MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD ON THE ARISTOCRATIC CREED.
114.R. MAI:MEW ARNOLD is the apostle of the "grand .111 style." When he descends into the arena of mortal con- flict it is with the stately step and compassionate air of the silver- bowed Apollo, who comes to release some sufferer from mortal toils with his painless but unerring shafts. He has just mani- fested himself in this way, in the earthly disguise of " Macmillan's. Magazine," to the Bishop of Natal, whom he transfixes with a lofty smile. For ourselves, we have already explained our grounds of difference from the book of the Bishop of Natal, and we concur in Mr. Arnold's criticisms on the literary narrowness of his work.. But on the issue raised by Mr. Arnold against the Bishop of Natal, we hold much more with the victim than with the godlike critic- who intervenes to slay him on the altar of his admiration for the- calm intellectual benignity of Benedict Spire' t. Mr. Arnold's view, like all M.r. Arnold's views, is beautif ully explained, in that lucid style which a true intellectual poet generally commands, and with that thoughtful condescension to the weakness of humanity which is Mr. Matthew Arnold's most characteristic literary virtue. It is not easy to condense language so perfectly adapted to its purpose. But we must try and do so as much as possible, in his own words.
Mr. Arnold holds that "knowledge and truth, in the. full sense of the words, are not attainable by the great mass- of the human race at all. The great mass of the hessian race have to be softened and humanized through their heart and imagination, before any soil can be found in them where knowledge can strike living roots. Until the softening and humanizing process is very far advanced, intellectual demonstrations are uninforming for them ; and if they impede the working of influences which advance- this softening and humanizing proems, they are even noxious they retard their development, they impede the culture of the' world." Hence Mr. Arnold divides all works on religious subjects- into the merely "edifying," which are intended only to advance- the.humanizing proems for the masses, works "which aiim at edify- ing the little-instructed," and the cultivating books, those which tend to "inform further the much-instructed." On the former, literary criticism has nothing, he thinks, to my. They are works of good intention, and probably add somethi g to the- moulding of the plebeian intellect into a more manageable shape. With the latter class, as enlarging the culture of the world, literary criticism has essentially to deal; and on the class of books which. fulfil neither purpose,—which cannot plead exemption from criti- cism on grounds of edification, which cannot justify their title to, tolerance as works tending to raise the level of culture,—criticisna has to wreak the vengeance of literary annihilation. Accordingly,. Mr. Arnold launches his dart at the Bishop of Natal first, and with a modified air of scorn at ths seven Essayists and RevMwers,—not. as false teachers, scarcely even as imperfect teachers,—but for the unpardonable crime of forcing on a collision between the esoteric- philosophy of the learned, and the exoteric doctrine which it is wholesome for the multitude to believe,—for addressing themselves neither to the initiated nor to the uninitiated, but attempting to break down the barrier between the two. Not so, he tells us, thought Benedict Spinoza. He wrote in Latin whatever he thought might. sap vulgar faith if translated into the vernacular, and the drift of all his works was to raise the calibre of cultivated thought without endangering the basis of ignorant belief,—an assertion which_ Mr. Arnold substantiates by an able resume of his criticism on the Bible. "When in 1861,"—thus he concludes his judgment,—the Bishop of Natal "heard for the first time that the old theory of the verbal inspiration of Scripture was untenable, he should, instead of proclaiming this news (if this was all he could proclaim) in an octavo volume, have remembered that excellent saying of the wise man:—'If thou bast heard a word let it clie with thee, and behold it will not burst thee.'"
Now we are not going to defend raw and wilfully imperfect criticism of religious problems in general, or the criticism of the Bishop of Naiad in particular, which we think very imperfect and even distorted, in effect, though not wilfully so. No doubt the snore solemn the subject, or the more closely the subject is inter- twined with the solemn thoughts of others, the more clearly does this responsibility of fully maturing our convictions before pub- lishing them, press upon us. But we are no judg,es of what is and what is not mature or immature to another man. Every one has not, like Mr. Arnold, the serene eye which can "See his steadily, and see it whole ;" and we regard the tenet that because of such imperfection we are to suppress our mature convictions and the grounds for them till we can be sure that they satisfy Mr. Arnold's criteria, as essentially pagan in conception, and not even pagan of the highest school. The assumption that you can diStinguish what truth is " edifying " for the uninstructed many, and what will be im- proving to the instructed few, is open to two very radical objec- tions,—first, that it implies, generally at least, that these esoteric truths do not command the mind at all, or they would not permit you to shelve them so quietly in these mental cupboards ; next it assumes that you can so far survey the world of truth as to de- cide, in God's place, what truth is fitted for the common herd., and what for your intellectual aristocracy. Both these assumptions seem to us to belong essentially to that pallid school of aristocratic philosophy, which has numbered among its disciples a few great intellects, but certainly no very great man. Mr. Arnold enume- rates casually among its adherents, the son of Sira.ch, who may be excused, perhaps, for esotericism more readily than a Christian ; Plato, who, in his most Socratic dialogues at least, teaches directly the reverse; Dr. Newman, who felt so keenly the defects of this aristocratic theory of rationality for the few and imagina- tion for the many, that he plunged into the spurious catholicity of Rome in great measure to escape it ; —and of all othergreat teachers in the world, the last a really critical intellect would have thought of as endorsing an esoteric system,—Christ himself, whose life was given to preach the gospel to the