It is an atmosphere from which
living stimulating influences have been excluded from which stimulating
and vigorous personalities are now being carefully eliminated, and in
which dull, prosaic men prevail invincibly. The explanation of the inert
commonness of "Kappa's" schoolboy lies not in his having learnt this or
not learnt that, but in the fact that from seven to twenty he has been
in the intellectual shadow of a number of good-hearted, sedulously
respectable conscientiously manly, conforming, well-behaved men, who
never, to the knowledge of their pupils and the public, at any rate,
think strange thoughts do imaginative or romantic things, pay tribute to
beauty, laugh carelessly, or countenance any irregularity in the world.
All erratic and enterprising tendencies in him have been checked by
them and brought at last to nothing; and so he emerges a mere residuum
of decent minor dispositions. The dullness of the scholastic atmosphere
the grey, intolerant mediocrity that is the natural or assumed quality
of every upper-class schoolmaster, is the true cause of the spiritual
etiolation of "Kappa's" young friend.
Now, it is a very grave thing, I know, to bring this charge against a
great profession--to say, as I do say, that it is collectively and
individually dull.
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