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THREE STUDIES IN 
 LITERATURE 
 
-y^^y^o 
 
THREE STUDIES IN 
 LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 LEWIS E. GATES 
 
 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
 1899 
 
 All rights reserved 
 

 24052 
 
 Copyright, 1899, 
 
 bt the macmillan company 
 
 
 
 
 Norfooolr ^resg 
 
 J. S. Cashing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
 
 Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 
 
 ^^0 — 
 
 4 ,-> nx n 
 
h*> 
 
 NOTE 
 
 These Studies were originally introductory es- 
 says in volumes of selections from the prose writ- 
 ings of Jeffrey, Newman, and Arnold. The essay 
 on Jeffrey has been rewritten and expanded. My 
 thanks are due to Messrs. Ginn and Co. for the 
 use of the essay on Jeffrey, and to Messrs. Henry 
 Holt and Co. for leave to reprint the essays on 
 Newman and Arnold. 
 
 December 15, 1898. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Francis Jeffrey . . . . 
 
 I. Jeffrey's Reputation 
 
 11. General Characteristics . 
 
 III. Literary Criticism . 
 
 IV. The Edinburgh Revieiv . 
 V. The New Editorial Policy 
 
 VI. The New Literary Form 
 
 VII. Conclusion 
 
 Newman as a Prose- Writer 
 
 I. Newman's Manner and its Critics 
 
 11. The Rhetorician 
 
 IIL Methods 
 
 IV. Irony 
 
 V. Style 
 
 VI. Additional Characteristics 
 
 VII. Relation to his Times . 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 6 
 
 12 
 
 41 
 46 
 54 
 59 
 
 64 
 64 
 
 72 
 82 
 88 
 92 
 98 
 108 
 
 L-' 
 
 l^" 
 
viii 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Matthew 
 
 Arnold 124 
 
 I. 
 
 Arnold's Manner 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 124 
 
 II. 
 
 Criticism of Life 
 
 
 
 
 
 129 
 
 III. 
 
 Theory of Culture 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 139 
 
 IV. 
 
 Ethical Bias . 
 
 
 
 
 
 151 
 
 V. 
 
 Literary Criticism 
 
 
 
 
 
 163 
 
 VI. 
 
 Appreciations 
 
 
 
 
 
 171 
 
 VII. 
 
 Style 
 
 
 
 
 
 180 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Relation to his Times 
 
 
 
 
 200 
 
FRANCIS JBFFEET 
 
 Who now reads Jeffrey? Only those, it may 
 be feared, who are intent on some scholarly pur- 
 pose or victims of sharp necessity. Yet in 1809 
 Jeffrey could boast that his articles in the Edin- 
 hurgh Review were read by fifty thousand thinking 
 people within a month after publication. Jef- 
 frey's reputation as a critic has run through a pict- 
 uresquely varied course. During nearly the first 
 half of the century he was, for many eminently 
 intelligent Englishmen, an all but infallible au- 
 thority in letters and whatever pertained to them. 
 He was Horner's and Sydney Smith's " King Jam- 
 fray " ; he was for Macaulay " more nearly a uni- 
 versal genius than any man of our time." Even 
 Carlyle declared, no critic since Jeffrey's day 
 "worth naming beside him." And when that 
 half -national institution, the Encyclopcedia Britan- 
 nica, required in its columns a discussion of the 
 theory of art, Jeffrey it was who was called in as 
 an authority and wrote the article on " Beauty " 
 that, down to 1875, stood as representing authentic 
 English opinion in matters of taste. 
 B 1 
 
2 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 Even those wlio hated Jeffrey admitted his 
 power. "Birds seldom sing," quoth Allan Cun- 
 ningham, " when the kite is in the air, and bards 
 dreaded the Judge Jeffrey of our day as much as 
 political offenders dreaded the Judge Jeffreys of 
 James the Second." Talfourd, Lamb's friend 
 and editor, asserted of Jeffrey that "with little 
 imagination, little genuine wit, and no clear view 
 of any great and central principles of criticism, he 
 . . . continued to dazzle, to astonish, and occa- 
 sionally to delight multitudes of readers, and at 
 one time to hold the temporary fate of authors in 
 his hands." 
 
 By way of final testimony to the magnitude of 
 Jeffrey's fame, Macaulay and Carlyle may be 
 quoted at length in his praise. One of Macaulay's 
 letters of 1828 deals wholly with his impressions 
 of Jeffrey, at whose home he had just been stay- 
 ing; the tone of the letter is that of unmixed 
 hero-worship; no details of the Scotch critic's 
 appearance or habits or opinions are too slight 
 to be sent to the Macaulay household in London. 
 " He has twenty faces almost as unlike each other 
 as my father's to Mr. Wilberforce's. . . . The 
 mere outline of his face is insignificant. The ex- 
 pression is everything; and such power and variety 
 of expression I never saw in any human counte- 
 nance. . . . The flow of his kindness is quite 
 inexhaustible. . . . His conversation is very 
 much like his countenance and his voice, of im- 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 3 
 
 mense variety. ... He is a slirewd observer; 
 and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the 
 awe in which many people seem to stand when in 
 his company." ^ These are only a few of Macau- 
 lay's details and admiring comments. Nor did 
 he outgrow this intense admiration. In April, 
 1843, he writes to Macvey Napier that he has 
 read and reread Jeffrey's old articles till he knows 
 them by heart; and in December, 1843, on the 
 appearance of Jeffrey's collected essays, he ex- 
 presses himself in almost unmeasured terms: 
 "The variety and versatility of Jeffrey's mind 
 seem to me more extraordinary than ever. . . . 
 I do not think that any one man except Jeffrey, 
 nay that any three men, could have produced such 
 diversified excellence. . . . Take him all in all, 
 I think him more nearly an universal genius than 
 any man of our time." ^ 
 
 Macaulay, however, may not be wholly beyond 
 suspicion as a witness in Jeffrey's favour. He 
 himself had much of Jeffrey's dryness and posi- 
 tiveness of nature, was temperamentally limited 
 in many of the same ways, and was, like Jeffrey, 
 an ardent Whig of the Constitutional type ; for all 
 these reasons he may be thought prejudiced. In 
 Carlyle, on the other hand, we have a witness who 
 was as far as possible from sympathy with Jef- 
 frey's neat little formulas in art and in poli- 
 
 1 Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, chap. 3. 
 
 2 Ibid., chap. 9. 
 
4 FKANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 tics, and who has never been accused of register- 
 ing unduly charitable opinions of even his best 
 friends. Yet of Jeffrey he says, "It is certain 
 there has no Critic appeared among us since who 
 was worth naming beside him; — and his influ- 
 ence, for good and for evil, in Literature and 
 otherwise, has been very great. . . . His Ed- 
 inburgh Review [was] a kind of Delphic Oracle, 
 and Voice of the Inspired, for great majorities of 
 what is called the 'Intelligent Public'; and him- 
 self regarded universally as a man of consummate 
 penetration, and the facile princeps in the depart- 
 ment he had chosen to cultivate and practise."^ 
 
 How has it happened that Jeffrey's lustre, once 
 so brilliant, has paled in our day into that of a 
 fifth-rate luminary? Was his earlier reputation 
 wholly undeserved? Or is the "dumb forgetful- 
 ness " that has overtaken him a real case of literary 
 injustice? Probably Jeffrey is now oftenest re- 
 membered for his unluckily haughty reprimand 
 to Wordsworth, " This will never do ! " — a sen- 
 tence which is popularly taken to be an incontes- 
 table proof of critical incapacity. Yet as regards 
 the artistic worth of the Excursion, the poem 
 against which Jeffrey was protesting, judges are 
 at present nearer in agreement with Jeffrey than 
 with Wordsworth. Ought not Jeffrey, the critic, 
 then, to benefit somewhat from the latter-day reac- 
 tion against overweening Komanticism ? 
 
 1 Carlyle's Beminiscences, II, 271. 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 5 
 
 Doubtless, Jeffrey's fate is in part merely an 
 illustration of the transiency of critical fame. 
 Jeffrey, like Eymer and John Dennis, has gone 
 the deciduous way of all writers of literature about 
 literature, save the few who have been actually 
 themselves, in their prose, creators of beauty. 
 Yet probably there is also something exceptional 
 in Jeffrey's case, — in his earlier complete ascen- 
 dency and in the later sorry disinheriting that has 
 overtaken him. Jeffrey's reputation was really a 
 composite affair, due fully as much to the timely- 
 happy establishment of the Edinburgh Review as 
 to his own personal cleverness, great as that was. 
 On Jeffrey, the editor, was reflected all the shin- 
 ing success of the first brilliant English Review. 
 To understand, then, the waxing and the waning of 
 Jeffrey's literary reputation, a somewhat careful 
 analysis will be needed not simply of his critical 
 genius, but also of the methods for making that 
 genius effective which fortune offered him and his 
 own keen practical instincts worked out success- 
 fully. As for his individual worth as a critic, the 
 truth will be found to lie, as so often happens, 
 about midway between the eulogists and the cavil- 
 lers. Judged even by present standards, Jeffrey 
 was a notably effective critic; he made blunders 
 not a few, but he was acute, entertaining, and sug- 
 gestive, even when he went astray; he excelled 
 in rapid analysis, apt illustration, and audacious 
 satire. He developed critical method in two very 
 
6 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 important directions, and seized upon and applied, 
 with at least partial success, two critical princi- 
 ples, hardly recognized in England before his day, 
 but thereafter more and more widely and fruitfully 
 employed. All these are points, however, that 
 need to be minutely dealt with and illustrated. 
 
 II 
 
 It was on Jeffrey's versatility — the universality 
 of his genius — that Macaulay's comments in 1843 
 laid special stress. That versatility remains note- 
 worthy for good or for ill to-day. No modern lit- 
 erary critic would venture on the vast range of 
 subjects that Jeffrey, even in the seventy or eighty 
 of his essays that he thought worth preserving, has 
 magisterially dealt with. His Collected Essays 
 are arranged under the following seven headings : 
 General Literature; History; Poetry; Philosophy 
 of the Mind, Metaphysics, and Jurisprudence; 
 Prose Fiction; General Politics; Miscellaneous. 
 Under all these headings the works of distin- 
 guished specialists are discussed, and the reviewer 
 declaims and dogmatizes like an expert, whether 
 he be holding forth on philosophy to Dugald Stew- 
 art or on politics and law to Jeremy Bentham, or 
 on poetry to Wordsworth or Scott. Such confident 
 universality is nowadays sure to suggest shallow- 
 ness, and yet the fact remains that for twenty-five 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 7 
 
 years Jeffrey was able to write on this vast variety 
 of topics so as to command the thorough respect 
 even of his opponents, and so as not simply to 
 avoid any scandalous misadventure through false 
 information or inept judgments (unless in the case 
 of Wordsworth), but to rule almost arbitrarily a 
 great mass of public opinion in morals, in politics, 
 and in literary and artistic theory. To carry 
 through successfully so difficult a task is in itself 
 a victory to be put to the credit of the audacious 
 Scotch critic, even though his work prove not in 
 all cases of permanent worth. 
 
 A rapid and pungent style and great adroitness 
 and attractiveness in exposition were doubtless 
 largely responsible for Jeffrey's constant success 
 with his public. But, in addition to these formal 
 excellences, Jeffrey was remarkably well equipped 
 and well trained for the part of a universal genius. 
 Instinct had been beforehand with him and led him 
 to prepare himself during a good many years of 
 faithful study for just the part he was to play. 
 When he had to choose a profession he decided 
 for the bar, and he was called as a barrister in 
 1796. But both before this decision and dur- 
 ing his actual legal studies, he read widely and 
 systematically by himself in general literature, 
 political theory, history, and philosophy; and dur- 
 ing all this patient, private reading, at Glasgow 
 University, at Edinburgh, and afterwards at Ox- 
 ford, he was busy, with canny Scotch diligence, at 
 
8 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 note-books, in which facts and ideas and theoriz- 
 ings were recorded and worked out. His mind 
 was conspicuously vivacious and alert, — swift to 
 catch up and make its own new knowledge, whether 
 about books or life. This keenness of intellectual 
 scent was always characteristic of him. Even 
 Matthew Arnold has conceded to him one trait of 
 the ideal critic — curiosity. A very different com- 
 mentator, Mrs. Carlyle, makes special mention, 
 after a call from him, of his " dark, penetrating " 
 eyes, that " had been taking note of most things in 
 God's universe." 
 
 Besides the results of this patient self-discipline, 
 and of this wide ranging and swiftly appropriating 
 intellectual interest, Jeffrey had, in a very high 
 degree, the barrister's power of seizing, compre- 
 hending, and controlling, quickly and surely, a 
 vast mass of new facts. He could "get up" an 
 unfamiliar subject with unsurpassable readiness 
 and completeness. His mastery of his subject in 
 a review-article seems often like the successful 
 barrister's knowledge of his brief: he knows what- 
 ever he needs to know to carry the matter in hand 
 triumphantly through. 
 
 His way of unfolding a subject is always deft 
 and delightful to follow. He had a sure exposi- 
 tory instinct. Point by point, the most complex 
 problem takes on, under his treatment, at least a 
 specious simplicity, and the most abstract theorem, 
 alluring familiarity, and definiteness. He is gen- 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 9 
 
 erous with illustrations and examples and mis- 
 chievous in giving them a satirical turn. Despite 
 his Scotch bias towards theorizing, he knows and 
 " hugs " his facts, and his discussions always keep 
 close to experience. 
 
 His breadth of view is remarkable, if his work 
 be compared with that of eighteenth-century critics. 
 Whatever the book or question under discussion, 
 Jeffrey lifts it into the region of general principles, 
 and is not content with formal judgments of literary 
 worth or with random comments on special points. 
 He is really bent on setting up "a free play of 
 ideas" over the literature and the modes of life 
 that he criticises, and on orienting his readers as 
 regards not simply the special work under discus- 
 sion, but the whole field of art or of study to which 
 it belongs. That his theories, at least in literary 
 matters, were not always searching or profound, 
 that they will not, in sweep and thoroughness, bear 
 comparison with those, for example, of Coleridge, 
 the great system-weaver of the Komanticists, is 
 undoubtedly true. Yet even in literary theory Jef- 
 frey, as will be presently shown, hit on some 
 notable truths; he partially comprehended and 
 applied the historical method for the study of lit- 
 erature ; he worked out with Alison an interpreta- 
 tion of beauty, which, though false in its emphasis 
 and distorted, recognized and illustrated with great 
 acuteness one highly important and comparatively 
 neglected source of aesthetic emotion; and, despite 
 
10 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 much mistaken ridicule of Romantic poetry and 
 much insensibility to its quintessential power and 
 charm, he showed his critical insight in his protests 
 against certain radical defects alike in the ethical 
 and in the aesthetic theory of the Romanticists, — 
 defects which, as Jeffrey contended and as modern 
 criticism admits, do much to invalidate Romantic 
 poetry, both as a criticism of life and as a perma- 
 nently invigorating imaginative stimulus. But 
 even apart from the absolute correctness or finality 
 of Jeffrey's theorizing, his practice of raising criti- 
 cism into the region of general principles and of 
 examining the material worth of books even more 
 searchingly than their barely formal qualities, was a 
 renovating change in criticism, and at once gave 
 new consideration and dignity to the work of the 
 critic. Mind was at any rate fermenting in what- 
 ever Jeffrey wrote, and for the most part the writ- 
 ing of earlier reviewers had been a barren waste 
 of words. 
 
 Finally, Jeffrey's style startled and challenged 
 and terrified and amused, and through its briskness 
 and audacity, its swift sparkle and gay bravado, 
 its satire and banter, its impetuous fulness and 
 unfailing wealth of fact and illustration fairly cap- 
 tivated a public that was used to the humdrum, 
 conventional speech of penny-a-lining critics. 
 There is a fine vein of mischief in Jeffrey that 
 leads continually to very grateful ridicule of 
 pedantry, dulness, and all kinds of absurdity. 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 11 
 
 Even the devoutest Wordsworthian will, if lie be 
 not an ingrained prig, relish Jeffrey's raillery at 
 the expense of Wordsworth's occasional pompous 
 ineptitude. And if Jeffrey's vivacity still seems 
 amusing, how much more irresistible must his 
 style have seemed before the days of Hazlitt and 
 Lamb and Macaulay and Carlyle. His dash and 
 wit and audacity were new in literary criticism, 
 and for the time being seemed to the public almost 
 more than mortal. 
 
 Whether or no all these qualities of Jeffrey's 
 genius and style are those of the ideal literary 
 critic, they were fitted to gain him success and re- 
 nown as a brilliant, argumentative writer on literary 
 topics. And, in point of fact, this is what Jeffrey 
 really was; he was a typically well equipped and 
 skilful middleman of ideas. He found an increas- 
 ingly large Liberal or Whig public anxious to have 
 its beliefs expressed plausibly, its feelings justi- 
 fied, and its taste made clear to itself and gently 
 improved. The Whig "sheep looked up," and 
 Jeffrey fed them. He did much the same work in 
 general literary, social, and political theory that 
 Macaulay did later in history. Macaulay's histori- 
 cal essays, also published in the Edinburgh Heview, 
 were, as Cotter Morison has pointed out, "great 
 historical cartoons," specially adapted for the 
 popularization of history, and specially suited to 
 the knowledge and aspirations of an intelligent 
 middle-class public. Jeffrey's essays in literature 
 
12 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 had much this same character and value. They 
 interpreted the freshest, most vital thought of the 
 time, so far as possible in harmony with Whig 
 formulas, and judged it by Whig standards ; they 
 made happily articulate Whig prejudices on all 
 subjects, from the French Eevolution to Words- 
 worth's peasant poetry. By their masterly exposi- 
 tion, their incisive argument, and their wit, they 
 entertained even those whom they exasperated. 
 Their success was prompt and unexampled. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It has already been hinted that the qualities of 
 Jeffrey's genius and style, great as may have been 
 their value for the work he accomplished, are not, 
 when judged from the modern point of view, alto- 
 gether those of the ideal literary critic. This is 
 particularly true if appreciation be included as 
 a vital part of the critic's task. Jeffrey rarely 
 appreciates a piece of literature, interprets it 
 imaginatively, lends himself to its peculiar charm, 
 and expresses this charm through sympathetic 
 symbolism. His readiness and his plausibility 
 are not the only points in which Jeffrey the critic 
 suggests Jeffrey the advocate. He has the defects 
 as well as the merits of the lawyer in literature. 
 He is always for or against his author; he is 
 always making points. The intellectual interest 
 preponderates in his critical work, and his discus- 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 13 
 
 sions often seem, particularly to a reader of mod- 
 ern impressionistic criticism, hard, unsympathetic, 
 searchingly analytical, repellingly abstract and 
 systematic. He is always on the watch ; he never 
 lends himself confidingly to his author and takes 
 passively and gratefully the mood and the images 
 his author suggests. He never loiters or dreams. 
 He is full of business and bustle, and perpetually 
 distracts his readers with his sense of the need of 
 making definite progress. He is one of those re- 
 sponsible folk who believe that 
 
 " Nothing of itself will come 
 But we must still be seeking." 
 
 Eor delicate and subtle appreciation, then, of the 
 best modern type it is useless to look in Jeffrey^s 
 essays. 
 
 Of course, historically, such criticism could 
 hardly have been expected in 1803. The critical 
 tradition that Jeffrey fell heir to was that of the 
 dogmatists, — the tradition that came down from 
 Ascham, the pedagogue, through the hands of the 
 would-be autocrats, Rymer and Dennis, to Dr. 
 Johnson. The theories of the dogmatists suffered 
 many changes, but remained nevertheless true to 
 one fundamental principle: the critic was to be 
 accepted as an infallible judge in literature because 
 of his familiarity with certain models or certain 
 abstract rules, the imitation or the observance of 
 which was essential to good art. The dogmatic 
 
14 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 critic deemed himself lord of literature by a kind 
 of divine right. Ascham believed in the plenary- 
 artistic inspiration of the Greek and Latin classics, 
 and posed as the authentic interpreter of the sacred 
 literary word. The pseudo-classical critics, Eymer 
 and Dennis, based themselves also partly on au- 
 thority, but even more upon reason ; they pretended 
 to rule by the divine right of pure logic. Their 
 implicit postulate might be likened to Hobbes's 
 theory in politics ; they substantially held that the 
 strongest must keep order in the commonwealth, 
 and that in the literary commonwealth this duty 
 fell to the intellectually strongest. Accordingly, 
 these critics administered justice magisterially in 
 accordance with a strict code of laws; they had 
 laws for the epic poet, laws for the writer of com- 
 edy, laws for the satirist, laws for the writer of 
 tragedy; the author of every new piece of litera- 
 ture was called up to the bar and reprimanded for 
 the least illegality. In short, the dogmatic critic 
 regarded himself and was generally regarded as 
 able to apply absolute tests of merit to all literary 
 work, and as the final authority on all doubtful 
 matters of taste. 
 
 Now, Jeffrey was the inheritor of this tradition 
 in criticism, and naturally adopted at times its 
 tyrannical tone and manner towards public and 
 authors. Yet, following his temperamental fond- 
 ness for compromises, for middle parties and medi- 
 ating measures, Jeffrey never tried formally to 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 15 
 
 defend this old doctrine or represented himself as 
 an absolute lawgiver in literature. Nowhere does 
 he lay down a complete set of principles, like the 
 rules of Bossu for epic poetry, or those of Eapin 
 for the drama, by which excellence in any form of 
 literature may be absolutely tested. Such a high- 
 and-dry Tory theory of criticism does not suggest 
 itself to Jeffrey as tenable. He is a Whig in taste 
 as in politics, and desires in both spheres the 
 supremacy of a chosen aristocracy. In his essay 
 on Scott's Lady of the Lake he declares the stand- 
 ard of literary excellence to reside in " the taste of 
 a few . . . persons, eminently qualified, by natural 
 sensibility and long experience and reflection, to 
 perceive all beauties that really exist, as well as to 
 settle the relative value and importance of all the 
 different sorts of beauty." Jeffrey regards himself 
 as one of the choicest spirits of this chosen aris- 
 tocracy, and it is as the exponent of the best cur- 
 rent opinion that he speaks on all questions of 
 taste. 
 
 It follows that, when Jeffrey is dealing with 
 purely literary questions, he is less argumentative 
 than at other times, and that what has been said of 
 his viewing every subject in the light of general 
 principles is least applicable to his dogmatic essays 
 on literature. When, for example, he attacks 
 Wilhelm Meister or the Excursion, he does so sim- 
 ply and frankly in terms of his temperament. 
 Wordsworth's mysticism baffles him, and he con- 
 
16 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 demns it; Goethe's sordid realism and sentiment 
 offend liis man-of-the-world taste and he anathe- 
 matizes them. His custom in such hostile criti- 
 cisms is to let his own taste masquerade as that of 
 "the judicious observer" or "the modern public." 
 His faith in his own personal equation is unques- 
 tioning and devout. Whatever fails to fall in with 
 his bias is a fair mark for his bitterest invective. 
 Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, for example, is "sheer 
 nonsense," "ludicrously unnatural," full of "pure 
 childishness or mere folly," "vulgar and obscure," 
 full of "absurdities and affectations." These 
 terms are, for the most part, mere circumlocutions 
 for Jeffrey's dislike, mere roundabout ways of say- 
 ing that the book is not to his taste. As for com- 
 ing to an understanding with author or reader about 
 the ends of prose fiction or the best methods of 
 reaching those ends, Jeffrey never thinks of such 
 an attempt. He simply takes up various passages 
 and declares he does not comprehend them, or does 
 not fancy the subjects they treat of, or does not 
 like the author's ideas or methods. He gives no 
 reasons for his likes or dislikes, but is content 
 to express them emphatically and picturesquely. 
 This is, of course, dogmatism pure and simple, and 
 a dogmatism, too, more irritating than the dog- 
 matism that argues, for it seems more arbitrary 
 and more challenging. Of this tone and method, 
 Coleridge complains in the twenty-first chapter of 
 his BiograpJiia Literaria, when, in commenting on 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 17 
 
 current critical literature, he protests against " the 
 substitution of assertion for argument " and against 
 "the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant 
 verdicts." 
 
 But, irritating as is this pragmatic, unreasoning 
 dogmatism, it is nevertheless plainly a step for- 
 ward from the view that makes the critic absolute 
 lawgiver in art. As the Whig position in politics 
 is midway between absolute monarchy and de- 
 mocracy, so what we may term the Whig com- 
 promise in criticism stands midway between the 
 tyranny of earlier critics and our modern freedom. 
 The mere recognition of the fact that the critic 
 speaks with authority only as representing a coterie^ 
 only as interpreting public opinion, is plainly a 
 change for the better. The critic no longer re- 
 gards himself as by divine right lord alike of pub- 
 lic and authors ; he no longer measures literary 
 success solely by changeless, abstract formulas of 
 excellence; he admits more or less explicitly that 
 the taste of living readers, not rules drawn from 
 the works of dead writers, must decide what in 
 literature is good or bad. He still, to be sure, 
 limits arbitrarily the circle whose taste he regards 
 as a valid test; but it is plain that a new principle 
 has implicitly been accepted, and that the way is 
 opened for the development and recognition of all 
 kinds of beauty and power the public may require. 
 
 Jeffrey himself, however, seems never to have 
 suspected the conclusions that might legitimately 
 
18 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 be drawn from the ideas that he was helping to 
 make current. He seems to have had no qualm of 
 doubt touching his right to dogmatize on the merits 
 and defects of art as violently as a critic of the 
 older school. In theory, he held that all artistic 
 excellence is relative; but in practice, he never let 
 this doctrine mitigate the severity of his judg- 
 ments. He asserts in his review of Alison on 
 Taste that "what a man feels distinctly to be 
 beautiful, is beautiful to him"; and that so far as 
 the individual is concerned all pleasure in art 
 is equally real and justifiable. Yet this doctrine 
 seems never to have paralyzed in the least his faith 
 in the superior worth of his owii kind of pleasure ; 
 and he upbraids Wordsworth and Coleridge just as 
 indignantly for not ministering to that pleasure, 
 as if he had some abstract standard of poetic 
 excellence, of which he could prove they fell 
 short. 
 
 When we try to define Jeffrey's taste and to de- 
 termine just what he liked and disliked in litera- 
 ture, we find an odd combination of sympathies 
 and antipathies. Mr. Leslie Stephen has spoken 
 of him as in politics an eighteenth-century sur- 
 vival;^ but this formula, apt as it is for his poli- 
 tics, scarcely applies to his taste in literature. 
 The typical eighteenth-century man of letters was 
 a pseudo-classicist; and beyond the pseudo-classi- 
 cal point of view Jeffrey had passed, just as cer- 
 
 1 Hours in a Library, III, 176. 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 19 
 
 tainly as he had never reached the Komantic point 
 of view. Of Pope, for example, he says: he is 
 " much the best we think of the classical Conti- 
 nental school; but he is not to be compared with 
 the masters — nor with the pupils — of that Old 
 English one from which there had been so lamen- 
 table an apostasy." Addison he condemns for his 
 "extreme caution, timidity, and flatness," and he 
 declares that "the narrowness of his range in 
 poetical sentiment and diction, and the utter want 
 either of passion or of brilliancy, render it diffi- 
 cult to believe that he was born under the same 
 sun with Shakespeare." These opinions are proof 
 patent of Jeffrey^s contempt for pseudo-classicism. 
 Then, too, Jeffrey is, as he himself boasts, almost 
 superstitious in his reverence for Shakespeare. 
 More significant still is his admiration for other 
 Elizabethan dramatists, like Beaumont, Fletcher, 
 Eord, and Webster. " Of the old English drama- 
 tists, " he assures us in his essay on Ford, " it may 
 be said, in general, that they are more poetical, 
 and more original in their diction, than the drama- 
 tists of any other age or country. Their scenes 
 abound more in varied images, and gratuitous ex- 
 cursions of fancy. Their illustrations and figures 
 of speech are more borrowed from rural life, and 
 from the simple occupations or universal feelings 
 of mankind. They are not confined to a certain 
 range of dignified expressions, nor restricted to a 
 particular assortment of imagery, beyond which it 
 
20 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 is not lawful to look for embellishments." Finally, 
 he even commends Coleridge's great favourite, 
 Jeremy Taylor, as enthusiastically as Coleridge 
 himself could do: "There is in any one of the 
 prose folios of Jeremy Taylor," he asserts, "more 
 fine fancy and original imagery — more brilliant 
 conceptions and glowing expressions — more new 
 figures, and new applications of old figures — 
 more, in short, of the body and the soul of poetry, 
 than in all the odes and the epics that have since 
 been produced in Europe." 
 
 Such judgments as these mark Jeffrey as, at any 
 rate, not an eighteenth-century survival; they must 
 be duly borne in mind when a formula is being 
 sought for his literary taste. Fully as significant, 
 though in a different way, is the series of essays 
 on the poet Crabbe. If the praise of the Eliza- 
 bethans seems to argue an almost Eomantic bias in 
 Jeffrey and to suggest that after all his tastes are 
 very like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the 
 Crabbe essays at once reveal his antipathy to the 
 men of the new age and show how far he is from 
 even being willing to allow its prophets to prophesy 
 in peace and obscurity. 
 
 Throughout his praise of Crabbe, Jeffrey is by 
 implication condemning Wordsworth; nor does he 
 confine himself to this roundabout method of at- 
 tacking Romanticism. In the very first essay on 
 Crabbe (1807), he turns aside from his subject to 
 ridicule by name, "the Wordsworths, and the 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 21 
 
 Southeys, and Coleridges, and all that ambitious 
 fraternity," and contrasts at great length Crabbe's 
 sanity with Wordsworth's mysticism. "Mr. 
 Crabbe exhibits the common people of England 
 pretty much as they are " ; whereas " Mr. Words- 
 worth and his associates . . . introduce us to 
 beings whose existence was not previously sus- 
 pected by the acutest observers of nature ; and ex- 
 cite an interest for them — where they do excite 
 any interest — more by an eloquent and refined 
 .analysis of their own capricious feelings, than by 
 any obvious or intelligible ground of sympathy in 
 their situation." With Crabbe, Jeffrey feels he 
 is on solid ground, dealing with a man who sees 
 life clearly and sensibly, as he himself sees it; and 
 in his enthusiastic praise of the minute fidelity of 
 Crabbe, of his uncompromising truth and realism, 
 and of his freedom from all meretricious effects, 
 from affectation, and from absurd mysticism, we 
 have at once the measure of Jeffrey's poetic sensi- 
 bility and the sure evidence of his inability to 
 sympathize genuinely with "the Lakers." 
 
 Of course, for the classic passages expressing his 
 impatience of the new movement, we must go to 
 the essays on Wordsworth's Excursion and Wliite 
 Doe. Jeffrey's objections to the Lakers fall under ^ 
 four heads : First, the new poets are nonsensically 
 mystical; secondly, they falsify life by showing it 
 through a distorting medium of personal emotion, 
 i.e. they are misleadingly subjective ; thirdly, they 
 
22 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 are guilty of grotesque bad taste in their demo- 
 cratic realism; fourthly, they are pedantically 
 earnest and serious in their treatment of art, and 
 inexcusably pretentious in their proclamation of a 
 new gospel of life. Mysticism, intense individu- 
 ality of feeling, naturalism, and "high serious- 
 ness," — these were the qualities that in the new 
 art particularly exasperated Jeffrey; and inasmuch 
 as these were the very qualities to which, in the 
 eyes of its devotees, the new art owed its special 
 potency, the division between Jeffrey and the Eo- 
 manticists was sufficiently deep and irreconcilable. 
 Wordsworth's transcendentalism, his intense 
 spiritual consciousness, his inveterate fashion of 
 apprehending all nature as instinct with spiritual 
 force and of converting "this whole Of suns and 
 worlds and men " and " all that it inherits " into a 
 series of splendid imaginative symbols of moral and 
 spiritual truth, — these qualities of Wordsworth's 
 genius were for his admirers among his most char- 
 acteristic sources of power, and tended to place him 
 as an imaginative interpreter of life far above those 
 Elizabethan writers whom Jeffrey, too, in opposition 
 to the eighteenth century, pretended to reverence. 
 But these were just the qualities in Wordsworth's 
 genius that seemed to Jeffrey most reprehensible. 
 After quoting a typical passage where Words- 
 worth's transcendentalism finds free utterance, 
 Jeffrey exclaims: "This is a fair sample of that 
 rapturous mysticism which eludes all comprehen- 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 23 
 
 sion, and fills the despairing reader with painful 
 giddiness and terror." Jeffrey's woe is by no 
 means feigned. We cannot doubt that his whole 
 mental life was perturbed by such of Wordsworth's 
 poems as the great Ode, and that it was an act of 
 self-preservation on his part to burst into indig- 
 nant ridicule and violent protest. To find a man 
 of Wordsworth's age and literary experience de- 
 liberately penning such bewildering stanzas and 
 expressing such unintelligible emotions, shook for 
 the moment Jeffrey's faith in his own little, well- 
 ordered universe, and then, as he recovered from 
 his earthquake, escaped from its vapours, and felt 
 secure once more in the clear, every-day light of 
 common sense, led him into fierce invective against 
 the cause of his momentary panic. 
 
