The thick, dark
clusters
of his hair, his bushy eyebrows and
curling whiskers, his straight nose and bulky chin, his firm and
upward-curving lower lip--all these revealed a temperament of ardour and
determination.
curling whiskers, his straight nose and bulky chin, his firm and
upward-curving lower lip--all these revealed a temperament of ardour and
determination.
Strachey - Eminent Victorians
As one turns over these
singular pages, one has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the
Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will
kill Him with overwork.
Then, suddenly, in the very midst of the ramifying generalities of her
metaphysical disquisitions, there is an unexpected turn and the reader
is plunged all at once into something particular, something personal,
something impregnated with intense experience--a virulent invective upon
the position of women in the upper ranks of society. Forgetful alike of
her high argument and of the artisans, the bitter creature rails through
a hundred pages of close print at the falsities of family life, the
ineptitudes of marriage, the emptinesses of convention, in the spirit of
an Ibsen or a Samuel Butler. Her fierce pen, shaking with intimate
anger, depicts in biting sentences the fearful fate of an unmarried girl
in a wealthy household. It is a cri du coeur; and then, as suddenly, she
returns once more to instruct the artisans upon the nature of Omnipotent
Righteousness.
Her mind was, indeed, better qualified to dissect the concrete and
distasteful fruits of actual life than to construct a coherent system of
abstract philosophy. In spite of her respect for Law, she was never at
home with a generalisation. Thus, though the great achievement of her
life lay in the immense impetus which she gave to the scientific
treatment of sickness, a true comprehension of the scientific method
itself was alien to her spirit. Like most great men of action--perhaps
like all--she was simply an empiricist. She believed in what she saw,
and she acted accordingly; beyond that she would not go. She had found
in Scutari that fresh air and light played an effective part in the
prevention of the maladies with which she had to deal; and that was
enough for her; she would not inquire further; what were the general
principles underlying that fact--or even whether there were any--she
refused to consider. Years after the discoveries of Pasteur and Lister,
she laughed at what she called the 'germ-fetish'. There was no such
thing as 'infection'; she had never seen it, therefore it did not exist.
But she had seen the good effects of fresh air; therefore, there could
be no doubt about them; and therefore, it was essential that the
bedrooms of patients should be well ventilated. Such was her doctrine;
and in those days of hermetically scaled windows it was a very valuable
one. But it was a purely empirical doctrine, and thus it led to some
unfortunate results. When, for instance, her influence in India was at
its height, she issued orders that all hospital windows should be
invariably kept open. The authorities, who knew what an open window in
the hot weather meant, protested, but in vain; Miss Nightingale was
incredulous. She knew nothing of the hot weather, but she did know the
value of fresh air--from personal experience; the authorities were
talking nonsense; and the windows must be kept open all the year round.
There was a great outcry from all the doctors in India, but she was
firm; and for a moment it seemed possible that her terrible commands
would have to be put into execution. Lord Lawrence, however, was
Viceroy, and he was able to intimate to Miss Nightingale, with
sufficient authority, that himself had decided upon the question, and
that his decision must stand, even against her own. Upon that she gave
way, but reluctantly and quite unconvinced; she was only puzzled by the
unexpected weakness of Lord Lawrence. No doubt, if she had lived today,
and if her experience had lain, not among cholera cases at Scutari, but
among yellow-fever cases in Panama, she would have declared fresh air a
fetish, and would have maintained to her dying day that the only really
effective way of dealing with disease was by the destruction of
mosquitoes.
Yet her mind, so positive, so realistic, so ultra-practical, had its
singular revulsions, its mysterious moods of mysticism and of doubt. At
times, lying sleepless in the early hours, she fell into long, strange,
agonised meditations, and then, seizing a pencil, she would commit to
paper the confessions of her soul. The morbid longings of her
pre-Crimean days came over her once more; she filled page after page
with self-examination, self-criticism, self-surrender. 'Oh Father,' she
wrote, 'I submit, I resign myself, I accept with all my heart, this
stretching out of Thy hand to save me. . . . Oh how vain it is, the vanity
of vanities, to live in men's thoughts instead of God's! '
She was lonely, she was miserable. 'Thou knowest that through all these
horrible twenty years, I have been supported by the belief that I was
working with Thee who would bring everyone, even our poor nurses, to
perfection'--and yet, after all, what was the result? Had not even she
been an unprofitable servant? One night, waking suddenly, she saw, in
the dim light of the night-lamp, tenebrous shapes upon the wall. The
past rushed back upon her. 'Am I she who once stood on that Crimean
height? ' she wildly asked--'The Lady with a lamp shall stand. . . . The lamp
shows me only my utter shipwreck. '
She sought consolation in the writings of the Mystics and in a
correspondence with Mr. Jowett. For many years the Master of Balliol
acted as her spiritual adviser. He discussed with her in a series of
enormous letters the problems of religion and philosophy; he criticised
her writings on those subjects with the tactful sympathy of a cleric who
was also a man of the world; and he even ventured to attempt at times to
instil into her rebellious nature some of his own peculiar suavity. 'I
sometimes think,' he told her, 'that you ought seriously to consider how
your work may be carried on, not with less energy, but in a calmer
spirit. I am not blaming the past . . . But I want the peace of God to
settle on the future. ' He recommended her to spend her time no longer in
'conflicts with Government offices', and to take up some literary work.
