My only consolation is that I have talked to a good many boys who have read the book; they have all been amused, interested, delighted.  But they say frankly that the boys are not like any boys they ever knew, and, when I timidly inquire about the masters, they laugh rather sheepishly, and say that they don’t know about that.

I am sure that we schoolmasters have many faults; but we are really trying to do better, and, as I said before, I only wish that a man of Kipling’s genius had held out to us a helping hand, instead of giving us a push back into the ugly slough of usherdom, out of which many good fellows, my friends and colleagues, have, however feebly, been struggling to emerge.—­Ever yours,

T. B.

Upton,
May 21, 1904.

My dear Herbert,—­I have been wondering since I wrote last whether I could possibly write a school story.  I have often desired to try.  The thing has hardly ever been well done.  Tom Brown remains the best.  Dean Farrar’s books, vigorous in a sense as they are, are too sentimental.  Stalky & Co., as I said in my last letter, in spite of its amazing cleverness of insight, is not typical.  Gilkes’ books are excellent studies of the subject, but lack unity of theme; Tim is an interesting book, but reflects a rather abnormal point of view; A Day of My Life at Eton is too definitely humorous in conception, though it has great verisimilitude.

In the first place the plot is a difficulty; the incidents of school life do not lend themselves to dramatic situations.  Then, too, the trivialities of which school life is so much composed, the minuteness of the details involved, make the subject a singularly complicated one; another great difficulty is to give any idea of the conversations of boys, which are mainly concerned with small concrete facts and incidents, and are lacking in humour and flexibility.

Again, to speak frankly, there is a Rabelaisian plainness of speech on certain subjects, which one must admit to be apt to characterise boys’ conversation, which it is impossible to construct or include, and yet the omission of which subtracts considerable reality from the picture.  Genius might triumph over all these obstacles, of course, but even a genius would find it very difficult to put himself back into line with the immaturity and narrow views of boys; their credulity, their preoccupations, their conventionality, their inarticulateness—­all these qualities are very hard to indicate.  Only a boy could formulate these things, and no boy has sufficient ease of expression to do so, or sufficient detachment both to play the part and describe it.  A very clever undergraduate, with a gift of language, might write a truthful school-book; but yet the task seems to require a certain mellowness and tolerance which can only be given by experience; and then the very experience would tend to blunt the sharpness of the impressions.