VIII

A fairly complete survey of the characteristics of Arnold’s style may perhaps best be obtained by recognizing in his prose-writings four distinct manners. First may be mentioned his least compromising, severest, most exact style; it is most consistently present in the first of theMixed Essays, that onDemocracy(1861). The sentences are apt to be long and periodic. The structure of the thought is defined by means of painstakingly accurate articulations. Progress in the discussion is systematic and is from time to time conscientiously noted. The tone is earnest, almost anxious. A strenuous, systematic, responsible style, we may call it. Somewhat mitigated in its severities, somewhat less palpably official, it remains the style of Arnold’s technical reports upon education and of great portions of his writings on religious topics. It is, however, most adequately exhibited in the essay onDemocracy.

Simpler in tone, easier, more colloquial, more casual, is the style that Arnold uses in his literary essays, in the uncontroversial parts of the lectures onTranslating Homer, and inCulture and Anarchy. This style is characterized by its admirable union of ease, simplicity, and strength; by the affability of its tone, an affability, however, that never degenerates into over-familiarity or loses dignified restraint; by its disregard of method, or of the morepretentious manifestations of method; and by the delicate certainty with which, when at its best, it takes the reader, despite its apparently casual movement, over the essential aspects of the subject under discussion. This is really Arnold’s most distinctive manner, and it will require, after his two remaining manners have been briefly noted, some further analysis.

Arnold’s third style is most apt to appear in controversial writings or in his treatment of subjects where he is particularly aware of his enemy, or particularly bent on getting a hearing from the inattentive through cleverly malicious satire, or particularly desirous of carrying things off with a nonchalant air. It appears in the controversial parts of the lectures onTranslating Homer, in many chapters ofCulture and Anarchy, and runs throughoutFriendship’s Garland. Its peculiarly rasping effect upon many readers has already been described. It is responsible for much of the prejudice against Arnold’s prose.

Arnold’s fourth style—intimate, rich in colour, intense in feeling, almost lyrical in tone—is the style that has just been noted as appearing in the essays onGeorge Sandand onEmerson. There are not many passages in Arnold’s prose where this style has its way with him. But these passages are so individual, and seem to reveal Arnold with such novelty and truth, that the style that pervades them deserves to be put by itself.

The style usually taken as characteristically Arnold’s is that here classed as his second, with a generous admixture of the third. Many of the qualities of this style have already been suggested as illustrative of certain aspects of Arnold’s temperament or habits of thought. Various important points, however, still remain to be appreciated.

Colloquial in its rhythms and its idiom this style surely is. It is fond of assenting to its own propositions; “well” and “yes” often begin its sentences—signs of its casual and tentative mode of advance. Arnold’s frequent use of “well” and “yes” and neglect of the anxiously demonstrative “now,” at the opening of his sentences, mark unmistakably the unrigorousness of his method. An easily negligent treatment of the sentence, too, is often noticeable; a subject is left suspended while phrase follows phrase, or even while clause follows clause, until, quite as in ordinary talk, the subject must be repeated, the beginning of the sentence must be brought freshly to mind. Often Arnold ends a sentence and begins the next with the same word or phrase; this trick is better suited to talk than to formal discourse. Indeed, Arnold permits himself not a few of the inaccuracies of every-day speech. He uses the cleft infinitive; he introduces relative clauses with superfluous “and” or “but”; he confuses the present participle with the verbal noun and speaks, for example, of “the creating a current”; and he usually “tries and does” a thinginstead of “trying to do” it. Finally, his prose abounds in exclamations and in italicized words or phrases, and so takes on much of the movement and rhythm of talk, as in the following passage: “But the gloomy, oppressive dream is now over. ‘Let us return to Nature!’ And all the world salutes with pride and joy the Renascence, and prays to Heaven: ‘Oh, thatIshmaelmight live before thee!’ Surely the future belongs to this brilliant newcomer, with his animating maxim:Let us return to Nature!Ah, what pitfalls are in that wordNature! Let us return to art and science, which are a part of Nature; yes. Let us return to a proper conception of righteousness, to a true sense of the method and secret of Jesus, which have been all denaturalized; yes. But, ‘Let us return toNature!’—do you mean that we are to give full swing to our inclinations?”[59]The colloquial character of these exclamations and the search, through the use of italics, for stress like the accent of speech are unmistakable.

