such a writer, for example, as Cardinal Newman, there is in Arnold's style, as the ear listens for the quality of the bell metal, not quite the same beautifully clear and sincere resonance. There seems to be now and then some unhappy warring of elements, some ill-adjustment of overtones, a trace of some flaw in mixing or casting.

Are not these defects in Arnold's style due to his somewhat self-conscious attempt to fascinate a recalcitrant public? Is it not the assumption of a manner that jars on us often in Arnold's less happy moments? Has he not the pose of the man who overdoes bravado with the hope of getting cleverly through a pass which he feels a bit trying to his nerves? Arnold has a keen consciousness of the very stupid beast of Philistinism lying in wait for him; and in the stress of the moment he is guilty of a little exaggeration of manner; he is just a shade unnatural in his flippancy; he treads his measure with an unduly mincing flourish.

Arnold's habit of half-mocking self-depreciation and of insincere apology for supposititious personal shortcomings has already been mentioned; to his controversial writings, particularly, it gives often a raspingly supercilious tone. He insists with mock humbleness that he is a mere belletristic trifler "; that he has no "system of philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative" to help him in the discussion of abstract questions. He assures us that he is merely "a feeble unit" of the "English middle class "; he deprecates being called a professor because it is a title he shares "with so many distinguished men-Professor Pepper, Professor Ander

son, Professor Frickel, and others--who adorn it," he feels, much more than he does. These mock apologies

are always amusing and yet a bit exasperating, too. Why should Arnold regard it, we ask ourselves, as such a relishing joke-the possibility that he has a defect? The implication of almost arrogant self-satisfaction is troublesomely present to us. Such passages certainly suggest that Arnold had an ingrained contempt for the "beast " he was charming.

Yet, when all is said, much of this supercilious satire is irresistibly droll, and refuses to be gainsaid. One of his most effective modes of ridiculing his opponents is through conjuring up imaginary scenes in which some ludicrous aspect of his opponent's case or character is thrown into diverting prominence. Is it the pompous, arrogant self-satisfaction of the prosperous middle-class tradesman that Arnold wishes to satirize? And more particularly is it the futility of the Saturday Review in holding up Benthamism-the systematic recognition of such a smug man's ideal of selfish happiness-as the true moral ideal? Arnold represents himself as travelling on a suburban railway on which a murder has recently been committed, and as falling into chat with the middle-class frequenters of this The demoralization of these worthy folk, Arnold assures us, was "something bewildering." "Myself a transcendentalist (as the Saturday Review knows), I escaped the infection; and, day after day, I used to ply my agitated fellow-travellers with all the consolations which my transcendentalism would naturally suggest to me. I reminded them how Cæsar refused to take precautions against assassination, be

route.

cause life was not worth having at the price of an ignoble solicitude for it. I reminded them what insignificant atoms we all are in the life of the world. 'Suppose the worst to happen,' I said, addressing a portly jeweller from Cheapside; 'suppose even yourself to be the victim; il n'y a pas d'homme nécessaire. We should miss you for a day or two upon the Woodford Branch; but the great mundane movement would still go on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled, dividends would still be paid at the Bank, omnibuses would still run, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street.' All was of no avail. Nothing could moderate in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost bloodthirsty clinging to life." This is, of course, “admirable fooling"; and equally of course, the little imaginary scene serves perfectly the purposes of Arnold's argument and turns into ridicule the narrowness and overweening selfimportance of the smug tradesman.

Another instance of Arnold's ability to conjure up fancifully a scene of satirical import may be adduced from the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy. Arnold has been ridiculing the worship of mere "bodily health and vigour" as ends in themselves. "Why, one has heard people," he exclaims, "fresh from reading certain articles of the Times on the Registrar General's returns of marriages and births in this country, who would talk of our large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had something in itself, beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in them; as if the British Philistine would have only to present

himself before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order to be received among the sheep as a matter of right!

It is noticeable that only in such scenes and pasages as these is Arnold's imagination active-scenes and passages that are a bit satirical, not to say malicious; on the other hand, scenes that have the limpid light and the winning quality of many in Cardinal Newman's writings-scenes that rest the eye and commend themselves simply and graciously to the heart-are in Arnold's prose hardly, if ever, to be found. This seems the less easy to explain inasmuch as his poetry, though of course not exceptionally rich in color, nevertheless shows everywhere a delicately sure sense of the surface of life. Nor is it only the large sweep of the earth-areas or the diversified play of the human spectacle that is absent from Arnold's prose; his imagination does not even make itself exceptionally felt through concrete phrasing or warmth of coloring; his style is usually intellectual almost to the point of wanness, and has rarely any of the heightened quality of so-called poetic prose. In point of fact, this conventional restraint in Arnold's style, this careful adherence to the mood of prose, is a very significant matter; it distinguishes Arnold both as a writer and as a critic of life from such men as Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin. The meaning of this quietly conventional manner will be later considered in the discussion of Arnold's relation to

his age.

The two pieces of writing where Arnold's style has 1 Selections, p. 158.

most fervor and imaginative glow are the essay on George Sand and the discourse upon Emerson. In each case he was returning in the choice of his subject to an earlier enthusiasm, and was reviving a mood that had for him a certain romantic consecration. George Sand had opened for him, while he was still at the University, a whole world of rich and halffearful imaginative experience; a world where he had delighted to follow through glowing southern landscapes the journeyings of picturesquely rebellious heroes and heroines, whose passionate declamation laid an irresistible spell on his English fancy. Her love and portrayal of rustic nature had also come to him as something graciously different from the saner and more moral or spiritual interpretation of rustic life to be found in Wordsworth's poems. Her personality, in all its passionate sincerity and with pathetically unrewarded aspirations, had imposed itself on Arnold's imagination both as this personality was revealed in her books and as it was afterward encountered in actual life. All these early feelings Arnold revives in a memorial essay written in 1877, one year after George Sand's death. From first to last the essay has a brooding sincerity of tone, an unconsidering frankness, and an intensity and color of phrase that are noteworthy. The descriptions of nature, both of the landscapes to be found in George Sand's romances and of those in the midst of which she herself lived, have a luxuriance and sensuousness of surface that Arnold rarely condescends to. The tone of unguarded devotion may be represented by part of the concluding paragraph of the essay: "It is silent, that eloquent