III.
Hush'd in a calm beyond mine utterance,
See in the western sky the evening spread;
Suspended in its pale, serene expanse,
Like scatter'd flames, the glowing cloudlets red.
Clear are those clouds; and that pure sky's profound,
Transparent as a lake of hyaline;
Nor motion, nor the faintest breath of sound,
Disturbs the steadfast beauty of the scene.
Far o'er the vault, the winnow'd welkin wide,
From the bronzed east unto the whiten'd west,
Moor'd, seem, in their sweet, tranquil, roseate pride,
Those clouds the fabled islands of the blest;—
The lands where pious spirits breathe in joy,
And love and worship all their hours employ.
[LXXII]. DOCTOR ARNOLD AT RUGBY.
Arthur Penrhyn Stanley.—1815-1880.
With his usual and undoubting confidence in what he believed to be a general law of Providence, he based his whole management of the school on his early-formed and yearly-increasing conviction that what he had to look for, both intellectually and morally, was not performance but promise; that the very freedom and independence of school life, which in itself he thought so dangerous, might be made the best preparation for Christian manhood; and he did not hesitate to apply to his scholars the principle which seemed to him to have been adopted in the training of the childhood of the human race itself. He shrunk from pressing on the conscience of boys rules of action which he felt they were not yet able to bear, and from enforcing actions which, though right in themselves, would in boys be performed from wrong motives. Keenly as he felt the risk and fatal consequences of the failure of this trial, still it was his great, sometimes his only support to believe that "the character is braced amid such scenes to a greater beauty and firmness than it ever can attain without enduring and witnessing them. Our work here would be absolutely unendurable if we did not bear in mind that we should look forward as well as backward—if we did not remember that the victory of fallen man lies not in innocence but in tried virtue." "I hold fast," he said, "to the great truth, that 'blessed is he that overcometh;'" and he writes in 1837: "Of all the painful things connected with my employment, nothing is equal to the grief of seeing a boy come to school innocent and promising, and tracing the corruption of his character from the influence of the temptations around him, in the very place which ought to have strengthened and improved it. But in most cases those who come with a character of positive good are benefited; it is the neutral and indecisive characters which are apt to be decided for evil by schools, as they would be in fact by any other temptation."
But this very feeling led him with the greater eagerness to catch at every means by which the trial might be shortened or alleviated. "Can the change from childhood to manhood be hastened, without prematurely exhausting the faculties of body or mind?" was one of the chief questions on which his mind was constantly at work, and which in the judgment of some he was disposed to answer too readily in the affirmative. It was with the elder boys, of course, that he chiefly acted on this principle, but with all above the very young ones he trusted to it more or less. Firmly as he believed that a time of trial was inevitable, he believed no less firmly that it might be passed at public schools sooner than under other circumstances; and, in proportion as he disliked the assumption of a false manliness in boys, was his desire to cultivate in them true manliness, as the only step to something higher, and to dwell on earnest principle and moral thoughtfulness, as the great and distinguishing mark between good and evil. Hence his wish that as much as possible should be done by the boys, and nothing for them; hence arose his practice, in which his own delicacy of feeling and uprightness of purpose powerfully assisted him, of treating the boys as gentlemen and reasonable beings, of making them respect themselves by the mere respect he showed to them; of showing that he appealed and trusted to their own common sense and conscience. Lying, for example, to the masters, he made a great moral offence: placing implicit confidence in a boy's assertion, and then, if a falsehood was discovered, punishing it severely,—in the upper part of the school, when persisted in, with expulsion. Even with the lower forms he never seemed to be on the watch for boys; and in the higher forms any attempt at further proof of an assertion was immediately checked: "If you say so, that is quite enough—of course I believe your word;" and there grew up in consequence a general feeling that "it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie—he always believes one."
Perhaps the liveliest representation of this general spirit, as distinguished from its exemplification in particular parts of the discipline and instruction, would be formed by recalling his manner, as he appeared in the great school, where the boys used to meet when the whole school was assembled collectively, and not in its different forms or classes. Then, whether on his usual entrance every morning to prayers before the first lesson, or on the more special emergencies which might require his presence, he seemed to stand before them, not merely as the head-master, but as the representative of the school. There he spoke to them as members together with himself of the same great institution, whose character and reputation they had to sustain as well as he. He would dwell on the satisfaction he had in being head of a society, where noble and honorable feelings were encouraged, or on the disgrace which he felt in hearing of acts of disorder or violence, such as in the humbler ranks of life would render them amenable to the laws of their country; or again, on the trust which he placed in their honor as gentlemen, and the baseness of any instance in which it was abused. "Is this a Christian school?" he indignantly asked at the end of one of those addresses, in which he had spoken of an extensive display of bad feeling amongst the boys; and then added,—"I cannot remain here if all this is to be carried on by constraint and force; if I am to be here as a jailer, I will resign my office at once." And few scenes can be recorded more characteristic of him than on one of these occasions, when, in consequence of a disturbance, he had been obliged to send away several boys, and when in the midst of the general spirit of discontent which this excited, he stood in his place before the assembled school and said: "It is not necessary that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen."