How could these heathens their doctors vex,
Putting the cure of the ills of humanity
Into the hands of the ‘weaker sex?’
O Pallas sublime! Would you come back revealing
Your glory immortal, our doctors should see,—
Instead of proclaiming you Goddess of Healing,
They’d prohibit your practice, refuse your degree!”
The first dinner-party I ever attended in London, before I went to live in town, was at Mr. Bagehot’s house. I sat beside Mr. Richard Hutton, who has been ever since my good friend, and opposite us there sat a gentleman who at once attracted my attention. He had a strong dark face, a low forehead and hair parted in the middle, the large loose mouth of an orator and a manner quite unique; as if he were gently looking down on the follies of mortality from the superior altitudes of Olympos, or perhaps of Parnassus. “Do you know who that is sitting opposite to us?” said Mr. Hutton. I looked at him again, and replied: “I never saw him before, and I have never seen his picture, but I feel in my inner consciousness that it can only be Mr. Matthew Arnold;” and Mr. Arnold, of course, it was,—with an air which made me think him (what he was not) an intellectual coxcomb. He wrote, about that time or soon afterwards, some dreadfully derisive things of my Theism; not on account, apparently, of its intrinsic demerits, but because of what he conceived to be its upstart character. We are all familiar with a certain tone of lofty superiority common to Roman Catholics and Anglicans in dealing with Dissenters of all classes; the tone, no doubt, in which the priests of On talked of Moses when he led the Israelitish schism in the wilderness. It comes naturally to everybody who stands serenely on “the old paths,” and watches those who walk below, or strive to fray new ways through the jungle of poor human thoughts. But when Mr. Arnold had himself slipped off the old road so far as to have liquefied the Articles of the Apostles’ Creed into a “Stream of Tendency;” and compared the doctrine of the Trinity to a story of “Three Lord Shaftesburys;” and reduced the Object of Worship to the lowest possible denomination as “a Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness;” he must, I think, have come to feel that it was scarcely his affair to treat other people’s heresies as new-fangled, and lacking in the sanctities of tradition. As one after another of his brilliant essays appeared, and it became manifest that his own creed grew continually thinner, more exiguous, and less and less substantial, I was reminded of an old sporting story which my father told of a town-bred gentleman, the “Mr. Briggs” of those days, who for the first time shot a cock-pheasant, and after greatly admiring it laid it down on the grass. A keeper took up the bird and stroked it, pretending to wonder at its size, and presently shifted it aside and substituted a partridge, which he likewise stroked and admired, till he had an opportunity of again changing it for a snipe. At this crisis “Mr. Briggs” broke in furiously, bidding the keeper to stop stroking his bird: “Be hanged to you! If you go on like that, you’ll rub it down to a wren!” The creed of many persons in these days seems to be undergoing the process of being patted and praised, while all the time it is being rubbed down to a wren!
But whatever hard things Mr. Arnold said of me, I liked and admired him, and he was always personally most kind to me. He had of all men I have ever known the truest insight,—the true Poet’s insight,—into the feelings and characters of animals, especially of dogs. His poem, Geist’s Grave, is to me the most affecting description of the death of an animal in the range of literature. Indeed, the subject of Death itself, whether of beasts or of men, viewed from the same standpoint of hopelessness, has never, I think, been more tenderly touched. How deeply true to every heart is the thought expressed in the stanzas, which remind us that in all the vastness of the universe and of endless time there is not, and never will be, another being like the one who is dead! That being (some of us believe) may revive and live for ever, but another who will “restore its little self” will never be.
“... Not the course