Chapter 4

IN THE WILDERNESS.

That the end of Mr Arnold's tenure of the Professorship of Poetry was a most important epoch in his life is sufficiently evident. In the ten years that came to an end then, he had, as two such extremely competent judges as Mr Disraeli and Crabb Robinson in different ways told him,[1] passed from comparative obscurity into something more than comparative prominence. His chair had been for him a real _cathedra_, and his deliverances from it had always assumed, and had at length, to a great extent, achieved, real authority. In criticism it was evident that if he had not revealed positively novel aspects of truth, he had formulated and put on record aspects which were presenting themselves to many, nay, most, of the best critical minds of his day. His criticism had drawn his poetry with it, if not into actual popularity, yet into something like attention. His attempts to obtain some other employment less irksome, less absorbing, and more profitable, had indeed been unsuccessful; but he was rising in his own department, and his work, if still in part uncongenial and decidedly laborious, appears to have been much less severe than in earlier days. Partly this work itself, partly his writings, and partly other causes had opened to him a very large circle of acquaintance, which it was in his own power to extend or contract as he pleased. His domestic life was perfectly happy, if his means were not very great: and his now assured literary position made it easy for him to increase these means, not indeed largely, but to a not despicable extent, by writing. The question was, "What should he write?"

It is probably idle ever to wish that a man had done anything different from that which he has done. Without being a rigid Determinist, one may be pretty well convinced that the actual conduct is the joint result of abilities, and of desires, and of opportunity to exercise them, and that the man, had he really done otherwise, would have been unsuccessful or unhappy or both. But I fear that if I had been arbiter of Mr Arnold's fate at this moment I should have arranged it differently. He should have given us more poems--the man who, far later, wrote the magnificent _Westminster Abbey_ on such a subject as Dean Stanley, had plenty more poetry in his sack. And in prose he should have given us infinite essays, as many as De Quincey's or as Sainte-Beuve's own, and more than Hazlitt's, of the kind of the _Heine_ and the _Joubert_ earlier, of the _Wordsworth_ and the _Byron_ later. I can see no reason why, in the twenty-one years' lease of life upon which he now entered, he should not have produced a volume a-year of these,--there are more than enough subjects in the various literatures that he knew; and though it is possible that in such extended application his method might have proved monotonous, or his range have seemed narrow, it is not likely. To complete the thing, I should have given him, instead of his inspectorship, a headship at Oxford, for which, it seems to me, he was admirably fitted. But _Dis aliter visum_: at least it seemed otherwise good to Mr Arnold himself as far as his literary employments were concerned, and the gods did not interfere.

We have seen that he had, some years before, conceived the ambitious idea of changing the mind of England on a good many points by no means merely literary; and he seems, not altogether unnaturally, to have thought that now was the time to apply seriously to that work. His tenure of the Oxford chair had given him the public ear; and the cessation of that tenure had removed any official seal of etiquette which it might have laid on his own lips. A far less alert and acute mind than his must have seen that the Reform troubles of 1866 and the "leap in the dark" of 1867 were certain to bring about very great changes indeed at home; and that the war of the first-named year meant the alteration of many things abroad. He at least thought--and there was some justification of a good many kinds for him in thinking--that intellectual changes, of importance equal to the political, were coming or come upon the world. And so for a time he seems to have grown rather cold towards the Muses, his earliest and always his truest loves. Social, political, and religious matters tempted him away from literature; and for a matter of ten years it can hardly be said that he had anything to do with her except to take her name in vain in the title of by far his worst, as it was by far his most popular, volume.

It has been hinted in a note on one of the early pages in this book that the secret of this unfortunate twist is at least partly to be found in the peculiar character of Mr Arnold's official employment. For nearly twenty years he had been constantly thrown into contact with the English Dissenters; and, far earlier than the time which we have reached, they seem not only, in familiar phrase, to have "got upon his nerves," but to have affected his brain. He saw all things in Dissent--or, at least, in the middle-class Philistine Dissenter. His Philistia is not in the least a true portrait of the average middle-class household thirty or forty years ago; though, I daresay (I have little direct knowledge), it is not an unfair one of the average Dissenting middle-class household. The religion which Mr Arnold attacks is not the religion of the Church of England at all, or only of what was even then a decaying and uninfluential part of it, the extremer and more intolerant sect of the Evangelicals. Once more, I cannot from personal knowledge say whether this portrait was true of Dissent, but I can believe it.

