A SEARCHING OF SCHOOLMASTERS

Joan and Peter by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. A SEARCHING OF SCHOOLMASTERS

A SEARCHING OF SCHOOLMASTERS

§ 1

So it was that a systematic intention took hold of the lives of Joan and Peter. They had been snatched apart adventurously and disastrously out of the hands of an aimless and impulsive modernism and dragged off into dusty and decaying corners of the Anglican system. Now they were to be rescued by this Empire worshipper, this disfigured and suffering educational fanatic, and taught——?

What was there in Oswald’s mind? His intentions were still sentimental and cloudy, but they were beginning to assume a firm and definite form. Just as the Uganda children were being made into civilized men and women according to the lights and means of the Protectorate government, so these two children had to be made fit rulers and servants of the greatest empire in the world. They had to know all that a ruling race should know, they had to think and act as befitted a leading people. All this seemed to him the simple and obvious necessity of the case. But he was a sick man, fatigued much more readily than most men, given to moods of bitter irritability; he had little knowledge of how he might set about this task, he did not know what help was available and what was impossible. He made enquiries and some were very absurd enquiries; he sought advice and talked to all sorts of people; and meanwhile Joan and Peter spent a very sunny and pleasant November running wild about Limpsfield—until one day Oswald noted as much and packed them off for the rest of the term to Miss Murgatroyd again. The School of St. George and the Venerable Bede was concentrating upon a Christmas production of Alice in Wonderland. There could not be very much bad teaching anyhow, and there would be plenty of fun.

How is one to learn where one’s children may be educated?

This story has its comic aspects: Oswald went first to the Education Department!

He thought that if one had two rather clever and hopeful children upon whom one was prepared to lavish time and money, an Imperial Education Department would be able to tell an anxious guardian what schools existed for them and the respective claims and merits and inter-relationships of such schools. But he found that the government which published a six-inch map of the British Isles on which even the meanest outhouse is marked, had no information for the enquiring parent or guardian at all in this matter of schools. An educational map had still to become a part of the equipment of the civilized state. As it was inconceivable that party capital could be made out of the production of such a map, it was likely to remain a desideratum in Great Britain for many years to come.

In an interview that remained dignified on one side at least until the last, Oswald was referred to the advertisement columns of The Times and the religious and educational papers, and to—“a class of educational agents,” said the official with extreme detachment. “Usually, of course, people hear of schools.”

So it was that England still referred back to the happy days of the eighteenth century when our world was small enough for everybody to know and trust and consult everybody, and tell in a safe and confidential manner everything that mattered.

“Oh, my God!” groaned Oswald suddenly, giving way to his internal enemies. “My God! Here are two children, brilliant children—with plenty of money to be spent on them! Doesn’t the Empire care a twopenny damn what becomes of them?”

“There is an Association of Private Schoolmasters, I believe,” said the official, staring at him; “but I don’t know if it’s any good.”

§ 2

Joan was rehearsing a special dance in costume and Peter was word-perfect as the White Knight long before Oswald had found even a hopeful school for either of them. He clung for some time to the delusion that there must exist somewhere a school that would exactly meet Peter’s natural and reasonable demand for an establishment where one would learn about “guns and animals, mountains, machines and foreign people,” that would give lessons about “the insides of animals” and “how engines work” and “all that sort of thing.” The man wanted a school kept by Leonardo da Vinci. When he found a curriculum singularly bare of these vital matters, he began to ask questions.

His questions presently developed into a very tiresome and trying Catechism for Schoolmasters. He did not allow for the fact that most private schoolmasters in England were rather overworked and rather under-exercised men with considerable financial worries. Indeed, he made allowances for no one. He wanted to get on with the education of Joan and Peter—and more particularly of Peter.

His Catechism varied considerably in detail, but always it ran upon the lines of the following questions.

“What sort of boy are you trying to make?”

“How will he differ from an uneducated boy?”

“I don’t mean in manners, I mean how will he differ in imagination?”

“Yes—I said—imagination.”

“Don’t you know that education is building up an imagination? I thought everybody knew that.”

“Then what is education doing?”

Here usually the Catechized would become troublesome and the Catechist short and rude. The Catechism would be not so much continued as resumed after incivilities and a silence.

“What sort of curriculum is my ward to go through?”

“Why is he to do Latin?”

“Why is he to do Greek?”

“Is he going to read or write or speak these languages?”

“Then what is the strange and peculiar benefit of them?”

“What will my ward know about Africa when you have done with him?”

“What will he know about India? Are there any Indian boys here?”

“What will he know about Garibaldi and Italy? About engineering? About Darwin?”

“Will he be able to write good English?”

“Do your boys do much German? Russian? Spanish or Hindustani?”

“Will he know anything about the way the Royal Exchange affects the Empire? But why shouldn’t he understand the elementary facts of finance and currency? Why shouldn’t every citizen understand what a pound sterling really means? All our everyday life depends on that. What do you teach about Socialism? Nothing! Did you say Nothing? But he may be a member of Parliament some day. Anyhow he’ll be a voter.”

“But if you can’t teach him everything why not leave out these damned classics of yours?”...

The record of an irritable man seeking the impossible is not to be dwelt upon too closely. During his search for the boys’ school that has yet to exist, Oswald gave way to some unhappy impulses; he made himself distressing and exasperating to quite a number of people. From the first his attitude to scholastic agents was hostile and uncharitable. His appearance made them nervous and defensive from the outset, more particularly the fierce cocking of his hat and the red intensity of his eye. He came in like an accusation rather than an application.

“And tell me, are these all the schools there are?” he would ask, sitting with various printed and copygraphed papers in his hand.

“All we can recommend,” the genteel young man in charge would say.

“All you are paid to recommend?” Oswald would ask.

