Eminent Victorians Part 9

There can be no doubt that Dr. Arnold's point of view was shared by the great ma.s.s of English parents. They cared very little for cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p; no doubt they would be pleased to find that their sons were being instructed in history or in French; but their real hopes, their real wishes, were of a very different kind. 'Shall I tell him to mind his work, and say he's sent to school to make himself a good scholar?' meditated old Squire Brown when he was sending off Tom for the first time to Rugby.

'Well, but he isn't sent to school for that-at any rate, not for that mainly. I don't care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma; no more does his mother. What is he sent to school for?... If he'll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a Christian, that's all I want.'

That was all; and it was that that Dr. Arnold set himself to accomplish. But how was he to achieve his end? Was he to improve the character of his pupils by gradually spreading around them an atmosphere of cultivation and intelligence? By bringing them into close and friendly contact with civilised men, and even, perhaps, with civilised women? By introducing into the life of his school all that he could of the humane, enlightened, and progressive elements in the life of the community? On the whole, he thought not. Such considerations left him cold, and he preferred to be guided by the general laws of Providence. It only remained to discover what those general laws were. He consulted the Old Testament, and could doubt no longer. He would apply to his scholars, as he himself explained to them in one of his sermons, 'the principle which seemed to him to have been adopted in the training of the childhood of the human race itself'. He would treat the boys at Rugby as Jehovah had treated the Chosen People: he would found a theocracy; and there should be judges in Israel.

For this purpose, the system, prevalent in most of the public schools of the day, by which the elder boys were deputed to keep order in the cla.s.s-rooms, lay ready to Dr. Arnold's hand. He found the Praepostor a mere disciplinary convenience, and he converted him into an organ of government. Every boy in the Sixth Form became ipso facto a Praepostor, with powers extending over every department of school life; and the Sixth Form as a body was erected into an authority responsible to the headmaster, and to the headmaster alone, for the internal management of the school.

This was the means by which Dr. Arnold hoped to turn Rugby into 'a place of really Christian education'. The boys were to work out their own salvation, like the human race. He himself, involved in awful grandeur, ruled remotely, through his chosen instruments, from an inaccessible heaven. Remotely-and yet with an omnipresent force. As the Israelite of old knew that his almighty Lawgiver might at any moment thunder to him from the whirlwind, or appear before his very eyes, the visible embodiment of power or wrath, so the Rugby schoolboy walked in a holy dread of some sudden manifestation of the sweeping gown, the majestic tone, the piercing glance, of Dr. Arnold. Among the lower forms of the school his appearances were rare and transitory, and upon these young children 'the chief impression', we are told, 'was of extreme fear'. The older boys saw more of him, but they did not see much. Outside the Sixth Form, no part of the school came into close intercourse with him; and it would often happen that a boy would leave Rugby without having had any personal communication with him at all.

Yet the effect which he produced upon the great ma.s.s of his pupils was remarkable. The prestige of his presence and the elevation of his sentiments were things which it was impossible to forget. In cla.s.s, every line of his countenance, every shade of his manner imprinted themselves indelibly on the minds of the boys who sat under him. One of these, writing long afterwards, has described, in phrases still impregnated with awestruck reverence, the familiar details of the scene: 'the glance with which he looked round in the few moments of silence before the lesson began, and which seemed to speak his sense of his own position'-'the att.i.tude in which he stood, turning over the pages of Facciolati's Lexicon, or Pole's synopsis, with his eye fixed upon the boy who was pausing to give an answer'-'the pleased look and the cheerful "thank you", which followed upon a successful translation'-'the fall of his countenance with its deepening severity, the stern elevation of the eyebrows, the sudden "sit down" which followed upon the reverse'-and 'the startling earnestness with which he would check in a moment the slightest approach to levity'.

