in-law There is no What's-his-name but Thingummy; and What-you-may-call-it is his prophet?"" To sum up. We have seen Mr. Arnold driven to take the true metaphysical point of view by the exigences of his polemic against the Liberal Philistine in "Culture and Anarchy," and again by the exigences of his polemic against the religious Philistine in "St. Paul and Protestantism;" we have then seen his decline and fall from this point of view in "Literature and Dogma" and in "God and the Bible," conditioned by the exigences of his efforts to persuade the irreligious and desirous-to-bescientific Philistine to reopen his Bible and to appreciate the importance of conduct. We have seen that he tries to "get round" the irreligious Philistine by saying, “ Come now, we will give up all metaphysics, and we will go only upon the ground of experience." We have seen that by thus descending to the Philistine's level, he does not really get out of the metaphysical region, but only out of the region of good metaphysic into the region of bad metaphysic, of idols and illusions such as the Philistine knows and rejoices in; and that he thereby leaves the main high road along which travels the large experience of mankind, and of which metaphysic is the formal science, and shuts himself up in the small parcel of experience, with which the Philistine nourishes and flatters himself. And the fundamental assumption which lies at the root of all this bad metaphysic, and this frustrated appeal to experience, is to be sought in a latent tendency in Mr. Arnold himself, which appears as early as in his first book.2 It is the assumption that "thought and speculation is an individual matter," it is the tendency to "philosophize alone," instead of moving in the broad pathways along 1 "Dombey and Son," ch. xxvii. The passage should have been quoted entire: "The idea! my dearest Edith, there is such an obvious destiny in it, that really one might almost be induced to cross one's arm upon one's frock, and say, like those wicked Turks, 'There is,'" &c. Culture and Anarchy," pp. 185, 186. 2 66 which knowledge is actually advancing. This assumption is at once the basis of the private judgment on which the religious Philistine relies, and of the popular empiricism upon which the irreligious Philistine builds. It is the same assumption as that of the individual as something given on the one side, and of experience as something given on the other and this assumption is itself metaphysical, only it is bad metaphysic, it is a petrified fragment of a metaphysical synthesis, instead of the living whole of a synthesis of the Zeit-Geist. May we not say of metaphysic in the words of the poet "They reckon ill who leave me out, When me they fly I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings." Having spoken so severely of Mr. Arnold's later works in their scientific aspect, I desire to record my enjoyment of them and gratitude for them in every other. What can be more delightful than the passage in "Literature and Dogma" about the "Muse of Righteousness"? The account, too, of St. Paul's doctrine in "St. Paul and Protestantism;" and of the early witnesses and of the "method" and "secret" of Jesus in "Literature and Dogma ;" and again of the Bible Canon and of the Fourth Gospel in "God and the Bible," seem to me, in spite of what the learned critics have said about their inaccuracy, to be quite admirable in their way. They surely contain with sufficient accuracy all that a man of general cultivation, as distinguished from a professional student, need know about these subjects. And then the purity and freshness of the thoughts which hide from us the angular and unlovely lineaments of the Puritan metaphysic― how charming they are! I always experience the same sensation in reading these books of Mr. Arnold as I have. when reading Mr. Ruskin's later works; it is the sensation 1 P. 23. as of a breeze bringing health from sweet and sunny fields, and blowing for a moment across the exhausted atmosphere of a German lecture-room. But then to enjoy this refreshment one must turn away from the thing said to the means and manner of saying it; and one must listen to these, not as to an exposition of fact, but as one listens to a nocturne of Chopin, or to the sound of wholesome rain dropping on a dry place. R |