By the time that we have now reached, that of his giving up the professorship, Mr Arnold's position was, for good and for evil, mostly fixed. When he took up the duties of his chair he was, though by no means a very young man and already the author of much remarkable work, yet almost unknown out of Oxford and a small official circle in London. He had now, at forty-five, not exactly popularity, but a very considerable, and a very lively and growing, reputation. By far the most and the best of his poetry was written; but it was only just coming to be at all generally read or at all justly appreciated. He had, partly in obeying, and partly in working against his official superiors, acquired a distinct position as an educational reformer. He had become something of a figure in society. But, above all, he had proclaimed with undoubting authority, and had exemplified with remarkable and varied skill, a new or at least a very greatly altered kind of literary criticism. And this had already threatened incursions into domains from which men of letters as such had generally kept aloof, or which, if they had touched, they had touched not as men of letters. Something of Socrates, something of Addison, something of Johnson, mingled in Mr Arnold's presentation of himself as, if not exactly an arbiter, at any rate a suggester of elegances in all things, poetry and politics, prose and polite manners, public thought, public morality, religion itself. These pretensions, if urged in a less agreeable manner, would have been intolerable; they were not universally tolerated as it was: but the gifts and graces of the critic made them—so far—inoffensive, even rather fascinating, to all save the least accommodating or the most clear-sighted, and to some even of these.

And we must remember that this appearance of Mr Arnold as the mild and ingenious tamer of the ferocious manners of Britons coincided with far wider and more remarkable innovations. This was the time, at home, of the second Parliamentary Reform, which did at least as much to infringe the authority of his enemy the Philistine, as the first had done to break the power of the half-dreaded, half-courted Barbarian. This was the time when, abroad, the long-disguised and disorganised power of Germany was to rearrange the map of Europe, and to bring about a considerable rearrangement of Mr Arnold's own ideas as to the respective greatness of foreign nations. And finally the walls of another stronghold of British Philistia, its intense and apparently impregnable self-satisfaction with Free-trade and cheap money and so forth, were tottering and crumbling. A blast against them—indeed a series of blasts from Chartism to the Latter-day Pamphlets—had been blown long before by Carlyle, in very different tones from Mr Arnold's. They had lost their stoutest champion and their most eloquent panegyrist in Macaulay. But Sadowa and household suffrage gave the final summons, if not the final shake. Mr Arnold had done his best to co-operate; but his object, to do him justice, was to be rather a raiser of the walls of Thebes than an over-thrower of those of Jericho, or even of Ashdod. He set about, in all seriousness, to clear away the rubbish and begin the re-edification; unluckily, in but too many cases, with dubious judgment, and by straying into quarters where he had no vocation. But he never entirely neglected his real business and his real vocation, and fortunately he returned to them almost entirely before it was too late.



CHAPTER IV.

IN THE WILDERNESS.

That the end of Mr Arnold's tenure of the Professorship of Poetry was a most important epoch in his life is sufficiently evident. In the ten years that came to an end then, he had, as two such extremely competent judges as Mr Disraeli and Crabb Robinson in different ways told him,[1] passed from comparative obscurity into something more than comparative prominence. His chair had been for him a real cathedra, and his deliverances from it had always assumed, and had at length, to a great extent, achieved, real authority. In criticism it was evident that if he had not revealed positively novel aspects of truth, he had formulated and put on record aspects which were presenting themselves to many, nay, most, of the best critical minds of his day. His criticism had drawn his poetry with it, if not into actual popularity, yet into something like attention. His attempts to obtain some other employment less irksome, less absorbing, and more profitable, had indeed been unsuccessful; but he was rising in his own department, and his work, if still in part uncongenial and decidedly laborious, appears to have been much less severe than in earlier days. Partly this work itself, partly his writings, and partly other causes had opened to him a very large circle of acquaintance, which it was in his own power to extend or contract as he pleased. His domestic life was perfectly happy, if his means were not very great: and his now assured literary position made it easy for him to increase these means, not indeed largely, but to a not despicable extent, by writing. The question was, "What should he write?"

It is probably idle ever to wish that a man had done anything different from that which he has done. Without being a rigid Determinist, one may be pretty well convinced that the actual conduct is the joint result of abilities, and of desires, and of opportunity to exercise them, and that the man, had he really done otherwise, would have been unsuccessful or unhappy or both. But I fear that if I had been arbiter of Mr Arnold's fate at this moment I should have arranged it differently. He should have given us more poems—the man who, far later, wrote the magnificent Westminster Abbey on such a subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in his sack. And in prose he should have given us infinite essays, as many as De Quincey's or as Sainte-Beuve's own, and more than Hazlitt's, of the kind of the Heine and the Joubert earlier, of the Wordsworth and the Byron later. I can see no reason why, in the twenty-one years' lease of life upon which he now entered, he should not have produced a volume a-year of these,—there are more than enough subjects in the various literatures that he knew; and though it is possible that in such extended application his method might have proved monotonous, or his range have seemed narrow, it is not likely. To complete the thing, I should have given him, instead of his inspectorship, a headship at Oxford, for which, it seems to me, he was admirably fitted. But Dis aliter visum: at least it seemed otherwise good to Mr Arnold himself as far as his literary employments were concerned, and the gods did not interfere.

We have seen that he had, some years before, conceived the ambitious idea of changing the mind of England on a good many points by no means merely literary; and he seems, not altogether unnaturally, to have thought that now was the time to apply seriously to that work. His tenure of the Oxford chair had given him the public ear; and the cessation of that tenure had removed any official seal of etiquette which it might have laid on his own lips. A far less alert and acute mind than his must have seen that the Reform troubles of 1866 and the "leap in the dark" of 1867 were certain to bring about very great changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant the alteration of many things abroad. He at least thought—and there was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking—that intellectual changes, of importance equal to the political, were coming or come upon the world. And so for a time he seems to have grown rather cold towards the Muses, his earliest and always his truest loves. Social, political, and religious matters tempted him away from literature; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be said that he had anything to do with her except to take her name in vain in the title of by far his worst, as it was by far his most popular, volume.

It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages in this book that the secret of this unfortunate twist is at least partly to be found in the peculiar character of Mr Arnold's official employment. For nearly twenty years he had been constantly thrown into contact with the English Dissenters; and, far earlier than the time which we have reached, they seem not only, in familiar phrase, to have "got upon his nerves," but to have affected his brain. He saw all things in Dissent—or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the average Dissenting middle-class household. The religion which Mr Arnold attacks is not the religion of the Church of England at all, or only of what was even then a decaying and uninfluential part of it, the extremer and more intolerant sect of the Evangelicals. Once more, I cannot from personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true of Dissent, but I can believe it.

Now, to derive an idea of England from the English Dissenter is and was absurd. Politically, indeed, he had only too much power between 1832 and 1866, from the tradition which made Liberal politicians fond of petting him. Socially, intellectually, and to a great extent religiously, he had next to no power at all. To take the average manager of a "British" school as the average representative of the British nation was the wildest and most mischievous of confusions. Yet this practically was the basis of Mr Arnold's crusade between 1867 and 1877.

The First Blast of the Trumpet was, intentionally no doubt, the last of the Oxford lectures, and for that very reason a rather gentle and insinuating one. Culture its Enemies, which was the origin and first part, so to say, of Culture and Anarchy, carried the campaign begun in the Essays in Criticism forward; but only in the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of the author's expressed, and very natural and proper, intention of closing his professorial exercises with the bocca dolce. Still this is at least conceivably due to the fact that the boldest extension of the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at least possessed, the author's mind. A considerable time, indeed from July 1867 to January 1868, passed before the publication of the lecture as an article in the Cornhill was followed up by the series from the latter month to August, which bore the general title of Anarchy and Authority, and completed the material of Culture and Anarchy itself. This, as a book, appeared in 1869.

It began, according to the author's favourite manner, which was already passing into something like a mannerism, with a sort of half-playful, half-serious battery against a living writer (in this case Mr Frederic Harrison), and with a laudatory citation from a dead one (in this case Bishop Wilson). Mr Harrison had blasphemed "the cant about culture," and Mr Arnold protests that culture's only aim is in the Bishop's words, "to make reason and the will of God prevail." In the first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature by its title, borrowed from Swift, of "Sweetness and Light," we have the old rallyings of the Daily Telegraph and the Nonconformist. Then the general view is laid down, and is developed in those that follow, but still with more of a political than a religious bent, and with the political bent itself chiefly limited to the social aspect.

"Doing as one Likes" scatters a mild rain of ridicule on this supposed fetich of all classes in England; and then, the very famous, if not perhaps very felicitous, nickname-classification of "Barbarian-Philistine-Populace" is launched, defended, discussed in a chapter to itself. To do Mr Arnold justice, the three classes are, if not very philosophically defined, very impartially and amusingly rallied, the rallier taking up that part of humble Philistine conscious of his own weaknesses, which, till he made it slightly tiresome by too long a run, was piquant enough. The fourth chapter, "Hebraism and Hellenism," coasts the sands and rocks (on which, as it seems to some, Mr Arnold was later to make shipwreck) very nearly in the title and rather nearly in the contents, but still with a fairly safe offing. The opposition might be put too bluntly by saying that "Hellenism" represents to Mr Arnold the love of truth at any price, and "Hebraism" the love of goodness at any price; but the actual difference is not far from this, or from those of knowing and doing, fear of stupidity and fear of sin, &c. We have the quotation from Mr Carlyle about Socrates being "terribly at ease in Zion," the promulgation of the word Renascence for Renaissauce, and so forth. "Porro unum est necessarium," a favourite tag of Mr Arnold's, rather holds up another side of the same lesson than continues it in a fresh direction; and then "Our Liberal Practitioners" brings it closer to politics, but (since the immediate subject is the Disestablishment of the Irish Church) nearer also to the quicksands. Yet Mr Arnold still keeps away from them; though from what followed it would seem that he could only have done so by some such tour de force as the famous "clubhauling" in Peter Simple. Had Culture and Anarchy stood by itself, it would have been, though very far from its author's masterpiece, an interesting document both in regard to his own mental history and that of England during the third quarter of the century, containing some of his best prose, and little, if any, of his worst sense.

