CHAPTER VII MORALITY AND THE ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIP
It is at this period, also, of a boy's development that the moral question assumes a definite significance. There is no phase of school life that is more generally misunderstood and misrepresented, and there is no phase that a writer tackles with greater misgiving and disinclination. He is confronted with the barricaded prejudices of a vested interest, with the tremulous ignorance of mothers who seek to be deceived, with the conspiracy of silence that exists between boys, parents, and masters, and, last of all, with the wilful jealousy of the yellow press that is only too ready to decry the value of what it is pleased to call the 'trades union of snobbery.' There are times, indeed, when it seems better to acquiesce in that conspiracy of silence rather than to give those speculators in contention another opportunity of mud-slinging. There are times when it seems hopeless to attempt to explain the nature of public school morality to those who have not themselves been to a Public School. It is like looking at a stained-glass window from the outside. One reminds oneself that for many years, without, perhaps, any very disastrous results, we have muddled along in contented ignorance and self-deceit. Why not leave things where they are? Why stir up trouble? And yet the moral question is such an essential part of school life, it exercises such an influence on the development of the boy; indirectly it colours so considerably the attitude of the master to every other phase of school life, that it is impossible to omit all reference to it in a detailed study such as this, and, if it is impossible to avoid mention of it, it is fatal to content oneself, as one may very well do in a novel, with stray suggestions and inferences.
A novel is an abstraction. One compresses into a few pages the action of several years, so that one has to suggest rather than to state. One can withhold one's own opinion, one is under no compunction to generalise from the incidents one selects. One is telling a story or interpreting a personality. Only rarely is one constructing a thesis. In a novel it is not difficult to deal with the moral question. Most good school stories have touched more or less indirectly on some side of it. Ivor Brown and Compton Mackenzie have both dealt subtly with an intricate relationship. Hugh Walpole, if less originally, faced the same situation more courageously, while Arnold Lunn in Loose Ends has interpreted the boy as opposed to the official attitude to this issue with extreme effectiveness. The novelist is constrained to discuss only that part of the question that affects the action of the story. That is one of the great charms of story-telling: one can touch lightly without need of explanation on the most delicate situations. One can say only as much as one wants to say, and say it, what is more, obliquely. In a book such as this, however, one must deal with the subject thoroughly if at all. One must tackle every side of it. One is bound to follow one's thought through to the end. And that is a thing that no one cares to do in public. It was said of a certain intrepid Rugby player that he had not the brains to be afraid. It is certainly true that many soldiers lost their nerve after they had been once wounded, and that few soldiers were really frightened till they had seen what a shell could do; it may well be that at twenty-three one has not sufficient experience of the world to realise what risks one runs through honesty.
The first difficulty, especially for those who, without having been to a Public School themselves, are the fathers of present or prospective public school boys, is to start investigations with a clear mind. This feat the majority never manage to accomplish. For the moral question in schools is concerned with the relationship of two members of the same sex. Now such a relationship is counted in the world at large an unmentionable and unforgivable sin. It is regarded with horror by the average man. It is a penal offence. The man who enters into such a relationship is abnormal, and, as such, is considered a menace to society. But the same standards are not applicable to school life.
A man was intended by nature to marry at eighteen. The average villager, clerk, pit-boy, work-boy begins 'walking out' with a girl at the age of fifteen or sixteen; the public school boy has no such opportunities of courtship. Three hundred boys are spending three-quarters of their lives in a monastic world; from the beginning of the term to the end the only women to whom they have the opportunity of speaking are the matron and the house master's wife. They have never any chances of seeing girls of their own class and of their own age. At a particularly susceptible period, therefore, they have no natural object for their affections. The youngest boys are only thirteen, the eldest are between eighteen or nineteen.
In such circumstances it would be surprising if there were no uncomfortable complications. The public school system is, in this respect, unnatural; one must expect unnatural results. The trouble is to discover what those results are. For, although people speak glibly enough of immorality in Public Schools, it is extremely doubtful whether they realise of what exactly that immorality consists.
