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 m
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 AND THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE 
 
 PAPERS OF THE ENGLISH CLUB OF SEWANEE 
 
 THE REVEREND GREENOUGH WHITE A.M. B.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH 
 
 AUTHOR OF AN "OUTLINE OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE" 
 
 "a SAINT OF THE SOUTHERN CHURCH," ETC. 
 
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 « 68 7 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK & LONDON 
 
 Cbc Iknickcrboclicr ipress 
 
 1898
 
 Copyright, 1898, by 
 GREENOUGH WHITE 
 
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 Ube 1knicl;erbocl;er press, mew ]L)orft
 
 
 TO ALL WHO ARE PROMOTING 
 
 THE CAUSE OF LITERATURE 
 
 IN THE SOUTHERN STATES 
 
 THESE ESSAYS ARE INSCRIBED 
 
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 CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction 
 
 the editor 
 
 I Character of A. H. Clough as Revealed in His Poems . 
 
 THE editor 
 
 ti Arnold's Character as Revealed in His Poems 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 17 
 
 -\ the editor 
 
 HI Arnold's Life and Character as Shown in His Letters . 31 
 
 MARY WICKLIFFE VAN NESS 
 
 IV The Late Course of Religious Thought ... 44 
 
 w. p. du bose 
 
 V Matthew Arnold and the Bible 51 
 
 w. a. guerry 
 
 VI The Late Course of Ethical Thought .... 62 
 
 w. p. woolf 
 
 VII Political and Economic Movements .... 75 
 
 M. G. JOHNSTON 
 
 VIII Recent History Writing 81 
 
 W. H. DU BOSE 
 
 IX Arnold's Character as Revealed in His Criticism . 93 
 
 H. J. mikell 
 
 X Lord Leighton and the Late Course of English Art . 104 
 
 marie huger 
 
 XI Mr. Meredith's Diana of the Crossways . . . .118 
 
 ALICE WITMAN 
 
 XII Mrs. Humphry Ward's Marcella 123 
 
 MARY WICKLIFFE VAN NESS 
 
 XIII Mr. Alfred Austin's Lyrical Poems .... 129 
 
 XIV Mr. William Watson's Poems 
 
 LOUISE FINLEY 
 
 adelene wicks 
 
 137
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE 
 SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 THE English Club originated at Sewanee, Tennessee, 
 in the summer of 1885. The object of its founders 
 (residents of the place, mostly ladies, and several 
 members of the University of the South) was a study of 
 English words — their derivation, definition, and pronun- 
 ciation. Interest in this field was erelong exhausted, 
 and the Club advanced from a study of language to that 
 of literature. In the season of 1886, popular lectures 
 were delivered under its auspices, the subjects being, for 
 the most part, English poets of the nineteenth century — 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson. One evening 
 was devoted to an American poet — Sidney Lanier, — and 
 another to Mr. Ruskin's writings. Beside these, lectures 
 were given by Germans on Klopstock and Lessing's 
 Laocod?t, and by an eminent Greek scholar on the poetess 
 Sappho. The excellent attendance upon these lectures 
 showed that the Club was supplying a widely felt need. 
 In 1887, it was completely reorganized, and a new chapter 
 in its history began. Its constituency changed, two or 
 three members only preserving continuity, and its course 
 of study was broadened and deepened, along Spencerian 
 lines. So thorough was the change that it seemed ad-
 
 I 
 
 2 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age N 
 
 visable to adopt a new designation, and the Club passed 
 for a time under the name " Philomathic." Yet through 
 this and future modifications the essential motive was 
 always preserved : that of furnishing a point of literary- 
 contact between the University and the community. 
 The subject then selected was " William Cowper and His 
 Times," and a somewhat exhaustive study was made of 
 the poet and of English civilization in the last half of the 
 eighteenth century. The Club next returned to one of 
 its former subjects, William Wordsworth, as the central 
 point for similar investigation, and in this field — the first 
 half of the nineteenth century — was frequently assisted 
 by the kindness of special lecturers, particularly on points 
 of scientific progress. This Philomathic chapter ended, 
 in 1888, with study of Charles Kingsley and his literary 
 and theological contemporaries, and so the course was 
 brought down to the passing hour. For over a year 
 thereafter its meetings were suspended, until in 1890 it 
 was resuscitated as a Browning Club. It would appear 
 that the members soon got lost in the wandering mazes 
 of " Sordello," for this chapter of its history was brief. 
 In the spring of 1895, it was again revived, and as in a 
 former instance recurred to one of its original subjects — 
 Alfred Tennyson. So began the period — the fourth in 
 its history— of which the present volume is a memorial. 
 It has proved the ripest period of its career, marked by 
 most breadth of treatment. Beside a comprehensive 
 study of the late laureate's works, papers were read on 
 the Oxford Movement and the English Pre-Raphaelites, 
 and lectures given on Maurice, Browning, and Mr. Rus- 
 kin, and on the main currents of European thought during 
 Tennyson's time. A pleasant feature of this and the fol- 
 lowing year was the recitation of selected poems. In 
 1896, the life and writings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning 
 formed the appropriate subject of discussion in a club 
 mainly composed of ladies, and opportunity was afforded
 
 Introduction 3 
 
 to introduce the contributions made to English thought 
 and letters by contemporaries of her sex — Mary Somer- 
 ville, Mary Russell Mitford, Felicia Hemans, Catherine 
 Gore, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth 
 Gaskell, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, and her Ma- 
 jesty the Queen. When at the end of the year a subject 
 was sought for ensuing study, which should lead into the 
 heart of our own times, and furnish a point of departure 
 for an investigation of the tendencies and characteristics 
 of the last generation of the century, none presented 
 itself more eHgible than Matthew Arnold. Subscriptions 
 were made, a library of thirty-six volumes was purchased, 
 to circulate among the members, and the work of a pros- 
 perous year began. As it progressed, such was the 
 benefit derived by the members, such the freshness of 
 the field, that a resolution to pubhsh the general result 
 of the course was confirmed. It was felt that at last, 
 after years of discipline, the Club had reached a point 
 where it might make a little contribution to the culture 
 of the country. A large and ever increasing proportion 
 of that culture is being provided by just such societies as 
 this, and it was believed that an example of its work 
 might prove suggestive and encouraging to like bands of 
 literary workers scattered widely over the land. 
 
 This motive, it is hoped, will win the reader's pardon 
 for the number of explanatory details just given, which 
 by themselves are, of course, of merely local interest. 
 We proceed to an interpretation of the volume itself, the 
 rationale of the course, the connection of the essays. It 
 is apparent that ours is an age much given to criticism ; 
 its spokesman, naturally, has been the finest critic of his 
 day — Matthew Arnold. As such we have studied him. 
 A moment's reflection serves to show that he stands as a 
 consummate type of literary criticism : his poetry is 
 " criticism of life," and his prose work may be classified 
 as criticism of (i) ancient literature, both Hebrew and
 
 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 classic, and (2) modern literature; what remains was of 
 temporary interest, and consists chiefly of criticism of the 
 political and religious situation in which he found himself 
 — affording, thus, points for discussion. Between Arnold 
 and the natural scientists his contemporaries there existed 
 a kind of armed neutrality ; they never struck up a cordial 
 alliance, though all reacted against the dogmatic and 
 supernaturalistic position of the preceding epoch. His 
 most conspicuous deficiency was aesthetic ; for fine art he 
 seems to have cared little and of its principles and history 
 to have known less. In the volumes of his letters there 
 occurs no reference to his celebrated contemporary, the 
 late President of the Royal Academy, — Sir Frederick 
 Leighton. This is the more remarkable in that they 
 were both of classic propensities; if any art might have 
 been expected to appeal to Arnold, it would be Leigh- 
 ton's. In the course of discussion it was agreed that 
 these two, with Jowett, sum up the prominent and essen- 
 tial features of the culture of their day — that is, our own, 
 — and this by itself is a valuable point to gain. 
 
 The starting-point of our interpretation has just been 
 hinted at; the work of the Club in 1897 was thrown into 
 salient relief against a background furnished by previous 
 years of study: the age, that is, of Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning and of Tennyson's best work — in a word, the 
 middle generation of the century, the years from 1830 to 
 i860. Beside the names last mentioned, those of New- 
 man, Rossetti, and Mr. Ruskin may be adduced in evi- 
 dence of the religious, idealistic, poetic character of that 
 epoch. As types of the succeeding generation, we have 
 to take Stanley, Jowett, Arnold, Leighton, Huxley, Mr. 
 Spencer, George Eliot, and Mr. Hardy. That is to say, 
 the key to our times is to be found in a strenuous and 
 consistent reaction, at all points, against the ideas of the 
 preceding generation. The inductive method of reason- 
 ing has superseded the deductive ; our age, to repeat, is
 
 Introduction 5 
 
 critical; criticism, Biblical and literary, has been its com- 
 manding and absorbing interest — and its chief literary 
 output beside has been fiction, and that of sceptical, real- 
 istic, and critical tendencies. Other notes have been the 
 spread of democratic ideas and the extraordinary advance 
 of physical science. 
 
 Taking Arnold, then, as our nucleus, we caused his 
 figure to revolve before our eyes, so that it might be ap- | 
 prehended in its various aspects, and proceeded to plot | 
 out the age, securing consistency of design and conse- I 
 quent unity in our course of study, by focussing all 
 lines of interest upon that figure, or making them radiate 
 from it, bringing all to bear so as to illustrate or be illus- 
 trated by his work. A short paper on " The Late Course 
 of Religious Thought " is devoted to an elucidation of 
 the one central point — the principles and tendencies of the 
 critical school in theology. This, like Arnold, is essen- 
 tially anti-dogmatic, anti-supernaturalistic, and seeks, as "'\ 
 he did, to eliminate the miraculous and prophetic elements 
 from religion, and so to forestall a radical conflict be- 
 tween it and science. In a paper on ' ' Ethical Thought, 
 the series of moral theorists is unfolded and Arnold's 
 place therein shown. It is to be observed that here alone 
 in the course could a place be found for any extended 
 mention of the great evolutionist philosophers whose 
 work has been such a prominent feature of the age; any 
 technical scientific exposition would have been out of 
 keeping with the purely literary motive of the Club, but 
 where scientific thought was projected into the sphere of 
 morals it came just within its scope. There follows a 
 summary statement of the leading internal political, 
 economic, and social movements in England. The order 
 of these papers is not haphazard but is designed to con- 
 form to natural fact ; religious and moral motives are 
 primary and deepest springs of action ; they preceded, 
 they underlie and inspire what is best in the great move-
 
 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 ment of our time toward equality, and without them it 
 could not be. Concerning the employment of quotations 
 in this and other papers, it is just to state, right here, that 
 several writers demurred to the publication of their essays 
 on the ground that they had been prepared solely for the 
 Club and a passing occasion, and that they were by no 
 means original. The editor reassured them by suggest- 
 ing that no sensible person could or would expect them 
 to go to their imaginations for their facts, and made the 
 incontestable point that the topics in question were essen- 
 tial to the design of the volume. We would make as 
 patent as possible the critical, instructive motive of the 
 book ; in the preparation of its parts the usual authorities 
 have been used ; a collocation of quotations may be 
 original, — may strike out a new thought or truth; and 
 the value of the essays that follow resides in their relation 
 to each other. With this explicit declaration of purpose 
 and method, we may leave it to the courteous and com- 
 petent reader to decide who were right, the editor or the 
 essayists above mentioned, and so pass on. As an intro- 
 duction to the paper on the late course of historic study 
 and composition, the editor may perhaps be pardoned if 
 he quotes a recently published opinion of his own relative 
 to the exceeding importance of the subject: " History is 
 destined to become the theatre of future discussion, the 
 battle-field of the mind ; all manner of questions, re- 
 ligious, political, literary, aesthetic, — questions of Biblical 
 and ecclesiastical authority, of social and individual rights, 
 — are bound to be carried eventually to the bar of history — 
 that is, the experience of the race." An increasing 
 recognition of this fact is one of the deepest notes of our 
 time. We have next an essay on Arnold's critical prin- 
 ciples, in which the sore need of our time — as he too con- 
 sidered it — is brought out, the imperative need of a 
 healthy, consistent, competent, and trustworthy criticism, 
 that is, a thoroughly educated criticism, instead of the
 
 Introduction 7 
 
 vanity, the moody, contradictory, incapable, misleading \ 
 effusions, full of personal crotchets and prejudices, and \ 
 of no possible use to either reader or author, that still 
 commonly pass as criticism. The ensuing paper illus- 
 trates the contemporary reaction in art, marked by the 
 resurgence of Raphael and Angelo, against the romanti- 
 cism, symbolism, and mysticism of the Pre-Raphaelites. 
 The remaining essays illustrate the application of critical 
 principles before elicited in the interpretation of con- 
 temporary fiction and poetry, the aim in all being to 
 furnish introductions as serviceable as possible to their 
 respective subjects. The essays in the criticism of fiction 
 throw suggestive side-lights on the movement toward 
 equality illustrated in an earlier paper, and show how 
 that art makes its contribution to great issues, — Mr. 
 Meredith's fundamental principle being, apparently, the 
 equality of the sexes, and " Marcella's," social equality; 
 while those in the criticism of poetry show the relation of 
 the present poet-laureate and Mr. William Watson to the 
 central figure of the course, that relation in the latter case 
 being peculiarly intimate. The determination of Mr. 
 Watson's position in the history of English poetry was, 
 indeed, one of the most striking results of the course. 
 The papers were limited in length, as they were designed, 
 severally, to afford a basis of discussion at successive 
 meetings. Their actual order corresponded closely to 
 the logical order according to which they are here ar- 
 ranged ; in the conduct of the Club, emergencies arose 
 that necessitated occasional transpositions. 
 
 In conclusion : this little book is sent forth in the hope 
 and conviction that it will prove helpful to present and 
 future students of Matthew Arnold.
 
 I. 
 
 CHARACTER OF A. H. CLOUGH AS REVEALED IN HIS 
 
 POEMS. 
 
 CLOUGH is a poet of peculiar interest to Americans 
 by reason of his connection, as boy and man, with 
 two representative seats of American culture, 
 South and North, — Charleston and Cambridge. In the 
 former city were passed the years of his early childhood ; 
 there his infant mind awoke, under the tutelage of a 
 fond and cultivated mother; there he made his earliest 
 sallies into the fascinating vistas of romance. In his 
 prime of life and power he visited Cambridge, and was in 
 intimate and cordial relations with the men of letters and 
 learning who made the place illustrious in the middle of 
 the century. He found much to enjoy in life in America, 
 but felt a lack in it, he said, of depth of experience. 
 Had he waited a few years longer, until the war of seces- 
 sion, the ground of that criticism would have been re- 
 moved ; he would have had no further cause of complaint 
 on that score. 
 
 The few, simple external events of Clough's life are 
 too well known to need enlargement here : his schooling 
 at Rugby, where to the sensitive, imaginative child was 
 applied the exalted moral standard of Dr. Thomas Ar- 
 nold; his passage thence to the University of Oxford, in 
 the heyday of the Tractarian Movement, where the 
 spectacle of conflicting ecclesiastical views had the effect 
 of reducing him to a species of religious paralysis; and 
 
 8
 
 Clough's Poetry 9 
 
 then (the crisis in his career, both ethical and literary) 
 his resignation successively of tutorship and fellowship at 
 the University and farewell to Oxford in the year 1848. 
 His departure thence, which subjected him to misunder- 
 standing and unfavorable criticism, was followed by a 
 moment of Parnassian exhilaration that amply justified 
 the step ; it was as if he had escaped from spiritual con- 
 finement — had snapped some bond that fettered his 
 power of expression. In three successive years he made 
 annual trips to the Continent (the first time in Emerson's 
 company) and composed his principal poems, " The 
 Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich " (1848), " Amours de Voy- 
 age " (1849), with its hero of Hamlet-like character, and 
 (most significant of all) the Faust-like " Dipsychus " — 
 i. e., the twy-souled, — begun at Venice in 1850; the 
 motive of which, as explained in its prose epilogue, was 
 to represent " the conflict between the tender conscience 
 and the world." After that, the fountain of his highest 
 inspiration fell ; the inhibition of free poetical composi- 
 tion, for a brief space removed, seemed again to descend ; 
 and in London the shadows closed in upon him once 
 more. 
 
 Clough was a modern Hamlet, his world, both outer 
 and inner, out of joint, and he powerless to set it right. 
 Its riddle was a knot that he was too weak to cleave. 
 He stands, like patience on her monument, the witness 
 and the martyr of morals divorced from religion. He is 
 a type of conscience just coming short of Christian faith, 
 or better, of conscience falling away from the faith of 
 youth. He represents, that is, a stage through which 
 almost every acutely conscientious temperament must 
 pass in the process from the unreasoning faith of child- 
 hood to the reasoned faith of maturity. He is a rela- 
 tively perfect type of the undogmatic poetic sceptic. 
 
 To understand his peculiar mood, it is necessary con- 
 stantly to refer to his training at Rugby. It is needless,
 
 lO Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 it would be an impertinence, to extol Dr. Arnold and his 
 educational reformation ; one may question whether his 
 moral standard, noble as it essentially was, was not too 
 exacting, too Quixotically ideal, for ordinary boy-nature; 
 whether it did not tend to induce, in the finer, more 
 serious spirits, an excessive scrupulousness, a self-con- 
 scious virtue, a self-questioning, introspective habit, 
 analysis of motives, and critical morality that hindered 
 healthy, instinctive action. This moral frame is certainly 
 mirrored to the life in Clough's verse. He left Rugby 
 with a conscience morbidly tender, and the oppositions 
 of opinion he encountered at Oxford deprived him of 
 what his state of mind imperatively demanded — definite 
 religious conviction. So he became, pre-eminently, the 
 poet of Doubt. 
 
 " One former frailty haunted him, a touch 
 Of something introspective overmuch." 
 
 And again, in powerful words descriptive of one of his 
 
 heroes: 
 
 ' ' he seemed to feel as in his veins 
 The moral mischief circulating still, 
 Racked vsrith the torture of the double will." 
 
 His poems depict a soul posed by the great dilemma: 
 
 It may be, it may not be; it may be true, it may be 
 
 false ' ' : 
 
 " Beyond the clouds, beyond the waves that roar, 
 There may indeed, or may not be, a shore, 
 Where fields as green, and hands and hearts as true 
 The old forgotten semblance may renew. " 
 
 His was a perplexed spirit, even to paralysis, hesitating 
 between motives, between various courses of action : 
 
 " The doubting soul, from day to day. 
 Uneasy, paralytic lay." 
 
 " So plumb I the deeps of depression, 
 Daily in deeper, and find no support, no will, no purpose.'
 
 Clough's Poetry ii 
 
 We are reminded, by the tone of these fragments, and 
 forcibly by a highly significant piece, " The Questioning 
 Spirit ' ' — a spirit that passes to and fro, 
 
 " Perplexing these that sleep, and in their folly 
 Inbreeding doubt and sceptic melancholy," — 
 
 that it was the very time when Tennyson produced his 
 first important poem, " The Two Voices." 
 
 For years Clough was full of misgiving as to whether 
 he was doing right in relaxing his hold on the Christian 
 faith ; he had the will to believe, but was daunted by the 
 Biblical criticism of the hour; the evangelists seemed 
 gone, and Christ a shade, " not risen." 
 
 " Trembling thinkers on the brink 
 Shiver, and know not how to think. . . 
 A thousand dupes point here and there. 
 Bewildered by the show and glare." 
 
 A term in the last couplet contains the secret of his mood : 
 he was over-fearful of being found a dupe — so afraid of 
 believing anything false that he would rather believe 
 nothing. A more robust character would rather believe 
 something even though in that something there might 
 be a strain of error. His intellectual career proves that 
 for healthy activity of soul one must take something for 
 granted; that it is wiser to trust one's intuitions, as pro- 
 ceeding from a faithful Creator, a God of truth ; better 
 to believe that the world is good and that men mean to 
 do right, until the contrary is proved. It was the other 
 way with Clough. His tendency was to suspect that he 
 would be imposed upon in intellectual matters. He is a 
 type of those who search for truth and never find it — 
 never in this life; of those who dread any blind submis- 
 sion of reason or judgment. Herein is exemplified his 
 intense conscientiousness ; he did not think it right to 
 say he believed until he was convinced. With him there
 
 12 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 could be no feigning, no " arbitrary judgment." His 
 favorite figure was that of a ship on a pathless sea. 
 
 " Where lies the land to which the ship would go ? 
 Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. 
 And where the land she travels from ? Away, 
 Far, far behind, is all that they can say." 
 
 To complete his figure, he was " like a ship that passes 
 in the night on the high seas " without the compass of 
 faith ; he was drifting with the waves. 
 
 In this predicament a common man would have ac- 
 cepted mere instinct as his guide, would have sought to 
 satisfy his heart with this world. Clough proved that the 
 world cannot satisfy the conscientious spirit. He ex- 
 pressed sovereign contempt for those who sought to 
 nourish themselves upon the ashes of this life and of the 
 senses; such seemed to him to be abandoned to the most 
 deceptive dreams. He found society and traffic full of 
 falsehood and dissimulation covering ruthless selfishness, 
 and this discord between the real and ideal, between what 
 things and relations are in social life and what they ought 
 to be, falling upon his highly developed conscience and 
 acute intellect, struck from them some of the most cut- 
 ting satire of his day. An example in point, truly ter- 
 rible in its irony, is " The Latest Decalogue " : 
 
 " Thou shalt have one God only ; who 
 Would be at the expense of two ? 
 No graven images may be 
 Worshipped, except the currency : 
 Swear not at all ; for, for thy curse 
 Thine enemy is none the worse : 
 At church on Sunday to attend 
 Will serve to keep the world thy friend : 
 Honor thy parents ; that is, all 
 From whom advancement may befall : 
 Thou shalt not kill ; but need'st not strive 
 Ofificiously to keep alive : 
 Do not adultery commit ; 
 Advantage rarely comes of it :
 
 Clough's Poetry 13 
 
 Thou shalt not steal ; an empty feat. 
 When it 's so lucrative to cheat : 
 Bear not false witness ; let the lie 
 Have time on its own wings to fly : 
 Thou shalt not covet, but tradition 
 Approves all forms of competition." 
 
 It would be a mistake to regard Clough as solely an 
 introspective poet, involved in his own mental difficul- 
 ties. He had, in fact, a lively sympathy with the poor 
 and an earnest desire to better their condition. Thus he 
 represents the awakening of the modern sense of social 
 compunction : 
 
 " How shall I laugh and sing and dance? 
 My very heart recoils, 
 While here to give my mirth a chance 
 A hungry brother toils." 
 
 His conscience, and heart as well, were almost too tender 
 for the stir and strife of this world. 
 
 We should still have a one-sided view of his personality 
 did we not record, making up by emphasis for necessary 
 brevity of statement, his hearty enjoyment of physical 
 life. Though there was in his physique, apparently, 
 some lack of stamina, and though he died early, there 
 was about him no aura of the invalid, but instead a deep 
 undercurrent of thoroughly healthy feeling. At school 
 he entered heartily into out-of-door sports, competing 
 with the best in swimming and running. Of swimming 
 he was particularly fond, and the zest of it is gaily regis- 
 tered in " The Bothie." In vacation time he refreshed 
 himself with nature, living as much as possible in the 
 open air. Sometimes in his poems we find truly Rabe- 
 laisian touches of delight in bodily life, in the elements 
 of air, light, and water, in wholesome satisfaction of the 
 senses; his first long poem fairly palpitates with this vital 
 sentiment. Ideally too, as was also the case with his 
 friend the younger Arnold, his highest satisfaction was
 
 14 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 found in external nature : in the beauty, variety, and re- 
 pose of nature, in sea or landscape, and in the not unlike 
 repose and harmony of classic literature, his spirit found 
 its chief resource and stay. His work is exceedingly in- 
 teresting to the student, for it is full of classic reminis- 
 cences, and much of it runs in classic rhythms. A few 
 lines from the end of the first and beginning of the second 
 canto of "Amours de Voyage" will illustrate at once 
 his response to the spell of antiquity, his questioning 
 habit, and the charm of the elegiac measure. " The 
 city " was Rome, and even among its ruins he could not 
 yield himself utterly to the spirit of the scene and of the 
 past, — could not forego a restless analysis of sentiment. 
 
 " Is it an idol I bow to, or is it a god that I worship ? 
 
 Do I sink back on the old, or do I soar from the mean? 
 So through the city I wander and question, unsatisfied ever, 
 Reverent so I accept, doubtful because I revere. 
 
 *' Is it illusion? or does there a spirit from perfecter ages, 
 
 Here, even yet, amid loss, change, and corruption abide ? 
 Does there a spirit we know not, though seek, though we find, compre- 
 hend not. 
 Here to entice and confuse, tempt and evade us, abide ? 
 Lives in the exquisite grace of the column disjointed and single. 
 
 Haunts the rude masses of brick garlanded gaily with vine. 
 E'en in the turret fantastic surviving that springs from the ruin, 
 E'en in the people itself ? is it illusion or not ? " 
 
 Finally, he was the poet of struggling faith and hope. 
 He verified in his experience the profound and subtle 
 analysis of Browning, simply exchanging a life of faith 
 diversified by doubt for one of doubt diversified by faith. 
 Seeming loss and waste, he thought, may have fruitful 
 ends; it took ages of dusk to produce Homer. This 
 discord will at last be resolved into harmony, this dualism 
 into unity. The end of social life is to ensure love. He 
 reminds us, by his insistence upon the value and neces- 
 sity of labor, that Carlyle (whom he knew personally) was
 
 Clough's Poetry 15 
 
 the prophet of that generation ; work we must, he 
 echoed — and in hard and steady work he himself found 
 comfort. Heroism of soul is expressed in his lines en- 
 titled " Peschiera, " among which appears a paraphrase 
 of Tennyson's most familiar saying: 
 
 " 'T is better to have fought and lost 
 Than never to have fought at all." 
 
 I " Say not, the struggle nought availeth, 
 
 The labor and the wounds are vain, 
 The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
 And as things have been they remain. 
 
 " If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars ; 
 It may be, in yon smoke concealed. 
 Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers. 
 And, but for you, possess the field." 
 
 His deepest message is that, in the struggle of the 
 soul, in solitude and silence, God is revealed as Will : 
 
 " O only Source of all our light and life. 
 
 Whom as our truth, our strength, we see and feel, 
 But whom the hours of mortal moral strife 
 Alone aright reveal ! 
 
 " Mine inmost soul, before Thee inly brought. 
 Thy presence owns ineffable, divine ; 
 Chastised each rebel self-encentred thought, 
 My will adoreth Thine." 
 
 Duty is the ultimate reality, resisting all analysis : 
 
 " Thought may well be ever ranging, 
 And opinion ever changing. 
 Task-work be, though ill-begun, 
 Dealt with by experience better ; 
 By the law and by the letter 
 Duty done is duty done : 
 Do it. Time is on the wing ! 
 
 " Go from the east to the west, as the sun and the stars direct thee. 
 Go with the girdle of man, go and encompass the earth. 
 Not for the gain of the gold ; for the getting, the hoarding, the having. 
 But for the joy of the deed, but for the Duty to do."
 
 i6 
 
 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 Yet that austere guide can never satisfy the heart — it 
 never satisfied his. He put expression of his own ex- 
 perience into the mouth of Jacob: 
 
 " I have striven all my days 
 To do my duty to my house and hearth. 
 And to the purpose of my father's race, 
 Yet is my heart therewith not satisfied." 
 
 Nothing can exceed the pathos of that attitude. Cer- 
 tainly, Clough makes an appeal that cannot be resisted to 
 our sympathies and affection. Doing his duty in the 
 spirit of a martyr, the hunger of his soul never appeased, 
 his emotions never at rest, he had the will to believe, to 
 trust the " ampler voice," — but could not. At one point 
 he seemed to rise to a conviction of the presence of in- 
 visible beings, of personal spirits about and above us ; do 
 they aid us ? Do they truly touch and aid us ? He 
 cried out for a prophet to dissolve the mystery. His 
 whole work ends in a great interrogation. 
 
 Greenough White.
 
 II. 
 
 ARNOLD'S CHARACTER AS REVEALED IN HIS POEMS. 
 
 IF Clough represents undogmatic scepticism, thorough- 
 going agnosticism, doubt of sceptical and critical 
 negations just as much as of theological affirmations, 
 his friend Matthew Arnold stands for dogmatic poetic 
 scepticism or agnosticism, for positive denial, and so 
 represents a second stage in the history of doubt in our 
 century. Though he was only four years younger than 
 Clough, he seems to belong to a later decade or gener- 
 ation ; and in fact he did outlive him for nearly a genera- 
 tion. There subsisted an extraordinary affinity between 
 their spirits; the environment of their youth was the 
 same; and Arnold's first poetic mood was practically 
 identical with his friend's. The ecclesiastical and politi- 
 cal ferment in which he found himself produced in him a 
 sense of painful confusion ; the ideals of former days were 
 dissolving away and those of the new era were not yet 
 clearly defined; in the interirn he felt like an alien, like 
 one 
 
 ■""- " Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 
 The other powerless to be born. 
 
 Now the old is out of date, 
 The new is not yet born," 
 
 he repeated, plaintively. It has been born since, this 
 new world with its insistence upon popular and natural 
 elements everywhere, this new democratic and industrial, 
 
 17
 
 1 8 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 scientific and critical world, — and he did much to assist 
 its bringing forth; but in the era of transition he was 
 thoroughly discontented with contemporary conditions; 
 his poems reveal no sympathy with the democratic tend- 
 encies and social movements of his time. Now without 
 sympathy there can be no comprehension ; hence his per- 
 plexity of mind, amounting at times to actual distress, to 
 a feeling akin to suffocation. Modern life was a labyrinth 
 to which he possessed no clue; its tumult made his head 
 swim ; from its complexities, in which he could discover 
 no order, no design, he longed to escape but could not; 
 the consequence was a nightmare sense of oppression. 
 
 He felt keenly, because of his own need of it, the lack 
 of human kindness in the world. He was naturally sen- 
 sitive ; his vein of sentiment was so deep and strong that 
 he realized instinctively the need of restraint; hence his 
 air of Stoic self-control, masking an emotion that was all 
 the deeper for such restraint. He lamented the general 
 want of common sympathy, humanity, gentleness, good- 
 ness, in society; and between individuals he saw love fail: 
 even upon love there was no dependence to be placed. 
 One is conscious, all through his verse, of a sense of lone- 
 liness and loss, which after the death of Clough it is easy 
 to interpret. 
 
 As an example of his cheerless creed, let us take his 
 reflections as he stood upon " Dover Beach," watching 
 the lights on the French coast opposite. The tide, which 
 had been at flood, began to turn, and he noted the 
 changing cadence of the waves upon the beach. 
 
 ' ' The sea of faith 
 
 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. 
 
 But now I only hear 
 
 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
 
 Retreating, to the breath 
 
 Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear 
 
 And naked shingles of the world."
 
