For thirty-five years then he served his country as an Inspector of
Elementary Schools, and the experience which he thus gained, the
interest which was thus awoke in him, suggested to him some large and
far-reaching views about our entire system of National Education. It is
no disparagement to a highly-cultivated and laborious staff of public
servants to say that he was the greatest Inspector of Schools that we
have ever possessed. It is true that he was not, as the manner of some
is, omnidoct and omnidocent. His incapacity to examine little girls in
needlework he frankly confessed; and his incapacity to examine them in
music, if unconfessed, was not less real. "I assure you," he said to the
Westminster Teachers, "I am not at all a harsh judge of myself; but I
know perfectly well that there have been much better inspectors than I."
Once, when a flood of compliments threatened to overwhelm him, he waved
it off with the frank admission--"Nobody can say I am a punctual
Inspector." Why then do we call him the greatest Inspector that we ever
had? Because he had that most precious of all combinations--a genius and
a heart. Trying to account for what he could not ignore--his immense
popularity with the masters and mistresses of the schools which he
inspected--he attributed part of it to the fact that he was Dr. Arnold's
son, part to the fact that he was "more or less known to the public as
an author"; but, of personal qualifications for his office, he
enumerated two only, and both eminently characteristic: "One is that,
having a serious sense of the nature and function of criticism, I from
the first sought to see the schools as they really were; thus it was
felt that I was fair, and that the teachers had not to apprehend from me
crotchets, pedantries, humours, favouritism, and prejudices." The other
was that he had learnt to sympathize with the teachers. "I met daily in
the schools men and women discharging duties akin to mine, duties as
irksome as mine, duties less well paid than mine; and I asked myself:
Are they on roses? Gradually it grew into a habit with me to put myself