What is almost more important is that the average literary criticism of William IV.'s reign and of the first twenty years of her present Majesty's was exceedingly bad. At one side, of course, the work of men like Thackeray, who were men of genius but not critics by profession, or in some respects by equipment, escapes this verdict. At the other were men (very few of them indeed) like Lockhart, who had admirable critical qualifications, but had allowed certain theories and predilections to harden and ossify within them, and who in some cases had not outgrown the rough uncivil ways of the great revolutionary struggle. Between these the average critic, if not quite so ignorant of literature as a certain proportion of the immensely larger body of reviewers to-day, was certainly even more blind to its general principles. Such critical work as that of Phillips, long a favourite pen on the Times, and enjoying (I do not know with how much justice) the repute of being the person whom Thackeray's Thunder and Small Beer has gibbeted for ever, excites amazement nowadays at its bland but evidently sincere ignoring of the very rudiments of criticism. I do not know that even in the most interesting remains of George Brimley (who, had fate spared him, might have grown into a great as he already was a good critic) we may not trace something of the same hopeless amateurishness, the same uncertainty and "wobbling" between the expression of unconnected and unargued likes and dislikes concerning the matter of the piece, and real critical considerations on its merits or demerits of scheme and form.

Not for the first time help came to us Trojans Graia ab urbe. Of the general merits of French literary criticism it is possible to entertain a somewhat lower idea than that which (in consequence of the very circumstances with which we are now dealing) it has been for many years fashionable in England to hold. But between 1830 and 1860 the French had a very strong critical school indeed—a school whose scholars and masters showed the daemonic, or at least prophetic, inspiration of Michelet, the milder and feebler but still inspiring enthusiasm of Quinet, the academic clearness and discipline of Villemain and Nisard, the Lucianic wit of Merimee, the matchless appreciation of Gautier, and, above all, the great new critical idiosyncrasy of Sainte-Beuve. Between these men there were the widest possible differences, not merely of personal taste and genius, but of literary theory and practice. But where they all differed quite infinitely from the lower class of English critics, and favourably from all but the highest in their happiest moments, was in a singular mixture of scholarship and appreciation. Even the most Romantic of them usually tried to compare the subject with its likes in his own and even, to some extent, in other literatures; even the most Classical acknowledged, to some extent, that it was his duty to appreciate, to understand, to grasp the case of the victim before ordering him off to execution.

In the practice of Sainte-Beuve himself, these two acknowledgments of the duty of the critic embraced each other in the happiest union. The want of enthusiasm which has been sometimes rather sillily charged against him, comes in reality to no more than this—that he is too busy in analysing, putting together again, comparing, setting things in different lights and in different companies, to have much time for dithyrambs. And the preference of second-to first-class subjects, which has been also urged, is little more than the result of the fact that these processes are more telling, more interesting, and more needed in the case of the former than in the case of the latter. Homer, AEschylus, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare will always make their own way with all fit readers sooner or later: it is not so with Meleager or Macrobius or Marmontel, with William Langland or with Thomas Love Peacock.

But Sainte-Beuve must not carry us too far from Mr Arnold, all important as was the influence of the one upon the other. It is enough to say that the new Professor of Poetry (who might be less appetisingly but more correctly called a Professor of Criticism) had long entertained the wish to attempt, and now had the means of effecting, a reform in English criticism, partly on Sainte-Beuve's own lines, partly on others which he had already made publicly known in his famous Preface, and in some later critical writings, and which he was for the rest of his life always unflinchingly to champion, sometimes rather disastrously to extend.

Still it has always been held that this chair is not merely a chair of criticism; and Mr Arnold lodged a poetical diploma-piece in the shape of Merope. This was avowedly written as a sort of professorial manifesto—a document to show what the only Professor of Poetry whom England allowed herself thought, in theory and practice, of at least dramatic poetry. It was, as was to be expected from the author's official position and his not widespread but well-grounded reputation, much less neglected than his earlier poetry had been. He even tells us that "it sells well"; but the reviewers were not pleased. The Athenaeum review is "a choice specimen of style," and the Spectator "of argumentation"; the Saturday Review is only "deadly prosy," but none were exactly favourable till G.H. Lewes in The Leader was "very gratifying." Private criticism was a little kinder. The present Archbishop of Canterbury (to whom, indeed, Mr Arnold had just given "a flaming testimonial for Rugby") read it "with astonishment at its goodness," a sentence which, it may be observed, is a little double-edged. Kingsley (whom the editor of the Letters good-naturedly but perhaps rather superfluously reintroduces to the British public as "author of The Saints' Tragedy and other poems") was "very handsome." Froude, though he begs the poet to "discontinue the line," was not uncomplimentary in other ways. His own conclusion, from reviews and letters together, is pretty plainly put in two sentences, that he "saw the book was not going to take as he wished," and that "she [Merope] is more calculated to inaugurate my professorship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of humans." Let us see what "she" is actually like.

It is rather curious that the story of Merope should have been so tempting as, to mention nothing else, Maffei's attempt in Italian, Voltaire's in French, and this of Mr Arnold's in English, show it to have been to modern admirers and would-be practitioners of the Classical drama: and the curiosity is of a tell-tale kind. For the fact is that the donnee is very much more of the Romantic than of the Classical description, and offers much greater conveniences to the Romantic than to the Classical practitioner. With minor variations, the story as generally dramatised is this. Merope, the widowed queen of the murdered Heraclid Cresphontes, has saved her youngest son from the murderer and usurper, Polyphontes, and sent him out of the country. When he has grown up, and has secretly returned to Messenia to take vengeance, Polyphontes is pressing Merope to let bygones be bygones and marry him, so as to reconcile the jarring parties in the State. AEpytus, the son, to facilitate his reception, represents himself as a messenger charged to bring the news of his own death; and Merope, hearing this and believing the messenger to be also the assassin, obtains access to the chamber where he is resting after his journey, and is about to murder her own sleeping son when he is saved by the inevitable anagnorisis. The party of Cresphontes is then secretly roused. AEpytus, at the sacrifice which the tyrant holds in honour of the news of his rival's death, snatches the sacrificial axe and kills Polyphontes himself, and all ends well.

There is, of course, a strong dramatic moment here; but I cannot think the plot by any means an ideal one for classical tragedy. At any rate the Aristotelian conditions—the real ones, not the fanciful distortions of sixteenth-seventeenth century criticism—are very ill satisfied. There is bloodshed, but there is no tragic bloodshed, as there would have been had Merope actually killed her son. The arresting and triumphant "grip" of the tragic misfortunes of Oedipus and Orestes, the combination of the course of fate and the [Greek: hamartia] of the individual, is totally absent. The wooing of Merope by Polyphontes is not so much preposterous as insignificant, though Voltaire, by a touch of modernism, has rescued it or half-rescued it from this most terrible of limbos. The right triumphs, no doubt; but who cares whether it does or not? And Mr Arnold, with the heroic obstinacy of the doctrinaire, has done nothing to help the effect of a scheme in itself sufficiently uninspiring to the modern reader. When he was at work upon the piece he had "thought and hoped" that it would have what Buddha called "the character of Fixity, that true sign of the law." A not unfriendly critic might have pointed out, with gloomy forebodings, that a sign of law is not necessarily a sign of poetry, and that, as a prophet of his own had laid it down, poetry should "transport" not "fix." At any rate, it is clear to any one who reads the book that the author was in a mood of deliberate provocation and exaggeration—not a favourable mood for art. The quiet grace of Sophocles is perhaps impossible to reproduce in English, but Mr Arnold's verse is more than quiet, it is positively tame. The dreary tirades of Polyphontes and Merope, and their snip-snap stichomythia, read equally ill in English. Mr Swinburne, who has succeeded where Mr Arnold failed, saw by a true intuition that, to equal the effect of the Greek chorus, full English lyric with rhyme and musical sweep was required. Mr Arnold himself, as might have been expected from his previous experiments in unrhymed Pindarics, has given us strophes and antistrophes most punctiliously equivalent in syllables; but sometimes with hardly any, and never with very much, vesture of poetry about them. It is absolutely preposterous to suppose that the effect on a Greek ear of a strophe even of Sophocles or Euripides, let alone the great Agamemnonian choruses, was anything like the effect on an English ear of such wooden stuff as this:—

"Three brothers roved the field, And to two did Destiny Give the thrones that they conquer'd, But the third, what delays him From his unattained crown?"

But Mr Arnold would say "This is your unchaste modern love for passages and patches. Tell me how I managed this worthy action?" To which the only answer can be, "Sir, the action is rather uninteresting. Save at one moment you have not raised the interest anywhere, and you have certainly not made the most of it there."

