I will go further, and admit that the brass plates may not all be
frauds. I will tell you that one of my friends was led to genuine
love and considerable knowledge of classical literature by an Irish
schoolmaster whom you would call a hedge schoolmaster (he would not be
allowed to teach anything now) and that it took four years of Harrow
to obliterate that knowledge and change the love into loathing. Another
friend of mine who keeps a school in the suburbs, and who deeply
deplores my "prejudice against schoolmasters," has offered to accept my
challenge to tell his pupils that they are as free to get up and go out
of the school at any moment as their parents are to get up and go out
of a theatre where my plays are being performed. Even among my own
schoolmasters I can recollect a few whose classes interested me, and
whom I should certainly have pestered for information and instruction
if I could have got into any decent human relationship with them, and
if they had not been compelled by their position to defend themselves as
carefully against such advances as against furtive attempts to hurt them
accidentally in the football field or smash their hats with a clod from
behind a wall. But these rare cases actually do more harm than good; for
they encourage us to pretend that all schoolmasters are like that.
Of what use is it to us that there are always somewhere two or three
teachers of children whose specific genius for their occupation triumphs
over our tyrannous system and even finds in it its opportunity? For that
matter, it is possible, if difficult, to find a solicitor, or even a
judge, who has some notion of what law means, a doctor with a glimmering
of science, an officer who understands duty and discipline, and a
clergyman with an inkling of religion, though there are nothing like
enough of them to go round. But even the few who, like Ibsen's Mrs
Solness, have "a genius for nursing the souls of little children" are
like angels forced to work in prisons instead of in heaven; and even