BOOKS

Headmasters

BY WILLIAM GOLDING THOSE who are wary of Lytton Strachey but flinch from engaging with Stanley's thick volumes will be grateful to Mr. Bamford for

presenting this new study of Thomas Arnold.* He does so with a detachment which is judicious but cold; and indeed a personality does not emerge very sharply from these pages.

Arnold's swarthy and passionate face looks out past us from the dust-cover; not the face of a myth, one would say. Yet that portrait, typical of its period, tells us a great deal. We examine the doctor's robes, the clergyman's bands, the sumptuous volume on the knees. These and the waxen, lay-figure hands, which support rather than grasp the open volume, might be expected. But the face is a different matter. Here is energy, impatience and self-esteem. Here is a man who bounced into the studio. Where shall I sit? How? How long? I haven't much time. Is that right?

I am engaged in a most important matter that simply must . . .

And surely he was off again before he had done more than leave an image on the artist's retina? The waxen hands, the robes, the bands remain; but surely the face had to be a snapshot, rapid movement arrested in flight? It is an impetuous and choleric face. Such a man would not be content to hold opinions. He would squeeze them, he would almost throttle them. He might achieve a great thing; but so much speed and energy would leave his back un- guarded, where ridicule lies in wait.

Thomas Arnold was a boy of the middle class who, at the age of nineteen, got a First in Greats, won the English Prize Essay, and was made a Fellow of Oriel. The paper work of his examina- tion for the fellowship was not outstanding. Nor were his family connections, good though some of them might be, sufficiently brilliant to ensure him the benefits of nepotism. What won him his fellowship was an air of nascent authority which impressed all who knew him. Neither he nor they knew what he would do, but he would do something. At the age of nineteen he was capax imperil. At twenty-one he was awarded the Chan- cellor's Latin Prize. At twenty-three, after a drawn battle over the Thirty-nine Articles, he was ordained in the Church of England. His rise seemed inevitable. He would be head of a col- lege, perhaps—certainly a bishop. The Province of Canterbury was not out of reach.

Yet Arnold gave up his fellowship and became a schoolmaster. It is astonishing but true to say that Arnold moved or drifted into teaching for the commonest reason of all; he wanted to get married. He never thought of teaching as a per- manency. He was a reformer in the wide world. Re sought to bring about

an inequality where some have all the enjoy- ments of civilised life and none are without its comforts—where some have all the treasures of knowledge and none are sunk in ignorance.. That is a social system in harmony with the order of God's creation in the natural world.

* THOMAS ARNOLD. By T. W. inamford. (Cresset Press, 25s.) To this end he was dedicated. But teaching would do as a temporary measure. It would tide him over until better things appeared. He felt no vocation for it. But he was Thomas Arnold. He did the job with passion even though it was not the centre of his interests.

The key to Arnold's nature, at every level, seems to have been passion. He was a reformer who did not so much approach a problem as declare personal war on it. At first his ideas on Church Reform, radical though they were, gained him a good deal of respect. But he attacked the High Church wing in the person of Newman so ferociously that he lost it again. And disquieting things were happening at the school. Capax imperil. The board who appointed him Headmaster of Rugby at the age of thirty- one must have wondered whether the other half of the tag, nisi imperasset, might not have some- thing for Arnold as well.

For what is a headmaster? Is he a leader? A co-ordinator? Is he to be a dictator, or a consti- tutional monarch? There is no post of responsi- bility in which a man is left so free to choose his own method. He may choose a cloistered virtue and live for the school. But the occupational hazard in this sort of life is grandiosity. He meets parents, masters, and boys. But boys lack the experience and audacity to challenge him; masters lack the energy to engage; and parents have given hostages to fortune. As for that freer audience, the governors, a self-regarding instinct will not readily allow them to question the wis- dom of their own choice. A headmaster who begins by dedicating himself wholly to this closed community may end in the placid admiration of his own image.

It need not be so. There have been many head- masters who, in the words of the Tory press,

sought their reward, not in the applause of publications relating to the passing events of the day, but in the genius, the acquirements and the success of their pupils. They held it beneath their dignity to become political parti- sans.

Arnold might have chosen to be one of these; but he did not do so. He remained in two worlds, so that the school, always distinguished, now became the centre of a political storm. He preached his Christian Radicalism to the sixth form. Stanley's parents knew what was happen- ing.