 Hardly less impatient is Jeffrey of Words- 
 worth's subjectivity than of his mysticism. Why 
 cannot Wordsworth feel about life as other people 
 feel about it, as any well-bred, cultivated man of 
 the world feels about it? When such a man sees 
 a poor old peasant gathering leeches in a pool, he 
 pulls out his purse, gives him a shilling, and walks 
 on, speculating about the state of the poor law; 
 Wordsworth, on the contrary, bursts into a strange 
 fit of raving about Chatterton and Burns, and 
 "mighty poets in their misery dead," and then in 
 some mysterious fashion converts the peasant's 
 stolidity into a defence against these gloomy 
 thoughts. This way of treating the peasant seems 
 
24 FKANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 to Jeffrey utterly unjustifiablej both because of its 
 grotesque mysticism, and because it thrusts a per- 
 sonal mo^i/ discourteously into the face of the pub- 
 lic and falsifies ludicrously the peasant's character 
 and life. Wordsworth has no right, Jeffrey in- 
 sists, to treat the peasant merely as the symbol of 
 his own peculiar mood. Here, as in his protest 
 against Wordsworth's mysticism, Jeffrey pleads 
 for common sense and the commonplace ; he is the 
 type of what Lamb calls "the Caledonian intel- 
 lect," which rejects scornfully ideas that cannot 
 be adequately expressed in good plain terms, and 
 grasped " by twelve men on a jury. " 
 
 Crabbe's superiority to the Lakers lies for Jef- 
 frey chiefly in the fact that he has no idiosyn- 
 crasies, though he has many mannerisms; he 
 expresses no new theories and no peculiar emo- 
 tions in his portrayal of common life. Hence his 
 choice of vulgar subjects is endurable — even 
 highly commendable. His peasants are the well- 
 known peasants of every-day England, with whose 
 hard lot it behoves an enlightened Whig to sym- 
 pathize — from a distance. But a realism that, 
 like Wordsworth's, professes to find in these poor 
 peasants the deepest spiritual insight and the 
 purest springs of moral life, is simply for Jef- 
 frey grotesque in its maladroitness and confusion 
 of values. Sydney Smith used to say, "If I am 
 doomed to be a slave at all, I would rather be the 
 slave of a king than a cobbler." And this same 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 25 
 
 prejudice against any topsy-turvy reassignment of 
 values was largely responsible for Jeffrey's dislike 
 of Wordsworth's peasants and of liis treatment of 
 common life. If peasants keep their places, as 
 Crabbe's peasants do, they may perfectly well be 
 brought into the precints of poetry; but to exalt 
 them into types of moral virtue and into heavenly 
 messengers of divine truth, is to " make tyrants of 
 cobblers." Jacobinism in art, as in politics, is to 
 Jeffrey detestable. 
 
 In fact, all the pretensions of the new school 
 to illustrate by its art a new gospel of life were 
 intensely disagreeable to Jeffrey. As long as 
 Ebmanticism seemed chiefly decorative, as in Scott 
 or Keats, Jeffrey could tolerate it or even delight 
 in it. But the moment it began, whether in Byron 
 or Wordsworth, to take itself seriously, and to 
 struggle to express new moral and spiritual ideals, 
 Jeffrey protested. Just here lies the key to what 
 some critics have found a rather perplexing prob- 
 lem, — the reasons for the varying degrees of Jef- 
 frey's sympathy with the poets of his day. Let the 
 poet remain a mere master of the revels, or a mere 
 magician calling up by his incantations in verse a 
 gorgeous phantasmagoria of sights and sounds for 
 the delectation of idle readers, and Jeffrey will 
 consent to admire him and will commend his fer- 
 tility of invention, his wealth of imagination, his 
 "rich lights of fancy," and "his flowers of poetry." 
 Keats's luxuriant pictures of Greek life in Endym- 
 
26 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 ion, Jeffrey finds irresistible in the "intoxication 
 of their sweetness" and in "the enchantments 
 which they so lavishly present." Moore and Camp- 
 bell, he regards as the most admirable of the Ro- 
 manticists, and their works as the very best of the 
 somewhat extravagant modern school. Writing in 
 1829, he arranges recent poets in the following 
 order, according to the probable duration of their 
 fame': "The tuneful quartos of Southey are 
 already little better than lumber : — and the rich 
 melodies of Keats and Shelley, — and the fantas- 
 tical emphasis of Wordsworth, — and the plebeian 
 pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field 
 of our view. The novels of Scott have put out his 
 poetry. Even the splendid strains of Moore are 
 fading into distance and dimness . . . and the 
 blazing star of Byron himself is receding from its 
 place of pride. . . . The two who have the long- 
 est withstood this rapid withering of the laurel 
 . . . are Rogers and Campbell; neither of them, 
 it may be remarked, voluminous writers, and both 
 distinguished rather for the fine taste and consum- 
 mate elegance of their writings, than for that fiery 
 passion, and disdainful vehemence, which seemed 
 for a time to be so much more in favour with the 
 public." Now a glance at Jeffrey's list of poets 
 makes it clear that those for whom he prophesies 
 lasting fame are either pseudo-classicists or decora-'^ 
 tive Romanticists, and that those whose day he de- 
 clares to be over are for the most part poets whose 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 27 
 
 Romanticism was a vital principle. Rogers is, of 
 course, a genuine representative of the pseudo- 
 classical tradition, with all its devotion to form, 
 its self-restraint, its poverty of imagination, and 
 its distrust of passion. Moore, whom Jeffrey places 
 late in his list of fading luminaries, and Campbell, 
 whom he finds most nearly unchanging in lustre, 
 are both in a way Romanticists ; but they are alike 
 in seeking chiefly for decorative effects and in not 
 taking their art too seriously. So long, then, as 
 the fire and the heat of Romanticism spent them- 
 selves merely in giving imaginative splendour to 
 style, Jeffrey could tolerate the movement, and 
 could even regard it with favour, as a return to 
 that power and fervour and wild beauty that he had 
 taught himself to admire in Elizabethan poetry. 
 But the moment the new energy was suffered to 
 penetrate life itself and to convert the conventional 
 world of dead fact, through the vitalizing power of 
 passion, into a genuinely new poetic material, then 
 Jeffrey stood aghast at what seemed to him a re^, 
 turn to chaos. Byron with his fiery bursts of self- 
 ish passion, Wordsworth with his steadily glowing 
 consciousness of the infinite, and Shelley with his 
 "white heat of transcendentalism," were all alike 
 for Jeffrey portentously dangerous forces and un- 
 healthy phenomena. 
 
 For the most part, in his attacks upon Romantic 
 poetry, Jeffrey indulges in little philosophizing; 
 he is content with wit, satire, epigram, and clever 
 
28 FRANCIS JEFFREY * 
 
 self-assertion. And yet, in the last analysis, there 
 is a vital connection between his rejection of Eo- 
 manticism and his abstract theorizings on beauty, 
 — small pains as he has taken to bring out this 
 obscure relationship. A complete account of his 
 temperament and taste ought to show how the same 
 instincts that led to his hostility to Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge expressed themselves formally, and 
 tried to justify themselves, through the theory of 
 Beauty which he worked out with Alison's help. 
 
 According to Jeffrey's account of the matter, a 
 beautiful object owes its beauty to its power to call 
 up in the observer latent past experiences of pleas- 
 ure and pain. These little fragments of past joy 
 and sorrow gather closely round the object and blend 
 in a kind of blurred halo of delight which we call 
 beauty. Suppose that an observer looks out upon 
 a luxuriant country landscape; the winding road 
 calls back to him (though without his conscious 
 recognition of the fact) leisurely afternoon drives ; 
 the green meadows suggest (again obscurely) past 
 sympathy with shepherds and grazing flocks and 
 rustic prosperity; the cottages surreptitiously 
 wake memories of home joys and content about 
 the hearthstone. And so the imagination garners 
 out of the summer landscape a myriad evanescent 
 associations with past life, which, too slight and 
 swift to be detected separately by thought, never- 
 theless unite like the harmonics of a musical note 
 to produce the peculiar character that we call 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 29 
 
 beauty. This being the nature of beauty, it fol- 
 lows that every individual's past will limit and 
 create for him his beauty in the present; his fore- 
 gone pleasures and pains will alone make possible 
 those echoes of intense feeling which in the present 
 combine into the single chord of beauty. Accord- 
 ing to every man's past, then, is his present sense 
 of beauty ; and as no two men have the same past, 
 no two men can have the same perceptions of 
 beauty in the present. 
 
 Jeffrey accepts unhesitatingly the conclusions 
 involved in this doctrine, and asserts that beauty 
 is wholly relative; that whatever seems to a man 
 beautiful is for him beautiful; and that no sensible 
 debate is possible over the legitimacy of the beauty 
 that a man's special temperament manufactures. 
 So long as a man confines himself to enjoying 
 beauty, he remains beyond criticism in the magic 
 region of his own private experience. But the 
 moment he offers himself as a creator or interpreter 
 of beauty for others, he must take into account the 
 scope and nature of common experience and try to 
 appeal imaginatively to associations which are 
 likely to be in the hearts of all. This is precisely, 
 Jeffrey once or twice implies, what Eomanticists 
 like Wordsworth and Coleridge failed to do. They 
 tried to impose on the public their own curiously 
 Whimsical associations of pleasure and pain; they 
 were incredibly presumptuous in their belief that 
 their own quaint, country-side blisses and sorrows 
 
30 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 and their own droll exaltations and despairs over 
 peddlers and beggars and leech-gatherers must 
 have universal value for mankind. Here for Jef- 
 frey lay the wilful and colossal egotism of Eoman- 
 tic art; and once more we find him posing as the 
 foe of idiosyncrasy and arbitrary whim, and as 
 the representative of a cultivated aristocracy of 
 intelligence and social experience and taste, who, 
 after all, have something like a common fund of 
 feelings and associations on which art can draw. 
 
 As for the actual worth of Jeffrey's theory of 
 beauty, its fault lies in trying to stretch into a 
 universal formula what is really only a partial ex- 
 planation of the facts. The beauty that Jeffrey 
 lays stress on — the kind of beauty that comes from 
 the suggestiveness of objects — is duly recognized 
 nowadays under the name of beauty of expression. 
 The possible origin of beauty through association 
 of ideas had not been thoroughly considered 
 before the days of Jeffrey and Alison, and their 
 work was therefore new and historically important. 
 But beside beauty that comes from this source, — 
 beside beauty of expression, — there are beauty of 
 form and beauty of material; neither of these is 
 recognized by Jeffrey as an independent variety, 
 and examples of each he tries, with really heroic 
 ingenuity, to reduce to beauty of expression. The 
 beauty of a Greek temple is explained as depending 
 solely on a swift, unconscious recognition of the 
 stability, costliness, splendour, and antiquity of 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 31 
 
 the structure. The beauty of special colours or of 
 chords of music is derived, not at all from the in- 
 trinsic quality of the sensations, — the hue or the 
 musical sound, — but wholly from subtle associa- 
 tions with past pleasure and pain. Thus Jeffrey's 
 theory becomes distorted and misleading in spite 
 of the truthfulness of much of his observation 
 and the real subtlety and acuteness of many of 
 his interpretations. The quintessential in art, the 
 pleasure that art gives through pure form and the 
 inexplicable ministry of sensation, Jeffrey is least 
 sensitive to, and is continually looking askance at 
 and trying to forget or to account for as merely 
 disguised human sympathy. 
 
 Besides the light it throws on Jeffrey's quarrel 
 with Eomanticism, his theory of beauty is of 
 special significance because it emphasizes the genu- 
 ineness and intensity of his ethical interest. All 
 artistic pleasure is for Jeffrey merely human sym- 
 pathy in masquerade — past love for one's fel- 
 lows, delicately revived in the music of art. The 
 only man, then, who can have a wide range of 
 artistic pleasure is he who in the past has shared 
 generously in the lives of his comrades. Holding 
 this theory of art, Jeffrey in his literary criticism 
 naturally laid great stress on the ethical qualities 
 of books and authors. Accordingly, in the preface 
 to his Collected Essays, Jeffrey claims special credit 
 for his frequent use of the ethical point of view. 
 " If I might be permitted farther, to state, in what 
 
32 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 particular department, and generally, on account 
 of what, I should most wish to claim a . share of 
 those merits, I should certainly say, that it was by 
 having constantly endeavoured to combine Ethical 
 precepts with Literary Criticism, and earnestly 
 sought to impress my readers with a sense, both 
 of the close connection between sound intellectual 
 attainments and the higher elements of duty and 
 enjoyment; and of the just and ultimate subor- 
 dination of the former to the latter. The praise, 
 in short, to which I aspire, and to merit which I 
 am conscious that my efforts were most constantly 
 directed, is, that I have, more uniformly and 
 earnestly than any preceding critic, made the Moral 
 tendencies of the works under consideration a lead- 
 ing subject of discussion." 
 
 This "proud claim," as Jeffrey calls it, seems 
 amply justified when we compare Jeffrey's essays 
 either with the critical essays in the earlier Eeviews, 
 or with the more formal and elaborate critical es- 
 says of the eighteenth century. Even Dr. Johnson 
 with all his didacticism had little notion of extract- 
 ing from a piece of literature the subtle spirit of 
 good or of evil by which it draws men this way or 
 that way in conduct. An obvious infringement of 
 good morals in speech or in plot he was sure to 
 condemn, and a formal inculcation of moral truth 
 he was sure to recognize and approve. But neither 
 in Johnson, nor anywhere else before Jeffrey, do 
 we find a critic constantly attempting to detect 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 33 
 
 and define the moral atmosphere that pervades 
 the whole work of an author, and to determine the 
 relation between this moral atmosphere and the 
 author's personality as man and as artist. To 
 have perceived the value of this ethical criticism, 
 to have practised it skilfully, and to have fostered 
 a taste for it, these are true claims to distinction ; 
 and Jeffrey's services in these directions have been 
 too often forgotten. The greater breadth of view 
 of later critics and their surer appreciation of ethi- 
 cal values should not be allowed to deprive Jeffrey 
 of his honour as a pioneer in ethical criticism. 
 
 For still another innovation in critical methods, 
 Jeffrey was at least partly responsible. He was 
 among the earliest English critics to see the im- 
 portance for the study of literature of the histori- 
 cal point of view and to take into close account, in 
 the study of an author or of a whole literature, the 
 social environment. Not that Jeffrey was one of 
 the original minds who first conceived of the his- 
 torical method of study in its application to art, 
 and worked out for themselves conceptions of lit- 
 erature as a growth and development and as de- 
 pendent upon the spirit of the age and upon social 
 conditions. Jeffrey, it can hardly be doubted, 
 was merely a clever borrower. Long before his 
 day, the principles underlying the historical con- 
 ception of literature had been worked out in Ger- 
 many, and had been applied by Herder and Goethe, 
 and their disciples, for the solution of problems 
 
34 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 in criticism. Of this German theorizing Jeffrey 
 can hardly have had direct knowledge. But to 
 Madame de Stael, who was an adept in German 
 speculation, Jeffrey probably owed much, — both 
 to her teaching and to her example. Her De la 
 Utterature consideree dans ses rapports avec les insti- 
 tutions sodales had appeared in France in 1800, and 
 her De VAllemagne, a study of German life and 
 literature conceived throughout in strict harmony 
 with the principles of the historical method, was 
 published in 1810. Now it is in 1811 that an un- 
 mistakable broadening of method may be discerned 
 in Jeffrey^s literary criticism. His essay on Ford's 
 Dramatic Works (August, 1811) is remarkable for 
 its rapid survey of the whole development of 
 English literature, its brilliant generalizations as 
 regards the characteristics of such definite periods 
 as that of the Eestoration, and its fairly successful 
 attempts to account for these characteristics as the 
 outcome in each case of the social conditions of the 
 time. Before 1811, or at any rate before 1810, 
 Jeffrey never gets, in his study of an author, beyond 
 the biographical point of view. He may consider 
 psychological questions, — the characteristics of 
 an author's mind that have impressed themselves 
 on his book, or the nature of the public taste to 
 which literature of a certain kind caters. But 
 the sociological origin of a literary school or a 
 writer has not before that time troubled Jeffrey. 
 After the Ford essay the historical and the socio- 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 35 
 
 logical points of view are used rather frequently, 
 though it must be admitted with uncertain success 
 and not with entire loyalty. 
 
 Perhaps Jeffrey's most interesting actual discus- 
 sion of the historical method occurs in the intro- 
 duction to his essay on Wilhelm MeisteVy written in 
 1825. In this introduction he tries to classify the 
 influences that mould literature and guide its de- 
 velopment, and his formulas are curiously sugges- 
 tive of the much later and rather famous theorizing 
 of the French critic, Taine. Jeffrey does not rec- 
 ognize race — the first of Taine's forces; "human 
 nature," Jeffrey asserts, "is everywhere funda- 
 mentally the same." But for Taine's two other 
 sets of forces which he groups under the names 
 moment and milieu, close equivalents may be found 
 in Jeffrey's formulas. "The circumstances," he 
 asserts, "which have distinguished [literature] 
 into so many local varieties . . . may be divided 
 into two great classes, — the one embracing all 
 that relates to the newness or antiquity of the 
 society to which they belong, or, in other words, to 
 the stage which any particular nation has attained 
 in that progress from rudeness to refinement, in 
 which all are engaged; the other comprehending 
 what may be termed the accidental causes by which 
 the character and condition of communities may be 
 affected; such as their government, their relative 
 position as to power and civilization to neighbour- 
 ing countries, their prevailing occupations, deter- 
 
36 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 mined in some degree by the capabilities of their 
 soil and climate." Of these principles, Jeffrey goes 
 on through a half-dozen paragraphs to make more 
 special application; he describes certain kinds of 
 literature, or certain characteristics of literature, 
 that are apt to correspond to certain stages of civi- 
 lization; he considers hastily some of the qualities 
 impressed upon literature by different sorts of 
 political institutions. All this general discussion, 
 though decidedly in the air, is true and suggestive; 
 it shows that by 1825 Jeffrey had a good deal of 
 insight into the general theory of the dependence 
 of literature on society. It must not be forgotten, 
 however, in estimating Jeffrey's originality, that 
 even in England Coleridge and Hazlitt had, for a 
 good many years before the date of this Wilhelm 
 Meister essay, been applying the historical method 
 with insight and power for the explanation of 
 literary problems. 
 
 In point of fact, Jeffrey is usually much more 
 impressive when he talks abstractly about the his- 
 torical method than when he tries to apply it 
 specifically. He is specially apt to be unhistorical 
 when he treats of the beginnings either of litera- 
 ture or of institutions. He lacked the knowledge 
 of facts which alone could render possible a fruit- 
 ful historical conception. His construction of 
 early periods is always a priori in terms of a cheap 
 psychology. His account, in the essay on LecMe, 
 of the origin of government, should be compared 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 37 
 
 with his description of the earliest attempts at 
 poetic composition. In both cases he has a great 
 deal to say about what "it was natural" for the 
 earliest experimenters in each kind of work to aim 
 at and to effect, and substantially nothing to say 
 of the actual facts as determined by investigation. 
 Moreover, these earliest experimenters are for 
 Jeffrey marvellously like eighteenth-century con- 
 noisseurs, confronting consciously, and trying to 
 solve reflectively, intricate problems in art or in 
 politics. This view is, of course, unhistorical, 
 and illustrates the difficulty Jeffrey had in escap- 
 ing from old ways of thought. 
 
 Finally, Jeffrey never applies the historical 
 method successfully to the study of any contem- 
 porary piece of literature. In the essay on Wil- 
 helm Meister, for example, the general account of 
 the principles that underlie historical criticism is 
 fluent and clear; but the change is abrupt and 
 disastrous when Jeffrey turns to the particular 
 discussion of Goethe's novels. Far from being 
 historical or scientific, or trying to trace out in 
 Goethe's work the significant forces that were 
 shaping contemporary German life, Jeffrey merely 
 gives himself over to railing at whatever jars on 
 his personal taste. In short, half the essay is 
 scientific and half purely dogmatic, and the two 
 halves have scarcely any logical connection. Sad 
 to say, Jeffrey nearly always bungled or faltered 
 like this when trying to use the historical method, 
 
38 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 particularly when trying to interpret the literature 
 of his own time. Other instances of his short- 
 sightedness or clumsiness are to be found in his 
 treatment of Byron and Wordsworth. He missed 
 entirely the meaning of Byron's savage revolt 
 against the conventionalism of eighteenth- century 
 moral ideals, and he was equally unable to under- 
 stand Wordsworth's high conservatism. Perhaps 
 the most damaging accusation that can be brought 
 against Jeffrey, as a critic, is inability to read and 
 interpret the age in which he lived. 
 
 Jeffrey's imperfect grasp of the historical 
 method is shown in one other way: he never 
 realized that there was any conflict between his 
 work as a dogmatic critic and his work as a scien- 
 tific student of literature, or had a premonition of 
 the blighting effect that the spread of historical 
 conceptions of literature was ultimately to have on 
 the prestige of the dogmatic critic. More and 
 more, since Jeffrey's day, criticism has concerned 
 itself with the scientific explanation and the inter- 
 pretation of literature ; less and less has it posed 
 as the ultimate science of right thinking and right 
 doing in literary art. This change has been 
 brought about partly by the Eomantic movement 
 with its fostering of individualism in art, and partly 
 through the development of historical conceptions 
 in all departments of thought. Both these forces 
 were in full play during Jeffrey's life, and of neither 
 did he at all measure the scope or significance. 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 39 
 
 Eegarded, then, from a modern point of view, 
 Jeffrey, as a literary critic, takes shape somewhat 
 as follows: As an appreciator he is sadly to 
 seek, owing largely to over-intellectualism and 
 disputatiousness. As a dogmatic critic he is even 
 yet thoroughly readable because of his dashing 
 style, his deft and ready handling, his shrewd 
 common sense, and his sincerity; he expressed 
 brilliantly the tastes and antipathies of a large 
 GiTqj.e of cultivated people of considerable social 
 distinction, who, while not peculiarly artistic or 
 literary, read widely and intelligently, and felt 
 keenly and delicately, though within a somewhat 
 limited range. Even in his dogmatic criticism, ' ^ 
 however, his faults are obvious ; his dogmatism is 
 peremptory; his tone, often bitter; and his preju- 
 dices are as scarlet. On the other hand, for giving 
 a strong ethical trend to literary criticism, he 
 deserves all honour. His social sympathies were 
 intense and alert; they fixed the character of his 
 whole theory of beauty, and continually expressed 
 themselves in his comments upon books and au- 
 thors. Through his persistently ethical interpre- 
 tations of literature, he really enlarged the borders 
 of literary criticism. As for his historical criti- 
 cism, it cannot be said to have much permanent 
 value. Into the general theory on which the use 
 of the historical method rests, Jeffrey shows con- 
 siderable insight ; but he was by nature and by 
 training a dogmatist, not a scientific student of 
 
40 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 fact. Though his theorizings led him to believe 
 speculatively in the relativity of beauty, and 
 though he recognized abstractly that literature 
 must vary from age to age as the time-spirit varies, 
 yet he rarely let these convictions affect his tone 
 or method in the treatment of literature; he is as 
 round and intolerant in his blame of Addison or 
 Pope as if he had never been within seeing dis- 
 tance of the historical point of view. In short, 
 the disinterestedness of science was foreign^ to 
 j Jeffrey's nature; he was primarily and distinc- 
 tively, not an investigator or interpreter, but a 
 censor bent on praise or blame. 
 
 These very characteristics of his criticism, how- 
 ever, were of a kind to bring Jeffrey, in 1803, 
 great glory. With some disguise until 1809, when 
 the Tory Quarterly Review was founded, undis- 
 guisedly thereafter, Jeffrey was the great Whig 
 champion in all that pertained to letters. From a 
 partisan critic, audacious and brilliant dogmatism 
 was just what was sure to win the widest hearing. 
 Moreover, in accounting for Jeffrey's enormous 
 popularity, the trashiness and insipidity of earlier 
 review-writing must be kept in mind. Eeviewing 
 had been the pet occupation of Grub street; penny- 
 a-liners had impressed upon criticism all their own 
 unloveliness and feebleness ; review articles seemed 
 to issue from under-fed, torpid brains and anaemic 
 bodies. Jeffrey's reviewing was the very incarna- 
 tion of health, vigour, and prosperity. 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 41 
 
 Finally, Jeffrey profited in name and fame more 
 than it is easy now to compute from the happy op- 
 portuneness of a new literary form, a literary form 
 that was made possible through the establishment 
 of the Edinburgh Review. This Review differed 
 in many of its business arrangements and in its 
 mode of publication from preceding Reviews; it 
 was established in accordance with a new concep- 
 tion of the scope of review-writing, and of the 
 relation of reviewers to the public. As the result 
 of this new conception and these new relations, 
 literary criticism, which had hitherto been merely 
 more or less ingenious talk about technical matters, 
 was transformed into the earnest and vigorous dis- 
 cussion of literature as the expression of all that 
 was significant and absorbing in the life of the 
 time. And as still further results of the new 
 policy, reviewing and reviewers came into hitherto 
 unknown honour; the Edinburgh Review was adored 
 or was hated and feared throughout the length and 
 breadth of the land, and Jeffrey was universally 
 regarded as demonic in his versatility, brilliancy, 
 penetration, and vigour. Much of Jeffrey's great 
 prestige as a critic must be set down as due to his 
 having long stood as the visible symbol of the suc- 
 cess of the new style of reviewing. 
 
 IV 
 
 The story of the foundation of the Edinburgh 
 Review has been told so often as hardly to bear 
 
42 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 repeating. Enough of the facts, however, must be 
 gone over again to make clear the change that the 
 new periodical wrought in reviewing and in the 
 relations between critics and the public. 
 
 The classical account of the origin of the Review 
 is Sydney Smith's and is to be found in the Preface 
 to his collected Worlis; it has been reproduced in 
 Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey ^ and in the Life 
 and Times of Lord Brougham.^ With his usual 
 crabbedness Brougham disputes a few minor de- 
 tails, but he leaves the substantial accuracy of 
 " Sydney's " story unimpeached. 
 
 The idea of the new Review was Sydney Smith's. 
 The most important conspirators were Sydney, 
 Jeffrey, Erancis Horner, and Brougham. The 
 plot was discussed and matured in Jeffrey's house 
 in Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh. Sydney Smith's 
 famous proposal of a motto, Tenui musam medi- 
 tamur avena, "We cultivate literature on a little 
 oatmeal," was rejected; the "sage Horner's" sug- 
 gestion was adopted, — a line from Publius Syrus, 
 Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur, which fore- 
 told the righteous severity of tone that was to char- 
 acterize the Revieiv, The first number was to have 
 appeared in June, 1802, but, owing to dilatory con- 
 tributors and Jeffrey's faintheartedness, was seri- 
 
 1 Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey (ed. Philadelphia, 1852), 
 I, 101 ff. 
 
 2 The Life and Times of Lord Brougham (ed. New York, 
 1871), I, 176 ff. 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 43 
 
 ously delayed; it finally appeared in October, 1802, 
 under the supervision of Sydney Smith. After 
 the publication of the first number Jeffrey was 
 formally appointed editor, and, with some hesita- 
 tion, accepted the post. 
 
 The success of the Review was from the start 
 beyond all expectation. "The effect," says Lord 
 Cockburn, '' was electrical. And instead of expir- 
 ing, as many wished, in their first effort, the force 
 of the shock was increased on each subsequent dis- 
 charge. It is impossible for those who did not 
 live at the time, and in the heart of the scene, to 
 feel, or almost to understand the impression made 
 by the new luminary, or the anxieties with which 
 its motions were observed." Lord Brougham's 
 account of the matter is no less emphatic. " The 
 success was far beyond any of our expectations. It 
 was so great that Jeffrey was utterly dumbfounded, 
 for he had predicted for our journal the fate of the 
 original Edinburgh Bevieio, which, born in 1755, 
 died in 1756, having produced only two num- 
 bers ! The truth is, the most sanguine among us, 
 even Smith himself, could not have foreseen the 
 greatness of the first triumph, any more than we 
 could have imagined the long and successful career 
 the Review was afterwards to run, or the vast re- 
 forms and improvements in all our institutions, 
 social as well as political, it was destined to effect." 
 
 The subscription list of the Review grew within 
 six years from 1750 to 9000 j and by 1813 it num- 
 
44 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 bered more than 12,000. The importance of these 
 figures will be better understood when the reader 
 recollects that in 1816 the London Times sold only 
 8000 copies daily. Moreover, it should be remem- 
 bered that one copy of a magazine went much 
 further then than it goes now, and did service in 
 more than a single household. In 1809 Jeffrey 
 boasted that the Revieio was read by 50,000 think- 
 ing people within a month after it was printed; 
 doubtless this was a perfectly sound estimate. 
 
 Various causes have been suggested as contribut- 
 ing to the instant and phenomenal success of the 
 Revieio, — the puzzling anonymity of its articles, 
 its magisterial tone, the audacity of its attacks, 
 what Horner calls its "scurrility," the novelty of 
 its Scotch origin. All these causes doubtless had 
 their influence. More important still, however, 
 were the wit, the knowledge, and the originality of 
 the brilliant contributors that Jeffrey rallied round 
 him. Writing to his brother in July, 1803, Jef- 
 frey thus describes his fellow-workers : " I do not 
 .think you know any of my associates. There is 
 the sage Horner, however, whom you have seen, 
 and who has gone to the English bar with the reso- 
 lution of being Lord Chancellor; Brougham, a 
 great mathematician, who has just published a 
 book upon the Colonial Policy of Europe, which 
 all you Americans should read; Eev. Sydney 
 Smith and P. Elmsley, two Oxonian priests, full 
 of jokes and erudition ; my excellent little Sanscrit 
 
PRANCIS JEFFREY 45 
 
 Hamilton, who is also in the hands of Bonaparte 
 at Eontaineblean ; Thomas Thomson and John 
 Murray, two ingenious advocates; and some dozen 
 of occasional contributors, among whom the most 
 illustrious, I think, are young Watt of Birming- 
 ham and Davy of the Eoyal Institution." ^ Many 
 of these names are now forgotten, but those of 
 Sydney Smith, Brougham,. Horner, and Davy speak 
 for themselves and are guarantees of brilliancy 
 of style, originality of treatment, and vigorous 
 thought. 
 
 The editor and the contributors, then, must re- 
 ceive their full share of credit for the success of the 
 new Review ; but their ability alone can hardly ac- 
 count for a success that converted the "blue and 
 yellow " into a national institution. To explain a 
 success so permanent and far-reaching, we must 
 look beyond editor and contributors and consider 
 the relation of the Eevieiv to its social environ- 
 ment. The Edinburgh Revieio came into being in 
 answer to a popular need; it developed a new lit- 
 erary form to meet this need ; and its business ar- 
 rangements were such as enabled the cleverest and 
 most suggestive writers to adapt their work to the 
 requirements of the reading public more readily 
 and more effectively than ever before. The mean- 
 ing of these assertions will grow clearer as we con- 
 sider the difference between the Edinburgh Revieio 
 and earlier English Ee views. 
 
 1 Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey^ II, 64. 
 
46 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 Prior to 1802 there were two standard Eeviews 
 in Great Britain, — the Monthly Review and the 
 Critical Review. Minor Eeviews there had been in 
 plenty, of longer or shorter life; but these two 
 periodicals had pushed beyond their competitors 
 and were regarded as the best of their kind. The 
 Monthly Review had been founded in 1749 by Ealph 
 Griffiths, a bookseller; it was Whig in politics and 
 Low Church in religion. Its rival, the Critical 
 Review y of which Smollett was for many years 
 editor, had been founded in 1756, and was Tory 
 and High Church. These Eeviews were alike in 
 form and in ostensible aim; they were published 
 monthly, were made up of unsigned articles of 
 moderate length, and professed to give competent 
 accounts of the qualities of all new books. But 
 though thus apparently worthy predecessors of the 
 great Eeviews with which nineteenth-century 
 readers are familiar, they were really quite unlike 
 them in general policy, in scope and style, and in 
 influence. They were merely booksellers' organs, 
 under the strict supervision of booksellers, and 
 often edited by booksellers. They were used per- 
 sistently and systematically, though, of course, 
 discreetly, to further the bookseller's business 
 schemes, to quicken the sale in case of a slow 
 market, and to damage the publications of rivals. 
 They were written for the most part by drudges 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 47 
 
 and penny-a-liners, who worked under the orders 
 of the bookseller like slaves under the lash of the 
 slave-driver. These characteristics of the older 
 Keviews may be best illustrated by a brief account 
 of the methods in accordance with which Griffiths, 
 the editor of the Montlily, conducted his Review, 
 and by some choice anecdotes of his treatment of 
 subordinates. 
 
 Griffiths was originally a bookseller ; and, though 
 he was able later to retire from this business and 
 to devote himself wholly to the management of his 
 Review, he retained still the instincts of a petty 
 tradesman, and kept his eye on the state of the 
 market like a skilful seller of perishable wares. 
 Of scholarship, of genuine taste, and literary 
 ability he had next to nothing; but he had shrewd 
 common sense, sound business instincts, tact in 
 dealing with men, readiness to bully or to fawn as 
 might be needful, and unlimited patience in schem- 
 ing for the commercial success of his venture. 
 
