Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/171

Rh : Or for a school of art, or for a museum where stuffed birds would be shown to gaping children. You did well, Barker, to put St James' Park out of your mind as a convenient site for the National Theatre.


 * Westminster has been long in my mind as the site we require. Westminster Hall was built in the reign of William Rufus You say you like listening to me, but I can see your thoughts are away.

I admit that my thoughts strayed from you to your book, The Exemplary Theatre, for I suddenly remembered that in your long conversation with the Minister of Education you based your claim for a National Theatre on the educational advantages thereof.

There was much else in my book besides the long talk with the Minister of Education, which I admit was a mistake.


 * That is what is so winning in you, Barker. You are ready always to confess a mistake, and thereby you weaken your opponent's defence. The day your book arrived from the Times office I was writing an article pointing out that the twentieth century had come to believe that by the aid of a curriculum an almost perfect uniformity of intelligence can be obtained, and on opening your book the first thing that met my eye was the long conversation between you and Mr Fisher. "How can I review this book?" I asked myself. "Barker places his demand for a National Theatre on an altogether false basis."


 * You would not say that listening to a play by Shakespeare, nobly interpreted, is of no avail?

In one instance it may meet with a response. But I have little belief in the boy who reads Shakespeare; much more in the literary future of the boy who likes swinging on a gate in Maytime in front of a meadow flooded with sun and shadow, his soul elated by the songs of the willow-wrens flitting in the sprouting larches.


 * You have always been averse from education. I remember a phrase in a little book you wrote many years ago, Confessions of a Young Man: "We never learn anything that we did not know before."

Meaning thereby that a man cannot be taught. But though he cannot be taught, he can learn, meaning thereby that he may discover a self within himself. I am thinking of the gift a man