SOURCE: Trilling, Lionel. “The Spirit of Criticism.” In Matthew Arnold, pp. 190-221. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.

[In the following excerpt, Trilling examines Arnold's widespread influence as a literary critic.]

For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always in the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.

—Descartes

Arnold was the most influential critic of his age: the estimate must be as unequivocal as this. Other critics may have been momentarily more exciting; none was eventually more convincing. T. S. Eliot has said that the academic literary opinions of our time were formed by Arnold; F. O. Matthiessen, recalling this comment, specifies George Saintsbury, Charles Whibley, A. C. Bradley, W. P. Ker and Irving Babbitt as the continuators of the Arnold tradition;¹ and in another essay Eliot finds that the assumptions of Arnold's criticism were adopted by Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, J. A. Symonds, Leslie Stephen and F. W. H. Myers.² “For half-a-century,” says R. A. Scott-James, “Arnold's position in [England] was comparable with that of [Aristotle] in respect of the wide influence he exercised, the mark he impressed upon criticism, and the blind faith with which he was trusted by his votaries.”³

What were the causes of Arnold's success? First of all, Arnold had a manner and a style rather new to England and perfectly adapted to the art of criticism—elegant yet sinewy, colloquial yet reserved, cool yet able to glow into warmth, careful never to flare into heat. It was a style which kept writer and reader at a sufficient distance from each other to allow room between them for the object of their consideration. The opposite of Macaulay's, of which it has been said that no one could tell the truth in it, Arnold's prose was sinuous and modulated, permitting every nuance and modification that exactness required. A prose of “line” rather than of “color,” it avoided the Wagnerian giantism of Carlyle and found its musical affinity, perhaps, in Gluck; it was the so-called Oxford prose⁴ which Newman also wrote, touched with Latinity and Addison, in which urbanity did not preclude vigor.

Moreover, with this style went a biographical talent nicely suited to the critical purpose, not so brilliant and dramatic as to overshadow the literary evaluation but alert to the tone and inflection of personality, able, by reference to these, to illustrate the spiritual meaning of style. In part learned from Johnson and Cotton, in larger part from Sainte-Beuve, it was a biographical method whose results, for all their frequent wrong-headedness, were perhaps more reassuring than Sainte-Beuve's because they sprang from a more firmly based temperament.

Sainte-Beuve had called himself a naturalist of souls and from Sainte-Beuve, his acknowledged master, Arnold learned the attitude of the “scientist” in literature. The “science” to which Sainte-Beuve subscribed was not Taine's; it had no system, no categories; it was an attitude merely—an insatiable curiosity and, so far as possible, the abrogation of passion and partisanship. But, as Arnold was later to say, Sainte-Beuve had stopped with curiosity; skepticism, the result of frustrated hope for himself and for society, had kept him from going further. Arnold went further; the tradition of his father, of moral strenuousness, was strong in him. He might use Sainte-Beuve's grave, imperturbable amenity, but beneath it was the intense desire to correct the world and to make right prevail.⁵

Style, biographical talent, the “scientific” attitude, were only the servants of Arnold's literary point of view; it was his point of view which made the success of the first series of Essays in Criticism. It had been variously expressed in Arnold's earliest critical writing; now it was summed up in the phrase which has been a gage thrown to all critics since: Literature is a criticism of life.⁶

For Arnold's contemporaries, living closer than we do to the tradition of the French Revolution, the phrase was an indication of the age's true tendency. For the Revolution of 1789, said Renan, had been wrought by philosophers; it was the first time that humanity undertook to reflect upon itself: “Condorcet, Mirabeau, Robespierre are the first instances of theorists meddling with the direction of affairs and endeavouring to govern humanity in a reasonable and scientific manner.”⁷ It was “the advent of the power of reflection in the government of humanity,”⁸ and Hegel used even more dramatic language about the same phenomenon:

Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man's existence centers in his head, i.e. in Thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality. Anaxagoras had been the first to say that [Thought] governs the World; but not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that Thought ought to govern spiritual reality.⁹

Arnold's distinction in criticism lay in his comprehension of this very fact. He had said that democracy is characterized by its response to ideas and can advance only by the discovery and maintenance of the best of them. Criticism, he announced, was the instrument for their discovery and evaluation; the close relationship between literature and life which Arnold perceived and explained gave him his first hold upon his readers.

Yet of the principal essays between 1863 and 1865 only four deal primarily with the literary life, with poetry and criticism: “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Literary Influence of Academies,” “Maurice de Guérin” and “Heinrich Heine.” But six deal, directly or indirectly, with religion: the nub of the essay on Eugénie de Guérin is the comparison of her life of Catholic piety with a Protestant lady's life of good works; the essay on Joubert reflects the Platonic religiosity of the “French Coleridge's” mind; “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment” gives the palm to the medieval while pleading for an understanding of any religion, even the decadent pagan; and the essays, “Spinoza and the Bible” (or its earlier and more topical version, “The Bishop and the Philosopher”), “Dr. Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church,” and “Marcus Aurelius,” are all concerned with distinguishing between the life of religion and the life of the intellect. For one of the discoveries of Arnold's criticism was that intellect was not enough, that it could not be the guide to a multitude of matters for the multitude of mankind—that religion still had its important place. It was this discovery that constituted a final assurance of Arnold's charm for a large class of cultivated but sorely-tried people.

Here, at a time when the modern spirit was questioning both the validity of religion and the intelligence of those who desired still to accept it, an avowed proponent of the modern spirit came forward and not in his own name only but in the name of criticism, which was the modern spirit itself, said that religion was good and necessary and must not be touched by the intellect:—and this was Professor Arnold, whose own religious doubts and denials were well known from his poems. True, he was not at all willing to admit that there was any reason to believe religion could be proved—that was perhaps disquieting; but it was something to have him say that, human nature being what it is, religion is necessary to it. Nor did he say that men should worship the All or the Absolute; although he did not regard all aspects of Christianity with equal pleasure, it was Christianity and no new philosophic religion that he recommended. If we are to understand Arnold's appeal to his contemporaries, we must understand this dual intention of his criticism. If we are to follow the fluctuations of his opinion, his often confusing modulations, we must see that his criticism is the reconciliation of the two traditions whose warfare had so disturbed his youth—rationalism and faith. It is an attempt to bring this synthesis to bear on all the aspects of modern life. He steers a course both by compass and by stars: reason, but not the cold and formal reason that makes the mind a machine; faith, but not the escape from earth-binding facts. “The main element of the modern spirit's life,” he says, “is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason.”¹⁰

The imaginative reason: with this phrase Arnold feels he has closed the gap between head and heart, between feelings and intellect, a schism, as it had appeared in his poetry, of which John Dewey has said:

We must bridge this gap of poetry from science. We must heal this unnatural wound. We must, in the cold, reflective way of critical system, justify and organize the truth which poetry, with its quick, naive contacts, has already felt and reported. The same movement of the spirit, bringing man and man, man and nature, into wider and closer unity, which has found expression by anticipation in poetry, must find expression by retrospection in philosophy. Thus will be hastened the day in which our sons and our daughters shall prophesy, our young men shall see visions, and our old men dream dreams.¹¹

If not exactly in the way Dewey suggests, if not quite “in the cold, reflective way of critical system,” Arnold's criticism makes the instauration Dewey asks for. And only when we understand this synthesis can we understand the phrase which has bothered so many of Arnold's modern readers: “Poetry [or “literature:” Arnold interchanges] is a criticism of life;” for Arnold, poetry is the highest expression of the imaginative reason.

