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MODERN POETS 
 
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 CHRISTIAN TEACHING 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
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 JAMES MAIN DIXON 
 
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 NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
 
 
 CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM 
 
 
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 LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
 
 Two Copies Received 
 
 NOV 21 i906 
 
 CopyrlffM Entry 
 
 cure O- XXc, No. 
 
 COPY 0. 
 
 Copyright, 1906, by 
 EATON & MAINS, 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. Modern German Thought in Arnold's Teaching - 7 
 
 II. Arnold and French Thotight - - - - - 31 
 
 III. Arnold and Wordsworth as Religious Teachers - 48 
 
 IV. The Mirror and the Cup 71 
 
 V. Arnold's Sympathy with the Brute Creation - 97 
 
 VI, Matthew Arnold and Modern Science - - - 113 
 
 VII. A Nineteenth Century Sadducee - - - 123 
 
 VIII. The Fatherhood of God in Arnold- - - - 148 
 
 Index - - -- - - - - - 163 
 
 / 
 
\ 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 These studies, thrown into the form of eight 
 lectures, deal with those phases and currents in the 
 hfe and philosophy of Matthew Arnold which 
 determined his religious creed and gave the final 
 drift to his poetry. 
 
 Good poetry ought to be taken seriously and 
 analytically. I remember the shock I received as 
 a youth in reading in an intensely orthodox journal 
 a favorable review of a book of poems which I 
 knew contained avowedly agnostic opinions. Had 
 these opinions been couched in prose, extreme 
 denunciation would have fallen upon them. Now, 
 true poetry is one of the subtlest mediums for 
 influencing thought and belief, and its aesthetic 
 appeal is only secondary. The theology in Arnold's 
 prose and poetry is essentially the same, otherwise 
 he would be no true poet; and the theology in 
 both is extraordinarily warped and defective. My 
 task has thus been somewhat of an ungracious one. 
 To have treated Arnold from the side of whole- 
 hearted eulogy would have meant an incursion 
 into fairyland, as in the "Forsaken Merman,'' 
 or into legendary history, as in "Sohrab and 
 Rustum" or "Tristram and Iseult." 
 
 The Author. 
 
 5 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 MODERN GERMAN THOUGHT IN ARNOLD'S ' 
 
 TEACHING 
 
 If Matthew Arnold may be termed the poet- 
 critic of England, then Goethe, the poet-critic of 
 Germany, is to be regarded as his forerunner and 
 instructor. Few thinkers in the whole record of 
 literature have exercised upon men of light and 
 leading so remarkable an influence as the German 
 Goethe. In his lucid pages we find expounded 
 the principles which are guiding our modern world, 
 as distinguished from the world of mediaevalism 
 and authority which preceded it. Those who read 
 at all deeply into poetry must feel how great is the 
 gap that divides, say, Milton from Tennyson, or 
 Pope from Arnold. It was the mission of Germany 
 to place upon the most systematic basis the laws 
 which regulate our modern theories of good and 
 bad, of the admirable and the trivial. Of all 
 thinkers, Goethe, with his large mind, best under- 
 stood the full significance of the change; took in 
 the final meaning of the drift toward evolution as 
 an explanation of things, and weighed all human 
 matters in a critical balance. 
 
 Arnold's very apposite and weighty verses on 
 
 7 
 
8 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Goethe I will deal with later. That he early came 
 under the spell of the sage of Weimar is apparent 
 to all acquainted with his life story. We find 
 him constantly making such references as this in 
 his Letters: "I read his [Goethe's] letters. Bacon, 
 Pindar, Sophocles, Milton, Thomas a Kempis, and 
 Ecclesiasticus;" and in his "Note-Book" Goethe's 
 name once and again recurs. For instance, in 
 the year 1878, he quotes Kestner on Goethe 
 at twenty-four: "Vor der Christlichen Religion 
 hat er Hochachtung, nicht aber in der Gestalt wie 
 sie unsere Theologen vorstellen" ("While highly 
 esteeming the Christian religion, it was not in the 
 way our theologians conceive it"). Goethe has 
 been called a modern pagan, and his conception 
 of Christianity was certainly very far from the 
 orthodox or evangelical conception. It does not 
 seem that Arnold ever broke away from his spell 
 as Tennyson did. 
 
 Practically, Tennyson's "In Memoriam" owes 
 its existence to the break he had to make 
 with Goethe's ideals of self-culture and perfection; 
 but Arnold never came to the forking of the roads. 
 It is no use attempting to place that great Chris- 
 tian apologetic, "In Memoriam," side by side with 
 Arnold's poems, as if the final teaching were the 
 same. Arnold remains in the lucidity or self- 
 culture fold from which Tennyson departed per- 
 
Modern German Thought 9 
 
 force, never to return. Arnold always regarded 
 the poet-laureate as not much of a philosopher, 
 but rather as a builder of words into sonorous 
 phrases; the judgment, not of a jealous contem- 
 porary, but of an honest friend who saw things 
 differently. Others, and I think rightly, rate 
 Tennyson very high as a profound thinker. 
 
 Turn lo the first section of "In Memoriam,'' 
 immediately following the great invocation : 
 
 I held it truth, with him who sings 
 To one clear harp in divers tones, 
 That men may rise on stepping-stones 
 
 Of their dead selves to higher things. 
 
 This word "clear" denotes the lucidity so dear 
 to lovers of classical literature, the characteristic 
 of the best spirits of the pagan world. So Milton 
 uses it: 
 
 Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise — 
 
 That last infirmity of noble mind — 
 
 To scorn delights, and live laborious days. 
 
 Tennyson had this ideal before him when Ar- 
 thur Hallam died; and the bitter experience made 
 him root his faith deeper. But no crisis came 
 in Arnold's life such as might test his spirit to its 
 depths; he always remained essentially a fair- 
 weather vessel, never venturing into the deeps 
 where storms are raging, nor did any chance 
 tempest strike him. To the end he appears 
 lacking in finally rigorous logic and thoroughness 
 
10 Matthew Arnold 
 
 of thought, and in moral grasp and conviction of 
 an overmastering kind. 
 
 Goethe purposely kept av^ay from stormy 
 waters. If we take his "Rule of Life," composed 
 in 1 8 15 and afterward expanded, as expounding 
 his principles, we have exactly such a philosophy 
 as might please and charm a thoughtful man 
 except when he was fathoming the depths of 
 despair: 
 
 If thou wouldst live unruffled by care, 
 Let not the past torment thee e'er; 
 If any loss thou hast to rue, 
 Act as though thou wert born anew; 
 Inquire the meaning of each day, 
 What each day means itself will say : 
 In thine own actions take thy pleasure, 
 What others do thou'lt duly treasure. 
 Ne'er let thy breast with hate be supplied. 
 And to God the future confide. 
 
 This "clearness" is the goal sought after by 
 Matthew Arnold. In the poem which contains 
 an exposition of his philosophy, "A Summer 
 Night," there is a closing invocation to clearness: 
 
 Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain, 
 
 Clearness divine! 
 
 Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign 
 
 Of languor, though so calm, and though so great 
 
 Are yet untroubled and unpassionate ; 
 
 Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil, 
 
 And, though so tasked, keep free from dust and soil! 
 
 I will not say that your mild deeps retain 
 
 A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain 
 
Modern Gerivian Thought ii 
 
 Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain — 
 
 But I will rather say that you remain 
 
 A world above man's head, to let him see 
 
 How boiuidless might his soul's horizons be, 
 
 How vast, yet of what clear transparency! 
 
 How prophetic was Milton in declaring that 
 he "clear spirit" had infirmities of its own! a 
 .^ve of distinction, a proud acceptance, if need be, 
 of isolation. Dr. Thomas Arnold confessed that 
 he had a weakness to be either Caesar or nobody; 
 proudly to assert himself or as proudly efface 
 himself. This temper descended to his gifted son. 
 A recent commentator, Professor Saintsbury, in 
 estimating highly the poetic quality of this poem 
 from which I have just quoted, questions whether 
 the vague life-philosophy of Arnold expounded 
 here and elsewhere — which, out of a melancholy 
 agnosticism, with a quantum of asceticism, erected 
 a creed — was "anything more than a not- 
 ungraceful will-worship of pride." It is the 
 haughty stoicism that the world has rejected. 
 Very disappointing is it to find Arnold bidding 
 farewell to a beloved son, who died in the first 
 flush of manhood, not in the words of hope given 
 to us by revelation, but in the phraseology of a 
 heathen poet. "How fond you were of him," he 
 wrote to the lad's grandmother, "and how I like 
 to recall this ! He looks beautiful, and my main 
 feeling about him is, I am glad to say, what I 
 
12 Matthew Arnold 
 
 have put in one of my poems, the 'Fragment 
 of Dejaneira': 
 
 "But him on whom, in the prime 
 Of life, with vigor undimmed, 
 With unspent mind, and a soul 
 Unworn, undebased, undecayed, 
 Mournfully grating, the gates 
 Of the city of death have forever closed — 
 Him, I count him, well-starred." 
 
 There is no hope born of the new life of the 
 soul that continues after death. With Goethe 
 and with Arnold the injunction, "Ye must be 
 born again," meant simply the attainment of 
 increased perfection in this present life. " Which 
 religion," asks Arnold in his "Progress," 
 
 Which has not taught weak wills how much they can ? 
 
 Which has not fall'n on the dry heart like rain? 
 Which has not cried to sunk, self -weary man: 
 Thou must be born again! 
 
 Surely none except the religion of Jesus, who 
 hath abolished death and brought life and 
 immortality to light through the gospel. Arnold, 
 the lover of lucidity, has estimated the German 
 poet in lines of singular appositeness: 
 
 When Goethe's death was told, we said: 
 Sunk, then, is Europe's sagest head. 
 Physician of the iron age, 
 Goethe has done his pilgrimage. 
 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! 
 
Modern German Thought 13 
 
 He looked on Europe's dying hour 
 
 Of fitful dream and feverish power ; 
 
 His eye plunged down the weltering strife — 
 
 The turmoil of expiring life — 
 
 He said: The end is everywhere. 
 
 Art still has truth, take refuge there! 
 
 And he was happy, if to know 
 
 Causes of things, and far below 
 
 His feet to see the Itirid flow 
 
 Of terror, and insane distress, 
 
 And headlong fate, be happiness! 
 
 In these lines Arnold ascribes to Goethe the 
 preeminent quality of lucidity: Felix qui potuit 
 rerum cognoscere causas. Skillful diagnosis, phil- 
 osophical insight into the workings of the world — 
 these qualities characterized him. But there he 
 stops. If this can constitute happiness, then, says 
 Arnold, Goethe had happiness; suggesting, how- 
 ever, at the same time, that this insight does 
 not bring happiness. In the agonized prayer 
 of his own Stagirius: 
 
 When the soul, growing clearer, 
 Sees God no nearer; 
 When the soul, mounting higher, 
 To God comes no nigher; 
 But the arch-fiend Pride 
 Mounts at her side, 
 Foiling her high emprise, 
 Sealing her eagle eyes, . . , 
 Save, O! save. 
 
 From the serene height of his own elevation, 
 borne along in the current of an age that was fuU 
 
14 Matthew Arnold 
 
 of life and enthusiasm, the sage of Weimar never 
 lost his buoyancy of temperament. His pupils, 
 however, with less vitality and poorer nerves, 
 found that his rule of life led to no such equable 
 contemplation of life. Goethe's optimism was tem- 
 peramental and accidental, rather than inherent 
 in his philosophy of life. 
 
 In two respects may Goethe's teaching be 
 pronounced unsatisfactory. His ideal of woman 
 is not lofty enough; and the defect may in a 
 measure be ascribed to a certain deliberate 
 resolve on his own part never to risk shipwreck 
 of fortune for a mere amatory passion. In 
 Goethe's love affairs we fail to discover that 
 ideal condition of things described by Tennyson, 
 in which 
 
 Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords 
 
 with might; 
 Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music 
 
 out of sight. 
 
 The realization of perfection, so far as it can 
 be obtained here, was his ideal — a pagan rather 
 than a Christian conception. This threw him 
 back on self, where a more ideal spirit would have 
 risked the earthly shipwreck of self. For in- 
 stance, in his love affair with Frederika there is 
 undoubtedly an element of unsatisfactoriness in 
 the cool way in which he left her just when the 
 
Modern German Thought 15 
 
 claims of his own personality seemed to demand 
 the severance of their relations. "He sighed as a 
 lover, he obeyed as a man of the vv^orld" — to parody 
 a saying of Gibbon's. This element of intellec- 
 tual coldness, visible here and elsewhere in the 
 story of Goethe's life, kept him indifferent on the 
 subject of immortality. He believed that a few 
 of the stronger and more select spirits might win 
 immortality; but the question did not trouble him 
 deeply. Now, immortality is a matter that cannot 
 be solved entirely in terms of the reason; it is 
 largely a question of the affections, in the highest 
 sense of the term. With Plato, the eternal was 
 symbolized by the heavenly Aphrodite, frequently 
 referred to by Tennyson in "In Memoriam" as 
 the "high Muse," or Urania. Goethe had wor- 
 shiped the earthly Aphrodite in but a half- 
 hearted fashion, and how could it be expected that 
 her heavenly sister would reveal herself to him ? 
 "He that loveth not his brother whom he hath 
 seen, how can he love God whom he hath not 
 seen?" Goethe's teaching was found lacking 
 by Tennyson when he stood by the recent grave 
 of his dearly loved friend. On one occasion Ten- 
 nyson and his friend Edward Fitzgerald were 
 gazing at the busts of Dante and Goethe in a shop 
 window in Regent Street, London. "What,'* 
 asked Fitzgerald, "is there wanting in Goethe 
 
1 6 Matthew Arnold 
 
 which the other has?" "The Divine/' replied 
 the poet-laureate. 
 
 In this rarefied atmosphere Arnold's notes 
 are thin and unsatisfying. He devotes a lyric 
 to Urania, but she figures as a disdainful goddess. 
 Plato speaks of Urania in his Symposium, where 
 she represents heavenly love as distinguished from 
 mere earthly love. Milton confides himself to 
 the guidance of Urania in one of his most impas- 
 sioned passages: 
 
 Up led by thee 
 
 Into the heaven of heavens I have presumea, 
 An earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air, 
 Thy tempering; with like safety gmded down, 
 Return me to my native element .... 
 Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole. 
 More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged 
 To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days, 
 On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues; 
 In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, 
 And solitude ; yet not alone, while thou 
 Visit' st my slumbers nightly, or when mom 
 Purples the east; still govern thou my song, 
 Urania, and fit audience find, though few. 
 
 With that timid reverence with which he ap- 
 proached sacred things, Tennyson introduces 
 Urania as reproving his boldness in entering upon 
 the domain of religion : 
 
 Urania speaks with darkened brow: 
 
 "Thou pratest here where thou art least" 
 This faith has many a purer priest. 
 
 And many an abler voice than thou. 
 
Modern German Thought 17 
 
 But later on in "In Memoriam" the heavenly 
 visitor speaks more encouragingly, as if touched 
 with love and sympathy for his sorrow: 
 
 The high Muse answered: "Wherefore grieve 
 
 Thy brethren with a fruitless tear? 
 
 Abide a Httle longer here, 
 And thou shalt take a nobler leave." 
 
 But Arnold's Urania, or Heavenly Wisdom, is 
 not an approachable personage, who stoops to 
 soothe and bless ordinary mortals. She reserves 
 all her smiles for some selecter being, better 
 worthy of her favors: 
 
 Eagerly once her gracious ken 
 
 Was turned upon the sons of men; 
 
 But light the serious visage grew — 
 
 She looked, and smiled, and saw them through. 
 
 If she had only "seen them through" in the 
 modern slang sense, as a helper and a kind friend, 
 no one would have complained; but hers was a 
 mere critical inspection that revealed their flaws: 
 
 Our petty souls, our strutting wits, 
 Our labored, puny passion-fits — 
 Ah, may she scorn them still, till we 
 Scorn them as bitterly as she ! 
 
 Yet show her once, ye heavenly Powers, 
 One of some worthier race than ours! 
 One for whose sake she once might prove 
 How deeply she who scorns can love. 
 
 • ••••• 
 
 And she to him will reach her hand, 
 And gazing in his eyes will stand. 
 And know her friend, and weep for glee, 
 And cry: "Long, long I've looked for thee." 
 
1 8 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Then will she weep: with smiles, till then, 
 Coldly she mocks the sons of men; 
 Till then, her lovely eyes maintain 
 Their pure, unwavering, deep disdain. 
 
 This word "disdain," not a pleasant word, 
 occurs in another of Arnold's lyrics — one of his 
 finest — the "Obermann Once More." He is paint- 
 ing the meeting of triumphant, stern Rome with 
 the grave Orient: 
 
 The brooding East with awe beheld 
 
 Her impious younger world. 
 The Roman tempest swelled and swelled, 
 
 And on her head was hurled. 
 
 The East bowed low before the blast 
 
 In patient, deep disdain; 
 She let the legions thunder past, 
 
 And plunged in thought again. 
 
 So well she mused, a morning broke 
 
 A.cross her spirit gray, 
 A conquering, newborn joy awoke, 
 
 And filled her life with day. 
 
 "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!" 
 
 She heard it, the victorious West, 
 
 In crown and sword arrayed! 
 She felt the void which mined her breast. 
 
 She shivered and obeyed. 
 
 This is bad psychology and bad history. So far 
 from "disdaining" the might of armies, the 
 
Modern German Thought 19 
 
 Oriental has ever been prone to worship and 
 glorify Power. "Disdain" of a dreamer, on the 
 one hand, "shivering" disillusion on the other, 
 do not interpret the situation. The first, the Dis- 
 dain, must be changed into warm, expansive Love, 
 fruitful in all helpful, patient deeds, which is more 
 powerful than armies; the second, the shivering 
 disillusion, into the heartful recognition of this 
 fuller humanity, the hearty acceptance of the 
 new life offered to man by the divine Friend. 
 
 The master and teacher of both Goethe and 
 Arnold in their final attitude to the physical world 
 was the Jewish philosopher, Benedict Spinoza. 
 The two things," remarks Arnold in his 
 Spinoza and the Bible," "which are most 
 remarkable about him [Spinoza], and by which, as 
 I think, he chiefly impressed Goethe, seem to me 
 not to come from his Hebrew nature at all — I 
 mean his denial of final causes and his stoicism, 
 not passive, but active. For a mind like Goethe's 
 — a mind profoundly impartial and passionately 
 aspiring after the science, not of men only, but of 
 universal nature — the popular philosophy which 
 explains all things by reference to man and 
 regards universal nature as existing for the sake 
 of man, and even of certain classes of men, was 
 utterly repulsive. Unchecked, this philosophy 
 would gladly maintain that the donkey exists in 
 
 (t 
 
20 Matthew Arnold 
 
 order that the invalid Christian may have donkey's 
 milk before breakfast; and such views of nature 
 as this were exactly what Goethe's whole soul ! 
 abhorred. Creation, he thought, should be made ,! 
 of sterner stuff; he desired to rest the donkey's ? 
 existence on larger grounds." 
 
 Arnold then goes on to quote some distinctive 
 passages from Spinoza's writings which outline 
 his standpoint: **God directs nature according 
 to the universal laws of nature, but not according 
 as the particular laws of human nature require; 
 and so God has regard, not of the human race 
 only, but of entire nature." Does not this level a 
 direct blow at the Puritan conception of God's 
 dealings with Adam, Noah, and his chosen 
 people .? Then follows a statement revealing 
 Spinoza's stoicism: "Our desire is not that 
 nature may obey us, but, on the contrary, that 
 we may obey nature." 
 
 "Here," remarks Arnold, "is the second source 
 of Spinoza's attractiveness for Goethe, and a 
 whole order of minds like him; he first impresses 
 him, and then composes him. Filling and satisfy- 
 ing his imagination by the width and grandeur of 
 his own view of nature, the Jewish thinker then 
 fortifies and stills his mobile, straining, passionate 
 temperament by the moral lesson he draws from 
 his view of nature." 
 
Modern German Thought 21 
 
 In his "Saint Paul and Protestantism" Arnold 
 loses his complete sympathy with the man of 
 Tarsus when the latter "Hebraizes" and 
 "Judaizes"; which Spinoza is careful not to do 
 — he keeps within the field common to philosophy, 
 literature, and natural religion. A combination of 
 Paul and Spinoza would have pleased Arnold 
 entirely. * Spinoza conceives of religious things in 
 terms that are too intellectual, " crowning the intel- 
 lectual life with a sacred transport." Goethe so 
 conceived of them and so did Arnold, making 
 abstractions out of life. The close of Arnold's 
 "Spinoza and the Bible" is well worth quoting as 
 summing up his final attitude toward this 
 modern Plato, as he calls him: "One may say 
 to the wise and devout Christian, 'Spinoza's con- 
 ception of beatitude is not yours and cannot 
 satisfy you, but whose conception of beatitude 
 would you accept as satisfying ? Not even that 
 of the devoutest of your fellow Christians. Fra 
 Angelico, the sweetest and most inspired of 
 devout souls, has given us, in his great picture of 
 the Last Judgment, his conception of beatitude. 
 The elect are going round in a ring on long 
 grass under laden fruit-trees; two of them, more 
 restless than the others, are flying up a battle- 
 mented street — a street blank with all the 
 ennui of the Middle Ages. Across a gulf is visible. 
 
22 Matthew Arnold 
 
 for the delectation of the saints, a blazing cal- 
 dron in which Beelzebub is sousing the damned. 
 This is hardly more your conception of beatitude 
 
 than Spinoza's is. But *^in my Father's house are ! 
 many mansions"; only, to reach any one of these 
 mansions, there are needed the wings of a genuine 
 sacred transport, of an "immortal longing."' 
 
 These wings Spinoza had; and because he had I 
 
 them his own language about himself, about his j 
 
 aspirations and his course, is true: his foot is in - 
 
 the vera vita, his eye on the beatific vision. " \ 
 
 In these closing passages in "Spinoza and the ! 
 
 Bible" Arnold speaks as if he himself were dis- 1 
 
 tinctly in the Christian fold; where he always was | 
 
 by inclination and training, but from which he \ 
 
 often seems to draw aside by a kind of intel- , 
 
 lectual overscrupulousness. He strove to realize j 
 
 two visions that are quite incompatible. * 
 
 Another German thinker, a predecessor of I 
 
 Goethe's, enters directly into Arnold's poetry — j 
 
 the Saxon Lessinp;. To him Arnold devotes a ; 
 
 poem which is but little noticed or quoted, his | 
 "Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon." And yet in 
 
 some respects the poem is equally significant to i 
 
 us with Browning's "Abt Vogler," in that it pro- { 
 
 pounds and answers a question in the sphere of the ] 
 
 higher aesthetics, where the domain of aesthetics i 
 
 touches that of religion. Browning gives music j 
 
Modern German Thought 23 
 
 a final preeminence over the other arts because 
 it is not subject to analysis: 
 
 But here is the finger of God, a flash of the Will that 
 
 can, 
 Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo! 
 
 they are. 
 
 Arnold discusses in his verses the question why 
 poetry so often fails of its mission when music 
 and art triumphantly succeed. He never allows 
 it to be doubted that poetry is the highest of all 
 arts; he merely wonders why first-rate poetry is 
 so rare, and tries to furnish a satisfactory answer. 
 
 Arnold is not a devotee of music, as was Brown- 
 ing, and is never warmed by its inspiration like 
 his contemporary. Music, after all, has but a 
 slight hold upon conduct, and is singularly unsatis- 
 fying on the moral side. For Browning's artistic 
 ends its symbolic use in " Abt Vogler" is justified, 
 and is appropriate; but, finally speaking, music 
 must rank below poetry; and Arnold is right in so 
 classing it. 
 
 To Arnold, Lessing was no mean prophet. In 
 the story of Germany he comes next after Luther 
 as an apostle of truth. While Luther was the 
 master spirit of the great religious upheaval of the 
 sixteenth century, Lessing was the chief light in 
 the intellectual revival of the eighteenth, known 
 as the period of Illuminism. Arnold was not 
 
24 Matthew Arnold 
 
 exceedingly fond of Luther, whose frequent lack ^"^ 
 
 of "dignity and distinction" displeased the fas- | 
 
 tidious Englishman. Even as a final exponent of I 
 
 God's eternal truths he has declared that Luther | 
 
 was equaled or surpassed by the old Greeks; and j 
 
 his Gemeinheity or commonness, prepared the I 
 
 way for no outburst of literature to elevate human- | 
 
 ity. The two hundred years of German life after j 
 
 Luther's death, save for a few inspired hymns, ] 
 
 are almost barren of any literary production of j 
 
 value. ! 
 
 But Lessing's mission was fruitful in results. J 
 
 When poetry was regarded as something merely \ 
 
 didactic or fanciful, he asserted for it a high and ; 
 
 dignified role as a final interpreter of life. Before j 
 
 Lessing's time the critical world was in a misty j 
 
 fog of verbiage and mere tradition, but with his i 
 
 labors we get into *'the bright and populous ; 
 
 thoroughfare of human life which binds the \ 
 
 ages together." Yet Lessing left one question : 
 
 unanswered which supplies material for Arnold's ; 
 
 poem: ] 
 
 "Ah, " cries my friend, ' 'but who hath taught : 
 
 Why music and the other arts \ 
 
 Oftener perform aright their parts ; 
 
 Than poetry? why she, than they, i 
 
 Fewer fine successes can display?" \ 
 
 In reply Arnold admits that Pausanias found, ! 
 
 when traveling in Greece — the highly gifted land — ! 
 
