tially Hellenic in temperament, though his Hellenism was corrected and harmonised by a moral earnestness which the Greek character lacked. Was there contradiction here? The answer is emphatically no; the contradiction lay rather in the Greek conception of life, which failed to attach to practical morals, to conduct, due weight. This admirable equipoise, this harmonious development at once of the intellectual and the moral faculties, is surely one of the most distinctive. marks of Arnold's character, and to understand it is to understand much else which might otherwise seem incongruous, if not inexplicable. The man who confessed! that the best his intellect knew was drawn from the thought of pagan antiquity yet nursed in his breast a moral code as stern and austere as that of Hebrew, prophet. The man who risked prejudice, misunderstanding, and disfavour-all that weaklings fear-by attacking the dogmas of the Churches and the creeds had in him more real religion than the best of Churches or creeds ever held. His head was brimful of secular learning, but his heart ever found its home in the Bible and the Imitation; "morbid,' 'not thoroughly sound," he declares the impossible spiritual organum of Thomas à Kempis to be, yet it is "exquisite." Remembering all this, we see how it was by no accident that his two exemplars both in antique and in modern letters were complementary, each correcting the other according to his deficiency. On the one hand were the Greek Sophocles, whom he apostrophises as

1

one "who saw life steadily and saw it whole," ' and the Roman Marcus Aurelius, from whom he learned to "keep the balance true and my mind even "; on the other hand were the German Goethe, "the strong, much-toiling sage," whose "large, liberal view of human life" so powerfully attracted him-Goethe who, in his fine and true characterisation,

pursued a lonely road,

His eyes on Nature's plan,

Neither made man too much a God,
Nor God too much a man, 2

and the white-souled Wordsworth of his own land, who
taught him to feel, who sent him, after every new
plunge into the current of actuality and distraction,
back to the deep, quiet waters of reflection, to the life
of inwardness.

The lessons of life are really very few if reduced to principles, yet it is one of the few that "happiness has no shirt." Arnold was never weary of preaching the eternally needful truth that satisfaction and sufficiency must be found within and not without, that man is his own best friend, and that what he cannot give to his life by thought and effort concentrated upon its harmonious development, no one else and nothing external can possibly give. Hence his insistence upon the absolute worth of the self. Not to copy others slavishly, not to bewail the fate which has set his course in one direction rather than another, not to To a Friend (Poems.) 2 Obermann.

be the drifting creature of circumstances, but to work out his own proper destiny, to overcome adventitious obstacles, and so to realise his true self-this is man's supreme duty, his unique privilege, and also the secret of his peace and contentment. This is the thought which runs through that fine poem Self-Dependence, beginning with the lament,

Weary of myself and sick of asking

What I am and what I ought to be,

and ending with the strain of triumphant assurance: Resolve to be thyself and know that he Who finds himself loses his misery.

"Find thyself!" That is part of the duty and part of the secret. But he who does not seek will never find himself, and with time for every other quest we have no time for the quest nearest to hand. M. Maeterlinck has philosophised upon the perpetual estrangement which exists between the outward self of action and the true inner life. Nous vivons à côté de notre véritable vie," he writes in Le Trésor des Humbles, "et nous sentons que nos pensées les plus intimes et les plus profondes même ne nous regardent pas, car nous sommes autre chose que nos pensées et que nos rêves. Et ce n'est qu'à certains moments et presque par distraction que nous vivons selon nous-mêmes.” And the reason he gives for this neglect to find the true self is that search sends the seeker to the sombre haunts of silence,-and let us go anywhere save there! "Nous usons une grande partie de notre vie à rechercher des lieux où le

silence ne régne pas. Dès que deux ou trois hommes se rencontrent, ils ne songent qu'à bannir l'invisible ennemi; car combien d'amitiés ordinaires n'ont d'autres fondements que la haine du silence?"

Arnold anticipates the thought in that striking Wordsworthian poem, The Buried Life:

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,

But often, in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life;

A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire

Into the mystery of this heart which beats

So wild, so deep in us-to know

Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.

And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;

But hardly have we, for one little hour,

Been on our own line, have we been ourselves

Hardly had skill to utter one of all

The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.

And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do

Is eloquent, is well-but 't is not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand

Of all the thousand nothings of the hour

Their stupefying power;

Ah, yes, and they benumb us at our call!

In these days we hear much in praise of the

stren

uous life," by which is meant the life that is crowded