 His dealings with Goldsmith between 1755 and 
 1765, and with William Taylor of Norwich be- 
 tween 1790 and 1800, illustrate his narrow policy 
 in the conduct of the Monthly and his tyranny 
 towards contributors. Goldsmith, he by turns bul- 
 lied and bribed according as poor Goldsmith was 
 more or less in need of money. On one occasion 
 he became Goldsmith's security with his tailor 
 for a new suit of clothes on condition that Gold- 
 smith at once write four articles for the Review; 
 
48 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 these articles were turned out to order, and ap- 
 peared in December, 1758. On Goldsmith's fail- 
 ing to pay his tailor's bill in the specified time, 
 Griffiths demanded the return of the suit and also 
 of the books ; and when he found that Goldsmith 
 had pawned the books, he wrote him abusively, 
 terming him sharper and villain, and threatening 
 him with jail. In 1759, on the appearance of Gold- 
 smith's first book, Griffiths ordered one of his 
 hacks, the notorious Kenrick, to ridicule the work, 
 and to make a personal attack on the author. 
 These orders were faithfully carried out in the next 
 number of the Monthly Review.^ 
 
 With William Taylor of jSTorwich Griffiths took 
 a very different tone. Taylor was one of the few 
 men of breeding and of parts who, before 1802, 
 condescended to write for Keviews, and he was 
 moreover for many years the great English au- 
 thority on German literature. For these reasons, 
 Griffiths always used him with the utmost tender- 
 ness, and, even when giving him orders or refusing 
 his articles, took a flattering tone of deference and 
 admiration. On one occasion Taylor demanded an 
 increase of pay; Griffiths's answer gives a very 
 instructive glimpse of the relations between the 
 bookseller-editor and his hack-writers. The 
 " gratuity " for review work, Griffiths assures Tay- 
 lor, had been settled fifty years before at two 
 guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages, " a sum 
 
 1 Forster's Goldsmith (ed. London, 1848), p. 170. 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 49 
 
 not then deemed altogether puny," and in the case 
 of most writers had since remained unchanged, 
 although there had been certain "allowed excep- 
 tions in favour of the most difficult branches of the 
 business." These exceptions, however, had tended 
 to cause much jealousy and heart-burning among 
 the contributors; for "it could not be expected 
 that those labourers in the vineyard, who cus- 
 tomarily executed the less difficult branches of the 
 culture, would ever be cordially convinced that 
 their merits and importance were inferior to any." 
 After these laborious explanations Griffiths agrees 
 to raise Taylor's compensation to three guineas per 
 sheet of sixteen printed pages, though he expressly 
 points out that by so doing he risks "exciting 
 jealousy in the corps, similar, perhaps, to what 
 happened among the vine-dressers. Matt., chap. 
 XX." " If objections arise," he shrewdly continues, 
 "we must resort for consolation to a list of can- 
 didates for the next vacancy, for in the literary 
 harvest there is never any want of reapers."^ 
 Griffiths 's slave-driving propensities show clearly 
 through the thin disguise of politic words. Plainly 
 he feels himself absolute master of the minds and 
 wills of an indefinite number of penny-a-liners; 
 and it is on these penny-a-liners that he resolves 
 to depend for the great mass of his articles. 
 
 The evil influence of the publisher's despotism 
 ran through the Review and vitiated all its judg- 
 
 1 J. W. Robberd's Life of William Taylor, I, 130-132. 
 
50 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 merits. The editor-publisher prescribed to his 
 hacks what treatment a book should receive. 
 Sometimes this was with a view to the market. 
 "I send also the HorcB Bibilicce at a venture," 
 writes Griffiths to Taylor, "... it signifies not 
 much whether we notice it or not, as it is not on 
 sale.'^^ The italics are Griffiths's own. Some- 
 times, the publisher-editor merely wanted to 
 favour a friend or injure an enemy. Griffiths 's 
 dictation in the case of Goldsmith's first book 
 has already been noted. On another occasion 
 Griffiths sent a copy of Murphy's Tacitus to Tay- 
 lor with the following significant suggestion: 
 "One thing I have to mention, entre nous, that 
 Mr. M. is one of us, and that it is a rule in our 
 society for the members to behave with due de- 
 corum toward each other, whenever they appear at 
 their own bar as authors, out of their own critical 
 province. If a kingdom (like poor France at 
 present) be divided against itself, 'how shall that 
 kingdom stand '?"^ If Griffiths ventured on this 
 dictation with a man of Taylor's standing and in- 
 dependence, his tyranny over his regular depend- 
 ents must have been complete and relentless. 
 
 As a result, review-writing became purely hack- 
 work. The reviewer had no voice of his own in 
 his criticism; what little individuality he might, 
 in his feebleness, have put into his work, had he 
 
 1 J. W. Robberd's Life of William Taylor, I, 139. 
 
 2 7&id., I, 122. 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 51 
 
 been left to himself, disappeared under the eye 
 of his taskmaster. He became a mere machine, 
 praising and blaming perfunctorily and conven- 
 tionally, at the bidding of the editor-publisher. 
 Mawkish adulation or random abuse became the 
 staple of critical articles; and in neither kind of 
 work did the critic rise above the dead level of 
 hopeless mediocrity. 
 
 A final result of this whole system of review- 
 managing and hack-writing was unwillingness on 
 the part of men of position to have anything to do 
 with review-writing. If a man criticised books in 
 a Eeview, he felt that he was putting himself on a 
 level with Kenrick, Griffiths's notorious hireling, 
 who had been imprisoned for libel, with Kit Smart, 
 who had bound himself to a bookseller for ninety- 
 nine years, and with other like wretches. William 
 Taylor of Norwich was one of the few gentlemen 
 who, before 1802, ventured to write for Eeviews. 
 / With the establishment of the Edinburgh Review 
 all this was changed. The prime principle of the 
 new Review was independence of booksellers. The 
 plan was not a bookseller's scheme, but was 
 the outcome of the ambitious fervour of half a 
 dozen young adventurers in law, literature, and 
 politics. From the start the bookseller was a 
 "mere instrument," as Brougham specially notes. 
 The management of the Review was at first in the 
 hands of Sydney Smith. When he set out for 
 London his last words to the publisher. Constable, 
 
52 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 were, "If you will give £200 per annum to your 
 editor and ten guineas a sheet, you will soon have 
 the best Eeview in Europe." Accordingly, the 
 editorship was at once offered to Jeffrey, at even a 
 higher salary, £300, than Sydney Smith had 
 named. Jeffrey hesitated because of " the risk of 
 general degradation." But he found the £300 "a 
 monstrous bribe"; moreover, the other contribu- 
 tors were all planning to take their ten guineas a 
 sheet ; accordingly, after many qualms, he swal- 
 lowed his scruples and became a paid editor. 
 "The publication," he wrote to his brother, in 
 July, 1803, "is in the highest degree respectable 
 as yet, as there are none but gentlemen connected 
 with it. If it ever sink into the ordinary book- 
 seller's journal, I have done with it." 
 (/ So began Jeffrey's "reign" of twenty-six years; 
 and so ended the despotism of booksellers. Hence- 
 forth the editor, not the publisher, was master. 
 It was Jeffrey who decided what books should be 
 handled, or rather what subjects should be dis- 
 cussed ; it was Jeffrey who determined the price to 
 be paid for each article, — "I had," he declares, 
 " an unlimited discretion in this respect " ; it was 
 Jeffrey who pleaded with the dilatory, mollified 
 the refractory, and reached out here and there after 
 new contributors; in short, it was Jeffrey who 
 shaped the policy of the Bevieiu and impressed on 
 x^ it its distinctive character. 
 
 ^ But there were several other hardly less important 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 53 
 
 points in which the business policy of the Edinburgh 
 was a new departure. The pay for reviewing was 
 greatly increased. The old price had been two 
 guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages ; the Edin- 
 burgh Review, after the first three numbers, paid ten 
 guineas a sheet, and very soon sixteen guineas. 
 Moreover, this was the minimum rate; over two- 
 thirds of the articles were, according to Jeffrey, 
 "paid much higher, averaging from twenty to 
 twenty-five guineas a sheet on the whole number." 
 
 Again, every contributor was forced to take pay ; 
 no contributor, however nice his honour, was suf- 
 fered to refuse. This regulation was of the ut- 
 most importance; the rule salved the consciences 
 of many brilliant young professional men, who were 
 glad of pay, but ashamed to write for it, and afraid 
 of being dubbed penny-a-liners. By Jeffrey's 
 clever arrangement they could write for fame or 
 for simple amusement, and then have money 
 "thrust upon them." With high prices and en- 
 forced compensation the new Review at once drew 
 into its service men of a totally different stamp 
 from the old hack-writers. 
 
 Finally, the Edinburgh was published quarterly, 
 whereas the old Eeviews were published monthly. 
 This change was for two reasons important: in the 
 first place, writers had more time in which to pre- 
 pare their articles and led less of a hand-to-mouth 
 life intellectually; and, in the second place, the 
 Revieiv made no attempt to notice all publications, 
 
54 
 
 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 and chose for discussion only books of real signifi- 
 cance. Coleridge particularly commends this part 
 of the policy of the Review : " It has a claim upon 
 the gratitude of the literary republic, and, indeed, 
 of the reading public at large, for having origi- 
 nated the scheme of reviewing those books only, 
 which are susceptible and deserving of argumenta- 
 tive criticism."^ 
 
 VI 
 
 These, then, were the principal points in which 
 the organization and policy of the Edinburgh Me- 
 vieiu contrasted with those of its predecessors ; and 
 the influence of these changes on the tone and 
 spirit of the articles in the new Review can hardly 
 be exaggerated. The Edinburgh Review was not 
 a catch-all for waste information; it was an organ 
 of thought, a busy intellectual centre, from which 
 the newest ideas were sent out in a perpetual 
 stream through the minds of sympathetic readers. 
 The Review had opinions of its own on all public 
 questions. In politics, it advocated the principles 
 of the Constitutional AVhigs, at first in a non- 
 partisan spirit, after 1808, fiercely and aggres- 
 sively ; it pleaded for reform of the representation, 
 for Catholic emancipation, for a wise recognition 
 of the just discontent of the lower classes, and for 
 judicious measures to allay this discontent without 
 violent Constitutional changes. In social matters, 
 
 1 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria., chap. 21. 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 55 
 
 it urged reforms of all kinds, the repeal of the 
 game-laws, the improvement of prisons, the pro- 
 tection of chimney-sweeps and other social unfort- 
 unates. In religion, it argued for toleration. In 
 education, it attacked pedantry and tradition, ridi- 
 culed the narrowness of university ideals, and 
 contended for the adoption of practical methods 
 and utilitarian aims. In all these departments it 
 criticised the existing order of things, always brill- 
 iantly and suggestively, and sometimes fiercely 
 and radically, and stirred the public into a keener 
 consciousness and more intelligent appreciation of 
 the questions of the hour, social, political, and 
 religious. 
 
 Now it is plain that, to accomplish all this, 
 writers would find it necessary to go far outside of 
 the old limits of book-reviewing, and to make their 
 articles express their own independent ideas on 
 various important topics, rather than simply their 
 critical opinions of the merits of new publications. 
 And this is precisely what happened. A book- 
 review became in most cases merely a mask for the 
 writer's own ideas on some burning question of the 
 hour. In other words, the establishment of the Ed- 
 inburgh Review really led to the evolution of a new 
 literary form ; the old-fashioned review-article was 
 converted into a brief argumentative essay discuss- 
 ing some living topic, political or social, in the 
 light of the very latest ideas. This kind of essay 
 had been unknown in the eighteenth century, and 
 
56 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 was developed at the opening of the nineteenth 
 century in response to the needs of the moment. 
 
 Nor was this change in the nature of the review- 
 article unremarked at the time; Hazlitt noted it, 
 and with his usual sourness protested against it. 
 "If [the critic] recurs," he says, "to the stipulated 
 subject in the end, it is not till after he has ex- 
 hausted his budget of general knowledge; and he 
 establishes his own claims first in an elaborate 
 inaugural dissertation de omni scihili et quibusdam 
 aliis, before he deigns to bring forward the preten- 
 sions of the original candidate for praise, who is 
 only the second figure in the piece. We may 
 sometimes see articles of this sort, in which no al- 
 lusion whatever is made to the work under sentence 
 of death, after the first announcement of the title- 
 page."^ Coleridge, on the other hand, approved 
 of the change, and commended the "plan of sup- 
 plying the vacant place of the trash or mediocrity 
 wisely left to sink into oblivion by their own 
 weight, with original essays on the most interest- 
 ing subjects of the time, religious or political ; in 
 which the titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed 
 furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisi- 
 tion."^ The reviewers themselves recognized, of 
 course, the change they were working, though they 
 did not altogether realize its significance. In 
 1807, Horner writes Jeffrey, " Have you any good 
 
 1 Hazlitt's Table Talk, 2d series, essay 6. 
 
 2 Coleridge's Biograpliia Literaria^ chap. 21. ^ 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 57 
 
 subjects in view for your nineteenth? There are 
 two I wish you, yourself, would undertake, if you 
 can pick up books that would admit of them."^ 
 This quotation illustrates the fact that the impor- 
 tant question in the minds of the reviewers was 
 always, not "What new books have appeared?" 
 but "What topics just now have the greatest 
 actuality and are best worth discussing? " 
 
 This, then, was largely the cause of the success 
 of the Bevieiv: it offered, in its articles, a literary 
 form by means of which the most active and origi- 
 nal minds could at once come into communication 
 with " the intelligent public ^' on all vital topics ; 
 it made the best thought and the newest knowledge 
 more readily available than ever before for readers 
 who were every day becoming more alive to their 
 value. 
 
 The times were plainly favourable. The French 
 Eevolution had stirred men's imaginations as they 
 had not been stirred for a century, and had shaken 
 portentously in all directions the foundations of 
 belief. Traditions in politics, in social organiza- 
 tion, in religion, were violently assailed by men 
 like Godwin, Home Tooke, and Holcroft, and 
 loyally defended by enthusiastic conservatives. 
 The fever of Komanticism was already making 
 itself felt and was quickening men's hearts to new 
 passions and firing their imaginations with new 
 visions of possible bliss. The air was full of 
 
 1 Memoirs and Correspondence of Horner, I, 419. 
 
58 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 questions and doubts, of eager forecasts,, and of 
 ominous warnings. All this ferment of life and 
 feeling demanded freer utterance than could be 
 found through old literary forms and with old 
 methods of publication. 
 
 Moreover, the increasing importance of the 
 middle class and the spread of popular education 
 were favourable to the development of the new 
 literary form. The number of men who read and 
 thought for themselves had been rapidly growing. 
 These men were not scholars or deep thinkers, and 
 had no leisure to puzzle out learned treatises. They 
 were overworked professional men or business 
 men, who were alive to the questions of the hour, 
 who had thought over them and discussed them 
 wherever and whenever they could, and who were 
 anxious for guidance from " men of light and lead- 
 ing." The essays of the new Review gave them 
 just what they wanted, — brief, clear, yet original 
 and suggestive, dissertations by the best-trained 
 minds on the most important current topics. 
 
 These, then, are some of the causes, over and 
 beyond Jeffrey's editorial skill, and the brilliancy 
 and originality of his co-workers, that led to the 
 unprecedented success of the Edinburgh Review. 
 Their importance and their significance are shown 
 by the fact that within a few years several other 
 Reviews were founded on precisely the same plan 
 with the Edinburgh, and soon rivalled it in popu- 
 lar favour. In 1809 the Tory Quarterly Review was 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 59 
 
 started with William Gifford as editor, and Scott, 
 Southey, Canning, Ellis, and Croker among its 
 contributors. In 1820 the Retrospective Review was 
 established, and in 1824 the Westminster Review, 
 the organ of the Eadicals ; Bentham was its patron, 
 Bowring its editor, and James Mill and John 
 Stuart Mill were constant contributors. These 
 Eeviews were all quarterlies, and in the details of 
 their organization were modelled after the famous 
 Ediiiburgh. They all found a ready welcome, and, 
 with the exception of the Retrospective, have con- 
 tinued to thrive down to our own day. 
 
 VII 
 
 The bearing of all this upon the history of Jef- 
 frey's literary reputation must be fairly obvious. 
 Jeffrey profited from the conspiracy of a great 
 many fortunate circumstances, and for a series of 
 years enjoyed, as dictator of the policy of the 
 Edinburgh Review, a reputation as critic that was' 
 really far beyond what his intrinsic merit justified. 
 Leigh Hunt and Lamb were much more delicate 
 and imaginative appreciators of literature than 
 Jeffrey; Hazlitt, despite his waywardness and 
 arrogance, was a subtler and more stimulating lit- 
 erary interpreter. Coleridge was incomparably 
 Jeffrey's superior in penetrating insight, in learn- 
 ing and scholarship, in philosophic scope, and in 
 refinement and sureness of taste. Yet Jeffrey, 
 
60 FRANCIS JEFFREY 
 
 by dint of his cleverness, versatility, brilliancy, 
 readiness of resource, and, above all, because of 
 his commanding position as the director of the new 
 Whig Review, outstripped all these competitors 
 and imposed himself on public opinion as the typi- 
 cally infallible critic of his day and generation. 
 His personal charm, too, worked in his favour ; his 
 Whig following was enthusiastically loyal. Every- 
 thing tended to increase, for the time being, his 
 fame as a literary autocrat. 
 
 The later reaction, which has so nearly con- 
 signed Jeffrey to the region of unread authors, was 
 in its turn extreme, and yet followed naturally. 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge, whom Jeffrey had as- 
 sailed persistently till he had become in the public 
 mind the representative foe of Eomanticism, had 
 won their cause, and been received by wider and 
 wider circles of the most cultivated and discerning 
 readers as among the foremost poets of their age. 
 Jeffrey, their arch-enemy, suffered correspondingly 
 in public esteem. Time seemed to have proved 
 him wrong in one of his most strenuously asserted 
 prejudices. Moreover, this particular defeat was 
 merely one special instance of the evil effect that 
 far-reaching influences were having upon Jeffrey's 
 reputation. His modes of conceiving life were 
 being outgrown. His genial, man-of-the-world 
 wisdom and somewhat narrow range of feeling 
 seemed more and more unsatisfactory, as the pub- 
 lic gradually made their own the deeper spiritual 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 61 
 
 experience of idealistic poets, like Shelley, and 
 of transcendental prose-writers, like Carlyle. Jef- 
 frey's dry intellectuality and his shallow asso- 
 ciational psychology seemed unequal to the yital 
 problems in art and in ethics that the new age was 
 canvassing. Moreover, his autocratic style and 
 omniscient air had been caught up by all the quar- 
 terly Eeviews, and no longer served to distinguish 
 him; the methods and the tone of the Edinburgh 
 were copied far and wide, and the critics of the 
 new generation were quite a match for Jeffrey in 
 gay, domineering assurance and in easy, swift om- 
 niscience. Jeffrey had trained many followers 
 into his own likeness ; or, at any rate, the methods 
 and the tone that he had hit upon " survived " and 
 had been universally received as fit. 
 
 Finally, Jeffrey's essays, even at their best, had 
 many of the qualities of " occasional " writing, and 
 too often seemed merely meant for the moment; 
 the trail of the periodical was over them all. 
 Their very rapidity, sparkle, and plausibility gave 
 them an air of perishableness ; they seemed clever 
 and entertaining improvisations. Work of this 
 sort could hardly hope to maintain itself perma- 
 nently in public favour. Nor was the collection of 
 his essays, that Jeffrey saw fit to publish in 1843, 
 of a sort to make a stand against the general in- 
 difference that was clouding his fame. Two thou- 
 sand pages of improvised comments on all manner 
 of topics, from the Memoirs of Baher to Dugald 
 
62 FRANCIS JP:FFREY 
 
 Stewart's Philosophical Essays, could scarcely be 
 expected to secure a fixed place for themselves in 
 the affections of large masses of readers. A far 
 smaller volume, that should have included only 
 the essays, or portions of essays, that were best 
 wrought in style, most vigorously thought out, and 
 contained the most characteristic and final of Jef- 
 frey's opinions, would have been more likely — ex- 
 cept in so far as Jeffrey based his claims on his 
 versatility — to have insured him permanent re- 
 membrance as critic and prose-writer. 
 
 The reaction, then, against Jeffrey was necessary 
 and, in some degree, just. Yet, now that the air 
 is cleared of Eomantic prejudices, Jeffrey's real 
 services to the causes both of criticism and of sound 
 literature may be more accurately perceived and 
 defined. Not for a moment can the student who 
 aims at genuine insight into the history of litera- 
 ture and of literary opinion during the first quarter 
 of our century afford to disregard Jeffrey and his 
 Edinburgh Review Essays, or to pass him by with 
 a phrase as a mere unsuccessful opponent of 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge. Jeffrey influenced 
 public opinion decisively and beneficially on a vast 
 range of subjects. He broadened the methods of 
 literary criticism and won for it new points of 
 view and new fields. He put the relations be- 
 tween critic and public on a sounder basis, and 
 raised the profession of literary criticism into an 
 honourable calling. Finally, he developed English 
 
FRANCIS JEFFREY 63 
 
 style, added to its swiftness of play and brilliant 
 serviceableness, and prepared the way for the 
 dazzlingly effective, if somewhat mechanical, tech- 
 nique of Macaulay. All these good works are 
 nowadays too often forgotten ; and on the injustice 
 of such neglect one cannot comment more aptly 
 than through the quotation of Jeffrey's own 
 famous phrase — "This will never do.'' 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 In these ^'imcanonical times," it may seem 
 somewhat grotesque to go for information about 
 an author's style to his patron saint. Yet no 
 surer way exists for gaining an insight into the 
 peculiar charm of Cardinal Newman's writings 
 than through an appeal to St. Philip Neri, the 
 founder of the Congregation of the Oratory, whom 
 Newman chose for his "own special Father and 
 Patron." In at least two of his discourses, or es- 
 says, Newman has analyzed the character and pe- 
 culiar influence of St. Philip Neri. "Whatever 
 was exact and systematic," Newman tells us, 
 "pleased him not; he put from him monastic rule 
 and authoritative speech, as David refused the 
 armour of his king. No ; he would be but an ordi- 
 nary individual priest as others ; and his weapons 
 should be but unaffected humility and unpretend- 
 ing love. All he did was to be done by the light, 
 and fervour, and convincing eloquence of his per- 
 sonal character and his easy conversation." In 
 another essay, Newman describes St. Philip's dis- 
 trust of " the severity of the Regular " as a means 
 G4 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER Q^ 
 
 for the control of those whom he sought to sub- 
 jugate. "Influence," adroit intimacy, winning 
 intercourse, these were the means by which St. 
 Philip preferred to work on those about him. 
 
 Newman's loving regard for these traits of St. 
 Philip's genius is a revelation of some of the deep- 
 est instincts of his nature, — instincts which must 
 at once be brought into view in any attempt to ap- 
 preciate his style as a writer of prose. A peculiar 
 personal charm is impressed on all the most char- 
 acteristic of Newman's prose-writings, — on what- 
 ever he wrote after he had, as an artist, found 
 himself and realized his essential genius. Ab- 
 stract as his subject may be, he gives it some colour 
 of life and some of the beauty and grace of friendly 
 discourse. Every one knows what charm there is 
 in the talk of a man of the world who puts before 
 his listeners, in picturesque phrases, the variable 
 incidents of actual life as he himself has encoun- 
 tered them. The whim, the. personal idiom, the 
 glancing humour, the concrete image, the vivacious 
 disorderliness, the skilful dealing at first hand 
 with glowing human experience, give to talk of 
 this sort a peculiarly winning quality. And the 
 style that in literature mimics afar the colloquial 
 rhythms and the idiom of such familiar talk has, 
 also, its peculiar charm. The writer seems to es- 
 cape from the blank region of authorship, to realize 
 himself before the reader as a friendly face and 
 form, and to communicate himself through the 
 
66 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 hundred and one subtle signs of eye and voice and 
 gesture and smile that give to actual human inter- 
 course its delight and stimulating power. The ex- 
 treme form of this colloquial style, where^an author 
 is merely amiably garrulous, is not to be found in 
 Newman's writings; Newman's temper was, after 
 all, too academic for this, and his subjects were too 
 abstract and difficult. Earely, however, have 
 topics as speculative as are many of Newman's 
 been treated with so much of the wayward charm 
 and pliant grace of friendly discourse as Newman 
 reaches. His style, at its best, has the urbanity, 
 the affability, the winning adroitness, even the 
 half-careless desultoriness of the familiar talk of 
 a man of the world with his fellows. 
 
 Yet it is not this colloquial grace by itself that 
 gives to Newman's discussions of abstract topics 
 their peculiar distinction; it is rather his recon- 
 ciliation of the charm of colloquial freedom with 
 the demands of logical method and thoroughness 
 of treatment. Garrulity to no purpose is usually 
 easy enough. But the peculiarity of Newman's 
 style and method is that, with all their apparent 
 casualness, they lead the reader to a complete and 
 essentially logical command of the topic under dis- 
 cussion. When he chose, Newman was absolute 
 master of the severe beauty of rational discourse, 
 
 — of the beauty of that kind of discourse that dis- 
 dains to follow any associations save those of logic, 
 
 — discusses with fine economic precision just the 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 67 
 
 aspects of truth that right reason detects as essen- 
 tial to the question in hand, and is everywhere 
 formally correct, systematic, and dignified. His 
 earliest work is often austerely wrought in accord- 
 ance with this ideal. Ultimately, however, the 
 essential charm that made him so winning in per- 
 sonal intercourse passed over into his prose, and 
 conveyed into it the warmth, and elasticity, and 
 colour of life. Yet this change involved no real 
 sacrifice of structure or loss of firmness in the text- 
 ure of his thought. And for the trained student of 
 literary method much of the surpassing charm of 
 Newman's work is due to the possibility of finding 
 in it, on analysis, a continual victorious union of 
 logical strenuousness with the grace and ease and 
 charm of a colloquial manner and idiom. This 
 victory is so easily won as to seem something by 
 the way; but the student and analyst knows that 
 it is the result of rare tact, finely disciplined in- 
 stinct, exquisite rhetorical insight and foresight, 
 and extraordinary luminousness and largeness of 
 thought. 
 
 The very perfection of Newman's rhetorical man- 
 ner has exposed him to some unpleasant charges 
 of insincerity. It is not strange that in the midst 
 of a people like the English, who are perhaps some- 
 what affectedly straightforward and pretentiously 
 downright, Newman should, now and then, have 
 suffered for his adroitness and grace. The bluff, 
 impetuous man is proverbially ready to interpret 
 
68 NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 
 
 subtlety as duplicity, and to rebuke reticence and 
 indirectness as deceit and hypocrisy. Prejudice 
 of this sort was probably the real cause of Canon 
 Kingsley's famous attack upon Newman. He had 
 an instinctive dislike of Newman's sinuousness and 
 suppleness, and, without pausing to analyze very 
 carefully, he spoke out fiercely against Newman's 
 whole work as containing a special variety of eccle- 
 siastical hypocrisy. The charge was the more 
 plausible inasmuch as there is unquestionably a 
 certain debased ecclesiastical manner whose 
 cheaply insinuating suavity might, by hasty ob- 
 servers, be confused with Newman's bearing and 
 style. Yet the injustice of this confusion and the 
 unfairness of Kingsley's charges become plain 
 after a moment's analysis. 
 
 In spite of Newman's ease and affability, a fair- 
 minded reader feels, throughout his writings, when 
 he stops to consider, an underlying suggestion of 
 uncompromising strength and unwavering convic- 
 tion. He is sure that the author is really revealing 
 himself frankly and unreservedly, notwithstanding 
 his apparent self-effacement, and that he is impos- 
 ing his own conclusions, persuasively and con- 
 strainingly. Moreover, the reader is sure that, 
 however adroitly Newman may be developing his 
 thesis, with an eye to the skilful manipulation of 
 his readers' prejudices, he would at any moment 
 give a point-blank answer to a point-blank ques- 
 tion. There is never any real doubt of Newman's 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 69 
 
 courage and manly English temper, or of his readi- 
 ness to meet an opponent fairly on the grounds of 
 debate. In the last analysis, it is this fundamen- 
 tal sincerity of tone and this all-pervasive, but un- 
 obtrusive self-assertion that preserve Newman's 
 style from the undue flexibility and the insincerity 
 of the debased ecclesiastical style, just as his 
 unfailing good taste preserves him from its cheap 
 suavity or unctuousness. 
 
 But JSTewman's adroitness and rhetorical skill 
 have exposed him to charges of still another kind, 
 charges that concern the very substance of his 
 thought and intellectual life, and charges that have 
 been urged with much greater dialectical skill than 
 Canon Kingsley could attain to. In a general 
 examination of Newman's theories, Mr. E. A. 
 Abbott ^ has accused him of systematically doctor- 
 ing truth, and of having elaborated, though per- 
 haps unconsciously, various ingenious methods for 
 inveigling unsuspecting readers into the acceptance 
 of doubtful propositions, methods for which Mr. 
 Abbott has devised satirical names, the Art of 
 Lubrication, the Art of Oscillation, the Art of 
 Assimilation. He does not assert that Newman 
 consciously palters with truth, or tries to make 
 the worse appear the better reason. But he urges 
 that Newman was constitutionally fonder of other 
 things than of truth, that he desired, with an over- 
 mastering strength, to establish certain conclusions, 
 
 / ^ Fhilomythus, by E. A. Abbott, London, 1891. 
 
70 NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 
 
 and that lie persuaded himself of their correctness 
 by a series of manoeuvres which really involved 
 insincere logic. 
 
 Here, again, the charges that are made against 
 Newman seem the result of prejudice and tempera- 
 mental hostility on the part of his critic. Mr. 
 Abbott is a bit of a formalist, a Caledonian in- 
 tellect, a thorough-going positivist, a thinker for 
 whom the only truth that exists is truth that can 
 be scientifically verified. He is quite unable to 
 comprehend, or, at any rate, to tolerate, Newman's 
 mental constitution and his resulting methods of 
 conceiving of life and relating himself to its facts. 
 Truth is to Newman a much subtler matter, a much 
 more elusive susbtance, than it is to the positivist, 
 to the mere intellectual dealer in facts and in fig- 
 ures ; it cannot be packed into syllogisms as pills 
 are packed into a box ; it cannot be conveyed into 
 the human system with the simple directness which 
 the Laputa wiseacre aimed at who was for teaching 
 his pupils geometry by feeding them on paper duly 
 inscribed with geometrical figures. Moreover, lan- 
 guage is an infinitely treacherous medium; words 
 are so "false," so capable of endless change, that 
 one is "loath to prove reason with them." Eead- 
 ers, too, are widely diverse, and are open to count- 
 less other appeals than that of sheer logic. Because 
 of such considerations as these, Newman is con- 
 tinually studious of effect in his writings ; he is in- 
 tensely conscious of his audience ; and he is always 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 71 
 
 striving to win a way for his convictions, and aim- 
 ing to insinuate them into the minds and hearts of 
 his hearers by gently persuasive means. 
 
 But all this by no means implies any real care- 
 lessness of truth on Newman's part, or any sacri- 
 fice of truth to expediency. Truth is difficult of 
 attainment, and hard to transmit; all the more 
 strenuously does Newman set himself to trace it 
 out in its obscurity and remoteness, and to reveal it 
 in all its intricacies. Moreover, subtle and elusive 
 as it may be, it is nevertheless something tangible 
 and describable and defensible ; something, further- 
 more, of the acquisition of which Newman can give 
 a very definite account; something as far as possible 
 from mere misty sentiment, and something, further- 
 more, to be strenuously asserted and defended. 
 
 Sympathetic and patient readers of Newman, 
 then, can hardly doubt his essential mental integ- 
 rity or his courage and readiness to be frank, even 
 in those passages or in those works where the 
 search for the subtlest shades of truth, or the 
 desire to avoid clashing needlessly on prejudice, 
 or the wish to win a favourable hearing, takes the 
 author most indirectly and tortuously towards his 
 end. It is his underlying manliness of mind and 
 frank readiness to give an account of himself that 
 prevent Newman's prevailing subtlety, adroitness, 
 and suavity from leaving on the mind of an unprej- 
 udiced reader any impression of timorousness or 
 disingenuousness. 
 