Now, to derive an idea of England from the English Dissenter is and was absurd. Politically, indeed, he had only too much power between 1832 and 1866, from the tradition which made Liberal politicians fond of petting him. Socially, intellectually, and to a great extent religiously, he had next to no power at all. To take the average manager of a "British" school as the average representative of the British nation was the wildest and most mischievous of confusions. Yet this practically was the basis of Mr Arnold's crusade between 1867 and 1877.

The First Blast of the Trumpet was, intentionally no doubt, the last of the Oxford lectures, and for that very reason a rather gentle and insinuating one. _Culture its Enemies_, which was the origin and first part, so to say, of _Culture and Anarchy_, carried the campaign begun in the _Essays in Criticism_ forward; but only in the most cautious manner, a caution no doubt partly due to the fact of the author's expressed, and very natural and proper, intention of closing his professorial exercises with the _bocca dolce_. Still this is at least conceivably due to the fact that the boldest extension of the campaign itself had not definitely entered, or at least possessed, the author's mind. A considerable time, indeed from July 1867 to January 1868, passed before the publication of the lecture as an article in the _Cornhill_ was followed up by the series from the latter month to August, which bore the general title of _Anarchy and Authority_, and completed the material of _Culture and Anarchy_ itself. This, as a book, appeared in 1869.

It began, according to the author's favourite manner, which was already passing into something like a mannerism, with a sort of half-playful, half-serious battery against a living writer (in this case Mr Frederic Harrison), and with a laudatory citation from a dead one (in this case Bishop Wilson). Mr Harrison had blasphemed "the cant about culture," and Mr Arnold protests that culture's only aim is in the Bishop's words, "to make reason and the will of God prevail." In the first chapter, famous thenceforward in English literature by its title, borrowed from Swift, of "Sweetness and Light," we have the old rallyings of the _Daily Telegraph_ and the _Nonconformist_. Then the general view is laid down, and is developed in those that follow, but still with more of a political than a religious bent, and with the political bent itself chiefly limited to the social aspect.

"Doing as one Likes" scatters a mild rain of ridicule on this supposed fetich of all classes in England; and then, the very famous, if not perhaps very felicitous, nickname-classification of "Barbarian-Philistine-Populace" is launched, defended, discussed in a chapter to itself. To do Mr Arnold justice, the three classes are, if not very philosophically defined, very impartially and amusingly rallied, the rallier taking up that part of humble Philistine conscious of his own weaknesses, which, till he made it slightly tiresome by too long a run, was piquant enough. The fourth chapter, "Hebraism and Hellenism," coasts the sands and rocks (on which, as it seems to some, Mr Arnold was later to make shipwreck) very nearly in the title and rather nearly in the contents, but still with a fairly safe offing. The opposition might be put too bluntly by saying that "Hellenism" represents to Mr Arnold the love of truth at any price, and "Hebraism" the love of goodness at any price; but the actual difference is not far from this, or from those of knowing and doing, fear of stupidity and fear of sin, &c. We have the quotation from Mr Carlyle about Socrates being "terribly at ease in Zion," the promulgation of the word Renascence for Renaissauce, and so forth. "Porro unum est necessarium," a favourite tag of Mr Arnold's, rather holds up another side of the same lesson than continues it in a fresh direction; and then "Our Liberal Practitioners" brings it closer to politics, but (since the immediate subject is the Disestablishment of the Irish Church) nearer also to the quicksands. Yet Mr Arnold still keeps away from them; though from what followed it would seem that he could only have done so by some such _tour de force_ as the famous "clubhauling" in _Peter Simple_. Had _Culture and Anarchy_ stood by itself, it would have been, though very far from its author's masterpiece, an interesting document both in regard to his own mental history and that of England during the third quarter of the century, containing some of his best prose, and little, if any, of his worst sense.