There is scarcely a true poet, whatever the philosophical or political intention of his work, who would accept literally Arnold's famous phrase as an adequate definition of poetry. Consequently, many interpretations of it have been offered by poets and critics. Professor Garrod, for example, interprets it to mean merely that insofar as a work possesses organic unity it is a criticism of the chaos of life; he quotes Edward Caird who said that “literature is a criticism of life exactly in the sense that a good man is a criticism of a bad one.”¹² This would bring Arnold's phrase close to Sir Philip Sidney's “golden world” of art which is a model and corrective for the “brazen world;”¹³ and in this sense music presents us with a golden world; so does dancing; so does a consummate athletic achievement or a circus feat—for in each we have a perfection of organization and execution which, by suggesting that we can overcome the limitations of the usual way of feeling or of moving, is (even though it has no explicit content) a criticism of the usual way.¹⁴ Arnold, it is apparent, meant something more literal by his words than this, something which seems to justify T. S. Eliot's protest that his definition of poetry is “frigid to anyone who has felt the full surprise and elevation of a new experience of poetry.”¹⁵ He is writing of Joubert when he first uses the phrase (here it is “literature” not “poetry”) and Joubert was no architect of a golden world but a critic, in a very literal sense, of this brazen world; Arnold simply meant that Joubert put his finger on aspects of life and judged “Good” or “Bad.” So poetry (or literature generally), Arnold feels, sometimes by accident and implication but sometimes by intent, says “Good” or “Bad.” And if Mr. Eliot's objection is valid, that poetry does much more than make such ethical and spiritual judgments, we must remember that Arnold is not offering a definition of poetry comparable to “The best words in the best order,”¹⁶ or any other of the scores of classic attempts at definition. He is stating the function of poetry, at least what he considers to be its chief function. Criticism is not what poetry is; it is what poetry does. How it does it is another matter. Insofar as poetry helps us to live, not merely by occupying us or by delighting us but by clarifying us with delight, it is a criticism of life.

“The grand work of literary genius,” says Arnold, “is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations,—making beautiful works with them, in short.”¹⁷ If literature is a criticism of life, it is of a very special kind. The synthetic and expository character of literature, as against the analytical and exploratory character of philosophy or science, keeps them each in their different spheres. “Poetry is the interpretress of the natural world”¹⁸ as well as of the moral world, and as the interpretress of the natural world it is linked with science yet does what science cannot do, for “the interpretations of science 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.”¹⁹

Natural magic and moral profundity—these are the two attributes of great poetry. But the pressure of moral ideas is more constant and immediate than the stimulus of natural magic. We can observe in the greatest poets—in Shakespeare and Lucretius, preeminently in Wordsworth—that the sensuous element diminishes as the moral increases and that, though the task of making “magically near and real the life of Nature, and man's life … so far as it is a part of that Nature”²⁰ is a fair half of the function of poetry, there is a tendency for philosophy and moral profundity to dominate and destroy natural magic. The grand power of poetry is not, as with philosophy and science, “a power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them.”²¹

But poetry nevertheless lives by ideas and if the poet is to deal with them only in a synthetic way, he cannot be expected to create them: that is the task of philosophy and science. The poet must live in an atmosphere of the best ideas; how determine the best? It is here that criticism proffers its good offices as a kind of broker between abstract thought and poetry. “Life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it; else it must be a comparatively poor, barren, and short-lived affair.”²²

Goethe had asked, “What are the conditions that produce a great classical national author?” His answer was substantially the one which Arnold makes to the same question. Goethe said:

He must, in the first place, be born in a great commonwealth, which after a series of great and historic events has become a happy and unified nation. He must find in his countrymen loftiness of disposition, depth of feeling, and vigor and consistency of action. He must be thoroughly pervaded with the national spirit, and through his innate genius feel capable of sympathizing with the past as well as the present. He must find his nation in a high state of civilization, so that he will have no difficulty in obtaining for himself a high degree of culture. He must find much material already collected and ready for his use, and a large number of more or less perfect attempts made by his predecessors. And finally, there must be such a happy conjuncture of outer and inner circumstances that he will not have to pay dearly for his mistakes, but that in the prime of his life he may be able to see the possibilities of a great theme and to develop it according to some uniform plan into a well-arranged and well-constructed literary work.²³

In short, the poet needs civil and intellectual order.

Of course, in England a kind of civil order prevailed, but were England's peace and her liberalistic economic system a true order or of a very fertile kind? Many men of divergent political views were united in believing they were not. They perceived energy and enterprise, but also waste and essential chaos. And Arnold saw this condition reflected in the intellectual life of the nation. Romanticism had abandoned the anti-individualistic poetic theories of the 18th century and the new reading public enshrined the mere energy of genius, just as liberal economic ethics had enshrined the mere energy of enterprise. The British public admired genius—and rather preferred it raw, like Alexander Smith's. The genius was the Bounderby of the arts, the man who could boast that he had started with nothing and had achieved everything—by himself alone, in the face of opposition. One might draw one's figure from industry and believe that genius was 10٪ inspiration and 90٪ perspiration: that was a comfortable notion, it gave every honest man a chance for genius. Or one could reverse the proportion and thus draw the figure from the dissenting chapel—make it 90٪ inspiration, and then the genius was very much like the religious man seized with the spirit. In either case the idea of genius was attractive to the middle class: a genius was an absolute success and he had won his way all by himself. The notion that society contributes to the making of genius was as antipathetic as the notion that society contributes to the making of a wealthy brewer. But one of the great comic moments of the 19th century is Dickens' unmasking of Bounderby: so far from having started life in a gutter with only a shirt, the enterprising manufacturer had had a comfortable home, a devoted mother and a nice little capital. Arnold undertook to unmask the Bounderby conception of genius and poetic success.

The reality or validity of “genius” is unquestionable, obviously, and Arnold did not question it. Genius is energy,²⁴ he said, and the first necessity of poetry. But genius is not all of poetry, for poetry is “simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things”²⁵ and if the things that are said are not the right things, no amount of energy—of genius—can excuse them.

Arnold, in his essay, “The Literary Influence of Academies,” pointed to the body of literature of England's latest burst of poetical energy, the Romantic Movement, and found it deficient. For one thing, it had produced no single work comparable in execution to the perfection of form of the Greek best, or equal in profundity of insight. For another, it had sired no line of poetical descendants of an interest equal to its own. It had been dominated by energy but had lacked order and this was typical of the British spirit.²⁶ England's geniuses had been solitary, individualistic—and discontinuous. Shakespeare may have far surpassed Corneille, Newton had excelled Leibnitz: the Continental instinct for order, however, had compensated for the inferiority in endowed energy. The English literature that followed Shakespeare and his group was provincial and parochial while the literature that followed Corneille was the world-shaking literature of the 18th century. And Newton, an isolated genius, had fathered disciples who were comparatively powerless whereas the less-gifted Leibnitz had generated on the Continent a great tradition of research.

