly is not remarkable for simplicity or direct reasoning power in his essays. It never strikes us that if a boy is capable of working out an intricate equation he ought to be able to build up a paragraph of carefully connected sentences, all sequent and working to some definite solution or proof.

I am coming to the conclusion that all true education is a striving after Beauty, and what does not actively pursue this end is a waste of effort.

No sooner do I reach this idea than I begin to wonder what can have induced our forefathers to erect such a hideous structure as Radchester, in the middle of so barren, ugly, and terrifying a country.

Surely there can be no more depressing district in England than the country round the school. On Sundays I occasionally go for walks, but I never return without being obsessed by the gloom and drabness of it all. If I walk down the seashore I see nothing but a bare waste of grey waters, relieved by an interminable stretch of sand. There are no gorgeous colourings on sea or land, such as we expect from the sea and get in Devon and Cornwall. If I go inland I have no alternative but to tramp over muddy fields the grass of which is as colourless as the sea, and the only variety to the monotony of the level stretch is a wind-swept naked tree, wan and haggard as an old tramp who has been buffeted by Nature too long to care about his personal appearance: if I take to the roads I am immediately led to contrast the solitary deadness of these straight lanes, where you know for miles exactly what is coming, with the rich lanes of the south, with their high hedges, a riot of colour and song, deviating romantically every few yards, up and down, round and round, ever calling you on to explore some gem which an all-provident Nature has built for you just round the corner. There are no mysteries to be explored in the vicinity of Radchester unless you dive down a drain.

It is not strange that the cult of Beauty is neglected in such a place, for where is Beauty to be found? The answer I find within my rooms: only in my books and my few chosen friends among the boys can I rid myself of the discontent which is so persistently seething within me.

Perhaps I should make an exception in the matter of games; I love strenuous exercise but I object to making football my God, as so many of my friends do. The boys, at any rate in the presence of masters, talk of little else. Their only other topic of conversation is the characters of their other masters, which is insidious and delightful, but savouring too much of disloyalty and scandal-mongering.

One of the things I have enjoyed most this term has been the O.T.C. All members of Common Room, by an excellent rule here, have first to serve in the ranks. I have got to know the boys in this House infinitely better by mixing with them on parades and field days as a private than I ever should have by any other means: they seem to forget all sense of difference and talk glibly and unconsciously about all sorts of topics that normally would not crop up between master and pupil. They no longer restrain their language quite in the same way they do before a master. I imagine that pretty vigorous swearing is prevalent in all schools: it seems to add a picturesqueness to their vocabulary which would be entirely lacking otherwise, for a boy's paucity of orthodox adjectives is astonishing. He is exactly on a par with the farm labourer in this respect. He swears simply because he has no other language to fall back upon. It is not his fault so much as the master's. So far as I can gather no subject seems to be so badly mishandled as the mother tongue. The average boy is expected to write Latin prose and is caned for a false quantity in verses. He tries his hand at original verse composition in both Latin and Greek: no one thinks of asking him to write poetry in English, and when he does he is looked upon as a freak. It seems a most topsy-turvy system: he spends at least one hour every day at Latin: to English (of which he knows nothing) he devotes two hours a week and during those two hours his masters don't know what to teach him.

Some spend the time in parsing and analysing, though what utilitarian benefits are to accrue hereafter from these it would be hard to see. Others "read a play of Shakespeare," which is a euphemism for note-taking and note-learning, a philological discourse or an exercise in repetition; others again read out notes on the Mendelian theory, which they call a skeleton, and require the form to clothe this skeleton and reproduce it in the form of an essay.

I find that all my English lessons this term have been of the nature of tentative experiments. First I read a play of Shakespeare very rapidly, allotting parts to every member of the form. My first shock was to discover that not one of them could read aloud. They were afraid of their own voices: they gabbled through their parts at top speed without paying any attention to the punctuation or attempting to express emotion. Then I decided to make them come out and try to act the play with the books in their hands. This was looked upon as a grave departure from precedent and an opportunity for "ragging." When I pointed out that there was plenty of chance for a display of horse-play in the crowd scenes in Julius Cæsar and Coriolanus, they possessed themselves in patience until the time to read these plays. Heavens! How they loved the mob scenes. Here was something after their own hearts. At last I had roused their interests. Most of the comic scenes fell very flat and so did all the more long-winded speeches, but once there was a call for an uproar or a pageant they were as pleased as Punch.

I have now discovered that the only way to read plays is to go straight ahead and disregard all difficult passages and notes and get them amused and keen to perform. Incidentally, it makes them far keener if they are permitted to "dress" the part. In She Stoops to Conquer and The Knight of the Burning Pestle I had them all in shrieks of laughter. But now, as I said, examinations are at hand and woe is me. I'm afraid they won't be able to answer anything. Perhaps their ideas of the characters may be more sound than if they learnt them second-hand from Mr. Verity, but they'll get badly "pipped" on historical inaccuracies and difficult contexts.

Then again, how am I to expect them suddenly to produce an essay on "Town and Country," or "Conscription," or "Capital Punishment" when I've always given them carte blanche to write short stories, or imaginary dialogues, or one-act plays or original verses on any subject under heaven?

I think I'm going to hate examinations. I wish we could dispense with them altogether. Most of the staff appear to revise all the work of the first two months in the third month, and so get their pupils thoroughly tired and stale of the tiny scrap of ground they have covered and re-covered until they have worn it threadbare.

December 31, 1909

When it came to the end of term I was amazingly loath to leave Radchester. In spite of the ghastly ugliness of the country, the bitter winds from which there is no refuge, unsympathetic colleagues (somehow I seem to have alienated most of the elder members of Common Room) and the shattering of several of my ideals, I cannot deny that I have enjoyed my first term as a Public School master immensely. I have not rid myself of my nervous fear lest my forms should rise against me and "rag" me as they "rag" poor old Pennyfeather and Dearden; I certainly did not gain much kudos from the results of the examinations, either in mathematics or in English; many of the boys dislike my methods and do the minimum of work necessary to evade punishment, yet I have made a few firm friends; I have led a healthy life, I have read a good many books, and I am as keen as mustard to prove my ability to teach.

Benbow and Illingworth have each written to me and I find that I treasure letters from boys above all others. Where other men of my age fall in love with girls I suppose I give my affections to those boys who show promise in English and take advantage of the seclusion of my rooms to come and pour out their petty worries and ask for advice.

I have been reading somewhere of late that it is a dreadful thing for a man with any brains to live always in the society of others less mature than himself: he becomes didactic and in every way obnoxious: I know that Charles Lamb was not alone in flying from the presence of all schoolmasters: there is a distinctly noticeable trait in us, as a profession, which makes us want to teach and advise, to lay down the law: it is a habit against which I must most carefully guard.

On the other hand, always being with crowds of healthy youngsters certainly tends to keep a man young: there are very few responsibilities, I am catered for, I pay no rates or taxes, I have £150 a year to spend on books, clothes, travel, and any other incidental expenses I like: I have longer holidays than any other professional man: for four months in the year I am free to do whatever I like.

Of course I shall never be able to marry, never have sons and daughters of my own. But then, as I never see a girl of my own class at Radchester, I am never likely to want to settle down to domestic life. After all, instead of one wife and a few children, I have three or four hundred children of the most fascinating ages: I stand in loco parentis to countless numbers.

I don't feel that I want to become rich: I am willing to forgo all the ordinary ambitions if I may have a more or less free hand in education, and at last realize my many ideals about the training of youth.

It seemed unduly lonely at home during Christmas week compared with the noisy cheeriness of school. For the first time in my life I am beginning to feel quite bored with life at Darley. I long for the games, the chatter, my form, my books, yes, even for Common Room, with an aching heart. I hope the rest of the holidays will pass more quickly than these last ten days. I take no pleasure in bridge-parties or tea-fights: my only solace is to write reams of nonsense to Illingworth and Benbow, and to read all that I can lay my hands on which bears on the million or so theories of education.

[II]

January 20, 1910

I suppose it is an ineradicable trait in human nature to want to be where one is not: when I was at home I longed for Radchester: now that I am safely back in my own rooms I miss the civilization of home, the constant presence of the other sex, the beauties of our moors and combes. This is really a very savage, uncouth sort of place: at present we are snow-bound, which seems to cut us off more than ever from the outside world. I should hate to be ill here: the school doctor is, I imagine, capable within limits, but there is no chance of securing any kind of adequate nursing or home comforts. We are in very truth a colony of Spartans. I find that I am hankering after the flesh-pots. I want to see Vera Buckley again. I must write and fix up a dinner and a theatre with her. I suppose if the Head Master found out I should be ignominiously "sacked." Yet I can't see that such conduct can really affect my status here. I don't propose to have her to tea in my rooms. She amuses me and I amuse her. She lives in a world poles apart from the one in which I live: she is a wonderful tonic after Common Room; her talk is all of gaiety and the different sorts of men she meets, pretty frocks and romance. By her side I feel amazingly old and dull and careworn: she is really my sole link with the workaday world outside. There is no chance of our friendship ripening into anything else: I fail to see where the harm or the danger lies; we like one another: we do each other good. As she so frequently tells me, I am different from all the other "boys." I don't make love to her or any nonsense of that sort; she acts as a refining influence on me. After parting from her I feel less of a boor, more of a man of the world.

I suppose in every profession there are points of routine and minute details that have to be observed that yet offend the new-comer's sensibilities, but I doubt whether anything so utterly devoid of purpose or so calculated to rub a man up the wrong way could ever have been devised to compare with a masters' meeting.

At the beginning of term we all assemble in Common Room and the Head Master reads out a list of proposed changes in the curriculum, which as a rule affect but two men out of the thirty or forty gathered round the table: the pros and cons of the changes are, however, heatedly discussed by the parties concerned, while the rest of us yawn and eat our heads off with boredom.

If, however, I or any junior member of the staff should have the effrontery to propose any alteration or reform, a storm of abuse immediately bursts on our heads and we are met with a final retort which is meant to quash us for all time: "The existing system has been in vogue for twenty-five years and no one has seen fit to question it before: it has become hallowed with the passing of time and it would be a sacrilege to tamper with it now."