The fact is, that very few even of thorough-going Arnoldians have had, or, except merely as "fighting a prize," could have had, much to say for Merope. The author pleads that he only meant "to give people a specimen of the world created by the Greek imagination." In the first place, one really cannot help (with the opening speech of the Prometheus, and the close of the Eumenides, and the whole of the Agamemnon in one's mind) saying that this is rather hard on the Greeks. And in the second place, what a curious way of setting about the object, when luckily specimens of the actual "world" so "created," not mere pastiches and plaster models of them, are still to be had, and of the very best! But the fact is, thirdly, that Mr Arnold, as all men so often do, and as he not very seldom did, was clearly trying not so much to extol one thing as to depreciate another. Probably in his heart of hearts (which is generally a much wiser heart than that according to which the mouth speaks and the pen writes) he knew his failure. At any rate, he never attempted anything of the kind again, and Merope, that queen of plaster, remains alone in his gallery, with, as we see in other galleries, merely some disjecta membra—"Fragment of an Antigone," "Fragment of a Dejaneira," grouped at her feet. In the definitive edition indeed, she is not with these but with Empedocles on Etna, a rather unlucky contrast. For Empedocles, if very much less deliberately Greek than Merope, is very much better poetry, and it is almost impossible that the comparison of the two should not suggest to the reader that the attempt to be Greek is exactly and precisely the cause of the failure to be poetical. Mr Arnold had forgotten his master's words about the oikeia hedone. The pleasure of Greek art is one thing—the pleasure of English poetry another.

His inaugural lecture, "On the Modern Element in Literature," was printed many years afterwards in Macmillan's Magazine for February 1869; and this long hesitation seems to have been followed by an even longer repentance, for the piece was never included in any one of his volumes of essays. But the ten years of his professorship are, according to the wise parsimony of the chair, amply represented by the two famous little books—On Translating Homer, which, with its supplementary "Last Words," appeared in 1861-62, and On the Study of Celtic Literature, which appeared at the termination of his tenure in 1867. It may be questioned whether he ever did anything of more influence than these books, this being due partly to the fashion of their publication—which, in the latter case at least, applied the triple shock of lecture at the greatest of English literary centres, of magazine article, and of book—and partly to the fact that they were about subjects in which a real or a factitious, a direct or an indirect, interest was taken by almost every one. Every educated person knew and cared something (or at least would not have liked to be supposed not to care and know something) about Homer; very few educated persons knew anything about Celtic literature. But in these later lectures he put in a more popular and provocative form than that of his French Eton (see next chapter) that mixture of literary, political, social, and miscellaneous critique of his countrymen for which he was thenceforward best known; and which, if it brought down some hard knocks from his adversaries, and perhaps was not altogether a healthy mixture for himself, could at least not be charged by any reasonable person with lack of piquancy and actuality.

Both books are, and, despite some drawbacks of personal and ephemeral allusion, always will be, interesting; and both had, perhaps even more than the Essays in Criticism themselves, a stimulating effect upon English men of letters which can hardly be overvalued. It may indeed be said without paradox that they owe not a little of their value to their faults; but they owe a great deal more to their merits.

The faults are apparent enough even in the first series, which falls to be noticed in this chapter; yet it is really difficult to say when a more important book of English criticism had appeared. Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Johnson's Lives at their frequent best, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, are greater things; but hardly the best of them was in its day more "important for us." To read even the best of that immediately preceding criticism of which something has been said above—nay, even to recur to Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb—and then to take up On Translating Homer, is to pass to a critic with a far fuller equipment, with a new method, with a style of his own, and with an almost entirely novel conception of the whole art of criticism. For the first time (even Coleridge with much wider reading had not co-ordinated it from this point of view) we find the two great ancient and the three or four great modern literatures of Europe taken synoptically, used to illustrate and explain each other, to point out each other's defects and throw up each other's merits. Almost for the first time, too, we have ancient literature treated more or less like modern—neither from the merely philological point of view, nor with reference to the stock platitudes and traditions about it. The critic is not afraid of doctrines and general principles—in fact, he is rather too fond of them—but his object is anything rather than mere arid deduction and codification. He has the aesthetic sense as thoroughly as Hazlitt and Lamb, but without the wilfulness of either, or at least with a different kind of wilfulness from that of either. Finally, in one of the numerous ways in which he shows that his subject is alive to him, he mixes it up with the queerest personalities and sudden zigzags, with all manner of digressions and side-flings. And last of all, he has that new style of which we spoke—a style by no means devoid of affectation and even trick, threatening, to experienced eyes, the disease of mannerism, but attractive in its very provocations, almost wholly original, and calculated, at least while it retains its freshness, to drive what is said home into the reader's mind and to stick it there.

The faults, we said, both critical and non-critical, are certainly not lacking; and if they were not partly excused by the author's avowedly militant position, might seem sometimes rather grave. Whatever may have been the want of taste, and even the want of sense, in the translation of F. W. Newman, it is almost sufficient to say that they were neither greater nor less than might have been expected from a person who, if the most scholarly of eccentrics, was also the most eccentric even of English scholars. It is difficult not to think that Mr Arnold makes too much of them and refers too frequently to them. Such "iteration" is literally "damnable": it must be condemned as unfair, out of place, out of taste, and even not distantly approaching that lack of urbanity with which Mr Arnold was never tired of reproaching his countrymen. Another translator, Mr Wright, was indeed needlessly sensitive to Mr Arnold's strictures; but these strictures themselves were needlessly severe. It is all very well for a reviewer, especially if he be young and anonymous, to tell a living writer that his book has "no reason for existing"; but chairs of literature are not maintained by universities that their occupants may, in relation to living persons, exercise the functions of young anonymous reviewers. It may indeed be doubted whether these occupants should, except in the most guarded way, touch living persons at all.

Critically too, as well as from the point of view of manners, the Lectures on Translating Homer are open to not a few criticisms. In the first place, the assumptions are enormous, and, in some cases at least, demonstrably baseless. One of Mr Arnold's strongest points, for instance, not merely against Mr Newman but against Homeric translators generally, is concerned with the renderings of the Homeric compound adjectives, especially the stock ones—koruthaiolos, merops, and the rest. The originals, he is never weary of repeating, did not strike a Greek and do not strike a Greek scholar as out of the way; the English equivalents do so strike an English reader. Now as to the Greeks themselves, we know nothing: they have left us no positive information on the subject. But if (which is no doubt at least partly true) koruthaiolos and dolichoskion do not strike us, who have been familiar with Greek almost as long as we can remember, as out of the way, is that an argument? Most of us, I suppose, at about nine or ten years old, some no doubt a little or a good deal earlier, learnt these words as part of the ordinary Greek that was presented to us, just as much as kai and ara; but if we had learnt Greek as we learn English, beginning with quite ordinary words, would it be so? I think not; nor would it be so if people began Greek at a later and more critical stage of their education.

It is also true that the book is full of that exceedingly arbitrary and unproved assertion, of that rather fanciful terminology, of those sometimes questionable aesthetic obiter dicta, of which, from first to last, Mr Arnold was so prolific. When he talks about the mysterious "grand style," and tells us that Milton can never be affected, we murmur, "De gustibus!" and add mentally, "Though Milton is the greatest of affected writers, Milton is, after Comus at least, never anything else!" When he tells us again that at that moment (1861) "English literature as a living intellectual instrument ranks after the literatures of France and Germany," we remember that at the time France possessed perhaps only one writer, Victor Hugo, and Germany absolutely none, of the calibre of a dozen Englishmen—Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, and not a few others, from Landor to Mr Ruskin; that Germany, further, had scarcely one, though France had more than one or two, great writers of the second class: and we say, "Either your 'living intellectual instrument' is a juggle of words, or you really are neglecting fact." Many—very many—similar retorts are possible; and the most hopeless variance of all must come when we arrive at Mr Arnold's championship of that ungainly and sterile mule the English hexameter, and when we review the specimens of the animal that he turns out from his own stables for our inspection.

But it matters not. For all this, and very much more than all this, which may be passed over as unnecessary or improper, nothing like the book had, for positive critical quality, and still more for germinal influence, been seen by its generation, and nothing of the same quality and influence has been seen for more than a technical generation since. It would of course be uncritical in the last degree to take the change in English criticism which followed as wholly and directly Mr Arnold's work. He was not even the voice crying in the wilderness: only one of many voices in a land ready at least to be eared and pathed. But he was the earliest of such voices, the clearest, most original, most potent; and a great deal of what followed was directly due to him.

The non-literary events of his life during this period were sufficiently varied if not very momentous. We have mentioned the domiciling in Chester Square, which took place in February 1858, perhaps on the strength of the additional income from Oxford. In the late summer of that year he went alone to Switzerland, and next spring, shortly after the New Year, received, to his very great joy, a roving commission to France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Piedmont, to report on elementary education. "Foreign life," he says, with that perfect naturalness which makes the charm of his letters, "is still to me perfectly delightful and liberating in the last degree." And he was duly "presented" at home, in order that he might be presentable abroad. But the first days of the actual sojourn (as we have them recorded in a letter to his mother of April 14) were saddened by that death of his brother William, which he has enshrined in verse.

