Chapter XI: Conclusion: 2 (1)

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT CLIFTON COLLEGE, SUNDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 1879.

“They crowd upon us in this shade,
The youth who own the coming years—
Be never God or land betrayed
By any son our Harvard rears!”

THE REV. R. LOWELL.

WHAT is it in such societies as yours that gives them so strong a hold on, so unique an attraction for, those who have been for years engaged in the rough work of life? That the fact is so I think no one will deny, explain it how they will. I at least cannot remember to have met with any man who will not own that a visit to one of our great schools moves and touches him on a side of his nature which for the most part lies quiet, almost dormant, but which he feels it is good for him should be stirred. He may go back to his work without an effort to explain to himself why these unwonted sensations have visited him, but not without a consciousness that he has had a change of air which has done him good—that he has been in a bracing atmosphere, like that at the top of some high mountain pass, where the morning sun strikes earlier and more brightly than in the valleys where his daily task must be done.

To him who cares to pursue the inquiry, I think the conviction will come, that to a stranger there is something at once inspiring and pathetic in such societies as this, standing apart as they do from, and yet so intimately connected with, the great outside world.

Inspiring, because he finds himself once again amongst those before whom the golden gates of active life are about to open, for good or evil—each one of whom holds in his hands the keys of those gates, the keys of light or of darkness, amongst whom faith is strong, hope bright, and ideals, untainted as yet by the world’s slow stain, still count for a great power.

Pathetic, because he knows but too well how hard the path is to find, how steep to climb, on the further side of those golden gates—how often in the journey since he himself passed out from under them, his own faith and hope have burned dimly, and his ideal has faded away as he toiled on, or sat by the wayside, looking wistfully after it; till in the dust and jar, the heat and strain of the mighty highway, he has been again and again tempted to doubt whether it was indeed anything more than a phantom exhalation, which had taken shape in the glorious morning light, only to vanish when the work-day sun had risen fairly above the horizon, and dispersed the coloured mists.

He may well be pardoned if, at such times, the remembrance of the actual world in which he is living, and of the generation which moved into line on the great battle-field when he himself shouldered musket and knapsack, and passed into action out of the golden gates, should for a moment or two bring the pathetic side of the picture into strongest relief. “Where are they now who represented genius, valour, self-sacrifice, the invisible heavenly world, to these? Are they dead? Has the high ideal died out of them? Will it be better with the new generation?”[3]

Such thoughts, such doubts, will force themselves at times on us all, to be met as best we may. Happy the man who is able, not at all times and in all places, but on the whole, to hold them resolutely at arm’s length, and to follow straight on, though often wearily and painfully, in the tracks of the divine visitor who stood by his side in his youth, though sadly conscious of weary lengths of way, of gulfs and chasms, which since those days have come to stretch and yawn between him and his ideal—of the difference between the man God meant him to be—of the manhood he thought he saw so clearly in those early days—and the man he and the world have together managed to make of himself.

I say, happy is that man. I had almost said that no other than he is happy in any true or noble sense, even in this hard materialist nineteenth century, when the faith that the weak must to the wall, that the strong alone are to survive, prevails as it never did before—which on the surface seems specially to be organised for the destruction of ideals and the quenching of enthusiasms. I feel deeply the responsibility of making _any_ assertion on so moot a point to such an audience in such a place as this; nevertheless, even in our materialist age I must urge you all, as you would do good work in the world, to take your stand resolutely and once for all, at school and all your lives through, on the side of the idealists.

In doing so I trust and believe I shall not be running counter to the teaching you are accustomed to hear in this place. I know that I _should_ be running counter to it if anything I may say were to give the least encouragement to dreaminess or dawdling. Let me say then at once and emphatically, that nothing can be farther from my wish, or thought. The only idealism I plead for is not only compatible with sustained and vigorous work: it cannot be maintained without it.

The gospel of work is a true gospel, though not the only one, or the highest, and has been preached in our day by great teachers. And I do not deny that the advice I have just been giving you may seem at first sight to conflict with the work-gospel. Listen, for instance, to the ring of it in the rugged and incisive words of one of our strongest poets.

“That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it.
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundreds soon hit.
This high man aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.”

This sounds like a deliberate attack on the idealist, a direct preference of low to high aims and standards, of the seen to the unseen. It is in reality only a wholesome warning against aiming at any ideal by wrong methods, though the use of the words “low” and “high” is no doubt likely to mislead. The true idealist has no quarrel with the lesson of these lines; indeed he would be glad to see them written on one of the door-posts of every great school, if only they were ballasted on the other by George Herbert’s quaint and deeper wisdom,

“Pitch thy behaviour low, thy projects high,
So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be.
Sink not in spirit: who aimeth at the sky,
Shoots higher much than he that means a tree.”

