The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

seling different things bewildering, the number of existing works capable of

attracting a young writer's attention and of becoming his models, immense.

What he wants is a hand to guide him through the confusion, a voice to

prescribe to him the aim which he should keep in view, and to explain to him

that the value of the literary works which offer themselves to his attention is

relative to their power of helping him forward on his road towards this aim.

Such a guide the English writer at the present day will nowhere find. Failing

this, all that can be looked for, all indeed that can be desired is, that his

attention should be fixed on excellent models; that he may reproduce, at any

rate, something of their excellence, by penetrating himself with their works

and by catching their spirit, if he cannot be taught to produce what is excellent

independently. 1. North British Revieiv 19 (Aug. 1853): 180 (U.S. edition). Arnold seems not to have noticed that Goethe (a critic he revered) had been cited earlier eralization. 2. J. Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, )an. 3, 1830. in the article as the authority for this critical gen

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138 0 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

Foremost among these models for the English writer stands Shakespeare: a

name the greatest perhaps of all poetical names; a name never to be mentioned

without reverence. I will venture, however, to express a doubt, whether the

influence of his works, excellent and fruitful for the readers of poetry, for the

great majority, has been of unmixed advantage to the writers of it. Shakespeare

indeed chose excellent subjects; the world could afford no better than Mac

beth, or Romeo and Juliet, or Othello: he had no theory respecting the neces

sity of choosing subjects of present import, or the paramount interest attaching

to allegories of the state of one's own mind; like all great poets, he knew well

what constituted a poetical action; like them, wherever he found such an

action, he took it; like them, too, he found his best in past times. Rut to these

general characteristics of all great poets he added a special one of his own; a

gift, namely, of happy, abundant, and ingenious expression, eminent and unri

valed: so eminent as irresistibly to strike the attention first in him, and even

to throw into comparative shade his other excellences as a poet. Here has been

the mischief. These other excellences were his fundamental excellences as a

poet; what distinguishes the artist from the mere amateur, says Goethe, is

Architectonice in the highest sense;' that power of execution, which creates,

forms, and constitutes: not the profoundness of single thoughts, not the rich

ness of imagery, not the abundance of illustration. Rut these attractive acces

sories of a poetical work being more easily seized than the spirit of the whole,

and these accessories being possessed by Shakespeare in an unequaled degree,

a young writer having recourse to Shakespeare as his model runs great risk of

being vanquished and absorbed by them, and, in consequence, of reproducing,

according to the measure of his power, these, and these alone.4 Of this pre

ponderating quality of Shakespeare's genius, accordingly almost the whole of

modern English poetry has, it appears to me, felt the influence. To the exclu

sive attention on the part of his imitators to this it is in a great degree owing,

that of the majority of modern poetical works the details alone are valuable,

the composition worthless. In reading them one is perpetually reminded of

that terrible sentence on a modern French poet: II dit tout ce qu'il veut, mais

malheureusement il n'a rien a dire.5

Let me give an instance of what I mean. I will take it from the works of the

very chief among those who seem to have been formed in the school of Shake

speare: of one whose exquisite genius and pathetic death render him forever

interesting. I will take the poem of Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, by Keats. I

choose this rather than the Endymion, because the latter work (which a mod

ern critic has classed with the Fairy Queen!)6 although undoubtedly there

blows through it the breath of genius, is yet as a whole so utterly incoherent,

as not strictly to merit the name of a poem at all. The poem of Isabella, then,

is a perfect treasure house of graceful and felicitous words and images: almost

in every stanza there occurs one of those vivid and picturesque turns of expres

3. In the essay "Concerning the So-called Dilet-and the felicity, of the Elizabethan poets. tantism" (1799) in his Werke (1833) 44.262-63. 5. He savs everything he wishes to, but unfortu4. Cf. Arnold's letter to Clough (Oct. 28, 1852): nately he has nothing to say (French). A comment about Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), whose More and more I feel that the difference emphasis on style was severely criticized by Arnold between a mature and a youthful age of the in his late essay "Wordsworth" (1888). world compels the poetry of the former to use 6. In the North British Review 19 (Aug. 1853): great plainness of speech . . . and that Keats and 172-74, John Keats's Endymion (1818) is twice Shelley were on a false track when they set linked with Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queenethemselves to reproduce the exuberance of (1 590) as "leisurely compositions of the sweet senexpression, the charm, the richness of images, suous order."

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PREFACE TO POEMS (1853) / 1 379

sion, by which the object is made to flash upon the eye of the mind, and which

thrill the reader with a sudden delight. This one short poem contains, perhaps,

a greater number of happy7 single expressions which one could quote than all

the extant tragedies of Sophocles. But the action, the story? The action in

itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so loosely

constructed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is absolutely null.

Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story

in the Decameron:8 he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same

action has become in the hands of a great artist, who above all things delin

eates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is designed to

express. I have said that the imitators of Shakespeare, fixing their attention on his

wonderful gift of expression, have directed their imitation to this, neglecting

his other excellences. These excellences, the fundamental excellences of

poetical art, Shakespeare no doubt possessed them�possessed many of them

in a splendid degree; but it may perhaps be doubted whether even he himself

did not sometimes give scope to his faculty of expression to the prejudice of a

higher poetical duty. For we must never forget that Shakespeare is the great

poet he is from his skill in discerning and firmly conceiving an excellent action,

from his power of intensely feeling a situation, of intimately associating him

self with a character; not from his gift of expression, which rather even leads

him astray, degenerating sometimes into a fondness for curiosity of expression,

into an irritability of fancy, which seems to make it impossible for him to say

a thing plainly, even when the press of the action demands the very direct

language, or its level character the very simplest. Mr. Hallam, than whom it

is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had the courage

(for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how extremely and faultily

difficult Shakespeare's language often is.9 It is so: you may find main scenes

in some of his greatest tragedies, King Lear for instance, where the language

is so artificial, so curiously tortured, and so difficult, that every speech has to

be read two or three times before its meaning can be comprehended. This

overcuriousness of expression is indeed but the excessive employment of a

wonderful gift�of the power of saying a thing in a happier way than any other

man; nevertheless, it is carried so far that one understands what M. Guizot

meant, when he said that Shakespeare appears in his language to have tried

all styles except that of simplicity.1 He has not the severe and scrupulous self-

restraint of the ancients, partly no doubt, because he had a far less cultivated

and exacting audience. He has indeed a far wider range than they had, a far

richer fertility of thought; in this respect he rises above them. In his strong

conception of his subject, in the genuine way in which he is penetrated with

it, he resembles them, and is unlike the moderns. But in the accurate limita

tion of it, the conscientious rejection of superfluities, the simple and rigorous

development of it from the first line of his work to the last, he falls below them,

and comes nearer to the moderns. In his chief works, besides what he has of

his own, he has the elementary soundness of the ancients; he has their impor

tant action and their large and broad manner; but he has not their purity of

method. He is therefore a less safe model; for what he has of his own is

7. Well-judged, fitting. (1779-1859). 8. By Boccaccio (1353): fourth day, fifth story. 1. F.P.G. Guizot (1787-1874), French historian, 9. Introduction to tlte Literature of Europe (1838� discusses Shakespeare's sonnets in his Shakespeare39), chap. 23, by the historian Henry Hallam et Son Temps (1852) I 14.

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1382 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

personal, and inseparable from his own rich nature; it may be imitated and

exaggerated, it cannot be learned or applied as an art. He is above all sugges

tive; more valuable, therefore, to young writers as men than as artists. But

clearness of arrangement, rigor of development, simplicity of style�these may

to a certain extent be learned; and these may, I am convinced, be learned best

from the ancients, who although infinitely less suggestive than Shakespeare,

are thus, to the artist, more instructive.

What, then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be our sole models? the

ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and their widely

different circumstances? Not, certainly, that which is narrow in the ancients,

nor that in which we can no longer sympathize. An action like the action of

the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the hero

ine's duty to her brother's corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no

longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest. I am

speaking too, it will be remembered, not of the best sources of intellectual

stimulus for the general reader, but of the best models of instruction for the

individual writer. This last may certainly learn of the ancients, better than

anywhere else, three things which it is vitally important for him to know: the

all-importance of the choice of a subject; the necessity of accurate construc

tion; and the subordinate character of expression. He will learn from them how

unspeakably superior is the effect of the one moral impression left by a great

action treated as a whole, to the effect produced by the most striking single

thought or by the happiest image. As he penetrates into the spirit of the great

classical works, as he becomes gradually aware of their intense significance,

their noble simplicity, and their calm pathos, he will be convinced that it is this

effect, unity and profoundness of moral impression, at which the ancient poets

aimed; that it is this which constitutes the grandeur of their works, and which

makes them immortal. He will desire to direct his own efforts towards produc

ing the same effect. Above all, he will deliver himself from the jargon of mod

ern criticism, and escape the danger of producing poetical works conceived in the spirit of the passing time, and which partake of its transitoriness.

The present age makes great claims upon us; we owe it service, it will not be satisfied without our admiration. I know not how it is, but their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those who constantly practice it, a steadying and composing effect upon their judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general. They are like persons who have had a very weighty and impressive experience; they are more truly than others under the empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among those with whom they live. They wish neither to applaud nor to revile their age; they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and whether this is what they want. What they want, they know very well; they want to educe and cultivate what is best and noblest in themselves; they know, too, that this is no easy task�^aAfTror, as Pittacus said, -/JIXEJIOV koQXbv E/ifievat2�and they ask themselves sincerely whether their age and its literature can assist them in the attempt. If they are endeavoring to practice any art, they remember the plain and simple proceedings of the old artists, who attained their grand results by penetrating themselves with some noble and significant action, not by inflating themselves with a belief in the pre-eminent importance and greatness of their own times. They do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their age, nor

2. It is hard to be good (Greek); an aphorism of the statesman and sage Pittacus (ca. 650�570 B.C.E.).

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PREFACE TO POEMS (1853) / 1 379

of the coming poet; all this, they know, is the mere delirium of vanity; their

business is not to praise their age, but to afford to the men who live in it the

highest pleasure which they are capable of feeling. If asked to afford this by

means of subjects drawn from the age itself, they ask what special fitness the

present age has for supplying them. They are told that it is an era of progress,

an age commissioned to carry out the great ideas of industrial development and

social amelioration. They reply that with all this they can do nothing; that the

elements they need for the exercise of their art are great actions, calculated

powerfully and delightfully to affect what is permanent in the human soul; that

so far as the present age can supply such actions, they will gladly make use of

them; but that an age wanting in moral grandeur can with difficulty supply

such, and an age of spiritual discomfort with difficulty be powerfully and

delightfully affected by them.

A host of voices will indignantly rejoin that the present age is inferior to the

past neither in moral grandeur nor in spiritual health. He who possesses the

discipline I speak of will content himself with remembering the judgments

passed upon the present age, in this respect, by the two men, the one of

strongest head, the other of widest culture, whom it has produced; by Goethe

and by Niebuhr.3 It will be sufficient for him that he knows the opinions held

by these two great men respecting the present age and its literature; and that

he feels assured in his own mind that their aims and demands upon life were

such as he would wish, at any rate, his own to be; and their judgment as to

what is impeding and disabling such as he may safely follow. He will not,

however, maintain a hostile attitude towards the false pretensions of his age:

he will content himself with not being overwhelmed by them. He will esteem

himself fortunate if he can succeed in banishing from his mind all feelings of

contradiction, and irritation, and impatience; in order to delight himself with

the contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable others,

through his representation of it, to delight in it also. I am far indeed from making any claim, for myself, that I possess this dis

cipline; or for the following poems, that they breathe its spirit. But I say, that

in the sincere endeavor to learn and practice, amid the bewildering confusion

of our times, what is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself to find

the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among the ancients. They, at

any rate, knew what they wanted in art, and we do not. It is this uncertainty

which is disheartening, and not hostile criticism. How often have I felt this

when reading words of disparagement or of cavil: that it is the uncertainty as

to what is really to be aimed at which makes our difficulty, not the dissatis

faction of the critic, who himself suffers from the same uncertainty. Non me

tua fervida terrent Dicta; . . . Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis.4

Two kinds of dilettanti, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who neglects

the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows

spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to arrive at poetry merely by mech

anism, in which he can acquire an artisan's readiness, and is without soul and

matter.5 And he adds, that the first does most harm to art, and the last to

himself. If we must be dilettanti; if it is impossible for us, under the circum

3. B. G. Niebuhr (1776-1831), German histo-Turnus, a warrior abandoned by the gods, is replyrian. Both writers felt that their own age had added ing to Aeneas, who has taunted him with being little to the store of great literature. afraid. 4. The gods frighten me, and [having] Jupiter as 5. See "Concerning the So-called Dilettantism" an enemy (Latin); from Virgil's Aeneid 12.894�95. (1799) in his Werke (1833) 44.281.

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1384 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

stances amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to delineate

firmly; if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great artists; let us, at least,

have so much respect for our art as to prefer it to ourselves. Let us not bewilder

our successors; let us transmit to them the practice of poetry, with its bound

aries and wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again,

perhaps, at some future time, be produced, not yet fallen into oblivion through

our neglect, not yet condemned and canceled by the influence of their eternal

enemy, caprice.

1853

From The Function of Criticism at the Present Time1

Many objections have been made to a proposition which, in some remarks

of mine on translating Homer,2 I ventured to put forth; a proposition about

criticism, and its importance at the present day. I said: "Of the literature of

France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort,

for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavor, in all branches

of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as

in itself it really is." I added, that owing to the operation in English literature

of certain causes, "almost the last thing for which one would come to English

literature is just that very thing which now Europe most desires�criticism";

and that the power and value of English literature was thereby impaired. More

than one rejoinder declared that the importance I here assigned to criticism

was excessive, and asserted the inherent superiority of the creative effort of

the human spirit over its critical effort. And the other day, having been led by

a Mr. Shairp's excellent notice of Wordsworth3 to turn again to his biography,

1 found, in the words of this great man, whom I, for one, must always listen

to with the profoundest respect, a sentence passed on the critic's business,

which seems to justify every possible disparagement of it. Wordsworth says in

one of his letters: The writers in these publications (the Reviews), while they prosecute their

inglorious employment, cannot be supposed to be in a state of mind very

favorable for being affected by the finer influences of a thing so pure as

genuine poetry. And a trustworthy reporter4 of his conversation quotes a more elaborate

judgment to the same effect: Wordsworth holds the critical power very low, infinitely lower than the

inventive; and he said today that if the quantity of time consumed in

1. This essay served as an introduction to Essays introduce all succeeding editions of Words- in Criticism (1865). worth, Mr. Shairp's notice might, it seems to me, 2. On Translating Homer (I 861). excellently serve; it is written from the point of 3. J. C. Shairp's essay "Wordsworth: The Man and view of an admirer, nay, of a disciple, and that the Poet" was published in 1864. Arnold com-is right; but then the disciple must be also, as in ments in a footnote: this case he is, a critic, a man of letters, not, as too often happens, some relation or friend with

I cannot help thinking that a practice, common

no qualification for his task except affection for

in England during the last century, and still fol

his author.

lowed in France, of printing a notice of this kind�a notice by a competent critic�to serve 4. Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William as an introduction to an eminent author's works, Wordsworth (1851). might be revived among us with advantage. To

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THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME / 138 5

writing critiques on the works of others were given to original composition,

of whatever kind it might be, it would be much better employed; it would

make a man find out sooner his own level, and it would do infinitely less

mischief. A false or malicious criticism may do much injury to the minds

of others; a stupid invention, either in prose or verse, is quite harmless. It is almost too much to expect of poor human nature, that a man capable

of producing some effect in one line of literature, should, for the greater good

of society, voluntarily doom himself to impotence and obscurity in another.