Another feature of these meetings is the way in which each head of a department fights for his own hand. The choirmaster thinks of nothing but getting more time for choir practice, the officer commanding the corps strenuously tries to procure an extra five minutes at each end for his parades, the gymnasium expert urges the necessity of physical training in school hours, the modern language master vainly begs for less classics, the mathematicians for more hours devoted to preparation, the games manager for less school work for the teams, and so on.

A stranger would guess (and he would not be far wrong) at the end of one of these meetings that we were all deadly enemies, each suspicious of the other and certain in his own mind that he alone among the many suppliants has been treated with great unfairness and that the school is rapidly going to the dogs because he has not obtained his request. The irony of the situation is heightened by the fact that we pray both before and after the meeting that we may all work in complete harmony for the common good of the boys, whereas in reality we are all as disunited as any body of men could possibly be.

One man will ardently support a motion solely to irritate his dearest enemy, who will suffer if the proposal is carried; another will just as strenuously oppose it for no other reason than the fact that his opponent might gain by it if it were carried. The common good seems to be about the last argument to carry weight. There are men here who never speak to one another from year's end to year's end, although they are forced to meet some twenty times a day and even sit next to one another (we sit in order of seniority) at meals. Hallows is, I fear, a case in point. He refused to shake hands with me when I came back this term and I know perfectly well that he will not take my part if I ask him to "ginger" up any boy in his house who shirks his prepared work.

March 1, 1910

A dreadful thing has happened. A boy in my form called Chorlthwaite has been expelled for stealing. He happens to have been in Hallows' house. He was certainly a boy without any moral sense at all. Twice I detected him in the act of "cooking" his marks: the first time I talked to him privately and gave him an imposition long enough (one would have thought) to have brought the lesson home to him; on the second occasion I went to see Hallows about it and he as good as told me that it was my fault for putting temptation in his way by making it possible for the boy to do such a thing.

"Trusting to a boy's honour?" he said with an ugly laugh when I tried to explain, "you might just as well trust a bookie with your purse: boys haven't got such a thing. The only way to keep them out of harm's way is never to trust them an inch, that's my way and I've never had a failure yet."

He is in a towering rage over this expulsion: he has told the Head Master that the whole blame lies on my shoulders, because I encouraged the boy to come up to my rooms and ransack my cupboards for chocolates and cakes. (I always allow all the boys in my form to do this.) They are not overfed here and several of them are too poor to be able to afford to go often to the tuck-shop. The wind is apt to give one a prodigious appetite, and most boys are only too glad to avail themselves of my offer. I have only just heard that Hallows issued an edict that no boy in his house was to come to my rooms under any pretext except with a signed order from him. Chorlthwaite revenged himself by helping himself lavishly from the cupboards of Benson, the assistant music master. It is all frightfully depressing. In my Divinity lessons on Sundays and Mondays I have always tried to put before my boys a rigid code of moral ethics and I had hoped that I was meeting with some success.

I trusted them all in everything: I always make a point of letting them give up their own marks and, except in the case of Chorlthwaite, I have never detected a boy in the act of cheating; neither have I come across a single case of cribbing, but there would be little point in that because a boy only cribs through fear of punishment and I punish so rarely that I have even been told by the Head Master that I am unduly lax. Anyway the boy has gone and I am abased and ashamed. I hope that this sort of thing won't happen often or it will wreck all my happiness. If my influence isn't good enough to keep my boys straight it were better for me and for them that I should become a street scavenger or a coal-heaver.

All the same I am not sure that expulsion meets the case. What is to happen to Chorlthwaite in the future? Is he to be branded for life? He had the elements of a Christian in him. I cannot think that his power for evil was strong enough to make him a bad influence over his fellows: their united good influence, on the other hand, would, I should have thought, in time have changed his perverted sense of morality.

Now I am fearful lest he should become callous and bitter and continue to the end in the path which he at present treads. Punishment never yet acted as a sufficient deterrent to any one who really wanted to commit a crime.

One of the minor things in life which infuriates me about schoolmastering is this silly rule about smoking. Every boy knows quite well that practically every grown-up man smokes, and at home he sees not only his father and elder brothers but also every man in the street with a pipe, cigar or cigarette in his mouth, and yet he is supposed to believe that his masters (unnatural beings) never condescend to the vice. In Common Room we may smoke and in the seclusion of our own rooms when there is no chance of any boy suddenly breaking in upon us ... but nowhere else. We are expected to hide all traces of pipes, jars of tobacco, or cigarette boxes before we admit any boy into our presence. It is a laughable pretence, but apt to be infernally annoying. It also strikes me as being immoral: we give our consent to the universal acting of a lie. What makes it worse is the fact that most of the boys smoke secretly far more than is good for them, solely from bravado.

If only, as in some schools, all boys over sixteen who have permission from home were allowed to smoke at certain hours of the day, the difficulty both for them and for us would be solved. It is like the question of drink: in some schools boys are given a glass of beer with their midday meal and again at supper. This effectually removes any sort of temptation to dive into the secret recesses of a bar parlour and there drink deep and long, as is the fashion among the bloods here.

I found this out by accident last Sunday. About four o'clock Jefferies, a brilliant scholar and athlete, came to my rooms, white as to the gills, and in a state of nervous terror unfolded a tale over which I could not help but gloat.

Some half-dozen of the more "sporting" prefects apparently have a habit of disappearing every Sunday after lunch and walking four miles to an inn, where they flirt with a fat and ugly barmaid (I have only Jefferies' word for the "fat and ugly") and drink until such time as they are expected back in their houses. On this Sunday afternoon the place was unfortunately raided by the police and Jefferies (luckily without a school cap) was seized: he gave a fictitious name and address and found that he was expected to appear at the local Police Court to answer the charge against him.

Naturally the whole thing was bound to come out and he would inevitably be expelled. The boy was in a state of pitiable terror and wanted to know what to do. As luck would have it, we did hit upon a scheme before he left the room which left him a loophole. He acted upon my suggestion, which was a simple one, and as it turned out everything was solved satisfactorily. He was fined heavily but did not appear, and I had the immense joy to see the case reported in the local weekly paper and read all unsuspectingly by members of Common Room, who never for one instant guessed that the George Holmes, clerk, etc., who was fined for obtaining drinks after hours, had any connexion with the noble and honourable foundation of Radchester. I suppose I ought not to have been a party to this nefarious scheme, but Jefferies was far too valuable a member of the school to lose. He certainly did not deserve to have his career ruined for a foolish prank like this.

If this came out, I imagine that I should also be thrown out into the streets: I wonder how much of this hushing up goes on in all Public Schools.

I remember that I took Dearden into my confidence over the case of Jefferies. He is a dear, good soul: why on earth he allows the boys to "rag" him as they do I can't think, except that he's too gentle and generous with every one.

He has the next rooms to mine, and whenever I'm out of cigarettes, or whisky, or cakes, I just raid his cupboards. Heavens! that places me exactly on a level with Chorlthwaite: it is true that I have asked him to take whatever he wants whenever he likes from my rooms, but my cupboards are usually bare owing to the appetite of my own form. When I told Dearden about Jefferies he laughed long and loud: he has an infectious laugh, and his already rubicund cheeks become purple with mirth. When his noises had somewhat subsided, except for a few intermittent guffaws that he seemed unable to suppress, he replied:

"Oh! I suppose we all behave like that really: it's a rotten game turning King's Evidence. I caught a fellow in this house with his arm round a flapper's waist on the beach, kissing her with great energy one night last summer term. It did me good to see them. He thought he was safe for expulsion. As a matter of fact I had him up and tried to lecture him, but it was all I could do to keep a straight face. What do you think his defence was? 'It's so jolly monotonous here, sir, with this continual round of work and games and corps and chapel, and never a decent-looking girl for miles.' I couldn't resist asking him how he unearthed so desirable a creature in a district which breeds little but sea-gulls and mussels.

"'I met her in a village about five miles away one Sunday afternoon and ... well, she was as bored with life as I was, so we agreed to walk to meet each other down the beach every Thursday and Saturday night: it meant two and a half miles each way for each of us, sir. It was rather a sweat, but it was worth it, just for the fun of the risk of being caught.' I warned him to be careful in future: I hadn't even the heart to make him promise never to see the girl again; I'm a rotten bad schoolmaster."

From this he went on to a heated disquisition on the advantages of co-education.

I'm in luck to have so delightful a companion as Dearden next door to me. He is about ten years senior to me and has had a chequered career. He has been already at about half a dozen schools and never given any great satisfaction. He is, I imagine, too easy-going: he just drifts along idly; he likes his game of bridge, his whisky, his nightly chatter, and beyond that very little except good holidays. Like most schoolmasters he is quite without ambition: he looks forward to nothing better than his present state. "I can conceive," he said once to me, "nothing more delightful than my present life, if only I were not so persistently 'ragged'; it does so lower a fellow in his own esteem."

I have been attending all the recent debates at the School Debating Society: it is a very formal and rigid body attended usually by some fifteen or twenty persons, all very nervous and none of them able to speak at all coherently or interestingly. Each time I have attended I have said something, but I find I am as bad as the rest: there is an air about the society which effectually prevents one from saying what one means. I don't know what it is. The debates are dull and mainly consist of long uncomfortable pauses, during which no one dares even to whisper, varied by grotesque attempts at humour which make me want to cry.

It seems to me that the power to state an argument concisely, without stammering or hesitation and in an interesting way, is a very necessary factor in our educational equipment. I have, therefore, started another private debating society, which meets in my rooms every Saturday night, limited to boys whom I take during the week. The bait of free food has netted a prodigious catch. I rarely have less than fifty: they lie about on the floor or prop themselves up against the walls. The atmosphere after an hour and a half is indescribable, but we certainly do debate. Blood-feuds seem to spring from the results of our arguments: tempers are really lost, and at times I have imagined that they resort to physical tests to prove the truth of their assertions as soon as they get outside. At any rate I get them interested and they certainly can talk—the difficulty is rather to make them desist.

We vary these debates with charades, mock trials, and readings of plays ancient and modern. Occasionally I read to them humorous extracts, for choice from Saki, Stephen Leacock, or some of the older school of comic writers.

