The dreadful “season of snows and sins” was already beginning to approach again: in other words more scholarship examinations at Oxford and Cambridge began to pile their fat clouds on the horizon. These were the snows: the sins were my own in not taking any intelligent interest in the subjects which would make them “big with blessing.” Certainly I had been sent to school to learn Latin and Greek among other things, but the other things were so vastly more interesting. I was usually about tenth in any form where I happened to be, and I remember a very serious letter from my father (after a series of consecutive tenths) saying that he had always observed that boys who were about tenth, could always do much better if they chose: boys lower in a form were those who often tried very hard, but were deficient in ability. I do not think I was so diabolically minded as to consider this a reason for doing worse, but certainly I declined from that modest eminence where boys who could do better pleasantly sunned themselves, and sank half a dozen places lower. By one of those wonderful coincidences which from time to time nourish starving optimists, it so happened that in the summer of 1884 an unusually large number of the sixth left school, and thus seventeen promotions were made out of the fifth form, the very last of which consisted of myself. With all the dignity and decoration of sixth form upon me, I had somehow justified my existence again, and the stigma of being seventeenth was swallowed up in the glory of being in the sixth. I had a study of my own, instead of being one of a herd in a classroom. I could make small boys fill my brewing kettle for me and run errands, and I could, without incurring criticism, wear my cap at the back of my head.
Something, I fancy, in an address which the headmaster gave to the new sixth form at the beginning of the September term, was said about duties and responsibilities: if it was, it must have rebounded out of one ear without penetration. For the average schoolboy is, I believe, waterproof to such suggestions, if they come from without he will get his idea of his duties and responsibilities purely from his own instinct, or rather from the collective instinct of his contemporaries, and his notion of proper behaviour in himself and others is practically entirely built on what he and they consider to be “good form.” These commandments are the most elusive and variable of decalogues, but usually wholesome, and completely autocratic. Immorality, for instance, at that time was bad form, though language which would have blistered the paint off a sewer, was perfectly permissible, if you wished to indulge in it: bullying was hopelessly beyond the pale, gambling and drinking, which figure so menacingly in those lurid histories designed to make mothers tremble for their innocent lambs, were absolutely unthought of. We (the sixth form generally) were a set of genial and energetic pagans, caring most of all for each other, next for games, but doing quite a decent amount of work; indeed, it was rather the fashion, and became more so, to be industrious in certain well-defined patches.