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THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER
* * * * * *
¶ Mr. Wells has also written the following novels:
THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
KIPPS
TONO BUNGAY
ANN VERONICA
MR. POLLY
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
MARRIAGE
THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
BEALBY
THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
JOAN AND PETER
THE UNDYING FIRE
THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART
¶ The following fantastic and imaginative romances:
THE TIME MACHINE
THE WONDERFUL VISIT
THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
THE INVISIBLE MAN
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
THE SLEEPER AWAKES
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
THE SEA LADY
THE FOOD OF THE GODS
IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
THE WAR IN THE AIR
THE WORLD SET FREE
MEN LIKE GODS
And numerous Short Stories published in several different collections
¶ A Series of books upon Social, Religious and Political questions:
ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
MANKIND IN THE MAKING
FIRST AND LAST THINGS
NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
A MODERN UTOPIA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
AN ENGLISHMAN LOOKS AT THE WORLD
WHAT IS COMING?
WAR AND THE FUTURE
IN THE FOURTH YEAR
GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS
THE SALVAGING OF CIVILIZATION
WASHINGTON AND THE RIDDLE OF PEACE
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD
¶ And two little books about children's play, called:
FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS
* * * * * *
[Illustration: F. W. Sanderson]
THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER
by
H. G. WELLS
New York
The Macmillan Company
1924
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1924, by H. G. Wells.
Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1924.
Printed in the United States of America by
The Ferris Printing Company, New York
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
SANDERSON THE MAN 1
CHAPTER II
THE MODERNISATION OF OUNDLE SCHOOL 25
CHAPTER III
THE REPLACEMENT OF COMPETITION BY GROUP
WORK 45
CHAPTER IV
THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF RELATIONS BETWEEN
SCHOOL AND REALITY 61
CHAPTER V
THE GROWTH OF SANDERSON SHOWN IN HIS
SERMONS AND SCRIPTURE LESSONS 72
CHAPTER VI
THE WAR AND SANDERSON'S PROPAGANDA OF
RECONSTRUCTION 97
CHAPTER VII
THE HOUSE OF VISION AND THE SCHOOL CHAPEL 131
CHAPTER VIII
THE LAST LECTURE 147
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
F. W. SANDERSON _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
INTERIOR IN SCIENCE BLOCK 34
THE HEAD AMONG THE PARENTS 84
THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER
CHAPTER I
SANDERSON THE MAN
§ 1
Of all the men I have met--and I have now had a fairly long and active
life and have met a very great variety of interesting people--one only
has stirred me to a biographical effort. This one exception is F. W.
Sanderson, for many years the headmaster of Oundle School. I think him
beyond question the greatest man I have ever known with any degree of
intimacy, and it is in the hope of conveying to others something of
my sense not merely of his importance, but of his peculiar genius and
the rich humanity of his character, that I am setting out to write
this book. He was in himself a very delightful mixture of subtlety
and simplicity, generosity, adventurousness, imagination and steadfast
purpose, and he approached the general life of our time at such an
angle as to reflect the most curious and profitable lights upon it. To
tell his story is to reflect upon all the main educational ideas of
the last half-century, and to revise our conception of the process and
purpose of the modern community in relation to education. For Sanderson
had a mind like an octopus, it seemed always to have a tentacle free
to reach out beyond what was already held, and his tentacles grew and
radiated farther and farther. Before his end he had come to a vision
of the school as a centre for the complete reorganisation of civilised
life.