I find that I look forward to this more than to anything else in the week: it unfortunately prevents me from going in to see Vera, but somehow she and I always seem to be able to hit upon mutually free evenings whenever we like. I never allow a week to pass without seeing her. She is my safety-valve: she gives me a proper perspective. After I have quarrelled violently with some colleague or taken some mistake of mine too seriously, she acts as a corrective and makes me see that Radchester is not, as Common Room fondly imagines, the whole of the world. I do not over-emphasize my importance to the State when I have been with her: to her I am just one of a crowd, very ordinary, fairly cheerful and companionable, less flighty than if I were merely "one of the boys," but not necessarily much more precious on that account. England would not materially suffer if Radchester were razed to the ground to-night; Radchester's idea is that England would cease to count if such a dire catastrophe were within the bounds of possibility. Yes, it is very good for me to see Vera weekly. I told her the story of Dearden about the flapper, and she replied somewhat to my astonishment, "Oh! you old goose. Why, I've been out with heaps of Radchester boys. They come into Scarborough quite often. Of course you wouldn't see them: they're not quite such fools, but I wouldn't mind betting that they've seen you with me. Oh! don't get frightened. Boys aren't likely to give you away: they understand only too well. They probably think you're the only sensible master on the staff for having the sense not to pretend that you can do without girls. I think it's a mad idea shutting up four or five hundred boys in a lonely place like Radchester. I shouldn't be surprised at the most horrible things happening there: it's unnatural."

"But, my dear child," I replied, "if you'd read any of the old books you'd realize how necessary it is, if you want to work, to get as far away from distraction as possible. Now what greater or more charming distraction could there be than you?"

"Oh! get along, you old silly! You're always pulling my leg. All the same I'm certain that nothing but harm can come of separating the sexes in this way."

"Oh, then, you are like my friend Dearden, in favour of co-education?"

"What's that?"

But I was not to be drawn into any argument. When I'm out with Vera I'm out for lightness, sweetness and gaiety: I want to forget school altogether. I go back refreshed, revivified and with new ideas. She is the finest pick-me-up I know. She doesn't quote the classics at me. For that alone I could hug her.

April 3, 1910

And here I am at the end of my second term. Anything more terrifying than the way in which time flits by here I cannot conceive. I made so many good resolutions at the beginning of term and none of them seems to have materialized. I am still going too fast in mathematics, although I keep a strict hold on myself all the time. I think the secret is that I am more of a lecturer than a teacher. I find it very hard indeed to repeat over and over again the same formulæ, dinning them into thick heads day after day for weeks on end without any variation. I want to keep the boys interested. Some of them make tremendous headway with me: others learn nothing from me at all. In English it is otherwise: most people who come to me for this subject are beginning to read, which is the best possible sign. In the past they seem to have read nothing, not even "The Arabian Nights," nor "The Canterbury Tales," nor "Gulliver's Travels," nor any of the novels of Thackeray, or Dickens, or the Brontës, nor any poetry, nor essays nor plays. Now at least they do search the library for books which I recommend.

The school library is worse than useless. In ecclesiastical history no library can compare with it, but for the standard English classics one may search in vain. Even if the book you want does by some strange chance happen to be there, you are not allowed to remove it unless you are in the Sixth Form. When I remonstrated with the librarian (a foolish thing to do: I have now made him my enemy for life) all he could say was, "My dear man, these rules have been in existence for generations: what was good enough for our fathers is surely good enough for us. Tell your boys to get these books from their House libraries." I have lately been for a tour of inspection round the House libraries. Edna Lyall, Charlotte Yonge, Conan Doyle, George Birmingham, H. A. Vachell, Harrison Ainsworth, Mark Twain, Seton Merriman—yes, but no Swift, no Pope, no Browning, no Thackeray, no Jane Austen, no Fielding, no Johnson, no Milton, no Chaucer, no Keats, no Shelley, no Meredith. Apparently the authorities wish boys to imitate Ruskin and not descend to libraries but to purchase for themselves the masterpieces if they want to read them.

Only the other day the Head Master posted a notice on the school board urging the school to devote less time to the perusal of sixpenny magazines and more to the reading of good, sound literature—very good advice too—but it isn't every boy who can afford to read the best authors, besides which the greatest writers cannot be tackled without due preparation and a sharpening of the wits: the average boy is prejudiced against all the classics as being intolerably dull. It never strikes him that these works were written for our enjoyment, our solace in woe, our constant companions in every mood.

He prefers to talk about the form displayed during the afternoon by his House captain in a school match, or ruminate on his own shortcomings in a recent House match.

Games seem to me to lose half their charm when they are taken so seriously that a boy contemplates suicide because of his failure in a House match.

I might give a hundred lectures in Big School on any subject under Heaven and very few would voluntarily attend, but if I suggest giving a few hints on how to train for games there wouldn't be a vacant seat. I am certain this making a fetish of games is too much of a good thing. There is a limit even to keenness. I love watching a fierce senior final House match and all school matches. I love going "all out" when I am playing any game, but I certainly object to treating it as if it were a religious ceremonial, or rather a display before my Supreme Judge and that on my merits or demerits I shall be saved or damned everlastingly.

Quite the most enjoyable days of this term have been those wild, wet, windy afternoons when I have expended all my energies dashing up and down the shore in that peculiar game, half rugger, half hockey, which is only played at Radchester, but I don't go back to my rooms and weep if I play badly, or preen myself like a peacock if by some lucky chance I give an exhibition beyond the normal.

This has been a better term than last, if only because of the three new men on the staff, all of whom are younger than I am. It was pleasant to watch them first of all roundly chafe at the limitless number of rules and restrictions placed upon us all, and gradually succumb to the tradition and become unquestioning, staunch adherents of a system against which their better judgments first taught them to rebel.

One excitement of the last month has been the visit of the Inspectors: they are due once every five years and are supposed to be selected with scrupulous care. They are fêted for a week and shown everything at its most abnormal and best: it is no fair test at all. For one whole week no boy dared to "rag" even such a pitiable ass as Pennefeather, lest the Head Master and Inspectors should suddenly come in. Richards having carefully worked out an admirable lesson on the Siege of Syracuse meticulously went through it every hour with his form for the whole period on the off-chance and, as luck would have it, no Inspector came near him.

I was not going to change my curriculum for any of the old dodderers, and they called on me daily. The English expert was a gentleman, and simply sat down and took notes of my methods all the time I was teaching, while the mathematical inspector did all the work for me and told me how to teach factors, without so much as worrying to ask how I got on or watching me display my talents at all.

These inspections are merely farcical. Their report was one long succession of "very good," "brilliant," "astonishingly capable," and so on.

I have of late been worrying over the code of honour that prevails among the boys. Apparently to cheat, to lie, to give way to unnatural vice, to torture poor, half-witted, feckless youngsters are venal offences, hardly counting as offences at all, whereas to make a friend of a master, to "cut" or "slack" during a game, to work hard, are unforgivable and heinous sins to be ruthlessly punished with the utmost severity. Mixed up with the innocence and almost angelic tenderness of some young boys there is a strain of dirt, craft, and hollow insincerity that appals me. I would give a good deal to know whence these theories of life have their source. I am certain that such things are not inherent in the boy-nature: it is a fungus-growth that is become part and parcel of the Public School spirit, the tares growing up with the wheat, and no one has the courage to try to exterminate them.

I am always priding myself upon the fact that none of my boys ever "crib," but last week I discovered a boy writing out a theorem in geometry from a fair copy which he had brought in with him. He knew that I always walked round and round the room (I make it a practice never to sit down in a classroom) and counted on my mistaking the fair copy at his side for one of the propositions which he had already written out. I could find it in my heart to wish that all propositions were deleted from the mathematical syllabus. If we were always to invent new exercises this temptation would be removed.

I am glad to be going away to-morrow: I want to think out all these myriad problems of education: I am very tired and rather depressed at the result of all my efforts. I have worked hard this term and yet I have a feeling in my bones that most of my keenness is wasted: I am almost a butterfly on a wheel. The system is going to be too strong for me. I have a lurking suspicion that schoolmastering is not a man's job at all. It only really appeals to humdrum invertebrates who can live in an entirely unreal atmosphere, who like being placed on a pedestal and held up as models of all the more insipid virtues and who can lay down the law and see that it is obeyed to the last letter.

In no profession is the danger of thinking too much so obvious: any one possessed of an introspective or imaginative temperament is quite out of place in a Public School. Every day by reading I find that I am enlarging my mind and getting to know all sorts of interesting things, but most of them are not for the ears of babes and sucklings, and so I am compelled to lead two quite different lives and am become a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

What I do hate about the end of the term is the fact that to-morrow night I shall no longer be able to hear the merry shouts of the boys in the House Room below or the careless chatter of hundreds coming out of chapel or school: there will be no more games; but I have one consolation. I am not, as I did at Christmas, going to a lonely home. Illingworth is coming with me on a walking tour through Devon. I am looking forward to that very much indeed.

[III]

May 4, 1910

I am glad to be back again, but I never enjoyed any holiday in all my life as I enjoyed the one just finished. Illingworth and I took a train to Bideford on the first day of the holidays and put up in the hotel where Kingsley wrote "Westward Ho!" The difference between that old, bizarre, mediæval sleepy town and Radchester is impossible to believe. We spent our first evening talking to old sailors on the quay, and it did not require much imagination to take us back to the brave days of Elizabeth.

