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Later on he was described by one who knew him well as "a man of the thirteenth century astray in the nineteenth." His ideas were not those of his country and generation, and he was never content without carrying his ideas into some sort of action. Hence much conflict and disillusion, hence also much apparent vacillation and failure. At any critical juncture in his life his course could have been generally foretold by asking which line of conduct was likely to serve his worldly interests least. Naturally, such a character does not make the best of this world, but it wins the warm affection of spirits kindred to itself, and what Dean Stanley wrote of him in his middle life was often said or thought by others whose good opinion was not less worth having. At a time when my father was a candidate for one of the Assistant Commissionerships of Endowed Schools, Dean Stanley wrote to one of those who were to decide the appointment:

Will you allow me to speak to you strongly in his behalf? He is, as you are perhaps aware, the second son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, who is associated in his father's life as being with him at his death. He was afterwards my pupil at University College, and is now, after a wandering life, both physically and intellectually (not morally, for he remained from first to last what I will presently describe), settled as private tutor at Oxford.

He is and was one of the gentlest, purest, and most ingenuous characters I have ever known, full of ability and of information, to me always instructive and interesting,- not so quick or brilliant as his brother Matthew, but without the qualities which in Matthew cause so much alarm to many, and certainly (as I have heard it well described by one who knows him well) belonging (to use his brother's words) to

"That small transfigur'd band

Whom the world cannot tame."

I have written this in a style not usual in testimonials, because I cannot half describe him otherwise.

My father was also the most intimate friend that Arthur Clough possessed, and of Arthur Clough the late Archbishop of Canterbury has borne witness that "he seemed to me, when first I knew him, the ablest and greatest man I had ever come across, and the one from whom I had learned more than from any other man

LXVI.-16

I knew." In Clough's " Bothie" the democrat, Philip Hewson, who "rounded the sphere to New Zealand," though in some respects very different from my father, was suggested by his career and his opinions, and in one of the letters from which I am about to quote, found among my father's papers at his death, Judge Coleridge tells him that he is "spoken of as the hero" of the poem. Dr. Arnold's favorite son, and Matthew Arnold's close friend as well as brother, was also "Clough's Philip." It is then natural to hope that whoever cares for any one of these three may also care for him.

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My grandfather died when the younger Thomas Arnold was nineteen, and the relations between them, therefore, were not those of man to man, but of child and boy to a famous and puissant father. There are no letters of this period, but two poems, written in the son's eighth and ninth years, attest the father's affection, reveal that tender side of the man which neither Stanley's Life nor" Tom Brown's School Days' has adequately brought out, and, for all their old-fashioned simplicity, suggest a hitherto unsuspected origin for Matthew Arnold's faculty. One of the poems was in a sense prompted by the child himself, who, recovering from one of childhood's illnesses, had asked his father to write something for him which should be his "very own." The father complied, with this result:

You bid me write in Verse or Prose

Something to be your very own:
Ah! were I but as one of those

Whose verses you and I have known-
If high the thought and sweet the line,
If flowed the measure bold and free,
Then gladly should such strain be thine
As suits the Love I bear to thee.

Time was-but that was long ago,

And you, my child, were yet unbornWhen readily and oft would flow

The current of my Verse-For Morn Was breathing then,-and all was new; And Thoughts were stirring at such HourBut melted in the Morning Dew

And vanished is my Fancy's Power. Thou art the self-same Race beginning,

Like Thoughts are pressing on thy Heart : To thee Earth wears a Face as winningAnd thou must see that Face depart. Now from thy little Bed thy Smile

How sweet it gleams when I draw nigh

'T is sweet, but let us pray the while To smile as sweetly when we die.—

Thy Father's Love, thou know'st it true;-
Thou know'st how dear thy Mother's Kiss:
And so whene'er we meet thy View

It fills thy little Heart with bliss:-
Now from thy Bed thine Eyes still turn
Thy Parents' loving Glance to crave-
May'st thou that better Parent learn

Whose Glance of Love can cheer thy Grave.

Our Care revives thee,-thou may'st rise

To Health and all of Childhood's GleeAnd Hope may paint thee to our Eyes

In Manhood, all we 'd have thee beBut yet again that Health must fade,

Thy youthful Glee to Sickness turn,— Others than we shall tend thy Bed

When we can neither love nor mourn.

So be it yet for us, for thee,

In Youth and Age alike at Hand,
One Love shall ever present be,

One Parent by our Sick Bed stand,
Whose look is Peace and Joy; -whose Care
Can to Eternal Health restore.
May we, my Child, His Blessing share
Where Age and Sickness vex no more.-
T. Arnold. April 5th, 1832.

The child was fragile, but grew up into healthy boyhood under the customary English influences. He went first to Winchester, then to Rugby. His brother Matt reminds him, in 1855, when they were both in their thirties, "how I disfigured your nose when we were boys," and in 1884 the sexagenarian, writing in December, recalls "old Rugby days":

This is the season when you and I, Edward and Willy, used to play our little football in the field behind the Close, with old Sam, his milk-pails on his shoulders, on his way to the farmyard, pausing to look on. Edward and Willy are gone-and how soon may we not follow! Still, so long as we are here, "haec meminisse juvat!"

