[VI]
March 3, 1911
These Easter terms, short as they are, are a big strain on the nervous system: no sooner do we get back to work than some luckless youth spreads measles, chicken-pox, scarlet fever or some other malady through the school, and we have to teach depleted forms, drill depleted companies and play House games with half our side away. I find that my favourite illness is influenza. I usually manage to keep a sort of running cold all through the winter months, which develops periodically into that vile sickness; it is then that I get pessimistic. I feel intolerably lonely and uncomfortable, and sigh for the sunny south and warmth and cosy fires and more humane companionship. The doctor here is a dear, but rather rough and ready in his methods. He hasn't the time to waste his hours on individual cases, neither is he exactly an expert. It is dreadful to lie in bed and hear the tramp of feet down the cloisters, the bells ringing for chapel, hall and school and not be in it.
One is forgotten almost at once by every one. People simply haven't the time to sit at a bedside even if they wanted to, and I long for conversation and a cheery laugh on these occasions. School is all right so long as one keeps fit, but once fall out of the race and it is a veritable hell. My last bout of "flu" has left my nerves in a thoroughly disordered condition: I feel almost suicidal at times. I get very restless. I long to create in writing: of late I have been trying, without any great success, in all sorts of directions, verse, short stories, plays, articles—even a novel. Everything I submit to publishers comes back after I have endured agonies of anticipation in waiting. Something is wrong. Yet I feel convinced that I have it in me to write. I can only let myself go in this diary: here I don't have to think of publishers or editors. I write just to please myself. That is what so delights me in reading Pepys. He just rattles on with no thought of an audience, absolutely unselfconscious. I look on this diary as a secret companion to whom I can confide all my troubles and joys: my hatred of Hallows, my love for the boys, my theories on education, the good days of the holidays, books I have read—anything and everything that interests me.
I am quietly amassing a library. I only wish that I could rely on borrowers to return the books I lend them. It is not the slightest good my going into form and advising boys to read Lamb and Browning and Dickens and Thackeray unless I can provide the books for them. The House libraries are under-equipped, the school library is only accessible to the Sixth Form. But boys have no consciences in the matter of returning books: they prefer to cut the fly-leaf out and substitute their own names in some cases! Still my job is to instil a love for the old and new masters of literature by whatever means, and to do this I suppose I must not grudge an impoverished library.
One thing that annoys me is the fact that I cannot share all my treasures with the boys. Most modern writing is too strong wine for adolescents. I wish Common Room did not also imagine that it is too strong meat for their innocent minds. It seems to me that the man who refuses to try to keep abreast of all the modern thought has no right to be a schoolmaster at all. What in the world is the use of living solely on a diet of the Times and the Spectator? I advocated the New Statesman for the reading-room and was promptly howled down. Apparently the idea that a man can look on both sides of a question is looked on here as preposterous. What the Spectator says is looked upon as a final judgment in all things. The middle articles of that quite estimable paper are read aloud as examples of perfect modern English style to boys in the top forms, and they are incited to ape it assiduously.
Occasionally, on Sunday mornings, a progressive young master will read a little "In Memoriam" or "A Death in the Desert" to his form as a variant to ordinary Divinity, but he does so tremblingly lest authority should hear of it and rebuke him.