CHAPTER VI

THEOLOGY 210

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Matthew Arnold, 1884 _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

Laleham Ferry 16

Thomas Arnold, D.D. 32

Laleham Church 48

Fox How, Ambleside 64

The House at Laleham, where Matthew Arnold first

went to School 80

Rugby School 96

Balliol College, Oxford 112

Fisher's Buildings, Balliol College 128

Oriel College, Oxford 144

Matthew Arnold, 1869 160

Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, Surrey 176

The Union Rooms, Oxford 192

Matthew Arnold, 1880, from the Painting by

G.F. Watts, R.A. 208

Pains Hill Cottage, Cobham, from the Lawn 224

Matthew Arnold, 1884 240

Matthew Arnold's Grave at Laleham 256

MATTHEW ARNOLD

_Eldest son of Thomas Arnold, D.D., and Mary Penrose_

Born 1822

Entered Winchester College 1836

Transferred to Rugby School 1837

Scholar of Balliol 1840

Entered Balliol College 1841

Newdigate Prizeman 1843

B.A. 1844

Fellow of Oriel 1845

Private Secretary to Lord Lansdowne 1847

Inspector of Schools 1851

Married Frances Lucy Wightman 1851

Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1857

D.C.L. 1870

Resigned Inspectorship 1886

Died 1888

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This book is intended to deal with substance rather than with form. But,

in estimating the work of a teacher who taught exclusively with the pen,

it would be perverse to disregard entirely the qualities of the writing

which so penetrated and coloured the intellectual life of the Victorian

age. Some cursory estimate of Arnold's powers in prose and verse must

therefore be attempted, before we pass on to consider the practical

effect which those powers enabled him to produce.

And here it behoves a loyal and grateful disciple to guard himself

sedulously against the peril of overstatement. For to the unerring

taste, the sane and sober judgment, of the Master, unrestrained and

inappropriate praise would have been peculiarly distressing.

This caution applies with special force to our estimate of his rank in

poetry. That he was a poet, the most exacting, the most paradoxical

criticism will hardly deny; but there is urgent need for moderation and

self-control when we come to consider his place among the poets. Are we

to call him a great poet? The answer must be carefully pondered.

In the first place, he did not write very much. The total body of his

poetry is small. He wrote in the rare leisure-hours of an exacting

profession, and he wrote only in the early part of his life. In later

years he seemed to feel that the "ancient fount of inspiration"[1] was

dry. He had delivered his message to his generation, and wisely avoided

last words. Then it seems indisputable that he wrote with difficulty.

His poetry has little ease, fluency, or spontaneous movement. In every

line it bears traces of the laborious file. He had the poet's heart and

mind, but they did not readily express themselves in the poetic medium.

He longed for poetic utterance, as his only adequate vent, and sought it

earnestly with tears. Often he achieved it, but not seldom he left the

impression of frustrated and disappointing effort, rather than of easy

mastery and sure attainment.

Again, if we bear in mind Milton's threefold canon, we must admit that

his poetry lacks three great elements of power. He is not Simple,

Sensuous, or Passionate. He is too essentially modern to be really

simple. He is the product of a high-strung civilization, and all its

complicated crosscurrents of thought and feeling stir and perplex his

verse. Simplicity of style indeed he constantly aims at, and, by the aid

of a fastidious culture, secures. But his simplicity is, to use the

distinction which he himself imported from France, rather akin to

_simplesse_ than to _simplicité_--to the elaborated and artificial

semblance than to the genuine quality. He is not sensuous except in so

far as the most refined and delicate appreciation of nature in all her

forms and phases can be said to constitute a sensuous enjoyment. And

then, again, he is pre-eminently not passionate. He is calm, balanced,

self-controlled, sane, austere. The very qualities which are his

characteristic glory make passion impossible.

Another hindrance to his title as a great poet, is that he is not, and

never could be, a poet of the multitude. His verse lacks all popular

fibre. It is the delight of scholars, of philosophers, of men who live

by silent introspection or quiet communing with nature. But it is

altogether remote from the stir and stress of popular life and struggle.

Then, again, his tone is profoundly, though not morbidly, melancholy,

and this is fatal to popularity. As he himself said, "The life of the

people is such that in literature they require joy." But not only his

thought, his very style, is anti-popular. Much of his most elaborate

work is in blank verse, and that in itself is a heavy draw-back. Much

also is in exotic and unaccustomed metres, which to the great bulk of

English readers must always be more of a discipline than of a delight.

And, even when he wrote in our indigenous metres, his ear often played

him false. His rhymes are sometimes only true to the eye, and his lines

are over-crowded with jerking monosyllables. Let one glaring instance

suffice--

Calm not life's crown, though calm is well.

The sentiment is true and even profound; but the expression is surely

rugged and jolting to the last degree; and there are many lines nearly

as ineuphonious. Here are some samples, collected by that fastidious

critic, Mr. Frederic Harrison--

"The sandy spits, the shore-lock'd lakes."

"Could'st thou no better keep, O Abbey old?"

"The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky."

These Mr. Harrison cites as proof that, "where Nature has withheld the

ear for music, no labour and no art can supply the want." And I think

that even a lover may add to the collection--

As the punt's rope chops round.

But, after all these deductions and qualifications have been made, it

remains true that Arnold was a poet, and that his poetic quality was

pure and rare. His musings "on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,"[2]

are essentially and profoundly poetical. They have indeed a tragic

inspiration. He is deeply imbued by the sense that human existence, at

its best, is inadequate and disappointing. He feels, and submits to, its

incompleteness and its limitations. With stately resignation he accepts

the common fate, and turns a glance of calm disdain on all endeavours

after a spurious consolation. All round him he sees

Uno'erleap'd Mountains of Necessity,

Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.

He dismissed with a rather excessive contempt the idea that the dreams

of childhood may be intimations of immortality; and the inspiration

which poets of all ages have agreed to seek in the hope of endless

renovation, he found in the immediate contemplation of present good.

What his brother-poet called "self-reverence, self-knowledge,

self-control," are the keynotes of that portion of his poetry which

deals with the problems of human existence. When he handles these

themes, he speaks to the innermost consciousness of his hearers, telling

us what we know about ourselves, and have believed hidden from all

others, or else putting into words of perfect suitableness what we have

dimly felt, and have striven in vain to utter. It is then that, to use

his own word, he is most "interpretative." It is this quality which

makes such poems as _Youth's Agitations_, _Youth and Calm_,

_Self-dependence_, and _The Grande Chartreuse_ so precious a part of our

intellectual heritage.

In 1873 he wrote to his sister: "I have a curious letter from the State

of Maine in America, from a young man who wished to tell me that a

friend of his, lately dead, had been especially fond of my poem, _A

Wish_, and often had it read to him in his last illness. They were both

of a class too poor to buy books, and had met with the poem in a

newspaper."

It will be remembered that in _A Wish_, the poet, contemptuously

discarding the conventional consolations of a death-bed, entreats his

friends to place him at the open window, that he may see yet once

again--

Bathed in the sacred dews of morn

The wide aerial landscape spread--

The world which was ere I was born,

The world which lasts when I am dead;

Which never was the friend of _one_,

Nor promised love it could not give.

But lit for all its generous sun,

And lived itself, and made us live.

There let me gaze, till I become

In soul, with what I gaze on, wed!

To feel the universe my home;

To have before my mind--instead

Of the sick room, the mortal strife,

The turmoil for a little breath--

The pure eternal course of life,

Not human combatings with death!

Thus feeling, gazing, might I grow

Composed, refresh'd, ennobled, clear;

Then willing let my spirit go

To work or wait elsewhere or here!

This solemn love and reverence for the continuous life of the physical

universe may remind us that Arnold's teaching about humanity, subtle and

searching as it is, has done less to endear him to many of his

disciples, than his feeling for Nature. His is the kind of

Nature-worship which takes nothing at second-hand. He paid "the Mighty

Mother" the only homage which is worthy of her acceptance, a minute and

dutiful study of her moods and methods. He placed himself as a reverent

learner at her feet before he presumed to go forth to the world as an

exponent of her teaching. It is this exactness of observation which

makes his touches of local colouring so vivid and so true. This gives

its winning charm to his landscape-painting, whether the scene is laid

in Kensington Gardens, or the Alps, or the valley of the Thames. This

fills _The Scholar-Gipsy_, and _Thyrsis_, and _Obermann_, and _The

Forsaken Merman_ with flawless gems of natural description, and

felicities of phrase which haunt the grateful memory.

