A BOOK OF THE MOMENT.

) MATTHEW ARNOLD'S PROSE.

To Messrs. Methuen are due -the thanks of the reading public for bringing out a volume of selections from Matthew Arnold's prose and for- having found so capital an editor and selector as Mr. Somervell. His introduction is an excellent stimulant to the appetite, and puts the reader just into the proper mood for appreciating Arnold. Therefore we trust the book

will be widely read. If it is, we are sure that it will make the readers wish to know more and to get into touch with the whole of Matthew Arnold's prose work. I am -one of

those who believe that Matthew Arnold was a great poet as well as a great prose writer. In the matter of style and of metrical accomplishment, that is in the arts of poetry, he was, in my opinion, as great, nay, greater, than any of his contemporaries—greater than Tennyson, greater than Browning, and far greater than Swinburne or William Morris, great as these two men were. But for the moment it is no use to try to bring the new literary thoroughbreds to this water, for they will not drink. In the matter of Matthew Arnold's prose there is far more hope. Matthew .Arnold always seems to me to strike a very modern note in criticism. He was never content to " wonder with a foolish face of praise," or, again, to harry any man of letters whose work he dislilred with mere vituperation. He always wanted to understand, to make' out what the poet or prose writer whom he was criticising was trying to do, and how he was trying to do it, and so judge him. Above all, he was no

pedant, no slave to any epoch, or to any rule. For him literature was literature-, and must not be looked at either through classical or modern spectacles. Indeed, for him classical meant a certain standard of art; not what was written

in a particular language and at a particular date. Again, he did not take sides with either the ancient, the modern or the mediaevalist. Lastly, he was a true internationalist. While he condemned and ricliceled our insularity, he was quite able to see and condemn parochialism when he found it abroad. Always he was lucid and convincing. He possessed the charming gift., not merely of irony, but of a pleasant,genial humour'. The French saying, "La melaneholie gale que les anglais nomment humeur," exactly represents his lighter mood.

In the true sense, too, he was .a great rhetorician, that is, he knew that grace and beauty winged the arrows of thought to fly farther and to strike deeper. Yet he never was tempted to sit down and write a purple passage. He knew that the written word must always be natural and appropriate, must spring up with the subject and be part of its elaboration, and not an ornament—plastered on merely to adorn. In the best sense Arnold was always a modernist. He never went dressed up in the faded clothes of antiquity or in a sham mediaeval or Elizabethan garb. It is true that he would make, as in Empedoeles or in Merope, a, _Greek story his vehicle of presentation, but his thought,his.appeal, was never narrowed to any age. It was universal. Therefore he touched our hearts and minds not only finely, but to the finest issues.

A hundred examples of Arnold's excellences in these respects can be found in this little volume of selections. The only difficulty is to find where to stop in giving proofs. Perhaps as good, instances of Matthew Arnold'S penetration and insight as can be found anywhere in his writings are to be found in the long passage in which he analyzes and compares

the Hebrew and Greek ideals. The passage.' in question comes from Culture and Anarchy. Take as an example

of Matthew Arnold's power of delicate discrimination the following passage. After an 'exquisitely balanced and fair description of what Hellenism offered to the world and what Hebraism, he proceeds - •

" Apparently it was the Hellenic conception of human nature which was unsound, for the world could not live by-it. Absolutely to call it unsound, however, is to fall into the common error of its Hebraising egemies ; but it was unsound at that particular 4noment of man's development, it was premature. The andis- pensable basis of conduct and self-control, the platform upon pit. alone the perfection aimed at by Greece can come into woe not to be reached by our race so easily; centuries of propagation and discipline were needed to bring us to it. There- fore:the bright promise sif Hellenism :faded; and Hebraism ruled the world. Then was seen that astonishing spectacle, so well marked by the often-quoted words df the prophet Zechariah, when men of all languages and nations took hold of the skirt of him that was a Jew, saying : We will go with -you, for we have heard that God is ' with, ,Aud the Ilebraisan which thus received and ruled a world all gone out. Of the way and altogether bedome unprofitable, was and could not but be, the later, the more spiritual, the more attractive development of H.ehraiern. It was Christianity ; that is to say, Hebraisin aiming at.self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile affections, net by' obedience to the letter of a law, but-by conformity to the image of a: self-sacrificing example.- To a world stricken with moral enervation Christianity offered- its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice ; to men who refused them- selves nothing. it showed one who refused himself 'everything 'My ,Saviour.- banished joy ! ' says George Herbert. When the alma Venna, the life-giving and joy-giving power of. nature, sa fetidly cherished by the. pagan world, .could not save her followers from self-dissatisfaction and ennui, the severe words of the apostle came bracingly and refreshingly : Let no man deceive you with vain wards, for- because of these things,cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.' Through age after age and generation after generation our race, or all that part of our race which was most' living and progressive, was baptized into a death : and endeavoured, by- suffering in the -flesh, to -cease-from- sin. Of this endeavour, the animating labours and afflictions of earlyi Christianity, the touching asceticism of mediaeval Christianity, are the great historical manifestations. Literary monuments of it, each- in its own way incomparable, remain in the Epistles of St. Paul, in Bt. Augustine's Confessions, and in the two original and simplest books of the Imitation."

