Part 23

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.