So the delicate child grew up into a tall man, never overflowing with vitality like his brother Matthew, but still sound in wind and limb, and exceptionally handsome. He was wonderfully like his Cornish mother (herself a Penrose, with Trevenen kin), and his brother wrote to their mother from Paris in 1859:

I could not but think of you in Brittany, with Cranics and Trevenecs all about me, and the peasantry with their expressive, rather mournful faces, long noses, and dark eyes, reminding me perpetually of dear Tom and Uncle Trevenen, and utterly unlike the French.1

The Breton peasant figured in Joanne's "Dictionnaire Topographique de la France" (sub voce Bretagne) is certainly like enough to my father to justify the parallel. Contemporaries at Oxford and elsewhere noticed his looks, and an old Oxford man once told me that a friend, meeting him in the High street in the summer of 1845, advised him to look in at the Schools, where the viva voce for "Greats" was going on, as he would there see "the handsomest don in Oxford examining the handsomest undergraduate." The don was Henry Liddell, afterward dean of Christ Church, and the undergraduate, Thomas Arnold the younger.

Dr. Arnold hoped for great things from "Tom's career at Oxford." "That ever dear and beloved one; that too trusting and sanguine nature, rated me much too highly," writes the son, in a fragment of journal, twenty years later. Yet Oxford, too, rated him highly. He got his first-class, and won the devoted affection of a small band of friends: Arthur Stanley, his tutor at University College, then a haunt of Rugby men; Arthur Clough-"Citizen Clough -of Oriel, doubter, democrat, and poet; F. T. Palgrave, the future editor of "The Golden Treasury "; Shairp; Tom Hughes; Theodore Walrond; above all, his brother Matt, at Balliol. Those were years of Sturm und Drang at Oxford, the years of Tract 90, of Newman's withdrawal to Littlemore, of the famous convocation in 1844, which deprived “Ideal Ward" of his degrees and was prevented from censuring Newman only by the veto of the two dauntless proctors, of Pusey's suspension from preaching within the university, and 1 "Letters of Matthew Arnold," edited by G. W. E. Russell, I, 85.

So again, at the same season, two years later:

How I wish we had you here to-day, you dear old boy! What a long way back it is to the school field at this season, and the withered elm-leaves, and the footballs kicking about, and the November dimness over everything!

Almost an epilogue to the poet's "Rugby
Chapel."

finally of Newman's secession to Rome remember occasionally going in to hear in September, 1845.

The year of Tom Arnold's entry at Oxford (1842) was the year of his father's sudden death, after a few hours' illness. The year of his degree (1845) was, as we all know, the year of Newman's reception into the Church of Rome. "To any one who has been accustomed to look upon Arnold and Newman as the two great men of the Church of England," wrote Stanley, while the news of Newman's secession was flying round Oxford, "the death of one and the secession of the other cannot but look ominous, like the rattle of departing chariots that was heard on the eve of the downfall of the Temple of Jerusalem."

So it was for Stanley, who, as fellow and tutor, was already in the thick of the Oxford struggles. But what is curious to notice is that for this little band of thinkers and poets we have enumerated-a band containing two of Arnold's sons-the interest of life during these tempestuous years lay not in ecclesiastical and dogmatic struggles, not in the famous tracts, or the fathers, or the great Anglican divines, but in literature-in Emerson, Carlyle, Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, and George Sand, George Sand and Emerson perhaps first and foremost. Not that spiritual conflict was absent; but it was concerned with questions far remote from those of subscription or church govern

ment.

The result was that for several of this little band of friends, certainly for Arthur Clough and Tom Arnold, their Oxford time was not as fruitful as at another moment it might have been. As Matthew Arnold said later of Gray at Cambridge, they were blown upon by a "spiritual east wind." The Oxford Movement, says Dean Stanley's biographer, interrupted an intellectual and literary movement on broader lines, which had begun before Newman appeared, and resumed its march only after he departed. "The educational life of Oxford was withered," for the time, by the "volcanic eruption" of Tractarianism; science, humane letters, and the first stirrings of intellectual freedom were for an indefinite period suspended.