It was an idyllic holiday: we never had any definite end in view: when we felt hungry, regardless of the time, we would just go in to the nearest cottage and fill ourselves up with junkets and fruits and cream and then lazily stroll on, regardless of rights of way, over fields, through dense woods, by rabbit-warrens and carefully guarded preserves. Often we had to run from farmers, gamekeepers and their dogs, which added a good deal to the enjoyment: it just gave the extra spice of danger which we wanted. Once we got cut off by the tide and had to row over to Clovelly, where we put up for the night in a white-washed cottage, which smelt so sweetly of lavender and thyme, and was altogether so delectable with its spotlessly clean "flags" and old oak panelling, that we swore that if we ever got rich we would retire there and live as hermits, with a vast library to console us for the loss of the outside world. One day we bought a couple of rucksacks and set our faces towards Hartland Point and tramped all round the coast until we got to Bude. We took several days over this, because neither Illingworth nor I could ever help turning aside to explore any lane which looked promising. We found so many wonderful old Tudor manor-houses and cheery farm-houses that we could never tear ourselves away before we had called and been given leave to explore to our heart's content. Alone, I should never have dared to ask for so strange a courtesy, but Illingworth is one of those boys who no sooner sees than he must possess, a trait that he must have inherited, for his father is one of the most famous and successful cotton men in Manchester. In the end we arrived at Chagford. I don't quite know why, except that Illingworth liked the sound of the name. We got there by way of Okehampton and Sticklepath.

He had become very interested in John Trevena's novels, "A Pixy in Petticoats," and "Arminel of the West," which he unearthed from my shelves at school, and when he heard that we were in the neighbourhood of the scenes therein depicted, nothing would content him but that we should see for ourselves whether the people were as delightful or the scenery so wonderful as Trevena had made them out to be; so we tramped round the fringe of Dartmoor and put up at the first house we saw that appealed to us on the outskirts of Chagford.

Looking back on it now I can honestly say that in this sweet village, nestling under the shadow of the great moor, I found my ideal home: no other place has ever given me, from the first moment I saw it in the distance, quite the same sense of security and home. We were welcomed at Fernworthy View as if we were prodigal sons returned home at last.

We had a wonderfully capacious sitting-room with a piano, which we thumped on every night, singing ribald songs, "Buffalo Gals," "The Mulligan Guards," and the latest musical comedy bits with Betty and Thomasin, the two daughters of the house who waited on us. Before we had been there three days we had made friends with the parson, the doctor, one or two hunting men and all the villagers. We used to go and gossip in the pubs, over the counter at the shops, and up by the village pump opposite the church, where the majority of the yokels used to collect in the evening to discuss the doings of the day: we learnt a good deal of local scandal, accounts of the day's sport with the hounds, or fishing or shooting. Wherever we went we seemed to make friends.

And then by day, when the villagers were at work, we used to go out on to the moor and follow the Wallabrook, trying to trace each part of the stream to its source.

The moor always has an amazing effect upon me. I know that Eden Phillpotts and John Trevena talk a good deal about the malicious spirit of the great monoliths and the permanence of the stone, making even more futile by contrast the efforts of puny and transient man, but I find Dartmoor infinitely consoling. Here at Radchester I certainly do feel a malign influence in the ugliness of the flat lands and the hideous waste of sand and grey water, but there is a richness about the moor that makes Nature there seem much more the Eternal Mother and Generous Giver, sympathizer at any rate with strong and lusty youth. Grandeur and beauty in scenery surely can never do anything but elevate and purify the spirit of man. I am never happier than when I have scaled the top of one of these Tors and can turn north, south, east, and west and see no living soul. The wind sweeps through me, the sun shines for me alone, all the blue of the heavens is mine. I am nearer to the elemental things than at any other time in my life. I am no longer introspective, dwelling on human imperfections; I am just filled to the brim with thankfulness, and opening my arms wide I feel that I am about to be taken into the embraces of my Lord Himself: He is never so near as He is on these Mounts of Transfiguration: for all hills tend to transfigure not only God but man. As he rises farther from the valley in body, so does his soul expand. Young Illingworth and I found that we could talk of things on the moor that we should never have dreamt of discussing elsewhere. After a long and arduous climb, just to throw oneself down on the heather and gaze languidly, in sweet and utter content, up into the sky! How remote and unreal Radchester and all it stands for seemed at such moments, how small and ridiculously inept the quarrels and troubles that loom so large in Common Room; these hills certainly sweep away any malice that one may feel, or grudge that one may bear against one's fellow-men. Like St. Peter I never want to come down from these heights: I want to live in that rarefied atmosphere always, but the workaday world calls and we have to descend again into the fray.

Betty and Thomasin, as an alternative to the noises on the piano, used to get us to go into the kitchen and read aloud to them till bedtime stories out of "The Arabian Nights."

As an alternative to the moor there was always the Teign, in which river we used to paddle and bathe and shoot at fish with a horrible old revolver which Illingworth had been prevailed upon to buy from a poacher. Another of our sources of pleasure was an old disused mill, a survival of the eighteenth century. Illingworth found a chain by which we could be hauled up from floor to floor by a system of pulleys on the fifth floor: he never tired of this particular form of amusement, and on really wet days we used to spend hours pulling one another up and down like sacks of wheat.

Alas, it was all too soon over: the weeks sped by like wildfire and yesterday was a day of sad partings from many firm and fast friends among the moor-folk. At any rate we have promised to go back. It seems incredible to think that it was only yesterday ... and here I am making out my scheme of work for the term, paying last term's accounts, getting ready to renew my feud with Hallows, full of determination like poor old Perrin in that school-story of Hugh Walpole's that this term shall be better. I really will not go so fast in mathematics, I will instil my own sense of morality in my boys, I will do something to alter the ridiculous codes which govern their mode of conduct. At any rate to-night I feel amazingly strong and healthy, and I am as fit for the fray physically as a man can be.

June 10, 1910

I suppose each individual master unconsciously draws to him a peculiar type of boy. I begin to think that the pariah finds himself especially attracted to me.

There have been two horrible rows this term, one during the first week when I was fresh from the healthy wilds of Dartmoor, full of vigour to instil my high ideals into the minds of all who came into contact with me.

Immorality appears to be all-prevalent; some of the finest boys in the school had to leave at a moment's notice, among them Illingworth. Even now, a month after the event, I can scarcely credit it. I cannot believe that it is the small boys' fault. Jefferies came up to say good-bye and appeared to be heart-broken: yet he was the most flagrant offender of them all. I felt quite unable to cope with the disaster at all. I didn't know what to say to him. I tried to elicit from him what it was that first of all started boys off in this hideous vice, and I think he tried his best to give me a rational answer.

"I suppose with me, sir," he began, "it was pure boredom. Life here seemed so narrow; there was no possibility of an outlet for the emotions. We are so narrowly confined, so closely watched, so driven and looked after every hour of every day: the routine is killing to the imagination. Then comes along a good-looking small boy; a longing comes over one to make a friend of him, but the school rules most stringently forbid that, so we are driven to secrecy and secrecy breeds vicious ideas. We can't meet openly: we have to think out lonely and unlikely places: then human nature asserts itself and the rest follows only too quickly."

"But surely," I interposed, "surely the thought of your own honour, if not of the physical ills that are bound to follow, act as a deterrent? Sermons and house-master's warnings and so on must have some effect."

"None, I'm afraid, sir, when it comes to the point; the attraction proves too strong and the added spice of danger, as in the case of those Sundays in the public-houses, is a tremendous incentive. The sin seems to lie, not in the action, but in being found out. There are heaps and heaps of fellows who have left here loaded with honours, thought by all of you to be paragons of virtue, veritable Sir Galahads, who in reality are infinitely worse than any of us who are now being sacked. You don't cleanse your Augean stable by firing out a score or so of unfortunate wretches every year as a horrible warning to the rest. Immorality is not like a fire which can be stamped out; if there is any certain method it lies in gentle handling and weaning us gradually from impure thoughts to higher things. I know that you are awfully sick with me and I feel a rotten swine to you, as if I had betrayed a trust, but you came too late for us; probably you'll do more for the new kids. It can only be done by catching us before we are bored and making us really interested in literature, music, art—something with Beauty in it which is not compulsory. I know the prevalent opinion is that those who are interested in art are the worst of all: the truth is quite the reverse, the worst offenders are the unimaginative beefy bloods. There seems to be a lurking suspicion in the average schoolmaster's mind that all beauty is effeminate, if not actively immoral. I believe in reality that immorality is as much due to the suspicious and not too clean minds of our masters as to any other agency.

"We are never directly spoken to on the matter. If a house-master does talk about it he blushes and stammers and talks about sex as if it were in itself foul. He makes a quite innocent youngster begin to take a delight in these hidden things. The truth is that they ought not to be hidden at all. Once people begin to talk openly and discuss without false shame all these matters, this vice will disappear, not before. I've got to suffer, so there's no point in my making excuses, but you, sir, if you are really keen on getting rid of this evil, remember that the only way to do it is to get hold of boys and interest them in life. Give them something to occupy their minds, so that there is no empty corner of their souls swept and garnished ready for the occupation of the spirit of evil."

It is altogether horrible; all my best friends have gone, the very boys that I had trusted most and loved most. I cannot imagine evil of young Illingworth after our month together on Dartmoor. I dare swear no evil thought once crossed his mind the whole time we were together. I am certain in my inmost mind that this vice is not an essential part of life as some writers try to make out; I do not believe that youth must pass through this stage of adolescence and that it would be uncanny if he did not give way to his natural feelings.

I believe one reason for our failure here to cope with this dire disease is the lack of feminine society. I wonder how co-education schools stand in this matter. I believe the natural throwing of boys into the constant society of girls would result in a total elimination of all foulness, whether of thought or deed.

One of the most disgusting things in all my life here is the uncleanness of so many boys' minds. I hate the idea of a Bowdlerized Shakespeare, for instance, and yet when I come across a passage that could possibly be construed in a dirty way, I find my boys sniggering, loving the innuendo: it is then that I want to make the reading of Rabelais compulsory: that would cure them. I have never passed occasions like this without bursting forth into a vehement tirade against the clod-like state of a mind that can find matter for jesting in such things.

It is the secrecy that ruins everything. If, for instance, I were openly to proclaim my friendship for Vera Buckley, whom I still see weekly, I should be suspected at once of having seduced her. Just as it is imagined that no older boy can make a friend of a younger boy without having some ulterior, filthy motive, so no man can be seen with a shop-girl (or any girl for the matter of that) without giving rise to scandalous suggestions as to his attitude towards her.