 Arnold's Poetry 19 
 
 A Few lines more disconsolate than these were ever penned. 
 What is to be done in this age of ebbing faith ? Shall 
 one go to the Grande Chartreuse and take up with the 
 " last of the people who believe " ? Arnold's stanzas 
 descriptive of a visit to the famous monastery are among 
 the most beautiful that he ever wrote, and are interesting 
 as a criticism of the Middle Ages by a poet of our own 
 time ; they preclude any such resort for a modern man. 
 
 j In his intellectual and emotional difficulties, amid the 
 t^ fever of modern life, infecting his own spirit, Arnold 
 
 J reacted against the intolerable strain, that threatened to 
 sap the springs of his being as it was sapping Clough's, 
 and crystallized into a poet of negation. In the melodi- 
 ous and melancholy lines entitled " Obermann Once 
 More," he dwelt upon the beauty of Christ's character, 
 admitting, with tender pathos, all that it had been to 
 men — but alas ! 
 
 " Now he is dead ; far hence he lies 
 In the lorn Syrian town. 
 And on his grave, with shining eyes. 
 The Syrian stars look down. 
 
 " Leave then the cross as ye have left carved gods. 
 " Creeds pass, rites change, no altar standeth whole." 
 
 These quotations serve to bring out one of the two 
 deepest points in his character; of his positive principle 
 we will speak later; here is his ngg ative side. He re- 
 acted vehemently against the dogmatic, sacramentarian, 
 and ritual, sacerdotal and ascetic tendencies of the Oxford 
 Movement ; the idea of supernatural revelation, the whole 
 system of church authority, clerical influence — these were 
 incredible or obnoxious to him. Of the aesthetic and 
 symbolic revival in public worship he wrote with utmost 
 contempt, as " pullulating rites extern and vain." He 
 had a work to do in the world, and that critical work; in
 
 20 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 order to accomplish it his nature demanded, apparently, 
 something to antagonize, something, whether in the fore- 
 ground or background of consciousness, against which 
 (perpetually to react ; and he found it in ecclesiasticism. 
 Here, accordingly, was his limitation. For the Established 
 rChurch of England he retained, as a venerable, national 
 institution, a lingering hereditary partiality, but in the 
 > ^ matter of the popular religion and dogmatic theology his 
 antipathies were so strong that his nature was warped and 
 rendered imperfect by them. 
 
 He did not stop here in his critical course. Not con- 
 [tent with rejecting creeds and institutions, his scepticism 
 assailed even the few simple postulates of natural religion. 
 When the body reverts to its elements, what becomes of 
 the mind ? His answer was that of the scientific agnos- 
 tics, his contemporaries: we cannot say; it is all a 
 mystery ; we are a single mood of the life of the spirit in 
 which we exist. We must " nurse no extravagant hope " 
 of future blessedness. The soul wins here a thousand 
 glimpses, but never sees a whole ; there is nothing clear, 
 nothing sure ; men are like spars of a wreck drifting over 
 the surface of an illimitable ocean of unfathomable depth. 
 
 " Like children bathing on the shore, 
 Buried a wave beneath, 
 The second wave succeeds before 
 We have had time to breathe. " 
 
 How forcibly that figure expresses the suffocation of the 
 soul! In a fine sonnet on " Rachel," he conceived of 
 the great actress as an impressive type of the contending 
 forces, Jewish, Greek, and Christian — of the clash of our 
 time. " Empedocles," the hero of one of his longer 
 efforts, is conceived as a spirit out of its element, out of 
 harmony with the times. 
 
 The figures in this last-mentioned work are types, one 
 might almost say, of the different tenses : Pausanias, the
 
 Arnold's Poetry 21 
 
 physician, is a sensible, kindly man of the old order, with 
 a characteristic touch of superstition and inability to 
 understand the unprecedented mood of Empedocles; 
 Callicles, the fair young harp-player, is of renascent, 
 humanistic type, in happy accord with his surroundings, 
 filled with the new wine of life, running over with fresh 
 enjoyment of the present world ; the sage and hero is 
 an idealist, embittered by experience of that world and 
 utterly dissatisfied with it : he has the temper of a moral- 
 ist and reformer, but the age is obdurate ; his is an in- 
 dignant, prophetic soul — he is almost a heathen Elijah 
 (the conception scarcely justifies the parallel), — he is a 
 rebellious Titan, a Saul whose distempered mood is 
 soothed by the music made by the young harp-player. 
 Callicles admires and reveres him, but steadily defends 
 the age: it is not that it has degenerated; it is Em- 
 pedocles himself that has changed. The piece is a lyrical 
 drama, not well sustained. A longer and more ambitious 
 dramatic essay, in imitation of the antique, upon the 
 theme of " Merope," while marked by dignity of sub- 
 ject, nobility of sentiment, and classical brevity of style, 
 and while interesting to the student and successful as an 
 imitation, leaves in the memory an indelible impression 
 of frigidity and artificiality, and, taken in connection 
 with the effort before mentioned, proves that Arnold's 
 gift was not dramatic. Narrative art may undoubtedly 
 be claimed for him, but his inspiration was essentially 
 elegiac. He composed best in a minor key. 
 
 An inevitable result of such melancholy, discordant, 
 disputatious moods as have just been described is to ex- , 
 haust the flow of inspiration. Arnold's period of poetic^ \ 
 production was practically over by the year 1867. For 
 some time before that he had been steadily gravitating 
 into prose, and the few poems he composed later betray 
 exhaustion of poetic power, by repetition of familiar 
 sentiments and an increasingly polemical tone. Depart-
 
 22 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 ing from consistent scepticism, unprejudiced, non-par- 
 tisan, he dogmatically denied; dissatisfied with Clough's 
 dilemma, " It may be — may n't be," he seized its left 
 horn, declaring, "It is not." With failure of the ideal, 
 and encroachment of a critical, controversial temper, the 
 full power of poetic production goes ; nothing great can 
 be accomplished in that line without faith, without a 
 secret, inward sense of harmony with the great forces 
 that buoy up the world. 
 
 The repetition of the word " tired " in his verse be- 
 comes noticeable by its frequency. He wrote of the 
 " jaded English," and complained of the unthinking 
 restlessness of his fellow-countrymen: "We English 
 
 See all sights from pole to pole. 
 
 And glance and nod and bustle by ; 
 And never once possess our soul 
 
 Before we die." 
 
 Such complaints as this are cause for wonder that his 
 definition of poetry as " criticism of life " bewildered 
 his readers as it did ; the term exactly describes his own 
 work, which is a long-drawn criticism of human life from 
 the cradle to the grave. He dilated upon the disadvan- 
 tages of " Growing Old," one of the chief of them being 
 that approval of one's work comes when it is too late to 
 enjoy it ; it affords no pleasure, after a lifetime of criti- 
 cism and neglect, 
 
 " To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost 
 Which blamed the living man." 
 
 In the thought of death all his reflection terminated ; the 
 conclusion of his thought about life was that it is a 
 funeral* Naturally, his finest, most characteristic verses 
 were elegiac ; among these we may mention the lines 
 headed" Rugby Chapel," composed fifteen years after 
 his father's death, in which he compared his father to a 
 
 I
 
 Arnold's Poetry 23 
 
 sturdy, spreading oak-tree under which a host of lesser 
 men might take shelter, — the " Stanzas from Carnac," 
 and " A Southern Night," both in memory of his 
 brother, William Delafield Arnold, — other " Stanzas in 
 Memory of the Author of Obermanti," — " Thyrsis," 
 a monody to commemorate his friend, Arthur Hugh 
 Clough, — and " Memorial Verses" on Byron, Goethe, 
 and Wordsworth. 
 
 Mention of Wordsworth conducts us straight to nature. 
 Arnold derived from nature simply the satisfaction that 
 Goethe found in nature and art combined. In her 
 beauty his troubled spirit ,fourid,,its_iiighjest.£jQnsnlat.iQn ; 
 and it is evident that it required some such resource — for 
 without any the mental frame thus far depicted would 
 speedily have worn out its mortal envelope. It is note- 
 worthy that the ancients did not betake themselves to 
 fields and woods, ramble beside streams or along the 
 seashore, or climb mountains for the sake of emotional, 
 imaginative, or spiritual consolation or gratification ; and 
 the natural allusions in classic literature seem to us inci- 
 dental and superficial. It was left for Wordsworth to 
 proclaim the truth toward which previous generations 
 had been slowly laboring, — to reveal in nature- th^- in- 
 dwelling Gpd^ of the_Christians. In spite of his admira- 
 tion of that great seer, Arnold never attained, on the one 
 hand, that height or depth of vision, and on the other 
 hand, although his agnosticism associated him, after a 
 fashion, with many men of science, his cast of mind and 
 mode of thought about nature were essentially unscien- 
 tific. In fact — and the fact is interesting and significant, 
 — it was in what one might call her et hical aspect tha t . 
 natureLappealed tohim. The thought of her permanency 
 gave his spirit rest ; he escaped from the heart-breaking 
 roar of cities to find in her calm an antidote to the fret 
 and fever of the age. The sum of her teaching was to 
 him labor in repose ; her forces go on without haste and
 
 24 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 without rest ; and his ideal of human effort, — his own per- 
 sonal aspiration, — was similar: steady work, silent and 
 restful. Along this line is effected, positively, the tran- 
 sition to his ethics. But nature does not point beyond 
 the grave; so this strain of thought, too, culminates in 
 death. Both strains are interwoven with remarkable 
 beauty in his last " Wish " : 
 
 " — let me be. 
 While all around in silence lies, 
 Moved to the window near, and see 
 Once more before my dying eyes, 
 
 " Bathed in the sacred dews of morn 
 The wide aerial landscape spread — 
 The world which was ere I was born, 
 The world which lasts when I am dead." 
 
 There is another sense of the term " nature," accord- 
 ing to which we speak of the merely natural life of man. 
 The sensual life and all its goods were to Arnold beneath 
 contempt. There is a magnificent passage in his stanzas 
 on Obermann in which he pictures the decay and misery 
 of pagan life at the time of the advent of Christianity : 
 
 " On that hard Pagan world disgust 
 And secret loathing fell. 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 Made human life a hell. 
 
 " In his cool hall, with haggard eyes. 
 The Roman noble lay ; 
 He drove abroad, in furious guise. 
 Along the Appian Way. 
 
 " He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, 
 And crown'd his hair with flowers — 
 No easier nor no quicker pass'd 
 The impracticable hours. 
 
 " The brooding East with awe beheld 
 Her impious younger world.
 
 Arnold's Poetry 25 
 
 The Roman tempest swell'd and swell'd, 
 And on her head was hurl'd. 
 
 " The East bow'd low before the blast 
 In patient, deep disdain ; 
 ' She let the legions thunder past, 
 
 And plunged in thought again. . . . 
 
 " ' Poor world,' she cried, ' so deep accurst, 
 That runn'st from pole to pole 
 To seek a draught to slake thy thirst — 
 Go, seek it in thy soul ! ' " 
 
 So it is in the soul that one is to find his ultimate re- 
 sort amid the questions that perplex and harass. Some- 
 thing beside nature is needed, for nature is not a sufficient 
 or competent guide, — in fact, she often if not generally 
 leads astray, and has to be opposed. Thus again the 
 transition is effected, but this time negatively, to our 1/ 
 poet's ethics; and his deepest message, to his own and 
 to after time, was ethical. This was his positive principle 
 before alluded to. Where, nature ends man begins. 
 Co'nscience — and with Arnold conscience is the spirit of \\ 
 man — is beyond nature and often opposed to her. He 
 was acutely conscious of the conflict between the spirit 
 and the flesh, and his aim, like that of all ancient moral- 
 ists, was tranquillity, to be attained by the undisputed '^-• 
 sovereignty of the superior principle. To him the soul, 
 conscience, the moral, was the highest revelation, and, 
 in truth, all that we actually know. Whatever God is, 
 he is so different from man that we cannot know his 
 nature. Arnold cautioned his hearers not to " make 
 man too much a God, or God too much a man." He 
 opposed ethics to religion, or better, to theology ; he 
 would make ethics stand for all that is best and lasting in 
 religion. What if old faiths, the cross among them, have 
 to be abandoned ? — still, " guard the fire within ! " Con- 
 science resists all analysis ; it remains, and also the human 
 example of Christ. If there be no divine judge, obey
 
 26 Arnold and the Spirit of the A^e 
 
 the inward judge more strictly; if there is no second life, 
 " pitch this one high." Though one is to nurse no ex- 
 travagant hope he need not therefore despair. That he 
 sees without nothing whole or clear should teach him to 
 look within, to curb desire and so cut off consequent 
 y vexation. " The better part " is to master one's own 
 soul, to cultivate that inner field, for that, and that only, 
 is within one's power. Externally, our freedom of action 
 IS confined on every side; the sphere of the moral is 
 limited by necessity ; it is then essential to our peace that 
 we should recognize our limitations and cultivate modera- 
 tion in all things. " What I would I cannot do," cried 
 the " Sick King in Bokhara." In such inevitable mo- 
 ments of moral strangulation, Arnold had recourse again 
 to objective nature ; it was a relief then to contemplate 
 the stars, with their perpetual, even motion. 
 
 " Calm soul of all things ! make it mine 
 To feel, amid the city's jar, 
 That there abides a peace of thine 
 Man did not make, and cannot mar. 
 
 " The will to neither strive nor cry, 
 \ The power to feel with others give ! 
 
 \^^ Calm, calm me more, nor let me die 
 
 ""^--^^.^ Before I have begun to live ! " 
 
 ! The power to feel with others, — want of which causes 
 most of the wretchedness of the world. It is true; lack 
 of sympathetic insight into others' conditions, inability 
 to see things as they see them, to apprehend what is 
 going on in their minds, — this lack, this inability, the 
 consequence of selfishness, is accountable for the keenest 
 / suffering. Here we are brought back again to our poet's 
 ^ tenderness of heart ; a quality which we must never allow 
 ourselves to forget, deceived by his apparent coldness. 
 He found a source of " Consolation " in the consideration 
 that many were happy while he was sad, and recom-
 
 Arnold's Poetry 27 
 
 mended it to all : Do not, accordingly, wish your sad 
 hour shortened, for that would be to shorten others' joy, 
 and, vice versa, do not wish your hour of gladness length- 
 ened, for myriad sufferers watch it pass with relief. ^ 
 
 C^^Vi the whole, patience rather than hope or action was/> 
 Arnold's attitude ; the tendency of his verse is certainly 
 to depress, to banish hope, to benumb action. On the 
 critical side he was great ; in criticism was his strength ; 
 all his life long — herein recalling Shelley's long conten- 
 tion — he was resolutely opposed to the comfortable, 
 Philistine, " optimistic sophistries," the conventional 
 notions of the unthinking multitude. He was a keen 
 critic of democracy (and democracy would do well to 
 heed his strictures); hence he appeared to many to be 
 merely an intellectual aristocrat. His function was toV -j^U 
 stir people up, to force them to think, to become indi- 
 vidual, — to shake them out of the easy contentment with 
 themselves, their traditions, their surroundings, in which 
 the well-to-do commonly wrap their souls and lay them 
 to sleep. ^^ Such is the inertia, the elastic power of resist- 
 ance of that class, that prosperous middle class to which 
 Arnold himself belonged, whose faults he clearly saw and 
 set himself to correct, that its reaction upon his spirit 
 must have been an important factor in inducing that at- 
 titude of waiting, of resignation, that one associates with 
 his figure. His frame of mind became essentially Stoical.^^ 
 
 C His deepest ethical deliverance is to be found in the 
 lines entitled " Morality " : 
 
 " We cannot kindle when we will 
 
 The fire which in the heart resides ; 
 The spirit bloweth and is still, 
 
 In mystery our soul abides ; 
 But tasks in hours of insight will'd 
 Can be in hours of gloom fulfil'd." 
 
 The experience of a lifetime is compressed into that 
 couplet, and it contains his most precious message to his
 
 
 28 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 age. We remark its modernness of tone: it could not 
 have been written a century before. Who does not know 
 those moments of insight and spiritual exaltation and 
 high resolve when nothing seems impossible and the 
 whole world is plastic in one's hands, — and who, then, 
 has not experienced those moments of obstruction that 
 inevitably supervene, — of depression all the more poignant 
 because of that elation ? Then our poet's teaching is 
 opportune, that after the glow has faded away one can 
 carry out by sheer effort of will, in darkness and dis- 
 couragement, the resolution born of the ideal flashed 
 upon one in the moment of revelation. 
 
 " Tasks in hours of insight will'd 
 Can be in hours of gloom fulfil'd." 
 
 That couplet is immortal. 
 
 Apart from the natural universe, the chief support and 
 stay of this austere exercise of will was found in classic 
 literature. Arnold's nature was not aesthetic; on the 
 whole, his tendency was to react against the contemporary 
 aesthetic development, or certainly the romantic mood 
 characteristic of that development. Romantic vague- 
 ness and excess were exceedingly distasteful to him ; his 
 theory of literary art was classical ; measure, proportion, 
 restraint were the qualities he prized. In a fine sonnet 
 (" That son of Italy ") he spoke of " austerjty " as the 
 substance of great poetry. 
 
 \ His literary affinities, as divulged in his poetry, yield 
 us reflections — or it may be the sources — of his teaching. 
 Among ancient classics, Greek poetry, epic and dramatic, 
 and practical philosophy seem chiefly to have appealed to 
 him. Homer (he replied to an inquirer) and Epictetus 
 (of mood congenial with his own) were props of his 
 j mind, but especially Sophocles, " who saw life steadily 
 and saw it whole." Marcus Aurelius he characterized as 
 the " purest of men." These, like nature, afforded him
 
 Arnold's Poetry 29 
 
 repose and consolation. Among modern classics, Byron, 
 Goethe, Heine, and Wordsworth were his favorites. Of 
 three of these he discoursed, in a strain of wonderfully 
 sound poetic criticism, in the " Memorial Verses " above 
 mentioned. He declared that Goethe was 
 
 " Europe's sagest head, 
 Physician of the iron age. . . . 
 
 " He took the suffering human race, 
 
 He read each wound, each weakness clear ; 
 And struck his finger on the place 
 
 And said : Thou ailest here, and here ! " 
 
 He ignored, however, Goethe's recommendation of art 
 as a refuge from the ills of the present. He took some 
 comfort in music, mentioning with gratitude, though 
 cursorily, the names of Mozart, Beethoven, and Men- 
 delssohn — but poetry he judged to be equal to painting 
 and music combined, for like these, respectively, it must 
 
 " The aspect of the moment show, 
 The feeling of the moment know. . . . 
 
 " Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach 
 The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach." 
 
 The tribute of his tenderest feeling was reserved for 
 Wordsworth, who 
 
 " spoke and loosed our heart in tears. 
 He laid us as we lay at birth 
 On the cool flowery lap of earth. . . . 
 Our youth returned, for there was shed 
 On spirits that had long been dead, 
 Spirits dried up and closely furl'd, 
 The freshness of the early world." 
 
 He testified, gratefully, to the great poet's " healing 
 power " (and much of Wordsworth's fame to-day is due 
 undoubtedly to Arnold's agency) and concluded,
 
 30 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 ' ' The cloud of mortal destiny, 
 Others will front it fearlessly — 
 But who, like him, will put it by?" 
 
 Finally, of course, fitienne de S^nancour, the author of 
 Obermann, and Emerson (" a voice oracular ") were also 
 literary idols of his. 
 
 Among his poems, strangely enough, and in marked 
 contrast with Clough and the Brownings, there is none" 
 inspired by the classic land of Italy. Out of his native 
 England, he was most inspired by France; seven at least 
 of his poems are owing to that influence. Yet he was no 
 blind worshipper, — he never could be such, — and in a 
 single line he has packed a penetrating criticism of French 
 genius : 
 
 " France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme." 
 
 The colossal calm of the Alps refreshed his spirit, and we 
 have a cycle of poems connected with Switzerland, be- 
 side, of course, the two on Obermamt. 
 
 With a few of the loveliest of his lines, peaceful lines, 
 unfolding an ideal prospect, we will close. The young 
 Callicles sings — and a ray of the golden age lights the 
 song: 
 
 " Far, far from here, 
 
 The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay 
 Among the green Illyrian hills ; and there 
 The sunshine in the happy glens is fair, 
 And by the sea, and in the brakes, 
 The grass is cool, the seaside air 
 Buoyant and fresh, the mountain-flowers 
 More virginal and sweet than ours." 
 
 Greenough White.
 
 in. 
 
 ARNOLD'S LIFE AND CHARACTER AS SHOWN IN HIS 
 
 LETTERS. 
 
 IN studying the character of any man, Dr. Holmes tells 
 us to begin with his grandparents. Arnold's an- 
 cestors were not remarkable people, his grandfather, 
 William Arnold, being a collector of customs, and his 
 maternal grandfather being the Rev. John Penrose, of no 
 particular note. His greatest ancestor was his own father, 
 the great Arnold of Rugby; " in whom," as some writer 
 has said, " there was such a union of qualities, and from 
 whom there radiated in so many different directions such 
 potent influences, that he may well be regarded as one of 
 the most forceful and impelling men of his times. Other 
 mountains may rise higher, but no one has at its foot 
 more springs from which mighty rivers have taken their 
 rise." According to Dean Burgon, had not the High 
 Churchmen in power fought most vigorously against it. 
 Dr. Arnold would have worn the mitre. He was pre- 
 eminent, of course, in the great reform of public schools 
 from reformatories for bad boys into training places for 
 pure and right-minded ones. As an historian he was, at 
 that time, in England, unique; a follower of Niebuhr, 
 with a hunger for facts, which he spared no labor to dis- 
 cover, a grasp of institutions, which were to him living 
 realities, — he is ranked by some with Gibbon and Macau- 
 lay, as one of the three great historical writers of Eng- 
 land. He was, finally, a veritable incarnation of ethics. 
 
 31
 
 32 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 High Churchmen say, " Behold an illustration of the 
 law of evolution! The elder Arnold, cutting loose 
 from precedent and authority, doubting the divine 
 authority of Holy Orders, the canonicity of Hebrews, 
 the received methods of exegesis, — warring against the 
 Oxford Movement on the one hand, and Evangelicalism 
 on the other, — what more natural than that the outcome 
 in the next generation should be the agnosticism of 
 Matthew Arnold, and in the third, the bald theism of 
 Mrs. Humphry Ward ? " 
 
 Can we ourselves detect his heredity in Matthew 
 Arnold ? His father had little poetical talent, though as 
 a boy he wrote heroics in blank verse. He had no mis- 
 sionary zeal. He lived more or less in an atmosphere of 
 conflict. And here the side question occurs, whether 
 the dust of the arena is a suitable pabulum for children, 
 — their impressionable natures at the formative period of 
 their lives receiving and assimilating surrounding influ- 
 ences, and producing undreamed-of results in ineffaceable 
 characteristics. " The doctrines of grace," as they were 
 called, had little hold on Dr. Arnold until late in hfe, and 
 as he could never speak of religion to his poor neighbors 
 in his visits, so possibly he may have been equally reti- 
 cent with his children on that subject. 
 
 These Letters of Matthew Arnold are edited by George 
 W. E. Russell, of whom all that we know is, that he is a 
 son of a Lady Charles Russell— that he was an invalid 
 boy at Harrow at the time when Arnold wished to enter 
 his eldest son there, and was at the school from 1867 to 
 1872. He seems to have been an adoring friend of 
 Arnold, though not thoroughly a convert to his religious 
 views. His preface is calculated to induce us to put on 
 our rosiest eye-glasses and see his hero as Mr. Russell 
 saw him, and we do not lay them aside and use our 
 natural eyes for several pages after. Matthew Arnold 
 did not wish his life written, but no biography could have
 
 Arnold's Letters 33 
 
 unveiled his heart, perxCtrating into the innermost recesses 
 of his life, as these letters do. Mr. Russell says, they 
 are " himself.'' At least they are one side of him, and 
 an entirely different side from that shown in his poems. 
 They were pubhshed in obedience to the wish of his 
 widow and two of his sisters, and consist mainly of letters 
 to his family, with some to his friends, — a few being in 
 French, — very easy French, — to a M. Fontanes, a French 
 Protestant, who was a prott^g^ of his, and who seems to 
 have been devoted to him. 
 
 The incidents of his life to be found in or deduced 
 from these letters are meagre. He was born on Christ- 
 mas Eve, 1822, at Laleham, in the valley of the Thames, 
 where his father took pupils until his election to the 
 head-mastership of Rugby, when Matthew was six years 
 old. At the age of eight, he was sent back to Laleham 
 as a pupil of his uncle, the Rev. John Buckland. At 
 fourteen years ( 1 836) he was sent to Winchester. Thomas 
 Arnold had been, as a boy, a pupil under the severe dis- 
 cipline of the school of William de Wykeham, and he 
 seemed to think the fagging and hardships of that rigor- 
 ous time were necessary for his son. (He may have been 
 pert and priggish, as a head-master's son might be.) But 
 he had not to endure the severity his father expected, as 
 he rose so rapidly in the school that he was soon beyond 
 the position of fagging. He was removed in a year, and 
 entered Rugby under his father's roof. At eighteen 
 years he won a school prize with his first published poem, 
 " Alaric at Rome," and was elected to an open Classical 
 Scholarship at Balliol. At the age of nineteen (1841) he 
 entered Oxford. A year later he won the Hertford 
 Scholarship, and in 1843, the Newdigate Prize with his 
 poem on Cromwell. When he was twenty-two he ob- 
 tained a second-class in the Final Classical School, and 
 in 1845 was elected a Fellow of Oriel. For a short time 
 
 he took classical work in the Fifth Form at Rugby, and 
 3
 
 34 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 in 1847 was appointed private secretary to Lord Lans- 
 downe, then Lord President of the Council. Four years 
 later, Lord Lansdowne appointed him Inspector of 
 Schools, and in the summer of his twenty-ninth year he 
 married Frances Lucy, daughter of Sir William Wight- 
 man, one of the Judges of the Court of Queen's Bench. 
 From that time until 1885, three years before his death, he 
 held the Inspectorship. It entailed a great deal of work 
 and much travelling, not only in England, but on the 
 Continent, in order to gain ideas from foreign schools. 
 His homes during this period were at Dover, in London, 
 and at Harrow (in order to have his sons at school there), 
 and after the death of his second son (1873) he removed 
 to Cobham, Surrey, to a place called Pains Hill Cottage, 
 which was his home during the rest of his life. He be- 
 came Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857 — a chair 
 which he also held from 1862-67. His two visits to 
 America were in 1883 and 1886. 
 
 Of his writings. The Strayed Reveler, and Other Poems, 
 by A. was published in 1849. Empedocles on Etna, and 
 Other Poems appeared in 1852; his first series of Poems 
 in 1853 and the second series in 1855. Merope, a Tragedy, 
 was published in 1858; New Poems in 1867; and his Col- 
 lected Poems zzvao. out in 1877-81 and 1885. His prose 
 writings were published between 1853 ^"^ 1888. Death 
 came suddenly to him at Liverpool, April 15, 1888. Of 
 his six children, four boys and two girls, the daughters 
 and only one son survived him. 
 
 These letters reveal him decidedly in undress — dress- 
 ing-gown and slippers as it were, — and no man can be a 
 hero to his valet (though that depends on the valet). 
 We cannot judge very critically the form of this un- 
 studied correspondence. It may be an English fashion 
 to paragraph one's letters only accidentally, and to forget 
 punctuation frequently; but the many sentences of such 
 defective construction as to need two readings to adjust
 
 Arnold's Letters 35 
 
 them, give one a distinct sense of discomfort. The 
 neglect of the editor to number the letters, or to give us 
 any form of index or table of contents, we hope may be 
 remedied in a future edition, as it entails a great deal of 
 labor upon any one who reviews them. 
 
 The first and most striking characteristic of Arnold's 
 family correspondence is its exceedingly affectionate 
 tone. There is an effusive tenderness of expression 
 which is quite admirable and attractive. But it might be 
 thought un-English and effeminate when used in speaking 
 of strangers, as — " The old Baron Cason is a dear, and so 
 also is his dog Baton ; the sweet creature is," etc. " Ed- 
 ward " (his married brother) '' is a duck, and I will keep 
 his letter as a memorial of his duckishness." And there 
 is a great deal more of this maidenly effusiveness. The 
 regularity, in the midst of work and travel, of his weekly 
 letter to his mother, and his obvious devotion to her; the 
 kind thoughtfulness shown his sisters, in sending pressed 
 flowers to the botanical sister and autographs of celebri- 
 ties to the autograph collector ; the general benevolence of 
 remembering to send them to his daughter in New York, 
 for friends of hers who might possibly be collectors; his 
 regular messages of loving remembrance to his old nurse 
 Rowland, and the record of his gifts to her on anniver- 
 saries, are all exceedingly beautiful traits. His letters 
 upon the death of his sons are touching beyond expres- 
 sion. But the editor has, unfortunately, given us a letter 
 to his grown son, on the death of his hound, which is 
 equally emotional, beautiful, and hopeless, and we ex- 
 claim involuntarily, " Certainly this man was not an 
 Englishman! " And he was not, — so far as the national- 
 ity of the soul is concerned, he was a pure Greek, with a 
 Hebrew training, against which he always revolted. The 
 thought of his heart seems always to have been, " Are 
 not Parnassus and Helicon better than all the mountains 
 and waters of Israel ? " {cf. pp. 434, 455).
 
 36 
 
 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 As we read these family letters we recall his quoting 
 Darwin to the effect that men do not need religion, the 
 domestic affections and natural sciences taking its place. 
 On domestic affection and literature Arnold sought to 
 rest and wrap himself from the cold and loneliness of a 
 soul without a Christ. But as Isaiah says, " The bed is 
 shorter than a man can stretch himself on it and the cov- 
 ering narrower than he can wrap himself in it," and the 
 cry of his soul in his poems was sadder than death. Even 
 in these letters he quotes as his own experience Goethe's 
 words, " Homer and Polygnotus daily teach me more and 
 more that life is a Hell, through which we must struggle 
 as one best may." He who could write for the instruc- 
 tion of youth such words as these : " There is not a creed 
 which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is 
 not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition 
 which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has 
 materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact, it has 
 attached its emotion to the fact, and now — the fact is 
 failing it! " ; and again: " The strongest part of our re- 
 ligion is its unconscious poetry. . , . The Bible is only 
 Hebrew poetry plainly translated into harmonious prose 
 — at least the great part is only this," — could he be 
 happy ? 
 
