for a boy, the give-and-take, the splendid equality, the manly code, the absence of affectation.  But the intellectual tone of schools is low, and the conventionality is great.  I don’t want Alec to be a conventional man, and yet I want him to accept current conventions instinctively about matters of indifference.  I have a horror of the sporting public-school type, the good-humoured, robust fellow, who does his work and fills his spare time with games, and thinks intellectual things, and artistic interests, and emotion, and sympathy, moonshine and rot.  Such people live a wholesome enough life; they make good soldiers, good officials, good men of business.  But they are woefully complacent and self-satisfied.  The schools develop a Spartan type, and I want Alec to be an Athenian.  But the experiment will have to be made, because a man is at a disadvantage in ordinary life if he has not the public school bonhomie, courtesy, and common sense.  I must try to keep the other side alive, and I don’t despair of doing it.

Meantime we are a very contented household, in spite of the fact that now, if ever, is the time for me to make my mark as a writer, and I have to pass all the opportunities that offer.  On the other hand, this is the point at which one sees, in the history of letters, so many writers go to pieces.  They suddenly find, after their first great success, that they have arrived, by a tortuous and secret path, at being a sort of public man.  They are dazzled by contact with the world.  They go into society, they make speeches, they write twaddle, they drain their energy, already depleted by creation, in fifty different ways.  Now I am strongly of Ruskin’s opinion that the duty of the artist is to make himself fit for the best society, and then to abstain from it.  Very fortunately I have no sort of taste for these things, beyond the simple human satisfaction in enjoying consideration.  That is natural and inevitable.  But I don’t value it unduly, and I dislike its penalties more than I love its rewards.

And then, too, I reflect that it is, after all, life that we are here to taste, and life that so many of us pass by.  Work is a part of life, perhaps the essence of life; but to be absorbed in work is to be like a man who is absorbed in collecting specimens, and never has time to sort them.  I knew of a man who determined, early in life, to write the history of political institutions.  He had a great library, and he devoted himself to study.  He put in his books, as he read them, slips of paper to indicate passages and chapters that he would have to consult, and as he finished with a book, he put it in a certain place on a certain shelf.  He made no other notes or references—­he was a man with a colossal memory, and he knew exactly what his markers meant.  In the middle of this life of acquisition, while he bored like a worm in a cheese, he died.  His library was sold.  The markers meant nothing to any one else; and the book-buyers merely took the markers out and threw them away, and that was the end of the history of political institutions.