Still less is this to be expected from men addicted to the composition of the

"false or malicious criticism" of which Wordsworth speaks. However, every

body would admit that a false or malicious criticism had better never have

been written. Everybody, too, would be willing to admit, as a general propo

sition, that the critical faculty is lower than the inventive. But is it true that

criticism is really, in itself, a baneful and injurious employment; is it true that

all time given to writing critiques on the works of others would be much better

employed if it were given to original composition, of whatever kind this may

be? Is it true that Johnson had better have gone on producing more Irenes5

instead of writing his Lives of the Poets; nay, is it certain that Wordsworth

himself was better employed in making his Ecclesiastical Sonnets than when

he made his celebrated Preface6 so full of criticism, and criticism of the works

of others? Wordsworth was himself a great critic, and it is to be sincerely

regretted that he has not left us more criticism; Goethe was one of the greatest

of critics, and we may sincerely congratulate ourselves that he has left us so

much criticism. Without wasting time over the exaggeration which Words

worth's judgment on criticism clearly contains, or over an attempt to trace the

causes�not difficult, I think, to be traced�which may have led Wordsworth

to this exaggeration, a critic may with advantage seize an occasion for trying

his own conscience, and for asking himself of what real service, at any given

moment, the practice of criticism either is or may be made to his own mind

and spirit, and to the minds and spirits of others. The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True; but in assenting

to this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind. It is undeniable

that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, is the highest

function of man; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it his true happiness.

But it is undeniable, also, that men may have the sense of exercising this free

creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of literature or

art; if it were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out from the true

happiness of all men. They may have it in well-doing, they may have it in

learning, they may have it even in criticizing. This is one thing to be kept in

mind. Another is, that the exercise of the creative power in the production of

great works of literature or art, however high this exercise of it may rank, is

not at all epochs and under all conditions possible; and that therefore labor

may be vainly spent in attempting it, which might with more fruit be used in

preparing for it, in rendering it possible. This creative power works with ele

ments, with materials; what if it has not those materials, those elements, ready

for its use? In that case it must surely wait till they are ready. Now, in litera

ture�I will limit myself to literature, for it is about literature that the question

5. Irene (1749) is a clumsy play by Samuel John-6. To Lyrical Ballads (1800). "Ecclesiastical Son- son (1709-1784), whose Lives of the Poets (1779-nets": a sonnet sequence (1821�22) by Words81) is a major work of criticism. worth, usually regarded as minor verse.

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138 6 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

arises�the elements with which the creative power works are ideas; the best ideas on every matter which literature touches, current at the time. At any rate we may lay it down as certain that in modern literature no manifestation of the creative power not working with these can be very important or fruitful. And I say current at the time, not merely accessible at the time; for creative literary genius does not principally show itself in discovering new ideas, that is rather the business of the philosopher. The grand work of literary genius 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. But it must have the atmosphere, it must find itself amidst the order of ideas, in order to work freely; and these it is not so easy to command. This is why great creative epochs in literature are so rare, this is why there is so much that is unsatisfactory in the productions of many men of real genius; because, for the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment; the creative power has, for its happy exercise, appointed elements, and those elements are not in its own control.

Nay, they are more within the control of the critical power. It is the business of the critical power, as I said in the words already quoted, "in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is." Thus it tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth everywhere; out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature.

Or, to narrow our range, and quit these considerations of the general march of genius and of society�considerations which are apt to become too abstract and impalpable�everyone can see that a poet, for instance, ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and 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. This is why Byron's poetry had so little endurance in it, and Goethe's so much; both Byron and Goethe had a great productive power, but Goethe's was nourished by a great critical effort providing the true materials for it, and Byron's was not; Goethe knew life and the world, the poet's necessary subjects, much more comprehensively and thoroughly than Byron. He knew a great deal more of them, and he knew them much more as they really are.

It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it in fact something premature; and that from this cause its productions are doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And this prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so

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THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME / 1 1387

empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and variety. Wordsworth cared little for books, and disparaged Goethe. I admire Wordsworth, as he is, so much that I cannot wish him different; and it is vain, no doubt, to imagine such a man different from what he is, to suppose that he could have been different. But surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is�his thought richer, and his influence of wider application�was that he should have read more books, among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him.

But to speak of books and reading may easily lead to a misunderstanding here. It was not really books and reading that lacked to our poetry at this epoch: Shelley had plenty of reading, Coleridge had immense reading. Pindar and Sophocles7�as we all say so glibly, and often with so little discernment of the real import of what we are saying�had not many books; Shakespeare was no deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive. And this state of things is the true basis for the creative power's exercise, in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps to this. Even when this does not actually exist, books and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge and intelligence in which he may live and work. This is by no means an equivalent to the artist for the nationally diffused life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or Shakespeare; but, besides that it may be a means of preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute, if many share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere of great value. Such an atmosphere the many-sided learning and the long and widely combined critical effort of Germany formed for Goethe, when he lived and worked. There was no national glow of life and thought there as in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth.8 That was the poet's weakness. But there was a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans. That was his strength. In the England of the first quarter of this century there was neither a national glow of life and thought, such as we had in the age of Elizabeth, nor yet a culture and a force of learning and criticism such as were to be found in Germany. Therefore the creative power of poetry wanted, for success in the highest sense, materials and a basis; a thorough interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it.

At first sight it seems strange that out of the immense stir of the French Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of genius equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive time of Greece, or out of that of the Renascence, with its powerful episode the Reformation. But the truth is that the stir of the French Revolution took a character which essentially distinguished it from such movements as these. These were, in the main, disinterestedly intellectual and spiritual movements; movements in which the human spirit looked for its satisfaction in itself and in the increased

7 . Greek tragedian (ca. 496�406 B.C.E.) . Pindar man of Athens during the period of the city's most (518-438 B.C.E.), Greek lyric poet. outstanding achievements in art, literature, and 8. Elizabeth I (1533-1603; reigned 1558-1603). politics. Pericles (ca. 495�429 B.C.E.), the leading states

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play of its own activity. The French Revolution took a political, practical character. The movement, which went on in France under the old regime, from 1700 to 1789, was far more really akin than that of the Revolution itself to the movement of the Renascence; the France of Voltaire and Rousseau9 told far more powerfully upon the mind of Europe than the France of the Revolution. Goethe reproached this last expressly with having "thrown quiet culture back."1 Nay, and the true key to how much in our Byron, even in our Words- worth, is this!�that they had their source in a great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind. The French Revolution, however�that object of so much blind love and so much blind hatred�found undoubtedly its motive power in the intelligence of men, and not in their practical sense; this is what distinguishes it from the English Revolution of Charles the First's time.2 This is what makes it a more spiritual event than our Revolution, an event of much more powerful and worldwide interest, though practically less successful; it appeals to an order of ideas which are universal, certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational? 1642 asked of a thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it according to conscience? This is the English fashion, a fashion to be treated, within its own sphere, with the highest respect; for its success, within its own sphere, has been prodigious. But what is law in one place is not law in another; what is law here today is not law even here tomorrow; and as for conscience, what is binding on one man's conscience is not binding on another's. The old woman who threw her stool at the head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles's Church at Edinburgh3 obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human race may be permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason are absolute, unchanging, of universal validity; to count by tens is the easiest way of counting�that is a proposition of which everyone, from here to the Antipodes, feels the force; at least I should say so if we did not live in a country where it is not impossible that any morning we may find a letter in the Times declaring that a decimal coinage is an absurdity.4 That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason, and with an ardent zeal for making its prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable thing, when we consider how little of mind, or anything so worthy and quickening as mind, comes into the motives which alone, in general, impel great masses of men. In spite of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude for these ideas, a unique and still living power; it is�it will probably long remain�the greatest, the most animating event in history. And as no sincere passion for the things of the mind, even though it turn out in many respects an unfortunate passion, is ever quite thrown away and quite barren of good, France has reaped from hers one fruit�the natural and legit

9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Swiss-3. In 1637 rioting broke out in Scotland against a bom French philosopher and political theorist. new kind of church service prescribed by Charles Voltaire (1694�1778), pen name of the French I. The riot was started by an old woman hurling a writer Francois Marie Arouet. stool at a clergyman, whom she accused of saying 1. See "Vier Jahreszeiten Herbst" (1796) in his Mass. Werke (1887) 1.354. 4. In 1863 a proposal in Parliament to introduce 2. Disputes between Charles I (1600-1649; the French decimal system for weights and meareigned 1625�49) and Parliament led in 1642 to sures had provoked articles in the London Times civil war and ultimately to the king's beheading. defending the English system (of ounces and (Eleven years later his son, Charles II, was recalled pounds or inches and feet) as more practical. Decfrom exile and proclaimed king.) imal coinage was finally instituted in 1971.

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imate fruit though not precisely the grand fruit she expected: she is the country

in Europe where the people is most alive. But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in his element: on this theme we can all go on for hours. And all we are in the habit of saying on it has undoubtedly a great deal of truth. Ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves, cannot be too much lived with; but to transport them abruptly into the world of politics and practice, violently to revolutionize this world to their bidding�that is quite another thing. There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed. A member of the House of Commons said to me the other day: "That a thing is an anomaly, I consider to be no objection to it whatever." I venture to think he was wrong; 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. Joubert' has said beautifully: "C'est la force et le droit qui reglent 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." Force till right is ready; and till right is ready, force, the existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler. 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 enamored 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. It sets at nought the second great half of our maxim, force till right is ready. This was the grand error of the French Revolution; and its movement of ideas, by quitting the intellectual sphere and rushing furiously into the political sphere, ran, indeed a prodigious and memorable course, but produced no such intellectual fruit as the movement of ideas of the Renascence, and created, in opposition to itself, what I may call an epoch of concentration. The great force of that epoch of concentration was England; and the great voice of that epoch of concentration was Burke.6 It is the fashion to treat Burke's writings on the French Revolution as superannuated and conquered by the event; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and prejudice. I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the violence and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Rurke's view was bounded, and his observation therefore at fault. But on the whole, and for those who can make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth, They contain the true philosophy of an epoch of concentration, dissipate the heavy atmosphere which its own nature is apt to engender round it, and make its resistance rational instead of mechanical.

But Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought

5. Joseph Joubert (1754-1824), French moralist statesman and author of Reflections on the French about whom Arnold wrote in his Essays in Criti-Revolution (1790), which expressed the conservacism. tive opposition to revolutionary theories. 6. Edmund Burke (1729�1797), prominent

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to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought. It is his accident7 that his ideas were at the service of an epoch of concentration, not of an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic that he so lived by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up within him, that he could float even an epoch of concentration and English Tory politics with them. It does not hurt him that Dr. Price8 and the Liberals were enraged with him; it does not even hurt him that George the Third and the Tories were enchanted with him. His greatness is that he lived in a world which neither English Liberalism nor English Toryism is apt to enter�the world of ideas, not the world of catchwords and party habits. So far is it from being really true of him that he "to party gave up what was meant for mankind,"9 that at the very end of his fierce struggle with the French Revolution, after all his invectives against its false pretensions, hollowness, and madness, with his sincere convictions of its mischievousness, he can close a memorandum on the best means of combating it, some of the last pages he ever wrote1�the Thoughts on French Affairs, in December 1791 � with these striking words:

The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be where power, wisdom, and information, I hope, are more united with good intentions than they can be with me. I have done with this subject, I believe, forever. It has given me many anxious moments for the last two years. If a great change is to he made in human affairs, the minds of men will he 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 he resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.

That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature. That is what I call living by ideas: when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all round you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam engine and can imagine no other�still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question, and, like Balaam, to be unable to speak anything but what the Lord has put in your mouth.2 I know nothing more striking, and I must add that I know nothing more un-English.

For the Englishman in general is like my friend the Member of Parliament, and believes, point-blank, that for a thing to be an anomaly is absolutely no objection to it whatever. He is like the Lord Auckland1 of Burke's day, who, in a memorandum on the French Revolution, talks of certain "miscreants, assuming the name of philosophers, who have presumed themselves capable of establishing a new system of society." The Englishman has been called a political animal, and he values what is political and practical so much that

7. Fortune. caused by misunderstanding a passage in one of 8. Richard Price (1723�1791), a prorevolutionary Burke's letters. clergyman who was an opponent of Burke's. 2. Balaam, a false and worldly prophet, pro9. From Oliver Goldsmith's poem "Retaliation" nounced a blessing on the Israelites instead of the (1774). curse he had intended (Numbers 22.38). 1. Arnold was mistaken; Burke continued to write 3. William Eden, first Baron Auckland (1744for another six years after 1791. According to 1814), statesman and diplomat. Arnold's editor, R. H. Super, the mistake was

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ideas easily become objects of dislike in his eyes, and thinkers, "miscreants," because ideas and thinkers have rashly meddled with politics and practice. This would be all very well if the dislike and neglect confined themselves to ideas transported out of their own sphere, and meddling rashly with practice; but they are inevitably extended to ideas as such, and to the whole life of intelligence; practice is everything, a free play of the mind is nothing. The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation's spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into an Englishman's thoughts. It is noticeable that the word curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense, to mean, as a high and fine quality of man's nature, just this disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake�it is noticeable, I say, that this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no sense but a rather bad and disparaging one. But criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quality. It obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations whatever. This is an instinct for which there is, I think, little original sympathy in the practical English nature, and what there was of it has undergone a long benumbing period of blight and suppression in the epoch of concentration which followed the French Revolution.

But epochs of concentration cannot well endure forever; epochs of expansion, in the due course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of expansion seems to be opening in this country. In the first place all danger of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long disappeared; like the traveler in the fable, therefore, we begin to wear our cloak a little more loosely.4 Then, with a long peace, the ideas of Europe steal gradually and amicably in, and mingle, though in infinitesimally small quantities at a time, with our own notions. Then, too, in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and brutalizing influence of our passionate material progress, it seems to me indisputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life; and that man, after he has made himself perfectly comfortable and has now to determine what to do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure. I grant it is mainly the privilege of faith, at present, to discern this end to our railways, our business, and our fortune-making; but we shall see if, here as elsewhere, faith is not in the end the true prophet. Our ease, our traveling, and our unbounded liberty to hold just as hard and securely as we please to the practice to which our notions have given birth, all tend to beget an inclination to deal a little more freely with these notions themselves, to canvass them a little, to penetrate a little into their real nature. Flutterings of curiosity, in the foreign sense of the word, appear amongst us, and it is in these that criticism must look to find its account. Criticism first; a time of true creative activity, perhaps�which, as I have said, must inevitably be preceded amongst us by a time of criticism�hereafter, when criticism has done its work.

4. In Aesop's fable of the wind and the sun, the goal of both), whereas the wind can only make him two compete to see who is more powerful. The sun bold it closely. wins by causing the traveler to take off his coat (the

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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,5 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 them. Else criticism, besides being really false to its own nature, merely continues in the old rut which it has hitherto followed in this country, and will certainly miss the chance now given to it. For what is at present the bane of criticism in this country? It is that practical considerations cling to it and stifle it. It subserves interests not its own. Our organs of criticism are organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first thing and the play of mind the second; so much play of mind as is compatible with the prosecution of those practical ends is all that is wanted. An organ like the Revue des Deux Mondes/' having for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and thought in the world, existing, it may be said, as just an organ for a free play of the mind, we have not. But we have the Edinburgh Review, existing as an organ of the old Whigs, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the Tories, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the British Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the political Dissenters, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the Times, existing as an organ of the common, satisfied, well-to-do Englishman, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that. And so on through all the various fractions, political and religious, of our society; every fraction has, as such, its organ of criticism, but the notion of combining all fractions in the common pleasure of a free disinterested play of mind meets with no favor. Directly this play of mind wants to have more scope, and to forget the pressure of practical considerations a little, it is checked, it is made to feel the chain. We saw this the other day in the extinction, so much to be regretted, of the Home and Foreign Review.7 Perhaps in no organ of criticism in this country was there so much knowledge, so much play of mind; but these could not save it. The Dublin Review subordinates play of mind to the practical business of English and Irish Catholicism, and lives. It must needs be that men should act in sects and parties, that each of these sects and parties should have its organ, and should make this organ subserve the interests of its action; but it would be well, too, that there should be a criticism, not the minister of these interests,

5. This key word in Arnold's argument connotes 6. An international magazine of exceptionally high independence and objectivity of mind. It means quality, founded in Paris in 1829. not having an interest, in the sense of an ax to 7. A liberal Catholic periodical, founded in 1862, grind. It does not mean lack of interest. which ceased publication in 1864.

