"And yet," suggested Martin, "don't you think it's rather refreshing to find something left to common-sense. Everything gets into the hands of faddists now. I once met an old lady who spent her life in teaching children how to play. Imagine the cheek of it! You put me on to Belloc and I think he's right about that sort of thing. We don't want too much of the bureaucratic specialist."
"I quite agree," said Finney. "That's the tragedy. Just where spontaneity really does matter, as in children's games, they go blundering in and knock imagination out of their victims, or give them someone else's, which is about the same thing. But just where training might be of some use, they do nothing. The superstition that a man can teach because he has taken a first in Classics at the varsity is childish. I don't claim to know very much now, but when I started my work I was hideously ignorant about the working of boys' minds: I never knew when I was being obvious or when I got beyond them. Of course one picks things up by experience, but it might be done so much better...."
"And then the narrowness," he rambled on, for he found a good audience in Martin. "You'll get a first in Mods, if you take the trouble, and by the time you're twenty or twenty-one you'll know all about Athenian law-courts and what the Greek is for a demurrer or a counter-claim, and you'll know all the hard words in Homer and be able to translate Cicero's jokes. You'll cram up a lot of variant readings for your special play and collect a nice set of texts with all the difficult passages marked. And when it's all over you'll thank God and imagine that you've done with it, only to find out that Greats is rather worse and means spotting the words for Egyptian bogwort in Herodotus and getting up the most meaningless bits of gibberish in Thucydides. It's the same all along. A schoolmaster wants to make some money, a don wants to make a name, so out comes a new reading, a new conjecture, a new edition and a thousand other straws of pedantry to be piled on the back of a poor old camel that collapsed years ago."
"It sounds pretty rotten," said Martin. "But I suppose at Oxford one can read and talk freely and follow up the things one likes?"
"Yes, you must do that. Don't get worried about Mods. Are you thinking of the Civil Service?"
"Yes, I suppose so."
"Well Mods won't matter much. So take up anything you really care for. That's the only thing in life worth doing, and it may be about the only time in your life when you're able to do it."
Of course Finney never spoke to Martin about school discipline, but it was not hard for Martin to see that he was very much depressed. His sufferings with the Fourth he might have expected: but that the Upper Sixth should rag childishly was a cruel blow. He was so keenly anxious to take an interest in his work and to make those hours of rapid translation valuable: but everything seemed to go against him.
He went through some Tacitus and Juvenal and Pindar at a great pace amid considerable amusement. For Tacitus gave facilities for journalese, Juvenal for obscenity, and Pindar for colossal bathos. In despair Finney turned to the sixth book of the Æneid, "Just to help your hexameters." They surely wouldn't rag that.
Yet trouble did break out. One Cartwright, a large, genial, athletic person who expected to get an exhibition at Cambridge for his games, was always to the fore when there seemed any opportunity of baiting Finney. To him fell the Daedalus passage at the beginning of the book: his rendering was picturesque and contained such gems as 'Intrepid aeronaut' and 'Bird-man.'