 We are thankful that his views were so negative as not 
 to be generally popular. His religion was so " chaotic, 
 vast, and vague " as not readily to impress the masses, 
 who cry out for positive teaching, and he himself says, 
 " I am not a popular writer." In a letter to one of his 
 perverts,' who had appealed to him for advice on the sub- 
 ject of teaching his ideas to the Sunday-school of which 
 he was superintendent, Arnold answered, in substance, 
 that it would be better to follow the old methods. This 
 shows that he was not a Herod to murder the faith of the 
 Innocents, and he so far commends himself to our re- 
 spect. But what of the young men and women of his
 
 Arnold's Letters 2)7 
 
 generation ? The Princess Alice of Hesse, who told him 
 that she read everything he wrote, strayed for a time on 
 the dark and desolate mountains of unbelief, — but, thank 
 Heaven and a mother's prayers, came back into the bright- 
 ness of the Light of the World. With all his brilliant 
 subtlety of criticism, Arnold was not a man of force; for 
 as in countries whose sterner virtues are displaced by the 
 ornamental fringes of poetry or art the national life be- 
 comes sleazy and worthless, so to the character of a man 
 who would substitute poetry for religion there comes the 
 same flimsiness and slightness of texture, and we plainly 
 perceive the lack of solidity of mind and judgment. We 
 see many instances of this in these letters — the hasty pro- 
 nunciamentos upon subjects of which he, at the time, 
 knew little, his phenomenal self-conceit,* his shallow 
 habit of sneering. The public must have thought his 
 conceit monumental as he writes, " that it was placarded 
 all over London that he had written an article on Marcus 
 Aurelius and had walked up Regent Street behind a man 
 with a board on his back announcing it." He writes: 
 My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement 
 of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will 
 probably have their day, as people become conscious to 
 themselves of what that movement of mind is." And 
 again: " The Princess is quite fascinated with my Culture 
 and Anarchy, uses all its phrases, and knows long bits by 
 heart. You will see that it will have a considerable effect 
 in the end, and the chapters on Hellenism and Hebraism 
 are in the main, I am convinced, so true that they will 
 form a kind of centre for English thought and speculation 
 on the matters treated in them ! ' ' And yet again : " I am 
 equally sure that I am doing what will sap the House of 
 Commons intellectually. ' ' Such sentiments are sprinkled 
 
 * The spiritual nemesis of agnosticism, which knows nothing in the uni- 
 verse superior to its lordly self, and so has nothing to revere. Such igno- 
 rance is always conceited. — Ed. 
 
 
 It
 
 38 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 plentifully throughout these volumes. With such an 
 opinion of his own value, what does he think of his great 
 contemporaries ? His opinions of them are the more in- 
 teresting as they do not appear elsewhere. Of Mrs. 
 Browning (p. 70) he gives a brutal criticism: " I regard 
 her as hopelessly confirmed in her aberration from health, 
 nature, beauty, and truth." Of Tennyson he writes: 
 ** Tennyson is deficient in intellectual power. In his 
 Idylls of the Khtg he does not give the peculiar charm and 
 aroma of the Middle Age. His lines on the Prince Con- 
 sort have no value. ' ' Of Ruskin he says : ' ' The man and 
 the character are too febrile, irritable, and weak to allow 
 him to possess," etc. Of Charlotte Bronte: " Her mind 
 contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and 
 therefore that is all she can in fact put into her book. ' ' Of 
 Lord Palmerston he writes: " He found England the first 
 power in the world's estimation and leaves it the third. 
 The mass of the English public, with the want of ideas of 
 its aristocratic class, the provincial narrowness and vulgar- 
 ity of its middle class, and the nonage of its lower, is ex- 
 actly at Lord Palmerston's level and not a bit beyond 
 it." Of Macaulay : " Macaulay is to me uninteresting, 
 mainly, I think, from a dash of intellectual vulgarity 
 which I find in all his performance. " He calls Mr. Swin- 
 burne, who greatly admired him, a" Pseudo Shelley," 
 and says, " Swinburne's fatal habit of using a hundred 
 words where one would suffice always offends me." So 
 much for individuals, " Man delights him not nor 
 woman either." How about nations ? " The Germans 
 are inconceivably and hideously ugly." ** My opinion 
 of the Italians is very unfavorable," he says. But his 
 choicest bits of caustic writing are reserved for us Ameri- 
 cans, and that too at a time when he knew very little 
 about us or our country. For profound criticism how is 
 this ?: " I fancy that the landscape of America is monoto- 
 nous.'' " Both French and Italians dislike the Americans
 
 Arnold's Letters 39 
 
 and call them a nation mal e'lev^e, and so they are. . . . 
 The American attache had the temper and moral tone 
 and making of a gentleman in him, and that is what so 
 few of his countrymen have. . . . When you find that 
 rara avis, a really well-bred and trained American, you 
 feel the bond of race. . . . The intolerable laideur of 
 well-fed American masses so deeply antipathetic to con- 
 tinental Europe," etc. Again: " I see a wave of more 
 than American vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, 
 preparing to break over us. " When we were in the great 
 agony of our Civil War, this emotional, tenderest-hearted 
 of men, who wrote a page of compassion over a cat that 
 a train ran over, says: " Tell William I hope the Ameri- 
 cans will not cease to be afflicted until they learn thor- 
 oughly, that man shall not live by Bunkum alone." And 
 again: " I myself think that it has become indispensable 
 to give the Americans a moral lesson, and fervently hope 
 it will be given them. Their radicalness, dissentingness, 
 and general mixture of self-assertion and narrowness," 
 etc. And again: " After immediate blood relationship, 
 the relationship of soul is the only important thing, and 
 this one has far more with the French, Italians, and 
 Germans than with the Americans." With all these 
 antagonistic sentiments, however, no sooner does he 
 receive a complimentary notice of his Essays in the 
 North American Review than he veers round in this 
 fashion : ' ' There is an immense public there [in America] , 
 and this alone makes them of importance, but besides 
 that I have been struck by what I saw of them on the 
 Continent in the last few months, both with their intel- 
 lectual liveliness and ardor, with which I had before been 
 willing enough to credit them [though he never said 
 so], as one of the good results of their democratic r^givu s 
 emancipating them from the blinking and hushing-up 
 system induced by our circumstances here, and also the 
 good effect their wonderful success had produced on
 
 40 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 them, giving them something really considerable to rest 
 upon, and freeing them from the necessity of being always 
 standing on their toes and crowing. I quite think we 
 shall see the good result of this in their policy, as well as 
 in the behavior of individuals. An English writer may 
 produce plenty of effect there," etc. 
 
 In his two visits to America he found this country of 
 the fancied " monotonous landscape " entirely too strong 
 for him, too tonic, too new, too bright, too clear, too 
 cold, too hot, too much of everything. He seemed to 
 be blinking in the sunshine and looking for some old, 
 shaded, interesting place — which he found only in 
 Quebec. He was ill at ease until he turned his face 
 homeward to the fogs of England. To suit him, the 
 wooded hills and mountains should have been, he writes, 
 scraggy and bare. They had no majesty, no interest. 
 He seemed the guest of the nation in its spontaneous 
 hospitality, and yet all his response was stinted praise 
 and unfavorable contrasts with things English. In the 
 midst of these remarks it is amusing to hear him say, 
 " Burroughs has the American disease of always con- 
 trasting other countries with his own." 
 
 It may have been that this habit of mind came to him 
 from the time of " storm and stress " of his earlier man- 
 hood, which for troubled currents of opposing arms and 
 thoughts has rarely been equalled in modern history — 
 the Oxford Movement, the French Revolution, Chartism, 
 Carlyle, George Sand, and the general upheaval of all 
 things. The condition of affairs that he describes in 
 England in 1848 sounds strangely to us now. Writing 
 of the Chartist riots in London he says: "Tell Miss 
 Martineau, it is said here, that Monckton Milnes [after- 
 wards Lord Houghton] refused to be sworn in a special 
 constable, that he might be free to assume the post of 
 President of the Republic at a moment's notice." And 
 again:" I believe that the English aristocratic system,
 
 Arnold's Letters 41 
 
 splendid fruits as it has undoubtedly borne, must go, 
 . . . its hour has struck." Yet he seems to have en- 
 joyed it in a way, as he speaks with regret of his father's 
 not having lived to see those changes, and winds up by 
 giving the Magnum Bonum of life in these words: " The 
 interest of the world and the spectacle of its events as 
 they unroll themselves is the main part of what is valuable 
 in life, for anybody." Poor pessimist! — but in the next 
 breath the emotional man speaks: " Children, however, 
 are a great pleasure; or, at least, I find mine so." 
 
 He wrote the beautiful elegiac ode, " Thyrsis," on the 
 death of his friend Clough, and yet in a letter he could 
 write, in a cool, regretful style, that " the impression 
 Clough had made upon him would get more distinct and 
 unique because the object no longer survived to wear 
 himself out by becoming ordinary and different from what 
 he had been. People were beginning to say about 
 Clough, that he never would do anything now, and in 
 short to pass him over," etc. What might he have been 
 without Matthew Arnold's influence ? His life was an 
 illustration of the old proverb, " He that will not believe 
 shall not be able to exalt himself." When Arnold re- 
 ceived the news of the sudden death of Thackeray he 
 wrote: " I cannot say I thoroughly liked him, though we 
 were on friendly terms, and he is not to my thinking a 
 great writer." What characteristics do these things 
 show ? 
 
 As " manners makyth man," we would like to know 
 something of his. There seems to have been a wide diver- 
 sity of opinion on that subject, Mr. Russell calling his man- 
 ner " magnificent serenity," an American writer speaking 
 of it as " the air supercilious," and others still as "an 
 arrogant manner." He himself characterized it as one of 
 " persuasion and charm," and thought he owed much of 
 his success to it. 
 
 We wonder at the great admiration the English seem
 
 42 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 to have feit for his "clever" expressions. Disraeli 
 seems especially to have valued him for the successful 
 hits he made in that line (possibly all else he wrote or 
 said was moonshine to Disraeli). But newspaper men 
 in America are so proficient in the art of apt epithets 
 and fitting adjectives that, though we adopt Matthew 
 Arnold's, we do not think them inimitable strokes of 
 genius, and are tempted to believe what he says of the 
 aristocratic class in England, that they suffer for a want 
 of ideas, which makes them grateful to any one of 
 nimble brain and tongue who can supply these ideas 
 embodied in neat phrases: " PhiHstines," " barbarians," 
 — meaning the aristocracy; " Sweetness and Light," — 
 meaning Matthew Arnold. 
 
 A few words in regard to his tastes and habits. He 
 could not endure the smell of tobacco, but he drank wines 
 and whiskey freely and gave his little children champagne 
 on certain occasions. He writes of having won some 
 money at cards twice, but speaks of such play in a way 
 that seems to show that it was not habitual. He claimed 
 morality as one of his strong points, — but did not seem 
 to take into consideration in any way the morals of his 
 two greatest of moderns, Goethe and George Sand. 
 Homer was to him pre-eminently the greatest of all poets, 
 Shakespeare being far inferior. Of modern English 
 poets, Wordsworth, from his love of nature and its heal- 
 ing power, was his favorite. He liked Jean Ingelow and 
 enjoyed Bulwer. He preferred sculpture to painting. 
 Of painters, Andrea del Sarto and Fra Bartolommeo were 
 his favorites. Music did not appeal to him, and even in 
 Wagner's Tannhdtiser he enjoyed the poetry of the li- 
 bretto more than the music. 
 ^""'And now we turn with pleasure to all that shows his 
 keen enjoyment of the beauty of this visible world — to 
 the natural man, the Greek side of him. His love of 
 clear, running streams, his delight in the every-day face
 
 Arnold's Letters 43 
 
 of nature, the common trees, the wild as well as the 
 garden flowers, his interest in the ordinary aspects of 
 weather, — all endear him to us. In Italy especially the 
 lovely southern landscape opened his heart in a miracu- 
 lous manner. From the time the balmy Italian air 
 breathed upon him, his whole nature burst into bloom. 
 He speaks of not being able to write a poem unless he 
 go again to Italy. Florence was the home of his heart. 
 He writes thence: "It is the look of the place, from 
 every point in the environs, which so charms me, and for 
 which I have such a thirst that it is difficult for me to 
 attend to anything else. ... I have a deep and grow- 
 ing sense of satisfaction, which was entirely wanting to 
 me in Paris; — a sense that I am seeing what it does me 
 good through my whole being to see, and for which I 
 shall be the better all my life." Writing of his first sight 
 of Vesuvius, he breaks out in the most impulsive, boyish 
 fashion: " My dearest mother, that is the view of all the 
 views of the world, that will stay longest with me. Capri 
 in front, Sorrento peninsula girdling the bay, never can 
 anything give one of itself, without any trouble on one's 
 own part, such delectation as that. . . . How I feel 
 Goethe's greatness in this place!" — that is, the Greek 
 nature, the tie between them. " Here in Italy one feels 
 that all time spent out of Italy by tourists elsewhere — 
 human life being so short — is time misspent. Greece and 
 parts of the East are the only places to go to." 
 
 With the pleasant memory of his great love for God's 
 works and with the motto of the volume, his own words, 
 we will close : 
 
 " O world as God has made it ! All is beauty, 
 And knowing this is love, and love is duty." 
 
 Mary Wickliffe Van Ness.
 
 IV. 
 
 THE LATE COURSE OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 
 
 THE period of our Civil War in America, i860 to 
 1865, was just that of the great Essays and Re- 
 views excitement in England. When we of the 
 South emerged from our four years' intellectual as well 
 as material blockade, we found ourselves in the midst of 
 one of the most important crises in English theological 
 and religious thought. 
 
 The great Tractarian wave had only recently broken, 
 and while leaving behind it a deposit of incalculable rich- 
 ness and fertility for the future life of the Church, had, 
 owing to Newman's defection, spread immediate desola- 
 tion, disaster, and dismay. Upon its ruin was rising a 
 movement which, for the moment, seemed destined to 
 work even greater destruction in an opposite direction. 
 Every revolution in Church as in State has worked a 
 present evil in preparing the way for future permanent 
 good. 
 
 It is well known what a great work had been wrought 
 in the eighteenth century by the Evangelical movement, 
 in restoring to the world the principle of immediate in- 
 dividual or personal religion. It is equally well known 
 how in the first half of the present century the Tractarian 
 movement had followed and supplemented it, by bring- 
 ing forward the neglected element of institutional or 
 corporate Christianity, the principle of Catholic truth 
 and order and of sacramental life. But these two move- 
 
 44
 
 Recent Religious Thought 45 
 
 merits, necessary as they were and much as they had 
 done, had not accompHshed everything. There was still 
 an element lacking to the full and free activity and work 
 of the Church in the world, and this was to be added by 
 a third great movement. 
 
 For a long time there had been going on all through 
 the world a silent revolution which, even more radically 
 than any previous movement, was destined to metamor- 
 phose the thought of men in every department of truth. 
 The age of Critical Kiwivledgc had come. And naturally, 
 but unfortunately, both the previous great Oxford move- 
 ments, instead of welcoming it as a friend, received it as an 
 enemy. Standing, as they conceived, for God against a 
 world lying outside of and against Him, for faith and the 
 supernatural against reason and the natural, they could 
 see nothing in the critical awakening but a general revolt 
 against religion. As against this they both fell back into 
 a reactionary attitude and erected in defence the principle 
 of a divine infallible authority, in the Bible and in the 
 Church. 
 
 But there is just as much a principle of truth, and there- 
 fore of divinity and of religion, in the proper use and 
 application of criticism as there is in authority ; and there- 
 fore it was destined to prevail not only in the world but 
 in the Church, not only in science, art, literature, history, 
 and philosophy, but in religion also and Christianity — in 
 so far as these contained matter of natural knowledge, 
 and were therefore subject to the only criterion of natural 
 truth. The time has passed when it is possible to exempt 
 any fact of nature or any event of history from the neces- 
 sity of verifying itself by the methods of natural and 
 critical investigation and knowledge. It was impossible 
 but that the critical sense, trained and become expert in 
 other fields, should sooner or later detect and expose the 
 fact that religion too, through the ages of uncritical ac- 
 cretion and tradition, had incorporated into itself, or
 
 46 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 incorporated itself into, a mass of unscientific facts and 
 unhistorical events which, if they were of it, would in- 
 validate it also ; and, if they were not, served only to 
 obscure and discredit it. Who does not know to what 
 extent Christianity was for ages identified with false 
 astronomy, false geology, a false theory of creation, — and 
 why not with as much more that is false, on its natural 
 side, that seems to belong to it but does not ? That was 
 not only not strange but was indeed inevitable. Only, if 
 these entangling alliances with false natural fact and 
 theory were entered into innocently because ignorantly, 
 they cannot now, except falsely and criminally, be main- 
 tained in the face of critical investigation and exposure. 
 We must recognize and accept natural science as the 
 divine instrument for ridding spiritual truth of the very 
 last admixture of natural falsehood. There was a service 
 to be rendered to Christianity by even the scientific 
 agnosticism of a Huxley or Spencer and the literary 
 Y agnosticism of a Matthew Arnold. 
 
 Out of this critical movement there has arisen a third 
 school whose true and therefore divine mission it is to 
 add to the inestimable services of the others the no less 
 necessary one, not merely of disentangling Christianity 
 from all untrue associations on the natural side, but also 
 of establishing for us the true relation between God and 
 the world, the supernatural and the natural, faith and 
 reason. The Christian mind has come to demand no 
 longer the opposition but the reconciliation of truths 
 which it more and more discovers to be not contradictory 
 but complementary. 
 
 The new movement was not so much created as pre- 
 cipitated by the one-sided reaction against it of the older 
 schools. It needed to be met and dealt with by a mind 
 capable of comprehending and combining them all, which 
 is, of course, asking for what was at the time an impos- 
 sibility. No one intelligence could at the moment accept
 
 Recent Religious Thought 47 
 
 all the necessary destruction and foresee all the possible 
 reconstruction. A careful re-weighing after so long a 
 time of the spirit and tendency of the Essays and Reviews 
 does not to our mind relieve that work of the charge of 
 an unnecessary one-sided destructiveness. There is too 
 much not merely of the method but also of the temper of 
 mere demolition. Coming from the heart of the Church 
 itself, it seems, in its general drift, to portend only the 
 overthrow of Christianity as it had been, without suffi- 
 cient thought of its reconstruction as it ought to be. And 
 the farther drift of that early movement, as manifested 
 in Bishop Colenso, was not merely in the direction of the 
 fearless and thorough-going application of criticism to 
 its proper subject-matter in the Scriptures, but toward a 
 weakened sense of the divine in the person of our Lord 
 himself. Of course it may be said that the work of pull- 
 ing down was as necessary as that of rebuilding, and that 
 the same hands could not be expected to accomplish both. 
 We leave it for a higher judgment to decide whether and 
 how much the positive truth of Christianity was com- 
 promised or satisfied by the negative effort to divorce it 
 from its unnatural alliance with false history and false 
 science. That the effort had to be made, and had to run 
 its risks, we do not for a moment question. 
 
 So the real work of criticism had to be done, and it has 
 been done perhaps, and is doing, in the only way that we 
 can expect of human nature and under human conditions, 
 — with much that is wrong in the doing but all toward a 
 divine result. We might define the true end and mission 
 of criticism to be the slow and painful removal of the 
 whitewash and plaster of a spurious and superficial con- 
 ception and construction of divinity with which the so- 
 called ages of faith had covered and concealed the true 
 and essential divinity of the Bible and the whole outward 
 institution of Christianity. The ultimate result of such a 
 criticism will be simply to restore the Bible and Christian-
 
 48 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 ity to what they are by divesting them of what an igno- 
 rant reverence has made them ; very much as our Lord 
 himself stripped from the true spirit and the divine form 
 of the Old Testament the wraps and impediments of a 
 false traditionalism. 
 
 So the critical spirit invaded and pervaded the Church, 
 until we have come now to see it begin its conquest of 
 the very Catholic party itself in the Church. The third 
 great movement, as we have described it, originated, as 
 the others had, in Oxford. In the decade following the 
 publication of the Essays and Reviews it spread in a very 
 modified form to Cambridge, in the learned, scholarly, 
 and conservative school of Lightfoot and Westcott. In 
 the same decade appeared the devout, accomplished, and 
 moderate second generation of Tractarians, represented 
 by Mozley, Liddon, Haddan, and Church, In vain did 
 these, especially Liddon, strive by their learning, their 
 holiness of life, their conciliatory spirit and sweet reason- 
 ableness to revive the old temper of humble and dutiful 
 obedience to authority and to stem the rising tide of 
 what seemed to them sceptical and faithless criticism. 
 When Liddon's own disciples and successors in the faith 
 in the third generation of Tractarians, as represented by 
 Lux Mundi, seemed to him to be surrendering to the 
 claims of the new thought, it is said to have broken his 
 spirit and shortened his life. 
 
 The present tendency in England is toward a fusion of 
 all the currents. The great parties are more or less run- 
 ning into one another. The personal religion of the 
 Evangelicals, the catholicity of the Tractarians, the 
 naturalism and rationalism of the Critical School, meet 
 and blend in the veins of the Lux Mundi School. 
 
 In order to appreciate the position of this " high- 
 broad " movement to which, some think, belongs the 
 future of the Church, it is necessary to consider the rela- 
 tive claims of three rival attitudes of Christianity, which
 
 Recent Religious Thought 49 
 
 might be characterized, respectively, as (i) the historical, 
 (2) the ideological, and (3) the ideo-historical. All these 
 profess the highest interest in the divine truth of Chris- 
 tianity, but they stand in different relations to it. 
 
 The historical point of view dwells upon Christianity 
 as an objective fact which has come into the world and 
 which rests for its truth upon external testimony — the 
 evidence of a long prophetic preparation, a miraculous 
 advent and abundant miraculous attestations, an immedi- 
 ately and infallibly inspired record which it is profane to 
 regard or treat like any other record, an authoritative 
 Church to which is committed the keeping and teaching 
 of a given infallible truth. To this view it is treason and 
 impiety to weaken by questioning these outward supports 
 upon which the existence and preservation of Christianity 
 depend. 
 
 The ideological view is that ultimate truth is always its 
 own only proof and cannot ever rest upon mere external 
 authority, — for the simple reason that authority itself is 
 always open to question and is more difficult of proof than 
 the truth which it seeks to establish. It is infinitely 
 easier for us now, it is claimed, to believe in Christianity 
 for what it is, than it would be, without that, to believe 
 in the miracles, the literal Biblical inspiration, the super- 
 natural ecclesiastical infallibility upon which it is sought 
 to rest it. The ideological school might seem on the 
 one hand to give a higher position to Christianity in itself 
 than the historical. It sees in Christ the whole truth of 
 God, of man, of history, of the meaning and destiny of 
 the universe. And it requires all this inherent and essen- 
 tial truth in Christianity to render credible the claims of 
 the so-called historical proofs. In other words, Chris- 
 tianity is much better able and much more needed to 
 prove the proofs than they it. On the other hand, the 
 inevitable tendency in this also one-sided view is to 
 make Christianity true and divine only in its idea and
 
 50 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 not in its temporal origin and course. Having, as it con- 
 ceives, the ideal truth, it does not care for its historical or 
 temporal setting. We see therefore in the school, as 
 represented, for example, by Dr. Pfleiderer, a progressive 
 surrender of the actual for the ideological truth of Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 Now the so-called high-broad school of thought, as 
 combining these opposite points of view, might, as has 
 been said, be called historico-ideal, or ideo-historical. It 
 believes in Christ in the flesh and Christ in the Church. 
 It believes in historical proofs subjected to proper histori- 
 cal tests — not accepting as proper or valid such as are 
 based upon an assumption of the impossibility of the 
 supernatural in human history. But on the other hand 
 it is quite ready to concede that now — and probably all 
 along, from the first — Christianity has been, is, and will be 
 believed not so much upon any external proof or author- 
 ity as because it is in itself the truth of God, of ourselves, 
 and of the world. Very many times more proof and 
 more authority could not make anything else as true as 
 Christianity is to our minds, our hearts, and all in us 
 that is divine and immortal. God, Incarnation, Atone- 
 ment, Eternal Life, once given to humanity, can never 
 be taken away — because they are its nature and its des- 
 tiny. Such a view makes us comparatively indifferent to 
 questions of many external forms of authority upon which 
 some think the existence of our religion depends. We 
 would say, however, that, because Christianity is so true 
 ideologically, or in itself, therefore the natural inference 
 is not, as with some, that it is not so historically, but that 
 it is. Indeed we should have had no idea of Christianity 
 as it is but for the objective, historical fact of it in the 
 
 world. 
 
 W. P. DUBOSE.
 
 V. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE BIBLE. 
 
 WHAT Strikes us most in Matthew Arnold, critic, 
 poet, and man of letters, is the extraordinary 
 interest he took in religious questions. At 
 times his whole thought seemed to revolve around the 
 great central theme of God, and he would return to it as 
 though it possessed a well-nigh irresistible fascination for 
 him. With all his avowed agnosticism (he hesitated to 
 the last to apply the term " person " to God) he wrote 
 on the Bible with remarkable lucidity, depth, and earnest- 
 ness, and has left us some most stimulating and suggestive 
 criticism, particularly on the New Testament. His expo- 
 sition of St. Paul's teaching, startling in its originality and 
 departure from accepted standards, is nearer the truth 
 than the view held by most Protestant theologians. 
 
 After a somewhat close and careful study of SL Pajil 
 and Protestantism, we cannot but feel that had our author 
 risen to the full height of the Christian faith, his abilities 
 as a critic and exegete would have placed him high in the 
 ranks of Biblical scholars. He would never, in our 
 opinion, have made a theologian, for he had not the 
 necessary philosophical grasp and insight. He was never 
 tired of ridiculing the subtleties of the metaphysicians 
 and often declared, " with characteristic, mocking irony, 
 that for philosophical thinking he had no faculty. In 
 this," says Dr. Pfleiderer, " he was undoubtedly per- 
 fectly right." Had he applied himself seriously to think 
 
 51
 
 52 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 out his ideas to their logical conclusion he must have 
 arrived at a clearer and more satisfactory conception of 
 God, in substantial accord with that generally held. As 
 it was, he involved himself, unawares, in contradictions 
 from which there is no escape.* 
 
 [Arnold's value for us, as students of the Bible, consists 
 m his wide culture and experience of life, his keen in- 
 sight, almost infallible taste, and unsurpassed literary 
 judgment — and these are indispensable qualities in any 
 who undertake to interpret that book which deals more 
 largely with human life than any other. It was the 
 human element in the Bible that appealed strongly to 
 Matthew Arnold. The literary beauty and charm of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures fascinated and delighted him. And 
 it was the lack of any true appreciation of the Bible as 
 literature for which he criticised the theologians of his 
 day. His whole contention from first to last was that 
 the language of Scripture was not scientific, but literary, 
 poetic, and eloquent, and therefore could in no sense be 
 construed scientifically. It would be a mistake to regard 
 him as an iconoclast. His severest critics must at least 
 give him the credit of making the attempt in every in- 
 stance to find some secure and permanent basis for faith 
 in the sacred Scriptures apart from the traditional belief 
 in their divine origin and inspiration. He noted with 
 regret what must have struck every observant and 
 thoughtful student of the times — the growing neglect 
 of the Bible by the multitude. Men even who consider 
 themselves well educated evince gross ignorance of quite 
 commonplace allusions to scriptural names and events. 
 
 * The denial, i. e., of personality to God, and the assertion of a cosmic 
 righteousness — an attribute inseparable from personality ; which he thus at 
 once implies and denies to the "Eternal not ourselves." This inconsist- 
 ency may be explained by variations of mood : in his serious, positive, con- 
 structive, and ethical moods he divined an attribute of personality in the 
 power behind phenomena, which in moments of levity, in his negative, 
 destructive, critical and purely intellectual vein, he denied. — Ed.
 
 Arnold and the Bible 53 
 
 Arnold's Literature and Dogma was an attempt to awaken 
 interest in the Bible, to induce a study of the Hebrew 
 Scriptures for their surpassing literary beauty, and yet 
 more for their unrivalled excellence as a guide in matters 
 of conduct. 
 
 The key to his interpretation, therefore, is to be sought 
 in these two words, " Culture " and " Conduct." " Cul- 
 ture " he defined to be " tact, judgment, knowledge, and 
 a wide literary experience of men and things," — and such 
 culture, he would say, is necessary to any proper appre- 
 ciation of the Bible as literature. If we have in the Bible 
 the remains of a national literature, we must of course 
 attach varying degrees of value and importance to its 
 various books. Arnold maintained that Chronicles could 
 not take rank with Judges, or the Epistle of Jude with 
 the Gospel according to St. John. In his view, the old 
 Protestant idea that the Bible was infallibly inspired 
 in every word and letter had done much to destroy 
 its literary attractiveness, because it failed to discrim- 
 inate between what was and what was not important. 
 The dry records of Chronicles could not be considered 
 to have equal inspiration Avith Isaiah and Jeremiah. It 
 is only necessary to refer to the growth of the canon of 
 Scripture to see that herein he was undoubtedly correct. 
 The fathers of the early Church not only distinguished 
 between the books themselves but also regarded some 
 books as possessing a higher degree of inspiration than 
 others. 
 