To be rebuked, however mildly, by Dr. Arnold was a Potable experience. One boy could never forget how he drew a distinction between 'mere amus.e.m.e.nt' and 'such as encroached on the next day's duties', nor the tone of voice with which the Doctor added 'and then it immediately becomes what St. Paul calls REVELLING'. Another remembered to his dying day his reproof of some boys who had behaved badly during prayers. 'Nowhere,' said Dr. Arnold, 'nowhere is Satan's work more evidently manifest than in turning holy things to ridicule.' On such occasions, as another of his pupils described it, it was impossible to avoid 'a consciousness almost amounting to solemnity' that, 'when his eye was upon you, he looked into your inmost heart'.

With the boys in the Sixth Form, and with them alone, the severe formality of his demeanour was to some degree relaxed. It was his wish, in his relations with the Praepostors, to allow the Master to be occasionally merged in the Friend. From time to time, he chatted with them in a familiar manner; once a term he asked them to dinner; and during the summer holidays he invited them, in rotation, to stay with him in Westmorland.

It was obvious that the primitive methods of discipline which had reached their apogee under the dominion of Keate were altogether incompatible with Dr. Arnold's view of the functions of a headmaster and the proper governance of a public school. Clearly, it was not for such as he to demean himself by bellowing and cuffing, by losing his temper once an hour, and by wreaking his vengeance with indiscriminate flagellations. Order must be kept in other ways. The worst boys were publicly expelled; many were silently removed; and, when Dr. Arnold considered that a flogging was necessary, he administered it with gravity. For he had no theoretical objection to corporal punishment. On the contrary, he supported it, as was his wont, by an appeal to general principles. 'There is,' he said, 'an essential inferiority in a boy as compared with a man'; and hence 'where there is no equality the exercise of superiority implied in personal chastis.e.m.e.nt' inevitably followed.

He was particularly disgusted by the view that 'personal correction', as he phrased it, was an insult or a degradation to the boy upon whom it was inflicted; and to accustom young boys to think so appeared to him to be 'positively mischievous'.

'At an age,' he wrote, 'when it is almost impossible to find a true, manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind which are the best ornaments of youth, and offer the best promise of a n.o.ble manhood?'

One had not to look far, he added, for 'the fruits of such a system'. In Paris, during the Revolution of 1830, an officer observed a boy of twelve insulting the soldiers, and

'though the action was then raging, merely struck him with the flat part of his sword, as the fit chastis.e.m.e.nt for boyish impertinence. But the boy had been taught to consider his person sacred, and that a blow was a deadly insult; he therefore followed the officer, and having watched his opportunity, took deliberate aim at him with a pistol and murdered him.'

Such were the alarming results of insufficient whipping.

Dr. Arnold did not apply this doctrine to the Praepostors, but the boys in the lower parts of the school felt its benefits, with a double force. The Sixth Form was not only excused from chastis.e.m.e.nt; it was given the right to chastise. The younger children, scourged both by Dr Arnold and by the elder children, were given every opportunity of acquiring the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornaments of youth.

In the actual sphere of teaching, Dr. Arnold's reforms were tentative and few. He introduced modern history, modern languages, and mathematics into the school curriculum; but the results were not encouraging. He devoted to the teaching of history one hour a week; yet, though he took care to inculcate in these lessons a wholesome hatred of moral evil, and to point out from time to time the indications of the providential government of the world, his pupils never seemed to make much progress in the subject. Could it have been that the time allotted to it was insufficient? Dr. Arnold had some suspicions that this might be the case. With modern languages there was the same difficulty. Here his hopes were certainly not excessive. 'I a.s.sume it,' he wrote, 'as the foundation of all my view of the case, that boys at a public school never will learn to speak or p.r.o.nounce French well, under any circ.u.mstances.' It would be enough if they could 'learn it grammatically as a dead language. But even this they very seldom managed to do.

'I know too well, [he was obliged to confess,] that most of the boys would pa.s.s a very poor examination even in French grammar. But so it is with their mathematics; and so it will be with any branch of knowledge that is taught but seldom, and is felt to be quite subordinate to the boys' main study.'

