In Germany, as in France, the mother tongue was carefully taught, and in the Realschule, intended to prepare boys for business, English was obligatory, as well as French. In England the teaching of foreign languages has made much progress since Mr. Arnold's day, but the study of English is confined to elementary schools. The public, or national, schools of Prussia are not boarding-schools, and the boys are, or were, for the most part taken in by private families. The German universities are the only avenue to the learned professions, and, as is well-known, a German professor, though receiving, according to our standard, a small salary, holds a position of great dignity. Admittance to a German university is obtained only by examination, and the test is a severe one. For the teachers there is a very stringent examination indeed. They have to graduate in "pædagogic" before they reach the facultas docendi. Mr. Arnold was conscious that to most Englishmen all this would seem mere pedantry. No man was less of a pedant than he. But he held that his countrymen's ideas of education were hopelessly unscientific, and he did his best to correct them. He believed in the State as an instrument of education, as we have all come to believe in it now, and the official position of German universities was congenial to him. At the same time, the German teachers were not, as the French were, liable to dismissal by the Government. Mr. Arnold may fairly be said to have fallen in love with the German system of education. The French universities, he said, wanted liberty; the English universities wanted science; the German universities had both.

In conclusion, Mr. Arnold recommended that Greek

and Latin should be studied in England more after the fashion of modern languages. The German boys he found inferior to the English in composition, where English scholarship has always been peculiarly strong. But the making of Latin verses is not, even in this country, so favourite a pursuit as it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and the scientific study of comparative philology has seriously modified classical education. Our secondary schools, to whose badness Mr. Arnold traced an undue distinction between classes in England, are almost as bad as ever. But some of his proposals have been carried out. He was the real father of university extension, and he recommended that the University of London should be made a teaching institution, as it was twelve years after his death. Of all educational reformers in the last century, not excepting his father, Mr. Arnold was the most enlightened, the most far-sighted, and the most fair-minded.

CHAPTER X.

MR. ARNOLD'S PHILOSOPHY.

MATTHEW ARNOLD always disclaimed the epithet Philosopher, just as he repudiated the title of Professor. But he had a philosophy of his own, which was perhaps, like Cicero's, rather Academic than Stoic or Epicurean. He was always much interested in the history of religion, and he took great delight in Deutsch's famous essay on the Talmud, which appeared in the Quarterly Review for October 1867. He wrote about it to Lady de Rothschild on the 4th of November in a letter which well deserves to be quoted, because it contains the germ of a theory that afterwards coloured almost the whole of his writings. What he liked best himself, he said, in the article, were "the long extracts from the Talmud itself," which gave him "huge satisfaction." With the Christian character of later Judaism he was already well acquainted. "It is curious," he added, "that, though Indo-European, the English people is so constituted and trained that there is a thousand times more chance of bringing it to a more philosophical conception of religion than its present conception of Christianity as something'utterly unique, isolated, and self-subsistent, through Judaism and its phænomena, than through Hellenism and its phænomena." Mr. Arnold's interest in such matters,

H

however, did not take his mind off politics, upon which he always kept a very keen eye. His theory of the Clerkenwell explosion, in December 1867, was at least original. He traced it to the immunity of the Hyde Park rioters in 1866. "You cannot," he wrote to his mother on the 14th of December, you cannot have one measure for Fenian rioting and another for English rioting, merely because the design of Fenian rioting is more subversive and desperate. What the State has to do is to put down all rioting with a strong hand, or it is sure to drift into troubles." It is true, but not the whole truth. Sir Robert Peel once said that everybody told him he ought to be firm, as if he did not know that, and as if the whole art of statesmanship consisted in firmness. The rioters of 1866 might say that they carried the Reform Act of 1867, and the rioters of 1867 might say that they disestablished the Irish Church in 1869. But, as a matter of fact, the rioters of 1867 were dangerous, and the rioters of 1866 were not.

In the same letter, Mr. Arnold mentions a tribute from a teacher of which he felt justly proud. He "was always gentle and patient with the children." No inspector of schools has ever been more universally beloved, though some, it must be confessed, have taken their duties in a more serious spirit. At the beginning of 1868 he was amused and pleased at an invitation from the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph to write them a notice of Blake the artist, and to " name his own price." "I sent a civil refusal," he characteristically remarks; "but, you may depend upon it, Lord Lytton was right in saying that it is no inconsiderable advantage to you that all the writing world have a kind of weakness for you even at the time they are

attacking you." Early this year, Mr. Arnold moved from London to Harrow for the better education of his children. At Harrow, on the 23rd of November, his eldest son, who had always been an invalid, died, and on the next day Mr. George Russell found the father seeking consolation from the pages of his favourite Marcus Aurelius. His feeling for religion was never confined to Christianity.

Early in 1867 Messrs. Smith and Elder-that is to say, Mr. Arnold's valued friend of a lifetime, Mr. George Smith-published Culture and Anarchy, which contains the writer's philosophical system, so far as he had one. Systematic thought he half ironically disclaimed. But he meant even by the title of his book to convey that lawlessness was the result of not deferring to the authority of cultivated persons. There was point in the sarcasm of the Nonconformist critic who spoke of Mr. Arnold's belief in the well known preference of the Almighty for University men. It is, however, undeniably true that whereas in France and Germany people have too little regard for individual freedom, in England adepts are slighted, knowledge undervalued, and the claim of every man to do as he pleases elevated from a legal doctrine into a moral ideal. There is some truth, though also some exaggeration, in the following passage: "While on the Continent the idea prevails that it is the business of the heads and representatives of the nation, by virtue of their superior means, power, and information, to set an example and to provide suggestions of right reason, among us the idea is that the business of the heads and representatives of the nation is to do nothing of the kind, but applaud the natural taste for the bathos