The Road to Rugby Chapel

THE ROAD TO RUGBY CHAPEL HARVEY KERPNECK Shortly after "Rugby Chapel" had been published, in New Poems by Matthew Arnold, 1867, Arnold wrote to his mother, in response to her praise of it: It was Fitzjames Stephen's thesis, maintained in the Edinburgh Review, of Papa's being a narrow, bustling fanatic, which moved me nrst to the poem. I think I have done something to nx the true legend about Papa [August 8, 1867]. This was a private letter, and made private disclosures about the beginnings of the poem. Arnold may even have had private motives for saying what he did, which the letter cannot disclose. And yet Arnold's remarks here may have been a little incautious. For since the publication of his correspondence he has been innocently guilty of misleading scholarship. Lionel Trilling, for example, bases his commentary on Arnold's letter to his mother: In passing, it may be mentioned that Stephen's "ill-treatment" (as Matthew called it) of Thomas Arnold in his review of Tom Brown's School-days (Edinburgh Review, eVIl, 1858) was the occasion which called forth Matthew Arnold's Rugby Chapel [Matthew Arnold, 386]. And Stephens, Beck and Snow, in their inauential anthology, Victorian and Later English Poets, quote at length from the letter and make a digest of Stephen's original review. Now in the latest volume to appear on Arnold, H. C. Duffin's Arnold the Poet (1962), Arnold's remarks to his mother are repeated as the basis for discussion: Arnold had waited nfteen years after his father's death... . The "nfteen years" was not a deliberately chosen period; Arnold told his mother he had been moved to write the poem by an attack on his father by Fitzjames Stephen. (A more seemly reply than that made by Browning to the other "Fitz"!) [96]. Mr. Duffin's comments even imply that the article by Fitzjames Stephen to which Arnold responded by exonerating his father in "Rugby Chapel" appeared, not in 1858, but in 1856 or 1857, and the poem was written in the white heat of a righteous wrath shortly afterwards. Volume XXXIV, Number 2, January. 1965 THE ROAD TO RUGBY CHAPEL 179 But the key word in Arnold's statement to his mother is "first." What Arnold told his mother in that fateful letter was not that the poem was composed in 1858 (sixteen, not fifteen, years after Thomas Arnold's death in 1842), nor even that he began to write it then. What he said was that Stephen's arch, crude, and deliberately intemperate criticism of Thomas Arnold in his Edinburgh Review article was the impetus which stirred him to vindicate his father in the public eye: that and nothing more. There is nothing here abeut the composition of the poem, nothing about the date of its inception or completion, nothing but the statement that Arnold felt compelled to reply in verse, which presumably alone was equal to the occasion, to Fitzjames Stephen's denigration of his father, anel that "Rugby Chapel" was the end-product of this impulse. One can understand Arnold's reaction when one reads Stephen's review, which was a long and violent harangue, even today. One extract can establish Stephen's thesis and make Arnold's anger intelligible: The great standing charge which Dr. Arnold brought against public school boys was the want of what he delighted to call "moral thoughtfulness"; a phrase, which to those who remember its employment at the universities by the solemn array of Rugby praepostors, is associated with a most ludicrous recollection of old heads set upon young shoulders, and completely puzzled by their position. Such, however, was far from being Dr. Arnold's estimate of this cardinal virtue. To make his beys morally thoughtful was for him the substance of the law and the prophets. The IOtal want of humour which characterized him prevented him from seeing that much of what he considered lCawful wickedness," was mere fun, and that it was far less desirable than possible to turn beys into men hefore their time. It seems to have been his serious wish to bring boys to see a duty in every act of their...