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not their enemy, but absolutely and entirely independent of them. No other criticism will ever attain any real authority or make any real way towards its end�the creating a current of true and fresh ideas.

It is because criticism has so little kept in the pure intellectual sphere, has so little detached itself from practice, has been so directly polemical and controversial, that it has so ill accomplished, in this country, its best spiritual work, which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things. A polemical practical criticism makes men blind even to the ideal imperfection of their practice, makes them willingly assert its ideal perfection, in order the better to secure it against attack; and clearly this is narrowing and baneful for them. If they were reassured on the practical side, speculative considerations of ideal perfection they might be brought to entertain, and their spiritual horizon would thus gradually widen. Sir Charles Adderley8 says to the Warwickshire farmers:

Talk of the improvement of breed! Why, the race we ourselves represent, the men and women, the old Anglo-Saxon race, are the best breed in the whole world. . . . The absence of a too enervating climate, too unclouded skies, and a too luxurious nature, has produced so vigorous a race of people, and has rendered us so superior to all the world.

Mr. Roebuck says to the Sheffield cutlers:9

I look around me and ask what is the state of England? Is not property safe? Is not every man able to say what he likes? Can you not walk from one end of England to the other in perfect security? I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it? Nothing. I pray that our unrivaled happiness may last.

Now obviously there is a peril for poor human nature in words and thoughts of such exuberant self-satisfaction, until we find ourselves safe in the streets of the Celestial City.

Das wenige verschwindet leicht dern Blicke

Der vorwarts sieht, wie viel noch iibrig hleibt�1

says Goethe; "the little that is done seems nothing when we look forward and see how much we have yet to do." Clearly this is a better line of reflection for weak humanity, so long as it remains on this earthly field of labor and trial.

But neither Sir Charles Adderley nor Mr. Roebuck is by nature inaccessible to considerations of this sort. They only lose sight of them owing to the controversial life we all lead, and the practical form which all speculation takes with us. They have in view opponents whose aim is not ideal, but practical; and in their zeal to uphold their own practice against these innovators, they go so far as even to attribute to this practice an ideal perfection. Somebody has been wanting to introduce a six-pound franchise, or to abolish churchrates, 2 or to collect agricultural statistics by force, or to diminish local self- government. How natural, in reply to such proposals, very likely improper or

8. Conservative politician and wealthy landowner 1. Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris (1787) 1.2.91( 1814-1905). 92. 9. Makers of knives and forks. John Arthur Roe-2. Taxes supporting the Church of England. "Sixbuck (1801�1879), radical politician and repre-pound franchise": a radical proposal to extend the sentative in Parliament for the industrial city of right to vote to anyone owning land worth .6 Sheffield, famous for its metahvorking trades. annual rent.

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ill-timed, to go a little beyond the mark and to say stoutly, "Such a race of people as we stand, so superior to all the world! The old Anglo-Saxon race, the best breed in the whole world! I pray that our unrivaled happiness may last! I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it?" And so long as criticism answers this dithyramb by insisting that the old Anglo-Saxon race would be still more superior to all others if it had no church- rates, or that our unrivaled happiness would last yet longer with a six-pound franchise, so long will the strain, "The best breed in the whole world!" swell louder and louder, everything ideal and refining will be lost out of sight, and both the assailed and their critics will remain in a sphere, to say the truth, perfectly unvital, a sphere in which spiritual progression is impossible. But let criticism leave church-rates and the franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit, without a single lurking thought of practical innovation, confront with our dithyramb this paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper immediately after reading Mr. Roebuck:

A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham.' A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.

Nothing but that; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of Sir Charles Adderley and Mr. Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are those few lines! "Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!"�how much that is harsh and ill-favored there is in this best! Wragg! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of "the best in the whole world," has anyone reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names�Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica4 they were luckier in this respect than "the best race in the world"; by the Ilissus5 there was no Wragg, poor thing! And "our unrivaled happiness"�what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills6�how dismal those who have seen them will remember�the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child! "I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it?" Perhaps not, one is inclined to answer; but at any rate, in that case, the world is very much to be pitied. And the final touch�short, bleak and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivaled happiness; or (shall I say?) the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigor of our old Anglo-Saxon breed! There is profit for the spirit in such contrasts as this; criticism serves the cause of perfection by establishing them. By eluding sterile conflict, by refusing to remain in the sphere where alone narrow and relative conceptions have any worth and validity, criticism may diminish its momentary importance, but only in this way has it a chance of gaining admittance for those wider and more perfect conceptions to which all its duty is really owed. Mr. Roebuck will have a poor opinion of an adversary who replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody; but in no other way will these songs of

3. It occurred on September 10, 1864. 5. A stream south of Athens. 4. The district in Greece that includes Athens. 6. Adjacent to the coal-mining and industrial area Ionia: area of the west coast of Asia Minor where of Nottingham (later associated with the writings Homer was believed to have lived. of D. H. Lawrence).

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triumph be induced gradually to moderate themselves, to get rid of what in them is excessive and offensive, and to fall into a softer and truer key.

It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action which I am thus prescribing for criticism, and that, by embracing in this manner the Indian7 virtue of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical life, it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper work of criticism. The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as much as saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle; but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. The rush and roar of practical life will always have a dizzying and attracting effect upon the most collected spectator, and tend to draw him into its vortex; most of all will this be the case where that life is so powerful as it is in England. But it is only by remaining collected, and refusing to lend himself to the point of view of the practical man, that the critic can do the practical man any service, and it is only by the greatest sincerity in pursuing his own course, and by at last convincing even the practical man of his sincerity, that he can escape misunderstandings which perpetually threaten him.

For the practical man is not apt for fine distinctions, and yet in these distinctions truth and the highest culture greatly find their account. But it is not easy to lead a practical man�unless you reassure him as to your practical intentions, you have no chance of leading him�to see that a thing which he has always been used to look at from one side only, which he greatly values, and which, looked at from that side, quite deserves, perhaps, all the prizing and admiring which he bestows upon it�that this thing, looked at from another side, may appear much less beneficent and beautiful, and yet retain all its claims to our practical allegiance. Where shall we find language innocent enough, how shall we make the spotless purity of our intentions evident enough, to enable us to say to the political Englishman that the British Constitution itself, which, seen from the practical side, looks such a magnificent organ of progress and virtue, seen from the speculative side�with its compromises, its love of facts, its horror of theory, its studied avoidance of clear thoughts�that, seen from this side, our august Constitution sometimes looks�forgive me, shade of Lord Somers!�a colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines?8 How is Cobbett9 to say this and not be misunderstood, blackened as he is with the smoke of a lifelong conflict in the field of political practice? how is Mr. Carlyle to say it and not be misunderstood, after his furious raid into this field with his Latter-day Pamphlets? how is Mr. Ruskin, after his pugnacious political economy?1 I say, the critic must keep out of the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere if he wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative treat

7. I.e., Hindu. Rights. 8. The unenlightened middle classes, whose oppo-9. William Cobbett (1762-1835), vehement sition to the defenders of culture is akin to that of reformer and champion of the poor and oppressed. the biblical tribe that fought against the people of 1. Reference to Unto This Last (1862), in which Israel, "the children of light." Arnold's repeated use John Ruskin shifted from art criticism to an attack of this parallel has established the term in our lan-on traditional theories of economics. In Latter-Day guage. John Somers (1651�1716), statesman Pamphlets (1850), Thomas Carlyle expressed bitter responsible for formulating the Declaration of antidemocratic views.

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ment of things, which may perhaps one day make its benefits felt even in this sphere, but in a natural and thence irresistible manner.

$ a *

If I have insisted so much on the course which criticism must take where politics and religion are concerned, it is because, where these burning matters are in question, it is most likely to go astray. I have wished, above all, to insist on the attitude which criticism should adopt towards things in general; on its right tone and temper of mind. But then comes another question as to the subject matter which literary criticism should most seek. Here, in general, its course is determined for it by the idea which is the law of its being; the idea of a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas. By the very nature of things, as England is not all the world, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of English growth, must be foreign; by the nature of things, again, it is just this that we are least likely to know, while English thought is streaming in upon us from all sides, and takes excellent care that we shall not be ignorant of its existence. The English critic of literature, therefore, must dwell much on foreign thought, and with particular heed on any part of it, which, while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him. Again, judging is often spoken of as the critic's one business, and so in some sense it is; but the judgment which almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge, is the valuable one; and thus knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic's great concern for himself. And it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment pass along with it�but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver�that the critic will generally do most good to his readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of establishing an author's place in literature, and his relation to a central standard (and if this is not done, how are we to get at our best in the world?) criticism may have to deal with a subject matter so familiar that fresh knowledge is out of the question, and then it must be all judgment; an enunciation and detailed application of principles. Here the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, to be sure that something is wrong. Still under all circumstances, this mere judgment and application of principles is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic; like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the sense of creative activity.

But stop, some one will say; all this talk is of no practical use to us whatever; this criticism of yours is not what we have in our minds when we speak of criticism; when we speak of critics and criticism, we mean critics and criticism of the current English literature of the day; when you offer to tell criticism its function, it is to this criticism that we expect you to address yourself. I am sorry for it, for I am afraid I must disappoint these expectations. I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world. How much of current English literature comes into this "best that is known and thought in the world"? Not very much I fear; certainly less, at this moment, than of the current literature of France or Germany. Well, then, am I to alter my definition of criticism, in order to meet the requirements of a number of practicing

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English critics, who, after all, are free in their choice of a business? That would be making criticism lend itself just to one of those alien practical considerations, which, I have said, are so fatal to it. One may say, indeed, to those who have to deal with the mass�so much better disregarded�of current English literature, that they may at all events endeavour, in dealing with this, to try it, so far as they can, by the standard of the best that is known and thought in the world; one may say, that to get anywhere near this standard, every critic should try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his own; and the more unlike his own, the better. But, after all, the criticism I am really concerned with�the criticism which alone can much help us for the future, the criticism which, throughout Europe, is at the present day meant, when so much stress is laid on the importance of criticism and the critical spirit�is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result, and whose members have, for their proper outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one another. Special, local, and temporary advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this program. And what is that but saying that we too, all of us, as individuals, the more thoroughly we carry it out, shall make the more progress?

There is so much inviting us!�what are we to take? what will nourish us in growth towards perfection? That is the question which, with the immense field of life and of literature lying before him, the critic has to answer; for himself first, and afterwards for others. In this idea of the critic's business the essays brought together in the following pages have had their origin; in this idea, widely different as are their subjects, they have, perhaps, their unity.

I conclude with what I said at the beginning: to have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative activity; a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs no other creation is possible.

Still, in full measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation; in literature we must never forget that. But what true man of letters ever can forget it? It is no such common matter for a gifted nature to come into possession of a current of true and living ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely to underrate it. The epochs of Aeschylus2 and Shakespeare make us feel their pre-eminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of literature; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon. That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness:3 but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity.

1864,1865

2. Greek tragedian (525-456 b.c.e.). 3. An allusion to the fate of rebellious Israelites (Numbers 14.26�35).

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From Culture and Anarchy1 From Chapter 1. Sweetness and Light

The impulse of the English race towards moral development and self- conquest has nowhere so powerfully manifested itself as in Puritanism. Nowhere has Puritanism found so adequate an expression as in the religious organization of the Independents.2 The modern Independents have a newspaper, the Nonconformist, written with great sincerity and ability. The motto, the standard, the profession of faith which this organ of theirs carries aloft, is: "The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." There is sweetness and light, and an ideal of complete harmonious human perfection! One need not go to culture and poetry to find language to judge it. Religion, with its instinct for perfection, supplies language to judge it, language, too, which is in our mouths every day. "Finally, be of one mind, united in feeling," says St. Peter.3 There is an ideal which judges the Puritan ideal: "The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion!" And religious organizations like this are what people believe in, rest in, would give their lives for! Such, I say, is the wonderful virtue of even the beginnings of perfection, of having conquered even the plain faults of our animality, that the religious organization which has helped us to do it can seem to us something precious, salutary, and to be propagated, even when it wears such a brand of imperfection on its forehead as this. And men have got such a habit of giving to the language of religion a special application, of making it a mere jargon, that for the condemnation which religion itself passes on the shortcomings of their religious organizations they have no ear; they are sure to cheat themselves and to explain this condemnation away. They can only be reached by the criticism which culture, like poetry, speaking of language not to be sophisticated, and resolutely testing these organizations by the ideal of a human perfection complete on all sides, applies to them.

But men of culture and poetry, it will be said, are again and again failing, and failing conspicuously, in the necessary first stage to a harmonious perfection, in the subduing of the great obvious faults of our animality, which it is the glory of these religious organizations to have helped us to subdue. True, they do often so fail. They have often been without the virtues as well as the faults of the Puritan; it has been one of their dangers that they so felt the Puritan's faults that they too much neglected the practice of his virtues. I will

1. Arnold began Culture and Anarchy in the context of the turbulent political debate that preceded the passage of the second Reform Bill in 1867. The political climate seemed to some to threaten anarchy, to which Arnold opposed culture. A characteristic quality of the cultured state of mind is summed up, for his purposes, in his formula "sweetness and light," a phrase suggesting reasonableness of temper and intellectual insight. Arnold derived the phrase from a fable contrasting the spider with the bee in Jonathan Swift's The Battle of the Books (1704). The spider (representing a narrow, self-centered, and uncultured mind) spins out of itself "nothing at all but flybane and cobweb." The bee (representing a cultured mind that has drawn nourishment from the humanist tradition) ranges far and wide and makes in its hive honey and also wax out of which candles may be made. Therefore, the bee, Swift says, furnishes humankind "with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light."

The selections printed here illustrate aspects of Arnold's indictment of the middle classes for their lack of sweetness and light. The first and third expose the narrowness and dullness of middle- class Puritan religious institutions in both the 17th and 19th centuries. The second, "Doing As One Likes," shows the limitations of the middle-class political bias and the irresponsibility of laissez-faire economics. Here Arnold is most close to Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin.

2. A 17th-century Puritan group (of which Oliver Cromwell was an adherent), allied with the Congregationalists. 3. Cf. 1 Peter 3.8.

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not, however, exculpate them at the Puritan's expense. They have often failed in morality, and morality is indispensable. And they have been punished for their failure, as the Puritan has been rewarded for his performance. They have been punished wherein they erred; but their ideal of beauty, of sweetness and light, and a human nature complete on all its sides, remains the true ideal of perfection still; just as the Puritan's ideal of perfection remains narrow and inadequate, although for what he did well he has been richly rewarded. Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers' voyage, they and their standard of perfection are rightly judged when we figure to ourselves Shakespeare or Virgil4�souls in whom sweetness and light, and all that in human nature is most humane, were eminent�accompanying them on their voyage, and think what intolerable company Shakespeare and Virgil would have found them! In the same way let us judge the religious organizations which we see all around us. Do not let us deny the good and the happiness which they have accomplished; but do not let us fail to see clearly that their idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate, and that the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion will never bring humanity to its true goal. As I said with regard to wealth: Let us look at the life of those who live in and for it�so I say with regard to the religious organizations. Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the Nonconformist�a life of jealousy of the Establishment,' disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons; and then think of it as an ideal of a human life completing itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its organs after sweetness, light, and perfection!