Modern German Thought 25 
 
 that good poems were rarer than good statues. 
 In mediaeval Italy, which produced Dante, Tasso, 
 Petrarch, and Ariosto, painting seemed to lead 
 the way with Raphael and his brotherhood: 
 
 And nobly perfect, in our day 
 Of haste, half -work, and disarray, 
 Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong, 
 ^ath risen Goethe's, Wordsworth's song; 
 Yet even I (and none will bow 
 Deeper to these) must needs allow, 
 They yield us not, to soothe our pains, 
 Such multitude of heavenly strains 
 As from the kings of sound are blown — 
 Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn. 
 
 As his friend and he passed along through Hyde 
 Park in London (where the conversation is repre- 
 sented as having occurred) they looked upon the 
 green grass, the bright elm trees, the restful kine: 
 
 "Behold," I said, "the painter's sphere! 
 The limits of his art appear. 
 The passing group, the summer mom. 
 The grass, the elms, that blossomed thorn — 
 Those cattle couched, or, as they rise, 
 Their shining flanks, their liquid eyes — 
 These, or much greater things, but caught 
 Like these, and in one aspect brought! 
 In outward semblance he must give 
 A moment's life of things that live; 
 Then let him choose his moment well, 
 With power divine its story tell." 
 
 Their walk brings them in sight of Westmin- 
 ster Abbey, and the rustling breeze seems to 
 
26 Matthew Arnold 
 
 whisper to their ears the charmed tones of sacred 
 music : i 
 
 "Miserere, Domine/" || 
 
 The words are uttered, and they flee. 
 
 Deep is their penitential moan, 
 
 Mighty their pathos, but 'tis gone. 
 
 They have declared the spirit's sore, 
 
 Sore load, and words can do no more, 
 
 Beethoven takes them then — these two 
 
 Poor, bounded words — and makes them new; 
 
 Infinite makes them, makes them young; 
 
 Transplants them to another tongue. 
 
 Where they can now, without constraint, 
 
 Pour all the soul of their complaint, 
 
 And roll adown a channel large 
 
 The wealth divine they have in charge. 
 
 Page after page of music turn. 
 
 And still they live, and still they burn. 
 
 Eternal, passion-fraught, and free — 
 
 ' ' Miserere, Domine / " • 
 
 So much for the mission of music. The scene i 
 
 then changes to the busy throng of Rotten Row, ; 
 
 and the two inquirers gaze upon humanity in j 
 
 movement: ! 
 
 The young, the happy, and the fair, 
 
 The old, the sad, the worn, were there; '< 
 
 Som.e vacant and some musing went. 
 
 And some in talk and merriment. 
 
 Nods, smiles, and greetings, and farewells! 
 
 And now and then, perhaps, there swells 
 
 A sigh, a tear — ^but in the throng 
 
 All changes fast, and hies along. 
 
 Hies, ah! from whence, what native ground? 
 
 And to what goal, what ending, bound? 
 
 "Behold at last the poet's sphere! 
 
 But who," I said, " suffices here?" 
 
Modern German Thought 27 
 
 The question as propounded by Arnold would 
 seem to demand an answer in terms of religion; 
 but he limits himself wholly to the domain of art, 
 and replies as a pure humanist. The task he 
 speaks of is not one for the moralist, but for 
 the supreme artist — the gifted personage who 
 can reveal to his audience not only the aspect 
 of the moment, like a painter, and the feeling of 
 the moment, like the musician, but also life's 
 movement: 
 
 The movement he must tell of life, 
 Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife; 
 His eye must travel down, at ftill. 
 The long, unpausing spectacle; 
 With faithful, unrelaxing force 
 Attend it from its primal source, 
 From change to change and year to year 
 Attend it of its mid-career, 
 Attend it to the last repose 
 And solemn silence of its close. 
 
 According to Arnold, most poets who apply them- 
 selves to this task of mirroring life — hov/ fond he 
 is of that word "mirror"! — are ill endowed for 
 the task, and some show feebleness and intellec- 
 tual embarrassment. All they get out of life's 
 majestic river is a momentary gleam, and they 
 give us mere snatches of song. 
 
 There are, however, two figures which tower 
 above the rest of the crowd and speak with power 
 
28 Matthew Arnold 
 
 and pathos far surpassing the message of any 
 painter or musician: 
 
 Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach 
 
 The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach. 
 
 To "^ lese, to these, their thankful race 
 
 Gives, then, the first, the fairest place; 
 
 And brightest is their glory's sheen, 
 
 For greatest hath their labor been. 
 
 Arnold here seems to speak the language of 
 exaggeration, and to place Homer and Shakespeare 
 upon an undeserved pinnacle. It must be 
 remembered that Shakespeare was dumb on 
 one deep and essential topic, that of religion. 
 He is a pure humanist, and in certain essential 
 respects limits the scope of his inquiries into the 
 meaning and drift of life. He can hardly be said 
 to have given us a hero; and to speak of his breath- 
 ing "immortal air" — an expression Arnold makes 
 use of in another passage — is to employ more than 
 equivocal language: 
 
 Deeply the poet feels; but he 
 Breathes, when he will, immortal air, 
 Where Orpheus and where Homer are. 
 
 The poet, he declares in "Resignation," is 
 "more than man": 
 
 In the day's life, whose iron round 
 Hems us all in, he is not bound ; 
 He leaves his kind, o'erleaps their pen, 
 And flees the coiTimon life of men. 
 
Modern German Thought 29 
 
 And yet, notwithstanding his almost idolatrous 
 sonnet to Shakespeare, Arnold reckoned him lower 
 than his idolized Homer; the modern poet was as 
 imperfection to perfection. Here is the sonnet: 
 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Others abide our question. Thou art free. 
 We ask and ask. Thou smilest and art still, 
 Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill, 
 
 Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty, 
 
 Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea, 
 
 Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place. 
 Spares but the cloudy border of his base 
 
 To the foiled searcher of mortality ; 
 
 And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know. 
 
 Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honored, self-secure. 
 Didst tread on earth imguessed at, — Better so! 
 
 All pains the immortal spirit must endure, 
 All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, 
 Find their sole speech in that victorious brow. 
 
 This language implies a deification of humanity 
 after the fashion of Auguste Comte. It is modern 
 Illuminism in its antichristian aspect, demanding 
 a new definition for the terms "immortal" and 
 "immortality" such as is accorded them by mod- 
 ern savants. When they bid an eternal farewell 
 to dead friends, beside graves unblest by Chris- 
 tian rites that bespeak the Christian hope of 
 immortality, their panegyrics contain aspirations 
 after this mundane form of immortality. It may 
 be defined from this "Epilogue to Lessing's 
 
30 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Laocoon" as the power to charm humanity for- 
 ever: 
 
 They speak ! the happiness divine 
 They feel runs o'er in every Hne ; 
 Its spell is round them like a shower — 
 It gives them pathos, gives them power. 
 No painter yet hath such a way, 
 Nor no musician made, as they. 
 And gathered on immortal knolls 
 Such lovely flowers for cheering souls. 
 
 If the words "immortal" and "divine" are 
 keywords to the interpretation of the essence of 
 Christ's message to man, then they are used here 
 with a significance that is entirely neopagan and 
 useless for theology. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 ARNOLD AND FRENCH THOUGHT 
 
 Matthew Arnold loved France and French- 
 men. The fair mistress to whom are addressed 
 his earl^fclove lays was Marguerite, a Swiss maiden 
 who spoke the soft, smooth accents of the people 
 dwelling by the Seine. His "A Memory-Picture'' 
 is laid in Switzerland; so is his "Dream'': 
 
 We shot beneath the cottage with the stream. 
 On the brown, rude-carved balcony, two forms 
 Came forth — Olivia's, Marguerite! and thine. 
 Clad were they both in white, flowers in their breast; 
 Straw hats bedecked their heads, with ribbons blue. 
 Which danced, and on their shoulders, fluttering, 
 
 played. 
 They saw us, they conferred; their bosoms heaved, 
 And more than mortal impulse filled their eyes. 
 Their lips moved; their white arms, waved eagerly, 
 Flashed once, like falling streams; we rose, we gazed; 
 One moment, on the rapid's top, our boat 
 Hung poised — and then the darting river of Life 
 (Such now, methought, it was), the river of Life, 
 Loud thundering, bore us by; swift, swift it foamed, 
 Black imder cliffs it raced, round headlands shone. 
 Soon the planked cottage 'mid the sim-warmed pines 
 Faded — the moss — the rocks; us burning plains, 
 Bristled with cities — us the sea received. 
 
 Here is his old-world conception of the sea 
 as something cruel and ingulfing which separates 
 
 31 
 
32 Matthew Arnold 
 
 mortals and keeps them apart. "Time's barren, j 
 Stormy flow" he calls it in another of the Mar- - 
 guerite poems, which contains two of his finest . 
 quatrains: 
 
 This is the curse of life ! that not 
 
 A nobler, calmer train 
 Of wiser thoughts and feelings blot 
 
 Our passions from our brain. 
 
 But each day brings its petty dust 
 
 Our soon-choked souls to fill, 
 And we forget because we must, 
 
 And not because we will. 
 
 But yet, interesting as are the Marguerite poems , 
 to readers of Arnold, Switzerland and the way i 
 thither through sunny France are less associated :i 
 with them than with the Obermann poems. Ober- i 
 mann was a philosopher with a certain outlook 'J 
 on life which fascinated Arnold. There is an ii 
 element of gay capriciousness in Arnold's whole ] 
 life and method which makes us feel that he cer- II 
 tainly saw life vividly, yet he failed to "see life,; 
 steadily and see it whole. " When he visited the j 
 Grande Chartreuse, 
 
 Through Alpine meadows soft-suffused 
 With rain, where thick the crocus blows , 
 
 •0 
 
 and felt its "gloom profound"; and, among Alpine ' 
 peaks, (i 
 
Arnold and French Thought 33 
 
 Watched the rosy light 
 Fade from the distant peaks of snow; 
 And on the air of night 
 
 Heard accents of the eternal tongue 
 Through the pine branches play — 
 
 he was under the spell of this skeptical, melan- 
 choly Obermann, who inhabited a mountain 
 chalet -in these retired haunts. A casual reader 
 of his pages would suppose that Senancour, the 
 creator of "Obermann," was a representative 
 Frenchman of the period, whose musings upon 
 life and destiny satisfied the intellectual cravings 
 of the time. But this is not the case, notwith- 
 standing George Sand's rhetoric. Sainte-Beuve, 
 the great French critic, for whom Arnold had 
 an unbounded respect, discusses at length, in the 
 numerous volumes of his Causeries de Lundi, 
 literary personages and literary influences, yet he 
 refers only twice to the author of **Obermann." 
 In each case it is to contrast him, and not over- 
 favorably, with some other nature-lover. In 
 his detailed account of TopfFer, for instance, a 
 highly accomplished writer who died in his prime, 
 in 1846, when fame was just coming to him, Sainte- 
 Beuve quotes his description of the valley of Cer- 
 vin, remarking on the magnificent sweep and 
 exactness of the passage. I translate the closing 
 half: "Lower down productiveness, change, 
 
34 Matthew Arnold ' j 
 
 renewal surround us; the active and fruitful soil i 
 clothes itself eternally with raiment or with flowers, j 
 and God seems to bring his hand near to us that J 
 we may take from it the food of summer and the 
 provisions of winter. But here, where that hand 
 seems to be withdrawn, deep down in the heart we 
 experience new impressions of abandonment 
 and terror; we recognize in its nakedness, so to 
 speak, the utter weakness of man, his speedy 
 and final destruction, if, but for an instant, the 
 divine goodness failed to surround him with tender 
 cares and infinite succors. Mute but powerful 
 poetry, which, from the very fact that it turns the 
 thought toward the grand mysteries of creation, 
 seizes the soul and uplifts it ! So, while the habitual 
 spectacle of the divine bounty is apt to make us 
 forget God, the chance spectacle of immense i 
 sterilities, of gloomy deserts, of regions without I 
 life, without succor, without bounties, draws us i 
 Godward by a lively feeling of gratitude; so that ' 
 more than one man who forgot God in the plains i 
 has remembered him among the mountains." At | 
 such times, says Sainte-Beuve, TopfFer's reflec- 
 tions carry us back to the awful glory of ancient 
 Sinai, the descriptions of the prophets, and all 
 that appeals to man in biblical story; while "the 
 same spectacle raises far other thoughts in the 
 minds of men like Senancour, another famous 
 
^ Arnold and French Thought 35 
 
 nature-lover; they see therein only the culmination 
 and underlying witness of blind forces, and, even 
 when most admiring, get nothing out of it but 
 sadness, horror, and desolation." He also con- 
 trasts Senancour's attitude elsewhere with that of 
 a lover of nature's moods, like Ramond, who was 
 at once geologist, botanist, and physicist. Where 
 Senancour merely gets a new ecstatic thrill which 
 leaves behind a sensation of blankness, Ramond 
 finds something to call forth admiration and 
 enthusiasm. Sainte-Beuve seems to have pre- 
 ferred Arnold's interpretation of Obermann to the 
 original, for he translated the English poet's verses 
 into excellent French equivalents. 
 
 In his first set of "Stanzas in Memory of the 
 Author of Obermann" Arnold compares the 
 Frenchman's teaching with that of Wordsworth 
 and of Goethe: 
 
 Yet, of the spirits who have reigned 
 
 In this our troubled day, 
 I know but two who have attained, 
 
 Save thee, to see their way. 
 
 • •«••• 
 
 But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken 
 
 From half of human fate; 
 And Goethe's course few sons of men 
 
 May think to emulate. 
 
 • • . • • • 
 
 Too fast we live, too much are tried. 
 
 Too harassed, to attain 
 Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide 
 
 And luminous view to gain. 
 
36 Matthew Arnold 
 
 And then we tiim, thou sadder sage, 
 
 To thee! we feel thy spell! 
 — The hopeless tangle of our age, 
 
 Thou too hast scanned it well. 
 
 Immovable thou sittest, still 
 
 As death, composed to bear! 
 Thy head is clear, thy feeling chill. 
 
 And icy thy despair. 
 
 Yes, as the son of Thetis said, 
 
 I hear thee saying now : 
 Greater by far than thou are dead; 
 
 Strive not! die also thou! 
 
 Away, the dreams that but deceive! 
 
 And thou, sad guide, adieu! 
 I go, fate drives me; but I leave 
 
 Half of my life with you. 
 
 We, in some unknown Power's employ, 
 
 Move in a rigorous line ; 
 Can neither, when we will, enjoy. 
 
 Nor, when we will, resign. ) 
 
 This is surely the philosophy of despair and \ 
 
 disillusion, from which all warmth and vital \ 
 
 humanity has departed. Is this "seeing one's j 
 
 way" ? Better the attitude of Newman, with its ■ 
 
 prayerfulness : I 
 
 Keep thou my feet! I do not ask to see | 
 
 The distant scene; one step enough for me. | 
 
 j 
 
 There is no prayer in Obermann's attitude; and ' 
 Arnold's own conception of prayer is thin and ; 
 faulty: an energy of aspiration toward the Eter- j 
 nal Not-ourselves that makes for righteousness. I 
 
Arnold and French Thought 37 
 
 "Nothing/' he remarks, "can be more efficacious, 
 more right and more real than this." He quotes 
 with approval Margaret Fuller's words: "Culti- 
 vate the spirit of prayer. I do not mean agitation 
 and excitement, but a deep desire for truth, purity, 
 and goodness." 
 
 Senancour, the author of "Obermann," lived in 
 a time of depression and disillusion among think- 
 ing men in France, when Napoleon Bonaparte 
 was riding roughshod over the prostrate forms 
 of French ideologues and idealists. Enthusiasts 
 who had for a time warmed to a religion of human- 
 ity felt their temperature grow cold and chill. 
 
 Etienne Pivert de Senancour was really a belated 
 French philosophe. Born in the reign of Louis 
 XV, he found himself a ruined man at the Revolu- 
 tion; and for some years he lived quietly in Switz- 
 erland, where he married. His Obermann letters, 
 which show the sentimental influence of Rousseau, 
 were published in the year 1804, and attracted 
 considerable notice and admiration. Obermann 
 has the philosophic melancholy of a Hamlet, a 
 Werther, or a Childe Harold, and has been com- 
 pared with Goethe's and Byron's heroes b} 
 George Sand, who held the book in high esteem. 
 She compares Obermann to a wild bird on the 
 cliffs, deprived of the use of his wings, who gazes 
 upon shores whence sail happy vessels, and on 
 
^S Matthew Arnold 
 
 which only wrecks are cast. It is the old, unhappy 
 view of the ocean which the true modern rejects, 
 but to which Arnold, with his belated classical 
 leanings, still clings. Every lover of Arnold 
 remembers the lines to Marguerite, beginning, 
 
 Yes, in the sea of life enisled, 
 
 With echoing straits between ns thrown, 
 
 Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 
 V/e mortals live alone, 
 
 and ending, 
 
 A God, a God their severance ruled! 
 And bade betwixt their souls to be 
 The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea. 
 
 To the ancient world the sea meant warfare, 
 trouble, disaster; only God could master it: **Or 
 who," says the Eternal to Job, "who shut up the 
 sea with doors, when it brake forth; and said. 
 Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and 
 here shall thy proud waves be stayed ?" In the 
 same book it is spoken of as a raging monster 
 or dragon; the sacred poet herein following the 
 nature myth in which the stormy sea, assaulting 
 the heavens with its billows, was an embodiment 
 of lawlessness and evil, a rebel leading his hosts 
 against the Almighty. Thus the opening verses of 
 the forty-sixth psalm do not refer to an actual 
 sea: "Though the waters thereof roar and be 
 troubled, though the mountains shake with the 
 
Arnold and French Thought 39 
 
 swelling thereof." It is the stormy maelstrom of 
 the nation which the psalmist depicts. We have the 
 same trope in the seventeenth chapter of the book 
 of Revelation : "The waters which thou sawest, 
 where the harlot sitteth, are peoples, and multi- 
 tudes, and nations, and tongues." And when the 
 seer declared that "there shall be no more sea" 
 he foretold an endless period of calm and bliss. 
 
 When they refer to the sea Byron speaks like 
 an ancient and Keats like a modern. In an 
 impassioned passage in "Fifine at the Fair" 
 Browning throws contempt upon Byron for his 
 attitude toward the ocean in the celebrated 
 apostrophe in "Childe Harold"; 
 
 [Thou] send'st him, shivering in the playful spray 
 And howling, to his gods, where haply lies 
 His petty hope in some near port or bay, 
 And dashest him to earth again: — there let him lay. 
 
 Browning rightly characterizes this as an un- 
 worthy conception, expressed in blundering Eng- 
 lish. But Keats rises to the occasion, as a 
 true modern who loves the ocean, in one of his 
 finest sonnets: 
 
 Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art. 
 
 Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night, 
 And w^atching with eternal lids apart. 
 
 Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, 
 The moving waters at their priestlike task 
 
 Of pure ablution round earth's human shores. 
 
40 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Oddly enough, in one of his Essays — that on 
 Maurice de Guerin — Arnold, quoting from this 
 sonnet of Keats, makes a serious and significant 
 blunder. He has been comparing religion with 
 science, to the detriment of the latter. "The 
 interpretations of science," he declares, *'do not 
 give us this intimate sense of objects as the 
 interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a 
 limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is 
 not Linnaeus, or Cavendish, or Cuvier who gives 
 us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, 
 who seizes their secret for us, who makes us par- 
 ticipate in their life; it is Shakespeare, with his 
 
 daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty ; 
 
 it is Wordsworth, with his 
 
 voice . . . heard 
 In springtime from the cuckoo-bird, 
 Breaking the silence of the seas 
 Among the farthest Hebrides ; 
 
 it is Keats, with his 
 
 moving waters at their priestlike task 
 Of cold [sic!] ablution round earth's human shores; 
 
 it is Chateaubriand, with his cime indeterminde 
 des jorSts; it is Senancour, with his mountain birch- 
 tree: Cette dcorce hlanche, lisse et crevassie; cette 
 
Arnold and French Thought 41 
 
 tige agreste; ces branches qui s^inclinent vers la 
 terre; la mohilitd des feutlles, et tout cet ahandoriy 
 simplicity de la nature, attitude des deserts.'' 
 
 The blundering substitution of "cold" for 
 "pure" makes a vital difference in the whole con- 
 ception. With the phraseology of Keats both 
 nature^ and humanity seem to acquire a new- 
 dignity; the ocean is pictured as a kindly, helpful 
 attendant, like a sweet-faced nurse at a well- 
 appointed hospital. Arnold's adjective "cold" 
 spoils the whole warm and peaceful effect. The 
 mistake is due to a radically defective attitude 
 toward the triumphs of modern science. In the 
 past century man has gained dominion over the 
 sea in a wonderful way, so that he is no longer 
 afraid of it as in the old days when he pictured 
 it as a dragon or demon. In these days, with due 
 precautions, it is as safe to live upon the ocean as 
 upon dry land. Some wealthy people are actually 
 known to live on a favorite ocean liner plying 
 between New York and Southampton. The sea 
 is no longer a divider but a unifier. When the 
 Panama Canal is completed San Francisco will 
 be much closer than before to New York. And 
 then how much has science done to make us 
 understand the health-giving functions of the sea! 
 its ozone-laden breezes; its ability to cool and tem- 
 per a whole coast, like that extending from Puget 
 
42 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Sound to San Diego, or, by its Gulf Stream, to | 
 make the shores of Ireland and North Britain } 
 habitable. I 
 
 Keats rises to the occasion, and characterizes j 
 the ocean as God's ambassador and minister — a 
 priest — performing a divine task. With a strangely 
 blind conservatism Arnold misses the whole point 
 and presents a picture that jars us and makes 
 us shiver. He allowed his old-world proclivities 
 to master him and to deaden his poetic insight. 
 Neopaganism like this has no message for modern 
 humanity. 
 
 His great contemporary, the poet-laureate, does 
 not fail in this respect. Tennyson is friendly 
 to the sea, regarding it as a mighty influence 
 beneficent to man. In "In Memoriam" he 
 makes the ocean a friend who soothes: 
 
 The salt sea-water passes by, 
 And hushes half the babbling Wye, 
 And makes a silence in the hills. 
 
 And in "Enoch Arden" the poet speaks of the 
 sea and land as friends — "a roar of the sea when 
 he welcomes the land." Even in "Self-Depend- 
 ence," where Arnold draws nearer to the sea, 
 he links it to the stars in a subordinate way, and 
 makes it typical of isolation. The stars and the 
 sea, he declares. 
 
Arnold and French Thought 43 
 
 Unaffrighted by the silence round them, 
 
 Undistracted by the sights they see, 
 These demand not that the things without them 
 
 Yield them love, amusement, sympathy. 
 
 And with joy the stars perform their shining. 
 And the sea its long moon-silvered roll; 
 
 For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting 
 All the fever of some differing soul. 
 
 "Bounded by themselves, and unregardful 
 In what state God's other works may be, 
 
 In their own tasks all their powers pouring. 
 These attain the mighty life you see. 
 
 How unlike Keats's "priestlike task," or the 
 "modern chemistry" recognition of the ozone-filled 
 ocean as a great physician and healer! 
 
 "He who is man," remarks Obermann in one 
 of his letters, "knows how to love without 
 forgetting that love is hut an accident of life." 
 This is the root fallacy of his whole outlook. What 
 strikes one in reading his pages is the aloofness, 
 the absence of other personalities in his life, domi- 
 nating him, or being dominated by him. He 
 gives an outline of his spiritual career in 
 another letter. When he left childhood behind, 
 the period that we all regret, he imagined that 
 he felt real life; but he found only "fantastic sen- 
 sations." He looked on beings, and they were 
 only shadows; he longed for harmony, and found 
 only contraries. Then he waxed gloomy, and his 
 
44 Matthew Arnold 
 
 heart grew hollow; with unlimited desires, he felt 
 the ennui of life come upon him just when man 
 usually begins to live. For a time his restless 
 spirit found relief and solace among the Alps; 
 the silence and beauty of the lakes and forests 
 seemed to realize the longed-for perfection. He 
 "heard the sound of another world." But a 
 return to the humdrum routine of earth disabused 
 him again, ridding him of his "blind faith." He 
 could see naught but endless changes, purposeless 
 actions, universal impenetrability, in this world 
 which we occupy. "Our dreams vanish, and 
 what replaces them I Power wearies; pleasure slips 
 from our grasp; glory is for our ashes; religion 
 is a system for the unhappy. Love had the colors 
 of life; but the shadow comes, the rose pales and 
 falls to earth, and behold eternal night!" 
 
 This is not healthy sentiment, nor sound philos- 
 ophy, but the morbidity of a sick personality, 
 requiring sustenance and stimulus from other per- 
 sonalities. The word " ennui," ever recurring, has 
 no place in the record of a wholesome, well- 
 ordered life. All life is indeed change; but, in 
 wholesome life, all change has a definite purpose. 
 In loving and caring for others we penetrate their 
 hearts and discover the real meaning of life. 
 
 Senancour's Obermann was inherently a senti- 
 mentalist who spent his days in dreams that came 
 
Arnold and French Thought 45 
 
 to nothing, in tracing out wishes that could never 
 be fulfilled. A call to real activity, the infusion 
 of some moral vitality, might, thinks George Sand, 
 have converted him into a saint. With his 
 incisive Voltairean philosophy, his fondness for 
 elegiac moods, his literary perfection of phrase, 
 he exercised a fascinating but unhappy influence 
 upon Arnold. College and school life — the life 
 that Arnold lived — is almost as artificial as that of 
 a convent. The dreams and enthusiasms of 
 youths and maidens take a literary and ineffective 
 shape, and their sorrows are euthanasiac and 
 morbid. The very term "academic" has in 
 practical life something of the capricious and 
 unpractical. The pages of "Obermann" are excel- 
 lent pasture for the budding essayist who wants 
 to do a finished thing in literary work; but the 
 exquisite psychological diagnosis is not to be 
 regarded as more than mildly helpful in any virile 
 discussion of modern social, philosophical, and 
 theological problems. 
 