But your crusader—still more your anti-crusader—never stops, and Mr Arnold was now pledged to this crusade or anti-crusade. In October 1869 he began, still in the Cornhill,—completing it by further instalments in the same place later in the year, and publishing it in 1870,—the book called St Paul and Protestantism, where he necessarily exchanges the mixed handling of Culture and Anarchy for a dead-set at the religious side of his imaginary citadel of Philistia. The point of at least ostensible connection—of real departure—is taken from the "Hebraism and Hellenism" contrast of the earlier book; and the same contrast is strongly urged throughout, especially in the coda, "A Comment on Christmas." But this contrast is gradually shaped into an onslaught on Puritanism, or rather on its dogmatic side, for its appreciation of "conduct" of morality is ever more and more eulogised. As regards the Church of England herself, the attack is oblique; in fact, it is disclaimed, and a sort of a Latitudinarian Union, with the Church for centre, and dogma left out, is advocated. Another of our Arnoldian friends, the "Zeit-Geist," makes his appearance, and it is more than hinted that one of the most important operations of this spirit is the exploding of miracles. The book is perfectly serious—its seriousness, indeed, is quite evidently deliberate and laboured, so that the author does not even fear to appear dull. But it is still admirably written, as well as studiously moderate and reverent; no exception can be taken to it on the score of taste, whatever may be taken on the score of orthodoxy from the one side, where no doubt the author would hasten to plead guilty, or on those of logic, history, and the needs of human nature on the other, where no doubt his "not guilty" would be equally emphatic.

The case is again altered, and very unfortunately altered, in the next, the most popular and, as has been said, the most famous of the series—its zenith at once and its nadir—Literature and Dogma. A very much smaller part of this had appeared in magazine form; indeed, the contents of St Paul and Protestantism itself must have seemed odd in that shape, and only strong sympathies on the part of the editor could have obtained admission for any part of Literature and Dogma. Much of it must have been written amid the excitement of the French-Prussian War, when the English public was athirst for "skits" of all sorts, and when Mr Arnold himself was "i' the vein," being engaged in the composition of much of the matter of Friendship's Garland. St Paul and Protestantism had had two editions in the same year (Culture and Anarchy, a far better thing, waited six for its second), and altogether the state of things was such as to invite any author to pursue the triumph and partake the gale. And he might at first flatter himself that he had caught the one and made cyclone-use of the other; for the book, appearing at the end of 1872, with the date of 1873, passed through three editions in that year, a fourth in 1874, and a fifth two years later. It was thus by far Mr Arnold's most popular book; I repeat also that it is quite his worst.

That it was in hopelessly bad taste here and there—in taste so bad that Mr Arnold himself later cut out the most famous passage of the book, to which accordingly we need here only allude—can be denied by nobody except those persons who hold "good form" to be, as somebody or other puts it, "an insular British delusion of the fifties and sixties." But this excision of his and, I think, some others, besides the "citations and illustrations" which he confesses to having excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to deal very briefly with this side of the matter in other respects also. We may pass over the fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson (who, whatsoe'er the failings on his part, was at any rate a logician) on the theory of causation; with the University of Cambridge about hominum divomque voluptas alma Venus (I have forgotten what was the bearing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring into); with the Bishop of Gloucester about the Personality of God; with the Athanasian Creed, and its "science got ruffled by fighting." These things, as "form," class themselves; one mutters something well known about risu inepto, and passes on. Such a tone on such a subject can only be carried off completely by the gigantic strength of Swift, though no doubt it is well enough in keeping with the merely negative and destructive purpose of Voltaire. It would be cruel to bring Literature and Dogma into competition with A Tale of a Tub; it would be more than unjust to bring it into comparison with Le Taureau blanc. And neither comparison is necessary, because the great fault of Literature and Dogma appears, not when it is considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful taste, but when it is regarded as a serious composition.

In the first place, the child-like fashion in which Mr Arnold swallowed the results of that very remarkable "science," Biblical criticism, has always struck some readers with astonishment and a kind of terror. This new La Fontaine asking everybody, "Avez-vous lu Kuenen?" is a lesson more humbling to the pride of literature than almost any that can be found. "The prophecy of the details of Peter's death," we are told in Literature and Dogma, "is almost certainly an addition after the event, because it is not at all in the manner of Jesus." Observe that we have absolutely no details, no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels for the "manner of Jesus." It is not, as in some at least of the more risky exercises of profane criticism in a similar field, as if we had some absolutely or almost absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge by them. External evidence, except for the mere fact of Christ's existence and death, we have none. So you must, by the inner light, pick and choose out of the very same documents, resting on the very same authority, what, according to your good pleasure, is "in the manner of Jesus," and then black-mark the rest as being not so. Of course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the method had not been pushed ad absurdum, as it was later by his friend M. Renan in the Histoire d'Israel, to the dismay and confusion of no less intelligent and unorthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer. But it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of this sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly.

Again, the chief bent of the book is to establish that "miracles do not happen." Alas! it is Mr Arnold's unhappy lot that if miracles do happen his argument confessedly disappears, while even if miracles do not happen it is, for his purpose, valueless. Like almost all critics of his class recently, especially like Professor Huxley in another division, he appears not to comprehend what, to the believers in the supernatural, the supernatural means. He applies, as they all apply, the tests of the natural, and says, "Now really, you know, these tests are destructive." He says—he cannot prove—that miracles do not happen now; his adversaries, if they were wise, would simply answer, "Apres?" Do any of them pretend to prescribe to their God that His methods shall be always the same, or that those methods shall stand the tests of the laboratory and the School of Charters? that He shall give "a good title," like a man who is selling a house? Some at least would rather not; they would feel appallingly little interest in a Divinity after this sworn-attorney and chartered-accountant fashion, who must produce vouchers for all His acts. And further (to speak with reverence), the Divinity whom they do worship would be likely to answer Mr Arnold in the words of a prophet of Mr Arnold's own—

"Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, Nicht Mir!"

But this is not all. There is not only begging of the question but ignoring of the issue. Literature and Dogma, to do it strict justice, is certainly not, in intention at any rate, a destructive book. It is meant, and meant very seriously, to be constructive—to provide a substitute for the effete religion of Hooker and Wilson, of Laud and Pusey, as well as for that of Baxter and Wesley and Mr Miall. This new religion is to have for its Jachin Literature—that is to say, a delicate aesthetic appreciation of all that is beautiful in Christianity and out of it; and for its Boaz Conduct—that is to say, a morality at least as rigid as that of the purest Judaism, though more amiable. If dogma is to be banished, so is anything like licence; and in the very book itself Mr Arnold formulated, against his once (and still partly) beloved France, something like that denunciation of her worship of Lubricity which he afterwards put more plainly still. Even Hellenism, the lauded Hellenism, is told to mend its ways (indeed there was need for it), and the Literature-without-Dogmatist will have to behave himself with an almost Pharisaic correctness, though in point of belief he is to be piously Sadducee.

Now this is all very pretty and very creditable, but it will not work. The goods, to use the vulgar but precise formula of English law, "are not of the nature and quality demanded by the purchaser." Nobody wants a religion of that sort. Conduct is good; poetic appreciation is perhaps better, though not for the general. But then religion happens to be something different from either, though no doubt closely connected with both. Mr Arnold does not exactly offer us a stone for bread, but he does, like the benevolent French princess in the story, offer us pie-crust. Pie-crust is a good thing; it is a close connection of bread; but it will not do for a substitute, and, in addition, it is much more difficult for the general to obtain. Moreover, there is a serious, a historical, difficulty about Conduct plus poetic appreciation, but minus what we call religion. Mr Arnold, in a stately sonnet, has told us that Sophocles was his ideal as a life-philosopher who was also a poet. He knew, presumably, the stories told about Sophocles in Athenaeus, and though these might be idle scandal, he knew far too much not to be aware that there is nothing intrinsically impossible about them. It would have been rather interesting to hear him fully on this subject. But he was too busy with expatiating on the sweet reasonableness of Jesus and "the Aberglaube of the Second Advent" to trouble himself with awkward matters of this kind at the moment.