He urged her to 'work out her notion of Divine Perfection', in a series
of essays for Frazer's Magazine. She did so; and the result was
submitted to Mr. Froude, who pronounced the second essay to be 'even
more pregnant than the first. I cannot tell,' he said, 'how sanitary,
with disordered intellects, the effects of such papers will be. '
Mr. Carlyle, indeed, used different language, and some remarks of his
about a lost lamb bleating on the mountains, having been unfortunately
repeated to Miss Nightingale, required all Mr. Jowett's suavity to keep
the peace. In a letter of fourteen sheets, he turned her attention from
this painful topic towards a discussion of Quietism. 'I don't see why,'
said the Master of Balliol, 'active life might not become a sort of
passive life too. ' And then, he added, 'I sometimes fancy there are
possibilities of human character much greater than have been realised. '
She found such sentiments helpful, underlining them in blue pencil; and,
in return, she assisted her friend with a long series of elaborate
comments upon the Dialogues of Plato, most of which he embodied in the
second edition of his translation. Gradually her interest became more
personal; she told him never to work again after midnight, and he obeyed
her. Then she helped him to draw up a special form of daily service for
the College Chapel, with selections from the Psalms under the heads of
'God the Lord, God the judge, God the Father, and God the
Friend'--though, indeed, this project was never realised; for the Bishop
of Oxford disallowed the alterations, exercising his legal powers, on
the advice of Sir Travers Twiss.
Their relations became intimate. 'The spirit of the Twenty-third Psalm
and the spirit of the Nineteenth Psalm should be united in our lives,'
Mr. Jowett said. Eventually, she asked him to do her a singular favour.
Would he, knowing what he did of her religious views, come to London and
administer to her the Holy Sacrament? He did not hesitate, and
afterwards declared that he would always regard the occasion as a solemn
event in his life. He was devoted to her--though the precise nature of
his feelings towards her never quite transpired. Her feelings towards
him were more mixed. At first, he was 'that great and good man'--'that
true saint, Mr. Jowett'; but, as time went on, some gall was mingled
with the balm; the acrimony of her nature asserted itself. She felt that
she gave more sympathy than she received; she was exhausted, and she was
annoyed by his conversation. Her tongue, one day, could not refrain from
shooting out at him: 'He comes to me, and he talks to me,' she said, 'as
if I were someone else. '
V
AT one time she had almost decided to end her life in retirement as a
patient at St. Thomas's Hospital. But partly owing to the persuasions of
Mr. Jowett, she changed her mind; for forty-five years she remained in
South Street; and in South Street she died. As old age approached,
though her influence with the official world gradually diminished, her
activities seemed to remain as intense and widespread as before. When
hospitals were to be built, when schemes of sanitary reform were in
agitation, when wars broke out, she was still the adviser of all Europe.
Still, with a characteristic self-assurance, she watched from her
Mayfair bedroom over the welfare of India. Still, with an indefatigable
enthusiasm, she pushed forward the work, which, perhaps, was nearer to
her heart, more completely her own, than all the rest--the training of
nurses. In her moments of deepest depression, when her greatest
achievements seemed to lose their lustre, she thought of her nurses, and
was comforted. The ways of God, she found, were strange indeed. 'How
inefficient I was in the Crimea,' she noted. 'Yet He has raised up from
it trained nursing. '
At other times, she was better satisfied. Looking back, she was amazed
by the enormous change which, since her early days, had come over the
whole treatment of illness, the whole conception of public and domestic
health--a change in which, she knew, she had played her part. One of her
Indian admirers, the Aga Khan, came to visit her. She expatiated on the
marvellous advances she had lived to see in the management of
hospitals--in drainage, in ventilation, in sanitary work of every kind.
There was a pause; and then, 'Do you think you are improving? ' asked the
Aga Khan. She was a little taken aback, and said, 'What do you mean by
"improving"? ' He replied, 'Believing more in God. ' She saw that he had a
view of God which was different from hers. 'A most interesting man,' she
noted after the interview; 'but you could never teach him sanitation. '
When old age actually came, something curious happened. Destiny, having
waited very patiently, played a queer trick on Miss Nightingale. The
benevolence and public spirit of that long life had only been equalled
by its acerbity. Her virtue had dwelt in hardness, and she had poured
forth her unstinted usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips. And
now the sarcastic years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was
not to die as she had lived. The sting was to be taken out of her; she
was to be made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance and
complacency. The change came gradually, but at last it was unmistakable.
The terrible commander who had driven Sidney Herbert to his death, to
whom Mr. Jowett had applied the words of Homer, amoton memaniia--raging
insatiably--now accepted small compliments with gratitude, and indulged
in sentimental friendships with young girls. The author of "Notes on
Nursing"--that classical compendium of the besetting sins of the
sisterhood, drawn up with the detailed acrimony, the vindictive relish,
of a Swift--now spent long hours in composing sympathetic Addresses to
Probationers, whom she petted and wept over in turn. And, at the same
time, there appeared a corresponding alteration in her physical mood.
The thin, angular woman, with her haughty eye and her acrid mouth, had
vanished; and in her place was the rounded, bulky form of a fat old
lady, smiling all day long. Then something else became visible. The
brain which had been steeled at Scutari was indeed, literally, growing
soft. Senility--an ever more and more amiable senility--descended.
