I wonder if I shall stay on here interminably friendless, and soured like most of the others. It's a rotten prospect. Now of course the boys keep me fresh, but as the years roll on I shall become more and more unfitted for any other profession and get further away by reason of my age from sympathizing with the youth of the time. Yet there are some men, Heatherington is one of them, who keep perennially young: they carry their boyishness with them to the grave. They can understand youth's difficulties as well at sixty-one as at twenty-one. I wish I knew the secret of this.
At present I can play games and take an active part in Corps work and so keep in touch with most of the boys I want to know, but when I am no longer able to do these things I shall lose touch with a generation that knows not Joseph and become despised like old "Soap-Suds," who thirty years ago was the hero of the school owing to his athletic prowess. I suppose the secret is that games ought not to count for so much as they do. No boy despises Heatherington, yet he can't play "Rugger" any more. Privately among themselves, of course, the boys "rag" his peculiarities, but they stand in fear of him and quake inwardly as they hear his footsteps coming down the passage, and old boys can testify how deep their love for him is.
I suppose one of the few rewards of the schoolmaster is that his name is bandied about in all the strange places of the earth. Old Radcastrians meet in the Himalayas, on the high seas, in a fever camp, on a lonely ranch, and they immediately begin to discuss their old masters. Mostly they speak of them with love if not with reverence. Our little mannerisms and tricks, which we imagine are known only to ourselves, lie open to them and endear us to them. They roar with laughter over our peculiar phraseology, our methods of punishment, our impotent rage over little things like chipped desks and false quantities.
I should like boys to remember me by the books I introduced them to: I like to think of them equipped with a taste for the best literature, gloating over Conrad or Doctor Johnson, Charles Lamb or E. V. Lucas, new God or old Giant, in some forsaken place where ordinary cheap reading would not satisfy any of the heartache, or remove any of the sense of desolation that comes upon the mind at such times.
Each time I come back to school I try a different method with my English classes. If only I had more time I really believe I could achieve something. At present all I can do is to read a short story of Stevenson like "Markheim" or "Thrawn Janet" and then get the form to reproduce the substance of it, or to rewrite it from the point of view of one of the other characters. I have found this method pay very well. Once jog a boy's imagination and he will produce quite original and diverting matter. The difficult thing is to hit on the particular sort of literature that boys like. Only too frequently Shakespeare palls; Milton, Pope and Wordsworth are quite beyond the average boy. On the other hand they cannot have too much of balladry. "Tam Lyn," "Sir Patrick Spens," "Sir Cauline," and the rest they love. So with mediæval legends like "Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight." Most boys after a careful introduction to the life of the age of Queen Anne and the curious characters of Swift, Steele, Addison and Defoe, appreciate quickly the beauties of the Spectator, and are only too glad as a weekly essay to interpolate a paper on some foible rampant in that school. Boswell, too, they can tackle if only you prepare them by giving a Macaulayesque account of Johnson's quaint tricks and mannerisms. Spenser, Shelley and Keats I find are only for the few. Most of them love Byron. Tennyson, like Dickens, they have been taught to revere at home. They are not very fond of either. But Browning and even Meredith quickly become bosom friends of theirs, as do the Pre-Raphaelites. But by far the greatest boom at present is the Masefield cult. I read "The Everlasting Mercy" when it came out in the English Review to all my sets and they were intoxicated. Hallows got to hear of this and was furious with me for introducing "so foul-mouthed and immoral-minded a poet" to boys. Poor old Masefield. I don't suppose he reckoned with the Public School attitude when he set out on his mission of outspokenness. In order to keep the problems of modern life before my form I strew my classroom with daily and weekly papers, monthly and quarterly reviews, and demand précis of all the more important articles before or after debates on all sorts of modern problems. I have started to do more original work myself. The World of School has accepted two or three articles on educational reform which I submitted to them, and I now have the lust of authorship on me badly. It's a very wearing disease. I am for ever planning books. I want to write a complete English course, eliminating all that nonsense about weak and strong verbs, different uses of the gerund and all grammar grind and analysis.
What I want is an historical survey of the whole of English literature, liberally interspersed with examples, with a list of the books they ought to buy and enjoy reading, imaginative questions which should spur them on to original composition in verse and prose with a stimulating introduction on why, how, and what we should read. I would make such books as Arnold Bennett's "Literary Taste" and "The Author's Craft" compulsory for every boy in every school in the kingdom. I would also make every boy learn by heart those passages in "Sesame and Lilies" where Ruskin points out the value of reading in practical life.
But all this would not gain a boy many marks in a modern examination, and we live or die by results in examinations. English papers seem to me to be the worst set of all. What can it profit a man to know the context of obscure passages in Shakespeare if he has not got the spirit of the play in him actively shaping his own life? If a boy does not feel the Hamlet or the Richard II within him shouting for utterance when he reads a Shakespeare play, he is doing himself no good at all. The whole argument brings one back to beauty and imagination. I want to see every boy's study crammed with copies of the "World's Classics," the "Everyman" and the "Home University Library." There is no excuse for anybody not having read standard works at this time of day.
I try to instil a love of books into my forms by telling them of men like George Gissing, with whom it became a question of breakfast or a precious volume acquired in a second-hand shop: a book must cost you something before you can expect really to value it at its true worth. As Ruskin says, we despise books simply because they are accessible. I've always had this book-fever on me. I remember even as a small boy suffering unduly from the pangs of hunger, going from fruiterer to book-shop and from book-shop to fruiterer, wondering which I really wanted more, the romance or the pound of cherries. I know that I always hated myself when I succumbed to the latter temptation, for the cherries were soon eaten but the delights of the book were perennial.
July 4, 1911