y trivial
and almost wholly symbolical; emotion reveals itself in glance and
gesture, not in word at all. I suppose that most of us remember our
boyish friendships, ardent and eager personal admirations,
extraordinary deifications of quite commonplace boys, emotions none of
which were ever put into words at all, hardly even into coherent
thought, and were yet a swift and vital current of the soul.

Now the most unreal part of the reconstructions of school life is the
insistence on the boyish code of honour. Neither as a boy nor as a
schoolmaster did I ever have much evidence of this. There were certain
hard and fast rules of conduct, like the rule which prevented any boy
from giving information to a master against another boy. But this was
not a conscientious thing. It was part of the tradition, and the social
ostracism which was the penalty of its infraction was too severe to
risk incurring. But the boys who cut a schoolfellow for telling tales,
did not do it from any high-minded sense of violated honour. It was
simply a piece of self-defence, and the basis of the convention was
merely this, that, if the rule were broken, it would produce an
impossible sense of insecurity and peril. However much boys might on
the whole approve of, respect, and even like their masters, still they
could not make common cause with them. The school was a perfectly
definite community, inside of which it was often convenient and
pleasant to do things which would be penalised if discovered; and thus
the whole stability of that society depended upon a certain secrecy.
The masters were not disliked for finding out the infractions of rules,
if only such infractions were patent and obvious. A master who looked
too closely into things, who practised any sort of espionage, who tried
to extort confession, was disapproved of as a menace, and it was
convenient to label him a sneak and a spy, and to say that he did not
play the game fair. But all this was a mere tradition. Boys do not
reflect much, or look into the reasons of things. It does not occur to
them to credit masters with the motive of wishing to protect them
against themselves, to minimise temptation, to shelter them from
undesirable influences; that perhaps dawns on the minds of sensible and
high-minded prefects, but the ordinary boy just regards the master as
an opposing power, whom he hoodwinks if he can.

And then the boyish ideal of courage is a very incomplete one. He does
not recogn