A Dominie in Doubt Part 33

"Why do papers send a funny book to an old fossil of a reviewer with no sense of humour?" I said, testily and waited for the next post. Well, it came; it brought three adverse notices and a letter.

"Dear Dominie, I admired your _Log_, but why, oh why, did you perpetrate such a monstrosity as _The Booming of Bunkie_?"

Then a friend wrote me a letter.

"Dear old chap,--You are suffering from the effects of the war. If the war has induced you to write _Bunkie_, I am all for hanging the Kaiser."

For weeks I clung to the belief that the crowd had no sense of humour . . . then I re-read my novel. I still hold that it is funny in parts, but I see what is wrong. It is a specialised type of humour, or rather wit, the type that undergraduates might appreciate. In fact I was recently gratified to hear that the students of a Scots university were rhapsodising about it. The real fault of the book is that it is clever, and to be clever is to be at once suspect.

I naturally like to think that the circulation of a book is generally in inverse proportion to its intrinsic merit. J. D. Beresford's novels are, to me, much better than those of the late Charles Garvice, yet I make a guess that Garvice's circulation was many times greater than Beresford's. Still I cannot argue that the reverse is true--that because a book does not go into its second edition it is necessarily good. I find that the problem of circulations is a difficult one. I cannot, for instance, understand why _The Young Visitors_ sold in thousands; I failed to raise a smile at it. Again, there is my friend although publisher, Herbert Jenkins. I didn't think _Bindle_ funny, yet it has been translated into umpteen European languages. Jenkins himself does not think it funny, and that, possibly, is why he is my friend.

The most surprising success to me was Ian Hay's _The First Hundred Thousand_. I read Pat MacGill's _Red Horizon_ about the same time, and thought Hay was stilted and superior with a public-school man's patronising Punch-like att.i.tude to the working-cla.s.s recruits. I thought that he didn't know what he was writing about, that he had not reached the souls of the men. MacGill, on the other hand, gave me the impression of a warm, pa.s.sionate, intense knowledge of men; he wrote as one who lived with ordinary men and knew them through and through. Yet I fancy that _The Red Horizon_, popular as it was, did not have the sales of _The First Hundred Thousand_.

I was lunching with Professor John Adams one day in London. We got on to the subject of circulations, and he said that he had just been asking the biggest bookseller in London what novel sold best.

"Have a guess," said the Professor to me.

"_David Copperfield_," I said promptly.

He laughed.

"Not bad!" he said, "you've got the author right, but the book is _A Tale of Two Cities_."

He then asked me to guess what two authors sold best among the troops at the front during the war.

"Charles Garvice and Nat Gould," I said, and the Professor thought me a wonderful fellow, for I had guessed aright.

There is a whiskered Ford story which tells that Mr. Ford took a new car from his factory and invited a visitor to have a spin. They started off, and went seven miles out. Then the car stopped. Ford jumped out and lifted the bonnet.

"Good Lord!" he cried, "the engine hasn't been put in! The car must have run seven miles on its reputation!"

I think that books run many miles on reputation alone. Like a s...o...b..ll the farther a circulation rolls the more it gathers to itself. But what is it that makes a book popular? The best press notices in the world will not send the circulation of a book up to a hundred thousand level. What sells a book is talk. Scores of people said to me: "Oh, _have_ you read _The Young Visitors_?" I hasten to add, as a Scot, that I personally did not help to increase the circulation; I borrowed the book from an enthusiast. Talk sells a book, but we have to discover why people talk about _The Young Visitors_ and not about--er--_The Booming of Bunkie_. The book that is to sell well must be able to touch a chord in the crowd heart, and _The Young Visitors_ sold because it touched the infantile chord in the crowd heart; it brought back the happiest days of life, the schooldays: again, its nave Malapropisms appealed to the crowd, because we are all glad to laugh at the social and grammatical errors we have made and conveniently forgotten about.

_Bunkie_ did not reach the hundred thousand level because it was too clever; it was a purely intellectual essay in wit rather than humour.

And the crowd distrusts wit, and that is why the witty plays of Oscar Wilde are seldom produced, while _Charley's Aunt_ goes on for ever.

I am tempted to go on to a comparison of wit with humour, but I shall only remark that wit is an intellectual thing, whereas humour is emotional. Humour is elemental, but wit is cultural. Without a language you could have humour, but without language there could be no wit.

I have just come across a small book ent.i.tled _Hints on School Discipline_, by Ernest F. Row, B.Sc.

"Boys will only respect a master whom they fear," he says. I have been preaching this doctrine for years . . . that respect always has fear behind it . . . and it pleases me to find that an exponent of the old methods should support my argument.

When I began to read the book I was amazed.

