By Prof. A. B. HYDE, D.D.

A man of letters, eminent in England, deserves, on visiting these shores, our brotherly attention. Nothing so holds us in fellowship with the people of “the little mother-land” as our reading their literature, and their reading ours, without translation. Their writers and speakers are thus our true kinsfolk, nearer to us than French or German can be. Mr. Arnold, known well rather than widely, has position among English thinkers of our day, such as demands for the readers of The Chautauquan a reasonable understanding of him and his work. His essays and addresses are published in seven volumes by MacMillan & Co. His poems, in two or three volumes, are had from the same house. He came to this country partly to visit and partly to deliver a few lectures. Mr. Arnold was born at Christmas of 1822, in Laleham, where his father was privately fitting students for the universities. His father, Thomas Arnold, eminent as clergyman and historian, is still more famed as teacher. At Rugby school his pupils loved and honored him. He understood the good and evil of English boys, and with wonderful skill he trained them in sound learning, and moulded them to pure and generous character. Gaining from him the tone of manly sentiment, many of his “Tom Browns” have been blessings to their generation.

Matthew was his eldest son. Another, Delafield Arnold, early worn out in the educational work of India, was buried on his homeward voyage, at Gibraltar, while his devoted wife went to a grave under the solemn shadow of the Himalayas.

In Matthew’s boyhood the family home was fixed at Fox How, near the abode of the poet Wordsworth. Here in his vacations the father studied, and Matthew could see Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, the “Lake Poets.” To Fox How, haunt of the muses, a crowd of distinguished visitors made streaming pilgrimage, and here the lad who early “seemed no vulgar boy,” could absorb the deep things of reason and the sweet things of song. He deeply revered these men under whose shadow he sat as a boyish listener. Of his father he says: “We rested till then in thy shade, as under the boughs of an oak. Toil and dejection have tried thy spirit, of that we say nothing. To us thou wast still cheerful and helpful and firm.”

After Wordsworth’s death he says of the dear and venerable man to whom his eyes in young weariness had often turned for refreshment:

In 1840, having prepared under his father, he was elected a scholar at Baliol College, Oxford, and four years later he gained a prize for an English poem. The next year he was made a Fellow of Oriel College. In 1846 he became private secretary of Lord Lansdowne, and so remained for several years. He also—after his marriage, in 1851, with Frances Wightman, daughter of an eminent jurist—served as Her Majesty’s Inspector of British schools. In 1857 he was with sharp competition chosen Professor of Poetry at Oxford. The term of office is ten years. Finding himself in later years growing alien from poetic composition (“these lips but rarely frame them now”), he allowed the place to pass to Principal Shairp, a man more distinguished as a critic than a producer of poetry. Mr. Arnold still gives an occasional poem, oftenest on simple themes, as the death of his terrier, “Geist,” or his canary, “Matthias.” His “Westminster Abbey,” on the death of Dean Stanley, is grand as an anthem. He is now heard chiefly in essays, critical and Æsthetic, and educational or other addresses. He is of noble presence and kindly, earnest face, over which his rich, full hair, now sable-silvered, parts and clusters. He is no orator, speaking low and slowly, but the charm of his personal appearance, the beauty of his thought, the clear incisive force of his silvery rhetoric make him to cultivated audiences ever welcome. Take him for all in all, he is so felt to-day and sure to be so read and felt hereafter, that some study of him as thinker and poet may be both instructive and entertaining.

Of his lectures in this country the best was on Emerson, whom he prized as “the friend and aid of those who wished to live in the spirit.”

His first stir of thought was from Wordsworth, not young Wordsworth, the flush “high-priest of man and nature and of human life,” but from the venerable laureate, when his utterances began to have “the sweetness, the gravity, the beauty, the languor of death.” The lofty energy which Arnold inherited from his father was seriously impaired by the contemplative egotism of his father’s friend. At the time when impressions deep and lasting were easily made on his young mind, Goethe, critic and artist of many generations, went to his grave. “Knowest thou,” says Carlyle, “no prophet even in the vesture, environment and dialect of this age? I know him and name him Goethe. In him man’s life begins again to be divine.” Goethe had at first held the principles of Rousseau. Later he announced with the serenity of a Brahmin and the authority of a Delphic oracle, that the chief end of man is “to cultivate his own spirit.” This utterance fell like a gospel on Arnold’s ear. He began to expound and enforce it, striving to engraft it on literary society and to embody it in the English national life. To him we owe that sense of the word “culture” which is so hard to state, and other terms and phrases, as “perfection, sweetness and light,” “harmonious development,” and the like. A better English pleader for the new “development” could hardly have been found. Clear and graceful in statement, gentle under criticism, patient under reproof and witty in reply, his one defect is in not doing what both the sacred and the profane oracles enjoin as the first thing in culture—to understand himself. Let us trace his ideas and doctrines in politics, in education, in religion, and in poetry.