72 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WKITER 
 
 II 
 
 In what has been said of Newman's realization 
 of the elusive nature of truth and of the great diffi- 
 culty of securing a welcome for it in the minds and 
 hearts of the mass of men lies the key to what is 
 most distinctive in his methods. He was a great 
 rhetorician, and whatever he produced shows evi- 
 dence, on analysis, of having been constructed with 
 the utmost niceness of instinct and deftness of 
 hand. He himself frankly admitted his rhetorical 
 bent. Writing to Hurrell Fronde in 1836, about 
 the management of the Tractarian agitation, he 
 says, " You and Keble are the philosophers, and I 
 the rhetorician." ^ And in a somewhat earlier let- 
 ter he speaks of his aptitude for rhetoric in even 
 stronger terms : " I have a vivid perception of the 
 consequences of certain admitted principles, have 
 a considerable intellectual capacity of drawing 
 them out, have the refinement to admire them, and 
 a rhetorical or histrionic power to represent them." "^ 
 
 This rhetorical skill was partly natural and in- 
 stinctive, and partly the result of training. From 
 his earliest years as a student, Newman had been 
 conspicuous for the subtlety and flexibility of his 
 intelligence, for his readiness in assuming for 
 speculative purposes the most diverse points of 
 
 1 Letters and Correspondence of J. H. Newman, 1891, II, 156. 
 
 2 Ibid., I, 416. 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 73 
 
 viewj and for his insight into temperaments and 
 his comprehension of their modifying action on the 
 white light of truth. With this admirable equip- 
 ment for effective rhetorical work, he came directly 
 under the influence, in Oriel College, of two excep- 
 tionally great rhetoricians, Dr. Copleston, for 
 many years Provost of Oriel, and Whately, one of 
 its most influential Fellows. Copleston was a 
 famous controversialist and dialectician, who had 
 long been regarded as the chief champion of the 
 University against the attacks of outsiders. His 
 Advice to a Young Bevieiver with a Specimen of the 
 Art (1807), had turned into ridicule the airs and 
 pretensions of the young Edinburgh reviewers and 
 had led them into severe strictures on Univer- 
 sity methods, against which attacks, however. Dr. 
 Copleston had vigorously defended Oxford in vari- 
 ous publications, to the satisfaction of all Univer- 
 sity men. He was the Provost of Oriel during the 
 first year of Newman's residence there, and sug- 
 gestions of the influence of his ideas and methods 
 are to be found throughout the early pages of the 
 Apologia and the Autobiographical Memoir. Still 
 more decisive, however, was the influence of a 
 yet more famous rhetorician. Dr. Whately, whose 
 lectures on logic and on rhetoric remained almost 
 down to the present day standard text-books in 
 those subjects. Whately was also renowned as a 
 controversialist, and his Historic Doubts relative to 
 Napoleon Buonaparte was perhaps the cleverest and 
 
74 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WHITEli 
 
 most famous piece of ironical argumentation pro- 
 duced in England during the first quarter of the 
 century. Newman, for several of his most impres- 
 sionable years, was intimately associated with 
 Whately. "He emphatically opened my mind,'' 
 Newman says in the Apologia, " and taught me to 
 think and to use my reason^" Under the influence 
 of these two masters of rhetoric and redoubtable 
 controversialists Newman's natural aptitude for 
 rhetorical methods was encouraged and fostered, so 
 that he became a perfect adept in all the arts of 
 exposition and argumentation and persuasion. 
 
 Whatever work of Newman's, then, we take up, 
 we may be sure that its construction will repay 
 careful analysis. In trying to present any set of 
 truths, Newman was consciously confronting a 
 delicate psychological problem; he was aware of 
 the elements that entered into the problem; he 
 knew what special difficulties he had to face because 
 of the special nature of the truth he was dealing 
 with, — its abstractness, or complexity, or novelty. 
 He had measured, also, the precise degree of re- 
 sistance he must expect because of the peculiar 
 prejudices or preoccupations of his readers. And 
 the shape which his discussion finally took — the 
 particular methods that he followed — were the 
 result of a deliberate adapt?.tion of means to ends ; 
 they were the methods that his trained rhetorical 
 instinct and his insight into the truth he was 
 handling and into the temperaments and intelli- 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 75 
 
 gences he was to address himself to dictated as 
 most likely to persuade. 
 
 Although ordinarily Newman does not explain 
 the method he follows or comment on the difficul- 
 ties of his problem, he has, in his Apologia, de- 
 parted from this rule, and taken his readers into 
 his confidence. In the first thirty pages of this 
 self-justificatory piece of writing, he sets forth 
 minutely the prejudices against which he must 
 make his way, considers various possible modes 
 of overcoming these prejudices, notes the precise 
 reasons that finally lead him to the actual plan he 
 chooses, and is entirely explicit as to the elaborate 
 design that underlies and controls the seeming 
 desultoriness of his whole discussion. 
 
 The problem which in this case confronted New- 
 man was briefly as follows. He had been charged 
 by Kingsley with teaching "lying on system." 
 He had protested against the charge and had ob- 
 tained a half-hearted apology. Later, however, the 
 charge had been reiterated more formally, and with 
 the added taunt that as Newman recommended sys- 
 tematic dissimulation no one could be expected to 
 accept his self-exculpating word. These charges 
 fell in, as Newman recognized, first, with the gen- 
 eral trend of British prejudice against Eoman 
 Catholics, and, secondly, with the particular prej- 
 udice against Newman himself that sprang from 
 his early attempts to make the Anglican Church 
 more Catholic, and his subsequent secession to 
 
76 NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 
 
 Eome. How, then, was Newman to i^ersuade the 
 public of Kingsley's injustice and his own inno- 
 cence? He saw at once that to deal with each 
 separate charge would be mere waste of time; to 
 prove that in a special case he had not lied or 
 recommended lying would carry him no whit to- 
 wards his end, as long as contemptuous distrust re- 
 mained the dominant mood of the British mind 
 towards himself and his party. First of all, he 
 must conquer this mood; he must overthrow the 
 presumption against him, and win for his cause at 
 least such an unbiassed hearing as is accorded to 
 the ordinary man upon trial whose record has been 
 hitherto clean; then he might hope to secure for 
 his particular denials a universal scope. The 
 method that he chose in order to win his readers 
 was admirably conceived. He would put himself 
 vitally and almost dramatically before them; he 
 would bring them within the actual sound of his 
 voice and the glance of his eye ; he would let them 
 follow him through the long course of his years as 
 student, tutor, preacher, and leader, and come to 
 know him as intimately as those few friends had 
 known him with whom he had lived most freely. 
 Then, he would ask his readers, when he had put 
 his personality before them in its many shifting, 
 but continuous aspects, and with all the intense 
 persuasiveness of a dramatic portrayal, whether 
 they were ready to believe of the man they had 
 thus watched through the round of his duties that 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITEB 77 
 
 he was a liar. Of the peculiar power which New- 
 man could count on exerting in thus appealing to 
 his personal charm he was, of course, unable to 
 speak in his Preface. In truth, however, he was 
 having recourse to an inflaence which had always 
 been potent whenever it had had a chance to make 
 itself felt. Throughout his life at Oxford it was 
 true of his relations to others that ^'friends un- 
 asked, unhoped " had " come, " — all men who met 
 him falling almost inevitably under the sway of his 
 winning and commanding personality. Newman 
 was, therefore, well advised when he resolved to 
 reveal himself to the world and to trust to the con- 
 ciliating effect of this self-revelation to prepare for 
 his specific denial of Kingsley's charges. 
 
 In accordance with this purpose and plan, the 
 Apologia pro Vita Sua, or History of his Eeligious 
 Opinions, was written; and for these reasons his 
 answer to certain definite charges of equivocation 
 and systematic and elaborate misrepresentation 
 was so shaped as to include in its scope the 
 story of his whole life. Of the 384 pages of 
 the original edition of the Ap)ologia, only the 
 last 93 pages are devoted to the actual refutation 
 of Kingsley's charges; the 238 pages that precede 
 are merely persuasive, and simply prepare the 
 way for the final defence. Probably in no other 
 piece of writing is the actual demonstration so 
 curiously small in proportion to the means that are 
 taken to make the logic effective. Of course, it 
 
78 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 may be urged in reply to this view of the construc- 
 tion of the Apologia, that to look at the book as 
 purely a reply to Kingsley, is to judge it from an 
 arbitrary and artificial point of view, and hence to 
 distort it inevitably and throw its parts out of pro- 
 portion; that the real aim of the book was simply 
 and sincerely autobiographic, and that, regarding 
 the book as frank autobiography, the critic need 
 find nothing strange in the proportioning of its 
 parts. In answer to this objection, it should be 
 noted that the last pages of the book deal directly 
 and argumentatively with " Mr. Kingsley's accusa- 
 tions " ; that the transition in Part YII. from the 
 history of Newman's opinions to the discussion of 
 the theory of truth -telling is almost imperceptible ; 
 and, finally, that Newman himself has declared in 
 the early pages of the book that the sole reason for 
 his self-revelations is his wish to clear away mis- 
 conceptions, to win once again the confidence of 
 that English public that had long been distrustful 
 of him, and to make widely effective his refutation 
 of Kingsley's charges. The book, then, is fairly 
 to be described as an enormously elaborate and in- 
 genious piece of special pleading to prepare the 
 way for a few syllogisms that have now become 
 grotesquely insignificant. 
 
 It has been worth while to lay great stress on 
 this disproportion between persuasion and demon- 
 stration in the Apologia, because this disproportion 
 illustrates, with almost the over-emphasis of carica- 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 79 
 
 tiire, certain of Newman's fundamental beliefs and 
 resulting tricks of method. First and foremost, it 
 illustrates the slight esteem in which he held the 
 formal logic of the schools and syllogistic demon- 
 strations. Not that he failed to recognize the 
 value of analysis and logical demonstration as 
 verifying processes; but he unhesitatingly subor- 
 dinated these processes to those by which truth is 
 originally won, and to those also by which truth 
 is persuasively inculcated. 
 
 In a sermon on Implicit and Explicit Reason, he 
 distinguishes with great elaborateness between the 
 method by which the mind makes its way almost 
 intuitively to the possession of a new truth, or set 
 of truths, and the subsequent analysis by which 
 it takes account of this half-instinctive original 
 process and renders the moments of the process 
 self-conscious and articulate. His description of 
 the intellect delicately and swiftly feeling its way 
 towards truth may well be quoted entire: "The 
 mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out and ad- 
 vances forward with a quickness which has become 
 a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which 
 baffle investigation. It passes on from point to 
 point, gaining one by some indication; another on 
 a probability; then availing itself of an associa- 
 tion; then falling back on some received law; next 
 seizing on testimony; then committing itself to 
 some popular impression, or some inward instinct, 
 or some obscure memory; and thus it makes prog- 
 
80 NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 
 
 ress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, 
 by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends, 
 how, he knows not himself, by personal endow- 
 ments and by practice, rather than by rule, leav- 
 ing no track behind him, and unable to teach 
 another. It is not too much to say that the step- 
 ping by which great geniuses scale the mountain 
 of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in 
 general as the ascent of a skilful mountaineer up 
 a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can 
 take; and its justification lies alone in their suc- 
 cess. And such mainly is the way in which all 
 men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason — not 
 by rule, but by an inward faculty. Keasoning, 
 then, or the exercise of reason, is a living, spon- 
 taneous energy within us, not an art." ^ 
 
 But not only is syllogistic reasoning not the 
 original process by which truth is attained; it is 
 in no way essential to the validity or completeness 
 of the process. " Clearness in argument certainly 
 is not indispensable to reasoning well. Accuracy 
 in stating doctrines or principles is not essential to 
 feeling and acting upon them. The exercise of 
 analysis is not necessary to the integrity of the 
 process analyzed. The process of reasoning is 
 complete in itself, and independent.'''^ 
 
 Finally, logical demonstration has relatively 
 little value as a means of winning a hearing for 
 
 1 Oxford University Sermons, ed. 1887, p. 257. 
 2/6M.,p. 259. 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 81 
 
 new tnitli, of securing its entrance into the popu- 
 lar consciousness, and of giving it a place among 
 the determining powers of life. "Logic makes 
 but a sorry rhetoric with the multitude ; first shoot 
 round corners, and you may not despair of con- 
 verting by a syllogism. '^ Men must be inveigled 
 into the acceptance of truth ; they cannot be driven 
 to accept it at the point of the syllogism. " The 
 heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, 
 but through the imagination, by means of direct 
 impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, 
 by history, by description. People influence us, 
 voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us." 
 
 The application of all this, — particularly of 
 what Newman says touching the persuasiveness of 
 a personal appeal, — to the whole method of the 
 Apologia hardly needs pointing out. The work 
 is, from first to last, intensely personal in its tone 
 and matter, persuasive because of its concreteness, 
 its dramatic vividness, the modulations of the 
 speaker's voice, the sincerity and dignity of his 
 look and bearing. Logic, of course, gives coherence 
 to the discussions. The processes of thought by 
 which Newman moved from point to point in his 
 theological development are consistently set forth; 
 but the convincing quality of the book comes from 
 its embodiment of a life, not from its systematiza- 
 tion of a theory. 
 
 In accordance with this general character of the 
 book is its tone throughout ; its style is the perf ec- 
 
82 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 tion of informality and easy colloquialism. Kow 
 and then, in describing his ideas on specially com- 
 plicated questions, Newman makes use of numbered 
 propositions, and proceeds, for the time being, with 
 the precaution and precision of the dialectician. 
 But, for the most part, he is as unconstrained and 
 apparently fortuitous in his presentation of ideas 
 as if he were merely emulating Montaigne in con- 
 fidential self-revelation, and were guided by no 
 controversial purpose. Perhaps no writer has sur- 
 passed, or even equalled, Newman in combining 
 apparent desultoriness of treatment with real defi- 
 niteness of purpose and clairvoyance of method. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Another admirable example of Newman's least 
 formal, and most characteristic, method may be 
 found in his series of papers on the Bise and Prog- 
 ress of Universities. Here, again, there is appar- 
 ent desultoriness, or, at most, a careless following 
 of historical sequence. One after another, with 
 what seems like a haphazard choice, Newman de- 
 scribes a half-dozen of the most famous universities 
 of the past, explains popularly their organization, 
 methods, and aims, entertaining the reader mean- 
 while with such superlative pieces of rhetoric as 
 the description of Attica and Athens, and with 
 such dramatic episodes as that of Abelard. Yet 
 underneath this apparent caprice runs the control- 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 88 
 
 ling purpose of putting the reader in possession, 
 through concrete illustrations, of the complete idea 
 of a typically effective university. Each special 
 school that Newman describes illustrates some es- 
 sential attribute of the ideal school; and inciden- 
 tally the reader, who is all the time beguiled, from 
 chapter to chapter, by Kewman's picturesque detail, 
 takes into his mind the various features, and ulti- 
 mately the complete image, of the perfect type. 
 
 In the series of Discourses on the Idea of a Uni- 
 versity, Newman's method is more formal and his 
 tone more controversial. Newman was this time 
 addressing a distinctly scholarly audience, and was 
 treating of a series of abstract topics, on which he 
 was called to pronounce in his character of proba- 
 ble vice-chancellor of the proposed university. 
 Accordingly, throughout these Discourses he is 
 consistently academic in tone and manner, and for- 
 mal and elaborate in method. He lays out his 
 work with somewhat mechanical precision; he 
 sketches his plan strictly beforehand; he defines 
 terms and refines upon possible meanings, and 
 guards at each step against misinterpretations ; he 
 pauses often to come to an understanding with his 
 hearers about the progress already made, and to 
 consider what line of advance severe logical method 
 next dictates. In all these ways, he is deliber- 
 ate, explicit, and demonstrative. Yet despite this 
 strenuous regard for system and method, not even 
 here does Newman become crabbedly scholastic or 
 
84 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 pedantically over-formal; the result of his strenu- 
 ousness is, rather, a finely conscientious circum- 
 spection of demeanour and an academic dignity of 
 bearing. There is something irresistibly impres- 
 sive in the perfect poise with which he moves 
 through the intricacies of the many abstractions 
 that his subject involves. He exhibits each as- 
 pect of his subject in just the right perspective and 
 with just the requisite minuteness of detail; he 
 leads us unerringly from each point of view to that 
 which most naturally follows ; he keeps us always 
 aware of the relation of each aspect to the total 
 sum of truth he is trying to help us to grasp ; and 
 so, little by little, he secures for us that perfect 
 command of an intellectual region, in its concrete 
 facts and in its abstract relations, which exposition 
 aims to make possible. These Discourses are as 
 fine an example as exists in English of the union 
 of strict method with charm of style in the treat- 
 ment of an abstract topic. 
 
 In the Develo])ment of Christian Doctrine and the 
 Grammar of Assent the severity of Newman's 
 method is somewhat greater, as is but natural in 
 strictly scientific treatises. Yet even in these ab- 
 stract discussions his style retains an inalienable 
 charm, due to the luminousness of the atmosphere, 
 the wide-ranging command of illustrations, the 
 unobtrusively tropical phrasing, and the steady 
 harmonious sweep of the periods. Few books on 
 equally abstract topics are as easy reading. 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 85 
 
 Newman's methods as a controversialist may 
 advantageously be studied in his Present Position 
 of Catholics in England, — a work that contains 
 some of his most ingenious and caustic irony. In 
 plan and construction, these discourses illustrate 
 once more Newman's consummate skill in adapting 
 his method to the matter in hand. His purpose in 
 this case is to right the Eoman Catholic Church 
 with the English nation, to exhibit the Eoman 
 Catholics as he knows them to be, a conscientious, 
 honourable, patriotic body of men, and to put an 
 end once for all, if possible, to the long tradition 
 of calumny that has persecuted them. Such is 
 his problem. He sets about its solution charac- 
 teristically. He does not undertake to demon- 
 strate the truth of Eoman Catholic doctrines, or, 
 by direct evidence and argument, to refute the 
 wild charges of hypocrisy and corruption which 
 Protestants are habitually making against Eoman 
 Catholics. His methods are much subtler than 
 these and also much more comprehensive and 
 final. He sets himself to analyze Protestant prej- 
 udice, and to destroy it by resolving it into its 
 elements. He takes it up historically, and ex- 
 hibits its origin in an atmosphere of intense par- 
 tisan conflict, and its development in the midst of 
 peculiarly favourable intellectual and moral con- 
 ditions; he shows that it is political in its origin 
 and has been inwrought into the very fibre of Eng- 
 lish national life: "English Protestantism is the 
 
86 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 religion of the throne; it is represented, realized, 
 taught, transmitted in the succession of monarchs 
 and an hereditary aristocracy. It is religion 
 grafted upon loyalty; and its strength is not in 
 argument, not in fact, not in the unanswerable 
 controversialist, not in an apostolic succession, not 
 in sanction of Scripture — but in a royal road to 
 faith, in backing up a King whom men see, against 
 a Pope whom they do not see. The devolution of 
 its crown is the tradition of its creed ; and to doubt 
 its truth is to be disloyal towards its Sovereign. 
 Kings are an Englishman's saints and doctors; he 
 likes somebody or something at which he can cry, 
 *huzzah,' and throw up his hat." 
 
 To hate a " Eomanist," then, is as natural for John 
 Bull as to hate a Frenchman, and to libel him is a 
 matter of patriotism. The Englishman's romantic 
 imagination has for generations been spinning 
 myths of Catholic misdoing to satisfy these deep 
 instinctive animosities. Moreover, many other 
 typical English qualities, in addition to loyalty 
 and patriotism, have contributed to foster and de- 
 velop this Protestant prejudice. Such are the con- 
 trolling practical interests of the middle-class 
 English, their content with compromise-working 
 schemes, and their contempt for abstractions and 
 subtleties ; their shuddering dislike of innovation ; 
 their well-meaning obstinacy in ignorance, and their 
 heroic adherence to familiar, though undeniable 
 error ; their insularity ; their hatred of foreigners 
 
NEWMAN AS A PKOSE-WRITER 87 
 
 in general, and their frenzied fear of the Pope in 
 particular. With unfailing adroitness of sugges- 
 tion, Newman makes clear how these national 
 traits, and many others closely related to them, 
 have cooperated to originate and develop Protes- 
 tant hatred of Roman Catholicism. His mastery 
 of the details of social life and of motives of action 
 is in this discussion of English history and con- 
 temporary life specially conspicuous. Every phase 
 of peculiarly English thought and feeling is pres- 
 ent to him; every intricacy of the curiously sub- 
 terranean British national temperament is traced 
 out. And the result is that prejudice is explained 
 out of existence. The intense hostility that seems 
 so primitive an instinct as to justify itself like the 
 belief in God or in an outer world, is resolved into 
 the expression of a vast mass of petty, and often 
 discreditable instincts, and so loses all its validity 
 in losing its apparent primitiveness and mystery. 
 
 Such is the general plan and scope of Newman^ s 
 attack on Protestant prejudice ; in carrying out the 
 plan and making his attack brilliantly effective, he 
 shows inexhaustible ingenuity and unwearied in- 
 vention. He uses fables, allegories, and elaborate 
 pieces of irony ; he develops an unending series of 
 picturesque illustrations of Protestant prejudice, 
 drawn from all sources, past and present; he sets 
 curious traps for this prejudice, catches it at 
 unawares, and shows it up to his readers in guises 
 they can hardly defend; he plays skilfully upon 
 
88 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 the instincts that lie at its root, and by clever 
 manipulation makes them declare themselves in 
 a twinkling in favour of some aspect of Eoman 
 Catholicism. In short, he uses all the rhetorical 
 devices of which he is master to win a hearing 
 from the half-hostile, to beguile the unwilling, to 
 amuse the captious, and, finally, to insinuate into 
 the minds of his readers an all-permeating mood of 
 contempt for Protestant narrowness and bigotry, 
 and of open-minded appreciation of the merits of 
 Roman Catholics. 
 
 IV 
 
 For still another reason the lectures on the Pres- 
 ent Position of Catholics are specially interesting to 
 a student of Newman's methods; they illustrate 
 exceptionally well his skill in the use of irony. 
 To the genuine rhetorician there is something 
 specially attractive in the duplicity of irony, be- 
 cause of the opportunity it offers of playing 
 with points of view, of juggling with phrases, of 
 showing virtuosity in the manipulation of both 
 thoughts and words. Newman was too much of a 
 rhetorician not to feel this fascination. Moreover, 
 he had learned from his study of Copleston and 
 Whately the possibilities of irony as a controver- 
 sial weapon. Copleston's Advice to a Young Re- 
 viewer, and Whately 's Historic Doubts relative to 
 Napoleon Buonaparte were typical specimens of 
 academic irony, where, with impressive dignity 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 89 
 
 and suavity and the most plausible simplicity and 
 candour, the writers, while seemingly advocating a 
 certain policy, or theory, or set of conclusions, 
 were really sneering throughout at a somewhat 
 similar policy or theory — that of their opponents 
 — and laying it open to helpless ridicule. 
 
 One of the most noteworthy characteristics of 
 Newman^s irony — and in this point his irony re- 
 sembled that of his masters — was its positive 
 argumentative value. Often an elaborate piece of 
 irony is chiefly destructive; it turns cleverly into 
 ridicule the general attitude of mind of the writer's 
 opponents, but makes no attempt to supply a sub- 
 stitute for the faith it destroys. Swift's irony is 
 usually of this character. It is intensely ill- 
 natured, even savage, and is so extravagant that it 
 sometimes defeats its own end as argument. Its 
 hauteur and bitterness produce a reaction in the 
 mind of the reader, and force him to distrust the 
 judgment and sanity of a man who can be so in- 
 veterately and fiercely insolent. Its indictment is 
 so sweeping and its mood so cynical, that the 
 reader, though he is bullied out of any regard for 
 the ideas that Swift attacks, is repelled from 
 Swift himself, and made to hate his notions as 
 much as he despises those of Swift's opponents. 
 Moreover, full of duplicity and innuendo as it is, its 
 innuendoes are often merely disguised sneers, and 
 not suggestions of genuinely valid reasons why the 
 opinions or prejudices which the writer is assailing 
 
90 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 sliould be abandoned. In the Modest Proposal and 
 the Argument against Abolishing Christianity, for 
 example, the irony reduces to one long sneer at 
 the prejudice, the selfishness, and the cruelty of 
 Yahoo human nature ; there is very little positive 
 argument in behalf of the oppressed Irish on the 
 one hand, or in favour of Christianity on the other. 
 
 Newman's irony, on the contrary, is subtle, in- 
 tellectual, and suggestive. It is positive in its 
 insinuation of actual reasons for abandoning preju- 
 dice against Eoman Catholics ; it is tirelessly adroit, 
 and adjusts itself delicately to every part of the 
 opposing argument; it is suggestive of new ideas, 
 and not only makes the reader see the absurdity of 
 some time-worn prejudice, but hints at its expla- 
 nation and is ready with a new opinion to take 
 its place. In tone, too, it is very different from 
 Swift's irony; it is not enraged and blindly sav- 
 age, but more like the best French irony — self- 
 possessed, suave, and oblique. Newman addresses 
 himself with unfailing skill to the prejudices of 
 those whom he is trying to move, and carries his 
 readers with him in a way that Swift was too con- 
 temptuous to aim at. Newman's irony wins the 
 wavering, while it routs the hostile. This is the 
 double task it proposes to itself. 
 
 An example of his irony at its best may be found 
 in the amusing piece of declamation against the 
 British Constitution and John Bullism which New- 
 man puts into the mouth of a Eussian count. The 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 91 
 
 passage occurs in a lecture on the Present Position 
 of Catholics, which was delivered just before the 
 war with Russia, when English jealousy of Eussia 
 and contempt for Russian prejudice and ignorance 
 were most intense. It was, of course, on these 
 feelings of jealousy and contempt that Newman 
 skilfully played when he represented the Russian 
 count as grotesquely misinterpreting the British 
 Constitution and Blackstone^s Commentaries, and 
 as charging them with irreligion and blasphemy. 
 His satirical portrayal of the Russian and the 
 clever manipulation by which he forces the count 
 to exhibit his stores of ungentle dulness and his 
 stock of malignant prejudice delighted every ordi- 
 nary British reader, and threw him into a pleasant 
 glow of self-satisfaction, and of sympathy with the 
 author ; now this was the very mood, as Newman 
 was well aware, in which, if ever, the anti-Catho- 
 lic reader might be led to question with himself 
 whether, after all, he was perfectly informed about 
 Roman Catholicism, or whether he did not, like 
 the Russian count, take most of his knowledge at 
 second-hand and inherit most of his prejudice. 
 Throughout this passage the ingenuity is conspicu- 
 ous with which Newman makes use of English 
 dislike of Russia and loyalty to Queen and Consti- 
 tution; the passage everywhere exemplifies the 
 adroitness, the flexibility, the persuasiveness, and 
 the far-reaching calculation of Newman's irony. 
 Indeed, this elaborateness and self-consciousness, 
 
92 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 and deliberateness of aim, are perhaps, at times, 
 limitations on the success of his irony; it is some- 
 what too cleverly planned and a trifle over-elaborate. 
 In these respects it contrasts disadvantageously 
 with French irony, which, at its best, is so delight- 
 fully by the way, so airily unexpected, so accidental, 
 and yet so dextrously fatal. It would be an in- 
 structive study in literary method to compare New- 
 man's ironical defence of Eoman Catholicism in 
 the passage already referred to with Montesquieu's 
 ironical attack upon the same system in the Lettres 
 Fersanes. 
 
 When we turn from Newman's methods to his 
 style in the narrower meaning of the term, we still 
 find careful elaboration and ingenious calculation 
 of effect, although here, again, the conscientious 
 workmanship becomes evident only on reflection, 
 and the general impression is that of easy and in- 
 stinctive mastery. Nevertheless, Newman wrought 
 out all that he wrote, with much patient recasting 
 and revising. "It is simply the fact," he tells a 
 friend in one of his letters, "that I have been 
 obliged to take great pains with everything I have 
 written, and I often write chapters over and over 
 again, besides innumerable corrections and inter- 
 linear additions. ... I think I have never writ- 
 ten for writing's sake; but my one and single desire 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 93 
 
 and aim has been to do what is so difficult : viz., 
 to express clearly and exactly my meaning; this 
 has been the motive principle of all my corrections 
 and rewritings."^ 
 
 It is perhaps this sincerity of aim and this sacri- 
 fice of the decorative impulse in the strenuous 
 search for adequacy of expression that keep out 
 of Newman's writing every trace of artificiality. 
 Sophisticated as is his style, it is never mannered. 
 There is no pretence, no flourish, no exhibition of 
 rhetorical resources for their own sake. The most 
 impressive and the most richly imaginative pas- 
 sages in his prose come in because he is betrayed 
 into them in his conscientious pursuit of all the 
 aspects of the truth he is illustrating. Moreover, 
 they are curiously congruous in tone with the most 
 colloquial parts of his writing. There is no sud- 
 den jar perceptible when, in the midst of his ordi- 
 nary discourse, one chances upon these passages of 
 essential beauty; perfect continuity of texture is 
 characteristic of his work. This perfect con- 
 tinuity of texture illustrates both the all-pervasive 
 fineness and nobleness of ]S"ewman's temper, which 
 constantly holds the elements of moral and spir- 
 itual beauty in solution, and which imprints a cer- 
 tain distinction upon even the commonplace, and 
 also the flexibility and elasticity of his style, 
 which enables him with such perfect gradation of 
 effect to change imperceptibly from the lofty to 
 
 1 Letters, II, 476. 
 
94 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 tlie common. An admirable example of this ex- 
 quisite gradation of values and continuity of texture 
 may be found in tbe third chapter of Newman's 
 Rise and Progress of Universities, where he de- 
 scribes Athens and the region round about as the 
 ideal site for a university. Alike in the earlier 
 paragraphs that are merely expository, and in the 
 later ones that portray the beauty of Attica, his 
 style is simple and easily colloquial ; and when 
 from the splendid imaginative picture that his 
 descriptive sentences call up, he turns again sud- 
 denly to exposition, the transition causes no per- 
 ceptible jar. The same flexibility and smoothness 
 of style is exemplified in a passage in the third 
 of the discourses on University Teaching, where he 
 defines his conception of the Science of Theology, 
 In this passage, the change from a scientific expla- 
 nation of the duties of the theologian to the almost 
 impassioned eloquence of the ascription of good- 
 ness and might to the Deity is effected with no 
 shock or sense of discontinuity. 
 
 In its freedom from artificiality and in its perfect 
 sincerity, Newman's style contrasts noticeably 
 with the style of a great rhetorician from whom he 
 nevertheless took many hints — De Quincey. Of 
 his careful study of De Quincey's style there can 
 be no question. In the passage on the Deity, to 
 which reference has just been made, there are un- 
 mistakable reminiscences of De Quincey in the 
 iteration of emphasis on an important word, in the 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 95 
 
 frequent use of inversions, in the rise and fall of 
 the periods, and, indeed, in the subtle rhythmic 
 effects throughout. The piece of writing, how- 
 ever, where the likeness to De Quincey and the 
 imitation of his manner and music are most evident 
 is the sermon on the Fitness of the Glories of Mary, 
 — that piece of Newman's prose, it should be noted, 
 which is least defensible against the charge of arti- 
 ficiality and undue ornateness. A passage near the 
 close of the sermon best illustrates the points in 
 question: "And therefore she died in private. It 
 became Him, who died for the world, to die in the 
 world's sight; it became the Great Sacrifice to be 
 lifted up on high, as a light that could not be hid. 
 But she, the Lily of Eden, who had always dwelt 
 out of the sight of man, fittingly did she die in the 
 garden's shade, and amid the sweet flowers in 
 which she had lived. Her departure made no 
 noise in the world. The Church went about her 
 common duties, preaching, converting, suffering. 
 There were persecutions, there was fleeing from 
 place to place, there were martyrs, there were tri- 
 umphs. At length the rumour spread abroad that 
 the Mother of God was no longer upon earth. 
 Pilgrims went to and fro; they sought for her 
 relics, but they found them not; did she die at 
 Ephesus? or did she die at Jerusalem? reports 
 varied; but her tomb could not be pointed out, or 
 if it was found, it was open; and instead of her 
 pure and fragrant body, there was a growth of 
 
96 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 lilies from the earth which she had touched. So 
 inquirers went home marvelling, and waiting for 
 further light." ^ 
 
 Though the cadences of Newman^s prose are 
 rarely as marked as here, a subtle musical beauty 
 runs elusively through it all. Kot that there is 
 any of the sing-song of pseudo-poetic prose. The 
 cadences are always wide-ranging and delicately 
 shifting, with none of the halting iteration and 
 feeble sameness of half-metrical work. Moreover, 
 the rhythms, subtly pervasive as they are, and 
 even symbolic of the mood of the passage as they 
 often prove to be, never compel direct recognition, 
 but act merely as a mass of undistinguished under- 
 and over-tones like those which give to a human 
 voice depth and tenderness and suggestiveness. 
 
 Newman understood perfectly the symbolic 
 value of rhythm and the possibility of imposing 
 upon a series of simple words, by delicately sensi- 
 tive adjustment, a power over the feelings and the 
 imagination like that of an incantation. Several 
 of the passages already quoted or referred to illus- 
 trate his instinctive adaptation of cadence to mean- 
 ing and tone ; another passage, in which this same 
 adaptation is exemplified, occurs towards the close 
 of the Apologia, where Newman describes the ap- 
 parent moral chaos in human history. For subtlety 
 of modulation, however, and symbolic suggestive- 
 ness, perhaps the tender leave-taking with which 
 
 1' Discourses to Mixed Congregations, ed. 1892, p. 373. 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 97 
 
 the Apologia concludes is the most beautiful piece 
 of prose that Newman has written : " I have closed 
 this history of myself with St. Philip's name upon 
 St. Philip's feast-day; and having done so, to 
 whom can I more suitably offer it, as a memorial 
 of affection and gratitude, than to St. Philip's sons, 
 my dearest brothers of this House, the Priests 
 of the Birmingham Oratory, Ambrose St. John, 
 Henry Austin Mills, Henry Bittleston, Edward 
 Caswall, William Paine Neville, and Henry Igna- 
 tius Dudley Eider, who have been so faithful to 
 me J who have been so sensitive of my needs; who 
 have been so indulgent to my failings; who have 
 carried me through so many trials; who have 
 grudged no sacrifice, if I have asked for it; who 
 have been so cheerful under discouragements of 
 my causing; who have done so many good works, 
 and let me have the credit of them; — with whom 
 I have lived so long, with whom I hope to die. 
 