 A later deliverance, in prose, would seem to 
 show that Arnold was fully alive to the singularly 
 negative aspect of Senancour's w^hole teaching. 
 The passage is to be found in his "Discourses in 
 America," where he is dealing with Emerson. He 
 quotes a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, wherein 
 the writer confesses that the "strong hours con- 
 
4-6 Matthew Arnold 
 
 qiier him," and that he is the victim of miscellany; 
 miscellany of designs, vast debility, and procras- 
 tination. "The forlorn note belonging to the 
 phrase Vast debility,' " adds Arnold, "recalls 
 that saddest and most discouraged of writers, the 
 author of *Obermann,' Senancour,* with whom 
 Emerson has in truth a certain kinship. He has, 
 in common with Senancour, his pureness, his 
 passion for nature, his single eye; and here we 
 find him confessing, like Senancour, a sense in ; 
 himself of sterility and impotence. " I 
 
 Arnold may be considered, then, as treating ] 
 Obermann somewhat in the manner of a bitter- | 
 sweet tonic, a wholesome alterative. Personally, < 
 his mood was optimistic, and he had a surplus of ; 
 gladness; as one critic remarks, Arnold's pessi- ] 
 mism was not of the feelings but of the under- i 
 standing. His real sympathies would probably : 
 have allied him to the more hopeful and radiant | 
 French school of Idees-Forces, known among j 
 English thinkers as Pragmatists. These philoso- 
 phers regard the whole world as moving to per- 
 fection on the basis of conduct. They carry out | 
 Arnold's quaint dictum, "Conduct is three fourths i 
 of life," into a systematic philosophy, and teach ', 
 that to be is to act; that the whole of life is in the | 
 
 i 
 
 * The spelling "Senancour," found throughout the authorized edition of i 
 Arnold's works, has been followed; the actual French form is "Senancour." r 
 • — ^Author's Note. \ 
 
 i 
 
Arnold and French Thought 47 
 
 present; and that the meaning and reason of 
 the "all-assuming years" are to be found in the 
 potency of to-day. Their ethical system may be 
 defined as moral opportunism; for it has no stay 
 on a personal God, who has willed things, is 
 willing things, and will call upon his creatures, 
 some day, to give an account of their stewardship, 
 as responsible to him. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 ARNOLD AND WORDSWORTH AS RELIGIOUS 
 
 TEACHERS 
 
 It is impossible to understand or appreciate 
 Arnold fully unless we are acquainted with the i 
 best work of his predecessor and master, William ' 
 Wordsworth. One of the most profoundly sig- ' 
 nificant events in the life of the great poet was \ 
 when he received the doctor's degree at the Ox- ^ 
 ford Commemoration of 1839, amid unusual ! 
 plaudits. For, a quarter of a century before, j 
 Wordsworth had been scorned as a poetaster 
 and literary crank. To none must the apprecia- \ 
 tion have come with greater delight than to the j 
 Arnolds, father and son, who were sworn ad- ■ 
 mirers of the modern prophet of natural religion. J 
 It was an act of national approval and confidence, i 
 
 So much of the best in the religious life of pa- j 
 ganism did Arnold find in Wordsworth that this 
 particular aspect of Wordsworthianism bulks too 
 largely in his estimate of the poet's teaching. In 
 his essay on Marcus Aurelius, a man whose pure j 
 and noble character seemed to him — as it has [ 
 done to others, John Wesley among the number — 
 
 to reach a verv pinnacle of greatness, he finds in i 
 
 48 j 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 49 
 
 the emperor's outlook on life much to remind him 
 of Wordsworth's teachings. Remarking on the 
 admixture of sweetness with dignity which makes 
 the Roman so beautiful a moralist, Arnold declares 
 that it enables him to carry even into his obser- 
 vation of nature a delicate penetration, a sympa- 
 thetic tenderness, worthy of Wordsworth. The 
 spirit of such a remark as the following has hardly 
 a parallel, he thinks, in the whole range of 
 Greek and Roman literature: 
 
 Figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the 
 ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to 
 rottenness adds a pecuHar beauty to the fruit. And the ears 
 of com bending down, and the hon's eyebrows and the foam 
 which flows from the mouth of the wild boars, and many 
 other things — though they are far from being beautiful, in a 
 certain sense — still, because they come in the course of 
 nattire, have a beauty in them, and they please the mind; 
 so that if a man should have a feeling and a deeper insight 
 with respect to the things which are produced in the universe, 
 there is hardly anything which comes in the course of nature 
 which will not seem to him to be in a manner disposed so as 
 to give him pleasure. 
 
 "But it is when his strain passes to directly 
 moral subjects," declares Arnold, "that his deli- 
 cacy and sweetness lend to it the greatest charm." 
 
 The other teachers of antiquity whom Arnold 
 would raise to a level with modern Christian poets 
 at their best are Simonides, Pindar, ^schylus, 
 and Sophocles, who lived in a time when it seemed 
 to him that "poetry made the noblest, the most 
 4 
 
50 Matthew Arnold j 
 
 successful effort she has ever made as the priestess i 
 of the imaginative reason, of the element by which | 
 the modern spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly ] 
 to live." \ 
 
 Matthew Arnold knew and loved the poets of j 
 ancient Greece in an intimate and first-hand way, I 
 and his tribute to their greatness is not a conven- | 
 tional or artificial one; he felt their power and j 
 nobility. On the other hand, his associations with ' 
 Wordsworth were singularly close and friendly, j 
 and merit a passing notice before proceeding to 
 further discussion. 
 
 The Arnolds became immediate neighbors of 
 Wordsworth when Matthew was a lad of ten, and 
 his holidays were spent in the beautiful lake coun- 
 try surrounding Rydal. Rugby, their other home, 
 lies in a flat and uninteresting district, and the 
 good Doctor was glad to retire for health and 
 inspiration to the mountain slopes of West- j 
 moreland and Cumberland. "I could still rave 'i 
 about Rydal," he says in one of his letters to an 
 old college friend; "^'t was a period of five weeks of 
 almost awful happiness, absolutely without a cloud; 
 and we all enjoyed it, I think, equally — mother, 
 father, and fry. Our intercourse with the Words- 
 worths was one of the brightest spots of all; 
 nothing could exceed their friendliness — and my 
 almost daily walks with him were things not to 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 51 
 
 be forgotten. . . . We were thinking of buying or 
 renting a place at Grasmere or Rydal, to spend 
 our holidays at constantly; for not only are the 
 Wordsworths and the scenery a very great attrac- 
 tion, but as I had the chapel at Rydal all the time 
 of our last visit I got acquainted with the poorer 
 people*besides." 
 
 Matthew was the largest of the "fry," and was 
 drinking in everything, no doubt. Next New 
 Year's Day the father writes: "New Year's Day 
 is in this part of the country regarded as a great 
 festival, and we have had prayers this morning 
 even in our village chapel at Rydal. May God 
 bless us in all our doings in the year that is now 
 begun, and make us increase more and more in 
 the knowledge and love of himself and of his Son; 
 that it may be blessed to us, whether we live to see 
 the end of it on earth or no. " This was the simple 
 Christian assurance of Thomas Arnold, shared 
 by his friend William Wordsworth, that the life 
 on earth is continued in heaven. How far his 
 son was to travel from this "illusion" it is my 
 purpose in this chapter to show. 
 
 Before the year was out the Arnolds were 
 established in a house of their own which became 
 associated with their name. "The Wordsworths' 
 friendship, for so I may call it," writes Dr. 
 Arnold to a pupil, *'is certainly one of the greatest 
 
52 Matthew Arnold 
 
 delights of Fox How — the name of my place — and 
 their kindness in arranging everything in our j 
 absence has been very great." And references j 
 recur later in his letters testifying to his intimate ] 
 friendship with the great poet. j 
 
 The son, then, grew up among Lake School j 
 associations, and essentially in sympathy with ! 
 the great exponent of its principles. In political { 
 matters, it is true, the somewhat ironbound con- I 
 servatism of Wordsworth was directly opposed J 
 to the liberalism of the two Arnolds. But their ; 
 ideals of conduct and of life were in harmony; 
 they respected and revered the pure and sacred 
 traditions of the English home and family. 
 
 When Wordsworth died, in 1850, Matthew 
 Arnold seized the occasion to write "Memorial I 
 Verses," in which he (^ontrasted the dead poet | 
 with Goethe and Byron, not to his disadvantage. | 
 "Time," he declared, "may restore us in his ^ 
 course the sage mind of Goethe and the force ! 
 of Byron; but where will a later Europe again find \ 
 the healing power of Wordsworth ?" Here is his j 
 appreciation: 
 
 And Wordsworth! — Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice T 
 For never has such soothing voice 
 Been to your shadowy world conveyed 
 Since erst, at mom, some wandering shade 
 Heard the clear song of Orpheus come 
 Through Hades, and the mournful gloom. 
 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 53 
 
 Wordsworth has gone from us — and ye, 
 Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! 
 He too upon a wintry clime 
 Had fallen — on this iron time 
 Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears. 
 He found us when the age had bound 
 Our sovls in its benumbing round ; 
 He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. 
 He laid us as we lay at birth 
 " On the cool flowery path of earth: 
 Smiles broke from us and we had ease; 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went o'er the sunlit fields again; 
 Oiu" foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
 Our youth returned ; for there was shed 
 On spirits that had long been dead, 
 Spirits dried up and closely fiirled. 
 The freshness of the early world. 
 
 These lines have received, and justly, great praise. 
 But are they an adequate appreciation ? Is Arnold 
 justified in eliminating the Christian element in 
 Wordsworth, and confining his vocabulary and ref- 
 erences entirely to what is pagan ? Surely W^ords- 
 worth's best work was distinctly Christian. Let us 
 compare this appreciation with that of the Quaker 
 poet: 
 
 WHITTIER ON WORDSWORTH 
 
 Dear friends who read the world aright — 
 And in its common forms discern 
 
 A beauty and a harmony 
 The many never learn! 
 
 Kindred in soul of him who found 
 In simple flower and leaf and stone 
 
 The impulse of the sweetest lays 
 Our Saxon tongue has known — 
 
54 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Accept this record of a life 
 
 As sweet and pure, as calm and good, 
 As a long day of blandest June 
 
 In green field and in wood. 
 
 How welcome to our ears, long pained 
 By strife of sect and party noise, 
 
 The brooklike murmur of his sons: 
 Of natiure's simple joys! 
 
 The violet by its mossy stone. 
 The primrose by the river's brim. 
 
 And chance-sown daffodil have found 
 Immortal life through him. 
 
 The sunrise on his breezy lake. 
 
 The rosy tints his sunset brought. 
 
 World-seen, are gladdening all the vales 
 And mountain peaks of thought. 
 
 Art builds on sand; the works of pride 
 And human passion change and fall; 
 
 But that which shares the life of God 
 With him surviveth all. 
 
 A close comparison of these studies will, I think, 
 reveal the fact that Whittier gives us more of the 
 atmosphere of Wordsworth than does Arnold — 
 leaving questions of poetical excellence apart. 
 Arnold recognizes in the poet a physician of the 
 soul who for the time being made life more 
 worth living; one who brought back the Greek 
 delight in the outer world and the forms of leaf 
 and flower; who made the fields sunlit again. But 
 is there not in this appreciation the defect noted 
 by Arnold's own father — the mere artistic 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 55 
 
 attitude toward the world ? Surely Words- 
 worth's message was not simply a lullaby which 
 soothes a fretful child and makes him smile and 
 forget. Did he shirk the darker problems of 
 life and give no answer to its questions — merely 
 "putting these things by" ? 
 
 Wojrdsworth, according to Whittier, is enjoyed 
 by the favored few who read the world aright; 
 and this final word is characteristic of his whole 
 outlook as distinguished from Arnold's; he read 
 the world as it ought to be read by all who 
 know and feel the truth. The Quaker poet claims 
 for Wordsworth's teaching an essential rightness 
 and final truth. Arnold's tribute is more aesthetic 
 or artistic; it is fanciful and literary. It refers us 
 to the song of Orpheus and the life of ancient 
 Greece — to the "freshness of the earlier world." 
 Whittier asserts far more than Arnold; he dwells 
 on the final harmony which Wordsworth revealed 
 not only in his poetry but in his life. This was a 
 gift to the world, conferred upon it not by a mere 
 artist but by a believer and a devotee who shared 
 in God's life. Whittier ends his tribute with a 
 reference to the personality of God and the pres- 
 ence in the world of the divine life. Wordsworth 
 gave us, he asserts, not an anodyne, but spiritual 
 food. 
 
 The lovers of Wordsworth find him at his best 
 
56 Matthew Arnold 
 
 in his "Intimations of Immortality from Recollec- 
 tions of Childhood," the loftiest strain the poet ever 
 uttered. Here we have the "full, the perfect 
 Wordsworth, . . . informed and chastened by an 
 intense sense of human conduct, of reverence and 
 almost of humbleness, displayed in the utmost 
 poetic felicity." When Wordsworth spoke of 
 finding strength 
 
 In the soothing thoughts that spring 
 
 Out of human suffering, 
 
 In the faith that looks through death, 
 
 he was not using mere phrases for the purposes of 
 artistic effect; he spoke as a believer. He consid- 
 ered, and rightly, that the hope of immortality 
 was the sheet anchor of our faith. The sixth 
 book of his "Excursion" describes a typical village 
 pastor who ministers faithfully to his jflock : 
 
 Exalting tender themes, by just degrees 
 
 To lofty raised ; and to the highest, last ; 
 
 The head and mighty paramount of truths — 
 
 Immortal life in never-fading worlds, 
 
 For mortal creatures, conquered and secured. 
 
 To Arnold, Wordsworth seemed often inspired 
 in the most direct way. "Nature herself seems," 
 he remarks in his essay on Wordsworth, "to take 
 the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with 
 her own bare, sheer, penetrating power. This 
 arises from two causes: from the profound sin- 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 57 
 
 cereness with which Wordsworth feels his subject, 
 and also from the profoundly sincere and natural 
 character of his subject itself." And yet he had 
 but a qualified admiration for the great Ode, as 
 "not wholly free from something declamatory," 
 this poem which Professor Saintsbury, in a passage 
 just quoted, terms the expression of "the full and 
 perfect Wordsworth." It seemed to Arnold to be 
 based on an "illusion," the illusion of immor- 
 tality. A few words on illusions. 
 
 It is astonishing how frequently this word 
 "illusion" recurs in modern French ethical discus- 
 sion, becoming, indeed, a kind of key\vord. As 
 interpreted by a certain school of thinkers, with 
 whom Arnold was more or less in sympathy, the 
 universe is material and eternal — the great solid 
 fact. This material world throws off from it 
 human beings who possess the wonderful power 
 of contemplating it; but they pass away like the 
 morning vapor. The only permanent thing these 
 minds can do is to help other minds, present 
 and to come, to contemplate the universe in the 
 most lucid and serviceable way. On what 
 principle ? On the principle of getting most hap- 
 piness or satisfaction out of it. What kind of 
 happiness or satisfaction ? The old Epicurean 
 happiness of sense pleasures, as refined and pro- 
 longed as possible; or the old Stoic satisfaction 
 
58 Matthew Arnold 
 
 of will-worship, the satisfaction of having real- 
 ized ourselves. 
 
 Listen to one French poet speaking of another 
 — the gifted Gautier: "A noble poet is dead. ' 
 Regrets ? But what then is the death of a man ] 
 but the vanishing of one of our dreams ? Men, ,1 
 whom we believe real, are but the triste opacity de | 
 leurs spectres futurs. But the poet, beyond his 
 vain physical existence, lives for us a high, im- 
 perishable life. The poet is a solemn agitation of 
 words; the death of a poet purifies our fiction of 
 nn. 
 
 This means that human personality is inferior 
 and subsidiary to the general ideas or utterances 
 to which it gives birth and expression; that person- 
 alities are mere bubbles, so to speak, on the waters j 
 of time. It means that this physical existence \ 
 is mere vanity and emptiness, an emanation of { 
 matter, and that its supremely useful result is to | 
 formulate ideas for the benefit of future ages, j 
 The horizon is the horizon of the world; the only 
 theater of action and of interest is the stage of the : 
 v/orld. 
 
 Arnold in his essay on Wordsworth, as we have ■ 
 seen, makes use of this keyword, "illusion;" de- | 
 daring that Wordsworth's philosophy is illusion | 
 and unsound; that *' the ^intimations' of the famous 
 Ode, those corner stones of the supposed philo- ] 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 59 
 
 sophic system of Wordsworth, . . . have no 
 real solidity." And yet, in the same essay, 
 when comparing him with Theophile Gautier, he 
 declares that Wordsworth surpasses the French- 
 man because he deals with life so powerfully. 
 Could Wordsworth have dealt powerfully with 
 life if his doctrine had been illusory .? Is this a 
 tenable theory ? Is it not rank heresy — the belief 
 that truth can be reared on falsehood ? Ex 
 falso falsum; ex vero verum. 
 
 Arnold has no use for revivals, or for the plat- 
 form and street-preacher's appeal. In the preface 
 to his "Culture and Anarchy" he talks somewhat 
 superciliously of "earnest young men conceiving 
 of salvation in the old Puritan fashion, and flinging 
 themselves ardently upon it in the old, false ways 
 of this fashion, which we know so well, and such 
 as Mr. Hammond, the American revivalist, has 
 lately at Mr. Spurgeon's Tabernacle been refresh- 
 ing our memory with." Compare this attitude 
 of his with that of Wordsworth, writing seventy 
 years before. When Wordsworth, whose "Peter 
 Bell" was composed as early as 1798, introduced 
 into the story a scene in a Methodist chapel he 
 was writing as an outsider and a literary man 
 whose object was to interpret life. Methodist 
 preachers were then the butt of ordinary men 
 of letters, even of churchmen like Sydney 
 
6o Matthew Arnold 
 
 Smith. So late as 1808 the witty canon contrib- 
 uted an article to the Edinburo;h Review in which 1 
 he spoke of Methodist itinerants as vermin to be \ 
 "caught, killed, and cracked" — in a superfine, ^ 
 literary fashion, of course — by the patent pumps ; 
 of Edinburgh Reviewers! We ought then to t 
 admire the moral courage shown by Wordsworth \ 
 in depicting Peter Bell as he did — a man to whose j 
 wounded spirit a Methodist preacher brought \ 
 healing: j 
 
 Calm is the well-deserving brute, 1 
 
 His peace has no offense betrayed ; ^ 
 
 But now, while down that slope he wends, | 
 
 A voice to Peter's ear ascends, ■ ] 
 
 » Resounding from the woody glade: ' 
 
 The voice, though clamorous as a horn | 
 
 Reechoed by a native rock, i 
 
 Comes from that tabernacle — List ! ■ 
 
 Within, a fervent Methodist ' 
 
 Is preaching to his flock! 
 
 The appeal to his better nature, and the offer j 
 
 of salvation, proved too much for Peter, who \ 
 
 melted into tears — i 
 
 i 
 
 Sweet tears of hope and tenderness! ' 
 And fast they fell, a plenteous shov/er! 
 
 His nerves, his sinews seemed to melt; 
 
 Through all his iron frame was felt i 
 
 A gentle, a relaxing power! ! 
 
 In the prefatory note attached to the 18 18 I 
 
 edition of the poem occurs this passage: "The ^ 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 6i 
 
 worship of the Methodists or Ranters is often 
 heard during the stillness of the summer evening 
 in the country, with affecting accompaniments 
 of rural beauty. In both the psalmody and the 
 voice of the preacher there is, not infrequently, 
 much solemnity likely to impress the feelings of 
 the rudest character under favorable circum- 
 stances." 
 
 My object in quoting these passages is to show 
 that Wordsworth's world, to which he transports 
 us for comfort, happiness, and healing, is no old 
 pagan world, haunted by nymphs and satyrs, and 
 studded with mystic shrines, but a world hallowed 
 by Christian worship and echoing the Christian 
 message. These were the words of the preacher 
 which struck conviction to Peter's heart: 
 
 "Repent! repent!" he cries aloud, 
 
 "While yet ye may find mercy; — strive 
 
 To love the Lord with all yotir might ; 
 
 Turn to Him, seek Him day and night, 
 And save your soul alive! " 
 
 Wordsworth accepted Methodism in its entirety 
 as a beneficent influence, while allowing for the 
 deficiencies that accompany all popular move- 
 ments; he did not register his inconsistency as 
 Matthew Arnold did, by honoring Wesley and 
 despising Wesley's life's work. 
 
 We know that Coleridge had a profound 
 admiration for the character of Wesley, and sug- 
 
62 Matthew Arnold 
 
 gested to Southey the advisability of undertaking 
 the biography. Deep, indeed, ought to be the 
 gratitude of Methodists to Robert Southey for the 
 service he rendered to the cause of truth in giving 
 John Wesley his proper place in the world's 
 estimation. When all deductions are made from 
 its excellences, Southey's " Life of Wesley " re- 
 mains, to use the term applied to it by a recent 
 Methodist biographer, a "beautiful" book. 
 
 Through his father, Southey, and the Words- 
 worths Arnold inherited a high respect for 
 Wesley; but he is careful to limit his admiration 
 to Wesley the English Churchman. **The fruitful 
 men of English Puritanism and Nonconformity," 
 he remarks in the preface to his "Culture and 
 Anarchy," "were trained within the pale of the 
 Establishment — Milton, Baxter, Wesley." For the 
 gospel message of Wesley and his followers he has 
 scant respect; witness what he says in the preface 
 to "God and the Bible": 
 
 "I heard Mr. Moody preach to one of his vast 
 audiences on a topic eternally attractive — salvation 
 by Jesus Christ. Mr. Moody's account was exactly 
 the old (Methodist) story, to which I have often 
 adverted, of the contract in the Council of the 
 Trinity. Justice puts in her claim, said Mr. 
 Moody, for the punishment of guilty mankind; 
 God admits it. Jesus intercedes, undertakes 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 63 
 
 to bear their punishment, and signs an undertak- 
 ing to that effect. Thousands of years pass; 
 Jesus is on the cross on Calvary. Justice appears, 
 and presents to him his signed undertaking. Jesus 
 accepts it, bows his head, and expires. Christian 
 salvation consists in the undoubted belief in the 
 transaction here described, and in the hearty 
 acceptance of the release offered by it. 
 
 "Never let us deny to this story power and 
 pathos, or treat with hostility ideas which have 
 entered so deep into the life of Christendom. 
 But the story is not true; it never really happened. 
 These personages never did meet together, and 
 speak and act in the manner related. The 
 personages in the Christian heaven and their 
 conversations are no more matter of fact than 
 the personages of the Greek Olympus and their 
 
 conversations. " 
 
 Notice the unfair logical step which Arnold 
 takes in this rehearsal. He treats a mere personi- 
 fication, Justice, as a supposed real person, 
 accepted as such by Mr. Moody and his fellow 
 Christians, and then banishes God, Jesus Christ, 
 and the personified Justice to the limbo of shadows 
 as all equally unreal. "Salvation by Jesus Christ, 
 therefore," continues he, "// it has any reality, 
 must be placed somewhere else than in a hearty 
 consent to Mr. Moody's ( ?) story. " 
 
i 
 
 64 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Writing to his mother at the close of 186 1, when 
 the Mason and Slidell case had strained matters 
 almost to the breaking point between Britain and 
 the United States, Arnold shows how little he is in 
 sympathy with Evangelicals in either country: 
 "Every one I see is very warlike. I myself think 
 that it has become indispensable to give the 
 Americans a moral lesson, and fervently hope it 
 will be given them; but I am still inclined to think 
 that they will take their lesson without war. 
 However, people keep saying they won't. The 
 most remarkable thing is that that feeling of sym- i 
 pathy with them (based very much on the ground \ 
 of their common radicalness, dissentingness, and ^^ 
 general mixture of self-assertion and narrowness) 
 which I thought our middle classes entertained I 
 seems to be so much weaker than was to be ;| 
 expected. I always thought it was this sympathy, ! 
 and not cotton, that kept our government from ; 
 resenting their insolences, for I don't imagme I 
 the feeling of kinship with them exists at all among ; 
 the higher classes; after immediate blood relation- i 
 ship the relationship of the Soul is the only ] 
 important thing, and this one has far more with 
 the French, Italians, or Germans than with the I 
 Americans." ' i\ 
 
 A passage like this, revealing his aloofness from I 
 middle-class "meetinghouse" people, goes far to '\ 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 65 
 
 explain his lack of success as the apostle of a new 
 creed, reducing God to an impersonal tendency 
 that makes for righteousness, A sentence like 
 the following puts the whole matter in a nutshell: 
 "Those who, like Christian philosophers in general, 
 begin by admitting that of the constitution of God 
 we know nothing, and who add, even, that ' we 
 are utterly powerless to conceive or comprehend 
 the idea of an infinite Being, Almighty, All- 
 knowing, Omnipotent, and Eternal, of whose 
 inscrutable purpose the material universe is the 
 unexplained manifestation,' but then proceed 
 calmly to affirm such a Being as positively as if he 
 were a man they were acquainted with in the next 
 street, talk idly." And yet such a conviction 
 of the nearness of God to every one of us, of 
 the immediacy of his dealings with human hearts, 
 of his pleading with us like a father, lies at the root 
 of all experimental Christianity. It is the hall- 
 mark of a living hymnology, the essence of revival 
 fervor. In his "Peter Bell" Wordsworth con- 
 fesses that this attitude of conviction is harmonious 
 with all nature, and that the sudden realization 
 of God's power and mercy as revealed in the gospel 
 story can change a ruffian into a man clothed and 
 in his right mind. But to Matthew Arnold all 
 this is phantasmagorial, fallacious, misleading. 
 Yet surely out of truth comes truth. These 
 
 5 
 
66 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Christian beliefs and sympathies inspired Words- 
 worth to write the noblest of his odes, possibly the 
 noblest ode in the language. Can we, in estimating 
 Wordsworth aright, calmly place these convictions 
 aside, and coolly rank the poet with an ancient 
 Greek pagan ? Arnold's odd attempts at theology 
 led him into strange inconsistencies and asser- 
 tions of impossibilities, which merit some rough 
 handling. 
 
