* * *
I find that I am becoming obsessed by my creed. I see that I place politics before everything else in education. But I feel that I am doing the best I can for true education. After all it isn't Socialism I am teaching, it is heresy. I am trying to form minds that will question and destroy and rebuild.
Morris's News from Nowhere appeals to me most as a Utopia. Like him I want to see an artistic world.
I travelled to Newcastle on Saturday, and the brick squalor that stretches for miles out Elswick and Blaydon way sickened me. Dirty bairns were playing on muddy patches, dirty women were gossiping at doors, miners were wandering off in twos and threes with whippets at their heels. And smoke was over all. Britain is the workshop of the world. Good old Merrie England!
These are strange entries for a Dominie's Log. I must bring my mind back to Vulgar Fractions and Composition.
* * *
There was a Cinema Show in the village hall to-night. My bairns turned out in force. Most of the pictures were drivel ... the typist wrongly accused, the seducing employer; the weeping parents at home. The average cinema plot is of the same brand as the plots in a washerwoman's weekly. Then we had the inevitable Indian chase on horseback, and the hero pardoned after the rope was round his neck.
I enjoyed the comic films. To see the comic go down in diver's dress to wreck a German submarine was delightfully ludicrous. He took off his helmet under water and wiped the sweat from his brow. Excellent fun!
I have often thought about the cinema as an aid to education. At the present time it is a drag on education, for its chief attraction is its piffling melodrama. Yet I have seen good plays and playlets filmed ... that is good melodramatic and incident plays.
I have seen Hamlet filmed, and then I understood what Tolstoi (or was it Shaw?) meant when he said that Shakespeare without his word music is nowhere. Yet I must be just; philosophy had to go along with music when the cinema took up Hamlet.