This is, at any rate, the only explanation that I can find for the superficial relations between son and father that are spread over so deep a trust and intimacy. They accept without appreciating this superficiality. The father comes down at half term, and he goes for a walk arm in arm with his son, along the slopes. They discuss home affairs and the external activities of school: football shop, cricket shop, house politics. They rarely touch on the boy's inner life; the father can only guess at what his boy is doing and thinking. Underneath their love for each other they are strangers.
On the important issues of school life they are both driven to accept the verdict of the house master or head master. And he, although he is working in the dark on both sides of him, is their only intermediary.
But the relationships between parents and children are too intricate for so short a book as this. Indeed, I doubt whether it is possible ever to tackle satisfactorily a subject, the nature of which alters with every individual case. One would be lost at once in a labyrinth of generalisations and exceptions; Lytton Strachey made no attempt to write a history of the Victorian era. He selected and analysed a few specimens; that is, I believe, the only way in which to deal with the complex subject of parenthood. And it can only be thus dealt with by the story-teller, by the man who says: 'I care nothing for general principles. But this is how things went for one family.' In a general study such as this, it is quite impossible to dogmatise from individual cases. But I would submit this facet of the relationship between father and son as an important one in the study of school society. It throws the need for co-operation almost entirely on the schoolmaster. It makes his responsibility greater than he knows.
Now there are three types of men to whom the scholastic profession makes its chief appeal. There is the brilliant scholar, the man with the double first, who will turn out to be either completely incompetent, or will become a head master. There is the athlete who takes a third, or at best a second in mods, and on the strength of a blue, returns as games master to his old school. Lastly, there is the idealist, the man who regards teaching as a calling and not a trade, the man who may be either an impossible crank or, in his own line, a genius.