Part 12

He had read Gibbon and Mitford through twice before he left Winchester, at sixteen. At fourteen he enjoyed "the modest, unaffected, and impartial narratives of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon," and did not like "the numerous boasts which are everywhere to be met with in the Latin writers." He thought Roman history "scandalously exaggerated," and had no idea that he was thereafter, in his manhood, to write a fair and delightful Roman history himself.

In 1811 he was elected a scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and four years later became a Fellow at Oriel College. He gained in 1815 and in 1817 the Chancellor's prize for the two University essays, Latin and English. In college he had a passion for Aristotle and Thucydides. Next to these he loved Herodotus. Though delicate in appearance, he took long walks, in which he studied nature, being a lover of flowers, birds, and clouds.

His friendships were warm and lasting. John Keble, author of "The Christian Year," Whately, later Archbishop of Dublin, and Coleridge, afterwards chief-justice, were his especial friends.

During his four years as a Fellow in Oriel College, he took private pupils, and read in the Oxford libraries. His plan was to make himself master of some one period, like the fifteenth century, and write full notes upon it.

Oxford was always very dear to Arnold. He wrote years later, "If I live till I am eighty, and were to enjoy all the happiness that the warmest wish could desire, I should never forget or cease to look back with something of a painful feeling on the years we were together there, and on all the delights that we have lost."

During these college years he was often restless and weary of duty, inclined to indolence, and an early riser with the greatest difficulty. These things he overcame in later life. He had some religious doubts, which completely vanished as he studied and thought more deeply.

In 1819 Arnold removed to Laleham, with his mother, sister, and aunt, and remained here for the next nine years, preparing private pupils for the universities.

A year after coming to Laleham, he married, when he was twenty-five, Mary, youngest daughter of the Rev. John Penrose, in Nottinghamshire, and sister of one of his best college friends, Trevenen Penrose. She was a worthy helper through all the laborious years which followed.

Although Arnold had fitted himself for the Church, he loved the work of teaching. He wrote to a friend about to engage in a similar occupation. "I know it has a bad name, but my wife and I always happened to be fond of it.... I enjoyed and do enjoy the society of youths of seventeen or eighteen; for they are all alive in limbs and spirits at least, if not in mind, while in older persons the body and spirits oftener become lazy and languid without the mind gaining any vigor to compensate for it....

"The misery of private tuition seems to me to consist in this, that men enter upon it as a means to some further end; are always impatient for the time when they may lay it aside; whereas, if you enter upon it heartily as your life's business, as a man enters upon any other profession, you are not then in danger of grudging every hour you give to it....

"I should say, have your pupils a good deal with you, and be as familiar with them as you possibly can. I did this continually more and more before I left Laleham, going to bathe with them, leaping, and all other gymnastic exercises within my capacity, and sometimes sailing or rowing with them. They, I believe, always liked it, and I enjoyed it myself like a boy, and found myself constantly the better for it."

"Large private schools," he thought, "the worst possible system; the choice lies between public schools, and an education whose character may be strictly private and domestic."

The home at Laleham was very dear to him. Here six of his children were born. He loved the quiet walks along the banks of the Thames, his garden back of his house, where, he said, "there is always something to interest me even in the very sight of the weeds and litter, for then I think how much improved the place will be when they are removed," and the churchyard, where in after years his mother, his infant child, and now his distinguished son Matthew are resting.

One of his pupils at Laleham thus writes of Arnold: "His great power as a private tutor resided in this, that he gave such an intense earnestness to life. Every pupil was made to feel that there was a work for him to do,--that his happiness as well as his duty lay in doing that work well.... His hold over all his pupils perfectly astonished me. It was not so much an enthusiastic admiration for his genius or learning or eloquence which stirred within them; it was a sympathetic thrill caught from a spirit that was earnestly at work in the world....

"In all this there was no excitement, no predilection for one class of work above another ... but an humble, profound, and most religious consciousness that work is the appointed calling of man on earth, the end for which his various faculties were given, the element in which his nature is ordained to develop itself."

Arnold used to say, "one must always expect to succeed, but never think he had succeeded."

Besides teaching, Arnold devoted his spare time to philology and history, preparing a Lexicon of Thucydides and articles on Roman History. He learned the German language that he might read Niebuhr's "History of Rome," and thereafter became deeply interested in German literature.