From Chapter 2. Doing As One Likes

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When I began to speak of culture, I insisted on our bondage to machinery,6 on our proneness to value machinery as an end in itself, without looking beyond it to the end for which alone, in truth, it is valuable. Freedom, I said, was one of those things which we thus worshiped in itself, without enough regarding the ends for which freedom is to be desired. In our common notions and talk about freedom, we eminently show our idolatry of machinery. Our prevalent notion is�and I quoted a number of instances to prove it�that it is a most happy and important thing for a man merely to be able to do as he likes. On what he is to do when he is thus free to do as he likes, we do not lay so much stress. Our familiar praise of the British Constitution under which we live, is that it is a system of checks�a system which stops and paralyzes any power in interfering with the free action of individuals. To this effect Mr. Bright,7 who loves to walk in the old ways of the Constitution, said forcibly in one of his great speeches, what many other people are every day saying less forcibly, that the central idea of English life and politics is the assertion of personal liberty. Evidently this is so; but evidently, also, as feudalism, which with its ideas, and habits of subordination was for many centuries silently behind the British Constitution, dies out, and we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our notion of its being the great right and happiness of

4. Roman poet (70-19 B.C.E.). ation and organization, not mechanized apparatus. 5. The Church of England or the Established 7. John Bright (1811-1889), self-made business- Church. man who became a noted orator and politician. 6. Arnold uses this word to signify systems of oper

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an Englishman to do as far as possible what he likes, we are in danger of drifting towards anarchy. We have not the notion, so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of the State�the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals. We say, what is very true, that this notion is often made instrumental to tyranny; we say that a State is in reality made up of the individuals who compose it, and that every individual is the best judge of his own interests. Our leading class is an aristocracy, and no aristocracy likes the notion of a State-authority greater than itself, with a stringent administrative machinery superseding the decorative inutilities of lord-lieutenancy, deputy-lieutenancy, and the posse comitatus,8 which are all in its own hands. Our middle class, the great representative of trade and Dissent, with its maxims of every man for himself in business, every man for himself in religion, dreads a powerful administration which might somehow interfere with it; and besides, it has its own decorative inutilities of vestrymanship9 and guardianship, which are to this class what lord-lieutenancy and the county magistracy are to the aristocratic class, and a stringent administration might either take these functions out of its hands, or prevent its exercising them in its own comfortable, independent manner, as at present.

Then as to our working class. This class, pressed constantly by the hard daily compulsion of material wants, is naturally the very center and stronghold of our national idea, that it is man's ideal right and felicity to do as he likes. I think I have somewhere related how M. Michelet1 said to me of the people of France, that it was "a nation of barbarians civilized by the conscription." He meant that through their military service the idea of public duty and of discipline was brought to the mind of these masses, in other respects so raw and uncultivated. Our masses are quite as raw and uncultivated as the French; and so far from their having the idea of public duty and of discipline, superior to the individual's self-will, brought to their mind by a universal obligation of military service, such as that of the conscription�so far from their having this, the very idea of a conscription is so at variance with our Enghsh notion of the prime right and blessedness of doing as one likes, that I remember the manager of the Clay Cross works in Derbyshire told me during the Crimean war,2 when our want of soldiers was much felt and some people were talking of a conscription, that sooner than submit to a conscription the population of that district would flee to the mines, and lead a sort of Robin Hood life underground.

For a long time, as I have said, the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits, and the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest. More and more, because of this our blind faith in machinery, because of our want of light to enable us to look beyond machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable, this and that

8. Power of the county (Latin); a feudal method 1. Jules Michelet (1798-1874), French historian. of enforcing law by local authorities instead of by 2. A war (1854�56) in which Britain joined agencies of the central government. France, Sardinia, and Turkey in fighting against 9. A vestryman is an appointed member on a local Russia in Ukraine. church council.

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man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman's right to do what he likes; his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes.1 All this, I say, tends to anarchy; and though a number of excellent people, and particularly my friends of the Liberal or progressive party, as they call themselves, are kind enough to reassure us by saying that these are trifles, that a few transient outbreaks of rowdyism signify nothing, that our system of liberty is one which itself cures all the evils which it works, that the educated and intelligent classes stand in overwhelming strength and majestic repose, ready, like our military force in riots, to act at a moment's notice�yet one finds that one's Liberal friends generally say this because they have such faith in themselves and their nostrums, when they shall return, as the public welfare requires, to place and power. But this faith of theirs one cannot exactly share, when one has so long had them and their nostrums at work, and see that they have not prevented our coming to our present embarrassed condition. And one finds, also, that the outbreaks of rowdyism tend to become less and less of trifles, to become more frequent rather than less frequent; and that meanwhile our educated and intelligent classes remain in their majestic repose, and somehow or other, whatever happens, their overwhelming strength, like our military force in riots, never does act.

How indeed, should, their overwhelming strength act, when the man who gives an inflammatory lecture, or breaks down the park railings, or invades a Secretary of State's office, is only following an Englishman's impulse to do as he likes; and our own conscience tells us that we ourselves have always regarded this impulse as something primary and sacred? Mr. Murphy4 lectures at Birmingham, and showers on the Catholic population of that town "words," says the Home Secretary, "only fit to be addressed to thieves or murderers." What then? Mr. Murphy has his own reasons of several kinds. He suspects the Roman Catholic Church of designs upon Mrs. Murphy; and he says if mayors and magistrates do not care for their wives and daughters, he does. But, above all, he is doing as he likes; or, in worthier language, asserting his personal liberty. "I will carry out my lectures if they walk over my body as a dead corpse, and I say to the Mayor of Birmingham that he is my servant while I am in Birmingham, and as my servant he must do his duty and protect me." Touching and beautiful words, which find a sympathetic chord in every British bosom! The moment it is plainly put before us that a man is asserting his personal liberty, we are half disarmed; because we are believers in freedom, and not in some dream of a right reason to which the assertion of our freedom is to be subordinated. Accordingly, the Secretary of State had to say that although the lecturer's language was "only fit to be addressed to thieves or murderers," yet, "I do not think he is to be deprived, I do not think that anything I have said could justify the inference that he is to be deprived, of the right of protection in a place built by him for the purpose of these lectures; because the language was not language which afforded grounds for a criminal prosecution." No, nor to be silenced by Mayor, or Home Secretary, or any

3. A reference to the riots of 1866 in which a Lon-public speech "The Errors of the Roman Church" don mob demolished the iron railings enclosing led to rioting in Birmingham and other cities in Hyde Park. 1867. 4. An orator whose inflammatory anti-Catholic

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administrative authority on earth, simply on their notion of what is discreet and reasonable! This is in perfect consonance with our public opinion, and with our national love for the assertion of personal liberty.

From Chapter 5. Porro Unum Est Necessarium5

* * * Sweetness and light evidently have to do with the bent or side in humanity which we call Hellenic. Greek intelligence has obviously for its essence the instinct for what Plato6 calls the true, firm, intelligible law of things; the law of light, of seeing things as they are. Even in the natural sciences, where the Greeks had not time and means adequately to apply this instinct, and where we have gone a great deal further than they did, it is this instinct which is the root of the whole matter and the ground of all our success; and this instinct the world has mainly learnt of the Greeks, inasmuch as they are humanity's most signal manifestation of it. Greek art, again, Greek beauty, have their root in the same impulse to see things as they really are, inasmuch as Greek art and beauty rest on fidelity to nature�the best nature�and on a delicate discrimination of what this best nature is. To say we work for sweetness and light, then, is only another way of saying that we work for Hellenism. But, oh! cry many people, sweetness and light are not enough; you must put strength or energy along with them, and make a kind of trinity of strength, sweetness and light, and then, perhaps, you may do some good. That is to say, we are to join Hebraism, strictness of the moral conscience, and manful walking by the best light we have, together with Hellenism, inculcate both, and rehearse7 the praises of both.

Or, rather, we may praise both in conjunction, but we must be careful to praise Hebraism most. "Culture," says an acute, though somewhat rigid critic, Mr. Sidgwick,8 "diffuses sweetness and light. I do not undervalue these blessings, but religion gives fire and strength, and the world wants9 fire and strength even more than sweetness and light." By religion, let me explain, Mr. Sidgwick here means particularly that Puritanism on the insufficiency of which I have been commenting and to which he says I am unfair. Now, no doubt, it is possible to be a fanatical partisan of light and the instincts which push us to it, a fanatical enemy of strictness of moral conscience and the instincts which push us to it. A fanaticism of this sort deforms and vulgarizes the well-known work, in some respects so remarkable, of the late Mr. Buckle.1 Such a fanaticism carries its own mark with it, in lacking sweetness; and its own penalty, in that, lacking sweetness, it comes in the end to lack light too. And the Greeks�the great exponents of humanity's bent for sweetness and light united, of its perception that the truth of things must be at the same time beauty�singularly escaped the fanaticism which we moderns, whether we

5. But one thing is needful (Latin; Luke 10.42). 6. Greek philosopher (ca. 427�ca 347 B.C.E.). This chapter develops a contrast established in 7. Repeat. chap. 4 between Hebraism (Puritan morality and 8. Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), philosopher energetic devotion to work) and Hellenism (culti-whose article on Arnold appeared in Macmillan's vation of the aesthetic and intellectual understand-Magazine (Aug. 1867). ing of life). The Puritan middle classes, according 9. Lacks. to Arnold, think that the "one thing needful" is the I. Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862), author of Hebraic form of virtue. A History of Civilization (1857-61).

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Hellenize or whether we Hebraize, are so apt to show. They arrived�though failing, as has been said, to give adequate practical satisfaction to the claims of man's moral side�at the idea of a comprehensive adjustment of the claims of both the sides in man, the moral as well as the intellectual, of a full estimate of both, and of a reconciliation of both; an idea which is philosophically of the greatest value, and the best of lessons for us moderns. So we ought to have no difficulty in conceding to Mr. Sidgwick that manful walking by the best light one has�fire and strength as he calls it�has its high value as well as culture, the endeavor to see things in their truth and beauty, the pursuit of sweetness and light. But whether at this or that time, and to this or that set of persons, one ought to insist most on the praises of fire and strength, or on the praises of sweetness and light, must depend, one would think, on the circumstances and needs of that particular time and those particular persons. And all that we have been saying, and indeed any glance at the world around us, shows that with us, with the most respectable and strongest part of us, the ruling force is now, and long has been, a Puritan force�the care for fire and strength, strictness of conscience, Hebraism, rather than the care for sweetness and light, spontaneity of consciousness, Hellenism.

Well, then, what is the good of our now rehearsing the praises of fire and strength to ourselves, who dwell too exclusively on them already? When Mr. Sidgwick says so broadly, that the world wants fire and strength even more than sweetness and light, is he not carried away by a turn for broad generalization? does he not forget that the world is not all of one piece, and every piece with the same needs at the same time? It may be true that the Roman world at the beginning of our era, or Leo the Tenth's Court at the time of the Reformation, or French society in the eighteenth century,2 needed fire and strength even more than sweetness and light. But can it be said that the Barbarians who overran the empire needed fire and strength even more than sweetness and light; or that the Puritans needed them more; or that Mr. Murphy, the Birmingham lecturer, and the Rev. W. Cattle3 and his friends, need them more?

The Puritan's great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, thinks he has now knowledge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of assurance and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of the instincts of his ordinary self. Some of the instincts of his ordinary self he has, by the help of his rule of life, conquered; but others which he has not conquered by this help he is so far from perceiving to need subjugation, and to be instincts of an inferior self, that he even fancies it to be his right and duty, in virtue of having conquered a limited part of himself, to give unchecked swing to the remainder. He is, I say, a victim of Hebraism, of the tendency to cultivate strictness of conscience rather than spontaneity of consciousness. And what he wants is a larger conception of human nature, showing him the number of other points at which his nature must come to its best, besides the points which he himself knows and thinks of. There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human

2. Societies representing an excess of sophisti-3. A Nonconformist clergyman who was chairman cated worldliness as at the courts of a Roman of the anti-Catholic meeting addressed by Murphy emperor such as Nero (54�68 C.E.) or of Pope Leo in 1867 (see chapter 2, "Doing As One Likes," X (1 513-21) or Louis XV (1715-74), respectively. p. 1399).

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nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points. The real unum necessarium for us is to come to our best at all points. Instead of our "one thing needful," justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence�our vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence, are really so many touchstones4 which try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we ourselves have it, it is not all we want. And as the force which encourages us to stand staunch and fast by the rule and ground we have is Hebraism, so the force which encourages us to go back upon this rule, and to try the very ground on which we appear to stand, is Hellenism�a turn for giving our consciousness free play and enlarging its range. And what I say is, not that Hellenism is always for everybody more wanted than Hebraism, but that for the Rev. W. Cattle at this particular moment, and for the great majority of us his fellow countrymen, it is more wanted.

1868,1869

From The Study of Poetry1

"The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry."

Let me be permitted to quote these words of my own, as uttering the thought which should, in my opinion, go with us and govern us in all our study of poetry. In the present work2 it is the course of one great contributory stream to the world-river of poetry that we are invited to follow. We are here invited to trace the stream of English poetry. Rut whether we set ourselves, as here, to follow only one of the several streams that make the mighty river of poetry, or whether we seek to know them all, our governing thought should be the

4. For the importance to Arnold of the concept of the touchstone�a succinct instance or standard by which to judge olher materials�see also "The Study of Poetry" (this page). 1. Aside from its vindication of the importance of literature, Lhis essay is an interesting example of the variety of Arnold's reading. To know literature in only one language seemed to him not to know literature. His personal Notebooks show that throughout his active life he continued to read books in French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek. His favorite authors in these languages are used by him as a means of testing English poetry. The testing is sometimes a severe one. Readers may also protest that despite Arnold's wit. his essay is limited by an incomplete recognition of the values of comic literature, a shortcoming abundantly evident in the discussion of Chaucer. Nevertheless, whether we agree or disagree with some of Arnold's verdicts, we can be attracted by the combination of traditionalism and impressionism on which these verdicts are based, and we can enjoy the memorable phrasemaking in which the verdicts are expressed. "The Study of Poetry" has been extraordinarily potent in shaping literary tastes in England and in America.

2. An anthology of English poetry for which this essay served as the introduction.

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same. We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. Science, I say, will appear incomplete without it. For finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry "the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science";' and what is a countenance without its expression? Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge": our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder at ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their hollowness, the more we shall prize "the breath and finer spirit of knowledge" offered to us by poetry.

But if we conceive thus highly of the destinies of poetry, we must also set our standard for poetry high, since poetry, to be capable of fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of excellence. We must accustom ourselves to a high standard and to a strict judgment. * * *

The best poetry is what we want; the best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can. A clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, is the most precious benefit which we can gather from a poetical collection such as the present. And yet in the very nature and conduct of such a collection there is inevitably something which tends to obscure in us the consciousness of what our benefit should be, and to distract us from the pursuit of it. We should therefore steadily set it before our minds at the outset, and should compel ourselves to revert constantly to the thought of it as we proceed.

Yes; constantly in reading poetry, a sense for the best, the really excellent, and of the strength and joy to be drawn from it, should be present in our minds and should govern our estimate of what we read. But this real estimate, the only true one, is liable to be superseded, if we are not watchful, by two other kinds of estimate, the historic estimate and the personal estimate, both of which are fallacious. A poet or a poem may count to us historically, they may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves, and they may count to us really. They may count to us historically. The course of development of a nation's language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet's work as a stage in this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than in itself it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticizing it; in short, to overrate it. So arises in our poetic judgments the fallacy caused by the estimate which we may call historic. Then, again, a poet or a poem may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves. Our personal affinities, likings, and circumstances, have great power to sway our estimate of this or that poet's work, and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it

3. Prefacc to Lyrical Ballads (1800).

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really possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high importance. Here also we overrate the object of our interest, and apply to it a language of praise which is quite exaggerated. And thus we get the source of a second fallacy in our poetic judgments�the fallacy caused by an estimate which we may call personal.

