It is the fashion nowadays to demand open discussion of all subjects; there must be no secrets. Parents are told that they are guilty of criminal negligence if they do not instruct their sons and daughters in the physiology of sex. And, no doubt, it will be maintained that at this point the father should have written his son a long letter explaining to him the nature of the temptation to which he would be exposed. That is the fashion nowadays. No doubt the Victorians suffered from an excessive reserve. We have gone to the other extreme. We are trying to reduce love to an exact science.
On the whole, I suppose that the instruction of children by parents depends entirely on the individual case. But at such a time it would be very easy for the parents to become embarrassed and lose the boy's sympathy. The number of boys who learn from their parents more than a vague idea of motherhood is probably small. And at a Public School it is the physiology of fatherhood that occupies the boy's attention.
We are given to understand that in the first place a boy must be corrupted by another boy. But this is not generally the case. A boy usually manages to corrupt himself. He has overheard the conversation of older boys, he has discussed different problems with his companions; theatmosphere of school life with its continual references to immorality in sermons and addresses, have made him precociously curious. He evolves for himself the practice of private immorality.
A boy's knowledge of sex necessarily is very fragmentary, and on many points he is actually misinformed. He has a preposterous idea, for instance, of the effects that this habit will have upon his health. Syphilis is not more dangerous. His hair will drop out, he will go blind, his brain will soften. Probably he will go mad. Numerical considerations mean nothing to him: once a thief always a thief. The idea of restrained disorder does not occur to him. He suffers from the misery of an incommunicable grief. He is apart from his fellows. If he told them his secret, he thinks that they would despise him. He becomes morbidly introspective. He makes vows to break himself of the habit, fails, and despises himself. He begins to search for the symptoms of his approaching physical and intellectual collapse. If he makes a duck at cricket, misses a catch in a house game, or fails badly in his repetition, he tells himself that the process has begun. There are times when he wants to steal away by himself like an animal that is sick. There are others in which he wishes at all costs to mix with his companions, to take part in any rag that is afoot; to this cause can be invariably attributed the mingled rowdyism and moodiness of certain boys. The idea that such practices are physically injurious is encouraged by the master. It appears to himthe most sure preventative. There are, indeed, occasions when masters are so misinformed that they actually believe in these terrible vengeances of the body. For schoolmasters who, of all people, ought to know most of hygiene and physiology, are, for the most part, woefully ignorant of them. It would be indeed interesting to discover what percentage of public school house masters have read any serious medical writing. They are only too willing to believe that such habits have the disastrous results they prophesy. And of course it has not, unless it is practised to excess and unless the subject is particularly feeble. It is foolish to throw lighted matches about the place, but the habit only becomes dangerous when the matches are flung on inflammable material.
It so happens that the greater part of active immorality in schools takes place between boys of fifteen and sixteen; not, as is more frequently imagined, between junior and senior boys. Such relationships are usually of brief duration. They pass with the dawn of the romantic friendship. And it is here that I feel most acutely the difficulty of my task. It is almost impossible to explain to some one who has not been to a Public School the nature of one of these romantic friendships. In a book calledPleasureI published a story dealing with such a friendship. The majority of old public school boys who read it seemed to like it. But none of the men who had not been to a Public School could make head or tail of it. They told mein their reviews of it that it was absurd, mawkish, and unhealthy. It may be so. It may be that I wrote the story badly. I can only repeat that old public school boys liked it. And indeed it is a difficult thing to explain. For what is a romantic friendship but the falling in love of one boy with another. Such a relationship seems preposterous. I can only repeat that the public school system is unnatural, and that one must expect unnatural results from it. What, after all, is to be expected?
A boy of seventeen is passing through a highly romantic period. His emotions are searching for a focus. He is filled with wild, impossible loyalties. He longs to surrender himself to some lost cause. He hungers for adventures. On occasions he even goes so far as to express himself in verse, an indiscretion that he will never subsequently commit. And what focus does a Public School provide for this eager emotionalism? There are the fierce contests of the football field, but they are, when all is said and done, the business of life, the cause for his existence. They are an enthusiasm he shares with three hundred others. He longs for something more intimate, more personal; he is, in fact, in love with love; he does not see a girl of his own age, of his own class, from one end of the term to the other; it is in human nature to accept the second best.
In this environment there is nothing unnatural about the attraction exercised by a small boy over an elder one. A small boy is the nearestapproach possible to the feminine ideal. Indeed a small boy at a Public School has many of the characteristics that a man would hope and expect to find in a woman. He is small, weak, and stands in need of protection. He is remote as a woman is, in that he moves in a different circle of school life, with different friends, different troubles, different ambitions. He is an undiscovered country. The emotion experienced is genuine, and usually takes the elder boy by surprise. In a man's love for a woman there is often a degree of premeditation. A man looks at a woman and wonders if he could ever come to fall in love with her. As he walks homewards from her drawing-room he asks himself whether or not he is in love with her. He analyses his emotions; very often he persuades himself he is in love with her when in reality he is not. Either way he is prepared.
