British love of "realized ideals," we are con- totle's moral system is from first to last a | And 'Sit apart holding no form of creed, But contemplating all.' diæval knights wandered in search of the sangreal but found it not. And while we continue to meditate, there is some risk of our being 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' The contrast between the two tendencies is seen in its sharpest form in the way in which they would respectively deal with the practical evils which menace every human life. "Sit still, and profoundly contemplate them," exclaims the meditative sage with the Hellenic spirit. "Arise and abolish them," says the deeper wisdom of the Hebrew nature. Let your consciousness play freely around the problems, lest you fall and worship the fetish of some practical reform," says the man of thought. "Get thee forth into their midst, and whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might,'" says the nobler law of Hebrew action. It seems evident that to continue thinking over problems that relate to action, without proceeding to act, is to become speedily paralyzed. Our faculties of thought may refuse to play longer around the problem, lest in that very process it becomes a different but more unworthy fetish than the other. It might occur to the advocates of Hellenic culture that were the Philistines whom they teach to practice this precept of letting thought play with the many sides of their own doctrine of culture, it would be a considerable time ere they could receive the very Helenism that is set before them. The Hellenist is in no particular haste to remove any existing evils that linger in the world. He appreciates the principle, "Let both grow together until the harvest; "they are but a few tares amongst the wheat, a variety to study and contemplate. It would be an unsafe experiment to try to uproot a single tare by an effort of the will; rather let your consciousness play freely around the tare. He is averse to all crusades against existing evil. Did not the crusaders of mediæval times, embarking on a bootless errand, come back in ignominy and failure? We regard this spirit as utterly fatal to true moral culture and spiritual progress. History, we remind the Hellenist, is full of abrupt and stormy movements even in that classic land of repose, and some of the most sudden revolutionary changes have heralded the seasons of choicest intellectual growth in a people, just as the most energetic movements of the will have promoted the moral life of the individual. Even Nature has her earthquakes, symbolic of those human forces that are subterranean and underworking; but these violent changes have been productive of ultimate good, in keeping the balance of physical force in the uniAnd whether his action resembles nature's more violent changes or her more tranquil processes of growth, whenever an unquestionable evil exists, it is the immediate duty of each man to remove it, and to clear the way for future contemplation by the vigor with which he works in beating it down. His primary duty is not to survey the numerous sides of the question in finely drawn analysis (in which case he would easily find a justification for any course of action he might eventually adopt), any more than it is his duty to consider what he up verse. would do were the conditions of the case altered. As Robert Browning profoundly Is Rome or London-not Fool's Paradise. Embellish Rome, idealize away, Make paradise of London if you can, You're welcome, nay, you're wise. " Again, in the same great poem he condenses much thought in a single line which we may apply, as we have applied the preceding extract "I am much, you are nothing! you would be all, I would be merely much." There can be little doubt that Mr. Arnold's doctrine tends less or more to emasculate character, because it lays an almost exclu sive stress on mere thought. It indefinitely postpones action. The efforts of the will are all subordinated to the calm luxury of the serene intelligence. Though it does not directly inculcate quietism, it does so vir tually; as it leads men to hold all forms of faith in solution, so to speak, or to study them as from a distance. Be it admitted that we need more of the light of reason to check the vagaries of a capricious activity, and the impulsive enthusiasm of a very practical people, in a very practical age. Nevertheless, as the age is on the whole as practical as it is contemplative, we must sympathize with its forward movements, or we unfit our natures for the reception of that light which these movements reveal, and cramp our intellectual energies. It is true that the majority of men need to reflect more accurately before they act. The discipline of thought is the most valuable means of regulating the very miscellaneous and ill-assorted forces that tend continually to action in an unreflective manner. Men must be taught to act with wisdom, grace, and rationality; and if trained to think more profoundly, they may be expected to act in a more enlightened manner. But no careful student of history can fail to see that the risk of lapsing into listless quiet ism has been greatest in the most intellectual men and the most intellectual ages. Meditative luxury breeds inaction, indolence in fa cing the evils of the present, with aloss of faith in the worth and power of action, which is one of the greatest calamities which can be fall a thinker. In proportion to the very delicacy of his perception of what constitutes the ideal, he may shrink from action till he has satisfied himself that he has withstood all false bias. But a disinclination to arise and take part in redressing an unquestionable wrong is very easily engendered. The fas cinations of cultured thought are great, especially when accompanied with a strong recoil from the rawness of the common Philistine" modes of action, with their obtuse precipitate and unreflective dours. But the Hellenist is most likely ar. to become disgusted with practical life al- | promise in order to succeed at all. He may We do not wonder that Mr. Arnold is somewhat sad in his anticipations of the future. The prospects which he sees a head are not encouraging, and he has few words of cheer to address to this generation. He laments our