Both sayings are true, and worth carrying in your minds as part of their permanent furniture, and you will find that they will live there very peaceably side by side.

There is in truth no real antagonism between them. The seeming paradox, like so many others, disappears in the working world. In the stress of the great battle of life it will trouble no soldier who keeps a single eye in his head, and a sound heart in his bosom. For he who has the clearest and intensest vision of what is at issue in that battle, and who quits himself in it most manfully, will be the first to acknowledge that for him there has been no approach to victory except by the faithful doing day by day of the work which lay at his own threshold.

On the other hand the universal experience of mankind—the dreary confession of those who have merely sought a “low thing,” and “gone on adding one to one,” making that the aim and object of their lives—unite in warning us that on these lines no true victory can be had, either for the man himself or for the cause he was sent into the world to maintain.

No, there is no victory possible for boy or man without humility and magnanimity; and no humility or magnanimity possible without an ideal. I have been pleading with you boys to take sides with the idealists at once and through life. I have told you unless you do so you can neither be truly humble nor truly magnanimous. You may reply, “Well, that advice may be good or bad, we cannot tell, until you tell us _how_ we are to side with them, and what you mean by an idealist.” Such a reply would be only reasonable, and I will try to answer the demand it makes, or at any rate to give you a few hints which will enable you to work out the question for yourselves.

There is not one amongst you all, I care not how young he may be, who has not heard or felt the call in his own heart, to put aside all evil habits, and to live a brave, simple, truthful life in this school. It may have come to you while listening in chapel or elsewhere to religious teaching, or in the play fields or dormitories; when you have been alone or in company, at work or at play; but that it has come, at some time, in some place, there is not a boy in this chapel who will deny. It is no modern, no Christian, experience this. The choice of Hercules, and numberless other Pagan stories, the witness of nearly all histories and all literatures, attest that it is an experience common to all our race. It is of it that the poet is thinking in those fine lines of Emerson which are written up in the Hall of Marlborough College:—

“So close is glory to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’
The youth replies, ‘I can.’”

It does not wait for the reasoning powers to be developed, but comes right in upon the boy himself, appealing to him to listen and follow.

It is this whisper, this call, which is the ground of what I have, for want of a better name, been speaking of as idealism. Just in so far as the boy listens to and welcomes it, he is becoming an idealist—one who is rising out of himself, and into direct contact and communion with spiritual influences, which, even when he shrinks from them, and tries to put them aside, he feels and knows to be as real (and will live I hope to acknowledge to be more real) than all influences coming to him from the outside world—one who is bent on bringing himself and the world into obedience to these spiritual influences. If he turns to meet the call and answers ever so feebly and hesitatingly, it becomes clearer and stronger. He will feel next, that just in so far as he is loyal to it he is becoming loyal to his brethren: that he must not only build his own life up in conformity with its teaching, must not only find or cut his own way straight to what is fair and true and noble, but must help on those who are around him and will come after him, and make the path easier and plainer for them also.

I have indicated in outline, in a few sentences, a process which takes a lifetime to work out. You all know too, alas! even those who have already listened most earnestly to the voice, and followed most faithfully, how many influences there are about you and within you which stand across the first steps in the path, and bar your progress; which are for ever dwarfing and distorting the ideal you are painfully struggling after, and appealing to the cowardice, and laziness, and impurity, which are in every one of us, to thwart obedience to the call. But here, as elsewhere, it is the first step which costs, and tells. He who has once taken that, consciously and resolutely, has gained a vantage ground for all his life. That first step, remember, ought to be taken by English boys at our English schools.

And here let me turn aside for a moment to note for you what seems to me, looking from outside, the ideal for which you English boys should just now be specially striving. The strength and weakness of the nation of which you are a part will always be reflected powerfully in these miniature Englands, and there is a national weakness which is alarming all thoughtful Englishmen at this time. Our race on both sides of the Atlantic has, for generations, got and spent money faster than any other, and this spendthrift habit has had a baleful effect on English life. It has made it more and more feverish and unsatisfying. The standard of expenditure has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and demoralising trade, society, every industry and every profession, until a false ideal has established itself, and the aim of life is too commonly to get, not to be, while men are valued more and more for what they have, not for what they are.

The reaction has, I trust, set in. A period of depression, such as has not been known for half a century, has come, happily in time to show us how unreal and transitory is all such material prosperity, that a nation’s life cannot stand any more than a man’s in the things which it possesses. But the reign of Mammon will be hard to put down, and all wholesome influences which can be brought to bear upon that evil stronghold will be sorely needed.