He had, however, plenty to distract him. France was all astir with the Austrian war, and it is impossible to read his expressions of half-awed admiration of French military and other greatness without rather mischievous amusement. He visited the Morbihan, which struck him as it must strike every one. Here he is pathetic over a promising but not performing dinner at Auray—"soup, Carnac oysters, shrimps, fricandeau of veal, breast of veal, and asparagus;" but "everything so detestable" that his dinner was bread and cheese. He must have been unlucky: the little Breton inns, at any rate a few years later than this, used, it is true, to be dirty to an extent appalling to an Englishman; but their provender was usually far from contemptible. There is more sense of Breton scenery in another letter a little later. Both here and, presently, in Gascony he notes truly enough "the incredible degree to which the Revolution has cleared the feudal ages out of the minds of the country people"; but if he reflected on the bad national effect of this breach with the past, he does not say so. By June 12 he is in Holland, and does not like it—weather, language, &c., all English in the worst sense, apparently without the Norman and Latin element which just saves us. And though he was a very short time in the Netherlands, he has to relieve his feelings by more abuse of them when he gets back to Paris—in fact, he speaks of Holland exactly as the typical Frenchman speaks of England, and is accordingly very funny to read. The two things that make Holland most interesting, history and art, were exactly those that appealed to Mr Arnold least. Then after a refreshing bath of Paris, he goes to Strasbourg, and Time—Time the Humourist as well as the Avenger and Consoler—makes him commit himself dreadfully. He "thinks there cannot be a moment's doubt" that the French will beat the Prussians even far more completely and rapidly than they are beating the Austrians. Lord Cowley, it seems, "entirely shared" his conviction that "the French will always beat any number of Germans who come into the field against them, and never be beaten by any one but the English." Let us hope that Jove, when he whistled half this prophecy down the wind, affirmed the rest of it! Switzerland comes next; and he is beginning to want very much to be back in England, partly "for the children, but partly also from affection for that foolish old country"—which paternal and patriotic desire was granted about the end of the month, though only for a short time, during which he wrote a pamphlet on the Italian question. Then "M. le Professeur Docteur Arnold, Directeur General de toutes les Ecoles de la Grande Bretagne," returned to France for a time, saw Merimee and George Sand and Renan, as well as a good deal of Sainte-Beuve, and was back again for good in the foolish old country at the end of the month.

In the early winter of 1859-60 we find him a volunteer, commenting not too happily on "the hideous English toadyism which invests lords and great people with commands," a remark which seems to clench the inference that he had not appreciated the effect of the Revolution upon France. For nearly three parts of 1860 we have not a single letter, except one in January pleasantly referring to his youngest child "in black velvet and red-and-white tartan, looking such a duck that it was hard to take one's eyes off him."[4] This letter, by the way, ends with an odd admission from the author of the remark quoted just now. He says of the Americans, "It seems as if few stocks could be trusted to grow up properly without having a priesthood and an aristocracy to act as their schoolmasters at some time or other of their national existence." This is a confession. The gap, however, is partly atoned for by a very pleasant batch in September from Viel Salm in the Ardennes, where the whole family spent a short time, and where the Director-General of all the schools in Great Britain had splendid fishing, the hapless Ardennes trout being only accustomed to nets.

Then the interest returns to literature, and the lectures on translating Homer, and Tennyson's "deficiency in intellectual power," and Mr Arnold's own interest in the Middle Ages, which may surprise some folk. It seems that he has "a strong sense of the irrationality of that period" and of "the utter folly of those who take it seriously and play at restoring it." Still it has "poetically the greatest charm and refreshment for me." One may perhaps be permitted to doubt whether you can get much real poetical refreshment out of a thing which is irrational and which you don't take seriously: the practice seems to be not unlike that mediaeval one of keeping fools for your delectation. Nor can the observations on Tennyson be said to be quite just or quite pleasant. But every age and every individual is unjust to his or its immediate predecessor—a saying dangerous and double-edged, but true for all that. Then he "entangles himself in the study of accents"—it would be difficult to find any adventurer who has not entangled himself in that study—and groans over "a frightful parcel of grammar papers," which he only just "manages in time," apparently on the very unwholesome principle (though this was not the same batch) of doing twenty before going to bed when he comes in from a dinner-party at eleven o'clock. Colds, Brighton, praise from Sainte-Beuve, critical attacks in the English papers, and (not quite unprovoked) from F.W. Newman, reflections on the Age of Wisdom (forty), and a meeting with Thackeray, the Laureate of that age, diversify the history agreeably. Then we come to a dead, and now rather more than dull, controversy over the Revised Code, of which we need not say much. Official etiquette on such matters, especially in England, is very loose, though he himself seems to have at one time thought it distantly possible, though not likely, that he would be ejected for the part he took. And his first five years' tenure of the Oxford Chair ends with the delivery of the Creweian oration, as to the composition of which he consoles himself (having heard both from the Vice-Chancellor and others that there was to be "a great row") by reflecting that "it doesn't much matter what he writes, as he shall not be heard." I do not know whether the prediction was justified; but if so, the same fate had, according to tradition, befallen his Newdigate some twenty years earlier. In neither case can the "row" have had any personal reference. Though his lectures were never largely attended by undergraduates, he was always popular in Oxford.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The mystery is partly explained, in a fashion of no little biographical importance, by the statement in Mr Arnold's first general report for the year 1852, that his district included Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Stafford, Salop, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick, Leicester, Rutland and Northants, Gloucester, Monmouth, all South Wales, most of North Wales, and some schools in the East and West Ridings. This apparently impossible range had its monstrosity reduced by the limitation of his inspectorship to Nonconformist schools of other denominations than the Roman Catholic, especially Wesleyan and the then powerful "British" schools. As the schools multiplied the district was reduced, and at last he had Westminster only; but the exclusion of Anglican and Roman Catholic schools remained till 1870. And it is impossible not to connect the somewhat exaggerated place which the Dissenters hold in his social and political theories (as well as perhaps some of his views about the "Philistine") with these associations of his. We must never forget that for nearly twenty years Mr Arnold worked in the shadow, not of Barchester Towers, but of Salem Chapel.

[2] "I have papers sent me to look over which will give me to the 20th of January in London without moving, then for a week to Huntingdonshire schools, then for another to London, ...and then Birmingham for a month."

[3] There are persons who would spell this moral; but I am not writing French, and in English the practice of good writers from Chesterfield downwards is my authority.

[4] The letters are full of pleasant child-worship, the best passage of all being perhaps the dialogue between Tom and "Budge," at vol. i. p. 56, with the five-year-old cynicism of the elder's reply, "Oh this is false Budge, this is all false!" to his infant brother's protestations of affection.



CHAPTER III.

A FRENCH ETON—ESSAYS IN CRITICISM—CELTIC LITERATURE—NEW POEMS—LIFE FROM 1862 TO 1867.

The period of Mr Arnold's second tenure of the Poetry Chair, from 1862 to 1867, was much more fertile in remarkable books than that of his first. It was during this time that he established himself at once as the leader of English critics by his Essays in Criticism (some of which had first taken form as Oxford Lectures) and that he made his last appearance with a considerable collection of New Poems. It was during this, or immediately after its expiration, that he issued his second collected book of lectures on The Study of Celtic Literature; and it was then that he put in more popular, though still in not extremely popular, forms the results of his investigations into Continental education. It was during this time also that his thoughts took the somewhat unfortunate twist towards the mission of reforming his country, not merely in matters literary, where he was excellently qualified for the apostolate, but in the much more dubiously warranted function of political, "sociological," and above all, ecclesiastical or anti-ecclesiastical gospeller. With all these things we must now deal.

No one of Mr Arnold's books is more important, or more useful in studying the evolution of his thought and style, than A French Eton (1864). Although he was advancing in middle-life when it was written, and had evidently, as the phrase goes, "made up his bundle of prejudices," he had not written, or at least published, very much prose; his mannerisms had not hardened. And above all, he was but just catching the public ear, and so was not tempted to assume the part of Chesterfield-Socrates, which he played later, to the diversion of some, to the real improvement of many, but a little to his own disaster. He was very thoroughly acquainted with the facts of his subject, which was not always the case later; and though his assumptions—the insensibility of aristocracies to ideas, the superiority of the French to the English in this respect, the failure of the Anglican Church, and so forth—are already as questionable as they are confident, he puts them with a certain modesty, a certain [Greek: epieikeia], which was perhaps not always so obvious when he came to preach that quality itself later. About the gist of the book it is not necessary to say very much. He practically admits the obvious and unanswerable objection that his French Eton, whether we look for it at Toulouse or look for it at Soreze, is very French, but not at all Eton. He does not really attempt to meet the more dangerous though less epigrammatic demurrer, "Do you want schools to turn out products of this sort?" It was only indirectly his fault, but it was a more or less direct consequence of his arguments, that a process of making ducks and drakes of English grammar-school endowments began, and was (chiefly in the "seventies") carried on, with results, the mischievousness of which apparently has been known and noted only by experts, and which they have chiefly kept to themselves.

