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have lacked the magnetism provided by frustration.
    But on the other hand, granted that some daydream, some sheltering fantasy, was necessary to Chris Jarmayne’s existence; granted that a weak creature like myself needed some private world into which to escape from over-harsh reality and gain courage to continue the daily struggle; thenpossibly this school fantasy was less harmful than some other types. At least it held no sadistic, no masochist enjoyments; its rules embodied a decent and kindly if juvenile code of ethics. But it was not adult. That for many men—and for women too perhaps, though I think more rarely—schooldays are often the happiest days of their lives, strikes me as a fact psychologically most deplorable and dangerous. This fixation is not the fault of the school, of course, but of the adult world for being so inferior in attraction. I often think now, when called upon to address Parent-Teacher or other such associations designed to bring the school world into touch with family life: first that if such organizations had existed in my youth they would have been the end of Chris Jarmayne, for I could not have endured the invasion of my happy world of learning by my family; next that the ability to compose the different spheres of one’s life into a unity, a harmonious relation, is perhaps the prime mark of a courageous and well-integrated mind.
(“Connect, connect!”
as E. M. Forster urges.) Any part of one’s life which, so to say, slips away from the rest, is apt to turn into a fantasy—of fear or joy as the case may be.
    The part played in my school fantasy by the wish-fulfilment Chris Jarmayne is highly significant. His name was never my own, but usually Etherington. My adoption of this variation of my father’s name shows at once my fixation on him and my efforts to conquer it by improving and refining on his personality. This Etherington, who as I have said before was never encumbered by a family, had (of course) all my good qualities and none of my bad ones. He was brilliantly clever and wrote—not essays or fiction, because I did that, myself in real life—but wonderful poems. He was strong for justice; he defended the weak, he resisted evil and routed the powerful— these villainous opponents were always rich, elegant and sophisticated, like Graham. After a period of storm and stress, during which he suffered much from the machinations of thesewicked ones, Etherington triumphed and was acclaimed as a leader (or dux or captain or what-have-you) by an overpowering majority of the popular vote. In appearance
chétif
at a casual glance, Etherington was presently discovered by those who loved him to have finely cut and
spirituel
features, somewhat like those of Shelley, and though he laid no claim to permanent ability in games, he often, by tenacity and the application of intelligence, saved the day for the school on the playing-field when all seemed lost.
    In later life, I have made quite a study of daydream fantasies as they have been recorded in literature—those of the Brontës, for example, and of Hartley Coleridge; also of fictitious characters such as Maggie Tulliver in
The Mill on the Floss,
Du Maurier’s ill-fated pair in
Peter Ibbetson,
Kipling’s hero in
The Brushwood Boy,
Barrie’s
Sentimental Tommy
and
Mary Rose,
J. D. Beresford’s
Jacob Stahl,
Hope Mirrlees’
Madeleine
at the court of Louis XIV, and so on. It is difficult to discern in these cases the exact degree to which the day-dreamer becomes his wish-fulfilment hero or heroine. For my part, I never actually lived inside Etherington’s skin; I only
watched
him, though I felt keenly all the sensations I caused him to undergo. I sometimes wonder whether this detachment, this status of onlooker, was indicative and prophetic of my later rôle of novelist.
    My fantasies, as I say, were not the fulfilments of evil or markedly anti-social desires; but