Amongst these none should be more potent than that of our great schools. It is probably too late for the present generation of grown men to restore a sounder tone, and set up a higher ideal. Those by whom it must be done, if it be done at all, are now growing up in such schools as this. There can be, I fear, no question that the outside world has been reflected in our schools. I hear on all sides stories of increased expenditure of all kinds. There must be fancy dresses for all games, and boys are made to feel uncomfortable who do not conform to the fashion, or who practise such useful and often necessary economies as wearing old clothes or travelling third-class. You know whether such things are true here. If they are, they are sapping true manliness, and tainting our national life at its roots. But the stain, I believe, has not sunk so deep, and the reaction may be swifter and deeper than elsewhere in societies bound together in so close an intimacy as must exist in such schools as this.

In no other portions of English society can public opinion be modified so swiftly and so radically as in a public school. One generation of brave boys may do it, and a school generation is only a short four or five years. I say then deliberately, that no man can gauge the value in English life, at this present critical time, of a steady stream of young men, flowing into all professions and all industries from our public schools, who have learnt resolutely to use those words so hard to speak in a society such as ours, “I can’t afford”; who have been trained to have few wants and to serve these themselves, so that they may have always something to spare, of power and of means, to help others; who are “careless of the comfits and cushions of life,” and content to leave them to the valets of all ranks. Many of us have hopes, from all we hear and know of this and other such schools, that such a stream of free and helpful young men may be looked for. Will you, boys, and above all you elder boys, who can give a tone to the standards and ideals of to-day here, which may last for many years, see that, so far at any rate as Clifton is concerned, such hopes shall not be disappointed?

And take my word for it, while you will be doing a great work for your country, and restoring an ideal which has all but faded out, you will be taking the surest road to all such success as becomes honest men to achieve, in whatever walk of life you may choose for yourselves. The outlook is by no means cheerful even for those who have learnt to live simply, and to estimate “comfits and cushions” at their true value, either in England or elsewhere. The following of false ideals has, I fear, thrown heavy odds for many years to come against the chances in our modern life of those who will not bow down to them.

It is more than thirty years since the wisest of American writers, and one of the best of American gentlemen, speaking to the young men of New England, made much the same sad confession as I am making to you to-day. “The young man,” he says, “on entering life finds the way to lucrative employment blocked by abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud. The employments of commerce are not intrinsically unfit for a man, or less genial to his faculties; but these are now in their general course so vitiated by derelictions and abuses, at which all connive, that it requires more vigour and resources than can be expected of every young man to right himself in them. Has he genius and virtue? the less does he find them fit for him to grow in, and if he would thrive in them he must sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of boyhood and youth; he must forget the prayers of his childhood, and must take on him the harness of routine and obsequiousness.... I do not charge the merchant or manufacturer. The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Everybody partakes, everybody confesses—with cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet none feels himself accountable. He did not create the abuse, he cannot alter it.... It happens, therefore, that all such ingenuous souls as feel in themselves the irrepressible strivings of a noble aim, who by the law of their nature must act simply, find these ways of trade unfit for them, and they come forth from it. Such cases are becoming more common every day. But by coming out of trade you have not cleared yourselves—the trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of men. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success.” And so further on he adds—“Considerations of this kind have turned the attention of many philanthropists and intelligent persons to the claims of manual labour as part of the education of every young man. If the accumulated wealth of the past generation is thus tainted—no matter how much of it is offered to us—we must begin to consider if it were not the nobler part to renounce it, and to put ourselves into primary relations with the soil and nature, and, abstaining from whatever is dishonest and unclean, to take each of us bravely his part with his own hands in the manual labour of the world.”

It is a sad confession that our modern society has come to such a pass, but one which I fear holds as true for England as for America. That it will continue so, no one who has faith in a righteous government of the world can believe. There seem to me signs on all sides that it is coming to an end, and that a new industrial world is already forming under the wreck of the old. But the time of change must be one of sore trial, and your generation will have to bear the strain of it. In such a time as this they only will be able to help their country in her need who have learnt in early life the great lessons of simplicity and self-denial, and I don’t hesitate to say, that the worst education which teaches simplicity and self-denial is better than the best which teaches all else but this.

The first aim then for your time and your generation should be, to foster, each in yourselves, and each in your school, a simple and self-denying life—your ideal to be a true and useful one must have these two characteristics before all others. Of course purity, courage, truthfulness are as absolutely necessary as ever, without them there can be no ideal at all. But as each age and each country has its own special needs and weaknesses, so the best mind of its youth should be bent on serving where the need is sorest, and bringing strength to the weak places. There will be always crowds ready to fall in with the dapper pliant ways which lead most readily to success in every community. Society has been said to be “always and everywhere in conspiracy against the true manhood of every one of its members”; and the saying, though bitter, contains a sad truth. So the faithful idealist will have to learn, without arrogance and with perfect good temper, to treat society as a child, and never to allow it to dictate. So treated, society will surely come round to those who have a high ideal before them, and therefore firm ground under their feet.

