Eminent Victorians

by Lytton Strachey

  At the end of the evening service the culminating moment of the week had come: the Doctor delivered his sermon. It was not until then, as all who had known him agreed, it was not until one had heard and seen him in the pulpit, that one could fully realize what it was to be face to face with Dr Arnold. The whole character of the man – so we are assured – stood at last revealed. His congregation sat in fixed attention (with the exception of the younger boys, whose thoughts occasionally wandered), while he propounded the general principles both of his own conduct and that of the Almighty, or indicated the bearing of the incidents of Jewish history in the sixth century B.C. upon the conduct of English schoolboys in 1830. Then, more than ever, his deep consciousness of the invisible world became evident; then, more than ever, he seemed to be battling with the wicked one. For his sermons ran on the eternal themes of the darkness of evil, the craft of the tempter, the punishment of obliquity, and he justified the persistence with which he dwelt upon these painful subjects by an appeal to a general principle: ‘The spirit of Elijah,’ he said, ‘must ever precede the spirit of Christ.’ The impression produced upon the boys was remarkable. It was noticed that even the most careless would sometimes, during the course of the week, refer almost involuntarily to the sermon of the past Sunday, as a condemnation of what they were doing. Others were heard to wonder how it was that the Doctor’s preaching, to which they had attended at the time so assiduously, seemed, after all, to have such a small effect upon what they did. An old gentleman, recalling those vanished hours, tried to recapture in words his state of mind as he sat in the darkened chapel, while Dr Arnold’s sermons, with their high-toned exhortations, their grave and sombre messages of incalculable import, clothed, like Dr Arnold’s body in its gown and bands, in the traditional stiffness of a formal phraseology, reverberated through his adolescent ears. ‘I used,’ he said, ‘to listen to those sermons from first to last with a kind of awe.’

  His success was not limited to his pupils and immediate auditors. The sermons were collected into five large volumes; they were the first of their kind; and they 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.

  Dr Arnold’s energies were by no means exhausted by his duties at Rugby. He became known, not merely as a headmaster, but as a public man. He held decided opinions upon a large number of topics; and he enunciated them – based as they were almost invariably upon general principles – in pamphlets, in prefaces, and in magazine articles, with an impressive self-confidence. He was, as he constantly declared, a Liberal. In his opinion, by the very constitution of human nature, the principles of progress and reform had been those of wisdom and justice in every age of the world – except one: that which had preceded the fall of man from Paradise. Had he lived then, Dr Arnold would have been a Conservative. As it was, his Liberalism was tempered by an ‘abhorrence of the spirit of 1789, of the American War, of the French Economistes, and of the English Whigs of the latter part of the seventeenth century’; and he always entertained a profound respect for the hereditary peerage. It might almost be said, in fact, that he was an orthodox Liberal. He believed in toleration, too, within limits; that is to say, in the toleration of those with whom he agreed. ‘I would gives James Mill as much opportunity for advocating his opinion,’ he said, ‘as is consistent with a voyage to Botany Bay.’ He had become convinced of the duty of sympathizing with the lower orders ever since he had made a serious study of the Epistle of St James; but he perceived clearly that the lower orders fell into two classes, that it was necessary to distinguish between them. There were the ‘good poor’ – and there were the others. ‘I am glad that you have made acquaintance with some of the good poor,’ he wrote to a Cambridge undergraduate; ‘I quite agree with you that it is most instructive to visit them.’ Dr Arnold himself occasionally visited them, in Rugby; and the condescension with which he shook hands with old men and women of the working classes was long remembered in the neighbourhood. As for the others, he regarded them with horror and alarm. ‘The disorders in our social state,’ he wrote to the Chevalier Bunsen in 1834, ‘appear to me to continue unabated. You have heard, I doubt not, of the Trades Unions; a fearful engine of mischief, ready to riot or to assassinate; and I see no counteracting power.’