He wrote a friend concerning his little study "where I have a sofa full of books, as of old, and the two verse books lying about on it, and a volume of Herodotus; and where I sit up and read or write till twelve or one o'clock." Plato's "Phædo" was a great favorite. He thought it "nearly the perfection of human language."

To another he wrote, "One of my most useful books is dear old Tottle's (Aristotle's) 'Politics,' which give one so full a notion of the state of society and opinions in old times, that by their aid one can pick out the wheat from the chaff in Livy with great success."

Arnold was always a learner. He studied Hebrew when he was forty-three and Sanscrit when he was forty-five. He urged ministers not to study works on "Divinity" only. "A man requires," he said "first, the general cultivation of his mind, by constantly reading the works of the very greatest writers, philosophers, orators, and poets, and next, an understanding of the actual state of society, ... and of political economy as teaching him how to deal with the poor.... Further, I should advise a constant use of the biography of good men."

Arnold's friends were urging him to a wider sphere of influence. Laleham had become too expensive for his means, and he had determined to move elsewhere. Just at this time the head-mastership of Rugby became vacant. There were about thirty applicants, and his testimonials were sent in late. His college friend, Dr. Hawkins, afterwards Provost of Oriel, wrote the twelve trustees a letter about Arnold, predicting that if he were elected, "he would change the face of education all through the public schools of England." He was elected in December, 1827, and the words of Dr. Hawkins were fully verified.

In 1828 he received the degree of D.D., and entered upon his new duties.

It cost the Arnold family many a struggle to leave Laleham. "I cannot tell you," Dr. Arnold writes J. T. Coleridge, "how we both love it, and its perfect peace seems at times an appalling contrast to the publicity of Rugby. I am sure that nothing could stifle this regret, were it not for my full consciousness that I have nothing to do with rest here, but with labor."

To another friend he writes, "On Tuesday, if God will, we shall leave this dear place, this nine years' home of such exceeding happiness. But it boots not to look backwards. Forwards, forwards, forwards,--should be one's motto."

For fourteen years Arnold lived at Rugby and did his great work, which has made his name known and honored among all educated nations. "What a pity," said some persons, "that a man fit to be a statesman should be employed in teaching school-boys."

But Arnold knew the greatness of his chosen work. "It is a most touching thing to me," he said, "to receive a new fellow from his father, when I think what an influence there is in this place for evil as well as for good. I do not know anything which affects me more. If ever I could receive a new boy from his father without emotion, I should think it was high time to be off."

With much firmness he united great tenderness. "Lenity is seldom to be repented of," he wrote a friend who had asked his advice in dealing with a difficult pupil. "In cases," says Dean Stanley, "when it might have been thought that tenderness would have been extinguished by indignation, he was sometimes so deeply affected in pronouncing sentence of punishment on offenders as to be hardly able to speak."

Once, when he heard of some great fault in one of his pupils, "I felt," he said--and his eyes filled with tears as he spoke, "as if it had been one of my own children, and, till I had ascertained that it was really true, I mentioned it to no one, not even to any of the masters."

At another time he said to one of the masters, speaking of a promising lad, "If he should turn out ill, I think it would break my heart."

He wrote a friend, "I believe that boys may be governed a great deal by gentle methods and kindness, and appealing to their better feelings, if you show that you are not afraid of them; I have seen great boys, six feet high, shed tears when I have sent for them up to my room and spoken to them quietly, in private, for not knowing their lesson, and I have found that this treatment produced its effect afterwards in making them do better. But of course deeds must second words when needful, or words will soon be laughed at."

When occasion demanded, Arnold could be very firm. If a boy were habitually idle, or doing harm in the school, he was expelled, for a time or permanently. "Often it would be wholly unknown who were thus dismissed or why," says Dean Stanley; "latterly, Arnold generally allowed such cases to remain till the end of the half-year, that their removal might pass altogether unnoticed."

Many parents were displeased, but Arnold never hesitated for a moment in what he believed to be his duty. The result was that the tone of the school became so elevated that more wished to come than could be accommodated.

He always appealed to the honor of the pupils. Once he said, with great spirit, in an address in which he had spoken of bad feeling amongst the boys, "Is this a Christian school? I cannot remain here if all is to be carried on by constraint and force; if I am to be here as a jailer, I will resign my office at once."

