by Simon Heffer
III
While the Classics were the heart of the curriculum – and, as the Clarendon commission would find in the early 1860s, they were still almost all that was taught in many public schools – Arnold raised the standards of subjects such as modern languages and mathematics, and modern history assumed an increased importance. He introduced the study of geology, something many clergymen regarded as heretical because of what it seemed to say about the Creation. Other physical sciences were not attempted, something for which Strachey mocked him: but his detractor admits Arnold avoided these subjects because he did not believe they could be taught properly, and because the time needed would have had to be taken from other subjects Arnold regarded as more important. He favoured the teaching of physical science, though only if morals were taught alongside it. Strachey, mocking Arnold from the security of the secular world, quotes him as saying: ‘Rather than have physical science the principal thing in my son’s mind I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament. Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral political philosophy.’19
Arnold was opposed to the utilitarian notion that saw education as a cramming of the mind with facts, but sought to make it a process that encouraged boys to find out answers to any problem that might confront them. Ironically, it was those of a utilitarian cast of mind who most readily praised his improvements to the curriculum. He brought in mathematics, some Shakespeare (whom he felt grossly inferior to Homer), and also Dante and Goethe. The Greek mathematicians were of natural interest to him, especially Euclid. Despite his belief in teaching modern history he struggled to get past the ancients: ‘The history of Greece and of Rome is not an idle inquiry about remote ages and forgotten institutions, but a living picture of things present, fitted not so much for the curiosity of the scholar, as for the instruction of the statesman and the citizen.’20 Sciences in any depth he believed necessary only for the class of person who would go into industry: in that he helped foster and influence a prejudice among the upper classes against the new source of Britain’s wealth, which would handicap the country. As another biographer, Michael McCrum, has written: ‘His view was that vocational training did not cultivate the mind and inspire the moral sense.’21
Stanley wrote of education at the time of Arnold’s translation to Rugby: ‘The range of classical reading, in itself confined, and with no admixture of other information, had been subject to vehement attacks from the Liberal party generally, on the grounds of its alleged narrowness and inutility.’22 He added that ‘it was not knowledge, but the means of gaining knowledge that he had to teach; as well as by his increasing sense of the value of the ancient authors, as belonging really to a period of modern civilisation like our own.’ He proceeded with his pupils by the Socratic method, of questioning them to elicit knowledge and stimulating them to think about the quality of the answers they gave. ‘His whole method,’ Stanley wrote, ‘was founded on the principle of awakening the intellect of every individual boy.’23
Arnold had one profound blind spot, which appears to have been an almost entire absence of the aesthetic sense. Fine art meant little or nothing to him. The notebooks of his foreign travels, reproduced by Stanley, show little regard for some of the cultural wonders of France and Italy. That his example to the products of his school, and to other schools of Christian gentlemen, was so deficient in this respect may explain some of the restrictions in Victorian taste.
He was no tyrant. Stanley writes that ‘every three weeks a council was held [for the masters], in which all school matters were discussed, and in which every one was free to express his opinion, or propose any measure not in contradiction to any fundamental principle of school administration, and in which it would not infrequently happen that he himself [Arnold] was opposed and outvoted.’24 In his dealings with the boys he sought to bring the older ones into line ‘by kindness and encouragement attracting the noble feelings of those with whom he had to deal.’25 He retained flogging ‘as fitly answering to and marking the naturally inferior state of boyhood, and therefore as conveying no peculiar degradation to persons in such a state’ but, according to Stanley, ‘it was confined to moral offences, such as lying, drinking and habitual idleness.’ His end was not retribution or the establishment of a reign of fear: ‘What I want to see in the school, and what I cannot find, is an abhorrence of evil.’26 He had moments of intense despair when ‘evil’ manifested itself too greatly, or when his trust in a boy turned out to be misplaced.