But the schoolboy is taken off his guard. He has not realised it is possible that he should fall in love with another boy. He has no previous experience which will enable him to recognise the symptoms. He has heard older boys spoken of as being 'keen' on some one or other, but he has associated such an assertion with the references in sermons to the corruption of a young mind. He does not, therefore, know what is happening when he finds himself becoming increasingly interested in some quite small boy. He has noticed him playing a plucky game on the Lower and has congratulated him. They have happened to meet on the way up from halland have walked across together to the studies. They have smiled when they passed each other as they changed from one class-room to another in break. The elder boy is surprised: he is still more surprised when he finds himself frequently walking into the smaller boy's study on no very necessary errand, to borrow a book he does not want or to return a book he has not borrowed; and that he should stop there to talk for an indefinite period. The day on which he has not seen or spoken to his small friend is empty for him. He does not understand his increasing wish for the company of an admittedly inferior person. But it is all very delightful. He is desperately anxious to appear in his best light. He makes strenuous, and often successful, efforts to abandon certain habits he had contracted. He may even work harder in form, and certainly he will make superhuman efforts on the football field, feeling that success will render him more attractive. He wonders what the small boy thinks of him, and persuades one whose social position lies midway between the two of them to make inquiries. The growing intimacy is a rich enchantment. He becomes curious, and, in a way, jealous of the life that his friend is leading; their standards, their environment, their friends are so different. He knows instinctively that one has more in common with one's contemporaries than with those who lie outside the circle of one's immediate interests, and this knowledge distresses him. There are times when he feels intensely miserable, others whenhe feels radiantly happy. At any rate he is living more intensely and less selfishly than he did before. He is on a distinctly higher plane of emotional tension.
Indeed in its beginnings such a friendship is certainly good for the elder boy and probably for the younger one; at any rate there is the comfortable knowledge that he has an elder friend to whom he can turn for sympathy and advice; and he is protected thus from many of the dangers to which his good looks might otherwise expose him. The environment of school life does not allow, however, the friendship to retain its first freshness. It becomes conscious of itself. It is noticed by other members of the house: 'Hallo, Jones,' they say, 'seen anything of Morrison this morning?' Jones, being the elder, is embarrassed by what seems to him an accusation of weakness. Morrison is flattered to think that others have recognised and perhaps envied the patronage. Jones begins to make inquiries of his friends, and a series of confidences convinces him that he has reached the condition of being 'keen' on Morrison. This conviction places his friendship on an entirely different and, to a certain extent, official basis. If he had been left alone it is not improbable that he would have made no such discovery. As Morrison would never have more than liked him, his feeling for the smaller boy would not have become defined. Their friendship would have remained in the strictest sense of the word, platonic. But so frail a flower could not hopeto flourish for long in the rigid atmosphere of a Public School. Everything in a Public School has to conform to type; there are rules for the proper ordering of every situation. Friendship, like personality, has to pass through the mint.
In order to follow the technique of such relationships, the official point of view towards them has to be understood. The house master on this point finds himself in extreme difficulty. And, indeed, there is no point on which schoolmasters as a whole waver quite so much. They realise, for the most part, that it is natural, if unfortunate, for boys to feel like this. At the same time they have to discountenance such friendships. Where actual misconduct is concerned, they think themselves to be on safe ground. And, as they believe that immorality in schools consists in the main of the corruption of small boys by big boys, they are able to speak with unrestrained violence against the majority of such friendships. They adjure their prefects to suppress at once the least sign of intimacy between a small and a big boy. They, themselves, watch carefully to see whether any of their seniors are evincing an interest in members of the day room. Every one in a school knows that a friendship between two boys of different positions will be viewed seriously by authority. A boy is given to understand that the romantic emotion he feels for a smaller boy is an emotion that is unworthy of him and of its object, and should consequently be suppressed. Such teaching is absolutely wrong. The emotions that aboy has for a smaller boy are as natural as those that he would feel for a girl were he not restrained by an unnatural system. It is wrong to make a boy say to himself: 'I ought not to feel like this.' Such teaching is responsible for many of the mistakes that a boy will make when he becomes a man; it arbitrarily defines the form which the romantic friendship takes.
A boy is surprised by a new, delightful, interesting emotion. He feels strangely happy. Under its inspiration he works better and plays his games harder. He is told it is wrong to feel as he is feeling. But that he cannot believe. The emotions that are condemned in the pulpit and in confirmation addresses must in their essentials be different from those that he is feeling. That must be lust, the mere desire for sensation. This, on the other hand, is love. And so the public school boy of sixteen makes the discovery that love is in its highest form unphysical. The truth of this intuition is established for him by public opinion and by the course of his own experience.
The slightest suggestion of indecent conduct between the big and the small boy is regarded by boys as well as masters as the unforgivable offence.
It is hard to know exactly how important a part these friendships play in the life of a boy. It has often been said that the novelist falsifies life by writing too much about love, that except at certain periods of a man's life love occupiesonly a small part of his attention; he is caught up by other interests. This argument, however, is no sounder than the objection raised by an old lady against the number of nudes displayed at the Paris Salon. 'It's so absurd,' she said, 'one-half of these portraits are nudes, and think how small a part of our life we spend without any clothes on.' A beautiful woman is most beautiful when she is naked, and a man's life is most interesting when he is in love. The condensation and indeed the actual elimination of whole periods must in a novel always falsify life for those who demand a direct transcription of it. If you were to record one average day of a man's life on gramophone and cinema and exhibit the result at the Alhambra you would empty the theatre in an hour. A story-teller recounts only what is of interest. He is a good or a bad story-teller according to the degree of his ability to discern what is, and what is not, of interest. He merely indicates the passage of the unimportant.