It may be suspected, however, that he did trouble himself with them, or with something like them, afterwards. The book—a deliberate provocation—naturally found plenty of respondents, though I do not remember that any one smashed it, as, for instance, Dean Mansel could have done if he had been alive, or as Cardinal Newman could, had he been still in the fold. Mr Arnold was perhaps not less really disquieted by its comparative popularity. For he had quite enough of Phocion in him to feel, if not to say, that he must have said something at least ambiguous, when the multitude applauded. At any rate, though the ill-omened series did not cease, nothing further appeared in it which showed the tone of Literature and Dogma. Indeed, of the concluding volumes, God and the Bible and Last Essays on Church and Religion, the first is an elaborate and rather anxious apology, and the second a collection of diverse and comparatively "anodyne" essays. It is significant—as showing how much of the success of Literature and Dogma had been a success of scandal—that neither of these volumes enjoyed the least popularity. God and the Bible was never reprinted till the popular edition of the series thus far in 1884; and Last Essays was never reprinted at all, or had not been up to the date of the invaluable Bibliography of the works. Indeed the copies now, 1899, on sale appear to be of the first edition. This cool reception does not discredit either Barbarians or Philistines or Populace. There are good things in the Last Essays (to which we shall return), but the general effect of them is that of a man who is withdrawing from a foray, not exactly beaten, but unsuccessful and disgusted, and is trying to cover his retreat by alarums and excursions.

God and the Bible tells much the same tale. It originally appeared by instalments in the Contemporary Review, where it must have been something of a choke-pear even for the readers of that then young and thoughtful periodical. Unless the replier has the vigour of Swift, or at least of Bentley, the adroitness in fence of Pascal, or at least of Voltaire, "replies, duplies, quadruplies" are apt to be wofully tedious reading, and Mr Arnold was rather a veles than a triarius of controversy. He could harass, but he did not himself stand harassing very well; and here he was not merely the object of attacks from all sides, but was most uneasily conscious that, in some cases at least, he did not wish his enemies to destroy each other. He had absolutely no sympathy with the rabid anti-Christianity of Clifford, very little with the mere agnosticism of Huxley; he wanted to be allowed to take just so much Biblical criticism as suited him and no more. He wished to prove, in his own remarkable way, the truth and necessity of Christianity, and to this wish the contradictions of sinners were too manifold. One must be stony-hearted not to feel some pity for him, as, just when he thinks he has evaded an orthodox brick, the tile of a disbeliever in the Fourth Gospel whizzes at him; or as, while he is trying to patch up his romantic reconstructions of imaginary Jewish history and religion, the push of some aggressive reviewer bids him make good his challenge to metaphysical theologians. But this interest is only passing.

In the Preface there is indeed some of the old attempt at liveliness. Professor Clifford himself, then dead, is disposed of with a not ungraceful mixture of pity and satire; Messrs Moody and Sankey are not unpleasantly rallied; Satan and Tisiphone, Mr Ruskin and Sir Robert Phillimore, once more remind one of the groves of Blarney or the more doubtful chorus in the Anti-Jacobin. But the apologist is not really light-hearted: he cannot keep the more solemn part of his apologia out of the Preface itself, and assures us that the story of Adam's fall "is all a legend. It never really happened, any of it." Again one asks Mr Arnold, as seriously as possible, "How do you know that? On your own calculus, with your own estimate of evidence, how is it possible for you to know that? You may, on your principles, say that you are insufficiently persuaded that it did happen; but how can you, without preternatural revelation (the very thing you will not admit) say that it did not? Surely there is some want of intellectual seriousness in thus lightly ignoring every rule of law and logic, of history and of common-sense?"

But the embarrassment thus revealed naturally shows itself even more in the book itself, notwithstanding the fact that Mr Arnold expressly declines to reply to those who have attacked Literature and Dogma as anti-Christian and irreligious. Not even by summarily banishing this not inconsiderable host can he face the rest comfortably: and he has to resort to the strangest reasons of defence, to the most eccentric invitation of reinforcements from afar.

The strangest of all these, the clearest proof in itself of flurry and sense of need, is exhibited in his summoning—of all wonderful things —of Comparative Philology to the rescue of Literature. To rebut the criticism on his denial of a Personal God, he takes refuge in the ethnological meaning of Deus, which, it seems, is "Shining." The poor plain mind, already staggered by Mr Arnold's private revelations as to what did not happen 6000 years ago (or earlier) in the garden of Eden, quite succumbs before this privilegium of omniscience. One had thought that the results of philology and etymology of this sort were extremely ingenious guesses, to be admitted in so far as they do not conflict with facts, and till the next guess comes, but nothing more. Lo! they are quoted as if they were on a par with "two and two make four," or the law of Excluded Middle. We may not take Moses and the prophets without proof, but Curtius and Professor Max Mueller may speak, and we must but hear. And later, when Mr Arnold is trying to cope with Descartes, he flies for refuge to "the roots as, bhu, and sta."

One is tempted rather to laugh at this; but on some sides it is very serious. That no God of any religion can be more of a mere hypothesis than as, bhu, and sta, never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold for one moment, nor that he was cutting the throat of his own argument. We must not, however, fall into his own mistake and quadruplicate to his duply. It may be sufficient to say that the long defence of the Fourth Gospel which this book contains is one of the oddest things in all literature. What, on Mr Arnold's principles, it matters whether the Fourth Gospel was written in the first century, the fourth, or the fourteenth, it is impossible for the poor plain mind to see. He will not have it as revelation, and as anything else its date is quite immaterial.

The fact is that this severe censor of "learned pseudo—science mixed with popular legend," as he terms theology, appears to have no idea of the value of evidence whatever. The traditional history of the Bible is not even to be considered; but a conjectural reconstruction of it by a Dutch critic, without in the older cases one jot or tittle of evidence outside the covers of the Bible itself, deserves every respect, if not reverent acceptance en bloc. Miracles are fictions, and the scenes in the garden of Eden and at the Sepulchre never happened; but as, bhu, and sta are very solemn facts, and you can find out all about the Divinity, because the word Deus means (not "has been guessed to mean," but means) "Shining." That Shakespeare knew everything is much more certain than that miracles do not happen; and he certainly knew Mr Arnold's case if not Mr Arnold, when he introduced a certain main episode in A Midsummer Night's Dream. To frown on Oberon and caress Bottom is venial compared with the dismissal of the Bible as popular legend, and the implicit belief in as, bhu, and sta.

A wilfully hostile historian of Mr Arnold could not dwell too long on these unfortunate books, for the handles they present are infinite; but for my part I shall take leave to say little more about them. To ask, in the common phrase, whether they did any harm would be to beg the question in their own manner; to ask whether they produced any effect would lead us too far. They certainly expressed a prevalent tendency. Most fortunately Mr Arnold was allowed another ten years and more wherein to escape from the wilderness which yielded these Dead Sea fruits, and to till his proper garden once more. Yet we have not quite done with the other fruits themselves.

The actual finale, Last Essays on Church and Religion, was still less popular, was indeed the least popular of all his works, seeing that, as has been said above, it has never been reprinted. It is easy to understand this, for it is perhaps the only one of his books which can be definitely called dull. The apologetic tone noticeable in God and the Bible continues, but the apology is illustrated and maintained in an even less attractive manner. The Preface is perhaps the least dead part of the book; but its line of argument shares, and perhaps even exaggerates, the controversial infelicity of this unfortunate series. Mr Arnold deals in it at some length with the comments of two foreign critics, M. Challemel-Lacour and Signor de Gubernatis, on Literature and Dogma, bringing out (what surely could have been no news to any but very ill-educated Englishmen) the fact of their surprise, not at his taking the Bible with so little seriousness, but at his taking it with any seriousness at all. And he seems never even to dream of the obvious retort: "Certainly. These men are at any rate 'thorough'; they are not dilettante dalliers between two opinions. They have got far beyond your half-way house and have arrived at their destination. We have no desire to arrive at the destination, and therefore, if you will excuse us, we decline to visit the half-way house." It is less surprising that he did not see the force of the objections of another critic, M. Maurice Vernes, to the equally illogical and unhistorical plan of arbitrarily selecting this utterance as that of "Jesus," and another, given by the same authority, as not that of "Jesus." A man, who was sensible of this paralogism, could never take Mr Arnold's views on Church and Religion at all.

But when we leave the Preface, even such faint liveliness as this deserts us. The text contains four (or five, the second being divided into two parts) essays, lectures, or papers, _A Psychological Parallel_, _Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist_, The Church of England_, and _A Last Word on the Burials Bill_. All had appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ or the _Contemporary Review_ during 1876, while _Bishop Butler_ had been delivered as two lectures at Edinburgh, and _The Church of England_ as an address to the London Clergy at Sion College, during the spring of that year.

Over all there is a curious constraint, the evidence of a mood not very difficult to analyse, and in the analysis of which lies almost all the satisfaction or edification to be got out of the book. The writer, though by no means abandoning his own point of view, and even flattering himself that some modus vivendi is about to be established between himself and the more moderate supporters of the Church and of religion, betrays not merely the well-known self-excusing and self-accusing tone, but odd flashes of discontent and weariness—nay, even a fretfulness such as might have been that of a Moses at Rephidim who could not bring water out of the rock. A Psychological Parallel is an attempt to buttress the apologia by referring to Sir Matthew Hale's views on witchcraft, to Smith, the Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian, and to the Book of Enoch (of which, by the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not live to see Mr Charles's excellent translation, since he desiderated a good one). Of course the argument is sun-clear. If Hale was mistaken about witchcraft, St Paul may have been mistaken about the Resurrection. Expressions attributed to Christ occur in the Book of Enoch, therefore they are not original and divine, &c., &c. And it would be out of place to attempt any reply to this argument, the reply being in each case as sun-clear as the argument itself. No believer in supernatural religion that I ever met considered Sir Matthew Hale to have been inspired; and no believer in the divinity of Christ can fail to hold that His adoption of words (if He did adopt them) makes them His.