But your crusader--still more your anti-crusader--never stops, and Mr Arnold was now pledged to this crusade or anti-crusade. In October 1869 he began, still in the _Cornhill_,--completing it by further instalments in the same place later in the year, and publishing it in 1870,--the book called _St Paul and Protestantism_, where he necessarily exchanges the mixed handling of _Culture and Anarchy_ for a dead-set at the religious side of his imaginary citadel of Philistia. The point of at least ostensible connection--of real departure--is taken from the "Hebraism and Hellenism" contrast of the earlier book; and the same contrast is strongly urged throughout, especially in the _coda_, "A Comment on Christmas." But this contrast is gradually shaped into an onslaught on Puritanism, or rather on its dogmatic side, for its appreciation of "conduct" of morality is ever more and more eulogised. As regards the Church of England herself, the attack is oblique; in fact, it is disclaimed, and a sort of a Latitudinarian Union, with the Church for centre, and dogma left out, is advocated. Another of our Arnoldian friends, the "Zeit-Geist," makes his appearance, and it is more than hinted that one of the most important operations of this spirit is the exploding of miracles. The book is perfectly serious--its seriousness, indeed, is quite evidently deliberate and laboured, so that the author does not even fear to appear dull. But it is still admirably written, as well as studiously moderate and reverent; no exception can be taken to it on the score of taste, whatever may be taken on the score of orthodoxy from the one side, where no doubt the author would hasten to plead guilty, or on those of logic, history, and the needs of human nature on the other, where no doubt his "not guilty" would be equally emphatic.

The case is again altered, and very unfortunately altered, in the next, the most popular and, as has been said, the most famous of the series--its zenith at once and its nadir--_Literature and Dogma_. A very much smaller part of this had appeared in magazine form; indeed, the contents of _St Paul and Protestantism_ itself must have seemed odd in that shape, and only strong sympathies on the part of the editor could have obtained admission for any part of _Literature and Dogma_. Much of it must have been written amid the excitement of the French-Prussian War, when the English public was athirst for "skits" of all sorts, and when Mr Arnold himself was "i' the vein," being engaged in the composition of much of the matter of _Friendship's Garland_. _St Paul and Protestantism_ had had two editions in the same year (_Culture and Anarchy_, a far better thing, waited six for its second), and altogether the state of things was such as to invite any author to pursue the triumph and partake the gale. And he might at first flatter himself that he had caught the one and made cyclone-use of the other; for the book, appearing at the end of 1872, with the date of 1873, passed through three editions in that year, a fourth in 1874, and a fifth two years later. It was thus by far Mr Arnold's most popular book; I repeat also that it is quite his worst.

That it was in hopelessly bad taste here and there--in taste so bad that Mr Arnold himself later cut out the most famous passage of the book, to which accordingly we need here only allude--can be denied by nobody except those persons who hold "good form" to be, as somebody or other puts it, "an insular British delusion of the fifties and sixties." But this excision of his and, I think, some others, besides the "citations and illustrations" which he confesses to having excluded from the popular edition, may give us the welcome leave to deal very briefly with this side of the matter in other respects also. We may pass over the fun which Mr Arnold had with Archbishop Thomson (who, whatsoe'er the failings on his part, was at any rate a logician) on the theory of causation; with the University of Cambridge about _hominum divomque voluptas alma Venus_ (I have forgotten what was the bearing of this joke, and it is probably not worth inquiring into); with the Bishop of Gloucester about the Personality of God; with the Athanasian Creed, and its "science got ruffled by fighting." These things, as "form," class themselves; one mutters something well known about _risu inepto_, and passes on. Such a tone on such a subject can only be carried off completely by the gigantic strength of Swift, though no doubt it is well enough in keeping with the merely negative and destructive purpose of Voltaire. It would be cruel to bring _Literature and Dogma_ into competition with _A Tale of a Tub_; it would be more than unjust to bring it into comparison with _Le Taureau blanc_. And neither comparison is necessary, because the great fault of _Literature and Dogma_ appears, not when it is considered as a piece of doubtful or not doubtful taste, but when it is regarded as a serious composition.

In the first place, the child-like fashion in which Mr Arnold swallowed the results of that very remarkable "science," Biblical criticism, has always struck some readers with astonishment and a kind of terror. This new La Fontaine asking everybody, "Avez-vous lu Kuenen?" is a lesson more humbling to the pride of literature than almost any that can be found. "The prophecy of the details of Peter's death," we are told in _Literature and Dogma_, "is almost certainly an addition after the event, _because it is not at all in the manner of Jesus_." Observe that we have absolutely no details, no evidence of any sort whatever, outside the Gospels for the "manner of Jesus." It is not, as in some at least of the more risky exercises of profane criticism in a similar field, as if we had some absolutely or almost absolutely authenticated documents, and others to judge by them. External evidence, except for the mere fact of Christ's existence and death, we have none. So you must, by the inner light, pick and choose out of the very same documents, resting on the very same authority, what, according to your good pleasure, is "in the manner of Jesus," and then black-mark the rest as being not so. Of course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the method had not been pushed _ad absurdum_, as it was later by his friend M. Renan in the _Histoire d'Israël_, to the dismay and confusion of no less intelligent and unorthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer. But it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of this sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly.

