puzzled look upon the face of Dr. Arnold.
And certainly, if he was to fulfil the prophecy of the Provost of Oriel, the task before him was sufficiently perplexing. The public schools of those days were still virgin forests, untouched by the hand of reform. Keate was still reigning at Eton; and we possess, in the records of his pupils, a picture of the public school education of the early nineteenth century, in its most characteristic state. It was a system of anarchy tempered by despotism. Hundreds of boys, herded together in miscellaneous boarding-houses, or in that grim ‘Long Chamber’ at whose name in after years aged statesmen and warriors would turn pale, lived, badgered and overawed by the furious incursions of an irascible little old man carrying a bundle of birch-twigs, a life in which licensed barbarism was mingled with the daily and hourly study of the niceties of Ovidian verse. It was a life of freedom and terror, of prosody and rebellion, of interminable floggings and appalling practical jokes. Keate ruled, unaided–for the undermasters were few and of no account–by sheer force of character. But there were times when even that indomitable will was overwhelmed by the flood of lawlessness. Every Sunday afternoon he attempted to read sermons to the whole school assembled; and every Sunday afternoon the whole school assembled shouted him down. The scenes in Chapel were far from edifying; while some antique Fellow doddered in the pulpit, rats would be let loose to scurry among the legs of the exploding boys. But next morning the hand of discipline would reassert itself; and the savage ritual of the whipping-block would remind a batch of whimpering children that, though sins against man and God might be forgiven them, a false quantity could only be expiated in tears and blood.
From two sides this system of education was beginning to be assailed by the awakening public opinion of the upper middle classes. On the one hand, there was a desire for a more liberal curriculum; on the other, there was a demand for a higher moral tone. The growing utilitarianism of the age viewed with impatience a course of instruction which excluded every branch of knowledge except classical philology; while its growing respectability was shocked by such a spectacle of disorder and brutality as was afforded by the Eton of Keate. ‘The public schools,’ said the Rev. Mr. Bowdler, ‘are the very seats and nurseries of vice.’
Dr. Arnold agreed. He was convinced of the necessity for reform. But it was only natural that to one of his temperament and education it should have been the moral rather than the intellectual side of the question which impressed itself upon his mind. Doubtless it was important to teach boys something more than the bleak rigidities of the ancient tongues; but how much more important to instil into them the elements of character and the principles of conduct! His great object, throughout his career at Rugby, was, as he repeatedly said, to ‘make the school a place of really Christian education’. To introduce ‘a religious principle into education’, was his ‘most earnest wish’, he wrote to a friend when he first became headmaster; ‘but to do this would be to succeed beyond all my hopes; it would be a happiness so great, that, I think, the world would yield me nothing comparable to it’. And he was constantly impressing these sentiments upon his pupils. ‘What I have often said before,’ he told them, ‘I repeat now: what we must look for here is, first, religious and moral principle; secondly, gentlemanly conduct; andthirdly, intellectual ability.’
There can be no doubt that Dr. Arnold’s point of view was shared by the great mass of English parents. They cared very little for classical scholarship; no doubt they would be pleased to find that their sons were being instructed in history or in French; but their real hopes, their real wishes, were of a very different kind. ‘Shall I tell him to mind his work, and say he’s sent to school to make himself a good scholar?’ meditated old Squire Brown when he was sending off Tom for the first time to Rugby. ‘Well, but he isn’t sent to school for that–at any rate, not for that mainly. I don’t care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma; no more does his mother. What is he sent to school for? … If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a Christian, that’s all I want.’
That was all; and it was that that Dr. Arnold set himself to accomplish. But how was he to achieve his end? Was he to improve the character of his pupils by gradually spreading around them an atmosphere of cultivation and intelligence? By bringing them into close and friendly contact with civilised men, and even, perhaps, with civilised women? By introducing into the life of his school all that he could of the humane, enlightened, and progressive elements in the life of the community? On the whole, he thought not. Such considerations left him cold, and he preferred to be guided by the general laws of Providence. It only remained to discover what those general laws were. He consulted the Old Testament, and could doubt no longer. He would apply to his scholars, as he himself explained to them in one of his sermons, ‘the principle which seemed to him to have been adopted in the training of the childhood of the human race itself’. He would treat the boys at Rugby as Jehovah had treated the Chosen People: he would found a theocracy; and there should be judges in Israel.
For this purpose, the system, prevalent in most of the public schools of the day, by which the elder boys were deputed to keep order in the class-rooms, lay ready to Dr. Arnold’s hand. He found the Praepostor a mere disciplinary convenience, and he converted him into an organ of government. Every boy in the Sixth Form became ipso facto a Praepostor, with powers extending over every department of school life; and the Sixth Form as a body was erected into an authority responsible to the headmaster, and to the headmaster alone, for the internal management of the school.
This was the means by which Dr. Arnold hoped to turn Rugby into ‘a place of really Christian education’. The boys were to work out their own salvation, like the human race. He himself, involved in awful grandeur, ruled remotely, through his chosen instruments, from an inaccessible heaven. Remotely– and yet with an omnipresent force. As the Israelite of old knew that his almighty Lawgiver might at any moment thunder to him from the whirlwind, or appear before his very eyes, the visible embodiment of power or wrath, so the Rugby schoolboy walked in a holy dread of some sudden manifestation of the sweeping gown, the majestic tone, the piercing glance, of Dr. Arnold. Among the lower forms of the school his appearances were rare and transitory, and upon these young children ‘the chief impression’, we are told, ‘was of extreme fear’. The older boys saw more of him, but they did not see much. Outside the Sixth Form, no part of the school came into close intercourse with him; and it would often happen that a boy would leave Rugby without having had any personal communication with him at all.
Yet the effect which he produced upon the great mass of his pupils was remarkable. The prestige of his presence and the elevation of his sentiments were things which it was impossible to forget. In class, every line of his countenance, every shade of his manner imprinted themselves indelibly on the minds of the boys who sat under him. One of these, writing long afterwards, has described, in phrases still impregnated with awestruck reverence, the familiar details of the scene: ‘the glance with which he looked round in the few moments of silence before the lesson began, and which seemed to speak his sense of his own position’–‘the attitude in which he stood, turning over the pages of Facciolati’s Lexicon, or Pole’s synopsis, with his eye fixed upon the boy who was pausing to give an answer’–‘the pleased look and the cheerful “thank you”, which followed upon a successful translation’–‘the fall of his countenance with its deepening severity, the stern elevation of the eyebrows, the sudden “sit down” which followed upon the reverse’–and ‘the startling earnestness with which he would cheek in a moment the slightest approach to levity’.
To be rebuked, however mildly, by Dr. Arnold was a Potable experience. One boy could never forget how he drew a distinction between ‘mere amusement’ and ‘such as encroached on the next day’s duties’, nor the tone of voice with which the Doctor added ‘and then it immediately becomes what St. Paul calls REVELLING’. Another remembered to his dying day his reproof of some boys who had behaved badly during prayers. ‘Nowhere,’ said Dr. Arnold, ‘nowhere is Satan’s work more evidently manifest than in turning holy things to ridicule.’ On such occasions, as another of his pupils described it, it was impossible to avoid ‘a consciousness almost amounting to solemnity’ that, ‘when his eye was upon you, he looked into your inmost heart’.
With the boys in the Sixth Form, and with them alone, the severe formality of his demeanour was to some degree relaxed. It was his wish, in his relations with the Praepostors, to allow the Master to be occasionally merged in the Friend. From time to time, he chatted with them in a familiar manner; once a term he asked them to dinner; and during the summer holidays he invited them, in rotation, to stay with him in Westmorland.
It was obvious that the primitive methods of discipline which had reached their apogee under the dominion of Keate were altogether incompatible with Dr. Arnold’s view of the functions of a headmaster and the proper governance of a public school. Clearly, it was not for such as he to demean himself by bellowing and cuffing, by losing his temper once an hour, and by wreaking his vengeance with indiscriminate flagellations. Order must be kept in other ways. The worst boys were publicly expelled; many were silently removed; and, when Dr. Arnold considered that a flogging was necessary, he administered it with gravity. For he had no theoretical objection to corporal punishment. On the contrary, he supported it, as was his wont, by an appeal to general principles. ‘There is,’ he said, ‘an essential inferiority in a boy as compared with a man’; and hence ‘where there is no equality the exercise of superiority implied in personal chastisement’ inevitably followed.
He was particularly disgusted by the view that ‘personal correction’,as he phrased it, was an insult or a degradation to the boy upon whom it was inflicted; and to accustom young boys to think so appeared to him to be ‘positively mischievous’. ‘At an age,’ he wrote, ‘when it is almost impossible to find a true, manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind which are the best ornaments of youth, and offer the best promise of a noble manhood?’ One had not to look far, he added, for ‘the fruits of such a system’. In Paris, during the Revolution of 1830, an officer observed a boy of twelve insulting the soldiers, and ‘though the action was then raging, merely struck him with the flat part of his sword, as the fit chastisement for boyish impertinence. But the boy had been taught to consider his person sacred, and that a blow was a deadly insult; he therefore followed the officer, and having watched his opportunity, took deliberate aim at him with a pistol and murdered him.’ Such were the alarming results of insufficient whipping.
Dr. Arnold did not apply this doctrine to the Praepostors, but the boys in the lower parts of the school felt its benefits, with a double force. The Sixth Form was not only excused from chastisement; it was given the right to chastise. The younger children, scourged both by Dr Arnold and by the elder children, were given every opportunity of acquiring the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornaments of youth.
In the actual sphere of teaching, Dr. Arnold’s reforms were tentative and few. He introduced modern history, modern languages, and mathematics into the school curriculum; but the results were not encouraging. He devoted to the teaching of history one hour a week; yet, though he took care to inculcate in these lessons a wholesome hatred of moral evil, and to point out from time to time the indications of the providential government of the world, his pupils never seemed to make much progress in the subject. Could it have been that the time allotted to it was insufficient? Dr. Arnold had some suspicions that this might be the case. With modern languages there was the same difficulty. Here his hopes were certainly not excessive. ‘I assume it,’ he wrote, ‘as the foundation of all my view of the case, that boys at a public school never will learn to speak or pronounce French well, under any circumstances.’ It would be enough if they could ‘learn it grammatically as a dead language. But even this they very seldom managed to do. I know too well,’ he was obliged to confess, ‘that most of the boys would pass a very poor examination even in French grammar. But so it is with their mathematics; and so it will be with any branch of knowledge that is taught but seldom, and is felt to be quite subordinate to the boys’ main study’.
