It is a common complaint of fathers that they are out of sympathy with their sons, because they have forgotten their own boyhood and they are unable to understand the dangers and the pleasures of school life. To them we can recommend 'Stalky and Co.' (Macmillan and Co., 8vo,pp.xi.272, 6s.), the book that all the world was reading when Mr. Rudyard Kipling was so dangerously ill, as an exact reproduction of certain phases of average school life.
It is true that the school here described is not strictly in all respects a public school. It is obviously a small school, with some of the advantages and some of the defects that pertain to a small school. But the ╥boy╙ is described to the life. Mr. Kipling has been able to remember, or perhaps it is truer to say that he has never forgotten, what he seemed and what he was as a boy, that incomprehensible and elusive being, as various as a woman, so stubborn and intractable in wrong hands, so malleable in right hands, so penetrating and cunning that he takes his master╒s measure in a day, so difficult and secretive to those who have not been gifted to see, so transparent and simple to the few who understand him.
Mr. Kipling not only understands the boy as a unit, but, what is far rarer and more difficult, he understands him as one of a crowd. And this is the great secret. The boy is the slave of his milieu, of his traditions. He is a ridiculous idealist, with a sense of honour that is magnificent but often totally wrong; he is at once cruel and affectionate, clinging and proud. In his secret heart he responds readily to appeals to elementary principle; he is easily moved by patriotism, by duty to his parents and to his school. But he will never show this, and if you do not understand him you will never guess it. Mr. Kipling remembers it all. It is wonderful how little his picture is marred by his literary craft; how very seldom his boys talk his language instead of their own. He makes us see the masters from the boys╒ point of view, and we are amazed at the justness of their insight.