His view of the human race is that we are utterly separate, “enisled,” each forever by himself as in “the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.”

It follows from this isolation (which is in one sense true) that no man can be his brother’s keeper. A strong-lunged islander can call to his fellow, but nothing more. With this view of the “environment” the first duty ever to be taught and ever rehearsed is endurance. Patience under an order of things that “man did not make and can not mar,” is a teaching traceable through all his poetry and prose. Then comes in many a pleasing form the lesson of “self-centering.”

In the “hopeless tangle of our age,” to which he is keenly alive, and to explore which is a task of misery and distress, “alone, self-poised, henceforward man must labor.” “No man can save his brother’s soul, nor pay his brother’s debt.” As man is thus set apart from his fellow, “self-culture,” “self-perfecting” are his duty and his chief concern. By culture Mr. Arnold means the development of every capacity and power enfolded within us, and the adapting of ourselves perfectly to the island, larger or smaller, of our Crusoe life. This culture is gained not by unions, coÖperations, or harangues “with tremendous cheers.” It is of one’s self and for one’s self, save as the wind may waft the odors of one “islet” to another. Culture must come by patient personal effort. Here Mr. Arnold looks back longingly to feudal times, and even beyond. The evil communications of the present corrupt good manners. He seems to say “any former times are better than these,” and to

Such a doctrine can never come well into politics. It is too remote—unsystematic, not to say fastidious. Pure as Arnold’s motives are known to be, he is too dainty to serve in a party, even that of Mr. Gladstone. He scouts “equality,” and prefers benevolence to democracy. As a result, the “sweetness and light” shed from his “islet” is little regarded by the masses, being about as effective as an aurora borealis.

Punch sums up Arnold’s discourses to the laboring classes—and all other classes:

In education Mr. Arnold’s efforts have been steady and sincere. To him, among others, is due the successful entrance of young women in England upon higher study, so that Cambridge and Oxford are now beset by troops of young ladies who must some day effect entrance. He inherits from his father an educational zeal. His pleadings for literature in courses of study as against the exclusive pursuit of physical science and the “practical” branches, has been earnest and eloquent. He holds that, to know ourselves and the world, we must know the best that has been thought and said in the world. The study of belles-letters may be so conducted as to yield only a smattering of benefit, but it may be made a very serious and critical search after truth. What has been done by civilized nations, and what manner of people they were, is as well worth knowing as chemistry or geology.

Examining a young man on the meaning of “Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?” he received as explanation, “Can you not wait upon the lunatic?” He asks whether to know the products of the combustion of wax is better than to understand Shakspere? He is sure that man’s need of beauty in truth, and of acquaintance with the general human mind demands the study of literature, and that for this study the best of all is the Greek.

Few will question, most teachers will accept, his educational doctrines.

Mr. Arnold explains that to attain perfect culture, we must be perfectly religious, and for this, we must properly understand the Bible. This brings us to look at his darkened side. He is an evolutionist in religion; that is, he holds that as the ages roll on, new religions unfold in newness of vigor and meaning, while the old decay and disappear. He tells us that to-day poetry is the true religion. In our time “every creed is shaken, every dogma questioned, every tradition dissolving.” “The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry, for poetry attaches its emotion to the idea, and all else is illusion.” Poetry has the highest truth, and the highest seriousness.

“Be ye perfect,” said the Great Teacher, and this, says Mr. Arnold, is a harmonious development of all sides of our humanity; a thing not found in our broken world. Therefore he calls the orthodox belief a failure; the working classes will have nothing to say to it. He will fix it for them. He takes out of it all its facts and leaves only its tone and its ideas—its poetry. The scheme of Christianity has never been understood until now a select few have grasped it.

“There is an enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness”—that is his cloudy piety. The “method” and “secret” of Jesus were commendable; the “method” was repentance, the “secret” was peace; but the Christian religion rests on the assumption of a Personal Ruler, “this cannot be verified.” Even the resurrection St. Paul poorly understood. It is in fact “rising to that harmonious conformity with the real and the eternal which is life and peace until it becomes glory.” Even the doctrine of the Trinity Mr. Arnold can speak of as “a fairy-tale of the three Lord Shaftburys,” a phrase that Ingersoll might quote. One can see—and it is a sad sight—how his religious views have been spoiled by a vain philosophy. How reassuring to know that Mr. Moody, preaching Jesus and the Resurrection at Oxford, in Arnold’s sight, found the working classes (and others) glad to hear. Where he had said,

Many are learning “Deny thyself” and in finding the Savior, losing their misery.

