Of Mr Arnold's efforts in editing I may be permitted to neglect his "intromittings" with Isaiah, for reasons already sufficiently given. In more hopeful matter there are three examples which are not soon likely to lose interest or value: the selection of his own poems, that from Wordsworth, and that from Byron. To the first the English habits of his own day did not permit him to prefix any extensive Introduction, and though the principle is sound, one is almost sorry for the application. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge would have had any scruples in doing this, and while Mr Arnold had the sense of the ludicrous which Wordsworth lacked, he was less subject to disastrous divagations than Coleridge. Still, the 1853 Preface enables those who have some slight power of expansion to fill in what is wanted from the point of view of purpose; and the selection itself is quite excellent. Almost the only things that, as a basis for a good knowledge of the poet, one finds it necessary to subjoin, are the beautiful Resignation, which Mr Humphry Ward had the good taste to include in the appendix to his English Poets; and the curious, characteristic, and not much short of admirable Dream, which in the earlier issues formed part of Switzerland, and should never have been excluded from it. It is probably the best selection by a poet from his own works that has ever been issued, and this is saying not a little. Nor does one like Mr Arnold less for his saying, reported either by Mr Ward or Lord Coleridge, that he had rather have given all the poems.

As for the "Wordsworth" and the "Byron," they gain enormously by "this man's estimate of them," and do not lose by "this man's" selection. I have had occasion, not once or twice only, and for purposes not invariably the same, to go through the Wordsworth book carefully, side by side with the complete poems, in order to see whether anything has necessarily to be added. I really do not know what has, unless it be a few of the oases from the deserts of the Excursion, the Prelude, and the then not published Recluse. Wordsworth's real titles are put in once for all; the things by which he must stand or fall are there. The professor, the very thorough-going student, the literary historian, must go farther; the idle person with a love of literature will; but nobody need.

And the Introduction (for after all we can all make our selections for ourselves, with a very little trouble) is still more precious. I know few critical essays which give me more pleasure in reading and re-reading than this. Not that I agree with it by any means as a whole; but he is in the mere "Pettys" of criticism (it is true not many seem to get beyond) who judges a critical essay by his own agreement with it. Mr Arnold puts Wordsworth, as a poet and an English poet, far higher than I can put him. He is not so great a poet to my thinking as Spenser or Shelley; if it were possible in these competitions to allow weight for age, he is not as great a poet as Keats; I am sure he is not a greater poet than Tennyson; I cannot give him rank above Heine or Hugo, though the first may be sometimes naughty and the second frequently silly or rhetorical; and when Mr Arnold begins to reckon Moliere in, I confess I am lost. When and where did Moliere write poetry? But these things do not matter; they are the things on which reviewers exercise their "will it be believed?" and on which critics agree to differ. We may include with them the disparaging passage on Gautier (of whom I suspect Mr Arnold knew little, and whom he was not quite fitted to judge had he known more) and the exaltation of "life" and "conduct" and all the rest of it. These are the colours of the regiment, the blazonry of the knight; we take them with it and him, and having once said our say against them, pass them as admitted.

But what is really precious is first the excellent criticism scattered broadcast all over the essay, and secondly, the onslaught on the Wordsworthians. They might perhaps retort with a tu quoque. When Mr Arnold attacks these poor folk for saying that Wordsworth's poetry is precious because its philosophy is sound, we remember a certain Preface with its "all depends on the subject," and chuckle a little, a very little. But Mr Arnold is right here. No philosophy, no subject, will make poetry without poetical treatment, and the consequence is that The Excursion and The Prelude are, as wholes, not good poems at all. They contain, indeed, passages of magnificent poetry. But how one longs, how, as one sees from this essay, Mr Arnold longed, for some mercury-process which would simply amalgamate the gold out of them and allow us to throw the dross down any nearest cataract, or let it be blown away by any casual hurricane!

The Byron paper contains more disputable statements—indeed the passage about Shelley, if it were quite serious, which may be doubted, would almost disqualify Mr Arnold as a critic of poetry. But it is hardly less interesting, and scarcely at all less valuable. In the first place, it is a very great thing that a man should be able to admire both Byron and Wordsworth. Of a mere Byronite, indeed, Mr Arnold has even less than he has of a Wordsworthian pure and simple. He makes the most damaging admissions; he has to fall back on Goethe for comfort and confirmation; he is greatly disturbed by M. Scherer's rough treatment of his subject. In no essay, I think, does he quote so much from others, does he seem to feel it such a relief to find a backer, a somebody to fight with on a side point, a somebody (for instance Professor Nichol) to correct and gloss and digress upon while complimenting him. Mr Arnold is obviously not at ease in this Zion—which indeed is a Zion of an odd kind. Yet this very uneasiness gives to the Essay a glancing variety, a sort of animation and excitement, which are not common things in critical prelections. Nor, though one may think that Mr Arnold's general estimate of Byron is not even half as sound as his general estimate of Wordsworth, does the former appear to be in even the slightest degree insincere. Much as there must have been in Byron's loose art, his voluble inadequacy—nay, even in his choice of subject—that was repellent to Mr Arnold: much more as there must have been in his unchastened conduct, his flashy affectations, his lack of dignity, morality, tenue of every kind,—yet there were real links between them. Mr Arnold saw in Byron an ally, if not an altogether admirable or trustworthy ally, against the Philistine. He saw in him a link with general European literature, a check and antidote to the merely insular. Byron's undoubtedly "sincere and strong" dislike of the extreme Romantic view of literature was not distasteful to Mr Arnold. Indeed, in his own earlier poems there are not wanting Byronic touches and echoes, not so easy to separate and put the finger on, as to see and hear "confusedly." Lastly, he had, by that sort of reaction which often exhibits itself in men of the study, an obvious admiration for Force—the admiration which makes him in his letters praise France up to 1870 and Germany after that date—and he thought he saw Force in Byron. So that the Essay is written with a stimulating mingle-mangle of attraction and reluctance, of advocacy and admission. It is very far indeed from being one of his best critically. You may, on his own principles, "catch him out" in it a score of times. But it is a good piece of special pleading, an excellent piece of writing, and one of the very best and most consummate literary causeries in English.

In strict chronological order, a third example of these most interesting and stimulating Prefaces should have been mentioned between the "Wordsworth" and the "Byron"—the latter of which, indeed, contains a reference to it. This is the famous Introduction to Mr T.H. Ward's English Poets, which, in that work and in the second series of Essays in Criticism, where it subsequently appeared, has perhaps had more readers than any other of its author's critical papers. It contains, moreover, that still more famous definition of poetry as "a criticism of life" which has been so often attacked and has sometimes been defended. I own to having been, both at the time and since, one of its most decided and irreconcilable assailants. Nor do I think that Mr Arnold would have much relished the apology made, I think, by Mr Leslie Stephen since his death, that its critics "mistake an epigram for a philosophical definition." In the first place, the epigrammatic quality is not clearly apparent; and in the second place, an epigram would in the particular place have been anything but appropriate, while a philosophical definition is exactly what was wanted.

