Literary Lives

MATTHEW ARNOLD

BY

G.W.E. RUSSELL

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1904

Copyright, 1904, By
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published, March, 1904

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
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LITERARY LIVES

Edited by Robertson Nicoll, LL.D.

MATTHEW ARNOLD. By G.W.E. Russell.
CARDINAL NEWMAN. By William Barry, D.D.
MRS. GASKELL. By Flora Masson.
JOHN BUNYAN. By W. Hale White.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË. By Clement K. Shorter.
R.M. HUTTON. By W. Robertson Nicoll.
GOETHE. By Edward Dowden.
HAZLITT. By Louise Imogen Guiney.

Each Volume, Illustrated, $1.00, net

OFFERED TO
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S CHILDREN
WITH AFFECTIONATE REMEMBRANCE
"OF THAT UNRETURNING DAY"

"We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless, yet with all this agitated, stretching out his arms for something beyond—tendentemque manus ripæ ulterioris amore."—Essays in Criticism.

PREFACE

It may be thought that some apology is needed for the production of yet another book about Matthew Arnold. If so, that apology is to be found in the fact that nothing has yet been written which covers exactly the ground assigned to me in the present volume.

It was Arnold's express wish that he should not be made the subject of a Biography. This rendered it impossible to produce the sort of book by which an eminent man is usually commemorated—at once a history of his life, an estimate of his work, and an analysis of his character and opinions. But though a Biography was forbidden, Arnold's family felt sure that he would not have objected to the publication of a selection from his correspondence; and it became my happy task to collect, and in some sense to edit, the two volumes of his Letters which were published in 1895. Yet in reality my functions were little more than those of the collector and the annotator. Most of the Letters had been severely edited before they came into my hands, and the process was repeated when they were in proof.

A comparison of the letters addressed to Mr. John Morley and Mr. Wyndham Slade with those addressed to the older members of the Arnold family will suggest to a careful reader the nature and extent of the excisions to which the bulk of the correspondence was subjected. The result was a curious obscuration of some of Arnold's most characteristic traits—such, for example, as his over-flowing gaiety, and his love of what our fathers called Raillery. And, in even more important respects than these, an erroneous impression was created by the suppression of what was thought too personal for publication. Thus I remember to have read, in some one's criticism of the Letters, that Mr. Arnold appeared to have loved his parents, brothers, sisters, and children, but not to have cared so much for his wife. To any one who knew the beauty of that life-long honeymoon, the criticism is almost too absurd to write down. And yet it not unfairly represents the impression created by a too liberal use of the effacing pencil.

But still, the Letters, with all their editorial shortcomings (of which I willingly take my full share) constitute the nearest approach to a narrative of Arnold's life which can, consistently with his wishes, be given to the world; and the ground so covered will not be retraversed here. All that literary criticism can do for the honour of his prose and verse has been done already: conscientiously by Mr. Saintsbury, affectionately and sympathetically by Mr. Herbert Paul, and with varying competence and skill by a host of minor critics. But in preparing this book I have been careful not to re-read what more accomplished pens than mine have written; for I wished my judgment to be, as far as possible, unbiassed by previous verdicts.

I do not aim at a criticism of the verbal medium through which a great Master uttered his heart and mind; but rather at a survey of the effect which he produced on the thought and action of his age.

To the late Professor Palgrave, to Monsieur Fontanès, and to Miss Rose Kingsley my thanks have been already paid for the use of some of Arnold's letters which are published now for the first time. It may be well to state that whenever, in the ensuing pages, passages are put in inverted commas, they are quoted from Arnold, unless some other authorship is indicated. Here and there I have borrowed from previous writings of my own, grounding myself on the principle so well enounced by Mr. John Morley—"that a man may once say a thing as he would have it said, δὶς δὲ οὑκ ἑνδέχεται—he cannot say it twice."

G.W.E.R.

Christmas, 1903.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Eldest son of Thomas Arnold, D.D., and Mary Penrose

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

This book is intended to deal with substance rather than with form. But, in estimating the work of a teacher who taught exclusively with the pen, it would be perverse to disregard entirely the qualities of the writing which so penetrated and coloured the intellectual life of the Victorian age. Some cursory estimate of Arnold's powers in prose and verse must therefore be attempted, before we pass on to consider the practical effect which those powers enabled him to produce.

And here it behoves a loyal and grateful disciple to guard himself sedulously against the peril of overstatement. For to the unerring taste, the sane and sober judgment, of the Master, unrestrained and inappropriate praise would have been peculiarly distressing.

This caution applies with special force to our estimate of his rank in poetry. That he was a poet, the most exacting, the most paradoxical criticism will hardly deny; but there is urgent need for moderation and self-control when we come to consider his place among the poets. Are we to call him a great poet? The answer must be carefully pondered.

In the first place, he did not write very much. The total body of his poetry is small. He wrote in the rare leisure-hours of an exacting profession, and he wrote only in the early part of his life. In later years he seemed to feel that the "ancient fount of inspiration"[1] was dry. He had delivered his message to his generation, and wisely avoided last words. Then it seems indisputable that he wrote with difficulty. His poetry has little ease, fluency, or spontaneous movement. In every line it bears traces of the laborious file. He had the poet's heart and mind, but they did not readily express themselves in the poetic medium. He longed for poetic utterance, as his only adequate vent, and sought it earnestly with tears. Often he achieved it, but not seldom he left the impression of frustrated and disappointing effort, rather than of easy mastery and sure attainment.

Again, if we bear in mind Milton's threefold canon, we must admit that his poetry lacks three great elements of power. He is not Simple, Sensuous, or Passionate. He is too essentially modern to be really simple. He is the product of a high-strung civilization, and all its complicated crosscurrents of thought and feeling stir and perplex his verse. Simplicity of style indeed he constantly aims at, and, by the aid of a fastidious culture, secures. But his simplicity is, to use the distinction which he himself imported from France, rather akin to simplesse than to simplicité—to the elaborated and artificial semblance than to the genuine quality. He is not sensuous except in so far as the most refined and delicate appreciation of nature in all her forms and phases can be said to constitute a sensuous enjoyment. And then, again, he is pre-eminently not passionate. He is calm, balanced, self-controlled, sane, austere. The very qualities which are his characteristic glory make passion impossible.

Another hindrance to his title as a great poet, is that he is not, and never could be, a poet of the multitude. His verse lacks all popular fibre. It is the delight of scholars, of philosophers, of men who live by silent introspection or quiet communing with nature. But it is altogether remote from the stir and stress of popular life and struggle. Then, again, his tone is profoundly, though not morbidly, melancholy, and this is fatal to popularity. As he himself said, "The life of the people is such that in literature they require joy." But not only his thought, his very style, is anti-popular. Much of his most elaborate work is in blank verse, and that in itself is a heavy draw-back. Much also is in exotic and unaccustomed metres, which to the great bulk of English readers must always be more of a discipline than of a delight. And, even when he wrote in our indigenous metres, his ear often played him false. His rhymes are sometimes only true to the eye, and his lines are over-crowded with jerking monosyllables. Let one glaring instance suffice—

Calm not life's crown, though calm is well.

The sentiment is true and even profound; but the expression is surely rugged and jolting to the last degree; and there are many lines nearly as ineuphonious. Here are some samples, collected by that fastidious critic, Mr. Frederic Harrison—

"The sandy spits, the shore-lock'd lakes."

"Could'st thou no better keep, O Abbey old?"

"The strange-scrawl'd rocks, the lonely sky."

These Mr. Harrison cites as proof that, "where Nature has withheld the ear for music, no labour and no art can supply the want." And I think that even a lover may add to the collection—

As the punt's rope chops round.

But, after all these deductions and qualifications have been made, it remains true that Arnold was a poet, and that his poetic quality was pure and rare. His musings "on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,"[2] are essentially and profoundly poetical. They have indeed a tragic inspiration. He is deeply imbued by the sense that human existence, at its best, is inadequate and disappointing. He feels, and submits to, its incompleteness and its limitations. With stately resignation he accepts the common fate, and turns a glance of calm disdain on all endeavours after a spurious consolation. All round him he sees

Uno'erleap'd Mountains of Necessity,
Sparing us narrower margin than we deem.

He dismissed with a rather excessive contempt the idea that the dreams of childhood may be intimations of immortality; and the inspiration which poets of all ages have agreed to seek in the hope of endless renovation, he found in the immediate contemplation of present good. What his brother-poet called "self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control," are the keynotes of that portion of his poetry which deals with the problems of human existence. When he handles these themes, he speaks to the innermost consciousness of his hearers, telling us what we know about ourselves, and have believed hidden from all others, or else putting into words of perfect suitableness what we have dimly felt, and have striven in vain to utter. It is then that, to use his own word, he is most "interpretative." It is this quality which makes such poems as Youth's Agitations, Youth and Calm, Self-dependence, and The Grande Chartreuse so precious a part of our intellectual heritage.

In 1873 he wrote to his sister: "I have a curious letter from the State of Maine in America, from a young man who wished to tell me that a friend of his, lately dead, had been especially fond of my poem, A Wish, and often had it read to him in his last illness. They were both of a class too poor to buy books, and had met with the poem in a newspaper."

It will be remembered that in A Wish, the poet, contemptuously discarding the conventional consolations of a death-bed, entreats his friends to place him at the open window, that he may see yet once again—

Bathed in the sacred dews of morn
The wide aerial landscape spread—
The world which was ere I was born,
The world which lasts when I am dead;

Which never was the friend of one,
Nor promised love it could not give.
But lit for all its generous sun,
And lived itself, and made us live.

There let me gaze, till I become
In soul, with what I gaze on, wed!
To feel the universe my home;
To have before my mind—instead

Of the sick room, the mortal strife,
The turmoil for a little breath—
The pure eternal course of life,
Not human combatings with death!

Thus feeling, gazing, might I grow
Composed, refresh'd, ennobled, clear;
Then willing let my spirit go
To work or wait elsewhere or here!

This solemn love and reverence for the continuous life of the physical universe may remind us that Arnold's teaching about humanity, subtle and searching as it is, has done less to endear him to many of his disciples, than his feeling for Nature. His is the kind of Nature-worship which takes nothing at second-hand. He paid "the Mighty Mother" the only homage which is worthy of her acceptance, a minute and dutiful study of her moods and methods. He placed himself as a reverent learner at her feet before he presumed to go forth to the world as an exponent of her teaching. It is this exactness of observation which makes his touches of local colouring so vivid and so true. This gives its winning charm to his landscape-painting, whether the scene is laid in Kensington Gardens, or the Alps, or the valley of the Thames. This fills The Scholar-Gipsy, and Thyrsis, and Obermann, and The Forsaken Merman with flawless gems of natural description, and felicities of phrase which haunt the grateful memory.

In brief, it seems to me that he was not a great poet, for he lacked the gifts which sway the multitude, and compel the attention of mankind. But he was a true poet, rich in those qualities which make the loved and trusted teacher of a chosen few—as he himself would have said, of "the Remnant." Often in point of beauty and effectiveness, always in his purity and elevation, he is worthy to be associated with the noblest names of all. Alone among his contemporaries, we can venture to say of him that he was not only of the school, but of the lineage, of Wordsworth. His own judgment on his place among the modern poets was thus given in a letter of 1869: "My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetic sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning. Yet because I have more perhaps of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs."

When we come to consider him as a prose-writer, cautions and qualifications are much less necessary. Whatever may be thought of the substance of his writings, it surely must be admitted that he was a great master of style. And his style was altogether his own. In the last year of his life he said to the present writer: "People think I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style."

Clearness is indeed his own most conspicuous note, and to clearness he added singular grace, great skill in phrase-making, great aptitude for beautiful description, perfect naturalness, absolute ease. The very faults which the lovers of a more pompous rhetoric profess to detect in his writing are the easy-going fashions of a man who wrote as he talked. The members of a college which produced Cardinal Newman, Dean Church, and Matthew Arnold are not without some justification when they boast of "the Oriel style."

But style, though a great delight and a great power, is not everything, and we must not found our claim for him as a prose-writer on style alone. His style was the worthy and the suitable vehicle of much of the very best criticism which English literature contains. We take the whole mass of his critical writing, from the Lectures on Homer and the Essays in Criticism down to the Preface to Wordsworth and the Discourse on Milton; and we ask, Is there anything better?

