in the 'National Dictionary of Biography,' and that gives no clue to
anything fuller. From this it appears he was born in 1813 at Harrington,
Cumberland, now a town of some 3,000 inhabitants on the London and
North-Western Railway, and on the seashore between Whitehaven and
Workington. An old coloured engraving of it about contemporary with
Gibson's youth shows it as a harbour nearly land-locked by hilly
promontories, and possessing a small stone-built pier. The village, more
ancient than the harbour, was half a mile inland. Gibson's father was
named James, and his mother was Mary Stuart Craig, a member of a Moffat
family. His early education was probably quite local, at any rate we
find that he got his first knowledge of medicine by serving his time
with a practitioner at Whitehaven, and from thence he went to Edinburgh
University to study and to take his diploma, commencing on his own
account at Branthwaite and Ullock, near Cockermouth, when twenty-eight
years of age. He did not remain there long, but in 1843 removed to
Coniston, and married Miss Sarah Bowman of Lamplough the following
year. He remained at Coniston for six years, and then removed to
Hawkshead, where he dwelt for another eight, and then, finding the
country practice, with long rides and exposure to all kinds of mountain
weather, becoming too hard and too heavy for him, he removed to
Bebington in Cheshire, where he remained for fifteen years more, and
when failing health and three score years of life compelled it, lived
there retired until his death in 1874. He is interred in the churchyard
of that village in the neighbourhood of Birkenhead. This is practically
all that is known, and, indeed, is all that need concern us of his
outward biography. His inner is indicated by his books. From them we
gather that he was a pleasant and genial man, who readily found his way
to the hearts of the 'statesmen' and peasantry among whom his
professional calling carried him every day of his life, and with whom he
would hold colloquies in the vernacular, and from whose fireside talks
he would gather the stories and legends he afterwards put together in
prose or verse, to illustrate both the Scandinavian dialects and the
folklore of the north-western shires, as William Barnes has in later
times done for the Saxon speech and thought-modes of the Dorsetshire
people. We are sure, too, that wherever he rode he was a keen observer
and investigator of natural objects among the rocks, and birds, and
flowers, as well as of castles, churches, mansions, schools, and ancient
earthworks. He was a learned geologist, and if you want to be assured of
this you have but to procure a copy of Harriet Martineau's 'Guide to the
Lakes,' and you will find the chapters on geology and mineralogy were
his compilation, though there is no further acknowledgment of the fact
than the presence of his initials, A. C. G., at the end. It is not the
hand of a mere scientific smatterer that can condense with ability into
some dozen or thirteen pages the earth treasures and stratification of
such a mountain-land as ours, respecting which he says, 'As no district
of similar extent displays such a variety of natural beauties in its
external aspect, so does no district present within equally limited
bounds such diversity of geological formation and arrangement, or a like
variety of mineral productions.' He was an excellent botanist, writing
upon the flora of Cumberland, though possibly his knowledge of
ornithology would be little more than that of any intelligent,
nature-loving country doctor almost always in the open. An antiquarian
he certainly was of no mean standing, being a Fellow of the Society of
Antiquaries--a society that asks, unlike many other 'learned'
associations, 'what has he done?' before receiving a member--and he was
a frequent contributor to the 'Transactions of the Historic Society of
Lancashire and Cheshire.' A good example of the quality of his
contributions is that on 'Hawkshead Town, Church, and School.' It is
interesting, and in a small space very enlightening. He tells us that
this is one of the smallest market towns in the kingdom, and he
describes it in a couplet of his own, a 'pattering' rhyme:
'A quaint old town is Hawkshead, and an ancient look it
bears,
Its church, its school, its dwellings, its streets, its lands, its
squares,
Are all irregularities--all angles, twists, and crooks,
With penthouses and gables over archways, wents, and nooks.'
It really has two small 'squares' and one street 'of varying contour,
and width frequently and awkwardly encroached upon by gabled shops
standing at right angles to the roadway and houses by aggressive corners
and low upper stories projected far beyond the foundation-line of the
buildings.' Altogether an eccentric town. Then, after speaking of its
lake, he points out to us the old glacier moraines, and its green
water-meadows, and next branches off into the story of the 'Pilgrimage
of Grace' in 1537, and the tale of the Plague in 1577, and of the
opening of the Quaker cemetery on the picturesque hillside in 1658, and
the founding and upkeep of the parish church with its peal of six bells,
each with its inscription, from which we can transcribe only the first:
'Awake, arise, the day's restored,
Awake, arise, to praise the Lord,
Regard, look to, the peal I lead.