I knew him personally only during the last eight years of his life;
I met him for the first time in 1914, when I was proposing to send
my sons to his school. But our thoughts and interests drew us very
close to one another, I never missed an opportunity of meeting and
talking to him, and I was the last person he spoke to before his
sudden death. He was sixty-six years of age when he died. Those last
eight years were certainly the richest and most productive of his
whole career; he grew most in those years; he travelled farthest. I
think I saw all the best of him. It is, I think, no disadvantage to
have known him only in his boldest and most characteristic phase. It
saves me from confusion between his maturer and his earlier phases. He
was a much stratified man. He had grown steadfastly all his life, he
had shaken off many habitual inhibitions and freed himself from once
necessary restraints and limitations. He would go discreetly while his
convictions accumulated and then break forward very rapidly. He had
a way of leaving people behind, and if I had fallen under his spell
earlier, I, too, might have been left far behind. He was, I recall, a
rock-climber; he was a mental rock-climber also, and though he was very
wary of recalcitrance, there were times when his pace became so urgent
that even his staff and his own family were left tugging, breathless
and perplexed, at the rope.
Out of a small country grammar-school he created something more
suggestive of those great modern teaching centres of which our world
stands in need than anything else that has yet been attempted. By
all ordinary standards the Oundle School of his later years was
a brilliant success; it prospered amazingly, there was an almost
hopeless waiting-list of applicants; boys had to be entered five
years ahead; but successful as it was, it was no more than a sketch
and demonstration of the great schools that are yet to be. I saw my
own sons get an education there better than I had ever dared hope for
them in England, but from the first my interest in the intention and
promise of Oundle went far beyond its working actualities. And all the
educational possibilities that I had hitherto felt to be unattainable
dreams, matters of speculation, things a little too extravagant even
to talk about in our dull age, I found being pushed far towards
realisation by this bold, persistent, humorous and most capable man.
Let me first try to give you a picture of his personality as he lives
in my memory. Then I will try to give an account of his beginnings, as
far as I have been able to learn about them, and so we will come to our
main theme, _Sanderson contra Mundum_, the schoolmaster who set out to
conquer the world. For, as I shall show, that and no less was what he
was trying to do in the last years of his life.
'Ruddy' and 'jolly' are the adjectives that come first to mind when I
think of describing him. He had been a slender, energetic young man
his early photographs witness; but long before I met him he had become
plump and energetic, with a twinkling appreciation for most of the
good things of life. His complexion had a reddish fairness; he had
well-modelled features, thick eyebrows and thick moustache touched with
grey, and he wore spectacles through and over and beside which his
active eyes took stock of you. About his eyes were kindly wrinkles, and
generally I remember him as smiling--often with a touch of roguery in
the smile. Quick movements of his head caused animating flashes of his
glasses. He was carrying a little too much body for his heart, and that
made him short of breath. His voice was in his chest, there was a touch
of his native Northumbria in his accent, and he had a habit of speaking
in incomplete sentences with a frequent use of the interrogative form.
His manner was confidential; he would bend towards his hearer and drop
his voice a little. 'Now what do you think of ----?' he would say,
or 'I've been thinking of ----' so and so. At times his confidential
manner became endearingly suggestive of a friendly conspirator. This,
as yet, he seemed to say, was not for too careless a publication.
You and he understood, but those other fellows--they were difficult
fellows. It might not be practicable to attempt everything at once.
That reservation, that humorous discretion, is very essential in my
memory of him. It is essential to the whole educational situation of
the world. He was an exceptionally bold and creative man, and he was a
schoolmaster, and that is perhaps as near as one can come to a complete
incompatibility of quality and conditions. In no part of our social
life is dull traditionalism so powerfully entrenched as it is in our
educational organisation. We have still to realise the evil of mental
heaviness in scholastic concerns. We take, very properly, the utmost
precautions to exclude men and women of immoral character not only from
actual teaching but also from any exercise of educational authority.
But no one ever makes the least objection to the far more deadly
influences of stupidity and unteachable ignorance. Our conceptions of
morality are still grossly physical. The heavier and slower a man's
mind seems to be, the more addicted he is to intellectual narcotics,
the more people trust him as a schoolmaster. He will 'stay put.'
A timid obstructiveness is the atmosphere in which almost all
educational effort has to work, and schoolmasters are denied a liberty
of thought and speech conceded to every other class of respectable men.
