ing everywhere the benefits of the as Arnold has shown, from the very son's satisfaction and the father's words of the Bible (St. Luke xxii. 20), goodness." Nay, even when he goes on "The cup is the new testament in my to say that this is precisely the Prot- blood." But the doctrine of the Trinity estant story of justification, what he requires a far more searching historical wants to impress on his Protestant study. As the very name of Trinity is readers is surely no more than this, a later invention, and absent from the that from his point of view there is New Testament, it requires a thorough nothing actually degrading in their study of Greek, more particularly of narrow view, as little as in the com- Alexandrian philosophy to understand mon Roman Catholic view of the Mass. its origin, for it is from Greek philosoWhat he means is no more than that phy that the idea of the Word, the both views as held by the many are Logos, was taken by some of the early grotesquely literal and unintelligent. Fathers of the Church. People who hold such views would be ready to tell you, he says, "the exact hangings in the Trinity's council chamber;" but, with all that, he is anxious to show that not only was the original intention both of Roman and English Catholics good, but that even in its mistaken application it may help towards righteousness. In trying to impress this view both on Protestants and Roman Catholics, Arnold certainly used language which must have pained particularly those who felt that the picture was not altogether untrue. However, his friends, and among them high ecclesiastics, forgave him. Stanley. I know, admired his theological writings very much. In fact, they fully agreed with what Arnold said, only they would have said it in a different way. There is a kind of cocaine style which is used by many able critics and reformers. It cuts deep into the flesh, and yet the patient remains insensible to pain. "You can say anything in English," Arthur Helps once said to me, "only you must know how to say it." Arnold, like Carlyle and others, preferred the old style of surgery. They thought that pain was good in certain operations, and helped to accelerate a healthy reaction. The only fault that one may find with Arnold, is that he did not himself try to restore the original and true conception of the Trinity to that clear and intelligible form which he as an historian and a man of culture could have brought out better than any one else. The original intention of the Lord's Supper, or Mass, can easily be learnt, As the Messiah was a Semitic thought which the Jewish disciples of Christ saw realized in the Son of Man, the Word was an Aryan thought which the Greek disciples saw fulfilled in the Son of God. The history of the divine Dyas which preceded the Trias is clear enough, if only we are acquainted with the antecedents of Greek philosophy. Without that background it is a mere phantasm, and no wonder that in the minds of uneducated people it should have become what Arnold describes it,' father, son, and grandson, living together in the same house, or possibly in the clouds. To make people shrink back from such a conception is worth something, and Arnold has certainly achieved this, if only he has caused hundreds and thousands to say to themselves, "We never were so foolish or so narrow-minded as to believe in three Lord Shaftesburys." For some reason or other, however, the "three Lord Shaftesburys" have disappeared in the last edition of "Literature and Dogma," and have been replaced by "a Supernatural Man. Froude, who was an intimate friend both of Arnold and Sir James Stephen, told me that the latter had warned Arnold that the three Lord Shaftesburys were really actionable, and if Arnold hated anything it was a fracas. In the fifth edition they still remain, so that the change must have been made later on, when he prepared the cheap edition of his book. Anyhow, they are gone! Arnold was a delightful man to argue 1 Literature and Dogma, page 143. on with, not that he could easily be convinced that he was wrong, but he never lost his temper, and in the most patronizing way he would generally end by: "Yes, yes! my good fellow, you are quite right, but, you see, my view of the matter is different, and I have little doubt it is the true one!" This went so far that even the simplest facts failed to produce any impression him. He had fallen in love with Emile Burnouf's attractive but not very scholar-like and trustworthy "Science de la Religion." I believe that at first he had mistaken Emile for Eugène Burnouf, a mistake which has been committed by other people besides him. But, afterwards, when he had perceived the difference between the two, he was not at all abashed. Nay, he was betrayed into a new mistake, and spoke of Emile as the son of Eugène. I told him that Eugène, the great Oriental scholar-one of the greatest that France has ever produced, and that is saying a great deal-had no son at all, and that he ought to