u Ibid., pp. 131132.
ACCORDING TO MATTHEW ARNOLD 207
The knowing of Latin and Greek in the sense Mr.
Arnold puts upon it is not something slight. It
represents thoroughness of training. He says :
When we talk of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, for
instance, which is the knowledge people have called the
humanities, I for my part mean a knowledge which is some-
thing more than a superficial humanism, mainly decorative.
"I call all teaching scientific," says Wolf, the critic of Homer,
"which is systematically laid out and followed up to its
original sources. For example : a knowledge of classical an-
tiquity is scientific when the remains of classical antiquity
are correctly studied in the original languages." There can
be no doubt that Wolf is perfectly right; that all learning
is scientific which is systematically laid out and followed up
to its original sources, and that a genuine humanism is
scientific.
When I speak of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity,
therefore, as a help to knowing ourselves and the world,
I mean more than a knowledge of so much vocabulary, so
mtach grammar, so many portions of authors in the Greek
and Latin languages, I mean knowing the Greeks and Romans,
and their life and genius, and what they were and did in
the world; what we get from them, and what is its value.
That, at least, is the ideal ; and when we talk of endeavouring
to know Greek and Roman antiquity, as a help to knowing
ourselves and the world, we mean endeavouring so to know
them as to satisfy this ideal, however much we may still
fall short of it. 18
u ' ' Discourses in America, ' ' pp. 87-89.
208 EDUCATION
But while our author thus commends Latin and
Greek, he is not at all blind or dumb to the value
of other forms of training. He recognizes that
there is a growing disbelief in Latin and Greek and
a growing belief in the modern languages and the
sciences as disciplines. Asked to give counsel re-
garding the education of a relative, he says in a
paragraph which may be quoted in full :
If it is perception you want to cultivate in Florence you
had much better take some science (botany is perhaps the best
for a girl, and I know Tyndall thinks it the best of all for
educational purposes), and choosing a good handbook, go
regularly through it with her. Handbooks have long been the
great want for teaching the natural sciences, but this want
is at last beginning to be supplied, and for botany a text-
book based on Henslow's "Lectures," which were excellent,
has recently been published by Macmillan. I cannot see
that there is much got out of learning the Latin Grammar
except the mainly normal discipline of learning something
much more exactly than one is made to learn anything else ;
and the verification of the laws of grammar, in the examples
furnished by one's reading, is certainly a far less fruitful
stimulus of one's powers of observation and comparison than
the verification of the laws of a science like botany in the
examples furnished by the world of nature before one's eyes.
The sciences have been abominably taught, and by untrained
people, but the moment properly trained people begin to
teach them properly they fill such a want in education as
that which you feel in Florence's better than either gram-
ACCORDING TO MATTHEW ARNOLD 209
mar or mathematics, which have been forced into the service
because they have been hitherto so far better studied and
known. Grammar and pure mathematics will fill a much
less important part in the education of the young than
formerly, though the knowledge of the ancient world will
continue to form a most important part in the education
of mankind generally. But the way grammar is studied at
present is an obstacle to this knowledge rather than a help to
it, and I should be glad to see it limited to learning thor-
oughly the example-forms of words, and very little more for
beginners, I mean. Those who have a taste for philosophi-
cal studies may push them further, and with far more intel-
ligible aids than our elementary grammars afterwards. So
I should inflict on Florence neither Latin nor English gram-
mar as an elaborate discipline; make her learn her French
verbs very thoroughly, and do her French exercises very
correctly; but do not go to grammar to cultivate in her
the power you mass, but rather to science. 14
In respect to the content of education Mr. Arnold
again and again refers to the worth of the Bible.