Again, the chief bent of the book is to establish that "miracles do not happen." Alas! it is Mr Arnold's unhappy lot that if miracles _do_ happen his argument confessedly disappears, while even if miracles do not happen it is, for his purpose, valueless. Like almost all critics of his class recently, especially like Professor Huxley in another division, he appears not to comprehend what, to the believers in the supernatural, the supernatural means. He applies, as they all apply, the tests of the natural, and says, "Now really, you know, these tests are destructive." He says--he cannot prove--that miracles do not happen now; his adversaries, if they were wise, would simply answer, "_Après?_" Do any of them pretend to prescribe to their God that His methods shall be always the same, or that those methods shall stand the tests of the laboratory and the School of Charters? that He shall give "a good title," like a man who is selling a house? Some at least would rather not; they would feel appallingly little interest in a Divinity after this sworn-attorney and chartered-accountant fashion, who must produce vouchers for all His acts. And further (to speak with reverence), the Divinity whom they _do_ worship would be likely to answer Mr Arnold in the words of a prophet of Mr Arnold's own--

"Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, Nicht Mir!"

But this is not all. There is not only begging of the question but ignoring of the issue. _Literature and Dogma_, to do it strict justice, is certainly not, in intention at any rate, a destructive book. It is meant, and meant very seriously, to be constructive--to provide a substitute for the effete religion of Hooker and Wilson, of Laud and Pusey, as well as for that of Baxter and Wesley and Mr Miall. This new religion is to have for its Jachin Literature--that is to say, a delicate æsthetic appreciation of all that is beautiful in Christianity and out of it; and for its Boaz Conduct--that is to say, a morality at least as rigid as that of the purest Judaism, though more amiable. If dogma is to be banished, so is anything like licence; and in the very book itself Mr Arnold formulated, against his once (and still partly) beloved France, something like that denunciation of her worship of Lubricity which he afterwards put more plainly still. Even Hellenism, the lauded Hellenism, is told to mend its ways (indeed there was need for it), and the Literature-without-Dogmatist will have to behave himself with an almost Pharisaic correctness, though in point of belief he is to be piously Sadducee.

Now this is all very pretty and very creditable, but it will not work. The goods, to use the vulgar but precise formula of English law, "are not of the nature and quality demanded by the purchaser." Nobody wants a religion of that sort. Conduct is good; poetic appreciation is perhaps better, though not for the general. But then religion happens to be something different from either, though no doubt closely connected with both. Mr Arnold does not exactly offer us a stone for bread, but he does, like the benevolent French princess in the story, offer us pie-crust. Pie-crust is a good thing; it is a close connection of bread; but it will not do for a substitute, and, in addition, it is much more difficult for the general to obtain. Moreover, there is a serious, a historical, difficulty about Conduct _plus_ poetic appreciation, but _minus_ what we call religion. Mr Arnold, in a stately sonnet, has told us that Sophocles was his ideal as a life-philosopher who was also a poet. He knew, presumably, the stories told about Sophocles in Athenæus, and though these might be idle scandal, he knew far too much not to be aware that there is nothing intrinsically impossible about them. It would have been rather interesting to hear him fully on this subject. But he was too busy with expatiating on the sweet reasonableness of Jesus and "the _Aberglaube_ of the Second Advent" to trouble himself with awkward matters of this kind at the moment.

It may be suspected, however, that he did trouble himself with them, or with something like them, afterwards. The book--a deliberate provocation--naturally found plenty of respondents, though I do not remember that any one smashed it, as, for instance, Dean Mansel could have done if he had been alive, or as Cardinal Newman could, had he been still in the fold. Mr Arnold was perhaps not less really disquieted by its comparative popularity. For he had quite enough of Phocion in him to feel, if not to say, that he must have said something at least ambiguous, when the multitude applauded. At any rate, though the ill-omened series did not cease, nothing further appeared in it which showed the tone of _Literature and Dogma_. Indeed, of the concluding volumes, _God and the Bible_ and _Last Essays on Church and Religion_, the first is an elaborate and rather anxious apology, and the second a collection of diverse and comparatively "anodyne" essays. It is significant--as showing how much of the success of _Literature and Dogma_ had been a success of scandal--that neither of these volumes enjoyed the least popularity. _God and the Bible_ was never reprinted till the popular edition of the series thus far in 1884; and _Last Essays_ was never reprinted at all, or had not been up to the date of the invaluable _Bibliography_ of the works. Indeed the copies now, 1899, on sale appear to be of the first edition. This cool reception does not discredit either Barbarians or Philistines or Populace. There are good things in the _Last Essays_ (to which we shall return), but the general effect of them is that of a man who is withdrawing from a foray, not exactly beaten, but unsuccessful and disgusted, and is trying to cover his retreat by alarums and excursions.