Mr Arnold himself never attempted any such defence. He pleaded, with literal justice, that the phrase "a criticism of life" was only part of his formula, which adds, "under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty." But this does not make the matter much better, while it shows beyond controversy that it was a philosophical definition that he was attempting. It merely takes us round in a circle, telling us that poetry is poetical, that the archdeacon performs archidiaconal functions. And while it is not more illuminative than that famous and useful jest, it has the drawback of being positively delusive, which the jest is not. Unless we are to assign some quite new meaning to "criticism"—and the assignment of new meanings to the terms of an explanation is the worst of all explanatory improprieties—poetry is not a criticism of life. It may be a passionate interpretation of life—that has seemed to some not a bad attempt at the unachievable,—a criticism it cannot be. Prose fiction may be and should be such; drama may be and should be such; but not poetry. And it is especially unfortunate that such poetry as answers best to the term is exactly that poetry which Mr Arnold liked least. Dryden and Pope have much good and true criticism of life: The Vanity of Human Wishes is magnificent criticism of life; but Mr Arnold has told us that Dryden and Pope and Johnson are but "classics of our prose." That there is criticism of life in poetry is true; but then in poetry there is everything.

It would also, no doubt, be possible to pick other holes in the paper. The depreciation of the "historic estimate," instead of a simple hint to correct it by the intrinsic, is certainly one. Another is a distinct arbitrariness in the commendation or discommendation of the examples selected. No one in his senses would put the Chanson de Roland on a level with the Iliad as a whole; but some among those people who happen to possess an equal acquaintance with Greek and Old French will demur to Mr Arnold's assignment of an ineffably superior poetical quality to one of the two passages he quotes over the other. So yet again with the denial of "high seriousness" to Chaucer. One feels disposed to enter and argue out a whole handful of not quite contradictory pleas, such as "He has high seriousness" (vide the "Temple of Mars," the beginning of the Parliament of Fowls, and many other places): "Why should he have high seriousness?" (a most effective demurrer); and "What is high seriousness, except a fond thing vainly invented for the nonce?"

But, as has so constantly to be said in reference to Mr Arnold, these things do not matter. He must have his catchwords: and so "criticism of life" and "high seriousness" are introduced at their and his peril. He must have his maintenance of the great classics, and so he exposes what I fear may be called no very extensive or accurate acquaintance with Old French. He must impress on us that conduct is three-fourths of life, and so he makes what even those who stop short of latreia in regard to Burns may well think mistakes about that poet likewise. But all the spirit, all the tendency, of the Introduction is what it ought to be, and the plea for the "real" estimate is as wholly right in principle as it is partly wrong in application.

It is well borne out by the two interesting articles on Gray and Keats which Mr Arnold contributed to the same work. In the former, and here perhaps only, do we find him putting his shoulder to the work of critical advocacy and sympathy with an absolutely whole heart. With Wordsworth, with Byron, with Heine, he was on points more or fewer at grave difference; though he affected to regard Goethe as a magnus Apollo of criticism and creation both, I think in his heart of hearts there must have been some misgivings; and it is impossible that he should not have known his fancy for people like the Guerins to be mere engouement. Gray's case was different. The resemblances between subject and critic were extraordinary. Mr Arnold is really an industrious, sociable, and moderately cheerful Gray of the nineteenth century; Gray an indolent, recluse, more melancholy Arnold of the eighteenth. Again, the literary quality of the bard of the Elegy was exactly of the kind which stimulates critics most. From Sainte-Beuve downwards the fraternity has, justly or unjustly, been accused of a tendency to extol writers who are a little problematical, who approach the second class, above the unquestioned masters. And there was the yet further stimulus of redressing wrongs. Gray, though a most scholarly poet, has always pleased the vulgar rather than the critics, and he had the singular fate of being dispraised both by Johnson and by Wordsworth. But in this paper of Mr Arnold's the wheel came full circle. Everything that can possibly be said for Gray—more than some of us would by any means indorse—is here said for him: here he has provided an everlasting critical harbour, into which he may retreat whensoever the popular or the critical breeze turns adverse.

And the Keats, less disputable in its general estimate, is equally good in itself, and specially interesting as a capital example of Mr Arnold's polemic—the capital example, indeed, if we except the not wholly dissimilar but much later article on Shelley's Life. He is rather unduly severe on the single letter of Keats which he quotes; but that was his way, and it is after all only a justifiable rhetorical reculade, with the intent to leap upon the maudlin defenders of the poet as a sort of hero of M. Feydeau, and rend them. The improvement of the mere fashion, as compared with the fantasticalities of the Friendship's Garland period, is simply enormous. And the praise which follows is praise really in the grand style—praise, the style and quality of which are positively rejoicing to the heart from their combination of fervour and accuracy, from their absolute fulfilment of the ideal of a word shockingly misused in these latter days, the word Appreciation. The personal sympathy which Mr Arnold evidently had with Gray neither makes nor mars here; all is purely critical, purely literary. And yet higher praise has never been given by any save the mere superlative-sloppers of the lower press, nor juster criticism meted out by the veriest critical Rhadamanthus. Of its scale and kind, this, I think, is the most perfect example of Mr Arnold's critical power, and it is so late that it shows that power to have been not merely far off exhaustion, but actually, like sound old wine, certain to improve for years to come.

In the seven years that were left to him after the publication of the Byron, Mr Arnold did not entirely confine himself to the service of his only true mistress Literature. But he never fell again so completely into the power of Duessa as he had fallen between 1867 and 1877. His infidelities were chiefly in the direction of politics, not of religion or irreligion, and they were of a less gay and frivolous character than those of a generally similar kind in earlier dates. They were partly devoted to the change which has brought it about, that, while during the third quarter of the century the Conservatives were in power, though on three different occasions, yet in each for absolutely insignificant terms, in the fourth Mr Gladstone's tenure of office from 1880 to 1885 has been the only period of real Liberal domination. But although he dealt with the phenomenon from various points of view in such articles as "The Nadir of Liberalism," the "Zenith of Conservatism," and so forth, it was chiefly, as was natural at the time, in relation to Ireland that he exercised his political pen, and enough has been said about these Irish articles by anticipation above. Discourses in America, the result of his lecturing tour to that country in 1883-84, and the articles on Amiel, Tolstoi, and Shelley's Life, which represent his very last stage of life, require more particular attention.

