The Project Gutenberg EBook of Matthew Arnold, by G. W. E. Russell
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Matthew Arnold
Author: G. W. E. Russell
Release Date: September 25, 2005 [EBook #16745]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MATTHEW ARNOLD ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Taavi Kalju and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Transcriber's note: The inconsistent use of quotation marks in the
original was retained in this etext.]
[Illustration: Matthew Arnold
_From a Photograph by Sarony_]
Literary Lives
MATTHEW ARNOLD
BY
G.W.E. RUSSELL
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1904
COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published, March, 1904
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
LITERARY LIVES
Edited by Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.
MATTHEW ARNOLD. By G.W.E. Russell.
CARDINAL NEWMAN. By William Barry, D.D.
MRS. GASKELL. By Flora Masson.
JOHN BUNYAN. By W. Hale White.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE. By Clement K. Shorter.
R.M. HUTTON. By W. Robertson Nicoll.
GOETHE. By Edward Dowden.
HAZLITT. By Louise Imogen Guiney.
Each Volume, Illustrated, $1.00, net
OFFERED TO
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CHILDREN
WITH AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE
"OF THAT UNRETURNING DAY"
"We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless,
yet with all this agitated, stretching out his arms for something
beyond--_tendentemque manus ripae ulterioris amore_."--_Essays in
Criticism_.
PREFACE
It may be thought that some apology is needed for the production of yet
another book about Matthew Arnold. If so, that apology is to be found in
the fact that nothing has yet been written which covers exactly the
ground assigned to me in the present volume.
It was Arnold's express wish that he should not be made the subject of a
Biography. This rendered it impossible to produce the sort of book by
which an eminent man is usually commemorated--at once a history of his
life, an estimate of his work, and an analysis of his character and
opinions. But though a Biography was forbidden, Arnold's family felt
sure that he would not have objected to the publication of a selection
from his correspondence; and it became my happy task to collect, and in
some sense to edit, the two volumes of his Letters which were published
in 1895. Yet in reality my functions were little more than those of the
collector and the annotator. Most of the Letters had been severely
edited before they came into my hands, and the process was repeated when
they were in proof.
A comparison of the letters addressed to Mr. John Morley and Mr. Wyndham
Slade with those addressed to the older members of the Arnold family
will suggest to a careful reader the nature and extent of the excisions
to which the bulk of the correspondence was subjected. The result was a
curious obscuration of some of Arnold's most characteristic
traits--such, for example, as his over-flowing gaiety, and his love of
what our fathers called Raillery. And, in even more important respects
than these, an erroneous impression was created by the suppression of
what was thought too personal for publication. Thus I remember to have
read, in some one's criticism of the Letters, that Mr. Arnold appeared
to have loved his parents, brothers, sisters, and children, but not to
have cared so much for his wife. To any one who knew the beauty of that
life-long honeymoon, the criticism is almost too absurd to write down.
And yet it not unfairly represents the impression created by a too
liberal use of the effacing pencil.
But still, the Letters, with all their editorial shortcomings (of which
I willingly take my full share) constitute the nearest approach to a
narrative of Arnold's life which can, consistently with his wishes, be
given to the world; and the ground so covered will not be retraversed
here. All that literary criticism can do for the honour of his prose and
verse has been done already: conscientiously by Mr. Saintsbury,
affectionately and sympathetically by Mr. Herbert Paul, and with varying
competence and skill by a host of minor critics. But in preparing this
book I have been careful not to re-read what more accomplished pens than
mine have written; for I wished my judgment to be, as far as possible,
unbiassed by previous verdicts.
I do not aim at a criticism of the verbal medium through which a great
Master uttered his heart and mind; but rather at a survey of the effect
which he produced on the thought and action of his age.
To the late Professor Palgrave, to Monsieur Fontanes, and to Miss Rose
Kingsley my thanks have been already paid for the use of some of
Arnold's letters which are published now for the first time. It may be
well to state that whenever, in the ensuing pages, passages are put in
inverted commas, they are quoted from Arnold, unless some other
authorship is indicated. Here and there I have borrowed from previous
writings of my own, grounding myself on the principle so well enounced
by Mr. John Morley--"that a man may once say a thing as he would have it
said, [Greek: dis de ouk endechetai]--he cannot say it twice."
G.W.E.R.
CHRISTMAS, 1903.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER II
METHOD 17
CHAPTER III
EDUCATION 48
CHAPTER IV
SOCIETY 111
CHAPTER V
CONDUCT 172
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 _simplicite_--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 inspired 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 _tourmente_ which excludes this natural
propriety; and I have myself in 'Sohrab' something, not dainty, but
_tourmente_ and Miltonically _ampoulle_, 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 L200 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 L20 to L50 a year if they are boarders, and from L5 to L15 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 Soreze?"
_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
Encaenia 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 lycees_; 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 L250 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."
But when those words were written, compulsion was near at hand. The
Parliament of 1868-1874--the first elected by a democratic
suffrage--was intent on Reform, and the right of a father to starve his
child's mind was strenuously denied. Forster, then Vice-President of the
Council, was charged with the duty of preparing a Bill to establish
Compulsory Education. Arnold was Forster's brother-in-law, and "heard
the contents" of the Bill in November, 1869. When in the following
February it was brought in, he wrote: "I think William's Bill will do
very well. I am glad it is so little altered"; and, after the Second
Reading, he wrote: "The majority on the Education Bill is a great
relief; it will now, if William has tolerable luck, get through safely
this session." By this time, therefore, he must have become a convert to
the system of compulsion. Perhaps he regarded the demand for the Bill as
a proof that the English people were at length waking up to a sense of
the value of Education. But, while the State thus outstripped his ideal
by establishing compulsion, it fell short of his ideal by severely
limiting the area of the population to which compulsion was to apply.
Again and again he warned his countrymen, then unaccustomed to the
practical working of Compulsory Education, that it would be intolerable,
unjust, and absurd if it were applied only to the children of the poor.
He contended that the Upper and Middle Classes were every bit as much
in need of a compulsory system, if their children were to be properly
educated, as the working classes for whom it was proposed to legislate.
This theme he illustrated, with the most exuberant fun and fancy, in a
letter addressed to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ in 1867, and afterwards
republished in _Friendship's Garland_. Arminius, the cultivated
Prussian, accompanies his English friend to Petty Sessions in a country
town, and is horrified by the degraded plight of an old peasant who is
tried for poaching. The English friend (the imaginary Arnold) says that
for his own part he is not so much concerned about the poacher as about
his children. They are being allowed to grow up anyhow. Really he thinks
the time has come when compulsion must be applied to the education of
children of this class. "The gap between them and our educated and
intelligent classes is really too frightful."
"_Your educated and intelligent classes_," sneered Arminius, in his most
offensive manner--"where are they? I should like to see them." The
English friend, thus rudely challenged, leads the Prussian into the
justice-room, where they find on the Bench three excellent specimens of
education and intelligence--Lord Lumpington, the Rev. Esau Hittall, and
Mr. Bottles. Arminius insists on knowing their qualifications for the
post of magistrate. He begins by defining the principle of Compulsory
Education. "It means that to ensure, as far as you can, every man's
being fit for his business in life, you put education as a bar, or
condition, between him and what he aims at. The principle is just as
good for one class as another, and it is only by applying it impartially
that you save its application from being insolent and invidious.... You
propose to make old Diggs' boys instruct themselves before they go
bird-scaring or sheep-tending. I want to know what you do to make those
three worthies in that justice-room instruct themselves before they may
go acting as magistrates and judges?"