The man, therefore, who draws direct conclusions from a school story, would imagine that a schoolboy spends his entire time in form ragging masters, and, when not ragging, in cribbing, and that the rest of his time is divided between the fierce rivalries of the football field and the intrigues of romantic friendships. Such, it is needless to say, is not the case. The story-teller has only written of what seemed to him to be of interest. He has omitted, and he has expected his reader to realise out of his ownexperience that he has omitted, the long, tedious hours of good behaviour, the ordered harmony of routine.
The romantic friendship has a modest place in the schoolboy's scale of values, but its nature is curious enough. It has the great charm of the forbidden. It is mixed with fear. Even after the first interest has waned, its setting makes it a delightful toy that no one would willingly throw away. It is the flavouring to the routine. There is usually a 'go between' who carries messages from one to the other. And the glance across a table stating that the intermediary has something of interest to disclose is one of the exciting moments of the day, as exciting as the post is to a recluse or the arrival of rations to a soldier. There are jealousies and intrigues. There is the interchange of notes—the joy of a secret. There are carefully arranged appointments. On Sundays there will be meetings in some prearranged point outside the town, at which each will arrive by a different route, and they will sit in a wood and talk till the afternoon has waned and the chiming of the abbey clock warns them that roll-call is imminent. It is not surprising that such an adventure should appeal irresistibly to a schoolboy. When such a friendship is ended either by the appearance of a rival, or more frequently through the inclination of the smaller boy, who has risen in the school and feels that such a position is beneath his dignity, the elder boy feels an immense gap in his life. The immediate senseof anticipation has gone. There is nothing particular to which he may look forward. He is bored. Often he drifts into such another friendship out of loneliness.
Authority adopts towards these friendships a wavering attitude. It realises that such a friendship does not necessarily imply the least indecency, that it often, on the other hand, has a very salubrious effect on the elder boy, but it still is vividly aware of the danger. Suppose something went wrong; suppose there was a grave scandal, on whose shoulders would the responsibility rest. We can well imagine a resentful father asking a head master why, if he was aware of the existence of such a friendship, he did not take immediate steps to stop it. 'You knew about this,' he would say, 'while my son was still innocent: why did you not protect him? Why should you knowingly subject him to such a risk?' The head master has always to be thinking of what a boy's parents will say.
It is difficult for him to work on the plan of 'circumstances alter cases.' He would thus lay himself open to the accusation of favouritism. 'You didn't stop Cartright and Evans, sir,' is a weapon for which a master has no shield. There is usually a compromise.[5]
The attitude of authority is one of nervous hesitance. The schoolboy, as in all other cases, evolves his own standards from his own life. It remains to be seen what are the actual effects on the partners in a relationship that must have a large influence on their subsequent development.
The first objection raised by authority is that it is very bad for a small boy to be petted and treated like a girl. And such is an undoubted fact. The small boy who is taken up by a 'blood' makes a very good thing out of it. He gets first-hand information on a number of disputed points. He knows two or three hours before any one else in the day room who is going to be given his house cap and who his seconds. He has a position among his contemporaries. Favours are sought through him. His friends get leave off house runs and are allowed to watch First Eleven matches when others have to attend pick ups. He is immune from the assaults of the swash-bucklers, for no one would willingly run the risk of making himself unpopular with the bloods. He gets his 'con' done for him, and, after football, he will sit in front of a warm study fire. He has many privileges, and, of course, it is very bad for him.
How far the effects last into manhood I cannot say with any degree of certainty. I am inclinedto think that they pass more quickly than is popularly imagined. But the small boy who is taken up by his seniors gets very little out of his schooldays. If he gets taken up by a 'blood' he has a fairly good time while that blood is still at school. But it is by no means certain that he will be taken up by a blood, and he may very likely find himself an object of fierce jealousy between two fellows in the Middle School, both of whom he likes, but for neither of whom he feels any strong attachment. Neither of them is sufficiently important to claim a monopoly. Between them they contrive to make his life wretched for him. They worry him with notes and with pleas for an appointment. Each tries to persuade him to have nothing to do with the other. The whole of his spare time is divided between them. And the small boy who is unable to see why he should not choose what friends he likes, grows more and more impatient. At the end of a term's wrangling he decides to speak to neither of them again.
But the life even of the favoured-of-the-mighty has its disadvantages. The hours that he spends in the day room are numbered, so that he makes few friends among his contemporaries. The majority of them dislike him; nearly all of them are jealous and distrust him. They are afraid to say things in his presence for fear that they will be repeated. His only friends are those who hope to be able to gain some advantages from him. His life is made nonetoo comfortable in the dormitory. He is accepted as being in a higher social position than the rest of the room, which is, of course, flattering to his pride; but it is not nice when every occupant of the room only speaks when he is spoken to. He feels himself apart. The evenings in the dormitory which, with their sing-songs, their football matches, and long talks, provide such delightful material for reminiscence, are for him cheerless. It cannot be too often repeated that the biggest mistake a boy can make at a Public School is to form friendships outside the circle of his contemporaries.