The boys’ main study remained the dead languages of Greece and Rome. That the classics should form the basis of all teaching was an axiom with Dr. Arnold. ‘The study of language,’ he said, ‘seems to me as if it was given for the very purpose of forming the human mind in youth; and the Greek and Latin languages seem the very instruments by which this is to be effected.’ Certainly, there was something providential about it– from the point of view of the teacher as well as of the taught. If Greek and Latin had not been ‘given’ in that convenient manner, Dr. Arnold, who had spent his life in acquiring those languages, might have discovered that he had acquired them in vain. As it was, he could set the noses of his pupils to the grindstone of syntax and prosody with a clear conscience. Latin verses and Greek prepositions divided between them the labours of the week.
As time went on he became, he declared, ‘increasingly convinced that it is not knowledge, but the means of gaining knowledge which I have to teach’. The reading of the school was devoted almost entirely to selected passages from the prose writers of antiquity. ‘Boys,’ he remarked, ‘do not like poetry.’ Perhaps his own poetical taste was a little dubious; at any rate, it is certain that he considered the Greek Tragedians greatly overrated, and that he ranked Propertius as ‘an indifferent poet’. As for Aristophanes, owing to his strong moral disapprobation, he could not bring himself to read him until he was forty, when, it is true, he was much struck by the ‘Clouds’. But Juvenal, the Doctor could never bring himself to read at all.
Physical science was not taught at Rugby. Since, in Dr. Arnold’s opinion, it was too great a subject to be studied en parergo, obviously only two alternatives were possible: it must either take the chief place in the school curriculum, or it must be left out altogether. Before such a choice, Dr. Arnold did not hesitate for a moment. ‘Rather than have physical science the principal thing in my son’s mind,’ he exclaimed in a letter to a friend, I would gladly have him think that the sun went around the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament. Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an English man to study is Christian, moral, and political philosophy.’
A Christian and an Englishman! After all, it was not in the classroom, nor in the boarding-house, that the essential elements of instruction could be imparted which should qualify the youthful neophyte to deserve those names. The final, the fundamental lesson could only be taught in the school chapel; in the school chapel the centre of Dr. Arnold’s system of education was inevitably fixed. There, too, the Doctor himself appeared in the plenitude of his dignity and his enthusiasm. There, with the morning sun shining on the freshly scrubbed faces of his 300 pupils, or, in the dusk of evening, through a glimmer of candles, his stately form, rapt in devotion or vibrant with exhortation, would dominate the scene. Every phase of the Church service seemed to receive its supreme expression in his voice, his attitude, his look. During the Te Deum, his whole countenance would light up; and he read the Psalms with such conviction that boys would often declare, after hearing him, that they understood them now for the first time.
It was his opinion that the creeds in public worship ought to be used as triumphant hymns of thanksgiving, and, in accordance with this view, although unfortunately he possessed no natural gift for music, he regularly joined in the chanting of the Nicene Creed with a visible animation and a peculiar fervour, which it was impossible to forget. The Communion service he regarded as a direct and special counterpoise to that false communion and false companionship, which, as he often observed, was a great source of mischief in the school; and he bent himself down with glistening eyes, and trembling voice, and looks of paternal solicitude, in the administration of the elements. Nor was it only the different sections of the liturgy, but the very divisions of the ecclesiastical year that reflected themselves in his demeanour; the most careless observer, we are told, ‘could not fail to be struck by the triumphant exultation of his whole manner on Easter Sunday’; though it needed a more familiar eye to discern the subtleties in his bearing which were produced by the approach or Advent, and the solemn thoughts which it awakened of the advance of human life, the progress of the human race, and the condition of the Church of England.
At the end of the evening service, the culminating moment of the week had come: the Doctor delivered his sermon. It was not until then, as all who had known him agreed, it was not until one had heard and seen him in the pulpit, that one could fully realise what it was to be face to face with Dr. Arnold. The whole character of the man–so we are assured–stood at last revealed. His congregation sat in fixed attention (with the exception of the younger boys, whose thoughts occasionally wandered), while he propounded the general principles both of his own conduct and that of the Almighty, or indicated the bearing of the incidents of Jewish history in the sixth century B.C. upon the conduct of English schoolboys in 1830. Then, more than ever, his deep consciousness of the invisible world became evident; then, more than ever, he seemed to be battling with the wicked one. For his sermons ran on the eternal themes of the darkness of evil, the craft of the tempter, the punishment of obliquity, and he justified the persistence with which he dwelt upon these painful subjects by an appeal to a general principle: ‘The spirit of Elijah,’ he said, ‘must ever precede the spirit of Christ.’
The impression produced upon the boys was remarkable. It was noticed that even the most careless would sometimes, during the course of the week, refer almost involuntarily to the sermon of the past Sunday, as a condemnation of what they were doing. Others were heard to wonder how it was that the Doctor’s preaching, to which they had attended at the time so assiduously, seemed, after all, to have such a small effect upon what they did. An old gentleman, recalling those vanished hours, tried to recapture in words his state of mind as he sat in the darkened chapel, while Dr. Arnold’s sermons, with their high-toned exhortations, their grave and sombre messages of incalculable import, clothed, like Dr. Arnold’s body in its gown and bands, in the traditional stiffness of a formal phraseology, reverberated through his adolescent ears. ‘I used,’ he said, ‘to listen to those sermons from first to last with a kind of awe.’
His success was not limited to his pupils and immediate auditors. The sermons were collected into five large volumes; they were the first of their kind; and they were received with admiration by a wide circle of pious readers. Queen Victoria herself possessed a copy in which several passages were marked in pencil, by the Royal hand.
Dr. Arnold’s energies were by no means exhausted by his duties at Rugby. He became known not merely as a headmaster, but as a public man. He held decided opinions upon a large number of topics; and he enunciated them–based as they were almost invariably upon general principles–in pamphlets, in prefaces, and in magazine articles, with an impressive self-confidence. He was, as he constantly declared, a Liberal. In his opinion, by the very constitution of human nature, the principles of progress and reform had been those of wisdom and justice in every age of the world–except one: that which had preceded the fall of man from Paradise. Had he lived then, Dr. Arnold would have been a Conservative. As it was, his Liberalism was tempered by an ‘abhorrence of the spirit of 1789, of the American War, of the French Economistes, and of the English Whigs of the latter part of the seventeenth century’; and he always entertained a profound respect for the hereditary peerage. It might almost be said, in fact, that he was an orthodox Liberal. He believed in toleration too, within limits; that is to say, in the toleration of those with whom he agreed. ‘I would give James Mill as much opportunity for advocating his opinion,’ he said, ‘as is consistent with a voyage to Botany Bay.’
He had become convinced of the duty of sympathising with the lower orders ever since he had made a serious study of the Epistle of St. James; but he perceived clearly that the lower orders fell into two classes, and that it was necessary to distinguish between them. There were the ‘good poor’–and there were the others. ‘I am glad that you have made acquaintance with some of the good poor,’ he wrote to a Cambridge undergraduate. ‘I quite agree with you that it is most instructive to visit them.’ Dr. Arnold himself occasionally visited them, in Rugby; and the condescension with which he shook hands with old men and women of the working classes was long remembered in the neighbourhood. As for the others, he regarded them with horror and alarm. ‘The disorders in our social state,’ he wrote to the Chevalier Bunsen in 1834, ‘appear to me to continue unabated. You have heard, I doubt not, of the Trades Unions; a fearful engine of mischief, ready to riot or to assassinate; and I see no counteracting power.’
On the whole, his view of the condition of England was a gloomy one. He recommended a correspondent to read ‘Isaiah iii, v, xxii; Jeremiah v, xxii, xxx; Amos iv; and Habakkuk ii’, adding, ‘you will be struck, I think, with the close resemblance of our own state with that of the Jews before the second destruction of Jerusalem’. When he was told that the gift of tongues had descended on the Irvingites at Glasgow, he was not surprised. ‘I should take it,’ he said, ‘merely as a sign of the coming of the day of the Lord.’ And he was convinced that the day of the Lord was coming–‘the termination of one of the great aiones of the human race’. Of that he had no doubt whatever; wherever he looked he saw ‘calamities, wars, tumults, pestilences, earthquakes, etc., all marking the time of one of God’s peculiar seasons of visitation’. His only uncertainty was whether this termination of an aion would turn out to be the absolutely final one; but that he believed ‘no created being knows or can know’. In any case, he had ‘not the slightest expectation of what is commonly meant by the Millennium’. And his only consolation was that he preferred the present Ministry, inefficient as it was, to the Tories.
He had planned a great work on Church and State, in which he intended to lay bare the causes and to point out the remedies of the evils which afflicted society. Its theme was to be, not the alliance or union, but the absolute identity of the Church and the State; and he felt sure that if only this fundamental truth were fully realised by the public, a general reformation would follow. Unfortunately, however, as time went on, the public seemed to realise it less and less. In spite of his protests, not only were Jews admitted to Parliament, but a Jew was actually appointed a governor of Christ’s Hospital; and Scripture was not made an obligatory subject at the London University.
There was one point in his theory which was not quite plain to Dr. Arnold. If Church and State were absolutely identical, it became important to decide precisely which classes of persons were to be excluded, owing to their beliefs, from the community. Jews, for instance, were decidedly outside the pale; while Dissenters–so Dr. Arnold argued–were as decidedly within it. But what was the position of the Unitarians? Were they, or were they not, members of the Church of Christ? This was one of those puzzling questions which deepened the frown upon the Doctor’s forehead and intensified the pursing of his lips. He thought long and earnestly upon the subject; he wrote elaborate letters on it to various correspondents; but his conclusions remained indefinite. ‘My great objection to Unitarianism,’ he wrote, ‘in its present form in England, is that it makes Christ virtually dead.’ Yet he expressed ‘a fervent hope that if we could get rid of the Athanasian Creed many good Unitarians would join their fellow Christians in bowing the knee to Him who is Lord both of the dead and the living’. Amid these perplexities, it was disquieting to learn that ‘Unitarianism is becoming very prevalent in Boston’. He inquired anxiously as to its ‘complexion’ there; but received no very illuminating answer. The whole matter continued to be wrapped in a painful obscurity, There were, he believed, Unitarians and Unitarians; and he could say no more.
