Mr. Arnold's love of Nature, and poetic treatment of Nature, was to many a vexed soul a great joy and an intense relief. Mr. Arnold was a genuine Wordsworthian-being able to read everything Wordsworth ever wrote except "Vaudracour and Julia." The influence of Wordsworth upon him was immense, but he was enabled, by the order of his mind, to reject with the heartiest goodwill the cloudy pantheism which robs so much of Wordsworth's best verse of the heightened charm of reality, for, after all, Poetry, like Religion, must be true, or it is nothing. This strong aversion to the unreal also prevented Mr. Arnold, despite his love of the classical forms, from a nonsensical neo-paganism. His was a manlier attitude. He had no desire to keep tugging at the dry breasts of an outworn creed, nor any disposition to go down on his knees, or hunkers as the Scotch more humorously call them, before plaster casts of Venus, or even of "Proteus rising from the sea." There was something very refreshing about this. In the long run even a gloomy truth is better company than a cheerful falsehood. The perpetual strain of living down to a lie, the depressing atmosphere of a circumscribed intelligence tell upon the system, and the cheerful falsehood soon begins to look puffy and dissipated.

Yourselves and your fellows ye know not; and me,

The mateless, the one, will ye know?
Will ye scan me, and read me, and tell
Of the thoughts that ferment in my breast,
My longing, my sadness, my joy?
Will ye claim for your great ones the gift
To have rendered the gleam of my skies,
To have echoed the moan of my seas,
Uttered the voice of my hills?
When your great ones depart, will ye say:
All things have suffered a loss,
Nature is hid in their grave?

Race after race, man after man,
Have thought that my secret was theirs,
Have dream'd that I lived but for them,
That they were my glory and joy.
They are dust, they are changed, they are
gone!
I remain.

When a poet is dead we turn to his
from his labors. We still
verse with quickened feelings. He rests

Stem across the sea of life by night,

and the Voice, once the Voice of the living-of one who stood by our side, has for a while an unfamiliar accent, coming to us as it does no longer from our friendly Earth but from the strange cold caverns of Death.

Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows
Like the wave,
Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of

Which never was the friend of one,
Nor promised love it could not give,
But lit for all its generous sun
And lived itself and made us live.

Then let me gaze-till I become
In soul, with what I gaze on, wed!
To feel the universe my home;
To have before my mind- instead

Of the sick room, the mortal strife
The turmoil for a little breath-
The pure eternal course of life,
Not human combatings with death!

Thus feeling, gazing, let me grow Composed, refresh d, ennobled, clearThen willing let my spirit go

To work or wait, elsewhere or here!

To turn from Arnold's poetry to his theological writings-if so grim a name can be given to these productions--from "Rugby Chapel" to "Literature and Dogma," from "Obermann" to "God and the Bible," from "Empedocles on Etna" to "St. Paul and Protestantism," is to descend from the lofty table-lands,

From the dragon-warder'd fountains Where the springs of knowledge are, From the watchers on the mountains And the bright and morning star,

to the dusty high-road. It cannot, I think, be asserted that either the place or the style of these books was in keeping with their subjects. It was characteristic of Mr. Arnold, and like his practical turn of mind to begin "Literature and Dogma" in the Cornhill Magazine. A book rarely shakes off the first draft-"Literature and Dogma" never did. It is full of repetitions and wearisome recapitulations, well enough in a magazine where each issue is sure to be read by many who will never see another number, but which disfigure a book. The style is likewise too jaunty. Chaffing the Trinity is not yet a recognized English pastime. Bishop-baiting is, but this notwithstanding, most readers of

66

Literature and Dogma" grew tired of the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol and of his alleged desire to do something for the honor of the Godhead long before Mr. Arnold showed any signs of weariness. But making all these abatements, and fully admitting that "Literature and Dogma" is not likely to prove permanently interesting to the English

