MATTHEW ARNOLD'S PROSE PASSAGES.

MR. ARNOLD, in selecting from his prose writings the passages* which most clearly mark and most brilliantly express his leading ideas, has not merely provided us with a number of very entertaining pages, almost all of them dis- tinguished by some prevailing 'note' of thought, and most of them full of the overspill of that abundant vivacity which usually marks a poet when he takes to prose, but has supplied us with a book of singularly strong interest for the student of the "modern spirit." You cannot open the book anywhere without being struck by the grace of the style, the lucidity of the thought, and very often by the humour and buoyancy and courage of the illustrations with which the thought is pressed home. What Mr. Arnold gives us is a vase of cut flowers, but of flowers which seem to suffer as little as flowers ever can suffer from their separation from the stem on which they grow. The present writer may justly call himself a careful student of Mr. Arnold. He has always discerned in Mr. Arnold's poems the truest representa- tive of the modern culture of Oxford,—which means, no doubt, of England,—with all its unsatisfied yearnings, its keen appre- ciation of what is noble in the tradition of the past, and its still keener appreciation of what is unscientific in that tradition ; its contempt for the baldness of rash innovators who want to cut themselves free from the growth of the ages which are past, its hardly inferior contempt for those recasts of old faiths by which they are robbed of all that is characteristic in them without being adapted to modern thought, and its sanguine anticipation that, somehow or other,—whence, Mr. Arnold, in his poems at least, never succeeds in telling us,—we are to have all the joy and buoyancy and science of a new world, without either the in- fantine unconsciousness, or the prophetic vision, or the revealed dogma, of the old. Naturally one looks in the prose works for the explanation of the poet's vision. But in the prose works one finds, indeed, a great deal that is not in the poems, a great deal of ex- quisite criticism, a great deal of lively banter, a great deal of just and striking delineation of the deformities and weakness of our English mode of religions thought and life ; but what one seeks for most eagerly,—the roots of the poet's hopes for the future, —this one does not find anywhere in the prose works, but rather lively explanations why it is childish and unscientific to seek for any such roots.

• Passages from the Prose Writings of Matthew Arnokt. London: Smith, Elder, and Co.

And that is one reason, indeed, why these cut flowers of Mr. Arnold's represent so perfectly the works from which they are culled. You can detach a criticism ; you can detach banter; you can detach satire ; you can detach an exquisite picture of the literary quality of a great author; you can detach a hope; but you cannot detach a philosophy of hope; and if Mr. Arnold's prose works had given us any reason for his buoyant hopes, any roots for the flowers of his poetry, he could hardly have exhibited this in such a volume as he here presents to us. But in truth the most marked characteristics of his leading ideas of spiritual life, as ex- pressed whether in his poetry or in his prose, is that, as with cut flowers, there never seems to be any root to them at all. There they are, brilliant and fascinating, full,—as they came from his mind,—of the vividness of life ; but how, after they quit that vivifying world, they are to renew their life, is precisely what his writings in prose, at least as much as in verse, utterly fail to show us. And that is why the books from which the "passages in prose" are culled, literally seem to come back to us in all their brilliancy, as we read the bright

mosaics here selected and happily pieced together from them. Mr. Arnold's leading thoughts are not mutilated by being pre- sented in this fragmentary form ; sometimes they are, as it

seems to us, rather gainers than losers by being thus detached and presented in an isolated form. If you find a cut flower stuck into the soil, you are disappointed; there you naturally look for a root, the source of more such blossoms, and if that is wanting, you almost lose your belief in the beauty of the blossom itself. But when you see the cut flower in its vase or glass,Iyou expect no such root, and dwell on its beauty, without asking for the stem from which it grew. And so it happens that to our minds many of these brilliant passages read almost better and more perfect in their detachment from the main discussions in which we expected, and failed, to find their root ideas, than they seemed when we met with them first, and puzzled ourselves in vain to discover whence they had been nourished and from what stock they had grown.