In brief, it seems to me that he was not a great poet, for he lacked the

gifts which sway the multitude, and compel the attention of mankind. But

he was a true poet, rich in those qualities which make the loved and

trusted teacher of a chosen few--as he himself would have said, of "the

Remnant." Often in point of beauty and effectiveness, always in his

purity and elevation, he is worthy to be associated with the noblest

names of all. Alone among his contemporaries, we can venture to say of

him that he was not only of the school, but of the lineage, of

Wordsworth. His own judgment on his place among the modern poets was

thus given in a letter of 1869: "My poems represent, on the whole, the

main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they

will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of

what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary

productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less

poetic sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and

abundance than Browning. Yet because I have more perhaps of a fusion of

the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion

to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my

turn, as they have had theirs."

When we come to consider him as a prose-writer, cautions and

qualifications are much less necessary. Whatever may be thought of the

substance of his writings, it surely must be admitted that he was a

great master of style. And his style was altogether his own. In the last

year of his life he said to the present writer: "People think I can

teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say

it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style."

Clearness is indeed his own most conspicuous note, and to clearness he

added singular grace, great skill in phrase-making, great aptitude for

beautiful description, perfect naturalness, absolute ease. The very

faults which the lovers of a more pompous rhetoric profess to detect in

his writing are the easy-going fashions of a man who wrote as he talked.

The members of a college which produced Cardinal Newman, Dean Church,

and Matthew Arnold are not without some justification when they boast of

"the Oriel style."

But style, though a great delight and a great power, is not everything,

and we must not found our claim for him as a prose-writer on style

alone. His style was the worthy and the suitable vehicle of much of the

very best criticism which English literature contains. We take the whole

mass of his critical writing, from the _Lectures on Homer_ and the

_Essays in Criticism_ down to the Preface to Wordsworth and the

Discourse on Milton; and we ask, Is there anything better?

When he wrote as a critic of books, his taste, his temper, his judgment

were pretty nearly infallible. He combined a loyal and reasonable

submission to literary authority with a free and even daring use of

private judgment. His admiration for the acknowledged masters of human

utterance--Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe--was genuine

and enthusiastic, and incomparably better informed than that of some

more conventional critics. Yet this cordial submission to recognized

authority, this honest loyalty to established reputation, did not blind

him to defects, did not seduce him into indiscriminate praise, did not

deter him from exposing the tendency to verbiage in Burke and Jeremy

Taylor, the excessive blankness of much of Wordsworth's blank verse, the

undercurrent of mediocrity in Macaulay, the absurdities of Ruskin's

etymology. And, as in great matters, so in small. Whatever literary

production was brought under his notice, his judgment was clear,

sympathetic, and independent. He had the readiest appreciation of true

excellence, a quick eye for minor merits of facility and method, a

severe intolerance of turgidity and inflation--of what he called

"desperate endeavours to render a platitude endurable by making it

pompous," and a lively horror of affectation and unreality. These, in

literature as in life, were in his eyes the unpardonable sins.

On the whole it may be said that, as a critic of books, he had in his

lifetime the reputation, the vogue, which he deserved. But his criticism

in other fields has hardly been appreciated at its proper value.

Certainly his politics were rather fantastic. They were influenced by

his father's fiery but limited Liberalism, by the abstract speculation

which flourishes perennially at Oxford, and by the cultivated Whiggery

which he imbibed as Lord Lansdowne's Private Secretary; and the result

often seemed wayward and whimsical. Of this he was himself in some

degree aware. At any rate he knew perfectly that his politics were

lightly esteemed by politicians, and, half jokingly, half seriously, he

used to account for the fact by that jealousy of an outsider's

interference, which is natural to all professional men. Yet he had the

keenest interest, not only in the deeper problems of politics, but also

in the routine and mechanism of the business. He enjoyed a good debate,

liked political society, and was interested in the personalities, the

trivialities, the individual and domestic ins-and-outs, which make so

large a part of political conversation.

But, after all, Politics, in the technical sense, did not afford a

suitable field for his peculiar gifts. It was when he came to the

criticism of national life that the hand of the master was felt. In all

questions affecting national character and tendency, the development of

civilization, public manners, morals, habits, idiosyncrasies, the

influence of institutions, of education, of literature, his insight was

penetrating, his point of view perfectly original, and his judgment, if

not always sound, invariably suggestive. These qualities, among others,

gave to such books as _Essays in Criticism_, _Friendship's Garland_, and

_Culture and Anarchy_, an interest and a value quite independent of

their literary merit. And they are displayed in their most serious and

deliberate form, dissociated from all mere fun and vivacity, in his

_Discourses in America_. This, he told the present writer, was the book

by which, of all his prose-writings, he most desired to be remembered.

It was a curious and memorable choice.

Another point of great importance in his prosewriting is this; if he

had never written prose the world would never have known him as a

humorist. And that would have been an intellectual loss not easily

estimated. How pure, how delicate, yet how natural and spontaneous his

humour was, his friends and associates knew well; and--what is by no

means always the case--the humour of his writing was of exactly the same

tone and quality as the humour of his conversation. It lost nothing in

the process of transplantation. As he himself was fond of saying, he was

not a popular writer, and he was never less popular than in his humorous

vein. In his fun there is no grinning through a horse-collar, no

standing on one's head, none of the guffaws, and antics, and

"full-bodied gaiety of our English Cider-Cellar." But there is a keen

eye for subtle absurdity, a glance which unveils affectation and

penetrates bombast, the most delicate sense of incongruity, the

liveliest disrelish for all the moral and intellectual qualities which

constitute the Bore, and a vein of personal raillery as refined as it is

pungent. Sydney Smith spoke of Sir James Mackintosh as "abating and

dissolving pompous gentlemen with the most successful ridicule." The

words not inaptly describe Arnold's method of handling personal and

literary pretentiousness.

His praise as a phrase-maker is in all the Churches of literature. It

was his skill in this respect which elicited the liveliest compliments

from a transcendent performer in the same field. In 1881 he wrote to his

sister: "On Friday night I had a long talk with Lord Beaconsfield. He

ended by declaring that I was the only living Englishman who had become

a classic in his own lifetime. The fact is that what I have done in

establishing a number of current phrases, such as _Philistinism,

Sweetness and Light_, and all that is just the thing to strike him." In

1884 he wrote from America about his phrase, _The Remnant_--"That term

is going the round of the United States, and I understand what Dizzy

meant when he said that I had performed 'a great achievement in

launching phrases.'" But his wise epigrams and compendious sentences

about books and life, admirable in themselves, will hardly recall the

true man to the recollection of his friends so effectually as his sketch

of the English Academy, disturbed by a "flight of Corinthian leading

articles, and an irruption of Mr. G.A. Sala;" his comparison of Miss

Cobbe's new religion to the British College of Health; his parallel

between Phidias' statue of the Olympian Zeus and Coles'

truss-manufactory; Sir William Harcourt's attempt to "develop a system

of unsectarian religion from the Life of Mr. Pickwick;" the "portly

jeweller from Cheapside," with his "passionate, absorbing, almost

blood-thirsty clinging to life;" the grandiose war-correspondence of the

_Times_, and "old Russell's guns getting a little honey-combed;" Lord

Lumpington's subjection to "the grand, old, fortifying, classical

curriculum," and the "feat of mental gymnastics" by which he obtained

his degree; the Rev. Esau Hittall's "longs and shorts about the

Calydonian Boar, which were not bad;" the agitation of the Paris

Correspondent of the _Daily Telegraph_ on hearing the word "delicacy";

the "bold, bad men, the haunters of Social Science Congresses," who

declaim "a sweet union of philosophy and poetry" from Wordsworth on the

duty of the State towards education; the impecunious author "commercing

with the stars" in Grub Street, reading "the _Star_ for wisdom and

charity, the _Telegraph_ for taste and style," and looking for the

letter from the Literary Fund, "enclosing half-a-crown, the promise of

my dinner at Christmas, and the kind wishes of Lord Stanhope[3] for my

better success in authorship."

One is tempted to prolong this analysis of literary arts and graces; but

enough has been said to recall some leading characteristics of Arnold's

genius in verse and prose. We turn now to our investigation of what he

accomplished. The field which he included in his purview was

wide--almost as wide as our national life. We will consider, one by one,

the various departments of it in which his influence was most distinctly

felt; but first of all a word must be said about his Method.

[Footnote 1: Tennyson.]

[Footnote 2: Wordsworth.]

[Footnote 3: See p. 207. Philip Henry, 5th Earl Stanhope (1805-1875),

Historian, and Patron of Letters.]

[Illustration: Laleham Ferry

Matthew Arnold was born on Christmas Eve, 1822, at Laleham, near

Staines.