� $ *

* * 4 The historic estimate is likely in especial to affect our judgment and our language when we are dealing with ancient poets; the personal estimate when we are dealing with poets our contemporaries, or at any rate modern. The exaggerations due to the historic estimate are not in themselves, perhaps, of very much gravity. Their report hardly enters the general ear; probably they do not always impose even on the literary men who adopt them. But they lead to a dangerous abuse of language. So we hear Caedmon,4 amongst our own poets, compared to Milton. I have already noticed the enthusiasm of one accomplished French critic for "historic origins."5 Another eminent French critic, M. Vitet, comments upon that famous document of the early poetry of his nation, the Chanson de Roland.'' It is indeed a most interesting document. The joculator or jongleur7 Taillefer, who was with William the Conqueror's army at Hastings,8 marched before the Norman troops, so said the tradition, singing "of Charlemagne and of Roland and of Oliver, and of the vassals who died at Roncevaux"; and it is suggested that in the Chanson de Roland by one Turoldus or Theroidde, a poem preserved in a manuscript of the twelfth century in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, we have certainly the matter, perhaps even some of the words, of the chant which Taillefer sang. The poem has vigor and freshness; it is not without pathos. But M. Vitet is not satisfied with seeing in it a document of some poetic value, and of very high historic and linguistic value; he sees in it a grand and beautiful work, a monument of epic genius. In its general design he finds the grandiose conception, in its details he finds the constant union of simplicity with greatness, which are the marks, he truly says, of the genuine epic, and distinguish it from the artificial epic of literary ages. One thinks of Homer; this is the sort of praise which is given to Homer, and justly given. Higher praise there cannot well be, and it is the praise due to epic poetry of the highest order only, and to no other. Let us try, then, the Chanson de Roland at its best. Roland, mortally wounded, lays himself down under a pine tree, with his face turned towards Spain and the enemy�

De plusurs choses a rememhrer li prist, De tantes teres cume li hers cunquist, De didce France, des humes de sun lign, De Carlemagne sun seignor ki I'nurrit.9

That is primitive work, I repeat, with an undeniable poetic quality of its own. It deserves such praise, and such praise is sufficient for it. But now turn to Homer�

4. A 7th-century Old English poet. Vitet (1802-1873) wrote on it in his Essais Histo5. Charles d'Hericault (1823-1899), a French riques et Litteraires (1862). critic cited earlier in a passage omitted here. 7. Jester or minstrel (French). Arnold had mildly reprimanded him for his 8. The battle in 1066 in which Harold II was killed "historical" bias in praising a 1 Sth-century poet, and the English army defeated. Clement Marot, at the expense of classical 17th-9. "Then began he to call many things to rememcentury poets such as Racine. brance�all the lands which his valor conquered 6. An 1 Ith-century epic poem in Old French that and pleasant France, and the men of his lineage, tells of the 8th-century wars of Charlemagne and Charlemagne his liege lord who nourished against the Moors in Spain and of the bravery of him." Chanson de Roland 3.939- 42 [Arnold's the French leaders Roland and Oliver. Ludovic note[.

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THE STUDY OF POETRY / 1407

"QQ (puro rovg 6' rjdr/ KOLTEXEV (pvoiQoog aia ev AaKedaifiovL avOt, 'tfo(i kv narpidt yah].'

We are here in another world, another order of poetry altogether; here is rightly due such supreme praise as that which M. Vitet gives to the Chanson de Roland. If our words are to have any meaning, if our judgments are to have any solidity, we must not heap that supreme praise upon poetry of an order immeasurably inferior.

Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. Of course we are not to require this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar. But if we have any tact we shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them. Short passages, even single lines, will serve our turn quite sufficiently. Take the two lines which I have just quoted from Homer, the poet's comment on Helen's mention of her brothers�or take his

A deilw, T'L ocpojL dofiev flrj?.fji avaxri

OvrjTOj; VFIEIG 6' EOTOV ayripco T ada.va.Ta> TE.

f] Iva 6VOTT]VOIOI FIEL avdpaotv olyz .%r/TOv;2

the address of Zeus to the horses of Peleus�or take finally his

Kal OE, yspov, TO npiv /XEV UKOVO/XEV okfiiov Eivai.3

the words of Achilles to Priam, a suppliant before him. Take that incomparable line and a half of Dante, Ugolino's tremendous words�

Io no piangeva; si dentro impietrai.

Piangevan elli... 4

take the lovely words of Beatrice to Virgil�

Io sonfatta da Dio, sua merce, tale, Che la rostra miseria non mi tange, Ne fiamma d'esto incendio non m'assale ... 5

take the simple, but perfect, single line�

In la sua volontade e nostra pace.6

Take of Shakespeare a line or two of Henry the Fourth's expostulation with sleep�

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast Seal up the shipboy's eyes, and rock his brains In cradle of the rude imperious surge .. . 7

1. "So said she; they long since in Earth's soft arms return the body of his son Hector, whom the Greek were reposing, /There, in their own dear land, their warrior had killed. fatherland, Lacedaemon." Iliad 3.243-44 (trans-4. "I wailed not, so of stone I grew within; they1 lated by Dr. Hawtrey) [Arnold's note], wailed." Inferno 33.49�50 [Arnold's note], 2. "Ah, unhappy pair, why gave we you to King 5. "Of such sort hath God, thanked be His mercy, Peleus, to a mortal? but ye are without old age, and made me, that your misery toucheth me not, neiimmortal. Was it that with men born to misery ye ther doth the flame of this fire strike me." Inferno might have sorrow?" Iliad 17.443�45 [Arnold's 2.91�93 [Arnold's note]. The Roman poet Virgil is note). Dante's guide. 3. "Nay, and thou too, old man, in former days 6. "In His will is our peace." Paradiso 3.85 wast, as we hear, happy." Iliad 24.543 [Arnold's [Arnold's note]. note). Priam, king of Troy, has begged Achilles to 7. 2 Henry IV 3.1.18-20.

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140 8 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

and take, as well, Hamlet's dying request to Horatio�

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story ... 8

Take of Milton that Miltonic passage�

Darkened so, yet shone Above them all the archangel; but his face Deep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care Sat on his faded cheek .. . 9

add two such lines as�

And courage never to submit or yield

And what is else not to be overcome .. . 1

and finish with the exquisite close to the loss of Proserpine, the loss

. . . which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world.2

These few lines, if we have tact and can use them, are enough even of themselves to keep clear and sound our judgments about poetry, to save us from fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real estimate.

The specimens I have quoted differ widely from one another, but they have in common this: the possession of the very highest poetical quality. If we are thoroughly penetrated by their power, we shall find that we have acquired a sense enabling us, whatever poetry may be laid before us, to feel the degree in which a high poetical quality is present or wanting there. Critics give themselves great labour to draw out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality of poetry. It is much better simply to have recourse to concrete examples�to take specimens of poetry of the high, the very highest quality, and to say: The characters of a high quality of poetry are what is expressed there. They are far better recognized by being felt in the verse of the master, than by being perused in the prose of the critic. Nevertheless if we are urgently pressed to give some critical account of them, we may safely, perhaps, venture on laying down, not indeed how and why the characters arise, but where and in what they arise. They are in the matter and substance of the poetry, and they are in its manner and style. Both of these, the substance and matter on the one hand, the style and manner on the other, have a mark, an accent, of high beauty, worth, and power. But if we are asked to define this mark and accent in the abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should thereby be darkening the question, not clearing it. The mark and accent are as given by the substance and matter of that poetry, by the style and manner of that poetry, and of all other poetry which is akin to it in quality.

Only one thing we may add as to the substance and matter of poetry, guiding ourselves by Aristotle's profound observation that the superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness {(j)i?ioao

8. Hamlet 5.2.288-91. dess of grain, searched for her daughter Proser9. Paradise Lost 1.599-602. pina, not knowing that she had been abducted by 1. Paradise Lost 1.108-9. Pluto, the god of the underworld. 2. Paradise Lost 4.271�72. Ceres, the Roman god-3. Aristotle's Poetics 9.

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THE STUDY OF POETRY / 1409

said, this: that the substance and matter of the best poetry acquire their special character from possessing, in an eminent degree, truth and seriousness. We may add yet further, what is in itself evident, that to the style and manner of the best poetry their special character, their accent, is given by their diction, and, even yet more, by their movement. And though we distinguish between the two characters, the two accents, of superiority, yet they are nevertheless vitally connected one with the other. The superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner. The two superiorities are closely related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the other. So far as high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet's matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner. In proportion as this high stamp of diction and movement, again, is absent from a poet's style and manner, we shall find, also, that high poetic truth and seriousness are absent from his substance and matter.

So stated, these are but dry generalities; their whole force lies in their application. And I could wish every student of poetry to make the application of them for himself. Made by himself, the application would impress itself upon his mind far more deeply than made by me. Neither will my limits allow me to make any full application of the generalities above propounded; but in the hope of bringing out, at any rate, some significance in them, and of establishing an important principle more firmly by their means, I will, in the space which remains to me, follow rapidly from the commencement the course of our English poetry with them in my view.

* * #

Chaucer's * * * poetical importance does not need the assistance of the historic estimate; it is real. He is a genuine source of joy and strength, which is flowing still for us and will flow always. He will be read, as time goes on, far more generally than he is read now. His language is a cause of difficulty for us; but so also, and I think in quite as great a degree, is the language of Burns.4 In Chaucer's case, as in that of Burns, it is a difficulty to be unhesitatingly accepted and overcome.

If we ask ourselves wherein consists the immense superiority of Chaucer's poetry over the romance poetry�why it is that in passing from this to Chaucer we suddenly feel ourselves to be in another world, we shall find that his superiority is both in the substance of his poetry and in the style of his poetry. His superiority in substance is given by his large, free, simple, clear yet kindly view of human life�so unlike the total want, in the romance poets, of all intelligent command of it. Chaucer has not their helplessness; he has gained the power to survey the world from a central, a truly human point of view. We have only to call to mind the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. The right comment upon it is Dryden's: "It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God's -plenty." And again: "He is a perpetual fountain of good sense."5 It is by a large, free, sound representation of things, that poetry, this high criticism of life, has truth of substance; and Chaucer's poetry has truth of substance.

Of his style and manner, if we think first of the romance poetry and then of Chaucer's divine liquidness of diction, his divine fluidity of movement, it is

4. Robert Burns (1759�1796), whose language is 5. Both quotations are from John Dryden's prefdifficult because he frequently uses Scottish dia- ace to his Fables Ancient and Modem (1700). lect.

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141 0 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

difficult to speak temperately. They are irresistible, and justify all the rapture with which his successors speak of his "gold dewdrops of speech."6 Johnson misses the point entirely when he finds fault with Dryden for ascribing to Chaucer the first refinement of our numbers, and says that Gower7 also can show smooth numbers and easy rhymes. The refinement of our numbers means something far more than this. A nation may have versifiers with smooth numbers and easy rhymes, and yet may have no real poetry at all. Chaucer is the father of our splendid English poetry; he is our "well of English undefiled,"8 because by the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his movement, he makes an epoch and founds a tradition. In Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, we can follow the tradition of the liquid diction, the fluid movement, of Chaucer; at one time it is his liquid diction of which in these poets we feel the virtue, and at another time it is his fluid movement. And the virtue is irresistible.

Bounded as is my space, I must yet find room for an example of Chaucer's virtue, as I have given examples to show the virtue of the great classics. I feel disposed to say that a single line is enough to show the charm of Chaucer's verse; that merely one line like this�

O martyr souded9 in virginitee!

has a virtue of manner and movement such as we shall not find in all the verse of romance poetry�but this is saying nothing. The virtue is such as we shall not find, perhaps, in all English poetry, outside the poets whom I have named as the special inheritors of Chaucer's tradition. A single line, however, is too little if we have not the strain of Chaucer's verse well in our memory; let us take a stanza. It is from The Prioress's Tale, the story of the Christian child murdered in a Jewry�1

My throte is cut unto my nekke-bone

Saide this child, and as by way of kinde

I should have deyd, yea, longe time agone;

But Jesu Christ, as ye in bookes finde,

Will that his glory last and be in minde,

And for the worship of his mother dere

Yet may I sing O Alma loud and clere.

Wordsworth has modernized this Tale, and to feel how delicate and evanescent is the charm of verse, we have only to read Wordsworth's first three lines of this stanza after Chaucer's�

My throat is cut unto the bone, I trow, Said this young child, and by the law of kind I should have died, yea, many hours ago.

The charm is departed. It is often said that the power of liquidness and fluidity in Chaucer's verse was dependent upon a free, a licentious dealing with language, such as is now impossible; upon a liberty, such as Burns too enjoyed,

6. "The Life of Our Lady," a poem by John Lyd-Faerie Queene (1590) 4.2.32. gate (ca. 1370-ca.l451). 9. The French sonde: soldered, fixed fast [Arnold's 7. John Gower (ca. 1325-1408), friend of Chau-note]. From The Canterbury Tales, The Prioress's cer and author of the Confessio Amantis, a long Tale (line 127); Chaucer wrote "souded to" rather poem in octosyllabic couplets. Samuel Johnson than "souded in." (1709�1784), critic, essayist, and poet. I. Jewish ghetto. 8. Said of Chaucer by Edmund Spenser in The

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THE STUDY OF POETRY / 1411

of making words like neck, bird, into a dissyllable by adding to them, and words like cause, rhyme, into a dissyllable by sounding the e mute. It is true that Chaucer's fluidity is conjoined with this liberty, and is admirably served by it; but we ought not to say that it was dependent upon it. It was dependent upon his talent. Other poets with a like liberty do not attain to the fluidity of Chaucer; Burns himself does not attain to it. Poets, again, who have a talent akin to Chaucer's, such as Shakespeare or Keats, have known how to attain to his fluidity without the like liberty.

And yet Chaucer is not one of the great classics. His poetry transcends and effaces, easily and without effort, all the romance poetry of Catholic Christendom; it transcends and effaces all the English poetry contemporary with it, it transcends and effaces all the English poetry subsequent to it down to the age of Elizabeth. Of such avail is poetic truth of substance, in its natural and necessary union with poetic truth of style. And yet, I say, Chaucer is not one of the great classics. He has not their accent. What is wanting to him is suggested by the mere mention of the name of the first great classic of Christendom, the immortal poet who died eighty years before Chaucer�Dante. The accent of such verse as

In la sua volontade e nostra pace . . .

is altogether beyond Chaucer's reach; we praise him, but we feel that this accent is out of the question for him. It may be said that it was necessarily out of the reach of any poet in the England of that stage of growth. Possibly; but we are to adopt a real, not a historic, estimate of poetry. However we may account for its absence, something is wanting, then, to the poetry of Chaucer, which poetry must have before it can be placed in the glorious class of the best. And there is no doubt what that something is. It is the ojiovdaiOTr/g, the high and excellent seriousness, which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand virtues of poetry. The substance of Chaucer's poetry, his view of things and his criticism of life, has largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity; but it has not this high seriousness. Homer's criticism of life has it, Dante's has it, Shakespeare's has it. It is this chiefly which gives to our spirits what they can rest upon; and with the increasing demands of our modern ages upon poetry, this virtue of giving us what we can rest upon will be more and more highly esteemed. A voice from the slums of Paris, fifty or sixty years after Chaucer, the voice of poor Villon out of his life of riot and crime, has at its happy moments (as, for instance, in the last stanza of La Belle Heaulmiere)2 more of this important poetic virtue of seriousness than all the productions of Chaucer. But its apparition' in Villon, and in men like Villon, is fitful; the greatness of the great poets, the power of their criticism of life, is that their virtue is sustained.

