from the whole matter is that the law of supply and demand will not suffice for education in the true sense of the word. What made it, according to his view, more efficient in France than in England was first supervision, and secondly publicity. To the familiar maxim that the State had better leave things alone he opposed Burke's definition of the State as beneficence acting by rule. From Burke's political philosophy Mr. Arnold drew most of his own lessons in politics, and, as an inspector of schools appointed by the State, it was natural that he should disbelieve in the sufficiency of private enterprise. So far as elementary education was concerned, he had his way. He lived to see it made compulsory, though not to see it made free. The upper and middle classes were left to educate themselves, or to go uneducated, as they pleased.

CHAPTER VI

ESSAYS IN CRITICISM

MR. ARNOLD was, as we have seen, elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857. The election was for a period of five years, but in accordance with custom he was re-elected for a similar term in 1862. He had more than justified the choice of the university, and his literary reputation was firmly established. At that time Mr. Disraeli was Leader of the Conservative party in the House of Commons, and at the very height of his Parliamentary powers. No politician except Lord Palmerston had then more influence in the country, for Mr. Gladstone's popularity was to come, and Lord Derby's never came. At Aston Clinton, Sir Anthony de Rothschild's house in Buckinghamshire, where he was in the habit of staying, Mr. Arnold met Mr. Disraeli on the 27th of January 1864. Mr. Disraeli was always at his best with men of letters. He sincerely respected them, and was proud to be one of their number. On this occasion he was very gracious to Mr. Arnold. "You have a great future before you," he said, "and you deserve it." He then went on to add that he had given up literature because he was not one of those who could do two things at once, but that he admired most the men like Cicero, who could. Bishop Wilberforce was another guest, and preached the next day a sermon which, in Mr.

Arnold's opinion, showed him to have no "real power of mind." "A truly emotional spirit," Mr. Arnold wrote to his mother, "he undoubtedly has, beneath his outside of society-haunting and men-pleasing, and each of the two lives he leads gives him the more zest for the other." It was clearly the Bishop from whom Mr. Arnold drew the type that "make the best of both worlds." There are probably few who would deny that he correctly estimated "the great lord bishop of England," as Wilberforce's satellites liked to call him, and as he liked to be called. His appreciation of Tennyson, on the other hand, was utterly inadequate. "I do not," he wrote to Mr. Dykes Campbell on the 22nd of September 1864, "I do not think Tennyson a great and powerful spirit in any line, as Goethe was in the line of modern thought, Wordsworth in that of contemplation, Byron even in that of passion; and unless a poet, especially a poet at this time of day, is that, my interest in him is only slight, and my conviction that he will not finally stand high is firm." It is strange that any critic should attribute want of sympathy with modern thought to the author of In Memoriam. It is stranger still that he should consider Byron a greater poet than Tennyson. But, for some reason or other, Mr. Arnold did not appreciate his English contemporaries. That reason was certainly not envy or jealousy, for of such feelings he was incapable. As his friend Lord Coleridge said, they "withered in his presence." The prejudice did not apply to foreigners. He idolised Sainte-Beuve. Nor was it strictly confined to contemporaries. He was never just to Shelley, and not till the close of his life to Keats. He seems to have got it into his head

that Tennyson was being "run" against Wordsworth, which is the last thing that Tennyson himself would have desired. But it is true that forty years ago Tennyson suffered a good deal from injudicious admirers. His May Queen, and Airy, Fairy Lilian were extolled as gems of the purest water. Rash, however, as this indiscriminate praise may have been, it should not have prevented Mr. Arnold from admiring Tithonus.

Essays in Criticism appeared in 1865. It is Mr. Arnold's most important work in prose, the central book, so to speak, of his life. Although it was not at first widely read, it made an immediate and a profound impression upon competent judges of literature. There had been nothing like it since Hazlitt. There has been nothing like it since. Mr. Arnold's judg ments are sometimes eccentric, and the place which he assigns to the two De Guérins is altogether out of proportion. But the value of Essays in Criticism does not depend upon this or that isolated opinion expressed by its author. Mr. Arnold did not merely criticise books himself. He taught others how to criticise them. He laid down principles, if he did not always keep the principles he laid down. Nobody, after reading Essays in Criticism, has any excuse for not being a critic. Mr. Ruskin once lamented that he had made a great number of entirely foolish people take an interest in art, and if there were too few critics in 1865, there may be too many now. But Mr. Arnold is not altogether responsible for the quantity. He has more to do with the quality, and the quality has beyond question been improved.

The famous Preface to Essays in Criticism was in the

second edition, the edition of 1869, curtailed, and, perhaps wisely, shorn of some ephemeral allusions. It contains, as every one knows, the exquisite address to Oxford: "beautiful city, so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene." The negative part of this praise could hardly be given now. Even in 1865 Oxford was not quite so free from intellectual disturbances as in Mr. Arnold's undergraduate days. But the question he asked then may be asked still: "And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side, nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen?" Of science, in the narrow or physical sense, Mr. Arnold knew little or nothing, and he had not his father's love of history. But of the old Oxford education, literæ humaniores, there have been few finer products. Excellent, in a lighter style, is his apology to Mr. Wright, the translator of Homer, for having been too vivacious. "Yes, the world will soon be the Philistines'! and then with every voice, not of thunder, silenced, and the whole. earth filled and ennobled every morning by the magnificent roaring of the young lions of the Daily Telegraph, we shall all yawn in one another's faces with the dismallest, the most unimpeachable gravity."

For it is in this volume, in his essay on Heine, that Mr. Arnold first uses the word "Philistine," borrowed of course from the German, and it played afterwards