ever surer sense of the points of the compass. Essays, to have this orienting power, need not be continually prating of theories and laws; they need not be rabidly scientific in phrase or in method. But they must issue from a mind that has come to an understanding with itself about the genesis of art in the genius of the artist; about the laws that, when the utmost plea has been made for freedom and caprice, regulate artistic production; about the history and evolution of art forms; and about the relations of the arts among themselves and to the other activities of life. It may fairly be doubted if Arnold had ever wrought out for himself consistent conclusions on all or on most of these topics. Indeed, the mere juxtaposition of his name and a formal list of these topics suggests the kind of mock-serious deprecatory paragraph with which the "unlearned belletristic. trifler" was wont to reply to such strictures—a paragraph sure to carry in its tail a stinging bit of sarcasm at the expense of pedantry and unenlightened formalism. And yet, great as must be every one's respect for the thorough scholarship and widely varied accomplishment that Arnold made so light of and carried off so easily, the doubt must nevertheless be suggested whether a more vigorous grasp on theory, and a more consistent habit of thinking out literary questions to their principles, would not have invigorated his work as a critic and given it greater permanence and richer suggestiveness.

VI.

Ir is, then, as an appreciator of what may perhaps be called the spiritual qualities of literature that Arnold is most distinctively a furtherer of criticism. An appreciator of beauty,-of true beauty wherever found, that is what he would willingly be; and yet, as the matter turns out, the beauty that he most surely enjoys and reveals has invariably a spiritual aroma,is the finer breath of intense spiritual life. Or, if spiritual be too mystical a word to apply to Homer and Goethe, perhaps Arnold should rather be termed an appreciator of beauty that is the effluence of noble character.

...

The importance of appreciation in criticism, Arnold has himself described in one of the Mixed Essays: "Admiration is salutary and formative; . . . but things admirable are sown wide, and are to be gathered here and gathered there, not all in one place; and until we have gathered them wherever they are to be found, we have not known the true salutariness and formativeness of admiration. The quest is large; and occupation with the unsound or half sound, delight in the not good or less good, is a sore let and hindrance to us. Release from such occupation and delight sets us free for ranging farther, and for perfecting our sense of beauty. He is the happy man, who, encumbering himself with the love of nothing which is not beautiful, is able to embrace the greatest number of things beautiful in his life."1

1 Mixed Essays, ed. 1883, p. 210.

On this disinterested quest then, for the beautiful, Arnold in his essays nominally fares forth. Yet certain limitations in his appreciation, over and beyond his prevalent ethical interest, must forthwith be noted. Music, painting, and sculpture have seemingly nothing to say to him. In his Letters there are only a few allusions to any of these arts, and such as occur do not surpass in significance the comments of the chance loiterer in foreign galleries or visitor of concert rooms. In his essays there are none of the correlations between the effects and methods of literature and those of kindred arts that may do so much either to individualize or to illustrate the characteristics of poetry. For Arnold, literature and poetry make up the whole range of art.

Within these limits, however, the limits imposed by preoccupation with conduct and by carelessness of all arts except literature,—Arnold has been a prevailing revealer of beauty. Not his most hostile critic can question the delicacy of his perception, so far as he allows his perception free play. On the need of nice. and ever nicer discriminations in the apprehension of the shifting values of literature, he has himself often insisted. Critics who let their likes and dislikes assert themselves turbulently, to the destruction of fine distinctions, always fall under Arnold's condemnation. "When Mr. Palgrave dislikes a thing, he feels no pressure constraining him, either to try his dislike closely or to express it moderately; he does not mince matters, he gives his dislike all its own way. He dislikes the architecture of the Rue Rivoli, and he puts it on the level with the architecture of Belgravia and

Gower Street; he lumps them all together in one condemnation; he loses sight of the shade, the distinction which is here everything." For a similar blurring of impressions, Professor Newman is taken to task, though in Newman's case the faulty appreciations are due to a different cause: "Like all learned men, accustomed to desire definite rules, he draws his conclusions too absolutely; he wants to include too much under his rules; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the shade, the fine distinction, is everything; and that, when he has once missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air."" To appreciate literature more and more sensitively in terms of "an undulating and diverse temperament," this is the ideal that Arnold puts before literary criticism.

His own appreciations of poetry are probably richest, most discriminating, and most disinterested in the lectures on Translating Homer. The imaginative tact is unfailing with which he renders the contour and the surface-qualities of the various poems that he comments on; and equally noteworthy is the divining instinct with which he captures the spirit of each poet and sets it before us with a phrase or a symbol. The "inversion and pregnant conciseness" of Milton's style, its "laborious and condensed fullness"; the plainspokenness, freshness, vigorousness, and yet fancifulness and curious complexity of Chapman's style; Spenser's "sweet and easy slipping move

1 Essays, i., ed. 1891, p. 73.

2 On Translating Homer, ed. 1883, p. 246.

ment"; Scott's "bastard epic style"; the "one continual falsetto" of Macaulay's "pinchbeck Roman Ballads"; all these characterizations are delicately sure in their phrasing and suggestion, and are the clearer because they are made to stand in continual contrast with Homer's style, the rapidity, directness, simplicity, and nobleness of which Arnold keeps ever present in our consciousness. Incidentally, too, such suggestive discriminations as that between simplesse and simplicité, the "semblance" of simplicity and the "real quality," are made ours by the critic, as he goes on with his pursuit of the essential qualities of Homeric thought and diction. To read these lectures is a thoroughly tempering process; a process that renders the mind and imagination permanently finer in texture, more elastic, more sensitively sure in tone, and subtly responsive to the demands of good art.

The essay on the Study of Poetry which was written as preface to Ward's English Poets is also rich in appreciation, and at times almost as disinterested as the lectures on Homer; yet perhaps never quite so disinterested. For in the Study of Poetry Arnold is persistently aware of his conception of "the grand style" and bent on winning his readers to make it their own. Only poets who attain this grand style deserve to be classics," and the continual insistence on the note of "high seriousness"-its presence or absence becomes rather wearisome. Moreover, Arnold's preoccupation with this ultimate manner and quality tends to limit a trifle the freedom and delicate truth of his appreciations of other manners and minor qualities. At times, one is tempted to charge Arnold