August 9, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
13 
Stterature anb art 
A Novel at Seventeen 
By J. C. Squire 
THE difficulties of writing good school stories are 
matters of commonplace observation. The boy 
cannot see everything and, as a rule, cannot write : 
The man forgets much and sentimentalises much. 
The dilemma will never be completely avoided : But Mr. 
Alec Waugh's The Loom of Youth (Grant Richards, 6s.), 
IS a remarkable attempt. The book, Mr. Seccombe explains 
in an amusing introduction, was written at the age of seven- 
teen by a boy who left school since the war began, and is 
now in the array. The school is easily identifiable. Mr. 
Waugh, it is true, makes a weak attempt to throw the reader 
off the scent at the start by saying that " Fernhurst " is in 
Derbyshire : but, if that be so, his hero must have had a 
remarkable cross-country journey when, on p. 154, he set 
out to get there from Waterloo Station. At any rate, Mr. 
Waugh was there ; he has described his life there, the place, 
the masters, the boys, the games, the curriculum and the 
gossip in immense detail, and with a passion for accuracy. 
And he saw things and wrote English as probably no other 
boy of his year in any school could have done. He writes 
too exuberantly and rapidly to keep his language always at 
its top level, and his progress, and ours, is rather impeded 
by a superfluity of dialogue. But at his best he manages his 
material like an old hand. It is a most astonishing feat. 
• ***♦■ 
Mr. Waugh is in violent reaction against the common con- 
ventional pictures of school life. With charming straight- 
forwardness he makes his hero himself discuss the question : 
It was rather unfortunate that, at a time when he was bubbling 
over with rebellion, Arnold Lunn's book. The Harrovians. 
should have been published. This book, as no other book 
has done, photographs the life of a Public School boy stripped 
of all sentiment, crude and raw, and is, of its kind, the finest 
school story written. It may have many artistic blunders ; 
it may be shapeless and disconnected, but it is true to life 
in every detail ; and Gordon was not likely at this time to 
be conscious of technical mistakes. Of course, a storm of 
adverse criticism bcoke out at once. Old Harrovians wrote 
to the papers, saying that they had been at Harrow for six 
years, and tliat the conversation was, except in a few ignoble 
exceptions, pure and manly, an^I that the general atmosphere 
was one of clean, healthy broadmindedness. Gordon fumed. 
What fools all these people were ! 
Here is a critical mind working, impatient of humbug and eager 
for truth. The attitude is not peculiar to clear-sighted school- 
boys : it was precisely that sort of feeling that led to the 
reaction against the \'ictorian novel and produced the modern 
reahstic novel which, in spite of " leaving nothing out," is 
often less hke life than Dickens himself, not to mention Jane 
Austen. Mr. Waugh himself uses the word " photograph " ; 
and the defects of photography are evident. It is in obedience 
to his theory that Mr. Waugh inserts an amount of promiscuous 
profanity, perhaps a little in excess of the truth, and innumer- 
able descriptions and conversations which are, in a manner, 
more accurately recorded than anything that has ever 
appeared in a school story, but which are not proportioned 
according to their interest and significance. If one's hfe 
for a day or a week were fully recorded by a combined 
cinematograph and gramophone, one would not find the 
result had much in common with Hamlet or the Elgin 
Marbles. Selection and proportion are necessary to produce 
not merely an effect of beauty, but one of truth. If Mr. 
Waugh, fifteen years hence, should write another book, in 
precisely the .same spirit of candour and with precisely the 
same desire to explore, it would lack some merits that this 
book possesses, but it would also catch aspects of the truth 
that this book insufficiently emphasises. It is always difficult, 
when in the middle of things described, to see the wood for 
the trees, and it is made more difficult if one is determined, 
on theory, that not a single tree should be overlooked. 