Arnold’s fundamental reason, conscious or unconscious, for the adoption of this colloquial tone and manner, may probably be found in the account of the ultimate purpose of all his writing, given near the close ofCulture and Anarchy; he aims, not to inculcate an absolutely determinate system of truth, but to stir his readers into the keenest possible self-questioning over the worth of theirstock ideas. “Socrates has drunk his hemlock and is dead; but in his own breast does not every man carry about with him a possible Socrates, in that power of disinterested play of consciousness upon his stock notions and habits, of which this wise and admirable man gave all through his lifetime the great example, and which was the secret of his incomparable influence? And he who leads men to call forth and exercise in themselves this power, and who busily calls it forth and exercises it in himself, is at the present moment, perhaps, as Socrates was in his time, more in concert with the vital working of men’s minds, and more effectually significant, than any House of Commons’ orator, or practical operator in politics.”[60]This dialectical habit of mind is, Arnold believes, best induced and stimulated by the free colloquial manner of writing that he usually adopts.

In the choice of words, however, Arnold is not noticeably colloquial. Less often in Arnold than in Newman is a familiar phrase caught audaciously from common speech and set with a sure sense of fitness and a vivifying effect in the midst of more formal expressions. His style, though idiomatic, stops short of the vocabulary of every day; it is nice—instinctively edited. Certain words are favourites with him, and, as is so often the case with the literary temperament, reveal special preoccupations. Such words arelucidity,urbanity,amenity,fluid(as an epithet for style),vital,puissant.

Arnold is never afraid of repeating a word or a phrase, hardly enough afraid of this. His trick of ending one sentence and beginning the next with the same set of words has already been noted. At times, his repetitions seem due to his attempt to write down to his public; he will not confuse them by making them grasp the same idea twice through two different forms of speech. Often, his repetitions come palpably from sheer fondness for his own happy phraseology. His description of Shelley as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” pleases him so well that he carries it over entire from one essay to another; even a whole page of his writing is sometimes so transferred.

And indeed iteration and reiteration of single phrases or forms of words is a mannerism with Arnold, and at times proves one of his most effective means both for stamping his own ideas on the mind of the public and for ridiculing his opponents. Many of his positive formulas have become part and parcel of the modern literary man’s equipment. His account of poetry as “a criticism of life”; his plea for “high seriousness” as essential to a classic; his pleasant substitute for the old English word God—“the not ourselves which makes for righteousness”; “lucidity of mind”; “natural magic” in the poetic treatment of nature;“the grand style” in poetry; these phrases of his have passed into the literary consciousness and carried with them at least a superficial recognition of many of his ideas.

Iteration Arnold uses, too, as a weapon of ridicule. He isolates some unluckily symbolic phrase of his opponent’s, points out its damaging implications or its absurdity, and then repeats it pitilessly as an ironical refrain. The phrase gains in grotesqueness at each return—“sweetening and gathering sweetness evermore”—and, finally, seems to the reader to contain the distilled quintessence of the foolishness inherent in the view that Arnold ridicules. It is in this way that inCulture and Anarchythe agitation to “enable a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister” becomes symbolic of all the absurd fads of “liberal practitioners.” Similarly, when he is criticising the cheap enthusiasm with which democratic politicians describe modern life, Arnold culls from the account of a Nottingham child-murder the phrase, “Wragg is in custody,” and adds it decoratively after every eulogy on present social conditions. Or, again, theTimes, at a certain diplomatic crisis, exhorts the Government to set forth England’s claims “with promptitude and energy”; and this grandiloquent, and, under the circumstances, empty phrase becomes, as Arnold persistently rings its changes, irresistibly droll as symbolic of cheap bluster. Whole sentences are often reiterated byArnold in this same satirical fashion. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in the course of a somewhat atrabilious criticism, had accused Arnold of being a mere dilettante and of having “no philosophy with coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative principles.” This latter phrase, with its bristling array of epithets, struck Arnold as delightfully redolent of pedantry; and, as has already been noted, it recurs again and again in his writings in passages of mock apology and ironical self-depreciation. Readers ofLiterature and Science, too, will remember how amusingly Arnold plays with “Mr. Darwin’s famous proposition that ‘our ancestor was a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits.’”It should be noted that in all these cases the phrase that is reiterated has a symbolic quality, and therefore, in addition to its delicious absurdity, comes to possess a subtly argumentative value.