_God and the Bible_ tells much the same tale. It originally appeared by instalments in the _Contemporary Review_, where it must have been something of a choke-pear even for the readers of that then young and thoughtful periodical. Unless the replier has the vigour of Swift, or at least of Bentley, the adroitness in fence of Pascal, or at least of Voltaire, "replies, duplies, quadruplies" are apt to be wofully tedious reading, and Mr Arnold was rather a _veles_ than a _triarius_ of controversy. He could harass, but he did not himself stand harassing very well; and here he was not merely the object of attacks from all sides, but was most uneasily conscious that, in some cases at least, he did not wish his enemies to destroy each other. He had absolutely no sympathy with the rabid anti-Christianity of Clifford, very little with the mere agnosticism of Huxley; he wanted to be allowed to take just so much Biblical criticism as suited him and no more. He wished to prove, in his own remarkable way, the truth and necessity of Christianity, and to this wish the contradictions of sinners were too manifold. One must be stony-hearted not to feel some pity for him, as, just when he thinks he has evaded an orthodox brick, the tile of a disbeliever in the Fourth Gospel whizzes at him; or as, while he is trying to patch up his romantic reconstructions of imaginary Jewish history and religion, the push of some aggressive reviewer bids him make good his challenge to metaphysical theologians. But this interest is only passing.

In the Preface there is indeed some of the old attempt at liveliness. Professor Clifford himself, then dead, is disposed of with a not ungraceful mixture of pity and satire; Messrs Moody and Sankey are not unpleasantly rallied; Satan and Tisiphone, Mr Ruskin and Sir Robert Phillimore, once more remind one of the groves of Blarney or the more doubtful chorus in the _Anti-Jacobin_. But the apologist is not really light-hearted: he cannot keep the more solemn part of his apologia out of the Preface itself, and assures us that the story of Adam's fall "is all a legend. It never really happened, any of it." Again one asks Mr Arnold, as seriously as possible, "How _do_ you know that? On your own calculus, with your own estimate of evidence, how is it possible for you to know that? You may, on your principles, say that you are insufficiently persuaded that it _did_ happen; but how can you, without preternatural revelation (the very thing you will not admit) say that it did _not?_ Surely there is some want of intellectual seriousness in thus lightly ignoring every rule of law and logic, of history and of common-sense?"

But the embarrassment thus revealed naturally shows itself even more in the book itself, notwithstanding the fact that Mr Arnold expressly declines to reply to those who have attacked _Literature and Dogma_ as anti-Christian and irreligious. Not even by summarily banishing this not inconsiderable host can he face the rest comfortably: and he has to resort to the strangest reasons of defence, to the most eccentric invitation of reinforcements from afar.

The strangest of all these, the clearest proof in itself of flurry and sense of need, is exhibited in his summoning--of all wonderful things --of Comparative Philology to the rescue of Literature. To rebut the criticism on his denial of a Personal God, he takes refuge in the ethnological meaning of Deus, which, it seems, is "Shining." The poor plain mind, already staggered by Mr Arnold's private revelations as to what did _not_ happen 6000 years ago (or earlier) in the garden of Eden, quite succumbs before this privilegium of omniscience. One had thought that the results of philology and etymology of this sort were extremely ingenious guesses, to be admitted in so far as they do not conflict with facts, and till the next guess comes, but nothing more. Lo! they are quoted as if they were on a par with "two and two make four," or the law of Excluded Middle. We may not take Moses and the prophets without proof, but Curtius and Professor Max Müller may speak, and we must but hear. And later, when Mr Arnold is trying to cope with Descartes, he flies for refuge to "the roots _as_, _bhu_, and _sta_."

