As a humble student of savage life, I have found it necessary to make
researches into the manners and customs of boys. Boys are not what a
vain people supposes. If you meet them in the holidays, you find them
affable and full of kindness and good qualities. They will condescend to
your weakness at lawn-tennis, they will aid you in your selection of fly-
hooks, and, to be brief, will behave with much more than the civility of
tame Zulus or Red Men on a missionary settlement. But boys at school and
among themselves, left to the wild justice and traditional laws which
many generations of boys have evolved, are entirely different beings.
They resemble that Polynesian prince who had rejected the errors of
polytheism for those of an extreme sect of Primitive Seceders. For weeks
at a time this prince was known to be "steady," but every month or so he
disappeared, and his subjects said he was "lying off." To adopt an
American idiom, he "felt like brandy and water"; he also "felt like"
wearing no clothes, and generally rejecting his new conceptions of duty
and decency. In fact, he had a good bout of savagery, and then he
returned to his tall hat, his varnished boots, his hymn-book, and his
edifying principles. The life of small boys at school (before they get
into long-tailed coats and the upper-fifth) is often a mere course of
"lying-off"--of relapse into native savagery with its laws and customs.
If any one has so far forgotten his own boyhood as to think this
description exaggerated, let him just fancy what our comfortable
civilised life would be, if we could become boys in character and custom.
Let us suppose that you are elected to a new club, of which most of the
members are strangers to you. You enter the doors for the first time,
when two older members, who have been gossiping in the hall, pounce upon
you with the exclamation, "Hullo, here's a new fellow! You fellow,
what's your name?" You reply, let us say, "Johnson." "I don't believe
it, it's such a rum name. What's your father?" Perhaps you are
constrained to answer "a Duke" or (more probably) "a solicitor." In the
former case your friends bound up into the smoking-room, howling, "Here's
a new fellow says his father is a Duke. Let's take the cheek out of
him." And they "take it out" with umbrellas, slippers, and other
surgical instruments. Or, in the latter case (your parent being a
solicitor) they reply, "Then your father must be a beastly cad. All
solicitors are sharks. _My_ father says so, and he knows. How many
sisters have you?" The new member answers, "Four." "Any of them
married?" "No." "How awfully awkward for you."
By this time, perhaps, luncheon is ready, or the evening papers come in,
and you are released for a moment. You sneak up into the library, where
you naturally expect to be entirely alone, and you settle on a sofa with
a novel. But an old member bursts into the room, spies a new fellow, and
puts him through the usual catechism. He ends with, "How much tin have
you got?" You answer "twenty pounds," or whatever the sum may be, for
perhaps you had contemplated playing whist. "Very well, fork it out; you
must give a dinner, all new fellows must, and _you_ are not going to
begin by being a stingy beast?" Thus addressed, as your friend is a big
bald man, who looks mischievous, you do "fork out" all your ready money,
and your new friend goes off to consult the cook. Meanwhile you "shed a
blooming tear," as Homer says, and go home heart-broken. Now, does any
grown-up man call this state of society civilisation? Would life be
worth living (whatever one's religious consolations) on these terms? Of
course not, and yet this picture is a not overdrawn sketch of the career
of some new boy, at some schools new or old. The existence of a small
schoolboy is, in other respects, not unlike that of an outsider in a
lawless "Brotherhood," as the Irish playfully call their murder clubs.
The small boy is _in_ the society, but not _of_ it, as far as any
benefits go. He has to field out (and I admit that the discipline is
salutary) while other boys bat. Other boys commit the faults, and compel
him to copy out the impositions--say five hundred lines of Virgil--with
which their sins are visited. Other boys enjoy the pleasures of
football, while the small boy has to run vaguely about, never within five
yards of the ball. Big boys reap the glories of paperchases, the small
boy gets lost in the bitter weather, on the open moors, or perhaps (as in
one historical case) is frozen to death within a measurable distance of
the school playground. And the worst of it is that, as a member of the
great school secret society, the small boy can never complain of his
wrongs, or divulge the name of his tormentors. It is in this respect
that he resembles a harmless fellow, dragged into the coils of an
Anarchist "Inner Brotherhood." He is exposed to all sorts of wrongs from
his neighbours, and he can only escape by turning "informer," by breaking
the most sacred law of his society, losing all social status, and,
probably, obliging his parents to remove him from school. Life at
school, as among the Celtic peoples, turns on the belief that law and
authority are natural enemies, against which every one is banded.