All this is already ancient history, and history not ancient enough to be venerable. But the book as a book, and also as a document in the case, has, and always will have, interest. "The cries and catchwords" which Mr Arnold denounces, as men so often do denounce their own most besetting temptations, have not yet quite mastered him; but they have made a lodgment. The revolt—in itself quite justifiable, and even admirable—from the complacent acceptance of English middle-class thought, English post-Reform-Bill politics, English mid-century taste and ethics and philosophy,—from everything, in short, of which Macaulay was the equally accepted and representative eulogist and exponent, is conspicuous. It is from foreign and almost hostile sources that we must expect help. The State is to resume, or to initiate, its guidance of a very large part, if not of the whole, of the matters which popular thought, Liberal and Conservative alike, then assigned to individual action or private combination. We have not yet Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace labelled with their tickets and furnished with their descriptions; but the three classes are already sharply separated in Mr Arnold's mind, and we can see that only in the Philistine who burns Dagon, and accepts circumcision and culture fully, is there to be any salvation. The anti-clerical and anti-theological animus is already strong; the attitude dantis jura Catonis is arranged; the jura themselves, if not actually graven and tabulated, can be seen coming with very little difficulty. Above all, the singing-robes are pretty clearly laid aside; the Scholar-Gipsy exercises no further spell; we have turned to prose and (as we can best manage it) sense.

But A French Eton is perhaps most interesting for its style. In this respect it marks a stage, and a distinct one, between the Preface of 1853 and the later and better known works. More of a concio ad vulgus than the former, it shows a pretty obvious endeavour to soften and popularise, without unduly vulgarising, the academic tone of the earlier work. And it does not yet display those "mincing graces" which were sometimes attributed (according to a very friendly and most competent critic, "harshly, but justly") to the later. The mannerisms, indeed, like the dogmatisms, are pretty clearly imminent. Slightly exotic vocabulary—"habitude" "repartition," for "habit," "distribution"—makes its appearance. That abhorrence of the conjunction, which made Mr Arnold later give us rows of adjectives and substantives, with never an "and" to string them together, is here. But no one of these tricks, nor any other, is present in excess: there is nothing that can justly be called falsetto; and in especial, though some names of merely ephemeral interest are in evidence—Baines, Roebuck, Miall, &c., Mr Arnold's well-known substitutes for Cleon and Cinesias—there is nothing like the torrent of personal allusion in Friendship's Garland. "Bottles" and his company are not yet with us; the dose of persiflage is rigorously kept down; the author has not reached the stage when he seemed to hold sincerely the principle so wickedly put by Mr Lewis Carroll, that

"What I tell you three times is true,"

and that the truth could be made truest by making the three thirty.

The result is that he never wrote better. A little of the dignity of his earlier manner—when he simply followed that admirable older Oxford style, of which Newman was the greatest master and the last—is gone, but it has taken some stiffness with it. Some—indeed a good deal—of the piquancy of the later is not yet apparent; but its absence implies, and is more than compensated by, the concomitant absence of those airs and flings, those interludes as of an academic jester, in cap and gown and liripipe instead of motley, which have been charged, not quite unjustly, on the Arnold that we know best. There is hardly in English a better example of the blending and conciliation of the two modes of argumentative writing referred to in Bishop Kurd's acute observation, that if your first object is to convince, you cannot use a style too soft and insinuating; if you want to confute, the rougher and more unsparing the better. And the description and characterisation are quite excellent.

Between A French Eton and the second collection of Oxford Lectures came, in 1865, the famous Essays in Criticism, the first full and varied, and perhaps always the best, expression and illustration of the author's critical attitude, the detailed manifesto and exemplar of the new critical method, and so one of the epoch-making books of the later nineteenth century in English. It consisted, in the first edition, of a Preface (afterwards somewhat altered and toned down) and of nine essays (afterwards to be made ten by the addition of A Persian Passion-Play). The two first of these were general, on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and The Literary Influence of Academies, while the other seven dealt respectively with the two Guerins, Heine, Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment, Joubert, Spinoza, and Marcus Aurelius. I am afraid it must be taken as only too strong a confirmation of Mr Arnold's own belief as to the indifference of the English people to criticism that no second edition of this book was called for till four years were past, no third for ten, and no fourth for nearly twenty.

Yet, to any one whom the gods have made in the very slightest degree critical, it is one of the most fascinating (if sometimes also one of the most provoking) of books; and the fascination and provocation should surely have been felt even by others. As always with the author, there is nothing easier than to pick holes in it: in fact, on his own principles, one is simply bound to pick holes. He evidently enjoyed himself very much in the Preface: but it may be doubted whether the severe Goddess of Taste can have altogether smiled on his enjoyment. He is superciliously bland to the unlucky and no doubt rather unwise Mr Wright (v. supra): he tells the Guardian in a periphrasis that it is dull, and "Presbyter Anglicanus" that he is born of Hyrcanian tigers, and the editor of the Saturday Review that he is a late and embarrassed convert to the Philistines. He introduces not merely Mr Spurgeon, a Philistine of some substance and memory, but hapless forgotten shadows like "Mr Clay," "Mr Diffanger," "Inspector Tanner," "Professor Pepper" to the contempt of the world. And then, when we are beginning to find all this laughter rather "thorn-crackling" and a little forced, the thing ends with the famous and magnificent epiphonema (as they would have said in the old days) to Oxford, which must for ever conciliate all sons of hers and all gracious outsiders to its author, just as it turns generation after generation of her enemies sick with an agonised grin.

So, again, one may marvel, and almost grow angry, at the whim which made Mr Arnold waste two whole essays on an amiable and interesting person like Eugenie de Guerin and a mere nobody like her brother. They are very pretty essays in themselves; but then (as Mr Arnold has taught us), "all depends on the subject," and the subjects here are so exceedingly unimportant! Besides, as he himself almost openly confessed, and as everybody admits now, he really did not understand French poetry at all. When we come to "Keats and Guerin," there is nothing for it but to take refuge in Byron's

"Such names coupled!"

and pass with averted face. Seventy-two mortal pages of Matthew Arnold's, at his very best time, wasted on a brother and sister who happened to be taken up by Sainte-Beuve!

But the rest of the book is entirely free from liability to any such criticism as this. To some criticism—even to a good deal—it is beyond doubt exposed. The first and most famous paper—the general manifesto, as the earlier Preface to the Poems is the special one, of its author's literary creed—on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time must indeed underlie much the same objections as those that have been made to the introduction. Here is the celebrated passage about "Wragg is in custody," the text of which, though no doubt painful in subject and inurbane in phraseology, is really a rather slender basis on which to draw up an indictment against a nation. Here is the astounding—the, if serious, almost preternatural—statement that "not very much of current English literature comes into this best that is known and thought in the world. Not very much I fear: certainly less than of the current literature of France and Germany." And this was 1865, when the Germans had had no great poet but Heine for a generation, nor any great poets but Goethe and Heine for some five hundred years, no great prose-writer but Heine (unless you call Goethe one), and were not going to have any! It was 1865, when all the great French writers, themselves of but some thirty years' standing, were dying off, not to be succeeded! 1865, when for seventy years England had not lacked, and for nearly thirty more was not to lack, poets and prose-writers of the first order by the dozen and almost the score! Here, too, is the marvellous companion-statement that in the England of the first quarter of the century was "no national glow of life." It was the chill of death, I suppose, which made the nation fasten on the throat of the world and choke it into submission during a twenty years' struggle.

But these things are only Mr Arnold's way. I have never been able to satisfy myself whether they were deliberate paradoxes, or sincere and rather pathetic paralogisms. For instance, did he really think that the Revue des Deux Mondes, an organ of "dukes, dunces, and devotes," as it used to be called even in those days by the wicked knowing ones, a nursing mother of Academies certainly, and a most respectable periodical in all ways—that this good Revue actually "had for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and thought in the world," absolutely existed as an organ for "the free play of mind"? I should be disposed to think that the truer explanation of such things is that they were neither quite paradoxes nor quite paralogisms; but the offspring of an innocent willingness to believe what he wished, and of an almost equally innocent desire to provoke the adversary. Unless (as unluckily they sometimes are) they be taken at the foot of the letter, they can do no harm, and their very piquancy helps the rest to do a great deal of good.

For there can be no doubt that in the main contention of his manifesto, as of his book, Mr Arnold was absolutely right. It was true that England, save for spasmodic and very partial appearances of it in a few of her great men of letters—Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison, Johnson—had been wonderfully deficient in criticism up to the end of the eighteenth century; and that though in the early nineteenth she had produced one great philosophical critic, another even greater on the purely literary side, and a third of unique appreciative sympathy, in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, she had not followed these up, and had, even in them, shown certain critical limitations. It was true that though the Germans had little and the French nothing to teach us in range, both had much to teach us in thoroughness, method, style of criticism. And it was truest of all (though Mr Arnold, who did not like the historic estimate, would have admitted this with a certain grudge) that the time imperatively demanded a thorough "stock-taking" of our own literature in the light and with the help of others.