 " And to you especially, dear Ambrose St. John, 
 whom God gave me, when He took every one else 
 away; who are the link between my old life and 
 my new ; who have now for twenty-one years been 
 so devoted to me, so patient, so zealous, so tender; 
 who have let me lean so hard upon you ; who have 
 watched me so narrowly ; who have never thought 
 of yourself, if I was in question. 
 
 "And in you I gather up and bear in memory 
 those familiar, affectionate companions and coun- 
 sellors, who, in Oxford, were given to me, one 
 
&8 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 after anotlier, to be my daily solace and relief; and 
 all those others, of great name and high example, 
 who were my thorough friends, and showed me 
 true attachment in times long past ; and also those 
 many younger men, whether I knew them or not, 
 who have never been disloyal to me by word or 
 deed; and of all these, thus various in their rela- 
 tions to me, those more especially who have since 
 joined the Catholic Church. 
 
 "And I earnestly pray for this whole company, 
 with a hope against hope, that all of us, who once 
 were so united, and so happy in our union, may 
 even now be brought at length, by the Power of 
 the Divine Will, into One Fold and under One 
 Shepherd." 
 
 VI 
 
 The careful gradation of values in Newman^ s 
 style and the far-reaching sweep of his periods 
 connect themselves closely with another of his 
 noteworthy characteristics — his breadth of han- 
 dling. He manipulates with perfect ease and pre- 
 cision vast masses of facts, and makes them all 
 contribute with unerring cooperation to the pro- 
 duction of a single effect. However minute his 
 detail, — and his liking for concreteness which 
 will be presently illustrated often incites him to 
 great minuteness, — he is careful not to confuse 
 his composition, destroy the perspective, or lose 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 99 
 
 sight of total effect. The largeness of his manner 
 and the certainty of his handling place him at 
 once among really great constructive artists. 
 
 Against this assertion it may be urged that in 
 his fiction it is just this breadth of effect and con- 
 structive skill that are most noticeably lacking; 
 that each of his novels, whatever its merits in 
 places, is unsuccessful as a whole, and leaves a 
 blurred impression. This must at once be granted. 
 But, after all, it is in his theoretical, or moral, or 
 historical work that the real Newman is to be 
 found; in such work he is much more himself, 
 much more thoroughly alive and efficient than in 
 his stories, which, though cleverly turned out, 
 were, after all, things by the way, were amateurish 
 in execution, and never completely called forth his 
 strength. Moreover, even in his novels, we find 
 occasionally the integrating power of his imagina- 
 tion remarkably illustrated. The description in 
 Callista of the invading and ravaging locusts is ad- 
 mirably sure in its treatment of detail and even 
 and impressive in tone; the episode of Gurta's 
 madness is powerfully conceived, is swift and sure 
 in its action, and is developed with admirable sub- 
 ordination and colouring of detail and regard to 
 climax. 
 
 On the whole, however, it must be granted that 
 in his fiction Newman's sense of total effect and 
 his constructive skill are least conspicuous. In 
 his abstract discussions they never fail him. First 
 
100 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 and foremost, they show themselves in the plan of 
 each work as a whole. The treatment is invariably 
 symmetrical and exhaustive ; part answers to part 
 with the precision and the delicacy of adjustment 
 of a work of art. Each part is conscious of the 
 whole and has a vitally loyal relation to it, so that 
 the needs and purposes of the whole organism seem 
 present as controlling and centralizing instincts in 
 every chapter, paragraph, and sentence. 
 
 In his use of elaborate illustrations for the sake 
 of securing concreteness and sensuous beauty, 
 Newman shows this same integrating power of 
 imagination. In the long illustrations, which 
 often take almost the proportions of episodes in 
 the epical progress of his argument or exposition, 
 the reader has no sense of bewilderment or uncer- 
 tainty of aim ; the strength of Newman's mind and 
 purpose subdues his endlessly diverse material, 
 and compels it into artistic coherence and vital 
 unity ; all details are coloured in harmony with the 
 dominant tone of the piece, and reenforce a pre- 
 determined mood. When a reader commits him- 
 self to one of Newman's discussions, he must 
 resign himself to him body and soul, and be pre- 
 pared to live and move and have his being in the 
 medium of Newman's thought, and, moreover, in 
 the special range of thought, and the special mood, 
 that this particular discussion provokes. Perhaps 
 this omnipresence of Newman in the minutest de- 
 tails of each discussion becomes ultimately to the 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 101 
 
 careful student of his writing the most convincing 
 proof of the largeness of his mind, of the intensity 
 of his conception, and of the vigour and vitality of 
 his imagination. 
 
 It may be urged that the copiousness of Newman 
 at times becomes wearisome ; that he is over-liberal 
 of both explanation and illustration; and that his 
 style, though never exuberant in ornament, is some- 
 times annoyingly luminous, and blinds with excess 
 of light. This is probably the point in which 
 Newman's style is most open to attack. It is a 
 cloyingly explicit, rather than a stimulatingly 
 suggestive, style ; it does almost too much for the 
 reader, and is almost inconsiderately generous. 
 Yet these qualities of his style are so intimately 
 connected with its peculiar personal charm that 
 they can hardly be censured. And it may be 
 noted that so strenuous an advocate of the austere 
 style as Walter Pater has instanced Newman's 
 Idea of a University as an example of " the perfect 
 handling of a theory." 
 
 One characteristic of the purely suggestive style 
 is certainly to be found in Newman's writing, — 
 great beauty and vigour of phrase. This fact is 
 the more noteworthy because a writer who, like 
 Newman, is impressive in the mass, and excels in 
 securing breadth of effect, very often lacks the 
 ability to strike out memorable epigrams. A few 
 quotations, brought together at random, will show 
 what point and terseness Newman could command 
 
102 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 when he chose. " Ten thousand difficulties do not 
 make a doubt." "Great things are done by devo- 
 tion to one idea." "Calculation never made a 
 hero." "All aberrations are founded on, and have 
 their life in, some truth or other." "Great acts 
 take time." "A book after all cannot make a 
 stand against the wild living intellect of man." 
 "To be converted in partnership." "It is not at 
 all easy (humanly speaking) to wind up an Eng- 
 lishman to a dogmatic level." "Paper logic." 
 "One is not at all pleased when poetry, or elo- 
 quence, or devotion is considered as if chiefly in- 
 tended to feed syllogisms." "Here below to live 
 is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed 
 often." In terseness and sententiousness these 
 utterances could hardly be surpassed by the most 
 acrimonious searcher after epigram, though of 
 course they have not the glitter of paradox to 
 which modern coiners of phrases aspire. 
 
 Of wit there is very little to be found in New- 
 man's writings; it is not the natural expression of 
 his temperament. Wit is too dryly intellectual, 
 too external and formal, too little vital, to suit 
 Newman's mental habit. To the appeal of humour 
 he was distinctly more open. It is from the 
 humorous incongruities of imaginary situations 
 that his irony secures its most persuasive effects. 
 Moreover, whenever he is not necessarily preoccu- 
 pied with the tragically serious aspects of life and 
 of history, or forced by his subject-matter, and 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 103 
 
 audience, into a formally restrained manner and 
 method, he has, in treating any topic, that urbanity 
 and half -playful kindliness that come from a large- 
 minded and almost tolerant recognition of the 
 essential imperfections of life and human nature. 
 The mood of the man of the world, sweetened and 
 ennobled, and enriched by profound knowledge 
 and deep feeling and spiritual seriousness, gives to 
 much of Newman's work its most distinctive note. 
 When he is able to be thoroughly colloquial, this 
 mood and this tone can assert themselves most 
 freely, and the result is a style through which a 
 gracious kindliness, which is never quite humour, 
 and which yet possesses all its elements, diffuses 
 itself pervasively and persuasively. Throughout 
 the Rise and Progress of Universities this tone is 
 traceable, and, to take a specific example, it is 
 largely to its influence that the description of 
 Athens, in the third chapter, owes its peculiar 
 charm. What can be more deliciously incongruous 
 than the agent of a London " mercantile firm " and 
 the Acropolis? or more curiously ill-mated than 
 his standards of valuation and the qualities of the 
 Grecian landscape? Yet how little malicious is 
 Newman's use of this incongruity or dispropor- 
 tion, and how unsuspiciously the "agent of a Lon- 
 don Company " ministers to the quiet amusement 
 of the reader, and also helps to heighten, by con- 
 trast, the effect of beauty and romance and mystery 
 that Newman is aiming at. 
 
104 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 Several allusions have already been made to 
 Newman's liking for concreteness, and in an 
 earlier paragraph his distrust of the abstract was 
 described and illustrated at length. These predi- 
 lections of his have left their unmistakable mark 
 on his style in ways more technical than those that 
 have thus far been noted. His vocabulary is, for 
 a scholar, exceptionally idiomatic and unliterary; 
 the most ordinary and unparsable turns of every- 
 day speech are inwrought into the texture of his 
 style. In the Apologia he speaks of himself in 
 one place as having had " a lounging, free-and-easy 
 way of carrying things on," and the phrase both 
 defines and illustrates one characteristic of his 
 style. Idioms that have the crude force of popular 
 speech, the vitality without the vulgarity of slang, 
 abound in his writings. Of his increasingly clear 
 recognition, in 1839, of the weakness of the Angli- 
 can position, he says : " The Via Media was an im- 
 possible idea; it was what I had called 'standing 
 on one leg.'" In describing his loss of control 
 over his party in 1840 he declares : " I never had 
 a strong wrist, but at the very time when it was 
 most needed, the reins had broken in my hands." 
 Of the ineradicableness of evil in human nature, he 
 exclaims: "You do but play a sort of 'hunt the 
 slipper, ' with the fault of our nature, till you go to 
 Christianity." Illustrations of this idiomatic and 
 homely phrasing might be endlessly multiplied. 
 Moreover, to the concreteness of colloquial phras- 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 105 
 
 ing, Newman adds the concreteness of the specific 
 word. Other things being equal, he prefers the 
 name of the species to that of the genus, and the 
 name of the class to that of the species; he is 
 always urged forward towards the individual and 
 the actual; his mind does not lag in the region of 
 abstractions and formulas, but presses past the 
 general term, or abstraction, or law, to the image 
 or the example, and into the tangible, glowing, 
 sensible world of fact. His imagery, though never 
 obtrusive, is almost lavishly present, and though 
 never purely decorative, is often very beautiful. 
 It is so inevitable, however, springs so organically 
 from the thought and the mood of the moment, 
 that the reader accepts it unmindfully, and is con- 
 scious only of grasping, easily and securely, the 
 writer's meaning. He must first look back through 
 the sentences and study the style in detail before 
 he will come to realize its continual, but decisive, 
 divergence from the literal and commonplace, and 
 its essential freshness and distinction. 
 
 On occasion, of course, Newman uses elaborate 
 figures; but commonly for purposes of exposition 
 or persuasion. In such cases the reader may well 
 note the thoroughness with which the figure adjusts 
 itself to every turn and phase of the thought, and 
 the surprising omnipresence and suggestiveness of 
 the tropical phrasing. These qualities of New- 
 man's style are illustrated in the following passage 
 from the Development of Christian Doctrine : — 
 
106 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 " Whatever be the risk of corruption from inter- 
 course with the world around, such a risk must be 
 encountered if a great idea is duly to be under- 
 stood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. 
 It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles 
 into perfection and supremacy. Nor does it escape 
 the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, 
 nor does it remain truer to itself, and with a better 
 claim to be considered one and the same, though 
 externally protected from vicissitude and change. 
 It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is 
 clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly 
 be made of this image, it does not apply to the 
 history of a philosophy or belief, which, on the 
 contrary, is more equable, and purer, and stronger, 
 when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. 
 It necessarily rises out of an existing state of 
 things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its 
 vital element needs disengaging from what is for- 
 eign and temporary, and is employed in efforts 
 after freedom which become more vigorous and 
 hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are 
 no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. 
 At first no one knows what it is, or what it is 
 worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; 
 it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the 
 ground under it, and feels its way. From time 
 to time, it makes essays which fail, and are in con- 
 sequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which 
 way to go ; it wavers, and at length strikes out in 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 107 
 
 one definite direction. In time it enters upon 
 strange territory ; points of controversy alter their 
 bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers 
 and hopes appear in new relations ; and old princi- 
 ples reappear under new forms. It changes with 
 them in order to remain the same. In a higher 
 world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to 
 change, and to be perfect is to have changed 
 often." ^ The image of the river pervades this pas- 
 sage throughout, and yet is never obtrusive and 
 never determines or even constrains the progress of 
 the thought. The imagery simply seems to insinu- 
 ate the ideas into the reader's mind with a certain 
 novelty of appeal and half-sensuous persuasiveness. 
 Another passage of much this kind has already 
 been quoted, where Newman describes the advent- 
 urous investigator scaling the crags of truth. ^ 
 
 Closely akin to this use of figures is Newman's 
 generous use of examples and illustrations. What- 
 ever be the principle he is discussing, he is not 
 content till he has realized it for the reader in 
 tangible, visible form, until he has given it the 
 cogency and intensity of appeal that only sensa- 
 tions or images possess. In all these ways, then, 
 by his idiomatic and colloquial phrasing, by his 
 specific vocabulary, by his delicately adroit use of 
 metaphors, by his carefully elaborated imagery, 
 and by his wealth of examples and illustrations, 
 
 1 Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. 1891, pp. 39-40. 
 
 2 See above, p. 79. 
 
108 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 Newman keeps resolutely close to tlie concrete, and 
 imparts everywhere to his style warmth, vividness, 
 colour, convincing actuality. 
 
 VII 
 
 It remains to suggest briefly Newman's relation 
 to what was most characteristic in the thought and 
 feeling of his times. Without any attempt at a 
 technical analysis of his doctrine or at a special 
 study of his theorizing in religion and philosophy, 
 it will be possible to connect him, by virtue of cer- 
 tain temperamental characteristics, and certain 
 prevailing modes of conceiving life, with what was 
 most distinctive in the literature of the early part 
 of the century. Interpreted most searchingly, his 
 early Anglicanism and his later Catholicism were 
 peculiar expressions of that Komantic spirit which 
 realized itself with such splendour and power in 
 the best and most vital literature of his day and 
 generation. 
 
 Perhaps the most general formula for the work 
 of English literature during the first quarter of the 
 present century is the rediscovery and vindication 
 of the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth 
 century had been to order, and to systematize, and 
 to name; its favourite methods had been analysis 
 and generalization. It asked for no new experi- 
 ence; it sought only to master and reduce to for- 
 mulas, and to find convenient labels for what 
 
 I 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 109 
 
 experience it already possessed. It was perpetu- 
 ally in searcli of standards and canons ; it was con- 
 ventional through and through; and its men felt 
 secure from the ills of time only when sheltered 
 under some ingenious artificial construction of rule 
 and precedent. Whatever lay beyond the scope of 
 their analysis and defied their laws, they disliked 
 and dreaded. The outlying regions of mystery 
 which hem life in on every side, are inaccessible 
 to the intellect and irreducible in terms of its 
 laws, were strangely repellent to them, and from 
 such shadowy vistas they resolutely turned their 
 eyes and fastened them on the solid ground at 
 their feet. The familiar bustle of the town, the 
 thronging streets of the city, the gay life of the 
 drawing-room, and coffee-house, and play-house; 
 or the more exalted life of Parliament and Court, 
 the intrigues of State-chambers, the manoeuvres of 
 the battle-field; the aspects of human activity, 
 wherever collective man in his social capacity 
 goes through the orderly and comprehensible 
 changes of his ceaseless pursuit of worldly happi- 
 ness and worldly success ; these were the subjects 
 that for the men of the eighteenth century had 
 absorbing charm : in seeking to master this intri- 
 cate play of forces, to fathom the motives below 
 it, to tabulate its experiences, to set up standards 
 to guide the individual successfully through the 
 intricacies of this commonplace, every-day world, 
 they spent their utmost energy, and to these tasks 
 
110 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 they instinctively limited themselves. In poetry, 
 it was a generalized view of life that they aimed 
 at, a semi-philosophical representation of man's 
 nature and actions. Pope, the typical poet of the 
 century, "stooped to truth and moralized his 
 song." Dr. Johnson, the most authoritative critic 
 of the century, taught that the poet should "re- 
 mark general properties and large appearances 
 . . . and must neglect the minuter discrimina- 
 tions, which one may have remarked, and another 
 have neglected, or those characteristics which are 
 alike obvious to vigilance and carelessness." In 
 prose, the same moralizing and generalizing ten- 
 dencies prevailed, and found their most adequate 
 and thorough-going expression in the abstract and 
 pretentiously latinized style of Dr. Johnson. 
 
 Everywhere thought gave the law; the senses 
 and the imagination were kept jealously in subor- 
 dination. The abstract, the typical, the general 
 — these were everywhere exalted at the expense 
 of the image, the specific experience, the vital 
 fact. In religion, the same tendencies showed 
 themselves. Orthodoxy and Deism alike were 
 mechanical in their conception of Nature and of 
 God. Both Free-thinkers and Apologists tried to 
 systematize religious experience, and to rationalize 
 theology. In the pursuit of historical evidences 
 and of logical demonstrations of the truth or falsity 
 of religion, genuine religious emotion was almost 
 neglected, or was actually condemned. Enthusi- 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER m 
 
 asm was distrusted or abhorred; an enthusiast was a 
 madman. Intense feeling of all kinds was regarded 
 askance, and avoided as irrational, unsettling, prone 
 to disarrange systems, and to overturn standards, 
 and burst the bonds of formulas. 
 
 It was to this limited manner of living life and 
 of conceiving of life that the great movement 
 which, for lack of a better name, may be called 
 the Romantic Movement, was to put an end. The 
 Romanticists sought to enrich life with new emo- 
 tions, to conquer new fields of experience, to come 
 into imaginative touch with far distant times, to 
 give its due to the encompassing world of dark- 
 ness and mystery, and even to pierce through the 
 darkness in the hope of finding, at the heart of 
 the mystery, a transcendental world of infinite 
 beauty and eternal truth. A keener sense of the 
 value of life penetrated them and stirred them into 
 imaginative sympathy with much that had left the 
 men of the eighteenth century unmoved. They 
 found in the naive life of Nature and animals and 
 children picturesqueness and grace that were want- 
 ing in the sophisticated life of the " town " ; they 
 delighted in the mysterious chiaroscuro of the 
 Middle Ages, in its rich blazonry of passion, and 
 its ever-changing spectacular magnificence; they 
 looked forward with ardour into the future, and 
 dreamed dreams of the progress of man; they 
 opened their hearts to the influences of the spir- 
 itual world, and religion became to them some- 
 
112 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 thing more than respectability and morality. In 
 every way they endeavoured to give some new 
 zest to life, to impart to it some fine novel flavour, 
 to attain to some exquisite new experience. They 
 sought this new experience imaginatively in the 
 past, with Scott and Southey ; they sought it with 
 fierce insistence in foreign lands, following Byron, 
 and in the wild exploitation of individual fancy 
 and caprice; they sought it with Coleridge and 
 Wordsworth through the revived sensitiveness of 
 the spirit and its intuitions of a transcendental 
 world of absolute reality; they sought Ig with 
 Shelley in the regions of the vast inane. 
 
 Now it was in the midst of these restless con- 
 ditions and under the influence of all this new 
 striving and aspiration that Newman's youth and 
 most impressionable years of development were 
 spent, and he took colour and tone from his epoch 
 to a degree that has often been overlooked. His 
 work, despite its reactionary character, indeed, 
 partly because of it, is a genuine expression of 
 the Eomantic spirit, and can be understood only 
 when thus interpreted and brought into relation 
 with the great tendencies of thought and feeling of 
 the early part of our century. Of his direct in- 
 debtedness to Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, 
 he has himself made record in the Apologia and 
 in his Autobiographical Sketch.^ But far more im- 
 
 1 Apologia, ed. 1890, p. 96. 
 
 2 Letters and Correspondence, I, 18. 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 113 
 
 portant than the influence of any single man was 
 the penetrating and determining action upon him 
 of the Eomantic atmosphere, overcharged as it 
 was with intense feeling and tingling with new 
 thought. The results of this action may be traced 
 throughout his temperament and in all his work. 
 
 Mediaevalism, as we have seen, was a distinctive 
 note of the Eomantic spirit, and, certainly, New- 
 man was intensely alive to the beauty and the 
 poetic charm of the life of the Middle Ages. One 
 is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great 
 mediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury and heroically striving to remodel modern life 
 in harmony with his temperamental needs. His 
 imagination was possessed with the Eomantic vision 
 of the greatness of the mediaeval Church, — of its 
 splendour and pomp and dignity, and of its power 
 over the hearts and lives of its members ; and the 
 Oxford movement was in its essence an attempt to 
 reconstruct the English Church in harmony with 
 this Eomantic ideal, to rouse the Church to a vital 
 realization of its own great traditions, and to re- 
 store to it the prestige and the dominating position 
 it had had in the past. As Scott's imagination 
 was fascinated with the picturesque parapherualia 
 of feudalism, — with its jousts, and courts of love, 
 and its coats of mail and buff -jerkins, — so New- 
 man's imagination was captivated by the gorgeous 
 ritual and ceremonial, the art and architecture of 
 medissval Christianity, and found in them the sym- 
 
114 NEWMAN AS A PROSE- WRITER 
 
 bols of the spirit of mystery and awe which was 
 for him the essentially religious spirit, and of the 
 mystical truths of which revealed religion was 
 made up. The Church, as Newman found it, was 
 Erastian and worldly; it was apt to regard itself 
 as merely an ally of the State for the maintenance 
 of order and spread of morality; it was coldly 
 rational in belief and theology, and prosaic in its 
 conception of religious truth and of its own posi- 
 tion and functions. Newman sought to revive in 
 the Church a mediaeval faith in its own divine mis- 
 sion and the intense spiritual consciousness of the 
 Middle Ages; he aimed to restore to religion its 
 mystical character, to exalt the sacramental sys- 
 tem as the divinely appointed means for the sal- 
 vation of souls, and to impose once more on men's 
 imaginations the mighty spell of a hierarchical 
 organization, the direct representative of God in 
 the world's affairs. Such was the mediaeval ideal 
 to which he devoted himself. Both he and Scott 
 substantially ruined themselves through their 
 medisevalism. Scott's luckless attempt was to 
 place his private and family life upon a feudal 
 basis and to give it mediaeval colour and beauty; 
 Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic, 
 but more intrinsically hopeless task, — that of re- 
 creating the whole English Church in harmony 
 with mediaeval conceptions. 
 
 Before Newman, Keble had already conceived of 
 the English Church in this imaginative spirit. In 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 115 
 
 one of his Essays, Newman describes how Keble 
 had made the Church "poetical," had "kindled 
 hearts towards it, " and by " his happy magic " had 
 thrown upon its ritual, offices, and servants a 
 glamour and beauty of which they had for many 
 generations been devoid. It was to the continu- 
 ance and the furtherance of this process of regen- 
 eration and transfiguration that Newman devoted 
 the Tractarian movement. 
 
 But the essentially Eomantic character of the 
 new movement comes out in other ways than in 
 its idealization of the Church. The relation of 
 Newman and of his friends to Nature was closely 
 akin to that of the Eomanticists. Newman, like 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, found Nature 
 mysteriously beautiful and instinct with strange 
 significance, a divinely elaborated language where- 
 by God speaks through symbols to the human soul. 
 Keble 's Christian Tear is full of this interpreta- 
 tion of natural sights and sounds as images of 
 spiritual truth, and with this mystical conception 
 of Nature Newman was in sympathy. Nature was 
 for him as rich in its spiritual suggestiveness, as 
 for Wordsworth or Shelley, and was as truly for 
 him as for Carlyle or Goethe the visible garment 
 of God. But in interpreting the emotional value 
 of Nature Newman had recourse to a symbolism 
 drawn ready-made from Christianity. The mys- 
 tical beauty of Nature, instead of calling up in his 
 imagination a Platonic ideal world; as with Shelley, 
 
116 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 or adumbrating the world of eternal verity of Ger- 
 man transcendentalism, as with Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge, suggested the presence and power of 
 seraphs and angels. Of the angels he says, " Every 
 breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beau- 
 tiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their 
 garments, the waving of the robes of those whose 
 faces see God." Again, he asks, "What would be 
 the thoughts of a man who, when examining a 
 flower, or an herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, 
 which he treats as something so beneath him in the 
 scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was 
 in the presence of some powerful being who was 
 hidden behind the visible things he was inspecting, 
 — who, though concealing his wise hand, was giv- 
 ing them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as 
 being God's instrument for the purpose, — nay, 
 whose robe and ornaments those objects were, 
 which he was so eager to analyze? "^ 
 
 Despite the somewhat conventional symbolism 
 that pervades these passages, the mystical mood 
 in the contemplation of Nature that underlies and 
 suggests them is substantially the same that ex- 
 presses itself through other imagery in the Eo- 
 mantic poets. In his intense sensitiveness, then, 
 to the emotional value of the visible universe, 
 and in his interpretation of the beauty of hill 
 and valley and mountain and stream in terms 
 of subjective emotion, Newman may justly be 
 
 1 Apologia, p. 28. 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 117 
 
 said to have shared in the Eomantic Keturn to 
 Nature. 
 
 But in a still more important way, Newman's 
 work was expressive of the Keturn to Nature. 
 Under this term is to be included not merely the 
 fresh delight that the Eomanticists felt in the 
 splendour of the firmament and the tender beauty 
 or the sublimity of sea and land, but also their 
 eager recognition of the value of the instinctive, 
 the spontaneous, the natural in life, as opposed to 
 the artificial, the self-conscious, the systematic, 
 and the conventional. This recognition pervades 
 all the literature of the first quarter of our cen- 
 tury, and, in fact, in one form or another, is the 
 characteristic note of what is most novel in the 
 thought and the life of the time. In this Eeturn 
 to Nature Newman shared. For him, as for all 
 the Eomanticists, life itself is more than what we 
 think about life, experience is infinitely more sig- 
 nificant than our formulas for summing it up, and 
 transcends them incalculably. General terms are 
 but the makeshifts of logic and can never cope with 
 the multiplicity and the intensity of sensation and 
 feeling. Newman's elaborate justification of this 
 indictment of logic is wrought out in the Grammar 
 of Assent and in his Sermon on Implicit and Ex- 
 plicit Reason. 
 
 Throughout these discourses he pleads for those 
 vital processes of thought and feeling and intui- 
 tion which every man goes through for himself in 
 
118 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 his acquisition of concrete truth, and which he 
 can perhaps describe in but a stammering and in- 
 consequent fashion in the terms of the schoolman's 
 logic. It is by these direct, spontaneous processes, 
 Newman urges, that men reach truth in whatever 
 concrete matter they apply themselves to, and the 
 truth that they reach need be none the less true 
 because they have not the knack of setting forth 
 syllogistically their reasons for accepting it. In 
 his rejection, then, of formal demonstration as the 
 sole method for attaining truth, in his recognition 
 of the limitations of logic, and in his deep convic- 
 tion of the surpassing importance of the spontane- 
 ous and instinctive in life Newman was at one with 
 the Eomanticists, and in all these particulars he 
 shared in their Eeturn to Nature. 
 
 This insistence of Newman's on the vital char- 
 acter of truth is a point, the importance of which 
 cannot be exaggerated when the attempt is being 
 made to grasp what is essential in his psychology 
 and his ways of conceiving of life and of human 
 nature. For him truth does not exist primarily, as 
 for the formalist, in the formulas or the theorems 
 of text-books, but in the minds and the hearts of 
 living men. In these minds and hearts truth 
 grows and spreads in countless subtle ways. Its 
 appeal is through numberless other channels than 
 those of the mind. Man is for Newman primarily 
 an agent, — an acting creature, — not an intellect 
 with merely accidental relations to an outer world. 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 119 
 
 First and foremost he is a doer, a bringer about 
 of results, a realizer of hopes and ambitions and 
 ideals. He is a mass of instincts and impulses, of 
 prejudices and passions; and it is in response to 
 these mighty and ceaselessly operating springs of 
 action that he makes his way through the world 
 and subdues it to himself. Truth, then, to com- 
 mend itself to such a being, must come not merely 
 by way of the brain, but also by that of the heart; 
 it must not be a collection of abstract formulas, 
 but must be concrete and vital. If it be religious 
 truth, it must not take the form of logical demon- 
 strations, but must be beautifully enshrined in the 
 symbols of an elaborate ritual, illustrated in the 
 lives of saints and doctors, authoritative and ven- 
 erable in the creeds and liturgies of a hierarchical 
 organization, irresistibly cogent as inculcated by 
 the divinely appointed representatives of the 
 Source of all Truth. In these forms religious 
 truth may be able to impose itself upon individuals, 
 to take complete possession of them, to master 
 their minds and hearts, and to rule their lives. 
 
 But what shall be the test of such truth? How 
 shall the individual be sure of its claims? How 
 shall he choose between rival systems? Here, 
 again, Newman refuses to be content with the 
 formal and the abstract, and goes straight to life 
 itself. In the search for a criterion of truth he 
 rejects purely intellectual tests, and has recourse 
 to tests which call into activity the whole of a 
 
120 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 man's nature. It is the Illative Sense that detects 
 and distinguishes truth, and the Illative Sense is 
 simply the entire mind of the individual vigor- 
 ously grasping concrete facts with all their impli- 
 cations for the heart and for the imagination and 
 for conduct, and extracting their peculiar signifi- 
 cance. This process, by which the individual 
 searches for and attains truth in concrete matters, 
 is admirably described in the passage quoted in 
 the second chapter of the present Study, where 
 the truth-seeker's progress is likened to that of 
 a mountain-climber scaling a crag. The whole 
 nature of a man must be put into play, if truth is 
 to be won. The formal logic of the schools falls 
 short of life ; its symbols are general terms, colour- 
 less abstractions, from which all the palpitating 
 warmth and persuasiveness of real life have been 
 carefully drained. Propositions fashioned out of 
 these colourless general terms cannot by any pro- 
 cess of syllogistic jugglery be made to comprehend 
 the whole truth of a religious system. They leave 
 out inevitably what is most vital, and what is 
 therefore most intimate in its appeal to the indi- 
 vidual, — to his heart and practical instincts, and 
 his imagination. "We proceed as far indeed as 
 we can, by the logic of language, but we are 
 obliged to supplement it by the more subtle and 
 elastic logic of thought; for forms by themselves 
 prove nothing."^ "It is to the living mind that 
 
 1 Grammar of Assent, ed. 1889, p. 359. 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 121 
 
 we must look for the means of using correctly 
 principles of whatever kind."^ "In all of these 
 separate actions of the intellect, the individual is 
 supreme and responsible to himself, nay, under 
 circumstances, may be justijB.ed in opposing him- 
 self to the judgment of the whole world; though 
 he uses rules to his great advantage, as far as they 
 go, and is in consequence bound to use them."^ 
 Absolute "proof can never be furnished to us by 
 the logic of words, for as certitude is of the mind, 
 so is the act of inference which leads to it. Every 
 one who reasons is his own centre."^ The prog- 
 ress of the individual "is a living growth, not a 
 mechanism; and its instruments are mental acts, 
 not the formulas and contrivances of language."* 
 
 The foregoing analysis has tended to illustrate 
 the facts that Newman aimed to make religion an 
 intensely concrete, personal experience, and to 
 fill out the spiritual life with widely varying and 
 richly beautiful feeling; and that he also set him- 
 self everywhere, consciously and directly, against 
 the eighteenth century ideal, according to which 
 reason was the sole discoverer and arbiter of truth 
 and regulator of conduct. In these respects, New- 
 man's work was in perfect harmony with that of 
 the Eomanticists. Like them he was pleading for 
 the spontaneous, for the emotions and the imagina- 
 tion, for what is most vital in life, in opposition to 
 
 1 Grammar of Assent, ed. 1889, p. 360. s /^jV?., p. 345. 
 2J6id, p. 353. */6id.,p. 350. 
 
122 NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 
 
 the formalists, the systematizers, and the devotees 
 of logic. 
 
 In the following points, then, Newman's kinship 
 with the Romanticists is recognizable: in his im- 
 aginative sympathy with the past, in the range 
 and perspective of his historical consciousness, 
 and in his devotion to an ideal framed largely in 
 accordance with a loving reverence for mediaeval 
 life. His vein of mysticism, his imaginative sym- 
 pathy with Nature, his interpretation of Nature as 
 symbolic of spiritual truth, his rejection of reason 
 as the guide of life, and his recognition of the in- 
 adequacy of generalizations and formulas to the 
 wealth of actual life and to the intensity and va- 
 riety of personal experience, are also characteristics 
 that mark his relation to the men of his period. 
 
