youth and bloom and this delightful world
have lost something of their freshness. In renouncing diplomacy he secured, before he was twenty-nine, the chief boon of human life; but a vague desire to enjoy that boon amid continental surroundings seems constantly to have visited him. In 1851 he wrote to his wife: “We can always look forward to retiring to Italy on £200 a year.” In 1853 he wrote to her again: “All this afternoon I have been haunted by a vision of living with you at Berne, on a diplomatic appointment, and how different that would be from this incessant grind in schools.” And, thirty years later, when he was approaching the end of his official life, he wrote a friend: “I must go once more to America to see my daughter, who is going to be married to an American, settled in her new home. Then I ‘feel like’ retiring to Florence, and rarely moving from it again.”
But, in spite of all these dreams and longings, he seems to have known that his lot was cast in England, and that England must be the sphere of his main activities. “Year slips away after year, and one begins to find that the Office has really had the main part of one’s life, and that little remains.”
We, who are his disciples, habitually think of him as a poet, or a critic, or an instructor in national righteousness and intelligence; as a model of private virtue and of public spirit. We do not habitually think of him as, in the narrow and technical sense, an Educator. And yet a man who gives his life to a profession must be in a great measure judged by what he accomplished in and through that profession, even though in the first instance he “adopted it in order to marry.”
Though not a born educator, not an educator by natural aptitude or inclination, he made himself an educator by choice; and, having once chosen his profession, he gradually developed an interest in it, a pride in it, a love of it which astonished some of his friends. How irksome it was to him at the beginning we saw just now in his address to the Teachers. How irksome in many of its incidents it remained we can see in his published Letters.
“I have had a hard day. Thirty pupil-teachers to examine in an inconvenient room, and nothing to eat except a biscuit which a charitable lady gave me.”
“This certainly has been one of the most uncomfortable weeks I ever spent. Battersea is so far off, the roads so execrable, and the rain so incessant.... There is not a yard of flagging, I believe, in all Battersea.”
“Here is my programme for this afternoon: Avalanches — The Steam-Engine — The Thames — India-Rubber — Bricks — The Battle of Poictiers — Subtraction — The Reindeer — The Gunpowder Plot — The Jordan. Alluring, is it not? Twenty minutes each, and the days of one’s life are only three score years and ten.”
“About four o’clock I found myself so exhausted, having eaten nothing since breakfast, that I sent out for a bun, and ate it before the astonished school.”
“Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I had to be at the Westminster Training School at ten o’clock; be there till half-past one, and begin again at two, going on till half-past six; this, with eighty candidates to look after, and gas burning most of the day, either to give light or to help to warm the room.”
“One sees a teacher holding up an apple to a gallery of little children, and saying: ‘An apple has a stalk, peel, pulp, core, pips, and juice; it is odorous and opaque, and is used for making a pleasant drink called cider.’”
“I sometimes grow impatient of getting old amid a press of occupation and labour for which, after all, I was not born.... The work I like is not very compatible with any other. But we are not here to have facilities found us for doing the work we like, but to make them.”
Still, his work as an inspector might have been made more interesting and less irksome, if he had served under chiefs of more enlightened or more liberal temper, as may be inferred from some words uttered after his retirement —
“To Government I owe nothing. But then I have always remembered that, under our Parliamentary system, the Government probably takes little interest in such work, whatever it is, as I have been able to do in the public service, and even perhaps knows nothing at all about it. But we must take the evil of our system along with the good. Abroad probably a Minister might have known more about my performances; but then abroad I doubt whether I should ever have survived to perform them. Under the strict bureaucratic system abroad, I feel pretty sure that I should have been dismissed ten times over for the freedom with which on various occasions I have exposed myself on matters of Religion and Politics. Our Government here in England takes a large and liberal view about what it considers a man’s private affairs, and so I have been able to survive as an Inspector for thirty-five years; and to the Government I at least owe this — to have been allowed to survive.”
