Now the most unreal part of the reconstructions of school life is the insistence on the boyish code of honour.  Neither as a boy nor as a schoolmaster did I ever have much evidence of this.  There were certain hard and fast rules of conduct, like the rule which prevented any boy from giving information to a master against another boy.  But this was not a conscientious thing.  It was part of the tradition, and the social ostracism which was the penalty of its infraction was too severe to risk incurring.  But the boys who cut a schoolfellow for telling tales, did not do it from any high-minded sense of violated honour.  It was simply a piece of self-defence, and the basis of the convention was merely this, that, if the rule were broken, it would produce an impossible sense of insecurity and peril.  However much boys might on the whole approve of, respect, and even like their masters, still they could not make common cause with them.  The school was a perfectly definite community, inside of which it was often convenient and pleasant to do things which would be penalised if discovered; and thus the whole stability of that society depended upon a certain secrecy.  The masters were not disliked for finding out the infractions of rules, if only such infractions were patent and obvious.  A master who looked too closely into things, who practised any sort of espionage, who tried to extort confession, was disapproved of as a menace, and it was convenient to label him a sneak and a spy, and to say that he did not play the game fair.  But all this was a mere tradition.  Boys do not reflect much, or look into the reasons of things.  It does not occur to them to credit masters with the motive of wishing to protect them against themselves, to minimise temptation, to shelter them from undesirable influences; that perhaps dawns on the minds of sensible and high-minded prefects, but the ordinary boy just regards the master as an opposing power, whom he hoodwinks if he can.

And then the boyish ideal of courage is a very incomplete one.  He does not recognise it as courage if a sensitive, conscientious, and right-minded boy risks unpopularity by telling a master of some evil practice which is spreading in a school.  He simply regards it as a desire to meddle, a priggish and pragmatical act, and even as a sneaking desire to inflict punishment by proxy.

Courage, for the schoolboy, is merely physical courage, aplomb, boldness, recklessness, high-handedness.  The hero of school life is one like Odysseus, who is strong, inventive, daring, full of resource.  The point is to come out on the top.  Odysseus yields to sensual delight, he is cruel, vindictive, and incredibly deceitful.  It is evident that successful beguiling, the power of telling an elaborate, plausible, and imperturbable lie on occasions, is an heroic quality in the Odyssey.  Odysseus is not a man who scorns to deceive, or who would rather take the consequences than utter a falsehood.  His