The boys' main study remained the dead languages of Greece and Rome. That the cla.s.sics should form the basis of all teaching was an axiom with Dr. Arnold. 'The study of language,' he said, 'seems to me as if it was given for the very purpose of forming the human mind in youth; and the Greek and Latin languages seem the very instruments by which this is to be effected.' Certainly, there was something providential about it-from the point of view of the teacher as well as of the taught. If Greek and Latin had not been 'given' in that convenient manner, Dr. Arnold, who had spent his life in acquiring those languages, might have discovered that he had acquired them in vain. As it was, he could set the noses of his pupils to the grindstone of syntax and prosody with a clear conscience. Latin verses and Greek prepositions divided between them the labours of the week.

As time went on he became, he declared, 'increasingly convinced that it is not knowledge, but the means of gaining knowledge which I have to teach'. The reading of the school was devoted almost entirely to selected pa.s.sages from the prose writers of antiquity. 'Boys,' he remarked, 'do not like poetry.' Perhaps his own poetical taste was a little dubious; at any rate, it is certain that he considered the Greek Tragedians greatly overrated, and that he ranked Propertius as 'an indifferent poet'. As for Aristophanes, owing to his strong moral disapprobation, he could not bring himself to read him until he was forty, when, it is true, he was much struck by the 'Clouds'. But Juvenal, the Doctor could never bring himself to read at all.

Physical science was not taught at Rugby. Since, in Dr. Arnold's opinion, it was too great a subject to be studied en parergo, obviously only two alternatives were possible: it must either take the chief place in the school curriculum, or it must be left out altogether. Before such a choice, Dr. Arnold did not hesitate for a moment.

'Rather than have physical science the princ.i.p.al thing in my son's mind,' he exclaimed in a letter to a friend, I would gladly have him think that the sun went around the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament. Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an English man to study is Christian, moral, and political philosophy.'

A Christian and an Englishman! After all, it was not in the cla.s.sroom, nor in the boarding-house, that the essential elements of instruction could be imparted which should qualify the youthful neophyte to deserve those names. The final, the fundamental lesson could only be taught in the school chapel; in the school chapel the centre of Dr. Arnold's system of education was inevitably fixed. There, too, the Doctor himself appeared in the plenitude of his dignity and his enthusiasm. There, with the morning sun s.h.i.+ning on the freshly scrubbed faces of his 300 pupils, or, in the dusk of evening, through a glimmer of candles, his stately form, rapt in devotion or vibrant with exhortation, would dominate the scene. Every phase of the Church service seemed to receive its supreme expression in his voice, his att.i.tude, his look. During the Te Deum, his whole countenance would light up; and he read the Psalms with such conviction that boys would often declare, after hearing him, that they understood them now for the first time.

It was his opinion that the creeds in public wors.h.i.+p ought to be used as triumphant hymns of thanksgiving, and, in accordance with this view, although unfortunately he possessed no natural gift for music, he regularly joined in the chanting of the Nicene Creed with a visible animation and a peculiar fervour, which it was impossible to forget. The Communion service he regarded as a direct and special counterpoise to that false communion and false companions.h.i.+p, which, as he often observed, was a great source of mischief in the school; and he bent himself down with glistening eyes, and trembling voice, and looks of paternal solicitude, in the administration of the elements. Nor was it only the different sections of the liturgy, but the very divisions of the ecclesiastical year that reflected themselves in his demeanour; the most careless observer, we are told, 'could not fail to be struck by the triumphant exultation of his whole manner on Easter Sunday'; though it needed a more familiar eye to discern the subtleties in his bearing which were produced by the approach or Advent, and the solemn thoughts which it awakened of the advance of human life, the progress of the human race, and the condition of the Church of England.

