IT

which Arnold held upon political questions would dispose him to think lightly, if not meanly, of party machinery, party ties, and still more of party shibboleths. "I do not profess to be a politician," he writes in his essay on "Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism," ," "but simply one of a disinterested class of observers who, with no organised and embodied set of supporters to please, set themselves to observe honestly and to report faithfully the state and prospects of our civilisation."

1

When challenged, however, to descend from the Olympian heights of serene contemplation, he professes to a preference for Liberalism, though with reservations. "I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture." He held that by party ties the true teacher of his age must not incumber himself; he must turn neither to right nor to left, must

1 Mixed Essays.

2

Culture and Anarchy: Introduction.

have no prejudices and no tendencies; he must be one thing to all men-the impartial voice of wisdom and verity.

"The free spontaneous play of consciousness with which culture tries to float our stock habits of thinking and acting is by its very nature disinterested. Sometimes the result of floating them may be agreeable to this party, sometimes to that; now it may be unwelcome to our so-called Liberals, now to our so-called Conservatives; but what culture seeks is, above all, to float them, to prevent their being stiff and stark pieces of petrifaction any longer." "

1

The little we know, from his published Letters, of Arnold's Lehrjahre convinces us that the political instinct was then very strong in him. He tells how he attended a Chartist convention in London in April, 1848, and was "much struck with the ability of the speakers.' The revolutionary movements which were shaking thrones on the Continent at that time had in this country a feeble echo in street rioting, innocent, however, of anti-dynastic significance. Yet to young Arnold, lately become private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, a member of Lord John Russell's Ministry, the political auguries of the time were startling enough. "It will be rioting here only" (as it was), he writes March 7, 1848, "still, the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has, I am convinced, as Lamartine would say, struck!"

1 Culture and Anarchy, chapter vi.

The

more Arnold knew of practical politics the less he prophesied, and the less he trusted the prescience of Lamartine. How powerful was the attraction of politics for the budding publicist at that time may perhaps be best judged by the fact that it required a positive effort to keep out of print. "I was myself tempted to attempt some political writing the other day," he writes on March 10th of the same ebullient

year,

"but

in the watches of the night I seemed to feel that in that direction I had some enthusiasm of the head perhaps, but no profound stirring. So I desisted."

Did his later controversial writing ever get beyond "enthusiasm of the head"; did a "profound stirring" ever come to him? It is very questionable. Politics came, indeed, to exert upon him a strong fascination, yet it is certain that in sober mood he never really loved a life which, do as he would, had always a tendency to bring him at least to the verge of that Jacobinic violence which he reprobated as the antithesis of culture. In a letter belonging to the middle period of his literary work, he writes (January, 1864), sobered by the reflection that he had just reached the patriarchal age of forty-one-" the middle of life in any case and for me perhaps more than the middle' '. "This treatment of politics with one's thought, or with one's imagination, or with one's soul, in place of the common treatment of them with one's Philistinism and with

1 As indeed it proved, for he died, at the age of sixty-five years and three months, on April 15, 1888.

one's passions, is the only thing which can reconcile, it seems to me, any serious person to politics, with their inevitable wear, waste, and sore trial to all that is best in one." And again on May 24th of the same year: "One is from time to time seized and irresistibly carried along by a temptation to treat political, or religious, or social matters directly; but after yielding to such a temptation I always feel myself recoiling again, and disposed to touch them only so far as they can be touched through poetry." Even in 1864 his serious controversial writing can hardly be said to have begun, yet his true attitude to polemic of all kinds is unquestionably represented by these utterances. The more he found himself becoming a conspicuous figure in the arena of public debate, the less in reality he liked it. The "ordinary self" (to use his own distinction), susceptible to every human impulse and stimulus, to every point of contact with his fellows, and not by any means indifferent to the keen joy of combat and the consciousness of strength and mastery, urged him with irresistible force into the wrestlers' ring; the "better self" recognised the barrenness and futility of it all, and refused assent even where it did not dissuade and reprove him. As years advanced, he recognised with growing clearness that direct political controversy was not an element specially suited to his temperament or his intellectual gifts. "Things being in England what they are," he writes October 17, 1871, "I am glad to work indirectly by literature rather than directly by politics,"

and it was with a profound feeling of relief-perhaps also with a certain remorse for the pugnacity of his more ardent years that he more and more left the field of combat to others.

And yet if Arnold lost by entanglement in political controversy, political controversy gained by the high virtues which he brought to an exercise which does not invariably draw out the best in a man's character: above all, by his absolute straightforwardness, his sheer, downright honesty, his unfailing instinct for truth-telling, even when truth-telling needed courage and offered the prospect of certain unpopularity. For he held in horror all temporising, all sophistry and playing tricks with the understanding, all sycophantism, whether its object were the Barbarians or the Populace, all pandering to men's lower tastes and instincts for the sake of momentary applause. "I have not that talent for ' blague' and mob-pleasing, which is a real talent, and tempts many men to apostasy," he wrote (April 8, 1884), when describing his first lecturing tour in America; what he had done was simply to utter his candid opinions both of his hearers and the things which concerned them,-"holding fast to the faith once delivered to the saints."

A man whose master passion was a love of truth, and the supreme end of whose thought was to get below all sham, show, and artificiality until he reached the solid foundation of fact, if fact there were, found much to criticise and even to condemn in the political