The Public School Mixture

Loose Ends — By Arnold Lunn

In attempting to make a novel out of his ideas on public school education, Mr. Lunn has set himself a peculiarly difficult task. This is, chiefly, because he knows his subject so well from the point of view of the boy as well as that of the master, and his sympathies are so nicely divided between them that he is unsatisfied if he does not convey both. He succeeds, but his success breaks his book into halves, and we cannot quite see how it can fail to have the same effect upon his public.

Who but little boys could take a lively interest in the play and chatter of little men of thirteen upwards, could exult in the way they routed old Slimy:

Phillips looked Slimy up and down. He gazed at his hair, his face and his feet.

‘Slimy dear,’ he said with deliberate and cold-blooded contempt, ‘you smell. Your feet stink. We don't want you. Get out, and leave the door open behind you to air the room….’

—could burn with indignation at the rotten shame it was page 21 that old Tom didn't get his colours and Burton did, could relish to the full the exquisite joke of bringing the Museum baboon into the class-room of the short-sighted master, or could squeeze the last drop of enjoyment from:

Jack's cricket was meteoric. He was a fast but indifferent bowler, a brilliant but not very reliable bat. The local yeomen who watched the school matches from behind the palings greeted his boundaries with full-throated enthusiasm, and his ‘ducks’ with noisy grief. No member of the school side could score so rapidly as Jack when he was in form, and none were more subjected to periodic runs of bad luck.

But the roaring conversations, debates and sets-to between ‘unconventional’ masters, whose pipes are always going out and who have a way of signifying their pleasure or displeasure by ‘inarticulate noises,’ would leave the juvenile reader dreadfully cold. And the vague sad fears of gentle, thoughtful Mother Helen that her boy is hers no longer—not wholly hers (can she win him back by taking a house on the river for his summer ‘hols’ and reading Swinburne to him in the punt?)—would leave him, if possible, colder still.

We are put to it to imagine whom these situations would warm and vivify, especially the former one—the young schoolmaster, rampant, in the old traditional school. What original fire it had has kindled many torches of late; it would need a powerful breath to blow the flame clear and shining again. Beautiful, gentle Helen, mother of the hero, in spite of the fact that she reads Mr. Masefield and has her very own opinion of Dickens and Mr. Arnold Bennett, is never more than a shadow. Were the light to fall upon her one instant, she would be gone.

The book opens with a discourse by the author upon ‘that most obstinately English of English families—the Chattel Leighs. It is typical of the family that they have never hyphened their double name and never dropped the Chattel.’ Conscientious, hard-headed, reserved and page 22 discreet, they are chosen for the hero's ancestors on the paternal side. Philip Chattel Leigh, father of Maurice, is indeed an astonishing reproduction of a Royal Academy portrait of an English gentleman. He is complete even to the little scene in the consulting room of the ‘eminent specialist,’ where he receives his sentence of death.

‘I think the end will be sudden, perhaps almost painless.’

Philip pulled out his notebook. ‘I'll jot down a note or two,’ he said calmly, ‘it's as well to make no mistake. Possibly two years, six months probably. Let's see, what about smoking? …’

‘Yes, smoke by all means in moderation.’

Philip rose briskly. ‘Well, Sir Horace, thank you for your sympathy. I know your time is valuable. The trees are coming out nicely, aren't they?’

His wife, daughter of a bookish father, ‘led a life of restrained happiness and entertained his friends with that tranquil serenity that was her most distinctive charm.’ But she kept ‘the intangible life of books’ away from her husband, and when he returned from his work she ‘listened patiently but with intelligence.’

They have two sons. Tom, the elder, is his father over again, but Maurice is cast in another mould.

He clung to his mother, appealed to her for sympathy, thought aloud when he was with her, and gave to Helen that unique joy that belongs to those who know they have the power of shaping and moulding a human soul.

Her ‘unique joy’ is short-lived. At eight years of age he goes off to a ‘Priver’; at thirteen he joins Tom at Horn-borough and becomes a public school man. What is the effect of the Public School system upon a boy who ‘worships at the shrine of physical fitness,’ and yet has ‘discovered that poetry not only unlocks new aspects of beauty, but that it serves as a key to those forgotten chambers of the soul where beauty once perceived … page 23 slumbers till the magic numbers waken her to life once more’? For the purposes of his experiment, Mr. Lunn selects two friends for him—Jack Spence, who stands for the life of the body and whose batting thrills him to the bone, and Quirk, the revolutionary schoolmaster, who makes Shakespeare live again and leads Maurice from Kipling to Conrad, higher still and higher.

We cannot see that it has any effect upon him at all. The Chattel Leigh in him makes him moderately good at games, and enthusiastic enough over ‘footer pots’; his mother's literary tastes keep him from narrow-mindedness or from being feverishly interested in knowing what a concubine is. In fact, he comes out by the same door as in he went, with Jack still his friend, Quirk his master, and his mother waiting, hoping still.

Is Mr. Lunn administering a powder? But if the powder is to be disguised, surely it is not too much to ask that the jam should be really good jam—none of your familiar mixtures from a dreary pot, but some exquisite preserve of the author's—black cherry, Frimley peach, sharp, sweet quince.

The dose is large; jam qua jam, alas! excites us nolonger. We cannot help feeling that Mr. Lunn expects of us an innocence of appetite which is very rare.