It is a convenient phrase, but beyond it there is the conspiracy of silence. Schoolmasters prefer to deal with straight issues. They dislike the subtleties of action and character which are of such charm to the psychologist. They like to say, 'This is an offence.' Finer shades of meaning trouble them. At least that is their official attitude. And so it has come to be generally accepted that public school morality resolves itself into one main issue: that is, the corruption of a small boy by a big one. To protect the new boy from this danger elaborate precautions are taken. It is on this point that a boy is given advice before he goes to school. He is warned never to make friends with boys bigger than himself; it is against this danger that the majority of school sermons are directed. And, of course, this is a very convenient attitude for the schoolmaster to adopt. The offence is obviously so grave that there can be no cause to withhold complete official condemnation; it is also so rare that the head master is able to assure prospective parents of the excellent tone of the school. For I am convinced that the deliberate seduction of a smaller boy is an extremely rare occurrence. There are, of course, certain houses—probably there is one at every school—in which a good-looking boy stands very little chance of remaining straight. But I have not been in such a house and I can speak with no authority. I have heard, certainly, some astonishing stories of what can be tolerated in a really bad house; but, second-hand reports, especially on such matters, can only be accepted with reserve. Certainly in the average house cases of corruption are very rare. Few boys have the nerve, the assurance, or the adroitness to attempt such a task. A man of twenty-five will set out deliberately to seduce a housemaid, but the schoolboy in such matters is a novice. If a senior boy is casually attracted by the appearance of a smaller boy, he asks a friend lower down in the house to make inquiries as to the morals of the small boy. If the 'go-between' discovers that the small boy is 'straight,' the elder boy lets the matter fall from his mind. There are others who are not. If, on the other hand, the attraction is more than casual, the chances of seduction are even more remote. It is unlikely that the affection will be reciprocated. And, if a boy is really fond of another boy, the last thing he would wish would be to subject his friend to unwelcome advances. When a boy first falls in love with a girl the thought of sexual intimacy is, often, unattractive. It is only when his love is returned that he really desires it. It is fatal to confuse the processes of life at large with the processes of life in a monastic system. Because young men seduce young women with regrettable frequency, it is assumed that much the same sort of thing is happening at a Public School. And, parents believing this, are reassured; they are certain that their dear child when young will be strong enough to resist the passive temptation; they are equally certain that their dear child when nearly a man would not, for one moment, consider the possibility of active sin. And this amiable delusion schoolmasters encourage. It saves them a lot of trouble. They say one thing in public and another in private. But the Jekyll and Hyde business breeds confusion. They forget what they should believe and what they should not believe. They are agreed only on this: that any attempt at criticism, at explanation, at interpretation shall be counteracted with a concerted unanimity of opinion. They will deny hotly the prevalence of any such practices, they will make slighting references to the bad house in the bad school. They will complete their defence by asserting that for what faults there are the parents are alone responsible in that they had not sufficiently warned their sons of the evils of a Public School—evils, be it noted, that they had previously assured the parent did not exist outside the perverted imagination of the critic. And yet it is amazing what these same apologists will be prepared to believe about any institution other than their own.
Six years ago Sandhurst had an extremely bad name. Every kind of debauch was rumoured to flourish there. Sobriety was only more unpopular than purity. The G. C.'s secreted whisky beneath their beds, and actresses within them. The glittering temptations of St Anthony allured the unwary in the tea-shops of Camberley. And I remember being shown, before I went there, a letter that had been sent to the parents of a prospective cadet by his head master. 'I hope,' the letter ran, 'that Arthur is aware of the temptations to which he will be subjected. Concupiscence seems to be the chief topic of conversation and the sole Sunday afternoon amusement of the cadets.' It all sounded fearfully exciting. But it proved very tame. Indeed I am inclined to think that, on the whole, fewer temptations presented themselves to me during the eight months I spent at Sandhurst than during any other period of my time in the army. A fellow could do what he liked. No pressure was put on him to drink or gamble, or pursue loose women. He was none the less respected for being straight, nor the more admired for being crooked. A community such as this which exerts pressure on the individual in neither direction, I should be prepared to call as moral as any that is likely to be found this side of heaven, yet this head master, who would, no doubt, repudiate hotly the least suggestion that immorality in his own school was anything but a spasmodic and occasional phenomenon, was ready to believe that Sandhurst was a cesspool of all the vices that flourished so gracefully in the days of Petronius Arbiter. In our investigations we are not likely to be helped far by schoolmasters. They are constrained by the laws of exchange and mart to vindicate the quality of their wares.
