OLD BOYS.

IT will not be a woman who will discover the secret of per- petual youth. Alas, no! Women may search diligently, but they cannot long avoid the looking-glass. Men, on the other hand, seem to be sometimes upon the verge of discovery. They mature slowly, they age slowly, so slowly that it is difficult for them often to observe the process. There is no minute-hand upon the masculine clock-face. Their physique is less susceptible of wear and tear than that of a woman. They are stronger altogether, and if we forget physique, and think of the mind apart from the body, the analogy still holds good up to a point. A woman's intelli- gence is never so robust as a man's (no feminine Dr. Johnson will ever exist), and it matures more quickly, but, such as it is, it almost always does mature. Her full mental stature may be a small one. But a woman after twenty-five is grown- up. This is less generally the case with men, among whom immature minds are very common, and are common, we think, by their own fault. We are not repeating the truism that men are big children. They are, of course ; but that is no sign of the arrested development to which we are alluding. On the contrary, it is a way of saying that the average masculine mind is simple in its mechanism and capable of spontaneous expansion. But there are some men who are not mentally big boys at all. They do, indeed, resemble boys, but they are boys who have lost their youth and retained their features—preserved boys, dried-up boys, so to speak, whom time has wrinkled, and perhaps sweetened, but never matured. We do not mean that they are stupid. Oh dear no! They are very clever occa- sionally, even very able. One of the most often remarked peculiarities of youth is the ease with which it learns— especially by heart. Some men learn just as easily and to just as little purpose. " Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth," as St. Paul said with a satiric humour which we do not look for, and therefore perhaps seldom find, in Holy Writ.

These easy learners have as a rule a good bit of intellectual vanity. So have boys—they believe that truth has altered

out of all knowledge since old people were young. It is only the very newest generation who can recognize it, they say to themselves—and of themselves. They are full of new

wine, these " heady " boys ; but there is something, after all, which is attractive about their intoxication. Older men are not afraid of them, or even disgusted by them, in their cape. It is pleasant to associate with those who are not yet sobered by experience. They will soon know that they do not know. But when experience has come, and has not brought sobriety, that is a different thing. When a little

learning still goes to a man's head, though it is beginning to grizzle, and leads him to rush forward among hilarious

boys and vow that he and they, the old boy and the young boys, know everything and the rest of the world are fogeys, then his intoxication revolts us.

Another rather pleasing quality of youth is fastidiousness. Fastidious a boy will be. He has not experience to enable him to form accurate judgments. His discriminating faculty works in a vacuum. He invents all sorts of shibboleths whereby to try his fellows. An acquaintance who cannot pronounce the fateful syllables is condemned out of hand.

To use the wrong slang, or no slang at all, to fail to con- form to the mode of the moment, is to take one's place in outer darkness among the people who count for nothing. His elders are amused at him, sometimes even rather pleased to observe that he does seek to differentiate sheep and goats, even though he does not yet know which is which. " When he gets older he will recognize that discrimination is not an end in itself," they say to themselves. As a rule they are right.

Most men do learn this sooner or later, but not all. Some " old boys " never know it. They cease to think about the nice conduct of an umbrella, about turns of phrase and tones of voice, but they invent new matters upon which to exercise their fastidiousness. They will not accept any mental food except in a specially prepared form. Their information must be " dressed " by a man of letters. They cannot talk to this, that, or the other person because he is not of their intellectual calibre. They discriminate for discrimination's sake till they forget how to acquire and know only how to discard. On such a meagre diet the mind cannot grow.

In youth, again, the sympathies are necessarily undeveloped. A boy has generally some weapon of offence in his hands, and he does not always know his friends from his foes.

Luckily age provides an armour. His elders are not much hurt by his thrusts. They smile as grown-up people

smile at a baby's attempts to fight, and parry the blows in such a manner as to spare the striker. His criticisms are crude, and sometimes unkind. They are not practical, yet in an oblique way they are trenchant. His hearers must laugh even if they wince. Have any of our readers lately met a boy who has been out to stay and has enjoyed himself P He comes home to find everything wrong. He seems almost ashamed of the customs of his own people. He thinks he has become an accomplished critic. That is the way that know- ledge of the world comes, and that the spirit of adventure shows. It is irritating, but no more. As a rule this depreciation of the only manner of life that he really knows represents a passing phase. The mature man is more likely to exaggerate than to detract from the delights of his boyhood's home. But, as we are

insisting, some men never mature. There are" old boys " who think themselves the first discoverers of foreign parte, and for

whom England has become simply the corpus vile that nourishes the critic, a series of mistakes invented for their correction. They confuse the new and the beautiful because they axe bored.

But a grown man has no right to be bored into injustice though we concede it to a boy. Just now we think that the half-hearted patriot is a bad fellow. In times of peace we pet him, and say he is witty and wide-minded and cosmopolitan. In reality both in peace and in war he is only an " old boy some one who has never really grown up.

Another very tiresome but not very serious bad habit of growing boys is a trick of ridiculing the things which their people hold sacred. They shock their little sisters, but their parents as a rule are not overwhelmed either by pain or indignation. Life has taught them that nothing is—or should be—sacred solely by association, though they may sigh to think how painfully experience will teach the young to rebuild the shrines they have thrown down, not knowing what they do. But only mature men can rebuild. "Old boys" are not strong enough. They stand laughing before the ruins they have made. We hear the sound above the careless glee of a generation to which they do not rightly belong, and the sound is very ugly.

In spite of all we have been saying against them, these "old boys " have some sort of charm. They are often very much liked, especially by real boys and by women. Boys see in them a likeness to themselves, and do not recognize that it is a caricature; and even a caricature of youth makes some appeal to the feminine heart. They retain the childish peculiarity of forgivableness, a quality which, while it is powerless to refute accusation, does effectually cancel condemnation. The years shrivel but do not embitter them. Could they have become full men, one wonders sometimes, had they wished it P Probably they could. They have formed a mental drug habit. They have drunk deeply of the cup of contempt, and that is a poison which is connected with vanity and levity, and which arrests more surely than any other the growth of the soul.

We have said that we do not think that women's minds are often thus stunted. A woman of ability is not like a clever child bereft of childhood's attractions. The fact that she is a poor critic as a rule is in a sense in her favour. She is thereby freed from the contempt habit. Women have by nature a strong wish to please, and it is a wish which brings endless good qualities in its train—tolerant sympathy, for instance, the fruit of the constant study of human nature. We know that some women will take exception to this assertion, and will declare that the wish to please is a fault in their own sex born of undue subordination. But does it really come of subordination P We should say that the average woman— taking all countries and all classes into count—makes more effort to please her subordinates than to please her lord. During a few years at least of her life the average woman is an absolute ruler. Her children are under her authority in a sense in which no one is under the authority of a man, and these subordinates she will die to please.

After all, it takes a good many people to make up a world. Do they do much harm, these " old boys" P We are inclined to think that they do. They are always offering the world their help and always hindering the world's progress. If any one has a job to do, nothing will make its accomplishment so slow as the proffered " help " of a child. Very often the worker will put up with the hindrance for the sake of the child's company, or in order to instruct him ; but if he does he must make up his mind to be a long time in "getting done," and he must risk the spoiling of his work. If he does not happen to love the child, and does not care to teach him, he will find him nothing but a " confounded little nuisance "—questioning, criticizing, and " getting under his feet." In like manner do these "old boys" binder the work of the world.