Towards the end, consciousness itself grew lost in a roseate haze, and
melted into nothingness.
It was just then, three years before her death, when she was
eighty-seven years old (1907), that those in authority bethought them
that the opportune moment had come for bestowing a public honour on
Florence Nightingale. She was offered the Order of Merit. That Order,
whose roll contains, among other distinguished names, those of Sir
Lawrence Alma Tadema and Sir Edward Elgar, is remarkable chiefly for the
fact that, as its title indicates, it is bestowed because its recipient
deserves it, and for no other reason. Miss Nightingale's representatives
accepted the honour, and her name, after a lapse of many years, once
more appeared in the Press. Congratulations from all sides came pouring
in. There was a universal burst of enthusiasm--a final revivification of
the ancient myth. Among her other admirers, the German Emperor took this
opportunity of expressing his feelings towards her. 'His Majesty,' wrote
the German Ambassador, 'having just brought to a close a most enjoyable
stay in the beautiful neighbourhood of your old home near Romsey, has
commanded me to present you with some flowers as a token of his esteem. '
Then, by Royal command, the Order of Merit was brought to South Street,
and there was a little ceremony of presentation. Sir Douglas Dawson,
after a short speech, stepped forward, and handed the insignia of the
Order to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows, she dimly recognised
that some compliment was being paid her. 'Too kind--too kind,' she
murmured; and she was not ironical.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sir E. Cook. Life of Florence Nightingale.
A. W. Kinglake. The Invasion of the Crimea.
Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne. Scutari and its Hospitals.
S. M. Mitra. Life of Sir John Hall.
Lord Stanmore. Sidney Herbert.
Sir G. Douglas. The Panmure Papers.
Sir H. Maxwell. Life and Letters of the Fourth Earl of Clarendon.
E. Abbott and L. Campbell. Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett.
A. H. Clough. Poems and Memoir.
Dr. Arnold
IN 1827 the headmastership of Rugby School fell vacant, and it became
necessary for the twelve trustees, noblemen and gentlemen of
Warwickshire, to appoint a successor to the post. Reform was in the
air--political, social, religious; there was even a feeling abroad that
our great public schools were not quite all that they should be, and
that some change or other--no one precisely knew what--but some change
in the system of their management, was highly desirable. Thus it was
natural that when the twelve noblemen and gentlemen, who had determined
to be guided entirely by the merits of the candidates, found among the
testimonials pouring in upon them a letter from Dr. Hawkins, the Provost
of Oriel, predicting that if they elected Mr. Thomas Arnold he would
'change the face of education all through the public schools of
England', they hesitated no longer; obviously, Mr. Thomas Arnold was
their man. He was elected therefore; received, as was fitting, priest's
orders; became, as was no less fitting, a Doctor of Divinity; and in
August, 1828, took up the duties of his office.
All that was known of the previous life of Dr. Arnold seemed to justify
the prediction of the Provost of Oriel, and the choice of the Trustees.
The son of a respectable Collector of Customs, he had been educated at
Winchester and at Oxford, where his industry and piety had given him a
conspicuous place among his fellow students. It is true that, as a
schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home
suggested to the more clear-sighted among his relatives the possibility
that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else
could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been
presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies,
with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett's History of England?
His career at Oxford had been a distinguished one, winding up with an
Oriel fellowship. It was at about this time that the smooth and
satisfactory progress of his life was for a moment interrupted: he began
to be troubled by religious doubts. These doubts, as we learn from one
of his contemporaries, who afterwards became Mr. Justice Coleridge,
'were not low nor rationalistic in their tendency, according to the bad
sense of that term; there was no indisposition in him to believe merely
because the article transcended his reason, he doubted the proof and the
interpretation of the textual authority'.
In his perturbation, Arnold consulted Keble, who was at that time one of
his closest friends, and a Fellow of the same College.
'The subject of these distressing thoughts,' Keble wrote to Coleridge,
'is that most awful one, on which all very inquisitive reasoning minds
are, I believe, most liable to such temptations--I mean, the doctrine of
the blessed Trinity. Do not start, my dear Coleridge; I do not believe
that Arnold has any serious scruples of the UNDERSTANDING about it, but
it is a defect of his mind that he cannot get rid of a certain feeling
of objections. ' What was to be done? Keble's advice was peremptory.
Arnold was 'bid to pause in his inquiries, to pray earnestly for help
and light from above, and turn himself more strongly than ever to the
practical duties of a holy life'. He did so, and the result was all that
could be wished. He soon found himself blessed with perfect peace of
mind, and a settled conviction.
One other difficulty, and one only, we hear of at this point in his
life. His dislike of early rising amounted, we are told, 'almost to a
constitutional infirmity'. This weakness too he overcame, yet not quite
so successfully as his doubts upon the doctrine of the Trinity. For in
afterlife, the Doctor would often declare 'that early rising continued
to be a daily effort to him and that in this instance he never found the
truth of the usual rule that all things are made easy by custom.
He married young and settled down in the country as a private tutor for
youths preparing for the Universities. There he remained for ten
years--happy, busy, and sufficiently prosperous. Occupied chiefly with
his pupils, he nevertheless devoted much of his energy to wider
interests. He delivered a series of sermons in the parish church; and he
began to write a History of Rome, in the hope, as he said, that its tone
might be such 'that the strictest of what is called the Evangelical
party would not object to putting it into the hands of their children'.
