High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  He wished to stop lower-middle-class boys being taken away from school ‘half-educated’ to go into a trade or profession, not least because he welcomed the prospect of further parliamentary reform after 1832. However, he wrote, ‘I do not see that we are likely to grow much wiser, or that though political power may pass into different hands, that it will be exercised more purely or sensibly than it has been.’53 He was, by the standards of his times, an extreme democrat: ‘The true and only way to make civil society really deserving of its name, is to give its members an active and not merely a passive part in the management of its concerns.’54 He articulated a view held, silently, by many of the educated classes: reform would come. Many feared this because they feared those in whose hands power would then rest. Arnold did not, because he believed society would by then have educated the new masters. The thirty years from Victoria’s accession until the second Reform Act would test such assumptions to the limit, because in that time there was no advance in educational opportunities for the masses who would have the vote.

  He sympathised with the attempts of men to obtain education once in work; but in a lecture to the Rugby Mechanics Institute in 1838 he crushed any notion they had that the process they were embarking upon could be called ‘education’. ‘It is idle to call Mechanics’ Institutes places of adult education. Physical science alone can never make a man educated; even the formal sciences, invaluable as they are with respect to the discipline of the reasoning powers, cannot instruct the judgment; it is only moral and religious knowledge which can accomplish this.’55 In 1834, with his mind again on the importance of the civilising process, he had told Chevalier Bunsen, a biblical scholar who became Prussian ambassador, that ‘education is wanted to improve the physical condition of the people, and yet this physical condition must be improved before they can be susceptible to education.’56

  When criticised for engaging in journalism, Arnold simply wrote another screed on the importance of a headmaster such as him having complete independence of action. As we shall see, his son Matthew took rather the same attitude in attacking successive governments for the implementation of the revised code for schools after 1862, even though he was in their employment as a schools inspector. Once Chartist agitation started in 1838, to secure the implementation of a ‘People’s Charter’ of civil rights, Arnold kept a close eye on organised labour, which he distrusted. He wrote sympathetically about the poor, but not about the Chartists, who he felt, because of the violence of their language, were ‘slaves of the most degraded sort: and made such not by others, but by themselves.’57 The theme constant in his writings about the poor is that they were freemen being allowed ‘to sink more and more into the state of slaves’.58 Such a person would end up hating ‘the rich as enemies’, and anarchy would ensue. He wanted such people to have the benefits of education not least to raise them nearer the levels of those whom they might otherwise seek to attack and overthrow.

  For all his idealism about the poor, there is occasionally a sense that it is balanced with a certain pragmatism. ‘Has the world ever yet seen a population so dangerous in every respect as to the society in which it existed as the manufacturing population of Great Britain?’ he asked in December 1838.59 He outlined reasons for his concern that would find echoes in Matthew’s writings thirty years later: the operatives were ‘not restrained by close connexion with other classes of society’ and were ‘not softened by knowledge’, but were ‘crowded together in most formidable masses, well aware of the force of organisation’. There was, as he saw it, a central dilemma that made matters so lethal: ‘If they were slaves, they might be kept down by force: if they were what citizens ought to be, they would be peaceable alike from interest and from duty; but as they are neither the one nor the other, what is to be done?’

  He repudiated the notion, popular in England since the eighteenth century, that ‘civil society ought to leave its members alone’. He felt the poor required serious State intervention, and that it was the duty of the State ‘to provide for the common good of all, by restraining the power of the strong and protecting the helplessness of the weak.’60 As the population grew, and labour became a less scarce (and therefore less well paid) commodity, these problems, and the need for intervention, could only increase, making ‘an evil of the first magnitude’.61 Anticipating Carlyle’s strictures on the ‘cash nexus’, Arnold argued that the relations between master and man should be the State’s business, because ‘that the relation between the rich and the poor in so large a part of the kingdom is purely commercial, is in itself most mischievous; because a purely commercial relation not only arises out of nothing better than self-interest, but it goes on to nothing better; it neither springs from nor leads to any feelings of admiration, confidence, reverence, or love, which are the true ties between man and man.’ Just as there was an element of idealism in Arnold’s regard for the working man, so too did he dislike what his son Matthew would term the ‘philistinism’ of the manufacturing classes who increasingly employed such men.

  This argument would drive some to wish a return to a fantasy, pre-industrial world. That man had become a commodity and ceased to be a human being was profoundly shocking, and denigrated capitalism in the eyes of many who were not natural revolutionaries. As Arnold put it, ‘they are regarded as hands – not as heads, hearts, or souls.’ He felt the nature of the tie these men had to their employer, and therefore to the place where they lived, as merely ‘transient’: and that in itself created a sense of rootlessness, and a lack of loyalty, that could only corrode society further.62 He cited the gangs of men shifting around the country to build the railways, then in the first flower of growth. Such men wanted ‘to become members of a society more varied in its elements and more wholesome in its character than their own clubs and unions. Unless these wants can be supplied, they will in some of the most important points resemble slaves rather than citizens.’ But because they were not chained together like slaves, they had the potential to be ‘a hundred times more dangerous’.