The Discourses in America, two of them specially written, and the other, originally a Cambridge "Rede" discourse, recast for the Western Hemisphere, must always rank with the most curious and interesting of Mr Arnold's works: but the very circumstances of their composition and delivery made it improbable, if not impossible, that they should form one of his best. These circumstances were of a kind which reproduces itself frequently in the careers of all men of any public distinction. In his days of comparative obscurity, or in some position of "greater freedom and less responsibility," even when he ceases to be obscure, a man deals faithfully, but perhaps a little flippantly, with this or that person, thing, nation, subject, doctrine. Afterwards he is brought into a relation with the person or nation, into a position as regards the thing, subject, or doctrine, which necessitates, if not exactly a distinct recantation in the humiliating sense attached to the Latin, yet a more or less graceful and ingenious palinode in the more honourable one which we allow to the Greek equivalent and original. Mr Arnold could never be lacking in grace or in ingenuity; but he certainly had, in his earlier work, allowed it to be perfectly visible that the world of American politics, American manners, American institutions and ways generally, was not in his eyes by any means a world all of sweetness or all of light.

His sense of the ludicrous, and his sense of art, alike precluded even the idea of a clumsy apology, and though, as was to be expected, the folk of the baser sort who exist everywhere may not have been pleased with his Discourses, the people of the United States generally did not owe him or show him any grudge for being frank and consistent as well as polite. The subjects were selected and grouped with great skill. "Numbers" dealt with the burning question of democracy, which must ever be uppermost—or as nethermost not less important—in a republic; and dealt with it after the more moderate, not the extremer form, of that combination of literature and politics which Mr Arnold had always affected. "Literature and Science," the middle discourse, attacked a question which, so far as the nationality of his audience was concerned, had nothing burning about it, which the lecturer was singularly well qualified to treat from the one side, and which is likely to retain its actuality and its moment for many a day and year, perhaps many a century. "Emerson," the last, descended from generalities to the consideration of a particular subject, at once specially American and specially literary. It would have been hard indeed to exhibit better composition in the grouping of the subjects as regards their classes, and criticism may be defied to find better examples of each class than those actually taken.

It is not clear that quite such high praise can be given to the execution, and the reason is plain: it was in the execution, not in the composition and scheme, that the hard practical difficulties of the task came in. Long harnessed official as he was, and preacher as he was, in his critical character, of Law, Order, Restraint, Mr Arnold was both too much of an Englishman and too much of a genius not to be ill to ride with the curb. And, save perhaps in "Literature and Science" (which was not at first written for an American audience at all), the pressure of the curb—I had almost said of the twitch—is too often evident, or at least suggested. This especially applies to the first, the longest, the most ambitious, and, as its author would say, most "nobly serious" of the three. There are quite admirable things in "Numbers"; and the descant on the worship of the great goddess Aselgeia, and its effect upon France, is not only nobly serious from the point of view of morality, but is one of Mr Arnold's best claims to the title of a political philosopher, and even of a political prophet. But it is less easy to say that this passage appears to be either specially in place or well composed with its companions. Perhaps the same is true of the earlier part, and its extensive dealings with Isaiah and Plato. As regards the prophet, it is pretty certain that of Mr Arnold's hearers, the larger number did not care to have Isaiah spoken about in that particular manner, while some at least of the rest did not care to have him spoken about at all. Of the philosopher, it is equally safe to say that the great majority knew very little, and that of the small minority, some must have had obstinate questionings connected with the appearance of Plato as an authority on the moral health of nations, and with the application of Mr Arnold's own very true and very noble doctrine about Aselgeia. In fact, although the lecture is the most thoughtful, the most serious in part, the most forcible, and the truest of all Mr Arnold's political or social discourses, yet it shares with all of them the reproach of a touch of desultory dilettantism.

The others, at least equally interesting in parts, are much better as wholes. The opening of the "Emerson," with its fond reminiscence of Oxford, is in a vein which Mr Arnold did not often work, but which always yielded him gold. In the words about Newman, one seems to recognise very much more than meets the ear—an explanation of much in the Arnoldian gospel, on something like the principle of revulsion, of soured love, which accounts for still more in the careers of his contemporaries, Mr Pattison and Mr Froude. He is less happy on Carlyle—he never was very happy on Carlyle, and for obvious reasons—but here he jars less than usual. As for Emerson himself, some readers have liked Emerson better than Carlyle at first, but have found that Carlyle "wears" a great deal better than Emerson. It seems to have been the other way with Mr Arnold; yet he is not uncritical about Emerson himself. On Emerson's poetry he is even, as on his own principles he was, perhaps, bound to be, rather hypercritical. Most of it, no doubt, is not poetry at all; but it has "once in a hundred years," as Mr O'Shaughnessy sang, the blossoming of the aloe, the star-shower of poetic meteors. And while, with all reverence, one is bound to say that his denying the title of "great writer" to Carlyle is merely absurd—is one of those caprices which somebody once told us are the eternal foes of art—he is not unjust in denying that title to Emerson. But after justifying his policy of not "cracking up" by still further denying his subject the title of a great philosophic thinker, he proceeds to find a pedestal for him at last as a friend and leader of those who would "live in the spirit." With such a judgment one has no fault to find, because it must be in all cases an almost purely personal one. To some Gautier, with his doctrine of

"Sculpte, lime, cisele,"

as the great commandment of the creative artist, has been a friend and leader in the life of the spirit: to Mr Arnold he was only a sort of unspiritual innkeeper. To Mr Arnold, Maurice de Guerin, with his second-hand Quinetism, was a friend and leader in the life of the spirit; others scarcely find him so. "This is this to thee and that to me."

The third (strictly the middle) piece fortunately requires no allowances, and suffers from no drawbacks. "Literature and Science" is an apology for a liberal education, and for a rationally ordered hierarchy of human study, which it would be almost impossible to improve, and respecting which it is difficult to think that it can ever grow obsolete. Not only was Mr Arnold here on his own ground, but he was fighting for his true mistress, with the lance and sword and shield that he had proved. And the result is like that, of the fortunate fights of romance: he thrusts his antagonists straight over the crupper, he sends them rolling on the ground, and clutching its sand with their fingers. Even Mr Huxley, stoutest and best of all the Paynim knights, never succeeded in wiping off this defeat; and it is tolerably certain that no one else will. The language of the piece is unusually lacking in ornateness or fanciful digression; but the logic is the strongest that Mr Arnold ever brought to bear.

The three last essays we have mentioned, apart from the pathetic and adventitious interest which attaches to them as last, would be in any case among the best of their author's, and their value is (at least, as it seems to me) in an ascending scale. To care very much for that on Count Tolstoi is not easy for those who are unfashionable enough not to care very much for the eloquent Russian himself. Nothing is satisfactory that one can only read in translations. But Mr Arnold, in whom a certain perennial youthfulness was (as it often, if not always, is in the chosen of the earth) one of his most amiable features, seems to have conceived a new engouement for this new and quaintly flavoured Russian literature. Had he lived longer, he probably would have sung us something in a cautionary strain; just as it can never be sufficiently regretted that he did not live long enough to handle Ibsenism. And it would have been very particularly pleasant to hear him on those Memoirs of a Mongol Minx (as they have been profanely called), which are assigned to the great Marie Bashkirtseff; or on those others of the learned She-Mathematician, who waited with a friend on a gentleman and suggested that he should marry one of them, no matter which, and lead both about. But the mixture of freshness, of passion, and of regard for conduct in Count Tolstoi could not but appeal to him; and he has given us a very charming causerie on Anna Karenina, notable—like O'Rourke's noble feast—to

"Those who were there And those who were not,"—

to those who have read the book itself, and to those who have not yet found time to read it.