In the meantime, pending the completion of his great work, he occupied himself with putting forward various suggestions of a practical kind. He advocated the restoration of the Order of Deacons, which, he observed, had long been ‘quoad the reality, dead; for he believed that ‘some plan of this sort might be the small end of the wedge, by which Antichrist might hereafter be burst asunder like the Dragon of Bel’s temple’. But the Order of Deacons was never restored, and Dr. Arnold turned his attention elsewhere, urging in a weighty pamphlet the desirabitity of authorising military officers, in congregations where it was impossible to procure the presence of clergy, to administer the Eucharist, as well as Baptism. It was with the object of laying such views as these before the public–‘to tell them plainly’, as he said, ‘the evils that exist, and lead them, if I can, to their causes and remedies’–that he started, in 1831, a weekly newspaper, “The Englishman’s Register”. The paper was not a success, in spite of the fact that it set out to improve its readers morally and, that it preserved, in every article, an avowedly Christian tone. After a few weeks, and after he had spent upon it more than £200, it came to an end.
Altogether, the prospect was decidedly discouraging. After all his efforts, the absolute identity of Church and State remained as unrecognised as ever. ‘So deep’, he was at last obliged to confess, ‘is the distinction between the Church and the State seated in our laws, our language, and our very notions, that nothing less than a miraculous interposition of God’s Providence seems capable of eradicating it.’ Dr. Arnold waited in vain.
But, he did not wait in idleness. He attacked the same question from another side: he explored the writings of the Christian Fathers, and began to compose a commentary on the New Testament. In his view, the Scriptures were as fit a subject as any other book for free inquiry and the exercise of the individual judgment, and it was in this spirit that he set about the interpretation of them. He was not afraid of facing apparent difficulties, of admitting inconsistencies, or even errors, in the sacred text. Thus he observed that ‘in Chronicles xi, 20 and xiii, 2, there is a decided difference in the parentage of Abijah’s mother;’– ‘which’, he added, ‘is curious on any supposition’. And at one time he had serious doubts as to the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But he was able, on various problematical points, to suggest interesting solutions.
At first, for instance, he could not but be startled by the cessation of miracles in the early Church; but upon consideration, he came to the conclusion that this phenomenon might be ‘truly accounted for by the supposition that none but the Apostles ever conferred miraculous powers, and that therefore they ceased of course, after one generation’. Nor did he fail to base his exegesis, whenever possible, upon an appeal to general principles. One of his admirers points out how Dr. Arnold ‘vindicated God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son and to the Jews to exterminate the nations of Canaan’, by explaining the principles on which these commands were given, and their reference to the moral state of those to whom they were addressed– thereby educing light out of darkness, unravelling the thread of God’s religious education of the human race, and holding up God’s marvellous counsels to the devout wonder and meditation of the thoughtful believer’.
There was one of his friends, however, who did not share this admiration for the Doctor’s methods of Scriptural interpretation. W. G. Ward, while still a young man at Oxford, had come under his influence, and had been for some time one of his most enthusiastic disciples. But the star of Newman was rising at the University; Ward soon felt the attraction of that magnetic power; and his belief in his old teacher began to waver. It was, in particular, Dr. Arnold’s treatment of the Scriptures which filled Ward’s argumentative mind, at first with distrust, and at last with positive antagonism. To subject the Bible to free inquiry, to exercise upon it the criticism of the individual judgment– where might not such methods lead? Who could say that they would not end in Socinianism?–nay, in Atheism itself? If the text of Scripture was to be submitted to the searchings of human reason, how could the question of its inspiration escape the same tribunal? And the proofs of revelation, and even of the existence of God? What human faculty was capable of deciding upon such enormous questions? And would not the logical result be a condition of universal doubt?
‘On a very moderate computation, Ward argued, ‘five times the amount of a man’s natural life might qualify a person endowed with extraordinary genius to have some faint notion (though even this we doubt) on which side truth lies.’ It was not that he had the slightest doubt of Dr. Arnold’s orthodoxy– Dr. Arnold, whose piety was universally recognised–Dr. Arnold, who had held up to scorn and execration Strauss’s Leben Jesu without reading it. What Ward complained of was the Doctor’s lack of logic, not his lack of faith. Could he not see that if he really carried out his own principles to a logical conclusion he would eventually find himself, precisely, in the arms of Strauss? The young man, whose personal friendship remained unshaken, determined upon an interview, and went down to Rugby primed with first principles, syllogisms, and dilemmas. Finding that the headmaster was busy in school, he spent the afternoon reading novels on the sofa in the drawing-room. When at last, late in the evening, the Doctor returned, tired out with his day’s work, Ward fell upon him with all his vigour. The contest was long and furious; it was also entirely inconclusive. When it was over, Ward, with none of his brilliant arguments disposed of, and none of his probing questions satisfactorily answered, returned to the University to plunge headlong into the vortex of the Oxford Movement; and Dr. Arnold, worried, perplexed, and exhausted, went to bed, where he remained for the next thirty-six hours.
The Commentary on the New Testament was never finished, and the great work on Church and State itself remained a fragment. Dr. Arnold’s active mind was diverted from political and theological speculations to the study of philology, and to historical composition. His Roman History, which he regarded as ‘the chief monument of his historical fame’, was based partly upon the researches of Niebuhr, and partly upon an aversion to Gibbon. ‘My highest ambition,’ he wrote, ‘is to make my history the very reverse of Gibbon in this respect, that whereas the whole spirit of his work, from its low morality, is hostile to religion, without speaking directly against it, so my greatest desire would be, in my History, by its high morals and its general tone, to be of use to the cause without actually bringing it forward.’ These efforts were rewarded, in 1841, by the Professorship of Modern History at Oxford. Meanwhile, he was engaged in the study of the Sanskrit and Slavonic languages, bringing out an elaborate edition of Thucydides, and carrying on a voluminous correspondence upon a multitude of topics with a large circle of men of learning. At his death, his published works, composed during such intervals as he could spare from the management of a great public school, filled, besides a large number of pamphlets and articles, no less than seventeen volumes. It was no wonder that Carlyle, after a visit to Rugby, should have characterised Dr. Arnold as a man of ‘unhasting, unresting diligence’.
Mrs. Arnold, too, no doubt agreed with Carlyle. During the first eight years of their married life, she bore him six children; and four more were to follow. In this large and growing domestic circle his hours of relaxation were spent. There those who had only known him in his professional capacity were surprised to find him displaying the tenderness and jocosity of a parent. The dignified and stern headmaster was actually seen to dandle infants and to caracole upon the hearthrug on all fours. Yet, we are told, ‘the sense of his authority as a father was never lost in his playfulness as a companion’. On more serious occasions, the voice of the spiritual teacher sometimes made itself heard. An intimate friend described how ‘on a comparison having been made in his family circle, which seemed to place St. Paul above St. John,’ the tears rushed to the Doctor’s eyes and how, repeating one of the verses from St. John, he begged that the comparison might never again be made. The longer holidays were spent in Westmorland, where, rambling with his offspring among the mountains, gathering wild flowers, and pointing out the beauties of Nature, Dr. Arnold enjoyed, as he himself would often say, ‘an almost awful happiness’. Music he did not appreciate, though he occasionally desired his eldest boy, Matthew, to sing him the Confirmation Hymn of Dr. Hinds, to which he had become endeared, owing to its use in Rugby Chapel. But his lack of ear was, he considered, amply recompensed by his love of flowers: ‘they are my music,’ he declared. Yet, in such a matter, he was careful to refrain from an excess of feeling, such as, in his opinion, marked the famous lines of Wordsworth:
‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’
He found the sentiment morbid. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘is not long enough to take such intense interest in objects in themselves so little.’ As for the animal world, his feelings towards it were of a very different cast. ‘The whole subject,’ he said, ‘of the brute creation is to me one of such painful mystery, that I dare not approach it.’ The Unitarians themselves were a less distressing thought.
Once or twice he found time to visit the Continent, and the letters and journals recording in minute detail his reflections and impressions in France or Italy show us that Dr. Arnold preserved, in spite of the distractions of foreign scenes and foreign manners, his accustomed habits of mind. Taking very little interest in works of art, he was occasionally moved by the beauty of natural objects; but his principal preoccupation remained with the moral aspects of things. From this point of view, he found much to reprehend in the conduct of his own countrymen. ‘I fear,’ he wrote, ‘that our countrymen who live abroad are not in the best possible moral state, however much they may do in science or literature.’ And this was unfortunate, because ‘a thorough English gentleman–Christian, manly, and enlightened–is more, I believe, than Guizot or Sismondi could comprehend; it is a finer specimen of human nature than any other country, I believe, could furnish’. Nevertheless, our travellers would imitate foreign customs without discrimination, ‘as in the absurd habit of not eating fish with a knife, borrowed from the French, who do it because they have no knives fit for use’. Places, no less than people, aroused similar reflections. By Pompeii, Dr. Arnold was not particularly impressed. ‘There is only,’ he observed, ‘the same sort of interest with which one would see the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, but indeed there is less. One is not authorised to ascribe so solemn a character to the destruction of Pompeii.’ The lake of Como moved him more profoundly. As he gazed upon the overwhelming beauty around him, he thought of ‘moral evil’, and was appalled by the contrast. ‘May the sense of moral evil’, he prayed, ‘be as strong in me as my delight in external beauty, for in a deep sense of moral evil, more perhaps than in anything else, abides a saving knowledge of God!’
His prayer was answered: Dr. Arnold was never in any danger of losing his sense of moral evil. If the landscapes of Italy only served to remind him of it, how could he forget it among the boys at Rugby School? The daily sight of so many young creatures in the hands of the Evil One filled him with agitated grief. ‘When the spring and activity of youth,’ he wrote, ‘is altogether unsanctified by anything pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is as dizzying and almost more morally distressing than the shouts and gambols of a set of lunatics.’ One thing struck him as particularly strange: ‘It is very startling,’ he said, ‘to see so much of sin combined with so little of sorrow.’ The naughtiest boys positively seemed to enjoy themselves most. There were moments when he almost lost faith in his whole system of education, when he began to doubt whether some far more radical reforms than any he had attempted might not be necessary, before the multitude of children under his charge– shouting and gambolling, and yet plunged all the while deep in moral evil– could ever be transformed into a set of Christian gentlemen. But then he remembered his general principles, the conduct of Jehovah with the Chosen People, and the childhood of the human race. No, it was for him to make himself, as one of his pupils afterwards described him, in the words of Bacon, ‘kin to God in spirit’; he would rule the school majestically from on high. He would deliver a series of sermons analysing ‘the six vices’ by which ‘great schools were corrupted, and changed from the likeness of God’s temple to that of a den of thieves’. He would exhort, he would denounce, he would sweep through the corridors, he would turn the pages of Facciolati’s Lexicon more imposingly than ever; and the rest he would leave to the Praepostors in the Sixth Form.
