Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 02.djvu/127

Arnold school education in England, it was mainly by very simple means — by treating the boys with confidence, and by impressing upon them his own sense of the value of knowledge and the sacredness of duty: in short, it was by the force of his personal character, touched, according to his habitual prayer, by the 'spirit of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.'

As a teacher his aim was not so much to impart information as to awaken thought and stimulate industry. While insisting, somewhat sternly, on a careful preparation of the prescribed lesson, if any difficulty arose in connection with it, instead of giving the explanation at once, he would place himself, so to speak, by the side of his pupils and help them to find it for themselves. Though not what is called a finished scholar, he had a strong turn for philology in its wider aspects, and a rare power of terse and spirited translation; and the ever fresh delight which he took in his favourite authors, such as Homer and Thucydides, Cicero and Virgil, was in itself a lesson to his scholars. While maintaining the old pre-eminence of the classics its the best vehicle for the study of language — a study which seemed to him as if 'given for the very purpose of forming the human mind in youth' — he was the first to add mathematics, modern history, and modern languages to the ordinary school course. Into the classical lessons he put fresh life by constantly directing attention to the general questions, literary, moral, or historical, which they opened up; and perhaps nothing in his method of teaching was more remarkable than the manner in which he habitually made different parts of knowledge illustrate one another. The 'Divinity' lessons, apt in those days to be few and meagre, were with him very frequent, and always marked by special fulness of interest and a pecidiar reverence of tone and manner. In these, as well as in the lessons on modern history, it was impossible but that his own views should find some expression; but he made it quite clear to his hearers that they were not desired to accept those views, but to examine and think for themselves.

In his government of the school he was undoubtedly aided by a natural sternness of aspect and manner, which, making all his relations with his pupils rest on a background of awe, gave the greater effect to his perfect frankness and simplicity, his entire freedom alike from 'donnishness' and from suspicion. The quick insight of boys soon discovered that his anger, if easily roused, had nothing in it of personal resentment, and that the severest sense of the sinfulness of an act did not exclude the most fatherly tenderness towards the offender. Sensitively alive to the peculiar evils incident to the free life of public schools, where a low tone may so easily be set by a few bad boys, he felt also their unique advantages if only a good tone could be infused into them. This he sought to do mainly through the medium of the sixth-form boys, with whom he was in hourly contact, and who were entrusted with much authority over the rest; and wherever he saw an evil influence at work — a boy, and still more a knot of boys, doing harm to themselves and others — it was his practice to require their parents to remove them quietly from the school. But as in intellectual so in moral matters, it was to promise rather than to attainment that he looked, and it was by stimulating to good, rather than by repression of evil, that he acted. He made boys feel that each individual was an object of personal interest to him, and they learned to think that he had an insight almost supernatural into their thoughts and feelings. At the same time the manliness, the independence, the buoyant cheerfulness of his own temperament, his hearty interest in the school games, which he looked upon as an integral part of education, put him in sympathy with all that was good, even in the least intellectual of his scholars.

As a moral and religious teacher, the special engine of his influence was the weekly sermon. Written generally with great rapidity, but expressing what was habitually in his mind, and delivered with singular earnestness and feeling, these discourses conveyed to his hearers, with a power exceeding that of the most finished compositions, the spirit that was in him. But more potent perhaps than any sermon was the impression habitually conveyed, with all the force of his powerful character, that in everything that he said or did, whether in the pulpit or out of it, he was seeking to do all to the glory of God.

The result of the new influence at work in the school soon began to attract attention. At the universities many of its scholars attained distinction, while very few (a point to which the head master himself attached even greater importance failed to pass their examinations. Not in the universities only, but in the army and elsewhere, it came more and more to be observed that Arnold's pupils were, to a degree unusual at that time, 'thoughtful, manly-minded, and conscious of duty and obligation.' For some years, however, the increase in the numbers of the school did not keep pace with the rise in its reputation, being checked by the unpopularity of the headmaster's utterances on public matters. In 1829 he published a pamphlet on the '