His views on the religious and political condition of the country began
to crystallise. He was alarmed by the 'want of Christian principle in
the literature of the day', looking forward anxiously to 'the approach
of a greater struggle between good and evil than the world has yet
seen'; and, after a serious conversation with Dr. Whately, began to
conceive the necessity of considerable alterations in the Church
Establishment.
All who knew him during these years were profoundly impressed by the
earnestness of his religious convictions and feelings, which, as one
observer said, 'were ever bursting forth'. It was impossible to
disregard his 'deep consciousness of the invisible world' and 'the
peculiar feeling of love and adoration which he entertained towards our
Lord Jesus Christ'. 'His manner of awful reverence when speaking of God
or of the Scriptures' was particularly striking. 'No one could know him
even a little,' said another friend, 'and not be struck by his absolute
wrestling with evil, so that like St. Paul, he seemed to be battling
with the wicked one, and yet with a feeling of God's help on his side. '
Such was the man who, at the age of thirty-three, became headmaster of
Rugby. His outward appearance was the index of his inward character;
everything about him denoted energy, earnestness, and the best
intentions. His legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been;
but the sturdy athletic frame, especially when it was swathed (as it
usually was) in the flowing robes of a Doctor of Divinity, was full of
an imposing vigour; and his head, set decisively upon the collar, stock,
and bands of ecclesiastical tradition, clearly belonged to a person of
eminence.
The thick, dark clusters of his hair, his bushy eyebrows and
curling whiskers, his straight nose and bulky chin, his firm and
upward-curving lower lip--all these revealed a temperament of ardour and
determination. His eyes were bright and large; they were also obviously
honest. And yet--why was it? Was it in the lines of the mouth or the
frown on the forehead? --it was hard to say, but it was
unmistakable--there was a slightly puzzled look upon the face of Dr.
Arnold.
And certainly, if he was to fulfil the prophecy of the Provost of Oriel,
the task before him was sufficiently perplexing. The public schools of
those days were still virgin forests, untouched by the hand of reform.
Keate was still reigning at Eton; and we possess, in the records of his
pupils, a picture of the public school education of the early nineteenth
century, in its most characteristic state. It was a system of anarchy
tempered by despotism. Hundreds of boys, herded together in
miscellaneous boarding-houses, or in that grim 'Long Chamber' at whose
name in after years aged statesmen and warriors would turn pale, lived,
badgered and overawed by the furious incursions of an irascible little
old man carrying a bundle of birch-twigs, a life in which licensed
barbarism was mingled with the daily and hourly study of the niceties of
Ovidian verse. It was a life of freedom and terror, of prosody and
rebellion, of interminable floggings and appalling practical jokes.
Keate ruled, unaided--for the undermasters were few and of no
account--by sheer force of character. But there were times when even
that indomitable will was overwhelmed by the flood of lawlessness. Every
Sunday afternoon he attempted to read sermons to the whole school
assembled; and every Sunday afternoon the whole school assembled shouted
him down. The scenes in Chapel were far from edifying; while some
antique Fellow doddered in the pulpit, rats would be let loose to scurry
among the legs of the exploding boys. But next morning the hand of
discipline would reassert itself; and the savage ritual of the
whipping-block would remind a batch of whimpering children that, though
sins against man and God might be forgiven them, a false quantity could
only be expiated in tears and blood.
From two sides this system of education was beginning to be assailed by
the awakening public opinion of the upper middle classes. On the one
hand, there was a desire for a more liberal curriculum; on the other,
there was a demand for a higher moral tone. The growing utilitarianism
of the age viewed with impatience a course of instruction which excluded
every branch of knowledge except classical philology; while its growing
respectability was shocked by such a spectacle of disorder and brutality
as was afforded by the Eton of Keate. 'The public schools,' said the
Rev. Mr. Bowdler, 'are the very seats and nurseries of vice. '
Dr. Arnold agreed. He was convinced of the necessity for reform. But it
was only natural that to one of his temperament and education it should
have been the moral rather than the intellectual side of the question
which impressed itself upon his mind. Doubtless it was important to
teach boys something more than the bleak rigidities of the ancient
tongues; but how much more important to instil into them the elements of
character and the principles of conduct! His great object, throughout
his career at Rugby, was, as he repeatedly said, to 'make the school a
place of really Christian education'. To introduce 'a religious
principle into education', was his 'most earnest wish', he wrote to a
friend when he first became headmaster; 'but to do this would be to
succeed beyond all my hopes; it would be a happiness so great, that, I
think, the world would yield me nothing comparable to it'. And he was
constantly impressing these sentiments upon his pupils. 'What I have
often said before,' he told them, 'I repeat now: what we must look for
here is, first, religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly
conduct; and thirdly, intellectual ability. '
There can be no doubt that Dr. Arnold's point of view was shared by the
great mass of English parents. They cared very little for classical
scholarship; 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
class-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 mass 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 class,
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 attitude 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
amusement' 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 chastisement' 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 noble 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 chastisement 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 chastisement; 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 assume 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 pronounce French well, under any
circumstances. ' 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 pass 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 classics 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 passages 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 principal 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 classroom,
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 shining 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 attitude, 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 worship 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 companionship, 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
assured--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 assiduously, 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
passages 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 constitution 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
classes, 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 classes 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
not or to assassinate; 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, xxx; 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 God'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'.
singular pages, one has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the
Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will
kill Him with overwork.