A month into his tenure, on 28 September 1828, he wrote to a friend and fellow clergyman, F. C. Blackstone, to say that ‘there has been no flogging yet, (and I hope that there will be none,) and surprisingly few irregularities. I chastise, at first, by very gentle impositions, which are raised for a repetition of offences – flogging will be only my ratio ultima – and talking I shall try to the utmost. I believe that boys may be governed a great deal by gentle methods and kindness, and appealing to their better feelings, if you show that you are not afraid of them; I have seen great boys, six feet high, shed tears when I have sent for them up into my room and spoken to them quietly, in private, for not knowing their lesson, and I found that this treatment produced its effects afterwards, in making them do better.’27 Yet the iron hand was in the velvet glove: ‘But, of course, deeds must second words when needful, or words will soon be laughed at.’
Arnold was not in the mould of nineteenth-century flagellomaniac headmasters: his contemporary at Eton, John Keate, flogged eighty boys in a day in 1832, a far from unusual occurrence in a regime Strachey described as ‘a life in which licensed barbarism was mingled with the daily and hourly study of the niceties of Ovidian verse.’28 Nevertheless, Arnold was cursed by a hot temper, and once savagely thrashed in front of a whole class a boy he thought had lied to him. The boy had had a hernia since infancy and needed two days in bed to recover. Arnold thought he was malingering and gave him extra work as a punishment. When it turned out the boy had not lied, Arnold not only apologised to him, but to the whole school. His parents removed the boy and demanded a written apology. Were that not humiliation enough for Arnold, the press – in those days usually deferential – got hold of the story. It was a serious dent in his reputation, and his behaviour suggests a degree of mental instability.
A system of fagging, in which the fag would be made aware of the decency and fairness of the fagmaster, was central to his system of rule. If that was an ambitious ideal, Arnold would reinforce it in his regular pep talks to the sixth formers in whom he would vest such authority: ‘I wish you to see fully how many and great are the opportunities offered to you here of doing good – good, too, of lasting benefit to yourselves as well as to others . . . what we must look for here is, first, religious and moral principles; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability.’29 He told his sixth formers that, were they to betray his trust in them, ‘you should feel like officers in the army or navy, whose want of moral courage would, indeed, be thought cowardice.’ The critic and jurist Fitzjames Stephen, who felt Arnold to have been something of a humbug, nonetheless conceded in 1859 that he had created ‘the leaders of every day English life, what we may call the non-commissioned officers of English society – the clergy, the lawyers, the doctors, the country squires, the junior partners in banks and merchants’ offices, men who are in every sense of the word gentlemen though no one would class them with the aristocracy.’30
IV
Arnold’s Christianity was defined specifically by his reverence for Christ and his example. His purpose was to make Rugby a school consonant with his idea of evangelical Christianity. ‘The boys were still treated as schoolboys, but as schoolboys who must grow up to be Christian men’, Stanley wrote; ‘whose age did not prevent their faults from being sins, or their excellences from being noble and Christian virtues.’31 For Arnold, God was everywhere, and his charges were told that th
eir every act was discharged in the presence of God. Stanley writes of his ‘desire of carrying out his favourite ideas of uniting things secular with things spiritual’.32 In addition to the prayers all boys had in the morning he introduced a separate prayer in the Sixth Form, because he felt their school work was not ‘sufficiently sanctified to God’s glory’.33 However, when defending his corner, he was not above a disingenuousness that sits ill with his piety. He was, to say the least, slippery in 1838 when taken to task for running down the lower school – boys younger than thirteen, whom he did not wish to have at Rugby – against the wishes of the founder. McCrum makes much of this: Stanley, as McCrum points out, almost ignores it.34
He was the school’s chaplain as well as its headmaster from 1831, and his weekly sermons were explicit instructions to his boys in the nature of the Christian life. His charges sat and heard him in silence and, in some cases, reverence: it was a far cry from the experience of his fellow doctor of divinity, Keate, who was routinely shouted down in the chapel at Eton. Strachey raises the idea of the chapel being ‘the centre of Dr Arnold’s system of education’ only to deprecate it.35 He conjures up the image of Rugby chapel as a place where ‘the Doctor himself appeared in the plenitude of his dignity and his enthusiasm . . . rapt in devotion or vibrant with exhortation’. Much of what Strachey writes, as well as being motivated by militant secularism, is sheer supposition. The ultimate condemnation comes in his note of the publication of Arnold’s sermons in (he says) five (there were in fact six) volumes that were ‘received with admiration by a wide circle of pious readers. Queen Victoria herself possessed a copy, in which several passages were marked in pencil, by the royal hand.’36