The French people, indeed, were preeminent in their understanding of the virtue of submitting, the individual genius to law, of subordinating energy to intelligence. The English lacked this perception and in the Romantic period they had been unable to advance beyond a wonderful outburst of energy. “According to the Romantic doctrine,” says Georg Brandes, “the artistic omnipotence of the Ego and the arbitrariness of the poet can submit to no law.”²⁷ In this direction, says Arnold, lies brilliance—but also failure and sterility. Samuel Rogers records a remark of Burke's that “England is a moon shone upon by France. France has all the things within herself; and she possesses the power of recovering from the severest blows. England is an artificial country: take away her commerce, and what has she?”²⁸ Arnold agrees, in effect. He finds the strength of France in her ability to establish an interrelation of parts, to create centrality and order.²⁹

Arnold had called to the attention of the British public the effect upon education of the French feeling for centrality and order embodied in the strong State. This same feeling created a State in the French Republic of Letters—the Academy—and Arnold is willing to consider the benefit that would accrue to English letters by the establishment of an English Academy. Swift had once proposed to Lord Oxford that the government undertake the erection of “a society or academy for correcting and settling our language, that we may not perpetually be changing as we do”³⁰ and Southey, conceiving that men would quickly abandon their principles and the charms of popular adulation for the distinction of an R.A., had outlined a Royal Academy whose purpose was to draw off men of letters from subversive activity. Arnold's plan has nothing in common with Swift's rather trifling scheme or with Southey's amusingly base one. Indeed, he always insisted that he had no scheme at all, but was merely exemplifying that enlightening play of purely theoretical fancy which criticism must be. He wanted to explore English intellectual life by showing what an Academy might accomplish in every field from journalism to poetry and to discover what English energy might gain from French order. An Academy, he indicated, would control the helter-skelter laissez-faire of English thought. Criticism's function was to determine the best thought of an age and to disseminate it and the Academy might well be the critic enlarged and endowed with the prestige of establishment. It might serve as a center for the best opinion of the time, checking the whim of the individual, advancing his talent. Where there was power, it could help to prevent its dissipation in personal crotchets and eccentricities—such as those of Ruskin. Where there was genius it might warn of too much genius: genius has been too busy there,³¹ Arnold says of a brilliant sentence of Jeremy Taylor's—too much force without justification. Where there were ideas it could insist upon the ethical value of style, where there was style it could point out the provincialism of the commonplace and the necessity for maturity.

Arnold, in questioning the value of untrammeled genius, never makes the mistake of Joubert, who felt that energy itself was evil, nor has he the daintiness of Sainte-Beuve, for whom Balzac's vitality was suspect. Yet sometimes we feel that certain characteristics of manner which Arnold praises in the Academy and the “center”—the qualities of “amenity,” “urbanity,” and “unction”—are also too much the characteristics of the courtier and the abbé. And sometimes they are present in Arnold's own style at the cost, we feel, of the true virile metal, and we are inclined to cherish our sub-Olympian humanity and cry, “Less light, more heat!” For Arnold's prepossession with discipline leads him to forget that the romantic poets, if they did not have order themselves, were struggling toward it and that our perception of the struggle is itself a vivifying experience. He does not see that order is not only a Greek temple at the end of a clear path, but also finding one's path in the wilderness, or clearing the wilderness away. The aesthetic theory and practice of the romantic poets was just such a struggle:—Wordsworth's development is almost too obvious and extreme an example; Coleridge became almost Aristotelean in his poetics; Keats was constantly moving toward chastity of expression and objectivity of content; and Byron, whose admiration of Pope was constant and significant, turned in the end to the Greek dramatic form. What is even clearer is the effort of all of these men to achieve not only formal but philosophic order.

Yet Arnold's exaggeration of urbanity, amenity and order was not without justification in his time. The tone of the intellectual life of his day was fairly raw; it was much invaded by the acerbities of party politics, the critic choosing the knout or the butter-spreader according to the politics of the author he was reviewing; and political life was too little touched by the intellect. Carlyle was threatening all classes with his mighty but often irresponsible voice: “part man of genius,” as Arnold called him in a letter to his brother, “part fanatic—and part tom-fool.”³² Macaulay had only recently stopped parading his apodictic-seeming priggishness as objectivity. Ruskin was exercising the incomparable orchestra of his prose, often to good ends but often to confusion. And these were the best, the men who were darkening counsel with great talents. The lesser men were yet more culpable and increasingly influential: Arnold watched the growth of journalese, saw the soulless flashiness of James Gordon Bennett's editorials appearing in Kinglake's historical prose and insisted that language like this was inevitably a falsification of fact. Consciously, he sought to move to a way of thought which would allow the sight to be undimmed by factional or personal interests or by foibles of personality, to a new manner of speech which should be the outward and visible sign of this new manner of thinking—new, that is, to English intellectual life. Thought and speech of this kind he called criticism.

Often Arnold's criticism has little enough to do with literary criticism; its meaning is often so loose and general as to make it seem a kind of magical incantation, but it is enough for its purpose. Criticism's first function is to “see the object as it really is”³³—to see behind the fine word and the inflated rhetoric to the actuality. Hegel had exemplified the critical attitude in Arnold's sense when he said: “When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.”³⁴

It is the age of science and it is the age of party—on the one hand there is the effort for clarity and the passionless definition of meaning, on the other, calculated obfuscation and the appeal to passion and interest. The statistical societies, already flourishing in the 1830's, could amass the facts; the party presses could display them to partisan ends. While the honest if fumbling effort of thinkers was trying to formulate the law behind society and to erect new sciences, the servants of interest were bending social concepts to their own social purposes. In such an age it was the duty of criticism to take the part of science and advance its unclouded disinterestedness. And this was especially necessary in England, for nothing was harder for the English, Arnold felt, than to see the object as it really was. Marked as they were by “energy” and “honesty,” they lacked the virtues of the quick and lively intelligence which implements true honesty. They saw what they wished to see and ignored what diminished their peace of mind. They could talk easily of the splendors of their civilization because they never allowed themselves to realize anything that would gainsay their belief. They needed criticism because criticism confronts the ideal with the fact. Sir Charles Adderley and Mr. Roebuck congratulate the nation on its achievement in population, coal and liberty? Criticism quietly asks, What of the case of Wragg, the girl discharged from the Nottingham workhouse, who murdered her child in a ditch?

In short, at a time when class set itself against class and interest against interest, Arnold, in his great essay, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” speaks of criticism, whose peculiar quality it is to be disinterested. Criticism, like science, espouses no party, no cause, however good, except the cause of truth and the general welfare of man. In practical life, party and the taking of sides may perhaps be a necessity; even this necessity does not inevitably preclude disinterestedness. At a later time Arnold is to speak of Falkland, his father's hero, who, forced to choose sides in the civil war, criticized the party he chose and was so torn by shame at its deficiencies that he seems to have courted his own death. Now Arnold gives the example of Burke, who, after years of attack on the French Revolution, was still able to write:

If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.³⁵

And Arnold comments, “That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature.”³⁶

But Falkland, after all, was rendered ineffectual by his disinterestedness. And Burke's disinterestedness did not prevent his long attack upon the French Revolution or keep the attack from being scurrilous and often unfair. Practical activity is either checked by disinterestedness or, if not, allows it but a moment in a lifetime. No doubt, Arnold would reply; and therefore if criticism is to assure its own disinterestedness it must remove itself from practical life.