I wish some members of Common Room could be privileged to hear the sort of conversation that passes between Vera and myself. She is something of a philosopher, and her outlook on life, which is eminently cheery and healthy, does me a world of good when I am depressed. I talk over with her all my schemes for educational reform and she is intensely sympathetic and alive. She offers a vast number of amazingly good suggestions: one of her most frequent points is that I should try to teach my boys not to divide all her sex into two quite separate divisions, (1) their mothers, sisters, and girls whom they meet at dances, parties and games, to whom they are studiously courteous and chivalrous, and (2) the rest, shop-girls and others, whom they ogle in the streets, take out for walks, kiss and fondle and treat as instruments for their own pleasures, to be discarded at will as soon as they tire of them.

July 4, 1910

The golden days of summer are fast slipping by and I do little else but bathe, play cricket, and read in my spare time.

Most of the boys hate having to play cricket every afternoon of the term and chafe exceedingly at the tediousness of "half-holidays," when they are expected to stay out at their games for four and a half hours. The more sensible take out rugs and books, and bask in the sun until they are called upon to field, but the temptation to go off and bathe must be pretty strong when you can hear the waves softly lapping on the beach below, calling you to come and cool yourself in the water. There is a most absurd rule here that only school prefects may bathe in the sea: the rest of the school has to content itself with the covered-in baths at stated and only too rare intervals.

These rules seem to me to be the ruin of the school: long summer afternoons ought to be given up to freedom and jollity. Boys should be encouraged to go as far away as possible for picnics, bicycle rides, and walks, to keep themselves fresh, instead of which "roll-calls" are held at ridiculously close intervals; not more than two hours are ever allowed to pass without assembling the whole school to answer their names. The place seems to be run on the basis of "Out of sight, up to mischief." Every one suspects everybody else.

The Common Room garden, which is the only place in the whole neighbourhood where one can see flowers growing, possesses one tennis-court; the rivalry to secure it for a game among those who like tennis is comic to watch. Intense hatred is bred if any one dares to use it more frequently than any one else. If any of the junior members of the staff try to get a game among themselves they are taunted with a lack of loyalty and duty. It is the young man's privilege to keep an eye on the games, to umpire at cricket and see that fellows don't "slack."

Luckily for me, I much prefer the society of the boys, and I play or umpire every day. Equally luckily I am tremendously keen on fielding and I thoroughly enjoy every game I play, so long as I am not expected to take it too seriously. But I certainly sympathize with those unfortunates who hate the game and yet are compelled to waste all these precious afternoons chasing after a ball, not caring in the least who wins or loses or how badly or well they play.

Quite a number of boys have told me that they would infinitely prefer that there were no "half-holidays." The hours in school pass so much quicker. If only the surrounding country were passably interesting and we could get up excursions to explore woods or churches, it would to some extent solve the difficulty, but though it is less depressing here in the summer than in the winter, there is no beauty anywhere, nothing to call one away from the eternal round of cricket.

The only break is Speech Day, a most amazing ceremony which gives one furiously to think. We had an Archbishop and several famous men of the day to talk to us this year, but the sole business of the affair seemed to be to feed the parents as lavishly as possible and to laud ourselves up to the skies. The only criterion of success, to judge from the Head Master's speech, was the number of Higher Certificates gained in the annual examination. He obviously makes a fetish of this; he publishes it in all the papers and recurs to it at constant intervals, in sermons, at masters' meetings and at dinner-parties. Apparently we stand or fall by this one qualification. Anything further from the true end and aim of education it would be hard to imagine. For this one day of speeches and lunch the whole place is transformed: it becomes almost civilized, a part of the world that we know outside. There are motor-cars, pretty, smartly dressed girls with their mothers, and proud fathers full of malapropos comments, and—most important of all—no compulsory cricket. For one whole day we get a chance to breathe, to look round and talk, and at night if a boy is lucky he may even dine with his people at their hotel in Scarborough.

It need scarcely be said how flat the rest of the term seems after this great day, so eagerly looked forward to, so long in coming, so quickly over when it does arrive.

I think I derived most of my joy from comparing the garb of my colleagues on this day with their ordinary, every-day habiliments.

I suppose no class of men dresses more shabbily than the schoolmaster; as he is so abominably underpaid that is not to be wondered at. What is a matter for comment is the extraordinary costume he dons on gala occasions.

Grey frock-coats with black trousers and a straw hat, dark morning coat with brown boots and a bowler—there is no end to the grotesqueness of the combination of ill-assorted garments. We look like a lot of master grocers tricked out for an annual convention. After all, clothes are not a very important part of life, but it does somehow emphasize our aloofness from the workaday world to appear clad like Rip Van Winkles once a year. Our gaucherie when we are called upon to talk to our visitors would make even a shop-walker wince. We seem to have lost the art of conversation: our tongues are rusty; we have no commonplaces, we cannot even hand round tea or food without falling over one another. We feel all the time that these parents are laughing at our awkwardness, that the girls have labelled us all as old fossils, bloodless, not unlike harmless lunatics: their brothers will certainly not tend to remove that impression when asked.

Altogether I felt ashamed of my profession for the whole of that day. I would willingly forget it.

I have been wondering lately whether I am not wasting such talents as I have at Radchester. I certainly do not want to stay here for ever with no prospect of ever earning more than £300 a year, and yet there is no denying that on the whole I love the place and that I feel an insidious temptation to take root here. Just by way of experiment I have answered a few advertisements to see if I have any chance of getting anything else.

One man wanted me to act as secretary to a firm of motor manufacturers, but that seems to be tame and dull compared with this.

The Board of Education have offered me a post as Junior Inspector of Board Schools in Essex, but I dislike the smell of board schools and constant travelling up and down the county does not appeal to me at all. The most tempting offer has come from India, to take over the job of Professor of English at a native university. I dallied with that idea for some time, but my people were against it, so I reluctantly refused it. The pay was good and the life would certainly be interesting, besides which I should then be able to gratify my desire to travel. The East is always calling me, ever since I first began to read Conrad. But should I find an Illingworth or a Benbow among the natives? I imagine the contingency to be a remote one. On the other hand, I should broaden my mind and come into contact with men and women with ideas as different as possible from those current here.

One result of my tentative efforts to leave has been a sort of restlessness which has made me buy guidebooks to all sorts of places. Illingworth and I had arranged to spend the summer holidays at Chagford, but now that he is gone I am likely to be at a loose end and I don't know where to go. I've thought of the Highlands, the Lakes, Ireland, Cornwall and Wales: I cannot make up my mind. I find that I want a companion and there is no one in Common Room with whom I should care to go.

July 31, 1910

Now that I have come to the end of my first year as a Public School master, I am trying to take stock of the situation. I have learnt a good deal since last September and I certainly am devoted to my job. I have not yet got over my initial nervousness. I still have nightmares of my boys getting out of hand and yet I have had no great difficulty in keeping order. I certainly don't like taking prep. or looking after "Hall" while three hundred and fifty boys eat, but I can cope with any number of boys up to forty and keep them at work. During the last week I have been invigilating and correcting examination work: my boys have not done particularly well in mathematics. Apparently I still go too fast or else I am unable to explain adequately. Compared with my English work I find mathematics uncommonly dull. In English I have got some really good results. Some boys have written short stories, others plays, others verses, many of which show originality, good sense, and a capacity for expression which I certainly did not get last year. I have interested them, too, in reading: they borrow all my books, new and old. I read extracts from all sorts of authors in form and try to whet their appetites for more. I only wish that instead of a paltry two hours a week I could inveigle the Head to give me an hour a day. All the other English masters here confine themselves to analysis, parsing, précis, and one play of Shakespeare per year. I have run through (lightly) the whole course of English Literature in the last three terms and some boys have specialized on drama, others on ballads, others on fiction and a few on poetry, each following his own bent.

I wonder why this all-important subject has been so neglected. That it has is evident from the silly letters most boys write and the twaddle that gets into the school magazine. Why any one pays sixpence for the monthly Radcastrian passes my comprehension. It consists of a facetious all too brief Editorial, badly strung together, followed by pages of description of games which interest no one except the players, and them only if they receive honourable mention, a sentimental piece of artificial versifying, a list of elevens and fifteens, promotions, colourless reports of debates and lectures, and a few letters of abuse. I'd guarantee to turn out a better journal from the weekly output of my form. The worst of it is that the average boy is interested in nothing at all, there is nothing that he wants to read about. So a tradition springs up that a school magazine shall be solely a chronicle of games.

I am now in the middle of writing reports. I wonder why it is that as soon as we are confronted by one of these queer documents all powers of criticism and expression desert us, and we, one and all, descend to a jargon which is quite meaningless. I find myself filling about a hundred of these slips with such idiotic remarks as "Industry adequate," "Painstaking," "Very fair but could work harder," "Lacks concentration," "Very weak but tries," "Neat and hard-working," and so on. When they are filled up they are about as much good as a guide to parents as when they are untouched. No one could possibly gauge a boy's merit or progress from these things. They remind me of marks, which as a criterion of a boy's terminal success are as bad a test as could be devised. I always feel that I am being paid £150 a year simply to do this sort of hack work, to fill up reports and to make out a weekly order for my form. All the rest of my work I give willingly without payment.

The first part of my summer holiday has been decided for me. To-morrow morning we leave for Salisbury Plain, where we are to camp out for ten days. To that I am looking forward immensely. Sharing a tent with seven boys in this house should bring me closer to them than ever and I ought to be able to learn something valuable about that most elusive and tricky thing, a boy's mind.

They are never quite natural in the presence of a master; perhaps they'll forget that I am one at Tidworth.