 In his lines " To a Gypsy Child by the Seashore" 
 Arnold reveals how profoundly he was impressed 
 by Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality; the poem, 
 indeed, is not fully intelligible unless we are 
 familiar with the earlier lyric. A better title for 
 the Ode, perhaps, would be, not "Intimations of 
 Immortality irovn. Recollections of Childhood," but 
 "Intimations of Eternality from Recollections of 
 Childhood.'* Immortality merely implies conti- 
 nuity of the life begun here; the survival of the 
 personality after the death of the body. But 
 Wordsworth's "Immortality" deals with a pro- 
 longation of life backward; a prenatal existence. 
 He argues that the soul comes down from heaven as 
 well as returns thither; that the child, when born 
 into the world, gradually forgets the glory of a 
 world which he has just left. The young human 
 soul comes " not in entire forgetfulness, and not in 
 utter nakedness," but like a "trailing cloud of 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 67 
 
 glory from God." It comes with a benediction 
 for humanity, with an innate attraction toward 
 goodness and purity. These passages in the Ode 
 remind the reader of the words of our Saviour: 
 "Except ye be converted, and become as Httle 
 children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven. " Its opening words are : 
 
 There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
 The earth and every common sight 
 To me did seem 
 Appareled in celestial light ; 
 
 which means that childhood was a time when the 
 poet felt close to heaven. This introductory pas- 
 sage breathes the fragrance of the exquisitely 
 pure domestic life of England at the close of the 
 eighteenth century. It is not Wordsworth alone 
 w^ho speaks in this strain. To John Henry New- 
 man, trained in a thoroughly Puritan English 
 home, the people around him in his early child- 
 hood appeared as angels, not earthborn but visit- 
 ants from heaven. "I thought life might be a 
 dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, 
 my fellow angels by a playful device concealing 
 themselves from me, and deceiving me with the 
 semblance of a material world." We are so apt 
 to think of the Puritan theology of a hundred 
 years ago — those Puritans who, according to 
 Matthew Arnold, "knew not God," that is, his 
 
68 Matthew Arnold 
 
 God of sweetness and light — as terrorizing chil- 
 dren with the horrors of hell, that we forget the 
 obverse side of the shield, the happy heaven that 
 was ever made present to them. Sin was then 
 recognized as so repulsive in its every aspect that 
 children in well-ordered households lived in 
 an atmosphere steeped in duty and purity. 
 Their later intercourse with the world blunted 
 this simple, exquisite, spontaneous delight in the 
 world of phenomena which God looked upon at 
 creation and declared very good. 
 
 Wordsworth did not teach this theory of a pre- 
 natal existence as a doctrine; indeed, he expressly 
 rejected so definite an attitude. But he regarded 
 the theory as harmonious with the best Christian 
 aspirations and beliefs, and full of suggestive com- 
 fort. In any case, the child world he depicted is 
 the child world of the Christian home. 
 
 Arnold dallies with the prenatal conception in 
 his lines "To a Gypsy Child." Unlike Words- 
 worth's happy lad, who is so full of the light 
 and the life whence it flows that he is rapturous 
 with joy and shouts with delight, this little gypsy is 
 pensive and moody; "clouds of doom are massed 
 round that slight brow:" 
 
 Down the pale cheek long lines of shadow slope, 
 
 Which years, and curious thought, and suffering give. 
 
 — Thou hast foreknown the vanity of hope, 
 Foreseen thy harvest, yet proceed'st to live. 
 
Arnold and Wordsworth 69 
 
 meek anticipant of that sure pain 
 
 Whose sureness gray-haired scholars hardly learn! 
 What wonder shall time breed, to swell thy strain? 
 
 What heavens, what earth, what suns shalt thou discern ? 
 
 Ere the long night, whose stillness brooks no star, 
 Match that funereal aspect with her pall, 
 
 1 think thou wilt have fathomed life too far, 
 
 Have known too much — or else forgotten all. 
 
 The Guide of our dark steps a triple veil 
 
 Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps; 
 Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale 
 
 Of grief, and eased us with a thousand sleeps. 
 
 Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use. 
 
 Not daily labor's dull, Lethean spring, 
 Oblivion in lost angels can infuse 
 
 Of the soiled glory, and the trailing wing. 
 
 The poet addresses her as if she were an angel 
 born again into an alien planet; one destined to 
 have some stray gleams of sunshine in her passage 
 through this stormy world, and to win some few 
 prizes in the struggle of life; but yet likely to be 
 blinded by the " black sunshine," to lose her 
 pristine grace, and to relearn but little of the 
 Wisdom that was formerly her birthright. Earthly 
 life would finally prove not worth living: 
 
 Once, ere thy day go down, thou shalt discern, 
 Oh once, ere night, in thy success, thy chain ! 
 
 Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return, 
 And wear this majesty of grief again. 
 
 This is Wordsworthianism conceived in a con- 
 trary way: childhood as a period of pensive sad- 
 
70 Matthew Arnold 
 
 ness; the experiences of life, not as furnishing us 
 with "a faith that looks through death," but with 
 materials to wrap our brows in gloom and make us 
 feel that all is vanity and vexation of spirit. A 
 natural result of eliminating from religious faith 
 and belief the bright hopes and assurances which 
 are woven into our historic creeds, and are essen- 
 tial to our spiritual well-being! 
 
\ 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MIRROR AND THE CUP 
 
 Poets in every age have been fond of insuring 
 dramatic intensity by throwing their own senti- 
 ments into some historic personage, who becomes 
 their mouthpiece. The perspective thus obtained 
 allows their audiences to see truth more clearly, 
 away from the disguising and distorting mists 
 and shadows of the present. People are thus led, 
 unconsciously, to assent to opinions which they 
 feel to be true before they grasp the immediate 
 practical import, which might have predisposed 
 their wills unfavorably. Arnold has made use of 
 this device. His historic mouthpiece, as might 
 be expected, is a Greek, a keen, lucid thinker, who 
 knows the value of the phrase "Meden agan" 
 ("Nothing too much"). The hymn of life which 
 Empedocles sings in the drama "Empedocles on 
 Etna" to a harp accompaniment is of intense 
 psychological interest to us, as embodying the 
 poet's own musings and findings on the problem 
 of existence. We must, of course, allow for the 
 "grain of salt,'' the quantum of dramatic simu- 
 lation; but substantially the reader must feel that 
 the voice that speaks in these stanzas is the voice 
 of Matthew Arnold. 
 
 71 
 
72 Matthew Arnold 
 
 The counterpart in Browning is "Rabbi Ben 
 Ezra," the closing message of the Hebrew teacher, 
 full of sweet sententiousness. I have called the 
 
 i 
 
 Greek teacher's message the Mirror, this being ( 
 the simile with which the poem opens: | 
 
 The outspread world to span, 
 
 A cord the gods first slung, 
 And then the soul of man 
 
 There, like a mirror, hung, 
 And bade the winds through space impel the gusty toy. 
 
 Hither and thither spins 
 
 The wind-borne mirroring soul, 
 
 A thousand glimpses wins, 
 
 And never sees a whole ; 
 
 Looks once, and drives elsewhere, and leaves its last em- I 
 
 ploy. I 
 
 It is a Greek simile, which carries us back to : 
 
 Plato and Platonism. The broad-browed philoso- j 
 
 pher states that man has many ways of creating • 
 
 things, none quicker than that of turning a mirror ! 
 
 round and round — you could soon have the sun, | 
 
 and the heaven, and the earth, and yourself, and I 
 
 the animals and plants in the mirror. But the i 
 
 result is evanescence and illusion — all such crea- ) 
 
 tion is vanity and vexation of spirit. | 
 
 To Browning's lyric I have given the name the 
 Cup, as embodying his final conception of life. 
 
 Here we have not the Greek lucidity, but the ^ 
 
 Hebrew warmth and energy; existence, not merely > 
 
 in terms of vision, which Aristotle and othef j 
 
The Mirror and the Cup 73 
 
 Greek thinkers so greatly overestimated as a gate- 
 way of truth, but in terms of the whole being. 
 The typical man is conceived as in sympathetic 
 association with his fellows, finally sitting down 
 with them at the Master's feast: 
 
 Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 
 
 That metaphor! and feel 
 WlTy time spins fast, why passive lies our clay, — 
 
 Thou, to whom fools propotmd, 
 
 When the wine makes its round, 
 *' Since life fleets, all is change ; the Past gone, seize to-day! " 
 
 Fool! All that is, at all, 
 
 Lasts ever, past recall; 
 Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 
 
 What entered into thee, 
 
 That was, is, and shall be: 
 Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. 
 
 He fixed thee 'mid this dance 
 
 Of plastic circumstance. 
 This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest: 
 
 Machinery just meant 
 
 To give thy soul its bent. 
 Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. 
 
 What though the earlier grooves, 
 
 Which ran the laughing loves 
 Around thy base, no longer pause and press? 
 
 What though, about thy rim, 
 
 Skull-things in order grim 
 Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? 
 
 Look not thou down but up ! 
 
 To uses of a cup, 
 The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal. 
 
 The new wine's foaming flow. 
 
 The Master's lips aglow! 
 Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou 
 with earth's wheel? 
 
74 Matthew Arnold 
 
 The metaphor of the Potter and the Wheel was 
 particularly distasteful to Arnold, and he rejects 
 its applicability to a sweet and reasonable system 
 of religious thought like Christianity. In his 
 treatise on "Saint Paul and Protestantism" he pro- 
 tests against its use by the great apostle. "It might 
 seem," he remarks, "as if the word purpose lured 
 him [Paul] on into speculative mazes, and involved 
 him at last in an embarrassment from which he 
 impatiently tore himself by the harsh and unedi- 
 fying image of the clay and the potter. But 
 this is not so. . . . He was led into difficulty by 
 the tendency which we have already noticed as 
 making his real imperfection both as a thinker 
 and as a writer — the tendency to Judaize." 
 Arnold goes on to say that Calvinists have 
 made out of this analogy the fundamental idea 
 of their theology; which with Paul was a mere 
 addition, extraneous to the essentials of his 
 teaching, and brought in for mere rhetorical 
 purposes. "It is as if Newton had intro- 
 duced into his exposition of the law of gravita- 
 tion an incidental statement, perhaps erroneous, 
 about light or colors; and we were then to make 
 this statement the head and front of Newton's 
 law." Arnold calls it a stock theological figure 
 found in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Apocrypha. 
 
 All of which argument is an illogical and 
 
The Mirror and the Cup 75 
 
 impossible attempt to show that we can separate 
 the higher teaching of Saint Paul from that which 
 Arnold chooses to term " Judaizing." "Take 
 Paul's truly essential idea," he exclaims: "'We 
 are buried with Christ through baptism into death, 
 that like as he was raised up from the dead by 
 the glory of the Father, even so we also shall walk 
 in newness of life/ Did Jeremiah say that ? 
 Is anyone the author of it except Paul ? Then 
 there should Calvinism have looked for Paul's 
 secret, and not in the commonplace about the 
 potter and the vessels of wrath." 
 
 That the metaphor will bear lofty spiritualizing, 
 suited to our modern needs and aspirations, is 
 abundantly shown by Browning's elaboration of it 
 in his "Rabbi Ben Ezra." A vessel in the hand of 
 the workman, being fashioned for further untold 
 service, differs in potency and value from a mere 
 brittle mirror passive in the hold of inanimate 
 forces. Personality is strengthened, not weakened, 
 or effaced, by coming under the influence of higher 
 personality, to be fashioned and used; but person- 
 ality made the tool of the inanimate means the 
 greater harnessed to the less, and so degraded. 
 Consequently Browning's analogy is full of the 
 expansiveness of wondrous possibilities; Arnold's 
 is contracted by the chill breath of resignation to 
 the inevitable. 
 
76 Matthew Arnold 
 
 The meters in which the two poems are thrown, 
 as the best vehicle for the emotional condition of 
 poet and reader in sympathy, are to a certain 
 degree remarkably similar, each containing four 
 trimeters and a closing hexameter; a "rolling," 
 surging close at once final in its effect and 
 yet preparatory. The impression resembles 
 that made by a long wave breaking upon the 
 sand, and lingering; it retreats only to make 
 way for a series of shorter and less resonant 
 waves. 
 
 But notice the fuller music of Browning's 
 stanza. The syllables in Browning's six lines 
 run 6, 6, 10, 6, 6, 12; while those in Arnold's five 
 lines run 6, 6, 6, 6, 12. In Browning's stanza 
 the preliminary expansion in the third line prepares 
 for and increases the expansive value of the final 
 sixth line, giving a swinging, happy movement to 
 the whole stanza : 
 
 Thoughts hardly to be packed 
 
 Into a narrow act, 
 Fancies that broke through language and escaped ; 
 
 All I could never be, 
 
 All men ignored in me. 
 This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
 shaped. 
 
 In Arnold's stanza there is a repression char- 
 acteristic of the poet's whole treatment, and 
 more consistent with the particular theme he 
 
The Mirror and the Cup 77 
 
 treats. Empedocles is about to take his own 
 life: 
 
 The weary man, the banished citizen, 
 Whose banishment was not his greatest ill, 
 Whose weariness no energy could reach. 
 And for whose hurt courage was not the cure — 
 What should he do with life and living more ? 
 
 The four short lines of six syllables in the hymn 
 stanza, succeeding one another without break, 
 have a chilling effect; and, when the rolling hex- 
 ameter follows, it swells rather in contrast with 
 the previous trimeters than as a resultant expan- 
 sion. The actual effect is therefore not really 
 expansive, but semicynical: 
 
 Is this, Pausanias, so? 
 
 And can our souls not strive, 
 But with the winds must go. 
 
 And hurry where they drive ? 
 Is fate indeed so strong, man's strength indeed so poor? 
 
 Browning's stanza, on the contrary, makes the 
 two trimeters subordinate in each case to the 
 pentameter and to the hexameter, in an upward 
 movement, continuous and progressive: 
 
 Therefore I summon age 
 
 To grant youth's heritage — 
 Life's struggle having so far reached its term: 
 
 Thence shall I pass, approved 
 
 A man, for aye removed 
 From the developed brute ; a God though in the germ. 
 
 Browning's stanza is a natural vehicle for his 
 optimistic hymn of hopefulness and trust; Arnold's 
 
78 Matthew Arnold 
 
 for an emotion less hopeful, tinged with disap- 
 pointment, distrustful of the future, anxious 
 regarding "the something after death." The 
 intellectual light burns clear; it searches the 
 heart like modern X-rays; warmth there is none 
 in the organic whole. The luckless sage, before 
 he takes the fatal plunge into the glowing crater, 
 envies the mountain its heat and fire. We feel 
 that we have here the uttered aspirations of a 
 "soul which may perish from cold." Of course, 
 the utterance is not Arnold's, any more than Ham- 
 let's soliloquy, " To be or not to be," is Shake- 
 speare's final utterance on life; but it is Arnold as 
 a merciless criticof the illusions of life, Arnold the 
 moral physician diagnosing mankind and having 
 no panacea to offer. In the interpretation of 
 the individuality which he chose in this present 
 case, and in the form of interpretation which he 
 saw fit to put upon the individuality — for Em- 
 pedocles is a somewhat misty personage histor- 
 ically — the force and excellence of his genius is 
 made apparent. Apart from the dramatic con- 
 ditions, however, his limitations appear; for, the 
 Empedocles diagnosis over, we ask. What had 
 Arnold himself to offer to make life worth living .? 
 Was he much better off than the old Greek .? 
 
 Arnold is never weary of dwelling upon the 
 limitations of the Hebraic conception of life, and 
 
The Mirror and the Cup 79 
 
 recommending an Hellenic course of treatment 
 for the modern Pharisee, unfortunately born 
 Wesleyan or Baptist, and fond of the tub of Dis- 
 sent. The dark complexion of Browning, the 
 rounded contour of his face, the glowing eyes, 
 the curved and full nose, have led many to suspect 
 Jewish^ancestry; but an investigation of his ances- 
 tral stock yields no evidence whatever of such 
 descent. Yet, in his translation of himself into 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra, the Hebrew sage of a thousand 
 years ago, he has approved the felicity of his choice 
 of a medium. Throughout the poem there is all the 
 glow of Hebrew moral emotion; man treated as 
 the friend of God, who has shepherded him and 
 will finally bring him into the fold, the eternal 
 home of warmth and love. 
 
 Arnold's was a different nature. The square 
 face, the thin lips, the straight, narrow nose, sug- 
 gest nicety and precision and restraint, rather 
 than full-blooded delight in life. He resembles 
 the wise physician, anxious above all things to hold 
 no false hopes that may misguide the patient and 
 wreck his career; reticent, self-contained, keen in 
 vision. 
 
 And yet both strove to interpret at once the 
 Hebrew and the Greek genius. We have 
 "Balaustion's Adventures" from the pen of 
 Browning, and Arnold's prose treatises on Isaiah 
 
8o Matthew Arnold 
 
 and the Psalms. But it was rather as an admiring I 
 critic than as one wholly in sympathy, even for 
 the time being, with Hebrew ideals that Arnold | 
 wrote concerning biblical events and characters; | 
 hence he chose a prose medium in their handling, i 
 Browning's *'A Death in the Desert" has an i 
 element of complete poetic absorption in the treat- j 
 ment, which demands a poetic instead of a prose ; 
 form. 
 
 No investigation of a literary kind would be : 
 likely to produce more valuable results than a | 
 comparison between Browning and Arnold in j 
 respect to their temperaments, methods, and j 
 principles of life. Happily, in regard to their I 
 manner of life, they were alike; though geniuses, ' 
 they were well-bred, honorable, and high-minded j 
 gentlemen; as Arnold said of his brother-in-law, ! 
 W. E. Forster/' integer vitae, scelerisque purus.'* \ 
 
 Both Rabbi Ben Ezra and Empedocles are 
 historic names used for poetic interpretation \ 
 rather than historic personages. The real Em- ] 
 pedocles, so far as we can speak at all about him, i 
 was a very different man from the poet's creation. | 
 Instead of advocating the calm of resignation, as ; 
 the teaching which ought to be enforced by the \ 
 wise man who, having seen life, has been dis- j 
 illusioned, he appears to have been somewhat ' 
 of a popular hero with a craving for distinction, j 
 
The Mirror and the Cup 8i 
 
 That he lost his life through an act of vainglorious 
 bravado is a fable, but it shoves how he has been 
 estimated. The following are the facts of his 
 career: 
 
 Born in the island of Sicily in the fifth century 
 B. C, in the flourishing town of Agrigentum, then 
 a forrnidable rival of Syracuse, he espoused, though 
 himself of noble birth, the cause of the democratic 
 party. Like all early philosophers, he spent 
 much of his time in traveling, and seems to have 
 learned in the East something of magic and medi- 
 cine. He gained a wonderful reputation as a 
 prophet and miracle-worker, and assumed a 
 special dress — priestly garments, a golden girdle, 
 the Delphic crown. Wherever he went he was ac- 
 companied by a train of attendants, and men con- 
 sidered him divine. His death being wrapped 
 in mystery, fables grew up to account for it. 
 According to one story, he was drawn up to heaven, 
 like Elijah, immediately after some sacred celebra- 
 tion. The more popular version pictured him as- 
 having flung himself into the crater of Mount 
 Etna in order that he might pass for a god; but 
 one of his brazen sandals being thrown up 
 revealed the secret. 
 
 His teaching has been summed up thus by 
 George Henry Lewes: He recognized two prin- 
 ciples. Love, the formative principle, and Hate, 
 
82 Matthew Arnold 
 
 the destructive. Strife is the parent of all things; 
 but it in no way disturbs the abode of the gods, 
 and operates only on the theater of the world. 
 For, inasmuch as Man is a fallen and perverted 
 god, doomed to wander on the face of the earth, 
 sky-aspiring but sense-clouded, so may Hate be 
 only perverted Love struggling through space. 
 His conception of God, the One, was that of a 
 sphere in the bosom of the harmony fixed in calm 
 rest, gladly rejoicing. This quiescent sphere, 
 which is Love, exists above and around the moral 
 world. 
 
 We find in the whole portraiture of the man no 
 touch of that world melancholy, that lack of 
 blitheness, which characterizes the Empedocles 
 of Arnold's hymn. Indeed, Arnold's conception 
 is hardly consistent with itself. The calm lucidity 
 of the hymn yields no hint of that pretentiousness 
 in dress and social ambition which appear later 
 in the drama, when, in a passion of disgust with 
 humanity, the sage throws away the golden circlet, 
 the purple robe, the laurel bough: 
 
 This envious, miserable age I 
 
 I am weary of it. 
 
 — Lie there, ye ensigns 
 
 Of my unloved preeminence 
 
 In an age like this! 
 
 Among a people of children, 
 
 Who thronged me in their cities, 
 
 Who worshiped me in their houses, 
 
The Mirror and the Cup S^ 
 
 And asked, not wisdom, 
 
 But drugs to charm with, 
 
 But spells to mutter — 
 
 All the fool's armory of magic! Lie there, 
 
 My golden circlet, 
 
 My purple robe! 
 
 The Empedocles of the hymn, as Arnold 
 outlines him, is a calm, impartial diagnoser 
 of humanity such as Goethe was. Man's 
 intellect critically inspecting humanity — what 
 does the combination give us ? The gods are 
 removed and apart; the sun shines, and fortune 
 smiles, upon the just and the unjust; what is 
 immortal and invisible may be set aside and 
 neglected because of its uncertainty; only the 
 intellect and society remain. Let us regulate 
 our desires and adjust our efforts to our pos- 
 sibilities : 
 
 For those who know 
 Themselves, who wisely take 
 Their way through life, and bow 
 To what they cannot break, 
 Why should I say that life need yield but moderate 
 bliss? 
 
 In Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra" we have a 
 personal God acting immediately on the human 
 soul; these are the two facts of existence. The 
 intellect is seemingly neglected, being lumped with 
 the bodily powers, and the perplexed world of 
 nature and society is relegated to a secondary 
 
84 Matthew Arnold i 
 
 j 
 
 place; 'tis merely Time's wheel which runs back j 
 or stops — Potter and clay endure: 
 
 i 
 
 He fixed thee 'mid this dance i 
 
 Of plastic circumstance, 
 
 This Present, thou, forsooth, would fain arrest: i 
 
 Machinery jtist meant .; 
 
 To give thy soul its bent, 1 
 
 Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed. | 
 
 There is outlined here, as ideal, no pyramid of j 
 life, complete and stately and statesmanlike, such j 
 as Goethe dreamed of and Arnold hankered after. ^ 
 "The desire," wrote the German Lavater, "to ' 
 raise the pja'amid of my existence — the base of ; 
 which is already laid — as high as possible in the 1 
 air absorbs every other desire and scarcely ever j 
 quits me." Immortality thus ceases to be an ] 
 immediate issue; it is neglected as remote, with 
 few bearings on present conduct; in the words of 
 the hymn : 
 
 Is it so small a thing 
 
 To have enjoyed the sun — 
 
 That we must feign a bliss 
 Of doubtful future date, 
 And, while we dream on this, 
 Lose all our present state. 
 And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose? 
 
 Here Arnold's philosophic self is speaking — we 
 feel it to be so. It is Goethe's teaching — he who 
 was so cold toward these aspirations after eternal 
 personal life. "Empedocles on Etna" is in many 
 
The Mirror and the Cup S^ 
 
 respects a puzzle. Classic in treatment, and 
 containing several passages which are often quoted 
 as typically Grecian, yet the general feeling 
 throughout is modern. This is especially true 
 of the hymn, where the topics taken up by the 
 sage are such as appeal to our immediate interests. 
 But it is certainly not a suitable preliminary argu- 
 ment to an act of suicide, as dramatically it 
 ought to be. The advice given by the lyrist 
 would rather lead to wholly different conduct 
 on the speaker's part — to the calm of resignation. 
 Suicide, we feel, should naturally be dubbed by 
 him rank cowardice, worthy of "one of the world's 
 poor, routed leavings, who had failed under the 
 heat of this life's death"; unworthy of the 
 wise adviser who declares in the closing stanza: 
 
 I say : Fear not ! Life still 
 
 Leaves human effort scope. 
 But, since life teems with ill, 
 Nurse no extravagant hope ; 
 Because thou must not dream, thou need'st not then 
 despair! 
 
 In the opening stanzas we have emphasized 
 the huge machinery of the world, and the helpless- 
 ness of man to do more than appreciate the vast- 
 ness. Man is portrayed as a mere pendant, 
 who is permitted to peep at the spectacle of 
 "eternal process moving on," but has nothing 
 to dowith carrying out the arrangements. We 
 
-J 
 
 I 
 
 86 Matthew Arnold | 
 
 remember Pascal's profound saying in regard j 
 to the satisfaction afforded by prayer — that man . 
 thereby gets strengthened by feeHng himself to \ 
 be a cause of things: "Why has God given man | 
 prayer, and bidden him use it ? — To leave him \ 
 the dignity of causality. " I 
 
 In the third stanza v^e find emphasized the | 
 deficiency so present in Goethe's constitution, and • 
 appearing in a less degree in Arnold's — the lack j 
 of the element of complete personal trust. The 
 elements do indeed baffle us, and play and sport ■ 
 with us, but the Power which controls them is ; 
 a loving personality, in sympathy with his crea- 
 tures. The idea of a supernatural Power so j 
 deficient in sympathy as to laugh at man's inabil- * 
 ity to solve the puzzle of existence is pagan and 1 
 early Hebrew, and may suit Arnold's philosophic \ 
 portraiture; but it is both unchristian and » 
 repulsive: 
 
 The gods laugh in their sleeve 
 
 To watch man doubt and fear, 
 Who knows not what to believe 
 Since he sees nothing clear, 
 And dares stamp nothing false where he finds nothing sure. 
 