correct his misstatement. "Yes, yes," he said, in his most good-humored way, "but you know how they manage these things in France. Emile was really a natural son of the great scholar, and they call that a nephew." This I stoutly denied, for never was there a more irreproachable père de famille than my friend and master, Eugène Burnouf. But in spite of all remonstrances, Emile remained with Arnold the son of Eugène, "for, you see, my good fellow, I know the French, and that is my view of the matter!" If that happened in the green wood, what would happen in the dry! We had a long-standing feud about poetry. To me, the difference between poetry and prose was one of form only. I always held that the same things that are said in prose could be said in poetry, and vice versâ, and I often quoted Goethe's saying that the best test of poetry was whether it would bear translation into prose or into a foreign language. To all that, even to Goethe's words, Arnold demurred. Poetry to him was a thing by itself, "not an art like other arts," but, as he grandly called it, "genius." He once had a great triumph over me. An American gentleman, who brought out a "Collection of the Portraits of the Hundred Greatest Men," divided them into eight classes, and the first class was assigned to poetry, the second to art, the third to religion, the fourth to philosophy, the fifth to history, the sixth to science, the seventh to politics, the eighth to industry. Arnold was asked to write the introduction to the first volume, H. Taine to the second, myself and Renan to the third; Noah Porter to the fourth, Dean Stanley to the fifth, Helmholtz to the sixth, Froude to the seventh, John Fiske to the eighth. I do not know whether Arnold had anything to do with suggesting this division of Omne Scibile into eight classes; anyhow, he did not allow the opportunity to pass to assert the superiority of poetry over every other branch of man's intellectual activity. "The men," he began, "who are the flower and glory of our race are to pass here before us, the highest manifestations, whether on this line or that, of the force which stirs in every one of us the chief poets, religious founders, philosophers, historians, scholars, orators, warriors, statesmen, voyagers, leaders in mechanical invention and industry, who have appeared among mankind. And the poets are to pass first. Why? Because, of the various modes of manifestation through which the human spirit pours its force, theirs is the most adequate and happy." This is the well-known "ore rotundo" and "spiritu profundo" style of Arnold. But might we not ask, Adequate to what? Happy in what? Arnold answers himself a little further on, "No man can fully draw out the reasons why the human spirit feels itself able to attain to a more adequate and satisfying expression in poetry than in any other of its modes of activity." Yet he continues to call this a primordial and incontestable fact; and how could we poor mortals venture to contest a primordial and incontestable fact? And then, limiting the question "to us for to-day," he says, "Surely it is its solidity that accounts to us for the superiority of poetry." How he would have railed if any of his Philistines had ventured to recognize the true superiority of poetry in its solidity! Prose may be solid, it may be dense, massive, lumpish, concrete, and all the rest, but poetry is generally prized for its being subtle, light, ideal, air-drawn, fairy-like, or made of such stuff as dreams are made of. However, let that pass. Let poetry be solid, for who knows what sense Arnold may have assigned to solid? He next falls back on his great master Goethe, and quotes a passage which I have not been able to find, but the bearing of which must depend very much on the context in which it occurs. Goethe, in one of his moods, is pleased to say: "I deny poetry to be an art. Neither is it a science. Poetry is to be called neither art nor science, but genius." Who would venture to differ from Goethe when he defines what poetry is? But does he define it? He simply says that it is not art or science. In this one may agree, if only art and science are defined first. No one I think has ever maintained that poetry was science, but no one would deny that poetry was a product of art, if only in the sense of the Ars poetica of Horace, or the Dichtkunst of Goethe. But if we ask what can be meant by saying that poetry is genius, Goethe himself would admit that he meant that poetry was the product of genius, the German Genie. Goethe, therefore, meant no more than that poetry quires, in the poet, originality and spontaneity of thought; and this, though it would require some limitation, no one surely would feel inclined to deny, though even the authority of Goethe would hardly suffice to deprive the decipherer of an inscription, the painter of the "Last Supper," or the discoverer of the bacilli of a claim to that divine light which we call genius. Arnold then goes on to say that poetry gives