The gist of the Butler lectures is considerably less clear, and, if only for that reason, it cannot be succinctly stated or answered. In particular, it requires rather careful "collection" in order to discover what our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley. I should imagine that, though an Edinburgh audience is by no means alarmed at philosophy, the majority, perhaps the enormous majority, of Mr Arnold's hearers must have had a singularly dim idea as to his exact drift. Indeed I cannot say that after reading the piece when it first appeared, and again, twenty years later, for the purposes of this book, I have any very distinct notion of that drift myself. If it merely means that Butler, being an eighteenth-century person, was afflicted with the eighteenth-century limitations by the Zeit-Geist, eighty-six pages, and an imposing German compound at the head of every other one of them, seem a good deal for telling us this. If it is a sort of indirect attack upon—an oblique demurrer to—Butler's constructive-aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and religion, one is bound to say with all politeness, first, that it is a case of impar congressus, and secondly, that the adventurous knight does not give himself a fair chance. It will take more than eighty-six not very large pages, and a German word at the top of the alternate ones, to do that! In the opening sketch of Butler himself Mr Arnold could not but be agreeable and even delightful. It gives us, indeed, most pleasant promise of work in this same good kind soon to follow; but for the rest we grope till we find, after some seventy-three of the eighty-six, that what Mr Arnold wanted to say is that Butler did not handle, and could not then have handled, miracles and the fulfilment of prophecy satisfactorily. Butler, like St Paul, is undoubtedly inconvenient for those who believe that miracles do not happen, and that prophecies were either not made or not fulfilled. So he must be got rid of. But whether he is got rid of,—whether Mr Arnold and the Zeit-Geist have put him on the shelf as a venerable but antiquated object,—that is another question.

The two remaining essays show us Mr Arnold, in his character of at least would-be practical statesman, dealing no longer with points of doctrine but with the affairs of the Church as a political body. The circumstances of the first—the address delivered at Sion College—had a certain piquancy: whether they had also sweet reasonableness and an entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt capable of being debated. Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as a little grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to examine at any length. He thought himself that he had "sufficiently marked the way in which the new world was to be reached." Paths to new worlds are always interesting, but in reading, or rather re-reading, the sailing directions of this Columbus twenty years after date, one may be a little disappointed. The sum appears to be a somewhat Tootsian declaration that things of general are of no consequence. The Church is better than Dissent; at least she would be so if she dropped all her dogma, the greater part of her superstitions about the rights of property and "my duty to my neighbour," and as much as possible of the barriers which separate her from Dissent itself. A most moderate eirenicon. Still less need be said of the Burials Bill paper, which is a sort of appendix or corollary to the Sion speech, at the end of which the subject had been referred to. The particular question, in this phase of it, has long ceased to burn, and one need not disturb the ashes.

We must now turn to the incursions of this time into politics, which, if not much happier, were more amusing. The chief monument of them is the long unreprinted Friendship's Garland, which has always had some fervent devotees, and is very characteristic. It so happened that the period when Essays in Criticism, combined with his Oxford Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold to the public, was the period of the first years of the Pall Mall Gazette, when that brilliant periodical, with the help of many of the original staff of the Saturday Review, and others, was renewing for the sixties the sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the Saturday itself had given to the fifties, while its form and daily appearance gave it even greater opportunities. As early as the summer of 1866, during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the Seven Weeks' War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in the style of persiflage, which Kinglake had introduced, or reintroduced, twenty years earlier in Eothen, and which the Saturday had taken up and widely developed. He also took not a few hints from Carlyle in Sartor and the Latterday Pamphlets. And for some years at intervals, with the help of a troupe of imaginary correspondents and comparses—Arminius von Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the Daily Telegraph, the Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased wife's sisters, as well as a large number of more or less celebrated personages of the day, introduced in their proper persons, and by their proper names—he instructed England on its own weakness, folly, and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the Germans, on the importance of Geist and ideas, &c., &c. The author brought himself in by name as a simple inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised, bullied, or compassionately looked down upon by everybody; and by this well-known device took licence for pretty familiar treatment of other people. When the greater crash of 1870 came, and the intelligent British mind was more puzzled, yet more Prusso-mimic, than ever, he supplemented these letters, framed or bound them up, as it were, with a moving account of the death of Arminius before Paris, and launched the whole as a book.

The letters had been much laughed over; but I do not think the book was very widely bought—at any rate, its very high price during the time in which it was out of print shows that no large number was printed. Perhaps this cold welcome was not altogether so discreditable to the British public as it would have been, had its sole cause been the undoubted but unpalatable truths told by the writer. Either, as some say, because of its thick-hidedness, or, as others, because of its arrogant self-sufficiency, the British public has never resented these much. But, in the first place, the thing was a falsetto. Mr Arnold had plenty of wit but not much humour; and after a time one feels that Bottles and Leo & Co. may be, as Dousterswivel says, "very witty and comedy," but that we should not be altogether sorry if they would go. Further, the direct personalities—the worst instances concerned Lord Elcho, Mr Frederic Harrison, and the late Mr Sala—struck, and strike, some people as being not precisely in good taste. The constant allusions and references to minor and ephemeral things and persons were not of course then unintelligible, but they were even then teasing, In all these points, if Friendship's Garland be compared, I will once more not say with A Tale of a Tub, but even with the History of John Bull, its weakness will come out rather strongly.

But this was not all. It was quite evident—and it was no shame and no disadvantage to him—that the jester was endeavouring to urge a very serious earnest behind, and by means of, his jest; that he was no mere railer, or caviller, or even satirist, but a convinced reformer and apostle. Yet when we try to get at his programme—at his gospel—there is no vestige of anything tangible about either. Not very many impartial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold's favourite doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in state-provided middle-class schools; and this was specially difficult in 1871, if they remembered how some few years before Mr Arnold had been extolling the state-provided middle-class schools of France. While, for the rest, a man might be (as many men were) thoroughly dissatisfied with the part England had played abroad in Italy, in the American Civil War, in Denmark, in the war of 1866, in the war of 1870, and at home from 1845 onwards, and yet not be able for the life of him to discover any way of safety in Friendship's Garland.

Nor, to take with the Garland for convenience sake Irish Essays, 1882, the political book which closed this period with the political book that opened it, do we find things much better, even long after "the Wilderness" had been mostly left behind. There is indeed less falsetto and less flippancy; perhaps Mr Arnold had silently learnt a lesson, perhaps the opportunities of regular essays in "three-decker" reviews—of a lay sermon to working men, of a speech at the greatest public school in the world—discouraged the playfulness which had seemed permissible in addressing a skittish young evening newspaper. But the unpracticalness—not in the Philistine but in the strictly scientific sense—is more glaring than ever, and there are other faults with it. Great part of An Unregarded Irish Grievance is occupied by a long-drawn-out comparison of England's behaviour to Ireland with that of Mr Murdstone and his friend and manager Quinion to David Copperfield. In the first place, one thinks wickedly of the gibe in Friendship's Garland about "Mr Vernon Harcourt developing a system of unsectarian religion from the life of Mr Pickwick." In the second, one asks on what principles of literary art a comparison, not wholly improper as a mere illustration in passing, can be worked to death and turned inside out and upside down, for some twenty mortal pages.

And so in other places. Yet the worst faults are not in form but in substance. Minor contradictions do not matter, though in a copy of the book I have read there is a damaging comparison by some annotator between Mr Arnold's description of English Government at p. 4 and his rosy picture of education under Government at p. 107. This might happen to anybody, and is not fatal. What is fatal is that this censor of the "unideaed" has evidently himself no "ideas," no first principles, in politics at all. That, play what tricks you will, all possible politics come round either to the Rule of the One, the Rule of the Few, or the Rule of the Many, and that the consequences of these rules, differentiated a little but not materially by historical and racial characteristics, are as constant as anything commonly called scientific,—this never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold at all. He did not fully appreciate Thackeray, and Thackeray died too soon to know very much of him. But I have always thought that, for a criticism of life possessing prophetic genius, the Chevalier Strong's wedding congratulations to Arthur Pendennis are almost uncanny as regards the Matthaean gospel. "Nothing," said the Chevalier, when he had established himself as agent to the Duke of Garbanzos, "is so important to the welfare of the household as Good Sherry." And so we find that the Irish question, like all others, will be solved by the substitution of State-governed for private middle-class schools, by the saturation of England with "ideas," by all our old friends.

The rest matches. Mr Arnold pooh-poohs the notion that Ireland, except by force, will never be blended with England; it would be as sensible to say this "of Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall." He was not, I think, dead—he was certainly not dead long—when Wales actually did follow, less formidably, of course, in the path of Ireland, beginning with the Church, going on to the Land, and not distantly threatening the State. As usual he goes to his books. He quotes Goethe—a great man of letters, but perhaps the most pedantic of great men of letters except Milton—to prove that "the English are pedants." He quotes Burke—the unregenerate Irish Whig Burke, not the prophet whose tongue the French Revolution had touched as it opened his eyes—to tell us what to do with Ireland. But the main point in at least one of these essays, The Incompatibles, is again connected with David Copperfield. I have said that, from the merely literary point of view, the perpetual ringing of the changes on Creakle, Murdstone, Quinion—Quinion, Murdstone, Creakle—is inartistic and irritating. But from the philosophical and political point of view it is far worse. No Englishman with any sense of fact ever has taken, or could take, Dickens's characters as normal types. They are always fantastic exaggerations, full of genius occasionally, but as unlike actual reality as those illustrations by Cruikshank which are their nearest companions in the art of line. Of the three figures selected in particular, Creakle is a caricature; Murdstone, though not exactly that, is a repulsive exception; and Quinion is so mere a comparse or "super" that to base any generalisation on him is absurd. The dislike of the British public to be "talked book to" may be healthy or unhealthy; but if it takes no great heed of this kind of talking book, small blame to it! The same hopeless, not to say the same wilful, neglect of the practical appears throughout. Mr Arnold (to his credit be it said) had no great hopes of the Land Bill of 1881. But his own panaceas—a sort of Cadi-court for "bag-and-baggaging" bad landlords, and the concurrent endowment of Catholicism—were, at least, no better, and went, if it were possible, even more in the teeth of history.