Akin to Arnold’s skilful use of reiteration is his ingenuity in the invention of telling nicknames. On three classes of his fellow-countrymen he has bestowed names that have become generally current,—Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace. The Nonconformist, because of his unyielding sectarianism, he compares to Ephraim, “a wild ass alone by himself.” To Professor Huxley, who has been talking of “the Levites of culture,” Arnold suggests that “the poor humanist is sometimes apt to regard” men of science as the “Nebuchadnezzars” of culture.The Church and State ReviewArnold dubs “the High Church rhinoceros”; theRecordis “the Evangelical hyena.”

It is interesting to note how often Arnold’s satire has a biblical turn. His mind is saturated with Bible history and his memory stored with biblical phraseology; moreover, allusions whether to the incidents or the language of the Bible are sure to be quickly caught by English readers; hence Arnold frequently gives point to his style through the use of scriptural phrases or illustrations. Many of the foregoing nicknames come from biblical sources. The lectures on Homer offer one admirable instance of Scripture quotation. Arnold has been urged to define the grand style. With his customary dislike of abstractions, he protests against the demand. “Alas! the grand style is the last matter in the world for verbal definition to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is said of faith: ‘One must feel it in order to know what it is.’ But, as of faith, so too we may say of nobleness, of the grand style: ‘Woe to those who know it not!’ yet this expression, though indefinable, has a charm; one is the better for considering it;bonum est, nos hic esse; nay, one loves to try to explain it, though one knows that one must speak imperfectly. For those, then, who ask the question, What is the grand style? with sincerity, I will try to make some answer, inadequate as it must be. For those who ask itmockingly I have no answer, except to repeat to them with compassionate sorrow, the Gospel words:Moriemini in peccatis vestris, Ye shall die in your sins.”

An interesting comment on this habit of Arnold’s of scriptural phrasing occurs in one of his letters: “The Bible,” he says, “is the only book well enough known to quote as the Greeks quoted Homer, sure that the quotation would go home to every reader, and it is quite astonishing how a Bible sentence clinches and sums up an argument. ‘Where the State’s treasure is bestowed,’ etc., for example, saved me at least half a column of disquisition.” A moment later he adds a charmingly characteristic explanation as regards his incidental use of Scripture texts: “I put it in the Vulgate Latin, as I always do when I am not earnestly serious.” This habit of “high seriousness” in such matters, it is to be feared he in some measure outgrew.

Arnold’s fine instinct in the choice of words has thus far been illustrated chiefly as subservient to satire. In point of fact, however, it is subject to no such limitation. Whatever his purpose, he has in a high degree the faculty of putting words together with a delicate congruity that gives them a permanent hold on the memory and imagination. In this power of fashioning vital phrases he far surpasses Newman, and indeed most recent writers except those who have developed epigram andparadox into a meretricious manner. “A free play of the mind”; “disinterestedness”; “a current of true and fresh ideas”; “the note of provinciality”; “sweet reasonableness”; “the method of inwardness”; “the secret of Jesus”; “the study of perfection”; “the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners”—how happily vital are all these phrases! How perfectly integrated! Yet they are unelaborate and almost obvious. Christianity is “the greatest and happiest stroke ever yet made for human perfection.” “Burke saturates politics with thought.” “Our august Constitution sometimes looks ... a colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines.” “English public life ... that Thyestëan banquet of claptrap.” The Atlantic cable—“that great rope, with a Philistine at each end of it talking inutilities.” These sentences illustrate still further Arnold’s deftness of phrasing. But with the last two or three we return to the ironical manner that has already been exemplified.

In his use of figures Arnold is sparing; similes are few, metaphors by no means frequent. It may be questioned whether it is ever the case with Arnold, as with Newman, that a whole paragraph is subtly controlled in its phrasing by the presence of a single figure in the author’s mind. Simpler in this respect Arnold’s style probably is than even Newman’s; its general inferiority to Newman’s style inpoint of simplicity is owing to the infelicities of tone and manner that have already been noted.