“Coy Hebe flies from those that woo,
And shuns the hand would seize upon her;
Live thou thy life, and she will sue,
To pour for thee the cup of honour.”

Let me say a word or two more on this business of success. Is it not, after all, the test of true and faithful work? Must it not be the touchstone of the humble and magnanimous, as well as of the self-asserting and ambitious? Undoubtedly; but here again we have to note that what passes with society for success, and is so labelled by public opinion, may well be, as often as not actually is, a bad kind of failure.

Public opinion in our day has for instance been jubilant over the success of those who have started in life penniless, and have made large fortunes. Indeed this particular class of self-made men is the one which we have been of late invited to honour. Before doing so, however, we shall have to ask with some care, and bearing in mind Emerson’s warnings, by what methods the fortune has been made. The rapid accumulation of national wealth in England can scarcely be called a success by any one who studies the methods by which it has been made, and its effects on the national character. It may be otherwise with this or that millionaire, but each case must be judged on its own merits.

I remember hearing, years ago, of an old merchant who on his death-bed divided the results of long years of labour, some few hundreds in all, amongst his sons. “It is little enough, my boys,” were almost his last words, “but there isn’t a dirty shilling in the whole of it.” He had been a successful man too, though not in the “self-made” sense. For his ideal had been, not to make money, but to keep clean hands. And he had been faithful to it.

In reading the stories of these last persons whom the English nation is invited to honour, I am generally struck with the predominance of the personal element. The key-note seems generally some resolve taken in early youth connected with their own temporal advancement. This one will be Lord Mayor; this other Prime Minister; a third determines to own a fine estate near the place of his birth; a fourth to become head of the business in which he started as an errand-boy. They did indeed achieve their ends, were faithful to the idea they had set before themselves as boys; but I doubt if we can put them anywhere but in the lower school of idealists. For the predominant motive being self-assertion, their idealism seems never to have got past the personal stage, which at best is but a poor business as compared with the true thing. Try the case by a test every one of you can apply directly and easily. One boy here resolves—I will win this scholarship; I will be head of the school; I will be captain of the eleven; and does it. Another resolves—this school shall be purer in tone, simpler in habits, braver and stronger in temper, for my presence here; does his best, but doubts after all whether he has succeeded. I need not say that the latter is the best idealist; but which is the most successful Clifton boy?

I must bring these remarks to an end, and yet have only been able to touch, and that very lightly, the fringe of a great subject. I am sure many of you have felt this; and I shall be surprised if some amongst you are not already listening to me with a shade of jealousy in your minds, which might formulate itself somehow perhaps thus:—“Is this talk about idealism quite straightforward? Haven’t we heard all this before?—Self-denial, simplicity of life, courage, and the rest, are they not the first fruits of Christianity as we have been taught it? And we have been told, too, that this call of which you have been talking is the voice of Christ’s spirit speaking to ours. Can any good come of swaddling these truths in other clothes which will scarcely fit them better, or make them more easy, or more acceptable?”

To which I am glad to reply from my heart—Truly; so it is. _Rem acu tetigisti._ Christ is, indeed, the great idealist. “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” is the ideal He sets before us—the only one which is permanent and all-sufficing. His own spirit communing with ours _is_ that call which comes to every human being. But my object has been to get you to-night to look at the facts of your own experience—and, as I have said already, the youngest has _some_ experience in these deep matters—without connecting them for the moment with any form of religion.

Supposing the whole Bible, every trace of Christendom, to disappear to-morrow, the same thing would, nevertheless, be occurring to you, and me, and every man. We should each of us still be conscious of a presence, which we are quite sure is not ourself, in the deepest recesses of our own heart, communing with us there and calling us to take up our twofold birthright as man—the mastery over visible things, and above all the mastery over our own bodies, actions, thoughts—and the power, always growing, of this mysterious communion with the invisible.

It is therefore that I have abstained from the use of religious phraseology, believing that, apart altogether from the Christian revelation, the idealist will and must always remain nearest to the invisible world, and therefore most powerful in this visible one.

I think this method is worth using now and then, because no doubt the popular verdict of this time is against idealism. If you have not already felt it, you will assuredly feel as soon as you leave these walls, that your lot is cast in a world which longs for nothing so much as to succeed in shaking off all belief in anything which cannot be tested by the senses, and gauged and measured by the intellect, as the trappings of a worn-out superstition.