Upon the boys in the Sixth Form, indeed, a strange burden would seem to have fallen. Dr. Arnold himself was very well aware of this. ‘I cannot deny,’ he told them in a sermon, ‘that you have an anxious duty– a duty which some might suppose was too heavy for your years’; and every term he pointed out to them, in a short address, the responsibilities of their position, and impressed upon them ‘the enormous influence’ they possessed ‘for good or for evil’. Nevertheless most youths of seventeen, in spite of the warnings of their elders, have a singular trick of carrying moral burdens lightly. The Doctor might preach and look grave; but young Brooke was ready enough to preside at a fight behind the Chapel, though he was in the Sixth, and knew that fighting was against the rules. At their best, it may be supposed that the Praepostors administered a kind of barbaric justice; but they were not always at their best, and the pages of “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” show us what was no doubt the normal condition of affairs under Dr. Arnold, when the boys in the Sixth Form were weak or brutal, and the blackguard Flashman, in the intervals of swigging brandy-punch with his boon companions, amused himself by toasting fags before the fire.
But there was an exceptional kind of boy, upon whom the high- pitched exhortations of Dr. Arnold produced a very different effect. A minority of susceptible and serious youths fell completely under his sway, responded like wax to the pressure of his influence, and moulded their whole lives with passionate reverence upon the teaching of their adored master. Conspicuous among these was Arthur Clough. Having been sent to Rugby at the age of ten, he quickly entered into every phase of school life, though, we are told, ‘a weakness in his ankles prevented him from taking a prominent part in the games of the place’. At the age of sixteen, he was in the Sixth Form, and not merely a Praepostor, but head of the School House. Never did Dr. Arnold have an apter pupil. This earnest adolescent, with the weak ankles and the solemn face, lived entirely with the highest ends in view. He thought of nothing but moral good, moral evil, moral influence, and moral responsibility. Some of his early letters have been preserved, and they reveal both the intensity with which he felt the importance of his own position, and the strange stress of spirit under which he laboured. ‘I have been in one continued state of excitement for at least the last three years,’ he wrote when he was not yet seventeen, ‘and now comes the time of exhaustion.’ But he did not allow himself to rest, and a few months later he was writing to a schoolfellow as follows: ‘I verily believe my whole being is soaked through with the wishing and hoping and striving to do the school good, or rather to keep it up and hinder it from falling in this, I do think, very critical time, so that my cares and affections and conversations, thoughts, words, and deeds look to that in voluntarily. I am afraid you will be inclined to think this “cant” and I am conscious that even one’s truest feelings, if very frequently put out in the light, do make a bad and disagreeable appearance; but this, however, is true, and even if I am carrying it too far, I do not think it has made me really forgetful of my personal friends, such as, in particular, Gell and Burbidge and Walrond, and yourself, my dear Simpkinson .’
Perhaps it was not surprising that a young man brought up in such an atmosphere, should have fallen a prey at Oxford, to the frenzies of religious controversy; that he should have been driven almost out of his wits by the ratiocinations of W. G. Ward; that he should have lost his faith; that he should have spent the rest of his existence lamenting that loss, both in prose and verse; and that he should have eventually succumbed, conscientiously doing up brown paper parcels for Florence Nightingale.
In the earlier years of his headmastership Dr. Arnold had to face a good deal of opposition. His advanced religious views were disliked, and there were many parents to whom his system of school government did not commend itself. But in time this hostility melted away. Succeeding generations of favourite pupils began to spread his fame through the Universities. At Oxford especially, men were profoundly impressed by the pious aims of the boys from Rugby. It was a new thing to see undergraduates going to Chapel more often than they were obliged, and visiting the good poor. Their reverent admiration for Dr. Arnold was no less remarkable. Whenever two of his old pupils met, they joined in his praises; and the sight of his picture had been known to call forth, from one who had not even reached the Sixth, exclamations of rapture lasting for ten minutes and filling with astonishment the young men from other schools who happened to be present.
He became a celebrity; he became at last a great man. Rugby prospered; its numbers rose higher than ever before; and, after thirteen years as headmaster, Dr. Arnold began to feel that his work there was accomplished, and that he might look forward either to other labours or, perhaps, to a dignified retirement. But it was not to be.
His father had died suddenly at the age of fifty-three from angina pectoris; and he himself was haunted by forebodings of an early death. To be snatched away without a warning, to come in a moment from the seductions of this World to the presence of Eternity– his most ordinary actions, the most casual remarks, served to keep him in remembrance of that dreadful possibility. When one of his little boys clapped his hands at the thought of the approaching holidays, the Doctor gently checked him, and repeated the story of his own early childhood; how his own father had made him read aloud a sermon on the text ‘Boast not thyself of tomorrow”; and how, within the week, his father was dead. On the title page of his MS. volume of sermons, he was always careful to write the date of its commencement, leaving a blank for that of its completion. One of his children asked him the meaning of this. ‘It is one of the most solemn things I do,’ he replied, ‘to write the beginning of that sentence, and think that I may perhaps not live to finish it.’
It was noticed that in the spring of 1842 such thoughts seemed to be even more frequently in his mind than usual. He was only in his forty-seventh year, but he dwelt darkly on the fragility of human existence. Towards the end of May, he began to keep a diary–a private memorandum of his intimate communings with the Almighty. Here, evening after evening, in the traditional language of religious devotion, he humbled himself before God, prayed for strength and purity, and threw himself upon the mercy of the Most High. ‘Another day and another month succeed’, he wrote on May 31st. ‘May God keep my mind and heart fixed on Him, and cleanse me from all sin. I would wish to keep a watch over my tongue, as to vehement speaking and censuring of others…I would desire to remember my latter end to which I am approaching… May God keep me in the hour of death, through Jesus Christ; and preserve me from every fear, as well as from presumption.’ On June 2nd he wrote, ‘Again the day is over and I am going to rest. Oh Lord, preserve me this night, and strengthen me to bear whatever Thou shalt see fit to lay on me, whether pain, sickness, danger, or distress.’ On Sunday, June 5th, the reading of the newspaper aroused ‘painful and solemn’ reflections… ‘So much of sin and so much of suffering in the world, as are there displayed, and no one seems able to remedy either. And then the thought of my own private life, so full of comforts, is very startling.’ He was puzzled; but he concluded with a prayer: ‘May I be kept humble and zealous, and may God give me grace to labour in my generation for the good of my brethren and for His Glory!’
The end of the term was approaching, and to all appearance the Doctor was in excellent spirits. On June 11th, after a hard day’s work, he spent the evening with a friend in the discussion of various topics upon which he often touched in his conversation the comparison of the art of medicine in barbarous and civilised ages, the philological importance of provincial vocabularies, and the threatening prospect of the moral condition of the United States. Left alone, he turned to his diary. ‘The day after tomorrow,’ he wrote, ‘is my birthday, if I am permitted to live to see it– my forty-seventh birthday since my birth. How large a portion of my life on earth is already passed! And then– what is to follow this life? How visibly my outward work seems contracting and softening away into the gentler employments of old age. In one sense how nearly can I now say, “Vivi”. And I thank God that, as far as ambition is concerned, it is, I trust, fully mortified; I have no desire other than to step back from my present place in the world, and not to rise to a higher. Still there are works which, with God’s permission, I would do before the night cometh.’ Dr. Arnold was thinking of his great work on Church and State.
Early next morning he awoke with a sharp pain in his chest. The pain increasing, a physician was sent for; and in the meantime Mrs. Arnold read aloud to her husband the Fifty-first Psalm. Upon one of their boys coming into the room, ‘My son, thank God for me,’ said Dr. Arnold; and as the boy did not at once catch his meaning, he added, ‘Thank God, Tom, for giving me this pain; I have suffered so little pain in my life that I feel it is very good for me. Now God has given it to me, and I do so thank Him for it.’ Then Mrs. Arnold read from the Prayer-book the ‘Visitation of the Sick’, her husband listening with deep attention, and assenting with an emphatic ‘Yes’ at the end of many of the sentences. When the physician arrived, he perceived at once the gravity of the case: it was an attack of angina pectoris. He began to prepare some laudanum, while Mrs. Arnold went out to fetch the children. All at once, as the medical man was bending over his glasses, there was a rattle from the bed; a convulsive struggle followed; and, when the unhappy woman, with the children, and all the servants, rushed into the room, Dr. Arnold had passed from his perplexities forever.
There can be little doubt that what he had achieved justified the prediction of the Provost of Oriel that he would ‘change the face of education all through the public schools of England’. It is true that, so far as the actual machinery of education was concerned, Dr. Arnold not only failed to effect a change, but deliberately adhered to the old system. The monastic and literary conceptions of education, which had their roots in the Middle Ages, and had been accepted and strengthened at the revival of Learning, he adopted almost without hesitation. Under him, the public school remained, in essentials, a conventional establishment, devoted to the teaching of Greek and Latin grammar. Had he set on foot reforms in these directions, it seems probable that he might have succeeded in carrying the parents of England with him. The moment was ripe; there was a general desire for educational changes; and Dr. Arnold’s great reputation could hardly have been resisted. As it was, he threw the whole weight of his influence into the opposite scale, and the ancient system became more firmly established than ever.
The changes which he did effect were of a very different nature. By introducing morals and religion into his scheme of education, he altered the whole atmosphere of public-school life. Henceforward the old rough-and-tumble, which was typified by the regime of Keate at Eton, became impossible. After Dr. Arnold, no public school could venture to ignore the virtues of respectability. Again, by his introduction of the prefectorial system, Dr. Arnold produced far-reaching effects–effects which he himself, perhaps, would have found perplexing. In his day, when the school hours were over, the boys were free to enjoy themselves as they liked; to bathe, to fish, to ramble for long afternoons in the country, collecting eggs or gathering flowers. ‘The taste of the boys at this period,’ writes an old Rugbaean who had been under Arnold, ‘leaned strongly towards flowers’. The words have an odd look today. ‘The modern reader of “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” searches in vain for any reference to compulsory games, house colours, or cricket averages. In those days, when boys played games they played them for pleasure; but in those days the prefectorial system– the system which hands over the life of a school to an oligarchy of a dozen youths of seventeen– was still in its infancy, and had not yet borne its fruit.
