He is--if one might hazard a guess--an uncle
bereft of great expectations. He finds an echo in thousands of other
distressed uncles and parents. They use the most divergent and
inadequate forms of expression for this vague sense that the result has
not come out good enough; they put it contradictorily and often wrongly,
but the sense is widespread and real and justifiable and we owe a great
debt to "Kappa" for an accurate diagnosis of what in the aggregate
amounts to a grave national and social evil.
The trouble with "Kappa's" particular public-school boy is his unlit
imagination, the apathetic commonness of his attitude to life at large.
He is almost stupidly not interested in the mysteries of material fact,
nor in the riddles and great dramatic movements of history, indifferent
to any form of beauty, and pedantically devoted to the pettiness of
games and clothing and social conduct. It is, in fact, chiefly by his
style in these latter things, his extensive unilluminated knowledge of
Greek and Latin, and his greater costliness, that he differs from a
young carpenter or clerk. A young carpenter or clerk of the same
temperament would have no narrower prejudices nor outlook, no less
capacity for the discussion of broad questions and for imaginative
thinking.
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