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.
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