One of the most striking features of the present-day cult of The Child is the fact that whereas school stories were formerly written to be read by schoolboys, they are now written to be read—and are read with avidity—by grown-up persons.

This revolution has produced some abiding results. In the first place, school stories are much better written than they were. Secondly, a certain proportion of the limelight has been shifted from the boy to the master, with the result that school life is now presented in a more true and corporate manner. Thirdly, school stories have become less romantic, less sentimental, more coldly psychological. They are tinged with adult worldliness, and, too often, with adult pessimism. As literature they are an enormous advance upon their predecessors; but what they have gained in savoir faire they appear to have lost in joie de vivre.

Let us enter upon the ever-fascinating task of comparing the old with the new.

To represent the ancients we will take that immortal giant, Tom Brown. With him, as they say in legal circles, Eric. Many people will say, and they will be right, that Tom Brown would make a much braver show for the old brigade if put forward alone, minus his depressing companion. But we must bear in mind that it takes more than one book to represent a literary era. We will therefore call upon Tom Brown and Eric Williams between them to represent the schoolboy of a bygone age.

Most of us make Tom Brown's acquaintance in early youth. We fortify ourselves with a course of him before going to school for the first time—at the age of twelve or thereabouts—and we quickly realise, even at that tender age, that there were giants in those days.

Have you ever considered Tom Brown's first day at school? No? Then observe. He was called at half-past two in the morning, at the Peacock Inn, Islington, and by three o'clock was off as an "outside" upon the Tally-Ho Coach, in the small hours of a November morning, on an eighty-mile drive to Rugby.

He arrived at his destination just in time to take dinner in Hall, chaperoned by his new friend East; and then, duce Old Brooke, plunged into that historic football match between the Schoolhouse and the School—sixty on one side and two hundred on the other. Modern gladiators who consider "two thirty-fives" a pretty stiff period of play will be interested to note that this battle raged for three hours, and that the Schoolhouse were filled with surprise and rapture at achieving a goal after only sixty minutes' play. ("A goal in an hour! Such a thing had not been done in a Schoolhouse match these five years.")

In the course of the game Tom was knocked over while stopping a rush, and as the result of spending some minutes at the bottom of a heap of humanity composed of a goodly proportion of his two hundred opponents, was finally hauled out "a motionless body." However, he recovered sufficiently to be able to entertain East to tea and sausages in the Lower Fifth School. After a brief interval for ablution came supper, followed by a free-and-easy musical entertainment in the Schoolhouse hall, which included singing, a good deal of indiscriminate beer-drinking, and the famous speech of Old Brooke. Tom, it is hardly necessary to say, obliged with a song—"with much applause."

Then came prayers, and Tom's first glimpse of the mighty Arnold. (We may note here that a new boy of the old days was not apparently troubled by tiresome regulations upon the subject of reporting himself to his housemaster on arrival.) Even then Tom's first day from home was not over, for before retiring to his slumber he was tossed in a blanket three times. Not a bad record for a boy of twelve! And yet we flatter ourselves that we live a strenuous life.

Customs have changed in many respects since Tom Brown's time. Public schoolboys of eighteen or nineteen do not now wear beards, neither do they carry pea-shooters. Our athletes array themselves for battle in the shortest of shorts and the thinnest of jerseys. The participators in the three-hour Schoolhouse match merely took off their jackets and hung them upon the railings or trees. We are told, however, with some pride, that those who meant real work added their hats, waistcoats, neck-handkerchiefs, and braces! What of those who did not? Again, a captain does not nowadays "administer toco" upon the field of battle to subordinates who have failed to prevent the enemy from scoring a try. Again, no master of to-day would dare to admit to a boy that he "does not understand" cricket, or for that matter draw parallels between cricket and Aristophanes for the benefit of an attentive audience in a corner of the playing-field during a school match.

But we accept all these incidents in Tom Brown without question. We never dream of doubting that they occurred, or could have occurred. Arthur, we admit, is a rare bird, but he is credible. Even East's religious difficulties, or rather his anxiety to discuss them, are made convincing. The reason is that Tom Brown contains nothing that is alien from human nature—schoolboy human nature. It is the real thing all through. Across the ages Tom Brown of Rugby speaks to Brown minor (also, possibly, of Rugby) with the voice of a brother. Details may have changed, but the essentials are the same. "How different," we say, "but oh, how like!"

Not so at all times with Eric, or Little by Little. Here we miss the robust philistinism of the eternal schoolboy, and the atmosphere of reality which pervades Tom Brown. We feel that we are not living a story, but merely reading it. Eric does not ring true. We suspect the reverend author—to employ an expression which his hero would never have used—of "talking through his hat."