Let palma—let the maxima palma—of criticism be given to him in that he first fought for the creed of this literary orthodoxy, and first exemplified (with whatever admixture of will-worship of his own, with whatever quaint rites and ceremonies) the carrying out of the cult. It is possible that his direct influence may have been exaggerated; one of the most necessary, though not of the most grateful, businesses of the literary historian is to point out that with rare exceptions, and those almost wholly on the poetic side, great men of letters rather show in a general, early, and original fashion a common tendency than definitely lead an otherwise sluggish multitude to the promised land. But no investigation has deprived, or is at all likely to deprive, the Essays in Criticism of their place as an epoch-making book, as the manual of a new and often independent, but, on the whole, like-minded, critical movement in England.

Nor can the blow of the first essay be said to be ill followed up in the second, the almost equally famous (perhaps the more famous) Influence of Academies. Of course here also, here as always, you may make reservations. It is a very strong argument, an argument stronger than any of Mr Arnold's, that the institutions of a nation, if they are to last, if they are to do any good, must be in accordance with the spirit of the nation; that if the French Academy has been beneficial, it is because the French spirit is academic; and that if (as we may fear, or hope, or believe, according to our different principles) the English spirit is unacademic, an Academy would probably be impotent and perhaps ridiculous in England. But we can allow for this; and when we have allowed for it, once more Mr Arnold's warnings are warnings on the right side, true, urgent, beneficial. There are still the minor difficulties. Even at the time, much less as was known of France in England then than now, there were those who opened their eyes first and then rubbed them at the assertion that "openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence" were the characteristics of the French people. But once more also, no matter! The central drift is right, and the central drift carries many excellent things with it, and may be allowed to wash away the less excellent. Mr Arnold is right on the average qualities of French prose; whether he is right about the "provinciality" of Jeremy Taylor as compared to Bossuet or not, he is right about "critical freaks," though, by the way—but it is perhaps unnecessary to finish that sentence. He is right about the style of Mr Palgrave and right about the style of Mr Kinglake; and I do not know that I feel more especially bound to pronounce him wrong about the ideas of Lord Macaulay. But had he been as wrong in all these things as he was right, the central drift would still be inestimable—the drift of censure and contrast applied to English eccentricity, the argument that this eccentricity, if it is not very good, is but too likely to be very bad.

Yet it is perhaps in the illustrative essays that the author shows at his best. Even in the Guerin pieces, annoyance at the waste of first-rate power on tenth-rate people need not wholly blind us to the grace of the exposition and to the charming eulogy of "distinction" at the end. That, if Mr Arnold had known a little more about that French Romantic School which he despised, he would have hardly assigned this distinction to Maurice; and that Eugenie, though undoubtedly a "fair soul," was in this not distinguished from hundreds and thousands of other women, need not matter very much after all. And with the rest there need be few allowances, or only amicable ones. One may doubt whether Heine's charm is not mainly due to the very lawlessness, the very contempt of "subject," the very quips and cranks and caprices that Mr Arnold so sternly bans. But who shall deny the excellence and the exquisiteness of this, the first English tribute of any real worth to the greatest of German poets, to one of the great poets of the world, to the poet who with Tennyson and Hugo completes the representative trinity of European poets of the nineteenth century proper? Very seldom (his applause of Gray, the only other instance, is not quite on a par with this) does the critic so nearly approach enthusiasm—not merely engouement on the one side or serene approval on the other. No matter that he pretends to admire Heine for his "modern spirit" (why, O Macaree, as his friend Maurice de Guerin might have said, should a modern spirit be better than an ancient one, or what is either before the Eternal?) instead of for what has been, conceitedly it may be, called the "tear-dew and star-fire and rainbow-gold" of his phrase and verse. He felt this magic at any rate. No matter that he applies the wrong comparison instead of the right one, and depreciates French in order to exalt German, instead of thanking Apollo for these two good different things. The root of the matter is the right root, a discriminating enthusiasm: and the flower of the matter is one of the most charming critical essays in English. It is good, no doubt, to have made up one's mind about Heine before reading Mr Arnold; but one almost envies those who were led to that enchanted garden by so delightful an interpreter.

Almost equally delightful, and with no touch of the sadness which must always blend with any treatment of Heine, is the next essay, the pet, I believe, of some very excellent judges, on "Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment," with its notable translation of Theocritus and its contrast with St Francis. One feels, indeed, that Mr Arnold was not quite so well equipped with knowledge on the one side as on the other; indeed, he never was well read in mediaeval literature. But his thesis, as a thesis, is capable of defence; in the sternest times of military etiquette he could not have been put to death on the charge of holding out an untenable post; and he puts the different sides with incomparable skill and charm. Mr Arnold glosses Pagan morals rather doubtfully, but so skilfully; he rumples and blackens mediaeval life more than rather unfairly, but with such a light and masterly touch!

Different again, inferior perhaps, but certainly not in any hostile sense inferior, is the "Joubert." It has been the fashion with some to join this essay to the Guerin pieces as an instance of some incorrigible twist in Mr Arnold's French estimates, of some inability to admire the right things, even when he did admire I cannot agree with them. Joubert, of course, has his own shortcomings as a pensee-writer. He is rococo beside La Bruyere, dilettante beside La Rochefoucauld, shallow beside Pascal. There is at times, even if you take him by himself, and without comparison, something thin and amateurish and conventional about him. But this is by no means always or very often the case; and his merits, very great in themselves, were even greater for Mr Arnold's general purpose.

That subtle and sensitive genius did not go wrong when it selected Joubert as an eminent example of those gifts of the French mind which most commended themselves to itself—an exquisite justesse, an alertness of spirit not shaking off rule and measure, above all, a consummate propriety in the true and best, not the limited sense of the word. Nor is it difficult to observe in the shy philosopher a temperament which must have commended itself to Mr Arnold almost as strongly as his literary quality, and very closely indeed connected with that—the temperament of equity, of epieikeia, of freedom from swagger and brag and self-assertion. And here, once more, the things receive precisely their right treatment, the treatment proportioned and adjusted at once to their own value and nature and to the use which their critic is intending to make of them. For it is one of the greatest literary excellences of the Essays in Criticism that, with rare exceptions, they bear a real relation to each other and to the whole—that they are not a bundle but an organism; a university, not a mob.

The subjects of the two last essays, Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius, may at first sight, and not at first sight only, seem oddly chosen. For although the conception of literature illustrated in the earlier part of the book is certainly wide, and admits—nay, insists upon, as it always did with Mr Arnold—considerations of subject in general and of morals and religion in particular, yet it is throughout one of literature as such. Now, we cannot say that the interest of Spinoza or that of Marcus Aurelius, great as it is in both cases, is wholly, or in the main, or even in any considerable part, a literary interest. With Spinoza it is a philosophical-religious interest, with Marcus Aurelius a moral-religious, almost purely. The one may indeed illustrate that attempt to see things in a perfectly white light which Mr Arnold thought so important in literature; the other, that attention to conduct which he thought more important still. But they illustrate these things in themselves, not in relation to literature. They are less literary even than St Francis; far less than the author of the Imitation.

It cannot therefore but be suspected that in including them Mr Arnold, unconsciously perhaps, but more probably with some consciousness, was feeling his way towards that wide extension of the province of the critic, that resurrection of the general Socratic attitude, which he afterwards adventured. But it cannot be said that his experiments are on this particular occasion in any way disastrous. With both his subjects he had the very strongest sympathy—with Spinoza (as already with Heine) as a remarkable example of the Hebraic spirit and genius, rebellious to or transcending the usual limitations of Hebraism; with Marcus Aurelius as an example of that non-Christian morality and religiosity which also had so strong an attraction for him. There is no trace in either essay of the disquieting and almost dismaying jocularity which was later to invade his discussion of such things: we are still far from Bottles; the three Lord Shaftesburys relieve us by not even threatening to appear. And accordingly the two essays add in no small degree, though somewhat after the fashion of an appendix or belated episode, to the charm of the book. They have an unction which never, as it so often does in the case of Mr Arnold's dangerous master and model Renan, degenerates into unctuosity; they are nobly serious, but without being in the least dull; they contain some exceedingly just and at the same time perfectly urbane criticism of the ordinary reviewing kind, and though they are not without instances of the author's by-blows of slightly unproved opinion, yet these are by no means eminent in them, and are not of a provocative nature. And I do not think it fanciful to suppose that the note of grave if unclassified piety, of reconciliation and resignation, with which they close the book, was intended—that it was a deliberate "evening voluntary" to play out of church the assistants at a most remarkable function—such a function as criticism in English had not celebrated before, such as, I think, it may without unfairness be said has not been repeated since. Essays in Criticism, let us repeat, is a book which is classed and placed, and it will remain in that class and place: the fresh wreaths and the fresh mud, that may be in turn unfitly thrown upon it, will affect neither.

Between this remarkable book and the later ones of the same lustrum, we may conveniently take up the thread of biography proper where we last dropped it. The letters are fuller for this period than perhaps for any other; but this very fulness makes it all the more difficult to select incidents, never, perhaps, of the very first importance, but vying with each other in the minor biographical interests. A second fishing expedition to Viel Salm was attempted in August 1862; but it did not escape the curse which seems to dog attempts at repetition of the same pleasure. The river was hopelessly low; the fish would not take; and the traveller came back in very little more than "a day and a night and a morrow." By December danger-signals are up in a letter to his mother, to the effect that "it is intolerable absurdity to profess [who does?] to see Christianity through the spectacles of a number of second- or third-rate men who lived in Queen Elizabeth's time"—that time so fertile in nothing but the second-rate and the third. But it is followed a little later by the less disputable observation, "It is difficult to make out exactly at what [F.D.] Maurice is driving; perhaps he is always a little dim in his own mind" on that point.