When he wrote as a critic of books, his taste, his temper, his judgment were pretty nearly infallible. He combined a loyal and reasonable submission to literary authority with a free and even daring use of private judgment. His admiration for the acknowledged masters of human utterance—Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe—was genuine and enthusiastic, and incomparably better informed than that of some more conventional critics. Yet this cordial submission to recognized authority, this honest loyalty to established reputation, did not blind him to defects, did not seduce him into indiscriminate praise, did not deter him from exposing the tendency to verbiage in Burke and Jeremy Taylor, the excessive blankness of much of Wordsworth's blank verse, the undercurrent of mediocrity in Macaulay, the absurdities of Ruskin's etymology. And, as in great matters, so in small. Whatever literary production was brought under his notice, his judgment was clear, sympathetic, and independent. He had the readiest appreciation of true excellence, a quick eye for minor merits of facility and method, a severe intolerance of turgidity and inflation—of what he called "desperate endeavours to render a platitude endurable by making it pompous," and a lively horror of affectation and unreality. These, in literature as in life, were in his eyes the unpardonable sins.

On the whole it may be said that, as a critic of books, he had in his lifetime the reputation, the vogue, which he deserved. But his criticism in other fields has hardly been appreciated at its proper value. Certainly his politics were rather fantastic. They were influenced by his father's fiery but limited Liberalism, by the abstract speculation which flourishes perennially at Oxford, and by the cultivated Whiggery which he imbibed as Lord Lansdowne's Private Secretary; and the result often seemed wayward and whimsical. Of this he was himself in some degree aware. At any rate he knew perfectly that his politics were lightly esteemed by politicians, and, half jokingly, half seriously, he used to account for the fact by that jealousy of an outsider's interference, which is natural to all professional men. Yet he had the keenest interest, not only in the deeper problems of politics, but also in the routine and mechanism of the business. He enjoyed a good debate, liked political society, and was interested in the personalities, the trivialities, the individual and domestic ins-and-outs, which make so large a part of political conversation.

But, after all, Politics, in the technical sense, did not afford a suitable field for his peculiar gifts. It was when he came to the criticism of national life that the hand of the master was felt. In all questions affecting national character and tendency, the development of civilization, public manners, morals, habits, idiosyncrasies, the influence of institutions, of education, of literature, his insight was penetrating, his point of view perfectly original, and his judgment, if not always sound, invariably suggestive. These qualities, among others, gave to such books as Essays in Criticism, Friendship's Garland, and Culture and Anarchy, an interest and a value quite independent of their literary merit. And they are displayed in their most serious and deliberate form, dissociated from all mere fun and vivacity, in his Discourses in America. This, he told the present writer, was the book by which, of all his prose-writings, he most desired to be remembered. It was a curious and memorable choice.

Another point of great importance in his prosewriting is this; if he had never written prose the world would never have known him as a humorist. And that would have been an intellectual loss not easily estimated. How pure, how delicate, yet how natural and spontaneous his humour was, his friends and associates knew well; and—what is by no means always the case—the humour of his writing was of exactly the same tone and quality as the humour of his conversation. It lost nothing in the process of transplantation. As he himself was fond of saying, he was not a popular writer, and he was never less popular than in his humorous vein. In his fun there is no grinning through a horse-collar, no standing on one's head, none of the guffaws, and antics, and "full-bodied gaiety of our English Cider-Cellar." But there is a keen eye for subtle absurdity, a glance which unveils affectation and penetrates bombast, the most delicate sense of incongruity, the liveliest disrelish for all the moral and intellectual qualities which constitute the Bore, and a vein of personal raillery as refined as it is pungent. Sydney Smith spoke of Sir James Mackintosh as "abating and dissolving pompous gentlemen with the most successful ridicule." The words not inaptly describe Arnold's method of handling personal and literary pretentiousness.

His praise as a phrase-maker is in all the Churches of literature. It was his skill in this respect which elicited the liveliest compliments from a transcendent performer in the same field. In 1881 he wrote to his sister: "On Friday night I had a long talk with Lord Beaconsfield. He ended by declaring that I was the only living Englishman who had become a classic in his own lifetime. The fact is that what I have done in establishing a number of current phrases, such as Philistinism, Sweetness and Light, and all that is just the thing to strike him." In 1884 he wrote from America about his phrase, The Remnant—"That term is going the round of the United States, and I understand what Dizzy meant when he said that I had performed 'a great achievement in launching phrases.'" But his wise epigrams and compendious sentences about books and life, admirable in themselves, will hardly recall the true man to the recollection of his friends so effectually as his sketch of the English Academy, disturbed by a "flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G.A. Sala;" his comparison of Miss Cobbe's new religion to the British College of Health; his parallel between Phidias' statue of the Olympian Zeus and Coles' truss-manufactory; Sir William Harcourt's attempt to "develop a system of unsectarian religion from the Life of Mr. Pickwick;" the "portly jeweller from Cheapside," with his "passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life;" the grandiose war-correspondence of the Times, and "old Russell's guns getting a little honey-combed;" Lord Lumpington's subjection to "the grand, old, fortifying, classical curriculum," and the "feat of mental gymnastics" by which he obtained his degree; the Rev. Esau Hittall's "longs and shorts about the Calydonian Boar, which were not bad;" the agitation of the Paris Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph on hearing the word "delicacy"; the "bold, bad men, the haunters of Social Science Congresses," who declaim "a sweet union of philosophy and poetry" from Wordsworth on the duty of the State towards education; the impecunious author "commercing with the stars" in Grub Street, reading "the Star for wisdom and charity, the Telegraph for taste and style," and looking for the letter from the Literary Fund, "enclosing half-a-crown, the promise of my dinner at Christmas, and the kind wishes of Lord Stanhope[3] for my better success in authorship."

One is tempted to prolong this analysis of literary arts and graces; but enough has been said to recall some leading characteristics of Arnold's genius in verse and prose. We turn now to our investigation of what he accomplished. The field which he included in his purview was wide—almost as wide as our national life. We will consider, one by one, the various departments of it in which his influence was most distinctly felt; but first of all a word must be said about his Method.

CHAPTER II

METHOD

The Matthew Arnold whom we know begins in 1848; and, when we first make his acquaintance, in his earliest letters to his mother and his eldest sister, he is already a Critic. He is only twenty-five years old, and he is writing in the year of Revolution. Thrones are going down with a crash all over Europe; the voices of triumphant freedom are in the air; the long-deferred millennium of peace and brotherhood seems to be just on the eve of realization. But, amid all this glorious hurly-burly, this "joy of eventful living," the young philosopher stands calm and unshaken; interested indeed, and to some extent sympathetic, but wholly detached and impartially critical. He thinks that the fall of the French Monarchy is likely to produce social changes here, for "no one looks on, seeing his neighbour mending, without asking himself if he cannot mend in the same way." He is convinced that "the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has struck"; he thinks that a five years' continuance of these institutions is "long enough, certainly, for patience, already at death's door, to have to die in." He pities (in a sonnet) "the armies of the homeless and unfed." But all the time he resents the "hot, dizzy trash which people are talking" about the Revolution. He sees a torrent of American vulgarity and "laideur" threatening to overflow Europe. He thinks England, as it is, "not liveable-in," but is convinced that a Government of Chartists would not mend matters; and, after telling a Republican friend that "God knows it, I am with you," he thus qualifies his sympathy—

Yet, when I muse on what life is, I seem
Rather to patience prompted, than that proud
Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud—
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

In fine, he is critical of his own country, critical of all foreign nations, critical of existing institutions, critical of well-meant but uninstructed attempts to set them right. And, as he was in the beginning, so he continued throughout his life and to its close. It is impossible to conceive of him as an enthusiastic and unqualified partisan of any cause, creed, party, society, or system. Admiration he had, for worthy objects, in abundant store; high appreciation for what was excellent; sympathy with all sincere and upward-tending endeavour. But few indeed were the objects which he found wholly admirable, and keen was his eye for the flaws and foibles which war against absolute perfection. On the last day of his life he said in a note to the present writer: "S—— has written a letter full of shriekings and cursings about my innocent article; the Americans will get their notion of it from that, and I shall never be able to enter America again." That "innocent article" was an estimate, based on his experience in two recent visits to the United States, of American civilization. "Innocent" perhaps it was, but it was essentially critical. He began by saying that in America the "political and social problem" had been well solved; that there the constitution and government were to the people as well-fitting clothes to a man; that there was a closer union between classes there than elsewhere, and a more "homogeneous" nation. But then he went on to say that, besides the political and social problem, there was a "human problem," and that in trying to solve this America had been less successful—indeed, very unsuccessful. The "human problem" was the problem of civilization, and civilization meant "humanization in society"—the development of the best in man, in and by a social system. And here he pronounced America defective. America generally—life, people, possessions—was not "interesting." Americans lived willingly in places called by such names as Briggsville, Jacksonville and Marcellus. The general tendency of public opinion was against distinction. America offered no satisfaction to the sense for beauty, the sense for elevation. Tall talk and self-glorification were rampant, and no criticism was tolerated. In fine, there were many countries, less free and less prosperous, which were more civilized.

That "innocent article," written in 1888, shows exactly the same balanced tone and temper—the same critical attitude towards things with which in the main he sympathizes—as the letters of 1848.

And what is true of the beginning and the end is true of the long tract which lay between. From first to last he was a Critic—a calm and impartial judge, a serene distributer of praise and blame—never a zealot, never a prophet, never an advocate, never a dealer in that "blague and mob-pleasing" of which he truly said that it "is a real talent and tempts many men to apostasy."

For some forty years he taught his fellow-men, and all his teaching was conveyed through the critical medium. He never dogmatized, preached, or laid down the law. Some great masters have taught by passionate glorification of favourite personalities or ideals, passionate denunciation of what they disliked or despised. Not such was Arnold's method; he himself described it, most happily, as "sinuous, easy, unpolemical." By his free yet courteous handling of subjects the most august and conventions the most respectable, he won to his side a band of disciples who had been repelled by the brutality and cocksureness of more boisterous teachers. He was as temperate in eulogy as in condemnation; he could hint a virtue and hesitate a liking.[4]

It happens, as we have just seen, that his earliest and latest criticisms were criticisms of Institutions, and a great part of his critical writing deals with similar topics; but these will be more conveniently considered when we come to estimate his effect on Society and Politics. That effect will perhaps be found to have been more considerable than his contemporaries imagined; for, though it became a convention to praise his literary performances and judgments, it was no less a convention to dismiss as visionary and absurd whatever he wrote about the State and the Community.

But in the meantime we must say a word about his critical method when applied to Life, and when applied to Books. When one speaks of criticism, one is generally thinking of prose. But, when we speak of Arnold's criticism, it is necessary to widen the scope of one's observation; for he was never more essentially the critic than when he concealed the true character of his method in the guise of poetry. Even if we decline to accept his strange judgment that all poetry "is at bottom a criticism of life," still we must perceive that, as a matter of fact, many of his own poems are as essentially critical as his Essays or his Lectures.

We all remember that he poked fun at those misguided Wordsworthians who seek to glorify their master by claiming for him an "ethical system as distinctive and capable of exposition as Bishop Butler's," and "a scientific system of thought." But surely we find in his own poetry a sustained doctrine of self-mastery, duty, and pursuit of truth, which is essentially ethical, and, in its form, as nearly "scientific" and systematic as the nature of poetry permits. And this doctrine is conveyed, not by positive, hortatory, or didactic methods, but by Criticism—the calm praise of what commends itself to his judgment, the gentle but decisive rebuke of whatever offends or darkens or misleads. Of him it may be truly said, as he said of Goethe, that

He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place,
And said: Thou ailest here, and here.

His deepest conviction about "the suffering human race" would seem to have been that its worst miseries arise from a too exalted estimate of its capacities. Men are perpetually disappointed and disillusioned because they expect too much from human life and human nature, and persuade themselves that their experience, here and hereafter, will be, not what they have any reasonable grounds for expecting, but what they imagine or desire. The true philosophy is that which

Neither makes man too much a god,
Nor God too much a man.

Wordsworth thought it a boon to "feel that we are greater than we know": Arnold thought it a misfortune. Wordsworth drew from the shadowy impressions of the past the most splendid intimations of the future. Against such vain imaginings Arnold set, in prose, the "inexorable sentence" in which Butler warned us to eschew pleasant self-deception; and, in verse, the persistent question—

Say, what blinds us, that we claim the glory
Of possessing powers not our share?