 To follow now more in detail his method of interpreta- 
 tion : he searched the Old Testament for some " master- 
 word " which should furnish the clue to the thought of 
 the Hebrew people. This he f ou nd in the word ' ' righteous- 
 ness. " " 'Conduct,' " he said, "is a word of common use. 
 ' Morality ' is a philosophical term." Religion he defined 
 as " morality touched with emotion." We need not go 
 far, he thought, in a study of the Bible to discover that
 
 54 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 conduct — righteousness — which is the end of rehgion, is in 
 a special manner the object of Bible-rehgion. Literature 
 and Dogma abounds in quotations in support of this 
 position. The name " Jeshurun," one of the ideal 
 names for the Hebrew people, means the " upright." 
 The name of that mysterious being " Melchizedek,"_ 
 who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the 
 kings and blessed him, has been interpreted to mean 
 " king of righteousness." The entire Old Testament is 
 filled with the word and thought of righteousness. " In 
 the way of righteousness is life. . . . Righteousness 
 tendeth to life. . . . He that pursueth evil pursueth 
 it to his own hurt. . . . The way of the transgressor 
 is hard." The law of righteousness was such an object 
 of veneration to the Jews that its very words were to be 
 in their hearts: " Thou shalt teach them diligently unto 
 thy children and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in 
 thine house and when thou walkest by the way, and 
 when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." They 
 said of the doctrine of righteousness: " Take fast hold 
 of her, let her not go. Keep her for she is thy life." 
 The germ therefore of the religious consciousness of the 
 Hebrew race, out of which sprang Israel's name for God, 
 was the idea of a " Power not ourselves that makes for 
 righteousness." The genesis of this conception of 
 righteousness our author explains as follows : In the be- 
 ginning of time some single man would control a selfish 
 propensity or animal instinct of his nature, and, finding 
 that this brought happiness and peace of mind, would be 
 induced to repeat the experiment, until by degrees he 
 built up in himself a habit of self-control and so came to 
 experience the actual workings of the law of righteous- 
 ness, the beneficial effects of which he could test for him- 
 self. From this stage of experience it was but a step to 
 the recognition of a truth which became clearer with 
 every fresh advance in a life of virtue — that this law of
 
 Arnold and the Bible 55 
 
 righteousness was unfailing and unchangeable. So man 
 gave it the name " Eternal " ; it was the " Eternal not 
 ourselves that makes for righteousness." From its per- 
 sonification the idea of God was evolved, and by a purely 
 anthropomorphic process converted eventually into a sort 
 of magnified non-natural man to whom the term " Per- 
 son " was applied. Arnold failed to tell us how it was 
 that the Jews came to make so much of this great thought 
 of righteousness. He believed that it was no more 
 capable of explanation than the fact that the Greeks 
 possessed a genius for form, for sensuous beauty, or the 
 Romans for government and order. He accepted the 
 fact without attempting to account for it. To return 
 therefore to his original proposition : the Bible he con- 
 sidered the world's masterpiece on the great subject of 
 conduct. As long as men aspire to virtuous living, they 
 must go to it for guidance and inspiration. He argued 
 that just as one with a talent for sculpture goes to the 
 remains of ancient Greek art to cultivate his sense of 
 form, or another with literary tastes studies the great 
 models of classical excellence, so one who really wants 
 to know how to live must go to the Hebrew and Christian 
 Scriptures to have his conscience enlightened and his 
 moral nature strengthened. Though there was much in 
 their national character that was unattractive, though as 
 a people they were singularly lacking in aesthetic appre- 
 ciation, the Hebrews yet deserve an enduring place in 
 the world's regard, because they were the first to grasp 
 clearly and firmly the workings of this law of righteous- 
 ness, and to see its bearing upon life and conduct — and 
 conduct, Arnold considered, makes up at the lowest esti- 
 mate three fourths of life. Satisfied that he had found 
 its open sesame, he proceeded to interpret the whole 
 Bible in terms of this master-word. " Wisdom becomes 
 the clear perception of the workings of the Law of 
 Righteousness." The wise man is he who clearly per-
 
 56 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 ceives the method and operation of this law and models 
 his Hfe upon it. Nor can he stop here, for its workings 
 being invariable, however different its manifestations, he 
 comes in time to regard the law as one. Monotheism 
 was therefore the personification of the oneness and in- 
 variableness of the law, and so the " Power not ourselves " 
 became an " Eternal Unity not ourselves." This con- 
 ception of Deity would naturally be opposed to idolatry 
 and creature worship, because idolatry tended to do away 
 with unity while it still further degraded the law of 
 righteousness by embodying it in visible objects of wor- 
 ship, whereas that law was above all else an inward and 
 spiritual reality. The prophets were they who more 
 profoundly than others believed in the " Eternal not 
 ourselves that makes for righteousness," and who looked 
 beyond present disaster and defeat to the ultimate 
 triumph of goodness. They constantly appealed from 
 the apostasy and infidelity of their own generation to a 
 future day when " truth would flourish out of the earth, 
 and righteousness look down from heaven." Hence the 
 Messianic hope of the Jews sprang primarily from their 
 indestructible faith in the final triumph of righteousness 
 and the final overthrow of evil. The Messianic idea as it 
 gradually took shape in the writings of the prophets was 
 simply the poetic form which this undying hope assumed. 
 Baffled, disappointed, crushed by repeated disasters, it 
 yet ran its magnificent course and showed its innate 
 power to hve in the millennial hopes and anticipations 
 which survived even the downfall of the nation. This is 
 what our author called the " Aberglaube," or" Extra- 
 belief" which makes up the poetry of Hfe. It is not 
 science, although it is always calling itself science. The 
 genius of Christ, according to this interpretation, con- 
 sisted in his grasp and expansion of this great thought of 
 righteousness. Christ was the first to lay special stress 
 upon personal as distinguished from social and national
 
 Arnold and the Bible 57 
 
 righteousness — upon which the emphasis of the Old 
 Testament chiefly fell. The prophets may have had a 
 true apprehension of an inner law of life which should 
 possess each individual conscience, but they labored in 
 vain to impress it upon the great mass of their fellow- 
 countrymen. Where they failed Christ succeeded, and 
 the secret of his success is to be found in his method, 
 which was to change the inner man. This change was 
 called repentance, and when once brought about, there 
 was revealed to the heart the " secret of Jesus." This 
 is best described as a state of inward peace and happiness. 
 But to the method and secret of Jesus we must add still 
 a third quality: " Sweet reasonableness." These when 
 taken together constitute the religion of Christ. To be 
 in Christ is to be in his " secret " and in his " method." 
 Salvation, therefore, consists in following him. What 
 Christ did for the cause of righteousness was to make it 
 personal, to quicken feeling, and so to give it that touch 
 of the emotional which marks the transition from moral- 
 ity to religion. Thus we are brought to our author's 
 views concerning the New Testament. We have already 
 referred to his bold and original interpretation of the 
 theology of St. Paul. Here he took issue with the 
 popular theology of his day, which made the test words 
 of the Apostle's Gospel to be " calling," " election," 
 " justification," and " sanctification," whereas he would 
 make them consist in such phrases as " Dying with 
 Christ," " Resurrection from the dead," " Growing 
 into Christ," " Salvation by righteousness," and " Right- 
 eousness by Jesus Christ." We may say in passing 
 that Christ is both the justification of our faith and 
 our salvation by righteousness. Arnold's interpretation 
 does not overthrow the old theology but simply com- 
 plements it by giving the practical side of faith as it 
 issues forth and proves itself in conduct. His handling 
 . of the vexed question of the authorship of St. John's
 
 58 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 Gospel was perhaps as original and striking as his treat- 
 ment of St. Paul. He assumed as the date of that Gos- 
 pel the year 125 A.D. — only fifteen years later than Dr. 
 Harnack's conjectural date. He held that it was written 
 at Ephesus by a Greek convert who was steeped in 
 Alexandrian philosophy. St. John's connection with it 
 consisted in the " logia," or sayings of our Lord which 
 he supplied. In support of his theory Arnold sought to 
 prove that the author of the fourth Gospel wrote as only 
 a foreigner would write when referring to the usages and 
 customs of an alien people. Thus the water-pots at 
 Cana are said to have been " after the manner of the 
 purifying of the Jews," and again, " The Jews' Pass- 
 over was at hand." " A dispute arose between some of 
 John's disciples and a Jew about purifying." It is as 
 though an Englishman should write of the Derby as the 
 " English people's Derby." In Hke manner the well- 
 known discrepancy between St. John and the Synoptics 
 as to the time of the Passover is to be explained by the 
 supposition that the author was a foreigner, and therefore 
 more liable to be mistaken than those who were born Jews. 
 In conclusion we may express our conviction that 
 Arnold has done the cause of religion a real service by 
 emphasizing the importance of righteousness. He falls 
 short of the Christian conception, but so far as he goes 
 he does nothing to undermine but a great deal to 
 strengthen the foundations of true religion, and his view 
 of the Bible is likely to commend itself to many who are 
 unable to accept the traditional view. And certainly 
 there can be no better test of the truth of any doctrine 
 than the influence which it has upon conduct; and we 
 need not ask for any more convincing evidence of the 
 inspiration of the Scriptures than the truth which he was 
 never tired of enforcing — that it is only by a study of 
 them that men can learn how to live. His high estimate 
 of the Bible as literature, in the light of Dr. R. G. Moul-
 
 Arnold and the Bible 59 
 
 ton's recent work, comes to us with something of the 
 force of prophecy. Speaking of its influence upon him- 
 self, he said: " From no poetry or literature, not even 
 from our own Shakespeare and Milton, great as they are 
 and our own as they are, have I, for my part, received so 
 much delight and stimulus as from Homer and Isaiah." 
 No one can read his masterly essay on Hellenism and 
 Hebraism without seeing how profoundly both the Greek 
 and Hebrew classics influenced him. It would scarcely 
 be too much to say that that essay contains the cream of 
 his philosophy and furnishes us with the key to his 
 thought. The Bible, he believed, has been of the high- 
 est possible value to the cause of culture, and its literary 
 power was heightened by the fact that the effect of 
 Hebrew poetry could be preserved and transmuted into 
 a foreign language — especially the English — as the effect 
 of no other great poetry could be. It is apparent that a 
 work on the plan of Dr. Moulton's Modern Readers' Bible 
 would have delighted him ; he would have been in entire 
 sympathy and accord with an undertaking which could 
 be carried out for the first time only in our own age, and 
 which illustrates his principle. 
 
 It is impossible to say to what degree Arnold believed 
 in the immortality of the soul. At times he seemed to 
 despair altogether of the life after death, but there is an 
 argument for immortality in Literature and Dogma which 
 reminds us somewhat of Kant's famous line of reasoning: 
 " Instead of fairy tales, let us begin, at least, in the cer- 
 tainties. And a certainty is the sense of life, of being 
 truly aHve, which accompanies righteousness. If this 
 experimental sense does not rise to be stronger in us, 
 does not rise to the sense of being inextinguishable, that 
 is probably because our experience of righteousness is 
 really so very small. Here, therefore, we may well per- 
 mit ourselves to trust Jesus, whose practice and intuition 
 both of them went, in these matters, so far deeper than
 
 6o Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 ours. At any rate, we have in our experience this strong 
 sense of Hfe from righteousness to start with ; capable of 
 being developed, apparently, by progress in righteous- 
 ness into something immeasurably stronger. Here is the 
 true basis for all religious aspiration after immortality." 
 One cannot help putting here the pertinent question: 
 " If we may permit ourselves to trust the practice and 
 intuition of Jesus in so solemn a matter as the soul's im- 
 mortality, why not trust them in regard to belief in a 
 personal God ? If Christ's intuitions are so much deeper 
 than ours and therefore so much more trustworthy, it 
 seems inconsistent to accept him as a guide on the ques- 
 tion of the soul's future existence and not to accept the 
 equally fundamental affirmation of his life that God was 
 his Father. If the religious instinct of the Hebrew race 
 led them to personify the ' Eternal not ourselves,* was 
 it not because the human heart can never attach itself to 
 an abstract and impersonal Power ? " 
 
 The confusion underlying Arnold's idea of an " Eter- 
 nal Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness " 
 is admirably exposed in an essay of Tulloch's, thus para- 
 phrased by Dr. Pfleiderer: Arnold's " Power not our- 
 selves " can as little be verified by experience in the 
 sense of natural science as any ancient dogma. All that 
 can be proved by the method of this science is the 
 recurrence of certain external conditions to which 
 Arnold gives the name of " righteousness," and behind 
 which he supposes a Power causing them. . . . The idea 
 of righteousness is as certainly a product of the conscience, 
 or of what he calls metaphysics, as the idea of personality ; 
 both arise from within, and are not brought from without. 
 In fact, the two are twin ideas, inseparably connected in 
 the Hebrew and the universal conscience — a law of con- 
 duct and a lawgiver or personal authority, from whom 
 it issues. . . . Accordingly, Arnold's notion of dogma 
 as an excrescence or a disease of religion is superficial.
 
 Arnold and the Bible 6i 
 
 If righteousness as a law of life can be proved by the 
 religious experience of the race, quite as well can dogma 
 be shown to be the legitimate fruit of the religious 
 thought of the race when reflecting upon this experience. 
 The Christian creed is the result of the finest exercise of 
 the greatest minds of the Church, who have made the 
 facts of religious consciousness as revealed in the Bible 
 and wrought out in the spiritual experience of mankind 
 the object of their study. To a truly logical agnostic, 
 Arnold's " Power not ourselves " must appear as a sur- 
 vival of that metaphysical and supernatural postulate 
 v^ich he himself rejected, and as no more capable than 
 that of verification by experience in the empirical sense 
 of that term. 
 
 W. A. GUERRY.
 
 VI. 
 
 THE LATE COURSE OF ETHICAL THOUGHT. 
 
 IN ethics, as in all other fields of human thought, there 
 is to be noted a constant tidal ebb and flow between 
 extremes, which in this case may be distinguished as 
 self-regard and regard for others, private and public in- 
 terest, hedonism, egoism or selfishness, and altruism or 
 benevolence ; and there is yet the further question, how 
 these stand related to religion, to religious motives and 
 sanctions. Thus there arises a third category : theologi- 
 cal ethics or piety. We shall find that all the moralists 
 of our or any time will find their place among these cate- 
 gories — for from this circle there is no escape. 
 
 The dominant system of morals at the beginning of our 
 period — that is, the middle of the century — was utilitari- 
 anism — and this furnishes our starting-point. In this 
 system the motive of all human conduct was held to be 
 the happiness of the individual. " The greatest happi- 
 ness of the greatest number " was its shibboleth, and it 
 was maintained that conduct which stood this test was 
 right, and conducive to individual happiness. As this 
 teaching was strictly in accordance with the then prevail- 
 ing spirit, it reigned supreme for many years, and in- 
 fluenced even Christian moralists. But in spite of its 
 seeming fairness and its high-sounding shibboleth, it 
 tended to and was at bottom mere selfishness. Since 
 from its principles it is impossible to prove that conduct 
 most productive of human welfare produces most individ- 
 
 62
 
 Recent Ethical Thought 63 
 
 ual happiness, it left self-interest supreme. Its inmost 
 essence is revealed by the saying of its founder Bentham : 
 " Nothing but self-regard will serve for diet, though for 
 dessert benevolence is a valuable addition." 
 
 The reaction against this position may be best illus- 
 trated by contrasting with it the opinion of John Stuart 
 Mill, the greatest and most influential of Bentham's dis- 
 ciples: " A disinterested spirit should be the motive in 
 the performance of all socially useful work." In contrast 
 to Bentham's opposition to the doctrine of a moral sense, 
 Mill adopted toward it a conciliatory attitude. He held 
 that " the mind is not in a situation conformable to the 
 highest utility unless it loves virtue as a thing desirable 
 in itself." Though this inverted the true order, still 
 subordinating virtue to utility, it marked a long advance, 
 and in fact amounted to a surrender of the essential prin- 
 ciple of utilitarianism. It was a sort of illicit process, 
 deriving disinterested virtue from premises that only 
 recognized self-interest. Mill sought to explain this re- 
 gard for virtue by a " law of association, of feelings and 
 ideas, by which objects originally desired as a means 
 come to be desired as an end." The inclination to 
 justice or any virtue was at first mere non-moral impulse, 
 but by repeated performance, always to one's benefit, 
 justice itself became an end and virtuous conduct received 
 a moral sanction. The tendency thus acquired, he main- 
 tained, " may become so strong that the habit of virtuous 
 conduct continues even when the reward the virtuous 
 man receives is anything but an equivalent for the suffer- 
 ing he undergoes or the wishes he may have to renounce, 
 and thus self-sacrifice — the sacrifice of utility, of indi- 
 vidual happiness — is made possible. 
 
 This generous inconsistency of Mill's, marking the 
 emergence of altruism out of a lower s^'stem, is to be ex- 
 plained in great measure by the influence, which we know 
 was powerful over him, of the contemporary French phi-
 
 64 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 losopher, Auguste Comte. Here accordingly it becomes 
 necessary to notice the inaportant contribution made by 
 the latter to the ethical thought of Great Britain. Ap- 
 plying his positivist method to moral science, Comte 
 explained all its phenomena as results of natural principles 
 and a natural development. The principle underlying 
 this development was the ever heightening supremacy of 
 the truly human over the animal side of our nature. To 
 him the highest social feeling was " devotion to humanity 
 as a whole." Benevolence and its increase — the habit of 
 living for others, rather than the mere increase of happi- 
 ness — should be the ultimate aim and standard of practice. 
 He held, however, that these are really inseparable, and 
 that the more altruistic any man's sentiments and habits 
 of action become the greater the happiness enjoyed by 
 him as well as by others. He never surrendered to 
 egoism, but recognized it as an ally when properly regu- 
 lated. 
 
 It was this Comtean ethic that introduced the phase of 
 thought characteristic of our period, influencing all who 
 adopted his positive philosophy or for any cause aban- 
 doned revealed religion. All later thinkers, except 
 Spencer, were more or less of this altruistic school, and 
 its evolutionary method harmonized well with the pre- 
 vailing scientific mood. 
 
 The next — and the most original — contribution to 
 ethical thought was made by Herbert Spencer in his Data 
 of Ethics (1879), i^ which he rigorously applied to morals 
 the principles of evolution. Though influenced by altru- 
 istic thought, his system turned out to be a kind of social 
 hedonism. He proposed three moral ends to attain which 
 all human conduct should be directed and by which its 
 value should be determined: (i) Duration (length) of 
 physical life; (2) Quantity (breadth) of life; that is, ex- 
 tent and intensity of its activities and enjoyments; (3) 
 Preservation of offspring. These ends should coincide
 
 Recent Ethical Thought 65 
 
 with other two : (4) So to attain them as not to pre- 
 vent others from equal enjoyment, and (5) Mutual help 
 in attaining these ends. Right and wrong, according to 
 this evolutionist scheme, always refer to duration and 
 quantity of life. Life is worth living if it has a surplus 
 of agreeable feeling, and the good is the pleasurable. 
 Having set forth these principles, Spencer turned to a 
 criticism of other schools, ridiculing the morals based on 
 sensation, and, concerning altruism, making the shrewd 
 observation that if carried to an extreme it causes esfoism 
 in the person or persons gratified — (as witness the extreme 
 selfishness of a husband who has a too self-sacrificing 
 wife). The over-altruistic, moreover, (and judged by his 
 principles, this is a most damaging conclusion,) leave no 
 descendants. His hope for the future was that " as 
 society advances sympathetic pleasures will ultimately 
 be spontaneously pursued." 
 
 We note in this system omissions that render it hope- 
 lessly ineffectual and unsatisfactory. There is no con- 
 sideration of will, of the sense of guilt or shortcoming, 
 or that of duty and reverence — and Duty is the sphinx 
 whose riddle every ethical aspirant must solve or be de- 
 voured. According to evolutionary standards, appar- 
 ently, much that is universally held wrong would be 
 perfectly legitimate, and much universally considered 
 right would be manifestly wrong. What room, for in- 
 stance, does Spencer's definition of right leave for Mar- 
 tyrdom ? To take a case about which all would agree, 
 let us consider the conduct of Antigone, the noblest 
 woman and the truest martyr in classic literature. The 
 principle for which she died was a superstition, and fur- 
 nished in reason no just cause for the sacrifice. And 
 judged by Spencer's criterion it was wrong, for it not 
 only sacrificed her own life but also the possibility of 
 descendants — a fact which she herself keenly lamented. 
 Yet, though this consideration was much stronger with
 
 66 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 an ancient Greek than it could possibly be with a modern, 
 it did not make her conception of right waver or her will 
 falter for an instant, and all who have been thrilled by 
 her story — even Mr. Spencer himself — will agree that her 
 conduct was right and praiseworthy. 
 
 This illustration casts a searching light upon his whole 
 system; it is incapable of justifying or producing the 
 noblest conduct. It is selfish at bottom, and only by a 
 forced development from his principles can he recognize 
 the value of conduct most conducive to the general wel- 
 fare. 
 
 It is no wonder that Mr. Leslie Stephen broke away 
 from evolutionary ethics as interpreted by Spencer, ad- 
 mitting, as in the preface to his latest book, that evolu- 
 tion is insufficient to solve the problem of ethics. 
 
 Huxley marked a distinct advance. His system was a 
 dualism — a contrast between the microcosm and the 
 macrocosm, as he phrased it, — and although its principles 
 were worked out along the lines of the theory of evolu- 
 tion, they were of firmer moral fibre than the foregoing. 
 He illustrated his view by an elaborate figure : the con- 
 trast between a garden protected by a wall, within which 
 a state of art is created by man, and uncultivated nature 
 without. In the garden the ordinary laws operating out- 
 side, especially the survival of the fittest, are suspended. 
 This distinction between the world of nature and of man 
 is universally recognized, and is both useful and justifi- 
 able; and yet the human energy and intelligence which 
 have brought into existence and maintain the garden are, 
 strictly speaking, part and parcel of the cosmic process. 
 If it be objected that the cosmic cannot then be in an- 
 tagonism to the horticultural process, which is part of 
 itself — that the assertion that they are antagonistic is 
 illogical — Huxley replies: So much the worse for logic, 
 for the fact is so. The horticultural process is opposed 
 in its very principle to the cosmic. The characteristic
 
 Recent Ethical Thought 67 
 
 feature of the latter is the intense and unceasing compe- 
 tition of the struggle for existence ; of the former, the 
 suppression of that struggle by the removal of the condi- 
 tions that give rise to it. Further elaboration of the 
 figure brings out analogies between the garden and a 
 colony, within which the flora and fauna native to the 
 country have been extirpated or driven out and new 
 species introduced. Farms and pastures now represent 
 the garden and the colonists the gardeners. The con- 
 trast still holds good between the laws which inure to 
 their preservation and development and the state of 
 nature outside. Their supreme concern is still to prevent 
 the encroachments of this warring nature ; their next to 
 secure peace within the colony and the gradual develop- 
 ment of all that constitutes civilization. And every step 
 of this progress would be obtained by removing the 
 colony one degree farther from the state of nature and 
 establishing a state more and more antagonistic to it. 
 But " a serpent " would enter the colony in the shape of 
 over-production of new members, the check upon repro- 
 duction of the struggle for existence having been removed, 
 and this would tend to destroy the colony and to bring 
 back the old conditions. Moreover, " all men agree in 
 their innate desire to enjoy the pleasures and escape the 
 pains of life ; to do nothing but what it pleases them to 
 do. This is the reality at the bottom of the old doctrine 
 of original sin — an inheritance from ancestors in whom 
 the strength of this tendency to self-assertion was the 
 condition of victory in the struggle for existence. Those 
 who advocate the ' Ethics of Evolution ' would not 
 combat this tendency, but because the survival of the 
 fittest through unrestricted competition operates for de- 
 velopment in the cosmic process, they would introduce it 
 into the human polity, not perceiving that it would destroy 
 it as certainly as tearing down the wall would destroy the 
 garden." The ethical progress of society depends not on
 
 68 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 imitating the cosmic process, still less on running away 
 from it, but upon combating it. But men make a mis- 
 take in supposing that there is any beneficent power in 
 the macrocosm that will ever aid their ends. "All efforts 
 to reconcile the existence of evil with the goodness of 
 God fail." Buddhist and Stoic aHke found their highest 
 development possible only by self-abnegation and avoid- 
 ance of all that would bring them into contact with the 
 outer order; but we to-day are agreed " that the propor- 
 tion of good and evil may be sensibly affected by human 
 action, and so far as we possess a power of bettering 
 things it is our paramount duty to use it and to train our 
 intellect and energy to this supreme service of our kind. 
 . . . Social progress will be attained by a checking of 
 the cosmic process at every step — but the great difference 
 between ancient times and the present day is that now 
 we have acquired a solid foundation for the belief that 
 this audacious combat of the microcosm with the macro- 
 cosm will reach a certain measure of success." 
 
 Here, too, beside the logical flaw in his dualism which 
 Huxley brushed aside in a cavalier manner that can 
 never satisfy the mind, one finds a contradiction. If the 
 macrocosm is wholly evil, nay, if it is only unmoral, 
 there is nothing for man to build on, no guarantee that 
 any progress is more than seeming, or that one day — as 
 he himself suggested — the conditions necessary to prog- 
 ress in the macrocosm may not be reversed and the 
 microcosm be overwhelmed in its retrogression. If, on 
 the other hand, reasonable progress has been made in the 
 past and can be counted on for the future, the existence 
 of a beneficent power is suggested in both microcosm and 
 macrocosm, who wills the development of each through 
 its own laws. 
 
 Matthew Arnold's ethical doctrine may be regarded as 
 a literary and subjective phase of that dualism of which 
 Huxley's was the scientific and objective. He summar-
 
 Recent Ethical Thought 69 
 
 ized it as follows in his preface to Last Essays on Church 
 and Religion : "All experience as to conduct brings us at 
 last to the fact of two selves or instincts or forces . 
 contending for the mastery in man : one, a movement of 
 first impulse and more involuntary, leading us to justify 
 any inclination that may solicit us, and called generally a 
 movement of man's ordinary or passing self, of sense, 
 appetite, desire; the other, a movement of reflection and 
 more voluntary, leading us to submit inclination to some 
 rule, and called generally a movement of man's higher or 
 enduring self, of reason, spirit, will, . . , For a man to 
 obey the highest self, or reason, or whatever it is to be 
 called, is happiness and life for him; to obey the lower, 
 is death and misery." That, while assuming this con- 
 flict, he suggested a way of escape through a motive that 
 should powerfully assist the appeal of the higher nature, 
 and that he recognized the truth embodied in our criti- 
 cism of Huxley — the existence of a moral order in the 
 universe — marked him as the herald of a higher stage of 
 ethical theory. 
 
 We know of his insistence in all his writings on the 
 importance of conduct — and by conduct he meant right 
 conduct, — and also of his affirmation of an " Eternal not 
 ourselves that makes for righteousness." And further: 
 he recognized more clearly than his predecessors the ne- 
 cessity of something more than a knowledge of the prin- 
 ciples of right and wrong to secure right conduct ; a need 
 which was pointed out by Aristotle in his criticism of 
 Plato's idea that the mere knowledge of the right course 
 would be sufficient to ensure its being pursued by any 
 reasonable man — and which was felt by the Roman poet 
 when he expressed the unceasing contest of all the ages 
 in the words, " Video meliora proboque pejora sequor. " 
 Sentiment, said Arnold, is needed to transform this 
 knowledge into conduct, and sentiment requires an object, 
 and no object can be found as capable of producing
 
 yo Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 sentiment adequate to secure right conduct as the person 
 of Christ. " Socrates inspired boundless friendship and 
 esteem ; but ... a penetrating enthusiasm of love, 
 sympathy, pity, adoration, reinforcing the inspiration of 
 reason and duty, does not belong to Socrates. With 
 Jesus it is different. On this point it is needless to 
 argue; history has proved. In the midst of errors the 
 most immoral, . . . the immense emotion of love 
 and sympathy inspired by the person and character of 
 Jesus has had to work almost by itself alone for righteous- 
 ness; and it has worked wonders. . . . Now, to 
 help our impulse toward righteousness, we have a power 
 enabling us to turn this impulse to full account " {St. 
 Paul and Protestantism). And yet he regarded Christ as 
 a purely human person, and did not seem to realize that 
 a denial of his divinity deprives his person of its chief 
 efficacy for good ; not at all because it makes his human 
 character less worthy of regard and imitation, but be- 
 cause it then ceases to reveal the divine. 
 
 Through Thomas Hill Green, the greatest philosopher 
 and moralist of Arnold's time, the transition was fairly 
 effected from altruism to theological ethics. Green was 
 distinctly a theist, believing in a personal or superpersonal 
 God. He taught " that there is one spiritual, self- 
 conscious being, of which all that is real is the activity 
 or expression ; that we are related to this spiritual being 
 as partakers ... of the self-consciousness 
 through which it at once constitutes and distinguishes 
 itself from the world ; that this participation is the source 
 of morality and religion." He found in the mental and 
 moral nature of man sufficient proofs of the existence of 
 God : our knowledge and will presuppose and are subli- 
 mated into a knowledge of a Universal Mind and Will. 
 He was dominated by an almost overpowering sense of 
 personal responsibility, and this, seen embodied in his 
 strong, admirable, and truly heroic personality, gave him
 
 Recent Ethical Thought 71 
 
 a wonderful influence over all thoughtful and earnest 
 minds among the undergraduates at Oxford. To those 
 who have read Robert Elsmcre — and who has not ? — it 
 may be some compensation for this necessarily brief and 
 inadequate mention to add that he was the original of 
 Mr. Gray in that book, who was to Robert Elsmere what 
 his original had been to its author. 
 
 In the course of our sketch we have noticed a progress 
 step by step in the ethical principles of successive teach- 
 ers and a gradual approximation to the truths of Chris- 
 tianity. Dr. James Martineau marks the culmination of 
 the movement so far, in a synthesis of ethics and religion. 
 According to him {Types of EtJiical Theory, 1886): 
 " The fundamental basis of ethics is the broad fact that 
 men have a consciousness of better and worse in human 
 beings and affairs and approve and disapprove accord- 
 ingly." The objects of our judgment are responsible 
 beings, — and it is the inner spring of action which deter- 
 mines our praise or blame. In the face of a general 
 opinion to the contrary, he maintains that the moral 
 sense is not a social product, but can be known in the 
 first instance only internally, by self-consciousness. We 
 judge other men's conduct by principles familiar to our 
 own inner experience. The moral judgment is aroused 
 through the " simultaneous presence of two springs, 
 whose difference amounts to strife, which check and ex- 
 clude each other." Whenever this happens we are im- 
 mediately sensible of a contrast between them — that one 
 is higher and worthier than the other. Thus we form 
 an ethical scale. The sensibility of the mind to the 
 gradations of this scale is what we call conscience, and 
 resembles the sensibility of the ear to gradations in pitch. 
 
 Dr. Martineau's analysis and classification of the mani- 
 fold springs of human action proceeds, from below up- 
 ward, from certain malevolent passions, through organic 
 propensions and the higher passions, affections and
 
 72 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 sentiments, to the primary motives of Wonder, Admira- 
 tion, Parental and Social Affections, Compassion, and 
 Reverence, From this scale he deduces the following 
 rule of moral conduct and definition of right and wrong: 
 every action is right which in the presence of a lower 
 principle follows a higher: every action is wrong which 
 in the presence of a higher principle follows a lower. 
 Criticising utilitarianism, he shows that " if it once admits 
 the moral sense to be there, in the mind, it must be ade- 
 quate to report to us right and wrong without an appeal 
 to self-love. " He also criticises the views of Mr. Leslie 
 Stephen and Mr. Herbert Spencer as to the origin of the 
 moral sense. Moral authority, he maintains, is ultimately 
 not subjective but objective — not vested in ideas but re- 
 siding in a person. Thus his ethics reach up into theology, 
 whence he derives Free Will and a Moral Governor. " If 
 the sense of authority means anything, it means the dis- 
 cernment of something higher than we, — and since we are 
 persons, therefore a person greater, higher, and of deeper 
 insight." The objection that, by recognizing a higher 
 power whose sanction is needed for the decisions of con- 
 science, he transforms his system from a psychological — 
 or since his psychology is controlled by conscience, an 
 ideo-psychological — into a theo-psychological system is 
 true, but it must be incurred ; since the faithful interro- 
 gation of conscience forces the mind from conscience up 
 to conscience' God. 
 
 In his Study of Religion (1888), Dr. Martineau demon- 
 strates in an interesting manner what a great factor rever- 
 ence toward a personality whom one loves and reveres is 
 in the education of the individual and of the race. 
 " Truths as such do not influence the will. All the ab- 
 stract teaching of religion and morality has very little 
 tendency to make people either religious or moral. . . . 
 The force of personal example, the personal character of 
 the teacher, must inspire the mind of the taught with
 
 Recent Ethical Thought 73 
 
 affection and reverence. . . . Our true moral life 
 and education are dependent on the presence of some 
 nature higher than our own. We need the assurance 
 that the moral differences that we feel have their verifica- 
 tion in reality. . . . The ascendency of the greater 
 soul over the less is won by touching the springs of rev- 
 erence. Example operates piecemeal upon the habits, 
 while the enthusiasm awakened by a loftier mind is a 
 universal energy, flooding the whole soul." This, he 
 maintains, can be evoked only by a sentiment of rever- 
 ence toward personality ; " We cannot present to children 
 abstract and empty formulas if we wish to bend their 
 wills to our liking. It must be reverence and love to- 
 ward a personality." And children again — as Landor 
 remarked — " when you have related to them a story 
 which has greatly interested them, ask immediately and 
 anxiously, ' Is it true ? ' Reverence must therefore be 
 for a personality that is real, existing, and true — for 
 God." 
 
 A peculiar feature of the thought of our time demands 
 notice, in concluding. From the time of Comte, ethical 
 writers have endeavored more eagerly than ever before 
 to eliminate religion from their systems. Taking from 
 Christianity its fundamental principle, they have dis- 
 guised it under the new name " Altruism," and have set 
 it over against religion, proclaiming its superiority to 
 Christianity. Their position is contradictory and char- 
 acterized by unstable equilibrium. " Ethics," says 
 Martineau, " must either perfect itself into religion or 
 else disintegrate into hedonism," — and history and ex- 
 perience corroborate the saying. Those who have at- 
 tempted to live by altruism alone have for the most part 
 degenerated into selfish pleasure-seekers or advanced into 
 devoted Christians ; in the rare cases in which they have 
 remained faithful adherents of their abstract creed their 
 lives have been characterized by the most profound mel-
 
 74 
 
 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 ancholy, as witness Henri Amiel and Arthur Hugh 
 Clough. 
 