None of us desire to scoff at true piety or moral loftiness, but we feel instinctively that in Eric these virtues are somewhat indecently paraded. The schoolboy is essentially a matter-of-fact animal, and extremely reticent. He is not usually concerned with the state of his soul, and never under any circumstances anxious to discuss the matter; and above all he abhors the preacher and the prig. Eric, or Little by Little is priggish from start to finish. Compare, for instance, Eric's father and Squire Brown. Here are the Squire's meditations as to the advice he should give Tom before saying good-bye:

Now compare Eric's father in one of his public appearances. That worthy but tiresome gentleman suddenly descends upon the bully Barker, engaged in chastising Eric.

Poor Eric! What chance can a boy have had whose egregious parent insisted upon outraging every canon of schoolboy law on his behalf? We are not altogether surprised to read, a little later, that though from that day Eric was never troubled with personal violence from Barker, "rancour smouldered deep in the heart of the baffled tyrant."

Then, as already noted, the atmosphere and incidents of Eric fail to carry conviction. Making every allowance for the eccentricities of people who lived sixty years ago, the modern boy simply refuses to credit the idea of members of a "decent" school indulging in "a superior titter" when one of their number performed the everyday feat of breaking down in translation. He finds it hard to believe that Owen (who is labelled with damning enthusiasm "a boy of mental superiority") would really report another boy for kicking him, and quite incredible that after the kicker had been flogged the virtuous Owen should "have the keen mortification of seeing 'Owen is a sneak' written up all about the walls." As for Eric and Russell, sitting on a green bank beside the sea and "looking into one another's eyes and silently promising that they will be loving friends for ever"—the spectacle makes the undemonstrative young Briton physically unwell. Again, no schoolboy ever called lighted candles "superfluous abundance of nocturnal illumination"; and no schoolmaster under any circumstances ever "laid a gentle hand" upon a schoolboy's head. A hand, possibly, but not a gentle one. Lower School boys are not given Æschylus to read; and if they were they would not waste their play-hours discussing the best rendering of a particularly knotty passage occurring in a lesson happily over and done with.

If the first half of Eric is overdrawn and improbable, the second is rank melodrama—and bad melodrama at that. The trial scene is impossibly theatrical, and Russell's illness and death-bed deliverances are an outrage on schoolboy reserve.

Listen again to one Montagu, a sixth-form boy who has caught a gang of dormitory roysterers preparing an apple-pie bed for him. Does he call them "cheeky young swine," and knock their heads together? No!

These silent, strong men!

Again, do, or did, English schoolboys ever behave like this?

The characters in Eric are far superior to the incidents. They may be exaggerated and irritating, but they are consistently drawn. Wildney is a true type, and still exists. Russell is a fair specimen of a "good" boy, though it is difficult to feel for him the tenderness which most of us extend, perhaps furtively, to Arthur in Tom Brown. But some of the masters are beyond comprehension. Pious but depressing pedagogues of the type of Mr. Rose (who at moments of crisis, it will be remembered, was usually to be found upon his knees in the School Library, oblivious of the greater privacy and comfort offered by his bedroom) have faded from our midst. Their place to-day is occupied by efficient and unsentimental young men in fancy waistcoats.

But the book for clear types is Tom Brown. East, the two Brookes, and Arthur—we recognise them all. There is Flashman the bully—an epitome of all bullies. He is of an everlasting pattern. And there is that curiously attractive person Martin, the scientist, with his jackdaw and his chemical research, and his chronic impecuniosity. You remember how he used to barter his allowance of candles for birds' eggs; with the result that, in those pre-gas-and-electricity days, he was reduced to doing his preparation by the glow of the fire, or "by the light of a flaring cotton wick, issuing from a ginger-beer bottle full of some doleful composition"? Lastly, there is Arnold himself. He is only revealed to us in glimpses: he emerges now and then like a mountain-peak from clouds; but is none the less imposing for that.

What impression of bygone schoolboy life do Tom Brown and Eric make upon our minds?

The outstanding sensation appears to be this, that fifty years ago life at school was more spacious than now—more full of incident and variety. In those days a boy's spare time was his own. How did he spend his half-holidays? If he was a good boy—good in the bad sense of the word—he went and sat upon a hill-top and admired the scenery, or thought of his mother, or possibly gripped another good boy by the hand and said: "Let me call you Edwin, and you shall always call me Eric." If he was a normal healthy boy he went swimming, or bird-nesting, or (more usually) poaching, and generally encountered adventure by the way. If he was a bad boy he retired with other malefactors to a public-house, where he indulged in an orgy of roast goose and brandy-and-water.

Nous avons changÉ tout cela. Compulsory games have put an end to such licence, and in so doing have docked a good deal of liberty as well. The result has been to emphasize the type at the expense of the individual. It is a good type—a grand type—but it bears hardly upon some of its more angular components. The new system keeps the weak boy out of temptation and the idle boy out of mischief; but the quiet, reflective, unathletic boy hates it. He has little chance now to dream dreams or commune with nature. Still, his chance comes later in life; and as we all have to learn to toe the line at some time or another, thrice blessed is he who gets over the lesson in early youth.