At the end of the evening service, the culminating moment of the week had come: the Doctor delivered his sermon. It was not until then, as all who had known him agreed, it was not until one had heard and seen him in the pulpit, that one could fully realise what it was to be face to face with Dr. Arnold. The whole character of the man-so we are a.s.sured-stood at last revealed. His congregation sat in fixed attention (with the exception of the younger boys, whose thoughts occasionally wandered), while he propounded the general principles both of his own conduct and that of the Almighty, or indicated the bearing of the incidents of Jewish history in the sixth century B.C. upon the conduct of English schoolboys in 1830. Then, more than ever, his deep consciousness of the invisible world became evident; then, more than ever, he seemed to be battling with the wicked one. For his sermons ran on the eternal themes of the darkness of evil, the craft of the tempter, the punishment of obliquity, and he justified the persistence with which he dwelt upon these painful subjects by an appeal to a general principle: 'The spirit of Elijah,' he said, 'must ever precede the spirit of Christ.'

The impression produced upon the boys was remarkable. It was noticed that even the most careless would sometimes, during the course of the week, refer almost involuntarily to the sermon of the past Sunday, as a condemnation of what they were doing. Others were heard to wonder how it was that the Doctor's preaching, to which they had attended at the time so a.s.siduously, seemed, after all, to have such a small effect upon what they did. An old gentleman, recalling those vanished hours, tried to recapture in words his state of mind as he sat in the darkened chapel, while Dr. Arnold's sermons, with their high-toned exhortations, their grave and sombre messages of incalculable import, clothed, like Dr. Arnold's body in its gown and bands, in the traditional stiffness of a formal phraseology, reverberated through his adolescent ears. 'I used,' he said, 'to listen to those sermons from first to last with a kind of awe.'

His success was not limited to his pupils and immediate auditors. The sermons were collected into five large volumes; they were the first of their kind; and they were received with admiration by a wide circle of pious readers. Queen Victoria herself possessed a copy in which several pa.s.sages were marked in pencil, by the Royal hand.

Dr. Arnold's energies were by no means exhausted by his duties at Rugby. He became known not merely as a headmaster, but as a public man. He held decided opinions upon a large number of topics; and he enunciated them-based as they were almost invariably upon general principles-in pamphlets, in prefaces, and in magazine articles, with an impressive self-confidence. He was, as he constantly declared, a Liberal. In his opinion, by the very const.i.tution of human nature, the principles of progress and reform had been those of wisdom and justice in every age of the world-except one: that which had preceded the fall of man from Paradise. Had he lived then, Dr. Arnold would have been a Conservative. As it was, his Liberalism was tempered by an 'abhorrence of the spirit of 1789, of the American War, of the French Economistes, and of the English Whigs of the latter part of the seventeenth century'; and he always entertained a profound respect for the hereditary peerage. It might almost be said, in fact, that he was an orthodox Liberal. He believed in toleration too, within limits; that is to say, in the toleration of those with whom he agreed. 'I would give James Mill as much opportunity for advocating his opinion,' he said, 'as is consistent with a voyage to Botany Bay.'

He had become convinced of the duty of sympathising with the lower orders ever since he had made a serious study of the Epistle of St. James; but he perceived clearly that the lower orders fell into two cla.s.ses, and that it was necessary to distinguish between them. There were the 'good poor'-and there were the others. 'I am glad that you have made acquaintance with some of the good poor,' he wrote to a Cambridge undergraduate. 'I quite agree with you that it is most instructive to visit them.' Dr. Arnold himself occasionally visited them, in Rugby; and the condescension with which he shook hands with old men and women of the working cla.s.ses was long remembered in the neighbourhood. As for the others, he regarded them with horror and alarm. 'The disorders in our social state,' he wrote to the Chevalier Bunsen in 1834, 'appear to me to continue unabated. You have heard, I doubt not, of the Trades Unions; a fearful engine of mischief, ready to riot or to a.s.sa.s.sinate; and I see no counteracting power.'

On the whole, his view of the condition of England was a gloomy one. He recommended a correspondent to read

'Isaiah iii, v, xxii; Jeremiah v, xxii, x.x.x; Amos iv; and Habakkuk ii', adding, 'you will be struck, I think, with the close resemblance of our own state with that of the Jews before the second destruction of Jerusalem'.