One is tempted rather to laugh at this; but on some sides it is very serious. That no God of any religion can be more of a mere hypothesis than _as_, _bhu_, and _sta_, never seems to have occurred to Mr Arnold for one moment, nor that he was cutting the throat of his own argument. We must not, however, fall into his own mistake and quadruplicate to his duply. It may be sufficient to say that the long defence of the Fourth Gospel which this book contains is one of the oddest things in all literature. What, on Mr Arnold's principles, it matters whether the Fourth Gospel was written in the first century, the fourth, or the fourteenth, it is impossible for the poor plain mind to see. He will not have it as revelation, and as anything else its date is quite immaterial.

The fact is that this severe censor of "learned pseudo--science mixed with popular legend," as he terms theology, appears to have no idea of the value of evidence whatever. The traditional history of the Bible is not even to be considered; but a conjectural reconstruction of it by a Dutch critic, without in the older cases one jot or tittle of evidence outside the covers of the Bible itself, deserves every respect, if not reverent acceptance _en bloc_. Miracles are fictions, and the scenes in the garden of Eden and at the Sepulchre never happened; but _as_, _bhu_, and _sta_ are very solemn facts, and you can find out all about the Divinity, because the word Deus means (not "has been guessed to mean," but _means_) "Shining." That Shakespeare knew everything is much more certain than that miracles do not happen; and he certainly knew Mr Arnold's case if not Mr Arnold, when he introduced a certain main episode in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. To frown on Oberon and caress Bottom is venial compared with the dismissal of the Bible as popular legend, and the implicit belief in _as_, _bhu_, and _sta_.

A wilfully hostile historian of Mr Arnold could not dwell too long on these unfortunate books, for the handles they present are infinite; but for my part I shall take leave to say little more about them. To ask, in the common phrase, whether they did any harm would be to beg the question in their own manner; to ask whether they produced any effect would lead us too far. They certainly expressed a prevalent tendency. Most fortunately Mr Arnold was allowed another ten years and more wherein to escape from the wilderness which yielded these Dead Sea fruits, and to till his proper garden once more. Yet we have not quite done with the other fruits themselves.

The actual finale, _Last Essays on Church_ and _Religion_, was still less popular, was indeed the least popular of all his works, seeing that, as has been said above, it has never been reprinted. It is easy to understand this, for it is perhaps the only one of his books which can be definitely called dull. The apologetic tone noticeable in _God and the Bible_ continues, but the apology is illustrated and maintained in an even less attractive manner. The Preface is perhaps the least dead part of the book; but its line of argument shares, and perhaps even exaggerates, the controversial infelicity of this unfortunate series. Mr Arnold deals in it at some length with the comments of two foreign critics, M. Challemel-Lacour and Signor de Gubernatis, on _Literature and Dogma_, bringing out (what surely could have been no news to any but very ill-educated Englishmen) the fact of their surprise, not at his taking the Bible with so little seriousness, but at his taking it with any seriousness at all. And he seems never even to dream of the obvious retort: "Certainly. These men are at any rate 'thorough'; they are not dilettante dalliers between two opinions. They have got far beyond your half-way house and have arrived at their destination. We have no desire to arrive at the destination, and therefore, if you will excuse us, we decline to visit the half-way house." It is less surprising that he did not see the force of the objections of another critic, M. Maurice Vernes, to the equally illogical and unhistorical plan of arbitrarily selecting this utterance as that of "Jesus," and another, given by the same authority, as not that of "Jesus." A man, who was sensible of this paralogism, could never take Mr Arnold's views on Church and Religion at all.

But when we leave the Preface, even such faint liveliness as this deserts us. The text contains four (or five, the second being divided into two parts) essays, lectures, or papers, _A Psychological Parallel_, _Bishop Butler and the Zeit-Geist_, The Church of England_, and _A Last Word on the Burials Bill_. All had appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_ or the _Contemporary Review_ during 1876, while _Bishop Butler_ had been delivered as two lectures at Edinburgh, and _The Church of England_ as an address to the London Clergy at Sion College, during the spring of that year.