The imaginary Arnold replies that Lord Lumpington was at Eton, and Mr.
Hittall at Charterhouse, and Mr. Bottles at Lycurgus House Academy,
Peckham. But Arminius insists that to send boys of the wealthy classes
to school is nothing--the natural course of things takes them there.
"Don't suppose that, by doing this, you are applying the principle of
Compulsory Education fairly, and as you apply it to Diggs' boys. You are
not interposing, for the rich, education as a bar or condition between
them and what they aim at.
"In my country," he went on, "we should have begun to put a pressure on
those future magistrates at school. Before we allowed Lord Lumpington
and Mr. Hittall to go to the University at all, we should have examined
them.... There would have been some Mr. Grote as School Board
Commissary, pitching into them questions about history, and some Mr.
Lowe, as Crown Patronage Commissary, pitching into them questions about
English literature; and these young men would have been kept from the
University, as Diggs' boys are kept from their bird-scaring, till they
had instructed themselves. Then, if, after three years of their
University, they wanted to be magistrates, another pressure!--a great
Civil Service Examination before a Board of Experts, an examination in
English law, Roman law, English history, history of jurisprudence."
"A most abominable liberty to take with Lumpington and Hittall," says
Arnold.
"Then your compulsory education is a most abominable liberty to take
with Diggs' boys," retorted Arminius.... "Oh, but," I answered, "to live
at all, even at the lowest stage of human life, a man needs
instruction." "Well," returns Arminius, "and to administer at all, even
at the lowest stage of public administration, a man needs instruction."
"_We have never found it so_," I said.
The same argument was urged, in a graver fashion, in _Schools and
Universities of the Continent_.
"In the view of the English friends of compulsory education, the
educated and intelligent Middle and Upper Classes amongst us are to
confer the boon of compulsory education upon the ignorant lower class,
which needs it while they do not. But, on the Continent, instruction is
obligatory for Lower, Middle, and Upper Class alike. I doubt whether our
educated and intelligent classes are at all prepared for this. I have an
acquaintance in easy circumstances, of distinguished connexions, living
in a fashionable part of London, who, like many other people, deals
rather easily with his son's schooling. Sometimes the boy is at school,
then for months together he is away from school, and taught, so far as
he is taught, by his father and mother at home. He is not the least an
invalid, but it pleases his father and mother to bring him up in this
manner. Now, I imagine, no English friends of compulsory education dream
of dealing with such a defaulter as this, and certainly his father, who
perhaps is himself a friend of compulsory education for the working
classes, would be astounded to find his education of his own son
interfered with. But, if my worthy acquaintance lived in Switzerland or
Germany, he would be dealt with as follows. I speak with the school-law
of Canton Neufchatel, immediately under my eyes, but the regulations on
this matter are substantially the same in all the states of Germany and
of German Switzerland. The Municipal Education Committee of the district
where my acquaintance lived would address a summons to him, informing
him that a comparison of the school-rolls of their district with the
municipal list of children of school-age, showed his son not to be at
school; and requiring him, in consequence, to appear before the
Municipal Committee at a place and time named, and there to satisfy
them, either that his son did attend some public school, or that, if
privately taught, he was taught by duly trained and certificated
teachers. On the back of the summons, my acquaintance would find printed
the penal articles of the School-Law, sentencing him to a fine if he
failed to satisfy the Municipal Committee; and, if he failed to pay the
fine, or was found a second time offending, to imprisonment. In some
Continental States he would be liable, in case of repeated infraction of
the School-Law, to be deprived of his parental rights, and to have the
care of his son transferred to guardians named by the State. It is
indeed terrible to think of the consternation and wrath of our educated
and intelligent classes under a discipline like this; and I should not
like to be the man to try and impose it on them. But I assure them most
emphatically--and if they study the experience of the Continent they
will convince themselves of the truth of what I say--that only on these
conditions of its equal and universal application is any law of
compulsory education possible."
We have now seen, at least in general outline, the system of National
Education which he would have wished to set up--how he would have
co-ordinated all instruction from the lowest to the highest, and how he
would have compelled all classes alike to submit their children, and in
the higher ranks of life to submit themselves, to the training which
should best equip them for their chosen or appointed work. We must now
enquire what sort of knowledge he would have endeavoured, by his
co-ordinated system, to impart.
He laid it down, more than once, that the aim of culture was "to know
ourselves and the world," and that, as the means to this end, we ought
"to know the best which has been thought and said in the world." He
recognized, candidly and fully, the claims of the physical sciences, and
their use and value in Education. For example, in advising about the
instruction of a little girl, in whom her teacher wished to arouse
"perception," he said, "You had much better take some science--(botany
is perhaps the best for a girl) and, choosing a good handbook, go
through it regularly with her.... The verification of the laws of
grammar, in the examples furnished by one's reading, is certainly a far
less fruitful stimulus of one's powers of observation and comparison,
than the verification of the laws of a science like botany in the
examples furnished by the world of nature before one's eyes."
But in spite of this, and of similar concessions, he deliberately held
the opinion that Literature, rather than Science, was the chief agent in
culture. In 1872 he wrote to an enquirer: "A single line of poetry,
working in the mind, may produce more thought and lead to more light,
which is what man wants, than the fullest acquaintance (to take your own
instance) with the processes of digestion." In 1884 he said to his
American audience: "My own studies have been almost wholly in Letters,
and my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight
and inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my
curiosity." In a word, he was, and gloried in being, a Humanist. What
Humanism meant for him is curiously illustrated by his comment on some
speeches which the late[14] Lord Salisbury delivered at Oxford on his
first appearance there as Chancellor of the University. After praising
his skill and courtesy, Arnold says: "He is a dangerous man, through,
and chiefly from, his want of any true sense and experience of
literature and its beneficent function. Religion he knows, and physical
science he knows; but the immense work between the two, which is for
literature to accomplish, he knows nothing of; and all his speeches at
Oxford[15] pointed this way. On the one hand, he was full of the great
future for physical science, and begging his University to make up her
mind to it, and to resign much of her literary studies; on the other
hand, he was full, almost defiantly full, of counsels and resolves for
retaining and upholding the old ecclesiastical and dogmatic form of
religion. From a juxtaposition of this kind, nothing but shocks and
collisions can come."