Illustrations, Arnold uses liberally and happily. He excels in drawing them patly from current events and the daily prints. This increases both the actuality of his discussion—its immediacy—and its appearance of casualness, of being a pleasantly unconsidered trifle. For example, the long and elaborate discussion,Culture and Anarchy, begins with an allusion to a recent article in theQuarterly Reviewon Sainte-Beuve.Curiosityas a habit of mind had been somewhat disparaged in that article, and it is through a colloquial examination of just what is involved in commendable curiosity that Arnold is led to his analysis ofculture. Later in the same chapter, references occur to such sectarian journals as theNonconformist, and to current events as reported and criticised in their columns. Even in essays dealing with purely literary topics—in such an essay as that onEugénie de Guérin—there is this same actuality. “While I was reading the journal of Mlle. de Guérin,” Arnold tells us, “there came into my hands the memoir and poems of a young Englishwoman, Miss Emma Tatham”; and then he uses this memoir to illustrate the contrasts between the poetic traditions of Roman Catholicism and the somewhat sordid intellectual poetry of English sectarian life. This closeness of relation between Arnold’s writing and his daily experience is very noticeable, and increases the reader’s sense of the novelty and genuineness and immediacy of what he reads; it conduces to that impression of vitality that is, perhaps, in the last analysis, the most characteristic impression the reader carries away from Arnold’s writings.

And, indeed, the union in Arnold’s style of actuality with distinction becomes a very significant matter when we turn to consider his precise relation to his age, for it suggests what is perhaps the most striking characteristic of his personality—his reconciliation of conventionality with fineness of spiritual temper. In this reconciliation lies the secret of Arnold’s relation to his romantic predecessors and to the men of his own time. He accepts the actual, conventional life of the every-day world frankly and fully, as the earlier idealists had never quite done, and yet he retains a strain of other-worldliness inherited from the dreamers of former generations. Arnold’s gospel of culture is an attempt to import into actual life something of the fine spiritual fervour of the Romanticists with none of the extravagance or the remoteness from fact of those “madmen”—those idealists of an earlier age.

Like the Romanticists, Arnold gives to the imagination and the emotions the primacy inlife; like the Romanticists he contends against formalists, system-makers, and all devotees of abstractions. It is by an exquisite tact, rather than by logic, that Arnold in all doubtful matters decides between good and evil. He keeps to the concrete image; he is an appreciator of life, not a deducer of formulas or a demonstrator. He is continually concerned about whatoughtto be; he is not cynically or scientifically content with the knowledge of whatis. And yet, unlike the Romanticists, Arnold isinthe world, andofit; he has given heed to the world-spirit’s warning, “submit, submit”; he has “learned the Second Reverence, for things around.” In Arnold, imaginative literature returns from its romantic quest for the Holy Grail and betakes itself half-humorously, and yet with now and then traces of the old fervour, to the homely duties of every-day life.

Arnold had in his youth been under the spell of romantic poetry; he had heard the echoes of “the puissant hail” of those “former men,” whose “voices were in all men’s ears.” Indeed, much of his poetry is essentially a beautiful threnody over the waning of romance, and in its tenor bears witness alike to the thoroughness with which he had been imbued with the spirit of the earlier idealists and to his inability to rest content with their relation to life and their accounts of it. It is the unreality of the idealists that dissatisfies Arnold, their visionary blindness to fact, their morbid distaste for the actual. Much as he delights in the poetry of Shelley and Coleridge, these qualities in their work seem to him unsound and injurious. Or, at other times, it is the capricious self-will of the Romanticists, their impotent isolation, their enormous egoism, that impress him as fatally wrong. Even in Wordsworth he is troubled by a semi-untruth and by the lack of a courageous acceptance of the conditions of human life. Wordsworth’s

“Eyes avert their kenFrom half of human fate.”

Tempered, then, as Arnold was by a deep sense of the beauty and nobleness of romantic and idealistic poetry, finely touched as he was into sympathy with the whole range of delicate intuitions, quivering sensibilities, and half-mystical aspirations that this poetry called into play, he yet came to regard its underlying conceptions of life as inadequate and misleading, and to feel the need of supplementing them by a surer and saner relation to the conventional world of common sense. The Romanticists lamented that “the world is too much with us.” Arnold shared their dislike of the world of dull routine, their fear of the world that enslaves to petty cares; yet he came more and more to distinguish between this world and the great world of common experience, spread out generously in the lives of all men; more and more clearly he realizedthat the true land of romance is in this region of every-day fact, or else is a mere mirage; that “America is here or nowhere.”