“They are the best schools available,” the genteel young man would fence.

“Bah!” Oswald would say.

A bad opening....

From the ruffled scholastic agents Oswald would go on in a mood that was bound to ruffle the hopeful school proprietor. Indeed some of these interviews became heated so soon and so extravagantly that there was a complete failure to state even the most elementary facts of the case. Lurid misunderstandings blazed. Uganda got perplexingly into the dispute. From one admirable establishment in Eastbourne Oswald retreated with its principal calling after him from his dignified portico, “I wouldn’t take the little nigger at any price.”

When his doctor saw him after this last encounter he told him; “You are not getting on as well as you ought to do. You are running about too much. You ought to be resting completely.”

So Oswald took a week’s rest from school visiting before he tried again.

§ 3

If it had not been for the sense of Joan and Peter growing visibly day by day, Oswald might perhaps have displayed more of the patience of the explorer. But his was rather the urgency of a thirsty traveller who looks for water than the deliberation of a trigonometrical survey. In a little while he mastered the obvious fact that preparatory schools were conditioned by the schools for which they prepared. He found a school at Margate, White Court, which differed rather in quality, and particularly in the quality of its proprietor, than in the nature of its arrangements from the other schools he had been visiting, and to this he committed Peter. Assisted by Aunt Phyllis he found an education for Joan in Highmorton School, ten miles away; he settled himself in a furnished house at Margate to be near them both; and having thus gained a breathing time, he devoted himself to a completer study of the perplexing chaos of upper-class education in England. What was it “up to”? He had his own clear conviction of what it ought to be up to, but the more he saw of existing conditions, the more hopelessly it seemed to be up to either entirely different things or else, in a spirit of intellectual sabotage, up to nothing at all. From the preparatory schools he went on to the great public schools, and from the public schools he went to the universities. He brought to the quest all the unsympathetic detachment of an alien observer and all the angry passion of an anxious patriot. With some suggestions from Matthew Arnold.

“Indolence.” “Insincerity.” These two words became more and more frequent in his thoughts as he went from one great institution to another. Occasionally the headmasters he talked to had more than a suspicion of his unspoken comments. “Their imaginations are dead within them,” said Oswald. “If only they could see the Empire! If only they could forget their little pride and dignity and affectations in the vision of mankind!”

His impressions of headmasters were for the most part taken against a background of white-flannelled boys in playing-fields or grey-flannelled boys in walled court-yards. Eton gave him its river effects and a bright, unforgetable boatman in a coat of wonderful blue; Harrow displayed its view and insisted upon its hill. Physically he liked almost all the schools he saw, except Winchester, which he visited on a rainy day. Almost always there were fine architectural effects; now there was a nucleus of Gothic, now it was time-worn Tudor red brick, now well-proportioned grey Georgian. Most of these establishments had the dignity of age, but Caxton was wealthily new. Caxton was a nest of new buildings of honey-coloured stone; it was growing energetically but tidily; it waved its hand to a busy wilderness of rocks and plants and said, “our botanical garden,” to a piece of field and said “our museum group.” But it had science laboratories with big apparatus, and the machinery for a small engineering factory. Oswald with an experienced eye approved of its biological equipment. All these great schools were visibly full of life and activity. At times Oswald was so impressed by this life and activity that he felt ashamed of his enquiries; it seemed ungracious not to suppose that all was going well here, that almost any of these schools was good enough and that almost any casual or sentimental considerations, Sydenham family traditions or the like, should suffice to determine which was to have the moulding of Peter. But he had set his heart now on getting to the very essentials of this problem; he was resolved to be blinded by no fair appearances, and though these schools looked as firmly rooted and stoutly prosperous as British oaks and as naturally grown as they, though they had an air of discharging a function as necessary as the beating of a heart and as inevitably, he still kept his grip on the idea that they were artificial things of men’s contriving, and still pressed his questions: What are you trying to do? What are you doing? How are you doing it? How do you fit in to the imperial scheme of things?

So challenged these various high and headmasters had most of them the air of men invited to talk of things that are easier to understand than to say. They were not at all pompous about their explanations; from first to last Oswald never discovered the pompous schoolmaster of legend and history; without exception they seemed anxious to get out of their gowns and pose as intelligent laymen; but they were not intelligent laymen, they did not explain, they did not explain, they waved hands and smiled. They “hoped” they were “turning out clean English gentlemen.” They didn’t train their men specially to any end at all. The aim was to develop a general intelligence, a general goodwill.

“In relation to the empire and its destiny?” said Oswald.

“I should hardly fix it so definitely as that,” said Overtone of Hillborough.

“But don’t you set before these youngsters some general aim in life to which they are all to contribute?”

“We rather leave the sort of contribution to them,” said Overtone.

“But you must put something before them of where they are, where they are to come in, what they belong to?” said Oswald.

“That lies in the world about them,” said Overtone. “King and country—we don’t need to preach such things.”

“But what the King signifies—if he signifies anything at all—and the aim of the country,” urged Oswald. “And the Empire! The Empire—our reality. This greatness of ours beyond the seas.”

“We don’t stress it,” said Overtone. “English boys are apt to be suspicious and ironical. Have you read that delightful account of the patriotic lecture in Stalky and Co? Oh, you should.”

