Born, at East Cowes, 13 June 1795. At school in Warminster, 1803–07; at Winchester, 1807–11. To Corpus Christi Coll., Oxford, as scholar, 1811; B.A., 27 Oct. 1814; M.A., 19 June 1817; Chancellor’s Latin Essay Prize, 1815; Chancellor’s English Essay Prize, 1817; Fellow of Oriel Coll., 1815–19. Ordained Deacon, Dec. 1818. Settled at Laleham-on-Thames to take pupils, 1819. Contrib. to “British Critic,” 1819–20. Married Mary Penrose, 11 Aug. 1820. Contrib. to “Quarterly Review,” 1825; to “Edinburgh Review,” 1826 and 1836. Wrote “History of the later Roman Commonwealth,” for “Encyclopædia Metropolitana,” 1821–27. B.D., 29 March 1828; D.D., 17 Dec. 1828. Ordained Priest, June 1828; Head Master of Rugby, Aug. 1828 to June 1842. Contrib. to “Sheffield Courant,” 1831–32; to “Quarterly Journal of Education,” 1834–35. Purchased Fox How, Westmoreland, 1832. Contrib. to “Hertford Reformer,” 1839–41. Regius Professor of History at Oxford, 1841. Died suddenly, at Rugby, 12 June 1842. Works: “The Effects of Distant Colonization on the Parent State” (privately printed), 1815; “The Christian Duty of Granting the Claims of the Roman Catholics,” 1829; “Sermons” (3 vols.), 1829–34; “Tract on the Cholera,” 1831; “Thirteen Letters on our Social Condition” (anon.), 1832; “Principles of Church Reform,” 1833 (2nd and 3rd edns., same year); “Postscript” to preceding, 1833; “History of Rome” (3 vols.), 1838–43; “On the Divisions and Mutual Relations of Knowledge,” 1839; “Two Sermons on the Interpretation of Prophecy,” 1839; “On the Revival of the Order of Deacons,” 1841; “Christian Life,” 1841; “Inaugural Lecture on the Study of Modern History,” 1841 (2nd edn. same year); “Introductory Lectures on Modern History,” 1842. Posthumous: “Fragment on the Church,” 1844; “Sermons,” 1845; “Miscellaneous Works,” ed. by A. P. Stanley, 1845; “History of the later Roman Commonwealth” (from “Encyclopædia Metropolitana”), 1845; “Travelling Journals,” ed. by A. P. Stanley, 1852. He edited: “Poetry of Common Life,” 1844; “Thucydides,” 1830, etc. Life: by A. P. Stanley.

Personal

  The great lion at present is Arnold and his lectures which have created a great stir in the exalted, the literary, and the fashionable word of Oxford. He is here with his whole family, and people look forward to his lectures in the theatre day after day, as they might to a play. He will be quite missed when he goes. Almost every Head goes with his wife and daughters, if he has any, and so powerful is Arnold’s eloquence, that the Master of Balliol was, on one occasion, quite over come, and fairly went—not quite into hysterics, but into tears—upon which the Provost remarked at a large party, that he supposed it was the gout. However, they are very striking lectures. He is working out his inaugural. Everything he does, he does with life and force, and I cannot help liking his manly and open way, and the great reality which he throws about such things as description of country, military laws and operations, and such like low concerns. He has exercised on the whole a generous forbearance towards us and let us off with a few angular points about Priesthood and the Puritans in one lecture, while he has been immensely liberal in other ways, and I should think not to the taste of the Capitular body, e. g. puffing with all his might the magnificent age and intensely interesting contests of Innocent III, and in allowing any one to believe, without any suspicion of superstition, a very great many of Bede’s miracles and some others beside.

  My heart has been with you, as I am sure yours has been with me. I returned last night from Rugby. O, what is the death of a great and good man! What distraction (humanly) and yet what consolation! Read the enclosed—I add nothing. All who saw him during the last month were struck by something more than usually heavenly-minded and awfully unearthly.