When he was told that the gift of tongues had descended on the Irvingites at Glasgow, he was not surprised. 'I should take it,' he said, 'merely as a sign of the coming of the day of the Lord.' And he was convinced that the day of the Lord was coming-'the termination of one of the great [Greek: aiones] of the human race'. Of that he had no doubt whatever; wherever he looked he saw 'calamities, wars, tumults, pestilences, earthquakes, etc., all marking the time of one of G.o.d's peculiar seasons of visitation'. His only uncertainty was whether this termination of an [Greek: aion] would turn out to be the absolutely final one; but that he believed 'no created being knows or can know'. In any case, he had 'not the slightest expectation of what is commonly meant by the Millennium'. And his only consolation was that he preferred the present Ministry, inefficient as it was, to the Tories.

He had planned a great work on Church and State, in which he intended to lay bare the causes and to point out the remedies of the evils which afflicted society. Its theme was to be, not the alliance or union, but the absolute ident.i.ty of the Church and the State; and he felt sure that if only this fundamental truth were fully realised by the public, a general reformation would follow. Unfortunately, however, as time went on, the public seemed to realise it less and less. In spite of his protests, not only were Jews admitted to Parliament, but a Jew was actually appointed a governor of Christ's Hospital; and Scripture was not made an obligatory subject at the London University.

There was one point in his theory which was not quite plain to Dr. Arnold. If Church and State were absolutely identical, it became important to decide precisely which cla.s.ses of persons were to be excluded, owing to their beliefs, from the community. Jews, for instance, were decidedly outside the pale; while Dissenters-so Dr. Arnold argued-were as decidedly within it. But what was the position of the Unitarians? Were they, or were they not, members of the Church of Christ? This was one of those puzzling questions which deepened the frown upon the Doctor's forehead and intensified the pursing of his lips. He thought long and earnestly upon the subject; he wrote elaborate letters on it to various correspondents; but his conclusions remained indefinite. 'My great objection to Unitarianism,' he wrote, 'in its present form in England, is that it makes Christ virtually dead.' Yet he expressed 'a fervent hope that if we could get rid of the Athanasian Creed many good Unitarians would join their fellow Christians in bowing the knee to Him who is Lord both of the dead and the living'. Amid these perplexities, it was disquieting to learn that 'Unitarianism is becoming very prevalent in Boston'. He inquired anxiously as to its 'complexion' there; but received no very illuminating answer. The whole matter continued to be wrapped in a painful obscurity, There were, he believed, Unitarians and Unitarians; and he could say no more.

In the meantime, pending the completion of his great work, he occupied himself with putting forward various suggestions of a practical kind. He advocated the restoration of the Order of Deacons, which, he observed, had long been 'quoad the reality, dead; for he believed that 'some plan of this sort might be the small end of the wedge, by which Antichrist might hereafter be burst asunder like the Dragon of Bel's temple'. But the Order of Deacons was never restored, and Dr. Arnold turned his attention elsewhere, urging in a weighty pamphlet the desirabit.i.ty of authorising military officers, in congregations where it was impossible to procure the presence of clergy, to administer the Eucharist, as well as Baptism. It was with the object of laying such views as these before the public-'to tell them plainly', as he said, 'the evils that exist, and lead them, if I can, to their causes and remedies'-that he started, in 1831, a weekly newspaper, "The Englishman's Register". The paper was not a success, in spite of the fact that it set out to improve its readers morally and, that it preserved, in every article, an avowedly Christian tone. After a few weeks, and after he had spent upon it more than L200, it came to an end.

Altogether, the prospect was decidedly discouraging. After all his efforts, the absolute ident.i.ty of Church and State remained as unrecognised as ever.

'So deep', he was at last obliged to confess, 'is the distinction between the Church and the State seated in our laws, our language, and our very notions, that nothing less than a miraculous interposition of G.o.d's Providence seems capable of eradicating it.'

Dr. Arnold waited in vain.