A common evasiveness characterized all these headmasters when Oswald demanded the particulars of Peter’s curriculum. He wanted to know just the subjects Peter would study and which were to be made the most important, and then when these questions were answered he would demand: “And why do you teach this? What is the particular benefit of that to the boy or the empire? How does this other fit into your scheme of a clear-minded man?” But it was difficult to get even the first questions answered plainly. From the very outset he found himself entangled in that longstanding controversy upon the educational value of Latin and Greek. His circumstances and his disposition alike disposed him to be sceptical of the value of these shibboleths of the British academic world. Their share in the time-table was enormous. Excellent gentlemen who failed to impress him as either strong-minded or exact, sought to convince him of the pricelessness of Latin in strengthening and disciplining the mind; Hinks of Carchester, the distinguished Greek scholar, slipped into his hand at parting a pamphlet asserting that only Greek studies would make a man write English beautifully and precisely. Unhappily for his argument Hinks had written his pamphlet neither beautifully nor precisely. Lippick, irregularly bald and with neglected teeth, a man needlessly unpleasing to the eye, descanted upon the Greek spirit, and its blend of wisdom and sensuous beauty. He quoted Euripides at Oswald and breathed an antique air in his face—although he knew that Oswald knew practically no Greek.

“Well,” said Oswald, “but compare this,” and gave him back three good minutes of Swahili.

“But what does it mean? It’s gibberish to me. A certain melody perhaps.”

“In English,” Oswald grinned, “you would lose it all. It is a passage of—oh! quite fantastic beauty.”...

No arguments, no apologetics, stayed the deepening of Oswald’s conviction that education in the public schools of Great Britain was not a forward-going process but a habit and tradition, that these classical schoolmasters were saying “nothing like the classics” in exactly the same spirit that the cobbler said “nothing like leather,” because it was the stuff they had in stock. These subjects were for the most part being slackly, tediously, and altogether badly taught to boys who found no element of interest in them, the boys were as a class acquiring a distaste and contempt for learning thus presented, and a subtle, wide demoralization ensued. They found a justification for cribs and every possible device for shirking work in the utter remoteness and uselessness of these main subjects; the extravagant interest they took in school games was very largely a direct consequence of their intense boredom in school hours.

Such was the impression formed by Oswald. To his eyes these great schools, architecturally so fine, so happy in their out-of-door aspects, so pleasant socially, became more and more visibly whirlpools into which the living curiosity and happy energy of the nation’s youth were drawn and caught, and fatigued, thwarted, and wasted. They were beautiful shelters of intellectual laziness—from which Peter must if possible be saved.

But how to save him? There was, Oswald discovered, no saving him completely. Oswald had a profound hostility to solitary education. He knew that except through accidental circumstances of the rarest sort, a private tutor must necessarily be a poor thing. A man who is cheap enough to devote all his time to the education of one boy can have very little that is worth imparting. And education is socialization. Education is the process of making the unsocial individual a citizen....

Oswald’s decision upon Caxton in the end, was by no means a certificate of perfection for Caxton. But Caxton had a good if lopsided Modern Side, with big, businesslike chemical and physical laboratories, a quite honest and living-looking biological and geological museum, and a pleasant and active layman as headmaster. The mathematical teaching instead of being a drill in examination solutions was carried on in connexion with work in the physical and engineering laboratories. It was true that the “Modern Side” of Caxton taught no history of any sort, ignored logic and philosophy, and, in the severity of its modernity, excluded even that amount of Latin which is needed for a complete mastery of English; nevertheless it did manifestly interest its boys enough to put games into a secondary place. At Caxton one did not see boys playing games as old ladies in hydropaths play patience, desperately and excessively and with a forced enthusiasm, because they had nothing better to do. Even the Caxton school magazine did not give much more than two-thirds of its space to games. So to Caxton Peter went, when Mr. Mackinder of White Court had done his duty by him.

§ 4

Mr. Henderson, the creator of Caxton, was of the large sized variety of schoolmaster, rather round-shouldered and with a slightly persecuted bearing towards parents; his mind seemed busy with many things—buildings, extensions, governors, chapels. Oswald walked with him through a field that was visibly becoming a botanical garden, towards the school playing-fields. Once the schoolmaster stopped, his mind distressed by a sudden intrusive doubt whether the exactly right place had been chosen for what he called a “biological pond.” He had to ask various questions of a gardener and give certain directions. But he was listening to Oswald, nevertheless.

Oswald discoursed upon the training of what he called “the fortunate Elite.” “We can’t properly educate the whole of our community yet, perhaps,” he said, “but at least these expensive boys of ours ought to be given everything we can possibly give them. It’s to them and their class the Empire will look. Naturally. We ought to turn out boys who know where they are in the world, what the empire is and what it aims to do, who understand something of their responsibilities to Asia and Africa and have a philosophy of life and duty....”

“More of that sort of thing is done,” said Mr. Henderson, “than outsiders suppose. Masters talk to boys. Lend them books.”

“In an incidental sort of way,” said Oswald. “But three-quarters of the boys you miss.... Even here, it seems, you must still have your classical side. You must still keep on with Latin and Greek, with courses that will never reach through the dull grind to the stale old culture beyond. Why not drop all that? Why not be modern outright, and leave Eton and Harrow and Winchester and Westminster to go the old ways? Why not teach modern history and modern philosophy in plain English here? Why not question the world we see, instead of the world of those dead Levantines? Why not be a modern school altogether?”

The headmaster seemed to consider that idea. But there were the gravest of practical objections.

“We’d get no scholarships,” he considered. “Our boys would stop at a dead end. They’d get no appointments. They’d be dreadfully handicapped....

“We’re not a complete system,” said Mr. Henderson. “No. We’re only part of a big circle. We’ve got to take what the parents send on to us and we’ve got to send them on to college or the professions or what not. It’s only part of a process here—only part of a process.”...

Just as the ultimate excuse of the private schoolmasters had been that they could do no more than prepare along the lines dictated for them by the public school, so the public school waved Oswald on to the university. Thus he came presently with his questions to the university, to Oxford and Cambridge, for it was clear these set the pattern of all the rest in England. He came to Oxford and Cambridge as he came to the public schools, it must be remembered, with a fresh mind, for the navy had snatched him straight out of his preparatory school away from the ordinary routines of an English education at the tender age of thirteen.

