Chapter 21

In the summer of 1805 Napoleon was again at Boulogne, but his plan of invasion was wrecked by the failure of the French fleet to reach the Channel. When Napoleon learned that the fleet had gone south, and that the attack upon England had been thwarted, he straightway marched his army to mid-Europe. Pitt had staked everything on the new coalition, and the surrender of the Austrians at Ulm was news of the utmost bitterness to him. But a splendid corrective came soon afterwards in the crowning naval victory of Trafalgar. Although the nation's feelings were divided between joy at the triumph and grief at the death of the illustrious victor, Pitt's popularity, which had been somewhat uncertain, was enormously enhanced by the event. The Lord Mayor proposed his health as "the saviour of Europe."

Pitt's reply was nearly as follows: "I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me, but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, I trust, save Europe by her example." With only these two sentences the minister sat down. They were the last words that Pitt ever spoke in public.

He was suffering much at this time from gout, and his general health was undermined by anxiety. In December he journeyed to Bath, and at Bath there reached him the news of the destruction of his coalition at Austerlitz. The battle was the cause of his death. He was struck down by a severe internal malady and he was in a state of extreme debility when on January 11, 1806, he returned home to the house he had taken on Putney Heath. It is said that as he passed along to his bedroom, he observed a map of Europe hanging on the wall, upon which he turned to his niece and mournfully said: "Roll up that map. It will not be wanted these ten years."

For a few days the doctors had hopes that he might recover, but on the 22nd it became evident that he could not live for twenty-four hours. Early in the morning of the 23rd he died.

"At about half-past two," wrote the Hon. James Hamilton Stanhope, who was at his bedside, "Mr. Pitt ceased moaning, and did not make the slightest sound for some time. Shortly afterwards, in a tone I never shall forget, he exclaimed: 'Oh, my country! How I love my country!' From that time he never spoke or moved, and at half-past four expired without a groan or struggle. His strength being quite exhausted, his life departed like a candle burning out."

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ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY

The Life of Thomas Arnold, D.D.

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley was born at Alderley Rectory, Cheshire, on December 13, 1815. He was educated at Rugby under Arnold, and at Oxford, where Tait, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, was his tutor. Entering holy orders, he was appointed select preacher in 1845; became Canon of Canterbury in 1851; and in 1863 succeeded Trench as Dean of Westminster. He died on July 18, 1881, and by Queen Victoria's commands his remains were laid beside those of his wife, Lady Augusta Bruce, in Henry VII.'s Chapel, Westminster. Of all his works, perhaps his most important contribution to English literature is the "Life of Arnold," which was published two years after the death of the famous master of Rugby. To the task of writing the book Stanley devoted all his energies, steering clear, however, of any attempt to form an opinion of his own upon Arnold's life and character, while achieving a result that not only assured his own position at Oxford, but brought him well into the front rank of contemporary writers. The religious animosity at Oxford was uncongenial to Stanley, and it was only the prospect of Dr. Arnold occupying the Chair of Modern History that reconciled him to his surroundings.

_I.--Youth and Early Manhood_

Thomas Arnold, seventh child and youngest son of William and Martha Arnold, was born June 13, 1795, at East Cowes, Isle of Wight, where his father was collector of customs. His early education was undertaken by a sister; and in 1803 he was sent to Warminister School, in Wiltshire. In 1807 he went to Winchester, where, having entered as a commoner and afterwards become a scholar of the college, he remained till 1811. In after life he always cherished a strong Wykehamist feeling, and, during his headmastership at Rugby, often recurred to his knowledge there first acquired, of the peculiar constitution of a public school.

He was then, as always, of a shy and retiring disposition; but his manner as a child, and till his entrance at Oxford, was marked by a stiffness and formality, the very reverse of the joyousness and simplicity of his later years. He was unlike those of his own age, with pursuits peculiar to himself; and the tone and style of his early letters are such as might have been produced by living chiefly with his elders, and reading, or hearing read, books suited to a more advanced age. Both as boy and young man he was remarkable for a difficulty in early rising amounting almost to a constitutional infirmity; and though in after life this was overcome by habit, he often said that early rising was a daily effort to him.

