“Let me see? Prior? Ah, that was a little age, Ingleby! The Augustans were not great men, and some of them were very coarse, too. Have you read the Idylls of the King?”
Mr. Leeming introduced Ingleby to the great Victorian, for he himself was an ardent believer in all the Galahad nonsense, and was astonished at Ingleby’s ignorance of the school in which those cherubic cheeks had expanded. He was very fond of talking about purity and conceived it his duty to keep his class spotless. In the Lent Term, when the form were working through the catechism, his glosses were most apparent. The explanation of some passages troubled him. “From fornication . . . that’s a bad thing,” he would mutter.
And once having put Edwin in the way of perfection he was not going to look back. A week or two later he asked him how he was getting on with Tennyson. “Who is your favourite character in the Idylls?” he asked.
Edwin glowed. “Oh, sir, Launcelot—or Bors.”
“But what about Sir Percivale? ‘Sir Percivale whom Arthur and his knighthood called “The Pure,”’” he quoted in the Oxford variety of Cockney.
“I don’t know, sir,” stammered Edwin. “They seem somehow made differently from me.”
“Arthur,” said Mr. Leeming impressively, “has a great and wonderful prototype whom we should all try to imitate no matter how distantly.”
Edwin, who had read the dedication, wondered why Mr. Leeming lowered his voice like that in speaking of the Prince Consort.
In some ways he was grateful to Mr. Leeming for superintending his literary diet, but he soon detected a sameness in the fare. One day he had got hold of a big Maroon edition of George Gordon, Lord Byron, with romantic engravings of the Newstead ruins and the poet’s own handsome head, and Mr. Leeming had swooped down on him, faintly flushed. “Lord Byron,” he had said, “was not a good man. Have you read Hiawatha?” And he reached down Longfellow . . . Longfellow in green boards decorated with a geometrical design in gold, and irritating to the touch.
At last Edwin was almost driven from the library by Mr. Leeming’s attentions. He never read Byron because the books were too big to be sneaked out of the room beneath a buttoned coat; but he did read, without distinction, nearly every volume of poetry that he could smuggle out in this way. He read these books in second “prep” when Layton was poring over Plato at his high desk, when Widdup was working out the cricket averages of the second eleven, and Griffin was looking for spicy bits in the Bible. And as second prep was generally a period of great sleepiness—since the boys had risen so early, and by that time of evening the air of the house classroom had been breathed and rebreathed so many times as to be almost narcotic, the poetry that he read became interwoven with the strands of his dreams. Dreamy and exalted, poppy-drenched, all poetry seemed at this time; and it was to intensify this feeling of sensuous languor that he so often chose the poems of Keats.