The chapter of bullying among boys is one on which a man enters with
reluctance. Boys are, on the whole, such good fellows, and so full of
fine unsophisticated qualities, that the mature mind would gladly turn
away its eyes from beholding their iniquities. Even a cruel bully does
not inevitably and invariably develop into a bad man. He is, let us
hope, only passing through the savage stage, in which the torture of
prisoners is a recognised institution. He has, perhaps, too little
imagination to understand the pain he causes. Very often bullying is not
physically cruel, but only a perverted sort of humour, such as Kingsley,
in "Hypatia," recognised among his favourite Goths. I remember a feeble
foolish boy at school (feeble he certainly was, and was thought foolish)
who became the subject of much humorous bullying. His companions used to
tie a thin thread round his ear, and attach this to a bar at such a
height that he could only avoid breaking it by standing on tiptoe. But
he was told that he must not break the thread. To avoid infringing this
commandment, he put himself to considerable inconvenience and afforded
much enjoyment to the spectators.
Men of middle age, rather early middle age, remember the two following
species of bullying to which they were subjected, and which, perhaps, are
obsolescent. Tall stools were piled up in a pyramid, and the victim was
seated on the top, near the roof of the room. The other savages brought
him down from this bad eminence by hurling other stools at those which
supported him. Or the victim was made to place his hands against the
door, with the fingers outstretched, while the young tormentors played at
the Chinese knife-trick. They threw knives, that is to say, at the door
between the apertures of the fingers, and, as a rule, they hit the
fingers and not the door. These diversions I know to be correctly
reported, but the following pretty story is, perhaps, a myth. At one of
the most famous public schools, a praepostor, or monitor, or sixth-form
boy having authority, heard a pistol-shot in the room above his own. He
went up and found a big boy and a little boy. They denied having any
pistol. The monitor returned to his studies, again was sure he heard a
shot, went up, and found the little boy dead. The big boy had been
playing the William Tell trick with him, and had hit his head instead of
the apple. That is the legend. Whether it be true or false, all boys
will agree that the little victim could not have escaped by complaining
to the monitor. No. Death before dishonour. But the side not so seamy
of this picture of school life is the extraordinary power of honour among
boys. Of course the laws of the secret society might well terrify a
puerile informer. But the sentiment of honour is even more strong than
fear, and will probably outlast the very disagreeable circumstances in
which it was developed.
People say bullying is not what it used to be. The much abused
monitorial system has this in it of good, that it enables a clever and
kindly boy who is high up in the school to stop the cruelties (if he
hears of them) of a much bigger boy who is low in the school. But he
seldom hears of them. Habitual bullies are very cunning, and I am
acquainted with instances in which they carry their victims off to lonely
torture cells (so to speak) and deserted places fit for the sport. Some
years ago a small boy, after a long course of rope's-ending in out-of-the-
way dens, revealed the abominations of some naval cadets. There was not
much sympathy with him in the public mind, and perhaps his case was not
well managed. But it was made clear that whereas among men an unpopular
person is only spoken evil of behind his back, an unpopular small boy
among boys is made to suffer in a more direct and very unpleasant way.
Most of us leave school with the impression that there was a good deal of
bullying when we were little, but that the institution has died out. The
truth is that we have grown too big to be bullied, and too good-natured
to bully ourselves. When I left school, I thought bullying was an
extinct art, like encaustic painting (before it was rediscovered by Sir
William Richmond). But a distinguished writer, who was a small boy when
I was a big one, has since revealed to me the most abominable cruelties
which were being practised at the very moment when I supposed bullying to
have had its day and ceased to be. Now, the small boy need only have
mentioned the circumstances to any one of a score of big boys, and the
tormentor would have been first thrashed, and then, probably, expelled.
A friend of my own was travelling lately in a wild and hilly region on
the other side of the world, let us say in the Mountains of the Moon. In
a mountain tavern he had thrust upon him the society of the cook, a very
useless young man, who astonished him by references to one of our
universities, and to the enjoyments of that seat of learning. This youth
(who was made cook, and a very bad cook too, because he could do nothing
else) had been expelled from a large English school. And he was expelled
because he had felled a bully with a paving-stone, and had expressed his
readiness to do it again. Now, there was no doubt that this cook in the
mountain inn was a very unserviceable young fellow. But I wish more boys
who have suffered things literally unspeakable from bullies would try
whether force (in the form of a paving stone) is really no remedy.
