Part 16

Sir E. Cook. Life of Florence Nightingale. A. W. Kinglake. The Invasion of the Crimea. Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne. Scutari and its Hospitals. S. M. Mitra. Life of Sir John Hall. Lord Stanmore. Sidney Herbert. Sir G. Douglas. The Panmure Papers. Sir H. Maxwell. Life and Letters of the Fourth Earl of Clarendon.

E. Abbott and L. Campbell. Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett. A.H. Clough. Poems and Memoir.

Dr. Arnold

IN 1827 the headmastership of Rugby School fell vacant, and it became necessary for the twelve trustees, noblemen and gentlemen of Warwickshire, to appoint a successor to the post. Reform was in the air--political, social, religious; there was even a feeling abroad that our great public schools were not quite all that they should be, and that some change or other--no one precisely knew what--but some change in the system of their management, was highly desirable. Thus it was natural that when the twelve noblemen and gentlemen, who had determined to be guided entirely by the merits of the candidates, found among the testimonials pouring in upon them a letter from Dr. Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, predicting that if they elected Mr. Thomas Arnold he would 'change the face of education all through the public schools of England', they hesitated no longer; obviously, Mr. Thomas Arnold was their man. He was elected therefore; received, as was fitting, priest's orders; became, as was no less fitting, a Doctor of Divinity; and in August, 1828, took up the duties of his office.

All that was known of the previous life of Dr. Arnold seemed to justify the prediction of the Provost of Oriel, and the choice of the Trustees. The son of a respectable Collector of Customs, he had been educated at Winchester and at Oxford, where his industry and piety had given him a conspicuous place among his fellow students. It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear-sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett's History of England?

His career at Oxford had been a distinguished one, winding up with an Oriel fellowship. It was at about this time that the smooth and satisfactory progress of his life was for a moment interrupted: he began to be troubled by religious doubts. These doubts, as we learn from one of his contemporaries, who afterwards became Mr. Justice Coleridge,

'were not low nor rationalistic in their tendency, according to the bad sense of that term; there was no indisposition in him to believe merely because the article transcended his reason, he doubted the proof and the interpretation of the textual authority'.

In his perturbation, Arnold consulted Keble, who was at that time one of his closest friends, and a Fellow of the same College.

'The subject of these distressing thoughts,' Keble wrote to Coleridge, 'is that most awful one, on which all very inquisitive reasoning minds are, I believe, most liable to such temptations--I mean, the doctrine of the blessed Trinity. Do not start, my dear Coleridge; I do not believe that Arnold has any serious scruples of the UNDERSTANDING about it, but it is a defect of his mind that he cannot get rid of a certain feeling of objections.' What was to be done? Keble's advice was peremptory. Arnold was 'bid to pause in his inquiries, to pray earnestly for help and light from above, and turn himself more strongly than ever to the practical duties of a holy life'. He did so, and the result was all that could be wished. He soon found himself blessed with perfect peace of mind, and a settled conviction.

One other difficulty, and one only, we hear of at this point in his life. His dislike of early rising amounted, we are told, 'almost to a constitutional infirmity'. This weakness too he overcame, yet not quite so successfully as his doubts upon the doctrine of the Trinity. For in afterlife, the Doctor would often declare 'that early rising continued to be a daily effort to him and that in this instance he never found the truth of the usual rule that all things are made easy by custom.

He married young and settled down in the country as a private tutor for youths preparing for the Universities. There he remained for ten years--happy, busy, and sufficiently prosperous. Occupied chiefly with his pupils, he nevertheless devoted much of his energy to wider interests. He delivered a series of sermons in the parish church; and he began to write a History of Rome, in the hope, as he said, that its tone might be such 'that the strictest of what is called the Evangelical party would not object to putting it into the hands of their children'. His views on the religious and political condition of the country began to crystallise. He was alarmed by the 'want of Christian principle in the literature of the day', looking forward anxiously to 'the approach of a greater struggle between good and evil than the world has yet seen'; and, after a serious conversation with Dr. Whately, began to conceive the necessity of considerable alterations in the Church Establishment.

All who knew him during these years were profoundly impressed by the earnestness of his religious convictions and feelings, which, as one observer said, 'were ever bursting forth'. It was impossible to disregard his 'deep consciousness of the invisible world' and 'the peculiar feeling of love and adoration which he entertained towards our Lord Jesus Christ'. 'His manner of awful reverence when speaking of God or of the Scriptures' was particularly striking. 'No one could know him even a little,' said another friend, 'and not be struck by his absolute wrestling with evil, so that like St. Paul, he seemed to be battling with the wicked one, and yet with a feeling of God's help on his side.'