The good-looking boy makes friends so easily among his seniors, and the successful athlete can, if he wants, after a year or two choose his friends among boys who have been at school a couple of years longer than he has. It is very exciting for a boy to feel that he is outstripping his contemporaries, to be able to nod to fellows in the Fifteen and Eleven, but, in the long run, it does not pay. The big man leaves, and the social aspirant is left stranded. I have seen it happen so many times. One term a boy seems to be surrounded with friends. His life is a continual course of tea parties and suppers. An arm always lies through his as he walks down to the field, or to the tuck shop. And then, suddenly, a generation passes; he is left an anachronism without his friends. His contemporaries do not welcome him. They have made their own friends. If he has reached his prominence as an athlete he will be able to makefriends in other houses, and, before long, in his own house. To the athlete everything is forgiven. But the boy who has become the associate of bloods not through any quality of his own, but merely because he is good-looking, never makes friends with his contemporaries. They have been jealous of him and have distrusted him a long time. There was a time when they longed for the big boy to go, so that they could 'jolly well boot the little swine.' But members of the Sixth Form table consider it beneath their dignity to indulge emotions that are the exclusive property of fags. They remain coldly distant. It may be that for the favoured small boy these years of loneliness adjust the balance and teach him those lessons of fortitude and independence that he should have learnt in the day room. But it is an unhappy time. He can hardly look back on his schooldays without regret. He would wish things had turned out otherwise. And it is not thus that we should look back on our schooldays. Certainly I could wish nothing worse for any friend of mine than to be taken up as a small boy.
There remains to be considered the effect that such friendships have on the elder boy. And it is generally conceded that though they may on occasions do harm to the smaller boy, they usually prove of benefit to the elder boy. Authority confines its objection to the secrecy that is involved. An eyebrow is raised at the interchange of notes and the carefully arranged Sunday afternoon walks. 'This is bad, this isbad,' says Authority. 'There would be no need for all this secrecy if the thing were honest and straightforward. They are both ashamed of themselves really. They wish to hide the thing away from their masters and their comrades. It is a bad thing for a boy, the harbouring of a secret. It will prey upon his mind. He will be forced to lie within himself. He will be unable to look us squarely in the face. He will never be free from worry.' Now all this about the subtle poison of a secret life is very true (though it is a fact seldom taken into account in the question of self abuse), but it is not at all applicable to the romantic friendship. The secret is an open secret. Neither party is ashamed of it. And the pretence of a secret is little more than part of a delightful game. A child in a nursery lays a deck chair on the blue carpet and imagines he is sailing the high seas in a schooner, while with a poker to his shoulder he shoots an albatross for breakfast. Twelve years later he signs notes with a false name, rolls them into a pellet, conveys them to a messenger and imagines he is a diplomat. The sending of notes is nothing but a game. Otherwise no one would write them, carry them, nor read them: for they are most unnecessary, and most dangerous. People will drop them in the cloisters, or put them in their waistcoat pockets and then leave their waistcoats in the matron's room to have a button sewn on them. The writing of notes has upset more careers than the rustling of silk or the creaking of shoes. And yet theywill always be written, for they are a prelude to adventure.
Moreover, a certain measure of secrecy is prudent. If you have stolen a man's greatcoat you do not call at his house next day wearing it; and the schoolboy sees no reason why he should parade his affection before his head master's study window. Only the ass courts trouble. Prefects who are well aware of the existence of such a friendship do not wish to have their attention called to it officially. There are things they prefer not to notice. If a member of the Eleven and a new boy started out together for a walk under the shade of the school buildings the heads of their houses would reluctantly feel themselves forced to take some sort of action. They would be extremely annoyed with the school slow bowler for his lack of tact. A prefect is usually on the side of the house.
Masters, however, are pleased to imagine that a pact has been signed between the schoolboy and themselves which binds the schoolboy to confess to any fault he may have committed, and to answer any leading questions that may be put to him. The schoolboy does not look on things in this light. He knows that there is no such agreement. There are certain things he wants to do, the doing of which, if known, will render him liable to punishment. When the wish to do these overrides the fear of punishment he takes all reasonable precautions to avoid detection, and proceeds to break the inconvenient rule. It is up to the master to find him out.If the master came down to the dining-hall one evening and said: 'Now, look here, there have been complaints that some fellows, I don't say you, but fellows in the school, have been getting out at night and going down to the Eversham Arms. If any one of you here has been getting out at night, I want him to come to my study afterwards and tell me.' If a house master were to do that, the guilty one would not feel himself under the least compunction to own up. He has run a big risk in getting out of the boothole window at half-past eleven. It was up to the master to catch him then.
If a form master were to call a member of his form aside and say to him: 'Jones, last term you were bottom of the form; this term you have reached single figures. Last term you had to write me a hundred lines nearly every time I put you on to construe; this term you have not failed once. I cannot understand it. Are you working honestly?' Jones would reply: 'Yes, sir.' He would not feel that he was telling a lie. He would feel, on the other hand, that his form master had taken an unfair advantage of him in putting him a leading question. No one thinks a murderer lies because he says, 'Not guilty, my lord.' It is the law of England that the Crown has to prove the defendant guilty. A schoolboy considers himself entitled to the same rights as the murderer and the thief. A master has to find him out. And it is quite absurd to say that a boy's soul is going to suffer because of the secrecy he imposes on himselfin the course of a romantic friendship. There are a lot of things that a boy is not anxious that his house master should know, and of which no one could expect him to be ashamed. To smuggle into the dormitory a chicken, a loaf of bread, and a pound of cheese in preparation for a midnight feast is a natural and, according to one's point of view, a worthy act; but it is not a performance the success of which one would be in a hurry to confide in one's house master. When a schoolboy deceives a master he does not feel he is deceiving an individual, but an impersonal body. In the same way do we call the grocer's attention to the omission of a pound of butter on our weekly books, but skilfully conceal from the income-tax assessor a number of interesting facts. A lie is hardly a lie if the person telling it does not consider it so. We may dismiss altogether the assertion that romantic friendships are bad because they entail secrecy.
