Eminent Victorians - Lytton Strachey (essential books to read TXT) 📗

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 boardinghouses, 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