reader, it must be pronounced a most valuable and useful book, and one to which the professional critics and philosophers never did justice. The object of "Literature and Dogma "was no less than the restoration of the use of the Bible to the sceptical laity. It was a noble object, and it was in a great measure, as thousands of quiet people could testify, attained. It was not a philosophical treatise. In its own way it was the same kind of thing as many of Cardinal Newman's writings. It started with an assumption, namely, that it is impossible to believe in the miracles recorded in the Old and New Testaments. There is no laborious attempt to distinguish between one miracle and another, or to lighten the burden of faith in any particular. Nor is any serious attempt made to disprove miracles. Mr. Arnold did not write for those who find no difficulty in believing in the first chapter of St. Luke's gospel, or the sixteenth chapter of St. Mark's, but for those who simply cannot believe a word of either the one chapter or the other. Mr. Arnold knew well that this inability to believe is apt to generate in the mind of the unbeliever an almost physical repulsion to open books which are full of supernatural events. Mr. Arnold knew this and lamented it. His own love of the Bible was genuine and intense. He could read even Jeremiah and Habakkuk. As he loved Homer with one side of him, so he loved the Bible with the other. He saw how men were crippled and maimed through growing up in ignorance of it, and living all the days of their lives outside its influence. He longed to restore it to them, to satisfy them that its place in the mind of man -that its educational and moral power was not due to the miracles it records nor to the dogmas that Catholics have developed or Calvinists extracted from its pages, but to its literary excellence and to the glow and enthusiasm it has shed over conduct, self-sacrifice, humanity, and holy living. It was at all events a worthy object and a most courageous task. It exposed him to a heavy crossfire. The Orthodox fell upon his book and abused it, unrestrainedly abused it for its familiar handling of their sacred books. They almost grudged Mr. Ar

nold his great acquaintance with the Bible, just as an Englishman might be annoyed at finding Moltke acquainted with all the roads from Dover to London. This feeling was natural, and on the whole I think it creditable to the orthodox party that a book so needlessly pain-giving as "Literature and Dogma" did not goad them into any personal abuse of its author. But they could not away with the book. Nor did the philosophical sceptic like it much better. The philosophical scepticin other words the malignant Atheist, hates the Bible, even as the Devil was reported to hate holy water. Its spirit condemns him. Its devout, heart-stirring, noble language creates an atmosphere which is deadly for pragmatic egotism. To make men once more careful students of the Bible was to deal a blow at materialism, and consequently was not easily forgiven. "Why can't you leave the Bible alone," they grumbled-"What have we to do with it?” But Pharisees and Sadducees do not exhaust mankind, and Mr. Arnold's contributions to the religious controversies of his time were very far from the barren things that are most contributions, and indeed most controversies on such subjects. I believe I am right when I say that he induced a very large number of persons to take up again and make a daily study of the books both of the Old and the New Testament.

As a literary critic Mr. Arnold had at one time a great vogue. His "Essays in Criticism," first published in 1865, made him known to a larger public than his poems or his delightful lectures on translating Homer had succeeded in doing. He had the happy knack of starting interesting subjects and saying all sorts of interesting things by the way. There was the French Academy. Would it be a good thing to have an English Academy? He started the question himself and answered it in the negative. The public took it out of his mouth and proceeded to discuss it for itself, always on the assumption that he had answered it in the affirmative. But that is the way with the public. No sensible man minds it. To set something going is the most anybody can hope to do in this world. Where it will go to, and what

*

sort of moss it will gather as it goes, for despite the proverb there is nothing incompatible between moss and motion, no one can say. In this volume, too, he struck the note, so frequently and usefully repeated, of self-dissatisfaction. To make us dissatisfied with ourselves, alive to our own inferiority, not absolute but in important respects, to check the chorus, then so loud, of self-approval of our majestic selves-to make us understand why nobody who is not an Englishman wants to be one, this was another of the tasks of this militant man. We all remember how "Wragg is in custody." The papers on Heine and Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius were read with eagerness, with an enjoyment, with a sense of widening horizons too rare to be easily forgotten. They were light and graceful, but it would I think be unjust to call them slender. They were not written for specialists or even for students, but for ordinary men and women, particularly for young men and women, who carried away with them from the reading of "Essays in Criticism" something they could not have found anywhere else and which remained with them for the rest of their days, namely, a way of looking at things. A perfectly safe critic Mr. Arnold hardly was. Even in this volume he fusses too much about the De Guérins. In a sugary bride-cake romance of the "John Inglesant" species it would have been pretty enough, but for sober reality it was not "on the line." To some later judgments of his it would be unkind to refer. It was said of the late Lord Justice Mellish by Lord Cairns that he went right instinctively. That is, he did not flounder into Truth. Mr. Arnold never floundered, but he sometimes fell. A more delightful critic of Literature we have not had for long. What pleasant reading are his "Lectures on Translating Homer," which ought to be at once reprinted. How full of good things! Not perhaps fit to be torn from their contexts, or paraded in a Commonplace book, but of the kind which give a reader joy-which make literature tempting-which revive, even in dull middleage, something of the enthusiasm of the love-stricken boy. Then, too, his "Study