Even more admirable, though not so easy to quote from, are. the passages that follow. It is in one of these that he, Arnold, tells us that " the Reformation was strong, in that it 'was an earnest return to the doing from . the heart the will of God." but it was weak, he adds, " in that it never consciously grasped or applied the central idea of the Renaissance—the Hellenic idea of pursuing, in ..all lines 01 activity, the. law and..scienee, to usePlato's words, of things as they really are." As an example of Matthew Arnold's lambent -wit I will take the • delicious passage from The Barbarians and Philistines, in which we are congratulated upon the beauties of our system of government :-

"` But in cur political system everybody is comforted. Our guides and governors who have to be elected by the influence of the Barbarians, and who depend on their favour, sing praises of the Barbarians, and say all the smooth things that can be said of them. With Mr. Tennyson, they celebrate the great broad- shouldered genial Englishman,' withlus sense of duty,' his 'reverence for the laws,' and his 'patient force,' who saves us from the `revolts,. republics, revolutions, most no graver than a schoolboy's barring out,' which upset other and less lbroad-shouldered nations. Our guides, who are chosen by the Philistines and who have to look to their favour, tell the Philistines how all the world knows that the great middle class of this country supplies the mind, the will, and the power requisite for all the great and good things that have to be done,' and congratulate them on their earnest good sense, which penetrates- through sophisms, ignores cornanonp a es, and gives to conventional illusions-their true value.' Our tidies who look to the favour of the Populace, tell them that theirs are the brightest powers of sympathy, and the readiest powers of action.' Harsh things are said too, no doubt, against all the great classes of the community ; but these things so evidently come from a hostile class, and are so manifestly dictated by the passions and prepossessions of a hostile class, and not by right reason, that, they make no serious impression on those at whom they are launched, but- slide easily off their minds. Eor• instance, when the Reform League orators inveigh against our cruel and Limited aristocracy; these invectives so evidently show the passions and point of view of the Populace, that they do not sink into the minds of those at whom they are addressed, or awaken any thought or self-exami- nation in them. Again, when our aristocratical baronet 'describes the Philistines and the Repulse° as influenced with a kind of hideous mania for emasculating the aristocracy, that reproach so clearly comes from the wrath and excited imagination of the Barbarians, that, it does not much' set the P,hilistines and the Populace thinking. Or when Mr. Lowe calls the. Populace drunken and venal, he so evidently calls them Allis in an agony of- apprehension for his Philistine or middle-class Parliament, which has done so many great and heroic works, and is now threatened with mixture and debasement, that the Populace do not lay his words seriously to heart."

I must not leave Matthew Arnold without also giving, an example of an art in which he was very nearly original, and certainly supreme. I mean Matthew Arnold's power of subtle, yet simple, analysis and appreciation, his power of estimating literary values. There was never a truer and more sincere worshipper at the twin shrine of Truth and Beauty than Matthew Arnold. Though he could not puff out his chest and roar out his eulogies, they were often as moving as more clarnorons adorations. Here is the passage on " The Three Kinds of Fame," which concludes the essay on Joubert " For a spirit of any delicacy and dignity, what a fate, if he could...foresee:, it 4 to be aa-Toracle for one generation. and .then of little or no account for ever. How far better, to pass with scant notice through one's own generation, but to be singled out and preserved by the very iconoclasts of the next, then in their turn by those of the next, and so, like the lamp of life itself, to be handed on from one generation to another in safety ! This is Joubert's lot, and it is a very enviable one. The new men of the new gener- ations, while they let the dust deepen on a thousand Laharpes, will say of him : He lived in the Philistine's day, in a place and time when almost every idea. current in literature had the mark of Dagon upon it, and not the mark of the children of light. Nay, the children of light were as yet hardly so much as heard of : the Cannanite was then in the land. Still, there were even then a few who, nourished on. some secret tradition, or illuminated, perhaps, by a divine inspiration, kept aloof from the reigning superstitions, never bowed the knee to the gods of Canaan ; and one of these few was called Joubert."

I have deliberately chosen Matthew Arnold in his softest and gentlest mood of appreciation, but could anything be more illuminating ? But who am I that I should venture to

praise Matthew Arnold ? As one re-reads and re-kindles one's spirit from his noble torch one feels that only Matthew Arnold himself and by his own exquisite methods amid do justice to such criticism. What a delightful review he would have made of his own works in selection. And how fair he would have been to himself ! How exquisitely he would have chaffed the over-fastidiousness which he occas- ionally shows and gently mocked his little airs and graces I I know he would have done that. We all know it, for did he not say of his wife, " She has all my, graces, but none of my airs " ?

But, though I am an admirer of Matthew Arnold's prose on this side of idolatry, I should be misleading my readers if I .were to give them the impression that I am one of those people who put him higher as a prose writer than as a poet.

Most emphatically I do not. I believe that in his poetry he has risen to Andean heights and that, though such words will be dismissed to-day with the frigidity of blank indifference, another thirty years will see Arnold crowned as the first of the Victorian poets. J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.