 Finally, his very style in the narrowest meaning 
 of the term also classes Newman among Romantic 
 writers. His debt to De Quincey has already been 
 noted. Though he is rarely, if ever, so ornate as 
 De Quincey, and though he perhaps never weaves 
 his prose into such a lustrous, shining surface 
 through the continual use of sensations and images 
 as does De Quincey in his impassioned prose, yet 
 the glowing beauty, the picture-making power, the 
 occasional imaginative splendour, the elaborate 
 swelling music of Newman's writings, place him 
 as a master of prose in the same group with De 
 Quincey, and Ruskin, and Carlyle, and part him 
 from Landor, or Macaulay, or Matthew Arnold. 
 
NEWMAN AS A PROSE-WRITER 123 
 
 No prose can more surely send quivering over 
 the nerves a sense of the shadowing mystery 
 of life, than certain of Newman's sermons, and 
 passages here and there in his Apologia and 
 in his Essays. Through the play, then, of his 
 imagination, its rhythms and beat of the wing, 
 because of the ease with which in a moment his 
 prose can carry the reader into regions of impas- 
 sioned and mystical feeling, even because of the 
 vital, intimate warmth and colour of his phrasing, 
 
 — qualities so different from the hard, external 
 glitter of Macaulay's specific, but rhetorical style, 
 
 — Newman reveals his kinship with the great 
 group of poets and prose-writers who deepened and 
 enriched the imaginative life of the early part of 
 our century. Ecclesiasticism and Academicism 
 are proverbially conservative powers. It may be 
 for this reason that the new spiritual forces of 
 Eomanticism did not renovate the Church through 
 the Oxford movement until a full generation after 
 they had made almost wholly their own the purely 
 imaginative literature and life of the English 
 nation. 
 
MATTHEW AENOLD 
 I 
 
 Admirers of Arnold's prose find it well to admit 
 frankly that his style has an unfortunate knack 
 of exciting prejudice. Emerson has somewhere 
 spoken of the unkind trick fate plays a man when 
 it gives him a strut in his gait. Here and there 
 in Arnold's prose, there is just a trace — some- 
 times more than a trace — of such a strut. He 
 condescends to his readers with a gracious elabo- 
 rateness; he is at great pains to make them feel 
 that they are his equals ; he undervalues himself 
 playfully; he assures us that "he is an unlearned 
 bellettristic trifler " ; he insists over and over again 
 that "he is an unpretending writer, without a 
 philosophy based on interdependent, subordinate, 
 and coherent principles." All this he does smil- 
 ingly ; but the smile seems to many on whom its 
 favours fall, supercilious; and the playful under- 
 valuation of self looks shrewdly like an affectation. 
 He is very debonair, — this apologetic writer, very 
 self-assured, at times even jaunty. 
 
 Stanch admirers of Arnold have always rel- 
 ished this strain in his style; they have enjoyed 
 124 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 125 
 
 its delicate challenge, the nice duplicity of its in- 
 nuendoes; they have found its insinuations and its 
 covert, satirical humour infinitely entertaining and 
 stimulating. Moreover, however seriously dis- 
 posed they may be, however exacting of all the 
 virtues from the author of their choice, they have 
 been able to reconcile their enjoyment of Arnold 
 with their serious inclinations, for they have been 
 confident that these tricks of manner implied no 
 essential or radical defect in Arnold's humanity, 
 no lack either of sincerity or of earnestness or of 
 broad sympathy. 
 
 Such admirers and interpreters of Arnold have 
 been amply justified of their confidence since the 
 publication in 1895 of Arnold's Letters. The 
 Arnold of these letters is a man the essential 
 integrity — wlwleness — of whose nature is incon- 
 testable. His sincerity, kindliness, wide-ranging 
 sympathy with all classes of men are unmistaka- 
 bly expressed on every page of his correspondence. 
 We see him having to do with people widely diverse 
 in their relations to him : with those close of kin, 
 with chance friends, with many men of business 
 or officials, with a wide circle of literary acquaint- 
 ances, with workingmen, and with foreign savants. 
 In all his intercourse the same sweet-tempered 
 frankness and the same readiness of sympathy are 
 manifest. There is never a trace of the duplicity 
 or the treacherous irony that are to be found in 
 much of his prose. 
 
126 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 Moreover, the record that these Letters contain 
 of close application to uncongenial tasks must have 
 been a revelation to many readers who have had 
 to rely upon books for their knowledge of literary 
 men. Popular caricatures of Arnold had repre- 
 sented him as " a high priest of the kid-glove per- 
 suasion," as an incorrigible dilettante, a literary 
 fop idling his time away over poetry and recom- 
 mending the parmaceti of culture as the sovereign- 
 est thing in nature for the inward bruises of the 
 spirit. This conception of Arnold, if it has at all 
 maintained itself, certainly cannot survive the 
 revelations of the Letters. The truth is beyond 
 cavil that he was among the most self-sacrificingly 
 laborious men of his time. 
 
 For a long period of years Arnold held the post 
 of inspector of schools. Day after day, and week 
 after week, he gave up one of the finest of minds, 
 one of the most sensitive of temperaments, one of 
 the most delicate of literary organizations, to the 
 drudgery of examining in its minutest details the 
 work of the schools in such elementary subjects as 
 mathematics and grammar. On January 7, 1863, 
 he writes to his mother, " I am now at the work I 
 dislike most in the world — looking over and mark- 
 ing examination papers. I was stopped last week 
 by my eyes, and the last year or two these sixty 
 papers a day of close handwriting to read have, I 
 am sorry to say, much tried my eyes for the time." 
 Two years later he laments again: "I am being 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 127 
 
 driven furious by seven hundred closely written 
 grammar papers, which I have to look over." 
 During these years he was holding the Chair of 
 Poetry at Oxford, and he had long since estab- 
 lished his reputation as one of the foremost of the 
 younger poets. Yet for a livelihood he was forced 
 still to endure — and he endured them till within 
 a few years of his death in 1888 — the exactions 
 of this wearing and exasperating drudgery. More- 
 over, despite occasional outbursts of impatience, 
 he gave himself to the work freely, heartily, and 
 effectively. He was sent on several occasions to 
 the Continent to examine and report on foreign 
 school systems ; his reports on German and French 
 education show immense diligence of investigation, 
 a thorough grasp of detail, and patience and per- 
 sistence in the acquisition of facts that in and for 
 themselves must have been unattractive and un- 
 rewarding. 
 
 The record of this severe labour is to be found 
 in Arnold's Letters, and it must dispose once for 
 all of any charge that he was a mere dilettante 
 and coiner of phrases. Through a long period of 
 years he was working diligently, wearisomely, in 
 minutely practical ways, to better the educational 
 system of England; he was persistently striving 
 both to spread sounder ideals of elementary edu- 
 cation and to make more effective the system actu- 
 ally in vogue. And thus, unpretentiously and 
 laboriously, he was serving the cause of sweetness 
 
128 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 and light as well as through his somewhat debonair 
 contributions to literature. 
 
 In another way his Letters have done much to 
 reveal the innermost core of Arnold's nature, and 
 so, ultimately, to explain the genesis of his prose. 
 They place it beyond doubt that in all he wrote 
 Arnold had an underlying purpose, clearly appre- 
 hended and faithfully pursued. In 1867, in a 
 letter to his mother, he says: "I more and more 
 become conscious of having something to do and 
 of a resolution to do it. . . . "Whether one lives 
 long or not, to be less and less personal in one's 
 desires and workings is the great matter." In a 
 letter of 1863 he had already written in much the 
 same strain: "However, one cannot change Eng- 
 lish ideas as much as, if I live, I hope to change 
 them, without saying imperturbably what one 
 thinks, and making a good many people uncom- 
 fortable." And in a letter of the same year he 
 exclaims : " It is very animating to think that one 
 at last has a chance of getting at the English pub- 
 lic. Such a public as it is, and such a work as one 
 wants to do with it." A work to do! The phrase 
 recalls Cardinal Newman and the well-known 
 anecdote of his Sicilian illness, when through all 
 the days of greatest danger he insisted that he 
 should get well because he had a work to do in 
 England. Despite Arnold's difference in tempera- 
 ment from Newman and the widely dissimilar task 
 he proposed to himself, he was no less in earnest 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 129 
 
 than Newman, and no less convinced of the impor- 
 tance of his task. 
 
 The occasional supercilious jauntiness of Ar- 
 nold's style, then, need not trouble even the most 
 conscientious of his admirers. To many of his 
 readers it is in itself, as has been already sug- 
 gested, delightfully stimulating. Others, the 
 more conscientious folk and perhaps also the 
 severer judges of literary quality, are bound to 
 find it artistically a blemish; but they need not 
 at any rate regard it as implying any radical de- 
 fect in Arnold's humanity or as the result of cheap 
 cynicism or of inadequate sympathy. In point of 
 fact, the true account of the matter seems rather 
 to lie in the paradox that the apparent supercili- 
 ousness of Arnold's style comes from the very 
 intensity of his moral earnestness, and that the 
 imperfections of his manner are often the result 
 of an over-conscientious desire to conciliate. 
 
 II 
 
 What, then, was Arnold's controlling purpose 
 in his prose-writing? What was the " work " that 
 he "wanted to do with the English public"? In 
 trying to find answers to these questions recourse 
 will first be had to stray phrases in Arnold's 
 prose; these phrases will give incidental glimpses, 
 from different points of view, of his central ideal ; 
 later, their fragmentary suggestions will be brought 
 
130 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 together into something like a comprehensive 
 formula. 
 
 In the lectures on Celtic Literature Arnold points 
 out, in closing, that it has been his aim to lead 
 Englishmen to "reunite themselves with their 
 better mind and with the world through science " ; 
 that he has sought to help them " conquer the hard 
 unintelligence, which was just then their bane; to 
 supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the 
 variety, fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual 
 life." In the Preface to his first volume of Essays 
 he explains that he is trying "to pull out a few 
 more stops in that powerful, but at present some- 
 what narrow-toned organ, the modern English- 
 man." In Culture and Anarchy he assures us that 
 his object is to convince men of the value of " cult- 
 ure"; to incite them to the pursuit of "perfec- 
 tion " ; to help " make reason and the will of God 
 prevail." And, again, in the same work he de- 
 clares that he is striving to intensify throughout 
 England " the impulse to the development of the 
 whole man, to connecting and harmonizing all parts 
 of him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their 
 chance." 
 
 These phrases give, often with capricious pictu- 
 resqueness, hints of the prevailing intention with 
 which Arnold writes. They may well be supple- 
 mented by a series of phrases in which, in simi- 
 larly picturesque fashion, he finds fault with life 
 as it actually exists in England, with the indi- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 131 
 
 vidual Englishman as he encounters him from day 
 to day; these phrases, through their critical im- 
 plications, also reveal the purpose that is always 
 present in Arnold's mind, when he addresses his 
 countrymen. "Provinciality," Arnold points out 
 as a widely prevalent and injurious characteristic 
 of English literature ; it argues a lack of centrality, 
 carelessness of ideal excellence, undue devotion to 
 relatively unimportant matters. Again, "arbi- 
 trariness " and " eccentricity " are noticeable traits 
 both of English literature and scholarship ; Arnold 
 finds them everywhere deforming Professor New- 
 man's interpretations of Homer, and he further 
 comments on them as in varying degrees " the great 
 defect of English intellect — the great blemish of 
 English literature." In religion he takes special 
 exception to the "loss of totality" that results 
 from sectarianism ; this is the penalty, Arnold con- 
 tends, that the Nonconformist pays for his hos- 
 tility to the established church; in his pursuit 
 of his own special enthusiasm the Nonconformist 
 becomes, like Ephraim, "a wild ass alone by 
 himself." 
 
 From all these brief quotations this much at 
 least is plain, that what Arnold is continually 
 recommending is the complete development of the 
 human type, and that what he is condemning is 
 departure from some finely conceived ideal of 
 human excellence — from some scheme of human 
 nature in which all its powers have full and har- 
 
132 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 monious play. The various phrases that have been 
 quoted, alike the positive and the negative ones, 
 imply, as Arnold's continual purpose in his prose- 
 writiugs, the recommendation of this ideal of 
 human excellence and the illustration of the evils 
 that result from its neglect. Evidently, his im- 
 agination is haunted by some symmetrical scheme 
 of character — by some exquisitely conceived pat- 
 tern of perfection — wherein manners and know- 
 ledge, and passion and religion, all have their due 
 value, and work together for righteousness. With 
 this scheme in mind, he goes through the length 
 and breadth of England, scanning each class of 
 men he meets, and questioning how far its mem- 
 bers conform to his type. And his continual 
 purpose is to stir in the minds of his fellow- 
 countrymen as keen a sense as may be of the 
 value of this perfect type and of the dangers of 
 disregarding it. The significance and the scope 
 of this purpose will become clearer if we consider 
 some of the imperfect ideals that Arnold finds 
 operative in place of his absolute ideal, and note 
 their misleading and depraving effects. 
 
 One such partial ideal is the worship of the ex- 
 cessively practical and the relentlessly utilitarian 
 as the only things in life worth while. England 
 is a prevailingly practical nation, and our age is a 
 prevailingly practical age ; the unregenerate prod- 
 uct of this nation and age is the Philistine, and 
 against the Philistine Arnold never wearies of 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD I33 
 
 inveighing. The Philistine is the swaggering 
 enemy of the children of light, of the chosen 
 people, of those who love art and ideas disinter- 
 estedly. The Philistine cares solely for business, 
 for developing the material resources of the coun- 
 try, for starting companies, building bridges, 
 making railways, and establishing plants. The 
 machinery of life — its material organization — 
 monopolizes all his attention. He judges of life 
 by the outside, and is careless of the things of the 
 spirit. The Philistine may, of course, be religious; 
 but his religion is as materialistic as his every-day 
 existence; his heaven is a triumph of engineering 
 skill, and his ideal of future bliss is, in Sydney 
 Smith's phrase, to eat "pdtes de foie gras to the 
 sound of trumpets." Against men of this class 
 Arnold cannot show himself too cynically severe. 
 They are pitiful distortions ; the practical instincts 
 have usurped, and have destroyed the symmetry 
 and integrity of the human type. The senses and 
 the will to live are monopolizing and determine all 
 the man's energy toward utilitarian ends. The 
 power of beauty, the power of intellect and know- 
 ledge, the power of social manners, are atrophied. 
 Society is in serious danger unless men of this 
 class can be touched with a sense of their short- 
 comings ; made aware of the larger values of life ; 
 made pervious to ideas; brought to recognize the 
 importance of the things of the mind and the spirit. 
 Another partial ideal, the prevalence of which 
 
134 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 Arnold laments, is the narrowly and unintelli- 
 gently religious ideal. The middle-class English- 
 man is, according to Arnold, a natural " Hebraist " ; 
 his whole energy is spent, when he is at his best, 
 in the struggle to obey certain traditional rules of 
 morality. In the origin of these rules, or in the 
 question as to whether or no they be founded in 
 right reason, he has little or no interest. In gen- 
 eral, he is careless or contemptuous of speculation 
 and of whatever savours of philosophy. He is 
 intent upon the fulfilment of a conventional code 
 of duty. Conduct, narrowly conceived, is his only 
 concern in life. Beauty has no charm for him; 
 art, no meaning. The free play of mind in the dis- 
 interested pursuit of truth seems waste of energy 
 or even vicious self-assertion. All the bright irre- 
 sponsibility, the sparkling delight in life and in 
 thought for their own sakes, that are characteristic 
 of what Arnold calls the " Hellenistic " temper — 
 its burning eagerness to knoiu, its strenuous will 
 to be sure that its truth is really truth — all these 
 qualities and instincts seem to the Hebraist abnor- 
 mal, pagan, altogether evil. The Puritanism of the 
 seventeenth century was the almost unrestricted 
 expression of the Hebraistic temper, and from the 
 conceptions of life that were then wrought out the 
 middle classes in England have never wholly es- 
 caped. The Puritans looked out upon life with a 
 narrow vision, recognized only a few of its varied 
 interests, and provided for the needs of only a part 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 135 
 
 of man's nature. - Yet their theories and concep- 
 tions of life — theories and conceptions that were 
 limited in the first place by the age in which they 
 originated, and in the second place by a Hebraistic 
 lack of sensitiveness to the manifold charm of 
 beauty and knowledge — these limited theories and 
 conceptions have imposed themselves constrain- 
 ingly on many generations of Englishmen. To- 
 day they remain, in all their narrowness and with 
 an ever-increasing disproportion to existing con- 
 ditions, the most influential guiding principles of 
 large masses of men. Such men spend their lives 
 in a round of petty religious meetings and employ- 
 ments. They think all truth is summed up in 
 their little cut-and-dried Biblical interpretations. 
 New truth is uninteresting or dangerous. Art dis- 
 tracts from religion, and is a siren against whose 
 seductive chanting the discreet religious Ulysses 
 seals his ears. To Arnold this whole view of life 
 seems sadly mistaken, and the men who hold it 
 seem fantastic distortions of the authentic human 
 type. The absurdities and the dangers of the un- 
 restricted Hebraistic ideal he satirizes or laments 
 in Culture and Anarchy, in Literature and Dogma, 
 in God and the Bible, and in St. Paul and Prot- 
 estantism. 
 
 Still another kind of deformity arises when the 
 intellect grows self-assertive and develops over- 
 weeningly. To this kind of distortion the modern 
 man of science is specially prone j his exclusive 
 
136 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 study of material facts leads to crude, unregenerate 
 strength of intellect, and leaves him careless of the 
 value truth may have for the spirit and of its 
 glimmering suggestions of beauty. Yes, and for 
 the philosopher and the scholar, too, over-intel- 
 lectualism has its peculiar dangers. The devotee 
 of a system of thought is apt to lose touch with the 
 real values of life, and in his exorbitant desire for 
 unity and thoroughness of organization, to miss 
 the free play of vital forces that gives to life its 
 manifold charm, its infinite variety, and its ulti- 
 mate reality. Bentham and Comte are examples 
 of the evil effects of this rabid pursuit of system. 
 " Culture is always assigning to system-makers and 
 systems a smaller share in the bent of human des- 
 tiny than their friends like." As for the pedant, 
 he is merely the miser of facts, who grows with- 
 ered in hoarding the vain fragments of precious 
 ore of whose use he has lost the sense. Men of all 
 these various types offend through their fanatical 
 devotion to truth; for, indeed, as some one has in 
 recent years well said, the intellect is " but a par- 
 venu,'' and the other powers of life, despite the 
 Napoleonic irresistibleness of the new-comer, have 
 rights that deserve respect. Over-intellectualism, 
 then, like the over-development of any other 
 power, leads to disproportion and disorder. 
 
 Such being some of the partial ideals against 
 which Arnold warns his readers, what account does 
 he give of that perfect human type in all its integ- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD I37 
 
 rity, in terms of which he criticises these aberra- 
 tions or deformities? Perhaps Arnold felt that 
 any attempt at an exact and systematic definition 
 of this type would be somewhat grotesque and 
 presumptuous; at any rate, he has avoided such 
 an attempt. Still, he has recorded clearly, in 
 many passages, his ideas as regards the powers in 
 man that are essential to perfect humanity, and 
 that must all be duly recognized and developed, if 
 man is to attain in full scope what nature offers. 
 A representative passage may be quoted from the 
 lecture on Literature and Science : " When we set 
 ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the 
 building up of human life, and say that they are 
 the power of conduct, the power of intellect and 
 knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of 
 social life and manners, he [Professor Huxley] can 
 hardly deny that this scheme, though drawn in 
 rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending 
 to scientiiic exactness, does yet give a fairly true 
 representation of the matter. Human nature is 
 built up of these powers; we have the need for 
 them all. When we have rightly met and ad- 
 justed the claims for them all, we shall then be in 
 a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness 
 with Avisdom." 
 
 These same ideas are presented, under a some- 
 what different aspect and with somewhat different 
 terminology, in the first chapter of Culture and 
 Anarchy: "The great aim of culture [is] the aim 
 
138 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is 
 and to make it prevail." Culture seeks "the de- 
 termination of this question through all the voices 
 of human experience which have been heard upon 
 it, — of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, 
 as well as of religion, — in order to give a greater 
 fulness and certainty to its solution. . . . Ee- 
 ligion says: The Kingdom of God is within you; 
 and culture, in like manner, places human perfec- 
 tion in an internal condition, in the growth and 
 predominance of our humanity proper, as distin- 
 guished from our animality. It places it in the 
 ever-increasing efi&cacy and in the general har- 
 monious expansion of those gifts of thought and 
 feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, 
 and happiness of human nature. As I have said 
 on a former occasion: 'It is in making endless ad- 
 ditions to itself, in the endless expansion of its 
 powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, 
 that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. 
 To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, 
 and that is the true value of culture.' " 
 
 In such passages as these Arnold comes as near 
 as he ever comes to defining the perfect human 
 type. He does not profess to define it universally 
 and in abstract terms, for indeed he " hates " ab- 
 stractions almost as inveterately as Burke hated 
 them. He does not even describe concretely for 
 men of his own time and nation the precise equi- 
 poise of powers essential to perfection. Yet he 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 139 
 
 names these powers, suggests the ends towards 
 which they must by their joint working contribute, 
 and illustrates, through examples, the evil effects 
 of the preponderance or absence of one and another. 
 Finally, in the course of his many discussions, he 
 describes in detail the method by which the deli- 
 cate adjustment of these rival powers may be se- 
 cured in the typical man; suggests who is to be 
 the judge of the conflicting claims of these powers, 
 and indicates the process by which this judge may 
 most persuasively lay his opinions before those 
 whom he wishes to influence. The method for 
 the attainment of the perfect type is culture; the 
 censor of defective types and the judge of the 
 rival claims of the cooperant powers is the critic; 
 and the process by which this judge clarifies his 
 own ideas and enforces his opinions on others is 
 criticism, 
 
 III 
 
 We are now at the centre of Arnold's theory of 
 life and hold the key to his system of belief, so 
 far as he had a system. His reasons for attach- 
 ing to the work of the critic the importance he 
 palpably attached to it are at once apparent. 
 Criticism is the method by which the perfect type 
 of human nature is at any moment to be appre- 
 hended and kept in uncontaminate clearness of 
 outline before the popular imagination. The ideal 
 critic is the man of nicest discernment in matters 
 
140 • MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 intellectual, moral, sesthetic, social; of perfect 
 equipoise of powers; of delicately pervasive sym- 
 pathy; of imaginative insight; who grasps com- 
 prehensively the whole life of his time; who feels 
 its vital tendencies and is intimately aware of its 
 most insistent preoccupations; who also keeps his 
 orientation towards the unchanging norms of human 
 endeavour; and who is thus able to note and set 
 forth the imperfections in existing types of human 
 nature and to urge persuasively a return in essen- 
 tial particulars to the normal type. The function 
 of criticism, then, is the vindication of the ideal 
 human type against perverting influences, and Ar- 
 nold's prose-writings will for the most part be 
 found to have been inspired in one form or another 
 by a single purpose: the correction of excess in 
 some human activity and the restoration of that 
 activity to its proper place among the powers that 
 make up the ideal human type. 
 
 Culture and Anarchy (1869) was the first of 
 Arnold's books to illustrate adequately this far- 
 reaching conception of criticism. His special topic 
 is, in this case, social conditions in England. Pol- 
 iticians, he urges, whose profession it is to deal 
 with social questions, are engrossed in practical 
 matters and biassed by party considerations; they 
 lack the detachment and breadth of view to see 
 the questions at issue in their true relations to 
 abstract standards of right and wrong. They mis- 
 take means for ends, machinery for the results that 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 141 
 
 machinery is meant to secure ; they lose all sense 
 of values and exalt temporary measures into mat- 
 ters of sacred import; finally, they come to that 
 pass of ineptitude which Arnold symbolizes by the 
 enthusiasm of Liberals over the measure to enable 
 a man to marry his deceased wife's sister. What 
 is needed to correct these absurd misapprehensions 
 is the free play of critical intelligence. The critic 
 from his secure coign of vantage must examine 
 social conditions dispassionately; he must deter- 
 mine what is essentially wrong in the inner lives 
 of the various classes of men around him, and so 
 reveal the real sources of those social evils which 
 politicians are trying to remedy by external re- 
 adjustments and temporary measures. 
 
 And this is just the task that Arnold undertakes 
 in Culture and Anarchy. He sets himself to con- 
 sider English society in its length and breadth 
 with a view to discovering what is its essential 
 constitution, what are the typical classes that enter 
 into it, and what are the characteristics of these 
 classes. So far as concerns classification he ulti- 
 mately accepts, it is true, as adequate to his pur- 
 pose, the traditional division of English society 
 into upper, middle, and lower classes. But he 
 then goes on to give an analysis of each of these 
 classes that is novel, penetrating, in the highest 
 degree stimulating. He takes a typical member 
 of each class and describes him in detail, intellectu- 
 ally, morally, socially; he points out his sources 
 
142 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 of strength and his sources of weakness. He 
 compares him as a type with the abstract ideal of 
 human excellence, and notes wherein his powers 
 "fall short or exceed." He indicates the reaction 
 upon the social and political life of the nation of 
 these various defects and excesses, their inevitable 
 influence in producing social misadjustment and 
 friction. Finally, he urges that the one remedy 
 that will correct these errant social types and bring 
 them nearer to the perfect human type is culture, 
 increase in vital knowledge. 
 
 The details of Arnold's application of this con- 
 ception of culture as a remedy for the social evils 
 of the time, every reader may follow out for him- 
 self in Culture and Anarchy. One point in Arnold's 
 conception, however, is to be noted forthwith; it 
 is a crucial point in its influence on his theoriz- 
 ings. By culture Arnold means increase of know- 
 ledge ; yes, but he means something more ; culture 
 is for Arnold not merely an intellectual matter. 
 Culture is the best knowledge made operative and 
 dynamic in life and character. Knowledge must 
 be vitalized ; it must be intimately conscious of the 
 whole range of human interests; it must ulti- 
 mately subserve the whole nature of man. Con- 
 tinually, then, as Arnold is pleading for the spread 
 of ideas, for increase of light, for the acceptance 
 on the part of his fellow-countrymen of new know- 
 ledge from the most diverse sources, he is as keenly 
 alive as any one to the dangers of over-intellectual- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 143 
 
 ism. The undue development of the intellectual 
 powers is as injurious to the individual as any 
 other form of deviation from the perfect human 
 type. 
 
 This distrust of over-intellectualism is the ulti- 
 mate ground of Arnold's hostility to the claims of 
 Physical Science to primacy in modern education. 
 His ideas on the relative educational value of the 
 physical sciences and of the humanities are set 
 forth in the well-known discourse on Literature and 
 Science, Arnold is ready, no one is more ready, 
 to accept the conclusions of science on all topics 
 that fall within its range ; whatever its authenti- 
 cated spokesmen have to say upon man's origin, 
 his moral nature, his relations to his fellows, his 
 place in the physical universe, his religions, his 
 sacred books — all these utterances are to be re- 
 ceived with entire loyalty as far as they can be 
 shown to embody the results of expert scientific 
 observation and thought. But for Arnold, the 
 great importance of modern scientific truth does 
 not for a moment make clear the superiority of the 
 physical sciences over the humanities as a means 
 of educational discipline. The study of the sci- 
 ences tends merely to intellectual development, to 
 the increase of mental power; the study of litera- 
 ture, on the other hand, trains a man emotionally 
 and morally, develops his human sympathies, sen- 
 sitizes him temperamentally, rouses his imagina- 
 tion, and elicits his sense of beauty. Science puts 
 
144 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 before the student the crude facts of nature, bids 
 him accept them dispassionately, rid himself of 
 all discolouring moods as he watches the play 
 of physical force, and convert himself into pure 
 intelligence; he is simply to observe, to analyze, 
 to classify, and to systematize, and he is to go 
 through these processes continually with facts 
 that have no human quality, that come raw from 
 the great whirl of the cosmic machine. As a dis- 
 cipline, then, for the ordinary man, the study of 
 science tends not a whit towards humanization, 
 towards refinement, towards temperamental regen- 
 eration ; it tends only to develop an accurate trick 
 of the senses, fine observation, crude intellectual 
 strength. These powers are of very great impor- 
 tance; but they may also be trained in the study 
 of literature, while at the same time the student, 
 as Sir Philip Sidney long ago pointed out, is being 
 led and drawn "to as high a perfection as our 
 degenerate souls, made worse by their clay lodg- 
 ings, can be capable of." Arnold, then, with 
 characteristic anxiety for the integrity of the 
 human type, urges the superior worth to most 
 young men of a literary rather than a scientific 
 training. Literature nourishes the whole spirit 
 of man ; science ministers only to the intellect. 
 
 The same insistent desire that culture be vital 
 is at the root of Arnold's discomfort in the pres- 
 ence of German scholarship. ¥ot the thorough- 
 ness and the disinterestedness of this scholarship 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 145 
 
 he has great respect; but he cannot endure its 
 trick of losing itself in the letter, its "pedantry, 
 slowness," its way of "fumbling" after truth, its 
 "ineffectiveness."^ "In the German mind," he 
 exclaims in Literature and Dogma, " as in the Ger- 
 man language, there does seem to be something 
 splay, something blunt-edged, unhandy, infelici- 
 tous, — some positive want of straightforward, 
 sure perception." 2 Of scholarship of this splay 
 variety, that comes from exaggerated intellectu- 
 ality and from lack of a delicate temperament and 
 of nice perceptions, Arnold is intolerant. Such 
 scholarship he finds working its customary mis- 
 chief in Professor Francis Newman's translation 
 of Homer, and, accordingly, he gives large parts 
 of the lectures on Translating Homer to the illus- 
 tration of its shortcomings and maladroitness; he 
 is bent on showing how inadequate is great learn- 
 ing alone to cope with any nice literary problem. 
 Newman's philological knowledge of Greek and of 
 Homer is beyond dispute, but his taste may be 
 judged from his assertion that Homer's verse, if 
 we could hear the living Homer, would affect us 
 "like an elegant and simple melody from an 
 African of the Gold Coast." ^ The remedy for 
 such inept scholarship lies in culture, in the vital- 
 ization of knowledge. The scholar must not be a 
 
 1 Celtic Literature^ p. 75.^ 
 
 2 Literature and Dogma, p. xxi. 
 ^ On Translating Homer, p. 295. 
 
146 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 mere kno^ver ; all his powers must be harmoniously 
 developed. 
 
 A last illustration of Arnold's insistence that 
 knowledge be vital may be drawn from his writ- 
 ings on religion aod theology. Again criticism 
 and culture are the passwords that open the way 
 to a new and better order of things. Formulas, 
 Arnold urges, have fastened themselves constrain- 
 ingly upon the English religious mind. Tra- 
 ditional interpretations of the Bible have come to 
 be received as beyond cavil. These interpretations 
 are really human inventions — the product of the 
 ingenious thinking of theologians like Calvin and 
 Luther. Yet they have so authenticated them- 
 selves that for most readers to-day the Bible means 
 solely what it meant for the exacerbated theological 
 mind of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
 If religion is to be vital, if knowledge of the 
 Bible is to be genuine and real, there must be a 
 critical examination of what this book means for 
 the disinterested intelligence of to-day; the Bible, 
 as literature, must be interpreted anew, sympa- 
 thetically and imaginatively; the moral inspira- 
 tion the Bible has to offer, even to men who are 
 rigidly insistent on scientific habits of thought and 
 standards of historical truth, must be disengaged 
 from what is unverifiable and transitory, and made 
 real and persuasive. "I write," Arnold declares, 
 " to convince the lover of religion that by following 
 habits of intellectual seriousness he need not, so 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 147 
 
 far as religion is concerned, lose anything. Tak- 
 ing the Old Testament as Israel's magnificent 
 establishment of the theme, Righteousness is salva- 
 tion! taking the New as the perfect elucidation 
 by Jesus of what righteousness is and how salva- 
 tion is won, I do not fear comparing even the 
 power over the soul and imagination of the Bible, 
 taken in this sense, — a sense which is at the 
 same time solid, — with the like power in the old 
 materialistic and miraculous sense for the Bible, 
 which is not."^ This definition of what Arnold 
 hopes to do for the Bible may be supplemented 
 by a description of the method in which culture 
 works towards the ends desired: "DiflRcult, cer- 
 tainly, is the right reading of the Bible, and 
 true culture, too, is difficult. For true culture 
 implies not only knowledge, but right tact and 
 justness of judgment, forming themselves by and 
 with knowledge; without this tact it is not true 
 culture. Difficult, however, as culture is, it is 
 necessary. For, after all, the Bible is not a tal- 
 isman, to be taken and used literally; neither is 
 any existing church a talisman, whatever preten- 
 sions of the sort it may make, for giving the right 
 interpretation of the Bible. Only true culture can 
 give us this interpretation; so that if conduct is, 
 as it is, inextricably bound up with the Bible and 
 the right interpretation of it, then the importance 
 of culture becomes unspeakable. For if conduct is 
 
 ^ God and the Bible^ p. xxxiv. 
 