They were not suspended in the individual mind, as my father's letters and journals show, but the atmosphere was nipping and unkind. Tom Arnold later could

Newman preach in St. Mary's, and waiting in the snowy High street for the news of Ward's degradation; but these things made little impression at the time. His own struggles were all within, concerned with the conflict between the ideas of Emerson and George Sand and the faith in which his father had trained him; and the din made by Tract 90 seemed to be mere empty clamor about an obsolete machinery. In the very spring, for instance, when Stanley writes from Oxford his animated accounts of the fights in convocation and the common rooms over the questions raised by Newman and Ward, Tom Arnold speaks of himself as sitting alone, in Stanley's college of University and in rooms overlooking the High street, brooding on the very foundations of belief. The following passage, where he writes of himself in the third person, for reasons to be explained presently, describes the outer and the inner scene:

The spring of that year (1845) was unusually cold; and the blasts of the northeast wind shook the large oriel window of his room, and made him shiver with cold as he crouched over the fire. A universal doubt shook every prop and pillar on which his moral Being had hitherto reposed. Something was continually whispering: "What if all thy Religion, all thy aspiring hope, all thy trust in God, be a mere delusion? The more thou searchest into the iron, relentless laws govern thee, and every mystery of thy Being, findest thou not that impulse and thought of thee, no less than the dull stones beneath thy feet? What art thou more than a material arrangement, the elements of which might at any moment, by an accident, be dispersed, and thou, without any to care for or pity thee throughout the wide universe, sink into the universal night? Prate not any more of thy God and thy Providence; thou art here alone, placed at the mercy of impersonal and unbending laws, which, whether they preserve or crush thee, the universe with supremest indifference will roll onward on its way."

The misery of the incessant recurrence of such thoughts to a believing mind, he only who has experienced them can understand. They took away the charm from the human face, the glory from the sky, the beauty from the flowers: all these seemed to be the garlands round the victim's neck, designed to cheat it for a time into a little ease and forgetfulness of the cold, inexorable necessity that lay beneath.

These lines are taken from a remarkable series of letters, written a couple of years later and in another stage of development; for Arnold's son did not long remain in the state of despondency thus described. Suddenly the cloud lifted; Emerson, Carlyle, and George Sand came to him as the prophets of a new age and new faiths. George Sand especially carried him on a full tide into the very midst of the social questionings and ardent hopes of the forties. He left Oxford after winning his firstclass, and went up to London, first as a law student, then as an official in the Colonial Office, many kind friends smiling on the handsome youth, both for his own sake and for his father's.

He did well in the Colonial Office, and attracted the attention of his chief, Lord Grey. Meanwhile his brother Matthew had become Lord Lansdowne's private secretary, and for both the brothers a happy and prosperous life seemed to be opening. But outside Oxford, no less than within, those were days of ferment and change. Chartism led the hopes and aspirations of the poor; the ideas of Christian socialism were working in the minds of Maurice and Kingsley; and abroad the upheavals of 1848 were approaching. At the same time the thought of the colonies, those new Englands across the sea, was becoming for many of the more ardent minds a means of escape from the Old-World problems.

It is this particular moment of English unrest, and this particular mode of escape from it, that have left their impress on Clough's poem "The Bothie of Tober-naVuolich." Philip Hewson, the poet and Radical, on fire against the Toryisms and tyrannies of English life-Philip, who "speaks like a book," and goes off to New Zealand in search of a virgin soil and an unspoilt social life, was certainly suggested by my father. English oppressions, English class distinctions, and English orthodoxies weighed upon him heavily at home; but out there in the shining Pacific was a land of freedom and beauty where man might mold his life afresh.

So Thomas Arnold determined to throw up the Colonial Office, take the few hundred pounds that might rightly come to him from the slender family store, and go to New Zealand. One may imagine the family consternation. But they were a

high-minded, idealist group, and the plea of following conscience and duty left them disabled in the presence of Tom's resolution. If he must go, he must. The mother especially showed extraordinary courage and tenderness, as her letters reveal. She suffered acutely, for the colonies were far away in those days. But her boy was a man, and she did not attempt to drive or coerce him. Many of the old family friends remonstrated; there is a fine letter of Bunsen's still in existence, in which Dr. Arnold's old friend, then Prussian ambassador to the English court, wrote sheet after sheet to the headstrong youth of twenty-four, trying to persuade him that England was still a possible dwelling-place for the honest and high-hearted. But the dream had grown too tempting, the sense of vocation too strong. The necessary arrangements were made, and my father set sail. It is characteristic of him that at the end of his life, in the book published the year before his death, he says: "I cannot even now make up my mind as to whether I was right in going to New Zealand or no."

Here is a little picture of the embarkation written by his brother Edward, who went up from Oxford to see him off. He, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Clough, and Tom Arnold went down to the London docks on the Sunday before the departure to look at the John Wickliffe, the emigrant vessel of six hundred and sixty tons which was to carry Tom to the antipodes.

Clough says [writes Edward to his mother] that it is a good-sized one for an emigrant ship, and that Tom is very lucky. I did not like to laugh at what was so serious a matter to Tom, but my firm conviction was that I could not live out a voyage of five months there.

The next day the brothers said farewell; they went down to Gravesend together.

It was very cold [writes Edward], yet it was a brilliant sunset, and the river, with all its shipping, is always beautiful. I asked him if he felt the least inclined to change his mind, were it possible. He said not the least, that when he had made up his mind fully, he looked upon the thing as inevitable; besides that, his wish to go was as strong as ever. What he felt most, I think, was the parting with Matt. I saw the tears in his eyes when it came to that.

It was during this long voyage that Thomas Arnold wrote what his friends

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