He said, "My great desire is to teach my boys to govern themselves--a much better thing than to govern them well myself."

At another time, when several boys had been sent away, and there was much discontent in consequence, he said, "It is _not_ necessary that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys; but it _is_ necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen."

He trusted the boys, and never seemed to watch them. Their word was not doubted. "If you say so, that is quite enough; _of course_ I believe your word," was his frequent statement.

"There grew up in consequence," says Stanley, "a general feeling that it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie--he always believes one." If falsehood was discovered, the punishment was severe.

He usually had great patience. When living at Laleham he once spoke sharply to a dull pupil. "Why do you speak angrily, sir?" said the youth, looking up in his face; "indeed, I am doing the best that I can."

Years afterward Arnold used to say to his children, "I never felt so much ashamed in my life--that look and that speech I have never forgotten."

For mere "intellectual acuteness" he had no admiration, unless united with goodness. "If there be one thing on earth which is truly admirable," he said, "it is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural powers, where they have been honestly, truly, and zealously cultivated.... I would stand to that man _hat in hand_."

Arnold's consistent and noble life won the undying regard of his pupils. One pupil writes: "I am sure that I do not exaggerate my feelings when I say that I felt a love and reverence for him as one of quite awful greatness and goodness, for whom, I well remember, that I used to think I would gladly lay down my life.... I used to believe that I, too, had a work to do for him in the school, and did, for his sake, labor to raise the tone of the set I lived in."

Who can ever forget the description of Arnold in that natural and fascinating book, "Tom Brown's School Days"?

"And then came that great event in his, as in every Rugby boy's life of that day--the first sermon from the Doctor.... 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....

"But what was it, after all, which seized and held these three hundred boys, dragging them out of themselves, willingly or unwillingly, for twenty minutes on Sunday afternoon? True, there always were boys scattered up and down the school, who in heart and head were worthy to hear and able to carry away the deepest and wisest words there spoken. But those were a minority always, generally a very small one....

"What was it that moved and held us, the rest of the three hundred scholars, childish boys, who feared the Doctor with all our hearts, and very little besides in heaven or earth; who thought more of our sets in the school than of the Church of Christ, and put the traditions of Rugby and the public opinion of boys in our daily life above the laws of God?

"We couldn't enter into half that we heard: we hadn't the knowledge of our own hearts or the knowledge of one another, and little enough of the faith, hope, and love needed to that end. But we listened, as all boys in their better moods will listen (ay, and men, too, for the matter of that), to a man whom we felt to be, with all his heart, and soul, and strength, striving against whatever was mean and unmanly and unrighteous in our little world."

Another pupil writes of these sermons: "I used to listen to them from first to last with a kind of awe, and over and over again could not join my friends at the chapel door, but would walk home to be alone; and I remember the same effects being produced by them, more or less, on others, whom I should think Arnold looked on as some of the worst boys in the school."

The influence at Rugby under Arnold was thoroughly Christian, though never sectarian. Harry East, the friend of Tom Brown (Thomas Hughes) went to Arnold to talk with him about being confirmed. "When I stuck," says East, "he lifted me, just as if I had been a little child; and he seemed to know all I'd felt, and to have gone through it all. And I burst out crying--more than I've done this five years; and he sat down by me and stroked my head; and I went blundering on.... And he wasn't shocked a bit, and didn't snub me, or tell me I was a fool ... and he didn't give me any cut-and-dried explanation. But when I'd done, he just talked a bit--I can hardly remember what he said yet; but it seemed to spread round me like healing, and strength, and light; and to bear me up and plant me on a rock, where I could hold my footing and fight for myself. I don't know what to do, I feel so happy."

While Arnold loved his boys, and felt the keenest interest in them, he did not forget his own mental requirements. "He is the best teacher of others," he said, "who is best taught himself; that which we know and love we cannot but communicate.... I hold that a man is only fit to teach so long as he is himself learning daily. If the mind once becomes stagnant, it can give no fresh draught to another mind; it is drinking out of a pond instead of from a spring.... I think it essential that I should not give up my own reading, as I always find any addition of knowledge to turn to account for the school in some way or other."