  On the whole, his view of the condition of England was a gloomy one. He recommended a correspondent to read ‘Isaiah iii, v, xxii; Jeremiah v, xxii, xxx; Amos iv; and Habakkuk ii’, adding, ‘you will be struck, I think, with the close resemblance of our own state with that of the Jews before the second destruction of Jerusalem’. When he was told that the gift of tongues had descended on the Irvingites at Glasgow, he was not surprised. ‘I should take it,’ he said, ‘merely as a sign of the coming of the day of the Lord.’ And he was convinced that the day of the Lord was coming – ‘the termination of one of the great of the human race.’ Of that he had no doubt whatever; wherever he looked he saw ‘calamities, wars, tumults, pestilences, earthquakes, etc., all marking the time of one of God’s peculiar seasons of visitation’. His only uncertainty was whether this termination of an would turn out to be the absolutely final one; but that he believed ‘no created being knows or can know’. In any case he had ‘not the slightest expectation of what is commonly meant by the Millennium’. And his only consolation was that he preferred the present Ministry, inefficient as it was, to the Tories.

  He had planned a great work on Church and State, in which he intended to lay bare the causes and to point out the remedies of the evils which afflicted society. Its theme was to be, not the alliance or union, but the absolute identity of the Church and the State; and he felt sure that if only this fundamental truth were fully realized by the public, a general reformation would follow. Unfortunately, however, as time went on, the public seemed to realize it less and less. In spite of his protests, not only were Jews admitted to Parliament, but a Jew was actually appointed a governor of Christ’s Hospital; and Scripture was not made an obligatory subject at the London University.

  There was one point in his theory which was not quite plain to Dr Arnold. If Church and State were absolutely identical, it became important to decide precisely which classes of persons were to be excluded, owing to their beliefs, from the community. 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. He thought long and earnestly upon the subject; he wrote elaborate letters on it to various correspondents; but his conclusions remained indefinite. ‘My great objection to Unitarianism,’ he wrote, ‘in its present form in England, is that it makes Christ virtually dead.’ Yet he expressed ‘a fervent hope that if we could get rid of the Athanasian Creed many good Unitarians would join their fellow Christians in bowing the knee to Him who is Lord both of the dead and the living’. Amid these perplexities, it was disquieting to learn that ‘Unitarianism is becoming very prevalent in Boston’. He inquired anxiously as to its ‘complexion’ there; but received no very illuminating answer. The whole matter continued to be wrapped in a painful obscurity: there were, he believed, Unitarians and Unitarians; and he could say no more.

  In the meantime, pending the completion of his great work, he occupied himself with putting forward various suggestions of a practical kind. He advocated the restoration of the Order of Deacons, which, he observed, had long been ‘quoad the reality, dead’; for he believed that ‘some plan of this sort might be the small end of the wedge, by which Antichrist might hereafter be burst asunder like the Dragon of Bel’s temple’. But the Order of Deacons was never restored, and Dr Arnold turned his attention elsewhere, urging in a weighty pamphlet the desirability of authorizing military officers, in congregations where it was impossible to proc
ure the presence of clergy, to administer the Eucharist, as well as Baptism. It was with the object of laying such views as these before the public – ‘to tell them plainly’, as he said, ‘the evils that exist, and lead them, if I can, to their causes and remedies’ – that he started, in 1831, a weekly newspaper, The Englishman’s Register. The paper was not a success, in spite of the fact that it set out to improve its readers morally and that it preserved, in every article, an avowedly Christian tone. After a few weeks, and after he had spent upon it more than £200, it came to an end.

  Altogether, the prospect was decidedly discouraging. After all his efforts, the absolute identity of Church and State remained as unrecognized as ever. ‘So deeply,’ he was at last obliged to confess, ‘is the distinction between the Church and the State seated in our laws, our language, and our very notions, that nothing less than a miraculous interposition of God’s Providence seems capable of eradicating it.’ Dr Arnold waited in vain.