Our O.C. here is a strange fellow. I like him very much, but his views on life are diametrically opposed to my own. He is as hard as nails and is a twentieth-century Stoic. He despises all beautiful things; his bookshelves are lined with Kipling and guides to military strategy and tactics. He lives in and for the Corps. He is never happy unless he is in uniform. Like myself he is a mathematician, but he makes all his work as military as possible. Day and night he evolves schemes for field-days, outpost, advanced guard and other exercises; he is an expert scout, signaller, and drill-master. He demands the utmost punctilio in matters of ceremonial on parade: he coaches individually each boy who shoots on the range; he spends most of his holidays in barracks or on Army manœuvres as a lieutenant in the Special Reserve. He is one of the few men I know who is convinced that we are shortly to embark on a colossal European war, and naturally all the rest of Common Room laugh at him. He really is rather absurd, yet I cannot help but love him, he is so splendidly sure of himself. His is one of the rooms to which I feel any inclination to go when I feel lonely. He sits up to all hours of the night drawing maps and working out military problems from old examination papers, but he is always eager and ready for an argument. His principal bone of contention with me is that I don't "ginger up" the boys enough. He is a firm believer in the rod; he canes nearly all the boys in his House weekly, just to keep them up to the mark and himself in training. He detests my theories that boys should be taught in comfortable rooms with good pictures on the walls and æsthetic colours to delight their senses. He is one of those men who is suspicious of all Art as tending towards the immoral. They say he is admirable in camp, and that all the other Public School officers stand in awe of him because he knows his job so much better than they do. He certainly is unlike any other schoolmaster whom I have ever known. There is a sort of Straffordian "thoroughness" about him which makes him an idol in the sight of the boys who, to give them their due, certainly do bestow all their hero-worship on the Nietzschean superman when they find him.

[IV]

August 10, 1910

I am back in Chagford again after ten of the best days I can remember. Camp was one continuous round of sheer joy. The weather was good: they gave us plenty of work to do; I learnt an immense amount of soldiering and I have become quite as keen as any of them.

O'Connor, our O.C., has recommended me for a commission and I go into barracks at the Depot in Exeter next week. I had no idea that life under canvas could be so good. To be woken after a dreamless sleep at five on a perfect summer morning, to open the tent-flaps and look out on the gorgeous woods of the Pennings and then to dash up and have an icy shower-bath before first parade, to come in to breakfast with an appetite as keen as that of a baby, to spend the greater part of the day in the open air, washing up, cleaning the tent and my uniform, or running about as a scout searching for information, to shout rowdy songs in company with a couple of thousand other spirits as healthy and care-free as oneself, to gossip in the lines as the light gradually dwindles away at night, and last of all to be sung to sleep by the bugle's "last post" and "lights out," in short to live as man should live, in a sort of half-savage, wholly healthy way like this is one delirious dream. I loved every minute of it. Would that it could have continued for a hundred instead of ten days. The boys in my tent treated me exactly as one of themselves. I was ordered about by my section commander just like any other private; in fact, I was privileged enough to be taken by everybody just as a private, as if there were no Radchester and this was all. It was just one glorious "rag": the fight for food and drink as orderly of the day, the hustle to get everything cleared up in time for parade, the deadly funk lest one's buttons should not pass muster at the inspection, the fear lest one should do the wrong thing in close order drill on parade, and so bring ridicule down on the school or oneself from the tyrannical sergeants who bullied us into shape, everything was thoroughly good and I loved it.

It is very quiet and tame at Chagford after that strenuous time, but I have never before realized how precious a thing a hot bath was, or clean sheets and a comfortable bed, and entire liberty with regard to the way in which one spends one's day. Chagford is becoming my home, my refuge from the world. Betty and Thomasin even came as far as Moretonhampstead in the motor-bus to meet me. I could have hugged them both for this. They were disappointed not to see Illingworth and it was hard to account for his absence. I said that he had gone to Switzerland to complete his education. I miss him even more here than I did at school. We sang all the old songs to-night and I read some more stories out of "The Arabian Nights." It is hard to imagine that three months have passed since I was last here. The village, they tell me, is crowded: all the summer visitors are now here. I don't like to hear that—I am jealous of my find. I don't like hordes of Londoners prying into my favourite nooks. I shall find banana-skins and orange-pips on the Wallabrook to-morrow, and probably the way to Cranmere will be indicated by a long succession of paper bags and bits of discarded bun.

I wish I could describe the fascination of the moor. As soon as I got to Exeter I saw the blue hills in the distance with their quaint, craggy tors, and my heart leaped within me. I wanted to get out of the train and run to greet them. By the time that we had climbed out of Newton to Bovey I was racing from side to side of the carriage to glut my eyes with the rich sights which met my eye wherever I looked, the white-washed cottages, the prosperous farms, the rookeries, the rock-strewn streams, the thick woods, the riot of many-coloured flowers, the red loam and real green fields—how different these from the poor parched pastures of Radchester; the square squat church towers, the tapering spires, the big mansions of the squirearchy, the slow plodding farm labourers in the winding lanes, the myriad animals squatting, running, flying, chasing and being chased; everything spoke to me of home and then at last at Moretonhampstead to be met by such dear creatures as Betty and Thomasin: my cup of happiness was indeed full.

August 21, 1910

I am to go back to Chagford as soon as I have finished my military training here in order to coach young Willoughby (whose brother was at New College with me last year) for Woolwich. He said that he didn't mind where he went and so he fell in at once with my suggestion of Chagford. I am not altogether liking life in barracks after my wild and free week at Chagford. There I got up when I liked, ordered what I liked for meals, was waited on hand and foot by Betty and Thomasin, lazed by the side of the Teign and bathed at frequent intervals in a deep pool which nobody knew of, far from all inquisitive eyes, and trapesed about the moor to my heart's content every day. I took a heap of books but except in the kitchen at nights, when I read aloud, I never had any temptation to open them. After the strenuous life of camp I was only too glad of the opportunity to meander and gossip. Life seems to move very slowly in these Devon villages. No one seems to have been married or to have died since I was last here: the same girls serve in the same shops, the same men occupy the same seats in the bar parlour at "The Half-Moon" and "The Goat and Boy"; the only change is the influx of visitors attired in immaculate flannels, who get excited because their copy of the Times "was not sent up at the usual time to-day."

Thank Heaven, I've only got to endure ten days more of this: I am not overfond of the officers. They resent my presence, I think, because I am not a pukka soldier: I never could be—I have not O'Connor's temperament. There is such an amazing amount of ritual and ceremony about the mess. There's not much to do except to drink and read the papers, and "get up" the parts of the "rifle," which bore me. The Sergeant-Major has taken me under his wing and given me tips preparatory to my exam., but I'm not so grateful as I ought to be. Every morning I go out on first parade, usually in a parlous funk about my clothes. Do I wear a sword or not? Whom exactly am I expected to salute? What are my duties? Everything is hazy: there is nothing definite laid down and frequently I loiter about all the morning only to find that I am not wanted. Most of the senior officers seem to spend their time filling up papers in the orderly room. In the afternoons they go off and play tennis or fish, and I am left to my own devices until dinner, which meal I am expected to attend. I have explored the city, which is an attractive one. The inhabitants are sleepy, but extraordinarily healthy-looking and rubicund of hue: the girls almost uncannily pretty.

Betty and Thomasin came in from Chagford for the day yesterday at my invitation and I took them out to lunch and tea, and we had a rare good time together. They are very anxious for my release and complain that Fernworthy View is very dull without me. Whether that be true or no, all blessings be upon their sweet heads for saying so.

I have had letters from heaps of Radcastrians who were in camp with me, declaring that they find home very slow and boring after the ecstatic days in camp.

September 15, 1910

I passed my exam. all right at Exeter and very glad I was to shake the dust of the barracks square from my feet and once more to get back to my beloved Chagford.

Willoughby is a Wykehamist, who is trying to get into "The Shop" in November. His mathematics are sound but his English is lamentable. He seems to have read nothing except, quaintly enough, Norwegian sagas: he is always quoting "Burnt Njal." I find him excellent company: and he has ravished the hearts of most of the girls who are staying here. It is much gayer than it was when I was last here; we have had three gorgeous dances. I wish I did not feel such a fool at these shows. Radchester has unfitted me for all these society gatherings. I feel abominably out of it; it is so long since I used to dance regularly. I get in a paralytic fear lest I should tread on my partners' toes. I imagine that I am wooden, gawky and stiff, in spite of my partner's eulogies on my ease and lightness.

We play tennis, golf and cricket a good deal and even got up some amateur theatricals, in which I took the part of Myngs in a Pepys play. These people are as different as possible from the north-country manufacturers. None of them have much money, but they all possess honoured names and an intense pride of birth: Cruwys, Polwhele, Chichester, Acland, Trefusis, or Champernowne. I wish we boasted such names at Radchester. They are all exceedingly kind to me. I feel thoroughly happy and at ease when I am gossiping with the villagers or running about on the moor with Willoughby, who is very slack about walking, and always wants to hire a car; he has heaps of money and is certainly lavish with it. He flirts outrageously with all the girls he comes across, but he is healthy and altogether lovable.

We work all the mornings and sometimes at night. I don't think there is much doubt about his getting in. He is beginning to take quite an interest in his English work and constantly bewails the fact that he never discovered at school what a delightful subject it is. He is interested in all sides of life and like Illingworth is afraid of nothing. If he wants to get into conversation with any one he just does it, whereas, however much I wanted to, I should always hold back through fear, what of I don't quite know.

I have tried to set down on paper exactly how this country affects me, but I cannot do it. I envy Eden Phillpotts and Trevena more than I can say. I look for romance in the faces of the passers-by and try to weave stories about the villagers but they all fail to materialize. I cannot make any of them live in my pages; they are all dolls. I haven't really been taught to observe properly. Willoughby comes back from a garden-party and can conjure up an exact picture of all the old frumps, the parsons, the retired civilians, their lovely daughters ... every one. He knows the colour of their eyes and hair, peculiarities of their hands and bodies, the material of which their clothes are made, together with their colour and shape.

I talk to a girl for an hour, find her captivating, come home, essay to describe her and fail entirely. I can't even remember whether she is dark or fair, what sort of frock she wore, what was the colour of her eyes, or whether her features are regular or not. I suppose I don't look at people enough. I simply daren't. I can't scrutinize: I wish I could overcome this bashfulness. All the time I keep on thinking what a fool all these people must imagine me to be. But all the same there are one or two types here who interest me a good deal. The captain of the cricket team is a retired colonel of an Indian regiment, an old M.C.C. man who lives for the game and curses us roundly when we fail to come up to his expectations. When we win he praises us extravagantly, when we lose his language becomes positively Oriental. He never misses an opportunity of net-practice and requires us to be equally keen. His one aim in life is to go through a season without losing a single match. In August he always invites the most famous cricketers he knows to come and stay with him, but they do not always come off on these tricky wickets and he gets much more furious with them if they fail than he does with us.