148 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 necessary (and there is nothing so necessary), cult- 
 ure is necessary/'^ 
 
 In all these various ways, then, that have been 
 illustrated, culture is a specific against the ills 
 that society is heir to. Culture is vital know- 
 ledge, and the critic is its fosterer and guardian; 
 culture and criticism work together for the preser- 
 vation of the integrity of the human type against 
 all the disasters that threaten it from the storm 
 and stress of modern life. Politics, religion, schol- 
 arship, science, each has its special danger for 
 the individual ; each seizes upon him, subdues him 
 relentlessly to the need of the moment and the re- 
 quirements of some particular function, and con- 
 verts him often into a mere distorted fragment of 
 humanity. Against this tyranny of the moment, 
 against the specializing and materializing trend of 
 modern life, criticism offers a powerful safeguard. 
 Criticism is ever concerned with archetypal excel- 
 lence, is continually disengaging, with fine dis- 
 crimination, what is transitory and accidental from 
 what is permanent and essential in all that man 
 busies himself about, and is thus perpetually help- 
 ing every individual to the apprehension of his 
 "best self," to the development of what is real and 
 absolute and the elimination of what is false or 
 deforming. And in doing all this the critic acts 
 as the appreciator of life; he is not the abstract 
 thinker. He apprehends the ideal intuitively; 
 
 1 Literature and Dogma , p. xxvii. 
 
MATTHEW" ARNOLD I49 
 
 he reaches it by the help of the feelings and the 
 imagination and a species of exquisite tact, not 
 through a series of syllogisms 5 he is really a poet, 
 rather than a philosopher. 
 
 This conception of the nature and functions of 
 criticism makes intelligible and justifies a phrase 
 of Arnold's that has often been impugned — his 
 description of poetry as a criticism of life. To 
 this account of poetry it has been objected that 
 criticism is an intellectual process, while poetry 
 is primarily an affair of the imagination and the 
 heart; and that to regard poetry as a criticism of 
 life is to take a view of poetry that tends to convert 
 it into mere rhetorical moralizing — the decorative 
 expression in rhythmical language of abstract truth 
 about life. This misinterpretation of Arnold's 
 meaning becomes impossible, if the foregoing 
 theory of criticism be borne in mind. Criticism is 
 the determination and the representation of the 
 archetypal, of the ideal. Moreover, it is not a de- 
 termination of the archetypal formally and theo- 
 retically, through speculation or the enumeration 
 of abstract qualities; Arnold's disinclination for 
 abstractions has been repeatedly noted. The pro- 
 cess to be used in criticism is a vital process of 
 appreciation, in which the critic, sensitive to the 
 whole value of human life, to the appeal of art and 
 of conduct and of manners as well as of abstract 
 truth, feels his way to a synthetic grasp upon what 
 is ideally best, and portrays this concretely and 
 
150 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 persuasively for the popular imagination. Such 
 an appreciator of life, if he produce beauty in 
 verse, if he embody his vision of the ideal in metre, 
 will be a poet. In other words, the poet is the 
 appreciator of human life who sees in it most 
 sensitively, inclusively, and penetratingly what 
 is archetypal, and evokes his vision before others 
 through rhythm and rhyme. In this sense poetry 
 can hardly be denied to be a criticism of life ; it is 
 the winning portrayal of the ideal of human life 
 as this ideal shapes itself in the mind of the poet. 
 Such a criticism of life Dante gives, a determina- 
 tion and portrayal of what is ideally best in life 
 according to mediaeval conceptions; a representa- 
 tion of life in its integrity with a due adjustment 
 of the claims of all the powers that enter into it — 
 friendship, ambition, patriotism, loyalty, religion, 
 artistic ardour, love. Such a criticism of life 
 Shakespeare incidentally gives in terms of the full 
 scope of Elizabethan experience in England, with 
 due imaginative setting forth of the splendid vistas 
 of possible achievement and unlimited develop- 
 ment that the new knowledge and the discoveries 
 of the Eenaissance had opened. In short, the 
 great poet is the typically sensitive, penetrative, 
 and suggestive appreciator of life, — who calls to 
 his aid, to make his appreciation as resonant and 
 persuasive as possible, as potent as possible over 
 men's minds and hearts, all the emotional and 
 imaginative resources of language, — rhythm, fig- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 151 
 
 ures, allegory, symbolism, — whatever will enable 
 him to impose his appreciation of life upon others 
 and to insinuate into their souls his sense of the 
 relative values of human acts and characters and 
 passions; whatever will help him to make more 
 overweeningly beautiful and insistently eloquent 
 his vision of truth and beauty. In this sense the 
 poet is the limiting ideal of the appreciative critic, 
 and poetry is the ultimate criticism of life — the 
 finest portrayal each age can attain to of what 
 seems to it in life most significant and delightful. 
 
 IV 
 
 The purpose with which Arnold writes is now 
 fairly apparent. His aim is to shape in happy 
 fashion the lives of his fellows ; to free them from 
 the bonds that the struggle for existence imposes 
 upon them; to enlarge their horizons, to enrich 
 them spiritually, and to call all that is best within 
 them into as vivid play as possible. When we 
 turn to Arnold's literary criticism we shall find 
 this purpose no less paramount. 
 
 A glance through the volumes of Arnold's essays 
 renders it clear that his selection of a poet or a 
 prose-writer for discussion was usually made with 
 a view to putting before English readers some 
 desirable trait of character for their imitation, 
 some temperamental excellence that they are lack- 
 ing in, some mode of belief that they neglect, some 
 
152 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 habit of thought that they need to cultivate. Jou- 
 bert is studied and portrayed because of his single- 
 hearted love of light, the purity of his disinter- 
 ested devotion to truth, the fine distinction of his 
 thought, and the freedom of his spirit from the 
 sordid stains of worldly life. Heine is a typical 
 leader in the war of emancipation, the arch-enemy 
 of Philistinism, and the light-hearted, indomitable 
 foe of prejudice and cant. Maurice and Eugenie 
 de Guerin are winning examples of the spiritual 
 distinction that modern Eomanism can induce in 
 timely-happy souls. Scherer, whose critiques upon 
 Milton and Goethe are painstakingly reproduced 
 in the Mixed Essays, represents French critical 
 intelligence in its best play — acute, yet compre- 
 hensive; exacting, yet sympathetic; regardful of 
 nuances and delicately refining, and yet virile and 
 constructive. Of the importance for modern Eng- 
 land of emphasis on all these qualities of mind and 
 heart, Arnold was securely convinced. 
 
 Moreover, even when his choice of subject is de- 
 termined by other than moral considerations, his 
 treatment is apt, none the less, to reveal his ethical 
 bias. Again and again in his essays on poetry, for 
 example, it is the substance of poetry that he is 
 chiefly anxious to handle, while the form is left 
 with incidental analysis. Wordsworth is the poet 
 of joy in widest commonalty spread — the poet 
 whose criticism of life is most sound and enduring 
 and salutary. Shelley is a febrile creature, inse- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 153 
 
 cure in his sense of worldly values, "a beautiful 
 and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his lu- 
 minous wings in vain."^ The essay on Heine 
 helps us only mediately to an appreciation of the 
 volatile beauty of Heine's songs, or to an intenser 
 delight in the mere surface play of hues and moods 
 in his verse. Erom the essay on George Sand, to 
 be sure, we receive many vivid impressions of the 
 emotional and imaginative scope of French ro- 
 mance ; for this essay was written con amove in the 
 revivification of an early mood of devotion, and in 
 an unusually heightened style ; the essay on Emer- 
 son is the one study that has in places somewhat 
 of the same lyrical intensity and the same vivid- 
 ness of realization. Yet even in the essay on 
 George Sand, the essayist is, on the whole, bent on 
 revealing the temperament of the woman rather in 
 its decisive influence on her theories of life than 
 in its reaction upon her art as art. There is 
 hardly a word of the Eomance as a definite literary 
 form, of George Sand's relation to earlier French 
 writers of fiction, or of her distinctive methods of 
 work as a portray er of the great human spectacle. 
 In short, literature as art, literary forms as definite 
 modes of artistic expression, the technique of the 
 
 1 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 his Jouhert, in Essays in Criticism, 1, 294. 
 
154 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 literary craftsman, receive, for the most part, from 
 Arnold sliglit attention. 
 
 Perhaps the one piece of work in which Arnold 
 set himself, with some thoroughness, to the discus- 
 sion of a purely literary problem was his series of 
 lectures on Translating Homer. These lectures 
 were produced before his sense of responsibility 
 for the moral regeneration of the Philistine had 
 become importunate, and were addressed to an 
 academic audience. Por these reasons, the treat- 
 ment of literary topics is more disinterested and 
 less interrupted by practical considerations. In- 
 deed, as will be presently noted in illustration of 
 another aspect of Arnold's work, these lectures 
 contain very subtle and delicate appreciations, 
 show everywhere exquisite responsiveness to 
 changing effects of style, and enrich gratefully 
 the vocabulary of impressionistic criticism. 
 
 Even in these exceptional lectures, however, 
 Arnold's ethical interest asserts itself. In the 
 course of them he gives an account of the grand 
 style in poetry, — of that poetic manner that seems 
 to him to stand highest in the scale of excellence ; 
 and he carefully notes as an essential of this manner, 
 — ■ of this grand style, — its moral power ; " it can 
 form the character, ... is edifying, . . . can 
 refine the raw natural man, . . . can transmute 
 him."^ This definition of the grand style will be 
 discussed presently in connection with Arnold's 
 
 1 On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 197. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 155 
 
 general theory of poetry; it is enough to note here 
 that it illustrates the inseparableness in Arnold's 
 mind between art and morals. 
 
 His description of poetry as a criticism of life 
 has already been mentioned. This doctrine is 
 early implied in Arnold's writings, for example, 
 in the passage just quoted from the lectures on 
 Translating Homer ; it becomes more explicit in 
 the Last Words, appended to these lectures, where 
 the critic asserts that " the noble and profound ap- 
 plication of ideas to life is the most essential part 
 of poetic greatness."^ It is elaborated in the es- 
 says on WordsKJorth (1879), on the Study of Poetry 
 (1880), and on Byron (1881). "It is important, 
 therefore," the essay on Wordsiuorth assures us, 
 " to hold fast to this : that poetry is at bottom a 
 criticism of life ; that the greatness of a poet lies 
 in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas 
 to life, — to the question: How to live."^ And 
 in the essay on the Study of Poetry Arnold urges 
 that " in poetry, as a criticism of life under the 
 conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of 
 poetic truth and poetic beauty, the spirit of our 
 race will find, ... as time goes on and as other 
 helps fail, its consolation and stay."^ 
 
 With this doctrine of the indissoluble connection 
 between the highest poetic excellence and essential 
 nobleness of subject-matter probably only the most 
 
 1 On Translating Horner^ ed. 1883, p. 295. 
 
 2 Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 143. 3 /^j^^.^ p. 5. 
 
156 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 irreconcilable advocates of art for art's sake would 
 quarrel. So loyal an adherent of art as Walter 
 Pater suggests a test of poetic "greatness" sub- 
 stantially the same with Arnold's. "It is on the 
 quality of the matter it informs or controls, its 
 compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or 
 the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of 
 hope in it, that the greatness of literary art de- 
 pends, as Tlie Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les 
 Miserables, The English Bible, are great art." ^ 
 This may be taken as merely a different phrasing 
 of Arnold's principle that "the greatness of a poet 
 lies in his powerful and beautiful application of 
 ideas to life — to the question : How to live." 
 Surely, then, we are not at liberty to press any ob- 
 jection to Arnold's general theory of poetry on the 
 ground of its being, in its essence, over-ethical. 
 
 There remains nevertheless the question of em- 
 phasis. In the application to special cases of this 
 test of essential worth, either the critic may be 
 constitutionally biassed in favour of a somewhat 
 restricted range of definite ideas about life, or even 
 when he is fairly hospitable towards various moral 
 idioms, he may still be so intent upon making ethi- 
 cal distinctions as to fail to give their due to the 
 purely artistic qualities of poetry. It is in this 
 latter way that Arnold is most apt to offend. The 
 emphasis in the discussions of Wordsworth, Shel- 
 ley, Byron, Keats, Gray, and Milton is prevail- 
 
 1 Pater's Appreciations, ed. 1890, p. 36. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD I57 
 
 ingly on the ethical characteristics of each poet; 
 and the reader carries away from an essay a vital 
 conception of the play of moral energy and of spir- 
 itual passion in the poet's verse rather than an im- 
 pression of his peculiar adumbration of beauty, the 
 characteristic rhythms of his imaginative move- 
 ment, the delicate colour modulations on the sur- 
 face of his image of life. 
 
 It must, however, be borne in mind that Arnold 
 has specially admitted the incompleteness of his 
 description of poetry as "a criticism of life"; this 
 criticism, he has expressly added, must be made 
 in conformity ''to the laws of poetic truth and 
 poetic beauty." "The profound criticism of life" 
 characteristic of " the few supreme masters " must 
 exhibit itself " in indissoluble connection with the 
 laws of poetic truth and beauty." ^ Is there, then, 
 to be found in Arnold any account of certain laws 
 the observance of which secures poetic beauty and 
 truth? Is there any description of the special 
 ways in which poetic beauty and truth manifest 
 themselves, of the formal characteristics to be 
 found in poetry where poetic beauty and truth are 
 present? Does Arnold either suggest the methods 
 the poet must follow to attain these qualities, or 
 classify the various subordinate effects through 
 which poetic beauty and truth invariably reveal 
 their presence? The most apposite parts of his 
 writings to search for some declaration on these 
 
 1 Essays, ed. 1891, II, pp. 186-187. 
 
158 MATTHEW AKNOLD 
 
 points are the lectures on Translating Homer, and 
 the second series of his essays which deal chiefly 
 with the study of poetry. Here, if anywhere, we 
 ought to find a registration of beliefs as regards 
 the precise nature and source of poetic beauty and 
 truth. 
 
 And indeed throughout all these writings, which 
 run through a considerable period of time, Arnold 
 makes fairly consistent use of a half-dozen cate- 
 gories for his analyses of poetic effects. These 
 categories are substance and matter, style and 
 manner, diction and movement. Of the substance 
 of really great poetry we learn repeatedly that it 
 must be made up of ideas of profound significance 
 "on man, on nature, and on human life."^ "This 
 is, however, merely the prescription already so 
 often noted that poetry, to reach the highest ex- 
 cellence, must contain a penetrating and ennobling 
 criticism of life. In the essay on Byron, however, 
 there is something formally added to this requisi- 
 tion of "truth and seriousness of substance and 
 matter " ; besides these, " felicity and perfection of 
 diction and manner, as these are exhibited in the 
 best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life 
 made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth 
 and poetic beauty." ^ /There must then be felicity 
 and perfection of diction and manner in poetry of 
 the highest order; these terms are somewhat vague, 
 but serve at least to guide us on our analytic way. 
 
 1 Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 141. 2 jz^^vz., p. 187. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 159 
 
 In the essay on the Study of Poetry, there is still 
 farther progress made in the description of poetic 
 excellence. " To the st3^1e and manner of the best 
 poetry, their special character, their accent is given 
 by their diction, and, even yet more, by their 
 movement. And though we distinguish between 
 the two characters, the two accents, of superi- 
 ority" (i.e, between the superiority that comes 
 from substance and the superiority that comes from 
 style), "yet they are nevertheless vitally connected 
 one with the other. The superior character of 
 truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance 
 of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superi- 
 ority of diction and movement marking its style 
 and manner. The two superiorities are closely 
 related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the 
 other. So far as high poetic truth and seriousness 
 are wanting to a poet's matter and substance, so 
 far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp 
 of diction and movement be wanting to his style 
 and manner."^ 
 
 Now that there is this intimate and necessary 
 union between a poet's mode of conceiving life and 
 his manner of poetic expression, is hardly disput- 
 able. The image of life in a poet's mind is simply 
 the outside world transformed by the complex of 
 sensations and thoughts and emotions peculiar to 
 the poet; and this image inevitably frames for it- 
 self a visible and audible expression that delicately 
 
 1 Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 22. 
 
160 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 utters its individual character — distils that char- 
 acter subtly through word and sentence, rhythm 
 and metaphor, image and figure of speech, and 
 through their integration into a vital work of art. 
 Moreover, the poet's style is itself in general the 
 product of the same personality which determines 
 his image of life, and must therefore be, like his 
 image of life, delicately striated with the markings 
 of his play of thought and feeling and fancy. The 
 close correspondence, then, between the poet's sub- 
 ject-matter and his manner or style is indubitable. 
 The part of Arnold's conclusion or the point in his 
 method that is regrettable is the exclusive stress 
 that he throws on this dependence of style upon 
 worth of substance. He converts style into a mere 
 function of the moral quality of a poet's thought 
 about life, and fails to furnish any delicately stud- 
 ied categories for the appreciation of poetic style 
 apart from its moral implications. 
 
 Take, for example, the judgments passed in the 
 Study of Poetry upon various poets ; in every in- 
 stance the estimate of the poet's style turns upon 
 the quality of his thought about life. Is it Chau- 
 cer whose right to be ranked as a classic is mooted? 
 He cannot be ranked as a classic because ^Hhe 
 substance of" his poetry has not "high serious- 
 ness."^ Is it Burns whose relative rank is being 
 fixed? Burns through lack of " absolute sincerity " 
 falls short of "high seriousness," and, hence, is 
 
 ^Essays, ed. 1891, II, p. 33. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 161 
 
 not to be placed among the classics. And thus 
 continually with Arnold, effects of style are 
 merged in moral qualities, and the reader gains 
 little insight into the refinements of poetical man- 
 ner except as these derive directly from the poet's 
 moral consciousness. The categories of style and 
 manner, diction and movement, are everywhere 
 subordinated to the categories of substance and 
 matter, are treated as almost wholly derivative. 
 "Felicity and perfection of diction and manner," 
 wherever they are admittedly present, are usually 
 explained as the direct result of the poet's lofty 
 conception of life. Such a treatment of questions 
 of style does not further us much on our way to a 
 knowledge of the " laws of poetic beauty and poetic 
 truth." 
 
 Doubtless somewhat more disinterested analyses 
 of style may be found in the lectures on Translat- 
 ing Homer. These discussions do not reach very 
 definite conclusions, but they at least consider 
 poetic excellence as for the moment dependent on 
 something else than the moral mood of the poet. 
 For example, the grand style is analyzed into two 
 varieties, the grand style in severity and the grand 
 style in simplicity. Each of these styles is de- 
 scribed and illustrated so that it enters into the 
 reader's imagination and increases his sensitiveness 
 to poetic excellence. Somewhat later in the lect- 
 ures, the distinction between real simplicity in 
 poetic style and sophisticated simplicity is drawn 
 
162 MATTHEW AKNOLD 
 
 with exquisite delicacy of appreciation. Through- 
 out these passages, there is an effort to deal directly 
 with artistic effects for their own sake and apart 
 from their significance as expressive of ethos. Yet 
 even here Arnold's ethical bias reveals itself in a 
 tendency, while he is describing the moods back of 
 these artistic qualities, to use words that have 
 moral implications, and that suggest the issue of 
 such moods in conduct. Self-restraint, proud 
 gravity, are among the moods that are found back 
 of the grand style in severity; over-refinement, 
 super-subtle sophistication, account for Tennyson's 
 simplesse. 
 
 To bring together, then, the results of this some- 
 what protracted analysis : Arnold ostensibly admits 
 that poetry, to be of the highest excellence, must, 
 in addition to containing a criticism of life of pro- 
 found significance, conform to the laws of poetic 
 beauty and truth. He accepts as necessary cate- 
 gories, for the appreciation of poetical excellence, 
 style and manner, diction and movement. Yet his 
 most important general assertion about these latter 
 purely formal determinations of poetry is that they 
 are inseparably connected with substance and mat- 
 ter; similarly, whenever he discusses artistic ef- 
 fects, he is apt to find them interesting simply as 
 serving to interpret the artist's prevailing mood 
 towards life ; and even where, as is at times doubt- 
 less the case, he escapes for the moment from his 
 ethical interest and appreciates with imaginative 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 163 
 
 delicacy the individual quality of a poem or a 
 poet's style, he is nearly always found sooner or 
 later explaining this quality as originating in the 
 poet's peculiar etlios. As for any systematic or 
 even incidental study of "the laws of poetic 
 beauty and truth," we search for it through his 
 pages in vain. 
 
 V 
 
 But it would be wrong in characterizing Arnold's 
 essays to attribute their lack of theorizing about 
 questions of art solely to his preoccupation with 
 conduct. For theory in general and for abstrac- 
 tions in general, — for all sorts of philosophizing, 
 — Arnold openly professes his dislike. " Perhaps 
 we shall one day learn," he says, in his essay on 
 Wordsivorth, "to make this proposition general, 
 and to say : Poetry is the reality, philosophy the 
 illusion." Distrust of the abstract and of the 
 purely theoretical shows itself throughout his 
 literary criticism and determines many of its 
 characteristics. 
 
 His hostility to systems and to system-makers 
 has already been pointed out; this hostility admits 
 of no exception in favour of the systematic critic. 
 "There is the judgment of ignorance, the judg- 
 ment of incompatibility, the judgment of envy and 
 jealousy. Finally, there is the systematic judg- 
 ment, and this judgment is the most worthless of 
 all. ... Its author has not really his eye upon 
 
164 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 the professed object of his criticism at all, but 
 upon something else which he wants to prove by 
 means of that object. He neither really tells us, 
 therefore, anything about the object, nor anything 
 about his own ignorance of the object. He never 
 fairly looks at it; he is looking at something 
 else." ^ This hypnotizing effect that a preconceived 
 theory exerts on a critic, is Arnold's first reason 
 for objecting to systematic criticism; the critic 
 with a theory is bound to find what he goes in 
 search of, and nothing else. He goes out — to 
 change somewhat one of Arnold's own figures — 
 like Saul, the son of Kish, in search of his father's 
 asses ; and he comes back with the authentic animals 
 instead of the traditional windfall of a kingdom. 
 
 Nor is preoccupation with a pet theory the sole 
 incapacity that Arnold finds in the systematic 
 critic; such a critic is almost sure to be over-intel- 
 lectualized, a victim of abstractions and definitions, 
 dependent for his judgments on conceptions, and 
 lacking in temperamental sensitiveness to the ap- 
 peal of literature as art. He is merely a triangu- 
 lator of the landscape of literature, and moves 
 resolutely in his process of triangulation from one 
 fixed point to another; he finds significant only 
 such parts of his literary experience as he can sum 
 up in a definite abstract formula at some one of 
 these arbitrary halting-places ; his ultimate opinion 
 of the ground he covers is merely the sum total of 
 
 1 Mixed Essaijs, ed. 1883, p. 209. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 165 
 
 a comparatively small number of such abstract ex- 
 pressions. To the manifold wealth of the land- 
 scape in colour, in light, in shade, and in poetic 
 suggestiveness, the system-monger, the theoretical 
 critic, has all the time been blind. 
 
 Knowledge, too, even though it be not severely 
 systematized, may interfere with the free play of 
 critical intelligence. An oversupply of unvitalized 
 facts or ideas, even though these facts or ideas be 
 not organized into an importunate theory, may 
 prove disastrous to the critic. This danger Arnold 
 has amusingly set forth in his Last Words on 
 Homeric translation : " Much as Mr. Newman was 
 mistaken when he talked of my rancour, he is en- 
 tirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And 
 yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes 
 find myself wishing, when dealing with these mat- 
 ters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were 
 even greater than it is. To handle these matters 
 properly, there is needed a poise so perfect that the 
 least overweight in any direction tends to destroy 
 the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet de- 
 stroys it, even erudition may destroy it. To press 
 to the sense of the thing with which one is dealing, 
 not to go off on some collateral issue about the 
 thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The 
 Hhing itself with which one is here dealing — 
 the critical perception of poetic truth — is of all 
 things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent; 
 by even pressing too impetuously after it, one 
 
166 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 runs the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry 
 should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, 
 the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imagi- 
 nable; he should be, indeed, the 'ondoyant et 
 divers, ' the undulating and diverse being of Mon- 
 taigne. The less he can deal with his object sim- 
 ply and freely, the more things he has to take into 
 account in dealing with it, — the more, in short, 
 he has to encumber himself, — so much the greater 
 force of spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. 
 But one cannot exactly have this greater force by 
 wishing for it; so, for the force of spirit one has, 
 the load put upon it is often heavier than it will 
 well bear. The late Duke of Wellington said of 
 a certain peer that 'it was a great pity his educa- 
 tion had been so far too much for his abilities.' In 
 like manner one often sees erudition out of all pro- 
 portion to its owner's critical faculty. Little as 
 I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive, in 
 dealing with poetry, lest even that little should 
 prove too much for my abilities." ^ 
 
 Discreet ignorance, then, is Arnold's counsel of 
 perfection to the would-be critic. And, accord- 
 ingly, he himself is desultory from conscientious 
 motives and unsystematic by fixed rule. There 
 are two passages in his writings where he explains 
 confidentially his methods and his reasons for 
 choosing them. The first occurs in a letter of 1864 : 
 " My sinuous, easy, unpolemical mode of proceed- 
 
 1 On Translating Homer, p. 245. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 167 
 
 ing has been adopted by me, first, because I really 
 think it the best way of proceeding, if one wants to 
 get at, and keep with, truth; secondly, because I 
 am convinced only by a literary form of this kind 
 being given to them can ideas such as mine ever 
 gain any access in a country such as ours." ^ The 
 second passage occurs in the Preface to his first 
 series of Essays in Criticism (1865) : " Indeed, it 
 is not in my nature — some of my critics would 
 rather say not in my power — to dispute on behalf 
 of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately. 
 To try and approach truth on one side after an- 
 other, not to strive or cry, not to persist in press- 
 ing forward, on any one side, with violence and 
 self-will, it is only thus, it seems to me, that mor- 
 tals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious 
 goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline. 
 He who will do nothing but fight impetuously 
 towards her, on his own one favourite particular 
 line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the 
 folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped." ^ 
 Such, then, is Arnold's ideal of critical method. 
 The critic is not to move from logical point to 
 point as, for example, Francis Jeffrey was wont, 
 in his essays, to move, with an advocate's devotion 
 to system and desire to make good some definite 
 conclusion. Eather he is to give rein to his tem- 
 perament; he is to make use of intuitions, imagi- 
 nations, hints that touch the heart, as well as 
 
 1 Letters, I, 282. 2 jEssays, ed. 1891, I, p. v. 
 
168 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 abstract principles, syllogisms, and arguments; 
 and so lie is to reach out tentatively through all 
 his powers after truth if haply he may find her ; in 
 the hope that thus, keeping close to the concrete 
 aspects of his subject, he may win to an ever more 
 inclusive and intimate command of its surface and 
 configurations. The type of mind most apt for 
 this kind of critical work is the " free, flexible, and 
 elastic spirit," described in the passage just quoted 
 from the Last Words; the "undulating and diverse 
 being of Montaigne." 
 
 A critic of this type will palpably concern him- 
 self slightly with abstractions, with theorizings, 
 with definitions. And, indeed, Arnold's unwill- 
 ingness to define becomes at times almost ludicrous. 
 "Nothing has raised more questioning among my 
 critics than these words — 7iohle^ the grand style. 
 . . . Alas ! the grand style is the last matter in 
 the world for verbal definition to deal with ade- 
 quately. One may say of it as is said of faith : 
 * One must feel it in order to know it. ' " ^ Similarly 
 in the Study of Poetry, Arnold urges : " Critics give 
 themselves great labour to draw out what in the 
 abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality 
 of poetry. It is much better to have recourse to 
 concrete examples. ... If we are asked to define 
 this mark and accent in the abstract, our answer 
 must be : No, for we should thereby be darkening 
 the question, not clearing it." Again : " I may dis- 
 
 1 On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 264. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 169 
 
 CUSS what in the abstract constitutes the grand 
 style; but that sort of general discussion never 
 much helps our judgment of particular instances." ^ 
 These passages are characteristic; rarely indeed 
 does Arnold consent to commit himself to the con- 
 trol of a definition. He prefers to convey into his 
 readers' mind a living realization of the thing or 
 the object he treats of rather than to put before 
 them its logically articulated outlines. 
 
 Moreover, when he undertakes the abstract dis- 
 cussion of a general term, he is apt to be capricious 
 in his treatment of it and to follow in his sub- 
 divisions and classifications some external clue 
 rather than logical structure. In the essay on 
 Celtic Literatui'e he discusses the various ways of 
 handling nature in poetry, and finds four such 
 ways — the conventional way, the faithful way, 
 the Greek way, and the magical way. The classi- 
 fication recommends itself through its superficial 
 charm and facility, yet rests on no psychological 
 truth, or at any rate carries with it, as Arnold 
 treats it, no psychological suggestions ; it gives no 
 swift insight into the origin in the poet's mind and 
 heart of these different modes of conceiving of 
 nature. Hence the classification, as Arnold uses it, 
 is merely a temporary makeshift for rather grace- 
 fully grouping effects, not an analj^tic interpre- 
 tation of these effects through a reduction of them 
 to their varying sources in thought and feeling. 
 
 1 On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 194. 
 
170 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 This may be taken as typical of Arnold's critical 
 methods. As we read his essays we have little 
 sense of making definite progress in the compre- 
 hension of literature as an art among arts, as well 
 as in the appreciation of an individual author or 
 poem. We are not being intellectually oriented, 
 as in reading the most stimulating critical work; 
 we are not getting an ever-surer sense of the points 
 of the compass. Essays, to have this orienting 
 power, need not be continually prating of theories 
 and laws; they need not be rabidly scientific in 
 phrase or in method. But they must issue from a 
 mind that has come to an understanding with itself 
 about the genesis of art in the genius of the artist; 
 about the laws that, when the utmost plea has 
 been made for freedom and caprice, regulate ar- 
 tistic production; about the history and evolution 
 of art forms; and about the relations of the arts 
 among themselves and to the other activities of life. 
 It may fairly be doubted if Arnold had ever wrought 
 out for himself consistent conclusions on all or 
 most of these topics. Indeed, the mere mention 
 of his name in connection with such a formal list 
 of topics suggests the kind of mock-serious depre- 
 catory paragraph with which the " unlearned bellet- 
 tristic trifler'' was wont to reply to charges of 
 dilettantism — a pa.ragraph sure to carry in its tail 
 a stinging bit of sarcasm at the expense of pedantry 
 and unenlightened formalism. And yet, great as 
 must be every one's respect for the thorough schol- 
 
MATTHEW AKNOLD 171 
 
 arship and widely varied accomplishment that Ar- 
 nold made so light of and carried off so easily, the 
 doubt must nevertheless remain whether a firmer 
 grasp on theory, and a more consistent habit of 
 thinking out literary questions to their principles, 
 would not have invigorated his work as a critic 
 and given it greater permanence and richer sug- 
 gestiveness. 
 
 VI 
 
 It is, then, as an appreciator of what may per- 
 haps be called the spiritual qualities of literature 
 that Arnold is most distinctively a furtherer of 
 criticism. An appreciator of beauty, — of true 
 beauty wherever found, — that is what he would 
 willingly be; and yet, as the matter turns out, the 
 beauty that he most surely enjoys and reveals has 
 invariably a spiritual aroma, — is the finer breath 
 of intense spiritual life. Or, if spiritual be too 
 mystical a word to apply to Homer and Goethe, 
 perhaps Arnold should rather be termed an appre- 
 ciator of such beauty in literature as carries with 
 it an inevitable suggestion of elevation and noble- 
 ness of character in the author. 
 
 The importance of appreciation in criticism Ar- 
 nold has described in one of the Mixed Essays: 
 "Admiration is salutary and formative; . . . but 
 things admirable are sown wide, and are to be gath- 
 ered here and gathered there, not all in one place ; 
 and until we have gathered them wherever they are 
 
172 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 to be found, we have not known the true salutari- 
 ness and formativeness of admiration. The quest 
 is large ; and occupation with the unsound or half- 
 sound, delight in the not good or less good, is a 
 sore let and hindrance to us. Eelease from such 
 occupation and delight sets us free for ranging far- 
 ther, and for perfecting our sense of beauty. He 
 is the happy man, who, encumbering himself with 
 the love of nothing which is not beautiful, is able 
 to embrace the greatest number of things beautiful 
 in his life." 1 
 
 On this disinterested quest, then, for the beauti- 
 ful, Arnold in his essays nominally fares forth. 
 Yet certain limitations in his appreciation, over 
 and beyond his prevalent ethical interest, must 
 at once be noted. Music, painting, and sculpt- 
 ure have seemingly nothing to say to him. In his 
 Letters there are only a few allusions to any of 
 these arts, and such as occur do not surpass in sig- 
 nificance the comments of the chance loiterer in 
 foreign galleries or visitor of concert rooms. In 
 his essays there are none of the correlations be- 
 tween the effects and methods of literature and 
 those of kindred arts that may do so much either 
 to individualize or to illustrate the characteristics 
 of poetry. For Arnold, literature and poetry seem 
 to make up the whole range of art. 
 