1765.'
He has, too, many sage remarks to make about 'Drunken Barnaby's' visit,
of which, perhaps, I shall say more in another article.
But the two books the worthy doctor has specially made his mark with as
regards the general public are 'Folk-Speech Tales and Rhymes of
Cumberland and Districts Adjacent,' and 'The Old Man, or Ravings and
Ramblings around Coniston.' The first has passed through several
editions, and is to be had quite cheaply through second-hand
booksellers; the second is scarcer and dearer. Of the first the
_Saturday Review_ wrote: 'Few people will dare to attack this
odd-looking book, with its unusual accents and its rude phonetic
spelling, and if they do they will not understand it if they have not
had some previous education. But to those who can read it it is full of
racy jokes and rich humour, and will afford infinite amusement when
intelligently undertaken.' This seems to be a tolerably correct
estimate, for, as he tells us in his preface, the tales relating to
Cumberland and Dumfriesshire are in pure Cumbrian--unadulterated, old
Norse-rooted Cumbrian vernacular--and pure Scotch folk-speech. The High
Furness dialect, he says, is rendered impure by the influx of emigrants
from across Morecambe Sands. How can I find specimens short enough? 'Joe
and the Geologist' is in the Cumberland mode. It tells of a lad hired by
a Savant to carry the stones and fossils collected in a two days'
excursion, and how the lad, thinking one stone as good as another,
emptied the leather bag on the sly, filled it again from a
stone-breaker's heap, earned his meals and half a sovereign for his
'hard work,' and managed to send his employer off by coach none the
wiser till he should reach home.
'When I com nar to Skeal-hill, I fund oald Aberram Achisson sittin' on a
steul breckan steans to mend rwoads wid, an' I axt him if I med full my
ledder pwokes frae his heap. Aberram was varra kaim't an' tell't ma to
tak them as wasn't brocken if I want'd steans, sooa I tell't hoo it was
an' oa' aboot it. T' oald maizlin was like to toytle of his steul wid'
laughin', and said me mudder sud tak gud care on ma, for I was ower
sharp a chap to leeve varra lang i' this warld; but I'd better full ma
pwokes as I liked an' mak on wid' them.' 'The Skulls of Calgarth,' a
North Country Naboth vineyard story with additions, is the only tale in
Westmorland talk.
'A house ligs la' an' leansome theear, doon in that oomer dark,
Wi' wide, heigh-risin' chimla-heads, la' roof, an' crumlin' wo',
O' wedder-gra'n an' weed-be grown--for time hes setten t' mark
O' scooers an' scooers o' wearin' years on hantit Co'garth Ho'.'
To the reader uninstructed in the vernacular his little work, entitled
'The Old Man; or, Ravings and Ramblings Round Coniston,' is more
interesting than 'Folk-Speech.' It contains capital descriptive
passages, some in pointed prose, and some in rhyme. Example of the
latter may be found in 'The Sunken Graves.'
'Near Esthwaite Head, remote and lone,
Where crag-born Dudden chafes and raves--
Unblest by priest--unmarked by stone--
Were lengthened rows of dateless graves.'
Of the prose, take these words about Coniston: 'Nowhere else have you
seen wood and water, hill and valley, green-sward and purple heather,
rugged crag and velvet lawn, gray rock and bright-blossoming shrub,
waving forest and spreading coppice brought under the eye at once in
such magnificent proportion and in such bewildering contrast.' He
narrates some exciting fox-hunting experiences of the fell-side farmers
and their hounds; he has some pithy tales of the native peasantry and
their folklore and their customs, as well as of their parsons, poor as
Goldsmith's 'Christian Hero'--passing rich at £40 a year, yet learned
and of cultured minds, though dressed in homespun, and toiling on the
land to eke out a living. His own adventures as a medical man in mists
and storms sweeping across the mountains are sometimes graphic. This
paragraph must suffice us: 'There had been a heavy snow, which for a day
or two, under the influence of soft weather and showers, had been
melting; the whole country was saturated with wet--every road was a
syke, every syke a beck, and every beck a river. The high lands were
covered with a thick, cold, driving, suffocating mist, which every now
and then thinned a little to make way for one of those thorough-bred
mountain showers, of which none can have any conception who have not
faced them on the fells in winter--wetting to the skin and chilling to
the marrow in three seconds, and piercing exposed parts like legions of
pins and needles. The hollows in the roads, which are neither few nor
far between, were filled with snow in a state of semi-fluidity, cold as
if it had been melted with salt, through which I splashed and struggled,
dragging my floundering jaded pony after me with the greatest
difficulty.'