He believes in the educative value of the English
Bible. In " A Bible Reading for Schools, ' ' he says :
Only one literature there is, one great literature, for which
the people have had a preparation the literature of the
Bible. However far they may be from having a complete
preparation for it, they have some; and it is the only great
literature for which they have any. Their bringing up, what
they have heard and talked of ever since they were born,
have given them no sort of conversance with the forms, fash-
**" Letters," Vol. I., p. 364.
210 EDUCATION
ions, notions, wordings, allusions, of literature having its
source in Greece and Rome ; but they have given them a good
deal of conversance with the forms, fashions, notions, word-
ings, allusions, of the Bible. Zion and Babylon are their
Athens and Rome, their Ida and Olympus are Tabor and
Hermon, Sharon is their Tempe; these and the like Bible
names can reach their imagination, kindle trains of thought
and remembrance in them. The elements with which the
literature of Greece and Rome conjures, have no power on
them; the elements with which the literature of the Bible
conjures, have. Therefore I have so often insisted, in re-
ports to the Education Department, on the need, if from
this point of view only, for the Bible in schools for the
people. If poetry, philosophy, and eloquence, if what we
call in one word letters, are a power, and a beneficent won-
der-working power, in education, through the Bible only
have the people much chance of getting at poetry, philosophy,
and eloquence. Perhaps I may here quote what I have
at former times said : ' ' Chords of power are touched by this
instruction which no other part of the instruction in a
popular school reaches, and chords various, not the single
religious chord only. The Bible is for the child in an ele-
mentary school almost his only contact with poetry and philos-
ophy. What a course of eloquence and poetry (to call it by
that name alone) is the Bible in a school which has and can
have but little eloquence and poetry! and how much do
our elementary schools lose by not having any such source
as part of their school-programme. All who value the Bible
may rest assured that thus to know and possess the Bible is
the most certain way to extend the power and efficacy of
the Bible." 15
15 "A Bible Heading for Schools," pp. x-xi.
ACCORDING TO MATTHEW ARNOLD 211
To the methods of education, Mr. Arnold gives
much heed, and in diverse forms and ways, al-
though not with the fullness and exactness which
he devotes to the content of education. He is
not a believer in the special value of rules or of
methods. He did not himself use rules. A great
man, his personality was his chief force. His ap-
preciation of the worth of rules in comparison to
personality may be inferred from what he says of
the normal school at Haarlem :
The normal school at Haarlem became justly celebrated
for its success, due to the capacity and character of its di-
rector, M. Prinsen. M. Prinsen was still at its head when
M. Cousin visited Holland. He received M. Cousin at Haar-
lem j and the vigour of the man, and the personal nature of
his influence over his pupils, is sufficiently revealed in his
reply to M. Cousin's request for a copy of the regulations of
his school: "I am the regulations," was M. Prinsen 's an-
swer. 16
The same lesson is taught in his summary of
Wolf's great rule for teaching:
Wolf's great rule in all these lessons was that rule which
all masters in the art of teaching have followed to take as
little part as possible in the lesson himself; merely to start
""The Popular Education of France, with Notices of that of Hol-
land and Switzerland," p. 206.
212 EDUCATION
it, guide it, and sum it up, and to let quite the main part
in it be borne by the learners. 17
It is in a word Mr. Arnold's belief that the
teacher is the school, and that the teacher's own
personality will make or impress the wisest meth-
ods for securing the highest results.
Although Mr. Arnold does not believe in methods
as applied to the school-room, he does believe in an
administration of education that shall be orderly,
logical, consistent.
It is not from any love of bureaucracy that men like Wil-
helm von Humboldt, ardent friends of human dignity and
liberty, have had recourse to a department of State in or-
ganizing universities; it is because an Education Minister
supplies you, for the discharge of certain critical functions,
the agent who will perform them in the greatest blaze of
daylight and with the keenest sense of responsibility. Con-
vocation made me formerly a professor, and I am very grate-
ful to Convocation ; but Convocation is not a fit body to have
the appointment of professors. It is far too numerous, and
the sense of responsibility does not tell upon it strongly
enough. A board is not a fit body to have the appointment
of professors; men will connive at a job as members of a
board who single-handed would never have perpetrated it.
Even the Crown that is, the Prime Minister is not the
fit power to have the appointment of professors; for the
Prime Minister is above all a political functionary, and feels
17 ' ' Higher Schools and Universities in Germany, ' ' p. 73.