  Arnold hoped the Church might provide the sense of community and permanence he craved on behalf of these people: but to do this would require a union of Church and State, or indeed of the Christian churches themselves in the first instance, that was highly unlikely. He exhorted the Church Building Society – which was attempting, in the late 1830s and early 1840s, to provide more places of worship to assist the salvation of the lower orders – instead to ‘build up living churches – not dead ones of brick and stone. That was a true and living Church which met for prayer and praise in the subterranean quarries without the walls of Rome; and such Churches would better serve our purposes than all the splendour of St Peter’s.’63 He added: ‘The money which is given for building places of worship should be given to provide ministers. Those ministers should each have their deacons . . . under the names of visitors of the poor.’ Thus the old paternalism of the countryside would be brought, in Arnold’s idealistic vision, into the manufacturing towns. ‘All that I have been urging was actually the system of our Saxon forefathers. They were fully aware how important it was in society that every man should know every man; they went even farther, and made every man answerable for every man’.64 Arnold knew society had changed and tried to appear progressive in embracing that change: but he did not see just how much it changed, not least because of the speed at which it had grown in the first forty years of the nineteenth century. Organising the disorganised mass of an industrial society was simply not feasible: at least, not by the Church.

  VI

  By the mid-1830s Arnold’s pupils were winning scholarships to Oxford (notably Balliol) and Cambridge (notably Trinity); he turned out men such as Stanley, who would be Dean of Westminster as well as his biographer, Arthur Hugh Clough and his own son Matthew, who came to Rugby after two unsatisfactory years at Winchester and flourished despite being weighed down by the burden of his father’s expectations. Another success was Vaughan, whose brilliant career at Cambridge was a prelude to his
becoming headmaster of Harrow, an appointment that ended unfortunately. Through Stanley, Arnold also exercised a posthumous influence over Benjamin Jowett, one of the most influential academics of the nineteenth century, with whom Stanley became close friends. Jowett became professor of Greek and Master of Balliol; when he died in 1893 his pall-bearers were seven heads of house and the Provost of Eton, all former pupils of his.

  Arnold worked ferociously hard, setting a system of examinations for the whole school; and he contributed his own money to scholarship funds to give greater incentives to his boys to study, presumably for the benefit of those for whom the glory of God was not enough. He maintained a strong interest in his former pupils once they had left school, particularly in those who, like Stanley, would have careers shaping minds and hearts either through the Church or as schoolmasters. Whatever other criticism may be thrown at Arnold, his vocation was palpable; he would help prepare former pupils for their university examinations, and would sometimes make them presents of books if their circumstances were hard.

  By 1841 his stock was high and his achievement widely recognised; he had set a template for the public schools that many would follow in the succeeding thirty or forty years, notably after the Clarendon Commission. Even Strachey, however baleful he might have found it, and however much it demanded his sarcastic inventions, had to concede Arnold’s influence: ‘Succeeding generations of favourite pupils began to spread his fame through the Universities. At Oxford especially men were profoundly impressed by the pious aims of the boys from Rugby. It was a new thing to see undergraduates going to Chapel more often than they were obliged, and visiting the good poor.’65 In what appears to be a statement of fact rather than of sarcasm, Strachey adds: ‘He became a celebrity; he became at last a great man.’ Arnold had also guided his boys towards careers that might be socially useful. The Army and the Navy he regarded as dens of iniquity and profanity. He told his boys they were already soldiers of Christ, and could want no better regiment. Those who, in a civilian occupation, took the message of Christianity and the ethos of Rugby to the corners of the globe were far more highly regarded, as discharging some degree of moral duty. He admired those who studied law and medicine, but found the practice of both repellent: he felt the lawyer had the worst of it, since ‘moral nastiness, in which a lawyer lives and breathes, is far worse than objects physically repulsive’. Worse still, ‘the lawyer meddles with moral evil rather to aggravate it than to mend.’66

  The Arnolds took favoured pupils into their family, and they stayed there long after they left Rugby. Arnold’s wife, Mary, endorsed this. Writing in 1840 to Richard Congreve – a former pupil who would return to Rugby as a master and then, in 1867, found the London Positivist Society – about a mutual friend’s trepidation at examinations, she echoed her husband’s voice uncannily: ‘We expect . . . that under all circumstances the examination will shew them what university competition is, and the good earnest work which must be required to meet it.’67 When later that year Congreve himself took a first and Arnold wrote to congratulate him, he observed: ‘I quite understand your feeling of not knowing which way to turn in the wide garden of knowledge, now that your path is no longer so strictly defined for you. But the very sense of the Power to turn with effect this way or that way is the best tribute to the goodness of our English System of Education, and shows that it has done its proper work.’68