The illuminations at the Prince of Wales's marriage, where like other people he found "the crowd very good-humoured," are noted; and the beginning of Thyrsis where and while the fritillaries blow. But from the literary point of view few letters are more interesting than a short one to Sir Mountstuart (then Mr) Grant Duff, dated May 14, 1863, in which Mr Arnold declines an edition of Heine, the loan of which was offered for his lecture—later the well-known essay. His object, he says, "is not so much to give a literary history of Heine's work as to mark his place in modern European letters, and the special tendency and significance of what he did." He will, therefore, not even read these things of Heine's that he has not read, but will take the Romancero alone for his text, with a few quotations from elsewhere, With a mere passing indication of the fact that Matthew Arnold here, like every good critic of this century, avowedly pursues that plan of "placing" writers which some of his own admirers so foolishly decry, I may observe that this is a locus classicus for his own special kind of criticism. It is possible—I do not know whether he did so—that Sir Mountstuart may, on receiving the letter, have smiled and thought of "Mon siege est fait"; but I am sure he would be the first to admit that the cases were different. I do not myself think that Mr Arnold's strong point was that complete grasp of a literary personality, and its place, which some critics aim at but which few achieve. His impatience—here perhaps half implied and later openly avowed—of the historic estimate in literature, would of itself have made this process irksome to him. But on the lines of his own special vocation as a critic it was not only irksome, it was unnecessary. His function was to mark the special—perhaps it would be safer to say a special—tendency of his man, and to bring that out with all his devices of ingenious reduplication, fascinating rhetoric, and skilful parading of certain favourite axioms and general principles. This function would not have been assisted—I think it nearly certain that it would have been hampered and baulked—by that attempt to find "the whole" which the Greek philosopher and poet so sadly and so truly declares that few boast to find. It was a side, a face, a phase of each man and writer, that he wished to bring out; and, though he might sometimes exaggerate this, yet his exaggeration was scarcely illegitimate. To bring out something he had to block out much. If he had attempted to show the whole Goethe, the whole Heine, the whole Homer or Shakespeare even, they would have been difficult if not impossible to group and to compare in the fashion in which he wished to deal with them.

And except on the sheer assumption, which is surely a fallacy, that suppressio veri is always and not only sometimes suggestio falsi, I do not see that he exceeded a due licence in this matter, while that he was wise in his generation there can be no doubt. He wanted to influence the average Englishman, and he knew perfectly well there is nothing the average Englishman dislikes so much as guarded and elaborately conditioned statements. The immense popularity and influence of Macaulay had been due to his hatred of half-lights, of "perhapses"; and little as Mr Arnold liked Macaulay's fiddle, he was wise enough to borrow his rosin, albeit in disguise. If a critic makes too many provisos, if he "buts" too much, if he attempts to paint the warts as well as the beauties, he will be accused of want of sympathy, he will be taxed with timorousness and hedging, at best he will be blamed for wire-drawn and hair-splitting argument. The preambles of exposition, the conclusions of summing up, will often be considered tedious or impertinent. The opposite plan of selecting a nail and hitting that on the head till you have driven it home was, in fact, as much Mr Arnold's as it was Macaulay's. The hammer-play of the first was far more graceful and far less monotonous: yet it was hammer-play all the same. But we must return to our Letters.

A dinner with Lord Houghton—"all the advanced Liberals in religion and politics, and a Cingalese in full costume"—a visit to Cambridge and a stroll to Grantchester, notice of about the first elaborate appreciation of his critical work which had appeared in England, the article by the late Mr S.H. Reynolds in the Westminster Review for October 1863, visits to the Rothschilds at Aston Clinton and Mentmore, and interesting notices of the composition of the Joubert, the French Eton, &c., fill up the year. The death of Thackeray extracts one of those criticisms of his great contemporaries which act as little douches from time to time, in the words, "I cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, though we were on friendly terms: and he was not to my mind a great writer." But the personal reflections which follow are of value. He finds "the sudden cessation of so vigorous an existence very sobering. To-day I am forty-one; the middle of life in any case, and for me perhaps much more than the middle. I have ripened and am ripening so slowly that I should be glad of as much time as possible. Yet I can feel, I rejoice to say, an inward spring which seems more and more to gain strength and to promise to resist outward shocks, if they must come, however rough. But of this inward spring one must not talk [it is only to his mother that he writes this] for it does not like being talked about, and threatens to depart if one will not leave it in mystery."

An interview with Mr Disraeli at Aston Clinton, not, as one may suppose, without pleasant words, opens 1864. "It is only from politicians who have themselves felt the spell of literature that one gets these charming speeches," he says, and they, not unnaturally, charmed him so much that he left his dressing-case and his umbrella behind him. But the anti-crusade is more and more declared. He "means to deliver the middle-class out of the hand of their Dissenting ministers," and in the interval wants to know how "that beast of a word 'waggonette' is spelt?" The early summer was spent at Woodford, on the borders of Epping Forest, and the early autumn at Llandudno, where Welsh scenery and the poetry of the Celtic race "quite overpower" him. Alas! some other poetry did not, and when we find him in September thinking Enoch Arden "perhaps the best thing Tennyson has done," we are not surprised to find this remarkable special appreciation followed by a general depreciation, which is quite in keeping. He is even tempted (and of course asked) to write a criticism of the Laureate, but justly replies, "How is that possible?"

From 1865 we get numerous notices of the notices of the Essays, and a pleasant and full account of a second official tour on the Continent, with special dwellings at most of the Western and Central European capitals. The tour lasted from April to November, and I have sometimes thought that it might, by itself, give a better idea of Mr Arnold as an epistoler than the Letters at large seem to have given. Early in 1866 we hear of the beginnings of the Friendship's Garland series, though the occasion for that name did not come till afterwards. And he spent the summer of that year (as he did that of the next) in a farmhouse at West Humble, near Dorking, while he caught "a salmon" in the Deveron during September.

The occasion is perhaps a good one to say a few words on the relations between Mr Arnold and M. Renan, though the latter is not so prominent in the Continental letters as Sainte-Beuve and M. Scherer are. The author of the Vie de Jesus was a very slightly younger man than Mr Arnold (he was born in 1823), but in consequence of his having left the seminary and begun early to live by literary work, he was somewhat in advance of his English compeer in literary repute. His contributions to the Debats and the Revue des Deux Mondes began to be collected soon after 1850, and his first remarkable single book, Averroes et l'Averroisme, dates from that year. I do not know how early Mr Arnold became acquainted with his written work. But they actually met in 1859, during the business of the Foreign Education Commission, and there is a very remarkable passage in a letter to Mrs Forster on Christmas Eve of that year. He tells his sister of "Ernest Renan, a Frenchman I met in Paris," and notes the considerable resemblance between their lines of endeavour, observing, however, that Renan is chiefly "trying to inculcate morality, in a high sense of the word, on the French," while he is trying to inculcate intelligence on the English. After which he makes a long and enthusiastic reference to the essay, Sur la Poesie des Races Celtiques, the literary results of which we shall soon see. I do not know whether Mr Arnold ever expressed to his intimates—for the reference to M. Renan in "Numbers" is not quite explicit—what he thought of those later and very peculiar developments of "morality in a high sense of the word" which culminated in the Abbesse de Jouarre and other things. His sense of humour must have painfully suggested to him that his own familiar friend and pattern Frenchman had become one of the most conspicuous examples of that French lubricity which he himself denounced. But there was no danger of his imitating M. Renan in this respect. In others the following was quite unmistakable, and, I am bound to say, on the whole rather disastrous. In literary criticism Mr Arnold needed no teaching from M. Renan, and as his English training on one of its sides preserved him from the Frenchman's sentimental hedonism, so on another it kept him from the wildest excesses of M. Renan's critical reconstructions of sacred history. But he copied a great deal too much of his master's dilettante attitude to religion as a whole, and, as we shall see, he adopted and carried a great deal further M. Renan's (I am told) not particularly well-informed and (I am sure) very hazardous and fantastic ideas about Celtic literature. On the whole, the two were far too much alike to do each other any good. Exquisite even as M. Renan's mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by strength or by practical and masculine force. Now it was the latter qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light he could not want.

