These suggestive essays are the antithesis of the Daily Mail.
Not that their author, like the Pope, is always right ; nor, though one would like to think so, that Lord Rothermere is always wrong. But the manner of approach and the stock-in-trade of the two differ. The one deals radically with realities ; the other superficially with shams. We are suffering, the Principal reminds us, " from a Thyestean banquet of claptrap " ; " Hats off to France ! " shouts the Peer. There is an association of ideas, if an association by contraries, between the points of view. Dr. Jacks' method is that of Matthew Arnold. He analyses the ideas of our generation, the result being to show not that they are in themselves shams, but that, as represented in the popular mind, they easily become so. And, as a corrective, he sends us back to old books whose teaching " has been clean forgotten by the vast majority of men who ought to have remembered it." If our politicians read Burke, and our preachers Matthew Arnold, the prospects both of Church and State would be brighter than they are.
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