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Necessarium' form in various lines a body of criteria holding up to admiration the methods and manners of the schools of France.

Omitting, therefore, any fallacious definitions of 'middle class,' Arnold seems to have struck a mean between Renan's analysis of the American popular instruction without any serious higher instruction,with its intellectual mediocrity, its superficial spirit, its lack of general intelligence,' and John Bright's view that 'the people of the United States have offered to the world more valuable information during the last forty years than all Europe put together.' There must be a blend; the aristocrats and the nonconformists must each derive strength from a combined system which finds its average in a cultivated middle class. Arnold would have sided with those Americans who believe that there is acute danger in the sharp contrast between a vocationalised mass and a group of privately nurtured leaders. For this reason, his studies in education prove clearly that he was neither an 'Isaiah in white kid gloves' nor an overdone Oxonian.

Just as the test of a successful sermon is the climax, from which we derive an interpretation that is applicable to our lives and does not merely return to the limbo of quotations, so the test of a literary critic is his ability to concentrate, in his final message, upon a solution of some. eternal problem. Down the ages literary critics who have stopped with the book or tendency under review, may leave ideas of value; but their ideas are not wide enough in their scope to affect the actual civilisation of which they are a fractional part. Aristotle, however, in addition to talking about poetry, told men how to reason; Dante, besides writing the 'Divine Comedy,' proved that power and love are divine rather than material or social manifestations; Sir Joshua Reynolds, after painting a gallery of worthies, revealed in his bestknown essay the rules of art as applied to life; Goethe, while endeavouring to make the Germany of 1800 more sweetly reasonable, left us as his heritage the fellowship. of intellectualism; Sainte-Beuve, party man at first, preached a gospel of lucidity. And what of Matthew Arnold? One who reads him more deeply than those to whom we have referred at the beginning of this

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article, will admit that he made it his life-work to impress all these qualities upon Victorian England Except for art-in which he was always a defective analyst and observer-one feels that he has succeeded in leaving his world better than he found it.

So to world-affairs he comes, at the last analysis. And he is always a Liberal. The older order of things had not the virtue which Burke supposed. The Revolution had not the banefulness which he supposed.' He is not afraid to put more power into the hands of the middle classes, as we have seen in his views on education. He misgauged America as every one knows; he felt that 'the French would beat the Prussians all to pieces' in 1870; he never could understand the Russians, or the Italians (a mere fair-weather kingdom'). He stoutly defends the right of Irish Catholicism to manage its own affairs, and then he says, 'The Westminster Rifle Corps puts more power into the hands of the upper and middle classes-where it should be.' Also, while advocating a wider sweep for the Anglican Church, he pokes fun at the ecclesiastical feudalism' of small municipalities. He applauded Harriet Martineau, and recanted in 1877. He advocated more popular participation in government, and yet he refused to stand for a magistracy in Middlesex. He is a child in practical politics, and yet luminous in his off-hand dashes of truth; vague in details and yet a genius in cumulative progress.

Perhaps the most significant phase of this worldvision is the fundamental idea expressed in the 'Function of Criticism at the Present Time.'

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Europe is, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result. . . . Special, local, and temporary advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will, in the intellectual and spiritual sphere, make most progress which most thoroughly carries out this programme.'

That this principle, which Goethe first proclaimed with modern clearness, is a vital accompaniment to world-harmony is borne out by the fact that Mr Britling would never have been compelled to 'see it through,’ and that the peace of the world could have been main

tained, had Europe only, in the words of Mr Wells, 'listened to Matthew Arnold.'

This greatest of English critics, then, had a policy. He was more than a phrase-maker and a cultivated Athenæum Club. He fought till his death in 1888 for real culture as opposed to vocationalism, for a spread of the Bible by its direct power among laymen, for a literature which would be free from lubricity or opportunism, and for an education which would produce an international temper-the only salvation of a harassed world. Arnold was like Josiah Wedgwood, of whom it is said that he used to wander through his pottery, and demolish with a cane all the creations which revealed the slightest flaw. Such rejections were productive of great art in manufacturing lines; but in the domain of letters, education, Church, and government, they do not tend to popularity. However, they produce martyrs of lucidity and largeness of temper.'

