relished this strain in his style; they have enjoyed its delicate challenge, the nice duplicity of its innuendoes; they have found its insinuations and its covert, satirical humor infinitely entertaining and stimulating. Moreover, however seriously disposed they may have been, however exacting of all the virtues from the author of their choice, they have been able to reconcile their enjoyment of Arnold with their serious inclinations, for they have been confident that these tricks of manner implied no essential or radical defect in Arnold's humanity, no lack either of sincerity or of earnestness or of broad sympathy.

Such admirers and interpreters of Arnold have been amply justified of their confidence since the publication in 1895 of Arnold's Letters. The Arnold. of these letters is a man the essential integrity-wholeness of whose nature is incontestable. His sincerity, kindliness, wide-ranging sympathy with all classes of men, are unmistakably expressed on every page of his correspondence. We see him having to do with people widely diverse in their relations to him; with those close of kin, with chance friends, with many men of business or officials, with a wide circle of literary acquaintances, with workingmen, and with foreign savants. In all of his intercourse the same sweet-tempered frankness and the same readiness of sympathy are manifest. There is never a trace of the duplicity or the treacherous irony that are to be found in much of his prose.

Moreover, the record that these Letters contain of close application to uncongenial tasks must have been a revelation to many readers who have had to rely

upon books for their knowledge of literary men. Popular caricatures of Arnold had represented him as "a high priest of the kid-glove persuasion," as an incorrigible dilettante, as a kind of literary fop idling his time away over poetry and recommending the parmaceti of culture as the sovereignest thing in nature for the inward bruises of the spirit. This conception of Arnold, if it has at all maintained itself, certainly cannot survive the revelations of the Letters. The truth is beyond cavil that he was one of the most self-sacrificingly laborious men of his time.

For a long period of years Arnold held the post of inspector of schools. Day after day, and week after week, he gave up one of the finest of minds, one of the most sensitive of temperaments, one of the most delicate of literary organizations, to the drudgery of examining in its minutest details the work of the schools in such elementary subjects as mathematics and grammar. On January 7, 1863, he writes to his mother, "I am now at the work I dislike most in the world-looking over and marking examination papers. I was stopped last week by my eyes, and the last year or two these sixty papers a day of close hand-writing to read have, I am sorry to say, much tried my eyes for the time."1 Two years later he laments again: "I am being driven furious by seven hundred closely-written grammar papers, which I have to look over." During these years he was holding the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, and he had long since established his reputation as one of the

1 Letters, i. 207. 2 Letters, i, 285

foremost of the younger poets. Yet for a livelihood he was forced still to endure-and he endured them till within a few years of his death in 1888-the exactions of this wearing and exasperating drudgery. Moreover, despite occasional outbursts of impatience, he gave himself to the work freely, heartily, and effectively. He was sent on several occasions to the Continent to examine and report on foreign school systems; his reports on German and French education show immense diligence of investigation, a thorough grasp of detail, and patience and persistence in the acquisition of facts that in and for themselves must have been unattractive and unrewarding.

The record of this severe labor is to be found in Arnold's Letters, and it must dispose once for all of any charge that he was a mere dilettante and coiner of phrases. Through a long period of years he was working diligently, wearisomely, in minutely practical ways, to better the educational system of England; he was persistently striving both to spread sounder ideals of elementary education and to make more effective the system actually in vogue. And thus, unpretentiously and laboriously, he was serving the cause of sweetness and light as well as through his somewhat debonair contributions to literature.

In another way his Letters have done much to reveal the innermost core of Arnold's nature, and so, ultimately, to explain the genesis of his prose. They place it beyond a doubt that in all he wrote Arnold had an underlying purpose, clearly apprehended and faithfully pursued. In 1867, in a letter to his mother, he says: "I more and more become conscious of

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1

66

having something to do and of a resolution to do it... Whether one lives long or not, to be less and less personal in one's desires and workings is the great matter." In a letter of 1863 he had already written in much the same strain : However, one cannot change English ideas as much as, if I live, I hope to change them, without saying imperturbably what one thinks, and making a good many people uncomfortable.' And in a letter of the same year he exclaims : 'It is very animating to think that one at last has a chance of getting at the English public. Such a public as it is, and such a work as one wants to do with it." A work to do! The phrase recalls Cardinal Newman and the well-known anecdote of his Sicilian illness, when through all the days of greatest danger he insisted that he should get well because he had a work to do in England. Despite Arnold's difference in temperament from Newman and the widely dissimilar task he proposed to himself, he was no less in earnest than Newman, and no less convinced of the importance of his task.

3

The occasional supercilious jauntiness of Arnold's style, then, need not trouble even the most conscientious of his admirers. To many of his readers it is in itself, as has been already suggested, delightfully stimulating. Others, the more conscientious folk and perhaps also the severer judges of literary quality, are bound to find it artistically a blemish; but they need not at any rate regard it as implying any radical defect in Arnold's humanity or as the result of cheap

1Letters, i. 400.

2 Letters, i. 225.

3 Letters, i. 233.

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.

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";