The Catholic author of a recent book ("Schools," by Lieut.-Col. Raleigh
Chichester), is very hard on "Protestant Schools," and thinks that the
Catholic system of constant watching is a remedy for bullying and other
evils. "Swing-doors with their upper half glazed, might have their
uses," he says, and he does not see why a boy should not be permitted to
complain, if he is roasted, like Tom Brown, before a large fire. The
boys at one Catholic school described by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, "are
never without surveillance of some sort." This is true of most French
schools, and any one who wishes to understand the consequences (there)
may read the published confessions of a _pion_--an usher, or "spy." A
more degraded and degrading life than that of the wretched _pion_, it is
impossible to imagine. In an English private school, the system of
_espionnage_ and tale bearing, when it exists, is probably not unlike
what Mr. Anstey describes in _Vice Versa_. But in the Catholic schools
spoken of by Colonel Raleigh Chichester, the surveillance may be, as he
says, "that of a parent; an aid to the boys in their games rather than a
check." The religious question as between Catholics and Protestants has
no essential connection with the subject. A Protestant school might, and
Grimstone's did, have tale-bearers; possibly a Catholic school might
exist without parental surveillance. That system is called by its foes a
"police," by its friends a "paternal" system. But fathers don't exercise
the "paternal" system themselves in this country, and we may take it for
granted that, while English society and religion are as they are,
surveillance at our large schools will be impossible. If any one regrets
this, let him read the descriptions of French schools and schooldays, in
Balzac's _Louis Lambert_, in the "Memoirs" of M. Maxime du Camp, in any
book where a Frenchman speaks his mind about his youth. He will find
spying (of course) among the ushers, contempt and hatred on the side of
the boys, unwholesome and cruel punishments, a total lack of healthy
exercise; and he will hear of holidays spent in premature excursions into
forbidden and shady quarters of the town.
No doubt the best security against bullying is in constant occupation.
There can hardly (in spite of Master George Osborne's experience in
"Vanity Fair") be much bullying in an open cricket-field. Big boys, too,
with good hearts, should not only stop bullying when they come across it,
but make it their business to find out where it exists. Exist it will,
more or less, despite all precautions, while boys are boys--that is, are
passing through a modified form of the savage state.
There is a curious fact in the boyish character which seems, at first
sight, to make good the opinion that private education, at home, is the
true method. Before they go out into school life, many little fellows of
nine, or so, are extremely original, imaginative, and almost poetical.
They are fond of books, fond of nature, and, if you can win their
confidence, will tell you all sorts of pretty thoughts and fancies which
lie about them in their infancy. I have known a little boy who liked to
lie on the grass and to people the alleys and glades of that miniature
forest with fairies and dwarfs, whom he seemed actually to see in a kind
of vision. But he went to school, he instantly won the hundred yards
race for boys under twelve, and he came back a young barbarian,
interested in "the theory of touch" (at football), curious in the art of
bowling, and no more capable than you or I of seeing fairies in a green
meadow. He was caught up into the air of the boy's world, and his
imagination was in abeyance for a season.
This is a common enough thing, and rather a melancholy spectacle to
behold. One is tempted to believe that school causes the loss of a good
deal of genius, and that the small boys who leave home poets, and come
back barbarians, have been wasted. But, on the other hand, if they had
been kept at home and encouraged, the chances are that they would have
blossomed into infant phenomena and nothing better. The awful infancy of
Mr. John Stuart Mill is a standing warning. Mr. Mill would probably have
been a much happier and wiser man if he had not been a precocious
linguist, economist, and philosopher, but had passed through a healthy
stage of indifference to learning and speculation at a public school.
Look again, at the childhood of Bishop Thirlwall. His _Primitiae_ were
published (by Samuel Tipper, London, 1808), when young Connop was but
eleven years of age. His indiscreet father "launched this slender bark,"
as he says, and it sailed through three editions between 1808 and 1809.
Young Thirlwall was taught Latin at three years of age, "and at four read
Greek with an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him." At
seven he composed an essay, "On the Uncertainty of Human Life," but "his
taste for poetry was not discovered till a later period." His sermons,
some forty, occupy most of the little volume in which these _Primitiae_
were collected.