It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word,—disinterestedness. And how is criticism to show disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from what is called “the practical view of things;” by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches. By steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas, which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in this country at any rate are certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and applications, questions which will never fail to have due prominence given to them³⁷

If the English mind, with its love of action, finds advice such as this difficult to grasp, without its comprehension, the intellectual—and, indeed, the practical—effort of the century must become sterile. For the French Revolution was not so much the fulfilment, Arnold believes, as the betrayal of the great ideas of France in the 18th century and failed because of the desire of men to give “an immediate and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason.”³⁸

Criticism must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims. Even with well-meant efforts of the practical spirit it must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting. It must not hurry on to the goal because of its practical importance. It must be patient, and know how to wait; and flexible, and know how to attach itself to things and how to withdraw from them.³⁹

The spirit of criticism, then, is that which measures the actual and the practical by the ideal. It never relinquishes its vision of what might be and never says that what can be is perfect merely because it is better than what is. Criticism does an even more difficult thing than this:

It must be apt to study and praise elements that for the fulness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the practical sphere may be maleficent. It must be apt to discern the spiritual shortcomings or illusions of powers that in the practical sphere may be beneficent.⁴⁰

Perhaps no man has ever formulated—though some have practised—so difficult an intellectual course. “To study and praise elements that for the fulness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the practical sphere may be maleficent!” It is dangerous but it is a necessary study for cultural completeness; only the man of perfect equipoise and great spiritual strength may undertake it, the man utterly sure of the beneficent goal toward which he is striving. Here, if anywhere, we have the key to Arnold's importance and to his method. Here, too, we have the key to the reason why he is the common butt of people of such diverse views, and why he is admired by people who harm him with their admiration.

Yet behind Arnold's generalizations lie specific facts which we must examine if we ourselves are to use upon him the critical method he himself taught. Arnold, like his father, lived in the shadow of the French Revolution and of the Reign of Terror. He welcomed the new democracy but he suspected it. He welcomed rationalism but feared its effects. He was far from being at one with established religion yet he feared the void which its disappearance would leave. He saw old institutions crumbling and was glad, but he was uneasy lest their fall bring down more than themselves. He wanted progress but he feared the “acridity”⁴¹ which would characterize the forward movement. Consequently he found it necessary to formulate a point of view which, while it affirmed the modern spirit with its positive goal and scientific method, would still allow him to defend the passing order. Arnold's criticism was, in effect, his refusal to move forward until Burke and Voltaire compounded their quarrel, bowed to each other and, taking him by either hand, agreed on the path to follow.

In his essay on Heine, Arnold defines the modern spirit. “Modern times,” he says, “find themselves with an immense system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules, which have come to them from times not modern. In this system their life has to be carried forward; yet they have a sense that this system is not of their own creation, that it by no means corresponds exactly with the wants of their actual life, that, for them, it is customary, not rational. The awakening of this sense is the awakening of the modern spirit.”⁴² In effect it is the “sense of want of correspondence between the forms of modern Europe and its spirit, between the new wine of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the old bottles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or even of the sixteenth and seventeenth.”⁴³ Arnold is very clear that to “remove this want of correspondence is beginning to be the settled endeavour of most persons of good sense.”⁴⁴ He concludes that “dissolvents of the old European system … we must all be, all of us who have any power of working.”⁴⁵ But this is not all: “What we have to study is that we may not be acrid dissolvents of it.”⁴⁶

Not acrid dissolvents: to only one dissolving agent of the old European system does Arnold give his full approval—to Goethe, who never fell into acridity and whose “profound, imperturbable naturalism is absolutely fatal to all routine thinking.”⁴⁷ Goethe “puts the standard, once for all, inside every man instead of outside him; when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favour of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, ‘But is it so? Is it so to me?’ Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested; and it may be remarked that no persons are so radically detached from this order, no persons so thoroughly modern, as those who have felt Goethe's influence most deeply.”⁴⁸

But this way of working, Arnold knows, is slow; it must be supplemented with the headlong force of Heine, the true follower of Goethe, for Heine too, as he said of himself, is a soldier in the Liberation War of humanity. Arnold had begun by despising Heine; the letter to his mother in which he describes his disgust at the false “Byronism” of this “Voltaire au clair de lune”⁴⁹ is a masterpiece of misunderstanding. We comprehend something of the nature of Arnold's critical mind when we see how the years brought the tempered but profound appreciation manifested in the essays, “Heinrich Heine” and “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment,” and in the sonnets, “Heine's Grave.” For Arnold, Heine becomes important not only because he is a soldier of liberation, but because his manner of fighting conforms to the demands of criticism. Heine understood the reality of ideas and knew that they were not marbles or counters but the basis of right conduct. Though he attacked reaction, he attacked it in his own way, with his eye on the realm of ideas and therefore his hatred of reaction was no greater than his hatred of the Philistine liberals who, though they too attacked the old order, betrayed the ideals of true liberalism.

Arnold nevertheless refuses to grant that Heine is a completely adequate interpreter of the modern spirit. True that he conforms to all the requirements that criticism might make of the intellect; he is the very embodiment of intelligence. But criticism demands more than intelligence; criticism demands that intelligence be not acrid, that it go hand in hand with “moral balance” and “nobleness of soul and character.”⁵⁰ Heine lacks these; he has everything save love.⁵¹

In other words, the social and intellectual ideas of the French Revolution—or most of them—must be made to prevail but the moral tone of the French Revolution must be replaced with something different and better, with what Arnold calls “unction.”

Bishop Colenso wrote a book, no ordinary book but the center of a long and acrimonious battle in which the forces of progress were aligned against the old institutions; it was, clearly, a book that sought to remove the “want of correspondence between the forms of modern Europe and its spirit.” Arnold condemned the book. Was he, as his liberal colleagues insisted, allying himself with the forces of reaction? He replied that he was not. Colenso had brought acridity to a situation which required unction and Arnold explains that when he denounces the mistake of a fellow-fighter in the liberal camp, he is not betraying liberalism but following the dictates of true criticism.

John William Colenso, bishop of the obscure African see of Natal, had set out to convert the heathen and found to his dismay that the heathen had converted him. It is rather like an 18th century tale of mythical exploration in which the simple rationalism of the savage triumphs over the dialectic of the priest; Voltaire would have enjoyed it. Colenso had made himself proficient in the Zulu tongue and had engaged the help of some intelligent natives to translate the Bible into their difficult language. But the intelligent natives began to ask questions. With their natural interest in wild life, they wanted to know how Noah had managed to get all the animals and all the necessary fodder into the ark with him. It was a simple question but it checked Colenso, and he tells us his heart answered, “Shall a man speak lies in the name of the LORD? Zech. xiii. 3.” He was the more embarrassed because he had lately been reading geology. He equivocated with his Zulu friends, sent for books, found that the apologists for the ordinary view were unsatisfactory but that the liberals, Ewald and Keunen, confirmed many of his own ideas.

Colenso saw at once the consequences of his position. He believed now that the so-called Mosaic narrative of the Pentateuch, “whatever value it may have, is not historically true.”⁵² There was no book in English which stated this simply and unequivocally and after some doubts Colenso published the work he had been preparing. He knew that he stood a good chance of being expelled from the Church but it was a “matter of life and death”⁵³ and he decided to take the chance.