 The next two stanzas are a Stoic protest against 
 a philosophy of necessitarianism or determinism. | 
 Empedocles asserts that, even if it be granted I 
 that freedom of the will is dubious and difficult I 
 
 "9. 
 
 of proof, yet it is better to assume it as a basis 
 
The Mirror and the Cup 87 
 
 of action. Otherwise man's personality is weak- 
 ened and degraded: 
 
 And can onr souls not strive, 
 But with the winds must go, 
 And hiury where they drive ? 
 Is fate indeed so strong, man's strength indeed so poor? 
 
 The speaker refuses to give a definite answer to 
 the pllilosophic question; he will confine himself 
 to conduct: 
 
 I will not judge. That man, 
 
 Howbeit, I judge as lost 
 Whose mind allows a plan 
 
 Which would degrade it most; 
 And he treats doubt the best who tries to see least ill. 
 
 Then follows a piece of Arnold's favorite teach- 
 ing, which he preached in season and out of sea- 
 son. The unfortunate thing about miracles, 
 he insists, is that they do not happen; moreover, 
 they distract men's minds from practical and ex- 
 perimental religion. Arnold was very impatient 
 with those who, while conceding on their own 
 part, and demanding from others, a complete be- 
 lief in all the miracles of the Bible, yet swiftly 
 and uncompromisingly reject all other miracles 
 whatsoever. He regarded it as an attitude diffi- 
 cult of rational defense, and shutting out good 
 orthodox Christians from wholesome sympathy 
 with religious peoples of other communions. 
 Why impose such arbitrary limits on miraculous 
 
88 Matthew Arnold 
 
 agency, he continued, if it be indeed conceded 
 as an historical reality ? In some respects these 
 sixth and following stanzas of the hymn may 
 be regarded as of prime importance in the poem, 
 as calling upon the modern Christian to put him- 
 self in the place of a good Greek who had no 
 use for thaumaturgy and Oriental marvels: 
 
 Ask not the latest news of the last miracle, 
 Ask not what days and nights 
 
 In trance Pantheia lay, 
 But ask how thou such sights 
 May'st see without dismay; 
 Ask what most helps when known, thou son of Anchitus! 
 
 This teaching was later expanded into a novel 
 by the poet's niece, Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose 
 "Robert Elsmere" was a nine days' wonder, and 
 enjoyed an extraordinary popularity, some fifteen 
 years ago. Its burden is, " Miracles do not 
 happen." 
 
 To-day a cautious and well-informed science 
 makes no such peremptory statements regarding 
 miracles. A recent commentator on Arnold — 
 Mr. W. H. Dawson — quotes from the scientific 
 veteran, Alfred Russell Wallace, writing so recently 
 as March, 1903, in that very critical journal, 
 The Fortnightly Review: ** Although these 
 [recent] discoveries have, of course, no bearing 
 upon the special theological dogmas of the Chris- 
 
The Mirror and the Cup 89 
 
 tian or of any other religion, they do tend to show 
 that our position in the material universe is special 
 and probably unique, and that it is such as to 
 lend support to the view, held by many great 
 thinkers and writers of to-day, that the supreme 
 end and purpose of this vast universe was the 
 production and development of the living soul 
 in the perishable body of man." Mr. Dawson 
 also quotes from the Cambridge poet and philoso- 
 pher, F. W. H. Myers, Henry Sidgwick's friend, 
 who died recently: "In consequence of the new 
 evidence all reasonable men a century hence 
 will believe the Resurrection of Christ, whereas, 
 in default of the new evidence, no reasonable men 
 a century hence would have believed it. " Arnold's 
 "Nature" and "principles of verification," indeed, 
 belong to a bygone era, and in these matters we 
 can leave him in company with his Greek mouth- 
 piece. 
 
 At stanza eleven we have the "double self" 
 described, that striking development of our mod- 
 ern civilization: 
 
 And we feel, day and night, 
 
 The burden of ourselves — 
 Well, then, the wiser wight 
 
 In his own bosom delves. 
 And asks what ails him so, and gets what cure he can. 
 
 Keen and poignant as have been the agonies 
 of this self-examination, yet the result has been 
 
QO Matthew Arnold 
 
 much earnest moral work. The recommenda- 
 tion comes in the following stanza: 
 
 The sophist sneers, "Fool, take 
 
 Thy pleasure, right or wrong." 
 The pious wail, "Forsake 
 
 A world these sophists throng." 
 Be neither saint- nor sophist-led, but be a man! 
 
 In stanza thirteen we have Emerson's teaching 
 that the truth preached by all the sects is but 
 the same as that possessed by every man: 
 
 These hundred doctors try- 
 To preach thee to their school. 
 
 "We have the truth!" they cry; 
 And yet their oracle, 
 Trumpet it as they will, is but the same as thine. 
 
 And it is followed in stanza fourteen by a 
 metrical exposition of Goethe's favorite theme — 
 "the harmony of a universally experienced 
 nature": 
 
 Once read thy own breast right 
 
 And thou hast done with fears ; 
 Man gets no other light. 
 
 Search he a thousand years. 
 Sink in thyself! there ask what ails thee, at that shrine! 
 
 Three stanzas further on the singer touches 
 upon the striking fallacy of the present era, the 
 identification of pain with evil — a fallacy which 
 springs out of that vaguest of phrases, yet one 
 most potent in political influence, the "rights of 
 
The Mirror and the Cup 91 
 
 man." Here it takes the form of the inherent 
 right of a man to enjoy happiness in this life : 
 
 Could'st thou, Pausanias, learn 
 
 How deep a faiilt is this ; 
 Could'st thou but once discern 
 
 Thou hast no right to bliss ; 
 No title from the gods to welfare and repose. 
 
 Man is apt to forget that he is not completely 
 his own, self-determined and self-regulated: 
 
 To tunes we did not call, our being must keep chime. 
 
 If a man would obtain even moderate bliss, and 
 he is justified in seeking it, he must discipline 
 himself painfully: 
 
 We would have health, and yet 
 Still use our bodies ill ; 
 Bafflers of our own prayers, from youth to life's last 
 scene. 
 
 We would have inAvard peace. 
 
 We will not look within ; 
 We would have misery cease, 
 
 Yet will not cease from sin ; 
 We want all pleasant ends, but will use no harsh means. 
 
 And good people grow peevish when troubles 
 come upon them, as if the powers above specially 
 shielded the pious from harm; but 
 
 Streams will not curb their pride 
 The just man not to entomb, 
 Nor lightnings go aside 
 
 To give his virtues room; 
 Nor is that wind less rough which blows a good man's 
 barge. 
 
92 Matthew Arnold 
 
 At stanza fifty-five the poet bluntly refuses 
 to accept the argument that the existence of wishes 
 and concepts proves the reality of these concepts 
 — the Cartesian method of proving the existence 
 of God; of that perfection which we, who are 
 finite and limited, can conceive clearly and dis- 
 tinctly, but cannot comprehend or attain to: 
 
 Fools! That in man's brief term 
 
 He cannot all things view, 
 Affords no ground to affirm 
 That there are gods who do ; 
 Nor does being weary prove that he has where to rest. 
 
 Here Arnold's limited and arbitrary conception 
 of Nature stands in the way of a just appreciation 
 of verification through the needs and claims of 
 personality. In the words of his doubting friend, 
 Arthur Hugh Clough: 
 
 And yet, when all is thought and said, 
 The heart still overrules the head; 
 Still what we hope we must believe. 
 And what is given us receive; 
 
 Must still believe, for still we hope 
 That in a world of larger scope 
 What here is faithfully begun 
 Will be completed, not -undone. 
 
 In stanzas sixty and sixty-one the miserable 
 delusion is ridiculed of passing the best part of 
 our lives in the pursuit of selfish pleasures and 
 then, when appetite fails and pleasures pall, of 
 
The Mirror and the Cup 93 
 
 offering the dregs of ourselves as a libation to the 
 gods — the fallacy of "young sinner, old saint '\- 
 
 We pause ; we hush our heart, 
 
 And thus address the gods: 
 "The world hath failed to impart 
 
 The joy our youth forebodes, 
 Failed to fill up the void whiclj in oiir breasts we bear. 
 
 "Changeftd till now, we still 
 
 Looked on to something new; 
 Let us, with changeless will, 
 
 Henceforth look on to you. 
 To find with you the joy we in vain here require!" 
 Fools! . . . 
 
 In two of the stanzas immediately succeeding 
 we seem to hear Arnold enunciate his own cheer- 
 ful, amiable, man-of-the-world creed: 
 
 And yet, for those who know 
 
 Themselves, who wisely take 
 Their way through life, and bow 
 
 To what they cannot break. 
 Why should I say that life need yield but moderate bliss? 
 
 • • • • • ••• 
 
 Is it so small a thing 
 
 To have enjoyed the sun, 
 To have lived light in the spring. 
 
 To have loved, to have thought, to have done; 
 To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling 
 foes? 
 
 In stanza sixty-six, which follows, there is a 
 Goethe-like warning against cherishing roseate 
 hopes of future bliss in a remote heaven, by which 
 we are apt to 
 
 Lose all our pleasant state. 
 And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose. 
 
94 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Then follows a short idyllic picture of the village 
 churl, as a person to be envied in his simple 
 happiness. The closing stanza, the seventieth, 
 gives all the comfort that can be given by a dis- 
 appointed man to those asking for advice: 
 
 Nurse no extravagant hope ; 
 Because thou must not dream, thou need'st not then 
 despair! 
 
 "Empedocles on Etna" was one of Arnold's 
 earlier poems, published anonymously under the 
 name "A"; and, although it gave the title to 
 the volume, he omitted it in the first collection 
 of his poems under his own name. His reasons 
 were based on dissatisfaction with its lack of 
 dramatic movement. Browning, however, highly 
 esteemed the piece, and induced him to insert it 
 in a later issue of poems. The author expressly 
 disclaims, in his Letters, an intention to identify 
 himself with the beliefs and opinions enunciated 
 in such creations as "Empedocles" and "Ober- 
 mann," where he speaks through a mask: ^*The 
 Contemporary Review, the Christian World, and 
 other similar periodicals fix on the speeches of 
 Empedocles and Obermann, and calmly say, 
 dropping all mention of the real speakers, *Mr. 
 Arnold here professes his Pantheism,' or, 'Mr. 
 Arnold here disowns Christianity.' However, 
 the religious world is in so unsettled a state that 
 
The Mirror and the Cup 95 
 
 this sort of thing does not do the harm it would 
 have done two years ago." The pity is, they 
 contain far less that is painful to orthodoxy than 
 the theological utterances to be found in his prose 
 treatises; while as an intellectual cold water 
 "shower bath" they are distinctly more stimu- 
 latino;. 
 
 The poem, however, which must be regarded as 
 a direct negative to the serene, expansive optimism 
 of Browning's "Rabbi Ben Ezra" is Arnold's 
 "Growing Old," where the poet surely succeeds 
 in giving an ordinary reader a fit of "the shivers": 
 
 What is it to grow old ? 
 
 Is it to lose the glory of the form, 
 
 The luster of the eye? 
 
 Is it for beauty to forgo her wreath? 
 
 — Yes, but not^this alone. 
 
 Is it to feel our strength — 
 
 Not our bloom only, but our strength — decay? 
 
 Is it to feel each limb 
 
 Grow stiff er, every function less exact. 
 
 Each nerve more loosely strung? 
 
 • • • • • • • 
 
 It is to spend long days 
 
 And not once feel that we were ever young; 
 
 It is to add, immured 
 
 In the hot prison of the present, month 
 
 To month with weary pain. 
 
 « • • • • • • 
 
 It is — last stage of all — 
 
 When we are frozen up within, and quite 
 
 The phantom of ourselves. 
 
 To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost, 
 
 Which blamed the living man. 
 
g6 Matthew Arnold 
 
 This is in truth the poetry of disillusion car- 
 ried to its limits; and a very excellent tonic to the 
 enthusiastic glow of "Rabbi Ben Ezra," if a tonic 
 be needed. Dramatically, it would agree better 
 with the mood of Empedocles, who, when his 
 song was ended, plunged into the crater; thus 
 shattering his outworn and dingy mirror — the 
 "gusty toy." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 ARNOLD'S SYMPATHY WITH THE BRUTE 
 
 CREATION 
 
 The relation of animals to man is treated 
 very sweetly and sympathetically in the poems 
 of Matthew Arnold; and one fault I have to find 
 in the otherwise excellent pocket edition of 
 his works published in the Golden Treasury 
 series is that it fails to give a corner to these 
 animal poems. The Christian world in the past 
 few centuries has grown much more tender to 
 dumb creatures, and is beginning to recognize 
 duties and responsibilities undreamed of before. 
 Dumb creatures can teach us many deep lessons 
 in life. We find this genial social current at its 
 strongest and best in Arnold. 
 
 There is but little in the Scriptures to draw us 
 close to animals, with the single exception of the 
 lamb. And even the loving scriptural use of the 
 lamb, in analogy, is largely due to the fact that 
 it was used sacrificially. All throughout the life 
 of the chosen people, indeed, the sheep was cher- 
 ished and valued, for it represented to them not 
 only helplessness, but also meekness, patience, 
 and submission. It is a mistake, however, to 
 suppose that the goat or kid was despised as com- 
 7 97 
 
98 Matthew Arnold 
 
 pared with the sheep or lamb. In Prov. 30. 31, 
 the he-goat is referred to as one who is stately 
 in march, for he was in the habit of leading the 
 combined flock; and so he became typical of the 
 princes of the people: "There be three things 
 which go well, yea, four are comely in going: a 
 lion which is strongest among beasts, and turneth 
 not away for any; a greyhound; an he-goat also; 
 and a king, against whom there is no rising up." 
 And so in Zechariah: **Mine anger was kindled 
 against the shepherds, and I punished the goats;" 
 that is, the leaders. And Isaiah speaks of the 
 he-goats of the earth, the kings of the nations, 
 rising up from their thrones. 
 
 We must be on our guard, then, against miscon- 
 ceiving the language of our Lord in Matt. 25. 32, 
 where he speaks of the blessed being separated 
 from the accursed as the sheep are separated 
 from the goats (or rather kids): "And before 
 him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall 
 separate them one from another, as a shepherd 
 divideth his sheep from the goats; and he shall 
 set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on 
 the left." This passage ought not to be inter- 
 preted too absolutely. We know that a meta- 
 phor does not go on all fours, and here the analogy 
 should be limited to the act of separation — famil- 
 iar to those living in a pastoral country like Pales- 
 
Sympathy with Brute Creation 99 
 
 tine, where goats and sheep herd together; but 
 even while awaiting the fiUing of the trough 
 they instinctively range themselves apart. Our 
 Lord's language does not imply that the kids are 
 either less valuable or less mild and tractable than 
 the lambs. And yet, with that tendency to 
 antijthesis which at certain periods of history has 
 been excessive, the goat has been degraded, and 
 his name despised, as if he were a type of the 
 sinner. Did Matthew Arnold in his beautiful son- 
 net "The Good Shepherd with the Kid" read 
 later views into the symbolism ? Was the kid 
 meant really to represent the child of a sinner ? 
 Possibly the symbolism of early Christianity 
 had already come to this antithesis by the time 
 of Tertullian, at the close of the second century. 
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE KID 
 
 He saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save! 
 So rang Tertullian's sentence, on the side 
 Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried, 
 
 "Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave, 
 Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave. " 
 So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed, 
 The infant Church! of love she felt the tide 
 
 Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave. 
 
 And then she smiled; and in the Catacombs, 
 With eye suffused but heart inspired true, 
 
 On those walls subterranean, where she hid 
 
 Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs, 
 
 She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew — 
 
 And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid. 
 
 « nrr 
 
100 Matthew Arnold 
 
 To turn to other animals mentioned in the 
 Scriptures. The Oriental dog to this day is 
 pretty much of a cur. If we enter Asia from the 
 West, we find Mohammedan intolerance express- 
 ing itself in terms of this useful animal. "Dog of 
 a Christian!" is the Moslem's favorite epithet. 
 And the dog in Mohammedan towns and cities 
 is a scavenger, unmannerly and unclean. If we 
 approach Asia from the East, matters are still not 
 satisfactory. The Japanese dog is an ungainly, 
 half-wolfish animal, and the other breeds which 
 have been introduced are allowed to mul- 
 tiply to an unseemly degree; for the Buddhist 
 dislike of the shedding of blood prevents a proper 
 supervision and weeding out of the worthless 
 and unnecessary. In the Old Testament the 
 type of dog most frequently referred to — and 
 there are only about thirty cases of such refer- 
 ence — is the unclean pariah dog. The phrase 
 "dead dog'' should indeed be translated "pa- 
 riah dog." 
 
 In the New Testament a new note is struck in 
 Matt. 15. 27, where the Syrophoenician woman 
 pleads for kinder treatment; "It is not meet," 
 remarked our Lord, "to take the children's bread, 
 and cast it to dogs." And she said, "Truth, Lord: 
 yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their 
 masters' table." Here we seem to touch Roman 
 
Sympathy with Brute Creation ioi 
 
 life and habits, and a friendlier relationship with 
 the canine tribe — the beginnings of the modern 
 attitude. 
 
 With the teaching of Augustine came an 
 unfriendly attitude toward all kinds of animals, 
 however harmless. The w^ay to heaven was sup- 
 posed to be in the path of sense-subjection, with 
 the animal in mankind trampled under foot. 
 Saint Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the School- 
 men, while allowing a soul to animals, declared 
 that the sensitive soul in the lower animals is 
 corruptible; while in man, since it is the same in 
 substance as the rational soul, it is incorruptible. 
 The kindly attitude toward the dumb creation 
 of the saintly Francis d'Assisi is one of the bright 
 spots in the social history of the Dark Ages. On 
 one occasion, as he was on a preaching tour, the 
 birds flocked around him as if to bid him 
 welcome. "Brother birds," was his salutation, 
 "you ought to praise and love your Creator very 
 much. He has given you feathers for clothing, 
 wings for flying, and all that is needful for you. He 
 has made you the noblest of all his creatures; he 
 permits you to live in the pure air; you have 
 neither to sow nor to reap, and yet he takes care 
 of you." Whereat the birds arched their necks, 
 spread out their wings, opened their beaks, as if to 
 thank him, while he went up and down among 
 
102 Matthew Arnold 
 
 them and stroked them with the border of his 
 tunic, at length sending them away with his bless- 
 ing. On another occasion, as he preached in the 
 open air, the swallows chirped so loudly as to 
 drown his voice. " 'Tis my turn to speak, sister 
 swallows," he expostulated; "be quiet, and wait 
 till I have finished." 
 
 This friendly tone is absent from the pages of 
 "The Imitation of Christ," with all its beauty; for 
 example, "If thy heart were right with God, all 
 creatures would be for thee a mirror of life, and a 
 volume of holy doctrines." This is sermonizing, 
 not the language of the heart. Saint Francis was 
 a living example of Coleridge's teaching: 
 
 He prayeth best who loveth best 
 All things both great and small. 
 
 Coleridge does not mean that kindness is an 
 equivalent for prayer, but that the prayerful 
 spirit is essentially the loving spirit. Pharisaic piety 
 is not really prayerful. Arnold held Saint Francis 
 in the highest honor, as a figure of magical power 
 and charm, esteeming his century, the thirteenth, 
 as "the most interesting in the history of Chris- 
 tianity after its primitive age, more interesting 
 than even the century of the Reformation"; and 
 the interest, he adds, centers chiefly in Saint 
 Francis. He it was who brought religion home 
 
Sympathy with Brute Creation 103 
 
 to the hearts of the people, and "founded the 
 most popular body of ministers of religion that 
 has ever existed in the church." 
 
 Saint Francis, finding prose too tame a me- 
 dium for the outpouring of his spirit, threw his 
 meditations into poetry, and has left us a "Can- 
 ticle of the Creatures," which Arnold translates 
 for us in his essay entitled " Pagan and Mediae- 
 val Religious Sentiment." Artless in language 
 and irregular in rhythm, this canticle was intended 
 for popular use: 
 
 O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong 
 praise, glory, honor, and all blessing! 
 
 Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures; and 
 especially our brother the sun, who brings us the day, and 
 who brings us the light; fair is he, and shining with a very 
 great splendor: O Lord, he signifies to us thee! 
 
 Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the 
 stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven. 
 
 Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air 
 and cloud, calms and all weather, by the which thou 
 upholdest in life all creatures. 
 
 Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serv- 
 iceable unto us, and humble and precious and clean. 
 
 Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom 
 thou givest us light in the darkness; and he is bright, and 
 pleasant, and very mighty, and strong. 
 
 Praised be my Lord for our mother the Earth, the which 
 doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth forth divers fruits, 
 and flowers of many colors, and grass. 
 
 Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another 
 for his love's sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation; 
 blessed are they who peaceably shall endure, for thou, O 
 most highest, shalt give them a crown! 
 
104 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Praised be my Lord for our sister the death of the body, 
 from whom no man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in 
 mortal sin! Blessed are they who are found walking by thy 
 most holy will, for the second death shall have no power to do 
 them harm. 
 
 Praise ye, and bless ye the Lord, and give thanks unto 
 him, and serve him with great humility. 
 
 Comparing this hymn with another hymn he 
 had rendered from the Greek of the Sicilian 
 Theocritus, Arnold remarks how the first admits 
 just as much of the world as is pleasure-giving; 
 while the second "admits the whole world, rough 
 and smooth, painful and pleasure-loving, all 
 alike but all transfigured by the power of a 
 spiritual emotion, all brought under a law of 
 supersensual love, having its seat in the soul. 
 It can thus even say, Traised be my Lord for our 
 stster the death of the body.^ 
 
 How unconventional was Saint Francis! The 
 prudish monks of his time would not allow even 
 the females of animals to enter the precincts of 
 their monasteries; but one day when at Siena he 
 asked for some turtledoves, and thus addressed 
 them: "Little sister turtledoves, you are simple, 
 innocent, and chaste; why did you let yourselves 
 be caught ? I shall save you from death, and 
 have nests made for you, so that you may bring 
 forth young, and multiply according to the 
 commandment of our Creator. " Again when, at 
 
Sympathy with Brute Creation 105 
 
 Greccio, they brought him a young hare which 
 had been caught in a trap, " Come to me, brother 
 leveret," he said; and when the poor thing, being 
 set free, approached him, he took it up, caressed 
 it, and then laid it down that it might run off; 
 but it returned to him agkin and again, so that he 
 had to take it himself to the woods. 
 
 We notice at this period a general growing 
 attachment to dogs. A proverb comes to us from 
 the time of Saint Bernard, "Qz^z me amat, amet 
 et canem meum,^^ which old Heywood, before 
 Shakespeare's time, translated, "Love me, love 
 my dog." 
 
 The kinship had grown close by the sixteenth 
 century. The story is told of Luther that when 
 his dog Hans was angrily growling he soothed 
 him with the words, "Don't growl, little Hans; 
 you too will go to heaven and have a little golden 
 tail to wag." We see, therefore, that dogs had 
 now names and individuality; a fact which comes 
 out in Shakespeare's "Lear" pathetically: 
 
 The little dogs and all, 
 Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me. 
 
 So complains the afflicted king. 
 
 A century later Newton and his dog Diamond 
 come on the scene. The household pet had 
 chanced to overturn a candle on his master's 
 table, whereby some important papers were re- 
 
io6 Matthew Arnold 
 
 duced to ashes. "Ah! Diamond, Diamond, thou 
 little knowest the damage thou hast done," was all 
 the amiable sage could say in reproof. 
 
 Descartes had carried his dualism of mind and 
 matter to such an extreme that, in the face of 
 common sense, he denied real feelings to animals, 
 and declared they were mere automata. Leibnitz, 
 who was four years old when Descartes died, and 
 the contemporary of Newton, refused to accept 
 such a doctrine; but while he claimed for animals 
 the immaterial principle of sensitive life, which 
 has a continuity apart from matter, yet he held 
 that we must not confound with other forms, 
 or souls, minds or rational souls which are of a 
 higher rank, and resemble little gods, made in the 
 image of God, and having within them some ray 
 of the divine enlightenment. For this reason 
 God governs minds as a father looks after his 
 children; while, on the other hand, he deals with 
 other substances as an engineer works with his 
 machine. 
 
 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, both 
 in Protestant and Catholic countries, animals 
 were but little esteemed. The doctrine of innate 
 human depravity leaves but meager possibilities 
 for poor brutes. A high sacramentarian of the 
 time of Queen Anne actually taught that infants 
 are mortal like the brutes until they are baptized ! 
 
Sympathy with Brute Creation 107 
 
 The great metaphysician Samuel Clarke, of 
 Norwich, to whom Bishop Butler owed so much, 
 taking a higher view of human nature than this 
 ultra-Augustinian, much preferred to allow the 
 possibility of immortality to the brute creation 
 rather than to deny to man an immortal soul at 
 birth. Joseph Butler was of the same mind, 
 greatly to the surprise and disgust of many good 
 people; and John Wesley, with a largeness of 
 mind that does not surprise close readers of his 
 Journal, did not disagree with the good bishop. 
 The time had gone by when a philosopher might 
 assert that he could not have discovered that 
 infants possessed souls, but for the later develop- 
 ment they showed as adults. This fallacy was 
 largely due to the old overemphasis of the 
 intellectual in man, of the purely discursive 
 reason. 
 
