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.”
CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH
ADOLESCENCE
§ 1
“The generations rushing to waste like rapids—like rapids....”
Ten years later Oswald found himself repeating the words of the little
private schoolmaster.
He was in the gravest perplexity. Joan was now nineteen and a half and
Peter almost of age, and they had had a violent quarrel. They would not
live in the same house together any longer, they declared. Peter had
gone back overnight to Cambridge on his motor bicycle; Joan’s was out of
order—an embittering addition to her distress—and she had cycled on her
push bicycle over the hills that morning to Bishop’s Stortford to catch
the Cambridge train. And Oswald was left to think over the situation and
all that had led to it.
He sat alone in the May sunshine in the little arbour that overlooked
his rose garden at Pelham Ford, trying to grasp all that had happened to
these stormy young people since he had so boldly taken the care of their
lives into his hands. He found himself trying to retrace the phases of
their upbringing, and his thoughts went wide and far over the problem of
human training. Suddenly he had discovered his charges adult. Joan had
stood before him, amazingly grown up—a woman, young, beautiful,
indignant.
Who could have foretold ten years ago that Joan would have been
declaring with tears in her voice but much stiffness in her manner, that
she had “stood enough” from Peter, and calling him “weak.”
“He insults all my friends, Nobby,” she had said, “and as for his——.
He’s like that puppy we had who dug up rotten bones we had never
suspected, all over the garden.
“Oh! _his women are horrible_!” Joan had cried....
§ 2
Oswald’s choice of a permanent home at Pelham Ford had been largely
determined by the educational requirements of Joan and Peter. While
Peter had been at White Court and Joan at Highmorton School twelve miles
away, Oswald had occupied a not very well furnished “furnished house” at
Margate. When Peter, after an inquisition by Oswald into English Public
Schools, had been awarded at last as a sort of prize, with reservations,
to Caxton, Oswald—convinced now by his doctors and his own disagreeable
experiences that he must live in England for the rest of his life if he
was to hope for any comfort or activity—decided to set up a permanent
home with a garden and buildings that would be helpful through days of
dullness in some position reasonably accessible from London, Caxton and
Margate, and later on from Cambridge, to which they were both
predestined. After some search he found the house he needed in the
pretty little valley of the Rash, that runs north-eastward from Ware.
The Stubland aunts still remained as tenants of The Ingle-Nook, and made
it a sort of alternative home for the youngsters.