the idea, but it gives it touched with beauty, heightened by re emotion. Would not Arnold have allowed that the language of Isaiah, and even some of the dialogues of Plato, were touched with beauty and heightened by emotion? I think he himself speaks somewhere of a poetic prose. Where, then, is the true difference between the eloquence of Plato and of Wordsworth? Arnold has one more trump card to play in order to win for poetry that superiority over all the other manifestations of the forces of the human spirit which he claims again and again. I have always been a sincere admirer of Arnold's poetry, still I think there is more massive force in some of his prose than in many of his poems; nay, I believe he has left a much deeper and more lasting impression on what he likes to call the Zeitgeist through his essays than through his tragedies. What then is his last card, his last proof of the superiority of poetry? Poetry, he argues, has more stability than anything else, and mankind finds in it a surer stay than in art, in philosophy, or religion. "Compare," he says, "the stability of Shakespeare with that of the Thirty-nine Articles." Poor Thirty-nine Articles! Did they ever claim to contain poetry, or even religion? Were they ever meant to be more than a dry abstract of theological dogmas? Surely they never challenged comparison with Shakespeare. They are an index, a table of contents a business-like agreement, if you like, between different parties in the Church of England. But to ask whether they will stand longer than Shakespeare is very much like asking whether the Treaty of Paris will last longer than Victor Hugo. There is stay in poetry provided that the prose which underlies it is lasting, or everlasting; there is no stay in it, if it is mere froth and rhyme. Arnold always liked to fall back on Goethe. "What a series of philosophic systems has Germany seen since the birth of Goethe," he says, "and what sort of stay is any one of them compared with the poetry of Germany's one great poet?" Is Goethe's poetry really so sure a stay as the philosophies of Germany; nay, would there be any stay in it at all without the support of that philosophy which Goethe drank in, whether from the vintage of Spinoza or from the more recent "crues" of Kant and Fichte? Goethe's name, no doubt, is always a pillar of strength, but there is even now a very great part of Goethe's Collected Works in thirty volumes that is no longer a stay, but is passé, and seldom read by any one, except by the historian. Poetry may act as a powerful preservative, and it is wonderful how much pleasure we may derive from thought mummified in verse. But in the end it is thought in its everchanging life that forms the real stay, and it matters little whether that thought speaks to us in marble, or in music, in hexameters, in blank verse, or even in prose. Poetry in itself is no protection against folly and feebleness. There is in the world a small amount of good, and an immense amount of bad poetry. The former, we may hope, will last, and will serve as a stay to all who care for the music of thought and the harmony of language; the twaddle, sometimes much admired in its time (and there is plenty of it in Goethe also), will, we hope, fade away from the memory of man, and serve as a lesson to poets who imagine that they may safely say in rhythm and rhyme what they would be ashamed to say in simple prose. Nor is the so-called stay or immortality of poetry of much consequence. To have benefited millions of his own age, ought to satisfy any poet, even if no one reads his poems, or translations of them, a thousand years hence. Denn wer den Besten seiner Zeit genug It is strange to go over the old ground when he with whom one travelled over it in former times is no more present to answer and to hold his own view against the world. There certainly was a great charm in Arnold, even though he could be very patronizing. But there was in all he said a kind of 1 Schiller's "Wallenstein," Prolog, vv. 48, 49. understood though seldom expressed sadness, as if to say, "It will soon be all over, don't let us get angry; we are all very good fellows," etc. He knew for years that though he was strong and looked very young for his age, the thread of his life might snap at any moment. And SO it did-felix opportunitate mortis. Not long before his death he met Browning on the steps of the Athenæum. He felt ill, and in taking leave of Browning he hinted that they might never meet again. Browning was profuse in his protestations, and Arnold, on turning away, said in his airy way, "Now, one promise, Browning: please, not more than ten lines." Browning understood, and went away with a solemn smile. Arnold was most brilliant as professor of poetry at Oxford, from 1857 to 1867. He took great pains in writing and delivering his lectures. He looked well and spoke well. Some of his lectures were masterpieces, and he set a good example which was followed by Sir Francis Doyle, 1867-77, well