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MATTHEW ARNOLD.

By Augustine Birrell.

In

HE news of Mr. Arnold's tion. His mind was based on the plainsudden death at Liver- est possible things. What he hated pool last April struck a most was the fantastic-the far-fetched, chill into many hearts, for all elaborated fancies, and strained inalthough a somewhat con- terpretations. He stuck to the beaten strained writer (despite his playful- track of human experience, and the ness) and certainly the least boisterous broader the better. He was a plain-sailof men, he was yet most distinctly on ing man. This is his true note. the side of human enjoyment. He con- his much criticised, but as I think adspired and contrived to make things mirable introduction to the selection he pleasant. Pedantry he abhorred. He made from Wordsworth's poems he adwas a man of this life and this world. mits that the famous "Ode on IntimaA severe critic of the world he indeed tions of Immortality from Recollections was, but finding himself in it and not in Early Childhood" is not one of his precisely knowing what is beyond it, prime favorites, and in that connection like a brave and true-hearted man he he quotes from Thucydides the followset himself to make the best of it. Its ing judgment on the early exploits of the sight and sounds were dear to him. The Greek Race and applies it to these in"uncrumpling fern," the eternal moon-lit timations of immortality in babies. "It snow, "Sweet William with its homely is impossible to speak with certainty of cottage-smell," "the red grouse spring- what is so remote, but from all that we ing at our sound," the tinkling bells of can really investigate I should say that the "high-pasturing kine," the vagaries they were no very great things." of men, women, and dogs, their odd ways and tricks, whether of mind or manner, all delighted, amused, tickled him. Human loves, joys, sorrows, human relationships, ordinary ties interested him

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This quotation is in Mr. Arnold's own vein. His readers will have no difficulty in calling to mind numerous instances in which his dislike of everything not broadly based on the generally admitted. facts of sane experience manifests itself. Though fond-perhaps exceptionally fond-of pretty things and sayings, he had a severe taste, and hated whatever struck him as being in the least degree sickly, or silly, or over-heated. No doubt

he

may

often have considered that to be

sickly or silly which in the opinion of be that he was over-impatient of men's others was pious and becoming. It may flirtations with futurity. As his paper on Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley shows, he disapproved of "irregular relations." He considered we were all mar

ried to plain Fact and objected to our carrying on a shadow-dance with mystic maybe's and calling it Religion. Had it been a man's duty to believe in a specific revelation it would have been God's duty to make that revelation credible. Such, at all events, would appear to have been the opinion of this remarkable man, who though he had even more than his share

of an Oxonian's reverence for the great Bishop of Durham, was unable to admit the force of the main argument of "The Analogy." Mr. Arnold was indeed too fond of parading his inability for hard reasoning. I am not, he keeps saying, like the Archbishop of York, or the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. There was affectation about this, for his professed inferiority did not prevent him from making it almost excruciatingly clear that in his opinion those gifted prelates were, whilst exercising their extraordinary powers, only beating the air, or in plainer words busily engaged in talking nonsense. But I must not wander from my point, which simply is that Arnold's dislike of anything recondite or remote was intense, genuine, and characteristic.

He always asserted himself to be a good Liberal. So in truth he was. A better Liberal than many a one whose claim to that title it would be thought absurd to dispute. He did not indeed care very much about some of the articles of the Liberal creed as now professed. He had taken a great dislike to the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill. He wished the Church and the State to continue to recognize each other. He had not that jealousy of State interference in England which used to be (it is so no longer) a note of political Liberalism. He sympathized with Italian national aspirations because he thought it wrong to expect a country with such a past as Italy to cast in her lot with Austria. He did not sympathize with Irish national aspirations because he thought Ireland ought to be willing to admit that she was relatively to England an inferior and less interesting country, and therefore one which had no moral claim for national institutions. He may have been right or wrong on these points without affecting his claim to be considered a Liberal. Liberalism is not a creed, but a frame of mind. Mr. Arnold's frame of mind was Liberal. No living man is more deeply permeated with the grand doctrine of Equality than was he. He wished to see his countrymen and countrywomen all equal: Jack as good as his master, and Jack's master as good as Jack; and neither talking clap-trap. He had a hearty un-English dislike of anomalies and absurdities. He

