Читать книгу Jeremy at Crale - Hugh Seymour Walpole - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Jeremy at Crale has been my single attempt at a school-story. The genre is not an easy one for the very simple reason that a school-story can be only truly written by a boy who is still at school. It is all very well for us to say that we remember, but the things that we recall are for all of us the same things. There is the further difficulty that the sentiment of a boy's life is compounded of elements very dangerous and difficult for analysis. No one has yet written in English an account of a boy's friendship that does not appear either too emotional or too unemotional to be true. Tom Brown's protection of Arthur still appears to me a beautiful and true thing, but Hughes was almost too manly in his admiration of British Virtues. I am not sure that Talbot Baines Reed in The Cock House at Fellsgarth and other masterpieces did not strike the best balance of any, but then he omitted all the psychology.

The fact is that boys are both little beasts and little heroes, that the age of puberty is the terror of parents and headmasters, and that no one dares to speak frankly, even in these frank days, of what everyone knows to be true. However, these are dangerous matters. I didn't write in Jeremy at Crale the school-story that I would like to have written, but I did, I think, tell the truth so far as I thought wise.

My chief satisfaction in it is that I feel that Jeremy survives it. If he was alive when he went into it, he was alive when he came out of it! All the conventional things are there, the football, the fights, the bullying, the friendships, and the rest. It is a true story and not, I think, sentimental.

Meanwhile we await the schoolboy of genius who will tell us what things are really like!

H.W.