in ideas; Keats lacks the moral element and Tennyson the intellectual; and so on. Only Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Milton come off unscathed. Before us march, like Richard's dream-victims on the eve of Bosworth Field, a host of bards whom Arnold has wholly or partially decapitated. But this strictness of judgment is not a sin. It is merely an approximation to the standard of the French Academy, which Arnold elsewhere admits is impossible and undesirable on English soil. The main reason for all this headsmanship was the fact that self-expression had run ahead of the Time-Spirit and unsettled English thought. Balance with life itself, the object of poetry, had been upset. Something was necessary to stamp books as good or bad. The desideratum was a cultivated body of readers who would accept nothing but the best.

Where would he place De La Mare, Masefield, Newbolt, Housman, Lindsay, Sandburg, and Robinson? How will poetry develop to-day without experimentation, latitude, and even eccentricity? Can we measure everything by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth? The answer, Arnold would declare, lies in the fundamental truth to life of any parts of these men's work, and their harmony with the moral balance of the world and the current of the Time-Spirit. Otherwise, one might as well gamble away the savings of St Francis and George Fox on the roulette-wheel of Greenwich Village and all other groups where creativity dries up through the unmorality of its poses. But it is a world of relativity; and we must grant that there is value in the study of psychology in the creation of poetry, and justification for what Mr Robert Graves calls the 'subjective analysis of the actual processes of inspiration.' There is an Anatomy of Poetry; Shelley and Coleridge had made some slight beginnings in this field. Again, it is not always safe to criticise every new power by comparison with a masterpiece; for the new power may, like one of Burbank's new flowers, be a masterpiece and a law unto itself. Granted these modifications, Arnold would still declare that Freudian eccentricities and over-analysis of temperament need to be overcome by a calm great truth-telling poetry, which aims at the universal through the concrete, rather than encouraged

by centrifugal impressions which have no relation at all to the life about us. 'If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him.'

6

With the Church and the Bible, Arnold's position is just the reverse of his literary position. Books were unfettered; the Mid-Victorian Church was stiff, conventional, too far removed from the wants and cravings of men in general. The Arnolds played no mean part in its humanisation: Thomas is declared by Pfleiderer, in his 'Development of Theology,' the pioneer of free theology in England.' Similarly Matthew, who loved his Church, had never had recourse to the solution of Newman and Manning, insisting that its true strength lay 'not in its powers of force, but in its powers of attractiveness.' He would call off the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester from their attempts in Convocation to re-define the Trinity; he would inculcate into the over-Hebraised system some of the sweet reasonableness of Hellenic thought; he would endeavour to spread more beauty through the brick chapels of black-clothed Dissenters; and he would read a sort of literary burial service over the lifeless corpse of ritualism. Hence resulted, about fifty years ago, his three utterances on the Church and religion— 'Literature and Dogma,'' God and the Bible,' and 'St Paul and Protestantism'; their aim is flexible and susceptible of as many interpretations as there are hearts to feel its force. In the light of recent discoveries he may be wrong about the order and meaning of certain books of the Bible; he may be weak on origins when he conceives of the earliest Hebrew God as a Conduct-God rather than a War-God, and declares that the early religion of Israel was free from supernatural belief. He is uniformly unfair to Puritanism, and does not understand what sent the Pilgrims overseas or made Archbishop Laud a reproach to men who would worship as they saw fit! With all his freedom, he is unfair to Bishops Colenso and Temple in their zeal for 'new wine in new bottles.' But he is in the essentials thoroughly at one with Dr Milligan in his claim that St Paul's letters are to be read like the contemporary papyri unearthed in Egypt by Messrs Grenfell and Hunt, that the New Testament writers had no notion of being read

too critically, and that the literary test is second only to the spiritual test in understanding the Scriptures.

'The language of the Bible is literary-language thrown out at an object of consciousness not fully grasped, which inspired emotion. Evidently, if the object be one not fully to be grasped, and one to inspire emotion, the language of figure and feeling will satisfy us better about it than the language of literal fact and science.'

Matthew Arnold, whose equipment for Biblical criticism was, of course, inadequate, simply said what the average Englishman was feeling fifty years ago and did not dare to say. Recall, he urged, your religion from theory to direct experience. Conduct is more vital than rules: an intellectual imagination more cogent than revivalism or ritualism. What was heresy in 1872 is general belief to-day. No one would regard the 'Personal First Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of the Universe' as reverently as one would regard Him to whom Isaiah cries: The Eternal is our God, the Eternal alone!' The special credit and glory of Arnold's doctrine is the wide sympathy of his interpretation, a combination of Thomas Arnold's stout Church Liberalism and the charm of Cardinal Newman 'gliding along the dim aisles of St Mary's at Oxford.'