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

CHAPTER II

METHOD

The Matthew Arnold whom we know begins in 1848; and, when we first make

his acquaintance, in his earliest letters to his mother and his eldest

sister, he is already a Critic. He is only twenty-five years old, and he

is writing in the year of Revolution. Thrones are going down with a

crash all over Europe; the voices of triumphant freedom are in the air;

the long-deferred millennium of peace and brotherhood seems to be just

on the eve of realization. But, amid all this glorious hurly-burly, this

"joy of eventful living," the young philosopher stands calm and

unshaken; interested indeed, and to some extent sympathetic, but wholly

detached and impartially critical. He thinks that the fall of the French

Monarchy is likely to produce social changes here, for "no one looks on,

seeing his neighbour mending, without asking himself if he cannot mend

in the same way." He is convinced that "the hour of the hereditary

peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has struck"; he thinks

that a five years' continuance of these institutions is "long enough,

certainly, for patience, already at death's door, to have to die in." He

pities (in a sonnet) "the armies of the homeless and unfed." But all the

time he resents the "hot, dizzy trash which people are talking" about

the Revolution. He sees a torrent of American vulgarity and "_laideur_"

threatening to overflow Europe. He thinks England, as it is, "not

liveable-in," but is convinced that a Government of Chartists would not

mend matters; and, after telling a Republican friend that "God knows it,

I am with you," he thus qualifies his sympathy--

Yet, when I muse on what life is, I seem

Rather to patience prompted, than that proud

Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud--

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

In fine, he is critical of his own country, critical of all foreign

nations, critical of existing institutions, critical of well-meant but

uninstructed attempts to set them right. And, as he was in the

beginning, so he continued throughout his life and to its close. It is

impossible to conceive of him as an enthusiastic and unqualified

partisan of any cause, creed, party, society, or system. Admiration he

had, for worthy objects, in abundant store; high appreciation for what

was excellent; sympathy with all sincere and upward-tending endeavour.

But few indeed were the objects which he found wholly admirable, and

keen was his eye for the flaws and foibles which war against absolute

perfection. On the last day of his life he said in a note to the present

writer: "S---- has written a letter full of shriekings and cursings

about my innocent article; the Americans will get their notion of it

from that, and I shall never be able to enter America again." That

"innocent article" was an estimate, based on his experience in two

recent visits to the United States, of American civilization. "Innocent"

perhaps it was, but it was essentially critical. He began by saying that

in America the "political and social problem" had been well solved; that

there the constitution and government were to the people as well-fitting

clothes to a man; that there was a closer union between classes there

than elsewhere, and a more "homogeneous" nation. But then he went on to

say that, besides the political and social problem, there was a "human

problem," and that in trying to solve this America had been less

successful--indeed, very unsuccessful. The "human problem" was the

problem of civilization, and civilization meant "humanization in

society"--the development of the best in man, in and by a social system.

And here he pronounced America defective. America generally--life,

people, possessions--was not "interesting." Americans lived willingly

in places called by such names as Briggsville, Jacksonville and

Marcellus. The general tendency of public opinion was against

distinction. America offered no satisfaction to the sense for beauty,

the sense for elevation. Tall talk and self-glorification were rampant,

and no criticism was tolerated. In fine, there were many countries, less

free and less prosperous, which were more civilized.

That "innocent article," written in 1888, shows exactly the same

balanced tone and temper--the same critical attitude towards things with

which in the main he sympathizes--as the letters of 1848.

And what is true of the beginning and the end is true of the long tract

which lay between. From first to last he was a Critic--a calm and

impartial judge, a serene distributer of praise and blame--never a

zealot, never a prophet, never an advocate, never a dealer in that

"_blague_ and mob-pleasing" of which he truly said that it "is a real

talent and tempts many men to apostasy."

For some forty years he taught his fellow-men, and all his teaching was

conveyed through the critical medium. He never dogmatized, preached, or

laid down the law. Some great masters have taught by passionate

glorification of favourite personalities or ideals, passionate

denunciation of what they disliked or despised. Not such was Arnold's

method; he himself described it, most happily, as "sinuous, easy,

unpolemical." By his free yet courteous handling of subjects the most

august and conventions the most respectable, he won to his side a band

of disciples who had been repelled by the brutality and cocksureness of

more boisterous teachers. He was as temperate in eulogy as in

condemnation; he could hint a virtue and hesitate a liking.[4]

It happens, as we have just seen, that his earliest and latest

criticisms were criticisms of Institutions, and a great part of his

critical writing deals with similar topics; but these will be more

conveniently considered when we come to estimate his effect on Society

and Politics. That effect will perhaps be found to have been more

considerable than his contemporaries imagined; for, though it became a

convention to praise his literary performances and judgments, it was no

less a convention to dismiss as visionary and absurd whatever he wrote

about the State and the Community.

But in the meantime we must say a word about his critical method when

applied to Life, and when applied to Books. When one speaks of

criticism, one is generally thinking of prose. But, when we speak of

Arnold's criticism, it is necessary to widen the scope of one's

observation; for he was never more essentially the critic than when he

concealed the true character of his method in the guise of poetry. Even

if we decline to accept his strange judgment that all poetry "is at

bottom a criticism of life," still we must perceive that, as a matter of

fact, many of his own poems are as essentially critical as his Essays or

his Lectures.

We all remember that he poked fun at those misguided Wordsworthians who

seek to glorify their master by claiming for him an "ethical system as

distinctive and capable of exposition as Bishop Butler's," and "a

scientific system of thought." But surely we find in his own poetry a

sustained doctrine of self-mastery, duty, and pursuit of truth, which is

essentially ethical, and, in its form, as nearly "scientific" and

systematic as the nature of poetry permits. And this doctrine is

conveyed, not by positive, hortatory, or didactic methods, but by

Criticism--the calm praise of what commends itself to his judgment, the

gentle but decisive rebuke of whatever offends or darkens or misleads.

Of him it may be truly said, as he said of Goethe, that

He took the suffering human race,

He read each wound, each weakness clear;

And struck his finger on the place,

And said: _Thou ailest here, and here._

His deepest conviction about "the suffering human race" would seem to

have been that its worst miseries arise from a too exalted estimate of

its capacities. Men are perpetually disappointed and disillusioned

because they expect too much from human life and human nature, and

persuade themselves that their experience, here and hereafter, will be,

not what they have any reasonable grounds for expecting, but what they

imagine or desire. The true philosophy is that which

Neither makes man too much a god,

Nor God too much a man.

Wordsworth thought it a boon to "feel that we are greater than we know":

Arnold thought it a misfortune. Wordsworth drew from the shadowy

impressions of the past the most splendid intimations of the future.

Against such vain imaginings Arnold set, in prose, the "inexorable

sentence" in which Butler warned us to eschew pleasant self-deception;

and, in verse, the persistent question--

Say, what blinds us, that we claim the glory

Of possessing powers not our share?

He rebuked

Wishes unworthy of a man full-grown.

He taught that there are

Joys which were not for our use designed.

He warned discontented youth not to expect greater happiness from

advancing years, because

one thing only has been lent

To youth and age in common--discontent.

Friendship is a broken reed, for

Our vaunted life is one long funeral,

and even Hope is buried with the "faces that smiled and fled."

Death, at least in some of its aspects, seemed to him the

Stern law of every mortal lot,

Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear;

And builds himself I know not what

Of second life I know not where.

And yet, in gleams of happier insight, he saw the man who "flagged not

in this earthly strife,"

His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,

mount, though hardly, to eternal life. And, as he mused over his

father's grave, the conviction forced itself upon his mind that

somewhere in the "labour-house of being" there still was employment for

that father's strength, "zealous, beneficent, firm."

Here indeed is the more cheerful aspect of his "criticism of life." Such

happiness as man is capable of enjoying is conditioned by a frank

recognition of his weaknesses and limitations; but it requires also for

its fulfilment the sedulous and dutiful employment of such powers and

opportunities as he has.

First and foremost, he must realize the "majestic unity" of his nature,

and not attempt by morbid introspection to dissect himself into

Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers,

Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control.

Then he must learn that

To its own impulse every action stirs.

He must live by his own light, and let earth live by hers. The forces of

nature are to be in this respect his teachers--

But with joy the stars perform their shining,

And the sea its long moon-silvered roll;

For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting

All the fever of some differing soul.

But, though he is to learn from Nature and love Nature and enjoy Nature,

he is to remember that she

never was the friend of _one_,

Nor promised love she could not give;

and so he is not to expect too much from her, or demand impossible

boons. Still less is he to be content with feeling himself "in harmony"

with her; for

Man covets all which Nature has, but more.

That "more" is Conscience and the Moral Sense.

Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;

Nature and man can never be fast friends.

And this brings us to the idea of Duty as set forth in his poems, and

Duty resolves itself into three main elements: Truth--Work--Love. Truth

comes first. Man's prime duty is to know things as they are. Truth can

only be attained by light, and light he must cultivate, he must worship.