Take, for instance, this little passage, from Mr. Arnold's very striking little "Bible Reading for Schools," on the later chapters in Isaiah :—

" EXHILARATION OF HEBREW PROPHECY.—To make a great work pass into the popular mind is not easy ; but the series of chapters at the end of the Book of Isaiah, the chapters containing the great pro- phecy of Israel's restoration,—have, as has Hebrew prophecy in general, but to a still higher degree than anything else in Hebrew prophecy, one quality which facilitates this passage for them : their boundless exhilaration. Mach good poetry is profoundly melancholy ; now, the life of the people is such that in literature they require joy. If ever that 'good time coming,' for which they long, was presented with energy and magnificence, it is in these chapters; it is impossible to read them without catching its glow."

One cannot help asking whether there was no rational account of this " exhilaration " of the Hebrew prophet except poetics temperament. For all Mr. Arnold's works teach us, there was none. We must find a new source of joy,—that he tells us again and again. We cannot rely on the prophet's source of joy, his supposed communion with a Personal God, who could assure

him of His purposes,—that would be unscientific, would be out of keeping with the "modern spirit ;" but a source of joy,—if

possible a " verifiable " source of joy,—we must have. The millions, says his favourite poetic seer, Obermann,— " The millions suffer still and grieve, And what can helpers heal

With old-world cures men half-believe For what they wholly feel ?

And yet men have such need of joy, But joy whose grounds are true ; And joy that should all hearts employ As when the past was new !

What still of strength is left, employ This end to help attain :

One common ware of thought and joy Lifting mankind again."

But whence that wave is to come, Mr. Arnold has not ex- pounded to us, either in verse or prose. His favourite and reiterated prayer, " Exoriatur aliquis," is answered neither by himself nor by any one else. The joy of the Hebrew prophet was a joy with a reason, for the Hebrew prophet believed himself to be speaking the word of the Lord, who had created the world of the past, and knew what He was going to create in the future. But to demand intellectual exhila- ration without the vision which will give it,—or, to praise the pro- phet whose exhilaration was rooted in what Mr. Arnold thinks a

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tangle of false ideas as to a personal God and that God's personal communications with men,—is surely to ask for blossoms with- out any root from which they may spring, or else to praise the beauty of a weed rooted in festering conceits and decaying hallucinations. When Mr. Arnold exposes so mercilessly, as he thinks he does, the hallucinations from which the old prophetic " exhilaration " sprang, how can he complain if the exhilaration ceases, unless he can contrive,—which he never does contrive,—to substitute some hing in its place. Surely what Mr. Arnold wants is the cut flower of "exhilaration," without the root of faith from which it grew.

It is just the same when Mr. Arnold comes to his deeper thoughts,—to the distinction between "morality" and "re- ligion," to his explanation of "the secret of Jesus." Take the passage on the former subject :—

"MORALITY TOUCHED BY EMOTION.—The antithesis between ethical and religious is quite a false one. Ethical means practical, it relates to practice or conduct passing into habit or disposition. Religious also means practical, but practical in a still higher degree ; and the right antithesis to both ethical and religious, is the same as the right antithesis to practical : namely, theoretical.—Now, propositions about the Godhead of the Eternal Son are theoretical, and they therefore are very properly opposed to propositions which are moral or ethical ; but they are with equal propriety opposed to propositions which are religions. They differ in kind from what is religions, while what is ethical agrees in kind with it. But is there, therefore, no difference between what is ethical, or morality, and religion ? There is a difference ; a difference of degree. Religion, if we allow the intention of human thought and human language in the use of the word, is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling ; the passage from morality to religion is made when to morality is applied emotion. And the true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion. And this new elevation and inspiration of morality is well marked by the word righteousness.' Conduct is the word of common life, morality is the word of philosophical disquisi- tion, righteousness is the word of religion.--Literature and Dogma."