For thirty-five years then he served his country as an Inspector of Elementary Schools, and the experience which he thus gained, the interest which was thus awoke in him, suggested to him some large and far-reaching views about our entire system of National Education. It is no disparagement to a highly-cultivated and laborious staff of public servants to say that he was the greatest Inspector of Schools that we have ever possessed. It is true that he was not, as the manner of some is, omnidoct and omnidocent. His incapacity to examine little girls in needlework he frankly confessed; and his incapacity to examine them in music, if unconfessed, was not less real. “I assure you,” he said to the Westminster Teachers, “I am not at all a harsh judge of myself; but I know perfectly well that there have been much better inspectors than I.” Once, when a flood of compliments threatened to overwhelm him, he waved it off with the frank admission— “Nobody can say I am a punctual Inspector.” Why then do we call him the greatest Inspector that we ever had? Because he had that most precious of all combinations — a genius and a heart. Trying to account for what he could not ignore — his immense popularity with the masters and mistresses of the schools which he inspected — he attributed part of it to the fact that he was Dr. Arnold’s son, part to the fact that he was “more or less known to the public as an author”; but, of personal qualifications for his office, he enumerated two only, and both eminently characteristic: “One is that, having a serious sense of the nature and function of criticism, I from the first sought to see the schools as they really were; thus it was felt that I was fair, and that the teachers had not to apprehend from me crotchets, pedantries, humours, favouritism, and prejudices.” The other was that he had learnt to sympathize with the teachers. “I met daily in the schools men and women discharging duties akin to mine, duties as irksome as mine, duties less well paid than mine; and I asked myself: Are they on roses? Gradually it grew into a habit with me to put myself into their places, to try and enter into their feelings, to represent to myself their life.”
It belongs to the very nature of an Inspector’s work that it escapes public notice. Very few are the people who care to inform themselves about the studies, the discipline, the intellectual and moral atmosphere of Elementary Schools, except in so far as those schools can be made battle-grounds for sectarian animosity. And, if they are few now, they were still fewer during the thirty-five years of Arnold’s Inspectorship. A conspicuous service was rendered both to the cause of Education and to Arnold’s memory when the late Lord Sandford rescued from the entombing blue-books his friend’s nineteen General Reports to the Education Department on Elementary Schools. In those Reports we read his deliberate judgment on the merits, defects, needs, possibilities and ideals of elementary schools; and this not merely as regards the choice of subjects taught, but as regards cleanliness, healthiness, good order, good manners, relations between teachers and pupils, selection of models in prose and verse, and the literary as contrasted with the polemical use of the Bible.
Such an enumeration may sound dull enough, but there is no dulness in the Reports themselves. They are stamped from the first page to the last with his lightness of touch and perfection of style. They belong as essentially to literature as his Essays or his Lectures.
In reading these Reports on Ele
mentary Schools we catch repeated allusions to his three Missions of enquiry into Education on the Continent. Those Missions produced separate Reports of their own, and each Report developed into a volume. “The Popular Education of France” gave the experience which he acquired in 1859, and its Introduction is reproduced in Mixed Essays under the title of “Democracy.” A French Eton (not very happily named) was an unofficial product of the same tour; for, extending his purview from Elementary Education, he there dealt with the relation between “Middle Class Education and the State.”
“Why,” he asked, “cannot we have throughout England as the French have throughout France, as the Germans have throughout Germany, as the Swiss have throughout Switzerland, and as the Dutch have throughout Holland, schools where the middle and professional classes may obtain at the rate of from £20 to £50 a year if they are boarders, and from £5 to £15 a year if they are day scholars, an education of as good quality, with as good guarantees of social character and advantages for a future career in the world, as the education which French children of the corresponding class can obtain from institutions like that of Toulouse or Sorèze?”
Schools and Universities of the Continent gave the result of the Mission in 1865 to investigate the Education of the Upper and Middle Classes in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Its bearing on English Education may be inferred from these words of its author, written in October, 1868: “There is a vicious article in the new Quarterly on my school-book, by one of the Eton undermasters, who, like Demetrius the Silversmith, seems alarmed for the gains of his occupation.”