 Egoism and altruism are opposed at every point, and 
 altruism is without a base for its principles or a motive 
 for their application strong enough to overcome the pal- 
 pable allurements of hedonism. Christianity is the 
 synthesis that combines the two, furnishing the base and 
 the motive needed by altruism, which then becomes ap- 
 plied Christianity, and proving the truest fulfilment of 
 hedonism : since in a universe governed by supreme be- 
 neficence virtue and happiness must ultimately coincide. 
 
 W. P. WOOLF.
 
 VII. 
 
 POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC MOVEMENTS. 
 
 THE aim and inspiration of all political and economic 
 movements in this century have been and are 
 political and economic equality. The means used 
 for the attainment of this consummation so devoutly 
 wished by many of the leaders as well as by the rank and 
 file of mankind have been the extension (i) of suffrage, 
 evidenced by the Reform Acts; (2) of distribution of 
 profits — the aim of trades-unions; and (3) of the functions 
 of government, illustrated by socialistic legislation, both 
 national and municipal. 
 
 I. Extension of Suffrage.— In 1830 Lord Wellington 
 said in debate in the House of Lords that he had never 
 heard or read of any measure, up to that moment, which 
 could in any degree satisfy his mind that the state of the 
 representation could be improved — be rendered more 
 satisfactory to the country at large. 
 
 At that time, " of six hundred and fifty-eight mem- 
 bers in the House of Commons, four hundred and 
 twenty-five were returned on the nomination or recom- 
 mendation of two hundred and fifty-two patrons/' 
 
 " It was to remedy this state of things," says Mr. 
 Woodrow Wilson, in his volume on Tlic State, " that 
 the well-known reforms of the present century were 
 undertaken," and he has summarized their results with 
 such precision and fitness for our purpose that we cannot 
 do better than to adopt his statement. " Those reforms 
 
 75
 
 76 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 have made the House of Commons truly representative 
 and national: and in making it national have made it 
 dominant. In 1832 there was made a wholesale redistri- 
 bution of seats and a complete reformation of the fran- 
 chise. The decayed towns were deprived of their 
 members, and the new centres of population were ac- 
 corded adequate representation. The right to vote in 
 the counties was extended from those who owned free- 
 holds to those who held property on lease and those who 
 held copyhold estates, and to tenants whose holdings 
 were of the clear annual value of fifty pounds. The 
 borough franchise was put upon the uniform basis of 
 householders whose houses were worth not less than ten 
 pounds a year. This was putting representation into the 
 hands of the middle, well-to-do classes; and with them 
 it remained till 1867. In 1867 another redistribution of 
 seats was effected, which increased the number of Scotch 
 members from fifty-four to sixty, and made other im- 
 portant readjustments of representation. The franchise 
 was at the same time very greatly widened. In the 
 boroughs all householders and every lodger whose lodg- 
 ings cost him ten pounds annually were given the right 
 to vote ; and in the counties, besides every forty-shilling 
 freeholder, every copyholder and leaseholder whose hold- 
 ing was of the annual value of five pounds, and every 
 householder whose rent was not less than twelve pounds 
 a year. Thus representation stood for almost twenty 
 years. Finally, in 1884, the basis of the present franchise 
 was laid. The qualifications for voters in the counties 
 were made the same as the qualifications fixed for 
 borough electors by the law of 1867, and over two mil- 
 lions and a half of voters were thus added to the active 
 citizenship of the country. There is now a uniform 
 ' household and lodger franchise ' throughout the king- 
 dom. In 1885 another great Redistribution Act was 
 passed, which merged eighty-one English, two Scotch,
 
 Political and Economic Movements ']'] 
 
 and twenty-two Irish boroughs in the counties in which 
 they lie, for purposes of representation ; gave additional 
 members to fourteen English, three Scotch, and two 
 Irish boroughs ; and created thirty-three new urban con- 
 stituencies. The greater towns which returned several 
 members were cut up into single-member districts, and a 
 like arrangement was effected in the counties, which were 
 divided into electoral districts, to each of which a single 
 representative was assigned. These changes were ac- 
 companied by an increase of twelve in the total number 
 of members," — raising it, that is, from six hundred and 
 fifty-eight to six hundred and seventy, where it now 
 stands. 
 
 The settlement of 1832 was quite artificial, the line 
 drawn both in boroughs and counties between voters and 
 non-voters being purely arbitrary. 
 
 The year 1866 was marked by great financial depression 
 and consequent disturbance of labor; and Mr. Gladstone 
 introduced a reform bill on behalf of the Government, 
 but could not carry it through. It took time to develop 
 enthusiasm for reform. Two events in the fall of the 
 year gave a marked impetus to the demand for it, — the 
 first being a vast popular meeting in Hyde Park that 
 ended in a riot; the second, a speech of Mr. Gladstone's, 
 in which he put the pertinent question, " Are they [the 
 non-voters] not our own flesh and blood ? " Soon after 
 the passage of the bill of 1867 began the agitation on 
 behalf of the rural laborers, conducted by Joseph Arch, 
 which resulted in the Reform Bill of 1884. 
 
 II. Extension of the Distribution of Profits. — The 
 great factor in this movement for the amelioration of the 
 condition of the working classes is that striking phenom- 
 enon of the last half of the century in the world of com- 
 merce — the Trades-Union. It was as late as 1825 that 
 the laws against any sort of union by workingmen for the 
 bettering of their condition were repealed, and for many
 
 78 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 years after that the common law against conspiracy was 
 used to put down all such united efforts. The Trades- 
 Union is practically a growth of the past fifty years. 
 Nearly every branch of activity now has its union, from 
 messenger boys upward. The chief aims of these unions 
 are to procure higher wages and shorter hours for the 
 laborer. One union declares its object to be " to guard 
 against encroachments by aristocracy, to preserve natural 
 and political rights, elevate moral and intellectual condi- 
 tions, and establish the honor and safety of the industrial 
 vocations." How large the share of the trades-unions 
 may be in the changes that have taken place and are still 
 going on in the world of labor is impossible to decide ; 
 tKat there has been a gradual increase in the rate of wages 
 in most occupations, a decrease in the hours of labor, and 
 a general improvement in the condition of the working 
 classes, — that political equality, that is, has been followed 
 by a more equal and equitable distribution of the product 
 of labor, is a firmly established fact. 
 
 III. Extension of the Functions of Government. — 
 As opposed to the laissez-faire doctrine of the elder 
 liberals, the late Professor Jevons lays down the modern 
 doctrine, in his essay on " The State in Relation to 
 Labor," in these words: " The State is justified in passing 
 any law, or even in doing any single act, which, without 
 ulterior consequences, adds to the sum total of happiness, 
 . . . The liberty of the subject is only the means towards 
 an end. Hence when it fails to produce the desired result, 
 it may be set aside and other means employed." In his 
 article on " Favorable Aspects of State Socialism," in 
 the North American Reviezu for May, 1891, the Right 
 Hon. Joseph Chamberlain excellently illustrates the ap- 
 plication of this principle : " An impartial consideration 
 of the facts . . . must lead to the conclusion that 
 there has been a very great improvement in the condi- 
 tion of the people during the period under review, and
 
 Political and Economic Movements 79 
 
 that this improvement has been largely due to the inter- 
 vention of the State and to what is called socialistic legis- 
 lation. The acts for the regulation of mines and the 
 inspection of factories and workshops, the Truck Act 
 (preventing the payment of wages in kind), the acts 
 regulating merchants' shipping, the Artisans'-Dwelling 
 Act, the Allotments Act (enabling local authorities to 
 take land and to provide allotments for laborers), the 
 Education Act, the Poor Law, and the Irish Land Acts, 
 are all of them measures which more or less limit or con- 
 trol individual action." These all are instances of na- 
 tional socialistic legislation, other famous examples of 
 which are the control not only of the post-office but of the 
 telegraph as well by the British Government. No better 
 ideas of the result of municipal socialistic legislation in 
 our period could be given than is afforded by another 
 paragraph in Mr. Chamberlain's article: " It is hardly 
 too much to say that the Birmingham of to-day is every- 
 thing that old Birmingham was not. The sewerage has 
 been completed, a system of sanitary inspection is strictly 
 carried out, the private monopolies have been acquired 
 by the corporation, their supply has been improved and 
 cheapened, and the surplus profits have been carried to 
 the credit of the rates. The town is well paved with 
 wood in the principal streets, and with stone where there 
 is the heaviest traffic. The footpaths have everywhere 
 been put in order. The courts have been paved and 
 drained. An infectious hospital has been established, to 
 which all contagious diseases are at once removed. In 
 every district of the city there have been provided baths 
 and wash-houses, parks and recreation grounds, and free 
 libraries which count their readers by hundreds of thou- 
 sands. A magnificent art gallery and museum has been 
 erected, the visitors to which number nearly a million in 
 a single year. School houses, under the management of 
 the School Board, with large playgrounds attached, have
 
 8o Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 sprung up everywhere, and now accommodate forty- 
 thousand children, the rest being provided for in the 
 voluntary schools. Technical education is offered at the 
 Midland Institute and the Mason College, and art educa- 
 tion at the School of Art and its branches. The great 
 local endowed school of King Edward's foundation has 
 been reformed and placed under representative manage- 
 ment, and by means of scholarships offers the opportunity 
 of higher education to the poorest of our citizens. In 
 fact, the ordinary artisan finds now within his reach the 
 appliances of health, the means of refinement, and the 
 opportunities of innocent recreation, which formerly were 
 at the disposal of only the more wealthy inhabitants." 
 
 In conclusion, to show the bearing of the above on our 
 subject, Arnold perceived plainly, with truly remarkable 
 insight, the tendency of events during his lifetime, and 
 ranged himself, however critically, and with whatever mis- 
 givings, on the side of the people. He saw and said that 
 the old aristocracy — the " Barbarians," as he called its 
 constituents — was doomed, and that the future was to be 
 given to democracy. In the midst of the alarm caused 
 among the upper classes by the sudden and wide extension 
 of the franchise to illiterate masses appeared his Culture 
 and Anarchy (1869), the essential idea of which was the ne- 
 cessity of popular education, the civilizing of the newly 
 enfranchised class. The Education Acts of 1870 owe 
 their existence in no small degree to Arnold's influence. 
 He was moreover in entire sympathy with the tendency 
 to extend the field of government in the ways just illus- 
 trated ; he early announced as his remedy for social ills, 
 " the action of the State." 
 
 M. G. Johnston.
 
 VIII. 
 
 RECENT HISTORY-WRITING. 
 
 OUR course of study has put us in touch with the 
 spirit of the age, an age essentially scientific in 
 its way of looking at things. The scientific atti- 
 tude of mind has been described as " the patient refusal 
 to attenuate or discard a fact because it will not fit into 
 a system ; the determined hope that whatever things are 
 true have further truth to teach if only they are held fast 
 and fairly dealt with." Within the last generation or 
 two this critical and inquisitive spirit and an accompany- 
 ing desire to turn back to first principles and inquire into 
 the actual truth of every period has led not only to the 
 working over of vast tracts of history, for example, of 
 classical history, but also to the production of new works 
 dealing not so much with the doings of individuals as 
 with manners and customs, the growth of institutions, 
 the influence of race and period upon the individual, the 
 development of law, language, literature, art, industry, 
 commerce, and kindred subjects. The application of the 
 scientific method to historical and cognate branches has 
 resulted in modifying the study of history and in broad- 
 ening its scope in an extraordinary manner. 
 
 The influence of the spirit of the age upon historical 
 study and composition has been manifested especially by 
 the increasing use of all sorts of contemporary' records, 
 monuments, inscriptions, documents, charters, and public 
 and private letters and reports. The necessity of a resort 
 
 ' 8i
 
 82 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 to such primary sources of information arises from the in- 
 adequacy, uncertainty, and contradictoriness of the early 
 authorities, annals, etc., of almost all periods of which 
 any record remains. The value of such testimony is 
 owing to the fact that it is unconscious and undesigned ; 
 the witness it bears is unpremeditated, and may there- 
 fore generally be accepted as true. Such documentary 
 evidence seldom deceives and almost never lies. This is 
 the rule; Freeman furnishes an exception: " It certainly 
 was going a long way when the burgesses of Barnstaple 
 in the time of Edward the Third brought forward a char- 
 ter of ^Ethelstan, which not only gave them the right of 
 sending the burgesses to Parliament but further relieved 
 them from divers services and payments on condition of 
 their sending those burgesses. The power of shameless 
 fiction could hardly go further." Here is an example of 
 unblushing forgery, yet the principle of reconstructing 
 certain periods of history from the statute-books and sim- 
 ilar records is not open to question, and in practice is 
 sufficiently guarded against deception by well-known rules 
 of criticism. 
 
 Again : the scientific scholarship of the age has greatly 
 changed the character of history by its critical examina- 
 tion of myths, fables, legends, anecdotes, and every im- 
 probable or extraordinary account. Many fond illusions 
 have been ruthlessly dispelled, many beautiful legends 
 have been shown to be poetical, and for the most part 
 valueless for the purposes of history. Scientific theories 
 have explained our myths and eliminated from our his- 
 tories quantities of legendary and apocryphal matter and 
 all that savors of the supernatural. The studies of com- 
 parative religion, comparative philology, and folk-lore 
 have contributed largely to this result. 
 
 So far we have spoken of the critical, analytic, and 
 scientific method ; we must next touch briefly on the 
 growth of a synthetic, constructive temper, that calls im-
 
 Recent History-Writing 83 
 
 agination and intuition into play in the attempt to form 
 true pictures of past ages. Conspicuous success has been 
 won in this field in the reconstruction of popular life, as 
 distinguished from public transactions. This necessitates 
 minute acquaintance with the daily and private pur. 
 suits, interest, and amusements of past times. History 
 no longer consists merely of accounts of campaigns, 
 treaties, and genealogies of kings, or even of great 
 national events. Our gaze is now turned upon the life 
 of the people — their social, economic, political, intellect- 
 ual, and moral development. Public events are studied 
 because of the light they throw upon popular progress 
 or conditions. Thus the point of view has been com- 
 pletely changed. 
 
 This line of thought culminates in an effort to discover 
 the philosophy of history, to go below the surface of 
 events and discover the underlying principles and laws 
 that control them and give them coherence. Owing to 
 our modern scientific methods of investigation and ex- 
 pression, the term " philosophy " has in many cases 
 properly given place to that of " science." Thus we 
 have converted natural " philosophy," mental, moral, 
 and political "philosophy," into "sciences"; the 
 change of term registering a change in the treatment of 
 these subjects — that is, the application of the inductive 
 method. The same is true of history. Men's views of 
 it and methods of studying it have changed, under the 
 influence of natural science. There is beyond question 
 a science of history. Must we then give up the idea 
 that there is a philosophy of history ? By no means; 
 for beside observation of the sequence of events there is 
 a more important matter — its interpretation. There are 
 problems that historical science can never solve ; " prob- 
 lems " (to quote a reviewer in the Nation^ " which in 
 the very nature of the case, no amount of scientific prog- 
 ress can ever subject to the methods of strict inductive
 
 84 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 investigation. There will be seen to be in the end a dis- 
 tinction between philosophy and science which is one of 
 kind and not one of degree merely; and . . . the 
 philosophy of history, as distinguished from the science 
 of history, will be a most important and fruitful subject 
 of inquiry. As much work has been done in the philos- 
 ophy of this sort by the great seers of the past as in the 
 other by the great analyzers, though it is as yet apparently 
 less productive and less completely systematized into a 
 single body of truth. The real work of Hegel is no more 
 of the same sort as John Stuart Mill's — though neces- 
 sarily traversing some of the same ground — than the 
 work of Beethoven is of the same kind as a scientific 
 treatise on harmony. The final philosophy of history will 
 no doubt be produced by a mind of this order." We 
 may add that rare is the mind which combines " a com- 
 prehensive and firm grasp of a complicated system of 
 ideas — clear, intellectual insight " — with " that peculiar 
 sympathetic and imaginative insight which characterizes 
 the great constructive thinker." Rare, indeed, but all 
 the more to be desired and cultivated ! 
 
 There is yet another point of contrast between past 
 and present conceptions of history that should be noted. 
 The modern demand is for absolute freedom from bias, 
 partiality, and partisanship in the writing of history. 
 We need only to cite such brilliant names as those of 
 Hume and Macaulay in evidence of the fact that history 
 has only too often been converted into advocacy. Their 
 writings have been called " huge political pamphlets," 
 and as such fail to satisfy the mind of our generation. 
 Our demand is for truth at any cost, truth even at the 
 expense of eloquence, sentiment, brilliancy — at the ex- 
 pense, if need be, of interest and vividness. The histo- 
 rian must be a transparent witness of the truth, not the 
 special pleader of any cause. The masterpieces of 
 Macaulay and Hume retain a hold by reason of their
 
 Recent History-Writing 85 
 
 literary merit ; their conclusions can no longer be ac- 
 cepted without qualification. 
 
 Having now described the principles that guide modern 
 historical investigation, we may illustrate their applica- 
 tion by examining briefly the work of certain famous 
 historians of recent years, noting how they stand these 
 tests, wherein they have achieved greatest success, and 
 what special contribution each has made to the science 
 or philosophy of history. 
 
 James Anthony Froude was born at Darlington, Eng- 
 land, in 181 8. His education began at Westminster 
 School, and thence he passed to Oriel College, Oxford, 
 then the hotbed of the Tractarian Movement, in which his 
 brother was a leader. He was graduated with honor, was 
 made a Fellow of Exeter College, and in 1845 was ordered 
 deacon. Very soon, however, it became evident that he 
 was out of sympathy with his ecclesiastical and scholastic 
 superiors, and his Shadows of the Clouds and Nemesis of 
 Faith were condemned by the authorities of the Univer- 
 sity. For twenty years he was connected with various 
 periodicals, first as contributor to, later as editor of, 
 Erasers Magazine. In 1869 he was installed Rector of 
 the University of St. Andrew's. For many years he en- 
 joyed an intimate association with Carlyle in London, 
 and was chosen to record and publish the story of his 
 life. On the sudden death of Professor Edward Augus- 
 tus Freeman in 1892, Mr. Froude succeeded him as 
 Regius Professor of Modern History in the University 
 of Oxford. It would be tedious to enumerate all his 
 works ; beside Short Studies on Great Subjects and CcBsar, 
 A Sketch, he published numerous essays and historical 
 studies. He attained an unenviable distinction by his 
 Remi?tiscences of Thomas Carlyle, above mentioned. The 
 task was undertaken unwillingly, and it was a most un- 
 fortunate production. Tyndall remarked that " he had 
 damaged Carlyle and damned himself." The reading
 
 86 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 world experienced a shock at this practical exposure, and 
 Froude himself suffered many anxieties and misgivings on 
 that account during the remainder of his life.* His great 
 and permanent work, of course, is TJie History of England 
 from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada, in 
 twelve volumes that date from 1856 to 1870. As Free- 
 man is the historian of early English history and Gardi- 
 ner of the Commonwealth, so Froude is the historian of 
 the Tudor dynasty, and here he has been of the great- 
 est service. It is a noteworthy fact that Henry VHI., 
 in spite of all his faults and grossness, and in the face 
 of general disparagement, has always been held in es- 
 teem by the masses in England. Froude has succeeded 
 in analyzing this sentiment or instinct, which is at bot- 
 tom sound, and has drawn a vivid picture of the 
 character of Henry, clearing it of some of the grosser 
 charges and revealing the close connection between the 
 King's State policy and private relations. This instance 
 may serve well to illustrate Froude's attitude. Henry 
 VHI. and the Reformation in general had been much 
 disparaged by the new school of High Churchmen : 
 Froude reacted against the High Church movement, and 
 with great vigor and bitter animus entered into a defence 
 of Protestant principles and Protestant heroes. His in- 
 tense feeling carried everything before it, and had a 
 marked influence in producing a style that is passionate, 
 vivid, rhetorical, sometimes rising to flights of genuine 
 eloquence, and even to sublimity. He delighted to draw 
 strong contrasts, to dwell at length upon his heroes, and 
 to present life-like pictures of their persons and characters. 
 Thus he developed a strong, dramatic, picturesque style. 
 
 * Concerning this point, of course, there may be and are more opinions 
 than one. Our view has just been inculcated : " Truth, even at the ex- 
 pense of sentiment." If facts are damaging, so much the worse for the man 
 they damage, and (to paraphrase a famous exclamation of Mill's), if a man 
 is to be damned for telling the truth, to hell he should be willing to go. — 
 Ed.
 
 Recent History- Writing 87 
 
 These are his virtues. His works are marred by a par- 
 tisan spirit that in the end injures his cause, and makes 
 one cautious about accepting his conclusions. In the 
 novel views taken of many of the characters of his period 
 he betrays a mood too emotional and romantic. He is 
 too often the advocate, the special pleader; seldom the 
 calm, impartial, and unprejudiced critic. Another serious 
 charge has been brought against him — that of inaccuracy; 
 an unpardonable fault in the eyes of his contemporaries. 
 One word, the word " reactionary," will characterize 
 Froude, in contrast to the other historians of his genera- 
 tion. He reacted against the trend of thought in re- 
 ligion, scholarship, and philosophy. As a reactionist 
 (with something of the reactionist's bitterness of spirit) 
 he belonged to another generation, and to another 
 school — not to the school of Freeman, Stubbs, Creigh- 
 ton, Gardiner, and Green. His books are valuable and 
 readable, and they will continue to be read, but his con- 
 clusions will be modified. 
 
 Turning to Freeman, we are at once struck by the fact 
 that his training was not unlike Froude's. Born at Har- 
 borne, in Staffordshire, in 1823, he was chosen a Scholar 
 of Trinity College, Oxford, in 1841 ; a Fellow in 1845. 
 Those were years of great agitation in Oxford. Free- 
 man, like Froude, who was there at the same time, was 
 deeply influenced by the Tractarian Movement, but in 
 his case the influence was positive. It is noteworthy, in 
 view of the revival of aesthetics consequent upon the re- 
 ligious revival of those days, that the first four volumes 
 published by Freeman were all on architectural subjects. 
 Throughout his life, he remained deeply interested in 
 architecture, especially in the revival of the Gothic type, 
 and was always archaeologist first, historian after. His 
 mode of thought savored of the lecture-room and the 
 University. He was pre-eminently a close, indefatigable, 
 accurate scholar, not a man of the world. More or less
 
 88 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 intimately associated with the University all his life, he 
 became Regius Professor of Modern History and Fellow 
 of Oriel College in 1884. 
 
 The especial field to which his energies were directed 
 was the influence of the Normans upon the civilization 
 of the world. His History of the Norman Conqiiest in 
 England, in four volumes, was completed in 1872. The 
 great part played by that northern race — " of which he 
 seemed an example and champion," — in the drama of 
 civilization, led to the study of the Norman conquest of 
 Sicily, and that in turn determined his choice of the 
 whole course of Sicilian history as his great life-work. 
 With genuine philosophical insight he perceived that 
 Sicily was always the pivot of the struggle between 
 Eastern and Western civilization. His determination to 
 write a complete history of the island from the very be- 
 ginning may be deemed a misfortune, " for had he but 
 given the years which he devoted to the Greek period to 
 that in which he was so easily first, the Norman, we 
 might have been spared the melancholy accident of his 
 death, and we should certainly have what we must now 
 wait long for, if ever we get it as he would have given it 
 to us, an appreciative history of the Norman dynasty of 
 the Two Sicilies." Just as the third volume of The 
 History of Sicily from the Earliest Times — describing the 
 Athenian and Carthaginian invasions — issued from the 
 press in 1892, Professor Freeman was attacked by small- 
 pox in Alicante, Spain, and died in the seventieth year 
 of his age. If he had lived to complete the series, this 
 history would have been of intolerable bulk. As far as 
 it goes, it is marked by excessive attention to details, and 
 embodies all the results of most minute and careful ar- 
 chaeological research. Freeman had, however, breadth of 
 view, and remarkable power of grasping the fundamental 
 facts of a period. He has left us a General Sketch of 
 European History, that for condensation and as a synop-
 
 Recent History-Writing 89 
 
 tic view of the vast subject as a whole can hardly be 
 matched. In it is exemplified his great idea of the Unity 
 of history. All history is a unit, with Rome as its centre. 
 Among all the nations, "it is the Romans," he says, 
 " who form the centre of the story. . . . Through 
 the whole of our sketch we must be ever thinking of 
 Rome, ever looking to Rome, sometimes looking forward 
 to it, sometimes looking back to it, but always having 
 Rome in our mind as the centre of the whole story." 
 
 This noble conception of the unity of history results in 
 thoroughness and breadth. With the wider outlook 
 comes a fairer and more catholic temper which does 
 justice to small states and obscure periods, and prepares 
 the way for a philosophy of history. These good quali- 
 ties, however, have corresponding defects, namely, dis- 
 proportion and pedantry. Freeman is at times guilty of 
 Matthew Arnold's charge of pedantry,* notably in his 
 crotchet of a " reformed " spelling of proper names. He 
 accepted the charge and counselled his followers ** not 
 to be discouraged if your striving after truth is rewarded 
 with the name of pedant." As Froude made use of 
 much new material, introducing the economic conditions 
 of the period he treated, so Freeman greatly widened the 
 scope of historical evidence by a careful study of archi- 
 tecture and archaeology. Finally, as to style — the ulti- 
 mate test of the vitality of all historical works : Freeman's 
 style is precise, documentary, analytic, and dry. It lacks 
 richness, depth, and imagination. It suffers from the 
 very excellence of his scholarship, his conscientiousness 
 and accuracy. Details and digressions interrupt its flow 
 and sometimes obscure the main current of his thought. 
 Like Froude, too, he was controversial, and more pettily 
 disputatious than he. Here, too, it may be that his in- 
 
 * " Freeman is an ardent, learned, and honest man, but he is a ferocious 
 pedant, and Stubbs, though not ferocious, is not without his dash of pedan- 
 try " {Letters, vol. ii., p. 173).
 
 90 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 stinct for thoroughness led him astray: he must fain 
 prove his points as he goes, lest he be accused of dog- 
 matizing. On the whole it seems probable that excel- 
 lence of style will outweigh patient fidelity, and that 
 Froude's writings will take a higher position in literature 
 than Freeman's. 
 
 The brightest example of the principles and methods 
 of modern historical study and composition is afforded 
 by the life-work of John Richard Green. How The 
 Short History of the English People came to be written 
 may be read in the introduction to that volume — and no 
 story could be more full of pathetic interest. Green was 
 born at Oxford, in December, 1837, and at the age of 
 eight was sent to Magdalen Grammar School. While 
 yet a child, the historical monuments and records with 
 which every street or court of Oxford is crammed seem 
 to have made a deep impression on his sensitive imagina- 
 tion. His interest in " man and man's history " increased 
 with his increasing years until it became the ruling pas- 
 sion and purpose of his life. He received a scholarship 
 in Jesus College at the age of eighteen years, but all 
 through his undergraduate days his thoughts ran more 
 upon historical studies than on passes and honors. His 
 mind was independent, and he developed a thoroughly 
 original method of historical composition. He deter- 
 mined to write the history of the national growth and 
 development of his country ; with this purpose in view 
 he read enormously, but books could not give him the 
 information he desired. In fact, no history had ever 
 been written with just his end in view, and the Univer- 
 sity could not supply him with the necessary materials 
 for his work. So he left its cloisters and went out into 
 the world to learn directly from the school of experience. 
 He took orders in i860, and for the rest of his short life 
 his days were devoted to historical research in the British 
 Museum and the Lambeth Library, and to parochial
 
 Recent History-Writing 91 
 
 work in Stepney, one of the poorest parishes in East 
 London. He read much, but his widow has told us that 
 " books were not his only source of knowledge. To the 
 last he looked on his London life as having given him 
 his best lessons in history. It was with his church- 
 wardens, his schoolmasters, in vestry meetings, in police- 
 courts, at boards of guardians, in service in chapel or 
 church, in the daily life of the dock laborer, the trades- 
 man, the costermonger, in the summer visitation of 
 cholera, in the winter misery that followed economic 
 changes, that he learnt what the life of the people meant 
 as perhaps no historian had ever learnt it before. Con- 
 stantly struck down as he was by illness, even the days 
 of sickness were turned to use. Every drive, every rail- 
 way journey, every town he passed through in brief 
 excursions for health's sake added something to his 
 knowledge." This contact with men in East London — 
 where he did a pioneer's work in the slums — was an ad- 
 mirable corrective to the academic temper of the Univer- 
 sity. He was unswerving in " his belief that it was the 
 great impulses of national feeling, and not the policy of 
 statesmen, that formed the groundwork and basis of the 
 history of nations, and [in] his certainty that political 
 history could only be made intelligible and just by basing 
 it on social history in its largest sense." His method was 
 sound and original. Architecture, as we have seen, was 
 almost his first incentive to the study of history, and 
 Freeman even did not use the witness of architecture 
 with more telling force. Economic conditions, of which 
 Froude had made some use, he far more thoroughly 
 understood. Literature as the interpreter of an age and 
 science as an index of its progress were both brought 
 under the scrutiny of those eyes which neglected no de- 
 tail that could throw light on the main subject. He was 
 both accurate and imaginative, analytic and synthetic, 
 and understood in their best sense both the science and
 
 92 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 the philosophy of history. He understood the signifi- 
 cance of facts. His style is animated, sympathetic, free 
 from prejudice or controversy, dramatic and picturesque. 
 In conclusion, let us link the subjects of this hasty 
 sketch closely in our memories. They are : James An- 
 thony Froude, 1818-1894; Edward Augustus Freeman, 
 1823-1892 ; John Richard Green, 1837-1883. Their 
 dates are memorable, and remind us of a similar relation 
 in the case of the poets, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, who 
 passed from the stage about the time when two of our 
 historians were born. As the circle of Keats's life was in- 
 cluded within that of Shelley's, and that in turn within 
 the greater circle of the life of Byron, so the span of 
 Green's life was overlapped at either end by a few years 
 of Freeman's, and he again was outlived and succeeded 
 by his senior rival Froude. Keats lies at the heart and 
 centre of the great poetical movement of his generation. 
 The president of our club has familiarized us with the 
 simile of the Indian box included within a series of many 
 other boxes and containing the jewel of them all ; and 
 again he has likened that poetical efflorescence to the ex- 
 pansion of a rose, with its shortest and most perfect life 
 at its very heart. In somewhat the same relation does 
 the author of the Short History of the Etiglish People 
 stand to his contemporaries, the historian of the Norman 
 Conquest, and the brilliant portrayer of the character of 
 Henry VIII., combining in a judicious and masterly 
 manner some of their best characteristics, and adding 
 qualities of his own. 
 
 W. H. DuBoSE.
 
 IX. 
 
 ARNOLD'S CHARACTER AS REVEALED IN HIS CRITICISM. 
 
