mind fell into halves, but the second clause was produced, not to
express any new thought, but rather to echo the previous clause. He
began at once on University topics. He had himself been a Pembroke
man, and it had cost him an effort, he said, to send Jack
elsewhere. "I don't take quite the orthodox view of education," he
said, "in fact I am decidedly heterodox about its aims and the
object that it has. It ought not to fall behind its object, and all
this specialisation seems to me to be dangerous, and in fact
decidedly perilous. My own education was on the old classical
lines--an excellent gymnastic, I think, and distinctly fortifying.
The old masterpieces, you know, Thucydides and so forth--they
should be the basis--the foundation so to speak. But we must not
forget the superstructure, the house of thought, if I may use the
expression. You must forgive my ventilating these crude ideas, Mr.
Kennedy. I went in myself, after taking my degree, for a course of
general reading. Goethe and Schiller, you know. Yes, how fine that
all is, though I sometimes feel it is a little Teutonic? One needs
to correct the Teutonic bias, and it is just there that the
gymnastic of the classics comes in; it gives one a standard--a
criterion in fact. One must have a criterion, mustn't one, or it is
all loose, and indeed, so to speak, illusive? I am all for
formative education; and it is there that women--I speak frankly in
the presence of three intelligent women--it is there that they
suffer. Their education is not formative enough--not formal enough,
in fact! Now, I have tried with dear Maud to communicate just that
touch of formality. You would be surprised, Mr. Kennedy, to know
what Maud has read under my guidance. Not learned, you know--I
don't care for that--but with a standard, or if I may revert to my
former expression, a criterion."