and weak; but character without culture is, on the other hand, something raw, blind, and dangerous." Safety is found only in a just combination of the two:"Hebraism strikes too exclusively upon one string in us; Hellenism does not address itself with serious energy enough to morals and righteousness. For our totality, for our general perfection, we need to unite the two; now the two are easily at variance. In their lower forms they are irreconcilably at variance; only when each of them is at its best, is their harmony possible. Hebraism at its best is beauty and charm; Hellenism at its best is also beauty and charm. As such they can unite; as anything short of this, each of them, they are at discord, and their separation must continue. The flower of Hellenism is a kind of amiable grace and artless, winning good nature, born out of the perfection of lucidity, simplicity, and natural truth; the flower of Christianity is grace and peace by the annulment of our ordinary self through the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ. Both are eminently humane, and for complete human perfection both are required; the second being the perfection of that side in us which is moral and acts, the first of that side in us which is intelligential and perceives and knows."

Profoundly sensible though he was of the strong hold which the Puritan conception of life had asserted upon the English nation, and pre-eminently upon the middle classes, and strong even to vehemence as was his dislike of its narrowness, harshness, and sterility, Arnold

yet believed that under the solvent influence of the modern spirit even this inveterate obstacle to culture would in the end be overcome. And if he had no great sympathy with the Puritan element in the national life, and spent no small part of his controversial energy in combating it, he yet admired its vigour and virility. "The Puritan middle class, with all its faults," he writes, "is still the best stuff in this nation. Some have hated and persecuted it, many have flattered and derided it-flattered it that, while they deride it, they may use it; I have believed in it. It is the best stuff in this nation, and in its success is our best hope for the future. But to succeed it must be transformed.” Signs of transformation he saw in a reviving taste for the theatre, in a furtive groping after knowledge, in a keener perception of the beautiful, in a greater cultivation of manners and the arts of society. The overthrow of Hebraism, however, would not be a victory for Hellenism but a victory for culture.

M

CHAPTER IV

THE THREE ESTATES

EETING Matthew Arnold on one occasion at

dinner, Lord Beaconsfield complimented him upon his felicity in phrase-making. Coming from a consummate master of an art in which, to do him justice, he also strove to excel, Arnold nursed the compliment as one of the most flattering which fell to his lot. It was the time which saw in vogue memorable collocations like "sweetness and light" (for which Arnold went, of course, to Swift), "conduct three-fourths of life," "Hebraism and Hellenism," and, above all, "Barbarian and Philistine." This was the happiest of designations to apply to the aristocracy and the middle class, for it told everything, and that in a manner at once epigrammatic and arresting. The words leaped at once into currency and popularity. Writing in one of those delightfully frank domestic letters of his, of an evening spent in congenial company just after the article introducing them to the British public appeared in Cornhill, he says: "I should think I heard the word Philistine used at least a hundred

times during dinner, and Barbarians very often." Amiable in all relationships, Arnold was in nothing so amiable as in the unaffected literary vanity which sat so gracefully upon him. More than that, both arbarian and Philistine took more than kindly to the gibe, the former because it was administered with the most utter urbanity and absence of malice,' the latter probably because he detected in it a subtle compliment.

In one of his essays Arnold refers to the imperviousness of the English mind to foreign ideas, and its stolid indifference to current foreign literature, and laments it as one of the most unfortunate marks of insularity. If anything had been wanting to complete the indictment of Philistinism of this kind, the crowning evidence was surely afforded by the naïveté with which most of the readers and many of the critics of Culture and Anarchy promptly concluded that the word was one which Arnold had coined out of his own head. Barbarian was his own idea,— Philistine was not his at all, not even in his special application of it. He refers, indeed, to Heine's use of the word. Nor was it Heine's. In its literary significance "Philistine" is a word with a past, with a history both long and distinguished. It

"I think Barbarian will stick," he writes in a letter of February 5, 1868, "but as a very charming Barbarianess . . expresses a great desire to make my acquaintance I dare say the race will bear no malice. In fact, the one arm they feel and respect is irony, as I have often said; whereas the Puritan middle class, at whom I have launched so much, are partly too good, partly too gross, to feel it. I shall tell upon them, however, somehow before I have done."

comes from Germany, and in the fertile brain of her academic youth it had its origin-how many centuries ago? By the word "Philistine" the student naturally denoted and denotes all who were not numbered among the children of light. If you are not a student, and so one of the favoured people, an Israelite indeed, what else can you be but a Philistine ?—it is the only other alternative. Applied thus generically, as who should say Jew and Gentile, the word was intended in a special manner to describe the characteristics of the humdrum civilian, lost in narrowness and prejudice, hating originality, obtuse in intelligence, smug and contented, and well provided with this world's goods -in short everything that the children of light are not. "When the student has no money he borrows from the Philistine." "Money have the Philistines, but their hearts are cold as ice." So it is written in two wellknown students' songs, and the same sentiment, variously expressed, is found in many another genial Kommerslied dating from a period far anterior to either Heine or Goethe, who also hits off the characteristic laches of the Philistine both in prose and verse. between the student world and the Philistine Bürgerthum no love should be lost was in the nature of things, for Scripture itself gave warrant for the merciless harrying of the enemy. Hence in the halcyon days of German student life, when every university was still bathed in the after-glow of medieval romance, perpetual war raged between gown and town, and this

That