Arthur was a running commentary upon Arnold's Church Reform— knowing so well what he meant by this, what led him to that, and recognising his illustrations and references. Since the name of 'Radical' was attached to

Arnold, much as the name of 'Communist' might be attached to a headmaster today, the propa- ganda offered to his captive audience made him the Bad Man of the Tory press. His denunciation of Newman—not yet gone over to Rome—left the Right wing outraged : 'in all the annals of the worst times of Popery [can] any anathema be found breathing a spirit of malevolence worse than this?' At that time, Arnold was on the short

list for a mitre. Lord Melbourne was the arbiter. It is a quaint comment on the organisation of a State Church that we hear, through all the lofty sentiments that surrounded the question of ap- pointing bishops, the strong, clear call of the party politician. 'What have the Tory churchmen ever done for me that 1 should make them a present of such a handle against my government?' The sensitive hand that held a mitre, paused, and took it back again.

Yet the question of Arnold's methods—his tempestuous kidnapping of the soul—goes far beyond party politics. It raises a fundamental issue in the ethics of responsibility, and Mr. Bamford is right to dwell on it. The Arnold sort of headmaster brings his grandiosity, his over- powering rightness, with him. The majesty of the great world lies round his shoulders like a cloak. Boys find him irresistible.

Newman went over to Rome and took others with him. Public opinion veered towards Arnold: he was right after all. They made him Regius Professor of History at Oxford, a post he could hold at the same time as his headmastership. The mitre hovered near again. Then, at the age of forty-seven, with the same precipitancy that had characterised all his actions—almost with the same urgency and passion—he died.

Arnold, famous in his life as a reformer, has become a totem of the Victorian public school system. Yet he disapproved of public schools. They took children away from their parents and the boys corrupted each other. What mattered was a sixth form which he could mould as he wished. The sixth form was an elite on which he lavished his learning and his passion, and to which he gave an authority that was absolute. They were to be made in his own image— reformers of a turbulent and misguided society. He was successful : for while boys will always listen to masters more than they pretend, they will listen without reservation to a master who has made some mark in the outside world. And what a mark Arnold had made! He was treated by one half of the press as a monster and idolised by the other. He was tomorrow's bishop or archbishop. He was a man of superb assur- ance who gave you faith in yourself so long as you went the way he wanted.

Is it any wonder he was successful with the sixth form? They took him neat. It is often said that Arnold the headmaster must be judged by the best of his pupils. Clough and Stanley, his most brilliant creations, remained what he made them. Clough, perhaps, had doubts.

[Arnold] used to attack offences, not as offences—the right view—against discipline, but as sins, heinous guilt, I don't know what beside! Why didn't he flog them and hold his tongue? Flog them he did, but why preach?

But Stanley remained what he was made till his dying day; and Stanley was to be Arnold's most influential biographer.

That is the danger of the Arnold system. It implies that one man can know exactly what another ought to be. So that when his admirers silence criticism by pointing to his pupils, Clough, Vaughan, Stanley, they raise a question which sounds so indecent that it is never asked. Let us ask it, then. Would you like to be Clough or Stanley? Would you give yourself up to a kind of jesuitical moulding process which is all the more powerful because you are not old enough to understand it? Moreover, Arnold has laid the way open for lesser men who imitated him to create the smug, the self-righteous prigs who re- gard themselves as a chosen people because some local boss of a closed shop has consistently told them they were so. Arnold kneW the will of God. His sense of rightness led him into cruelty and

dishonesty. One of his first actions as headmaster was to beat a small boy who appeared to lie. A little deliberation would have saved them both, but the awful immorality of a lie brought the blood into those swarthy cheeks. The boy had told the truth. Then again Rugby was a founda- tion for the education of local children. Arnold killed the lower school, to keep them out; and in so doing prised open the gap that still lies be- tween the public schools and the rest. Though what he did was illegal and immoral, he knew he was right, and he was unperturbed. God be- lieved in a stratified society.

One is haunted throughout Mr. Bamford's careful book by the knowledge that Arnold was to exercise a wide influence over' Victorian education, and so on to our own times. Genera- tions of boys have grown up by Arnold out of Stanley. Yet neither of them, Dean or Professor of History, guessed how the future would shape. if You have an empire, you have to have the men to run it. Arnold's Rugby became the Pattern for a hundred new foundations which saw their first duty in a steady stream of trained and pruned young men to take law to the black, brown and yellow. At his best, then, and at second hand, he may be said to have produced the men and the tradition which made such a shining example of the administration of the Sudan. At his worst, he made certain the ludi- crous and tragic pattern of colonialism which is satirised in the recent novel Sons of God.