Culture & Anarchy. Arnold Matthew
"A single line of poetry, working in the mind, may produce more thought and lead to more light, which is what man wants, than the fullest acquaintance (to take your own instance) with the processes of digestion." In 1884 he said to his American audience: "My own studies have been almost wholly in Letters, and my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight and inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my curiosity." In a word, he was, and gloried in being, a Humanist. What Humanism meant for him is curiously illustrated by his comment on some speeches which the late14 Lord Salisbury delivered at Oxford on his first appearance there as Chancellor of the University. After praising his skill and courtesy, Arnold says: "He is a dangerous man, through, and chiefly from, his want of any true sense and experience of literature and its beneficent function. Religion he knows, and physical science he knows; but the immense work between the two, which is for literature to accomplish, he knows nothing of; and all his speeches at Oxford15 pointed this way. On the one hand, he was full of the great future for physical science, and begging his University to make up her mind to it, and to resign much of her literary studies; on the other hand, he was full, almost defiantly full, of counsels and resolves for retaining and upholding the old ecclesiastical and dogmatic form of religion. From a juxtaposition of this kind, nothing but shocks and collisions can come."
The immense work which is for literature to accomplish. This work, lying between the work of Religion and the work of Science, was, in his view, nothing less than the culture of Humanity. Religion had its sphere, and Science had its sphere, but culture was to be effected neither by Religion nor by Science, but by Literature. The literature which he extolled was literature in its widest sense—ancient and modern, English and Continental, Occidental and Oriental—whatever contained "the best which had been thought and said in the world." And, when we come to the sub-divisions of literature, we note that he was pre-eminently a classicist. This he was partly by temperament, partly by training, partly by his matured and deliberate judgment. It can scarcely be doubted that he had an innate love of perfect form, an innate "sentiment against hideousness and rawness," and so he was a classicist by temperament. Then his training was essentially classical. He used to protest, with amusing earnestness, against the notion that his father had been a bad scholar. "People talk the greatest nonsense about my father's scholarship. The Wykehamists of his day were excellent scholars. Dr. Gabell made them so. My father's Latin verses were not good; but that was because he was not poetical—not because he was a bad scholar. But he wrote the most admirable Latin prose; and, as for his Greek prose, you couldn't tell it from Thucydides." In this kind of scholarship Matthew Arnold was nurtured; and whatever in this respect his training had left imperfect, he perfected by close and continuous study. His Greek and Latin reading was both wide and accurate, perhaps wider in Greek than in Latin, though the soundness of his Latin scholarship is proved by the fact that he was proxime for the Hertford Scholarship at Oxford. He had read Plato in the Sixth Form at Rugby, and Oxford taught him Aristotle. From first to last his "unapproachable favourites" were Homer and Sophocles, and Hesiod was "a Greek friend to whom he turned with excellent effect." But though he was thus essentially a classicist, a mere classicist he was not. No one had a wider, a more familiar, a more discriminating knowledge of English literature; no one—and this is worthy of remark—had the text of the Bible more perfectly at his fingers' ends. He had read all that was best in French, German, and Italian;16 and in French at any rate he was an exact and judicious critic, as is sufficiently shown by his essay on The French Play in London.17 Hebrew he mastered sufficiently to "follow and weigh the reasons offered by others" for a retranslation of the Old Testament; and into Celtic literature he made at any rate one memorable incursion.18
A man so equipped was essentially a man of letters: a great deal more than a classicist, but a classicist first and foremost. And so it was natural that he should think a classical education the best education that could be offered to boys, and should desire to see classics, taught in a literary and not a pedantic spirit, the staple of instruction in all those Public Schools, whether of ancient or of modern foundation, to which the Upper and Middle Classes should resort. He was perfectly ready to make composition in Greek and Latin the luxury of the few who had a special aptitude for it, therein following the doctrine of Dr. Whewell, and leading the way to a notable reform in Public Schools. But to read the best Latin and Greek authors was to be the staple of a boy's education, and thereto were to be added a full and scholarly knowledge of English, and a sufficiency, such as modern life demands, of Science and Mathematics. He "ventured once, in the very Senate-House and heart of Cambridge, to hazard the opinion that for the majority of mankind a little of mathematics goes a long way." He thought it no particular gain for a boy to know that "when a taper burns, the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water." He thought it a clear loss that he should not know the last book of the Iliad, or the sixth book of the Æneid, or the Agamemnon. He encouraged the Eton boys to laugh at "Scientific lectures, and lessons on the diameter of the sun and moon"; but he was moved almost to tears when "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" was offered as a paraphrase of "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" He listened with amused interest to the teachers who deduced our descent from "a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits." But he thought it deplorable that a leading physicist should never have heard of Bishop Wilson of Sodor and Man, and that a leading journalist should confound him with Bishop Wilson of Calcutta.
To the Public Schools he would have entrusted that thorough drilling in Greek, Latin and English which was to be the foundation of the pupils' culture; and, this done, he would have required the University to offer scope for the fullest development of any special aptitude which the pupil might display. In brief, the school was to train in general knowledge; the University was to specialize. In 1868 he wrote: "An admirable English mathematician told me that he should never recover the loss of the two years which after his degree he wasted without fit instruction at an English University, when he ought to have been under superior instruction, for which the present University course in England makes no provision. I daresay he will recover it, for a man of genius counts no worthy effort too hard; but who can estimate the loss to the mental training and intellectual habits of the country, from the absence—so complete that it needs genius to be sensible of it, and costs genius an effort to repair it—of all regular public provision for the scientific study and teaching of any branch of knowledge?"
Rugby
Matthew Arnold entered Rugby School in August, 1837, living under his father's roof at the School-house.
He left Rugby for Oxford in June, 1841
But these larger views of education belong, after all, to the region of theory, and he never had the opportunity, except very indirectly, of putting them into practice. With the Elementary Schools he dealt practically, officially, and directly; but even here, as in so many other departments, his influence was rather critical than constructive. He had only an imperfect sympathy with "that somewhat terrible character, the scientific educator." A brother-inspector says that, "if he saw little children looking good and happy, and under the care of a kindly and sympathetic teacher, he would give a favourable report, without enquiring too curiously into the percentage of scholars who could pass the 'standard' examination." There must be many who still remember with amused affection his demeanour in an Elementary School. They see the tall figure, at once graceful and stately; the benign air, as of an affable archangel; the critical brow and enquiring eyeglass bent on some very immature performance in penmanship or needlework; and the frightened children and the anxious teacher, gradually lapsing into smiles and peace, as the great man tested the proficiency in some such humble art as spelling. "Well, my little man, and how do you spell dog?" "Please sir, d-o-g." "Capital, very good indeed. I couldn't do it better myself. And now let us go a little further, and see if we can spell cat." (Chorus excitedly.) "c-a-t." "Now, this is really excellent. (To the teacher.) You have brought them on wonderfully in spelling since I was here last. You shall have a capital report. Good-bye." To those who cherish these memories there is nothing surprising in this tribute by a friend: "His effect on the teachers when he examined a school was extraordinary. He was sympathetic without being condescending, and he reconciled the humblest drudge in a London school to his or her drudgery for the next twelve months."
As