mental discipline altogether, which he maintained was the same thing as
to train agricultural labourers in high-jumping and sprinting, or like
trying to put a razor-edge on a hoe. What he said was neglected
altogether was the cultivation of artistic susceptibility. In nature,
in art, in literature, he maintained, lay an immense possibility of
refined and simple pleasure, which was never cultivated at all. The
mental discipline, he argued, which average boys received, was doubly
futile, because it neither equipped them for practical life, nor opened
to them any vista of intellectual or artistic pleasure. What he
himself desired to do was, on the one hand, to equip boys for practical
life, and on the other to initiate them into the possibilities of
intellectual recreation. The ordinary boy, he thought, was turned out
with a profound disbelief in intellectual things, and a no less
profound belief in games as the only source of rational pleasure. His
own belief was that a great many English boys had the germs of simple
artistic pleasures dormant in their spirits, and that they might be
encouraged to believe in books, in art, in music, as sources of
tranquil enjoyment, instead of regarding them as slightly unwholesome
and affected tastes. He was aware that his views were being regarded
as dangerously heterodox, and as tainted indeed with a kind of
aesthetic languor. He felt that he was appearing to pose as the
champion, not only of an unpopular cause, but of an essentially
effeminate system. His opponents were certainly not effeminate; but
they were masculine only in the sense in which the soldier is
masculine, in his sturdy contempt for the arts of peace; whereas to
Hugh the soldier was only an inevitable excrescence on the community, a
disagreeable necessity which would disappear in the light of a rational
and humane civilisation.

A young Don, a friend of Hugh's, who had taken part in the discussion,
a few days after, in the course of a walk, attacked Hugh on the
subject. Hugh was aware that he defended himself very indifferently at
the time; but some remarks of his friend, who was a brisk and practical
young man with a caustic wit, rankled in Hugh's mind. His friend had
said that the danger of Hugh's scheme was that it tended to produce
people of the Maudle and Postlethwaite type, who made life into a mere
pursuit of artistic impressions and sensations. "The fact is,
Neville," he said, "that you upheld Epic