to reproduce in later life the mental shocks of childhood.  Anger, intemperate punishment, any attempt to produce instant submission and dismay in children, is very apt to hurt the nervous organisation.  Of course it is easy enough to be careful about these things in sheltered environments, where there is some 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 very trivial and almost wholly symbolical; emotion reveals itself in glance and gesture, not in word at all.  I suppose that most of us remember our boyish friendships, ardent and eager personal admirations, extraordinary deifications of quite commonplace boys, emotions none of which were ever put into words at all, hardly even into coherent thought, and were yet a swift and vital current of the soul.