To our praise, therefore, of Chaucer as a poet there must be this limitation: he lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and therewith an important

2. The name Heaulmiere is said to be derived from en prend a maintz et maintes." [It may be trans- a headdress (helm) worn as a mask by courtesans. lated:] "Thus amongst ourselves we regret the good In Villon's ballad a poor old creature of this class time, poor silly old things, low-seated on our heels, laments her days of youth and beauty. The last all in a heap like so many balls; by a little fire of stanza of the ballad runs thus�"Ainsi le bon temps hemp stalks, soon lighted, soon spent. And once regretons / Entrenous, pauvres vieilles sottes, / we were such darlings! So fares it with many and Assises has, a croppetons, / Tout en ting tas comme many a one" [Arnold's note], Francois Villon pelottes; IA petit feu de clxenevottes / Tost allumees, (1431 � 1484), French poet and vagabond. tost estaincles, / Et jadis fnsmes si mignottes! / Ainsi 3. Appearance.

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1412 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

part of their virtue. Still, the main fact for us to bear in mind about Chaucer is his sterling value according to that real estimate which we firmly adopt for all poets. He has poetic truth of substance, though he has not high poetic seriousness, and corresponding to his truth of substance he has an exquisite virtue of style and manner. With him is born our real poetry.

For my present purpose I need not dwell on our Elizabethan poetry, or on the continuation and close of this poetry in Milton. We all of us profess to be agreed in the estimate of this poetry; we all of us recognize it as great poetry, our greatest, and Shakespeare and Milton as our poetical classics. The real estimate, here, has universal currency. With the next age of our poetry divergency and difficulty begin. An historic estimate of that poetry has established itself; and the question is, whether it will be found to coincide with the real estimate.

The age of Dryden, together with our whole eighteenth century which followed it, sincerely believed itself to have produced poetical classics of its own, and even to have made advance, in poetry, beyond all its predecessors. Dryden regards as not seriously disputable the opinion "that the sweetness of English verse was never understood or practiced by our fathers."4 Cowley5 could see nothing at all in Chaucer's poetry. Dryden heartily admired it, and, as we have seen, praised its matter admirably; but of its exquisite manner and movement all he can find to say is that "there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect."6 Addison,7 wishing to praise Chaucer's numbers, compares them with Dryden's own. And all through the eighteenth century, and down even into our own times, the stereotyped phrase of approbation for good verse found in our early poetry has been, that it even approached the verse of Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Johnson.

Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? Is the historic estimate, which represents them as such, and which has been so long established that it cannot easily give way, the real estimate? Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is well known, denied it; but the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh much with the young generation, and there are many signs to show that the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into favor again. Are the favorite poets of the eighteenth century classics?

It is impossible within my present limits to discuss the question fully. And what man of letters would not shrink from seeming to dispose dictatorially of the claims of two men who are, at any rate, such masters in letters as Dryden and Pope; two men of such admirable talent, both of them, and one of them, Dryden, a man, on all sides, of such energetic and genial power? And yet, if we are to gain the full benefit from poetry, we must have the real estimate of it. I cast about for some mode of arriving, in the present case, at such an estimate without offense. And perhaps the best way is to begin, as it is easy to begin, with cordial praise.

When we find Chapman,8 the Elizabethan translator of Homer, expressing himself in his preface thus: "Though truth in her very nakedness sits in so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora and Ganges few eyes can sound her, I hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm that, the date being out of her darkness in this morning of our poet, he shall now gird his temples with

4. Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668). poet. 5. Abraham Cowley (1618�1667), English poet. 8. George Chapman (ca. 1559�1634), poet and 6. Preface to his Fahles. dramatist; the quotation is from his translation 7. Joseph Addison (1672�1719), essayist and (1598-1611) of the Iliad.

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THE STUDY OF POETRY / 1413

the sun," we pronounce that such a prose is intolerable. When we find Milton writing: "And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he, who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem"9�we pronounce that such a prose has its own grandeur, but that it is obsolete and inconvenient. But when we find Dryden telling us: "What Virgil wrote in the vigor of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all 1 write"'�then we exclaim that here at last we have the true English prose, a prose such as we would all gladly use if we only knew how. Yet Dryden was Milton's contemporary.

But after the Restoration the time had come when our nation felt the imperious need of a fit prose. So, too, the time had likewise come when our nation felt the imperious need of freeing itself from the absorbing preoccupation which religion in the Puritan age had exercised. It was impossible that this freedom should be brought about without some negative excess, without some neglect and impairment of the religious life of the soul; and the spiritual history of the eighteenth century shows us that the freedom was not achieved without them. Still, the freedom was achieved; the preoccupation, an undoubtedly baneful and retarding one if it had continued, was got rid of. And as with religion amongst us at that period, so it was also with letters. A fit prose was a necessity; but it was impossible that a fit prose should establish itself amongst us without some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul. The needful qualities for a fit prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. The men of letters, whose destiny it may be to bring their nation to the attainment of a fit prose, must of necessity, whether they work in prose or in verse, give a predominating, an almost exclusive attention to the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. But an almost exclusive attention to these qualities involves some repression and silencing of poetry.

We are to regard Dryden as the puissant and glorious founder, Pope as the splendid high priest, of our age of prose and reason, of our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century. For the purposes of their mission and destiny their poetry, like their prose, is admirable. Do you ask me whether Dry- den's verse, take it almost where you will, is not good?

A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,

Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged.2

I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the inaugurator of an age of prose and reason. Do you ask me whether Pope's verse, take it almost where you will, is not good?

To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down; Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own.3

I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the high priest of an age of prose and reason. But do you ask me whether such verse proceeds from men with an adequate poetic criticism of life, from men whose criticism of life has a high seriousness, or even, without that high seriousness, has poetic largeness, freedom, insight, benignity? Do you ask me whether the application of ideas to

9. "Apology for Smectymnuus" (1642). 2. The Hind and the Panther (1687) 1.1-2. 1. "Postscript to the Reader" (1698) in his trans- 3. Imitations of Horace (1737), Satire 2.2.143-44. lation of Virgil.

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141 4 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

life in the verse of these men, often a powerful application, no doubt, is a powerful poetic application? Do you ask me whether the poetry of these men has either the matter or the inseparable manner of such an adequate poetic criticism; whether it has the accent of

Absent thee from felicity awhile . . .

or of

And what is else not to be overcome . . .

or of

O martyr souded in virginitee!

I answer: It has not and cannot have them; it is the poetry of the builders of an age of prose and reason. Though they may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose.

Gray4 is our poetical classic of that literature and age; the position of Gray is singular, and demands a word of notice here. He has not the volume or the power of poets who, coming in times more favorable, have attained to an independent criticism of life. But he lived with the great poets, he lived, above all, with the Greeks, through perpetually studying and enjoying them; and he caught their poetic point of view for regarding life, caught their poetic manner. The point of view and the manner are not self-sprung in him, he caught them of others; and he had not the free and abundant use of them. But whereas Addison and Pope never had the use of them, Gray had the use of them at times. He is the scantiest and frailest of classics in our poetry, but he is a classic.5

$ s $

At any rate the end to which the method and the estimate are designed to lead, and from leading to which, if they do lead to it, they get their whole value�the benefit of being able clearly to feel and deeply to enjoy the best, the truly classic, in poetry�is an end, let me say it once more at parting, of supreme importance. We are often told that an era is opening in which we are to see multitudes of a common sort of readers, and masses of a common sort of literature; that such readers do not want and could not relish anything better than such literature, and that to provide it is becoming a vast and profitable industry. Even if good literature entirely lost currency with the world, it would still be abundantly worth while to continue to enjoy it by oneself. But it never will lose currency with the world, in spite of momentary appearances; it never will lose supremacy. Currency and supremacy are insured to it, not indeed by the world's deliberate and conscious choice, but by something far deeper�by the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.

1880

4. Thomas Gray (1716-1771), British poet. cludes that "Burns, like Chaucer, comes short of 5. After Gray, the only other poet discussed by the high seriousness of the great classics." Arnold is Burns (not printed here). Arnold con

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LITERATURE AND SCIENCE / 141 5

Literature and Science1

Practical people talk with a smile of Plato and of his absolute ideas: and it is impossible to deny that Plato's ideas do often seem unpractical and unpracticable, and especially when one views them in connection with the life of a great work-a-day world like the United States. The necessary staple of the life of such a world Plato regards with disdain; handicraft and trade and the working professions he regards with disdain; but what becomes of the life of an industrial modern community if you take handicraft and trade and the working professions out of it? The base mechanic arts and handicrafts, says Plato, bring about a natural weakness in the principle of excellence in a man, so that he cannot govern the ignoble growths in him, but nurses them, and cannot understand fostering any other. Those who exercise such arts and trades, as they have their bodies, he says, marred by their vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little tinker, who has scraped together money, and has got his release from service, and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into poor and helpless estate.2

Nor do the working professions fare any better than trade at the hands of Plato. He draws for us an inimitable picture of the working lawyer, and of his life of bondage; he shows how this bondage from his youth up has stunted and warped him, and made him small and crooked of soul, encompassing him with difficulties which he is not man enough to rely on justice and truth as means to encounter, but has recourse, for help out of them, to falsehood and wrong. And so, says Plato, this poor creature is bent and broken, and grows up from boy to man without a particle of soundness in him, although exceedingly smart and clever in his own esteem.3

One cannot refuse to admire the artist who draws these pictures. But we say to ourselves that his ideas show the influence of a primitive and obsolete order of things, when the warrior caste and the priestly caste were alone in honor, and the humble work of the world was done by slaves. We have now changed all that; the modern majesty consists in work, as Emerson declares;4 and in work, we may add, principally of such plain and dusty kind as the work of cultivators of the ground, handicraftsmen, men of trade and business, men of the working professions. Above all is this true in a great industrious community such as that of the United States.

Now education, many people go on to say, is still mainly governed by the ideas of men like Plato, who lived when the warrior caste and the priestly or philosophical class were alone in honor, and the really useful part of the community were slaves. It is an education fitted for persons of leisure in such a community. This education passed from Greece and Rome to the feudal com

!. Delivered as a lecture during Arnold's tour of of a superficial epigram; he would have spoken the United States in 1883 and published in Dis-from the depths of his experience." courses in America (1885), this essay has become 2. Republic 6.495. a classic contribution to a subject endlessly 3. Republic 3.405. debated. Its main argument was summed up by 4. See Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Literary Ethics," Stuart P. Sherman: "If Arnold had said outright an address delivered at Dartmouth College in that the study of letters helps us to bear the grand 1838. results of science, he would not have been guilty

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munities of Europe, where also the warrior caste and the priestly caste were alone held in honor, and where the really useful and working part of the community, though not nominally slaves as in the pagan world, were practically not much better off than slaves, and not more seriously regarded. And how absurd it is, people end by saying, to inflict this education upon an industrious modern community, where very few indeed are persons of leisure, and the mass to be considered has not leisure, but is bound, for its own great good, and for the great good of the world at large, to plain labor and to industrial pursuits, and the education in question tends necessarily to make men dissatisfied with these pursuits and unfitted for them!

That is what is said. So far I must defend Plato, as to plead that his view of education and studies is in the general, as it seems to me, sound enough, and fitted for all sorts and conditions of men, whatever their pursuits may be. "An intelligent man," says Plato, "will prize those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness, and wisdom, and will less value the others."5 I cannot consider that a bad description of the aim of education, and of the motives which should govern us in the choice of studies, whether we are preparing ourselves for a hereditary seat in the English House of Lords or for the pork trade in Chicago.

Still I admit that Plato's world was not ours, that his scorn of trade and handicraft is fantastic,6 that he had no conception of a great industrial community such as that of the United States, and that such a community must and will shape its education to suit its own needs. If the usual education handed down to it from the past does not suit it, it will certainly before long drop this and try another. The usual education in the past has been mainly literary. The question is whether the studies which were long supposed to be the best for all of us are practically the best now; whether others are not better. The tyranny of the past, many think, weighs on us injuriously in the predominance given to letters in education. The question is raised whether, to meet the needs of our modern life, the predominance ought not now to pass from letters to science; and naturally the question is nowhere raised with more energy than here in the United States. The design of abasing what is called "mere literary instruction and education," and of exalting what is called "sound, extensive, and practical scientific knowledge," is, in this intensely modern world of the United States, even more perhaps than in Europe, a very popular design, and makes great and rapid progress.

I am going to ask whether the present movement for ousting letters from their old predominance in education, and for transferring the predominance in education to the natural sciences, whether this brisk and flourishing movement ought to prevail, and whether it is likely that in the end it really will prevail. An objection may be raised which I will anticipate. My own studies have been almost wholly in letters, and my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight and inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my curiosity. A man of letters, it will perhaps be said, is not competent to discuss the comparative merits of letters and natural science as means of education. To this objection I reply, first of all, that his incompetence, if he attempts the discussion but is really incompetent for it, will be abundantly visible; nobody will be taken in; he will have plenty of sharp observers and critics to save mankind from that danger. But the line I am going to follow is, as you will soon discover, so extremely simple, that perhaps

5. Republic 9.591. 6. Unconvincing, fanciful.

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it may be followed without failure even by one who for a more ambitious line of discussion would be quite incompetent.

Some of you may possibly remember a phrase of mine which has been the object of a good deal of comment; an observation to the effect that in our culture, the aim being to know ourselves and the world, we have, as the means to this end, to know the best which has been thought and said in the world.7 A man of science, who is also an excellent writer and the very prince of debaters, Professor Huxley, in a discourse at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason's college at Birmingham,8 laying hold of this phrase, expanded it by quoting some more words of mine, which are these: "The civilized world is to be regarded as now being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result; and whose members have for their proper outfit a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one another. Special local and temporary advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this program."

Now on my phrase, thus enlarged, Professor Huxley remarks that when I speak of the above-mentioned knowledge as enabling us to know ourselves and the world, I assert literature to contain the materials which suffice for thus making us know ourselves and the world. But it is not by any means clear, says he, that after having learnt all which ancient and modern literatures have to tell us, we have laid a sufficiently broad and deep foundation for that criticism of life, that knowledge of ourselves and the world, which constitutes culture. On the contrary, Professor Huxley declares that he finds himself "wholly unable to admit that either nations or individuals will really advance, if their outfit draws nothing from the stores of physical science. An army without weapons of precision, and with no particular base of operations, might more hopefully enter upon a campaign on the Rhine, than a man, devoid of a knowledge of what physical science has done in the last century, upon a criticism of life."

This shows how needful it is for those who are to discuss any matter together, to have a common understanding as to the sense of the terms they employ�how needful, and how difficult. What Professor Huxley says, implies just the reproach which is so often brought against the study of belles-lettres, as they are called: that the study is an elegant one, but slight and ineffectual; a smattering of Greek and Latin and other ornamental things, of little use for anyone whose object is to get at truth, and to be a practical man. So, too, M. Renan9 talks of the "superficial humanism" of a school course which treats us as if we were all going to be poets, writers, preachers, orators, and he opposes this humanism to positive science, or the critical search after truth. And there is always a tendency in those who are remonstrating against the predominance of letters in education, to understand by letters belles-lettres, and by belleslettres a superficial humanism, the opposite of science or true knowledge.

But when we talk of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, for instance, which is the knowledge people have called the humanities, I for my part mean a knowledge which is something more than a superficial humanism, mainly decorative. "I call all teaching scientific," says Wolf,1 the critic of Homer, "which is systematically laid out and followed up to its original sources. For

7. See "The Function of Criticism at the Present philosopher and archaeologist. Time" (p. 1384). 1. Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), German 8. See "Science and Culture" (p. 1429). scholar. 9. Ernest Renan (1823-1892), French religious

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example: a knowledge of classical antiquity is scientific when the remains of classical antiquity are correctly studied in the original languages." There can be no doubt that Wolf is perfectly right; that all learning is scientific which is systematically laid out and followed up to its original sources, and that a genuine humanism is scientific.

