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

believe, could furnish.” Nevertheless, our travellers would imitate foreign customs without discrimination, “as in the absurd habit of not eating fish with a knife, borrowed from the French, who do it because they have no knives fit for use.” Places, no less than people, aroused similar reflections. By Pompeii, Dr. Arnold was not particularly impressed.

“There is only,” he observed, “the same sort of interest with which one would see the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, but indeed there is less. One is not authorised to ascribe so solemn a character to the destruction of Pompeii.”

The lake of Como moved him more profoundly. As he gazed upon the overwhelming beauty around him, he thought of “moral evil,” and was appalled by the contrast. “May the sense of moral evil,” he prayed, “be as strong in me as my delight in external beauty, for in a deep sense of moral evil, more perhaps than in anything else, abides a saving knowledge of God!”

His prayer was answered: Dr. Arnold was never in any danger of losing his sense of moral evil. If the landscapes of Italy only served to remind him of it, how could he forget it among the boys at Rugby School? The daily sight of so many young creatures in the hands of the Evil One filled him with agitated grief.

“When the spring and activity of youth,” he wrote, “is altogether unsanctified by anything pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is as dizzying and almost more morally distressing than the shouts and gambols of a set of lunatics.”

One thing struck him as particularly strange: “It is very startling,” he said, “to see so much of sin combined with so little of sorrow.” The naughtiest boys positively seemed to enjoy themselves most. There were moments when he almost lost faith in his whole system of education, when he began to doubt whether some far more radical reforms than any he had attempted might not be necessary, before the multitude of children under his charge⁠—shouting and gambolling, and yet plunged all the while deep in moral evil⁠—could ever be transformed into a set of Christian gentlemen. But then he remembered his general principles, the conduct of Jehovah with the Chosen People, and the childhood of the human race. No, it was for him to make himself, as one of his pupils afterwards described him, in the words of Bacon, “kin to God in spirit”; he would rule the school majestically from on high. He would deliver a series of sermons analysing “the six vices” by which “great schools were corrupted, and changed from the likeness of God’s temple to that of a den of thieves.” He would exhort, he would denounce, he would sweep through the corridors, he would turn the pages of Facciolati’s Lexicon more imposingly than ever; and the rest he would leave to the Praepostors in the Sixth Form.

Upon the boys in the Sixth Form, indeed, a strange burden would seem to have fallen. Dr. Arnold himself was very well aware of this. “I cannot deny,” he told them in a sermon, “that you have an anxious duty⁠—a duty which some might suppose was too heavy for your years”; and every term he pointed out to them, in a short address, the responsibilities of their position, and impressed upon them “the enormous influence” they possessed “for good or for evil.” Nevertheless most youths of seventeen, in spite of the warnings of their elders, have a singular trick of carrying moral burdens lightly. The Doctor might preach and look grave; but young Brooke was ready enough to preside at a fight behind the Chapel, though he was in the Sixth, and knew that fighting was against the rules. At their best, it may be supposed that the Praepostors administered a kind of barbaric justice; but they were not always at their best, and the pages of Tom Brown’s Schooldays show us what was no doubt the normal condition of affairs under Dr. Arnold, when the boys in the Sixth Form were weak or brutal, and the blackguard Flashman, in the intervals of swigging brandy-punch with his boon companions, amused himself by toasting fags before the fire.

But there was an exceptional kind of boy, upon whom the high-pitched exhortations of Dr. Arnold produced a very different effect. A minority of susceptible and serious youths fell completely under his sway, responded like wax to the pressure of his influence, and moulded their whole lives with passionate reverence upon the teaching of their adored master. Conspicuous among these was Arthur Clough. Having been sent to Rugby at the age of ten, he quickly entered into every phase of school life, though, we are told, “a weakness in his ankles prevented him from taking a prominent part in the games of the place.” At the age of sixteen, he was in the Sixth Form, and not merely a Praepostor, but head of the School House. Never did Dr. Arnold have an apter pupil. This earnest adolescent, with the weak ankles and the solemn face, lived entirely with the highest ends in view. He thought of nothing but moral good, moral evil, moral influence, and moral responsibility. Some of his early letters have been preserved, and they reveal both the intensity with which he felt the importance of his own position, and the strange stress of spirit under which he laboured. “I have been in one continued state of excitement for at least the last three years,” he wrote when he was not yet seventeen, “and now comes the time of exhaustion.” But he did not allow himself to rest, and a few months later he was writing to a schoolfellow as follows:

“I verily believe my whole being is soaked through with the wishing and hoping and striving to do the school good, or rather to keep it up and hinder it from falling in this, I do think, very critical time, so that my cares and affections and conversations, thoughts, words, and deeds