The doctor is another good type: he is very handsome and beloved of every one. He bears his honours lightly so long as every one gives in to him, but he sulks like any two-year-old child if he is crossed in any way. He likes to keep himself surrounded by pretty girls and as there is no dearth of them he has a good time.

One of the best points about Chagford is the way in which every one collects at different houses without any special invitation. I find that the Chagford people have done me no end of good. They've laughed me out of a good deal of my awkwardness. Though I am much slower at making friends than Willoughby, I have ceased to regard all mankind as hostile to me.

The parson here has become a great pal of mine. He is young, extraordinarily well-read, athletic, and madly keen about his work. It is a treat, by way of a change, to leave the roysterers and sit smoking in his study and talk about books and education and social problems. His life is full to the brim with that happiness which comes from service. It seems to me an ideal existence to try to keep the vision splendid before the eyes of these moor-folk, to comfort them in their distress.... I have often thought of taking Orders. I don't quite know what keeps me back. I can conceive no finer life than that led by the preacher. Of all men in history I think I should like to have been John Wesley. At home nothing delights me so much as taking my father's Bible Classes or preaching to his Sunday afternoon congregations from the lectern. I've read the Thirty-nine Articles again lately: I don't like the thought of swearing my allegiance to them, but there are heaps of parsons who do excellent work without regarding a great many of them. I like visiting the cottagers and for the most part they seem to like me. I know that at home they all expect me "to go into the Church," as they call it, in the end. The difficulty is about the call. Is the Church my vocation? One thing I would not do and that is to take Orders solely with a view to preferment at school.... No, I could not become a parson unless I felt a clear call and it is that call that I am so uncertain of. I don't like separating myself from my fellow-men by wearing a sombre garb. I believe that it is possible to fulfil one's life-mission quite as well by remaining among the laity. Certainly points of ecclesiastical etiquette give rise to no wild enthusiasms or hatred in my breast. I was educated as a High Churchman and I like incense and vestments, good music and ritual, but I am quite happy with the Evangelicals. I could never get so tempestuously wrathful about minor points of doctrine as that flamboyant, truculent paper that represents the Catholic Anglican party does. I attend Wesleyan chapels and Roman Catholic churches and from all of them I derive some measure of comfort. I have been reading the lessons in church here for the last few Sundays.

Willoughby always laughs at my church-going; like most of the visitors he never enters a place of worship. I see no reason why any man should unless he feels the need of it. I do. He doesn't, and there's an end of it. The psalms and collects and hymns uplift me and the sermons I look forward to more than anything in the week. There is always some strain of philosophy in sermons which appeals to me. I certainly dislike chapel at school, solely because it is compulsory. The sermons, too, there are curiously uneven. Most of the parsons on the staff are good, conscientious Christians, but some are devoted to dogma and others to moral conduct, and they tend to separate these two features of religion absolutely, which I am certain is a mistake.

It is like our Divinity lessons: one has to test whether a boy has done his preparation by asking all sorts of silly questions, while all the time one is longing to preach, to point out the inspiration, to expound the Bible as a complete guide to life. It is very difficult to reconcile the two. My best Divinity scholars are certainly my least reliable boys as regards Christian practice.

I wish I knew where the solution lies. I am tempted always to let the exact knowledge go and preach from a text whenever I go in to class. The object of education is to fit a boy for life, so that he may learn to conduct himself honourably and valiantly wherever he goes. Does our present system succeed in doing this? If not, it is a very serious shortcoming. What we want is much more Christian doctrine taught—it ought to pervade every lesson. There is still far too great a tendency to regard Sundays, chapels, and the Divinity lessons as something quite outside the ordinary things of life: boys are not made to perceive that their whole life is a religion and that where there is no religion there is no life, and that to try to live according to one code of ethics on Sundays and an entirely opposite one all the rest of the week is simply to kill either the spiritual or the material.

During these holidays I have devised several new schemes for next term: I don't know how many of them I shall bring to fruition. I've been reading a good many books on school life lately, but they all seem to me to lack something, I don't quite know what it is. Most novelists at one time or another try their hand at a Public School novel—but I expect that the next generation will smile at our present efforts, just as we do at "Eric, or Little by Little."

H. A. Vachell in "The Hill" wrote a most readable novel and certainly portrayed that amazingly sentimental side that is really very prominent in the human boy. He hates and loves whole-heartedly. Other men and boys become the whitest of heroes and the blackest of villains in his eyes. But beyond this there was nothing of truth to life in what was an exceedingly successful book.

Arnold Lunn in his counterblast to this, "The Harrovians," dwelt too distinctly on the reverse side of the picture, on the more drab side of life at school. He is certainly truer in his descriptions but somehow he missed the soul: "The Harrovians" and "The Hill" are both like Academy pictures.

I don't know if the real Public School novel will ever be written: I don't quite know if it can. In the first place, to make it both readable and true, you must take an exceptional boy like Denis Yorke in St. John Lucas's "The First Round," or those immortal scamps in "Stalky and Co."

The average boy's life is too humdrum to make material for a book: of course a good journalist could make an excellent chapter out of an account of a house or school match. Most novelists are quite bad at this journeyman sort of writing. Modern writers are trying different tactics. The popular way at present is to focus the reader's attention on Common Room. Boys are dull compared with men; their conversations inept; all the normal plots round which novels spin i.e. love-making, are out of place in a boy's life, so clever Hugh Walpole in "Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill" has approached nearer than any one else in presenting at once a readable, exciting and true picture of a certain sort of school. Certainly there are men on the Radchester staff who might have walked straight out of the pages of this remarkable novel. Anything truer than that sordid, lurid picture of the petty jealousies that exist between grown man and man at a school has never been written.

"But surely," said the parson here to me the other night, while we were discussing this, "no two cultivated men of the world would be at daggers drawn simply over a ridiculous umbrella."

"That's just the hideousness of it all," I replied. "Men do behave in that incomprehensible way at schools. They are like naughty children: you'd never believe that they are graduates, picked men, both intellectually and physically. You'd never believe how spiteful and inhuman men can be to one another until you've lived with them in a school. I suppose we see too much of one another. I cannot believe that all schools are like Radchester, but certainly Hugh Walpole must have suffered at one not unlike it."

I have had a great many talks about education with the parson while I have been here: he is very keen on raising the age-limit to sixteen in elementary schools. At present he says that the education they get is of no use to them. There are heaps of boys and girls of eighteen and nineteen in Chagford who can neither read nor write, although they were taught to do both when they were children: as soon as they go on to the farms they find that these accomplishments are not marketable, and so they forget them in an incredibly short space of time. Apparently, too, the standard of morality in village life is deplorably low. When the youths attend church it is, only too frequently, so that they may ogle the girls: the church makes a good rendezvous. Neither drunkenness nor immorality have decreased with the spread of education, nor are the people any more thrifty or ambitious.

The farmers are as ignorant as they were before the Corn Laws were repealed. Altogether he draws a lurid, hopeless picture of the country yokel.

There must be at bottom a wonderfully fine instinct at the heart of every Englishman for, however bad the system of education may be, and that it is bad from the highest to lowest I am becoming surer every day, he still makes a good thing of life.

The Public School product is a fine specimen of a man: he is strictly honest in all his dealings, he will never turn his back on a "pal," he is capable of handling men with sympathy, he can adapt himself at short shrift to almost any circumstance: if only he could be prevailed upon not to despise learning and beauty no other type of man could touch him.

I have lately been trying to understand more of foreign countries through their fiction, particularly Russia. Years ago I read and loved Tolstoi's "Resurrection"; last week I tried to get through "Anna Karenin" and failed. I can't explain quite why, unless it is that Dostoievsky has supplanted him in my estimation. I never read any one in the least like Dostoievsky. I think "The Brothers Karamazov" is the greatest novel I ever read. No man rises from it with exactly the same outlook on life which he had when he sat down to it. Dostoievsky seemed in that book to be on the point of discovering all that hurt and puzzled us about the world: every now and then we seem to get a glimpse millions of years ahead into a timeless, limitless space where truth and beauty at last prevail, and misery and suffering are no more. Everything that he writes seems to turn on this word "suffering." Light, not salvation, comes to man through his capacity to suffer. The characters in "The Brothers Karamazov" are not human beings at all: they are disembodied spirits with an amazing power of self-analysis: this gloomy introspectiveness is the chief feature of all Russian writing. They seem to know so much more than we do about the actions of the human heart: their sympathy with humanity is deeper than ours: we are too apt to dismiss from our thoughts what we do not immediately understand—the more complex a man's character the more we shun him, but the Russian seeks to disintegrate it and account for his contradictory traits: how Iago must appeal to the Russian mind. They appear to be a nation of Hamlets. Those that are not are Lucifers.

I am not pleased with the German mind. There is, in their plays at any rate, an awful playing with fire. Nietzsche paralyses me—this will to power would be frightful if it were ever given full play. The present effect of their refined system of education seems to drive the flower of their youth to suicide. English stupidity is better than German kultur if that is what love of learning leads to. There must be some middle way.

It is a relief to turn to American fiction. All the world seems to be passing through a stage of transition much as it did in the days of the Romantic Revival.

Then all Europe was bothered about the Brotherhood of Man and the Return to Nature; nowadays we are casting off all the conventions of our fathers and pressing towards the rights of the individual to be a law unto himself.

In "Jean Christophe" Romain Rolland seems to be expressing on the Continent what Wells, Bennett, J. D. Beresford, Gilbert Cannan and others are trying to express here, that the young man of to-day is not content to accept religion, or the codes of morality or conduct which his father believed in and acted upon. The new age asks the right to discover a fresh religion for itself and to live according to the light of its own reason. The hero of the modern novel, if hero he can be called, is feckless and unsteady: like Dostoievsky he is continually on the look-out for what is round the corner. He prefers misery to happiness, for out of intense misery and unhappiness he learns to harden himself, in Hugh Walpole's words, by this means alone can he come to real adequate manhood and subdue fear and hypocrisy.