 Within these limits, however, — the limits im- 
 posed by preoccupation with conduct and by care- 
 
 1 Mixed Essays, ed. 1883, p. 210. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD I73 
 
 lessness of all arts except literature, — Arnold has 
 been a prevailing revealer of beauty. Not bis 
 most hostile critic can question the delicacy of his 
 perception, so far as he allows his perception free 
 play. On the need of nice and ever nicer dis- 
 criminations in the apprehension of the shifting 
 values of literature, he has himself often insisted. 
 Critics who let their likes and dislikes assert them- 
 selves turbulently, to the destruction of fine dis- 
 tinctions, always fall under Arnold's condemnation. 
 " When Mr. Palgrave dislikes a thing, he feels no 
 pressure constraining him, either to try his dislike 
 closely or to express it moderately; he does not 
 mince matters, he gives his dislike all its own way. 
 . . . He dislikes the architecture of the Kue 
 Eivoli, and he puts it on the level with the archi- 
 tecture of Belgravia and Gower Street; he lumps 
 them all together in one condemnation; he loses 
 sight of the shade, the distinction which is here 
 everything." For a similar blurring of impres- 
 sions. Professor Newman is taken to task, though 
 in Newman's case the faulty appreciations are due 
 to a different cause : " Like all learned men, accus- 
 tomed to desire definite rules, he draws his conclu- 
 sions too absolutely; he wants to include too much 
 under his rules ; he does not quite perceive that in 
 poetical criticism the shade, the fine distinction, 
 is everything; and that, when he has once missed 
 this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the 
 air." Here, again, what Arnold pleads for is tem- 
 
174 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 peramental sensitivenesSj delicacy of perception. 
 To appreciate literature more and more sensitively 
 in terms of " an undulating and diverse tempera- 
 ment, " this is the ideal that he puts before literary 
 criticism. 
 
 His own appreciations of poetry are probably 
 richest, most discriminating, and most disinter- 
 ested in the lectures on Translating Homer. The 
 imaginative tact is unfailing with which he renders 
 the contour and the subject-qualities of the various 
 poems that he comments on; and equally note- 
 worthy is the divining instinct with which he capt- 
 ures the spirit of each poet and sets it before us 
 with a phrase or a symbol. The " inversion and 
 pregnant conciseness'^ of Milton's style, its "la- 
 borious and condensed fulness"; the plainspoken- 
 ness, freshness, vigorousness, and yet fancifulness 
 and curious complexity of Chapman's style; Spen- 
 ser's "sweet and easy slipping movement"; Scott's 
 " bastard epic style " ; the " one continual falsetto " 
 of Macaulay's "pinchbeck Roman Ballads,^^ — all 
 these characterizations are delicately sure in their 
 phrasing and suggestion, and are the clearer because 
 the various styles are made to stand in continual 
 contrast with Homer's style, the rapidity, direct- 
 ness, simplicity, and nobleness of which Arnold 
 keeps ever present in our consciousness. Inci- 
 dentally, too, such suggestive discriminations as 
 that between simplesse and simplicite, the "sem- 
 blance" of simplicity and the "real quality," are 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 175 
 
 wrought out for the reader as the critic goes on 
 with his pursuit of the essential qualities of 
 Homeric thought and diction. To read these lect- 
 ures is a thoroughly tempering process ; a process 
 that renders the mind and imagination permanently 
 finer in texture, more elastic, more sensitively sure 
 in tone, and subtly responsive to the demands of 
 good art. 
 
 The essay on the Study of Poetry, which was 
 written as preface to Ward's English Poets, is also 
 rich in appreciation, and at times almost as disin- 
 terested as the lectures on Homer; yet perhaps 
 never quite so disinterested. Por in the Study of 
 Poetry Arnold is persistently aware of his concep- 
 tion of ^' the grand style '' and bent on winning his 
 readers to make it their own. Only poets who 
 attain this grand style deserve to be "classics," 
 and the continual insistence on the note of " high 
 seriousness" — its presence or absence — becomes 
 rather wearisome. Moreover, Arnold's preoccupa- 
 tion with this ultimate manner and quality tends 
 to limit the freedom and delicate truth of his ap- 
 preciations of other manners and minor qualities. 
 At times, one is tempted to charge Arnold with 
 some of the unresponsiveness of temperament that 
 he ascribes to systematic critics, and to find even 
 Arnold himself under the perilous sway of a fixed 
 idea. Yet, when all is said, the Study of Poetry 
 is full of fine things, and does much to widen the 
 range of appreciation, and, at the same time, to 
 
176 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 make appreciation more certain. "The liquid dic- 
 tion, the fluid movement of Chaucer, his large, free, 
 sound representation of things " ; Burns's " touches 
 of piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos," 
 his "archness," too, and his "soundness"; Shel- 
 ley, "that beautiful spirit building his many -col- 
 oured haze of words and images 'Pinnacled dim in 
 the intense inane ' " j these, and other interpreta- 
 tions like them, are easily adequate and carry the 
 qualities of each poet readily into the minds and 
 imaginations of sympathetic readers. Apprecia- 
 tion is much the richer for this essay on the Study 
 of Poetry. 
 
 Nor must Arnold's suggestive appreciations of 
 prose style be forgotten. Several of them have 
 passed into standard accounts of clearly recognized 
 varieties of prose diction. Arnold's phrasing of 
 the matter has made all sensitive English readers 
 permanently more sensitive to "the warm glow, 
 blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life " of the 
 Attic style, and also permanently more hostile to 
 " the over-heavy richness and encumbered gait " of 
 the Asiatic style. Equally good is his account of 
 the Corinthian style: "It has glitter without 
 warmth, rapidity without ease, effectiveness with- 
 out charm. Its characteristic is that it has no 
 soul; all it exists for, is to get its ends, to make 
 its points, to damage its adversaries, to be admired, 
 to triumph. A style so bent on effect at the ex- 
 pense of soul, simplicity, and delicacy; a style so 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD I77 
 
 little studious of tlie charm of tlie great models; 
 so far from classic truth and grace, must surely be 
 said to have the note of provinciality." ^ " Middle- 
 class Macaulayese '' is his name for Hepworth 
 Dixon's style; a style which he evidently regards 
 as likely to gain favour and establish itself. " I 
 call it Macaulayese . . . because it has the same 
 internal and external characteristics as Macaulay's 
 style; the external characteristic being a hard, 
 metallic movement with nothing of the soft play 
 of life, and the internal characteristic being a per- 
 petual semblance of hitting the right nail on the 
 head without the reality. And I call it middle- 
 class Macaulayese, because it has these faults 
 without the compensation of great studies and of 
 conversance with great affairs, by which Macaulay 
 partly redeemed them."^ It will, of course, be 
 noted that these latter appreciations deal for the 
 most part with divergences from the beautiful in 
 style, but they none the less quicken and refine the 
 aesthetic sense. 
 
 Finally, throughout the two series of miscellane- 
 ous essays there is, in the midst of much business 
 with ethical matters, an often-recurring free play 
 of imagination in the interests, solely and simply, 
 of beauty. Many are the happy windfalls these 
 essays offer of delicate interpretation both of poetic 
 effect and of creative movement, and many are 
 
 1 Essays, ed. 1891, I, p. 75. 
 
 2 Friendship:)' s Garland, ed. 1883, p. 279. 
 
 N 
 
178 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 the memorable phrases and symbols by which 
 incidentally the essential quality of a poet or 
 prose-writer is securely lodged in the reader's 
 consciousness. 
 
 And yet, wide ranging and delicately sensitive 
 as are Arnold's appreciations, the feeling will as- 
 sert itself, in a final survey of his work in literary 
 criticism, that he nearly always has designs on his 
 readers and that appreciation is a means to an end. 
 The end in view is the exorcism of the spirit of 
 Philistinism. Arnold's conscience is haunted by 
 this hideous apparition as Luther's was by the 
 devil, and he is all the time metaphorically throw- 
 ing his inkstand at the spectre. Or, to put the 
 matter in another way, his one dominating wish is 
 to help modern Englishmen to "conquer the hard 
 unintelligence " which is "their bane; to supple 
 and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the variety, 
 fulness, and sweetness of their spiritual life " ; and 
 the appreciative interpretation of literature to as 
 wide a circle of readers as possible seems to him 
 one of the surest ways of thus educing in his fel- 
 low-countrymen new spiritual qualities. It must 
 not be forgotten that Matthew Arnold was the son 
 of Thomas Arnold, master of Rugby; there is in 
 him a hereditary pedagogic bias — an inevitable 
 trend towards moral suasion. The pedagogic spirit 
 has suffered a sea-change into something rich and 
 strange, and yet traces of its origin linger about it. 
 Criticism with Arnold is rarely, if ever, irre- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD I79 
 
 sponsible; it is our sclioolmaster to bring us to 
 culture. 
 
 In a letter of 1863 Arnold speaks of the great 
 transformation which " in this concluding half of 
 the century the English spirit is destined to un- 
 dergo." "I shall do," he adds, "what I can for 
 this movement in literature ; freer perhaps in that 
 sphere than I could be in any other, but with the 
 risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild 
 beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert 
 him, of being torn in pieces by him." ^ In charming 
 the wild beast Arnold ultimately succeeded; and 
 yet there is a sense in which he fell a victim to his 
 very success. The presence of the beast, and the 
 necessity of fluting to him debonairly and win- 
 ningly, fastened themselves on Arnold's imagina- 
 tion, and subdued him to a comparatively narrow 
 range of subjects and set of interests. From the 
 point of view, at least, of what is desirable in ap- 
 preciative criticism, Arnold was injured by his 
 sense of responsibility; he lacks the detachment 
 and the delicate mobility that are the redeeming 
 traits of modern dilettantism. 
 
 If, then, we regard Arnold as a writer with a 
 task to accomplish, with certain definite regenera- 
 tive purposes to carry out, with a body of original 
 ideas about the conduct of life to inculcate, we 
 must conclude that he succeeded admirably in his 
 work, followed out his ideas with persistence and 
 
 1 Letters, I, 240. 
 
180 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 temerity through many regions of human activity, 
 and embodied them with unwearying ingenuity and 
 persuasiveness in a wide range of discussions. If, 
 on the other hand, we consider him solely as a lit- 
 erary critic, we are forced to admit that he is not 
 the ideal literary critic ; he is not the ideal literary 
 critic because he is so much more, and because his 
 interests lie so decisively outside of art. Nor is 
 this opinion meant to imply an ultimate theory of 
 art for art's sake, or to suggest any limitation of 
 criticism to mere impressionism or appreciation. 
 Literature must be known historically and philo- 
 sophically before it can be adequately appreciated ; 
 that is emphatically true. Art may or may not be 
 justifiable solely as it is of service to society; that 
 need not be debated. But, in any event, literary 
 criticism, if it is to reach its utmost effectiveness, 
 must regard works of art for the time being as 
 self-justified integrations of beauty and truth, 
 and so regarding them must record and interpret 
 their power and their charm. And this temporary 
 isolating process is just the process which Arnold 
 very rarely, for the reasons that have been traced 
 in detail, is willing or able to go through with. 
 
 VII 
 
 When we turn to consider Arnold's literary 
 style, we are forced to admit that this, too, has 
 suffered from the strenuousness of his moral pur- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 181 
 
 pose; it has been unduly sophisticated, here and 
 there, because of his desire to charm "the wikl 
 beast of Philistinism." To this purpose and this 
 desire is owing, at least in part, that falsetto note 
 — that half -querulous, half -supercilious artifici- 
 ality of tone — which is now and then to be heard 
 in his writing. To exaggerate the extent to which 
 this note is audible would doubtless be easy; an 
 unprejudiced reader will find long continuous pas- 
 sages of even Arnold's most elaborately designed 
 writing free from any trace of undue self-con- 
 sciousness or of gentle condescension. And yet it 
 is undeniable that when, apart from his Letters, 
 Arnold's prose, as a whole, is compared with that 
 of such a writer, for example, as Cardinal New- 
 man, there is in Arnold's style, as the ear listens 
 for the quality of the bell-metal, not quite the 
 same beautifully clear and sincere resonance. 
 There seems to be, now and then, some unhappy 
 warring of elements, some ill-adjustment of over- 
 tones, a trace of some flaw in mixing or casting. 
 
 Are not these defects in Arnold's style due to 
 his somewhat self-conscious attempt to fascinate a 
 recalcitrant public? Is it not the assumption of 
 a manner that jars on us often in Arnold's less 
 happy moments? Has he not the pose of the man 
 who overdoes bravado with the hope of getting 
 cleverly through a pass which he feels a bit trying 
 to his nerves? Arnold has a keen consciousness 
 of the very stupid beast of Philistinism lying in 
 
182 MATTHEW AKNOLD 
 
 wait for him ; and in the stress of the moment he 
 is guilty of a little exaggeration of manner; he is 
 just a shade unnatural in his flippancy; he treads 
 his measure with an unduly mincing flourish. 
 
 Arnold's habit of half -mocking self-depreciation 
 and of insincere apology for supposititious personal 
 shortcomings has already been mentioned; to his 
 controversial writings, particularly, it gives often 
 a raspingly supercilious tone. He insists with 
 mock humbleness that he is a "mere bellettristic 
 trifler"; that he has no "system of philosophy 
 with principles coherent, interdependent, subor- 
 dinate, and derivative " to help him in the discus- 
 sion of abstract questions. He assures us that he 
 is merely " a feeble unit " of the " English middle 
 class"; he deprecates being called a professor 
 because it is a title he shares " with so many dis- 
 tinguished men — Professor Pepper, Professor An- 
 derson, Professor Frickel, and others — who adorn 
 it," he feels, much more than he does. These 
 mock apologies are always amusing and yet a bit 
 exasperating too. Why should Arnold regard it, 
 we ask ourselves, as such a relishing joke — the 
 possibility that he has a defect? The implication 
 of almost arrogant self-satisfaction is trouble- 
 somely present to us. Such passages certainly 
 suggest that Arnold had an ingrained contempt 
 for the "beast" he was charmiug. 
 
 Yet, when all is said, much of this supercilious 
 satire is irresistibly droll, and refuses to be gain- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 183 
 
 said. One of his most effective modes of ridiculing 
 his opponents is through conjuring up imaginary- 
 scenes in which some ludicrous aspect of his oppo- 
 nent's case or character is thrown into diverting 
 prominence. Is it the pompous, arrogant self-sat- 
 isfaction of the prosperous middle-class tradesman 
 that Arnold wishes to satirize? And more par- 
 ticularly is it the futility of the Saturday Beview 
 in holding up Benthamism — the systematic recog- 
 nition of such a smug man's ideal of selfish happi- 
 ness — as the true moral ideal? Arnold represents 
 himself as travelling on a suburban railway on 
 which a murder has recently been committed, and 
 as falling into chat with the middle-class frequent- 
 ers of this route. The demoralization of these 
 worthy folk, Arnold assures us, was "something 
 bewildering." "Myself a transcendentalist (as 
 the Saturday Review knows), I escaped the infec- 
 tion ; and, day after day, I used to ply my agitated 
 fellow-travellers with all the consolations which 
 my transcendentalism would naturally suggest to 
 me. I reminded them how Caesar refused to take 
 precautions against assassination, because life was 
 not worth having at the price of an ignoble solici- 
 tude for it. I reminded them what insignificant 
 atoms we all are in the life of the world. 'Sup- 
 pose the worst to happen,' I said, addressing a 
 portly jeweller from Cheapside; 'suppose even 
 yourself to be the victim; il n^y a pas d^liomme 
 n4cessaire. We should miss you for a day or two 
 
184 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 upon 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. ' All was of no avail. jSToth- 
 ing could moderate in the bosom of the great Eng- 
 lish middle class, their passionate, absorbing, 
 almost bloodthirsty clinging to life." This is, of 
 course, "admirable fooling"; and equally, of 
 course, the little imaginary scene serves perfectly 
 the purposes of Arnold's argument and turns into 
 ridicule the narrowness and overweening self- 
 importance of the smug tradesman. 
 
 Another instance of Arnold's ability to conjure 
 up fancifully a scene of satirical import may be ad- 
 duced from the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy. 
 Arnold has been ridiculing the worship of mere 
 "bodily health and vigour" as ends in themselves. 
 "Why, one has heard people," he exclaims, "fresh 
 from reading certain articles of the Times on the 
 Kegistrar General's returns of marriages and births 
 in this country, who would talk of our large English 
 families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had 
 something in itself, beautiful, elevating, and meri- 
 torious in them; as if the British Philistine would 
 have only to present himself before the Great Judge 
 with his twelve children, in order to be received 
 among the sheep as a matter of right ! " 
 
 It is a fact worth remarking that in his prose 
 
MATTHEW AENOLD 185 
 
 Arnold's imagination seems naturally to call up 
 and visualize only such scenes as those that have 
 just been quoted — scenes that are satirically and 
 even maliciously suggestive; scenes, on the other 
 hand, that have the limpid light and the winning 
 quality of many in Cardinal Newman's writings 
 — scenes that rest the eye and commend them- 
 selves simply and graciously to the heart — are in 
 Arnold's prose rarely, if ever, to be found. This 
 seems the less easy to explain inasmuch as his 
 poetry, though of course not exceptionally rich in 
 colour, nevertheless shows everywhere a delicately 
 sure sense of the surface of life. Nor is it only 
 the large sweep of the earth-areas or the diversified 
 play of the human spectacle that is absent from 
 Arnold's prose; his imagination does not even 
 make itself exceptionally felt through concrete 
 phrasing or warmth of colouring; his style is usu- 
 ally intellectual almost to the point of wanness, 
 and has rarely any of the heightened quality of 
 so-called poetic prose. In point of fact, this con- 
 ventional restraint in Arnold's style, this careful 
 adherence to the mood of prose, is a very signifi- 
 cant matter; it distinguishes Arnold both as writer 
 and as critic of life from such men as Carlyle and 
 Mr. Euskin. The meaning of this quietly conven- 
 tional manner will be later considered in the dis- 
 cussion of Arnold's relation to his age. 
 
 The two pieces of writing where Arnold's style 
 has most fervour and imaginative glow are the 
 
186 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 essay on George Sand and the discourse on Emer- 
 son. In each case he was returning in the choice 
 of his subject to an earlier enthusiasm, and was 
 reviving a mood that had for him a certain roman- 
 tic consecration. George Sand had opened for 
 him, while he was still at the University, a whole 
 world of rich and half-fearful imaginative experi- 
 ence; a world where he had delighted to follow 
 through glowing southern landscapes the journey- 
 ings of picturesquely rebellious heroes and heroines, 
 whose passionate declamation laid an irresistible 
 spell on his English fancy. Her love and portrayal 
 of rustic nature had also come to him as something 
 graciously different from the sterner and more 
 moral or spiritual interpretation of rustic life to be 
 found in Wordsworth's poems. Her personality, in 
 all its passionate sincerity and with its pathetically 
 unrewarded aspirations, had imposed itself on Ar- 
 nold's imagination both as this personality was 
 revealed in her books and as it was afterward en- 
 countered in actual life. All these early feelings 
 Arnold revives in a memorial essay written in 1877, 
 one year after George Sand's death. From first 
 to last the essay has a brooding sincerity of tone, 
 an unconsidering frankness, and an intensity and 
 colour of phrase that are noteworthy. The descrip- 
 tions of nature, both of the landscapes to be found 
 in George Sand's romances and of those in the 
 midst of which she herself lived, have a luxuriance 
 and sensuousness of surface that Arnold rarely con- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 187 
 
 descends to. The tone of unguarded devotion may- 
 be represented by part of the concluding paragraph 
 of the essay: "It is silent, that eloquent voice! 
 it is sunk, that noble, that speaking head! We 
 sum up, as we best can, what she said to us, and 
 we bid her adieu. From many hearts in many 
 lands a troop of tender and grateful regrets con- 
 verge towards her humble churchyard in Berry. 
 Let them be joined by these words of sad homage 
 from one of a nation which she esteemed, and 
 which knew her very little and very ill." There 
 can be no question of the passionate sincerity and 
 the poetic beauty of this passage. 
 
 Comparable in atmosphere and tone to this essay 
 on George Sand is the discourse on Emerson, in 
 certain parts of which Arnold again has the cour- 
 age of his emotions. In the earlier paragraphs 
 there is the same revivification of a youthful mood 
 as in the essay on George Sand. There is also the 
 same only half -restrained pulsation in the rhythm, 
 an emotional throb that at times almost produces 
 an effect of metre. " Forty years ago, when I was 
 an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in the air 
 there which haunt my memory still. Happy the 
 man who in that susceptible season of youth hears 
 such voices! they are a possession to him forever." 
 Of this discourse, however, only the introduction 
 and the conclusion are of this intense, self-com- 
 muning passionateness ; the analysis of Emerson's 
 qualities as writer and thinker, that makes up the 
 
188 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 greater part of the discourse, has Arnold's usual 
 colloquial, self-consciously wary tone. 
 
 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 com- 
 promising, severest, most exact style; it is most 
 consistently present in the first of the Mixed Es- 
 says, that on Democracy (1861). The sentences are 
 apt to be long and periodic. The structure of the 
 thought is defined by means of painstakingly accu- 
 rate 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 on Democracy. 
 
 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 
 on Translating Homer, and in Culture 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 degen- 
 erates into over-familiarity or loses dignified re- 
 straint ; by its disregard of method, or of the more 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 189 
 
 pretentious 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 sub- 
 jects 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 on Translating Homerj in 
 many chapters of Culture and Anarchy, and runs 
 throughout Friendship's Garland. Its peculiarly 
 rasping effect upon many readers has already been 
 described. It is responsible for much of the prej- 
 udice 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 on George Sand and on Emerson. 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. 
 
190 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 The style usually taken as characteristically Ar- 
 nold'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 tem- 
 perament 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 prop- 
 ositions; "well" and "yes" often begin its sen: 
 tences — 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 un- 
 mistakably 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 thing 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 191 
 
 instead 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, that Ishmael might 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 word Nature! 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 to Nature !^ — do you mean that we 
 are to give full swing to our inclinations? '^^ 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 un- 
 conscious, 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 of Culture 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 their 
 
 1 Literature and Dogma, ed. 1893, p. 321. 
 
192 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 stock 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 foTth 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."^ This dialec- 
 tical 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 everyday; it is 
 nice — instinctively edited. Certain words are 
 favourites with him, and, as is so often the case 
 with the literary temperament, reveal special pre- 
 occupations. Such words are lucidity ^ urbanity , 
 
 1 Culture and Anarchy^ ed. 1883, p. 205. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD I93 
 
 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 repeti- 
 tions come palpably from sheer fondness for his 
 own happy phraseology. His description of Shel- 
 ley 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 effec- 
 tive means both for stamping his own ideas on the 
 mind of the public and for ridiculing his oppo- 
 nents. Many of his positive formulas have become 
 part and parcel of the modern literary man's equip- 
 ment. 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 j 
 
194 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 " 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 ridi- 
 cule. He isolates some unluckily symbolic phrase 
 of his opponent's, points out its damaging implica- 
 tions or its absurdity, and then repeats it pitilessly 
 as an ironical refrain. The phrase gains in gro- 
 tesqueness at each return — ^' sweetening and gath- 
 ering sweetness evermore" — and, finally, seems 
 to the reader to contain the distilled quintes- 
 sence of the foolishness inherent in the view that 
 Arnold ridicules. It is in this way that in Culture 
 and Anarchy the 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 enthu- 
 siasm 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, 
 the Times, at a certain diplomatic crisis, exhorts 
 the Government to set forth England's claims 
 "with promptitude and energy"; and this gran- 
 diloquent, 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 by 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 195 
 
 Arnold in tliis same satirical fashion. Mr. Pred- 
 eric Harrison, in the course of a somewhat atra- 
 bilious criticism, had accused Arnold of being a 
 mere dilettante and of having " no philosophy with 
 coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and deriva- 
 tive principles." This latter phrase, with its bris- 
 tling 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-depre- 
 ciation. Eeaders of Literature arid Sdencej too, 
 will remember how amusingly Arnold plays with 
 "Mr. Darwin's famous proposition that *our an- 
 cestor 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 there- 
 fore, 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 cur- 
 rent, — Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace. 
 The Nonconformist, because of his unyielding sec- 
 tarianism, 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 "Nebuchadnez- 
 
196 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 zars" of culture. The Church and State Revieio 
 Arnold dubs " the High Church rhinoceros " ; the 
 Record is "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 Ar- 
 nold frequently gives point to his style through 
 the use of scriptural phrases or illustrations. 
 Many of the foregoing nicknames come from bib- 
 lical sources. The lectures on Homer offer one 
 admirable instance of Scripture quotation. Ar- 
 nold 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 hie 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 it 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD I97 
 
 mockingly 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 dis- 
 quisition." 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 to- 
 gether 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 and ^ 
 
198 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 paradox into a meretricious manner. "A free 
 play of the mind " ; " disinterestedness " ; "a cur- 
 rent of true and fresh, ideas " ; " the note of pro- 
 vinciality " ; " 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 hap- 
 pily vital are all these phrases! How perfectly 
 integrated ! Yet they are unelaborate and almost 
 obvious. Christianity is "the greatest and happi- 
 est stroke ever yet made for human perfection." 
 "Burke saturates politics with thought." "Our 
 august Constitution sometimes looks ... a colos- 
 sal machine for the manufacture of Philistines." 
 " English public life . . . that Thyestean banquet 
 of claptrap." The Atlantic cable — "that great 
 rope, with a Philistine at each end of it talking in- 
 utilities." 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 Ar- 
 nold, 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 New- 
 man's; its general inferiority to Newman's style in 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 199 
 
 point 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 pleas- 
 antly unconsidered trifle. For example, the long 
 and elaborate discussion, Culture and Anarchy, be- 
 gins with an allusion to a recent article in the 
 Quarterly Review on Sainte-Beuve. Curiosity as a 
 habit of mind had been somewhat disparaged in 
 that article, and it is through a colloquial exami- 
 nation of just what is involved in commendable 
 curiosity that Arnold is led to his analysis of 
 culture. Later in the same chapter, references 
 occur to such sectarian journals as the Noncon- 
 formist, and to current events as reported and crit- 
 icised in their columns. Even in essays dealing 
 with purely literary topics — in such an essay as 
 that on Eugenie de Guerin — there is this same 
 actuality. "While I was reading the journal of 
 Mile, de Guerin," 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 Eoman Catholi- 
 cism and the somewhat sordid intellectual poetry 
 of English sectarian life. This closeness of rela- 
 tion between Arnold's writing and his daily expe- 
 
200 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 rience is very noticeable, and increases tlie 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. 
 
 VIII 
 
 And, indeed, the union in Arnold's style of actu- 
 ality with distinction becomes a very significant 
 matter when we turn to consider his precise rela- 
 tion 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 prede- 
 cessors and to the men of his own time. He ac- 
 cepts 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 Komanticists 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 th^ 
 imagination and the emotions the », primacy in 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 201 
 
 life; like the Eomanticists 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 inatters 
 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 con- 
 tinually concerned about what ought to be; he is 
 not cynically or scientifically content with the 
 knowledge of what is. And yet, unlike the Eo- 
 manticists, Arnold is in the world, and of it; he 
 has given heed to the world-spirit's warning, " sub- 
 mit, submit''; he has *' learned the Second Eever- 
 ence, 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 mor- 
 
202 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 bid 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 Eomanticists, their impotent iso- 
 lation, 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 ken 
 From half of human fate." 
 
 Tempered, then, as Arnold was by a deep sense 
 of the beauty and nobleness of romantic and ideal- 
 istic poetry, finely touched as he was into sympa- 
 thy with the whole range of delicate intuitions, 
 quivering sensibilities, and half-mystical aspira- 
 tions that this poetry called into play, he yet came 
 to regard its underlying conceptions of life as in- 
 adequate and misleading, and to feel the need of 
 supplementing them by a surer and saner relation 
 to the conventional world of common sense. The 
 Eomanticists 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 dis- 
 tinguish between this world and the great world of 
 common experience, spread out generously in the 
 lives of all men ; more and more clearly he realized 
 
MATTHEW AKNOLD 203 
 
 that 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 un- 
 reality 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 — /m Ganzen, Guteyi 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. 
 
 Allasions 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. ^ 
 His splendid poetic tributes to Goethe, in his 
 Memorial Verses and Obermann, have given endur- 
 ing expression to his admiration for Goethe's 
 sanity, insight, and serene courage. His frankest 
 prose appreciation of Goethe occurs in A French 
 Critic on Goethe, where he characterizes him as 
 " the clearest, the largest, the most helpful thinker 
 of modern times; ... in the width, depth, and 
 
 1 Letters, II, 165. 
 
204 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 richness of his criticism of life, by far our greatest 
 modern man."^ 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 Eomanti- 
 cism; he had rebelled against the limitations of 
 actual life (in Werther, for example, and Goetz), and 
 sought passionately for the realization of romantic 
 dreams ; and he had finally come to admit the fu- 
 tility 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 -disci- 
 pline for the good of society, the secret of success- 
 ful 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 English- 
 men. There is in Arnold somewhat less sleek 
 paganism than in Goethe — a somewhat more genu- 
 ine 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 uncom- 
 plaining 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 fairly 
 
 1 Mixed Essays, pp. 233-234. 
 
 I 
 
MATTHEW AENOLD 205 
 
 enough be called the special advocate of conven- 
 tionality. He recommends and practises conform- 
 ity 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 her- 
 oine 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 sen- 
 timent 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 Mere- 
 dith's Comic Spirit. It is " in this world " that 
 "he has hope," in its ever greater refinement, in 
 its ever greater comprehensiveness, in its increas- 
 ing 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 that 
 
206 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 it offers by far the best means for imposing widely 
 upon the nation, as a standard of religious experi- 
 ence, what is most spiritual in the lives and aspira- 
 tions 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 Lock- 
 hart, — there is at once obvious in him an all-per- 
 vasive quality that marks his temper as far subtler 
 and finer than theirs. His worldliness is a world- 
 liness of his own, compounded out of many exqui- 
 site 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 decla- 
 ration contrasts strikingly with Macaulay's pes- 
 simistic 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 genu- 
 ine maturity. Poetry always remains for Arnold 
 the most adequate and beautiful mode of speech 
 possible to man; and this faith, which runs im- 
 plicitly through all his writing, is plainly the out- 
 come of a mood very different from that of the 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 207 
 
 ordinary man of the world, and is the expression 
 of an emotional refinement and a spiritual sensitive- 
 ness that are, at least in part, his abiding inheri- 
 tance from the Eomanticists. 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 tran- 
 scendentalist. To the stricter sect of the transcen- 
 dentalists he can hardly pretend to belong. He 
 certainly has none of their delight in envisag- 
 ing 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 righteous- 
 ness"; but his interest in this power and his com- 
 ments upon it confine themselves almost wholly to 
 its plain and palpable influence upon human con- 
 duct. Even in his poetry he can hardly be rated 
 as more than a transcendentalist manque; and in 
 his prose he is never so aware of the unseen as in 
 his poetry. 
 
 Yet, whether or no he be strictly a transcenden- 
 talist, Arnold is, in Disraeli's famous phrase, "on 
 the side of the angels " ; he is a persistent and 
 ingenious opponent of purely materialistic or utili- 
 tarian conceptions of life. " The kingdom of God 
 
208 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 is 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 
 an inner state of 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 mere machinery — 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 spir- 
 itual 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 Ar- 
 nold's genius, one has but to compare him with 
 men of science or with rationalists pure and sim- 
 ple, — with men like Professor Huxley, Darwin, 
 or Bentham. Their carefulness for truth, their 
 intellectual strength, their vast services to man- 
 kind, 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 anH more various ways ; it touches him into 
 response through associations that have a more dis- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 209 
 
 tinctively liuman characterj 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 sci- 
 ence — a larger accumulation of imaginative expe- 
 rience. 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 ex- 
 quisite tact, rather than to reason or demonstra- 
 tion. The imaginative assimilation of all the best 
 experience of the past — this he regards as the 
 right training to develop true tact for the discern- 
 ment 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 dex- 
 trous apprehension of truth through the aid of 
 
210 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 tlie feelings and the imagination. But Arnold's 
 new Sense comes much nearer than Newman's to 
 being a genuinely sublimated Common Sense. Ar- 
 nold's own Jlair in matters of art and life was as- 
 tonishingly 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-called remnant — in 
 the collective sense of the most cultivated, most 
 delicately perceptive, most spiritually-minded 
 people of the world. Through the combined intui- 
 tions 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 the Zeitgeist 
 of 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 preoccupa- 
 tions ; 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 quin- 
 tessence of this ideal life of former generations and 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 211 
 
 insinuating 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 
 aestheticism on the other hand. Newman, whose 
 delicately spiritual temperament was subdued even 
 more deeply than Arnold's to Eomanticism, shrunk 
 before the immediacy and apparent anarchy of 
 modern life, and sought to realize his spiritual 
 ideals through the aid of mediaeval formulas and a 
 return to mediaeval conceptions and standards of 
 truth. Exquisite spirituality was attained, but at 
 the cost of what some have called the Great Re- 
 fusal. 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 un- 
 malleable, irreducible to terms of the ideal. They 
 turn for consolation to their own dreams, and 
 frame for themselves a House Beautiful, where 
 tney 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 disorderli- 
 ness ; but he has faith in the instincts that civil- 
 ized men have developed in common, and finds 
 in the working of these instincts the continuous, 
 if irregular, realization of the ideal. 
 
JAN 18 1899 
 
 XI 9 
 

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