When I speak of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, therefore, as a help to knowing ourselves and the world, I mean more than a knowledge of so much vocabulary, so much grammar, so many portions of authors in the Greek and Latin languages, I mean knowing the Greeks and Romans, and their life and genius,2 and what they were and did in the world; what we get from them, and what is its value. That, at least, is the ideal; and when we talk of endeavoring to know Greek and Roman antiquity, as a help to knowing ourselves and the world, we mean endeavoring so to know them as to satisfy this ideal, however much we may still fall short of it.

The same also as to knowing our own and other modern nations, with the like aim of getting to understand ourselves and the world. To know the best that has been thought and said by the modern nations, is to know, says Professor Huxley, "only what modern literatures have to tell us; it is the criticism of life contained in modern literature." And yet "the distinctive character of our times," he urges, "lies in the vast and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge." And how, therefore, can a man, devoid of knowledge of what physical science has done in the last century, enter hopefully upon a criticism of modern life?

Let us, I say, be agreed about the meaning of the terms we are using. I talk of knowing the best which has been thought and uttered in the world; Professor Huxley says this means knowing literature. Literature is a large word; it may mean everything written with letters or printed in a book. Euclid's Elements and Newton's Principia3 are thus literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books is literature. But by literature Professor Huxley means belleslettres. He means to make me say, that knowing the best which has been thought and said by the modern nations is knowing their belles-lettres and no more. And this is no sufficient equipment, he argues, for a criticism of modern life. But as I do not mean, by knowing ancient Rome, knowing merely more or less of Latin belles-lettres, and taking no account of Rome's military, and political, and legal, and administrative work in the world; and as, by knowing ancient Greece, I understand knowing her as the giver of Greek art, and the guide to a free and right use of reason and to scientific method, and the founder of our mathematics and physics and astronomy and biology�I understand knowing her as all this, and not merely knowing certain Greek poems, and histories, and treatises, and speeches�so as to the knowledge of modern nations also. Ry knowing modern nations, I mean not merely knowing their belles-lettres, but knowing also what has been done by such men as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin. "Our ancestors learned," says Professor Huxley, "that the earth is the center of the visible universe, and that man is the cynosure of things terrestrial; and more especially was it inculcated that the course of nature had no fixed order, but that it could be, and constantly was, altered." "But for us now," continues Professor Huxley, "the notions of

2. Characteristic spirit or excellence. physics (The Mathematical Principles of Natural 3. A comprehensive treatise on mathematics (ca. Philosophy, 1687), respectively. 300 B.C.E.) and a foundational work of modern

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the beginning and the end of the world entertained by our forefathers are no longer credible. It is very certain that the earth is not the chief body in the material universe, and that the world is not subordinated to man's use. It is even more certain that nature is the expression of a definite order, with which nothing interferes." "And yet," he cries, "the purely classical education advocated by the representatives of the humanists in our day gives no inkling of all this."

In due place and time I will just touch upon that vexed question of classical education; but at present the question is as to what is meant by knowing the best which modern nations have thought and said. It is not knowing their belles-lettres merely which is meant. To know Italian belles-lettres is not to know Italy, and to know English belles-lettres is not to know England. Into knowing Italy and England there comes a great deal more, Galileo and Newton amongst it. The reproach of being a superficial humanism, a tincture of belleslettres, may attach rightly enough to some other disciplines; but to the particular discipline recommended when I proposed knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world, it does not apply. In that best I certainly include what in modern times has been thought and said by the great observers and knowers of nature.

There is, therefore, really no question between Professor Huxley and me as to whether knowing the great results of the modern scientific study of nature is not required as a part of our culture, as well as knowing the products of literature and art. But to follow the processes by which those results are reached, ought, say the friends of physical science, to be made the staple of education for the bulk of mankind. And here there does arise a question between those whom Professor Huxley calls with playful sarcasm "the Levites of culture," and those whom the poor humanist is sometimes apt to regard as its Nebuchadnezzars.4

The great results of the scientific investigation of nature we are agreed upon knowing, but how much of our study are we bound to give to the processes by which those results are reached? The results have their visible bearing on human life. But all the processes, too, all the items of fact, by which those results are reached and established, are interesting. All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men. It is very interesting to know, that, from the albuminous white of the egg, the chick in the egg gets the materials for its flesh, bones, blood, and feathers; while, from the fatty yolk of the egg, it gets the heat and energy which enable it at length to break its shell and begin the world. It is less interesting, perhaps, but still it is interesting, to know that when a taper burns, the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water. Moreover, it is quite true that the habit of dealing with facts, which is given by the study of nature, is, as the friends of physical science praise it for being, an excellent discipline. The appeal, in the study of nature, is constantly to observation and experiment; not only is it said that the thing is so, but we can be made to see that it is so. Not only does a man tell us that when a taper burns the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water, as a man may tell us, if he likes, that Charon5 is punting his ferry boat on the

4. Huxley implies that the humanists are hide-like Nebuchadnezzar, a Babylonian king who bound conservatives like the Levites, priests who destroyed the temple of Jerusalem. were preoccupied with traditional ritual obser-5. In Greek mythology the boatman who convances. Arnold implies that the scientists may be ducted the souls of the dead across the river Styx.

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river Styx, or that Victor Hugo is a sublime poet, or Mr. Gladstone6 the most admirable of statesmen; but we are made to see that the conversion into carbonic acid and water does actually happen. This reality of natural knowledge it is, which makes the friends of physical science contrast it, as a knowledge of things, with the humanist's knowledge, which is, say they, a knowledge of words. And hence Professor Huxley is moved to lay it down that, "for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education." And a certain President of the Section for Mechanical Science in the British Association is, in Scripture phrase, "very bold,"7 and declares that if a man, in his mental training, "has substituted literature and history for natural science, he has chosen the less useful alternative." But whether we go these lengths or not, we must all admit that in natural science the habit gained of dealing with facts is a most valuable discipline, and that everyone should have some experience of it.

More than this, however, is demanded by the reformers. It is proposed to make the training in natural science the main part of education, for the great majority of mankind at any rate. And here, I confess, I part company with the friends of physical science, with whom up to this point I have been agreeing. In differing from them, however, I wish to proceed with the utmost caution and diffidence. The smallness of my own acquaintance with the disciplines of natural science is ever before my mind, and I am fearful of doing these disciplines an injustice. The ability and pugnacity of the partisans of natural science make them formidable persons to contradict. The tone of tentative inquiry, which befits a being of dim faculties and bounded knowledge, is the tone I would wish to take and not to depart from. At present it seems to me, that those who are for giving to natural knowledge, as they call it, the chief place in the education of the majority of mankind, leave one important thing out of their account: the constitution of human nature. But I put this forward on the strength of some facts not at all recondite, very far from it; facts capable of being stated in the simplest possible fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of science will, I am sure, be willing to allow their due weight.

Deny the facts altogether, I think, he hardly can. He can hardly deny, that when we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the building up of human life, and say that they are the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners�he can hardly deny that this scheme, though drawn in rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending to scientific exactness, does yet give a fairly true representation of the matter. Human nature is built up by these powers; we have the need for them all. When we have rightly met and adjusted the claims of them all, we shall then be in a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness, with wdsdom. This is evident enough, and the friends of physical science would admit it.

But perhaps they may not have sufficiently observed another thing: namely, that the several powers just mentioned are not isolated, but there is, in the generality of mankind, a perpetual tendency to relate them one to another in divers ways. With one such way of relating them I am particularly concerned now. Following our instinct for intellect and knowledge, we acquire pieces of

6. William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), leader (1802-1885), French poet and novelist, of the Liberal Party from 1868 to 1875 and from 7. Romans 10.20. 1880 to 1894 and prime minister four times. Hugo

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knowledge; and presently, in the generality of men, there arises the desire to relate these pieces of knowledge to our sense for conduct, to our sense for beauty�and there is weariness and dissatisfaction if the desire is balked. Now in this desire lies, I think, the strength of that hold which letters have upon us.

All knowledge is, as I said just now, interesting; and even items of knowledge which from the nature of the case cannot well be related, but must stand isolated in our thoughts, have their interest. Even lists of exceptions have their interest. If we are studying Greek accents, it is interesting to know that paisand pas, and some other monosyllables of the same form of declension, do not take the circumflex upon the last syllable of the genitive plural, but vary, in this respect, from the common rule. If we are studying physiology, it is interesting to know that the pulmonary artery carries dark blood and the pulmonary vein carries bright blood, departing in this respect from the common rule for the division of labor between the veins and the arteries. But everyone knows how we seek naturally to combine the pieces of our knowledge together, to bring them under general rules, to relate them to principles; and how unsatisfactory and tiresome it would be to go on forever learning lists of exceptions, or accumulating items of fact which must stand isolated.

Well, that same need of relating our knowledge, which operates here within the sphere of our knowledge itself, we shall find operating, also, outside that sphere. We experience, as we go on learning and knowing�the vast majority of us experience�the need of relating what we have learnt and known to the sense which we have in us for conduct, to the sense which we have in us for beauty.

A certain Greek prophetess of Mantineia in Arcadia, Diotima by name, once explained to the philosopher Socrates that love, and impulse, and bent of all kinds, is, in fact, nothing else but the desire in men that good should forever be present to them. This desire for good, Diotima assured Socrates, is our fundamental desire, of which fundamental desire every impulse in us is only some one particular form.8 And therefore this fundamental desire it is, I sup- pose�this desire in men that good should be forever present to them�which acts in us when we feel the impulse for relating our knowledge to our sense for conduct and to our sense for beauty. At any rate, with men in general the instinct exists. Such is human nature. And the instinct, it will be admitted, is innocent, and human nature is preserved by our following the lead of its innocent instincts. Therefore, in seeking to gratify this instinct in question, we are following the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.

But, no doubt, some kinds of knowledge cannot be made to directly serve the instinct in question, cannot be directly related to the sense for beauty, to the sense for conduct. These are instrument knowledges; they lead on to other knowledges, which can. A man who passes his life in instrument knowledges is a specialist. They may be invaluable as instruments to something beyond, for those who have the gift thus to employ them; and they may be disciplines in themselves wherein it is useful for everyone to have some schooling. But it is inconceivable that the generality of men should pass all their mental life with Greek accents or with formal logic. My friend Professor Sylvester, who is one of the first9 mathematicians in the world, holds transcendental

8. Plato's Symposium 201�7. fessor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University 9. Foremost. JamesJ. Sylvester(1814�1897),pro- and at Oxford.

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doctrines as to the virtue of mathematics, but those doctrines are not for common men. In the very Senate House and heart of our English Cambridge1 I once ventured, though not without an apology for my profaneness, to hazard the opinion that for the majority of mankind a little of mathematics, even, goes a long way. Of course this is quite consistent with their being of immense importance as an instrument to something else; but it is the few who have the aptitude for thus using them, not the bulk of mankind.

The natural sciences do not, however, stand on the same footing with these instrument knowledges. Experience shows us that the generality of men will find more interest in learning that, when a taper burns, the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water, or in learning the explanation of the phenomenon of dew, or in learning how the circulation of the blood is carried on, than they find in learning that the genitive plural of pais and pas does not take the circumflex on the termination. And one piece of natural knowledge is added to another, and others are added to that, and at last we come to propositions so interesting as Mr. Darwin's famous proposition that "our ancestor was a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits."2 Or we come to propositions of such reach and magnitude as those which Professor Huxley delivers, when he says that the notions of our forefathers about the beginning and the end of the world were all wrong, and that nature is the expression of a definite order with which nothing interferes.

Interesting, indeed, these results of science are, important they are, and we should all of us be acquainted with them. But what I now wish you to mark is, that we are still, when they are propounded to us and we receive them, we are still in the sphere of intellect and knowledge. And for the generality of men there will be found, I say, to arise, when they have duly taken in the proposition that their ancestor was "a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits," there will be found to arise an invincible desire to relate this proposition to the sense in us for conduct, and to the sense in us for beauty. But this the men of science will not do for us, and will hardly even profess to do. They will give us other pieces of knowledge, other facts, about other animals and their ancestors, or about plants, or about stones, or about stars; and they may finally bring us to those great "general conceptions of the universe, which are forced upon us all," says Professor Huxley, "by the progress of physical science." But still it will be knowledgeonly which they give us; knowledge not put for us into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty, and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for us, and therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain while, unsatisfying, wearying.

Not to the born naturalist, I admit. But what do we mean by a born naturalist? We mean a man in whom the zeal for observing nature is so uncommonly strong and eminent, that it marks him off from the bulk of mankind. Such a man will pass his life happily in collecting natural knowledge and reasoning upon it, and will ask for nothing, or hardly anything, more. I have heard it said that the sagacious and admirable naturalist whom we lost not very long ago, Mr. Darwin, once owned to a friend that for his part he did not experience the necessity for two things which most men find so necessary to

1. In its original form "Literature and Science" emphasized. had been delivered as a lecture at Cambridge Uni- 2. The Descent of Man (1871), chap. 21 (see versity, where mathematics traditionally has been below, p. 1546).

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them�religion and poetry; science and the domestic affections, he thought, were enough. To a born naturalist, I can well understand that this should seem so. So absorbing is his occupation with nature, so strong his love for his occupation, that he goes on acquiring natural knowledge and reasoning upon it, and has little time or inclination for thinking about getting it related to the desire in man for conduct, the desire in man for beauty. He relates it to them for himself as he goes along, so far as he feels the need; and he draws from the domestic affections all the additional solace necessary. But then Darwins are extremely rare. Another great and admirable master of natural knowledge, Faraday,3 was a Sandemanian. That is to say, he related his knowledge to his instinct for conduct and to his instinct for beauty, by the aid of that respectable Scottish sectary, Robert Sandeman.4 And so strong, in general, is the demand of religion and poetry to have their share in a man, to associate themselves with his knowing, and to relieve and rejoice it, that, probably, for one man amongst us with the disposition to do as Darwin did in this respect, there are at least fifty with the disposition to do as Faraday.

Education lays hold upon us, in fact, by satisfying this demand. Professor Huxley holds up to scorn medieval education, with its neglect of the knowledge of nature, its poverty even of literary studies, its formal logic devoted to "showing how and why that which the Church said was true must be true." But the great medieval Universities were not brought into being, we may be sure, by the zeal for giving a jejune and contemptible education. Kings have been their nursing fathers, and queens have been their nursing mothers,5 but not for this. The medieval Universities came into being, because the supposed knowledge, delivered by Scripture and the Church, so deeply engaged men's hearts, by so simply, easily, and powerfully relating itself to their desire for conduct, their desire for beauty. All other knowledge was dominated by this supposed knowledge and was subordinated to it, because of the surpassing strength of the hold which it gained upon the affections of men, by allying itself profoundly with their sense for conduct, their sense for beauty.

But now, says Professor Huxley, conceptions of the universe fatal to the notions held by our forefathers have been forced upon us by physical science. Grant to him that they are thus fatal, that the new conceptions must and will soon become current everywhere, and that everyone will finally perceive them to be fatal to the beliefs of our forefathers. The need of humane letters, as they are truly called, because they serve the paramount desire in men that good should be forever present to them�the need of humane letters, to establish a relation between the new conceptions, and our instinct for beauty, our instinct for conduct, is only the more visible. The Middle Age could do without humane letters, as it could do without the study of nature, because its supposed knowledge was made to engage its emotions so powerfully. Grant that the supposed knowledge disappears, its power of being made to engage the emotions will of course disappear along with it�but the emotions themselves, and their claim to be engaged and satisfied, will remain. Now if we find by experience that humane letters have an undeniable power of engaging the emotions, the importance of humane letters in a man's training becomes not

3. Michael Faraday (1791�1867), British chem- (1718� 1771). "Sectary": zealous member of a sect, ist. ' 5. Isaiah 49.23. 4. Founder of a Scottish sect bearing his name

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less, but greater, in proportion to the success of modern science in extirpating what it calls "medieval thinking."