 It is in the poems and letters of Cowper, Gray, 
 and Burns that we first find animal friendships 
 made the theme of serious treatment. Burns 
 rises to his highest when he takes to his heart a 
 poor sheep like Mailie, or a dog like Luath, or a 
 nameless field mouse. Why, asks he, of the wee 
 mousie, whose little biggin he had unwittingly 
 demolished, why should you startle 
 
 At me, thy poor earthbom companion 
 And fellow mortal? 
 
io8 Matthew Arnold 
 
 And so dear was Mailie to his heart that we 
 feel that the Elegy, with its mock-heroics, would 
 never have been written had the poor sheep 
 really been cruelly killed before her time. The 
 fact is, Mailie was rescued in time by her kind 
 master and friend. 
 
 In the century which intervened between the 
 writing of Burns's "To a Field Mouse'* and Mat- 
 thew Arnold's "Geist's Grave" there is nothing 
 similar in literature of equal pathos, at least in 
 poetry. Perhaps Dr. Brown's immortal "Rab 
 and His Friends" should not be forgotten. The 
 tributes to canine fidelity in Scott and Words- 
 worth are not in the same category. Sir Wal- 
 ter's attachment to Maida was part of his life, 
 and he brings this close relationship between man 
 and beast into his "Guy Mannering," in his 
 sympathetic treatment of Dandie Dinmont and 
 the four eager terriers. But the treatment re- 
 mains objective, and does not enter into the 
 psychology of the relationship. 
 
 The pretty little dachshund Geist, one of 
 four canine pets who brought brightness into 
 the Arnold household, lived but four years with 
 them: 
 
 That loving heart, that patient soul, 
 
 Had they indeed no longer span, 
 To run their course, and reach their goal, 
 
 And read their homily to man? 
 
Sympathy with Brute Creation 109 
 
 That liquid, melancholy eye, 
 
 From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs 
 
 Seemed surging the Virgilian cry. 
 The sense of tears in mortal things. 
 
 Here the poet appears naturally to revert to the 
 classical concept, the eleos, which enters into 
 Virgil's pathetic ^^ Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem 
 morlalta fangunt/' 
 
 But while Butler, in searching for stable grounds 
 whereon to place the doctrine of immortality, 
 finds it impossible to rule out summarily the brute 
 creation, " which groaneth and travaileth in 
 pain together until now, waiting for the manifes- 
 tation of the sons of God," Arnold resignedly 
 accepts a common lot of annihilation with them : 
 
 That steadfast, mournful strain, consoled 
 
 By spirits gloriotisly gay. 
 And temper of heroic mold — 
 
 What, was four years their whole short day? 
 
 Yes, only four! — and not the course 
 
 Of all the centuries yet to come, 
 And not the infinite resource 
 
 Of Nature, with her countless sum 
 
 Of figures, with her fullness vast 
 
 Of new creation evermore, 
 Can ever quite repeat the past, 
 
 Or just thy little self restore. 
 
 Stern law of every mortal lot! 
 
 Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear, 
 And builds himself I know not what 
 
 Of second life I know not where. 
 
no Matthew Arnold 
 
 But thou, when struck thine hour to go, 
 
 On us, who stood despondent by, 
 A meek last glance of love didst throw, 
 
 And humbly lay thee down to die. 
 
 Surely it is a pity to use our love for unselfish 
 animal friends in order to point so despairing a 
 moral. Nelly Arnold's pet canary, Matthias, 
 has also received a memorial tribute from the 
 poet: 
 
 Poor Matthias! — Found him lying 
 Fall'n beneath his perch and dying? 
 
 — Songster thou of many a year, 
 Now thy mistress brings thee here, 
 Says it fits that I rehearse. 
 Tribute due to thee, a verse. 
 Meed for daily song of yore 
 • Silent now for evermore. 
 
 The poet remarks upon the greater aloofness 
 of the feathered tribe from man. We can be 
 joyful with the sportive antics of a dog or a cat, 
 we can soothe these pets when they are troubled, 
 stroke or pat them back into cheerfulness; but 
 
 Birds, companions more unknown, 
 Live beside us, but alone; 
 Finding not, do all they can, 
 Passage from their souls to man. 
 Kindness we bestow, and praise. 
 Laud their plumage, greet their lays; 
 Still, beneath their feathered breast. 
 Stirs a history unexpressed. 
 
Sympathy with Brute Creation hi 
 
 The poet's farewell to Matthias is a farewell of 
 resignation, in the mildly pathetic key that suits 
 the situation: 
 
 Fare thee well, companion dear! 
 Fare for ever well; nor fear, 
 Tiny though thou art, to stray- 
 Down the uncompanioned way! 
 We without thee, Httle friend, 
 Many years have not to spend; 
 What are left will hardly be 
 Better than we spent with thee. 
 
 Why was it that the publication of Matthew 
 Arnold's Letters, a few years ago, proved so pro- 
 found a disappointment ? They were eagerly 
 waited for, in the absence of autobiographical 
 or other matter. It is well known that he shrank 
 almost morbidly from publicity, and left in- 
 structions at his death that no biography should 
 be published. His letters are bright and human; 
 they tell us of his children and his pets; there was 
 Atossa, the favorite cat: 
 
 Cruel, but composed and bland, 
 Dumb, inscrutable and grand. 
 So Tiberius might have sat, 
 Had Tiberius been a cat. 
 
 He seems to have had a growing devotion to 
 flowers. But there are no signs in the letters 
 that he had sufficiently fathomed the depths 
 of human nature, interested himself sufficiently 
 in the social problems of the age, or learned 
 
112 Matthew Arnold i 
 
 the meaning of humanity and nature in so thorough j 
 a way as to justify his sweeping negations cov- | 
 ering the universe and the future. He rises ' 
 merely to a sufficient height to view the drama of j 
 history, and exclaim in a passion of disappoint- \ 
 ment, "O, the pity of it!" It seemed to Richard I 
 Holt Hutton that Arnold felt a subtle delight in i 
 the expression of that exquisite pathos of which I 
 he was undoubtedly a master; there is an evident \ 
 ultimate reaction in his moods from the cold \ 
 pessimism into which he drifts. He swings back \ 
 again into the warmer current of life and hope and j 
 trust. It would be well for his readers to make l 
 sure that this "moral shower-bath'* treatment is \ 
 followed in their case also by the same reactive j 
 glow. 
 
 ■:\ 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD AND MODERN SCIENCE 
 
 The question has often been asked, What 
 exactly was Arnold's attitude toward modern 
 science ? In his writings he professes to be keenly 
 scientific, but his treatment of things and his 
 general affiliations were always distinctly literary. 
 We do not associate him with painful and accurate 
 laboratory work; and his etymologies and general- 
 izations in the field of philological science are 
 neither founded on first-hand investigation nor 
 are they rigidly accurate. Oxford, also, is usually 
 credited with being almost mediseval in her phil- 
 osophic and scientific outlook. We remember 
 the pathetic exclamation of a puzzled Oxford don 
 who resented the influx of German methods into 
 the peaceful antiquity of the university on the Isis : 
 **I wish," he moaned, "that Jarman philosophy 
 and Jarman theology were all at the bottom of 
 the Jarman Ocean!" 
 
 And yet the fact remains that, whatever Ger- 
 man institutes have since accomplished, Oxford 
 was, a hundred years ago, the home and cradle 
 of modern geology. The father of geology 
 was William Smith, born in the county of Oxford. 
 
 8 113 
 
114 Matthew Arnold 
 
 In his practical duties as surveyor ana engineer 
 of canals and irrigation works Smith gathered 
 together valuable original material which he used 
 for the publication of maps, and these maps are 
 of great historic moment. His work was passed 
 on to an Oxford scholar, William Buckland, later 
 Dean of Westminster; a deanery, by the way, 
 which ranks in importance higher than many 
 English bishoprics. The dignity of science — real 
 science — v^as thus installed in an honored place in 
 the Anglican Church; one reason, certainly, why 
 Matthew Arnold was so proud of his church. 
 Buckland, making use of these maps, was able to 
 follow out Smith's indications, and to trace back 
 the history of the world's mutations. His work 
 was familiar to Thomas Arnold. Three years 
 before the latter came up as a freshman to Corpus 
 Christi College in Oxford, Buckland had been 
 appointed a fellow of the college, and in 1813 he 
 became University Professor of Geology. His 
 influence was great in thinking circles. He did 
 much to infuse a new scientific spirit into the uni- 
 versity, and at the same time to quiet the pertur- 
 bations of the timidly orthodox, who were afraid 
 of the effect of these scientific revelations on the 
 traditional Mosaic cosmogony, which they associ- 
 ated with absolute religious truth. Dr. William 
 Buckland was a consistent Christian, as well as a 
 
Modern Science 115 
 
 leader in science, and was not afraid of proclaim- 
 ino[ truths which revealed God's manner of work- 
 ing in his own universe. His methods fascinated 
 Thomas Arnold, who, as we learn from Justice 
 Coleridge, became one of his most earnest and 
 intelligent pupils, and was afterward known for 
 the skill and ease with which he made use of 
 geological facts in enforcing moral truths. 
 
 The friendship between Buckland and the 
 Arnolds continued throup;hout their lives. The 
 geologist served as a village pastor in Hampshire, 
 and then as a canon of Christ Church, before 
 he was appointed Dean of Westminster ; and 
 marriage ties strengthened the friendship between 
 the two families. 
 
 The friend and pupil of Buckland could not 
 write a poem like *'Empedocles on Etna" as 
 if he were a pure ancient Greek. It was morally 
 impossible. The modern attitude toward the 
 created world of to-day, as a phase in a long his- 
 tory of progress, is notable in the writings of both 
 Thomas and Matthew. Like the great Scotch- 
 man Thomas Chalmers, Buckland was appointed 
 lecturer by the Bridgewater trustees, and in 
 1836 appeared his treatise, which aimed to prove, 
 by the aids of science, "The Power, Wisdom, and 
 Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation.'' 
 When Baron Bunsen visited England two years 
 
ii6 Matthew Arnold 
 
 later he found Buckland "persecuted by bigots 
 for having asserted that among the fossils there 
 might be a preadamic species." 
 
 Readers of "In Memoriam" know how the 
 notion of a universe which had existed and pro- 
 duced grass, and vegetables, and creatures, for 
 countless ages before the advent of man, domi- 
 nated the thought of the poet Tennyson; and how 
 the expression of the thought puzzled many good 
 people who conceived it irreligious to think of a 
 world much over four thousand years old. Very 
 early in Matthew Arnold's life, history thus came 
 in a mystic preadamic form; and the conversa- 
 tions to which he listened at his father's table, 
 entered into by clergymen and dignitaries of the 
 church, accustomed him to conceive of a process 
 in creation working away back in the dim begin- 
 nings of time. This conception is present in his 
 poem "The Future": 
 
 Who can see the green earth any more 
 
 As she was by the sources of Time ? 
 
 Who imagines her fields as they lay 
 
 In the sunshine, unworn by the plow? 
 
 Who thinks as they thought, 
 
 The tribes who then roamed on her breast, 
 
 Her vigorous, primitive sons? 
 
 For geology, however, Matthew Arnold had 
 no special liking; the natural science which 
 attracted him most was botany. His passionate 
 
Modern Science 117 
 
 love of flowers appears in his letters, but is by 
 no means so evident in his poems; not so evident, 
 for instance, as in the poems of Tennyson, who was 
 always at home in the garden, among scented 
 lanes, and in the flower-strewn meadows. Per- 
 haps the most striking flower passage in Arnold 
 occjars in his "Thyrsis," when he addresses the 
 cuckoo: 
 
 Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? 
 Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on, 
 
 Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, 
 Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, 
 
 Sweet-william with his homely cottage-smell, 
 And stocks in fragrant blow; 
 Roses that down the alleys shine afar, 
 
 And open, jasmine-muffled lattices. 
 
 And groups under the dreaming garden-trees , 
 And the full moon, and the white evening star. 
 
 It was one of the poet's great objects in life to 
 teach youth to delight in the beauties of God's 
 earth as the Master delighted in them; he who 
 bade his disciples gaze upon the lilies of the field, 
 which neither toil nor spin, but whose glory 
 surpasses the raiment of princes. There was a 
 morbid teaching abroad which associated holiness 
 with an indiff'erence to the beauties of earth. A 
 good Mr. Cecil is quoted as having so expressed 
 himself: " I want to see no more sea, hills, valleys, 
 fields, abbeys, or castles. I feel vanity pervading 
 everything but eternity and its concerns, and per- 
 
ii8 Matthew Arnold 
 
 ceive these things to be suited to children." 
 Arnold was right in declaring that the Bible, 
 which he knew so well and quoted so often, teaches 
 no such ascetic attitude. 
 
 Some of his letters are delightfully full of flower 
 lore, revealing what accurate botanical knowl- 
 edge lay beneath his descriptions of nature in his 
 poems. Take, for instance, the closing passage of 
 a letter to his friend Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, 
 written from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, just 
 two years before his death: "The flowers and 
 trees are delightfully interesting. On a woody 
 knoll behind this cottage the undergrowth is 
 kalmia, which was all in flower when we came. 
 The Monotropa untflora (Indian pipe or corpse 
 plant, as they call it here — excellent names) is 
 under every tree, the Pyrola rotundifolia in masses. 
 Then we drive out through boggy ground, and 
 towering up everywhere are the great meadow 
 rue, beautifully elegant, the Helianthus giganteus 
 and the milkweed — this last {Asclepias) in several 
 varieties, and very effective. I believe it is an 
 American plant only, and so I think is the shrubby 
 cinquefoil, which covers waste ground, as the whin 
 does with us. . . . The trees, too, delight 
 me. I had no notion what maples really were, 
 thinking only of our pretty hedgerow shrub at 
 home; but they are, as, of course, you know, trees 
 
Modern Science 119 
 
 of the family of our sycamore, but more imposing 
 than our sycamore and more delicate. " 
 
 And again, in one of his letters to his mother, 
 he reveals this same passion — there are many such 
 passages : '* I find it very, very useful and inter- 
 esting to know the signification of names, and had 
 written to ask him (Professor Deutsch) whether 
 Jerusalem meant the Vision of peace' or *the 
 foundation of peace'; either meaning is beautiful, 
 but I wished for the first, as the more beautiful. 
 However, you will see what he says. I should have 
 written to you yesterday, but was taken out for 
 a walk by the little girls. Our white violets have 
 prospered. .• . . I know of but one clump of 
 blue violets near Harrow, and that is kept well 
 picked by village children. However, we found 
 one or two in it, to the little girls' great delight. " 
 
 His "Bacchanalia; or. The New Age" begins 
 with a nature touch of this kind: 
 
 The business of the day is done, 
 The last-left haymaker is gone. 
 And from the thyme upon the height, 
 And from the elder-blossom white 
 And pale dog-roses in the hedge, 
 And from the mint-plant in the sedge, 
 In puffs of balm the night air blows 
 The perfume which the day forgoes. 
 
 Suddenly the scene appears to be filled with a 
 procession of Maenads and Bacchantes, and ancient 
 
120 Matthew Arnold 
 
 
 Greece and her magic world are before the poet. 
 But all is a passing illusion, the figures vanish 
 and the voices are still: 
 
 Ah, so the quiet was! 
 So was the hush! 
 
 Then comes the New Age, with all its violence 
 and vigor: 
 
 Thundering and bursting 
 
 In torrents, in waves — 
 Caroling and shouting 
 
 Over tombs, amid graves — 
 See! on the cumbered plain 
 
 Clearing a stage, 
 Scattering the past about, 
 
 Comes the new age. 
 Bards make new poems, 
 
 Thinkers new schools, 
 ^ Statesmen new systems, 
 
 Critics new rules. 
 All things begin again; 
 
 Life is their prize ; 
 Earth with their deeds they fill, 
 
 Fill with their cries. 
 
 The singer calls upon the ideal poet to rise to 
 the opportunities spread before him, to mirror 
 forever the life that he sees and feels. Why is 
 he mute ? 
 
 Look, ah, what genius, 
 
 Art, science, wit! 
 Soldiers like Caesar, 
 
 Statesmen like Pitt! 
 Sculptors like Phidias, 
 
 Raphaels in shoals, 
 
Modern Science 121 
 
 Poets like Shakespeare — 
 
 Beautiful souls! 
 See on their glowing cheeks 
 
 Heavenly the flush! 
 
 Then again comes the chill disillusion: 
 
 Ah, so the silence was! 
 So was the hush! 
 
 It js noticeable that Arnold in these lines makes 
 no reference whatever to the triumphs of science, 
 nor mentions any great name in the scientific 
 world. After all, to him the most imposing 
 achievements of man, since the time of Newton 
 and Priestley — man's harnessing of the winds and 
 the waves — meant little more than Nuremberg 
 toys. He sought to dwell in the realm of the 
 Eternal. 
 
 But Arnold's realm of the Eternal rests on a 
 misconception of what the Eternal really is. The 
 Eternal is not that which a critic, sitting in judg- 
 ment upon, can term finally exquisite and satisfy- 
 ing to the aesthetic sense. There is as much of the 
 Eternal in a great, moving steamship — although 
 its mechanism and machinery may be antiquated 
 five years hence — as in Saint Peter's at Rome or in 
 a masterpiece of Raphael. The man who hves 
 the Christ life to-day in some repulsive slum of a 
 great, unlovely city may be closer to the Eternal 
 than Homer, whose poetry has charmed twenty-five 
 centuries of mankind. All human beings who 
 
122 Matthew Arnold 
 
 fulfill the destiny which God has allotted to them 
 are ambassadors of the Eternal; not the mere 
 fortunate few who, happening to possess a literary 
 or artistic gift, have produced masterpieces before 
 which criticism is disarmed. Christ came not to 
 judge the world, or as a supreme artist, but to 
 give the world more of the divine energy and life. 
 Whether this energy realizes itself in the evanes- 
 cent products of to-day, or the (comparatively) ,' 
 more enduring literary and artistic masterpieces j 
 of Greece, Italy, and England, the Eternal Glory, ' 
 the enduring Power of Love, is behind both, and , 
 informing both; the products themselves are on a I 
 secondary plane. The master worker in science i 
 and in law is worthy of our respect equally with 
 Homer and Raphael as an instrument of the 
 Eternal. Part of his strength lies in the belief that 
 he is getting nearer the mind of the great Being 
 who is working out his purposes in this universe; 
 and that man's relation to the universe is not a 
 constant, but a ratio which is constantly growing 
 in favor of man. If so, the great discoverers in 
 science, and the noble army of efficient workers j 
 in every field of human activity, deserve a place I 
 with the poets, sculptors, and painters as revealers . 
 of the Divine and Eternal. 
 
 
 . 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 A NINETEENTH CENTURY SADDUCEE 
 
 From the beginning of his career to its close 
 Arnold was a close and devout reader of the Scrip- 
 ture&> not only of the canonical books of the Old 
 and New Testaments, but also of the Apocrypha, 
 several of the books in which have been recom- 
 mended to the devout for their reading by the 
 authorities of the Anglican Church. One of these 
 is the Wisdom book of the Son of Sirach, com- 
 monly known as Ecclesiasticus, a noble utterance; 
 and its pages were familiar to Arnold. It was 
 down among the list of books he took with 
 him on his American tour to be read, and one of 
 those marked out as having been read. In the 
 very closing days of his life he must have been 
 turning up its pages, for an excerpt from the thirty- 
 eighth chapter appears in his notebook: "When 
 the dead is at rest, let his remembrance rest; and 
 be comforted for him, when his spirit departeth 
 from him." 
 
 The term '^Pharisee" has been abundantly used 
 in modern discussions to give edge to sarcasm, 
 and the party that Arnold constantly antagonized 
 within and without the church have had this 
 
 123 
 
124 Matthew Ar.nold 
 
 epithet constantly flung at them. The associated 
 name "Sadducee/* however, has not been so 
 popular. And yet, if the term "Pharisee" suits 
 well a rigid Evangelical, that of "Sadducee" 
 comes remarkably near fitting Arnold's peculiar 
 position in religious matters. 
 
 A conservative excessively reverent toward the 
 past, an aristocrat by birth and temperament, 
 one who looked coldly on all religious innovations 
 and enthusiasm, the typical Sadducee had little 
 influence outside of Jerusalem. He was strong 
 in denials. He denied the resurrection of the 
 dead, and refused to accept the plea that there 
 must be retribution in a future state — a plea which 
 appealed so strongly to the poor and needy Jews 
 scattered abroad after the Exile. He denied the 
 existence of angels and demons. He rejected 
 fatalism, and, like the Stoic, regarded man as 
 master of his own fate. A man must realize 
 himself in this present world, and work out his 
 own salvation here on earth; so declared the 
 high-class Sadducee. 
 
 Ecclesiasticus may be regarded as the first and 
 greatest of Sadducee productions. It is the work 
 of an author touched by the fascination of Greek 
 culture, who yet reveres the law of his own people. 
 As with Arnold, there is no dualism in Ecclesi- 
 asticus. Sin is not something eternal realizing 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 125 
 
 itself in the personality of Satan. "When the 
 wicked man curses Satan he curses his own soul," 
 says Ben Sirach. Compare this with Arnold's 
 dictum, that sin is merely our own impotence or 
 weakness; let a man be only true to himself 
 and he can overcome sin by his own force and 
 goodness. 
 
 This slack-water period, as it may be termed, 
 in Jewish history, when the canon of the Old 
 Testament was complete and that of the New 
 Testament was still in the future, had special 
 attractions for modern thinkers like Arnold and 
 Huxley. It was a time when the Greek Logos or 
 Word, and the Greek Sophia or Wisdom, came 
 into relations with the Hebrew law and right- 
 eousness. A mysterious Other World, inhabited 
 by God and angelic beings, and destined for the 
 saints, had not yet laid hold upon the religious con- 
 cepts of the people. The leading minds were satis- 
 fied with the declaration of Micah (6. 8): "He 
 hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what 
 doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and 
 to love mercy, and to walk hum.bly with thy God ?" 
 
 Some of the later prophets seemed to nineteenth 
 century moralists to stand on a pinnacle of truth 
 w^hich makes their great proclamations and 
 exhortations better fitted for general use to-day 
 than any other portions of the Scriptures. Dr. 
 
126 Matthew Arnold 
 
 Thomas Arnold, in one of his letters, notes that 
 the poet George Herbert, in one of his poems, 
 uses language of this kind, as if he regarded the 
 revelations of the patriarchal church almost with 
 envy, because they had closer communion with 
 God than Christians have. "All which seems to 
 me to arise out of a forgetfulness or misappre- 
 hension of the privileges of Christians in their 
 communion with the Holy Spirit. . . . The 
 third relation of the Deity to man is rather the 
 most perfect of all, as it is that in which God 
 communes with men, not *as a man talketh with 
 his friend,' but as a Spirit holding discourse in- 
 visibly and incomprehensibly, but more effectually 
 than by any outward address — with the spirits 
 only of his creatures." The discipline of the 
 Old Testament, says his son, may be summed 
 up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee 
 from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, 
 as a discipline teaching us to die to it. 
 
 Matthew Arnold preferred an attitude that 
 was negative on the subject of the life after death 
 and demanded no reliance on a mystic Third 
 Person. So impressed was he with the educa- 
 tional value and availability of the Old Testament 
 prophetic teaching that he edited for school use 
 the chapters in Isaiah dealing with the great 
 destiny of the nation, and known as the Restora- 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 127 
 
 tion-Prophecy. His little book contained the last 
 twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah, with ample notes 
 and a long preface, and was entitled "The Great 
 Prophecy of Israel's Restoration." The book, 
 although now very scarce, never actually became 
 a text-book. 
 
 A new meaning had been read into these 
 chapters by recent research, and Arnold was 
 anxious to popularize this interpretation. Instead 
 of the term "Servant of the Lord" being made to 
 apply immediately to Christ and his mission, it 
 was understood as having a first reference to the 
 times in which it was written. Suffering Israel 
 was the servant upheld by the Eternal, the chosen 
 one in whom his soul delighted; upon whom 
 was poured his Spirit, who was destined to pro- 
 claim his law of truth and righteousness to the 
 nations. 
 
 Availing himself of the labors of Ewald, 
 Gesenius, Kuenen, and other learned biblical 
 scholars, Arnold threw his convictions into book 
 form in "Literature and Dogma," a brilliant 
 attempt to rationalize the Scriptures. Many good 
 Evangelicals had become reconciled to the theory 
 that in the Old Testament we have a gift from 
 God whose value lies not in its being in a literal 
 sense a divine production, but as containing an 
 invaluable record of divine dealings with a chosen 
 
128 Matthew Arnold 
 
 people. Arnold was in the same camp with ortho- 
 dox Christians in claiming for the Jewish people 
 a special mission in history, a peculiar passion for 
 righteousness, a unique genius for handling the 
 deepest religious questions; in asserting that the 
 man who does not know the Bible knows not the 
 meaning of religion. Unbelievers openly scoff 
 at this claim, and have as little use for Arnold's 
 defense of Holy Writ as for Dr. Pusey's. 
 
