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Page 34
Opinions may differ more as to the value of the book as a lesson, or
as an argument. Mr Arnold had started with a strong belief in the
desirableness--indeed of the necessity--of State-control of the most
thoroughgoing kind in education; and he was not at all likely to miss
the opportunity of fetching new weapons from the very arsenals and
_places d'armes_ of that system. He was thoroughly convinced that
English ways generally, and especially the ways of English schools and
colleges, were wrong; and he had, of course, no difficulty in pointing
triumphantly to the fact that, if the institutions of Continental
countries differed in some ways from each other, they all differed in
nearly the same way from ours. It may undoubtedly be claimed for
him--by those who see any force in the argument--that events have
followed him. Education, both secondary and university in England,
_has_ to a large extent gone since on the lines he indicates; the
threatened superiority of the German bagman has asserted itself even
more and more; the "teaching of literature" has planted a terrible
fixed foot in our schools and colleges. But perhaps the weight usually
assigned to this kind of corroboration is rather imaginary. That a
thing has happened does not prove that it ought to have happened,
except on a theory of determinism, which puts "conduct" out of sight
altogether. There are those who will still, in the vein of
Mephistopheles-Akinetos, urge that the system which gave us the men
who pulled us out of the Indian Mutiny can stand comparison with the
system which gave France the authors of the _d�b�cle_; that the
successes of Germany over France in war have no necessary connection
with education, and those of Germany over England in commerce,
diplomacy, &c., still less. They will even go further--some of
them--and ask whether the Continental practices and the Arnoldian
principles do not necessitate divers terribly large and terribly
ill-based assumptions, as that all men are _educable_, that the value
of education is undiminished by its diffusion, that all, or at least
most, subjects are capable of being made educational instruments, and
a great many more.
On the other hand, they will cheerfully grant that Mr Arnold never
succumbed to that senseless belief in examination which has done, and
is doing, such infinite harm. But they will add to the debit side that
the account of English university studies which ends the book was even
at the time of writing so inaccurate as to be quite incomprehensible,
unless we suppose that Mr Arnold was thinking of the days of his own
youth, and not of those with complete accuracy. He says "the
examination for the degree of bachelor of arts, which we place at the
end of our three years' university course, is merely the
_Abiturienten-examen_ of Germany, the _�preuve du baccalaur�at_ of
France, placed in both those countries at the entrance to university
studies"; and it is by this that he justifies Signer Matteucci's
absurd description of Oxford and Cambridge as _hauts lyce�s_ Now, in
the first place, there is not one single word in this sentence, or in
the context, or, so far as I remember, in the whole book, about the
Honours system, which for very many years before 1868 had exalted the
standard infinitely higher in the case of a very large proportion of
men. And in the second place, there is not a word about the
Scholarship system, which in the same way had for very many years
provided an entrance standard actually higher--far higher in some
ways--than the _concluding_ examinations of the French _baccalaur�at_.
My own days at Oxford were from 1863 to 1868, the year of Mr Arnold's
book. During that time there were always in the university some 400
men who had actually obtained scholarships on this standard; and a
very considerable number who had competed on it, and done fairly.
Whether Mr Arnold shared Mark Pattison's craze about the abolition of
the pass-man altogether, I do not know. But he ought to have known,
and I should think he must have known, that at the time of his writing
the mere and sheer pass-man--the man whose knowledge was represented
by the minimum of Smalls, Mods, and Greats--was, if not actually in a
minority,--in some colleges at least he was that--at any rate in a
pretty bare majority. With his love of interference and control, he
might have retorted that this did not matter, that the university
_permitted_ every one to stick to the minimum. But as a matter of fact
he suggests that it provided no alternative, no _maximum_ or _majus_
at all.
By the time that we have now reached, that of his giving up the
professorship, Mr Arnold's position was, for good and for evil, mostly
fixed. When he took up the duties of his chair he was, though by no
means a very young man and already the author of much remarkable work,
yet almost unknown out of Oxford and a small official circle in
London. He had now, at forty-five, not exactly popularity, but a very
considerable, and a very lively and growing, reputation. By far the
most and the best of his poetry was written; but it was only just
coming to be at all generally read or at all justly appreciated. He
had, partly in obeying, and partly in working against his official
superiors, acquired a distinct position as an educational reformer. He
had become something of a figure in society. But, above all, he had
proclaimed with undoubting authority, and had exemplified with
remarkable and varied skill, a new or at least a very greatly altered
kind of literary criticism. And this had already threatened incursions
into domains from which men of letters as such had generally kept
aloof, or which, if they had touched, they had touched not as men of
letters. Something of Socrates, something of Addison, something of
Johnson, mingled in Mr Arnold's presentation of himself as, if not
exactly an arbiter, at any rate a suggester of elegances in all
things, poetry and politics, prose and polite manners, public thought,
public morality, religion itself. These pretensions, if urged in a
less agreeable manner, would have been intolerable; they were not
universally tolerated as it was: but the gifts and graces of the
critic made them--so far--inoffensive, even rather fascinating, to all
save the least accommodating or the most clear-sighted, and to some
even of these.
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