MATTHEW ARNOLD IN IkLE UNITED STATES.

WHETHER Mr. Arnold proves or does not prove the subject of intense interest in the -United States, we have probably never lent to the United States any man of genius who is more

likely at once to excite and to tantalise the intelligent curio- sity with which he must be regarded. It is not that the phase of culture which Matthew Arnold represents is at all specially rare in the "United States. In Massachusetts at least, Mr. Clough,—Matthew Arnold's intimate friend and brother- poet—found himself almost more at home than even in the Old Country. And Matthew Arnold himself, who was swift to appreciate the genius of Emerson, to whom indeed one of his own earliest sonnets was written, has shown in all his writings that perfect lucidity and serenity, that desire to gaze wistfully into the future, while discriminating all the -beauty sif the past, that subtle love of irony, and that freedom from any- thing like undue deference to authority, which may be said to dis- tinguish especially the highest culture of New England. .Never- theless, we believe that Matthew Arnold will pique and tanta- lise the curiosity which he must excite as few Englishmen have ever piqued and tantalised it before. For he-will present to those who crowd to hear him the singular spectacle of 'a genius formed entirely by the old world, and richly endowed with the power of writing the most lucid and graphic epitaphs on some of the greatest epochs of the old world,—on the wisdom of Greece,—on the meditative rapture of the East, —on the piety of Roman Stoicism,—on the vision of the Cross,—on mediaeval asceticism,—on Goethe's calm, self-centred insight,—on the despair of unbelief,—and on the ardour of revolutionary hope, —who is nevertheless prepared to face the future quite undis- mayed, and that with no better weapon, as it seems to us, than that of the dignity of manner which the memory of the great past inspires. Emerson at least believed in democracy, believed in the new institutions, believed in the growing power of man. His calm confidence was derived from some transcendental faith in the power of the multiplying millions to manifest more adequately, as they multiplied, the transcendental divinity of his semi-pantheistic faith. Matthew Arnold, so far as we can see, has no such superstition. The more numerous are the hosts of the Philistines, the less he hopes from them. They do not dig- may him, he is too robust in the triple brass of his culture for that, but he defies them. " Dii me torrent," he says, " et Jupiter hostis." But he has little hope in the masses.

"Not here, 0 Apollo !

Are haunts meet for thee, But where Helicon breaks down In cliffs to the sea,"

will be his feeling, as he looks at the mighty volume of human energy which will meet him in the United States. Democracy has never inspired him with any enthusiasm, and republican institu- tions will probably win from him no cry of admiration. Emanci- pated man, while he remains, as he probably always will remain, for the most part uncultivated man,—man with the instinct of self-preservation and self-assertion still unrefined within him, —elicits no brilliant augury of hope from Matthew Arnold And yet, while Mr. Arnold has no prophecy inspired by political Utopianism to utter, he obtains nothing from his exquisite insight into the past on which he can rely to mould the world of the future, except only what is, of all things, least likely to mould it, that tradition of antique stateliness and dignity which the past has bequeathed to us. He will praise to the busy Yankees, Sophocles,—

"Whose even balanced soul, From first youth tested up to extreme old age, Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily and saw it whole, The mellow glory of the Attic Stage, Singer of sweet Colonns and •his child."

He will praise Goethe to them, and tell them that,- - "he pursued a lonely 'road,

His eyes on Nature's plan; Neither made man too much a God, Nor God too much a mad."

He will praise Wordsworth, of whom he has told us,— "He found us when the age bad bound Our souls in its benumbing round; He spoke and loosed our hearts in tears, Helaid us, as 4ve-bi sUbitith.

On the cool, flowering lap of earth ; Smiles broke from ns, and we had ease ; The hills were o'er us, and the breeze Went o'er the sunlit fields again ; Our foreheads felt the wind and rain, Oar youth return' d, for there was shed On spirits that had long been dead, Spirits dried np and closely furl'd, The freshness of the early world."

But he has no secret for restoring to us the even balance of Sophocles, or the commanding intelligence of Goethe, or the fresh insight of Wordsworth. He can revivify for us the stately humility of the East, and the grand imperiousness of Rome, and the cloistered sanctity of the middle-ages ; but he has no spell,—he believes in no spell,—for the reanimation of a past world. Ask him of his hopes, and you find that they consist chiefly in borrowing dignity from the past, without borrowing the creeds on which that dignity was fed. This is the burden of his song :— " Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead, Your social order, too !