The prefectorial system, too, has enlarged boys' sense of responsibility, and has put an end to many abuses which no master could ever reach. But on the whole we may say of the public-school boy throughout the ages that plus que l'on le change, plus c'est la mÊme chose. Schoolboy gods have not altered. Strength, fleetness of foot, physical beauty, loyalty to one's House and one's School—youth still worships these things. There is the same admiration for natural brilliancy, be it in athletics or conversation or scholarship, and the same curious contempt for the plodder—even the successful plodder—in all departments of life. The weakest still goes to the wall. He is not bumped against it so vigorously as he used to be; but he still goes there, and always will.

Still, has the present generation developed no new characteristics? Let us turn to a batch of modern school stories, and see.

We have many to choose from—Stalky, for instance. Stalky has come in for a shower of abuse from certain quarters. He hits the sentimentalist hard. We are told that the book is vulgar, that the famous trio are "little beasts." (I think Mr. A. C. Benson said so.) Still, Mr. Kipling never touches any subject which he does not adorn, and in Stalky he brings out vividly some of the salient features of modern school life. He has drawn masters as they have never been drawn before: the portraits may be cruel, biassed, not sufficiently representative; but how they live! He has put the case for the unathletic boy with convincing truth. He depicts, too, very faithfully, the curious camaraderie which prevails nowadays between boys and masters, and pokes mordant fun at the sycophancy which this state of things breeds in a certain type of boy—the "Oh, sir! and No, sir! and Yes, sir! and Please, sir!" brigade—and deals faithfully with the master who takes advantage of out-of-school intimacy to be familiar and offensive in school, addressing boys by their nicknames and making humorous reference to extra-scholastic incidents. And above all Mr. Kipling knows the heart of a boy. He understands, above all men, a boy's intense reserve upon matters that lie deepest within him, and his shrinking from and repugnance to unrestrained and blatant discussion of these things. Do you remember the story of the fat man—"the jelly-bellied flag-flapper"—who came down to lecture to the school on patriotism?

It was a Union Jack, you will remember, suddenly unfurled by way of peroration.

That is true, true, all through.

Then comes another class of school-story—the school-story written primarily for boys. Such are the books of Mr. Talbot Baines Reed. These are regarded as somewhat vieux jeu at the present day, but in their own particular line they have never been bettered. They were written to be read by comparatively young boys in a semi-religious magazine; and anybody who has ever attempted to write a tale which shall be probable yet interesting, and racy yet moral, will realise how admirably Mr. Reed has achieved this feat—in such books as The Willoughby Captains, The Master of the Shell, and The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's.

Another excellent book is Godfrey Marten, Schoolboy. Here Mr. Charles Turley achieves success by the most commendable means. He eschews the theatrical. His story contains no death-bed heroics; no rescues from drowning; no highly-coloured moral crises. He takes as his theme the humdrum daily life—and no one who has not lived through it for weeks at a time knows how humdrum it can be—of a public school, and makes it interesting. He lacks fire, it may be said, but he avoids the sentimentality of the old school and the cynicism of the new.

Perhaps the best of all this class is The Bending of a Twig, by Mr. Desmond Coke—an absolutely faithful picture, drawn with unerring instinct and refreshing humour. In fact it is so much the real thing that at times it is a trifle monotonous, just because school life at times is a trifle monotonous. But those who know what schoolboys are cannot fail to appreciate the intrinsic merits of this book. It gently derides the stagey incidents and emotional heroics of the old style of school story. Here a small boy comes to Shrewsbury primed with the lore of Eric and Tom Brown and The Hill, fully expecting to be tossed in a blanket or roasted on sight. But nothing happens: he is merely ignored. He has laboriously committed to memory a quantity of Harrow slang from The Hill: he finds this is meaningless at Shrewsbury. He cannot understand the situation: he has to unlearn all his lessons in sophistication. The whole thing is admirably done.

The story strikes a deeper note towards the end. Here we are given a very vivid study of the same boy, now head of his House, struggling between his sense of duty and the fear of unpopularity. Shall he tackle the disturbing element boldly, invoking if necessary the assistance of the Housemaster, or let things slide for the sake of peace? Many a tragedy of the Prefect's Room has hinged upon that struggle; and although Mr. Coke's solution of the problem is not heroic, it is probably all the more true to life. Altogether a fine book, but from its very nature a book for boys rather than grown-ups.

