where the same creative force is now working in our own houses and public assemblies, to convert the vivid energies working at this hour into universal symbols, requires a subtle and commanding thought. . Every man would be a poet if his intellectual digestion were perfect. The test of the poet is the power to take the passing day, with its news, its cares, its fears, as he shares them, and hold it up to a divine reason till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty, and to be related to astronomy and history and the eternal order of the world. There is no subject that does not belong to him-politics, economy, manufactures, and stock-brokerage-as much as sunsets and souls; only these things, placed in their true order, are poetry; displaced or put in kitchen order, they are unpoetic.

3

These are the words of a man who lived his life genuinely and with genius; and if they and others of his doctrines are found to expand some that are associated with the name of Carlyle, nothing can be idler than to repeat the vacuous old epigram that he was but a pocket edition of his friend. 2 Carlyle himself seems to have thought that Emerson was in a measure a "spiritual son" of his; but it would be hard to lay the finger on a passage in Emerson, good or bad, wise or unwise, which he could not conceivably have come by if Carlyle had never lived. That he himself was a magnetic and commanding personality is shown by his marked influence on Thoreau, who, however, made the Emersonian style as much his own as Emerson did when he developed it from that of his aunt. Thoreau, I take it, repaid the debt when he gave Emerson the right lead on the slavery question. Not that Emerson could, under any conceivable circumstances, have gone wrong on that as Carlyle went wrong; but that it did not come quite naturally to him to cleave to the right side in the face of all its extravagances and fanaticisms. At first he was not hearty against slavery; and he blamed the Abolitionists for their "impatience of discipline" and "haste to rule before we have served." 4 But his "unhappy conscience" respected them; and he went straight. By degrees he warmed to the great issue. From the first he spoke

1 Letters and Social Aims: Poetry and Imagination.

2 That this view was shared by Poe is one of the heaviest critical charges against that great critic. (Works, iii. 378.)

8 Described in Cabot's Memoir.

4

Cabot, ii. 45.

"1

"stir

well: no man better; but he writes of it in his journal as ring in philanthropical mud," and adds:-"I fully sympathise, be sure, with the sentiment I write; but I accept it rather from my friends than dictate it. It is not my impulse to say it." At an earlier stage he had sophisticated himself out of doing anything by means of his all-accommodating Theism. In 1852 he wrote in his journal:

"I waked last night and bemoaned myself because I had not thrown myself into the deplorable question of slavery, which seems to want nothing so much as a few assured voices. But then, in hours of sanity, I recover myself and say, God must govern his own world, and knows his way out of this pit without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it but me. I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man-far retired in the heaven of invention, and which, important to the republic of man, have no watchman, or lover, or defender but I." 2

On that reasoning no man need ever move, since God could always find his way out of the pit if he wanted; and if he did not go, why then it was best so. But when the crisis came, Emerson's manhood pushed his theistic sophistry aside, and in the fiery trial of the war his heart did not falter or change, seeming indeed to find there, as others found, the rectification of many moral confusions.

But his service to mankind is wider than the example of his own conduct in any one conjuncture; and it is wider, too, than his mere optimism, bracing as that is. Arnold, estimating in his facile way the value of the English Traits, decides that that book misses permanent value because it is the "observation of a man systematically benevolent," as Hawthorne's Our Old Home fails because it is "the work of a man chagrined." 3 That is a singular misfit in criticism. Emerson was indeed benevolent, but Arnold's criticism is meaningless unless it signify that his benevolence blinded him to English defects. Now, it did no such thing. The

1 Cabot, pp. 51-2.

2 Emerson in Concord, by Edward W. Emerson, p. 78.

& Discourses in America, p. 173.

weakness of that book is not systematic benevolence, though it is undoubtedly over-benevolent to Anglo-Saxonism in the lump. Its weakness is that which always inheres in Emerson's method, unresolved contradiction and unabashed inconsistency. If you analyse it you find that, as usual, he has booked every generalisation that occurred to him day by day, and made no attempt to correct one by another, though in the nature of the case each is a generalisation from a few particulars. But take the book as you find it, and you have a series of the most brilliant characterisations of English defects and limitations, so much to Arnold's own purpose, many of them, that you can hardly avoid concluding that he had only skimmed the book or had mostly forgotten it when he spoke of its systematic benevolence.

But Arnold himself goes on to avow that, "Strong as was Emerson's optimism, and unconquerable as was his belief in a good result to emerge from all which he saw going on around him, no misanthropical satirist ever saw shortcomings and absurdities more clearly than he did, or expressed them more courageously." That is true of his criticism alike of English and American life and institutions; and his general social doctrine, at its best, is medicinal for all civilisation :—

1

"Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time. Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. The worst of charity is, that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! the calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only; lovely, sweet, accomplished women only; and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If Government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential."

These are the words, remember, of a republican of republicans, not merely the friend but spiritually the representative of the 1 Pp. 189, 190.

temper of democracy. They are not a call for a stoppage of progress, but an earnest incitation to progress of a better kind. "We think our civilisation," he writes again, "near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star." That is a protest and a prediction in one. And if he who delivered it did not also give the science by which the prediction should be realised, none the less is he to be honoured and laurelled for that he brought to bear on all who could share his ideal the compulsion of his noble aspiration and his beautiful speech.

1 Politics.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

I.

I SAW lately pencilled on the title-page of a copy of Mr. Thomas Arnold's handbook of English Literature, an indictment of the Arnold family, by one of those sectaries who still chequer our civilisation in such numbers, and sometimes move one to ask in what sense fanaticism can be said to be disappearing. It was to the effect that the book was written from the Roman Catholic standpoint; and that the Catholicism of the writer, and the scepticism of his brother, Matthew Arnold, and further, the rationalism of their niece, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, were significant of the evil inherent in the educational system of Dr. Arnold, who had brought up his children to be Christians in a merely general sense, without inculcating on them any precise system of doctrine. That commentary is interesting as throwing light on the feeling of English Churchmen about the control of the schools; but I doubt if it is of any more value than other clerical generalisations, as an explanation of the facts it deals with. The Newman family, which diverged in a similar fashion, was brought up, it would appear, in the orthodox manner; and we do not find that rationalists usually come of latitudinarian Christian parents. What may reasonably be suggested is that some of the intellectual tendencies of Dr. Arnold, developed freely in different directions, are to be traced in the careers of his sons; but the most careful doctrinal training by him would conceivably have served only to stimulate and emphasise their special tendencies. He was one of those men who combine a considerable intellectual or critical faculty with a strong emotional or temperamental grasp of inherited beliefs. "The tendency to Atheism, I imagine," he wrote to an expupil, "exists in every study followed up vigorously, without a foundation of faith, and that foundation carefully strengthened