The “Special Report on Elementary Education Abroad” grew out of his third Mission in 1885; and, over and above these books, dealing specifically with educational problems, we meet constant allusions to the same topics in nearly all his prose-writings. A life-long contact with Education produced in him a profound dissatisfaction with our English system, or want of system, and an almost passionate desire to turn chaos into order by the persistent use of the critical method.
When one talks about English Education, the subject naturally divides itself into the Universities, the Public Schools, the Private Schools, and the Elementary Schools. The classification is not scientifically accurate, but it will serve. With all these strata of Education, he in turn concerned himself; but with the two higher strata much less effectively than with the two lower. It was necessary to the theoretical completeness of his scheme for organizing National Education, that the Universities and the Public Schools, as well as the Private and the Elementary Schools, should be criticised; but, in dealing with the former, his criticism is far less drastic and insistent than with the latter. The reason of the difference probably is that, though an Inspector, a Professor, and a critic, he was frankly human, and shrank from laying his hand too roughly on institutions to which he himself had owed so much.
His feeling for Oxford every one knows. The apostrophe to the “Adorable Dreamer” is familiar to hundreds who could not, for their life, repeat another line of his prose or verse. It was “the place he liked best in the world.” When he climbed the hill at Hinksey and looked down on Oxford, he “could not describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me — the hillside, with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames Valley below.”
Of the spiritual effect of the place upon hearts nurtured there, he said: “We in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth — the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford.”
Of the Honorary Degree conferred on him by Oxford, he said: “Nothing could more gratify me, I think, than this recognition by my own University, of which I am so fond, and where, according to their own established standard of distinction, I did so little.” And, after the Encænia at which the degree was actually given, he wrote: “I felt sure I should be well received, because there is so much of an Oxford character about what I have written, and the undergraduates are the last people to bear one a grudge for having occasionally chaffed them.”
And here let me insert the moving passage in which, speaking in his last years to an American audience, he did honour to the spiritual master of his undergraduate days. “Forty years ago Cardinal Newman was in the very prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Oxford; he was preaching in St. Mary’s pulpit every Sunday; he seemed about to transform and to renew what was for us the most national and natural institution in the world, the Church of England. Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary’s, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music — subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem to hear him still.... Or, if we followed him back to his seclusion at Littlemore, that dreary village by the London road, and to the house of retreat and the church which he built there — a mean house such as Paul might have lived in when he was tent-making at Ephesus, a church plain and thinly sown with worshippers — who could resist him there either, welcoming back to the severe joys of Church-fellowship, and of daily worship and prayer, the firstlings of a generation which had well-nigh forgotten them?”
When we bear in mind this devotion to Oxford, it is not surprising that he dealt very gently with the defects of English Universities. In 1868 he laid it down that the University ought to provide facilities, after the general education is finished, for the cultivation of special aptitudes. “Our great Universities,” he said, “Oxford and Cambridge, do next to nothing towards this end. They are, as Signor Mateucci called them, hauts lycées; and, though invaluable in their way as places where the youth of the upper class prolong to a very great age, and under some very valuable influences, their school-education, yet, with their college and tutor system, nay, with their examination and degree system, they are still, in fact, schools, and do not carry education beyond the stage of general and school education.” This is just in the spirit of his famous quotation about the Oxford which he loved so well —
There are our young barbarians, all at play!
In 1875 he wrote: “I do not at all like the course for the History School (at Oxford). Nothing but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading truly great authors forms it, or even to exercise it, as learning a new language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises it.... The regulation of studies is all-important, and there is no one to regulate them, and people think that anyone can regulate them. We shall never do any good till we get a man like Guizot, or W. von Humboldt to deal with the matter, men who have the highest mental training themselves, and this we shall probably in this country never get.”