_The immense work which is for literature to accomplish._ This work,
lying between the work of Religion and the work of Science, was, in his
view, nothing less than the culture of Humanity. Religion had its
sphere, and Science had its sphere, but culture was to be effected
neither by Religion nor by Science, but by Literature. The literature
which he extolled was literature in its widest sense--ancient and
modern, English and Continental, Occidental and Oriental--whatever
contained "the best which had been thought and said in the world." And,
when we come to the sub-divisions of literature, we note that he was
pre-eminently a classicist. This he was partly by temperament, partly by
training, partly by his matured and deliberate judgment. It can scarcely
be doubted that he had an innate love of perfect form, an innate
"sentiment against hideousness and rawness," and so he was a classicist
by temperament. Then his training was essentially classical. He used to
protest, with amusing earnestness, against the notion that his father
had been a bad scholar. "People talk the greatest nonsense about my
father's scholarship. The Wykehamists of his day were excellent
scholars. Dr. Gabell made them so. My father's Latin verses were not
good; but that was because he was not poetical--not because he was a bad
scholar. But he wrote the most admirable Latin prose; and, as for his
Greek prose, you couldn't tell it from Thucydides." In this kind of
scholarship Matthew Arnold was nurtured; and whatever in this respect
his training had left imperfect, he perfected by close and continuous
study. His Greek and Latin reading was both wide and accurate, perhaps
wider in Greek than in Latin, though the soundness of his Latin
scholarship is proved by the fact that he was _proxime_ for the Hertford
Scholarship at Oxford. He had read Plato in the Sixth Form at Rugby, and
Oxford taught him Aristotle. From first to last his "unapproachable
favourites" were Homer and Sophocles, and Hesiod was "a Greek friend to
whom he turned with excellent effect." But though he was thus
essentially a classicist, a mere classicist he was not. No one had a
wider, a more familiar, a more discriminating knowledge of English
literature; no one--and this is worthy of remark--had the text of the
Bible more perfectly at his fingers' ends. He had read all that was best
in French, German, and Italian;[16] and in French at any rate he was an
exact and judicious critic, as is sufficiently shown by his essay on
_The French Play in London_.[17] Hebrew he mastered sufficiently to
"follow and weigh the reasons offered by others" for a retranslation of
the Old Testament; and into Celtic literature he made at any rate one
memorable incursion.[18]
A man so equipped was essentially a man of letters: a great deal more
than a classicist, but a classicist first and foremost. And so it was
natural that he should think a classical education the best education
that could be offered to boys, and should desire to see classics, taught
in a literary and not a pedantic spirit, the staple of instruction in
all those Public Schools, whether of ancient or of modern foundation,
to which the Upper and Middle Classes should resort. He was perfectly
ready to make composition in Greek and Latin the luxury of the few who
had a special aptitude for it, therein following the doctrine of Dr.
Whewell, and leading the way to a notable reform in Public Schools. But
to read the best Latin and Greek authors was to be the staple of a boy's
education, and thereto were to be added a full and scholarly knowledge
of English, and a sufficiency, such as modern life demands, of Science
and Mathematics. He "ventured once, in the very Senate-House and heart
of Cambridge, to hazard the opinion that for the majority of mankind a
little of mathematics goes a long way." He thought it no particular gain
for a boy to know that "when a taper burns, the wax is converted into
carbonic acid and water." He thought it a clear loss that he should not
know the last book of the _Iliad_, or the sixth book of the _AEneid_, or
the _Agamemnon_. He encouraged the Eton boys to laugh at "Scientific
lectures, and lessons on the diameter of the sun and moon"; but he was
moved almost to tears when "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" was
offered as a paraphrase of "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?"
He listened with amused interest to the teachers who deduced our descent
from "a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears,
probably arboreal in his habits." But he thought it deplorable that a
leading physicist should never have heard of Bishop Wilson of Sodor and
Man, and that a leading journalist should confound him with Bishop
Wilson of Calcutta.
To the Public Schools he would have entrusted that thorough drilling in
Greek, Latin and English which was to be the foundation of the pupils'
culture; and, this done, he would have required the University to offer
scope for the fullest development of any special aptitude which the
pupil might display. In brief, the school was to train in general
knowledge; the University was to specialize. In 1868 he wrote: "An
admirable English mathematician told me that he should never recover the
loss of the two years which after his degree he wasted without fit
instruction at an English University, when he ought to have been under
superior instruction, for which the present University course in England
makes no provision. I daresay he _will_ recover it, for a man of genius
counts no worthy effort too hard; but who can estimate the loss to the
mental training and intellectual habits of the country, from the
absence--so complete that it needs genius to be sensible of it, and
costs genius an effort to repair it--of all regular public provision
for the scientific study and teaching of any branch of knowledge?"
[Illustration: Rugby
Matthew Arnold entered Rugby School in August, 1837, living under his
father's roof at the School-house.
He left Rugby for Oxford in June, 1841
_Photo H.W. Taunt_]
But these larger views of education belong, after all, to the region of
theory, and he never had the opportunity, except very indirectly, of
putting them into practice. With the Elementary Schools he dealt
practically, officially, and directly; but even here, as in so many
other departments, his influence was rather critical than constructive.
He had only an imperfect sympathy with "that somewhat terrible
character, the scientific educator." A brother-inspector says that, "if
he saw little children looking good and happy, and under the care of a
kindly and sympathetic teacher, he would give a favourable report,
without enquiring too curiously into the percentage of scholars who
could pass the 'standard' examination." There must be many who still
remember with amused affection his demeanour in an Elementary School.
They see the tall figure, at once graceful and stately; the benign air,
as of an affable archangel; the critical brow and enquiring eyeglass
bent on some very immature performance in penmanship or needlework; and
the frightened children and the anxious teacher, gradually lapsing into
smiles and peace, as the great man tested the proficiency in some such
humble art as spelling. "Well, my little man, and how do you spell
_dog_?" "Please sir, _d-o-g_." "Capital, very good indeed. I couldn't
do it better myself. And now let us go a little further, and see if we
can spell _cat_." (Chorus excitedly.) "C-A-T." "Now, this is
really excellent. (To the teacher.) You have brought them on wonderfully
in spelling since I was here last. You shall have a capital report.
Good-bye." To those who cherish these memories there is nothing
surprising in this tribute by a friend: "His effect on the teachers when
he examined a school was extraordinary. He was sympathetic without being
condescending, and he reconciled the humblest drudge in a London school
to his or her drudgery for the next twelve months."
As regards the matter of education, he was all for Reality, as against
Pretentiousness, "the stamp of plainness and freedom from charlatanism."
He had no notion that children could be humanized by being made to read
that "the crocodile is oviparous," or that "summer ornaments for grates
are made of wood shavings and of different coloured papers." He wished
that the youngest and poorest children should be nurtured on the
wholesome and delicious food of actual literature, instead of
"skeletons" and "abstracts." He set great store on learning poetry by
heart, for he believed in poetry as the chief instrument of culture. He
poured just contempt upon the wretched doggerel which in school
reading-books too often passed for poetry. "When one thinks how noble
and admirable a thing genuine popular poetry is, it is provoking to
think that such rubbish should be palmed off on a poor child, with any
apparent sanction from the Education Department and its grants."
With regard to the special evil of teaching poetry by "selections" or
"extracts," he wrote in his Report for 1880: "That the poetry chosen
should have real beauties of expression and feeling, that these beauties
should be such as the children's hearts and minds can lay hold of, and
that a distinct point or centre of beauty and interest should occur
within the limits of the passage learned--all these are conditions to be
insisted on. Some of the short pieces by Mrs. Hemans, such as 'The
Graves of a Household,' 'The Homes of England,' 'The Better Land,' are
to be recommended because they fulfil all three conditions; they have
real merits of expression and sentiment; the merits are such as the
children can feel, and the centre of interest, these pieces being so
short, necessarily occurs within the limits of what is learnt. On the
other hand, in extracts taken from Scott or Shakespeare, the point of
interest is not often reached within the hundred lines which is all that
children in the Fourth Standard learn. The Judgment Scene in the
_Merchant of Venice_ affords me a good example of what I mean.... The
children in the Fourth Standard begin at the beginning and stop at the
end of a hundred lines. Now the children in the Fourth Standard are
often a majority of the children learning poetry, and this is all their
poetry for the year. But within these hundred lines the real interest of
the situation is not reached; neither do they contain any poetry of
signal beauty and effectiveness. How little, therefore, has the
poetry-exercise been made to do for these children, many of whom will
leave school at once, and learn no more poetry!" He greatly favoured all
such exercises as tend to make the mind "creative," and give it "a
native play of its own, as against such exercises as learning strings of
promontories, battles, and minerals." As to the number of subjects
taught, he was in favour of few rather than many. He dreaded for the
children the strain of having to receive a large number of "knowledges"
(as he oddly called them), and "store them up to be reproduced in an
examination." But in spite of this well-founded dread of an undue
multiplication of subjects, he wished to make Latin compulsory in the
upper standards of elementary schools, and he wished to see it taught
through the Vulgate. Perhaps in this particular he showed an effect of
his father's influence; for the late Dean of Westminster[19] used to
imitate the enormous emphasis with which Dr. Arnold replied to some one
who had depreciated the language of the Vulgate as "Dog Latin"--"_Dog
Latin_, indeed! I call it _Lion Latin_!"