They must still be mealy-mouthed about Darwin, fatuously conventional
in politics, and emptily orthodox in religion. If they stimulate their
boys they must stimulate as a brass trumpet does, without words or
ideas. They may be great leaders of men--provided they lead backwards
or nowhither. Sanderson in his latter days broke into unexampled
freedom, but for the greater part of his life he was--like most of
his profession--'wading hips-deep in fools,' and equally resolved
to work out his personal impulse and retain the great opportunities
that the governing body of Oundle School had, almost unwittingly, put
into his hands. He was therefore not only a great revolutionary but
something of a Vicar of Bray. A large part of the amusing subtlety of
his personality was the result of the balanced course he had to pursue.
In all he did, in all he said, he was feeling his way. No other
schoolmaster--and there must be many a rebellious heart lying still
in the graves of dead schoolmasters and many a stifled rebel in the
schoolrooms of to-day--no other schoolmaster has ever felt his way so
discreetly, so far and, at last, so triumphantly.
I remember as a very characteristic thing that he said one day when
I asked for his opinion of a particularly progressive and hopeful
addition to his board of governors: 'He does not know much about
schools yet, but he will learn. Oundle will teach him.' And in his last
great lecture, he flung out a general 'aside'--that lecture was full of
astonishing 'asides'--'I turned round on the boys and the parents,' he
said, '_both are my business_.'
Never was schoolmaster so emancipated as he in his latter years from
the ancient servility of the pedagogue. Not for him the handing on
of mellow traditions and genteel gestures of the mind, not for him
the obedient administration of useful information to employers' sons
by the docile employee. He saw the modern teacher in university and
school plainly for what he has to be, the anticipator, the planner, and
the foundation-maker of the new and greater order of human life that
arises now visibly amidst the decaying structures of the old.
§ 2
Sanderson was born and brought up outside the British public-school
system that he was to affect so profoundly. His early education was
obtained in a parish school. His father was employed in the estate
office of Lord Boyne at Brancepeth in Durham. There were several
brothers but they all died before manhood, and the scanty indications
one can glean of those early years suggest a slender, studious, and
probably rather delicate youngster. He was never very proficient in
any out-of-door games. In the early days at Oundle he careered about
on a bicycle; in later years he played tennis; his vacation exercise
was rock-scrambling. He became a 'student-teacher,' so the official
Life phrases it, at a school at Tudhoe, but whether there was any
difference between being a student-teacher at a school at Tudhoe and
being an ordinary pupil-teacher in an ordinary elementary school under
the English Education Department I have been unable to ascertain. He
was already notable in his village world as exceptionally intelligent,
industrious, and ambitious, and with a little encouragement from the
local vicar and one or two friends he effected an escape from the
strangling limitations of elementary teaching.
He may have aimed at the church at that time. At any rate he gained a
scholarship and entered Durham University as a theological student.
He did well in Durham University both in theology and mathematics; he
was made a Fellow and he was able to go on as a scholar from Durham to
the wider and more strenuous academic life of Cambridge. At Cambridge
theology drops out of the foreground of the picture. He took a fairly
good degree in mathematics, and he worked for the Natural Science
Tripos. He did not fight his way up into that select class which
secures Cambridge fellowships, but he had made a reputation as an able,
hard, and honest worker; he was much sought after as a coach, and he
was given a lectureship in the woman's college of Girton. From this he
went as senior physics master to the big school for boys at Dulwich.
A photograph of him in the early Dulwich period shows him slender and
keen-looking, already bespectacled and with a thick moustache; except
for the glasses not unlike another ruddy north-countryman I once knew,
the novelist George Gissing. Both were what one might call Scandinavian
in type. But Gissing was as despondent as Sanderson was buoyant. In
those days, an old Dulwich associate tells me, Sanderson was in a
state of great mental fermentation. He loved long walks in his spare
time, and along the pebbly paths and roads and up and down the little
hills of that corner of Kent, the two of them talked out a hundred
aspects and issues of the perplexing changing world in which they found
themselves.
It was the world of the eighteen-eighties they were looking at,
before the first Jubilee of Queen Victoria, and it may be worth while
to devote a paragraph or so to a reconstruction of the moral and
intellectual landscape this lean and eager young man was confronting.
