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