d be
noticed or sensationally separated from the long line of boys; for him,
to be distinguished was to be disgraced.

Those who interpret schoolboys as merely wooden and barbarous, unmoved
by anything but a savage seriousness about tuck or cricket, make the
mistake of forgetting how much of the schoolboy life is public and
ceremonial, having reference to an ideal; or, if you like, to an
affectation. Boys, like dogs, have a sort of romantic ritual which is
not always their real selves. And this romantic ritual is generally the
ritual of not being romantic; the pretence of being much more
masculine and materialistic than they are. Boys in themselves are very
sentimental. The most sentimental thing in the world is to hide your
feelings; it is making too much of them. Stoicism is the direct product
of sentimentalism; and schoolboys are sentimental individually, but
stoical collectively.

For example, there were numbers of boys at my school besides myself
who took a private pleasure in poetry; but red-hot iron would not have
induced most of us to admit this to the masters, or to repeat poetry
with the faintest inflection of rhythm or intelligence. That would have
been anti-social egoism; we called it "showing off." I myself remember
running to school (an extraordinary thing to do) with mere internal
ecstasy in repeating lines of Walter Scott about the taunts of Marmion
or the boasts of Roderick Dhu, and then repeating the same lines in
class with the colourless decorum of a hurdy-gurdy. We all wished to be
invisible in our uniformity; a mere pattern of Eton collars and coats.

But Simmons went even further. He felt it as an insult to brotherly
equality if any task or knowledge out of the ordinary track was
discovered even by accident. If a boy had learnt German in infancy; or
if a boy knew some terms in music; or if a boy was forced to confess
feebly that he had read "The Mill on the Floss"--then Simmons was in a
perspiration of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still less any
petty jealousy, what he felt was an honourable and generous shame. He
hated it as a lady hates coarseness in a pantomime; it made him want to
hide himself. Just that feeling of impersonal ignominy which most of us
have when some one betrays indecent ignorance, Simmons had when some one
betrayed special knowledge. He writhed and went red in the face; he used
to put up the lid of his desk to hide his blushes for human dignity,
and from behind th