  He came to us in Lent Term, 1811, from Winchester, winning his election against several very respectable candidates. He was a mere boy in appearance as well as in age; but we saw in a very short time that he was quite equal to take his part in the arguments of the common room; and he was, I rather think, admitted by Mr. Cooke at once into his senior class. As he was equal, so was he ready to take part in our discussions: he was fond of conversation on serious matters, and vehement in argument; fearless in advancing his opinions—which, to say the truth, often startled us a good deal; but he was ingenuous and candid, and though the fearlessness with which, so young as he was, he advanced his opinions might have seemed to betoken presumption, yet the good temper with which he bore retort or rebuke relieved him from that imputation; he was bold and warm, because so far as his knowledge went he saw very clearly, and he was an ardent lover of truth, but I never saw in him even then a grain of vanity or conceit…. Arnold’s bodily recreations were walking and bathing. It was a particular delight to him, with two or three companions, to make what he called a skirmish across the country; on these occasions we deserted the road, crossed fences, and leaped ditches, or fell into them: he enjoyed the country round Oxford, and while out in this way his spirits would rise and his mirth overflowed. Though delicate in appearance, and not giving promise of great muscular strength, yet his form was light, and he was capable of going long distances and bearing much fatigue.

  But more than either matter or manner of his preaching, was the impression of himself. Even the mere readers of his sermons will derive from them the history of his whole mind, and of his whole management of the school. But to his hearers it was more than this. It was the man himself, there more than in any other place, concentrating all his various faculties and feelings on one sole object, combating face to face the evil, with which directly or indirectly he was elsewhere perpetually struggling. He was not the preacher or the clergyman who had left behind all his thoughts and occupations as soon as he had ascended the pulpit. He was still the scholar, the historian, and theologian, basing all that he said, not indeed ostensibly, but consciously, and often visibly, on the deepest principles of the past and present. He was still the instructor and the schoolmaster, only teaching and educating with increased solemnity and energy. He was still the simple-hearted and earnest man, labouring to win others to share in his own personal feelings of disgust at sin, and love of goodness, and to trust to the same faith, in which he hoped to live and die himself.

  As to Arnold’s “Remains,” I cannot put myself enough in your place to know the precise point which pains you so much, but for myself there seems much to take comfort in, in things as they are. I do not think that the book will take any great effect in a wrong direction. Of course there is a great deal in it to touch people, but there is so little consistency in his intellectual basis that I cannot think that he will affect readers permanently; and then it is very pleasant to think that his work has been so good a one—the reformation of public schools. This seems to have been blessed, and will survive him, and forms the principal, or one of the two principal, subjects of the books. And, further, if it is right to speculate on such serious matters, there is something quite of comfort to be gathered from his removal from the scene of action at the time it took place, as if so good a man should not be suffered to commit himself cominus against truth which he so little understood.

  It does one’s heart good to contemplate the life of such a man as Dr. Arnold of Rugby. He possessed that quality of earnestness which gives force to every purpose in life. He was full of strong sympathy for all that was true and good in our modern social movements, and of as strong antipathy for all that he conceived to be false and unjust. He did battle in the cause that he conscientiously felt to be right, with his whole heart and soul; and waged an uncompromising war against what seemed to him to be shams and falsities. He was of the stern stuff of which martyrs are made; for when he saw his way clear, and his conscience approved, he never hesitated at once to act boldly and energetically. We may not agree with him in all the views that he held and advocated; but we never fail to admire the undeviating and high-minded consistency of his life, and the purity of the motives on which he acted.

  The great peculiarity and charm of his nature seemed to lie in the regal supremacy of the moral and the spiritual element over his whole being and powers. His intellectual faculties were not such as to surpass those of many who were his contemporaries; in scholarship he occupied a subordinate place to several who filled situations like his; and he had not much of what is called tact in his dealings either with the juvenile or the adult mind. What gave him his power, and secured for him so deeply the respect and veneration of his pupils and acquaintances, was the intensely religious character of his whole life. He seemed ever to act from a severe and lofty estimate of duty. To be just, honest, and truthful, he ever held to be the first aim of his being. With all this, there was intense sympathy with his fellows, the tenderest domestic affections, and the most generous friendship, the most expansive benevolence.