Coming to the type of school-story at present in vogue, we have The Hill, deservedly ranking as first-class. But The Hill is essentially a book for Harrovians; and the more likely a book is to appeal to members of one particular school, the less likely it is to appeal to members of any other school. (In this respect we may note that Tom Brown forms an exception. But then Tom Brown is an exceptional book.) If The Hill had been written as a "general" school story, with the identity of Harrow veiled, however thinly, under a fictitious name, its glamour and romance, together with its enthusiasm for all that is straight and strong and of old standing and of good report, would have made it a classic among school fiction. But non-Harrovians—and there are a considerable number of them—decline with natural insularity to follow Mr. Vachell to his topmost heights. They are conscious of a clannish, slightly patronising air about The Hill, which is notably absent in other stories which tell the tale of a particular school. The reader is treated to pedantic little footnotes, and given a good deal of information which is either gratuitous or uninteresting. He is made to understand that he is on The Hill but not of it. He recognises frankly enough the greatness of Harrow tradition and the glory of Harrow history, but he rightly reserves his enthusiasm over such things for his own school; and there are moments when he feels inclined to bawl out to the author that he envies Harrow nothing—except perhaps Forty Years On.

In other words, The Hill, owing to the insistent fashion in which it puts Harrow first and general schoolboy nature second, must be regarded more as a glorified prospectus than as a representative novel of English school life.

But The Hill stands high. It cannot be hid. It is supersentimental at times, but then so are schoolboys. And the characters are clean-cut and finely finished. Scaife is a memorable figure; so is Warde. John Verney, like most virtuous persons, is a bit of a bore at times; but the Caterpillar, with his drawling little epigrams, and their inevitable tag—"Not my own; my Governor's!"—is a joy for ever. Lastly, the description of the Eton and Harrow Match at Lord's takes unquestionable rank as one of the few things in this world which will never be better done.

Two other books may be mentioned here, as illustrating the tendency, already mentioned, of modern school-novelists to shift the limelight from the boy to the master. The first is Mr. Hugh Walpole's Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill. A young man lacking means, and possessing only a moderate degree, who feels inclined, as many do, to drift into schoolmastering as a pis aller, should read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest this book. It draws a pitiless picture of Common Room life in a third-rate public school—the monotony; the discomfort; the mutual antagonism and jealousy of a body of men herded together year after year, condemned to celibacy by want of means, and deprived of all prospect of advancement or change of scene. It hammers in the undeniable truth that in the great majority of cases a schoolmaster's market value depreciates steadily from the date of his first appointment. Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill is a very able book, but should not be read by schoolmasters while recovering, let us say, from influenza.

If the reader desires a further picture of the amenities of the Common Room, viewed from a less oblique angle, he can confidently be recommended to turn to The Lanchester Tradition, by Mr. G. F. Bradby. The Lanchester Tradition is a comparatively short story, but it is all pure gold. It is written with knowledge, insight, and above all with an appreciation of that broad tolerant humorous outlook on life which alone can lubricate the soul-grinding wheels of routine. In Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill we have a young, able, and merciless critic exposing some of the weaknesses of the public-school system. In The Lanchester Tradition we have a seasoned and experienced representative of that system demonstrating that real character can always rise superior to circumstance, and that for all its creaking machinery and accompanying friction the pedagogue's existence can be a very tolerable and at times a very uplifting one. It is the old struggle between theory and practice. Solvitur ambulando.

There are many other school stories of recent date, of which no mention has been made in this survey; but our excursions seem to have covered a fairly representative field. What is the prevailing characteristic of the new, as compared with the old? It appears to be a very insistent and rather discordant note of realism—the sort of realism which leaves nothing unphotographed. Romance and sentiment are swept aside: they might fog the negative. Our rising generation are not permitted to see visions or dream dreams. And there is a tendency—mercifully absent in most of the books which we have described—to discuss matters which are better not discussed, at any rate in a work of fiction. There is a great vogue in these introspective days for outspokenness upon intimate matters. We are told that such matter should not be excluded from the text, because it is "true to life." So are the police reports in the Sunday newspapers; but we do not present files of these delectable journals to our sons and daughters—let us not forget the daughters: the sons go to school, but the daughters can only sit at home and read schoolboy stories—as Christmas presents.

There is another marked characteristic of modern school fiction—its intense topicality. The slang, the allusions, the incidents—they are all dernier cri. But the more up-to-date a thing may be, whether it be a popular catchphrase or a whole book, the more ephemeral is its existence. A book of this kind reproduces the spirit of the moment, often with surprising fidelity; but after all it is only the spirit of the moment. Its very applicability to the moment unfits it for any other position. Books, speeches, and jokes—very few of these breathe the spirit not only of the moment but of all time. When they do, we call them Classics. Tom Brown is a Classic, and probably Stalky too. They are built of material which is imperishable, because it is quarried from the bed-rock of human nature, which never varies, though architectural fashions come and go.