He was especially concerned about Sabbath desecration. "I confess,"
observes this sage of ten, "when I look upon the present and past state
of our public morals, and when I contrast our present luxury,
dissipation, and depravity, with past frugality and virtue, I feel not
merely a sensation of regret, but also of terror, for the result of the
change." "The late Revolution in France," he adds, "has afforded us a
remarkable lesson how necessary religion is to a State, and that from a
deficiency on that head arise the chief evils which can befall society."
He then bids us "remember that the Nebuchadnezzar who may destroy our
Israel is near at hand," though it might be difficult to show how
Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Israel.
As to the uncertainty of life, he remarks that "Edward VI. died in his
minority, and disappointed his subjects, to whom he had promised a happy
reign." Of this infant's thirty-nine sermons (just as many as the
Articles), it may be said that they are in no way inferior to other
examples of this class of literature. But sermons are among the least
"scarce" and "rare" of human essays, and many parents would rather see
their boy patiently acquiring the art of wicket-keeping at school than
moralising on the uncertainty of life at home. Some one "having
presented to the young author a copy of verses on the trite and familiar
subject of the Ploughboy," he replied with an ode on "The Potboy."
"Bliss is not always join'd to wealth,
Nor dwells beneath the gilded roof
For poverty is bliss with health,
Of that my potboy stands a proof."
The volume ends with this determination,
"Still shall I seek Apollo's shelt'ring ray,
To cheer my spirits and inspire my lay."
If any parent or guardian desires any further information about _Les
Enfans devenus celebres par leurs ecrits_, he will find it in a work of
that name, published in Paris in 1688. The learned Scioppius published
works at sixteen, "which deserved" (and perhaps obtained) "the admiration
of dotards." M. Du Maurier asserts that, at the age of fifteen, Grotius
pleaded causes at the Bar. At eleven Meursius made orations and
harangues which were much admired. At fifteen, Alexandre le Jeune wrote
anacreontic verses, and (less excusably) a commentary on the Institutions
of Gaius. Grevin published a tragedy and two comedies at the age of
thirteen, and at fifteen Louis Stella was a professor of Greek. But no
one reads Grevin now, nor Stella, nor Alexandre le Jeune, and perhaps
their time might have been better occupied in being "soaring human boys"
than in composing tragedies and commentaries. Monsieur le Duc de Maine
published, in 1678, his _OEuvres d'un Auteur de Sept Ans_, a royal
example to be avoided by all boys. These and several score of other
examples may perhaps reconcile us to the spectacle of puerile genius
fading away in the existence of the common British schoolboy, who is
nothing of a poet, and still less of a jurisconsult.
The British authors who understand boys best are not those who have
written books exclusively about boys. There is Canon Farrar, for
example, whose romances of boyish life appear to be very popular, but
whose boys, somehow, are not real boys. They are too good when they are
good, and when they are bad, they are not perhaps too bad (that is
impossible), but they are bad in the wrong way. They are bad with a
mannish and conscious vice, whereas even bad boys seem to sin less
consciously and after a ferocious fashion of their own. Of the boys in
"Tom Brown" it is difficult to speak, because the Rugby boy under Arnold
seems to have been of a peculiar species. A contemporary pupil was
asked, when an undergraduate, what he conceived to be the peculiar
characteristic of Rugby boys. He said, after mature reflection, that
"the _differentia_ of the Rugby boy was his moral thoughtfulness." Now
the characteristic of the ordinary boy is his want of what is called
moral thoughtfulness.
He lives in simple obedience to school traditions. These may compel him,
at one school, to speak in a peculiar language, and to persecute and beat
all boys who are slow at learning this language. At another school he
may regard dislike of the manly game of football as the sin with which
"heaven heads the count of crimes." On the whole this notion seems a
useful protest against the prematurely artistic beings who fill their
studies with photographs of Greek fragments, vases, etchings by the
newest etcher, bits of China, Oriental rugs, and very curious old brass
candlesticks. The "challenge cup" soon passes away from the keeping of
any house in a public school where Bunthorne is a popular and imitated
character. But when we reach aesthetic boys, we pass out of the savage
stage into hobbledehoyhood. The bigger boys at public schools are often
terribly "advanced," and when they are not at work or play, they are
vexing themselves with the riddle of the earth, evolution, agnosticism,
and all that kind of thing. Latin verses may not be what conservatives
fondly deem them, and even cricket may, it is said, become too absorbing
a pursuit, but either or both are better than precocious freethinking and
sacrifice on the altar of the Beautiful.