He rebuked

Wishes unworthy of a man full-grown.

He taught that there are

Joys which were not for our use designed.

He warned discontented youth not to expect greater happiness from advancing years, because

one thing only has been lent
To youth and age in common—discontent.

Friendship is a broken reed, for

Our vaunted life is one long funeral,

and even Hope is buried with the "faces that smiled and fled."

Death, at least in some of its aspects, seemed to him the

Stern law of every mortal lot,
Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear;
And builds himself I know not what
Of second life I know not where.

And yet, in gleams of happier insight, he saw the man who "flagged not in this earthly strife,"

His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,

mount, though hardly, to eternal life. And, as he mused over his father's grave, the conviction forced itself upon his mind that somewhere in the "labour-house of being" there still was employment for that father's strength, "zealous, beneficent, firm."

Here indeed is the more cheerful aspect of his "criticism of life." Such happiness as man is capable of enjoying is conditioned by a frank recognition of his weaknesses and limitations; but it requires also for its fulfilment the sedulous and dutiful employment of such powers and opportunities as he has.

First and foremost, he must realize the "majestic unity" of his nature, and not attempt by morbid introspection to dissect himself into

Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers,
Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control.

Then he must learn that

To its own impulse every action stirs.

He must live by his own light, and let earth live by hers. The forces of nature are to be in this respect his teachers—

But with joy the stars perform their shining,
And the sea its long moon-silvered roll;
For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul.

But, though he is to learn from Nature and love Nature and enjoy Nature, he is to remember that she

never was the friend of one,
Nor promised love she could not give;

and so he is not to expect too much from her, or demand impossible boons. Still less is he to be content with feeling himself "in harmony" with her; for

Man covets all which Nature has, but more.

That "more" is Conscience and the Moral Sense.

Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.

And this brings us to the idea of Duty as set forth in his poems, and Duty resolves itself into three main elements: Truth—Work—Love. Truth comes first. Man's prime duty is to know things as they are. Truth can only be attained by light, and light he must cultivate, he must worship. Arnold's highest praise for a lost friend is that he was "a child of light"; that he had "truth without alloy,"

And joy in light, and power to spread the joy.

The saddest part of that friend's death is the fear that it may bring,

After light's term, a term of cecity:

the best hope for the future, that light will return and banish the follies, sophistries, delusions, which have accumulated in the darkness. "Lucidity of soul" may be—nay, must be, "sad"; but it is not less imperative. And the truth which light reveals must not only be sought earnestly and cherished carefully, but even, when the cause demands it, championed strenuously. The voices of conflict, the joy of battle, the "garments rolled in blood," the "burning and fuel of fire" have little place in Arnold's poetry. But once at any rate he bursts into a strain so passionate, so combatant, that it is difficult for a disciple to recognize his voice; and then the motive is a summons to a last charge for Truth and Light—

They out-talk'd thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee?
Better men fared thus before thee;
Fired their ringing shot and pass'd,
Hotly charged—and sank at last.

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!

But the note of battle, even for what he holds dearest and most sacred, is not a familiar note in his poetry. He had no natural love of

the throng'd field where winning comes by strife.

His criticism of life sets a higher value on work than on fighting. "Toil unsevered from tranquillity," "Labour, accomplish'd in repose"—is his ideal of happiness and duty.

Even the Duke of Wellington—surely an unpromising subject for poetic eulogy—is praised because he was a worker,

Laborious, persevering, serious, firm.

Nature, again, is called in to teach us the secret of successful labour. Her forces are incessantly at work, and in that work they are entirely concentrated—

Bounded by themselves, and unregardful
In what state God's other works may be,
In their own tasks all their powers pouring,
These attain the mighty life you see.

But those who had the happiness of knowing Arnold in the flesh will feel that they never so clearly recognize his natural voice as when, by his criticism of life, he is inculcating the great law of Love. Even in the swirl of Revolution he clings to his fixed idea of love as duty. After discussing the rise and fall of dynasties, the crimes of diplomacy, the characteristic defects of rival nations, and all the stirring topics of the time, he abruptly concludes his criticism with an appeal to Love. "Be kind to the neighbours—'this is all we can.'"

And as in his prose, so in his poetry. Love, even in arrest of formal justice, is the motive of The Sick King in Bokhara; love, that wipes out sin, of Saint Brandan—

That germ of kindness, in the womb
Of mercy caught, did not expire;
Outlives my guilt, outlives my doom,
And friends me in the pit of fire.

The Neckan and The Forsaken Merman tell the tale of contemptuous unkindness and its enduring poison. A Picture at Newstead depicts the inexpiable evils wrought by violent wrong. Poor Matthias tells in a parable the cruelty, not less real because unconscious, of imperfect sympathy—

Human longings, human fears,
Miss our eyes and miss our ears.
Little helping, wounding much,
Dull of heart, and hard of touch,
Brother man's despairing sign
Who may trust us to divine?

In Geist's Grave, the "loving heart," the "patient soul" of the dog-friend are made to "read their homily to man"; and the theme of the homily is still the same: the preciousness of the love which outlives the grave. But nowhere perhaps is his doctrine about the true divinity of love so exquisitely expressed as in The Good Shepherd with the Kid—

He saves the sheep, the goats He doth not save.
So rang Tertullian's sentence . . .
. . . . . But she sigh'd,
The infant Church! Of love she felt the tide

So much, then, for his Criticism of Life, as applied in and through his poems. It is not easy to estimate, even approximately, the effect produced by a loved and gifted poet, who for thirty years taught an audience, fit though few, that the main concerns of human life were Truth, Work, and Love. Those "two noblest of things, Sweetness and Light" (though heaven only knows what they meant to Swift), meant to him Love and Truth; and to these he added the third great ideal, Work—patient, persistent, undaunted effort for what a man genuinely believes to be high and beneficent ends. Such a "Criticism of Life," we must all admit, is not unworthy of one who seeks to teach his fellow-men; even though some may doubt whether poetry is the medium best fitted for conveying it.

We must now turn our attention to his performances in the field of literary criticism; and we begin in the year 1853. He had won the prize for an English poem at Rugby, and again at Oxford. In 1849 he had published without his name, and had recalled, a thin volume, called The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems. He had done the same with Empedocles on Etna, and other Poems in 1852. The best contents of these two volumes were combined in Poems, 1853, and to this book he gave a Preface, which was his first essay in Literary Criticism. In this essay he enounces a certain doctrine of poetry, and, true to his lifelong practice, he enounces it mainly by criticism of what other people had said. A favourite cry of the time was that Poetry, to be vital and interesting, must "leave the exhausted past, and draw its subjects from matters of present import." It was the favourite theory of Middle Class Liberalism. The Spectator uttered it with characteristic gravity; Kingsley taught it obliquely in Alton Locke. Arnold assailed it as "completely false," as "having a philosophical form and air, but no real basis in fact." In assailing it, he justified his constant recourse to Antiquity for subject and method; he exalted Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, and Dido as eternally interesting; he asserted that the most famous poems of the nineteenth century "left the reader cold in comparison with the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the Oresteia, or by the episode of Dido." He glorified the Greeks as the "unapproached masters of the grand style." He even ventured to doubt whether the influence of Shakespeare, "the greatest, perhaps, of all poetical names," had been wholly advantageous to the writers of poetry. He weighed Keats in the balance against Sophocles and found him wanting.

Of course, this criticism, so hostile to the current cant of the moment, was endlessly misinterpreted and misunderstood. He thus explained his doctrine in a Preface to a Second Edition of his Poems: "It has been said that I wish to limit the poet, in his choice of subjects, to the period of Greek and Roman antiquity; but it is not so. I only counsel him to choose for his subjects great actions, without regarding to what time they belong." A few years later he wrote to a friend (in a letter hitherto unpublished): "The modern world is the widest and richest material ever offered to the artist; but the moulding and representing power of the artist is not, or has not yet become (in my opinion), commensurate with his material, his mundus representandus. This adequacy of the artist to his world, this command of the latter by him, seems to me to be what constitutes a first-class poetic epoch, and to distinguish it from such an epoch as our own; in this sense, the Homeric and Elizabethan poetry seems to me of a superior class to ours, though the world represented by it was far less full and significant."

There is no need to describe in greater detail the two Prefaces, which can be read, among rather incongruous surroundings, in the volume called Irish Essays, and Others. But they are worth noting, because in them, at the age of thirty, he first displayed the peculiar temper in literary criticism which so conspicuously marked him to the end; and that temper happily infected the critical writing of a whole generation; until the Iron Age returned, and the bludgeon was taken down from its shelf, and the scalping-knife refurbished.

In his critical temper, lucidity, courage, and serenity were equally blended. In his criticism of books, as in his criticism of life, he aimed first at Lucidity—at that clear light, uncoloured by prepossession, which should enable him to see things as they really are. In a word, he judged for himself; and, however much his judgment might run counter to prejudice or tradition, he dared to enounce it and persist in it. He spoke with proper contempt of the "tenth-rate critics, for whom any violent shock to the public taste would be a temerity not to be risked"; but that temerity he himself had in rich abundance. Homer and Sophocles are the only poets of whom, if my memory serves me, he never wrote a disparaging word. Shakespeare is, and rightly, an object of national worship; yet Arnold ventured to point out his "over-curiousness of expression"; and, where he writes—

Till that Bellona's bridegroom, lapped in proof,
Confronted him with self-comparisons,

Arnold dared to say that the writing was "detestable."

Macaulay is, perhaps less rightly, another object of national worship; yet Arnold denounced the "confident shallowness which makes him so admired by public speakers and leading-article writers, and so intolerable to all searchers for truth"; and frankly avowed that to his mind "a man's power to detect the ring of false metal in the Lays of Ancient Rome was a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all." According to Macaulay, Burke was "the greatest man since Shakespeare." Arnold admired Burke, revered him, paid him the highest compliment by trying to apply his ideas to actual life; but, when Burke urged his great arguments by obstetrical and pathological illustrations, Arnold was ready to denounce his extravagances, his capriciousness, his lapses from good taste.

The same perfectly courageous criticism, qualifying generous admiration, he applied in turn to Jeremy Taylor and Addison, to Milton, and Pope, and Gray, and Keats, and Shelley, and Scott—to all the principal luminaries of our literary heaven. He went all lengths with Mr. Swinburne in praising Byron's "sincerity and strength," but he qualified the praise: "Our soul had felt him like the thunder's roll," but "he taught us little." Devout Wordsworthian as he is, he does not shrink from saying that much of Wordsworth's work is "quite uninspired, flat and dull," and sets himself to the task of "relieving him from a great deal of the poetical baggage which now encumbers him."

And so Lucidity, which reveals the Truth, enounces its decisions with absolute courage; and to Lucidity and Courage is added the crowning grace of Serenity. However much the subject of his study may offend his taste or sin against his judgment, he never loses his temper with the author whom he is criticising. He never bludgeons or scalps or scarifies; but serenely indicates, with the calm gesture of a superior authority, the defects and blots which mar perfection, but which the unthinking multitude ignores, or, at worst, admires.

The years 1860 and 1861 mark an important stage in the development of his critical method. He was now Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and he delivered from the professorial chair his famous lectures On Translating Homer, to which in 1862 he added his "Last Words." As much as anything which he ever wrote, these lectures have a chance of living and being enjoyed when we are dust. For Homer is immortal, and he who interprets Homer to Englishmen may hope at least for a longer life than most of us.

Few are those who can still recall the graceful figure in its silken gown; the gracious address, the slightly supercilious smile, of the Milton jeune et voyageant,[5] just returned from contact with all that was best in French culture to instruct and astonish his own university; few who can still catch the cadence of the opening sentence: "It has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer"; few that heard the fine tribute of the aged scholar,[6] who, as the young lecturer closed a later discourse, murmured to himself, "The Angel ended."

With his characteristic trick of humorous mock-humility, Arnold wrote to a friendly reviewer who praised these lectures on translating Homer: "I am glad any influential person should call attention to the fact that there was some criticism in the three lectures; most people seem to have gathered nothing from them except that I abused F.W. Newman, and liked English hexameters."