If, then, the objection of secrecy is to be discounted, it would at first sight appear that for the elder boy these friendships are, on the whole, good things. The emotion experienced is a noble one; it is unselfish, it makes considerable demands on the patience and self-control of the subject; it encourages the bigger boy to work hard and play his games harder; it protects him from many of the dangers of school life, and yet I believe that its results are, in the long run, more serious for the elder than for the younger boy.
It is the worst possible prelude to the sexual life of a man. It sends a boy into the world with an entirely false view of the normal sexual relations of men and women; it is a hindrance to him in marriage. A boy of sixteen experiences for a younger boy the emotion that he would naturally at such a period feel for a girl of his own age. He is surprised into a new relationship, and he is told that the relationship can only remain worthy of him as long as it remains platonic. Sexual emotion is, he is given to understand, unclean. During adolescence he will be subjected to a force that he must, at all costs, resist. That is the official attitude, and it is the attitude of nearly every unscientific writer on the subject. A schoolmaster considers the moral question from the point of view of the policeman. 'Here,' he says, 'is something that must be suppressed.' Various writers suggest various remedies. The popular idea is to sublimate the passions, to provide another focus. Schoolmasters usually select the focus that is most near to the boy's interests: namely, athletics. They encourage the athletic worship, because a boy who really wishes to excel in this will not run the risk of losing his proficiency by weakening practices. This panacea has not worked too well, and the band of earnest idealists has begun to clamour for a more spiritual focus: poetry, art, religion. Which is all very jolly, but gets us no nearer to solving the main problem of how a natural force is to be directed through an unnatural channel into a natural one. It isno sort of use to place a lump of granite in front of the unnatural channel and say: 'This is forbidden.' The stream will only select another course, and very likely one that will not lead it to the natural waters.
It is, I admit, an extremely difficult question, but that does not alter the fact that it is being treated in an entirely wrong manner. The boy is told that sexual emotion is wrong; he assumes, therefore, that love to be truly love must be sexless. He draws fine distinctions between love and lust. A decent fellow, he says, would never want to do anything like that with some one for whom he really cared. And nothing happens in the course of his romantic friendship to make him reconsider this opinion. It is probable that his affection will not be returned; and, indeed, why should it be? Under such circumstances it is natural that a big boy should be attracted by a smaller boy because the smaller boy is the nearest approach to the feminine ideal. It would be quite unnatural for a small boy to be attracted by a bigger boy who would be to him as far as possible removed from femininity. The small boy likes the elder boy, is grateful for his kindness to him, is perhaps even mildly fond of him; nothing more. As, therefore, there is no response to the elder boy, it is impossible for the natural rhythm of mutually felt emotion to carry them out of the reach of conventional standards, and the friendship is too sacred to the elder boy to allow passage to the itch of sensation; while the small boy, evenif he happened to be casual among his contemporaries on such matters, would be restrained by the shyness that he must always feel in the presence of a senior boy and by the inevitable embarrassment at finding himself the object of an emotion he does not understand.
Nothing happens, therefore, to disabuse the conviction that love in its purest form is sexless. As a boy is, however, on the whole an amoral creature, he sees no reason why he should not misconduct himself with a person for whom he has no respect. He is not sullying a fine romance. It is a different thing altogether; this is a thing of sensation. A bachelor refrains from prostitutes more often through fear of illness than through reverence for a moral code. There is at school a type that corresponds to the prostitute from whom boys refrain, when they do refrain, for many mixed reasons, of which fear of expulsion is generally not one. Boys are not afraid of punishments, nor do they think that a punishable offence is necessarily a moral offence. That point must always be kept in mind. Punishments to a boy's mind are part of the game that is played between him and authority. The boy has his own scale of values. He would think an immoral act highly reprehensible if he were at the time engaged in a romantic friendship, but he could square his conscience to it if he happened to be emotionally free.
The reasons why a boy commits an immoral act are so many and so complex that inquiry into them for the purpose of a generalisation isunprofitable. It may be that he has had a quarrel with his small friend, it may be that he is bored, or that he is curious; he may think it the 'blood' thing to do. If he is literary he may be in search of some equivalent for the emotional reactions of decadent poetry. The confessions that a boy makes himself must always be accepted with reserve. The confessional is a subtle form of flattery. It titillates the egotism; it is a self-indulgence. Madame Bovary used to invent small crimes because she enjoyed the romantic atmosphere of the confessional, and though most schoolboys would stand in no need of such invention, they create the most ingenious setting for their offences. They feel what they want to feel. They have derived emotion at second hand from some book, or the confidence of an elder brother; they want to make themselves believe that they are interesting. The most trivial affair is embellished with a wealth of motive that would have delighted Henry James. Sometimes they lie quite conscientiously.
