The most sentimental thing
in the world is to hide your feelings; it is making too much of them.
Stoicism is the direct product of sentimentalism; and schoolboys
are sentimental individually, but stoical collectively,
For example, there were numbers of boys at my school besides myself
who took a private pleasure in poetry; but red-hot iron would not
have induced most of us to admit this to the masters, or to repeat
poetry with the faintest inflection of rhythm or intelligence.
That would have been anti-social egoism; we called it "showing off."
I myself remember running to school (an extraordinary thing to do)
with mere internal ecstasy in repeating lines of Walter Scott
about the taunts of Marmion or the boasts of Roderick Dhu, and then
repeating the same lines in class with the colourless decorum
of a hurdy-gurdy. We all wished to be invisible in our uniformity;
a mere pattern of Eton collars and coats.
But Simmons went even further. He felt it as an insult to brotherly
equality if any task or knowledge out of the ordinary track was
discovered even by accident. If a boy had learnt German in infancy;
or if a boy knew some terms in music; or if a boy was forced to confess
feebly that he had read "The Mill on the Floss"--then Simmons was in
a perspiration of discomfort. He felt no personal anger, still less
any petty jealousy, what he felt was an honourable and generous shame.
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