 How completely, in this rationalizing work, 
 Arnold forgot the wise adage of the saintly old 
 teacher — "Conserve the mystery" — is evident 
 from the well-known passage dealing with the 
 three Lord Shaftesburys. And yet he was 
 intensely in earnest, and did not mean to scoff — 
 far from it. Here is the passage: "As the Romish 
 doctrine of the mass, the Real Presence, is a 
 rude and blind criticism of *He that eateth me 
 shall live by me,' so the Protestant tenet of justi- 
 fication, 'pleading the blood of the Covenant,' is a 
 rude and blind criticism of *The Son of Man came 
 to give his life a ransom for many.' It is a taking 
 of the words of Scripture literally and unintelli- 
 gently. And our friends, the philosophical Lib- 
 erals, are not slow to call this, too, a degrading 
 superstition, just as Protestants call the doctrine 
 of the mass a degrading superstition. We say, 
 on the contrary, that a degrading superstition 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 129 
 
 neither the one nor the other is. In imagining a 
 sort of infinitely magnified and improved Lord 
 Shaftesbury, with a race of vile offenders to deal 
 with, whom his natural goodness would incline 
 him to let off, only his sense of justice will not allow 
 it; then a younger Lord Shaftesbury, on the scale 
 of his father and very dear to him, who might 
 lire in grandeur and splendor if he liked, but who 
 prefers to leave his home to go and live among the 
 race of offenders and to be put to an ignominious 
 death, on condition that his merits shall be counted 
 against their demerits, and that his father's good- 
 ness shall be restrained no longer from taking 
 effect, but any offender shall be admitted to the 
 benefit of it on simply pleading the satisfaction 
 made by the son; and then, finally, a third Lord 
 Shaftesbury, still on the same high scale, who 
 keeps very much in the background, and works 
 in a very occult manner, but very efficaciously 
 nevertheless, and who is busy in applying every- 
 where the benefits of the son's satisfaction and 
 the father's goodness — in an imagination, I say, 
 such as this there is nothing degrading, and this 
 is precisely the Protestant story of Justification. 
 And how awe of the first Lord Shaftesbury, grati- 
 tude and love toward the second, and earnest 
 cooperation with the third, may fill and rule 
 men's hearts so as to transform their conduct we 
 
 9 
 
130 Matthew Arnold 
 
 need not go about to show, for we have all seen it 
 with our eyes. " 
 
 This is the famous passage on the Trinity which 
 Arnold saw fit later to regret, because of the offense 
 it gave. There is a moral and intellectual serious- 
 ness and earnestness underlying the whole of 
 "Literature and Dogma" which makes the reader 
 lament that one so ill equipped for theological 
 discussion should have entered so airily into the 
 theological arena. Of course, its publication 
 meant a complete break, not only with Trini- 
 tarians, but even with ordinary Unitarians. In its 
 pages Arnold carries his dislike of anthropomor- 
 phism so far as to deny personality to God, who 
 becomes in its pages "the Eternal." 
 
 Oddly enough, Arnold had never considered 
 himself to be, nominally or sympathetically, in 
 the Unitarian camp. From his father he had 
 inherited a dislike to Unitarians, as "political Dis- 
 senters," and he seems always to have fought shy 
 of them in England. Toward American Uni- 
 tarians he was more friendly, as was Dr. Thomas 
 Arnold. "I heard some time since," writes the 
 latter from Rugby in 1832, "that in the United 
 States, where the Episcopal Church has expelled 
 this creed (the Athanasian) the character of 
 Unitarianism is very different from what it is in 
 England, and is returning toward high Arianism, 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 131 
 
 just as here it has gone a downward course to the 
 very verge of utter disbelief." They could not 
 have gone farther than his son. The present 
 Minister of Education at Westminster, son of a 
 Unitarian minister, recently defined the modi- 
 cum of religion which he considered ought to be 
 taught in the state schools. The majority of 
 parents, he said, would undoubtedly like their 
 children to be taught the simple elementary truths, 
 the Fatherhood of God, the responsibilities of man, 
 and the existence of a future state. Matthew 
 Arnold's creed summarily disposes of the first 
 and last as mere Aherglauhe, of the nature of 
 superstition. 
 
 Arnold early came under the spell of Emerson, 
 and the teaching of the two men had much in 
 common. He records his debt to the New Eng- 
 lander in an early sonnet: 
 
 written in Emerson's essays 
 
 O monstrous, dead, unprofitable world, 
 
 That thou canst hear, and hearing hold thy way ! 
 A voice oracular hath pealed to-day; 
 
 To-day a hero's banner is unfurled; 
 
 Hast thou no lip for welcome? — So I said. 
 
 Man after man, the world smiled and passed by; 
 
 A smile of wistful incredulity. 
 As though one spake of life unto the dead — 
 
 Scornful, and strange, and sorrowful, and full 
 
 Of bitter knowledge. Yet the will is free ; 
 Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; 
 
132 Matthew Arnold 
 
 The seeds of godlike power are in us still ; 
 Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will! — 
 Dumb judges, answer, truth or mockery? 
 
 The two thinkers, in many respects so unlike, 
 had yet essentially the same mission. Bathed and 
 steeped in Christian thought, Emerson spent his 
 life in reconciling it with Greek speculation and 
 modern scientific results. Lowell was right when, 
 in his "Fable for Critics," he calls him "half 
 Greek": 
 
 C.'s the Titan, as shaggy of mind as of limb, — 
 E. the clear-eyed Olympian, rapid and slim; 
 The one's two thirds Norseman, the other half Greek, 
 Where the one's most abounding, the other's to seek. 
 
 Emerson's mission was to protest against the 
 worldly or utilitarian spirit, and his aims were 
 never negative. What he preached was eternal 
 truth, revealed by the Almighty in the glory of the 
 starry firmament, the splendor of the sunsets, 
 the majesty of the mountains, the mystic beauty 
 of ocean and river, and the still small voice in the 
 heart of man. His words are often semi-Oriental 
 in tone, which Arnold's never are. Man, he 
 declared, by rights and often in reality, should be 
 regarded as a divine incarnation, linking the 
 eternal world with the phenomenal. This Ori- 
 ental insistence upon personality as the last and 
 greatest thing in the universe makes Emerson 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 133 
 
 an optimist, while Arnold's doctrine that our per- 
 sonalities must finally submit themselves to a 
 Force is pessimistic. 
 
 One crusade waged by Arnold w^ith zeal and 
 insistence was surely but a hollow mockery. He 
 never tired of proclaiming the need and advisability 
 of a national church, with its noble and refined 
 liturgy, its trained clergy, and its historic temples; 
 "a great national society," as he termed it, for 
 the promotion of what is commonly called good- 
 ness, and for promoting it through the most effec- 
 tual means possible, the only means which are 
 really and truly effectual for the object — through 
 the means of the Christian religion and of the Bible. 
 In the essay from which I have just quoted he 
 declares that the '^essence of religion is grace and 
 peace." The more the sense of religion grows, 
 he declares, and of religion in a large way — the 
 sense of the beauty and rest of religion, the sense 
 that its charm lies in grace and peace — the more 
 will the present attitude, objections, and com- 
 plaints of those who dislike an established church 
 seem unworthy. 
 
 But surely these words, charm, grace, peace, place 
 Christianity upon an aesthetic basis rather than 
 on its true foundation of saving power. The 
 emphasis is entirely wrong; just as when a well- 
 meaning person declares that only a Christian 
 
134 Matthew Arnold 
 
 man can be a real gentleman. The term gentle- 
 man is secondary and superficial, and is too small 
 to include the deeper word Christian; so charm- 
 ing, graceful, peaceful fail entirely to indicate the 
 reality of Christ's teaching. The terms are com- 
 patible with a mere religion of conformity, which 
 is death, not life. "Unity and continuity in public 
 religious worship are," he asserts, "a need of 
 human nature, an eternal aspiration of Christen- 
 dom; but unity and continuity in religious worship 
 joined with perfect mental sanity and freedom. 
 A Catholic church transformed is, I believe, the 
 church of the future." 
 
 Arnold's somewhat supercilious references to 
 hymns reveal the weakness of his position. It was 
 mainly through Christian hymns, popular ditties 
 sung by the people, that Western Europe was 
 civilized. These Latin hymns, with their forceful 
 and measured lines, were a creation in the world's 
 history; for the first time uniting, in one energizing 
 expression, poetry, music, and moral conviction. 
 The people sang them as nothing in the world's 
 history had ever been sung before; for the singing 
 signified new life to them. Again, at the Refor- 
 mation, the soldiers of the new creed of individual 
 faith, hope, and love, each with Bible in his pocket, 
 read therein his "title to a mansion in the skies," 
 and went forth to war singing, " Ein' feste Burg ist 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 135 
 
 unserGott" — Luther's glorious battle hymn — or 
 some other song of intense moral conviction. 
 The "Jesus" hymns of the Moravians v^^ere an 
 inspiration to the founder of Methodism; and his 
 brother's "Jesus, Lover of my soul," meant 
 far more to the century than all the poems of 
 Pope, Thomson, Gray, and Goldsmith together. 
 The Roman Catholic Church, clinging in a con- 
 servative way to ancient habits, failed to make 
 use of this great lever for uplifting the masses; 
 but popular hymns lie at the core of our militant 
 Protestantism. Their value is dynamic, however, 
 rather than aesthetic; hence Arnold's small esteem 
 for hymns. "Hymns, such as we know them," 
 he declares, " are a sort of composition which I do 
 not at all admire. I freely say so now, as I have 
 often said it before. I regret their prevalence and 
 popularity among us. Taking man in his totality 
 and in the long run, bad music and bad poetry, 
 to whatever good and useful purposes a man may 
 often manage to turn them, are in themselves 
 mischievous and deteriorating to him. Some- 
 where and somehow, and at some time or other, 
 he has to pay a penalty and to suffer a loss for 
 taking delight in them. It is bad for people to 
 hear such words and such a tune as the words 
 and tune of *0 happy place! when shall I be, 
 my God, with thee, to see thy face.?' — ^worse for 
 
136 Matthew Arnold 
 
 them to take pleasure in it. And the time will 
 come, I hope, when we shall feel the unsatisfac- 
 toriness of our present hymns, and they will disap- 
 pear from our religious services. " 
 
 Sixteen hundred years ago, perhaps the most 
 valuable element in humanity was to be found in 
 the devoted Christians who worshiped secretly in 
 the gloom of the catacombs. To what sort of 
 melodies they sang their " psalms and hymns and 
 spiritual songs " can never probably be known 
 exactly, but, as a recent authority remarks, " the 
 Christian religion had little to do in those days 
 with fashion and the fine arts. . . . The 
 apostles did not travel as music teachers. . . . 
 If the words sung expressed a heartfelt Christian 
 faith it made little difference what modes or 
 melodies were used with them." 
 
 Coming down to more recent days, we may feel 
 certain that the singing of psalms in the family 
 circle, when Elgin and such quaint and quavering 
 tunes "beet the heavenly flame," has usually been 
 more blunt and crude than finished or artistic. 
 Both the music and the poetry have often been 
 distinctly "bad," and yet the resultant effects 
 cannot be described as "mischievous and deteri- 
 
 orating." 
 
 And yet we must agree with Arnold that nothing 
 deserves more to be antagonized and frowned 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 137 
 
 upon than the combination of bad theology and 
 bad poetry, to be found in too many popular 
 revival hymns. Arnold knew what a good hymn 
 was, and could appreciate the best type. He has 
 left on record his admiration of the sublime stanza 
 of Isaac Watts : 
 
 • See, from his head, his hands, his feet, 
 Sorrow and love flow mingled down ! 
 Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, 
 Or thorns compose so rich a crown? 
 
 Still, the poem in which this stanza appears is 
 more suited for Christian meditation than for 
 general singing. 
 
 Arnold's criticism of modern hymns is altogether 
 too sweepingly unfavorable; but it was through 
 no lack of reverence. His reverent attitude 
 toward the Bible is best brought out, I think, in 
 the introductory paragraph of two lectures he 
 delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical 
 Institution of Edinburgh, the subject being 
 "Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist." He begins 
 by complimenting his audience on the breadth of 
 their reading: "Your students in philosophy have 
 always read pretty widely, and have not concen- 
 trated themselves, as we at Oxford used to con- 
 centrate ourselves, upon one or two great books. 
 However, in your study of the Bible you got 
 abundant experience of our attitude of mind 
 
138 Matthew Arnold 
 
 toward our two philosophers. Your text-book 
 was right ; there were no mistakes there. If 
 there was anything obscure, anything hard to 
 be comprehended, it was your ignorance which 
 was at fault, your failure of comprehension. 
 Just such was our mode of dealing with Butler's 
 sermons and Aristotle's ethics. Whatever was 
 hard, whatever was obscure, the text-book was 
 all right, and our understandings were to conform 
 themselves to it. What agonies of puzzle has 
 Butler's account of self-love, or Aristotle's of the 
 intellectual virtues, caused to clever undergraduates 
 and to clever tutors; and by what feats of astonish- 
 ing explanation, astonishingly acquiesced in, 
 were these agonies calmed! We at Oxford used 
 to read our Aristotle or our Butler with the same 
 absolute faith in the classicality of their matter as 
 in the classicality of Homer's form." That 
 what followed was not in accordance with this 
 attitude of implicit trust toward Butler may be 
 gathered from the lines of his sonnet: 
 
 WRITTEN IN butler's SERMONS 
 
 Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers, 
 Impulse and Reason, Freedom and Control, 
 So men, unraveling God's harmonious whole, 
 
 Rend in a thousand shreds this life of ours. 
 
 Vain labor! Deep and broad, where none may see, 
 Spring the foundations of that shadowy throne 
 Where man's one nature, queen-like, sits alone, 
 
 Centered in a majestic unity; 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 139 
 
 And rays her powers, like sister-islands seen 
 
 Linking their coral arms under the sea, 
 Or clustered peaks with plunging gulfs between, 
 
 Spanned by aerial arches all of gold, 
 Whereo'er the chariot wheels of life are rolled 
 In cloudy circles to eternity. 
 
 That he placed John Wesley above the author 
 of the Analogy he makes plain in the course of 
 his criticism. '* Butler, " he says, " met John Wesley 
 [who admired the Analogy], and one would like 
 to have a full record of w^hat passed at such a 
 meeting. He [Butler] was of a most reverend 
 aspect; his face thin and pale, but there was a 
 divine placidness in his countenance which 
 inspired veneration and expressed the most 
 benevolent mind. His white hair hung gracefully 
 on his shoulders, and his whole figure was 
 patriarchal. This description would not ill suit 
 Wesley himself, and it may be thought, perhaps, 
 that here, at any rate, we find the saint. . . . 
 But still the total impression left by Butler is not 
 exactly that of a saint. " 
 
 To Arnold, Wesley, with his ^'genius for godli- 
 ness," was a type of saintliness. It is interesting 
 to find him more in harmony with the great 
 revivalist than with the Anglican bishop. Later 
 on in this discussion of Butler, speaking of the 
 Greek word epieikeia, that which has an air of 
 consummate truth and likelihood, of "sweet 
 
140 Matthew Arnold 
 
 reasonableness," he declares in words which 
 Wesley would have heartily indorsed: "You know | 
 what a power was this quality in the talkings and j 
 dealings of Jesus Christ; epieikeia is the very word j 
 to characterize true Christianity. And this Chris- i 
 tianity wins, not by an argumentative victory, \ 
 not by going through a long debate with a person, ;| 
 examining the arguments for his case from begin- \ 
 ning to end, and making him confess that, whether | 
 he feels disposed to yield or no, yet in fair logic 
 and fair reason he ought to yield. But it puts 
 something that tends to transform him and his 
 practice — it puts this particular thing in such a 
 way that he feels disposed and eager to lay hold 
 of it; and he does lay hold of it, though without at | 
 all perceiving, very often, the whole scheme to 1 
 which it belongs; and thus his practice gets * 
 changed. This, I think, everyone will admit to be ; 
 Christianity's characteristic way of getting people ; 
 to embrace religion. Now, it is to be observed 
 how totally unlike a way it is to Butler's, although 
 Butler's object is the same as Christianity's — 
 to get people to embrace religion. And, the object 
 being the same, it must strike everyone that the 
 way followed by Christianity has the advantage 
 of a far greater effectiveness than Butler's way; 
 since people are much more easily attracted into 
 making a change than argued into it." The 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 141 
 
 absence of "saintliness'' in the appeal made by 
 Butler is evidently present to the critic, who 
 remarks that the total impression left by the 
 bishop is not exactly that of a saint. Arnold is 
 evidently in far completer harmony v^ith Wes- 
 ley, who preached, interpreted, and practiced 
 Christianity as a life. 
 
 Arnold objects to Bishop Butler that he regards 
 our interests and principles of action as if they 
 were things as separate, fixed, and palpable as 
 bodily organs; that he speaks of benevolence as 
 if it had always gone on secreting love for our 
 neighbor, and of compassion as if it had gone on 
 secreting a desire to relieve misery, and of con- 
 science as if it always had sent forth right verdicts, 
 just as the liver secretes bile. He is right in chang- 
 ing Butler's expression "the desire for happiness" 
 into "the instinct to live," and making this 
 impulse the motor principle of life. The experi- 
 ences of the unity which we know as "I" are 
 divisible only in an abstract manner; for the "I" 
 cannot be broken up into a combination of war- 
 ring or harmonious instincts and principles to 
 be regarded as separately existing, and not as 
 mere facts of the individual spirit. But, in pos- 
 tulating the existence of two lives or selves in a 
 man, Arnold creates a duality which also is 
 defensible only as an abstraction for the analyst; 
 
142 Matthew Arnold 
 
 and possibly he intends his words to be construed 
 in this way. "It is not true/' he states, "that 
 the affections and impulses of both alike [self- 
 love and benevolence] are, as Butler says, the voice 
 of God; the self-love of Butler, the 'cool study 
 of our private interest,' is not the voice of God. 
 It is a hasty, erroneous interpretation by us, 
 in our long, tentative, up-struggling develop- 
 ment of the instinct-to-live, the desire-for-happi- 
 ness, which is the voice of our authentic nature, 
 the voice of God; and it has to be corrected by 
 experience. . . . Jesus Christ said, 'Renounce 
 thyself!' and yet he also said: *What is a man 
 advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and yet 
 lose himself, be mulcted of himself?' He said: 
 *I am come that men might have life, and might 
 have it more abundantly;' and *ye will not come to 
 me that ye may have ItfeF And yet he said: 
 'Whosoever will save his life shall lose it !' This 
 psychology," says Arnold, "carries everyone 
 with it" — the "psychology of Jesus Christ, which 
 without the least apparatus of system is yet 
 incomparably exacter than Butler's, as well as 
 incomparably more illuminative and fruitful.'* 
 He considers that there is no danger, such as 
 Butler felt, in making the instinct to live that 
 which we must set out with in explaining human 
 nature, so long as we remember that only in the 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 143 
 
 impersonal life and with the higher self is the 
 instinct truly served and the desire truly satis- 
 fied. 
 
 But it is Arnold's use here of the word imper- 
 sojtal that is unsatisfactory. The higher life is not 
 impersonal, but more truly personal; nor is man 
 asked to lose himself in the universe by "joining 
 the choir invisible." The same speaker tells 
 those who figuratively "lose their lives" that 
 great is their reward in heaven. It is through the 
 reception of other personalities unto our own 
 personalities that we finally realize ourselves and 
 come to find God. "Christ in us, the hope of 
 glory" is not a mere trope; it is a spiritual fact, 
 at the root of our religious experience. Arnold 
 quotes Schleiermacher approvingly, and accepts 
 what the German says in the matter of recogniz- 
 ing Platonic and Greek thought in our modern 
 Christianity; but he fails to appreciate the value 
 of Schleiermacher's psychology. 
 
 And what heart knows another? 
 Ah! who knows his own? 
 
 These are the dreamy questions of the poet. 
 Flis conception of friendship suffers under this 
 limitation : 
 
 Like driftwood spars, which meet and pass 
 
 Upon the boundless ocean-plain, 
 So on the sea of life, alas! 
 
 Man meets man — meets and quits again. 
 
144 Matthew Arnold 
 
 The bond is a temporary one, liable to be broken \ 
 
 again at any time; "to friends," he says in one of ,j 
 
 his poems, "we have no natural right;" we have \ 
 no property in them. But this is just what 
 
 Schleiermacher and the modern idealist deny. i 
 
 When Archbishop Trench lay dying his chap- ; 
 
 lain began to read at his request the glowing pas- ! 
 
 sage from PauFs Second Epistle to Timothy i 
 
 beginning, " For God has not given to us the spirit ] 
 
 of fear. " When he came to the words, " I know \ 
 
 in whom I have believed," "Hold, hold!" cried • 
 
 the dying saint; "not m whom, but whom — I l 
 
 know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded ; 
 
 that he is able to guard that which I have \ 
 
 committed to him against that day." | 
 
 It is this immediate knowledge and belief of i 
 
 the heart which is lacking in Arnold's whole treat- ! 
 
 ment of religious themes. His psychology is the ) 
 
 out-of-date psychology of the isolated man, which j 
 
 marked the eighteenth century type of thought; ! 
 
 poor, little, feeble man, a mere accident in the ] 
 
 great machinery of the universe! Arnold's | 
 "Nature" is a misconception of God's creation: 
 
 Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring, 
 Man's senseless uproar mingling with his toil, 
 Still do thy quiet ministers move on, 
 
 Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting; 
 Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil; 
 Laborers that shall not fail, when man is gone. 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 145 
 
 But man is an integral portion of the great 
 eternity of mind which makes use of matter as a 
 master makes use of a servant. Mind is, so to 
 speak, a great ocean, which moves fluidly, with no 
 loss, but a constant gain. We are heirs, not only 
 of what our fathers have done in the material 
 world, but of what they have been unable to 
 do in the spiritual world — their apparently 
 fruitless efforts, their ideals and longings; 
 and there is room in the universe for the 
 individual survival of everyone. Not force, 
 conceived as present in atoms, is power, but 
 personality; and the words wise, good, true 
 have a meaning only when used as attributes 
 of some personality. The communion of saints 
 perpetuates itself by the communication of virtue 
 from one person to another. No worse psychol- 
 ogy could be uttered than Arnold's statement 
 in his sonnet "The Divinity," that "Wisdom 
 and goodness they are God." To pray to wis- 
 dom and goodness is an impossibility and an 
 absurdity. Will, aspiration, sympathy, love, 
 beauty are unthinkable apart from the beings 
 in whom they inhere, and who, by living, give 
 them reality. The reality in the world is the 
 warm, expansive life of persons in touch with 
 the center of Life and Love. We are mysteriously 
 
 bound to one another and to God, as the branches 
 10 
 
146 Matthew Arnold 
 
 of a tree belong to each other and to the trunk 
 and roots. We find absolute truth not by 
 isolating ourselves from our fellows, but by identi- 
 fying our lives with theirs. "The social con- 
 sciousness," says Schleiermacher, "finds its satis- 
 faction only in stepping out of the limits of its 
 own personality, and taking up into its own per- 
 sonality the things pertaining to other personali- 
 ties. Every one must concede as a matter of 
 experience that it is his natural condition to stand 
 always in a many-sided fellowship of feeling, 
 and his feeling of absolute dependence on God 
 has been awakened by the communicative and 
 stimulative power of human utterance. " 
 
 In his strangely unsympathetic and antiquated 
 attitude toward the ocean Arnold failed to grasp the 
 conception which makes of the great encircling 
 element not a dragon or force of evil, as it 
 appeared to the early world, but the symbol of an 
 all-prevailing, all-embracing Deity. Schleier- 
 macher's theology has received a poetic interpre- 
 tation from Whittier: 
 
 Immortal Love, forever full, 
 
 Forever flowing free, 
 Forever shared, forever whole, 
 
 A never-ebbing sea ! 
 
 The Quaker poet here gives expression to a 
 truth which has refreshed and vivified modern 
 
A Nineteenth Century Sadducee 147 
 
 theology, and has brought us nearer to the mind 
 of God. Noble as were Homer and the Greeks, 
 full of inspiration as were the Hebrew prophets 
 whom Arnold so passionately admired, still there 
 were left in the domain of religion some fresh 
 aspects of truth and beauty for the modern world 
 to grasp, and this is one of them. 
 
 Truth does not lie buried in the tombs of 
 ancient Greece. With all his sweet reasonable- 
 ness, his culture and his open-minded rationalism, 
 Arnold was strangely old-fashioned and con- 
 servative in his religious outlook — a veritable 
 Sadducee. After all, the future of Judaism and 
 of the world was not with the Sadducees. Men 
 like Paul, reared Pharisees, gave up their early 
 creed to become teachers of the Cross, which was 
 to the Jews a stumbling-block; to the Greeks, 
 foolishness; and to those Hellenized Jews, the 
 Sadducees, both one and the other. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD IN ARNOLD 
 
 On one occasion the Platonist and idealist, 
 Frederic W. H. Myers — known to all lovers of 
 Wordsworth for his classic little biography of the 
 poet — ^was walking under the elms in the Fellows' 
 Garden of Trinity College, Cambridge, in com- 
 pany with an earnest-eyed woman. His com- 
 panion was George Eliot. "She, stirred some- 
 what beyond her wont, and taking as her text 
 the three words which have been used so often as 
 the inspiring trumpet call of men — the words, 
 God, Immortality, Duty — pronounced with 
 terrible earnestness how inconceivable was the 
 ■jirst, how unbelievable the second, and yet how 
 peremptory and absolute was the third.'' In 
 making this emphatic profession of belief the 
 novelist pretty well expressed the intellectual 
 attitude of the Victorian age, a century of spiritual 
 doubt and unrest. 
 
 To the devout Christian the three conceptions 
 of God, Immortality, and Duty are bound together 
 by an indissoluble tie. God is personal; Immor- 
 tality rests on a personal basis; Duty is a personal 
 
 relation with a perfect Being whose constant help- 
 
 148 
 
The Fatherhood of God 149 
 
 fulness constitutes part of his perfection. As 
 soon as we make God an abstraction we cause 
 the hope of immortality to vanish, and destroy 
 the very roots of Duty as an expulsive, impulsive 
 reality. Just as plants and the simpler denizens 
 of the sea are steadily heliocentric — turning ever 
 to the sun — so are human hearts theocentric; 
 and must be, for their spiritual health. 
 