Men have been trying, so runs the new gospel, to live by faith, and not by sight, ever since there is any record at all of their lives; and so they have had to manufacture for themselves the faiths they were to live by. What is called the life of the soul or spirit, and the life of the understanding, have been in conflict all this time, and the one has always been gaining on the other. Stronghold after stronghold has fallen, till it is clear almost to demonstration that there will soon be no place left for that which was once deemed all-powerful. The spiritual life can no longer be led honestly. Man has no knowledge of the invisible upon which he can build. Let him own the truth and turn to that upon which he _can_ build safely—the world of matter, his knowledge of which is always growing; and be content with the things he can see and taste and handle. Those who are telling you still in this time that your life can and ought to be lived in daily communion with the unseen—that so only you can loyally control the visible—are either wilfully deceiving you, or are dreamers and visionaries.

So the high priests of the new gospel teach, and their teaching echoes through our literature, and colours the life of the streets and markets in a thousand ways; and a Mammon-ridden generation longing to be rid of what they hope are only certain old and clumsy superstitions—which they _try_ to believe injurious to others, and are quite sure make them uneasy in their own efforts to eat, drink, and be merry—applauds as openly as it dare, and hopes soon to see the millennium of the flesh-pots publicly declared and recognised.

Against which, wherever you may encounter them, that you young Englishmen may be ready and able to stand fast, is the hope and prayer of many anxious hearts; in a time, charged on every side with signs of the passing away of old things, such as have not been seen above the horizon in Christendom since Luther nailed his protest on the church door of a German village.

-----

Footnote 2:

Printed by request. T. H.

Footnote 3:

Emerson.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

DELIVERED ON 8TH FEBRUARY 1891, IN THE COURSE OF LAYMEN’S SUNDAY
EVENING ADDRESSES AT RUGBY.

JUST fifty years ago, in February 1841, I was a Rugby boy, sitting where you sit now. That half-year was my last at school. It was Dr. Arnold’s last year. He died in June 1842. I had been at the school for eight years, and had gone through it from the third to the sixth, in the School House. It had been a notable eight years in Rugby’s history. Stanley and Vaughan were sixth form boys in their last year when I was a new boy. I was Clough’s study fag. Matthew Arnold, the present Dean of Westminster, and Franklin Lushington were my contemporaries. Theodore Walrond was head of the school when I left, with Conington next, or next but one, to him. I need not name a score of others

“fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cleanthum”

who have done good work for England in Church and State, in India and the Colonies, in this eventful half-century. I only name those who occur to me as the typical Rugbeians of those years. You can fill up the list yourselves if you like from the school register. You will find it a noteworthy roll-call.

When I was a new boy, Christmas 1833, the tide of religious and political bigotry, which would surely have drowned a weaker man, was in full flood against our headmaster. He was forbidden to preach the sermon on the installation of Arthur Stanley’s father to the Bishopric of Norwich. Many of his oldest and dearest Oxford friends were openly alienated from him, and bitterly opposed to his teaching. Even those who remained staunch were seriously alarmed at many of the doings and sayings of this new type of headmaster.

When I left, the tide had turned. Even the (so-called) religious newspapers were silenced. He had been made Queen’s Chaplain, and, what he valued most, Professor of Modern History at his old university. In my undergraduate year I attended his inaugural lecture and his first course on Modern History, and witnessed the noble amends which Oxford then made to one whom she now recognised as amongst her noblest and most attached sons.

You may well believe then what a power Rugby has been in my life, and so far as I can judge, in the life of most of my schoolfellows. For, though there may be exceptions to the rule, it is undoubtedly true, that the years from ten till eighteen or nineteen are those in which the seed is sown and the bent given which determine the after-life of men. I passed all those years under the spell of this place and Arnold, and for half a century have never ceased to thank God for it.

My first duty then to-day is to confess this in the fullest and frankest words. So far I have felt my course clear, but no further. From circumstances to which I need not refer, my connection with Rugby has been less close than with other schools. When my own boys were old enough, I had to look round and choose the school which answered best to the Rugby of my day. Happily for me—happily too for England—my choice was ample. Three of my old schoolfellows were headmasters,—Vaughan of Harrow, Bradley of Marlborough (where Bishop Cotton, my old private tutor here, had preceded him), Bradby of Haileybury (in succession to Arthur Butler, another distinguished Rugbeian). So my eldest son went to Marlborough, and the younger ones to Haileybury, and I have thus seen more of these daughters, as I may call them, of the old Rugby, than of my own old school.

