The Upton Letters - Arthur Christopher Benson (learn to read books TXT) 📗

I say, I met him here. He came into the room with the same old pleasant smile, beautifully dressed, soberly appointed. His look and gestures were perfectly natural and appropriate. He has never made any attempt to see me or keep up old acquaintance; but here, where I have a certain standing and position, it was obviously the right thing to treat me with courteous deference. He came up to me with a genial welcome, and, but for a little touch of prosperous baldness, I could have imagined that he was hardly a day older than when he was a boy. He reminded me of some cheerful passages of boyhood; he asked with kindly interest after my work; he paid me exactly the right compliments; and I became aware that I was, for the moment, one of the pawns in his game, to be delicately pushed about where it suited him. We talked of other matters; he held exactly the right political opinions, a mild and cautious liberalism; he touched on the successes of certain politicians and praised them appropriately; he deplored the failure of certain old friends in political life. "A very good fellow," he said of Hughes, "but just a little--what shall I say?--impracticable?" He had seen all the right plays, heard the right music, read the right books. He deplored the obscurity of George Meredith, but added that he was an undoubted genius. He confessed himself to be an ardent admirer of Wagner; he thought Elgar a man of great power; but he had not made up his mind about Strauss. I found that "not making up his mind about" a person was one of his favourite expressions. If he sees that some man is showing signs of vigour and originality in any department of life, he keeps his eye upon him; if he passes safely through the shallows, he praises him, saying that he has watched his rise; if he fails, our friend will be ready with the reasons for his failure, adding that he always feared that so-and-so was a little unpractical.

I can't describe to you the dreariness and oppression that fell upon me. The total absence of generosity, of independent interest, weighed on my soul. The one quality that this equable and judicious critic was on the look-out for was the power of being approved. Foster's view seemed to knock the bottom out of life, to deprive everything equally of charm and individuality.

The conversation turned on golf, and one of the guests, whom I am shortly about to describe, said bluffly that he considered golf and drink to be the two curses of the country. Our polite friend turned courteously towards him, treated the remark as an excellent sally, and then said that he feared he must himself plead guilty to a great devotion to golf. "You see all kinds of pleasant people," he said, "in such a pleasant way; and then it tempts one into the open air; and it is such an excellent investment, in the way of exercise, for one's age; a man can play a very decent game till he is sixty--though, of course, it is no doubt a little overdone." We all felt that he was right; he took the rational, the sensible view; but it tempted me, though I successfully resisted the temptation, to express an exaggerated dislike of golf which I do not feel.

The guest whose remark had occasioned this discourse is one of my colleagues, Murchison by name--you don't know him--a big, rugged, shy, sociable fellow, who is in many ways one of the best masters here. He is always friendly, amusing, courteous. He holds strong opinions, which he does not produce unless the occasion demands it. He keeps a good deal to himself, follows his own pursuits, and knows his own mind. He is very tolerant, and can get on with almost everybody. The boys respect him, like his teaching, think him clever, sensible, and amusing. There are a great many things about which he knows nothing, and is always ready to confess his ignorance. But whenever he does understand a subject, and he has a strong taste for art and letters, you always feel that his thoughts and opinions are fresh and living. They are not produced like sardines from a tin, with a painful similarity and regularity. He has strong prejudices, for which he can always give a reason; but he is always ready to admit that it is a matter of taste. He does not tilt in a Quixotic manner at established things, but he goes along trying to do his work in the best manner attainable. He is no genius, and his character is by no means a perfect one; he has pronounced faults, of which he is perfectly conscious, and which he never attempts to disguise. But he is simple, straightforward, affectionate, and sincere. If he were more courageous, more fiery, he would be, I think, a really great man; but this he somehow misses.

The two men, Foster and Murchison, are as great a contrast as can well be imagined. They serve to illustrate exactly what I mean. Our friend Foster is perfectly correct and admirably pleasant. You would never think of confiding in him, or saying to him what you really felt; but, on the other hand, there is no one whom I would more willingly consult in a small and delicate point of practical conduct--and his advice would be excellent.

But Murchison is a real man; he knows his limitations, but he takes nothing second-hand. He brings his own mind and character to bear on every problem, and judges people and things on their own merits.