fully appreciated the French Revolution and was consequently a Democrat. He was not like Mr. Gladstone a democrat from irresistible impulse, nor like Mr. Labouchere from love of mischief, nor like Mr. Morley from hatred of priests, nor like the average British workman from a not unnatural desire to get something on account of his share of the family inheritance-but all roads lead to Rome, and Mr. Arnold was a democrat from a sober and partly sorrowful conviction that no other form of government was possible. He was an Educationalist, and Education is the true Leveller. His almost passionate cry for better middle-class education arose from his annoyance at the exclusion of large numbers of this great class from the best education the country afforded. It was a ticklish job telling this great, wealthy, middle class-which according to the newspapers had made England what she was and what everybody else wished to be—that it was, from an educational point of view, beneath contempt. "I hear with surprise," said Sir Thomas Basley at Manchester, "that the education of our great middle class requires improvement." But Mr. Arnold had courage. Indeed he carried one kind of courage to an heroic pitch. I mean the courage of repeating yourself over and over again. It is a sound forensic maxim: Tell a judge twice whatever you want him to hear. Tell a special jury thrice, and a common jury half-a-dozen times the view of a case you wish them to entertain. Mr. Arnold treated the middle class as a common jury and hammered away at them remorselessly and with the most unblushing iteration. They groaned under him, they snorted, and they sniffed-but they listened, and, what was more to the purpose, their children listened, and with filial frankness told their heavy sires that Mr. Arnold was quite right, and that their lives were dull, and hideous, and arid, even as he described them as being. Mr. Arnold's work as a School Inspector gave him great opportunities of going, about amongst all classes of the people. Though not exactly apostolic in manner or method, he had something to say both to and of everybody. The aristocracy were polite and had ways he admired, but they were

impotent of ideas and had a dangerous tendency to become studiously frivolous. Consequently the Future did not belong to them. Get ideas and study gravity, was the substance of his discourse to the Barbarians, as, with that trick of his of miscalling God's creatures, he had the effrontery to dub our adorable nobility. But it was the middle class upon whom fell the full weight of his discourse. His sermons to them would fill a volume. Their great need was culture, which he declared to be a study of perfection, the sentiment for beauty and sweetness, the sentiment against hideousness and rawness. The middle class, he protested, needed to know all the best things that have been said and done in the world since it began, and to be thereby lifted out of their holes and corners, private academies and chapels in side streets, above their tenth-rate books and miserable preferences, into the main stream of national existence. The lower orders he judged to be a mere rabble, and thought it was as yet impossible to predict whether or not they would hereafter display any aptitude for Ideas, or passion for Perfection. But in the meantime he bade them learn to cohere, and to read and write, and above all he conjured them not to imitate the middle classes.

It is not easy to know everything about everybody, and it may be doubted whether Mr. Arnold did not overrate the degree of acquaintance with his countrymen his peregrinations among them had conferred upon him. In certain circles he was supposed to have made the completest possible diagnosis of dissent, and was credited with being able, after five minutes' conversation with any individual Nonconformist, unerringly to assign him to his particular chapel, Independent, Baptist, Primitive Methodist, Unitarian, or whatever else it might be, and this though they had only been talking about the weather. To people who know nothing about dissenters, Mr. Arnold might well seem to know everything. However, he did. know a great deal, and used his knowledge with great cunning and effect, and a fine instinctive sense of the whereabouts

not impeded by any exclusive tastes or hobbies. Your collector, even though it be but of butterflies, is rarely a democrat. One of Arnold's favorite lines in Wordsworth was

Joy that is in widest commonalty spread.

66

The collector's joys are not of that kind. Mr. Arnold was not, I believe, a collector of anything. He certainly was not of books. I once told him I had been reading a pamphlet written by him in 1859 on the Italian Question. He enquired somewhat curiously how I came across it. I said I had picked it up in a shop. 'Oh, yes," said he, "some old curiosity shop, I suppose.' Nor was he joking. He seemed quite to suppose that old books, and old clothes, and old chairs were huddled together for sale in the same resort of the curious. He was not curious about such things. The prices given for the early editions of his own poems seemed to tease him. His literary taste was broadly democratic. He did not care much for fished-up authors, nor did he ever indulge in swaggering rhapsodies over second-rate poets. The Best was good enough for him. "The best poetry" is what he wants, "a clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it." So he wrote in his General Introduction to Mr. Ward's "Selections from the English Poets." The best of Everything for Everybody. This was his gospel and his prayer.