So far was Colenso from attacking the Church and religion that he believed he was contributing to their intellectual support. For it was no longer possible to keep things quiet: the simple fact that the biblical narrative was non-historical by modern standards of history was rapidly weakening faith in religion—exactly as Voltaire knew it would. It was significant that the brilliant university men were not going into the Church; the creed demanded a credulity which their intelligence could not allow. Colenso saw a general drift toward irreligion among thinking people; “The Church of England,” he said, “must fall to the ground by its own internal weakness,—by losing its hold upon the growing intelligence of all classes,—unless some remedy be very soon applied to this state of things.”⁵⁴ And this state of things, he believed, was all the more dangerous because the skepticism of the intellectual middle classes was being shared by the multitudes of more intelligent factory operatives.

Colenso, in short, wanted religion to live on a somewhat reduced budget and to maintain its solvency by giving up the literal (or the slightly concessionary “apologetic”) interpretation of the Bible. It was an obviously necessary move. It was, however, not so obvious to Colenso and his liberal partisans what dangers lay in this reduction of religion's budget; for though the modern highly-instructed man may accept religious supernaturalism without the evidence of miracle, simpler people cannot. Without supernaturalism religion is in danger of becoming little more than ethical culture, and often less. By reducing its budget in this one item religion may become undercapitalized. Yet there seemed nothing else to do.

Colenso was right to fear ecclesiastical punishment. England had not yet quieted down from the storm in 1860 over Essays and Reviews, a plea by several Churchmen for a more liberalized religion. The anger of the conservative Church had been enormous; the matter had come to legal prosecution and Dr. Pusey had so far forgotten himself as to write private letters to one of the judges to influence his decision in the interests of eternal damnation. The case had been brought before the House of Lords and the essayists and reviewers had been vindicated. But the forces which had been defeated in 1860 rallied now against Colenso in 1863, captained by the same Bishop Samuel Wilberforce who had led them in the earlier struggle. Soapy Sam—for such, because of his slippery arts in Church politics, was this prelate's unfortunate nickname—won a condemnation of Colenso from Convocation. A colonial bishop excommunicated his episcopal colleague, barred him from his own cathedral as a heathen man and a publican, and there were more lawsuits. Colenso's clerical supporters were persecuted; the press groaned with attack and defense. In court, despite the talents of Mr. Gladstone who was of counsel for the conservative faction, Colenso, to the misery of John Keble, was eventually sustained, his salary continued and his excommunication voided. But though Colenso had triumphed and his victory indicated an important change in English religious thought, he lived a miserable life; he was cut by his old friends and even his servants feared to stay with him.

Almost to a man, the liberals, in Church and out, defended Colenso. Arnold, however, though deprecating the belief that he was flinging a brother liberal to the High Church “hyenas,” aggressively dissociated himself from the defense. He consulted the spirit of criticism and announced that Colenso's treatise had failed of the two requirements of a religious book, which are that it either inform the “much-instructed” or edify “the little-instructed.”⁵⁵ So far from instructing the much-instructed, the book had raised “a titter from educated Europe.”⁵⁶ It was, he said, useless to slay the slain and to tell portentously what everybody knew.

But Arnold's estimate on this point is not accurate. If indeed a titter had been raised from educated Europe it was probably at the spectacle of the English bishops gravely defending the propriety of the Leviticus hare that chewed its cud⁵⁷ The commotion that was created among the English scarcely testified to the ease with which their much-instruction sat upon them. Colenso, it is true, was the equal neither in learning nor in analytical subtlety of the great biblical scholars of the Continent; his foreign colleagues were nevertheless ready to admit the importance of his work and to confess his influence upon them. If his mathematical demonstrations of discrepancies were perhaps too detailed for a reader impatient of naive literalness, he could yet scarcely be condemned apart from the whole movement of biblical criticism.

But Arnold's chief objection to Colenso was not his relative failure to inform the much-instructed, but rather his absolute failure to edify the little-instructed. Arnold insists that the factory operatives whom Colenso had had in mind could not possibly be edified—that is, their spirits could not be raised, their moral sense heightened nor their religious faith strengthened—by this work. But perhaps, Arnold suggests, Colenso had not sought to edify but to enlighten them? And perhaps

a religious book which attempts to enlighten the little-instructed by sweeping away their prejudices, attempts a good work and is justifiable before criticism, exactly as much as a book which attempts to enlighten on these matters the much-instructed. No doubt, to say this is to say what seems quite in accordance with modern notions. … [But] the highly-instructed few, and not the scantily-instructed many, will ever be the organ to the human race of knowledge and truth. Knowledge and truth, in the full sense of the words, are not attainable by the great mass of the human race at all. The great mass of the human race have to be softened and humanised through their heart and imagination, before any soil can be found in them where knowledge may strike living roots. Until the softening and humanising process is very far advanced, intellectual demonstrations are uninforming for them; and, if they impede the working of influences which advance this softening and humanising process, they are even noxious; they retard their development, they impair the culture of the world. All the great teachers, divine and human, who have ever appeared, have united in proclaiming this.⁵⁸

And he continues:

Old moral ideas leaven and humanise the multitude: new intellectual ideas filter slowly down to them from the thinking few; and only when they reach them in this manner do they adjust themselves to their practice without convulsing it.⁵⁹

Many readers found this disturbing and Arnold had to explain that he was not throwing the multitude the sop of any convenient religious fiction. He had also to defend himself against the charge that he was making religion the prop of the political status quo:—he sought to correct this impression by shifting the argument from the factory operatives to men of all classes. Yet his position was an awkward one. He had said that democracy is moved by ideas, now he says that the vast majority of the members of a democracy must be protected from a certain set of ideas, those about religion. Obviously he cannot have it both ways. If democracy is to subsist by the current of ideas, it is inevitable that questions of religion will rise in that current.

It is a dilemma, certainly—but as much the dilemma of democracy as of Arnold. If Arnold's language is not of the clearest, at least he is trying to face an inescapable problem. If democracy assumes the ability of all men to live by the intellect, it argues that every man's faculty to know his own best interests indicates his ability to reason on all the problems of existence. But looking at the difficulties of the intellectual life and the enormous effort required of even our greatest philosophical minds, the mental rigors truth demands, we surely must question with Arnold the number of those who can support the intellectual life, even in a secondary way as pupils of the great. Especially today a survey of the condition of things cannot confirm our faith in the intellect either of masses or leaders and our optimism must be strong indeed if we are to believe in the dominion of reason in the future.

Arnold, having raised the question, answered inevitably that the number of those who can live in the rarefied air of the intellect must be small. He might have used the words of Rousseau: “Although it might belong to Socrates and other minds of the like craft to acquire virtue by reason, the human race would long have ceased to be, had its preservation depended only on the reasonings of the individuals composing it.”⁶⁰ How, then, do the great multitude live? If not by philosophy, then by religion, Arnold answers, and is sure there is no other way. For those who cannot reason out what is right, religion lays down the path; for those who cannot find an abstract ethical basis for their action, religion provides the code.

