I do not think that the life there, sensible, healthy, and well-ordered as it was, did me much good.  I was a happy enough boy in home life, but had little animal spirits, and none of the boisterous, rough-and-tumble ebullience of boyhood.  I was shy and sensitive; but I doubt if it was well that interest, enjoyment, emotion, should all have been so utterly starved as they were.  It made me suspicious of life, and incurious about it; I did not like its loud sounds, its combative merriment, its coarse flavours; the real life, that of observation, imagination, dreams, fancies, had been hunted into a corner; and the sense that one might incur ridicule, enmity, severity, dislike, harshness, had filled the air with uneasy terrors.  I came away selfish, able—­I had won a scholarship at Eton with entire ease—­innocent, childish, bewildered, wholly unambitious.  The world seemed to me a big, noisy, stupid place, in which there was no place for me.  The little inner sense of which I have spoken was hardly awake; it had had its first sight of humanity, and it disliked it; it was still solitary and silent, finding its own way, and quite unaware that it need have any relation with other human beings.

3

Then came Eton.  Into which big place I drifted again in a state of mild bewilderment.  But big as Eton is—­it was close on a thousand boys, when I went there—­at no time was I in the least degree conscious of its size as an uncomfortable element.  The truth is that Eton runs itself on lines far more like a university than a school:  each house is like a college, with its own traditions and its own authority.  There is very little intercourse between the younger boys at different houses, and there is an instinctive disapproval among the boys themselves of external relations.  The younger boys of a house play together, to a large extent work together, and live a common life.  It is tacitly understood that a boy throws in his lot with his own house, and if he makes many friends outside he is generally unpopular, on the ground that he is thought to find his natural companions not good enough for him.  Neither have boys of different ages much to do with each other; each house is divided by parallel lines of cleavage, so that it is not a weltering mass of boyhood, but a collection of very clearly defined groups and circles.

Moreover, in my own time there was no building at Eton which could hold the whole school, so that on no occasion did I ever see the school assembled.  There were two chapels, the schoolrooms were considerably scattered; even on the occasions when the headmaster made a speech to the school, he did not even invite the lower boys to attend, while there was no compulsion on the upper boys to be present, so that it was not necessary to go, unless one thought it likely to be amusing.