It may be worth while (taking the usual chronological licence for the sake of logical coherence) to say a few words on the other political and quasi-political pieces reprinted with Irish Essays—the address to Ipswich working men, Ecce Convertimur ad Gentes, the Eton speech on Eutrapelia, and the ambitious Future of Liberalism[2] The first is a curious but not very important appeal to the lower class to educate the middle, with episodic praises of "equality," "academies," and the like, as well as glances at a more extensive system of "municipalisation," which, not to the satisfaction of everybody, has come about since. The second contains some admirable remarks on classical education, some still more admirable protests against reading about the classics instead of reading the classics, and the famous discourse on Eutrapelia, with its doctrine that "conduct is three-fourths of life," its denunciation of "moral inadequacy," and its really great indications of societies dying of the triumph of Liberalism and Conservatism respectively. A discourse quite admirable in intention, though if "heckling" had been in order on that occasion, a sharp youth might have put Mr Arnold in some difficulty by asking where the canons of "moral adequacy" are written.

But The Future of Liberalism, which the Elizabethans would have called a "cooling-card" after the Liberal triumph of 1880, exhibits its author's political quiddity most clearly. Much that he says is perfectly true; much of it, whether true or not, is, as Mr Weller observes, "wery pretty." But the old mistake recurs of playing on a phrase ad nauseam—in this case a phrase of Cobbett's (one of the greatest of phrase-makers, but also one of the chief of the apostles of unreason) about "the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke." It was, of course, a capital argumentum ad invidiam, and Mr Arnold frankly adopted it. He compared himself to Cobbett—a compliment, no doubt; but one which, I fear, Cobbett, who hated nothing so much as a university man, would not have appreciated. Cobbett thought of nothing but the agricultural labourer's "full belly"—at least this is how he himself put it; and it would have enforced Mr Arnold's argument and antithesis had he known or dared to use it. Mr Arnold thought of nothing but the middle classes' empty mind. The two parties, as represented by the rather small Lord Camden and the rather great Lord Hardwicke, cared for neither of these things—so "the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke" comes in as a refrain. To the average Briton quotation is no more argument than, on higher authority, is blank verse. Still it might do for ornament, if not for argument,—might help the lesson and point it at least. So we turn to the lesson itself. This "Liberal of the future," as Mr Arnold styles himself, begins, with orthodoxy if not with philosophy, by warning the Tories off entirely. "They cannot really profit the nation, or give it what it needs." Perhaps; but suppose we ask for a little reason, just a ghost of a premiss or two for this extensive conclusion? There is no voice, neither any that answers. And then, the Tories dismissed with a wave to all but temporary oblivion (they are to be allowed, it seems, to appear from time to time to chasten Liberalism), our prophet turns to Liberalism itself. It ought to promote "the humanisation of man in society," and it doesn't promote this. Ah! what a blessed word is "humanisation," the very equivalent, in syllables as in blessedness, of "Mesopotamia"! But when for the considerable rest of the essay we try to find out what humanisation is, why we find nothing but the old negative impalpable gospel, that we must "dismaterialise our upper class, disvulgarise our middle class, disbrutalise our lower class." "Om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject!" "om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject," in short, as that famous flash of Thomas Carlyle's genius discovered and summarised Coleridge, and with Coleridge the whole nineteenth century. A screed of jargon—a patter of shibboleth—and that is all. Never a thought for this momentous question—"May you not possibly—indeed most probably—in attempting to remove what you choose to consider as the defects of these classes, remove also what you acknowledge to be their virtues—the governing faculty of the upper class, the conduct and moral health of the middle, the force and vigour of the lower?" A momentous question indeed, and one which, as some think, has got something of an answer since, and no comfortable one!

I must apologise, and I do, for anything that may appear too polemical in this chapter. But the circumstances of the case made it almost as impossible, as it would have been uninteresting, to be merely recitative and colourless; and Mr Arnold's own example gives ample licence. In particular, any one who has had actual and close knowledge of the actual progress of politics for many years may be pardoned for speaking with some decision on the practice of sitting at ease in Zion, and raying out curious observations on Barbarians and Eutrapelia and the character of Mr Quinion. We may have too little of such things in English politics—no doubt for a good many years before Mr Arnold's day we had too little of them. But too much, though a not unpopular, is a very clumsy and very unscientific antidote to too little; and in Mr Arnold's own handling of politics, I venture to think that there was too much of them by a very great deal.

It is very pleasant to turn from the literary results of this period, from the spectacle of Pegasus

"Stumbling in miry roads of alien art,"

and harnessing himself to all manner of unsuitable vehicles, to the private history of the decade. This, though sadly chequered by Mr Arnold's first domestic troubles, was on the whole prosperous, was somewhat less laborious than the earlier years, and was lightened by ever more of the social and public distractions, which no man entirely dislikes, and which—to a certain extent and in a certain way—Mr Arnold did not dislike at all. The changes of occupation and of literary aim by the termination of the professorship coincided, as such things have a habit of doing, with changes in place and circumstance. The Chester Square house grew too small for the children, and a move to Harrow was first meditated and then achieved. A very pleasant letter to his mother, in November 1867, tells how he was present at the farewell dinner to Dickens on his departure for America, how they wanted him (vainly) to come to the high table and speak, and how Lord Lytton finally brought him into his own speech. He adds that some one has given him "a magnificent box of four hundred Manilla cheroots" (he must surely have counted wrong, for they usually make these things in two-hundred-and-fifties or five-hundreds), welcome to hand on, though he did not smoke himself. In another he expresses the evangelical desire to "do Mr Swinburne some good."

But in January 1868 his baby-child Basil died; and the intense family affection, which was one of his strongest characteristics, suffered of course cruelly, as is recorded in a series of touching letters to his sister and mother. He fell and hurt himself at Cannon Street, too, but was comforted by his sister with a leading case about an illiterate man who fell into a reservoir through not reading a notice. The Harrow house became a reality at Lady Day, and at Midsummer he went to stay at Panshanger, and "heard the word 'Philistine' used a hundred times during dinner and 'Barbarian' nearly as often" (it must be remembered that the "Culture and Anarchy" articles were coming out now). This half-childish delight in such matters (like Mr Pendennis's "It's all in the papers, and my name too!") is one of the most fascinating things about him, and one of not a few, proving that, if there was some affectation, there was no dissimulation in his nature. Too many men, I fear, would have said nothing about them, or assumed a lofty disdain. In September he mentions to Mr Grant Duff a plan (which one only wishes he had carried out, letting all the "Dogma" series go [Greek: kat ouron] as it deserved) for "a sketch of Greek poetry, illustrated by extracts in harmonious prose." This would have been one of the few great literary histories of the world, and so Apollo kept it in his own lap. The winter repeated, far more heavily, the domestic blow of the spring, and Tom, his eldest son, who had always been delicate, died, aged sixteen only, at Harrow, where since the removal he had been at school. There is something about this in the Letters; but on the great principle of curae leves, less, as we should expect, than about the baby's death.

In February next year Mr Arnold's double repute, as a practical and official "educationist" and as a man of letters, brought him the offer of the care of Prince Thomas of Savoy, son of the Duke of Genoa, and grandson of Victor Emmanuel, who was to attend Harrow School and board with the Arnolds. The charge, though honourable and, I suppose, profitable, might not have been entirely to the taste of everybody; but it seemed to Mr Arnold a new link with the Continent, and he welcomed it. The same year saw a visit to Knebworth, and a very interesting and by no means unsound criticism on that important event in the life of a poet, the issue of the first collected edition of his poems.[3] This was in two volumes, and is now rather precious. "It might be fairly urged that I have less poetic sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigour and abundance than Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn." One can only query whether poetry has anything to do with "modern development," and desiderate the addition to "sentiment" of "art." He seems to imply that Mr Gladstone personally prevented his appointment to a commissionership under the Endowed Schools Act. But the year ended with a complimentary reference from Mr Disraeli at Latimers about "Sweetness and Light."

In February 1870 the famous Persian cat Atossa (now in the most comfortable lap of all the gods or goddesses, with Hodge and Bona Marietta and Hinse of Hinsfeldt) makes her first appearance; and in June Mr Arnold received the Oxford D.C.L. He set it down to "a young and original sort of man, Lord Salisbury, being Chancellor"; and Lord Salisbury himself afterwards told him that "no doubt he ought to have addressed him as 'vir dulcissime et lucidissime.'" But though he was much pleased by his reception, he thought Lord Salisbury "dangerous," as being unliterary, and only scientific and religious in his tastes.