known by his happy occasional poems, then by John Shairp from 1877 to his death, and lastly by Francis Palgrave from 1885-1895. The best of Arnold's lectures were published as essays; Shairp's lectures appeared after his death, and have retained their popularity, particularly in America. Palgrave's lectures, we may hope, will soon appear. They were full of most valuable information, and would prove very useful to many as a book of reference. I have known no one better informed on English poetry than my friend Palgrave. His "Golden Treasury" bears evidence of his wide reading, and his ripe judgment in selecting the best specimens of English lyric poetry. One had but to touch on any subject in the history of English literature, or to ask him a question, and there was always an abundance of most valuable information to be got from him. I owe him a great deal, particularly in my early Oxford days. For it was he who revised my first attempts at writing in English, and gave me good advice for the rest of my jour ney, more particularly as to what to avoid. He is now one of the very few friends left who remember my first appearance in Oxford in 1846, and who were chiefly instrumental in retaining my services for a university which has proved a true Alma Mater to me during all my life. Grant (Sir Alexander), Sellar, Froude, Sandars, Morier, Neate, Johnson (Manuel), Church, Jowett, all are gone before. What happy days, what happy evenings we spent together lang syne. How patient they all were with their German guest when he first tried in his broken English to take part in their lively and sparkling conversations. Having once been received in that delightful circle, it was easy to make more acquaintances among their friends who lived at Oxford, or who from time to time came to visit them at Oxford. It was thus that I first came to know Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, and others. Ruskin often came to spend a few days with his old friends, and uncompromising and severe as he could be when he wielded his pen, he was always most charming in conversation. He never, when he was with his friends, claimed the right of speaking with authority, even on his own special subjects, as he might well have done. It seemed to be his pen that made him say bitter things. He must have been sorry himself for the severe censure he passed in his earlier years on men whose honest labor, if nothing else, ought to have protected them against such cruel onslaughts. Grote's style may not be the very best for an historian, but in his "Quellenstudium" he was surely most conscientious. Yet this is what Ruskin wrote of him: "There is probably no commercial establishment between Charing Cross and the Bank, whose head clerk could not have written a better history of Greece, if he had the vanity to waste his time on it." Of Gibbon's classical work he spoke with even greater contempt. "Gibbon's is the worst English ever written by an educated Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic, he is alike incapable either of picturesqueness or wit, his epithets are malicious without point, sonorous without weight, and have no office but to make a flat sentence turgid." I feel sure that Ruskin, such as I knew him in later years, would have wished these sentences unwritten. He was really the most tolerant and agreeable man in society. He could discover beauty where no one else saw it, and make allowance where others saw no excuse. I remember him as diffident as a young girl, full of questions, and grateful for any information. Even on art topics I have watched him listening almost deferentially to others who laid down the law in his presence. His voice was always most winning. and his language simply perfect. He was one of the few Englishmen I knew who, instead of tumbling out their sentences like so many portmanteaux, bags, rugs, and hat-boxes from an open railway van, seemed to take a real delight in building up his sentences, even in familiar conversation, so as to make each deliverance a work of art. I.ater in life that even temperament may have become somewhat changed. He had suffered much, and one saw that his wounds had not quite healed. His public lectures as professor of fine art were most attractive, and extremely popular at first. But they were evidently too much for him, and on the advice of his medical friends be had at last to cease from lecturing altogether. Several times his brain had been a very serious trouble to him. People forget that, as we want good eyes for seeing, and good ears for hearing, we want a strong, sound brain for lecturing. I have seen much of such brain troubles among my friends, and who can account for them? It is not the brain that thinks, nor do we think by means of our brain; but we caunot think without our brain, and the slightest lesion of our brain in any one of its wonderful convolutions is as bad as a shot in the eye. If ever there was an active, powerful brain, it was Ruskin's. No doubt |