l tale of heads that they can
afford to the flashing blades of the protagonists; and even so the
chief figures, realistic though they are, remind me not so much of
spirited pictures as of Gillray's caricatures. They are highly
coloured, fantastic, horribly human and yet, somehow, grotesque.
Everything is elongated, widened, magnified, exaggerated. The
difficulty is, to my mind, to imagine boys so lawless, so unbridled, so
fond at intervals of low delights, who are yet so obviously
wholesome-minded and manly. I can only humbly say that it is my belief,
confirmed by experience, that boys of so unconventional and daring a
type would not be content without dipping into darker pleasures. But
Kipling is a great magician, and, in reading the book, one can
thankfully believe that in this case it was not so; just as one can
also believe that, in this particular case, the boys were as mature and
shrewd, and of as complete and trenchant a wit as they appear. My own
experience here again is that no boys could keep so easily on so high a
level of originality and sagacity. The chief characteristic of all the
boys I have ever known is that they are so fitful, so unfinished. A
clever boy will say incredibly acute things, but among a dreary tract
of wonderfully silly ones. The most original boys will have long lapses
into conventionality, but the heroes of Kipling's book are never
conventional, never ordinary; and then there is an absence of
restfulness which is one of the greatest merits of Tom Brown.

But what has made the book to me into a kind of Lenten manual is the
presentation of the masters. Here I see, portrayed with remorseless
fidelity, the faults and foibles of my own class; and I am sorry to say
that I feel deliberately, on closing the book, that schoolmastering
must be a dingy trade. My better self cries out against this
conclusion, and tries feebly to say that it is one of the noblest of
professions; and then I think of King and Prout, and all my highest
aspirations die away at the thought that I may be even as these.

I suppose that Kipling would reply that he has done full justice to the
profession by giving us the figures of the Headmaster and the Chaplain.
The Headmaster is obviously a figure which his creator regards with
respect. He is fair-minded, human, generous; it is true that he is
enveloped with a strange awe and majesty; he moves in a mysterious way,
and acts in a most inconsequent and unexpected manner. But