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.