The beginning of some of his later interests may be traced in his earlier amusements and occupations. He never lost the recollection of the impression produced upon him by the excitement of naval and military affairs, of which he naturally saw and heard much by living at Cowes in the time of the Napoleonic war; and with his playmates he would sail rival toy fleets or act the battles of the Homeric heroes with improvised spears and shields. He was extremely fond of ballad poetry, and his earliest compositions all ran in that direction. At Winchester he was noted for his forwardness in history and geography; and there also he gave indications of that mnemonic faculty which in later years showed itself in minute details, extending to the exact state of the weather on particular days, or the exact words or passages he had not seen for twenty years. The period of his home and school education was too short to exercise much influence on his after life, but he always looked back upon it with tenderness.

In 1811 he was elected a scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; in 1814 he took a first class in classics; in 1815 he was made a Fellow of Oriel; and he gained the Chancellor's prizes for the Latin and English essays in 1815 and 1817. During his later time at Oxford he took private pupils and read extensively in the libraries. Meanwhile, he had been led gradually to fix on his future life course. In December, 1818, he was ordained deacon and next year settled at Laleham, where, in August, 1820, he married Mary Penrose, daughter of the rector of Fledborough, Notts.

At Laleham he remained for nine years, coaching private pupils for the universities. Here were born six of his nine children; the youngest three, besides one who died in infancy, were born at Rugby. During this period an essential change and growth of Arnold's character became manifest. The warm feelings of his youth gave place to the fixed earnestness and devotion which henceforth took possession of him. His former indolent habits, his morbid restlessness and occasional weariness of duty, indulgence of vague schemes without definite purpose, intellectual doubts as to accepted religious beliefs--all seem to have vanished for ever.

It was now that the religious aspect of his character came to be emphasised. In common acts of life, public and private, the depths of his religious convictions very visibly appeared. And while it is impossible to understand his religious belief except through the knowledge of his life and writings on ordinary subjects, it is impossible on the other hand, to understand his life and writings without bearing in mind how vivid was his realisation of those truths of religion on which he most habitually dwelt. It was this which enabled him to undertake labours which, without such a power, must have crushed or enfeebled the spiritual growth which in him they seemed only to foster. His letters at this time show better than anything else how he was, though unconsciously to himself, maturing for the arduous duties he afterwards undertook. It was now, too, that he first became acquainted with Niebuhr's "History of Rome," which revolutionised his views of history, and, later, served as a model for his own "History of Rome."

_II.--Headmaster of Rugby_

Arnold was not without his visions of ambition and extensive influence from the first, but he liked Laleham, and always looked back with fond regret to his time there. "I have always thought," he wrote in 1823, "with regard to ambition, that I should like to be _aut Caesar aut nullus;_ and as it is pretty well settled for me that I shall not be Caesar, I am quite content to live in peace as _nullus_." But the fates had ordered it otherwise. Friends had long been urging him to seek a larger sphere of usefulness; and when, in August, 1827, the headmastership of Rugby became vacant, he applied for the post.

He had himself little hope of success. The testimonials he sent in were few, but all spoke strongly of his qualifications. Among them was a letter from Dr. Hawkins, the future Provost of Oriel, in which the prediction was made that if Arnold were elected he would change the face of education throughout the public schools of England. The impression produced upon the trustees by this letter and by the other testimonials was such that Arnold was immediately appointed. In June, 1828, he received priest's orders; in April and November of the same year took his degrees of B.D. and D.D., and in August entered on his new office.

The post was in many respects suited to his natural tastes--to his love of tuition, which had now grown so strongly upon him that he declared sometimes that he could hardly live without such employment; to the vigour and spirits which fitted him rather to deal with the young than the old; to the desire of carrying out his favourite ideas of uniting things secular with things spiritual, and of introducing the highest principles of action into regions comparatively uncongenial to their reception. He had not, however, accepted it without grave doubts about his fitness. In a private letter he says:

I confess that I should very much object to undertake a charge in which I was not invested with pretty full discretion. According to my notions of what large schools are, founded on all I know and all I have ever heard of them, expulsion should be practised much oftener than it is. Now, I know that trustees, in general, are averse to this plan, because it has a tendency to lessen the numbers of the school, and they regard quantity more than quality. In fact, my opinions on this point might, perhaps, generally be considered as disqualifying me for the situation of master of a great school; yet I could not consent to tolerate much that I know is tolerated generally, and, therefore, I should not like to enter on an office which I could not discharge according to my own views of what is right.