Be that as it may, Matthew Arnold thus gave his judgment on the possible
uses of the Vulgate in elementary schools--
"Latin is the foundation of so much in the written and spoken language
of modern Europe, that it is the best language to take as a second
language; in our own written and book language, above all, it fills so
large a part that we perhaps hardly know how much of their reading falls
meaningless upon the eye and ear of children in our elementary schools,
from their total ignorance of either Latin or a modern language derived
from it. For the little of languages that can be taught in our
elementary schools, it is far better to go to the root at once; and
Latin, besides, is the best of all languages to learn grammar by. But it
should by no means be taught as in our classical schools; far less time
should be spent on the grammatical framework, and classical literature
should be left quite out of view. A second language, and a language
coming very largely into the vocabulary of modern nations, is what Latin
should stand for to the teacher of an elementary school. I am convinced
that for his purpose the best way would be to disregard classical Latin
entirely, to use neither Cornelius Nepos, nor Eutropius, nor Caesar, nor
any _delectus_ from them, but to use the Latin Bible, the Vulgate. A
chapter or two from the story of Joseph, a chapter or two from
Deuteronomy, and the first two chapters of St. Luke's Gospel would be
the sort of delectus we want; add to them a vocabulary and a simple
grammar of the main forms of the Latin language, and you have a
perfectly compact and cheap school book, and yet all that you need. In
the extracts the child would be at home, instead of, as in extracts from
classical Latin, in an utterly strange land; and the Latin of the
Vulgate, while it is real and living Latin, is yet, like the Greek of
the New Testament, much nearer to modern idiom, and therefore much
easier for a modern learner than classical idiom can be. True, a child
whose delectus is taken from Cornelius Nepos or Caesar will be better
prepared perhaps for going on to Virgil and Cicero than a child whose
delectus is taken from the Vulgate. But we do not want to carry our
elementary schools into Virgil or Cicero; one child in five thousand,
with a special talent, may go on to higher schools, and to Virgil, and
he will go on to them all the better for the little we have at any rate
given him. But what we want to give to our Elementary Schools in
general is the vocabulary, to some extent, of a second language, and
that language one which is at the bottom of a great deal of modern life
and modern language. This, I am convinced, we may give in some such
method as the method I have above suggested, but in no other."
There is, perhaps, no more interesting or more characteristic feature of
his doctrine about elementary schools than his insistence, early and
late, on a close and familiar acquaintance with the Bible. "Chords of
power," he said, "are touched by this instruction which no other part of
the instruction in a popular school reaches, and chords various, not the
single religious chord only. The Bible is for the child in an elementary
school almost his only contact with poetry and philosophy. What a course
of eloquence and poetry (to call it by that name alone) is the Bible in
a school which has and can have but little eloquence and poetry! and how
much do our elementary schools lose by not having any such course as
part of their school programme! All who value the Bible may rest assured
that thus to know and possess the Bible is the most certain way to
extend the power and efficacy of the Bible."
The spiritual sense, the doctrinal and dogmatic import, of Holy
Scripture lay, in his judgment, quite outside the scope of the School.
"The Bible's application and edification belong to the Church; its
literary and historical substance to the School." He saw clearly the
manifold and conflicting perils to which a simple love and knowledge of
the Bible were exposed the moment that exegesis began to play about it.
He pointed out that Cardinal Newman interpreted the words, _I will lay
thy stones with fair colours and thy foundations with sapphires_, as
authorizing "the sumptuosities of the Church of Rome"; and to
Protestants who said that this was a wrong use of the passage he pointed
out that their similar use of the Beast and the Scarlet Woman and
Antichrist would seem equally wrong to Cardinal Newman; "and in these
cases of application who shall decide"? What he insisted on was the
value of the Bible as a beautiful and ennobling literature, easily
accessible to all. He would have it taught with intelligence, sympathy,
reverence, and, above all, "as a Literature,"--for biblical teaching
ought to show the widely varying elements of which the Bible is
composed: the profound differences, not merely of authorship and style,
but of tone and temper, between one book and another; the historical
circumstances under which each came into being; the section of humanity
and the period of time to which each made its appeal.
In 1869 he wrote in his Annual Report--
"Let the school managers make the main outlines of Bible history, and
the getting by heart a selection of the finest Psalms, the most
interesting passages from the historical and prophetical books of the
Old Testament, and the chief parables, discourses, and exhortations, of
the New, a part of the regular school work, to be submitted to
inspection and to be seen in its strength or weakness like any other.
This could raise no jealousies; or, if it still raises some, let a
sacrifice be made of them for the sake of the end in view. Some will say
that what we propose is but a small use to put the Bible to; yet it is
that on which all higher use of the Bible is to be built, and its
adoption is the only chance for saving the one elevating and inspiring
element in the scanty instruction of our primary schools from being
sacrificed to a politico-religious difficulty. There was no Greek school
in which Homer was not read; cannot our popular schools, with their
narrow range and their jejune alimentation in secular literature, do as
much for the Bible as the Greek schools did for Homer?"
In 1870 he wrote about a book[20] by two young Jewish ladies: "I am sure
it will be found, as I told them, that their book meets a real want;
there were good books about the Bible for the learned, and there were
bad books about it--that is to say, bad _resumes_ of its history and
literature--for the general public; but anything like a good and sound
_resume_ for the general public did not exist till this book came."
It is interesting to observe that to his deep conviction of the ethical
and educational value of the Bible is due his only direct and
constructive effort to enrich the apparatus of the schools which he
inspected. Of improvement by way of criticism and suggestion he gave
them enough and to spare, but to supply them with a new reading-book was
a departure from his usual method. Nevertheless in 1872 he wrote: "An
ounce of practice, they say, is better than a pound of theory; and
certainly one may talk for ever about the wonder-working power of
Letters, and yet produce no good at all, unless one really puts people
in the way of feeling their power. The friends of Physics do not content
themselves with extolling Physics; they put forth school-books by which
the study of Physics may be with proper advantage brought near to those
who before were strangers to it; and they do wisely. For any one who
believes in the civilizing power of Letters, and often talks of this
belief, to think that he has for more than twenty years got his living
by inspecting schools for the people, has gone in and out among them,
has seen that the power of Letters never reaches them at all, and that
the whole study of Letters is thereby discredited, and its power called
in question, and yet has attempted nothing to remedy this state of
things, cannot but be vexing and disquieting. He may truly say, like the
Israel of the prophet, 'We have not wrought any deliverance in the
earth'! and he may well desire to do something to pay his debt to
popular education before he finally departs, and to serve it, if he can,
in that point where its need is sorest, where he has always said its
need was sorest, and where, nevertheless, it is as sore still as when he
began saying this twenty years ago. Even if what he does cannot be of
service at once, owing to special prejudices and difficulties, yet these
prejudices and difficulties years are almost sure to dissipate, and the
work may be of service hereafter."