  Arnold was appointed Regius professor of modern history at Oxford in 1841, and made a great success. George Moberly, the headmaster of Winchester when Stanley was writing his Life (and who, after his retirement, was summoned by Gladstone to be Bishop of Salisbury), observed that in the pre-Arnoldian era ‘a religious undergraduate was very rare, very much laughed at when he appeared; and I think I may confidently say, hardly to be found among public-school men.’69 But of late there had been a ‘singular and striking’ change and, Moberly asserted, ‘this change is undoubtedly part of a general improvement of our generation in respect of piety and reverence, but I am sure that to Dr Arnold’s personal earnest simplicity of purpose, strength of character, power of influence and piety, which none who never came near him could mistake or question, the carrying of this improvement into our schools is mainly attributable. He was the first.’

  Arnold’s death had a neatness at odds with the often turbulent and emotional character of his life. It also had a drama that would feed his posthumous legend. He had for the last academic year at Rugby combined his headmastership with his Oxford chair. The school year was divided into two unequal halves at Rugby, the second running from late January to early June. In June 1842 Arnold was preparing for his summer break at Fox How, his house in the Lake District. He gave his farewell sermon; he gave his farewell dinner to his sixth formers; he settled accounts with his servants, but on the eve of his forty-seventh birthday, just after dawn broke on 12 June 1842, he awoke with the pains of angina in his chest. His condition deteriorated rapidly; a physician was called, but Arnold was dead before eight o’clock, at a similar age to his father and, like him, of heart failure. Stanley describes in almost biblical tones not just the death, but the sense of shock that passed around the school as word was broadcast. In a letter to Clough written immediately afterwards, Stanley spoke with a studied lack of understatement of ‘the almost royal majesty of his death’ and made the immediate judgement that Arnold had been ‘one of the greatest and holiest men whom this generation has produced.’70 The Doctor had died, but his legend was about to be propelled to glory.

  Arnold had three stabs at immortality. The first was Stanley’s Life, which quickly became one of his monuments; the second a novel written by one of his pupils, Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which put him into legend; and, more than seventy-five years after his death, the cynical deconstruction of him by Strachey in Eminent Victorians. The suddenness of his death and the shock it occasioned led to exaggerations about the wonder of Arnold, and the extent of his achievement. These are abundant in Stanley (who writes of ‘the almost filial relation in which I stood towards him’), and in Hughes’s novel, which ends with Brown, by now at Oxford, coming back to Rugby after Arnold’s death and seeking to come to terms with the immensity of his grief. Strachey’s was but the first corrective to this view: other less flamboyant revisionist texts appeared after him.71 However – and this was not apparent when Stanley wrote – Arnold’s influence spread as his assistant masters and his pupils went out in the world. His essentially liberal ideals were seldom better or more influentially disseminated than through his son Matthew.

  Hughes’s fictional representation of Arnold is, it seems, accurate. Arnold is spoken of long before he appears, and is a God-like figure: not just in his piety and in his attempt to shape the lives of his charges in a way that will have them do God’s will, but in the awesome power of love and punishment that he exerts over his community. Rugbeians, despite Arnold’s influence, are just as vile as any boys of that age: while Arnold is with them in chapel one is busy etching his name on the back of the stall in front of him, and ‘the general atmosphere was by no means devotional’.72 However, there then ‘came that great event in his [Brown’s], as in every Rugby boy’s life of that day – the first sermon from the Doctor.’ He describes ‘the tall gallant form, the kindling eye, the voice, now soft as the low notes of a flute, now clear and stirring as the call of the light infantry bugle, of him who stood there Sunday after Sunday, witnessing and pleading for his Lord, the King of righteousness and love and glory, with whose spirit he was filled, and in whose power he spoke.’ He was, Hughes added, one who ‘brought home to the young boy, for the first time, the meaning of his life . . . a battle-field ordained from of old . . . and the stakes are life and death.’73

  The Doctor, in Hughes’s depiction, has his Old Testament moments. He will lose his temper and box a boy’s ears; there are frequent floggings. For these and other reasons he inspires fear: but when Brown and his friends come in late from hare and hounds, and are sent up to the Doctor,
his response is not to thrash them, but to ensure they are not hurt, tell them to ask the housekeeper for tea, and warn them that they must not do long runs until they are bigger and stronger. After a career of getting into scrapes; being reckless, thoughtless and careless, Tom, inevitably, becomes an upright, responsible, God-fearing youth, captain of the Eleven. At the end, he and his friends reflect on ‘the way that all the Doctor’s reforms have been carried out when he has been left to himself – quietly and naturally, putting a good thing in the place of a bad, and letting the bad die out; no wavering and no hurry – the best thing that could be done for the time being, and patience for the rest.’74 It is a metaphor for how change would be accomplished in wider society.