The most outstanding characteristic of the new school of hero is his selfishness: he thinks of no one but himself. It does not matter very much that he should be unhappy: he deserves to be and he almost seems to delight in being so, but unfortunately he brings every one else with whom he comes into contact into a like state—his womenfolk, his parents, are left heart-broken while he continues on his wild way, Mazeppa-like, riding rough-shod over old-established prejudices, subverting the minds of the young, overturning traditions and setting up new gods only to desert them in their turn.

I certainly prefer this new generation to the decadents of the nineties; at least we are spared artificiality, idle philandering, and that delicate languor of lilies and harping on vice as a desirable thing. Our new heroes are never dirty-minded though they frequently perform rotten things. If only they would not think so much they might be quite decent beings.

Unfortunately all these supermen lack the one great essential of all true men, they have no glimmer of humour in their composition. They are so deadly in earnest to find out the meaning of life that they have no time to turn aside and browse in the pastures which Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Charles Lamb and Dickens so enjoyed; the comic spirit seems to be dead in us.

They leave jesting to the music-hall artiste—they have no room for laughter in their scheme of existence. This is where the great American short-story writer scores so heavily. He is incurably romantic and yet alive and alert: he is interested in all humanity and like all sympathetic observers of erring mankind, he can afford to laugh not at but with them at the absurdity of things.

I find in J. M. Synge the best epitome of this age. He has a superb intellect (most of the young writers are prodigiously clever), his style is clear, simple, forcible and exact, and he tears up all our old ideas by the roots. In "The Playboy of the Western World" he has offended his own people of Ireland for all time. They cannot understand the universality of the theme. He did not write his play to show how excellent a thing it is to be a parricide, though incidentally he does carry on the Shavian idea that sons owe no duty to their parents—they did not ask to be born. What he did set out to do was to show how the feckless, unappreciated lout may realize that he has a soul, and how easily he stands alone without love of women or any other sentimental prop when he has found it. Stanley Houghton is another exponent of the twentieth-century philosophy. "Hindle Wakes" merely shows that the new theories of life have spread not only to the other sex, but to mill-girls and shop-girls. Fanny was willing to spend a week-end in the society of a man simply for enjoyment, and refused to bind herself to him for the rest of her life just to satisfy an effete convention. What she wanted and meant to have was freedom: she was well able to take care of herself; she was earning a good wage and had become self-supporting. Her parents might turn her out; she was not, on that account, like the forsaken mistress of the nineties, therefore bound to go on the streets. She could live her life in her own way, beholden to no man.

We are passing through grave and strenuous times and it is quite obvious that we shall have to adapt ourselves to new conditions: "new truths make ancient good uncouth."

We have come a long way from the sentimental, the artificial, the Restoration attitude to life. In the new age men and women are coming to work side by side, are beginning to understand one another better and do not contemplate seductions or marriage whenever they meet.

What are our schools doing to prepare their pupils for this new world? Nothing at all so far as I can see. Masters do not trouble to read the very obvious signs in the sky. At girls' schools I am told the same old methods of stringent secrecy about everything that matters are carried out. The girl of to-day leaves school with an outlook on life formed on an incomplete acquaintance with the world of Jane Austen. There has been no gradual unfolding of the new ideas—what an awakening lies before some of the wives of the next generation. But boys are in no happier case. They are being brought up to believe that they will go out into a world exactly similar to that in which their fathers lived. Theirs too will be a troublous time before they learn the lesson. I don't quite see how the problem is to be tackled. It is scarcely possible to give readings from all the modern novelists to schoolboys: the outspokenness of this new writing is frightening even to adult minds.

What we want is more knowledge; the zeal of the present day is for facts. We want the truth at all costs: we don't mind how much it hurts. We are not like the men who have to create a God if there isn't one, we are able to bear anything except shams and lies; we recognize one aristocracy only, the aristocracy of intellect and truth.

As an honest man I feel that I ought to resign my post at Radchester after reading these moderns, because I am paid to go on retailing hypocritical untruths to my boys. Having caught me out in one falsification they will be suspicious of me altogether. I wonder how much Illingworth and Jefferies already look on me as a charlatan—but then, according to my lights I was proclaiming my faith ... and now, well I find it hard to put down how I stand with regard to the new school of thought. After all, these men are all experimentalists, they are in the position of men who are testing the scaffolding of a house: they say our edifice is insecure, that our props are rotten, that the architects who built our house of life were jerry-builders, but how do we know that these men are any better? I am so afraid of offending the susceptibilities of one of my charges that I dare tell them nothing, but on the other hand, surely it were better for them to be guided now than to be flung without a guide into the maelstrom of conflicting public opinion when they leave school.

If only some of my colleagues had read these new writers it would be so much more helpful. But all books since Dickens and Thackeray are taboo at school as new-fangled and hence ephemeral. The attitude to life of the mid-Victorians is the attitude we ourselves are expected not only to adopt for ourselves but to teach. No wonder we are looked upon as hopeless old fogies by our boys as soon as they leave us.

The old idea that fiction was written as Fielding wrote it, solely for our amusement and not at all for our instruction, appears still to prevail pretty well everywhere, so that even the most omnivorous readers here in Chagford do not take the new men seriously; they think that they are trying to shock and startle us but have no sort of propagandist theory at the back of their minds. It is the same with the theatre. People resent the thought that they might learn something of value by listening to a play: they go to the theatre to be amused, not to be preached at, consequently they miss the point of quite half the plays they see. They are very good lessons for every one except ourselves, but we never need correction.

[V]

October 1, 1910

I have joined the Times Book Club. I find that I cannot get along without a constant supply of new books. I want to keep abreast of modern thought at all costs. I don't see why, because I am condemned to teach Descartes and Pythagoras, I should deny myself Henry James or Bourget. I find that standard works are not enough. There are times when Pope palls on me, when Dickens and Thackeray ask to be given a rest. At such times I want to read some of the new school, the men who have broken away from the old traditions and carved out a new world. Perhaps if I were not in such a deadly fear of getting into a groove I should not pin my faith so largely to these very restless and rather morbid young men, but a schoolmaster seems to be expected to stifle any growth that a nation might be showing signs of, to prevent youth from essaying out of the beaten tracks into the many virgin jungles that surround life.

This term so far is going fairly smoothly. We have a new German master who gets unmercifully "ragged"; O'Connor looks upon him with extreme suspicion. He thinks that the German Government have sent him here purposely to spy out this part of the country. A more harmless fellow than Koenig it would be hard to find. O'Connor really is a prodigious ass. In the first place the man is very nervous: he has no idea of keeping order. Boys have a habit of entering his classroom by the window; they also burn bonfires in his waste-paper basket; they bring mice into form and chase them all over the room; they cheer when any boy gets good marks and hiss when any one fails to score. Altogether his sets derive a considerable amount of amusement from him and we in Common Room profess to be shocked but are in reality secretly pleased to think how infinitely superior we are to him. Nothing gives a man self-confidence so quickly as to see another one making a havoc of his job.

Benson is also getting "ragged," not so much by the boys as by some of the younger members of the staff. Last term we started a club which meets nightly in his rooms and "rouses the welkin with a succession of catches." We drink whisky and consume vast quantities of fruit and cake, while he plays to us on the piano or violin and we shout snatches from the latest musical comedy.

Benson's forte lies in the subject of boys' smoking. He is certain that boys use the music-rooms to smoke in. To encourage him in this idea, several of us have lately dropped cigarette ends in different parts of the building; these he discovers, picks up and treasures, revealing them to us later. He has a wonderful scheme (which he thinks is his own but which in reality we have put him up to) by which he means to catch the miscreants red-handed.

Half of the club are to sit in darkness and silence in one room, the other half in another: we are all to listen until we hear the boys come in, and at a given signal dash out upon them from two directions and so catch them.

Jackson and I have been deputed by the others to dress up and do the smoking; we are to get out of the window after smoking two or three cheap cigarettes one night and then be chased up and down the shore. That is, Benson will do the chasing, the others will slip back in the dark to consume whisky and wait for his return. He will then be told and the sight of his face ought to be good to see.

October 24, 1910

We have brought off the rag: it didn't turn out as we expected. Both Jackson and I elaborated the jest. I was produced in a (pretended) faint, covered with mud and bleeding at the nose, after a supposed fight with one of the boys, who "in the end got away by pushing me into a pond." I put so much realism into this that Benson was quite concerned about me. I felt an awful pig and so seriously did Benson take it that we did not feel that we could let him know the truth of the matter.

I have been restless again of late and to cure myself have taken to going into Scarborough and roaming round the streets at night. I find this an excellent remedy. I love watching crowds, especially a seaside crowd. They are so obviously out to enjoy life once work for the day is over. They are hail-fellow-well-met with everybody. I don't know why I get so fascinated with the life of the streets: no one else at Radchester ever thinks of any other strata of society than his own.

I want to probe the drama of life: each lighted window conjures up some vision of domestic comedy or tragedy to me. I want to know. I want to play eavesdropper to whisperers in the dark: I scent romance at every corner of the street. Partly I attribute this to reading O. Henry's short stories. "We live by habits, but for adventure" would seem to be the foundation of his belief about life. The skirts of Romance are always swishing past us; we just hear faintly the sound of her tread, we see dimly the sheen of her garments, but we are so bolstered up and surrounded by convention that we dare not give chase, much as we should like to. So Romance for us, as O. Henry says, comes to mean a mere matter of a marriage or two, a few old letters, and a ball programme stuffed away in a drawer—the memory of one scent-laden evening, and for the rest, our existence consists of a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.

I find that my boys love these American short stories, with their quaint extravagances of language, their three-fold surprise upon surprise, their outspokenness and world-wide sympathies with every sort of man and woman, from train-robber to shop-girl and man about town to murderer and convict.

I have been reading lately Edmund Holmes's book on "What Is and What Might Be." He seems to express the ideals of education better than any one I have ever read: yet no one on the staff does more than sneer or laugh at him as an idealist and an impracticable dreamer. I like particularly his six instinctive desires of youth. Every child, he says, wants passionately (1) to talk and listen, (2) to act (in the dramatic sense), (3) to draw, paint, and model, (4) to dance and sing, (5) to know the why of things, and (6) to construct things. To develop all these six instincts he declares is the true aim of all real education.