These wise, though rather melancholy, words occur in the Preface to a
little book called _A Bible Reading for Schools_, and in its fuller and
alternative title, _The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration, Arranged
and Edited for Young Learners_. Arnold, himself a constant and attentive
student of Holy Writ, "liked reading his Bible without being baffled by
unmeaningnesses." He complained that "the fatal thing about our version
is that it so often spoils a chapter in the Old Testament by making
sheer nonsense out of one or two verses, and so throwing the reader
out." He habitually used a Bible--a present from his godfather, John
Keble--"where the numbers of the chapters are marked at the side and do
not interpose a break between chapter and chapter; and where the
divisions of the verses, being numbered in like manner at the side of
the page, not in the body of the verse, and being numbered in very small
type, do not thrust themselves forcibly on the attention," and these
circumstances suggested the form of his _Bible Reading for Schools_. The
little book consists of the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah,
running on continuously, with some twenty pages of notes, and he thus
introduces it--
"At the very outset, the humbleness of what is professed in this little
book cannot be set forth too strongly. With the aim of enabling English
school children to read as a connected whole the last twenty-seven
chapters of Isaiah, without being frequently stopped by passages of
which the meaning is almost or quite unintelligible, I have sought to
choose, among the better meanings which have been offered for each of
the passages, that which seemed the best, and to weave it into the
authorized text in such a manner as not to produce any sense of
strangeness or interruption." The attempt was truly laudable, and the
execution admirable for taste and ease. The majestic flow and cadence of
the traditional English are never interrupted. There is no concession to
such pedantries as Professor Robertson Smith's "greaves of the warrior
that stampeth in the fray," or such barbarisms as Professor Cheynes'
"boot of him that trampleth noisily." But here and there a turn is given
to a sentence, which for the first time reveals its true meaning; here
and there a word which really represents the Hebrew is substituted for
one which makes nonsense of the sentence.
The little book has often been reprinted; but as "A Bible Reading for
Schools" it failed, as, to judge by his own melancholy words about it,
he seems to have foreseen that it would fail. People who have charge of
Elementary Education in England, whether in Church Schools or in Board
Schools, are eminently and rightly suspicious about new views in
religion; and _The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration_ gave currency
to a view which in 1872 was probably new to most School Managers and
School Boards. He carefully disclaimed any intention to decide the
authorship of the chapters which he edited. But the fact that they were
detached from the earlier ones might perhaps raise questions in
enquiring minds; and in the preface he stated his personal belief that
"the author of the earlier part of the Book of Isaiah was not the author
of these last chapters." He most truly added that "there is nothing to
forbid a member of the Church of England, or, for that matter, a member
of the Church of Rome either, or a member of the Jewish Synagogue, from
holding such a belief"; but probably clergymen and Dissenting ministers
and pious laymen of all denominations looked rather askance at it; and
the little book never got itself adopted as "A Bible Reading for
Schools."
Thus ended his one attempt to improve, positively and by construction,
the curriculum of the Elementary Schools; and we return, at the end of
this study of his Educational doctrine, to the point at which we began.
"Organize your Elementary, your Secondary, your Superior, Education."
This was the burden of his teaching for five-and-thirty years; and, if
the community has at length really set its hand to that great task, it
is only right that we should remember with honour the Master who first
taught us (when the doctrine was unpopular) that the primary duty of a
civilized State is to educate its children.
[Footnote 9: Thomas Arnold, D.D., Head Master of Rugby. His eldest son,
Matthew Arnold, Inspector of Schools. His second son, Thomas Arnold,
Professor in University College, Dublin. His third son, Edward Penrose
Arnold, Inspector of Schools. His fourth son, William Delafield Arnold,
Director of Public Instruction in the Punjaub.]
[Footnote 10: See p. 135.]
[Footnote 11: Reprinted in _Irish Essays and Others_.]
[Footnote 12: This essay, unfortunately, was never reprinted.]
[Footnote 13: It was published in 1850.]
[Footnote 14: An Oxford man must write this word _late_ with regret.
August 23, 1903.]
[Footnote 15: In 1870.]
[Footnote 16: For the width of his reading, see his _Note-Books_, Edited
by his daughter, Mrs. Wodehouse.]
[Footnote 17: Reprinted in _Irish Essays, and Others_.]
[Footnote 18: _On the Study of Celtic Literature_, 1867.]
[Footnote 19: Dr. Bradley.]
[Footnote 20: _The History and Literature of the Israelites._ By C. and
A. de Rothschild.]
CHAPTER IV
SOCIETY
"Culture seeks to do away with classes and sects; to make the best that
has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all
men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use
ideas, as it uses them itself, freely; nourished, and not bound, by
them. This is the _social idea_; and the men of culture are the true
apostles of equality."
The words--_social idea_--which Arnold himself italicized in the
foregoing extract from _Culture and Anarchy_, will indicate the sense in
which "Society" is here intended. We are not thinking of that which
Pennialinus[21] means when he writes about "Society gossip" or "a
Society function." We are concerned with the thoughts and temper and
actions of men, not as isolated units, but as living in an organized
community; and, taking "Society" in this sense, we are to examine
Arnold's influence on the Society of his time.
[Illustration: Front of Balliol College, Oxford, in Arnold's Time
In 1840 Matthew Arnold won an open scholarship at Balliol and went into
residence in 1841
_Photo H.W. Taunt_]
Certainly the most obvious and palpable way of affecting Society--and to
many Englishmen the only conceivable way--is by the method of Politics;
by the definite and positive action of human law, and by such endeavours
as we can make towards shaping that action. Now, if indeed the Political
method were the only one, there could be little to be said about his
effect on Society. Politics, in the limited and conventional sense just
now suggested, were not much in his line. He was interested in them; he
had opinions about them; he occasionally intervened in them. But he made
no mark on the political work of his time; nor, so far as one can judge,
did he aspire to do so. Of the man of letters in the field of politics,
he said: "He is in truth not on his own ground there, and is in peculiar
danger of talking at random." In politics, as in all else that he
touched, he was critical rather than constructive; and in politics,
"immersed," as Bacon said, "in matter," a man must be constructive, if
his influence is to be felt and to endure. "Politicians," he said in
1880, "we all of us here in England are and must be, and I too cannot
help being a politician; but a politician of that commonwealth of which
the pattern, as the philosopher says, exists perhaps somewhere in
Heaven, but certainly is at present found nowhere on earth." In 1887,
describing himself as "an aged outsider," he thus stated his own
attitude towards political problems--
"The professional politicians are always apt to be impatient of the
intervention in politics of a candid outsider, and he must expect to
provoke contempt and resentment in a good many of them. Still the action
of the regular politicians continues to be, for the most part, so very
far from successful, that the outsider is perpetually tempted to brave
their anger and to offer his observations, with the hope of possibly
doing some little good by saying what many quiet people are thinking and
wishing outside of the strife, phrases, and routine of professional
politics."
From first to last, he professed himself, and no doubt believed himself,
to be on the Liberal side. At the General Election of 1868 he urbanely
informed a Tory Committee, which asked for the advantage of his name,
that he was "an old Whig," nurtured in the traditions of Lansdowne
House. "Although," he said in 1869, "I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal
tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement." In 1878 he
described himself as a "sincere but ineffectual Liberal": in 1880, as "a
Liberal of the future rather than a Liberal of the present." A year
later, he spoke smilingly of "all good Liberals, of whom I wish to be
considered one"; and as late as 1887 he declared himself "one of the
Liberals of the future, who happen to be grown, alas! rather old."