A boy was once asked by his house master whether he felt that confirmation had been of any assistance to him. It had not, but the boy felt that it was up to him to pretend that it had. The house master obviously expected it; it was a social decency, on a par with the assurance to a hostess that one had spent a most delightful evening. The boy was inclined to think that he swore less than he had done. The master's interest was aroused. Where had he learnt to swear? The boy had, of course, acquired thisknowledge in the day room. He realised, however, that this was one of the things that one did not confess. He said he had learnt it from some navvies in the holidays. More questions were asked. 'Oh, yes,' the boy said, 'My people allow me to do more or less what I like. I wander all over the place.' It was quite untrue, but it confirmed the house master in his belief that all the faults of a Public School could be attributed to the ignorance and foolishness of parents. He developed the idea in a letter which he contributed to a well-known weekly.
It is never safe to generalise from a boy's confession, and house masters would do well in such cases to base their conclusions on their own experience and on their previous knowledge of the boy's character. In their investigations, however, of the moral question, there is one motive that they can almost certainly rule out: the motive of strong personal attraction. Such an act would be opposed to the ethics of school society, and a boy only rarely does what he, himself, feels to be wrong.
He is inclined to enter a world of women with the idea that the sexual impulse can only be gratified with a woman he does not love. He realises that in marriage it is necessary for the procreation of children. But he regards it chiefly from his point of view as a 'remedy against sin,' and on the woman's part an act of gracious compliance. It is thus that a man comes to divide women into classes: one's sisters' friends, and the rest. There is little needto elaborate the results of such an attitude. The subject has been discussed exhaustively. On this rock many marriages have been shipwrecked. It can do little in cases of strong mutual feeling. Passion harmonises all things; the rhythm of love takes its own course. But where the woman has not been deeply moved before marriage, where she knows her future husband only slightly, and is timid in his presence, then the preconceived formula of the 'pure girl' will achieve havoc. The woman will sink herself in motherhood, and the man will seek elsewhere diversion. A cynic has remarked that the man who marries a girl because she appeals to his higher nature will spend the rest of his life among those who appeal to his lower nature. And, like all epigrams, that remark presents a facet of the truth. It is now generally accepted that there is no more dangerous heresy than the idea that one does not 'feel like that about a decent girl.' Much has been written on the subject. But the causes of the heresy have not been sufficiently investigated. It is said, 'Boys are badly brought up.' Children, we are told, should be brought to regard their bodies as temples, and there the matter is left.
But this heresy is, I am certain, very largely the natural result of the public school system. It is confined to the upper and upper-middle classes, to those, that is, who have been to Public Schools. The collier and the peasant have no such fanciful illusions. Divorce must naturally be more common in circles where men and womenhave leisure to indulge their emotions, where temptations are frequent, where the imagination is most vivid, the longing for the unattainable most acute. But, even so, any student of character cannot but feel that the married lives of public school men are less happy than those of the lower classes.
All through the discussion of this delicate subject I have used marriage as the norm. It includes all other considerations. There are those who are shocked to learn of the existence of immorality in Public Schools, and the socialist press is only too ready for an opportunity of slinging mud at the object of its envy. But, however a boy is brought up, it is unlikely that he would pass unscathed through adolescence. Curiosity is as irresistible as fear. It is the power of the unknown. The moral offences of a public school boy are disgusting enough, but because they are so entirely physical they have little lasting effect on him. They play indeed a very casual part in his life. Nothing is at stake. The romantic friendship, on the other hand, is the dawn of love; it is a delicate and deep emotion; it is the most exciting thing that up to then has happened to a boy; it touches his senses and his soul. And, because he experiences this emotion for the first time in an unnatural environment, his natural reaction is misdirected and misinformed. It is important that we should find some remedy.
FOOTNOTE:[5]It may here be mentioned that in girls' schools such friendships would seem to be common, and no great objection taken to them. Unnatural vice between women is not, of course, a criminal offence. Its existence is not widely recognised. And it has never been treated very seriously by men. But it was surprising to read a few months ago in a leading London newspaper an article on 'schoolgirls,' which accepted such friendships among girls as an amusing topic for popular journalism. The editor would probably have had a fit if a similar article on romantic friendships in Public Schools had been submitted to him. The attitude of the man who has not been to a Public School to this side of school life is a mixture of ignorance and astonished horror.
[5]It may here be mentioned that in girls' schools such friendships would seem to be common, and no great objection taken to them. Unnatural vice between women is not, of course, a criminal offence. Its existence is not widely recognised. And it has never been treated very seriously by men. But it was surprising to read a few months ago in a leading London newspaper an article on 'schoolgirls,' which accepted such friendships among girls as an amusing topic for popular journalism. The editor would probably have had a fit if a similar article on romantic friendships in Public Schools had been submitted to him. The attitude of the man who has not been to a Public School to this side of school life is a mixture of ignorance and astonished horror.
[5]It may here be mentioned that in girls' schools such friendships would seem to be common, and no great objection taken to them. Unnatural vice between women is not, of course, a criminal offence. Its existence is not widely recognised. And it has never been treated very seriously by men. But it was surprising to read a few months ago in a leading London newspaper an article on 'schoolgirls,' which accepted such friendships among girls as an amusing topic for popular journalism. The editor would probably have had a fit if a similar article on romantic friendships in Public Schools had been submitted to him. The attitude of the man who has not been to a Public School to this side of school life is a mixture of ignorance and astonished horror.