  Arnold’s life, no less pure and spiritual and fragrant than Keble’s, was a life infinitely truer to the actual state of things in the world, infinitely richer in practical aims, infinitely fuller of the heroic and inspiring, a life great in its faithfulness to the present and with the promise of the future. If the opposing tendencies in religious thought were to have their fate settled by the character of the two representatives, there is little doubt, we think, as to which has the more virtue in it, and the greater fitness for the work of the world.

  In person he was a little above the middle height; spare, but vigorous, and healthy without being robust. A slightly projecting underlip, and eyes deep set beneath strongly marked eyebrows, gave to his countenance when at rest a somewhat stern expression, which became formidable when he was moved to anger; but the effect was all the greater when, in the playful or tender moods which were frequent with him, or on meeting in a book or in conversation with a noble sentiment or a striking thought, his eye gleamed, and his whole face lighted up. Simple in his tastes and habits, never idle and never hurried, he made his home a “temple of industrious peace;” and he rarely left it except to travel occasionally on the continent, with an eye enlightened by lifelong studies in history and geography. He had an intense delight in beautiful scenery, and took pleasure in the fine arts, and in some of the natural sciences, but chiefly as bearing on the life and history of man. For science as such, for art as such, he cared comparatively little; for music not at all. “Flowers,” he used to say, “are my music,” and his love for them was like that of a child.

  Of those whom he left behind him, Jane, the eldest daughter, became the wife of William Edward Foster, afterwards M.P. for Bradford and Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education; Matthew was the eldest son; Thomas, the second son, became a Fellow of his college at Oxford, and has devoted himself to literary and educational work; William Delafield Arnold was for a time director of public instruction in the Punjaub, and died on his way homewards in 1859; and Edward was a clergyman and inspector of schools. In the next generation, Mrs. Humphry Ward, the gifted daughter of Thomas, and the author of “Robert Elsmere,” and Mr. H. O. Arnold Forster, M.P. for Belfast, the son of W. D. Arnold, have in different ways achieved honourable reputation.

Educator

  This unsound and unhealthy tone of public morality carries with it a species of contagious virus which stains the honour of the State, and poisons the very fountains of political philosophy. Against this Dr. Arnold exclaimed with characteristic energy; and had he lived to shed credit over Oxford, and infuse a manlier and more honourable spirit among the rising generation of statesmen, he might have done much to arrest and antagonize the mischief. But since he has been called away, we know not where to turn for a Teacher fitted to “take his stand,” like the Prophet, “between the Living and the Dead,” and stay the progress of the moral plague.

  The striking feature of Arnold’s mind—and we notice it as being literally a phenomenon, a remarkable specimen of that particular internal power—is his confidence; we mean a rare, esoteric intensity of assurance in his own views. He is omnia magna; has every quality that there is in him forcibly, and confidence among the rest. A firm faith is one thing; what we mean is another. A brilliancy of the whole chamber of the mind—a dance of light—a clearness which made his own view of truth to him an object of the keenest internal ocular demonstration rather than of faith, carried him into conflicts and controversies with a boldness that an evident warrant from the invisible world might produce. A phantasmagoric halo of truth accompanied him, and the flame played upon his helmet, as it did on that of Diomede; he was invulnerable; his armour was proof against sword-cut and thrust; a dip in the magical pool had achieved the same security for him that it had done for the hero of old…. At Rugby he is great, because at Rugby only the power of self-expansion and self-imparting was wanted. A school of boys is a great receptacle of ideas, and not a counter-stream; they lean upon the master mind, treasure up the thought, suck in the hint, but oppose no standard of their own to exercise and try the master’s apprehension, and to be penetrated and surmounted by it. Arnold could watch with genuine tutorial sympathy every stage of the ingress of the idea from his own mind into the pupil’s; and all the issues from himself were keenly and minutely seen. That answered perfectly for Rugby; that showed the accomplished schoolmaster. But the schoolmaster came out into the world, and then the scene was changed. In order to implant his ideas in men and equals, he had first to understand theirs, and be the learner and the listener that he might be the teacher; and that he could not be, or would not try to be. He came out into the world, and immediately spoke ex cathedra, as if he were in his school-seat. He pictured the world a large Rugby, a grand receptacle of his ideas, and did not think of it in any other light. But the world turned out to be no passive receptacle; it started back and was restive, and then Arnold could not deal with it. Then Arnold was a child. He saw that he had disturbed people indefinitely, but he saw no more. He could not explain, meet objections, soften, accommodate. He could not see why people objected; the mind without was a blank to him; and he could only stare and complain of the unreasoning mass. He was out of his element. Triumphant at Rugby, his exhibition in the world was a failure.