§ 5

Oswald’s investigation of Oxford and Cambridge began even before Peter had entered School House at Caxton. As early as the spring of 1906, the scarred face under the soft felt hat was to be seen projecting from one of those brown-coloured hansom cabs that used to ply in Cambridge. His bag was on the top and he was going to the University Arms to instal himself and have “a good look round the damned place.” At times there still hung about Oswald a faint flavour of the midshipman on leave in a foreign town.

He spent three days watching undergraduates, he prowled about the streets, and with his face a little on one side, brought his red-brown eye to bear on the books in bookshop windows and the display of socks and ties and handkerchiefs in the outfitters. In those years the chromatic sock was just dawning upon the adolescent mind, it had still to achieve the iridescent glories of its crowning years. But Oswald found it symptomatic; ex pede Herculem. He was to be seen surveying the Backs, and standing about among the bookstalls in the Market Place. He paddled a Canadian canoe to Byron’s pool, and watched a cheerful group dispose of a huge tea in the garden of the inn close at hand. They seemed to joke for his benefit, neat rather than merry jesting. So that was Cambridge, was it? Then he went on by a tedious crosscountry journey to the slack horrors of one of the Oxford hotels, and made a similar preliminary survey of the land here that he proposed to prospect. There seemed to be more rubbish and more remainders in the Oxford second-hand bookshops and less comfort in the hotels; the place was more self-consciously picturesque, there was less of Diana and more of Venus about its beauty, a rather blowsy Gothic Venus with a bad tooth or so. So it impressed Oswald. The glamour of Oxford, sunrise upon Magdalen tower, Oriel, Pater, and so forth, were lost upon Oswald’s toughened mind; he had spent his susceptible adolescence on a battleship, and the sunblaze of Africa had given him a taste for colour like a taste for raw rye whiskey....

He walked about the perfect garden of St. Giles’ College and beat at the head of Blepp, the senior tutor, whose acquaintance he had made in the Athenaeum, with his stock questions. The garden of St. Giles’ College is as delicate as fine linen in lavender; its turf is supposed to make American visitors regret the ancestral trip in the Mayflower very bitterly; Blepp had fancied that in a way it answered Oswald. But Oswald turned his glass eye and his ugly side to the garden, it might just as well have not been there, and kept to his questioning; “What are we making of our boys here? What are they going to make of the Empire? What are you teaching them? What are you not teaching them? How are you working them? And why? Why? What’s the idea of it all? Suppose presently when this fine October in history ends, that the weather of the world breaks up; what will you have ready for the storm?”

Blepp felt the ungraciousness of such behaviour acutely. It was like suddenly asking the host of some great beautiful dinner-party whether he earned his income honestly. Like shouting it up the table at him. But Oswald was almost as comfortable a guest for a don to entertain as a spur in one’s trouser pocket. Blepp did his best to temper the occasion by an elaborate sweet reasonableness.

“Don’t you think there’s something in our atmosphere?” he began.

“I don’t like your atmosphere. The Oxford shops seem grubby little shops. The streets are narrow and badly lit.”

“I wasn’t thinking of the shops.”

“It’s where the youngsters buy their stuff, their furniture, and as far as I can see, most of their ideas.”

“You’ll be in sympathy with the American lady who complained the other day about our want of bathrooms,” Blepp sneered.

“Well, why not?” said Oswald outrageously.

Blepp shrugged his shoulders and looked for sympathy at the twisted brick chimneys of St. Giles’.

Oswald became jerkily eloquent. “We’ve got an empire sprawling all over the world. We’re a people at grips with all mankind. And in a few years these few thousand men here and at Cambridge and a few thousand in the other universities, have practically to be the mind of the empire. Think of the problems that press upon us as an empire. All the nations sharpen themselves now like knives. Are we making the mentality to solve the Irish riddle here? Are we preparing any outlook for India here? What are you doing here to get ready for such tasks as these?”

“How can I show you the realities that go on beneath the surface?” said Blepp. “You don’t see what is brewing today, the talk that goes on in the men’s rooms, the mutual polishing of minds. Look not at our formal life but our informal life. Consider one college, consider for example Balliol. Think of the Jowett influence, the Milner group—not blind to the empire there, were we? Even that fellow Belloc. A saucy rogue, but good rich stuff. All out of just one college. These are things one cannot put in a syllabus. These are things that defeat statistics.”

“But that is no reason why you should put chaff and dry bones into the syllabus,” said Oswald....

“This place,” said Oswald, and waved his arm at the great serenity of St. Giles’, “it has the air of a cathedral close. It might be a beautiful place of retirement for sad and weary old men. It seems a thousand miles from machinery, from great towns and the work of the world.”

“Would you have us teach in a foundry?”

“I’d have you teaching something about the storm that seems to me to be gathering in the world of labour. These youngsters here are going to be the statesmen, the writers and teachers, the lawyers, the high officials, the big employers, of tomorrow. But all that world of industry they have to control seems as far off here as if it were on another planet. You’re not talking about it, you’re not thinking about it. You’re teaching about the Gracchi and the Greek fig trade. You’re magnifying that pompous bore Cicero and minimizing—old Salisbury for example—who was a far more important figure in history—a greater man in a greater world.”

“With all respect to his memory,” said Blepp, “but good Lord!”

