Mrs. Buttons, it is as much as we can expect, and a great deal
more than we deserve.

But this study is not about Mrs. Buttons; she would require many
studies. I will take a less impressive case of my principle, the
principle of keeping in the mind an actual personality when we are
talking about types or tendencies or generalized ideals. Take, for
example, the question of the education of boys. Almost every post
brings me pamphlets expounding some advanced and suggestive scheme of
education; the pupils are to be taught separate; the sexes are to
be taught together; there should be no prizes; there should be no
punishments; the master should lift the boys to his level; the master
should descend to their level; we should encourage the heartiest
comradeship among boys, and also the tenderest spiritual intimacy with
masters; toil must be pleasant and holidays must be instructive; with
all these things I am daily impressed and somewhat bewildered. But on
the great Buttons' principle I keep in my mind and apply to all these
ideals one still vivid fact; the face and character of a particular
schoolboy whom I once knew. I am not taking a mere individual oddity, as
you will hear. He was exceptional, and yet the reverse of eccentric;
he was (in a quite sober and strict sense of the words) exceptionally
average. He was the incarnation and the exaggeration of a certain spirit
which is the common spirit of boys, but which nowhere else became so
obvious and outrageous. And because he was an incarnation he was, in his
way, a tragedy.

I will call him Simmons. He was a tall, healthy figure, strong, but a
little slouching, and there was in his walk something between a slight
swagger and a seaman's roll; he commonly had his hands in his pockets.
His hair was dark, straight, and undistinguished; and his face, if one
saw it after his figure, was something of a surprise. For while the form
might be called big and braggart, the face might have been called weak,
and was certainly worried. It was a hesitating face, which seemed to
blink doubtfully in the daylight. He had even the look of one who has
received a buffet that he cannot return. In all occupations he was the
average boy; just sufficiently good at sports, just sufficiently bad at
work to be universally satisfactory. But he was prominent in nothing,
for prominence was to him a thing like bodily pain. He could not endure,
without discomfort amounting to desperation, that any boy shoul