As the tenure of his Chair drew to a close, and as he began to loathe examination papers more and more (indeed I know no one to whom usus concinnat amorem in the case of these documents), he made some endeavours to obtain employment which might be, if not both more profitable and less onerous, at any rate one or the other. First he tried for a Charity Commissionership; then for the librarianship of the House of Commons. For the former post it may be permitted to think that his extremely strong—in fact partisan—opinions, both on education and on the Church of England, were a most serious disqualification; his appointment to the latter would have been an honour to the House and to England, and would have shown that sometimes at any rate the right man can find the right place. But he got neither. He delivered his last Oxford lecture in the summer term of 1867. I remember that there were strong undergraduate hopes that Mr Browning, who was an Honorary M.A., might be got to succeed him; but it was decided that the honorary qualification was insufficient, and I daresay there were other objections. Mr Arnold had a sort of "send-off" in the shape of two great dinners at Balliol and Merton, at which he and Mr Browning were the principal guests, and the close of his professorial career was further made memorable by the issue of the Study of Celtic Literature in prose and the New Poems in verse, with Schools and Universities on the Continent to follow next year. Of these something must be said before this chapter is closed.

On the Study of Celtic Literature is the first book of his to which, as a whole, and from his own point of view, we may take rather serious objections. That it has merits not affected by these objections need hardly be said; indeed I think it would not be foolish to say that it is—or was—even the superior of the Homer in comparative and indirect importance. In that Mr Arnold had but, at the best, roused men to enter upon new ways of dealing with old and familiar matter; in this he was leading them to conquest of new realms. Now, as we have seen, it was exactly this exploration, this expansion, of which English was then in most need, just as it is now perhaps in most need of concentration and retreat upon the older acquisitions.

So far so good; but if we go farther, we do not at first fare better. It would be grossly unjust to charge Mr Arnold with all the nonsense which has since been talked about Celtic Renascences; but I fear we cannot write all that nonsense off his account. In particular, he set an example, which has in this and other matters been far too widely followed, of speaking without sufficient knowledge of fact. It cannot be too peremptorily laid down that the literary equivalent of a "revoke"—the literary act after which, if he does it on purpose, you must not play with a man—is speaking of authors and books which he has not read and cannot read in the original, while he leaves you ignorant of his ignorance. This Mr Arnold never committed, and could never have committed. But short of it, and while escaping its penalty, a man may err by speaking too freely even of what he confesses that he does not know; and of this minor and less discreditable sin, I own (acknowledging most frankly that I know even less of the originals than he did), I think Mr Arnold was here guilty.

Exactly how much Gaelic, Irish, or Welsh Mr Arnold knew at first-hand, I cannot say: he frankly enough confesses that his knowledge was very closely limited. But what is really surprising, is that he does not seem to have taken much trouble to extend it at second-hand. A very few Welsh triads and scraps of Irish are all that, even in translation, he seems to have consulted: he never, I think, names Dafydd ap Gwilym, usually put forward as the greatest of Celtic poets; and in the main his citations are derived either from Ossian ("this do seem going far," as an American poetess observes), or else from the Mabinogion, where some of the articles are positively known to be late translations of French-English originals, and the others are very uncertain. You really cannot found any safe literary generalisations on so very small a basis of such very shaky matter. In fact, Mr Arnold's argument for the presence of "Celtic magic," &c., in Celtic poetry comes to something like this. "There is a quality of magic in Shakespeare, Keats, &c.; this magic must be Celtic: therefore it must be in Celtic poetry." Fill up the double enthymeme who list, I am not going to endeavour to do so. I shall only say that two sentences give the key-note of the book as argument. "Rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, came into our poetry from the Celts." Now to some of us all the weight of evidence tends to show that it came from the Latins. "Our only first-rate body of contemporary poetry is the German." Now at the time (1867), for more than thirty years, Germany had not had a single poet of the first or the second class except Heine, who, as Mr Arnold himself very truly says, was not a German but a Jew.

But once more, what we go to Mr Matthew Arnold for is not fact, it is not argument, it is not even learning. It is phrase, attitude, style, that by which, as he says admirably in this very book, "what a man has to say is recast and heightened in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it." It is the new critical attitude, the appreciation of literary beauty in and for itself, the sense of "the word," the power of discerning and the power of reflecting charm, the method not more different from the wooden deduction of the old school of critics than from the merely unenlightened and Philistine commonness of the reviewers, his earlier contemporaries, or from the aimless "I like that" and "I don't like this" which does duty now, and did then, and has done always, for criticism itself. True, Mr Arnold himself might be wilful, capricious, haphazard; true, he might often be absolutely unable to give any real reason for the faith that was in him; true, he sometimes might have known more than he did know about his subject. But in all these points he saved himself: in his wilfulness, by the grace and charm that sometimes attend caprice; in his want of reason, by his genuineness of faith itself; in his occasional lack of the fullest knowledge, by the admirable use—not merely display—which he made of what knowledge he had. There may be hardly a page of the two books of his lectures in which it is not possible to find some opportunity for disagreement—sometimes pretty grave disagreement; but I am sure that no two more valuable books, in their kind and subject, to their country and time, have been ever issued from the press.

The New Poems make a volume of unusual importance in the history of poetical careers. Mr Arnold lived more than twenty years after the date of their publication; but his poetical production during that time filled no more than a few pages. At this date he was a man of forty-five—an age at which the poetical impulse has been supposed to run low, but perhaps with no sufficient reason. Poets of such very different types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced work equal to their best, if not actually their best, at that age and later. Mr Browning had, a few years before, produced what are perhaps his actually greatest volumes, Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two. According to Mr Arnold's own conception of poetry-making, as depending upon the subject and upon the just and artist-like exposition of that subject, no age should be too late.

Certainly this age was not too late with him. The contents all answered strictly enough to their title, except that Empedocles on Etna and some half-dozen of its companions were, at Mr Browning's request, reprinted from the almost unpublished volume of 1852, and that Thyrsis, St Brandan, A Southern Night, and the Grande Chartreuse had made magazine appearances. Again the moment was most important. When Mr Arnold had last made (omitting with an apology the "transient and embarrassed phantom" of Merope) an appearance in 1855, the transition age of English nineteenth-century poetry was in full force. No one's place was safe but Tennyson's; and even his was denied by some, including Mr Arnold himself, who never got his eyes quite clear of scales in that matter. Browning, though he had handed in indisputable proofs, had not yet had them allowed; the Spasmodics had not disappeared; the great prae-Raphaelite school was but on the way. The critics knew not what to think; the vulgar thought (to the tune of myriad copies) of Tupper. Both classes, critic and public, rent Maud and neglected Men and Women: The Defence of Guenevere had not yet rung the matins—bell in the ears of the new generation.

Now things were all altered. The mixture of popularity and perfection in the Idylls and the Enoch Arden volume—the title poem and Aylmer's Field for some, The Voyage and Tithonus and In the Valley of Cauterets for others—had put Tennyson's place

"Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men."

The three-volume collection of Browning's Poems, and Dramatis Personae which followed to clench it, had nearly, if not quite, done the same for him. The Defence of Guenevere and The Life and Death of Jason, Atalanta, Chastelard, and most of all the Poems and Ballads, had launched an entirely new poetical school with almost unexampled pomp and promise on the world. The Spasmodics were forgotten, the Tupper cult had been nearly (not yet quite) laughed out of existence. That Mr Arnold's own poems had had any widely extended sale or reading could hardly be said; but they were read by those who were or were shortly to be themselves read. You had not to look far in any Oxford college (I cannot speak of Cambridge) before you found them on those undergraduate shelves which mean so much; while many who, from general distaste to poetry or from accident, knew them not, or hardly knew them, were familiar with their author's prose work, or at least knew him as one whom others knew.

The volume itself was well calculated to take advantage, to at least a moderate extent, of this conjunction of circumstance. At no time was the appeal of Mr Arnold's poetry of the most impetuous or peremptory order. And it might be contended that this collection contains nothing quite up to the very best things of the earlier poems, to the Shakespeare sonnet, to The Scholar-Gipsy, to the Isolation stanzas. But with the majority of its readers it was sure rather to send them to these earlier things than to remind them thereof, and its own attractions were abundant, various, and strong.

In the poet himself there was perhaps a slight consciousness of "the silver age." The prefatory Stanzas, a title changed in the collected works to Persistency of Poetry, sound this note—

"Though the Muse be gone away, Though she move not earth to-day, Souls, erewhile who caught her word, Ah! still harp on what they heard."

A confession perhaps a little dangerous, when the Muses were speaking in no uncertain tones not merely to juniors like Mr Morris and Mr Swinburne but to seniors like Tennyson and Browning. But the actual contents were more than reassuring. Of Empedocles it is not necessary to speak again: Thyrsis could not but charm. The famous line,

"And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,"

sets the key dangerously high; but it is kept by the magnificent address to the cuckoo,

"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?"

and the flower-piece that follows; by that other single masterpiece,

"The coronals of that forgotten time;"

by the more solemn splendour of the stanza beginning

"And long the way appears which seemed so short;"

by the Signal tree; and by the allegoric close with the reassertion of the Scholar. All these things stand by themselves, hold their sure and reserved place, even in the rush and crowd of the poetry of the sixties, the richest, perhaps, since the time from 1805 to 1822.

