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 Æneid, 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?"
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—