Chesterfield is one of the grimiest and most hideous of towns on the borders of Derbyshire and Yorkshire. My pupil was a slack, good-for-nothing, over-affluent, overgrown youth who had to pass in English, knowing none. His father, who was a colliery owner, happened also to be a Director of Education for the county, and was anxious to know what education really meant.
He had read Huxley, Spencer and Darwin, and no one else. I asked him to come along and join his son and the three of us went through the history of English literature from Shakespeare to the present day. The father was really interested, the son frankly bored. In mathematics the boy knew far more than I did, but he could not frame an English sentence for any money. Neither could he see the use of poetry, drama, novel or essay.
I was taken to the Corporation Baths, I was motored all over the place, I encountered some of the rudest people I have ever met in my life, and I was thoroughly miserable for ten whole days in a house which "stank" of money and where everything was uncomfortable and wrong. Work was the only relief. The abjectness of the shops and the people's faces threatened to drive me mad, so great was the contrast between Chesterfield and my Devon home. How any one could live for choice in an ugly misbegotten place like this I can't think. It seemed to me to invite crime or at least criminal thoughts. The meals were one long unendurable agony: high tea of pine-apple, blancmange and tinned salmon at 5.45, 7.30 or 8.45, according as "the master" returned from work. I went hungry most days. After a day I found myself studying this new type closely: the father collects the most evil oil-paintings and the most exquisite old oak furniture. They have a pigsty in the front garden, which occupies their spare hours. The old man is deeply religious, very methodical, Liberal in politics, very quiet, very anxious not to spend money, as honest as the day, fond of power and passionately devoted to his son. He keeps a journal containing a list of all the books he reads and his opinions of them.
I went into barracks at Exeter for a few days before returning to Ilfracombe, to keep my hand in, but I was chafing all the time to get back to the sea and freedom. The convention of mess is only less nauseating than that of Common Room.
For the last fortnight of the holidays I went up home to stay with my people and had to submit to being shown to people as a sort of prize pig. A round of tea-fights and bridge-drives, walks and sleep. I don't seem to be able to get going with any original writing. I wonder why in the world they give us such long holidays. In eight weeks one ought to be able to achieve something, write a novel or at any rate perform something useful. Instead of which we travel up and down the country and waste the precious hours—I hate not being actively occupied every hour of every day—life is damned dull that way. There must be thousands of men who would give anything to get as much holiday as I do, whereas I chafe and long to be back at work again weeks before the time comes to return. It's pleasant to get a chance of seeing my father and mother, though they are never very communicative. My father is out visiting in the parish all and every day, and only gets back late at night, and my mother is usually very busy in the house or shopping. I accompany them in their walks as a general rule, but they are not interested in talk about Radchester—they like to discuss books, but my mother reads little but theological and philosophical treatises. My father lives for humour: he is amazingly witty in himself (his letters are a treasure-house of shrewd and excruciatingly funny character-sketches of his parishioners) and he is passionately fond of wit in others. I wish I inherited some of this gift. I find that I am too deadly serious. I get too excited over my schemes to reform mankind. He is too kindly and tolerant, too good-natured and easy-going to try to shock people out of their indifference. My mother looks on my educational ideals as a sort of mania out of which I shall grow when I come to years of discretion: she thinks all education nonsense and a mistake.
I find that I become pretty well the ideal lotus-eater at home. I sleep from 10 P.M. to 9 in the morning and then read whatever I can lay my hands on if it is wet, or go out in the parish if it is fine. If I write, which is seldom, I rarely give up more than a couple of hours a day to it. I ought to imitate A. C. Benson and write two or three hours regularly daily, year in, year out—but I never do anything regularly.
If I were ever to write a novel I should finish it in a fortnight or three weeks. I can't bear to have anything hanging over my head. I am always afraid lest I should die in the middle and then find all the good work go for nothing. I wish I could cultivate the calm patience of these men, who work steadily for fifty years to produce some little thesis. Would I had the calm assurance of Lord Acton or Lord Morley.
If I could only cultivate a sense of arrangement. Here am I a strenuous and not altogether unsuccessful teacher of English, and I can't even string paragraphs together properly. That's why I like writing up my diary. I don't have to worry about arrangement. I can just write down things as they occur to me, matters of infinite moment cheek by jowl with ephemeral topics of the hour. I have been reading Montaigne's "Essays" of late and derived considerable comfort therefrom. I always carry a book about in my pocket wherever I go, one of the "World's Classics" for preference: it effectually prevents me from getting peevish if I have to wait for a train or in a shop to be attended to.
These holidays I have read very thoroughly John Stuart Mill "On Liberty" and Hobbes's "Leviathan" in this way. Oh for a lucid pen like Mill's or an orderly mind like Hobbes'. Such books are best read quietly and in small quantities at a time. When I read a novel I tear the heart out of it, just as Doctor Johnson did. There are very few novels I can't get through in a day. I usually sit up to finish them if I can't manage it otherwise. My mother says that I can't possibly remember what I read and that it's pure waste of time to read in this way, but I think I generally manage to squeeze the best out of a book in this way.