 A MERE glance over the literary world will show 
 the most casual observer that its great need is a 
 competent and healthy criticism. There is no 
 lack of criticism, or what passes for such ; every magazine 
 has pages on the latest books, every daily paper rescues a 
 column from its narrative of crimes and sensations and 
 devotes it to criticism of works which the critic has never 
 read and authors of whom he has no knowledge. But 
 over this hubbub of voices there rise the tones of no 
 master; no lion's roar silences the braying of these criti- 
 cal asses.* Yet there never was a time when the voice 
 of a master was more needed, — a pilot who should steer 
 the bark of men's literary appreciation through the flood 
 of books which threatens to inundate us, — a master who, 
 from a vast store of learning and culture and infinite ap- 
 preciation of the true and beautiful, would fathom for a 
 world busied with other pursuits, but longing for higher 
 things, the beauties of Swinburne's last sigh for the old 
 Greek world, or calculate the orbit of the new comet that 
 has flashed across the English literary heavens, Mr. 
 Francis Thompson. 
 
 Some will object: " There cannot always be a master 
 of criticism. There is no great critic to-day just as there 
 
 * It is a pity that they do not realize the fact that in their criticisms 
 CRITICS CRITICISE THEMSELVES : by silence they might avoid exposure. — 
 Ed. 
 
 93
 
 94 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 is no great poet, no great novelist." It is true, since 
 Tennyson died, we have had to Hsten to the Jubilee Odes 
 of a new poet-laureate, and since Dickens passed away 
 he has had no worthy successor save Mr. Hardy; but the 
 lull in literary criticism is not only due to the fact that 
 there is no great critic now alive, but also to the fact 
 that the methods of criticism which have obtained are no 
 longer satisfactory. Not only must a great critic arise, 
 but he must also adopt a new method. 
 
 The two methods which have been mainly followed 
 may be called the evolutionist and the interpretative 
 method.* 
 
 The first looks upon literature as a vast chain ; it fastens 
 an author to the past and the future; it shows whom he 
 influenced and who influenced him ; it reduces his work to 
 a skeleton well hung together, carefully tabulates it, and 
 puts it into its proper case. This method of criticism is 
 doomed on account of its lack of insight. Masters of 
 literature are not links of a chain, but embodiments and 
 expressions of human nature and life. Matthew Arnold, 
 however, defends the evolutionist method, and says: 
 " For the sake of establishing an author's place in liter- 
 ature and his relation to a central standard (and if this is 
 not done, how are we to get at our best in the world ?) 
 criticism may have to deal with a subject-matter so 
 familiar that fresh knowledge is out of the question, and 
 then it must be all judgment; an enunciation and de- 
 tailed application of principles." Here we see all the 
 wheels and machinery of criticism. But literature cannot 
 be characterized thus mechanically; it belongs to the 
 spiritual part of man and must be interpreted spiritually. 
 
 Here accordingly the interpretative school of criticism 
 takes its stand. It reveals the supposed hidden meaning 
 in an author's work. It tells us that the " Endymion " 
 
 * Or the objective, historical, realistic, and the subjective, personal, 
 idealistic. — Ed. 
 
 Jl
 
 Arnold's Critical Principles 95 
 
 of Keats is imagination searching for the spirit of beauty 
 — Cynthia representing the beauty of a bygone age ; im- 
 agination at last discovering the eternal unity of beauty 
 and becoming one with it forever. Such criticism is the 
 allegorical exegesis of literature, and the critic only suc- 
 ceeds in making a valuable elucidation — of himself. 
 
 Both of these methods are at fault, and no universal 
 laws can be deduced for literary criticism.''^ 
 
 In this state of critical anarchy, let us turn to the work 
 of the last great representative of criticism, Matthew 
 Arnold. It is on his work in this department that Ar- 
 nold's fame must rest. His poetry appeals only to the 
 student ; it will never influence and mould the taste of 
 even the educated public. What, then, was his charac- 
 ter in this regard ? There are two essential qualifications 
 of a critic, the moral and the intellectual — that is, disin- 
 terestedness and knowledge, honesty and information, — 
 and in Arnold, the professor of morality, the apostle of 
 culture, we expect to find these qualifications paramount. 
 His master was Sainte Beuve, whom he ranks in his 
 special field of criticism among the world's masters, with 
 Shakespeare and Dante. With Sainte Beuve and Goethe 
 as models, he put forth certain dicta which he professed 
 to follow. With the pertinacity of phrasing peculiar to 
 him he declared: " Criticism is a disinterested endeavor 
 to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought 
 in the world"; and again: "Literary criticism is an 
 effort to see the object as in itself it really is " ; and yet 
 again: " The great art of criticism is to get oneself out 
 of the way and let humanity decide." Here, indeed, we 
 have the best that has been said on the subject of criti- 
 cism, and the author of these dicta, if he live up to them, 
 must be the greatest of critics. 
 
 Arnold also put forth a famous definition of poetry, 
 
 * Rather, each principle, insufficient when taken by itself, needs correc- 
 tion through combination with the other. — Ed.
 
 96 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 I calling it a " criticism of life," — yet how little of human 
 life did his poetry touch ! He might bemoan a friend in 
 stately verse with many a calm and cultured reference, 
 but one scarcely derives thence an impression of genuine 
 sorrow; yet sorrow is the chief portion of human life. 
 Did his work justify his laws of criticism better than his 
 law of poetry ? He sincerely tried to " learn and propa- 
 gate the best that is known and thought in the world." 
 Culture was his religion, learning his God, and he served 
 it well and would fain have others fall down and worship 
 
 . it. He was an ardent missionary for this religion of his. 
 He possessed a wide knowledge and threw its search-light 
 upon any subject which he had in hand. But according 
 to the inevitable result of the evolutionary method he 
 was somewhat mechanical. ' By three passages of Homer, 
 three of Dante, two of Shakespeare, and three of Milton, 
 he would judge all poetry, ^ These were J:ouchstones, 
 and he would apply them to all verse. If it fires the soul, 
 if it stirs the faculties which these passages move, if, one 
 is tempted to say, it matches the sample, then it is great 
 poetry ; if not, standards of the second class or of the 
 third must be applied until its level be found. Thus 
 
 f'Chaucer cannot rank with Dante because his poetry does 
 not come up to the standard of a " simple but perfect 
 single line " of the great Italian. 
 
 Another element which poetry as a " criticism of life " 
 must have is " high seriousness." "It is this high 
 seriousness which Homer's criticism of life has; which 
 Dante's has; which Shakespeare's has; and it is this 
 which gives to our spirits what they can rest upon. ' ' This 
 resting-place for our spirits Gray has, and he is among 
 our classics, though the frailest of them all. Villon, the 
 voice from the French slums, has it ; Burns fails of it, 
 and he is a " beast with splendid gleams." 
 
 With these set rules Arnold engaged in the disinter- 
 ested endeavor to propagate the best that is known and
 
 Arnold's Critical Principles 97 
 
 thought in literature. And disinterested he surely was. 
 He never trimmed the sails of his criticism to the 
 breezes of popular or court favor, — never said the words 
 that would have ingratiated him with Gladstone, — never 
 took advantage of the good will of Beaconsfield. So the 
 favors which he received were forced recognitions of the 
 pre-eminent English man of letters of his day. 
 ^Arnold's second rule was to " see the object as in itself 
 it-really is. " His criticism was essentially realistic. It 
 was for a definite purpose ; it was to teach men some- 
 thing, to broaden their point of view, to redeem them 
 from Philistinism — with which title he had branded a 
 stolid, self-satisfied public. He attempted to see the 
 object as it really was, and when the clear light of his 
 intellect was turned upon it, anything false in the esti- 
 mate which men had put upon it was revealed. 
 
 Lord Macaulay had said: " The literature now extant 
 in the English language is of far greater value than all 
 the literature which three hundred years ago was extant 
 in all the languages of the world together." Upon this 
 statement, Arnold, thoroughly English as he was, turned 
 the fierce light of his European culture, and at the end 
 of one of his most brilliant essays (that on " The Literary 
 Influence of Academies," an essay in which the prose 
 writers of England pass through a crucible of criticism, — in 
 which Ruskin's style is called " Asiatic," and his intelli- 
 gence and judgment are called " notes of provinciality," 
 and some of Mr. Palgrave's criticisms, " freaks of vio- 
 lence ") he declared " all glorification by ourselves of our- 
 selves or our literature, in the strain of what I quoted from 
 Lord Macaulay, is both vulgar, and besides being vulgar, 
 retarding." 
 
 Again : Arnold saw the object as it really was when he 
 
 estimated the literature of the eighteenth century, and 
 
 the verse of Dr>'den, Addison, Pope, and Johnson. It 
 
 had been said that before them the " sweetness of Eng- 
 7 
 
 ;
 
 98 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 lish verse was never understood or practised by our 
 fathers " ; applying his touchstones, he exposed this false 
 estimate and showed that theirs was the poetry only of 
 the builders of an age of prose and reason. 
 
 In the application of his third rule he succeeded least, 
 and so fell short of being an ideal critic. 
 
 " The great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the 
 way and to let humanity decide." Certainly breadth, 
 openness of mind, and appreciation are indispensable to 
 an authoritative judgment. To judge a subject with 
 heart and mind free from all prejudices, all preposses- 
 sions, all pet aversions, is at once the hardest task and 
 the highest reach of criticism. One should never under- 
 take to judge a subject which is wholly antipathetic to 
 him. Sympathy, not antipathy, should be the first in- 
 gredient of a well-compounded critic. The poet Gray 
 disliked Johnson, and refused to meet him. Johnson, 
 in his turn, in his life of Gray, disparaged his poetry and 
 failed to do him justice. Arnold said that " Johnson 
 was not by nature fitted to do justice to Gray and his 
 poetry. He was not naturally in sympathy with Gray. 
 This by itself is a sufficient explanation of the deficiencies 
 of his criticism." Arnold himself was in thorough 
 sympathy with the Elegist, whose verse possessed in the 
 highest degree the " high seriousness " which he held 
 indispensable. To get oneself out of the way is the 
 hardest task of a critic, for the utmost that he can do is 
 to tell what an author means to him. Thus to judge by 
 oneself and yet not to be oneself the judge, to bring to 
 a subject great knowledge and infinite capabiHty of being 
 attracted or repelled, to say in what one was attracted or 
 repelled and then to step aside and let humanity decide, 
 — is the test the application of which leaves us so few 
 great critics. And it is here that Matthew Arnold fell 
 short of an ideal standard. . 
 
 Perhaps it was his nationality that was at fault. We
 
 Arnold's Critical Principles 99 
 
 should hardly expect an Englishman to " get himself 
 out of the way." A Frenchman can do so, and for this 
 reason the French are greater critics than the Enghsh. 
 For this reason Arnold was inferior as a critic to his 
 ideal Sainte Beuve. Humanity must be the final judge. 
 It has been well said that " How large a circle of human 
 experience does it describe ? " must be the test question 
 concerning the value of any man's criticism.* When all 
 has been said, when all the rules have been laid down, 
 the fact remains that criticism is largely intuitive, and a 
 critic's judgment is of value in proportion as it expresses 
 more or less of the thought and feeling of mankind. 
 
 Having thus discussed Arnold's standards and his 
 fidelity to them, let us illustrate by a few examples the 
 results that he reached. When his Essays in Criticism 
 appeared they at once attracted marked attention. Such 
 an attempt to bring together representatives of different 
 literatures, to place in juxtaposition many different sub- 
 jects and to treat them all from a common point of view, — 
 above all, the style in which they were written, hardly 
 disguising the peculiarities of the personality from which 
 it emanated, with its mechanical devices of repetition of 
 phrases and epithets, — its " damnable iteration," as 
 his severer censors styled it, — was new and startling to 
 the literary England of his day. Some of the essays 
 are indeed revelations, and those on Marcus Aurelius, 
 Joubert, Heine, with their able presentation, their fasci- 
 nating glimpses of those great personalities, their charming 
 sympathy, may well deserve to be called the high-water 
 mark of English criticism. It would be hard also to give 
 too much praise to essays like that on " The Literary In- 
 fluence of Academies," with its illuminating characteriza- 
 tion of English prose writers, or that on " Pagan and 
 Medieval Religious Sentiment," which with its breath 
 
 * And Arnold's eyes averted their ken from half, and that the more im- 
 portant half, of human experience, interest, and aspiration. — Ed.
 
 loo Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 from beautiful Greece might alone inculcate a love of 
 classic lyric. 
 
 r When we leave these essays and come to those dealing 
 wfth Englishmen and English subjects nearer the author's 
 
 : day, we strike Arnold's greatest limitation. The farther 
 off a subject was the clearer he saw it, the more lumi- 
 nously he treated it ; when he touched upon modern Eng- 
 lish literature, the personal element entered too largely 
 into his criticism. Of modern English poets he most 
 admired Wordsworth ; ' his estimate of him was that he 
 was a greater poet than any in England from Milton 
 down (through Gray, Burns, Coleridge, Scott, Moore, 
 Byron, Shelley, and Keats), and on the Continent, from 
 Lessing down through Schiller and Heine in Germany ; 
 through Lamartine, Musset, and Victor Hugo in France. 
 Wordsworth's " body of work," he considered in power, 
 interest, and the qualities which give enduring freshness, 
 superior to theirs. High praise this for the author of 
 
 , " Peter Bell" and the " Ecclesiastical Sonnets,"— but 
 then Wordsworth's poetry has that Arnoldian essential, 
 " high seriousness." The essays on Byron, Shelley, and 
 Keats are more judicial, and have done much to place 
 those poets on their true level. They are perhaps the best 
 critical utterances regarding them, and help to remove 
 the veils with which intense admiration or uncritical cen- 
 sure have enveloped poets who, as Goethe said of Byron, 
 " were too much in the dark about themselves." 
 
 When Arnold touched upon authors of his own day, 
 however, his judgments were not as sound.* These 
 judgments are to be found in his Letters, which contain 
 some of his most piquant criticisms. Of Heine he said : 
 " I have just finished a German book, a mixture of poems 
 and travelling journal by Heinrich Heine, the most 
 famous of the young literary set. He has a good deal of 
 
 * And the relative soundness of one's estimate of contemporaries is the 
 ultimate test of critical power. — Ed.
 
 
 Arnold's Critical Principles loi 
 
 I 
 
 power, though more trick; however, he has thoroughly 
 disgusted me. The Byronism of a German, of a man 
 trying to be gloomy, cynical, impassioned . . . with 
 their total want of experience of the kind that Lord 
 Byron, an EngHsh peer, with access everywhere, pos- 
 sessed, is the most ridiculous thing in the world." Yet 
 his ex cathedra utterances on this same Heine were very 
 different, and formed his most brilliant essay. His fellow- 
 critic, William Rossetti, he called " an ingenious youth 
 who used to write articles in a defunct review." Of 
 Bulwer he wrote: '' My Novel I have just finished. I 
 have read it with great pleasure, though Bulwer's nature 
 is by no means a perfect one either, which makes itself 
 felt in his book; but his gush, his better humor, his 
 abundant materials, and his mellowed constructive skill, — 
 all these are great things." * With prophetic instinct he 
 said of the present Archbishop of Canterbury, then Head 
 Master of Rugby, " Dr. Temple is the one man who 
 may do something of the same work my father did." 
 
 The conceit with which Arnold has been charged shows 
 plainly in some of his criticisms. Comparing himself to 
 Renan he said : " Renan tends to inculcate morality upon 
 the French nation as what they most want, while I tend 
 to inculcate intelligence upon the English nation as what 
 they most want." And this high opinion of himself al- 
 ways kept him from doing justice to his great contempo- 
 rary, the late poet-laureate. " The fault I find with 
 Tennyson in his Idylls of the King is that the peculiar 
 charm and aroma of the Middle Age he does not give in 
 them. There is something magical about it, and I will 
 do something with it before I have done. The real truth 
 is that Tennyson, with all his temperament and artistic 
 skill, is deficient in intellectual power. . . . Is it 
 possible for one who has himself published verses to print 
 
 * He wrote of him later as " a strange mixture of what is really romantic 
 and interesting with what is tawdry and gimcracky." — Ed.
 
 I02 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 a criticism on Tennyson in which perfect freedom shall 
 be used ? . . . I do not think Tennyson a great and 
 powerful spirit in any line ... as Goethe was in 
 the line of modern thought, Wordsworth in that of con- 
 templation, Byron even in that of passion; and unless a 
 poet ... is that, my interest in him is only slight, 
 and my conviction that he will not finally stand high is 
 firm." 
 
 He showed his greatest weakness as a critic in his judg- 
 ment of Mrs. Browning, saying: " I regard her as hope- 
 lessly confirmed in her aberration from health, nature, 
 beauty, and truth." Here can be said of him what he 
 said in regard to Johnson's criticism of Gray; Arnold 
 was not by nature fitted to do justice to Mrs. Browning, 
 for he was not naturally in sympathy with her.* It is 
 limitations Hke this which prove that he fell short of a 
 perfectly satisfactory criticism. 
 
 In conclusion, let us look for a moment at his judgment 
 of his own poems. " My poems," he said, " represent 
 the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a 
 century, and thus they will probably have their day as 
 people become conscious to themselves of what that 
 movement of mind is, and interested in the hterary pro- 
 ductions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that 
 I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson and less in- 
 tellectual vigor and abundance than Browning; yet be- 
 cause I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than 
 
 * The opinion of a spiritualist held by an agnostic has the nature and 
 value of that held of a fowl of the air by a fish in the sea : it is simply out 
 of range. Arnold had disqualified himself for judging in the case : corre- 
 lating this with other opinions of his elder contemporaries — for example, 
 Carlyle and Ruskin, — his most serious shortcoming as a critic is revealed as 
 the outcome of reactionary prejudice against the ideas of the generation in 
 which he grew up. The aberration of his whole critical school is hereby 
 made manifest : it is impotent in the interpretation of the spiritual and 
 ideal, the mystical and supernatural in literature. Truly, it is a costly 
 error to forget that " in their criticisms critics criticise themselves." — Ed.
 
 Arnold's Critical Principles 103 
 
 either of them, and have more regularly applied that 
 
 fusion to the main line of modern development, I am 
 
 likely enough to have my turn as they have had theirs." 
 
 Again: " I dined with the Bishop of Derry. . . . 
 
 I could not refuse a man who told me that my poems 
 
 were the centre of his mental life, and that he had read 
 
 many of them hundreds of times." Arnold had here 
 
 that sympathy with his subject which he lacked in the 
 
 case of Mrs. Browning. 
 
 In spite of all the limitations that have been pointed 
 
 out, in spite of the personal element which he could not 
 
 eliminate from some of his criticisms, — the prejudices 
 
 sometimes, the favoritism often, — Matthew Arnold is the 
 
 master spirit in the literature of the years that have just 
 
 passed. 
 
 H. J. MiKELL.
 
 LORD LEIGHTON AND THE LATE COURSE OF ENGLISH 
 
 ART. 
 
 AROUND Lord Leighton, a man eminently fitted by- 
 birth, culture, and genius for the high position he 
 was called to fill, it is proposed to group a few 
 representatives of modern English art, especially those 
 whose names were mentioned as worthy to succeed his 
 in the Presidency of the Royal Academy. This Academy, 
 of which we hear so much, was founded in the year 1768 
 by his Majesty George III. It numbered thirty mem- 
 bers, two of whom were women — Angelica Kaufmann 
 and Mary Moser. Sir Joshua Reynolds was its first 
 President.* Its present home is known as Burlington 
 House ; there the fate of artistic aspirants is decided. Its 
 Presidency is one of the honors of the realm of Great 
 Britain. Of the qualifications of its incumbent, Mr. 
 Frederick Wedmore says: " Most certainly he is not 
 bound to be a great painter in a great style. He is not 
 bound to be an artist whose claim to the Ideal consists, 
 in chief, in a plentiful lack of appreciation of the Real. 
 It is enough if he paints something greatly — be it Olym- 
 
 * Reynolds was succeeded by an American, Benjamin West, he, in 1820, 
 by the elegant portrait-painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and he by another 
 portrait-painter, not so famous. Sir Martin Archer Shee, an Irishman, who was 
 succeeded, in 1850, by the learned Sir Charles Eastlake, and he by a Scotch- 
 man, the polished gentleman and portrait-painter. Sir Francis Grant, upon 
 whose death, in 1878, Leighton was elected, becoming thus the seventh 
 President of the Academy. — Ed. 
 
 104
 
 Leighton and English Art 105 
 
 pian gods or a dish of fruit. And if it may fairly be 
 asked of him that he should represent in some measure 
 the taste of his time, . . . may there not be the yet 
 more important demand, ' Is the man a great gentleman ? ' 
 [how un-American !] ' an artist, not perhaps of extraordi- 
 nary achievement, but of comprehensive view ? . . . 
 a leader of men, just and conciliatory, with manner 
 bland and yet decisive ? ' — complicated by such a con- 
 sideration as this : ' In the world of society will the man 
 do ? ' — for he has to do there as well as in the world of the 
 studio." 
 
 His advanced age alone stood in the way of the election 
 of Mr. George Frederick Watts to the Presidency in 1896. 
 In him we find the philosophic and mystical painter. He 
 is both poet and moralist, and something of the prophet, 
 penetrated by ideal and spiritual beauty, — but on the 
 whole a painter of righteousness rather than of religion. 
 His subjects are steeped in mystery ; many of his can- 
 vases bear such titles as Death the Consoler, Love ajid 
 Death, etc. They are marked by purity and wide range 
 of color. He may be loosely affiliated to the Pre- 
 Raphaelites. Far more closely related to them stands 
 Sir Edward Burne-Jones; it is he who makes the work of 
 " the Brotherhood " a live thing to-day. Rossetti was 
 one of his earliest friends and his first master. He was 
 also on friendly terms with the late William Morris and 
 with Mr. Swinburne — one of whose early and very char- 
 acteristic poems — " Laus Veneris" — gave the title to 
 one of his pictures. He has had a prosperous career, has 
 been honored with a degree, a decoration, and a baron- 
 etcy, and is quite popular and successful enough to be 
 independent of the Academy and the criticisms" mor- 
 bid " and " archaic " with which some still greet an 
 exhibition of his pictures. 
 
 It is needless to say more about Pre-Raphaelitism, for 
 it was one of our subjects in a previous term of study,
 
 io6 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 and the famous brotherhood is a thing of the past ; but 
 it seemed well to remind the Club, by an example or 
 two, that its spirit has not passed away. Its aims were 
 high and its influence has been lasting; in fact, it must 
 be kept continually in mind as the background of our 
 present subject; there is hardly an artist to be mentioned 
 who has not been affected by it either positively or 
 negatively. 
 
 Frederick Leighton was born at Scarborough in the 
 year 1830. His father was a physician, and both his 
 parents were people of cultivated tastes. When he was 
 about ten years of age, the delicacy of his mother's health 
 caused the family to move to Rome, and there he was 
 taught drawing by Signor Meli. Later, his parents went 
 to Dresden and Berlin, where he was admitted to the 
 Academy. In 1843, ^^ the age of thirteen, he was sent 
 to school at Frankfort, and the following winter the 
 family visited Florence, where his future career was de- 
 cided upon. His father was willing that he should de- 
 vote himself to art if it appeared that he would attain 
 distinction in that profession ; for a decision of the 
 weighty question he took the lad and some of his sketches 
 to the American sculptor, Mr. Hiram Powers, then resi- 
 dent in Rome. To Dr. Leighton's question, " Shall I 
 try to make an artist of him ? ' ' Mr. Powers replied : 
 " Sir, you have no choice in the matter; nature has de- 
 cided for you." 
 
 Now fairly launched, young Leighton studied anatomy 
 for a short time in Florence, but soon returned to Frank- 
 fort and visited Brussels and Paris, copying in the gal- 
 leries, but under no direct instruction until his return to 
 Frankfort, when he settled down to serious work under 
 Edward Steinle. This artist belonged to the school of 
 Overbeck, or the Christian or Gothic movement in 
 German art, which anticipated and in some degree 
 corresponded to the Romantic movement in France, as
 
 Leighton and English Art 107 
 
 represented by Ary Scheffer, and the Pre-RaphaeHte in 
 England. 
 
 This hasty summary of Leighton's career down to his 
 twentieth year brings out the fact of his extraordinary 
 culture. At an age when few have begun their travels, 
 he was acquainted with many lands and many tongues, 
 and had met many distinguished men. He himself was 
 distinguished both in appearance and manner. 
 
 Although he spent many years in Germany, surrounded 
 by native art, and his only direct teaching w^as received 
 from German artists, " he could never be made to see 
 beauty through German eyes." His soul was imbued 
 with the classic beauty of the ancient Greeks, — a beauty 
 instinct with grace, elegance, dignity, and nobility, — and 
 these qualities passed into his own art. It cannot be 
 said that he was ever greatly influenced by any artist of 
 his own land, or indeed any one artist. He was widely 
 read on all subjects pertaining to his profession, as his 
 admirable lectures before the students of the Royal 
 Academy testify, and responded, no doubt, to the influ- 
 ence of the Italian Renascence and foreign art of later 
 date generally, but certainly he was never swept away by 
 the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as was his successor in the 
 President's chair. It seems strange that Thackeray 
 should have foreseen the succession of Leighton and 
 Millais in that position as long ago as 1853. He had 
 met the former in Rome that year and gave " the warn- 
 ing word to his friend John Millais, ' I have met in Rome 
 a versatile young dog named Leighton, who will run you 
 hard for the Presidentship one day,' " — and so he did — 
 and outran him. 
 
 One of Leighton's earliest pictures was Giotto Found by 
 Ciniabue atnong the Sheep, and considering his youth at 
 the time (he was only seventeen), it was a work of rare 
 promise. In 1855 he sent home the painting that won 
 him name and fame in his native land, Cimabue's
 
 io8 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 Triumph. It was hung on the walls of Burlington 
 House, and became eventually the property of her 
 Majesty the Queen. To quote from one who knew the 
 artist personally and was at the exhibition: " At this 
 time the public mind was so absorbed by the works of 
 the Pre-Raphaelites that to divert their attention to a 
 picture in a new and different style was no easy part — 
 yet Leighton's procession did more than this; it created 
 a sensation of its own. Its size alone compelled atten- 
 tion ; it occupied nearly the whole side of one of the 
 rooms, and was hung on the line, — an honor to a young 
 and quite unknown artist which could not be ignored, — 
 and it was unlike anything which the British public had 
 ever seen. When it was examined, surprise gave way to 
 admiration at its stately arrangement of beautiful forms, 
 and its strange, rich beauty of color. Even Ruskin, the 
 champion of Pre-Raphaelitism, praised it, and many 
 of those who demanded a deeper moral significance, a 
 stronger subjective expression, in a work of art, and who 
 sneered at it as a* mere pageant,' and ' only decorative! ' 
 were impressed ; while others went home possessed with 
 a new and inexplicable joy." In 1864 he produced a 
 work that may be said to have definitively " announced 
 Leighton," — his masterpiece (it has even been called the 
 greatest picture of the century), in which his Greek 
 classic and Raphaelite proclivities were consummately 
 displayed, — The Daphncphoria, or nonennial Theban pro- 
 cession of the Laurel Bough. It is a nobly beautiful 
 composition, and exquisitely reveals its creator's peculiar 
 virtue — the representation of graceful human figures in 
 rhythmic motion. Mr. Holman Hunt (who alone remains 
 strictly faithful to the principles of the Pre-Raphaelite 
 brotherhood, enunciated half a century ago) has praised 
 this picture, so different in style from his own, in terms 
 the most generous and sincere. In 1866 Xki^ Syranisan 
 Bride secured our hero's associateship with the Royal
 
 Leighton and English Art 109 
 
 Academy, and the following year SL Jerome in the 
 Desert caused him to be elected a full member. The 
 height of his popularity was reached in 1871, when he 
 exhibited his Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body 
 of Alcestis. To this picture was paid the compliment of a 
 reference in the " Balaustion's Adventure" of Robert 
 Browning — a poet who was thoroughly familiar with the 
 spirit and the history of art. The Summer Moon, one of 
 our artist's most admired compositions, in which he ex- 
 hibited his remarkable power of representing utter repose 
 and languor, was sent to the Centennial Exhibition in 
 Philadelphia, and excited evident enthusiasm. He 
 painted only a few portraits, among them one of Captain 
 Burton, the celebrated traveller, and one of himself, 
 executed for the Uffizi. 
 
 In 1878 he proved the most eligible among all the 
 painters of England for the headship of the Royal 
 Academy. He was knighted the same year. He de- 
 serves to rank among the greatest in the Presidential 
 line; " not necessarily one of the greatest artists, for Sir 
 Joshua painted better; and Sir Thomas Lawrence was 
 the smarter courtier; but as the standard-bearer of the 
 arts, and as an administrator. Sir Frederick Leighton 
 has compelled the admiration of the world." He was 
 thoroughly a man of the world, a strong and wise man, 
 with a consistent and sensible policy; kindly too, and 
 ever ready to help his needy brethren of the brush. 
 " Though a conservative in art as in politics, he knew a 
 good artist when he saw him, and the sight made him 
 glad," — and such always received courteous recognition 
 from the catholic-minded President, in spite of any 
 difference in methods. 
 
 Sir Frederick painted in all some seventy pictures, not 
 counting many fine sketches in oils. He has also left us 
 several essays in sculpture — and his Hercules and the 
 Python justifies Mr. Powers's conviction that " he might
 
 no Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 be as eminent as he chose in more lines than one." 
 Furthermore, he tried his hand at mural decoration, 
 and produced the two fine frescos in the Kensington 
 Museum, TJie Arts of War and The Arts of Peace, which 
 give evidence of mastery of the medium. 
 
 This sketch, cursory as it must needs be, would yet be 
 sadly inadequate did we not say something about our 
 artist's methods and principles. He was accustomed to 
 think out his entire design before putting brush to can- 
 vas, and, having come to a decision, he never varied from 
 it in the least during the execution. He would some- 
 times even model in clay the principal figures in his com- 
 position, and over them arrange his draperies with the 
 utmost fastidiousness. His palette was usually set with 
 secondary rather than primary colors — with rare tints, 
 such as plum, saffron, amber, olive, cinnamon, pink, 
 crimson, and purple. 
 
 He held that artistic production springs from and 
 appeals to aesthetic and not ethical impulse or emotion. 
 The language of art, he used to say, is not the appro- 
 priate vehicle of moral truths; it must address the faculty 
 of aesthetic emotion. The character of an artist is un- 
 doubtedly stamped on his work, and his moral advance 
 or decline will be faithfully reflected in it. 
 
 Leighton's works exhibit " a fastidious, faultless ele- 
 gance, a profound sentiment of loveliness of color, a 
 classic purity of form, a sense of beauty . . . that 
 leans rather to the graceful than the strong. 
 Neither pathos nor passion was his forte. His pictures 
 are poems, Italian sonnets in their finish and sweetness." 
 Mr. Ruskin writes: "It is with extreme gratitude and 
 unqualified admiration that I find Sir Frederick conde- 
 scending from the majesties of Olympus to paint for us, 
 with a soft charm peculiarly his own, the witchcraft and 
 wonderfulness of childhood." 
 