Arnold's highest praise for a lost friend is that he was "a child of

light"; that he had "truth without alloy,"

And joy in light, and power to spread the joy.

The saddest part of that friend's death is the fear that it may bring,

After light's term, a term of cecity:

the best hope for the future, that light will return and banish the

follies, sophistries, delusions, which have accumulated in the darkness.

"Lucidity of soul" may be--nay, must be, "sad"; but it is not less

imperative. And the truth which light reveals must not only be sought

earnestly and cherished carefully, but even, when the cause demands it,

championed strenuously. The voices of conflict, the joy of battle, the

"garments rolled in blood," the "burning and fuel of fire" have little

place in Arnold's poetry. But once at any rate he bursts into a strain

so passionate, so combatant, that it is difficult for a disciple to

recognize his voice; and then the motive is a summons to a last charge

for Truth and Light--

They out-talk'd thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee?

Better men fared thus before thee;

Fired their ringing shot and pass'd,

Hotly charged--and sank at last.

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!

Let the victors, when they come,

When the forts of folly fall,

Find thy body by the wall!

But the note of battle, even for what he holds dearest and most sacred,

is not a familiar note in his poetry. He had no natural love of

the throng'd field where winning comes by strife.

His criticism of life sets a higher value on work than on fighting.

"Toil unsevered from tranquillity," "Labour, accomplish'd in repose"--is

his ideal of happiness and duty.

Even the Duke of Wellington--surely an unpromising subject for poetic

eulogy--is praised because he was a worker,

Laborious, persevering, serious, firm.

Nature, again, is called in to teach us the secret of successful labour.

Her forces are incessantly at work, and in that work they are entirely

concentrated--

Bounded by themselves, and unregardful

In what state God's other works may be,

In their own tasks all their powers pouring,

These attain the mighty life you see.

But those who had the happiness of knowing Arnold in the flesh will feel

that they never so clearly recognize his natural voice as when, by his

criticism of life, he is inculcating the great law of Love. Even in the

swirl of Revolution he clings to his fixed idea of love as duty. After

discussing the rise and fall of dynasties, the crimes of diplomacy, the

characteristic defects of rival nations, and all the stirring topics of

the time, he abruptly concludes his criticism with an appeal to Love.

"Be kind to the neighbours--'this is all we can.'"

And as in his prose, so in his poetry. Love, even in arrest of formal

justice, is the motive of _The Sick King in Bokhara_; love, that wipes

out sin, of _Saint Brandan_--

That germ of kindness, in the womb

Of mercy caught, did not expire;

Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom,

And friends me in the pit of fire.

_The Neckan_ and _The Forsaken Merman_ tell the tale of contemptuous

unkindness and its enduring poison. _A Picture at Newstead_ depicts the

inexpiable evils wrought by violent wrong. _Poor Matthias_ tells in a

parable the cruelty, not less real because unconscious, of imperfect

sympathy--

Human longings, human fears,

Miss our eyes and miss our ears.

Little helping, wounding much,

Dull of heart, and hard of touch,

Brother man's despairing sign

Who may trust us to divine?

In _Geist's Grave_, the "loving heart," the "patient soul" of the

dog-friend are made to "read their homily to man"; and the theme of the

homily is still the same: the preciousness of the love which outlives

the grave. But nowhere perhaps is his doctrine about the true divinity

of love so exquisitely expressed as in _The Good Shepherd with the

Kid_--

_He saves the sheep, the goats He doth not save._

So rang Tertullian's sentence . . .

. . . . . But she sigh'd,

The infant Church! Of love she felt the tide

Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave.

And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs,

With eye suffused but heart inspirèd true,

On those walls subterranean, where she hid

Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs,

She the Good Shepherd's hasty image drew--

And on His shoulders not a lamb, a kid.

So much, then, for his Criticism of Life, as applied in and through his

poems. It is not easy to estimate, even approximately, the effect

produced by a loved and gifted poet, who for thirty years taught an

audience, fit though few, that the main concerns of human life were

Truth, Work, and Love. Those "two noblest of things, Sweetness and

Light" (though heaven only knows what they meant to Swift), meant to him

Love and Truth; and to these he added the third great ideal,

Work--patient, persistent, undaunted effort for what a man genuinely

believes to be high and beneficent ends. Such a "Criticism of Life," we

must all admit, is not unworthy of one who seeks to teach his

fellow-men; even though some may doubt whether poetry is the medium best

fitted for conveying it.

We must now turn our attention to his performances in the field of

literary criticism; and we begin in the year 1853. He had won the prize

for an English poem at Rugby, and again at Oxford. In 1849 he had

published without his name, and had recalled, a thin volume, called _The

Strayed Reveller, and other Poems_. He had done the same with

_Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems_ in 1852. The best contents of

these two volumes were combined in _Poems_, 1853, and to this book he

gave a Preface, which was his first essay in Literary Criticism. In this

essay he enounces a certain doctrine of poetry, and, true to his

lifelong practice, he enounces it mainly by criticism of what other

people had said. A favourite cry of the time was that Poetry, to be

vital and interesting, must "leave the exhausted past, and draw its

subjects from matters of present import." It was the favourite theory of

Middle Class Liberalism. The _Spectator_ uttered it with characteristic

gravity; Kingsley taught it obliquely in _Alton Locke_. Arnold assailed

it as "completely false," as "having a philosophical form and air, but

no real basis in fact." In assailing it, he justified his constant

recourse to Antiquity for subject and method; he exalted Achilles,

Prometheus, Clytemnestra, and Dido as eternally interesting; he asserted

that the most famous poems of the nineteenth century "left the reader

cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter

books of the _Iliad_, by the _Oresteia_, or by the episode of Dido." He

glorified the Greeks as the "unapproached masters of the _grand style_."

He even ventured to doubt whether the influence of Shakespeare, "the

greatest, perhaps, of all poetical names," had been wholly advantageous

to the writers of poetry. He weighed Keats in the balance against

Sophocles and found him wanting.

[Illustration: Thomas Arnold, D.D.

Head Master of Rugby, and father of Matthew Arnold

_From the Painting in Oriel College_

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

Of course, this criticism, so hostile to the current cant of the moment,

was endlessly misinterpreted and misunderstood. He thus explained his

doctrine in a Preface to a Second Edition of his Poems: "It has been

said that I wish to limit the poet, in his choice of subjects, to the

period of Greek and Roman antiquity; but it is not so. I only counsel

him to choose for his subjects great actions, without regarding to what

time they belong." A few years later he wrote to a friend (in a letter

hitherto unpublished): "The modern world is the widest and richest

material ever offered to the artist; but the moulding and representing

power of the artist is not, or has not yet become (in my opinion),

commensurate with his material, his _mundus representandus_. This

adequacy of the artist to his world, this command of the latter by him,

seems to me to be what constitutes a first-class poetic epoch, and to

distinguish it from such an epoch as our own; in this sense, the Homeric

and Elizabethan poetry seems to me of a superior class to ours, though

the world represented by it was far less full and significant."

There is no need to describe in greater detail the two Prefaces, which

can be read, among rather incongruous surroundings, in the volume called

_Irish Essays, and Others_. But they are worth noting, because in them,

at the age of thirty, he first displayed the peculiar temper in literary

criticism which so conspicuously marked him to the end; and that temper

happily infected the critical writing of a whole generation; until the

Iron Age returned, and the bludgeon was taken down from its shelf, and

the scalping-knife refurbished.

In his critical temper, lucidity, courage, and serenity were equally

blended. In his criticism of books, as in his criticism of life, he

aimed first at Lucidity--at that clear light, uncoloured by

prepossession, which should enable him to see things as they really are.

In a word, he judged for himself; and, however much his judgment might

run counter to prejudice or tradition, he dared to enounce it and

persist in it. He spoke with proper contempt of the "tenth-rate critics,

for whom any violent shock to the public taste would be a temerity not

to be risked"; but that temerity he himself had in rich abundance. Homer

and Sophocles are the only poets of whom, if my memory serves me, he

never wrote a disparaging word. Shakespeare is, and rightly, an object

of national worship; yet Arnold ventured to point out his

"over-curiousness of expression"; and, where he writes--

Till that Bellona's bridegroom, lapped in proof,

Confronted him with self-comparisons,

Arnold dared to say that the writing was "detestable."

Macaulay is, perhaps less rightly, another object of national worship;

yet Arnold denounced the "confident shallowness which makes him so

admired by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so

intolerable to all searchers for truth"; and frankly avowed that to his

mind "a man's power to detect the ring of false metal in the _Lays of

Ancient Rome_ was a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about

poetical matters at all." According to Macaulay, Burke was "the greatest

man since Shakespeare." Arnold admired Burke, revered him, paid him the

highest compliment by trying to apply his ideas to actual life; but,

when Burke urged his great arguments by obstetrical and pathological

illustrations, Arnold was ready to denounce his extravagances, his

capriciousness, his lapses from good taste.