Of course one does not desire that conventional people should strive after unconventionality. That produces the most sickening conventionality of all, because it is merely an attempt to construct a pose that shall be accepted as unconventional. The only thing is to be natural; and, after all, if one merely desires to see how the cat jumps and then to jump after it, it is better to do so frankly and make no pretence about it.

But I am sure that it is one's duty as a teacher to try and show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this. I found--I am now speaking of intellectual things--that certain authors were held up to me as models which I was unfortunate enough to dislike. Instead of making up my own mind about it, instead of trying to see what I did admire and why I admired it, I tried feebly for years to admire what I was told was admirable. The result was waste of time and confusion of thought. In the same way I followed feebly, as a boy, after the social code. I tried to like the regulation arrangements, and thought dimly that I was in some way to blame because I did not. Not until I went up to Cambridge did the conception of mental liberty steal upon me--and then only partly. Of course if I had had more originality I should have perceived this earlier. But the world appeared to me a great, organised, kindly conspiracy, which must be joined, in however feeble a spirit. I have learnt gradually that, after a decent compliance with superficial conventionalities, there are not only no penalties attached to independence, but that there, and there alone, is happiness to be found; and that the rewards of a free judgement and an authentic admiration are among the best and highest things that the world has to bestow. . . .--Ever yours,

T. B.


UPTON, June 18, 1904.


DEAR HERBERT,--I am sick at heart. I received one of those letters this morning which are the despair of most schoolmasters. I have in my house a boy aged seventeen, who is absolutely alone in the world. He has neither father or mother, brother or sister. He spends his holidays with an aunt, a clever and charming person, but a sad invalid (by the way, in passing, what a wretched thing in English it is that there is no female of the word "man"; "woman" means something quite different, and always sounds slightly disrespectful; "lady" is impossible, except in certain antique phrases). The boy is frail, intellectual, ungenial. He is quite incapable of playing games decently, having neither strength or aptitude; he finds it hard to make friends, and the consequence is that, like all clever people who don't meet with any success, he takes refuge in a kind of contemptuous cynicism. His aunt is devoted to him and to his best interests, but she is too much of an invalid to be able to look after him; the result is that he is allowed practically to do exactly as he likes in the holidays; he hates school cordially, and I don't wonder. He fortunately has one taste, and that is for science, and it is more than a taste, it is a real passion. He does not merely dabble about with chemicals, or play tricks with electricity; but he reads dry, hard, abstruse science, and writes elaborate monographs, which I read with more admiration than comprehension. This is almost his only hold on ordinary life, and I encourage it with all my might; I ask about his work, make such suggestions as I can, and praise his successful experiments and his treatises, so far as I can understand them, loudly and liberally.

This morning one of his guardians writes to me about him. He is a country gentleman, with a large estate, who married a cousin of my pupil. He is a big, pompous, bumble-bee kind of man, who prides himself on speaking his mind, and is quite unaware that it is only his position that saves him from the plainest retorts. He writes to say that he is much exercised about his ward's progress. The boy, he says, is fanciful and delicate, and has much too good an opinion of himself. That is true; and he goes on to lay down the law as to what he "needs." He must be thrown into the society of active and vigorous boys; he must play games; he must go to the gymnasium. And then he must learn self-reliance; he must not be waited upon; he must be taught that it is his business to be considerate of others; he must learn to be obliging, and to look after other people. He goes on to say that all he wants is the influence of a strong and sensible man (that is a cut at me), and he will be obliged if I will kindly attend to the matter.

Well, what does he want me to do? Does he expect me to run races with the boy? To introduce him to the captain of the eleven? To have him thrust into teams of cricket and football from which his incapacity for all games naturally excludes him? When our bumble-bee friend was at school himself--and a horrid boy he must have been--what would he have said if a master had told him to put a big, clumsy, and incapable boy into a house cricket eleven in order to bring him out?

Then as to teaching him to be considerate, the mischief is all done in the holidays; the boy is not waited on here, and he has plenty of vigorous discipline in the kind of barrack life the boys lead. Does he expect me to march into the boy's home, and request that the boy may black his own boots and carry up the coals!

The truth is that the man has no real policy; he sees the boy's deficiencies, and liberates his mind by requesting