Over all there is a curious constraint, the evidence of a mood not very difficult to analyse, and in the analysis of which lies almost all the satisfaction or edification to be got out of the book. The writer, though by no means abandoning his own point of view, and even flattering himself that some _modus vivendi_ is about to be established between himself and the more moderate supporters of the Church and of religion, betrays not merely the well-known self-excusing and self-accusing tone, but odd flashes of discontent and weariness--nay, even a fretfulness such as might have been that of a Moses at Rephidim who could not bring water out of the rock. _A Psychological Parallel_ is an attempt to buttress the apologia by referring to Sir Matthew Hale's views on witchcraft, to Smith, the Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian, and to the _Book of Enoch_ (of which, by the way, it is a pity that Mr Arnold did not live to see Mr Charles's excellent translation, since he desiderated a good one). Of course the argument is sun-clear. If Hale was mistaken about witchcraft, St Paul may have been mistaken about the Resurrection. Expressions attributed to Christ occur in the _Book of Enoch_, therefore they are not original and divine, &c., &c. And it would be out of place to attempt any reply to this argument, the reply being in each case as sun-clear as the argument itself. No believer in supernatural religion that I ever met considered Sir Matthew Hale to have been inspired; and no believer in the divinity of Christ can fail to hold that His adoption of words (if He did adopt them) makes them His.

The gist of the Butler lectures is considerably less clear, and, if only for that reason, it cannot be succinctly stated or answered. In particular, it requires rather careful "collection" in order to discover what our friend the Zeit-Geist has to do in this galley. I should imagine that, though an Edinburgh audience is by no means alarmed at philosophy, the majority, perhaps the enormous majority, of Mr Arnold's hearers must have had a singularly dim idea as to his exact drift. Indeed I cannot say that after reading the piece when it first appeared, and again, twenty years later, for the purposes of this book, I have any very distinct notion of that drift myself. If it merely means that Butler, being an eighteenth-century person, was afflicted with the eighteenth-century limitations by the Zeit-Geist, eighty-six pages, and an imposing German compound at the head of every other one of them, seem a good deal for telling us this. If it is a sort of indirect attack upon--an oblique demurrer to--Butler's constructive-aggressive orthodoxy in psychology and religion, one is bound to say with all politeness, first, that it is a case of _impar congressus_, and secondly, that the adventurous knight does not give himself a fair chance. It will take more than eighty-six not very large pages, and a German word at the top of the alternate ones, to do that! In the opening sketch of Butler himself Mr Arnold could not but be agreeable and even delightful. It gives us, indeed, most pleasant promise of work in this same good kind soon to follow; but for the rest we grope till we find, after some seventy-three of the eighty-six, that what Mr Arnold wanted to say is that Butler did not handle, and could not then have handled, miracles and the fulfilment of prophecy satisfactorily. Butler, like St Paul, is undoubtedly inconvenient for those who believe that miracles do not happen, and that prophecies were either not made or not fulfilled. So he must be got rid of. But whether he is got rid of,--whether Mr Arnold and the Zeit-Geist have put him on the shelf as a venerable but antiquated object,--that is another question.

The two remaining essays show us Mr Arnold, in his character of at least would-be practical statesman, dealing no longer with points of doctrine but with the affairs of the Church as a political body. The circumstances of the first--the address delivered at Sion College--had a certain piquancy: whether they had also sweet reasonableness and an entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt capable of being debated. Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as a little grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to examine at any length. He thought himself that he had "sufficiently marked the way in which the new world was to be reached." Paths to new worlds are always interesting, but in reading, or rather re-reading, the sailing directions of this Columbus twenty years after date, one may be a little disappointed. The sum appears to be a somewhat Tootsian declaration that things of general are of no consequence. The Church is better than Dissent; at least she would be so if she dropped all her dogma, the greater part of her superstitions about the rights of property and "my duty to my neighbour," and as much as possible of the barriers which separate her from Dissent itself. A most moderate eirenicon. Still less need be said of the Burials Bill paper, which is a sort of appendix or corollary to the Sion speech, at the end of which the subject had been referred to. The particular question, in this phase of it, has long ceased to burn, and one need not disturb the ashes.