“Much greater. Your classics put out your perspective. Dozens of living statesmen are greater than Cicero. Of course our moderns are greater. If only because of the greatness of our horizons. Oxford and Cambridge ought to be the learning and thinking part of the whole empire, twin hemispheres in the imperial brain. But when I think of the size of the imperial body, its hundreds of nations, its thousands of cities, its tribes, its vast extension round and about the world, the immense problem of it, and then of the size and quality of this, I’m reminded of the Atlantosaurus. You’ve heard of the beast? Its brain was smaller than the ganglia of its rump. No doubt its brain thought itself quite up to its job. It wasn’t. Something ate up the Atlantosaurus. These two places, this place, ought to be big enough, and bigly conceived enough, to irradiate our whole world with ideas. All the empire. They ought to dominate the minds of hundreds of millions of men. And they dominate nothing. Leave India and Africa out of it. They do not even dominate England. Think only of your labour at home, of that huge blind Titan, whom you won’t understand, which doesn’t understand you——”

“There again,” interrupted Blepp sharply, “you are simply ignorant of what is going on here. Because Oxford has a certain traditional beauty and a decent respect for the past, because it doesn’t pose and assert itself rawly, you are offended. You do not realize how active we can be, how up-to-date we are. It wouldn’t make us more modern in spirit if we lived in enamelled bathrooms and lectured in corrugated iron sheds. That isn’t modernity. That’s your mistake. In respect to this very question of labour, we have got our labour contact. Have you never heard of Ruskin College? Founded here by an American of the most modern type, one Vrooman.” He repeated the name “Vrooman,” not as though he loved it but as though he thought it ought to appeal to Oswald. “I think he came from Chicago.” Surely a Teutonic name from Chicago was modern enough to satisfy any one! “It is a college of real working-men, of the Trade Union leader type, the actual horny-handed article, who come up here—I suppose because they don’t agree with your idea that we deal only in the swathings of mummies. They at any rate think that we have something to tell the modern world, something worth their learning. Perhaps they know their needs better than you do.”

Oswald was momentarily abashed. He expressed a desire to visit this Ruskin College.

Blepp explained he was not himself connected with the college. “Not quite my line,” said Blepp parenthetically; but he could arrange for a visit under proper guidance, and presently under the wing of a don of radical tendencies Oswald went.

It seemed to him the most touching and illuminating thing in Oxford. It reminded him of Jude the Obscure.

Ruskin College was sheltered over some stables in a back street, and it displayed a small group of oldish young men, for the most part with north-country accents, engaged in living under austere circumstances—they paid scarcely anything and did all the housework—and doing their best to get hold of the precious treasure of knowledge and understanding they were persuaded Oxford possessed. They had come up on their savings by virtue of extraordinary sacrifices. Graduation in any of the Oxford schools was manifestly impossible to them, if only on account of the Greek bar; the university had no use for these respectful pilgrims and no intention of encouraging more of them, and the “principal,” Mr. Dennis Hird, in the teeth of much opposition, was vamping a sort of course for them with the aid of a few liberal-minded junior dons who delivered a lecture when their proper engagements permitted. There was a vague suggestion of perplexity in the conversation of the two students with whom Oswald talked. This tepid drip of disconnected instruction wasn’t what they had expected, but then, what had they expected? Vrooman, the idealist who had set the thing going, had returned to America leaving much to be explained. Oswald dined with Blepp at St. Osyth’s that night, and spoke over the port in the common room of these working men who were “dunning Oxford for wisdom.”

Jarlow, the wit of the college, who had been entertaining the company with the last half-dozen Spoonerisms he had invented, was at once reminded of a little poem he had made, and he recited it. It was supposed to be by one of these same Ruskin College men, and his artless rhyming of “Socrates” and “fates” and “sides” and “Euripides,” combined with a sort of modest pretentiousness of thought and intention, was very laughable indeed. Everybody laughed merrily except Oswald.

“That’s quite one of your best, Jarlow,” said Blepp.

But Oxford had been rubbing Oswald’s fur backwards that day. The common room became aware of him sitting up stiffly and regarding Jarlow with an evil expression.

“Why the Devil,” said Oswald, addressing himself pointedly and querulously to Jarlow, “shouldn’t a working-man say ’So-crates?’ We all say ’Paris.’ These men do Oxford too much honour.”

§ 6

Perhaps there was a sort of necessity in the educational stagnation of England during those crucial years before the Great War. All the influential and important people of the country were having a thoroughly good time, and if there was a growing quarrel between worker and employer no one saw any reason in that for sticking a goad into the teacher. The disposition of the mass of men is always on the side of custom against innovation. The clear-headed effort of yesterday tends always to become the unintelligent routine of tomorrow. So long as we get along we go along. In the less exacting days of good Queen Victoria the educational processes of Great Britain had served well enough; they still went on because the necessity for a more thorough, coherent, and lucid education had still to be made glaringly manifest. Few people understood the discontent of a Ray Lankester, the fretfulness of a Kipling. Foresight dies when the imagination slumbers. Only catastrophe can convince the mass of people of the possibility of catastrophe. The system had the inertia of a spinning top. The most thoroughly and completely mis-taught of one generation became the mis-teachers of the next. “Learn, obey, create nothing, initiate nothing, have no troublesome doubts,” ran the rules of scholarly discretion. “Prize-boy, scholar, fellow, don, pedagogue; prize-boy, scholar, fellow, don”—so spun the circle of the schools. Into that relentless circle the bright, curious little Peters, who wanted to know about the insides of animals and the way of machines and what was happening, were drawn; the little Joans, too, were being drawn. The best escaped complete deadening, they found a use for themselves, but life usually kept them too busy and used them too hard for them ever to return to teach in college or school of the realities they had experienced. And so as Joan and Peter grew up, Oswald became more and more tolerant of a certain rabble rout of inky outsiders who, without authority and dignity, were at least putting living ideas of social function and relationship in the way of adolescent inquiry.