The same perfectly courageous criticism, qualifying generous admiration,

he applied in turn to Jeremy Taylor and Addison, to Milton, and Pope,

and Gray, and Keats, and Shelley, and Scott--to all the principal

luminaries of our literary heaven. He went all lengths with Mr.

Swinburne in praising Byron's "sincerity and strength," but he qualified

the praise: "Our soul had _felt_ him like the thunder's roll," but "he

taught us little." Devout Wordsworthian as he is, he does not shrink

from saying that much of Wordsworth's work is "quite uninspired, flat

and dull," and sets himself to the task of "relieving him from a great

deal of the poetical baggage which now encumbers him."

And so Lucidity, which reveals the Truth, enounces its decisions with

absolute courage; and to Lucidity and Courage is added the crowning

grace of Serenity. However much the subject of his study may offend his

taste or sin against his judgment, he never loses his temper with the

author whom he is criticising. He never bludgeons or scalps or

scarifies; but serenely indicates, with the calm gesture of a superior

authority, the defects and blots which mar perfection, but which the

unthinking multitude ignores, or, at worst, admires.

The years 1860 and 1861 mark an important stage in the development of

his critical method. He was now Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and he

delivered from the professorial chair his famous lectures _On

Translating Homer_, to which in 1862 he added his "Last Words." As much

as anything which he ever wrote, these lectures have a chance of living

and being enjoyed when we are dust. For Homer is immortal, and he who

interprets Homer to Englishmen may hope at least for a longer life than

most of us.

Few are those who can still recall the graceful figure in its silken

gown; the gracious address, the slightly supercilious smile, of the

_Milton jeune et voyageant_,[5] just returned from contact with all that

was best in French culture to instruct and astonish his own university;

few who can still catch the cadence of the opening sentence: "It has

more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer"; few

that heard the fine tribute of the aged scholar,[6] who, as the young

lecturer closed a later discourse, murmured to himself, "The Angel

ended."

With his characteristic trick of humorous mock-humility, Arnold wrote to

a friendly reviewer who praised these lectures on translating Homer: "I

am glad any influential person should call attention to the fact that

there was some criticism in the three lectures; most people seem to have

gathered nothing from them except that I abused F.W. Newman, and liked

English hexameters."

Criticisms of criticism are the most melancholy reading in the world,

and therefore no attempt will here be made to examine in detail the

praise which in these lectures he poured upon the supreme exemplar of

pure art, or the delicious ridicule with which he assailed the most

respectable attempts to render Homer into English. For the praise, let

one quotation suffice--"Homer's grandeur is not the mixed and turbid

grandeur of the great poets of the North, of the authors of _Othello_

and _Faust_; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry

has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates; but it

has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness

of an Ionian sky."

On the ridicule, we must dwell a little more at length; for this was, in

the modern slang, "a new departure" in his critical method. At the date

when he published his lectures _On Translating Homer_, English criticism

of literature was, and for some time had been, an extremely solemn

business. Much of it had been exceedingly good, for it had been produced

by Johnson and Coleridge, and De Quincey and Hazlitt. Much had been

atrociously bad, resembling all too closely Mr. Girdle's pamphlet "in

sixty-four pages, post octavo, on the character of the Nurse's deceased

husband in _Romeo and Juliet_, with an enquiry whether he had really

been a 'merry man' in his lifetime, or whether it was merely his widow's

affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him."[7]

But, whether good or bad, criticism had been solemn. Even Arnold's first

performances in the art had been as grave as Burke or Wordsworth. But in

his lectures _On Translating Homer_ he added a new resource to his

critical apparatus. He still pursued Lucidity, Courage, and Serenity; he

still praised temperately and blamed humanely; but now he brought to the

enforcement of his literary judgment the aid of a delicious playfulness.

Cardinal Newman was not ashamed to talk of "chucking" a thing off, or

getting into a "scrape." So perhaps a humble disciple may be permitted

to say that Arnold pointed his criticisms with "chaff."

This method of depreciating literary performances which one dislikes,

of conveying dissent from literary doctrines which one considers

erroneous, had fallen out of use in our literary criticism. It was least

to be expected from a professorial chair in a venerable

university--least of all from a professor not yet forty, who might have

been expected to be weighed down and solemnized by the greatness of his

function and the awfulness of his surroundings. Hence arose the simple

and amusing wrath of pedestrian poets like Mr. Ichabod Wright, and

ferocious pedants like Professor Francis Newman, and conventional

worshippers of such idols as Scott and Macaulay, when they found him

poking his seraphic fun at the notion that Homer's song was like "an

elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast," or at

lines so purely prosaic as--

All these thy anxious cares are also mine,

Partner beloved;

or so eccentric as--

Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle

or so painful as--

To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

This habit of enlisting playfulness in aid of literary judgment was

carried a step further in _Essays in Criticism_, published in 1865. This

book, of which Mr. Paul justly remarks that it was "a great intellectual

event," was a collection of essays written in the years 1863 and 1864.

The original edition contained a preface dealing very skittishly with

Bishop Colenso's biblical aberrations. The allusions to Colenso were

wisely omitted from later editions, but the preface as it stands

contains (besides the divinely-beautiful eulogy of Oxford) some of

Arnold's most delightful humour. He never wrote anything better than his

apology to the indignant Mr. Ichabod Wright; his disclaimer of the title

of Professor, "which I share with so many distinguished men--Professor

Pepper, Professor Anderson, Professor Frickel"; his attempt to comfort

the old gentleman who was afraid of being murdered, by reminding him

that "il n'y a pas d'homme necessaire"; and in all these cases the

humour subserves and advances a serious criticism of books or of life.

As we have now seen him engaged in the duty of criticising others, it

will not be out of place to cite in this connection, though they belong

to other periods, some criticisms of himself. As far back as 1853, he

had observed, with characteristic lucidity, that the great fault of his

earlier poems was "the absence of charm." "Charm" was indeed the

element in which they were deficient; but, as years advanced, charm was

superadded to thought and feeling. In 1867, he said in a letter to his

friend F.T. Palgrave: "Saint Beuve has written to me with great interest

about the _Obermann poem_, which he is getting translated. Swinburne

fairly took my breath away. I must say the general public praise me in

the dubious style in which old Wordsworth used to praise Bernard Barton,

James Montgomery, and suchlike; and the writers of poetry, on the other

hand--Browning, Swinburne, Lytton--praise me as the general public

praises its favourites. This is a curious reversal of the usual order of

things. Perhaps it is from an exaggerated estimate of my own

unpopularity and obscurity as a poet, but my first impulse is to be

astonished at Swinburne's praising me, and to think it an act of

generosity. Also he picks passages which I myself should have picked,

and which I have not seen other people pick."

In 1869, when the first Collected Edition of his poems was in the press,

he wrote to Palgrave, who had suggested some alterations, this estimate

of his own merits and defects,--

"I am really very much obliged to you for your letter. I think the

printing has made too much progress to allow of dealing with any of the

long things now; I have left 'Merope' aside entirely, but the rest I

have reprinted. In a succeeding edition, however, I am not at all sure

that I shall not leave out the second part of the 'Church of Brou.' With

regard to the others, I think I shall let them stand--but often for

other reasons than because of their intrinsic merit. For instance, I

agree that in the 'Sick King in Bokhara' there is a flatness in parts;

but then it was the first thing of mine dear old Clough thoroughly

liked. Against 'Tristram,' too, many objections may fairly be urged; but

then the subject is a very popular one, and many people will tell you

they like it best of anything I have written. All this has to be taken

into account. 'Balder' perhaps no one cares much for except myself; but

I have always thought, though very likely I am wrong, that it has not

had justice done to it; I consider that it has a natural _propriety_ of

diction and rhythm which is what we all prize so much in Virgil, and

which is not common in English poetry. For instance, Tennyson has in the

_Idylls_ something dainty and _tourmenté_ which excludes this natural

propriety; and I have myself in 'Sohrab' something, not dainty, but

_tourmenté_ and Miltonically _ampoullé_, which excludes it.... We have

enough Scandinavianism in our nature and history to make a short

_conspectus_ of the Scandinavian mythology admissible. As to the shorter

things, the 'Dream' I have struck out. 'One Lesson' I have re-written

and banished from its pre-eminence as an introductory piece. 'To

Marguerite' (I suppose you mean 'We were apart' and not 'Yes! in the

sea') I had paused over, but my instinct was to strike it out, and now

your suggestion comes to confirm this instinct, I shall act upon it. The

same with 'Second Best.' It is quite true there is a horrid falsetto in

some stanzas of the 'Gipsy Child'--it was a very youthful production. I

have re-written those stanzas, but am not quite satisfied with the poem

even now. 'Shakespeare' I have re-written. 'Cruikshank' I have

re-titled, and re-arranged the 'World's Triumphs.' 'Morality' I stick

to--and 'Palladium' also. 'Second Best' I strike out and will try to put

in 'Modern Sappho' instead--though the metre is not right. In the

'Voice' the falsetto rages too furiously; I can do nothing with it;

ditto in 'Stagirius,' which I have struck out. Some half-dozen other

things I either have struck out, or think of striking out. 'Hush, not to

me at this bitter departing' is one of them. The Preface I omit

entirely. 'St. Brandan,' like 'Self-Deception,' is not a piece that at

all satisfies me, but I shall let both of them stand."