I cannot plead much greater affection for the lucubrations of Amiel than for Count Tolstoi's dealings with that odd compound of crudity and rottenness, the Russian nature; but Mr Arnold's "Amiel" is admirable. Never was there a more "gentlemanly correction," a more delicate and good-humoured setting to rights, than that which he administers to Amiel's two great panegyrists (who happened to be Mr Arnold's own niece and Mr Arnold's own friend). On subjects like Maya and the "great wheel" it would almost be impossible to conceive, and certainly impossible to find, a happier commentator than Mr Arnold, though perhaps in the regions of theology he had a private Maya, a very Great Wheel, of his own. The firmness with which he rebukes the maunderings of the Genevese hypochondriac—of whom some one once unkindly remarked that he was not so much intoxicated with Idealism as suffering from the subsequent headache—is equalled by the kindness of the dealing; and the quiet decision with which he puts his fine writing in its proper place is better still. Nobody could call Mr Arnold a Philistine or one insensible to finesse, grace, sehnsucht, the impalpable and intangible charm of melancholy and of thought. And his comments on Amiel's loaded pathos and his muddled meditation are therefore invaluable. Nor is he less happy or less just in the praise which, though not the first, he was one of the first to give to by far the strongest side of Amiel's talent, his really remarkable power of literary criticism.

But the best wine was still kept for the very last. It will have been observed in these brief sketches of his work that, since his return to the fields of literature proper, Mr Arnold had drawn nearer to the causerie and farther from the abstract critical essay,—that he had taken to that mixture of biography, abstract of work, and interspersed critical comment which Sainte-Beuve, though he did not exactly invent it, had perfected, and which somebody, I think, has recently described as "intensely irritating." Well! well! pearls, as we all know, are irritating to certain classes of consumers. He had from the first done this well, he now did it consummately. That he took occasion, in the paper on Shelley's life which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for January 1888, to repeat his pet heresy about Shelley's poetry, matters nothing at all. It is an innocent defiance, and no attempt whatever is made to support it by argument. The purpose of the essay is quite different. Already, some years before, in his article on Keats, Mr Arnold had dealt some pretty sharp blows both at the indiscretion of a certain class of modern literary biographers, and at the pawing and morbid sentimentality of the same persons or others. He had a new and a better opportunity in the matter he was now handling, and he struck more strongly, more repeatedly, and with truer aim than ever. From the moment of its appearance to the present day, this piece has been an unceasing joy to all who love literature with a sane devotion. Its composition is excellent; it selects just the right points, dwells on them in just the right way, and drops them just when we have had enough. In mere style it yields to nothing of its author's, and is conspicuously and quite triumphantly free from his repetitions and other mannerisms. No English writer—indeed one may say no writer at all—has ever tempered such a blend of quiet contempt with perfect good-humour and perfect good-breeding. Dryden would have written with an equally fatal serenity, but not so lightly; Voltaire with as much lightness, but not nearly so much like a gentleman—which may also be said Of Courier. Thackeray could not have helped a blaze of indignation—honest and healthy, but possibly just plusquam-artistic—at the unspeakable persons who think that by blackening the unhappy Harriet they can whiten Shelley. And almost any one would have been likely either to commit the complementary error of being too severe on Shelley himself, or, if this were avoided, to underlie the charge of being callous and unsympathetic. Every one of these rocks, and others, Mr Arnold has avoided; and he has left us in the piece one of the most perfect examples that exist of the English essay on subjects connected with literature. In its own special division of causerie the thing is not only without a superior, it is almost without a peer; its insinuated or passing literary comments are usually as happy as its censure of vital matters, and even the above-referred-to heresy itself gives it a certain piquancy. Ill indeed was the fate that took its author away so soon after the completion of this little masterpiece; yet he could not have desired to leave the world with a better diploma-performance, lodged as an example of his actual accomplishment.

We must now return, for the last time unfortunately, to the narrative of biographical events. December 1877 furnishes, in some letters to his sister, evidence that he was increasingly "spread" (as the French say quaintly) by notices of parties and persons—Mr Disraeli and Mr Gladstone, Mr Huxley and Mr Ruskin. One is glad to hear of the last-named that the writer "is getting to like him "—the passages on the author of Modern Painters in the earlier letters are certainly not enthusiastic—and that "he gains much by his fancy being forbidden to range through the world of coloured cravats." This beneficial effect of evening dress is not limited to Mr Ruskin, and is so well expressed that one only wishes Mr Arnold had let his own fancy range more freely in such epistolary criticisms of life. We hear that Mr J.R. Green "likes the Reformation and Puritanism less the more he looks into them," again a not uncommon experience—and that Mr Stopford Brooke is deriving much edification from the review of his Primer. The next year continues the series of letters to M. Fontanes, and gives a pleasant phrase in one to another sister, Mrs Cropper. "My poems have had no better friends in their early and needy days than my own sisters"—wherein Mr Arnold unconsciously quotes Goblin Market, "there is no friend like a sister." Later, Mr Freeman is dashed off, a la maniere noire, as "an ardent, learned, and honest man, but a ferocious pedant." 1879 yields a letter to Miss Arnold, expressing the intention to send the Wordsworth book of selections to M. Scherer, and beg him to review it, which request resulted in one of the very best, perhaps the very best, of that critic's essays in English Literature. Mr Arnold is distressed later at Renan's taking Victor Hugo's poetry so prodigiously au serieux, just as some of us have been, if not distressed, yet mildly astonished, at Mr Arnold for not taking it, with all its faults, half seriously enough. Geist, the dachshund, appears agreeably, with many other birds and beasts, in a May letter of this year, and botany reinforces zoology in a later one to Mr Grant Duff.

1880 is at first less fertile, but gives an amusing account of a semi-royal reception of Cardinal Newman at the Duke of Norfolk's in May, and a very interesting series of letters from Pontresina in the autumn. Fortunately for us Mrs Arnold was not with him, and we profit by his letters to her. In one of them there is a very pleasing and probably unconscious touch. "Rapallo [the Duchess of Genoa's husband] smokes the whole evening: but I think he has a good heart." And later still we have the curious and not uncharacteristic information that he is reading David Copperfield for the first time (whence no doubt its undue predominance in a certain essay), and the description of Burns as "a beast with splendid gleams," a view which has been fully developed since. On February 21, 1881, there is another interview, flattering as ever, with Lord Beaconsfield, and later he tells M. Fontanes, "I never much liked Carlyle," which indeed we knew. The same correspondent has the only references preserved to Dean Stanley's death; but the magnificent verses which that death produced make anything else superfluous. They appeared in the first number of the Nineteenth Century for 1882, when New Year's Day gives us a melancholy prediction. If "I live to be eighty [i.e., in some three years from the present moment], I shall probably be the only person in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications." Too gloomy a view, let us hope; yet with something in it. And a letter, a very little later, gives us interesting hints of his method in verse composition, which was to hunt a Dictionary (Richardson's) for good but unusual words—Theophile Gautier's way also, as it happens, though probably he did not know that.

