Harper's Round Table, December 8, 1896

by Various

Arnold's admirable manner of dealing with the boys is familiar to all readers of Tom Brown, but besides the fighting, betting, and bullying which lingered in Tom's day, Arnold encountered a great deal of open and systematic rule-breaking. The boys used to keep guns and beagles in the backs of shops, and employed much of their spare time in poaching in the neighborhood. This sort of thing Arnold easily quelled by telling the shopkeepers that he would "put their shops out of bounds"—that is, forbid the boys from entering them, even to buy things,—if they kept on helping the boys to go poaching. The horsy cliques among the boys caused Arnold more trouble. Rugby is in a first-rate hunting country, so that the temptation was very great to mount a nag and go scurrying off over fences and hedges. On one occasion, a boy who fancied himself as a steeple-chaser bragged that he could give any fellow in the school the pick of all the horses in Rugby town and beat him. A boy named Corbett accepted the challenge, selecting as a mount the best fencer he could find. The challenger picked the fastest horse in town. In the race the fast horse refused several of the fences, so that Corbett won. After the race the challenger blustered so much about the superiority of Corbett's horse as a fencer that Corbett challenged him to swap horses and try another race. This time Corbett was so careful in taking the fences that he fell behind; yet he did not miss a single obstacle. On the homestretch he gave his speedy animal the spurs, and, as he had planned, sported in ahead amid wild enthusiasm from his friends. Of all this Arnold took no notice. This so elated the boys that they got up a grand steeple-chase, for which seven horses entered. At this juncture Arnold sent for Corbett, and told him that he had winked at the first two races only because if he had taken any notice of it he should have had to expel both boys. He added that if the steeple-chase came off he would expel every boy who rode or was present at it. There was no steeple-chase. Soon after, however, a great national steeple-chase took place at Dunchurch, a neighboring town, and Arnold "put the course in bounds" for the day. The whole school went to see it, and every sensible and manly boy must have been won over to his master's side.

RUGBY SCHOOL-HOUSE FROM THE CLOSE.

Fights among the boys Arnold handled with similar moderation and firmness. It had been the custom to settle quarrels by knock-out contests somewhere out of bounds, where there was little or no chance of interruption. Arnold ruled that all fights should take place within the close—that is, in the great playing-field just behind the school—every part of which his study windows overlooked. The penalty for the breach of this rule was the expulsion of all parties concerned. The fight between Tom Brown and Slogger Williams, which took place in the close behind the chapel, was no child's play; but the appearance of the Doctor at least cut it off short of manslaughter. Once fighting was put under rules, it was in the plain road toward being suppressed altogether.

To ascribe all these reforms, and the general elevation of public opinion with regard to the discipline of schoolboys, to Arnold's sole influence would perhaps not be just. His plan of governing the school, as I have said, was only a modification of that which Wykeham had framed centuries earlier for his school at Winchester. In only one particular did Arnold attempt to improve on Wykeham's plan. He tried to make the sixth form report offenders to him for punishment. In the few cases in which this was done the informers lost caste forever. The sixth form would lick offenders, as upper boys have done, I suppose, ever since Wykeham's day, but they wouldn't blab. It shows what a good plan Wykeham established, that even Arnold couldn't better it. Arnold's ideas about influencing his upper boys he seems also to have learned at Winchester. When he was himself an upper boy his master once set him to construe a hard passage in Thucydides, of whom he was so fond that later he edited his works. When his master objected to the rendering, Arnold stood up for it stoutly, even obstinately. "Very well," said the master, quietly, "we will have some one who will construe it my way." Some hours after school Arnold came to the master looking very crestfallen. "I have come to tell you, sir, that I have found out I was wrong." "Ay, Arnold," said the master, holding out his hand in forgiveness, "I knew you would come." The question of kneeling to pray in the dormitory, over which Tom Brown struggled so manfully in defence of Arthur, cropped out at other public schools at the same time and even earlier. In a word, Arnold's mastership at Rugby fell in a time when all matters of life not only in public schools, but in general society, were being elevated and purified. The prominent place which Rugby took in the general movement was due partly to the fact that it was the most turbulent of the schools, and partly to the fact that of all head masters Arnold was the most manly, devout, and beloved.

