Marcus Aurelius, and Goethe! All of these, and all he says about education, gain much by the pellucid, grace and precision with which they are presented. They are presented, it is true, rather as the treasure-trove of instinctive taste than as the laborious conclusions of any profound logic; for Culture, as we have often said, naturally approached even the problems of the universe, not so much from the side of metaphysics as from the side of. Belles-Lettres. I can remember Matthew Arnold telling us with triumph that he had sought to exclude from a certain library a work of Herbert Spencer, by reading to the committee a passage therefrom which he pronounced to be clumsy in style. He knew as little about Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy" as he did about Comte's, which he pretended to discuss with an air of laughable superiority, at which no doubt he was himself the first to laugh.

Arnold, indeed, like M. Jourdain, was constantly talking Comte without knowing it, and was quite delighted to find how cleverly he could do it. There is a charming and really grand passage in which he sums up his conclusion at the close of his "Culture and Anarchy." I cannot resist the pleasure of quoting this fine piece of English, every word of which I devoutly believe:

But for us,-who believe in right reason, in the duty and possibility of extricating and elevating our best self, in the progress of humanity towards perfection, for us the framework of society, that theatre on which this august drama has to unroll itself, is sacred; and whoever administers it, and however we may seek to remove them from their tenure of administration, yet while they administer, we steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing anarchy and disorder; because without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection.

It so happens that this, the summing up of the mission of Culture, is entirely and exactly the mission of Positivism, and is even expressed in the very language used by Comte in all his writings,

and notably in his "Appeal to Conservatives" (1855). How pleasantly we can fancy Culture now meeting the founder of Positivism in some Elysian fields, and accosting him in that inimitably genial way: "Ah, well! I see now that we were not so far apart, but I never had patience to read your rather dry French, you know!"

Of his theology, or his anti-theology, even less need be said here. It was most interesting and pregnant, and was certainly the source of his great popularity and vogue. Here indeed he touched to the quick the Hebraism of our middle classes, the thought of our cultured classes, the insurgent instincts of the people. It was a singular mixture-Anglican divinity adjusted to the Pantheism of Spinoza-to parody a famous definition of Huxley's, it was Anglicanism minus Christianity, and even Theism. It is difficult for the poor Philistine to grasp the notion that all this devotional sympathy with the Psalmists, prophets, and Evangelists, this beautiful enthusiasm for "the secret of Jesus" and the "profound originality" of Paul, were possible to a man whose intellect rejected the belief that there was even any probable evidence for the personality of God, or for the celestial immortality of the soul, who flatly denied the existence of miracle, and treated the entire fabric of dogmatic theology as a figment. Yet this is the truth; and what is more, this startling, and somewhat para

doxical, transformation scene of the Anglican creeds and formularies sank deep into the reflective minds of many thinking men and women, who could neither abandon the spiritual poetry of the Bible nor resist the demonstrations of science. The combination, amongst many combinations, is one that, in a different form, was taught by Comte, which has earned for Positivism the title of Catholicism plus Science. Matthew Arnold, who but for his father's too early death might have been the son of a bishop, and who, in the last century, would himself have been a classical dean, made an analogous and somewhat restricted combination that

fairs and prohibited any assembly that might interfere with farmers on market-days; which allowed liberty to the grower to get the highest price he could and discouraged monopolies; which kept the public roads both safe and in excellent condition, thus facilitating the transport of produce.

of

Then came the too easy acquisition of wealth, the importation of Egyptian corn, the multiplication of slave-labor, the increase of large holdings and the consequent conversion of much arable land into pasture. No attempt can be made here to gauge the effects of these changes on the Italian peasantry. We often read of the Italian peasant class being swept away, but if this happened, it showed a remarkable faculty for resuscitation. Perhaps a love eccentricity made De Quincey argue that, "there was not one ploughman the less at the end than at the beginning," but his paradox may not be farther from the truth than the theory of wholesale extirpation. Enough peasants were left to be the chief transmitters of the old Italian blood which was to color all the northern deluges and so to bear out Virgil's prophecy that the name of Italy would survive every conquest and that, by a fatal law, only those invaders came to stay who merged their own language and character in the native speech and birthstamp of the people of the land.

Through all changes the idea remained; the idea of the paramount importance and dignity of agriculture. The figure of the hero who, after saving his country, returned to till his fields, had taken hold of the Roman mind as the type of true virtue, and the quality of a nation's ideals is as important as the quality of its realities. When Trajan made it a law that those who aspired to occupy public office must possess a third of their substance in land, he was wisely yielding to the influence of one of the continually recurring waves of popular opinion in favor of husbandry. However much the agriculturist was sacrificed, first to faction and then to despotism, this opinion never really altered. The taste

for country things, of which all the Roman poets were in some degree interpreters, was built upon the national conviction of a national necessity.

