"
CRABBE, _The Borough_.
A great many people say that all suffering is good for one, and I am
sure pain does improve one very often, and in many ways. It teaches one
sympathy, it softens and it strengthens. But I cannot help thinking that
there are some evil experiences which only harden and stain. The best I
can say for what we endured at Crayshaw's is that it _was_ experience,
and so I suppose could not fail to teach one something, which, as Jem
says, was "more than Snuffy did."
The affection with which I have heard men speak of their school-days and
school-masters makes me know that Mr. Crayshaw was not a common type of
pedagogue. He was not a common type of man, happily; but I have met
other specimens in other parts of the world in which his leading quality
was as fully developed, though their lives had nothing in common with
his except the opportunities of irresponsible power.
The old wounds are scars now, it is long past and over, and I am grown
up, and have roughed it in the world; but I say quite deliberately that
I believe that Mr. Crayshaw was not merely a harsh man, uncultured and
inconsiderate, having need and greed of money, taking pupils cheap,
teaching them little or nothing, and keeping a kind of rough order with
too much flogging,--but that the mischief of him was that he was
possessed by a passion (not the less fierce because it was unnatural)
which grew with indulgence and opportunity, as other passions grow, and
that this was a passion for cruelty.
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