Then, suddenly, in the very midst of the ramifying generalities of her
metaphysical disquisitions, there is an unexpected turn and the reader
is plunged all at once into something particular, something personal,
something impregnated with intense experience--a virulent invective upon
the position of women in the upper ranks of society. Forgetful alike of
her high argument and of the artisans, the bitter creature rails through
a hundred pages of close print at the falsities of family life, the
ineptitudes of marriage, the emptinesses of convention, in the spirit of
an Ibsen or a Samuel Butler. Her fierce pen, shaking with intimate
anger, depicts in biting sentences the fearful fate of an unmarried girl
in a wealthy household. It is a cri du coeur; and then, as suddenly, she
returns once more to instruct the artisans upon the nature of Omnipotent
Righteousness.
Her mind was, indeed, better qualified to dissect the concrete and
distasteful fruits of actual life than to construct a coherent system of
abstract philosophy. In spite of her respect for Law, she was never at
home with a generalisation. Thus, though the great achievement of her
life lay in the immense impetus which she gave to the scientific
treatment of sickness, a true comprehension of the scientific method
itself was alien to her spirit. Like most great men of action--perhaps
like all--she was simply an empiricist. She believed in what she saw,
and she acted accordingly; beyond that she would not go. She had found
in Scutari that fresh air and light played an effective part in the
prevention of the maladies with which she had to deal; and that was
enough for her; she would not inquire further; what were the general
principles underlying that fact--or even whether there were any--she
refused to consider. Years after the discoveries of Pasteur and Lister,
she laughed at what she called the 'germ-fetish'. There was no such
thing as 'infection'; she had never seen it, therefore it did not exist.
But she had seen the good effects of fresh air; therefore, there could
be no doubt about them; and therefore, it was essential that the
bedrooms of patients should be well ventilated. Such was her doctrine;
and in those days of hermetically scaled windows it was a very valuable
one. But it was a purely empirical doctrine, and thus it led to some
unfortunate results. When, for instance, her influence in India was at
its height, she issued orders that all hospital windows should be
invariably kept open. The authorities, who knew what an open window in
the hot weather meant, protested, but in vain; Miss Nightingale was
incredulous. She knew nothing of the hot weather, but she did know the
value of fresh air--from personal experience; the authorities were
talking nonsense; and the windows must be kept open all the year round.
There was a great outcry from all the doctors in India, but she was
firm; and for a moment it seemed possible that her terrible commands
would have to be put into execution. Lord Lawrence, however, was
Viceroy, and he was able to intimate to Miss Nightingale, with
sufficient authority, that himself had decided upon the question, and
that his decision must stand, even against her own. Upon that she gave
way, but reluctantly and quite unconvinced; she was only puzzled by the
unexpected weakness of Lord Lawrence. No doubt, if she had lived today,
and if her experience had lain, not among cholera cases at Scutari, but
among yellow-fever cases in Panama, she would have declared fresh air a
fetish, and would have maintained to her dying day that the only really
effective way of dealing with disease was by the destruction of
mosquitoes.
Yet her mind, so positive, so realistic, so ultra-practical, had its
singular revulsions, its mysterious moods of mysticism and of doubt. At
times, lying sleepless in the early hours, she fell into long, strange,
agonised meditations, and then, seizing a pencil, she would commit to
paper the confessions of her soul. The morbid longings of her
pre-Crimean days came over her once more; she filled page after page
with self-examination, self-criticism, self-surrender. 'Oh Father,' she
wrote, 'I submit, I resign myself, I accept with all my heart, this
stretching out of Thy hand to save me. . . . Oh how vain it is, the vanity
of vanities, to live in men's thoughts instead of God's! '
She was lonely, she was miserable. 'Thou knowest that through all these
horrible twenty years, I have been supported by the belief that I was
working with Thee who would bring everyone, even our poor nurses, to
perfection'--and yet, after all, what was the result? Had not even she
been an unprofitable servant? One night, waking suddenly, she saw, in
the dim light of the night-lamp, tenebrous shapes upon the wall. The
past rushed back upon her. 'Am I she who once stood on that Crimean
height? ' she wildly asked--'The Lady with a lamp shall stand. . . . The lamp
shows me only my utter shipwreck. '
She sought consolation in the writings of the Mystics and in a
correspondence with Mr. Jowett. For many years the Master of Balliol
acted as her spiritual adviser. He discussed with her in a series of
enormous letters the problems of religion and philosophy; he criticised
her writings on those subjects with the tactful sympathy of a cleric who
was also a man of the world; and he even ventured to attempt at times to
instil into her rebellious nature some of his own peculiar suavity. 'I
sometimes think,' he told her, 'that you ought seriously to consider how
your work may be carried on, not with less energy, but in a calmer
spirit. I am not blaming the past . . . But I want the peace of God to
settle on the future. ' He recommended her to spend her time no longer in
'conflicts with Government offices', and to take up some literary work.
