with visible energy and outward action. Energy and action are enjoined as the one needful thing, reflection is depreciated as old-fashioned and, to speak very frankly, a mere impediment to progress. For has not mankind all through the cycles of its history been reflecting? Surely the time for activity has now come; so let us all be up and doing; life may be short, but at any rate it shall be strenuous." So says one voice of the age, and a powerful voice it is. It was this gospel of fuss and bustle which drew from Arnold those energetic words in Obermann, words at once of protest and lament: But we, brought forth and rear'd in hours Of change, alarm, surprise What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise? Too fast we live, too much are tried, Too harass'd, to attain Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide Strenuous in this sense Matthew Arnold's life was not, yet it was none the less a life of steady and systematic work, a life ceaselessly moving towards ends deliberately chosen as supremely reasonable and worthy of pursuit. Familiar though they are, the lines in Sir John Denham's poem on the Thames aptly describe this life of disciplined endeavour, of enthusiasm tempered by restraint: Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; Has he not himself, however, described and passed judgment upon the strenuous life and its antithesis in that intensely personal poem Rugby Chapel? What is the course of the life Of mortal men on the earth ?- Who or what they have been. And there are some, whom a thirst It was one of his profoundest convictions that English people suffered from excess of "strenuousness," a result, if we are able to follow him in his conclusion, of their religious development upon the lines of Hebraism more than of Hellenism. Hence his healthy revolt against Carlyle's gospel of earnestness, the preaching of which seemed to him very like the carrying of coals to Newcastle. Of Arnold pre-eminently it may be said, as of Joseph Joubert, whom he so greatly admired, that he "cared more for perfection than for renown," and if he advised his countrymen to seek spiritual illumination by ac quainting themselves with "the best that has been thought and said in the world," he at least practised what he preached. In these strained and overcrowded days one reads with a feeling akin to amazement and despair of the liberal portion of his time which Arnold, even at the height of his literary career, dedicated to reading, and that not merely for the enjoyment and relaxation it afforded, but as part of a severe intellectual discipline. In a letter written January 1, 1882, six years before his death, he says: "The importance of reading, not slight stuff to get through the time, but the best that has been written, forces itself upon me more and more every year I live; it is living in good company, the best company, and people are generally quite keen enough, or too keen, about doing that, yet they will not do it in the simplest and most innocent manner by reading." System was the secret of it all. The great Napoleon's maxim, "Savoir se borner," was constantly upon his lips, and to the method which he introduced into his life, the care which he took to economise effort, to prevent the indifferent from overbearing the essential, among the countless claims upon his thought and time, was due the fact that this busy man -and of what a crowded life do his Letters speak!had time for everything that was worth doing. "But such efforts were centred upon himself and his own pleasure," says the advocate of the life." It is not true, not even partially true, for to the strenuous fulness, and ripeness, and wealth of his own life were due the influences and impulses which so powerfully impressed his generation, and which will yet stretch helpfully and beneficently into the distant future. One "Es ist nicht genug of his Notebook memoranda runs: zu wissen, man muss auch anwenden; es ist nicht genug zu wollen, man muss auch thun," and no man acted more faithfully up to this maxim. Self-admonitions on the value of time and the duty of unselfish effort abound, indeed, in that revealing work: "Grant that I may this day omit no part of my duty," "Vigilandum est et orandum ne tempus otiosè transeat," "Ein unnütz Leben ist ein früher Tod," "Numquam sis ex toto otiosus, sed aut legens, aut scribens, aut orans, aut meditans, aut aliquid utilitatis pro communi laborans." These words, from the Imitation,' might stand as the motto of his life. And yet this man, who cultivated so ardently the inward life, whose great call to his countrymen was to look within, was nothing less than a recluse. "Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well," he writes in one of his shorter poems. It would be idle to pretend that in worldly matters Fortune bore a grudge against him. It stands on record, indeed, that his own timely action alone relieved him from the necessity of "executing the Dance of Death in an elementary school"; yet if his genius did not receive the official recognition which it deserved, he enjoyed during his lifetime far more popularity, of a kind which he could legitimately 1 Book I., chap. xix., section 4. value, than falls to the lot of most literary men, and a wide and congenial circle of friendships enriched his private life. No man, in fact, was more human on every side of his nature, and no man had a keener perception of the good in life or possessed in stronger measure the faculty for extracting and appropriating it. Altogether alien to his nature and to his theory of life was the moroseness which distrusts every joyous emotion and would destroy the instinct of happiness. Challenging Bishop Butler's depressing view that man's business in the world is "to endeavour chiefly to escape misery, keep free from uneasiness, pain, and sorrow, or to get relief and mitigation from them," he replies: "In his main assertion that man's proper aim is to escape from misery rather than positive happiness Butler goes clean counter to the most intimate, the most sure, the most irresistible instinct of human nature. But Butler goes counter, also, to the clear voice of our religion. 'Rejoice and give thanks!' exhorts the Old Testament; 'Rejoice evermore!' exhorts the New. This, and not mere escape from misery, getting freedom from uneasiness, pain, and sorrow, or getting mitigation of them, is what (to turn. Butler's words against himself)' the consideration of nature marks out as the course we should follow and the end we should aim at.'" It was the singular felicity of Joubert's nature, which sought happiness as a flower seeks the sunshine, that drew him to that lovable character. To understand the sympathy one |