Upon the surface and in its general structure that British world of
the eighties had a delusive air of final establishment. Queen Victoria
had been reigning for close upon half a century and seemed likely to
reign for ever. The economic system of unrestricted private enterprise
with privately owned capital had yielded a great harvest of material
prosperity, and few people suspected how rapidly it was exhausting the
soil of willing service in which it grew. Production increased every
year; population increased every year; there was a steady progress
of invention and discovery, comfort, and convenience. Wars went on,
a marginal stimulation of the empire, but since the collapse of
Napoleon I. no war had happened to frighten England for its existence
as a country; no threat of warfare that could touch English life
or English soil troubled men's imagination. Ruskin and Carlyle had
criticised English ideals and the righteousness of English commerce
and industrialism, but they were regarded generally as eccentric
and unaccountable men; there was already a conflict of science and
theology, but it affected the national life very little outside the
world of the intellectuals; a certain amount of trade competition from
the United States and from other European countries was developing, but
at most it ruffled the surface of the national self-confidence. There
was a socialist movement, but it was still only a passionless criticism
of trade and manufacturers, a criticism poised between aesthetic
fastidiousness and benevolence. People played with that Victorian
socialism as they would have played with a very young tiger-cub. The
labour movement was a gentle insistence upon rather higher wages and
rather shorter hours; it had still to discover Socialism. In a world
of certainties the rate of interest fell by minute but perceptible
degrees, and as a consequence money for investment went abroad until
all the world was under tribute to Britain. History seemed to be
over, entirely superseded by the daily paper; tragedy and catastrophe
were largely eliminated from human life. One read of famines in India
and civil chaos in China, but one felt that these were diminishing
distresses; the missionaries were at work there and railways spreading.
It was indeed a mild and massive Sphynx of British life that confronted
our young man at Dulwich and his friend, an amoeboid Sphynx which
enveloped and assimilated rather than tore and devoured. It had not
been stricken for a generation, and so it felt assured of the ages.
But beneath its tranquil-looking surfaces many ferments were actively
at work, and its serene and empty visage masked extensive processes
of decay. The fifty-year-old faith on which the social and political
fabric rested--for all social and political fabrics must in the last
resort rest upon faith--was being corroded and dissolved and removed.
Britain in the mid-Victorian time stood strong and sturdy in the
world because a great number of its people, its officials, employers,
professional men and workers honestly believed in the rightness of its
claims and professions, believed in its state theology, in the justice
of its economic relationships, in the romantic dignity of its monarchy,
and in the real beneficence and righteousness of its relations to
foreigners and the subject-races of the Empire. They did what they
understood to be their duty in the light of that belief, simply,
directly, and with self-respect and mutual confidence. If some of its
institutions fell short of perfection, few people doubted that they led
towards it. But from the middle of the century onward this assurance of
the prosperous British in their world was being subjected to a more
and more destructive criticism, spreading slowly from intellectual
circles into the general consciousness.
It is interesting to note one or two dates in relation to Sanderson's
life. He was born in the year 1857. This was two years before the
publication of Darwin's _Origin of Species_. He was growing up
through boyhood as the application of the Darwinian criticism of life
to current theology was made, and as the great controversy between
Science and orthodox beliefs came to a head. Huxley's challenging
book, _Man's Place in Nature_, was published in 1863; Darwin became
completely explicit about human origins only in 1871 with _The Descent
of Man_. Sanderson, then a bright and forward boy of fourteen, was
probably already beginning to take notice of these disputes about the
fundamentals, as they were then considered, of sound Christianity.