A big boy who is tackling Haeckel or composing _virelais_ in playtime is
doing himself no good, and is worse than useless to the society of which
he is a member. The small boys, who are the most ardent of
hero-worshippers, either despise him or they allow him to address them in
_chansons royaux_, and respond with trebles in _triolets_. At present a
great many boys leave school, pass three years or four at the
universities, and go back as masters to the place where some of their old
schoolfellows are still pupils. It is through these very young masters,
perhaps, that "advanced" speculations and tastes get into schools, where,
however excellent in themselves, they are rather out of place. Indeed,
the very young master, though usually earnest in his work, must be a sage
indeed if he can avoid talking to the elder boys about the problems that
interest him, and so forcing their minds into precocious attitudes. The
advantage of Eton boys used to be, perhaps is still, that they came up to
college absolutely destitute of "ideas," and guiltless of reading
anything more modern than Virgil. Thus their intellects were quite
fallow, and they made astonishing progress when they bent their fresh and
unwearied minds to study. But too many boys now leave school with
settled opinions derived from the very latest thing out, from the newest
German pessimist or American socialist. It may, however, be argued that
ideas of these sorts are like measles, and that it is better to take them
early and be done with them for ever.
While schools are reformed and Latin grammars of the utmost ingenuity and
difficulty are published, boys on the whole change very little. They
remain the beings whom Thackeray understood better than any other writer:
Thackeray, who liked boys so much and was so little blind to their
defects. I think he exaggerates their habit of lying to masters, or, if
they lied in his day, their character has altered in that respect, and
they are more truthful than many men find it expedient to be. And they
have given up fighting; the old battles between Berry and Biggs, or
Dobbin and Cuff (major) are things of the glorious past. Big boys don't
fight, and there is a whisper that little boys kick each other's shins
when in wrath. That practice can hardly be called an improvement, even
if we do not care for fisticuffs. Perhaps the gloves are the best
peacemakers at school. When all the boys, by practice in boxing, know
pretty well whom they can in a friendly way lick, they are less tempted
to more crucial experiments "without the gloves."
But even the ascertainment of one's relative merits with the gloves hurts
a good deal, and one may thank heaven that the fountain of youth (as
described by Pontus de Tyarde) is not a common beverage. By drinking
this liquid, says the old Frenchman, one is insensibly brought back from
old to middle age, and to youth and boyhood. But one would prefer to
stop drinking of the fountain before actually being reduced to boy's
estate, and passing once more through the tumultuous experiences of that
period. And of these, _not having enough to eat_ is by no means the
least common. The evidence as to execrable dinners is rather
dispiriting, and one may end by saying that if there is a worse fellow
than a bully, it is a master who does not see that his boys are supplied
with plenty of wholesome food. He, at least, could not venture, like a
distinguished headmaster, to preach and publish sermons on "Boys' Life:
its Fulness." A schoolmaster who has boarders is a hotel-keeper, and
thereby makes his income, but he need not keep a hotel which would be
dispraised in guide books. Dinners are a branch of school economy which
should not be left to the wives of schoolmasters. _They_ have never been
boys.
FOOTNOTES
{1} "Mauth" is Manx for dog, I am told.
{2} It is easy to bear the misfortunes of others.
{3} In the third volume of his essays.
{4} "I remember I went into the room where my father's body lay, and my
mother sat weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell
a-beating the coffin and calling 'Papa,' for I know not how, I had some
slight idea that he was locked up there."--STEELE, _The Tatler_, June 6,
1710.
{5} Longmans.
{6} I like to know what the author got.
{7} Salmon roe, I am sorry to say.
{8} "Why and Wherefore," Aytoun.
{9} _Fersitan legendum_, "Help Thou."
{10} I know, now, who Miriam was and who was the haunter of the
Catacombs. But perhaps the people is as well without the knowledge of an
old and "ower true tale" that shook a throne.
{11} Cannot the reader guess? I am afraid that I can!
{12} Edinburgh, 1685.