ARNOLD, SIR EDWIN (1832-1904), British poet and journalist, was born on the 10th of June 1832, and was educated at the King’s school, Rochester; King’s College, London; and University College, Oxford, where in 1852 he gained the Newdigate prize for a poem on Belshazzar’s feast. On leaving Oxford he became a schoolmaster, and went to India as principal of the government Sanskrit College at Poona, a post which he held during the mutiny of 1857, when he was able to render services for which he was publicly thanked by Lord Elphinstone in the Bombay council. Returning to England in 1861 he worked as a journalist on the staff of the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper with which he continued to be associated for more than forty years. It was he who, on behalf of the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph in conjunction with the New York Herald, arranged for the journey of H.M. Stanley to Africa to discover the course of the Congo, and Stanley named after him a mountain to the north-east of Albert Edward Nyanza. Arnold must also be credited with the first idea of a great trunk line traversing the entire African continent, for in 1874 he first employed the phrase “a Cape to Cairo railway” subsequently popularized by Cecil Rhodes. It was, however, as a poet that he was best known to his contemporaries. The Light of Asia appeared in 1879 and won an immediate success, going through numerous editions both in England and America. It is an Indian epic, dealing with the life and teaching of Buddha, which are expounded with much wealth of local colour and not a little felicity of versification. The poem contains many lines of unquestionable beauty; and its immediate popularity was rather increased than diminished by the twofold criticism to which it was subjected. On the one hand it was held by Oriental scholars to give a false impression of Buddhist doctrine; while, on the other, the suggested analogy between Sakyamuni and Christ offended the taste of some devout Christians. The latter criticism probably suggested to Arnold the idea of attempting a second narrative poem of which the central figure should be the founder of Christianity, as the founder of Buddhism had been that of the first. But though The Light of the World (1891), in which this idea took shape, had considerable poetic merit, it lacked the novelty of theme and setting which had given the earlier poem much of its attractiveness; and it failed to repeat the success attained by The Light of Asia. Arnold’s other principal volumes of poetry were Indian Song of Songs (1875), Pearls of the Faith (1883), The Song Celestial (1885), With Sadi in the Garden (1888), Potiphar’s Wife (1892) and Adzuma (1893). In his later years Arnold resided for some time in Japan, and his third wife was a Japanese lady. In Seas and Lands (1891) and Japonica (1892) he gives an interesting study of Japanese life. He received the order of C.S.I. on the occasion of the proclamation of Queen Victoria as empress of India in 1877, and in 1888 was created K.C.I.E. He also possessed decorations conferred by the rulers of Japan, Persia, Turkey and Siam. Sir Edwin Arnold died on the 24th of March 1904.
ARNOLD, GOTTFRIED (1666-1714), German Protestant divine, was born at Annaberg, in Saxony, where his father was a schoolmaster. In 1682 he went to the Gymnasium at Gera, and three years later to the university of Wittenberg. Here he made a special study of theology and history, and afterwards, through the influence of P.J. Spener, “the father of pietism,” he became tutor in Quedlinburg. His first work, Die Erste Liebe zu Christo, to which in modern times attention was again directed by Leo Tolstoy, appeared in 1696. It went through five editions before 1728, and gained the author much reputation. In the year after its publication he was invited to Giessen as professor of church history. The life and work here, however, proved so distasteful to him that he resigned in 1698, and returned to Quedlinburg. In 1699 he began to publish his largest work, described by Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God is within You, chap, iii.) as “remarkable, although little known,” Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, in which he has been thought by some to show more impartiality towards heresy than towards the Church (cp. Otto Pfleiderer, Development of Theology, p. 277). His next work, Geheimniss der göttlichen Sophia, published in 1700, seemed to indicate that he had developed a form of mysticism. Soon afterwards, however, his acceptance of a pastorate marked a change, and he produced a number of noteworthy works on practical theology. He was also known as the author of sacred poems. Gottfried Arnold has rightly been classed with the pietistic section of Protestant historians (Bibliotheca Sacra, 1850).
See Calwer-Zeller, Theologisches Handwörterbuch, and the account of him in Albert Knapp’s new edition of Die erste Liebe zu Christo (1845).
ARNOLD, MATTHEW (1822-1888), English poet, literary critic and inspector of schools, was born at Laleham, near Staines, on the 24th of December 1822. When it is said that he was the son of the famous Dr Arnold of Rugby, and that Winchester, Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, contributed their best towards his education, it seems superfluous to add that, in estimating Matthew Arnold and his work, training no less than original endowment has to be considered. A full academic training has its disadvantages as well as its gains. In the individual no less than in the species the history of man’s development is the history of the struggle between the impulse to express original personal force and the impulse to make that force bow to the authority of custom. Where in any individual the first of these impulses is stronger than usual, a complete academic training is a gain; but where the second of these impulses is the dominant one, the effect of the academic habit upon the mind at its most sensitive and most plastic period is apt to be crippling. In regard to Matthew Arnold, it would be a bold critic of his life and his writings who should attempt to say what his work would have been if his training had been different. In his judgments on Goethe, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Hugo, it may be seen how strong was his impulse to bow to authority. On the other hand, in Arnold’s ingenious reasoning away the conception of Providence to “a stream of tendency not ourselves which makes for righteousness,” we see how strong was his natural impulse for taking original views. The fact that the very air Arnold breathed during the whole of the impressionable period of his life was academic is therefore a very important fact to bear in mind.