ACCORDING TO MATTHEW ARNOLD 213
political influences overwhelmingly. An Education Minis-
ter, directly representing all the interests of learning and
intelligence in this great country, a full mark for their
criticism and conscious of his responsibility to them, that is
the power to whom to give the appointment of professors, not
for his own sake, but for the sake of public education. 18
He believes in fact that organization is the
method for securing superiority in the teaching
staff:
The instruction is better in the foreign popular schools than
in ours, because the teachers are better trained, and of the
training of teachers I shall have to speak presently. This is
the main reason of the superiority, that the teachers are bet-
ter trained. But that they are better trained comes from
a cause which acts for good upon the whole of education
abroad, that the instruction as a whole is better organized
than with us. Indeed, with us it is not, and cannot at pres-
ent be organized as a whole at all, for the public adminis-
tration, which deals with the popular schools, stops at those
schools, and takes into its view no others. But there is an
article in the constitution of Canton Zurich which well ex-
presses the idea which prevails everywhere abroad of the
organization of instruction from top to bottom as one whole :
Die hohern Lehranstalten sollen mit der Volkschule in organ-
ische Verbindung gebraclit werden; the higher establish-
ments for teaching shall be brought into organic connexion
with the popular school. And men like Wilhelm von Hum-
boldt in Germany and Guizot or Cousin in France have been
at the head of the public administration of schools in those
"Ibid., pp. 222-223.
214 EDUCATION
countries, and have organized popular instruction as a part
of one great system, a part in correspondence of some kind
with the higher parts, and to be organized with the same
seriousness, the same thorough knowledge and large views
of education, the same single eye to its requirements, as
the higher parts.
We may imagine the like in England if we suppose a
man like Sir James Mackintosh at the head of the Education
Department having to administer the public school system
for intermediate and higher education as well as the popular
schools, in continual intercourse with the representatives
of that system as well as with representatives of the popular
schools, and treating questions respecting popular instruc-
tion with a mind apt for all educational questions and con-
versant with them, aided, moreover, by the intercourse just
spoken of. Evidently questions respecting codes and pro-
grams would then present themselves under conditions very
different from the present conditions. The popular school
in our country is at present considered by the minister in
charge of it not at all as one stage to be co-ordered with the
other stages in a great system of public schools, and to have
its course surveyed and fixed from the point of view of a
knower and lover of education. Not at all; the popular
school is necessarily, for him, not so much an educational
problem as a social and political one; as a school dealing
with a few elementary matters, simple enough, and the
great thing is to make the House of Commons and the pub-
lic mind satisfied that value is received for the public money
spent on teaching these matters. Hence the Code which
governs the instruction in our popular schools. And I have
always felt that objections made in the pure interest of good
instruction and education to the Code had this disadvantage,
ACCORDING TO MATTHEW ARNOLD 215
that they came before a man, often very able, but who, from
his circumstances, would not and could not consider them
from the point of a disinterested knower and friend of edu-
cation at all, but from a point of view quite different. 19
The contrast between Mr. Arnold's lack of belief
in methods in the school-room and his outstanding
belief in method as applied to administration and
in an administrative organization, beginning with
a minister of education, who is a monarch, and run-
ning down through a Prussian system of subordi-
nate officers is striking and impressive.
Mr. Arnold recognizes that the teacher is, under
a good system of administration, the chief or the
only force. In respect to the training of teachers,
he says :
They say, why demand so much learning from those who
will have to impart so little? why impose on those who
will have to teach the- rudiments only of knowledge to the
children of the poor, an examination so wide in its range,
so searching in its details?
The answer to this involves the whole question as to the
training of the teachers of elementary schools. It is suffi-
cient to say, that the plan which these objectors recommend,
the plan of employing teachers whose attainments do not rise
far above the level of the attainments of their scholars, has
already been tried. It has been tried, and it has failed. Its
""Special Eeport on Elementary Education in Germany, Switzer-
land, and France, 1886," p. 15.
