M

VII

CLEMENCE DANE

ISS CLEMENCE DANE in Regiment of

Women has startled me more than any

writer on education whose work I have ever read. Why the book was not censored I cannot understand. Those of us whose prime care in life it is to see a wholesale reform in education must owe her a very considerable debt, for she has attacked the existing system with an amazing insight into its weakest and most vulnerable places. I have spent many years in trying to prove that our great stumbling-block was the lack of interest in intellectual and artistic occupations, and that all would be well if we could once stimulate the youth of the country to care about learning in the same degree that it cares about athletics and now a self-confessed amateur comes along and knocks all my pet theories down and tells us that the problem is quite different.

To put it tersely, it is not the brain, but sex that is wrongly developed and neglected. Every schoolmaster knows that one of the most perplexing features of boarding-school life lies in the question of boyfriendships. We of the public schools rigorously keep boys of sixteen and over apart from the juniors. In spite, however, of the harshest rules (perhaps because of them, in some instances) irregular friendships are formed, hideous scandals take place, and wholesale expulsions follow.

On the face of it there would appear to be little

harm in these friendships, and if these led to nothing more than friendships we should encourage rather than hinder them. But strange as it may sound to the uninitiated, these friendships rapidly develop into love-affairs, and the element of passion is introduced. We talk of boys "being keen" on each other, of girls having "a craze " for one another. If we could dismiss these cases as mere ebullitions of sloshy sentiment we might perhaps have cause to complain that they were a waste of time, but we could scarcely condemn them as pernicious.

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I do not wish in a paper on the art of the novel to introduce a disquisition on unnatural vice, but I never met an author who dared even to suggest the prevalence of this poisonous habit in schools. We have bound ourself in a conspiracy of silence to the detriment of all progress. It is quite time we started to enlighten the parents of our charges. But while we professionals funk the problem, a mere outsider throws the bomb with complete assurance and leaves us aghast . . . not because she joins with our unspoken thoughts, and decides that the imagination of a child's heart is unclean, but because she wishes to make all of us-schoolmasters and mistresses-sit up and take stock of our own position in the matter.

It is we who are to blame, it seems. Instead of keeping to our rôle of stern autocrat, unapproachable despot, we choose to descend from our daïs, become friendly and companionable and inspire hero- and heroine-worship, quite without meaning to. A kindly word here, encouragement over a piece of work, an inspired talk about History or Mathematics or Divinity (even the dullest of us is inspired sometimes), and we are regarded as only a little inferior to the Deity our lightest word is regarded as a

dictum straight from Heaven, our ill-considered judgments as the voice of God. I quite grant at the outset that I cannot seriously bring myself to believe, even after fifteen years' experience, that I have ever caused any boy of any age to regard me with any feeling in any way related to hero-worship. I have been regarded as slightly mad, slack, a martinet, impartial, grossly unfair, an impractical idealist, shockingly material, a human companion, an inhuman beast, almost everything except a god. Most schoolmasters among my very varied acquaintance would confess to much the same experience. Girls may be more inclined to bestow their affections passionately (I was going to say unhealthily) on their mistresses than boys do on their masters, but no one in his senses would conclude from this that a boy is less passionate than a girl to whom then does he turn, failing his masters ? On his companions, not usually of the same age. Here lies the danger of bringing up boys of all ages from thirteen to nineteen together. There is no question that such companionships lead to terrible situations and unmentionable crimes.

The point is how to avoid them. By far the best thing to do to begin with is to read Clemence Dane. Regiment of Women is an astounding novel to launch on the world as one's initial effort. It requires courage to attempt to interest a public, nourished on love-stories, a public exceedingly conservative in its tastes in the daily round of a girls' school. Yet she grips our attention at once and never for a moment loses it.

All the characters are drawn with an almost diabolic insight into the human mind. The most important person is a mistress, Clare Hartill, whose one aim in life is to surround herself with youthful protégés and

make them submit themselves wholly to her influence, alternately fawning upon them and neglecting them. She it is who is chosen to exemplify the force of John Knox's judgment that "the monstrous empire of a cruell woman we knowe to be the onlie occasion of all these miseries "; the miseries being inflicted on an imaginative lonely child of thirteen who commits suicide because her mistress alternately pets and bullies her, and a young assistant mistress who has to choose between her devotion to the same tyrant and her love for a man.

Miss Dane puts her case with a force which is undeniable, emphasising each incident with such care and full detail that the dénouement is quite inevitable, and there is no trace of the machinery, no noise of engine or whirring of wheels as one would expect after hearing the bare outlines of the story.

It is inevitable that the pretty, young, enthusiastic, simple-minded Alwynne should fall a prey to Clare Hartill's carefully-spread net, and just as inevitable that the lonely thirteen-year-old Louise should respond to Clare's attentions.

That Louise should be precocious in her reading, acting, and thinking is no anomaly. Every schoolmaster and mistress must know of hundreds of cases where a quite young child shows æsthetic appreciation of a most advanced and mature kind while he or she retains the most childlike attitude to many of the problems of life which are no longer problems to the adult, either because they are solved or shelved sine die. Louise, for instance, can talk glibly about Meredith, but is completely woebegone when she finds that her mistress is ignorant of the Bible and will not commit herself to any positive assertions about God. It is hard for a child to understand that when we grow

up we are either completely sure or magnificently careless about immortality and a Deity.

There are critics who rebel against the suicide incident: they deny that any small girl could feel so depressed at the harshness of a beloved mistress as to kill herself. But Louise, to me at least, rings true no less in her death than in her life. She is exceptionally impressionable and came under a ghoulish influence: taking the part of Arthur in King John had unsettled her completely. Her failure to satisfy, her inability to fathom, the shallows of Clare's mind, led her to destroy herself rather than continue an existence which had suddenly, inexplicably, become unbearably hateful. After all, boys and girls at school have committed suicide in real life before now, not solely because they failed to pass examinations. There are more ways than one even of killing a child.

It may be urged, not unreasonably, that Miss Dane is altogether too bitter: that she feels deeply is evident on every page, that she is extremely sensitive even to the least sinister usage must be plain to every one. Sensibility and depth of emotion lead to bitterness, if not cynicism, when thwarted, and it is possible to be thwarted objectively. How else account for such a passage as this?

"Henrietta Vigers was forty-seven when she left. She had spent youth and prime at the school, and had nothing more to sell. She had neither certificates nor recommendations behind her. She was hampered by her aggressive gentility. Out of a £50-salary she had scraped together £500. Invested daringly it yielded her £25 a year. She had no friends outside the school. She left none within it. Miss Marsham presented her with a gold watch, decorously inscribed,