One of the best points about Chagford is the way in which every one collects at different houses without any special invitation. I find that the Chagford people have done me no end of good. They've laughed me out of a good deal of my awkwardness. Though I am much slower at making friends than Willoughby, I have ceased to regard all mankind as hostile to me.
The parson here has become a great pal of mine. He is young, extraordinarily well-read, athletic, and madly keen about his work. It is a treat, by way of a change, to leave the roysterers and sit smoking in his study and talk about books and education and social problems. His life is full to the brim with that happiness which comes from service. It seems to me an ideal existence to try to keep the vision splendid before the eyes of these moor-folk, to comfort them in their distress.... I have often thought of taking Orders. I don't quite know what keeps me back. I can conceive no finer life than that led by the preacher. Of all men in history I think I should like to have been John Wesley. At home nothing delights me so much as taking my father's Bible Classes or preaching to his Sunday afternoon congregations from the lectern. I've read the Thirty-nine Articles again lately: I don't like the thought of swearing my allegiance to them, but there are heaps of parsons who do excellent work without regarding a great many of them. I like visiting the cottagers and for the most part they seem to like me. I know that at home they all expect me "to go into the Church," as they call it, in the end. The difficulty is about the call. Is the Church my vocation? One thing I would not do and that is to take Orders solely with a view to preferment at school.... No, I could not become a parson unless I felt a clear call and it is that call that I am so uncertain of. I don't like separating myself from my fellow-men by wearing a sombre garb. I believe that it is possible to fulfil one's life-mission quite as well by remaining among the laity. Certainly points of ecclesiastical etiquette give rise to no wild enthusiasms or hatred in my breast. I was educated as a High Churchman and I like incense and vestments, good music and ritual, but I am quite happy with the Evangelicals. I could never get so tempestuously wrathful about minor points of doctrine as that flamboyant, truculent paper that represents the Catholic Anglican party does. I attend Wesleyan chapels and Roman Catholic churches and from all of them I derive some measure of comfort. I have been reading the lessons in church here for the last few Sundays.
Willoughby always laughs at my church-going; like most of the visitors he never enters a place of worship. I see no reason why any man should unless he feels the need of it. I do. He doesn't, and there's an end of it. The psalms and collects and hymns uplift me and the sermons I look forward to more than anything in the week. There is always some strain of philosophy in sermons which appeals to me. I certainly dislike chapel at school, solely because it is compulsory. The sermons, too, there are curiously uneven. Most of the parsons on the staff are good, conscientious Christians, but some are devoted to dogma and others to moral conduct, and they tend to separate these two features of religion absolutely, which I am certain is a mistake.
It is like our Divinity lessons: one has to test whether a boy has done his preparation by asking all sorts of silly questions, while all the time one is longing to preach, to point out the inspiration, to expound the Bible as a complete guide to life. It is very difficult to reconcile the two. My best Divinity scholars are certainly my least reliable boys as regards Christian practice.
I wish I knew where the solution lies. I am tempted always to let the exact knowledge go and preach from a text whenever I go in to class. The object of education is to fit a boy for life, so that he may learn to conduct himself honourably and valiantly wherever he goes. Does our present system succeed in doing this? If not, it is a very serious shortcoming. What we want is much more Christian doctrine taught—it ought to pervade every lesson. There is still far too great a tendency to regard Sundays, chapels, and the Divinity lessons as something quite outside the ordinary things of life: boys are not made to perceive that their whole life is a religion and that where there is no religion there is no life, and that to try to live according to one code of ethics on Sundays and an entirely opposite one all the rest of the week is simply to kill either the spiritual or the material.
During these holidays I have devised several new schemes for next term: I don't know how many of them I shall bring to fruition. I've been reading a good many books on school life lately, but they all seem to me to lack something, I don't quite know what it is. Most novelists at one time or another try their hand at a Public School novel—but I expect that the next generation will smile at our present efforts, just as we do at "Eric, or Little by Little."
H. A. Vachell in "The Hill" wrote a most readable novel and certainly portrayed that amazingly sentimental side that is really very prominent in the human boy. He hates and loves whole-heartedly. Other men and boys become the whitest of heroes and the blackest of villains in his eyes. But beyond this there was nothing of truth to life in what was an exceedingly successful book.
Arnold Lunn in his counterblast to this, "The Harrovians," dwelt too distinctly on the reverse side of the picture, on the more drab side of life at school. He is certainly truer in his descriptions but somehow he missed the soul: "The Harrovians" and "The Hill" are both like Academy pictures.
I don't know if the real Public School novel will ever be written: I don't quite know if it can. In the first place, to make it both readable and true, you must take an exceptional boy like Denis Yorke in St. John Lucas's "The First Round," or those immortal scamps in "Stalky and Co."
The average boy's life is too humdrum to make material for a book: of course a good journalist could make an excellent chapter out of an account of a house or school match. Most novelists are quite bad at this journeyman sort of writing. Modern writers are trying different tactics. The popular way at present is to focus the reader's attention on Common Room. Boys are dull compared with men; their conversations inept; all the normal plots round which novels spin i.e. love-making, are out of place in a boy's life, so clever Hugh Walpole in "Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill" has approached nearer than any one else in presenting at once a readable, exciting and true picture of a certain sort of school. Certainly there are men on the Radchester staff who might have walked straight out of the pages of this remarkable novel. Anything truer than that sordid, lurid picture of the petty jealousies that exist between grown man and man at a school has never been written.