Since Arnold's time, the work he began has been carried steadily on. To-day the boys break bounds chiefly to go bicycling or to take a swim in the Avon. Bullying is almost entirely a thing of the past. Of the old fighting spirit little remains. The very site of Tom's famous encounter is now occupied by the chancel of the new chapel, and choir-boys sing whereof old Rattle, in his thunder-and-lightning waist-coat, wagered "two to one in half-crowns on the big 'un." All this, of course, is as it should be; but one of the masters admitted to me that spite and backbiting are probably commoner than they were in the days of black eyes and bloody noses. I could not help suspecting that if Tom Brown were to come back to his old haunts he would find life pretty dull, and perhaps even hanker for another encounter with the bully Flashman. It would be a capital joke, I often think, to make a born reformer live in a place that was just as he liked it.

All the dearest associations at Rugby, at any rate, have to do with the fight that was fought in Arnold's time, and the most sacred landmarks and customs are those which are mentioned in Tom Brown. As you are shown through the school-house your guide points out the "double study"—fully five feet by six—which is said to have been occupied by Tom and Arthur. The boys who use it now, I am certain, never doubt that an actual Tom Brown once lived in it. In the corridor, to be sure, the top of the old hall table, with T. HUGHES carved boldly upon it in capitals, is hung reverently upon the wall; but the explanation of this is precisely that which a schoolboy once gave to the question of the authorship of Homer. If Tom Brown's School-Days was not about Tom Brown, it was about another boy of the same name.

In one of the dormitories you will find the oak table on top of which new boys were—and still are—made to sing. The rule is that they must stand with their legs as wide astraddle as possible, and hold a lighted candle in each hand. Your guide will show you the tin candle-guards or "parishes" in which the candles were held. On the table beside the boy is always placed a jug of drink, composed of beer, salt, mustard, soap, and other savory ingredients, a swallow of which the new boy is made to gulp down if he fails to sing a song. About the walls of the room are ranged eleven little oak cots, beside one of which Arthur most certainly knelt to pray on his first night in school. Or if you insist that Arthur never lived, why, then, you remember that every fellow has knelt down, or wished he dared to, on his first night of homesickness in a strange, rough place.

The school-house dining-room stands almost exactly as it stood in Tom Brown's days. There are tables all around the sides, and a table in the middle. The small boys sit about the side tables, and, as the years go by, move gradually around the room, until at last they are admitted to the middle table. To sit here means much more than merely being in the sixth form. At the side of the hall is the fireplace where Flashman roasted Tom for refusing to sell the lottery ticket on Harkaway; and the very benches stand beside it upon which the bully's head struck, a few days later, when Tom and East finally got the better of him. From the dining-room there are two doors leading into the quad, one through a long and difficult passage, and the other opening directly upon it. The little boys who sit at the side tables have to go out through the long passage; only the big boys at the middle table can go out directly. For a little boy to go out through the big boys' door would be unheard-of arrogance. This, Rugbeians think, is an excellent custom, both because it existed in Tom Brown's time, and because it teaches boys their places. When I told my guide that it reminded me of the farmer who had a big hole in his barn door for his cat, and a little hole for his kitten, I think he thought me irreverent.

Across the court, outside the hall, are the turret stairs leading up to the school-rooms where Arnold met his sixth form. Many a man who is now old and gray remembers these rooms as the place where he learned more about obedience and more about ruling vigorously and justly than he might ever have known except for his head master at Rugby. The walls of the rooms are covered with old table-tops, upon which are carved the names of these ancient Rugbeians. The tables now in use are untouched. If a boy carves so much as his initials, he has to have the wood planed and polished, or pay the price of a new table. Fame, you see, comes harder nowadays.