216 EDUCATION
fruits were to be seen in the condition of elementary educa-
tion throughout England, until a very recent period. It is
now sufficiently clear, that the teacher to whom you give
only a drudge's training, will do only a drudge's work, and
will do it in a drudge's spirit: that in order to ensure good
instruction even within narrow limits in a school, you must
provide it with a master far superior to his scholars, with
a master whose own attainments reach beyond the limits
within which those of his scholars may be bounded. To form
a good teacher for the simplest elementary school, a period
of regular training is requisite: this period must ~be filled
with work. . . . 20
For that outstanding element in English educa-
tion, the examination, Mr. Arnold has a just con-
demnation. Especially does he condemn examina-
tions conducted for men who have been preparing
for them by cramming :
Examinations preceded by preparation in a first-rate su-
perior school, with first-rate professors, give you a formed
man; examinations preceded by preparation under a cram-
mer give you a crammed man, but not a formed one. I once
bore part in the examinations for the Indian Civil Service,
and I can truly say that the candidates to whom I gave
the highest marks were almost without exception the can-
didates whom I would not have appointed. They were
crammed men, not formed men; the formed men were the
public school men, but they were ignorant on the special
matter of examination, English literature. A superior school
* ' ' Reports on Elementary Schools, 1855, ' ' p. 55.
ACCORDING TO MATTHEW ARNOLD 217
forms a man at the same time that it gives him special
knowledge. 21
Mr. Arnold says in testing this type of training :
Attention has lately been called to the breakdown, in India,
of a number of young nuen who had won their appointments
after severe study and severe examination. No doubt the
quantity of mental exertion required for examinations is often
excessive, but the strain is much the more severe, because
the quality and character of mental exertion required are so
often injudicious. The mind is less strained the more it
reacts on what it deals with, and has a native play of its
own, and is creative. It is more strained the more it has to
receive a number of "knowledges" passively, and to store
them up to be reproduced in an examination. But to ac-
quire a number of "knowledges," store them, and reproduce
them, was what in general those candidates for Indian em-
ployment had had to do. By their success in doing this they
were tested, and the examination turned on it. In old days
examinations mainly turned upon Latin and Greek composi-
tion. Composition in the dead languages is now wholly out
of favor, and I by no means say that it is a sufficient test
for candidates for Indian employment. But I will say that
the character and quality of mental exertion required for it
is more healthy than the character and quality of exertion
required for receiving and storing a number of "knowl-
edges." 22
In a brief and comprehensive word, it is to be
said that Mr. Arnold believes the great benefit of
n "A French Eton," p. 412.
""Reports on Elementary Schools, 1882," p. 256.
218 EDUCATION
education lies in the elevation of the mind and feel-
ings. This is "the unspeakable benefit." He be-
lieves that the humanizing touch is the greatest
and most precious worth. This worth is especially
emphasized in the schools of Germany. There he
finds "the children human." He says in detail:
They had heen brought under teaching of a quality to
touch and interest them, and were being formed by it. The
fault of the teaching in our popular schools at home is, as I
have often said, that it is so little formative; it gives the
children the power to read the newspapers, to write a
letter, to cast accounts, and gives them a certain number of
pieces of knowledge, but it does little to touch their nature
for good and to mould them. You hear often people of the
richer class in England wishing that they and their children
were as well educated as the children of an elementary school ;
they mean that they wish they wrote as good a hand, worked
sums as rapidly and correctly, and had as many facts of
geography at command ; but they suppose themselves retain-
ing all the while the fuller cultivation of taste and feeling
which is their advantage and their children's advantage
over the pupils of the elementary school at present, and they
forget that it is within the power of the popular school, and
should be its aim, to do much for this cultivation, although
our schools accomplish for it so very little. The excellent
maxim of that true friend of education, the German school-
master, John Comenius, "The aim is to train generally all
who are born to all which is human," does in some consid-
erable degree govern the proceedings of popular schools in
ACCORDING TO MATTHEW ARNOLD 219
German countries, and now in France also, bat in England
hardly at all. 28
He says comprehensively :
The aim and office of instruction, say many people, is to
make a man a good citizen, or a good Christian, or a gentle-
man; or it is to fit him to get on in the world, or it is to
enable him to do his duty in that state of life to which he
is called. It is none of these, and the modern spirit more
and more discerns it to be none of these. These are at best
secondary and indirect aims of instruction; its prime direct
aim is to enable a man to know himself and the world. 2 *
And he adds in conclusion :
As our public instruction gets a clearer view of its own
functions, of the relations of the human spirit to knowledge,
and of the entire circle of knowledge, it will certainly more
learn to awaken in its pupils an interest in that entire circle,
and less allow them to remain total strangers to any part
of it. Still, the circle is so vast and human faculties are
so limited, that it is for the most part through a single apti-
tude, or group of aptitudes, that each individual will really
get his access to intellectual life and vital knowledge; and
it is by effectually directing these aptitudes on definite points
of the circle, that he will really obtain his comprehension of
the whole. 25
""Special Report on Elementary Education in Germany, Switzer-
land, and France, 1886," p. 14.