Such was the man who, at the age of thirty-three, became headmaster of Rugby. His outward appearance was the index of his inward character; everything about him denoted energy, earnestness, and the best intentions. His legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been; but the sturdy athletic frame, especially when it was swathed (as it usually was) in the flowing robes of a Doctor of Divinity, was full of an imposing vigour; and his head, set decisively upon the collar, stock, and bands of ecclesiastical tradition, clearly belonged to a person of eminence. The thick, dark clusters of his hair, his bushy eyebrows and curling whiskers, his straight nose and bulky chin, his firm and upward-curving lower lip--all these revealed a temperament of ardour and determination. His eyes were bright and large; they were also obviously honest. And yet--why was it? Was it in the lines of the mouth or the frown on the forehead?--it was hard to say, but it was unmistakable--there was a slightly puzzled look upon the face of Dr. Arnold.

And certainly, if he was to fulfil the prophecy of the Provost of Oriel, the task before him was sufficiently perplexing. The public schools of those days were still virgin forests, untouched by the hand of reform. Keate was still reigning at Eton; and we possess, in the records of his pupils, a picture of the public school education of the early nineteenth century, in its most characteristic state. It was a system of anarchy tempered by despotism. Hundreds of boys, herded together in miscellaneous boarding-houses, or in that grim 'Long Chamber' at whose name in after years aged statesmen and warriors would turn pale, lived, badgered and overawed by the furious incursions of an irascible little old man carrying a bundle of birch-twigs, a life in which licensed barbarism was mingled with the daily and hourly study of the niceties of Ovidian verse. It was a life of freedom and terror, of prosody and rebellion, of interminable floggings and appalling practical jokes. Keate ruled, unaided--for the undermasters were few and of no account--by sheer force of character. But there were times when even that indomitable will was overwhelmed by the flood of lawlessness. Every Sunday afternoon he attempted to read sermons to the whole school assembled; and every Sunday afternoon the whole school assembled shouted him down. The scenes in Chapel were far from edifying; while some antique Fellow doddered in the pulpit, rats would be let loose to scurry among the legs of the exploding boys. But next morning the hand of discipline would reassert itself; and the savage ritual of the whipping-block would remind a batch of whimpering children that, though sins against man and God might be forgiven them, a false quantity could only be expiated in tears and blood.

From two sides this system of education was beginning to be assailed by the awakening public opinion of the upper middle classes. On the one hand, there was a desire for a more liberal curriculum; on the other, there was a demand for a higher moral tone. The growing utilitarianism of the age viewed with impatience a course of instruction which excluded every branch of knowledge except classical philology; while its growing respectability was shocked by such a spectacle of disorder and brutality as was afforded by the Eton of Keate. 'The public schools,' said the Rev. Mr. Bowdler, 'are the very seats and nurseries of vice.'

Dr. Arnold agreed. He was convinced of the necessity for reform. But it was only natural that to one of his temperament and education it should have been the moral rather than the intellectual side of the question which impressed itself upon his mind. Doubtless it was important to teach boys something more than the bleak rigidities of the ancient tongues; but how much more important to instil into them the elements of character and the principles of conduct! His great object, throughout his career at Rugby, was, as he repeatedly said, to 'make the school a place of really Christian education'. To introduce 'a religious principle into education', was his 'most earnest wish', he wrote to a friend when he first became headmaster; 'but to do this would be to succeed beyond all my hopes; it would be a happiness so great, that, I think, the world would yield me nothing comparable to it'. And he was constantly impressing these sentiments upon his pupils. 'What I have often said before,' he told them, 'I repeat now: what we must look for here is, first, religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; and thirdly, intellectual ability.'

There can be no doubt that Dr. Arnold's point of view was shared by the great mass of English parents. They cared very little for classical scholarship; no doubt they would be pleased to find that their sons were being instructed in history or in French; but their real hopes, their real wishes, were of a very different kind. 'Shall I tell him to mind his work, and say he's sent to school to make himself a good scholar?' meditated old Squire Brown when he was sending off Tom for the first time to Rugby.

'Well, but he isn't sent to school for that--at any rate, not for that mainly. I don't care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma; no more does his mother. What is he sent to school for?... If he'll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a Christian, that's all I want.'

That was all; and it was that that Dr. Arnold set himself to accomplish. But how was he to achieve his end? Was he to improve the character of his pupils by gradually spreading around them an atmosphere of cultivation and intelligence? By bringing them into close and friendly contact with civilised men, and even, perhaps, with civilised women? By introducing into the life of his school all that he could of the humane, enlightened, and progressive elements in the life of the community? On the whole, he thought not. Such considerations left him cold, and he preferred to be guided by the general laws of Providence. It only remained to discover what those general laws were. He consulted the Old Testament, and could doubt no longer. He would apply to his scholars, as he himself explained to them in one of his sermons, 'the principle which seemed to him to have been adopted in the training of the childhood of the human race itself'. He would treat the boys at Rugby as Jehovah had treated the Chosen People: he would found a theocracy; and there should be judges in Israel.