For attendance at Rugby dinners and flying visits on Speech days and other special occasions, however pleasant, are not enough to keep one in touch with the place—to know how far the old lines have been kept, the old traditions cherished—what are the new tendencies and temptations which have arisen as the years rolled by. And yet without such knowledge how could I hope to respond to any good purpose to the desire of your headmaster that I should deliver this address? A question which I own I found it difficult to answer to my own satisfaction; but in such cases one has no right to rely on one’s own judgment. Obedience to the man at the helm is the only true rule; and so in deference to his wish I am here to-night to do my best to justify his choice.

After thinking the matter over with some care, I resolved that I cannot do better than give you my view of what it was that the average boy carried away from our Rugby of half a century ago which stood him in the best stead—was of the highest value to him in after-life. By the average boy I mean, one who entered into the life and caught some of the spirit of the place, without distinguishing himself as a scholar, or coming under the direct personal teaching and influence of the man of genius who was our headmaster. Indirectly, no boy could help being more or less under that influence, for the air of the whole place was full of it.

I have been in some doubt as to what to put first, and am by no means sure that the few who are left of my old schoolfellows would agree with me; but, speaking for myself, I think this was our most marked characteristic, the feeling that in school and close we were in training for a big fight—were in fact already engaged in it—a fight which would last all our lives, and try all our powers, physical, intellectual, and moral, to the utmost. I need not say that this fight was the world-old one of good with evil, of light and truth against darkness and lies, of Christ against the devil.

Of course all education worthy of the name teaches this lesson indirectly, but to have it vividly and directly brought home to us, as it was here fifty years ago, was a boon beyond price. I have always thought that it was his recognition of this in the Rugby boys of that time which drew that well-known testimony from Dr. Moberly, then an Oxford tutor, afterwards headmaster of Winchester, and one of the greatest educators of our time,—“Arnold’s pupils,” he wrote, “brought up to Oxford a quite different character from what we knew elsewhere. They were thoughtful, manly-minded, conscious of duty and obligation when they first came up; and we looked on him as exercising an influence for good which (for how many years I know not) had been absolutely unknown to our public schools.” But this testimony I believe could never have been given had Arnold’s teaching stopped here. What gave, I think, the character Dr. Moberly recognised to Rugby boys, was, not the mere conviction that we were soldiers in a war, but that we were soldiers who were absolutely sure to win if only we were true to our Captain,—that He was actually present with every one of us, and would surely give the battle to our hands if we would loyally surrender our wills to Him. Let me express what I want to say in the noble words of Arnold’s most famous pupil. You all, I hope, know A. Stanley’s hymn for Ascension Day. One verse runs:

“He is gone, towards their goal
World and Church must onward roll.
Far behind we leave the past,
Forwards are our glances cast.
Still His words before us range
Through the ages as they change;
Wheresoe’er the Truth shall lead
He will give whate’er we need.”

The youngest boy here, we were taught in no faltering speech, has an utterly trustworthy guide in his own heart and conscience, if he will only listen to Him and trust Him—if he will only follow the Truth and go forward boldly. “It is a lying spirit,” was one of Arnold’s most emphatic sayings, “that says, ‘Look backwards.’”

There was an inspiring ring in such teaching as this; and for my part, with half-a-century’s experience behind me, I hold it to-day to be simply and absolutely true, in spite of oft-repeated criticisms as to Arnold’s methods in teaching and ruling. It is written of the most self-willed of American Presidents:

“He couldn’t see but jest one side;
Ef his ’twas God’s, and that was plenty:
And so his ‘forrard’ multiplied
An army’s fighting power by twenty.”

And I have heard the words applied to Arnold. His habit of ignoring the other side of questions, it has been urged, combined with his masterfulness of character, when brought to bear on young minds, exercised an influence on them, which, though undoubtedly powerful, was by no means free from serious drawbacks; and often had the effect of making his pupils dogmatists, or of weakening their hold on truth in after years, when they came to know the difficulties which surround all the serious problems of our complicated and rudderless time.

Were that criticism true it would be undoubtedly damaging; but, is it true? In preparing this address I once more read through his lectures on Modern History and Stanley’s Life, and rose from them with my own old memories and belief confirmed, that never was there a teacher who took more conscientious pains to understand himself, and make his pupils see all sides of, the political and social problems which met them in their reading. But, while scrupulously fair in weighing both sides, there was no faltering or counting the cost in his own verdicts—no “patting the devil on the back and calling him poor mistaken angel.” And I am inclined to think (though by no means sure at this distance of time that it is not a mere afterthought) that this vigour and directness may have made some of his pupils, though not those who had profited most by his teaching, more ready to take sides, and more sure of their own judgments, than young men on entering life ought to be. In my own case, at any rate—the only one in which a man can really speak with confidence—I think on looking back I can detect a readiness to take sides before I had qualified myself to judge which was right and which wrong. And perhaps this was more or less characteristic of a good many Rugbeians of that day, of whom it might be said in the words of Hosea Biglow—

“Nothin’ from Adam’s fall to Huldy’s bonnet
That we warn’t full cocked with our judgment on it.”

