breathe his air, but not to live upon him.' For the same reason Arnold was never in touch with Shelley, that brilliant transgressor into the field of pure abstractions. Shelley too was in the void (the figure is borrowed from Joubert's), a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.' Or again, Marcus Aurelius, had he known the Christian writings, would have found in the Gospel of St. John, which has leavened Christendom so powerfully, too much Greek metaphysics, too much gnosis'; and we may assume that the real worth of the reflections of the Roman Emperor lies in their practical efficacy, in their richness of suggestion for the government of daily life. The utilitarian spirit which has gone so far to determine the English racial type, which has dominated the counsels political, religious, and social of the nation, and made the Englishman the most successful practical man of affairs the world has ever seen, has, nevertheless, severely circumscribed the sphere of his mental energy. It has denied to the race, as it denied to the Roman, any philosopher of the first rank; while in Berkeley despised Ireland was the mother of a son who takes rank with Plato as a primate in the hierarchy of thought as well as a master of style.

'All good poetry, all good literature, is a criticism of life,' said Arnold; and it is true of his own poetry

that it is such.

Whether there may or may not be

good literature other than this we need not stay to question. The poetry of Matthew Arnold, genuine poetry, is a criticism of life. perhaps the most perfect of his To Marguerite, beginning

Take as typical

poems, the lyric

"Yes! in the sea of life enisled.'

With what fidelity to human emotion does he here express that sense of solitariness that accompanies individuality, with what pathos invest it, with what subtle beauty shape it to a "lyrical cry'! But critical it is, nevertheless; a delineation of the conditions of life, a judgment upon them.

'Who ordered that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?—
A God, a God, their severance ruled !
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.'

To the critic the universe presents itself as a problem, or a series of problems; and as long as he can look on them impersonally, as he might on a proposition in the pure mathematics, he may exercise his intellect without feeling that his will is in any degree strengthened or impaired, his sorrows deepened, or the fountains of But the critic who joins to his critical faculty the temperament of the poet

his joy dried up.

is in no such happy case. He hangs upon the answers which are returned to his anxious questionings as upon words which, issuing from a final tribunal, make for life or death. Born into a critical period which had few fresh vital forces to arouse or sustain it, Arnold, while he preserved his zeal for high moral standards, became the prey of an unquiet mind. The restless century of his birth transformed him, sensitive as he was, too sensitive to remain unimpressed by it. Had he been less of a poet he might have escaped its influence; but the prevailing scepticism of the age, the atmosphere of doubt, of uncertainty, of anxiety, of fever, took from him the natural self-sufficingness, the inner dependence, which of all the gifts of health he felt to be the most precious. And throughout his poetry, expressive as it is of the longing for the spirit of the Greek life, a cheerful Stoic Epicurean acceptance' of things as they were, and a real delight in the environment thus acquiesced in, with all its longing for the spirit that was never sick or sorry— throughout his poetry there are few indications of the attainment of that serener air. When the note of its profoundest conviction falls upon our ears, it has far other sound :

'Ah love, let us be true

To one another, for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,
And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.'

In some sense a Greek born out of due season, Arnold was yet far separated from the Greek temper. May not a student go further and say that the scholars who have discovered the classic tone in his poetry have been misled by the classic cast, the simplicity, of its diction, into the belief that his kinship with the Greek is a close and vital one? The kinship is, I think, in reality superficial and slight. What were the motives of the poetry of the Attic stage, taking it as representative of Greek poetry in general? There is nothing more distinctly marked in Æschylus, in Sophocles, or in Euripides, than the simplicity and directness of the central motive, and the absence of secondary motives. There is nothing more characteristic of Arnold's poetry, as of all modern poetry, than the complexity of its motive-it is the battle-ground of varied and conflicting emotions, thoughts, passions. The analysis of the Weltschmerz, the world-pain which broods over modern life, and throws it into shadow, beside which the Greek life is bright with sunshine, this analysis is altogether foreign to classic art. Take another point. Arnold turns to Nature for a season of consolation. In her dispas

sionate calm he finds an anodyne for the hurrying fever of the soul—a conception so modern as to be almost new to ourselves, and one which never crossed the mind of a Greek poet, to whom Nature (at most) supplies the landscape in his background -a simple and slightly sketched landscape, while as in real life the figures of men occupy and animate the foreground.

One idea, however, a central idea in the developed philosophy we owe to Greece, Arnold seems to make his own. In his revolt from the intense individualism of modern ethics, in his desire to render up his own private, partial, and narrow life for the universal, wide, and elemental movement of the whole, to receive the spirit and join in the order of the Cosmos, to enter thus into the great harmonic progression of the living All, which is the interpretation of the maxim ζῆν κατὰ φύσιν—here he is more of a Greek thinker than elsewhere :

""Ah, once more," I cried, "ye stars, ye waters,

On my heart your mighty charm renew;

Still, still let me as I gaze upon you
Feel my soul becoming vast like you!"

From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven,
Over the lit sea's unquiet way,

In the rustling night air came the answer,

"Wouldst thou be as these are? Live as they."

"Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undistracted by the sights they see,