* * 4> * * 
But, of course, he does not produce a photograph : he was 
not old and hardened enough to do that, even if anyone can — 
which is doubtful. He is a most exceptional being, an 
enthusiast and at hearf, a fierce romantic. So is his hero, 
Gordon Caruthers— we may note that the whole-hog reahst 
would have called him Henry Wilkins Simpson. He is 
followed from the age of thirteen (when, a point that I feel 
sure no adult novelist has remembered, he is struck, on his 
first day, by the " unending stream of bowler hats ") until 
he leaves to enter the Army, an athlete, a scholar, and a 
blood. That he is not a normal boy is natural : it would be 
difficult to write a novel about him if he were, for he would 
have next to no thoughts. But he is abnormal even among 
unusual boys. The author, at seventeen, quotes not merely 
the classical authors, but the latest and voungest of living 
writers. So Caruthers and some of his friends have tastes 
cultivated to a quite exceptional degree. Wilde, Shaw and 
Chesterton crop up in their daily conversation. " Marlowe 
had been right," reflects Caruthers at a crisis of thought, and 
his hohdays at Hampstead produce reflections like " Near 
John Masefield's house was the garden where Keats had 
written his immortal Ode to a Nightingale ": 
Tester had been right ; he had wasted himself ; he had been 
bhnded by the drab atmosphere of Public School life. And 
as he read on. while the summer sun sank in a red sea behind 
the gaunt Hampstead firs, read of the proud domineering 
soul of Manfred, visualised the burst of' passion that had 
prompted the murder in The Last Confession, felt the thunder- 
ing paganism of the Hymn to Proserpine, he was overcome 
^yith a tremendous hatred for the system that had kept 
literature from him as a shut book, that had offered him 
mature philosophy instead of colour and youth, and that tried 
to prevent him from seeking it for himself. . . . What a 
system, what an education. 
The quotation is rather an extreme one. Mr. Waugh does 
not really desire boys to spend all their time visualising 
murders and listening to thundering paganism. His in- 
vective is not unmitigated ; he has, for instance, a great 
admiration for his headmaster. And one would be giving a 
false impression if one did not make it clear that his polemic is 
only occasional, and that most of his pages are filled with 
life-like descriptions of daily life. But Mr. Waugh does not 
leave us in doubt that his principal object is exposure and 
reform. And one can understand what he feels. 
* * * * 
He is, mentally, in rebellion. He has few positive suggestions 
to make, perhaps, save that athletics should be less glorified 
and that English literature should be taught— suggestions 
with one or both of which many schoolmasters agree. But 
his real trouble is that he feels cramped ; that he is haunted 
by a sense of the pettiness of his daily occupations, the 
triviality of his companions' interests, the realisation of 
the difference between what life is and what it might be. 
The vehemence of his attack upon the " system " is, I think, 
possibly accounted for by a failure to realise that the limita- 
tions of life at school are, to a large extent, the limitations of 
life everywhere. Public school curricula and public school 
masters might both be improved — like almost everji;hing 
else in our civilisation — but no improvement is going to pro- 
duce a whole race of boys who read the world's literature 
at sixteen, write remarkable books at seventeen, and at the 
same tiine play games well and escape priggery. And it would 
be unfair to test any system of education solely by its reac- 
tions upon such exceptional beings when they find themselves 
caught in its toils. Time will probably teach Mr. Waugh 
this. He will know, later on, better than he does now, what 
events made the deepest and most permanent impressions 
on him : some of them may prove to be casual sentences of 
which he thought he took httle notice. His conceptions 
of the malleabihty of human beings will be modified ; he 
will still appreciate, but not quite so highly, the value of an 
early acquaintance with the works of Mr. Compton Mackenzie ; 
he will discover that what was one boy's poison may often 
have been many boys' meat ; and he will, standing more out- 
side, see in his old friends and his old self charms and virtues, 
and in his old life foundations of moral qualities which he 
naturally did not perceive when he was a boy himself. His 
crowd were healthier than he knew, the masters were not quite 
such asses as they seemed, and even the games, in retrospect, 
will appear to have both more importance and more beauty 
than they had to a rebel. But it is at least evident that almost 
in spite of himself, Mr. Waugh, like his hero, both enjoyed 
them and excelled in them. And it is equally evident that 
in spite of all his diatribes, he passionately loved his school. 
He might reflect that there is much to be said, in spite of a 
defective " system," for the spirit of an institution which gets 
such a hold over the affections of even the most detached 
and enlightened as does the English public school. The French 
convict in Guiana does not find his heart-strings tugged by 
memories of dear old Devil's Island. 