  He communicated this earnestness and sincerity to a large number of those who are becoming the men of a later time. As an educator, he put his heart into his work, and laboured there as elsewhere, for truth and good. The views which he considered invaluable may not be in every case held by those whom he trained to hold ideas on conviction only; points which he insisted on as indispensable may appear otherwise to his pupils in their maturity; but they owe to him the power and the conscience to think for themselves, and the earnest habit of mind which makes their conviction a part of their life. By this exalted view and method as an educator, Dr. Arnold did more for education than even by his express and unintermitting assertion of the importance of the function—powerful as his testimony was.

  He certainly did teach us—thank God for it!—that we could not cut our life into slices and say, “In this slice your actions are indifferent, and you needn’t trouble your heads about them one way or another; but in this slice mind what you are about, for they are important”—a pretty muddle we should have been in had he done so. He taught us that in this wonderful world, no boy or man can tell which of his actions is indifferent and which not; that by a thoughtless word or look we may lead astray a brother for whom Christ died. He taught us that life is a whole, made up of actions and thoughts and longings, great and small, noble and ignoble; therefore the only true wisdom for boy or man is to bring the whole life into obedience to Him whose world we live in, and who has purchased us with His blood; and that whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever we do, we are to do all in His name and to His glory; in such teaching, faithfully, as it seems to me, following that of Paul of Tarsus, who was in the habit of meaning what he said, and who laid down this standard for every man and boy in his time.

  Dr. Arnold will be more widely remembered as a shaper of men than of books.

  We cannot concede to him the character of a great reformer or revolutionist in the sense in which Comenius, Rousseau, Locke, or Pestalozzi was entitled to one of those designations. He was not a realist, but essentially a “humanist” of the type of Milton. He accepted the traditions of the long succession of English teachers, from Ascham and Colet down to Busby and Keate, in favour of making the study of language, and particularly the languages of Greece and Rome, the staple of a liberal education. But, like Milton, he rebelled strongly against the wooden, mechanical, and pedantic fashion in which those languages were often taught, as if the attainment of proficiency in them were an end in itself and not the means to some higher end…. The characteristic of Arnold as a schoolmaster was that he was much more concerned to put new life, freshness, and meaning into the received methods than to invent new ones.

  It is in this department of the theory of Education, that Arnold’s permanent contribution will be found. Many other Public School masters before and after his time have worked in the same cause, but none have so set their mark upon the work, and no one has expounded the system as clearly as himself, and his biographer. Since his day, new conceptions of education and of teaching have become popular—conceptions which would limit the function of the school to the attainment of knowledge or of manual skill, confusing the office of the teacher with that of an instructor. Against all such doctrine Arnold asserts an eloquent Non possumus. The boy is a moral being and the school is a human society; the teacher moving in and out of this society, is required not only to train the intelligence and inform the mind, but to touch the springs of character. First of all, as we have seen, in this conception of the aim of education, he declares the teacher’s duty, and now, in his exposition of practice, we observe how he laboured to discharge it.

