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

which it was impossible to forget. In class, every line of his countenance, every shade of his manner imprinted themselves indelibly on the minds of the boys who sat under him. One of these, writing long afterwards, has described, in phrases still impregnated with awestruck reverence, the familiar details of the scene: “the glance with which he looked round in the few moments of silence before the lesson began, and which seemed to speak his sense of his own position”⁠—“the attitude in which he stood, turning over the pages of Facciolati’s Lexicon, or Pole’s Synopsis, with his eye fixed upon the boy who was pausing to give an answer”⁠—“the pleased look and the cheerful ‘thank you’, which followed upon a successful translation”⁠—“the fall of his countenance with its deepening severity, the stern elevation of the eyebrows, the sudden ‘sit down’ which followed upon the reverse”⁠—and “the startling earnestness with which he would check in a moment the slightest approach to levity.”

To be rebuked, however mildly, by Dr. Arnold was a Potable experience. One boy could never forget how he drew a distinction between “mere amusement” and “such as encroached on the next day’s duties,” nor the tone of voice with which the Doctor added “and then it immediately becomes what St. Paul calls ‘revelling.’ ” Another remembered to his dying day his reproof of some boys who had behaved badly during prayers. “Nowhere,” said Dr. Arnold, “nowhere is Satan’s work more evidently manifest than in turning holy things to ridicule.” On such occasions, as another of his pupils described it, it was impossible to avoid “a consciousness almost amounting to solemnity” that, “when his eye was upon you, he looked into your inmost heart.”

With the boys in the Sixth Form, and with them alone, the severe formality of his demeanour was to some degree relaxed. It was his wish, in his relations with the Praepostors, to allow the Master to be occasionally merged in the Friend. From time to time, he chatted with them in a familiar manner; once a term he asked them to dinner; and during the summer holidays he invited them, in rotation, to stay with him in Westmorland.

It was obvious that the primitive methods of discipline which had reached their apogee under the dominion of Keate were altogether incompatible with Dr. Arnold’s view of the functions of a headmaster and the proper governance of a public school. Clearly, it was not for such as he to demean himself by bellowing and cuffing, by losing his temper once an hour, and by wreaking his vengeance with indiscriminate flagellations. Order must be kept in other ways. The worst boys were publicly expelled; many were silently removed; and, when Dr. Arnold considered that a flogging was necessary, he administered it with gravity. For he had no theoretical objection to corporal punishment. On the contrary, he supported it, as was his wont, by an appeal to general principles. “There is,” he said, “an essential inferiority in a boy as compared with a man”; and hence “where there is no equality the exercise of superiority implied in personal chastisement” inevitably followed.

He was particularly disgusted by the view that “personal correction,” as he phrased it, was an insult or a degradation to the boy upon whom it was inflicted; and to accustom young boys to think so appeared to him to be “positively mischievous.”

“At an age,” he wrote, “when it is almost impossible to find a true, manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind which are the best ornaments of youth, and offer the best promise of a noble manhood?”

One had not to look far, he added, for “the fruits of such a system.” In Paris, during the Revolution of 1830, an officer observed a boy of twelve insulting the soldiers, and

“though the action was then raging, merely struck him with the flat part of his sword, as the fit chastisement for boyish impertinence. But the boy had been taught to consider his person sacred, and that a blow was a deadly insult; he therefore followed the officer, and having watched his opportunity, took deliberate aim at him with a pistol and murdered him.”

Such were the alarming results of insufficient whipping.

Dr. Arnold did not apply this doctrine to the Praepostors, but the boys in the lower parts of the school felt its benefits, with a double force. The Sixth Form was not only excused from chastisement; it was given the right to chastise. The younger children, scourged both by Dr. Arnold and by the elder children, were given every opportunity of acquiring the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornaments of youth.

In the actual sphere of teaching, Dr. Arnold’s reforms were tentative and few. He introduced modern history, modern languages, and mathematics into the school curriculum; but the results were not encouraging. He devoted to the teaching of history one hour a week; yet, though he took care to inculcate in these lessons a wholesome hatred of moral evil, and to point out from time to time the indications of the providential government of the world, his pupils never seemed to make much progress in the subject. Could it have been that the time allotted to it was insufficient? Dr. Arnold had some suspicions that this might be the case. With modern languages there was the same difficulty. Here his hopes were certainly not excessive. “I assume it,” he wrote, “as the foundation of all my view of the case, that boys at a public school never will learn to speak or pronounce French well, under any circumstances.” It would be enough if they could “learn it grammatically as a dead language. But even this they very seldom managed to do.

“I know too well,” he was obliged to confess, “that most of the boys would pass a very poor examination even in French