It became manifest to Oswald that the real work of higher education, the discussion of God, of the state and of sex, of all the great issues in life, while it was being elaborately evaded in the formal education of the country, was to a certain extent being done, thinly, unsatisfactorily, pervertedly even by the talk of boys and girls among themselves, by the casual suggestions of tutors, friends, and chance acquaintances, and more particularly by a number of irresponsible journalists and literary men. For example though the higher education of the country afforded no comprehensive view of social inter-relationship at all, the propaganda of the socialists did give a scheme—Oswald thought it was a mistaken and wrong-headed scheme—of economic interdependence. If the school showed nothing to their children of the Empire but a few tiresome maps, Kipling’s stories, for all his Jingo violence, did at least breathe something of its living spirit. As Joan and Peter grew up they ferreted out and brought to their guardian’s knowledge a school of irresponsible contemporary teachers, Shaw, Wells and the other Fabian Society pamphleteers, the Belloc-Chesterton group, Cunninghame Graham, Edward Carpenter, Orage of The New Age, Galsworthy, Cannan; the suffragettes, and the like. If the formal teachers lacked boldness these strange self-appointed instructors seemed to be nothing if not bold. The Freewoman, which died to rise again as The New Freewoman, existed it seemed chiefly to mention everything that a young lady should never dream of mentioning. Aunt Phœbe’s monthly, Wayleaves, in its green and purple cover, made a gallant effort to outdo that valiant weekly. Aunt Phœbe was a bright and irresponsible assistant in the education of Oswald’s wards. She sowed the house with strange books whenever she came to stay with them. Oswald found Joan reading Oscar Wilde when she was seventeen. He did not interrupt her reading, for he could not imagine how to set about the interruption. Later on he discovered a most extraordinary volume by Havelock Ellis lying in the library, an impossible volume. He read in it a little and then put it down. Afterwards he could not believe that book existed. He thought he must have dreamt about it, or dreamt the contents into it. It seemed incredible that Aunt Phœbe——!... He was never quite sure. When he went to look for it again it had vanished, and he did not like to ask for it.

More and more did this outside supplement of education in England press upon Oswald’s reluctant attention. Most of these irregulars he disliked by nature and tradition. None of them had the dignity and restraint of the great Victorians, the Corinthian elegance of Ruskin, the Teutonic hammer-blows of Carlyle. Shaw he understood was a lean, red-haired Pantaloon, terribly garrulous and vain; Belloc and Chesterton thrust a shameless obesity upon the public attention; the social origins of most of the crew were appalling, Bennett was a solicitor’s clerk from the potteries, Wells a counter-jumper, Orage came from Leeds. Oswald had seen a picture of Wells by Max that confirmed his worst suspicions about these people; a heavy bang of hair assisted a cascade moustache to veil a pasty face that was broad rather than long and with a sly, conceited expression; the creature still wore a long and crumpled frock coat, acquired no doubt during his commercial phase, and rubbed together two large, clammy, white, misshapen hands. Except for Cunninghame Graham there was not a gentleman, as Oswald understood the word, among them all. But these writers got hold of the intelligent young because they did at least write freely where the university teacher feared to tread. They wrote, he thought, without any decent restraint. They seasoned even wholesome suggestions with a flavour of scandalous excitement. It remained an open question in his mind whether they did more good by making young people think or more harm by making them think wrong. Progressive dons he found maintained the former opinion. With that support Oswald was able to follow his natural disposition and leave the reading of his two wards unrestrained.

And they read—and thought, to such purpose as will be presently told.

§ 7

But here Justice demands an interlude.

Before we go on to tell of how Joan and Peter grew up to adolescence in these schools that Oswald—assisted by Aunt Phyllis in the case of Joan—found for them, Mr. Mackinder must have his say, and make the Apology of the Schoolmaster. He made it to Oswald when first Oswald visited him and chose his school out of all the other preparatory schools, to be Peter’s. He appeared as a little brown man with a hedgehog’s nose and much of the hedgehog’s indignant note in his voice. He came, shy and hostile, into the drawing-room in which Oswald awaited him. It was, by the by, the most drawing-room-like drawing-room that Oswald had ever been in; it was as if some one had said to a furniture dealer, “People expect me to have a drawing-room. Please let me have exactly the sort of drawing-room that people expect.” It displayed a grand piano towards the French window, a large standard lamp with an enormous shade, a pale silk sofa, an Ottoman, a big fern in an ornate pot, and water-colours of Venetian lagoons. In the midst of it all stood Mr. Mackinder, in a highly contracted state, mutely radiating an interrogative “Well?”

“I’m looking for a school for my nephew,” said Oswald.

“You want him here?”

“Well— Do you mind if first of all I see something of the school?”

“We’re always open to investigation,” said Mr. Mackinder, bitterly.

“I want to do the very best I can for this boy. I feel very strongly that it’s my duty to him and the country to turn him out—as well as a boy can be turned out.”

Mr. Mackinder nodded his head and continued to listen.

This was something new in private schoolmasters. For the most part they had opened themselves out to Oswald, like sunflowers, like the receptive throats of nestlings. They had embraced and silenced him by the wealth of their assurances.

“I have two little wards,” he said. “A boy and a girl. I want to make all I can of them. They ought to belong to the Elite. The strength of a country—of an empire—depends ultimately almost entirely on its Elite. This empire isn’t overwhelmed with intelligence and most of the talk we hear about the tradition of statesmanship——”

Mr. Mackinder made a short snorting noise through his nose that seemed to indicate his opinion of contemporary statesmanship.

“You see I take this schooling business very solemnly. These upper-class schools, I say, these schools for the sons of prosperous people and scholarship winners, are really Elite-making machines. They really make—or fail to make—the Empire. That makes me go about asking schoolmasters a string of questions. Some of them don’t like my questions. Perhaps they are too elementary. I ask: what is this education of yours up to? What is the design of the whole? What is this preparation of yours for? This is called a Preparatory School. You lay the foundations. What is the design of the building for which these foundations are laid?”