But, though he believed himself to be a Liberal, he had the most lively
disrelish for the Liberalism of that great Middle Class which, during
the greater part of his life, played so large a part in Liberal
politics. In 1882, reviewing, in his favourite manner, the various
classes of English Society, and discussing their adequacy to fulfil the
ideal of perfect citizenship, he wrote--
"Suppose we take that figure we know so well, the earnest and
non-conforming Liberal of our Middle Classes, as his schools and his
civilization have made him. He is for Disestablishment; he is for
Temperance; he has an eye to his Wife's Sister; he is a member of his
local caucus; he is learning to go up to Birmingham every year to the
feast of Mr. Chamberlain. His inadequacy is but too visible."
Certainly Arnold's Liberalism had nothing in common with the Liberalism
of the great Middle Class. Indeed, so far as theory is concerned, it had
a democratic basis, inasmuch as he believed that democracy was a product
of natural law, and that our business was to adapt our political and
social institutions to it. "Democracy," he said, "is trying to _affirm
its own essence_: to live, to enjoy, to possess the world, as
aristocracy has tried, and successfully tried, before it."
The movement of Democracy he regarded as being an "operation of nature,"
and, like other operations of nature, it was neither to be praised nor
blamed. He was neither a "partisan" of it, nor an "enemy." His only care
was, if he could, to guide it aright, and to secure that it used its
predominant power in human affairs at least as wisely as the aristocracy
which had preceded it. Of aristocratic rule in foreign countries--of
such rule as preceded the French Revolution--he thought as poorly as
most men think; but for the aristocracy of England he had a singular
esteem. It is true that he gave it a nickname; that he poked fun at its
illiteracy and its inaccessibility to ideas; that he was impatient of
"immense inequalities of condition and property," and huge estates, and
irresponsible landlordism; that he contemned the "hideous English
toadyism" and "immense vulgar-mindedness" of the Middle Class when
confronted with "lords and great people."
But, for all that, he wrote about the English Aristocracy, as it stood
in 1859: "I desire to speak of it with the most unbounded respect. It is
the most popular of aristocracies; it has avoided faults which have
ruined other aristocracies equally splendid. While the aristocracy of
France was destroying its estates by its extravagance, and itself by
its impertinence, the aristocracy of England was founding English
agriculture, and commanding respect by a personal dignity which made
even its pride forgiven. Historical and political England, the England
of which we are all so proud, is of its making."
In spite, however, of this high estimate of what Aristocracy had
accomplished in the past, he felt that power was slipping away from it,
and was passing into the hands of the Multitude. But he also felt--and
it was certainly one of his most profound convictions--that the
Multitude could never govern properly, could never regulate its own
affairs, could never present England adequately to the view of the
world, unless it cast aside the Individualism in which it had been
nurtured, and made up its mind to act in and through the State. Perhaps
his ideal of a State can best be described as an Educated Democracy,
working by Collectivism in Government, Religion, and Social order.
"If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has
established this: that it is well for any great class or description of
men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to
have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes,
acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and
to provide for them. They do not really understand its wants, they do
not really provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either
fully understand its own wants, or adequately express them; but it has a
nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its
proctors, and therefore a better chance of success." Amid many
fluctuations of opinion on minor points, he was, from first to last, a
thoroughgoing advocate for extending the action of the State. In his
ideal of government, the State was to play in a democratic age the part
which the Aristocracy had played in earlier ages--it was to govern and
administer and control and inspire. And, it was, in one important
respect, a far nobler thing than the best aristocracy could ever be, for
it was the "representative acting-power of the nation"; and so the
relation of the citizen to the State was a much more dignified relation
than that of a citizen to an aristocracy could ever be. "Is it that of a
dependant to a parental benefactor? By no means: it is that of a member
in a partnership to the whole firm." The citizens of a State, the
members of a society, are really "'a _partnership_,' as Burke nobly
says, '_in all science, in all art, in every virtue, in all
perfection_.' Towards this great final design of their connexion, they
apply the aids which co-operative association can give them." We turn
now to the practical application of this doctrine.
We have seen in the previous chapter how earnestly and consistently
throughout his working life he urged the State to take into its control,
and so far as was needed to subsidize, the Education of the whole
nation. "How vain, how meaningless," he cried, "to tell a man who, for
the instruction of his offspring, receives aid from the State, that he
is humiliated! Humiliated by receiving help for himself as an individual
from himself in his corporate and associated capacity! help to which his
own money, as a tax-payer, contributes, and for which, as a result of
the joint energy and intelligence of the whole community in employing as
powers, he himself deserves some of the praise!... He is no more
humiliated than when he crosses London Bridge or walks down the King's
Road, or visits the British Museum. But it is one of the extraordinary
inconsistencies of some English people in this matter, that they keep
all their cry of humiliation and degradation for help which the State
offers." We shall see in a subsequent chapter that he was as strong for
Established Churches as for State-regulated Schools, and for the same
reason. In Religion, as in Education, he disparaged private institutions
and individual ventures. The State, "the nation in its corporate and
collective capacity," ought to transcend the individual citizen: it
should supply him, to help him as one of its units to supply himself,
with the thing which he wanted--Education or Religion--in the grand
style, on a large scale, with all the authority which comes from
national recognition, with all the dignity of a historical descent.
Arnold's appeal for State-supplied and State-controlled Education has,
as we have already seen, met with some practical response, and in the
main falls in with the modern drift of Liberal ideas. In upholding
State-supported and State-controlled Religion, he was rather continuing
an old tradition than starting a new idea, and modern Liberalism is
moving away from him.
But in some important respects, all strictly political, his advocacy of
extended action by the State fell in with the Liberal movement of his
time. The hideous misgovernment of Ireland he had always deplored. It
touched him long before it touched the great majority of Englishmen.
With a view to informing people on the Irish question, he compiled a
book of Burke's most telling utterances on Ireland and her woes. Those
utterances, as he said, "Show at work all the causes which have brought
Ireland to its present state--the tyranny of the grantees of
confiscation; of the English garrison; Protestant ascendancy; the
reliance of the English Government upon this ascendancy and its
instruments as their means of government; the yielding to menaces of
danger and insurrection what was never yielded to considerations of
equity and reason; the recurrence to the old perversity of mismanagement
as soon as ever the danger was passed." To all these evils he would have
applied the remedies which Burke suggested. He would have had the State
endow the religions of Ireland and their ministries, supply Ireland with
good schools, and defend Irish tenants against the extortions of bad
landlords. He was vehemently opposed to Gladstone's scheme of Home Rule,
because, in his view, it tended to disintegration where he specially
desired cohesion: but, in the tumults of 1885-8, he never lost his head,
never forgot his old sympathy with Irish wrongs, never "drew up an
indictment against a whole people."[22] All through these stormy years,
he stood firm for an effective system of Local Government in Ireland.
Irish government, he said, had "been conducted in accordance with the
wishes of the minority, and of the British Philistine." He desired a
system which should accord with the wishes of the majority. He
deprecated Forster's "expression of general objection to Home Rule";
because, though Home Rule as understood by Parnell was intolerable,
there was another kind of Home Rule which was possible and even
desirable. He was keenly anxious that his friends, the Liberal
Unionists, should not let the opportunity slip, but should bring forward
a "counter scheme to Gladstone's," giving real powers of local
government. In 1887 he again insisted that the "opinion of quiet
reasonable people throughout the country" was bent on giving the Irish
the due control of their own local affairs. He pleaded for a system
"built on sufficiently large lines, not too complicated, not fantastic,
not hesitating and suspicious, not taking back with one hand what it
gives with the other." A similar system he wished to see extended to
England, and he pointed out that it admirably facilitated that national
control of Secondary Education for which he was always pleading.
