Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 02.djvu/82

ARNOLD. father in 1801, Arnold was put in charge of his aunt, Miss Delafield, and remained with her for two years. At the age of eight he was sent to Warminster School in Wiltshire, whence, four years afterwards, he was sent to Winchester. From this famous school he went up to Oxford at sixteen as a scholar of Corpus Christi College, where he remained three years. Here he fell in with a small group of men, chief among whom were John Keble, the originator of the Tractarian movement and author of the Christian Year, and John Taylor Coleridge, afterwards judge of the Queen's Bench, by whom he was greatly influenced. He took a first in classics in 1814, and in the following year was elected fellow of Oriel College, a position which he held for the next four years. In 1815 he took the Chancellor's Prize for a Latin essay, and in 1817 the same prize for an English essay. It was during his residence at Oriel that he laid the foundation for his later work in the classics and history by wide reading along those lines, especially in Thucydides and Aristotle. Here, too, though at first reserved and shy, and later very disputatious in his maintenance of bold, if not very well-matured, opinions, he gained consideration and won distinction among the group of able men by whom he was surrounded.

He took deacon's orders in 1818, and in the following year left the University to settle at Laleham, near Staines, where he occupied himself chiefly in preparing pupils for the University, and in the pursuit of his own studies. Here he spent eight quiet years, devoting himself particularly to the study of Thucydides and Roman history, in which he was profoundly influenced by the works of Niebuhr and other German historians whose influence was very apparent in his own writings. Here, too, he began his History of Rome. Besides these activities he devoted much attention to problems of the Church as well as to questions affecting the lower classes, and to practical work among the poor, all of which led to the maturing of ideas on Church and social problems that brought upon him fierce attacks in later years. His political opinions, affected by his life and work here, tended to crystallize into a form of advanced liberalism, which his opponents afterwards characterized so bitterly as dangerous radicalism.

Any final estimate of Arnold must rest on his influence at Rugby. The head-mastership of Rugby fell vacant in 1827, and, though Arnold entered late in the contest and was not personally known to the electors, he was chosen for the position, largely, it would appear, on the recommendation of one of his friends, who predicted that if elected he would change the face of the public-school education throughout England. After being chosen in December, 1827, he took priestly orders and proceeded to the degrees of B.D. and D.D. He entered on his duties in August, 1828. The remaining fourteen years of his life were spent at Rugby and at Fox How in Westmoreland, an estate which he bought in 1832, and his career was that of the school to which he devoted himself. Dr. Percival, successor of Arnold in 1887-95, afterwards Bishop of Hereford, has said: "If I were called upon to express in a sentence or two my feeling in regard to Dr. Arnold's influence in school life, I should describe him as a great prophet among schoolmasters, rather than an instructor or educator in the ordinary sense of the term. ... His influence was stimulative rather than formative, the secret of his power consisting not so much in the novelty of his ideas or methods, as in his commanding and magnetic personality and the intensity and earnestness with which he impressed his views and made them — as a prophet makes his message — a part of the living forces of the time."

Arnold was not the originator of any didactic system. In general, he accepted the system which he found, and infused into it a new meaning. Thus, without doing away with 'fagging,' he tempered it into a responsible supervision by the sixth form of the forms below. He insisted upon the preëminence of classical studies, but enriched the ordinary school course of the day with mathematics, modern languages, and modern history. Above all, without its "accredited phraseology of piety," he emphasized the moral and spiritual interest. True scholarship he held to be associated with Christianity. He aimed, in the common lessons and in the weekly sermon, to mold the public opinion of the school. As the head-master of Rugby, he looked as much to the development of manly character as to the training of students. His policy, in which he was eminently successful, was to send to the universities not a number of men trained to take firsts in the schools, but rather "thoughtful, manly-minded men, conscious of duty and obligation," who were almost certain to do uniformly well whatever they undertook. One immediate result was that after the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832, Rugby men represented the best reform sentiment. His own character, his deep religious sense, his noble estimate of duty, of justice, of honesty, and of truth, were strongly impressed on the school. His great ability as an organizer and administrator of men and measures did much to work, at Rugby and elsewhere, the revolution which had been predicted.

Profoundly religious, Arnold came naturally to take part in those theological discussions which attained prominence in the early decades of the last century. He wished to conserve the faith of the Church, and also to liberalize its thought. The clergy of his time appeared to him negligent and apathetic; hence he welcomed the new life promised by the Oxford Movement, and in 1829 published his pamphlets on "The Christian Duty of Conceding the Roman Catholic Claims." But he soon perceived that for him dogma could not be the sole basis of Christianity: and when, in 1836, the party in power at Oxford sought to keep Dr. Hampden from a professorship on a charge of heresy, he wrote for the Edinburgh Review an article of unsparing rebuke. For many years he was misunderstood by broad and by high churchmen alike. Because of the temper of his Christian Duty, the Archbishop of Canterbury refused to permit him to preach Bishop Stanley's consecration sermon. His Edinburgh article nearly cost him his Rugby post. But by 1840, with the passing of the first shock of the religious controversies of 1830-40 and with the lessening of his early strenuousness, as well as by the increasing recognition of his great work as master of Rugby, much of this friction passed away and his last years were full of honors. The honor most prized by him was his appointment by Lord Melbourne to the professorship of modern history at Oxford in 1841. His enjoyment of