Here, again, Mr. Arnold demands an extraneous emotion to vivify the feeling of right conduct, and this extraneous emotion will transmute, he says, morality into religion. Perhaps,—when you get it. But where is it to come from P We all know where it comes from in Christ's teaching :—" 0 righteous Father, the world hath not known thee : but I have known thee : and these have known that thou bast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it : that the love wherewith thou hest loved me may be in them, and I in them." This is a very plain and manifest declaration of where the " emotion " is to come from with which the Christian's morality is to be "touched." It is to come from the love of the righteous Father, which Christ has declared ; which he has declared because he has known it ; and which his disciples have recognised as con- trolling and exalting his whole life. But Mr. Arnold positively asserts all this to be unknown and unknowable :—

"Tan STREAM OF TENDENCY.—Many excellent people are crying out every day, that all is lost in religion unless we can affirm that God is a person who thinks and loves. I say that, unless we can verify this, it is impossible to build religion successfully upon it ; and it cannot be verified. Even if it could be shown that there is a low degree of probability fir it, I say that it is a grave and fatal error to imagine that religion can be built on what has a low degree of pro bability. However, I do not think it can be said that there is even a low degree of probebility for the assertion that God is a person who thinks and loves, properly and naturally though we may make him such in the language of feeling ; the assertion deals with what is so utterly beyond us. But I maintain that, starting from what may be verified about God—that he is the Eternal which makes for right- eousness—and reading the Bible with this idea to govern us, we have here the elements for a religion more solid, serious, awe-inspiring, and profound, than any which the world has yet seen. True, it will not be just the same religion which prevails now; but who supposes that the religion now current can go on always, or ought to go on ? Nay and even of that much-decried idea of God as the dreant of ten- dency by which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being, it may be said with confidence that it has in it the elements of a religion new, indeed, but in the highest degree serious, hopeful, solemn, and profound.—Ood and the Bible."

Away, then, goes all the trustworthy basis of our Lord's declara- tion that it is love of a "righteous Father" which justifies the "emotion" on which all religion hinges. In the place of it, we are told to conceive of "a stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being," and as you certainly cannot love a stream of tendency, and in all probability it cannot love you, the whole foundation for the emotion with which Christ taught his disciples to contemplate the life of righteousness is at an end ; and we are driven back on the ordinary and cold conception of conduct, as that which is most expedient first for ourselves, and next for others. Here, then, is another cut flower which Mr. Arnold presents to us, the emotion with which right conduct ought to be accom-

panied, but the very source of which, so. far as it is distinct from the satisfaction in right conduct itself, he has attempted completely to dry up. It is the same with his eloquent delineation of "the secret of Jesus,"—that secret being the renunciation of "the ordinary self," instead of the assertion of the ordinary self, and the access to a well of living water which springs up from that renunciation of one's ordinary self. One asks at once what it is which secures us this living water ? Does it spring from the mere fact of self-renunciation P Are not the cases innumerable in which self-renunciation is mere self. mortification, and a well of bitter water, not a well of living water at all ? How does Christ explain the difference ? Thus : "I have not spoken of myself, but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment what I should say and what I should speak ; and I know that his commandment is life ever- lasting ; whatsoever I speak, therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak." This is Christ's own explanation of what Mr. Arnold calls "the sec'ret of Jesus." It is not bare self- renunciation. It is self-renunciation in order that a higher and more living will may be substituted for the self that is renounced. If you cut off this belief from its root; if you admit, as Mr. Arnold does, that the attributing of personal life and love to the "stream of tendency not ourselves" is a superstition for which we have no basis, the very flower of "the secret of Jesus" is severed from its root. Mr. Arnold's volume is full of bright and beautiful detached criticisms. But it is at once the charm of the volume, and the defect of some of the most im- portant and weighty of these thoughts, that they are not the worse,—nay, are even the better,—for being detached from the context which ought to constitute their justification, and fails to constitute it.