Approaching Mr. Arnold's writings more nearly, it seems inevitable to divide them into three classes. His poems, his theological excursions, and his criticism, using the last word in a wide sense as including a criticism of life and of politics as well as of books and style.

Of Mr. Arnold's poetry it is hard for anyone who has felt it to the full during the most impressionable period of life to speak without emotion overcoming

reason.

Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows, Hopes and fears, belief and unbelieving.

of the weakest points. Mr. Arnold's It is easy to admit, in general terms, its sense for Equality and Solidarity was limitations. Mr. Arnold is the last man

in the world anybody would wish to shove out of his place. A poet at all points, armed cap-a-pie against criticism, like Lord Tennyson, he certainly was not. Nor had his verse any share of the boundless vitality, the fierce pulsation so nobly characteristic of Mr. Browning. But these admissions made, we decline to parley any further with the enemy. We cast him behind us. Mr. Arnold, to those who cared for him at all, was the most useful poet of his day. He lived much nearer us than poets of his distinction usually do. He was neither a prophet nor a recluse. He lived neither above us, nor away from us. There are two ways of being a recluse-a poet may live remote from men, or he may live in a crowded street but remote from their thoughts. Mr. Arnold did neither, and consequently his verse tells and tingles. None of it is thrown away. His readers feel that he bore the same yoke as themselves. Theirs is a common bondage with his. Beautiful, surpassingly beautiful some of Mr. Arnold's poetry is, but we seize upon the thought first and delight in the form afterwards. No doubt the form is an extraordinary comfort, for the thoughts are often, as thoughts so widely spread could not fail to be, the very thoughts that are too frequently expressed rudely, crudely, indelicately. To open Mr. Arnold's poems is to escape from a heated atmosphere and a company not wholly free from offence even though composed of those who share our opinions-from loud-mouthed, random talking men into a well-shaded retreat which seems able to impart, even to our feverish persuasions and crude conclusions, something of the coolness of falling water, something of the music of rustling trees. This union of Thought, substantive Thought, with beauty of Form-of Strength with Elegance, is rare. I doubt very much whether Mr. Arnold ever realized the devotedness his verse inspired in the minds of thousands of his countrymen and countrywomen, both in the old world and the new. He is not a bulky poet. Three volumes contain him. But hardly a page can be opened without the eye lighting on verse which at one time or another has been, either to you or to

some one dear to you, strength or joy. The "Buried Life," "A Southern Night," "Dover Beach," "A Wanderer is Man from his Birth," "Rugby Chapel," "Resignation." How easy to prolong the list, and what a list it is. Their very names are dear to us even as are the names of Mother Churches and Holy Places to the Votaries of the old Religion. I read the other day in the Spectator newspaper an assertion that Mr. Arnold's poetry had never consoled anybody. A falser statement was never made innocently. It may never have consoled the writer in the Spectator, but because the stomach of a dram-drinker rejects cold water is no kind of reason for a sober man abandoning his morning tumbler of the pure element. Mr. Arnold's poetry has been found full of consolation. It would be strange if it had not been. It is

No stretched metre of an antique song,

but quick and to the point. There are finer sonnets in the English Language than the two following, but there are no better sermons. And if it be said that sermons may be found in stones, but ought not to be in sonnets, I fall back upon the fact which Mr. Arnold himself so cheerfully admitted, that the middle classes, who in England, at all events, are Mr. Arnold's chief readers, are serious, and love sermons. Some day perhaps they will be content with metrical exercises, ballads, and roundels.

EAST LONDON.

'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited.

I met a preacher there I knew, and said: "Ill and o'erwork'd, how fare you in this scene?

"Bravely!" said he; "for I of late have been Much cheer'd with thoughts of Christ, the lic ing bread."

Set up a mark of everlasting light, Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,

O human soul! as long as thou canst so

To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roamNot with lost toil thou laborest through the night!

Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.

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