Criticisms of criticism are the most melancholy reading in the world, and therefore no attempt will here be made to examine in detail the praise which in these lectures he poured upon the supreme exemplar of pure art, or the delicious ridicule with which he assailed the most respectable attempts to render Homer into English. For the praise, let one quotation suffice—"Homer's grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the North, of the authors of Othello and Faust; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky."

On the ridicule, we must dwell a little more at length; for this was, in the modern slang, "a new departure" in his critical method. At the date when he published his lectures On Translating Homer, English criticism of literature was, and for some time had been, an extremely solemn business. Much of it had been exceedingly good, for it had been produced by Johnson and Coleridge, and De Quincey and Hazlitt. Much had been atrociously bad, resembling all too closely Mr. Girdle's pamphlet "in sixty-four pages, post octavo, on the character of the Nurse's deceased husband in Romeo and Juliet, with an enquiry whether he had really been a 'merry man' in his lifetime, or whether it was merely his widow's affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him."[7]

But, whether good or bad, criticism had been solemn. Even Arnold's first performances in the art had been as grave as Burke or Wordsworth. But in his lectures On Translating Homer he added a new resource to his critical apparatus. He still pursued Lucidity, Courage, and Serenity; he still praised temperately and blamed humanely; but now he brought to the enforcement of his literary judgment the aid of a delicious playfulness. Cardinal Newman was not ashamed to talk of "chucking" a thing off, or getting into a "scrape." So perhaps a humble disciple may be permitted to say that Arnold pointed his criticisms with "chaff."

This method of depreciating literary performances which one dislikes, of conveying dissent from literary doctrines which one considers erroneous, had fallen out of use in our literary criticism. It was least to be expected from a professorial chair in a venerable university—least of all from a professor not yet forty, who might have been expected to be weighed down and solemnized by the greatness of his function and the awfulness of his surroundings. Hence arose the simple and amusing wrath of pedestrian poets like Mr. Ichabod Wright, and ferocious pedants like Professor Francis Newman, and conventional worshippers of such idols as Scott and Macaulay, when they found him poking his seraphic fun at the notion that Homer's song was like "an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast," or at lines so purely prosaic as—

All these thy anxious cares are also mine,
Partner beloved;

or so eccentric as—

Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle

or so painful as—

To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.

This habit of enlisting playfulness in aid of literary judgment was carried a step further in Essays in Criticism, published in 1865. This book, of which Mr. Paul justly remarks that it was "a great intellectual event," was a collection of essays written in the years 1863 and 1864. The original edition contained a preface dealing very skittishly with Bishop Colenso's biblical aberrations. The allusions to Colenso were wisely omitted from later editions, but the preface as it stands contains (besides the divinely-beautiful eulogy of Oxford) some of Arnold's most delightful humour. He never wrote anything better than his apology to the indignant Mr. Ichabod Wright; his disclaimer of the title of Professor, "which I share with so many distinguished men—Professor Pepper, Professor Anderson, Professor Frickel"; his attempt to comfort the old gentleman who was afraid of being murdered, by reminding him that "il n'y a pas d'homme necessaire"; and in all these cases the humour subserves and advances a serious criticism of books or of life.

As we have now seen him engaged in the duty of criticising others, it will not be out of place to cite in this connection, though they belong to other periods, some criticisms of himself. As far back as 1853, he had observed, with characteristic lucidity, that the great fault of his earlier poems was "the absence of charm." "Charm" was indeed the element in which they were deficient; but, as years advanced, charm was superadded to thought and feeling. In 1867, he said in a letter to his friend F.T. Palgrave: "Saint Beuve has written to me with great interest about the Obermann poem, which he is getting translated. Swinburne fairly took my breath away. I must say the general public praise me in the dubious style in which old Wordsworth used to praise Bernard Barton, James Montgomery, and suchlike; and the writers of poetry, on the other hand—Browning, Swinburne, Lytton—praise me as the general public praises its favourites. This is a curious reversal of the usual order of things. Perhaps it is from an exaggerated estimate of my own unpopularity and obscurity as a poet, but my first impulse is to be astonished at Swinburne's praising me, and to think it an act of generosity. Also he picks passages which I myself should have picked, and which I have not seen other people pick."

In 1869, when the first Collected Edition of his poems was in the press, he wrote to Palgrave, who had suggested some alterations, this estimate of his own merits and defects,—

"I am really very much obliged to you for your letter. I think the printing has made too much progress to allow of dealing with any of the long things now; I have left 'Merope' aside entirely, but the rest I have reprinted. In a succeeding edition, however, I am not at all sure that I shall not leave out the second part of the 'Church of Brou.' With regard to the others, I think I shall let them stand—but often for other reasons than because of their intrinsic merit. For instance, I agree that in the 'Sick King in Bokhara' there is a flatness in parts; but then it was the first thing of mine dear old Clough thoroughly liked. Against 'Tristram,' too, many objections may fairly be urged; but then the subject is a very popular one, and many people will tell you they like it best of anything I have written. All this has to be taken into account. 'Balder' perhaps no one cares much for except myself; but I have always thought, though very likely I am wrong, that it has not had justice done to it; I consider that it has a natural propriety of diction and rhythm which is what we all prize so much in Virgil, and which is not common in English poetry. For instance, Tennyson has in the Idylls something dainty and tourmenté which excludes this natural propriety; and I have myself in 'Sohrab' something, not dainty, but tourmenté and Miltonically ampoullé, which excludes it.... We have enough Scandinavianism in our nature and history to make a short conspectus of the Scandinavian mythology admissible. As to the shorter things, the 'Dream' I have struck out. 'One Lesson' I have re-written and banished from its pre-eminence as an introductory piece. 'To Marguerite' (I suppose you mean 'We were apart' and not 'Yes! in the sea') I had paused over, but my instinct was to strike it out, and now your suggestion comes to confirm this instinct, I shall act upon it. The same with 'Second Best.' It is quite true there is a horrid falsetto in some stanzas of the 'Gipsy Child'—it was a very youthful production. I have re-written those stanzas, but am not quite satisfied with the poem even now. 'Shakespeare' I have re-written. 'Cruikshank' I have re-titled, and re-arranged the 'World's Triumphs.' 'Morality' I stick to—and 'Palladium' also. 'Second Best' I strike out and will try to put in 'Modern Sappho' instead—though the metre is not right. In the 'Voice' the falsetto rages too furiously; I can do nothing with it; ditto in 'Stagirius,' which I have struck out. Some half-dozen other things I either have struck out, or think of striking out. 'Hush, not to me at this bitter departing' is one of them. The Preface I omit entirely. 'St. Brandan,' like 'Self-Deception,' is not a piece that at all satisfies me, but I shall let both of them stand."

In 1879 he wrote with reference to the edition of his poems in two volumes—

"In beginning with 'early poems' I followed, as I have done throughout, the chronological arrangement adopted in the last edition, an arrangement which is, on the whole, I think, the most satisfactory. The title of 'early' implies an excuse for defective work of which I would not be supposed blind to the defects—such as the 'Gipsy Child,' which you suggest for exclusion; but something these early pieces have which later work has not, and many people—perhaps for what are truth faults in the poems—have liked them. You have been a good friend to my poems from the first, one of those whose approbation has been a real source of pleasure to me. There are things which I should like to do in poetry before I die, and of which lines and bits have long been done, in particular Lucretius, St. Alexius, and the journey of Achilles after death to the Island of Leuce; but we accomplish what we can, not what we will."

Enough, perhaps, has now been said about his critical method; and, as this book proposes to deal with results, it is right to enquire into the effect of that method upon men who aspired to follow him, at whatever distance, in the path of criticism. The answer can be easily given. He taught us, first and foremost, to judge for ourselves; to take nothing at second hand; to bow the knee to no reputation, however high its pedestal in the Temple of Fame, unless we were satisfied of its right to stand where it was. Then he taught us to discriminate, even in what we loved best, between its excellences and its defects; to swallow nothing whole, but to chew the cud of disinterested meditation, and accept or reject, praise or blame, in accordance with our natural and deliberate taste. He taught us to love Beauty supremely, to ensue it, to be on the look out for it; and, when we found it—when we found what really and without convention satisfied our "sense for beauty"—to adore it, and, as far as we could, to imitate it. Contrariwise, he taught us to shun and eschew what was hideous, to make war upon it, and to be on our guard against its contaminating influence. And this teaching he applied alike to hideousness in character, sight, and sound—to "watchful jealousy" and rancour and uncleanness; to the "dismal Mapperly Hills," and the "uncomeliness of Margate," the "squalid streets of Bethnal Green," and "Coles' Truss Manufactory standing where it ought not, on the finest site in Europe"; to such poetry as—

And scarcely had she begun to wash
When she was aware of the grisly gash,

to such hymns as—

O happy place!
When shall I be
My God with Thee,
To see Thy face?

"What a touch of grossness!" he exclaimed, "what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than "the best race in the world"; by the Ilissus there was "no Wragg,[8] poor thing!"

Then he taught us to aim at sincerity in our intercourse with Nature. Never to describe her as others saw her, never to pretend a knowledge of her which we did not possess, never to endow her with fanciful attributes of our own or other people's imagining, never to assume her sympathy with mortal lots, never to forget that she, like humanity, has her dark, her awful, her revengeful moods. He taught us not to be ashamed of our own sense of fun, our own faculty of laughter; but to let them play freely even round the objects of our reasoned reverence, just in the spirit of the teacher who said that no man really believed in his religion till he could venture to joke about it. Above all, he taught us, even when our feelings were most forcibly aroused, to be serene, courteous, and humane; never to scold, or storm, or bully; and to avoid like a pestilence such brutality as that of the Saturday Review when it said that something or another was "eminently worthy of a great nation," and to disparage it "eminently worthy of a great fool." He laid it down as a "precious truth" that one's effectiveness depends upon "the power of persuasion, of charm; that without this all fury, energy, reasoning power, acquirement, are thrown away and only render their owner more miserable."

In a word, he combined Light with Sweetness, and in the combination lies his abiding power.

CHAPTER III

EDUCATION

"Though I am a schoolmaster's son, I confess that school-teaching or school-inspecting is not the line of life I should naturally have chosen. I adopted it in order to marry a lady who is here to-night, and who feels your kindness as warmly and gratefully as I do. My wife and I had a wandering life of it at first. There were but three lay-inspectors for all England. My district went right across from Pembroke Dock to Great Yarmouth. We had no home. One of our children was born in a lodging at Derby, with a workhouse, if I recollect aright, behind and a penitentiary in front. But the irksomeness of my new duties was what I felt most, and during the first year or so it was sometimes insupportable."

The name of Arnold is so inseparably connected with Education[9] that many of Matthew Arnold's friends were astonished by this frank confession, which he made in his address to the Westminster Teachers' Association on the occasion of his retirement from the office of Inspector. There is reason to believe that the profession on which he had set his early affections was Diplomacy. It is easy to see how perfectly, in many respects, diplomatic life would have suited him. The proceeds of his Fellowship, then considerable and unhampered by any conditions of residence, would have supplied the lack of private fortune. He had some of the diplomatist's most necessary gifts—love of travel, familiarity with European literature, keen interest in foreign politics and institutions, taste for cultivated society, rich enjoyment of life, and fascinating manners conspicuously free from English stiffness and shyness. As to his interest in foreign politics, it is only necessary to cite England and the Italian Question, which he wrote in 1859, and which deals with the unity and independence of Italy. It is the first essay which he ever published, but it abounds in clearness and force, and is entirely free from the whimsicality which in later years sometimes marred his prose. Above all it shows a sympathetic insight into foreign aspirations which is rare indeed even among cultivated Englishmen. In reference to this pamphlet he truly observed: "The worst of the English is that on foreign politics they search so very much more for what they like and wish to be true, than for what is true. In Paris there is certainly a larger body of people than in London who treat foreign politics as a science, as a matter to know upon before feeling upon."