He was already at college when Huxley was pounding Gladstone and the
Duke of Argyll upon such issues as whether the first chapter of Genesis
was strictly parallel with the known course of evolution, and whether
the miracle of the Gadarene swine was a just treatment of the Gadarene
swineherds. Sanderson's Durham and Cambridge studies and talks went
on amidst the thunder of these debates, and there can be little doubt
that his early theology underwent much bending and adaptation to the
new realisations of the past of man, and of human destiny that these
discussions opened out. He did not take holy orders but he remained
in the Anglican Church; manifestly he could still find a meaning
in the Fall and in the scheme of Salvation. Many other promising
teachers of his generation found this impossible; such men as Graham
Wallas, for example, felt compelled for conscience'-sake to abandon
the public-school teaching to which they had hoped to give their
lives. Wallas found scope for his very great gifts of suggestion and
inspiration in the London School of Economics, but many others of these
Victorian non-jurors were lost to education altogether.
The criticism of the economic life and social organisation of that age
was going on almost parallel with the destruction of its cosmogony.
Ruskin's _Unto this Last_ was issued when Sanderson was four years
old; _Fors Clavigera_ was appearing in the seventies and the early
eighties. William Morris was a little later with _News from Nowhere_
and _The Dream of John Ball_; they must have still been vividly new
books in Sanderson's Cambridge days. Marx was little heard of then in
England. He was already a power in German socialism in the seventies,
but he did not reach the reader of English until the eighties were
nearly at an end. When Sanderson discussed socialism during those
Dulwich walks, it must have been Ruskin and Morris rather than Marx
who figured in his talk. Although there remains no account of those
early conversations, it is easy to guess that this stir of social
reconstruction and religious readjustment must have played a large part
in them. Sanderson meant to teach and wanted to teach; he was quite
unlike that too common sort of schoolmaster who has fallen back into
teaching after the collapse of other ambitions; like all really sincere
teachers he was eager to learn, open to every new and stimulating idea,
and free altogether from the malignant conservatism of the disappointed
type.
He kept that adolescent power of mental growth throughout life. I
remember my pleased astonishment on my first visit to Oundle to
find in his library--I had drifted to his bookshelves while I
awaited him--a row of the works of Nietzsche (who came into the
English-speaking world in the late nineties) and recent books by
Bertrand Russell and Shaw. Here was a schoolmaster, a British public
schoolmaster, aware that the world was still going on! It seemed too
good to be true. But it was true, and in the end Sanderson was to die,
ten years, shall we say?--or twenty, ahead of his time.
And while we are placing Sanderson in relation to the intellectual
stir of the age let us note, too, the general shape of human affairs
as it was presented to his mind. It was an age of steadily accelerated
political change, and of a vast increase in the population of the
world. The fifties and sixties of the nineteenth century had seen
the world-wide spread of the railway and telegraph network, and a
consequent opening up of vast regions of production that had hitherto
lain fallow. The screw was replacing the ineffective paddle-wheel of
the earlier steamships and revolutionising ocean transport. There was
a great increase in mechanical and agricultural efficiency. We still
call that time the mid-Victorian period, but the history teacher of
the future, more sensible than we are of the innocence of good Queen
Victoria in any concern of importance to mankind, is more likely to
distinguish it as the Advent of the New Communications. These new
inventions were 'abolishing distance.' They were demanding a political
synthesis of mankind. But there was little understanding as yet of
this now manifest truth. One hardly notes a sign of any such awareness
in literature and public discussions until the end of the century;
and failing a clear understanding of their nature the new expansive
forces operated through the cheap and unsound interpretations first of
sentimental nationalism and then of romantic imperialism.
Sanderson's boyhood saw the differences of the cultures of north and
south in the United States of America at first exacerbated by the
new means of communication and then, after four years of civil war,
resolved into a stabler unity. The straggling peninsula of Italy
under the sway of the new synthetic forces recovered a unity it had
lost with the decay of the Roman roads; the internal tension of the
continental powers culminated in the Franco-German war. But these
were insufficient adjustments, and a renewed growth of armaments
upon land and sea alike, betrayed the growing mutual pressure of the
great powers. All dreamt of expansion and none of coalescence. The
dominant political fact in Europe while Sanderson was a young man, was
the rise of Germany to political and economic predominance. German
energy, restrained from geographical release, drove upward along the
lines of scientific and technical progress, and the outward thrust of
its pent-up imperialism took the form of a gathering military threat.