  It is by virtue of great qualities and an intensity and ardor of spirit which would have made him great in any sphere, that he was a great teacher. Consequently his real position is not so much that of a schoolmaster as of a prophet among schoolmasters, a man whose special mission it was to unveil and interpret the higher possibilities, responsibilities, and duties of the schoolmaster’s life. Through the intensity of his moral and spiritual feeling and his “radiant vigour” he vitalised ideas of which weaker men had been but dimly conscious, or which they had merely carried about with them as inert or pious opinions. Thus the value of his example to all teachers is to be sought in his unconventional attitude of mind, his striving for reality, his desire to improve upon what has been already attained, his high moral aim, his intense religious purpose, his sense of the responsibility undertaken by every trainer of young lives, and his magnetic and inspiring personality. In one word it is that influence of the prophet which is the salt of society in every age…. He rises before us like an inspired prophet, preaching to every schoolmaster sacredness of his calling, and bidding him always remember that formation of character is the primary aim of every good teacher, that it is the duty of the teacher to hasten growth out of the immature and dangerous period of boyhood, and that to do this we should give direct responsibility for the moral conduct and the honour of the whole school to those members of it who are the ablest and most advanced, thus instilling from early years the Christian principle of service as the guiding rule of life; and finally that for these ends the schoolmaster’s ideal aim must always be to cultivate in his pupils the habit of moral thoughtfulness, and the conviction that life in Christ is the true goal of all human endeavour.

History of Rome, 1838–43

  His “History of Rome” is undoubtedly the best history in the language.

  Dr. Arnold lived to complete his history only as far as to the end of the Spanish Campaign in the Second Punic War. The work, therefore, breaks off just after its distinguishing merits began to be conspicuously manifest. The portion of the work that had to deal with the early periods of Roman history was founded on the investigations of Niebuhr, in whose genius as a guide Arnold placed implicit trust. The consequence inevitably was that as Niebuhr’s conclusions one after another came to be rejected, those of Arnold fell with them. But from the time of Pyrrhus the author emerges upon ground where independent research becomes possible and fruitful. His account of the First Punic War, and of the Second, as far as to the return of Scipio from Spain, is the most satisfactory yet written in English. It has all the qualities of a great history. But the work is to be regarded only as a fragment, and one of which the last part only is of great value.

  His style is undoubtedly of its own kind scholarly and excellent; the matter of his history suffers from the common fault of taking Niebuhr at too high a valuation.

  Arnold’s English is always forcible, and in the best passages it is eloquent. He is strongest in his account of military operations, and his description of the campaigns of the Second Punic War remains still the most vivid and readable in our language, and probably in modern literature. Certainly Mommsen, powerful as his work is, cannot rival Arnold as a military historian.

General

  I admire, and, what is more, deeply honor him as a man, and as a writer so far as the man appears in his writings. As a reasoner and speculator I surmise that he was not great, though what he does see clearly he expresses with great energy and lifesomeness. It seems to me that he arrived at much truth which subtler men miss through sheer honesty and singleness of heart and mind, through sheer impatience and imprudence, not through philosophy. His views of Church and State I can well understand (I have not seen his fragment on the Church): so far as I can understand them, I imagine (it seems presumptuous for such as I to opine positively on such a subject) that they are incorrect and inadequate. He was a great historian; yet I would fain see how he reconciled them with history, let alone philosophy.

  The merits and influence of Arnold as a theologian have, I think, been underrated. At any rate I can recall but few modern clergymen whose opinions would furnish a more wholesome study…. To read Arnold’s sermons, after reading too many of those which are now in vogue, is like passing out of the conservatory into the free air and eager breeze of heaven.

  These eight lectures [on history] though forming Dr. Arnold’s Inaugural Course at the University of Oxford, were prepared and delivered in the last year of the author’s life, and, consequently, were the ripe fruit of a profound scholarship. The author’s object was not to impart historical knowledge, but rather to awaken a greater interest in the study of history. The first lecture is devoted to a definition of history in general, and of modern history in particular; while the body of the work is an expansion of these definitions, and a description of the proper manner of studying the external and the internal life of nations.

  None of his writings made more noise, or gave more offence, than the “Principles of Church Reform.” It offended equally churchmen and dissenters. Its latitudinarianism was obnoxious to the one; its defence of an Established Church, and its assaults upon sectarianism, obnoxious to the other. Its advocacy of large and liberal changes repelled the Conservatives; its severe religious tone displeased the Liberals…. If ever, indeed, there was a mind intensely English in the practical, ethical bent underlying all his studies and all his work, it was Arnold’s. His powers as an interpreter of Scripture, therefore, sprang from his own native instincts of inquiry and the clear moral sense which made him hate confusion of thought in all directions.

  Though in my opinion inferior to Whately in intellectual power, was far his superior in the moral influence which he exercised.