In the wittiest of all his books, and one of the wisest, Friendship’s Garland, he thus summarized the too-usual result of our “grand, old, fortifying, classical curriculum.” To his Prussian friend enquiring what benefit Lord Lumpington and the Rev. Esau Hittall have derived from that curriculum, that “course of mental gymnastics,” the imaginary Arnold replied: “Well, during their three years at Oxford, they were so much occupied with Bullingdon and hunting that there was no great opportunity to judge. But for my own part, I have always thought that their both getting their degrees at last with flying colours, after three weeks of a famous coach for fast men, four nights without going to bed, and an incredible consumption of wet towels, strong cigars, and brandy-and-water, was one of the most astonishing feats of mental gymnastics I ever heard of!”
It must be admitted that his effect on the Universities was not very tangible, not very positive. It was not the kind of effect which can be expressed in figures or reported in Blue Books. One cannot stand in the High Street of Oxford, or on King’s Parade at Cambridge, and point to an Institute, or a college, or a school of learning, and say: “Matthew Arnold made that what it is.”
Fox How, Ambleside
Dr. Thomas Arnold’s holiday home.
Mrs. Arnold continued to reside at Fox How until her death, in 1873
Photo Herbert Bell
As in dealing with the Universities, so also in dealing with the Public Schools, Arnold found it difficult to liberate himself from his early environment and prepossessions. He was the son of a Wykehamist, who had become the greatest of Head Masters; he himself was both a Wykehamist and a Rugbeian; he was the brother of three Rugbeians, and the father of three Harrovians. Thus it was impossible for him to regard the Public Schools of England with the dispassionate eye of the complete outsider. It is true that, when he gave rein to his critical instinct, he could not help observing that Public Schools are “precious institutions where, for £250 a year, our boys learn gentlemanlike deportment and cricket”; that with us “the playing-fields are the school”; and that a Prussian Minister of Education would not permit “the keepers of those absurd cock-pits” to examine the boys as they choose, “and send them jogging comfortably off to the University on their lame longs and shorts about the Calydonian Boar.” But, when it came to practical dealing, he had a tenderness for the “cock-pit” — even for the playing-fields — almost for the Calydonian Boar — which hindered him from being a very formidable or effective critic. Rugby, with which he was so closely connected, and to which he was so much attached, owes nothing, as far as one knows, to his suggestions or reproaches. At Harrow he lived for five years, on terms of affectionate intimacy with the Head Master and the staff; and, though he was keenly alive to the absurdities of the “catch-scholarship,” as he called it, which was cultivated there, and to the inefficiency of the Principia and Notabilia, on which the Harrovian mind was nourished, his adverse judgment never made itself felt. Marlborough he praised and admired as “a decided offspring of Rugby.” At Eton his fascinating essay on “Eutrapelia” was given; and he in turn was fascinated by the Memorials of “An Eton Boy,” which he reviewed in the Fortnightly for June, 1882. That boy, Arthur Baskerville-Mynors, was certainly a most lovable and attractive character, and he was thus commemorated in the Eton College Chronicle: “His life here was always joyous, a fearless, keen boyhood, spent sans peur et sans reproche. Many will remember him as fleet of foot and of lasting powers, winning the mile and the steeplechase in 1871, and the walking race in 1875. As master of the Beagles in 1875, he showed himself to possess all the qualities of a keen sportsman, with an instinctive knowledge of the craft.” On this last sentence Arnold fastened with his characteristic insistence, and used it to point the moral which he was always trying to teach. The Barbarian, as “for shortness we had accustomed ourselves to call” a member of the English upper classes, even when “adult and rigid,” had often “invaluable qualities.” “It is hard for him, no doubt, to enter into the Kingdom of God — hard for him to believe in the sentiment of the ideal life transforming the life which now is, to believe in it and even to serve it — hard, but not impossible. And in the young the qualities take a brighter colour, and the rich and magical time of youth adds graces of its own to them; and then, in happy natures, they are irresistible.”
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 95