Teachers and prophets have strange after-histories; and that of Dr. Arnold has been no exception. The earnest enthusiast who strove to make his pupils Christian gentlemen and who governed his school according to the principles of the Old Testament, has proved to be the founder of the worship of athletics and the worship of good form. Upon those two poles our public schools have turned for so long that we have almost come to believe that such is their essential nature, and that an English public schoolboy who wears the wrong clothes and takes no interest in football, is a contradiction in terms. Yet it was not so before Dr. Arnold; will it always be so after him? We shall see.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dean Stanley. Life and Correspondence of Dr Arnold. Thomas Hughes. Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
Sir H. Maxwell-Lyte. History of Eton College. Wilfrid Ward. W. G. Ward and the Oxford Movement. H. Clough. Letters. An Old Rugbaean. Recollections of Rugby. Thomas Arnold. Passages in a Wandering Life.
The End of General Gordon
DURING the year 1883 a solitary English gentleman was to be seen,
wandering, with a thick book under his arm, in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. His unassuming figure, short and slight, with its half-gliding, half-tripping motion, gave him a boyish aspect, which contrasted, oddly, but not unpleasantly, with the touch of grey on his hair and whiskers. There was the same contrast– enigmatic and attractive–between the sunburnt brick-red complexion–the hue of the seasoned traveller–and the large blue
eyes, with their look of almost childish sincerity. To the friendly inquirer, he would explain, in a row, soft, and very distinct voice, that he was engaged in elucidating four questions–the site of the Crucifixion, the line of division between the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, the identification of Gideon, and the position of the Garden of Eden. He was also, he would add, most anxious to discover the spot where the Ark first touched ground, after the subsidence of the Flood: he believed, indeed, that he had solved that problem, as a reference to some passages in the book which he was carrying would show.
This singular person was General Gordon, and his book was the Holy Bible.
In such complete retirement from the world and the ways of men, it might have seemed that a life of inordinate activity had found
at last a longed-for, final peacefulness. For month after month, for an entire year, the General lingered by the banks of the Jordan. But then the enchantment was suddenly broken. Once more adventure claimed him; he plunged into the whirl of high affairs; his fate was mingled with the frenzies of Empire and the
doom of peoples. And it was not in peace and rest, but in ruin and horror, that he reached his end.
The circumstances of that tragic history, so famous, so bitterly debated, so often and so controversially described, remain full of suggestion for the curious examiner of the past. There emerges
from those obscure, unhappy records an interest, not merely political and historical, but human and dramatic. One catches a vision of strange characters, moved by mysterious impulses, interacting in queer complication, and hurrying at last–so it almost seems–like creatures in a puppet show to a predestined catastrophe. The characters, too, have a charm of their own: they
are curiously English. What other nation on the face of the earth
could have produced Mr. Gladstone and Sir Evelyn Baring and Lord Hartington and General Gordon? Alike in their emphasis and their lack of emphasis, in their eccentricity and their conventionality,
in their matter-of-factness and their romance, these four figures
seem to embody the mingling contradictions of the English spirit.
As for the mise-en-scene, it is perfectly appropriate. But first,
let us glance at the earlier adventures of the hero of the piece.
Charles George Gordon was born in 1833. His father, of Highland and military descent, was himself a Lieutenant-General; his mother came of a family of merchants, distinguished for their sea
voyages into remote regions of the Globe. As a boy, Charlie was remarkable for his high spirits, pluck, and love of mischief. Destined for the Artillery, he was sent to the Academy at Woolwich, where some other characteristics made their appearance.
On one occasion, when the cadets had been forbidden to leave the dining-room and the senior corporal stood with outstretched arms in the doorway to prevent their exit, Charlie Gordon put his head
down, and, butting the officer in the pit of the stomach, projected him down a flight of stairs and through a glass door at
the bottom. For this act of insubordination he was nearly dismissed– while the captain of his company predicted that he would never make an officer. A little later, when he was eighteen, it came to the knowledge of the authorities that bullying was rife at the Academy. The new-comers were questioned,
and one of them said that Charlie Gordon had hit him over the head with a clothes-brush. He had worked well, and his record was
on the whole a good one; but the authorities took a serious view of the case, and held back his commission for six months. It was owing to this delay that he went into the Royal Engineers, instead of the Royal Artillery.
He was sent to Pembroke, to work at the erection of fortifications; and at Pembroke those religious convictions, which never afterwards left him, first gained a hold upon his mind. Under the influence of his sister Augusta and of a ‘very religious captain of the name of Drew’, he began to reflect upon his sins, look up texts, and hope for salvation. Though he had never been confirmed– he never was confirmed– he took the sacrament every Sunday; and he eagerly perused the Priceless Diamond, Scott’s Commentaries, and The Remains of the Rev. R. McCheyne. ‘No novels or worldly books,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘come up to the Commentaries of Scott…. I, remember well when you used to get them in numbers, and I used to laugh at them; but, thank God, it is different with me now. I feel much happier and more contented than I used to do. I did not like Pembroke, but now I would not wish for any prettier place. I have got a horse and gig, and Drew and myself drive all about the country. I
hope my dear father and mother think of eternal things… Dearest Augusta, pray for me, I beg of you.’
He was twenty-one; the Crimean War broke out; and before the year
was over, he had managed to get himself transferred to Balaclava.
During the siege of Sebastopol he behaved with conspicuous gallantry. Upon the declaration of peace, he was sent to Bessarabia to assist in determining the frontier between Russia and Turkey, in accordance with the Treaty of Paris; and upon this
duty he was occupied for nearly two years. Not long after his return home, in 1860, war was declared upon China. Captain Gordon
was dispatched to the scene of operations, but the fighting was over before he arrived. Nevertheless, he was to remain for the next four years in China, where he was to lay the foundations of extraordinary renown.
Though he was too late to take part in the capture of the Taku Forts, he was in time to witness the destruction of the Summer Palace at Peking–the act by which Lord Elgin, in the name of European civilisation, took vengeance upon the barbarism of the East.
The war was over; but the British Army remained in the country, until the payment of an indemnity by the Chinese Government was completed. A camp was formed at Tientsin, and Gordon was occupied
in setting up huts for the troops. While he was thus engaged, he had a slight attack of smallpox. ‘I am glad to say,’ he told his sister, ‘that this disease has brought me back to my Saviour, and
I trust in future to be a better Christian than I have been hitherto.’
Curiously enough a similar circumstance had, more than twenty years earlier, brought about a singular succession of events which were now upon the point of opening the way to Gordon’s first great adventure. In 1837, a village schoolmaster near Canton had been attacked by illness; and, as in the case of Gordon, illness had been followed by a religious revulsion. Hong- Siu-Tsuen– for such was his name– saw visions, went into ecstasies, and entered into relations with the Deity. Shortly afterwards, he fell in with a Methodist missionary from America, who instructed him in the Christian religion. The new doctrine, working upon the mystical ferment already in Hong’s mind, produced a remarkable result. He was, he declared, the prophet of
God; he was more– he was the Son of God; he was Tien Wang, the Celestial King; he was the younger brother of Jesus.
The times were propitious, and proselytes soon gathered around him.
Having conceived a grudge against the Government, owing to his failure
in an examination, Hong gave a political turn to his teaching, which soon developed into a propaganda of rebellion against the rule of the Manchus and the Mandarins. The authorities took fright, attempted to suppress Hong by force, and failed. The movement spread. By 1850 the rebels were overrunning the populous
and flourishing delta of the Yangtse Kiang, and had become a formidable force. In 1853 they captured Nankin, which was henceforth their capital. The Tien Wang, established himself in a
splendid palace, and proclaimed his new evangel. His theogony included the wife of God, or the celestial Mother, the wife of Jesus, or the celestial daughter-in-law, and a sister of Jesus, whom he married to one of his lieutenants, who thus became the celestial son-in-law; the Holy Ghost, however, was eliminated.
His mission was to root out Demons and Manchus from the face of the earth, and to establish Taiping, the reign of eternal peace. In the meantime, retiring into the depths of his palace, he left the further conduct of earthly operations to his lieutenants, upon whom he bestowed the title of ‘Wangs’ (kings), while he himself, surrounded by thirty wives and one hundred concubines, devoted his energies to the spiritual side of his mission. The Taiping Rebellion, as it came to be called, had now reached its furthest extent. The rebels were even able to occupy, for more than a year, the semi-European city of Shanghai.
But then the tide turned. The latent forces of theEmpire gradually
asserted themselves. The rebels lost ground, their armies were defeated,
and in 1859 Nankin itself was besieged, and the Celestial King trembled
in his palace. The end seemed to be at hand, when there was a sudden
twist of Fortune’s wheel. The war of 860, the invasion of China by
European armies, their march into the interior, and their occupation of
Peking, not only saved the rebels from destruction, but allowed them to
recover the greater part of what they had lost. Once more they seized upon the provinces of the delta, once more they menaced Shanghai. It was clear that the Imperial army was incompetent, and the Shanghai merchants determined to provide for their own safety as best they could. They accordingly got together a body of troops, partly Chinese and partly European, and under European
officers, to which they entrusted the defence of the town. This small force, which, after a few preliminary successes, received from the Chinese Government the title of the ‘Ever Victorious Army’, was able to hold the rebels at bay, but it could do no more.
For two years Shanghai was in constant danger. The Taipings, steadily
growing in power, were spreading destruction far and wide. The Ever
Victorious Army was the only force capable of opposing them, and the
Ever Victorious Army was defeated more often than not. Its first European
leader had been killed; his successor quarrelled with the Chinese
Governor, Li Hung Chang, and was dismissed. At last it was determined to
ask the General at the head of the British Army of Occupation for the loan
of an officer to command the force. The English, who had been at first
inclined to favour the Taipings, on religious grounds, were now convinced, on practical grounds, of the necessity of suppressing them. It was in these circumstances that, early in 1863, the command of the Ever Victorious Army was offered to Gordon. He accepted it, received the title of General from the Chinese authorities, and entered forthwith upon his new task. He was just
thirty.