This gifted disbeliever has longings that he cannot quite conceal. He does not believe Jesus divine, yet he seems to yearn for faith in him, such as his father had, and such as was easy when

He himself would gladly have been caught in the tide

Turning sadly away he says:

At last we seem to find this scholar and poet, Christian born and Christian bred, sinking into the pantheism of heathenism, such as our missionaries confront in India.

Through all Mr. Arnold’s utterances there seems a certain air of condescension. To the masses, “the un-Hellenic public,” he seems to look from his own “islet” and say, “Cultivate your own spirit;” “Cherish light and sweetness,” and to add, “Look at me and aspire to your own best self.” This looks like a delicate self-worship, such as was in Goethe, and thither “self-culture” easily leads.

In Mr. Arnold as poet one finds enough to admire and enjoy. His first volume of poems was given anonymously to the world in 1849. It made some stir. We thought another of the immortals was among us, and so it proved. He followed in song the same who were his masters in culture, striving, “Wordsworth’s sweet calm, and Goethe’s wide and luminous view to gain.” He took up poetry seriously, for he thought that “poetry is the impassioned expression in the countenance of all science,” “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.” To him poetry is no idle warbling, but an intense criticism of life in which he works from sense of duty. In all his poems one finds dignity and grace of spirit, something of Goethe’s spiritual unrest, and of Wordsworth’s healing balm found in communion with nature.

Thus, after Rustum in desperate fight has unknowingly slain his son Sohrab, (who has disclosed himself in his last moments) with how quiet dignity does the Oxus move on, leaving on its bank Sohrab in his gore, and Rustum in his hot agony and blinding tears!

He comes to nature, not to bring anything, but to seek rest and refreshment. Byron pours out upon nature, as in Childe Harold, the “sparkling gloom” of his own spirit. Coleridge, as in the Hymn at Chamouni, fills nature with his own lofty rapture. Arnold’s poems all show how he asks of nature, not pleasure or exaltation—only relief. By the lake he says:

In his Summer Night,

He turns to the

In Kensington Gardens he says:

Nowhere in all his pictures of nature, given in the most musical of English and in style flowing, bright and tender, do we find the deep gladness of Wordsworth, or the organ-toned joy of Milton. To each, as his heart is, nature gives. Arnold, sad, unbelieving, self-absorbed, looking at his own shadow, sees the beautiful and sings it, as he finds it, but, “life is wanting there.” As our human race appears in his poems, the men of to-day are of small account. “There has passed away a glory from the earth.” He has little to say of hope, so much in his eye is the past better than any possible future. Even his favorite metres are of Greek pattern. Admitting that the Pagan world, worn and weary, was revived by Christianity, he thinks this is in its turn “outworn,” and men are waning now. Therefore he goes to olden time for heroes, for Prometheus and Pericle, Tristam and Rustum. His only poem truly dramatic, a complete work of art, is The Sick King in Bokhara. The elements of the story bring out his genius, and he puts forth the best effort of his mind and art. Here are that dignified self-poise, that unrest akin to remorse that frames so strangely with the calm of helplessness, that lip-curling criticism and that transparent simplicity of which we have been speaking. All is brilliant in setting and rich in color. All his poems we might read (and we should then all the more watch for new ones) but in none shall find the whole of Mr. Arnold as we find it in this.

How beautiful is this from Tristam. It is Iseult after the death of her husband and rival, living with her children, as in a fading, misty, moon-lit dream:

Mr. Arnold does not attain to the first rank of either men or poets, but there is a charm about him and his poetry. Too bad it is that he has not the joy and nerve that come of Christian faith “which worketh by love.” He would diffuse sweetness and light indeed. But is his poetry, as poetry, the worse for his lack of faith? Its plaintive utterance of the sadness of a soul whose wants are proudly shut from their true satisfaction, will long be read by those who strive to still the heart with supplies from the intellect and to make genius serve for Living Bread. No English poet has made the soul-hunger so attractive, or given airy negatives in forms and colors so fascinating.

It is often found that those feelings which are best, noblest, and most self-denying, are exactly those which lead to a disastrous issue. It is as if, by the command of a higher and wiser power, man’s fate were intentionally brought into variance with his inner feelings, in order that the latter might acquire a higher value, shine with greater purity, and thus become more precious by the very privations and sufferings to him who cherishes such feelings. However benevolent may be the intentions of Providence, they do not always advance the happiness of the individual. Providence has always higher ends in view, and works in a preËminent degree on the inner feelings and disposition.—Humboldt.