He urged her to 'work out her notion of Divine Perfection', in a series
of essays for Frazer's Magazine. She did so; and the result was
submitted to Mr. Froude, who pronounced the second essay to be 'even
more pregnant than the first. I cannot tell,' he said, 'how sanitary,
with disordered intellects, the effects of such papers will be. '
Mr. Carlyle, indeed, used different language, and some remarks of his
about a lost lamb bleating on the mountains, having been unfortunately
repeated to Miss Nightingale, required all Mr. Jowett's suavity to keep
the peace. In a letter of fourteen sheets, he turned her attention from
this painful topic towards a discussion of Quietism. 'I don't see why,'
said the Master of Balliol, 'active life might not become a sort of
passive life too. ' And then, he added, 'I sometimes fancy there are
possibilities of human character much greater than have been realised. '
She found such sentiments helpful, underlining them in blue pencil; and,
in return, she assisted her friend with a long series of elaborate
comments upon the Dialogues of Plato, most of which he embodied in the
second edition of his translation. Gradually her interest became more
personal; she told him never to work again after midnight, and he obeyed
her. Then she helped him to draw up a special form of daily service for
the College Chapel, with selections from the Psalms under the heads of
'God the Lord, God the judge, God the Father, and God the
Friend'--though, indeed, this project was never realised; for the Bishop
of Oxford disallowed the alterations, exercising his legal powers, on
the advice of Sir Travers Twiss.
Their relations became intimate. 'The spirit of the Twenty-third Psalm
and the spirit of the Nineteenth Psalm should be united in our lives,'
Mr. Jowett said. Eventually, she asked him to do her a singular favour.
Would he, knowing what he did of her religious views, come to London and
administer to her the Holy Sacrament? He did not hesitate, and
afterwards declared that he would always regard the occasion as a solemn
event in his life. He was devoted to her--though the precise nature of
his feelings towards her never quite transpired. Her feelings towards
him were more mixed. At first, he was 'that great and good man'--'that
true saint, Mr. Jowett'; but, as time went on, some gall was mingled
with the balm; the acrimony of her nature asserted itself. She felt that
she gave more sympathy than she received; she was exhausted, and she was
annoyed by his conversation. Her tongue, one day, could not refrain from
shooting out at him: 'He comes to me, and he talks to me,' she said, 'as
if I were someone else. '
V
AT one time she had almost decided to end her life in retirement as a
patient at St. Thomas's Hospital. But partly owing to the persuasions of
Mr. Jowett, she changed her mind; for forty-five years she remained in
South Street; and in South Street she died. As old age approached,
though her influence with the official world gradually diminished, her
activities seemed to remain as intense and widespread as before. When
hospitals were to be built, when schemes of sanitary reform were in
agitation, when wars broke out, she was still the adviser of all Europe.
Still, with a characteristic self-assurance, she watched from her
Mayfair bedroom over the welfare of India. Still, with an indefatigable
enthusiasm, she pushed forward the work, which, perhaps, was nearer to
her heart, more completely her own, than all the rest--the training of
nurses. In her moments of deepest depression, when her greatest
achievements seemed to lose their lustre, she thought of her nurses, and
was comforted. The ways of God, she found, were strange indeed. 'How
inefficient I was in the Crimea,' she noted. 'Yet He has raised up from
it trained nursing. '
At other times, she was better satisfied. Looking back, she was amazed
by the enormous change which, since her early days, had come over the
whole treatment of illness, the whole conception of public and domestic
health--a change in which, she knew, she had played her part. One of her
Indian admirers, the Aga Khan, came to visit her. She expatiated on the
marvellous advances she had lived to see in the management of
hospitals--in drainage, in ventilation, in sanitary work of every kind.
There was a pause; and then, 'Do you think you are improving? ' asked the
Aga Khan. She was a little taken aback, and said, 'What do you mean by
"improving"? ' He replied, 'Believing more in God. ' She saw that he had a
view of God which was different from hers. 'A most interesting man,' she
noted after the interview; 'but you could never teach him sanitation. '
When old age actually came, something curious happened. Destiny, having
waited very patiently, played a queer trick on Miss Nightingale. The
benevolence and public spirit of that long life had only been equalled
by its acerbity. Her virtue had dwelt in hardness, and she had poured
forth her unstinted usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips. And
now the sarcastic years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was
not to die as she had lived. The sting was to be taken out of her; she
was to be made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance and
complacency. The change came gradually, but at last it was unmistakable.
The terrible commander who had driven Sidney Herbert to his death, to
whom Mr. Jowett had applied the words of Homer, amoton memaniia--raging
insatiably--now accepted small compliments with gratitude, and indulged
in sentimental friendships with young girls. The author of "Notes on
Nursing"--that classical compendium of the besetting sins of the
sisterhood, drawn up with the detailed acrimony, the vindictive relish,
of a Swift--now spent long hours in composing sympathetic Addresses to
Probationers, whom she petted and wept over in turn. And, at the same
time, there appeared a corresponding alteration in her physical mood.
The thin, angular woman, with her haughty eye and her acrid mouth, had
vanished; and in her place was the rounded, bulky form of a fat old
lady, smiling all day long. Then something else became visible. The
brain which had been steeled at Scutari was indeed, literally, growing
soft. Senility--an ever more and more amiable senility--descended.
Towards the end, consciousness itself grew lost in a roseate haze, and
melted into nothingness.