The account given by Lucretius of the first steps of humanity was as good science as he could make it. No line, no word is thrown in for the sake of poetic effect; though the story is avowedly constructed by guess-work, the guesses are based on carefully weighed probabilities.

The type of his primitive man and woman is to be looked for, not among contemporary savages (who may have been descending all the while that we have been ascending), but among our fellow-creatures the beasts of the field. Each animal in its natural state follows the law which is fitted to perpetuate its species; it is not the enemy of its kind, it has its own method of keeping its person and its nest or lair clean; the males do not ill-treat the females; parents bring up their offspring even at a great sacrifice to themselves; those species in which the male is obliged to find food for the female after the birth of the young ones are mostly monogamous, and as long as the contract lasts it is faithfully observed. In the time of courting every creature seeks to be admired by its mate. Here are the materials which Lucretius used.

If, he says, the human race in its infancy had not, as a rule, respected the weak, and watched over the woman and the child, it would very soon have come to an end. He describes the discovery of language much in the same way as a biologist of the present day would do; all creatures make different noises under different circumstances; the Molossian dogs make one sound when they growl with fury, another when they bark in company, another when they howl in lonely buildings, a fourth when they shrink from a blow, a fifth when they tenderly lick and fondle their whelps, pretending to snap at them or swallow them up, and whining in a low, soothing note. Man, having a voice and tongue well adapted to language, soon developed a rude form of articulate speech. Then his educa

tion progressed rapidly. The pretty, winning ways of children were what' first softened and civilized the wild human heart. Men learnt the uses of fire, of which a flash of lightning or the friction of dead branches was the origin; stone weapons were invented and animals were tamed; it occurred to one man to clothe himself in a skin, not, alas! to his advantage, for his fellows, filled with envy, set upon him and killed him, and in the struggle the skin was spoilt and rendered useless to any one. So, perhaps, began human strife! Originally beauty and strength were what gave the chiefship, but, by and by, wealth began to interfere with that natural selection. Man applied himself to the vast undertaking of cultivating the earth; the forests retreated up the mountains, vineyards and olive groves and cornfields appeared in the plains and valleys. The great invention of how to work in wool substituted a better sort of dress for skins. At first men, doubtless, spun as well as delved, "since the male sex are far superior in art and ingenuity in whatever they turn their hand to," but the sturdy laborers jeered at their stay-at-home brothers, and called them out to help them in the fields; thus it was that women became spinsters.

About this time Lucretius placed his Golden Age, in which no privileged beings lead an impossible life, but real rustics taste the joys of simplicity. Here the real is beautiful, but it does not cease to be the real; there is as much reality in an arum lily as in a toadstool. In fine weather, when the young men had satisfied their hunger, they laughed and jested under the trees, dancing with stiff, awkward steps, and crowning their heads with flowers and leaves. Then they sang, imitating the liquid voices of birds, and they found the way to make music on a reed. The sweet, plaintive notes of the pipe were heard through all the pathless woods and in secret haunts and divine resting-places.

This generation, which had no empty cares nor emptier ambitions, could be called happy, if men could ever be

called so. But of all writers Lucretius was most conscious of the elemental world-pain which none can escape. No day passes into night, no night passes into day, that does not hear the cries of the new-born infant mixing with the wails of the mourners by their dead. Nor is man alone in his sorrow; while the calf bleeds before some lovely temple, the mother, vainly seeking her child, wanders hither and thither through the wood, leaving the print of her hoofs upon the moist ground. Then she stands still and fills the air with her laments, and then hurriedly she returns to the stable to see if by chance it is not there. Nor do fresh pastures, nor the sight of other calves console her, for she nowhere beholds the loved form.

With the exception of Dante no poet has the contained descriptive power of Lucretius, or, perhaps, in the same degree, the art of choosing suggestive words. A few lines bring a natural scene or a person before our eyes so forcibly that no detail seems to be wanting. His similes produce the illusion of making a direct appeal to our eyes. Take, for instance, that of the flock of grazing sheep and frisking lambs scattered over the down "which in the distance appears to be only a whiteness on a green hill." Or take the portrait of the old countryman whom we all have met:

And now, shaking his head, the aged peasant laments with a sigh that the toil of his hands has often come to nought, and as he compares the present with the past time, he extols the fortune of his father and harps on this theme, how the good old race, full of piety, bore the burden of their life very easily within narrow bounds, when the portion of land for each man was far less than now (Sellar).

When we speak of nature we are generally thinking of the desert, the Alps, the ocean, the prairie-nature without man. This is what was rarely thought of by the poet of antiquity. Lucretius, almost alone, contemplated nature as detached from man, of whose powerlessness he had a sense which was still more eastern than modern.