shall be a day-school at first, if I can find
one. As to the question of a public school, I am much exercised. Of
course there are nightmare terrors about tone and morals; but I am not
really very anxious about the boy, because he is sensible and
independent, and has no lack of moral courage. The vigorous
barrack-life is good 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 o