These later letters contain so many references to living people that one has to be careful in quoting from them; but as regards himself, there is of course no such need of care. That self-ruthlessness which always prevented him from scamping work is amazingly illustrated in one of October 1882, which tells how he sat up till five in the morning rewriting a lecture he was to deliver in Liverpool, and got up at eight to start for the place of delivery. Let us hope that a champagne luncheon there—"chiefly doctors, but you know I like doctors"—revived him after the night and the journey. And two months later he makes pleasant allusion to "that demon Traill," in reference to a certain admirable parody of Poor Matthias. He had thought Mr Gladstone "hopelessly prejudiced against" him, and was proportionately surprised when in August 1883 he was offered by that Minister a pension of L250 for service to the poetry and literature of England. Few Civil List pensions have been so well deserved. But Mr Arnold, as most men of his quality would have been, was at once struck with the danger of evil constructions being put by the baser sort on the acceptance of an extra allowance from public funds by a man who already had a fair income from them, and a comfortable pension in the ordinary way to look forward to. Mr John Morley, however, and Lord Lingen, luckily succeeded in quieting his scruples, and only the very basest sort grumbled. The great advantage, of course, was that it enabled him to retire, as soon as his time was up, without too great loss of income.

A lecturing tour to America was already planned, and October 7, 1883 is the last date from Cobham, "New York" succeeding it without any; for Mr Arnold had the reprehensible and, in official persons, rare habit of very constantly omitting dates, though not places. The St Nicholas Club, "a delightful, poky, dark, exclusive little old club of the Dutch families," is the only place in which he finds peace. For, as one expected, the interviewers made life terrible. These American letters are interesting reading enough, but naturally tend to be little more than a replica of similar letters from other Englishmen who have done the same thing. As has been quite frankly admitted here, Mr Arnold never made any effort, and seldom seems to have been independently prompted, to write what are called "amusing" letters: he merely tells a plain tale of journeys, lectures, meals, persons, scenery, manners and customs, etc. Chicago seems to have vindicated its character for "character" by hospitably forcing him to eat dinner and supper "on end," and by describing him in its newspapers as "an elderly bird pecking at grapes on a trellis." The whole tour, including a visit to Canada, lasted nearly five months, and brought—not the profit which some people expected, but—a good sum, with wrinkles as to more if the experiment were repeated. And when he came back to England, the lectures were collected and printed.

In February 1885 we have, addressed to his eldest daughter, then married and living in America, a definition of "real civilisation" as the state "when the world does not begin till 8 P.M. and goes on from that till 1 A.M., not later." This is, though doubtless jestful, really a point de repere for the manners of the later nineteenth century as concerns a busy man who likes society. In the eighteenth, and earlier in the nineteenth, men as busy as Mr Arnold practically abstained from "the world" except quite rarely, while "the world" was not busy. The dachshunds come in for frequent mention.

On a Sunday in May of this year comes the warning of "a horrid pain across my chest," which, however, "Andrew Clark thinks [wrongly, alas!] to be not heart" but indigestion. The Discourses in America, for which their author had a great predilection, came out later. In August the pain is mentioned again; and the subsequent remark, "I was a little tired, but the cool champagne at dinner brought me round," is another ominous hint that it was not indigestion. Two of the most valuable of all the letters come in October, one saying, "I think Oxford is still, on the whole, the place in the world to which I am most attached" ["And so say all of us"]; the other, after some notice of the Corpus plate, telling how "I got out to Hinksey and up the hill to within sight of the Cumnor firs. I cannot describe the effect which this landscape always has upon me: the hillside with its valleys, and Oxford in the great Thames valley below." And this walk is again referred to later. He was pleased by a requisition that he should stand yet again for the Poetry Professorship, though of course he did not accede to it. And at the beginning of winter he had a foreign mission (his last) to Berlin, to get some information for the Government as to German school fees. He was much lionised, and seems to have enjoyed himself very much during his stay, the Crown Princess being specially gracious to him.

Nor was he long in England on his return, though long enough to bring another mention of the chest pain, and an excellent definition of education—would there were no worse!—"Reading five pages of the Greek Anthology every day, and looking out all the words I do not know." In February 1886 he was back again investigating the Swiss and Bavarian school systems; and that amiable animal-worship of his receives a fresh evidence in the mention and mourning of the death of "dear Lola" (not Montes, but another; in short, a pony), with a sigh for "a meche of her hair." The journey was finished by way of France towards the end of March. At Hamburg Mr Arnold was "really [and very creditably] glad to have had the opportunity of calling a man Your Magnificence," that being, it seems, the proper official style in addressing the burgomaster. And May took him back to America, to see his married daughter and divers old friends. He remained there till the beginning of September, improving, as he thought, in health, but meeting towards the close an awkward bathing accident, which involved no risk of drowning, but gave him a shock that was followed by a week or two of troublesome attacks of pain across the chest. There is very much in the letters of the time about the political crisis of 1886. His retirement from official work came in November, and the letters are fuller than ever of delight in the Cobham landscape.

But the warnings grew more frequent, and we know that long before this he had had no delusions about their nature. Indeed, it is doubtful whether he had ever had any, considering the fact of the malady, which had, as he says in a singularly manly and dignified commentatio mortis dated January 29, 1887, struck down his father and grandfather in middle life long before they came to his present age. He "refuses every invitation to lecture or make addresses." The letters of 1887, too, are very few, and contain little of interest, except an indication of a visit to Fox How; while much the same may be said of those, also few, from the early months of 1888. The last of all contains a reference to Robert Elsmere. Five days later, on April 15, a sudden exertion, it seems, brought on the fatal attack, and he died. He had outlived his grand climacteric of sixty-three (which he had thought would be "the end as well as the climax") by two years and three months.



CHAPTER VI.

CONCLUSION.

The personal matters which usually, and more or less gracefully, fill the beginning of the end of a biography, are perhaps superfluous in the case of a man who died so recently, and who was so well known as Mr Matthew Arnold. Moreover, if given at all, they should be given by some one who knew him more intimately than did the present writer. He was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of the painter's model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile. Some artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think rather unjustly; but he certainly had "tricks and manners" of the kind very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all mere trick, after the fashion which we know in Scott, which we are sure of, without knowing, in Shakespeare. One of these Mr George Russell glances at in the preface to the Letters, a passage which I read with not a little amusement, because I could confirm it from a memory of my only conversation with Mr Arnold. He had been good-humouredly expostulating with me for overvaluing some French poet. I forget at the distance of seventeen or eighteen years who it was, but it was not Gautier. I replied in some such words as, "Well; perhaps he is not very important in himself, but I think he is 'important for us,' if I may borrow that." So he looked at me and said, "I didn't write that anywhere, did I?" And when I reminded him that he had told us how Sainte-Beuve said it of Lamartine, he declared that he had quite forgotten it. Which might, or might not, be Socratic.