Desmond Coke has described inThe Bending of a Twig, the middle years of a public school career as being slow to pass, but swift in retrospect. He devoted two chapters to them—'See-saw down' and 'See-saw up.' And those chapter headings convey more clearly than a long analysis the nature of that period. To begin with it is 'See-saw down.' The boy is confused with his new-found liberty; the future stretches endlessly before him. There is plenty of time. There is no need for hurry. And so he rags and wastes his time and makes, on the whole, a pretty general nuisance of himself. His house reports are worse at the end of every term. His parents grow worried; they remember the bright promise of that first term: the prize, the promotion, the glowing panegyric. The arrival of the blue envelope during the second week of the holidays is the occasion of considerable domestic stress. On such a morning one remembers that one has promised to spend the day with a friend at Richmond.
And then suddenly, when the revel is at its height, some chance incident or conversation forces a boy to realise that he has not so much time as he had thought, that the weeks arepassing, that, already, the end has drawn close to him. Clifford Bax, in one of his many beautiful poems, has described a man's first appreciation of the approach of age.
'There is a certain mid-way hour in lifeWhich startles every man, when the tide turnsAnd, wave on wave, we hear death coming on.'
'There is a certain mid-way hour in lifeWhich startles every man, when the tide turnsAnd, wave on wave, we hear death coming on.'
'There is a certain mid-way hour in lifeWhich startles every man, when the tide turnsAnd, wave on wave, we hear death coming on.'
'There is a certain mid-way hour in life
Which startles every man, when the tide turns
And, wave on wave, we hear death coming on.'
In the same way the boy discovers that the half of his schooldays are at an end, that he has put them to little use. And, as the temporal quality of life drives the epicurean to gather with what eager haste he may, flowers that for him will soon have blossomed, the sense of passing days defines and directs for the schoolboy the course of ambition. It is perhaps the first moment of conscious thought, of objective reasoning. The days of unreflecting action are at an end. He is no longer a child playing in a nursery. He is a man, subject to the laws of time and space, a mortal man aware of his mortality.
Now this sudden change, which partakes of the nature of a conversion, owes its existence, as often as not, to some perfectly trivial occurrence. The stage is not set appropriately. There is no long heart to heart talk with a schoolmaster, a parent, or a friend at the end of which the boy leaps to his feet, claps his hand to his forehead, and exclaims: 'I see the evil of my ways.' Such dramatic moments, I suppose, take place occasionally, but they are the exception. Theboy has reached that stage of his development when the idea of time can become an actuality to him, and some quite casual incident will bring this actuality before him.
It is possible, of course, that this reformation may be effected by a conversation. But it will be an unrehearsed effect. One is walking down to hall, and, through the open door of the changing room overhears some uncomplimentary statement of one's worth. The statement need not be made by a particular friend. Indeed, it will probably be more effective if it is not. We accept with composure the criticisms of our friends, our relatives, our enemies. Wherever there is an intimate relationship there is friction. We know that, at times, we must be intensely annoying to our friends, because they are at times so intensely annoying to ourselves. Little tricks, traits of character, intonations of the voice that we should hardly notice in those to whom we are indifferent, exasperate us in those for whom we care. We expect our friends at times to say nasty things about us. We are too conscious of our own delinquencies. But impersonal criticism is unpleasant; it is like an unfavourable review that is unsigned. If we cannot reassure ourselves with the knowledge that our assailant is either jealous of us or dislikes us, or thinks we pay too many attentions to his wife; if, that is to say, we can detect in this criticism no ulterior motive, but simply a dispassionate impersonal disapproval of ourselves and of our work, then we do indeedfeel that the need for drastic self-criticism is immediate.
When, therefore, Jones on his way down to hall overhears Ferguson, who is in another form, who has never been brought into contact with him, who has no possible reason for feeling envious or jealous, remark that Jones is the sort of fellow whom the house could get on very well without, he goes quickly to his study and communes with himself.
At the beginning of my third year at school, when I was very happy, very light-hearted, very boisterous, and, I suppose, rather obnoxious generally, I was standing at the counter of the tuck shop waiting to be served with a poached egg and a sausage. I experienced considerable difficulty in catching the eye of the waitress, and for the better announcing of my presence I took a knife out of the basket and beat it upon the zinc covering of the counter. The waitress, who was harassed by the number of orders, turned round impatiently: 'Oh, do be quiet, Mr. Waugh,' she said, 'I don't know what's come over you lately. You used to be such a nice quiet boy when you first came.' Several people laughed, but her remark was a shock to me. I had not the slightest romantic interest in her. I did not care greatly what opinion she held of my moral worth, but I had not before realised that it was possible for a change of which I was myself ignorant to take place within me, that a process of degeneration could take its slow effect, altering me in the eyes of others,leaving me unaltered in my own, that, like rust on iron, environment could corrode temperament. That chance remark had a most profound effect on me. It gave me a sudden insight into the secret forces that lie under the surface of life. I do not know whether from the outside I appeared afterwards a different person. One cannot focus the impression one has of oneself and the impression one makes on others. But to myself I know that I was different. And some such revelation invariably comes to a boy during his period of school life.