Then again, with reference to Irish land, his belief in the action of
the State displayed itself very clearly. In his opinion the remedy for
agrarian trouble in Ireland was that the State should, after rigid and
impartial enquiry, distinguish between good landlords and bad, and then
expropriate the bad ones. This, he thought, would "give the sort of
equity, the sort of moral satisfaction, which the case needed." Once
again he was in harmony with Liberal opinion, when he desired to widen
the basis of the State by extending the suffrage in turn to the Artisans
and the Labourers. In one respect at least he was in harmony rather with
Collectivist Radicalism than with orthodox Liberalism, for he did not in
the least dread the intervention of the State between employer and
employed. He desired to strengthen Parliament, the supreme organ of the
national will, by reforming the House of Lords; though he strongly
dissented from a scheme of reform just then in vogue. "One can hardly
imagine sensible men planning a Second Chamber which should not include
the Archbishop of Canterbury, or which should include the young
gentlemen who flock to the House of Lords when pigeon-shooting is in
question. But our precious Liberal Reformers are for retaining the
pigeon-shooters and for expelling the Archbishop of Canterbury."[23]
Even in the full flood of Liberal victory which followed the General
Election of 1880, he saw what was coming. "What strikes one is the
insecureness of the Liberals' hold upon office and upon public favour;
the probability of the return, perhaps even more than once, of their
adversaries to office, before that final and happy consummation is
reached--the permanent establishment of Liberalism in power." And, while
he saw what was coming, he thus divined the cause. The official and
commanding part of the Liberal Party was at the best stolidly
indifferent to Social Reform; at the worst, viciously angry with the
idea and those who propagated it. The commercialism of the great Middle
Class had covered the face of England with places like St. Helens, which
the capitalists called "great centres of national enterprise," and
Cobbett called "Hell-Holes." In these places life was lived under
conditions of squalid and hideous misery, and the inhabitants were
beginning to find out, in the words of one of their own class, that
"free political institutions do not guarantee the well-being of the
toiling class." Under these circumstances it was natural that the
toilers, having looked for redress to the Liberal Party and looked in
vain, should, when next they had the chance, try a spell of that
Democratic Toryism which at any rate held out some shadowy hope of
social betterment. Arnold's misgivings about the future of the Liberal
Party were abundantly made good by the General Election of 1885; but
enough has now been said about his contribution to the practical
politics of his time. A much larger space must be given to the influence
which he brought to bear on Society by methods not political--by
criticism, by banter, by literary felicities, by "sinuous, easy,
unpolemical" methods.
England had known him first as a poet, then as a literary critic. Next
came a rather hazy impression that he was an educational reformer whose
suggestions might be worth attending to. It was not till 1869 that his
countrymen became fully aware of him as a social critic, a commentator
on life and society. Looking back, one seems to see that by that time
his poetical function was fulfilled. As far as the medium of poetry is
concerned, he had said his say; said it incomparably well, said it with
abiding effect. Now it seemed that a new function presented itself to
him; a great door and effectual was opened to him. He found a fresh
sphere of usefulness and influence in applying his critical method to
the ideals and follies of his countrymen; to their scheme of life, ways
of thinking and acting, prejudices, conventions, and limitations. Mr.
Paul said, as we have already seen, that the appearance of _Essays in
Criticism_ was "a great intellectual event." That is perfectly true; and
the appearance of _Culture and Anarchy_ was a great social event. The
book so named was published in 1869; but the ground had been prepared
for it by some earlier writings, and these we must consider before we
come to the book itself.
In February, 1866, there appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ an essay
called "My Countrymen." In this essay Arnold, fresh from one of his
Continental tours, tried to show English people what the intelligent
mind of Europe was really thinking of them. "'It is not so much that we
dislike England,' a Prussian official, with the graceful tact of his
nation, said to me the other day, 'as that we think little of her.'"
Broadly speaking, European judgment on us came to this--that England had
been great, powerful, and prosperous under an aristocratic government,
at a time when the chief requisite for national greatness was Action,
"for aristocracies, poor in ideas, are rich in energy"; but that England
was rapidly losing ground, was becoming a second-rate power, was falling
from her place in admiration and respect, since the Government had
passed into the hands of the Middle Class. What was now the chief
requisite for national greatness was Intelligence; and in intelligence
the Middle Class had shown itself signally deficient. In foreign
affairs--in its dealings with Russia and Turkey, Germany and America--it
had shown "rash engagement, intemperate threatenings, undignified
retreat, ill-timed cordiality," in short, every quality best calculated
to lower England in the esteem of the civilized world.
In domestic affairs, the life and mind of the Middle Class were thus
described by the foreign critic. "The fineness and capacity of man's
spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your Middle Class has an enjoyment in
its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money;
but beyond that? Drugged with business, your Middle Class seems to have
its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except Religion; it has a
religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive.... What other enjoyments
have they? The newspapers, a sort of eating and drinking which are not
to our taste, a literature of books almost entirely religious or
semi-religious, books utterly unreadable by an educated class anywhere,
but which your Middle Class consumes by the hundred thousand, and in
their evenings, for a great treat, a lecture on Teetotalism or
Nunneries. Can any life be imagined more hideous, more dismal, more
unenviable?... Your Middle Class man thinks it the highest pitch of
development and civilization when his letters are carried twelve times a
day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and
if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour.
He thinks it is nothing that the trains only carry him from an
illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at
Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there."
And, as to political and social reform, "Such a spectacle as your Irish
Church Establishment you cannot find in France or Germany. Your Irish
Land Question you dare not face." English Schools, English vestrydom,
English provincialism--all alike stand in the most urgent need of
reform; but with all alike the Middle Class is serenely content. After
reporting these exceedingly frank comments of foreign critics to his
English readers, Arnold thus expresses his own conviction on the matters
in dispute. "All due deductions made for envy, exaggeration, and
injustice, enough stuck by me of these remarks to determine me to go on
trying to keep my mind fixed on these, instead of singing hosannahs to
our actual state of development and civilization. The old recipe, to
think a little more and bustle a little less, seemed to me still to be
the best recipe to follow. So I take comfort when I find the _Guardian_
reproaching me with having no influence; for I know what influence
means--a party, practical proposals, action; and I say to myself: 'Even
suppose I could get some followers, and assemble them, brimming with
affectionate enthusiasm, to a committee-room in some inn; what on earth
should I say to them? What resolutions could I propose? I could only
propose the old Socratic commonplace, _Know thyself_; and how black they
would all look at that!' No; to enquire, perhaps too curiously, what
that present state of English development and civilization is, which
according to Mr. Lowe is so perfect that to give votes to the working
class is stark madness; and, on the other hand, to be less sanguine
about the divine and saving effect of a vote on its possessor than my
friends in the committee-room at the _Spotted Dog_--that is my
inevitable portion. To bring things under the light of one's
intelligence, to see how they look there, to accustom oneself simply to
regard the Marylebone Vestry, or the Educational Home, or the Irish
Church Establishment, or our railway management, or our Divorce Court,
or our gin-palaces open on Sunday and the Crystal Palace shut, as
absurdities--that is, I am sure, invaluable exercise for us just at
present. Let all persist in it who can, and steadily set their desires
on introducing, with time, a little more soul and spirit into the too,
too solid flesh of English society."