WRITTEN IN THE WORDSWORTH COUNTRY
'He is dead, and the fruit-bearing day
Of his race is past on the earth;
And darkness returns to our eyes.
For, oh! is it you, is it you,
Moonlight and shadow, and lake,
And mountains, that fill us with joy,
Or the poet who sings you so well?
Is it you, O beauty, O grace,
Or the voice that reveals what you are?
Are ye, like daylight and sun,
Shared and rejoiced in by all?
Or are you immersed in the mass
Of matter, and hard to extract,
Or sunk at the core of the world
Too deep for the most to discern?
Like stars in the deep of the sky,
Which arise on the glass of the sage,
But are lost when their watcher is gone.'
MATTHEW ARNOLD: _The Youth of Nature_.
[llustration:
_Photo by Herbert Bell, Ambleside._
FOX HOW, AMBLESIDE.
The Home of the Arnolds.]
XX
TWO PIONEER EDUCATIONISTS
THOMAS AND MATTHEW ARNOLD
'Speaking of the Arnolds, he (Hartley Coleridge) said they are a
most gifted family. I asked what specially in their education
distinguished them. He rose from the dinner-table, as his manner is,
and answered, "Why, they were suckled on Latin and weaned upon
Greek!"'--CAROLINE FOX'S _Journal_.
Do not the Ambleside and Grasmere char-a-bancs proclaim on their
back-boards in letters large and ugly that they will 'return by Fox How,
the residence of Dr. Arnold'? And is not the advertised route a pretty
one, despite the disadvantage of its being frequented by thousands of
'trippers' to whom the Arnolds are not even names, and who can hardly be
much illuminated by the drivers?
When Arnold of Rugby bought the property and built the house for a
holiday home, with the hope of some day retiring permanently to it, he
wrote of its being 'a mountain nest of sweetness.' Even his son Matthew,
more of an introversive than a descriptive poet, more inclined to utter
a thought of Goethe's or quote a song of Beranger's than to dwell on the
inwardness of natural scenery, must perforce write of 'Rotha's living
wave'--the stream that 'sparkles through fields vested for ever with
green,' and of
'Moonlight, and shadow, and lake,
And mountains that fill us with joy.'
The father died in harness, and was buried in Rugby Chapel, and not in
Grasmere, by the Wordsworth graves, as he had hoped. The son spent his
boyhood at Fox How, and returned to it often in later life, for Mrs. Dr.
Arnold remained there--a widow--for many years.
Thomas Arnold, born in 1795, at Cowes, Isle of Wight, was the son of the
Collector of Customs in that little port. He was educated first at
Westminster, and then for four years at Winchester. As a child he was
stiff, shy, and formal, says Dean Stanley, and after entering Oxford,
indeed until mature life, was a 'lie-a-bed.' Still, he was forward at
school, strong in history and geography, took early to his pen, and had
a good memory for poetry. At the University, a scholar at Corpus
Christi, Fellow of Oriel, he took a first-class in Classics, and two
Chancellor's Prizes in 1815 and 1817. Corpus Christi was a small,
intellectual community, and this fact helped to form his character. He
was, and remained, a Liberal in a society of convinced Tories. Outside
his companionship and his necessary studies the formative influences of
that period of his life were Aristotle, Thucydides, and Wordsworth. He
took 'orders,' and settled at Laleham, near Staines, where he remained
nine years, taking youths as pupils to prepare them for the
Universities. Here six of his children were born, including Matthew, and
here he developed his theories of education, to become so important a
factor in English life by-and-by. Here, too, he pursued diligently his
own deeper studies in the Bible, in theology, and in Roman history. Some
of the sermons preached at this village are incorporated with those,
afterwards so celebrated, delivered to the Rugby School. He became
Head-master of Rugby in 1827. At that time most of the great public
schools with clerical headmasters were in low condition, and upper-class
education was poor. The rich Churchmen held possession of the national
Universities, and social rather than intellectual status was the chief
thing aimed at. Of course there were many noble exceptions among the
undergraduates to this general truth, and Arnold was one of them, and
his compeers at Corpus Christi were others. Rugby as a school was in a
very poor state when he took hold of it. He raised it into one of the
first schools of its kind in the kingdom, and provoked the others into a
healthy competition. It is impossible here to give more than the barest
outline of his magnificent scholastic career. The ordinary reader may
judge for himself of its character by reading Thomas Hughes' 'Tom
Browne's School Days,' and the more studious Stanley's 'Life' of the
Doctor. It has been my own privilege to know several clergymen who were
Arnold's pupils. They reverenced his memory, they spoke of their
intellectual and spiritual obligations to their master in the warmest