Arnold also sought to reform his boys by forging a partnership with his prefects, or praepostors, who helped run the institution. A generation before The Origin of Species, Arnold instilled an almost Darwinian process into Rugby: it was the fittest who survived, because the morally and intellectually defective were simply thrown out. To those who stayed the course he was an inspirational, if occasionally terrifying, figure. One of the gravest offences, in his view, was lying to a master. Junior boys were flogged for it, senior ones expelled. Arnold would always take a boy’s word, because he worked on the assumption that others were inevitably truthful. Stanley says that ‘there grew up in consequence a general feeling that ‘it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie – he always believes one.’37
As well as seeing God everywhere, Arnold saw evil everywhere too. ‘At the very sight’, wrote Stanley, ‘of a knot of vicious or careless boys gathered together round the great school-house fire, “It makes me think”, he would say, “that I see the Devil in the midst of them.” From first to last it was the great subject to which all his anxiety converged.’38 This notion entertains Strachey more than almost any other: ‘The daily sight of so many young creatures in the hands of the Evil One filled him with agitated grief.’39 However upright the example he and his masters set, there could be no improvement ‘unless there were something to counteract it constantly amongst the boys themselves.’ This was why he gave authority to the most senior boys in the school, hoping that their example would make more of an impression on those below them than anything done by the masters would.
Strachey reserved special ridicule for this system – ‘the boys were to work out their own salvation, like the human race’ while Arnold ‘involved in awful grandeur, ruled remotely, through his chosen instruments, from an inaccessible heaven’.40 Strachey himself was bullied at school, and so may have had particular reasons for disliking systems in which boys ruled other boys, anticipating Lord of the Flies. Deploring Arnold’s decision to allow the Sixth Form to punish junior boys, Strachey drifts into mockery: ‘The younger children, scourged both by Dr Arnold and by the elder children, were given every opportunity of acquiring the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornaments of youth.’41
Stanley categorises Arnold as a Whig – a man who believed fundamentally in progress and improvement – though argues that ‘Liberal principles were not merely the expression of his adherence to a Whig ministry, but of his belief in the constant necessity of applying those principles of advance and reform, which, in their most perfect development, he conceived to be identical with Christianity itself.’42 Arnold’s writings are filled with disobliging references to Conservatism, which he regards as an extreme form of Toryism. ‘I think Conservatism far worse than Toryism’, he wrote to his friend Mr Justice Coleridge on 16 December 1835, ‘if by Toryism be meant a fondness for monarchical or even despotic government; for despotism may often further the advance of a nation, and a good dictatorship may be a very excellent thing. . . . but Conservatism always looks backwards, and therefore, under whatever form of government, I think it the enemy of all good.’43 For all the assertions of Arnold’s liberalism, however, he had some remarkably illiberal ideas. He wanted Jews barred from the universities and from becoming British subjects. He also believed that criminality was genetic and that the immediate descendants of those transported to Australia, to the third generation, should be forbidden from holding any public positions there.
Strachey asserts that ‘he had become convinced of the duty of sympathising with the lower orders ever since he had made a serious study of the Epistle of St James [which reinforces the importance of observing Christian duties]; but he perceived clearly that the lower orders fell into two classes, and that it was necessary to distinguish between them. There were the “good poor” – and there were the others.’44 Strachey seeks to paint Arnold as a hypocrite for making this distinction, which is not quite identical to that made by many of his contemporaries between the deserving and the undeserving. The good poor were those who did not join trades unions or engage in Chartist plotting; a view held by many others at the time, not least Disraeli, who depicts the folly of seeking to subvert the law in Sybil.