modern British "Philistinism," with its sordid worship of machinery and comfort. But he offers no scheme of redress. He is confessedly without a system, and distrusts all system-builders. The substance of his message to his contemporaries is, "It is light and sweetness that you all need, therefore get light and get sweetness, both within you and around you." But he does not tell the generation of the "Philistines" how they are to get these inestimable gifts, except by bidding them look back to Greece, and "let their mind and consciousness play around all problems." He shrinks from counselling men to take part in any practical scheme for the amelioration of their fellows, from his antipathy to all rough and coarse movements. Yet every worker, who strives to carry the ideal into practice, must come into close contact with the ungainliness and awkward movements of those who are acting without an ideal around him. And this is precisely the difficulty which the man of the highest culture finds in all his efforts to translate his ideal into actual life. The moment he begins to act amongst the raw unidealized portions of humanity, that moment he meets with an arrest; and it may be sometimes necessary to make a com -- It is not difficult to explain the melancholy undertone of Mr. Arnold's teaching, and the helplessness of his Hellenic ideal to touch the miseries of the world, and rectify its disorder. He confines us, after all, to individual perfection, and never carries us out of the charmed circle of self. He leaves no scope for the centrifugal tendency of human nature. True, he does not directly enforce the utilitarian creed, but its aroma (if it can be said to possess one) is felt throughout. He even recognises "the love of our neighbour, impulses towards action, help and beneficence, the desire of stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of human misery," as parts of human culture. But it is in their relation to self-perfection that these are valued; the motive that urges to | ideals, he finds that they agree in the precept, their cultivation is, according to the Helle- "Be ye perfect." We think that in this nic ideal, the desire of individual complete- statement of the case, he has unduly narness. This contraction of the area of culture rowed the range of culture, and exposed attenuates while it refines the spirit, and himself needlessly to a flank movement of dries up some of the purest springs of human attack. It is at once simpler, and philoso energy and hopefulness. When the Greek phically more accurate, to regard religion as ideal is exclusively present to the soul, it one part of the universal culture, which, in restrains unnatural fervour, it represses fire its totality, is the true end and ideal of hu and enthusiasm, but it also begets a distinc-man life; or, as we have suggested in an eartive type of sadness, intellectual languor, and ennui. We trace this in some of Mr. Arnold's subtlest and finest poems, as well as in his prose essays. Exquisite and delicate thought is exquisitely and delicately expressed; but a sad refrain of life-weariness seems to underlie or to haunt them all. It is partly the absence of faith in the power of unselfish action which imparts this tone of sadness; and partly the tendency of the Hellenic ideal to isolate its votary from his fellows. We miss the spring of creative joy which wells up in that man's heart, who grapples with the evil he laments, in heroic self-forgetfulness, and in the patience of hope. For the same reason we find that some of the most exquisite phrases of culture are overlooked by Mr. Arnold altogether. The conscious pursuit of self-perfection necessarily fails in those regions where greatness, to be sublime, must be unconscious; and we never find the unconscious grace of culture when the individual does not act, as well as think. Our thought is most vigorous when it is most conscious; our actions are the fairest when they are least consciously performed; and by far the larger portion of moral culture is unconscious. Even in those cases in which an effort of the will is needed, self-consciousness, and the desire to perfect our being by the act, is fatal to the act's perfection. For example, if in benevolence we think of any after gain arising from its practice, the moral quality of our deed disappears. It ceases to be charity, and sinks to the level of almsgiving. So with the gain resulting from acts of self-control and sacrifice. It is only to be won when the very process of winning it, and the compensations which it brings, are altogether forgotten. We must discount these from our calculations, or rather make no account of them at all, if we would secure their richest bloom and fruit. Several minor points in Mr. Arnold's teaching remain to be noticed. One of these is his separation of Culture from Religion, and even from Poetry, Philosophy, and Science; though he maintains that they all cooperate to one end. In vindicating his doctrine from assault, he seeks to prove that an enlightened religion and culture have a common tendency; comparing their respective lier page, to broaden the meaning of the term Religion, and regard it as the homage of all the powers in their uprise towards God. Either the term Culture should be used generi cally as inclusive of all the human faculties and all their tendencies-in which case it will include the religious instincts within itor the term Religion should be widened to embrace the action of all the faculties when they ascend in the tribute of adoration. In either case Mr. Arnold's limitation is unwise. scope Further, we think that he has put himself into a position of needless and (at times) of almost cynical antagonism to what he calls "machinery." He uses the term in a double sense,-the ordinary one of mechanical contrivance, with its new inventions and large industrial results; and (as an idea derived from this) the routine or stock notions, and processes of action, which have been mechanically adopted to secure certain ends. As to the former, we cannot think that human na ture, in finding an outlet for its many-sided activity in the direction of "machinery," acts in a way that is hostile to culture. We prefer (as in the case of religion) to include the practical