terms, and in every case were among the most liberal-minded and cultured
men I have known. They were but examples of hundreds, cleric and lay, of
his excellent modelling. The key to his influence and reforms is found
in his own high Christian character, and, as one biographer says, in the
fact that 'the most strongly-marked feature of his intellect was the
strength and clearness of his conceptions. It seemed the possession of
an inward light so intense that it penetrated on the instant every
subject laid before him, and enabled him to grasp it with the vividness
of sense and the force of reality.' His administrative methods
revolutionized the discipline and the punishments. He relied on the
honour of the boys, and their Christian and gentlemanly characters, and
especially on the right leadership of the older ones, whom he trusted
implicitly, unless found untrustworthy. He had also, and this,
doubtless, was part of his secret, an unusual faculty of right
discernment in the selection of his masters. Character was the basis of
his system--upon that he could build scholarship, without it he would
not try to. 'It is not necessary,' he once said to his pupils, 'that
this school should be a school of 300, or 100, or 50 boys; but it is
necessary it should be a school of Christian gentlemen.' Through good
and evil report, opposition and scoffing, he went on his way, and
conquered. He took his part, too, in liberalizing the Anglican Church.
For defending Bishop Hampden of Hereford, to whose appointment a violent
outcry was raised for alleged unorthodoxy, Arnold nearly lost his own
post. Earl Howe, one of the champions of the narrow-minded heresy
hunters, moved a condemnatory resolution at the Board of
Governors--there being four for, and four against, and none possessing a
casting vote, the headmaster was not suspended, and did not resign. In
1841 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History, and his
lectures remain in their published form as evidences of his accuracy and
lucidity. The next year, however, he was seized with angina pectoris,
and he died just about the time he was intending to retire from his
fourteen years' successful pioneering of the modern methods of secondary
and higher education. His character was well estimated by a writer in
the _Edinburgh Review_, albeit the comparison of Arnold with Milton is
not altogether felicitous in other respects. He says: 'They both so
lived in their great Task-master's eye as to verify Bacon's observation,
in his 'Essay on Atheism,' making themselves akin to God in spirit, and
raising their natures by means of a higher nature than their own.'
Matthew alludes to his father in his poem on Rugby Chapel. This poem is
in awkward metre, and the query might have been answered more positively
than he has ventured to do, if there is any truth whatsoever in the
Christian doctrine of immortality and a 'labour-house vast' seems a poor
substitute for scriptural imagery of the unseen spirit world.
'Oh, strong soul, by what shore
Tarriest thou now? For that force,
Surely, has not been left vain!
Somewhere, surely, afar,
In the sounding labour-house vast
Of being is practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficent, firm.'
Another appreciation of the father by the son is interesting. 'He was
the first English clergyman who could speak as freely on religious
subjects as if he had been a layman.'
Of Matthew himself there needs little to be said. From whom did he
inherit his strange temperament? His poetry lacks the warmth of feeling
his father would have put into it. His muse is cold, classical, joyless.
His criticisms are keen, incisive, often just, more often marred by
foolish prejudices, almost brutally expressed. To Dissenters he was
intolerant, and never lost a chance of sneering at them, especially for
their want of that culture, or rather that special form of culture,
which he personally affected, and which his own Church had debarred them
from obtaining at the Universities. He laid himself open to the retort
of a leading Nonconformist, who spoke of Mr. Arnold's belief in the
well-known preference of the Almighty for University men. Mr. Herbert
Paul is not wide of the mark when he writes of his re-translations of
the Bible 'making one feel as if one had suddenly swallowed a
fish-bone.' Certainly the perusal of most of his books, such as 'Essays
in Criticism,' 'Culture and Anarchy,' 'Paul and Protestantism,'
'Literature and Dogma,' 'God and the Bible,' gives to the thoughtful
reader a sensation of being drawn by a swift, high-mettled, blood horse,
trying to get his head, and to run away with you over a stony road--the
pace is exhilarating, but the jolting is terrible. His best
contributions to the commonwealth are some of his educational theories
and suggestions, and most of his reports on foreign education, and on
his experience as an Inspector of Schools. In the latter capacity he
laboured for thirty-five years, and the impress of his genius abides.
