CHAPTER VII.

THE END OF THE PROFESSORSHIP.

MR. ARNOLD held the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford for ten years, from 1857 to 1867. He was twice elected for periods of five years each. But for him, as for the President of the United States, a third term was impossible. In 1867 he retired, and was succeeded by Sir Francis Doyle, author of that noble poem "The Return of the Guards," that justly popular poem "The Private of the Buffs," and "The Doncaster St. Leger," the best description of a horse-race ever written in English verse. There were parts of Mr. Arnold's professorial duties, such as reading the Creweian Oration and examining for the Newdigate, which he heartily disliked. But, on the whole, the position gave him great pleasure, and he laid it down with sincere regret. He was anxious that Mr. Browning should succeed him. Mr. Browning, however, was not an Oxford man, and though an honorary Master's Degree had been conferred upon him, the objection was held to be fatal.

The Chair of Poetry is not an exhausting burden, and all the time he held it Mr. Arnold was zealously fulfilling his duty to the Department of Education. In 1865 he undertook another of those Continental investigations which he so thoroughly enjoyed. The

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Schools Inquiry Commissioners charged him with the agreeable task-agreeable at least to him-of reporting upon the system of teaching for the upper and middle classes which prevailed in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. At the beginning of April he left London for Paris, where he began his work. In Paris he met a citizen of the United States who might almost have walked out of Martin Chuzzlewit. Such are scarcely to be found now. "I have just seen," he writes to his mother on the 1st of May, "an American, a great admirer of mine, who says that the three people he wanted to see in Europe were James Martineau, Herbert Spencer, and myself. His talk was not as our talk, but he was a good man." The last touch is characteristically and ironically urbane. At this time, seven years after "Merope," appeared "Atalanta in Calydon," which proved as popular as "Merope was the reverse. It did not, however, satisfy Mr. Arnold, and in a critical letter to Professor Conington, dated the 17th of May, he thus speaks of it:-"The moderns will only have the antique on the condition of making it more beautiful (according to their own notions of beauty) than the antique-i.e. something wholly different." This is just criticism so far as it goes. "Atalanta" is not Greek. It is far too violent and impulsive to be Greek. But its magnificent verses, with their rush and ring, their surge and flow, will always raise the spirits and charm the ear. Conington, a profoundly learned man, but a pedant if ever there was one, was also, it seems, a great admirer of "Merope." He must have taken it with him to the grave, for it died long before its author. Mr. Arnold did not enjoy Italy so much as he might have done if he had

known more about architecture and painting. But he was a keen critic of national character, and being at Florence just after Florence had become, for a short time, the capital of Italy, he saw in a moment the weak point of the modern Italians. "They imitate the French too much," he wrote to his mother on the 24th of May. "It is good for us to attend to the French, they are so unlike us, but not good for the Italians, who are a sister nation." Luminous ideas of this kind light up the not very brilliant atmosphere of Mr. Arnold's correspondence, most of which he dashed off at odd moments, without having any special turn for the art. We could well have spared his comparison between the sham, gimcrack cathedral at Milan, which contains half a dozen more beautiful churches, and the great Duomo at Florence, with the cupola of Brunelleschi, unequalled in the world. But the fascination of Italy overcame Mr. Arnold at last, for on the 12th of September he wrote from Dresden to Mr. Slade, that "all time passed in touring anywhere in Western Europe, except Italy, seemed to him, with his present lights, time misspent," and it does not appear that he ever changed this opinion.

Mr. Arnold was at Zurich in October 1865, when he heard of Lord Palmerston's death. Palmerston, though an aristocrat, as this word is generally understood, had none of the cosmopolitan culture which aristocracies are supposed to affect. He was as typical an Englishman as Bright or Cobden, far too typical for Mr. Arnold's taste. But with some allowance for personal prejudice, the following extract from Mr. Arnold's letter to his mother on Palmerston's career has truth as well as point in it. "I do not deny his

popular personal qualities, but as to calling him a great Minister like Pitt, Walpole, and Peel, and talking of his death as a national calamity, why, taking his career from 1830, when his importance really begins, to the present time, he found his country the first power in the world's estimation, and he leaves it the third; of this, no person with eyes to see and ears to hear, and opportunities for using them, can doubt; it may even be doubted whether, thanks to Bismarck's audacity, resolution, and success, Prussia too, as well as France and the United States, does not come before England at present in general respect.” This contemporary judgment of a calm observer, whose political opinions were those of an independent Whig, may be commended to believers in the Palmerstonian legend. Matthew Arnold was the best of sons, and the allusions to his father in his letters to his mother, are really a more affectionate form of the feeling which prompted Frederick the Great's filial presents of gigantic grenadiers. Thus, on the 18th of November 1865, after reading Mr. Stopford Brooke's excellent Life of Frederick Robertson, he writes: "It is a mistake to put him with papa, as the Spectator does: papa's greatness consists in his bringing such a torrent of freshness into English religion by placing history and politics in connection with it; Robertson's is a mere religious biography, but as a religious biography it is deeply interesting." Mr. Arnold was, of course, before all things a man of letters, and of physical science he knew little or nothing. It is, therefore, an interesting proof of his mental width that he should have strongly recommended to his sister, Mrs. Forster, science, especially botany, as better suited to cultivate

perception in a child than grammar or mathematics. Perhaps he felt the want of scientific training himself. But he was intensely practical, and did his official work far more efficiently than many drudges who never wrote a verse. Just before Lord Russell's Government resigned in 1866, he applied for a Commissionership of Charities. It would, as he told his mother, have given him another three hundred a year, and an independent instead of a subordinate position. No man in England was better qualified for it. His views on charitable endowments were, as almost every one would now admit, thoroughly wise, enlightened, and sound. But the post was wanted for a lawyer, and lawyers, in this country, are made everything except judges. The appointment was Lord Russell's, and Lord Russell, as we know, was one of Mr. Arnold's earliest admirers. Mr. Gladstone, however, had paramount influence, and it is said that he had already discovered the theological heterodoxy which afterwards became patent to the vulgar eye. It is almost inconceivable nowadays that such an argument should have weighed with a Minister filling a purely secular place. Mr. Arnold's failure was a disaster to the public service, and may almost be called a scandal. He was also unsuccessful in the following year, when he applied for the post of Librarian to the House of Commons. His application was supported by Mr. Disraeli, the leader of the House, and by many other distinguished persons. But Speaker Denison had determined to carry out one of those mysterious rearrangements in which the great functionaries of Parliament delight, and this particular plan involved the elevation of the Sub