A Dominie Dismissed

by Alexander Sutherland Neill

"Why," she said, "it's all about yourself!"

"Not all," I said hastily, "some of it is about you ... but I won't let you read that part until you are my wife. If you knew the terrible things I have written about you you would go off straightway and marry Joe Smith."

"You think quite a lot of yourself," she said with a laugh.

"Everybody thinks a lot of himself, Margaret. If I died to-night you would probably have forgotten the shape of my nose by the time you were sixty, but you'll never forget that I told you your neck was the loveliest neck in the county. My old grandmother used to tell me again and again of the man who stopped her on the road when she was seven and told her that her eyes were like blue stars. His name was Donald Gunn ... but she could never recollect the names of the girls she played with.

"The people who don't think much of themselves are people who have no personality to be proud of ... personally I haven't yet met any of the brand. We all have something that we're conceited about, dear. You are conceited about your eyes and your neck and your hair. Jean Hardie is about the plainest girl in the village, but I could bet that she thinks her hair the most glorious in the place ... and it is too.

"Very often we are conceited about the things that we can do worst. I can draw pretty well, but I'm not conceited about it. I can't sing for nuts ... and if anyone left the room when I was warbling I should hate him to all eternity. I like a man to be an egotist ... if he has got an ego of any value. Peter MacMannish is a type of egotist that should be put into a lethal chamber. He has no ego to talk about, but he imagines that his stomach is his ego, and he will talk to you for an hour about the 'yirkin'' of the organ in question."

"What is an ego?" asked Margaret. "I never heard the word before."

"It is the Latin word for 'I,' and a person who uses the pronoun 'I' very often is called an egotist. The other word egoist has a different meaning; it means a person who thinks of himself all the time, a selfish person. You can be an egotist without being an egoist, and vice versa. Peter Mitchell never talks about himself; while you talk about yourself he is thinking out a method of selling you something at double its value.

"There are two kinds of egotist ... the man who talks about what he does, and the man who talks about what he thinks. When I get letters from my friends they are full of "I's." Dorothy Westbrook, a college friend of mine, a medallist in half-a-dozen classes, fills eight pages with small talk.... 'I went to see Tree in the Darling of the Gods last night,' and so on. I generally skip the eight pages and look at the post-script. May Baxter, another college friend, a girl who wouldn't recognise a medal if you showed her one, writes ten pages, and she usually commences with something like this:—'I was re-reading The New Machiavelli last night, and I think that I begin to despise Wells now.' I read her letter a dozen times. When she does take a fancy for the other kind of egotism she is delightful: she doesn't tell me what she does; she tells me what she is.

"I have half a mind to leave you for a year, Margaret, just to give you a chance of writing about yourself. I won't be able to write to you in the same strain: I wrote myself out when I fell in love at twenty-two. You can only be a good letter-writer once, and that is when you are discovering yourself for the first time, and ramming it down on paper as fast as you can. I used to write letters of twenty foolscap pages, but now I never write a letter if I can help it. Life has lost most of its glamour when you realise that you have discovered yourself. It's a sad business discovering yourself, dear. You set out to persuade yourself that you are a genius or a saint, and, after a long examination of yourself you discover that you are a sorry creature. You set out with Faith and Hope at your elbow, and at the end you find that they have long since left you, but you find that Charity has taken their place. Charity begins at home says the proverb, and I take this to mean that Charity comes to you when you find yourself at home, when you discover yourself. I used to be the most uncharitable of mortals, but now I seldom judge a man or woman. Peter MacMannish gets drunk; I do not condemn him, for I have looked on the wine when it was red. Mary MacWinnie has had two illegitimate children; I am a theoretical Don Juan. Shepherd, the rabbit-catcher, has an atrocious temper; I do not judge him, because, although my own temper is pretty equable, I can realise that the man can no more help his temper than I can the size of my feet. Charity comes to you when you have discovered how weak you are, and that's what kept me from being a good code teacher. I was such a poor weak devil that I couldn't bring myself to make the boys salute me or fear me."