‘Bathed in the sacred dews of morn
The wide aerial landscape spread—
The world which was ere I was born,
The world which lasts when I am dead.
‘Which never was the friend of one,
Nor promised love it could not give,
But lit for all its generous sun
And lived itself and made us live.
‘Then let me gaze—till I become
In soul, with what I gaze on, wed!
To feel the universe my home;
To have before my mind—instead
‘Of the sick room, the mortal strife,
The turmoil for a little breath—
The pure eternal course of life,
Not human combatings with death!
‘Thus feeling, gazing, let me grow
Composed, refresh'd, ennobled, clear—
Then willing let my spirit go
To work or wait, elsewhere or here!’
To turn from Arnold's poetry to his theological writings—if so grim a name can be given to these productions—from Rugby Chapel to Literature and Dogma, from Obermann to God and the Bible, from Empedocles on Etna to St. Paul and Protestantism, is to descend from the lofty table-lands,
‘From the dragon-warder'd fountains
Where the springs of knowledge are,
From the watchers on the mountains
And the bright and morning star,’
to the dusty highroad. It cannot, I think, be asserted that either the plan or the style of these books was in keeping with their subjects. It was characteristic of Mr. Arnold, and like his practical turn of mind, to begin Literature and Dogma in the Cornhill Magazine. A book rarely shakes off the first draft—Literature and Dogma never did. It is full of repetitions and wearisome recapitulations, well enough in a magazine where each issue is sure to be read by many who will never see another number, but which disfigure a book. The style is likewise too jaunty. Bantering the Trinity is not yet a recognised English pastime. Bishop-baiting is, but this notwithstanding, most readers of Literature and Dogma grew tired of the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol and of his alleged desire to do something for the honour of the Godhead, long before Mr. Arnold showed any signs of weariness. But making all these abatements, and fully admitting that Literature and Dogma is not likely to prove permanently interesting to the English reader, it must be pronounced a most valuable and useful book, and one to which the professional critics and philosophers never did justice. The object of Literature and Dogma was no less than the restoration of the use of the Bible to the sceptical laity. It was a noble object, and it was in a great measure, as thousands of quiet people could testify, attained. It was not a philosophical treatise. In its own way it was the same kind of thing as many of Cardinal Newman's writings. It started with an assumption, namely, that it is impossible to believe in the miracles recorded in the Old and New Testaments. There is no laborious attempt to distinguish between one miracle and another, or to lighten the burden of faith in any particular. Nor is any serious attempt made to disprove miracles. Mr. Arnold did not write for those who find no difficulty in believing in the first chapter of St. Luke's gospel, or the sixteenth chapter of St. Mark's, but for those who simply cannot believe a word of either the one chapter or the other. Mr. Arnold knew well that this inability to believe is apt to generate in the mind of the unbeliever an almost physical repulsion to open books which are full of supernatural events. Mr. Arnold knew this and lamented it. His own love of the Bible was genuine and intense. He could read even Jeremiah and Habakkuk. As he loved Homer with one side of him, so he loved the Bible with the other. He saw how men were crippled and maimed through growing up in ignorance of it, and living all the days of their lives outside its influence. He longed to restore it to them, to satisfy them that its place in the mind of man—that its educational and moral power was not due to the miracles it records nor to the dogmas that Catholics have developed or Calvanists extracted from its pages, but to its literary excellence and to the glow and enthusiasm it has shed over conduct, self-sacrifice, humanity, and holy living. It was at all events a worthy object and a most courageous task. It exposed him to a heavy cross-fire. The Orthodox fell upon his book and abused it, unrestrainedly abused it for its familiar handling of their sacred books. They almost grudged Mr. Arnold his great acquaintance with the Bible, just as an Englishman might be annoyed at finding Moltke acquainted with all the roads from Dover to London. This feeling was natural, and on the whole I think it creditable to the orthodox party that a book so needlessly pain-giving as Literature and Dogma did not goad them into any personal abuse of its author. But they could not away with the book. Nor did the philosophical sceptic like it much better. The philosophical sceptic is too apt to hate the Bible, even as the devil was reported to hate holy water. Its spirit condemns him. Its devout, heart-stirring, noble language creates an atmosphere which is deadly for pragmatic egotism. To make men once more careful students of the Bible was to deal a blow at materialism, and consequently was not easily forgiven. 'Why can't you leave the Bible alone?' they grumbled—'What have we to do with it?' But Pharisees and Sadducees do not exhaust mankind, and Mr. Arnold's contributions to the religious controversies of his time were very far from the barren things that are most contributions, and indeed most controversies on such subjects. I believe I am right when I say that he induced a very large number of persons to take up again and make a daily study of the books both of the Old and the New Testament.