But we paid for our haste. For one of the results of this characteristic was that old Rugby friends of that time were apt to find themselves, both at the universities and in active life, not only in opposite camps, but in sharp antagonism. There were burning questions then as now which divided men sharply, such as the Tractarian movement and the People’s Charter; and like Home Rule to-day were of a kind which tried friendships to the breaking-point. If you boys know A. Clough’s poems as you ought, you must remember those lines in which this pathetic side of the after-life of many of Arnold’s pupils, as it had been of his own life, is touched so vividly and tenderly:—

“Qua cursum ventus.

As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day
Are scarce long leagues apart descried;

When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side:

E’en so—but why the tale reveal
Of those, whom year by year unchanged,
Brief absence joined anew to feel,
Astounded, soul from soul estranged?

At dead of night their sails were filled,
And onward each rejoicing steered—
Ah, neither blame, for neither willed,
Or wist, what first with dawn appeared!

To veer, how vain! On, onward strain,
Brave barks! In light, in darkness too,
Through winds and tides one compass guides—
To that, and your own selves, be true.

But O blithe breeze; and O great seas,
Though ne’er, that earliest parting past,
On your wide plain they join again,
Together lead them home at last.

One port, methought, alike they sought,
One purpose hold where’er they fare,—
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas!
At last, at last, unite them there!”

So far I have been able to speak with confidence, but I cannot do so on the next point. For I cannot be sure now whether it was while at school or after I had left, though I am quite sure it was from Arnold’s teaching, that I learnt the invaluable lesson in early life, that there are subjects—such as the origin of evil, and the co-existence of man’s free will and God’s omnipotence and omniscience—which lie beyond the range of the human intellect; and before which, if we are in a healthy moral state, we shall be content to sit down patiently and quietly, without attempting to solve problems which lie at depths which no lead or line of man’s invention can ever sound. Let me enforce this lesson in his own words—“It should always be remembered that there are difficulties in the way of all religion which can never be solved by human powers. Intellectually, we can point out the greater difficulties of Atheism and Scepticism. Practically, they yield to faith sought in God’s way by doing His will.” “Living thus by faith, a man finds that his course is one of perfect light: the moral result is so certain that he is sure he has truth on his side.”

I have tried to indicate the main lines of the education we got here fifty years ago (apart, of course, from our school studies). It was undoubtedly before all things training for a big fight—or rather for _the_ big fight to which we had all been pledged at our baptism, “manfully to fight under Christ’s banner against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue His faithful soldiers and servants unto our life’s end.”

And has not this, my young schoolfellows, been the aim of all education in England worthy of the name since Alfred, a thousand years ago, caused to be written up on the walls of his schools,

“With all thy might
Stand by the right,
And be thou strong
Against the wrong.”

It was probably brought more vividly before Rugby boys in Arnold’s time than has often been the case in our schools, as he was himself so essentially a fighting man—“one,” to use his own words, “whose spirit of pugnacity would rejoice in fighting out this battle in a saw-pit.” But the more you think of it, and the longer you live, the more firmly will you get to hold the truth, that you _must_ be fighting men if you would keep your self-respect, or do any stroke of work worth doing in this tough old world. If you learn here to make pleasure or comfort or success your aim, or to turn aside to any siren call from the steady summons of duty, depend upon it, even if you attain them, you will find long before you reach my age, that they have turned into ashes in your mouth, and are like Dead Sea apples, fair to look on, but only fit for the dust-heap.

There will always be plenty of men in all times, especially in old and rich countries, who take no side on great questions, having enough work and enjoyment to satisfy all their own wants, like Isaak Walton and his friends in our great civil war. Of them Arnold said, “I know not how the peaceableness of such persons can be either admirable or amiable”; contrasting them with Lord Falkland and others, who left the popular side when it was triumphing, and joined the opposite ranks without changing their principles or becoming renegades. Such men, he taught us, are amongst the noblest characters in history; but they change their sides not to conquer but to die—uncheered by sympathy, and therefore the purest of martyrs. These were the models he set before Rugby boys in my time, and lived up to himself. Our spokesman of that time, the most typical poet that Rugby has bred, sang of such—

“So thou but strive, thou soon shalt see
Defeat itself is victory.”

