What impression of bygone schoolboy life
do Tom Brown and Eric make upon our minds?
The outstanding sensation appears to be this, that fifty years ago life at school was more spacious than now—more full of incident and variety. In those days a boy's spare time was his own. How did he spend his half-holidays? If he was a good boy—good in the bad sense of the word—he went and sat upon a hill-top and admired the scenery, or thought of his mother, or possibly gripped another good boy by the hand and said: "Let me call you Edwin, and you shall always call me Eric." If he was a normal healthy boy he went swimming, or bird-nesting, or (more usually) poaching, and generally encountered adventure by the way. If he was a bad boy he retired with other malefactors to a public-house, where he indulged in an orgy of roast goose and brandy-and-water.
Nous avons changé tout cela. Compulsory games have put an end to such licence, and in so doing have docked a good deal of liberty as well. The result has been to emphasize the type at the expense of the individual. It is a good type—a grand type—but it bears hardly upon some of its more angular components. The new system keeps the weak boy out of temptation and the idle boy out of mischief; but the quiet, reflective, unathletic boy hates it. He has little chance now to dream dreams or commune with nature. Still, his chance comes later in life; and as we all have to learn to toe the line at some time or another, thrice blessed is he who gets over the lesson in early youth.
The prefectorial system, too, has enlarged boys' sense of responsibility, and has put an end to many abuses which no master could ever reach. But on the whole we may say of the public-school boy throughout the ages that plus que l'on le change, plus c'est la même chose. Schoolboy gods have not altered. Strength, fleetness of foot, physical beauty, loyalty to one's House and one's School—youth still worships these things. There is the same admiration for natural brilliancy, be it in athletics or conversation or scholarship, and the same curious contempt for the plodder—even the successful plodder—in all departments of life. The weakest still goes to the wall. He is not bumped against it so vigorously as he used to be; but he still goes there, and always will.
Still, has the present generation developed no new characteristics? Let us turn to a batch of modern school stories, and see.
We have many to choose from—Stalky, for instance. Stalky has come in for a shower of abuse from certain quarters. He hits the sentimentalist hard. We are told that the book is vulgar, that the famous trio are "little beasts." (I think Mr. A. C. Benson said so.) Still, Mr. Kipling never touches any subject which he does not adorn, and in Stalky he brings out vividly some of the salient features of modern school life. He has drawn masters as they have never been drawn before: the portraits may be cruel, biassed, not sufficiently representative; but how they live! He has put the case for the unathletic boy with convincing truth. He depicts, too, very faithfully, the curious camaraderie which prevails nowadays between boys and masters, and pokes mordant fun at the sycophancy which this state of things breeds in a certain type of boy—the "Oh, sir! and No, sir! and Yes, sir! and Please, sir!" brigade—and deals faithfully with the master who takes advantage of out-of-school intimacy to be familiar and offensive in school, addressing boys by their nicknames and making humorous reference to extra-scholastic incidents. And above all Mr. Kipling knows the heart of a boy. He understands, above all men, a boy's intense reserve upon matters that lie deepest within him, and his shrinking from and repugnance to unrestrained and blatant discussion of these things. Do you remember the story of the fat man—"the jelly-bellied flag-flapper"—who came down to lecture to the school on patriotism?
"Now the reserve of a boy is tenfold deeper than the reserve of a maid, she having been made for one end only by blind Nature, but man for several. With a large and healthy hand he tore down these veils, and trampled them under the well-intentioned feet of eloquence. In a raucous voice he cried aloud little matters, like the hope of Honour and the dream of Glory, that boys do not discuss with their most intimate equals.... He profaned the most secret places of their souls with outcries and gesticulations. He bade them consider the deeds of their ancestors, in such fashion that they were flushed to their tingling ears. Some of them—the rending voice cut a frozen stillness—might have had relatives who perished in defence of their country. (They thought, not a few of them, of an old sword in a passage, or above a breakfast-table, seen and fingered by stealth since they could walk.) He adjured them to emulate those illustrious examples; and they looked all ways in their extreme discomfort.
"Their years forbade them even to shape their thoughts clearly to themselves. They felt savagely that they were being outraged by a fat man who considered
marbles a game.... What, in the name of everything caddish, was he driving at, who waved this horror before their eyes?"