Tell England: A Study in a Generation

For all emotions that are tense and strong, And utmost knowledge, I have lived for these— Lived deep, and let the lesser things live long, The everlasting hills, the lakes, the trees, Who'd give their thousand years to sing this song Of Life, and Man's high sensibilities, Which I into the face of Death can sing— O Death, then poor and disappointed thing—
Strike if thou wilt, and soon; strike breast and brow; For I have lived: and thou canst rob me now Only of some long life that ne'er has been. The life that I have lived, so full, so keen, Is mine! I hold it firm beneath thy blow And, dying, take it with me where I go.
In the year that the Colonel died he took little Rupert to see the swallows fly away. I can find no better beginning than that.
When there devolved upon me as a labour of love the editing of Rupert Ray's book, Tell England, I carried the manuscript into my room one bright autumn afternoon, and read it during the fall of a soft evening, till the light failed, and my eyes burned with the strain of reading in the dark. I could hardly leave his ingenuous tale to rise and turn on the gas. Nor, perhaps, did I want such artificial brightness. There are times when one prefers the twilight. Doubtless the tale held me fascinated because it revealed the schooldays of those boys whom I met in their young manhood, and told afresh that wild old Gallipoli adventure which I shared with them. Though, sadly enough, I take Heaven to witness that I was not the idealised creature whom Rupert portrays. God bless them, how these boys will idealise us!
Then again, as Rupert tells you, it was I who suggested to him the writing of his story. And well I recall how he demurred, asking:
But what am I to write about? For he was always diffident and unconscious of his power.
Is Gallipoli nothing to write about? I retorted. And you can't have spent five years at a great public school like Kensingtowe without one or two sensational things. Pick them out and let us have them. For whatever the modern theorists say, the main duty of a story-teller is certainly to tell stories.