In 1879 he wrote with reference to the edition of his poems in two

volumes--

"In beginning with 'early poems' I followed, as I have done throughout,

the chronological arrangement adopted in the last edition, an

arrangement which is, on the whole, I think, the most satisfactory. The

title of 'early' implies an excuse for defective work of which I would

not be supposed blind to the defects--such as the 'Gipsy Child,' which

you suggest for exclusion; but something these early pieces have which

later work has not, and many people--perhaps for what are truth faults

in the poems--have liked them. You have been a good friend to my poems

from the first, one of those whose approbation has been a real source of

pleasure to me. There are things which I should like to do in poetry

before I die, and of which lines and bits have long been done, in

particular Lucretius, St. Alexius, and the journey of Achilles after

death to the Island of Leuce; but we accomplish what we can, not what we

will."

Enough, perhaps, has now been said about his critical method; and, as

this book proposes to deal with results, it is right to enquire into the

effect of that method upon men who aspired to follow him, at whatever

distance, in the path of criticism. The answer can be easily given. He

taught us, first and foremost, to judge for ourselves; to take nothing

at second hand; to bow the knee to no reputation, however high its

pedestal in the Temple of Fame, unless we were satisfied of its right to

stand where it was. Then he taught us to discriminate, even in what we

loved best, between its excellences and its defects; to swallow nothing

whole, but to chew the cud of disinterested meditation, and accept or

reject, praise or blame, in accordance with our natural and deliberate

taste. He taught us to love Beauty supremely, to ensue it, to be on the

look out for it; and, when we found it--when we found what really and

without convention satisfied our "sense for beauty"--to adore it, and,

as far as we could, to imitate it. Contrariwise, he taught us to shun

and eschew what was hideous, to make war upon it, and to be on our guard

against its contaminating influence. And this teaching he applied alike

to hideousness in character, sight, and sound--to "watchful jealousy"

and rancour and uncleanness; to the "dismal Mapperly Hills," and the

"uncomeliness of Margate," the "squalid streets of Bethnal Green," and

"Coles' Truss Manufactory standing where it ought not, on the finest

site in Europe"; to such poetry as--

And scarcely had she begun to wash

When she was aware of the grisly gash,

to such hymns as--

O happy place!

When shall I be

My God with Thee,

To see Thy face?

"What a touch of grossness!" he exclaimed, "what an original shortcoming

in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural

growth amongst us of such hideous names--Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg!

In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than "the best

race in the world"; by the Ilissus there was "no Wragg,[8] poor thing!"

Then he taught us to aim at sincerity in our intercourse with Nature.

Never to describe her as others saw her, never to pretend a knowledge of

her which we did not possess, never to endow her with fanciful

attributes of our own or other people's imagining, never to assume her

sympathy with mortal lots, never to forget that she, like humanity, has

her dark, her awful, her revengeful moods. He taught us not to be

ashamed of our own sense of fun, our own faculty of laughter; but to let

them play freely even round the objects of our reasoned reverence, just

in the spirit of the teacher who said that no man really believed in his

religion till he could venture to joke about it. Above all, he taught

us, even when our feelings were most forcibly aroused, to be serene,

courteous, and humane; never to scold, or storm, or bully; and to avoid

like a pestilence such brutality as that of the _Saturday Review_ when

it said that something or another was "eminently worthy of a great

nation," and to disparage it "eminently worthy of a great fool." He laid

it down as a "precious truth" that one's effectiveness depends upon "the

power of persuasion, of charm; that without this all fury, energy,

reasoning power, acquirement, are thrown away and only render their

owner more miserable."

In a word, he combined Light with Sweetness, and in the combination lies

his abiding power.

[Footnote 4: "Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike."--_Pope_.]

[Footnote 5: He was so described by George Sand.]

[Footnote 6: Dr. Williams, President of Jesus College.]

[Footnote 7: _Nicholas Nickleby_.]

[Footnote 8: "A shocking child-murder has just been committed at

Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday

morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards

found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. _Wragg is in

custody._"]

CHAPTER III

EDUCATION

"Though I am a schoolmaster's son, I confess that school-teaching or

school-inspecting is not the line of life I should naturally have

chosen. I adopted it in order to marry a lady who is here to-night, and

who feels your kindness as warmly and gratefully as I do. My wife and I

had a wandering life of it at first. There were but three lay-inspectors

for all England. My district went right across from Pembroke Dock to

Great Yarmouth. We had no home. One of our children was born in a

lodging at Derby, with a workhouse, if I recollect aright, behind and a

penitentiary in front. But the _irksomeness_ of my new duties was what I

felt most, and during the first year or so it was sometimes

insupportable."

[Illustration: Laleham Church

As it was in Matthew Arnold's boyhood

_Photo H.W. Taunt_]

The name of Arnold is so inseparably connected with Education[9] that

many of Matthew Arnold's friends were astonished by this frank

confession, which he made in his address to the Westminster Teachers'

Association on the occasion of his retirement from the office of

Inspector. There is reason to believe that the profession on which he

had set his early affections was Diplomacy. It is easy to see how

perfectly, in many respects, diplomatic life would have suited him. The

proceeds of his Fellowship, then considerable and unhampered by any

conditions of residence, would have supplied the lack of private

fortune. He had some of the diplomatist's most necessary gifts--love of

travel, familiarity with European literature, keen interest in foreign

politics and institutions, taste for cultivated society, rich enjoyment

of life, and fascinating manners conspicuously free from English

stiffness and shyness. As to his interest in foreign politics, it is

only necessary to cite _England and the Italian Question_, which he

wrote in 1859, and which deals with the unity and independence of Italy.

It is the first essay which he ever published, but it abounds in

clearness and force, and is entirely free from the whimsicality which in

later years sometimes marred his prose. Above all it shows a sympathetic

insight into foreign aspirations which is rare indeed even among

cultivated Englishmen. In reference to this pamphlet he truly observed:

"The worst of the English is that on foreign politics they search so

very much more for what they like and wish to be true, than for what

_is_ true. In Paris there is certainly a larger body of people than in

London who treat foreign politics as a science, as a matter to _know_

upon before _feeling_ upon."

As regards the diplomatic life, it seems certain that he would have

enjoyed it thoroughly, and one would think that he was exactly the man

to conduct a delicate negotiation with tact, good humour, and good

sense. Some glimmering of these gifts seems to have dawned from time to

time on the unimaginative minds of his official chiefs; for three times

he was sent by the Education Office on Foreign Missions, half diplomatic

in their character, to enquire into the condition and methods of Public

Instruction on the Continent. The ever-increasing popularity which

attended him on these Missions, and his excellent judgment in handling

Foreign Ministers and officials, might perhaps suggest the thought that

in renouncing diplomacy he renounced his true vocation. But the thought,

though natural, is superficial, and must give way to the absolute

conviction that he never could have known true happiness--never realized

his own ideal of life--without a wife, a family, and a home. And these

are luxuries which, as a rule, diplomatists cannot attain till

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 Elementary 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_,[10] 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."

His effect was of a different kind. It was written on the fleshly tables

of the heart. To Oxford men he seemed like an elder brother, brilliant,

playful, lovable, yet profoundly wise; teaching us what to think, to

admire, to avoid. His influence fell upon a thirsty and receptive soil.

We drank it with delight; and it co-operated with all the best

traditions of the place in making us lifelong lovers of romance, and

truth, and beauty. One of the keenest minds produced by Oxford between

1870 and 1880 thus summarized his effect on us: "I think he was almost

the only man who did not disappoint one."

[Illustration: 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;[11]

and he in turn was fascinated by the Memorials of "An Eton Boy," which

he reviewed in the _Fortnightly_ for June, 1882.[12] 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."