We have seen that Arnold's heredity was strongly of the pulpit and of the desk, that his father, brothers, brother-in-law, and nephews held educational positions, and that even his niece drew a modicum of her plots from the gardens and tea-tables of Oxford. If we add to this his own thirty-six years of School Inspectorship, and his reports of 1861, 1865, and 1885, based upon examination of European schools, we can understand that such a temperament would impress itself profoundly upon the English system of training children. A product of Winchester, Rugby, and Oxford, he took into the 'little red schoolhouse' a different atmosphere from that which we should expect in the graduate of a normal school. It reveals him as a logical ancestor of the Working Men's Educational Association movement and Mr Edmund G. A. Holmes's policy of Joy and Child Training.' And yet, just as he called himself a 'belletristic trifler' in the world of letters, a layman in the interpretation and an unpolitical Liberal in the science

of government, so he repeatedly emphasized his amateur rather than his professional status in education. He was bored by books on pedagogy. 'Study,' he said, 'the living problem before you, the child and the thing he needs.'

When Matthew was himself learning the three R's, there was practically no State education in England. While Thomas fought Anglican reaction, the Reform Bill was admitting a brief claim and a slender grant for public education, as a result of the middle-class rise in social and industrial prominence. The Tories died hard, just as their Corn-law legislation died hard. With the British idea of liberty and varying opinion, it had been left to charities, public bequests, and the Sunday-school movement to make progress. It would be tedious to rehearse details which are to be found in any text-book: suffice it to say that even recently, when Mr Fisher was at the head of the Board of Education, he had his troubles in the establishment of universal English education.

As we have seen, the young Fellow of Oriel in 1848, amid European revolution, expressed himself as doubtful of the continuity of England's aristocracy. Nor did he many years later, as an official representative of Great Britain, see any reason to recant. He attacked the situation within his party. Arnold held, in 'Democracy,' that it was a time-worn creed to believe that the State 'neither would nor could make a safe use of any more extended liberty'; and he applied this view of his to education. He was impressed with 'that impulse which drives society as a whole-no longer individuals and limited classes only, but the whole mass of a community -to develop itself with the utmost possible fullness and freedom.' France, with other defects which he does not avoid facing-France, the gay, the unmoral, the land of catch-words, has this advantage over English training, has so organised herself as to facilitate for all members of her society full and free expansion.' And the remedy, in England, is, not to bolster up aristocracy, but to fill the democracy full of ideas which circulate and count. It would be better, he holds, to Etonise the populace than to board-school' the Etonians; 'a nation having great and complicated matters to deal with must greatly gain

by employing the action of the State.' Elsewhere we find him declaring that Irish Catholicism should have more control over the training of its own children, and that in handling all the classes and denominations one should profit by the French system of public secondary instruction, which raises the lower classes to the level of the nation at large, and compels the aristocratic section to offer and spread ideas which will not be out of harmony and will not smack of the Versailles viewpoint of the days before 1789. It is the very essence of Matthew Arnold that we breathe here-an intense desire to give every British boy an opportunity to become a leader, just as the typical American boy is pointed towards the White House and a typical French soldier has in his knapsack a marshal's bâton. 'Open their minds; take them into a world of Shakespeare, and try to make them feel that there is no book so full of poetry and beauty as the Bible!'

· Arnold was thus ever an opponent of standardisation; his reports to the London Council were always favourable when teachers were conscientious and sympathetic, and children happy. For this reason he opposed Lowe's 'Payment by Results,' which features the revised code of 1872; he stood for Home Rule in districts, free play for the inspector, and no dictation of methods. Arnold was a pioneer in recommending the scientific study of English composition; he would bring Latin and French down into the elementary school; and in order to prove the point which has first been mentioned regarding the Bible, he published a 'Bible Reading for Schools' in 1872, based upon the literary and imaginative side of the Scriptures, thus linking his educational policy with his New Testament critique as evidenced in Literature and Dogma.'

In the public schools with which he was more familiar by inheritance than with the popular institutions, he advocates more flexibility and intellectual freedom; the evils of restraint, stoppage, and prejudice' must be exposed. And even here he cannot do without his Greek and Latin; they were excellent people, the conservative Roman aristocracy . . . only Conservatism, like Liberalism, taken alone, is not sufficient, is not itself saving.' Democracy,' Equality,' and 'Porro Unum est