Arnold, then, sought to correct the febrile unreality of the idealists by restoring to men a true sense of the actual values of life. In this attempt he had recourse to Hellenic conceptions with their sanity, their firm delight in the tangible and the visible, their regard for proportion and symmetry—and more particularly to the Hellenism of Goethe. Indeed, Goethe may justly be called Arnold’s master—the writer who had the largest share in determining the characteristic principles in his theory of life. Goethe’s formula for the ideal life—Im Ganzen, Guten Wahren, resolut zu leben—sums up in a phrase the plea for perfection, for totality, for wisely balanced self-culture, that Arnold makes in so many of his essays and books.

Allusions to Goethe abound in Arnold’s essays, and in one of his letters he speaks particularly of his close and extended reading of Goethe’s works.[61]His splendid poetic tributes to Goethe, in hisMemorial VersesandObermann, have given enduring expression to his admiration for Goethe’s sanity, insight, and serene courage. His frankest prose appreciation of Goethe occurs inA French Critic on Goethe, where he characterizes him as “the clearest, the largest, the most helpfulthinker of modern times; ... in the width, depth, and richness of his criticism of life, by far our greatest modern man.”[62]It is precisely in this matter of the criticism of life that Arnold took Goethe for master. Goethe, as Arnold saw, had passed through the tempering experiences of Romanticism; he had rebelled against the limitations of actual life (inWerther, for example, andGoetz), and sought passionately for the realization of romantic dreams; and he had finally come to admit the futility of rebellion and to recognize the treacherous evasiveness of emotional ideals; he had learned the “Second Reverence, for things around.” He had found in self-development, in wise self-discipline for the good of society, the secret of successful living. Arnold’s gospel of culture is largely a translation of Goethe’s doctrine into the idiom of the later years of the century, and the minute adaptation of it to the special needs of Englishmen. There is in Arnold somewhat less sleek paganism than in Goethe—a somewhat more genuine spiritual quality. But the wise limitation of the scope of human endeavour to this world is the same with both; so, too, is the sane and uncomplaining acceptance of fact and the concentration of thought and effort on the pursuit of tangible ideals of human perfection. Goethe tempered by Wordsworth—this is not an unfair account of the derivation of Arnold’s ideal.

From one point of view, then, Arnold may fairlyenough be called the special advocate of conventionality. He recommends and practises conformity to the demands of conventional life. He has none of the pose or the mannerisms of the seer or the bard; he is a frequenter of drawing-rooms and a diner-out, and is fairly adept in the dialect and mental idiom of the frivolously-minded. In all that he writes, “he delivers himself,” as the heroine in Peacock’s novel urged Scythrop (Shelley) to do, “like a man of this world.” He pretends to no transcendental second sight and indulges in none of Carlyle’s spinning-dervish jargon. He is never guilty of Ruskin’s occasional false sentiment or falsetto rhetoric. The world that he lives in is the world that exists in the minds and thoughts and feelings of the most sensible and cultivated people who make up modern society; the world over which, as its presiding genius, broods the haunting presence of Mr. George Meredith’s Comic Spirit. It is “in this world” that “he has hope,” in its ever greater refinement, in its ever greater comprehensiveness, in its increasing ability to impose its standards on others. When he half pleads for an English Academy—he never quite pleads for one—he does this because of his desire for some organ by which, in art and literature, the collective sense of the best minds in society assembled may make itself effective. So, too, when he pleads for the Established Church he does this for similar reasons; he is convinced thatit offers by far the best means for imposing widely upon the nation, as a standard of religious experience, what is most spiritual in the lives and aspirations of the greatest number of cultivated people. In many such ways as these, then, Matthew Arnold’s kingdom is a kingdom of this world.

