The first hobby was wood-carving, an affair so hazardous that the first day numbered about ten per cent. casualties. It demanded enormous delicacy. Boxes of all descriptions were on sale, on which were traced patterns of labyrinthic intricacy; one could cut photo frames, cigar boxes, paper cutters, and to accomplish this labour there were provided small knives of a razor-like sharpness, which under the influence of the least overweight of pressure flew off the box at an alarming angle, to bury themselves in the palm of the other hand. It required enormous patience, and to me appeared one of the most monotonous occupations. It took hours of work to complete the smallest job.
This, of course, was not at all what the Kantine Wallahs desired. They wanted a hobby which would require a lot of material and very little time. Wood-carving took much too long, and the profits arrived much too slowly, and so they accelerated the slump in wood-carving by the innovation of satin-tasso, which was in every way a far more noble craft.
To begin with, it gave the personality of the artist a fuller freedom. In wood-carving individual preference was hopelessly bound down by the laws of pattern. As in the cast of certain modern painters who having once conceived a “stunt,” proceed to pour the most unlikely moods into one artistic mould, the individual was a slave to shapes. Against this, liberty was driven to revolt, and satin-tasso provided the necessary outlet.
Even here, of course, there were, it is true, laws and patterns, but there was full scope for the peculiarities of taste. The satin-tasso box had on it simply the bare outline of a picture. This one cut round with a sharp knife, and then proceeded to colour in with special paints; and in the employment of these paints any extravagance was permitted. Mediæval costumes offered superb opportunities for splendour and pagan gold. Across a pearl-flecked sky emerald clouds could fade into a wash of scarlet. It was truly a noble craft, and the whole business only took a few hours, which was most advantageous both for the suppliers and the supplied.
There is nothing that pleases the craftsman more than the sight of a finished article, and there is nothing that gives more pleasure to the tradesman than the swift return of gigantic profits, and both these wishes were granted. The Kantine did a roaring trade in satin-tasso, and the portmanteaus of the artisan grew heavy with trophies and souvenirs.
But all the same it was rather a pathetic sight to see a man of about twenty-eight, in the prime of life, sitting down every afternoon and evening, fiddling about with a piece of wood and a box of paints. He derived no pleasure from it: it merely served the purpose of a narcotic. As long as his hands were employed his brain would go to sleep, and he need no longer see the tedious procession of days that lay before him. He was symbolic in a way of the Public School Education that deliberately starves a boy’s intellect for the sake of his body. The type of clean-limbed Britisher, that Public Schools produce, is all very well in its way, and is infinitely preferable to the type produced by any other system, either in England or France. Of that there can be no doubt whatsoever. But the schoolmasters who adopt this line of argument, forget that they are dealing with a material refined upon by the breeding of centuries. The question is not, “Is the material good?” because it is. The question is, “Does Education make the best of this material?” and I am very certain that it does not. Every man should have sufficient part in the intellectual interests of life, to be able to keep his intelligence active for eight months in surroundings that provide no physical outlets. For after all, it is the mind, or, to use Pater’s phrase, “the imaginative reason” that counts.
“Thank God that while the nerves decay
And muscles desiccate away,
The brain’s the hardiest part of men
And thrives till threescore years and ten.”
And it is surely a severe condemnation of any system that its average products can derive no sustenance from the contemplative side of life, that the moment they are out of the theatres, they have absolutely no resources left. It would have given me the most acute satisfaction to have been able to escort there some of the many schoolmasters who so fiercely defended themselves behind the legend, “By our works ye shall judge us,” which was exactly what I tried to do.
The narrow limits of our captivity provided us with only one other craze, the last and the most decadent, for which reason, probably, it was the only one to which I succumbed—Manicure. It was really a tempting lure. One evening I went to the Kantine to buy a pencil, and saw a row of beautiful plush boxes, in which reposed long-handled files, and scissors, and knives; and beside these were bottles of delicate scents and polishes and powders, strangely reminiscent of Amiens. The lure was too great, and forty marks went west.
From that day onwards our room was a sort of general manicuring saloon. Several of us bought sets, and from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. we received visitors. As our guests received treatment gratis, and the initial outlay towards the opening of the saloon was sufficiently generous, it might have been thought that our guests came out of the transaction rather well. But they paid richly for their adornment in pain. We were all amateurs, and the manipulation of a pair of curved scissors requires feminine skill; no one has ever yet called me neat-fingered, and those scissors were very sharp. During the operations of our first fortnight, of all those who came to us with gay step, there were few who went away without at least one finger swathed in bandages.