poor. Surely Mr. Arnold has dealt unfairly with his own fine critical faculty, when he can quote a remarkable saying of our Lord's with an exactly opposite drift, only in order to adduce a fresh witness to the value of an esoteric teaching for the few and an imaginative course of fiction for the many. The "few," in this last special plea of Mr. Arnold's, are the uninstructed ,fishermen, deep in all the prejudices of the Hebrew nation; and the thread at which he catches is the answer given to the following question : "And the disciples came and mid unto him,. Why speakeat thou unto us in parables? He answered and said, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever bath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundantly; but from whom. scorer bath not, from him shall be taken away even that which he bath. Therefore speak I to them in parables, because they seeing see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand." If Mr. Arnold's critical faculty fails to discover in this passage, as in the whole life of Christ on earth, a protest against esoteric doctrine, we fear that even kis critical acumen has waxed gross, and that his ear is dull of hearing. Christ expressly says that He adopts both
• with the outer world and" his own,"—not the ‘, little-instructed and the much-instructed" of Mr. Arnold, but the sleeping conscience of the Pharisee or Publican and the awakened conscience of the few disciples,—the method most directly adapted to quicken it with the new light. That method was not by holding up a screen between that light and the common herd, but by appealing to them wherever they had least lost the sense of spiritual truth. To have talked to them of the Spirit of God directly was (he says) not dangerous (as Mr. Arnold says), not "unsettling," but simply dull, useless,—they had not learned to live in the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven, as the disciples had begun to live. It would have been speaking to the idle air to speak to them of the naked spiritual world ; because seeing the outward forms they saw not the inward spiiit,— hearing the outward words they heard not the divine thought. They had ceased to see what once they saw, to hear what once they heard, because while they saw and heard they had not acted. From them who had not was taken away gradually much that they had. He could but seize on their spirits, therefore, on the side where the last remnant of real life lingered, and speak to them in that language of the organic world, which still retained a signifi-
cance for them, of the seed on the beaten highway, on the stony ground, among the thorns, and on the good soil. And these parables are not chosen in order to conceal and soften but in order to transmit and embody a deeper meaning. This avenue was still open : on this side there was still a public conscience. The husbandman knew the law of growth, and felt it a sacred law. Here, then, Christ began. The parable was not chosen as a veil, but as a medium of living power ;—not to veil what He dared not declare openly, but to help to unveil it. And Mr. Arnold must well know that nothing is so absolutely counter even in a literary sense to what we may call the genius of Chris- tianity, as a reserved esoteric teaching for the few, and a purposely alloyed gospel for the many.
But, in truth, Mr. Arnold's teaching can only apply to the frigid artistic perceptions of such teachers as Goethe. For them it may be possible to reserve a mature conviction, for their mind is not bound by such conviction, not conquered by it, but merely playing with it. With true convictions it is impossible. They may be firebrands which will set the nations in a blaze, still the mind will "burst" with them, for it serves them, not they the mind. Was it not Dr. Arnold who once said of a mere political truth that if he did not write a pamphlet to set it forth his mind would burst? Has the classical culture of the poet blinded him W- all sympathy with this feeling ? Or does he think that a man possessed by a truth can calmly survey the intellectual world and say whether that truth is, or is not, for the good of the people at large? We do feel sincerely the misleading effect of Dr. Colenso's book on the general meaning of Revelation; and yet we conceive that he himself is far nearer to the frame of mind of a servant of the truth, with his energetic, critical arithmetic, than Mr. Arnold, with his aristocratic forbearance from injuring the prejudices of the multitude. Are we to be judges of the good and ill of truth, or He who is Truth? May not Dr. Colenso or Mr. Jewett believe in their inmost hearts that textualism is killing faith,—that it would be better for thousands of our clergy to be liberated at once from the profound and enslaving delusion of a God imprisoned in the letters of a book? And if a delusion so gigantic can be slain by a stone from the sling of a humble arithmetician, ought we not to be glad that it is discharged, however much we are convinced that the arithmetical error does not slay the revelation? To us it seems that no truth, how- ever humble, of which, and of the importance of which, Our own conscience testifies, can be detained in aristocratic seclusion in our own hearts without killing the very soul within us. If there be error mixed up with it, God is not so weak that He cannot choose other instruments to expose the error. The consequences are not for us to calculate. 'The impulse to proclaim all truth that opens new light to our own minds, is one which Mr. Arnold seems either to ignore or despise. He sings somewhere of his favourite hero-
" For he pursued a lonely road, His eyes on Nature's plan,
Neither Made man too much a God,
Nor God too much a man."
To us, part of the last sentence seems profoundly false. Goethe, and all others of this aristocratic, esoteric, common-herd-compas- sionating school, make man far too much a God—nay, raise him above God,—for they place truth at his feet, and endow him with the power to discriminate between the "much-instructed," whom truth will not injure, and the "little instructed," whom it will. There is but one logical conclusion to such a faith. The intellectual aris- tocracy which once site serenely weighing the day of concealing or proclaiming truth will soon wish
"To live and lie reclined On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind."
To this conclusion even the apostle of "the grand style" will scarcely wish to lead us.
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