  But he did not wait in idleness. He attacked the same question from another side: he explored the writings of the Christian Fathers, and began to compose a commentary on the New Testament. In his view, the Scriptures were as fit a subject as any other book for free inquiry and the exercise of the individual judgement, and it was in this spirit that he set about the interpretation of them. He was not afraid of facing apparent difficulties of admitting inconsistencies, or even errors, in the sacred text. Thus he observed that ‘in Chronicles xi, 20, and xiii, 2, there is a decided difference in the parentage of Abijah’s mother’; – ‘which’, he added, ‘is curious on any supposition’. And at one time he had serious doubts as to the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But he was able, on various problematical points, to suggest interesting solutions. At first, for instance, he could not but be startled by the cessation of miracles in the early Church; but on consideration he came to the conclusion that this phenomenon might be ‘truly accounted for by the supposition that none but the Apostles ever conferred miraculous powers, and that therefore they ceased of course after one generation’. Nor did he fail to base his exegesis, whenever possible, upon an appeal to general principles. One of his admirers points out how Dr Arnold ‘vindicated God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, and to the Jews to exterminate the nations of Canaan, by explaining the principles on which these commands were given, and their reference to the moral state of those to whom they were addressed; thereby educing light out of darkness, unravelling the thread of God’s religious education of the human race, and holding up God’s marvellous counsels to the devout wonder and meditation of the thoughtful believer.’

  There was one of his friends, however, who did not share this admiration for the Doctor’s methods of Scriptural interpretation. W. G. Ward, while still a young man at Oxford, had come under his influence, and had been for some time one of his most enthusiastic disciples. But the star of Newman was rising at the University; Ward soon felt the attraction of that magnetic power; and his belief in his old teacher began to waver. It was, in particular, Dr Arnold’s treatment of the Scriptures which filled Ward’s argumentative mind, at first with distrust, and at last with positive antagonism. To subject the Bible to free inquiry, to exercise upon it the criticism of the individual judgement – where might not such methods lead? Who could say that they would not end in Socinianism? – nay, in Atheism itself? If the text of Scripture was to be submitted to the searchings of human reason, how could the question of its inspiration escape the same tribunal? And the proofs of revelation, and even of the existence of God? What human faculty was capable of deciding upon such enormous questions? And would not the logical result be a condition of universal doubt? ‘On a very moderate computation,’ Ward argued, ‘five times the amount of a man’s natural life might qualify a person endowed with extraordinary genius to have some faint notion (though even this we doubt) on which side truth lies.’ It was not that he had the slightest doubt of Dr Arnold’s orthodoxy – Dr Arnold, whose piety was universally recognized – Dr Arnold, who had held up to scorn and execration Strauss’s Leben Jesu without reading it. What Ward complained of was the Doctor’s lack of logic, not his lack of faith. Could he not see that if he really carried out his own principles to a logical conclusion he would eventually find himself, precisely, in the arms of Strauss? The young man, whose personal friendship remained unshaken, determined upon an interview, and went down to Rugby primed with first principles, syllogisms, and dilemmas. Finding that the headmaster was busy in school, he spent the afternoon reading novels on the sofa in the drawing-room. When at last, late in the evening, the Doctor returned, tired out with his day’s work, Ward fell upon him with all his vigour. The contest was long and furious; it was also entirely inconclusive. When it was over, Ward, with none of his brilliant arguments disposed of, and none of his probing questions satisfactorily answered, returned to the University, to plunge headlong into the vortex of the Oxford Movement; and Dr Arnold, worried, perplexed, and exhausted, went to bed, where he remained for the next thirty-six hours.

  The Commentary on the New Testament was never finished, and the great work of Church and State itself remained a fragment. Dr Arnold’s active mind was diverted from political and theological speculations to the study of philology and to historical composition. His Roman History, which he regarded as ‘the chief monument of his historical fame’, was based partly upon the researches of Niebuhr, and partly upon an aversion to Gibbon. ‘My highest ambition,’ he wrote, ‘is to make my history the very reverse of Gibbon – in this respect, that whereas the whole spirit of his work, from its low morality, is hostile to religion, without speaking directly against it, so my greatest desire would be, in my History, by its high morals and its general tone, to be of use to the cause without actually bringing it forward.’ These efforts were rewarded, in 1841, by the Professorship of Modern History at Oxford. Meanwhile, he was engaged in the study of the Sanskrit and Slavonic languages, bringing out an elaborate edition of Thucydides, and carrying on a voluminous correspondence upon a multitude of topics with a large circle of men of learning. At his death, his published works, composed during such intervals as he could spare from the management of a great public school, filled, besides a large number of pamphlets and articles, no less than seventeen volumes. It was no wonder that Carlyle, after a visit to Rugby, should have characterized Dr Arnold as a man of ‘un-hasting, unresting diligence’.