Like Gladstone, he would regard the religious impulse as implicit in politics, just as in all else. He wanted a complete identity of Church and State. So did Gladstone, who saw religion as inseparable from a sense of nationality, at least in England, and who wrote a book on the subject in 1839. Gladstone though wanted a marriage between Anglo-Catholicism and the State: Arnold by contrast wanted evangelism to guide national political life, emphasising the importance of converting to Christianity those who did not believe. Gladstone would by 1841 realise the impracticabilities of his idea, not least as the Oxford Movement – which had since 1833 advocated the catholicising of the Anglican Church – went in a direction he had feared to contemplate, with people (including his own sister, Helen) becoming Roman Catholics. Even Arnold, by the end of his life, appears to have started to realise the difficulties of such a thing: and, as Strachey delights in pointing out, would have forced the exclusion of certain groups from the community thus created. ‘Jews, for instance, were decidedly outside the pale; while Dissenters – so Dr Arnold argued – were as decidedly within it. But what was the position of the Unitarians? Were they, or were they not, Members of the Church of Christ? This was one of those puzzling questions which deepened the frown upon the Doctor’s forehead and intensified the pursing of his lips.’45 Arnold had had his own problems with the Athanasian Creed, and believed if it could be dispensed with Unitarians would happily join in with their fellow Christians and make his ideal possible. His inability to reconcile this point with reality gives Strachey much pleasure.
V
Arnold was an early advocate of what we would now call ‘social justice’. He had supported the Reform Bill of 1832, which widened the political franchise beyond its traditionally very narrow limits, and was so moved by the political currents of the times that he set up a newspaper to advocate his views and those of Christian gentlemen like him: it lasted only a few issues. He had a compulsion to express his opinions: shortly before Christmas 1830 he wrote to his sister Susannah saying that ‘the paramount interest of public affairs outweighs with me even the school itself. . . . I must
write a pamphlet in the holidays, or I shall burst.’46 Through a series of letters written to the Sheffield Courant in 1831–2 he had set out and analysed the social problems facing the country, notably in the recently industrialised districts of the north. Such writings caused discomfort among the school governors, who felt he should not seek such a profile, and at least once he came close to resignation. In the end the force of his character, that tool used to shape so many boys, helped him prevail. As Stanley put it, ‘he governed the school precisely on the same principles as he would have governed a great empire’.47 Such was his self-belief that he refused to enter into a public debate when criticisms were levelled at him and his methods. He told a colleague: ‘I will not condescend to justify the school against attacks, when I believe that it is going on not only not ill, but positively well.’48
He believed education should extend beyond the privileged classes, to widen the civilising process and to improve the condition of the poor; and that the poor who went to schools should receive an education, rather than simply enduring rote-learning. ‘Many persons confound reading and writing with education: they consider themselves as having been engaged in educating the poor; and then, when they see that their labours have produced little fruit, they are half bewildered when they hear it said that this is plain proof that to educate the poor can do no good. . . . I never knew any poor man who could properly be said to be educated.’49 This would become a great mission for reformers. Arnold drew a distinction between a man’s ‘professional’ education, which taught him his line of business, and his ‘liberal’ education, which trained him for ‘his general calling, which he has in common with all his neighbours, namely, the calling of a citizen and a man’.50 He observed that a man deficient in the first would be swiftly found out, whereas one deficient in the second would not, ‘because there are so many who share in it’.51 As a result, a society had been created which, through ignorance, ‘it is every man’s business to meddle in, but no man’s to learn.’ As a result, ‘false notions are entertained and acted upon; prejudices and passions multiply; abuses become manifold; difficulty and distress at last press on the whole community.’ He also expressed, in 1834, a belief that would resonate during debates about education over the next half-century: ‘If ever the question of National Education comes definitely before the Government, I am very desirous of their not centralising too much.’52