And so he goes on to give a truly appreciative and affectionate sketch

of young Arthur Mynors; and then he quotes the sentence about the Master

of the Beagles, and on this he comments thus: "The aged Barbarian will,

upon this, admiringly mumble to us his story how the battle of Waterloo

was won in the playing-fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have been

prepared in those playing-fields as well as victories; disasters due to

inadequate mental training--to want of application, knowledge,

intelligence, lucidity. The Eton playing-fields have their great charm,

notwithstanding; but with what felicity of unconscious satire does that

stroke of 'the Master of the Beagles' hit off our whole system of

provision of public secondary schools; a provision for the fortunate and

privileged few, but for the many, for the nation, ridiculously

impossible!" This is his last word on the Public Schools, as that title

is conventionally understood. He had a much fuller and more searching

criticism for the schools in which the great Middle Class is educated.

It may perhaps be fairly questioned whether great humourists much enjoy

the humour of other people. If we apply this question to Arnold's case

and seek to answer it by his published works, we shall probably answer

in the negative. From first to last, he takes little heed of humorous

writers or humorous books. Even in those great authors who are masters

of all moods, it is the grave, rather than the humorous mood, which he

chooses for commendation. He was a devout Shakespearian, but it is

difficult to recall an allusion to Shakespeare's humour, except in the

rather oblique form of Dogberry as the type of German officialdom. Swift

he quoted with admirable effect, but it was Swift the reviler, not Swift

the jester. He says that he made a "wooden Oxford audience laugh aloud

with two pages of Heine's wit"; but the lecture, as we read it, shows

more of mordant sarcasm than of the material for laughter. Scott he knew

by heart, and Carlyle he honestly revered; but he admired the one for

his romance and the other for his philosophy. Thackeray, sad to

remember, he "did not think a great writer," and so Thackeray's humour

disappears, with his pathos and his satire, into the limbo of

common-place. The imaginary spokesman of the _Daily Telegraph_ in

_Friendship's Garland_ reckons as "the great masters of human thought

and human literature, Plato, Shakespeare, Confucius, and Charles

Dickens"; and there, to judge from the great bulk of his writing,

Arnold's acquaintance with Dickens begins and ends.

But it was one of his amiable traits that, whenever he read a book which

pleased him, he immediately began to share his pleasure with his

friends. In the year 1880, he writes to his colleague, Mr. Fitch, "I

have this year been reading _David Copperfield_ for the first time.[13]

Mr. Creakle's School at Blackheath is the type of our English Middle

Class Schools, and our Middle Class is satisfied that so it should be."

It would seem that he made this rather belated acquaintance with

Dickens' masterpiece, through reading it aloud to one of his children

who was laid up with a swelled face. But, however introduced to his

notice, the book made a deep impression on him. In the following June he

contributed to the _Nineteenth Century_ an article on Ireland styled

"The Incompatibles." In that article he suggests that the Irish dislike

of England arises in part from the fact that "the Irish do not much come

across our aristocracy, exhibiting that factor of civilization, the

power of manners, which has undoubtedly a strong attraction for them.

What they do come across, and what gives them the idea they have of our

civilization and its promise, is our Middle Class."

The mention, so frequent in his writings, of "our Middle Class," seems

to demand a definition; and, admitting that in this country the Middle

Class has no naturally defined limits, and that it is difficult to say

who properly belong to it and who do not, he adopts an educational test.

The Middle Class means the people who are brought up at a particular

kind of school, and to illustrate that kind of school he has recourse to

his newly-discovered treasure. "Much as I have published, I do not think

it has ever yet happened to me to comment in print upon any production

of Charles Dickens. What a pleasure to have the opportunity of praising

a work so sound, a work so rich in merit, as _David Copperfield_!... Of

the contemporary rubbish which is shot so plentifully all round us, we

can, indeed, hardly read too little. But to contemporary work so good as

_David Copperfield_ we are in danger of perhaps not paying respect

enough, of reading it (for who could help reading it?) too hastily, and

then putting it aside for something else and forgetting it. What

treasures of gaiety, invention, life, are in that book! what alertness

and resource! what a soul of good nature and kindness governing the

whole! Such is the admirable work which I am now going to call in

evidence. Intimately, indeed, did Dickens know the Middle Class; he was

bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. Intimately he knew its

bringing-up. With the hand of a master he has drawn for us a type of the

teachers and trainers of its youth, a type of its places of education.

Mr. Creakle and Salem House are immortal. The type itself, it is to be

hoped, will perish; but the drawing of it which Dickens has given cannot

die. Mr. Creakle, the stout gentleman with a bunch of watch-chain and

seals, in an armchair, with the fiery face and the thick veins in his

forehead; Mr. Creakle sitting at his breakfast with the cane, and a

newspaper, and the buttered toast before him, will sit on, like Theseus,

for ever. For ever will last the recollection of Salem House, and of the

'daily strife and struggle' there; the recollection 'of the frosty

mornings when we were rung out of bed, and the cold, cold smell of the

dark nights when we were rung into bed again; of the evening schoolroom

dimly lighted and indifferently warmed, and the morning schoolroom which

was nothing but a great shivering-machine; of the alternation of boiled

beef with roast beef, and boiled mutton with roast mutton; of clods of

bread and butter, dog's-eared lesson-books, cracked slates, tear-blotted

copy-books, canings, rulerings, hair-cuttings, rainy Sundays, suet

puddings, and a dirty atmosphere of ink surrounding all.' By the Middle

Class I understand those who are brought up at establishments more or

less like Salem House, and by educators more or less like Mr. Creakle.

And the great mass of the Middle part of our community, the part which

comes between those who labour with their hands, on the one side, and

people of fortune on the other, is brought up at establishments of this

kind, although there is a certain portion broken off at the top which is

educated at better. But the great mass are both badly taught, and are

also brought up on a lower plane than is right, brought up ignobly. And

this deteriorates their standard of life, their civilization."

It surely must have been Salem House, or an institution very like it,

that produced the delicious letter quoted by Arnold in his General

Report for 1867. Even Mr. Anstey Guthrie never excelled it in the letter

dictated by Dr. Grimstone to his pupils at Crichton House.

"MY DEAR PARENTS.--The anticipation of our Christmas

vacation abounds in peculiar delights. Not only that its

'festivities,' its social gatherings and its lively amusements

crown the old year with happiness and mirth, but that I come a

guest commended to your hospitable love by the performance of all

you bade me remember when I left you in the glad season of sun and

flowers. And time has sped fleetly since reluctant my departing

step crossed the threshold of that home whose indulgences and

endearments their temporary loss has taught me to value more and

more. Yet that restraint is salutary, and that self-reliance is as

easily learnt as it is laudable, the propriety of my conduct and

the readiness of my services shall ere long aptly illustrate. It is

with confidence I promise that the close of every year shall find

me advancing in your regard by constantly observing the precepts of

my excellent tutors and the example of my excellent parents.

"We break up on Thursday, the 11th of December instant, and my

impatience of the short delay will assure my dear parents of the

filial sentiments of

"Theirs very sincerely,

"N.

"P.S. We shall reassemble on the 19th of January. Mr. and Mrs. P.

present their respectful compliments."

The present writer lately asked a close observer of educational matters

if Arnold had produced any practical effect on Secondary Education, and

the answer was--"He pulled down the strongholds of such as Mr. Creakle."

If he did that, he did much; and it is a eulogy which he would have

greatly appreciated. Let us see how far it was deserved. Let us admit

at the outset that Mr. Squeers is dead; but then he was dead before

Arnold took in hand to reform our system of Education. Mr. Creakle, it

is to be feared, still exists, though his former assistant, the more

benign Mr. Mell, has to some extent supplanted him. Dr. Blimber is,

perhaps, a little superannuated, but still holds his own. Dr. Grimstone

is going strong and well. In a word, the Private School for bigger

boys--(we are not thinking of Preparatory Schools for little

boys)--still exists and even flourishes. Now, if Arnold could have had

his way, the Private School for bigger boys would long since have

disappeared. "Mr. Creakle's stronghold" would have been pulled down, and

Salem House and Crichton House and Lycurgus House Academy would have

crumbled into ruins.

And what would he have raised in their place? He wrote so often and so

variously about Education--now in official reports, now in popular

essays, now again in private letters, that it is not difficult to detect

some inconsistencies, some contradictions, some changes of view. Indeed,

it needs but the alteration of a single word to justify, at least to

some extent, the "damning sentence," which, according to Arnold, Mr.

Frederic Harrison "launched" against him in 1867. "We seek vainly in Mr.

A. a system of philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent,

subordinate, and derivative." For "Philosophy" read "Education," and the

reproach holds good. For in Education, as in everything else that he

touched, he proceeded rather by criticism than by dogma--by showing

faults in existing things rather than by theoretically constructing

perfection. Yet, after all said and done, his general view of the

subject is quite plain. He had in his mind an idea or scheme of what

National Education ought to be; and, though from time to time he changed

his view about details and methods, the general outline of his scheme is

clear enough.