Saint Brandan, which follows, has pathos if not great power, and connects itself agreeably with those Celtic and mediaeval studies which had just attracted and occupied Mr Arnold. The sonnets which form the next division might be variously judged. None of them equals the Shakespeare; and one may legitimately hold the opinion that the sonnet was not specially Mr Arnold's form. Its greatest examples have always been reached by the reflex, the almost combative, action of intense poetic feeling—Shakespeare's, Milton's, Wordsworth's, Rossetti's—and intensity was not Mr Arnold's characteristic. Yet Austerity of Poetry, East London, and Monica's Last Prayer must always stand so high in the second class that it is hardly critical weakness to allow them the first. And then the tide rises. Calais Sands may not be more than very pretty, but it is that, and Dover Beach is very much more. Mr Arnold's theological prepossessions and assumptions may appear in it, and it may be unfortunately weak as an argument, for except the flood itself nothing is so certain a testimony to the flood as the ebb. But the order, the purpose, the argument, the subject, matter little to poetry. The expression, the thing that is not the subject, the tendency outside the subject, which makes for poetry, are here, and almost of the very best. Here you have that passionate interpretation of life, which is so different a thing from the criticism of it; that marvellous pictorial effect to which the art of line and colour itself is commonplace and banal, and which prose literature never attains except by a tour de force; that almost more marvellous accompaniment of vowel and consonant music, independent of the sense but reinforcing it, which is the glory of English poetry among all, and of nineteenth-century poetry among all English, poetries. As is the case with most Englishmen, the sea usually inspired Mr Arnold—it is as natural to great English poets to leave the echo of the very word ringing at the close of their verse as it was to Dante to end with "stars." But it has not often inspired any poet so well as this, nor anywhere this poet better than here. If at any time a critic may without fatuity utter judgment with some confidence, it is where he disagrees with the sentiment and admires the poem; and for my part I find in Dover Beach, even without the Merman, without the Scholar-Gipsy, without Isolation, a document which I could be content to indorse "Poetry, sans phrase."

The Terrace at Berne has been already dealt with, but that mood for epicede, which was so frequent in Mr Arnold, finds in the Carnac stanzas adequate, and in A Southern Night consummate, expression. The Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira, written long before, but now first published, has the usual faults of Mr Arnold's rhymeless verse. It is really quite impossible, when one reads such stuff as—

"Thither in your adversity Do you betake yourselves for light, But strangely misinterpret all you hear. For you will not put on New hearts with the inquirer's holy robe And purged considerate minds"—

not to ask what, poetically speaking, is the difference between this and the following—

"To college in the pursuit of duly Did I betake myself for lecture; But very soon I got extremely wet, For I had not put on The stout ulster appropriate to Britain, And my umbrella was at home."

But Palladium, if not magnificent, is reconciling, the Shakespearian Youth's Agitations beautiful, and Growing Old delightful, not without a touch of terror. It is the reply, the verneinung, to Browning's magnificent Rabbi ben Ezra, and one has almost to fly to that stronghold in order to resist its chilling influence. But it is poetry for all that, and whatever there is in it of weakness is redeemed, though not quite so poetically, by The Last Word. The Lines written in Kensington Gardens (which had appeared with Empedocles, but were missed above) may be half saddened, half endeared to some by their own remembrance of the "black-crowned red-boled" giants there celebrated—trees long since killed by London smoke, as the good-natured say, as others, by the idiotic tidiness of the gardeners, who swept the needles up and left the roots without natural comfort and protection. And then, after lesser things, the interesting, if not intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's poems, Bacchanalia, or the New Age. The word remarkable has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia, though it has poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of the most specially poetical of its author's pieces. But it is certainly his only considerable piece of that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful a thing. And, like all poetic humour, it oscillates between cynicism and passion almost bewilderingly. For a little more of this what pages and pages of jocularity about Bottles and the Rev. Esau Hittall would we not have given! what volumes of polemic with the Guardian and amateur discussions of the Gospel of St John! In the first place, note the metrical structure, the sober level octosyllables of the overture changing suddenly to a dance-measure which, for a wonder in English, almost keeps the true dactylic movement. How effective is the rhetorical iteration of

"The famous orators have shone, The famous poets sung and gone,"

and so on for nearly half a score of lines! How perfect the sad contrast of the refrain—

"Ah! so the quiet was! So was the hush!"

how justly set and felicitously worded the rural picture of the opening! how riotous the famous irruption of the New Agers! how adequate the quiet-moral of the end, that the Past is as the Present, and more also! And then he went and wrote about Bottles!

"Progress," with a splendid opening—

"The master stood upon the mount and taught— He saw a fire in his disciples' eyes,"—

conducts us to two other fine, though rhymeless, dirges. In the first, Rugby Chapel, the intensity of feeling is sufficient to carry off the lack of lyrical accomplishment. The other is the still better Heine's Grave, and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous lines about the "weary Titan," which are among the best known of their author's, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other elegies—in rhyme this time—The Stanzas written at the Grande Chartreuse and Obermann once more. They are, however, elegies of a different kind, much more self-centred, and, indeed, little more than fresh variations on "the note," as I ventured to call it before. Their descriptive and autobiographic interest is great, and if poetry were a criticism of life, there is plenty of that of them. The third book—Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868)—in which are put the complete results of the second Continental exploration—is, I suppose, much less known than the non-professional work, though perhaps not quite so unknown as the earlier report on elementary education. By far the larger part of it—the whole, indeed, except a "General Conclusion" of some forty pages—is a reasoned account of the actual state of matters in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. It is not exactly judicial; for the conclusion—perhaps the foregone conclusion—obviously colours every page. But it is an excellent example (as, indeed, is all its author's non-popular writing) of clear and orderly exposition—never arranged ad captandum, but also never "dry." Indeed there certainly are some tastes, and there may be many, to which the style is a distinct relief after the less quiet and more mannered graces of some of the rest.

Opinions may differ more as to the value of the book as a lesson, or as an argument. Mr Arnold had started with a strong belief in the desirableness—indeed of the necessity—of State-control of the most thoroughgoing kind in education; and he was not at all likely to miss the opportunity of fetching new weapons from the very arsenals and places d'armes of that system. He was thoroughly convinced that English ways generally, and especially the ways of English schools and colleges, were wrong; and he had, of course, no difficulty in pointing triumphantly to the fact that, if the institutions of Continental countries differed in some ways from each other, they all differed in nearly the same way from ours. It may undoubtedly be claimed for him—by those who see any force in the argument—that events have followed him. Education, both secondary and university in England, has to a large extent gone since on the lines he indicates; the threatened superiority of the German bagman has asserted itself even more and more; the "teaching of literature" has planted a terrible fixed foot in our schools and colleges. But perhaps the weight usually assigned to this kind of corroboration is rather imaginary. That a thing has happened does not prove that it ought to have happened, except on a theory of determinism, which puts "conduct" out of sight altogether. There are those who will still, in the vein of Mephistopheles-Akinetos, urge that the system which gave us the men who pulled us out of the Indian Mutiny can stand comparison with the system which gave France the authors of the debacle; that the successes of Germany over France in war have no necessary connection with education, and those of Germany over England in commerce, diplomacy, &c., still less. They will even go further—some of them—and ask whether the Continental practices and the Arnoldian principles do not necessitate divers terribly large and terribly ill-based assumptions, as that all men are educable, that the value of education is undiminished by its diffusion, that all, or at least most, subjects are capable of being made educational instruments, and a great many more.

On the other hand, they will cheerfully grant that Mr Arnold never succumbed to that senseless belief in examination which has done, and is doing, such infinite harm. But they will add to the debit side that the account of English university studies which ends the book was even at the time of writing so inaccurate as to be quite incomprehensible, unless we suppose that Mr Arnold was thinking of the days of his own youth, and not of those with complete accuracy. He says "the examination for the degree of bachelor of arts, which we place at the end of our three years' university course, is merely the Abiturienten-examen of Germany, the epreuve du baccalaureat of France, placed in both those countries at the entrance to university studies"; and it is by this that he justifies Signer Matteucci's absurd description of Oxford and Cambridge as hauts lycees Now, in the first place, there is not one single word in this sentence, or in the context, or, so far as I remember, in the whole book, about the Honours system, which for very many years before 1868 had exalted the standard infinitely higher in the case of a very large proportion of men. And in the second place, there is not a word about the Scholarship system, which in the same way had for very many years provided an entrance standard actually higher—far higher in some ways—than the concluding examinations of the French baccalaureat. My own days at Oxford were from 1863 to 1868, the year of Mr Arnold's book. During that time there were always in the university some 400 men who had actually obtained scholarships on this standard; and a very considerable number who had competed on it, and done fairly. Whether Mr Arnold shared Mark Pattison's craze about the abolition of the pass-man altogether, I do not know. But he ought to have known, and I should think he must have known, that at the time of his writing the mere and sheer pass-man—the man whose knowledge was represented by the minimum of Smalls, Mods, and Greats—was, if not actually in a minority,—in some colleges at least he was that—at any rate in a pretty bare majority. With his love of interference and control, he might have retorted that this did not matter, that the university permitted every one to stick to the minimum. But as a matter of fact he suggests that it provided no alternative, no maximum or majus at all.