And yet, after all, Arnold wears his worldliness with a very great difference. If he be compared, for example, with other literary men of the world,—with Francis Jeffrey or Lord Macaulay or Lockhart,—there is at once obvious in him an all-pervasive quality that marks his temper as far subtler and finer than theirs. His worldliness is a worldliness of his own, compounded out of many exquisite simples. His faith in poetry is intense and absolute. “The future of poetry,” he declares, “is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.” This declaration contrasts strikingly with Macaulay’s pessimistic theory of the essentially make-believe character of poetry—a theory that puts it on a level with children’s games, and, like the still more puerile theory of Herr Max Nordau, looks forward to its extinction as the race reaches genuine maturity. Poetry always remains for Arnold the most adequate and beautiful mode of speech possible to man; and this faith, which runs implicitly through all his writing, is plainly the outcome of a mood very different from that of theordinary man of the world, and is the expression of an emotional refinement and a spiritual sensitiveness that are, at least in part, his abiding inheritance from the Romanticists. This faith is the manifestation of the ideal element in his nature, which, in spite of the plausible man-of-the-world aspect and tone of much of his prose, makes itself felt even in his prose as the inspirer of a kind of “divine unrest.”

In his Preface to his first series of essays Arnold playfully takes to himself the name transcendentalist. To the stricter sect of the transcendentalists he can hardly pretend to belong. He certainly has none of their delight in envisaging mystery; none of their morbid relish for an “O altitudo!” provided only the altitude be wrapped in clouds. He believes, to be sure, in a “power not ourselves that makes for righteousness”; but his interest in this power and his comments upon it confine themselves almost wholly to its plain and palpable influence upon human conduct. Even in his poetry he can hardly be rated as more than a transcendentalistmanqué; and in his prose he is never so aware of the unseen as in his poetry.

Yet, whether or no he be strictly a transcendentalist, Arnold is, in Disraeli’s famous phrase, “on the-side of the angels”; he is a persistent and ingenious opponent of purely materialistic or utilitarian conceptions of life. “The kingdom of Godis within you”; this is a cardinal point in the doctrine of Culture. The highest good, that for which every man should continually be striving, is aninner stateof perfection; material prosperity, political enactments, religious organizations—all these things are to be judged solely according to their furtherance of the spiritual well-being of the individual; they are all meremachinery—more or less ingenious means for giving to every man a chance to make the most of his life. The true “ideal of human perfection” is “an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy.” Arnold’s worldliness, then, is a worldliness that holds many of the elements of idealism in solution, that has none of the cynical acquiescence of unmitigated worldliness, that throughout all its range shows the gentle urgency of a fine discontent with fact.

To realize the subtle and high quality of Arnold’s genius, one has but to compare him with men of science or with rationalists pure and simple,—with men like Professor Huxley, Darwin, or Bentham. Their carefulness for truth, their intellectual strength, their vast services to mankind, are acknowledged even by their opponents. Yet Arnold has a far wider range of sensibilities than any one of them; life plays upon him in far richer and more various ways; it touches him into response through associations that have a more distinctively human character, and that have a deeper and a warmer colour of emotion drawn out of the past of the race. In short, Arnold brings to bear upon the present a finer spiritual appreciation than the mere man of the world or the mere man of science—a larger accumulation of imaginative experience. Through this temperamental scope and refinement he is able, while accepting conventional and actual life, to redeem it in some measure from its routine and its commonplace character, and to import into it beauty and meaning and good from beyond the range of science or positive truth. All this comes from the fact that, despite his worldly conformity, he has the romantic ferment in his blood. If his conformity be compared with that of the eighteenth century,—with the worldliness of Swift or Addison,—the transformation wrought by romantic influences is appreciable in all its scope and meaning.

Finally, Arnold makes of life an art rather than a science, and commits the conduct of it to an exquisite tact, rather than to reason or demonstration. The imaginative assimilation of all the best experience of the past—this he regards as the right training to develop true tact for the discernment of good and evil in all practical matters, where probability must be the guide of life. We are at once reminded of Newman’s Illative Sense, which was also an intuitive faculty for the dextrous apprehension of truth through the aid ofthe feelings and the imagination. But Arnold’s new Sense comes much nearer than Newman’s to being a genuinely sublimatedCommonSense. Arnold’s ownflairin matters of art and life was astonishingly keen, and yet he would have been the last to exalt it as unerring. His faith is ultimately in the best instincts of the so-calledremnant—in the collective sense of the most cultivated, most delicately perceptive, most spiritually-minded people of the world. Through the combined intuitions of such men sincerely aiming at perfection, truth in all that pertains to the conduct of life will be more and more nearly won. Because of this faith of his in sublimated worldly wisdom, Arnold, unlike Newman, is in sympathy with theZeitgeistof a democratic age.