In eighteen months, he told Li Hung Chang, the business would be finished; and he was as good as his word. The difficulties before
him were very great. A vast tract of country was in the possession of the rebels– an area, at the lowest estimate, of 14,000 square miles with a population of 20,000,000. For centuries this low-lying plain of the Yangtse delta, rich in silk
and tea, fertilised by elaborate irrigation, and covered with great walled cities, had been one of the most flourishing districts in China. Though it was now being rapidly ruined by the
depredations of the Taipings, its strategic strength was obviously enormous. Gordon, however, with the eye of a born general, perceived that he could convert the very feature of the country which, on the face of it, most favoured an army on the defence– its complicated geographical system of interlacing roads
and waterways, canals, lakes and rivers– into a means of offensive warfare. The force at his disposal was small, but it was mobile. He had a passion for map-making, and had already, in his leisure hours, made a careful survey of the country round Shanghai; he was thus able to execute a series of manoeuvres which proved fatal to the enemy. By swift marches and counter- marches, by sudden attacks and surprises, above all by the dispatch of armed steamboats up the circuitous waterways into positions from which they could fall upon the enemy in reverse, he was able gradually to force back the rebels, to cut them off piecemeal in the field, and to seize upon their cities.
But, brilliant as these operations were, Gordon’s military genius
showed itself no less unmistakably in other directions. The Ever Victorious Army, recruited from the riff-raff of Shanghai, was an
ill-disciplined, ill-organised body of about three thousand men, constantly on the verge of mutiny, supporting itself on plunder, and, at the slightest provocation, melting into thin air. Gordon,
by sheer force of character, established over this incoherent mass of ruffians an extraordinary ascendancy. He drilled them with rigid severity; he put them into a uniform, armed them systematically, substituted pay for loot, and was even able, at last, to introduce regulations of a sanitary kind. There were some terrible scenes, in which the General, alone, faced the whole furious army, and quelled scenes of rage, desperation, towering courage, and summary execution. Eventually he attained an almost magical prestige. Walking at the head of his troops with nothing but a light cane in his hand, he seemed to pass through every danger with the scatheless equanimity of a demi- god. The Taipings themselves were awed into a strange reverence. More than once their leaders, in a frenzy of fear and admiration,
ordered the sharp-shooters not to take aim at the advancing figure of the faintly smiling Englishman.
It is significant that Gordon found it easier to win battles and to crush mutineers than to keep on good terms with the Chinese authorities. He had to act in cooperation with a large native force; and it was only natural that the general at the head of it
should grow more and more jealous and angry as the Englishman’s successes revealed more and more clearly his own incompetence. At
first, indeed, Gordon could rely upon the support of the Governor. Li Flung Chang’s experience of Europeans had been hitherto limited to low-class adventurers, and Gordon came as a revelation. ‘It is a direct blessing from Heaven,’ he noted in his diary, ‘the coming of this British Gordon. … He is superior
in manner and bearing to any of the foreigners whom I have come into contact with, and does not show outwardly that conceit which
makes most of them repugnant in my sight.’ A few months later, after he had accompanied Gordon on a victorious expedition, the Mandarin’s enthusiasm burst forth. ‘What a sight for tired eyes,’
he wrote, ‘what an elixir for a heavy heart– to see this splendid Englishman fight! … If there is anything that I admire
nearly as much as the superb scholarship of Tseng Kuofan, it is the military qualities of this fine officer. He is a glorious fellow!’ In his emotion, Li Hung Chang addressed Gordon as his brother, declaring that he ‘considered him worthy to fill the place of the brother who is departed. Could I have said more in all the words of the world?’
Then something happened which impressed and mystified the sensitive
Chinaman. ‘The Englishman’s face was first filled with a deep pleasure,
and then he seemed to be thinking), of something depressing and sad; for
the smile went from his mouth and there were tears in his eyes when he
thanked me for what I had said. Can it be that he has, or has had, some
great trouble in his life, and that he fights recklessly to forget it, or that Death has no terrors for him?’ But, as time went on, Li Hung Chang’s attitude began to change. ‘General Gordon,’ he notes in July, ‘must control his tongue, even if he lets his mind run loose.’ The Englishman had accused him of intriguing with the Chinese general, and of withholding money due
to the Ever Victorious Army. ‘Why does he not accord me the honours that are due to me, as head of the military and civil authority in these parts?’ By September, the Governor’s earlier transports have been replaced by a more judicial frame of mind. ‘With his many faults, his pride, his temper, and his never- ending demand for money, (for one is a noble man, and in spite of all
I have said to him or about him) I will ever think most highly of
him. … He is an honest man, but difficult to get on with.’
Disagreements of this kind might perhaps have been tided over until the end of the campaign; but an unfortunate incident suddenly led to a more serious quarrel. Gordon’s advance had been
fiercely contested, but it had been constant; he had captured several important towns; and in October lice laid siege to the city of Soo-chow, once one of the most famous and splendid in China. In December, its fall being obviously imminent, the Taiping leaders agreed to surrender it on condition that their lives were spared. Gordon was a party to the agreement, and laid special stress upon his presence with the Imperial forces as a pledge of its fulfilment. No sooner, however, was the city surrendered than the rebel ‘Wangs’ were assassinated. In his fury, it is said that Gordon searched everywhere for Li Hung Chang with a loaded pistol in his hand. He was convinced of the complicity of the Governor, who, on his side, denied that he was responsible for what had happened. ‘I asked him why I should plot, and go around a mountain, when a mere order, written with five strokes of the quill, would have accomplished the same thing. He did not answer, but he insulted me, and said he would report my treachery, as he called it, to Shanghai and England. Let him do so; he cannot bring the crazy Wangs back.’ The agitated Mandarin hoped to placate Gordon by a large gratuity and
an Imperial medal; but the plan was not successful. ‘General Gordon,’ he writes, ‘called upon me in his angriest mood. He repeated his former speeches about the Wangs. I did not attempt to argue with him… He refused the 10,000 taels, which I had ready for him, and, with an oath, said that he did not want the Throne’s medal. This is showing the greatest disrespect.’
Gordon resigned his command; and it was only with the utmost reluctance that he agreed at last to resume it. An arduous and terrible series of operations followed; but they were successful,
and by June, 1864, the Ever Victorious Army, having accomplished its task, was disbanded. The Imperial forces now closed round Nankin; the last hopes of the Tien Wang had vanished. In the recesses of his seraglio, the Celestial King, judging that the time had come for the conclusion of his mission, swallowed gold leaf until he ascended to Heaven. In July, Nankin was taken, the remaining chiefs were executed, and the rebellion was at an end. The Chinese Government gave Gordon the highest rank in its military hierarchy, and invested him with the yellow jacket and the peacock’s feather. He rejected an enormous offer of money; but he could not refuse a great gold medal, specially struck in his honour by order of the Emperor. At the end of the year he returned to England, where the conqueror of the Taipings was made
a Companion of the Bath.
That the English authorities should have seen fit to recognise Gordon’s services by the reward usually reserved for industrious clerks was typical of their attitude towards him until the very end of his career. Perhaps if he had been ready to make the most of the wave of popularity which greeted him on his return–if he had advertised his fame and, amid high circles, played the part of Chinese Gordon in a becoming manner– the results would have been different. But he was by nature farouche; his soul revolted against dinner parties and stiff shirts; and the presence of ladies– especially of fashionable ladies– filled him with uneasiness. He had, besides, a deeper dread of the world’s contaminations. And so, when he was appointed to Gravesend to supervise the erection of a system of forts at the mouth of the Thames, he remained there quietly for six years, and at last was almost forgotten. The forts, which were extremely expensive and quite useless, occupied his working hours; his leisure he devoted
to acts of charity and to religious contemplation. The neighbourhood
was a poverty-stricken one, and the kind Colonel, with his tripping
step and simple manner, was soon a familiar figure in it, chatting
with the seamen, taking provisions to starving families, or visiting
some bedridden old woman to light her fire. He was particularly fond
of boys. Ragged street arabs and rough sailor-lads crowded about him.
They were made free of his house and garden; they visited him in the
evenings for lessons and advice; he helped them, found them employment,
corresponded with them when they went out into the world. They were, he said, his Wangs. It was only by a singular austerity of living that he was able to afford such a variety of charitable expenses. The easy luxuries of his class and station were unknown
to him: his clothes verged upon the shabby; and his frugal meals were eaten at a table with a drawer, into which the loaf and plate were quickly swept at the approach of his poor visitors. Special occasions demanded special sacrifices. When, during the Lancashire famine, a public subscription was opened, finding that he had no ready money, he remembered his Chinese medal, and, after effacing the inscription, dispatched it as an anonymous gift.
Except for his boys and his paupers, he lived alone. In his solitude, he ruminated upon the mysteries of the universe; and those religious tendencies, which had already shown themselves, now became a fixed and dominating factor in his life. His reading
was confined almost entirely to the Bible; but the Bible he read and re-read with an untiring, unending assiduity. There, he was convinced, all truth was to be found; and he was equally convinced that he could find it. The doubts of philosophers, the investigations of commentators, the smiles of men of the world, the dogmas of Churches– such things meant nothing to the Colonel.
Two facts alone were evident: there was the Bible, and there was himself; and all that remained to be done was for him to discover
what were the Bible’s instructions, and to act accordingly. In order to make this discovery it was only necessary for him to read the Bible over and over again; and therefore, for the rest of his life, he did so.
The faith that he evolved was mystical and fatalistic; it was also highly unconventional. His creed, based upon the narrow foundations of Jewish Scripture, eked out occasionally by some English evangelical manual, was yet wide enough to ignore every doctrinal difference, and even, at moments, to transcend the bounds of Christianity itself. The just man was he who submitted to the Will of God, and the Will of God, inscrutable and absolute, could be served aright only by those who turned away from earthly desires and temporal temptations, to rest themselves
whole-heartedly upon the in-dwelling Spirit. Human beings were the transitory embodiments of souls who had existed through an infinite past, and would continue to exist through an infinite future.
The world was vanity; the flesh was dust and ashes. ‘A man,’ Gordon
wrote to his sister, ‘who knows not the secret, who has not the in-dwelling
of God revealed to him, is like this–[picture of a circle with Body and
Soul written within it]. He takes the promises and curses as addressed
to him as one man, and will not hear of there being any birth before his
natural birth, in any existence except with the body he is in. The man to
whom the secret (the indwelling of God) is revealed is like this: [picture
of a circle with soul and body enclosed in two separate circles].
He applies the promises to one and the curses to the other, if disobedient, which he must be, except the soul is enabled by God to rule. He then sees he is not of this world; for when he speaks
of himself he quite disregards the body his soul lives in, which is earthly.’ Such conceptions are familiar enough in the history of religious thought: they are those of the hermit and the fakir;
and it might have been expected that, when once they had taken hold upon his mind, Gordon would have been content to lay aside the activities of his profession, and would have relapsed at last
into the complete retirement of holy meditation. But there were other elements in his nature which urged him towards a very different course. He was no simple quietist. He was an English gentleman, an officer, a man of energy and action, a lover of danger and the audacities that defeat danger; a passionate creature, flowing over with the self-assertiveness of independent
judgment and the arbitrary temper of command.
