science is specially prone; his exclusive study of
material facts leads to crude, unregenerate strength
of intellect, and leaves him careless of the value truth
may have for the spirit, and of its glimmering sugges-
tions of beauty. Yes, and for the philosopher and the
scholar, too, over-intellectualism has its peculiar dan-
gers.
The devotee of a system of thought is apt to
lose touch with the real values of life, and in his exor-
bitant desire for unity and thoroughness of organiza-
tion, to miss the free play of vital forces that gives
to life its manifold charm, its infinite variety, and
its ultimate reality. Bentham and Comte are ex-

As for the

amples of the evil effects of this rabid pursuit of
system. 'Culture is always assigning to system-
makers and systems a smaller share in the bent of
human destiny than their friends like."'
pedant he is merely the miser of facts, who grows
withered in hoarding the vain fragments of precious
ore of whose use he has lost the sense. Men of all
these various types offend through their fanatical
devotion to truth; for, indeed, as someone has in
recent years well said, the intellect is “but a parvenu,”
and the other powers of life, despite the Napoleonic
irresistibleness of the newcomer, have rights that de-
serve respect. Over-intellectualism, then, like the
over-development of any other power, leads to dis
proportion and disorder.

Such being some of the partial ideals against which Arnold warns his readers, what account does he give of that perfect human type in all its integrity, in terms

1 Culture and Anarchy, p. 33.

of which he criticises these aberrations or deformities? To attempt an exact definition of this type would perhaps be a bit presumptuous and grotesque, and, with his usual sureness of taste, Arnold has avoided the experiment. But in many passages he has recorded clearly enough his notion of the powers in man that are essential to his humanity, and that must all be duly recognized and developed, if man is to attain in its full scope what nature offers him. A representative passage may be quoted from the lecture on Literature and Science : When we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the building up of human life, and say that they are the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners, he [Professor Huxley] can hardly deny that this scheme, though drawn in rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending to scientific exactness, does yet give a fairly true representation of the matter. Human nature is built up of these powers; we have the need for them all. When we have rightly met and adjusted the claims for them all, we shall then be in a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness with wisdom." " These same ideas are presented under a somewhat different aspect and with somewhat different termipology in the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy:

The great aim of culture [is] the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make it prevail." Culture seeks "the determination of this question through all the voices of human experience.

1 Selections, p. 116.

which have been heard upon it,-of art, science, poetry,, philosophy, history, as well as of religion,—in order to give a greater fullness and certainty to its solution. Religion says: The Kingdom of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality. It places it in the ever-increasing efficacy and in the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature. As I have said on a former occasion: 'It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture.'"'1

In such passages as these Arnold comes as near as he ever comes to defining the perfect human type. He does not profess to define it universally and in abstract terms, for indeed he "hates " abstractions almost as inveterately as Burke hated them. He does not even describe concretely for men of his own time and nation the precise equipoise of powers essential to perfection. Yet he names these powers, suggests the ends toward which they must by their joint working contribute, and illustrates through examples the evil effects of the preponderance or absence of one and another. Finally, in the course of his many discussions, he describes in detail the method by which the

1 Selections, p. 152.

delicate adjustment of these rival powers may be secured in the typical man; suggests who is to be the judge of the conflicting claims of these powers, and indicates the process by which this judge may most persuasively lay his opinions before those whom he wishes to influence. The method for the attainment of the perfect type is culture; the censor of defective types and the judge of the rival claims of the co-operant powers is the critic; and the process by which this judge clarifies his own ideas and enforces his opinions on others is criticism.

III.

We are now at the centre of Arnold's theory of life and hold the keyword to his system of belief, so far as he had a system. His reasons for attaching to the work of the critic the importance he palpably attached to it, are at once apparent. Criticism is the method by which the perfect type of human nature is at any moment to be apprehended and kept in uncontaminate clearness of outline before the popular imagination. The ideal critic is the man of nicest discernment in matters intellectual, moral, æsthetic, social; of perfect equipoise of powers; of delicately pervasive sympathy; of imaginative insight; who grasps comprehensively the whole life of his time; who feels its vital tendencies and is intimately aware of its most insistent preoccupations; who also keeps his orientation toward the unchanging norms of human endeavor: and who is thus able to note and set forth the imper

fections in existing types of human nature and to urge persuasively a return in essential particulars to the normal type. The function of criticism, then, is the vindication of the ideal human type against perverting influences, and Arnold's prose writings will for the most part be found to have been inspired in one form or another by a single purpose: the correction of excess in some human activity and the restoration of that activity to its proper place among the powers that make up the ideal human type.

Culture and Anarchy (1869) was the first of Arnold's books to illustrate adequately this far-reaching conception of criticism. His special topic is, in this case, social conditions in England. Politicians, he urges, whose profession it is to deal with social questions, are engrossed in practical matters and biassed by party considerations; they lack the detachment and breadth. of view to see the questions at issue in their true relations to abstract standards of right and wrong. They mistake means for ends, machinery for the results that machinery is meant to secure; they lose all sense of values and exalt temporary measures into matters of sacred import; finally they come to that pass of ineptitude which Arnold symbolizes by the enthusiasm. of Liberals over the measure to enable a man to marry his deceased wife's sister. What is needed to correct these absurd misapprehensions is the free play of critical intelligence. The critic from his secure coign of vantage must examine social conditions dispassionately; he must determine what is essentially wrong in the inner lives of the various classes of men around him and so reveal the real sources of those social evils