It was just then, three years before her death, when she was
eighty-seven years old (1907), that those in authority bethought them
that the opportune moment had come for bestowing a public honour on
Florence Nightingale. She was offered the Order of Merit. That Order,
whose roll contains, among other distinguished names, those of Sir
Lawrence Alma Tadema and Sir Edward Elgar, is remarkable chiefly for the
fact that, as its title indicates, it is bestowed because its recipient
deserves it, and for no other reason. Miss Nightingale's representatives
accepted the honour, and her name, after a lapse of many years, once
more appeared in the Press. Congratulations from all sides came pouring
in. There was a universal burst of enthusiasm--a final revivification of
the ancient myth. Among her other admirers, the German Emperor took this
opportunity of expressing his feelings towards her. 'His Majesty,' wrote
the German Ambassador, 'having just brought to a close a most enjoyable
stay in the beautiful neighbourhood of your old home near Romsey, has
commanded me to present you with some flowers as a token of his esteem. '
Then, by Royal command, the Order of Merit was brought to South Street,
and there was a little ceremony of presentation. Sir Douglas Dawson,
after a short speech, stepped forward, and handed the insignia of the
Order to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows, she dimly recognised
that some compliment was being paid her. 'Too kind--too kind,' she
murmured; and she was not ironical.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sir E. Cook. Life of Florence Nightingale.
A. W. Kinglake. The Invasion of the Crimea.
Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne. Scutari and its Hospitals.
S. M. Mitra. Life of Sir John Hall.
Lord Stanmore. Sidney Herbert.
Sir G. Douglas. The Panmure Papers.
Sir H. Maxwell. Life and Letters of the Fourth Earl of Clarendon.
E. Abbott and L. Campbell. Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett.
A. H. Clough. Poems and Memoir.
Dr. Arnold
IN 1827 the headmastership of Rugby School fell vacant, and it became
necessary for the twelve trustees, noblemen and gentlemen of
Warwickshire, to appoint a successor to the post. Reform was in the
air--political, social, religious; there was even a feeling abroad that
our great public schools were not quite all that they should be, and
that some change or other--no one precisely knew what--but some change
in the system of their management, was highly desirable. Thus it was
natural that when the twelve noblemen and gentlemen, who had determined
to be guided entirely by the merits of the candidates, found among the
testimonials pouring in upon them a letter from Dr. Hawkins, the Provost
of Oriel, predicting that if they elected Mr. Thomas Arnold he would
'change the face of education all through the public schools of
England', they hesitated no longer; obviously, Mr. Thomas Arnold was
their man. He was elected therefore; received, as was fitting, priest's
orders; became, as was no less fitting, a Doctor of Divinity; and in
August, 1828, took up the duties of his office.
All that was known of the previous life of Dr. Arnold seemed to justify
the prediction of the Provost of Oriel, and the choice of the Trustees.
The son of a respectable Collector of Customs, he had been educated at
Winchester and at Oxford, where his industry and piety had given him a
conspicuous place among his fellow students. It is true that, as a
schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home
suggested to the more clear-sighted among his relatives the possibility
that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else
could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been
presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies,
with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett's History of England?
His career at Oxford had been a distinguished one, winding up with an
Oriel fellowship. It was at about this time that the smooth and
satisfactory progress of his life was for a moment interrupted: he began
to be troubled by religious doubts. These doubts, as we learn from one
of his contemporaries, who afterwards became Mr. Justice Coleridge,
'were not low nor rationalistic in their tendency, according to the bad
sense of that term; there was no indisposition in him to believe merely
because the article transcended his reason, he doubted the proof and the
interpretation of the textual authority'.
In his perturbation, Arnold consulted Keble, who was at that time one of
his closest friends, and a Fellow of the same College.
'The subject of these distressing thoughts,' Keble wrote to Coleridge,
'is that most awful one, on which all very inquisitive reasoning minds
are, I believe, most liable to such temptations--I mean, the doctrine of
the blessed Trinity. Do not start, my dear Coleridge; I do not believe
that Arnold has any serious scruples of the UNDERSTANDING about it, but
it is a defect of his mind that he cannot get rid of a certain feeling
of objections. ' What was to be done? Keble's advice was peremptory.
Arnold was 'bid to pause in his inquiries, to pray earnestly for help
and light from above, and turn himself more strongly than ever to the
practical duties of a holy life'. He did so, and the result was all that
could be wished. He soon found himself blessed with perfect peace of
mind, and a settled conviction.
One other difficulty, and one only, we hear of at this point in his
life. His dislike of early rising amounted, we are told, 'almost to a
constitutional infirmity'. This weakness too he overcame, yet not quite
so successfully as his doubts upon the doctrine of the Trinity. For in
afterlife, the Doctor would often declare 'that early rising continued
to be a daily effort to him and that in this instance he never found the
truth of the usual rule that all things are made easy by custom.
He married young and settled down in the country as a private tutor for
youths preparing for the Universities. There he remained for ten
years--happy, busy, and sufficiently prosperous. Occupied chiefly with
his pupils, he nevertheless devoted much of his energy to wider
interests. He delivered a series of sermons in the parish church; and he
began to write a History of Rome, in the hope, as he said, that its tone
might be such 'that the strictest of what is called the Evangelical
party would not object to putting it into the hands of their children'.