In one of his own most charming critical essays he contrasts the poetry of Homer, which consists of “natural thoughts in natural words,” with the poetry of Tennyson, which consists of “distilled thoughts in distilled words.” “Distilled” is one of the happiest words to be found in poetical criticism, and may be used with equal aptitude in the criticism of life. To most people the waters of life come with all their natural qualities—sweet or bitter—undistilled. Only the ordinary conditions of civilization, common to all, flavoured the waters of life to Shakespeare, to Cervantes, to Burns, to Scott, to Dumas, and those other great creators whose minds were mirrors—broad and clear—for reflecting the rich drama of life around them. To Arnold the waters of life came distilled so carefully that the wonder is that he had any originality left. A member of the upper stratum of that “middle class” which he despised, or pretended to despise—the eldest son of one of the most accomplished as well as one of the most noble-tempered men of his time—Arnold from the moment of his birth drank the finest distilled waters that can be drunk even in these days. Perhaps, on the whole, the surprising thing is how little he suffered thereby. Indeed those who had formed an idea of Arnold’s personality from their knowledge of his “culture,” and especially those who had been delighted by the fastidious and feminine delicacy of his prose style, used to be quite bewildered when for the first time they met him at a dinner-table or in a friend’s smoking-room. His prose was so self-conscious that what people expected to find in the writer was the Arnold as he was conceived by certain “young lions” of journalism whom he satirized—a somewhat over-cultured petit-maître—almost, indeed, a coxcomb of letters. On the other hand, those who had been captured by his poetry expected to find a man whose sensitive organism responded nervously to every uttered word as an aeolian harp answers to the faintest breeze. What they found was a broad-shouldered, manly—almost burly—Englishman with a fine countenance, bronzed by the open air of England, wrinkled apparently by the sun, wind-worn as an English skipper’s, open and frank as a fox-hunting squire’s—and yet a countenance whose finely chiselled features were as high-bred and as commanding as Wellington’s or Sir Charles Napier’s. The voice they heard was deep-toned, fearless, rich and frank, and yet modulated to express every nuance of thought, every movement of emotion and humour. In his prose essays the humour he showed was of a somewhat thin-lipped kind; in his more important poems he showed none at all. It was here, in this matter of humour, that Arnold’s writings were specially misleading as to the personality of the man. Judged from his poems, it was not with a poet like the writer of “The Northern Farmer,” or a poet like the writer of “Ned Bratts,” that any student of poetry would have dreamed of classing him. Such a student would actually have been more likely to class him with two of his contemporaries between whom and himself there were but few points in common, the “humourless” William Morris and the “humourless” Rossetti. For, singularly enough, between him and them there was this one point of resemblance: while all three were richly endowed with humour, while all three were the very lights of the sets in which they moved, the moment they took pen in hand to write poetry they became sad. It would almost seem as if, like Rossetti, Arnold actually held that poetry was not the proper medium for humour. No wonder, then, if the absence of humour in his poetry did much to mislead the student of his work as to the real character of the man.
After a year at Winchester, Matthew Arnold entered Rugby school in 1837. He early began to write and print verses. His first publication was a Rugby prize poem, Alaric at Rome, in 1840. This was followed in 1843, after he had gone up to Oxford in 1840 as a scholar of Balliol, by his poem Cromwell, which won the Newdigate prize. In 1844 he graduated with second-class honours, and in 1845 was elected a fellow of Oriel College, where among his colleagues was A.H. Clough, his friendship with whom is commemorated in that exquisite elegy Thyrsis. From 1847 to 1851 he acted as private secretary to Lord Lansdowne; and in the latter year, after acting for a short time as assistant-master at Rugby, he was appointed to an inspectorship of schools, a post which he retained until two years before his death. He married, in June 1851, the daughter of Mr Justice Wightman, Meanwhile, in 1849, appeared The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, by A, a volume which gained a considerable esoteric reputation. In 1852 he published another volume under the same initial, Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems. Empedocles is as undramatic a poem perhaps as was ever written in dramatic form, but studded with lyrical beauties of a very high order. In 1853 Arnold published a volume of Poems under his own name. This consisted partially of poems selected from the two previous volumes. A second series of poems, which contained, however, only two new ones, was published in 1855. So great was the impression made by these in academic circles, that in 1857 Arnold was elected professor of poetry at Oxford, and he held the chair for ten years. In 1858 he published his classical tragedy, Merope. Nine years afterwards his New Poems (1867) were published. While he held the Oxford professorship he published several series of lectures, which gave him a high place as a scholar and critic. The essays[1] On Translating Homer: Three Lectures given at Oxford, published in 1861, supplemented in 1862 by On Translating Homer: Last Words, a fourth lecture given in reply to F.W. Newman’s Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice (1861), and On the Study of Celtic Literature, published in 1867, were full of subtle and brilliant if not of profound criticism. So were the two series of Essays in Criticism, the first of which, consisting of articles reprinted from various reviews, appeared in 1865. The essay on “A Persian Passion Play” was added in the editions of 1875; and a second series, edited by Lord Coleridge, appeared in 1888.
