THE MODERN DILEMMA his problems were, mutatis mutandis, ours, and

his resolution of them, however partial, a very important step in the integra-

tion of Action and Contemplation. Mr. Trilling has seen that to tell Arnold's story usefully must be to concentrate on the very complex evolution of the inner man ; this he has done, touching lightly but sufficiently on the exterior events, in a book that deserves to be called wonderful—for its clarity and brilliance, its profundity and scholarship, its fairness and wit.

In all its 406 admirably written pages there is not one flat sentence—a considerable feat. Thrillingly interesting, this book is the work of a wise and clever man who has read widely and never failed to connect what he read.

After first sketching out the shape of the young Arnold's problem, Mr. Trilling, in a chapter which could scarcely be better, fills in the background—Dr. Arnold, his character and his England. From this emerges the conclusion that the father's lifelong contest, on the side of Morality versus Dogma, was paralleled in the development of the son's political thought. Hereafter, for some time, poetry holds the stage— the poetry of The Strayed Reveller, The New Sirens, and Resignation. The latter was a temporary feature in Arnold's life—a phase whose end is marked by thc expostulation with Clough over the latter's defeatist view of life. Arnold's Wehschmerz was quite as real as his friend's, but his spiritual toughness prevented him from weakening into an English equivalent—not of his admired Senancour, whose own despair was alike offset by a stoic insight into his true position—but of the woolly Amid. Melancholy is the most disintegrative of the passions, because it is so negative : abortive hatred turned back upon the self. For a time Arnold seems to have believed in "controlled self-pity " ; but he soon found that that way lay invalidism or madness, and ended by finding the true answer in Goethe.

"No one has a stronger and more abiding sense than I have of the ' daemonic ' element . . . which underlies and encompasses our life ; but I think, as Goethe thought, that the right thing is, while conscious of this element, and of all that there is inexplicable round one, to keep pushing on one's posts into the darkness, and to establish no post that is not perfectly in light and firm."

he wrote to his mother in 1865; but years before this he had written the line : "Resolve to be thyself." The slow but steady evolution of the malleable personality into character had begun before Arnold himself was fully aware of it ; it shows in his early poems, in Empedokles, and in his choice of heroes. He refused any " escape " ; for him art is never a self-sufficient activity, as witness the famous definition (which, however, as Mr. Trilling observes, does not define poetry, but only describes what poetry does). Those who take this view of art will tend to resume their lives in what they write, and Mr. Trilling squeezes every drop of pignificance from the poetry.

The transition which so agonised Matthew Arnold is one which everyone must make ; but if it is made at the proper (i.e., the body's) time, it does not cause so prolonged an agony, nor trail so much regret. The later the break is made, the more is left behind, so to speak—as an old tooth, when extracted, is apt to tear away pieces of the jaw. A bulwark must then be found—in Arnold's case what he called Tuchtig- keit (capability), which took the concrete form of the Chair of Poetry at Oxford and an Inspectorship of Schools. Such things open out on to life—into action, away from contemplation— and the resulting decline of Joy (= poetic wonder) spelt the gradual retirement of the Muse. The two Obermann poems are the milestones on this Via Crucis, and Mr. Trilling is careful not to underrate the importance of Senancour in Arnold's life. He could in no case have ignored that name

and Goethe's ; that he has also invoked those of Balzac, Vigny, Gobineau, Stendhal, Baudelaire and Brandes (to mention but

a few), are signs not only of true cleverness on his part, but of the importance of Arnold's position in nineteenth-century history. Every current of thought and feeling met in him, and was inflected. He attacked the problem of life from many angles—literary, political, religious ; but Mr. Trilling makes it clear that he never succeeded in his main endeavour, which was to "see the object as it really is."

Culture and Anarchy (and its poetical epilogue, Obermann Once More), is the crux of Arnold's career as a thinker, and

it is primarily an affirmation of the truth of the human soul. The latter may now be defined as that interior regulator which says no to anti-social conduct and prompts the actions of love —a definition which avoids mysticism and a reference to supernatural sanctions. Arnold, I think, perceived this, but the language in which he proclaims it (the passage is quoted by Mr. Trilling on p. 342) dances round the central ptoblem.

"Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends ; " he had written, in an early poem. But it is significant that Spinoza provided—as he so often does, for sensitive intellec-

tuals—the alibi which enabled Arnold to eat the cake of Christianity and have it. " Culture " meant "reason experi- enced as a kind of grace by each citizen, the conscious effort of each man to come to the realisation of his complete man- hood." Unfortunately for Arnold, Spinozism squares ill with a church, just because it can do without one. Arnold's defini- tion of religion is on a par with his definition of poetry. "Morality touched by emotion" may have satisfied him, but to us it seems a shuffle, because it balks the fundamental issue of the historical and objective truth of Christianity "That Christianity is true : that is, after all, the one thing that Arnold cannot really say." The result of this shuffle was an ama- teur's view of religion. It was to be considered as an expres- sion of Beauty ; dogma was to take a back seat and poetry (but not Arnold's) was to come to the fore. The fact is that Arnold clung to Christianity as he felt his poetical inspiration deserting him—hypostatised it out of the poetry he could no longer write.

Yet when it came down to the brass tacks of political con- flict in the England of the sixties, Arnold knew that "the way of Spinoza is not enough for most men." And he did not see how it could be made enough ; the "possible Socrates in each man's breast" was but another phrase ; and his politi- cal speculation foundered on the rock that has proved too much for many a sensitive spirit. As Mr. Trilling drily puts it :

"Out of the belief that the best self, Hero or State, is in touch with the order of the universe . . . may flow chauvinism imperial- ism, Governor Eyre the white man's burden—all the things which make us turn to Mill and scepticism, well-nigh willing to rest in ' anarchy.' " But the "crude issue of power" is a stumbling-block only to those who found their system of thought on Hegel, who—as can now be seen—threw the largest monkey-wrench of all into the delicate motor of human progress, driving (to change the metaphor) a wedge between word and meaning, and confusing a tout jamais the fundamental issues of epistemology. Neither Arnold nor those who came after him were able to see that the Best Self, the General Will (Rousseau), the Collective Man, the State, are all posterior to the question of the individual psyche and its development from childhood into adulthood.

To the last Matthew Arnold saw the object, not as it really is, but at one remove. This was the burden of Walt Whitman's criticism, and it was justified. It was a temperamental, as much as an intellectual, failure. Everything, with Arnold, tended to turn into something else, as he looked at it, because the contemplation was unaccompanied by action. His contacts were always mediate, and nothing is more fatal. Even in the affairs of his heart, he seems to have been remarkably—even pathetically—inadequate. Mr. Trilling sensibly refuses to play the traditional game of Spillikins with the story of

Marguerite, but he puts his finger on the spot by adroitly enlisting the testimony of Baudelaire. "It is simplicity which saves. . . . Love should be love." Arnold relinquished the girl, whoever she was, because he knew that his love for her was not love, as she, a simpler nature, conceived it.

Here once again the poems fill the gap : Dover Beach is there to console us for the inadequacies of its author's thought. When poetically inspired, Arnold no longer shuffles ; here the object is seen as it is ; love really is love. As a poet he kept to the last that grave fluency, rendered poignant by single lines of memorable loveliness, which makes his poetry the opposite of Swisiburne's, for example ; so that one prizes it more, not less, as one grows older. He is the perfect poet of middle age, when vague hopes have given place to energetic resignation.

Such are some of the reflections induced by a book of which it would, I think, be hard to overestimate the value. I personally have no hesitation in acclaiming it as the most brilliant piece of biographical criticism issued in English