as contrasted with English methods, showed how conscientiously he had devoted some of his best energies to the work. His fame as a poet and a literary critic has somewhat overshadowed the fact that he was during thirty-five years of his life—from 1851 to 1836—employed in the Education Department as one of H.M. inspectors of schools, while his literary work was achieved in such intervals of leisure as could be spared from the public service. At the time of his appointment the government, by arrangement with the religious bodies, entrusted the inspection of schools connected with the Church of England to clergymen, and agreed also to send Roman Catholic inspectors to schools managed by members of that communion. Other schools—those of the British and Foreign Society, the Wesleyans, and undenominational schools generally—were inspected by laymen, of whom Arnold was one. There were only three or four of these officers at first, and their districts were necessarily large. It is to the experience gained in intercourse with Nonconformist school managers that we may attribute the curiously intimate knowledge of religious sects which furnished the material for some of his keen though good-humoured sarcasms. The Education Act of 1870, which simplified the administrative system, abolished denominational inspection, and thus greatly reduced the area assigned to a single inspector. Arnold took charge of the district of Westminster, and remained in that office until his resignation, taking also an occasional share in the inspection of training colleges for teachers, and in conferences at the central office. His letters, passim, show that some of the routine which devolved upon him was distasteful, and that he was glad to entrust to a skilled assistant much of the duty of individual examination and the making up of schedules and returns. But the influence he exerted on schools, on the department, and on the primary education of the whole country, was indirectly far greater than is generally supposed. His annual reports, of which more than twenty were collected into a volume by his friend and official chief, Sir Francis (afterwards Lord) Sandford, attracted, by reason of their freshness of style and thought, much more of public attention than is usually accorded to blue-book literature; and his high aims, and his sympathetic appreciation of the efforts and difficulties of the teachers, had a remarkable effect in raising the tone of elementary education, and in indicating the way to improvement. In particular, he insisted on the formative elements of school education, on literature and the “humanities,” as distinguished from the collection of scraps of information and “useful knowledge”; and he sought to impress all the young teachers with the necessity of broader mental cultivation than was absolutely required to obtain the government certificate. In his reports also he dwelt often and forcibly on the place which the study of the Bible, not the distinctive formularies of the churches, ought to hold in English schools. He urged that besides the religious and moral purposes of Scriptural teaching, it had a literary value of its own, and was the best instrument in the hands even of the elementary teacher for uplifting the soul and refining and enlarging the thoughts of young children.
On three occasions Arnold was asked to assist the government by making special inquiries into the state of education in foreign countries. These duties were especially welcome to him, serving as they did as a relief from the monotony of school inspection at home, and as opportunities for taking a wider survey of the whole subject of education, and for expressing his views on principles and national aims as well as administrative details. In 1859, as foreign assistant commissioner, he prepared for the duke of Newcastle’s commission to inquire into the subject of elementary education a report (printed 1860) which was afterwards reprinted (1861) in a volume entitled The Popular Education of France, with Notices of that of Holland and Switzerland. In 1865 he was again employed as assistant-commissioner by the Schools Inquiry Commission under Lord Taunton; and his report on this subject, On Secondary Education in Foreign Countries (1866), was subsequently reprinted under the title Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868). Twenty years later he was sent by the Education Department to make special inquiries on certain specified points, e.g. free education, the status and training of teachers, and compulsory attendance at schools. The result of this investigation appeared as a parliamentary paper, Special Report on certain points connected with Elementary Education in Germany, Switzerland and France, in 1886. He also contributed the chapter on “Schools” (1837–1887) to the second volume of Mr Humphry Ward’s Reign of Queen Victoria. Part of his official writings may be studied in Reports for Elementary Schools (1852–1882), edited by Sir F. Sandford in 1889.
All these reports form substantial contributions to the history and literature of education in the Victorian age. They have been quoted often, and have exercised marked influence on subsequent changes and controversies. One great purpose underlies them all. It is to bring home to the English people a conviction that education ought to be a national concern, that it should not be left entirely to local, or private, or irresponsible initiative, that the watchful jealousy so long shown by Liberals, and especially by Nonconformists, in regard to state action was a grave practical mistake, and that in an enlightened democracy, animated by a progressive spirit and noble and generous ideals, it was the part of wisdom to invoke the collective power of the state to give effect to those ideals. To this theme he constantly recurred in his essays, articles and official reports. “Porro unum est necessarium. One thing is needful; organize your secondary education.”
In 1883 a pension of £250 was conferred on Arnold in recognition of his literary merits. In the same year he went to the United States on a lecturing tour, and again in 1886, his subjects being “Emerson” and the “Principles and Value of Numbers.” The success of these lectures, though they were admirable in matter and form, was marred by the lecturer’s lack of experience in delivery. It is sufficient, further, to say that Culture and Anarchy: an Essay in Political and Social Criticism, appeared in 1869; St Paul and Protestantism, with an Introduction on Puritanism and the Church of England (1870); Friendship’s Garland: being the Conversations, Letters and Opinions of the late Arminius Baron von Thunder-ten-Tronckh (1871); Literature and Dogma: an Essay towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (1873); God and the Bible: a Review of Objections to Literature and Dogma (1875); Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877); Mixed Essays (1879); Irish Essays and Others (1882); Discourses in America (1885). Such essays as the first of these, embodying as they did Arnold’s views of theological and polemical subjects, attracted much attention at the time of their publication, owing to the state of the intellectual atmosphere at the moment; but it is doubtful, perhaps, whether they will be greatly considered in the near future. Many severe things have been said, and will be said, concerning the inadequacy of poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth when confronting subjects of a theological or philosophical kind. Wordsworth’s High Church Pantheism and Coleridge’s disquisitions on the Logos seem farther removed from the speculations of to-day than do the dreams of Lucretius. But these two great writers lived before the days of modern science. Arnold, living only a few years later, came at a transition period when the winds of tyrannous knowledge had blown off the protecting roof that had covered the centuries before, but when time and much labour were needed to build another roof of new materials—a period when it was impossible for the poet to enjoy either the quietism of High Church Pantheism in which Wordsworth had basked, or the sheltering protection of German metaphysics under which Coleridge had preached—a period, nevertheless, when the wonderful revelations of science were still too raw, too cold and hard, to satisfy the yearnings of the poetic soul. Objectionable as Arnold’s rationalizing criticism was to contemporary orthodoxy, and questionable as was his equipment in point of theological learning, his spirituality of outlook and ethical purpose were not to be denied. Yet it is not Arnold’s views that have become current coin so much as his literary phrases—his craving for “culture” and “sweetness and light,” his contempt for “the dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism
