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.
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