 This inadequate sketch of a refined and gracious per-
 
 Leighton and English Art 1 1 1 
 
 sonality cannot be more fitly closed than with the feeling 
 words of one who knew him well, and to whom the writer 
 is indebted for many suggestions, Mr. Cosmo Monk- 
 house: " Honorable and honored Sir Frederick Leighton 
 has worked on, . , . striving still to reach some 
 higher pinnacle of art, though conscious, like his own 
 Spirit of the Summit, that when the loftiest of all is 
 reached, the heaven of his ideal is as unattainable as 
 ever. 
 
 He had only just been elevated to the peerage — the 
 highest honor of the kind ever conferred upon a man, in 
 England, purely for art's sake — when he died, toward 
 the end of January, 1896. His body lies in the crypt of 
 St. Paul's Cathedral, The dust of Benjamin West and 
 Sir Christopher Wren is at his side, and Turner's at his 
 feet. 
 
 It seems natural to follow an account of the great 
 President with some few words about his successor, 
 whose reign of only six months hardly allowed one to 
 judge of his qualities as head of the Royal Academy. 
 As an artist Millais ranked high. He was much admired 
 by his fellow-countrymen, though many thought him 
 too sweet to be great, and all deplored a decline that 
 made him at last too eager for the guineas, and indifferent 
 about giving his best to his work. " When will painters 
 learn that lesson taught by the old Greek myth of the 
 dart-bearing Atalanta, that a race may be lost by stooping 
 to pick up golden apples ? " 
 
 The Club knows already of the part John Everett Mil- 
 lais played in the Pre-Raphaelite movement — in that 
 Brotherhood whose motto was " Truth." His pictures 
 belonging to this period were : The Huguenot Lover {18^2), 
 which brought one hundred and fifty pounds sterling, — 
 and when its fortunate possessor had made thousands by 
 it, he paid Millais an additional fifty; Ophelia, The Order 
 of Release, The Proscribed Royalists, and in \%^6, Autumn
 
 112 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 Leaves: " ruddy, meditative children around a bonfire, 
 its smoke traihng across the evening sky ; its figures in 
 the sadness, not the gloom, of shadow." This picture 
 proved an inspiration to many artists ; its influence may 
 be traced in Frederick Walker's Gypsies. Soon after, 
 The Vale of Rest — an actual scene in France : nuns in a 
 convent garden digging a grave — closed the list of his 
 poetic paintings. There followed a number of popular 
 subjects that betrayed his desertion of the Pre-Raphaehte 
 ranks. About the year 1870 his range was widened by 
 a triumphant experiment in the nude and by successful 
 essays in the lower but more popular art of landscape : 
 Chill October, Flowing to the River, Flowing to the Sea, 
 The Fringe of the Moor. It is said that while making 
 studies for this latter picture, Millais was accosted by a 
 critical native of the neighborhood: " The painter was 
 making a study of reeds by the side of the river Tay, 
 when a voice came over his shoulder: ' Hey, mann! did 
 ye ever use photography ? ' ' No, never,' was the reply. 
 The voice continued; ' Ye-e-s, I suppose so,' said the 
 absorbed artist. ' And it 's a deal liker the place! ' was 
 the startling rejoinder." Millais was stung by another 
 Scotchman, whose sharp tongue spared few. After a 
 visit to his luxurious residence in London, with its 
 beautiful marbles, rich upholstery and decorations, Carlyle 
 broke out: " Has paint done all this ? " " Yes," said 
 Millais, simply. "Then," muttered the cynic philos- 
 opher, " there must be more fools in the world than I 
 thought," — a keen thrust at his pot-boiling work in por- 
 traiture. It is hard to forgive the pretty ladies and 
 fashionable society women to whom his time and art 
 were sacrificed — but we must forgive him much for the 
 sake of such fine works as The Northwest Passage and 
 The Ornithologist. The old sailor of the Passage was 
 Trelawney, Shelley's and Byron's friend; the invaHd 
 ornithologist, the engraver Barlow. Among his best
 
 Leighton and English Art 113 
 
 portraits are those of John Bright and Lord SaHsbury, 
 and a " worthy vision of the pearl- and rose-colored com- 
 plexion, silver hair, and serene eyes of Cardinal Newman. ' ' 
 
 Sir Frederick Leighton " painted always with the 
 Greek or pre-Christian feeling, aiming at the beauty 
 shown through the physiognomy of the whole figure, 
 neglecting facial expression," — which chiefly appealed 
 to Millais. To sum up: Millais was " a realist, a man 
 with a rare hold on the modern world, and an interpreter 
 of modern character, — no old-world dreams, — no drawing 
 his inspiration from the past; Millais' painting mirrors 
 the life of his own generation." 
 
 These two artists with whom we have just dealt will 
 stand together, without doubt, as the chief representatives 
 of British art in our generation. It only remains to indi- 
 cate, very briefly, the lines pursued by their (generally 
 slightly younger) contemporaries. 
 
 In 1836 were born Messrs. Edward John Poynter and 
 Laurence Alma-Tadema, and in or about 1840, Frederick 
 Walker, Albert Moore, and Mr. Briton Riviere. About 
 1870, accordingly, they began to influence the art of their 
 time. Their names bring into prominent relief the fact 
 that the dominant tendency of English art in our day 
 has been classic as contrasted with the religious and 
 romantic leanings of former time. Albert Moore might 
 be called a pendant, a grace-note, to Leighton, like 
 whom he was a devotee of Grecian beauty, charmed by 
 classic contours and draperies. He was essentially a de- 
 signer, his virtue lying in pure line, and was rather an 
 illustrator than a painter, elaborating decorative schemes 
 of color that are almost always pleasing. In Sea Shells 
 and Sea Giills the color harmonies run through a scale of 
 pale green, yellow, and white. Moore was so particular 
 about keeping his color pure that he is said to have used 
 over two hundred brushes while painting a single picture 
 — which would seem rather to indicate an impressionist's
 
 114 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 palette. Like Leighton, too, he could portray graceful, 
 indolent poise, relaxation, and rapid movement. The 
 latter feature is charmingly exemplified in his Follow my 
 Leader — in which the effect is heightened by a row of 
 young trees that lean in an opposite direction from the 
 figures. How wonderfully Sir Frederick gave us an im- 
 pression of motion without the aid of such devices! 
 
 It is Mr. Alma-Tadema who " paints blue sky, blue 
 sea, and marble benches " — and, let us add, glossy green 
 laurel — " as no other artist ever painted them." He is 
 a native of the quaint old Dutch province of Friesland, 
 and passed the first thirty-four years of his life in that 
 land, marrying one of his own countrywomen. One of 
 his daughters is an artist of merit. After the death of his 
 wife, he removed to England, where he married again. 
 He became erelong a Royal Academician, and now ranks 
 high among the painters of his adopted country. He 
 was even mentioned as a possible successor to Sir John 
 Millais in the Presidency, but his foreign birth proved a 
 disqualification. Some one has said that " Sir Frederick 
 Leighton aims at presenting ideal classic beauty, but Mr. 
 Tadema is content to infuse life and spirit into the scenes 
 and events of long ago." 
 
 Mr. Briton Riviere is an artist by lineal descent, both 
 his father and grandfather having been pupils of the 
 Royal Academy: — no anxious thought in his case as to 
 " what the boy should be " ! He was as precocious as 
 the young Millais, making clever drawings of animals* 
 heads at the age of seven, exhibiting pictures at the 
 British Institute when only eleven years old, and at Bur- 
 lington House when he had reached the mature age of 
 seventeen. We recollect that Cimabiie among the Sheep 
 was also painted at that age. Mr. Riviere was drawn for 
 a season into the eddy of Pre-Raphaelitism, but soon 
 emerged, following the line his early tastes had marked 
 out for him, and which he has made so peculiarly his
 
 Leighton and English Art 115 
 
 own that he may be called the prince of English animal- 
 painters. He is particularly fond of picturing lions 
 prowling among the ruins of a pre-classic past. Some 
 regard as his masterpiece his Daniel in the Den of Lions 
 — the prophet facing a group of seven ferocious beasts, — 
 while others award the palm to the grand Ruins of Per- 
 scpolis — an illustration of a couplet in the Riibaiyat of 
 Omar Khayyam : 
 
 " They say the lion and the lizard keep 
 The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep." 
 
 With Mr. Riviere we pass from the classic, archaeologi- 
 cal school of Leighton, Moore, and Alma-Tadema to that 
 in which Millais was master, which draws its subjects from 
 nature and modern times: to a group of animal-, land- 
 scape-, and marine-painters, and painters of historical and 
 modern genre. In this group no British artist of latter 
 days has been more significant than Frederick Walker. 
 Like Millais, he was indebted for his art career to the in- 
 telligent sympathy of his mother. In early youth he was 
 deeply, and we may say permanently, influenced by the 
 Elgin marbles ; yet his art at its inception was more or 
 less a product of the Pre-Raphaelite movement as repre- 
 sented by Millais. Thus it exhibits in an interesting way 
 the composite culture of the hour. In 1867 he visited 
 Paris. Jean Fran9ois Millet was superbly represented in 
 the Salon that year by no fewer than eight of his finest 
 canvases; and Walker's MiisJirooju Gatherers, produced 
 the year following, justifies the inference that he was 
 profoundly influenced by what he saw of the great 
 Frenchman's work. Henceforth he labored to substi- 
 tute for that sentimental subject-painting, so popular 
 with the British masses, a species of imaginative realism, 
 natural in color and national in spirit. In 1875 the world 
 of art was called to lament his untimely death, at the 
 age of thirty-five years.
 
 ii6 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 As a representative marine-painter of the time we have 
 Mr. James Clarke Hook, mention of whom could not be 
 omitted among these slight notices. He may well be 
 called " The Grand Old Man " of the brush— for he is 
 old enough to have been encouraged by Constable, who 
 died sixty years ago. At first he studied the Elgin 
 marbles, was entered as a student of the Royal Academy, 
 and succeeded in carrying off the " blue-ribbon " prize 
 of a travelHng scholarship, on the strength of which he 
 went to Italy, and for some time painted scenes sug- 
 gested by the history and literature of that fairest of 
 lands. Upon his return to England, he made the artistic 
 discovery of Clovelly, the quaint old North Devon fishing 
 village celebrated by Charles Kingsley as " the most beau- 
 tiful place in the world." The result of his visit there, in 
 1854, was to reveal his true bent, and since then he has 
 confined himself almost entirely to sea-scapes or " Hook- 
 scapes," as some one has called them, and scenes of fisher- 
 folk life; and on these his fame as a painter will rest.* 
 
 In the lines of social and domestic genre, Mr. Luke 
 Fildes demands notice as the painter of the most popular 
 pictures of the years 1874 and 1891 respectively: Appli- 
 cants for Admission to a Casual Ward and The Doctor. 
 In these he struck a tragically pathetic note, remarkable 
 because of its rarity. Judged by the work of his con- 
 temporaries, London might seem to be Athens or 
 Arcadia, and the social question to be restricted to Kam- 
 schatka. This aloofness from the burning questions of 
 the hour is certainly a weakness, and gives to English 
 art the appearance of an exotic. 
 
 Mr. Fildes' name was suggested for the Presidency of 
 the Academy, at the time of Millais' death, as was also 
 
 * Here, no doubt, should be mentioned the names of Mr. Birket Foster 
 in landscape, Mr. William Quiller Orchardson in portraiture, Mr. George 
 Henry Boughton in seventeenth-century, and Mr. Marcus Stone in dilet- 
 tante eighteenth-century, genre. — Ed.
 
 Leighton and English Art 1 1 7 
 
 Mr. Hubert Herkomer's. As in an instance above noted, 
 the foreign birth of the latter (Mr. Herkomer is a native 
 of Bavaria) led to an abandonment of the idea. It is 
 easy to divine Mr. Fildes' disqualification ; he is too 
 thoroughly a man of the people. It is a comment on the 
 widespread and growing conviction that, though modern 
 English art is alive, it is showing, unfortunately, an in- 
 spiration drawn rather from without than within. 
 
 The successful candidate for the position left vacant by 
 Leighton and Millais, was, as all the world knows, Sir 
 Edward J. Poynter. He possesses all the qualifications 
 for the President's chair enumerated by Mr. Wedmore, 
 and quoted at the beginning of this paper. It was as far 
 back as 1854 that Mr. Poynter met Leighton, then study- 
 ing in Rome, and was persuaded by him to devote his 
 attention to the human figure rather than to landscape. 
 The influence of that advice upon his after career cannot 
 be over-estimated. It has been said: " The art of both 
 these men is decorative rather than realistic. Leighton 
 worshipped Raphael and Botticelli, while Poynter bends 
 the knee to Michael Angelo." On his return to Paris, he 
 entered the studio of Gleyre (so vividly described in 
 Trilby). He made his first contribution to an Academy 
 Exhibition in 1861. He has painted, all told, some 
 eighty canvases, mostly on literary subjects. He has 
 been accused of lack of humanity — because he would not 
 treat of the domestic — that theme so precious to the 
 average British mind ; which makes the Briton so sure 
 that Millais is a great artist. Opinions are divided 
 whether Israel in Egypt or Atalanta s Race is Mr. Poyn- 
 ter's greatest production ; both display, not genius but 
 much talent — the artist of reason and culture rather than 
 of feeling; the Academician, in a word. He needs the 
 catholicity of Leighton to raise him to the unquestioned 
 
 leadership of English art. 
 
 Marie Huger.
 
 XI. 
 
 MR. MEREDITH S DIANA OF THE CROSSWA YS. 
 
 THE above has been singled out for our particular 
 study because it is considered to be its author's 
 most popular, most representative novel. 
 
 The question has been asked: " Why are Mr. Mere- 
 dith's novels distasteful to so many intelligent readers ? " 
 — and we are sorely put to it for an answer. His style, 
 though unusual, with its epigrammatic sentences and 
 odd phrases, is not displeasing. He uses words not 
 found in the dictionary (though " somnivolent " is a 
 good Latin word), and expressions that are anything but 
 commonplace. How graceful and charming his heroine 
 may have actually appeared, " darting on a trip of little 
 runs, both hands out, all her face one tender sparkle of a 
 smile," is perhaps open to question. Yet with many 
 possible defects such as these he might have told a more 
 attractive story. Perhaps the explanation may be that 
 he fails to lose himself in his characters: " George Mere- 
 dith " is written large over every page. 
 
 It is only in his descriptions of nature that we forget 
 who is describing. The clear, cold morning, the icy moun- 
 tain stream, the gloomy night, call forth his best work. 
 There seems to be no summer in Diana's year; a touch of 
 spring — the rest all autumn and winter — like her life. 
 
 A good example of Mr. Merdith's prose style and also 
 of his power of vivid description is the account of the 
 night spent at Paris : 
 
 ii8
 
 " Diana of the Crossways " 1 19 
 
 Hard by their inn, close enough for a priestly homily 
 to have been audible, stood a church campanile, wherein 
 hung a Bell, not ostensibly communicating with the 
 demons of the pit ; in daylight rather a merry comrade. 
 But at night, when the children of nerves lay stretched, 
 he threw off the mask. As soon as they had fairly 
 nestled he smote their pillows a shattering blow, loud for 
 the retold preluding quarters, incredibly clanging the 
 number ten. Then he waited for neighboring campanili 
 to box the ears of slumber's votaries in turn, whereupon 
 under pretense of excessive conscientiousness, or else 
 oblivious of his antecedent damnable misconduct, or per- 
 haps in actual league and trap-door conspiracy with the 
 surging goblin hosts beneath us, he resumed his blaring 
 strokes, a sonorous recapitulation of the number; all the 
 others likewise. It was an alarm fit to warn off Attila or 
 Alaric; and not simply the maniacal noise invaded the 
 fruitful provinces of sleep like Hun and Vandal, the 
 irrational repetition plowed the minds of these unhappy 
 somnivolents, leaving them worse than sheared by bar- 
 barians, disrupt, as by earthquake, with the unanswerable 
 question to Providence, Why ? — Why twice ? 
 
 " They were unaware of his religious obligation, fol- 
 lowing the hour of the district, to inform them of the 
 tardy hour of Rome. Every resonant quarter was antici- 
 pated up to the blow, without averting its murderous 
 abruptness; and an executioner Midnight that sounded, 
 in addition to the reiterated quarters, four and twenty 
 ringing hammer strokes with the aching pause between the 
 twelves, left them the prey of legions of torturers which 
 are summed though not described in a sleepless night. 
 
 From that period the curse was milder, but the 
 victims raged. They swam on vasty deeps, they knocked 
 at rusty gates, they shouldered all the weapons of black 
 Insomnia's armory and became her soldiery, doing her 
 will upon themselves. Of her originally sprung the in-
 
 I20 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 spired teaching of the doom of men to excruciation in 
 endlessness. She is the fountain of the infinite ocean 
 whereon the exceedingly sensitive soul is tumbled ever- 
 lastingly, with the diversion of hot pincers to appease its 
 appetite for change. 
 
 In describing his characters, Mr. Meredith goes less 
 into detail ; he does not paint, he sketches ; he does not 
 tell us the color of eyes and hair, but in a few words sets 
 a figure before us. We can see, at the brilliant ball in 
 the Irish capital, the dashing, attractive girl, the elderly 
 but vigorous and gallant general, and all the lesser lights. 
 
 Mr. Meredith is a champion of women; " not the 
 humbly knitting housewife unquestionably worshipful of 
 her lord," as one of his reviewers has it, but the woman 
 who longs to break the fetters imposed on her by social 
 conventions. His programme is truly democratic — the 
 equality of the sexes. He sets his heroine voyaging on 
 unknown seas, with the oft-repeated result — an unseen 
 rock — a crash. He gives her abundant health and spirits, 
 pride of a certain kind, plenty of Irish wit, an impulsive 
 temperament — though warm-hearted, she is incapable of 
 lasting affection — and withal a stoical disposition that 
 enables her to go without flinching through the series of 
 trials imposed on her by her hasty marriage. Her pur- 
 posed flight to Ireland or America shows daring and dis- 
 regard of consequences, but not moral courage. 
 
 In complete contrast to Diana, he depicts a woman 
 who, though weak in body and " perpetually in the ante- 
 chamber of death," possesses her soul in sunny patience, 
 and exhibits the strong and tender love of an elder for a 
 younger woman. Never a creature of impulse, she under- 
 takes fatiguing trips and suffers sleepless nights for the 
 sake of her beloved " Tony." 
 
 In Mrs. Cramborne Wathin, wife of a " potent sergeant- 
 at-law fast mounting to the bar and knighthood," we 
 have the virtuous lady, " whose appearance and princi-
 
 " Diana of the Cro-ssways" 121 
 
 pies fitted her to stand for the Puritan rich of the period, 
 emerging by the aid of an extending wealth into luxuri- 
 ous worldliness, and retaining the maxims of their fore- 
 fathers for the discipline of the poor and erring." ^ No 
 description of her appearance is afforded — but do we not 
 see her, prim and stately, and well disposed to give a 
 downward push to an already falling fellow-mortal ? 
 
 Of the servant class and its quite human ways our au- 
 thor gives a glimpse on occasion of one of Diana's visits 
 to Copsley ; her maid reports what goes on below stairs : 
 
 " They read all the vilest of the town papers, and put 
 their two and two together of what is happening in and 
 about. And not one of the footmen thinks of staying — 
 because it 's so dull, and they and the maids object — 
 did one ever hear ? — to the upper three retiring, when 
 they 're done dining, to the private room for dessert. 
 Foster carries the decanter, ma'am, and Mrs. 
 Bridges the biscuit, and Bartlett the plate of fruit, and 
 they march out in order." 
 
 Taking the principal actors in this drama and grouping 
 them, we have Diana as the central figure, attracting all 
 and by her very attractiveness bringing upon herself 
 annoyances from vulgar men. At her right, on the one 
 hand, we have Lady Dunstane, whose influence over our 
 wayward heroine is always for the best. This is made 
 evident at a supreme crisis — for when Diana decides on a 
 dangerous course of action, she goes in her trouble, not 
 to her friend, who, she knows, will persuade her against 
 her inclination, but to her old home, to pass a lonely 
 night. Lady Dunstane, then, is her good angel — as 
 Redworth might have been, had he not felt that without 
 a large income he was not justified in offering himself to 
 her. It is he who appears just in time to save her from 
 taking a fatal step, by inducing her to return to her 
 
 * A merciless exposure of the dissenting Philistine and Pharisee, — a type 
 of character that was Arnold's chief aversion. — Ed.
 
 122 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 suffering friend. With these may be classed, as one of 
 the uplifting influences, Lord Dannisburgh, who, though 
 as a man of the world he should have realized how his 
 friendship was compromising her, helps her for a time to 
 be herself. At Diana's left, on the other hand, we have 
 the contemptible Sir Lukin Dunstane, who should have 
 protected her for his invalid wife's sake, but whose con- 
 duct hurries her into marriage, for protection, with a man 
 whom she despises and with whom she cannot live. 
 Lowest in the scale of the downward influences we place 
 the Honorable Member of Parliament who, after regard- 
 ing her curiously for a time, becomes so desperately in- 
 fatuated as to disclose state secrets to her. When he 
 finds that he has been betrayed, his pride reacts, his pas- 
 sion grows cold, and he marries, leaving her to recover 
 from the shock as best she may. 
 
 Diana's is a somewhat contradictory character. It is 
 hard for us to discover the consistency between the un- 
 developed girl of eighteen years and the mature woman 
 of twenty, who faces the world in full cry against her, sup- 
 ports herself by writing successful novels, betrays her 
 lover to his political enemies, and, without pride to up- 
 hold her when he finally abandons her, yet develops a 
 determination to starve and freeze herself to death. 
 
 That closing scene, and not that only but several situa- 
 tions as well, may be original and dramatic, — but such 
 improbability can never please. In many an incident our 
 author fails, as he often fails, in natural humor, and — 
 notably in the scene just mentioned — in pathos also, 
 through too much inventiveness, too much study; one 
 feels a want of reality, of natural inevitableness. 
 
 And now, though we have finished our review, we are 
 apparently as far as ever from a satisfactory solution of 
 the question with which we started, — for if Diana had 
 married Redworth all would have gone happily, — but we 
 should have had no story. Alice Witman.
 
 
 
 *t_^ 
 
 
 
 
 XII. 
 
 MRS. HUMPHRY WARD S MARCELLA. 
 
 IN considering Marcella, we take it as a cameo, without 
 connection with its author's previous works, or its 
 sequel, Sir George Tressady. In our studies this 
 year we have dwelt much upon evolution in many lines 
 of thought ; and it would be of interest to those in 
 thorough sympathy with Mrs. Ward to trace the evolu- 
 tion of her views from the time when she wrote Robert 
 Ehmere up to the creation of such a character as Mar- 
 cella. And yet Marcella is not a creation of Mrs. Ward's. 
 She lived before, she lives now. Mrs. Ward merely saw 
 her in a vision and told us of her. Some might feel in- 
 clined to find fault with her character as formed without 
 due regard to heredity; but we feel instinctively that she 
 must have been just as she was, and begin to try to ac- 
 count for her by atavism, just as we would in the case of 
 any actual character, reasoning thus: From such a father 
 and such a mother — What ? From such a grandfather ? — 
 Yes. Then from the closed bud of her unpromising child- 
 hood, blighted by the lack of warm mother-love and care, — 
 that mother's almost unnatural reserve and fortitude 
 caused by the bitter frost of the father's crime, — could 
 she bloom out into such a woman, " formed in the 
 prodigality of nature," unsuspicious, altruistic, ardent, 
 loving, flowering into tropical bloom with no mark of the 
 deforming effects of her childhood's environment ? We 
 only know that she did so and that so we accept her. 
 
 123
 
 124 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 This evolution from a black-browed, brooding, savage 
 childhood into a tender, impressionable maidenhood is 
 not new in fiction or reaHty, — as witness George Eliot's 
 Maggie Tulliver in fiction, and in real life Amelie Rives. 
 Marcella's self-conscious posing, love of display, and wish 
 to have the power to play the Lady Bountiful were quali- 
 ties of a perfectly natural character; but underlying 
 these was the undisciplined but intense altruism of her 
 nature, — the noble wish to help to lift the burden of 
 poverty, suffering, and wrong from her brothers and 
 sisters of the submerged multitude. The great Social 
 Question, unanswered and ignored by the past, the 
 problem of the present, and, if unsolved, the fearful 
 menace of the future, — what wonder if in trying to grasp 
 such a burden, far too great for her feeble woman's 
 hands, she made failures ? Her connection with the 
 society of the Venturists in London, at the formative 
 period of her career, giving her great but dangerous pur- 
 poses to dwell upon, was the determining influence of her 
 life. Its accompanying weakness — her love of display — 
 was only the girlish element in her character. With what 
 consummate power has her biographer illustrated the im- 
 possibility of a woman's ever being able to grasp the idea 
 of abstract justice, — by the scene of Marcella's advocacy 
 of Jim Hurd, who killed the gamekeeper! With all of 
 woman's added powers at this end of the century, few 
 of us can picture her as wearing the judicial ermine. 
 
 Americans can appreciate far better than average Eng- 
 lishmen Marcella's ideas on the subject of the game laws 
 and other kindred English abominations, and, much as 
 the statement might shock Mrs. Ward, it is a fact that in 
 many aspects of her character Marcella is an American 
 of Americans. 
 
 Mrs. Ward seems to prefer to draw her heroes from 
 among middle-aged, mature men of repressed natures, 
 who have outlived their early enthusiasms. In spite of
 
 "Marcella" 125 
 
 her evident admiration of Aldous Raeburn, we scarcely 
 wonder that her heroine felt no overpowering passion for 
 him, either first or last, and that calm approval of his 
 goodness was the prevailing sentiment when she finally 
 accepted him. The reader cannot help being disap- 
 pointed at this dtfuoihnent. When we read fiction we feel 
 defrauded if we do not find some transfiguration of 
 nature by the divine passion of youthful love — but for 
 this Mrs. Ward, no doubt, considers herself too much of 
 a realist ; certainly in Marcella she attempts nothing of 
 the kind. 
 
 In the picture of Marcella's life in London we see 
 something unusual — a pure socialist undergoing the 
 humiliations and labors of a nursing sister. We are 
 familiar with pictures of socialist women working as 
 organizers in the cause they have espoused, risking their 
 lives, killing the woman's pity in their hearts, giving 
 their very souls to plan and carry out the terrorist pro- 
 gramme of a Nihilist junta; and are also familiar with the 
 Sister of Charity who does Marcella's work, — only in her 
 case the motive power is the love of the cross she clasps. 
 No cross is in Marcella's hand, no faith is in her heart, 
 not even that of the fair Antigone ; and we do not won- 
 der that the superstructure without foundation soon gives 
 way, — that the inverted pyramid of trivial yet heavy 
 duties poised upon the unstable point of vague human 
 pity soon topples, — and Marcella finds her occupation 
 gone. 
 
 Some critics have found her mother incomprehensible, 
 — but the wreck of her married life by her husband's 
 crime and its effect upon such a nature as hers, producing 
 an entirely abnormal character, is one of the master- 
 strokes of Mrs. Ward's genius. She is engraved with 
 microscopic fidelity, not painted with the broad touch and 
 free brush used in delineating Marcella. Mrs. Boyce's 
 self-protective detachment from surrounding interests.
 
 126 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 her cool stoicism, and withal her love for her dog, are 
 dehcate touches of reaHsm. Every fine stroke tells, 
 especially the subtle tie woven by mutual repression of 
 nature between her and the kindred character of Aldous 
 Raeburn. Her want of maternal affection is understood 
 upon closer study. When the blow fell, after the first 
 horror of her husband's crime and infidelity, a feeling of 
 relief must have been uppermost in her, that there was 
 no son to inherit the father's shame. That there was a 
 daughter was a misfortune ; but, like all else in the 
 misery of her lot, it was to be borne with sternest forti- 
 tude : no relaxing of that grim endurance, or reason 
 would give way. When Marcella became a woman, her 
 mother and she had grown so far apart, lived in such 
 different worlds, that there could be no sympathy be- 
 tween them ; her mother's absorption in the task she had 
 set herself of duty to the ignoble husband, made Mar- 
 cella's tastes seem strange and irrational to her, — a discord 
 to be ignored. Her daughter's exuberant life and beauty 
 were to her like a glare of painful light to sick and suffer- 
 ing eyes. Given the conditions, no character could show 
 more clearly the effects. Her desire to leave Marcella 
 after her husband's death proves Mrs. Ward's keen study 
 of this character. It is so apparently unnatural that she 
 would not have invented it; it must have been drawn 
 from some living prototype. 
 
 There is in this novel an entire departure from the in- 
 tricacy of plot of the novels of the middle of the century. 
 We can readily discern the end from the beginning, and 
 there are few contretemps to disturb the flow of events. 
 Characterization is altogether the strong and main point. 
 Of the minor characters in Marcella some are living, 
 breathing people. This is especially true of Miss Agneta 
 Raeburn, who is perfectly real and natural, as is also 
 Lord Maxwell. Even Betty Macdonald, though more 
 slightly sketched, can be seen and known. Wharton is a
 
 "Marcella" 127 
 
 type too well known in American politics to require 
 proving, though too often Mrs. Ward makes him a mere 
 mouthpiece for the expression of the views of his class of 
 socialists. The question arises: Is he individual? His 
 creator evidently worked patiently upon him, especially 
 upon the mental process by which he arrived at his final 
 degeneracy, and the study in psychology is good, but we 
 doubt that he was a living, breathing entity. Mrs. Ward 
 seems to have a grudge against him for his youth and 
 beauty ; and when her own life story is told it may be 
 found that, like George Eliot's, her mind was dominated 
 by her own heart experiences, and that her ideal heroes 
 were accordingly made or marred. 
 
 Edward Hallin is an embodiment of the qualities of 
 conservative socialism and answers the purpose of a con- 
 fidant to Raeburn — who, as he is a repressed person, 
 cannot speak his feelings, but must write them to some 
 one, or else we should not know them. Hallin serves to 
 bridge the chasm between extreme socialism and the 
 claims of the present proprietors : a motive rather didactic 
 than strictly artistic. As a consequence, he is not particu- 
 larly vivid or human. The Cravens are mere etchings of 
 little value and of no great degree of reality. Lady Selina 
 Farrell is a type of Mrs. Ward's own, and as we know as 
 little of the English nobility as her creator apparently 
 knows, we cannot judge of the truth of this product of 
 environment. Lady Winterbourne is not a personality 
 at all, but, as our president has said, " a thing of shreds 
 and patches." In the execution of Mr. Boyce we have 
 no masterly strokes and he does not materialize. In her 
 characterization of the lower orders Mrs. Ward is at her 
 best — is, in fact, inimitable. Jim Hurd, the living, re- 
 bellious protest against the existing order of things; 
 Westall, bad yet natural, with his one good trait; Mrs. 
 Jellison, who is realism itself, and who supplies the live- 
 liest humor in the book; and the pathetic figure of Minta
 
 128 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 Hurd, which we can never forget, — these are specimens 
 of our author's best work. 
 