**" Higher Schools and Universities in Germany," p. 154.
Ibid., p. 157.
220 EDUCATION
As I write the closing paragraph of this chapter,
I find hanging before me a picture of Matthew
Arnold. It is a strong, calm, serious, solemn face,
touched with semi-melancholy. It is as if the effort
to see life sanely and to see it whole were too heavy,
or as if, having seen life, the inevitable result were
depression of soul. Yet the face thus set forth is
not quite a true exponent of the man. For Mat-
thew Arnold had much of the Greek's joyousness in
life, much of the French lucidity and delicacy of
taste, much of the Englishman's solidity and pa-
tience. A critic of life, he sought through his criti-
cisms to minister to his nation's well-being. An
interpreter of religion, he endeavored to make the
Christian faith more rational without causing it
to lose its spirit of devotion. A poet, his verses
are, though carefully wrought in his own tongue,
bathed in the Attic dew. An inspector of schools,
he tried to make education of every sort a more
efficient instrument of genuine culture and of noble
joyousness. If his father was the most outstanding
school master of the early years of the Victorian
period, he himself was in its later decades an ex-
positor of commanding comprehensiveness, of defi-
nite criticism, of charming persuasiveness and of
quickening enthusiasms.
VII
EDUCATION ACCORDING TO JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
IN an inconspicuous private library hang photo-
graphs of two great portraits. One shows a
man of twenty-five, having a face regular in out-
line, full and fair, content without self-satisfac-
tion, with eyes direct and alert, with hair, regularly
laid, brushed back from a high intellectual fore-
head, with lips set firmly and yet without any sus-
picion of obstinacy, with chin strong, yet free from
any undue assertiveness, with head resting well
poised on a neck straight and strong, and over all a
radiant atmosphere of hopefulness, of sunshine, of
force, of poise, and of elevation. In the other por-
trait is seen an old man of four score years, with
face thin and worn, the cheeks fallen in, the eyes,
sunken back into their sockets, patiently looking
out into some indefinite unknown, locks of hair few,
irregular, scattered, the chin receding and the chest
retreating, and over all a dark, dull atmosphere of
depression, dejection and disappointment, "dull,
monotonous, unprofitable, hopeless," though the
221
222 EDUCATION
robe of a cardinal rests on the narrow and thin
shoulders and though the ring of a cardinal is on
the hand which grasps the crosier which seems
rather the crutch of support than a symbol of au-
thority or of power. The one picture recalls the
portrait of Titian's " Young Nobleman," yet hav-
ing an intellectual and moral virility of which the
nobleman never dreamed. The other recalls the
portrait of Voltaire, the aged, without the in-
tellectual activity, acquisitiveness and alertness,
which the great Frenchman possessed.
Between the time of these two portraits for
they each bear the one name of John Henry New-
man lies a life of high distinction, of manifold
and diverse achievements, which is still one of the
enigmas of biographic interpretation.
Yet, interpretations, moving and keen, have been
essayed, and their diversity illustrates the enig-
matic quality of this outstanding life and career.
To some, Newman is a religious philosopher like
Pascal, to others, a mystic like Fenelon. To one,