Whatever he might find in his pocket-Bible, it was not for such as
he to dream out his days in devout obscurity. But, conveniently enough,
he found nothing in his pocket-Bible indicating that he should. What
he did find was that the Will of God was inscrutable and absolute;
that it was man’s duty to follow where God’s hand led; and, if God’s hand led towards violent excitements and extraordinary vicissitudes, that it was not only futile, it was impious to turn another way. Fatalism is always apt to be a double-edged philosophy; for while, on the one hand, it reveals the minutest occurrences as the immutable result of a rigid chain of infinitely predestined causes, on the other, it invests the wildest incoherences of conduct or of circumstance with the sanctity of eternal law. And Gordon’s fatalism was no exception. The same doctrine that led him to dally with omens, to search for
prophetic texts, and to append, in brackets, the apotropaic initials D.V. after every statement in his letters implying futurity, led him also to envisage his moods and his desires, his
passing reckless whims and his deep unconscious instincts, as the
mysterious manifestations of the indwelling God. That there was danger lurking in such a creed he was very well aware. The grosser temptations of the world– money and the vulgar attributes
of power– had, indeed, no charms for him; but there were subtler
and more insinuating allurements which it was not so easy to resist. More than one observer declared that ambition was, in reality, the essential motive in his life: ambition, neither for wealth nor titles, but for fame and influence, for the swaying of
multitudes, and for that kind of enlarged and intensified existence ‘where breath breathes most even in the mouths of men’.
Was it so? In the depths of Gordon’s soul there were intertwining
contradictions– intricate recesses where egoism and renunciation
melted into one another, where the flesh lost itself in the spirit, and the spirit in the flesh. What was the Will of God? The question, which first became insistent during his retirement at Gravesend, never afterwards left him; it might almost be said that he spent the remainder of his life in searching for the answer to it. In all his Odysseys, in all his strange and agitated adventures, a day never passed on which he neglected the
voice of eternal wisdom as it spoke through the words of Paul or Solomon, of Jonah or Habakkuk. He opened his Bible, he read, and then he noted down his reflections upon scraps of paper, which, periodically pinned together, he dispatched to one or other of his religious friends, and particularly his sister Augusta. The published extracts from these voluminous outpourings lay bare the
inner history of Gordon’s spirit, and reveal the pious visionary of Gravesend in the restless hero of three continents.
His seclusion came to an end in a distinctly providential manner.
In accordance with a stipulation in the Treaty of Paris, an international commission had been appointed to improve the navigation of the Danube; and Gordon, who had acted on a similar body fifteen years earlier, was sent out to represent Great Britain. At Constantinople, he chanced to meet the Egyptian minister, Nubar Pasha. The Governorship of the Equatorial Provinces of the Sudan was about to fall vacant; and Nubar offered the post to Gordon, who accepted it. ‘For some wise design,’ he wrote to his sister, ‘God turns events one way or another, whether man likes it or not, as a man driving a horse turns it to right or left without consideration as to whether the
horse likes that way or not. To be happy, a man must be like a well-broken, willing horse, ready for anything. Events will go as
God likes.’
And then followed six years of extraordinary, desperate, unceasing, and ungrateful labour. The unexplored and pestilential
region of Equatoria, stretching southwards to the Great Lakes and
the sources of the Nile, had been annexed to Egypt by the Khedive
Ismail, who, while he squandered his millions on Parisian ballet- dancers, dreamt strange dreams of glory and empire. Those dim tracts of swamp and forest in Central Africa were– so he declared– to be ‘opened up’; they were to receive the blessings of civilisation, they were to become a source of eternal honour to himself and Egypt. The slave-trade, which flourished there, was to be put down; the savage inhabitants were to become acquainted with freedom, justice, and prosperity. Incidentally, a
government monopoly in ivory was to be established, and the place
was to be made a paying concern. Ismail, hopelessly in debt to a horde of European creditors, looked to Europe to support him in his schemes. Europe, and, in particular, England, with her passion for extraneous philanthropy, was not averse.
Sir Samuel Baker became the first Governor of Equatoria, and now Gordon was to carry on the good work. In such circumstances it was
only natural that Gordon should consider himself a special instrument
in God’s band. To put his disinterestedness beyond doubt, he reduced his salary, which had been fixed at £10,000, to £2,000. He
took over his new duties early in 1874, and it was not long before he had a first hint of disillusionment. On his way up the Nile, he was received in state at Khartoum by the Egyptian Governor– General of the Sudan, his immediate official superior.
The function ended in a prolonged banquet, followed by a mixed ballet of soldiers and completely naked young women, who danced in a circle, beat time with their feet, and accompanied their gestures with a curious sound of clucking. At last the Austrian Consul, overcome by the exhilaration of the scene, flung himself in a frenzy among the dancers; the Governor-General, shouting with delight, seemed about to follow suit, when Gordon abruptly left the room, and the party broke up in confusion.
When, 1,500 miles to the southward, Gordon reached the seat of his government, and the desolation of the Tropics closed over him, the agonising nature of his task stood fully revealed. For the next three years he struggled with enormous difficulties– with the confused and horrible country, the appalling climate, the maddening insects and the loathsome diseases, the indifference of subordinates and superiors, the savagery of the slave-traders, and the hatred of the inhabitants. One by one the small company of his European staff succumbed. With a few hundred
Egyptian soldiers he had to suppress insurrections, make roads, establish fortified posts, and enforce the government monopoly of
ivory. All this he accomplished; he even succeeded in sending enough money to Cairo to pay for the expenses of the expedition.
But a deep gloom had fallen upon his spirit. When, after a series
of incredible obstacles had been overcome, a steamer was launched
upon the unexplored Albert Nyanza, he turned his back upon the lake, leaving the glory of its navigation to his Italian lieutenant, Gessi. ‘I wish,’ he wrote, ‘to give a practical proof
of what I think regarding the inordinate praise which is given to
an explorer.’ Among his distresses and self-mortifications, he loathed the thought of all such honours, and remembered the attentions of English society with a snarl. ‘When, D.V., I get home, I do not dine out. My reminiscences of these lands will not be more pleasant to me than the China ones. What I shall have
done, will be what I have done. Men think giving dinners is conferring a favour on you… Why not give dinners to those who need them?’ No! His heart was set upon a very different object. ‘To each is allotted a distinct work, to each a destined goal; to
some the seat at the right hand or left hand of the Saviour. (It was not His to give; it was already given– Matthew xx, 23. Again,
Judas went to “HIS OWN PLACE”–Acts i, 25.) It is difficult for the flesh to accept: “Ye are dead, ye have naught to do with the world”. How difficult for anyone to be circumcised from the world, to be as indifferent to its pleasures, its sorrows, and its comforts as a corpse is! That is to know the resurrection.’
But the Holy Bible was not his only solace. For now, under the parching African sun, we catch glimpses, for the first time, of Gordon’s hand stretching out towards stimulants of a more material quality. For months together, we are told, he would drink nothing but pure water; and then … water that was not so pure. In his fits of melancholy, he would shut himself up in his tent for days at a time, with a hatchet and a flag placed at the door to indicate that he was not to be disturbed for any reason whatever; until at last the cloud would lift, the signals would be removed, and the Governor would reappear, brisk and cheerful.
During, one of these retirements, there was grave danger of a native attack upon the camp. Colonel Long, the Chief of Staff, ventured, after some hesitation, to ignore the flag and hatchet, and to enter the forbidden tent. He found Gordon seated at a table, upon which were an open Bible and an open bottle of brandy. Long explained the circumstances, but could obtain no answer beyond the abrupt words–‘You are commander of the camp’– and was obliged to retire, nonplussed, to deal with the situation
as best he could. On the following morning, Gordon, cleanly shaven, and in the full-dress uniform of the Royal Engineers, entered Long’s hut with his usual tripping step, exclaiming ‘Old fellow, now don’t be angry with me. I was very low last night. Let’s have a good breakfast–a little b. and s. Do you feel up to
it?’ And, with these veering moods and dangerous restoratives, there came an intensification of the queer and violent elements in the temper of the man.
His eccentricities grew upon him. He found it more and more uncomfortable
to follow the ordinary course. Official routine was an agony to him. His
caustic and satirical humour expressed itself in a style that astounded
government departments. While he jibed at his superiors, his subordinates
learned to dread the explosions of his wrath. There were moments when his
passion became utterly ungovernable; and the gentle soldier of God, who
had spent the day in quoting texts for the edification of his sister, would
slap the face of his Arab aide-de-camp in a sudden access of fury, or set
upon his Alsatian servant and kick him until he screamed.
At the end of three years, Gordon resigned his post in Equatoria,
and prepared to return home. But again Providence intervened: the
Khedive offered him, as an inducement to remain in the Egyptian service, a position of still higher consequence– the Governor- Generalship of the whole Sudan; and Gordon once more took up his task. Another three years were passed in grappling with vast revolting provinces, with the ineradicable iniquities of the slave-trade, and with all the complications of weakness and corruption incident to an oriental administration extending over almost boundless tracts of savage territory which had never been effectively subdued. His headquarters were fixed in the palace at
Khartoum; but there were various interludes in his government. Once,
when the Khedive’s finances had become peculiarly embroiled, he summoned Gordon to Cairo to preside over a commission which should set matters to rights.
Gordon accepted the post, but soon found that his situation was untenable. He was between the devil and the deep sea– between the
unscrupulous cunning of the Egyptian Pashas, and the immeasurable
immensity of the Khedive’s debts to his European creditors. The Pashas
were anxious to use him as a respectable mask for their own nefarious
dealings; and the representatives of the European creditors, who looked
upon him as an irresponsible intruder, were anxious simply to get rid
of him as soon as they could. One of these representatives was Sir Evelyn Baring, whom Gordon now met for the first time. An immediate antagonism flashed out between the two men. But their hostility had no time to mature; for Gordon, baffled on all sides, and deserted even by the Khedive, precipitately returned to his Governor-Generalship. Whatever else Providence might have decreed, it had certainly not decided that he should be a financier.