In December he had an amusing and (as it ended well) not unsatisfactory experience of the ways of Income Tax Commissioners. These gentlemen acted on even vaguer principles than those on which they once assessed a poor dramatic amateur, who had by accident received L6 "author's rights" for a week, at L300 per annum, on the sound arithmetical argument that there are fifty (indeed, there are fifty-two) weeks in a year, and that fifty times six is three hundred. They put Mr Arnold's literary profits at L1000, and he had to expostulate in person before they would let him down to L200, though he pathetically explained that "he should have to write more articles than he ever had done" to prevent his being a loser even at that. About the catastrophe of the Annee Terrible, his craze for "righteousness" makes him a very little Pecksniffian—one thinks of the Tower of Siloam. But it is pleasant to hear that, early in 1871, they are arranging for him "a perfect district, Westminster and a small rural part near Harrow." So one hopes that the days of posting from shire to shire and subsisting on buns were over. He is interested about Deutsch (the comet of a season for his famous Talmud articles), receives the Commandership of the Crown of Italy for his services to Prince Thomas, and is proposed for the Middlesex magistracy, but (to one's sorrow) declines. There is fishing at Chenies (vide an admirable essay of Mr Froude's) in the early summer, a visit to Switzerland in the later, and in September "the pigs are grown very large and handsome, and experts advise their conversion into bacon." But Mrs Arnold "does not like the idea." Indeed this is the drawback of pig-keeping, which is otherwise a most fascinating pastime; but you can escape it, and unite pleasure with profit, by merely breeding the pigs and selling the litters young.

After this respite fate was again cruel. On February 16, 1872, Mr Arnold's second son died at Harrow, and again the reception of the blow and its effect are marked by lesser voicefulness in the grief. Yet one phrase, "I cannot write his name without stopping to look at it in stupefaction at his not being alive," is equal to volumes. The letters of this year are few, but in September begins a correspondence of some interest and duration with a French pastor, M. Fontanes. Nor does 1873 give much except description of a tour to Italy, while in May the Arnolds moved from Harrow, with its painful memories, to Cobham, which was Mr Arnold's home for the rest of his life. In September he "shoots worse than ever" (vide Friendship's Garland) in the famous preserves of Six Mile Bottom, and soon after his mother dies. But it is not given to all men not to be motherless till they themselves are fifty. And 1874 is again rather barren, even such yield as it gives being rather didactic and controversial, as for instance in a letter to his sister, who had apparently remonstrated with some vigour against the tone of Literature and Dogma. A pleasant letter to Miss Kingsley on her father's death (1875) puts in good evidence against the charge of grudging appreciation of contemporaries which has often been brought against Mr Arnold, and which some unguarded expressions, rather injudiciously published in other letters, may seem to confirm.

Another in December contains an instance[4] of that dislike to history, which long before its publication careful students of his works had always noticed in him. The fact is, that to a man of ideas, as Mr Arnold would have liked to be called—a man of theories or of crotchets, as in extending order of unkindness people actually did call him—history must be an annoying study. The things that ought to happen do not happen, and the things that do happen have to be awkwardly explained away or hazardously ignored His almost pettish disgust for the historic estimate in literature itself may have either caused or been caused by this more general dislike, and the dislike itself explains the leniency with which he always regarded the sheer guess-work of the Biblical critics. But it is possible to sympathise with his disapproval of the divorce of History and Law, which used to be united in the Oxford schools. Together they made a discipline, inferior indeed, but only inferior, to that of the great school of Literae Humaniores, the best intellectual training in the world. When they are divided, it may be feared that law becomes a mere technicality, if not a mere bread-study, and that history is at once thin and vague.

But Clio must have made interest with Nemesis; for, but a page or two afterwards, this disregard of history leads Mr Arnold into a very odd blunder. His French friend, M. Fontanes, had thought of writing about Godwin, but Mr Arnold dissuades him. "Godwin," he says, "est interessant, mais il n'est pas une source; des courants actuels qui nous portent, aucun ne vient de lui." Godwin is the high priest of Anarchism; he is our first Socialist philosopher, he advocated no marriage, woman's rights, the abolition of religion. And dans nos courants actuels rien ne vient de lui! This was early in 1876, and later in the same year we have from him the singular judgment that George Sand, just dead, was "the greatest spirit in our European world from the time that Goethe departed." The chronicle may be appropriately closed for the time by mentioning that in the spring of 1877 Mr Arnold was approached with a view to his standing once more for the Poetry Chair, and declined. The invitation, however, was a sort of summons to him to go back to his proper work, and in effect, though doubtless not in intention, he had already obeyed it. "A French Critic on Milton," published in January 1877, is the first literary article of any importance that his bibliography records for the whole decade which we have surveyed in this chapter.

Note.—It is particularly unlucky that the Prose Passages, which the author selected from his works and published in 1879, did not appear later. It is almost sufficient to say that less than one-fourth of their contents is devoted to literature, all the rest to the "Dead Sea fruit." I have therefore said nothing about the book in the text. It is, however, a useful though incomplete and one-sided chrestomathy of Mr Arnold's style from the formal point of view, illustrating both his minor devices of phrase and the ingenious ordonnance of his paragraphs in building up thought and statement.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Mr Disraeli's words (in 1864) have been referred to above (p. 100). They were actually: "At that time [when they had met at Lord Houghton's some seven or eight years earlier] ... you yourself were little known. Now you are well known. You have made a reputation, but you will go further yet. You have a great future before you, and you deserve it." Crabb Robinson was a much older acquaintance, and is credited, I believe, with the remark far earlier, that "he shouldn't dare to be intimate" with so clever a young man as Matthew Arnold. Very shortly before his death in February 1867, he had met Mr Arnold in the Athenaeum, and asked "which of all my books I should myself name as the one that had got me my great reputation. I said I had not a great reputation, upon which he answered: 'Then it is some other Matthew Arnold who writes the books.'" The passage, which contains an odd prophecy of the speaker's own death, and an interesting indication that Mr Arnold rightly considered the Essays to be "the book that got him his reputation," will be found in Letters, i. 351.

[2] Of the remaining contents, the Prefaces of 1853-5 are invaluable, at least the first is, but this has been already noticed. Of The French Play in London, I am, perhaps, no good judge, as I take little interest in the acted drama. It is much occupied with the inferiority of French poetry, and especially of the poetry of Hugo; the inferiority of English civilisation, especially of the middle class. There are good things in it, but they are better said elsewhere. The rest needs no notice.

[3] A note on the contents of this and the subsequent collected editions may not be unwelcome; for, as was always the case with him, he varied them not a little. This first collection was advertised as comprehending "the First and Second Series of the Author's Poems and the New Poems," but as a matter of fact half-a-dozen pieces—including things as interesting as A Dream and Stagirius—are omitted, though the fine In Utrumque Paratus reappears for the first time as a consolation. As reprinted in 1877, this collection dropped The Church of Brou except the third part, and recovered not only Stagirius and others but The New Sirens, besides giving, for the first time in book-form, Haworth Churchyard, printed twenty-two years before in Fraser. A further reprint in 1881 restored the whole Church of Brou and A Dream, and gave two or three small additions, especially Geist's Grave. The three-volume edition of 1885 also republished Merope for the first time, and added Westminster Abbey and Poor Matthias. The one-volume edition of 1890 reproduced all this, adding Horatian Echo and Kaiser Dead; it is complete save for the two prize poems, and six or seven smaller pieces.

[4] "I do not like the course for the History School at all; nothing but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading really great authors forms it, or even to exercise it as learning a new language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises it."



CHAPTER V.

THE LAST DECADE.

It would be unhistorical to assert, and unphilosophical to assume, that in the change or reversion noted at the end of the last chapter, Mr Arnold had any consciousness of relinquishment, still more to hint any definite sense of failure on his part. He would probably have said (if any one had been impertinent enough to ask, and he had condescended to reply) that he had said his say, had shot his bolt, and might leave them to produce their effect. But that there was, if no repentance, a certain disgust, I cannot but believe. He must have seen—he almost acknowledges that he saw—that the work which he at least thought was conservative was being utilised by others in a purely destructive spirit; he must have found himself in very unwelcome alliances; and (which is worst of all to a delicate and sensitive spirit) he must constantly have found fools dotting his i's and emphasising his innuendoes in their own clumsy and Philistine fashion. At any rate, it is purely historical to say that he did henceforward almost entirely change his main line of operation as to religious matters, and that though, as has been shown, he persisted, not too fortunately, in politics, his method of discussion in that likewise was altered. As we heard no more of the three Lord Shaftesburys, so Bottles and his unwelcome society were permitted to remain unchronicled. In the latter department seriousness came upon Mr Arnold; in the former, if not a total, yet a general and certainly most welcome silence.

Most welcome: for he was voiceful enough on other and his proper subjects. "Falkland," which followed "A French Critic on Milton," in March in the Fortnightly, and "George Sand," which followed it, as has been said, in June in the Nineteenth Century, somewhat deserved the title (Mixed Essays) of the volume in which they were two years later reprinted. But the last essay of the year 1877, that on Mr Stopford Brooke's Primer, was, like the "French Critic," and even more than that, pure literature. "A French Critic on Goethe," which appeared in the Quarterly Review for January 1878, followed next. The other pieces of this year, which also, with one exception, appeared in Mixed Essays, were, with that exception, evidences of a slight but venial relapse, or let us say of convalescence not yet quite turned into health. "Equality" (Fortnightly, March 1878), "Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism" (Fortnightly, July 1878), and "Porro Unum est Necessarium" (Fortnightly, November 1878), were, if not of "the utmost last provincial band," yet not of the pure Quirites, the genuine citizens of the sacred city of Mr Arnold's thought: and he seceded from this latter in not a few of those estimable but unimportant Irish essays which have been noticed in the last chapter.