As regards the diplomatic life, it seems certain that he would have enjoyed it thoroughly, and one would think that he was exactly the man to conduct a delicate negotiation with tact, good humour, and good sense. Some glimmering of these gifts seems to have dawned from time to time on the unimaginative minds of his official chiefs; for three times he was sent by the Education Office on Foreign Missions, half diplomatic in their character, to enquire into the condition and methods of Public Instruction on the Continent. The ever-increasing popularity which attended him on these Missions, and his excellent judgment in handling Foreign Ministers and officials, might perhaps suggest the thought that in renouncing diplomacy he renounced his true vocation. But the thought, though natural, is superficial, and must give way to the absolute conviction that he never could have known true happiness—never realized his own ideal of life—without a wife, a family, and a home. And these are luxuries which, as a rule, diplomatists cannot attain till

youth and bloom and this delightful world

have lost something of their freshness. In renouncing diplomacy he secured, before he was twenty-nine, the chief boon of human life; but a vague desire to enjoy that boon amid continental surroundings seems constantly to have visited him. In 1851 he wrote to his wife: "We can always look forward to retiring to Italy on £200 a year." In 1853 he wrote to her again: "All this afternoon I have been haunted by a vision of living with you at Berne, on a diplomatic appointment, and how different that would be from this incessant grind in schools." And, thirty years later, when he was approaching the end of his official life, he wrote a friend: "I must go once more to America to see my daughter, who is going to be married to an American, settled in her new home. Then I 'feel like' retiring to Florence, and rarely moving from it again."

But, in spite of all these dreams and longings, he seems to have known that his lot was cast in England, and that England must be the sphere of his main activities. "Year slips away after year, and one begins to find that the Office has really had the main part of one's life, and that little remains."

We, who are his disciples, habitually think of him as a poet, or a critic, or an instructor in national righteousness and intelligence; as a model of private virtue and of public spirit. We do not habitually think of him as, in the narrow and technical sense, an Educator. And yet a man who gives his life to a profession must be in a great measure judged by what he accomplished in and through that profession, even though in the first instance he "adopted it in order to marry."

Though not a born educator, not an educator by natural aptitude or inclination, he made himself an educator by choice; and, having once chosen his profession, he gradually developed an interest in it, a pride in it, a love of it which astonished some of his friends. How irksome it was to him at the beginning we saw just now in his address to the Teachers. How irksome in many of its incidents it remained we can see in his published Letters.

"I have had a hard day. Thirty pupil-teachers to examine in an inconvenient room, and nothing to eat except a biscuit which a charitable lady gave me."

"This certainly has been one of the most uncomfortable weeks I ever spent. Battersea is so far off, the roads so execrable, and the rain so incessant.... There is not a yard of flagging, I believe, in all Battersea."

"Here is my programme for this afternoon: Avalanches—The Steam-Engine—The Thames—India-Rubber—Bricks—The Battle of Poictiers—Subtraction—The Reindeer—The Gunpowder Plot—The Jordan. Alluring, is it not? Twenty minutes each, and the days of one's life are only three score years and ten."

"About four o'clock I found myself so exhausted, having eaten nothing since breakfast, that I sent out for a bun, and ate it before the astonished school."

"Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I had to be at the Westminster Training School at ten o'clock; be there till half-past one, and begin again at two, going on till half-past six; this, with eighty candidates to look after, and gas burning most of the day, either to give light or to help to warm the room."

"One sees a teacher holding up an apple to a gallery of little children, and saying: 'An apple has a stalk, peel, pulp, core, pips, and juice; it is odorous and opaque, and is used for making a pleasant drink called cider.'"

"I sometimes grow impatient of getting old amid a press of occupation and labour for which, after all, I was not born.... The work I like is not very compatible with any other. But we are not here to have facilities found us for doing the work we like, but to make them."

Still, his work as an inspector might have been made more interesting and less irksome, if he had served under chiefs of more enlightened or more liberal temper, as may be inferred from some words uttered after his retirement—

"To Government I owe nothing. But then I have always remembered that, under our Parliamentary system, the Government probably takes little interest in such work, whatever it is, as I have been able to do in the public service, and even perhaps knows nothing at all about it. But we must take the evil of our system along with the good. Abroad probably a Minister might have known more about my performances; but then abroad I doubt whether I should ever have survived to perform them. Under the strict bureaucratic system abroad, I feel pretty sure that I should have been dismissed ten times over for the freedom with which on various occasions I have exposed myself on matters of Religion and Politics. Our Government here in England takes a large and liberal view about what it considers a man's private affairs, and so I have been able to survive as an Inspector for thirty-five years; and to the Government I at least owe this—to have been allowed to survive."

For thirty-five years then he served his country as an Inspector of Elementary Schools, and the experience which he thus gained, the interest which was thus awoke in him, suggested to him some large and far-reaching views about our entire system of National Education. It is no disparagement to a highly-cultivated and laborious staff of public servants to say that he was the greatest Inspector of Schools that we have ever possessed. It is true that he was not, as the manner of some is, omnidoct and omnidocent. His incapacity to examine little girls in needlework he frankly confessed; and his incapacity to examine them in music, if unconfessed, was not less real. "I assure you," he said to the Westminster Teachers, "I am not at all a harsh judge of myself; but I know perfectly well that there have been much better inspectors than I." Once, when a flood of compliments threatened to overwhelm him, he waved it off with the frank admission—"Nobody can say I am a punctual Inspector." Why then do we call him the greatest Inspector that we ever had? Because he had that most precious of all combinations—a genius and a heart. Trying to account for what he could not ignore—his immense popularity with the masters and mistresses of the schools which he inspected—he attributed part of it to the fact that he was Dr. Arnold's son, part to the fact that he was "more or less known to the public as an author"; but, of personal qualifications for his office, he enumerated two only, and both eminently characteristic: "One is that, having a serious sense of the nature and function of criticism, I from the first sought to see the schools as they really were; thus it was felt that I was fair, and that the teachers had not to apprehend from me crotchets, pedantries, humours, favouritism, and prejudices." The other was that he had learnt to sympathize with the teachers. "I met daily in the schools men and women discharging duties akin to mine, duties as irksome as mine, duties less well paid than mine; and I asked myself: Are they on roses? Gradually it grew into a habit with me to put myself into their places, to try and enter into their feelings, to represent to myself their life."

It belongs to the very nature of an Inspector's work that it escapes public notice. Very few are the people who care to inform themselves about the studies, the discipline, the intellectual and moral atmosphere of Elementary Schools, except in so far as those schools can be made battle-grounds for sectarian animosity. And, if they are few now, they were still fewer during the thirty-five years of Arnold's Inspectorship. A conspicuous service was rendered both to the cause of Education and to Arnold's memory when the late Lord Sandford rescued from the entombing blue-books his friend's nineteen General Reports to the Education Department on Elementary Schools. In those Reports we read his deliberate judgment on the merits, defects, needs, possibilities and ideals of elementary schools; and this not merely as regards the choice of subjects taught, but as regards cleanliness, healthiness, good order, good manners, relations between teachers and pupils, selection of models in prose and verse, and the literary as contrasted with the polemical use of the Bible.

Such an enumeration may sound dull enough, but there is no dulness in the Reports themselves. They are stamped from the first page to the last with his lightness of touch and perfection of style. They belong as essentially to literature as his Essays or his Lectures.

In reading these Reports on Elementary Schools we catch repeated allusions to his three Missions of enquiry into Education on the Continent. Those Missions produced separate Reports of their own, and each Report developed into a volume. "The Popular Education of France" gave the experience which he acquired in 1859, and its Introduction is reproduced in Mixed Essays under the title of "Democracy." A French Eton (not very happily named) was an unofficial product of the same tour; for, extending his purview from Elementary Education, he there dealt with the relation between "Middle Class Education and the State."

"Why," he asked, "cannot we have throughout England as the French have throughout France, as the Germans have throughout Germany, as the Swiss have throughout Switzerland, and as the Dutch have throughout Holland, schools where the middle and professional classes may obtain at the rate of from £20 to £50 a year if they are boarders, and from £5 to £15 a year if they are day scholars, an education of as good quality, with as good guarantees of social character and advantages for a future career in the world, as the education which French children of the corresponding class can obtain from institutions like that of Toulouse or Sorèze?"

Schools and Universities of the Continent gave the result of the Mission in 1865 to investigate the Education of the Upper and Middle Classes in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Its bearing on English Education may be inferred from these words of its author, written in October, 1868: "There is a vicious article in the new Quarterly on my school-book, by one of the Eton undermasters, who, like Demetrius the Silversmith, seems alarmed for the gains of his occupation."

The "Special Report on Elementary Education Abroad" grew out of his third Mission in 1885; and, over and above these books, dealing specifically with educational problems, we meet constant allusions to the same topics in nearly all his prose-writings. A life-long contact with Education produced in him a profound dissatisfaction with our English system, or want of system, and an almost passionate desire to turn chaos into order by the persistent use of the critical method.

When one talks about English Education, the subject naturally divides itself into the Universities, the Public Schools, the Private Schools, and the Elementary Schools. The classification is not scientifically accurate, but it will serve. With all these strata of Education, he in turn concerned himself; but with the two higher strata much less effectively than with the two lower. It was necessary to the theoretical completeness of his scheme for organizing National Education, that the Universities and the Public Schools, as well as the Private and the Elementary Schools, should be criticised; but, in dealing with the former, his criticism is far less drastic and insistent than with the latter. The reason of the difference probably is that, though an Inspector, a Professor, and a critic, he was frankly human, and shrank from laying his hand too roughly on institutions to which he himself had owed so much.

His feeling for Oxford every one knows. The apostrophe to the "Adorable Dreamer" is familiar to hundreds who could not, for their life, repeat another line of his prose or verse. It was "the place he liked best in the world." When he climbed the hill at Hinksey and looked down on Oxford, he "could not describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me—the hillside, with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames Valley below."

Of the spiritual effect of the place upon hearts nurtured there, he said: "We in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth—the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford."

Of the Honorary Degree conferred on him by Oxford, he said: "Nothing could more gratify me, I think, than this recognition by my own University, of which I am so fond, and where, according to their own established standard of distinction, I did so little." And, after the Encænia at which the degree was actually given, he wrote: "I felt sure I should be well received, because there is so much of an Oxford character about what I have written, and the undergraduates are the last people to bear one a grudge for having occasionally chaffed them."

And here let me insert the moving passage in which, speaking in his last years to an American audience, he did honour to the spiritual master of his undergraduate days. "Forty years ago Cardinal Newman was in the very prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Oxford; he was preaching in St. Mary's pulpit every Sunday; he seemed about to transform and to renew what was for us the most national and natural institution in the world, the Church of England. Who could resist the charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a religious music—subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem to hear him still.... Or, if we followed him back to his seclusion at Littlemore, that dreary village by the London road, and to the house of retreat and the church which he built there—a mean house such as Paul might have lived in when he was tent-making at Ephesus, a church plain and thinly sown with worshippers—who could resist him there either, welcoming back to the severe joys of Church-fellowship, and of daily worship and prayer, the firstlings of a generation which had well-nigh forgotten them?"

When we bear in mind this devotion to Oxford, it is not surprising that he dealt very gently with the defects of English Universities. In 1868 he laid it down that the University ought to provide facilities, after the general education is finished, for the cultivation of special aptitudes. "Our great Universities," he said, "Oxford and Cambridge, do next to nothing towards this end. They are, as Signor Mateucci called them, hauts lycées; and, though invaluable in their way as places where the youth of the upper class prolong to a very great age, and under some very valuable influences, their school-education, yet, with their college and tutor system, nay, with their examination and degree system, they are still, in fact, schools, and do not carry education beyond the stage of general and school education." This is just in the spirit of his famous quotation about the Oxford which he loved so well—

There are our young barbarians, all at play!

In 1875 he wrote: "I do not at all like the course for the History School (at Oxford). Nothing but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading truly great authors forms it, or even to exercise it, as learning a new language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises it.... The regulation of studies is all-important, and there is no one to regulate them, and people think that anyone can regulate them. We shall never do any good till we get a man like Guizot, or W. von Humboldt to deal with the matter, men who have the highest mental training themselves, and this we shall probably in this country never get."

In the wittiest of all his books, and one of the wisest, Friendship's Garland,[10] he thus summarized the too-usual result of our "grand, old, fortifying, classical curriculum." To his Prussian friend enquiring what benefit Lord Lumpington and the Rev. Esau Hittall have derived from that curriculum, that "course of mental gymnastics," the imaginary Arnold replied: "Well, during their three years at Oxford, they were so much occupied with Bullingdon and hunting that there was no great opportunity to judge. But for my own part, I have always thought that their both getting their degrees at last with flying colours, after three weeks of a famous coach for fast men, four nights without going to bed, and an incredible consumption of wet towels, strong cigars, and brandy-and-water, was one of the most astonishing feats of mental gymnastics I ever heard of!"