His views on the religious and political condition of the country began
to crystallise. He was alarmed by the 'want of Christian principle in
the literature of the day', looking forward anxiously to 'the approach
of a greater struggle between good and evil than the world has yet
seen'; and, after a serious conversation with Dr. Whately, began to
conceive the necessity of considerable alterations in the Church
Establishment.
All who knew him during these years were profoundly impressed by the
earnestness of his religious convictions and feelings, which, as one
observer said, 'were ever bursting forth'. It was impossible to
disregard his 'deep consciousness of the invisible world' and 'the
peculiar feeling of love and adoration which he entertained towards our
Lord Jesus Christ'. 'His manner of awful reverence when speaking of God
or of the Scriptures' was particularly striking. 'No one could know him
even a little,' said another friend, 'and not be struck by his absolute
wrestling with evil, so that like St. Paul, he seemed to be battling
with the wicked one, and yet with a feeling of God's help on his side. '
Such was the man who, at the age of thirty-three, became headmaster of
Rugby. His outward appearance was the index of his inward character;
everything about him denoted energy, earnestness, and the best
intentions. His legs, perhaps, were shorter than they should have been;
but the sturdy athletic frame, especially when it was swathed (as it
usually was) in the flowing robes of a Doctor of Divinity, was full of
an imposing vigour; and his head, set decisively upon the collar, stock,
and bands of ecclesiastical tradition, clearly belonged to a person of
eminence.
The thick, dark clusters of his hair, his bushy eyebrows and
curling whiskers, his straight nose and bulky chin, his firm and
upward-curving lower lip--all these revealed a temperament of ardour and
determination. His eyes were bright and large; they were also obviously
honest. And yet--why was it? Was it in the lines of the mouth or the
frown on the forehead? --it was hard to say, but it was
unmistakable--there was a slightly puzzled look upon the face of Dr.
Arnold.
And certainly, if he was to fulfil the prophecy of the Provost of Oriel,
the task before him was sufficiently perplexing. The public schools of
those days were still virgin forests, untouched by the hand of reform.
Keate was still reigning at Eton; and we possess, in the records of his
pupils, a picture of the public school education of the early nineteenth
century, in its most characteristic state. It was a system of anarchy
tempered by despotism. Hundreds of boys, herded together in
miscellaneous boarding-houses, or in that grim 'Long Chamber' at whose
name in after years aged statesmen and warriors would turn pale, lived,
badgered and overawed by the furious incursions of an irascible little
old man carrying a bundle of birch-twigs, a life in which licensed
barbarism was mingled with the daily and hourly study of the niceties of
Ovidian verse. It was a life of freedom and terror, of prosody and
rebellion, of interminable floggings and appalling practical jokes.
Keate ruled, unaided--for the undermasters were few and of no
account--by sheer force of character. But there were times when even
that indomitable will was overwhelmed by the flood of lawlessness. Every
Sunday afternoon he attempted to read sermons to the whole school
assembled; and every Sunday afternoon the whole school assembled shouted
him down. The scenes in Chapel were far from edifying; while some
antique Fellow doddered in the pulpit, rats would be let loose to scurry
among the legs of the exploding boys. But next morning the hand of
discipline would reassert itself; and the savage ritual of the
whipping-block would remind a batch of whimpering children that, though
sins against man and God might be forgiven them, a false quantity could
only be expiated in tears and blood.
From two sides this system of education was beginning to be assailed by
the awakening public opinion of the upper middle classes. On the one
hand, there was a desire for a more liberal curriculum; on the other,
there was a demand for a higher moral tone. The growing utilitarianism
of the age viewed with impatience a course of instruction which excluded
every branch of knowledge except classical philology; while its growing
respectability was shocked by such a spectacle of disorder and brutality
as was afforded by the Eton of Keate. 'The public schools,' said the
Rev. Mr. Bowdler, 'are the very seats and nurseries of vice. '
Dr. Arnold agreed. He was convinced of the necessity for reform. But it
was only natural that to one of his temperament and education it should
have been the moral rather than the intellectual side of the question
which impressed itself upon his mind. Doubtless it was important to
teach boys something more than the bleak rigidities of the ancient
tongues; but how much more important to instil into them the elements of
character and the principles of conduct! His great object, throughout
his career at Rugby, was, as he repeatedly said, to 'make the school a
place of really Christian education'. To introduce 'a religious
principle into education', was his 'most earnest wish', he wrote to a
friend when he first became headmaster; 'but to do this would be to
succeed beyond all my hopes; it would be a happiness so great, that, I
think, the world would yield me nothing comparable to it'. And he was
constantly impressing these sentiments upon his pupils. 'What I have
often said before,' he told them, 'I repeat now: what we must look for
here is, first, religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly
conduct; and thirdly, intellectual ability. '
There can be no doubt that Dr. Arnold's point of view was shared by the
great mass of English parents. They cared very little for classical
scholarship; 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
class-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 mass 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 class,
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 attitude 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
amusement' 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 chastisement' 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 noble 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 chastisement 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 chastisement; 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 assume 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 pronounce French well, under any
circumstances. ' 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 pass 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 classics 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 passages 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 principal 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 classroom,
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 shining 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 attitude, 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 worship 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 companionship, 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
assured--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 assiduously, 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
passages 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 constitution 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
classes, 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 classes 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
not or to assassinate; 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, xxx; 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 God'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'.