Have humane letters, then, have poetry and eloquence, the power here attributed to them of engaging the emotions, and do they exercise it? And if they have it and exercise it, how do they exercise it, so as to exert an influence upon man's sense for conduct, his sense for beauty? Finally, even if they both can and do exert an influence upon the senses in question, how are they to relate to them the results�the modern results�of natural science? All these questions may be asked. First, have poetry and eloquence the power of calling out the emotions? The appeal is to experience. Experience shows that for the vast majority of men, for mankind in general, they have the power. Next, do they exercise it? They do. But then, how do they exercise it so as to affect man's sense for conduct, his sense for beauty? And this is perhaps a case for applying the Preacher's words: "Though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; yea, farther, though a wise man think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it."6 Why should it be one thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to say, "Patience is a virtue," and quite another thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to say with Homer,

rXtjTov yap Molpai 6v/udv Oeaav avGpdmototv7�

"for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of men"? Why should it be one thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to say with the philosopher Spinoza, Felicitas in eo consistit quod homo suum esse conservare potest�"Man's happiness consists in his being able to preserve his own essence,"8 and quite another thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to say with the Gospel, "What is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, forfeit himself?"9 How does this difference of effect arise? I cannot tell, and I am not much concerned to know; the important thing is that it does arise, and that we can profit by it. But how, finally, are poetry and eloquence to exercise the power of relating the modern results of natural science to man's instinct for conduct, his instinct for beauty? And here again I answer that I do not know how they will exercise it, but that they can and will exercise it I am sure. I do not mean that modern philosophical poets and modern philosophical moralists are to come and relate for us, in express terms, the results of modern scientific research to our instinct for conduct, our instinct for beauty. But I mean that we shall find, as a matter of experience, if we know the best that has been thought and uttered in the world, we shall find that the art and poetry and eloquence of men who lived, perhaps, long ago, who had the most limited natural knowledge, who had the most erroneous conceptions about many important matters, we shall find that this art, and poetry, and eloquence, have in fact not only the power of refreshing and delighting us, they have also the power�such is the strength and worth, in essentials, of their authors' criticism of life�they have a fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power, capable of wonderfully helping us to relate the results of modern science to our need for conduct, our need for beauty. Homer's conceptions of the physical universe were, I imagine, grotesque; but really, under the shock of hearing from modern science that "the world is not subordinated to man's use, and that man is not the cynosure of things terres

6. Ecclesiastes 8.17 [Arnold's note], 8. Ethics (1677) 4.18. 7. Iliad 24.49 [Arnold's note]. 9. Cf. Luke 9.25.

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LITERATURE AND SCIENCE / 1425

trial," I could, for my own part, desire no better comfort than Homer's line which I quoted just now,

TXYJTOV yap Molpat Ovpiov Oeoav avdpwnototv�

"for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of men"!

And the more that men's minds are cleared, the more that the results of science are frankly accepted, the more that poetry and eloquence come to be received and studied as what in truth they really are�the criticism of life by gifted men, alive and active with extraordinary power at an unusual number of points�so much the more will the value of humane letters, and of art also, which is an utterance having a like kind of power with theirs, be felt and acknowledged, and their place in education be secured.

Let us therefore, all of us, avoid indeed as much as possible any invidious comparison between the merits of humane letters, as means of education, and the merits of the natural sciences. But when some President of a Section for Mechanical Science insists on making the comparison, and tells us that "he who in his training has substituted literature and history for natural science has chosen the less useful alternative," let us make answer to him that the student of humane letters only, will, at least, know also the great general conceptions brought in by modern physical science; for science, as Professor Huxley says, forces them upon us all. But the student of the natural sciences only, will, by our very hypothesis, know nothing of humane letters; not to mention that in setting himself to be perpetually accumulating natural knowledge, he sets himself to do what only specialists have in general the gift for doing genially. And so he will probably be unsatisfied, or at any rate incomplete, and even more incomplete than the student of humane letters only.

I once mentioned in a school report, how a young man in one of our English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in Macbeth beginning,

Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?1

turned this line into, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" And I remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every pupil of our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is two thousand one hundred and sixty miles in diameter, and thought at the same time that a good paraphrase for

Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?

was, "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" If one is driven to choose, I think I would rather have a young person ignorant about the moon's diameter, but aware that "Can you not wait upon the lunatic?" is bad, than a young person whose education had been such as to manage things the other way.

Or to go higher than the pupils of our national schools. I have in my mind's eye a member of our British Parliament who comes to travel here in America, who afterwards relates his travels, and who shows a really masterly knowledge of the geology of this great country and of its mining capabilities, but who ends by gravely suggesting that the United States should borrow a prince from our Royal Family, and should make him their king, and should create a House of Lords of great landed proprietors after the pattern of ours; and then America, he thinks, would have her future happily and perfectly secured. Surely, in this case, the President of the Section for Mechanical Science would himself

1. Shakespeare's Macbeth 5.3.42.

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142 6 / MATTHEW ARNOLD

hardly say that our member of Parliament, by concentrating himself upon geology and mineralogy, and so on, and not attending to literature and history, had "chosen the more useful alternative."

If then there is to be separation and option between humane letters on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other, the great majority of mankind, all who have not exceptional and overpowering aptitudes for the study of nature, would do well, I cannot but think, to choose to be educated in humane letters rather than in the natural sciences. Letters will call out their being at more points, will make them live more.

I said that before I ended I would just touch on the question of classical education, and I will keep my word. Even if literature is to retain a large place in our education, yet Latin and Greek, say the friends of progress, will certainly have to go. Greek is the grand offender in the eyes of these gentlemen. The attackers of the established course of study think that against Greek, at any rate, they have irresistible arguments. Literature may perhaps be needed in education, they say; but why on earth should it be Greek literature? Why not French or German? Nay, "has not an Englishman models in his own literature of every kind of excellence?"2 As before, it is not on any weak pleadings of my own that I rely for convincing the gainsayers; it is on the constitution of human nature itself, and on the instinct of self-preservation in humanity. The instinct for beauty is set in human nature, as surely as the instinct for knowledge is set there, or the instinct for conduct. If the instinct for beauty is served by Greek literature and art as it is served by no other literature and art, we may trust to the instinct of self-preservation in humanity for keeping Greek as part of our culture. We may trust to it for even making the study of Greek more prevalent than it is now. Greek will come, I hope, some day to be studied more rationally than at present; but it will be increasingly studied as men increasingly feel the need in them for beauty, and how powerfully Greek art and Greek literature can serve this need. Women will again study Greek, as Lady Jane Grey3 did; I believe that in that chain of forts, with which the fair host of the Amazons are now engirdling our English universities,4 I find that here in America, in colleges like Smith College in Massachusetts, and Vassar College in the State of New York, and in the happy families of the mixed universities out West, they are studying it already.

Defuit una mihi symmetria prisca�"The antique symmetry was the one thing wanting to me," said Leonardo da Vinci; and he was an Italian. I will not presume to speak for the Americans, but I am sure that, in the Englishman, the want of this admirable symmetry of the Greeks is a thousand times more great and crying than in any Italian. The results of the want show themselves most glaringly, perhaps, in our architecture, but they show themselves, also, in all our art. Fit details strictly combined, in view of a large general residt nobly conceived; that is just the beautiful symmetria prisca of the Greeks, and it is just where we English fail, where all our art fails. Striking ideas we have, and well-executed details we have; but that high symmetry which, with satisfying and delightful effect, combines them, we seldom or never have. The glorious beauty of the Acropolis at Athens did not come from single fine things stuck about on that hill, a statue here, a gateway there�no, it arose from all things

2. Cf. Huxley's "Science and Culture." (p. 1429). days later. She was executed by order of Queen 3. Reputed to be a learned scholar in Greek. Grey Mary. (1537�1554) was proclaimed queen of England in 4. Colleges for women at Oxford and Cambridge. 1553 but was forced to abdicate the throne nine

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THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY / 142 7

being perfectly combined for a supreme total effect. What must not an Englishman feel about our deficiencies in this respect, as the sense for beauty, whereof this symmetry is an essential element, awakens and strengthens within him! what will not one day be his respect and desire for Greece and its sjmmetria prisca, when the scales drop from his eyes as he walks the London streets, and he sees such a lesson in meanness as the Strand, for instance, in its true deformity! But here we are coming to our friend Mr. Ruskin's province, 5 and I will not intrude upon it, for he is its very sufficient guardian.

And so we at last find, it seems, we find flowing in favor of the humanities the natural and necessary stream of things, which seemed against them when we started. The "hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits," this good fellow carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters. Nay, more; we seem finally to be even led to the further conclusion that our hairy ancestor carried in his nature, also, a necessity for Greek.

And therefore, to say the truth, I cannot really think that humane letters are in much actual danger of being thrust out from their leading place in education, in spite of the array of authorities against them at this moment. So long as human nature is what it is, their attractions will remain irresistible. As with Greek, so with letters generally: they will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more rationally, but they will not lose their place. What will happen will rather be that there will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too many; there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and false tendency; but letters will not in the end lose their leading place. If they lose it for a time, they will get it back again. We shall be brought back to them by our wants and aspirations. And a poor humanist may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry,6 admit the energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and their present favor with the public, to be far greater than his own, and still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on behalf of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science, and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane letters; and so much the more, as they have the more and the greater results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the need in him for beauty.

1882,1885

5. In books such as The Stones of Venice (1851- 6. Matthew 12.19; "possess his soul in patience," 53), John Ruskin had criticized the "meanness" of Luke 21.19. Victorian architecture. THOiMAS HENRY HUXLEY

1825-1895

In Victorian controversies over religion and education, one of the most distinctive participants was Thomas Henry Huxley, a scientist who wrote clear, readable, and very persuasive English prose. Huxley's literary skill was responsible for his being lured out of his laboratory onto the platforms of public debate where his role was to

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1428 / THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

champion, as he said, "the application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems of life."

Huxley, a schoolmaster's son, was born in a London suburb. Until beginning the study of medicine, at seventeen, he had had little formal education, having taught himself classical and modern languages and the rudiments of scientific theory. In 1846, after receiving his degree in medicine, he embarked on a long voyage to the South Seas during which he studied the marine life of the tropical oceans and established a considerable reputation as a zoologist. Later he made investigations in geology and physiology, completing a total of 250 research papers during his lifetime. He also held teaching positions and served on public committees, but it was as a popularizer of science that he made his real mark. His popularizing was of two kinds. The first was to make the results of scientific investigations intelligible to a large audience. Such lectures as "On a Piece of Chalk" (not included here) are models of clear, vivid exposition that can be studied with profit by anyone interested in the art of teaching. His second kind of popularizing consisted of expounding the values of scientific education or of the application of scientific thinking to problems in religion. Here Huxley excels not so much as a teacher as a debater. In 1860 he demonstrated his argumentative skill when, as Darwin's defender or "bulldog," he demolished Bishop Wilber- force in a battle over The Origin of Species (an account of the confrontation, written by Huxley's son Leonard, appears in the "Evolution" cluster). In the 1870s, in such lectures as "Science and Culture" (1880), he engaged in more genial fencing with Matthew Arnold concerning the relative importance of the study of science or the humanities in education. And in the 1880s he debated with William Gladstone on the topic of interpreting the Bible. His essay "Agnosticism and Christianity" (1889) indicates his premises in this controversy.

Summing up his own career in his "Autobiography" (1890), Huxley noted that he had subordinated his ambition for scientific fame to other ends: "to the popularization of science; to the development and organization of scientific education; to the endless series of battles and skirmishes over evolution; and to untiring opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that clericalism, which .. . to whatever denomination it may belong, is the deadly enemy of science." In fighting these "battles" Huxley operated from different bases. Most of the time he wrote as a biologist engaged in assessing all assumptions by the tests of laboratory science. In this role he argued that humans are merely animals and that traditional religion is a tissue of superstitions and lies. For some recent critics Huxley comes close to setting up his own religion of sorts, so fervent and sweeping is his rhetoric in defense of scientific naturalism. Further, it has been argued that the emphasis he and other like-minded writers placed on the inevitability of English technological progress significantly affected Britain's expansionist imperial policies in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Huxley's vision was broader than that of most of his comrades in the science and religion debates. In fact, he often wrote as a humanist and even as a follower of Thomas Carlyle. As he stated in a letter: "Sartor Resartus led me to know that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology." In this second role he argued that humans are a very special kind of animal whose great distinction is that they are endowed with a moral sense and with freedom of the will; creatures who are admirable not for following nature but for departing from nature. The humanistic streak muddies the seemingly clear current of Huxley's thinking yet makes him a more interesting figure than he might otherwise have been. It is noteworthy that in the writings of his grandsons�Julian Huxley, a biologist, and Aldous Huxley, a novelist�a similar division of mind can once more be detected.

Even in his dying, T. H. Huxley continued his role as controversialist. The words he asked to be engraved on his tomb are typical of his view of life and typical, also, in the effect they had on his contemporaries, some of whom found the epitaph to be shocking:

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SCIENCE AND CULTURE / 1429

Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep For still he giveth His beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.

From Science and Culture1

[THE VALUES OF EDUCATION IN THE SCIENCES]

From the time that the first suggestion to introduce physical science into ordinary education was timidly whispered, until now, the advocates of scientific education have met with opposition of two kinds. On the one hand, they have been pooh-poohed by the men of business who pride themselves on being the representatives of practicality; while, on the other hand, they have been excommunicated by the classical scholars, in their capacity of Levites in charge of the ark of culture2 and monopolists of liberal education.

The practical men believed that the idol whom they worship�rule of thumb�has been the source of the past prosperity, and will suffice for the future welfare of the arts and manufactures. They are of opinion that science is speculative rubbish; that theory and practice have nothing to do with one another; and that the scientific habit of mind is an impediment, rather than an aid, in the conduct of ordinary affairs.

I have used the past tense in speaking of the practical men�for although they were very formidable thirty years ago, I am not sure that the pure species has not been extirpated. In fact, so far as mere argument goes, they have been subjected to such a feu d'enfer5 that it is a miracle if any have escaped. But I have remarked that your typical practical man has an unexpected resemblance to one of Milton's angels. His spiritual wounds, such as are inflicted by logical weapons, may be as deep as a well and as wide as a church door,4 but beyond shedding a few drops of ichor,5 celestial or otherwise, he is no whit the worse. So, if any of these opponents be left, I will not waste time in vain repetition of the demonstrative evidence of the practical value of science; but knowing that a parable will sometimes penetrate where syllogisms fail to effect an entrance, I will offer a story for their consideration.

Once upon a time, a boy, with nothing to depend upon but his own vigorous nature, was thrown into the thick of the struggle for existence in the midst of a great manufacturing population. He seems to have had a hard fight, inasmuch as, by the time he was thirty years of age, his total disposable funds amounted to twenty pounds. Nevertheless, middle life found him giving proof of his comprehension of the practical problems he had been roughly called upon to solve, by a career of remarkable prosperity.

Finally, having reached old age with its well-earned surroundings of "honour, troops of friends,"6 the hero of my story bethought himself of those who

1. This essay was first delivered as an address in (Numbers 3.1 � 1 3); in Joshua 6 priests carried the 1880. The occasion had been the opening of a new Ark of the Covenant. Scientific College at Birmingham, which had been 3. Hellfire (French). endowed by Sir Josiah Mason (1795-1881), a self-4. Cf. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet 3.1.92�93. made businessman. For Matthew Arnold's reply to 5. Ethereal fluid that supposedly flows through Huxley's argument, see his essay "Literature and the veins of the gods. On angels' wounds see Mil- Science" (p. 1415). ton's Paradise Lost 6.320�56. 2. In the Old Testament the whole tribe of Levi 6. Cf. Shakespeare's Macbeth 5.3.26. was entrusted with Israel's ritual observances