It must be admitted that his effect on the Universities was not very tangible, not very positive. It was not the kind of effect which can be expressed in figures or reported in Blue Books. One cannot stand in the High Street of Oxford, or on King's Parade at Cambridge, and point to an Institute, or a college, or a school of learning, and say: "Matthew Arnold made that what it is."

His effect was of a different kind. It was written on the fleshly tables of the heart. To Oxford men he seemed like an elder brother, brilliant, playful, lovable, yet profoundly wise; teaching us what to think, to admire, to avoid. His influence fell upon a thirsty and receptive soil. We drank it with delight; and it co-operated with all the best traditions of the place in making us lifelong lovers of romance, and truth, and beauty. One of the keenest minds produced by Oxford between 1870 and 1880 thus summarized his effect on us: "I think he was almost the only man who did not disappoint one."

As in dealing with the Universities, so also in dealing with the Public Schools, Arnold found it difficult to liberate himself from his early environment and prepossessions. He was the son of a Wykehamist, who had become the greatest of Head Masters; he himself was both a Wykehamist and a Rugbeian; he was the brother of three Rugbeians, and the father of three Harrovians. Thus it was impossible for him to regard the Public Schools of England with the dispassionate eye of the complete outsider. It is true that, when he gave rein to his critical instinct, he could not help observing that Public Schools are "precious institutions where, for £250 a year, our boys learn gentlemanlike deportment and cricket"; that with us "the playing-fields are the school"; and that a Prussian Minister of Education would not permit "the keepers of those absurd cock-pits" to examine the boys as they choose, "and send them jogging comfortably off to the University on their lame longs and shorts about the Calydonian Boar." But, when it came to practical dealing, he had a tenderness for the "cock-pit"—even for the playing-fields—almost for the Calydonian Boar—which hindered him from being a very formidable or effective critic. Rugby, with which he was so closely connected, and to which he was so much attached, owes nothing, as far as one knows, to his suggestions or reproaches. At Harrow he lived for five years, on terms of affectionate intimacy with the Head Master and the staff; and, though he was keenly alive to the absurdities of the "catch-scholarship," as he called it, which was cultivated there, and to the inefficiency of the Principia and Notabilia, on which the Harrovian mind was nourished, his adverse judgment never made itself felt. Marlborough he praised and admired as "a decided offspring of Rugby." At Eton his fascinating essay on "Eutrapelia" was given;[11] and he in turn was fascinated by the Memorials of "An Eton Boy," which he reviewed in the Fortnightly for June, 1882.[12] That boy, Arthur Baskerville-Mynors, was certainly a most lovable and attractive character, and he was thus commemorated in the Eton College Chronicle: "His life here was always joyous, a fearless, keen boyhood, spent sans peur et sans reproche. Many will remember him as fleet of foot and of lasting powers, winning the mile and the steeplechase in 1871, and the walking race in 1875. As master of the Beagles in 1875, he showed himself to possess all the qualities of a keen sportsman, with an instinctive knowledge of the craft." On this last sentence Arnold fastened with his characteristic insistence, and used it to point the moral which he was always trying to teach. The Barbarian, as "for shortness we had accustomed ourselves to call" a member of the English upper classes, even when "adult and rigid," had often "invaluable qualities." "It is hard for him, no doubt, to enter into the Kingdom of God—hard for him to believe in the sentiment of the ideal life transforming the life which now is, to believe in it and even to serve it—hard, but not impossible. And in the young the qualities take a brighter colour, and the rich and magical time of youth adds graces of its own to them; and then, in happy natures, they are irresistible."

And so he goes on to give a truly appreciative and affectionate sketch of young Arthur Mynors; and then he quotes the sentence about the Master of the Beagles, and on this he comments thus: "The aged Barbarian will, upon this, admiringly mumble to us his story how the battle of Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have been prepared in those playing-fields as well as victories; disasters due to inadequate mental training—to want of application, knowledge, intelligence, lucidity. The Eton playing-fields have their great charm, notwithstanding; but with what felicity of unconscious satire does that stroke of 'the Master of the Beagles' hit off our whole system of provision of public secondary schools; a provision for the fortunate and privileged few, but for the many, for the nation, ridiculously impossible!" This is his last word on the Public Schools, as that title is conventionally understood. He had a much fuller and more searching criticism for the schools in which the great Middle Class is educated.

It may perhaps be fairly questioned whether great humourists much enjoy the humour of other people. If we apply this question to Arnold's case and seek to answer it by his published works, we shall probably answer in the negative. From first to last, he takes little heed of humorous writers or humorous books. Even in those great authors who are masters of all moods, it is the grave, rather than the humorous mood, which he chooses for commendation. He was a devout Shakespearian, but it is difficult to recall an allusion to Shakespeare's humour, except in the rather oblique form of Dogberry as the type of German officialdom. Swift he quoted with admirable effect, but it was Swift the reviler, not Swift the jester. He says that he made a "wooden Oxford audience laugh aloud with two pages of Heine's wit"; but the lecture, as we read it, shows more of mordant sarcasm than of the material for laughter. Scott he knew by heart, and Carlyle he honestly revered; but he admired the one for his romance and the other for his philosophy. Thackeray, sad to remember, he "did not think a great writer," and so Thackeray's humour disappears, with his pathos and his satire, into the limbo of common-place. The imaginary spokesman of the Daily Telegraph in Friendship's Garland reckons as "the great masters of human thought and human literature, Plato, Shakespeare, Confucius, and Charles Dickens"; and there, to judge from the great bulk of his writing, Arnold's acquaintance with Dickens begins and ends.

But it was one of his amiable traits that, whenever he read a book which pleased him, he immediately began to share his pleasure with his friends. In the year 1880, he writes to his colleague, Mr. Fitch, "I have this year been reading David Copperfield for the first time.[13] Mr. Creakle's School at Blackheath is the type of our English Middle Class Schools, and our Middle Class is satisfied that so it should be."

It would seem that he made this rather belated acquaintance with Dickens' masterpiece, through reading it aloud to one of his children who was laid up with a swelled face. But, however introduced to his notice, the book made a deep impression on him. In the following June he contributed to the Nineteenth Century an article on Ireland styled "The Incompatibles." In that article he suggests that the Irish dislike of England arises in part from the fact that "the Irish do not much come across our aristocracy, exhibiting that factor of civilization, the power of manners, which has undoubtedly a strong attraction for them. What they do come across, and what gives them the idea they have of our civilization and its promise, is our Middle Class."

The mention, so frequent in his writings, of "our Middle Class," seems to demand a definition; and, admitting that in this country the Middle Class has no naturally defined limits, and that it is difficult to say who properly belong to it and who do not, he adopts an educational test. The Middle Class means the people who are brought up at a particular kind of school, and to illustrate that kind of school he has recourse to his newly-discovered treasure. "Much as I have published, I do not think it has ever yet happened to me to comment in print upon any production of Charles Dickens. What a pleasure to have the opportunity of praising a work so sound, a work so rich in merit, as David Copperfield!... Of the contemporary rubbish which is shot so plentifully all round us, we can, indeed, hardly read too little. But to contemporary work so good as David Copperfield we are in danger of perhaps not paying respect enough, of reading it (for who could help reading it?) too hastily, and then putting it aside for something else and forgetting it. What treasures of gaiety, invention, life, are in that book! what alertness and resource! what a soul of good nature and kindness governing the whole! Such is the admirable work which I am now going to call in evidence. Intimately, indeed, did Dickens know the Middle Class; he was bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. Intimately he knew its bringing-up. With the hand of a master he has drawn for us a type of the teachers and trainers of its youth, a type of its places of education. Mr. Creakle and Salem House are immortal. The type itself, it is to be hoped, will perish; but the drawing of it which Dickens has given cannot die. Mr. Creakle, the stout gentleman with a bunch of watch-chain and seals, in an armchair, with the fiery face and the thick veins in his forehead; Mr. Creakle sitting at his breakfast with the cane, and a newspaper, and the buttered toast before him, will sit on, like Theseus, for ever. For ever will last the recollection of Salem House, and of the 'daily strife and struggle' there; the recollection 'of the frosty mornings when we were rung out of bed, and the cold, cold smell of the dark nights when we were rung into bed again; of the evening schoolroom dimly lighted and indifferently warmed, and the morning schoolroom which was nothing but a great shivering-machine; of the alternation of boiled beef with roast beef, and boiled mutton with roast mutton; of clods of bread and butter, dog's-eared lesson-books, cracked slates, tear-blotted copy-books, canings, rulerings, hair-cuttings, rainy Sundays, suet puddings, and a dirty atmosphere of ink surrounding all.' By the Middle Class I understand those who are brought up at establishments more or less like Salem House, and by educators more or less like Mr. Creakle. And the great mass of the Middle part of our community, the part which comes between those who labour with their hands, on the one side, and people of fortune on the other, is brought up at establishments of this kind, although there is a certain portion broken off at the top which is educated at better. But the great mass are both badly taught, and are also brought up on a lower plane than is right, brought up ignobly. And this deteriorates their standard of life, their civilization."

It surely must have been Salem House, or an institution very like it, that produced the delicious letter quoted by Arnold in his General Report for 1867. Even Mr. Anstey Guthrie never excelled it in the letter dictated by Dr. Grimstone to his pupils at Crichton House.

"My dear Parents.—The anticipation of our Christmas vacation abounds in peculiar delights. Not only that its 'festivities,' its social gatherings and its lively amusements crown the old year with happiness and mirth, but that I come a guest commended to your hospitable love by the performance of all you bade me remember when I left you in the glad season of sun and flowers. And time has sped fleetly since reluctant my departing step crossed the threshold of that home whose indulgences and endearments their temporary loss has taught me to value more and more. Yet that restraint is salutary, and that self-reliance is as easily learnt as it is laudable, the propriety of my conduct and the readiness of my services shall ere long aptly illustrate. It is with confidence I promise that the close of every year shall find me advancing in your regard by constantly observing the precepts of my excellent tutors and the example of my excellent parents.

"We break up on Thursday, the 11th of December instant, and my impatience of the short delay will assure my dear parents of the filial sentiments of

"Theirs very sincerely,

"N.

"P.S. We shall reassemble on the 19th of January. Mr. and Mrs. P. present their respectful compliments."

The present writer lately asked a close observer of educational matters if Arnold had produced any practical effect on Secondary Education, and the answer was—"He pulled down the strongholds of such as Mr. Creakle." If he did that, he did much; and it is a eulogy which he would have greatly appreciated. Let us see how far it was deserved. Let us admit at the outset that Mr. Squeers is dead; but then he was dead before Arnold took in hand to reform our system of Education. Mr. Creakle, it is to be feared, still exists, though his former assistant, the more benign Mr. Mell, has to some extent supplanted him. Dr. Blimber is, perhaps, a little superannuated, but still holds his own. Dr. Grimstone is going strong and well. In a word, the Private School for bigger boys—(we are not thinking of Preparatory Schools for little boys)—still exists and even flourishes. Now, if Arnold could have had his way, the Private School for bigger boys would long since have disappeared. "Mr. Creakle's stronghold" would have been pulled down, and Salem House and Crichton House and Lycurgus House Academy would have crumbled into ruins.

And what would he have raised in their place? He wrote so often and so variously about Education—now in official reports, now in popular essays, now again in private letters, that it is not difficult to detect some inconsistencies, some contradictions, some changes of view. Indeed, it needs but the alteration of a single word to justify, at least to some extent, the "damning sentence," which, according to Arnold, Mr. Frederic Harrison "launched" against him in 1867. "We seek vainly in Mr. A. a system of philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative." For "Philosophy" read "Education," and the reproach holds good. For in Education, as in everything else that he touched, he proceeded rather by criticism than by dogma—by showing faults in existing things rather than by theoretically constructing perfection. Yet, after all said and done, his general view of the subject is quite plain. He had in his mind an idea or scheme of what National Education ought to be; and, though from time to time he changed his view about details and methods, the general outline of his scheme is clear enough.

