me security and refinement of life. And
this opens up a vast problem which cannot be touched on here, because
it is practically certain that many children in poor and unsatisfactory
homes sustain shocks to their mental organisation in early life which
damage them irreparably, and which could be avoided if they could be
brought up on more wholesome and tender lines.

VII

FEARS OF BOYHOOD

There is a tendency, I am sure, in books, to shirk the whole subject of
fear, as though it were a thing disgraceful, shameful, almost
unmentionable. The coward, the timid person, receives very little
sympathy; he is rather like one tainted with a shocking disease, of
which the less said the better. He is not viewed with any sympathy or
commiseration, but as something almost lower in the scale of humanity.
Take the literature that deals with school life, for instance. I do not
think that there is any province of our literature so inept, so
conventional, so entirely lacking in reality, as the books which deal
with the life of schools. The difficulty of writing them is very great,
because they can only be reconstructed by an effort of memory. The boy
himself is quite unable to give expression to his thoughts and
feelings; school life is a time of sharp, eager, often rather savage
emotions, lived by beings who have no sense of proportion, no knowledge
of life, no idea of what is really going on in the world. The actual
incidents which occur are very trivial, and yet to the fresh minds and
spirits of boyhood they seem all charged with an intense significance.
Then again the talk of schoolboys is wholly immature and shapeless.
They cannot express themselves, and moreover there is a very strict and
peremptory convention which dictates what may be talked about and what
may not. No society in the world is under so oppressive a taboo. They
must not speak of anything emotional or intellectual, at the cost of
being thought a fool or a prig. They talk about games, they gossip
about boys and masters, sometimes their conversation is nasty and
bestial. But it conceals very real if very fitful emotions; yet it is
impossible to recall or to reconstruct; and when older people attempt
to reconstruct it, they remember the emotions which underlay it, and
the eager interests out of which it all sprang; and they make it
something picturesque, epigrammatic, and vernacular which is wholly
untrue to life. The fact is that the talk of schoolboys is ver