"Good Lord!" I cried, "this chap should have published his book in the year 1820. He advocates a system that modern psychology has shown to be fatal to the child. It is army discipline applied to schools."

I found it hard to finish the book, but I read every word of it and then I said to myself: "The majority is on the side of Row. Eton, Harrow, many elementary teachers would agree with him. He is evidently an honest sort of fellow, and he must be reckoned with. I must try to see his point of view."

And I think I see it. He accepts current education with its set subjects, time-tables, order, morality, and he is trying to adapt the young teacher to what is established. Hence to maintain all these things, we must have stern discipline and swift punishment. But I wonder if Row has thought of the other side of the question; I wonder if he has asked himself whether order and time-tables and obedience and respect are really necessary. I should like to meet him and have a chat; I think I should like him, and further, I think that I could convert him to the other way . . . if he is under forty.

Ah! Horrid thought! Is it possible that Row is pulling our legs? No, he writes as an honest man. Perhaps he knows all about the modern movement; perhaps he has studied Montessori, Freud, Jung, Homer Lane, Edmond Holmes, and found that they are all pathetically wrong. Mayhap he has proved that the child _is_ a sinner.

"The young teacher should never address a boy by his Christian name or nickname," he says.

Oh, surely he _is_ pulling our legs!

At intervals during the past few years I have been puzzled when people congratulated me on my village school in Lancas.h.i.+re. I had quite a number of misunderstandings on the subject. Then one day I discovered that there was a village schoolmaster in Lancas.h.i.+re called E. F.

O'Neill. I wrote him telling him that I was coming to see his school, and one July morning I alighted at one of the ugliest villages in the world, and I walked past slag-heaps and all the horrors of industrialism to a red building on the outskirts. Three or four boys were digging in the school garden. I walked into the school, and two seconds after entering I said to myself: "E. F. O'Neill, you are a great man!"

There were no desks, and I could see no teacher. Half-a-dozen children stood round a table weighing things and cutting things.

"What's this?" I asked.

"The shop," said a girl, and after a little time I grasped the idea.

You have paste-board coins, and you come to the shop and buy a pound of b.u.t.ter (plasticene), two pounds of sugar (sand), and a bottle of Yorks.h.i.+re Relish (a brown mixture unrecognisable to me). You pay your sovereign and the shop-keeper gives you the change, remarks on the likelihood of the weather's keeping up and turns to the next customer.

I walked on and found a boy writing.

"Hullo, sonny, what are you on?"

"My novel," he said, and showed me the beginning of chapter XII.

A young man came forward, a slim youth with twinkling eyes.

"E. F. O'Neill?"

"A. S. Neill?"

We shook hands, and then he began to talk. I wanted to tell him that his school was a pure delight, but I couldn't get a word in edgeways.

If anything, he was over-explanatory, but I pardoned him, for I realised that the poor man's life must be spent in explaining himself to unbelievers. I disliked his tacit cla.s.sing of me with the infidel, and I indignantly took the side of the infidel and asked him questions.

Then he gave me of his best.

He is a great man. I don't think he has any theoretical knowledge, and I believe that anyone could trip him up over Freud or Jung, Montessori or Froebel, Dewey or Homer Lane; but the man seems to know it all by instinct or intuition. To him creation is everything. I was half afraid that he might have the typical crank's belief in imposing his taste on the pupils, and I mentioned my doubt.

"No," he said, "we have a gramophone with fox-trots, ragtimes, Beethoven and Melba, and the children nearly always choose the best records."

Love of beauty is a real thing in this school. The playground is full of bonny corners with flowers and bushes. The school writing books are bound in artistic wallpaper by the children, and hand-made frames enclose reproductions of good pictures on the walls.

I saw no corporate teaching, and I should have asked O'Neill if he had any. If he hasn't I think he is wrong, for the other way--the learn-by-doing individual way--starves the group spirit. The cla.s.s-teaching system has many faults, and O'Neill seems to have abolished spoon-feeding, but the cla.s.s has one merit--it is a crowd.

Each child measures himself against the others, not necessarily in compet.i.tion. Perhaps it is the psychological effect of having an audience that I am trying to praise. Yes, that is it: the individual-work way is like a rehearsal of a play to empty seats; the cla.s.s-way is like a performance before a crowded house. It is a projection of one's ego outward.

"This method," said O'Neill, "may be out-of-date in a month."

I think highly of him for these words alone. He has no fixed beliefs about methods of study; he himself learns by doing, and to-morrow will be cheerfully willing to sc.r.a.p the method he is using to-day. If the ideal teacher is the man who is always learning, then O'Neill comes pretty near that ideal. I wish that every teacher in Britain could see his school.