One of the most characteristic passages which he ever wrote is that in

which he describes his interview in 1865 with Cardinal Antonelli, then

Secretary of State at Rome. "When he asked me what I thought of the

Roman schools, I said that, for the first time since I came on the

Continent, I was reminded of England. I meant, in real truth, that there

was the same easy-going and absence of system on all sides, the same

powerlessness and indifference of the State, the same independence in

single institutions, the same free course for abuses, the same

confusion, the same lack of all idea of _co-ordering_ things, as the

French say--that is, of making them work fitly together to a fit end;

the same waste of power, therefore the same extravagance, and the same

poverty of result."

Enlarging on this congenial theme, and applying it to England and

English requirements, he promulged in 1868 a very revolutionary scheme

for Public Education. At the apex of the pyramid there should be a

Minister of Education. "Merely for administrative convenience he is,

indeed, indispensable. But it is even more important to have _a centre

in which to fix responsibility_." In 1886 he said to the teachers at

Westminster, "I know the Duke of Richmond told the House of Lords that,

as Lord President, he was Minister of Education--(laughter)--but really

the Duke of Richmond's sense of humour must have been slumbering when he

told the House of Lords that. A man is not Minister of Education by

taking the name, but by doing the functions. (Cheers.) To do the

functions he must put his mind to the subject of education; and so long

as Lord Presidents are what they are, and education is what it is, a

Lord President will not be a man who puts his mind to the subject of

education. A Vice-President is not, on the Lord President's own showing,

and cannot be, Minister for Education. He cannot be made responsible for

faults and neglects. Now what we want in a Minister for Education is

this--a centre where we can fix the responsibility." This great and

responsible officer, who presumably was to be a Cabinet Minister and

change with the changes of administration, was to preside over the whole

education of the country. The Universities, the Public Schools, the

Middle-Class Schools, and the Elementary Schools were all to be, in

greater or less degree, subject to his sway. The Minister was to be

assisted by a Council of Education, "comprising, without regard to

politics, the personages most proper to be heard on questions of public

education." It was to be, like the Council at the India Office,

consultative only, but the Minister was to be bound to take its opinion

on all important measures. It should be the special duty of this Council

to advise on the graduation of schools, on the organization of

examinations both in the schools and in the Universities, and to adjust

them to one another. The Universities were not to be increased in

number, but all such anomalous institutions as King's College and

University College were to be co-ordinated to the existing Universities;

and the Universities were to establish "faculties" in great centres of

population, supply professors and lecturers, and then examine and confer

degrees. Then the country should be mapped out into eight or ten

districts, and each of these districts should have a Provincial

School-Board, which should "represent the State in the country," keep

the Minister informed of local requirements, and be the organ of

communication between him and the schools in its jurisdiction. The exact

amount of interference, inspection, and control which the Minister, the

Council, and the Boards should exercise should vary in accordance with

the grade of the schools: it should be greater in the elementary

schools, less in the higher. But, in their degree, all, from Eton

downwards, were to be subject to it. Then came the most revolutionary

part of the whole scheme. Mr. Creakle and his congeners were to be

abolished. They were not to be put to a violent death, but they were to

be starved out. The whole face of the country is studded with small

grammar-schools or foundation-schools, like knots in a network; and

these schools, enlarged and reformed, were to be the ordinary

training-places of the Middle Class. Where they did not exist, similar

schools were to be created by the State--"Royal or Public Schools"--and

these, like all the rest, were to be subject to the Minister and to the

Provincial Boards. Arnold contended that ancient schools so revived, and

modern schools so constituted, would have a dignity and a status such as

no private school could attain, and would be free from the

pretentiousness and charlatanism which he regarded as the bane of

private education. The inspection and control of these Public Schools

would be in the hands of competent officers of the State, whereas the

private school is appraised only by the vulgar and uneducated class that

feeds it.

And so, descending from the Universities through Public Schools of two

grades, we touch the foundation of the whole edifice--the Elementary

Schools. On this all-important topic, he wrote in 1868: "About popular

education I have here but a very few words to say. People are at last

beginning to see in what condition this really is amongst us. Obligatory

instruction is talked of. But what is the capital difficulty in the way

of obligatory instruction, or indeed any national system of instruction,

in this country? It is this: that the moment the working class of this

country have this question of instruction brought home to them, their

self-respect will make them demand, like the working classes of the

Continent, _Public_ Schools, and not schools which the clergyman, or the

squire, or the mill-owner calls "my school." And again: "The object

should be to draw the existing Elementary Schools from their present

private management, and to reconstitute them on a municipal basis."

That word which he italicized--_public_--is the key to his whole system.

The whole education of the country was to be Public. The Universities,

already "public" in the sense that they are not private ventures, were

to be made public in the sense that they were to be supervised and to

some extent regulated by the State. The Public Schools, traditionally

so-called, were to be made more really public by being brought under the

Minister and the School-Boards. The lesser foundation-schools were to be

made public by a redistribution of their revenues and a reconstruction

of their system; and new schools, public by virtue of their creation,

were to be put alongside of the older ones. So schools of private

venture would be eliminated. And thus the whole elementary education of

the country was to be taken out of the hands of societies or

individuals, and was to be organized and conducted by the officials of

the State. Finally, all four (or three, as you choose to reckon them)

grades of public education were to be co-ordinated with one another and

subordinated to a chief Minister of State presiding over a great

department.

[Illustration: The House of the Rev. John Buckland, at Laleham

Where Matthew Arnold went to school from 1830-1836.

The Rev. John Buckland was his maternal Uncle

_Photo Ralph Lane_]

Here was a scheme of National Education, clear enough in its general

outlines, and sufficiently far-reaching in its scope. But its author,

promulging it thirty-five years ago, saw one "capital difficulty" in the

way of realizing it, and he stated the difficulty thus: "The Public

School for the people must rest upon the municipal organization of the

country. In France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the public

elementary school has, and exists by having, the Commune, and the

Municipal Government of the Commune, as its foundations, and it could

not exist without them. But we in England have our municipal

organization state to get; the country districts, with us, have at

present only the feudal and ecclesiastical organization of the Middle

Ages, or of France before the Revolution.... The real preliminary to an

effective system of popular education is, in fact, to provide the

country with an effective municipal organization."

It would be impossible, unless one could trace the mental processes of

the Bishop of Rochester, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Sir John Gorst, and other

eminent persons who had a hand in constructing the Education Acts of

1892 and 1893, to say how far the system now in existence owes any of

its features to the influence of Matthew Arnold. It is the lot of great

thoughts to fall upon very different kinds of soil; to be trodden under

foot by one set of enemies, and carried away by another; and yet

sometimes to find a congenial lodgment, and after long years to spring

into life and manifest themselves in very unexpected quarters. So it may

well have been with Arnold's educational theories. Certainly during the

last five-and-thirty years people have come to regard Education in all

its branches as far more a matter of public concern, far less a matter

of private venture, than formerly. More and more we have come to see

that the State and the Municipality, in their respective areas, have

something to say on the matter. The idea of the Golden Ladder, having

its base in the Elementary Schools and its top rung in the highest

honours of the University, has taken hold of the public mind, and has

passed out of the region of abstractions into practical life.

Institutions of Local Government have developed themselves on the lines

desiderated by Arnold in 1868. The subordination of education to

municipal authority is a new and a risky experiment, but it is exactly

the experiment which he wished to see. The resuscitation of the

Edwardian and Elizabethan Grammar Schools all over the country has

brought the notion of the Public School to the very door of the Middle

Class, and has shaken, if it has not yet destroyed, Mr. Creakle's

stronghold. Even in the matter of Denominational Education in the

Elementary Schools, where many deem that a retrograde step has been

taken, the State has acted on a hint which Arnold gave to the extreme

reformers of his time.

"Most English Liberals," he said, "seem persuaded that our Elementary

Schools should be undenominational, and their teaching secular; and that

with a public elementary school it cannot well be otherwise. Let them

clearly understand, however, that on the Continent generally--everywhere

except in Holland--the public elementary school is denominational (of

course with what we should call a 'conscience clause') and its teaching

religious as well as secular."

In one important respect the State, which has so often adopted his

views, at once outstripped and fell short of his ideal. He was not a

strong or undiscriminating advocate for Compulsory Education. He

believed that, in the foreign countries where compulsion obtained, it

was not the cause, but the effect, of a national feeling for education.

When a people set a high value on knowledge, they would insist that

every child should have a chance of acquiring it. But you could not

create that high value by compelling people to send their children to

school. As late as the end of the year 1869, he seems to have feared

that any legislation which hindered a child from working for its own or

its parents' support would be highly unpopular and would be evaded. "A

law of direct compulsion on the parent and child would probably be

violated every day in practice; and, so long as this is the case, a law

levelled at the employer is preferable."