It is generally assumed for the purposes of dialectic that there are two classes of persons: the normal and the abnormal, and that all normal people follow the same process of development from birth to death. To disprove this Havelock Ellis collected at the end of certain volumes of his psychology authenticated histories of men whose development he claimed to be normal, but whose histories were as different from one another as apples are from plums. In the face of such evidence it is dangerous to dogmatise on the gradual discovery of the sexual impulse by public school boys during adolescence. The most one can say is that the majority of them come to a Public School innocent and ignorant, and that they leave it certainly not ignorant and with a relative degree of innocence. This at least is sure—that between the years of thirteen and nineteen the impulse will have become powerfully defined and that each boy will have had to come to terms with its direction and control.
Now the important point seems to me to be this: the sexual impulse is a force on the proper direction of which depends, to a large extent, the happiness of a man's life; and marriage is the course into which it should be directed. No one, I think, will deny that. We may talk of the liberation of the sexes, of greater facilities for divorce, of the right of each man and woman to repair a mistake caused by the first surprise of a newly-awakened instinct; but there can be no questioning the assertion that monogamy is the ideal, and that while nothing can be more wretched than an ill-harmonised relationship, in the lifelong devotion of man and woman is to be found the surest happiness. That is the standard by which public school morality should be judged. But it is not the standard by which it is officially, and indeed generally, judged. A Public School is only a phase, a prelude in the sexual development of a man. Head masters are inclined to mistake it for the completed rhythm.
In the same way that the head master of a Preparatory School specially coaches a boy for a scholarship, not realising that what for him is the whole race is for the boy but a first lap, so the head master of a Public School regards the preservation of innocence between the years of 13 and 19 as the entire battle. As far as I can make out this attitude is adopted by nearly every unscientific writer on the subject.
If the matter ended there it would, of course, be simple. Rigid policemanship and supervision and a system of spies would probably be effective. They might stamp out impurity to a large extent; they would also destroy the discipline of independence, of trust and of authority that one learns at a Public School. The matter is far less simple. The public school system is unnatural. Through unnatural channels, therefore, a natural impulse has to flow into a natural course.
Let us see, more or less, what happens.
We have assumed that an ignorant and innocent boy arrives at his Public School at the age of thirteen, and, to simplify the matter further, we will assume that the boy is not particularly good-looking, and is not, therefore, likely to win the patronage of his seniors. For the first weeks everything is so strange that he lives in a world of his own fashioning. Later on, as he begins to enter the life of the school, he is puzzled by references to an offence the nature of which he does not understand. He hears some one described as being 'smutty.' He does not in any way connect this with the elaborate address that was delivered to him on the last day at his prep. Indeed I knew of a new boy who informed his parents on a postcard that a rather decent chap in his house had been nearly sacked for 'smut.' 'Is this,' he asked, 'anything serious?' He received in reply a reassuring letter telling him that he need not worry about such things just yet.
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; the atmosphere 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 him the 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 called Pleasure I 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 me in 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 nearest approach 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 hall and 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 when he 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 hope to 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 a boy 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 occupies only 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 own experience 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 sense of 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 inclined to 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 none too 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 make friends 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 is bad,' 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 they will 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 himself in 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 is no 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, even if 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 is unprofitable. 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 this knowledge 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 need to 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 women have 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.