But the literary contents of Mixed Essays are very interesting, and the Johnson paper (really a preface to the six selected lives, which he edited for Messrs Macmillan in 1878) is a most excellent piece of work. His selection of the Lives is perhaps not quite unerring. For he ought surely to have given the "Cowley," with its (from his own point of view) invaluable point de repere in the estimate of the "metaphysicals." And he might have missed the "Swift," which, though extremely interesting as a personal study from its mixture of prejudice and constraint, its willingness to wound, and yet—not its fear but—its honest compunction at striking, is, for the purpose of the volume, misplaced. But he had a right to give what he chose: and his preface has points of the very highest value. The opening passage about the point de repere itself, the fixed halting-place to which we can always resort for fresh starts, fresh calculations, is one of the great critical loci of the world, and especially involves the main contribution of the nineteenth century to criticism if not to literature altogether. We may exalt, without very much doubt or dread, the positive achievements of the century of Tennyson and Browning, of Carlyle and Thackeray, of Heine and Hugo. But we have seen such strange revolutions in this respect that it may not do to be too confident. The glory of which no man can deprive our poor dying siecle is that not one, of all the others since history began, has taken such pains to understand those before it, has, in other words, so discovered and so utilised the value of points de repere. It may be that this value is, except in the rarest cases, all that a critic can ever pretend to—that he may be happy if, as few do, he reaches this. But in the formulation of the idea (for he did much more than merely borrow it from the French) Mr Arnold showed his genius, his faculty of putting

"What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed."

And when a man does this in prose or in verse, in criticism or in creation, he has his reward—a reward that no man can take away, even if any one were disposed to try.

As a whole, Mixed Essays itself, which followed Last Essays on Church and Religion at an interval of two years, is an almost immeasurably livelier book than its predecessor, and to some judgments at least seems to excel that predecessor in solid value as much as in the graces. "Mixed" is perhaps not a strictly accurate title, for the volume consists of two halves, the contents of each of which are homogeneous enough, but which have next to nothing to do with each other. But even in the non-literary essays we are out of "The Wilderness" in its worst sense. Most of the essays had, as has just been shown, appeared in different periodicals, while "Equality" was also delivered as a lecture during the years 1877 and 1878. The exception was the paper called "Democracy," which he reprinted from his first work on Foreign Schools in 1861, where it had appeared as an Introduction. The juxtaposition is by no means uninteresting or uninstructive, though perhaps it is not entirely favourable to the idea of Mr Arnold's development as a zoon politicon. It has been said before that his earliest political writing is a good deal less fantastic and more sane than that of his middle period, and though "the last of life for which the first was made" was now restoring to him much of his power in this direction, yet he was always much joined to idols in matters political. In grasp "Democracy" does not quite come up to its rather ambitious title; and a moment's thought will show why. In 1861 Democracy was a very academic subject. All projects for further Parliamentary Reform had failed utterly in England; and nobody dreamt of what the next five or six years would bring. In France there was what looked like a crushing military despotism: in other Continental countries the repression which had followed the outbreaks of 1848-49 was only just being relaxed, or not relaxed at all. American democracy had not had its second baptism of Civil War. The favourite fancies about the respective ethos of aristocracy, of the middle-class, and of the lower do indeed appear, but for the most part Mr Arnold confines himself to the simple question of State interference, for which in his own subject of education he was so anxious, and which he would gladly have seen extended. It has been more than once remarked already that he may justly be regarded as a politician of more seriousness than he has here been represented as possessing, if espousing the cause of the things which actually happen is taken as the criterion. For State interference has grown and is growing every day. But then it may be held—and as a matter of principle he would not himself have contested it—that a man's politics should be directed, not by what he thinks will happen, but by what he thinks ought to happen. And some of us, while not in love by any means with the middle-class Liberal ideas of 1830-1860, think that the saving grace of that day that is dead was precisely its objection to State interference.

"Equality," which follows, and which starts what might be called at the time of the book its contemporary interest, is much more far-reaching and of greater curiosity; indeed, it may perhaps be held to be the most curious, in a certain sense, of all its author's writings, and to give, in a not fully satisfactory but suggestive fashion, a key to his complex character which is supplied by no other of his essays. That there was (in no silly or derogatory sense of an often absurdly used word) a slightly un-English side to that character, few acute judges would deny. But its results, in the greater part of the works, are so diffused, and, as it were, subterranean, that they are difficult to extract and concentrate. Here we seem to get the spirit much nearer proof. For the Equality which Mr Arnold here champions is not English but French equality; not political and judicial equality before the law, but social equality enforced by the law. He himself admits, and perhaps even a little exaggerates, his attitude of Athanasius contra mundum in this respect, amassing with relish expressions, in the sense opposite to his own, from such representative and yet essentially diverse authorities as Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone, Sir Erskine May, Mr Froude, and Mr Lowe. Against them he arrays Menander and George Sand—a counter-championship not itself suggestive of Equality. This may be "only his fun"—a famous utterance which it is never more necessary to keep in mind than when speaking or writing of Mr Arnold, for his fun, such as it was, was pervading, and occasionally rather cryptic. But the bulk of the paper is perfectly serious. Social equality, and its compulsory establishment by a law against free bequest or by public opinion, these are his themes. He asserts that the Continent is in favour of them; that the English colonies, ci-devant and actual, are in favour of them; that the Greeks were in favour of them; that the Bible is in favour of them. He cites Mr Hamerton as to the virtues of the French peasant. He renews his old tilt at the manners of the English lower-middle class, at Messrs Moody and Sankey, at the great "Jingo" song of twenty years ago (as to which, by the way, a modern Fletcher of Saltoun might have something to say to-day), at the Puritans, at Mr Goldwin Smith, at many things and many persons.

I feel that history has given me at the moment rather an unfair advantage over Mr Arnold here. One could always pick plenty of holes in "Equality," could suggest that the Greeks did not make such a very good thing of it with their equality (which included slavery); that the Biblical point is far from past argument; that M. Zola, for instance, supplies an interesting commentary on Mr Hamerton's rose-coloured pictures of the French peasantry; that whatever Mr Arnold's own lot may have been, others who have lived in small French towns with the commis voyageur have not found his manners so greatly superior to those of the English bagman. But just at this moment, and, in fact, in an increasing degree ever since Mr Arnold wrote, the glorification of France has become difficult or impossible. Sir Erskine May, it seems, had warned him in vain about the political effect of French Equality even at that time: but one need not confine oneself to politics. At the end of the nineteenth century France has enjoyed the blessings of social equality, enforced by compulsory division of estates, for a hundred years and more. Perhaps equality has nothing to do with the decadence of her literature, with that state of morals which Mr Arnold himself deplored with almost Puritan emphasis, with the state of religion which he holds up as an awful example, fit to warn England to flee to the refuge of his own undogmatic Nephelococcygia, with the ineffable scandals of Panama and the Dreyfus case, with the mixture of blind illucidity and febrile passion which characterises the French press. Only, what is left? Where are the improvements due to this great influence? They are, according to Mr Arnold, in the amiable dignity of the French peasant and the polished refinement of the French middle-class. Frankly, one may prefer Hodge and Bottles.

"Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism" has less actuality, and, moreover, it belongs to a group of which enough has been said in reference to the Irish Essays. But "Porro Unum est Necessarium" possesses not merely an accidental but a real claim to fresh attention, not merely at the moment when there is at last some chance of the dream of Mr Arnold's life, the interference of the State in English secondary education, being realised, but because it is one of the expressions of that dream which was in his life so important. It consists partly of statistics and partly of a moan over the fact that, in the heat and heyday of Mr Gladstone's levee en masse against the Tory Government of 1874-80, the Liberal programme contained nothing about this darling object. And the superiority of France is trotted out again; but it would be cruel to insist any more. Yet at last Mr Arnold becomes practical, and contends for pretty much the substance of present Secondary Education Reform schemes—limited inspection, qualification of masters, leaving certificates, &c. "It do not over-stimulate," to quote an author to whom Mr Arnold was shortly to devote much attention; but we leave the political or semi-political batch in considerably greater charity with the author than his prose volumes for years past had rendered possible.