In novels and stories we attribute it to some emotional crisis. The reason of the change is less important than that there should be change, and that the reader should be able to realise that for such a change there was a reason. But, actually, the reason is usually trivial enough. It may be that a boy's pride has been rebuffed; some one has got a house cap before him. He begins to reassure himself with the old dope: 'There is plenty of time. It doesn't matter. I'll catch him later on.' But for once the old dope does not work. He realises with a shock that there is less time than he had thought. He has allowed his rival to get too far ahead. A house cap is only two stages distant from a first. He may not have time to catch him up. In the light of the discovery he revises his whole career. He asks himself whither he is drifting. He sees that he has passed beyond the stage of a vague promise into one of definite rivalry and achievement.
The prospects of the beginner are always golden. His wares are not yet for sale in the open market. He has not entered into competition with his contemporaries. A young professional makes a century during his first month of first-class cricket and is immediately the object of generous enthusiasm. The reporter can write of him as ecstatically as he will. The professional has not yet reached representative cricket. At school a slow left-hand bowler takes eight wickets for twenty-seven in a house match. He is spoken of at once as the coming man. For another season he will continue to take wickets in house matches to the delight of every one. Then he will enter the lists of representative cricket. He will play on uppers, and it will have to be decided, not whether he is a good slow left-hand bowler, but whether he is better than Evans in Buller's, and Morrison in Wilkes's. It is so easy to say of a boy of fifteen: 'Some day he will be captain of the house.' We can all of us exclaim at the beginning of a Marathon: 'What a beautiful runner that fellow is.' It is after ten miles have been run and the runners have sorted themselves out that the real race begins. It is the appreciation of this moment that ends the 'see-saw down' period and sees the start of the 'see-saw up.'
It must not be imagined, however, that this process of see-saw up involves a complete moral, spiritual, and intellectual reformation; it sometimes does; more usually it means that the schoolboy looks at the same life from adifferent angle. His standards, his scale of values remain unaltered. He feels that he has not adjusted himself properly to their demands. He has been making an ass of himself: he has been ragging about, he has allowed opportunities to slip past him. 'It won't do,' he tells himself. 'I must stop all this. I must settle down.'
Such a resolution involves, to a certain extent, an appreciation of imminent responsibilities; a boy realises that a series of desperate escapades will prejudice his prospects of prefectship; it often results in the exchange of a positive for a negative manner of life. The Sixth Former, the potential scholar of Balliol, is spurred by such an experience to really hard work. For him a turning-point has been reached. It is different, however, for the second eleven colour who has reached the Lower Fifth after three years of spasmodic cribbing. He has been in the past a free-lance, an irresponsible ragster. He decides that the time has come for him to settle down. If the Lower Fifth is, as it often is, a comfortable backwater, he is content to rest there. He sits on a back bench, and plays an occasional part in the life of the form. While he was a ragster he had to work. A well-prepared lesson was his armour. Now that he no longer rags he need no longer work; he is content to be inoffensive, agreeable, somnolent. He considers that between himself and his form master there is an unwritten pact by which each agrees to leave the other alone. It is as though he said:'Your time, Mr. Featherbrain, is fully occupied between the ragsters and the industrious. You have to keep a constant watch upon the ragster. You have to teach the industrious. That is a whole-time job. Why worry about me? You need not keep a watch upon me. It is agreed that I shall do no ragging. And why try to teach me anything. Your energies are wasted upon me. I don't want to learn anything. You may lead a horse to the water, you know. Why worry yourself and me! There are all those other fellows who want to learn.' And the master, usually, signs the contract. He is a busy man. The temptation is very great. He excuses himself in the common room by speaking of 'fellows like dear old Thomas; good-natured chaps, but with absolutely no brains. Latin and Greek are flung away on them. But they'll make fine empire builders.' And so the boy who has settled down spends the greater part of his day wool-gathering in vacuous laziness. To nothing that happens between chapel and lunch can he bring the least enthusiasm. His thoughts are fixed on the more thrilling encounters of the football field. His whole life, indeed, is centred on sport, and on the most entertaining methods he can discover for the better employing of his spare time. All his energy, all his enthusiasm, is concentrated into one, or perhaps two, focuses. It is not surprising that he should become tolerably proficient at games and a source of moral anxiety to prefects and house masters.
Is the pursuit of athletic success a sufficiently engrossing occupation for such a boy? That is the question that a house master unconsciously puts to himself. He must put it to himself, but his attitude to this particular type of boy is based on a non-committal answer to this question: the answer—'Perhaps; but it's up to you.' The house master, therefore, does all in his power to persuade the boy that the acquiring of a First Fifteen cap is his immediate object in life. He will not state his case in words; but he will omit the uncomfortable topic of form work in conversations, and discuss at length the prospects of the house in the senior matches. If he does not succeed in directing the entire energy of the boy on games, the results of such a failure may be disastrous. A fellow of seventeen who has nothing particular to do is bound to find himself in mischief. This fact is realised by both parents and house masters, and those boys who are good neither at games nor work usually leave at about this period. It is the falling out of the unsuccessful runner in a long race. It is no good going on. The leaders are too far ahead. The gap between the senior and the junior is thus considerably increased. The stepping-stones have been removed. A boy of eighteen at the start of his last year sees very few of his contemporaries sitting at the Sixth Form table. Of the eight or nine boys who came there with him, only three are left, and the Fifth Form table is filled by fellows two or three years junior to himself, with whom he has buta slight acquaintance. It is always the 'blood' who is asked to stop on that extra year. The insignificant are encouraged by silence to retire.