THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BOY - THE EDITORS APOLOGY I fulfilling a
promise made to my friend, whom by your leave I will call simply
Tubby, I have been conscious of a some- what difficult dilemma.
When he went to Canada, he placed the manuscript of his
autobiography in my hands, with power to select and abridge. I
perceived that if I published it in all its length nobody would
read it his life in England was not various, his orbit was
circumscribed, the people he met and the situations he faced had a
cer- tain sameness, the comments he made on them dealt in
repetitions. On the other hand, having made my selections on the
principle of giving you none but typical viii AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A
BOY incidents, and these but once, I find the result is meagre, and
fear you may be angry at being troubled with it at all. Tubby
himself was for publishing the whole. But craving your pardon, if
you be angry, I think it is better to be amused if amused you be
for an hour or so than to be bored for a day. I do assure you, you
could have borne no more. The autobiography covers only the period
from his leaving Oxford to the other day, and it may therefore be
well to give you a few facts of his earlier life, and perhaps a
word or two concerning the period men- tioned above, since I may be
deceived bymy intimate acquaintance with him in thinking that his
mode of life, his point of view, and his peculiar qualities are
indicated suffi- ciently by himself. He was expelled from two
private and our public school but his private tutor gave him an
excellent character, proving that the rougli and ready methods of
school- masters appreciation were unsuited to the fineness of his
nature. As a young boy he was not remarkablefor distinction of the
ordinary sort at his prescribed studies and at games involving
muscular strength and activity. But in very early life the infinite
indulgence of his smile was famous, and as in after years was often
misunderstood it was even thought by his schoolfellows that its
effect at a crisis in his career was largely responsible for the
rigour was treated by the authorities not men of the world, 1 with
which he they were was the harshest comment he himself was ever
known to make on them. He spoke with invariable kindness also of
the dons at Oxford who sent him down in his third year, com-
plaining only that they had not absorbed the true atmosphere of the
place, which he loved. He was thought eccentric there, and was well
known only in a small and very exclusive set. But a certain amount
of general popularity was secured to him by the disfavour of the
powers, his reputation for wickedness, and the supposed magni-
ficence of his debts. His theory of life also compelled him to be
sometimes drunk. In his first year he was a severe ritualist, in
his second an anarchist and an atheist, in his third wearily
indifferent to all things, in which attitude he remained in the two
years since he left the University until now whe, n he is gone from
us. His humour of being carried in a sedan chair, swathed in
blankets and reading a Latin poet, from his rooms to the Turkish
bath, is still remem- bered in his college. When he came to live in
town, he used to quote Ambition was my idol, which was broken but I
think he never really thought of it, certainly not in its common
forms, but lived his artistic life naturally, as a bird sings. One
or two ambitions he did, however, confide to hisintimates. He
drsiivd to be regarded as a man to whom no chaste woman should be
allowed to speak, an aim he would mention wistfully, in a manner
inexpressibly touching, for he never achieved it...
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