Arnold, now as later, believes that religion is morality's best stay and he rejects Colenso's book because it unsettled faith among the factory operatives and offered nothing new to stabilize it. Yet if Colenso was not especially notable for his subtlety of insight, at least in this instance he was more realistic than Arnold because he knew that the secret was out, that no amount of “edification” could offset the influence of Tom Paine—long a favorite among the better-instructed factory workers—and of the hundreds of pamphlets that Paine's followers were supplying them. These men, suspicious of miracle with all the natural skepticism of men who spend their lives with machinery, had little interest in the Bible of miracle and they were increasingly indifferent to a Church which sought to supply them with a way of life based upon supernaturalism. As well ask them to believe that their looms could go without the power-belt as that Jericho's walls fell at a trumpet. The Church's only hope lay in renouncing or making secondary its claims to miracle. But Arnold is not sure. He even goes so far as to question the loyalty to the Church of the liberals who hold this view and to doubt whether they are in the right or in good taste to convulse the Church with questions: “The clergy of a Church with formularies like those of the Church of England, exist in virtue of their relinquishing in religious matters full liberty of speculation.”⁶¹ It is a position that would much have surprised his father.

The certainty that the choice lies between religion and the rigors of philosophy leads Arnold back to Spinoza's Political-Theological Tractate. Spinoza's theory of biblical criticism, which was epoch-making, undertook to establish religion of a kind acceptable to men of good will who stood on a middle ground between the vulgar, superstitious masses and those very few who were capable of understanding and supporting the strenuous conclusions of the author's naturalistic philosophy as set forth in the Ethics.⁶² It had, too, a political purpose, for it sought to prove what its title declared, “that freedom of thought and speech not only may, without prejudice to piety and the public peace, be granted; but also may not, without danger to piety and the public peace, be withheld.”⁶³

Spinoza's conception of religion is simple but daring. He set religion apart from philosophy and science and forbade either to interfere with the other. For one is the product of the imagination, the other of the intellect, and the two are not interdependent. Religion deals with morality, which can never be proved true but only good; philosophy deals with what can be demonstrated by mathematics. Religion is a matter of revelation, though by revelation we must understand the imagination and intuition of man apprehending the order of the universe, so far as that is moral; through human agency, not by miracle, the simple idea of the “Divine Mind” is given to man—and that idea is only “obedience to God in singleness of heart, and in the practice of justice and charity.”⁶⁴ And justice and charity are not things that require speculation; everyone knows them.

Spinoza is very clear, and rather depressing, on the limits of religion as well as on its practical advantages.

Therefore this whole basis of theology and Scripture, though it does not admit of mathematical proof, may yet be accepted with the approval of our judgment. It would be folly to refuse to accept what is confirmed by such ample prophetic testimony, and what has proved such a comfort to those whose reason is comparatively weak, and such a benefit to the state; a doctrine, moreover, which we may believe in without the slightest peril or hurt, and should reject simply because it cannot be mathematically proved: it is as though we should admit nothing as true, or as a wise rule of life, which could ever, in any possible way, be called into question; or as though most of our actions were not full of uncertainty and hazard.⁶⁵

Arnold seizes on this ticket of leave which Spinoza gives religion. Philosophy and science and biblical criticism may assert anything they like; they are censurable only if they offer their ideas in contradiction to the ideas of the religious life—then they are censurable indeed. For then they disturb men of comparatively weak reason (the mass of mankind) without providing a new source of peace.

Arnold, in defending religion, was chiefly concerned with the advantages to the individual life which religion offered. He was convinced that a rational ethic was inevitably depressing and he desired the joy and affirmation which religion afforded, even if the expansion of the human spirit was the response to a poetic and not to a scientific truth. But beyond the motive of defending the poetic truth of religion, Arnold saw in it a fundamental instrument of civil order—not only in its tenets but in its method of approach. There were in France many men who had brought the method of a sophisticated religion into conjunction with politics, but Arnold avoided the diversely extreme examples of Bonald, Maistre and Lamennais and chose Joubert. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Arnold had quoted one of Joubert's maxims: “C'est la force et le droit qui règlent toutes choses dans le monde; la force en attendant le droit. (Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.)”⁶⁶ In essence, this idea and the system of thought it implies hark back to Pascal who had sought to erect an intelligent and realistic anti-rationalism to combat the growing rationalistic analysis of the injustice of government.⁶⁷ Arnold aligns himself with the Pascalian position and amplifies the maxim of Joubert: “And till right is ready, force, the existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler.”⁶⁸

Divide life into two realms, one of speculation and the other of practice or obedience, and this is perhaps bound to be the outcome. The idea of right exists for Arnold—now at least—only in the world of ideas; force exists in the world of practice. To the comment made to him that a thing's being an anomaly is no objection, Arnold replies with a distinguo: “I venture to think … that a thing is an anomaly is an objection to it, but absolutely and in the sphere of ideas: it is not necessarily, under such and such circumstances, or at such and such a moment, an objection to it in the sphere of politics and practice.”⁶⁹ It might be Burke speaking of the irrational wisdom of States. For he is saying something more than that right ideas cannot be immediately put into practice; the language is almost that of Pascal himself, as Arnold says:

But right is something moral, and implies inward recognition, free assent of the will; we are not ready for right,—right, so far as we are concerned, is not ready,—until we have attained this sense of seeing it and willing it. The way in which for us it may change and transform force, the existing order of things, and become, in its turn, the legitimate ruler of the world, should depend on the way in which, when our time comes, we see it and will it. Therefore for other people enamoured of their own newly discerned right, to attempt to impose it upon us as ours, and violently to substitute their right for our force, is an act of tyranny, and to be resisted.⁷⁰

We must admire the realism with which Arnold sees the nature of government, for by “force” he means only that—government as we know it. But, as Arnold himself implies, his “force,” his government, is founded not on reason and justice but on irrational things, on property and the ascendancy of some classes over others. The critic who follows Arnold's own method of criticism must immediately ask when he reads the passage just quoted who are “we” and who are “they,” we with “our force,” they with “their right”? Are “we” the ruling classes? Then Arnold has himself chosen a party. Are “we,” by some chance, the followers of criticism? Then Arnold has lost his precious disinterestedness and entered serenely into the world of practice. Finally, should not “we,” who are so quick to brand “their” attempt to impose “their” right upon us as tyranny, be equally quick to accuse “our” force of being tyrannical to “them”?

Hegel's theory of history had found the justification for force in the success of force, and Hegel denounced the school-masterish moralism which would vainly introduce the concept of right and bootlessly mumble such words as justice. Arnold is ready to accept, in some measure, the Hegelian justification of force, but he shrinks from making the consequent dismissal of a liberal morality. He will have both “force” and “right;” confusion results—and Arnold's criticism retires before the brutal questions of power.

Arnold, we must perceive, labors always under the fear of revolution. He desires progress and he sees in the peace of Europe the promise of “an epoch of expansion”⁷¹ in which the old institutions may be “dissolved” by the current of modern ideas. But the acrid yeast of rationalism is still working strongly; the later revolutions in France are fresh in memory and likely to recur; agitation in England among the working class is growing again after the Chartist defeat. The pressure of democracy he believes must again be channeled. The spirit of criticism with its separation of theory from practice, and the spirit of religion with its assurance of permanent values supply ways to check the tide or to lay out its direction. Arnold turns to Joubert and finds in him the virtues of criticism and religion brought directly to bear upon politics and social life.

