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.
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.
CHAPTER VIII THE MIDDLE YEARS
Desmond Coke has described in The 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 are passing, 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 life