No reserves, no allowances of the least importance are necessary in dealing with the rest of the volume. I do not think it fanciful to discern a sort of involuntary or rather unconscious "Ouf!" of relief in the first, the "Guide to English Literature," on the subject, as has been said, of Mr Stopford Brooke's always excellent and then novel Primer. A tribute to duty is, indeed, paid at starting: we are told sternly that we must not laugh (as it is to be feared too many of us did and do) at the famous boast of the French Minister, as to all the boys in France learning the same lesson at the same hour. For this was the result of State interference: and all the works of State interference are blessing and blessed. But, this due rite paid, Mr Arnold gives himself up to enjoyment, laudation, and a few good-natured and, for the most part, extremely judicious proposals for making the good better still. Even if this last characteristic were not present, it would be unjust to call the article a puff. Besides, are puffs so wholly bad? A man may be not very fond of sweets, and yet think a good puff now and then, a puff with its three corners just hot from the oven, full of jam, light, artistically frothed, to be a very pleasing thing. And, as I have said, Mr Arnold's review is much more than a puff. Once, indeed, there is even a hypercriticism, due to that slight want of familiarity with literary history proper which has been noticed more than once. Mr Arnold finds fault with Mr Brooke for adopting, as one of his chapter divisions, "from the Restoration to George III." He objects to this that "George III. has nothing to do with literature," and suggests "to the Death of Pope and Swift." This is a curious mistake, of a kind which lesser critics have often repeated. Perhaps George III. had nothing to do with literature; but his accession immediately preceded, and may even, as the beginning of a pure English regime, have done something to produce, numerous appearances of the Romantic revival—Percy's Reliques, Hurd's Essays, Macpherson's Ossian, The Castle of Otranto, and others. The deaths of Pope and Swift have no such synchronism. They mark, indeed, the disappearance of the strongest men of the old school, but not the appearance of even the weakest and most infantine of the new. Still this, though interesting in itself, is a trifle, and the whole paper, short as it is, is a sort of Nunc Dimittis in a new sense, a hymn of praise for dismissal, not from but to work—to the singer's proper function, from which he has been long divorced.

"Falkland," which follows, is less purely literary, but yet closely connected with literature. One thinks with some ruth of its original text, which was a discourse on Falkland by that modern Lucius Gary, the late Lord Carnarvon—the most curious and pathetic instance of a man of the nineteenth century speaking of one who was almost his exact prototype, in virtues and graces as in weaknesses and disabilities of temperament, during the seventeenth. It would, of course, have been indecent for Mr Arnold to bring this parallel out, writing as he did in his own name and at the moment, and I do not find any reference to it in the Letters; but I can remember how strongly it was felt at the time. His own interest in Falkland as the martyr of Sweetness and Light, of lucidity of mind and largeness of temper, was most natural, and its sources most obvious. It would be cruel, and is quite unnecessary, to insist on the too certain fact that, in this instance at any rate, these excellent qualities were accompanied by a distinct weakness of will, by a mania for sitting between two stools, and by that—it may be lovable, it may be even estimable—incapacity to think, to speak, to behave like a man of this world, which besets the conscientious idealist who is not a fanatic. On the contrary, let us not grudge Mr Arnold a hero so congenial to himself, and so little repulsive to any of us. He could not have had a better subject; nor can Falkland ever hope for a vates better consecrated, by taste, temper, and ability, to sing his praises.

Then we are back again in pure literature, with the two notable Quarterly articles, already glanced at, on M. Scherer as "A French Critic on Milton" and "A French Critic on Goethe." There was a very strong sympathy, creditable to both, between the two. M. Scherer went further than Mr Arnold in the negative character of his views on religion; but they agreed as to dogma. His literary criticism was somewhat harder and drier than Mr Arnold's; but the two agreed in acuteness, lucidity, and a wide, if not quite a thoroughgoing, use of the comparative method. Both were absolutely at one in their uncompromising exaltation of "conduct." So that Mr Arnold was writing quite con amore when he took up his pen to recommend M. Scherer to the British public, which mostly knew him not at that time.

But he did not begin directly with his main subject. He had always, as we have seen, had a particular grudge at Macaulay, who indeed represented in many ways the tendencies which Mr Arnold was born to oppose. Now just at this time certain younger critics, while by no means championing Macaulay generally, had raised pretty loud and repeated protests against Mr Arnold's exaggerated depreciation of the Lays as "pinchbeck"; and I am rather disposed to think that he took this opportunity for a sort of sally in flank. He fastens on one of Macaulay's weakest points, a point the weakness of which was admitted by Macaulay himself—the "gaudily and ungracefully ornamented" (as its author calls it) Essay on Milton. And he points out, with truth enough, that its "gaudy and ungraceful ornament" is by no means its only fault—that it is bad as criticism, that it shows no clear grasp of Milton's real merits, that it ignores his faults, that it attributes to him qualities which were the very reverse of his real qualities. He next deals slighter but still telling blows at Addison, defends Johnson, in passing, as only negatively deficient in the necessary qualifications, not positively conventional like Addison, or rhetorical like Macaulay, and then with a turn, itself excellently rhetorical in the good sense, passes to M. Scherer's own dealings with the subject. Thenceforward he rather effaces himself, and chiefly abstracts and summarises the "French Critic's" deliverances, laying special stress on the encomiums given to Milton's style. The piece is one of his most artfully constructed; and I do not anywhere know a better example of ingenious and attractive introduction of a friend, as we may call it, to a new society.

The method is not very different in "A French Critic on Goethe," though Carlyle, the English "awful example" selected for contrast, is less maltreated than Macaulay, and shares the disadvantageous part with Lewes, and with divers German critics. On the whole, this essay, good as it is, seems to me less effective than the other; perhaps because Mr Arnold is in less accord with his author, and even seems to be in two minds about that author's subject—about Goethe himself. Earlier, as we have partly seen, he had, both in prose and in verse, spoken with praise—for him altogether extraordinary, if not positively extravagant—of Goethe; he now seems a little doubtful, and asks rather wistfully for "the just judgment of forty years," the calm revised estimate of the Age of Wisdom. But M. Scherer's estimate is in parts lower than he can bring himself to admit; and this turns the final passages of the essay into a rather unsatisfactory chain of "I agree with this," "I do not agree with that." But the paper retains the great merit which has been assigned to its predecessor as a piece of ushering; and that, we must remember, was what it was designed to be.

In "George Sand," which completes the volume, we have Mr Arnold no longer as harbinger of another, but in the character, in which after all he is most welcome, of speaker on his own account. His estimate of this prolific amuseuse will probably in the long-run seem excessive to the majority of catholic and comparative critics; nor is it at all difficult to account for the excess. Mr Arnold belonged exactly to the generation to which in England, even more than in France, George Sand came as a soothing and sympathetic exponent of personal sorrows. Even the works of her "storm-and-stress" period were not too far behind them; and her later calmer productions seem to have had, at least for some natures among the "discouraged generation of 1850" (to which, as we have said, Mr Arnold himself by his first publications belonged), something of that healing power which he has assigned, in larger measure and with greater truth, to Wordsworth. A man is never to be blamed for a certain generous overvaluation of those who have thus succoured him; it would be as just to blame him for thinking his mother more beautiful, his father wiser than they actually were. And Mr Arnold's obituary here has a great deal of charm. The personal and biographical part is done with admirable taste, not a grain too much or too little of that moi so haissable in excess, so piquant as a mere seasoning, being introduced: and the panegyric is skilful in the extreme. To be sure, Mr Hamerton reappears, and Mr Arnold joins in the chorus of delight because the French peasant no longer takes off his hat. Alas! there is no need to go to the country of La Terre to discover this sign of moral elevation. But the delusion itself is only another proof of Mr Arnold's constancy to his early ideas. And looking back on the whole volume, one is almost tempted to say that, barring the first Essays in Criticism itself, he had written no better book.

Before very long the skill in selecting and editing which had been first applied to Johnson's Lives found extended opportunities. Mr Arnold had much earlier, in the Essays in Criticism, expressed a wish that the practice of introducing books by a critical and biographical Essay, which had long been naturalised in France, and had in former times not been unknown in England, should be revived among us. His words had been heard even before he himself took up the practice, and for about the usual time—your thirty years is as a matter of fact your generation—it flourished and prospered, not let us hope to the great detriment of readers, and certainly to the modest advantage of the public man when vexed by want of pence. Nor can it exactly be said to have ceased—though for some years grumbles have been uttered. "Why," says one haughty critic,—"why mar a beautiful edition of So-and-so's works by incorporating with them this or that man's estimate of their value?" "The publishers," says an inspired communique, "are beginning to recognise that the public has no need of such things in the case of works of established repute, of which there is nothing new to be said." No doubt both these are genuine utterances: no doubt the haughty critic would have steadily refused to "mar" the book by his estimate if he had been asked to do so; no doubt the particular firm of publishers were not in the least influenced by a desire to save the ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred guineas which this or that man might have demanded for saying nothing new.

But Mr Arnold did not agree with these severe folk. He thought—and not a few good wits have thought with him—not only that these Introductions are an opportunity for men like himself, with original gifts of thought and style, to display these gifts, but that the mighty public, for all its knowledge of everything that has been thought and said about everybody, might find something new to it even in the observations of lesser folk. As a matter of fact, of course, and neither to talk nor to quote nonsense, the utility of such Introductions, even if moderately well done, is unmistakable. Not one in a thousand of the probable readers of any book has all the information which even a fairly competent introducer will put before him; not one in a hundred knows the previous estimates of the author; not many possess that acquaintance with his whole work which it is part of the business of the introducer to acquire, and adjust for the better understanding of the particular book. Of course, if an Introduction is imperfectly furnished with fact and thought and reading—if it is desultory, in bad taste, and so forth—it had better not be there. But this is only saying that a bad Introduction is a bad thing, which does not get us much beyond the intellectual edification of the niece of Gorboduc. Unless the introducer is a boggler, the Introduction will probably do good to those who want it and can be neglected by those who don't; while in the rarer and better cases it will itself acquire, or even possess from the first, that very value as a point de repere which Mr Arnold had discussed. It will be good relatively and good in itself,—a contribution at once to the literature of knowledge and to the literature of power.