His tastes and his talents were indeed of a very different kind. In his absence, a rebellion had broken out in Darfur– one of the
vast outlying provinces of his government– where a native chieftain, Zobeir, had erected, on a basis of slave-traffic, a dangerous military power. Zobeir himself had been lured to Cairo,
where he was detained in a state of semi-captivity; but his son, Suleiman, ruled in his stead, and was now defying the Governor- General. Gordon determined upon a hazardous stroke. He mounted a camel, and rode, alone, in the blazing heat, across eighty-five miles of desert, to Suleiman’s camp. His sudden apparition dumbfounded the rebels; his imperious bearing overawed them; he signified to them that in two days they must disarm and disperse;
and the whole host obeyed. Gordon returned to Khartoum in triumph.
But he had not heard the last of Suleiman. Flying southwards from
Darfur to the neighbouring province of Bahr-el-Ghazal, the young man was soon once more at the head of a formidable force. A prolonged campaign of extreme difficulty and danger followed. Eventually, Gordon, summoned again to Cairo, was obliged to leave
to Gessi the task of finally crushing the revolt. After a brilliant campaign, Gessi forced Suleiman to surrender, and then shot him as a rebel. The deed was to exercise a curious influence
upon Gordon’s fate.
Though Suleiman had been killed and his power broken, the slave- trade still flourished in the Sudan. Gordon’s efforts to suppress
it resembled the palliatives of an empiric treating the superficial symptoms of some profound constitutional disease. The
root of the malady lay in the slave-markets of Cairo and Constantinople: the supply followed the demand. Gordon, after years of labour, might here and there stop up a spring or divert a tributary, but, somehow or other the waters would reach the river-bed. In the end, he himself came to recognise this. ‘When you have got the ink that has soaked into blotting-paper out of it,’ he said, ‘then slavery will cease in these lands.’ And yet he struggled desperately on; it was not for him to murmur. ‘I feel my own weakness, and look to Him who is Almighty, and I leave the issue without inordinate care to Him.’
Relief came at last. The Khedive Ismail was deposed; and Gordon felt at liberty to send in his resignation. Before he left Egypt, however, he was to experience yet one more remarkable adventure. At his own request, he set out on a diplomatic mission to the Negus of Abyssinia. The mission was a complete failure. The Negus was intractable, and, when his bribes were refused, furious. Gordon was ignominiously dismissed; every insult was heaped on him; he was arrested, and obliged to traverse the Abyssinian Mountains in the depth of winter under the escort of a savage troop of horse. When, after great hardships and dangers, he reached Cairo, he found the whole official world up in arms against him. The Pashas had determined at last that they had no further use for this honest and peculiar
Englishman. It was arranged that one of his confidential dispatches should be published in the newspapers; naturally, it contained indiscretions; there was a universal outcry– the man was insubordinate, and mad. He departed under a storm of obloquy.
It seemed impossible that he should ever return to Egypt.
On his way home he stopped in Paris, saw the English Ambassador, Lord Lyons, and speedily came into conflict with him over Egyptian
affairs. There ensued a heated correspondence, which was finally closed by a letter from Gordon, ending as follows: ‘I have some comfort in thinking that in ten or fifteen years’ time it will matter
little to either of us. A black box, six feet six by three feet wide,
will then contain all that is left of Ambassador, or Cabinet Minister,
or of your humble and obedient servant.’
He arrived in England early in 1880 ill and exhausted; and it might have been supposed that after the terrible activities of his African exile he would have been ready to rest. But the very opposite was the case; the next three years were the most momentous of his life. He hurried from post to post, from enterprise to enterprise, from continent to continent, with a vertiginous rapidity. He accepted the Private Secretaryship to Lord Ripon, the new Viceroy of India, and, three days after his arrival at Bombay, he resigned. He had suddenly realised that he was not cut out for a Private Secretary, when, on an address being sent in from some deputation, he was asked to say that the Viceroy had read it with interest. ‘You know perfectly,’ he said to Lord William Beresford, ‘that Lord Ripon has never read it, and I can’t say that sort of thing; so I will resign, and you take in my resignation.’ He confessed to Lord William that the world was not big enough for him, that there was ‘no king or country big enough’; and then he added, hitting him on the shoulder, ‘Yes, that is flesh, that is what I hate, and what makes me wish to die.’
Two days later, he was off for Pekin. ‘Every one will say I am mad,’ were his last words to Lord William Beresford; ‘but you say
I am not.’ The position in China was critical; war with Russia appeared to be imminent; and Gordon had been appealed to in order to use his influence on the side of peace. He was welcomed by many old friends of former days, among them Li Hung Chang, whose diplomatic views coincided with his own. Li’s diplomatic language, however, was less unconventional. In an interview with the Ministers, Gordon’s expressions were such that the interpreter
shook with terror, upset a cup of tea, and finally refused to translate
the dreadful words; upon which Gordon snatched up a dictionary, and,
with his finger on the word ‘idiocy’, showed it to the startled Mandarins.
A few weeks later, Li Hung Chang was in power, and peace was assured.
Gordon had spent two and a half days in Pekin, and was whirling through
China, when a telegram arrived from the home authorities, who viewed his movements with uneasiness, ordering him to return at once to England. ‘It did not produce a twitter in me,’ he wrote to his sister; ‘I died long ago, and it will not make any difference to me; I am prepared to follow the unrolling of the scroll.’ The world, perhaps, was not big enough for him; and yet how clearly he recognised that he was ‘a poor insect!’ ‘My heart tells me that, and I am glad of it.’
On his return to England, he telegraphed to the Government of the
Cape of Good Hope, which had become involved in a war with the Basutos, offering his services; but his telegram received no reply. Just then, Sir Howard Elphinstone was appointed to the command of the Royal Engineers in Mauritius. it was a thankless and insignificant post; and, rather than accept it, Elphinstone was prepared to retire from the Army– unless some other officer could be induced, in return for £800, to act as his substitute. Gordon, who was an old friend, agreed to undertake the work upon one condition: that he should receive nothing from Elphinstone; and accordingly, he spent the next year in that remote and unhealthy island, looking after the barrack repairs and testing the drains.
While he was thus engaged, the Cape Government, whose difficulties
had been increasing, changed its mind, and early in 1882, begged for
Gordon’s help. Once more he was involved in great affairs: a new field
of action opened before him; and then, in a moment, there was another
shift of the kaleidoscope, and again he was thrown upon the world. Within
a few weeks, after a violent quarrel with the Cape authorities, his mission
had come to an end. What should he do next? To what remote corner or what
enormous stage, to what self-sacrificing drudgeries or what resounding
exploits, would the hand of God lead him now? He waited, in an odd hesitation.
He opened the Bible, but neither the prophecies of Hosea nor the epistles
to Timothy gave him any advice. The King of the Belgians asked if he would
be willing to go to the Congo. He was perfectly willing; he would go whenever
the King of the Belgians sent for him; his services, however, were not required
yet. It was at this juncture that he betook himself to Palestine. His studies
there were embodied in a correspondence with the Rev. Mr. Barnes, filling over
2,000 pages of manuscript– a correspondence which was only put an end to
when, at last, the summons from the King of the Belgians came. He
hurried back to England; but it was not to the Congo that he was being led by the hand of God.
Gordon’s last great adventure, like his first, was occasioned by a religious revolt. At the very moment when, apparently forever, he was shaking the dust of Egypt from his feet, Mahommed Ahmed was starting upon his extraordinary career in the Sudan. The time
was propitious for revolutions. The effete Egyptian Empire was hovering upon the verge of collapse. The enormous territories of the Sudan were seething with discontent. Gordon’s administration had, by its very vigour, only helped to precipitate the inevitable disaster. His attacks upon the slave-trade, his establishment of a government monopoly in ivory, his hostility to
the Egyptian officials, had been so many shocks, shaking to its foundations the whole rickety machine. The result of all his efforts had been, on the one hand, to fill the most powerful classes in the community– the dealers in slaves and, ivory– with
a hatred of the government, and on the other to awaken among the mass of the inhabitants a new perception of the dishonesty and incompetence of their Egyptian masters.
When, after Gordon’s removal, the rule of the Pashas once more asserted
itself over the Sudan, a general combustion became inevitable: the first
spark would set off the blaze. Just then it happened that Mahommed Ahmed,
the son of an insignificant priest in Dongola, having quarrelled with the
Sheikh from whom he was receiving religious instruction, set up as an
independent preacher, with his headquarters at Abba Island, on the Nile,
150 miles above Khartoum. Like Hong-siu-tsuen, he began as a religious
reformer, and ended as a rebel king. It was his mission, he declared, to
purge the true Faith of its worldliness and corruptions, to lead the followers of the prophet into the paths of chastity, simplicity, and holiness; with the puritanical zeal of a Calvin, be denounced junketings and merrymakings, songs and dances, lewd living and all the delights of the flesh. He fell into trances, he saw visions, he saw the prophet and Jesus, and the Angel Izrail accompanying him and watching over him forever. He prophesied and performed miracles, and his fame spread through the land.
There is an ancient tradition in the Mohammedan world, telling of
a mysterious being, the last in succession of the twelve holy Imams, who, untouched by death and withdrawn into the recesses of
a mountain, was destined, at the appointted hour, to come forth again among men. His title was the Mahdi, the guide; some believed that he would be the forerunner of the Messiah; others believed that he would be Christ himself. Already various Mahdis
had made their appearance; several had been highly successful, and
two, in medieval times, had founded dynasties in Egypt. But who could
tell whether ail these were not impostors? Might not the twelfth Imam be still waiting, in mystical concealment, ready to emerge, at any moment, at the bidding of God? There were signs by which the true Mahdi might be recognised– unmistakable signs, if one could but read them aright. He must be of the family of the prophet; he must possess miraculous powers of no common kind; and
his person must be overflowing with a peculiar sanctity. The pious dwellers beside those distant waters, where holy men by dint of a constant repetition of one of the ninety-nine names of God, secured the protection of guardian angels, and where groups of devotees, shaking their heads with a violence which would unseat the reason of less athletic worshippers, attained to an extraordinary beatitude, heard with awe of the young preacher whose saintliness was almost more than mortal and whose miracles brought amazement to the mind. Was he not also of the family of the prophet? He himself had said so, and who would disbelieve the
holy man? When he appeared in person, every doubt was swept away.
There was a strange splendour in his presence, an overpowering passion in the torrent of his speech. Great was the wickedness of
the people, and great was their punishment! Surely their miseries
were a visible sign of the wrath of the Lord. They had sinned, and the cruel tax gatherers had come among them, and the corrupt governors, and all the oppressions of the Egyptians. Yet these things, ‘Too, should have an end. The Lord would raise up his chosen deliverer; the hearts of the people would be purified, and
their enemies would be laid low. The accursed Egyptian would be driven from the land. Let the faithful take heart and make ready.