Finally, Arnold makes of life an art rather than a science, and commits the conduct of it to an exquisite tact, rather than to reason or demonstration. The imaginative assimilation of all the best experience of the past—this he regards as the right training to develop true tact for the discernment of good and evil in all practical matters, where probability must be the guide of life. We are at once reminded of Newman’s Illative Sense, which was also an intuitive faculty for the dextrous apprehension of truth through the aid of the feelings and the imagination. But Arnold’s new Sense comes much nearer than Newman’s to being a genuinely sublimated Common Sense. Arnold’s own flair in matters of art and life was astonishingly keen, and yet he would have been the last to exalt it as unerring. His faith is ultimately in the best instincts of the so-called remnant—in the collective sense of the most cultivated, most delicately perceptive, most spiritually-minded people of the world. Through the combined intuitions of such men sincerely aiming at perfection, truth in all that pertains to the conduct of life will be more and more nearly won. Because of this faith of his in sublimated worldly wisdom, Arnold, unlike Newman, is in sympathy with the Zeitgeist of a democratic age.
And, indeed, here seems to rest Arnold’s really most permanent claim to gratitude and honour. He accepts—with some sadness, it is true, and yet genuinely and generously—the modern age, with its scientific bias and its worldly preoccupations; humanist as he is, half-romantic lover of an elder time, he yet masters his regret over what is disappearing and welcomes the present loyally. Believing, however, in the continuity of human experience, and, above all, in the transcendent worth to mankind of its spiritual acquisitions, won largely through the past domination of Christian ideals, he devotes himself to preserving the quintessence of this ideal life of former generations and insinuating it into the hearts and imaginations of men of a ruder age. He converts himself into a patient, courageous mediator between the old and the new. Herein he contrasts with Newman on the one hand, and with modern devotees of æstheticism on the other hand. Newman, whose delicately spiritual temperament was subdued even more deeply than Arnold’s to Romanticism, shrunk before the immediacy and apparent anarchy of modern life, and sought to realize his spiritual ideals through the aid of mediæval formulas and a return to mediæval conceptions and standards of truth. Exquisite spirituality was attained, but at the cost of what some have called the Great Refusal. A like imperfect synthesis is characteristic of the followers of art for art’s sake. They, too, give up common life as irredeemably crass, as unmalleable, irreducible to terms of the ideal. They turn for consolation to their own dreams, and frame for themselves a House Beautiful, where they may let these dreams have their way, “far from the world’s noise,” and “life’s confederate plea.” Arnold, with a temperament perhaps as exacting as either of these other temperaments, takes life as it offers itself and does his best with it. He sees and feels its crudeness and disorderliness; but he has faith in the instincts that civilized men have developed in common, and finds in the working of these instincts the continuous, if irregular, realization of the ideal.
[1] Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, chap. 3.
[2] Ibid., chap. 9.
[3] Carlyle’s Reminiscences, II, 271.
[4] Hours in a Library, III, 176.
[5] Lord Cockburn’s Life of Jeffrey (ed. Philadelphia, 1852), I, 101 ff.
[6] The Life and Times of Lord Brougham (ed. New York, 1871), I, 176 ff.
[7] Lord Cockburn’s Life of Jeffrey, II, 64.