improvement in our civilization which it is the object of all cultivating of our intelligence to bring about, the establishment of a genuine municipal system for the whole country, will hardly perhaps come in our time; men's minds have not yet been sufficiently turned to it for that." But subsequent events have shown that he undervalued the force and influence of his own crusade. In all later educational controversies, in Parliament, at the Universities, at Congresses, in meetings of teachers, and in the evidence and reports issued by Royal Commissions, his words have been constantly quoted, his facts referred to, and his authority invoked. Notably, the Report of the Royal Commission on Secondary Instruction, which was issued in 1895, proceeds to a large extent on lines which he was the first to trace, and recommends a policy which would have gone far to realize his hopes. And in the near future when English statesmen rouse themselves to a perception of the need of a coherent and well-ordered system of secondary schools, in which due regard shall be had not only to the claims of active life, but to the higher claims of the inner life for expansion and for purification, the result will be largely owing to the stimulus which his writings afforded and to the high and generous conception he had formed of the ends which ought to be attained in a liberal education, and of the spirit in which we ought to pursue them.

CHAPTER XII

Arnold as a literary critic, a humorist, and as a poet-Criticism and its functions - Comparison with Sainte Beuve-Examples of his critical judgments - Homer, Pope, and Dryden, Byron, Wordsworth, Burke, Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, and Macaulay-The gift of humour indispensable to a critic-English newspapers The Telegraph and the Times - His American experiences - His personal charm-Tributes of Mr. John Morley, Augustine Birrell, and William Watson-Poems- Arnold's place as a poetExamples of his poems - General estimate of his own and his father's services to English education-Rugby Chapel

OUTSIDE the world of schools and Universities Matthew Arnold is better known, and is likely to be longer remembered, as a literary critic and as a poet, than as an official or as an advocate of improved public instruction. He was especially noticeable for the importance he attached to just criticism in relation to books and to life. He thought it the main function of a true critic first to know and then to set up a high standard of literary style and finish, and to judge all books by that standard. Criticism, he said, is the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known or thought in the world. It was the business of a critic to detect and to expose insincerity, vulgarity, the mere watchwords of parties and cliques, and in particular the slovenly and pretentious use of terms and phrases which were only half understood.

Arnold greatly valued and admired the influence

of the French Academy: "a sovereign organ of the highest literary opinion, a recognized authority in matters of intellectual tone and taste." Every one who knows what it is to take up a French book which has been couronné by the Academy, knows what this safeguard means. He thought that the corporation of forty of the most eminent French writers exercised great power in preserving the purity of their language, encouraging learning, and setting up before the whole nation a high ideal of beauty and perfection of style. Yet he doubted the wisdom of any attempt to introduce such an institution into England, and he thought our faults were not to be cured by that method.

"It is constantly said that I want to introduce here an institution like the French Academy. I have, indeed, expressly declared that I wanted no such thing. But let me notice how it is just our worship of machinery, and of external doing, which leads to this charge being brought; and how the inwardness of culture would make us seize, for watching and cure, the faults to which our want of an Academy inclines us, and yet prevent us from trusting to an arm of flesh- as the Puritans say; from blindly flying to this outward machinery of an Academy in order to help ourselves. . . . Every one who knows the characteristics of our national life, knows exactly what an English Academy would be like. We can see the happy family in one's mind's eye as distinctly as if it were already constituted. Stanhope,1 the Dean of St. Paul's, the Bishop of Oxford,3 Lord Houghton, Mr. Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster,1 Mr. Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve - everything which is influ

5

1 The late Lord Stanhope.

2 The late Dean Milman.

8 The late Bishop Wilberforce. 4 The late Dean Stanley.

2

5 The historian.

Lord

6 Late editor of the Edinburgh Review.

ential, accomplished, and distinguished; and then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. Clearly this is not what will do us good. The very same faults the want of sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in right reason, the dislike of authority - which have hindered our having an Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature, would also hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which would really correct them."

But in the absence of any such recognized authority he regarded the function of the literary critic as one of high value. One of the most interesting acquaintances he ever made was that of Sainte Beuve, the accomplished author of the Causeries du Lundi, whose works he greatly admired and whom he met more than once in Paris. Of him he says in one of his letters: "Sainte Beuve gave me an excellent dinner and was in full vein of conversation, which as his conversation is about the best to be heard in France was charming. . . . I staid with him till midnight, and would not have missed my evening for the world. I think he likes me, and likes my caring so much about his criticisms and appreciating his extraordinary delicacy of tact and judgment in literature." Later, when Arnold contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica a memoir of his friend, he used language which with little qualification might not inappropriately be applied to himself:

"He was a critic of measure, not exuberant, of the centre, not provincial, of keen industry and curiosity, with Truth (the word engraved in English on his seal) for his motto; moreover, with gay and amiable temper, his manner as good as his matter the 'critique souriant,' as in Monselet's dedication to him he is called. It so happens that the great place of France in the world is very much due to her eminent gift for social life and development, and this gift French literature has accompanied, fashioned, perfected, and continues to reflect. This gives a special interest to French literature, and an interest independent even of the excellence of individual French writers, high as that office is. And nowhere shall we find such interest more completely and charmingly brought out than in the Causeries du Lund of this consummmate critic. As a guide to bring us to a knowledge of the French genius and literature, he is unrivalled, perfect so far as a poor mortal critic can be perfect in judgment, in tact and tone."1

There was much in the serene intellectual detachment of Marcus Aurelius which to the last appealed powerfully to Arnold's sympathy. "We are all,” says the Imperial Philosopher, "working together to one end, some with knowledge and design, and others without knowing what they do. But men co-operate after different fashions and even those co-operate abundantly who find fault with what happens and those who try to oppose it, and to hinder it; for the Universe hath need of such men as these." . . "Reverence that which is best in the Universe, and in like manner reverence that which is best in thyself." Herein we are reminded of the apostolic injunc

1 Encyclopedia Britannica.