While his great desire for his boys was "moral thoughtfulness: _the inquiring love of truth going along with the devoted love of goodness_," he insisted on liveliness in his teachers: "It is a great matter to make these boys understand that liveliness is not folly and thoughtlessness. A schoolmaster's intercourse is with the young, the strong, and the happy; and he cannot get on with them unless in animal spirits he can sympathize with them, and show them that his thoughtfulness is not connected with selfishness or weakness.... He who likes boys has probably a daily sympathy with them."

One great secret of Arnold's success was that he loved his work. Not that he had not strong ambitions like other men. He said, "I believe that, naturally, I am one of the most ambitious men alive," and thought that "the three great objects of human ambition" which would attract him, were "to be the prime minister of a great kingdom, the governor of a great empire, or the writer of works which should live in every age and in every country." But he felt that God had opened a great school to him, and that his path of duty was clearly marked out.

He grew tired, as do others, with what he felt to be very hard work, as all know who have tried teaching, and almost yearly took a journey on the Continent for rest and change.

"I hunger sometimes," he said, "for more time for writing; but I do not indulge the feeling, and on the other hand, I think my love of tuition rather grows upon me.... The work here is more and more engrossing continually, but I like it better and better; it has all the interest of a great game of chess, with living creatures for pawns and pieces." No one ever studied the game more intently.

"Do you see those two boys walking together?" he said to an assistant master. "I never saw them together before; you should make an especial point of observing the company they keep; nothing so tells the changes in a boy's character."

He deprecated such long terms for boys or masters as twenty-one weeks, and wished for more "co-operation in our system of public education, including both the great schools and the universities."

Besides his teaching, Arnold did much writing of pamphlets and books. "I must write or die," was an expression which he often used. His pamphlet on "The Christian Duty of Conceding the Roman Catholic Claims," in 1828, whereby many of their civil and political disabilities were to be removed, created great bitterness of feeling against him. Sir Robert Peel, the leader of the House of Commons, was also fighting the battles for the Roman Catholics of Ireland, and probably saved England from a civil war by his advocacy. But toleration was as rare nearly a century ago as it is to-day, and Arnold soon received abuse from pulpit and pew.

He was the devoted friend of the poor and the laborers. In 1831 Arnold started the _Englishmen's Register_, a weekly newspaper, with the hope of telling the people "the evils that exist, and lead them, if I can, to their causes and their remedies."

"If the clergy would come forward," he writes to his beloved sister Susannah, "as one man, from Cumberland to Cornwall, exhorting peaceableness on the one side and justice on the other, denouncing the high rents and the game laws, and the carelessness which keeps the poor ignorant, and then wonders that they are brutal, I verily believe they might yet save themselves and the State." ...

To the Rev. Augustus Hare, he writes; "Unquestionably our aristocratic manners and habits have made us and the poor two distinct and unsympathizing bodies; and from want of sympathy I fear the transition to enmity is but too easy when distress embitters the feelings, and the sight of others in luxury makes that distress still more intolerable. This is the plague-spot, to my mind, in our whole state of society, which must be removed, or the whole must perish."

He rejoiced that some of the leading manufacturers "are considering that their workmen have something else besides hands belonging to them, and are beginning to attend to the welfare of that something."

The _Register_ soon died, because Arnold could not give all the time needed to conduct it, or the large amount of money necessary to start and carry on a weekly paper. His articles, however, about laborers were copied into the _Sheffield Courant_, and he was asked to continue his writings for its columns.

He was always a noble friend to the poor. At Laleham and Rugby he gave lectures in their interest, and was often seen in their homes. "I never knew such an humble man as the doctor," said the parish clerk at Laleham; "he comes and shakes us by the hand as if he was one of us." At his later home in Westmoreland a poor woman said, "He used to come into my house and talk to me as if I was a lady."

"Prayer and kindly intercourse with the poor," said Arnold, "are the two great safeguards of spiritual life; its more than food and raiment."

Dr. Arnold held that there "are but two things of vital importance," which Algernon Sidney calls Religion and Politics, "but which I would rather call our duties and affections toward God, and our duties and feelings toward men; science and literature are but a poor make-up for the want of these."

At one time Arnold was very anxious to start a journal, a portion of which should be devoted regularly to such subjects as history, statistics of different countries, and the like. "All instruction must be systematic," he said, "and it is this which the people want."