"Take these," he said, suddenly producing five stout volumes. "Here is my diary for the last eight years. Go through it and select such passages as you think fit and show the world exactly what manner of man I was: 'Speak of me as I am: nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice; then must you speak of one that loved not wisely but too well,' just the bare truth. Justice is what I want, not charity."
It was the least I could do ... and now for some months I have been engaged upon this strange task. Even now I am afraid I have failed. These diaries were so incoherent, so much prominence was given to irrelevant matter, so little to the thousand things I wanted to know, but I have kept my promise, and this book is the result. I wish he could have lived to see it in the hands of the public who so misjudged him.
It is easy to see the tenets which Traherne held most dear: he looked upon education as the saving grace of a nation or an individual. The object of education with him was to develop imagination and sympathy, so that all men in the future should realize the value of Truth and Beauty, and be tolerant of other men's opinions. To this end he endeavoured to make his boys realize the importance of making the most of their brains: he rated the intellect highest of all.
He laid it down as a fundamental principle that each boy should be encouraged to be strongly individual and I don't think he quite realized the dangers which individualism brings in its wake. He hated tradition unless it could be proved that it served some useful purpose: he was averse from all forms of ceremonial. Consequently he set his face against the cult of "Bloodism." He does not seem in his diary at any rate to have dwelt on the humorous side of his colleagues: there is very little description of the vagaries of different masters, which I have found so extraordinarily amusing among my own acquaintances in usherdom.
He laid immense stress on the teaching of English and encouraged his boys to read omnivorously; by this means alone, he said, could they be expected to learn.
Where he failed most of all was in his inability to suffer fools gladly: he hated "sloppy" work either in colleague or boy; if he had only kept his hatred to himself, it might have been all right, but he was too honest, too impetuous. He would blurt out his natural feelings everywhere and expect everybody to see his point of view at once. Considering all things his colleagues were in some ways extremely long-suffering, for he was so sensitive that out of sheer nervousness and ineffectual anger he would show his worst side and hide his better nature. He must have seemed to those who only knew him superficially to be one mass of contradictions.
Take, for instance, his reading. He seems to have read everything of any note that appeared during these eight years, but his judgments on current writers are ludicrous: he hails any new-comer as a great genius, and yet at the same time he had a nice and exact taste in English literature and in talking could tell you just the strong and weak points of all big writers. In his written criticism he seems to have no standards at all. As he himself says, he was like a motor-car without brakes. His motor-power was very high, but he had no control over it: consequently he was always running away with himself and finishing up with incredible smashes whenever he started out on a literary or educational excursion.
I have been going through his letters to me of late, but I have not found any clue in them to the mania which has led to his downfall. In the diary, on the other hand, he lets himself go; the constant friction, the unrealized ideals find expression: on the surface, in his letters to his friends, he was charmingly lighthearted and humorous. One would never suspect the sæva indignatio which was ultimately to be his undoing, in anything but his published works.
I never met a man who was so different in his person from what you would expect after reading his books. To meet him at a dinner-party in London, to accompany him on a walking-tour, to play games with him, you would never guess that he had a care in the world. He seemed to enjoy life much in the same way as his great ancestor, the mystic, did. He was very devout, it is true, but his Christianity was of the optimistic Chestertonian sort, a kind of prizefighter's epicureanism, "Eat, drink, and be merry, but for the Lord's sake be careful not to get flabby." But suddenly, not so much in the holidays as in term time, some luckless creature would quite innocently introduce the topics of Socialism, Liberty, Religion, Morals, or Education, and at once Patrick would flush scarlet, stamp up and down his rooms and call down fire from Heaven on every existing institution. I never came across such an iconoclast. We who knew him understood that his frenzy was simply the burning ardour of the reformer who refuses to compromise: he was convinced that certain ideals were right and could not understand why the rest of mankind did not immediately forsake their old gods when he propagated his gospel of the new ones. Because he attempted to treat the boys with whom he came into contact as his intellectual equals, and never snubbed them, never punished or rewarded them, he expected every other master to employ the same methods.
"Show 'em," he would say, "that they've jolly well got to work if they want to get anything out of life; tell 'em that if they work to please a master, to avoid the cane, to secure a trumpery prize, or for any other reason than that work is a good thing in itself, they are committing an immoral and indecent act, and then there's just a chance that the intellect may grow. Not one boy in five hundred even uses ten per cent. of his brain-cells: the average man or boy has no idea of what real work means."