  Mrs Arnold, too, no doubt agreed with Carlyle. During the first eight years of their married life, she bore him six children; and four more were to follow. In this large and growing domestic circle his hours of relaxation were spent. There those who had only known him in his professional capacity were surprised to find him displaying the tenderness and jocosity of a parent. The dignified and stern headmaster was actually seen to dandle infants and to caracole upon the hearthrug on all fours. Yet, we are told, ‘the sense of his authority as a father was never lost in his playfulness as a companion’. On more serious occasions, the voice of the spiritual teacher sometimes made itself heard. An intimate friend described how ‘on a comparison having been made in his family circle, which seemed to place St Paul above St John,’ the tears rushed to the Doctor’s eyes and how, repeating one of the verses from St John, he begged that the comparison might never again be made. The longer holidays were spent in Westmorland, where, rambling with his offspring among the mountains, gathering wild flowers, and pointing out the beauties of Nature, Dr Arnold enjoyed, as he himself would often say, ‘an almost awful happiness’. Music he did not appreciate, though he occasionally desired his eldest boy, Matthew, to sing him the Confirmation Hymn of Dr Hinds, to which he had become endeared, owing to its use in Rugby Chapel. But his lack of ear was, he considered, amply recompensed by his love of flowers: ‘they are my music’, he declared. Yet, in such a matter, he was careful to refrain from an excess of feeling, such as, in his opinion, marked the famous lines of Wordsworth:

  To me the meanest flower that blows can give

  Thou
ghts that do often lie too deep for tears.

  He found the sentiment morbid. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘is not long enough to take such intense interest in objects in themselves so little.’ As for the animal world, his feelings toward it were of a very different cast. ‘The whole subject,’ he said, ‘of the brute creation is to me one of such painful mystery, that I dare not approach it.’ The Unitarians themselves were a less distressing thought.

  Once or twice he found time to visit the Continent, and the letters and journals recording in minute details his reflections and impressions in France or Italy show us that Dr Arnold preserved, in spite of the distractions of foreign scenes and foreign manners, his accustomed habits of mind. Taking very little interest in works of art, he was occasionally moved by the beauty of natural objects; but his principal preoccupation remained with the moral aspects of things. From this point of view, he found much to reprehend in the conduct of his own countrymen. ‘I fear,’ he wrote, ‘that our countrymen who live abroad are not in the best possible moral state, however much they may do in science or literature.’ And this was unfortunate, because ‘a thorough English gentleman – Christian, manly, and enlightened – is more, I believe, than Guizot or Sismondi could comprehend; it is a finer specimen of human nature than any other country, I believe, could furnish’. Nevertheless, our travellers would imitate foreign customs without discrimination, ‘as in the absurd habit of not eating fish with a knife, borrowed from the French, who do it because they have no knives fit for use’. Places, no less than people, aroused similar reflections. By Pompeii, Dr Arnold was not particularly impressed. ‘There is only,’ he observed, ‘the same sort of interest with which one would see the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, but indeed there is less. One is not authorized to ascribe so solemn a character to the destruction of Pompeii.’ The lake of Como moved him profoundly. As he gazed upon the overwhelming beauty around him, he thought of ‘moral evil’, and was appalled by the contrast. ‘May the sense of moral evil’, he prayed, ‘be as strong in me as my delight in external beauty, for in a deep sense of moral evil, more perhaps than in anything else, abides a saving knowledge of God!’