He paused, determined to make Mr. Mackinder say something before he discoursed further.

“It isn’t so simple as that,” was wrung from Mr. Mackinder. “Suppose we just walk round the school. Suppose we just see the sort of place it is and what we are doing here. Then perhaps you’ll be able to see better what we contribute—in the way of making a citizen.”

The inspection was an unusually satisfactory one. White Court was one of the few private schools Oswald had seen that had been built expressly for its purpose. Its class rooms were well lit and well arranged, its little science museum seemed good and well arranged and well provided with diagrams; its gymnasium was businesslike; its wall blackboards unusually abundant and generously used, and everything was tidy. Nevertheless the Catechism for Schoolmasters was not spared. “Now,” said Oswald, “now for the curriculum?”

“We live in the same world with most other English schools,” Mr. Mackinder sulked. “This is a preparatory school.”

“What are called English subjects?”

“Yes.”

“How do you teach geography?”

“With books and maps.”

Oswald spoke of lantern slides and museum visits. The cinema had yet to become an educational possibility.

“I do what I can,” said Mr. Mackinder; “I’m not a millionaire.”

“Do you do classics?”

“We do Latin. Clever boys do a little Greek. In preparation for the public schools.”

“Grammar of course?...”

“What else?...”

“French, German, Latin, Greek, bits of mathematics, botany, geography, bits of history, book-keeping, music lessons, some water-colour painting; it’s very mixed,” said Oswald.

“It’s miscellaneous.”

Mr. Mackinder roused himself to a word of defence: “The boys don’t specialize.”

“But this is a diet of scraps,” said Oswald, reviving one of the most controversial topics of the catechism. “Nothing can be done thoroughly.”

“We are necessarily elementary.”

“It’s rather like the White Knight in Alice in Wonderland packing his luggage for nowhere.”

“We have to teach what is required of us,” said Mr. Mackinder.

“But what is education up to?” asked Oswald.

As Mr. Mackinder offered no answer to that riddle, Oswald went on. “What is Education in England up to, anyhow? In Uganda we knew what we were doing. There was an idea in it. The old native tradition was breaking up. We taught them to count and reckon English fashion, to read and write, we gave them books and the Christian elements, so that they could join on to our civilization and play a part in the great world that was breaking up their little world. We didn’t teach them anything that didn’t serve mind or soul or body. We saw the end of what we were doing. But half this school teaching of yours is like teaching in a dream. You don’t teach the boy what he wants to know and needs to know. You spend half his time on calculations he has no use for, mere formal calculations, and on this dead language stuff——! It’s like trying to graft mummy steak on living flesh. It’s like boiling fossils for soup.”

Mr. Mackinder said nothing.

“And damn it!” said Oswald petulantly; “your school is about as good a school as I’ve seen or am likely to see....

“I had an idea,” he went on, “of just getting the very best out of those two youngsters—the boy especially—of making every hour of his school work a gift of so much power or skill or subtlety, of opening the world to him like a magic book.... The boy’s tugging at the magic covers....”

He stopped short.

“There are no such schools,” said Mr. Mackinder compactly. "This is as good a school as you will find.”

And there he left the matter for the time. But in the evening he dined with Oswald at his hotel, and it may be that iced champagne had something to do with a certain relaxation from his afternoon restraint. Oswald had already arranged about Peter, but he wanted the little man to talk more. So he set him an example. He talked of his own life. He represented it as a life of disappointment and futility. “I envy you your life of steadfast usefulness.” He spoke of his truncated naval career and his disfigurement. Of the years of uncertainty that had followed. He talked of the ambitions and achievements of other men, of the large hopes and ambitions of youth.

“I too,” said Mr. Mackinder, warming for a moment, and then left his sentence unfinished. Oswald continued to generalize....

“All life, I suppose, is disappointment—is anyhow largely disappointment,” said Mr. Mackinder presently.

“We get something done.”

“Five per cent., ten per cent., of what we meant to do.”

The schoolmaster reflected. Oswald refilled his glass for him.

“To begin with I thought, none of these other fellows really know how to run a school. I will, I said, make a nest of Young Paragons. I will take a bunch of boys and get the best out of them, the best possible; watch them, study them, foster them, make a sort of boy so that the White Court brand shall be looked for and recognized....”

He sipped his faintly seething wine and put down the glass.

“Five per cent.,” he said; “ten per cent., perhaps.” He touched his lips with his dinner-napkin. “I have turned out some creditable boys.”

“Did you make any experiments in the subjects you taught?”

“At first. But one of the things we discover in life as we grow past the first flush of beginning, is just how severely we are conditioned. We are conditioned. We seem to be free. And we are in a net. You have criticized my curriculum today pretty severely, Mr. Sydenham. Much that you say is absolutely right. It is wasteful, discursive, ineffective. Yes.... But in my place I doubt if you could have made it much other than it is....

“One or two things I do. Latin grammar here is taught on lines strictly parallel with the English and French and German—that is to say, we teach languages comparatively. It was troublesome to arrange, but it makes a difference mentally. And I take a class in Formal Logic; English teaching is imperfect, expression is slovenly, without that. The boys write English verse. The mathematical teaching too, is as modern as the examining boards will let it be. Small things, perhaps. But you do not know the obstacles.

“Mr. Sydenham, your talk today has reminded me of all the magnificent things I set out to do at White Court, when I sank my capital in building White Court six and twenty years ago. When I found that I couldn’t control the choice of subjects, when I found that in that matter I was ruled by the sort of schools and colleges the boys had to go on to and by the preposterous examinations they would have to pass, then I told myself, ’at least I can cultivate their characters and develop something like a soul in them, instead of crushing out individuality and imagination as most schools do....’