[Illustration: Fisher's Buildings, Balliol College, Oxford
Showing Matthew Arnold's Rooms
_Photo H.W. Taunt_]
So much for his first deliberate attempt in the way of social criticism.
It was levelled, we observe, at the thoughts and doings of the great
Middle Class, and it is natural to ask why that class was so specially
the target for his scorn. To that class, as he was fond of declaring,
half in fun and half in earnest, he himself belonged. "I always thought
my marriage," he used to say, "such a perfect marriage of the Middle
Classes--a schoolmaster's son and a judge's daughter." In the preface to
the _Essays in Criticism_, he spoke of "the English Middle Class, of
which I am myself a feeble unit." He used to declare that his feeling
towards his brethren of the Middle Class was that of St. Paul towards
his brethren of Israel: "My heart's desire and prayer for them is that
they may be saved." In _Culture and Anarchy_ he was constrained to admit
that "through circumstances which will perhaps one day be known, if ever
the affecting history of my conversion comes to be written, I have, for
the most part, broken with the ideas and the tea-meetings of my own
class"; but he found that he had not, by that conversion, come much
nearer to the ideas and works of the Aristocracy or the Populace.
He admired the fine manners, the governing faculty, the reticent and
dignified habit, of the Aristocracy. He deplored its limitations and its
obduracy, its "little culture and no ideas." He made fun of it when its
external manifestations touched the region of the ludicrous--"Everybody
knows Lord Elcho's[24] appearance, and how admirably he looks the part
of our governing classes; to my mind, indeed, the mere cock of his
lordship's hat is one of the finest and most aristocratic things we
have." In a more serious vein he taught--and enraged the _Guardian_ by
teaching--that, "ever since the advent of Christianity, _the prince of
this world is judged_"; and that wealth and rank and dignified ease are
bound to justify themselves for their apparent inconsistency with the
Christian ideal. He pitied the sorrows of the "people who suffer," the
"dim, common populations," the "poor who faint alway"; but he pitied
them from above. He certainly did not enter into their position; did not
share their ideas, or feel their sorrows as part of his own experience.
In an amazing passage he says that, when we snatch up a vehement opinion
in ignorance and passion, when we long to crush an adversary by sheer
violence, when we are envious, when we are brutal, when "we add our
voices to swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage," when
"we trample savagely on the fallen," then we find in our own bosom "the
eternal spirit of the Populace." That a spirit so hideous, so infernal
as is here described, is the eternal spirit of fallen humanity may be
painfully true; but to say that it is the special or characteristic
spirit of "the Populace" is to show that one has no genuine sympathy and
no real acquaintance with the life and heart of the poor. So far, then,
his account of his own transition is true. He had "broken with the ideas
of his own class, and had not come much nearer to the ideas and works
of Aristocracy or the Populace." But the work of his life had brought
him into close and continuous contact with the great Middle Class, which
practically had the whole management of Elementary Education in its
hands. He knew the members of that class, as he said, "experimentally."
He slept in their houses, and ate at their tables, and observed at close
quarters their books, their amusements, and their social life. Thus he
judged of their civilization by intimate acquaintance, and found it
eminently distasteful and defective. From 1832 to 1867 the Middle Class
had governed England, manipulating the Aristocracy through the medium of
the House of Commons; and the Aristocracy, though still occupying the
place of visible dignity, had its eye nervously fixed on the movement,
actual and impending, of the Middle Class. This system of government by
the predominance of the Middle Class, was not only distasteful to
culture, but was actually a source of danger to the State when it came
to be applied to Foreign Affairs. "That makes the difference between
Lord Grenville and Lord Granville." So it was to the shortcomings of the
Middle Class, from which he professed to be sprung and which he so
intimately knew, that he first addressed his social criticism. The essay
on "My Countrymen" immediately attracted notice. It was fresh, it was
lively, it put forth a new view, it gaily ran counter to the great mass
of current prejudice. He was frankly pleased by the way in which it was
received. It was noticed and quoted and talked about. He reported to his
mother that it was thought "witty and suggestive," "timely and true."
Carlyle "almost wholly approved of it," and Bright was "full of it." He
did not expect it to be liked by people who belonged to "the _old_
English time, of which the greatness and success was so immense and
indisputable that no one who flourished when it was at its height could
ever lose the impression of it," or realize how far we had fallen in
Continental esteem. His friend Lingen was "indignant" because he thought
the essay exalted the Aristocracy at the expense of the Middle Class;
and the Whig newspapers were "almost all unfavourable, because it tells
disagreeable truths to the class which furnishes the great body of what
is called the Liberal interest." From the foreign side came a criticism
in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, "professing to be by a Frenchman," but "I am
sure it is by a woman I know something of in Paris, a half Russian, half
Englishwoman, married to a Frenchman." The first part of this criticism
"is not good, and perhaps when the second part appears I shall write a
short and light letter by way of reply." That "short and light letter"
appeared in the _Pall Mall_ of March 20, 1866. It dealt with the
respective but not incompatible claims of Culture and Liberty--the
former so defective in England, the latter so abundant--and it contained
this aspiration for Englishmen of the Middle Class. "I do not wish them
to be the cafe-haunting, dominoes-playing Frenchmen, but some third
thing: neither the Frenchmen nor their present selves."
He was now fairly launched on the course of social criticism. As time
went on, his essays attracted more and more notice, sometimes friendly,
sometimes hostile, but always interested and not seldom excited. Some of
the comments on the new and daring critic were inconceivably absurd. Of
Mr. Frederic Harrison's retort,[25] Arnold wrote that it was "scarcely
the least vicious, and in parts so amusing that I laughed till I cried."
Mr. Goldwin Smith described him as "a gentleman of a jaunty air, and on
good terms with the world." To the _Times_ he seemed "a sentimentalist
whose dainty taste requires something more flimsy than the strong sense
and sturdy morality of his fellow-Englishmen." One newspaper called him
"a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion"; another, "an elegant
Jeremiah"; and Mr. Lionel Tollemache, combining in one harmonious whole
the absurdities of all the other commentators, says: "When asked my
opinion of this quaint man of genius, I have described him as a _Hebrew
prophet in white kid gloves_."
The fact is that we are a serious people. The Middle Class, which he
singled out for attack, is quite pre-eminently serious. Philosophers and
critics--the _Spectator_ and the _Edinburgh_--had made seriousness a
religion. Editors, leader-writers, reviewers, the Press generally, were
steeped to their lips in seriousness. They could not understand, and
were greatly inclined to resent, the appearance of this bright, playful,
unconventional spirit, happy and brilliant himself, and loving the
happiness and brilliancy of the world; with not an ounce of pomposity in
his own nature, and with the most irreverent demeanour towards pomposity
in other people. "Our social Polyphemes," as Lord Beaconsfield said,
"have only one eye"; and they could not the least perceive that Arnold's
genius was like the genius of poetry as he himself described it--
Radiant, adorn'd outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.
In a letter to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ of July 21, 1866, he first
introduced his friend Arminius,[26] Baron Von Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, the
cultivated and enquiring Prussian who had come to England to study our
Politics, Education, Local Government,
This is a short letter on Arnold's stationery (but bordered in black) from Mrs. Arnold to, I assume, Macmillan and Co., Publishers, 8 years after Matthew Arnold's death.