Arnold does not present the whole of Joubert's philosophy. Had he done so we might understand more immediately the fears behind Arnold's effort to advance the cause of modern thought, for Joubert in his entirety is the very essence of refined reaction. Even Arnold, who did not quite see that Joubert's “light” is the phosphorescence of decay, is constrained to reject some of Joubert's most typical thoughts and when he cries “Liberty! Liberty! in all things let us have justice, and then we shall have enough liberty,” Arnold replies, “The wise man will never refuse to echo these words; but then, such is the imperfection of human governments, that almost always, in order to get justice, one has first to secure liberty.”⁷² On the whole, however, Arnold finds Joubert an admirable antidote to “acridity.” Neo-Platonism had assured Joubert the belief in the “reality of ideas;” Schleiermachian pietism had lifted his eyes above sordid realities; his adoration of literary classicism made him stand in opposition to all that did not conform to the ancient pattern; his aristocratic background and his horror of the French Revolution made him live in a kind of sweet and passive resistance to modernity and to the notions of the philosophes. But Arnold misses the essential vulgarity of Joubert's refinement. Joubert sought timeless wisdom and produced an exquisite Bourbonism; he sought perfection but meant a denial of the body; he fostered the spirit, which only meant that he hated vigor. Someone said of him that he was “like a spirit which has found a body by accident, and manages with it as best it may”⁷³ and Joubert was very pleased:

My wish, I tell you, is to be perfect. That alone suits me and can give me satisfaction. So I am going to make for myself a region more or less heavenly and very peaceful, where everything will please me and call me again. … Here, I hope that my thoughts will take on more purity than glitter, yet not lose all colour, for colours appeal to my mind. As for what they call strength, vigour, nerve, energy, “life,” I hope I have no more use for it than just to climb up to my star.⁷⁴

Even Arnold feels this kind of thing is a bit too thick—or thin: of another similar self-glorification he says, “No doubt there is something a little too ethereal in all this.”⁷⁵

But Joubert's ethereality did not keep him from laying down rules for the bodies and vitality of other men. With the provoking, unexplaining calm of the pensée-writer⁷⁶ he declares, “We must be pleased with our state, that is, the meanness or superiority of our condition. The king should enjoy his sceptre; the flunkey his livery.”⁷⁷ A staunch anti-libertarian in the philosophic interest of monarchy, Joubert admired the Chinese fixity of government, order and the abandonment of passion, and for the establishment of these qualities felt that the belief in a heaven was necessary. He hated Rousseau because Rousseau represented morality as positive and not merely negative. “Morality,” he said, “is formed only to repress and constrain; it is a criterion, a criterion immovable and unchangeable, and for that very reason is a barrier: morality is a bridle and not a spur.”⁷⁸ For to give morality a positive function was to rob religion of some of its province. He felt the loss of the Catholic synthesis keenly and we understand what endeared him to Arnold—who did not always approve of the Goethean method of self-reference—when he exclaims, “What lamentable ages these are, in which each of us measures everything by his own standards, and goes, in the Biblical phrase, by the light of his own lamp!”⁷⁹ The new welter of facts which were presenting themselves to literature enraged him. “‘I'm hungry, I'm cold, help me!’ There is material for a good deed, but not for a good work [of art].”⁸⁰ And again: “From the fever of the senses, the frenzies of the heart, and the afflictions of the mind; from the disasters of the times and the great scourges of life—hunger, thirst, shame, sickness, and death—they can make many tales to draw many tears; but the soul whispers: ‘You are hurting me.’”⁸¹ And yet again: “To be a good man and a poet, it is necessary first to drape the objects of one's contemplation, and to look upon nothing in its nakedness. At least, to interpose goodwill and a certain amenity.”⁸²

Joubert epitomizes the cardinal vice of the intellectual: the substitution of words for things, of tropes for ideas. The only remedy for the deficiencies of such a mind, one feels, would be the hunger, thirst, cold which he excluded from art, or whatever else might give it the sense of the presence of the world of matter and the resistance it offers to the spirit of man. But though Arnold suspected something of Joubert's vice, he himself shared it in some measure and he had use for Joubert's unctuous religiosity to confront acrid rationalism and utilitarianism. Joubert's mind might be vague but it saw life under the glowing aspect of myth, evanescent and illusory perhaps, but more enchanting than utilitarianism and the compromise of practice.

“In your metaphysics,” said Emerson, “you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color.”⁸³ Shape and color were necessary to the moral life, Arnold believed: the “sage” can perhaps take his morality without them, the “rest of mankind” cannot. The “mass of mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas,” says Arnold, “nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws.”⁸⁴ The philosophical way of life cannot give joy: “It is impossible to rise from reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of constraint and melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear.”⁸⁵ He rejects Mill's accusation that the ideal of Christian morality is negative rather than positive, passive rather than active. For what Christianity can give is “the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all.”⁸⁶ The essay on Marcus Aurelius insists on the advantages of religion over philosophy; the essay “Pagan and Mediæval Religious Sentiment” shows the advantage of the religion of sorrow over the religion of pleasure despite all the charm of the latter. If negativism lies anywhere, Arnold insists, it does not lie in Christianity but in the intellectual and philosophic systems of morality which guide life but cannot affirm it. The old theme of joy has recurred once more, the theme of positive happiness to which the intellect cannot minister and which paganism cannot serve, exactly because it sees only happiness and does not recognize the possibility of being sick or sorry. It is, again, the theme of the “whole man” who needs religion for his completeness.

Notes

1. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, Boston and New York, 1935, p. 2.

2. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 115.

3. R. A. Scott-James, The Making of Literature, New York, n. d., p. 262.

4. See Ludwig Lewisohn, The Sewanee Review, April 1902, vol. x, no. 2, p. 143. Mr. Lewisohn quotes a letter of Saintsbury to Professor L. M. Harris of the College of Charleston.

5. If Arnold helped establish Sainte-Beuve's reputation in England, Sainte-Beuve, by his translation of “Obermann” in his Chateaubriand et sa groupe littéraire, by quotation of the Homer lectures and by other references, helped to make Arnold's name known to France. The two men met on Arnold's educational tour of 1858 and dined together. Their literary relations have been studied in A. Fryer Powell's essay, “Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold,” in the French Quarterly, vol. iii, September 1921 and in great detail by Paul Furrer in Der Einfluss Sainte-Beuves auf die Kritik Matthew Arnolds. Arnold's essay on the occasion of Sainte-Beuve's death has been reprinted in the Oxford edition of his essays; his article on Sainte-Beuve in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1886) is excellent.

6. Essays Crit. I, p. 303.

7. Renan, The Future of Science, p. 19.

8. Ibid., p. 18.

9. Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 466.

10. Essays Crit. I, p. 220.

11. Characters and Events, I, 17.

12. The Profession of Poetry, p. 263.

13. Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” English Critical Essays, 16th, 17th, 18th Centuries, ed. Jones, Oxford, 1922, p. 8.

14. An important and illuminating corollary to this is given by Professor I. A. Richards: “The artist is an expert in the ‘minute particulars’ and qua artist pays little or no attention to generalizations which he finds in actual practice are too crude to discriminate between what is valuable and the reverse. For this reason the moralist has always tended to distrust or to ignore him. Yet since the fine conduct of life springs only from fine ordering of responses far too subtle to be touched by any general ethical maxims, this neglect of art by the moralist has been tantamount to a disqualification. The basis of morality, as Shelley insisted, is laid not by preachers but by poets. Bad taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise admirable person. They are actually a root evil from which other defects follow. No life can be excellent in which the elementary responses are disorganized and confused.”—Principles of Literary Criticism, pp. 61-62.