But I should imagine that the complaints of his affectations in ordinary society were as much exaggerated as I am sure that the opposite complaints of the humdrum character of his letters are. Somebody talks of the "wicked charm" which a popular epithet or nickname possesses, and something of the sort seems to have hung about "The Apostle of Culture," "The Prophet of Sweetness and Light," and the rest. He only deserved his finical reputation inasmuch as he was unduly given to the use of these catch-words, not because he in any undue way affected to "look the part" or live up to them. And as for the letters, it must be remembered that he was a very busy man, with clerical work of the official kind enough to disgust a very Scriblerus; that he had, so far as the published letters show us, no very intimate friend, male or (still better) female, outside his own family; and further, that the degeneration of the art of letter-writing is not a mere phrase, it is a fact. Has any of my readers many—or any—correspondents like Scott or like Southey, like Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de Sevigne or like Lady Mary? He is lucky if he has. Indeed, the simplicity of the Letters is the very surest evidence of a real simplicity in the nature. In the so-called best letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent. Scott had it; but then Scott's genius as a novelist overflowed into his letters, as did Southey's talent of universal writing, and Lamb's unalterable quintessence of quaintness. But though I will allow no one to take precedence of me as a champion of Madame de Sevigne, I do not think that simplicity is exactly the note of that beautiful and gracious person; it is certainly not that of our own Lady Mary, or of Horace Walpole, or of Pope, or of Byron. Some of these, as we know, or suspect with a strength equal to knowledge, write with at least a sidelong glance at possible publication; some with a deliberate intention of it; all, I think, with a sort of unconscious consciousness of "how it will look" on paper. Of this in Mr Arnold's letters there is absolutely no sign. Even when he writes to comparative strangers, he never lays himself out for a "point" or a phrase, rarely even for a joke. To his family (and it should be remembered that the immense majority of the letters that we possess are family letters) he is naturally more familiar, but the familiarity does not bring with it any quips or gambols. Only in the very early letters, and chiefly in those to Wyndham Slade, is there any appearance of second thought, of "conceit," in the good sense. Later, he seems to have been too much absorbed in his three functions of official, critic, and poet to do more than shake hands by letter and talk without effort.

But if he, as the phrase is, "put himself out" little as to letter-writing, it was by no means the same in those other functions which have been just referred to. In later years (it is Mr Humphry Ward, I think, who is our sufficient authority for it) poetry was but occasional amusement and solace to him, prose his regular avocation from task-work; and there is abundant evidence that, willingly or unwillingly, he never allowed either to usurp the place of the vocation which he had accepted. Not everybody, perhaps, is so scrupulous. It is not an absolutely unknown thing to hear men boast of getting through their work somehow or other, that they may devote themselves to parerga which they like, and which they are pleased to consider more dignified, more important, nearer the chief end of man. And from the extremely common assumption that other people, whether they confess this or not, act upon it, one may at least not uncharitably suppose that a much larger number would so act if they dared, or had the opportunity. This was not Mr Arnold's conception of the relations of the hired labourer and the labour which gains him his hire. Not only does he seem to have performed his actual inspecting duties with that exact punctiliousness which in such cases is much better than zeal, but he did not grudge the expenditure of his art on the requirements, and not the strict requirements only, of his craft. The unfitness of poets for business has been often enough proved to be a mere fond thing vainly invented; but it was never better disproved than in this particular instance.

Of the manner in which he had discharged these duties, some idea may be formed from the volume of Reports which was edited, the year after his death, by Sir Francis Sandford. It would really be difficult to imagine a better display of that "sweet reasonableness," the frequency of which phrase on a man's lips does not invariably imply the presence of the corresponding thing in his conduct. It would be impossible for the most plodding inspector, who never dared commit a sonnet or an essay, to deal with his subject in a way showing better acquaintance with it, more interest in it, or more business-like abstinence from fads, and flights, and flings. Faint and far-off suggestions of the biographer of Arminius may, indeed, by a very sensitive reader, be discovered in the slightly eccentric suggestion that the Latin of the Vulgate (of which Mr Arnold himself was justly fond) should be taught in primary schools, and in the rather perverse coupling of "Scott and Mrs Hemans." But these are absolutely the only approaches to naughtiness in the whole volume. It is a real misfortune that the nature of the subject should make readers of the book unlikely to be ever numerous; for it supplies a side of its author's character nowhere else (except in glimpses) provided by his extant work. It may even be doubted, by those who have read it, whether "cutting blocks with a razor" is such a Gothamite proceeding as it is sometimes held to be. For in this case the blocks are chopped as well as the homeliest bill-hook could do it; and we know that the razor was none the blunter. At any rate, the ethical document is one of the highest value, and very fit, indeed, to be recommended to the attention of young gentlemen of genius who think it the business of the State to provide for them, and not to require any dismal drudgery from them in return.

But the importance of Mr Arnold to English history and English literature has, of course, little or nothing to do with his official work. The faithful performance of that work is important to his character; and the character of the work itself colours very importantly, and, as we have seen, not perhaps always to unmitigated advantage, the nature of his performances as a man of letters. But it is as a man of letters, as a poet, as a critic, and perhaps most of all as both combined, that he ranks for history and for the world.

A detailed examination of his poetic performance has been attempted in the earlier pages of this little book, as well as some general remarks upon it; but we may well find room here for something more general still. That the poet is as much above the prose-writer in rank as he is admittedly of an older creation, has always been held; and here, as elsewhere, I am not careful to attempt innovation. In fact, though it may seem unkind to say so, it may be suspected that nobody has ever tried to elevate the function of the prose-writer above that of the poet, unless he thought he could write great prose and knew he could not write great poetry. But in another order of estimate than this, Mr Arnold's poetic work may seem of greater value than his prose, always admirable and sometimes consummate as the latter is, if we take each at its best.