One of the most characteristic passages which he ever wrote is that in which he describes his interview in 1865 with Cardinal Antonelli, then Secretary of State at Rome. "When he asked me what I thought of the Roman schools, I said that, for the first time since I came on the Continent, I was reminded of England. I meant, in real truth, that there was the same easy-going and absence of system on all sides, the same powerlessness and indifference of the State, the same independence in single institutions, the same free course for abuses, the same confusion, the same lack of all idea of co-ordering things, as the French say—that is, of making them work fitly together to a fit end; the same waste of power, therefore the same extravagance, and the same poverty of result."

Enlarging on this congenial theme, and applying it to England and English requirements, he promulged in 1868 a very revolutionary scheme for Public Education. At the apex of the pyramid there should be a Minister of Education. "Merely for administrative convenience he is, indeed, indispensable. But it is even more important to have a centre in which to fix responsibility." In 1886 he said to the teachers at Westminster, "I know the Duke of Richmond told the House of Lords that, as Lord President, he was Minister of Education—(laughter)—but really the Duke of Richmond's sense of humour must have been slumbering when he told the House of Lords that. A man is not Minister of Education by taking the name, but by doing the functions. (Cheers.) To do the functions he must put his mind to the subject of education; and so long as Lord Presidents are what they are, and education is what it is, a Lord President will not be a man who puts his mind to the subject of education. A Vice-President is not, on the Lord President's own showing, and cannot be, Minister for Education. He cannot be made responsible for faults and neglects. Now what we want in a Minister for Education is this—a centre where we can fix the responsibility." This great and responsible officer, who presumably was to be a Cabinet Minister and change with the changes of administration, was to preside over the whole education of the country. The Universities, the Public Schools, the Middle-Class Schools, and the Elementary Schools were all to be, in greater or less degree, subject to his sway. The Minister was to be assisted by a Council of Education, "comprising, without regard to politics, the personages most proper to be heard on questions of public education." It was to be, like the Council at the India Office, consultative only, but the Minister was to be bound to take its opinion on all important measures. It should be the special duty of this Council to advise on the graduation of schools, on the organization of examinations both in the schools and in the Universities, and to adjust them to one another. The Universities were not to be increased in number, but all such anomalous institutions as King's College and University College were to be co-ordinated to the existing Universities; and the Universities were to establish "faculties" in great centres of population, supply professors and lecturers, and then examine and confer degrees. Then the country should be mapped out into eight or ten districts, and each of these districts should have a Provincial School-Board, which should "represent the State in the country," keep the Minister informed of local requirements, and be the organ of communication between him and the schools in its jurisdiction. The exact amount of interference, inspection, and control which the Minister, the Council, and the Boards should exercise should vary in accordance with the grade of the schools: it should be greater in the elementary schools, less in the higher. But, in their degree, all, from Eton downwards, were to be subject to it. Then came the most revolutionary part of the whole scheme. Mr. Creakle and his congeners were to be abolished. They were not to be put to a violent death, but they were to be starved out. The whole face of the country is studded with small grammar-schools or foundation-schools, like knots in a network; and these schools, enlarged and reformed, were to be the ordinary training-places of the Middle Class. Where they did not exist, similar schools were to be created by the State—"Royal or Public Schools"—and these, like all the rest, were to be subject to the Minister and to the Provincial Boards. Arnold contended that ancient schools so revived, and modern schools so constituted, would have a dignity and a status such as no private school could attain, and would be free from the pretentiousness and charlatanism which he regarded as the bane of private education. The inspection and control of these Public Schools would be in the hands of competent officers of the State, whereas the private school is appraised only by the vulgar and uneducated class that feeds it.

And so, descending from the Universities through Public Schools of two grades, we touch the foundation of the whole edifice—the Elementary Schools. On this all-important topic, he wrote in 1868: "About popular education I have here but a very few words to say. People are at last beginning to see in what condition this really is amongst us. Obligatory instruction is talked of. But what is the capital difficulty in the way of obligatory instruction, or indeed any national system of instruction, in this country? It is this: that the moment the working class of this country have this question of instruction brought home to them, their self-respect will make them demand, like the working classes of the Continent, Public Schools, and not schools which the clergyman, or the squire, or the mill-owner calls "my school." And again: "The object should be to draw the existing Elementary Schools from their present private management, and to reconstitute them on a municipal basis."

That word which he italicized—public—is the key to his whole system. The whole education of the country was to be Public. The Universities, already "public" in the sense that they are not private ventures, were to be made public in the sense that they were to be supervised and to some extent regulated by the State. The Public Schools, traditionally so-called, were to be made more really public by being brought under the Minister and the School-Boards. The lesser foundation-schools were to be made public by a redistribution of their revenues and a reconstruction of their system; and new schools, public by virtue of their creation, were to be put alongside of the older ones. So schools of private venture would be eliminated. And thus the whole elementary education of the country was to be taken out of the hands of societies or individuals, and was to be organized and conducted by the officials of the State. Finally, all four (or three, as you choose to reckon them) grades of public education were to be co-ordinated with one another and subordinated to a chief Minister of State presiding over a great department.

Here was a scheme of National Education, clear enough in its general outlines, and sufficiently far-reaching in its scope. But its author, promulging it thirty-five years ago, saw one "capital difficulty" in the way of realizing it, and he stated the difficulty thus: "The Public School for the people must rest upon the municipal organization of the country. In France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the public elementary school has, and exists by having, the Commune, and the Municipal Government of the Commune, as its foundations, and it could not exist without them. But we in England have our municipal organization state to get; the country districts, with us, have at present only the feudal and ecclesiastical organization of the Middle Ages, or of France before the Revolution.... The real preliminary to an effective system of popular education is, in fact, to provide the country with an effective municipal organization."

It would be impossible, unless one could trace the mental processes of the Bishop of Rochester, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Sir John Gorst, and other eminent persons who had a hand in constructing the Education Acts of 1892 and 1893, to say how far the system now in existence owes any of its features to the influence of Matthew Arnold. It is the lot of great thoughts to fall upon very different kinds of soil; to be trodden under foot by one set of enemies, and carried away by another; and yet sometimes to find a congenial lodgment, and after long years to spring into life and manifest themselves in very unexpected quarters. So it may well have been with Arnold's educational theories. Certainly during the last five-and-thirty years people have come to regard Education in all its branches as far more a matter of public concern, far less a matter of private venture, than formerly. More and more we have come to see that the State and the Municipality, in their respective areas, have something to say on the matter. The idea of the Golden Ladder, having its base in the Elementary Schools and its top rung in the highest honours of the University, has taken hold of the public mind, and has passed out of the region of abstractions into practical life. Institutions of Local Government have developed themselves on the lines desiderated by Arnold in 1868. The subordination of education to municipal authority is a new and a risky experiment, but it is exactly the experiment which he wished to see. The resuscitation of the Edwardian and Elizabethan Grammar Schools all over the country has brought the notion of the Public School to the very door of the Middle Class, and has shaken, if it has not yet destroyed, Mr. Creakle's stronghold. Even in the matter of Denominational Education in the Elementary Schools, where many deem that a retrograde step has been taken, the State has acted on a hint which Arnold gave to the extreme reformers of his time.

"Most English Liberals," he said, "seem persuaded that our Elementary Schools should be undenominational, and their teaching secular; and that with a public elementary school it cannot well be otherwise. Let them clearly understand, however, that on the Continent generally—everywhere except in Holland—the public elementary school is denominational (of course with what we should call a 'conscience clause') and its teaching religious as well as secular."

In one important respect the State, which has so often adopted his views, at once outstripped and fell short of his ideal. He was not a strong or undiscriminating advocate for Compulsory Education. He believed that, in the foreign countries where compulsion obtained, it was not the cause, but the effect, of a national feeling for education. When a people set a high value on knowledge, they would insist that every child should have a chance of acquiring it. But you could not create that high value by compelling people to send their children to school. As late as the end of the year 1869, he seems to have feared that any legislation which hindered a child from working for its own or its parents' support would be highly unpopular and would be evaded. "A law of direct compulsion on the parent and child would probably be violated every day in practice; and, so long as this is the case, a law levelled at the employer is preferable."

But when those words were written, compulsion was near at hand. The Parliament of 1868-1874—the first elected by a democratic suffrage—was intent on Reform, and the right of a father to starve his child's mind was strenuously denied. Forster, then Vice-President of the Council, was charged with the duty of preparing a Bill to establish Compulsory Education. Arnold was Forster's brother-in-law, and "heard the contents" of the Bill in November, 1869. When in the following February it was brought in, he wrote: "I think William's Bill will do very well. I am glad it is so little altered"; and, after the Second Reading, he wrote: "The majority on the Education Bill is a great relief; it will now, if William has tolerable luck, get through safely this session." By this time, therefore, he must have become a convert to the system of compulsion. Perhaps he regarded the demand for the Bill as a proof that the English people were at length waking up to a sense of the value of Education. But, while the State thus outstripped his ideal by establishing compulsion, it fell short of his ideal by severely limiting the area of the population to which compulsion was to apply. Again and again he warned his countrymen, then unaccustomed to the practical working of Compulsory Education, that it would be intolerable, unjust, and absurd if it were applied only to the children of the poor. He contended that the Upper and Middle Classes were every bit as much in need of a compulsory system, if their children were to be properly educated, as the working classes for whom it was proposed to legislate. This theme he illustrated, with the most exuberant fun and fancy, in a letter addressed to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1867, and afterwards republished in Friendship's Garland. Arminius, the cultivated Prussian, accompanies his English friend to Petty Sessions in a country town, and is horrified by the degraded plight of an old peasant who is tried for poaching. The English friend (the imaginary Arnold) says that for his own part he is not so much concerned about the poacher as about his children. They are being allowed to grow up anyhow. Really he thinks the time has come when compulsion must be applied to the education of children of this class. "The gap between them and our educated and intelligent classes is really too frightful."

"Your educated and intelligent classes," sneered Arminius, in his most offensive manner—"where are they? I should like to see them." The English friend, thus rudely challenged, leads the Prussian into the justice-room, where they find on the Bench three excellent specimens of education and intelligence—Lord Lumpington, the Rev. Esau Hittall, and Mr. Bottles. Arminius insists on knowing their qualifications for the post of magistrate. He begins by defining the principle of Compulsory Education. "It means that to ensure, as far as you can, every man's being fit for his business in life, you put education as a bar, or condition, between him and what he aims at. The principle is just as good for one class as another, and it is only by applying it impartially that you save its application from being insolent and invidious.... You propose to make old Diggs' boys instruct themselves before they go bird-scaring or sheep-tending. I want to know what you do to make those three worthies in that justice-room instruct themselves before they may go acting as magistrates and judges?"

The imaginary Arnold replies that Lord Lumpington was at Eton, and Mr. Hittall at Charterhouse, and Mr. Bottles at Lycurgus House Academy, Peckham. But Arminius insists that to send boys of the wealthy classes to school is nothing—the natural course of things takes them there. "Don't suppose that, by doing this, you are applying the principle of Compulsory Education fairly, and as you apply it to Diggs' boys. You are not interposing, for the rich, education as a bar or condition between them and what they aim at.

"In my country," he went on, "we should have begun to put a pressure on those future magistrates at school. Before we allowed Lord Lumpington and Mr. Hittall to go to the University at all, we should have examined them.... There would have been some Mr. Grote as School Board Commissary, pitching into them questions about history, and some Mr. Lowe, as Crown Patronage Commissary, pitching into them questions about English literature; and these young men would have been kept from the University, as Diggs' boys are kept from their bird-scaring, till they had instructed themselves. Then, if, after three years of their University, they wanted to be magistrates, another pressure!—a great Civil Service Examination before a Board of Experts, an examination in English law, Roman law, English history, history of jurisprudence."

"A most abominable liberty to take with Lumpington and Hittall," says Arnold.

"Then your compulsory education is a most abominable liberty to take with Diggs' boys," retorted Arminius.... "Oh, but," I answered, "to live at all, even at the lowest stage of human life, a man needs instruction." "Well," returns Arminius, "and to administer at all, even at the lowest stage of public administration, a man needs instruction."

"We have never found it so," I said.

The same argument was urged, in a graver fashion, in Schools and Universities of the Continent.