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RICHARD M. GUMMERE.

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without much sense of the presence of individual wills weaving or thwarting collective destinies, and, in shortalmost as if the contributors had received the funereal admonition* supposed to have been addressed to the compilers of the Dictionary of National Biography'— without many flowers for reflexion or remembrance. For this, no doubt, the modern practice of fitting, or attempting to fit, large subjects almost as if they were the component parts of a jig-saw puzzle into all too nicely defined limits of space, instead of recognising that, within the broader classifications of size, every subject possesses a kind of natural length, must be held partly responsible. An author's freedom to write well and to give his thesis full expression is now more than ever restricted by the high rate of printers' wages and the high price of paper; and an editor has an increased obligation to provide against idle repetition. It cannot, however, be said that Sir Adolphus Ward, one of the most precise and painstaking of overseers, has invariably succeeded here. Even if the appearance of overlapping is sometimes unavoidable in a collaborative enterprise, it is not easy to defend the arrangement of the material relating to the outbreak of the Crimean War, which in these volumes is a twice-told tale that had better have been told once only and in greater detail. For the rest, one or two solecisms strike the eye strangely in a work dedicated to Diplomacy, and presumably not impatient of the claims of diplomatic and social etiquette. The expression Tsar' of Russia, where the Emperor is intended, is inaccurate, and has been, for some while, criticised and condemned by sticklers for propriety in these particular matters; whilst the practice sometimes employed by contributors to these pages of alluding to peers by their actual rank in the peerage is not borne out by social custom. Only the ignorant, or the facetious, would speak of Lord Curzon as 'Marquess Curzon,' and, though this particular reproach is not incurred, solecisms precisely similar are to be found where a punctilious exactitude might have been expected.

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These, however, are trifles light as air, and their mention only to be pardoned to a reviewer for lack of

* No flowers by request.'

graver errors in the principal work under review. When all has been said by way of adverse criticism, the 'Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy,' possessing, as it does, contributions from such high authorities upon the topics they discuss as Dr Rose and Prof. Webster, Major Temperley and Sir Valentine Chirol, Prof. Alison Phillips and Mr Harbutt Dawson, to mention some only of the more important collaborators, must long remain the standard book of reference on a subject till now in England insufficiently explored. The impress of the Cambridge School of Modern History is strong upon it-the impress of solidity, of caution, of abundant knowledge, of devotion to fact, of patient research-so that the completion of this great enterprise furnishes a fitting crown to the long and assiduous labours of Sir Adolphus Ward in the field of historical studies.

There are those, it is true, who, as has been already indicated, will look for something more than the book possesses-for vision as well as for fact, for penetration as well as for exactitude, for the delineation of personalities as well as of policies, above all for those high moralities which, as the late Lord Morley has justly said, are the life-blood of style and of greater things than style can ever be.' They will want to know not only what part their country has played in the past, but whether she has played it wisely, not alone whence as a people we are come, but also whither we are bound; they will ask which of our ministers have served idols and which the Living God, and what nations are, according to the law of intellectual and moral gravities, our natural friends and what our foes. The book answers these questions indeed, but it does not answer them directly, nor clearly, nor with unanimity.

They are, indeed, no easy questions to reply to, for the British people seem, in regard at least to their opinions about foreign affairs, to be of a more uncertain mind than most of their neighbours. The French, the Prussians, and the Italians are, with some individual exceptions, adherents of what is called Realpolitikthinly-veiled disciples of the most openly cynical of all the masters of political thought-the illustrious Machiavelli. They idolise their own countries, but they reverence nothing else; and the idea that any nation should look

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