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showing itself vigorously in any part of the community, and to encourage its works" (Culture and Anarchy, second edition, p. 115). That is what Mr. Arnold would himself have called a heightened and telling way of putting it. But he was attacking a real error, of which practical politics afford numerous examples. It is difficult to be personal without being offensive. If I could avoid offence by taking two instances from the same party, I should say that Mr. Chamberlain represented the theory assailed by Mr. Arnold (for which there is much to be said), and Mr. Balfour the theory he would have substituted for it.

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Culture, says Mr. Arnold in his Preface (page x.), is a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world." In this respect no man ever practised what he preached more thoroughly than Matthew Arnold. To use a phrase widely current of late, he was "the fine flower of Oxford culture," and there has seldom been a more delicate, or a more delightful specimen. Yet he belonged, as he often said, to the middle class, whom he called Philistines, implying that culture was what they lacked. Philistinism is a convenient and expressive term. But it describes a frame of mind, not a class. Mr. Arnold, as I have said before, used the word "class" as if it were synonymous with caste, which in English society does not exist. Common occupations, common professions, above all, intermarriage, make it impossible. There is nothing, except his title, to distinguish a lord from a commoner. The richest people are not the best educated, nor the worst. Mr. Arnold called "the aristocracy," which he would have been

puzzled to define, barbarians, because they cared more for field sports than for the improvement of their minds. Some of them do, some of them do not. There is no rule. The love of sport pervades the working classes as well as the House of Lords. Mr. Arnold's name for the proletariate was a confession of failure. He simply called them "the populace," which is no more descriptive than Mr. Bright's "residuum." The English people do not live in classes, they live as individuals, and in sets. Culture and ignorance, simplicity and vulgarity, high and low ideals, are pretty equally divided among all sections of the community. Mr.

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"undesirable provincialism of the English Puritans and Protestant Nonconformists." If by provincialism (a rather "provincial" word) is meant narrowness of view, it might apply to the school of Mr. Spurgeon, but it certainly would not apply to the school of Dr. Martineau. It would be as reasonable to lump Dr. Creighton with Dr. Ryle because both were Anglican Bishops.

In Culture and Anarchy, Mr. Arnold preaches his favourite doctrine of "sweetness and light." The phrase, as he acknowledged, is Swift's. Swift used it of the bees, because they make honey and wax. Mr. Arnold transferred it to the operation of culture, which would, if it could, "make reason and the will of God prevail." He contrasted it with the motto of the Nonconformist newspaper: "The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." It is easy to be sarcastic upon this pugnacious device, and to quote St. Peter's "Be of one mind"; but without Protestantism, which is a form of Dissent,

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Mr. Arnold's books would have been condemned and suppressed. The religious freedom in which he so lavishly indulged, was secured for him by the objects of his constant gibes. Mr. Arnold's official connection with Oxford had now ceased, but her hold upon his allegiance was undiminished. "We have not won our political battles," he says, at page 32, "we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries' advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries' position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the future." Who are "we"? Mr. Arnold means Oxford men, and he refers to the Oxford Movement. But Oxford would have condemned Newman's most famous Tract if two High Church proctors had not interfered, and the same Oxford actually degraded Dr. Ward for writing a High Church book. The intellectual, as distinguished from the political, Liberalism of Oxford dates from the admission of Nonconformists. It is only fair to add, before leaving this part of the subject, that Mr. Arnold himself acknowledges his tripartite division of society not to be mutually exclusive. "An English barbarian who examines himself," he says, on page 96, "will in general find himself to be not so entirely a barbarian, but that he has in him also something of the Philistine, and even something of the Populace as well. And the same with Englishmen of the other two classes." Just so. But, then, what is the value of the classification? One is reminded of Thurlow's famous remark about Kenyon and Buller. A rule with too many exceptions ceases to be a rule at all.

"No man," says Mr. Arnold, at page 163, "no man who knows nothing else knows even his Bible." The sentiment is familiar; and Mr. Rudyard Kipling has performed a variation upon it in his celebrated, but fallacious, inquiry, "What can they know of England who only England know?" The answer to Mr. Kipling is-"Everything, if they read the newspapers." Mr. Arnold was aiming at Mr. Spurgeon, but he hit Bunyan without meaning it. If stupid people would read the Bible less, and clever people would read it more, the world would be much improved. The objects of Mr. Arnold's just scorn were not really men who confined themselves to the Bible, but those who tried to serve God and Mammon. Such, for example, was a late Chairman of the Great Western Railway, who quoted to the workmen at Swindon the beautiful sentence uttered to him every morning by his mother when he went to work on the line. "Ever remember, my dear Dan," said the good lady, "that you should look forward to being some day manager of that concern." The words of the Gospel were fulfilled in Dan. He had his reward. He did become manager of that not very well-managed concern. He was outwardly more fortunate than the secretary of the insurance company who committed suicide because he "laboured under the apprehension that he would come to poverty, and that he was eternally lost." Against the vulgar degradation of religion, as unchristian as it is gloomy and sordid, implied in these awful words, Matthew Arnold set his face, and so far he followed the teaching of Christ.

Mr. Arnold had now a European reputation as a man of letters, and at the beginning of 1869 the Italian

Government proposed to him that Prince Thomas of Savoy, the Duke of Genoa, who a year afterwards refused the crown of Spain, should live with the Arnolds at Harrow while he attended the school. The proposal would not have been attractive to every one, but it suited Mr. Arnold very well. He was sociable in his tastes, and cosmopolitan in his sympathies. He had travelled a good deal on the Continent, and knew foreign languages well. Mrs. Arnold had no objection, and she, after all, as he remarked to his mother, was the person most concerned. The arrangement answered perfectly, and Mr. Arnold, who loved young people, became very fond of the prince. The boy was a Roman Catholic, but there seems to have been no apprehension that Mr. Arnold would subvert his faith; and when he left Harrow in 1871, his host received from Victor Emmanuel "the Order of Commander of the Crown of Italy." Mr. Arnold's failure in getting a Commissionership under his brother-in-law's Endowed Schools' Act he attributed, no doubt correctly, to Mr. Gladstone; but the disappointment was not very keen, and when the Conservatives came into power five years afterwards, they put a summary end to the Commission. On the other hand, he thoroughly appreciated the honorary degree conferred upon him by his own University at the Commemoration of 1870. The list was made out by the new Chancellor, Lord Salisbury, who had succeeded Lord Derby the year before, and none of the names chosen did more credit to his choice than Mr. Arnold's. He was presented to Lord Salisbury by his friend Mr. Bryce, the Professor of Civil Law, and received by graduates as well as undergraduates with a heartiness which greatly pleased him.

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