Librarian, a thoroughly competent man. In this case Mr. Arnold's success would have been a public misfortune, for it would have withdrawn him from work of the greatest value, and laid him, for all practical purposes, on the shelf. Mr. Arnold's last lectures as Professor of Poetry were devoted to the study of Celtic Literature. They were four in number, and were successively published after delivery in the Cornhill Magazine. In 1867, when Mr. Arnold retired from the Chair, they were reprinted in a small volume. Mr. George Smith, the great publisher, remarked that it was not exactly the sort of book which Paterfamilias would buy at a bookstall, and take down to his Jemima. I should be sorry to suggest that Mr. Smith did not get further than the title, to which his remark would apply. But no title was ever more misleading, and few books are easier to read. This is perhaps the most brilliantly audacious of all Mr. Arnold's performances. Mr. Gladstone wrote a book on the Bible without knowing a word of Hebrew. Matthew Arnold wrote, not indeed on Celtic literature, but on the study of it, in happy and contented ignorance of Gaelic, Erse, and Cymry. Only men of genius can do these things. Upon the real nature and value of Celtic literature these charming pages throw little, if any, light. The most solid part consists of notes contributed by Lord Strangford, a scientific philologist, and they are comically like a tutor's corrections of his pupil's exercise. Mr. Arnold tells us, with engaging frankness, how the idea of these lectures arose in his mind. He was staying at Llandudno, and got tired of gazing on the sea, especially on the Liverpool steamboats. So he looked inland, and studied the local traditions. He even attended an Eisteddfod, which he describes without enthusiasm. This national institution was attacked at that time by a great English newspaper in language of almost inconceivable brutality, which would be quite impossible now. Mr. Arnold, a true gentleman in the highest meaning of the term, resented the insult, and the chief merit of his book is its delicately sympathetic handling of the Celtic character. Admitting that all Welshmen ought to learn English, he pleads for the preservation of the Welsh language, and this led him to the "Science of Origins," on which French scholars have bestowed so much research. He reminded the English people that they have a Celtic as well as a Norman element in them, and that to it they owed much of what was best in their poetry. His theory that rhyme is Celtic has been disputed, and certainly medieval Latin is a more obvious source. The Celtic genius for style, for "melancholy and natural magic," is perhaps hardly borne out by the few fragments of translation which Mr. Arnold produces. But the notion of England as "a vast obscure Cymric basis with a vast visible Teutonic superstructure" is fascinating, if unknown and unknowable. Of happy touches this little volume is full. There we have Luther and Bunyan, whose connection with Celtic literature is remote, labelled as "Philistines of genius." There we have the Celt "always ready to react against the despotism of fact." Touches of human interest are not wanting. There is Owen Jones, who slowly and laboriously amassed a fortune that he might spend it all in printing and publishing every Welsh manuscript upon which he could lay his G hands. There is Eugene O'Curry, the learned and indefatigable student of his native Erse, who edited the Annals of the Four Masters. To him enters Thomas Moore, lazily contemplating a History of Ireland, and remarks profoundly that these Annals "could not have been written by fools, or for any foolish purpose." What the Annals of the Four Masters, and the Myvyrian Archæology, and Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion, are actually worth, we know no more when we have finished the book than we knew when we began it. But for British prejudice against other nationalities it is a wholesome antidote. In this, as in so many other respects, Mr. Arnold was in advance of his age, unless, indeed, we prefer to say that he led his generation to a culture less partial and more urbane. The severest censor of sciolism, to which perhaps Mr. Arnold was not wholly a stranger, may well be appeased by such a charming phrase as "bellettristic trifler," which this amateur of Celtic applies to himself. CHAPTER VIII. THE NEW POEMS THE publication of Mr. Arnold's New Poems in 1867, "Though the Muse be gone away, Ah! still harp on what they heard." With these poems the poetical career of Matthew Arnold may be said to close. To the end of his life he wrote occasional verses. But they were few in number, and they neither, with the exception of "Westminster Abbey," added to his fame nor detracted from it. His outward circumstances armonised with this inward change. Mr. Arnold ceased to 99 Har M be Professor of Poetry. He remained an Inspector of Schools. But his poetical fame was established, and no living English poet except Tennyson was incontestably his superior. The greatest poem in the volume, some think the greatest he ever wrote, is "Thyrsis," a monody, or elegy, on his friend Arthur Clough, who had died, as we have seen, at Florence in 1861. Mr. Swinburne, a warm admirer of Matthew Arnold, has expressed a too contemptuous estimate of Clough's poetical powers. His English hexameters and pentameters are doggerel, though the ideas which they express are often subtle. But some of his shorter pieces, such as "Say not the struggle nought availeth," and "As ships at eve becalmed they lay," have retained their hold upon the minds and hearts of men. Clough is not likely ever to become a mere name, like the Reverend Mr. King. That "Thyrsis" is inferior to "Lycidas” hardly requires stating. All English dirges, except the dirge in "Cymbeline," are. But in truth the comparison is fruitless, for there is no resemblance. Mr. Arnold's model was not Milton, but Theocritus, and "Thyrsis" is thoroughly Theocritean in sentiment. The opening stanza strikes the keynote, and is, I think, unsurpassed throughout the poem. It is penetrated, like most of the stanzas which succeed it, with the spirit of the place, and is redolent of the beautiful country round Oxford-- "How changed is here each spot man makes or fills! In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same; The village street its haunted mansion lacks, |