tendency which finds in new inventions to accelerate labour, and to supersede manual toil by mechanical contrivance, within the sphere of culture. Let it be admitted, that it is intrinsically of much lower value than any other kind of effort, bearing on the perfection of the individual. Still, as it implies the victory of man over nature, insight into her laws, and the utilization of her processes, it is the condition of other and higher grades of culture; and iuasmuch as it is a virtual necessity of human. life, let us concede its value and respect its tendency. As to the latter, we think that what Mr. Arnold would substitute in place of the machinery he rejects, runs no small risk of becoming itself mechanical. Fre quently he speaks of culture as if it were some magical instrument or weapon which its fol lowers must wield to effect certain ends otherwise unattainable, to get rid of certain blemishes otherwise ineradicable. Culture, he says, does this, culture asks that; culture forbids this, culture enjoys that. We become weary of the reiteration; and though the worship of machinery is everywhere denounced, and the effort to accomplish by certain stock methods certain preconceived results is represented as the very bane of our modern civilization, we cannot avoid feeling that the new instrument may be worshipped as a new "machine," though baptized with the name of Culture. This result is almost certain should Mr. Arnold have the satisfaction of seeing a school of disciples arise to follow him in their devotion to the Hellenic ideal. In their hands it would degenerate. The eσoτηs of the master would become a stock notion to the disciples; and either dilettantism would ensue, or a more defined system would arise, and the pupils learn to swear by their rabbi. As we have used the term Culture, it only amounts to a convenient phrase by which the process of education is tersely described. Then when Mr. Arnold endeavours to explain the ultimate meaning of his doctrine, he tells us that his aim is "to see things as they are." "To this culture sticks fondly." Again and again he reiterates the statement that culture refers "all our operating to a firm intelligible law of things," but when we ask what this law is, we have no firm intelligible answer. We are not landed in the ultimate mystery of a first principle, but we are lost in the mist of an abstract proposition. We ask for an interpretation and we obtain a formula, we desire bread and we receive a stone. Instead of a fruitful and elastic rule which might become a guiding principle, a test by which to distinguish the spurious from the real,-we have a barren aphorism, which in its turn runs no small danger of being "worshipped as a fetish" by those who may adopt it. To say that a tone of intellectual arrogance, especially towards this generation, characterizes all Mr. Arnold's teaching is perhaps to say too much; but his attitude is austere, and his work is not lovingly and healthily constructive. He would have accomplished a nobler and more durable result had he restrained his powers of polished satire, and while more sparing in his criticism of minor men and measures, had contented himself with holding up an exalted ideal to his contemporaries. Respect for your adversary is a prime condition of success in intellectual warfare; respect for your pupils (even although they are Philistines) a condition of successful teaching. A singularly acute and victorious critic of our existing systems, Mr. Arnold proclaims that they all lack "sweetness and light." It is well that we have one amongst us so profoundly in sympathy with the Hellenic ideal, and so swift to correct our British " Philistinism" with its rash impulses, its stock notions, and vulgar appreciations. But we cannot regard the critic's as the highest type of mind. Mr. Arnold is not of the mould of Carlyle, who with all his destructive energy is kindly within, and creative, with no touch of the cynic in his nature. He has the critic's clear eye; but he lacks the warmth, the large fertility, the creative sympathy and kindliness of the seer. He has told us over and over again that he is a man without a system. He can hardly expect to induce the age to follow him towards an ideal of which the root is so very vague. But while theoretically disowning system, and hitting hard at the system-makers, he is practically forced to depart from this attitude of negation. He brings forward several highly elaborate and suggestive schemes, which he tells us "culture approves." He is anxious to guard us against supposing that when by the help of culture he "criticises some imperfect doing or other, he has in his eye some well-known rival plan of doing which he wants to serve and recommend." But in spite of this protest against a course, which he elsewhere describes as "giving the victory to some rival fetish," he is compelled to do much more than merely "turn a fresh stream of thought on the matter in question." Thus he praises a National Church, and is vehemently opposed to all disestablishment. He even satirizes the advocates of the latter, and imputes unworthy motives to the present Liberal leader; and in his opposition to the unbridled individualism of Dissent, he wishes us to fall back on "what has commended itself most to the religious life of the nation." But may not the idea conveyed in this phrase become as absolute a stock notion" as any of those which Nonconformity worships? It may degenerate into the mere authority of the past, and the nation find itself fettered by tradition. And may not the advocates of Nonconformity make a similar appeal to "what has commanded itself to the religious life of the nation," and plead a raison d'etre in pointing to the past history of their sects? Mr. Arnold finds that culture "leads him to propose to do for the Nonconformists more than they themselves venture to claim," more than the Dean of Westminster and his party have proposed in their scheme of a National Church of the future. Culture, he says, leads us to think that the best thing is "to establish, that is, to bring into contact with the main current of national life in Ireland, the Roman Catholic and Presbyterian Churches along with the Anglican Church; and in England a Congregational |