Where tarries he, the Power who said,— ' See, I make all things new r "

And he cannot answer his own question except by vainly invoking joy from unknown and unknowable sources :- " What still of strength is left, employ, This end to help attain : One common ware of thought and joy Lifting mankind again."

But whence " the common wave of thought and joy" is to flow, he cannot tell us.

Yet, while Mr. Arnold keeps his secret carefully as to the source of this renovating power, it is obvious that, in his poetry at least, and partly, perhaps, also in his criticism, his irony, and the badinage directed against Philistines, Puritans, Parlia- mentary statesmen, and the " young lions " of the Daily Press, he has not lost hopes of " the common wave of thought and joy " which he invokes. His attitude towards the future is never pessimist, though he is so scornful of the present. The strong vitality in him appears to surge up in the form of vague revolutionary hopes, though he never finds the germs of what he hopes for in the methods and the institutions which he criticises. Still, though while making light of all the actual agencies of his time, he falls back upon the nobler past with a dignified and sometimes a lyrical melancholy, he finds somewhere,—we presume, in the never-failing spring of poetic impulse,--the secret of an unaccountable hope. He prophesies sternly against all he sees, and yet he cannot persuade himself to prophesy anything but good,—however dim,—of the future. This, is his tone :—

" This tract which the river of Time Now flows through with us, is the plain. Gone is the calm of its earlier shore. Border'd by cities, and hoarse With a thousand cries is its stream. And we on its breast, our minds Are confused as the ories which we hear, Changing and shot as the sights which we see.

And we say that repose has fled For ever the course of the river of Time.

That cities will crowd to its edge, In a blacker, incessanter line ; That the din will be more on its banks, Denser the trade on its stream, Flatter the plain where it flows, Mercer the sun overhead.

That never will those on its breast See an ennobling sight, Drink of the feeling of quiet again.

But what was before us, we know not, And we know not what shall succeed.

Haply the river of Time,— As it grows, as the towns on its merge

Fling their wavering lights

On a wider, statelier stream,—

May acquire, if not the calm Of its early mountainous shore, Yet a solemn peace of its own.

And the width of the waters, the hush Of the grey expanse where he floats, Freshening its current and spotted with foam As it draws to the Ocean, may strike Peace to the soul of the man on its breast,— As the pale waste widens around him, As the banks fade dimmer away, As the stars come oat, and the night wind Brings up the stream

Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea."

That is Matthew Arnold's prevailing tone,—condemnation of all the actual tendencies of his time, hopelessness of its actual forces, but vague hope, nevertheless, of somewhat of which he can give no account. It is so in his religious criticism. While reducing all faith in God to a dim confidence in "the stream. of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," he yet claims the privilege to speak of that " stream of tendency " in the grand and awful strains of Isaiah, and with the solemn certainty and tenderness of Christ. He explains "the secret of Jesus,"—the secret of the Cross,—as being nothing, more than the discovery that if you look beneath your super- ficial impulses and wishes, you will find a truer life which feeda 'itself upon the denial of these superficial impulses and wishes. He ridicules as untrue dogma all those explanations of that fact which refer this growth of the spirit, to life in a personal Gud and saviour. He will admit nothing but the bare fact that by• giving the go-by to your strongest desires, a deeper life willhe reached, and will be found fruitful in peace and strength. But of the revealed explanation of such peace and strength he will' not hear a word. He insists that all the sources of hope which the human race have hitherto discovered are dreamy and base- less, but hope he will have nevertheless, and harps on his mighty wave of thought and joy lifting mankind again" as if he actually discerned its approach. All that the Republicans of the United States lean upon with confidence, he will probably declare to be a broken reed. But he will bear a radiant countenance all the same, and will not abandon his—must we not call it P—superstitions hope. There.. 'fore we say that he will pique and tantalise the good people, whom he has gone to see. They will trace in him at• ones the buoyant gaze of a seer, and the negative creed on which' pessimism is usually founded. They will find in him a welbof poetry which compels him to look with hope on the future, while he despises all the living seeds of that future which he discerns in the present. He undermines for us our best hopes with one breath, and invokes strength and joy with the next. He rejects the deepest religion of the day, the best political institution& of the day, and the clearest social tendencies of the day, yes, rejects them with scorn; and yet Emerson himself could hardly have put on a look of the same buoyancy and radiance as Mr. Arnold, when he turns his face towards the new heavens and the new earth, not of his creed, but of his poetic day-dream.