As a literary critic Mr. Arnold had at one time a great vogue. His Essays in Criticism, first published in 1865, made him known to a larger public than his poems or his delightful lectures on translating Homer had succeeded in doing. He had the happy knack of starting interesting subjects and saying all sorts of interesting things by the way. There was the French Academy. Would it be a good thing to have an English Academy? He started the question himself and answered it in the negative. The public took it out of his mouth and proceeded to discuss it for itself, always on the assumption that he had answered it in the affirmative. But that is the way with the public. No sensible man minds it. To set something going is the most anybody can hope to do in this world. Where it will go to, and what sort of moss it will gather as it goes, for despite the proverb there is nothing incompatible between moss and motion, no one can say. In this volume, too, he struck the note, so frequently and usefully repeated, of self-dissatisfaction. To make us dissatisfied with ourselves, alive to our own inferiority, not absolute but in important respects, to check the chorus, then so loud, of self-approval of our majestic selves—to make us understand why nobody who is not an Englishman wants to be one, this was another of the tasks of this militant man. We all remember how Wragg[6] is in custody. The papers on Heine and Spinoza and Marcus Aurelius were read with eagerness, with an enjoyment, with a sense of widening horizons too rare to be easily forgotten. They were light and graceful, but it would I think be unjust to call them slender. They were not written for specialists or even for students, but for ordinary men and women, particularly for young men and women, who carried away with them from the reading of Essays in Criticism something they could not have found anywhere else and which remained with them for the rest of their days, namely, a way of looking at things. A perfectly safe critic Mr. Arnold hardly was. Even in this volume he fusses too much about the De Guérins. To some later judgments of his it would be unkind to refer. It was said of the late Lord Justice Mellish by Lord Cairns that he went right instinctively. That is, he did not flounder into truth. Mr. Arnold never floundered, but he sometimes fell. A more delightful critic of literature we have not had for long. What pleasant reading are his Lectures on Translating Homer, which ought to be at once reprinted. How full of good things! Not perhaps fit to be torn from their contexts, or paraded in a commonplace book, but of the kind which give a reader joy—which make literature tempting—which revive, even in dull middle-age, something of the enthusiasm of the love-stricken boy. Then, too, his Study of Celtic Literature. It does not matter much whether you can bring yourself to believe in the Eisteddfod or not. In fact Mr. Arnold did not believe in it. He knew perfectly well that better poetry is to be found every week in the poet's corner of every county newspaper in England than is produced annually at the Eisteddfod. You need not even share Mr. Arnold's opinion as to the inherent value of Celtic Literature, though this is of course a grave question, worthy of all consideration—but his Study is good enough to be read for love. It is full of charming criticism. Most critics are such savages—or if they are not savages, they are full of fantasies, and are capable at any moment of calling Tom Jones dull, or Sydney Smith a bore. Mr. Arnold was not a savage, and could no more have called Tom Jones dull or Sydney Smith a bore, than Homer heavy or Milton vulgar. He was no gloomy specialist. He knew it took all sorts to make a world. He was alive to life. Its great movement fascinated him, even as it had done Burke, even as it did Cardinal Newman. He watched the rushing stream, the 'stir of existence,' the good and the bad, the false and the true, with an interest that never flagged. In his last words on translating Homer he says: 'And thus false tendency as well as true, vain effort as well as fruitful, go together to produce that great movement of life, to present that immense and magic spectacle of human affairs, which from boyhood to old age fascinates the gaze of every man of imagination, and which would be his terror if it were not at the same time his delight.'
Mr. Arnold never succeeded in getting his countrymen to take him seriously as a practical politician. He was regarded as an unauthorised practitioner whose prescriptions no respectable chemist would consent to make up. He had not the diploma of Parliament, nor was he able, like the Secretary of an Early Closing Association, to assure any political aspirant that he commanded enough votes to turn an election. When Mr. John Morley took occasion after Mr. Arnold's death to refer to him in Parliament, the name was received respectfully but coldly. And yet he was eager about politics, and had much to say about political questions. His work in these respects was far from futile. What he said was never inept. It coloured men's thoughts, and contributed to the formation of their opinions far more than even public meetings. His introduction to his Report on Popular Education in France, published in 1861, is as instructive a piece of writing as is to be found in any historical disquisition of the last three decades. The paper on 'My Countrymen' in that most amusing book Friendship's Garland (which ought also to be at once reprinted) is full of point.