“Well, I think I have a house of clean-minded and cheerful and willing boys, and I think they all tell the truth....”

“I don’t know what I’m to do with the religious teaching of these two youngsters of mine,” said Oswald abruptly. “Practically, they’re Godless.”

Mr. Mackinder did not speak for a little while. Then he said, “It is almost unavoidable, under existing conditions, that the religious teaching in a school should be—formal and orthodox.

“For my own part—I’m liberal,” said Mr. Mackinder, and added, “very liberal. Let me tell you, Mr. Sydenham, exactly how I see things.”

He paused for a moment as if he collected his views.

“If a little boy has grown up in a home, in the sort of home which one might describe as God-fearing, if he has not only heard of God but seen God as a living influence upon the people about him, then—then, I admit, you have something real. He will believe in God. He will know God. God—simply because of the faith about him—will be a knowable reality. God is a faith. In men. Such a boy’s world will fall into shape about the idea of God. He will take God as a matter of course. Such a boy can be religious from childhood—yes.... But there are very few such homes.”

“Less, probably, than there used to be?”

Mr. Mackinder disavowed an answer by a gesture of hands and shoulders. He went on, frowning slightly as he talked. He wanted to say exactly what he thought. “For all other boys, Mr. Sydenham, God, for all practical purposes, does not exist. Their worlds have been made without him; they do not think in terms of him; and if he is to come into their lives at all he must come in from the outside—a discovery, like a mighty rushing wind. By what is called Conversion. At adolescence. Until that happens you must build the soul on pride, on honour, on the decent instincts. It is all you have. And the less they hear about God the better. They will not understand. It will be a cant to them—a kind of indelicacy. The two greatest things in the world have been the most vulgarized. God and sex.... If I had my own way I would have no religious services for my boys at all.”

“Instead of which?”

Mr. Mackinder paused impressively before replying.

“The local curate is preparing two of my elder boys for Confirmation at the present time.”

He gazed gloomily at the tablecloth. “If one could do as one liked!” he said. “If only one could do as one liked!”

But now Oswald was realizing for the first time the eternal tragedy of the teacher, that sower of unseen harvests, that reaper of thistles and the wind, that serf of custom, that subjugated rebel, that feeble, persistent antagonist of the triumphant things that rule him. And behind that immediate tragedy Oswald was now apprehending for the first time something more universally tragic, an incessantly recurring story of high hopes and a grey ending; the story of boys and girls, clean and sweet-minded, growing up into life, and of the victory of world inertia, of custom drift and the tarnishing years.

Mr. Mackinder spoke of his own youth. Quite early in life had come physical humiliations, the realization that his slender and delicate physique debarred him from most active occupations, and his resolve to be of use in some field where his weak and undersized body would be at no great disadvantage. “I made up my mind that teaching should be my religion,” he said.

He told of the difficulties he had encountered in his attempts to get any pedagogic science or training. “This is the most difficult profession in the world,” he said, “and the most important. Yet it is not studied; it has no established practice; it is not endowed. Buildings are endowed and institutions, but not teachers.” And in Great Britain, in the schools of the classes that will own and rule the country, ninety-nine per cent. of the work was done by unskilled workmen, by low-grade, genteel women and young men. In America the teachers were nearly all women. “How can we expect to raise a nation nearly as good as we might do under such a handicap?” He had read and learnt what he could about teaching; he had served for small salaries in schools that seemed living and efficient; finally he had built his own school with his own money. He had had the direst difficulties in getting a staff together. “What can one expect?” he said. “We pay them hardly better than shop assistants—less than bank clerks. You see the relative importance of things in the British mind.” What hope or pride was there to inspire an assistant schoolmaster to do good work?

“I thought I could make a school different from all other schools, and I found I had to make a school like most other fairly good schools. I had to work for what the parents required of me, and the ideas of the parents had been shaped by their schools. I had never dreamt of the immensity of the resistance these would offer to constructive change. In this world there are incessant changes, but most of them are landslides or epidemics.... I tried to get away from stereotyping examinations. I couldn’t. I tried to get away from formal soul-destroying religion. I couldn’t. I tried to get a staff of real assistants. I couldn’t. I had to take what came. I had to be what was required of me....

“One works against time always. Over against the Parents. It is not only the boys one must educate, but the parents—let alone one’s self. The parents demand impossible things. I have been asked for Greek and for book-keeping by double-entry by the same parent. I had—I had to leave the matter—as if I thought such things were possible. After all, the Parent is master. One can’t run a school without boys.”

“You’d get some boys,” said Oswald.

“Not enough. I’m up against time. The school has to pay.”

“Can’t you hold out for a time? Run the school on a handful of oatmeal?”

“It’s running it on an overdraft I don’t fancy. You’re not a married man, Mr. Sydenham, with sons to consider.”

“No,” said Oswald shortly. “But I have these wards. And, after all, there’s not only today but tomorrow. If the world is going wrong for want of education——. If you don’t give it your sons will suffer.”

“Tomorrow, perhaps. But today comes first. I’m up against time. Oh, I’m up against time.”

He sat with his hands held out supine on the table before him.

“I started my school twenty-seven years ago next Hilary. And it seems like yesterday. When I started it I meant it to be something memorable in schools.... I jumped into it. I thought I should swim about.... It was like jumping into the rapids of Niagara. I was seized, I was rushed along.... Ai! Ai!...”

“Time’s against us all,” said Oswald. “I suppose the next glacial age will overtake us long before we’re ready to fight out our destiny.”

“If you want to feel the generations rushing to waste,” said Mr. Mackinder, “like rapids—like rapids—you must put your heart and life into a private school.”

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This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2020). Joan and Peter. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61426/61426-h/61426-h.htm

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