Bacon, Pindar, Sophocles, Milton, Thomas à Kempis, and Ecclesiasticus, and retire more and more from the modern world and modern literature, which is all only what has been before and what will be again, and not bracing or edifying in the least. I have not looked at the newspapers for months, and when I hear of some new dispute or rage that has arisen it sounds quite historical." His first literary essay was poetry, and when at last he touched the fringe of politics the year 1858 had come and he had just overstepped his thirty-fifth year the age at which, according to Hippocrates, youth ends. For Arnold it was the parting of the ways. More and more the problems which stirred men's minds-problems political, theological, educational-drew him into the open arena of controversy, where mind sharpens mind as iron sharpens iron, and this arena once entered he continued for thirty years to address himself to the absorbing questions of the day in the hearing of an audience which grew with every year and which, even when least convinced by his unconventional attitude, seldom refused him a respectful hearing and even a hearty admiration.

From the first he took upon himself the rôle of the independent critic of society, and he has told us in many places wherein, in his view, the function of criticism consists. "The business of criticism," he says in one of his most memorable essays, "is simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known to create a

current of new and fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and applications, questions which will never fail to have due prominence given to them." Hence he would be in the world of politics while not of it. Detached from parties, interests, prejudices of every kind, he desired to speak for culture, for reason, and for the truth of things, and for them alone. Writing in 1868, he utters his belief that "In this country the functions of a disinterested literary class—a class of non-political writers, having no organised and embodied set of supporters to please, simply setting themselves to observe and report faithfully, and looking for favour to those isolated persons only, scattered all through the community, whom such an attempt may interest-are of incalculable importance."" To be a voice outside the State," he writes elsewhere, "speaking to mankind or to the future, perhaps shaking the actual State to pieces in doing so, one man will suffice. But to reform the State in order to save it, to preserve it by changing it, a body of workers is needed as well as a leader: a considerable body of workers, placed at many points and operating in many directions." To such a class of writers, to such a body of workers, free, untrammelled, impartial, living in fellowship with the 1 Essay on "The Function of Criticism," in Essays in Criticism.

? Preface to Higher Schools and Universities of France. Essay on "Numbers" in American Essays.

world's best minds, susceptible to every new idea, liberal in thought yet cautious in action, he aspired to belong. Direct influence he did not seek to exert. D Transformation of thought rather than practical reform was his aim, for to such transformation of thought he looked for the impulse which alone could lead to any wholesome scheme of social reconstruction.

"We, indeed, pretend to educate no one," he writes later in perhaps the most widely read of all his prose works, "for we are still engaged in trying to clear and educate ourselves. But we are sure that the endeavour to reach, through culture, the firm, intelligible law of things, we are sure that the detaching ourselves from our stock notions and habits-that a more free play of consciousness, an increased desire for sweetness and light, and all the bent which we call Hellenising, is the master-impulse, even now, of the life of our nation. and of humanity-somewhat obscurely, perhaps, for this actual moment, but decisively and certainly for the immediate future; and that those who work for this are the sovereign educators. Docile echoes of the eternal voice, pliant organs of the infinite will, such workers are going along with the essential movement of the world, and this is their strength and their happy and divine fortune."''

His path was not always a smooth one. Perhaps he did not always choose the way of prudence and ease. He conceived it to be his first duty to be honest with

1 Culture and Anarchy, Conclusion.

himself, his next to be honest with the world. Yet nothing is so difficult, or at least so unpopular, as honesty in opinion. Nearly everything is against it— the prejudice which makes so large a part of human nature, conventionality, conservatism, the clamour of the multitude which suffers no setter forth of strange gods, but clings with slavish devotion to its old fantastic deities. But Arnold never temporised, and of sophistry he was incapable. Truth was his foremost quest, and the truth as he knew it, without garnishment or reservation, he gave in turn; and truth is the severest test of magnanimity. Hence frequent conflict with those whom he desired to influence and to convince, with misjudgment and harsh judgment sometimes on one side, sometimes on both. But, as he writes in one of his letters, "More than half the world can never frankly accept the person of whom they learn, but kick at the same time that they learn."

The philosophy of life of such a man must always possess an absorbing interest, and to understand that philosophy is the best possible initiation to the study of his systematic teaching.

If one were to attempt to summarise in a single phrase the ideal which he sought to realise, and in a rare degree succeeded in realising, that phrase would

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"the balance of life." To see all things, and above everything else life itself, in a true proportion was his constant aim, for he recognised that therein lies the secret of human completeness. Arnold was here essen