But, he did not wait in idleness. He attacked the same question from another side: he explored the writings of the Christian Fathers, and began to compose a commentary on the New Testament. In his view, the Scriptures were as fit a subject as any other book for free inquiry and the exercise of the individual judgment, and it was in this spirit that he set about the interpretation of them. He was not afraid of facing apparent difficulties, of admitting inconsistencies, or even errors, in the sacred text. Thus he observed that 'in Chronicles xi, 20 and xiii, 2, there is a decided difference in the parentage of Abijah's mother;'-'which', he added, 'is curious on any supposition'. And at one time he had serious doubts as to the authors.h.i.+p of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But he was able, on various problematical points, to suggest interesting solutions.

At first, for instance, he could not but be startled by the cessation of miracles in the early Church; but upon consideration, he came to the conclusion that this phenomenon might be 'truly accounted for by the supposition that none but the Apostles ever conferred miraculous powers, and that therefore they ceased of course, after one generation'. Nor did he fail to base his exegesis, whenever possible, upon an appeal to general principles. One of his admirers points out how Dr. Arnold

'vindicated G.o.d's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son and to the Jews to exterminate the nations of Canaan', by explaining the principles on which these commands were given, and their reference to the moral state of those to whom they were addressed-thereby educing light out of darkness, unravelling the thread of G.o.d's religious education of the human race, and holding up G.o.d's marvellous counsels to the devout wonder and meditation of the thoughtful believer'.

There was one of his friends, however, who did not share this admiration for the Doctor's methods of Scriptural interpretation. W. G. Ward, while still a young man at Oxford, had come under his influence, and had been for some time one of his most enthusiastic disciples. But the star of Newman was rising at the University; Ward soon felt the attraction of that magnetic power; and his belief in his old teacher began to waver. It was, in particular, Dr. Arnold's treatment of the Scriptures which filled Ward's argumentative mind, at first with distrust, and at last with positive antagonism. To subject the Bible to free inquiry, to exercise upon it the criticism of the individual judgment-where might not such methods lead? Who could say that they would not end in Socinianism?-nay, in Atheism itself? If the text of Scripture was to be submitted to the searchings of human reason, how could the question of its inspiration escape the same tribunal? And the proofs of revelation, and even of the existence of G.o.d? What human faculty was capable of deciding upon such enormous questions? And would not the logical result be a condition of universal doubt?

'On a very moderate computation, Ward argued, 'five times the amount of a man's natural life might qualify a person endowed with extraordinary genius to have some faint notion (though even this we doubt) on which side truth lies.' It was not that he had the slightest doubt of Dr. Arnold's orthodoxy-Dr. Arnold, whose piety was universally recognised-Dr. Arnold, who had held up to scorn and execration Strauss's Leben Jesu without reading it. What Ward complained of was the Doctor's lack of logic, not his lack of faith. Could he not see that if he really carried out his own principles to a logical conclusion he would eventually find himself, precisely, in the arms of Strauss? The young man, whose personal friends.h.i.+p remained unshaken, determined upon an interview, and went down to Rugby primed with first principles, syllogisms, and dilemmas. Finding that the headmaster was busy in school, he spent the afternoon reading novels on the sofa in the drawing-room. When at last, late in the evening, the Doctor returned, tired out with his day's work, Ward fell upon him with all his vigour. The contest was long and furious; it was also entirely inconclusive. When it was over, Ward, with none of his brilliant arguments disposed of, and none of his probing questions satisfactorily answered, returned to the University to plunge headlong into the vortex of the Oxford Movement; and Dr. Arnold, worried, perplexed, and exhausted, went to bed, where he remained for the next thirty-six hours.

The Commentary on the New Testament was never finished, and the great work on Church and State itself remained a fragment. Dr. Arnold's active mind was diverted from political and theological speculations to the study of philology, and to historical composition. His Roman History, which he regarded as 'the chief monument of his historical fame', was based partly upon the researches of Niebuhr, and partly upon an aversion to Gibbon.

'My highest ambition,' he wrote, 'is to make my history the very reverse of Gibbon in this respect, that whereas the whole spirit of his work, from its low morality, is hostile to religion, without speaking directly against it, so my greatest desire would be, in my History, by its high morals and its general tone, to be of use to the cause without actually bringing it forward.'