At its best—and this is how, though he would himself seem to have sometimes felt inclined to dispute the fact, we must reckon a poet. His is not poetry of the absolutely trustworthy kind. It is not like that of Shelley or of Keats, who, when their period of mere juvenility is past, simply cannot help writing poetry; nor is it, on the other hand, like that of Wordsworth, who flies and flounders with an incalculable and apparently irresponsible alternation. It is rather—though I should rank it far higher, on all but the historic estimate, than Gray's—like that of Gray. The poet has in him a vein, or, if the metaphor be preferred, a spring, of the most real and rarest poetry. But the vein is constantly broken by faults, and never very thick; the spring is intermittent, and runs at times by drops only. There is always, as it were, an effort to get it to yield freely, to run clear and constant. And—again as in the case of Gray—the poet subjects himself to a further disability by all manner of artificial restrictions, struggles to comply with this or that system, theories, formulas, tricks. He will not "indulge his genius." And so it is but rarely that we get things like the Scholar-Gipsy, like the Forsaken Merman, like the second Isolation; and when we do get such things there is sometimes, as in the case of the peroration to Sohrab and Rustum, and perhaps the splendid opening of Westminster Abbey and Thyrsis, a certain sense of parade, of the elaborate assumption of the singing-robe. There is too seldom the sensation which Coleridge unconsciously suggested in the poem that heralded the poetry of the nineteenth century. We do not feel that

"The fair breeze blew, the while foam flew, The furrow followed free"—

that

"We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea;"

but that a mighty launch of elaborate preparation is taking place, that we are pleased and orderly spectators standing round, and that the ship is gliding in due manner, but with no rush or burst, into the sea of poetry. While elsewhere there may be even the sense of effort and preparation without the success.

But, once more, a poet is to be judged first by his best things, and secondly by a certain aura or atmosphere, by a nameless, intangible, but sensible quality, which, now nearer and fuller, now farther and fainter, is over his work throughout. In both respects Mr Arnold passes the test. The things mentioned above and others, even many others, are the right things. They do not need the help of that rotten reed, the subject, to warrant and support them; we know that they are in accordance with the great masters, but we do not care whether they are or not. They sound the poetic note; they give the poetic flash and iridescence; they cause the poetic intoxication. Even in things not by any means of the best as wholes, you may follow that gleam safely. The exquisite revulsion of the undertone in Bacchanalia—

"Ah! so the silence was, So was the hush;"

the honey-dropping trochees of the New Sirens; the description of the poet in Resignation; the outburst—

"What voices are these on the clear night air?"

of Tristram and Iseult; the melancholy meditation of A Summer Night and Dover Beach, with the plangent note so cunningly yet so easily accommodated to the general tone and motive of the piece,—these and a hundred other things fulfil all the requirements of the true poetic criticism, which only marks, and only asks for, the differentia of poetry.

And this poetic moment—this (if one may use the words, about another matter, of one who wrote no poetry, yet had more than all but three or four poets), this "exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow" which poetry and poetry alone confers upon the fit readers of it—is never far off or absent for long together in Mr Arnold's verse. His command of it is indeed uncertain. But all over his work, from The Strayed Reveller to Westminster Abbey, it may happen at any minute, and it does happen at many minutes. This is what makes a poet: not the most judicious selection of subject, not the most studious contemplation and, as far as he manages it, representation of the grand style and the great masters. And this is what Mr Arnold has.

That his prose, admirable as it always is in form and invaluable as it often is in matter, is on the whole inferior to his verse, is by no means a common opinion, though it was expressed by some good judges both during his life and at the time of his death. As we have seen, both from a chance indication in his own letters and from Mr Humphry Ward's statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "drabness" by the efforts of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain freedom on the one side, and a certain grace and colour on the other, were being taken from the new experiments of nineteenth-century prose proper. Whether he or his contemporary Mr Froude was the greatest master of this particular blend is a question which no doubt had best be answered by the individual taste of the competent. I should say myself that Mr Froude at certain moments rose higher than Mr Arnold ever did; nothing of the latter's can approach that magnificent passage on the passing of the Middle Ages and on the church-bell sound that memorises it. And Mr Froude was also free from the mannerisms, at times amounting to very distinct affectation, to which, in his middle period more especially, Mr Arnold succumbed. But he did not quite keep his friend's high level of distinction and tenue. It was almost impossible for Mr Arnold to be slipshod—I do not mean in the sense of the composition books, which is mostly an unimportant sense, but in one quite different; and he never, as Mr Froude sometimes did, contented himself with correct but ordinary writing. If his defect was mannerism, his quality was certain manner.

The most noticeable, the most easily imitated, and the most doubtful of his mannerisms was, of course, the famous iteration, which was probably at first natural, but which, as we see from the Letters, he afterwards deliberately fostered and accentuated, in order, as he thought, the better to get his new ideas into the heads of what the type-writer sometimes calls the "Brutish" public. That it became at times extremely teasing is beyond argument, and I should be rather afraid that Prince Posterity will be even more teased by it than we are, because to him the ideas it enforces will be, and will have been ever since he can remember, obvious and common-place enough. But when this and some other peccadillos (on which it is unnecessary to dwell, lest we imitate the composition-books aforesaid) were absent or even moderately present, sometimes even in spite of their intrusion, Mr Arnold's style was of a curiously fascinating character. I have often thought that, in the good sense of that unlucky word "genteel," this style deserves it far more than the style either of Shaftesbury or of Temple; while in its different and nineteenth-century way, it is as much a model of the "middle" style, neither very plain nor very ornate, but "elegant," as Addison's own. Yet it is observable that all the three writers just mentioned keep their place, except with deliberate students of the subject, rather by courtesy or prescription than by actual conviction and relish on the part of readers: and it is possible that something of the same kind may happen in Mr Arnold's case also, when his claims come to be considered by other generations from the merely formal point of view. Nor can those claims be said to be very securely based in respect of matter. It is impossible to believe that posterity will trouble itself about the dreary apologetics of undogmatism on which he wasted so much precious time and energy; they will have been arranged by the Prince's governor on the shelves, with Hobbes's mathematics and Southey's political essays. "But the criticism," it will be said, "that ought to endure." No doubt from some points of view it ought, but will it? So long, or as soon, as English literature is intelligently taught in universities, it is sure of its place in any decently arranged course of Higher Rhetoric; so long, or as soon, as critics consider themselves bound to study the history and documents of their business, it will be read by them. But what hold does this give it? Certainly not a stronger hold than that of Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, which, though some of us may know it by heart, can scarcely be said to be a commonly read classic.

The fact is—and no one knew this fact more thoroughly, or would have acknowledged it more frankly, than Mr Arnold himself—that criticism has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious existence. Each generation likes, and is hardly wrong in liking, to create for itself in this province, to which creation is so scornfully denied by some; and old critics are to all but experts (and apparently to some of them) as useless as old moons. Nor can one help regretting that so long a time has been lost in putting before the public a cheap, complete, handy, and fairly handsome edition of the whole of Mr Arnold's prose. There is no doubt at all that the existence of such an edition, even before his death, was part cause, and a large part of the cause, of the great and continued popularity of De Quincey; and it is a thousand pities that, before a generation arises which knows him not, Mr Arnold is not allowed the same chance. As it is, not a little of his work has never been reprinted at all; some of the rest is difficult of access, and what there is exists in numerous volumes of different forms, some cheap, some dear, the whole cumbersome. And if his prose work seems to me inferior to his poetical in absolute and perennial value, its value is still very great. Not so much English prose has that character of grace, of elegance, which has been vindicated for this, that we can afford to lay aside or to forget such consummate examples of it. Academic urbanity is not so universal a feature of our race—the constant endeavour at least to "live by the law of the peras," to observe lucidity, to shun exaggeration, is scarcely so endemic. Let it be added, too, that if not as the sole, yet as the chief, herald and champion of the new criticism, as a front-fighter in the revolutions of literary view which have distinguished the latter half of the nineteenth century in England, Mr Arnold will be forgotten or neglected at the peril of the generations and the individuals that forget or neglect him.