Or, if that saying seem to you mere paradox, take this expansion of it in one of the noblest of his later poems—

“Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.”

Well, my boys, I can fancy that by this time some of you are thinking that I might as well turn to the Rugby of to-day, if I have anything to say about it, instead of dwelling all the time on the old Rugby of half-a-century ago. And so I will turn, for the few minutes that are left to me, to the present and the future. But after all, the times differ much less, in this place at any rate, than would appear superficially. It is still the old fight you are training for as we were, and must be fought under the old banner and with the old weapons.

No doubt some of the old pitfalls have been filled up, and new ones opened by the enemy, who is always alert and on the watch for the laggards and the half-hearted. And, judging from my general experience—for as I have confessed already my special experience here is scarcely more than that of a stranger—I think that one of the sides on which the attack presses more than of old lies in the temptation and tendency to careless expense; and to a taking it for granted that the world is to be made easy for you; that you have all a sort of prescriptive right to enjoyments and advantages: or, as the Americans say, “to a good time,” without any special effort or vigilance of your own. Depend upon it, all such notions are lies, and come from the father of lies. The more you train yourselves here to do everything for yourselves—even in your games—to look for no good thing for which you have not strenuously striven yourselves—the better and happier men will you be in after-life. Happy is the man, has been most truly said, who can help himself, for he shall be waited upon. The most pitiable man in these, or indeed in any, times, is he who has only learned to ring a bell. And as to carelessness in expense, no doubt England is immensely richer than it was fifty years ago, and so probably you come mostly from richer homes than we did. But for all that, I am quite sure that there must be many boys here who are only kept here by friends to whom the cost is a serious consideration. To all such I would say that there is no discipline of more value than to learn to say frankly and positively, and to act on the words, “I can’t afford it.”

And now my time is up, and I have only to wish our noble old school and you of this generation who belong to it, God’s speed.

It is allowed to few men to revisit their old boyish haunts, and revive old school memories, after fifty years, and to come in touch with one company of that great host in whose hands the future of our England rests for good or ill, who are even now buckling on the armour which we are laying down.

If ever one of you should chance to come back here in 1940 to speak to the Rugby boys who will then be sitting on those benches, he will know how pathetic an experience it is: he will be able to appreciate the solemn but yet hopeful thoughts which crowd on me to-night—solemn indeed, but yet full of hope. For I will never believe that the living faith which was breathed into this school fifty years ago will ever be allowed to fade out while the world stands: the faith which made the Rugby of my time a missionary school, from which the whole higher education of England drew a new inspiration, and a new life: the faith, once more to quote Arnold’s own words, “which is the opposite of all idolatry, the doctrine of the person of Christ, not His church, not His sacraments, not His teaching: not even the truths about Him, or the virtues He most enforced, but Himself—the only object which bars fanaticism and idolatry on the one hand and gives life and power to all morality on the other.”

Keep Him alive in your hearts, my boys, and go forward bravely, you

“Who stand before us in this shade,
The youth who own the coming years:
Be never God or land betrayed
By any son our Rugby rears.”[4]

-----

Footnote 4:

It is not “Rugby” but “Harvard” in the original, which is taken from
the Commemoration hymn written by the Rev. J. R. Lowell.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED ON 12TH JUNE 1892, THE ANNIVERSARY OF DR.
ARNOLD’S DEATH.

WE are gathered here on this great Christian festival to keep what I may, with our preacher of this afternoon, call our second founder’s day. I am sure that every good Rugbeian is proud of Queen Elizabeth’s sturdy and loyal grocer, who bore testimony to his “gracious lady and mistress” before Bishop Bonner and the other commissioners of her sister, at the risk of being burnt as a heretic in Smithfield. Lawrence Sheriff’s day, 20th October, will never be forgotten or neglected in this place. But, as the United States do wisely and well to recognise Abraham Lincoln as the second father and founder of their Republic, so may we rightly honour Thomas Arnold as the second father and founder of Rugby School, and set apart this 12th of June, the day on which he passed away here fifty years ago, as one to be kept sacred to his memory.

This Saint’s day then I hope and believe will be kept while Rugby stands, for in so keeping it we are carrying out his own wish, that the English Church might learn in the new time to restore, amongst other practices she has abandoned, “Commemorations of holy men of all times and all countries.”

This 12th of June is then the 50th anniversary of the death of our second founder, who was taken in the fulness of his strength, and in the hour of his triumph, when his long battle was really won, and his old university, and his country, were vying with one another to honour the man, who it was at last recognised had raised the true standard of education again in England, and had inspired it with a soul and a purpose which it had wanted since Elizabeth’s day.