And, indeed, here seems to rest Arnold’s really most permanent claim to gratitude and honour. He accepts—with some sadness, it is true, and yet genuinely and generously—the modern age, with its scientific bias and its worldly preoccupations; humanist as he is, half-romantic lover of an elder time, he yet masters his regret over what is disappearing and welcomes the present loyally. Believing, however, in the continuity of human experience, and, above all, in the transcendent worth to mankind of its spiritual acquisitions, won largely through the past domination of Christian ideals, he devotes himself to preserving the quintessence of this ideal life of former generations andinsinuating it into the hearts and imaginations of men of a ruder age. He converts himself into a patient, courageous mediator between the old and the new. Herein he contrasts with Newman on the one hand, and with modern devotees of æstheticism on the other hand. Newman, whose delicately spiritual temperament was subdued even more deeply than Arnold’s to Romanticism, shrunk before the immediacy and apparent anarchy of modern life, and sought to realize his spiritual ideals through the aid of mediæval formulas and a return to mediæval conceptions and standards of truth. Exquisite spirituality was attained, but at the cost of what some have called the Great Refusal. A like imperfect synthesis is characteristic of the followers of art for art’s sake. They, too, give up common life as irredeemably crass, as unmalleable, irreducible to terms of the ideal. They turn for consolation to their own dreams, and frame for themselves a House Beautiful, where they may let these dreams have their way, “far from the world’s noise,” and “life’s confederate plea.” Arnold, with a temperament perhaps as exacting as either of these other temperaments, takes life as it offers itself and does his best with it. He sees and feels its crudeness and disorderliness; but he has faith in the instincts that civilized men have developed in common, and finds in the working of these instincts the continuous, if irregular, realization of the ideal.

FOOTNOTES:[1]Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, chap. 3.[2]Ibid., chap. 9.[3]Carlyle’sReminiscences, II, 271.[4]Hours in a Library, III, 176.[5]Lord Cockburn’sLife of Jeffrey(ed. Philadelphia, 1852), I, 101 ff.[6]The Life and Times of Lord Brougham(ed. New York, 1871), I, 176 ff.[7]Lord Cockburn’sLife of Jeffrey, II, 64.[8]Forster’sGoldsmith(ed. London, 1848), p. 170.[9]J. W. Robberd’sLife of William Taylor, I, 130-132.[10]J. W. Robberd’sLife of William Taylor, I, 139.[11]Ibid., I, 122.[12]Coleridge,Biographia Literaria, chap. 21.[13]Hazlitt’sTable Talk, 2d series, essay 6.[14]Coleridge’sBiographia Literaria, chap. 21.[15]Memoirs and Correspondence of Horner, I, 419.[16]Philomythus, by E. A. Abbott, London, 1891.[17]Letters and Correspondence of J. H. Newman, 1891, II, 156.[18]Ibid., I, 416.[19]Oxford University Sermons, ed. 1887, p. 257.[20]Ibid., p. 259.[21]Letters, II, 476.[22]Discourses to Mixed Congregations, ed. 1892, p. 373.[23]Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. 1891, pp. 39-40.[24]See above, p. 79.[25]Apologia, ed. 1890, p. 96.[26]Letters and Correspondence, I, 18.[27]Apologia, p. 28.[28]Grammar of Assent, ed. 1889, p. 359.[29]Grammar of Assent, ed. 1889, p. 360.[30]Ibid., p. 353.[31]Ibid., p. 345.[32]Ibid., p. 350.[33]Celtic Literature, p. 75.[34]Literature and Dogma, p. xxi.[35]On Translating Homer, p. 295.[36]God and the Bible, p. xxxiv.[37]Literature and Dogma, p. xxvii.[38]This image may have been suggested by a sentence of Joubert’s: “Plato loses himself in the void, but one sees the play of his wings, one hears their rustle.... It is good to breathe his air, but not to live upon him.” The translation is Arnold’s own. See hisJoubert, inEssays in Criticism, I, 294.[39]On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 197.[40]On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 295.[41]Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 143.[42]Ibid., p. 5.[43]Pater’sAppreciations, ed. 1890, p. 36.[44]Essays, ed. 1891, II, pp. 186-187.[45]Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 141.[46]Ibid., p. 187.[47]Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 22.[48]Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 33.[49]Mixed Essays, ed. 1883, p. 209.[50]On Translating Homer, p. 245.[51]Letters, I, 282.[52]Essays, ed. 1891, I, p. v.[53]On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 264.[54]On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 194.[55]Mixed Essays, ed. 1883, p. 210.[56]Essays, ed. 1891, I, p. 75.[57]Friendship’s Garland, ed. 1883, p. 279.[58]Letters, I, 240.[59]Literature and Dogma, ed. 1893, p. 321.[60]Culture and Anarchy, ed. 1883, p. 205.[61]Letters, II, 165.[62]Mixed Essays, pp. 233-234.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, chap. 3.