 Many are willing to accept, as fairly well 
 embodying their religious aspirations on the sub- 
 ject of immortality, the lines of George Eliot, 
 which begin with a phrase that has given its name 
 to a book of the day, with a passing vogue: 
 
 THE CHOIR INVISIBLE 
 
 O may I join the choir invisible 
 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 
 In minds made better by their presence: live 
 
 In pulses stirred to generosity, 
 
 In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
 
 For miserable aims that end with self, 
 
 In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
 
 And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
 
 To vaster issues. So to live is heaven. 
 
 Such is the Positivist creed — a creed of abstrac- 
 tions; a creed limited to the amelioration of 
 earthly conditions; a creed that has no use for the 
 continuation of personality after death. When, 
 fifty years ago, it was proposed to start in Lon- 
 don a Positivist church, based on the teachings of 
 Auguste Comte, eager minds resolved to supply it 
 
150 Matthew Arnold 
 
 with a liturgy, and George Eliot was asked to pro- 
 vide an anthem. "The Choir Invisible" was the 
 response; and it is an emphatic negation of per- 
 sonal immortality, as a fond dream of the imagi- 
 nation. 
 
 To me the lines have never appealed, either as 
 attractive religion or as good poetry. Rather 
 would I describe them as a string of platitudes, 
 lacking the essence of noble and lucid poetry. 
 Immortal life begins and ends with personality. 
 As the babe starts out on the voyage of life by 
 resting its eyes on its fond mother, so the dying 
 saint looks heavenward to the divine face of the 
 Master, which blesses, invites, and welcomes. 
 
 Queen Victoria, v/ho had shown herself for 
 half a century the ablest statesman in the broad 
 British empire, repeated with her dying breath 
 those lines of personal appeal: 
 
 My faith looks up to thee, 
 Thou Lamb of Calvary, 
 Saviour divine! 
 
 Her natural expression at this supreme hour was 
 just one of those hymns which, from his Olym- 
 pian height of art perfection, Arnold was wont to 
 regard so superciliously. 
 
 And yet no one was more attached to that 
 exquisite heritage of our Christian faith, the 
 church liturgy, and the other concrete expressions 
 
The Fatherhood of God 151 
 
 of our devotional life. But he spent an immense 
 amount of energy and sweet persuasiveness in 
 trying to prove that heaven is a kind of land 
 of Lyonnesse, an exquisite Nowhere, and that 
 the Bible is a sort of "Morte d' Arthur," with 
 only a literary truth and reality finally appertain- 
 ing to it. He wanted no brand-new Comtist 
 anthem and Comtist liturgy. 
 
 Arnold was a victim of the fallacy that religious 
 beliefs can be stripped of mystery; that they are 
 all, Hke the planks in a political platform, sub- 
 ject to general discussion for final approba- 
 tion or rejection; and that religious constituencies 
 have to be educated up to a condition in which 
 the attitude of rational discussion becomes nor- 
 mal and habitual. The church might thus be 
 regarded as an intellectual club or symposium, 
 the members whereof, animated by a spirit of 
 sweet reasonableness, are able to adjust their 
 platform to the needs of the community. 
 
 He fails strangely to recognize that final force of 
 tremendous individual conviction, demanding from 
 the will unhesitating obedience; all with Arnold 
 is on the basis of an easy and refined optimism. 
 A deeper and more thorough realization of what 
 religious faith really is would have taught him 
 that the world is not moved and impelled onward 
 in this way. Civilizations are borne to new lands. 
 
152 Matthew Arnold 
 
 not by intelligent exponents of their advantages, 
 but by fearless missionaries whose whole life is 
 a credo; and a civilization without this credo is 
 a tottering structure. The gospel of the cross, 
 preached by Saint Paul, was not, to the Greeks, 
 sweet reasonableness, but foolishness. Its ac- 
 ceptance has ever demanded an exercise of deep 
 personal humility and submission of the proud 
 intellectual will, which Arnold, with all his sympa- 
 thetic nature, disdainfully rejected. The final 
 truth which makes us free is not found in an 
 enthusiastic recognition of intellectual abstractions, 
 but in mystic union with the personality which 
 guides the universe; a mystic union which 
 demands a constant exercise, not so much of self- 
 repression and negative self-renunciation as of 
 obedient activity and ardent devotion. Warmth 
 and faith as displayed in religious matters, often 
 crudely and oddly, Arnold treats with a pitying 
 sadness which suits the case dramatically; it is 
 the attitude of the superior person face to face 
 with the great reality of life. It is as if a cultured 
 Greek had returned to earth and was gazing at 
 our modern world, "where clash contending 
 powers, Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, 
 Rome." Himself one of the most amiable and 
 forgiving of men, who never harbored a grudge or 
 cursed an enemy, yet he had some of the " defects 
 
f 
 
 The Fatherhood of God 153 
 
 of his qualities," to use a French phrase. He 
 was too amiable to profess a creed which meant 
 aught but sweetness and Hght to everybody con- 
 cerned. Because there is much severe denunci- 
 ation in Matthew's gospel, therefore John's gospel 
 is undoubtedly the sacred record which brings 
 us closer to the Master! 
 
 George Eliot, who has supplied lis with a 
 pseudo-anthem of abstractions which does not 
 bring religion nearer to us, has also furnished us, 
 in perhaps the greatest of her stories, with a bril- 
 liant description of religion in its essence. The 
 germ of "Adam Bede," she herself tells us, was an 
 anecdote told her by her Methodist "Aunt Samuel" 
 Evans, wife of her father's younger brother. 
 They were sitting together one afternoon, when it 
 occurred to the elder to relate the story of a visit 
 she had to make to a condemned criminal — a very 
 ignorant girl, who had murdered her child and 
 refused to confess. Mrs. Evans stayed with her 
 praying during the night; and the poor creature 
 at last broke out into tears and confessed her * 
 crime. The good woman afterward accompanied 
 the girl in the cart to the place of execution — for 
 there occurred no melodramatic reprieve as in 
 the case of Hetty Sorrel ! 
 
 How beautifully George Eliot tells the story in 
 her "Adam Bede": 
 
154 Matthew Arnold 
 
 "Dinah held the clinging hand, and all her soul 
 went forth in her voice: 
 
 " *Jesus, thou present Saviour! Thou hast 
 known the depths of all sorrow; thou hast 
 entered that black darkness where God is not, 
 and hast uttered the cry of the forsaken. . . . 
 
 " 'Saviour! it is yet time — time to snatch this 
 poor soul from everlasting darkness, I believe — 
 I believe in thy infinite love. What is my love 
 or my pleading ? It is quenched in thine. I 
 can only clasp her in my weak arms, and urge her 
 with my weak pity. Thou — ^thou wilt breathe 
 on the dead soul and it shall arise from the unan- 
 swering sleep of death. 
 
 " *Yea, Lord, I see thee coming through the 
 darkness, coming like the morning, with healing 
 on thy wings.' '* 
 
 Here the impassioned prayer actually breaks 
 at last into a rhythmic chant. This is a prayer 
 for power, not a mere aspiration after purity and 
 perfection. Is it all a mere illusion t A com- 
 memorative tablet in the Wesleyan chapel at 
 Wirksworth tells that it was "Erected by numer- 
 ous friends to the memory of Elizabeth Evans, 
 known to the world as 'Dinah Bede,' who during 
 many years proclaimed alike in the open air, the 
 sanctuary, and from house to house, the love of 
 Christ." 
 
The Fatherhood of God 155 
 
 Was her story a mere fairy tale ? Is the Christ 
 she invoked a personage of the past, and power- 
 less to save ? So Arnold tells us, through the 
 lips of Obermann: 
 
 While we believed, on earth He went, 
 
 And open stood His grave. 
 Men called from chamber, church, and tent, 
 
 And Christ was by to save. 
 
 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. 
 
 In vain men still, with hoping new, 
 
 Regard His death-place dumb, 
 And say the stone is not yet to, 
 
 And wait for words to come. 
 
 Ah, from that silent sacred land, 
 
 Of sun, and arid stone. 
 And crumbling wall, and sultry sand. 
 
 Comes now one word alone! 
 
 From David's lips that word did roll, 
 
 *Tis true and living yet: 
 No man can save his brother's soul. 
 
 Nor pay his brother's debt. 
 
 Alone, self-poised, henceforward man 
 
 Must labor; must resign 
 His all too human creeds, and scan 
 
 Simply the way divine. 
 
 This is a direct blow leveled at a cherished 
 Christian belief. We know from his prose writings 
 how much Arnold disliked the doctrine of sub- 
 stitution or imputed righteousness. "In the 
 
156 Matthew Arnold 
 
 scientific language of Protestant theology," he 
 states in his "Saint Paul and Protestantism,'* "to 
 embrace Christ, to have saving faith, is *to give 
 our consent heartily to the covenant of grace, and 
 so to receive the benefit of justification, whereby 
 God pardons all our sins and accepts us as 
 righteous for the righteousness of Christ imputed 
 to us.' This is mere theurgy, in which, so far as 
 we have yet gone, we have not found Paul dealing. 
 Wesley, with his genius for godliness, struggled 
 all his life for some deeper and more edifying 
 account of that faith, which he felt working 
 wonders in his own soul, than that it was a hearty 
 consent to the covenant of grace and an accept- 
 ance of the benefit of Christ's imputed righteous- 
 ness. Yet this amiable and gracious spirit, but 
 intellectually slight and shallow compared to Paul, 
 beat his wings in vain. . . . 'He that believes 
 in Christ,' says Wesley, 'discerns spiritual things: 
 he is enabled to taste, see, hear, and feel God.' 
 There is nothing practical here. A company of 
 Cornish revivalists will have no difficulty in tast- 
 ing, seeing, hearing, and feeling God, twenty times 
 over, to-night, and yet may be none the better for 
 
 it to-morrow morning." 
 
 An ungracious and shallow comment. If any- 
 one can draw from Arnold's rosewater religion 
 of sweetness and light a power for salvation such 
 
The Fatherhood of God 157 
 
 as has changed many a Cornish miner from a 
 brute into a saint, then it will be time to get rid 
 of the mystery of Christ's imputed righteousness. 
 Arnold's aloofness from the main current of 
 vital religion is modified when he actually touches 
 noble personality. In no instance is this more 
 apparent than in the exquisite apostrophe to his 
 dead father, the elegy known as "Rugby Chapel." 
 Rejecting elsewhere, for intellectual reasons, the 
 doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, and cutting it 
 out peremptorily from his patchwork "system," 
 he there restores this elemental truth of Chris- 
 tianity to its proper place. Faith and trust bear 
 him for the moment irresistibly on their wings. 
 In one other passage in his poems heightened 
 emotion carries him up to the same glorious incon- 
 sistency. It is present in those stanzas addressed 
 to Marguerite, where he bids her a long farewell : 
 
 We school our manners, act our parts — 
 But He, who sees us through and through, 
 
 Knows that the bent of both our hearts 
 Was to be gentle, tranquil, true. 
 
 And though we wear out life, alas! 
 
 Distracted as a homeless wind. 
 In beating where we must not pass, 
 
 In seeking what we shall not find ; 
 
 Yet we shall one day gain, life past, 
 Clear prospect o'er our being's whole; 
 
 Shall see ourselves, and learn at last 
 Our true affinities of soul. 
 

 158 Matthew Arnold 
 
 We shall not then deny a course 
 To every thought the mass ignore ; 
 
 We shall not then call hardness force, 
 
 Nor lightness wisdom any more. ^-. 
 
 Then, in the Eternal Father's smile, 
 
 Our soothed, encouraged souls will dare 
 
 To seem as free from pride and guile, 
 As good, as generous, as they are. 
 
 Here he is face to face with an ideal womanly 
 personality. 
 
 To the memory of his great and good father 
 Arnold remained true in word, and thought, and 
 deed during his life. He never ceased, to worship 
 God as his father had worshiped him. It was 
 after attending divine service at the church of 
 Dr. John Watson (Ian Maclaren) in Liverpool 
 that a fatal heart spasm carried him off. 
 
 Arnold's practical interpretation of prayer was 
 far fuller and richer than the meager definition 
 we gather from his writings — a mere "energy of 
 aspiration toward the principle of good." He 
 early learned what real prayer v^as at his father's 
 knees. One of the passages which Dr. Thomas 
 Arnold entered in his journal a few weeks before 
 his death is quite touching: "May God keep me 
 in the hour of death through Jesus Christ; and 
 preserve me from overfear, as well as from pre- 
 sumption. Now, O Lord, whilst I am in health, 
 keep my heart fixed on thee by faith, and then 
 
The Fatherhood of God 159 
 
 I shall not lose thee in sickness or in death. 
 Guide and strengthen and enkindle me, and bless 
 those dearest to me, and those committed to my 
 charge, and keep them thine, and guide and sup- 
 port them in thy holy ways. Keep sin far from 
 them, O Lord, and let it not come upon them 
 through any neglect of mine." 
 
 A modern poet of extreme naturalistic creed 
 has quoted a phrase applied to Matthew Arnold 
 — " David, the son of Goliath. " While admitting 
 its quaint absurdity, he yet asserts its essential 
 applicability. No doubt Mr. Swinburne intends 
 to imply that the elder Arnold was a narrow bigot 
 or Philistine, while his sOn rose into a higher 
 plane of undogmatic cosmopolitanism. But, on 
 the other hand, it might with more justice be 
 contended that the younger Arnold's cosmopoli- 
 tanism was his weakness, while his father's 
 straight creed and sturdy patriotism were his 
 strength. A father's greatness of soul often breathes 
 through the impassioned words of his son. It was 
 William Burns — the most conscientious man in 
 the whole countryside — ^who inspired the stanzas 
 of "The Cotter's Saturday Night. " To his doubt- 
 ing son the elder Arnold remained through life a 
 beam of hope, reviving the great truths of the 
 Fatherhood of God and of a fuller life beyond 
 the grave: 
 
i6o Matthew Arnold 
 
 Yes, in some far-shining sphere, 
 
 Conscious or not of the past, 
 
 Still thou performest the word 
 
 Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live — 
 
 Prompt, unwearied, as here! 
 
 The second line of the above, with its dubious 
 note, is to be regretted; but a fuller note is struck 
 later on in the poem, where the communion of 
 saints is addressed: 
 
 Servants of God ! — or sons 
 Shall I not call you? because 
 Not as servants ye knew 
 Your Father's innermost mind, 
 His who unwillingly sees 
 One of his little ones lost — 
 Yours is the praise, if mankind 
 Hath not as yet in its march 
 Fainted, and fallen, and died! 
 
 There is the same tender, vibrating string 
 touched here as in his sonnet "The Good Shep- 
 herd with the Kid." The flimsy negations and 
 abstractions of his pseudo-theology are brushed 
 aside, and he speaks the language of Christian 
 faith and hope. He thinks and talks of life as 
 God's service; of God as the keeper of our souls, 
 
 who unwillingly sees 
 One of his little ones lost. 
 
 The "secret of Jesus,'' whereof Arnold talks 
 elsewhere so freely and so ineffectually, is the 
 power to help others to a fuller life. It is not 
 mere self-renunciation; it is the realization of a 
 
The Fatherhood of God i6i 
 
 fuller life by the transmission of life to those who 
 stand in need of it. Arnold recognizes this in 
 his "East London" sonnet: 
 
 I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 
 
 "111 and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene?" 
 "Bravely," said he, "for I of late have been 
 
 Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread. " 
 
 The words "thoughts of" may be eliminated, 
 to the strengthening of the whole passage. The 
 insertion of the intellectual link is less in harmony 
 with the religious trust in Him who came that 
 his flock might, through him, have life, and have 
 it more abundantly, and through this transmitting 
 vitality attain to sonship and heirship. Arnold 
 describes the earthly mission of these sons and 
 heirs very nobly: 
 
 Ye fill up the gaps in our files. 
 Strengthen the wavering line, 
 Stablish, continue our march, 
 On, to the bound of the waste, 
 On, to the City of God. 
 
 The lines form a fitting peroration to the great 
 
 elegy on his much-loved father; thev are last 
 
 words in a full and special sense. 
 II 
 
INDEX 
 
 "AdamBede," 153 
 Americans, Criticism of, 59 
 Animals as automata, 106 
 Apocrypha, The, 123 
 Aquinas, Thomas, loi 
 Arnold, Matthew, Goethe's 
 influence, 7-10; a lover of 
 lucidity, 1 2 ; his disdainful 
 Urania, 15, 16; Spinoza's 
 influence, 20-22; on Less- 
 ing's "Laocoon," 22-26; ex- 
 aggerated estimate of 
 Homer and Shakespeare, 
 28; his use of "immortal" 
 and "divine," 30; his love 
 for France, 31; the Mar- 
 guerite poems, 31, 32; the 
 Obermann poems, 33-37; 
 his conception of prayer, 
 37; antique view of the 
 ocean, 38, 39; misquotes 
 Keats, 40, 41; his final 
 appreciation of Senancour, 
 46; his admiration for 
 Marcus Aurelius, 48, 49; 
 early associations with 
 Wordsworth, 50, 51 ; his ap- 
 preciation of Wordsworth, 
 52; on illusions, 57, 58; 
 on revivals, 59; on modern 
 Evangelicalism, 64; on 
 American friendship, 64; 
 on childhood and immor- 
 tality, 66-70; makes his- 
 toric mouthpiece of Em- 
 pedocles, 7 1 ; simile of the 
 mirror, 72; the meter of 
 "Empedocles on Etna," 
 77, 78; his personal ap- 
 pearance, 79; his attitude 
 toward miracles, 88; he 
 protests against his being 
 
 identified with his charac- 
 ters, 94; his fondness for 
 household pets, 105; his 
 Greek eleos, 109; subtle de- 
 light in pathos, 112; his 
 early acquaintance with 
 geology, 113, 114; fondness 
 for botany, 11 6- 118; mis- 
 conception of the Eternal, 
 121; fond of Ecclesiasticus 
 and its teachings, 124; 
 attacks Trinitarianism, 129, 
 130 ; dislike of English Uni- 
 tarianism, 131; under the 
 spell of Emerson, 132; 
 depreciates modem hymns, 
 1 34 ; on Bishop Butler, 137; 
 admiration for Wesley, 
 139, 140; his psychology of 
 an antiquated type, 144; 
 preaches a religion stripped 
 of mystery, 151; his dislike 
 of the doctrine of imputed 
 righteousness, 155; his rev- 
 erence for his father's mem- 
 ory, 158; recognizes the 
 divine sonship of men, 160. 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, 11, 115, 
 126, 130, 158 
 
 Atossa, Arnold's cat, iii 
 
 Aurelius, Marcus, 48 
 
 "Bacchanalia," 119 
 
 "Balaustion's Adventures," 
 
 79 
 Beauties of earth. Morbid 
 
 teaching regarding the, 117 
 
 Ben Sirach, 125 
 
 Birds and mankind, no 
 
 Botany, Arnold's acquaint- 
 ance with, 1 1 6-1 18 
 
 Browning, Robert, 39, 75, 80- 
 
 83, 76, 94 
 
 163 
 
164 
 
 Index 
 
 Buckland, Dean, 114-115 
 Bunsen, Baron, 115 
 Burns, Robert, 108 
 Butler, Bishop, 107, 138-139 
 "Butler and the Zeit-Geist," 
 
 ^ 137 
 
 Byron, Lord, 39-52 
 Canary, Nelly Arnold's Mat- 
 thias, no. III 
 "Canticle of the Creatures," 
 
 103 
 Cartesian proof of God's 
 
 existence, 92 
 Cat, Atossa, in 
 Catacombs, Hymnsof the, 136 
 Catholic Church the church 
 
 of the future, 134 
 "Choir Invisible, The," 149 
 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 92 
 Coleridge, Justice, 115 
 Coleridge, S. T., 62, 102 
 Comte, Augusta, 29, 149 
 Conviction, Force of individ- 
 ual, 151 
 Cosmopolitanism, Arnold's, 
 
 159 
 "Culture and Anarchy," 59 
 
 Dante and Goethe, 15 
 
 Dawson, W. H., 88, 89 
 
 Descartes, 106 
 
 Dog in the Scriptures, The, 
 105, 106 
 
 Duff, SirM. G., 118 
 
 "East London" sonnet, 161 
 
 Ecclesiasticus, 124 
 
 Eleos, Greek, 109 
 
 Eliot, George, 148-153 
 
 Emerson, R, W., 45, 90, 131, 
 132 
 
 "EmpedoclesonEtna," 71-94 
 
 "Enoch Arden," 42 
 
 Epieikeia, or sweet reason- 
 ableness, 139 
 
 "Excursion," Wordsworth's, 
 56 
 
 Fitzgerald, Edward, 15 
 
 Fox How in the Lake Dis- 
 trict, 52 
 
 Francis d'Assisi, 101-104 
 
 Fuller, Margaret, on prayer, 3 7 
 Gautier, Thdophile, 58 
 Geist, the dachshund, 108 
 "Geist's Grave," 108, 109 
 Geology, Arnold's acquaint- 
 ance with, 116 
 Goat in Scripture, The, 97 
 God, 145 
 
 Goethe, 7-21, 35, 83 
 "Good Shepherd with the 
 
 Kid, The," 99, 160 
 "Growing Old," 95 
 Gu6rin, Maurice de, 39 
 Gypsy Child, Lines to a, 66-68 
 Herbert, George, 126 
 Heywood's proverb, 105 
 Homer, 28 
 Hutton, R. H., 112 
 Huxley, Professor, 125 
 Hymns, 134-136 
 Idees-Forces, 46 
 Illusion, Doctrine of, 57 
 "Imitation of Christ, The," 
 
 102 
 Immortality, 29, 66-70, 107, 
 
 148 
 Impersonal, Arnold's use of 
 
 the word, 143 
 Imputed righteousness, 155 
 "In Memoriam," 9, 15, 17, 
 
 42, 116 
 "Intimations of Immortal- 
 ity," Wordsworth's, 56 
 Isaiah's Restoration- Proph- 
 ecy, 126 
 Jesus, The secret of, 160 
 "Jesus" hymns of the Mora- 
 vians, 135 
 Keats on the ocean, 39-41 
 "Kid, The Good Shepherd 
 
 with the," 99 
 Lake School, The, 52 
 Lavater, 84 
 Leibnitz, 106 
 Lessing and his Laocoon, 
 
 22-29 
 Lewes, George Henry, 81 
 "Literature and Dogma," 
 127, 130 
 
Index 
 
 165 
 
 Luther, Martin, 2$, 105, 135 
 Maclaren, Ian, 158 
 Marguerite poems, 31, 32, 157 
 "Memorial Verses," 52 
 Methodism, 59-61 
 Milton, 7, 16 
 Miracles, 88 
 Moody, D. W., 62 
 Mosaic cosmogony, 114 
 Music, Mission of, 26 
 Myers, F. W. H., 89, 148 
 Mystefy in religion, 151 
 Newman, Cardinal, 37, 66 
 Newton, Isaac, 105, 121 
 Note-Book, Arnold's, 8 
 "Obermann Once More," 18 
 Obermann poems, 32-38 
 Ocean, Arnold's treatment of 
 
 (see Sea), 146 
 Oxford and science, 113 
 "Pagan and Mediaeval Reli- 
 gious Sentiment," 103 
 Pascal on prayer, 85 
 Pathos in Arnold, iii, 112 
 Personality in Arnold's teach- 
 ing, i43» 144 
 Pessimism, 46 
 "Peter Bell," Wordsworth's, 
 
 60 
 Pharisee and Sadducee, 123, 
 
 147 
 Philistine, 159 
 Plato, 72 
 Positivists, 149 
 Potter and the wheel, The, 
 
 73, 84 
 Prayer. Arnold's conception 
 
 of, 36, 156 
 Psychology, Arnold's, 142, 
 
 143 
 Puritanism and childhood, 67 
 
 "Rab and His Friends," 108 
 
 "Rabbi Ben Ezra," 72-77 
 
 Ramond, 35 
 
 "Resignation," 28 
 
 Resurrection of Christ, The, 
 
 89 
 
 "Rugby Chapel," 157 
 Rydal in the Lake District, 
 
 50 
 Sadducee, A typical, 124 
 
 "Saint Paul and Protestant- 
 ism," 74, 153 
 Sainte-Beuve, 33, 34 
 Saintsbury, Professor, 11, 57 
 Sand, George, S3, 37, 45 
 Schleiermacher, 143-146 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 108 
 Sea, Arnold's conception of 
 
 the, 31,35-43 
 "Self-Dependence,'' 42 
 Senancour, 37-46 
 Shaftesburys,The three Lord, 
 
 128 
 Shakespeare, 28, 29, 105 
 Sirach, Son of, 123 
 Smith, the father of geology, 
 
 ^ 113 
 
 Southey, Robert, 62 
 
 Spinoza, Benedict, 19, 20, 21 
 
 "Stagirius," 13 
 
 State church, Necessity of 
 
 a, 133 
 Stoicism, 86 
 
 "Summer Night, A," 10 
 Swinburne, Algernon, 159 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 8, 9, 16 
 "The Future," 116 
 "Thyrsis," 117 
 Topffer, 33 
 Trench, Archbishop, Story 
 
 of, 144 
 Trinitarianism, 128 
 Unitarianism, 130-132 
 Urania, 15-17 
 
 Wallace, Alfred Russell, 88 
 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 88 
 Watts, Isaac, 137 
 Wesley, John, 61, 139, 140, 
 
 156 
 Whittier the poet, 53, 146 
 Wisdom book of Sirach, 123 
 Wordsworth, William, 40, 
 
 48-57 
 
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