"In the view of the English friends of compulsory education, the educated and intelligent Middle and Upper Classes amongst us are to confer the boon of compulsory education upon the ignorant lower class, which needs it while they do not. But, on the Continent, instruction is obligatory for Lower, Middle, and Upper Class alike. I doubt whether our educated and intelligent classes are at all prepared for this. I have an acquaintance in easy circumstances, of distinguished connexions, living in a fashionable part of London, who, like many other people, deals rather easily with his son's schooling. Sometimes the boy is at school, then for months together he is away from school, and taught, so far as he is taught, by his father and mother at home. He is not the least an invalid, but it pleases his father and mother to bring him up in this manner. Now, I imagine, no English friends of compulsory education dream of dealing with such a defaulter as this, and certainly his father, who perhaps is himself a friend of compulsory education for the working classes, would be astounded to find his education of his own son interfered with. But, if my worthy acquaintance lived in Switzerland or Germany, he would be dealt with as follows. I speak with the school-law of Canton Neufchatel, immediately under my eyes, but the regulations on this matter are substantially the same in all the states of Germany and of German Switzerland. The Municipal Education Committee of the district where my acquaintance lived would address a summons to him, informing him that a comparison of the school-rolls of their district with the municipal list of children of school-age, showed his son not to be at school; and requiring him, in consequence, to appear before the Municipal Committee at a place and time named, and there to satisfy them, either that his son did attend some public school, or that, if privately taught, he was taught by duly trained and certificated teachers. On the back of the summons, my acquaintance would find printed the penal articles of the School-Law, sentencing him to a fine if he failed to satisfy the Municipal Committee; and, if he failed to pay the fine, or was found a second time offending, to imprisonment. In some Continental States he would be liable, in case of repeated infraction of the School-Law, to be deprived of his parental rights, and to have the care of his son transferred to guardians named by the State. It is indeed terrible to think of the consternation and wrath of our educated and intelligent classes under a discipline like this; and I should not like to be the man to try and impose it on them. But I assure them most emphatically—and if they study the experience of the Continent they will convince themselves of the truth of what I say—that only on these conditions of its equal and universal application is any law of compulsory education possible."

We have now seen, at least in general outline, the system of National Education which he would have wished to set up—how he would have co-ordinated all instruction from the lowest to the highest, and how he would have compelled all classes alike to submit their children, and in the higher ranks of life to submit themselves, to the training which should best equip them for their chosen or appointed work. We must now enquire what sort of knowledge he would have endeavoured, by his co-ordinated system, to impart.

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—

"Latin is the foundation of so much in the written and spoken language of modern Europe, that it is the best language to take as a second language; in our own written and book language, above all, it fills so large a part that we perhaps hardly know how much of their reading falls meaningless upon the eye and ear of children in our elementary schools, from their total ignorance of either Latin or a modern language derived from it. For the little of languages that can be taught in our elementary schools, it is far better to go to the root at once; and Latin, besides, is the best of all languages to learn grammar by. But it should by no means be taught as in our classical schools; far less time should be spent on the grammatical framework, and classical literature should be left quite out of view. A second language, and a language coming very largely into the vocabulary of modern nations, is what Latin should stand for to the teacher of an elementary school. I am convinced that for his purpose the best way would be to disregard classical Latin entirely, to use neither Cornelius Nepos, nor Eutropius, nor Cæsar, nor any delectus from them, but to use the Latin Bible, the Vulgate. A chapter or two from the story of Joseph, a chapter or two from Deuteronomy, and the first two chapters of St. Luke's Gospel would be the sort of delectus we want; add to them a vocabulary and a simple grammar of the main forms of the Latin language, and you have a perfectly compact and cheap school book, and yet all that you need. In the extracts the child would be at home, instead of, as in extracts from classical Latin, in an utterly strange land; and the Latin of the Vulgate, while it is real and living Latin, is yet, like the Greek of the New Testament, much nearer to modern idiom, and therefore much easier for a modern learner than classical idiom can be. True, a child whose delectus is taken from Cornelius Nepos or Cæsar will be better prepared perhaps for going on to Virgil and Cicero than a child whose delectus is taken from the Vulgate. But we do not want to carry our elementary schools into Virgil or Cicero; one child in five thousand, with a special talent, may go on to higher schools, and to Virgil, and he will go on to them all the better for the little we have at any rate given him. But what we want to give to our Elementary Schools in general is the vocabulary, to some extent, of a second language, and that language one which is at the bottom of a great deal of modern life and modern language. This, I am convinced, we may give in some such method as the method I have above suggested, but in no other."

There is, perhaps, no more interesting or more characteristic feature of his doctrine about elementary schools than his insistence, early and late, on a close and familiar acquaintance with the Bible. "Chords of power," he said, "are touched by this instruction which no other part of the instruction in a popular school reaches, and chords various, not the single religious chord only. The Bible is for the child in an elementary school almost his only contact with poetry and philosophy. What a course of eloquence and poetry (to call it by that name alone) is the Bible in a school which has and can have but little eloquence and poetry! and how much do our elementary schools lose by not having any such course as part of their school programme! All who value the Bible may rest assured that thus to know and possess the Bible is the most certain way to extend the power and efficacy of the Bible."

The spiritual sense, the doctrinal and dogmatic import, of Holy Scripture lay, in his judgment, quite outside the scope of the School. "The Bible's application and edification belong to the Church; its literary and historical substance to the School." He saw clearly the manifold and conflicting perils to which a simple love and knowledge of the Bible were exposed the moment that exegesis began to play about it. He pointed out that Cardinal Newman interpreted the words, I will lay thy stones with fair colours and thy foundations with sapphires, as authorizing "the sumptuosities of the Church of Rome"; and to Protestants who said that this was a wrong use of the passage he pointed out that their similar use of the Beast and the Scarlet Woman and Antichrist would seem equally wrong to Cardinal Newman; "and in these cases of application who shall decide"? What he insisted on was the value of the Bible as a beautiful and ennobling literature, easily accessible to all. He would have it taught with intelligence, sympathy, reverence, and, above all, "as a Literature,"—for biblical teaching ought to show the widely varying elements of which the Bible is composed: the profound differences, not merely of authorship and style, but of tone and temper, between one book and another; the historical circumstances under which each came into being; the section of humanity and the period of time to which each made its appeal.

In 1869 he wrote in his Annual Report—

"Let the school managers make the main outlines of Bible history, and the getting by heart a selection of the finest Psalms, the most interesting passages from the historical and prophetical books of the Old Testament, and the chief parables, discourses, and exhortations, of the New, a part of the regular school work, to be submitted to inspection and to be seen in its strength or weakness like any other. This could raise no jealousies; or, if it still raises some, let a sacrifice be made of them for the sake of the end in view. Some will say that what we propose is but a small use to put the Bible to; yet it is that on which all higher use of the Bible is to be built, and its adoption is the only chance for saving the one elevating and inspiring element in the scanty instruction of our primary schools from being sacrificed to a politico-religious difficulty. There was no Greek school in which Homer was not read; cannot our popular schools, with their narrow range and their jejune alimentation in secular literature, do as much for the Bible as the Greek schools did for Homer?"

In 1870 he wrote about a book[20] by two young Jewish ladies: "I am sure it will be found, as I told them, that their book meets a real want; there were good books about the Bible for the learned, and there were bad books about it—that is to say, bad résumés of its history and literature—for the general public; but anything like a good and sound résumé for the general public did not exist till this book came."

It is interesting to observe that to his deep conviction of the ethical and educational value of the Bible is due his only direct and constructive effort to enrich the apparatus of the schools which he inspected. Of improvement by way of criticism and suggestion he gave them enough and to spare, but to supply them with a new reading-book was a departure from his usual method. Nevertheless in 1872 he wrote: "An ounce of practice, they say, is better than a pound of theory; and certainly one may talk for ever about the wonder-working power of Letters, and yet produce no good at all, unless one really puts people in the way of feeling their power. The friends of Physics do not content themselves with extolling Physics; they put forth school-books by which the study of Physics may be with proper advantage brought near to those who before were strangers to it; and they do wisely. For any one who believes in the civilizing power of Letters, and often talks of this belief, to think that he has for more than twenty years got his living by inspecting schools for the people, has gone in and out among them, has seen that the power of Letters never reaches them at all, and that the whole study of Letters is thereby discredited, and its power called in question, and yet has attempted nothing to remedy this state of things, cannot but be vexing and disquieting. He may truly say, like the Israel of the prophet, 'We have not wrought any deliverance in the earth'! and he may well desire to do something to pay his debt to popular education before he finally departs, and to serve it, if he can, in that point where its need is sorest, where he has always said its need was sorest, and where, nevertheless, it is as sore still as when he began saying this twenty years ago. Even if what he does cannot be of service at once, owing to special prejudices and difficulties, yet these prejudices and difficulties years are almost sure to dissipate, and the work may be of service hereafter."

These wise, though rather melancholy, words occur in the Preface to a little book called A Bible Reading for Schools, and in its fuller and alternative title, The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration, Arranged and Edited for Young Learners. Arnold, himself a constant and attentive student of Holy Writ, "liked reading his Bible without being baffled by unmeaningnesses." He complained that "the fatal thing about our version is that it so often spoils a chapter in the Old Testament by making sheer nonsense out of one or two verses, and so throwing the reader out." He habitually used a Bible—a present from his godfather, John Keble—"where the numbers of the chapters are marked at the side and do not interpose a break between chapter and chapter; and where the divisions of the verses, being numbered in like manner at the side of the page, not in the body of the verse, and being numbered in very small type, do not thrust themselves forcibly on the attention," and these circumstances suggested the form of his Bible Reading for Schools. The little book consists of the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah, running on continuously, with some twenty pages of notes, and he thus introduces it—

"At the very outset, the humbleness of what is professed in this little book cannot be set forth too strongly. With the aim of enabling English school children to read as a connected whole the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah, without being frequently stopped by passages of which the meaning is almost or quite unintelligible, I have sought to choose, among the better meanings which have been offered for each of the passages, that which seemed the best, and to weave it into the authorized text in such a manner as not to produce any sense of strangeness or interruption." The attempt was truly laudable, and the execution admirable for taste and ease. The majestic flow and cadence of the traditional English are never interrupted. There is no concession to such pedantries as Professor Robertson Smith's "greaves of the warrior that stampeth in the fray," or such barbarisms as Professor Cheynes' "boot of him that trampleth noisily." But here and there a turn is given to a sentence, which for the first time reveals its true meaning; here and there a word which really represents the Hebrew is substituted for one which makes nonsense of the sentence.

The little book has often been reprinted; but as "A Bible Reading for Schools" it failed, as, to judge by his own melancholy words about it, he seems to have foreseen that it would fail. People who have charge of Elementary Education in England, whether in Church Schools or in Board Schools, are eminently and rightly suspicious about new views in religion; and The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration gave currency to a view which in 1872 was probably new to most School Managers and School Boards. He carefully disclaimed any intention to decide the authorship of the chapters which he edited. But the fact that they were detached from the earlier ones might perhaps raise questions in enquiring minds; and in the preface he stated his personal belief that "the author of the earlier part of the Book of Isaiah was not the author of these last chapters." He most truly added that "there is nothing to forbid a member of the Church of England, or, for that matter, a member of the Church of Rome either, or a member of the Jewish Synagogue, from holding such a belief"; but probably clergymen and Dissenting ministers and pious laymen of all denominations looked rather askance at it; and the little book never got itself adopted as "A Bible Reading for Schools."

Thus ended his one attempt to improve, positively and by construction, the curriculum of the Elementary Schools; and we return, at the end of this study of his Educational doctrine, to the point at which we began.

"Organize your Elementary, your Secondary, your Superior, Education." This was the burden of his teaching for five-and-thirty years; and, if the community has at length really set its hand to that great task, it is only right that we should remember with honour the Master who first taught us (when the doctrine was unpopular) that the primary duty of a civilized State is to educate its children.

CHAPTER IV

SOCIETY

"Culture seeks to do away with classes and sects; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely; nourished, and not bound, by them. This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality."

The words—social idea—which Arnold himself italicized in the foregoing extract from Culture and Anarchy, will indicate the sense in which "Society" is here intended. We are not thinking of that which Pennialinus[21] means when he writes about "Society gossip" or "a Society function." We are concerned with the thoughts and temper and actions of men, not as isolated units, but as living in an organized community; and, taking "Society" in this sense, we are to examine Arnold's influence on the Society of his time.