[2]Ibid., chap. 9.

[3]Carlyle’sReminiscences, II, 271.

[4]Hours in a Library, III, 176.

[5]Lord Cockburn’sLife of Jeffrey(ed. Philadelphia, 1852), I, 101 ff.

[6]The Life and Times of Lord Brougham(ed. New York, 1871), I, 176 ff.

[7]Lord Cockburn’sLife of Jeffrey, II, 64.

[8]Forster’sGoldsmith(ed. London, 1848), p. 170.

[9]J. W. Robberd’sLife of William Taylor, I, 130-132.

[10]J. W. Robberd’sLife of William Taylor, I, 139.

[11]Ibid., I, 122.

[12]Coleridge,Biographia Literaria, chap. 21.

[13]Hazlitt’sTable Talk, 2d series, essay 6.

[14]Coleridge’sBiographia Literaria, chap. 21.

[15]Memoirs and Correspondence of Horner, I, 419.

[16]Philomythus, by E. A. Abbott, London, 1891.

[17]Letters and Correspondence of J. H. Newman, 1891, II, 156.

[18]Ibid., I, 416.

[19]Oxford University Sermons, ed. 1887, p. 257.

[20]Ibid., p. 259.

[21]Letters, II, 476.

[22]Discourses to Mixed Congregations, ed. 1892, p. 373.

[23]Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. 1891, pp. 39-40.

[24]See above, p. 79.

[25]Apologia, ed. 1890, p. 96.

[26]Letters and Correspondence, I, 18.

[27]Apologia, p. 28.

[28]Grammar of Assent, ed. 1889, p. 359.

[29]Grammar of Assent, ed. 1889, p. 360.

[30]Ibid., p. 353.

[31]Ibid., p. 345.

[32]Ibid., p. 350.

[33]Celtic Literature, p. 75.

[34]Literature and Dogma, p. xxi.

[35]On Translating Homer, p. 295.

[36]God and the Bible, p. xxxiv.

[37]Literature and Dogma, p. xxvii.

[38]This image may have been suggested by a sentence of Joubert’s: “Plato loses himself in the void, but one sees the play of his wings, one hears their rustle.... It is good to breathe his air, but not to live upon him.” The translation is Arnold’s own. See hisJoubert, inEssays in Criticism, I, 294.

[39]On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 197.

[40]On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 295.

[41]Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 143.

[42]Ibid., p. 5.

[43]Pater’sAppreciations, ed. 1890, p. 36.

[44]Essays, ed. 1891, II, pp. 186-187.

[45]Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 141.

[46]Ibid., p. 187.

[47]Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 22.

[48]Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 33.

[49]Mixed Essays, ed. 1883, p. 209.

[50]On Translating Homer, p. 245.

[51]Letters, I, 282.

[52]Essays, ed. 1891, I, p. v.

[53]On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 264.

[54]On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 194.

[55]Mixed Essays, ed. 1883, p. 210.

[56]Essays, ed. 1891, I, p. 75.

[57]Friendship’s Garland, ed. 1883, p. 279.

[58]Letters, I, 240.

[59]Literature and Dogma, ed. 1893, p. 321.

[60]Culture and Anarchy, ed. 1883, p. 205.

[61]Letters, II, 165.

[62]Mixed Essays, pp. 233-234.

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