Little need be added about the loss of actual artistic pleasure which such neglect must bring. Mr Arnold may never, in prose, be read with quite the same keenness of delight with which we read him in poetry; but he will yield delight more surely. His manner, except in his rare "thorn-crackling" moments, and sometimes even then, will carry off even the less agreeable matter; with matter at all agreeable, it has a hardly to be exaggerated charm.

But it is in his general literary position that Mr Arnold's strongest title to eminence consists. There have certainly been greater poets in English: I think there have been greater critics. But as poet and critic combined, no one but Dryden and Coleridge can be for a moment placed beside him: the fate of the false Florimel must await all others who dare that adventure. And if he must yield—yield by a long way—to Dryden in strength and easy command of whatsoever craft he tried, to Coleridge in depth and range and philosophical grasp, yet he has his revenges. Beside his delicacy and his cosmopolitan accomplishment, Dryden is blunt and unscholarly; beside his directness of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense, more disreputable than ever. Here was a man who could not only criticise but create; who, though he may sometimes, like others, have convicted his preaching of falsity by his practice, and his practice of sin by his preaching, yet could in the main make practice and preaching fit together. Here was a critic against whom the foolish charge, "You can break, but you cannot make," was confessedly impossible—a poet who knew not only the rule of thumb, but the rule of the uttermost art. In him the corruption of the poet had not been the generation of the critic, as his great predecessor in the two arts, himself secure and supreme in both, had scornfully said. Both faculties had always existed, and did always exist, side by side in him. He might exercise one more freely at one time, one at another; but the author of the Preface of 1853 was a critic, and a ripe one, in his heyday of poetry, the author of Westminster Abbey was a poet in his mellowest autumn of criticism.

And yet he was something more than both these things, more than both of these at once. But for that unlucky divagation in the Wilderness, his life would have been the life of a man of letters only as far as choice went, with the duties of no dishonourable profession superadded. And even with the divagation it was mainly and really this. To find parallels for Mr Arnold in his unflinching devotion to literature we must, I fear, go elsewhere than to Dryden or to Coleridge, we must go to Johnson and Southey. And here again we may find something in him beyond both, in that he had an even nobler conception of Literature than either. That he would have put her even too high, would have assigned to her functions which she is unable to discharge, is true enough; but this is at least no vulgar error. Against ignoble neglect, against stolid misunderstanding, against mushroom rivalry, he championed her alike. And it was most certainly from no base motive. If he wanted an English Academy, I am quite sure it was not from any desire for a canary ribbon or a sixteen-pointed star. Yet, after Southey himself in the first half of the century, who has done so much for letters qua letters as Mr Arnold in the second? His poems were never popular, and he tried no other of the popular departments of literature. But he wrote, and I think he could write, nothing that was not literature, in and by the fact that he was its writer. It has been observed of others in other kinds, that somehow or other, by merely living, by pursuing their own arts or crafts whatever they were, they raised those arts and crafts in dignity, they bestowed on them as it were a rank, a position. A few—a very few—at successive times have done this for literature in England, and Mr Arnold was perhaps the last who did it notably in ours. One cannot imagine him writing merely for money, for position, even for fame—for anything but the devoir of the born and sworn servant of Apollo and Pallas. Such devotion need not, of course, forbid others of their servants to try his shield now and then with courteous arms or even at sharps—as he tried many. But it was so signal, so happy in its general results, so exactly what was required in and for England at the time, that recognition of it can never be frank enough, or cordial enough, or too much admiring. Whenever I think of Mr Arnold it is in those own words of his, which I have quoted already, and which I quoted to myself on the hill by Hinksey as I began this little book in the time of fritillaries—

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade"—

the hope and shade that never desert, even if they flit before and above, the servants and the lovers of the humaner literature.



INDEX.

* * * * * Alaric at Rome, 4.

Bacchanalia, or the New Age, 114. Balder Dead, 52, 53. Byron, Poetry of, ed. Arnold, 185.

Celtic Literature, On the Study of, 66, 104 et seq. Church of Brou, The, 38. Consolation, 28. Cromwell, 8, 9. Culture and Anarchy, 128 et seq.

Discourses in America, 195. Dover Beach, 112.

Empedocles on Etna, 23. Essays in Criticism, 83 et seq., 123. Eton, A French, 79 et seq.

Farewell, A, 27. Forsaken Merman, The, 19. French Eton, A, 79 et seq. Friend, To a, sonnet, 15. Friendship's Garland, 148.

God and the Bible, 137.

Heine's Grave, 115. Homer, On Translating, 66.

In Utrumque Paratus, 20. Irish Essays, 151. Isolation, 31.

Johnson's Lives of the Poets, ed. Arnold, 169.

Last Essays on Church and Religion, 137, 142. Letters, 1, 15 et seq., 214. Lines written by a Death-bed, 32. Literature and Dogma, 131 et seq. Longing, 30.

Marguerite, To, 31. Memorial Verses, 26. Merman, The Forsaken, 19. Merope, 60. Mixed Essays, 168 et seq. Modern Sappho, The, 17. Mycerinus, 13.

New Sirens, The, 17.

Obermann, 53. On the Rhine, 29. On the Study of Celtic Literature, 66, 104 et seq. On the Terrace at Berne, 16. On Translating Homer, 66.

Preface, the, to the 'Poems' of 1853. 33 et seq. Prose Passages, 166.

Renan, Arnold's relations with, 101. Requiescat, 39. Resignation, 20, 185. Rugby Chapel, 115.

Sainte-Beuve, 59, 203. Scholar-Gipsy, The, 5, 40 et seq. Schools and Universities on the Continent, 116. Selected Poems, 184. Shairp, Principal, lines on Arnold by, 5. Shakespeare, Sonnet to, 15. Sick King in Bokhara, 15. Sohrab and Rustum, 37, 51, 52. Southey, use of rhymeless metre by, 11. St Brandan, 111. St Paul and Protestantism, 130 et seq. Stagirius, 19. Strayed Reveller, The, 10 et seq. Summer Night, A, 26. Switzerland, 16.

Tennyson, influence of, on Arnold, 19. Thyrsis, 111. To Fausta, 19. To Marguerite, 31. To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking, 16, 27. Tristram and Iseult, 24, 25.

Voice, The, 19.

Ward's English Poets, Arnold's Introduction to, 189. Westminster Abbey, 207, 220, 228. Wordsworth, Poems of, ed. Arnold, 185.



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