“The Public School boy has after all strong feelings of honour and fairness: and I am sure much might be done by cultivating the Public Opinion of the school: making devoted and disinterested friendships highly thought of and praised, and condemning as base and mean the least attempt to befoul a young boy’s purity through a gross and selfish desire for personal gratification. School public opinion would, I am sure, tend quite readily to flow in such channels. But this would demand an openness of treatment of the whole question such as does not at present exist. That the greatest force the schoolmaster has at his command should be so ignored (and so needlessly) is more than absurd: it is monstrous. And it concerns him as a teacher quite as much as the boys themselves in their relations with each other. I believe that gaining a boy’s affection is the necessary preliminary to really teaching him anything. Otherwise you do not really teach him at all.”—Private letter.
“I could tell you a good deal of another equally strong friendship I formed (myself twenty-five, boy fourteen) which was one of the happiest events of my life. It was acknowledged on both sides, but perfectly restrained and pure: and we saw a great deal of each other during most of the school holidays for about a year. I could have done anything with that boy, my influence over him was for the time being I should say unlimited: and undoubtedly immense good accrued to us both.”—Ibid.
“In my own school-life—as a day scholar—I had two such friendships, though of course in a day school there was not the same possibility of their development. One was with an elder boy some five years my senior, and the other with a master some twelve years older than myself. I was a shy, timid youngster, and not having a robust physique did not enter much into the ordinary athletics of the school. My elder friend was a very delicate, gentle, refined boy with a purity and loftiness of mind in striking contrast to the filthy moral atmosphere of the school at that time, but he was never censorious or self-righteous. I feel that this friendship was the most powerful influence in my early life in keeping a high ideal of conduct before me—much more powerful than the influence of home, which I do not think I was at all conscious of.
“After he left school, for Cambridge, we used to write regularly to one another—long letters, hardly ever less than three sheets in length. I remember I used to think him the most handsome man I knew, but looking now at his photo, taken about that time and comparing it with others, I see that his features were inferior to many others of my school-fellows. At the end of his second year he died of consumption. It was during the Long Vacation, and I was abroad at the time. I remember I used to sit up late into the night writing very long letters to him about all I had seen, to interest him during his illness. I did not know how ill he really was, but I had a terrible fear that I should not see him again. When I got back and found he had just died the shock was awful. For weeks I felt as if I had not a friend in the whole world. I have never felt any loss so keenly either before or since.…
“The other friendship with my mathematical master, though not so intimate, was still of a very affectionate character. I feel I owe a great deal to it—he laid the foundation of my ideal of a teacher’s duty to his pupils.”—Private letter.
“It is not new in itself; this, the feeling that drew Jesus to John, or Shakespeare to the youth of the sonnets, or that inspired the friendships of Greece, has been with us before, and in the new citizenship we shall need it again. The Whitmanic love of comrades is its modern expression; Democracy—as socially, not politically conceived—its basis. The thought as to how much of the solidarity of labour and the modern Trade-Union movement may be due to an unconscious faith in this principle of comradeship, is no idle one. The freer, more direct, and more genuine relationship between men, which is implied by it, must be the ultimate basis of the reconstructed Workshop.”—C. R. Ashbee, “Workshop Reconstruction and Citizenship,” p. 160.
A case of passionate attachment between two Indian boys was told to the author of the present book by a master at a school in India. The boys—who were about sixteen years of age—were both at the same school, and were devoted friends; but the day came when they had to part. One was taken away by his parents to go to a distant part of the country. The other was inconsolable at the prospect. When the day arrived, and his companion was removed, he soon after went quietly to a well in the school precincts, jumped in, and was drowned. The news, sent on by wire, reached the departing friend while still on his journey. He said little, but at one of the stations left the train and disappeared. The train went on, but at a little distance out, the boy ran out of the bushes by the line, threw himself on the rails, and was killed.
The following is taken from one of the “cases” recorded by Havelock Ellis in his “Sexual Inversion”; “The earliest sex-impression that I am conscious of is at the age of nine or ten falling in love with a handsome boy who must have been about two years my senior. I do not recollect ever having spoken to him, but my desire, as far as I can recall, was that he should seize hold of and handle me. I have a distinct impression yet of how pleasurable even physical pain or cruelty would have been at his hands.”—Havelock Ellis, op. cit., “case” xiii., p. 71.
“When I was about sixteen-and-a-half years old, there came into the house a boy about two years younger than myself, who became the absorbing thought of my school-days. I do not remember a moment, from the time I first saw him to the time I left school, that I was not in love with him, and the affection was reciprocated, if somewhat reservedly. He was always a little ahead of me in books and scholarship, but as our affection ripened we spent most of our spare time together, and he received my advances much as a girl who is being wooed, a little mockingly perhaps, but with real pleasure. He allowed me to fondle and caress him, but our intimacy never went further than a kiss, and about that even was the slur of shame; there was always a barrier between us, and we never so much as whispered to one another concerning those things of which all the school obscenely talked.”—Same case, p. 73.