We must now turn to the incursions of this time into politics, which, if not much happier, were more amusing. The chief monument of them is the long unreprinted _Friendship's Garland_, which has always had some fervent devotees, and is very characteristic. It so happened that the period when _Essays in Criticism_, combined with his Oxford Lectures, introduced Mr Arnold to the public, was the period of the first years of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, when that brilliant periodical, with the help of many of the original staff of the _Saturday Review_, and others, was renewing for the sixties the sensation of a new kind of journalism, which the _Saturday_ itself had given to the fifties, while its form and daily appearance gave it even greater opportunities. As early as the summer of 1866, during the agitation into which the public mind had been thrown by the astounding rapidity and thoroughness of the Prussian successes in the Seven Weeks' War, Mr Arnold had begun a series of letters, couched in the style of _persiflage_, which Kinglake had introduced, or reintroduced, twenty years earlier in _Eothen_, and which the _Saturday_ had taken up and widely developed. He also took not a few hints from Carlyle in _Sartor_ and the _Latterday Pamphlets_. And for some years at intervals, with the help of a troupe of imaginary correspondents and _comparses_--Arminius von Thundertentronckh, Adolescens Leo of the _Daily Telegraph_, the Bottles family of wealthy Dissenters, with cravings for their deceased wife's sisters, as well as a large number of more or less celebrated personages of the day, introduced in their proper persons, and by their proper names--he instructed England on its own weakness, folly, and vulgarity, on the wisdom and strength of the Germans, on the importance of _Geist_ and ideas, &c., &c. The author brought himself in by name as a simple inhabitant of Grub Street, victimised, bullied, or compassionately looked down upon by everybody; and by this well-known device took licence for pretty familiar treatment of other people. When the greater crash of 1870 came, and the intelligent British mind was more puzzled, yet more _Prusso-mimic_, than ever, he supplemented these letters, framed or bound them up, as it were, with a moving account of the death of Arminius before Paris, and launched the whole as a book.

The letters had been much laughed over; but I do not think the book was very widely bought--at any rate, its very high price during the time in which it was out of print shows that no large number was printed. Perhaps this cold welcome was not altogether so discreditable to the British public as it would have been, had its sole cause been the undoubted but unpalatable truths told by the writer. Either, as some say, because of its thick-hidedness, or, as others, because of its arrogant self-sufficiency, the British public has never resented these much. But, in the first place, the thing was a falsetto. Mr Arnold had plenty of wit but not much humour; and after a time one feels that Bottles and Leo & Co. may be, as Dousterswivel says, "very witty and comedy," but that we should not be altogether sorry if they would _go_. Further, the direct personalities--the worst instances concerned Lord Elcho, Mr Frederic Harrison, and the late Mr Sala--struck, and strike, some people as being not precisely in good taste. The constant allusions and references to minor and ephemeral things and persons were not of course then unintelligible, but they were even then teasing, In all these points, if _Friendship's Garland_ be compared, I will once more not say with _A Tale of a Tub_, but even with the _History of John Bull_, its weakness will come out rather strongly.

But this was not all. It was quite evident--and it was no shame and no disadvantage to him--that the jester was endeavouring to urge a very serious earnest behind, and by means of, his jest; that he was no mere railer, or caviller, or even satirist, but a convinced reformer and apostle. Yet when we try to get at his programme--at his gospel--there is no vestige of anything tangible about either. Not very many impartial persons could possibly accept Mr Arnold's favourite doctrine, that the salvation of the people lies in state-provided middle-class schools; and this was specially difficult in 1871, if they remembered how some few years before Mr Arnold had been extolling the state-provided middle-class schools of France. While, for the rest, a man might be (as many men were) thoroughly dissatisfied with the part England had played abroad in Italy, in the American Civil War, in Denmark, in the war of 1866, in the war of 1870, and at home from 1845 onwards, and yet not be able for the life of him to discover any way of safety in _Friendship's Garland_.

Nor, to take with the _Garland_ for convenience sake _Irish Essays_, 1882, the political book which closed this period with the political book that opened it, do we find things much better, even long after "the Wilderness" had been mostly left behind. There is indeed less falsetto and less flippancy; perhaps Mr Arnold had silently learnt a lesson, perhaps the opportunities of regular essays in "three-decker" reviews--of a lay sermon to working men, of a speech at the greatest public school in the world--discouraged the playfulness which had seemed permissible in addressing a skittish young evening newspaper. But the unpracticalness--not in the Philistine but in the strictly scientific sense--is more glaring than ever, and there are other faults with it. Great part of _An Unregarded Irish Grievance_ is occupied by a long-drawn-out comparison of England's behaviour to Ireland with that of Mr Murdstone and his friend and manager Quinion to David Copperfield. In the first place, one thinks wickedly of the gibe in _Friendship's Garland_ about "Mr Vernon Harcourt developing a system of unsectarian religion from the life of Mr Pickwick." In the second, one asks on what principles of literary art a comparison, not wholly improper as a mere illustration in passing, can be worked to death and turned inside out and upside down, for some twenty mortal pages.

And so in other places. Yet the worst faults are not in form but in substance. Minor contradictions do not matter, though in a copy of the