15. The Sacred Wood, p. ix.

16. S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk and Omniana, p. 54.

17. Essays Crit. I, p. 5.

18. Ibid., pp. 106-107.

19. Ibid., p. 82.

20. Ibid., p. 107.

21. Ibid., p. 81.

22. Ibid., p. 6.

23. Goethe's Literary Essays, p. 83.

24. Essays Crit. I, p. 50.

25. Ibid., p. 161.

26. In fairness to the British spirit, we ought perhaps to remember Dr. Johnson's comparison of it with the French: “The English are the only nation who ride hard a-hunting. A Frenchman goes out upon a managed horse, and capers in the field, and no more thinks of leaping a hedge than of mounting a breach. Lord Powerscourt laid a wager, in France, that he would ride a great many miles in a certain short time. The French academicians set to work, and calculated that, from the resistance of the air, it was impossible. His lordship, however, performed it.”—Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1936) p. 217. Voltaire's description of the English genius is interesting: “The poetic genius of the English resembles, at this day, a spreading tree planted by nature, shooting forth at random a thousand branches, and growing with unequal strength: it dies if you force its nature or shape into a regular tree fit for the gardens of Marly.”—Short Studies in English and American Subjects.

27. Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature, II, 40.

28. Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers, &c., New York, 1856, pp. 99-100.

29. In his book, The Civilization of France (1932), one of the mementoes of an extinct German culture, Ernst Robert Curtius speaks of the profound French feeling for centrality: “So far as I know, France alone, of all modern countries, has a myth of centrality. At Bruère in Département Cher a Roman milestone is described as the ‘Centre Géographique de la France.’ … [The French pupil] learns from the explanations in his atlas that the outline of France can be defined as a hexagon, divided into two equal parts by the meridian of Paris. Thus his fatherland has a harmonious, almost geometrical shape. … It is at an equal distance from the North Pole and from the Equator. … The different ‘regions’ are nowhere separated by physical obstacles, and they form an organic unity.” This is, for Curtius, the symbol of the French method of organizing social, political and intellectual life.—The Civilization of France, p. 45.

30. Quoted by Carl Van Doren, Swift, New York, 1930, p. 133.

31. Essays Crit. I, p. 62.

32. In the Morgan Library. The letter is dated 1858.

33. Arnold first uses the phrase in On Translating Homer (Celtic and Homer, p. 199). He quotes himself in the first paragraph of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”

34. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, p. 448.

35. Quoted in Essays Crit. I, p. 15.

36. Ibid., p. 15.

37. Ibid., pp. 18-19.

38. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

39. Ibid., p. 34.

40. Ibid., p. 34.

41. Ibid., p. 160.

42. Ibid., p. 159.

43. Ibid., p. 160.

44. Ibid., p. 160.

45. Ibid., p. 160.

46. Ibid., p. 160.

47. Ibid., p. 161.

48. Ibid., p. 161.

49. Letters, I, 10-11.

50. Essays Crit. I, p. 193.

51. Arnold quotes Goethe to this effect, but he was mistaken; Goethe did not say this of Heine but of Platen. See Conversations with Eckermann, the last conversation of 1825.

52. J. W. Colenso, The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined, Part I, p. xix. My account summarizes Colenso's own in the Preface to Part I of his work.

53. Ibid., p. xxxii.

54. Ibid., p. xxiv.

55. “The Bishop and the Philosopher,” Macmillan's Magazine, January 1863, vol. vii, no. 39, p. 242.

56. Ibid., p. 241.

57. “Prof. Hitzig, of Leipsic, one of the best Hebrew scholars of his time, remarked: ‘Your bishops are making themselves the laughing-stock of Europe. Every Hebraist knows that the animal mentioned in Leviticus is really the hare; … every zoölogist knows that it does not chew the cud.’”—A. D. White: History of The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, v. ii, p. 351.

58. Ibid., pp. 242-243.

59. Ibid., p. 243.

60. A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in The Social Contract, p. 200.

61. Macmillan's Magazine, loc. cit., p. 252.

62. Arnold recalls that Spinoza refused to allow the Tractate to be translated out of its original Latin for fear lest it upset the faith of the “crowd.” Spinoza had, perhaps, a justified fear of the “crowd;” his friends, the brothers de Witt, had been murdered in a political riot and Spinoza would have courted the same fate by denouncing the rioters to their faces, had he not been prevented by solicitous friends.

63. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, p. 1.

64. Ibid., p. 9.

65. Ibid., p. 197.

66. Essays Crit. I, p. 12.

67. Pascal says: “Nothing, according to reason alone, is just in itself; all changes with time. Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted. It is the mystical foundation of its (equity's) authority; who ever carries it back to first principles destroys it. Nothing is so faulty as those laws which correct faults. He who obeys them because they are just, obeys a justice which is imaginary, and not the essence of law; it is quite self-contained, it is law and nothing more. He who will examine its motive will find it so feeble and so trifling that if he be not accustomed to contemplate the wonders of human imagination, he will marvel that one century has gained for it so much pomp and reverence. The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice. We must, it is said, get back to the natural and fundamental laws of the State, which an unjust custom has abolished. It is a game certain to result in the loss of all; nothing will be just on the balance. … We must not see the fact of usurpation; law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable. We must make it regarded as authoritative, eternal, and conceal its origin, if we do not wish that it should soon come to an end.”—Pascal, Pensées, pp. 84-85. In the following, we may almost see the direct inspiration of Joubert's own pensée: “Justice is subject to dispute; might is easily recognized and is not disputed. So we cannot give might to justice, because might has gainsaid justice, and has declared that it is she herself who is just. And thus being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.”—Ibid., p. 85.

68. Ibid., p. 12.

69. Essays Crit. I, p. 12.

70. Ibid., pp. 12-13.

71. Ibid., p. 17.

72. Ibid., pp. 300-301.

73. Pensées and Letters, p. 39.

74. Ibid., p. 211.

75. Essays Crit. I, p. 285.

76. Which Aldous Huxley has so well hit off in the words of Sidney Quarles, the ridiculous scholar of Point Counter Point: “Dragged from the ivorah pinnacles of thought into the common dust comma I am exasperated comma I lose my peace of mind and am unable to climb again into my tower.” “True greatness is invarsely proportional to myah immediate success.”

77. Pensées and Letters, p. 81.

78. Ibid., p. 78.

79. Ibid., p. 113.

80. Ibid., p. 156.

81. Ibid., p. 156.

82. Ibid., p. 129.

83. “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series.

84. Essays Crit. I, p. 346.

85. Ibid., p. 346.

86. Ibid., p. 346.

Bibliography

Works of Matthew Arnold

Essays by Matthew Arnold, Including Essays In Criticism, 1865, On Translating Homer (With F. W. Newman's Reply) And Five Other Essays Now For The First Time Collected, Oxford, 1919.

Essays in Criticism: First Series, New York, 1924.

Essays in Criticism: Second Series, New York, 1935.

Essays in Criticism: Third Series, ed. E. J. O'Brien, Boston, 1910.

General Bibliography

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Table Talk and Omniana, ed. T. Ashe, London, 1923.

Eliot, T. S., The Sacred Wood, 2nd ed., London, 1928.

———. Selected Essays, 1917-1932, New York, 1932.

———. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Cambridge, Mass., 1933.

Glover, T. R., Paul of Tarsus, New York, 1930.

Goethe, J. W. von, Literary Essays, ed. and trans. J. E. Spingarn, New York, 1921.

Renan, Ernest, The Future of Science, London, 1891.