cynicism or of inadequate sympathy. In point of fact, the true account of the matter seems rather to lie in the paradox that the apparent superciliousness of Arnold's style comes from the very intensity of his moral earnestness, and that the limitations of his style and method are largely due to the strenuousness of his moral purpose.

II.

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WHAT, then, was Arnold's controlling purpose in his prose writing? What was the work" that he "wanted to do with the English public"? In trying to find answers to these questions it will be well first to have recourse to stray phrases in Arnold's prose; these phrases will give incidental glimpses, from different points of view, of his central ideal; later, their fragmentary suggestions may be brought together into something like a comprehensive formula.

In the lectures on Celtic Literature Arnold points out in closing that it has been his aim to lead Englishmen to "reunite themselves with their better mind and with the world through science"; that he has sought to help them "conquer the hard unintelligence, which was just then their bane; to supple and reduce it by culture, by a growth in the variety, fullness, and sweetness of their spiritual life." In the Preface to his first volume of Essays he explains that he is trying "to pull out a few more stops in that powerful but at present somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman." In Culture and Anarchy he assures us that his object is to convince men of the value of "culture";

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to incite them to the pursuit of "perfection"; to help make reason and the will of God prevail." And again in the same work he declares that he is striving to intensify throughout England "the impulse to the development of the whole man, to connecting and harmonizing all parts of him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their chance."

These phrases give, often with capricious picturesqueness, hints of the prevailing intention with which Arnold writes. They may well be supplemented by a series of phrases in which, in similarly picturesque fashion, he finds fault with life as it actually exists in England, with the individual Englishman as he encounters him from day to day; these phrases, through their critical implications, also reveal the purpose that is always present in Arnold's mind, when he addresses his countrymen. Provinciality," Arnold! points out as a widely prevalent and injurious characteristic of English literature; it argues a lack of centrality, carelessness of ideal excellence, undue devotion to relatively unimportant matters. Again, "arbitrariness," and "eccentricity" are noticeable traits both of English literature and scholarship; Arnold finds them everywhere deforming Professor Newman's interpretations of Homer, and he further comments on them as in varying degrees "the great defect of English intellect-the great blemish of English literature." In religion he takes special exception to the "loss of totality" that results from sectarianism; this is the penalty, Arnold contends, that the Nonconformist pays for his hostility to the established church; in his pursuit of his own special

enthusiasm the Nonconformist becomes, like Ephraim, "a wild ass alone by himself."

From all these brief quotations this much at least is plain, that what Arnold is continually recommending is the complete development of the human type, and that what he is condemning is departure from some finely conceived ideal of human excellencefrom some scheme of human nature in which all its powers have full and harmonious play. The various phrases that have been quoted, alike the positive and the negative ones, imply as Arnold's continual purpose in his prose-writings the recommendation of this ideal of human excellence and the illustration of the evils that result from its neglect. The significance and the scope of this purpose will become clearer, however, if we consider some of the imperfect ideals which Arnold finds operative in place of this absolute ideal, and note their misleading and depraving effects.

One such partial ideal is the worship of the excessively practical and the relentlessly utilitarian as the only things in life worth while. England is a prevailingly practical nation, and our age is a prevailingly practical age; the unregenerate product of this nation and age is the Philistine, and against the Philistine Arnold never wearies of inveighing. The Philistine is the swaggering enemy of the children of light, of the chosen people, of those who love art and ideas disinterestedly. The Philistine cares solely for business, for developing the material resources of the country, for starting companies, building bridges, making railways, and establishing plants. The machinery of life-its material organ

ization-monopolizes all his attention. He judges of life by the outside, and is careless of the things of the spirit. The Philistine may, of course, be religious; but his religion is as materialistic as his everyday existence; his heaven is a triumph of engineering skill and his ideal of future bliss is, in Sydney Smith's phrase, to eat "pâtés de foie gras to the sound of trumpets." Against men of this class Arnold cannot show himself too cynically severe; they are pitiful distortions; the practical instincts have usurped, and have destroyed the symmetry and integrity of the human type. The senses and the will to live are monopolizing and determine all the man's energy toward utilitarian ends. The power of beauty, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of social manners are atrophied. Society is in serious danger unless men of this class can be touched with a sense of their shortcomings; made aware of the larger values of life; made pervious to ideas; brought to recognize the importance of the things of the mind and the spirit.

Another partial ideal, the prevalence of which Arnold laments, is the narrowly and unintelligently religious ideal. The middle class Englishman is according to Arnold a natural Hebraist; he is pre-occupied with matters of conduct and careless about things of the mind; he is negligent of beauty and abstract truth, of all those interests in life which had for the Greek of old, and still have for the modern man of "Hellenistic" temper, such inalienable charm. The Puritanism of the seventeenth century was the almost unrestricted expression of the Hebraistic temper, and

from the conceptions of life that were then wrought out, the middle classes in Er gland have never wholly escaped. The Puritans looked out upon life with a narrow vision, recognized only a few of its varied interests, and provided for the needs of only a part of man's nature. Yet their theories and conceptions of life-theories and conceptions that were limited in the first place by the age in which they originated, and in the second place by a Hebraistic lack of sensitiveness to the manifold charm of beauty and knowledgethese limited theories and conceptions have imposed themselves constrainingly on many generations of Englishmen. To-day they remain, in all their narrowness and with an ever increasing disproportion to existing conditions, the most influential guiding principles of large masses of men. Such men spend their lives in a round of petty religious meetings and employments. They think all truth is summed up in their little cut and dried Biblical interpretations/ New truth is uninteresting or dangerous. Art distracts from religion, and is a siren against whose seductive chanting the discreet religious Ulysses seals his ears. To Arnold this whole view of life seems sadly mistaken, and the men who hold it seem fantastic distortions of the authentic human type. The' absurdities and the dangers of the unrestricted Hebraistic ideal he satirizes or laments in Culture and Anarchy, in Literature and Dogma, in God and the Bible, and in St. Paul and Protestantism.

Still another kind of deformity arises when the intellect grows self-assertive and develops overweeningly. To this kind of distortion the modern man or