 The sociaHsm of which we hear so much in this book is 
 rarely introduced in a perforce or didactic manner; gen- 
 erally we breathe it in as the natural atmosphere of the 
 time. It has been said that Mrs. Ward " writes each 
 novel for a Purpose, with a capital P," — but the ribs of 
 the skeleton do not protrude painfully in the work before 
 us. In Robert Elsmere the skeleton purpose is in the 
 closet, but we constantly feel its presence, — the motive 
 of that mysterious book upon the shelf which proved, or 
 might have proved if one had ever had the opportunity 
 of reading it, that the Christian religion was, as somebody 
 says, " a grotesque fungoid growth from the root of ances- 
 tor worship." We have nothing of this in Marcella, and 
 an orthodox Christian might read it and imagine, if he 
 pleased, that its heroine's motives were drawn from the 
 faith he reveres, — but to the initiated it is perfectly plain 
 that she is an embodiment, and her career the working 
 out, of Matthew Arnold's theories. 
 
 While reading Mrs. Ward's books one is always 
 haunted by her grandfather's ghost, and as Tennyson 
 imagines Adam our first father as looking down upon us : 
 
 " From yon blue heavens above us bent 
 The grand old gardener and his wife 
 Smile at the claims of long descent," 
 
 — SO one can but wonder if the grand old Arnold of 
 Rugby smiles or frowns at his granddaughter's work. 
 
 Mary Wickliffe Van Ness.
 
 XIII. 
 
 MR. ALFRED AUSTIN S LYRICAL POEMS. 
 
 WHEN Tennyson died, leaving vacant the poet- 
 laureateship, the duties of which he had filled 
 so worthily and so beautifully for over forty 
 years, there was a general shock of surprise throughout 
 the literary world when Mr. Alfred Austin was appointed 
 as his successor. By virtue of the office which Tennyson 
 and Wordsworth had ennobled, the new poet-laureate has 
 come suddenly into prominence. He has been the ob- 
 ject of much unfavorable criticism, but it is as unfair as 
 it is idle to compare him with men of greater genius. It 
 may be the fault of the present age, so wonderful in 
 science and invention, that it has produced no great poet, 
 — and he has been judged by the accepted authorities the 
 most fitting man that England has to offer for the place. 
 Swinburne, with his melody and passion, has surely more 
 of the magic of true poetry, but he is too much of a radi- 
 cal, both in politics and religion, to please conservative 
 England. Austin, on the other hand, is a personal friend 
 of the Queen and of the prime minister, and a loyal sup- 
 porter of their policy. He is thoroughly English, too, in 
 his use of the honest, homely Saxon words which are so 
 dear to the people, and these impart, at times, a touch 
 of quaintness to his style that is very pleasing. 
 
 A knowledge of the life of the man often helps us to 
 understand the work of the poet. Alfred Austin was 
 
 born near Leeds in May, 1835. His father was a mer- 
 
 9 
 
 129
 
 130 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 chant and a magistrate of that town. Both his parents 
 were Roman Cathohcs, and he was brought up in their 
 church — although now, like Arnold, he is an agnostic, 
 with a warm sympathy and admiration for the Church of 
 England. He was educated at various Catholic institu- 
 tions, graduating from the University of London in 1853; 
 then, to please his parents, he studied law, but soon 
 abandoned that profession for the more congenial pur- 
 suit of literature. He has written much for reviews and 
 magazines, and has given us some valuable prose crit- 
 icism, but it is his poetical works that chiefly interest us, 
 and of these his lyrical poems have been chosen for our 
 discussion. 
 
 In his beautiful country home sixty miles from London, 
 Mr. Austin lives very " near to nature's heart," and it 
 is probably this close companionship with nature which 
 has preserved for him the innocence, simplicity, and 
 purity which constitute his chief charm. Like Words- 
 worth, he averts his " ken from half of human fate." 
 City life — the life of men together — with its toil and 
 struggle and achievement, its pain and self-sacrifice, does 
 not appeal to him. He dismisses it rather contemptu- 
 ously in one line: 
 
 " In woods men feel ; in towns they think." 
 
 Mr. William Watson has well said that the two distin- 
 guishing notes of Austin's poetry are " a love of country 
 and a love of the country " ; and he has also called him 
 " the poet-laureate of the seasons." Certainly, many of 
 his best stanzas have been inspired by what he calls " the 
 rapture of an English spring." 
 
 " When cowslips come again, and spring 
 Is winsome with their breath 
 And life 's in love with everything — 
 With everything but death."
 
 Austin's Lyrical Poems 131 
 
 ^ 
 
 He views the seasons from a variety of standpoints, but 
 spring is always to him the time of light, and life, and 
 beauty. 
 
 " The boles are brown, the branches gray, 
 Yet green buds live on every spray. 
 But 'tis the ground most wins your gaze. 
 And makes you question, with amaze, 
 What these are? Shells flung far and wide 
 By winter's now fast-ebbing tide, 
 In language called, for him who sees 
 But grossly, wood anemones ! 
 Those too ? Nay, pluck not. You will find 
 That they maintain a silent mind. 
 You do not understand? I meant 
 They will not talk to you in scent. 
 Sweet violets you know ; but these 
 Have their own rustic way to please. 
 Their charm is in the look, their free 
 Unfrightened gaze of gaiety. 
 Are they not ever>-where ? Their eyes 
 Glance up to the cerulean skies 
 And challenge them to match the glow 
 Of their own bluer heaven below. . 
 Lo ! wheresoe'er you onward press 
 Shine milky ways of primroses. 
 So thick there are, when these have birth, 
 Far fewer stars in heaven than earth ; 
 Beholding these would you not say 
 The world was born but yesterday. 
 And while the years such scenes unfold 
 Afresh, it never can grow old." 
 
 The thrush is the " poet-prophet of the spring," of 
 whom he says : 
 
 " Thou flauntest winter with thy lay 
 And art thyself the spring ! " 
 
 The nightingale is 
 
 " the poet-bird that sings, 
 Through joy, through sorrow, through all things. 
 'T is only we that do not hark 
 Until our own bright days grow dark.'
 
 132 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 Summer seems to Austin a richer and completer spring 
 without its freshness, and already touched with the 
 shadow of decay : 
 
 " Then revel in your roses, reckless June, 
 Revel and ripen swift to your decay, 
 But your turn will follow soon. 
 And the rounding harvest moon 
 
 Avenge the too brief innocence of May." 
 
 Then, 
 
 " as the sunset saddens in the west 
 Funereal mist comes creeping down the dale 
 And widowed Autumn weeps behind her veil,"- 
 
 while Austin's winter, with her 
 
 ' dumb days 
 Where neither sunlight is nor smiles of flowers," 
 
 reminds us of our own " melancholy days." 
 
 In his " Defence of English Spring," he tells us some- 
 thing of the inspiration and the aim of his poetry. He 
 seems to have taken Arnold's advice to " seek repose in 
 nature," and there he found, what Arnold vainly sought, 
 how " to merge doubt in melody." 
 
 " Now think you that I gleaned all this, 
 This mite of wisdom, wealth of bliss 
 In dusty shelf or yellowing tome ? 
 Is it not rather that I roam 
 From dawn to noon, from noon till eve. 
 Ready to gladden or to grieve 
 With every aspect, impulse, mood 
 Of nature's active solitude ? 
 Ah ! if you knew the hours on hours 
 One lives with birds, one spends with flowers, 
 How often all one has to show 
 For days that come and days that go 
 Are woodland nosegays all ablow, 
 You then I think would scarcely deem 
 Our songs of spring a borrowed theme, 
 But own that English poets learn 
 In every hour, at every turn.
 
 Austin's Lyrical Poems 133 
 
 From nature's page, from nature's speech, 
 
 What neither book nor bard can teach . . . 
 
 Infer from her uncertain text 
 
 A hopeful creed for souls perplexed ; 
 
 To them her busy calm impart. 
 
 And harmonize the human heart." 
 
 In his intense love of nature, Austin again reminds us 
 of Wordsworth, and, indeed, Wordsworth is evidently 
 his master, but where the greater poet always leads our 
 thoughts " through nature up to nature's God," Austin 
 seems to be satisfied with nature for the sake of her own 
 beauty, and not for what that beauty reveals or suggests. 
 He says: 
 
 " Why do you beckon to another sphere ? 
 
 Here was I born, 
 Am deeply rooted here, 
 
 And would not be uptorn. 
 I want no other fields than these. 
 
 No other skies. 
 No redder dawn to break on bluer seas, 
 
 No brighter stars to rise. . . . 
 I love the mystery, nor seek to solve, 
 Content to let the stars revolve. 
 Nor ask to have their meaning clear, 
 
 Enough for me, enough to feel. 
 
 To let the mystic shadows steal 
 Into a land whither I cannot follow." 
 
 It is nature in her every-day aspect with which Austin 
 is most at home, — English meadows and orchards and ex- 
 quisitely cultivated gardens, — rather than the grandeur of 
 the mountains or the vastness of the sea. Only in his 
 poem on " Celestial Heights" does he lift us up amid 
 " sun-confronting peaks," to feel 
 
 " as air and sky expand 
 That here the spirit as the flesh 
 Grows fragrant, dewy, healthful, fresh. 
 And, like the landscape, grand ' "
 
 134 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 Austin's love of his country is second only to his love 
 of nature. He is proud — as every Englishman must be 
 — of his 
 
 " privileged Isle, 
 This brave, this blest, 
 This deathless England." 
 
 On returning home from Italy he gives his best expres- 
 sion to his love and admiration for his mother country. 
 
 *' And well I know that there will greet me there 
 No soft foam fawning upon smiling strand, 
 No scent of orange groves, no zephyrs bland. 
 But Amazonian March with breast half bare, 
 And sleety arrows whistling through the air, 
 Will be my welcome from that burly land. 
 Yet he who boasts his birthplace yonder lies 
 Owns in his heart a mood akin to scorn 
 For sensuous slopes that bask 'neath southern skies, 
 Teeming with wine and prodigal of corn. 
 And gazing through the mist, with misty eyes, 
 Blesses the brave, bleak land where he was born." 
 
 " How should strange lands, it boots not where, 
 Divorce one from one's native air. 
 Or in a loyal breast dethrone 
 Unreasoning reverence for one's own." 
 
 Austin has also that necessary enthusiasm for the 
 history, the institutions, and the royal family of England, 
 without which no one could be poet-laureate. The Jubi- 
 lee has, of course, taxed his powers to the utmost, and it 
 cannot be said that his made-to-order poems are very suc- 
 cessful. In one of them he carried his conservatism too 
 far for even the Queen herself, one may venture to sup- 
 pose, when he makes her say : 
 
 " Being a woman only 
 
 I can be not great, but good " ; 
 
 and in another he expresses the cheerful hope that " long 
 may she litiger."
 
 Austin's Lyrical Poems 135 
 
 Austin has given us many interesting criticisms of other 
 poets in his poems, and the tribute that he pays to those 
 he loves is often very beautiful. Of Byron , whom he calls 
 his " earliest master," and " the strongest voice of later 
 days," he writes: 
 
 " For me, I think of you as one 
 
 Who vaguely pined for worthier lot 
 Than to be blinked at by the sun, 
 But found it not. 
 
 " Who blindly fought his way from birth, 
 Nor learned till 't was too late to heed, 
 Not all the noblest songs are worth 
 One noble deed " ; 
 
 on Shelley's death : 
 
 " We felt we had no right to keep 
 What never had been ours ; 
 That thou belongedst to the deep, 
 
 And the uncounted hours ; 
 That thou earthly no more wert 
 Than the rainbow's melting skirt. 
 
 The sunset's fading bloom, and midnight's 
 shooting showers " ; 
 
 and his favorite, Wordsworth : 
 
 " Your sacred music still is heard 
 
 When notes profane have died. 
 Like some familiar home-bred word 
 
 You in our lives abide ; 
 And when with trackless feet we rove 
 By meadow, mountain, mere, or grove. 
 
 We feel you at our side." 
 
 Those of us who know and love George Eliot are glad 
 to read the tribute that he pays to her in whom " com- 
 passion " and " exonerating pity " never failed. " A 
 Poet's Eightieth Birthday " he dedicates to Tennyson, 
 to whose brow, " by right divine, the laurel lapsed " from 
 Wordsworth's. Of himself, he writes very modestly as 
 but a gleaner in the field of fame, 
 
 " Whence the main harvest hath been gathered in."
 
 136 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 He gratefully acknowledges his debt to the older poets, 
 the reapers of the past, whose songs he echoes in his 
 own feebler strains. Poetry is Austin's religion, of which 
 the poet is the prophet and the priest. 
 
 " Then apprehended right his lays 
 
 Shall seem a hymn of prayer and praise, 
 
 To purify from stain ; 
 Shall bridge with love the severed years, 
 Instil the sacredness of tears, 
 The piety of pain. 
 
 " Let him then rest where now he lies, 
 So that if narrower ritual dies, 
 
 Devout feet still may come, 
 Confessing what his strains impart, 
 The deep religion of the heart 
 
 That never will be dumb." 
 
 To many the best and truest lesson Austin has to teach 
 is embodied in his little poem on " Content." He is 
 neither high nor deep enough to inspire us with divine 
 discontent, with longings and ideals that can never be 
 satisfied, but he does try to make us see and prize the 
 simple, every-day joys and compensations of our lives. 
 
 " I could not find the little maid, Content, 
 
 So out I rushed and sought her far and wide. 
 But not where Pleasure each new fancy tried, 
 
 Heading the maze of reeling merriment. 
 
 Nor where with restless eyes and bow half bent 
 Love, in a brake of sweet-brier, smiled and sighed. 
 Nor yet where Fame towered, crowned and glorified, 
 
 Found I her face, nor whereso'er I went. 
 
 So homeward back I crawled, like wounded bird. 
 
 When lo ! Content sat spinning at my door ; 
 
 And, when I asked her where she was before, 
 ' Here all the time,' she said, ' I never stirred ; 
 
 Too eager in your search you passed me o'er. 
 And, tho' I called, you neither saw nor heard.'" 
 
 Louise Finley.
 
 XIV. 
 
 MR. WILLIAM WATSON S POEMS. 
 
 IT is fitting that at the close of our course of study we 
 should have Mr, Watson's poems as our subject for 
 discussion. Having chosen Matthew Arnold as our 
 central figure and as the typical expression of the influ- 
 ences of the time, it follows naturally that we should 
 close with the poet whose verse concludes that classical 
 and agnostic tradition that originated with Clough. 
 Arnold stands as the highest exponent of this school, 
 in power and perfection never approached by Clough, 
 and evidently out of Watson's reach. Watson writes in 
 the same minor key, but enchantment is wanting, and 
 there is a finality about his melancholy that excludes the 
 visionary gleam which illumines the greater poet's verse. 
 It is as if 
 
 " Fated among time's fallen leaves to stray, 
 
 We breathe an air that savours of the tomb, 
 Heavy with dissolution and decay." 
 
 We have gathered from other writers an impression of 
 restlessness in these last years of the century; have noted 
 sceptical and critical tendencies; but nowhere have these 
 been presented to us with such a sense of doom — doom, 
 surely, of the poet's inspiration — as in one of Watson's 
 latest poems, " The Unknown God." Former poems of 
 his betray the doubt and melancholy that pervade his 
 philosophy, but such reckless and open confession of
 
 138 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 agnosticism is of the nature of a shock. If, like Arnold, 
 he could have paused till he possessed his soul again, the 
 outlook for the poet's future work would be much 
 brighter. It was Arnold's " ultimate hope" that pre- 
 vented his strain of melancholy from degenerating into 
 pessimism. 
 
 Circumstances have made the poem alluded to the sub- 
 ject of more criticism and comment, doubtless, than have 
 greeted any occasional poem since Tennyson's " Locks- 
 ley Hall Sixty Years After." Its interest to us lies in 
 its exposition of our author's religious views, and we 
 quote it first, not because of its poetical value, but be- 
 cause as a recent and most definite utterance, it had 
 better be placed in the forefront of those poems that in- 
 dicate doubt and religious discontent. The title indi- 
 cates his agnostic views, and the body of the poem reveals 
 the fact that this agnosticism is of pantheistic character : 
 
 " The God I know of, I shall ne'er 
 
 Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. 
 
 Raise thou the stone and find me there. 
 Cleave thou the wood and there am I, 
 
 Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow, 
 
 Too near, too far, for me to know. 
 
 " Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure 
 
 That I can pleasure him, or vex : 
 I that must use a speech so poor 
 
 It narrows the supreme with sex. 
 Notes he the good or ill in man ? 
 To hope he cares is all I can. 
 
 " And dreaming much, I never dare 
 To dream that in my prisoned soul 
 The flutter of a trembling prayer 
 
 Can move the Mind that is the Whole. 
 Though kneeling nations watch and yearn. 
 Does the primordial purpose turn ?
 
 William Watson's Poems 139 
 
 " Unmeet to be profaned by praise 
 
 Is he whose coils the world enfold ; 
 The God on whom I ever gaze, 
 
 The God I never once behold ; 
 Above the cloud, beneath the clod: 
 The Unknown God, the Unknown God." 
 
 The poem speaks for itself. There is nothing indefinite 
 about it. It leaves the feeling that here, after having 
 written much that is beautiful and sympathetic, Watson's 
 poetic insight has failed him, and that he has cut himself 
 off from the source of inspiration. He has put himself 
 on record, so to speak, and should his soul ever yearn 
 toward God, Truth, and the Infinite Love, this fateful 
 outcome of an indignant mood may recur to bar expres- 
 sion of better and more hopeful thought. Should he 
 disregard it, and write as feeling urged, he would prob- 
 ably be met with the charge of inconsistency, which by 
 the way has already been preferred against him. It has 
 been remarked that while in opposition to Mr. Kipling 
 he here disclaims all belief in the God of Hosts, other of 
 his poems suggest such belief. While this is true in a 
 sense, as in the appeal to God in the " New National 
 Anthem," "A New Year's Prayer," and other pieces, 
 it can be shown that his idea of the " Somewhat that we 
 name, but cannot know " is throughout the centre of his 
 philosophy. His lines to Aubrey De Vere deny behef in 
 a personal God in Christ : 
 
 "Not mine your mystic creed ; not mine in prayer 
 And worship at the ensanguined cross to kneel ; 
 
 But when I mark your faith how pure and fair. 
 How based on love, on passion for man's weal. 
 
 My mind, half envying what it cannot share, 
 Reveres the reverence which it cannot feel." 
 
 He is undecided in regard to immortality and the future 
 life. He would not dismiss
 
 140 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 " with light, hard phrase and cold, 
 Even if it be but fond imagining, 
 The hope whereto so passionately cling 
 The dreaming generations from of old." 
 
 In a poem called " The Great Misgiving," he dwells 
 upon a haunting doubt : 
 
 " And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit. 
 And while the purple joy is passed about. 
 Whether 't is ampler day divinelier lit 
 Or homeless night without ; 
 
 " And whether, stepping forth, my soul shall see 
 New prospects, or fall sheer — a blinded thing ! 
 There is, O grave, thy hourly victory, 
 And there, O death, thy sting." 
 
 In a recent poem he describes men as God's captives, — 
 a sadly pessimistic thought — and this is the captive's 
 dream : 
 
 " Ah, if there be indeed 
 
 Beyond some darksome door a secret stair 
 That, winding to the battlements, shall lead 
 Hence to pure light, free air ! 
 This is the master hope, or the supreme despair. " 
 
 If in a review of his poems we find little that is hope- 
 ful from a religious point of view, there is certainly no 
 lack of high ethical spirit — nothing that does not tend 
 toward the good, the true, the pure in human nature. 
 Mention of these qualities leads up to what is, strange as 
 it may seem after reading " The Unknown God," a lead- 
 ing characteristic of the poet, that is, his ideal patriotism. 
 Watson loves England, and longs for her to stand first 
 among nations not only in strength of arms but in lofty 
 principle as well. He writes with more passion of the 
 instances where according to his vision she has disre- 
 garded " her high imperial lot," than on any other sub- 
 ject. We find this exemplified in his sonnets of March
 
 William Watson's Poems 141 
 
 and April, 1885. One of these, " Hasheen," especially 
 portrays the vehemence of his feelings where the matter 
 of England's righteousness and honor is at stake: 
 
 " ' Of British arms, another victory ! ' 
 
 Triumphant words, through all the land's length sped. 
 
 Triumphant words, but, being interpreted, 
 Words of ill sound, woful as words can be. 
 Another carnage by the drear Red Sea — 
 
 Another efflux of a sea more red ! 
 
 Another bruising of the hapless head 
 Of a wronged people yearning to be free. 
 Another blot on her great name who stands 
 
 Confounded, left intolerably alone 
 
 With the dilating spectre of her own 
 Dark sin, uprisen from yonder spectral sands : 
 
 Penitent more than to herself is known ; 
 England, appalled by her own crimson hands." 
 
 Right here we have a suggestion as to the motive of his 
 retort to Mr. Kipling's " Recessional Hymn," in the last 
 stanzas of " The Unknown God." It is easy to see that 
 his sympathies are with the oppressed, and England's ap- 
 parent indifference to the struggles of the little band of 
 Christians against the Turks, in Southern Europe, has 
 roused his indignation and inflamed the smouldering 
 scepticism within him. Whether it is expedient for Eng- 
 land to take up the cause of her Christian brethren is, as 
 has been sarcastically hinted, not for Watson to decide; 
 but surely the ideal patriotism of the poet has struck a 
 true chord. It seems intolerable to him that a matter of 
 expediency should be considered by illustrious England 
 before duty in God's cause and the cause of humanity. 
 His scorn is great that England should hesitate to do the 
 work of Heaven lest Heaven should hurl her in the dust. 
 It seems far more likely, after reading all of the poet's 
 verse, that his allusion to Kipling's hymn was more from 
 this disappointment than from any personal jealousy of 
 its author's popularity, as has been hinted. There is no
 
 142 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 evidence of any such pettiness in all his work, and his 
 pen seems ever ready for the praise of other singers. His 
 bitterness springs from a higher source, and a more fatal 
 one to him — the awful inconsistencies of life. A poem 
 lately published, called " Hellas, Hail!" illustrates his 
 appreciation of the Grecian struggle and his opinion re- 
 garding England's position. 
 
 In many instances, however, he has written with pride 
 of his native land, and his homage to her past is unquali- 
 fied. His " New National Anthem," a paraphrase of 
 the National Hymn, is good, and one verse should be 
 quoted to remark his popular sympathies: 
 
 " Too long the gulf betwixt 
 This man and that man fixt 
 
 Yawns yet unspanned. 
 Too long that some may rest, 
 Tired millions toil unblest. 
 God lift our lowliest, 
 
 God save our land." 
 
 His feeling is not for the high in power, but for the 
 struggling masses, the downtrodden and oppressed. 
 Among all his songs, there is none to royalty, and there 
 is no suggestion of flattery of England's aristocracy. 
 Another verse of the National Hymn serves to show that 
 he places the people above the Crown : 
 
 " God bless our reigning race ! 
 Truth, honor, wisdom, grace, 
 
 Guide their right hand ! 
 Yet, though we love their sway, 
 England is more than they : 
 God bless their realm, we pray, 
 
 God save our land ! " 
 
 This is only an instance, but from the general tenor of 
 his work it is easy to perceive that Watson could never 
 have been poet-laureate, however great his poetical worth.
 
 William Watson's Poems 143 
 
 He sympathizes with Ireland in her misfortune and blind- 
 ness, but from his poem, " England to Ireland," one 
 would not infer that he favors Mr. Gladstone's policy of 
 Home Rule. Nor would it seem from his sonnet, " A 
 Political Luminary," that he approves his policy in 
 general, however much he admires the man. " After 
 the Titans " is a fine ode to Gladstone and Salisbury: 
 
 " Strong souls and massive, such as England bred 
 In the brave day that cometh not again." 
 
 Watson touches but lightly upon art and music, and in 
 no instance do they appear as inspirations of his verse. 
 In one place he says of art : 
 
 " There is toil on the steeps, 
 On the summit, repose " ; 
 
 in another place, among his epigrams : 
 
 " The thousand painful steps at last are trod, 
 At last the temple's difficult door we win ; 
 But perfect on his pedestal the god 
 
 Freezes us hopeless when we enter in." 
 
 He deals with nature much as Arnold did ; rarely with 
 the purpose of describing her beauty, generally as she 
 serves to illustrate a particular mood, or chimes with 
 some line of contemplation. He does not write of spring 
 with the pure joy in its bloom and sunshine that inspires 
 Mr. Austin. Autumn he has made his own by one beauti- 
 ful refrain. He confesses the same fascination that the 
 skylark possessed for Shelley and Wordsworth. " The 
 First Skylark of Spring " is one of his best lyrics, musical 
 and earnest. Into it he pours his sense of man's impo- 
 tence, and bewails the limitations of human life and aspira- 
 tion. Its introspectiveness reminds us even more of 
 Matthew Arnold than of the poets just mentioned :
 
 144 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 " Thy spirit knows nor bounds nor bars ; 
 On thee no shreds of thraldom hang : 
 Not more enlarged, the morning stars 
 Their great Te Deum sang. 
 
 " But I am fettered to the sod, 
 
 And but forget my bonds an hour ; 
 In amplitude of dreams a god, 
 A slave in dearth of power." 
 
 Perhaps the sea, " that thousand-memoried, unimpul- 
 sive sea," appeals more to Watson than anything else in 
 nature : he has more frequent mention of it than of land- 
 scape, trees, or flowers. This is especially noticeable in 
 his longest poem, " The Prince's Quest " ; a poem which 
 has some fine lines, but which is too allegorical and too 
 long drawn out. 
 
 His subdued thought and melancholy temperament are 
 well expressed and revealed in the group of elegiac poems 
 with which we end. They are not more perfect in form 
 and finish than many of his sonnets and lyrics, but his 
 love for the poets — and here he wins our strongest 
 sympathy — places him in touch with them and enables 
 him to write with true insight and poetic charm. He is 
 inspired by his theme, and the result is an impression of 
 highest relative success. 
 
 " Lachrymae Musarum " is a fine tribute to the late 
 poet-laureate. The first stanza is remarkably Tennyson- 
 ian in style. It should be quoted in evidence of this 
 resemblance, and because it expresses in a few words 
 Watson's estimate of Tennyson, which is enlarged on 
 throughout the poem : 
 
 " Low, like another's, lies the laureled head : 
 The life that seemed a perfect song is o'er : 
 
 Carry the last great bard to his last bed. 
 
 Land that he loved, thy noblest voice is mute. 
 Land that he loved, that loved him ! — nevermore 
 Meadow of thine, smooth lawn or wild seashore. 
 
 Gardens of odorous bloom and tremulous fruit.
 
 William Watson's Poems 145 
 
 Or woodlands old, like Druid couches spread 
 The master's feet shall tread. 
 Death's little rift hath rent the faultless lute : 
 The singer of undying songs is dead." 
 
 Higher praise could hardly be given than is accorded 
 in this poem, but it lacks the tenderness that marks the 
 elegy on Wordsworth. It would appear that Watson, 
 like Arnold, has taken that great poet as his master, for 
 he offers him a worshipful devotion. In the opening 
 verses of " Wordsworth's Grave " we have a fresh 
 glimpse of the author's pantheism, and notice, not only 
 in them, but throughout the elegy, a deep appreciation 
 of the quality that Arnold found in Wordsworth and 
 prized so highly — peace and repose. Stanzas in the 
 second part bring out beside our author's felicity of ex- 
 pression in allusion to the poets: 
 
 ' ' Poet who sleepest by this wandering wave ! 
 
 When thou wast born, what birth-gift hadst thou then ? 
 To thee what wealth was that the Immortals gave, 
 The wealth thou gavest in thy turn to men ? 
 
 " Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine ; 
 
 Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless human view ; 
 Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine ; 
 Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew. 
 
 " What hadst thou that could make so large amends 
 For all thou hadst not and thy peers possessed, 
 Motion and fire, swift means to radiant ends ? — 
 Thou hadst, for weary feet, the gift of rest. 
 
 " From Shelley's dazzling glow or thunderous haze. 
 From Byron's tempest anger, tempest mirth, 
 Men turned to thee and found — not blast and blaze. 
 Tumult of tottering heavens, but peace on earth. 
 
 " Nor peace that grows by Lethe, scentless flower, 
 There in white languors to decline and cease ; 
 But peace whose names are also rapture, power, 
 Clear sight, and love : for these are parts of peace.
 
 146 Arnold and the Spirit of the Age 
 
 He reviews the poetry of the period previous to Words- 
 worth's manhood, passing with appropriate, illuminating 
 touch each poet in his turn, until he comes to those 
 
 " Twin morning stars of the new century's song, — 
 Those morning stars that sang together. . . . 
 
 " In elvish speech the Dreamer told his tale 
 
 Of marvellous oceans swept by fateful wings. 
 The Seer strayed not from earth's human pale, 
 But the mysterious face of common things 
 
 " He mirrored as the moon in Rydal Mere 
 
 Is mirrored, when the breathless night hangs blue ; 
 Strangely remote she seems and wondrous near, 
 And by some nameless difference born anew." 
 
 This is the longest of the elegies, and the best. The 
 quite different style of " Shelley's Centenary " is equally 
 well adapted to the subject; the verse throbs with life, 
 the poet seeming to partake of the spirit he is dreaming 
 over, and the poem is buoyantly lyrical. " In Laleham 
 Churchyard," on the contrary, is appropriately cold, con- 
 templative, critical. Perhaps the writer does not realize 
 how much akin his own mind is to Arnold's. He says of 
 him: " The deep authentic mountain thrill ne'er shook 
 his page," and though he pays him tribute he turns at 
 last from one 
 
 " Too grandly free. 
 Too loftily secure in such 
 Cold purity," — 
 
 to those less calm and self-contained : 
 
 " And ye the baffled many, who 
 Dejected from afar off view 
 The easily victorious few 
 
 Of calm renown, — 
 Have ye not your sad glory too, 
 
 And mournful crown ?
 
 William Watson's Poems 147 
 
 " Great is the facile conqueror ; 
 Yet haply he who, wounded sore, 
 Breathless, unhorsed, all covered o'er 
 
 With blood and sweat, 
 Sinks foiled, but fighting evermore, — 
 
 Is greater yet." 
 
 Though he says of Arnold that he 
 
 " In all things sought to see the Whole ; 
 Brooked no disguise ; 
 And set his heart upon the goal. 
 Not on the prize," — 
 
 he accords him that prize with less enthusiasm than 
 one might expect. 
 
 We cannot more fittingly close than by quoting the 
 noble lines in which Watson embodies his ideal of the 
 poet: 
 
 " He sits above the clang and dust of Time, 
 
 With the world's secret trembling on his lip. 
 He asks not converse nor companionship. 
 In the cold starlight where thou canst not climb. 
 
 " The undelivered tidings in his breast 
 Suffer him not to rest. 
 He sees afar the immemorable throng, 
 And binds the scattered ages with a song. 
 
 " The glorious riddle of his rhythmic breath, 
 
 His might, his spell, we know not what they be : 
 We only feel, whate'er he uttereth. 
 This savours not of death. 
 
 This hath a relish of eternity." 
 
 Adelene Wicks.
 
 THE ENGLISH CLUB 
 
 MEMBERSHIP OFA.D. 1897 
 
 Mrs. B. K. Allison 
 
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 Rev. W. p. DuBose, S.T.D. 
 
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 G. C. Edwards 
 
 Louise Finley 
 
 Rev. W. a. Guerry, M.A., B.D. 
 
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 Mrs. A. L. Hall 
 
 Virginia Harrison 
 
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 Rev. Greenough White, A.M., B.D. 
 
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