Germany first and then the United States, released and renewed after
their escape from the fragmentation that had threatened them, made the
economic pace for the rest of the world throughout the eighties and the
nineties. They stirred the British manufacturer and parent to indignant
inquiries; they forced the drowsy schools of Great Britain into a
reluctant admission of scientific and technical teaching. But they
awakened as yet no profounder heart-searchings.
The young science-master at Dulwich talked, no doubt, as we all did in
those days, of Evolution and Socialism, of the rights of labour and
the Christianisation of industry, of the progress of science and the
scandal of the increasing expenditure upon armaments, with the illusion
of an immense general stability in the background of his mind. It was
an illusion that needed not only the Great War of 1914-18 but its
illuminating sequelae to shatter and destroy.
§ 3
Accounts of Sanderson's work in Dulwich school differ very widely.
At one time it would seem that he had troubles about discipline, and
it is quite conceivable that his methods there were experimental and
fluctuating. No doubt he was trying over at Dulwich many of the things
that were to establish his success at Oundle. On the whole the Dulwich
work was good work, and it gave him sufficient reputation to secure the
headmastership of Oundle School when presently the governing body of
that school sought a man of energy and character to modernise it.
The most valuable result of his Dulwich period was the demonstration
of the interestingness of practical work in physical science for
boys who remained apathetic under the infliction of the stereotyped
classical curriculum. He was not getting the pick of the boys there but
the residue, but he was getting an alertness and interest out of this
second-grade material that surprised even himself. The interest of the
classical teaching was largely the interest of a spirited competition
which demanded not only a special sort of literary ability but a
special sort of competitive disposition. But there are quite clever
boys of an amiable type to whom competition does not appeal, and some
of these were among the most interesting of the youngsters who were
awakened to industrious work by his laboratory instruction.
It is clear that before Sanderson went to Oundle he had already
developed a firm faith in the possibility of a school with a new and
more varied curriculum, in which a far greater proportion of the boys
could be interested in their work than was the case in the contemporary
classical and (formal) mathematical school, and also that he had
conceived the idea of replacing the competitive motive, which had ruled
the schools of Europe since the establishment of the great Jesuit
schools three hundred years before, by the more vital stimulus of
interest in the work itself. He also took to Oundle a proved and tested
conception of the need for the utmost possible personal participation
by every boy in every collective function of the school. Quite early
in his Oundle career he came into conflict with his boys and carried
his point upon the issue whether every boy was to sing in the school
singing or whether that was to be left to the specialised choir of
boys who had voices and a taste for that sort of thing. That was an
essential issue for him. From the very first he was working for the
rank and file and against the star system of school work by which a
few boys sing or work or play with distinction and encouragement,
against a background of neglected shirkers and defeated and discouraged
competitors.
Sanderson married soon after he went to Dulwich. His wife came from
Cumberland and she excelled in all those domestic matters that made a
successful headmaster's wife. Throughout all the rest of his life she
was his loyal and passionate partisan. His friends were her friends,
and his critics and opponents were her enemies, and if she had a fault
it was that she found it difficult to forgive any one who had seemed
ever to differ from him. Two sons were born during the seven years
that passed in the little home in Dulwich. It must have been a very
brisk and happy little home. One can imagine the tall young man with
his gown a little powdered with blackboard chalk, flying out behind
him, striding along the school corridors to some fresh and successful
experiment in laboratory work, or in homely tweeds walking along the
Kentish lanes with his friend, or snatching a delightful half-hour in
the nursery to see Master Roy's first attempts to walk, or reading
some new and stirring book with the lamp of those days before electric
lighting at his elbow. He was thirty-five when he achieved his last
step in the upward career of a secondary schoolmaster and was appointed
headmaster of Oundle. That success probably came as a surprise, for
Sanderson's modest origins and the fact that he was not in holy orders
must have been a serious handicap upon his application. It must have
been a very elated young couple who packed their household belongings
for the unknown town of Oundle.