These efforts were rewarded, in 1841, by the Professors.h.i.+p of Modern History at Oxford. Meanwhile, he was engaged in the study of the Sanskrit and Slavonic languages, bringing out an elaborate edition of Thucydides, and carrying on a voluminous correspondence upon a mult.i.tude of topics with a large circle of men of learning. At his death, his published works, composed during such intervals as he could spare from the management of a great public school, filled, besides a large number of pamphlets and articles, no less than seventeen volumes. It was no wonder that Carlyle, after a visit to Rugby, should have characterised Dr. Arnold as a man of 'unhasting, unresting diligence'.

Mrs. Arnold, too, no doubt agreed with Carlyle. During the first eight years of their married life, she bore him six children; and four more were to follow. In this large and growing domestic circle his hours of relaxation were spent. There those who had only known him in his professional capacity were surprised to find him displaying the tenderness and jocosity of a parent. The dignified and stern headmaster was actually seen to dandle infants and to caracole upon the hearthrug on all fours. Yet, we are told, 'the sense of his authority as a father was never lost in his playfulness as a companion'. On more serious occasions, the voice of the spiritual teacher sometimes made itself heard. An intimate friend described how 'on a comparison having been made in his family circle, which seemed to place St. Paul above St. John,' the tears rushed to the Doctor's eyes and how, repeating one of the verses from St. John, he begged that the comparison might never again be made. The longer holidays were spent in Westmorland, where, rambling with his offspring among the mountains, gathering wild flowers, and pointing out the beauties of Nature, Dr. Arnold enjoyed, as he himself would often say, 'an almost awful happiness'. Music he did not appreciate, though he occasionally desired his eldest boy, Matthew, to sing him the Confirmation Hymn of Dr. Hinds, to which he had become endeared, owing to its use in Rugby Chapel. But his lack of ear was, he considered, amply recompensed by his love of flowers: 'they are my music,' he declared. Yet, in such a matter, he was careful to refrain from an excess of feeling, such as, in his opinion, marked the famous lines of Wordsworth:

'To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'

He found the sentiment morbid. 'Life,' he said, 'is not long enough to take such intense interest in objects in themselves so little.' As for the animal world, his feelings towards it were of a very different cast. 'The whole subject,' he said, 'of the brute creation is to me one of such painful mystery, that I dare not approach it.' The Unitarians themselves were a less distressing thought.

Once or twice he found time to visit the Continent, and the letters and journals recording in minute detail his reflections and impressions in France or Italy show us that Dr. Arnold preserved, in spite of the distractions of foreign scenes and foreign manners, his accustomed habits of mind. Taking very little interest in works of art, he was occasionally moved by the beauty of natural objects; but his princ.i.p.al preoccupation remained with the moral aspects of things. From this point of view, he found much to reprehend in the conduct of his own countrymen. 'I fear,' he wrote, 'that our countrymen who live abroad are not in the best possible moral state, however much they may do in science or literature.' And this was unfortunate, because 'a thorough English gentleman-Christian, manly, and enlightened-is more, I believe, than Guizot or Sismondi could comprehend; it is a finer specimen of human nature than any other country, I believe, could furnish'. Nevertheless, our travellers would imitate foreign customs without discrimination, 'as in the absurd habit of not eating fish with a knife, borrowed from the French, who do it because they have no knives fit for use'. Places, no less than people, aroused similar reflections. By Pompeii, Dr. Arnold was not particularly impressed.

'There is only,' he observed, 'the same sort of interest with which one would see the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, but indeed there is less. One is not authorised to ascribe so solemn a character to the destruction of Pompeii.'

The lake of Como moved him more profoundly. As he gazed upon the overwhelming beauty around him, he thought of 'moral evil', and was appalled by the contrast. 'May the sense of moral evil', he prayed, 'be as strong in me as my delight in external beauty, for in a deep sense of moral evil, more perhaps than in anything else, abides a saving knowledge of G.o.d!'