Arnold’s poetic activity almost ceased after he left the chair of poetry at Oxford. He was several times sent by government to make inquiries into the state of education in France, Germany, Holland and other countries; and his reports, with their thorough-going and searching criticism of continental methods, as contrasted with English methods, showed how conscientiously he had devoted some of his best energies to the work. His fame as a poet and a literary critic has somewhat overshadowed the fact that he was during thirty-five years of his life—from 1851 to 1836—employed in the Education Department as one of H.M. inspectors of schools, while his literary work was achieved in such intervals of leisure as could be spared from the public service. At the time of his appointment the government, by arrangement with the religious bodies, entrusted the inspection of schools connected with the Church of England to clergymen, and agreed also to send Roman Catholic inspectors to schools managed by members of that communion. Other schools—those of the British and Foreign Society, the Wesleyans, and undenominational schools generally—were inspected by laymen, of whom Arnold was one. There were only three or four of these officers at first, and their districts were necessarily large. It is to the experience gained in intercourse with Nonconformist school managers that we may attribute the curiously intimate knowledge of religious sects which furnished the material for some of his keen though good-humoured sarcasms. The Education Act of 1870, which simplified the administrative system, abolished denominational inspection, and thus greatly reduced the area assigned to a single inspector. Arnold took charge of the district of Westminster, and remained in that office until his resignation, taking also an occasional share in the inspection of training colleges for teachers, and in conferences at the central office. His letters, passim, show that some of the routine which devolved upon him was distasteful, and that he was glad to entrust to a skilled assistant much of the duty of individual examination and the making up of schedules and returns. But the influence he exerted on schools, on the department, and on the primary education of the whole country, was indirectly far greater than is generally supposed. His annual reports, of which more than twenty were collected into a volume by his friend and official chief, Sir Francis (afterwards Lord) Sandford, attracted, by reason of their freshness of style and thought, much more of public attention than is usually accorded to blue-book literature; and his high aims, and his sympathetic appreciation of the efforts and difficulties of the teachers, had a remarkable effect in raising the tone of elementary education, and in indicating the way to improvement. In particular, he insisted on the formative elements of school education, on literature and the “humanities,” as distinguished from the collection of scraps of information and “useful knowledge”; and he sought to impress all the young teachers with the necessity of broader mental cultivation than was absolutely required to obtain the government certificate. In his reports also he dwelt often and forcibly on the place which the study of the Bible, not the distinctive formularies of the churches, ought to hold in English schools. He urged that besides the religious and moral purposes of Scriptural teaching, it had a literary value of its own, and was the best instrument in the hands even of the elementary teacher for uplifting the soul and refining and enlarging the thoughts of young children.
On three occasions Arnold was asked to assist the government by making special inquiries into the state of education in foreign countries. These duties were especially welcome to him, serving as they did as a relief from the monotony of school inspection at home, and as opportunities for taking a wider survey of the whole subject of education, and for expressing his views on principles and national aims as well as administrative details. In 1859, as foreign assistant commissioner, he prepared for the duke of Newcastle’s commission to inquire into the subject of elementary education a report (printed 1860) which was afterwards reprinted (1861) in a volume entitled The Popular Education of France, with Notices of that of Holland and Switzerland. In 1865 he was again employed as assistant-commissioner by the Schools Inquiry Commission under Lord Taunton; and his report on this subject, On Secondary Education in Foreign Countries (1866), was subsequently reprinted under the title Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868). Twenty years later he was sent by the Education Department to make special inquiries on certain specified points, e.g. free education, the status and training of teachers, and compulsory attendance at schools. The result of this investigation appeared as a parliamentary paper, Special Report on certain points connected with Elementary Education in Germany, Switzerland and France, in 1886. He also contributed the chapter on “Schools” (1837-1887) to the second volume of Mr Humphry Ward’s Reign of Queen Victoria. Part of his official writings may be studied in Reports for Elementary Schools (1852-1882), edited by Sir F. Sandford in 1889.