Some of his forecasts of the future have come true, others are certain
yet to be fulfilled. He was the real founder of University Extension,
and he urged that the University of London should be made a teaching
institution only. Mr. Paul's estimate of him we may cordially assent to:
'Of all education reformers in the last century, not excepting his
father, Mr. Arnold was the most enlightened, the most far-sighted, and
the most fair-minded.' 'Fair-minded' he assuredly was when dealing with
the practical side of his profession. 'Fair-minded' he always believed
he was. 'Fair-minded' he seldom was on purely political or academic
matters, for then his extraordinary prejudices asserted their
sovereignty over him, and he was helpless beneath their sway. Mr.
Gladstone he disliked so intensely that we should hardly be wrong in
saying he hated him and all his works.
He exhibited a supercilious contempt for what he chose to brand as the
provincialism of the 'Low Church' and the Free Church; for the
aristocracy, who to him were 'barbarians' for preferring field sports to
the improvement of their minds; for the masses of the community, whom he
dismissed with the epithet 'the populace,' while the middle-classes were
'Philistines' (a word he borrowed from the Germans), because they were
'respectable' and kept gigs! Really all this shows too small a mind, too
circumscribed an outlook on humanity, to qualify Matthew Arnold for a
place among philosophers or national reformers. It is satisfactory to
turn from him as politician and critic of the Bible, of literature, and
of society, to his status as a poet, which, though really secondary to
that as an educationist, he will naturally be most widely remembered by.
His letters, too, recently published, show the pleasant side of his
private life. 'He was a poet of the closet,' is Mr. Stedman's summary of
him. Arthur Clough preferred Alexander Smith (practically a forgotten
minor poet) to the author of 'Empedocles,' and complained of the
obscurity and 'pseudo-Greek inflation' of 'Tristram and Iseult.' 'The
Scholar-Gipsy' is his best elegiac poem; 'The Forsaken Merman' his best
narrative piece; 'Bacchanalia, or the New Age,' his best lyric. This is
from 'The Merman':
'Children dear, was it yesterday
We heard the sweet bells over the bay?
In the caverns where we lay,
Through the surf, and through the swell,
The far-off sound of a silver bell?
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep;
Where the spent lights quiver and gleam,
Where the salt weed sways in the stream,
Where the sea-breeze, ranged all round,
Feed in the ooze of their pasture ground;
Where the sea-snakes coil and twine,
Dry their mail, and bask in the brine;
Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail, and sail, with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye?
When did music come this way?
Children dear, was it yesterday?'
Herein are lines more melodious, and ideas more English, than in other
verses, just because he 'let himself go' more than usual. He was
generally too self-conscious to do this at all.
His schools were Winchester and Rugby. His college was Balliol. For a
short time he was master under his father. For four years he acted as
private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, and in 1857 was made Inspector of
Schools. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1857 to 1867. He died
suddenly of inherited heart disease while running to catch a tram at
Liverpool in 1888, at sixty-six years of age. All this may be read in
any Dictionary of Biography, and really there is little more to note of
events in his life outside the daily routine of his official career. He
was buried at Laleham, where he was born. Something better might be his
epitaph than his own pessimistic lines:
'Creep into this narrow bed,
Creep, and let no more be said.'
PHILARETVS, HIS INSTRUCTIONS TO HIS
SONNE
'Deare Sonne, as thou art tender to mee, remember these
advertisements of thy careful father.
'Bee zealous in the service of thy God; ever recommending
in the prime houre of the day all thy ensuing actions to
His gracious protection.
'Bee constant in thy Resolves, ever grounded on a
religious feare, that they may bee seconded by God's
favour.
'Bee serious in thy Studies; with all humility crave the
assistance of others, for thy better proficiency.
'Bee affable to all; familiar to few.
'Bee to such a constant consort where thou hast hope
to bee a daily proficient.
'Bee provident and discreetly frugal in thy expense.
'Honour those in whose charge thou art instructed.
'And, sweet Jesu, with Thy grace enrich him, to Thy
glory, my comfort.
'Thy deare Father,
'PHILARETVS.'
'_Essais upon the Five Senses, Revived by a new Supplement,
with a pithy one upon Detraction, continued
with sundry Christian Resolves, etc._, by RIC. BRATHVVAYT,
ESQ. (1635).
[Illustration:
_Photo by Gilbert Hogg, Kendal._
BURNESIDE HALL, NEAR KENDAL.
The Home of Richard Braithwaite.]
XXI
DRUNKEN BARNABY
RICHARD BRAITHWAITE