At Rugby, Arnold from the first maintained that in the actual working of the school he must be completely independent, and that the remedy of the trustees, if they were dissatisfied, was not interference, but dismissal. It was on this condition that he took the post; and any attempt to control either the administration of the school or his own private occupations he felt bound to resist as a duty not only to himself but the master of every foundation school in England. The remonstrances which he encountered, particularly from his fixed determination always to get rid of unpromising subjects, were vehement and numerous; but he repeatedly declared that on no other conditions could he hold his appointment, or justify the existence of the public school system in a Christian country.

"My object," he wrote, just before taking up duty, "will be, if possible, to form Christian men, for Christian boys I can scarcely hope to make; I mean that, from the natural imperfect state of boyhood, they are not susceptible of Christian principles in their full development upon their practice, and I suspect that a low standard of morals in many respects must be tolerated amongst them, as it was on a larger scale in what I consider the boyhood of the human race."

This is the keynote of his whole system. As he put it, what he looked for in the school was, first, religious and moral principles; second, gentlemanly conduct; and third, intellectual ability. Intellectual training was never for a moment underrated, but he always thought first of his charges as schoolboys who must grow up to be Christian men. His education, in short, "was not based upon religion, but was itself _religious_." For cleverness as such, Arnold had no regard. "Mere intellectual acuteness," he used to say, "divested as it is, in too many cases, of all that is comprehensive and great and good, is to me more revolting than the most helpless imbecility, seeming to be almost like the spirit of Mephistopheles." Often when this intellectual cleverness was seen in union with moral depravity, he would be inclined to deny its existence altogether.

A mere plodding boy was, above all others, encouraged by him. At Laleham he had once got out of patience, and spoken sharply to a pupil of this kind, when the pupil looked up in his face and said, "Why do you speak angrily, sir? Indeed, I am doing the best that I can." Years afterwards he used to tell the story to his children, and said, "I never felt so much ashamed in my life--that look and that speech I have never forgotten." And though it would, of course, happen that clever boys, from a greater sympathy with his understanding, would be brought into closer intercourse with him, this did not affect his feeling of respect, and even of reverence, for those who, without ability, were distinguished for high principle and industry. "If there be one thing on earth which is truly admirable, it is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural powers where they have been honestly, truly and zealously cultivated."

_III.--As Teacher and Preacher_

Arnold had always been painfully impressed by the evils of the public school system, according to which a number of boys are left to form an independent society of their own, in which the influence they exert over each other is far greater than that exerted by the masters. He writes, in 1837:

Of all the painful things connected with my employment, nothing is equal to the grief of seeing a boy come to school innocent and promising, and tracing the corruption of his character from the influence of the temptations around him, in the very place which ought to have strengthened and improved it. But in most cases those who come with a character of positive good are benefited; it is the neutral and indecisive characters which are apt to be decided for evil by schools, as they would be, in fact, by any other temptation.

This very feeling led him to catch with eagerness at every means by which the trial might be shortened or alleviated. He believed that the change from childhood to manhood might be hastened without prematurely exhausting the faculties of body and mind; and it was on this principle that he chiefly acted. He desired the boys to cultivate true manliness as the only step to something higher. He treated them as gentlemen, and appealed and trusted to their common sense and conscience.

Lying to the masters he made a grave offence. He placed implicit confidence in a boy's assertion, and then, if a falsehood were discovered, punished it severely. In the higher forms any attempt at further proof of an assertion was immediately checked. "If you say so, that is quite enough; of course, I believe your word"; and there grew up in consequence a general feeling that "it was a shame to tell Arnold a lie: he always believed you." Few scenes can be recorded more characteristic of him than when, in consequence of a disturbance, he had been obliged to send away several boys, and when, in the midst of the general spirit of discontent which this excited, he stood in his place before the assembled school and said, "It is _not_ necessary that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen."

Arnold's method of teaching was founded on the principle of awakening the intellect of every individual boy. Hence it was his practice to teach by questioning. As a general rule, he never gave information, except as a kind of reward for an answer, and often withheld it altogether, or checked himself in the very act of uttering it, from a sense that those whom he was addressing had not sufficient interest or sympathy to receive it. His explanations were at short as possible--enough to dispose of the difficulty and no more; and his questions were of a kind to call the attention of the boys to the real point of every subject and to disclose to them the exact boundaries of what they knew or did not know. With regard to the younger boys, he said: "It is a great mistake to think that they should _understand_ all they learn; for God has ordered that in youth the memory should act vigorously, independent of the understanding--whereas a man cannot usually recollect a thing unless he understands it."