For this purpose, the system, prevalent in most of the public schools of the day, by which the elder boys were deputed to keep order in the class-rooms, lay ready to Dr. Arnold's hand. He found the Praepostor a mere disciplinary convenience, and he converted him into an organ of government. Every boy in the Sixth Form became ipso facto a Praepostor, with powers extending over every department of school life; and the Sixth Form as a body was erected into an authority responsible to the headmaster, and to the headmaster alone, for the internal management of the school.

This was the means by which Dr. Arnold hoped to turn Rugby into 'a place of really Christian education'. The boys were to work out their own salvation, like the human race. He himself, involved in awful grandeur, ruled remotely, through his chosen instruments, from an inaccessible heaven. Remotely--and yet with an omnipresent force. As the Israelite of old knew that his almighty Lawgiver might at any moment thunder to him from the whirlwind, or appear before his very eyes, the visible embodiment of power or wrath, so the Rugby schoolboy walked in a holy dread of some sudden manifestation of the sweeping gown, the majestic tone, the piercing glance, of Dr. Arnold. Among the lower forms of the school his appearances were rare and transitory, and upon these young children 'the chief impression', we are told, 'was of extreme fear'. The older boys saw more of him, but they did not see much. Outside the Sixth Form, no part of the school came into close intercourse with him; and it would often happen that a boy would leave Rugby without having had any personal communication with him at all.

Yet the effect which he produced upon the great mass of his pupils was remarkable. The prestige of his presence and the elevation of his sentiments were things which it was impossible to forget. In class, every line of his countenance, every shade of his manner imprinted themselves indelibly on the minds of the boys who sat under him. One of these, writing long afterwards, has described, in phrases still impregnated with awestruck reverence, the familiar details of the scene: 'the glance with which he looked round in the few moments of silence before the lesson began, and which seemed to speak his sense of his own position'--'the attitude in which he stood, turning over the pages of Facciolati's Lexicon, or Pole's synopsis, with his eye fixed upon the boy who was pausing to give an answer'--'the pleased look and the cheerful "thank you", which followed upon a successful translation'--'the fall of his countenance with its deepening severity, the stern elevation of the eyebrows, the sudden "sit down" which followed upon the reverse'--and 'the startling earnestness with which he would check in a moment the slightest approach to levity'.

To be rebuked, however mildly, by Dr. Arnold was a Potable experience. One boy could never forget how he drew a distinction between 'mere amusement' and 'such as encroached on the next day's duties', nor the tone of voice with which the Doctor added 'and then it immediately becomes what St. Paul calls REVELLING'. Another remembered to his dying day his reproof of some boys who had behaved badly during prayers. 'Nowhere,' said Dr. Arnold, 'nowhere is Satan's work more evidently manifest than in turning holy things to ridicule.' On such occasions, as another of his pupils described it, it was impossible to avoid 'a consciousness almost amounting to solemnity' that, 'when his eye was upon you, he looked into your inmost heart'.

With the boys in the Sixth Form, and with them alone, the severe formality of his demeanour was to some degree relaxed. It was his wish, in his relations with the Praepostors, to allow the Master to be occasionally merged in the Friend. From time to time, he chatted with them in a familiar manner; once a term he asked them to dinner; and during the summer holidays he invited them, in rotation, to stay with him in Westmorland.

It was obvious that the primitive methods of discipline which had reached their apogee under the dominion of Keate were altogether incompatible with Dr. Arnold's view of the functions of a headmaster and the proper governance of a public school. Clearly, it was not for such as he to demean himself by bellowing and cuffing, by losing his temper once an hour, and by wreaking his vengeance with indiscriminate flagellations. Order must be kept in other ways. The worst boys were publicly expelled; many were silently removed; and, when Dr. Arnold considered that a flogging was necessary, he administered it with gravity. For he had no theoretical objection to corporal punishment. On the contrary, he supported it, as was his wont, by an appeal to general principles. 'There is,' he said, 'an essential inferiority in a boy as compared with a man'; and hence 'where there is no equality the exercise of superiority implied in personal chastisement' inevitably followed.

He was particularly disgusted by the view that 'personal correction', as he phrased it, was an insult or a degradation to the boy upon whom it was inflicted; and to accustom young boys to think so appeared to him to be 'positively mischievous'.

'At an age,' he wrote, 'when it is almost impossible to find a true, manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind which are the best ornaments of youth, and offer the best promise of a noble manhood?'

One had not to look far, he added, for 'the fruits of such a system'. In Paris, during the Revolution of 1830, an officer observed a boy of twelve insulting the soldiers, and