13 June: Boreham on Thomas Arnold

Transformation of Schools
On this, his birthday, and in view of the anniversary of his early death yesterday, it is worth recalling that it was a golden day for England, and for the world at large, when Thomas Arnold, a young Oxford don, took up his residence at Rugby. The history of the public schools of England divides itself into two parts—before Arnold and after. Before Arnold, the condition of the most reputable seminaries was a public scandal. Lytton Strachey gives us a peep into the life of Eton at that day. Keane, an irascible little old man, savagely clutching a bundle of birch twigs, was in command. He relied almost exclusively upon a regimen of stark terror. "Every Sunday afteroon," Strachey says, "Keane attempted to read sermons to the whole school, and, every Sunday afternoon, the whole school shouted him down. Rats were let loose to scurry to and fro among the legs of the exploding boys; even worship became pandemonium." Monday morning, it is true, brought the headmaster his fierce hour of terrible revenge; and the blood and tears of the whipping-block gave murderous evidence of Keane's despotic authority. Education walked hand in hand with obscenity and brutality. It was at this critical juncture that Arnold appeared upon the scene; he was the very man wanted.

Arnold was only 32, but had already made his mark. Many who had known him at Winchester and Oxford regarded his appointment with disgust. "It is a crying shame," they protested, "that a man fitted to be Prime Minister should be sent to Rugby to teach a pack of schoolboys." This mental attitude is in itself evidence of the low level to which the schools had fallen in the public esteem.

Insistence On Quality Rather Than Quantity
Arnold accepted the appointment with avidity. "It is possible," he said to himself, "that, if I decline it, I may become Prime Minister; but, if I accept it, I may provide the country with a constant succession of Prime Ministers." In this high and dauntless spirit he entered upon his new duties. He made no fuss. He held that the attitude of a headmaster should be one of extreme reserve. He deliberately held himself aloof from the rank and file of the boys. He governed through his subordinates and especially through the praepostors. Never was a man more adamant. It became his duty, in the pursuance of the policy to which he had set himself, to expel a number of boys—the sons of noblemen—from the school. In the midst of the storm of resentment which his actions excited, he stood like a rock on which the towering waves are vainly breaking. "Gentlemen," he said quietly, as he addressed the assembled school, "it is not necessary that Rugby should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or even fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen." From that moment the boys worshipped the very ground he trod.

Dr. Mozley and Charlotte Bronte agreed in attributing Arnold's extraordinary authority to his sheer downright goodness and to his overflowing and exuberant happiness. Thanks to "Tom Brown's Schooldays," we have all capitulated to the robust, resistless charm of Arnold. With Tom Brown we have seen the illustrious dominie on the cricket ground; in the lanes round Rugby; amidst the felicities of that home of which Arnold himself said that it seemed to be too happy; in the classrooms; and in the familiar chapel that Arnold has made famous for all time. For, just as Keane's degrading domination at Eton touched its lowest level at sermon-time, so, in the oak pulpit of that beautiful sanctuary at Rugby, Arnold rose to his golden best. To his boys he seemed not only a principal but a prince; and not only a prince but a prophet; a prophet of crystalline culture and inflexible righteousness, a prophet of passionate and persuasive eloquence.

Profound Influence Of A Princely Personality
When, in 1842, the whisper ran through the country that Arnold of Rugby had suddenly died of heart failure on the eve of his 47th birthday, it did not create such a sensation as marks the death of a distinguished soldier or an eminent statesman. But, scattered over the land, there were a few hundred young men who, when they heard the news, betrayed the deepest emotion. Tom Brown, it will be remembered, was fishing in a Scottish stream when a companion, sitting on the grassy bank, read the tragic paragraph. "Tom's hand stopped half-way in his cast; his line and flies went all tangling round and round his rod; you might have knocked him down with a feather." He abandoned the holiday at once and set out for Rugby. The passage with which Thomas Hughes' celebrated classic closes—the passage that describes Tom offering the homage of his grief at the doctor's tomb in the old chapel—is one of the most affecting in our literature. And it gathers the force of its appeal from the circumstance that it is typical of so many such scenes that actually happened in that day of widespread and profound lamentation.

During his reign at Rugby, Arnold's personality pervaded everything. Old boys, for years after their departure from the school, loved to revisit it merely for the sake of once more getting into touch with the doctor. "His very presence," as one of them said, "seemed to create a new spring of health and vigour within us, and to give life an interest and an elevation which remained with us long after we had left him again. He dwelt so habitually in our thoughts as a living force and authority, that even when death had suddenly snatched him from us, the bond appeared to be still unbroken, and the sense of separation was almost lost in the still deeper sense of a life and union indestructible." Although he was so young when he died, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the monumental work to which he had tremblingly set his hand had been well and truly done. He had effected the transformation of which he had so fondly dreamed. From the Queen downwards, everybody recognised that he had served his country nobly, and to this day the whole world is the better for the work that he so excellently did.

F W Boreham

Image: Thomas Arnold