At Rugby he made it an essential part of the headmaster's office to preach a sermon every Sunday in the school chapel. "The veriest stranger," he said, "who ever attends service in this chapel does well to feel something more than common interest in the sight of the congregation here assembled. But if the sight so interests a mere stranger, what should it be to ourselves, both to you and to me?" More than either matter or manner of his preaching was the impression of himself. Even the mere readers of his sermons will derive from them the history of his whole mind, and of his whole management of the school. But to his hearers it was more than this. It was the man himself, there more than in any other place, concentrating all his various faculties and feelings on one sole object, combating face to face the evil which, directly or indirectly, he was elsewhere perpetually struggling.

His personal interest in the boys was always strong. "Do you see," he on one occasion said to an assistant-master who had recently come, "those two boys walking together? I never saw them together before; you should make an especial point of observing the company they keep; nothing so tells the changes in a boy's character."

_IV.--Influence of the Great Teacher_

But the impression which Arnold produced upon the boys was derived not so much from any immediate intercourse or conversation with them as from the general influence of his whole character, displayed consistently whenever he appeared before them. This influence, with its consequent effects, was gradually on the increase during the whole of his stay. From the earliest period, indeed, the boys were conscious of something unlike what they had been taught to imagine of a schoolmaster, and by many a lasting regard was contracted for him. In the higher forms, at least, it became the fashion, so to speak, to think and talk of him with pride and affection. As regards the permanent effects of his whole system, it may be said that not so much among his own pupils, or in the scene of his actual labours, as in every public school throughout England is to be sought the chief and enduring monument of Arnold's headmastership at Rugby.

Of Arnold's general life at Rugby there is no need to say much; for although the school did not occupy his whole energies, it is almost solely by his school work that he is remembered. He took a not unimportant part in the political and theological discussions of his time, and various literary enterprises also engaged his attention. In theology he entertained very broad views. One great principle he advocated with intense earnestness was that a Christian people and a Christian Church should be synonymous. That use of the word "Church" which limits it to the clergy, or which implies in the clergy any particular sacredness, he entirely repudiated.

He was convinced that the founders of our constitution in Church and State did truly consider them to be identical; the Christian nation of England to be the Church of England; the head of that nation to be, for that very reason, the head of the Church. This view placed him in antagonism to the High Church party; but, as a matter of fact, he neither belonged, nor felt himself to belong, to any section of the English clergy. Politically, he held himself to be a strong Whig; but that he was not, in the common sense of the word, a member of any party is shown by the readiness with which all parties alike, according to the fashion of the time, claimed or renounced him as an associate.

Arnold did not like the flat scenery of Warwickshire He described himself as "in it like a plant sunk in the ground in a pot." His holidays were always spent away from Rugby, either on the Continent, or, in later years, at his Westmoreland home, Fox How, a small estate between Rydal and Ambleside, which he purchased in 1832. He was just about to leave Rugby for Fox How when his life was mournfully and suddenly ended by an attack of angina pectoris, on June 12, 1842. Only the year before he had been appointed by Lord Melbourne Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford.

Arnold's principal works are six volumes of sermons, a three-volume edition of Thucydides, the Oxford "Lectures on Modern History," and the three-volume "History of Rome," which, by his unfortunate death, was broken off at the Second Punic War. To the last-named he looked as the chief monument of his historical fame.

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AGNES STRICKLAND

Life of Queen Elizabeth

Agnes Strickland, born in London on August 19, 1796, with her sister Elizabeth began in 1840 the publication of the immense series of historical biographies of which the "Lives of the Queens of England" formed the first and most important group. In that group the "Elizabeth" is recognised as holding the highest rank. It is an essentially feminine study of one of the most remarkable of women; not a history, for historical events are treated as of infinitely less importance than picturesque personal details and miscellaneous gossip, but presenting altogether an admirable picture of the outward seeming of those spacious days, and a discriminating and judicious portrait of the maiden queen herself. The author's views, however, would not always be endorsed by a masculine critic. Agnes Strickland died on July 13, 1874. The literature relating to the life and times of Queen Elizabeth would form a library of contemporary records. Many volumes of state papers have been published: Camden's "Annals of Elizabeth" is the classical account of her. Creighton's "Queen Elizabeth" and volumes VII. to XII. of Froude's "History of England" are the leading modern works; and no one who wishes to know anything of the great queen can afford to neglect Hume's "Courtships of Queen Elizabeth," which will also be found in these pages (see Hume).

_I.--The Lady Elizabeth_