* See Essays in Criticism, p. 23.

of Celtic Literature." It does not matter much whether you can bring yourself to believe in the "Eisteddfod" or not. In fact Mr. Arnold did not believe in it. He knew perfectly well that better poetry is to be found every week in the poet's corner of every county newspaper in England than is produced annually at the Eisteddfod. You need not even share Mr. Arnold's opinion as to the inherent value of Celtic Literature, though this is of course a grave question, worthy of all consideration-but his "Study" is good enough to be read for love. It is full of charming criticism. Most critics are such savages-or if they are not savages, they are full of fantasies, and are capable at any moment of calling "Tom Jones" dull, or Sydney Smith a bore. Mr. Arnold was not a savage, and was as likely of calling "Tom Jones" dull, or Sydney Smith a bore as he was to call Homer heavy or Milton vulgar. He was no gloomy specialist. He knew it took all sorts to make a world. He was alive to life. Its great movement fascinated him, even as it had done Burke, even as it does Cardinal Newman. He watched the rushing stream, the "stir of existence," the good and the bad, the false and the true, with an interest that never flagged. In his last words on translating Homer he says: "And thus false tendency as well as true, vain effort as well as fruitful, go together to produce that great movement of life, to present that immense and magic spectacle of human affairs, which from boyhood to old age fascinates the gaze of every man of imagination, and which would be his terror if it were not at the same time his delight."

Mr. Arnold never succeeded in getting his countrymen to take him seriously as a practical politician. He was regarded as an unauthorized practitioner whose prescriptions no respectable chemist would consent to make up. He had not the diploma of Parliament, nor was he able, like the Secretary of an Early Closing Association, to assure any political aspirant that he commanded enough votes to turn an election. When Mr. John Morley took occasion after Mr. Arnold's death to refer to him in Parliament, the name was received respectfully but coldly. Mr. W. H. Smith is be

lieved by many never to have heard of the author of " Thyrsis." And yet he was eager about politics and had much to say about political questions. His work in these respects was far from futile. What he said was never inapt. It colored men's thoughts and contributed to the formation of their opinions far more than even public meetings. His introduction to his "Report on Popular Education in France," published in 1861, is as instructive a piece of writing as is to be found in any historical disquisition of the last three decades. The paper on "My Countrymen in that most amusing book "Friendship's Garland" (which ought also to be at once reprinted) is full of point.

دو

But it is time to stop. It is only possible to stop where we began. Matthew Arnold is dead. He would have been the last man to expect anyone to grow hysterical over the circumstance, and the first to denounce any strained emotion. Il n'y a pas d'homme nécessaire. No one ever grasped this great, this comforting, this cooling, this self-destroying truth more cordially than he did. As I write the words I remember how he VOL. IV.-58

employed them in his preface to the second edition of "Essays in Criticism where he records a conversation, I doubt not an imaginary one, between himself and a portly jeweller from Cheapside-his fellow-traveller on the Woodford Branch of the Great Eastern Line. The Traveller was greatly perturbed in his mind by the murder then lately perpetrated in a railway carriage by the notorious Müller. Mr. Arnold plied him with consolation. " 'Suppose the worst to happen," I said, "suppose even yourself to be the victim-il n'y a pas d'homme nécessaire-we should miss you for a day or two on the Woodford Branch, but the great mundane movement would still go on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled, dividends would still be paid at the Bank, omnibuses would still run, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street."

And so it proves for all-for portly jewellers and lovely poets.

The Pillar still broods o'er the fields
Which border Ennerdale Lake,
And Egremont sleeps by the sea-
Nature is fresh as of old,

Is lovely; a mortal is dead.