I cannot think how this colleague can have offended the lady: unless she sat under him. Her criticism betrays a sense of personal resentment.
The complaint that things and persons are not what they were is familiar. It must have frequently been made by Eve, after her change of residence, and in the family of Noah it would be the merest commonplace. “What pterodactyls we used to have before the Flood!”
But there is some justification for the lament of The Times. There were two or three Inspectors of Schools who were more distinguished than any whom I have known in later years. Dr. Temple, and Matthew Arnold, for instance, gave lustre to the office. But the former was “Inspector, chiefly of Training Schools” (Life, Vol. I., p. 97) for only two years; and the latter was—to put it in most courteous terms—more efficient on the literary side. “Mr. Arnold inspects our school in Westminster,” a London school manager said to me. “Of course we are much honoured, and the managers make a point of attending to meet him. He arrives in the course of the morning; shakes hands with the managers and teachers; and talks very pleasantly for a few minutes; then he walks through the classes between the desks, looking over the children’s shoulders at some exercises, and so makes his way to the door, and we see him no more.”
His letters in his Life give some plausibility to the story: his heart was not in the work, and the drudgery was distasteful. But he wrote admirable Reports in the Blue Books: there is a volume of these collected Reports before me, and I think no one reading them would detect any lack of experience in the writer. He did what we were strictly forbidden to do, and what lesser lights were afraid to do; he freely criticised the Code, and freely suggested improvements. And throughout there ran the three threads of humour, irony, and hard common-sense. Is it possible that my London friend slightly embellished his account? When managers got bad reports, they were dreadfully untruthful.
Mr. M. Arnold’s other mission in the world of education was to supply the Office with amusement. The most detestable of our obligations was to compile a weekly diary, forwarded to Whitehall every Saturday, showing the daily employment, and the daily expenditure on travelling expenses—which the Treasury repaid. “Vex not thou the poet’s mind” said his great contemporary; and it may be that such minds require special consideration, when striving to deal with prosaic details.
“Who knows what ‘things unknown’ I might have ‘bodied
Forth,’ if not checked by that absurd Too-too?”
sang Calverley, when his neighbour played on the “crumpled horn.” And in the office the Too-too was represented by a clerk, whose mission in life was to return these diaries to negligent Inspectors with pertinent or impertinent queries. “Why not travel by train instead of taking a cab?” “Why go round by C. to get to B.?” and so on. When in my latest days forty-five of these hateful diaries came to me weekly, I began to see the standpoint of the clerk: but in 1875 the Senior Inspectors had no such offensive duties: “they themselves were custodianed.”
Arnold’s district consisted of Westminster and Edmonton, a ridiculous grouping. His official address was “The Athenæum,” and he lived, I believe, at Esher. By the Treasury rules, if his work at Edmonton required his attendance for two or more consecutive days, he was bound after the first day to spend the night there, or to refrain from charging his train and cab fares home again. Being a poet, of course he returned home, and charged his fare every day. “The knight of the Blue Pencil,” as he called his enemy, sharpened his blue pencil, and wrote—“Mr. M. Arnold, H.M.I. Why not stay at Edmonton?” And the great man plaintively replied: “How can you expect me to stay at Edmonton, when John Gilpin[26] couldn’t?” The account was passed.
I imagine that his rule was lenient. A colleague told me how they sat together at Whitelands Training College (where the girls have the rude wind of education tempered to them by the study of Ruskin, and the cultus of the maypole) and listened to “Recitation,” which at school we called “Lines.” The prosaic colleague, looking over the poet’s marks, noticed that every girl had got the highest mark possible, and he commented on this monotony of excellence. Arnold merely purred—“they are such charming girls.”
Of these two great men Dr. Temple represented the clerical inspector, who in those days inspected the National schools: Arnold and a few more laymen took the Protestant Dissenters, and the British and Foreign Society’s Schools. A still smaller body visited the Roman Catholics. The clerical inspectors were men who had aspirations above parochial work, and souls above common-room life. The laymen were men who wanted a fixed income and congenial work, and saw neither floating on the surface of any of the ordinary professions. It must be borne in mind that inspecting schools was only part of the early inspectors’ work: they were missionaries over all the land, and did much to stir up men and bodies of men to take an interest in education. Men of high attainments and diplomatic powers would be most valuable at such times, and if the country got them, whether clerical or lay, the country was fortunate.